WWDC 2019, a new Mac Pro, and updates to the iPad

This week Apple held their annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller discuss everything announced — from the Mac Pro to iOS to iPadOS. Also, Google gave some updates on their new Stadia game service right before the show so the crew dives into that as well as the Palm Pre 10th anniversary. Stories discussed this week: -The Palm Pre launched 10 years ago today, here’s what it meant to me -Apple’s $5,000 Pro Display monitor doesn’t come with a stand in the box -Apple announces all-new redesigned Mac Pro, starting at $5,999 -Does the iPad make sense as a computer now? -Apple knows that iPad mouse support has broad appeal -iPadOS should make the iPad a better tablet, but not a laptop -Sidecar lets you use your iPad as a second display for your Mac -Apple reveals iPadOS for iPad with new home screen widgets and multitasking improvements -Apple Maps is getting its own version of Google Maps’ Street View -House lawmakers launch antitrust investigation into Big Tech -Apple announces new sign-in tool to compete with Facebook and Google -Apple will permanently remove Dashboard in macOS Catalina -Apple CarPlay getting design refresh and better Siri support in iOS 13 -Apple TV and iOS will soon support Xbox One and PS4 controllers -Apple’s HomePod speaker will be able to recognize who’s speaking to it with iOS 13 -Apple enables HomeKit support for home security cameras and routers -Apple wants to save your hearing and track your menstrual cycle with new Apple Watch update - Google’s Stadia game service is officially coming November: Everything you need to know Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, all WWDC, all the time. We're going to get into everything from the Mac Pro to iOS to the iPad. It's coming up.

• 1:09Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge Podcast Empire, an empire that consists of two shows, but it's small but mighty. Rapidly growing. We're trying. Every day we try. I'm your friend Eli. I'm here. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  I'm here and I'm old. I just realized that there was a song called Empire by, I believe, Queensryche that is now in my head. And that's just the saddest thing ever.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  I think a thing that Vergecast listeners maybe don't know is that Dieter listens to a lot of metal. It's like a real thing.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  I don't know if I call that metal, but.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  It's not what you expect, but it's also exactly what you expect. Paul Miller is here.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  How's it going, man?

• 1:47Speaker 04

  It's going pretty good. I do not listen to metal. I gotta, that's my confession for the day.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I mean, it's, I mean, you should start. It's healthy. I've been listening to a lot of old Nine Inch Nails, like Broken era Nine Inch Nails, just because I think it's important for someone in the world to remember that Nine Inch Nails used to be like a super aggressive band and not just like the banjo riff from Old Town Road. Like, that's, that's the modern experience of Nine Inch Nails. It's like, this one sample on Old Town Road. Anyway, listen to Broken, it's a good album. Anyway, so we're gonna do something a little different this week. Normally, we have two episodes a week. This week, I think we're gonna have 2.5. Just follow me on this. There's WWDC, which happened. Dieter and I have been getting, I would say, hundreds of tweets waiting for our WWDC podcast.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Because Apple announced so, so much stuff. It dubbed, dubbed. And we were there, we got to meet with a lot of people, we got to play with a lot of stuff. So that's this episode of the Vergecast. At the same time, there's another gigantic story happening with YouTube and censorship and all that stuff. I was trying to put together the show last night, and I realized I had no idea how to talk about both of those things at the same time. Because they're radically divergent. They're both really important. So we're gonna do the dub dub episode. And then we're gonna put out, you know, Vergecast B with Casey Natty, and we're gonna go through the YouTube stuff. So if you're interested in both things, and if people want to hear us talk about both things, this is gonna be the dub dub episode. A little bit later today,

• 3:20Nilay Patel?

  uh, we're gonna do an episode about YouTube platforms, all that stuff, with Casey Natty, because, quite frankly, Casey writes a newsletter about it every day. We should probably let him talk to you. So I just want everyone to know what's going on. It's just too much for one episode, so we're gonna try something this week and break them up. I know that's a lot of Vergecasts in one week, but quite honestly, there's, there's enough to support it. If you think it's too much of Vergecast, let me know. Uh, and we'll, maybe we'll do, we'll just do all the news in like 10 second bites next week. But this is what we're trying this week. Just trying to be as transparent as possible. Okay. So here's the news. Here's the big thing I want to talk about. Today, the day that we're recording, is the 10 year anniversary of the Palm Pre.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  And that's the only thing that's worth talking about. There's no other, nothing else in the world that matters.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  And Dieter wrote a great piece for us on the Pre and the community. Dieter, I'm just, this is basically how I came to know of Dieter, is that he ran precentral.com. Paul, I have an extraordinarily vivid memory of you, like, running into the trailer at CES with an SD card full of photos of the Pre on the day it was announced.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  I, I published the first hands-on photos of the Palm Pre.

• 4:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, but like sprinting, there was no connectivity in Vegas when this thing was launched 10 years ago.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  Right, right. I sprinted an SD card throughout, through the convention center to get to our trailer to publish.

• 4:43Nilay Patel?

  And he burst into the trailer, holding an SD card aloft. It was like, it's an unbelievably vivid memory. But this is the day 10 years ago that it came out. People go to Sprint stores and buy it. So I just want to talk about it for two minutes before we get into the Apple stuff, because it's kind of a momentous thing. Maybe people aren't as familiar with the pre anymore, you've forgotten it. The pre and WebOS, everything is, like, everything is sprung from it. The cast of characters in the world of tech are all deeply related to that project, especially in the Android side. Yep. Dieter, you want to kind of go through it?

• 5:21Speaker 03

  All of the history of WebOS? Well, yes, I would. Yes, Neelai, may I?

• 5:25Nilay Patel?

  I want to do three Verge casts this week.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  I have, I bought a pre and in my tainted memory, I believe it was a perfect device only ruined by Sprint. Is that true?

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Uh, no. Absolutely not true. Sprint did not make it better, I will tell you that. But it was a compromised device that they had to get the thing out the door. And so they, there was a conflict within Palm of, are we just going to do this thing and see, or screw it, can we do it with web technology? And then like, well, the web technology, we can get that done faster. And so it became WebOS. But there was a conflict there and that like, eventually led to like, a series of compromises that kind of stuck with the company. And then they were always the underdog. Anyway, the point is, the thing that made the, that WebOS, especially that initial launch at CES so amazing, was it was one of, I mean, I don't know, fewer than five times in the

• 6:16Speaker 03

  past decade and a half, maybe even, where there was a tech keynote where somebody got on stage and said, this is a brand new way to use a thing, in this case, a phone, that you've never thought of before, that you've never seen before, and that is completely consistent and coherent and not just like, a sort of an idea. We had it with the iPhone. I think you could say we had it with the Palm Pre. Maybe we had that moment with Windows Phone, maybe.

• 6:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we did. Yeah, okay. That first Windows Phone launch event, they were like, everything is squares. And we were like, yes.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  This will definitely work. Yeah. But like, everything that you use on your phone right now, not everything, but many things that you use on your phone right now that you take for granted were done first on the pre. So like, proper notifications that don't annoy you that just pop in with a little thing that you can swipe away. Having your apps arranged in little cards that you can move, you know, navigate through. They haven't quite matched that exactly, but whatever. Swiping up to go to your card view, you know, like, be having a universal search that goes across apps and settings and the web, you know, just ba-da-ba-da-ba-da. Slide-out keyboards. Slide-out keyboards. The most popular form factor right now. Yeah. But the article

• 7:37Speaker 03

  that Neil and I was referencing is like, the other thing that mattered was, there was this really great community of just like, nice people. And I do take a little bit of credit for it because I was the person running the forums and I, you know, moderated them. And, but I can't take the full credit because there are a bunch of other people that really were like, thinking clearly about what makes a good online community. In particular, like, WebOS internals did a really good job of like, if you're gonna have a jailbreaking scene, this is how you do it so that it's ethical and they're not stealing stuff and it actually like, works right. And that was great and it worked super well. So there's a bunch of that stuff that I actually miss more than I miss, you know, waiting for a webpage to load in on a Palm Pre.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think as we, again, we're gonna have a whole other episode about platforms and moderation in this moment. And a thing that Dieter knows really well, because he started many of your favorite, I don't know what to call it, platform-based websites and communities.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  It's true. I mean, Dieter was the editor-in-chief of Android Central, Dieter was the editor-in-chief of Pre-Central, he started these sites. Creating a community that's healthy and respectful and productive and useful to the world requires a fair amount of curation and norm-setting and moderation. And it's just weird that we used to do that so much. And we seem to have forgotten how to do it, or forgotten that it's important. And we've definitely forgotten that, like, how- We can't get into this, but it's not that we forgot how to do it, it's that we, nobody knows how to do it when there's more than a million people in a single community.

• 9:06Nilay Patel?

  It's true.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  Which maybe, maybe that's why WebOS never succeeded.

• 9:12Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  It solved it.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyhow, that's that part. I just want to point out the pre, because it... All of us have really deep memories of that moment in smartphone history. And it's, it's really important to me that we, we trace those connections back, because so much was in that platform and it's gone everywhere else. But speaking of platforms, dominant platforms at that, it was WWDC.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  Dieter and I were there, Nick Sat was there with us, Veron, our, our video producer was there. I managed to say a lot of specs about the Mac Pro in a three-minute video. I was just like, that was nerve-wracking, because there was a bunch of like, Apple people and video pros around me, and I was like, Radeon Vega 2 Pro dual. And they're like, no, that's not it.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  How many times did it take you to get the type of RAM correct?

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  A thousand times. Also saying eight PCI, can't do it, eight PCIe 4 slots is like a very, your brain doesn't want to think that way.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:13Nilay Patel?

  So there's new Mac Pro. That was the big announcement. I feel somewhat bad for Apple that their $1,000 monitor stands like overtook all the rest of the news from WWDC.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. That's a self-inflicted wound.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  A truly self-inflicted wound.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  What are you doing?

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  So, we're gonna break this up into two chunks, basically by, by platform, but not really. So there's a lot of macOS news with Catalyst, the Mac Pro, the new display, we gotta talk about that. There's a ton of iPad news, Dieter just put out a video about iPadOS, its new gestures. Highly recommend it, because it really does appear like Fred, Federighi just read our review. And just addressed it.

• 10:53Nilay Patel?

  There's not a lot of iOS stuff, right?

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, less than you'd think.

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  So we'll, we'll do that later. And then there's like, just a grab bag of silly things. You know what my favorite news from WWDC is? Absolutely my favorite piece of news? It's that the HomeKit now supports video cameras. And because Apple cares about privacy, the way they're gonna do like, motion detection and, and like, people detection on, on HomeKit cameras. Is instead of sending it to the cloud, they're gonna render that video on HomePods. So the HomePod...

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  Is now gonna do like local video AI stuff. It's just, it's just the silliest. I love it the most. But there's like a whole grab bag of miscellaneous like that that we'll get to at the end. But let's start with the Mac because it, it's a big deal. Do you think we should start the Mac Pro or Catalyst first?

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Uh, bleh.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  Let's start with the Mac Pro.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:44Nilay Patel?

  Sorry. I'm excited about the Mac Pro.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  You should be.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  And then we'll, we'll wrap it up. We'll like, we'll start at a high and then a low Catalyst. Or the medium of Catalyst. So the new Mac Pro, we've been waiting for it forever, two years. The trash can, the, the trash can Pro from 2013 was idling. People thought they were gonna get out of that business entirely. Apple, you know, had their, they talk about it as like the moment they admitted they were gonna make a new computer, which is really funny. Like, you know, they brought in Matt Penzerino and John Gruber and some other folks and said, "We've designed ourselves in a thermal corner. We're gonna do a new Pro machine. We're gonna do a new Pro display." That was two years ago. And they finally announced it. And it is ridiculous and wonderful. It seems like it is going to be ludicrously expensive. Uh, but just to go through it, if you haven't seen it, you haven't heard about it, real quick.

• 12:33Nilay Patel?

  It is a tower. It's built in a stainless steel frame. All the components mount to that frame. So the outside sort of external cheese grater thing is just a slide over cover.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Yep. Although it does have a couple of Thunderbolt 3 ports on it, on the top of it.

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  On the top, but that's mounted, like the, the, it's like a, that, that part's hollow. That, that's the top.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  So it's got two Thunderbolt 3 ports in the back. It has eight PCIe 4 slots. Nailed it. Uh, three single height, four double height, and then one is like half size. And that comes with a, a pre-populated I/O daughter card that has USBAs, has USB, has Thunderbolts, and it has a headphone jack. Uh, Apple's story about that daughter card is we put out the daughter card because maybe you don't want it at all. You can just pull it out, you can do something else with it, maybe there's gonna be new I/O in the future, you can replace it.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  It's just, that's how they're doing it. One of my favorite I/O features is there's an internal USB port, this is true, an internal USB-A port, inside, because Apple knows that pro users often have crazy pro applications that require hardware dongles for DRM. And so you can just install that dongle right inside, right inside the machine. That's where we are with dongles now. Internal support.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  There's a SATA connection in there if you want to plug in a traditional hard drive or SSD, right?

• 13:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and during one of our briefings, they kept saying JBODs, and I forgot that that is a great term. It stands for just a bunch of discs.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  But they kept saying, you can, that's really the bay for JBODs. Which is great. You can put like a raid, array in there. I'm just saying, it's crazy spec. It has a 28-core, 26-core? 28-core Xeon?

• 14:16Speaker 03

  28.

• 14:17Nilay Patel?

  28-core Xeon, that processor itself is brand-new, seems like it's very expensive.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  One thing to be aware of with the processor is, they opted to, they're only offering it right now in a configuration with one, you know, slot for the processor. They're not gonna have like, you know, dual processor slots, that may, maybe someday in the future, but given the specs of this chip and the thermal envelope that they've created, by the way, they've overdone the power and the thermals here, so that you can run this thing flat-out and it won't, it won't hit its threshold for temperature, because the fans are supposed to be really quiet. They say it'll be quiet, as quiet under your desk as the iMac Pro on top of your desk, so it's probably a little bit louder than an iMac Pro.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  But, the point is that they, there's these three fans that like blow stuff through, and then they've got a couple other things, so the thermals of this should allow you to just run that 28-core Xeon processor flat-out for as long as you want.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that processor, I don't think Apple is going to officially support this, but that processor is socketed. So if you want to get crazy in the future, you can replace it. That's something that you cannot do with any other part of any other Mac, as far as I can tell. A bunch of DIMM slots, and then Apple has this new connector module system called the MPX connector. So those, those double height PCIe slots, they're going to sell special cards inside of these MPX modules. So you get the regular PCIe connector, and then Apple's RIF on that connector, another one that has power and basically another Thunderbolt bus on it.

• 15:54Nilay Patel?

  So that you get the system connection between the GPU and the CPU on the PCIe, and then you get the Thunderbolt bus and power, so you don't have to run a power cable to your video card. And you don't have to run one of those like weird Thunderbolt jumper cables. So any video card that goes into one of these slots, you can address it from any Thunderbolt port on the system. So you could plug it at display into the top of the computer, which I think is very funny. But that is, I would not say it's proprietary, but it's not open. They said they weren't going to publish the spec for this special connector. You have to like go talk to Apple, but they didn't sound like they're going to be weird about it.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Well, and there's also, if you have dual cards in this thing, they also like have a faster channel between each other.

• 16:34Nilay Patel?

  No, that's what Paul was talking about last week, the Fabric Link. That's, that's on, isn't that on the same card?

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's on, that's on one card, the

• 16:42Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  Infinity Fabric, that's AMD technology that links them up. I do know that the power headroom that this is offering to cards is a, a, a pretty notable. Like, obviously, Apple is mostly using stock off-the-shelf parts, but the fact that they've designed their own module, there is a lot more power delivery to this module than you typically get with PCIe, like, almost, like, like, almost an order of magnitude. So I think that is actually, I think, one of the biggest deals as far as like the potential headroom of this computer.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  I was listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast, highly recommend that podcast. They, they were talking about the, the The power supply on this thing, I forget what it's rated at, like 15k?

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  1500.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  1500? And apparently in the US, the most that you are allowed to have drawing from a standard outlet, like continuously is like 14, or yeah, so it's like, or 16 or something. So they're like right at the limit of what's like actually legally allowed to just be continuously drawing power out of an outlet.

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  Sounds about right. So then in these MPX slots, you can put Radeon, I'm gonna get it right. This is from the video. Radeon Vega 2 Pro graphics cards. Pro Vega.

• 18:01Nilay Patel?

  Killing me. So many words. Or the dual version of these graphics cards have two GPUs on a single card. So you can get up to four GPUs. And then all that cooling and power can just support all of that running flat out. Here's what you cannot do with this machine. I mean, you can, but it just won't work. You cannot install an Nvidia GPU. You can put it in there and then it will do nothing.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  You can put it there and have feelings at it.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, it's like, when I say you can't do it, it's like the police are gonna come.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  It's like the TikTok meme where they like, they actually charge their phone off.

• 18:37Nilay Patel?

  It's not like it like fires like lightning at you when you try. Like you can do it, it just won't do anything. And we asked, Dieter, I would say, everyone in San Jose, why Apple won't support, like people on the street, Chipotle employees.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  The crossing guard, yeah.

• 18:53Nilay Patel?

  And so the answer that we got from Apple, most commonly, to synthesize all the answers we heard, was basically instead of OpenGL, Apple has to metal to support a graphics card on macOS now or an iOS. The amount of integration work that needs to be done is a lot different than just putting a driver on Windows and Apple doesn't want to do it. Like, there was, there was nothing beyond it. Like, they just kept saying, it's like, you know, it's a lot of work and we're supporting AMD. And we'd be like, but why, do we tell them? And they're like, you know, it's a lot of work to integrate these cars. We take it really seriously and we're supporting AMD. It's like, but they're right, you could call them, maybe they could do it. They've got, like, it's a lot of work and we...

• 19:30Nilay Patel?

  And what is absolutely nuts about this, Sean Hollister confirmed this, you can run the new Mac Pro in boot camp. So you can boot it into Windows and then your Nvidia graphics cards will work.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  That's what I was gonna ask. So there's nothing, there's no physical limitation. This is a standard plug.

• 19:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's PCI, PCIe 4, 8 PCIe 4 slots. Yes, it is. That's what it is. So if you boot it into Windows, which you can do, you can, it will happily support an Nvidia card because Windows will happily support Nvidia card. But you cannot, you cannot in, in, in macOS because Apple, you know, it's a lot of work tuning right these cards and we're just supporting AMD at this time.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 20:17Nilay Patel?

  I mean, literally like everyone, everyone in San Jose was briefed with this answer. Now, I would say, Apple kind of believes that the reason people want to run Nvidia cards is video games and Bitcoin. Like that's kind of their,

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  Right? That's kind of their brush off. Like the available AMD cards are very fast for most of their use cases. They're as fast as the available Nvidia cards. If you want to do compute, you know, you can like write your weird metal compute application and it's, it'll be fine. Like what do you, what is it really that you're after? And then it was like, yeah, it's Bitcoin, right? Like, it's, it's like, they think the use cases are actually corner cases. I don't think that's true at all.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's really hard to tell. Is Apple making some idyllic future that we will soon ride in? I mean, that's the thing. Apple does metal. Apple is not making a future for everybody. Apple is making a future for people who use Macs and iPhones.

• 21:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  And so, you know, Vulkan is not like the perfect spec or anything, but that is a spec that benefits everybody when it's supported. You know, it's on Linux, it's on Windows, it's on Android. You know, that's, that's a, a industry standard that people have rallied around. Apple is building its own alternate universe and investing heavily in that alternate universe is only good as long as that alternate universe. You can do everything there. Can't do everything there. For instance, maybe your, um, your like machine learning algorithms were designed against Nvidia hardware, or they use Vulcan compute type stuff. Well, you're out of luck now.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, I think the answer is then you can just go buy a PC, which has been quite fairly the answer for like three years. Like Apple's like re-entering this market. It's not like that market wasn't well served. So I, I think that's kind of their answer. What I think is funny about the sort of compute stuff you're talking about is the future of those applications are FPGA's, right? I mean, that's where like particular lot of mining is going. And Apple is actually putting out an FPGA for the Mac Pro. It's called the Afterburner Card. Uh, and it, it, uh, accelerates rendering of ProRes files natively. So you don't have to transcode them. Any app that supports their render API will like just get it for free. So I think they, they showed us Premiere doing it. They showed us DaVinci Resolve doing it.

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  So that's neat, right? A custom FPGA chip just to do that. It kind of reminds me of the Mac I had in like high school. Uh, the Centrus 660AV, uh, one of the shortest-lived Macs of all times that had an AT&T DSP chip in it. And you can plug in RCA jack into it and watch video and like a 240 window.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  I had a, a power Mac with RCA as well.

• 23:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah. No, there was a real moment when Apple was like RCA jacks are the future of this platform.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, right now FPGA, like we've talked about this on the podcast before, but this is a, where a lot of the performance gain, like this is how the, the new fancy cameras that we all love so much are working.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  It's dedicated custom hardware acceleration.

• 23:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, people are really excited about this card. We have no idea how much it costs. We have no idea how much these video cards cost. We actually have no idea how much any of this really costs. All we have is the sort of base spec, which is $6,000.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Which by the way, that is not a deal at $6,000.

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  So Apple's claim is that it's a deal against a similarly configured HP, which is $8,000.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  I believe Apple is incorrect.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  I will see, we'll see. The benchmarks will come out and people will put $6,000 PCs next to $6,000 Mac Pros. Because most of the enthusiasts who want to check this out are probably not going to dump $35,000 to get like a specked out Mac Pro. Just, just to have a bake off, you know?

• 24:02Nilay Patel?

  So here is what they said to us several times, which is, this is what we announced just because we have to have some starting place. But their belief is that this is not for enthusiasts, this is for pros. It will go into big pro workflows at Hollywood studios and production companies and what have you. And almost every one of these machines will be configured to order.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. In fact, Neil, I asked multiple people some variation of, are you going to have this in Apple stores? And the answer was never yes or no. It was, we think that this thing is going to be 90% BTO. Or I don't know what, you know, some percent, this is going to be almost completely build to order. So it's like, ah, huh.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  So yeah, I don't think they're, they're anticipating that like a bunch of people are going to go buy this thing. And, and that's fine, but to me, that, that does mean that there is like, there's a possibility that there's a dip in like, if you look at the like, the ramp up from like amateur to pro, like you've got the iMac and then like, you could like, geek out a Mac Mini and then you could get an iMac and then you can get an iMac Pro. But like, is there a gulf between like iMac Pro and Mac Pro? That, you know, 10, 15 years ago with our, with the old towers, like you would just like, you'd buy a tower for like, you know, reasonable price. And then you would just start throwing cards in it as you, you know, earn more money in your life. Like there's so no speakers.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  And then all of a sudden you like had a killer machine, like the idea that like a regular person would want to go buy a tower. And then like upgraded over time. Apple's basically saying with this thing, that's never coming back. Those people should just buy IMAX.

• 25:39Nilay Patel?

  But I think that is true. I think those people are buying laptops. I don't even think they're buying IMAX.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I don't think they should, anybody who really needs horsepower, unless they can afford a Mac Pro is, or unless they absolutely have to use Logic or Final Cut, is getting ripped off if they even buy an iMac.

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, because you can buy a PC tower, but I think Apple's point is like that market is saturated, it's well served. Everything is build to order. Like they are aiming for the very, very tippy top of the market with a. Super fancy computer that has an enormous amount of headroom. And then I think the, the reason I'm laughing about this thousand dollar monitor stand like the most is for the people who are gonna buy it, it doesn't even, Disney's gonna buy that thing. You think Bob Iger's like sweating a thousand dollar monitor stand? Like, he's good. Pixar, Disney owns Pixar. I mean, I can't name another company because Disney owns them all. But just imagine that there was another one.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  AT&T.

• 26:36Nilay Patel?

  Marvel. AT&T.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, they're post-production artists.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  AT&T's post-production. What world do we live in?

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's one more, there's one more group of people that the Mac Pro is for.

• 26:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  And that's for people that just have way too many gigantic, solid blocks of cheese that they don't know what to do with. They need to like reduce them in size.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Okay, thank you, Dieter, thank you for bringing this up. This is the real elephant in the room, alright? Everybody, everybody called the G5 Mac Pro back in the day, the, um,

• 27:11Nilay Patel?

  Cheese grater.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  The cheese grater Mac, right? And it's like, it's funny shorthand, like, and you can, you squint your eyes, you can kind of see it, right? There's holes lined up in the front and there's handles on the, on both ends, kind of like a cheese grater. And I feel like the design team at Apple took this as a challenge. They're like, they called the last one a cheese grater and it wasn't even very much like a cheese grater, only slightly. We will show them how to produce a computer that looks exactly like a cheese grater. And I think they knocked it out of the park.

• 27:45Nilay Patel?

  They did a great job. It looks like one of those fancy cheese graters with wire handles.

• 27:49Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  It's great. I mean, it looks cool. It looks smaller than it is, which is a, a, like, a feat.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I will say that, speaking of feet, the feet on the bottom look really dumb.

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  They look really dumb.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  It just looks dumb.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they look like bad off, you know, like if you, if you buy like a bad TV stand from Best Buy and it's the modern one.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  It's definitely those feet. However, you can buy casters.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, the wheels, you know, I, I was not at WWDC, I was watching at home and that, you know, when I'm watching a live stream of a tech conference, sometimes I applaud. Wheels was one of my applause moments.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. So Paul, what do you think? I come to you with PC nerdery. Do you think they, you think they got it right?

• 28:35Speaker 04

  I'm so conflicted about this. It's everything I love and some of what I hate about Apple. I love that they have pushed the envelope in every sense of the word. They are, they have created a computer that seems to have a higher ceiling for power than almost any desktop computer I've ever seen. It might be the most powerful computer you can just like buy straight up. But it, it doesn't solve the problem that I feel like, it doesn't solve the part of the market that I feel like Apple's underserving. It is solved, it is serving a part of the market that they also were underserving, which was these really high-end production pros and stuff.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  But it doesn't solve the problem of the fact that if, if I'm an up and coming, up and comer, and I want to use Unity or Unreal or, or DaVinci Resolve, and I want a decently powerful computer, but I'm not already rich. This doesn't do anything for me.

• 29:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think they would point you at the iMac or the iMac Pro for that stuff.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  And then I would laugh at them and cry.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  It's not unfair.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  So I'm very confused right now because I don't know, we're 20, 30 minutes into the Verge cast. And I expected that we were going to be spending the entire first half of this thing, listening to Neelai discuss methods of local dimming on displays.

• 29:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, is it that time?

• 29:55Speaker 03

  With regard to the, the Pro Display XDR. And before you pop off, I just want to say, XDR is the stupidest name.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  It is not a great name.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  It's not high definition, it's extreme definition. It's like, no, no.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  It's the most.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  Apple has very, I would say, reality adjacent definitions of HDR.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

  Like it's so close and you're like huh like definitely we were in a briefing and they told us the iMac Pro had an HDR display and I was like it doesn't. Uh they will happily claim that the iPhone XS has an HDR display and it's like, does it?

• 30:32Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 30:32Nilay Patel?

  Cause it doesn't, you know, like it does if you define it to have it.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 30:38Nilay Patel?

  You know, like if you define a minute differently, I can run a four minute mile. But like, but do other people define it that way?

• 30:46Speaker 04

  Okay, okay. Here, here's a dumb question that maybe will help understand what this display actually does better. If I'm at AT&T and I'm mastering an episode of Game of Thrones, right?

• 30:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 04

  And I can see everything that's happening because my XDR display has amazing contrast. So I can see all the differences in the dark portions of the scene. When I email that to your Vizio television and you watch it in fake HD or plebeian HDR.

• 31:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  Will it look better because I had so much attention to detail? Or will it be pure black all the way across the screen?

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  First of all, we're starting in the email based streaming service. That's the best idea we've ever had. That shit's never going 90.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Email to Chromecast. Oh my gosh, it's so powerful.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  Email to Chromecast. That's great. Uh, just think about like a TV, a 4K HDR TV, like a Samsung HDR TV. Will like happily produce a thousand nits of brightness, maybe more, like someone can go like 2000 nits brightness. That generates a lot of heat. You need to have a lot of LEDs back there, but it's big. So they're spaced out.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  And so you can just do it. And they're also like, the pixel density of that display is actually not very high.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:05Nilay Patel?

  Right. Cause it's a TV, it's on the wall. So even though you got 4K, it's like big and far away from you. To master for that on a computer monitor, to match a thousand nits of brightness, to get a retina quality, you, you're just packing more stuff in there. So you're, you're generating an awful lot more heat. So Apple's big claim with this display is that you will be able to properly master HDR. And you will see it on your, in your work canvas, such that when it goes to an HDR TV, which many of them will do a thousand nits of brightness, it will match.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:38Nilay Patel?

  Right. So it's not, it's not like necessarily superior to a TV. I mean, it is because it's a reference display, but in terms of brightness, many TVs on the market are really, really bright in a way that monitors cannot be.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 32:53Nilay Patel?

  So Apple's big comparison is like a $43,000 Sony OLED reference display that will go to reference brightness for HDR, but can't stay there and overheats and then dims to cool down and then flips back. And they're very proud of this demo. They're like, look, the light is amber. It's off reference. And I'm like, that's not relevant to literally anything I do.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  But it was like, that's the demo. So they've got this display and the thing that is that is different about it is they've used this array of blue LEDs as the backlight. It's 576 local dimming zones, you know, Apple, I love Apple display stuff. Like they, they do different things than virtually everybody else. And I always think it's interesting. I think their displays are great. So the, each of those LEDs is like in a custom little reflector pocket that's sitting in front of a half mirror that re reflects the light. So they're like shaping this light and the LEDs don't shine forward, they shine out. So first they're using blue LEDs, which basically no one else does. They're shaping that light really aggressively.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  What do you mean, don't shine forward, but shine out?

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  So if you just think like the, the wave guides are in and around the LED instead of shooting straight at you, they're shooting out. I'm like spreading my hands out. They're shooting out into this like well. And that light has been collated and sent out. So it's more diffused from the jump.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  So the light would be more diffused and it would bleed, but since it gets shaped by this, pros will understand this phrase, a layer mask.

• 34:25Nilay Patel?

  The shooting it out means that the, the light is more even across the, the points of the LEDs. That's how they're shaping the light to be more even. And then on top of that, they find a way to have it not bloom so that one thing can be super bright. And right, the pixel right next to it can be fully black. And the question is, what are they doing to LCD to make that happen? So this is really hard to describe. I encourage you, like, just go look on YouTube for like a local dimming demo. But the thing that you want. Is blacks be black and whites be really bright, right? And doing those things right next to each other is extremely hard. So like an OLED TV or an OLED display in your phone, the pixel itself is the light source. So you're literally turning the light on and off.

• 35:08Nilay Patel?

  And so you can have a totally black pixel and a totally bright pixel and they don't bleed. An LCD display, it gets its light from a grid of LEDs behind the display. That's why they're called LED LCDs. And so local dimming is we're going to turn some of that grid off and some of that grid on around the portions of the screen that are light and dark. So if you've ever seen an LCD TV bloom, and this is if you turn, if you have like a Vizio TV or any TV that does aggressive local dimming, a Samsung TV, and you turn local dimming all the way up, like, and then you bring up, and you have a black screen and you bring up a UI element over the black screen.

• 35:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  Like in an Apple TV, you will literally see the TV bloom. Because all the LEDs around the UI element turn on and all the LEDs around it are off. So you see a blooms of light. So that's the problem with LCD TVs. Apple is controlling it because they're, they're sending that light out from the grid behind the display. It's an LCD display. They've got 576 zones that can turn on and off. And they're sending that grid out and more precisely shaping it. But they showed us this demo. This is why Dieter thinks I'm going to nerd out about this. By the way, I'm fully nerding out about it right now. They showed us this demo. It's a, it was one of the Pro Display XDRs. And it was like successive layers of it were removed. So all the way on the right was like the finished image and then without the diffuser

• 36:30Nilay Patel?

  and then without the color correcting layer and then all the way down to we can see the individual blue LEDs turning on and off is like an image moved across the screen. One of those layers, Dieter, I don't remember this, one of those layers was not in color. Right? As the image moved, there was like a monochrome image moving on the screen.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  That's not how a normal LED works.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 36:50Nilay Patel?

  Or a normal, a normal LCD is like always in color. Yeah. So I they I asked this question very directly, like three times. Are you using an LCD to further mask the local dimming? Yeah. Because that is that is one of the newer technologies on the market. The we've seen it. We saw it at CES from like Hi-Sense. And they were like, we're not going to talk about that. I was like, but are you using an LCD to mask the back? And they're like, we're doing something else that you can't just do it later. So I was like, are you doing it? And they're like, we're not talking about it. So I think they're doing, maybe they're not doing it at all, and they just don't want to talk about it at all. It's probable. But I think they're doing some crazy stuff to get that million to one contrast ratio

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  that literally no one else is doing because no one else can get it with an LCD. And this display looks great. It is super expensive. It's $5,000 without a stand. Yeah. Uh, by the way, the the mount on the display itself is like a magnet. So if you watch the video, it clips onto that $1,000 stand with a magnet. So even mounted on a Visa stand, you have to pay like 200 bucks for a little adapter. Yep. Again, I don't think, you know, if you run a big production company and you buy 50 of these things, you've got the racks all set up like you're just, you don't want to buy the stand. So why would you? So that makes sense. And then if you're like, that's whatever, like I'm the editor of Game of Thrones. Like I would like a $1,000 monitor stand. They're gonna be like, yeah, it's fine. You've made enough money for us. Uh, the stand is really cool. Uh, the display has two fans in it.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  Just FYI, uh, they're very quiet. Apparently can't hear them. They can also grate cheese. They can also, it's got the same cheese grater pattern on the back. Uh, and then there is a matte version, which is $1,000 extra because the glass itself is etched as opposed to like a filming applied. It's nano etched, Neely. Yeah. We were in the briefing and they were like showing us a lot of stuff and they, you know, they did the bake off with all the other displays. And then they were like, tell us what else a pro would need. And we were in there with another journalist and he was just like, I don't know. I'm sorry.

• 38:50Nilay Patel?

  But it was very impressive. I want one of these displays very, very badly. But I don't think my use of Google Docs and Slack are gonna convince our CEO to give me one of them, but I'm gonna do my best.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay, do you want to talk about Catalyst? And then we can, we can shift the, we take a break and talk about the iPad?

• 39:07Speaker 03

  All right, so the new version of macOS is called Catalina. I, I literally do not know or care what most of the new features are. I mean, it's like, whatever. But the big new one is they have made Project Marzipan. They've officially given it a name, which I almost didn't think they were gonna do. They're calling it Catalyst. And I was really hoping that they would, you know, make, make it good. Make it, everything feel like that, you know, it belonged on the Mac. And I kinda don't think they did. I kinda don't think that they, they did enough. And so we might have another year of like iPad apps on the Mac that feel, yeah, not great. We'll see, we'll see. Maybe all these iOS developers are gonna do amazing work.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  But I don't know that there are quite enough tools. But perhaps there are. But Apple itself only released a couple of these apps, a couple of new versions of these apps. There's the Podcast app and the, the something else. I forget the other one.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, they decomposed iTunes into podcasts, music, and Apple TV.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  TV, Apple TV, yeah. Apple TV might be the other one. But yeah, that's, that's the other big news with Catalina is they, they, they killed off the, the iTunes app, although it still exists, sort of, in terms of like their, a store existing. When you plug in your iPhone, sync becomes an option in the sidebar of the Finder, which makes sense. It's sort of like where your like external discs show up. I still wish that they would have just brought back iSync, but whatever. And then, you know, the dashboard is gone now and they changed the shell.

• 40:41Nilay Patel?

  To ZSH.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  To ZSH. Neil, do you want to have feelings about the dashboard or shall we move on? Let's move on, nobody cares about the dashboard.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  I use it every day!

• 40:48Speaker 03

  It's trash! Give it up!

• 40:52Nilay Patel?

  I do, you know, the thing with the dashboard is that it, it was like the first time, or one of the first times Apple just killed a third-party utility by building it into the system. Yeah, it was called Confabulator or something? Yeah, and they, and they like reached out to the Confabulator guy and they're like, "We love your thing." And he's like, "I don't wanna sell." And they're like, "Here's Dashboard."

• 41:13Nilay Patel?

  And now it's gone.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  We still look, we saw some catalyst apps.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  They're fine, but you can tell, you definitely can tell like the sidebar is a little bit bigger. Like there's things like you look and you're like, oh, I see that. I see you.

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  They're definitely iPhone apps. Like the podcast app is 100% the iPhone podcast app.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  Just with some Windows stuff.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  Some of that's gonna suck. Some of it's gonna be just fine. And I might not super like snooty about it. Um, but then again, I use Electron on Mac and I'm fine with that. So I am by definition not snooty.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is nice. They have that low bar. Like if you can beat like Qt and GTK or I don't know if GTK actually goes on Mac. But if you can compete with like a knockoff or a non-native UI library or framework, then you're, you win, right?

• 42:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much. Um, the one thing that they kept on saying though, they said this twice in the keynote is how excited their developers were to not have to have a macOS development team. They could just have the iOS development team handle it. Which is like, woof, man. You're just telling people not to hire developers. I see you. That's, that's, that's rough.

• 42:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, they weren't doing it anyway.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So that's that. That's all I really have to say about it. We should talk about iPad though. There's a lot more that's going on with iPad.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  Well, we've gone for almost 40 minutes. Let's take a break and come back and do the iPad.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  Okay.

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• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Dieter, we're back.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:05Nilay Patel?

  It's, this is your, I mean, you gave me 20 minutes to talk about display LEDs. So I feel like we should talk about the future of computing, maybe for like five?

• 44:13Speaker 03

  So, the, man, I don't even know if I can list off all of the stuff that they did to the iPad. Number one, it's no longer running iOS, it's running iPadOS. What does it mean that it's iPadOS instead of iOS? It means, I don't know. I don't know what it means. As near as I can tell, it means that now Apple has to commit to having like real iPadOS updates every year, which is actually great. They have changed up the way that multitasking works a little bit. Now you can have that slide over app, you can have like multiple versions of them and they can like fan out. You can't rearrange them like you can with iOS, but you can like swipe through them really quickly, like you can on an iPhone X, which basically means that that little slide over

• 44:58Speaker 03

  window becomes like an iPhone X that's like hanging out on the right side of your tablet, which is pretty cool. They also have done a bunch of stuff with drag and drop for multiple windows. So, apps can have multiple windows now and not just Safari, so that's great. Anything that you can like drag, you can basically turn into a window, which is kind of wild. And then they also have like app expose. So, if you long press an app on the dock, you'll see all the instances of that app, all the spaces you put it in. Or if the app is open, you can like tap on the, that same app on the dock and it'll jump into that thing where you can like look at all the windows on it.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  And I want to clarify, multiple windows sort of means multiple instances of the same app? So they could be different views of the same app.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Or they could be multiple of the same view in the same app, right?

• 45:48Speaker 03

  Well, it depends what the app allows you to do, right? Like Safari, you could just open up the same page in two columns. But Mail, you like, you probably, I doubt that you'd be able to get like two, your inbox in two different separate windows. But you could definitely get your inbox and, you know, one of the emails you're writing. And then a third email that you're like referencing in three different windows if you wanted to.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  I guess I'm a crazy person. This has been a longstanding thing with, with the iPad for me. Like as a writer, one of my fundamental things I do when I write, I have the text in front of me. And then I have reference text. It might be notes. It might be an earlier draft. And not being able to use the same app in that side by side way has been very frustrating. So I, I feel like they, they solved that for me, hopefully.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, they didn't solve it for me because I still have to use the garbage Google Docs app on the iPad. And yeah, and that doesn't multi-window, but they're going to force all iPad apps to support at least like the resizing window thing next year. It's going to become mandatory, which is like just great news. I, I don't know that all this new multi-tagging stuff, like it's like some real finger gymnastics, right? Uh, and I don't know, like, are people going to use all that stuff? I think people are going to take to that new, uh, the new like iPhone on the side of your iPad thing really, really quickly. Whether or not like it conceptually makes sense to start like dragging sheets off and like take it, take an icon and drag it over here. And like, how many app instances in my app window do I have a lot like? All of that, managing that kind of workspace, I think gets, um, will get really hard, really quickly.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  Uh, it is actually way more complicated, like way more complicated than the simple like window model on your Mac on a desktop.

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  So I read your, your piece today, which is very good and I watched your video.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Well, I haven't even gotten to the finger, the like, the new like finger gestures. That stuff is crazy town.

• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, the drag and drop piece, I want to talk about the finger stuff, but the drag and drop piece. I think where Apple is going with the iPad is that if you just try to do something, it happens.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like if you're just like, what if I just like pick this up and slide it over here and like use five fingers and a thumb from my app. Like, and they're like, yep, that'll, that'll work. And I don't think any of it is meant to be a workflow.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:57Nilay Patel?

  That's kind of like, that's my read of it now is like, it all just kind of does stuff.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like it all just sort of happens and like there's an internal consistency. So if you just like keep monkeying around. More things will happen.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  I don't know that it, that they're, they're expecting anyone to do it on purpose, I guess.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but that gets into the, the, the pinches, cause there's like 50 pinches now.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  They added, like, one of the problems with iOS is you had to shake to undo and everybody hated that. So they needed a new gesture for that. So they've added new language to the iPadOS, not necessarily to the iPhone, where three fingers does stuff now. So if you, uh, three finger pinch, that copies, do it twice, a paste. If you three finger plop, that paste, no, it cuts and then paste. Uh, then you can go left and right and that'll be undo and redo. My whole hang up with this, and I made a whole video about it, is like, I don't understand conceptually how someone graduates from like one finger to two fingers to three fingers. Like they don't seem conceptually like related to each other. They, they're internally consistent. So one finger like moves stuff, two fingers selects stuff, three fingers edits stuff. So that all makes sense. But I don't know how like somebody learns all of that stuff.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  Well, two pin, two finger pinch zooms.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  Two finger pinch zooms, right? But sometimes, sometimes it selects, it can select on lists. If you don't pinch, you just hold them down. Also, if you tap three fingers, different things can happen too.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  And on your computer, two fingers scrolls.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Right. That's true. Two fingers scrolls, one finger scrolls on, um, on the iPad, but two fingers selects.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, now if you have an iPad here in the future, you don't, what's a computer?

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Well, now you could, you could plug in a mouse.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  And you can plug in a mouse.

• 49:34Speaker 04

  So, also you can barely grab the scroll bar on the side now.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  You can grab the scroll bar. If you move the cursor around and you like, like move your finger really fast, it, the cursor like gets really, really big. So you can just like move paragraphs at a time, which is kinda cool.

• 49:49Speaker 04

  One of the new gestures is, I don't even know if you call it a gesture, is selecting text. So I, I'm sure everybody who's ever used a mobile device, basically since the pre came out, has had a problem where when you're editing text, you have a cursor. And when you use your finger to move around in that editable text environment, all sorts of bad things happen and it's never fun on any platform.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so this is, this is to Nilay's point is they like got rid of the magnifying glass and they, they're just like, just move your finger around and we'll get it. We'll figure it out. If you're, are you trying to select or move the cursor? There's like a difference in how exactly you pull each of those things off, but Apple's basically like, we're going to figure that out for you with the iPad. Like I don't, I actually don't know if I can precisely explain how you move the cursor versus how you like start with a selection with the cursor.

• 50:36Speaker 04

  The on-screen demo, the first time Apple ever demonstrated this new interaction method of an intuitive selection. The guy who works for Apple couldn't do it. And like, I, I don't want to judge beta software too strongly, but this is literally, the demo is designed to demonstrate that they have improved on text selection and he can't get the motion right.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  So all of this like interface stuff, um, I think that for mo, for a lot of people, it's not going to matter because they're just going to use it like they use their iPads. It's like, but it matters for like, can you use it as a computer? But it doesn't matter. Can you use a computer as some other things that they did? For example, uh, they watched Nilay's review of the iPad Pro. And then they specifically just went thing by thing that he complained about in that video. And then they announced a fix for that precise, exact thing onstage during the keynote.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  I mean, by name, like literally by name.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  Do you feel powerful, Nilay? Do you feel vindicated?

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  I feel like, uh, I said extremely obvious things to them about their decade old tablet. And they're like, yeah, yeah, that's the one.

• 51:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, they made it sound, look, they did some stuff around like plugging in USB drives that is indeed novel, right? Yeah. So USB drives mount in, in user space are protected. They don't want you to like, I don't know, install malware off a USB. Great. So that's different. Did that require a multi-year project? For their operating system that is based on like a 40-year-old operating system? I don't know. Right? Like I doubt it.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. It required somebody telling them, it would be nice if like this totally normal, natural thing worked. And they're like, oh, people use our devices not at, uh, Apple Park.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  So what it's USB drives, you can mount, you can mount local storage in the files app. A huge variety of file systems, hard drives, USB drives, SD cards and readers.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  Files app also works with SMB if you are living in that world.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, we think that's gonna be great for people without airdrop. And just like the way they said it was very much like, can you imagine?

• 52:46Speaker 04

  For dirty people.

• 52:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was a lot. They wrote an API so that apps can address particularly the, the camera stuff directly. So you can import directly into Lightroom, which honestly is just so late coming, but I'm so happy it's finally here. And then they added a desktop class browser. Those are the things. Those are the things.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  Yep. They, they added a browser that they are calling desktop class. I think the verdict is out whether or not they, how good they did.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, you, I mean, you, you played with it. You opened Google Docs. You did the whole thing. What do you think?

• 53:18Speaker 03

  It, it is, the verdict is out. It is unclear. One of two things, one of three things happened. One, they like, took like proper mobile Safari and like did some real ports and like put it on the iPad. And it just works better that now, along with, two, they have figured out how to do a better job of making touch work on a bunch of different websites that are, don't expect to have touch. Or three, they have gone through the most popular websites that people complain about the most and made sure that they work. Amongst all of that, the thing they, they like clearly did is they changed the browser's user agent to desktop Safari. So like it is desktop Safari. That's what a website sees.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  And then when you go there, it will present, it will try and send you the desktop version instead of just, you know, assuming you're on like a big ass iPhone. And then Safari on the iPad will be like, well, this actually kind of sucks. I'm going to reflow this website a little bit to make it better. And then I'm going to put like this layer in between that it optimizes it for touch. So they are like re-rendering a website and they're optimizing it for touch. And they're quote unquote lying, I don't know about what kind of browser they are.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  All that adds up to me like they didn't. And take Safari from the Mac and put it on the iPad. It's still basically mobile Safari. But it's more capable now and they're doing much more work to get websites that don't aren't optimized for mobile Safari in the way that in a perfect world, they would be. And they're basically like, you know what, our, our mobile Safari actually could work with your thing if you weren't idiots who didn't know how to code a webpage. So we're just gonna like, do that for you.

• 54:55Nilay Patel?

  So here are my questions.

• 54:58Nilay Patel?

  There are so many of them.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 54:59Nilay Patel?

  One, just like philosophically, in a world of responsive websites, which is basically the world, the tablet breakpoint is like gone. Right? Like you're not doing that. Like you're still making a breakpoint for different sizes, but you're not like turning it into some mobile version at the tablet breakpoint.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  In some cases, some websites do, but I'm with you.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  You see, well, you're not doing the like, here's the mobile experience of some subset of functionality. Here's the sort of middle one, and then here's the desktop one with all the buttons, right? Like

• 55:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 55:29Nilay Patel?

  That middle zone is going away. This makes sense, unlike the 13 inch iPad Pro. Because it's a 13, it's a laptop sized display, right? It kind of makes sense on the 11. Are they gonna do this on the iPad Mini? Because that just like, to me is like the funniest idea. So that's like one question, like, you know, that the whole world has kind of built itself around, like there's an iPad class, an iPad breakpoint class. We're gonna build websites that do iPad stuff, but now they're just saying it's desktop Safari. That's gonna be super interesting. How are they gonna rewire it?

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 56:02Nilay Patel?

  Second big question, this one I kind of like, I think is even more philosophical. It's like, what is a desktop class browser? Cause we, what we have been, what we have always meant is a bunch of these web apps don't work here. And you get kicked to using an iPad app and the iPad apps are often inferior. The, the example is Google Docs. Google Docs for iPad is just an inferior product as an app. And they were very clear that Google Docs on the web now works in this browser. They're very clear that a bunch of like web CMSs work in this browser. I think that is in particularly directed at like product reviewers. Where like, I can't use this as my laptop because my like rinky dink.

• 56:45Nilay Patel?

  CMS, I won't name names, but like, we know these folks, doesn't work in it. So like, I have to go to laptop to file. That is not true of Vox Media, by the way.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:53Nilay Patel?

  Chorus.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  We can use Chorus from an iPad right now, it works fine.

• 56:56Nilay Patel?

  You can use Chorus from an iPhone. If you're a, by the way, a major media company, you're in the market for a new CMS, Chorus is not available for licensing.

• 57:03Speaker 04

  I have this problem when I was, I would, I would try to send the newsletter for Circuit Breaker, and I could do everything pretty much okay. But then, there's a slider that you can slide to delay the sending. And I couldn't grab the slider with the iPad. So I'd have to have a, if I was only iPad that day, a coworker would have to fit, to slide a slider for me. But to answer a couple of your questions, most breakpoints are just based on size. So that's already pretty much a solved problem. The big problem with interactivity in web apps is that there's a concept of a click and a concept of a touch. And you have to program for both.

• 57:48Speaker 04

  Unless you do a simple click, like, most interactivity doesn't quite, it doesn't actually interpret one to one. So it is more work for the web developers. There is no automatic fix to turn every click interface into a touch.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  But I think that might be the work that Apple is doing.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, Apple's trying to do some of that on the fly. And I don't know if they're doing it like, through like, magic, or like, they've picked three or four like, common like, web interactions and are like, just translating them.

• 58:16Speaker 04

  Or like a web monkey script.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, like a grease monkey script, exactly. Or if they've got a whole bunch of like, websites that they're like, okay, we know this one is broken, we're gonna fix this one. And it may be that if it's doing the second one, it may be that that's fine. Like, honestly, like, there'll be some stuff at the edges that doesn't work, but if Apple like, just has to go through and like, when a website is broken, like manually like, re-code Safari to fix it, that sucks, that's not what you want a web browser to do, but.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  If that's how they want to run their, you know, their engineering time, then more power to them, I guess. I don't know.

• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, when you add it all up, it's like they said, it's iPadOS. It's just a marketing term. And then they did all this stuff and that the real question for me is like the big, big question. Is it going to diverge from iOS?

• 59:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:01Nilay Patel?

  Right? And is the phone going to be one thing and is there going to be an iPad team and it's going to gain more capability? That eats into laptop capability in a way that the phone doesn't need that work to get done. Or is all, wait, a lot of that stuff is bleeding back to the phone already. Right? You can actually like plug a mouse into the phone.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  Do USB sticks?

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  Yep. All that stuff is going to bleed right back in iOS.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are some, I think some of the three finger gestures might not bleed back to the phone, but otherwise, yeah, it's all there.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  And, and the windowing. So basically the windowing and a couple of the gestures, that's the big difference.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  Also, Sidecar, very excited about Sidecar.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh, can I tell you the coolest thing about Sidecar?

• 59:41Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  They Sherlocked not one, but two very popular iPad apps.

• 59:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, they did that. I never thought I would say this. They did something really cool with the touch bar. So like, it's just a fact. They did it. I'm, I'm out here. I'm, I'm, I'm standing touch bar. So you plug your iPad into the, into your Mac. It shows up. It's, you know, it's a little Wacom tablet. The stylus works, the whole thing. On the left side is like a bunch of modifier keys. So if you're writing with a stylus, you want to hold down command and get a different, you know, function out of the pencil, you can do that. And then on the bottom, they redisplay the touch bar.

• 1:00:16Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:00:17Nilay Patel?

  So you can like, you know, you're like in whatever Adobe app and you see the touch bar at the bottom with all its like little quick commands. It's just right there. And it's like, they forced everyone to make touch bar stuff. Even though no one wanted it. And I'm just like, was the grand plan that they were going to make it cool on an iPad? Cause it's, it's like the one place where you see, you're like, that's really neat. Like they just got for free, this like row of shortcuts in every app that displays on Sidecar. Because it's just the touch bar again. It's just cool. We saw it. It was, I mean, it's all beta. A little bit buggy when we saw it, but I'm, I'm actually super excited about Sidecar.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  And it works over wifi, which I do not believe will be as responsive as a cable, but they claim that it is as responsive as a cable.

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  You cannot start it from an iPad. You have to go to your Mac and say, send to the thing. So it's not like VNC, you have to like, go do it.

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  Right, right, right.

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  But I think it's super smart.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  Okay. Do we want to go through a bunch of miscellany?

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  iOS iPhone is literally miscellany. It got dark mode. Uh, they fixed the video editor so you can record stuff. They made a dope editing interface for photos. It's really good.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Um, they changed the way that Siri works so that it's no longer taking little snippets of human voices and like putting them together like, like jigsaw puzzles to make Siri talk. They're actually just straight up doing computational voice from the jump. Um, that's kind of, oh, and then Apple Maps, uh, the good Apple Maps that only exist in the Bay Area are going to be in all the US, I think by the end of the year. And they copied Street View.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  They like made a big deal out of announcing Street View, which Google announced in 2008.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  It did feel a little tone deaf at the moment.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  The audio sharing thing, what's, I forget what it's called. You, okay, before the pre, there was a TV commercial that probably sent me on the path that I, where I am today of being a huge nerd is there's a Palm commercial where there's this missed connection on a train. And so he, he or she, I forget who instigates the IR beaming of contact information between Palm devices. Uh, and that's so cool. And then I remember when Bluetooth came out, I was like, oh, Bluetooth is going to make this missed connection situation even better. And now here comes Apple with what was already such, such a status symbol for teens, the AirPods.

• 1:02:40Speaker 04

  And now if two people have AirPods and iPhones, they can tap their iPhones together somehow and listen to the same music.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:02:49Speaker 04

  It's a revolution in cute aspirational products.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  It is. I mean, you know, a few years ago, you would just take one headphone out of your ear and just give it to someone.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  And now you can do that same thing with four Bluetooth radios and three computers.

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  You have like $3,000 worth of hardware.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  It's neat. Uh, who doesn't love it?

• 1:03:11Nilay Patel?

  We should talk about single sign on.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 1:03:14Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot.

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  I bet I can do it quickly.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Hmm, good luck.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  This is a big deal.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Nilay Patel?

  It has not been implemented, so I cannot tell you what kind of big deal it is. But Apple keeps coming at Google and Facebook for tracking. So you might remember they've blocked like third-party cookies in Safari by default. They do all kinds of ad tracking blocking by default and other ways. Now they're, they're coming after login with Google and login with Facebook's single sign-on buttons, which are very popular, very useful, but track you. Like, that's the, the trade, right? Like, Facebook gets app analytic data about how many of its users log into apps and what they use, and they can correlate all kinds of stuff. Google, it's the same data. So Apple's saying, okay, we're doing login with Apple, sign-in with Apple. So Apple says, we're doing sign-in with Apple.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  We're not gonna do any of that tracking, we promise. We, we, we cross our heart and hope to die. There's no way to, no. Maybe Tim Cook is tracking everything you're doing, but he promises he isn't. But given Apple's entire history and public stances, you can assume they're not. So we're not gonna track you. And if you want, if the service requires an email address as part of the sign-in, we will automatically generate randomized email addresses per service for you that correlate back to your account, and you can turn them on and off at will.

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:04:30Nilay Patel?

  Right? So you sign into Uber, you give them a fake email address. A year from now, it turns out Uber's doing some shady tracking. You don't have to like reset your whole iCloud account. You just like turn off your Uber account in Apple.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Right. And it makes it completely impossible for you to, you know, share passwords and, across accounts. And it makes it much harder for somebody to do the, the kind of hack that happened to Matt Honan, you know, a decade ago. The, the really famous hack where they got, they knew what his email address was, and so they went from like Amazon to iCloud. They got, they got his email address from one, and then they were able to go to the other. Right?

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  So if you, if you have a random email address for every single service that you use, it, nobody will be able to like get, get from, it'll be harder to get from that to your identity.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So that's a, that's a big deal, right? And Apple's position is developers really want it. The developers are wary of Facebook and Google, so they, they want to, so they've come to them. So that's good, meeting some market demand. The, the power move is that the iOS Developer Agreement has been updated to say if...

• 1:05:36Nilay Patel?

  You have Google or Facebook login buttons in your app. You must provide sign in with Apple. You have, you have to have it. Your app will be rejected if you have sign in with Facebook and you don't have sign in with Apple. There's a Reuters story saying Apple also wants their button to be the first button. Uh, that's a little bit in dispute. Uh, but there is a Reuters story claiming that. So that's like a big platform owner move, right?

• 1:06:00Speaker 04

  How does that work with like Tinder? For instance, doesn't have a whole bunch of buttons. It has the Facebook button because they kind of want you to have a pretty expensive account. So that you can't be a scammer.

• 1:06:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, Barry Diller is going to have to sit down in his new Mac Pro. Code up a sign in with Apple button. I mean, like, that's the answer.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  The sign in with Apple, like from a technical level, it's like not exactly OAuth, but it's like OAuth-esque is what we were told. Um, and it will work. There's no reason you couldn't just put it on Android or put it on the web via any web browser. It's, it'll work in, you know, such as a Safari thing. So it's not like Apple Pay, for example. So from a technical perspective, it's not like there's lock in other than like, you know, in your heart that your account is like with Apple. And even if you don't own a single Apple device, you could still use it. But like in your heart, like you know that like Apple is the one that's sort of the mediator for all of your accounts.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  And I think this is like a big, another big philosophical shit for the company, right? I think a lot of people for a long time, their online presence, their online identity was like their Gmail account. Or their Hotmail account, or the Yahoo account, or their Facebook account, right? Like your identity lives in like a web service of this kind. And your iCloud account philosophically existentially tied to your phone. Apple is like disassociating that a little bit and saying, anybody can have an iCloud account. We will protect your privacy and you can like sign in with iCloud everywhere.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Nilay Patel?

  Do people, are people going to believe that like?

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  It is, it's really hard to know exactly how this will play out, but I will say like this idea of like, it's super important for individual security and privacy to decompose your email address from your phone number, from your other online identities. Like those, those really need to become separate things because it's a huge attack vector for every human who has those things correlated.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's a good idea. People, I mean, like, there are wild cheers in the audience when they announce this thing.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  There is this company called Okta.

• 1:08:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  That offers single sign-in for corporations so that you can have one sort of singular place that your employees need to sign into all the services that you offer, like Expensify and Concur and Slack and, you know, Filebug, you know, whatever, whatever you need to sign into. So that is technically a third-party sign-in. Do all these companies have to make a sign-in with Apple? But no? If they offer, like, corporate, single-sign-in services?

• 1:08:28Nilay Patel?

  I think we know that enterprise apps get passes.

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:08:32Nilay Patel?

  Right? I mean, the, like, the pilot app that Delta deploys on iPad Mini, like, they're not gonna be like, "You have to sign up with Apple Pilots." Like, they changed it, and that's very aggressive. I would say they changed it in the context of, on the day of WWDC, another lawsuit from developers was filed against Apple for antitrust stuff in the store. The FTC basically leaked, announced, like, they told some reporters, like, "We're gonna start looking at Apple." The House Judiciary Committee announced antitrust investigations in big tech. You actually look at Apple's stock price, all that stuff hit, and their stock price cratered while the keynote was going on.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:09:12Nilay Patel?

  It's coming.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

  If you had to rank who's in the most being investigated right now of the big tech companies?

• 1:09:20Nilay Patel?

  Facebook.

• 1:09:22Speaker 04

  Facebook, then?

• 1:09:24Nilay Patel?

  Google.

• 1:09:25Speaker 04

  Then Apple?

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  Then Amazon.

• 1:09:27Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 1:09:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the list. That's Elizabeth Warren's list, right? Facebook, Google, Amazon.

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  But as far as actively, what is actually happening?

• 1:09:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, we know that, like, the DOJ and the FTC have divvied up Google, Facebook, and Amazon. It's like a thing that's occurring. And then we know that Apple is, like, on everybody's list. We know there's these lawsuits pending. So that, you know, Apple's position is like, look, we on the platform, like, just buy something else. It's not a bad position for them to be in. But when they say, hey, if you use a rival service and you, you want to put your app on our phone, you have to use our service. It's really touchy. It's like right on the line.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  Like, what if you want to be Tinder and you want to have a tight Facebook integration and you don't want to offer login with Google? And you're, you've like made that business choice. To put Tinder on the iPhone, now you have to make the business choice to log in with Apple.

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's like a pure expression of iPhone dominance.

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's textbook, we are dominant in this domain. And we are going to use that dominance to become stronger in another domain where we are not currently.

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  And their argument is, and that's great because we're not going to steal your data like these other jerks.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:38Nilay Patel?

  So like you have to like really buy it. I think a lot of people do buy it. That's why they were cheering, but it, that, the backdrop of WWBC was like antitrust rumbles. And then Apple's big announcement that got all these cheers was like, by the way, if you want to use our platform, you have to use our service. Uh, all right, let's very quickly go through the rest. We're going way over. Yeah, I'm just going to read some stuff. Apple is building a major defense against spam calls in iOS 13. That's great. Kind of overdue. CarPlay is getting a redesign.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, the new CarPlay redesign is great. It's tunes and turns on the same screen and I'm very happy.

• 1:11:13Nilay Patel?

  Apple TV and iOS will soon support Xbox One and PS4 controllers. Massive cheers for this in the room.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  I think it is very smart. HomePod will get multi-user support. Like, you know, this is just a list of things that are overdue. The HomePod will get multi-user support. That's cool.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  The iPad won't, though.

• 1:11:30Nilay Patel?

  The iPad won't, bizarrely.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  HomeKit is getting support for home security cameras. Oh, they announced that, uh, they're going to work with Eero and Linksys to firewall HomeKit away from like the internet. So your HomeKit devices like are, are like firewalled, so they, you can't basically, it's, you reduce the attack vector.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Nilay Patel?

  They definitely made it sound like you would need a new router for this. I can tell you that Eero just needs a software update. But they it just it's just something I know. So that's coming. That's it's neat, I guess. The video camera thing is a long time coming, so people are excited about that. Apple Watch got a bunch of updates. There's cycle tracking, also sort of long overdue. 50% of the world is women, as you may know.

• 1:12:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, one thing about that cycle tracking, they were really thoughtful about the display of it. They're really conservative about what days they were going to predict for your period. And they were also just really, I don't know, thoughtful, I guess is the word I'll use again. When it comes to fertility tracking, you have to turn it on in the initial setup workflow of it. And you can turn it off at any time. So if that's the sort of thing you just don't want to see, you won't have to see it.

• 1:12:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  Which is like a super important thing to have done.

• 1:12:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I think they spent, obviously spent the most time there with watch OS. I think people are going to really like it.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Nilay Patel?

  Watch OS, new watch faces, great. New monochrome stuff, great. Streaming audio API, which is notable because Spotify is suing Apple for antitrust issues in Europe. And one of their big concerns is that they were never allowed to make a watch app.

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:12Nilay Patel?

  This is a question. Could Spotify make an app now? And they're like, you'd have to ask them, but but, you know, using these puzzle pieces. It is true that you could assemble a puzzle like it was. So that's a big one. Oh, and it has a decimal meter, which I think is super fun. It's like the nerdiest thing you can do. It'll tell you when your environment's too loud. TV OS gets a new home screen, also long overdue, and multi-user support.

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

  That new home screen has like full screen, like moving previews, which is like the big thing that all, you know, TV, smart TVs are doing. If that bleepin', bleepin', bleepin', bleepin' has sound, I am lighting my Apple TV on fire.

• 1:13:52Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna have sound.

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  God damn it.

• 1:13:54Nilay Patel?

  Duh. Multiuser support, long time coming. TVOS is getting a home, like a control center. One thing I think is really interesting on TVOS and the Apple TV in particular now is now that Apple's putting its app everywhere, they have to do something to make the box worth it. Right. Right? Because if you want to watch an Apple show or use iTunes or whatever, and it's already built in your Samsung TV, why would you ever buy this box? So I, I'm hoping that that, the box gets more powerful because they have to, they have to sell it. Yeah. All right. I think that's everything.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  Now, last week, we can talk about the most important part of Dub Dub, which was Swift UI. Thank you for bringing it up.

• 1:14:34Nilay Patel?

  Is that, is that, is that, is that the feature of the week that we never forget, Paul?

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  No, no, Swift UI is important mainstream news for regular people.

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  I just, Swift UI is really exciting to me. I have attempted, I've never worked very hard to learn how to be an Apple developer, but it's always been very difficult, especially because Apple, Swift exists, but Apple's UI toolkit that you are talking to using the programming language Swift has all still been, for the most part, Objective C. And so the thing that you quickly learn when you're trying to learn how to develop for iOS and Mac is that you actually need to learn two programming languages, which is just, it's a little foreboding. Apple is finally making like a natively Swift UI kit called Swift UI.

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  And it's also part of this like main, this like trend in the industry of these declarative UI paradigms. So like Google's Flutter or Android Jetpack or Facebook's React, Swift UI really fits in with those. So whereas you do have to learn Swift. To make an app with it, you pretty much already understand how to use something like this because it's a very familiar paradigm for most developers. I think it could be huge as far as bringing in new developers to the ecosystem who were just put off, like me, who are put off by all the complexity and difficulty. And if they want to make a greenfield, brand new app, it seems like, it looks like it

• 1:16:10Speaker 04

  will be a lot easier, more straightforward and more fun to develop for.

• 1:16:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I didn't get to go to the State of the Union developer keynote side, but just like, I got the distinct vibe that Apple, as far as Apple is concerned, like Swift and Swift UI is like, it's the future. They're not saying, get with the program, but they're saying, if you got with the program, I wouldn't, that wouldn't be the worst idea.

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  Well, it's sort of one in, one out, where they're kind of deprecating the old Mac, the old way of making Mac applications.

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:16:40Speaker 04

  While they're also bringing in a brand new paradigm. I'm stoked.

• 1:16:46Nilay Patel?

  It seemed like a lot of people are very excited about this as well. I mean, more cheers, more, more demo cheers. I do wonder, it's more like you made an app for our platform, we want you to spend all of your time writing this code over here and maybe not this other kind of, you know what I mean? It's just more Apple ecosystem stuff. But like, what are you gonna do?

• 1:17:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:08Nilay Patel?

  Paul, what's the comparison between this and like React Native?

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  Well, the classic React Native term is, is learn once, write anywhere. So that you still have to write platform-specific code, but you're all, doing it all on that single paradigm. But React Native is JavaScript that then communicates with native widgets to get them, move them around the screen and put them on, on the screen and stuff. So it's, you're not rendering a webpage, but you're, it's still powered by JavaScript. So this is actual native Swift code that's calling native APIs. So it's theoretically going to be more performant.

• 1:17:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, I look forward to your forthcoming iOS apps, Paul. gone90.biz.

• 1:17:50Speaker 04

  I could bring gone90.biz to native iPad, iPadOS only. Requires a file browser.

• 1:17:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, we're gonna take a break. We're not gonna forget Paul's segment and we're gonna spend, I would say, three minutes talking about Stadia, because it literally happened today. We'll be right back.

• 1:18:14Speaker 07

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• 1:18:54Speaker 01

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• 1:19:25Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller.

• 1:19:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:27Nilay Patel?

  Every week.

• 1:19:28Speaker 04

  All the time.

• 1:19:28Nilay Patel?

  You deliver a segment. Renowned for its consistency.

• 1:19:33Speaker 04

  And renowned for the idea that I always have the tab open before you start saying

• 1:19:39Nilay Patel?

  What I think is the best thing about this segment is that we literally do it every week and it's still literally the sloppiest intro. Like, what are we most practiced at? It is this.

• 1:19:51Speaker 04

  It's called.

• 1:19:53Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 1:19:53Speaker 04

  It's called No More Notches. And there's a question mark. A lot of people leave off the question mark, but it's, it's No More Notches. So Oppo hits the scene with a notchless phone that has a front-facing camera through magical technology that makes the, the, the screen see-through when the camera's engaged. But like, three hours later.

• 1:20:18Speaker 04

  Xiaomi also has an under display camera. So apparently, right now, like you're not going to have as good of quality from the front facing camera as you would if you have a TrueNotch. But this does seem like this was the inevitable, this is the actual future, right?

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  Like a screen that disappears so that the camera can take a front facing shot and then it goes back.

• 1:20:44Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Yeah, I mean, the the goal is to hide that all the sensors, the fingerprint reader and the camera under the screen.

• 1:20:52Speaker 04

  It's happening. Here we are.

• 1:20:54Nilay Patel?

  It's the dream.

• 1:20:54Speaker 04

  No more notches, question mark?

• 1:20:56Nilay Patel?

  So I still think the future is the insane Asus phone that we saw with a camera literally like flips up. It's the rear cameras and it makes like Cybertron noises when it does it. So it's like and then you can like rotate it to any any angle because that's obviously what phones have needed.

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  I think if Samsung and Apple have taught us anything, it is that hinges are the highest of engineering arts.

• 1:21:22Nilay Patel?

  It's true. Yeah. Here's my conspiracy theory. The big honkin' notch on the Pixel 3 XL was there because they when you if you're going to have the camera behind the screen, you need to have a bigger sensor to bring in more light, you'd like you've got you need you've got more space to work with back there. So they designed the whole thing, assuming they'd get the screen technology figured out. And then at the 11th hour, like that doesn't work. Well, we're not going to redesign the whole phone. Well, I guess we have a big notch now, don't we? Way to go, guys.

• 1:21:51Speaker 04

  Sure do.

• 1:21:53Nilay Patel?

  That's my conspiracy theory.

• 1:21:54Speaker 04

  That's a good conspiracy theory. I'm a fan.

• 1:21:56Nilay Patel?

  I think my conspiracy theory about the Pixel 3 is it was designed to make people really want the Pixel 4.

• 1:22:03Nilay Patel?

  It's something I'm working with. Um, our stadium with Google Stadium was literally announced today.

• 1:22:09Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:22:09Nilay Patel?

  Just before we came on, so I feel like we have to talk about it just for a minute, even though we just did an hour and a half in W W C. The news is that it costs $10 a month.

• 1:22:19Speaker 04

  And it's launching in November.

• 1:22:20Nilay Patel?

  It's launching in November. $10 a month for the the sort of like 4K tier. You can buy like the Founder's Edition, they'll give you the controller, it's like 130 bucks, then give you three months free. Neat. You still have to buy the games?

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  You still have to buy the games. There will be a free tier in 2020. That's 1080p 60, so you don't have to pay the subscription for it. Um, but you're, and they do intend to someday have a back catalog of free games. But at this point, Google launched a service and it just took us three minutes to explain to you how much it's going to cost and what you're going to get. Which means that they, they just, they just did it wrong.

• 1:22:53Speaker 04

  Hmm. I mean, I am excited about Power Rangers Battle for the Grid.

• 1:22:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So here's, here's my question. So I have not paid for Xbox Live for a long time. Cause I, I just play one video game, which is Madden and I play it by myself at night very badly. But I just started paying for PS Plus because I have two PS4s and I need to get a save file from one to the other. Uh, and it is literally easier to pay for a cloud service to do that than it is to like use a USB stick. So I just did it. Uh, great. So my question is, does this compete? Is this more like you're already paying X dollars a month for PS Plus and Xbox Live? Pay that same amount a month. You don't need a console and you get multiplayer and you get games.

• 1:23:40Nilay Patel?

  Or is it buy this instead of a console and just rent access to your video games that you buy from us forever?

• 1:23:47Speaker 03

  Unclear. I think the answer, as always with video games is are there exclusives? Which we know it's, uh, Gil by Tequila Works and Get Packed by CodeSync. I know nothing about these games. If they're, if the exclusives are any good, that changes the calculus on that decision.

• 1:24:02Speaker 04

  If Stadia does have the opportunity, the technology, like a lot of the limitations in multiplayer about how many people you can have all at once. Are due to the, the fact that the players are geographically distributed and they're all trying to cheat and hack for your WoW gold. So Stadia has the potential to solve those and make very unique, interesting multiplayer experiences. And so they, they could have some pretty compelling, they're not exclusives just because, uh, Google paid somebody $10 million. They're exclusives because they only work on Stadia and then other possible cloud similar services. But until they have that, I don't see who this appeals to other, it's like maybe a cash strapped parent.

• 1:24:47Speaker 04

  Whose child wants video games, but you can't afford a console for them.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Nilay Patel?

  But you're still paying 10 bucks a month.

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you could do the free tier at 1080. And honestly, the question is, given the state of quote unquote, high speed internet in America, is it worth paying the 10 bucks a month? Or does enough people, do enough people in America have like the bandwidth to justify that?

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  If you have fiber, you seem like the sort of person that could probably afford an Xbox One or PlayStation 4, or a real computer.

• 1:25:21Speaker 03

  By the way, sucks to be Hawaii or Guam because they're not launching in Hawaii or Guam for now.

• 1:25:27Nilay Patel?

  I will say that they're launching first in Europe because Europe has the appropriate regulatory infrastructure to make sure fiber is deployed to many people and their speeds are faster and their prices are cheaper. But that's just me. That's just who I am.

• 1:25:39Nilay Patel?

  Look, this is why we got to race to 5G for some reason.

• 1:25:43Speaker 04

  That's right. So we can have stadia, so that we can rent access to things that we buy.

• 1:25:50Nilay Patel?

  So confusing. Anyway, that's the news. It's E3 next week. So like, there's more video game news coming. We'll have people there. It's gonna happen. But I want to talk about it because it happened today. Okay, we have gone way too long. It's been emotional. We talked about everything. I do want to remind everyone that Apple's idea about where machine learning should happen involves detecting motion and video on the HomePod. It's very important to me to remind you that that's where they're at. That's the end of the show. You can listen to Why'd You Push That Button with Caitlin and Ashley. It's very good. I encourage you to listen to it. You can listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Recode Media, Peter Kafka. All excellent shows available on the Vox Podcast Network. You can rate us and review

• 1:26:33Nilay Patel?

  us on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts, you might know, is a dominant provider of podcasts. So our producers asked me to make you rate us and review us there. I'm just saying. Those are just words I'm saying. I'm also saying, break him up. Rock and roll.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  Paul.

• 1:27:06Speaker 08

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