Jony Ive leaving Apple, iPadOS public beta, and Bill Gates’ greatest mistake

Public betas for iPadOS, iOS 13, and macOS Catalina are available now so Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller discuss the updates from using the software themselves. Also, It was announced during this recording that Apple’s chief design officer Jony Ive will depart the company later this year — the crew reacts. Other topics this week include Bill Gates discussing Microsoft losing to Android, a new Raspberry Pi, and updates on Foxconn's factory in Wisconsin. Stories discussed this week: Jony Ive leaving Apple after nearly 30 years to start new design firmiPadOS public beta preview: worthy of the new nameiOS 13 hands-on: dark mode, Apple Maps, Reminders, and moreiOS 13’s best upgrade is in your car macOS Catalina first look: goodbye, iTunes; hello, iPad apps on Mac$35 Raspberry Pi 4 announced with 4K support and up to 4GB of RAMJony Ive leaving Apple after nearly 30 years to start new design firmBill Gates says his ‘greatest mistake ever’ was Microsoft losing to AndroidOne year after Trump's Foxconn groundbreaking, there is almost nothing to show for it Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:04Speaker 02

  Andrew, we need to pause this, and everyone needs to go read the story that Johnny Ive is forming an independent design company. He's leaving the company, and then Apple will become one of his clients.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge Empire. Is that a good one?

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Hmm?

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna be honest with the listeners. We rerecorded the beginning of the show. So I'm Nilay, that's Dieter.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  It's Paul. Hello. We were halfway, this is true, this is a true story. We were halfway through The Vergecast. We were about to take our first break. We were about, we were like, done.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Huge news broke, literally in the middle of our recording, which is that Johnny Ive is leaving Apple. Uh, that's Sir Jonathan Ive. It's Sir, Sir J Ive is leaving Apple. He's taking Marc Newsom with him, who is a very famous designer that he hired to work at Apple. They're starting a new company called Love From, which will be based in California.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Quote-unquote "for now."

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  For now.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  And Apple will be one of their first and major exclusive clients.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  So that's, we, we realized we had to stop the show and start over, because there's no way we can put out a Vergecast this week that doesn't lead with Johnny Ive leaving Apple, because that is just massive news. So we're gonna talk about that right now. But I'm just gonna be very honest with you. Then we're gonna stop talking about it. And then you're gonna listen to us talk about iOS 13 and the iPad and macOS Catalina. And we didn't know that Johnny Ive was leaving when we were talking about that stuff. So that, it might be a little strange. I think it'll be fine, though.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  I will say, Neel, like, you know that I don't typically blow smoke up your butt. But really enjoyed the Kara convo. I felt like it was a really good summary of the overall situation that had all the right specifics and all the right context then. So I definitely encourage people to check that out.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  It is true. Paul does not often pay me compliments. So I appreciate that. If you didn't listen to that, Kara Swisher was on the interview episode on Tuesday. Kara's always fun to talk to because she does not take shit from anyone.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, just doesn't. So it was really fun to try to articulate, I think, what we've been seeing for the past few weeks and get her perspective on it. She obviously knows everybody. So if you haven't listened to that, go listen to it. But let's talk Johnny Ive. So rumors of Ive leaving Apple have floated around for years and years and years.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was a whole thing, like, he was disconnected. He wasn't paying attention. He was spending all his time in London and he's actually not really working at Apple at all. And he's like, no, no, no, I'm still here. But then, like, I saw him at the last Apple event at WWDC and he's, like, explaining the Mac Pro to Tim Cook and the design of it. And it's, does Tim Cook need this to explain? Do you guys not hang out and talk? It was very confusing.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Also, the pivot to where he was just designed in a broader sense, which also included software.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  Right. So Ive, just a little bit of history here. Ive famously was already at Apple when Steve Jobs came back. He had been in another firm called Tangerine. He came to work at Apple because he thought it was inspiring. Jobs came back. He saw the talent radiating off of Johnny Ive. They obviously had their incredible collaboration over the years, the iMac, the iPod, the phone. Ive was very front and center at that moment in Apple. Every time there'd be a new product, there'd be a Johnny Ive video. He would say, "Aluminium, it was great. We all loved it." But those two were very, very close collaborators. Jobs sadly dies. And immediately the sort of rumbles of can Tim Cook keep this executive team together? Can he keep everybody happy? Can they, right? All of those questions happened.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  This is a long time ago now, but all those questions happened. There have been rumors just over the years that Ive was bored, that he wanted to do different things. He got the title of Chief Design Officer at Apple. So now he oversaw all design, including software, and most importantly, including architecture. So he was instrumental in the spaceship campus and the stores and sort of the experience of Apple. He was no longer just like, the next iMac is, has spots, which was like a thing that he did with Steve Jobs. He has a bunch of designers working under him. He hired Mark Newsom. The watch came out that was very much an Ive project. But these rumbles have been there for such a long time, particularly that he wants to move his family back to England. Cause that's where, yeah.

• 5:30Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if you know this, Johnny Ive is not from America, he's from England. I don't know if the accent, the pronunciation of aluminium gave it away. Or the knighthood, all clues he hadn't put it together. So now it's happened. It's absolutely massive. There's, I don't think there's any understating it. I think, I have some big, I would say it's sad, like it's bittersweet, like he's a character in the, the story of this company.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  But he's, he says, I don't know how much I believe it, that he's going to keep working with Apple as a client in his new firm.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, he says that there's like a bunch of stuff that they've continued, they've been working on for a number of years and he's going to continue to work on them. But he also has personal passions that he wants to work on outside of Apple now.

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  Do you think he's going to start a clothing line like Kanye?

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  I was going to say, do you think he's going to design a Porsche hard drive case?

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, like there's a real question, like is this new thing going to be Frog Design? Dieter, you just did a whole piece with Frog Design.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:27Nilay Patel?

  Can other companies hire Johnny Ive to make stuff that compete with Apple? Like can Sony show up and be like, can you just help us? We've always needed the help, can you help us?

• 6:37Speaker 04

  And he was already doing like random side projects, just not like corporate gigs, right? So he would only, the only reason he'd need to leave would be.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  To work less with Apple, basically, right? Or to do more corporate gigs, right? Because it's not like he couldn't do random passion projects.

• 6:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, to be honest, he doesn't have to do anything ever again for the rest of his life.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because he puts spots on an iMac.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, he did a lot of things, but like, uh, he is a knight.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  He's friends with Bono. He's extraordinarily wealthy and he designed the iPhone. I, like, if you, if that's your resume, you're like, yeah, I'm, I don't want to go to meetings anymore. Like, that's what I would say. Like, I'm just never, I'm literally never going into a conference room again in my life. It's never gonna happen. You can't have me.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm only gonna, I don't know, sculpt with clay. Like, you could just make that call. I don't know that I would personally sculpt with clay, but I'm, I'm just trying to imagine. I'm trying to have things. I'm only gonna use a CNC machine for art.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  Do you think he has a person? Anyway, the point being, Apple's design has been remarkably consistent for a long time. Right? I think iOS 7 was the big hiccup and they've walked it back a lot since then.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there are a lot of easy potshots you could take at Johnny Ive. And in some ways, maybe they're not potshots if you look at the arc of the, like, the, the thoughtfulness of the design. I mean, we're talking about the keyboard on the MacBook Pros. We could talk about charging the original Apple pencil by having it stick out the side of the iPad. We could talk about charging the Magic Mouse by, you can't, by sticking a lightning underneath it. There are a lot of like, oh yeah, ha ha, that you could do. I, I'm actually a little bit torn because on the one hand, he designed the iPhone and like, the iMac and like, the most iconic computers of the past 30 years. But does that mean that these other things are not misses? iOS 7 is included in that list.

• 8:30Nilay Patel?

  So iOS 7 was famously, they got rid of Scott Forstall, who was the software architect, partner to Steve Jobs with iOS, who made everything skeuomorphic. I've hated that stuff. He took over. iOS 7 went super flat, was legitimately hard to use because it looked, it, it just like, didn't give you any visual affordances of what was going on. They have largely left that behind, right? If you just look at the, the evolution to iOS 13 now. There's a lot more texture and depth and gradient and shadow in iOS again. But that was his first big, I'm in charge of software now moment.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 9:05Nilay Patel?

  It was obviously his first one. So that side's gotten a little bit better. The hardware design stuff, right? There's been stories forever at Apple design. We've published them.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  Apple design is super weird and lazy now. So maybe some fresh faces, some, you know, lack of respect for tradition. All that stuff is going to be very good for the company. One imagines that that's years away, right?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gonna take a minute.

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  Like, the iPhone X design is gonna be the iPhone design for quite some time.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  Hopefully, there's like a new MacBook design. That would be great. They obviously just did a new Mac Pro design. So hopefully, there's other products sort of in the cycle that are gonna change. But it's still like, this has been one of the most consistent companies and consistent sets of executive leadership in the entire industry. I don't think there's any discounting the fact that this is a massive change. Also, Tim Cook has to replace him.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  So who are the two executives? There's two executives you're gonna report to Jeff Williams?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the new plan here is Evans Hankey, who's the Vice President of Industrial Design, and Alan Dai, who's the Vice President of Human Interface Design, are going to report to Jeff Williams, who is the COO at Apple. And so they have been on Apple's design team for a really long time. And so they're sort of, they're taking over those two things. So it sounds like they might be splitting a little bit, software and hardware, although saying Human Interface Design and Industrial Design are like, you know, software and hardware is an oversimplification by quite a bit.

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but, I mean, that's also huge, right? They're reporting not to the CEO, they're reporting to the operations guy. Apple's Subicon is being promoted, another 24-year veteran of Apple is being promoted to SUV of Operations. So you see Jeff Williams' world get a little bit bigger. If you watch Apple Keynotes, you actually know Jeff Williams is, he always does the watch stuff, but he's also the COO of the company. But remember, when Jobs died, in his book, he's like, I set up the company so no one can screw with design. I set up the company so Johnny Ive is in charge of what the products are. It's a product-forward company. Now, design is not at the CEO level, it's two people under the COO. Like, org charts are boring, and this is ridiculous, like, it's an org chart.

• 11:20Nilay Patel?

  But like, keep in mind, the soul of Apple is design-first. And their big famous designer, again, who is a knight, is leaving. I like, I think it's a good, I kinda think it's a good thing.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, the charging the Apple pencil and charging the Magic Mouse are really sticking out to me right now, like literally and figuratively.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  You know, it's just like, I think I've had a little bit enough of that brand of Apple. And I, I mean, the lamp, the iMac lamp, the cube, it's really end of an era. It's wild.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  The thing that I have been thinking about, as we've been talking here, is Apple's design, especially in hardware, but a little bit in software, although they dial it back, has become more austere over the years, over like the last five, 10 years. And the thing that brought Apple back from the brink was playfulness, like that original iMac, the idea of having the iMac, the new iMac be on a funny little lamp stand. There was an approachability and a lightheartedness to their designs. The, the iBook was huge for that, like the weird clamshell, like literally a clam.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  With a handle?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would love to see a little bit of that playfulness come back. Or just, just a little bit, I don't know, it's, again, it's a cheap shot to say pretension, because I don't think that's quite right, but it's not totally wrong. Austere is, I think, the word that's been way too austere.

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  Austere is a good word. Severe is another good word.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:52Nilay Patel?

  Right, I mean, a lot of these designs are, they're very cold. And I think with the phone, it makes sense, like, they know, people put phones in cases, you're gonna personalize it. They know, I mean, they sell however many watch bands, so they have some element of it, but the playfulness and sort of expressiveness of their product design has definitely just sort of coalesced on, yep, it's a, it's a blank slab of metal, and this is what you get, you also can't change the default apps, and you're locked into our products and services because we're a services company. Like, it's, it, like, the whole thing is like, it's, it's very perfect, which, you know, is Apple's brand, but I think they've lost sort of a human element over time, it's just real.

• 13:36Nilay Patel?

  There's also a giant notch in the front of the phone, I don't know if you're aware.

• 13:40Nilay Patel?

  See, it's absolutely huge news. He's obviously starting this new firm. Apple plans its products years and years ahead. So I don't anticipate we're going to see any massive changes. Software does change a little bit faster, so we might see some changes on the software UI front. But you know, there's continuity of that leadership there, too. I just think we're, he says it's a natural and gentle moment to leave. I don't know what a gentle moment to leave is, but maybe he's like, the spaceship has done. It has landed.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  All the, all the furniture has moved in. You know, I'm done. I've, I've parked my car and I'll now zoom off into the sunset. Uh, it is remarkable that he's also taking Mark Newsom with him, which is less sort of headline news. But that was a big, famous, is this the person who's going to replace you higher? And it seems like that's in, that's in go.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  No, the thing I'll be curious to see, like Eve Behar designs a bunch of random gadgets to the point where it's almost like, not a joke, but become like, oh yeah, here we go. Another company that got Eve Behar to design their, you know, hard drive enclosure or their, you know, wacky smartwatch or whatever it is. I mean, is Johnny Ive going to go like full Eve Behar and just like design, you know, random Kickstarter's? I mean, the answer has to be no, right? He's going to design luxury products.

• 14:55Nilay Patel?

  Again, he's a knight. He's best friends with Bono.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm assuming he owns a castle and he, he's a billionaire. Cause he designed the iPhone.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm, I'm guessing when like the, the Juicero folks show up, he's like, I'm not, I'm not doing this.

• 15:16Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't think so.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  I think everybody has a price. I think Juicero at the right price. I mean, why else start a firm? That's the thing. Like if he said, I'm going to go to my home in England and sculpt clay, I'd be like, whatever. But he's starting a firm, there's going to be a price. There is a, a number of, I'm sure he will also have a high bar of things that he finds interesting, but. I feel like there will be a price that you can get the Johnny Ive juicer.

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Ivero.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, we'll see. I mean, like, that's obviously gonna be the thing. He's not a very public person.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  He doesn't go onstage at these events. He doesn't talk. I doubt that even the Apple products that he continues to work on will make any mention of the fact that his firm worked on them. The way that Eve Behar, like, literally startups hire Eve Behar so they can email us saying Eve Behar designed this.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  Right? Which is like a little mark of quality, or at least like, someone thought through this design. We're not gonna send you, like, a breadboard in a wooden box. It's called the Juicero. I don't know. We'll see. I get the sense that this is like a, he's out. It's like a real he's out moment, and this is just a staging ground for him to continue to work on those projects and hang out and, you know, have an office and write off whatever he has to write off because it's a business expense.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  It's like a tax thing. I get it.

• 16:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, he and Mark Newsom are like, well, what if we wanna buy really expensive chairs and look at them? Well, we'll just write them off to this page. Um, isn't that how businesses work? I don't know. It's been a while since I ran this one. Okay, so we've talked about that. Let's, if you're in your car, just pull over and just honestly think about the number of products in your life that were either directly designed by or heavily influenced by this one person. It is almost every single phone, right? Like, he pushed the industry forward for phones. Almost every single laptop looks like the MacBook Air.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, some of them, so much so that they might as well just be MacBook Airs. That's Johnny Ive. Like, you are surrounded by this person's influence. Uh, and now, as far as we can tell, it's a, he's running some sort of tax scam with his buddy Mark. Um, I'm kidding, I'm absolutely kidding. Uh, almost every product that we encounter has been influenced, AirPods, right? They're still his responsibility. Uh, the spaceship itself, like, this, this influence is gigantic. So take a minute to just ponder that. We'll see what happens next. I mean, there's a September event. We're gonna get some hardware out of it, right?

• 17:44Speaker 04

  Notably, most of your car not designed by Johnny Ive.

• 17:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  He did design a car.

• 17:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's true. It was, it was some little weird silver car, because of course it was. Yeah, I mean, Apple designing a car was, I mean, they just bought a little car startup, right? Um, so maybe, maybe that's what he's gonna go work on. But just think about it. Like, we don't know what's gonna happen next. All we know is that he's leaving you, starting this new firm. But it's a pretty remarkable thing. Okay, we're gonna take a break. Everybody process. We're gonna come back, we're gonna talk about iPadOS and all the other stuff that's going on.

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• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so we're back. Like I said, the Johnny Ive news broke in the middle of us recording The Vergecast. So we'd already had an entire conversation about iPadOS. We'd already talked a little bit about iOS 13. We'd gotten deep in the weeds on how CarPlay works. So listen to that, and then when you hear me say the magic word, Catalina, you'll know that we just picked it up. It'll be, it's gonna be seamless. It's gonna be magic. You said it like five times before the, before the actual thing. This isn't gonna work. It's totally gonna work. Okay. Here we go. This is a big week. There's not one, not two, but five Apple OSs in beta or something like that. It's something insane number of... It's five. It's five. It's crazy. Yeah. I kept forgetting about one of them. Like, I'm like, oh, we got them. No, we don't. There's one more. Damn it.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  Wait, can I, can I try iPad?

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  I-O-I-O-S?

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  WatchOS?

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh huh.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  macOS?

• 20:11Nilay Patel?

  Uh huh.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Car?

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  CarTalk?

• 20:14Nilay Patel?

  CarTalk?

• 20:15Speaker 04

  TVOS?

• 20:16Nilay Patel?

  TVOS.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  There it is, yeah.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  CarTalk.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  CarPlay is not an OS.

• 20:21Nilay Patel?

  CarPlay is an, we're gonna get to it. CarPlay is an extension of iOS. Uh, Apple did buy a small self-driving car company this week.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:27Nilay Patel?

  Um, the company was like going, they're like one week away from going out of business. Uh, and then Apple's like, what if we buy you?

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Well, there'd even been a rumor that like Apple was gonna, and then they decided, nah, we don't need you. We'll just let you die. They're like, we're gonna die. And Apple's like, okay, fine, we'll buy you.

• 20:41Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's some brutal negotiating from Tim Cook. He's like, stare into your mortality. And then you will know if I will buy you. Um, but yeah, so CarTalk coming soon from Apple.

• 20:55Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, a bunch of new OSs, we gotta go through them all. They're in public beta. We can talk about them a lot more freely. Dieter made some videos, Chris Welch made some videos. We, we like made a bunch of videos. I made an iOS video. Um, so lots to talk about there. Uh, Google continues its, uh, new comms strategy of just having Rick Ostrow say what they're doing months before they do it, even if what they're doing is not doing anything.

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  So that's pretty good. So we gotta talk about what is going on with Google and tablets. There's a rumor of a Microsoft Surface that go on Android apps. That actually flows right into Bill Gates, just like lamenting the fact that Microsoft didn't do Android, which I think is really interesting. We gotta talk about that. I'm gonna say this, the day you're listening to this, Friday, you're in your car. This is the one year anniversary of Trump breaking ground at the Foxconn factory. So I just wanna, we're just gonna end on that, on that moment, because I think-

• 21:44Speaker 02

  That high note?

• 21:46Nilay Patel?

  It's a high note from, anyway. Let's start with Apple's flurry of operating systems. So Dieter, you are running iPadOS.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Not as I speak to you on my current machine.

• 21:56Nilay Patel?

  Your current machine, which is a Mac laptop with, uh, I believe a frozen touchbar?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  That is correct.

• 22:01Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  It is, uh, it's on Mojave though. It's not running Catalina. So yeah, iPadOS, the big deal was they changed the name. And Neela, I know you had a lot of feelings about them changing the name. And, uh, I think they were right to change the name. I think this deserves to be called iPadOS instead of iOS.

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  I think they're being very, what's the, they're of two minds about what this name change means. So to us, when we were speaking to the Apple people at WWDC, they're like, "It's not a big change. We're just changing the name to, you know, it's still iOS. All the features are gonna go back and forth. It's really sharing the same stuff." And then in public, they're like, "It's more than a name change. It's the future of computing." And I don't think they've decided where on that spectrum the name change actually lies. I would prefer it to be way more on the, "It's really different. It's its own thing. It's its own team." That's where it's needed to go for some time. But when we, when we talked to them at WWDC, they're like, "It's just a marketing. We're just, you know, it seems nice."

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  Having used it, where do you think it lies?

• 23:03Speaker 02

  I think it lies in between those two poles, I guess. I'll cop out and say that. There are things you can do on iPadOS that you just can't do on the iPhone. You know, specifically like the multitasking stuff, but like all the files app stuff, like everything there actually does work on the iPhone. But the multitasking specifically, to have like a little iPhone in the slide over, that you just like have a bunch of apps just hanging out over there, is what makes it feel different. So like, you've got your split screen apps or whatever, and then you've just got a whole bunch of like stuff that is just hanging out, ready to look at and swipe away if you don't want it over on the side. That is radically different in terms of my day-to-day use than what was there before. That sounds like I'm overstating it, but it really is convenient to have

• 23:46Speaker 02

  a stack of like little things that you want, like the messages app, and your RSS reader so you don't look at it too much, and Twitter so you don't look at it too much, and I don't know, maybe Slack or something, just hanging out over there. And you can bring them in quick and get rid of them quick. It's like having an iPhone sitting next to your iPad, only it's on your iPad.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  Is it actually like an iPhone? Cause it, you know, it superficially looks. It's got the bar at the bottom, the whole thing. It very superficially looks like a little iPhone. Does it work like a little iPhone?

• 24:13Speaker 02

  You mean like, does it make calls?

• 24:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  No, like, does it, there's still iPad apps, they're just smaller, you know what I mean?

• 24:22Speaker 04

  The muscle memory that you've developed navigating around iPhones, can you use that for the one-third of your screen that is a little iPhone?

• 24:31Speaker 02

  You can. You can like swipe on the bottom to switch through things, or you can swipe up to like fan out the things on it. But like, you say that there are iPad apps on, on the iPhone, but like, all iPad apps are iPhone apps, just redesigned for larger screens.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Right? So like, yeah.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  So do they, do they revert to the iPhone UI? Like, is there a back gesture and all that stuff? Yeah, it's all there.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  That's nuts.

• 24:54Nilay Patel?

  It's like a little-

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Well, the back gesture's tough, but yeah, you can, you can kinda get it on the edge.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  The-

• 25:01Nilay Patel?

  Wait. You, you gave two very different responses to that very same thing.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  I don't know what you're asking. Like, is it, is it really like an iPhone? What is an iPhone? What is an OS? Like-

• 25:13Nilay Patel?

  Wow, Dieter. We're like, we're, we're one minute and 43 seconds into this conversation and we're, what is an iPhone?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Well, right. I don't know what you're asking.

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  So, longstanding Chrome OS, longstanding dream. We're gonna have a little Android app, this didn't work for them. But we're gonna have little Android apps in the corner. It's like, we're gonna run phone apps in the middle of this like more desktop operating system.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:33Nilay Patel?

  Does this pop over system in the iPad feel like you've got a bunch of iPad apps taking advantage of the full surface area of the display? And now you've got a little baby iPhone over here running iPhone apps? Or is it more like just a shrunk down, you know what I mean? Like, does it feel like having a little phone in the corner?

• 25:47Speaker 02

  It feels like having a little phone in the corner, except that those apps are just iPad apps, shrunk it down to, in the, in the iPhone form factor. So if you want to like, grab the little bar at the top and pull it down and make it a full split screen and have it become a full-size iPad app, you can. So it's, it's a little bit of the best of both worlds, except that Apple added a whole bunch of stuff that we wanted in order to have better multitasking. So multiple windows out of a single app, uh, you know, this like, having a bunch of stuff sitting in the slide over, that's all great. They don't know what they're doing. Because if you command tab over to an app, you just don't know what's gonna launch. If you had an app inside, in slide over and you try to open it, it'll pull up in the slide over if you have an app open.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  But if you're on the home screen and you try and open the app, then it'll just open up full screen. You kind of never really know what's gonna happen when you tap on an app icon.

• 26:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's the future of computing. Surprise and delight.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  That's always been something with Mac where they kind of they order the spaces sort of based on like a recency.

• 26:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  And so, but I I'm curious and I need to spend some time with it, but like I'm curious what I'll land with, because I can imagine there seems like there'd be two different ways to to use an iPad. You could have a bunch of different spaces for different scenarios. Or you could say, this space is my home and I will manage, you know, I will swap between the iPhone apps and I will swap between the main app. And we're abusing this concept of iPhone apps. I know they're not really iPhone apps, but you know, I will, I will, I will manage what's on the sidebar. I will manage what's floating. I will manage the main, the main screen because I I'm going to live in this space rather than I'm going to switch between different spaces that are each suited for a different work.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  So part of the problem is we don't know what the metaphor is for how you operate these windows. Right? And when there's just a full screen metaphor, uh, which is what you've got on an iPhone and, you know, on the iPad a little bit, it was basically like you'd go into the multi look view and you would see everything was like in order of recency. Right? You would just go back in time. What's the last app you opened? The one before that, the one before that, slide over back in time till you find the thing that you want, tap it, and then it opens back up and then it comes to the top of the stack. Right?

• 28:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  The iPad mixes those metaphors because in some ways it's a spatial metaphor, like a desktop. This window's over here on the left, this window's over here on the right, this window's behind those other windows, this window's on the other screen over to the right of the screen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it also still has the recency metaphor. When you swipe up, it's like, here's the, but here's one space I use, the one before that, the one before that, the one before that, and back in time. And so when you command tab into something or you have multiple windows from a single app, the system doesn't know or it's incoherent between, are we dealing with a most recently used metaphor or are we dealing with a spatial metaphor?

• 28:42Nilay Patel?

  Do they call them spaces?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  Because what this reminds me of is the thing on the Mac spaces and expose and all that window management that they layered on that no one really used.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Yep, I use it every day, all the time.

• 28:56Nilay Patel?

  The biggest nerd I know.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  Congratulations, you're in a space. You want me to move? I'll move you to a different space. You want to be on desktop too?

• 29:02Speaker 02

  That's what you get.

• 29:04Nilay Patel?

  Paul, are you supposed to be running like desktop Linux? What are you doing right now? But like they didn't, they like underutilized it because it was so hard to understand.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  This is, isn't this computer supposed to be the easy one?

• 29:13Speaker 02

  It is the easy one as long as you don't try and do too much. And then as soon as you try and do too much, it becomes the harder one.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's truly the iPad story.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  But I, I'm not giving out a final judgment on that because it is technically beta. And they could theoretically like clean that up a little bit before the official release. I have a tiny glimmer of faith.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Either way, there, there are fewer things that you can't do. No matter how hard they are, there are fewer things that you just can't all do.

• 29:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Can you just tell me what the most important thing? What happens when you plug in a thumb drive? Does it work?

• 29:46Speaker 02

  It works. And you can unplug it without having to like unmount it.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  The future is finally here.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  And you unplug it.

• 29:51Nilay Patel?

  All it took was a $1,200 tablet with a supercomputer processor. And you can finally don't have to eject a thumb drive from an app.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Well, what, what they had to do was they, they wanted to, they rewrote the USB stack to basically be more like, um, like discreet APIs to that of what USB is allowed to do. Instead of being a thing that's like plugged directly into, I don't know, the kernel. So the way they say it is like they've put USB into user space. And so like there are, there are certain discrete things that it's allowed to do, like present files to an app or to the files app. Or do, you know, like the various different camera protocols that work over USB. And so they're adding those like one by one, sort of like APIs that you hand out to a developer. Rather than just saying, yep, anything USB can do in a Mac, you can do on an iPad. Because they're trying to be a little bit more secure than that.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Have any of the apps been updated to directly address USB?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Not any that I've used now.

• 30:45Nilay Patel?

  I think that's going to be a big turn. That's going to make this really useful, right? I mean, the, what is the thing I want most? I want to import photos to Lightroom without round shipping files. Like, we just call Adobe. Does anybody have Adobe's phone number? Send it to me. I mean, I probably have Adobe's phone number.

• 31:02Nilay Patel?

  Dom has a Adobe phone number. We'll do some, we'll do the work that we're, you know, paid to do and we'll let you know when like we'll be updated. Have you tried the mouse stuff?

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Just like I turned it on and like, yep, there it is and turned it off. Tom Warren wrote a pretty good piece about it. Oh no, I'm sorry. Sam Byford wrote a pretty good piece about it. There are lots of people that are really into it just because it lets you have a desktop setup, but it's very clear that Apple is putting as many barriers between you and having a mouse controlled iPad as possible. And I kind of respect it because the, one of the things that killed Windows tablets and Windows tablet apps is everyone could just fall back on making old style Windows apps with mouse pointers and tiny little ass buttons. It's because that's what the majority of people used and wanted. And so they just kept doing that. And so no one made the new style apps. And so Apple being

• 31:52Speaker 02

  pretty obstinate about making sure that the iPad stays touch, at least for now, makes it more likely that they're going to get more apps that are properly designed for the iPad in this windowing system.

• 32:04Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So here's a million dollar question. The one in your piece previewing iPadOS. Is it iPadOS 13? We're like completely through the looking glass with Apple names.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's iPadOS.

• 32:16Nilay Patel?

  I hate you. iPadOS. Does it have a number?

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  Because it's technically iPadOS 1. And it's like watchOS 5. It's tvOS 3.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  No, they're going to stop doing version numbers. You know, like the, there, there are certain, certain things where they, they, they won't let you use the word the in front of it. You know, like it's not the iPhone, it's just iPhone.

• 32:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  They, they still let you have version numbers for iPhone, but eventually they're, make, make those go away. Every now and then they release an iPad and they're like, it's the iPad. We're like, isn't it the iPad 4? No, no, it's the iPad. That's what they're doing with iPadOS. It's just iPadOS, man. No articles, no numbers. It just exists like a platonic ideal outside the cave.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  It's always been iPadOS.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's never not. They didn't actually make this name change. There's no confusion there at all. It's actually what they, when they named it when they released it.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Can I, just one more thing real quick and now we've got to go on to the other stuff. The desktop version of Safari, the desktop class browser is

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  Not, really?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  I mean, it is. They did a very good job making things work that didn't work before. And it does, in fact, you know, because it tells sites that it's the Mac version of Safari, it does, in fact, serve the desktop version of homepages by default. But there are certain times where like, that stack of, alright, we get the desktop version of the page, it expects a mouse pointer, iPad is gonna tell it that it's a mouse pointer, but really it's touch and we've created a translation layer in between. There are certain times where that just doesn't quite work. It works for the really obvious stuff that we all check, like, I don't know, Google Docs. But like, for example, our content management system, Chorus, works incredibly well on the iPad before iPadOS.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  With iPadOS, I actually have to request the mobile site to get it to work, because in that desktop translation that it's doing, it gets a little twitchy and like, certain things don't work and you like, can't scroll and like, strange things happen. So, it's great that Apple did it, because it shows that they're willing to compromise and make clutches to make their computers better. But it is, at the end of the day, a bit of a cludge. And I'm not as mad about it as I expected, because even if it was the full-on desktop version of Safari, websites expect mouses and like, scrolling in a way that isn't exactly the same thing as touch. And so, I don't know what other solution they had for this. There was always gonna have to be a touch translation layer for the web,

• 34:46Speaker 02

  and sometimes that's just gonna get twitchy and that's just how it has to be.

• 34:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this seems like a massive philosophical debate too, right? It's like, not great to lie about your user agent when you're asking for a website. They're lying, like, it's like a thing they're doing. They're saying that this is a Mac.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  Is it lying?

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  We've already asked what a phone is, what is a lie?

• 35:08Speaker 02

  iPadOS is based on iOS, which is based on the kernel from macOS, so technically, deep down, it's a Mac, right?

• 35:14Speaker 04

  Sure. Doesn't every single web browser for all time claim to be Mozilla?

• 35:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I guess the question of what is the nature of a lie on the web is just like, extremely up for grabs.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  But they can't say it's an iPad. That's the real problem. Because then people will give them weirdo iPad versions of websites.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:32Nilay Patel?

  And those versions are bad.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Yep. I mean, that fundamentally problem is people made bad iPad websites. So now they have to lie about being a Mac.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  I do think it's interesting specifically, like you're talking about like, so you're saying Google Docs works pretty well?

• 35:46Speaker 02

  It works pretty well, not perfect, but pretty well.

• 35:48Speaker 04

  The instrumented, rich text editor component of websites is one of the most complicated like layout and JavaScript, like parts of any website. Because it's just, it's just a very difficult problem. So I am guessing that will also improve just in a general sense as like more modern versions of that component are included in webpages. Maybe this, there will be less weirdness to translate.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  I mean, also, I really think Apple views Safari in the web as a backstop. Right? They've done this thing, but what they really want is for Google to make a good Google Docs app for the iPad. And one of the most important changes we haven't talked about is Apple is going to require that iPad apps that are on the iPad support this at least resizing window system, if not also multiple windows. But definitely like the resizing window system is going to be a requirement. So apps aren't just taking over your whole screen because they don't know that they're on an iPad or are bad at being an iPad app. Yeah. And Google actually updated Google Docs to work with the multiple window thing. So like, or not multiple window, but like the resizing window at least, like relatively recently.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  But it still sucks for comments, so I still have to use the web.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  There's one thing they need to fix in this app. Like of all of the AI and data collection that Google does, they can't detect that millions of people hate this stupid app on the iPad. Like somewhere, shouldn't the algorithm be like Sundar?

• 37:17Speaker 04

  Google can't make websites that don't work in Chrome, Eli. What are you asking for?

• 37:21Nilay Patel?

  No, wait, wait, that's not a can't.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  It's they know that they don't have to and they won't. So Dieter, here's a big question. You actually refused. It was like the first line of your piece. I will not address whether this can replace a laptop. But here we are in this safe space of an audio environment listened to by hundreds of thousands of people. Can it replace your laptop?

• 37:47Nilay Patel?

  Here's an analogy. There's trucks and there's cars. I hate this analogy so much. Why? Because the Ford I have 150 has been the best selling vehicle in America for like 45 years. People want trucks, really big trucks, just like people want gaming PCs. That support file workflow and Lightroom. It's just the worst metaphor. Lightroom trucks. That's what I want, like a Ford Raptor that runs Lightroom. Give me that.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  The answer is no, it cannot replace your laptop. However, it could now in a way it couldn't before. There's no longer like this philosophical refusal to do the things you want it to do there. It has the capability and it's giving apps permission to do the things that you would want it to do in order to replace your laptop. It just now they actually have to make good on those capabilities. And so give it another year because you know, they have, it's only been around for a decade, Neelai. You gotta give it more time.

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  All right. I mean, I will say I'm looking at my iPad more charitably now that this is here.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  It's really buggy, so I haven't put it on like the main iPad that I know my wife watches Netflix on. Like that seems like a dangerous game to play. But I thought like, oh, I could, I'd rather have this on a plane than my laptop right now.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty buggy and it's better on a plane. I'm using my iPad more now that I have it, which makes me even angrier at the garbage smart keyboard that they made for the new iPad form factor.

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It is not great. It's a good thing they have an open connector, but a total control over their hardware ecosystem. So no one can improve it.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:26Nilay Patel?

  They're like, the connector's open. I'm like, but the MFI program is jail. And they're like, it is. All right. The phone, there's not much to talk about with the phone, as near as I can tell.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Maps are better. Dark mode is fine. We've already talked about the Apple privacy stuff. The reminders app seems really good, but I don't use it because I want cross-platform apps for my primary PIM apps, personal information management apps.

• 39:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  But yeah, like, the thing I'm really curious about is will it be faster on older hardware? They say it will be, but we can't know that until the beta's through because the beta is actually pretty hard on battery life right now and not, not totally ready. It's usually what happens is like, there's a bunch of stuff for the iPhone, and then the iPad gets a couple of things, and this year that was totally flipped.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The thing I'm excited about most is CarPlay, which is a little random, because to get the most out of the new CarPlay features, you also need a new car. I've seen the universe really pointing me at getting a new car. We're going to spend the rest of the Vergecast just shopping for cars.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Are you talking about support for dual screens?

• 40:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. So I watched the sort of like WWDC presentation of the new CarPlay features. The interface is revised and better.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  The interface thing is huge.

• 40:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  It's a big, big deal.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  It's much better, and there's, you know, there's safe areas, and you can have these. It supports irregularly sized displays, so car interiors no longer have to be designed around a giant rectangle, which is cool. But I actually didn't quite realize how it, how CarPlay works, and I think it really speaks how powerful the phone is. So it just sends out, you know, it's not just like an external display. The phone is encoding and sending out like an H.2.6.4 video stream and then getting back input, which is just not how you think about displays working. And now it can do like three of them across the displays in a car. So you can have a map in your instrument cluster, another CarPlay, like, Apple Music display, and then something else, third entirely happening in your center console.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  And those are all just encoded H.2.6.4 video streams.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Does this mean more HUDs?

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  It could. I think they're just supporting like, if you've got displays in your car, we can send a video stream to them. I just think it's wild that a phone can drive that many displays and the way it's doing it is by literally just encoding video. Like, it's not-

• 41:39Speaker 02

  You think that simplifies it for car manufacturers? Like, you don't have to like make the thing that works precisely with the thing, just accept a video stream and you're fine.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, I think they have to send back the, you know, whatever inputs.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 41:50Nilay Patel?

  But it's just neat. Like, I hadn't thought about it that way. I think Apple's doing a lot of that stuff, right? Like, there's Sidecar on the iPad where you can like send the Mac display out. And that feels like they're just really good at encoding a display and sending it off.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the funny thing is, I mean, we should actually get into Catalina, but it lives in the same menu as like AirPlay. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And, you know, so I click on it. And I was like, okay, so it's probably not AirPlay though, right? It's AirPlay-esque or something. But when it crashed on me, like, it also crashed AirPlay. And so I'm wondering if fundamentally it's just basically built on that same technology, especially if you use it wirelessly.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you get the feeling like a bunch of Apple engineers, like, look at all the stuff we have. What if we AirPlay to an iPad and show the touchbar at the bottom? It's like a real like Taco Bell assembly line of remixing features to make new products.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:39Nilay Patel?

  It's a, Sidecar's a good Gordita.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  By the way, the touchbar on the bottom of Sidecar means that it's never going away on the laptops.

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, the brigger of bad news. Someone was telling me that the T2 chip can like also accelerates hardware encoding on these laptops now. Yeah, I think we're, I think we're doing, I think fundamentally, Apple just wants the keyboard deck to be another iPad. Like, that's their goal. All right, so Paul, you have been running macOS Catalina. Yes. Do you remember? That's the callback, bud. I have been running Catalina.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  Welcome to the real timeline where everything that happens has real consequences.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  This is where we know that Johnny Ive has left Apple. All right.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  In this timeline, there is no Johnny Ive and I am indeed running macOS Catalina, which is, it's not hugely different, right? The big, the big headline stories, they broke up iTunes. My first experience with Catalina is I wanted to also update my iPad and I wanted to do it the fancy developer way where you download like the, a backup, right? And you use iTunes to sideload it, but there's no iTunes. But then I saw that my iPad show up in iTunes and I was like, whoa, whoa, I guess they thought of this through.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  They knew I'd least need access to my iPad for sideloading developer versions of iOS. But then it disappeared and I couldn't find it and I was so confused. And then I realized that it's in the Finder now, which I had just glossed over that news. And the Finder looks like Apple Music, which looks like all of these apps that are sort of, and I don't really know exactly which ones are catalyst, which ones, but they almost all look the same. You've got that sidebar on the side and then a bunch of stuff happening in the middle. And I just didn't notice the first time I saw my iPad show up that I was looking at Finder, not Apple Music. But anyways, that all worked out and it's fine.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Can I interrupt you for just a second, Paul?

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  The, the claim that all the sidebars look the same is objectively a lie. Like the, Daniel Arndt Dilger over at Apple Insider and his big giant Catalina preview posted a screenshot of all the different like versions of a sidebar that you can get in Catalina from the different eras of macOS software. And there are five different ways to build a soft, to build a sidebar on the Mac. There's a Catalina way, there's a catalyst way, there's a Mojave way, there's the old aluminum way, and then there's like super old ways like Lion way back in the day that are still there on first party apps.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  Yes, that is true, but also if you're not paying very good attention and you're confused, you know, there's just like this, I'm running it in dark mode and there's just this vague sense. We're so far past the skew morphic world, right?

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  And there is a way to make Mac apps. And yes, if you examine the pixels, they look a lot different. If you're not, if you're just in dark mode and just jumping around, these apps tend to look very similar in my experience, which is not bad. I'm just saying like, there is a way to make Mac apps nowadays. The main thing I've noticed running Catalina is that Apple is doing this move of trying to lock down more of the operating system. And one of the main ways you sense that is whenever you open an app, well, either they say you downloaded this from internet, are you crazy?

• 46:20Speaker 04

  And then you go, the system preferences, you say, yes, I do want to open that app. But once you do open an app, the app, it's kind of like the web browser asks for privileges. So like even Apple's own reminders app will ask for access to your location. Or most app want to look at your documents folder for whatever reason. I love that. And it's really scary because if Apple does it wrong, it breaks all the apps and like weird workflows you have are totally busted. But that hasn't been my experience. And in exchange, you're getting a lot more safety because random apps can't just look at your documents until you say, yes, they can look at your documents.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Have you played with a bunch of catalyst apps? Are you like into them?

• 47:03Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm like Dieter where I don't use, I don't want to get my life locked into Apple Music or reminders, like I've checked out.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  No, those aren't catalysts. So like the catalyst apps, there's the original four, which are completely unchanged and still god awful. And then there's Apple podcasts and Find My. Which is still the worst name for an app ever. And they're slightly different and maybe they can use some stuff that regular developers can't use. But I came into this challenging Apple to like make as many catalyst apps as possible and show developers how it's done. And how to make good ones. And they just didn't. They're just like, yep, go, go ahead and do it. Here, here, here are some other bad ones and the other ones are bad, still bad. Now, the people in the Mac community are saying, whatever, we'll get some of those bad apps. But the real news is that Swift UI is coming.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  And there will be a single UI language that will work across every single Apple device ever made. And so don't worry about catalyst apps being the future of the Mac. They're just a stopgap until all the cool new Swift UI apps can come.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Which maybe.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  I'm getting the impression that Swift UI is a ways out as far as getting like the big complicated apps being. I'm, I do think Catalyst will bring a lot of iPad apps and I'm seeing a ton of that experimentation. But it seems like a lot of the developers I follow have tried out Swift UI. It's really cool. It's, it feels like the future. And then they like run into something that's really hard to do. And like, ah, it's not, it's not quite ready.

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  I think what you and I think you and Dieter are saying is the exact same thing. Right? Like they have Catalyst. Lots of developers have iPad apps. This is an easy mechanism to just like do that for now.

• 48:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  And then the future is, okay, like Swift UI is here. Start playing with it. You're going to run in some roadblocks. You've got to iterate it. We've got like build big apps in it. Five years from now, everything will be Swift UI and we won't be doing this catalyst thing. I think Apple's investment in, in the, the team is building this stuff also kind of reflects that.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the, the thing that's really fascinating about that is like, Apple has created an experience that they're not putting a ton of work into making good. A software like Catalyst is fundamentally not going to be great on a Mac. Unless they put a lot more work into making it great themselves and helping developers make it feel more Mac like. And so they explicitly have this new solution for getting a bunch of apps on the Mac that is like.

• 49:29Nilay Patel?

  Nerfed, basically, until, you know, the better thing comes, which is a very strange place to be in.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  I guess it's just the beta life where so many of the Mac apps are so busted that like, I'll have a bad experience with a Mac app. And I don't want to name names because I am running a beta, but I'll have a bad experience of like, oh, this is so buggy. It must be one of those catalyst apps. And then it's not, you know, so like, maybe it's just also bad right now that I can't even tell like what makes catalyst bad. Like, I don't, I, I noticed it a little Mojave, but like, I guess, I guess I'm just not noticing. It's not, they're not setting themselves apart. And because I don't have access to this new glut of developer, third-party catalyst apps, I don't really know how to identify them and what's, what are the pitfalls?

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. To me, it's the one that always just leaps out is Apple News. Right? And it's super dumb, but it's, I pay for Apple News. It's, and it is always Vanity Fair. I always want to read something in Vanity Fair. And I go on the web and like, pay walled out, but I pay for Apple News. And I'm like, I just want to read this over here. And it is impossible. Like, it's like, okay, here's this weird iPad app on my Mac. I'm gonna just fight it to read this like 800-word article I wanted to read. It's that stuff. It's just like not complete. It's not part of the system. It's still sitting a little bit farther away from it, in a way that is super annoying. I think that might

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  get better over time, but right now, that's the one that jumps. And then like the Home app, if you ever just use it, which I don't.

• 51:06Speaker 04

  I don't have a Home.

• 51:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm gonna get you like one smart light bulb. And I'm gonna code it to my, to me, so I can turn off one light bulb in your house all the time.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  So I could feel the pain of catalyst?

• 51:17Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot. The Home app is in particular is like, what?

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, like if you, if you try and set an automation, the date is still the like, the dial thing that you're supposed to slide up and down. And it's a pop over window. And normally on a Mac, when there's a pop over window, you can click outside it to make it go away, or you can move the pop over window around or whatever. And no, you can't, because it's basically fundamentally an iPhone app. And so, an iPhone app expects there to be one window on top of the other window. And the only way to go back is to literally hit the back button, which is how it works here. So there's just, there's a bunch of stuff that just doesn't feel right.

• 51:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. We're gonna take a break. When we come back, Paul's gonna do his thing. We're gonna talk a little bit about Bill Gates saying his greatest mistake was not making Android, or making something that was like Android. And I honestly, I just had to talk about Fox on for two minutes. We'll be right back.

• 52:08Speaker 07

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• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Paul.

• 53:09Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  Every week, my man.

• 53:12Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  You do something. It's the consistency is out of this world.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  It's called the sweetest pies. We got...

• 53:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this was big news this week.

• 53:21Speaker 04

  We got a Raspberry Pi 4. I mean, it's great. So, one of the real hot thing, there's so many, so many wonderful things about the new Raspberry Pi. It is faster, it's got USB 3, it's got gigabit Ethernet, it's got dual HDMI for, actually, that's a bad thing. That's now, doesn't have a regular HDMI connector, so you got some HDMI dongle life. It, there's a, there's different versions, so you can get a $55 one with four gigabytes of RAM, which is awesome. But one of the wonderful things that happened alongside this announcement was this thread on Hacker News.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  Just somebody's like, hey, what do you guys use your, uh, your raspberry pies for? And it's these testimonials of, uh, of just like wonderful, beautiful. It's like, it's like, this is what you wish technology was every day. It's like, like one of the top ones is like, uh, there's a bus stop across the street from me. And so I put a screen up in my window to tell people what the ETA is of the next bus. That's incredible. Uh, or some guys like my spouse never answers her or never has the ringer on. So I like V, like SSH into a raspberry pi to play a loud ring, ring noise.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  So it's just like, yeah, so ask Hacker News, what do you do with your raspberry pi? It's a, a thread with a thou- over a thousand comments and it's just, it's just beautiful. It is, this is like, it's just an ode to what I like about technology. And anyways, Raspberry Pi four, very exciting. People are super into it. Well, and it's, it is one of those things where a lot of people, you end up with a Raspberry Pi because you thought you were going to do some projects, but you didn't do projects. But it doesn't, it's never too late. It's never too late to, to plug into your Raspberry Pi and plug in HDMI monitor and a mouse and keyboard and learn a little bit about Linux or go real crazy and like SSH into it. Some, I saw somebody on Twitter talking about, and I don't know if this has anything to do with

• 55:28Speaker 04

  the new version of iPad OS. It does, the new iPad has USB C, right? And it can support USB on the go. And so you can set up your Raspberry Pi so that it is like a USB on the go device. And then you can SSH into your Raspberry Pi and power from an iPad, um, using Blinkshell. So you could have, you could have a portable Linux development environment. There's just so, there's so much wonderful things to do, uh, and it's faster. So many people use Raspberry Pis as media servers and do various network things. And the, the speed, the, the improvements that this will have for networking applications are really big.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  I'm excited. I'm going to get a Raspberry Pi. I'm going to do some coding. Do all happening. Learn to code.

• 56:20Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta talk about this Bill Gates thing, right? Yeah. Bill Gates giving an interview to a venture capitalist firm. They said, "What's your biggest mistake?" And he said, "Mismanaging Microsoft so that it didn't become whatever Android became." That is like news on its own, right? Like, Tom Warren wrote that story. He has a lot of great detail. You should read it. There's a lot of great detail in there about how Microsoft missed the mobile moment, how Windows Phone was a mess, how they couldn't decide whether they're gonna keep going with Windows Mobile or do Windows Phone the way they did it. Yep. Until it was way too late. They weren't committed. And then Android was free and allowed customization in a way that Windows didn't. They missed it.

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  I think we all agree that you cannot currently buy a phone running a Microsoft operating system. Because they missed it. And Bill Gates, we had him on the Vergecast a while back. Dude's got a Samsung phone, running Android. I don't think he loves it. You know, like, he's even saying, "This was my biggest mistake. We had this failure. We should've been..." And I think he's like, "That's $400 billion that would've been transferred from Google to Microsoft if we'd won." Yeah. He's right, by the way. I think that that is his biggest mistake. Oh, by far. And Microsoft's doing fine. But what jumps out to me, and I wrote a little piece on it this week. We keep talking about dominance of platforms and antitrust and regulation and privacy regulation and the trade-offs in there.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  And Gates, to me, just made the case for why we need to think about this stuff differently than we think about every other kind of market. And what he said was, "These markets are winner-take-all." They absolutely are. If you have 90% of the apps, it's still complete doom. Right? There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system out there. And if you only have 90% of the apps, it's complete doom. Which is 100% true. And then he went on to say, because it happened. There are actually not any other non-Apple operat... There's Tyson. And you

• 58:25Speaker 04

  There's KaiOS, but that's like a totally different category.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  And there's, you know, Chinese risks on Android, but in

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  In America and Europe, uh, there's Android and iOS and then a bunch of

• 58:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:35Nilay Patel?

  Third party.

• 58:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:37Nilay Patel?

  What's the phrase I'm using? Also Rans. A bunch of also Rans. And then he says, it's not that, it's not true for other markets. If you're in like the services business, this isn't true, but it's absolutely true for platforms that they are winner take all. And it just made me think if Bill Gates is so aware that Microsoft didn't win because it's a winner take all market. And Microsoft, I don't know if you guys remember this famously was like paying its own engineers to make apps to fill the gaps. Was paying third parties to make like Instagram clones, right? They were, they were trying to flood their own ecosystem. Remember when we gave ecosystem scores and people would like, we'd get like death threats because we're like the Windows ecosystem isn't very good.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 59:20Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Okay. They couldn't, even with all of their money and all of their power, they could not make that ecosystem good because they were in second place.

• 59:28Speaker 04

  Was it all timing or was, were there also, like you mentioned, like, you know, Windows phone, uh, was not as customizable. Right? It wasn't as, uh, amenable to, uh, you know, weird carrier apps and, and the gross sort of deals that, that dominated Android early on. Right? Like the, you know, like me, me and my best friend, uh, Sprint have skinned

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 04

  The hell out of this operating system.

• 59:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  You know, but it's cheap and we made a phone for you. Do you want it? And some people did and Android succeeded. Like what was, was there something to that? Cause I love that austere minimal, like sort of revolutionary UI of Windows phone, but it seemed like it really did not help app developer stand out. And then it didn't help, uh, phone manufacturers stand out.

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  That's exactly right. I think there's a million ways that, look, we were just talking about Johnny Ive and iOS seven. In many ways iOS seven was a response to Windows phone. Right, they made it totally flat, they made it totally, it was called metro and then modern, right? They made it modern. Yeah, I look, they made a bunch of business mistakes, right? They made a bunch of product mistakes. They were, they were a little bit late. Then they bought Nokia for some reason, like, they didn't do a good job. I, I don't even, but I think the argument is, even if they had been perfect, there wouldn't have been a third contender, right? The market is winner take all. So maybe they might have won, but then Android wouldn't have succeeded. Or Android won and then Windows won and couldn't succeed. Even if they had, they had executed well, there still would have been only one winner. That's his point.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, there, there's not three. It's not, it, it will never be the year of the Linux desktop, is what he's saying.

• 1:01:10Nilay Patel?

  Although, you know, get a raspberry pi, learn to code.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Get a raspberry pi!

• 1:01:14Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, my point is, when you hear Bill Gates say, "It's winner take all", even, we, we couldn't create a third option. It's either, it's either you're it or you're not. When you look around the industry and you see monopolies and duopolies all over the place, there's Uber and Lyft, there's not a third one. There's Google search, not really a second one.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  There's a lot of third ones for Uber and Lyft.

• 1:01:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they're all bleeding money and crashing. I live in New York City. There were a lot of third ones for a minute. It's Uber and Lyft, right? Like, that's it. Like, Juno is not doing it. They just burned a lot of money and died, right? And when we cover, you just see it, like, you aggregate the demand, you get the people, and then your ability to get people to switch to a third one is very, very low. And Lyft, until Uber had its extraordinarily bad run of basically being jerks, that's where the, like, the Lyft bump came from. They were, like, on their way to not even being in second place. There's, like, what do we talk about all the time? Content moderation. Why are YouTubers so mad at YouTube? Because they don't have anywhere to go. It's, it's a monopoly for their, for both their services and for audience demand.

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  So you see those winner take all markets over and over again, and you see Bill Gates saying like, it is when we, it absolutely is winner take all. I feel like you are, you are making the argument for, okay, well, if we cannot trust the market to reflect the demand of consumers, we can't trust consumers can send a signal by shifting their dollars, then the market needs to be constrained in some other way. And that's, that to me is like the thing, like platform economies are so different. They're so, so different than I'm gonna go and buy laundry detergent and have 50 options and those companies can compete. I'm gonna pick what restaurant to go to and those are competitive because they're a little bit fungible.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  So how this got solved last time was, um, there was something called Netscape and then Microsoft was

• 1:03:10Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  evil assholes. And they did so many mean, bad, horrible things. And, and they got the whole world running IE6. And then thank goodness for another, turns out to be relatively amoral corporation, Google showed up and they built Chrome. And then Chrome is really sort of the new IE6 in some ways, but we, we have this interesting vibrancy where we have Firefox is still around. Safari has a real important role. And then because Chrome is open source, you end up with a lot of different, I mean, you almost have sort of like the Android scenario.

• 1:03:51Nilay Patel?

  I feel like you're missing a, a, a big chunk of that narrative, which is that the United States government sued Microsoft for illegally bundling IE6 with Windows, creating years of scrutiny. Bill Gates even said it here, right? There was an antitrust lawsuit and some other things that took, right? Uh, that created the opportunity for Google to rise.

• 1:04:16Speaker 04

  Right. Like Microsoft couldn't really use the same playbook this time.

• 1:04:20Nilay Patel?

  Right. They were under scrutiny. And so the argument, and I think this is gonna be in the history of business academia, in the history of business journalism, in the history of business scholarship, this debate is gonna rage forever. Right? But the sort of conventional wisdom is even though we didn't break Microsoft up, the scrutiny, the public exposure of how ruthless they were being, the suggestion that you could be too ruthless. Stop them, like stopped some of the anti-competitive behavior and they entered into a consent agreement with the Justice Department, all this stuff. And they said they would stop and that created the conditions by which Google could be on Windows computers, not blocked by IE6. But they weren't going to do all this stuff and that's why you have a Google, right?

• 1:05:04Nilay Patel?

  And if they had been able to just bundle IE6 and then set IE6 to be the default to Bing, they could have just kept on rolling and rolling and rolling because they, Bill Gates wasn't like going to forget how to be ruthless. Right? He wasn't just like take his eye off the ball, but the Justice Department then stopped. And I think some people would argue that, you know, we had Brad Smith on the show ages ago. That was literally the first interview that we did on the interview episode. And he was like, nah, kinda. I mean, it was annoying. And then you have a bunch of like, like literally the New York Times has a piece looking back at the Microsoft antitrust experiment from people who were there that week. Steve Lor, I think, wrote it. And like the conclusion of like professors, other smart people is yeah, that's really, that happened.

• 1:05:45Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's what happened. There was antitrust action. We didn't break up Microsoft, but it created the conditions for there to be competition.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  I think aside from that discussion, or in addition to that discussion, I have a theory of, of the, the way technology evolves, where it's in a walled garden while you're deciding what's correct, what you need, what are the minimum correct features, right? And walled gardens are expensive to build and so they need these sort of high returns. And then there's the after the walled garden where you've figured out the functionality that you need. And now you can afford, or somebody else can afford to make the open source version. I have a theory and I feel like we are going to get close to that. I, I feel like in five years, there will be a very good viable, open source, usable phone operating system.

• 1:06:37Speaker 04

  I don't think this has to be forever. That's my theory based on this. You start with walled gardens and then you, you, you open up from there. But I, I definitely don't have any, anything to argue against the fact that Microsoft got stopped, stopped in its tracks.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  It sure did.

• 1:06:55Speaker 04

  I think rolling is a, is a good term.

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, the point that I want to make is, I mean, Paul, you and I have argued about this for years now. I think what is just really crystallized for me. And the reason I wrote the piece out this week because Bill Gates said what he said. That's not new information that it's a winner take all market. I mean, that's the the heart of the argument we've been having for however long. I just think we're at a point where other people, policymakers, regulators, consumers, everybody's starting to realize, oh, the platform economy is different, meaningfully different than the rest of the economy. Right? That we, when you buy a Ford, you can just say like, I hate this Ford and leave.

• 1:07:38Nilay Patel?

  And you don't have to buy a new watch and your chat bubbles don't turn green. Right? And like, you don't lose access to all the TV shows you ever bought. Like, there's not this huge network of, right? Like, that's crazy. And that's where we are with these platform companies. Like, you're not leaving a product. You're leaving your network of millions of other people. You're leaving the accrued value of every bit of data Google has ever collected about what search result you might want. And you cannot pay your way into that. You cannot pay your way into a complete app ecosystem that just accrues over time and then you have this huge monopoly. And I think that, I think everyone's just starting

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  to get it. You cannot start a competitor to Uber right now. You just can't. And that's why there aren't any. Right? Like, it seems very natural. Like, I'm going to start a new ride hailing startup and we're going to differentiate it and all the cars are going to be red because that's what we think consumers want. That's what the data shows us consumers want. You could not make that happen.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  And one of the reasons that people have been talking about antitrust so much in this, instead of just regulating, is look at Google, for example. You cannot start a competing search engine. You cannot start a competing phone platform. You cannot start a competing ad network. You know, like, that list is growing of the things that Google just utterly dominates and it's not worth your time to try and compete with.

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  As a business.

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can start another search engine. It's just, I don't think you're going to be very successful as a business.

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  I really do have actually really high expectations for what open sources is building right now, what people are building for themselves with, you know, with open source technology. A lot of it is open sourced by these companies themselves, you know? These companies build interesting technology and to continue to attract Good developers, they feel like it's mandatory to open source a lot of their technology and that that technology, that the hard to build stuff of a lot of these platforms is now free to use and will eventually be cobbled together into competent, useful products, I think.

• 1:09:52Nilay Patel?

  I hope so. I just think that you gotta eat, right? Some people are gonna do that and maybe they'll just have enough money to do it on a volunteer basis, but right now you gotta go to work and make money and feed yourself and like, if you can't build a search engine that makes money, the chances of it happening are very low and it doesn't seem like many people can build it. Microsoft runs a search engine. They're a big company. They have a lot of money. They have the ability to collect a lot of data. They have the ability to set it to be the default in Windows. It is still not a good competitor.

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

  The thing is, I think this whole this whole mindset, this winner take all mindset, like the mindset-

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it's a mindset. I think it's a fact.

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  There's a fact, but there's also you can set up your company in such a way that it's like my company is designed so that my users have a great time when they pay for my product and they suffer when they don't. They can't watch the television shows anymore, you know, like all the their chat bubbles change colors, you know, I need, it's not just enough that the platform, like concept seems built around this idea. It's not just enough to offer a good thing to people. You also have to harm them if they leave you.

• 1:11:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's like, I think that's just part of it. I don't think there's not a way, and that's what I mean by like winner take, like, I don't think there's a way for me as a consumer to send a signal to Apple that I I think other watches should work with iOS. How can I do that? Right? Like, I can't. There's nothing for me to buy that says, hey, you should you should make it so other watches can send iMessages and when I pair it with my phone. There's, there's literally no way for me to, as an individual consumer, to send that signal. So then there's definitely no way I could not buy the watch. That's what I can do.

• 1:11:42Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  There's no way for me to send Apple a signal, hey, I value a headphone jack more than I value secure end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms. That's an insane choice.

• 1:11:55Speaker 04

  I mean, I think this is our choice with a lot of these platforms. They've offered us a lot of these free products that we were on platforms like, hey, look at this. This is free. And we realized very much later that it wasn't free.

• 1:12:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I'm saying there's no, there's no way for me to vote with my dollars. There just isn't.

• 1:12:13Speaker 04

  Other than not buying things.

• 1:12:15Nilay Patel?

  Right, but-

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  That, that is the way to, to vote with your dollars.

• 1:12:18Nilay Patel?

  But my market alternative is, is bad.

• 1:12:21Speaker 04

  Not getting the Apple thing doesn't mean you automatically get what you want. It just means that Apple suffers.

• 1:12:27Nilay Patel?

  Right, and I don't think that you can make them suffer in aggregate, right? Like, if it's so hard for me, a very informed consumer, to say, hey, I would prefer to use another watch with my phone, so I'm gonna go ahead and leave this entire ecosystem, uh, and go to the platform that enables different kinds of accessories to work, where I can get a phone with a headphone jack. That's a very difficult choice for me, and I, I completely understand the trade-offs I'm making. And I still don't get end-to-end encrypted chat, right? Like, no, there's no way the market as a whole is gonna send an effective signal to Apple.

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  Well, and that's what these companies rely on. They rely on us to be lazy and weak, and therefore they can dictate our life choices to us.

• 1:13:11Nilay Patel?

  So, Paul, I think we've arrived at the same place. If it's so hard to vote with your dollars, then you might have to vote with your vote. And that's all I'm getting at, right? If, if it's so difficult to send the market a signal by just spending money on the thing you want, so the thing you want gets better, and the competitor understands that that's the reason you're leaving. Then it's probably appropriate for something for some other corrective force in the market. Like, for example, an antitrust against an antitrust use against Microsoft that paves the way for Google to enter.

• 1:13:39Speaker 04

  That is one way to solve. I just think that in the long run, all the good things that we get with technology will be hard won. I don't think the best thing that I ever get with technology will be the thing that was like a five second download and like three swipes. You know, like the best thing I get with technology will be something that I coded myself, you know, I something I worked for, something that was difficult and challenging.

• 1:14:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's probably true as well. Everybody buy your raspberry pi. Send that signal to the market. All right, we've gone way over time. I just want to give one update. It's coming out on Friday. This day, this moment that this podcast is coming out is the one year anniversary of President Donald Trump going to my hometown, picking up a gold shovel, sticking it into the dirt in my hometown, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.

• 1:14:25Speaker 04

  I'm so glad it was a gold shovel.

• 1:14:27Nilay Patel?

  Of course it was. And saying the factory that Foxconn is building here will be the eighth wonder of the world. Uh, it is now one year later.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  I will confidently report to you that the eighth wonder of the world has not been constructed in Racine, Wisconsin. Josh has a big piece, a timeline. This thing has shrunk in size so much from eighth wonder of the world to maybe we're assembling servers and automotive components. I will tell you this, Foxconn has still not told us what the AI AK 5G ecosystem is.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  Neil, I wanted to, on this special occasion, I want to provide you with an update.

• 1:15:02Nilay Patel?

  You have an update.

• 1:15:03Speaker 04

  You might have seen, well, there's, you know, the, the display port, um, 2.0 spec was announced.

• 1:15:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  Which supports up to 16K.

• 1:15:12Nilay Patel?

  Woo!

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  And so I think this new factory that will definitely arrive soon.

• 1:15:16Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna make display port cables.

• 1:15:18Speaker 04

  Well, no, no, no, no, no. We, it used to be AI 8K plus 5G, but you know, tech moves on.

• 1:15:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  Now, there is a new buzzword that I have just discovered.

• 1:15:29Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  AIOT, right? Like AI plus IOT. So, and then Trump, your, your, your favorite shovel man, has introduced the concept of 6G. So this factory may very well bring us the first AIOT 16K plus 6G.

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  It's possible. That was just a journey, Paul. How long have you been preparing that? Yeah, it's a good troll. By the way, the AIOT just leaks your security cam credentials automatically. That's all that happens there. I don't think so. I think they're gonna end up building like little screens for car displays. But go read the story. Obviously, we've been tracking it forever. They have never issued us a correction. We're like three months in now. They've never issued us a correction for our reports. The buildings they bought are empty, even though they promised us one. They did file some plans for the facility they're building in Mount Pleasant. The plans include a description of the Japanese gardens they're gonna have, the meditation area, you know, the gardens out front.

• 1:16:39Nilay Patel?

  But they don't include, we asked some consultants to look at this for us, some analysts. They said, there's no fab, like, there's no LCD fab outlined in this plan. So it looks like it's just gonna be an assembly factory. But read Josh's piece. It's just a timeline of how we've gone from eighth wonder of the world, and it's just scaled down, like, month after month, they have scaled down. Actually, and there was a report in the Racine Journal Times today, that maybe the factory is even a bit more delayed than previously estimated. But read Josh's piece. I just wanna keep everyone's focus on Foxconn when I can. Not selfishly because it is my hometown, but I think that deal is so emblematic of how we're building stuff lately.

• 1:17:23Nilay Patel?

  Also, AK plus 5G. Or, as Paul said, the AIOT 16K 6G. It's the worst. All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. A big thanks to our producer, Andrew Moreno, for figuring out how to edit this one. It was all over the place this week. And a sincere goodbye to Johnny Ive, who's gonna party in a boat with Bono with his perfect phone with no ports. You know, he's got one. Yeah, it's no screen, it's just a block of aluminum. Protects your privacy perfectly. All right, that's fresh. You can tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. Dieter's a back lawn, Paul's a future Paul. Let us know what you want to talk about next week. Just give us some feedback. We'd love it. Rate us and review us on Apple Podcasts.

• 1:18:06Nilay Patel?

  That's where the producers ask me because that's, I don't know, that's the monopoly provider of podcasts in the business, let's be honest. And please, listen to Why'd You Push That Button? It was their big death online wrap up. They did celebrity death Twitter is the worst Twitter. I was trolled in this episode, which I'm not happy about, but I'm telling you so you can go listen to it. I think Caitlin made a lot of fun of me in this episode. That's fine. It's fine. I'm totally okay with it. You can also listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Pivot with Karen Scott Galloway. You can listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That's all in the Vox Media Podcast Network. That's it. Goodbye. Rock and roll. Paul. Aluminum.

• 1:19:02Speaker 07

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