Apple announces macOS Big Sur, new silicon chips, and iOS 14

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn welcome back Verge alum and Wall Street Journal columnist Joanna Stern to discuss the big announcements from Apple's developer conference this week. Verge news editor Chaim Gartenberg joins in the second half to discuss the Apple updates you may have missed. Stories discussed this week: Fire and plague prepared these teens for the world New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut will quarantine travelers from states with surging COVID-19 cases The EU plans to ban US travelers indefinitely after haphazard COVID-19 response The healing power of Black art Big Sur is officially macOS 11.0 as Apple finally leaves OS X behind Macs with new Apple-built chips will natively run iPhone and iPad apps Apple’s new ARM-based Macs won’t support Windows through Boot Camp Apple details iOS 14, its next major software update iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 will let you set default email and browser apps watchOS 7 announced with sleep tracking and rebranded Fitness app Apple TV 4K will at last play YouTube in 4K with tvOS 14 update AirPods updated with automatic switching and a new ‘Spatial Audio’ feature Apple teases new tracking protections and an approximate location feature in iOS 14 Apple approves Hey email app, but the fight’s not over After outcry, Apple will let developers challenge App Store guidelines Hey opens its email service to everyone as Apple approves its app for good Microsoft is shutting down Mixer and partnering with Facebook Gaming Mixer failed — here's why 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, WWDC, Apple's moving its Macs to ARM. Our friend Joanna Stern joins us to talk about the event, the big move, make a little bet, and one touchscreen's are coming to Mac. Then Heim Gartenberg joins us to dive into all the rest of the news from Apple's WWDC. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 0:46Speaker 02

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• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of seamless platform transitions. Huh? Wow. I prepared this week, Dieter. Is that, is that a joke about food delivery? It is. It's, um, well, yeah. Uh, I take it it's just an enormous cut from small businesses around, around the country. Uh, I'm your friend Neelai. Dieter Bohn is here. Also your friend. Uh, we got kind of a great show this week. It's WWDC week. Obviously, Apple had a lot of announcements about the future of its operating system. Uh, operating systems, there's 12 of them, 14? That was, uh, interlaced with some drama around the App Store, which we can get into. But our friend Joanna Stern is going to join us. Joanna Stern, a co-founder of The Verge, actually, and now, uh, personal and technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal. She's going to join us for a bit.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then Heim Gartenberg from our staff is going to join us, and we're going to get deep into the news, uh, the big news, uh, which is Apple's move to ARM processors, its own silicon for Macs. Before we do that, uh, every week, I do like to just give an update on our coverage of the virus, of various racial justice initiatives that are going on in the world. I say every week, those are the two biggest stories going. The virus in particular, I think, will be the dominant story of our lifetimes. So we got to keep tabs on it. I don't want to shortchange the great work our team is doing. So I just want to call some stuff out. It has been 15 weeks. This is important for a very specific reason this week. It has been 15 weeks since Trump and Dr. Deborah Birx

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  held up a flow chart promising a website that Google was going to make. This all happened.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  15 weeks ago, this actually happened. Trump said, "Thank you, Google. Thousands of Google engineers are working on a website." And they held up a flow chart and you're supposed to go to the website. The website would be a symptom checker and then it would direct you to the parking lot of a major retailer. They had all the CEOs of the retailers for that. This actually happened within our memory 15 weeks ago. This occurred.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  And then you would get a test, a drive-through test in a parking lot. You'd go home, you'd log on the website and it would, it would tell you the results of the test. 15 weeks later, that website, that national testing apparatus embodied in a website built by Google does not exist. There is a website being built by a division of Alphabet called Verily. They've got, you know, a couple dozen testing sites open across the country.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Access to testing in general is up, which is good. We also, not good, have more positive results this week in the US than, than any week previous.

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would say that we have not done a good job, particularly in South. The percentage of positive tests, testing numbers are going up.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:51Nilay Patel?

  The percentage of positive tests also skyrocketing. And that's a lagging indicator, right? That's, that data tells us what happened like two to three weeks ago. So we're, we're just seeing Texas thinking about shutting down again. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are going to quarantine travelers coming from states with surging cases. That's all happening.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  Apple's closing yet more stores again.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  Apple's closing its stores again, but that website does not exist. That was 15 weeks ago. That's a real thing that happened. And I, Dieter, I know you were... You and I were just like on the phone at 11:00 PM every night for a week being like, what's up with this website? A lot of people were very angry that we were pointing out that usually when Google puts 10,000 engineers on a project. It was 10,000? Whatever the number. It was some absurd number. 1,500, I think it was. Usually when they do that and they have a big announcement, they make the announcement. Right. And Google's approach to hearing the president say it was just outright surprise and silence for a while. And everyone told us we were overreacting, but I'm telling you 15 weeks later, the numbers are rising. That website is not doing the thing it said it was.

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  And the reason I said it's particularly important this week is not just the skyrocketing numbers we're seeing in other parts of the country. But yesterday NBC News reported that the White House is going to pull back from federal support for testing and leave most of it to the states. Further pulling back. So they were all the way at, we're working with Google on a website. 15 weeks later, they are saying, we're pulling back from this testing. I promise you that the country will not get the virus under control before a vaccine without an organized testing apparatus, testing and tracing. We just don't have one. I'm just going to keep counting the weeks because it's the, it's the form of accountability that I can do. I, you know, I can't like walk up to Jared Kushner and be like, what's up with the flow chart? If I could, I'd have to remain six feet away and yell through a mask.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  It would be, it wouldn't be, you know, it wouldn't be as effective as me just counting, I think. Anyway, so that's that. I've just, like I said, I'm just going to keep counting. I'm sorry if it's tiresome. There's a button in your podcast player. You can just scoot right by it, but I'm definitely going to keep counting. Some other stories, I want to call it Justine Kalma on our team. She is our great science reporter. She just profiled this high school in a town that's called Paradise, California, which is just deeply ironic. Last year, the students in the Paradise, California High School graduated into the campfire wildfire. The town was devastated by this wildfire. The students graduating in that. This year, they're graduating into the pandemic. The town is being decimated by that. It is just an incredible story of how resilient the teenagers are. You read it, their town has been devastated two years in a row.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  Their school has been disrupted two years in a row. They just sound like the most resilient. We're going to get through it, a group of people. So it's very touching in that sense. But it is also a story about how the pandemic and the environmental factors that caused the wildfires are interacting with this community. It's really eye opening. She did a great job. It's her first feature for the site. So I want to call it out. Like I said, we have some news on New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. That's on the site. You can get some details on that. The EU is planning to ban US travelers indefinitely because of our COVID-19 response. That's on the site. You can read about that. And then lastly, the other big story in the country is about racial justice. It's about the protests. It's about how we're going to solve systematic racism in the country. We have a lot of stories about that.

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  Casey had a scoop over the weekend about Snapchat's disastrous Juneteenth filter. There's a letter. You can read it. I want to focus on something else that we did, which is our illustrator, Alex Castro, who is amazing, just wrote a story for us over the last weekend called "The Healing Power of Black Art." And it's just a lot of, I mean, it's a lot of beautiful things to look at made by black artists and his experiences. As a black person, looking at those things, understanding these part of a community, it was great. I just like, there's another side to this that I wanted to call out. And Alex just did an amazing job with that piece. So I wanted to call it out.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  And that piece in particular, like if you catch yourself doom scrolling, which is my favorite new word everyone's using lately, just like, just going through Twitter, just, you know, looking for more bad news, even though you don't know that's what you're doing. Stop and go look at his piece. And instead of just scrolling through it, like, stop on something that you see that interests you and then sit with it. Watch the video, look at the art, whatever it might be. It's a, it's actually a much nicer way to use your phone or your computer than just seeing what the latest bullshit out of Congress is.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  Yes. With that said, we will now do two hours of bullshit out of Congress. No, no. That's for next week. No, in all seriousness, Alex did a great job with that piece. I want to call it out specifically. So check that out. Okay, that's the the big stories. Like I said, those are the two biggest stories in the world. I don't want to take our eyes off of it. Our team is doing just incredible job covering those stories. It's our priority is is really those those stories. But at the same time, Apple had a gigantic event. We got to talk about it. So without further ado, let's bring on Joanna Stern. Joanna Stern, you are, I think, most famously a co-founder of The Verge.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Most famously.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Second most famously, you were the world's premier netbook reviewer.

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  That's true. I think most famously, you were the netbook diva at Laptop Magazine. That's a real title that you held. Then The Verge, and then personal technology columnist of Wall Street Journal. Welcome.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  It is a pleasure to be here.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  It sounds like it. All right.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  What with that intro, where else could I possibly want to go?

• 9:18Nilay Patel?

  There's like massive news from Apple about ARM and Macs. That's like the thing I want to talk to you about. But we all have been to like dozens of WWDCs now, dozens of Apple events. What was your sense of this one?

• 9:33Speaker 04

  I missed you.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Aww.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  And you too, Dieter. I do miss Dieter too. But he's usually really running around like his head like complete cut off and Neelai's just chilling in the corner and just talking to everybody.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  That's very accurate. Yeah.

• 9:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. My job is to schmooze on our little planning doc. It's like Dieter, 15 hands on, Neelai schmooze. It's like over there. That I will say, I absolutely miss that sense of community. I get, I mean, it's not anyone's fault, right? It's the way they had to do it. But I think really changed the nature of the event. What did you think of the pre-recorded TV show keynote?

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Oh, I loved that part.

• 10:10Nilay Patel?

  You did?

• 10:11Speaker 04

  I loved that part for, I think, you know, two reasons. One, it's been a really long time since I've sat in my home and watched one of these. The crazy, high-pressure situation around getting into the theater and getting all your equipment set and all of those things, which really I do really love about the job. And I think we're also like experienced at it now for a decade of doing it. It's sort of second nature, but you still get nerves and Freaked out about, do I have all my equipment? Am I going to be able to do this? Not having that, though, and just sitting right here in my elastic pants with my dog right here with iced coffee and quiet was pretty nice.

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  You know, just that atmosphere, like I missed the, it's a double edged sword. I missed it, but also I really didn't miss it. But then I would say from the second thing, like it was a really slick event. I thought it was very clear. I thought you really, I, I'm not sure I really took it all in better because it moved so fast. I think it moved way too fast.

• 11:15Nilay Patel?

  Move way faster than it does, than they do when they're actually on stage, like way faster.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  You know, the transitions, first of all, they talked faster, but the transitions, there's this clip, and I have to find that section with Federighi. He just, I do, he must've had to practice him saying these crazy words so fast. Like I would have to say five times. I mean, he's, he's a robot and a magical man, so.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Maybe he didn't have to, you know, he probably just nailed it the first time, but they were fast. And, and, and also on top of that, there's that spacing as when you're blogging or you're writing or taking notes of one person enters the stage, does their thing, leaves the stage and gives you like two minutes in a way to like kind of readjust and catch up. But you didn't have that here. They had crazy flash pans and Steadicam movements to the next thing. And they were like, there you were. You were in a lab across the world in secret Appleville.

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  It is actually true that in our planning document, we sketch out who will do what in the live log. And we model it after like sports announcing. So we have a play by play and a color commentator, like that's how we think of it. So Dieter and Walt are usually, well Walt joined us this time, which is great. Dieter's usually the color commentator. Walt was a color commentator. My job is always to transcribe as fast as I can. Usually at an Apple event, they talk so slow. We should get to the substance of the announcements. I just go back and watch it. Watch like last year's WWE and then watch this one. Tim Cook gets on stage and he's like, welcome to Apple.

• 12:47Nilay Patel?

  We make the iPhone and like it repeats everything twice and they like hammer it on because it's a live audience and that's what you get. This they made for streaming and like talked three times faster than normal.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Also, the audience pauses for the applause also give you a lot of time.

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  So it's like third-party apps are coming to CarPlay. Here you go. Five minutes of applause from very excited CarPlay fans, which frankly, honestly, I would have clapped if it was appropriate.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  You would have clapped?

• 13:16Speaker 04

  For a CarPlay third-party? That was a J- that was game-changing.

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  You're a capital J Wall Street Journal journalist. You're not a clap at events.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  It's true, but when we got Google Maps on CarPlay, it was fucking huge.

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that's right. The thing was different. It felt different in just we were all at home. The presentation was much different. I thought the organization was good, right? They're like, here's all of our OSs. We're just gonna bang through them. We gotta start, we gotta start with the biggest news of all, which is the Mac. They're gonna use their own chips. They're putting out this developer kit, which is a Mac Mini with an iPad chip in it. What do you make of it, Joanna?

• 13:53Speaker 04

  How do we know that it's the biggest news of all?

• 13:56Nilay Patel?

  What do you think? Like the using your iPhone as a car key is bigger news than the Mac moving to ARM?

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Emoji masks.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, emoji masks, obviously the biggest news. Change the culture. We're all gonna warp around it. We're finally all gonna wear masks because our iPhones have emoji masks in it. But the ARM, I mean, the ARM news, like, one of the reasons I want to talk to you about it is, I mean, still at the verge to this day, we joke that every laptop review ends with, for $200 more, you can buy a MacBook Air. Because that set, which was your line in every review you did for us for like four years, that particular computer set just the standard of performance and battery life. That was why. It was a nice enough computer. After a while, it did not have a retina screen, and that was its big failing. But it was the combination of performance, battery life, that you wanted from a computer and a size. We've steadily gotten away from that. You and I actually both reviewed MacBook Airs

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  this year, right? And we're like, it's fine, but the battery life is medium.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  The webcam is horrible.

• 14:52Nilay Patel?

  That was your review? The webcam is terrible. The webcam is horrible? You will note that Apple did not use any built-in webcams for any of its

• 15:00Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I wrote today, I said, I'm so excited for this future laptop that has this ARM chip, but also better webcam.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I think they're so constrained in how thin the lid is, they don't really know what to do. Well, but there's one way to make that lid thicker.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:13Nilay Patel?

  Put a touchscreen in there.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  Thicken it up a little bit.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, making an iPad.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  Do you think this is the, right, I mean, this is the question, the Mac and the iPad on a collision course with this processor switch, do you think they're going to be able to get back to that moment where their laptops set an absolute standard?

• 15:29Speaker 04

  I think it's interesting you bring up the Air because there hasn't been any laptop as groundbreaking since the Air. And Dieter, we talked about this earlier this week on our informal podcast, about, about what we were thinking would be the first system that would have the chips. And I thought, okay, it's something new. It's not an Air, it's not a Pro, it's like a MacBook, which I did not like. I know you loved it.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  I deeply loved it. I miss it so much.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  I really disliked that laptop because it did not match the Air or what the Air stood for ever. So there was also somebody, I can't remember who said this to me this week, but when Jobs decided to switch from Power PC to Intel, what was the type of system he had in his mind that would be enabled? Because if you go back and you look at all the Power PC, the transition stuff and the marketing messages, it's very similar to now, which is, we can't make these great products we want to with this processor or with this chipset. We need to, we need to move ahead into the future. So I keep thinking, what is the system that they want to make? What are the changes they want to make? At least on mobile, there's obviously a lot of other reasons for them wanting to make this move.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  And what does that system look like? What does that machine look like?

• 16:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and there's a part of me that says it just looks like today's MacBook Air with a 13-hour battery life.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  Right? It could just be that simple. They just want to get back to that industry-leading power performance mix that they had, but run a retina display, which takes a lot more power, but keep the size down, plus Thunderbolt 3, all the other stuff they want to do. And it can run iPad apps, right? Like, that could be it. I think this idea of a tweener, that really runs you into the iPad Pro. Like, I had my iPad Pro and its magic keyboard today, and I was like, what if this was just a Mac?

• 17:26Speaker 04

  I don't understand the iPad Pro anymore.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like, why? At the end of this all, when you can buy a Mac that can run native iPad apps on its faster ARM processor, that can run iPhone apps and run macOS apps, and open the terminal, and run, like, be the whole computer, why would you buy the constrained iPad Pro, except maybe it has a touchscreen and a pencil?

• 17:48Speaker 04

  A pencil and a touchscreen.

• 17:50Nilay Patel?

  And that seems like the worst choice to force people into.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  I know.

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  I think these are like by far the open questions, I think, of this entire transition.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  I wrote in this, just a quick piece off today, about what Apple products to buy and not buy, and because I felt what happened this week in terms of software shifted so much of what Apple had just released in the spring. So it was like, I was thrilled, actually, with the Mac lineup till, like, four days ago. Till four days ago, I was like, okay, I can highly recommend that you go get an Air. I can highly recommend you go get this brand-new, it's got great keyboard now, I can finally say this keyboard is great, it's got good new processors, these are solid systems. And then it's like...

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  They refreshed everything in like the last year. It was wild, because they had to get those new keyboards in.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  And you had the Pro, which, like, I've been using, I never did a full review on it, but I've been using it, and I really like it. And now I'm looking, and I'm like, but why? This is gonna be better very soon, I think.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  I have the same 16-inch MacBook Pro. I really like it. It's very fast, it's very capable. Why would I buy a computer, I think it has, you spend this much money, $2,500 on a computer, that is a four-year investment for most people, at the low end. I still have that tiny little one-port MacBook that you hate, that's six years old, and I use it all the time. So at the low end, you spend this much money on a computer, that's four years.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Well, at the end of this year, they're going to make a Mac that can run iPad apps. Why would I invest this much money and then find myself two years from it? And they said the transition is going to end in two years. So the entire line will be transitioned over in two years. And then the entire future of the Mac is like going that way. Why would you at this moment buy any Mac unless you desperately need one?

• 19:28Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, a lot of people desperately need them. That's what I wrote in this piece. Like, you have a lot of kids going off to school and they need to get laptops and they should get an Air or they should get a Pro because you shouldn't be waiting around for something that we don't know and how it's going to work. And I don't think this is coming in October. I think this is probably coming November, December. So you're sort of stuck, but if you can wait, yeah, you should be waiting. And that was like the weird thing. It's like you just had these great Macs and you just had these great iPads. And they're not like, they're not on like the iPhone schedule or the watch schedule. These were mid-year products or actually beginning of the year products. So like, it's just a weird time. It's like the worst time to buy Apple products, as I said.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  What's wild to me is they also said explicitly in the keynote, there are more Intel Macs coming. Like we're waiting for that redesigned iMac.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  That's also very confusing to me. So that's what makes me think that maybe this is going to be a MacBook era or like bring the MacBook back because like the people, they're going to, they're going to, for the next couple of years, like if you need serious horsepower and you don't care about power, get an Intel that's like our desktop chip for the next couple of years. If you want long battery life, get Apple Silicon.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And one thing that you guys, I did a lot of reading of The Verge this week. The Intel question mark I think is really interesting too, is how Windows will run on ARM. And they're not saying Boot Camp is gone, which that part makes sense. They're not saying how virtualization will, would, or if it will work with Windows. Microsoft is not saying anything yet. So there's a lot of big question marks and how long they have to keep Intel around is one of them, I think.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  I wonder honestly, how many, and if you are listening to this and this is you, let me know. How many people are like honestly regularly using Boot Camp except for games?

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, you have to think that's like the lowest thing on Apple's priority list is like, work with Microsoft on their weird ARM version of Windows. And Microsoft has a weird licensing requirement. Like, I'm sure if everybody wanted to do it, they could easily do it. But there's not like, like in Intel Mac, especially the very early ones, were basically PC architecture, right? They were just a modernized, they've strayed from that pretty dramatically now with the T2 chip and all the other stuff they're doing for security. But they still enable Windows because they can just kind of do it and Windows is built to sort of accept drivers for all that custom stuff. Their ARM architecture isn't based on some standardized architecture, because there isn't one. So I think Microsoft has a slightly different riff and Apple has a different riff and it

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  could bridge that gap, but like, what in the market is pushing them to do that? Like, until there's a reason, I suspect they won't. My, my big question is really, as we look at this transition, we look at how confident they are on it. Dieter, you brought up on this show a while ago and in your newsletter, "Apple is no longer good at admitting when things might not go according to plan."

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  I didn't see a crack. They didn't even make mention of any cracks in this plan, where it might be slow to emulate software, or where something might not work. Or, I mean, the Power PC to Intel transition had some bumps in the road. And famously Jobs put up the emulation slide and he was like, "Rosetta is fast, parentheses enough." Right? Like, he was like, "It's gonna be fine, but what you really want is this." Apple's like, "Here's Maya, rendering in 3D and emulation, it's great." Did you see any cracks in any, any of these promises where this first set of systems might not do everything they said it might, or what everyone hopes it might do?

• 22:56Speaker 03

  I mean, I didn't. And I honestly, it makes me think of what is significantly different about this transition than the transition from OS 9 to OS 10, or the transition from Power PC to Intel. I wasn't around for the old, old, original processor transition. And that's that those first two Mac transitions were existential for Apple. If they didn't pull off OS 10, or if they didn't pull off Intel, the company was toast and everybody knew it. This one, it's not existential at all. It's like, this is, this is what they want to do. They want to have a nicer processor in their Macs and they want them to, they want to be less dependent on Intel figuring it out, which maybe they never will. It's kind of what Apple is assuming at this point.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  And so I think that they don't have to be, they don't have to have that much humility because like it'll be better. And if, if, um, if it turns out that there are some bumps in the road, like, I don't know, they can power through it because they're Apple and they all live in a beautiful spaceship.

• 23:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And also like, it's not like Intel's going away. Like if they're like, we screwed it up. Can we have some more Core i5 chips? Like Intel's gonna be like, yeah, that's great. AMD is right there. They screwed it up and they need to stay on x86 that could be there. You know, it's like they're buffered in some ways. They're very confident about it. There are many, many, we don't even know what the name of the chip is going to be, right? They're just calling it Apple silicon. They haven't even branded the thing yet. I would say one, Joanna, you said like you missed that in-person element. One thing that I really missed was there was no unguarded time with developers, with Apple executives, with anyone to kind of get a sense of how we think it's going to go, or to get a, there's just so much that happens in side conversations and hallways and events

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  at a regular WWDC where you fill in the picture and all of that, because we're all remote, has to be so structured that it's like, I still just have a bunch of questions and I don't even really have a lot of hints, right? Like, we kind of know what that developer transition kit is going to be. It's a Mac mini with an iPad shoved into it. But Apple is very clear, like, do not look at this product as a window into it. It's just, here's the, here's the chip so you can develop on it. We have no, there are no big hints about what the, that next set of products will be.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. Though going back to the, I was doing, again, a lot of reading, uh, and history, historical reading about that Power PC transition. The first laptops to come after that were MacBook Pros, 15-inch MacBook Pros.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  The titanium books. Love that. That was, that was, that was the laptop that made me start using the Mac.

• 25:30Nilay Patel?

  No, the titanium was a G4.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  That's right. There was origin.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  They moved to aluminum and then they switched it from PowerBook G4 to MacBook.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:38Nilay Patel?

  They switched to Intel. And that 13-inch Pro is like a real sweet spot for them. They sell a lot of those. So that's a real, I think the air in the 13-inch Pro are where the energy will be. However, Joanna, I know we don't have a ton of time with you. The reason I wanted you on here, because you referenced our informal podcast, which was not actually a podcast. You cannot listen to it. I would never let anybody listen to it. Also, we didn't record it, although maybe Walt recorded it.

• 26:01Speaker 04

  Very private things.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  Usually WWDC, we all get to like hang out and like have a dinner and a drink. Then we weren't able to do that. So we had, we just hung out. It was me, Joanna, Dieter, Walt, Lauren Good from Wired. But Joanna, in order to troll this conversation, insisted that we all bet on when the first touchscreen Mac will be. Because you look at those screenshots of macOS Big Sur, they look like they're for touching. They just look like they're made to be touched. The control center, the volume dial, the wifi icon. I mean, they're harmonizing the iOS and macOS user interfaces. Definitely more towards touching stuff than not.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  A computer you could touch.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  More like big surface, am I right?

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. Have you been holding on to that all week?

• 26:45Speaker 03

  No, I tweeted it. It's fine.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, he did.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  I'm just repeating a joke I've already made.

• 26:49Nilay Patel?

  All right. Save it for the podcast, Dieter. Anyway, Joanna, issue your challenge and I will issue my prediction. That's the whole reason I wanted you on here, so we can make this bet in public.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  It's not my challenge. I don't know why, and maybe listeners, maybe you would like to go in on this bet for me. We can make the pool huge. When are we putting our money on the Mac getting a touchscreen? I'm not saying we need to go into specifics on which model and what kind of form factor of just say, what at some point a Mac is going to get a touchscreen. I feel certain in that.

• 27:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I do too. The question is when. Here's my answer.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  And when we have to figure out the pool of money, but let's just hear what your predictions are.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  My answer is I'll put 20 bucks this year, the first one. They said the first ARM Mac is coming out at the end of this year. I strongly feel it will have a touchscreen.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  You're strongly wrong.

• 27:39Nilay Patel?

  I do not know how you're going to enable iPad apps on this Mac unless you can touch them.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  What do you mean? They just rolled out this new fancy little circle cursor.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, they got Catalyst.

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  No, Catalyst is to make your iPad app a Mac app.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Catalyst is proof that Apple is willing to have a kind of a crappy app experience on the Mac. And so they will let, you know, native iPad apps have kind of a crappy experience.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  I feel strongly. It's the first one. Why not take the shot? Come out strong.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  All right. You know what? You're probably not, I mean, like maybe just 100% wrong, not 150% wrong.

• 28:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm betting $20.22 on 2022 because then we'll have a couple of years of Apple trying to say that there's no collision between the Mac and the iPad and they're totally different, nobody believing them, and then them giving up and putting a touchscreen on the Mac.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  See, I think Dieter's really close and I would, I wish I had said 2022 when we were doing this and not said $20.23 on 2023.

• 28:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. So those are the predictions. I have right away, Dieter has two years and Joanna has three years. You can tweet at us with your predictions. I don't know how we're going to collect this money. Someone invent some Bitcoin system for us, please. Just like do some Bitcoin stuff. It'll be great. But those are the bets. You heard them here.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  But let's go back one more time to what you're saying will be in this first one because there is a chance they just take the 13-inch Pro or Air and just put in the chip because that like, that does some marketing for them. They're like, look, this is just a Mac and it can do it. I still think they'd make something new, but I think they have to add some things to show off why this is better. So I've been like trying to think of what that list of things is. And I, that's, that's where I have a lot of questions is like, battery life, sure, right? Battery life is something. Cellular?

• 29:27Nilay Patel?

  No, the cellular, they'll add cellular, but it'll be a 13-inch MacBook Pro, but they're going to take away one port because the battery life lasts so long, you don't need to plug it in. A zero-port 13-inch MacBook Pro with a cellular chip.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  And no touch bar because they just want to make some of us happy.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  That'd be great. They take away the touch bar and give me a touchscreen. Maybe this is why I want it so bad because then you would move the touch interface up there.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Also, I want a U1 chip.

• 29:51Nilay Patel?

  In a Mac?

• 29:52Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  For what? So you can unlock your car?

• 29:55Speaker 04

  So many things. I want the U1 chip in everything now.

• 29:59Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to tell us about your TV remote, Joanna?

• 30:01Speaker 04

  I want it in my TV remote so badly and I do not understand why it is not, what, I have a lot of feelings about the TV remote this week.

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  But the Apple TV remote?

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Yes, the Apple TV remote.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  By the way, mostly what Joanna and I talk about is parenting toddlers. You said your son had hidden the remote someplace spooky, but you couldn't, he wouldn't tell you where. Where was it?

• 30:22Speaker 04

  Under the couch.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  That's a spooky spot. All right. Fair enough. I mean, that remote, they didn't talk about the Apple TV hardly at all. They showed off one trailer for a show and they said some, some videos on YouTube would be in 4K and notably refused to answer any clarifying questions about it when we asked about it. Just said, no, we're not answering that question. Uh, so we don't know how that's going to work. That was the only update to the TV. I think if they release a new Apple TV, they have to change that remote.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:49Nilay Patel?

  There's been too much outcry about it. But my feeling very strongly is the thing they will add is a touchscreen to the Mac. They, I mean, they just have to do it. You cannot look at that volume slider and say Alan Dye designed that, their new head of design for this stuff. Did he design that and thought to himself, this is great for clicking? It's super not. He designed it for reaching up to the screen and sliding around. It's gonna be great. Touchscreen iMac, you know, it's all coming. Intel Macs will not have touchscreens. Arm Macs will have touchscreens.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Oh, that's something. And the touch, the trackpad is also three times as big and it just takes up the entire keyboard deck.

• 31:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Exactly. All right, Joanna, uh, we did not talk about the iPhone or iPad OS, but I know you gotta go. Do you have any parting thoughts on Apple's actually big platform?

• 31:34Speaker 04

  No. I'm, I'm, I'm actually more interested in the, the watch stuff that's going to come in the fall than, than the iPhone. I've, I've decided, I'm excited about the iOS stuff and I liked Dieter's first look at the widget stuff and I think it's, it's good.

• 31:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm excited for the, I think Dieter, your point was it's getting more complicated.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  But like, these platforms need the additional complexity now as they take over as everyone's computers. You should be able to pull them towards you instead of adapting to them.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  Plus you don't have to make it complicated, which was I think another point Dieter made, which is like what I can tell all my readers who write to me every time I tell them Apple's moving their cheese again and just say, you don't, you don't need to deal with this. Keep it the same.

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  You don't need a widget, even though you should want a widget.

• 32:20Nilay Patel?

  I love the idea of Joanna's Wall Street Journal, like mailbag column being like, you don't, sir, you do not need a widget this time. Moving on.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  It's okay.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Uh, well, Joanna, thank you for joining us. I love having you on our show. Uh, we'll talk to you soon.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  I miss you guys.

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• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Gartenberg. Welcome to The Vergecast.

• 33:38Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 33:38Nilay Patel?

  It's been a minute since we've had you on, man. Thanks for joining us.

• 33:41Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me. Always glad to be here.

• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the reason we wanted you on, you are The Verge's premier reporter on software version names. And now that we can't talk about Android dessert names anymore, we thought we'd want you to rant for about 45 minutes about how they changed the version number for macOS from 10 to 11. Do you have any thoughts?

• 33:59Speaker 05

  So many thoughts. I mean, first of all, to change at OS 10.16 is just really, you know, just poor planning.

• 34:11Speaker 05

  They could have waited for a round number. They could have done this five years ago at OS 10.10 and made decimals make sense again. It's just deeply upsetting.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, OS, macOS 11.0, big sir. Obviously, the big news, we were just talking about it with Joanna, is they're going to support ARM chips. Hi, I'm curious for your thoughts on two things in particular. One, Apple's made a gigantic bet on Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt 3. I also think of you as our premier USB-C emotions haver. Like, above Dieter, it's the time. Hi really powers a lot of it. So there's a lot there on the connectivity side. And then there's kind of this big question around GPUs. Like, Apple's gonna make its own GPUs. They talked about it, but they've got to compete with some heavy hitters in the GPU world. And I'm curious how they might ramp to that. But let's start with the connectivity. Thunderbolt 3 is an Intel standard, right?

• 35:04Speaker 05

  Thunderbolt 3 is an Intel standard, and you can only use it with Intel stuff. That's a fundamental thing. USB-C is not an Intel standard, so you can still have USB-C ports, and that part's fine. But if you want it to be a Thunderbolt 3 spec with all the benefits and advantages that you get from Thunderbolt 3, it's just with Intel.

• 35:26Nilay Patel?

  Right now, if you buy a MacBook, you get an Intel chip and an ARM-based, like, T3 chip to run the touchbar and the fingerprint sensor. What if they flip it? And they just buy a bargain basement Intel chip so that they can slap Thunderbolt in their ARM Macs?

• 35:42Speaker 05

  I would be deeply frightened to see that, but it's possible.

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, so importantly, the comparison here is the iPad Pro, right? Which has a USB-C port that is not Thunderbolt 3. It's just straight USB-C.

• 35:55Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, there's a simple, and I use "simple" in the loosest possible terms when talking about anything related to USB-C, but the simple solution is actually a new USB-C spec.

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  Yay!

• 36:06Speaker 05

  Because, of course, it is. Which is never going to make anything more complicated. But there is a USB-4 spec, which would use USB-C physical ports, but it's a new standard. And the goal of USB-4 is essentially to bring Thunderbolt 3-like capabilities without requiring that Intel licensing. So maximum speeds of 40 gigabit per second, up to 100 watts of power, ability to power two 4K displays or a 5K display, external graphics card, everything. But the trick is, you don't have to pay Intel or have Intel's chips anymore. So if I had to guess, my bet is that Apple will do that.

• 36:50Speaker 05

  And because of the nature of USB-C, it'll be backwards compatible, in theory, allegedly, with other Thunderbolt stuff. So if you have a Thunderbolt 3 display, it should work with USB-4 ports.

• 37:03Nilay Patel?

  Why would USB-4 be backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 3?

• 37:09Speaker 05

  So that I'm not entirely sure, but apparently they're designing to do that because at a certain point, it won't be compatible with Thunderbolt's specific features. So if you're doing anything, you know, weird that relies on Thunderbolt, that won't work. But most of the Thunderbolt spec is just allowing for higher data throughput than than the minimum specs from USB 3, USB 3.2. And just by raising the floor on USB 4, it apparently gives enough. I honestly don't have a lot of details because no one's actually done this yet. But this is what the USB Innovators Forum says, or at least that's what the post on The Verge about this says.

• 37:48Speaker 05

  Intel says that they'll still coexist and that Thunderbolt 3 will still stick around because Intel provides other services that go beyond hardware. Again, we're really going to have to wait and see what this looks like when they start rolling around, which could be as early as Apple's laptops. The other answer is that Apple has no answer and they're just going to wing it and they're going to break all your accessories again.

• 38:10Nilay Patel?

  Which a healthy portion of their business is selling your ports back to you at $29 apiece. This is the best argument for dongle life, right? You have all of your accessories and they're not obsolete. It's just the intermediary dongles that connect them to your computer. So you just have to buy another $200 for the dongles and you're good.

• 38:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:30Nilay Patel?

  I don't know that I love that as an answer. It's just one possible future.

• 38:34Speaker 05

  Well, Apple sells cables and accessories. So I'm sure Apple would would love to sell you a new $1,000 monitor because your old $1,000 monitor doesn't work with the Mac Pro 2022.

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  Do you really think Apple will ever sell a monitor again that costs as little as $1,000? Like, is that ever going to happen for us?

• 38:53Speaker 05

  Maybe.

• 38:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. Yeah. Okay. So that's one open question. That there's a, you know, obviously layers of complexity there. Is Apple going to somehow retrofit Thunderbolt 3 onto their new Arm Macs? Are they going to move on to the new USB? Will that be cross compatible? That's one big thing. And we'll find out. The other big thing is, right now, Apple uses Intel's integrated GPUs and then in some machines uses AMD's GPUs.

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  Where do you see that going? Because they did talk a lot about how they're going to make their own GPUs now.

• 39:27Speaker 05

  I mean, on the one hand, there's already like, Apple already makes its own GPUs. Like, they make their own GPUs for for iOS. They make their own GPUs for the iPad. The iPad can run some, you know, fairly beefy applications, fairly beefy games, you know, fairly intensive video editing. And for, you know, lower powered laptops, for anything that's already using integrated Intel graphics, I suspect isn't going to be too much of an issue. And I suspect is also going to be the first computers that Apple's going to replace. I doubt you're going to see, you know, anything with the word Pro in the name, certainly on the desktop side, the iMac Pro, the Mac Pro getting replaced till the end of this cycle. It would be a big shift in how just like graphics and video editing work, which is

• 40:12Speaker 05

  really the question for Apple here. It's not so much about gaming, especially after the ARM transition. But Apple is selling these as pro computers and pro apps. It's, you know, Photoshop and and Final Cut. I assume that they're, you know, obviously testing this already. And I'm very curious to see like, when this early Mac mini unit ships, what what that looks like. But I think it's possible.

• 40:34Nilay Patel?

  There's a part of me that says it's possible. And the reason that Apple has been so stubborn about Metal and deprecating OpenGL is that they have been abstracting developers away from the hardware so they can make this switch more seamlessly.

• 40:49Speaker 05

  Their their big tech demo at the event was was that, you know, backwards compatible version of Tomb Raider running, you know, with Rosetta 2 on Metal or something. So like, it's definitely a key part of their strategy is is trying to shift the conversation a bit away from from just raw GPU specs. Is it going to be successful in practice is a very good question.

• 41:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just at the top end of their line is the Mac Pro, which has multiple GPU options in slots, which has a custom connector for specialized GPUs, has a custom connector for the Afterburner card, which is a PG, like.

• 41:30Nilay Patel?

  There's a modularity at the top of the line where it's like, what is the point of the modularity if your choice is one of two Apple GPUs?

• 41:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:39Nilay Patel?

  And like that, that to me is like, well, you should also be able to drop in, I doubt Apple and Nvidia will ever come to a conclusion, but you should be able to drop in like the top end AMG AMD GPU because AMD has a market beyond Apple that incentivizes their investment in research and like, right? Like right now, Apple's GPUs are pointed at phones and iPads. They're not pointed at, you know, the kind of like compute on GPU that AMD is involved in, that Nvidia is involved in that's happening over there. Like, is that something Apple you think can slide into that kind of bigger horsepower? Or is it they're just differently architected?

• 42:18Speaker 05

  I honestly don't know the answer to that. I think it's possible. You'd have to, you know, I'd have to do more research and I suspect AMD has to do more research to, to build something like that. I assume that this is something Apple's thought of, right? Like they're, they're not launching a $20,000 Mac Pro and then telling everyone, guess what? This is obsolete in a year. At least I don't think they are.

• 42:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, that's like, it's, that's a real, we don't know how they're, they're planning that, right? Like they just made a big deal out of it. They put it out.

• 42:49Speaker 05

  I mean, the last Mac Pro had this exact problem of, of being too limited in your CPU choices, being too limited in your GPU choices. It was, you know, built like a small Apple product and the new one's supposed to be, you know, the opposite of that. I can't see them ping ponging back and being like, okay, that was, that was a fun two years. Now we're back to, to, you know, tiny custom Apple GPUs that are very limited in what they can do.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  So the, these GPUs are made obviously to work with x86 systems. How hard do you think it would be to make them work with an ARM? Right? Like, would you, do you have to build an emulator in between to, to make them talk to each other? Like?

• 43:29Speaker 03

  That's like a core question, like, is it even possible?

• 43:32Speaker 05

  I don't think you need a core emulator. I mean, we have, there are, there are plenty of instances of, of companies mix and matching, you know, ARM chips with other GPUs like, you know, Samsung phones, not all Samsung phones on, on Samsung's, you know, Exynos chips use ARM-based or use different ARM-based, they mix and match, you know, ARM GPUs with their own GPUs and, and multiple cores. It's possible there's something in, in deeper, underlying, you know, code architecture that I just don't know of, but it seems to me that it'd at least be possible to leverage, you know, some aspect of it.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  And the last question on this, as you look at this transition, what's kind of your biggest, what's your biggest question mark?

• 44:10Speaker 05

  My biggest question mark is, is it's not so much selling the developers, it's selling everyone else. Like, you have a certain thing that you come to expect when you buy a laptop and you're looking at, you know, a Mac or a PC, but at a certain point, you're looking at, you know, design and software, but you know that they'll kind of work pretty much the same. This is like a very radical shift, you know, the apps that are available are going to be a radical shift. You're going to see a lot more, you know, iPad, you know, iOS stuff transitioning on. And the question is, do, do people want computers that look less like computers?

• 44:45Speaker 03

  I mean, that's, that's my whole thing. Like, my biggest question, I can't start ask, I can't start saying what my biggest question is without like flying into all the other questions. So like, I want to say my biggest question is, what's going to hap- what, what platform should developers develop to if they want to be like ready for the future? Should they make iPad apps because they don't work on Mac? Should they use Swift? Should they just keep on going on going, making classic Mac apps? Is Apple really going to want them to do that? Should they actually pay attention to Catalyst because then they can like still work on Intel Macs, which aren't going away? And like, to try and answer that, you like start flipping into, well, we actually got to talk about like how fast this ARM transition is going to happen and how good the GPUs will be. And then you want to talk about that, you end up like flipping all the way back. Like, but then again, look

• 45:27Speaker 03

  at the design of Big Sur. Everything here is designed to be touched. They also like updated all the sidebars on iPadOS so that they would look more like Mac sidebars and the buttons too, and vice versa. And like, you just end up like spinning, trying to figure out like, what is the clear path forward? Because at the end of it, the world either looks like everything is an iPad and the Mac happens to have a non-detachable, non-touchscreen, or I don't even know.

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's like you can't, you can't disconnect any of this stuff. It's really frustrating.

• 45:59Speaker 05

  And there's like an end of the road where it's just an Apple OS that runs the same on all three devices and you're choosing a form factor. Like that's a very feasible thing in five years for, for it to just be Apple OS.

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  Have you heard of Dex?

• 46:16Nilay Patel?

  It's coming. Apple's version of Dex. You're gonna plug your iPhone into your thousand dollar USB four Apple display. It's gonna light up and be a Mac. And then Apple's gonna look across the ocean to South Korea and say, we did it. It's gonna be weirdest keynote of all time. Apple just, Tim Cook just facing in a direction screaming, we did it. You know, I don't think that they would have renamed iPad OS to iPad OS. Like they are trying to create space between those OSs. They're trying to let the iPad be more of itself and the iPhone be more of itself. Federighi said on John Gruber's podcast from W W C, the Mac is a Mac. It's gonna stay a Mac. You're always gonna be able to launch terminal on it. Like,

• 46:59Nilay Patel?

  we know what a Mac is. Where they're crossing over is the design of the operating system. Big Sur looks more like iOS than ever before. You know, the one thing they kept saying to us over and over again? They're like, we know it's a Mac. We know they changed it, but we've kept the Mac icons as beautiful as ever. And it was, every time they said it, I was just like, that's not the thing.

• 47:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. Also, the icons are not great. I do not love the new icons.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  It was such, they, it was, they, they'd obviously all been like trained in our conversations to like mention the icons. And I went back and I was like, that, that's not the thing that made a Mac a Mac is like, the system preferences icon is not why I'm like, oh, this is the most Mac part of it. But they're, they're obviously bringing them together. And I think that the real question is just, once you've got a Mac, it is all the way Mac, can run terminal, can run applications. It's got a fast processor and good battery life, potentially has a touchscreen. And you can run native iPad and iPhone apps on it. Doesn't that squeeze out like an entire middle class of iPads? Like, why would you? I just keep looking at my iPad Pro right now and be like, just make it a Mac.

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  Just let me turn it into whatever Mac you're gonna make it. It's already the developer kit. It already has that processor in it. Like, why not just let it go? And I think that more than anything will be that, first of all, if they don't do it openly, if they don't just let people do it, it will be the thing that jailbreak community wants to do the most of all. Right? They just like, they just set up a new goal for all jailbreakers in the world. Run macOS on, on an iPad.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we're losing the hackintosh community because there's no way that Apple's ARM silicon is gonna be as easily hackintosh, you know, you can't go out and buy Apple's processor. So all Intel-based hackintoshes are going away, but instead, we're gonna start hackintoshing iPads? That's like a super fun trade.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  It's a pretty good trade. Like, if you can get macOS to run in like a $329 iPad, it's like, pretty good.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  We'll see, we'll see if anybody can ever do that, but I suspect that'll be the first thing that sort of jailbreak hackintosh community wants to do. And then the second part of it is like, the identity of the iPad Pro, like, quickly becomes, like, the entire, is it a computer? Can it replace your laptop? Conversation goes away. In one case, in a very positive way, right? It is a computer. It's just, it's a more limited, more focused, better interaction for a computer. And then the more negative one is, it's not a computer because the computers are over there. And it actually has a bigger app library and is more functional and feasible, and the file system makes sense. And like, I, I couldn't tell you which way that's gonna go, but you can see where they're

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  cruising towards that moment.

• 49:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, at a certain point, if you have an iPad that's, you know, a 12.9 inch screen with a keyboard with a mouse that has the same hardware as whatever MacBook they release at the end of this year, what's the difference other than that you can take the keyboard off on the iPad?

• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  Right, and they have to, I mean, we're saying this because we're reacting to it in real time. They have been talking about this for years and years and years.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  So when they released that magic keyboard with a trackpad, they had to know. One hopes that Craig knew the other part of the company was doing. They knew they were about to do this other thing and that these, the question on convergence was coming for them. The only question is, what is the answer?

• 50:23Speaker 03

  Their, their consistent answer is stop overthinking it. Everybody knows the difference intuitively. Right? And like, on the one hand, I'm like, yeah, no, that's true. Like, I'm actually not confused by what I want to use my Mac for and what I want to use my iPad for. That's, that's right. But in the, in almost the exact same breath, I'm like, actually hang on though, because I have to put something in my bag and part of me wants to just put the iPad in there and I have to like, sit there and think about it for a minute. And like, the answers are changing over time. So I, I think that their answer is going to continue to be, don't sweat it so much. Just use the one that you like better, which is a weird thing to do, but like, there might just not be a grand master plan here. They might just have two teams that are like, kind of competing with each other a little bit, but also using each other's stuff.

• 51:08Nilay Patel?

  Cats in a bag.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Cats in a bag.

• 51:10Nilay Patel?

  Do you know this reference, Sam?

• 51:12Speaker 05

  I do not know this reference.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  There's a very famous story about Michael Bloomberg, when he was in charge of Bloomberg Media and his management philosophy was cats in a bag, that he at all times wanted his executives infighting. And then when the cats in the bag killed themselves, he threw them out and would get some new ones and like, let them fight some more. And so, cats in a bag. Like, that's, that could just be Apple's strategy right here.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:40Nilay Patel?

  I think that they have a clear plan. Apple, for, for all of their flaws or whatever, Apple is, right? They put one foot in front of the other and they build to a vision consistently. And I really think their vision is the Mac is the more powerful, more open superset of iOS. Right? There's iOS, which is their big volume consumer product, and then the Mac is going to sit next to it, can do all of those things, and then a bunch of Mac stuff that quote unquote "power users" need to do.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  So then the fundamental question becomes, will there be a time when, are you, are you envisioning a future where? Will you ever be able to say there's something the iPad can do that the Mac cannot? In your vision of the long-term future that Apple's building here?

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  Yes, the iPad can have 45 cameras and a time of flight sensor on the back of it. Right? That's just one thing it can do right now that no Mac can do and no Mac maybe ever will. The iPad has a bunch of sensors in it. The iPhone has a bunch of sensors in it that I very much doubt any Mac will ever have. What Mac is ever going to support rotation?

• 52:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, that was the, that was the asterisk on the ARM Macs will be able to run all iPad and iOS apps that they can. Like if your app is built around, you know, motion controls or hardware that's exclusive to an iPhone, then, then presumably you can't run. And if you have a game that requires, you know, tilt sensing, you're going to have, you know, no luck playing that on, on a Mac if it's built around the time of flight sensor. If you have some AR apps, those aren't presumably going to work on, on your ARM Mac.

• 53:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, poor Quibi. They finally got that pathway straight to the Mac app and it's not going to work out for them.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  In the middle of this, just like Quibi is the thing you're thinking about.

• 53:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm always thinking about Quibi. It's, it's the fire on the horizon, man. It's, it's right there. Yeah, look, I, I think that stuff is really interesting. Like they're obviously making a gigantic push in AR. That push right now is expressed on the iPad and on the iPhone. It is nowhere expressed on the Mac. Does this let them do that? Or does that become the stuff that those devices do that the Mac doesn't do?

• 53:53Speaker 05

  Or is your next Mac going to have a camera on the back of the lid?

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  That would be insane. I feel like if you open up a laptop and it had a camera on the back of the lid, like people would like run you out of the coffee shop.

• 54:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  Just like fully run you out of the coffee shop. Um, it's weird that that's not a norm around the iPad, but that's just the way it is. But like, if you've got like a 16 inch power book and you open the lid and it's just got that huge array of cameras on that, people are like, get out of here. I do not trust this for one second.

• 54:20Speaker 05

  There's definitely a prototype in a lab somewhere at, at Cupertino that has, that has an iPad camera array on the back of the lid.

• 54:27Nilay Patel?

  If they're going to put that array in the back of the lid, they should at least upgrade the front-facing camera so it's not garbage.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  Oh no, that's, it'll stay 720p.

• 54:34Speaker 05

  720p FaceTime forever.

• 54:37Nilay Patel?

  For sure. All right. Well, that brings us to the phone. Dieter, you have more thoughts on complexity in the home screen than anybody. What do you think?

• 54:44Speaker 03

  I mean, I go watch the preview, but I think that it I wish that Apple had just started slowly introducing some of these new concepts to the home screen over time, over like the eight, 10 years that we've been waiting for this stuff. Instead of just in one fell swoop, being like, all right, the iPhone home screen has been the same and you can't change it forever. And then all of a sudden, right now, you can put widgets wherever you want, you could turn off pages. There's app clips. So like, there's these new temporary apps that people are going to have to figure out. And what's the fourth thing? Oh, the app library, which is, I think, the biggest thing at all of all, because historically,

• 55:26Speaker 03

  like, the thing that differentiated an iPhone from an Android phone in terms of like, how do you use it? Was Android phones were confusing because they had a separate app drawer from the home screen. And iPhone people are like, why do you accept that complicated thing? Mine's really simple. Everybody understands what happens when you hit the home button. And now, like, maybe not. You can hide apps on an iPhone. There's a hide button. Yeah, the hide button is great, although it's like a minus button and then it pops up a dialog box. So like, It's so confusing.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  There's that. The fact that you can't change the categories in the app library, like, You can't? So I just assumed it was like an automatic version of the existing foldering system, right? You like, you take any, like a fun game to play in the iPhone is you take any two apps, totally disparate, right? The Hertz Rent a Car app and Dropbox. And you like, put them together and iOS will like, make up a category for them that makes no sense. It's like romance. And it's like, this is all confusing. As far as I could tell, they pull all of the folder names out of like, the App Store categories. But like, Eero is in the lifestyle category.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  Why? Why?

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  And you can't rename them?

• 56:38Speaker 03

  No.

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  That makes no sense. I mean, I get why you do it. If you do have like 4,000 apps and some of them are old. The iPhone is very much about like automatic management of things. It doesn't want you to think about managing it as a computer. So we'll just like slide some of them away and you can find them if you need them. But this like main interface is like clean, consistent. All that makes perfect sense to me. The idea that you cannot then impose your own categorization system on sort of like the back half of your apps. I mean, that's iOS 15 in like in Apple's way, right? But it's like, it should be there from the jump.

• 57:14Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, you also can just like make your own folders on the more traditional home screens. Here's my question. They added the ability to put widgets anywhere you want, just like Windows phone and Windows phone sizes and blah, blah, blah, blah. Developers have to remake their widgets, by the way, in order to work with the system. We can get into that if you want. They've added the app library. They've added the ability, like the thing where you can turn pages off is like actually genuinely useful and a thing that I'm probably gonna do where like I'll have a work page and I'll turn it off for the weekends. They added all of this stuff, all this complexity, and I still can't place an icon on the bottom right of my screen and have blank space above it. What is the deal?

• 57:54Nilay Patel?

  The magic of the grid, Dieter.

• 57:56Speaker 03

  No, but it could stay on a grid. Just let me put it in the grid in the lower right.

• 57:59Nilay Patel?

  We need to make you an app icon that's just like a clear PNG, like a transparent PNG.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  Oh, I've done this. You go to a website and then you upload your wallpaper and then they map every little thing on the wallpaper to an icon. And then you make a web shortcut and then you set the icon for the web shortcut to the icon that you download from this custom website and that's how you get blank spaces.

• 58:23Speaker 05

  I mean, you could just get a, just get a big, big, empty, blank space widget.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a really good idea. Oh, I like that idea.

• 58:32Speaker 05

  If you make a widget and then you upload your background wallpaper, it should be able to just display it to a point. You'd have to turn off the moving, the moving home screen, but.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm definitely doing that.

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  So this is, these are all bad ideas and I, I love you both and this is why I love you. I'm just telling the listener, don't do any of this. Do the widgets on iOS run on Intel Big Sur?

• 58:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 58:57Speaker 05

  They should.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  They do. So you only have to develop them once. Uh, but you know, you need to like, figure out how to get your Big Sur app, your Mac app to talk to a widget, but they're built using, using Swift UI. And they got into this in the State of the Union, which is the second developer conference. So right now, like a widget on the iPhone is basically like a little tiny app, right? And they didn't want little tiny apps running on the home screen because that eats battery and eats memory. So they want them to basically be static, you know, like widgets, like webpages, like, like, like the dashboard on the Mac. Remember that?

• 59:28Nilay Patel?

  This is where I'm going. Yes.

• 59:30Speaker 05

  Rest in peace.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  So what they've done is like, you have to use Swift UI, you make a relatively static widget. And then, um, iOS has a timeline where it's like every couple of minutes, it says, hey widgets, it's time to update. You got anything? And the widgets can be like, I should be updated every seven minutes. So that now I've got something and then it'll get updated. And then in that process, those widgets can also say, my shit's really high priority. And that's what puts them at the top of the widget stack, which is another level of complexity that we haven't even gotten into.

• 59:58Nilay Patel?

  No one will ever abuse the ability to set your own shit as high priority. No developer will ever say, my update is medium priority.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  No, but Neil, if someone does abuse it, Apple's, um, never fail, no errors, ever crack team of App Store reviewers will, uh, catch it. And do something about it.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I love, I mean, the entire idea is good. It references, I think Tom read about it, references live tiles on Windows Phone. There's a little bit of Palm DNA in there. There's a little bit of like early Android DNA in there. If you work at HTC, here's what I want from you. I want a widget for the iPhone that is the HTC Android clock. You know that big flip clock?

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:37Nilay Patel?

  That was in every early HTC phone. I want that.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  That shit was originally from Windows Mobile.

• 1:00:43Nilay Patel?

  Fine. Bring forward.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  And they brought it over to Android.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  Make the circle complete. Bring me the, the original Windows Mobile widget.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  Get it running in Swift UI. Like, you need that widget, like that, the, literally the circle of life. Like, all of the operating systems that the iPhone destroyed, the widgets here. HD steals in the game. I mean, that stuff is great. That DNA is long. Why do you think it took them so long to put it in here?

• 1:01:12Speaker 05

  Apple is afraid of letting people make choices about the iPhone. I mean, Apple's, Apple, the iPhone is too big and too important to its bottom line to risk people breaking things. It has been for a long time. It's, it's the reason behind the App Store gating. It's the reason behind the restrictive controls, or at least part of the reason, is it is just too important to Apple to risk. Like, you need to be able to give an iPhone to, to a 12-year-old and to an 80-year-old and to everyone in between and have them all know how it works and not get lost in, you know, an app library trying to find where FaceTime is. The, the calculus has been, we need to keep it simple for the masses rather than

• 1:01:57Speaker 05

  give options for complex, for, for the people who want to switch Gmail to be their main browser.

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  Sure. Oh, we got to get into default apps. But I don't, I, like, they, the solution was make it an option and then don't have a million options, have a few options, but don't have it be the default. And that's where they landed. And that's not like a genius, oh, my God, thing. They could have figured that. They could have just done it three years ago. That's what I don't get. And I, I never will. I don't think there's a good answer.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you wrote that 72 and sunny piece like six years ago?

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  Eight years ago.

• 1:02:32Nilay Patel?

  Eight years ago. Dieter wrote a piece for us that I recall Apple was very unhappy with.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  They weren't, they weren't super pleased.

• 1:02:38Nilay Patel?

  They were very, very mad because Dieter pointed out that, I mean, like, the heart of that piece, it's very good. You go read it. Dieter was just as smart, if not smarter, eight years ago.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  Time has dulled us all, my friend. But it's very good. And the heart of it is the weather icon on the iPhone always tells you it's 72 and sunny, 73 and sunny. And it's like, that is the dumbest thing to change. Just make that alive. And now, now we're like, full on widgets that are like smart detecting the priority of data. That's great. Yeah, you didn't, you could have iterated their three years, but I'm glad they finally did it. It's very exciting. And this other piece of default apps is buried news across all of their platforms in a way. So the iPad OS and iOS, you can set default browser and mail clients.

• 1:03:28Nilay Patel?

  The apps have to be updated for that in some way. We don't know how you cannot delete Safari in mail. You, I think you can tuck them away and hide them. You can't hide them.

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  Yep. You also can't use your own web rendering engine that you have to use WebKit from Safari.

• 1:03:44Speaker 05

  All iOS browsers are just, are just Safari in disguise.

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. But like you get Chrome syncing or, you know, Firefox like does its thing like great. Different tracking protection, different UI, but you can do it now. We were not able to do it before. The HomePod is going to use all their music services. All of this is buried in their keynote. It's buried in the slides with all the features. These are some of those monumental changes on the platform that can exist, actually. The HomePod that doesn't require Apple Music is a fundamentally different product.

• 1:04:15Speaker 05

  I don't think the HomePod you can set it as the default. I think it's like the current, you know, Spotify integration with Siri on an iPhone now where you can ask, you know, Siri to play a song on your HomePod, but you still have to add an with Spotify at the end.

• 1:04:28Nilay Patel?

  But I think they're going to change it for HomePod because.

• 1:04:31Speaker 05

  No, HomePod can't do it at all right now.

• 1:04:33Nilay Patel?

  Can't do it at all. I'm guessing you're going to be able to say just use Spotify. Like if you have a HomePod, you don't have Apple Music and you have Spotify and then you are required to say, play it on Spotify. That is a horrible user experience that even Apple's thirst for services revenue cannot overcome. Right?

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  One hopes.

• 1:04:53Speaker 05

  I say one, one hopes, but I'm still skeptical.

• 1:04:57Nilay Patel?

  But setting a new browser on the iPhone is a monumental shift. Setting a new mail client is a monumental shift. These to me, like the fact that they just skimmed over them. implies they know they're going to be popular. They want to tell people about it. They don't want to say it out loud. They're not enthusiastic about it.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  I saw this. I saw a bunch of people talking about this, so I don't, I don't know who I am supposed to cite it to. I kind of thought something similar myself, but this keynote, maybe it's because it was, you know, only online or whatever, but it really felt like Apple is more and more living in its own world. And it's more and more the hero of its own story. And so it's harder for Apple to like, I don't know, like not be the center of attention. Like this is, the developer conference is supposed to be about a whole lot of other developers. And maybe again, it was because of the COVID, of COVID-19. But normally at WWDC, there's a section about two thirds of the way into the keynote, where it is just a parade of third-party developers showing you their app, you know, running on whatever, you know, the new software is.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  And we got to try the thing and we managed to develop it in just a week. Isn't this amazing? Right? Like, we didn't get a Lego AR demo for the first time in five years. And so part of me is like, they didn't bring it up because like, it doesn't occur to Apple that they should admit that you could leave Apple world, at least in the context of this particular keynote.

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Speaker 05

  I mean, Apple thinks it makes the best email and the best web browser on, on iOS or, or on Mac. That's, that's always been Apple's, Apple's party line.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  That's very confusing to me because everybody knows it's not true. Their party line is a little...

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  The browser is great.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  The browser is good. Their party line...

• 1:06:35Speaker 05

  The email app is not.

• 1:06:36Nilay Patel?

  Their party line has been, it's very hard to undo this, right? The whole OS is built around knowing that Safari is your browser. I imagine this is why other vendors have to update their apps. We've gone very long in this section. Let's take a break, come back. We got to talk about WatchOS, TBOS, AirPods. There's a whole bunch of other stuff to talk about in this five-hour Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  All right. So we talked about the Mac it-length, the ARM transition. We talked about iPadOS, iOS. Turns out Apple has 45 other operating systems that also got updated. Dieter, I want to start with something that I know is near and dear to your heart, which is smart home alliances.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. There are so many little things that I could just pop off on right now. We haven't even talked about the fact that Safari now uses the standard web API for extensions, but they're doing it in a very Apple way. Like, there's like a whole lot of Safari stuff I want to get into. But, okay, so they announced that there's a smart home alliance, and they're working with Amazon, and they're working with Google because developers are being forced to redo work for all these platforms. And we're like, whoa, why didn't they mention Samsung? Well, it turns out that Samsung is also in this alliance. And then keynote gets over, and I'm like, wait a minute. There already is a smart home alliance with all these companies. It's called the Connected Home over IP Alliance.

• 1:08:57Nilay Patel?

  Choype.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  Choype. So I'm pretty sure that this is just the same alliance, but it's unclear. But regardless, the idea is that if you make Hue light bulbs or a thermostat or whatever, if you want it to work with Alexa and Google Assistant and Apple, you have to do some pretty fundamental things multiple times. And the idea of Choype is like, do it all over IP by these standard protocols. And like, we're going to pull a bunch of this stuff from HomeKit. HomeKit is going to be open sourced in some ways. And then you just do that and then everything will work with it.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  And I think that's, they basically just announced that thing again themselves on stage is my hope. There is a tiny chance that there's like a whole other smart home alliance that like, and then we're just gonna have to live with that. But I'm like, I'm like fairly confident it's just Choype.

• 1:09:46Nilay Patel?

  I think it is too. My evidence is very different than yours, which is that if Apple were to announce a new smart home alliance with Google and Amazon in it, Google and Amazon would have also told us about it.

• 1:10:02Nilay Patel?

  Right? They wouldn't have been like, yep, Apple's got this one. They would have like also sent us a press release. They would have done a whole thing and they had already done that with Choype. So I think it's just Choype. HomeKit is open sourced. HomeKit is getting some new features. They're going to be able to do local face recognition for doorbells.

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  It's like HomeKit continues a pace. It's still, in many ways, it's the best one. Like it's the fastest, it does the most stuff locally. It's obviously the most privacy centric. And then in many ways, it's the worst one because the least amount of stuff works with it.

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  Also Siri.

• 1:10:39Nilay Patel?

  Also Siri is, Siri is involved. Siri, it's controlled by one drunk person who means so well.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  Siri got top billing this year, like showed up pretty early.

• 1:10:49Nilay Patel?

  Siri got top billing because they, they, they said, here are the things they said about Siri. Siri now knows 30,000 more facts, which is just an insane idea. Like that there is a quantifiable number of facts. Like Siri is moving towards the goal of all facts, right? Or there was a baseline number of facts, which was acceptable, but now we got 30,000 more. Very confusing thing to say. Also, definitely not as many facts as Google. Whatever number Google knows is definitely higher than Siri. That's one. That was it in terms of Siri being smarter. They announced that the interface for Siri would like, we didn't even talk about compact UI in the iPhone. Many iPhone UI elements are getting much smaller.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  On the iPad, when you invoke Siri, instead of taking over the whole screen, there's just a little circle at the bottom, which could be really cool if that was like an always on voice assistant that was like you were talking to while you did stuff. But so far in the beta, the circle comes on the screen and the entire touchscreen of the iPad is unresponsive. And if you tap on the screen, the bubble goes away. So some things to work out there. When you get a phone call, more compact UI, instead of taking over the whole screen, you use a notification. That's very cool, very useful. But those are the Siri improvements. It's like now it's a little bubble in the corner and it knows 30,000 more facts.

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  Takes a while to write 30,000 facts.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  It's all facts about the spaceship campus.

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  It would have been 60,000, but all the facts had to go through App Store review.

• 1:12:19Nilay Patel?

  So Siri did get top billing. They're still proud of it, but they weren't like it can now answer complex queries or like 30,000 facts.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Real quick on iPad, just because like we shouldn't forget, they didn't get any of the home screen improvements.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  No widgets on iPad is very strange.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  And then they have got this, I do think called Scribble, where you can just use the pencil to write text when you see a text field, which is pretty cool. So you could like, we finally achieved the dream of just having a tablet you can write on and it'll handle all your text fields.

• 1:12:49Nilay Patel?

  It's the revenge of the Newton.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  In practice, it's like.

• 1:12:53Nilay Patel?

  So it's the revenge of the Newton.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, no. So the handwriting recognition is pretty good. It uses machine learning, but it doesn't learn your handwriting over time, which is a bad idea. And when you start in a text field, you can like start, you can like roam over the whole screen and it knows to keep writing in the text field. But it's not instant, instant. And so like, if it gets it wrong, you get like, enter a hell world of scratching stuff out. So it still works better to write notes with handwriting in the notes app and then it can copy and paste that into the plain text if you want it later.

• 1:13:22Speaker 05

  How good is it at like, bad handwriting? Cause I have abysmal handwriting. Like, I've had teachers in high school reject essays I'd written because they were too impossible to read.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  I have bad handwriting and it's only gotten worse over time. And it is okay. But again, like, when it gets it wrong, the hassle of fixing it, if you're in the scribble mode, is very high. So like, you, if you're using it just like, reply to a text, or like jot down a quick to do item or something, it's fine. But like, you're not gonna be taking notes in class with this thing. You should still do that by actually doing it in the notes app and like, having it save the angst so that you can figure it out later. So, sorry, I just, like, the iPad stuff is like, one other thing on top of all of this that was easy to get lost. Uh, but we should talk about watching TV.

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, take me away and watch. I think you spent more time thinking about that stuff this week than I did.

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  I mean, they added more like, elegant ways to detect what the accelerometer is doing so they can detect more things you're doing when you're dancing for fitness. So you can do all sorts of dance fitness stuff. And then they added sleep detection, um, which, great, like, good, finally, like, about time.

• 1:14:32Nilay Patel?

  Didn't they buy a sleep tracking company?

• 1:14:36Speaker 05

  They did.

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's like the thing on the mattress that like, the mattress detects your movement. And they, I think they're actually using some of that in terms of like, sound and in general to, to do some sleep detection stuff. Um, oh, and they added hand washing detection. That's actually really-

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  That's a moment where, like, we had to listen to them talk about the, the sound of water and soap squishing and that's what the thing detects. That's clever. I like that.

• 1:15:01Nilay Patel?

  I really, I love that. I mean, I've given up on all the cute hand washing stuff. I no longer like, sing the chorus to landslide or whatever, I just count to 10 twice.

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:09Nilay Patel?

  It's fine, you know, it's boring, like, I, I mean, if this watch is telling me what to do and I could think about anything else for this 20 seconds, I'd be very happy. That's what technology is for. You give it back that little slice of time.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  Landslide? That's your hand washing song?

• 1:15:23Nilay Patel?

  It, no, my hand washing song is now me counting to 10 twice.

• 1:15:26Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:15:27Nilay Patel?

  Because I'm just done with the games. I'm like, I just, I just need to get through this. And then also the two-year-old is there and I help her count to 10.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  Right, but at one point, it was landslide.

• 1:15:37Nilay Patel?

  It was, it was, that's what Liz told me to do, so I did-

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:15:41Nilay Patel?

  There are, there are many songs. There was like a website of songs. Yeah. But now it's like, I'm just fully here. I'm like, I don't, this isn't like a fun game anymore. Right. Except for the teaching the two year old to count to ten, but that's not every, you know, you see what I'm saying? The technology exists to give you back productive time in your life. That's what automation is for. And that's what I'm very excited about it. Yeah. We already talked about the Apple TV. The only thing of interest, I can get into the nerdier details here on the YouTube 4K stuff. Yeah. So they, it's just, you know, they didn't announce it. They didn't, they said nothing about the Apple TV. Right? They're like, TVOS. Here's a trailer for a show we made. Like, there were literally no announcements of TVOS, right?

• 1:16:24Nilay Patel?

  Um, nothing is really changing. They didn't fix the remote. The UI is still bifurcated between whatever. It's all the same. But then there, you know, here's a TVOS slide. Here's the announcement. It's like a little slide. YouTube in 4K. It says the latest YouTube videos now be in 4K. That is an extremely important clarification, right? That narrows the scope of what you get to watch to just new stuff. My theory is that right now, the reason YouTube doesn't play in 4K in sort of any Apple rendering software. So Safari on the iPhone, Safari on your Mac, the Apple TV, whatever, Safari on the iPad.

• 1:17:06Nilay Patel?

  Is because Apple doesn't support YouTube's VP9 codec, which is what they deliver 4K in. They just don't do it. They don't want to do it. It's never made any sense at all. They just don't want to pay the patent license, whatever it is, they don't want to do it. Well, YouTube and Apple and a bunch of other companies, Netflix, they've all come together. They made a consortium, our favorite. New video codec called AV1. Netflix has started rolling out AV1. Uh, Android TV plays some YouTube videos in AV1. Hey, did you guys, are you supporting AV1, the newest, best codec? And maybe YouTube has encoded its newest videos in AV1 first, and then it's going to go back to the library? Just refuse to say. Yeah.

• 1:17:46Nilay Patel?

  Just flat out, I will tell you, I've just, just didn't say like as explicitly dodged as any question has ever been explicitly dodged. So we're gonna find out, but that is my theory is they've, they've added codec support and it's the new one. It's not the old one. They didn't want to use.

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  Makes sense.

• 1:18:05Nilay Patel?

  But it's a big deal, but I think it's gonna mean until YouTube back in codes its entire library in AV1, it will just be new stuff from like today on.

• 1:18:14Speaker 05

  So there, there is another Apple TV thing, which is interesting, which they also didn't talk about at all. They just like casually added multi-user support to the Apple TV, like a whole UI.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  They added a whole UI because multi-user was there before, right?

• 1:18:28Speaker 05

  Right. It's like a whole UI. It's like a slide out thing. It's built into Control Center. It's like really easy to switch between accounts, but you can just use it for Apple Arcade and nothing else.

• 1:18:37Nilay Patel?

  That's what they added.

• 1:18:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Nilay Patel?

  So they had multi-user support so that if you were, and they added it because we, because they have a recommendation engine in the TV app.

• 1:18:45Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:46Nilay Patel?

  So the idea was that you would switch over and then you can see how the TV app should be the interface for the whole thing.

• 1:18:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:52Nilay Patel?

  And they can't get there. So they added multi-user support so that your recommended shows or whatever would be yours and your kids are watching, it would be theirs. I think now they've added it just so you can switch between games.

• 1:19:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:03Nilay Patel?

  And have different game saves, which is very clever.

• 1:19:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  You know, you know what would be great to have multi-user support is the iPad, but we can move on from that.

• 1:19:11Nilay Patel?

  They just don't want to do it. They're like, you can get multi-user support for the iPad by spending $329 on another iPad. That is there. Have you heard about our great family sharing app plan?

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  That's the only difference between the Mac and the iPad in three years is the Mac lets you log in as somebody else and that's it.

• 1:19:30Speaker 05

  Or, or in three years, or in three years, you have to buy a second Mac.

• 1:19:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. And it's a 300k iPad. You see where this is going. Other little stuff, I thought this was very funny. I actually got a text from our friend Micah Singleton in the middle of this announcement. They're like, we're updating the AirPods. We now do automatic detection. We can switch devices they're connected to across iCloud. And then they're like, have you heard of spatial audio? And the actual tech demo was like really cool, right? They're gonna do motion detecting, uh, using the AirPods and your phone so that it's like a, like a, a sort of baby version of head tracking. So they know where your head is in relationship to the phone. You're all moving and like the sounds are whizzing around. Like it's a whole thing. This is the whole promise. And they're like, it's a, they just kept on calling it spatial audio.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Nilay Patel?

  The only, the most popular spatial audio that Apple delivers is in Atmos.

• 1:20:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Nilay Patel?

  And they just like, wouldn't say it. And so Micah texts me, it's like, how burned is Dolby right now? And then at the very end, at the very end, they're like, it supports 5.1, 7.1 Atmos. So they're supporting it, but they've built their own entire spatial audio system.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:37Nilay Patel?

  With one supported format, which I think is interesting because all the 3D audio stuff from Sony and Amazon is like, it's coming, you know? There's that one Amazon speaker that does like 3D audio. So maybe like Apple's building a world where, you know, you're going to listen to Landslide and 3D audio. I just went back to Landslide. You understand what I'm saying? I actually don't even like Landslide. I don't know why I keep bringing up this song. I don't like it. So that was, that was a good one. And then lastly, Dieter, you wanted to talk about Safari. We could do an entire show on Safari, but they are, they are doing some of the most aggressive moves against tracking and extension lockdowns that anyone is doing.

• 1:21:17Speaker 03

  So, okay, uh, real quick, they are switching to the web API for extensions. The current app extensions for Safari still exist, so they're going to have both. But you can't just go to the Chrome store and install it like you can on Edge or Chrome or, you know, whatever. You need to go through Apple's app or app review process to get the extensions in. Cool. Uh, they're putting smartphone style permission warnings on those extensions. So you can like grant permission once, grant permission just for this website or grant a total permission. Cause you know, turns out that most of your extensions, if you don't, aren't paying attention to them, could like literally see everything you do on the web. You should check your extensions. Just take a look at them. They're highly recommended. And then the, the other thing they're doing is they have this thing called intelligent tracking protection.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  And it is a huge combination of like cookie blocking and they also like stop tracking pixels. And they also prevent fingerprinting by randomizing certain things. And like, it's a, it's a whole, it's a lot of stuff. And they've bundled all that up into a number for every website you visit that will just tell you how many trackers were prevented. Not blocked. Some of it's blocking, but some of it's just like, they stop the tracking from, they like prevent the tracking, but they don't actually block it. Cause if you block it, then JavaScript is like, oh, this doesn't work. I'm going to break the website. But if you just like trick JavaScript and prevent it, it's a whole thing. But now every single website visit, it will tell you how many trackers were prevented. And with that information, you are able to do nothing.

• 1:22:43Speaker 03

  You can email us and tell us what the number is on The Verge and shame us. And you could do that with every website. You can, if a website has a bunch of them, you can be like, I don't feel good about this website. But the button doesn't actually, like, you can't click on anything and be like, no, actually, I'm OK with this tracker, or no, block this more, or whatever. It's literally just a button so that, like, you become more aware that tracking exists on the web, which is interesting. And like, it's great, like, good service. And like, I'm actually, like, Chrome is like, slow-rolling its privacy stuff. And, you know, there's like, every browser's in a different place. And Apple is by far the most aggressive at protecting privacy and preventing tracking.

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  And, you know, the flip side of that is they don't allow single-site browsers still. So you can't just make a Gmail app out of a webpage. They say that's a privacy thing, too. I don't agree.

• 1:23:36Speaker 03

  But yeah, it's all great. It's just, I'm very fascinated that they wanted to put this tracking number in front of people, very, very prominently.

• 1:23:46Nilay Patel?

  Here's my frame for all of this. Because they, on the iPhone, they're also blocking, they have a little identifier, IDFA, identifier for advertisers, that a bunch of apps they often use. And they're being very aggressive with it on iOS 14. So anytime an app wants to use it, you have to give it permission. You can limit that permission, you can turn it off. That's going to wreck, like, all those free-to-play games that have bad ads in them, that this is what they're relying on, right? This is going to wreck those games. Like, they won't be able to do personalized advertising at scale. A bunch of ad tech companies are freaking out. Like, Apple's position towards tracking is noble, and I like it. And that's like, one of the reasons I use an iPhone.

• 1:24:30Nilay Patel?

  It is also colored by the fact that the web, in general, is Google's revenue platform.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Nilay Patel?

  So every shot Apple gets to take against advertising, against tracking, against all the stuff, is a direct shot at Google's business.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Nilay Patel?

  As its primary revenue line. And it is super interesting to watch that play out, particularly in browsers. Less so on the, do I want crummy games to track me? I don't. Like, all those games can go away. To be perfectly honest, they can all go away. I'd much rather be in a market where I'm paying five bucks for a game than... Not knowing that free games are tracking me for garbage ads, me personally, but other people feel differently. But that's the choice Apple's making. That's where they're pushing that market. When it comes to the web, it's like, in order for websites to exist, candidly, art, here's a disclosure. Our website has a lot of trackers on it because we run ads to pay our bills. We'd be happy to find a different business model.

• 1:25:26Nilay Patel?

  What Apple is doing with its browser browser is forcibly constraining sort of the web business model of advertising. And they're saying the way it works is bad. Presumably, some people innovate. They have lots of incentives to innovate and save their jobs. But it is very interesting to see, when you say Google's slow rolling it. I think Google also thinks it's a little out of control and bad, but they also make all of their money doing it.

• 1:25:52Nilay Patel?

  So like, you just see the different incentives where Apple's like, we're just gonna burn this forest down and a new beautiful private forest will grow. And Google's like, what if we trim? What if we just mow the lawn and see what happens? Have you thought about a new layer of mulch? Like, they're just like, we're just radically different perspectives. We'll see. I think the tracking identifier stuff on the iPhone is actually great. It's gonna freak a lot of people out in the early going, the sort of notifications Apple's doing. Did you see the TikTok thing that went around today? No. So there's a new notification or like a banner slide down when an app pulls your pasteboard. So if you copy something, it goes into the clipboard. Oh, yeah, no, I've seen, I've seen that, yeah.

• 1:26:33Nilay Patel?

  So if an app hits, takes what's in the clipboard or checks the clipboard, you get a notification. So lots and lots of apps check the clipboard. For like, all kinds of reasons, nefarious and not, right? Like, they might check to see if you have a link in your clipboard, so it can prefetch the link and do a preview. It might prefetch, if you have an email address in your clipboard, it might prefetch it to see if it's in the contact database and fill out a card, like. You might just want to enable the paste option.

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  I've got an app called Shop, which is that they it's terrible. It's called Shop, but it checks the clipboard for tracking numbers. And if it sees a tracking number, it just gives you a button to be like, track this thing.

• 1:27:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So apparently TikTok on every third or fourth key press, if you're typing in a comment, checks the clipboard for some reason.

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:27:22Nilay Patel?

  So as you're typing, you just get the string of notifications beep beep beep beep beep. TikTok pulled from the clipboard. TikTok pulled from it. And it's like TikTok is already a Chinese company with already weird privacy concerns. And like, that's just going to freak people out until it is clear why all these apps are checking the clipboard or they're able to do more data. I think that's and maybe for all I know TikTok's being super nefarious, although I don't know what from the clipboards of millions of teenagers the Chinese government wants. Who knows?

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Nilay Patel?

  But it's it's one of these norms. It's going to shift on the phone that, you know, when they started sort of doing like enable Bluetooth access, here's why. Like, everybody quickly figured out they had to explain like, we're just looking for a Chromecast. Like, they got added to like every video app. Like, we're just, we only want Bluetooth because we're looking for a Chromecast. All of these other notifications are going to have to get more detailed. So they don't freak people out. I think that is unequivocally a good thing.

• 1:28:16Speaker 03

  What do you think of the the RDA nutrition label style privacy report that every app maker is required to build now? That's also self-reported.

• 1:28:26Nilay Patel?

  You know, this is one of those things. Remember Casey two years ago, like interviewed this guy Tristan Harris, who's all about digital wellbeing and the dark patterns and it's all about addiction. And like, he had a whole moment, Tristan Harris had a whole moment. And then within like 18 months, every major platform had digital wellbeing in it.

• 1:28:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:43Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, it just was the fastest take up of an idea that we've seen across at scale across all the platforms. I think this nutrition label thing is the same stuff. It's it's a faddish idea that you should package concisely the the most important information in a consistent way so that consumers can parse and understand it. Apple does not have the power to check everything or nor the scale to do it. I don't think they want to. So it's a good first step, but it's only valuable if every app that you use on all of your platforms do it. And then people like us like tell you how to read that stuff. And that's agree to continue in a more standardized or agree to continue where we where wherever

• 1:29:24Nilay Patel?

  we review a product, whenever we review a product, we list all the things you have to agree to was it's the same idea. Right? Which is cool. Like, please build an idea and do it at the system level. That's great. I just think there's another level of education that makes that label powerful. And like, is that going to be right? Like, last year, carbs were bad, but this year they're better in moderation. And next, you know, it's like, we, there's just an entire world of consumer understanding has to come along with it, but you can't do it unless you have the the structured data. And I think it's a good move towards structured data. All right. Did anything else happen?

• 1:30:02Speaker 03

  At W W C, no. The the biggest story at the verge.com on W W C day was Microsoft just like gave up on Mixer and gave it to Facebook, but that's another show.

• 1:30:11Nilay Patel?

  That's a whole other show. Bijan, Stephen and Andrew Webster have been doing a great job on that story, really pulling apart what made Mixer bad. There's another whole story happening in gaming on game streaming platforms around harassment. Jake Kastenakis actually has a great story up on that today. So we don't have time for it, but it is true. That was actually one of the most popular stories was Mixer shutting down on W W C day. So check that out. I want to just give a quick update on the Hey app. So you might recall last week before W W C kicked off, we had David Hanna Meyer Hansen. From Basecamp, the developer of Hay, and Congressman David Cicilline from Rhode Island, he's the Chair of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, yelling about Apple's App Store policies because

• 1:30:55Nilay Patel?

  Hay had been rejected. Hay is now approved. There's a lot of back and forth. I cannot at all go into it in detail. Basically, what happened was, Apple said, "It can't do nothing when you first light it up." That is just a random rule, I promise you. It came out of nowhere, basically. But Hay said, "Fine." They made a version of Hay. When you first light it up, you can get a burner account with a random email address that will last for 14 days. That was enough to meet the rule. They're back in the store for good. And also, Hay has no invite codes left. So if you want to go check out a cool new email service, go check out Hay. That has colored all of WWDC. And because we're not there in person, because the developers aren't in bars, because we're not at parties and events,

• 1:31:38Nilay Patel?

  it's hard to know if the temperature has really come down on Apple and its developer relationships. It certainly has not come down for the regulators at all. There was, just this week, reports of the Justice Department thinking about antitrust actions against Apple. This particular Justice Department under Trump is a lot of smoke and no fire. But we'll see. There's that noise. It's there. It's not going away. So that story is going to keep playing out. And it was hard to get any reporting about how developers felt this week because we weren't there. But I suspect it's not going away, even though Hay is in the store now, even though Apple changed its rules to let you appeal not just to your rejections, but the rule itself, which is either monumental or the biggest dodge ever.

• 1:32:23Nilay Patel?

  We just have to see if they actually take that seriously and change the rules in response to developers. But that was the big color over it all. But the outcome today is, there's an interesting new email service. You can download the app and use it for 14 days with a burner account. All right. It was a lot. Hi, man. Thank you so much for joining us. That was great. Anytime. Thank you to Joanna Stern for joining us at the beginning. You can find her on Twitter. She's at Joanna Stern. Thanks to Heim. He's at C Gartenberg. Dieter's at Baccon. I'm at Reckless. On Tuesday, we got a special drop in the feed. It's the new episode of Recode's Land of the Giants, all about Netflix. It's hosted by Peter Kafka and Ronnie Mola. That's going to be great. We're taking next week off for the chat show. It's the holiday. But we'll be back after that. We love hearing from you. That's it.

• 1:33:10Nilay Patel?

  I like how Joanna came back into the end to troll us. That's it. That's the end of the show. Goodbye. I win, and I also win the bet.