Pod Insights The Vergecast Apple’s AI moment is coming About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss what they expect to see next week at Apple's WWDC, or "dub dub" as it's more affectionately known. But first, we take you through all the gadgets previewed at Computex.
Further reading:
This is Lunar Lake — Intel’s utterly overhauled AI laptop chip that ditches memory sticks
Humane is reportedly trying to sell itself to HP for $1 billion
Humane, the startup behind the AI Pin, in talks with HP, telecoms to sell
Humane warns AI Pin owners to ‘immediately’ stop using its charging case
Even the Raspberry Pi is getting in on AI
Apple put a Thread smart home radio into its newest Macs and iPads
Apple just corrected the M2 iPad Air’s core count
Samsung leak reveals a cheaper Galaxy Watch
Meta is fixing three of the biggest Quest 3 annoyances with v66 update
Nothing’s Phone 3 will be all about AI apps
The Asus ROG Ally X is official — and I took a peek inside
Palmer Luckey is now selling pixel-perfect ultrabright magnesium Game Boys for $199
iOS 18 (and AI) will give Siri much more control over your apps
Apple’s non-AI WWDC plans include Settings and Control Center revamps
Apple might bring AI transcription to Voice Memos and Notes
Apple’s WWDC may include AI-generated emoji and an OpenAI partnership
Apple’s WWDC 2024 is set for June 10th
Think inside the box
Max raises prices across its ad-free plans
We tested Aptoide, the first free iPhone app store alternative
Google acquires Cameyo to integrate Windows app virtualization into ChromeOS
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 16,185 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard Confessions.
0:09 Speaker 01 My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.
0:17 Speaker 00 Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
0:30 Speaker 02 College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.
1:02 Nilay Patel? Hello, and welcome to The Fresh Cast, the flagship podcast of defense contractors selling Game Boys.
1:07 Alex Cranz? There you go.
1:09 Nilay Patel? It's a weird time we live in. That's a real thing that I said.
1:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah, Northman.
1:15 Nilay Patel? Northman Crum.
1:16 Alex Cranz? Just doing it.
1:17 David Pierce? I've been meaning for years to like, keep track of, on a scale of 1 to 10, how plausibly we could be the flagship podcast of whatever thing we are the flagship podcast of. 10 out of 10 today. Easy 10 out of 10. We have no competition on this particular front right now. And I'm very excited about it.
1:34 Nilay Patel? The other one I was going to say is the flagship podcast of multiple device management solutions.
1:41 David Pierce? See, there, I think we have some competition.
1:42 Nilay Patel? There's definitely other MDN podcasts in the world. And if you're out there, please keep doing what you're doing, because we are not going to. Serve your market, you know? By all means. Lots to talk about, lots of things not connected into any coherent whole, which I think is choice for us. That's where we shine. Next week is WWDC. We gotta do a preview of what we think Apple's gonna do, and then another disconnected set of news to talk about.
2:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
2:15 Nilay Patel? I'm your friend Neelai. Alex Cranz is here.
2:17 Alex Cranz? I'm your friend who's just excited.
2:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
2:19 Alex Cranz? Just thrilled to learn more about defense contractors, who also moonlight as game designers.
2:23 Nilay Patel? This is a real thing, and I promise you're gonna talk... If you can already guess what it is, God bless you, because you are spending too much time on the internet, which means you're our people. David Pierce is here.
2:32 David Pierce? Hi.
2:33 Nilay Patel? How's it going, buddy?
2:34 David Pierce? It's good to be here.
2:36 Nilay Patel? Are you excited to manage multiple devices in an enterprise environment?
2:39 David Pierce? Listen, I did choose one of the stories in here that is about Windows app virtualization, and I am surprisingly excited to talk about it. So I'm gonna say I'm a hard yes on that front today.
2:49 Nilay Patel? Alright, so we're opening with a lightning round. The gadget lightning round. I have proposed that we do it a little differently than normal. Usually when we have a lightning round, we have a bunch of stuff, and then we all pick one.
3:03 Alex Cranz? Yep.
3:04 Nilay Patel? Rest assured, that's how we're doing the third lightning round.
3:06 Alex Cranz? I got my name next to my little thing and everything.
3:09 Nilay Patel? I feel like that is not how lightning rounds work. Like, we have just made up an alternative to lightning rounds. Really what we're supposed to do is look at all the headlines and go through them as fast as we can. And I suggest we do this, and then David poo-pooed me.
3:24 David Pierce? It's not so much that. It's just that you have many skills in life, and one of them is not doing several things in a row quickly. And so, we have, I would say, I don't know, probably 10 headlines here. This is going to take us four and a half hours.
3:43 Nilay Patel? We're gonna do it.
3:44 David Pierce? And everybody should just buckle up for this.
3:45 Nilay Patel? People love buckling up.
3:46 David Pierce? I'm not mad at it. I'm just, I just, you claim to have a train to catch.
3:50 Nilay Patel? That's true. I do. I'm supposed to leave today. I'm just saying, I'm gonna quote our transportation editor, Andy Hawkins, who every time he puts the phrase "buckle up" in a headline, the story goes viral. And then he says, "People love buckling up." So buckle up.
4:06 David Pierce? Buckle up.
4:07 Nilay Patel? That's what I got for you.
4:08 David Pierce? Lightning round time.
4:09 Nilay Patel? Alright, we're gonna go through these as fast as we can.
4:10 Alex Cranz? Okay.
4:12 Alex Cranz? Like speed run them?
4:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's Computex week this week. Intel showed up after Nvidia announced all of its new chips and announced something called Lunar Lake. And the thing that I understand it from this, Cranz, is that they're trying real hard, but they've also gotten rid of upgradable memory.
4:28 Alex Cranz? Yeah, so their typical way of building chips wasn't working for them. So they've gone a whole new route and this is Lunar Lake. It is just for mobile devices. It's not going to be in big desktops and stuff like that.
4:41 Nilay Patel? Wait, wait, laptop mobile devices or phone?
4:43 Alex Cranz? Yes, laptops.
4:44 Nilay Patel? Okay.
4:45 Alex Cranz? Laptops.
4:46 Nilay Patel? Because Intel being like, we're doing phones again is...
4:48 Alex Cranz? Like...
4:49 Nilay Patel? That's a straight line down.
4:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah, straight line down. Like, I would say maybe 80, 90% of what is in this chip, like the little chips within the chip, not made by Intel. Like, it's based on like a TSMMC node. So they just fully were like, yeah, we can't do it. You do it. So there's all of that. Then they've just changed it all up. And one of their big things is like, we need it to be faster. So we're going to put the RAM on the chip, which will make it faster.
5:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah, famously Apple's move.
5:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah. People like to upgrade the RAM on their devices, so we'll see how that goes.
5:26 Nilay Patel? The PC market less compliant than I think Mac users.
5:30 Alex Cranz? Yeah, so we'll see how it goes. They're claiming 48 tops for their AI chip, the MPU specifically.
5:38 Nilay Patel? Trillion operations per second.
5:40 Alex Cranz? Yes, trillion operations per second. And this only matters because everybody has decided that this is the way we're going to calculate how good things are at processing AI workloads.
5:49 Nilay Patel? Has anyone figured out what to do with AI on these computers?
5:53 David Pierce? You can take a thing and a photo and move it over here.
5:58 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
5:59 David Pierce? I think that's about as far as we've gotten, and now you can do it very fast.
6:02 Alex Cranz? And some of them have like a little chatbot powered by ChatGPT, and you can be like, hey, it'll be okay.
6:08 David Pierce? That runs in the cloud. That's not even, that's not even anything. That's, that's fine, but that's like over there.
6:14 Alex Cranz? But it could, one day.
6:15 David Pierce? It could one day.
6:16 Alex Cranz? Run on a laptop powered by Lunar Lake.
6:18 Nilay Patel? When Oregon Trail tries to bang you, that's happening in Azure.
6:21 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
6:22 Nilay Patel? I'm just putting, I'm just saying.
6:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah, there's no like, local banging happening.
6:31 Nilay Patel? Intel, we got a new marketing message for you.
6:34 Alex Cranz? We helped.
6:36 Nilay Patel? This computer will try to get it on with you, no internet required.
6:39 David Pierce? Local dimming is out, local banging is in.
6:43 Nilay Patel? I'm just saying, so far, the biggest consumer success of the AI industry has been the fact that it's a little bit horny. Fine.
6:51 Alex Cranz? Yep.
6:52 Nilay Patel? Okay, do we think Lunar, based on what we saw from Qualcomm in Windows?
6:59 Nilay Patel? And then Nvidia, Nvidia was not a Computex or event was just before they announced like 500 new chips. Like a whole roadmap and they said, we're doing this every year. It was very aggressive. Jensen Huang looks very proud of himself. Is, is this competitive from Intel or no?
7:15 Alex Cranz? This is different. So this is not like Nvidia and Intel don't compete in this space.
7:20 Nilay Patel? No, I meant with Qualcomm. Like we're seeing this thing happen where right, Qualcomm, like Microsoft wants to say these new Qualcomm Windows laptops are faster than the MacBook era. They're better than the MacBook era. They've got AI built into them. And then our data centers full of Nvidia chips are rocketing into the future. And none of that has Intel in it.
7:41 Alex Cranz? Yeah. So yeah, this is, this is definitely their, their attempt to like catch up with everybody else. Because I think they just got bodied by Apple for a long time in, in this space, in this laptop CPU space. And so this is their like, they've just changed their whole strategy. It's all about power efficiency first, soldering the RAM directly onto the chip so it'll go even faster. Everything is about how can we get every single like piece of power out of this thing? While also keeping it as energy efficient as possible. And their, their claims are really big, like, right? Like they're saying like 50% better GPU performance. They're saying 60% better battery life, which is huge if true.
8:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
8:22 Alex Cranz? But it's also if true, we still have to see these chips. We still have to see them in a laptop. We still have to test them. There's a lot more to come. Intel always likes to make huge claims. And then it's like, okay, but what is reality?
8:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
8:35 David Pierce? Intel has even less credibility for making some of these claims right now than Qualcomm does, which is tough because we're still in the, you know, let's see if it's real phase for what Qualcomm just launched. And Microsoft also at that event was like, we have stuff coming from AMD and Intel too. This Copilot Plus PC thing is going to be real. Everything's going to be great. I found myself reading about all of this from Intel going like, yeah, okay, sure. And I hope it's great. Like, I really do. And I think Intel is right to do it this way. And I think the overlap of people for whom this chip would be useful and people who upgrade their RAM is like zero.
9:14 David Pierce? So I think that's actually fine. But I just, I think Intel is lying until proven truthful in a pretty real way about some of its chips right now.
9:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I also want to know what I can do with 40 TOPs that I can't do with 25 or two.
9:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
9:35 Nilay Patel? What is it? Is it something? Because we seem to be in a spec war over nothing. And I love a spec war. Don't get me wrong. You want to take me from 12 to 14 megapixels? I will talk to you all day about that. You want to go from HDMI 2.1 to 2.1A? We'll give you an hour. That's what we do here. I just, what is it? Like, I don't need generative fill in Photoshop to go that much faster. And on my computer, anyway, that's CPU bound. It's not even GPU bound. So like, what is the thing? And I don't think there's a great, broad consumer answer to that question yet.
10:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I would say 100% you're correct. I think most of the answers are for like engineers and stuff like that. They'll probably see some advantage from this.
10:24 Nilay Patel? But we're not generative fill. AID noise in Lightroom. That's the one on my computer, anyway. That's CPU bound.
10:30 David Pierce? Surprisingly good, too. That works remarkably well every time I use it.
10:34 Nilay Patel? Every time I do it, I realize I'm committing like here or see against what is photo. The Pope should come to my house and bless me.
10:42 David Pierce? But it's only like gentle heresy. Good hearted heresy.
10:47 Alex Cranz? It's fine.
10:48 David Pierce? Yeah.
10:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
10:49 David Pierce? I have, we should keep going. We're already.
10:51 Alex Cranz? We're going to crack down.
10:53 Nilay Patel? All right, lunar lake, who knows? Question mark. Number two.
10:57 Nilay Patel? Humane is trying to sell stuff to HP for a billion dollars. This is perfect.
11:02 Nilay Patel? David, the reporting from CNBC says there's also at least one telecom company in the mix.
11:08 David Pierce? Yeah, so one of the things that humane needed really early on was telecom support. And it has been working with different telecoms around the world. I think it made a deal in Japan fairly recently to launch the device over there. Like getting the AI pin on these networks is crucial to it working. So in a certain way, like if you're Verizon, you're like, oh, all we do is sell other people's stuff. We are desperate to be more than a dumb pipe. Like you can see how you have that meeting, right? And I think.
11:36 Nilay Patel? This is how Verizon ended up buying Blue Jeans.
11:39 David Pierce? That's what I mean. And like they will keep. This is how it ended up buying Yahoo. Startups until morale improves. This is just what they do. So I would not be, I would not be shocked by that at all. The HP one seems very strange to me. HP just can't do this and seems to have finally understood that being cool is not HP's thing. And that's fine. And yet here we are.
12:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
12:03 Alex Cranz? You know what? You never like, as you get older, you always have those moments where you're like, yeah, I can pull that off. Right? Like.
12:11 Nilay Patel? No, HP already had that moment. I want to be very clear.
12:13 Alex Cranz? We all had that moment. I thought I could pull off a leather hat. I couldn't do that.
12:19 Nilay Patel? When did you think you could pull off a leather hat?
12:22 David Pierce? It was like three days ago.
12:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it was last week.
12:24 Nilay Patel? Tuesday.
12:25 Alex Cranz? Last week.
12:27 Alex Cranz? I thought I could pull off skinny jeans.
12:30 Alex Cranz? Like, like, like you always have these moments.
12:31 Nilay Patel? So I just want to point out in, in this comparison very directly.
12:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I'm comparing buying humane to buying skinny jeans.
12:38 Nilay Patel? And that's great. I'm, I'm running with you.
12:40 Alex Cranz? Yes.
12:40 Nilay Patel? I'm just saying HP went through its skinny jeans phase when it bought Palm and had an entire event that I went to in San Francisco on the water. It was beautiful.
12:51 Alex Cranz? No, this is like.
12:52 Nilay Patel? Where they were like, here's the HP touchpad, our WebOS tablet that will compete with the iPod. Jimmy Iovine was there and he got on stage and was apparently so blown away with the level of innovation on display that he just went off script for like 10 minutes.
13:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
13:07 Nilay Patel? Paul Jacobs, who's the CEO of Qualcomm spoke right before. This is a real, I want you to go watch this video.
13:12 Alex Cranz? I remember.
13:13 Nilay Patel? He was like, Dr. Paul Jacobs was incredible. I was supposed to say something about music, but you know, what's beats? We don't make chips. Like it was nuts, nuts. And then they canceled the touchpad.
13:24 Alex Cranz? No, this is like.
13:25 Nilay Patel? No one has one except for Dieter and I don't think he's allowed to admit it anymore because he works at Google now.
13:31 Alex Cranz? I, I would say that this is like.
13:33 Nilay Patel? Those were the skinny jeans.
13:34 Alex Cranz? These are, yeah, that's skinny jeans. This is like when you hit like your 60s and you get the motorcycle and you're like, I'm going to be a guy that does motorcycling on the weekends. They're going to be a company that does humane.
13:45 David Pierce? This is the midlife crisis. This isn't the, the cool kids phase. This is the midlife crisis.
13:50 Nilay Patel? No, that's, the skinny jeans was the midlife crisis.
13:53 David Pierce? Oh, that's fair.
13:53 Nilay Patel? This is your, it depends on when you think your, the 60s are.
13:57 David Pierce? Fair.
13:57 Nilay Patel? I, I would say it's midlife now that I'm in my 40s. This is, you're saying this is the, the Harley with a windshield.
14:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
14:04 Nilay Patel? That's humane.
14:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
14:05 Nilay Patel? In this context for HP. I understand. Totally nailed it. Understood. Harley with a windshield. I grew up in Wisconsin. There were a lot of Harleys with the windshield.
14:15 Alex Cranz? It's like, look at that lawyer go. He bought that Harley last week.
14:18 Nilay Patel? If you're a Harley person, you have a windshield. I want, it's America, you know? Live your life.
14:21 Alex Cranz? You go real fast.
14:23 Nilay Patel? I'm a sports person. Uh, okay. Uh, they also humane, uh, the gift that keeps on giving, uh, recalled their, their battery cases this week.
14:32 David Pierce? Really tough week for humane. And it's, it's actually humane has entered that rare phase where everyone has gone from making fun of them to feeling bad for them. Uh, and it is, it's a tough time at humane. But yeah, they had what sounds like one incident with a charging case, uh, which is a little like egg shaped thing that they ship with the AI pin because the battery life is awful. Uh, and because of that one incident, they are getting rid of that supplier and giving all of the AI pin owners two extra months of service. What they're not saying is whether they're going to replace anybody's charging case, how they're doing better with the charging case. Like, it just seems like this company is scrambling in a really bad way. And I think correctly realized like, oh, something
15:15 David Pierce? bad happened. It could happen again. We have to stop it from happening and did that before it made any other plan because I don't think there is another plan because I think they're just trying to sell as fast as they can and get out. It's just bad times all around.
15:26 Nilay Patel? There's a very long, uh, Times article about the inside of humane during this period. And there's a lot of people saying, this isn't as good as we think. Should we launch it now? And apparently being shut down.
15:38 David Pierce? Slash fired.
15:39 Nilay Patel? Slash fired. Yeah. One case being fired. Uh, go read that. But we'll see. I will say the idea of either of the founders of humane working for Verizon, very funny.
15:51 David Pierce? Very funny.
15:52 Nilay Patel? Uh, or AT&T. And I, I will say just, I know we have to move on because it's lightning round. I will say once again, a workable antitrust policy for the United States is to prevent AT&T from buying anything.
16:05 David Pierce? It's like an anti-monopoly because it will just drag it down into the muck.
16:10 Nilay Patel? It's, it's fine. That would work. You could, Joe, if you're listening, Donald, you know, you're in the mix. Let's see what happens.
16:17 David Pierce? Yeah, let's get after it.
16:18 Nilay Patel? You didn't want them to buy Time Warner and you were right, my friend. Do you think Donald Trump has ever watched the 43 Snyder Cut?
16:25 David Pierce? He 100% did. Wait, before, before we do move on, I, I'm just curious, the, the number in the Times story was that humane has sold 10,000 AI pins. They were hoping to sell 100, but they have 10. And my question for the two of you, is that more or less than you would have guessed?
16:38 Nilay Patel? More. More.
16:40 David Pierce? Same, actually. I, I, I, what I wonder is how many of those were pre-orders and how many of those came after the reviews and after the thing shipped. And I would be shocked if a thousand people have bought that thing.
16:52 Nilay Patel? Wasn't 10,000 the number of rabbits, too?
16:55 David Pierce? No, they sold, they sold like 100,000 rabbits.
16:57 Nilay Patel? Oh, because they were cheap. Yeah.
16:58 David Pierce? Yeah.
17:00 Nilay Patel? I think you said on the show, when we heard the rabbit number the first time, like, you could probably saw that number of $300 or anything.
17:07 David Pierce? Yeah, I really believe that. It's orange.
17:12 Nilay Patel? Speaking of extremely odd AI news, someone just explained this to me. Raspberry Pi is getting AI features?
17:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they're getting, I believe, they're, they're gonna have a little, a like, add-on accelerator that's gonna give you 13 tops.
17:28 Nilay Patel? Again, someone tell me what to do with one top.
17:30 David Pierce? Wait, no, but, but Neel, the thing that's great about this is now every other chipmaker on Earth is going to have to convince you that they can do more than your Raspberry Pi. This is perfect. Raspberry Pi is, the thing is $70.
17:42 Nilay Patel? Floor.
17:42 David Pierce? And this is the bar now. Like, in order for you to buy your thing, you have to be more compelling than a Raspberry Pi, which I love.
17:50 Alex Cranz? I, I love this because if anyone can figure out why tops matter, it's, it's people using like Raspberry Pis for stuff.
17:57 Nilay Patel? All that's gonna happen is a bunch of people are gonna like hook a Raspberry Pi up to their video doorbells and that.
18:02 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
18:03 Nilay Patel? Like unhinged LLM horny responses from video doorbells will happen.
18:08 Alex Cranz? Or what if like Pi-hole gets better? What if like Pi-hole can do something with?
18:12 Nilay Patel? AI.
18:13 Alex Cranz? With AI? I don't know what.
18:16 Nilay Patel? What?
18:17 Alex Cranz? I'm just saying.
18:18 Nilay Patel? What if the routing on your network was a little bit less reliable than it was today?
18:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's just gonna start making stuff up. It's gonna be like, eat the cheese, Alex. It's got glue in it.
18:29 Nilay Patel? Like, at the network level, it's telling lies. I'm into it. It does feel like the $70 Raspberry Pi is expensive. That's not where they started.
18:38 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
18:39 Nilay Patel? And so it feels like this push is just, it's making everything more expensive. I'm just begging for one, what's it, 18 tops?
18:47 David Pierce? 13.
18:48 Nilay Patel? Thir- 13.
18:50 Nilay Patel? Just, just tell me what 13 TOPs are for. If you want to max out in a Raspberry Pi compute environment.
18:57 Alex Cranz? I mean, I do know what 13 TOPs are for, but it's a different time of TOPs.
19:01 Nilay Patel? With the, the trading cards are actual spinning TOPs.
19:03 Alex Cranz? We'll keep going.
19:04 Nilay Patel? All right.
19:05 David Pierce? Moving on.
19:06 Alex Cranz? Liam's gonna love that.
19:07 Nilay Patel? Uh, this is maybe a perfect Verge scoop. I'm very happy Gen 2 got the scoop.
19:12 Alex Cranz? Yes.
19:12 Nilay Patel? When I think, when I think of reasons the Verge exists, we found a secret Thread radio in every Mac. Right, it's right at the top of the list. Like, we had to manufacture the reasons people care about this. Uh, but Jen, uh, noticed in a bunch of FCC documents that there are in fact Thread radios in a bunch of Macs and iPads. This follows on Apple announcing a Thread radio in the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro, which they've never done anything with as far as we can tell.
19:44 David Pierce? Yeah. Or even explained why it would be there.
19:47 Nilay Patel? Well, you know, what they said about the iPhone was this is for future home app integrations.
19:51 Alex Cranz? Right.
19:52 Nilay Patel? Cool.
19:53 David Pierce? Sure.
19:54 Nilay Patel? This sort of like makes sense, like in the world of chip design at Apple's scale, maybe you just bought a bunch of Wi-Fi chips and they have Thread radios. You might as well have them. But they've said nothing, they, they tested them, which means they can be used. They're not just like dark on the, on the chip die. But why? Apple said nothing to Jen, Jen ran around and asked everybody what it's for. There's a bunch of reasons. You could have faster setup, you could have a low-power Thread network in your house.
20:22 Alex Cranz? That'd be cool.
20:23 Nilay Patel? That'd be neat, um, and have the devices serve as border routers between Wi-Fi and Thread. Although you want that usually to be stationary. Like having your Thread router leave your home with your laptop or your iPad, not great. Or your iPhone. Um, there's a bunch of other little like ideas people have, but Apple hasn't said anything. I'm kind of hoping we find out at WWDC.
20:42 Alex Cranz? That, that's Jen's hope too.
20:45 Nilay Patel? We'll see.
20:46 David Pierce? It also, it, there is like, we're going to talk about this in the next segment, but if you like, push this into the big like AI makes your life easier narrative of Apple, like pushing into smart home stuff and like sensors and letting your devices talk to each other makes a lot of sense. I still think the, the like Occam's razor explanation here is that they got that chip for free inside of these tri-band chips that are in a lot of devices. But I hope it's more cool, more interesting than that.
21:15 Alex Cranz? I was just trying to see if Thread radios have TOPs in them.
21:20 Alex Cranz? So far, it seems no.
21:21 Nilay Patel? Not even a single top.
21:22 Alex Cranz? No tops.
21:23 Nilay Patel? And also, very few uses for threat.
21:27 Nilay Patel? Where we have to create the conditions by which people care about these scoops. But a perfect vertical scoop from Jen. Speaking of Apple, another weird one. They misstated the core count, the number of GPUs on the M2 iPad Air. They said it was 10, it's actually 9. How do you make a mistake like this?
21:48 Alex Cranz? Like, yeah, that's just the thing. This was very surprising to see from Apple because they have a whole marketing department, a very good one, when it's not like crushing all of art.
22:00 Alex Cranz? So like, to screw up, which I think is fair to say that's a screw up, is to put the wrong number of cores on all of the marketing materials? That's a pretty big one.
22:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and you think that the engineers, the chip designers, I mean, because the way these work is they pixel bin the chips.
22:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
22:16 Nilay Patel? So they try to make the chips the most number of cores. Some of them don't get, don't work. And they pixel bin them and they cut down the number of cores that are active to just the ones that work. And off you go. Every manufacturer does this.
22:28 Alex Cranz? Maybe someone just like forgot to be like, yo, we pixel bin that one. And then it was up on the screen and they're like, oh dang, I forgot to send that email last week.
22:35 Nilay Patel? Right. And then Apple's email system is like archaic.
22:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
22:37 Nilay Patel? And it just didn't go through approvals.
22:39 David Pierce? WebEx was down that day.
22:41 Nilay Patel? They do use WebEx. I will say, this is not in our show, in our line of, we had the CEO of Zoom on Decoder and he used to work at WebEx. And I asked him if he used WebEx in the past year and he was like, I don't, no.
22:55 Nilay Patel? Truly weird. They haven't said that they're gonna make it right. Because they say the performance that they're offering is the same, is what they said. So they just got the number wrong, but the performance right.
23:03 David Pierce? Well, and even apparently the listed performance is right. So like, the only mistake that they made was a 10 instead of a 9. Which, if that's true, is like... Mostly, it's just weird that it happened.
23:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
23:15 David Pierce? But I do, yeah, I do.
23:18 Alex Cranz? I do typos all the time.
23:21 Nilay Patel? This is what happens when you let the AI write your spec sheets for you. I just made stuff up and I'm like, oh crap. See, lightning round, this is, this is all the more than needs to be said. Moving right on, Samsung had a leak, potentially a cheaper Galaxy Watch.
23:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yes, Samsung loves to leak things. They're not as bad as like Google, but they're, they're, they're up there. So there's new Galaxy Watch, it's gonna be like their founder's edition. So the FE edition could cost about $200, has a lot of really pretty colors. Seems really neat, if it's real, and it probably is. So I think like Galaxy Unpacked is happening very, very soon. So we should know a lot more very, very soon, but now we know a lot. It's gonna probably be $199. It's got an Exynos W920 chip in it, 1.5GB of RAM, 16GB of storage.
24:13 Nilay Patel? What do you do with 16GB of storage on a smartwatch?
24:15 Alex Cranz? You put all, only music.
24:17 David Pierce? I think that's the real answer.
24:19 Alex Cranz? All the time.
24:19 David Pierce? Like, yeah, download, you just download a bunch of playlists and you're off.
24:23 Alex Cranz? Cause people need their, their, like, that was always a weird thing when I was reviewing watches years ago. People would always be like, yeah, how many songs can I get on that?
24:30 Nilay Patel? No, cause you wanna go for a run without your phone.
24:32 Alex Cranz? And I'm like, why are you running? One, why are you running? And then you're just gonna use your watch? That's a-
24:39 Nilay Patel? People do it.
24:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah, a lot of people do it and I respect them for it.
24:42 Nilay Patel? Unpacked is- This is why we have V on our staff.
24:44 Alex Cranz? That's why V, V runs, thank you, V.
24:46 David Pierce? V begrudgingly runs, which is the correct way to review products, I think. And I love that about V. Unpacked is usually, what, like, early August, right?
24:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
24:55 David Pierce? I think it's gonna be a really interesting one. Like, the Galaxy Ring seems like it might be a pretty cool. This is coming, you know Samsung is going to have hundreds of thousands of weird ideas about AI. Samsung will answer your TOPS questions, Neelai. Samsung is going to figure out what to do with TOPS. Will they be good ideas? I don't know. Will they be branded milk? Like, maybe, but they will, they will use those TOPS. And I, I think it's gonna actually be a really fun event this year.
25:18 Alex Cranz? They're gonna have the most unhinged digital assistant, right? Like, it's, it's gonna have like a face.
25:24 Nilay Patel? Like Bixby with a face.
25:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's gonna talk to you, it's gonna make you feel very uncomfortable. I am so excited.
25:31 Nilay Patel? I feel like this W W C and we'll talk about that next segment. We're leading into what I have begun to think of as the what is a feto apocalypse. Cause Apple's just gonna let people start, but like it's when Samsung is like, this is what the tops are for. All bets are off.
25:47 Alex Cranz? We just made a new moon.
25:48 Nilay Patel? Just straight up like two moons, fine. That's what the tops are for.
25:54 Alex Cranz? Each tops gives you another moon.
25:56 Nilay Patel? Uh, speaking of A I, more A I, nothing has the phone three. David, you looked at it, apparently just A I apps for days.
26:04 David Pierce? Yeah. Did you guys see this teaser that, that Carl pay the C E O of nothing put up? He basically, it's like him sitting in an armchair being like, we believe that smartphones are the future of A I. And it's like, cool, Carl, like great job. But then they show off a couple of things they've been working on. And one of them is just like, straight up like G P T four O rip, like push the button, talk to the assistant. Looks very cool, uh, but they also had this prototype they've been working on of a dynamic personalized home screen. I guess you'd call it, it's like a little bit news feed, a little bit sort of live updating widgets with all the information you care about. And, uh, Carl has been saying for years, including on this show, I think almost exactly a year ago, that their big idea is like, okay, smartphones are still the thing, but the app model is wrong.
26:49 David Pierce? And how do we start to push past this idea that all of life is just siloed off into a million apps? And I happen to agree with that more and more every day. And so I think it was interesting to see what they were working on. And he just sort of said, we're going to start working on this stuff on the phone three. Like not surprising that there's going to be a thing called the phone three, but interesting that he said it. And presumably it's going to be launched this summer. Very curious to see what they do, because they've been kind of like forward looking in some of their designing stuff, but have mostly just made like pretty straightforward cell phones and headphones. Like it's a, it's a design around a pretty straightforward product. But if they're going to start doing this stuff, it might be more of a push into something different in the Android world, which I think would be pretty cool.
27:31 Alex Cranz? Does it give you guys kind of like a Windows phone vibe?
27:34 Nilay Patel? Yes, I was gonna say, this is the episode of Veritas where I brought up the fact that I lived through the touchpad. And now I have to be here being like, this was the, this is Windows phone.
27:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
27:44 Nilay Patel? Like, we're just, we're just do and engadget again.
27:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
27:49 Nilay Patel? I mean, this is how I spent my time back then.
27:51 David Pierce? A, it is just 2004 again. I would point that out. It just is. But also, like, it's really, it's long past due for us to just admit that live tiles were a good idea and Microsoft should have stuck to them. Because
28:03 Nilay Patel? They shouldn't have stuck to Windows.
28:05 David Pierce? They should have stuck, no, no, they should have, they should have changed every other thing about what they were doing except for live tiles, which were a good idea. It's a real, like, baby bathwater situation.
28:17 Alex Cranz? Like, this is, like, less attractive live tiles.
28:21 Nilay Patel? There was a Microsoft event in Vegas where they announced, like, the next version of the app model of Windows Phone. I'm just saying, that's where I fell in love with Dieter Bohn.
28:29 Alex Cranz? Aww.
28:29 Nilay Patel? It's like, we were, we were there being like, are they gonna say anything?
28:32 Alex Cranz? Connected over the shitty phone.
28:33 Nilay Patel? We, we drank a lot. We, we drank a lot.
28:39 Nilay Patel? And I was like, we will be friends now. You belong to me. We lasted a lot longer than Windows Phone. I'm just saying.
28:46 David Pierce? It's beautiful.
28:46 Alex Cranz? It's true, it's true.
28:47 Nilay Patel? Uh, but the idea that Microsoft should have stuck to Windows Phone because Carl P. is out here with nothing. I mean, like, what if we did this idea again? What if we exposed the apps or another interface on the home screen?
29:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah, man, I don't know. Like, everyone wants to do this, but the app makers don't want to do it. They want you in their app.
29:04 David Pierce? Right. I mean, it's, we've seen this even, like, again, WWDC is going to be interesting in that respect because we spent a lot of time last year talking about these live updating widgets and the interactive widgets and the dynamic island and this idea that, like, oh, you can pull information out of the apps and onto the home screen of your phone. Uh, I think we've gotten to, like, a two out of 10 on where that could have gone. And it's been a year. And like, I don't know how many live activities y'all interact with every day, but my answer is pretty damn close to zero.
29:32 Alex Cranz? Once a week when I get Uber Eats.
29:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah, there's countdown timers for various things that are gonna happen.
29:38 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
29:38 Nilay Patel? All very good.
29:39 David Pierce? Yeah.
29:39 Nilay Patel? But it's also kind of like, yeah, I, I super know the plane is gonna land in 45 minutes.
29:44 Alex Cranz? I mean, I, like, the Uber Eats one is great. I'm like, wings almost here.
29:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
29:48 Alex Cranz? And then sometimes it goes up and I'm like, wings took a wrong turn. Come back, wings.
29:53 Nilay Patel? All right, we're gonna get through this whole
29:54 Alex Cranz? We're almost there.
29:55 Nilay Patel? We got two left. Uh, the Asus Rogue Ally X.
30:01 Nilay Patel? Sean looked at it. Alex, what do you think?
30:03 Alex Cranz? Um, I love Sean's enthusiasm for this thing. Cause he, he went to look at it originally.
30:09 Nilay Patel? Rog or Rogue?
30:10 David Pierce? Rog.
30:10 Alex Cranz? Rog.
30:10 Nilay Patel? That's right. I know, I know.
30:12 Alex Cranz? It stands for Republic of Gamers.
30:14 Nilay Patel? I'm aware of that.
30:15 Alex Cranz? Which was, which was a gaming company that Asus bought, cause all of the cool ones.
30:19 Nilay Patel? All of this stuff is in my brain. It's just right next to Windows Phone.
30:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Windows Phone was really loud.
30:24 Nilay Patel? You gotta spin up the drive.
30:25 Alex Cranz? Just, just, just really loud. No, I, I like, I, I'm, I'm really optimistic. I mean, we both talk about this a lot, like Sean and I's DMs are just like more Steam Decks and more Steam Decks clones. Um, we've designed about four of our own.
30:40 Nilay Patel? This is how it starts.
30:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Someone call us. We, we've got great ideas. Um, this thing is, is, is definitely still pretty heavy. It's, it's definitely beefy, um, in a way that I think people will not find always so pleasing.
30:53 Nilay Patel? Is, is the Steam Deck still just the, the, the prototypical one of these?
30:58 Alex Cranz? Yeah. And it's, it's primarily because. Yeah. Cause most of these run on Windows.
31:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
31:04 Alex Cranz? And that's not very good for, for this, for this platform, right? Like, I, I think that's the thing that Steam Deck has done really, really well, is they built this really, really good platform. So you can just pop in, start downloading games and go. Whereas everybody else, you have to like futz with it. There's always something.
31:21 David Pierce? This is like a sneakily exciting reason to be optimistic for all these new chips, right? That if they, if they are as good as advertised, suddenly building a device like this that is light and good and lasts a long time and still does the stuff you want it to do becomes a lot more plausible. Whereas right now, you basically have to just shove as much of a gaming PC as possible into as small a box as possible. And that is just physics.
31:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
31:45 David Pierce? And physics is hard. But I will say on this.
31:47 Nilay Patel? And all the while, Microsoft is like, what if Windows just watched everything you did? And wrote it down in a plaintext database? And it's like, I don't.
31:55 Alex Cranz? It'll be fine.
31:56 Nilay Patel? But that's one of the reasons, that's the advantage Steam Deck has is they were able to cut down the, the operating system.
32:01 Alex Cranz? Right. And, and this one, like Asus, their, their way of doing it is like, well, we're not gonna fix Windows.
32:08 Alex Cranz? But we're gonna make the battery a lot bigger.
32:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
32:10 Alex Cranz? So, so that could, that could be really cool. Like, like this thing should have probably, I think, the biggest battery of all of these kinda deals. Um, but we'll, we'll see. I like, I would love, every time I get one of these in, I'm like, oh, this is gonna be rad. And then I meet Windows and I'm having to use a joystick to move a mouse around the screen, and it stops being rad real fast.
32:29 David Pierce? Yeah.
32:30 Nilay Patel? All right, let's end it where we need to end it, with the promise we made at the top of the show. There's a defense contractor who made a Game Boy. It's Palmer Lucky, everybody. What a surprise. Of course. Uh, this is a long and twisted tale. Palmer Lucky, we met when he was a literal child. Speaking of things that happened a million years ago, we saw the first Oculus prototype in our, like, trailer at CES.
32:57 Alex Cranz? 2012, right?
32:58 Nilay Patel? A hundred million years ago. Uh, it was a young, fresh-faced Palmer Lucky.
33:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
33:03 Nilay Patel? Showing us the thing, talking about OLED refresh rates and how he'd built the thing in forums and met John Carmack in the forums of the OLED nerds. It was very virg- Many things have happened to both Oculus and Palmer Lucky in that time.
33:17 Alex Cranz? Mm-hmm. He grew a little mustache.
33:19 Nilay Patel? Facial hair is, we're gonna set it aside. Uh, you're allowed to make whatever choices you want with your facial hair.
33:25 Alex Cranz? It's true.
33:26 Nilay Patel? If you wanna make those, we will just note them and set them aside. Uh, Meta bought Oculus, it turned into the Quest line, they fired Palmer Lucky for being kinda weird. Palmer Lucky made a bunch of weird donations to the Trump campaign, mostly in the form of inflammatory billboards, I believe.
33:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
33:46 Nilay Patel? This is all real. This is like, in the past. And then he started a defense contractor named Andrew, which makes drones with guns on them.
33:52 Alex Cranz? And is also named after, like, a JK, no, not a JK Rowling, named after a JR Tolkien.
33:59 Nilay Patel? Oh, sure. He also has-
34:00 Alex Cranz? Like Lord of the Rings stuff.
34:01 Nilay Patel? He's also cosplayed as Quiet from Metal Gear series.
34:04 David Pierce? One of the great-
34:04 Nilay Patel? A real thing that you can go look at a photo-
34:06 David Pierce? One of the great sightings of my life was in San Jose. I was at a bar with my wife, watching the NBA playoffs, and Palmer Lucky comes walking in with a tail on and just sits down at the bar and orders a drink. Just a delightful day.
34:20 Nilay Patel? Uh, he's been spiky with us. Whatever. This is all Palmer Lucky stuff. And it's in the, like, people arguing about the merits of spending money on Palmer Lucky devices in our comments. But it is true. That he's made something called the chromatic.
34:33 David Pierce? And it looks sick.
34:35 Nilay Patel? Which is $199 and apparently is just like, what if you finished a Game Boy? Like, what if you took a Game Boy to the most Game Boy conclusion it could be?
34:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah, what if you took all of the technology we have in 2024 and made a Game Boy from 1989?
34:52 David Pierce? That plays Game Boy cartridges for like, it's, it's, it is exactly what I want it to be. And it's like.
34:58 Alex Cranz? Or, excuse me, Game Boy Color 2.
35:00 David Pierce? You're right. Yeah, it has a, it has a color matched screen to the Game Boy Color, right? Super bright, really good screen, the colors look awesome, like this, this thing, yeah, you're right. All the pedigree of it aside, this thing looks awesome. And it's 200 bucks and I think like, people love the stuff that Analog makes. And, and at least from the little bit we've seen so far, this belongs like right there.
35:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like Analog, I would say is for modern nerds who want to like get into retro gaming. This is for like, you are in retro gaming because this is, this is like, what if we could make it as accurate as possible, but modern? So like, like the pixels and everything, you know, it's not a super high resolution display or anything like that. It is meant to be the same resolution as the Game Boy Color, which came out.
35:48 Nilay Patel? And then also it comes with a side of deep moral ambivalence.
35:52 Alex Cranz? There you go.
35:52 David Pierce? And Tetris. Don't forget Tetris.
35:54 Alex Cranz? And Tetris.
35:55 Nilay Patel? Very confusing product, just all the way around. I don't know that I'm going to spend $200 on it. I know that, boy, would I love to spend $200 on something just like.
36:06 David Pierce? Yeah.
36:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
36:08 Nilay Patel? Uh, deep moral ambivalence. That's, that's what I would say. A defense contractor. Although if Lockheed Martin was to make a 200 dollar Game Boy, would we cover it? The, I think the answer is assuredly yes.
36:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
36:19 Nilay Patel? Lockheed, you have your orders.
36:20 David Pierce? Yeah, agreed. I mean, it is interesting, like Palmer Lucky, it is documented as having been into this for a really, really long time. Like, I, I, again, all of, all of the feelings about Palmer Lucky aside, he's actually a person you would think would probably do a very good job of this.
36:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
36:37 David Pierce? It's going to be, it's going to be really interesting to see. He's also apparently about to launch some new headset. Like Palmer's, he's just running around doing stuff now. It's, it's very odd.
36:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I mean, that defense contractor money really helps out.
36:48 David Pierce? Yeah, seriously.
36:49 Alex Cranz? But again, that, that's the, that's the challenge of trying to wear as many hats as he does is that people don't like sell a lot of those hats.
36:55 Nilay Patel? And one of those hats is reprehensible politics. Okay, that's the lightning round. We finished it.
37:00 David Pierce? We did it.
37:01 Nilay Patel? I don't know how long it took, 45 minutes.
37:03 David Pierce? You did a good job.
37:04 Nilay Patel? It was so long.
37:05 David Pierce? I only had to delete two things from the list. It was really good.
37:08 Nilay Patel? As we went. All right, we have to take a quick break. We'll be back. Preview of WWDC, and then a second traditional lightning round for you traditionalists. We'll be right back.
37:23 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back.
37:24 Speaker 00 Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bull spend, and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
37:33 Speaker 01 My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had: impressions.
37:41 Speaker 00 Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
37:54 Speaker 02 College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.
38:25 Speaker 06 Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero Powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors, great tasting hydration no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade: Hydrates Better Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.
38:54 Nilay Patel? We gotta talk about it. WWDC.
38:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
38:58 Nilay Patel? I was at a conference earlier this week and I called it Dub Dub and someone looked at me and said, "You actually call it Dub Dub."
39:03 Alex Cranz? It's so much easier, like, my friends roasted me about this last week, too. I was like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to Dub Dub." And they were like, "You called it that?" And I'm like, "Look."
39:12 Nilay Patel? They really did make it happen.
39:13 Alex Cranz? They made it.
39:14 Nilay Patel? They manufactured calling it Dub Dub.
39:15 Alex Cranz? And it's less syllables than WWDC.
39:19 Nilay Patel? That's true. But it's coming. We're going. We'll be there. We're gonna Vergecast from there.
39:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
39:23 Nilay Patel? Apparently, there's a sick house we're gonna Vergecast from.
39:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
39:26 Nilay Patel? Very excited about this. And then I'm told that we're gonna have tacos.
39:29 Alex Cranz? It's gonna...
39:30 Nilay Patel? This is all of the more planning for WWDC.
39:32 David Pierce? There's your WWDC preview.
39:33 Nilay Patel? It's gonna be great.
39:36 Nilay Patel? This feels like a big one. So there's been a bunch of reporting leading up to it. Obviously, some news about AI and all the platforms, potentially an OpenAI partnership. Mark Gurman reported there'll be no hardware, which is really interesting. Traditionally, we've seen Mac Pros, other sort of developer look-ahead hardware happen at WWDC.
39:55 David Pierce? We also got MacBook Airs a couple of years, didn't we? That was like...
39:58 Nilay Patel? Well, that's when they did chip bumps. They were just like...
40:00 David Pierce? Oh, yeah, that's true.
40:01 Nilay Patel? Right. This is a moment to just like get some stuff out in the world and make some noise. And it seems like they did the hard... This is where you would have done the iPads.
40:08 David Pierce? True.
40:09 Nilay Patel? This would be a great place for iPads. But they moved that stuff out of the way. I will say, Apple keeps advertising the new iPad as the thinnest iPad, the thinnest Apple product ever, which just really implies there's not much else to say. Like, that's the advertising?
40:23 Alex Cranz? Just iPad.
40:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Here it is. It's, uh, it's thin.
40:27 Alex Cranz? It's iPad.
40:29 Nilay Patel? That makes sense. There's no hardware at this one, because you want all of the focus to be on what the software can do now, if you're gonna put AI all through the software. And you certainly don't want to tie that to the idea that you need new hardware to do it. Right? Because Apple has been on that cadence in the past, where they're like, "Here's a new iPhone. We've gated some camera features that you could definitely do on the old iPhone to the new iPhone." But here, this is about the future of iOS. It's about the future of Siri. It seems like you need all of the focus to be like, "A great upgrade that's coming to everybody with a recent iPhone." AI.
41:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah, Apple does not want to be talking about TOPS. I mean, not just because their their processors have the fewest. But yeah, that's not a thing they want.
41:12 Nilay Patel? They never, I mean, they never want to talk about specs.
41:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they never want to talk about specs.
41:16 David Pierce? But Alex, that's that's true and it isn't right? Because the the it is true that Apple is maybe losing the TOPS. Where it's also definitely true that Apple is going to have the most devices that this stuff can run on.
41:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
41:30 David Pierce? By a million miles on day one. And that is like, that's the flex Apple is going to want here. Not, we launched a new AI thing, but like, we made all your things AI things. And if you're Apple and the world feels like you need to catch up in AI, that's how you do it.
41:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I totally, totally agree. And especially because, as we we know, we have no idea what TOPS actually do. So so they don't need to care about it.
41:54 Nilay Patel? Well, so like, what are TOPS for? A good question. Apple has an opportunity to answer that question, maybe not by saying.
42:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we don't care.
42:02 Nilay Patel? But by saying like, here are a bunch of features in the operating system. Apple very famously has so much headroom in terms of performance.
42:10 Alex Cranz? Uh huh.
42:11 Nilay Patel? That it can just put out features. It can it can waste cycles, basically. Again, to just sound like an old man, when OS and Apple first announced OS 10. And it was like beautiful and had extra animations. Everyone would complain that they were just like running the processor all the time. And Apple is like, yeah, it's pretty. That's what we do here. It's delightful. That's what that's what the processors are for. And now they have so much headroom, they can do a bunch of stuff. So there's just a bunch of stuff. There's AI generated emojis.
42:42 Alex Cranz? Yep.
42:43 Nilay Patel? Rumored to be announced. There's AI powered voice transcription and voice memos and in notes, which sounds great.
42:50 Alex Cranz? I love it.
42:50 Nilay Patel? Put that in the operating system. Sorry, a bunch of India apps that are offering that right now. The idea that Siri will be able to just like go into your apps and do things. An idea that we have talked about for a long time. Programmatically with Big B, programmatically with Siri, with shortcuts. Uh, in implausible and ultimately fake ways with Rabbit and the large action model. Like, the idea that an assistant can just use a computer for you. That is the dream. If Apple can get to somewhere farther than we are now with Siri on the phone, that's a huge
43:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
43:26 Nilay Patel? step forward.
43:27 Alex Cranz? If I can just go, because we all have like, what? Four different music and podcasting and audiobook apps on our phones. And so when you're like, yeah, I just want to listen to my book. It's like, okay, would you like to buy it from the Apple Store? And you're like, no, I have it in like Libby or Libro.fm or whatever. And the idea to just be like, hey, Play that. Go do it. And it would just do it? Oh, my God, that would be incredible.
43:51 Nilay Patel? Will that actually happen?
43:52 Alex Cranz? No.
43:53 Nilay Patel? Or will Apple still try to get you to buy a book from the iBook Store?
43:56 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah, I think I think that's going to be the real issue for that particular use case.
44:02 David Pierce? So I think the question is exclusively what you just said, Neelai, which I think is really fascinating, right? Because until now, there have been a million problems, right? One of which is the like, underlying machine learning technology is not very good. One of which is that Siri is not historically very good at speech recognition. One is that the processing stuff has not been as fast as it needs to be to be useful for stuff. But the biggest one has just been that Apple won't let developers do stuff. And if you're Apple, the question now is like, what are we going to expose to developers? Because the way it's been for a long time is developers would have had to do all the work, right? So Apple just says like, here's what Siri can do. Plug it into your app however you'd like.
44:43 David Pierce? But if this new AI thing can work the way that it might, or at least that it's been reported to work, all developers have to do is basically just like expose their app to Siri in a way that could become very powerful, in the way that it's like, I don't know, Google Search is a good example of this, right? Like, if you just write a recipe on your website in a certain way, or you structure the page a certain way, like Google can understand it and index it and do stuff with it. And if Apple can say, hey, Spotify, Libby, whoever else, you want somebody to just be able to listen to their podcasts in your app? Just turn these three flags on that say, here's how you play a podcast in our app. And we're off and running like. If everybody wants this to happen, it could happen.
45:25 Nilay Patel? But that's not the AI of it.
45:27 David Pierce? No, that's.
45:27 Nilay Patel? Like, that exists sort of today. Like, you can kind of get there. My favorite example of this, I'm just gonna admit to being a dad who buys chicken nuggets in the McDonald's app all the time. It's like a real thing that happens. I'm counting those points. We're gonna get six free nuggets one of these days.
45:47 Nilay Patel? And every time I make this order, it's like, do you want to make a Siri shortcut for this order? And I have like a total moral crisis about voice ordering chicken nuggets. Like, but it's like, those flags already exist.
45:59 David Pierce? No, but this is my point. Walk me through that process. Tell me, tell me every step you take to do that.
46:04 Nilay Patel? You literally hit a button in the app that's like, just say this as a, as a favorite. And then you can be like.
46:09 David Pierce? No, I mean, to order Siri or to, oh, wait, wait. You order McDonald's and then it says, do you want to order McDonald's with your voice? And you can't bring yourself to do that?
46:17 Nilay Patel? If you make me open this app on this podcast.
46:18 David Pierce? I would like you to do that very much.
46:20 Nilay Patel? My God.
46:20 David Pierce? I would like you to do that very much. No, because one thing I should, I should have said this at the beginning is there are going to be a lot of people listening to this who are like, shortcuts solve this. And no, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. Shortcuts is a bad app that no one can figure out. And if you figured it out, congratulations, and I'm proud of you. Shortcuts is not the solution to this problem.
46:37 Alex Cranz? I was like, shortcuts is a solution if you're a programmer and you have a really strong grasp of programming.
46:42 David Pierce? If you want to write code, you can solve a lot of your problems, including in shortcuts. Absolutely true.
46:47 Alex Cranz? I don't want to write code.
46:48 David Pierce? If you know what an ex callback URL is, congratulations, you can use shortcuts. Most people don't. And that's fine.
46:56 Nilay Patel? I don't think you can set up Siri on the McDonald's app unless you order McDonald's.
47:03 David Pierce? That's, that's how they get you.
47:05 Nilay Patel? But it is true that you can set up a Siri thing. It might use shortcuts in the background.
47:09 David Pierce? Right.
47:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
47:10 Nilay Patel? But like the hooks for have Siri do stuff in the app, programmatically, semantically, like you're talking about with Google, they exist. The opportunity for Apple is to say, we control this operating system top to bottom. We control the App Store top to bottom, at least in this country. And we can now use your phone for you, which is more or less the promise Samsung made with Big Spie a million years ago. And more or less the promise Microsoft is starting to make with Windows.
47:37 David Pierce? Yeah.
47:38 Nilay Patel? Right? We, we just sit over the top of everything and we'll click around for you. And if Apple can get there, which I don't know if they can, but it's certainly the promise that's been reported by Grumman and others, they will get there in their own apps, that you will just be able to talk to Siri and it will take action in Apple's own apps. And there's obviously privacy and security concerns, all this stuff. But if they can get even a little bit farther there on the phone with AI, so it's not this like very manual, set the flags of what you're allowed to do and here's how it works, but much more where the computer's going to use the computer for you, that's a huge deal. Oh, I agree. I don't know how much processing power you need for that. I don't know if.
48:17 Alex Cranz? Well, you're also going to run into to Apple's like desire to have you use their stuff so that they get money.
48:24 Nilay Patel? Right. And then, and once you, once, once you're using Apple stuff in Apple's ecosystem, whether or not it even is AI, like starts to get fully obfuscated.
48:32 Alex Cranz? Mm hmm.
48:33 Nilay Patel? Because you don't, you could just fake, once you control everything, you just like fake it more or less.
48:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
48:37 Nilay Patel? Um, so there's a million questions in there. And then there's obviously the big problem of how many tops do you need to pull that off? Can they run locally on the phone, which is power constrained, network constrained, all this stuff, uh, heat thermal constrained?
48:52 Nilay Patel? Yikes. And then do you want your phone watching everything you do? Like, just like a series of escalating yikes problems?
48:58 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
48:58 Nilay Patel? I'm very curious to see how Apple talks about this stuff. Cause this sort of like chatbot-esque part, where you're like, make a custom emoji for me, or like do a voice transcription, like these familiar things all make sense to do. The part where they're like, we control everything and we can do things that no one else can do. Wild.
49:17 Alex Cranz? I'm also going to be curious if they can even like roll it out as fast as they want to, right? Cause I think technologically they can, but I'm just thinking of what we've, what we've seen again and again and again, is that these companies are pushing these things out and not considering the edge cases. Cause I was just sitting here being like, oh man, I'm totally going to have it make an ugly Sonic the Hedgehog emoji that looks like raccoon girl, which is like, that is a whole thing that would, see, I think any AI would struggle with that. Siri would struggle with that.
49:50 Nilay Patel? There's a red team at Apple right now, listening to this podcast, being like, did we test?
49:54 Alex Cranz? I hope you guys did.
49:56 Nilay Patel? Please hire Alex Cranz for all your edge case.
49:59 Alex Cranz? Edge case, yeah.
50:01 Nilay Patel? That's a service we can provide on this show.
50:03 Alex Cranz? The glue thing happened because they were like, how do I get the cheese to stick to the pizza?
50:07 Nilay Patel? Can I say the funniest thing about the glue thing?
50:10 Alex Cranz? What? Did you do it?
50:11 Nilay Patel? I have not. Katie and Adipala said Insider did it. She said it was fine. But, you know, you have to trust her that it was fine.
50:19 Nilay Patel? So, Google is manually deleting the bad results. Or Google contractors in some other country are manually deleting the results as people see them. But because so many people have now searched for how to keep pizza glue, the cheese on pizza, and then proactively clicked on Fucksmith's comment on Reddit about the glue, the regular Google search algorithm now is like, that's the answer.
50:44 Alex Cranz? So, Google AI, Google bombed Google?
50:47 Nilay Patel? Yes.
50:48 Alex Cranz? Yes!
50:49 Nilay Patel? If you, at least I have a screenshot of it, but when I searched for it the other day, no AI result, but straight up, it was like, here's a Reddit answer from 11 years ago by a user named Fucksmith, who's like, put the glue on pizza. You got it, didn't you?
51:04 Alex Cranz? Yep, I just immediately got it. That was the first thing I got.
51:06 Nilay Patel? The regular Google algorithm is now broken.
51:11 Alex Cranz? That brings me so much guilt.
51:13 Nilay Patel? It's like, what are you gonna do with this man?
51:17 Alex Cranz? You can put the glue on the pizza.
51:19 Nilay Patel? And it's funny because with the Google leak that we were talking about last week, we know it's because of the clicks.
51:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
51:27 Nilay Patel? We know that so many people have like clicked on this answer as a goof that regular Google got confused.
51:31 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Oh, it's beautiful.
51:33 Nilay Patel? It's good. Anyway, back to Apple. Can Apple's brand sustain that kind of error? It seems like they're not gonna do an Open Chatbot in this way.
51:41 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
51:42 Nilay Patel? But that brings us to whatever this OpenAI partnership is gonna be. I feel like I'm gonna disclose now that Fox Media has a content deal with OpenAI.
51:50 Alex Cranz? Yep.
51:51 Nilay Patel? It's the first time we've done it in the course of the show, like in the flow.
51:54 Alex Cranz? Quick, somebody bring up Netflix.
51:56 Nilay Patel? I made a Netflix show.
51:59 Nilay Patel? Hi. Hollywood Hotel over here. It's called The Future Of. It's a great show. I encourage you to watch it. It was number one for five minutes, and then immediately other shows were number one.
52:12 Nilay Patel? Anyhow, um, uh, what are they gonna do with OpenAI? It feels like this is where OpenAI launches a search product or another kind of integration. Who knows? David, do you have any?
52:24 David Pierce? It's gonna be a chatbot.
52:25 Nilay Patel? You think it's just a straight chatbot?
52:27 David Pierce? Well, no, so there's a bunch of things going on here. One is that like-
52:29 Nilay Patel? No multimodal 4O search?
52:31 David Pierce? There's gonna be some of that, right? And to your point about how Apple does this on-device Siri thing, there's this research paper that Apple put out, I think earlier this year. It was either very late last year or early this year, about this thing called Ferret, which is basically the like academic version of some of what we're talking about. It's basically how to teach a language model, how to understand what's on a screen. And one of the things they say in that paper is that GPT-4 is very good at sort of conceptually understanding a page, right? Like you, you show it something and it says, this is an image of people on the beach. But if you zoom all the way in and you're like, what's this little thing on the sand? GPT-4 is not good at that. So what they built is this thing Ferret that is very good in these small spaces.
53:14 David Pierce? And what they say in the paper is this combination is going to be very useful for us because we have this one simple system that can just say, this is the Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify. And then you have this thing Ferret that can drill down and be like, okay, that's the song that they're looking for. And so I think that is probably more what you're gonna see that GPT-4 and this OpenAI partnership is sort of the big broad strokes, like let's do the first 80% of the AI job with a lot of the stuff. And then Apple's job underneath it is going to be to fix all of the things that GPT-4 either can't do or doesn't do very well, which actually in a lot of ways is really smart because you don't need to reinvent all the, you know, quote unquote easier stuff.
53:58 David Pierce? Apple can just like build features on top of it. It's like all the browsers building out of Chromium now. It's like we don't, we, we've more or less finished the job of like how to do the very small, simple basics. All the interesting stuff is like the interface and the last mile stuff. And so I suspect that's what we'll see a lot of all over iOS.
54:18 Nilay Patel? But where is it gonna happen? Cause if you're relying on GPT-4O to do something aside, you have to go to the cloud. You probably have to go to Microsoft servers, right? Because most of that runs in Azure.
54:28 David Pierce? If you want the full model, yeah. I also, I don't, I don't pretend to have a ton of knowledge, but I'm confident that OpenAI is working on smaller versions of its stuff that works on device and locally and all that stuff. But I think if you look at something like, uh, what's a good example? Voice transcription. We were just talking about, why on earth, if you're Apple, would you try to rebuild Whisper when Whisper is really good? And OpenAI made it already. Whisper's maybe a bad example because it's actually open source and Apple could just take it. But that's the sort of thing that's like, OpenAI is sitting on a lot of very good technology that is not being made into very good products. And I think if I'm Apple, what I'm doing is looking at them and saying, I know how to make products. I'm just going to take your sort of base level infrastructure technology and build on top of it.
55:13 David Pierce? I do think the what's going to happen on device versus what's going to happen in the cloud thing is going to be messy for Apple at first and has been messy with Siri over the years, right? Like for a long time, one of the things that sucked about Siri was that it went to the cloud for basically everything. And progressively over time, Siri has gotten to do more stuff locally and has gotten better and faster as a result. And so I think we're going to see a lot of that sort of calibration of that sliding scale again from Apple here.
55:39 Nilay Patel? But if they get to the point where they're sending what's happening on your device to a cloud server, especially one that Apple doesn't own, that's a, that is Apple walking away from some of its privacy promises.
55:51 David Pierce? They made a Google deal, dude. Like this is what happens.
55:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I was like.
55:54 Nilay Patel? No, but I'm saying if they do the thing where you're like, PlaySpot, Discover Weekly and GPT-4 in an Azure server is looking at your screen and then locally it's something else? Like, no.
56:02 Alex Cranz? Oh.
56:03 Nilay Patel? Like, there's a level, there's a line that I don't think Apple will cross.
56:07 Alex Cranz? I think, I think we don't know the full terms of the OpenAI partnership, right? And Apple would be very, very, very, very, very stupid to throw away that, that like privacy marketing that they have. So I could totally see them being like, yeah, we're going to, we have OpenAI, but we're going to use it on our servers. And it'll go through our stuff and it's all going to be through your iCloud and all of that.
56:29 David Pierce? I think that's probably what it is. I think, I think this is going to be less like, we want to run this stuff on the back of OpenAI's server infrastructure, which is literally, as you said, Azure, and more like, we're going to take some of their technology and we're going to run it on our servers. And it's just going to be like a white label licensing deal.
56:47 Alex Cranz? And we've, we've heard rumors about Apple having like, building their own processors and stuff.
56:52 Nilay Patel? No, they're putting M2 ultras.
56:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah, that's it. That's it. Yeah. And that's what it's for.
56:56 Nilay Patel? How many tops on an M2 Ultra?
56:58 David Pierce? Some.
57:00 David Pierce? Some to vary.
57:01 Nilay Patel? I mean, look, if there's, if there's one company, like you said, David, that can say like, this is what all the headroom on the phone is for.
57:07 Alex Cranz? Thirty one point six tops.
57:10 David Pierce? It's pretty good.
57:12 Nilay Patel? It's an amount of tops.
57:14 Alex Cranz? That's, that is more than a raspberry pie.
57:17 David Pierce? Two and a half raspberry pies right there.
57:21 Nilay Patel? It's brutal. If you can tell us what incremental tops are for, please leave us a note. But you can't be an AI researcher. Like if you are building a consumer application where you're like, oh, man, when phones have at least 27 tops, like the world will, like you let us know. I'm dying to know the answer to this question.
57:42 Alex Cranz? Writing you as we speak to be like, we can put, we can map weird stuff to your face so well with more tops.
57:49 Nilay Patel? But if Evan Spiegel is like up at night because the average phone has 20 tops and he needs 27, like you, that's what I'm looking for.
57:55 David Pierce? Evan, I love it.
57:56 Alex Cranz? This is such a good conversation for the beginning of Pride. I love it so much.
58:01 Nilay Patel? My God, Alex.
58:03 Alex Cranz? I just had to say.
58:04 Nilay Patel? What's randomly horny or Alex Cranz, Renee? Only a top.
58:09 Alex Cranz? We'll find out. That's going to be a head to head on the later Vergecast.
58:13 Nilay Patel? All right. What do we think is like the big thing that we're looking for from WAC? So let's, let's wrap it up this way. What's yours?
58:21 Nilay Patel? Like wishlist style?
58:22 Alex Cranz? Ooh. I don't even know because I like, as, as David well knows, I started using Arc. And so now that's all I care about on my Mac. So like, I'm like, yeah, I just wanted to like, look nice. I want better control over my, the appearance of my device. I would love if the AI would just, I'd be able to be like, I want it to be like cool cyberpunk green. And it would just be like, got you.
58:48 Alex Cranz? That's my wish list.
58:49 Nilay Patel? A cyberpunk green.
58:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I want, I want, I want macOS in Siri to make my computer look as ugly as possible.
58:57 Nilay Patel? AI powered theming is incredible. I'm not, I don't think it's Apple.
59:01 Alex Cranz? That was like a Samsung Saturday.
59:04 David Pierce? There has been some reporting that Apple is going to like really open up the possibilities for what you can do with your home screen. Like they're going to let you put app icons wherever you want, which like, oh my God, what, how did no one think of this before? It's unbelievable, incredible. But like, maybe we're not that far away from you just being able to tell Siri like, just ugh up my phone. It's no big deal and it'll just happen. That'd be amazing.
59:27 Alex Cranz? That's what I want.
59:28 David Pierce? That's the dream.
59:29 Nilay Patel? All right, that's Alex's. David?
59:32 David Pierce? All of my stuff is Spotlight, which I would very much like to, that's where I want all the AI stuff to go. I think the like little AI features, voice transcription, all that stuff is going to be very cool. For me, it's like, if it can get very good at me just being like, what was that picture of the sign that I took a few days ago? And it'll just be like this one, or like the, the thing in Google Photos where you can just ask it about things in your photos. Like I want that locally on my phone and also with access to all of my stuff, right? Like Spotlight knows everything. It sees the internet. It has all the stuff on your device. It, there's been some reporting, I think from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, that it's going to be able to do more stuff inside of files and with documents.
1:00:14 David Pierce? And I just want to be like, I want to just live my life inside of that Spotlight search and just have it understand everything on my phone all the time. Like that's, that's, that's the AI job here as far as.
1:00:25 Nilay Patel? You want rewind?
1:00:27 David Pierce? Basically, but it's just sitting here.
1:00:29 Nilay Patel? Like you're one of the people who's like, just do all of it.
1:00:31 David Pierce? It already does, Neelai. It's already like, do you know what already knows everything that's happening on my phone is my phone? Like, just do it for me. And again, like, I think the, the interesting thing about the recall thing is that it's like. The worry is that somebody can get all the stuff on your device, right? Malware exists on Windows that just lets somebody look at that plaintext database that is sitting on your device. Way less of a threat on the iPhone. And so for me, like, all my stuff is already here, and if you get my phone and my passcode, I'm screwed already. So I'm like, let's at least make use of the fact that this device essentially contains every piece of my life and existence and make it useful to me, because I can't help what it already is.
1:01:14 Alex Cranz? I love this, because I have like a whole reservoir of horrible photos and GIFs, and it would be real, it would rule to just be like, hey Siri.
1:01:22 Nilay Patel? Again, if Apple's red team is available.
1:01:24 Alex Cranz? I got you.
1:01:25 Nilay Patel? Alex Cranz is also available.
1:01:27 David Pierce? If I could just be like, where's the Wilmer Valderrama gif where he does the "I love you" with his hands? And it just shows it to me, like, that's what I want. That's the dream.
1:01:34 Alex Cranz? Yes. Yeah, that's, I love this dream. Okay, I'm on board. I switched mine to David's.
1:01:40 David Pierce? But also, I want to make my phone ugly with one command. I'm with Alex, too. Neelai, what's yours?
1:01:46 Nilay Patel? I feel like the, the, "Hey, don't share Wilmer Valderrama GIFs anymore" warning is something that you need from an AI system in this context. Like, hey, you're a little out of date, there's been some news. Just helping you out there, bud. Okay, mine is very small. It's not really a wishlist of a feature.
1:02:07 Alex Cranz? Okay.
1:02:08 Nilay Patel? I am dying to see how Apple addresses adding RCS to messages.
1:02:13 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
1:02:14 Nilay Patel? Is it an announcement? Is it a bento box slide? Is it the world's smallest type? Is it just Fred Fegretti being like, "We've added the letters," and just like moving on? Like, it could go a million different ways.
1:02:26 Alex Cranz? It's gonna be bento.
1:02:27 Nilay Patel? It could be a full thing, like, "We've now added support for the standard that everyone's been waiting for," right?
1:02:33 Alex Cranz? I figured it out. They're gonna talk about the emojis that they can make with AI, and then be like, "And you can even send them to your friend on Android, because we've introduced RCS."
1:02:43 Nilay Patel? Right. Any number of ways. Will they show green bubbles on that stage? Yeah. Anything could happen. Oh, it's gonna rule. And I'm just like, that's the thing that I'm, or they could do nothing.
1:02:56 David Pierce? I love this, Alex, because like, do you remember a million years ago when Paul Pierce sent that tweet where he tried to send an emoji, but he actually sent a picture, like a JPEG of the rocket ship emoji? That's what it's gonna look like when you make a custom emoji on an iPhone and send it to an Android person. And that is how Apple gets to support RCS and still kind of knife all the Android users all at the same time.
1:03:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:03:18 David Pierce? That's good.
1:03:19 Nilay Patel? These new features are for message users, messages users, and for Android users.
1:03:24 David Pierce? You get JPEGs.
1:03:25 Nilay Patel? You get a JPEG.
1:03:28 David Pierce? I love this.
1:03:30 Nilay Patel? Like, I've just, anything could happen. Like, literally, anything from that, like, open, cutting warfare, all the way down to we've put three letters in like the tiniest box of the other features in iOS.
1:03:44 David Pierce? They might not even call it RCS, like.
1:03:47 Nilay Patel? Right.
1:03:47 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:03:48 Nilay Patel? Just like rich messaging.
1:03:49 David Pierce? What did they call it on the Apple Home app, like, new architecture? Maybe they'll just call it new architecture.
1:03:55 Nilay Patel? Rich, complex messaging. Yeah, so whatever, they'll just, literally, anything is possible.
1:04:02 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:04:02 Nilay Patel? But like, I cannot wait, because they've announced they're gonna do it. Yeah. And this is when they roll out the new operating systems, this is when they might do it. They just don't say anything. I'm on pins and needles.
1:04:12 David Pierce? It is really interesting, by the way, how little we've heard about non-AI stuff coming this year. Like, the non-AI reporting so far is basically like, new settings menu and some more native apps for the Vision Pro. And all that stuff is well and good, but there is surprisingly little, at least from what we've heard so far, that is not going to be about AI. And I think both for just how the presentation goes, but also what these things are, it's gonna be really interesting to see if basically, whatever, 12 months ago, Craig Federighi was like, we only do AI from now on, or not. Like, it's just, it's, that's the thing I'm gonna be watching the most for, is like, how much non-AI stuff is there?
1:04:56 David Pierce? Which I think is very telling for how much Apple is gonna feel like it has to do with AI.
1:05:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I'm telling you, it's gonna be RCS. All right, we gotta wrap this up. We're gonna be at WWC.
1:05:06 Alex Cranz? He's so sad.
1:05:07 Nilay Patel? What?
1:05:08 Speaker 07 I was gonna get in there and-
1:05:09 Nilay Patel? Oh yeah, Liam's got one. Okay, Liam, we, we, bonus round.
1:05:12 Speaker 07 Okay, this one has technically been announced already, but the thing I'm most excited to try next week is the motion sickness feature.
1:05:19 Nilay Patel? Oh yeah.
1:05:20 Speaker 07 Uh, I'm one of those people that like when I'm in an Uber, I can't read my phone for more than a few seconds because I get horrible motion sickness. So I really want to try this if it's in beta, uh, and hopefully it works.
1:05:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Alright, we're gonna get Liam in a car, just zooming around.
1:05:36 Alex Cranz? I'll, I'll drive.
1:05:37 David Pierce? This is a first cast that we should do. Liam and I are gonna get in the back, we're gonna both look at our phones and we're gonna see who pukes first. And that's, that's the first cast.
1:05:44 Alex Cranz? I'm just gonna be doing figure eights in a parking lot.
1:05:46 Nilay Patel? That's also sponsorable, even considering the lightning round.
1:05:51 Nilay Patel? Who boots first? Uh, alright, that's it. We're gonna be there next week. Uh, sick house. Again, I've been told there will be tacos. I'm not 100% sure how we're gonna work the tacos in the show.
1:06:01 Alex Cranz? A lot of horses are gonna be everywhere.
1:06:03 Nilay Patel? It's just, it's just what I know. Uh, I'm excited to see everybody. I'm excited to be out there. We gotta take a break though, we're gonna come back with lightning round. We'll be right back.
1:06:11 Speaker 00 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out, in. Dashboard, confessions.
1:06:21 Speaker 01 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.
1:06:29 Speaker 00 Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
1:06:42 Speaker 02 College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Wanna make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.
1:07:13 Speaker 06 Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade, hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.
1:07:44 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back.
1:07:45 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:07:46 Nilay Patel? This has been a very family-friendly episode of The Vergecast. There are no Alex Cranz moments to speak of.
1:07:52 Alex Cranz? None. But we gotta talk about HBO Max, so it's Zaddy Report.
1:07:59 David Pierce? I'm sorry. Zaddy Report, I should say, also sponsorable, but only by one company. You know who you are.
1:08:05 Alex Cranz? One. I want to see the check handwritten.
1:08:13 Nilay Patel? It's a traditional lightning round, which means we have a list and each of us is going to pick one thing, and then we're going to get out of here. Alex, I'm gonna, I think we just gotta get this off, off our plates.
1:08:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:08:27 Nilay Patel? Just move it on down the line. What's your lightning round on?
1:08:29 Alex Cranz? Um, Max, sorry, not HBO Max, Max is about to be a lot more expensive.
1:08:35 Nilay Patel? I mean, she, she already was.
1:08:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:08:37 Nilay Patel? But my daughter's name is Max, by the way. This is a horrible situation for me.
1:08:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah, she, she like, she's gonna be able to afford a lot more chicken nuggets. Because she's gonna be charging $16.99 a month.
1:08:48 Nilay Patel? That is too much money for Max.
1:08:49 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:08:50 Nilay Patel? Straightforwardly too much money. Does that give you 4K?
1:08:53 Alex Cranz? Uh, no.
1:08:54 David Pierce? The 4K plan is $20.99 a month.
1:08:57 Alex Cranz? $20.99 for 4K. So it goes up about a dollar. Everything's just going up a dollar, but it's at $1. It's like how, when you get a, when you got a 92...
1:09:07 Nilay Patel? $21 a month for HBO Max.
1:09:09 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:09:10 Nilay Patel? Because you have to have the 4K plan, in my opinion. What are you doing?
1:09:13 Alex Cranz? It's the only way to watch...
1:09:14 Nilay Patel? That's too much money.
1:09:16 Alex Cranz? No, yeah. It is, it is, it is a lot, and it's, it's set off a lot of people just very upset in their feelings about how expensive all of this is. And no, it's not gonna stop anytime soon.
1:09:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:09:29 Alex Cranz? Is, is the unfortunate reality.
1:09:32 Alex Cranz? Streaming is just going to continue to get more expensive until they figure out how to make money?
1:09:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't think they know. It also just seems like at some point, paying 80 bucks a month, or whatever YouTube TV is, just becomes the better deal.
1:09:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but that's not where all the content is, right? Like, so much of this content now is exclusive to these streaming services, so...
1:09:57 Nilay Patel? Right, but you're still just like, I'm gonna, like HBO, or Max, I'm sorry, is now just full of a bunch of weird Discovery reality shows. Like, that's, that's the value for dollar there.
1:10:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:10:06 Nilay Patel? It's like, you wanna watch House Hunters, here it is, and that stuff is still super available on a cable package.
1:10:13 Alex Cranz? Yep, and, and the cable package is probably gonna be a nicer experience, where it'll be easier to find the episode you wanna watch and get started, because the, the Max UI is still hot, hot garbage.
1:10:26 Nilay Patel? So, my Max is still paid for, because, as you know,
1:10:30 Alex Cranz? It's a child.
1:10:31 Nilay Patel? AT&T bought, that's not a lie, that'd be incredible. If everyone named Max got free Max, that would actually be great.
1:10:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:10:37 Nilay Patel? It would justify the bad name. Uh, no, as you are aware, uh, AT&T bought Warner Brothers.
1:10:42 Alex Cranz? I did know that, yes.
1:10:44 Nilay Patel? A deal which led only to the release of the 4.3 Snyder Cut. Sigh. Uh, but also a bunch of grandfathered plans, and I have one, that is the same money as a new AT&T plan, it just includes...
1:10:58 Alex Cranz? Max?
1:10:59 Nilay Patel? But in 1080p.
1:11:01 Alex Cranz? Oh, that's brutal.
1:11:02 Nilay Patel? And so I'm just like stuck with free 1080p Max.
1:11:05 Alex Cranz? Nope.
1:11:05 Nilay Patel? Until someone will notices at AT&T, which they never will.
1:11:09 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:11:10 Nilay Patel? They just want, they're just not gonna notice.
1:11:11 Alex Cranz? And they're like, "You enjoy 1080."
1:11:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, no, they're gonna be like, "A grandfathered AT&T plan? You're not churning? You may have it forever."
1:11:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:11:19 Nilay Patel? Until you get a, until they get to 6G, that's when they churn ya.
1:11:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah, you're done then.
1:11:23 Nilay Patel? But I'm stuck with this horrible plan.
1:11:25 David Pierce? I'm sorry.
1:11:25 Nilay Patel? David, are you are you paying 21 bucks a month?
1:11:27 David Pierce? No, I'm switching to ads over and over again. Uh, and it's just, it's just fine. Um, and the thing that I have realized increasingly is that the idea that people are churning is less real than people think. And I think these services are stickier than people give them credit for. Like I was, I was reading something the other day about how, uh, one of the big reasons these companies get sports is that people sign up to watch one game. And then like an overwhelmingly large percentage of those people keep the service. Like it's actually the, this idea that people are coming, watching the thing and then canceling until that thing comes back a year later is largely not the behavior. And as a result, once you're in, you're kind of in.
1:12:10 David Pierce? And I think these companies have figured out that a dollar at a time is not terrifying. Like I think if, if Mac suddenly went up $10 a month, people would freak out and leave, right? Like I think I've been watching Evernote for this, I don't know why this just came into my head, but I've been watching Evernote over the last couple beers. They basically just doubled their subscription price. And we're very honestly like, this is the only way this is a sustainable business. Here we go. And people freaked out. That's how you churn people, but a dollar a month at a time, just there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that that costs them anything. And it gets them more money. And also what they want is either for you to pay $50 a month or get ads. And they will, they will keep raising the price until those are the only two options left. I really believe that.
1:12:56 Alex Cranz? I totally agree with you. I mean, it's, it's just the frog in the, the boiling pot, right? Like it's the water.
1:13:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I'm stuck with an AT&T plan.
1:13:03 Alex Cranz? You're, you're stuck with 10 ADP forever. I'm sorry.
1:13:10 Nilay Patel? Bah, all right. David, what's yours?
1:13:11 David Pierce? Mine is, uh, maybe the wonkiest thing I've picked on the Vergecast in a while. Uh, Google bought this company called Cameo with a Y, not the cameo where you can get famous people to like, tell you, you're terrific. It's a, it's a company that does Windows app virtualization on Chrome OS. And I thought this was very funny because this happened this week after I had a very like. Related Cameo experience. My wife is in grad school and she's taking like a statistics class right now and she had to download this unbelievably like esoteric old app called R Studio, I think, that looks like it has not been updated since 1994, runs on Windows,
1:13:56 David Pierce? Linux and Mac and not Chrome OS. And she has a Chromebook for her like personal use. And so she spent, I would say, the better part of a day trying to install Linux on her Chromebook in order to do this. And was as she got like most of the way down, I was actually very impressed with how far down the like running Linux distro on a Chromebook she got. And then eventually just gave up and was like, it's not worth it. Do you have a Windows computer I can use? But the thing that we found was like, oh, the best answer to this is this app called Cameo, which just lets you run Windows apps on your Chromebook, but it's prohibitively expensive and like explicitly not designed for just like regular people. But now as part of Google, I think this is super interesting. It gives Google like a new inroad into businesses with
1:14:37 David Pierce? Chromebooks where it has traditionally had trouble. It gives Chromebooks a lot more to do because if this works well, you could start to just do more Windows stuff inside of Chromebooks. There's a lot left to shake out here. This acquisition like just happened, but I actually think it's super interesting. And as like the one person on earth who still really, really, really, really wants Chromebooks to be cool and succeed, this makes me happy.
1:14:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah, the best thing I've ever bought for my mom is a Chromebook.
1:15:01 Alex Cranz? Really?
1:15:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah, because a regular computer, a regular Mac or Windows PC is like 55 different operating system metaphors all at once. Like this is called Launchpad. Why? And you get a Chromebook, you're like, use this browser. They just use it. And it's like, fine.
1:15:17 Alex Cranz? Does your mom know what, when you say?
1:15:19 Nilay Patel? I wrote a whole article about it ages ago.
1:15:20 Alex Cranz? Does she know like what the box is to where to type things in?
1:15:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's just a browser. It's like, this is Chrome. You like Chrome, right? Go to YouTube.
1:15:28 Alex Cranz? Your mom is so much more advanced than my mom.
1:15:30 Nilay Patel? But like, now what I worry about with Chrome OS is they added Android apps. Now they're adding Cameo. They're getting in the same place where you're like, oh, there's multiple competing application metaphors at once. Okay, but I still love a Chromebook. Oh, and Chromebook pluses now have all the Gemini stuff.
1:15:48 Alex Cranz? Man.
1:15:49 Nilay Patel? It's like, I just want a browser, man.
1:15:51 Alex Cranz? That Pixelbook was such a good device.
1:15:53 David Pierce? It was very fun watching everybody argue in our comments about sort of the overall Chromebook thesis. And like, one of the things obviously Chromebooks have done is they've been hugely successful in schools. And there were a lot of people in our comments who were like, yeah, I had a Chromebook in high school and it ensured that I will never, ever buy myself a Chromebook because it was a piece of junk. And it's like, yeah, maybe at some point, Google and others should have invested in making Chromebooks good and then people would want them. Like, what a crazy idea that would be.
1:16:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:16:22 Alex Cranz? They should put Arc on it.
1:16:23 Nilay Patel? I had a Chrome, I bought my mom a Chromebook Pixel, $1,000 Chrome laptop. People thought I was nuts. It's still rocking because it has like 16 gigs of RAM.
1:16:31 David Pierce? Yeah, that thing has 10 times the power it needed.
1:16:34 Alex Cranz? That's such a good laptop.
1:16:35 Nilay Patel? Like an i7, it was amazing. It's still going because it just runs.
1:16:38 Alex Cranz? It rules.
1:16:39 Nilay Patel? All right, mine is last minute game time decision. We just put this story up. The chair of the Tesla board is warning shareholders today that if they don't approve Elon's $56 billion pay package, he might leave Tesla.
1:16:55 Alex Cranz? Oh, no.
1:16:58 Alex Cranz? Oh, that's terrible.
1:17:01 Nilay Patel? Elon is not a typical executive and Tesla's not a typical company, he says in the letter, which was filed to the SEC. So the typical way in which companies compensate key executives will not drive results for Tesla. Motivating someone like Elon requires something different, he says.
1:17:14 David Pierce? To be fair, I would also be very motivated by $56 billion. Like, I don't know that that's different. That's the same.
1:17:21 Nilay Patel? Somehow, he says, and it's not about the money. It's like, following up, you ought to motivate Elon somehow, and then it's not about the money when the letter is about approve the pay package.
1:17:31 Alex Cranz? Didn't he just like?
1:17:32 Nilay Patel? Thread and needle there, buddy.
1:17:34 Alex Cranz? Didn't he just screw over Tesla by having a bunch of like H100s from Nvidia shipped?
1:17:41 David Pierce? Yeah, he sent them to X instead. This, Matt Levine at Bloomberg made what I thought was a very good point about this, which is that what this, the, the initial read on that is like, oh, this is a sign that Elon Musk is not paying attention to Tesla. Why would you give him the money? The Galaxy brand take is, oh, this is a threat that if you don't give Elon Musk his money, he will stop paying attention to Tesla and this is what will happen. And I think that is a fun, like...
1:18:09 David Pierce? War games version of this story that is just gonna keep getting where he's obviously gonna get the money, right? Like, you don't think so?
1:18:17 Nilay Patel? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
1:18:18 David Pierce? I think he's gonna get the money.
1:18:19 Nilay Patel? No, this vote doesn't even guarantee that he gets money. He could win this vote and still not get the money.
1:18:24 David Pierce? Okay, that's fair. I think he'll win the vote.
1:18:27 Nilay Patel? Maybe. I think they're worried. I don't think the chairman of your board sends letters about how you have to motivate Elon, which by the way is hilarious. That's a letter you send about like me in eighth grade.
1:18:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:18:41 David Pierce? Do you think $56 billion would have done it for you?
1:18:44 Nilay Patel? I don't know. I was not a typical eighth grader and I did not respond to typical motivations. Right, we have to challenge him. We gotta keep him involved. Otherwise, he's gonna light yet another classroom on fire. Like, that's a crazy letter.
1:19:01 David Pierce? Yeah, it really is.
1:19:02 Alex Cranz? That's too much.
1:19:03 Nilay Patel? And I will point out, Chancery Daily has been doing great work on this. If you've been following, they've followed a lot of the Tesla and Twitter, back and forth. Yeah, like, the court in Delaware said this pay package was illegal. Like, this vote doesn't cure the problem, actually. It's like a weird dance. Who knows, man? I just think he... The thing that caught my eye here is all this preamble about how it takes something special to motivate Elon. It's not money, and then it's like, and also vote for the money.
1:19:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:19:39 Nilay Patel? It's very good. All right, we're going to WWDC. We gotta get out of here. That vote, by the way, is June 13th, where Andy and Liz are primed, as you can imagine, primed to cover it. It's gonna be, I think it's gonna be wild. I think the future of Tesla and X and SpaceX kind of all tied up in this one little, very odd moment.
1:19:58 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:19:59 Nilay Patel? So they'll be covering that next week while we are headed back from Dub Dub. I think there's gonna be a lot of stuff to cover out of Dub Dub. I was saying this to our team today. People have a lot of feelings about AI.
1:20:09 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:20:10 Nilay Patel? And Apple putting AI all over its operating system. If you just look at the response to that ad that Alex mentioned before, the crush ad, that ad was not about AI. That was just about iPads.
1:20:20 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:20:21 Nilay Patel? You actually do the thing where the photo editing gets easier or the copy is easier to write. I think people, Apple has a lot of creatives who care a lot about this company. It's gonna be a weird time next week, I think. Yeah, I would agree. So, all that covered, that's why The Verge exists. Why do we exist? That's why, to figure out why we make art with computers. And the answer, according to trans, is to do weird horny stuff. Yeah! That's The Verge Cast. Rock and roll.
1:20:51 Speaker 07 And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it, we'll see you next week.
1:21:12 Speaker 08 Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.
1:21:42 Speaker 09 Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.
Previous Sonos' headphones are extremely Sonos Next Apple Intelligence, iPhones, and the rest of WWDC 2024 Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
