Apple Intelligence, iPhones, and the rest of WWDC 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Allison Johnson, and David Pierce discuss all the announcements from Apple's WWDC event. Further reading: Apple WWDC 2024: the 13 biggest announcements Apple Intelligence: every new AI feature coming to the iPhone and Mac Apple is giving Siri an AI upgrade in iOS 18 Apple announces iOS 18 with new AI features and more customizable homescreen Apple says iPhones will support RCS in 2024 Apple’s AI can make custom emoji and images iOS 18 introduces satellite capabilities to its iMessage app Apple announces iPadOS 18 with a built-in calculator and customizable homescreen Apple made an iPad calculator app after 14 years The iPhone’s new Game Mode makes it faster and more responsive Apple announces watchOS 11 with new training features and Live Activitie Apple announces macOS Sequoia at WWDC 2024 Apple’s standalone Passwords app syncs across iOS, iPad, Mac, and Windows Apple’s AirPods are being upgraded with powerful accessibility features Apple’s InSight feature for Apple TV Plus will tell you who that actor is Apple teases new seasons of Severance and Silo Apple announces visionOS 2 with 3D photo transformations and an ultrawide Mac display Apple is finally launching the Vision Pro outside the US Canon made a special lens for the Apple Vision Pro’s spatial videos 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

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

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• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Red Cast, the flagship podcast of stateless computation on personal data with enforceable guarantees. Hey! I got it. David pointed out that you can pick any phrase from Apple's white paper about privacy and AI. And we're the flagship podcast of that. I picked leaky user data earlier, but we don't want to get the explicit label on YouTube and Spotify. Yeah, it's a family friendly podcast. Stateless computation on personal data. I'm your friend Eli. We're here at WWDC. David Pierce is here. Hello. We're in this fancy house. It's awesome. It is a very fancy house. Alex Cranz is here.

• 1:36Alex Cranz?

  I love that it smells like tacos in here.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  That's our fault.

• 1:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's delicious.

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  It's fully our fault. A lot of Veritas fans have wanted us to talk about the tacos. And we will, if you get through the entire episode, including the ad breaks. Later on, Allison Johnson will be joining us. We are at WWDC. Apple announced updates to every single one of its operating systems. No hardware, as was rumored, and I think the most important set of announcements. Apple Intelligence, which is the company's approach to AI, which has many, many, many components, including all the way at the end, a little old chat GPT-4O. Yeah, just a little. There it is. Just shut up, Wall Street. That is pretty much what it was.

• 2:17David Pierce?

  You want us to have a chat GPT strategy? Here it is.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  It's just chat GPT. So David and I were walking around the event, we're walking to Apple Park. The vibe was very much like, what is GPT doing here? Like, they were excited about it, they were talking about it. But they were kept on talking about all the stuff they had built. Yeah. Uh, in the keynote, their principles for how to build it, how they're going to protect user privacy. There was a second on the record event. Uh, where I just interviewed John Jean Andrea, who's their head of AI and Greg Federighi. They recapitulated the keynote and said the principles and values again. And then they kept being, and then some people are going to want to use chat GPT.

• 2:53David Pierce?

  Right.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  And it was just like, I think all the lead up was like, are they going to pick Google? Are they going to pick OpenAI? They're behind, they gotta catch up. These models will power the stuff. And David, I, it just felt like they could have done without it.

• 3:07David Pierce?

  Well, there was the assumption going in that if they were going to sign a deal like this, it was going to be to sort of underpin all of this stuff, right? That like, in the sense that when you go to Safari and you do a search, you get Google, right? You don't get like a mishmash of Apple and Google when it's useful. Like, it's just Google, because that's the one that Apple picked and also billions of dollars is fun. But the assumption then was like, okay, this will be a Siri based on Gemini. Apple doesn't have the technology yet. Apple hasn't been able to compete with OpenAI and others. So they're going to build on top of this infrastructure, which, as we've talked about, has all kinds of like weird privacy implications. But in a certain way, it kind of makes sense.

• 3:46David Pierce?

  Instead, it's just like a weird thing off to the side where Apple made a huge deal out of all the stuff that it has built. It says it can do a ton. It's built this incredibly vertically integrated system that it says preserves your privacy and knows what's on the screen. And then, like you said, oh, and also chat GPT. And so it's, it feels like just a, an afterthought.

• 4:06David Pierce?

  Because it's a really good brand that people know.

• 4:08Alex Cranz?

  It it it does actually feel like the Google thing because it's in that it's only being used for search, right? Like that that was that was my.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  It's not even being used for search in that way. It's.

• 4:19David Pierce?

  It it would be like if you only took Google Images.

• 4:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:24David Pierce?

  Everything else was Apple except Google Images and you it and you so if you do a search for a picture, you get Google and everything else is Apple and you'd be like, what? This doesn't make any sense.

• 4:33Alex Cranz?

  Because the integration is like you just you ask and then if it decides that it doesn't want to do it and it wants chat GPT to do it.

• 4:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, sorry. We should step through it.

• 4:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like.

• 4:43Nilay Patel?

  The big headline feature we should talk about is Apple Intelligence.

• 4:46Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 4:47Nilay Patel?

  The way the keynote was structured was to put all of that stuff at the end. It was the grand finale of.

• 4:53Alex Cranz?

  It was the one more thing.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  WWDC.

• 4:54David Pierce?

  Neelai turned to me at one point during the live blog as they they hit like a wrap up moment.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:59David Pierce?

  Before they did the Apple Intelligence stuff and Neelai just turns to me and he goes, is that it?

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:02David Pierce?

  Like, are we?

• 5:03Nilay Patel?

  Because they ran through all the OSs.

• 5:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Nilay Patel?

  Which we'll get to later, but they ran through all the OSs and I'm like, here's the new grid of icons on the home screen. Look, you can put the icons everywhere. Here's TVOS. We didn't do anything. And then they they came to like a natural apple point and then Tim Cook came back and he's like, power of generative intelligence, blah, blah, blah. Here's all the stuff we're doing. And they laid out a bunch of principles. It has to be powerful. It has to be useful. It has to be private. They've built this extraordinarily complicated system where your device decides whether it can do some of the things that you might want it to do, or it has to go to Apple's private cloud compute nodes, which we should definitely talk about. Lots of privacy claims there. And then it's not. And then it goes to chat GPT.

• 5:49Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  It's that's Apple Intelligence. And the heart of almost all these announcements are like, here's some stuff you can do in your phone or your Mac. Here's some stuff that we built this very complicated system to do in the cloud securely. And then also, there's a button here where if you want to take a picture of your fridge and ask it to make up a recipe, you can send a photo to chat GPT if you'd like. Also, we're going to ask you if you ever want to do that. And every time you do it, we're going to say, do you want to send this photo to chat GPT?

• 6:20David Pierce?

  You don't.

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  So there's no, there's almost no integration.

• 6:22Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that is like, yeah, that's.

• 6:25David Pierce?

  I had I had not thought about this until just now. I think that's on purpose. I think that's like extremely on purpose.

• 6:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:30David Pierce?

  Because what Apple is trying to do is like abstract all of the A I-ness away, right? That like you as a user shouldn't have to care or notice what's going to the cloud and what's happening on device. They want it to all be secure. It should all work the same. Like, fine. Uh, Apple wants it to be damn clear when you are using Chat G P T. Because Chat G P T is going to make mistakes. It's going to do a lot of weird stuff and Apple would very much like to be like, hey, remember when you hit a button that said Chat G P T? Like, this is no longer our problem.

• 6:57Alex Cranz?

  Even the prompt is like, sometimes we'll make errors.

• 7:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, at the bottom of every result, it says, check important info.

• 7:03David Pierce?

  Rude.

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  Which is just Chat G P T's reputation now. This thing lies to you.

• 7:06David Pierce?

  It's even, that's even crueler than like Chat G P T is typical, which is just like, sometimes it makes mistakes.

• 7:12Nilay Patel?

  No, this is just straight up, like, just check this, right?

• 7:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:15Nilay Patel?

  So, but there's a real line there. And that's what I'm saying. It felt like the vibe was, we did all the stuff. Also, this is yours, so don't ask us about it. Right? Like,

• 7:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Nilay Patel?

  They said Craig Federighi at the, I don't even know what you call this. It was an interview, but it was like, it was very staged.

• 7:31Alex Cranz?

  A coffee side.

• 7:32Nilay Patel?

  Um, uh, he said that Gemini would be an example of another L M they could bring into this. And he said, there will be others. We heard people talk about like, what if you're a doctor and there's a medical A I system that you want to plug into your Mac in this way? The hooks are being built so that you'll have multiple models you can pick from. So Chat G P T is just the one they're starting with today because they kept saying it's the market leader. They think it's the best one of these things. They can integrate it all these places. Over time, it's obvious that Apple Intelligence, this much more private system, is going to get better and maybe push one out. Or there's going to be like competition and you get to pick whatever model you want.

• 8:12Alex Cranz?

  So is it effectively just advertisement for the A P I then?

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  I think, I suspect, I do not know that Apple is paying OpenAI to have this built into their operating systems. I don't know how they're getting paid, I don't know if it's per use, I don't know if it's a bulk rate, whatever. I know that OpenAI doesn't make any money. Famously, they have not yet made any money. Microsoft owns forty nine percent of OpenAI. It would be very funny if Microsoft was putting money into OpenAI and OpenAI was paying Apple for the privilege of being in Apple's operating, like, that would be almost backwards. So that, you know, the logical assumption is that Apple is paying to have this be part of their operating system, and maybe they will pay other companies over time.

• 9:02Nilay Patel?

  Or there will be some other kind of arrangement you can have. You can log in, if you subscribe to ChatGPT, you can log into your account, you get more features. It will remember you, for example. Whereas if you don't have a ChatGPT account, you're not paying for premium, it doesn't remember anything about you, it's free. It's free to use on your iPhone, it has no memory, and it throws everything out about you. So they have built this, like, very firewallled version of ChatGPT that's just around.

• 9:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  But all of the action is Apple intelligence, which is totally controlled by Apple.

• 9:35Alex Cranz?

  That makes a hun- like, that just makes sense. Apple was never gonna let anybody that tightly integrated.

• 9:41Nilay Patel?

  But these are not the rumors, right?

• 9:43David Pierce?

  No, well, and it also makes the ChatGPT piece of it make less sense to me, right? Because if OpenAI is paying Apple, that I understand, right? Like, I get that for OpenAI, they say, okay, this is going to make people use our product more, which is gonna make more people subscribe. That's, that's the path. We get user data, whatever, but OpenAI, in the way that it's set up now, seems to be getting most of the upside, and all Apple gets is just like a weird way to offload you to another system for some questions that you have.

• 10:11Nilay Patel?

  It's very much like, to do the good, fun stuff, it has to be not private, and that's Sam Altman's problem. We're gonna, we're gonna have this. So the, the

• 10:19David Pierce?

  So you think the risk then is that if, if it's, if you don't have that, all you get is kind of a like not fully baked AI system that people don't use. And so you're sort of lost at the beginning?

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think one of the really interesting pieces of the puzzle here is we don't know how much of these features will arrive with iOS 18 at the beginning. We don't know how many are coming towards the end. Every time they talked about Siri, um, I kept noticing that they, they insistedly used like off in the distance verb tenses.

• 10:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  Siri is going to be able to do this. And it's like, when is Siri going to be able to do this? The answer appears to be within the window of iOS 18. So Siri will be able to do a bunch of the stuff they demoed before iOS 19 comes out.

• 11:03Alex Cranz?

  But not necessarily.

• 11:05Nilay Patel?

  A long time from now.

• 11:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  Like that's, that's September 2025 is the release date of iOS 19. So there's a long way to go, uh, before they have to ship all these features. But the fundamental architecture of Apple Intelligence is really interesting because they have, they are claiming very much that the on-device intelligence that they've built. They said, there are already 200 models running your phone before we ever do any of this generative stuff. For things like car crash detection and photo editing and all photos in general on an iPhone, tons of AI. And then now they're adding some of these other models. It's only going to run on the iPhone 15 Pro and presumably the next one.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  And then Max with an M1 chip, uh, or above. So that's interesting because the M1, I think is more similar to some of the previous iPhone chips.

• 11:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  But they are gating it. Uh, so it's the 15 Pro and above and M1 and above, obviously running the new versions of the operating system. And it's going to add more models that let you do more stuff on the phone. So you will be able to generate horrifying, uh, images on the phone.

• 12:08Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited about that.

• 12:10Nilay Patel?

  Photos. Um, you'll be able to ask Siri for certain things using app intents, which we talked about a bunch last week.

• 12:17Alex Cranz?

  But it's only using the data on your device, right?

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  Only using the data on your device.

• 12:21Alex Cranz?

  Which is why all of the images from the image playground that we saw in the keynote were horrible.

• 12:27David Pierce?

  They were so bad.

• 12:28Alex Cranz?

  They were like. It was like, do you remember how when you're when you're downloading an app? And it's like, do you want to download any of these other games? That you've never heard of and are probably going to steal your data? They it like all the art looked like those apps.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's image playground, which is all local.

• 12:43Alex Cranz?

  Uh, and yeah, it looks bad. It looks real bad.

• 12:47Nilay Patel?

  But image playground is a thing you can just integrate into apps now. So you can draw a sketch and notes and circle it and then it'll make the AI bubble and then I'll turn your sketch into a thing.

• 12:55David Pierce?

  Is that anything?

• 12:59David Pierce?

  I'm sort of seriously, I think I have been, I have been thinking about this so much the last few weeks about like how, what in AI is a real thing that people will do? And what is going to be a tech demo that no one in the world ever actually does? And I've been thinking about this actually ever since Rabbit did the demo where he drew a spreadsheet on a piece of paper. And then pointed his rabbit to it and was like, transpose the rows and columns and send this to my email. And it did it and I was like, oh, neat. Unusable feature for anyone who exists in the world, like why on earth would you do this? And I wonder with this thing where he's like, there was a moment in the keynote where he was in notes. And he just did a circle in a note, in an open part of the note. And it made a picture of the stuff that was in his note. It's like, A, technically neat thing.

• 13:44David Pierce?

  It made a thing. Why? What is this for?

• 13:49Alex Cranz?

  I know, I figured it out. It's when, you know, how when you have to send a deck and you don't want to go look for art? To send that deck to like all your other coworkers to be like, this is why we're going to do this new policy or whatever.

• 13:59David Pierce?

  Okay, that's actually.

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  You can really tell that Alex used to be the managing editor.

• 14:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. She had to explain a lot of.

• 14:03David Pierce?

  I know, I think I don't make enough decks to like be.

• 14:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:06David Pierce?

  You're steward of the world. I need to make more decks.

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you make me an installer deck. You can entirely. But there's other stuff that will happen locally on the phone, like the new iOS that you get AI powered summaries of your notifications. And they previewed this with a very like, like the stock thing that everyone previews everything with, which is like, your friends are planning a trip in a group text. And it's like so and so booked a house. So the first date is this and so and so is going to be late. I'm like, none of my friends are this transactional. They do not communicate this way. It's going to be like, your law school friends are shitposting again. Some of these images are not safe for work, right? And it's like, what will he have to?

• 14:45Nilay Patel?

  So like, there's a real, I think, just gap between sort of these demos, like these ideas of what you can do on a phone, the reality of how powerful your phone might have to be, and then like, what actually is happening on people's phones? And then at some point, and we don't really know when, the phone's gonna say, I don't have the horsepower to do this, or my battery life will be too compromised, or the thermals are out of whack, and it will create a secure connection to Apple's secure, private compute cloud service that is running Apple silicon somewhere. And that whole mechanism is Apple's innovation. Like, at the end of the day, Apple running a bunch of tiny models on-device, and a bunch of bigger models in the cloud, is what everyone is doing.

• 15:28David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 15:29Nilay Patel?

  Some of the user experiences they are delivering are exactly the same ones as we've seen demoed by other companies. Apple's much better at telling you a compelling story about those user interface ideas, but it's the same stuff. We're gonna read all your email and make you a list of flights, like, yeah, we saw that at I/O.

• 15:47David Pierce?

  Right.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  That's Microsoft's demoing. But the, the big innovation is they're saying, we're doing this all on your device as much as we can, and when we have to go up to the cloud, we've built this whole system to keep that secure, and then importantly, throw your data away on the cloud when we're done, so there's no chance of being compromised.

• 16:06David Pierce?

  Right. That whole chain is supposed to be exactly as secure as just doing it on your device.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:11David Pierce?

  Which just instinctively, I don't believe, because that's not a thing. You've just, you've taken a thing that was on my device and you've put it somewhere else, and so now by definition, it's less secure. But at least to Apple's credit, it does seem like it has done just about everything you can do to mitigate that.

• 16:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's kind of like, it seems to be just as secure as possible with still, but refusing to acknowledge that it is still way less secure than everything just being on your device.

• 16:38David Pierce?

  Right.

• 16:38Alex Cranz?

  Because it's like, yeah, this is probably one of the most secure ways you can transfer this information. You are still transferring this information, and that means you open yourself up to other people. Inserting themselves in.

• 16:50David Pierce?

  Right. And there's all kinds of potential for weirdness if you have network problems. Or again, like it turns out sending a bunch of data to the web and the cloud is also taxing on your battery life and thermals. Like, this stuff is hard. And I think doing all of this super seamlessly, if Apple can pull it off, is going to be like the true magic trick of this whole system.

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So the basics are complicated. They just released a white paper about how it all works. It is very dry.

• 17:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my.

• 17:17Nilay Patel?

  Alex, I believe your read on it was they don't want people to read this.

• 17:20Alex Cranz?

  No, you sure don't.

• 17:24Nilay Patel?

  But there's some interesting pieces of it, right? Craig Federighi described one part of the system as blockchain-ish, which is actually a great description. So your phone, when it goes to talk to one of these servers, if they have not published the code for researchers to verify the security of the code to an append-only cryptographically signed database, blockchain-ish, that your phone can check, it just won't talk to that server. Right? So like your man in the middle attack there, like they're trying to cut that down. There's a lot in the white paper that says, we do not want there to be targetability. So it's not like you have a Mac Mini in the cloud.

• 18:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  There's a huge array of devices in the cloud and they don't want any one of those to be associated with you. So your device, when it asks for a server to run some of these workloads on, it actually will only ever get a group and it won't know which one is in the end. And then that load balancer is also like hardened. So like you can't attack it. So no, no, like attacker can be like, okay, they always get that one.

• 18:27Alex Cranz?

  And it's not sending all the data in plain text.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  But it's not storing a database of everything you've ever done on your computer in plain text, like Windows recall. Although Microsoft did say they were going to fix it. This is just a bunch of stuff like that. One of the more interesting pieces, the servers run a custom operating system that Apple says in the white paper is a combination of macOS and iOS that is designed just for inference loads. They've cut down all the other attack surfaces. And then the hardware itself, in addition to all their usual like security measures, they have additional layers of security when they make the hardware, ship it to the data center and validate it for installation.

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  And also, there's a large man with a gun just standing next to each one. Well, I think some of that stuff is in this white paper. They talk about it. It's in this blog post. Because if you recall, there was a huge Bloomberg story about Apple's data centers being attacked at the supply chain level. And I think they're like, yeah, we're not, that's not even a possibility here. So they're saying all of these things about how the system will work. I think the most important thing they're saying is we want researchers to come in and validate this stuff over and over and over again. The firmware for these devices, they're going to publish it in plain text and like, look at it. So I think there's this level of we want, we want to take the pressure on the system. At the same time, the pressure is not necessarily technical.

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  The pressure is legal and political, like the Chinese government doesn't give a shit. They're just gonna say, if you want to keep selling iPhones in China, you're gonna have to let us see everything. Right. What are you gonna do about that? The Indian government is probably not gonna give a shit. Like, they just want to see things. They just had some elections, it's a little softened over there, but like, who knows, right? Like, that's the pressure on the world. Our FBI here in the United States has repeatedly tried to pressure Apple into turning over encryption keys to iMessage and iCloud. This is a new vector of attack to say, okay, you're moving personal device off of people's phones into the cloud. There is something called the third-party doctrine in this country that says, if you, anything touches your telecom provider

• 20:36Nilay Patel?

  or a cloud service, you no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy because a third party has seen it and now the government can see it too. Apple's answer to this is we're gonna throw it all away as soon as we're done processing in the cloud and we send your result back. And so we don't even have it to turn it over, but the pressure is gonna keep coming. So it's interesting that the technical side, they've tried to button it up as much as they can. The legal and political side. They want to keep selling phones in China.

• 21:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  They're

• 21:03Alex Cranz?

  It's just a big we'll see.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like we're just gonna see how people react.

• 21:07David Pierce?

  That problem doesn't cease to exist, even if you don't have the system for Apple, right? Like, this is just, this is just the price of doing business in Apples or in China.

• 21:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:16David Pierce?

  So fundamentally, like, Apple made that decision a very long time ago.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:20David Pierce?

  And this is just another version of that same decision. What it seems like here is Apple is trying to give itself an out for the rest of the world's versions of those legal and political problems where it can just be like, sorry, we don't, we don't have it to give you. Like, I don't know what you want.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  Right, they've sort of engineered a technical solution to a legal problem.

• 21:37David Pierce?

  Right, well, this is the thing you hear a lot now from people who are building web services is like, the main thing you should do is make sure you don't have one shred of data that you don't absolutely need. Because if you accidentally store a bunch of people's credit card numbers, somebody's gonna hack it and they're gonna get it and that's gonna suck real bad for you.

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 21:55David Pierce?

  If you have a bunch of people's email addresses and passwords for accounts that don't really matter to you, same thing's gonna happen. Like, all this stuff, and so these data minimization practices are not just like good for the world, even though I think they are, but it's just good business practice. And so it's like, for Apple, if they're sincerely not turning around and training more models on that data or selling that data, both of which they say they're not, and I think I believe them, keeping that data is just a liability.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:22David Pierce?

  And so it's actually, it's smart for so many reasons to be like, the minute you're done with it, it's just shredded and gone. We can't get it back if you want it.

• 22:28Alex Cranz?

  Apple's ideal is that everything will eventually be on the phone. The processors will be fast enough that they don't have to send anything to the cloud, right?

• 22:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think very clearly, Apple's goal is to do more and more on-device over time.

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  I disagree.

• 22:41David Pierce?

  Really?

• 22:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Nilay Patel?

  But not in like a meaningful.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  I think when you say Apple's goal is to get it all on your phone, I think it's gone. The horse has left the station. It's been a long day. Horses, you keep horses in the station, right?

• 22:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  Horse has left the barn.

• 23:00Alex Cranz?

  The train has left the station.

• 23:02David Pierce?

  Train has left.

• 23:02Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone workload has left your phone. And I think what's gonna happen is the phone will get more and more powerful, take more workloads onto the phone, sure, but then you're gonna invent more stuff you wanna do, and now you've built this incredibly powerful, secure, cloud, blah, blah, blah, and you're gonna do all the stuff you, there will always be some level of stuff you can't do on a phone that now you can do up there.

• 23:23David Pierce?

  I think both of those things can be simultaneously true, right? Like, the, the private cloud compute is how you get rid of ChatGPT. And like, ultimately, at some point, if we go far enough down this road, OpenAI and Apple will be naked competitors in this space. Like, that's just where we're headed. And that's how you get rid of ChatGPT needing to do all this stuff, right? I think every time Apple sends something out of Apple Intelligence and into ChatGPT, that is going to look like failure to Apple for a whole variety of reasons. But it's still true, I think, that as the set of workloads gets larger, Apple is going to want to do more and more of them on your device, because it's gonna save them computing. Apple talked a bunch about the environmental impact of all of this stuff, and they make a big deal about the fact that the more you can do

• 24:08David Pierce?

  on your device, the less they have to send anywhere, which is computationally expensive, costs electricity, like, it's just more efficient to do it on their device. So I think the push to do that stuff locally is going to be real. It probably won't ever be the whole answer, though. I think you're, like, and the bleeding-edge stuff can happen in the compute cloud, so that doesn't have to happen in Azure, which is a bummer if you're Apple.

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's kind of what I'm getting at. I disagree with you, but not in like, some huge sense. I just think there will always be some set of ideas that is too big for the phone.

• 24:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Nilay Patel?

  And once you've opened the door to Apple saying, we've built a system that allows us to take some stuff away from your phone and up into the cloud, which they're very proud of, that all of their data centers run on 100% renewable energy, and Apple silicon is already high performance per watt, and like, they can do all this stuff where maybe they can solve some of those efficiency problems, right? Like,

• 24:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, fair, yeah.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  There's just gonna be some set of stuff they can do in the cloud. So like, this is like, this is today's the change, and like, a year from now, or two years from now, it'll just be, part of the way the iPhone works is you have access to private compute cloud that no dumb Android

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  Whereas like with Android, you gotta send everything to Google, which is like training all your emails, like whatever thing Apple's gonna say. So I just think this is the beginning of a change. And that's really how they framed it all day long.

• 25:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:28Nilay Patel?

  Was this is the beginning of a change. Like, this is the next generation of these devices. This is the next generation of how we use these apps. David, at one point, he said, you can, you can squint, and you can see the end of the app era here, in the way that they're talking about Siri. There's just excitement, in a way that I would, for example, contrast with the Vision Pro.

• 25:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  Which received forty-five seconds of like, now you can look at your keyboard in immersive mode.

• 25:53Alex Cranz?

  Um, ultra wide displays, thank you.

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but, you know, the way, the way they talked about that product four months ago was like, we have to pretend this is the thing. And the way they talked about Apple Intelligence today was like, this is the thing that changes your experience with this phone forever.

• 26:09Alex Cranz?

  What is the cool stuff here? Because I, I mean, I obviously see there, or wasn't there, I watched it here at this beautiful house, the image playground I was really excited about. But I can just like, do that right now with most online image generators. What are the other, like?

• 26:25Nilay Patel?

  At higher, at higher quality.

• 26:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, right. They will look better. My, my shitpost will be infinitely better. With something else. What, what is cool? Like, we got ChatGPT integration, we got image playground, we got Jemojis, which is like, make your own emojis. That's cool. That rules.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:42Alex Cranz?

  What's the other AI stuff? Like, what is this for? Are we, the, the math notes, where we'll like, calculate the math?

• 26:47Nilay Patel?

  I think that's something, everything. I don't think, that's like AI, but it's the old.

• 26:51Alex Cranz?

  It's the old AI.

• 26:52David Pierce?

  This is, I mean, this is the weirdest thing about all of the Apple Intelligence stuff is like, you and I kept accidentally disagreeing with each other in the live blog, which I really enjoyed. You kept saying, so weird, we're forty-five minutes in and there's been no AI. And I kept saying, all they're talking about is AI. Because like, every single one of these features, it's just AI underneath.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:10David Pierce?

  It's not the AI they're talking about. And there is this like, long spectrum of what is just software and what is AI and what is like, new thing. And it's, it's all sort of progressing together.

• 27:22Alex Cranz?

  Fuzzy as AI's definition is.

• 27:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, for sure. But like, the, the, everything on the iPad. Pure AI and they didn't talk about it as AI at all. They in fact pulled it out of the thing where they talked about AI and talked about it separately. But I think all the intelligence stuff to me felt like a sort of developer demo in a very real way, right? Like this is a developer conference and I think it it made me think of the Vision Pro thing actually because to some extent like what Apple is doing with all of this is saying, "Look, we built a bunch of really cool technology. Here it is. Please go do something interesting with it." And so far the Vision Pro, not so much. We'll get to that later. But I was kind of struck by the same thing of like, this is a lot of talk about the logistics

• 28:07David Pierce?

  of a compute cloud and not a lot of talk about features that people can use. And there was a bunch of Siri stuff and I think we can talk about what's coming to Siri. But this idea, I think especially of the sort of Siri app intense thing where you can talk to your phone and it can do stuff on your device for you, that's the whole thing.

• 28:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:26David Pierce?

  And I feel like Apple didn't weirdly sort of connect those dots today because they have this big idea of what Apple intelligence can be. They have to convince everybody that this is going to be humongous and like the size of, you know, the iPhone as an industry, that's how you keep growing if you're Apple. This whole thing, I just could not stop thinking was like, Apple executives talking to investors, like in a very real way.

• 28:45Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 28:45David Pierce?

  Was them being like, "Please, we have a growth plan. We're going to be so successful. Don't let us be the third most valuable company anymore. Like, give it back to us."

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'll just give you the clearest, the clearest evidence of this that I can offer you. The keynote ended and we did not go to look at any demos.

• 29:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  We went to, we had lunch.

• 29:04Alex Cranz?

  How was it?

• 29:05Nilay Patel?

  It was fine. I eat the, I eat the corporate food with an immense amount of guilt. So it was fine. It was at the, you know, Apple. They have a good chef at Cafe Max or whatever. But, um, but there were no, there was not like a thing where we like ran around playing with a bunch of AI stuff afterwards. And I even think to some extent the OpenAI partnership is so that no one is comparing Apple to OpenAI.

• 29:25Alex Cranz?

  Oh, 100, like I think the AI, OpenAI partnership is almost exclusively for investors rather than actual people.

• 29:32Nilay Patel?

  Well, see, we have to get the stuff and like Craig said, any place you see a blinking text cursor is a place where you can use this integration in the system. That's pretty interesting.

• 29:42Alex Cranz?

  Well, a lot of it also felt like very Windowsy. Like a lot of the big, the biggest tools, the coolest stuff was like, oh, that's also stuff Microsoft announced.

• 29:51David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:52Alex Cranz?

  Like, like, oh, we can convince an email.

• 29:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Alex Cranz?

  Cool.

• 29:56David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's really, it's, it's like genuinely insane to me how similar everybody is doing AI. Like, God help me if one more company is like, we have an idea for how to summarize your emails so that you can read them faster. Like, I'm good. We have solved that problem that I don't think was a real problem.

• 30:14Nilay Patel?

  Did you see the fake email that they made nicer? It was actually very good.

• 30:17David Pierce?

  Was it?

• 30:18Nilay Patel?

  I should get the screen cap of this from the keynote, but they're like, you know, sometimes you're at an email at work and it's a little too spicy and you need to make it nicer. And then there's like, they flashed up a meat email and it was like, guys, we have to stop doing this bullshit. And you're like, oh, that's, that's how Craig emails.

• 30:34Nilay Patel?

  I must insist that you like blah, blah, blah. And they made it nicer. And it was like, gentlemen, I must once again ask that you stop fucking it up.

• 30:43David Pierce?

  Is it Jeff Bezos who is famous for forwarding customer emails to people with just a question mark?

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 30:47David Pierce?

  I'm imagining now you take that, highlight the question mark and you're like, make this nice. And it's just like, hello, everyone.

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:52David Pierce?

  I received this email from a customer.

• 30:54Nilay Patel?

  There's a real part of this to your point about features and the only the six ideas. They are playing a little bit of catch up, right?

• 31:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft's been out there making Google enhance this whole time. Like it's hard to demo features and say like, we made it more personal. Until you get to Siri and all the stuff they think Siri can do, which is you just ask Siri, what time do I have to leave? So you ask my daughter's dance recital. This is the example they used 50 times. And then Siri has to know that you have a daughter and where she is and where that dance recital is, what your schedule is. Uh, I think Federer, you pointed out like, it has to know if you like using Uber or Lyft, like you just, you go down the list of things you do on your phone. And you need all what they call personal context to make it work. And right now, none of the other compute models we've seen pull this off. Maybe Google will get there on Android.

• 31:45Nilay Patel?

  They're less good at making the people who work at Google talk to each other.

• 31:51David Pierce?

  But those are the only two companies that even can.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  There's only two companies that come close and like Google to some extent was trying to show these ideas. Right. In a less sort of like focused way. Apple was straight up like, here's what you're going to do. You're going to pick up Siri, you're going to say, I gotta get to this dance recital, make it happen. And Siri is going to run off and tie into all the app intents on your phone. It's going to book a thing. It's going to move a meeting. It's going to call it today and you're going to get in the car. And you know, look at the dance recital. You're going to say, edit me a video. Was it fishing trip? That was the demo.

• 32:16David Pierce?

  I think that's.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  Like, I went fishing. Make me a video of this fishing trip of my son learning to fish. And Siri is just going to talk to whatever video editing app is on your phone that you've chosen. It's going to like, read all the videos for you. It's going to make a thing. It's going to pick a song about fishing from Apple Music. Here you go. Bob's your uncle. You're all done. Right. And like this thing, those are the features. They need a bunch of developers to expose all the hooks.

• 32:40Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  So Siri can actually do it. I think it is very interesting that they're going to app intense. They're not doing the, the stuff that we thought they might do, which is like screen reading your phone and clicking around for you. I think everyone has realized like, that idea sounds great, but is ultimately not trustworthy. I think it would also break Apple's relationships with its developers.

• 33:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's also unnecessary if you have a gigantic developer ecosystem of people who are very happy to build stuff for your platform.

• 33:07Alex Cranz?

  But that means they have to be happy to build stuff.

• 33:10David Pierce?

  Right. Which is super debatable right now. I feel like.

• 33:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Cause this would also, your, your example, that means, okay, I'm not checking Outlook to, to find the email for when the recital is. I'm not checking Outlook to move this. You can tell I use Outlook to use, to move my calendar around. I'm not going to, into the Uber app myself or the Lyft app. It's going to auto choose all of that. Like that's suddenly, that's lost revenue for a lot of different people. Just to make my experience.

• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uber CEO is like, all right, when do I upsell you to Uber plus or whatever?

• 33:39Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 33:39David Pierce?

  What this means is, uh, the subscription economy in apps goes through the roof. Because all of a sudden, I just need you to sign up for my thing. Right. Like if I'm Uber, I don't actually care if you're in the Uber app for the most part, as long as you're using Uber. Because I make money when you use Uber. So actually making it easy for you to use Uber. Benefits me to some extent, right? Whereas if I run Yelp and I'm an ad-based system, I have exactly zero incentive to be part of this because all I'm doing is giving you the information that you want without you having to come look at my ads. So like the end of this is, and I think this is true with a lot of AI, is you look at a lot fewer things, but you pay a lot more subscriptions.

• 34:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:18David Pierce?

  And that, I don't know how I feel about that.

• 34:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I can say I hate that. I don't want to spend more money.

• 34:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they did say they will have something called on-screen awareness, which is, they will know the state of your phone as you're using it. They will like help you. Again, this is Google.

• 34:34David Pierce?

  Google Now, baby.

• 34:35Nilay Patel?

  A million years ago, we have an entire feature about Google Now from like 10 years ago. Like, these ideas have been floating around for a while. I think it's been very hard for Apple to make them seem new in this context because we just came, we're in developer conference season. This is the end of it. And the same ideas have been done over and over again. The one that struck me is particularly interesting is type to Siri because they kept saying it's, you know, chatbots are not this. We actually keep people safe by not letting them just do chatbot stuff. That's how you break this stuff and find its weaknesses and make it do evil stuff. Also, you can now type to Siri. And it's like, first of all, they should have had type to Siri from the very beginning of Siri. And Paul Miller on this show was like, it is a crime that you can't just like type Siri a command that you have to talk to it.

• 35:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like an accessibility nightmare.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:21David Pierce?

  But this is. It does exist, but you have to pick, which is ridiculous.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will just remind everybody, Siri launched like the year The Verge launched. Like, that's how old this thing is. Like.

• 35:30David Pierce?

  Who do you think has done better?

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  We are told that it's like a billion and a half requests of Siri a day. Just slightly behind The Verge.

• 35:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Nilay Patel?

  People command us to do set timers all day long. The Verge has hotline is just like five minutes.

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  But they should have had it for a long, and now they do. So you can type to Siri. Whether that feels like a chatbot to people or just commands, who knows?

• 35:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Nilay Patel?

  One of the coolest features, by the way, they added to AirPods for Siri is now when it asks you if you want to do something, you can just nod yes or shake no.

• 36:02Alex Cranz?

  I'm very excited about that.

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  Very cool. So they're just kind of making Siri more natural and more like available to you and then increasing a set of capabilities. None of that is coming in the betas of iOS. They're going to be out. That is just going to slowly increase over the course of now until the end of iOS 18. And then we'll see what makes it, what gets pushed to iOS 19, whatever. But they're basically saying like, we're starting now. Bob, we're going. Siri is going to become this thing. That's what we want it to be.

• 36:28Alex Cranz?

  And they're severely limiting what phones it will work on. Right?

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  Right. And it's unclear whether that's because they want everybody to buy a new phone. They probably want everybody to buy a new phone.

• 36:40David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, you don't think that's clear?

• 36:41Nilay Patel?

  I think I need to like spend more time thinking about the differences between the M1 and sort of like whatever the A series, the iPhone 15 Pro. Like, there's some stuff there that's different. But yeah, they probably just want everybody to buy a new phone. And you're not going to get some like M1 MacBook Air owner to be like, I'm doing this for Siri.

• 36:59David Pierce?

  If this cloud computing thing works as well as Apple says, you should actually be able to fail it pretty gracefully down and just do more and more in the cloud as you get to older and older phones.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, you want, yeah, you want the older phones with the older cell radios pushing more and more.

• 37:12David Pierce?

  Hell, yeah, dude. Let's go.

• 37:15Alex Cranz?

  Maybe the cell radios is it. Maybe the cell radio is why.

• 37:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, who does? Or they just want to sell a bunch of phones. I don't know if you looked at their last quarterly earnings. They're desperate for an upgrade cycle.

• 37:25Alex Cranz?

  A mix.

• 37:26David Pierce?

  But I do think this is an unusually developer-dependent feature, not only to plug into the intense, but like, one of the things Apple did a lot of today, and we should get into it, like, we have a lot of OSs to get to. But they opened up a lot of new APIs and things people can tap into and gave them access to new stuff that's going on in the system. And like, they're both giving users more stuff they can noodle around with, but also developers feel like they're getting way more access to like the underlying stuff happening on the device than they have in the past. And I feel like if you're Apple and you want to like make things work across the device, you have to do that. But it also feels like this is Apple being like, okay, we are sort of throwing open the iPhone in a new way.

• 38:09David Pierce?

  Please come do cool things with it. Please, we need it so bad.

• 38:14Alex Cranz?

  Please come, which is like wild for them to be doing right now when probably their relationship with the developers has never been more fraught.

• 38:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. I spend a lot of time trying to decide how big a deal I think that is. Because on the one hand, where the hell are you going to go? Like, what other moves do you have at this point? And for Apple, this is another chance to shore that up. Because if this increases Apple's market share, it starts to fight against some of these other AI systems. Everybody who's like, oh, OpenAI is going to break the paradigm of the smartphone. Apple can just sit here and be like, gotcha. We win. Come make apps for us again.

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Have fun with your rabbit.

• 38:50David Pierce?

  But at the same time, it is it is true that there are a lot of developers who do not believe Apple has their best interests at heart right now.

• 38:57Nilay Patel?

  Especially if the point of the all this stuff is to obviate the app, right? Like, right.

• 39:03Nilay Patel?

  I think I think like fundamentally, it's very interesting to look at Apple under a little bit of competitive pressure. Like, where are you gonna go is like, that's the monopoly. Where are you gonna go? Like, we they have all the customers. No one right now is like running off to buy an AI powered Surface Book. Federighi again today said, technically, we've been shipping AI PCs since 2020.

• 39:24Alex Cranz?

  All right.

• 39:25Nilay Patel?

  And some people want to call that a category now. And it's like, they are feeling pressure. It's good.

• 39:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's good for all of technology when these companies are ferociously competitive. And this stuff has made them ferociously competitive. They all have the same idea. It's all the same stuff. We make this email 10% nicer.

• 39:42David Pierce?

  Yeah. Email summarization wars, baby. Let's go.

• 39:45Nilay Patel?

  There's just a part of but there's a part of this right at the end of it. It's just like, I'm sending David a robot email. It's his robot summarizing it. He's sending me some weird mutant Gen Moji in response. It's like, what have we accomplished?

• 39:58Alex Cranz?

  I I love how it's just abstracting all communication. Like, that's all AI does now is it just abstracts everything we say.

• 40:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, you'll send the first email and then it'll just be AI forever.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:09David Pierce?

  And then something will end up in your calendar.

• 40:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:11David Pierce?

  And that'll be great.

• 40:12Nilay Patel?

  Some stuff that they did not announce, which I was curious if they would. They announced AI image removal in the background of photos, but not anything beyond that. Right, so they basically smart eraser, which like photos has had forever and Lightroom now has. That's really interesting. They're gonna add this to more of their products. But you could go even farther and be like, you can just take people out of these photos. And like, they didn't demo that, right?

• 40:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  So, Apple is clearly operating within some set of constraints. They did a lot of safety checking around the their generative AI tool, which again produces just like horrific cartoons.

• 40:47Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited.

• 40:48Nilay Patel?

  It's not nearly as photorealistic as the other stuff that we see on the market. Like Meta's AI tool is just like, just a weird spaghetti Jesus day and night, right?

• 40:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  Apple can't make anything of that quality because it's running everything locally.

• 41:01Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's using all of like your images to train on it. Right?

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 41:06Alex Cranz?

  It's not.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no.

• 41:07Alex Cranz?

  So where's it training? How's it training?

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  It just has a model. It's a pre-trained model. It's running on your phone.

• 41:11Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so a pre-trained garbage model.

• 41:13Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, and they were very clear. Actually, David wrote this up. The Apple, just like everybody else, like, yeah, we trained on the public web.

• 41:18Alex Cranz?

  Does?

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  For its text models. Yep, just like, yeah, like you do.

• 41:21Alex Cranz?

  Like, yeah.

• 41:22Nilay Patel?

  And like publishers could have opted out. It's like, what? Publisher is like, to make sure Apple Bot isn't scraping us. Maybe they were, and everyone freaked out about ChatGPT.

• 41:30Alex Cranz?

  Just one person.

• 41:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't even know if we block it. Disclosure, we have a robot's file. Someone else is in charge of it. Um, uh, but like, they said they trained their image model on a bunch of Apple-owned images. In order to maintain safety, they selected the data they were training with. They licensed a bunch of books and news archives and stuff. So all that stuff is sitting on the, on the phone, which is why it's as limited as it is. It's not trained on your data.

• 41:59Alex Cranz?

  I was really.

• 42:00Nilay Patel?

  Training, training a model on even just a amount of photos on like a normal phone, like your phone would explode.

• 42:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:05Alex Cranz?

  Also, just horrible.

• 42:07Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to, I don't.

• 42:08Alex Cranz?

  I don't want to see anything it, it does there.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  That, that's why, that's why you need to go from 35 to 38 tops.

• 42:17Nilay Patel?

  Good comments on YouTube last week.

• 42:20Nilay Patel?

  But like that last piece where like, how will we keep it safe? How will we keep it from doing the weird stuff the other models have done? The weirdest part about this is on your own phone, code running locally on the phone you purchased with the operating system you're on, there's stuff Apple will not let you do. In a way that, right now, Apple doesn't sit between you and what you type into Pages. It doesn't sit between you and what you can record with the camera. It doesn't sit with, between you and what you can edit in iMovie, but you open Image Playground and you're like, make me some horrific stuff. And Apple's just gonna say no.

• 42:50Alex Cranz?

  Because Apple doesn't want to run into what every single other company runs into, where it's like, oh no, you did a racism.

• 42:57Nilay Patel?

  But that, so the difference is all that stuff is happening on a website, controlled by a company, on someone else's server. There's a lot of precedent for, you know, once you're using cloud service, other people get to say what you do with it. There's not a lot of precedent for you are running code locally on your computer.

• 43:13David Pierce?

  If you can do it in airplane mode, should there be any rules?

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  Right. And the one that I think of all the time, I've asked a bunch of people about this. The one that comes to mind right now is Adobe Photoshop will not let you print out a dollar bill. You scan a dollar into Photoshop and try to print it. I'm like, no, it's a dollar. We're not gonna let you do counterfeiting. The government has asked us very politely to not enable counterfeiting and just like, won't do it. Okay, like we've, I think everyone has sort of like accepted over time. Yeah, you know, fine. Like, don't do counterfeiting in Photoshop.

• 43:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but that's very different than like, what, just reading the paper and what kind of Apple tested on and what they're trying to get rid of. It's like, it's just all the shitposting. It's, it's all the stuff like, yeah, sometimes you do want to send something absolutely horrible to your friend.

• 43:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, like I bet Photoshop will let you print out like a bunch of butts.

• 44:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Photoshop will absolutely.

• 44:02Alex Cranz?

  In fact, encourage it.

• 44:03David Pierce?

  And I bet Apple will not let you.

• 44:04Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if Firefly is ready for like, make a bunch of butts. But Firefly runs in the cloud, right? So we've accepted this thing where it's like, you're using someone else's computer, particularly for free. Uh, and then you can just say what's good or bad. And we have some expectations about what they will allow. You're using your own computer. There are no, there, we do not usually allow these things to have rules.

• 44:23David Pierce?

  You can make all the butts you want.

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  Right. If you pick an open source.

• 44:28Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that is the use case.

• 44:30Nilay Patel?

  Finally, finally a way to sell Chromebooks to scale.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  AI PCs for Microsoft. All the butts you want.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, if you take an open source model and like, run it on some PC today, like you, nothing's stopping you. There's not really a way to stop you unless, I don't know, the chipmakers prevented it. Like, that's just not gonna happen, right? Like, I've asked Lisa Su this question. I've asked Qualcomm this question. They're like, yeah, if the government tells us not to allow stuff, we won't do it. Anyhow, the point of this is, I think people are gonna get this. They're gonna assume it's their computer. And the thing that it will not be is 100% their computer anymore.

• 45:06Alex Cranz?

  No, and I can't find, kind of find that a little gross. I mean, it's, it's, I think if it was an, just a straight up app, if it wasn't like, integrated into a whole bunch of other apps, I wouldn't feel as gross about it. If it was just like, oh yeah, that's the Apple image generator app. It won't let you make butts. I'd be like, okay, that's fair. But like, okay, if you want to make butts in any of these other tools, I should be allowed to.

• 45:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think we're having our first test.

• 45:32Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited.

• 45:33Nilay Patel?

  Well, Apple, again, the vibe at WDC is like, we know people are gonna do weird stuff with our thing. We'll take it down when we need to. They very much know that the systems will hallucinate and there's gonna be some weird outcomes. They're just like, ready for it.

• 45:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  But it, I just like, and I think we should take a break and actually talk about all the OSs after this. But like, the one piece of this that philosophically I'm thinking about is like, This is the first time an operating system is going to be straight up like.

• 45:58Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  No. We're just not gonna let you do it. And Apple's approach to it is like, we're the ones generating it, so we're gonna set the rules.

• 46:05Alex Cranz?

  That's just, that feels weird to me.

• 46:07Nilay Patel?

  It's weird. It's gonna be weird.

• 46:08Alex Cranz?

  I don't like that.

• 46:09Nilay Patel?

  And all the other ones are on the cloud. So you can't like roll up to Google and be like, here's what I want to do with your data center today.

• 46:14Alex Cranz?

  I think I just want to say, free the butts. Like, we gotta free.

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  We gotta take a break.

• 46:18Alex Cranz?

  So, we'll take a break. We'll be fine.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  Everybody think about whatever you need to think about.

• 46:22Alex Cranz?

  But free the butts.

• 46:24Nilay Patel?

  Free the butts. We'll be right back.

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• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back with Vergecast, the flagship podcast of leaky user data.

• 48:05Speaker 07

  There we go.

• 48:05Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna keep saying it. Allison Johnson's here. Welcome, Allison. All right. Outside of the AI stuff, there was a ton of other news. WWDC, Apple updated almost every single one of its operating systems. I say almost because TVOS received virtually no updates.

• 48:21Speaker 07

  It got some. It got the same updates Amazon has had for years.

• 48:25Nilay Patel?

  But only in the Apple TV Plus app for Apple TV originals.

• 48:30David Pierce?

  Perfect.

• 48:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:32David Pierce?

  It's the severance box now. That's just what that's for. It's fine.

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  It's the most expensive treatment. Dave, you want to run us through all these?

• 48:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's do this. So I, there are eight platforms I have here, and I'm defining platforms slightly more loosely than Apple did. And I have ordered them in what I would call rough order of my own particular interest.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good.

• 48:51David Pierce?

  So I feel like the first one we should start with is iOS 18.

• 48:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:58David Pierce?

  We should start with the personalization, right? This is like the thing I was most excited about coming into this. And Allison, I'm particularly curious how you feel as someone who uses all the phones and is someone who is like, I feel like every single time I look over your shoulder, you're like moving things around on your home screen, just in life.

• 49:15Speaker 07

  To add some chaos.

• 49:16David Pierce?

  What did you make of all this?

• 49:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's, I feel like it's the next step, you know, with the lock screen customization we've gotten and homes lock screen widgets, which I love and I don't know if anybody else uses, but yeah, just a few more options. I'm pretty interested in the control center updates. They've like kind of rejiggered it. And now it's like way more customizable. You can like resize the tiles and you can move things around. And then that kind of feeds into the lock screen where you can change the shortcuts, the like, what is it flashlight and camera?

• 49:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, flashlight, bottom left, camera, bottom right. Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 07

  Which for some reason I have trouble hitting those things, but you can change them and you can make them pretty much anything that's in the control center options, I think.

• 50:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The halide folks are very excited because you can just put halide in.

• 50:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:12David Pierce?

  Oh, true.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  Right on lock screen.

• 50:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  Which is wild. Like, do I want to blame this on EU regulatory pressure? I would like to.

• 50:22Alex Cranz?

  But it's rules, I think.

• 50:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's great. This is like what everybody wants is to be able to reprogram a bunch of these buttons to different kinds of apps.

• 50:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, it's something that Android's been doing, what, since it started? A long time.

• 50:35David Pierce?

  It is so funny watching Craig Federighi stand on stage and be like, "Look, I have an app icon. I can put it anywhere I want." And it's like, "Oh, my God, Craig."

• 50:43Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I just want to point out-

• 50:44David Pierce?

  What? You can't put- No, you can't!

• 50:47Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 50:47David Pierce?

  Thank you.

• 50:47Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  It's still a grid.

• 50:49David Pierce?

  I compared it to Stage Manager in the live blog, and a bunch of people gave me shit for it. And I'm right. It's Stage Manager.

• 50:54Nilay Patel?

  It's not like a preform. You can't get to like desktop levels of crazy.

• 50:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  It's a grid.

• 51:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  And you can put some stuff on one side or the bottom.

• 51:04Alex Cranz?

  Honestly, moving out of the grid and making you be like, allowing you to put wherever you want would be good security for them. Because if you get somebody's phone, you're like, "Oh, I don't fucking know where any of these apps are." It's just a pile. You're like, "Oh, God."

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  They also announced what I think should just be known as the Grindr feature. The Ashley Madison, if you will.

• 51:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  Where you can have a folder full of hidden apps that are locked.

• 51:28Alex Cranz?

  I was like, "Oh, what are those hidden apps? Oh, if you're married, I know what those hidden apps are." So. Sensitive information. I'm gonna be suspicious of all of y'all's phones.

• 51:37David Pierce?

  That's where I put the notes for things I'm gonna buy my wife.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  You're real sweet.

• 51:43Alex Cranz?

  A whole app just for that.

• 51:46David Pierce?

  No, but so I'm very excited about the, the apps on the home screen thing. Like, that rules. Just the thing where you can put a row of them on the side and nowhere else, wonderful.

• 51:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:55David Pierce?

  Like, that's where icons should go. Like, if you've ever tried to use your phone in one hand, it's stupid that there are icons everywhere. Anyway, uh, the thing that I think is bad is the, the color theming that Apple is trying to do.

• 52:07Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 52:07David Pierce?

  I've seen a bunch of screenshots of this. So in theory, you can, like, apps will be able to deem their own apps, so they are, deem their own icons, so you'll be able to do lots of different things with it. But you can also, it seems like just brute force a color across the whole home screen. Every single screenshot I've seen of it from devs so far looks like trash.

• 52:24Alex Cranz?

  That's because they haven't done it right. It's gotta be that really horrible green, and you've gotta have like the Matrix background on your phone. And then it's gonna be sick. I don't believe that.

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if anyone has ever seen Cranz's Slack theme.

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  Unusable. Unusable.

• 52:42Alex Cranz?

  It's a beautiful security measure. No one's gonna be like looking over my shoulder at Slack. They're gonna be like, nope.

• 52:47David Pierce?

  You know, you have to look at it, right? Like, that's, that's the challenge there.

• 52:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but you like, you just harden yourself.

• 52:53David Pierce?

  This explains a lot of why sometimes I'll Slack you and like eight days later, you're like, oh, hey.

• 52:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I don't like it. But no, I thought that was like both the dumbest thing and also my favorite thing. Cause like, if there's the potential to make it look really pretty, you could theoretically. But every example they had on there was like horrible.

• 53:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, like what Google has done with Material U, I think is, is great. And they've done a good job of making it match with backgrounds and that's some of what Apple is trying to do here, it seems like. But, uh, I don't know. It's just like a weird brute force thing that I'm not into.

• 53:26Alex Cranz?

  Even the sample he did where he's like, it's like the dog and then there's a bunch of tennis balls. And he's like, yeah, I can choose a color from here. And immediately chose the tennis ball color. So like, that was, that was in the demo. He made it look like garbage in the demo.

• 53:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  You just, all of you underestimate the power of teens to theme their phones. Like, this is for some huge percentage of people, this is the reason they have been jailbreaking their phones.

• 53:50Alex Cranz?

  No, no, there's gonna be so many purple and pink very, very soon with like the Comic Sans font.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's gonna be amazing. I'm very excited for the teenagers to ruin their phones.

• 54:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:01Nilay Patel?

  But this is like table stakes stuff. Yeah. Apple has not had forever. And now they're like, okay, you can like customize your home screen even more. And the reason they never had it before was because Steve Jobs and maybe only Steve Jobs had the, the, the conviction to say, most of you have bad taste and I don't want you to make my phone ugly. And now they're out of those guys.

• 54:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Jo- Joni left.

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  He's gone. Yeah. What's he gonna do?

• 54:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he was like, and with him, all good taste went to.

• 54:27Nilay Patel?

  All the rest of the designers left. They're gonna throw up some other designer. Here's this guy. Uh, he made the fabric band on the Vision Pro. He thinks he has horrible taste.

• 54:36Speaker 07

  I feel like every year for the past few years, we've been allowed to make our phones a little bit uglier.

• 54:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 07

  Like, we're just given a little bit more.

• 54:44Alex Cranz?

  And, and we should be allowed to make them as ugly as possible. If I'm one of those in Myspace, let me.

• 54:50Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's, it's so obviously coming. Just give it.

• 54:52Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited.

• 54:54Nilay Patel?

  Even though, even the control center stuff is really fascinating. There, it now has pages. I think Ford CEO Jim Farley was out there posting on threads about how excited he is for the

• 55:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  Ford Pass integration with Control Center.

• 55:09Alex Cranz?

  The Maki got like a little cameo.

• 55:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Alex Cranz?

  On the phone.

• 55:12Nilay Patel?

  You can super unlock your doors from Control Center now.

• 55:15Alex Cranz?

  I think they even unlocked the doors. I think they just turned on the air conditioning in the car.

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  Uh, that was the demo during the keynote, but the, the integration has, you can unlock the doors.

• 55:24Nilay Patel?

  It's just what everybody wanted was to not have to use the Ford Pass app. But it's like, even that is just, it's a little bit more, just let anything happen here.

• 55:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 55:34Nilay Patel?

  Like Control Center, I think is a successful product for Apple.

• 55:38Speaker 07

  I think so.

• 55:38Nilay Patel?

  It does the thing that everybody wants it to do. And now it's just another surface to muddy up.

• 55:44Alex Cranz?

  I did like, well, cause Jim and I have talked about this a lot, where we talk about the smart home stuff and smart home controls and the control center were pretty terrible.

• 55:52Nilay Patel?

  They weren't great.

• 55:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:54Nilay Patel?

  Cause they kept on, um, they moved them around, which is exactly what you don't want to.

• 55:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. You really, I want to turn off my light. Oh, cool. You decided I never need to turn off my light.

• 56:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Cause the, the four that they do, they auto populate based on what you've used last.

• 56:08Alex Cranz?

  Horrible.

• 56:08Nilay Patel?

  If you're like, I want to turn off this light, you gotta, you end up all the way in the home app.

• 56:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  Whereas the light you turned on yesterday is like, here I am, ready to turn me on again.

• 56:16Alex Cranz?

  No, I never go in that room. Leave me alone. Yeah. So, so I think the fact that you can customize the home stuff more, that, that was like, I was like, okay. Cause that gives me, that's like, I think about how many swipes it takes me to like, turn off a light in my house, right?

• 56:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Alex Cranz?

  And right now it's like, okay, I gotta go into the home app. I gotta find the, look for it. If it's not on that front page, I gotta go to the thing and now be like swipe. Swipe to the home section.

• 56:39Nilay Patel?

  And soon you'll be able to just be like Siri, dark.

• 56:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:41David Pierce?

  There's now like a lot of ways to do everything on your phone.

• 56:45Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 56:45David Pierce?

  Because to some extent, your home screen now has widgets, your lock screen now has widgets. There's still the weird old like today screen to the left of your home screen. That you can put stuff in apps, you can long press on an app icon to do stuff. You can now, one cool thing that I saw, you can long press on an app icon to turn it into a widget in place on the home screen, which looks very cool. It's neat. They like breezed through this stuff to get to the AI. And there's actually a lot of like little design details in iOS 18 that look really great.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  The new settings for flashlight in the flashlight widget are awesome.

• 57:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Nilay Patel?

  You can set the width of the beam of the flashlight.

• 57:18Alex Cranz?

  Oh, beautiful.

• 57:19Nilay Patel?

  They should have spent an hour on this.

• 57:20David Pierce?

  That's.

• 57:23David Pierce?

  I honestly believe like in any other year where Apple didn't feel like it either had to or had an AI story to tell. We would have spent like an hour talking about little tiny design details and there would have been long videos about like, I just saw one thing on Twitter. That now when you press the volume button, the bezel indents slightly on the screen. So you can see the button being pressed, just this like tiny little affordance that it looks like it's being pressed from the side.

• 57:47Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's beautiful.

• 57:48David Pierce?

  Love it. Um, but also.

• 57:50Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, I know, I know what they're doing with that. You know what they're doing with that. We all know what they're doing with that. They're getting ready, ready to take the buttons away.

• 57:56Alex Cranz?

  No, that was my next thought.

• 57:57David Pierce?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 57:58Alex Cranz?

  I hate both of you for ushering that into existence.

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no. I mean, the second I saw them be like, the screen will dink. I'm like, oh, I know what you're doing.

• 58:06David Pierce?

  Don't make my screen dink.

• 58:09David Pierce?

  But we, we have buried the lead long enough. We got our RCS. It's RCS time.

• 58:13Nilay Patel?

  Um, if you.

• 58:13David Pierce?

  Eli screamed.

• 58:16Nilay Patel?

  I, I, I did a whelp.

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  I wish I had thought about it sooner. Um, so at I O, when they mention RCS, like the crowd goes wild. Like Dieter rips his shirt. At the Apple event, when their RCS shows up and he says it for one second, and now I don't know, RCS thing, dead silence, except for me. And I believe Alison also cheered.

• 58:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, when I realized you were, I was like, oh, I can do a cheer.

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  I should have just screamed, Dieter.

• 58:47David Pierce?

  That would have gotten a laugh, I think.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  Other than that, there was, there were no sounds. No other sounds were made.

• 58:52David Pierce?

  I bet you could hear you somewhere in the live stream. If you, if you do, send it to us, firstcastoftheverge.com. Send us Neil I screaming about RCS.

• 58:59Nilay Patel?

  There's a very famous bootleg of Jeff Tweedy from Waco playing Madison. And I forced him to play the son gun by Uncle Tupelo. And like, it goes out there and it's just me going, gun! And he's like, really? It's not that you can find it. It's, it's not a legal recording.

• 59:12David Pierce?

  But I, the RCS, so we talked last week and we were debating like, are, how big a deal are they going to make out of RCS? And I think where we landed, if I'm not mistaken, was it'll be in the, the bento box at the end that shows all the features, but they won't name it. And I would say we almost got that. He did say the letters RCS out loud onstage.

• 59:31Speaker 07

  As the bento box appeared.

• 59:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, right. It was like a brief, I was kind of like, oh, there's RCS. And then he said, and now we have RCS and then just breezed past it.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  Dead silence. Did not like this.

• 59:41Speaker 07

  They spent more time on the satellite messaging. You're in the woods, you can now thumbs up emoji, you know, your friend. And then we have RCS.

• 59:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. And the fact that you can now do text formatting, you can do like a

• 59:54Speaker 07

  Oh, that rules.

• 59:55David Pierce?

  Breakthrough in your messages now, which is definitely not going to work over RCS. I can tell you that with great

• 1:00:01Nilay Patel?

  That's a bunch of features that are IM message only. They could be like, now we have RCS. By the way, SMS works over saddle, it's not RCS.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  Over satellites, but not RCS. I did think it was incredible that in 2024, we went to a keynote by the third richest company in the world. State of the art computing company. And they're like, you can underline this text. Also bold it and italicize it. And people were like,

• 1:00:31David Pierce?

  Well, there was a moment in the Siri one where he was like, now you can find documents. And we're like, oh, my God, documents.

• 1:00:36Nilay Patel?

  In the iPad where it was like, we've made my browsing easier. Dude, this problem is just super solved. Like, you just refuse to solve it.

• 1:00:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Nilay Patel?

  A lot of those moments where you just recontextualize old solutions in the new places. Like, you can italicize text in messages.

• 1:00:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I understand. It's just like, really? It's the, it's the I button. It's been in every word processor I've ever used. The little slanty I, you could just push it?

• 1:01:02Alex Cranz?

  You can do it just anywhere. You can do it on Twitter. Or you could. Yeah, but you had to like, it was like weird. You had to like, think about it.

• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, now I can do it in messages.

• 1:01:11David Pierce?

  It's very exciting.

• 1:01:12Nilay Patel?

  Message also got any emoji is now a tap back in, in messages.

• 1:01:15David Pierce?

  That I actually think is very exciting.

• 1:01:16Nilay Patel?

  People are super stoked about that. You can make your words jitter and shake and explode. Right? Things the other.

• 1:01:22David Pierce?

  Do you guys use that stuff? Like, do you? I find I use the tap backs all the time. And that's about the only kind of wacky iMessage feature I use consistently.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  I'm very excited.

• 1:01:32David Pierce?

  Except the birthday balloons. I love the birthday balloons. I rock the birthday balloons every time.

• 1:01:36Speaker 07

  I forget about them and I see them.

• 1:01:37David Pierce?

  They're very good.

• 1:01:38Speaker 07

  Oh, that was nice.

• 1:01:38Alex Cranz?

  I always forget about them until I'm like, oh, congratulations. Oh, I get fireworks.

• 1:01:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, right.

• 1:01:43Nilay Patel?

  I'm very excited about the ability to use any emoji as a tap pack.

• 1:01:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's gonna be pretty good.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  Effectively, it just, now you just have emoji responses. Which every other platform supports. Whereas being like, ha, ha. It's just like, this is too sarcastic.

• 1:01:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, right. It's like the, I use the thumbs up and the, the bang, bang for way too many things.

• 1:02:02Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I use the ha, ha when like, I'm not truly engaged.

• 1:02:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Alex Cranz?

  Conversation. But I'm like, oh, but that was funny. Point.

• 1:02:09Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's, it's the you tried of emoji reactions.

• 1:02:12Alex Cranz?

  I don't have any more energy for this.

• 1:02:14Speaker 07

  I got nothing.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  It makes you a dick whether or not you want to be one. Like, it's not, so I'm very excited to expand the range. Blood tears is my favorite.

• 1:02:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you're not gonna be able to get custom emojis. I think blood tears might be a custom emoji just in our Slack instance. If you want to know what it's like working at Verge, often I reply with a picture of a smiley face crying blood.

• 1:02:33Alex Cranz?

  It's true. It's super useful.

• 1:02:36David Pierce?

  Fraternalism.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  It expresses so much about what we do here.

• 1:02:39Alex Cranz?

  More than ha, ha.

• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  More than.

• 1:02:41Alex Cranz?

  Just way more than ha, ha.

• 1:02:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, starting today, ha, ha means blood tears.

• 1:02:47David Pierce?

  Tell everybody.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  Make it happen.

• 1:02:51Alex Cranz?

  We're just gonna make this a thing now.

• 1:02:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you see these words, it means I'm crying blood.

• 1:02:56Alex Cranz?

  I mean, sometimes the jokes, yeah, that's that is a feeling.

• 1:02:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00David Pierce?

  All right, let's keep moving. We got more platforms to do here.

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  You don't talk about game mode?

• 1:03:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, what's game mode?

• 1:03:05David Pierce?

  There, you just did. That's welcome to game mode. You can now play five-year-old video games poorly on your computer. And there's a new Assassin's Creed game. Whatever.

• 1:03:16Alex Cranz?

  The new Assassin's Creed's coming to the house.

• 1:03:17David Pierce?

  You can play your phone on your computer now.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna talk about Apple announcing games in 2017 when it gets the Mac.

• 1:03:22Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  Game mode prioritizes wireless performance of controllers in your iPhone, okay?

• 1:03:26David Pierce?

  There, done, great. Congratulations to all of your wireless controllers. Let's move on.

• 1:03:32David Pierce?

  The next platform, and this is not technically a platform by Apple's definition, but I think we should talk about it, is Photos. Because Photos is like a hugely used app, and they announced a bunch of stuff, including a giant redesign, that I would argue is not a particularly giant redesign. It's just that they put a bunch of new albums in your Photos app that I am suspicious of their usefulness, but now they exist.

• 1:03:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's very like memories forward. Like, it seems like the actual photos you're going to look for are just right up there with like, remember this time and here was this thing that happened?

• 1:04:10Alex Cranz?

  Look at all your dead pets.

• 1:04:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Alex Cranz?

  Really, really enjoy them.

• 1:04:14David Pierce?

  I just remember like, there was years ago at an iPad event, I think it was the iPad event they did in New York. They put up this marketing image that was a guy sitting like in a, in the crook of one of the supports on the Brooklyn Bridge, doodling on his iPad.

• 1:04:30Alex Cranz?

  Sure.

• 1:04:30David Pierce?

  And it's like, sure, this is like a normal thing a person does on their device. And every time Apple shows new Photos features, I think of that guy sitting on the Brooklyn Bridge because it's like this thing where there is a whole album of just all your awesome pictures from yesterday. It's like, no, I don't have any awesome pictures from yesterday. I have a bunch of accidental screenshots. I have receipts from the plane. And I have a picture of my toddler that is the same picture that I take of my toddler that's blurry and weird every single day. Like, I don't need this, Apple. And all of these things are made for like extremely interesting, worldly, beautiful people who take thousands of photos of themselves every day. And I think none of those people exist in the actual world. It makes me crazy.

• 1:05:11Alex Cranz?

  They exist on Instagram. All my friends on Instagram.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  But they, they try. Right, like, most people are just using their phones to take photos. But I do think the idea that the app is not memory forward is fascinating. Because it does imply you're taking more photos and videos than ever. And it's hard to find them. And the device should, like, sort them for you. Which I buy in theory, like, it's good logic. Yeah, I mean, I don't use Google Photos as my camera roll, do you? I mean, like, on my iPhone.

• 1:05:39Alex Cranz?

  I use the Photos app.

• 1:05:40Nilay Patel?

  Right, and I think the sort of conflation of the Photos app with the camera roll is like fighting against Apple's goals here, which is to compete with Google Photos and other apps like Google Photos. And so it's just like, at some point, I just need to see all the photos I took. Get in a list. Google Photos right now, actually, its most infuriating feature is it insists on stacking your photos for you.

• 1:06:00Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I hate that.

• 1:06:01Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, you took five of these frames. And it's like, yeah, I know. I would like to see all five. I would like to see them. I don't want you to pick one. And I think it gets weird when you think of the Photos app as actually your camera roll and not this, like, memory playground. Yeah.

• 1:06:15Alex Cranz?

  Well, I wonder also how much of this is the fact that we all review devices?

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  What do you mean?

• 1:06:20Alex Cranz?

  Like, do most people take screenshots?

• 1:06:23Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:06:24Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  All the time.

• 1:06:25Alex Cranz?

  On purpose?

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  All the time. I take a lot of accidental screenshots.

• 1:06:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  That's real. Yeah. But I also take a lot of on purpose screenshots. I know people who have 10,000 screenshots in their phone. Just like, things, conversations, disappearing messages, Snapchats, like, all this stuff. Like, anything that happens on your phone, the way, the easiest, fastest way to capture is a screenshot.

• 1:06:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Nilay Patel?

  So you can actually do some segmenting and making that stuff searchable and filterable from last. Like, there's a lot of good intent in this app. And I think the way it looks is like, ever, it's even more complicated than it's ever been before.

• 1:06:58Alex Cranz?

  But I also think it is prettier than it's ever been. Like, if you think of where we started with iPhotos to now. Gorgeous app compared to iPhotos, right?

• 1:07:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:11Alex Cranz?

  I care about that.

• 1:07:12David Pierce?

  No, I agree. It has gotten a lot better. And I think as a like, management system, it makes sense that this is kind of what they're trying to do. It just seems like this idea of we are going to constantly repackage your photos and shove them at you. Feels like the wrong answer to me.

• 1:07:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28David Pierce?

  Uh, but I do think some of the stuff they're doing like they, I think said the exact same, you can find your driver's license, or your license plate in your photos, the like the identical demo to Google, which is just like, this is everybody's.

• 1:07:39Nilay Patel?

  My driver's license.

• 1:07:40David Pierce?

  Was your driver's license. Okay. Google's was your license plate, right?

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  Right. So you're, yeah, it was what?

• 1:07:45David Pierce?

  Slightly different.

• 1:07:45Nilay Patel?

  Totally different features.

• 1:07:47Alex Cranz?

  Two phones in order to get all your information.

• 1:07:49David Pierce?

  And then I'll know everything about my.

• 1:07:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, the demo of the, they are slightly different. They were ever so slightly different. Google was you just asked it, you just like asked Google Photos what my license plate number was.

• 1:08:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:08:01Nilay Patel?

  Told you the answer. This one was you were in a web form and said, enter your driver's license number. And like, the Apple intelligence would go and get it and like enter it for you.

• 1:08:13David Pierce?

  That's cool.

• 1:08:13Nilay Patel?

  Slightly different demos.

• 1:08:14David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:08:15Nilay Patel?

  Same exact result.

• 1:08:16David Pierce?

  Correct.

• 1:08:16Nilay Patel?

  You filled out a meaningless number of form.

• 1:08:20David Pierce?

  Welcome to the AI future. Just a bunch of weird UI.

• 1:08:24Nilay Patel?

  You are gonna throw robots at the DMV until the DMV submit. My taxes paid for this shit.

• 1:08:34David Pierce?

  Uh, yeah, it was perfect. Uh, so that's photos, uh, iPad, which I think was a weird one in that it was both incredibly disappointing and also the single coolest demo of the day by a pretty wide margin.

• 1:08:44Nilay Patel?

  I ended the iPad session with, I felt by saying, I'm sorry. Overwhelmingly what I felt at the end of that. Why did you think that was cool?

• 1:08:52Alex Cranz?

  The math?

• 1:08:52David Pierce?

  The math thing was awesome.

• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  Just the calculator.

• 1:08:55David Pierce?

  Just the single, just in terms of like, holy God, this is cool technology. Just the thing where he's writing down an equation in notes and he writes the equal sign and it just does it.

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:09:03David Pierce?

  In his handwriting, that ripped, dude. Another one that I'm like, does it, does this help anyone with anything in reality that exists? I don't know.

• 1:09:10Nilay Patel?

  Where they did the table tennis, uh, algebra and then he was like, make a graph of velocities.

• 1:09:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Nilay Patel?

  Distance over velocity.

• 1:09:16David Pierce?

  Kids are just doing stuff on Chromebooks now. Like, it's fine. But it was awesome technology. And yet I think, and I'm curious if this was.

• 1:09:24Nilay Patel?

  Just the calculator app?

• 1:09:26David Pierce?

  Listen, it was awesome.

• 1:09:28Alex Cranz?

  Look, they spent 14 years to make the best damn-

• 1:09:32Nilay Patel?

  People walked into this thinking iPads were gonna come out of WWDC running macOS. And you're like, the calculator app did-

• 1:09:38David Pierce?

  A thing that is important to say is that the biggest cheer by a wide margin at this year's WWDC was for the calculator app for iPad. Do with that what you will, but it was not close.

• 1:09:51Nilay Patel?

  People saw algebra being done by a computer and they're like, finally.

• 1:09:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, but I found this one so fascinating because it was like, we got the new iPad Pro and the new iPads, what, like a month ago, two months ago? Times whatever. Everybody was like, okay, this is a device waiting for amazing software. And like, WWDC is coming, this is gonna be the one. And we just super duper didn't get it.

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15David Pierce?

  Like, just not even a little bit at all. And I don't know if you guys felt this way being in there, but the energy in the room was the lowest as he was describing like share play improvements on the iPad.

• 1:10:29Nilay Patel?

  Right. When he got to, we've added some UI improvements to iPad and everyone thought it would be like a windowing system. He was like floating tab bar and then he said the word morph five times. Just seamlessly morphs into the sidebar. I don't know if you've seen anything more famously the robot in Terminator 2 morphs. The video for Michael Jackson's Black and White, some of the first morphing ever done. He turns into a tiger. Nothing about this hit on the level of Michael Jackson turning into a tiger in the video for Black and White.

• 1:11:03Alex Cranz?

  This was no two-

• 1:11:04Nilay Patel?

  Absolute zero, zero response to this morphing.

• 1:11:08Alex Cranz?

  It was-

• 1:11:09Nilay Patel?

  Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, I think emotional reactions from everybody in that room. Nothing on this hit the level of the White Ranger coming back. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:11:19David Pierce?

  Impossible bar. Impossible bar.

• 1:11:23Alex Cranz?

  Nobody else, I'm just surprised you know that much about-

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  I know, I'm morphing.

• 1:11:28Nilay Patel?

  I grew up in a time of morphing.

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  These were core childhood memories.

• 1:11:33Speaker 07

  Morphing was very popular in the 90s.

• 1:11:36Nilay Patel?

  Like a lot of late 90s, early 2000s culture really revolved around morphing. The guy, he said, we watched the tab bar seamlessly morph into the sidebar.

• 1:11:45Alex Cranz?

  Like, no.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It is baby morphing.

• 1:11:51David Pierce?

  We should move on, but I just wanna say if you ever write like a Sufjan Stevens style album, "I grew up in a time of morphing," is the title of your single.

• 1:11:57Nilay Patel?

  It's just oddly prevalent. Allison's with me, she knows.

• 1:12:01Speaker 07

  There were, yeah.

• 1:12:02Alex Cranz?

  There's a lot of morphing.

• 1:12:03Speaker 07

  There was morphing.

• 1:12:04Nilay Patel?

  They were mighty.

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  Only one verb in there.

• 1:12:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. Alright, let's move on. That's enough for the iPad. The iPad. Still disappointing now with a calculator.

• 1:12:20David Pierce?

  I put watchOS next, but it's really a tie between-

• 1:12:23Nilay Patel?

  Can we say two things about the iPad?

• 1:12:24David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:12:24Nilay Patel?

  There are two things. One, they announced the most important feature of all for anyone who has a parent with an iPad. You can now take over their screen.

• 1:12:32David Pierce?

  Oh, I missed that.

• 1:12:33Nilay Patel?

  So when you're FaceTiming with them, you can share play and they're like, "What am I doing?" You can draw on their screen to call their attention to something you want them to do, or you can just do it.

• 1:12:41David Pierce?

  That's cool.

• 1:12:41Nilay Patel?

  Killer feature.

• 1:12:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's a good feature.

• 1:12:43Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely killer feature. And then the weird dynamic handwriting font thing they're doing, SmartScript. Where you draw on it and it smoothes out your handwriting, but then also sort of creates handwriting for you. It's unclear whether it was like a system-wide typeface, or it just has a model of your handwriting that you can now copy and paste. You can paste, you can copy text from somewhere else, paste it into a document in your handwriting.

• 1:13:06David Pierce?

  That's pretty awesome. You're right.

• 1:13:07Alex Cranz?

  Couldn't you do that on like a Surface device five years ago?

• 1:13:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Alex Cranz?

  But now it's on the iPad!

• 1:13:14Nilay Patel?

  Look, they didn't ahead Windows. They added a morphing taskbar. And you get-

• 1:13:19Alex Cranz?

  They're like, "We're gonna set the bar real low."

• 1:13:21Nilay Patel?

  It's very low.

• 1:13:22Alex Cranz?

  And then we're gonna go slight-

• 1:13:23Nilay Patel?

  People thought they were gonna run macOS on their iPads coming out of this event. They got SmartScript.

• 1:13:28David Pierce?

  Were not correct.

• 1:13:29Nilay Patel?

  And David got a calculator.

• 1:13:30David Pierce?

  You know what's ironic?

• 1:13:31Nilay Patel?

  For all the algebra you do at work.

• 1:13:32David Pierce?

  This is actually, this is a good segue into the next one. Let's do macOS next, because what we actually got is much closer to the exact opposite.

• 1:13:41David Pierce?

  Of getting macOS on your iPad. We got iPhones on your Mac.

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:13:46David Pierce?

  macOS Sequoia. How do we feel about Sequoia?

• 1:13:48Speaker 07

  It's like a name?

• 1:13:50David Pierce?

  It's fine. It's a name.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  I've live logged for like 10 years, 15 years now. And when Craig does the bit about the name, I literally just like take a break.

• 1:13:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  Crack my knuckles. I'm like, you're gonna, it's a name. It's gonna be a mountain.

• 1:14:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, they did or didn't get high. It's fine. But yeah, the big things, we should talk about iPhone mirroring because this is one of those things that I think.

• 1:14:10Nilay Patel?

  The big thing.

• 1:14:11David Pierce?

  Apple probably didn't expect to be as exciting to people as it was, but it's very exciting. And I think it's like gonna be a huge deal.

• 1:14:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, they're, they're missing a key interface element.

• 1:14:26David Pierce?

  You mean a digital crown?

• 1:14:29Nilay Patel?

  It took the world by storm. So it's right up there. It's the click wheel, digital crown. It's the trackpad. Three most important devices. No, they don't have a touchscreen. It's like bananas. I can mirror a phone onto your Mac without touchscreen. But I think the, the basic idea that people want to use their phone, there's a bunch of apps on your phone that did not sign up for the Mac App Store when the Mac went to Apple Silicon, which they really thought would happen. It did not happen.

• 1:14:55David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  How are you gonna get the Instagram app on your Mac? How are you gonna do it?

• 1:14:58David Pierce?

  Catalyst that was supposed to bring all that stuff across?

• 1:15:00Nilay Patel?

  Catalyst was iPad apps being remapped into Mac apps. But now you can just run iOS apps on Apple Silicon Mac, straight up, no porting. The Bluetooth lights in the studio at my house have a horrible iPhone app and it's the only, it's the only app that has ever, I've been like, I wonder if that's here. And it's there because they don't care. Instagram is like, no, we're not letting you do this. TikTok is like, we're not letting you do this. We're not making you a Mac app. Yeah, you just mirror your iPhone. And it's just the most brute force. Like we're just horsepower-ing this screen onto that screen, solve the problem. The app's still running on the phone. It's very cool. I think it will work. I think people are gonna use it all the time. The coolest part, I don't know if you guys saw this, the notifications get remapped.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  So your iPhone notifications show up on your Mac and you.

• 1:15:48David Pierce?

  As Mac notifications?

• 1:15:49Nilay Patel?

  As Mac notifications and you click them and it'll pop open the iPhone mirroring and drop you into.

• 1:15:55Speaker 07

  I mean, I'm nervous about that. I already don't like how many notifications I get on my iPhone. I'm like, are they gonna be on my computer now too?

• 1:16:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So you're like, AP News loves to push a breaking notification for everything. Is that just gonna? Pop up on my my Mac.

• 1:16:11David Pierce?

  Well, supposedly now, thanks to the magic of AI, all of your notifications are going to be sorted by priority, which couldn't possibly go wrong or be gamed by any systems. Because Apple has historically done such a good job of managing notifications.

• 1:16:24Alex Cranz?

  Growl back. Like, that's that's all you gotta do.

• 1:16:27Nilay Patel?

  No, they sure locked the hell out of ground.

• 1:16:28Alex Cranz?

  I know. They sure locked it, but like, they didn't make anything better.

• 1:16:32Nilay Patel?

  No, that's not what you do when you use your dominant monopoly to kill your competition. It's not the choice you're making.

• 1:16:38Alex Cranz?

  But I am I am excited about like the iPhone thing just because I'll be able to never have to get off my couch again. When I need to like, log into something that needs two factor authentication.

• 1:16:49Nilay Patel?

  That's why you get an Apple Watch.

• 1:16:50David Pierce?

  Oh, that's a good one.

• 1:16:51Nilay Patel?

  You all think the Apple Watch is a health and fitness device? I think if this is a two factor dongle.

• 1:16:56Alex Cranz?

  Does it have like?

• 1:16:56Nilay Patel?

  It shames me from.

• 1:16:57Alex Cranz?

  Does it have the authenticators on it?

• 1:16:59David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. I use I use Okta Verify and Authy on it. Well, I'm gonna. Thanks to you, actually, because you have been proselytizing this for years.

• 1:17:07Nilay Patel?

  We don't use any of those services. We use other ones. This was not a security hole.

• 1:17:14Alex Cranz?

  I don't have any of those on my watch.

• 1:17:15David Pierce?

  We use the new Apple.

• 1:17:16Nilay Patel?

  I'm downloading them right now. This is a two factor dongle that will occasionally shame you for not standing up, and it's fine. It works. But I but that thing where they added more iPhone to the Mac, deep deeply funny.

• 1:17:28David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:29Nilay Patel?

  They also, we talked a lot about Siri in the AI section. They changed the way Siri looks and works on the Mac to make it more powerful, to give it more of these text inputs. But like, it's they didn't change much. The big other feature that got a lot of cheers, the Mac section, was automatic window tiling, which Windows has had for 100 years.

• 1:17:46Alex Cranz?

  I have used it so much on Windows and I have an app on my computer that I like when they announced it, I was like, but I thought we already had that.

• 1:17:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's it's one of those features that it is truly bonkers. It didn't have already. And there are a million apps out there that are free and great for window tiling and will do it better than Sequoia, I'm sure. So go use those. I use one called Rectangle. It's very good.

• 1:18:08Nilay Patel?

  That's a good name for an app.

• 1:18:09David Pierce?

  It is. It's very good. It's very good. And it's free and it's wonderful and everybody should use it. But this it's, yeah, there's so many things in here that are just like, Apple sort of slowly checking off boxes of like, features. It's insane that have not been here for a decade.

• 1:18:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24David Pierce?

  And that's fine. I'll take it.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  A lot of people have asked me. How to feel, I guess.

• 1:18:31David Pierce?

  That's safari.

• 1:18:32Nilay Patel?

  This about safari and the fact that it has AI summaries built into it now, which is, I know you two love Arc, but a lot of people have feelings about Arc doing that in different ways. Feelings on perplexity doing that in different ways. This one feels much more innocuous because you're browsing the web and it is loading the webpages.

• 1:18:50Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I have it turned off in Arc. I always forget that it's it's there.

• 1:18:53Nilay Patel?

  You just like Arc.

• 1:18:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I just love art.

• 1:18:55David Pierce?

  But that that distinction you made, I think, is actually really important and is the whole thing. Right? Like, Apple's way of doing this is you go to a webpage and then AI can do things to that webpage.

• 1:19:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05David Pierce?

  And like a bunch of it is really clever, right? It's like there, if you're looking for important information on a webpage, it will help you surface it. Like, if you ever go to like a restaurant website and you look for the phone number, impossible. And this is like, it will just find you the phone number. Like, that's good. But you're already on the website, right? And so now, now all you're doing is you're solving for awful web design, which I'm fully in favor of. AI should destroy bad web design.

• 1:19:30David Pierce?

  But it flips the equation of the thing. Like, it's not going to the webpage and then returning information on my behalf. I am going to the webpage and then asking it for information.

• 1:19:39Nilay Patel?

  To be clear, we have not used this to any great extent. Like,

• 1:19:42David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:19:42Nilay Patel?

  We've seen some demos. We, people have the private betas and I'm publishing about it. So like, people are talking about it. But I think there's going to be a lot of back and forth between, hey, this web browser is now doing a lot of summary. You have a big partner with OpenAI, which not everyone is so happy with. Disclosure, our company has a content deal with OpenAI. Cool. I don't know if we have one with anyone else. But like, I think a lot of, a lot of the Safari work, at one point, the person who's presenting Safari was like, if you haven't used it, you should try it. It got pretty good.

• 1:20:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Nilay Patel?

  It's like, oh, boy, you need to get this back. Like, you gotta get this back on track. So they're adding some features to it. Because as David has been covering and installer, like Browser Wars are back. There's like a bunch of very interesting browsers because of AI features. And so I think Apple needs to capture some of that.

• 1:20:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, and the like, the reader mode updates that it got was cool. Reader is another one that it's like, nobody's mad at reader mode, even though it strips everything out, because you have to load the webpage.

• 1:20:40Nilay Patel?

  You have to load the webpage.

• 1:20:41David Pierce?

  Like, it's, that's just the whole thing. And the, there's now the, what's it called? They call it the viewer mode, where it'll just pop up a video that's on the page, if you want to watch the video, and give you like, native picture-in-picture and viewing controls.

• 1:20:52Nilay Patel?

  That's very good.

• 1:20:53David Pierce?

  Awesome, love it.

• 1:20:54Nilay Patel?

  Incredible feature.

• 1:20:55David Pierce?

  It's making bad websites better. Unbelievable. Huge fan. Make me go to the website.

• 1:20:59Nilay Patel?

  Right. The problem with all these other browsers, like, you'll stop browsing the web.

• 1:21:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:21:04Nilay Patel?

  And then there's no more incentive to make web. And I think Apple's trying to walk the line here.

• 1:21:07David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. But I'm, I'm, again, yeah, there's a lot of questions, but I'm kind of in favor. Is, does anyone sitting here use Safari with any regularity?

• 1:21:15Alex Cranz?

  I, I do.

• 1:21:16David Pierce?

  Do you? Like, on purpose?

• 1:21:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. For, for, until I switched to Arc, I would do like, Edge is my work browser, and Safari was my personal browser. I tried to keep the work separate.

• 1:21:27David Pierce?

  So what I've learned about you in this podcast so far, you are a devoted Mac user who loves Outlook and Edge.

• 1:21:36Alex Cranz?

  Make better mail and, uh, web browsers.

• 1:21:41David Pierce?

  Use other devices.

• 1:21:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Have you heard about these AI PCs? You love being watched by big corporations.

• 1:21:48David Pierce?

  You were also on this podcast not long ago, being like, oh, what Apple wants to do is build a Surface. You could just have one.

• 1:21:53Alex Cranz?

  I know, but I don't want it. I, I want, I want Apple to do what I want it to do.

• 1:21:58David Pierce?

  You just want to ugh up your iPhone.

• 1:21:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:00Nilay Patel?

  This is, this is like, people in America are so confused about competition.

• 1:22:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Nilay Patel?

  They're like, I'll just yell at Apple until it makes me the product I want. I won't just buy the product that exists.

• 1:22:09Alex Cranz?

  Exactly.

• 1:22:10Nilay Patel?

  Party is the thing I want.

• 1:22:11Alex Cranz?

  That's, that's why I'm in the job I'm in, so I can just yell everywhere.

• 1:22:13Nilay Patel?

  Uh, can we spend two seconds talking about gaming and then talk about passwords?

• 1:22:17David Pierce?

  Literally two seconds.

• 1:22:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Apple announced a bunch of

• 1:22:21David Pierce?

  That's it, sorry.

• 1:22:22Nilay Patel?

  I just want to announce, they, uh, they were like, you can now play Death Stranding on the Mac, that came, came out in 2019. Assassin's Creed game, one that is coming out, that's true, but another one came out in 2019. And then the big finale was Control, now with ray tracing. Control was the game of the year. In like 2017.

• 1:22:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's Control is a game that everybody just uses to show off ray tracing because it has really good ray tracing like.

• 1:22:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Alex Cranz?

  That's kind of why it exists in most people's computers now.

• 1:22:50Nilay Patel?

  Like Control is at the point where it's like you open the PlayStation Store on the right day. It's like, do you just want Control?

• 1:22:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Nilay Patel?

  You should have, it's like really good, you know, like you should try it out.

• 1:23:00Alex Cranz?

  But the Ubisoft stuff was interesting. It did feel like Apple is trying to kind of brute force its way back into the gaming conversation. I mean, it's been doing it for the last three or four years, but uh, having the Ubisoft like guy on stage, having the new games come out on the iPad, on the Mac, like day and date, that that's, that's not nothing.

• 1:23:20Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I got this wrong. Control is a game of the year contender in 2019. The Assassin's Creed game came out in 2017. I'm sorry. Apologies to everyone.

• 1:23:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, they're all old.

• 1:23:32David Pierce?

  But also this, this does.

• 1:23:33Nilay Patel?

  I was a different person. This was before pandemic.

• 1:23:37Alex Cranz?

  It was like it's pre-COVID, it was old.

• 1:23:38Nilay Patel?

  I used to, I was breathing on people every day.

• 1:23:42David Pierce?

  This does continue Assassin's Creed's perfect streak of being available on every platform invented by anyone.

• 1:23:48Nilay Patel?

  If you have a computer and you're like, can I stab someone on this computer? Ubisoft is there.

• 1:23:52Alex Cranz?

  They're like, yes. And a little friend Jack said, me.

• 1:23:57Nilay Patel?

  The new one is in feudal Japan.

• 1:23:58David Pierce?

  All right. That's, that's too much game mode talk. Um, let's watch OS briefly. Uh, this is the one I am perhaps least qualified to talk about because I just went in and turned off all of the fitness notifications on my Apple Watch because they were making me sad. And it's like, do you want to stand up? And I was like, no, I'm on a call. Leave me alone, Apple. But there's like, if you're a fitness person and Allison, you're wearing a watch and seem like a fitness person. There's a lot of new stuff here. This thing is like a super intense health and fitness device now. It's getting serious.

• 1:24:27Speaker 07

  I, I will say, and we'll give a shout out for our colleague V Song, that you can now finally tell Apple you're taking a rest day. Yeah. Or like, you're sick. You're not going to go do your little jog or whatever. Yeah, I like I could feel it. I could feel her, you know, energy.

• 1:24:46David Pierce?

  She was typing in our Slack when this got launched and was typing in all caps so fast she was just making thousands of typos.

• 1:24:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52David Pierce?

  Just, ah, happy. Pure joy. Yeah. But yeah, so there's you can now take rest days. You can also change your goals day to day throughout the week, which I think is very clever. Uh, there's a new vitals app that'll track new stuff on your body. If I explain it more than that, I will immediately sound as dumb as I am about all this. Uh, you can rate like the effort of a workout. It's basically like this is all just health inputs and outputs, right? That is what this device is now.

• 1:25:18Alex Cranz?

  It felt like they added a bunch of stuff that other folks have been doing, like Aura Ring has been doing it, Garmin has been doing it. Especially the health stuff like Aura has been all over that.

• 1:25:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Alex Cranz?

  And it was like, oh, we we can we've got all those sensors. We've in fact got better sensors. We could probably do that. And Apple has just been really weird about it before now.

• 1:25:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, they've been in a pretty healthy lawsuit. The company.

• 1:25:40Alex Cranz?

  That's probably why. But so so it's it's nice to see that. Yeah, you'll be able to the rest days is the big one though. I think I think that was what the one like I was seeing on threads even. Everybody was just like, yeah.

• 1:25:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that was the one that people asked that forever.

• 1:25:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because it's yeah, sometimes you feel like garbage and your watch is like you haven't moved at all today, you piece of shit.

• 1:25:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Alex Cranz?

  And you're like, yeah, because I feel like garbage. Thanks, mom. Like, leave me alone.

• 1:26:04David Pierce?

  And it seems to get like meaner and meaner as time goes on. Like if you get to like day three of not closing all your rings, your watch is just so disappointed in you.

• 1:26:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14David Pierce?

  It's like you get the yeah, you get the message. It's like you didn't close any rings yesterday. Like, let's just try for one today. I'm like, I'm sorry.

• 1:26:20Speaker 07

  It's the bare minimum.

• 1:26:22David Pierce?

  What if you did anything today? I'm like, I didn't even have my watch on yesterday. Leave me alone.

• 1:26:26Nilay Patel?

  Stand ring. We're gonna go for stand ring once an hour.

• 1:26:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30Nilay Patel?

  Just stand.

• 1:26:32David Pierce?

  I'm gonna put my goal to three hours today. Let's go, Apple.

• 1:26:35Nilay Patel?

  It's good.

• 1:26:36David Pierce?

  Um, all right, let's burn through the last ones, then we can take a break. Uh, AirPods. We talked a little bit about the AirPods.

• 1:26:41Alex Cranz?

  You know it.

• 1:26:41David Pierce?

  Head shake, nod.

• 1:26:42Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 1:26:44David Pierce?

  Unbelievably unconvinced that that works, but if it does, very excited. Uh, there are a lot of people out there who, uh, are trying to make that stuff work. Turns out you move your head a lot. I don't know if you've noticed, but like in just being a person in the world, you move ahead your head a lot. And so figuring those gestures out.

• 1:27:02Alex Cranz?

  I hope it's the same way, like when you talk to your computer, I use a voice. You have like your computer voice. I hope you have to like have a computer head nod.

• 1:27:09David Pierce?

  Dramatically head nod.

• 1:27:11Alex Cranz?

  You're just like walking down the street, doing these really dramatic head nods. That would be ideal.

• 1:27:15David Pierce?

  Which is definitely better than talking to yourself.

• 1:27:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17David Pierce?

  Yeah. Not, not weird to just constantly be walking down the street.

• 1:27:21Alex Cranz?

  You'll probably get the Carter yourself on the subway.

• 1:27:24Nilay Patel?

  I was walking on the street in Philadelphia the other day, uh, and a woman rode behind her bike and she just goes, hey Siri, really loud.

• 1:27:32Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, literally like a lot of people stopped because that was just a weird thing to happen. And I said out loud to the person I was walking with, I've never seen anyone do that in the world before. And they're like, that was special. And that we had like, everyone's like, the whole street had a moment because she was like, I'm gonna talk to Siri while I'm biking.

• 1:27:48Alex Cranz?

  It's hard to do in public because you're like, I'm always like, hey Siri, how are you?

• 1:27:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, she, I, you gotta.

• 1:27:53Alex Cranz?

  No, she just.

• 1:27:53Nilay Patel?

  Philly, man.

• 1:27:54Alex Cranz?

  With her whole chest.

• 1:27:55Nilay Patel?

  The whole.

• 1:27:56Alex Cranz?

  I love that.

• 1:27:57Nilay Patel?

  Philly. That's where, that's where you can just do it.

• 1:27:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:00Nilay Patel?

  There are some towns in America where you can just address your voice assistant.

• 1:28:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:03Alex Cranz?

  The AirPods Pros, they're getting better like phone calls too.

• 1:28:07Nilay Patel?

  Voice isolation.

• 1:28:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09David Pierce?

  Which is a feature that has existed for a long time and is deeply buried in settings on all of your devices. This is like a thing you can do on phone calls now and it makes you sound so much better. And it has always driven me crazy that Apple doesn't just turn it on by default. But it's a thing that exists on the Mac. It's a thing that exists on the iPhone. But you have to turn it on for every single call, like in the middle of the call. And that's very stupid. And so the fact that it's just on now, there's also the personalized spatial audio, which you know, Neil's favorite feature. So that everyone can sneak up on you during your phone calls.

• 1:28:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what you want.

• 1:28:39David Pierce?

  But no, I'm into it. The AirPods.

• 1:28:42Nilay Patel?

  They did it.

• 1:28:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's still AirPods. No more AirPods Maxes. I really thought that we were gonna get AirPods today. Either it was gonna be a HomePod or a new AirPods Maxes, and they were gonna like make a whole series story out of it. Nothing.

• 1:28:54Nilay Patel?

  Whatever in thought was that they were gonna add macOS to the iPod, and the AirPods would be the focus of all the AF. All of you people were disappointed.

• 1:29:01David Pierce?

  So we got a calculator hat, and it was sick. tvOS, we have covered several times. We'll just move on from there. It'll now, we're getting a new season of-

• 1:29:12Nilay Patel?

  They added 219 projector support to tvOS, okay? This is the next hour of The Vergecast.

• 1:29:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm very excited about this.

• 1:29:19David Pierce?

  To, speaking of the next hour of The Vergecast, VisionOS.

• 1:29:23Nilay Patel?

  I will not name names.

• 1:29:26Nilay Patel?

  A friend of ours, friend of the show, came up to us, and they're like, so they're just giving up on the Vision Pro? And this person looked bereft.

• 1:29:37Nilay Patel?

  Bereft.

• 1:29:38Alex Cranz?

  That's sad.

• 1:29:38Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, no, I think they just, they announced it four months ago. I don't think they had anything left in the tank. And like, they're giving up on it.

• 1:29:46Alex Cranz?

  Wes Davis was going through all of the updates, and he's like, oh, what they didn't say on stage was that they're fixing a ton of bugs and issues he's had with it. Cause he's like the one person on the staff.

• 1:29:57Nilay Patel?

  He loves it.

• 1:29:57Alex Cranz?

  He loves it.

• 1:29:58Nilay Patel?

  God bless him.

• 1:29:59Alex Cranz?

  He's always like, you wanna FaceTime? I'm like, absolutely not.

• 1:30:03Alex Cranz?

  Put that in the fire. But, uh, but yeah, so he's, apparently there's doing a bunch of updates to it, but they just didn't talk about any of that.

• 1:30:09Nilay Patel?

  They did not, because I think you have to know what is broken about the Vision Pro in order to appreciate the fixes.

• 1:30:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16Nilay Patel?

  And most people don't know anything about the Vision Pro.

• 1:30:18Alex Cranz?

  And they're like, we're not spending time on that.

• 1:30:19Nilay Patel?

  David is fond of reminding us it costs $3,500.

• 1:30:21David Pierce?

  Seven out of 10, baby. Here we go.

• 1:30:25Nilay Patel?

  I stand by my review now more than ever, actually. Not the score, but the review.

• 1:30:31David Pierce?

  No, I think it's right, and I think we have, we have continued to find what is, that it's better out here than in there.

• 1:30:37Nilay Patel?

  But they did add, they're adding more immersive videos, they're gonna release more stuff, they're releasing more countries, which actually got a huge cheer. That expands the market. Canon's making a special lens just for the R9, which Alison, I'm curious if you ever read on this?

• 1:30:49Speaker 07

  Oh my god, I totally like blanked that out. It looked like, wasn't there a moment where some company was making a 3D lens for the camera?

• 1:30:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:58Speaker 07

  Like Fujifilm, I think, did the like- You know, when 3D was gonna be the next thing, they're like, here's a camera lens that will shoot 3D photos for you. And I was like, we're doing it again.

• 1:31:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I can't tell if the EOS R9, it was specifically the camera they called out, has a sensor or a processing system that can take the split image, right? Because what they're doing is they're making a right and left image and then combining it somewhere. So I'm wondering if the camera has some setting, but Canon's making a lens for one camera. It's not just a Canon lens like you would expect. It's for this one camera. So now you can shoot Apple immersive with this one camera.

• 1:31:36Alex Cranz?

  Is it the R9 or the R7?

• 1:31:39Nilay Patel?

  Was it the R7? Duran says it was the R7. Duran's already bought the lens.

• 1:31:46Speaker 07

  No? Oh, my gosh. Live fact checking.

• 1:31:51Nilay Patel?

  Maybe I just typed it wrong in the live log.

• 1:31:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, again, I would say this is indicative of how important this actually is to the world.

• 1:32:00Nilay Patel?

  I think this is really wild because there's not enough content for this headset.

• 1:32:04David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:32:04Nilay Patel?

  So that they spent a lot of time talking about just like how they're building out the content pipelines for the Canon EOS R7.

• 1:32:10David Pierce?

  Thank you, Duran.

• 1:32:13David Pierce?

  No, it's true. It's very clear that Apple thinks content is the thing.

• 1:32:16Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:32:16David Pierce?

  And they announced like new environments, new ways to look at the spatial photos, like new, new tools for showing this stuff. It's very obvious to me that the two things they're seeing people do in this are use it as a monitor, which is why they announced the new ultra wide monitor, which looked awesome. I'm confident will not look like that in actual use, but the idea of having one wild giant like wall sized monitor in front of you kicks ass and I want it very badly.

• 1:32:41Nilay Patel?

  I am very excited to see if that means macOS will now support ultra wides, curved ultra wides.

• 1:32:48David Pierce?

  That's interesting.

• 1:32:49Nilay Patel?

  Because right now, if you get one of the crazy Samsungs, they just like don't work very well.

• 1:32:52David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:32:53Alex Cranz?

  It would be hysterical if it only works with the Vision Pro.

• 1:32:56Nilay Patel?

  It would be perfectly on brand. If you could get a giant curved ultra wide in the $35 headset, but that same resolution could not be displayed on an actual monitor.

• 1:33:05Alex Cranz?

  Just beautiful.

• 1:33:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. But I, people did cheer for that. It is the thing they're using it for. Um, but yeah, I, I, I think that just means they're adding more display resolutions to the Mac, which would be good. Because there is a class of monitors that you really can't use very well with Mac right now.

• 1:33:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and with that, that's the last we're gonna hear of the Vision Pro for a pretty long time, I think.

• 1:33:24Nilay Patel?

  Can I, in my continuing quest to describe the what is photo apocalypse, they added a feature, right now you can shoot spatial audio, right now you can shoot spatial video and photos with your iPhone. I don't think you should do it because it actually really reduces the quality of, especially in low light, so.

• 1:33:42David Pierce?

  And the files are monstrous.

• 1:33:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and you can only look at them in a headset.

• 1:33:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:47Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, not worth it right now. But they are adding a feature where it can spatialize your regular photos. Which means it is creating a bunch of synthetic data for your eyes to look at out of one photo.

• 1:33:59David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:34:00Nilay Patel?

  So you've got a left eye vision and it's gonna make a right eye, or you've got a right eye, or whatever it's doing. It's just gonna create a little bit of a depth map and it's gonna just synthesize some information that super wasn't there in the photo. Is this the greatest what is a photo crime? No, it is not. Is it super weird that we're all just racing headlong into the future of synthetic imagery and being like, that's fun?

• 1:34:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but that's stuff they've been doing on like TVs for ages, right? When they do the auto upscaling and stuff, isn't that the same thing where they're just adding pixels?

• 1:34:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, so auto upscaling is, you know, you take like a 720 image and you just like make it bigger.

• 1:34:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:40Nilay Patel?

  And you get a bunch of AI stuff in there. This is, in like, that's still, right, you're right, that's happening, but you're adding pixels like in a 2D plane.

• 1:34:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Nilay Patel?

  This is, they're gonna add a 3D image. So you're gonna get another angle from, like, if, assume the picture again is your left eye, you're gonna get another angle on the same image, and you're gonna see like a little bit of the side of someone's head.

• 1:35:03Alex Cranz?

  I cannot wait to look at a little bit of the side of Allison's head.

• 1:35:06Nilay Patel?

  But an AI Allison's head.

• 1:35:09Alex Cranz?

  Synthetic. Yeah, you're just gonna have like four ears.

• 1:35:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it'll be great.

• 1:35:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, it's just like one of those things where you're like, oh, huh, they're just doing that. They're gonna totally synthesize another image for you to look at to create a 3D effect. That image never existed.

• 1:35:24David Pierce?

  Nope.

• 1:35:24Nilay Patel?

  It did not happen. He did not capture it. This computer is just going to confidently tell you, this is what your other eye would have seen. And you're gonna be like, huh, that's weird. It's a weird thing that's happening. I will say, I know people, Liam is always on me for endlessly going on about what is a photo. I ruthlessly used the generative racer in my room the other day to take people out of the back of a photo of my daughter. I am as conflicted as you are. I am but a man. Okay?

• 1:35:47David Pierce?

  How does it make you feel?

• 1:35:48Nilay Patel?

  Huh?

• 1:35:48David Pierce?

  Do you look at that photo differently now?

• 1:35:50Nilay Patel?

  Awesome. I do look at the photo differently because I know what I did. But I don't know that most people have a feeling of shame when they're done using my room.

• 1:35:58David Pierce?

  Generative shame is a whole thing we're not even...

• 1:36:00Nilay Patel?

  They should market it as shame.

• 1:36:04Nilay Patel?

  We're about to, by the way, have a big story. Just whether that is working on it. Regular photographers are now running into the reality that any use of AI tools appends a watermark, which then Instagram will just like say made with AI. And people have real feelings about that label. It's the verges for a story that exists. But just...

• 1:36:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that's all the platforms. Uh, there's a lot we didn't get to. I suspect we will talk a lot more about this, both like on Friday and for the rest of our lives. But it was a lot. Like, this is a big...

• 1:36:35Nilay Patel?

  It was a lot.

• 1:36:35David Pierce?

  It was a big day. And I think it was a funny one because in another world, just that run of platforms would have been a two hour...

• 1:36:43Nilay Patel?

  That's why at the end of it, I was like, are they done?

• 1:36:45David Pierce?

  Yeah. And as it was, they just blew through it. Like, I think one of the things we're going to see over the next few days, because the developer baders are out, we're going to learn about so many things that didn't even come up or get mentioned. They're not in blog posts. They weren't on the bento's. Like, there's a lot of stuff in these platforms that's not being talked about.

• 1:36:59Nilay Patel?

  The bento's are getting surprisingly less dense.

• 1:37:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're very sparing now.

• 1:37:03Nilay Patel?

  I think Apple should repack those with information. They're...

• 1:37:06David Pierce?

  I think just like a plain text screen.

• 1:37:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, here's a list of stuff.

• 1:37:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:11David Pierce?

  Just full changelog. If that's it, we should, we should take a break.

• 1:37:15Nilay Patel?

  You don't want to talk about games more?

• 1:37:16David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:37:19David Pierce?

  I don't want to play Assassin's Creed on any of my Apple devices. Leave me alone about it.

• 1:37:25Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll be right back.

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• 1:39:00Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Welcome back to our show. We're ending with a lightning round. Unsponsored. Sponsored by the E.S.

• 1:39:10Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I would like to thank the very many people who have sent me photos of the Sony ULT speakers in the wild. One person was like, I was in Best Buy and I had to go look at my for myself.

• 1:39:19David Pierce?

  Amazing.

• 1:39:20Nilay Patel?

  Hit the button. Enter the ULT era. They have not sponsored lighting around. I'm just giving this away. But it's lighting around. We're gonna do something special here to end. We're gonna go around. We're gonna say what our two favorite features of WWDC were.

• 1:39:32David Pierce?

  And these are like, these are like features we will use, like.

• 1:39:35Nilay Patel?

  Features we will use.

• 1:39:36David Pierce?

  Right, okay.

• 1:39:37Nilay Patel?

  And frustratingly, we picked them before the show.

• 1:39:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:40Nilay Patel?

  Where we all took stands against one another's opinions.

• 1:39:44Alex Cranz?

  Couldn't change it, not allowed.

• 1:39:46Nilay Patel?

  We're not allowed to change it as we came back in from break. Kranz, let's begin with you. I'm very worried about your choices.

• 1:39:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, mine, um, you and HR are probably gonna be very worried because Jinmoji and Image Playground are at the top of my list.

• 1:39:58David Pierce?

  Oh, Lord.

• 1:39:59Alex Cranz?

  I have no artistic ability and the ability to make a horse with 12 butts just sounds weird. I wanna see what happens.

• 1:40:06David Pierce?

  It's a really interesting no artistic ability and terrible person. It's like a really fascinating combination.

• 1:40:12Nilay Patel?

  But semi, but also wildly creative.

• 1:40:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like if you were like, I have no artistic ability, I'm a bad person, but I couldn't imagine a horse with 12 butts. Like, fine, what about you today? Kranz is like, I got ideas.

• 1:40:25Alex Cranz?

  I go, I wanna see, I wanna see what happens. So I'm, I'm super excited about that. Uh, we'll see how long I'm allowed to be excited about it before Apple just shuts me off.

• 1:40:35Nilay Patel?

  Shut you down at the server level. Like, we got the kill switch in iOS? Fire.

• 1:40:40Alex Cranz?

  Soon as I log in, they're like, nope, that's not for you.

• 1:40:43Nilay Patel?

  Execute.

• 1:40:44Alex Cranz?

  But it's gonna be sick. And then my other one I've talked about already is the, the ugly dark mode apps.

• 1:40:50Nilay Patel?

  Kranz, oh my god.

• 1:40:51Alex Cranz?

  You've seen that my slack now. You know, I just, I want everything, I want all of my devices when I turn them on for you to go.

• 1:41:01Nilay Patel?

  Again, why don't you use Windows and Android, which from the like, the base levels of the operating system are designed to be this ugly.

• 1:41:09Alex Cranz?

  It's too easy. You're not a hacker if you're not hacking.

• 1:41:14Nilay Patel?

  By using the system level.

• 1:41:19Alex Cranz?

  It feels like hacking when it's on iOS.

• 1:41:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, the cranks, everybody.

• 1:41:26Nilay Patel?

  David, what are you?

• 1:41:27David Pierce?

  Uh, my two, I changed it because I want to talk about two things.

• 1:41:32Nilay Patel?

  You changed yours?

• 1:41:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, but who can remember what my last one was now? It's been too long.

• 1:41:36Nilay Patel?

  There are rules.

• 1:41:37David Pierce?

  I changed it mid-show, not during the break, so it was fine. I changed it while you were talking about something or other.

• 1:41:44Nilay Patel?

  Remotely.

• 1:41:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, you were like, oh, Assassin's Creed, and I just started typing.

• 1:41:49Nilay Patel?

  You know, they shot Control in 2017.

• 1:41:51David Pierce?

  My first one.

• 1:41:55David Pierce?

  My first one is weirdly just like a throw-in at the end of WWDC, which I actually thought was very exciting. It's transcription and AI summarization in the voice memos app.

• 1:42:03Nilay Patel?

  And also the phone app.

• 1:42:04David Pierce?

  And also the phone app.

• 1:42:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:42:06David Pierce?

  So exciting, which is like, this is the kind of thing that like, if you're a reporter, is life-changing. And if you're a real person, is just like, sort of whatever. But for me, like, I spend a lot of time talking into things and being talked at on those same things. And having a decent recorder is amazing. Like, you use a Pixel Recorder, Alison, I know.

• 1:42:25Speaker 07

  I have a Pixel.

• 1:42:26David Pierce?

  Because that is like a magical little piece of software.

• 1:42:28Speaker 07

  At all times.

• 1:42:29David Pierce?

  And this feels like it might do the same thing, and I'm very excited about that fact.

• 1:42:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:33David Pierce?

  So that's awesome. Also, maybe the thing that AI is the most consistently good at is transcription and summarization. So like, sold, love it, I'll take it. The other one is all of the organization stuff in mail, which I am more excited about as time goes on. Because, Neil is making a face at me, which is fair.

• 1:42:53Speaker 07

  He's just thinking MimeStream is.

• 1:42:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm just, I'm like, this man who has to run installer, and he has to pretend all software is interesting.

• 1:42:58David Pierce?

  So, no, it's that all email apps for iPhone are bad.

• 1:43:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:05David Pierce?

  Which is just a fact of the world. Solid problem on the Mac, MimeStream is excellent, everybody should use MimeStream. Love it to death. There are no good email apps for the iPhone. And before you hear this or see this and send me one, don't. I've tried it, it sucks, they're all bad. But this thing that Apple did, which is basically just launched Gmail.

• 1:43:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:25David Pierce?

  They were just like.

• 1:43:26Nilay Patel?

  Updates tab, like the whole thing.

• 1:43:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, they they do the categorization. They're doing some AI summarization. You can use the tools to rewrite your emails like we were talking about earlier. I'm gonna go back to using Apple Mail again because it is like useful. The problem with Apple Mail has always been that search sucks, which I assume is still the case. And it doesn't have the split inboxes in Gmail, which I've actually now come to rely on. They're not very good, but they're better than just dumping everything into your one inbox. And at least when I go to promotions, it's like mostly stuff I don't want. And when I go to updates, it's like mostly newsletters and receipts. Again, not perfect, but pretty good. And if Apple can do that stuff even that well, it immediately becomes the best email app on the iPhone, like by a mile.

• 1:44:09David Pierce?

  And so I'm cautiously optimistic. I just, the Gmail app is so bad.

• 1:44:14Nilay Patel?

  I want to believe for you.

• 1:44:15David Pierce?

  It's so.

• 1:44:15Nilay Patel?

  It's not good.

• 1:44:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's why you gotta use Outlook.

• 1:44:18David Pierce?

  No. Can I tell you what sucks about Outlook?

• 1:44:22Alex Cranz?

  Every.

• 1:44:22David Pierce?

  Well, A, everything. B, it's very slow. But C, when you open an email, the archive button, which is the only button that matters on an email app, is all the way at the top right of the screen where it is completely unreachable, no matter how you hold your phone. Ridiculous.

• 1:44:35Alex Cranz?

  You archive them?

• 1:44:38David Pierce?

  Do you just leave them? Oh, you're, oh, crap.

• 1:44:40Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 1:44:41David Pierce?

  I'm discovering I hate you in this episode.

• 1:44:43Alex Cranz?

  No, no. Don't worry about my little number. You have like a 1,000, don't you? No, it's fine.

• 1:44:49David Pierce?

  You read it, then mark it as unread for the chaos and then go about your business.

• 1:44:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like sometimes I'll be like, oh, that's spam. I'll leave it unread till one day.

• 1:44:57David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:44:59Nilay Patel?

  One.

• 1:44:59David Pierce?

  Oh, that hurts my soul.

• 1:45:00Nilay Patel?

  That's the way to do it. Second, the Gmail app has actually solved this by way of a bug that is still not fixed, which is sometimes when you open an email from the notification on the Gmail app for iOS, it just deletes the email.

• 1:45:15David Pierce?

  I've noticed this.

• 1:45:15Nilay Patel?

  And it's just like, how do you get here? How did, how did you arrive at this state?

• 1:45:22David Pierce?

  I mean.

• 1:45:22Nilay Patel?

  All that AI, like I bet what you wanted to do was immediately delete this email that you actually chose to take an action on. Then action was delete. And that's how I pit inbox zero.

• 1:45:32David Pierce?

  Congratulations. That's really exciting. Yeah. Reading it is not important to getting to inbox zero.

• 1:45:36Nilay Patel?

  No longer. I'm just hoping the robots summarize the email. I can't believe you picked fucking mail.

• 1:45:41David Pierce?

  I honestly, the more I think about it, the more excited I am. But also the thing where you can now group by sender. So I'm like, the one time you go to a restaurant and then they send you an email every day for the rest of your life? Going and clicking the unsubscribe button, too much work. Doing it in Gmail doesn't work. That's just a lie that they tell you. Uh, but now you can group them and just delete them all at once. Yeah. I, I like that.

• 1:46:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited. I'm excited for their, the same AI idea everyone else has, which is like, you're planning a trip. All the emails from your trip are going to be a little digest of trip emails.

• 1:46:12David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 1:46:12Nilay Patel?

  Great. I'm super excited for you.

• 1:46:15David Pierce?

  Thank you. It's going to be an awesome, like six days.

• 1:46:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18David Pierce?

  And then somebody will update their app again. And I'll be like, maybe they fixed it and they didn't.

• 1:46:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24David Pierce?

  But I will try it again.

• 1:46:24Nilay Patel?

  You've got a problem and it's fine because it keeps you ready.

• 1:46:27David Pierce?

  I do it for work now.

• 1:46:28Nilay Patel?

  Allison, what do you mean? That's what I'm saying.

• 1:46:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Nilay Patel?

  All right. What are yours, Allison?

• 1:46:33Speaker 07

  Uh, minor messaging related. I am, because I test a lot of Android phones, I'm usually the person on Android in the group chat.

• 1:46:44David Pierce?

  Do you turn iMessage on when you test an iPhone and then off when you stop?

• 1:46:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48David Pierce?

  Does it ruin your life every time you do that?

• 1:46:50Speaker 07

  Kind of like possibly I have missed out on friendships, you know, things happening. I don't know.

• 1:46:58David Pierce?

  When you de-enroll from, from iMessage, you miss messages like for days.

• 1:47:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:47:03David Pierce?

  It's insane.

• 1:47:04Speaker 07

  I think there's people I just don't talk to anymore.

• 1:47:08Speaker 07

  Because they probably tried to message me. No, I do this. I do it with RCS. So like, yeah, RCS and iMessage is gonna fix everything for me. I feel really good about.

• 1:47:19Nilay Patel?

  That's even more optimistic than David picking mail.

• 1:47:22Alex Cranz?

  I love this.

• 1:47:23David Pierce?

  Well, you can send high resolution. It's photos now.

• 1:47:26Speaker 07

  It's the photos. Because like, right now, when in the group chat, we're sharing photos of our kids doing cute things. And I have to be like, I'm sorry, I'm screwing up the, the, you know, the quality of the images here. Can you just send them to my husband? Or can we put them in a Google? There's so many Google Photos albums. It's like.

• 1:47:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:47:47Alex Cranz?

  How are you on any group chats in text?

• 1:47:50Nilay Patel?

  I so, I love the idea of everybody sending photos back and forth, and then you just sending Google Photos links.

• 1:47:56Speaker 07

  Oh, my God, yeah. Check out my cool photos.

• 1:48:00Alex Cranz?

  You have really good friends.

• 1:48:02Speaker 07

  I know. They are so patient with me.

• 1:48:04Alex Cranz?

  Those are some like rock solid.

• 1:48:06Speaker 07

  But you know what? There was one Android guy, and he just switched to iPhone 2. I was like, ah, now it's just me. Yeah. So that's it. RCS is gonna fix everything for me. I feel good about it.

• 1:48:17David Pierce?

  That is a good one.

• 1:48:18Speaker 07

  Yeah. And scheduling messages.

• 1:48:21Nilay Patel?

  Yes, that's a clutch one.

• 1:48:22Speaker 07

  Which is iMessage only.

• 1:48:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna schedule so many messages for like, seven minutes from now.

• 1:48:29Nilay Patel?

  Just so it's not like, immediately thirsty. But like, within 10 is too much. Right?

• 1:48:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:48:35Nilay Patel?

  Send seven minutes from now.

• 1:48:36Speaker 07

  It fixes the like, oh, you just texted me, and I'm gonna text you right back. But that like, seems weird. And then I'm gonna forget about it. And then never text you back.

• 1:48:44Nilay Patel?

  Those are the only two options that exist.

• 1:48:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:48:47David Pierce?

  Honestly, I'm so glad you both just said that. Because this is my main problem as a person. Is I will read your message. And if I respond, if I am in the right headspace to respond to it, I'm very responsive, I'm ready. But if I do the thing where I put my phone down, we're done. It's I'm never, ever getting back to it. And I will just feel an increasing sense of guilt. Like, I could name you, right now, off the top of my head, 15 people I owe text messages to, who are never getting text messages from me.

• 1:49:13Alex Cranz?

  Do you read them?

• 1:49:14Nilay Patel?

  Name them now. This will be the greatest TikTok in brush chat history. Name the 15 people you know that you are supposed to text.

• 1:49:22David Pierce?

  Under no circumstance. But all of them know who they are, which is the beauty of it.

• 1:49:28David Pierce?

  And I'm just, it's-

• 1:49:29Nilay Patel?

  Seven minutes, right. They should just add it as a default button. Send in seven minutes.

• 1:49:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:34David Pierce?

  Send, but be cool.

• 1:49:35Nilay Patel?

  Be cool about it.

• 1:49:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:39Nilay Patel?

  This is like the swingers button. Uh, all right. It's, I can't believe I picked-

• 1:49:43Alex Cranz?

  Hey, hey, Neelai, what are yours? What are your picks?

• 1:49:46Nilay Patel?

  I picked one that I, I, I stand by.

• 1:49:48Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 1:49:49Nilay Patel?

  Which is phone mirror, phone mirroring.

• 1:49:51David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:49:51Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:49:52Nilay Patel?

  And remote iOS access for, uh, grandparent tech support.

• 1:49:55Alex Cranz?

  That's huge.

• 1:49:56Nilay Patel?

  Game changers. Game changers all the way around. And that's it.

• 1:49:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no, no, you had one more. What was it?

• 1:50:01Nilay Patel?

  At the time, I did not know what we were picking.

• 1:50:05Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:05Nilay Patel?

  I thought we were just picking some cool features. I did not know that I would create false conflict with David in the iPad segment. And I picked the calculator.

• 1:50:15David Pierce?

  Okay, Neelai, I would like you, I would like you to do the following. I would like you to, right now, make the case that the calculator app is the missing thing on the iPad and the iPad is now perfect and complete. I would like you to make that case right now.

• 1:50:28Nilay Patel?

  The problem with the iPad for the past 13 years has been its inability to do simple mathematics. I think, as we've all known. Uh, and now you can.

• 1:50:44David Pierce?

  That was it. Uh, I do want to say quickly, just to pour one out for the app called Solver.

• 1:50:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:50David Pierce?

  Uh, which is an awesome, very cool, very clever app where you can just like type out the math you're trying to do. Just like, the bill is $65, there's four of us, how much does everybody owe with a 20% tip? And it just answers your math questions like that. Apple just full Sherlock that app today.

• 1:51:06Nilay Patel?

  No, because you would have to get out your iPad and start writing with a pencil at dinner? And I just don't, I don't think that's what's happening here.

• 1:51:16David Pierce?

  You're like, oh, do you want to sign the check? And you're like, not yet. Hold on.

• 1:51:19Nilay Patel?

  I've got a draw dinner.

• 1:51:22Nilay Patel?

  How much, how much of the apps did you?

• 1:51:26Nilay Patel?

  I agree that they took a lot of those ideas. But yeah, I don't, I think Solvers one, because it's an iPhone app, right?

• 1:51:32David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's very good on the iPhone.

• 1:51:34Nilay Patel?

  It's unbelievable. They're not adding any of these calculator features to the iPhone. It's like the iPhone and the iPad will never have the same calculator experience.

• 1:51:41David Pierce?

  The, the epiphany that I had during the live blog today was that, uh, everybody desperately wants the iPad to become a Mac and what it actually is, is an iPhone with a stylus.

• 1:51:50Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:51:52David Pierce?

  And to the extent that that changes what you can do on it, Apple is like pushing really hard on that idea. That like, because there's a stylus, you can do new things. That's, that's the whole bent of the iPad right now.

• 1:52:02Alex Cranz?

  When we get the folding phone, it's gonna be sick.

• 1:52:04Speaker 07

  When it folds.

• 1:52:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, it may well be, but it is like, it is further and further away from being a Mac all the time.

• 1:52:10Speaker 07

  And then you can use your folding iPad on your computer, uh, because it will do iPhone mirroring.

• 1:52:19David Pierce?

  And then you plug in your Vision Pro and you get a giant.

• 1:52:23Speaker 07

  Bringing it on again.

• 1:52:23David Pierce?

  We fixed it.

• 1:52:25Nilay Patel?

  I think I've never been more depressed about computers. After that entire sequence. What?

• 1:52:32Nilay Patel?

  I, I actually think, uh, we saw a lot from Apple today, which indicates this company can actually have new ideas. Which is sort of not been the case for a minute. Right? Like they're like, we added theming to iOS for clients. Great.

• 1:52:46Alex Cranz?

  Thank you.

• 1:52:47Nilay Patel?

  Um, stuff that other platforms had forever, even though all these AI features are kind of the same. Like as everybody else, they've integrated into the operating system in better ways, have a better story to tell. Like, here's why it's useful as opposed to like, here's just the raw amount of compute that we can throw at a problem, which is basically how Google handles things. But I come back to this thing about the iPad and so they still don't know why they make this thing. They just don't know.

• 1:53:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, it gets increasingly cool without ever getting.

• 1:53:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:16David Pierce?

  More itself.

• 1:53:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that they make it because they sell them.

• 1:53:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:21Nilay Patel?

  And that's kind of, and it's like they're, they need to kickstart that somehow.

• 1:53:26Alex Cranz?

  Or do they? Because they sell them.

• 1:53:28Nilay Patel?

  That's true. I think the, my bold prediction here is the iPhone thing is heading towards a touchscreen on a Mac. Because you put the iPhone's display in a Mac, there's but one thing people are gonna ask to start doing with it and start touching it.

• 1:53:42David Pierce?

  Swipe.

• 1:53:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:43David Pierce?

  I just want to swipe TikTok in a tiny window on my Mac.

• 1:53:46Nilay Patel?

  I just want to respond to a Google notification directly on a mirrored iPhone window and immediately delete that message for no reason.

• 1:53:53David Pierce?

  It's the future.

• 1:53:54Nilay Patel?

  All right, is that it? Is that our show?

• 1:53:55David Pierce?

  That's it.

• 1:53:57Nilay Patel?

  Since six hours long, we have more. We're gonna go through all the betas that we're seeing.

• 1:54:02David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:54:02Nilay Patel?

  We'll run through additional features on Friday. But it says Monday.

• 1:54:06David Pierce?

  It says Monday. For, yeah, for Friday's show, we're gonna do sort of a cleanup because like I said, there's been a ton of new stuff that we've seen if people have been installing the betas. We have a lot more white paper reading to do where so we're gonna do a like everything we didn't talk about thing on Friday's show. So if there is stuff we didn't talk about.

• 1:54:24Nilay Patel?

  If you work in another company, don't make any news.

• 1:54:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, oh, my God, please. Honestly, I'm begging.

• 1:54:29Alex Cranz?

  Turn it off.

• 1:54:30David Pierce?

  We have to talk about the stupid Xbox and we have to talk about this. So the show is done. No more news this week.

• 1:54:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Allison, for joining us. We'll be back on Friday with more of this, which you love, and all the platforms you love the most. Well, that's it. That's where our chat's rocking.

• 1:54:51David Pierce?

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866VERGE11. The Vergecast 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.

• 1:55:11Speaker 08

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• 1:55:42Speaker 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.