AGI is whatever you want it to be

OpenAI announced its next big model, GPT-6 Astra, and also, by the way, that AGI is here now. Today on The Vergecast, we've got an all-star panel to break down the news of the week. First, senior AI reporter Hayden Field joins us to talk about our supposed AGI era and Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face. Then, our friend Joanna Stern pops in to talk about new Apple CEO John Ternus, old Apple CEO Tim Cook, and to, most importantly, speculate on the format of next week's Apple keynote. We wrap things up with a super-special lightning round from the IFA electronics show in Berlin. Senior reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy and editor Dominic Preston each pick out the five most interesting gadgets they saw at the show. And two more things: Vergecast producer Travis Larchuk pops in to tell his tale of identity theft woe and warn you that he isn't the one DMing you on Twitter to ask you to be on The Vergecast. Plus, Brendan Carr is a dummy. Further reading: OpenAI’s next big AI model has ‘entered the AGI era’ Researchers fear safety disaster ahead of OpenAI’s Astra release OpenAI delayed its new model’s development after the Hugging Face hack Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion John Ternus sends first memo as Apple CEO teasing a ‘huge launch next week’ Phil Schiller is leaving his biggest jobs at Apple Siri AI is already changing how I use my iPhone IFA 2026: the biggest tech and gadget announcements This might be the fanciest toothbrush launch ever. Anker’s new MindBase is an AI-powered brain for your smart home This NAS company wants to run your local smart home I want to wrap myself in Hue’s new Liane rope lights Homey just made the smart home controller I hoped Apple would The robot butler dream doesn’t have legs Here’s Xiaomi’s wide 18 Fold I held the first truly bezel-free phone Acer’s new concept hardware is a gaming handheld with a keyboard Lenovo’s new MacBook Neo competitor comes in two sizes and seven colors Packard Bell is back, and more colorful than ever. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Welcome00:46 Fake Travis warning03:01 OpenAI's Astra model05:45 Safeguards and delays08:55 Opaque recurrence fears13:08 What Astra does well18:08 Access tiers and rollout19:53 Nvidia buys Hugging Face23:04 Is this really AGI26:28 AGI vibes and Microsoft clause32:17 Apple event preview33:41 Ternus keynote politics39:43 Keynote Vibes Shift40:23 Tim Cook Era Review44:56 Services And Fees Machine47:15 Phil Schiller Steps Back49:52 Event Predictions Fold And AI55:43 Siri AI Real Use Cases58:32 Smart Home Display Rumors59:47 Bets And Keynote Structure01:05:19 Brendan Carr Is A Dummy01:09:23 IFA Lightning Round01:10:49 Philips Hue Smart Lighting01:11:03 Hue Rope Light Rave01:11:44 Sticker Shock Pricing01:13:03 Xiaomi Wide Foldable01:15:43 Dyson Camera Toothbrush01:20:31 Tecno Bezelless Concept01:22:42 Local AI Smart Home Hub01:27:09 MacBook Neo Clones01:29:35 Homey Dial Controller01:33:39 Acer DualPlay Handheld01:36:19 Dreame Humanoid Robot01:39:44 Packard Bell Revival01:42:17 Wrap Up And Credits Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:32Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the AGI era. We're in it. We were told that today by Greg Brockman. He's the main guy at OpenAI. It's a real thing we're going to talk about today. I'm your friend Neelai. David Amel is here.

• 1:42David Pierce?

  What's up? I'm back.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  I'm happy to have you, man. You're like a star of the show. Everyone loves you.

• 1:47David Pierce?

  I'm trying to stay as long as I can, you know? Having a good time.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Uh-uh. Don't try me with that. You're never leaving that studio. I'm going to live there forever. We have an all-star lineup today. Dom Preston and Jen Tui are going to be here to do a lightning-fast lightning round of all the gadgets from IFA. Joanna Stern is going to join us to talk about the end of the Tim Cook era, the dawn of the John Ternus era, and the Apple event next week. And then we're going to start with Hayden Field. Talk about OpenAI's big news, their new model, and the dawn of the AGI era. But first, Travis is here to warn you about identity theft. Travis, what's going on?

• 2:21Speaker 04

  I choose to believe you looped me in with the all-stars.

• 2:26David Pierce?

  Hey now, you're an all-star.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  You have a dilemma, you have a warning.

• 2:30Speaker 04

  I'm going to keep this short. Someone is impersonating me. I am one of the producers of The Vergecast, and several people have reached out to me on LinkedIn to say that I, it's not me, have contacted them, saying, "Do you want to be on The Vergecast?" And then this leads to a phishing scheme. I have no way to fix this problem because it's happening from multiple accounts, it's happening on Twitter, it's happening on Telegram. So I'm just here on this platform to tell you, I'm not that proactive to be reaching out to people on Twitter all the time. It's probably not me.

• 3:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, the fact that this is happening through LinkedIn makes me think that they're trying to get you in a phishing scam.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Well...

• 3:18David Pierce?

  Could be.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  So curious. No, it's just people screenshotting. They send me the screenshots, but I like what you're thinking. Also, person who's impersonating me, get in touch because you're a hard worker, you know?

• 3:31David Pierce?

  Maybe we should have them on the show.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  You know it's not a person, right? It is one of the cheapest models running on a mid-range Android phone in a server rack overseas.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  I'm open to that, too. No, no, no, no. Yeah, so anyway, I just wanted to put that out there. I am sorry if a fake me has reached out to you, listener or watcher of The Vergecast. I'm sorry, but also, it's not me.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Be warned, Travis Larchuk will never offer you a spot on The Vergecast.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  Never, ever.

• 4:00David Pierce?

  Let's get that Gemini Nano on the show.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  You'll know if it's me. I'll make some sort of heated rivalry or alias reference in my message.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Now that AI phone knows what to do.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Oh, no. I'll come up with something else.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  We'll come up with like a private key exchange system for Travis. It's going to be great.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  All right, I'm going to leave now.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  All right, don't be fooled by Travis reaching out to you on The Vergecast. It's a stern warning to everyone.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  All right, that was great. Please be on the lookout for fake Travis and real Travis, if you see him on the street. Hayden Field is here. Hayden?

• 4:33Speaker 05

  Hey, great to be here.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I am excited to talk to you because we were told earlier today that AGI is here. So it's the dawn of a new era.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  Yes, I was really surprised to hear him say that on the press call. And then later on, he kind of doubled down on it. He said, "For me personally, you know, we're there." So, you know, I thought he was trying to hedge, but he believes that we've pretty much made it.

• 4:56David Pierce?

  Does Demis Hassabis have to no longer say we're in the foothills, but now we are at the mountaintop of the Singularity?

• 5:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're going to hear way more nature metaphors for hiking through the AGI landscape.

• 5:08David Pierce?

  Hey, Claude is great at that. You know, they use all those little butterflies and whatever.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's how they watermark your text with like flowery metaphors about AGI. All right, let's just start with the basics. OpenAI announced the new model today. I was kind of surprised. We've heard about Astra before, they just basically just up and did it. Hayden, what's going on with the model itself?

• 5:27Speaker 05

  So yeah, today they announced Astra, and we did know about it before. You know, we had heard rumblings of it, but we didn't really know what it would be or what it would really specialize in. So they called it a generational leap in capability for cybersecurity, professional work, software engineering, science, and computer and browser use. And they really harked on the computer and browser use thing. They kept saying like, "It's not embarrassing anymore. It's not cringe to watch it do these things anymore. It can really do these things." And then they showed us a demo video during the press call of like all different types of knowledge workers using, you know, Astra via like a ChatGPT voice mode, saying like, "Oh, can you draw me a yellow circle for like design work?" Or, "Can you like change this legal briefing if you're a lawyer?"

• 6:12Speaker 05

  So it was interesting to see how much they're trying to, you know, really double down on this enterprise push, which makes sense because they're about to enter, you know, IPO time or, you know, depending on how the Apple lawsuit shakes out, I guess. But they're really being pressured to drive more revenue than ever before. So, you know, obviously, enterprise and coding are the two biggest drivers there they're going to try to lean into. But the problem is with the recent hugging face hack, obviously, that probably dismantled a lot of enterprise trust. Like, "Oh, sorry, our model, you know, hacked a rival lab, and we had no idea about it until they told the public that that had happened." So, you know, I think that they're really doing some damage control here.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  And so that's why they, you know, held a press call even a couple of days before launching this model, saying, "We did a lot of work on alignment, we did a lot of work on cybersecurity safeguards, here are the other things we're doing." It's kind of like an apology post before even being, you know, they're trying to get ahead of the cancellation, basically.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:16David Pierce?

  Did it feel like they worked with the government at all before this got released? Whatever happened to that whole era of like every single model has to be run through the government?

• 7:24Speaker 05

  Yes, they did do that. They said that, actually Brockman said that the Trump administration didn't have any changes for them to make as far as safeguards or anything, so.

• 7:33David Pierce?

  Oops, we're at AGI. We're not making any changes.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  I mean, Altman has been out, he was on Alex Heath's podcast, saying that they really considered the hugging face incident to be the first AI safety lapse. They took it seriously, they're pausing model training. How is that connected to Astra? Is that the next model they're pausing training on? Is it Astra needed to get realigned? What happened there?

• 7:56Speaker 05

  They actually delayed the release of Astra by what I think is a few weeks or a month due to the hugging face thing. So they slowed down training, they stopped training altogether for a little while, then they apparently just, you know, really slowed down the release of it so they could run more tests, introduce more safeguards, things like that. They also introduced new evaluations where they kind of tested Astra on the types of things that GPT-5.6 Sol would have failed at during the hugging face hack. Like, they did some hugging face hack-specific evaluations to see kind of how Astra would act, and they...

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Do you want to hack hugging face? Yes or no?

• 8:36Speaker 05

  Astro was like, apparently it never took the bait, whereas like GPT 5.6 Sol took the bait more than half the time, I believe.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 8:46David Pierce?

  It's a bigger deal if they hack Nvidia now. So, you know.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, we should come to this Nvidia. It's confirmed that they're going to buy Hugging Face, uh, which is a big deal in the sort of competitive landscape of open models and so on. But let's stay focused on Astro for, for one turn. Astro is a model that did the, they solved the unsolvable math problems. There's rumors that it was the model that was doing some other work. When you say they slowed down training and they came up with more evaluations, maybe I just don't understand enough, but Astro was complete and it was like doing things. Was that while it was still training or did they change the safeguards and the system prompts?

• 9:22Speaker 05

  They said that Astro wasn't the one that hacked Hugging Face. They said it wasn't involved. Now, you know, I don't know which model was, maybe another released unreleased model, or maybe it's some other previous iteration of Astro and they're just not, they're saying technically Astro wasn't involved. We're not really sure, but all we know is that they said Astro did not hack Hugging Face. So basically the messaging is telling us they stopped training for a while, they delayed the release of Astro and um, they introduced a ton more safeguards despite it not being involved in the hack. Now, maybe just this version of the model wasn't, or maybe it was a different unreleased model altogether. We're not really sure.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  What is truly called Astro is like the underlying root of this question. Was it the model in training or is it the model we have now that was finished after the delay in the safeguards? But does it seem like the security community is happy with the safeguards? Is happy with these changes?

• 10:18Speaker 05

  As for the safeguards and the evaluations, it seems like it's a little bit too early to tell because people are just now starting to look at the paper and um, check it out. But what I can tell you is that the security community is extremely upset about this thing called opaque recurrence. So basically with alignment, which basically means how well an AI system is aligned with human goals and interests, like is it secretly scheming or trying to be evil? So with alignment, the biggest tool you have in your toolbox for making sure an AI model isn't like secretly evil is watching its chain of thought, which is like a mental scratchpad. It's kind of like if you had a journal and you wrote every single one of your thoughts in there and then someone else was like looking over your shoulder. It's kind of a similar situation.

• 11:02Speaker 05

  And so people are upset because apparently according to reports, OpenAI allowed Astro to obfuscate its chain of thought in kind of a way that humans can't understand. So essentially allowing it to hide the way it's really thinking, which is.

• 11:18David Pierce?

  Why would they do that?

• 11:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. Apparently it might've made it more efficient. We're not really sure, but there's, there's a lot of uh, you know, think pieces coming out on this right now. There's a lot of Twitter threads by AI researchers talking about how worried they are about this. So that's the thing I'm watching right now. How worried all the people that I follow their research are about this specific thing? So, you know, whether the safety evaluations are good or whether they put a lot of locks on the cybersecurity stuff is one thing, but then the other matter is really just uh, are we able to control this model? And it looks like this is one thing that's really worrying people.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Right. Can you see what it's doing? Robert Hart has a piece for us about all this. Uh, we'll link it in the show notes. At the very end, like an OpenAI researcher is like, monitoring is fragile and unfortunately trending in a negative direction. And it's like, that's not good. Like, that doesn't seem good. That seems like the market for faster, more capable models is leading to techniques that implicate how, how much you can monitor what they're actually doing because you want them to be faster, more efficient. You want to make money ahead of your IPO. And that's where the industry should either regulate itself, which doesn't seem like it's happening, or someone else should. But Astro seems like they're just doing it anyway.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  It could be that. I mean, it's, it's also interesting because the chief scientist of OpenAI kind of got at this a little bit on their press call. Um, you know, but a lot of what he said was uh, kind of grandiose statements like um, you know, it's our job to make sure that, you know, AI benefits humanity, things like that. Um, but you know, people are really worried about this opaque recurrence thing. And so all the external third party researchers that I follow have been really um, you know, kind of trying to bring him to task about this and saying like, how can you think this is okay? Um, and just like kind of calling for transparency from OpenAI, which is the same thing they've been calling for in light of the Hugging Face uh, attack as well.

• 13:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, seems especially strange to me that they would make that opaque when the only way that they were able to trace the Hugging Face attack was seeing the little agents talking to each other, being like, oh my gosh, we can leave notes here. We can talk to each other through this. Like, if that doesn't exist, wouldn't, they just called, they called the Hugging Face attack like one of the biggest changes in AI in history. And now they're making it more opaque? That seems strange.

• 13:38Speaker 05

  Right. Or at least not stopping it from becoming more opaque, maybe. Um, so yeah, we'll see. I think this is going to be a really big thing to watch. I've actually been hearing a lot about like problems with chain of thought for the past year or so, you know, there are times when AI models will use weird words um, as kind of like a code, like they'll say like fudge or marinade or um, vantage, like these words that we know, but they will use them in a way that isn't the way we use them. And people are still kind of decoding how they're using them and what that means in their like language. And there's other times when they enter into this thing called neural ease, which is like, yeah, it's, it's, it's like truly indecipherable to humans. And so I think, you know, everyone's been worried about this, the potential of this

• 14:22Speaker 05

  happening for a while, and now it looks like it is. And it, you know, they're pushing for OpenAI to maybe do something about it, but we'll have to see, you know, what their statement is.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  So an unmonitored opaque system that can coordinate hacks on other companies. Okay. What can it do that's good?

• 14:41Speaker 05

  The good things it can do are, and I think they front loaded this because it's good PR, um, science, great at science, great at math. Um, it's apparently made a lot of advancements and like really difficult to solve math problems and therefore a lot of cool science advancements are a potential for this. Um, they also said it's really great at creating like polished documents, uh, spreadsheets, uh, you know, PowerPoint presentations, things like that. They said it's great for all different types of knowledge work when it comes to staying on task, kind of deciphering your intent. If you weren't that clear about it, apparently it's better at deciphering kind of what you meant by that, kind of like a good personal assistant would instead of like a bad personal assistant, you know, that would need you to spell things out.

• 15:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Like an emotionally distant personal assistant that doesn't care about you really. Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 05

  Or, or like just doesn't have good common sense, which is what AI has been to date, you know? So, you know, we'll see. I mean, yeah, there's apparently a lot of great things about it, but I think I'm going to have to test it out for myself because, you know, if you're calling it potentially AGI, uh, you know, I, I think it'll be interesting to see how it feels as a user and to see if it's a big step forward or if it's kind of more of the same and, you know, decipher, decidedly not AGI. We'll see.

• 15:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, we were talking a little bit about this off show, but do you feel like most of the benefits of this model only come from using it on your computer? Because I feel like people are going to need to use these models on their phones because that's when people are usually generally computing. But it feels to me like all the benefits of this are computer use, business enterprise stuff, PowerPoint presentations, as you said. Is that AGI if most of the benefits are just on your laptop?

• 16:23Speaker 05

  I think that could be the case. I mean, they pushed browser use as well a lot, but I mean, I don't know. I, I wouldn't really trust that on my phone per se. I don't know how good it will be. We'll have to test it out, but you know, apparently it's also just a lot better at uh, you know, actually understanding what you mean and what you want. But I don't think we're going to see a ton of the benefits, like you said, unless you're on the computer, especially because, you know, they are courting enterprise customers. That's the big moneymaker here. Um, therefore the first release of Astro was actually to like this small group of approved uh, cybersecurity defenders, they call them. So like, you know, big organizations that have gaps to fill in their systems. So, you know, I think they're going to be getting the most use out of it.

• 17:07Speaker 05

  It's kind of like the Mythos um, situation for Anthropic in which, you know, there's a watered down version that we all get to use, but the top cybersecurity capabilities mostly go to these big organizations. And that's actually another potential issue that a lot of researchers have been talking about, saying like, you know, yeah, it's great for these um, big platforms like your bank or um, your healthcare facility to plug gaps in their systems. But also, um, does that mean that small businesses, locally run healthcare clinics, um, you know, like your local retailer are going to see a huge spike in cyber attacks without really any way to defend themselves? Probably.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Again, I want to come back. There's can do good stuff, too, right?

• 17:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, like, you know, the science and math things I think are really big. I love whenever these models are used for drug discovery. I think that's really cool. You know, this one, they didn't mention drug discovery that I saw, but you know, science advancement, hopefully that involves that, or at least, you know, helps inform it. And then, yeah, just the knowledge work potential seems to be good for a lot of people. And, you know, they did in the demo video show across a lot of different industries, you know, things that were pretty promising if the demo, again, we're gonna have to test it out because you know how demo videos are, like, sometimes they kind of are showing the the highlight reel. So we'll see.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's another big model release this week, right? Fable and Mythos were released by Anthropic this week. Put this up against that, like Anthropic did not announce AGI.

• 18:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Are these all the same class of model? Are they similarly capable? Did OpenAI just leap ahead? I know you're saying we have to actually see what they can do, but where's the where's the conventional wisdom right now about where all these models are?

• 18:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, it seems like they're not that far off from each other. I mean, like, you know, again, the thing is, it's tough because evaluations, a lot of times you can kind of optimize for performing well on evaluations, kind of like if you're in a class when you're just studying for the SAT instead of like just studying to learn. So, you know, I mean, like, I don't put that much stock in how they perform on evaluations, especially because you can kind of cherry pick stuff like that. But, you know, I did see a couple of jokes already about Astra on my feed today that were like, oh, they say we've reached AGI, but it only performed this percentage on this evaluation. So, you know, it seems like I, I don't know that it's anything way crazier than Anthropic's, you know, rival model. But again, we'll, we'll check it out when we actually test it.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  One of the things I'm really curious about, just like broadly, is whether or not the models or products, right? Like, they're good at certain things, but they're not the products, like ChatGPT and Claude Co., like, those are the products that people use. Do the models immediately make the products better? Like, there's some disconnect between OpenAI jumps ahead by announcing the new model and we're also using ChatGPT, like, maybe asking it the same questions we were asking yesterday, and it, maybe it's a little bit better answer. Like, do you know what I mean? Is, are the products gonna change now? Because that's the big turn that all these companies need to make.

• 20:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think the products are gonna change right away, but it really, the, the amount of benefit you're gonna see is, you know, how much of a power user you are, right? Because, you know, for, at first, this is rolling out to a select set of enterprise organizations, then it's gonna roll out to paying users, but the watered down version, but still, you know, just minus the top crazy cybersecurity capabilities. It's gonna be like pro, business, enterprise, education. And then, you know, the free, they didn't mention free yet, that they'll probably be last to get it, if at all. We'll see. I mean, I think that it's gonna make the product better if you get access to it. That's the thing.

• 20:55Speaker 05

  I think if you're a user who uses the product and you have the tier, the subscription tier or whatever that lets you access this model, great. But even if you can't access it, the hard part is the more you pay, the more you'll get, because obviously, you know, you have a certain amount of tokens to use, you have a certain amount of usage, and like, you know, if you have the lowest subscription tier, maybe you get a great use out of this model for a little bit, and then you're cut off. So, and it reverts back to a lower one. So, you know, it, it kind of depends in that way.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's quickly talk about Hugging Face. We mentioned it earlier. Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion. This has been rumored for quite a while. I think it was first scooped in the information. Hugging Face is, obviously, it's more famous now because it's the thing that was hacked by OpenAI's models. They did set up a message board. There is a lot of drama around interpreting what happened there. We'll set that aside. Nvidia is buying Hugging Face because it's where all the open source models, open weight models are stored. It's the big repository for them. This feels to me almost like a Nvidia hedging against the dominance of Anthropic and OpenAI, right? They want to own the thing where all the open models are so that there's always demand for their chips instead of, I don't know, OpenAI shipping jalapeno its own inference

• 22:07Speaker 02

  chip and moving away from Nvidia. Is that, am I just doing a conspiracy theory, or is there something else happening here?

• 22:12Speaker 05

  No, I think that's true. I mean, you know, I think they're diversifying. And, you know, as they're seeing all these other AI labs trying to bring ship making in-house and, you know, go big on hardware and invest largely on that, they're trying to diversify as well. You know, they're like, oh, if you guys can do that, then we can do the same thing, but in reverse. So that's what I think is happening here. And they certainly have the money to do it.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Is this just like Microsoft on GitHub? Or is there something deeper happening here?

• 22:42Speaker 05

  I think of it as that, yeah. It's often compared, when you're trying to kind of like explain Hugging Face in layman's terms, it sometimes is compared to GitHub. So I think it is pretty similar to that. It's just like, you know, it's, it's the type of thing where the name of the company sometimes like raises eyebrows. It's, it's a hilarious name, but it's the type of thing where like, you know, a household may not know what that is, except for the hack that just happened. But in AI, yeah, it's as, as a big of a deal as any like AI library could be. I mean, it's, you think about it probably, you know, every couple of days, if not every day. So I think, yeah, it's, it's pretty similar to the Microsoft buying GitHub situation.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Do you think this has any big implications for OpenAI or Anthropic or Google?

• 23:25Speaker 05

  You know, we'll see how, what happens after the acquisition. I feel like anytime an acquisition happens, you're gonna see what changes with the company later. And, you know, whatever promises the acquiring company makes right away, it, it may not pan out. We have to see. So I think right now, it's just a wait and see situation with Hugging Face. I mean, it's, it's mostly, I think, I've been thinking a lot about the business and enterprise kind of implications of this, of just Nvidia feeling that they have to diversify. I mean, Nvidia has been in a big heavyweight in terms of investing and in diversifying its portfolio for a long time. You know, I once tried to interview the person that decides what they invest in, because

• 24:08Speaker 05

  they were always like pretty first to invest in a lot of small startups that a lot of people weren't taking notice of, and then those would like rocket up. So, you know, it's interesting to see them say, okay, we're not, yeah, we have all these startups and we're kind of rocking them up, and now let's also invest in something that like, you know, the AI industry uses every day and diversify in that way. So I think it's kind of just like a reverse diversification compared to what all the OpenAI and Anthropic labs are doing, yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hayden, you and I have talked a lot about AGI on many shows. It's always drama when, when you and I talk to each other.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  The working definition has been better than humans at economically viable tasks, or some riff on that, right? Better than humans at things that make money. If we're in the AGI era now, is OpenAI saying this model is better at humans at economically viable things? Because that's when the jobs start to go away. So is that, is that the claim they're making?

• 25:01Speaker 05

  Yes, that seems to be what he's saying here, because, I mean, they've always been, he, he did start, I should say, he did start out, before he said the AGI thing, he said, you know, everyone has a different definition of AGI. We used to think when we started OpenAI that there would be one moment that everyone would agree, okay, we've hit AGI, but it's actually hasn't happened that way, and it's a lot more fuzzy and gray, he said. So that was his disclaimer. But then he went on to say, yeah, if we fast forward a couple of years and we look back and say, when was it really that AGI was created? I think it's going to be about this time, and I think it might be about this model. Then he doubled down later in the call and he said, for me personally, I do think we're there. I think it's not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era.

• 25:43David Pierce?

  He feels the AGI.

• 25:45Speaker 05

  He feels the AGI. He is, you know, they've been touting the knowledge work capabilities of this model a ton. You know, that's what the whole demo video focused on. They're saying, you know, whether you're in legal, you're in design, you're in marketing, whatever, you're in science, it can, you know, do your job and help you in your job. They're framing it as help you in your job, but on the other side of the coin is it can do your job equally or better than you is, is what they're kind of, you know, implying for enterprise users. So I think, you know, yeah, the, the definition has always been equal or surpass human abilities. And it seems like, you know, they're really making the play that this, that, that we're at that now.

• 26:26David Pierce?

  This model feels like a particularly big enterprise push to me. Like, it feels like they're really targeting this at, at big corporations, not at consumers.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Now is the time to not lose to Anthropic for this. If David Pierce was here, he would be pounding the table and screaming, AI is business software, and we should just get over it. Because that's what he says every time we talk about it. And it feels like this moment is very much, oh, it's gonna be business software. This is a bunch of CIOs are gonna buy this and deploy it across big organizations. And somewhere, as Hayden's saying, the free models will get updated, or the free products will get updated along the line.

• 26:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think you gotta look at where the money is flowing from, and it's enterprise.

• 27:03David Pierce?

  It's all going to enterprise.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hayden, this is great. Thank you so much for being on. Well, let us know when you decide if it's AGI and we'll have you, we'll have you back.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  Will do, can't wait. Thanks.

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• 28:50Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. Joanna Stern is with us. Hey, Joanna.

• 28:52Speaker 08

  Hi, Eli. Hi, David.

• 28:54David Pierce?

  Hello, hello.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  I really wanted you to talk about Apple, and we should talk about Apple. We should preview the event next week. We should talk about John Turnus's first 48 hours as CEO. But Joanna, you were just saying you were also on this OpenAI call where they just casually announced AGI. What do you think? Is it here?

• 29:09Speaker 08

  It feels like it was a moment in tech history that is either going to go down as one of the funniest moments in my life of covering tech or one of the darkest, saddest changes for humanity. Or maybe it's going to be someplace in between. But right now, I'm leaning towards the first because it was crazy. I just thought it was crazy. They held this call today to tell reporters what they're announcing, which is GPT-6, Astra is here. But then Greg Brockman was really clear that he believes this is the beginning of the AGI era. He actually ended the call saying, welcome to the AGI era. He said that to everyone.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 29:48Speaker 08

  And when another reporter, kind of later in the call, they described all the capabilities of the model and didn't give totally concrete examples. There's this video that they showed showing the things you can do with it, but it kind of looked like the things I can already do with it. Let's leave that aside for a minute. But so a reporter kind of asks him about the, can you really say this is AGI? There's this stuff that has to do with Microsoft. He says, you know, are you calling this AGI right now? Like, is this what you're saying, right? Like, we all want to know what the headline is. And I'm going to read to you what Brockman says back. He says, so ideally, I leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves if this qualifies for them.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  The reader.

• 30:30Speaker 08

  The reader, yes. For me personally, I do think we're there. I think there's a pretty good argument for it. Sorry, I'm using Apple's transcription, and it's quite bad. It says, there's a, I do, I think here's a pretty good argument for it. I think it's, he was saying theirs.

• 30:51Speaker 08

  Like, that, that, yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. Let's call it AGI. It's true. You mentioned Microsoft. They, you know, famously OpenAI and Microsoft have been intertangled with each other forever. There's some clause in their contract that when AGI is discovered, everything changes, right?

• 31:06Speaker 08

  Well, he pushed back on that. I can, I can read you the quote on that. He said that, we talked, he says, there's no contractual AGI triggering anymore. So that's, and this is a quote, so that's actually not a relevant concept.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Sure. Okay.

• 31:23David Pierce?

  So that's why they announced it. Okay.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  But also, like, humanity might be over. Yeah, you can say whatever you want.

• 31:29Speaker 08

  Right. And that's what was kind of crazy to me, especially as like I read this quote back, which is like, the reader can decide. And I know you guys have talked about this for a long time on the podcast. Like, is the AGI governing board? Is it you? Is it my dog? Like, I just kind of kept being like, anyone right now can say it's AGI? Like, my dog was sitting in the room like, browser, AGI. You called it. Like, okay. Um, it's a vibes thing. Like, it just feels like it was a vibes announcement. For an IPO, that's probably coming.

• 32:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's what I was going to ask.

• 32:02Speaker 08

  This is really just the feeling I had was like, there's a rush to say this right now. This was something that they didn't tell reporters about till yesterday to get on this call. Like, it just feel like last night, Trulie was going to bed, and I was like, yeah, sure, I can make this meeting. Um, it just, it felt very rushed. They want to get this out. Of course, they've been talking about this model. There's been, you know, the conversations they've had with the government. There's been the testing of it. They're also saying, you know, there was a lot of good time in this call spent talking about the alignment, the testing. So props to them for focusing on that. But it just, it does feel very, very rushed. Like, there's a, there's a reason they wanted this out.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  And then they wanted to say AGI. I mean, Joanna, you're as deep in AI as anyone. Do you feel like AGI is here? I mean, you can call it too.

• 32:45Speaker 08

  I, I could call it too. And look, I know it's like, people will say to me like, oh, you're going to point to all the things that are just so bad still with AI, which is what I want to do right now. And people will say, well, that doesn't count all the great things that you can still do and the computer control and that it can work at superhuman speeds on things that humans have never been able to do. And that's true, but you still have the whole reality that right now, some of this is still so dumb.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems like an important piece of the puzzle.

• 33:15Speaker 08

  Look, he's calling it, and he's calling it, and he's saying it's the beginning of the AGI era, which means he thinks there's going to be some big discoveries and big, big progress that's going to come out of this model. And I'm excited to see that, too. So I'm like, very pessimistic, but also like, I want to be optimistic about some of it.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  I have one more question to this, and we should talk about Apple because it's interesting to call the beginning of the AGI era right before Apple announces an iPhone. There's some connection there that's interesting to talk about. Is this just Brockman doing the same move as Demis Hassabis, saying that we're in the foothills of the singularity, which is just a phrase? Like, he hasn't declared AGI. He's saying we're in the AGI era, which presumably begins around AGI.

• 33:55Speaker 08

  In the foothills. You're right.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 08

  That's why it was funny. Like, there was just like this couching, right? Like, I'm not going to say it, but I'm going to say it. There was a lot of couch, like, the reader should decide, but I think, you know. And look, he's the president of OpenAI, arguably the most important person at OpenAI right now. I mean, he is the one controlling all these teams. So that, that is a super significant thing. Like, honestly, to me, I believe it more from him versus Altman, who's been saying things like this for a long time, right? So, okay, like, but you're still waffling, and yeah.

• 34:31David Pierce?

  I imagine when, that when they needed funding, they needed to keep saying, we need more funding so we can get to AGI, right? And now that they're about to IPO, they're like, well, now our IPO makes sense. You should all invest after we're officially public. That does seem to signal that that's going to happen fairly soon.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  We'll see.

• 34:49Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  All right. The reason I connected that to Apple is that we are a week away from an iPhone event. We assume that there will be a folding phone. There'll obviously be new Pro phones. I'm actually curious to see if they do the regular phone at the same time. There's a lot of rumors that they won't just do a regular iPhone and ship it at the same time as the other ones. We're expecting kind of other hardware. There's been a lot of rumors that it'll be a big launch. John Ternus, the new CEO, said it's going to be a huge launch in his first memo to staff. What do you make of this? Does Apple have to respond to their former partner, OpenAI, saying that we're in the AGI era? Because that's the thing that kills the phone, right?

• 35:25Speaker 08

  I don't think they, I think, I think the timing, like David's hint, is this an IPO timing situation? I don't, I think they probably want to have something that they could dominate in the news next week, but like, there's always something connected to OpenAI next week or, you know, in the news.

• 35:44Speaker 08

  I don't think Apple's going to change a thing about what's happening in their presentation. That's been on lock, I'm sure.

• 35:49David Pierce?

  What about their ChatGPT integration contract? Because the last I looked, the plugin with ChatGPT was still in the settings. And I feel like at some point, they're going to kill that off.

• 36:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's still there. It's still their latest build in iOS 27, too. And you can, like, adjust turning it on and off.

• 36:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was a weird choice.

• 36:08Speaker 08

  I mean, do you know anyone who uses that? Like, have you ever met a person that uses that?

• 36:13David Pierce?

  No, not a single person. Not a single person.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  We'll just start at the start. Uh, John Ternus is now CEO of Apple. This was the big transition week, long planned. Tim Cook said goodbye. He, his last meeting is his last act as CEO was in the retail store on the Apple campus, which I thought was, it was very touching. He was like, this is the thing I care about the most. We can recap the Tim Cook era. We can talk about the beginning of the Ternus era. Joanna, do you think Apple's going to be meaningfully different with a different CEO?

• 36:41Speaker 08

  I do think in the long term, they will be. I keep wondering about this event. And I started going back through some of John Ternus's appearances and keynotes. And I really just wonder what the format of this is going to be. I want to pick both of your brains on it because. We had such a clear format in the world of the Steve Jobs keynote, right? We just like, if you watched it, you knew it was just like, everything was so Steve Jobs about those, his keynotes. Then we move into the Tim Cook era. We had a little bit of a continuation of it, but many years, I'd say probably what? Probably five to eight years. I didn't do the math, but we were, they had big stuff done in the Moscone Center and they did big stuff on, in different theaters where it was live.

• 37:26Speaker 08

  But then COVID happens and they are able to go and pivot to the recorded streamed presentation, which honestly, I think was a blessing for Tim Cook. It was like, kind of great that COVID happened for Tim Cook because then they could move to this, this way, right?

• 37:40Speaker 02

  In the context of keynote presentations.

• 37:42Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Just, yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 08

  Yes, asterisk. And then they can move to this presentation, which was really good for Cook. He could tee up all these great people. These people didn't have to be great on stage. John Ternus was one of them, obviously Craig being another, but then lots of other executives at the company that we don't really often see. And we wouldn't see kind of come on stage in the fast ways that they do it in the, in the edited video. And so now I'm really wondering, what does it look like for the John Ternus keynote? Do they keep the streaming, which Apple has been, has been very successful for Apple? Or are they going to go back to some hybrid of this? Like, how, how is it going to look? And is he going to be a showman because he loves talking about products?

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I really appreciate it. At the last Apple event, you and I are sitting next to each other. They had the pre-recorded thing and they brought the press to a live Q and A with some of their executives to talk more about AI. David, I think you were there, you were like sitting right in front of us.

• 38:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  I just thought, okay, this is kind of best of both worlds. I think Apple is very committed to their infomercials. They will tell you that those things get more views and they travel more than anything that they could ever do live and they love them. They've gotten in trouble. They faked the Siri demo ages ago in one of them and they had to walk it all back. So I think they, they're, they're learning how to bring some of that live experience back. I don't think that will be like, in this event, my curiosity is how much does Ternus talk?

• 39:02Speaker 08

  Right.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  He's the product person. He's the product CEO. Tim Cook hasn't really introduced a product in some time, if I recall, right? He's done the big intro. He's so excited to be here and then it's off to the races with 50 different people. And I think that reflects how Tim has managed the company, like to some huge extent that that is how he's, all these other people make the products. I'm curious if Ternus is the one who introduces the folding iPhone, right? And he's like, I'm the product visionary here. I'm the best marketer for this product. Cause that is a thing that you haven't had since Steve Jobs.

• 39:33David Pierce?

  I get the feeling that he won't. I'm not really sure why. I feel like it's, uh, it's, they've set a bit of a precedent that there's an intro from the CEO. I think John Ternus will intro the show. Everyone will clap and get excited, but I think he'll pass it off to all of those other execs that are still the ones introducing the new chips, the new hardware. I mean, this was one of his babies, so there's a chance that he gets excited about it and he'll probably, and the keynote talking about it, but I don't know. I'm, I don't feel like he's going to be the one to announce it. That's just a guess.

• 40:03Speaker 08

  I don't know if he'll be the one to announce it, but that's where I'm going with that. Jobs just famously held up products, right? And I mean, I think there were a couple of times where Cook would hold the product up at the end. I, I think there's going to be a moment where we do see Ternus with the folding phone, whether it's a photo moment at the end or comes on stage in the middle. Like I just, I, I just got this feeling like that he's going to want to make a mark in a different way than Cook had on these presentations.

• 40:30David Pierce?

  The question is, how does that work when you have these pre-recorded videos, you know? Like what they've done previously, I think last year in the Steve Jobs theater, Tim Cook comes on stage, they don't broadcast this. They just talk to the press and then they play the video. We all sit in a movie theater together for an hour for some reason. Everyone else sees that in the world. Tim Cook comes back on stage, they leave. How do they do this hybrid situation? Maybe they only show the press the phone and they don't show the rest of the world the phone?

• 40:58Speaker 08

  Or, or the trillion dollar company can figure out how to break from a recorded video into a live video.

• 41:08David Pierce?

  We need AGI for that.

• 41:08Speaker 08

  I'm just saying, you know, technology is not the hold up here.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  It's going to be AI avatars. The AGI era is here. AI Ternus is going to hold up an AI phone. It's going to be amazing. It's funny, you know, you can read, overread way too much in Apple keynotes. I'm sure we have listeners who are asking why we would overanalyze an Apple keynote and its staging in a way that you would never overanalyze the staging of a Samsung keynote or a Google keynote. And the only thing I would offer you is it's because it's real. Like Apple keynotes are political in this specific way. The best example I can give you of this is famously, uh, Steve Jobs signaled that he was going to fire Tony Fadell by deleting his name from the contacts list in the very first iPhone keynote. Like this was like a coded mafia message.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  And if you, if you read Mark Gurman, who constantly is talking about the palace intrigue of Apple, who they feature in the keynotes, it actually reflects the politics of the organization in a way that like, I don't even think Google knows what's going to happen in the keynote until 20 minutes before they start.

• 42:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Right? Like is Demis going to say, we're in the foothills of the singularity? Like, who knows? Like, let's get out there, have a good time, everybody. Like, it's just like a very different vibe.

• 42:20Speaker 08

  And it's like polished by the top people at Apple, right? The CEO is in the keynote script and working through, I mean, that's how Jobs did it. Job, and so I, I don't think it's crazy that we're talking about it. I think this whole podcast should be two hours just talking.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Just over analyzing the Apple keynote. It's like the way we overanalyze the invites. I mean, like they know, they're, they're trying to be all Taylor Swift and like leave the Easter eggs. I don't know if they're as successful at it, but this is the turn, right? Is we're talking about John Ternus, the product CEO. Is he going to take ownership of the product during the presentation in a way that Cook really didn't take ownership? And I think that is, you know, we should look back a little bit on the Cook era. It has been a remarkable run for him as CEO. There's been some big swings, some big misses. Apple services exist in a way that like did not exist before Tim Cook just realized that he was out of people to sell iPhones to and turned on a services business that reset the entire app economy. AirPods happened on his watch.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  The removal of the headphone jack happened on Tim Cook's watch.

• 43:25David Pierce?

  The courage.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  The Apple watch, which I will never forget that event, which was live and featured Bono and a lengthy explanation of how the digital crown would be the next great input device, which was just, in that moment, I was like, are you guys serious about this? There was just like something about Tim where he needed at first to do a Steve Jobs style product introduction and needed to prove that Apple still had its spirit inside of it. And then it stopped and it became, Apple became pretty corporate and became all about scale and like fees. I'm wondering, Jenna, where would you mark that transition or do you think that transition happened?

• 44:04Speaker 08

  That's, I mean, did it happen?

• 44:05Speaker 02

  I think so. I think a lot of, I think a lot of our readers.

• 44:08Speaker 08

  Oh, a hundred percent it happened. I think first of all, like the launch of Apple TV was a big moment on that timeline. Like that's a huge, a huge moment for the services shift in that he wanted Apple to be this entertainment company because everyone else was an entertainment company as well, a content company. Yeah, I guess you mark it at the Apple watch, but, or AirPods as the expansion that goes beyond the iPhone, because all of this is just, right? As famously we've talked about for the decade now, which is the iPhone is the center of this economy for them. And what are the other pieces that we can get people to come into the ecosystem? It is the center of the walled garden. And so I think you put it with these other devices, I think.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. David, what do you think?

• 44:50David Pierce?

  It does feel to me that there was a bit of a shift, maybe five or six years ago, more directed towards hardware engineering again, because before that, we had the Apple Watch Edition Edition. We had a lot of Hermes stuff. We had gold. We had all that stuff. Apple was kind of seen as this luxury company. It's not not a luxury company now, but it feels that in, you know, ever since Apple silicon, ever since the new MacBook Pros with ports, what a concept. We're actually getting hardware for a good price. That's very focused around the hardware. And I don't know how much of that was a John Ternus decision, but it seems to me that they have pivoted a little bit from being this like luxury fashion company, more towards,

• 45:35David Pierce?

  back towards the, the old kind of Apple hardware stuff.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's interesting you bring this up because that maybe isn't Tim Cook's doing. It's more Johnny Ive's leaving.

• 45:46David Pierce?

  Fair. It's very fair.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  I mean, this, this might be the single biggest success for Tim Cook is that he managed Johnny Ive out of the company.

• 45:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Without a catastrophe. And you could maybe argue that there is a catastrophe and like liquid glass exists and like, oh, like.

• 46:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, he managed that out of the company too, or at least he got the guy out.

• 46:05Speaker 08

  But it's funny, actually, David, you maybe look up two things. It really is around 2019, 2020, where there's the shift. Two things happened around that time. The shift to Apple silicon, Apple TV streaming plus whatever it was called. It was Apple TV plus, right?

• 46:21David Pierce?

  Apple TV on the Apple TV and Apple TV.

• 46:23Speaker 08

  Yeah, Apple TV streaming plus on the, on the box.

• 46:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 08

  And those things, I think marked, we're talking about an ecosystem change as an expansion into the services. And that's just six years ago. That's, I think, that feels right. I think your five to six year mark stuff feels right.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that services business is a huge deal.

• 46:43Speaker 08

  Yeah. And that, and to be clear, like the Apple, the Apple watch and AirPods predated that.

• 46:48David Pierce?

  Which the Apple watch felt more luxury when it first came out.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Yes. If you remember, I mean, that was an Ive project and he had brought in a bunch of fashion people into the company. I will never forget like, hearing old guard Apple people derisively refer to the fashion executives was a thing that would happen because there were a lot of fashion executives rolling around Apple. And there was a moment where it felt like. They had, they had taken winning for granted, or they'd taken the idea that they made the best hardware for granted, or the best products for granted.

• 47:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  And now they would be this lifestyle thing. And yeah, Johnny, I believe is all the fashion people leave and like the MacBooks get ports again.

• 47:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  And like, it's, it's as direct as it can be. But right next to that, as Joanna's saying, is, oh, boy, we make a lot of money on Candy Crush whales. And to obscure the fact that a huge portion of our revenue is taking 30% from apps in particular games. We'll make a TV show or two. Have you met Reese Witherspoon? Like, there's something about that that is just very different in Apple's conception of itself. That is, I think will be forever the big mark of the Tim Cook era.

• 47:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Because they, they became a business that, that charged a lot of fees. And that, again, they hit it with celebrities. But that engine is fees. It's iCloud service fees. It's the App Store fees. It's all the problems they got into developers and regulators around those fees. It is the endless forever lawsuit with Epic, which will reach some conclusions someday, but not today. Like, that is a, a kind of fight that Apple got into in an almost existential way. They never backed down an inch on wanting to collect those fees. And I, it's probably under remarked in the Tim Cook era, but it is the, it's the driver of their market cap in the, the realist way.

• 48:34David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it really feels like they're trying to double down on their services too. Like, they need to get more and more people into Apple One. I think that's why they're focused so hard on Apple TV and maybe not as much as on Apple Fitness, because they're kind of scaling that back a little bit. But a lot of their services, Google is trying to catch up to Apple One's value. You know, I don't think that the Fitbit Air Gemini integration for $10 a month is meant to be a product that gets sold at an individual level. They want to sell as many microservices as possible in one big bundle. And I think that's what Apple is particularly good at at the moment, is each of their microservices are actually worth a decent amount of money. So you buy Apple One, you have these recurring revenue customers for quite a while.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think we're, we're going to see like a leasing program with these new phones.

• 49:19David Pierce?

  Right.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Apple is just becoming a subscription company.

• 49:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. Your life as a subscription.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  And that, again, this is, this is Tim Cook legacy. He revitalized the, the business of the company to be about recurring revenue, to be about, he started a credit card. Like, all of that happened in the Tim Cook era. I just try to imagine Steve Jobs sitting down with Goldman Sachs and being like, we're, we're going to do a co-branded credit, like.

• 49:42David Pierce?

  That doesn't.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Like, I can't talk to you. Like, you, I just don't think that would have happened. There's one other executive I want to talk about really quickly. It was announced quietly by Apple this week that Phil Schiller would be leaving his biggest jobs at Apple. He's still on the executive page as an Apple fellow, but Eddie Q is not going to run the App Store, which is a thing Phil had been doing and spending most of his time on. He's still on the executive leadership page. It very much seems like there's a bat phone to Phil if you need him. But he's, he's just not in the day to day. Joanna, you and I have interacted with Phil lots and lots and lots over the years. My relationship with him has been pretty spiky and it has since warmed up because now we're both just old guys. Like, we're like, who are these, who are these YouTubers?

• 50:21Speaker 08

  Same here, same here. I have lots of memories of, of being on the other side of the table from Phil Schiller.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that one feels as big to me as anything. Like, he, he's old school.

• 50:32Speaker 08

  He's old school. He had the courage. We know he was the one with the courage.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  If you want to know why Phil Schiller and I had a spiky relationship, it's because he, he was the one who took ownership of, and had been Jack from phones.

• 50:42Speaker 08

  I totally agree. I think, look, there's this old guard of people who have been at Apple since the days of Jobs. They have made it through the Cook era and some, it seems, will definitely be here for the first few years, if not longer, of, of the Ternus era. And Schiller seems to not be one of those people. Mostly, I assume, is he's had a long time at the company.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a long time.

• 51:05Speaker 08

  He's older. He's an older gentleman.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  This is the man who introduced Wi-Fi at the first iBook. Dave Pearce, I tell you this all the time. He did it by jumping off the stage and onto a mattress, holding an iBook, downloading. Like, this is a long time.

• 51:17David Pierce?

  That gif is so good.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  It's very good.

• 51:20David Pierce?

  It's very good.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  But you're right about this old guard. I mean, Ternus is looking at a totally different set of executives, the exception of Eddie Q and Greg Josweck. Greg Josweck is the head of marketing now. He, he basically replaced Schiller. He's got some deputies that you've seen on these videos as well. Like, Kayanne Drance is like on all the Apple event videos. She seems very senior at the company as well. And you just kind of wonder, are those two going to be next in some way, or do they have a long run? I mean, we, Joanna, I think we see Jaws at every Apple event. He, he's in it, right? Like, he's, he's in the game.

• 51:51Speaker 08

  He's fully in it. And when, David, when you said before, is Ternus going to announce the Fold? I think it's the question, is it Ternus or is it Jaws? Jaws always does the iPhone Pro. He always does the Pro. You watch last 10 years. He, yeah, he always is talking the camera specs. Like, is that going to, oh, maybe he doesn't do the Fold because it's going to have to, they're going to have to address.

• 52:10David Pierce?

  I'm curious if they do a one more thing for the Fold, because they still have to make a bunch of, kind of, a bunch of noise about the Pros, right? If the, if the event is about the Pros, it's about maybe some AirPods 5. Do they do it as a one more thing? Is it a big enough deal?

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's, let's talk about what we're expecting from the event, right? I mean, so it's the end of an era and it's like, you can talk about Tim Cook a lot, but my perspective on it is that as a business executive, he is singular. As a person people had an emotional connection to, he's a cipher. It, it doesn't feel like the, our audience was like, oh, no, not Tim Cook going, how will Apple ever recover? And they're like, well, the guy who deals with Donald Trump is still in that job and that's their reaction to him. And he's going to get paid a lot, by the way. It's like $47 million a year to still be the guy who Donald Trump talks to.

• 52:59David Pierce?

  Barely less.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  I, I, I wouldn't have, I don't think I would have taken 40. I would have had to round me up to 50 to be the Donald Trump whisperer for Apple. But next week, we're expecting, obviously, the folding phone and the sort of wide form factor. There's been some case leaks already. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 12, Ultra 4, AirPods 5. So the iPhone ecosystem, right? We're expecting a rev of the iPhone ecosystem. I don't think we're expecting MacBooks. I don't think we're expecting iPads.

• 53:26David Pierce?

  Probably not till November, October, November would be my guess.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  A big question I have here is how much AI are they going to talk about? Because they're going to launch Siri AI with iOS 27.

• 53:36David Pierce?

  True.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  And that's going to have to be a big part of the phone.

• 53:38Speaker 08

  Well, there's no base iPhone 18.

• 53:41David Pierce?

  That's the rumor. Yeah.

• 53:43Speaker 08

  That's the rumor, which saves some time in the presentation, because we don't have to go through the whole iPhone baseline, all the improvements and then like, but then it's even better with the Pro, right? Like, that arc of the presentation doesn't have to happen, I guess. Though it will, it will be interesting how they address that there's no iPhone 18 model right now.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Apple never addresses anything.

• 54:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't think they'll say anything.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  The iPhone 17 is still here for $599. It's like what they're going to do.

• 54:10Speaker 08

  Right. They do that at the end, I guess, with the, the lineup and show us that this is the best iPhone lineup we've ever had, right? And so they do that in the, the thing. So, yeah, I think they probably end up starting with the Pro, working in how much better. This is the true AI phone. It's got the Siri. That's the best ever. And also, I think they'll likely say it's not coming right away. That's what's been rumored too, which is that it's going to be like a rolling waitlist on the Siri stuff, though it seems like it will come pretty soon.

• 54:39David Pierce?

  I think they start with the cheap stuff.

• 54:40Speaker 08

  Well, yeah, they start with the watch and the AirPods. They go into the iPhone and then they end with the, the Fold.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  Again, we're like overreading Apple keynote. Do you think it's too much for Ternus on his first shout out to Gate to do one more thing?

• 54:54David Pierce?

  I don't think so.

• 54:54Speaker 08

  No, I don't think so.

• 54:56David Pierce?

  I think it's going to be important for him to do something big like that.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Okay, this is the bet. This is the bet. You're, you're betting yes.

• 55:02Speaker 08

  But, but.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  Joanna's yes. I'm a hard no. There's no way.

• 55:06Speaker 08

  I mean, I think it's hard to do a one more thing when everyone knows the thing.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  When case manufacturers are literally sending products out to YouTubers, yeah, I think that's pretty hard to do.

• 55:17Speaker 08

  But.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  I think one more thing is, it's, that's a move.

• 55:20David Pierce?

  I think they'll do that.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  It's a move. That, that is a very specific thing to try to message and to, I don't think so. I think you play this one cool. You let the, you let the Fold unfold itself. You know what I mean?

• 55:32Speaker 02

  One of the things I'm curious about with AI in particular is, obviously can control a lot. It can do a lot on your phone. Do you think they're going to expand like the roster of agentic app integrations? Do you think we're going to see Uber and DoorDash and the rest on stage? Because this is like Google's big thing now, right? Is you just talk to your phone and a bunch of things happen in the background.

• 55:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, people have been building against iOS 27 since June practically. And they can't announce, they haven't been able to release any of these except their test flight that could actually make use of Siri AI. So I imagine they probably, you know, they probably worked with a lot of smaller developers just so they can show they work with smaller developers. And they'll show a giant list of all the things that Siri AI can plug into. But I do think that they're going to downplay Siri AI a little bit, just because of how much trouble they got in for overplaying it last time. And they'll probably, you know, show some cool examples of things it can definitely do, because they've tested it thoroughly. And everything else will be like, and more, and then we'll see.

• 56:36Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  I'm just, I'm honestly curious, yeah.

• 56:38Speaker 08

  It's hard to imagine, though, what they have to show on the iPhone 18 that like enhances Siri. Like, that's what I keep wondering. Like, we know that there's going to be camera improvements. We know there's going to be processor improvement. Like, I guess you could just like really be hampering up, similar to Google, that the processor really makes Siri better, but like.

• 56:57David Pierce?

  It's built for Siri AI, remember?

• 56:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, better bean forming mics that can listen to you call for Siri a mile away. Like, you.

• 57:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  You can, you can lay this stuff out. I think the question I have, and David actually wrote a great piece about app developers who are excited about Siri AI that we will link, is whether the promise comes true, right? Whether the AI can actually run your phone for you, which is the promise everywhere else. The reason that Greg Rockman says we're in the AGI era is because ChatGPT can use a computer really fast. Like, that, that's why. That's like the thing that they're excited about, right? That's the demo they're giving. So the idea that your phone can just use itself for you is a very powerful story, but the apps haven't been ready. So if the app's ready now, like, how much time are we going to spend on demos of quasi-agentic iOS app usage? Because I think they have to do it now. I think it's, it's time, right?

• 57:47Speaker 02

  For them to show that this is going to pay off on this platform, as opposed to happening in a virtualized, like Linux PC in a cloud run by Claude, which is basically whatever else is doing.

• 57:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, but it is pretty hampered right now, like what you can do with Siri and these third-party apps. It's, there's stuff and it's decent, but it's not, hey, take over my phone and go do all of this stuff in a multi-step way without me looking at it. So I don't know. If I'm Apple, I'm focusing on some of the stuff that they showed during WWDC, which works really well. I, I use Siri daily to do some of that stuff now.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  Wait, what do you use Siri for?

• 58:26Speaker 08

  Siri is the ultimate iMessage searcher. I will, I will say that the way that Siri can search through my iMessage is, is, and my life is there, like, my life is there. And so I use it all the time. I can't remember something I said to someone about going to someplace, what time I said I would do something, a message that I had with my wife like two years ago about, I don't know, some karate place that we said we would, you know, take the kid, like, random things. And it is just fast. It is good.

• 58:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. Though what is this person's address is actually insanely useful because I have used, I've asked this person their address seven times and not saved in their contacts. And then when it gives it to me, I say, can you add that to their contact? And it does. And that is possibly the best use case of Siri.

• 59:13Speaker 08

  Or I just say, like, give me directions. Like, it, it, there are these small things. And I like, I don't think it's AGI. It's not, no, like, it's, it's great iMessage search. Like, search is just fine. It's like, it's just, we can just say it's fine. It searches the answer here.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  What are the names of the Great Lakes? Oh, yeah. It didn't change it. Superior, Michigan, here on Erie and Ontario.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Uh oh.

• 59:38Speaker 08

  But there's like a lot of little things like that.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  That's gonna be a phone call. I know the Trump administration monitors this podcast. We just caused a phone call, a headache on Ternus's first day.

• 59:47Speaker 08

  There are a lot of little things like Siri. I just find me, I use it. I just use it now.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's, I mean, that is the win, right?

• 59:55Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  I was just talking about The Verge at the beginning, and I was pulling up our first iPhone review, which was the iPhone 4S, which had Siri on it 15 years ago. And I was like, boy, have we just come full circle in 15 years that we're gonna basically review Siri again. And it, it's gonna, the promises are all kind of the same.

• 1:00:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Right? You're gonna ask it anything and it's gonna go to some database, which would, at the time, it was like a series of weird database deals that they'd made. Like Wolfram Alpha was the big database, right?

• 1:00:25David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  And now it's gonna do that, but it's like the web and like whatever it can find and pull it all together. I think that's deeply fascinating.

• 1:00:32Speaker 08

  That was a classic Phil Schiller demo, by the way.

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  It was. I think they're gonna spend an awful lot of time talking about Siri AI. Like, an awful lot of time. Because they're gonna ship it, like you're saying, it's useful in some ways. And every minute that they're not trying to get you to use Siri is a minute that Greg Brockman is gonna get you to use AGI in the chat GPT. And they, that's the thing they have to stop, is the bleed away from them towards something else that might, you know, create a new kind of device. And you're like, well, I just use ChatGPT anyway, I'm gonna switch to it. I'm not sure that will happen. I know that's the thing they're threatened by.

• 1:01:04Speaker 08

  Well, also, I think that we're supposed to see, right? This display, this home display thing, right? This has been long talked about. We have heard the reporting from German that this has been pushed down, I guess, almost now, almost a whole calendar year because they wanted the Siri AI to be right and to work. It sounds like it's sort of this home kit, home, smart home device, but that it's a portal to using Siri in your home. Also, there's notably not much support for Siri AI on HomePods right now. So I think we hear that story as well.

• 1:01:40Speaker 08

  But, yeah, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna question. I think that, that we hear that story about how Siri can do all of these things in your home and like as this assistant in your home, but.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  There's no way they, they throw in a speaker with a robot arm in the middle of this camera. They're gonna, they will call us back for that one.

• 1:02:00David Pierce?

  Well, there's the robot arm speaker, but there's also the HomePod with the, with the display on it.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Oh, like more of a Google Nest type thing?

• 1:02:07David Pierce?

  Yeah. I don't imagine they're gonna show that, though, because I feel like it would take away from the fold too much in their eyes. I don't know.

• 1:02:14Speaker 08

  I don't know. They're hyping this event. I think if you're gonna tell the Siri story, you might bring that thing out.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  So just to, to line up our bets. First of all, by the way, Joanna, our long-running bet of when will there be a MacBook Touch Screen seems like it's gonna break my way soon. So I'm just gonna put, we'll put a pin in that one.

• 1:02:30Speaker 08

  I will, I will go back to the records. I will ask, I will ask Siri AI to search through my messages to find the records of what here I said.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  I put a date on it and I was wrong, but it's gonna come true. On another timeline, it's gonna come true.

• 1:02:43Speaker 08

  And Dieter will return to the podcast as an employee of Google.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  If I can get Dieter to come back as a Google executive to talk about the touchscreen MacBook, that will be the single greatest booking coup in history. I don't think it will ever happen.

• 1:02:56Speaker 08

  We tell him, we book him, this is a secret, he won't listen to this one. We book him as he's coming to talk about the Google Books, okay? But then we quickly bring back the old tape. I'm on this. I'm, I'm producing it right now.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is all you. You can, you have, we'll give you a whole episode if you can pull off this move. Dieter, don't listen to anything that was just said. Erase your brain. All right, here are your bets. I just wanna lay them out and then Joanna, we gotta let you go. Joanna thinks the fold will be one more thing, but a new product, a HomePod with a speaker will just be announced but not shipped. Those are your bets.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  See, when you, when you say in black and white.

• 1:03:35Speaker 08

  No, no, here are my bets. I, I'm going back, I wanna be with you, David. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna be on your side on the one more thing, but now I'm second guessing that because I think in the flow of the keynote, if I were an Apple executive writing it, you wouldn't wanna put the fold at the end.

• 1:03:52David Pierce?

  Why's that?

• 1:03:52Speaker 08

  Or it's towards the end, but it's not a one more thing. Like, we don't have that big announcement.

• 1:03:57David Pierce?

  It just comes in from a black screen and fades into the, into the foreground.

• 1:04:02Speaker 08

  I don't wanna put many, any bet on the one more thing. I wanna say there's a fold, absolutely. It comes in the section of where they're talking about the iPhones. And I do believe we will see this, we will, we will hear about the HomePods and we will hear about a new HomePod with a screen that has Siri AI. And they will make a, a thing about it, but it might not ship right now. And by the way, I don't know if the fold ships right now. I don't know if the fold and this display ships right now. Do they ship before, I mean, fold is gonna ship this year, but maybe HomePod with screen doesn't ship till the end of the year. I don't know.

• 1:04:35David Pierce?

  M6 stuff ships at the end of September, so I imagine it's just all gonna ship at the same time. And they just wanted to move out the computers because this is too much stuff.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. David, what's your bet?

• 1:04:45David Pierce?

  My bet is that iPhone Fold is one more thing.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Sticking to it.

• 1:04:50David Pierce?

  Sticking to it. I think John Ternus will hold it up, but it might not be in the, in the recording. And I do not think they're gonna show the, uh, home screen. I think they're gonna do that in the fall because it feels like a fall thing for me.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna go with David on, after the video, Ternus is gonna come out holding the thing. It's obviously gonna happen, right? Because it's big. The whole point of it's really big. It's gonna be unfolded, it's like, look at the size of this thing.

• 1:05:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, if you can grasp it, you know?

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  If Ternus screams, look at the size of this thing, then I will have won all these bets. That's, that's like my asterisk over that. No, one more thing, that's too much. And I also agree that any smart home stuff, it just has to be set aside. Like, every smart home thing they might wanna do is just dragons. Like, they have to talk about so much stuff in order to be like, and it will turn on the lights, right? Like, you can't just do it.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  Like, most people do not have any HomeKit devices in their house. They have to introduce the very concept of HomeKit.

• 1:05:47David Pierce?

  Yeah. That's a bigger deal.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  And then Joanna and I have to chase Craig Federighi around Apple Park in a literal circle, being like, how does your garage door work? Which is a thing that has happened.

• 1:05:58David Pierce?

  He's great at sprinting, you gotta be careful.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  So I, I just think you gotta, we gotta reduce the complexity of that thing, right? You gotta, you gotta tell a whole story about it.

• 1:06:07Speaker 08

  I'm gonna lose a lot of bets on this one, it's fine. I, I wanna believe, I wanna be optimistic that this will just be jam-packed.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  I think the best video idea I have for you, having had this whole conversation, Joanna, is you should show up to Apple Park with one of those Matter Garage Door Controllers that are like rebranded by 50 companies. You and I both have them. And you should present one to Craig Federighi. I've solved your problem for you. With a $27 Matter Garage Door Opener that I bought from.

• 1:06:37Speaker 08

  When they give me him again, I will, I will, I will purchase such thing and ask him if this is what he has in his garage.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  And ask him if Apple will go to the mat on, on proprietary RF Garage Door Opener remotes with rolling codes.

• 1:06:51Speaker 08

  And does he also have the crappy HomeKit shade that I bought on Amazon because it is the only HomeKit shade you can buy?

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  This is a totally different episode. I don't believe that's true. There are excellent Matter over Thread shades. Different episode. Joanna, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for being on Vergecast. We'll see you next week at the Apple event.

• 1:07:11Speaker 06

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• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  All right, we're back. We have a very intense line around coming up about all the gadgets. Before that, it's time, my friends, for America's favorite podcast, Within Podcast, Running Cars a Dummy.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:08:41David Pierce?

  It's very Berlin core.

• 1:08:45David Pierce?

  On theme. Oh.

• 1:08:58Speaker 07

  He's not a savvy operator.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  But I agree with you. He's still going.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  I have been asking for a drop. All right. Well, that was incredible. That was by Andreas, AKA Error Audio, who wants you to know that it was produced exclusively for party speakers with Ultra Bass. I will point out Sony did announce new party speakers this week. This show is so long, we do not have time to talk about the party speaker revolution that continues brewing at the world's electronics companies. This week's Brendan Carr's dummy is going to be very short because what I want you to know is that we have managed to break contain with America's favorite podcast within the podcast. We've ended up on other podcasts before, which is important. But we are now America's favorite podcast within cable news. It's good stuff. So this week, the thing that happened was Kristen Welker, who is an NBC News anchor,

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  said a very innocuous thing. She said President Trump's endorsements have mixed results. And then President Trump responded to that by ordering Brendan to fine or censor her.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  I know this because I was on MS Now with Stephanie Ruhl, and she opened the segment with it. We actually have a clip. We can just run Stephanie's description of it.

• 1:10:14Speaker 10

  Okay, President Trump is calling on the FCC to go after another journalist. This time going after our former colleague, NBC anchor Kristen Welker. He called for her to be rebuked or punished for what he claims were inaccurate comments she made about his endorsements in this election cycle. But I want you to listen to what she actually said.

• 1:10:38Speaker 10

  Well, he's going to loom large over these midterms. There's no doubt about that. He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He's had some mixed results. That was it. That's it. That's all she said. We've had some mixed results.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  So I know this happened on her show because I was there. She invited me on. It's great. It's I've been on a few times now. It's been great fun being on the show. And it just occurred to me in that moment that I had the opportunity to bring Brendan Carr as a dummy to the viewers of MS Now. So here I am. You can here it is. Let's watch it.

• 1:11:11David Pierce?

  Even a material misstatement. You can retract it.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  The opportunity to monologue about how dumb Brendan Carr is. Well, I love talking about that. We spend so much time at The Verge covering telecom policy and tech policy. And usually what that has meant is we're going to cover internet access and kids getting broadband. In this administration, particularly with Brendan Carr, what we have basically started covering is this man going into the library at Hogwarts, looking at ancient statutes for magic words and using them to punish speech over and over and over again. So notably, I did not get censored or rebuked by anyone at the FCC or at Versant for saying Brendan Carr is a dummy on cable news. And so if I have the opportunity again, I'm going to do it again.

• 1:11:50David Pierce?

  So far.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  So far. I'm not in jail yet.

• 1:11:53David Pierce?

  There's time. There's plenty of time.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  You know, we're breaking contain here on America's favorite podcast within podcasts. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show or apparently any other show and debate me about your war on free speech in America. I would love to do it. I think in this election year, it would serve us both well. Anytime you want, Brendan. Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

• 1:12:15Speaker 11

  Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  Next time I'm going to play the Gregorian chant on cable news.

• 1:12:26David Pierce?

  It's I think they would love it.

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  I don't think Steph would ever invite me back, but we'll see what I can do. All right. We have more distinguished guests on this episode of Verge Chat. This has been an all star lineup. Jen Toohey is here. Dom Preston is here. Hey, friends.

• 1:12:38Speaker 12

  Hello, hello.

• 1:12:39Speaker 13

  Hey.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  Are you guys in the same hotel room in Germany or different identical hotel rooms in Germany?

• 1:12:44Speaker 12

  Different identical hotel rooms.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  That's very good. You all are at IFA, which is the big tech show in Europe. There's quite a lot going on there. We're going to do this actual lightning round style. I was looking at the list of gadgets and it occurred to me if we tried to have a fake lightning round, we'd be here for six more hours, which I know some listeners want, but everyone has children.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  So I'm going to ask you all to pick five things from your time on the show floor. This is a hard ask. There's a lot going on at IFA.

• 1:13:14David Pierce?

  It's a busy year.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  You should look at our story stream. A lot of stuff got announced this week in Germany.

• 1:13:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  But we're going to ask Jen and Dom to pick five each. And we're going to we're going to move through them in true lightning round fashions. So you guys ready?

• 1:13:25Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 1:13:26David Pierce?

  Ready.

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  All right, Jen.

• 1:13:26Speaker 12

  Prime.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  Prime.

• 1:13:30Speaker 12

  I have not. I have slept seven hours in the last four days. So I can go fast.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  This is what happens when you let a European go back to Europe. You're just like raging all over town.

• 1:13:41Speaker 12

  All the town. I mean, this is Berlin, too. This is like the heart of rave capital.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  Jen, have you wait, hold on. I will do six hours if you will tell me that you've been raving this entire time.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  All right. You ready? Jen, let's start with you. What's your first one?

• 1:13:57Speaker 12

  Okay, my first one. Philips Hue launched a new line of architectural interior design smart lighting, which I know perhaps is not The Verge Cast's target target audience gadget. But for me, I love it. It's a beautiful rope light. It's the Liane 360 degree rope light. And this thing just kind of blew me away. They had it set up like a chandelier, which they had 17 of these three meter. We are in Europe rope lights that are 360 degrees of diffuse light. So no pinpricks, no backing. It's just light hanging from the ceiling. And I got to like dance in the lights. You know, raving.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  You were in fact raving.

• 1:14:41Speaker 12

  I was actually raving.

• 1:14:44Speaker 12

  And I just I just thought they were. It's just a great combination of design and technology. And that's something that I'm always looking for when it comes to smart home tech. It's beautiful and oh my God, it's expensive. That's the downside.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Yes, I watched your video and at the end you said the prices. And I was like, are you kidding? How much is it?

• 1:15:03Speaker 12

  Well, the chandelier was like seven grand, but each each individual light is $400. So.

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  That's ridiculous.

• 1:15:13Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 1:15:14David Pierce?

  On the Hue website, it shows 440 USD for three meters.

• 1:15:18Speaker 12

  That so you can that's if you get the weight that holds it down. If you just want the line that you can drape elegantly over your like dining room table, it's it's 400.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Isn't Gobi just going to put out a version of this for like $200 and take the market?

• 1:15:36Speaker 12

  Yeah, well, for something like this, that's like a centerpiece. Like you, you've bought a house, Neelai. You've bought lighting. You know, a nice chandelier over the dining room table. That is not a cheap purchase.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  A chandelier that you purchased. I don't know if anyone's purchased a chandelier before. I've purchased many. They obviously look at me.

• 1:15:59Speaker 12

  A light fixture.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  Look upon my chandeliers. They usually come preassembled as actual lights. This is just a rope.

• 1:16:06Speaker 12

  That's true.

• 1:16:06Speaker 02

  All right, we have to move on. I'm just I'm just saying this is outrageously priced. Dom, what do you got?

• 1:16:11Speaker 13

  It's a slight cheat because it's only half an IFA launch, but the Xiaomi 18 Fold, which is their new foldable phone. It is getting an official launch on Monday in China. Completely coincidental timing, I'm sure. No idea what's going on in California over there, so it's all by chance. But this is them doing a wide foldable. So it looks a lot like Samsung's Z Fold 8. It looks a lot like what we think. Apple's iPhone Fold is about to look like. It's got an edge over the Samsung at least because it's got a triple camera, which I think was the big thing that the Samsung Z Fold 8 was kind of held back from for me, that you felt like you were getting this cool shape, but it was held back from the kind of a lot of the photography and the spec side. I didn't get the chance to actually play with it. It was just sitting on a case on the IFA IFA show floor. But we know we're going to see a lot more of it on on Monday in China.

• 1:16:56Speaker 13

  And I think this is just exciting to see the way that we are seeing this wide foldable market very much open up ahead of Apple's arrival. We're expecting a lot more brands to kind of enter this space as well. And it's interesting to see the subtle differences. Like this is actually, from what I can tell, it looks like it's even wider and even shorter than Samsung's. So it's kind of pushing that a little bit further.

• 1:17:18David Pierce?

  Finally, as intended. We started with this and now we're back. We're finally back.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  Is everyone just make I mean, don't these all just turn into Android tablets? Like, I feel like at least with the previous taller foldable, you entered an experience that was not, oh, it's an Android tablet. It was like a weirder aspect ratio.

• 1:17:35David Pierce?

  It was just a square. But what did you do with a square?

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  You would run two apps side by side. That was the whole promise of these things.

• 1:17:42Speaker 13

  No, but that kind of, you know, it's awkward. This is this is now you're getting a tablet. You're getting like a little. It reminds me of having like a Nexus 7. You don't get that many of the small seven inch kind of tablet size anymore. So it's this tiny, compact, genuinely portable because it folds tablet that's kind of nice for.

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  As a person who has a Nexus 7 sitting right over there, I'm just going to tell you, they didn't change the world. The the people are not clamoring for seven inch Android tablets.

• 1:18:07Speaker 13

  I'm clamoring for the Nexus 7. So, you know.

• 1:18:10David Pierce?

  They are clamoring for a phone. And now you can also have the tablet. You know, you don't even need it. Yeah.

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  That's true. I'm excited for this one. Do we have any? Is this one also going to be outrageously expensive? Is Gobi going to make a wide foldable that takes blows this something out of the water?

• 1:18:23Speaker 13

  I can only imagine this is going to be a lot. I mean, it's hard to say because it's going to launch in China and the Chinese prices will scale very weirdly. So you'll do the dollar conversion and it will come out like 800 bucks. And that will have no reflection on what it would actually cost.

• 1:18:34David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:18:34Speaker 13

  If they ever launched it in the US or in Europe.

• 1:18:37David Pierce?

  It is Xiaomi and not Huawei, though, so it'll be cheaper than Huawei, right? Since a Xiaomi phone.

• 1:18:43Speaker 13

  Yeah, I think they can run a little cheaper than Huawei. I'm not too sure. I'm not too to invoke with like the the hierarchy within China in terms of the pricing tiers.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51David Pierce?

  All right.

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  All right, Jen.

• 1:18:53Speaker 12

  Okay, I have another expensive one for you.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  Oh, wonderful.

• 1:18:57Speaker 12

  It is it has a camera and it goes in your mouth. And it's from Dyson.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  This is the worst product introduction of all time.

• 1:19:05David Pierce?

  Can I veto this? And it shoots you.

• 1:19:10Speaker 12

  I went to an iPhone-esque event today in Berlin where Dyson had the whole room all decked out. You know, thousands of seats for journalists and they came on stage and they introduced a toothbrush.

• 1:19:23Speaker 02

  A toothbrush.

• 1:19:24Speaker 12

  A toothbrush.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  I'm proud of Dyson. Usually everything they make is a fan.

• 1:19:29Speaker 12

  I know. Where's the motor?

• 1:19:31David Pierce?

  Or vacuum, which is a fan notably.

• 1:19:33Speaker 12

  Actually, it does have a sort of mechanism in it. It has like this rubber balloon that kind of inflates to push.

• 1:19:39David Pierce?

  Call it a bladder.

• 1:19:40Speaker 12

  Bladder. There you go.

• 1:19:41David Pierce?

  Bladder.

• 1:19:42Speaker 12

  You've been reading up on the camera toothbrush.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  Wait, so that wait, why is there?

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  Why is there a bladder? When you say it goes in your mouth and then you say it's a bladder, I'm like very unhappy about all of this right now.

• 1:19:56Speaker 12

  Okay, I'm sorry, I backed into this one. Okay, so this is the $499 camera jet. It is not, they don't call it a toothbrush in the name, but it is the first electric toothbrush, they say, to incorporate a camera in the brush head. And they showed me the camera and it really is, it's literally on like the tip of a pencil. And then what it, the camera does is, is able to sense the gaps between your teeth. So while you're brushing your teeth, it squirts water in between the gaps. So you're brushing and flossing simultaneously. So it's ultimate multitasking.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  Like an AI water pick.

• 1:20:30Speaker 12

  And toothbrush at the same time. And you can also see into your, so you can see the camera on your phone. It's all local, so they're not, you are not streaming the inside of your mouth to the cloud.

• 1:20:40David Pierce?

  Oh, good local AI, that's good, yeah.

• 1:20:43Speaker 12

  And it is able to, so you can look and sort of see inside your mouth while you're brushing. I kind of feel like that's a bit of like, I'll do that once and then never again, but you never know, I suppose.

• 1:20:53David Pierce?

  It's squirting mouthwash, right?

• 1:20:54Speaker 12

  So they have very specially designed Dyson mouthwash. And they have three distinct flavors. And the gentleman who developed them was really excited to tell me all about them.

• 1:21:05Speaker 12

  And yeah, it's, it, for me, I just, I have a daughter that just got braces. I can see a use case, $500, mm, but.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  $500?

• 1:21:17Speaker 12

  And I couldn't get anyone to tell me how much the replacement heads were. Cause each head has a camera in it.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  I have a, I have an electric toothbrush, right? The whole brush head, you just like take it off the thing and you throw it away.

• 1:21:29Speaker 12

  Exactly.

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  Is the camera in the brush head?

• 1:21:32Speaker 12

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  So you're throwing the camera away every time? Have these people seen RAM prices? That's, that's outrageous.

• 1:21:37Speaker 12

  Oh, no, no, no. So the, the, there's a, the camera's in the stick and then you put the brush head over the top.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:21:44Speaker 12

  Okay, so yes, you're not throwing the camera away each time. Cause that would be very expensive, but I'm assuming there is still going to be an expense to this fancy brush head.

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  Is this, and is it like DRM'd mouthwash?

• 1:22:00Speaker 12

  Can you use something else?

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  You can see the opportunity to, for them to do bad things here, right? Like proprietary brush heads, proprietary, like.

• 1:22:09Speaker 12

  It's definitely proprietary brush heads, yes. But no, I, I don't think.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  Toothpaste famously foams in your mouth, which would.

• 1:22:15David Pierce?

  Well, they have anti-foaming toothpaste.

• 1:22:17Speaker 12

  This is the, the value of the Dyson toothpaste is that it is low foaming. So it shouldn't block the camera.

• 1:22:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  I want one of these so badly and everything about it morally offends me.

• 1:22:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. Can I tell you my favorite thing about this toothbrush?

• 1:22:33Speaker 12

  Please.

• 1:22:34David Pierce?

  They market the camera as being 100,000 pixels and they talk about it, they use that number over and over and over again. That's 0.1 megapixels, by the way. They're just really hoping people don't think about that. This is lower resolution than my Moto Razr flip phone camera. I just want to note that.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  That's very good. Maybe you can, so that, that camera you could throw away every time.

• 1:22:57David Pierce?

  Probably cheap.

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  This is the, like, they literally taking like the bin sensors and just like slicing them up. It's just like, you can have them. All right, we will acquire a Dyson toothbrush and find a way to review it.

• 1:23:11Speaker 12

  Please.

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  This is one of those products where it's like, I'm like, I would love to have it. I'll just wait for, to buy it used a year for it and it's like, nope, can't do that. It's a toothbrush, don't buy a used toothbrush.

• 1:23:20Speaker 12

  Yeah, I know, I asked, cause they come with two heads. I said like, could I share it? Could my husband and I both use it rather than buying two $500?

• 1:23:28David Pierce?

  You guessed mode for it.

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  Wait, what'd they say?

• 1:23:31Speaker 12

  They said, we recommend that you do not share toothbrush.

• 1:23:34David Pierce?

  Why?

• 1:23:37Speaker 12

  Why? I know.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  Why? Losing my mind. All right, Dom.

• 1:23:40Speaker 13

  Oh. I, I feel like Jen and I have very, had very different EFA experiences so far. I just have another phone, I keep seeing phones. Um, yeah, I saw the Techno have a bezel-less concept device. So this is a smartphone where they have done their best to completely eliminate the black bezel around the edge of the screen. It's a concept, it's not a real product and it's just kind of bezel-less in a way oversells it. Cause you look at it and you think there's definitely still a bezel there, uh, because there is a silver edge all around the screen. That is technically the frame as opposed to the bezel of the, of the OLED display.

• 1:24:11Speaker 12

  That nomenclature is very important.

• 1:24:13Speaker 13

  Yeah, it's very, very important. So the, the black bit around the edge of the screen is, is, is technically still there. What they've done is just hide it under the frame. Um, so kind of had to re-engineer how they build this. They kind of built the phone backwards. So now the edge of the OLED sits under the frame, but the frame is still very thin. Like if you put it, I put it side by side with a Galaxy S26 Plus. And the overall edge is definitely still thinner than that. Like they have shrunk the edge of the, the whole thing. And I think because, partly because the frame of this phone is silver. And I wonder how this would feel with different colors. But it feels a bit more open and expansive, so you don't have that black dark border that kind of constricts the edge. And having a light color does strangely make the thing feel a bit bigger. This doesn't really matter at all.

• 1:24:55Speaker 13

  They've shaved, you know, 0.1 millimeters off each side of a phone fundamentally. But, you know.

• 1:25:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Speaker 13

  No one had done that before. No one had shaved that specific 0.1 millimeter off until now.

• 1:25:07David Pierce?

  Did you get to handle it?

• 1:25:08Speaker 13

  Yeah, Techno actually sent me the phone like a, a week ago, so I've had it to, I've had it to play around with.

• 1:25:13David Pierce?

  I heard that if you slide your finger like across it and when you touch the bezel area where they lift the frame, your finger kind of catches the frame, like, cause the frame is lifted. Was that true on your unit?

• 1:25:24Speaker 13

  Very slightly, I think, you know, the frame definitely sits.

• 1:25:27David Pierce?

  Higher than the screen, right?

• 1:25:28Speaker 13

  Probably like a fraction of a millimeter up from the screen.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, I'm looking at a picture of this and this is completely ridiculous.

• 1:25:34David Pierce?

  It's just a.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  There's a, there's an edge.

• 1:25:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter. This is like, Apple spent years being like, it's an edge-to-edge display. And I'd be like, no, I can see the edge.

• 1:25:41Speaker 13

  You can see the edge, yeah. The edge is definitely there, but it's a slightly different color edge now.

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 1:25:46David Pierce?

  And slightly smaller.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  All right, dead, we're moving on. Jen, what nonsense have you brought for us for your thread?

• 1:25:54Speaker 12

  Okay, this one is not, well, I don't know how much this one costs, so it can go in the maybe it isn't expensive category, but probably is. This is a, okay, can I introduce you in local AI for your smart home, Neelai?

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, what else is there? Truly, this is all I dream of.

• 1:26:11Speaker 12

  This is, I know, this is the Tamagotchi grown up. This is definitely, you know, this is what, this is a trend we're, I'm starting to see really sort of take off. Um, this is the Yufi Mindbase. It's from Anchor. Uh, Yufi is its smart home brand. And it is a local AI hub with an Anchor-developed LLM that basically runs your entire smart home, but is focused on security to start with. So you connect your security cameras to it. And the things that like Ring and Nest can do today, like with AI-powered video search, um, AI text descriptions, those types of things which rely on the cloud.

• 1:26:49Speaker 12

  Uh, Anchor says that this Mindbase hub can run a local LLM and process all of your video footage locally on the device. And so you still get those AI features from your security cameras. It's also a Matter Controller, a Thread border router, a Zigbee hub. So it can be a central brain for your smart home. Um, and it supports Matter cameras, of which there are not many, but in theory.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  And it supports this vaporware we've been talking about for ages.

• 1:27:20Speaker 12

  In theory though, that means you can connect cameras from other.

• 1:27:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:27:25Speaker 12

  So not just Yufi cameras. Um, so yeah, this, you know, there's a real shift move towards, you know, running everything locally. People don't like the idea of their video footage, security footage going to cloud.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  Does this integrate seamlessly with Flock or not is really the question.

• 1:27:39Speaker 12

  Exactly. Um, and so there's two of them actually that we, that debuted at EFA this week. So Yufi has one and the second one comes from a company which also explains where this trend is coming from. Ugreen, which is a NAS, traditionally a NAS storage, um, brand. And both of these devices also act as a NAS on your home network. So you can store your like family photos, you could run your Plex server whilst you're also running your smart home and your security cameras all on one box in your home.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  I do like the return of the home server as a concept.

• 1:28:16Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, that's what we're seeing.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  I will say the Anchor Mindbase tagline is straightforwardly the mind within your home.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Which is quite a promise. And it, I mean, it looks like an S. So is this meant to be stored in like, in like a rack? I mean, that's, I mean, like physically, that's what, that's what it looks like.

• 1:28:34Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 1:28:35Speaker 02

  Are you supposed to like keep it in the basement? And where are you supposed to put this thing?

• 1:28:39Speaker 12

  So the, the Yufi one, you could put anywhere, yes, because it doesn't, you don't interact with it. The Ugreen one actually has a built-in voice assistant that you can talk to. And also comes with, they've, they've launched a smart speaker and they have a, a smart assistant on the, on their, they have three boxes that you can, that you can buy. And, um, that, that's more of, they call it a home agent. So actually both of these systems run different agents to do different tasks in your home. The Yufi one is security to start with, but they're also going to do energy management because Yufi has a whole line of home backup batteries. And they're going to do a cleaning agent as well to work with like robot vacuums, those types of things.

• 1:29:22Speaker 12

  So there's a lot of potential in each device, like you could expand and have more functionality. But yeah, it is, it is a hub, a hub for your home. You either stick in your rack or in your hub box and then, you know. I have a hub box.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  Yes, in your closet, which has not been cable managed, if you are me. I, I would applaud Ugreen for the audacity to believe that people will put a NAS in their kitchen and talk to it.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  That's incredible.

• 1:29:51Speaker 12

  I know. And it's big, too. Like, these are chunky devices.

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  All right, Jen, tell me, what is the outrageous price of these devices?

• 1:30:00Speaker 12

  To be determined.

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 1:30:03Speaker 12

  So we do not have exact pricing, although we might have exact pricing by the time this episode goes live, because they said we would learn tomorrow, which is Friday as of the recording. So watch this space.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  10 million euros, I should say. All right, Dom.

• 1:30:18Speaker 13

  I have got the Lenovo Ideapad Vibe, which is kind of more representative of an idea that has been all over EFA this year, which is the shameless MacBook Neo clone. And the Ideapad Vibe is the cloniest of all of the MacBook Neo clones we have seen this year. It is a $700 Windows laptop that comes in seven different colors and is meant to be cheap and friendly and lightweight and get the job done. And it's the exact same price Apple now charges for the Neo. It joins similarly priced laptops from at least Dell, Acer and Samsung. And it basically just, when the Neo came out, I think one of the first questions Antonio really asked when he was writing about it for the site was, you know, how does the Windows market react? How do

• 1:31:03Speaker 13

  all these Windows OEMs like deal with the Neo coming into their space? And the answer apparently is just copy the Neo. Make clones.

• 1:31:11Speaker 12

  Copy it.

• 1:31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, just do a Neo. Is it, I mean, the point of the Neo is that it's nice for the money?

• 1:31:19Speaker 13

  The Ideapad Vibe is also nice. I think it's, it's got a metal build. I don't think it feels quite as premium as the Neo does for the price. They've lent into the customizability, so you can replace all the keycaps easily. And they are selling keycap sets in different colors, that kind of color match the different seven colors they get. And you can mix and match. So trying to like, make it playful and fun that way. I still think it's got that problem where it just doesn't quite, I don't know that a Windows OEM can deliver the same build quality at that price that Apple can. And I think performance will be the big question, because this comes with a choice of either Qualcomm or AMD chips. And apparently Intel down the line. I, you know, didn't get the chance to really put this thing through its paces, but I

• 1:32:03Speaker 13

  still just have so many doubts that Windows can run on this kind of like lowish entry level RAM spec that you're going to get at a $700 entry point.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, a slow processor and a base of eight gigs of RAM is, that's a lot for Windows.

• 1:32:17Speaker 13

  Yeah, it's not a great pitch for Windows right now. Microsoft is trying to get to the point where that will work, but it is, it is not there yet.

• 1:32:23Speaker 02

  I do like that you can spec the AMD one up to 32 gigs of RAM.

• 1:32:26Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  Which is like a $12,000 computer now.

• 1:32:29Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  That's good. When did this come out?

• 1:32:31Speaker 13

  They are coming out starting October, and then there's more rolling out in November, depending on which CPU option you go for.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  It's perfect that the Windows OEMs did not hit back to school.

• 1:32:39Speaker 13

  Oh, no. That would make far too much sense.

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  All right. Reasonably priced, Dom. Thank you.

• 1:32:47Speaker 13

  I'm trying.

• 1:32:47Speaker 12

  I've got another ridiculously expensive product for you. People tell me I'm an expensive friend. I get that a lot.

• 1:32:58Speaker 12

  This is, I have for you a smart home controller. It's the Homie Portal. And Homie, if you're not familiar with it, is a Dutch-based smart home ecosystem platform, sort of rival to like Home Assistant, Apple Home, Amazon Alexa. It's actually owned by LG, or recently was purchased by LG, but it's been around for over a decade. A great company. They have a smart home hub that has all the radios. So it's like SmartThings was 10 years ago. And they have come out with a touchscreen controller. And I really love the look of this thing from the videos and from the pictures they sent. And then as soon as I got here, I went straight to the LG booth, and they had one under a glass case.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:33:44Speaker 12

  And I was so annoyed because I really wanted, it's a dial. And the way it works, it's a touchscreen. So you tap, say, lights, and then your light control shows, and then you can twist the dial to brighten and dim. Same for like your thermostat, climate control, speakers, so you can adjust like your Sono speakers. It just, it's, it's, it looks like a delightful thing that you just really want to touch and play with. And that's the fun thing about coming to a trade show. And I was like, why is it locked under glass like the crown jewels?

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this thing does look really cool.

• 1:34:17Speaker 12

  It does.

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

  Many, many questions about how well it will possibly work.

• 1:34:21Speaker 12

  Yeah. So they, you do need one of the Homie hubs to use it. There is a cloud option, but for the experience that you're probably going to want, which is local control, so it can work locally, even if your internet goes down, if you have Matter or Thread or Zigbee devices connected to your Homie hub. It's $249. And that's the introductory price. It's going to be $300 if you don't get it on a pre-order.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  If you don't jump on this unproven thing that may or may not work with all this stuff in your house, it will charge you more money.

• 1:34:53Speaker 12

  Well, Homie's pitch is they are, they do integrate with everyone. And they do have a wide, you know, there's a lot of radios in their hub, so you can connect to most platforms that you, most smart home devices you might have, as well as cloud integrations with all the big names. But it, yeah, that, they recommend you get like one per room, because you can, you tailor them to the rooms.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  One $300 dial per room.

• 1:35:20Speaker 12

  Yeah. So it does feel a little over, well, a lot overpriced, considering there isn't actually a hub built into this. You also need to buy the hub for the best experience. But the concept here is what I kind of felt like we were going to get from Apple at some point. I know we're still thinking we're going to get a smart display of some kind, but the idea being just a very simple but intuitive interface, like, like reaching for a light switch, but you know what to do while still having many more options than just on and off, like color changing brightness, change your climate, you know, that, that control in your smart home. Obviously, voice is great, wonderful if you've set up excellent automations, but also something for grandma or for, you know, your visitors or

• 1:36:05Speaker 12

  your dog sitter who can just know how to use it once you walk in. Obvious intuitive. That's what I'm hoping we're going to see from Apple at some point. I mean, one of the things we've seen is rumored is like an Apple Watch kind of interface, or the standby mode type of interface, where just a very simple. And that's what I think this portal looks like it achieves really well. I'm just really disappointed I didn't get to play with it yet. So watch this space.

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  Well, we can do another full hour on when Matter will support scenes across ecosystems. But that is not for today. And I'm just going to say, I prefer the senior citizens of my life to speak to my kitchen mounted NAS, because I think that's, that's the future of this.

• 1:36:46Speaker 12

  That is the future. Yes, I agree.

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

  All right, Dom.

• 1:36:49Speaker 13

  I have got another silly concept product that probably doesn't make any sense, but I'm kind of glad to see someone try and make it.

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  Real themes from both of you.

• 1:36:56Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Speaker 12

  Wait for my next one.

• 1:37:00Speaker 13

  I have no idea what she's got coming, so I'm curious. The Acer Project Dual Play Mini, which is basically Acer kind of working backwards to reinvent the gaming laptop. So it is a gaming handheld, the kind of Steam Deck style thing, but running on Windows. But it has, it kind of opens up like a laptop to reveal a keyboard underneath. And then you flip the screen round on a hinge, so that then you have a tiny laptop with an eight inch display. And it's a full Windows laptop, and like a moderately powerful one, given, given, you know, what this is capable of. But then you shut it again. And now you've got your kind of Windows Steam Deck handheld experience.

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  I just want to point out that it is, it feels very obvious to me that these press images are AI-generated.

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  I don't know what to say about this. Like, I'm looking at them, and I'm like, none of this feels possible in a way that suggests that they're AI.

• 1:37:53Speaker 13

  I did.

• 1:37:54Speaker 02

  Have you seen this thing?

• 1:37:55Speaker 13

  I used one. I've played Forza Horizons on it very jankily. They had three samples at Acer's booth. Two of them had games running that you could play. And one of them, the controls were broken. So that is kind of the level of quality we're talking about so far. And even of the one that worked, it kind of hummed and vibrated the whole time you were holding it.

• 1:38:16Speaker 02

  Yes, that's what you want.

• 1:38:17Speaker 13

  And the fans made a kind of whining noise.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  You're like, let me bring this onto an airplane.

• 1:38:20Speaker 13

  Yeah. So is a really strong proof of concept there in that sense. And it felt a bit janky, which is kind of funny, because they have this line of Predator Atlas gaming handhelds, which look and feel a lot better. And I'm a bit surprised they didn't just pull the ergonomics and the design from that, because they kind of already have that figured out over there.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  When it's in laptop mode, the controllers form what can only be described as wings on the side of this. If you're in your car and you're just listening to this, you have to pull over and just look at these images. Because they are bananas. And the other thing is when it's in laptop mode and it's open, what other people see on the other side of the screen is like the thumbsticks glowing with archery lights, which is incredible.

• 1:39:01Speaker 13

  It's also worth pointing out that when it's in laptop mode, you don't have a trackpad. So you either have to bring your own mouse, or you're going to have to use the eight inch touchscreen to navigate Windows with your tidy. Which true gamers bring their own mouse anyway. Come on. I don't know what we're talking about here.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  Tremendous all around. So far, I would say the kitchen NAS and this are tied for winning the lightning round. Jen, you've got, you've got one more shot at it.

• 1:39:29Speaker 12

  Can, can I give you a humanoid robot?

• 1:39:32Speaker 02

  Yes, that's, I mean, that's where this has to end. If you're going to take the, I didn't know the lightning round is competition, but it is now. And this is how you win.

• 1:39:40Speaker 12

  From Dreamy. Do we know Dreamy? Dreamy, the robot vacuum company.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  We profiled Dreamy earlier this year, yeah.

• 1:39:48Speaker 12

  Who brought this amazing looking rocket car to their big launch event, which now turns out to have just been like an empty chassis.

• 1:39:54Speaker 02

  What a surprise. Wait, what? The rocket car doesn't exist?

• 1:39:58Speaker 12

  Yeah, apparently not. But, but this robot, I did get to see today in action, in as much as it raised its arms and, and pincered claws at me.

• 1:40:11Speaker 12

  But humanoids are definitely a theme of this show this year. They actually have on Saturday, there's going to be Robots on the Runway and they're going to have these robots dance down the runway and do backflips and such, which sounds very exciting. But Dreamy is, you know, it's a smart home brand. They've done robot vacuums, robot lawn mowers. They've branched off into all different things, but they have been working on a humanoid for a few years now. And this is the first time they've actually shown one at a trade show in Europe or the US. And it was kind of tucked away in the back of their booth, which I thought was a bit surprising. And they had three versions. One was a full humanoid, but I should caveat

• 1:40:54Speaker 12

  this with it's on wheels. And I genuinely believe that if we are ever going to have humanoids in our homes, humanoid robots in our homes, they can't have legs. Legs are just not going to work in homes.

• 1:41:06David Pierce?

  What about stairs?

• 1:41:07Speaker 02

  Incredible, incredible take.

• 1:41:10Speaker 12

  Because, okay, stairs, yes, that's a problem. But also, you've got an escape route.

• 1:41:16Speaker 12

  If they can't go upstairs, you've always got a way away from them.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  You're making, you're making a safety claim. All right. So Dreamy humanoid robot with wheels so that you may escape it when it goes nuts.

• 1:41:26Speaker 12

  Well, it also means it's less likely to fall on you because I have had personal experience with 175 pound humanoid falling on me at CES. And it is not a good experience.

• 1:41:38Speaker 12

  And so what the concept here is a law, it's a robot to help around the house. It's similar to LG's Cloyde, which we saw at CES. And then the second version they had was a robot that's got on wheels that has a pincer that moves up and down. And its entire purpose was to be able to take clothes out of the dryer or out of the washing machine and put it into the dryer. It just goes up and down.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  I'm going to stop you here. I don't, I don't think you won the lightning round. How much does this robot cost?

• 1:42:06Speaker 12

  I have no idea. Dreamy has no idea because this is not available.

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  It's not a real product.

• 1:42:12Speaker 12

  It's going to be a while.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  I really encourage everyone to go read our various coverage of Dreamy, which a company that, I mean, the CEO is like, I'm Elon Musk. Like, that's his mindset. And then it's all this stuff underneath it.

• 1:42:25Speaker 12

  Yeah. And the humanoid robot form factor is definitely a big debate in the space right now. And having spent time with both, the wheels make sense. They really do. But yes, you are, you are going to struggle if you have stairs. Just means we all have to go live in, you know, one but one floor apartments and bungalows so that we can have robot butlers.

• 1:42:47Speaker 02

  Right. We need, we need the population density of Europe. I understand.

• 1:42:51Speaker 02

  All right, Dom.

• 1:42:52Speaker 13

  I've gone the complete opposite direction for my final pick. I've actually gone cheap, cheerful, and quite practical. Which is, Acer has brought back, of all things, the Packard Bell brand, a kind of old, defunct computer brand that, you know, lurks in the depths of my memory. But they've just reinvented it as this like cute, cheerful, colorful company. They've got a laptop for 500 euros. But otherwise, they've got like headphones and Bluetooth speakers and a really weird range of products. They've got a, one of those portable suitcase vinyl players. They've got a mouse and keyboard. They've got a feature

• 1:43:33Speaker 13

  phone. They've got smart glasses that very pointedly have speakers but no camera. So they're very much not perfect glasses. And they have a portable steamer for reheating your leftovers. All tied under this one brand. But it actually all looks really nice. Everything is really bright and vibrant and colorful. It's all pretty cheap. When I kind of, I just found this at the Acer booth and mentioned it on Slack. And so I found these like cute and colorful products from, from Packard Bell. It was like some weird Verge writer wake word, because within minutes, this like Slack thread was just crawling with everyone going, oh my God, those are great. Oh, so cute. Colorful tech. Ah, I miss it. Ah, that's brilliant. So there is something about it. I think if you go look at the designs, they're really lovely. Sadly, it's all only in Europe right now. So I have no idea if it will ever come to the US or anywhere else, but.

• 1:44:19Speaker 02

  Right. Did Packard Bell have some like brand loyalty in Europe that I don't understand? Everybody know the Packard Bell PC in the States when I was young was like, I hate this thing.

• 1:44:29Speaker 13

  Yeah, I, not as far as I'm aware of. I have no deep loyalty to Packard Bell. There's no Packard Bell nostalgia going around that I know of. And I don't know why they thought Packard Bell lined up with like really colorful, affordable accessories. I, the connection I do not understand. I think they just realized they had this like brand name lying around in the back of a drawer and had this idea for colorful accessories and just kind of cram them together.

• 1:44:51Speaker 02

  All right. I appreciate it. I, I'm just staring at this record player in deep confusion.

• 1:44:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Speaker 13

  Oh, did I not mention the RGB lights on the turntable suitcase player? Sorry, I forgot that as well.

• 1:45:03Speaker 12

  This is for college kids, right? The steamer, this feels like it's definitely targeted.

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  Right. You can, you can buy one whole dorm room of garbage from Packard Bell.

• 1:45:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  But I do, I do appreciate it's colorful. David, does it sing to you?

• 1:45:16David Pierce?

  Um, it probably doesn't sing, but it does play music.

• 1:45:20Speaker 02

  Rough. Well, I know who lost lightning round with that joke. All right. This was wonderful. We went way over what we expected. I appreciate you both very much. There's more to come from Efa. I should note, as we're recording this, hours from now, there will be a Tesla Cyber Cab announcement. So if you're listening to this wondering why we're going to talk that, it's because it didn't happen yet. So if you know what happened at that event, tell us. You can email us at [email protected]. You can call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Reminder, you can subscribe to The Verge for ad-free episodes of this and all of our other podcasts. There's exclusive newsletters. We'll make Jen come to your house and reboot your smart home. That's the highest tier.

• 1:46:02Speaker 12

  Hang on, what?

• 1:46:05Speaker 02

  Guess what's happening. Thanks to Joanna Stern and Hayden Field for joining us earlier. Thanks to Jen and Dom. Thanks to David and Mel for holding the show down. And David Pearce's absence, it's been wonderful. Vergecast is production of The Verge and the Box Me Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk, who is not impersonating himself on LinkedIn to get you to come on the show. Just a reminder, I'm not even going to explain to Jen and Dom what that means. I think that's the show.

• 1:46:31David Pierce?

  I think that's the show.

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  Next week is Apple Week.

• 1:46:33David Pierce?

  Next week's Apple Week. It's going to be crazy.

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  It's going to be nuts. We're going to be on the ground there. It's going to be great. That's The Vergecast.

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