Apple's iPhone X Event, Bodega, and Animoji

Recorded live in front of an audience in San Francisco after Apple's iPhone X event, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul welcome Lauren Goode and Casey Newton back to The Vergecast to run through everything announced at the new Steve Jobs theater in Apple Park. The gang also takes questions from the audience. If you weren't able to make it to the show, we've got the tape for you here. 02:11 - Apple park 07:54 - Apple TV 4K 12:32 - iPhone 8 17:52 - iPhone X 28:57 - "the notch" 38:38 - Apple Watch 48:41 - Paul's weekly segment "Is there a refrigerator in this thing?" 53:40 - Animoji 1:02:34 - The state of Apple 1:17:37 - Q & A 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.

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast.

• 0:24Nilay Patel?

  You may have noticed that something is different about the flagship podcast of theverge.mobi. Today, we've been raided by pirates.

• 0:35Nilay Patel?

  No, we are here, I'm very excited to say, we are here in front of a live audience in San Francisco. It's the day after the iPhone event. Give ourselves a hand.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  And because it's the day after the iPhone event, we're gonna talk about Windows Phone?

• 0:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, only Windows Phone. 90 minutes of pure Windows excitement. No, but these people, if you're listening in your car, just know that we'll be interrupted by the shouts of drunkards for the next hour to 90 minutes. But that's great.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  I think everybody's drinking responsibly that I've seen so far.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Is there like a key word that we have that every time we say they have to...

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  I guess we're gonna all figure it out together, Lauren. It's iPhone.

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  It's not right. Anyway, I'm Neelai Patel, I'm the energy of The Verge. Dieter Bone is here. Hello. Paul Miller is here. Hello. And Lauren Good is joining us today. Whoa. How you doing, Lauren? Good, how are you guys? So we should just get into it. I need to say some things that I've forgotten. Here are the things I need to say. One, we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We are the best podcast in that network, in case you were confused about that situation.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Weeds fan out there.

• 1:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, The Weeds is great. They're like a tank. We're a flagship. It's a very different situation.

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  Just barreling over the landscape of policy. Good job, Ezra. But we sail through the water, the greatest of ease. Second, I want to just say thank you, T-Mobile is helping us present this live event today, so thank you to them. But that's enough business. Let's get on the business.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  Yesterday was the iPhone event. We were there. Dieter, Lauren and I were there. Our talented video director, Phil Esposito, was with us. And there's lots of iPhone news. There's an iPhone 10, there's an iPhone 8, it's not an iPhone 9. Nope. Troublesome. No SC news. There's a watch, there's an Apple TV. But honestly, the biggest thing, literally, physically, the biggest thing that happened was that we went to Apple Park for the first time. We were in the Steve Jobs Theater. And it was, it was beautiful, it was breathtaking, it was also very strange. Lauren, I think you at one point described it to me as post-apocalyptic.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had the distinct feeling that if anything were to really go down, you know, sometime soon, as you sometimes read about on Twitter these days, that we would have survived if it happened yesterday, because we were in what felt like this, I don't know, hyper-realistic, or surrealistic, is that a word? Surreal?

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  Hypersurreal.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Hypersurreal, post-modern bunker. Designed by Johnny Ive, but dreamt up by Steve Jobs years ago.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  You know who's getting like the shaft and all that is Norman Foster, the very famous architect who designed the building. Johnny Ive's like, "Norm, you're good. Just take a seat, buddy, I'm..." Wait, just circle, I've got it.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Just to be clear, I was not there. And it's a circle that's above ground.

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  And then you go into that circle, and then you descend into the theater.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you go into the lair. Well, that's just the Steve Jobs Theater. So the part where employees are going to be, or I guess have started to populate, is the big circle that you've all seen drone footage of.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Spaceship.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  The spaceship, right.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Seeing it from a distance, there's only one way to describe the Apple, the actual Apple Park, you know, spaceship. It looms.

• 3:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  It just, it just looms.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  It's, it's pretty impressive than the Steve Jobs... What was that?

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  Nothing. That's our first live event, everybody.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  That's the word, everybody. How many times can we say looms? No, but the Steve Jobs Theater is the glass structure that has no apparent beam, so it's just this glass circle that's somehow holding up a ceiling. I guess they're load-bearing glass panels. It's, it's just remarkably beautiful. And then, yes, there is staircase that kind of goes below, and then you go into the Steve Jobs Theater, and that's where we were.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that first room that you walk into, we took a bunch of photos, there's photos everywhere, but it's eerie because they've aligned all of the buildings to look perfect in like the morning sunlight. So everyone like looks happy and beautiful, and then it's a totally bare concrete floor, and there's just Apple employees in white shirts smiling at you.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, "We're gonna die here."

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  There's no chance that we're not. Because it's too nice here. Everything's too nice. And then you go down, and then you're in the theater. And behind you, what you don't understand is that the middle of the circle is hidden from you. And while you're sitting there and Tim Cook is like distracting you, the middle of the circle is opening to reveal the hands-on area where you saw all of our videos. And that just like quietly... I mean, it very much is like a cult.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:15Nilay Patel?

  It's like a... The whole campus is like a really super-nice college. I think Jobs like modeled it after Stanford. He like loved Stanford. So they basically tore up a parking lot and then built hills in it, which is very Apple. We got... Someone today told us all of the concrete they dug up was re-recycled into the building. So we're very proud of that. So it felt like we had arrived at college for the first day. I took iPhone 101.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  How was the Wi-Fi? Oh my god, the Wi-Fi was...

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  We have very different opinions.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Great. I had zero problems with the Wi-Fi.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  I had all the problems.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  It's never happened to me at a tech event before.

• 5:47Nilay Patel?

  I think it's because you have a newer Mac than I do.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's because you were using your Mac Pro from like 2011.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  I was using a MacBook Pro from 2012 and it worked fine.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  My theory is that they had detected my useful USB ports. SD card reader, workable processor, and just shut me the fuck down.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  My favorite detail about the Steve Jobs Theater and the whole area, it's underground and every door is actually like 14 inches thick at minimum. It is ready for an apocalypse.

• 6:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  It might cause one.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  There are little things too, like, not to get too TMI, but like the doors to the bathrooms are really nice. You're like, "Oh, somebody thought about the bathroom doors."

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  It was Johnny Ive.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  It was Norman Foster.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  Norman Foster is like easily the finest bathroom.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  And you go to like authenticate and the keypads and walls. You know, like normal office buildings are like these terrible, ugly things that stick out from the door frame? And these are just like, these beautiful white pads flush with the wall. Like, where is the keypad?

• 6:45Nilay Patel?

  It's somewhat unfortunate that the movie "The Circle" came out

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:48Nilay Patel?

  right before we went to a circle. That looked like we were going to die. But it was very beautiful. And like, one of the stunning things that you can go see. You can actually go there. There's a visitor's center that is a store.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  Go there and like, you can. It's a town hall. A town square.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  A square.

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  It's a town square. You can have a civics situation there if you want. But anyway, so we're there. It's worth talking about because it was just so amazing to be there. We're gonna go there a lot and it's gonna get less amazing over time, but this time was amazing. But then they announced a whole bunch of stuff.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Oh, did they?

• 7:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It was all leaked. You could read about it in the first.

• 7:24Nilay Patel?

  But they actually announced the stuff. It was great. Where should we start?

• 7:28Speaker 02

  iPhone X.

• 7:29Nilay Patel?

  Is it?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  What do you guys think?

• 7:31Nilay Patel?

  They're not. It's like some medium. What about Atmos support on the Dolby TV?

• 7:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, see, they all, what they came here for. And I just want to point this out. The Verge has created a community where 200 people paid tickets to hear about surround sun formats.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  If you're in the crowd.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  After that, headphone jacks.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Let's just do, let's just do, let's start with, let's start with the Apple TV. Get it out of the way and then we'll go to iPhone X, AKA iPhone X. I just want the crowd, if you understand the following joke, I want you to yell and cheer.

• 8:06Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna yell anyway.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  There are four lights.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  These guys aren't.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  You keep quiet, Joey.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  They're not, they're not.

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  Was I supposed to yell?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Next Generation fans. It really disappoints me.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Okay. So, Apple TV was like, it was the first up.

• 8:24Nilay Patel?

  Here's, I think, the most important thing to know about the Apple TV.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  It was, when they were done with the event, they're like, go play with all the stuff. There was no Apple TV there. Like, literally, they were like, yeah, that didn't happen.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  Uh, because the only update to it is the resolution update.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no. The remote is.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  They put a ring around one of the buttons so that you could maybe know which way it was pointing when you picked it up.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They didn't mention it.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  Like, during the keynote or the thing, we had to ask them later. And they're like, yeah, we, um, added a ridge of plastic. It's great. It's the biggest upgrade to the Apple TV in years, everybody. No, literally, the one thing they added was 4K HDR, and they came out and they did all the stuff. Yeah. And they, the, was it the founder or CEO of Dolby was there?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  CEO of Dolby was there.

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  CEO of Dolby was there. And I think you all know this, I'm very excited about the idea of having both Dolby Vision, which is better than HDR 10, and Dolby Atmos, which is like object-based surround sound, happening in my life. Yeah. Thing I want. Yeah. Because I don't want to go to the movie theater. You want all the lights to light up on your receiver. All of the lights. So, did you get all the lights? No. I did not. Well, what happened? In fact, they were so confused about the lights that I assumed, when I was talking to them afterwards, I was like, "This is great. It's a thing, and like, you're gonna..." They also announced that all of your iTunes purchases that you did in HD will be automatically upgraded to 4K. Which is great. Which is great. It's a big deal. That was great, big. They're gonna be cheaper than like Vudu and Amazon, all the other people. All that's great. Well, the-

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  This is a huge win. I'm gonna get all the lights, I'm gonna save some money, get all these free upgrades, I'm gonna watch movies for days. Excited to spend $180 on it? And then, in, I was talking to them later, and I, I was so excited that I just assumed that all the lights would light up, and I was like, "How's the Atmos thing going?" And they're like, "Yeah." And then like later on, they're like, "We forgot to tell you something." This is a true story. Like, later on, I got a note, and I'm like,

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  it, the email had an emoji, an "an" emoji. Thank you, tucking his hair behind his ears sheepishly. And they're like, "Yeah, we're just not doing it." And I was like, "Why?" And they're like, "We have nothing to say to this." They, they couldn't get the extra, the fourth light, because they don't actually employ any Romulan torture.

• 10:34Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna make this joke happen. It's happening. It's- You're listening to this podcast in your car, pull over and watch all of the next generation. Should I watch to be able to get this joke? That I don't know. Which of the Star Treks is it? I don't know. Somebody, somebody, somebody Google it for us, real quick. We're sitting in front of computers.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Speaking of computers, there's a mysterious-

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  No one knows.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  -mysterious MacBook Air. It's been here all day.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  Are we gonna open it?

• 10:58Speaker 03

  I think it's fine. It's fine. It's not bothering.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, this isn't a surprise. It's not a reveal. It doesn't have an iPhone in it. It's literally just someone's computer.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  I think it's one of Walt Mossberg's because he has-

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Is there anything else to say about the Apple TV?

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  Uh, well, there's, so there's the one thing I will say about it.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  It's very expensive, right? It's like, it's really actually quite expensive. And I think that their intention for it is that all the people who have 4K TVs, who have just held on to their Apple TVs because they have bought a lot of movies and iTunes already, will get the upgrade and they'll be so happy that their TV is 4K now because they haven't bought a Roku in the meantime. I think that is very hopeful of them. And I think the enthusiast community that would have otherwise bought it is already disappointed.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  I don't understand why you're putting... It's basically a home theater PC, right? It's more powerful than a Mac Mini. It has an A10 in it. The Mac Mini has like a Steam engine.

• 11:55Nilay Patel?

  You, right, like, there's a world in which that thing is actually a computer and you run apps on it and do it. So, they're, and we're gonna talk about the iPhone 8 too. They have entered a weird middle of the market where the bottom of the market is gonna buy something very cheap that's useful and good, and the top of the market is gonna say, "This isn't the thing I want." Or they're gonna buy something else that does more. So, I don't know. We're gonna get one. We're gonna review it.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  See what lights I can get out of it.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:17Nilay Patel?

  There's the potential that you do a software update and then-

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Get more lights.

• 12:21Nilay Patel?

  This is really emotional.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Download, download the lights.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  You buy the thing. It has all the lights in the front. You just want- You under, you people understand, right?

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:30Nilay Patel?

  One guy understands. That's great. Okay, let's talk about phones. We've done enough on the TVs. Go ahead.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  So, there's an 8 and there's a 10.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  Your thing. I had my thing.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:37Nilay Patel?

  My sad thing.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Okay, so, the thing that I will say that is not popular is there's only two things different between the 8 and the 10, and the 8 is not getting enough respect. I think the eight is an iPhone X for all intents and purposes, except for the screen and the crazy selfie face unlock.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  Screen and the front camera.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but same processor, back camera's just as good. The screen isn't like as amazing, but like it's an iPhone screen. It looks fine. Um, you know, you've got.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  So you wait, you mean the Plus?

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Well, the Plus, yeah, the Plus, which it's a big dopey surfboard of a phone.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Does the Plus have, the Plus doesn't have optical image stabilization for both cameras.

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  It does.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  I think it does.

• 13:20Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:22Nilay Patel?

  It's not.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Look at this. Just the one.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Just the one.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Whatever.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Uh, but it does have wireless charging, right? It will have wireless charging.

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  Everyone angrily Google.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  What are we doing?

• 13:32Nilay Patel?

  Just angrily.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Trust our audience.

• 13:33Nilay Patel?

  You know, the problem with being at the event when you live blog and take photos and do the things.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:39Nilay Patel?

  You actually have no idea what happened.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Or remember.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  No, information just goes into your brain and then goes out.

• 13:43Nilay Patel?

  And then turns into a live blog.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  And then we have to go back and read our own live blogs later.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  I watch all the events in 3X Speed afterwards, which is very entertaining and I recommend it to everyone.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  No, I think we can, we can get the eight, like the basic specs of it out of the way. You all know it. It's got the bionic.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  It's the bionic sensor, which Apple started naming their chips.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I'm very angry that the processor's called A11 bionic.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  Wait, tell them the reason. The reason's amazing.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  So, I mean, every year, there's an incremental process, I shouldn't say incremental, there's a significant processor upgrade and it's, it's numeric. It's, you know, the A9 or the A10 or whatever it might be. And then the iPad, it's the X, right? But people weren't making as big of a deal of that as Apple wanted, so they started giving it a name, like Fusion or Bionic. And now we're all talking about it and saying, it's got a bionic sensor.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Because the numbers just weren't doing it.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Right, but like Fusion you get, it's taking two different things and fusing them together and you get both. It's great, but.

• 14:44Nilay Patel?

  What were the two different things?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Things that are different.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Two of them, just checking. Um, the, the big and the small.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  Big and the small.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  The bionic either means a, a electronic thing that is inspired by a biological thing, the original definition, or it means bionic man, a biological thing that is infused with technology.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  It's a chip for running machine learning algorithms.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  So it's, it's, it's therefore informed by the structure of our brain?

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Well, neural networks are basically inspired.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Once again, they steal from all that's Jeff Hawkins' idea, by the way.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Jeff Hawkins did not invent neural networks.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  No, he didn't.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Just wrote a really good book that I highly recommend about how our brains work.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Hawkins is older than a palm, by the way, if you're not aware. Youngins.

• 15:27Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Youngins.

• 15:29Nilay Patel?

  You're pushing the fact that you're old today.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  It's super old today.

• 15:31Nilay Patel?

  Alright, Paul, go ahead.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so, but 12 megapixel camera, optical stabilization on just the one.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:41Nilay Patel?

  You're right. Everyone's right about the one camera. You should buy an iPhone X. I hope you have a thousand dollars.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Stereo speakers sound very good. It's like on the earpiece and on the bottom thing, it's, I think, a little bit overdue that we got that on an iPhone, but it's great. I'm happy to have it. And it feels better than you expect. Like, I was expecting to walk and be like, "Oh, it's just another iPhone 7," which is just another iPhone 6, but it does feel significantly better. They did a better job with the glass back on the iPhone 8 than I, than most other companies do. It's like Galaxy S8 quality in terms of its overall build.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  I read that when you guys wrote that up for theverge.com. How can you tell that glass is better by just touching it?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  You touch it?

• 16:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I dropped it. I threw it on the ground in a fit of panic.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:30Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, like, so the Galaxy has the weird curve and it comes to that edge, because of the front screen.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  And the S7 had like the rail that like stuck out and then the S8 like flowed in a little bit better.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  These are features. You're talking about the flat surface.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, as a physical object, just strictly as a physical object, yo, it's an iPhone. It's like got giant bezels. But it's like, it's a very nicely made iPhone.

• 16:54Nilay Patel?

  It's also the one most people are gonna get, I think.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Well, that is a big question.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  So your argument is that there's really no need to get that excited about the, I want to say X all the time, about the 10, because the iPhone 8 is just as good minus the display. It's basically minus the display.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  You, I'm saying, I'm not saying that it's just as good, but I'm saying that if you go out and get an 8 or an 8+, you shouldn't feel bereft. You shouldn't feel like, "Oh, I didn't get the good one. Everybody else is better than me." You should feel like you got it amazing.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  Until you get your first an emoji, like, "I suck. I'm the lamest kid at this private school."

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  That's your life now. You had $700 but not $1,000. Yeah. That's who you are. You bought the V6 Mustang.

• 17:39Nilay Patel?

  That was me. That was my high school experience. Wait, can you explain that one for me?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  You had a nice car in high school.

• 17:46Nilay Patel?

  It's a Mustang without an edged edge screen. Wait, Paul, you actually wrote a... Wait. I want to stop doing this iPhone analysis. Let's talk about the 10 and what it is. Let's get into the tech. Lauren, you held it in your hand. You played with it.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  I did. It's beautiful. I was surprised by that. I am not the first person to upgrade to the newest phones. Or just in general, for a gadget reviewer. I tend to take my time. I am carrying the 6S right now.

• 18:11Nilay Patel?

  Headphone jack.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  With a headphone jack.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  R.I.P.

• 18:17Nilay Patel?

  My people love analog audio.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  And I live blogged yesterday on a late 2012 MacBook Pro. So, keys are missing. It's amazing. So, like, you know, I'm just... I'm not the fastest person to upgrade. And I thought, well, I'm not... Whatever this iPhone 10 is, if it's $1,000, I am a real human being and I immediately am going to be like, "Yeah, I don't know. I'll probably just go for whatever one is next." Beyond that. I saw it and I thought, "That's a really beautiful phone." I thought the display was absolutely beautiful. I thought it was designed really nicely. They're like... The elongated camera on the back is like a little jarring at first, but there's, of course, a design reason for that. The stuff that it appears to be able to do, which is very limited in the hands-on area, is impressive.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  So, I'm still not like rush out and buy this thing, but I don't know, just it's a really nice-looking phone. And I've brought this up a lot in the past few days. And we wrote about this. We did this in our Instagram Live, which you guys probably saw. Not that I expect anyone here to follow our Instagram Live. You all did. But... Like, Apple is doing everything after everybody else. They're doing an edge-to-edge OLED display. They're doing biometric unlocking. They're doing wireless charging. They're doing like all this stuff after everybody else. But they just have such control over the full stack of everything that there are little things that they can do to make it better. And we're not going to know if it actually is better until we use the phone, but there's like a good chance that there are certain things that are definitely better.

• 19:44Nilay Patel?

  I mean, just in the little bit of time I got to play with Face ID, it is miles better than any Samsung implementation of that.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Do you get to set it up?

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you set it up.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  I set it up.

• 19:54Nilay Patel?

  I didn't get to set it up.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  It worked. I set it up and I would say that it failed on me a couple of times, like the 10 times I tried it. But the times that it worked, it super worked. And I think it failing was me like not knowing the precise angle to like point it at me.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  I think it failing was probably your hair was not quite as high as Cracker Federighi's. And so it just...

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Probably true.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, you just needed to adjust.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  It definitely feels more accurate than Samsung's Face Unlock and is 1,000% more convenient than Samsung's iris scanning. So I think that in general, at least for just basic unlocking and using your phone, it's maybe going to be like a half step back in terms of convenience from Touch ID, but that'll iterate over time and you're not like going to suffer if you get this and don't have Touch ID.

• 20:44Nilay Patel?

  Or next year, they're going to figure out how to put the fingerprint sensor into the screen.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:48Nilay Patel?

  Right? I mean, that's like the big rumor. But so the way it works, in case none of you are... I could pull anyone up from the audience, be like, "Tell me how Face ID works." But if you're listening in a car, and this is how you catch money, so it has an array of sensors they call TrueDepth at the top of the phone in the notch. The notch is very controversial, but in that notch is all the sensors.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  There is an infrared camera, a flood illuminator, a proximity sensor, an ambient light sensor, a speaker, a microphone, a front camera, and a dot projector.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  So here's the thing about the dot projector.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  It's almost like a tiny Kinect, right?

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a little tiny Xbox Kinect.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  And you can have it pause movies whenever you want.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  We need to do, we need to have Hines do a DIY with a Kinect.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so here's the thing about-

• 21:34Speaker 01

  This is a Kinect, because people will use this.

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, they, um, so, uh-

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  How many people saw, how many people here have a Kinect under their TV right now? It's, it, I can't see you, so it's just me, from what I see.

• 21:51Nilay Patel?

  Okay, yes, one yes, okay.

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  Here is the thing about this, and I will tell you, my family, about this, and we'll share our shame together. The dot projector, if you watch our hands-on video, uh, I didn't see this, but our camera picked it up, it's constantly blinking at you, because it's projecting IR dots on your face. It's a fucking IR blaster. On the front of this phone.

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  Which makes me think that someone is gonna, like, jailbreak the phone and turn it into a remote for the TV. And that's what I want. That's like, all I want out of this, is like, all of that design, all of that engineering, and you can be like, "I turned the volume up with this jailbreak app." But, so, it works.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  It's like a Googoo Tango module for your face.

• 22:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, it's wild. So, Dieter had it work on his face. I, when we rushed to do our video, I was not able to set up, because there were some people behind me. So I just had this poor gentleman from Apple, who's like, job it is to walk you through the demos, and it was set up for his face, and I, this poor guy's in our video, I kept pointing at his face. Which is hilarious in this context, not so hilarious in the context of like, the cops.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:00Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, you can't reset your face if it's your password. Uh, it doesn't work if your eyes are closed, so if you get pulled over, you just have to shut your eyes. Forever.

• 23:12Nilay Patel?

  Huh? What, yeah, okay, yes, you're a pirate, great. That's a, approach for you, is to have an emergency security eye patch at all times. But it's also supposed to recognize as you age, if you grow your hair long, if you wear a hat-

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Makeup.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  If you wear glasses, makeup, unclear sunglasses will trigger it or not.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:33Nilay Patel?

  So there's all these, this set of questions that I think remain unanswered about it. And, you know, Apple tried to address some of them in the presentation, I'm sure they're gonna address more of them over time. But, you know, they had the wall of like- Aria Stark masks showed. We've made all these faces. It didn't trick them.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  The poster for the movie Face Off.

• 23:57Nilay Patel?

  Nicolas Cage was there yesterday. It was very strange.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  And then all of a sudden it was John Travolta. So we were like.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  But they also are like, if you have a twin, you should probably just use your passcode.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:08Nilay Patel?

  Which is a really weird thing for the richest and most powerful company in technology to say like, we've solved every problem except twins.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  That doesn't happen. No one has those. So I think there's like this whole set of questions about what it means for literally the most public part of you to be your password. Because you can't constantly hide your face. You can't keep it a secret. You can't, I don't know, write it down on a piece of paper and like tuck it away. And that's not great. Like, I think all of us understand it's not a good solution, like having a password. But to go from something that you can obviously keep a secret to something that can never truly be a secret, I think is like very difficult. And that, to me, is a whole set of questions about Face ID. Can they navigate all those turns?

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, like, great, you can click. So people are yelling five clicks. Two people. Two nerds who have drugs with them right now are yelling.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  So you click the side button five times and you get your, and it turns off Face ID and you have to enter the passcode. That's cool and that's smart.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  But can you explain to me, why is it?

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  We're off script now.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  So fundamentally more easy to take a picture of a face than get your hands? I guess because you have to touch me to get my fingerprint?

• 25:25Speaker 02

  That's what I was wondering. Like, in the point of sale situation right now, we're all, well, a lot of us are used to just going like this and then your thumb is already there. Now you're going to be like, if you have a $1,000 iPhone and you're in line at Whole Foods, like all the other $1,000 iPhone people.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  Amazon's lowering prices.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Hold on, hold those avocados. Hold my beer.

• 25:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. I'll take my kombucha now.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  I mean, it's like, you're right. Like, is it that much easier than just going like this?

• 25:58Speaker 01

  What Apple will tell you, and you're like, do you really have to like, hold your face over the point-of-sale terminal? Like, no, no, just like, double-click the home, the home, the side button. No, it's not called the sleep-wake button. It's called the side button now.

• 26:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it launches Bixby.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Double-click that, that turns on the Face Unlock thing. That turns on Apple Pay. Then you authenticate it, then you tap the terminal, which is a very different, sort of, quick and easy workflow from just doing before.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  I can barely pay with my thumb already.

• 26:32Nilay Patel?

  The security stuff where you click it five times and you, I get it. But what I'm saying is, if you can actually beat it, the information that is required for you to input into the mechanism that beats it is the most public information about you that is commonly available. So, they have to make sure you can't beat it. And like, the cop's showing up and you click it five times and like, and I throw it in the air and run away, like, great. We've all been there, together as a family. I don't know, I travel through the TSA a lot with a bag full of wires, so like, I have a weird... But, it's just, on my way here, I got stopped. Because I, I mean, honestly, I was carrying like, 15 lithium-ion batteries,

• 27:13Nilay Patel?

  like, I would have said. But, if you can beat it, and, you know, there's like, Dieter yesterday was talking about, it has new vectors. So, Touch ID only ever talked to the authentication chip in the phone.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:26Nilay Patel?

  Never talked to anything else. But the front camera and all that tracking talks to Animoji. Right, so like it's, you can get that data in other ways. Like the Snapchat filters we demoed are obviously mapping your face. So there are other ways to collect the data and then potentially, I'm sure immediately people are gonna try to beat it.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the, I actually talked to our security reporter Russell Brandon about this a little bit. Presumably those apps that use the, you know, the data that you can get from that to make crazy face filters, it's just working through an API and that stuff isn't lossy. But like the fear is you, somebody makes a random app. What was the app that did the face filters that turned out to have a bunch of spyware in it?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Oh, Me Too.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Me Too, yeah. Uh, like that app is like, makes cute face filters, but what it's actually doing is secretly recording all your face data so they can build a mask to get you. It's probably like through the standard APIs, like they're not getting enough data to do that, we don't know.

• 28:24Nilay Patel?

  I love the idea of a, a person with both the capability of launching that app

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:30Nilay Patel?

  and making really high-res masks.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Right?

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  Right, like there's a mask maker out there who's like, I gotta fucking learn to code.

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  This is my future.

• 28:40Nilay Patel?

  So Paul, you wrote, I want to make sure you talk about the watch.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  I'm gonna talk about how you think this is the best OLED screen ever made by human hands.

• 28:47Nilay Patel?

  I also want to talk about the notch. There's like two things to talk about.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:50Nilay Patel?

  Let's do this, let's do the notch first, and then I want to ask Paul, because you wrote a piece today about why you want to buy the eight over the 10. But, so the notch, I don't know if you guys have been following like the deep Apple nerd community that I'm forced to follow.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  I find it a pleasure.

• 29:09Nilay Patel?

  There, there. So there is like deep, meaningful, like controversy about the existence of the notch, what it means for developers. I think the thing that is really interesting to me is the screen is 5.8 inches. Like Dieter said, I think it is easily the best OLED screen I've ever seen. I've never really liked them. I think they're way oversaturated. I think most of them have weird pixel matrix issues. This one looks-

• 29:34Speaker 01

  He wants to say Pentile, but he knows that that time has passed, so he's not bringing it up.

• 29:38Nilay Patel?

  Over.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  It's like BlackBerry, it's fucking dead. Sorry, the one BlackBerry person hissed at me.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  That was weird. But no, you're good, you're, you're great.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Thumbs up.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  TCL's gonna take care of you.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  No, so like it looks beautiful, but the notch, it's five point inches, but the notch, and then the rounded corners.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Rounded corners, I think, are the big.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  And then the, the home area at the bottom that you have to protect. All of that means that the usable screen area is more like the iPhone six, seven, eight design than the plus design.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  I heard a really good analogy for this. Do you remember like old cameras would have kind of a safe area, like it'd show the corners of what's like, this will definitely show up on every CRT TV.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  That is what developers have now, because there are rounded corners and a bunch of this screen is being wasted. Also, Apple, through the WebKit team, asked the CSS committee, who add safe areas to the CSS spec back in August.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  And then like, so on the GitHub comments, there's like a comment, like from yesterday, it's like, oh, so that's why Apple did that. They're trying to figure out, how do you add this to CSS so that like, oh, oh, because if you look at, look, look at your computer the next time, is there anything in the corners?

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  There's lots of things in the corners. A lot of times the close buttons are in the corners. There's things that we put in corners of our user interfaces all the time. And now you have to be cognizant as a developer, both for the web and for apps. Um, and there'll be some ways that'll automatically kind of dodge them out of the corners. But like, if you want to use the whole screen, you have to figure out how to not use corners because they're curved.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  The other thing about the safe area thing is that in order to get the, you know, the home bar that indicates that you swipe out to go home to work, it needs to cut that out from the safe area. And when you, when you turn the phone in landscape, the home button moves to the bottom of the landscape. You swipe up in landscape to go home, which is cool. Cool. But also bonkers.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  By the way, I own swipe2gohome.com now.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  Finally, a monetization strategy.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Usable area for developers when you're in landscape mode is shorter than you get on an iPhone 6, 7, 8. It actually has less usable vertical space in landscape mode than like a regular iPhone.

• 32:03Nilay Patel?

  Also, if your app is not coded correctly and you turn it into landscape and you scroll, the scroll bar disappears behind the notch.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:10Nilay Patel?

  Then it shows up again.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Really exciting.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  I think all of this doesn't matter because, one, I don't use any app except for video apps. I go 90. I'm not ashamed to admit it.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  The show is presented by T-Mobile, and Go 90 is a terrible joke, so it all works out. So like, video apps, you turn your phone. Videos are pillar boxed, so you don't actually see it.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  On a 10, they're pillar boxed?

• 32:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  You can double-tap to get the full zoom in and have it notch cut out, but by default, they're boxed.

• 32:38Nilay Patel?

  So, Apple just didn't show that yesterday. So, I think everyone's assuming that videos are gonna be cut off by the notch. But I think, more importantly, this phone is designed to be held in portrait.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  Which is actually the more natural way to hold a phone. And I think in portrait, the bottom is an issue, but the top is just not.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  The bottom's an issue in terms of the content getting cut off?

• 32:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the corners and the bottom of the screen.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  That's like, kind of the dead space you're talking about, that's where you're gonna be doing the swiping up anyway, right?

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Like, even when you're holding the phone, like, your fingers are gonna be sort of curling around it.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  So, here's my, my big question. Like, I'm, everybody's all freaked out. I'm fine with it, because I've used a bunch of Android phones, and they all have crazy UIs, and like, things will be different, it's cool. No. It's fine.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  This has been Dieter's Jam for like, two days.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  He's like, Android's a mess and everyone's alive.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  You'll be fine.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  It's fine. And like, swipe up to go home? Love that! That's some WebOS shit right there. Moving Control Center to the upper right, swipe down to get your system controls? Love that! That's some WebOS shit right there.

• 33:41Nilay Patel?

  Found your people.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Notifications, that's fine.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Although notifications on iOS are still a hot mess.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Every app is a website.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Y'all are just mean.

• 34:01Nilay Patel?

  We're only available on Sprint.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  The phone is double tall. It's a super tall phone and they, because there's no home button to slightly tap with your finger twice, there's no more reachability to move half the screen down. And I think that kind of sucks.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  People use reachability?

• 34:20Nilay Patel?

  Use it all the time.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Really?

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Also, iOS 11 has killed the 3D Touch from the side for switching apps.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  The 3D Touch does still exist.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  New phone, but our understanding, and we don't, we don't have like the deep dive into this yet, but our understanding is because the display is different and so, of course, the display stack is different and so the usual mechanism that was created to make 3D Touch work on the existing models, they had to like do a bunch of new stuff to, I just like kissed the microphone, I was so excited about this. They had to do a bunch of different stuff to in order to fit the 3D mechanism into the display stack. And we don't know exactly like where that is yet. It's different. They had to redesign 3D Touch for, for the 10.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  And that might be why they are de-emphasizing it in the software because they're not...

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  That's it, we used it.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's there. It's almost like, um, you know, for a while, like everyone said multi-touch every chance they got and now it's like just assumed. I think that we're getting to a point where for people who do use 3D Touch, it's like, it's just kind of assumed it's part of like your, your interface and your controls and that's what you do.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Well, you also, on the, on the home bar, on the bottom, you can, you can swipe to the right and it will, that is how you switch to the last app and you can just switch through apps that way. And once you do it a couple of times, like, oh yeah, this is how it should work. It's great.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Wait, explain that again. On the home bar?

• 35:39Speaker 01

  The home bar, you, you swipe up to home, you swipe up.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  ToGoHome.com.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, but if you just swipe over on it, it swipe, it swipes the app over to your last app. So you just, you just very quickly without having to do any 3D touch shenanigans, you just swipe over and it's the last app you're using. It's great.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  It's a little grabber for your app.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  And if you throw it up, you go home. And if you slide, you go, okay, that works.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Why didn't they pull a Samsung?

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  You just hold down on it.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Get a 3D touch home button where you could just press on it really hard.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Really hard, right?

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Here's my question.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  I mean, if they tried that and it just, it just didn't work.

• 36:16Nilay Patel?

  That's your question, Paul.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Why didn't they do something crazy and absurd down in the bottom portion of the phone? Like, I know, I was so stoked on all the wild UI concepts I saw that they're gonna basically use that portion to create like sort of a contextual UI. And now that I think about it, it is kind of stupid to have a software circle there all the time. Obviously, things change around.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  But, I don't know, I just feel like they've gotten more.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  A lot of Android fans here.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  Like, they made, not only did they not like super utilize the bottom of the phone, they kind of made it like a safe area, literally, they call it a safe area, because of that little bar that always has to be like available for grabbing. So you can't have too many controls at the bottom of the phone.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  You're already getting more screen than you would have otherwise, right? You're already getting more screen just because they reserved a portion of it to like work the phone. Like, fine, I don't know.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  I thought it might have something to do with like drag and drop. Like, you could have like a dock that shows up there. Like, you could make multitasking better somehow.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  No, I honestly think that their move here, they're not gonna sell very many of this phone. And the people who buy it, I think they're gonna be caught in the loop of, I spent a lot of money on this phone. Because, to be honest, I think most people will buy the 256 gig version, which is $1,125. So like, really, this phone costs $1,125. I think if you spend that much money on a phone that is actually a very beautiful physical object, your natural state of being is to be happy with it. Right? Like, it's like, I bought a Ferrari, and it gets terrible gas mileage. Like, it's fucking Ferrari.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  It's a Ferrari.

• 37:51Nilay Patel?

  Um, it's true. That's how I would feel. Any Ferrari owners here? Dead silence.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 37:58Nilay Patel?

  Or there's like two of them and they're like, "We can't talk about it." No, but I think they're able, because the scale is so much smaller, to do things like, "What if we completely change the home button, control center, swipe interface? What if we push it?" And then they'll, they have a year of seeing how that goes. They can either commit to it or change it in iOS 12 when that comes to the mainstream part of their lineup. But they do have this opportunity to screw around, and I, I agree with you, like, I don't know why they didn't screw on more, but they've created the space to, A, revert if it's a huge fail, the amount of changes they've made, or to push it if it's a success.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:37Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's cool. Okay, I want to make sure we talk about the watch, yeah. So Lauren, you have been cursed with wearable reviews. No, but you, you're, you've reviewed the last few watches.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  I have.

• 38:50Nilay Patel?

  This one is the, it's the same watch with LTE, basically.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  As expected. Everything really was leaked, wasn't it?

• 38:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Everything was leaked. Yeah, so this Apple watch has LTE in it. It is not the first smartwatch to have LTE. Some of you may have tried LG's LTE smartwatch before.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  Also dead silence. More Ferrari owners than LG watch owners in this room currently.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  Perhaps Samsung's Galaxy Gear, was it the S2? Or was it, it was the S3?

• 39:19Nilay Patel?

  Also crickets.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Me on the spot.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Gear had a better implementation.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Okay, so here, here's the thing, when you're talking about these little wrist computers that are about yay big, and you start to add things like cellular modems and more stuff to them, is that the battery life generally suffers. So that was my biggest thing going into this, was like, how, how badly, or how much is this going to impact battery life? We don't know yet. Stay tuned for reviews. I told a few people in the audience this earlier, but Apple is saying that they've managed to keep the 18-hour battery claim, even with an LTE modem, which if they manage to do that is impressive. But I'm not, I'm not wholly convinced. I'm not wholly convinced, like, there was this moment when, during the introduction, when they showed a woman on a surfboard, and she was like catching this wave, and then all of a sudden she got a phone call, and it was supposed to be this lighthearted moment, but I was like, "Wow."

• 40:08Speaker 02

  That just like, totally, I don't know, I just feel like there's some places still where you shouldn't have an LTE connection. There should still be some places in the world where you can escape from a cellular connection.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  For me, the standout is seeing the keypad, the number keypad on that phone's play. That was, that's terrifying to me.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, at the end of the day, I think what's going to happen is people are going to use the LTE for true emergency situations, like your, your phone battery died and you're like, I still need to call Lyft. Or, you know.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Why are we all laughing?

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  I think the idea that your phone battery dies before your watch battery is tough.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  I thought you were laughing because I didn't say Uber.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  No, we call lifts, okay? We call lifts.

• 40:55Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  And...

• 40:58Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I don't spend a lot of time in the Bay Area, but the idea of ride-sharing service fans is terrifying. Leave California.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Have you heard anything about what's going on at Uber?

• 41:13Speaker 02

  All right, so back, back to the watch. I think that it's going to be helpful in some situations. I think like, once they get the music streaming thing down on it, that that could be a real value proposition for people who want to go out and about with a watch and they want to just like, on the fly, change their music selection, they happen to not have their phone with them. But we, I mean, the, the LTE watches we reviewed prior to this, it's been a little, it's been a little iffy. So it's, it's still, yeah. I mean, I think what Apple is doing is like, it's a kind of a classic product differentiation, right? That we no longer see the Series 2 available, so we've got the Series 3 with LTE. There's a Series 3 without LTE. That's the price of the Series 2. If you don't want LTE, you can still get GPS and waterproofing, which like, workout people like. I say that like, I'm not one of them.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  And, and then there's the Series 1 for people who just, which is the less, the least expensive for people who just want kind of like a basic smartwatch that does like notifications and other, and other cool things like that. So like, this is just like, classic, like, okay, if you want to pay the most, you're going to have this LTE thing and maybe you're not going to use it all the time, but it's like, the feature. It's the thing. And they always, I mean, there's a faster processor.

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  All that.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  They built the antenna into the face of the watch, which is interesting.

• 42:22Nilay Patel?

  That is really cool.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  They like figured it out.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's pretty cool.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  You have to imagine that that was, they had been thinking about that with the first watch.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  And by the way, Fitbit did something similar with their new like Ioniq smartwatch. They did some fusion thing in the build where the antenna is actually like, anyway, we can get into Fitbit in another podcast. We could spend another entire hour on that. Good week. No, I'm calling it out. But let's talk about the red dot.

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  A lot of feelings about that red dot.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  A lot of feelings about the red dot so far.

• 42:49Nilay Patel?

  It's just cosmetic.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  My understanding, well, it's cosmetic to indicate the LTE.

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  To tell people, I have a watch, but by the way, if my phone dies, I can call Lyft.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Which is when you're in line at Whole Foods?

• 43:08Speaker 02

  And you've got that really heavy grocery bag of avocados.

• 43:12Nilay Patel?

  You're screaming at your wrist.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  And you left your $1,000 iPhone at home.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  It kind of looks like a record button.

• 43:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, or I think it looks like an SOS button, which is interesting because the watch actually has an SOS feature.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  But like to me, it looks like, like, emergency.

• 43:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm rich.

• 43:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Would you guys, would you guys get, get one? Would you like get an LTE Apple Watch?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  If the, if I had the money to spare, it's like, it's an extra 70 bucks for the LTE version.

• 43:46Nilay Patel?

  And it's 10 bucks a month for the connection.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Then I would not. That's a good point. Like the 10 bucks a month, like, unless they make a Project Five version, because extra data sims on Fire are free.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  See? Cheers. Uh, but that's never gonna... Yeah, I don't know that I want to pay 10 bucks a month for my watch.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Because the question about that too is not just that you're paying for LTE, but it's going to be how intelligently they manage the handoff. Because there's already like, right, you can use a lot of things with Bluetooth on the watch. Or if you're in an area where there's a known Wi-Fi network, then the watch will connect to that. And then it's, you know, it's not like using the other protocols. And so they're going to do this handoff thing where it's going to go from different wireless protocols to LTE when you need it. And I think how well it works is all going to be dependent on that handoff process.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Will it work as well as the lift your arm or... Tweak your arm gesture to actually have the watch face turn on.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  That's an excellent question.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Works that well.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  Deep Apple watch burn.

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  So, you've got to review the thing. We've got it, but they're winning, right? So if they just make it incrementally better, they're just going to keep trucking along, basically.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  That's the thing.

• 44:57Nilay Patel?

  They presented a slide yesterday that I thought was fascinating. They're like, "We're now the number one watch brand in the world." And they just listed all the... But the metric by which they're number one was not presented. And the second one that they listed was Rolex? And it's like, okay, they can't beat number of watches sold.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Right, so I think it's revenue?

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  It's revenue. Rolex sells four million dollar watches a year. And Apple sells that many, number of like $300 watches. And they're number one.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Right. They said their sales have increased 50% year over year. And then if you look at the latest IDC numbers, which puts out these reports of global wearable shipments every so often, they're actually now only number two to Xiaomi. So Xiaomi's beating them in volume, which is not surprising because it's Xiaomi. But Apple has now snuck ahead of Fitbit, which has had a lot of sales declines this year. It's snuck ahead of Garmin, which is impressive because they're in that sports enthusiast category. So, yeah, and then Cook has said in vague terms, "This business is the size of Fortune 500 business on its own." So it's a real thing at Apple. But, you know, how many people here are wearing smartwatches? Probably a lot in this crowd, right? Yeah, there's a good amount.

• 46:06Nilay Patel?

  Joey, dude.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's like, "I have four."

• 46:08Speaker 01

  If it's more than 10, I'd be shocked.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Thanks, Joe. You just boosted the average for the rest of us. Like, I think for a lot of normal people still, they're like, "I don't know if I need a smartwatch." I still think that's a very real question. Apple Watch for kids, yeah.

• 46:24Nilay Patel?

  That's dystopian. And then you release them into the cement circle and just chase them around. Okay, we are... I told everyone that we were going to go long, and we have certainly gone long.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  We longed.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  So Lauren, I really want to thank you for coming to the event yesterday.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  Being on stage, seeing these people.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  It was super fun. I'm going to go...

• 46:41Nilay Patel?

  Lauren, clap for Lauren.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Bye, guys.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

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• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  I want to bring out a dude right now, the only person I can think of to talk about an emoji with, Casey Newton.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  Hi, everybody. I just say, the last time I was in this physical space, I saw Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announce a campaign to end all human disease. So it's great to hear you guys talk about the iPhone. But anyway, what were we saying?

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  I just shook a bunch of strangers' hands and then ate food, so I'm... Did that happen in this room?

• 48:22Speaker 04

  Yes, in this very room.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  And how's it going?

• 48:25Speaker 04

  As far as I can tell, cancer is still a thing, so...

• 48:29Nilay Patel?

  All right, Casey, before we begin, I don't want to forget, that was dark, by the way, that was...

• 48:34Speaker 04

  And I'm just getting started.

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  Casey's like a professional improv comedian now, and that was one of the roughest chuckles I've ever heard.

• 48:41Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to forget. Paul, how were you, buddy? Oh, we almost forgot. But we never forget. We never... You do a thing, a segment, what's it called, buddy?

• 48:58Speaker 03

  It's called...

• 49:02Speaker 03

  Is there a refrigerator in this thing?

• 49:09Speaker 03

  I forgot to come up with a new title because it... It's not bad. This happens also, by the way. It's called, "Is there a refrigerator in this thing?" Well, edit it.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  The famous Virgcast segment. All right, this is burning up the internet today. Um, it's something called bodega.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  And a chill filled the room. There is a refrigerator in this thing. No, no, that's, I'm pretty sure they sell beverages in this bodega, but it does not seem to be refrigerated. So, you can get like a lukewarm vitamin water? What the bodega is that they didn't see? So, bodega, imagine a box in a building, and you approach that box and you give that box money somehow, and you receive a product from that box. What would you call that? A vending machine? Yeah. No, it's a bodega. It's gonna disrupt the bodega industry, and mom and pop and first-generation immigrants are all gonna be out of business and destitute,

• 50:13Speaker 03

  and Silicon Valley meanwhile is going to take all the money. Big bodega has it coming. Big bodega. I don't know. I think it's hilarious. These guys made a box that has like some machine learning in it, so that basically you unlock it with your phone, you open it up, you get a... You're listening in your car and making aggressive scare quotes at the words "machine learning." It's a real thing. People do it. It's a job. No, machines do it. You can get like a Udemy course on machine learning. Right. So, it's two Google, ex-Google engineers. It's a talent. It's like a Codecademy course. Lawyer quotes. Oh, boy. Machines can do that now better than I ever could.

• 50:52Nilay Patel?

  All right, go ahead.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Don't be mean to Codecademy, by the way.

• 50:55Nilay Patel?

  No, they're great.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  They'll come at you. It's a long story.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  So you unlock this box, and then it sees what you take out of it, and it charges it to your account. And so the idea is that they're gonna put them in apartment buildings, or gyms, or kind of shared spaces that are relatively secure, because this box doesn't look very secure. But there was just a huge controversy today, because they called it Bodega. And I think Bodega means a lot to a lot of people.

• 51:23Nilay Patel?

  They'd called it vendor with no E.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, like vendor, exactly. No vowels, vendor.

• 51:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so you're my resident Silicon Valley silliness reporter.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 51:34Nilay Patel?

  Tell me about Bodega.

• 51:34Speaker 04

  The name was a really bad choice. What we learned today is that 80% of a New Yorker's identity is that they're friends with a cat in a convenience store.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  If you read Twitter today, man, did you hear about the deep, deep friendships that these rich people have with people who work at their bodega. I don't believe any of that, by the way. I think they buy Cheetos there and tell themselves they have a friend who's unlike them. That's not real. Here's the thing. What is real is that technology is displacing jobs, and technology has no answer for that. And Silicon Valley is extremely callous about that. And its only alternative to jobs seems to be, what if we just have the government write you a check? So Silicon Valley doesn't have the first thing to do about, doesn't know the first thing to do about what is happening because of automation.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  So when things like Bodega come along with the implication that they're gonna get rid of real people's jobs, then I think there is a justified backlash against it. Because it does come across as idiotic. Now, the founders of Bodega said in a Medium post today, which was inevitable, and had 241 claps the last time I looked.

• 52:44Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my god.

• 52:47Nilay Patel?

  Stop clapping. Do not clap in the audience.

• 52:49Speaker 04

  Because it doesn't count. You have to clap on the website. No one gets paid.

• 52:55Speaker 04

  This is real. Stop laughing. Authors do not get paid unless you physically clap on the website. What the author said was essentially that they feel really sorry about the name because they never intended to go head to head with actual convenience stores. They just wanted to put vending machines in apartment complexes. And apparently, they'd done a bunch of market research that said that immigrants did not object to this name. So, anyway, the whole thing is a huge mess, but I think if they had to do it over again, they'd pick a different name.

• 53:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Also, I think that the Fast Company headline was like, "This Silicon Valley startups wants to deport immigrants with their vending machines." It was like, they didn't write that. Whatever. It's not fair for me to ever complain about headlines. Animoji. Yeah, Casey, that's why you're here.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  Here we go.

• 53:44Nilay Patel?

  Let's get off this dark stuff and talk about talking foxes.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  So, well, Animoji. Which Animoji are you? Well, as far as I was able to ascertain yesterday, there is no eggplant Animoji. Okay. Which feels like a missed opportunity to me. You know, my thing is that the Animoji are apparently in the iMessage App Store. Is that right? You have to access the App Store to use them? Or how's that work?

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so you have a keyboard. You do click on the App Store icon. The first thing that opens is Animoji.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  I see.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  And then you're another level away.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  Great.

• 54:18Nilay Patel?

  So they're training you to click on that button. That is true. But whether you will ever go to...

• 54:23Speaker 04

  I once hired a private investigator to find the iMessage App Store, and I'm still waiting to hear about it. No, look, I think these things are fun, but all of the recent kind of social enhancement to iMessage have felt a little bit either half-hearted or too late to me. How many times, if iMessage users out there, in the past day, has someone sent you something with lasers? Right? Like, this stuff is there, but I don't think it gets widely used. And so I think you might see a few novelty foxes and panda faces in your iMessage, but I don't think this is going to become like the new default way for teens to communicate.

• 55:01Nilay Patel?

  It's a bummer to me that it's locked to iMessage because I hate it. Things that are locked to iMessage.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Peter is just watching a GIF of the

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  I am smiling at him on his computer right now.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  I wanted to look at the, I wanted to gaze upon the different emoji options and a GIF is the first thing that came up. So we got to try it though.

• 55:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  And I will tell you, it is the most fun I've had with the phone in the past six months. It is wildly fun to like talk to your phone and have an emoji, literally like beat for beat, no lag at all, become your face. Like I, I became a little dog yesterday. It was very cute.

• 55:33Speaker 04

  Sure, but even.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Are you gonna deny that that was cute?

• 55:38Speaker 04

  I would never deny that that's cute. It was very cute, but the thing is, I've been using Snapchat for four years, right? And they have lenses that are not actually all that different. So I, I don't deny that the technology is cute. I think some people will have a little bit of fun with it. Uh, and it is a novel demonstration of this technology that they built into this very expensive phone. Um, but I like, I don't know. I just think iMessage is such an amazing platform for Apple. I would love to see them invest like 10 times more in it because uh, there, there's actually a lot of research out there that it, it's really the number one chat app for teens, right? Cause like for teens, having iPhone is such a status symbol and it's where most of their communications are going on. So man, like you could just imagine iMessage being so much more than it is right now.

• 56:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I think the thing about emoji that gets me is the way they want you to use it is that you're gonna record a movie.

• 56:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  And I don't like, I don't do that with iMessage ever. I'd never send the little audio messages. So the idea that I'm gonna respond to someone instead of like sending them one quick emoji, I'm gonna pull out my phone and like act out a quiet scene for them.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  Right. What if you were recording a lady? Would, do you think you would maybe invest a little time in making a panda face?

• 56:45Nilay Patel?

  I will confidently tell you that if I send my wife a talking poop,

• 56:50Nilay Patel?

  I am literally married to a divorce attorney.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  I will do this shit for free.

• 56:57Nilay Patel?

  So I don't think that's gonna happen. I'll try it. We'll just see what happens. No, I mean, sure. But I think you're right. I think Snapchat is like, it's so much farther. And there's a huge incremental upgrade to Snapchat filters. That stuff, when I tried it yesterday, was also incredible.

• 57:14Speaker 04

  Okay, but what was different? I've watched this video. It looked like a Snapchat filter. What was the difference?

• 57:19Nilay Patel?

  So usually, when I use Snapchat filters or Instagram filters, which I think are a little bit worse.

• 57:23Speaker 04

  They are.

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  There is a perceptible lag between what you're doing and what the computer is pasting on to your face. None of it is there. It just looks actually like it's applied to your face.

• 57:33Speaker 04

  It became the dancing hot dog.

• 57:34Nilay Patel?

  I was the dancing hot dog.

• 57:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  That's my Animoji. Just dancing away while the world burns.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that stuff's great. Look, to the extent that all of this is making augmented reality a thing, I think it's really exciting. You know, something that did not get a lot of attention yesterday at the keynote, but that has been huge, particularly on Twitter, is all of these novel applications of ARKit, right? Like, there are Twitter accounts where you can just see every day novel applications of ARKit, and it's some of the absolute coolest stuff that is being done with the iPhone. So I hope we see a lot more of that, and I hope Apple talks a lot more about that. So Animoji, like, great use for that, but I think the AR stuff that is gonna come out in the next six months is gonna have nothing to do with Animoji, and like, that's gonna be the stuff we're talking about.

• 58:15Nilay Patel?

  Also, the limited amount of people who are gonna have the 10, it's not gonna be a huge number of people. It just isn't.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  But only because of supply constraints. Like, this is where I differ from you guys. Like, I think that it's the 8 that is not going to be a huge hit, and I think that Apple is gonna sell every 10 that it makes. Because I think you either want the best iPhone, or you want the iPhone that you can best afford, and the 8 is neither of those things.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  So, okay, like, let's posit that anybody who can spend $750, $800 for an 8 or 8+.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  Or $50 a month.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Well, and if they could, would get the 10, because it's like, not that much more on an amortized carrier plan. So let's stipulate that that's true. And let's also further stipulate that it seems likely that Apple's not gonna be able to make enough of these damn things.

• 59:01Nilay Patel?

  Resolves. The Model United Nations shall buy an iPhone X.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  So what happens on December 20th? When I'm, my phone breaks, I need to go buy a phone. I've surveyed the market. I didn't buy a phone in the fall, because I'm not an idiot. And I, you don't buy a fall till after all the phones are announced, that's what I mean. And I go, and I discover that if I wanna get an iPhone X, I have to wait until... June, right? It's gonna, the backlog is that long.

• 59:27Speaker 04

  I waited six weeks for my AirPod and I, my AirPods, and I still feel sad about it, but I waited.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Do you think that most people are gonna do that, or are they gonna quote-unquote settle for an eight?

• 59:36Speaker 04

  I think that so many, for so many people, like the, the, the, the current year iPhone, it, it's a status symbol. It's something they're, they look forward to all year. Like, I absolutely think that people are going to wait. Particularly those like us who are buying a new phone every year. Let's say there's a two-month wait for the new phone. They'll wait, because the phone they have in their pocket is a seven or a seven S, and it's fine, right? Like, they only want it because it does some cool stuff, it's gonna look cool when they bring it out at parties. Uh, I think people are absolutely gonna wait for the ten.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the question is, are they gonna wait so long that it's next September?

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  Right, that's like real. If it's true that there's a 12-month wait for the iPhone X, everything you guys have said is true.

• 1:00:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I, I think that's the most interesting problem for them. I hung out, by the way, with a guy named Kanal Dua. Today, he's the editor-in-chief of Gadget 360, which is the biggest tech site in India. It's actually bigger than The Verge, and it's just Indian audiences. And he told me that Indian buyers, on average, buy a new phone every nine months.

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:00:36Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they cover two phone launches a day. There's an average of 10 phones launched in India every week. Uh, and they, all the companies have price segments from, that are like, Samsung has a phone at every eight dollars, which is every 500 rupees, like, from zero to the top of the line. And he's like, the reason the iPhone 6S still exists is because it is the most popular phone Apple sells in India. Because it's the one that fits into that pricing strategy that's new, and what people don't want there is refurbished phones. So, Apple has this, obviously, we have a somewhat myopic view of our market. And like, there's all of the, if you can afford 750, you can afford 1,000, which I am pretty shaky on. Like, I understand it, it's, it's, it's a big leap.

• 1:01:18Nilay Patel?

  But it's funny how Apple also has to cater to these other huge markets that they are seeing, where they have to show growth. Because if all that happens is the wave of carrier upgrade plans sweeps over America, and everybody gets an iPhone 8, because it's the one that you've been paying on installments for this entire time, they will have zero growth.

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:01:38Nilay Patel?

  So, they have to find ways to capture new people, which means both going down market, which is not what we generally... You know, pay attention to, and it also means they've got to convert a bunch of Android high-end owners over, which means they have to appeal to like

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:51Nilay Patel?

  Note owners.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  So here's the thing.

• 1:01:53Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if the iPhone X appeals to like the Note owner who's like, what I want is like a 400 horsepower engine and a stylus, right?

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  But so like, talk about my app, my app, you know, like, you're getting a 10?

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  Uh, that's the plan.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Neil is going to 10, I'm probably going to 10. Paul is not. I want to hear about this.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Cars.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Cars.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was been working on this. I was pretty, up pretty late last night trying to make a car analogy. I don't know a lot about cars. Here's my, here's where I went with it. The iPhone X is like a Ferrari, but I just need a Honda. I just need something where like reliable and affordable and like something that like matches like my actual use, use case. And I don't, it, it's not such a precious object in my life that I need the ultra luxury one. So I do like to have a really nice phone and I like it to have a long-lasting battery life and be reliable and taking nice pictures and stuff. But it's not the most important object in my life.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  See, if I'm Apple and I hear this, like this terrifies me because what Paul is saying is the iPhone 8 is a station wagon, right? And, and Apple's never been about that. They've always been about creating that, um, that sense of like, oh my God, the future has just landed in the present. So.

• 1:03:11Nilay Patel?

  That was the entire, I mean, that was the thesis of the event yesterday.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  We're in the Steve Jobs Theater. This is his dream. He would, it literally, I've heard multiple Apple executives saying, we hope he's proud of us. Right? Like they were, like, is the iPhone X to you the same as the iPhone? The answer to me is like, no, it just has an edge-shaped screen.

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  Well, here's what I would say about it. The, the iPhone that I remain the most satisfied with in terms of like where it took me from where I was is the iPhone 4. The iPhone 4, every time you took it out of your pocket, it looked like jewelry. It looked like you were holding this just incredible object, right? And I haven't held the iPhone X in my hands yesterday, but looking at the, the, the video that you did, looking at everything else, it looked like jewelry. And I haven't felt that way about the iPhone for a long time.

• 1:03:56Nilay Patel?

  As a piece of hardware, it is absolutely stunning.

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  I think that's going to carry it so much further than the 8 being like, you know, the, the camera's nice. Yeah.

• 1:04:03Nilay Patel?

  How many people, a lot of people tweeted me, tweeted this to me yesterday. When I said, does anybody have thoughts about the 8? I've only heard about the X today. And like, a flood of people tweeted, "It's the iPhone 7S." Who here thinks it's the 7S they renamed the 8 to make it sound better? You're got... Joey's got nothing. So it's like, it's like a medium feeling that's out there in the world that I think they have to contend with. I think the vast majority of people who do not come to podcasts about surround sound formats are probably not thinking about. But actually, this leads me to my next question. It's like, really what I want to talk to you about, which is, what emoji are you? Um, no. So you weren't there, but you are, you watched it, obviously, you paid attention.

• 1:04:44Nilay Patel?

  I felt like the vibe towards Apple and its self-regard yesterday was distinctly different than 10 years ago, or last year, or even the year before that, where it was seen as somewhat out of touch. Did you get that?

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, they said a couple of things that I would have personally advised them against. I don't think you can call a corporate retail space a town square. I think that it's, it actually, like, it offends my sensibilities, just because there's a lot of things that you can't do in a retail store that you can and should do in a town square, right? I also think there was a lot of talk about Apple as a company and, you know, having, like, I saw Steve Jobs introduce the iPad too, and it was very, like, the whole event was sort of about the iPad and what it could do for your life, not about Apple and what a incredible company Apple is, although, of course, Steve Jobs talked about that too. So I do think it was somewhat backward-looking, but I can't fault Apple for that too much because they were there to inaugurate a new building. It was named after their founder. So, you know, as somebody who has loved Apple products for a really long time, like, I

• 1:05:45Speaker 04

  did cut them a lot of slack, like, to a degree that I think some other journalists would say that I was, you know, like, sort of going too soft on them, but like, you know, stuff Apple has made has done really amazing things in my life, and if, so if they want to spend 10 minutes at the top of their, you know, show, telling me about, you know, Steve Jobs' view on technology, I'm like, I'm super down for that. Like, maybe in ways that are not flattering to me as a journalist, but like, I was sort of there for it. You know, but then when they're, when they sort of come around to like, you know, an Apple Store is a community center, like, I've been to their flagship store in Union Square, and it's just like, lines of people trying to buy AirPods, so.

• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, to me, the feeling I got was, there's so much more attention being paid, and actually, in weird ways, we talk about this on the show all the time, between what our corporations should do, what they're free to do, and what our government should do, and what our government is free to do. Does that make any sense? Sure, let's go with it. We've all been drinking. We talk about that. You know, we talk about it all the time. And Apple seems to be taking the position that it actually will be the greatest force for good in your life, right? And the way it will do that is by selling you relatively expensive things. Yeah. Which I think is actually fine for a company like Apple to say, because their business is selling expensive things. But where they're not, I think, making the connection that people want, if they were

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  actually going out into cities and spending their war chest of billions of dollars to build a library, and like, "This is a town square, it's our gift to you." But they're not, right? They're like, "We're gonna capture an obvious return on investment in this space that is our retail space." Right. And I think that distinction is actually quite troublesome, and they haven't quite thought about the messaging of it. Because, and I don't mean to say this about this government, although I feel this very deeply in my heart about our current government, our current government is not, like, doing it. Right? And that is true, I think that'd be true whether we had a Democrat, like, but our current government is not doing it. Sorry.

• 1:07:41Speaker 04

  I was listening to another Vox Media podcast, Recode Decode, with Kara Swisher, who had Scott Galloway on, I believe it was this week, and he talked about the idea of, you know, "What if Apple just used some of those many, many billions that it has in reserves to create a free online university? And just sort of like, put that out in the world, and anyone could just study any subject that they wanted, and Apple subsidize it, right? Sort of bring, you know, really like, put your money where your mouth is when it comes to being like, humanitarians at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts." So, I do think that there is a lot more that Apple can do there. I think that, you know, they're talking about themselves as humanitarians, it does get somewhat overwrought, but they do create creative tools that a lot of people in the creative arts do use to make very cool things, and that buys them a certain amount of leeway to do that kind of talk.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  I think for me, if they're still toeing the line of, well toeing the line, if they're still following the theme of talking more about Apple as a company and a concept, instead of the things we made and what precisely it will do for you in six months or a year, that's a problem. You just built the most amazing corporate campus, you know, ever made. You've built a thing that is insanely beautiful and cool.

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  That does not have childcare, but go on.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  It does not have childcare.

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  It's a fact.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Very good point.

• 1:08:53Nilay Patel?

  But Tim Cook likes to work out, so has a 10,000 square foot workout facility in it.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:08:58Nilay Patel?

  Those are your choices, right?

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say.

• 1:09:00Nilay Patel?

  You reflect yourself.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  You can have that minute. You can have that introduction to the keynote. You can like have the moment playing insanely creepy music in your atrium that we all, you know, sat there for, stood there for. You get that. Like, Apple was unashamed about being Apple yesterday. They were not modest.

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  They were unapologetically Apple.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Unapologetically Apple, right. It's fine.

• 1:09:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Like, they just opened the Steve Jobs Theater. They just like invited people over to the giant spaceship they built. They, you know, announced the most ambitious iPhone they've done in, how many years do you want to say?

• 1:09:35Nilay Patel?

  Several.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, yeah, take the moment. But if you do it again, if you're still acting that way in a year, then, you know, you're a little full of yourself.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  Right. And then they'll introduce an incremental upgrade and we'll sit here talking about how boring it was and, you know, Apple can't innovate anymore.

• 1:09:54Nilay Patel?

  No, I think it's less than that. I think it's, they're so important, right? Like, they broke through the noise of our current political discourse. They broke through the noise of whatever people were angry about on Twitter yesterday. Like, they're able to do it with products. And I think the big difference, and I think about this a lot, there's a great interview, one of the many great interviews Walt and Kara did with Steve Jobs at Code, and I don't know what they were talking about, but Jobs said to Walt, We're gonna make choices for people, and if they like it, they buy it, and if they don't, they won't, and that's the best we can do. But he never talked about a larger mission, right? He was entirely focused on, here's how I make choices about what products to make, and here,

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna sell them to you for whatever price I think is fair, and hopefully you like it. And I think also, by the way, everyone else is a piece of shit. That's why we loved him. Apple, right now, keeps talking about their larger responsibility to the world, because they are the most valuable corporation in the world. And I think doing that without the corresponding action is what caused that other reaction we saw yesterday. Yeah. But Paul, I'm actually really curious in your take of this, because we generally disagree on these sorts of things, and I'm very curious what you think about it.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  I don't know how the federal government would be creating, like, these public spaces, so I'm not actually exactly sure. I do get that, like, what you're talking about with the store being like a town square, that does, that bugs me as well. The idea that a company, I, to be honest, the thing I love about Apple is that it makes my decisions for me, right? Like, it's like, I've signed up to be an Apple user, so Apple can make all these decisions for me, I'll go along with them, if I have strong opinions about certain things, like pages, I'll use Google Docs or whatever, but, you know, for the most part, I'll just use the Apple stuff, and it simplifies my life, and that's great.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  The only person has an opinion about pages, let alone a strong one.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  Um, I don't want them to make my political decisions for me.

• 1:11:54Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  I don't, they don't define my religion, my politics, my activism, you know? And so it's fine for a company to go out and do that, but I don't want them to sell me that.

• 1:12:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:12:08Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's actually the heart of this troublesome town square thing, where this podcast got very deep. Everybody take a breath. Okay, we're gonna keep going. Does everyone finish taking their notes? There'll be a quiz at the end. No, at the end of it, they're a company and they have to sell to everyone. And that means they will file the edges off their harshest opinions in a way the government kinda doesn't. Right? The government like takes all the input, they take your tax dollars and they make a bunch of policy decisions. And like, half of you hate them. Right? And that, that to me is like the difference and I, I just wanted, I, I wanted to bring that up in this show in front of this audience that came here for surround sound jokes. Why the one choice that Apple's made for you is that you want a fucking Atmos.

• 1:12:45Nilay Patel?

  It's true. I wanted to bring it up on the show because we spend so much time talking about their hardware, but so much of yesterday was also laced through with their social ambition and their policy ambition. Like, Apple, for example, came out a few weeks ago and for the first time filed a brief in support of net neutrality. And that's great. Largest, most powerful company in technology being like, here's a policy that I personally agree with. Paul doesn't agree with. But they're doing it because they're about to launch video content, right? They hired a bunch of Sony executives to make shows. And if some carriers block those shows, Apple's at a disadvantage. So that now they're making policy decisions that obviously serve their interests, I think, serve everyone's interests. But they're using that way to do it. But they only did it when it actually began to serve their interests rather than a larger interest.

• 1:13:28Nilay Patel?

  And I think it's important to just take a half step back from arguing about notches and whatever and just point out that they talk a huge game, but there is actually a lot of dissent underneath that that I think is tied into a moment. You know, the, the EU find Google, there's a lot of talk about antitrust law coming after Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. Amazon now owns everything. They actually own this building. Are you, are you sensing the, the sort of panic in the valley around the tech moment colliding with the, hey, you guys are a little too powerful?

• 1:14:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think it has, it has, the, the writing has maybe been on the wall for a few months, but I think you, you're just starting to see it crystallize even within the last few weeks with the EU and Google. There is this sense that all of a sudden, we don't feel the same way about tech companies that we once did. Now, obviously, kind of the, the big four or five, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc., like those. I know I've left out one, but we're doing it live.

• 1:14:31Speaker 04

  They're beloved consumer brands and I don't think the average citizen is mad at them. And in fact, they're probably the source of national pride, but at the same time, there are real threats. And probably the number one threat is that they are eliminating jobs, right? Like, you think of Facebook as one of the biggest companies in the world and it has 17,000 employees. So I think of how many employees like Ford or like General Motors had back in the day. So those jobs are going away, there's a sense that they're not coming back, the companies are growing ever larger. So at some point, I think there is a thought that something has to give. And so I think you're going to see tech companies spend a lot more on lobbying, but maybe you'll even see them making some preemptive moves. Maybe they'll spin out one of their businesses. I think they'll do whatever they can to be the masters of their own destiny.

• 1:15:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. When you think, because you cover all the other companies here in the valley pretty closely, how do they feel about Apple? Like, and when these moments happen and there's a big new piece of hardware, it's suddenly like Twitter's like, "We figured out Nazis because we have corners on the screens now." Or like, how do they think it through?

• 1:15:29Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I think the rank and file employees like get very excited about it. I was actually chatting with some folks in the audience here before and they work for tech companies in Silicon Valley and they were all really excited to watch the iPhone event yesterday because they want to know, you know, what is this device that I use like 90 times a day going to look like? So I think at the individual level, they are largely fans of the product. You know, at the corporate level, they will gripe about the same things that everybody gripes about with Apple, you know? Like, the partnerships can be hard. You know, Apple says no to an awful lot of things that can be difficult to work with. But, you know, compared, like, I'll just say personally, I'm far more worried about Facebook's effect on the public sphere than I am about Apple, right? Because like, Apple makes the tools and like, Facebook is the stuff that we're actually

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  looking at that appears to be warping all of our minds in frightening ways, right? So I think Apple actually will get a pass on a, like, I think you'll see antitrust come for Amazon and Facebook and Google long before you see it come for Apple.

• 1:16:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think it's interesting because Apple owns the store. Like, they have, in a real way, like, far more power. I feel like we need to end this on an up note. You know how we're going to do that?

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

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• 1:17:24Nilay Patel?

  Use offer code VERGE, you get 10% off your first purchase. Again, that's offer code VERGE, V-E-R-G-E. Squarespace.com, offer code VERGE. Squarespace. This was an advertisement. We're going to take some questions from these people. Yeah. Does that feel right to you? Joey, can you bring us up, buddy? Go nuts. Bring up that. That is... Hey. That's our... You're like 7'4". Oh, wow, lights. Wow. Oh, there you are.

• 1:17:53Speaker 04

  Hey.

• 1:17:54Nilay Patel?

  All so beautiful. Look at how beautiful they look. All right.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  By the way, by the way, I'm really grateful for people that came.

• 1:18:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, thank you all so much. Phenomenal, thank you.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  Really nice and validating and beautiful.

• 1:18:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm talking to somebody who came here from Singapore. Yeah. And he told me he was actually here to help with Hurricane Harvey relief, but then he came here. Thank you, sir. I talked to somebody who escaped from Mobile World Congress America, which... Arguably even more difficult. Ooh. It's rough. He's right there.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  Look, it's quite possible that we've already answered all of your questions because of our detailed and excellent analysis of the app, don't we?

• 1:18:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, so if you have a question...

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  It's gonna happen.

• 1:18:38Nilay Patel?

  There we go. What's up, man?

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  I was really terrified it would be Mobile World, just like, "Yeah, no, we don't want to talk to you. Goodbye."

• 1:18:43Nilay Patel?

  No, we do want to talk to you. You're great.

• 1:18:45Speaker 05

  What do y'all think about the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus pricing, considering the base models are more expensive than the 7 and 7 Plus?

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  Inflation.

• 1:18:53Nilay Patel?

  Just go with it. Also, gas is more expensive now. It's the seventies. Actually, Lauren was saying this earlier, like, they have an average selling price problem. They also bumped the prices of the iPads quietly by fifty bucks yesterday. I think it comes down to if they show relatively flat growth, but tons of revenue growth, they'll be okay. They'll be able to make that excuse. I don't know if adding a glass back and a bunch of Qi licensing for wireless charging costs that much money, but I do think there's a move to make all the products more premium.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  It's possible the processor was like a bunch more money.

• 1:19:26Nilay Patel?

  It's bionic now.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  It's bionic.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  But, yeah, I will say I'm not super pleased by it. But, I mean, you know, the iPhone 7 is also around. They could have dropped the price on that a little more, maybe.

• 1:19:41Nilay Patel?

  I would pay another fifty bucks for a headphone jack.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45Nilay Patel?

  Super would.

• 1:19:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, man.

• 1:19:49Speaker 06

  So, a hidden feature of that sort of an emoji style thing that they've got going on is, actually, that dot matrix is used in affective neuroscience to measure facial expressions and facial emotions. Do you think we're going to enter into a world where Siri starts interacting with us, sort of in our own emotional context? And how long do you think it's going to be before Domino starts paying money to make sure that they can add to your sound?

• 1:20:15Speaker 04

  I'll just say, I think that'll happen after you're able to use Siri to set a timer on your Mac.

• 1:20:21Nilay Patel?

  It's probably the dream. I'm sure someone else will do it first. All of that also is scary, right? I think to cross that wall where you're not just unlocking it by looking at it, but Apple's saying to you, "Now we can read your emotions and adjust the color temperature of the display." Because that's their best trick. It is, by the way, their best trick, but there's so much of just questions around, "We're looking at you," that they have to answer with unlocking the phone before they can go all the way there. But also Siri.

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  There is like a history of research, like, I think it's called affective computing, and there is a lot of interesting stuff around if your devices were more aware of you, like, when you're perspiring, or if you're getting mad, or if you're happy or you're sad, or something like that. That there might be, because obviously, there's a lot of creepy ways you can go with that, but there's also might be some really interesting ways like where you're like, hey, you should take a breather, or like, you know, there are ways that our devices could help us out by understanding our emotions better and giving us little cues, or it could just be creepy.

• 1:21:24Nilay Patel?

  I just don't trust them to not be ham-fisted.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:27Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, I saw one of the guy-

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  Creepy pops up.

• 1:21:31Nilay Patel?

  An Apple employee who works on a heart rate monitor, you know, they released, the watch is the most popular heart rate monitor in the world, and they released a feature, a new one, where it will measure your resting heart rate and when it's elevated abnormally, like when you're not working out, and one of the Apple employees was tweeting yesterday, "I worked on this feature, my heart rate gets elevated when I'm on a date and when I'm stressed out," and I was like, "Yeah, and also when like Trump tweets." If you just like, if you know that, those two pieces of information, like, you should just shut my computer down, like, you should shut, like, go outside. Alright, what's up, man?

• 1:22:05Speaker 07

  Alright, so, uh, the iPhone X is supposed to be the next decade for what the iPhone should be. Do you think there's enough courage there to really be that?

• 1:22:17Nilay Patel?

  Alright, Dr. Samsung. I'm on to you. Kevin Samsung is here.

• 1:22:26Nilay Patel?

  That's my whole answer.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  I can address this. Um, the idea that the iPhone X has a bunch of like, new fundamental like, concepts of the way a phone should work, doesn't ring true to me, in the way that the original iPhone, original and then later on a couple iterations into Android, you know, iOS, even Windows Phone, all had brand-new ideas of this is the way a phone should work, and this is how you're going to interact with this device. Um, and even though there's like, a couple new ways to swipe around and do whatever, um, and there's a bunch of new AR stuff, I think that a lot of that stuff feels more, um, like, experimental and trying it out, rather than like, a systematized thought process of, this is the way that phones

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  are going to work from now on. Um, so, yes, there are surely things in the iPhone X that are indicators of what the next, you know, 10 years of the iPhone are going to look like, but there's not a grand new big idea there. It is- Fundamentally iterative, and I know that tech reviewers and tech writers use the word iterative too often and it kind of doesn't mean as much as it used to. But they've introduced a few new concepts, but I don't think they've introduced a brand new foundation. So, yes, screens are going to look like that from now on. That's just the default now. Phones are going to have cool AR stuff from now on. That's just the default now. But that doesn't mean that it's changed everything.

• 1:23:50Nilay Patel?

  So, my answer is only slightly different, in that the first iPhone was this absolute force of convergence. So it ate your MP3 player, it ate your camera, it ate, I don't know, taxi dispatch services. Like, it just ate everything in its wake, right? And it was able to do that in a way that literally no other product before it was able to do. You can't do that again, so like, you're kind of like limited in scope. But I do think that front camera stack, that is the beginning of something really, really important, right? It's, I think we put this in the hands-on yesterday, the front camera on the 10 is way more important than the back camera. And that, I think, ushers in another set of uses for the phone that we kind of don't

• 1:24:32Nilay Patel?

  understand that could lead it to, once again, disrupting taxi services.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  I also-

• 1:24:37Nilay Patel?

  Uber knows you're pissed off.

• 1:24:39Speaker 03

  Something interesting about the portrait lighting-

• 1:24:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  It was something I was trying to like, come up with, like, what's another photographic technique that could be added as a technology? And I didn't think of lighting, but Apple thought of lighting and did a really cool technology. And like, if you combine that with like, that front sensor, like, if you think of where the phone is eventually going, it's something that you hold out and it has a perfect 3D photorealistic map of everything around you, and then you can do things based on all of that information that's now on your phone. You could make a video game out of it and explore it, or you could get contextual information in AR, or you could Photoshop it like crazy and relight it and change everybody's faces and-

• 1:25:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't think we know, but if it comes from anywhere, I think it's that. Joey!

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  What's up?

• 1:25:27Nilay Patel?

  Everybody give a hand for Joey. He had to deal with me. (applause)

• 1:25:32Nilay Patel?

  I made a lot of angry faces at Joey because he was literally the only person I could see.

• 1:25:36Speaker 08

  Alright, so you guys have touched on this, this whole show and a few episodes back, but Apple's obviously in a kind of state of flux right now. You know, we saw Apple as a company where they sold the best product at the highest price point for a long time. Now they're about to sell five different models of the iPhone, eight if you count the pluses. What does this mean for the next five, 10 years of Apple? Are they gonna sell a $200, $100 iPhone? What is their future in terms of growth? You know, are we looking at the best phone forever? Are we really trying to get the entire world to buy an iPhone?

• 1:26:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, if I knew that, I would work in a circle.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  I will say, when I was writing my car piece, I got a feeling that it wasn't, I wasn't mad at Apple, I was kind of celebrating them. Like, you have, you've made a good enough phone and like, you know, I would love that, like, these specs, someone tweeted this at me, like, "Put these new specs in like the SE." Like, Apple is definitely in a position where they have the good enough. Like, the camera, good enough, screen, good enough, software, good enough. You know, they can make smaller, cheaper phones that are good enough. And that's like, really exciting that, you know, this technology can keep on going down the price. I have no idea where to go on the high end at all.

• 1:26:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think to me that that future of Apple is one a lot of people talk about and care about. The one that is always the most important, as one Casey was discussing earlier, is what Apple has historically done is democratize tools of creation. And so if you can get all of that in a cheaper phone, now you've got kids who are like, "I'm gonna shoot a 4K video." And like, now we have vloggers. So I guess that was a mistake.

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:27:16Nilay Patel?

  There's like 10 vloggers. No, it's like, we have Instagram influencers. Can we agree that that is a mistake?

• 1:27:23Nilay Patel?

  No. Guess not. Okay. You know what I mean? Like, but that's like, all of that, jokes aside, all of that is super exciting, right? Like, they have created an entirely new class of creators that have in turn created an entirely new world of like, business and commerce and culture. That's like Apple's move. Like, I think if they continue to live there, the business stuff will actually sort itself out. But the question of, should they just have a four-product matrix? I think is like, long gone. Like, they're too big for that. When they were doing that project, they were 90 days away from bankruptcy, and like, 10 people bought Macs, and I was three of them.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  I also think that the, the question of will the iPhone become the best-selling phone on the planet is kind of irrelevant. I don't think Apple even cares. They, they want to make the tools for creators, and they want to make a ton of money, and they don't have to, you know, beat Android to do that.

• 1:28:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We can probably do two, three.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're running out of time.

• 1:28:15Speaker 09

  Hello?

• 1:28:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:16Speaker 09

  I think they'll make an iPhone SE as the iPhone X. And also, did 7, 8, 9?

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:28:24Nilay Patel?

  Security? Goodbye, everybody. That was very chest.

• 1:28:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't think I was gonna get that.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  No. They might make another one, but it's, it's gonna be one of those things where like, every few years, like, oh yeah, we forgot, we gotta make a small one again, and then they'll slightly update it.

• 1:28:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I think they were surprised at how many people bought the SE, so they're gonna keep, they'll update it one more time. Like, even they are like, yeah, we make it, people like that size. But the whole goal of the X is to make it smaller. So they can probably make a bigger screen in a smaller size, and they might just.

• 1:28:56Speaker 09

  So, when you were seeing the iPhone, iPhone X, not iPhone X, had to correct myself there. The iPhone X yesterday, did you see anybody, did you see touch, rather, Face ID fail? In particular, I'm concerned because I wear glasses all the time, and I have Snapchat filters just straight up not work on me. And also, I'm of East Asian descent, and I often have cameras tell me, "Did you blink?" So, is this like, did you see this at all?

• 1:29:25Nilay Patel?

  It failed for Dieter a couple of times, right, you were saying?

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was wearing glasses. But it, it was also like, I didn't know what I was doing, and people, I was getting jostled and whatever.

• 1:29:34Speaker 09

  You, you were holding it wrong?

• 1:29:35Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna have to review the phone.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  I was holding it wrong, yeah. We have to review the phone, we don't know.

• 1:29:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But like, literally, Federer's first demo failed.

• 1:29:43Nilay Patel?

  So like, you know, like, we're gonna, we're gonna all learn how to use it in the same way that we all learned how to use Touch ID, and we'll review it and we'll find out. Yeah. All right, we'll do one more.

• 1:29:50Speaker 10

  All right. So, back to the monopoly stuff, why do you think that tech's getting so much more attention than like Lockheed, or like the ag tech companies, like the pharmaceutical companies, that are much bigger and much more pervasive, just more behind the scenes?

• 1:30:02Nilay Patel?

  That's a really good question. I've seen a lot of people talk about it recently. I think part of it's related to what Casey was talking about. Those companies still employ a lot of people, and they also price their products, right? So like, the classic antitrust model, which is like the Chicago School, and I went to University of Chicago, so like, it's really great, and we should stick with it.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they screwed up our, our concept of monopoly and...

• 1:30:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, but it's a great school, and you should all go there. So, the classic model is about price, right? So, the way that you measure the effect of monopoly is like, if consumer prices go up, because now you know there's not pricing pressure in the market, I know, it's...

• 1:30:37Speaker 10

  Like, EpiPen?

• 1:30:38Nilay Patel?

  The argument is about that, right? So, you can measure Lockheed's price, you can do all this stuff with their prices. All of these other companies give their stuff away for free, generally, or they provide an inordinate amount of value for a small amount of money. So like, Prime, there's no competitor at a Prime to measure its price against. I think what is happening is, for, at least in my opinion, the longest time, the government, regulators, lawyers, they were not aware of how tech companies worked. But, what happened was, a lot of nerds went to college and became lawyers. So they're like, really aware of how these companies work, and they're looking at it, and they're saying, "This model that I was trained in, we can never, ever make it apply to Google. We just can't.

• 1:31:21Nilay Patel?

  So we need some other model that explains Google's market power." And, that is actually like, to me, that, that's the engine that's turning all of the interest, and the interest is turning into, "We should do something." No one knows what to do, but I think the amount of attention that you're seeing is, a lot of very smart people who are intimately familiar with tech products, as familiar as anybody in this room, are saying, "Hey, wait a minute. Right now, our model does not allow the government to say anything about what they're doing, and that is probably not the right place to go. And also, Google is a search company, does not have a competitor for, for us to even think about. And if we're, in the absence of a competitor, the government should probably think about that in some way." Now, do I think they should regulate Google? Like, no? Right? Like, probably not? Like...

• 1:32:05Nilay Patel?

  Google makes a lot of products. They, Google feels like it has a lot of competitors. And they give their shit away for free. So like, I was trained in that school. I don't think that that's the first place we should go. I think the first place we should go is coming on Comcast. But, that's another show.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Tune in next time.

• 1:32:28Nilay Patel?

  Are we done? So now we have to do the wrap-up. Dieter, you were like trying to say something and I kept interrupting you.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say that the Chicago schools interpretation of how monopolies work based on price is fundamentally flawed and we should go back to a Rooseveltian version.

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  I think monopolies are myth.

• 1:32:48Nilay Patel?

  Anyway. The old trust buster, Dieter Bone is here, everybody. Watch out Carnegie, we're coming for ya. Should we wrap up the show?

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  What? Yeah, I think it's-

• 1:32:57Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to threaten Andrew Carnegie some more?

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:33:01Nilay Patel?

  I hate you, John Rockefeller. By the way, John Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago. You can understand why his school was opposed to monopoly regulation.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  Our whole plan to end on an up note just totally destroyed.

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  I feel like I learned-

• 1:33:11Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't love a good John Rockefeller story?

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  Can anybody just raise a hand you didn't know that there was this whole like kerfuffle about like, let's sue all the tech companies? Cause like-

• 1:33:21Nilay Patel?

  That's kerfuffle.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  The thing.

• 1:33:23Nilay Patel?

  Real kerfuffle.

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  I wasn't aware, I'm sorry.

• 1:33:25Nilay Patel?

  Furfuffle.

• 1:33:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Nilay Patel?

  Real talking fox situation.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess.

• 1:33:28Nilay Patel?

  I want to ask this question. Here's how we're gonna end on a note. Make some noise you're gonna buy an iPhone X.

• 1:33:36Nilay Patel?

  Make some noise you're gonna buy an iPhone 8. Okay, 8 Plus.

• 1:33:39Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:33:41Nilay Patel?

  Dead silent for 8 Plus.

• 1:33:42Speaker 04

  I'm so right about this.

• 1:33:45Nilay Patel?

  I think that's like the real noise. Anyway. Case called it.

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  Case called it.

• 1:33:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, at least for these nerds. Anyway, here's what I'll say. I love all of you so much for coming. It is absolutely wild to us.

• 1:34:01Nilay Patel?

  This conversation, I think, for all of us was, like, when I was growing up, there was no one to have this conversation with in Racine, Wisconsin. And now, like, I get to do it with people that I love very much. And all of you came to see us, and that just, like, makes my heart explode with joy. So, thank you so much for coming. I have to plug some other podcasts. There's only one Verge podcast at this moment. This one, the best one. No other podcast exists in the world. But Casey is gonna start a show soon. He keeps promising me. Stay tuned. Lot of exciting things coming later this year. You know, usually on the show, like, Dieter or Paul will tell me an idea they have, and I'm like, "You have to write that story now." Now you've told the people you're starting a podcast. So, we're raising the bar for the live show. That's what I like.

• 1:34:46Nilay Patel?

  Casey's gonna do one. Our two great reporters, Ashley Carmen and Caitlin Tiffany, have a new show that's coming soon. I can't give you a date yet, called "Why'd You Push That Button?", which I'm really excited about, so look around for that. Lauren, who is onstage with us, has an amazing show called "Too Embarrassed to Ask", which all of you should listen to. Lauren, who's your guest this week? Yeah. Dan, everyone loves Dan. So, Dan was also at the Apple event, so they're gonna be presumably talking about Apple. So, you should listen to Lauren's show, which is wonderful. She does it with Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher herself does Recode Decode, and Peter Kafka does Recode Media, which, if you are a media nerd, which I suspect many of you are, you should absolutely listen to.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  Oh, Ezra Klein has the Ezra Klein Interview Show. He interviewed Hillary Clinton.

• 1:35:27Nilay Patel?

  Who's he?

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  Just a guy.

• 1:35:29Nilay Patel?

  No, it's fine. There's also, there's all kinds of other great Vox podcasts, including "I Have Some D to Ezra." He's fine. We're actually friends. The fact that I'm starting a feud with Ezra on this show... I was fully supporting. I guarantee you, he does not know about and does not care about. It's my favorite thing right now. Also, we're friends, so, like, whatever. But, death to Ezra.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  You know what you are?

• 1:35:54Nilay Patel?

  Better than Ezra. Oh, god. That's our show. Thank you all so much for coming. Rock and roll. Paul? Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul! Paul!