WWDC, Sonos Beam, and Microsoft buys Github

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference happened this week, and Nilay, Dieter, Jake, and Ashley are on top of it. Second half of the show, we’ve got Dieter’s exclusive look at the Sonos Beam, Microsoft buying GitHub, a new Fire TV thingy, and breaking news for Essential. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like Paul’s weekly segment (hosted by Jake Kastrenakes) “Hey look at this thing I just found on theverge.com“ — so if you listen to it all, you’ll get it all. 02:48 - Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 04:35 - Siri will soon be able to pull off multistep routines through Shortcuts 15:40 - Walkie-Talkie on the Apple Watch is a clever riff on FaceTime Audio 19:01 - Apple’s Memoji lets you create an Animoji of yourself 23:35 - Apple CarPlay will soon let you use Google Maps, Waze, and other third-party maps 25:21 - Apple will let developers port iOS apps to macOS in 2019 33:51 - The Apple TV is finally getting Dolby Atmos support 38:56 - The Essential Phone’s first new module since launch is a magnetic headphone jack 41:02 - The Beam is Sonos’ ambitious attempt to win the living room 50:40 - Amazon’s Fire TV Cube is an Echo, streaming box, and universal remote in one 55:05 - Paul’s weekly segment “Hey look at this thing I just found on theverge.com” by Jake 57:30 - Microsoft confirms it’s acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion 1:00:07 - Facebook accused of giving over 60 device makers inappropriate access to user data 1:06:06 - Instagram might soon let you post videos up to an hour long 1:09:48 - California’s net neutrality bill could set a national standard Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. 16 million new collar jobs will be created by 2024. To help fill them, IBM's new education model gives high school students workplace experience and an associate's degree. 90 PTEC schools are already preparing graduates for tomorrow's STEM careers. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at ibm.com/ptech.

• 0:25Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Vox Media, a thing that I just keep saying because no one stops me.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Seems true.

• 0:35Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's, if I keep saying it, it's true.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  You can sell off of that, too.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Are you an advertiser?

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:40Nilay Patel?

  Would you like to be on the flagship? Anyway, I'm Neelai. Paul Miller is on vacation this week. He's out, but Jay Castanacris is here.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  I've mind melded with Paul and can fully service purpose.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  You're speaking to him right now.

• 0:51Nilay Patel?

  That's actually terrifying.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  This is some Westworld stuff.

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  Knowing Paul as well as we all do, mind melding with Paul would be a true experience.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  I have a great, great segment to tell you about later.

• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, are you doing it?

• 1:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, you just signed up. This is Circuit Breaker editor. You're in it.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  I'll figure it out.

• 1:06Nilay Patel?

  Ashley Carmen is here.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  So it's like a little Circuit Breaker reunion.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  The reunion. We see each other every day.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  And Dieter is here.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Can I just say, people ask me if I'm a Westworld fan and my response is always the same. I watch Westworld.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24Nilay Patel?

  Westworld is a truly confounding show.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Last season was the same, same thing. It's just not good.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm just gonna, I know you're supposed to suspend your disbelief with the show and it, this is spoiler. So if you haven't been watching, just like, close your mind, stop your car, walk away for the next 30 seconds. They're in the cradle, right?

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  And Ford's like, my brain only works in the cradle, but if I was in the real world, it would decay. And it's like, the fuck, that's not how computers work. Like, my brain can run on this simulation, but if I give myself some robot arms, I'll decay and fall. It's like, that's not how anything works. Okay, spoiler over.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  I, I can't believe that is your biggest problem.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  It's just, yeah, but no, it's the one I can like, focus on, right? Like, everything else is like a branching. I don't know when anything's happening. That one is just like, if you run the code on this computer, it's fine, but if you run it on that computer, you go crazy.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to burn it with fire.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Because that's how you turn computers.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  It's just, ah, anyway.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Uh, there's, there's a whole marzipan metaphor from WWDC that I could make here, but I'm gonna let that go.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  No, right. If you run the iOS app on your Mac, it decays, then you have to let your Mac on fire. I, I'm with you. Let's talk about WWDC. The spoilers are over. I promise you no more Westworld spoilers. Except the hosts are alive.

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  All right. It was, there's actually a lot going on this week, but

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:52Nilay Patel?

  The whole show is gonna be WWDC and then whatever other exclusives Dieter got as he roamed the world. A lot, a lot, a lot. No hardware. The only hardware was new watchpans and cases for the iPhone in what I will say are extraordinarily not good colors. They're like-

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Last year's pride bands were better than this year's pride bands by like a long shot.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  The hottest take.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're just like pastels.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  Are those hot colors right now?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  You know, I'm sure they went to Pantone and were like, what should we do? And Pantone was like, do this. And they were like, okay. I'm sure some moms out there will dig it.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  Do you think Johnny Ive has a list of colors and he's like, ah, I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  He only likes space gray. That's it. His entire apartment, house, whatever, castle.

• 3:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Gray.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  But that was the only new hardware.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:39Nilay Patel?

  Which is surprising because the, all the chips in all the computers are extremely old, right?

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, they're well overdue for an update. That's not, I mean, Apple loves to, to hang tight and take its time on these things. But last year at WWDC, there was a lot of hardware. So this year, kind of weird.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  True developer conference.

• 3:59Nilay Patel?

  True. And Tim Ko came on stage and said, it's all about software. And then we all kind of knew, and all of our pre-rites that like, they fixed the keyboard on the MacBook and it was gone.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  New iPhone SE.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. They aggressively didn't talk about hardware, like the, them not talking about hardware and saying, we're not talking about hardware, meant that they didn't have to bring up air power. They didn't have to bring up the keyboard. Like all the things that people are kind of rah rah rah rah rah about Apple, Apple at this keynote just refused to address it. It does not live in a world where Siri is bad.

• 4:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Right? It does not live in a world where people are concerned about that.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  So let's start there. So last week on the show, we did our little preview. We're like, they gotta talk about Siri. I may, I still don't have a word for this, but I was excited to be disappointed when people cheered for two timers at once. And I was like, that's gonna happen and the people are gonna cheer. They didn't do it.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  They didn't do it.

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  Tell Siri can still not set two timers, which is insanity. But there's a custom macro language that you can use now called shortcuts. What's going on there?

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. Shortcuts is basically just the workflow app that Apple acquired. But now it integrates with Siri, which is very, very smart. Because the workflow app, now that it's like a full first party thing, can do a lot more interesting stuff and you know, it's not going to get as hobbled.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  What is workflow?

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Might have been. Sorry. I'm getting there. Give me a second. It's a way for you to like basically macro things together. It's like Automator, but for the iPhone. So you can tell it to tell me the weather and send a text and turn on maps and give me directions to a thing. And then just say, then you can set a custom keyword to that and in Siri and then go do it. And so they took this very nerdy thing of macros for your iPhone. And then they made it accessible by integrating it as Siri shortcuts and letting apps say, do you want to make a shortcut for this? And so it, it gives power users a really cool, deep thing to do. And it gives regular people like better ways to make Siri work.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  It's also, I think, an end around for the problems with Siri. Like, well, we're not as good as Google at AI stuff and figuring out what you're actually asking for. So instead, what we're going to do is we're going to make you just do it yourself.

• 6:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The human algorithm.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  Like, what would you like your phone to do? You can code this yourself. How hard is it to set up these shortcuts? So you get to play with it at all?

• 6:25Speaker 03

  I got to watch a shortcut get set up. They had like a food delivery one set up. And basically the app like throws up a like button that says, hey, you just ordered groceries. Do you want to make a shortcut for this? So then you hit the shortcut and then you record a hot word, a keyword for it, and then you're done.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  What I don't understand is like, why do I have to manually activate every single one of these shortcuts? It sounds like they're starting to give third-party access to Siri, but rather than just doing it in like a normal sensible, logical way, they're like, "What if instead you could customize the command and have to activate every individual one?"

• 7:05Speaker 03

  So shortcuts, this is the same day this Vergecast is going up, we're going to talk about this on the processor episode a little bit. Shortcuts on iOS are analogous to quote-unquote "actions and slices" on Android P. It's a way to take stuff that you do inside an app and embrace and extend it

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  inside a digital assistant, for real. So instead of like, "I need to order a Lyft," go open the Lyft app, find the button, blah, blah, blah, you just ask your assistant to order the Lyft. Now, the way Google does it is the apps basically tell Google, "Here's everything we can do. Here's literally everything that's possible." And then Google's like, "Cool, well, I'm going to figure it out." With Siri, you can tell it, "Here's everything I can do," but then it's like the short way to do it. And then if you tell Siri to do it, it opens the app and like goes, does a deep link to that thing. Or you can manually code these configuration things. And I think to answer your question, Jake, the reason that they're making users configure it is because they can't actually pull off what Google can pull off and like let the assistant figure it out.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  And this goes back, I think, to that information story about how there's like real problems with the Siri development team, where they like don't actually know what they want to do next.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  And it's like not, not there.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  But they hired a guy from Google. Google's ex had a search to come around. I'm assuming he just got there, so they couldn't at WWDC be like, "He'll fix it." They had to like show some things. But it's wild to me that after all of the heat they've taken in the past year for extremely basic things, they didn't deliver any of the basic things and they delivered a programming language. Right, like that's fundamentally what it is. And I'm the sort of person who wants to screw with that. But compared to Alexa or Google Assistant, Apple's answer being you can code your own hot word that kicks off fundamentally an if this then that recipe. It just doesn't, it seems like a different company made that product, right? Like, that's like Microsoft's answer to things.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  I was so surprised by that and then the whole, what was the other thing they went into that was just workflow? Was that a separate app? Was it the same thing?

• 9:12Nilay Patel?

  No, it's the same app. They took workflow and turned it to shortcuts. In fact, if you are a workflow user, your workflows turn into shortcuts with iOS 12. They poured everything over, which is nice. That's nice.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Is this an app that's gonna be installed by default in iOS 12?

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  This seems way too complicated for most people.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  You can, I think, I could be wrong, but I seem to recall.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Siri shortcuts is right. But like the workflow.

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  That's Siri shortcuts. Workflow is turning into Siri shortcuts. I don't think it's installed by default, but like all the functionality is there, but you have to like go and install it if you want to do like the crazy complicated macro stuff. I could be wrong about that, but I think I heard somebody say that.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so developers are into this probably because they want to mess around and be nerdy. But like, most people, moms and youths and whatever, have probably already gone all in on Alexa, right? Like, they're not using HomeKit.

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  No, I think a lot of people use HomeKit because if you have an iPhone, you have HomeKit stuff, it's just sitting there on the Control Center.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  So you think people are like?

• 10:20Nilay Patel?

  But I think the home app, there's a split here. So it's very convenient if you have any HomeKit stuff in your house. So I have an August lock which talks to HomeKit. I can just be like, Siri, lock the door. And it'll just do it. And I can push the home thing on Control Center, it shows me that I can lock the door there. So like that system integration of HomeKit, great. You go a little bit farther and you like want to set up a homekit scene, like one of these like extended routines. And then you're in hell. And I think, and you're in hell on every platform, but like Apple is like a particular hell. And I think Apple, I hate to anthropomorphize the company, but I'm gonna do it. Apple, like, it's inherently messy to show the user these things.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  It just is.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  And Apple like hates it. So they don't like try.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  They have no option.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  Right. Right. They're just like, fine, this is horrible. You're the asshole who doesn't want to, you know, like, like Johnny was like, this room is dirty and it will always be dirty and we're never gonna clean it up. Just lock the door. Right. And if some idiot wants to go in this dirty room, so be it. And that's like how Apple thinks about, like notifications on the Apple Watch, they're all on by default, but if you have a lot of apps to turn them all off, there's, you have to just like sit there clicking them all because Apple's like, no one should do this.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Oh, but they, that's changing. iOS 12.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. So iOS 12 is doing two things to notifications that I'm wildly excited about. Uh, the first is they're grouping them both on the phone and on the watch.

• 11:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  So if you've got 50 tweets, you just see the latest one and then you can tap to expand it. And then they're also giving you on that, that weird slide over where it doesn't actually swipe it away, but it like reveals buttons. There's now a button for manage and then you can, I think the two options they gave you are turn off and send a notification center, which I don't love. Apple has this weird distinction between notification center and lock screen. They're like the same thing, but they're not the same thing, but it basically makes your notifications appear silently. They don't buzz your, they don't buzz your phone. They don't buzz your wrist, but they're like there if you want to go looking for them. But the key thing is you can manage a notification right there from the notification instead of having to go dig through it in settings.

• 12:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I was talking about on the watch where, when you don't want to send every notification to a watch. There's no button, just turn them all off. You just have to click a thousand radio buttons. And that to me is evidence that you could build more and more tools to make the inherently messy thing not less messy, but to acknowledge the messiness. Apple rarely builds those tools.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  And I think the Siri shortcut thing, like that to me, when we were live logging it, I was like, this is gonna be a mess. Like, because workflow is good, but with second, second you get into that branching complexity, like that's not where Apple shines. Apple shines at like-

• 13:08Speaker 01

  No one wants to do that.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  Hiding the branching complexity from you.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  No regular person wants to do that, I don't think.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  I just can't imagine that the answer to the regular person's problems with Siri is like, write a macro. But I do think it will give it more power for the people who are like, I can't do these things with Siri. So there's like an answer there, and I think Apple's whole move is to say like, this isn't a mainstream product yet, right? So we're gonna, we're gonna satisfy these power users and then catch up for everybody else.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I feel like most people I know who use Siri are just like, set alarm.

• 13:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or they're like, set a timer. And then-

• 13:48Speaker 03

  But okay, so like, just to wrap this up, so Google has a search mentality. They don't make you figure out what the keywords are, you just ask for it and Google figures it out, which figures out what you want, right? Alexa has a like, whoever like, claims the hot word first gets it mentality. And so there's a million skills and you have to say these awkward things to make them happen. So Apple can't pull off what Google wants to do, and it doesn't want to have the mess that Alexa is, and so their solution is just set it up yourself.

• 14:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will say there's, not to, I don't know which one is best, but here's what's interesting to me is Google's solutions are often completely opaque. You talk to Google-

• 14:27Speaker 03

  That's fair.

• 14:27Nilay Patel?

  The, the, the cloud infrastructure has a lot of thoughts for you, and it delivers some result out of a black box. You don't know what it's gonna be. Hopefully it's the right one. With Alexa, it's a little bit more straightforward because it's like, you're like, Alexa, talk to something else, which will do something else and have this result. Apple is like, you're gonna just set it up. So there's more transparency with Apple, which is like, kinda vibes the, the company's ethos, but it's, it's just more complicated. All right, so that's Siri. You want, is there anything else with notifications? I bet you have a lot of thoughts about notifications. I mean, we gotta see it. We gotta try it. But like, those are the things I mentioned already are like the two big things, right? It's grouped and it's managing them directly from the thing. Like, that's

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  that's like the bare minimum that I expect from a mobile platform right now. I don't think it's as advanced as what you can do on Android. But it's richer than what you can do on Android. And like on the watch, you can like get like rich notifications that like have got stuff in them.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:22Nilay Patel?

  We could get the watch out of the way. I think the most important thing on the watch is that you can load webpages on it now.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, wait, why? Like, I was doing something else when they announced this. I'm like, I clearly heard that wrong.

• 15:34Nilay Patel?

  No, the watch. So what we didn't talk about with iOS is the time well spent stuff. Where the

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  So they're introducing all this stuff to iOS where it's, you know, put limits on your app usage, tells you what you're doing, when. If you've used Instagram for too long, it'll say you've got 10 minutes left, time to move on.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  But it's just like a little, little warning, right?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will never heed that.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  You use Instagram for a while, but then you just hit a button and ignore it.

• 15:59Nilay Patel?

  Right. So on Android P, there's no button to ignore it.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  You have to like go

• 16:02Speaker 01

  It just like locks you out.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  I'm not into it. No. I'm literally getting anxiety right now thinking I'm getting locked out of Instagram. No.

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  That's why it's there. And then with, with iOS. So both Android and iOS are like, we've got to manage your time with the phone, we've got to calm the sound. And then the watch demo was just the opposite of that thing, right?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:26Nilay Patel?

  But Kevin Lynch came out, he introduced a watch designer. She got on a, an exercise bike. Was like, the watch is automatically detected that I'm exercising. It's linked up to the bike. She started walkie talkie.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  She's like, I'm gonna complete my rings today.

• 16:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, she's like, I gotta get these rings. She's like looking furious. She's like, I'm talking to someone. They're sending me a menu. I'm loading the menu on a, on a, on a embedded WebKit browser. It's like, this is the opposite. This is crazy. There was a notification on her watch, I swear to God, that said, remember to do yoga today to be 10% happier. That is insane.

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's like the phone, it's like, you gotta stop using the phone. And then there's the watch, which is like, are you the most frenetic person in the world? The watch, the, the watch is for you. But I will say, they've circled all the way back around to the watch they wanted to put out in 2014, when U2 was there and they built this thing. They added the feature back, they announced walkie talkie at that time, they never shipped it, they added it back. They, you know, they were like, the watch will do everything. Now they've got a cellular capable watch and they're, they're adding more computer-like features to it. Right? That's about it.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:38Nilay Patel?

  But it still doesn't have any apps.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  There's a bunch of health stuff that, you know, is like, you can compete now and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's all fine. I'm not, I don't exercise and so it doesn't appeal to me, I guess. The walkie talkie thing is clever because it's basically just FaceTime. You literally set up a call and then you just like push, it's push to talk, uh, which is kind of funny. But yeah, I, this was not a huge year for the watch. They, they, and they definitely have stopped talking about third-party apps altogether. They're just done worrying about that.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  I, I feel like that's okay. I, I have never used a single app on the watch that made me happy.

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  Are you wearing one?

• 18:11Speaker 02

  In any way. No, mine broke.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  You, you, I've never seen you wear one. Dieter, are you wearing yours right now?

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Uh, not at the present moment, but I have been when I wear the, when I use the iPhone. I have been using the iPhone for the last month or so.

• 18:23Nilay Patel?

  I will say this stuff got me to reconsider wearing it. Yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  There's two things, uh, the podcast app is coming to the watch and, uh, third-party audio apps will be able to work in the background. So Overcast will be able to make a new version if they want to that works on the watch. Audible will be able to make a version that works on the watch. Uh, cause that was a huge problem is like, no third-party app could do audio. They're not gonna let those apps stream, but they will be able to like, you know, load up stuff on the watch and let you play it when you go for a run.

• 18:48Nilay Patel?

  Definitely what that watch demon needed was a podcast playing at 2X speed while she frenetically loaded what it is. Walkie talkie.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 18:57Nilay Patel?

  Peddled furiously. I, they've got to figure it. Okay, let's talk about it. Cause it, it's so real. Emoji. Yes. It's so real. There's already like- I'm so excited. Emoji me. So Apple did an emoji of the iPhone X when it came out. Then they were like, we've added some new emojis. Uh, emoji famously could not wink or stick their tongue out. iOS X, they can do those things. But now you can capture your face and be a cartoon that yells at people.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  It's like Bitmoji, but mapped to your face.

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Exactly that.

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And I feel bad for Bitmoji because I'm like, if you had just done this, you would have been ahead of the game.

• 19:35Nilay Patel?

  But we, so we were talking about this. The thing about emoji that's great is you make an avatar and then like, there's a team of emoji that's like, we're, we're gonna make memes for you.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, but it's so much more awesome if I can just be my avatar.

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, it's funny to send the memes, for sure.

• 19:51Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  But you can also always just make stickers, like Bitmoji could do the stickers and do this.

• 19:56Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  And they could do it in Snapchat. Like Snapchat has this capability because they do the, the lenses. So it's like, oh, just make a lens of my face.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man, they missed this boat.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like it literally, I, I just wanna know what that office is like right now.

• 20:09Nilay Patel?

  The Snapchat office?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, with Bitmo, well, Bitmoji's in Canada, but I wanna know what's going on in Canada right now.

• 20:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they're, they're on the phone, it's Evan Spiegel, like Evan, you got rocked. And Evan's like, I'm, I'm, I'm busy reinventing the interface again.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I'm, oh, I wanna know. But yeah.

• 20:24Nilay Patel?

  Are you, here's my question. An emoji I was high on, they were everywhere for a hot minute. Then they disappeared. I haven't seen anybody using emoji for anything. Do you think Memoji is gonna be on a similar trajectory?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't think so.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  No, why?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  I just think because it's yourself, like it gets old to use the dragon emoji or whatever it is. Being yourself is, if emoji hasn't died yet, it's just, it's just, it's you.

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't think that can get old.

• 20:52Nilay Patel?

  I could be wrong about this, but I think, so in the, in the camera app, they now have this star button. But it's not in the camera app, in the like, the, the camera pop. One of the, one of the important things in iOS 12 is that AR is built into the platform at like a platform level. So the same way any app can like call, ask for the camera and then the camera interface pops up. Now any app could ask for AR and the AR interface will pop up and there's an AR camera interface. Which I think means any app will be able to be like, hey, bring up the camera. And then you'll be able to do, hit that star button and use your Memoji on your head. And so I think it's not, it's not what we really want, which is just the floating Memoji head. You know, you gotta like export that shit from iMessage and that's super annoying. Um, so they didn't do that. I don't know why they didn't just make an app, they really still should. But I think you'll be able to.

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  Like throw me emoji on anything that uses like the built in like pull up the camera app thing.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know why. I just feel like me emoji is gonna be really good for celebrities ranting about stuff. Like in Instagram, they're just gonna like, they don't want to use their real face. They're just gonna be like, this is me and this is my rant.

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  I don't know why. I just feel like that's gonna be the go to.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  The rant.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  And they've got the the filters for the camera now, like the built in like crayon filter.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it got so extra up there. I was like, what is Apple doing?

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Wait, those filters felt like the old school like photo booth filters.

• 22:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Those have been on the Mac for like a decade and they still look exactly the same.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  And when they pulled it up with the group FaceTime and everyone was wearing their emoji or whatever, I was just like, no.

• 22:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  This is too much.

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  It's no, but it's exactly what I want.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  When I group FaceTime, it took them a decade, straight up. Now it's here.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  They used to have group iChat. These are like old Mac features coming to the phone. Uh, cause they it's photo booth effects and group iChat now on your iPhone.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Do y'all think that's gonna kill House Party or whatever?

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  I think House, well, no, because House Party has a user base. Like, I don't know why they would move. House Party has Android version. It's like a whole thing, right?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:52Nilay Patel?

  But it's gonna make my parents involved.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's, I mean, it's, it's great.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  I can't wait till Max gets her own phone and then she can be part of the group FaceTime.

• 23:03Nilay Patel?

  My parents already feel left out when my sister is FaceTiming with my kid.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:09Nilay Patel?

  They all text me and I'll be like, sorry, my sister's on. And they're like, oh, call us next. And now they can just roll in and they're like, oh, you didn't call us first. But now it's like, it's a thing. It's a thing. It's gonna be a thing.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 23:23Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be super great. I'm really excited about it. I add, families are great. You should have one. Um, last few things here on iOS, or should we just move on to?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Well, we just mentioned that CarPlay is now with Google Maps, which is like the best thing. That's the best news ever.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  Actually, put that second because it's my favorite feature.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  It's amazing. That's the biggest complaint I ever had with CarPlay. I was like, all I want is Google Maps, or Waze, but for the same reason. I want Google's mapping.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  And now?

• 23:52Nilay Patel?

  It's there.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  It's there.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  You know they gave up too. They were, they were like, ah, we thought, we thought we could get people to use these Apple Maps.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:59Nilay Patel?

  And everyone hates it.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  It really felt like a huge concession.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  Eddie, he got lost in his Ferrari. He's like, guys, I was just like, what the fuck?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I felt kind of bad for Apple because I was like, they totally didn't want to have to do this. And they had to.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Whenever you talk to anybody from Apple about it, they'd be like, yeah, so you could like do Waze. And it's like, and also Google Maps. Yeah, but Waze. It's like, did you know Waze is owned by Google?

• 24:22Speaker 03

  You're not, you're not getting around it.

• 24:24Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so here's the big news. That's the phone. The phone's interesting. Not a lot with the phone, some stuff with the phone. Oh, they, they increased the performance, which is good. I would say my iPhone X is hitting that point, or it's like midway through. I'm like, oh, this is getting a little clunky.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Already?

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  Already.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Your 10?

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  My 10.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Neelai.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  I'm on a 6S.

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Your shit's probably way slower.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Hell over here. I'm waiting till fall when I will buy the iPhone X.

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'll be 11. Oh, you're gonna buy the 10?

• 24:53Speaker 01

  I'm gonna buy the 10 because it'll drop in price ideally.

• 24:54Nilay Patel?

  I got you. From $900?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  I, this is not that.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  So hang on, they're gonna do, they're gonna do an iPhone 9, right?

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  And then why?

• 25:03Speaker 02

  No, who would want a 9?

• 25:04Nilay Patel?

  No, they, yeah, they'll never do a 9. You're saying they'll, they'll update the 8 to the 9? No, they're gonna drop the 10 to replace the 8. They'll probably make the 8 even cheaper. And they'll do like an 11. X2.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  XS.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  He's going like Final Fantasy numbers.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  Extra. Yeah. It's, it's out of control. Okay, let's talk about the Mac. So the Mac is a, is a big deal with this marzipan thing. Dieter, tell, tell us what's happening.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Okay, so, uh, first of all, dark mode, everyone's very excited, got lots of cheers. They did some stuff in the Finder. They like made the get info window a pane in the Finder. Fine. They pretended like Cover Flow never existed and they replaced it with a new view called Gallery View. Uh, they added stacks to the desktop, uh, for you, Neelai.

• 25:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  To organize your messy ass desktop.

• 25:49Nilay Patel?

  My desktop is awful.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  So all that's, your desktop is awful. It's just the worst. It's the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. So there was all that, like here's all the stuff. And throughout the keynote, they're like, oh, we, we're, you know, all these apps that came to the iPad, they're also coming to the Mac. We're bringing the Stocks app and the Voice Memos app and Apple News and the Mac Store is getting an update. And I was looking at these apps and I'm like, huh, these all look just like the iPad apps. And they're like, guess what? We're doing a thing. So they won't give it a name. We know it's codename Marzipan, but Apple won't say so. They won't say that it's porting apps because they don't think it's that because they don't want people to think it's just iPad apps copied over to the Mac. So we have nothing to call this thing. But it's basically, you can take an iOS app and a

• 26:32Speaker 03

  bunch of the stuff that you, okay, are you ready? It's complicated. Heim, Heim wrote a really good piece. I threw in some thoughts in there.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  That piece was super helpful. Everyone should read that piece.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. So iOS and the Mac are both like Unix platforms, right? But then you have to build apps on top of it. And you have to like, create a user interface. And the way that you create a user interface on the Mac is traditionally this thing called AppKit. So that gives you your sidebars and your scroll bars and your menus and all the stuff. And then on iOS, it's this thing called UIKit, which gives you, you know, the slide over things and the, you know, tabs on the bottom and scrolling and touch buttons and blah, blah, blah. Right? So what they're doing is they are saying, if you make an iOS app, you can use UIKit to turn it into a Mac app, and then it'll work on the Mac. And that'll let you have resizing windows and scrolling and clicking and right clicking and like the file view edit menu and all that stuff. But

• 27:29Speaker 03

  they're not letting developers play around with it, even though a bunch of developers have already figured out how to mess with it until next year. And instead, Apple is eating its own dog food by coding some of its own apps with this new thing right now.

• 27:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I gotta say that the people who make the Stocks app at Apple, this is as much public recognition as they have ever gotten in their entire life. First of all, it's the first update to the Stocks app ever. It's just straight up. And then it has like a bunch of new features, it has Apple News integration. You just know the Stocks app is like Tim Cook's favorite app. And like every, every, you know, they have like a long, Apple famously has a long weekly senior leadership meeting. And you know, at the bottom of his agenda is like, always like stocks, question mark. And they, they just never get to it.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  If we have time. He's like, it's like, supply chain, future of the business, AR, privacy concerns, merging our platforms, and like 50 more things, stocks? And they're like, Steve, we don't have time for this. Steve, Tim, we don't have time for this. Anyway, so I looked at the Home app, and it has like, absolutely iOS sliders in it. Like, the to-set timers and things, like, that rolling cylindrical thing. So there's iOS elements here, right?

• 28:38Speaker 03

  Oh, the, the Home app in particular, I played around with it a little bit. It did a better job of resizing the window than Apple News, which I'll get to in a second. But you just want to touch those buttons, because they just look like big old buttons that you touch with your finger.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  The, like, if it's gonna be a Mac app, it should have a dropdown. It should have keyboard shortcuts. It should, you know, have automator action, all, all the stuff that makes a Mac app a Mac app. Only like, a portion of that is here.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Do we expect that to change? Like, i- i- is this because it's like, pre-release of this marzipan stuff? They haven't actually figured it out? Or is this the hellish future we have to look forward to?

• 29:17Speaker 03

  So I have two answers to that. One, I do expect it to change a little bit. So if you like, I went to like, look at the, the, you know, view menu, and there were some like, keyboard shortcuts there, but it's clear they could have just added more. So they haven't done all of the work that I think they could do to make these feel more Mac-like, so that's one. Two, this is the hellish future you have to look forward to, where it feels more like iOS apps. Like, for example, when I was resizing the Apple News app, it would like, the window contents would take a, take a second longer than I expected to like, reform to the window size, and it was really clear that it was using a different window set of layout tools. There was like, a little spinner that showed up for half a second.

• 29:54Nilay Patel?

  Whoa.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  That's not good.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  It's not great, no.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  But they're a year away. It's like, hard to judge them on that.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, they got a year, and I think so they can do more to make it feel more Mac-like. But my second answer to that question is, even if they don't, even if this is what we get, uh, fine, yes, great, do it, love it, awesome.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  So here's my-

• 30:13Speaker 03

  Having used Android apps on Chrome OS, having cute little mobile apps on your desktop is the best.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  Except you can't touch them.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  It's awesome. Except you can't touch them.

• 30:22Nilay Patel?

  So here's my question. So Twitter famously killed its desktop client, like, three weeks ago.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  How long was that out? There's two months of ten years that just didn't happen.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Really, they killed it like five years ago.

• 30:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. So this is, not to float a conspiracy theory here, but if you're Twitter, you know this thing is coming because you're on good graces with Apple. You're like, let's kill this Mac app now. This is going to roll out and then we'll just port the Twitter iOS app to the Mac.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:49Nilay Patel?

  And that's the move for everybody.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  So a bunch of, a bunch of companies don't want to make Mac apps anymore, I don't think. And, but they do want, go on to keep making iPhone apps and iPad apps. And so this, a bunch of companies are going to be like, eh, whatever, we'll just port over the iOS app.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  So does this, this, this is like dangerous, right? There's like a deep danger here, but eventually there will be no Mac apps.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Right. But which danger is more likely? That there'll be no Mac apps and everyone's going to make iOS apps and that'll be a hellish future? Or that everyone's going to stop using Mac apps altogether because they're all just using Electron apps?

• 31:24Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Electron apps are way more likely right now.

• 31:27Nilay Patel?

  If you are coming into the Vergecast cold, we've talked about Electron for the last few weeks, because it's basically the set of web technologies that, like Slack, if you use Slack on a Mac, is basically a web browser showing you a web view of Slack, with a whole bunch of other stuff behind it. So that is way more dangerous.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Would you rather have a, yeah, would you rather have, uh, basically Slack's iPad app on the Mac, or Slack's web browser-based app, which is more full-featured, but also like a huge ram hog? And you know what? I think I'd rather have the iOS version.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  On my Mac.

• 31:58Nilay Patel?

  So Walt tweeted, Walt Mossberg, good, our good friend, just won an award for mentoring young journalists, by the way, but Walt tweeted, this is, he's like, this is pure speculation, but he's like, this is a step towards what I want, which is, uh, an iOS laptop. Is this that step?

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's two possible futures that I see. One is it's a

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  There's always two futures with you, man.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  I know, I'm sorry. It's a step towards ARM-based Macs.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Because if you've got a bunch of iOS apps that work just fine on ARM processors on the iPad, uh, then you put on a Mac, but then they, they could, they could release an ARM-based Mac. They could theoretically make a clamshell iOS device that has a touchpad and a mouse, because all these apps would support it because they've been made for the Mac. I don't know.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  That's never gonna happen. That's never

• 32:43Speaker 03

  They're gonna do that, but I don't know.

• 32:45Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think that at some point that everybody has to confront the idea. The iPad Pro is like fun to use. I've been using one a lot. It's really fun, uh, to load up Lightroom and then like edit a photo with a pen. It's just a good time. I'll say I'm older, like clearly very much a dad.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  It's like the coloring books.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  My definition of a good time has radically changed, but it's a good time. But every other computing thing I want to do, I'm like, I just need a computer, right? So there's something in the middle with the iPad that they're not getting right.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  The iPad needs a trackpad. I'm just going there.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  The iPad.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  I'm not reaching up to scroll down every webpage. Give me something.

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  But so they were talking to Lauren Good, she's at Wired now. She interviewed Craig Federighi, great interview, go read it. Very light on details, lots of dancing, because they don't know, it's a year out, so they're not going to do a detail.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I talked to her, by the way, light on details, not through any fault of hers, like, they just didn't give her.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just, yes. Blaming anybody for Apple being vague and fucking weird is not their fault, guaranteed. But he's like, we're never doing a touchscreen laptop, which, you know, it's Apple, so like, they'll never do it until they do it. But they seem just dead set that the Mac is, they're going to do a touch bar, which is horrible.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:59Nilay Patel?

  This, to me, is the thing that undoes that, right?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Stefan, who I sit next to now, was using a touchscreen laptop yesterday, and I just watched him for like, four minutes, try to tap something and it not register. And I was just like, dude, that is why Apple's not going to make a touchscreen laptop. And he's like, yeah, it's really bad.

• 34:16Nilay Patel?

  No, it's just he was using some garbage HP.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  I don't know what he was doing. All I know is I saw him for a lot, and then he's like, listening to the fans on his laptop, all the time. I'm like, Stefan, what's going on over here, man? You doing okay?

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  This poor dude is on like, a gaming PC beat.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  I know.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  It's like, not the right place to go. Alright, so that's the Mac. I mean, I feel like we could talk about it forever, but like, that's a big deal. I think we're going to see that play out a lot, basically, right? Like, over the next year, more and more hand wringing about the future of the Mac is going to come, because the developers are going to start moving their iOS apps, and they're going to hit their limits. They're going to say, well, I just need a touchscreen to make this work properly. And then a year from now, the apps are actually going to be here, and we're all going to realize, like... Oh, that that moment when like you had a really beautiful sort of mid-level Mac app and it did one thing really great is gone.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  This makes me so nervous because some of the smaller apps I've tested on the iPad will just port over their iPhone app and it's the worst experience ever. And I'm just so scared of reliving that where they just like enlarge the thing. It looks blown up and terrible. And they're just like, oh, we'll put a scroll bar here or whatever they're gonna do.

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  And that is gonna be bad if they do that. It'll be the smaller developers, probably.

• 35:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the ones who don't have recent, now we can get all the Mac people too.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:35Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be a thing. Circle of your teens about to have a great time with all the configurating, configuration apps of like all these IoT devices.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:43Nilay Patel?

  It took Philips like 15 years to update the Hue app. I cannot wait for their Mac app to control Hue lights. It's gonna be a thing. All right, I'm gonna read this ad. Oh, we should talk about Atmos on the Apple TV. Exists, the ad. They did it. They told me they're gonna do it and then they did it. The end.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Everyone was very happy for you.

• 35:59Nilay Patel?

  I was very, to to be in a position where the richest company on earth announces a feature and strangers on Twitter say, congratulations to me. It's like extremely weird, but I'll take it. I'm very excited for it. There's a, so it's not in the beta. It's not done yet. They haven't rolled it out. There's no content until the fall, so it's not here yet. I am dying to know how they solve the Siri Atmos problem because that was the holdup as far as I know.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Can I ask what the Siri Atmos problem is?

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  So, right now, the Apple TV does all of its audio decoding internally. So you send it a Dolby Digital 5.1, you're watching a movie on iTunes in Dolby Digital, it decodes all of that audio and then sends out five channels of PCM audio to whatever, right? So it it does the surround processing for you. And the reason it does that is so that when you hold down the button and call Siri, it can put the Siri audio and responses into the audio stream. That's like very complicated. They can't, they have to put Siri into the audio. They can't just pass, you know, your TV show or your movie or whatever straight to your soundbar. They have to decode the audio, mix Siri into it. Atmos is object-based, so they can't just get, they can't just pick five channels of audio and put Siri wherever they want. They have to make Siri an object in the Atmos stream.

• 37:17Nilay Patel?

  So that's like a big, complicated, how did you solve this problem? No one's ever solved it well. Who knows? I'm very curious to hear how they do it.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  So Siri could just like appear at some corner of your room?

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  That would be the dream, right? Like Siri's like swirling around you. But I'm very excited for that. That is true that the Apple TV now is the only, is the best streamer if you want W vision and W I most. The Chromecast can do it and I do it all the time on my Chromecast and it is the most annoying experience in the world.

• 37:44Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Hiring is challenging, but if there's one place you can go where hiring is simple, fast and smart, a place for growing businesses, connect to qualified candidates. That place is ziprecruiter.com/verge. ZipRecruiter sends your job to over 100 of the web's leading job boards, but they don't stop there. Their powerful matching technology, ZipRecruiter scans thousands of resumes to find people the right experience and invite them to apply for your job. So applications come in, ZipRecruiter analyzes each one, spotlights the top candidates so you never miss a great match. ZipRecruiter is so effective that 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the first day. With results like that, it's no wonder ZipRecruiter is the highest rated hiring site in America. Right now, Vergecast listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/verge.

• 38:29Nilay Patel?

  That's ziprecruiter.com/verge, V E R G E. Once more, that is ziprecruiter.com/verge. ZipRecruiter says they're the smartest way to hire. It's a tagline. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Excited to go find a job.

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  No, I invite you.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  I post the job and then the robot invites you. In a zip, it recruits you.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  He's recruiting.

• 38:53Nilay Patel?

  That's not their tagline.

• 38:56Nilay Patel?

  Alright, this is breaking Essential news. Ashley, break the news.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Essential announced on Twitter that its second module is a hi-fi headphone jack.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  What up? All my dreams are coming true.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  They're bringing back the headphone jack as a mod.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Nooo.

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  That's what you want.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  What in the heck?

• 39:13Speaker 03

  They're gonna support ESS Saber, it's got an ESS Saber DAC. It supports, it's a hardware MQA rendering.

• 39:20Nilay Patel?

  These are just-

• 39:21Speaker 03

  And it's crafted-

• 39:22Nilay Patel?

  You're just saying whatever goddamn letters you want. Here's what you need to know, they partnered with Tidal. The failed phone company and the extremely confusingly is it failed music service have brought you the ultimate in dongles. Exclusive to Sprint.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  So it's a magnet that sticks to your phone.

• 39:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  That is a headphone.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  That's how their accessory thing works. It's a magnet.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 39:46Nilay Patel?

  Ashley, I'm assigning you a story on this podcast right now. Last week on this podcast, I laid out my conspiracy theory that Apple won't let anybody make headphone jack accessories for the iPhone.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I know. I heard this conspiracy theory. Yeah, I believe that.

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  I've been trying. I've been trying to hunt this down. You know, I have been.

• 40:07Nilay Patel?

  But I just hear the distaste, the disdain in your voice for this headphone magnet.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Perfect for the fridge.

• 40:13Nilay Patel?

  Perfect for the fridge. Now you can add a headphone jack to anything made of metal. Why would anybody, Dieter, Essential's over, right? Like, why are they even trying?

• 40:24Speaker 03

  I mean, they're not making a second phone, right? That's what we're thinking. But they still want to get that home thing done. I don't know, man. They want to do for the smart home what Sonos is doing for audio. They want to be the neutral translator.

• 40:39Nilay Patel?

  Are you just segueing into the real story that you covered?

• 40:42Speaker 03

  No, I'm just, I'm just saying that there's a, there's a parallel there, but like Sonos is doing it and Essential's promising that someday, maybe it will do it.

• 40:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You're the last person I know using an Essential phone, so I just wanted, I just wanted to hear your emotions.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  I mean, I do, I do have.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  He sounds despondent if you ask me.

• 40:58Nilay Patel?

  Let's see if we can figure out what Dieter's feeling. Despair. All right, Dieter, you had, you had the big product exclusive on the new Sonos Beam. What's going on with this thing?

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's a soundbar that has Alexa, which seems pretty straightforward. But what's clever about it is they decided to finally make the switch away from optical audio to HDMI for audio input. Which lets them, if you plug it into a TV, it means the TV should automatically recognize it and port all your audio over to the soundbar. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You gotta configure it. And sometimes you don't want to get out, give up an HDMI port, so they are shipping a dongle that has optical audio to HDMI. But as a smart speaker, as an Alexa speaker, it's, it's pretty good, right? It does all the Alexa stuff and it recognizes my voice pretty well. It's a, it's a small soundbar. It's 400 bucks, which is like important because I think it's going to help them expand their market.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  And it's, it's sort of meant for, I don't know, name your demographic, urban hipsters, something, something.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  It's small. It's cute. It's a baguette. It's like a baguette.

• 42:03Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I think it's for. Here's my, my take.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 42:05Nilay Patel?

  I think lots of people have smart TVs and they just use Netflix on their smart TVs. You don't have a box. Smart TVs sound horrible. And Sonos is like, you ought an Alexa, just put this under your smart TV, plug it in with one cable, it'll just work. Your TV will sound good. And you can get this like Alexa streaming speaker. And now, when you listen to that one Jay-Z song where he's like Frank Sinatra on my Sono, you're like, I have one of those.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Wait, I, I've been bewildered by this. So because there's only one HDMI port, you cannot use this with a Roku and Apple TV.

• 42:35Nilay Patel?

  No, you'd plug those into the TV.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  You can?

• 42:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you'd plug it in, you'd plug everything into the TV.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's, it's, it's the HDMI audio return channel. And the return means that the TV does audio out through HDMI to the soundbar.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Okay, got it.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  So you, you plug everything into the TV and then you use one of the HDMI ports to set audio down to the soundbar. And then, because it's hooked up over HDMI, it can use HDMI CEC to turn the TV on and off. And if you happen to have a Fire TV, you can use Alexa to like control the Fire TV. And later on, when you have a Chromecast, you can use Google Assistant to control a Chromecast. So.

• 43:11Nilay Patel?

  Is Google Assistant ever coming to Sonos? We've been saying that shit for a year.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  They said this year. They said, they said, they said it's coming this year.

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  That's all I got. Uh, the pitch here is you want an Alexa in your living room, but you don't want another frickin' speaker. And you, you definitely want a soundbar because your TV sounds like garbage, but you don't want a big honking one. So get this cute little soundbar. It sounds better than an Echo. Uh, it's maybe comparable to a HomePod. I don't know. Well, I don't know. I'm not going to get into too many comparisons because I haven't been able to list them, but I have, I have a guess of what the comparison is going to be like. But you get a really good speaker for music in your room. You get a smart speaker in your living room without having to have another thing plugged in somewhere. And you get better sound from your TV. 400 bucks and it's small and cute. That's the idea.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  And most TVs will work with it, right? That's what I was, the only thing I was wondering.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think most new TVs, if you have like a 15-year-old like plasma that's like generating heat in your apartment.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  This feels targeted at me.

• 44:04Nilay Patel?

  Do you have a 15-year-old plasma in your apartment?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  I have a 3D TV.

• 44:08Nilay Patel?

  Do you really?

• 44:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 44:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, I have a 3D TV. I've only ever watched one thing.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  My dad has a 3D TV.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  Did you have the Gravity Blu-ray? Because it is worth it.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  I don't know what he's doing. I don't ask.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying, a great present is the Gravity Blu-ray because it's in 3D. Wear the glasses as a family.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not even gonna respond to this.

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  It just seems fine. It seems like this is a product Sonos should have made with the play base they put out last year.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, the fact that the play base doesn't have Alexa is still just dumb.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  So this is like the first product.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  A lot of people love it. Walt has a play, Walt Mossberg has a play base. Producer Felicia Schimmar has a play base. They love it. It sounds great. It's got a lot of bass. It's really, really good. You can just buy an Echo Dot and everything works the same. But I don't know. It takes them two years to make one of these speakers. At least the Sonos Beam was two years in development. It's just, it's really dumb to me that they didn't find a way to cram Alexa onto the play base.

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Because it just came out.

• 45:04Nilay Patel?

  But this is the first product from the new CEO. The new CEO is trying to like make the company go faster. Here's what I think is super interesting. Right before they announced this, they announced that they are partnering with a bunch of AV receiver manufacturers so that their Sonos stuff can like turn those on and off by themselves. So more things can be Sonos like. And then today, IKEA like put out a teaser that they're going to make their own Sonos speakers which are even cheaper than $150 Play One. So they're just getting bigger. Like, I think Sonos wants you to have Sonos speakers in your house. Their pitch, I think, is good. So if you are, right now, if you're like, when you buy one of these things, you have to be an Alexa person, or you have to be a Google person, in that, you know, it's a lot. It's a lot to be like, I bet that Amazon's gonna win, and I've installed

• 45:47Nilay Patel?

  all this stuff in my house. But if you buy all Sonos stuff, and like, five years down the road, you're like, oh, man, Google won. You like, switch it over. I think it's very

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and Sonos also works with AirPlay 2. And I think it, I think it does like room syncing. So like you said, Sonos rooms, and then AirPlay 2 can see them.

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  Man, I got, I got doubts.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, we gotta try it, right? But it also does clever shit like, when you send a song over AirPlay 2, it also sends them the name of the song. And so you can start a thing with AirPlay 2, and then you can ask Alexa what's playing, and then Alexa will tell you what's playing, because it knows. Because Sonos knows. Sonos tells Alexa. And then you can play pause or whatever. So like, normally, if like, you're doing AirPlay stuff, you gotta find the person with the phone and ask them to do some, change it, right? Change the volume, change the song, whatever. But when you send it to a Sonos speaker, you can like, send, start an AirPlay 2 song, and then you can go Alexa, next track, and it'll jump over to the next track, even though you started it on AirPlay 2. So they do a pretty good job of like translating between all these services.

• 46:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. At the end of the day, it's a landmark for $100. Like, Sonos is very good at making its announcements seem huge. Just like commend them for that, like they're an important company, people care about, people get, but like they made one more Sonos speaker. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I think a lot of people are gonna buy this thing, which is their goal. But in terms of like pushing the state of the art forward.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  What is Sonos's game with opening up the ability to connect other speakers to Sonos? Cause this is very surprising to me. Right? It seemed like Sonos's business was, we sell you a bunch of extremely expensive speakers and they all work together.

• 47:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  And now they're saying, I, I mean, it's great if you can connect cheaper speakers.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  I think their game ultimately is like, you know, you're gonna, so I, I think I said this on the show like a week ago, two weeks ago, and time is relative. So it's construct, uh, the hosts are alive. I think Sonos optimistically believes every single one of its customers is going to get richer and have a bigger house over time. So you buy one and then you're gonna be successful.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  They're investing in your future. And then you're gonna have a room with two, you're gonna have a house with two rooms and you're like, I should buy another Sonos speaker. And then you're gonna have a house with like five rooms.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  Thirty-eight percent of Sonos customers end up buying another Sonos speaker.

• 47:58Nilay Patel?

  Right, because they were successful. Because they, they had the good sense to buy a Sonos speaker. People who don't buy a Sonos speaker, they fail in life, in smaller houses.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  This, this should be.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  I don't think this is their pitch.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  You want me to break your spirit?

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  They said this on stage, uh, fortunately, they didn't try and sell me on this concept when I went down to their offices in beautiful Santa Barbara, where I'm going to retire someday. Sonos believes that it is the best platform for the, you ready?

• 48:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  This is what they call it.

• 48:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  Everyone, everyone, everyone prepared for the sonic internet.

• 48:29Nilay Patel?

  The sonic internet?

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Wait, I, where, where, what is the sonic internet? Is that literally all sound?

• 48:39Nilay Patel?

  The internet of sounds. It's the newest, hottest internet. Look Jake, just buy a Sonos speaker and then think about how to get yourself into a bigger house. That's their business model.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  What if they're right? What if, what if this has all been a sonic internet? Like, is this a sonic internet?

• 48:54Nilay Patel?

  Yes, dude.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  We're on the sonic internet right now.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  This is why Sonos makes so much money.

• 48:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  They have these.

• 49:01Nilay Patel?

  It's all hidden Jake right now. You buy a Sonos speaker, you're just a regular guy, and you open that app and you're like, oh, man. I wish I could use some of this multi-room functionality. And you're like, I gotta work harder. I gotta hustle. I gotta, I gotta drive. And then you're like, I need two rooms. And then like, you're motivated. You're listening to Gary Vaynerchuk tapes every morning. You're like on that boosted board. Suddenly you've got 15 rooms in your house. And you're like, it's all because I just wanted multi-room streaming capability. Sonos, thank you for the kick in the ass I needed to be the best Jake I could be.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Sonos is the ultimate peddler of capitalism.

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  That's right. So Adam Smith was like, one day there'll be a wireless speaker company that really picks my theories to the max.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  They'll get it.

• 49:45Nilay Patel?

  He was a weird Victorian.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  I, I mean, I'm glad Sonos could finally bring, bring this to reality and, and.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Here's, here's, yeah. Here's the big problem for Sonos. They're, they're gonna have an IPO pretty soon.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  And all of a sudden, they're gonna have to start giving quarterly reports. And Sonos likes to talk about a 10-year time span, not a three-month time span. And so when they start getting pressure from investors to start doing stuff more quickly, when what they really want to do is make a speaker that you'll buy and use for 10 years, uh, that's gonna be rough for them.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  The Sonos subscription service of some kind is coming. That, like, that recurring revenue thing where they charge you 10 bucks a month for something to happen on the sonic internet?

• 50:22Speaker 02

  And especially if they're opening this up to third-party speakers. There's no way there's not.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, then they get licensing revenue. That's a good recurring revenue stream, right? Like IKEA sells so many speakers a month, they all have Sonos technology that's like, you know, $3 of patent licensing fees or whatever the hell it is. Okay. One more thing, and then we gotta read a break, and then you are in charge of the gadget segment, my friend. Okay. Amazon's Fire TV Cube is an Echo Streambox Universal Remote in one. Here's what this is. This is an all-black cube with two very smart things in it. It's a combination of Fire TV Streambox and Echo. Lights up, listen to it. All four sides of this cube have an IR blaster to control your cable box.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  And there's an IR extender too, if you want it.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  This is a hellish idea. This is a great idea.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  I thought this, this thing does everything. It does everything.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  At most. I thought this was.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Like, isn't this your dream product?

• 51:11Nilay Patel?

  No, this is my nightmare. You have to move away from this garbage standard.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  At least five IR blasters, by my count.

• 51:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's five. There's one on each side. I don't want to put one in the top and the bottom, too.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  This is incredible. What can't you do with this?

• 51:27Nilay Patel?

  Uh, change the channel with any sort of credibility. Yeah, no, infrared is fine for things that don't require state. So you're like, volume up, volume just go up. But you can't be like, volume 50%, which I don't know why you do, but you can't, because IR will never know what's happening. So that means you definitely can't say something like, change the channel to HBO. And it'll like-

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Yes, you can.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  With fight not to a cable box. It will fail.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  It understands the cable box and it'll send the channel number to the cable box.

• 51:56Nilay Patel?

  There's a graveyard of idiots who have tried this before with this exact technology. Like, Google TV, the, uh, Mark Whitten, who is a lovely man, I don't mean to integrate him, literally tweeted me, "I've been arguing with you about this since 2013." Because he was in charge of the Xbox One, and I was like, "The fuck are these IR blasters?" He's like, "I need to have them, but one day, everyone will understand the Xbox One is the ultimate TV device for the living room." And I was like, "I don't think so. I think your IR blaster is just gonna fail and people are gonna turn off." And now it doesn't work with Microsoft anymore, and I'm just saying that's maybe not 100% what happened there, but, love you, Mark. Okay, I'm done talking about the IR blasters.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Wait, so Sonos thinks cable boxes are dead? And Amazon is like, "No, like, we think people still have them."

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I think most people just buy the smart TV. By the way, I don't mean to like harsh on Mark, I'm just telling jokes. Mark's a good guy. He actually used to work at Sonos. He was a shit, yeah, there's a thing. He worked for Microsoft Sonos. Good, smart guy. Xbox One, great, prefer to use PS4.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  You're wrong about that.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, I know. Now I'm just thinking about all of the hate that's gonna flow my way. Because I hate the IR blaster and I love the Xbox. Anyway, um, I think stream boxes are coming to an end. Because smart TVs are pretty good. So you can just buy one and not screw with any other stuff and just like, use Netflix. Most people just watch the Netflix. They all have Netflix. A lot of them have Netflix buttons on their remote. So you buy the Sonos, you plug it in, that same remote will control the volume of your Sonos. You get Alexa, you get, you know, driven to be a capitalist murderer. Because you want more room.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Jake.

• 53:22Nilay Patel?

  Jake.

• 53:26Nilay Patel?

  But if you, I think Amazon rightly sees that lots of people have a cable box. They want, their Fire TV products are very popular. They have an old TV. They can just put all this stuff in there and then promise that you can say, Alexa, change the channel and maybe it will do it. And that maybe is just very important because it never works.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  I mean, if they can pull it off, this Alexa Echo box, what is it called? Fire TV box?

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Fire TV Cube.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  The Cube. It does, it does literally everything you could want in your living room, except YouTube.

• 53:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  Womp womp.

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  Do you ever need to send money internationally? Jake? He's a capitalist. Of course he does.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Every day.

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  From one of the many rooms in your Sonos enabled house.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Especially over the sonic internet.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  I want to warn you against using your bank or PayPal, Jake. Surely getting money from A to B, that transfer costs you more than it should, a lot more. It's the old way. Let me tell you about the new way, TransferWise. TransferWise was founded by two friends, Tavita and Cristo, who were frustrated by the bank's bad exchange rate and high fees. They wondered what if it could pipe best to the banks entirely, so they built TransferWise, the smartest way to spend money internationally. That was seven years ago. Today, more than too many people use TransferWise, people sending money home, business paying suppliers, freelancers getting paid, the list goes on. TransferWise is clever new technology, gives you a great exchange rate and a low fee, so it'll put some extra money in your pocket for the more important things, because no one has ever said, "It is important that my bank gets some extra money," except for presumably the CEO of the bank. But that's not you, yet. Buy a son, no kidding. To sign up for free, transferwise.com/podcast.

• 54:57Nilay Patel?

  Download the app. Once again, that's transferwise.com/podcast, the smartest way to spend money internationally. Jake, every week Paul does a segment.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I believe this segment is called, "Hey, look at this thing I just found on virch.com."

• 55:15Nilay Patel?

  That is actually really accurate.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Well, what I wanted to ask is, I actually just found two things that are completely unrelated, but were two of my favorite things this week. And I want to know which one you want to hear about more.

• 55:31Nilay Patel?

  Talk to me.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  One of them involves routers with lots of antennas.

• 55:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Classic. The other involves fake technology that you can buy.

• 55:43Nilay Patel?

  Can you combine them? Let's go fake technology.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 55:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  So, you're a gamer. You love glowing stuff. Everything on your computer has to glow. Now, here's the predicament. You have four RAM slots. You don't have the money to fill up four RAM slots.

• 55:59Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  That's expensive. But it would be so embarrassing if you had two glowing sticks of RAM and just two empty slots, right? Enter Gigabyte, which will now sell you two fake sticks of RAM that will glow alongside your real sticks of RAM. Are you serious?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  What?

• 56:20Speaker 02

  This is the future of gaming technology.

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  It is. So, you're playing some games. Friend comes over, maybe some of you romantically interested in. Your room's aglow, and they're like, "Those empty RAM slots are dark. I'm getting out of here, buster." But now, they'll be like, "Oh, you got 32 gigs in there."

• 56:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you can love how much RAM you've got. It's incredible. You can feel faster.

• 56:47Nilay Patel?

  That's important. How much do these cost?

• 56:49Speaker 02

  You can't really put a price on fake RAM.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Oh, god, wait, no, they cost... So, you gotta buy them bundled with the real RAM at this point, and it's like 230 bucks.

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  But in the future, they are considering selling the fake RAM entirely on its own. So, you can just buy fake RAM.

• 57:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm so into this.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  No real RAM.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm 100% buying gaming PC just so I can have fake RAM.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  I mean, this is maybe my favorite technology product in a long time.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  It's good. It really speaks to where the gaming PC market has been and will stay.

• 57:26Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what else to say about that. All right, a little bit more when we wrap this up. I wish Paul was here because I, the actually bigger news in W W C, this is true. More popular on our site, uh, moved the market more, just in general. Microsoft bought GitHub for 7.5 billion dollars. If you don't know GitHub is, it's because you're probably not a developer. GitHub is where open source developers predominantly post all their code to like share and comment on open source projects. Microsoft is a major user of GitHub. You can also obviously have private repositories on GitHub. This is like a big deal. It was a big deal to the point where they're like tons and tons of like GitHub memes about Microsoft. But Paul's not here and I feel like he's the one to really, really dive into the psyche here.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  Has kind of surprised me is Microsoft hasn't, I mean, at least as far as I've seen, really detailed what they plan to do with GitHub. Or, or even like necessarily promised like, we're not gonna mess it up.

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  No, they've absolutely promised they're not gonna mess it up.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 58:24Nilay Patel?

  Without question, right? So, you know, Microsoft is old, hated open source, they want to kill Linux.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:29Nilay Patel?

  That was Steve Ballmer's Microsoft. The Satya Nadella Microsoft is like.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  They love open source.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're putting out memes like Microsoft hearts Linux, right? Like they have become a tool vendor. GitHub is an extraordinary important tool. They did, I will say this, they drew some sort of line between GitHub and LinkedIn. Where they were like, people on LinkedIn show off their skills and GitHub is where the skills come. And it was like, I don't, please don't talk about LinkedIn in a positive way.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Microsoft didn't screw up LinkedIn, yes.

• 58:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, they just, they connected the acquisitions in a way that I, I just don't use LinkedIn. Like it's just not a thing because I'm not out there trying to get more wins in my stone house. Yeah. But they connected the idea that they own LinkedIn, which is where professionals like do their networking. And GitHub is this place where software professionals like literally do their work, but also network. And I don't understand that link particularly well, but their whole thing is like, we're gonna leave GitHub alone. I think a lot of people are really nervous about this because with Microsoft's ownership comes more scrutiny of their behavior.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of weird stuff on GitHub, like the code for like, make deep fakes on GitHub. So like, will Microsoft take your spot? Like, that's a lot. Like, it's a, it's a publishing platform, if you think about it that way. And that means is Microsoft gonna care about what's published on there? But I don't think.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  I mean, and I've like, looked through like leaked code that's sitting on GitHub. And I assume that Microsoft will be less lenient about that.

• 1:00:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so it's unclear, but it's a, it's a big deal when Paul comes back next week. Next week? Two weeks? How long is Paul going for? Whenever Paul comes back from his voyages, I want to have him talk about that. Okay, here's the other one. I just wanna, I wanna pull into this. It requires us to trust Facebook to make a claim, which is hard to do at this moment in time. But the New York Times ran a story, a big story that they, they have issued multiple follows on because there's congressional interest in it, saying Facebook gave sixty, over sixty device makers inappropriate access to user data, which is a huge claim. Among those device makers, Huawei, ZTE, the Chinese companies that our government is like shutting down because they, I don't know, sell secrets to Chinese government. Give secrets to Chinese government. But here's the thing.

• 1:00:45Nilay Patel?

  Facebook is saying, of course we did. And the big example in the Times is true. And I, I like literally started laughing out loud when I got to this example because I was like, no one ever bought this phone. So it doesn't matter. They're like, a BlackBerry 10 phone, when you like load it up, pulled in all this data from Facebook, including data about your friends that they hadn't consented to give, right? But nobody ever bought a BlackBerry phone. But Facebook's claim is, we couldn't build apps for all the platforms, so we opened the API hooks so these device makers could build their own apps on platforms, including these like miniature versions of Facebook, which at the time was a huge trend, right? The BlackBerry Hub, you pull in your contacts, your Gmail, your Facebook calendar, one view of all of the things.

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  So, and Facebook says, we never sent any, all the data was on the device. No data. And we monitored everybody. So it's fine. If you believe Facebook, then this entire uproar is ridiculous. Because, I don't know, you can build an app for Twitter and just log into Twitter and you get all the data from Twitter. It's just building apps. And Facebook said, some people can build apps and some people can't, but that's how the apps work. Great. But if you don't believe Facebook, then it's like, okay, Huawei was scraping Facebook the whole time.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  I mean, the problem is that it just shows how lenient Facebook is with giving this out, right? They do have deals with all these companies, and maybe they are monitoring them. But just the fact that so many companies, so many developers, have access to such a huge amount of information. I mean, I think that is maybe just a thing. Like, even if nothing wrong happened, we're realizing now just how much data Facebook is giving over to these companies. And even Facebook is saying, we might have given too much data to them, right? Because it cut back on how much data it gives to app developers now.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. So that was their app developers. Facebook's argument here is, these weren't app developers, these were people who made cell phones. We couldn't get our app on every one of their platforms. We allowed the platform vendors to build a Facebook experience.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I mean, I feel like even if we're accepting that that is okay, it's still just bad that there's so much information that is available to them, right? Like, they didn't need to make that much information available to run BlackBerry Hub, did they?

• 1:03:04Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I mean, the answer is like, if what you're trying to build is a cut-down version of Facebook, then the future of that is to add more and more features to it. So eventually, you just have Facebook again. So, right? And I feel like the real thing we're getting at is reckoning with the size of Facebook's data set is like a weaponizable thing, as opposed to several years ago, when it was just like, you want access to Facebook. And Dieter, I'm interested in your take on this. Here's my, if Facebook was open and anyone could have built a Facebook client, a lot of people would have been happier, right? Because right now, Facebook is this closed ecosystem.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  Yep. In fact, Facebook said that they were under a ton of pressure to open up and let other people make apps for them.

• 1:03:45Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  It wasn't just BlackBerry, yeah.

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  A lot of people previously have said Facebook should open up and become part of the web. And now they're getting all this heat because they opened up in this very selective way. So I, it feels like the story is too much, but it's only too much if you absolutely believe that Facebook is telling the truth about data sharing.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  Well, the, it's not just, is Facebook telling the truth? It's, does Facebook actually know? So, all right, you can make, anybody can make a Twitter app, presumably you can get a bunch of information about the people that you follow, you know, that even they haven't consented to share with that app, whatever. So anybody can make a Facebook app, or these particular companies can make a Facebook app. Facebook's like, yeah, they just made an app. And like, when you make an app, you get to grab information about the friends. But we know with Cambridge Analytica, they said, yeah, we realized they had this data, we told them to get rid of it, and then they didn't. And so, the thing about these other companies making Facebook apps is, Facebook is presuming

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  to know what other companies have done with the data, that they stayed on device, blah, blah, blah. And do we actually believe that back then and now, Facebook was actually had the access to do the audits to make sure that the user data that they gave another company access to make an app out of was kept safe and secure?

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  Right. Who knows?

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, so she's a part of Facebook.

• 1:05:09Nilay Patel?

  That's the one.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  There it is.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, I don't know. That story's out there, but I just wanted to underline the central tension of it, which is, it's probably overheated, but to say that, you have to truly believe Facebook. And Facebook has gotten itself into a position where I am absolutely uncomfortable going out of that one. Even though it seems extremely reasonable, that they're like, we're not gonna build a BlackBerry app, BlackBerry, just go ahead, here's some API hooks. Okay, one more Facebook-y thing.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  I just wanna say, I think it's funny because it's like, most people probably think of hackers, and they're like, oh, I don't want the hackers to hack into Facebook and steal my data. What we're really just talking about now is just Facebook not knowing what they're doing with data. Like, having this huge repository of information, being like, eh, we're good. The hackers can't get to us. But everyone else...

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  Everyone else. Just show up and say you're a phone company.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Steve's Phones.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Cambridge Analytica.

• 1:06:02Nilay Patel?

  I'd like deep access here. All right, I'm asking you this question.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Yes?

• 1:06:06Nilay Patel?

  Instagram teasing hour-long video support. Which seems crazy to me.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  I saw someone say this is like, supposed to be a Snapchat Discover competitor.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  No. I just, there is no way I want to watch an hour-long newscast? I don't know, in Instagram. I was like, is this for, is this like, supposed to be like Vimeo?

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Do the influencers want this?

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I guess if you're a YouTuber.

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  Yes, we do.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Link in bio, I'm sure I'll find out what you're selling.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  Find my merch, yo. Sorry, I don't have any.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  That is not true.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  But it's not like personal merch.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  You do dictate a lot of it, though.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  I do capriciously run our merch store it. But you don't think anybody will view it?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  I mean, that just seems like not what people, I don't think people are, I mean, maybe people are sitting on Instagram and want to watch an hour video. I don't know anyone who would. That seems just like a sentence.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  Are they, are they doing too much with Instagram right now?

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  I think what's going on is that Facebook has such a bad rap. I think Facebook is big in other countries, for sure. But I think in the US, which is kind of, you know, like what Facebook probably makes most of its money and whatnot. But like, I think in the US, people aren't using Facebook. So Facebook's like, hey, we got Instagram here. People like Instagram. Why don't we just stuff all of the features into Instagram and see how that goes? And I just think that is a terrible play. Instagram succeeded because it was just photos. Everyone liked photos.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  I really want them to spin out original Instagram and then just have new Instagrams.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  That would be great.

• 1:07:47Nilay Patel?

  When was the last time you posted a photo versus a story?

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm back with the grid now.

• 1:07:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you're in, you're back in?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I made, it's because I made my Instagram public and I get a lot of likes.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  If I'm being honest, guys, I just went through a breakup. I need likes, okay?

• 1:08:05Nilay Patel?

  I got you.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  It's for my ego.

• 1:08:09Nilay Patel?

  That's a, do you want to pimp your Instagram on the show?

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Follow me.

• 1:08:14Nilay Patel?

  Link in bio. No, but I, I literally think the stories, Katie and I published a great piece about this for BuzzFeed. Stories mean that I think way harder about putting shit in the grid.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm not posting every day or anything like that. It's like once a month.

• 1:08:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  But, yeah, back in the day, it was like, you posted to the grid all the time.

• 1:08:30Nilay Patel?

  Especially because.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Multiple times a week even, back in the day.

• 1:08:32Nilay Patel?

  It was like, last year. Stories coming out last year.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Feels like ages ago.

• 1:08:37Nilay Patel?

  I will say this, especially because I know a lot of people want to see my kid, but I don't want to. I know the stories will go away unless people are like really creepy. And I don't think, I don't think my Instagram followers are creepy. Maybe I'm crazy. But if I put it in the grid, it's like they're permanently, like, I don't want that. Like, people just want to, like, see, like, Max did a thing today. So it's wild to me that I'd never think about posting, like, real photos.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  That is kind of crazy.

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  It's gotta be a real thing. It's gotta be like a real moment that I'm trying to communicate.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Well, when Max grows up, you can tell her that she wasn't real enough for the grid.

• 1:09:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Max has a shout-out Instagram. She has a Finsta. I haven't done anything with it yet.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  You need to get it up and running so I can follow it.

• 1:09:17Nilay Patel?

  I know. It's gonna happen. One of our coworkers just had a kid, um, a little bit older than Max, and he and his wife have an email account in every, they basically are journaling in this email account so that when she's older, she can, like, open these emails and it's like, "Today, you walked."

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Wow. That's, that's, whoa.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  So they're basically emailing her every day. It's crazy. Okay, that's it.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  My parents gave up on my baby scrapbook two days in.

• 1:09:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. They were like, "We tried."

• 1:09:45Nilay Patel?

  All right, let me just say one more thing and we can wrap this up. Net neutrality is over on Monday. Well, Pi's order goes into effect.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of heat out there in this world. I think you're gonna see some protests. Uh, the Democrats are off, are running on net neutrality in the midterm elections. So I think just get ready for that coverage to come back to the Vergecast, because it's gonna, now that it's over, the changes are here.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Only like a hundred signatures or something like that away from a vote in the House. So that's right around the corner.

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  Hey, elections are coming, uh, and the states are passing that neutrality bill. So California just passed one, which is, by the way, prohibited by the order. So if you are into legal drama.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Well, California's gonna secede, so.

• 1:10:25Nilay Patel?

  That'd be cool. All right, that's it. Ashley's here, so I'm gonna tell you, you can listen to both seasons of Why'd You Push That Button? All at once.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  You can listen on your Sono Soundbar.

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  On, in any room of your increasingly larger house.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Or over your essential headphone mod through your refrigerator.

• 1:10:43Nilay Patel?

  Actually, here's what I'll say. Why'd You Push That Button is so good that if you listen to it on anything but in extraordinarily high-quality

• 1:10:52Nilay Patel?

  Accessory headphone jack on your doomed custom phone.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  You're doing it wrong.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm fine with that.

• 1:10:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Good job.

• 1:11:00Nilay Patel?

  Elevate.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  That sells it.

• 1:11:01Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's every podcast are. Converge with Casey Newton is up and running. This week's episode, he interviewed the, the, the person who runs spam at Google. A great interview. I gave Casey this compliment last week. I'm going to give it to him again, even though it's not here. Casey's interview style is such that when he's done, I feel like I am best friends with that person.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  And like, I almost tweeted at this person, I mean, like, hey, man. Cool joke. And I was like, wait, I don't know you at all. But you should listen.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  I admire his passion for spam.

• 1:11:29Nilay Patel?

  He loves spam, dude.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  He hates it. He loves to hate.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. He's in a fight.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:35Nilay Patel?

  For his life.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  He's a warrior.

• 1:11:36Nilay Patel?

  He's going to clean up that inbox. Uh, there's also other great podcasts out there in the world. Rico Decode with Kara Swisher, Rico Media with Peter Kafka. That stuff is going great. Kara, by the way, she's got that MSNBC show, Revolution. They're going to run a whole bunch of code interviews on MSNBC. That's coming up, so check that out. That's it for us.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Can I, can I say everyone should watch Dieter's YouTube show?

• 1:11:57Nilay Patel?

  You'll watch Processor.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:11:59Nilay Patel?

  It's real good.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  It's great, Dieter.

• 1:12:00Nilay Patel?

  Thank you. You have an episode coming out, uh, the same day this is coming out.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're doing a bonus episode this week.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  About, about WWDC. You want to, you want to hear, you want me to tease it?

• 1:12:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  The WWC 2018 keynote was the most Google keynote Apple has ever given.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. Stuck in the flames.

• 1:12:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  Someone just crashed a car at you. That's your fault. Okay, that was it for the Vergecast this week. I know we went a little long. Thank you for sticking with us. We'll be back next week. Thank you so much for listening. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  Snap.

• 1:12:48Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Vergecast was brought to you by IBM. Technology today has never been smarter, but smart only matters when you put it to good use. Together, we can build a smarter future for all of us. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at IBM.com/smart.