The confusing state of Apple Intelligence

Nilay, David, and Richard Lawler talk about all of the coming Apple gadgets and software, from the new iPad Mini to the upcoming week of Mac announcements to the many flavors of iOS and Apple Intelligence heading to a device near you soon. Then they talk about the other news in AI, from Anthropic's new computer-using model to the growing set of lawsuits against AI companies. In the lightning round, they discuss the Boox Palma 2, T-Mobile's "lifetime" deals, and the battle over FTC's click-to-cancel rule. Further reading: Apple iPad Mini 2024 review: missing pieces iOS 18.2 will let everyone set new default phone and messaging apps Apple’s first iOS 18.2 beta adds more AI features and ChatGPT integration Apple teases ‘week’ of Mac announcements starting Monday Apple is preparing an M4 MacBook Air update for early next year Tim Cook says he uses every Apple product every day — how does that work? Tim Cook on Why Apple’s Huge Bets Will Pay Off Anthropic’s latest AI update can use a computer on its own Humane slashes the price of its AI Pin after weak sales Apple is ‘concerned’ about AI turning real photos into ‘fantasy’ News Corp sues Perplexity for ripping off WSJ and New York Post Kevin Bacon, Kate McKinnon, and other creatives warn of ‘unjust’ AI threat Industry groups are suing the FTC to stop its click to cancel rule The Boox Palma 2 has a faster processor and adds a fingerprint reader Seniors are PISSED that T-Mobile won’t honor its “lifetime” price guarantee. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:36Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:07Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of Jellyscrolling. We're sorry it's still there. All right, use your eyes. I'm your friend Neela. David Pierce is here.

• 1:17David Pierce?

  Hi. I hate that I know what Jellyscrolling is.

• 1:20Nilay Patel?

  You got in a lot of trouble this week, buddy.

• 1:22David Pierce?

  I did, and then I was immediately vindicated. And it's been, it's been a fun week. I would like to, I'm excited to talk about this.

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  We'll come back to this in a moment. Richard Lawler is here.

• 1:30Speaker 04

  Hello. I am somehow unaware of the massive Jellyscrolling scandal.

• 1:35David Pierce?

  Richard doesn't Jellyscroll. That's one important thing to know about Richard.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  How do you know Richard doesn't pay attention to stakes-free Apple drama? He doesn't know about Jellyscrolling.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  Welcome back, Richard. Fan favorite, Richard Lawler.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  My people, they, they made the request and we came through. There will be crypto in all of your wallets. It's coming.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  Richard will give you a Bitcoin if you vote for the Vergecast.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  It's quantum locked, so it's already there and it's coming all at the same time.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Speaker 04

  It's a thing.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  I believe it was Richard who today pointed out, what was it? Starbucks is failing and some other companies failing. And you're like, these are the two companies. Nike, Starbucks and Nike. Tell your theory. Say your theory about Starbucks and Nike.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Starbucks and Nike, they were both out there just promoting NFTs. There were lots of companies and lots of brands doing NFT things a few years ago that now have, are acting like they didn't. But they were out there and they, they were doing it big. They were really, really pushing it. And I don't think that they are going down now or that they're having the struggles they're having because they did NFTs. But I think that if you look at the companies that were really into it, where the executives looked at NFTs and didn't immediately say, that is nothing and move on. That they had something wrong in their boardroom, that their executives, they weren't focused on what was going on and what their customers really wanted.

• 2:55David Pierce?

  Right, the NFTs aren't the, aren't the cause, but they're, they're a symptom of the problem that is causing all these other problems.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  Right, and the problem is you have no idea what you make or sell and you think selling nothing is, is a functional business.

• 3:07David Pierce?

  You think NFT shoes are the same as shoes? Is, yeah.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  Should we make good coffee or the idea of coffee?

• 3:15Speaker 04

  If we will sell experiences behind digital tokens.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Hey, hey, hey, don't knock selling experiences behind digital tokens. What is a podcast in our RSS feed except an experience behind a deeply fungible digital token? But never mind, there's a lot to talk about this week. Quite a lot to talk about. There's David reviewed an iPad mini. I would say that as someone who edited that review, felt like a hostage situation for David, we'll talk about that. There's a bunch of other Apple news. iOS 18.1 is coming out next week with Apple Intelligence, which means Apple has already started seeding iOS 18.2, which has the actual features in it. Very confusing what worked through all of that. Then there's a week of Mac announcements to come. Greg Jozwiak is posting at that right now.

• 4:04Nilay Patel?

  There's a bunch of AI news as always, including some deeply funny humane news. And then we got a lightning round. All right, but let's start with the drama. Look, every now and again, the Verge gets itself mixed up in a bunch of high stakes drama, journalism, ethics. What are we doing here? And we did that this week and then David also pissed off a bunch of people by talking about the iPad.

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  So the iPad mini came out, they updated the chip, it supports Apple Intelligence at eight gigs of RAM. David, you reviewed it. You were disappointed. There's no other way to put this.

• 4:38David Pierce?

  No, that's, that's right. Disappointed is fair. So I, I have been an iPad mini person forever. I think I've owned two different generations. I bought my wife and my dad iPad minis over the years. Like I, this thing is awesome and I love it and believe in it and have used it many times or many, for many years. Apple shipped this one and like, I don't know how else to frame it, except it did the literal least it possibly could in a way that felt rude. Like this was not a case of, of just sort of chip upgrades that make the thing not necessarily brand new, but like commensurate with the times.

• 5:19David Pierce?

  Apple gave this a worse version of last year's chip and changed nothing else. And, and you're supposed to be like, oh, thank God, a new iPad mini. And the thing that Apple knows, and Nathan Edwards, who worked with me on this piece a lot, the thing he kept pointing out is like, Apple knows that if you want an iPad mini, you're going to buy an iPad mini because it's the iPad mini and you want an iPad mini. And that is how Apple has you. It is, it is the most like self-selecting device Apple makes. And so why would Apple try if it doesn't have to try? It's just going to do the absolute literal bare minimum. And just, here you go. Do you, do you want it? You're going to have it. If not, like,

• 6:03David Pierce?

  and, and so I just got to this point where I was like, this thing is, it's not that it's not good. It's just that it's not nearly as good as it could be. And Apple only had to try a tiny bit to make it way better. And it just didn't. And the thing I wrote was like, this feels like an iPad designed by a supply chain, not by a designer. And it's, it's just true. I cannot shake that feeling. And so it is both a good tablet and a deeply disappointing one, which is a very strange, it's a thing we deal with a lot with the iPad, honestly and frankly, is like, we want the iPad to be more than it is, but what it is, is very good for what it is in a lot of ways. And so we, we felt this tension more and more. And I feel like with this one, it just tipped the other way for me where I was like, this is just not, it's just not a good buy. Lots of people

• 6:47David Pierce?

  are going to buy it. Lots of people are going to like it, but it is not. Good.

• 6:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's funny because, you know, the old one will be around on sale for quite some, like in true Apple fashion, you'll be able to get the old one for a minute, right, on, on some discount.

• 7:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, and the only meaningful difference is it doesn't run Apple Intelligence. And like, is that a meaningful difference to anyone? And will it be anytime soon?

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, especially because the iPad Mini in particular is a secondary device, like almost definitionally, you have another thing if you have an iPad Mini.

• 7:16David Pierce?

  Right.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, the iPad maybe can replace your laptop, and maybe you want Apple Intelligence there. I'm, I'm struggling to make the case, but you know, maybe you do. The, there's no one who's like, I need my notifications on my iPad Mini somewhere.

• 7:32David Pierce?

  Right. My travel laptop is my iPad Mini is not a sentence people say.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:37David Pierce?

  It's just not. And so it's like, yeah, all this stuff that Apple does, where it's like, help me write this email, is not an iPad Mini thing. They're like, really good Siri might someday be, but, but again, like I-

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  But you have your phone.

• 7:51David Pierce?

  I don't think anyone should buy any Apple product on the basis of Apple Intelligence right now. And the iPad Mini might be the one that needs it the least at this moment. And so, yeah, I just got to this point where I was like, I, unless your iPad Mini is broken and you are desperate for a new iPad Mini, there is no reason this thing is compelling. And it turns out a lot of people disagreed with me about that. Or what is actually true is there are a lot of iPad Mini people out there.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  So, so what's their, their case? And I guess my question is, what's the problem with this one? So it's using the A17 processor from the iPhone and not the M4 that the other tablets and the laptops use?

• 8:28Nilay Patel?

  A17 Pro from the iPhone 15 Pro, but it appears to be the, like, the bend version.

• 8:33David Pierce?

  Right. So it, it benchmarks slightly below the iPhone 15 Pro, and it also has one fewer GPU core, which in both cases suggests that it's basically a chip that came off the manufacturing line, for whatever reason, not up to full capacity. And that's like a normal thing. A lot of companies do this, right? Like when they sell you a, a middle range processor, often it is a- A sort of imperfectly manufactured version of a better processor. Like, that's a super normal thing. People do it. It's fine. But it's just like, this, this brand new product is giving you a worse version of last year's chip. In a time when Apple is like, A, telling you that you need all the performance you can possibly get in order to run Apple Intelligence, has massively upgraded a bunch of its other iPads.

• 9:19David Pierce?

  There's just no way to look at this, other than it got the worst of the worst.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  Like, literally, the part's been?

• 9:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's a Chevy with a Cadillac logo on it?

• 9:28David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  The Pontiac iPad is just fine.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So we should talk about the Jelly Scrolling. Because I think if people understand, the iPad Mini got a chip bump and nothing is very compelling. And that's why, and the iPad Mini has effectively no competition. There's not some, like, 8-inch Android tablet that's crushing it.

• 9:45David Pierce?

  Right.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  And the iPad Mini has, for whatever it's worth, the iPad app library, which doesn't exist on the Android side.

• 9:52David Pierce?

  Correct. Also, pilots use it. I don't know if you knew that?

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  The pilots are out of control.

• 9:57David Pierce?

  The pilots, and apparently, there are like hundreds of millions of pilots out there.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  Flying planes directly to Apple stores.

• 10:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 10:05Nilay Patel?

  Landing right on Michigan Avenue.

• 10:08David Pierce?

  Outside of the Fifth Avenue store, instead of people, it's just a bunch of tiny planes lining Fifth Avenue to get to the store.

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  Right, right in Lake Michigan, in the pontoons, swimming up to the Apple store.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Don't do that. If you're listening to this and you're like, I should fly my float plane to the Chicago Apple store, I'm just encouraging you not to do that.

• 10:30David Pierce?

  If you do, send us a video, because we will put it on our website.

• 10:34Nilay Patel?

  That's the opposite of not showing the person running onto the field during a football game.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  Opposite incentive. Alright, so there's, whatever, the spec bump. The thing that got people really lit up is not you dared to criticize an Apple product. It's that- The screen on the iPad mini is notorious for jelly scrolling.

• 10:55David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  Which is when you scroll, one side of the screen moves faster than the other, which warps everything on the screen. This is one of those things where some people can see it and some people can't. But unlike 120 hertz refresh, like, once you see it, you're done. You're hoot.

• 11:10David Pierce?

  100%.

• 11:11Nilay Patel?

  It's never, it's like motion smoothing. It's like you can ruin someone's life by pointing this out.

• 11:15David Pierce?

  And do you know who ruined my life? Dieter Bone. Thank you, Dieter, with his 2021 review of the iPad mini, in which he spent a long time talking about how bad the jelly scrolling is. And I think he, he either there or somewhere else linked to a test you can do to test for jelly scrolling, that actually it just basically moves a thing across the screen so you can see it. And it's a line. And the idea is if the line appears to bend, it means the screen is not refreshing in a uniform way. And once you see it, holy lord, can you not unsee it? And you can, you can super see it on the, the 2021 mini. So yeah, the, here are several things that I know. I know that jelly scrolling was a big problem on the 2021 mini.

• 11:58David Pierce?

  I know that Apple said in 2021, it's not a real problem. Don't worry about it. Everything's fine. That's, you, you can go back and find that. Those are statements Apple gave that was like, yeah, this is a normal thing that happens on screens. Don't worry about it. Like, bad response, but that was the response. I also know that Apple this year tried to fix it. They changed the way the display controller works in order to ostensibly refresh the screen more uniformly. This one is better. It is certainly less jelly than the 2021 model. I sat, I mean, I like, so our, our reviews all went up at nine. And at like 9:30, a bunch of like the, the Apple blogs and stuff do the roundups of reviews.

• 12:41David Pierce?

  And because the jelly scrolling was a tiny, low stakes, you know, controversy in 2021.

• 12:48David Pierce?

  They all are talking about the jelly scrolling. I was the only reviewer of that early batch that said jelly scrolling still existed. And these, it's a bunch of other like good, smart reviewers, people whose work that I like. So I was like, oh my God, did I get this wrong? So I went upstairs and got Anna's 2021 mini, uh, grabbed the 2024 mini and sat here for, I don't know, 90 minutes, just scrolling, scrolling everything I could find up and down. Do you believe your own eyes? That's like, I didn't for like an hour and a half. And then either our own staff, I think it was Chris Welch, who posted a link and was like, everybody else disagrees with you, David, are you sure you're right? And I was like, no.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's one of the most in-character Chris Welch things I've ever heard.

• 13:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, oh, for sure. Yeah. And it's like typically when I disagree with like Federico Vitici, it's like I should internally really think through life. But I went and looked and like it is, it is better than it was in 2021. Like you can really see it's, it's like the, the 2021 screen is like a ship on the ocean. Yes. Right. It's like rolling waves as you scroll. The new one is better. It is, it is meaningfully better. It's still jelly scrolls like, and, and the way I think about it is like the, the easiest one to see for me was, uh, you go to the Amazon homepage and it's a bunch of white boxes with like images and text and stuff inside. And if you scroll quickly, the right side of the box appears to pull down and then up faster than the left side.

• 14:12David Pierce?

  So it just, it just every, and then it catches up and it, but it's like you're, you're turning a rectangle into a parallelogram and then back into a rectangle as you scroll. And it's not horrible. Like on the 2021 one, Anna has never looked at me and been like, is this scrolling weird? Like it's not. Never tell her. I'm not going to. So this is the thing, right? It's like, it's not, and even a lot of the reviewers were like, I didn't really notice it then. And I definitely don't notice it now. And that's A, fine. And B, I think representative of just about everybody's experience. But once you see it, you can't unsee it and it is there. And the great thing for me was our reviews ran on Tuesday. The thing started shit. I, I got 24 hours of people being like, you're a monster who has an agenda against Apple or for jelly scrolling or something.

• 14:54David Pierce?

  And then 24 hours later, a bunch of people who reluctantly were like, oh no, he's right. There's some jelly scrolling. Some people still don't notice it. Some people see it. I am absolutely confident it's there. But it's also fine. Like, don't not buy it because of the jelly scrolling.

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, you have no choice.

• 15:09David Pierce?

  It doesn't make it better or worse, but also you have no choice.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  If you're a pilot, you have no choice. You're like, this is what I, this is who I am now. I have to see this parallelogram.

• 15:17David Pierce?

  I think if you have the thing strapped to your thigh, jelly scrolling is not going to be a huge issue. It's just a thought.

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  That's a sentence that only makes sense in the context of aviation and almost in no other context.

• 15:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, as you walk about the subway in New York City.

• 15:35Nilay Patel?

  You're like, jelly scrolling is an issue. Would you like to scroll?

• 15:38David Pierce?

  It's too big for a pocket, so you just kind of wrap it around your thigh.

• 15:41Nilay Patel?

  That experience of writing the review that everyone disagrees with and then being fully vindicated by it, uh, much later. The longer it takes, the better it is. I'm just telling you. But you had 24 hours. I'm, I'm reading, they cut Vision Pro production this week and I'm like, I told you so.

• 15:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Nilay Patel?

  So that's the iPad mini. You can get one. Scroll away. Let us know what you think. If, if like motion smoothing, it's the thing you start to see and then you blame us forever. That's not our fault.

• 16:08David Pierce?

  If you don't see jelly scrolling, don't run the test and just believe that I'm wrong. Like truly, your life will be better if you just send me a mean message about how I'm wrong and then move on with your life.

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's nothing worse you can do for yourself than learn how to evaluate screens.

• 16:23David Pierce?

  It's really true. This is why Nilay has been so ruined.

• 16:26Nilay Patel?

  Why am I a cranky monster?

• 16:28David Pierce?

  For that matter, both of you are like true pixel monsters.

• 16:30Nilay Patel?

  You should not do it.

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  Why are Richard and I trauma bonded for life? We can look at screens. Okay. So that's the iPad mini. We can set that aside. Although, please continue sending David notes about the words jelly scrolling. That's very good. Then there's what's going on with like this next week of announcements to come. Which it seems like Apple has very purposefully lined up a bunch of things in a way that I don't want to say it's confusing. It's just noisy. Right? Like, there's just a lot of Apple noise coming next week. There's Apple Intelligence launching. There's a week of Mac announcements. 18.2 is in developer beta.

• 17:12Nilay Patel?

  If you were a casual, I don't know that you would understand what's shipping, what's not, what works with what, right? Because there's just going to be this flood of stuff. And in particular, 18.1 is coming to the phone. So now Apple Intelligence really is here. But then you're going to see a bunch of demos of like Gen Moji, which is not only in the developer beta for 18.2, which most people can't get, but on a waitlist inside that developer beta. Can you peel this apart for me, David?

• 17:39David Pierce?

  No.

• 17:41David Pierce?

  And I honestly, I have, I think that's on purpose, right? Like every time I watch an ad for the iPhone 16 and it's running Apple Intelligence, I want to like throw things at my TV. It's so just disingenuous at this point to sell this stuff based on, look, here's a Siri feature you can't use. But anyway, so I think just to like run down the list of stuff, and Richard, you should tell me what I'm missing because I'm pretty sure I'm missing stuff. iOS 18.1 is launching for real, like out of beta and on to people's phones on Monday. That's the very first run of Apple Intelligence stuff. Some of the like, help me write stuff, some of the message summaries,

• 18:23David Pierce?

  which appear to mostly just be funny for hilarious reasons and not actually useful in anyone's life.

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  Did you see the one that's Ring notifications? And it was summarized as five to 10 people are at your door? Easily the best one.

• 18:36David Pierce?

  That's very good. That's very good. Yeah, there's one running around that I think is like, I think it's a joke, but it's like, it's a text from somebody that's like, very busy right now, semicolon, not ready for a relationship. And it's like, well, I guess. But so 18.1 is coming, but 18.2, which as you mentioned, I think is going to be a much bigger change for some reasons we should get into, is in developer beta now, which typically means we're somewhere between a few weeks and a couple of months from shipping for real. I don't know if Apple has promised when that's supposed to be coming. I've lost track of the timeline. But it's basically all supposed to happen somewhere between right now and like spring. So do with that what you will.

• 19:15Nilay Patel?

  But 18.2 seems like the real iOS 18. That's what I'm getting about by how noisy next week is going to be. We don't know what week of Mac news is coming. We can guess, right? There's been a lot of leaks. I think we're going to get M4 MacBook Pros. I think we're going to get this new Mac Mini that's in a much smaller case that looks like an Apple TV. That maybe some other Macs, but like, maybe the SiMac that people have been talking about, I don't know. But like, so there's a week of Mac news to come. So a bunch of Apple noise. Which is great. I'm actually, if they do with, Apple, if you're listening, if you do a 32 and SiMac, I'll buy that thing tomorrow. Just saying, jaws. So that's great. So like dead ahead Mac news. There are new Macs. They look different.

• 20:00Nilay Patel?

  At least in the case of the Mac Mini, we'll generate some headlines. Then on Monday, you get iOS 18.1 is here. Apple Intelligence is here. And then what actually people will have on their phones is almost nothing. Right? Like truly almost nothing. It's message summaries, a little bit of Help Me Write. It's a new Siri animation that isn't connected to an actual new Siri. Weird.

• 20:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  That's just weird all the way around.

• 20:27David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 20:27Nilay Patel?

  But then what people also see, if they go to any tech website, including our own, is a bunch of coverage of 18.2, which is now out, which has the features people want. And not just the AI features people want, like big features people want, like alternative browsers set as default. Alternative message clients set as default. Other browser engines being able to set web apps on the home screen. In the EU, like big sweeping changes to iOS 18. And then also the, the good Apple Intelligence features, like visual intelligence and Genmoji, like things, chat GPT integration. The stuff that people thought would be there from the beginning. So that just feels like a lot of stuff to parse out at once.

• 21:11David Pierce?

  My ongoing theory about Apple Intelligence is that the only three features most people will like, think are cool and get excited about are Genmoji, uh, which I actually think is going to be a big deal. Uh, I think like it might be sticky, but I think a lot of people are going to use it. Uh, in the way that like, I don't know if this has been y'all's experience, but like tap back emoji now are like completely normalized in my life. Like the every, everyone I text with uses the tap backs now, uh, which I think is awesome. And like, that is the Genmoji is like the next step to that, which I think is going to be cool.

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  By the way, can I just say, I desperately wish email had tap backs.

• 21:50David Pierce?

  Yes. It is, it is such good messaging UI. Like bring it everywhere. Let me like an email. Like, and let them see that I liked the email. So I can just be like, yep, I read it. Please don't follow up again. Like we're good.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  When did you ever liked an email?

• 22:06David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 22:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, no.

• 22:07David Pierce?

  Let me thumbs down an email.

• 22:08Nilay Patel?

  You know, everybody watched the show The Bear and then everyone went through the phase where they talked like a Chicago line cook for like a summer and said, heard. The word heard is just a IRL tap back. That's all it is. And that's all I want to do with most of my email is just signify receipt.

• 22:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  I, I see what you said here. I have no further reactions.

• 22:31Nilay Patel?

  That's it. Nothing. You are getting nothing else from me.

• 22:35David Pierce?

  What is the emoji for that? Is it the, is it the face that's not smiling or frowning? It's just the completely neutral face?

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  That face is Dieter.

• 22:41David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 22:44David Pierce?

  So then what's the, what's the, is it just a, is it just an ear?

• 22:47Nilay Patel?

  That's true. But he sent me that emoji more than anyone else in my entire life.

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't think there is one. You just need a, like a check. That's the one.

• 22:58David Pierce?

  Check is good. I use the raise hands emoji for that a lot.

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  That's horrible. That's like a celebration.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  No, no, no, that's good. That's what it's for.

• 23:07David Pierce?

  Yeah. Raised hands, raised hands can be like, oh, thank you. Or it can just be like, got it. Or it can just be like, sick.

• 23:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm under arrest.

• 23:14David Pierce?

  It's just a, it's a sort of a, I'm under arrest. It's just, it's just acknowledgement. That's all it is.

• 23:20Nilay Patel?

  If you think raised hands is, I'm so confused. A lot of our conver, I have to rethink a lot of our conversations.

• 23:26David Pierce?

  Do you think I'm telling you I'm being arrested every time?

• 23:32Nilay Patel?

  All right. So gen emoji tap backs of being arrested are coming to iOS 18.2.

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  That's where we're getting.

• 23:39David Pierce?

  But yeah, anyway, so gen emoji is, is the first thing I think people are going to care about that is actually like a net new thing. The second one is chat GPT, um, which I think it remains to be seen if that's actually going to really be baked into iOS in a way that people care about. Right now it seems kind of clunky, but it is a thing people will like go find and do on purpose. And then the third one is visual intelligence, especially because of the camera control. So I, I totally agree with you that like the first sincerely new Apple intelligence things are all in 18.2. And, uh, they're also pretty big, complicated things. So I would not be shocked to see this in a dev beta longer than some features we've seen from iOS before.

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  But also the part where 18.2 everywhere, including United States, lets you set default phone and messaging apps is a big change to iOS. And that's 18.2. The part of 18.2 where. The beginnings of different browser engines in the EU. Huge, like earth shattering change to iOS 18.2.

• 24:43David Pierce?

  Richard, what do you know about how this is actually going to work? Because I'm skeptical of this being actually a big deal.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  In terms of the browser changes and the default changing?

• 24:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, what does it mean when you do that? Do we know anything?

• 24:53Speaker 04

  The way that I am reading it is that you will actually be able to have a different browser engine. And because what we've had so far is people, you can have Chrome on your iPhone, right? But it's still Safari underneath. It just looks a little different. But if you can actually have your own browsing engine, you can have a lot more features. You can enable a lot more things than they are able to right now. Right now, they're limited by what Apple wants to do. I think that those are things that they will be mastered, as they're saying, a lot. But the things that people might notice, I know at least in our newsroom, Jen was excited seeing this announcement about the Mail app having categories like Gmail has had forever. Like, we've seen the on-device AI scanning. They talked about how that's going to do child-saving things in iMessage. I think there are going to be a lot more like, kind of small features of things that

• 25:38Speaker 04

  it does on the device now that just haven't been there. And those may be bigger than any of the Apple Intelligence features right away.

• 25:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the upgrading that apps people use, yeah, that's always better than use a new thing, right? Like, if you use Mail every day and now Mail has new features, you'll be happy. I'm just getting at the idea that iOS 18.2 is going to fast-follow 18.1 when it is actually full of huge changes to how iOS works and Apple Intelligence, the first real set of Apple Intelligence features. I just suspect that one's going to be longer in the future. And then we're going to talk about AI agents and stuff in the second section because there's a bunch of that news. But, you know, the real promise of Apple Intelligence is a Siri that is actually smart and can do things for you. And that is a million years away, from what I can tell.

• 26:28David Pierce?

  Yes, it is not, it is not here. We can say that with great confidence. But the thing on the defaults that I can't figure out is, I think, A, The browser thing is very cool in theory, but Thomas Ricker pointed out this morning that it's been nine months and no one has built the browser. So like, Google and Mozilla, like, where are you at, friends? Build us, build us the better browser, prove to us this will actually work. And the second one I really want to know is about messaging apps, because I actually think being able to change your default messaging app on iOS could be massively consequential, but only if you can do SMS and RCS in the US on those things.

• 27:12Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 27:12David Pierce?

  What this will mean for a lot of people, especially in the EU, is that when you tap a phone number, it'll go to WhatsApp, right? Like, that's a, that's a big victory for all those people. And I think is like a pretty neat sort of one-to-one mapping of features that is just, it just makes more sense, right? Like, that is, instead of having to copy it and then paste it, you just tap it and it'll go to WhatsApp. That's great. For me personally, and for people in the US, the question is, can I SMS from another app? And I'm assuming the answer is no. And until you can, the default is sort of meaningless. So my, my theory as to why Apple is willing to do this everywhere, specifically with messaging, is that it actually isn't gonna do very well.

• 27:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Apple always gives up the ones that it's like, fine.

• 27:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  Right, you want to leave on, you can leave on.

• 27:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, do you want to switch to a browser engine that doesn't exist? Or like, go use a messaging app that's worse? Knock yourself out.

• 28:06Nilay Patel?

  The browser one in particular is interesting, because, you know, the Safari team will be upset that I say this, because I say it a lot and they're always upset. But Apple has intentionally limited what Safari can do on the phone to keep web apps from competing with App Store apps. That is real.

• 28:24David Pierce?

  Like, yeah.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  That is, in the heart of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Apple, evidence of that is presented. And every browser maker will tell you, we would love to do more things on the, on the phone browser and let web apps flourish like they have on the desktop. But there's only Safari and Apple has carefully calibrated Safari at exactly the level they need to, to keep everyone away until, I don't know, the DOJ woke up and filed a lawsuit. So, things like game streaming. Microsoft really wanted to do that. They tried to do it in the web browser, if you recall, and they just kind of like couldn't get there. Like, it's not compelling. The apps don't feel like real apps. Safari will just like, be like, you know what? I'm out of memory. Shut everything

• 29:07Nilay Patel?

  down. Like, there's a million things that are a problem there. So the idea that Chrome can show up and build, let you build real web apps inside of Chrome, or Chrome will be more powerful, all of that is great, but then the reality of it's still a mobile phone, it still has a battery, it still has a limited amount of RAM, it's still often on a cellular connection. I think those, those things are real. You know, they're just meaningfully real, and I think that a lot of people are taking a lot of time with it. And then on top of it, who do you really want here? You want Google to show up with Chrome, and Google and Apple are currently in a international regulatory dogfight about how much Google pays Apple to be the default,

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  and then opening up a new sphere of competition for applications in the App Store versus WebKit versus Blink web apps. And I, that seems like Google would have to give up negotiating with Apple in the future, right? In like a very real way. Do you know what I mean? Like, Google's like, screw it. Here's Chrome on the iPhone. You can run web apps in it that are great. This will disrupt the iOS App Store. It feels like that is a move that's nuclear enough to foreclose any amount of future Google/Apple negotiating, which they need to do, because Google is about to be forced to stop paying Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search. All very complicated.

• 30:33David Pierce?

  It's essentially like a declaration of war if Google does that. And, and the thing I keep thinking about is, from the search trial, one of the things that Apple was really worried about with Google and their deal, was that if Apple didn't set Google as the default, Google had a bunch of apps on the iPhone that were super popular, and it was really worried that Google would just start getting people to use the Google app, and that because it had such a wide surface, like if Google put a banner at the top of YouTube and Gmail and Docs and everything else that they have on the iPhone, saying, "Download the Google app and do all of your searching there," it could do that. Like, Google could engineer scale in that way,

• 31:14David Pierce?

  unlike almost any other company. And Apple was really worried about that happening if they took Google out of the default position in Safari. This is the inverse of that, right? What Google could say is now you can run full-featured Chrome web apps, which have become very powerful in the last few years, as progressive web apps on your phone. Like, Google could essentially undo the whole App Store model under this new system. And if, in a purely competitive world, that is obviously what Google would try to do, right? They say, "Don't download apps from the App Store and give up 30%. Just install the app running on Blink and Chromium, because now you can, on your iPhone."

• 31:57David Pierce?

  And that would put these two companies at incredible odds with each other, but is also, if there weren't many billions of dollars between the two of them, exactly what Google would do.

• 32:07Nilay Patel?

  And that is the heart of the DOJ case against Apple.

• 32:09David Pierce?

  Right, totally.

• 32:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, inside of that case, the thing that that lawsuit claims, at its core, is, "Well, web apps did this to Windows. There's a reason they haven't done it to phones."

• 32:21David Pierce?

  Right.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  And it's not battery life. It's because Apple has kept blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We'll see. It's like, it's very funny to go from, "You can install native web apps in iOS 18.2", to look at this thicket of lawsuits. But that's really what's happening here. Like, that thicket of lawsuits is directly impacting how these products are designed.

• 32:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Nilay Patel?

  I think it is also, we should just talk about this, Tim Cook, a big Tim Cook interview in a Wall Street Journal magazine, because it's a big argument for the, I think his quote is, "Best, not first."

• 32:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, he's like, "We'll make the best products, and the first products." And that is in reference to the Vision Pro, which we should talk about for one second, and definitely in reference to AI. Right? He's like, "We're not first out of the gate, but we're going to be the best with these over time. These are our big bets." With the Vision Pro, he basically is like, "Here's how I use it. I lie flat on my back on the couch and I watch TV."

• 33:14Nilay Patel?

  A real quote.

• 33:15David Pierce?

  Fun fact, that's how Richard watches TV, too.

• 33:17Nilay Patel?

  And he's like, "At $3,500..." Yeah. "At $3,500, it's not a mainstream device." Fine, right? Like, they took a shot on a weird product and whatever, and they did admit there was a VR headset. Fine, they're going to make a cheaper one. With AI, it's like, I get that you're saying, you know, you want to be the best thing, and you certainly have the distribution advantage because you have the iPhone. You can just get it in front of more people fastest. But have you looked around? Like, this week, Anthropic is saying Claude can now just use computers for you. Like, there's just a, there's, the level of innovation in the industry is like out of control. Like, everyone is racing as fast as they can. Whether or not that's gonna come to anything, we should talk about.

• 34:01Nilay Patel?

  But it's this thing that where Tim Cook is saying, these glimmers of Apple intelligence are evidence that will make the best thing. I'm not, I'm just, I'm not so sure about it.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  It's evidence that they're making something now. They are sort of, at least in this kind of artificial intelligence race that Google and Microsoft and everyone have been just driving forward over the last, I guess, year, 18 months now. But I think that's the question. Is it any good? Is it what people want? Is it going to do something other than generate a new emoji? That you will send to only other people with iPhones?

• 34:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  Is it gonna kill your battery? We don't know.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  That part, actually, we definitely do not know. Like, if you make Genmo jail there, you're gonna destroy a battery. David will soon find out.

• 34:44David Pierce?

  And also potentially the world. Yeah. I, I don't know. I read a lot of this Wall Street Journal pieces, like, what else is Tim Cook supposed to say? Right? Like, seriously, I don't even, I don't even blame the guy. Like, this is, uh, seven months ago, he was telling everybody how he liked to do everything in addition. Like, this is just what you do. And I think Apple is in a position now where it is forced to try to make the case that this stuff is really great. So Tim Cook is waking, is saying he like wakes up in the morning and checks his email. And having summaries of his emails is a game changer. Like, I just don't believe that. Like, maybe having a bunch of emails slightly better triaged for you is a game changer in your life.

• 35:29David Pierce?

  I don't think that's true for very many people.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Can you imagine if you were an Apple executive and you're like, this email got summarized?

• 35:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:38Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook didn't read my shit.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  I think, I think Tim Cook can afford an assistant. Like, if, if that were the game, if that were truly the game changer that he needed. What has he been doing until now? And why has someone not been summarizing Tim Cook's emails for him?

• 35:52Speaker 04

  Like, like, how much value have Apple shareholders lost? Because Tim Cook insisted on reading every word of every email for the last 10 years.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, he's famous. He's, he's one of the CEOs who's famous for reading customer emails and like forwarding them off. But you can email Tim Cook and like some Apple SVP, three layers down the chain will write back to you. Because he'll, he'll do that. I don't know if he does it the way that Jeff Bezos used to do it. Which is forward the email to a deputy with just a question mark. Like

• 36:21David Pierce?

  At like all hours of the day and night, which is truly incredible.

• 36:24Nilay Patel?

  Why am I getting this email?

• 36:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Nilay Patel?

  Um, do you think Tim Cook uses enterprise software?

• 36:30David Pierce?

  No.

• 36:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm just asking, like, has this man ever logged into Concur?

• 36:34David Pierce?

  No.

• 36:34Nilay Patel?

  Do you think he knows his frequent flyer number? He has a plane.

• 36:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I bet he does. I bet he knows his United number.

• 36:41Nilay Patel?

  No way.

• 36:41David Pierce?

  Cause Apple famously has like a big thing with United.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  For people who are not Tim Cook, Apple's famous thing with United is they own a plane. And sometimes they say the word United on it.

• 36:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's, that's reasonable.

• 36:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm reading this profile and I'm looking at the two big product launches this year. And the profile is very much about Tim Cook making big bets. Right? And it's, okay, the Vision Pro, whatever. You, you gotta put one foot in front of the other. And yes, the Meta glasses exist and yes, the Quest 3S is even cheaper than before, whatever.

• 37:14Nilay Patel?

  It's much more like, his argument is we will eventually do this best and that will win. And I actually don't know if that is the case right now for, in these two categories.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  Well, his argument for the Vision Pro is that they're getting the started for the developers. They're getting the ecosystem, kickstarted and that, you know, there's these early adopters, the people who are going to make things are getting into it. But I'm not seeing that yet. I'm not seeing the, the people who are making and using these tools and that, that's kicking a flywheel of innovation. It's going to help them make something that someone else will use years from now. Have we actually gotten anywhere with this $3,500 device?

• 37:48David Pierce?

  Isn't that also the opposite of the best not first strategy? Like

• 37:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 37:53David Pierce?

  Nothing, nothing about the Vision Pro suggests best not first. Nothing.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  $3,500.

• 38:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:00David Pierce?

  Seven out of 10.

• 38:02Nilay Patel?

  God damn it. All right. He said one other thing in this profile that I just want to, I want to sit with for a second. He said he uses every Apple product every day. Every product every day. That's a quote. Uh, our own Wes Davis tried to figure out how you would do that. Apple makes a lot of products. Wes owns a lot of them, including a 3500 Heartfish Pro. And, uh, I would say that he, he, he made a valiant effort and failed. Because there are too many Apple products. Like, using every kind of iPad in a single day is not a good idea.

• 38:36David Pierce?

  It's not just that there are too many Apple products. It's that they overlap in complicated ways, right? So that like, even, even Cook's thing is, uh, he, he claims to have an, a MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro and an iMac at the office. And like, God help you if you try to use all three of those devices during a single workday. Like, how, what?

• 38:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, so that's what kicked me off. Cause I was like, Wes, you should do this story. Cause it's, it's one thing if you say, I use every, one of every kind of product we make every day.

• 39:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  I use one Mac, one iPad, one phone, one AirPods.

• 39:09David Pierce?

  I think.

• 39:09Nilay Patel?

  Every product every day. And then specifically calling out three Macs is like, oh, you mean every product. Right?

• 39:17David Pierce?

  Does that include both sizes of the Apple Watch?

• 39:20Nilay Patel?

  Both sizes of the Apple Watch. All 15 SKUs of the Apple Watch. Do you think he's like, well, time to switch the Apple Watch with cellular? Like, that's a lot of products. And I actually think the evidence is that he doesn't use most of the products most of the time.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  The number one thing that came up in the comments was, this guy does not use Apple Home. There's no way.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 39:42Speaker 04

  No one believes it.

• 39:44David Pierce?

  No, Tim Cook's a Sonos guy. Let's be real with each other. He's definitely a Sonos guy.

• 39:48Nilay Patel?

  I could buy it. Well, Sonos supports AirPlay. Um, uh, Joanna Stern interviewed Craig Federighi at Wall Street Journal Tech Live this week. You can go watch that. She has some Apple intelligence. And, uh, two things she said of note related to that, Richard. She asked him about Siri and he said, uh, I use Siri every day. Siri serves 1.5 billion queries a day, which is an interesting number we should come back to. And he said, I use it to open my garage. Which is fine, implies that Craig Federighi has a HomeKit garage drawer opener,

• 40:19Nilay Patel?

  which is challenging, actually, for a variety of ways.

• 40:23Nilay Patel?

  And that he does not, he chooses to say Siri, open the garage every single day, instead of just pressing a button.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  As somebody with two different kinds of HomeKit garage drawer openers, I love the idea of Apple's SVP of all software, going on Amazon and ordering a $30 Muras garage drawer opener and wiring it.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  I love it with all of my heart. And I am absolutely certain that did not happen. I don't know how he's opening his garage drawer with HomeKit, but that's the way you do it. And I just, I love the idea of him being like, my ecosystem is working. While he's like screwing the thing into the terminals.

• 41:03David Pierce?

  I wonder if at Apple, when you get like promoted to SVP, instead of getting, you know, a Rolex or a company car, or whatever, they just hand you a giant box full of Apple connected gear? And they're like, you have to have this in your house now? Like, this is, this is the setup.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:20David Pierce?

  Welcome. You're now in charge.

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  You're in HomeKit now. Actually, I, you know, as somebody who runs HomeBridge, to bridge a lot of stuff into HomeKit, I know that a lot of the people who work on HomeKit at Apple also run HomeBridge. This is a real thing.

• 41:37David Pierce?

  Huh.

• 41:37Nilay Patel?

  Like, a lot of HomeKit engineers are like, yep, we're going to build the plugins to integrate. It's a real thing. And if you are those people, let us know. Because I have a number of feature requests for you. And also, I just want to say thank you.

• 41:50Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, I don't know that you can use every Apple product every day. But if you are listening to this and you can figure it out, send us your chart. We'll read the chart next week. That's all I really want to say.

• 41:59David Pierce?

  We think Tim is mostly an iPad guy, right? In my head, Tim is an iPad guy.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  Tim has got it figured out. He's circling things in red and sending PDFs back to people.

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to take a break. Again, if you can figure it out, let me know. We're going to come back, we're going to talk about some AI with Richard, which is going to be incredible. Get ready, Richard. We'll be right back.

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• 43:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. We're going to let AI drive this segment. It's gonna be great. Take it away, Claude.

• 43:55David Pierce?

  Hello, welcome to.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  We should let Notebook LM do a Verchess segment. That's a pretty good gimmick, actually.

• 44:03David Pierce?

  That is actually fun. Maybe I'll do that for the next one. I'll just upload all the stuff in our rundown to Notebook LM and let it make the podcast. And then we'll run it, because it makes like a 12-minute podcast. We'll run it at the end of an episode and people can decide which one they like better.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  That's actually pretty good. I will say that the chances that that is a. More evenly paced Vergecast is very high.

• 44:25David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 44:25Nilay Patel?

  More focused. Anyway.

• 44:27David Pierce?

  Do they have more catchphrases than Nilay is really the question?

• 44:30Nilay Patel?

  No, absolutely not. So there's a lot of AI news this week. The big theme is that everyone figured out that chatbots aren't going to make them enough money. And so now we have to build robots that can take actions on our computers. Is that about right, David?

• 44:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think there's, there's basically like two big pieces of AI news this week. Which is, we have to give AI more stuff to do. And then, oh God, what if we give AI more stuff to do? Let's sue the AI companies. So I'd say those are the two things. So let's, let's just take them one at a time. The biggest news, I would say, in terms of like things that got the AI people excited, was the new update to Claude, which is Anthropic's chatbot. It's, it's, it's competitor to GPT-4O and Lama and whatever else.

• 45:23David Pierce?

  It can now use a computer for you. They, they released a very cool demo video, which is just one of the researchers sitting there and he basically opens up a spreadsheet. And is like, hey, I need you to pull data out of this and put it into an email for me. And it goes through and it clicks around and it says, oh, I can't find this data in here. So it opens. I think it's like a vendor software thing, searches through that, finds the information, puts it where it is.

• 45:48David Pierce?

  The idea is that it can actually click around and look at and use your computer and pull data from it. It was actually tracking what it was doing as it was going. So it was saying like, I hit the page down button and I put the cursor over here and I typed this into the. Seems to work very well. It is one demo and it's not a product that Anthropic is shipping. It's a thing in the API that other people can build on top of.

• 46:09Nilay Patel?

  I've already seen someone build an app that can sort of do this on a Mac.

• 46:11David Pierce?

  Oh, really?

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  Yep, sort of.

• 46:13David Pierce?

  I, I will say Anthropic is productizing its AI better and faster than any of its competitors right now in a way that I think is really interesting. But that is, that is the thing, right? That's what everyone is out there trying to build, that it's a more elegant version essentially of what Rabbit is doing with the large action model. I mean, it's the same thing. It just clicks around a webpage for you.

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  I mean, is Rabbit doing it? They, they said they would do it and they have built something that does something. And some people have tried it and.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  It does mostly nothing, but some things.

• 46:48David Pierce?

  I'm sorry, they've built something that does something and so people have tried it is the AI industry.

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  Can you actually do anything useful with what they've built?

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  No. Yes, we, again, we, we have to see a rabbit on decoder, you can listen to it. They're at a very different spot than Anthropic. And we had Mike Krieger, who's the head of product at Anthropic. And your point about they're better at productizing is because they have a great product person.

• 47:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  And all the AI companies are trying to hire product people.

• 47:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, I hired Kevin Wheel, who's done a bunch of really interesting product stuff for social companies over the years. Like, this is the playbook now. Everybody's after this.

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  And so the first product everyone's thinking of is beyond a chatbot, what can we do? And it appears to be super Siri, right? Like, the thing that everyone is trying to build is the ultimate Google assistant or super Siri. Or this vision that everybody had when Alexa first hit the scene ages ago, which is you're going to talk to the computer and the computer is going to do stuff. And then the sort of how underneath this user story, no one could do forever, right? Like, oh, here's what Alexa can do. You can play music and set timers and not much else. Here's what Siri can do. Apparently, open Craig Federighi's garage door. That's what it can do. But then you, because it can't understand actual language, you're stuck.

• 48:09Nilay Patel?

  You have to write every query and match every query. Now you can understand actual language, now you gotta do the next thing. And then the solution seems to be, we'll just have it use a computer to do that for you. And then AI will solve that problem too.

• 48:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, and it's actually, I encourage everyone to watch the Anthropic video because it's actually sort of inadvertently a really interesting breakdown of how this tech works. Like, it essentially just goes through and takes a series of screenshots and OCRs the information out of the screenshots. And then says, oh, I don't have what I need from this screenshot, but I see, I see from the scroll bar, I can page down. Or I see there's a thing over there. Like, The key here is basically taking this thing that people know how to do, but is very complicated to teach computers, and just breaking it down to a bunch of very simple things, which is like, look for this number next to this name. And if you don't see the name, search for it in this thing. Like, it's actually a bunch of pretty discreet steps.

• 49:07David Pierce?

  It's just very hard to explain to a computer in an efficient way. But like you said, now that a computer can understand language and images, essentially, all you have to do is figure out a way to keep feeding it language and images, and it can do something with it. And I think, like, the Anthropic video was the most convinced I've been that this is doable, because it's like, here's just a bunch of screenshots. And it's like, it's the same thing that Microsoft is pitching with Recall, and we've seen from some startups and stuff, like, if you just turn the universe into a series of screenshots, AI can actually make a lot out of that for you.

• 49:42Speaker 04

  Well, it's not that far off from the way that autonomous vehicles work. I mean, they're not necessarily looking at things the way that a driver does, but they're taking these pictures many, many, many times a second.

• 49:53David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  And reacting based on that. And it's just doing this on a computer, which, to some extent, more and less complicated because of the way things are already labeled.

• 50:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. It is amazing to me how many people building all kinds of AI products I talk to who just want to use the self-driving car metaphor. It's very funny. And I think you're right. It is a really similar problem. It's also a really similar, like, challenge over time to get from, like, very good to perfect. But it is, like, you're totally right. I think that's exactly the right comparison.

• 50:24Nilay Patel?

  The really interesting thing on the computer side is self-driving cars can't, like, be recursive in that particular way. The most interesting Claude demo I saw was Claude asking itself to generate code to solve a problem.

• 50:39David Pierce?

  Whoa, you can Claude with Claude.

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  So it's like, you're like, do you solve this problem for me? And it's like, okay, the best thing I know how to do is open a web browser, open Claude, ask, prompt myself, get an answer. And like, that is really clever. You know, there's all these benchmarks that, candidly, I think are too early in the world of AI benchmarks to mean anything. But they're like, here's a test we ran that humans score 70% on. Claude is at, like, 7.

• 51:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Nilay Patel?

  It's nowhere, but it's twice as good as the next nearest thing. And then Rabbit is like... We we're not doing a good job of Spotify. Um, sorry, I'm gonna get another angry email.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Who is doing a good job with Spotify? Can you use Spotify? Well, I think we are all at about 7% using Spotify.

• 51:28Nilay Patel?

  Spotify is like, it's a podcast. Like, that's not what I wanted. Um, but the the idea that the computer will figure out how to use itself is powerful. The idea that the the computer can generically use any computer and reason its way to, I should just use Claude to solve this, powerful. And then underneath it is, I think, just a, like, the industry has to come to grips with the idea that we're, we're not programming computers anymore. Like, an API is the best way to use Spotify.

• 51:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, there's a lot of tasks where just telling the computer what to do and having it do it deterministically is the correct solution. And we're headed towards a place where a robot, taking an infinite number of screenshots of a Windows desktop, clicking on stuff, is the, is gonna support the billion-dollar valuations of the AI companies. And it's like, I don't actually know about, I don't, I don't know about that. I, I don't know. It's probably broken, and I don't believe you.

• 52:27David Pierce?

  Well, this is, this is a good pivot into the humane stuff, which is the other, kind of, I don't know, agent might even be too kind to what humane is trying to do.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  Every company is doing this. Microsoft's announced some agent-y stuff this week.

• 52:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  In response to the Anthropic news and some of the Microsoft news, uh, OpenAI leaked out that it's working on some agent stuff. Like, again, the future of Siri that they have described is a, the, the, I'm so sorry for this word, agentic.

• 52:56David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  Whatever I keep saying. So the future of Siri is agentic. Apple has a different way of building it, because they actually have the apps running locally on their operating system, and they control the operating system. So they can, they can do more API layer stuff. But everyone's headed here. And then humane, sort of like, here they are.

• 53:14David Pierce?

  You skipped right past that, by the way, but that is Apple's single biggest advantage in all of this. I'm increasingly convinced, is that Apple is going to, with the new Siri, just launch a thing, I think it's either called Siri Intense or App Intense. And basically, it allows developers to open up things that Siri can go do inside of their apps. That's the answer, right? Like, the only reason to go do this much more complicated deterministic thing is if you can't convince the world to open up APIs to you. And Apple is maybe the only company that can just tell developers to give it access to stuff, and most of them will do it. And I think it's We'll see about that. We will. It's possible that I'm wrong, but historically speaking,

• 53:58David Pierce?

  Apple is the only company on earth that tells developers to jump, and they jump. And Netflix, still not on Apple TV or Vision Pro, or integrated into the Apple TV app or on Vision Pro. True. That is true. There are not many companies as powerful as Netflix in those negotiations. That's true. But so I think it's if Apple can do that, it puts Apple way ahead because you don't have to solve really complicated AI problems if you just are handed the structured data. Then Siri has to do the beginning and end, right? Which is understand what you want and figure out how to go do it. Make sense of the universe is not part of it. And that that is the hard part. But the humane thing is, so there were two bits of humane news this week that I very much enjoyed.

• 54:40David Pierce?

  One is that humane drastically cut the price of the AI pin from $699 to $499. And if you're saying, David, that sounds too expensive. Is there still a $24 a month subscription? The answer is yes, it is. There is. But they're still here. They're still trying to ship stuff and do stuff. And the other bit of news that has been, it's like, kind of news, but kind of not news. Oh, Malik went and met with Bethany and Imran, the co-founders, and saw their operating system, which they call Cosmos, but it's OS at the end capitalized because it's an operating system. It's very good. Running on a some kind of car dashboard.

• 55:23David Pierce?

  It was not exactly clear, but the idea was humane now wants to license its AI operating system to other companies. The WebOS story. Yes, this is what I said. This is BlackBerry, it's Palm, it's WebOS, you name it. Yeah. Yeah. And so, A,

• 55:43David Pierce?

  Perfectly reasonable idea. I think there are a lot of bets right now about who the AI operating system is going to be. Every Google would like it to be Gemini.

• 55:52Nilay Patel?

  Is that a bet? Is that it? It's I don't get it.

• 55:55David Pierce?

  Amazon is about to spend an awful lot of money and try to convince you to spend some money on the idea that it might be Alexa that can underpin all of your AI devices. Google, that's what Gemini is trying to be. I mean, that's what that's what GPT-4O is. Like, all these companies are going to make most of their money baking their stuff into other products. Like, that is that is the win here if you can pull it off.

• 56:18Nilay Patel?

  That's what I mean. But that's not an OS. Like, I'm looking at this humane image of what Cosmos, Cosmo OS, whatever it's called, Cosmos.

• 56:29David Pierce?

  It's called Cosmos.

• 56:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's put the the OS is capitalized.

• 56:33David Pierce?

  You just have to kind of hit it hard. You hit the last Cosmos.

• 56:37David Pierce?

  It's reboved.

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to talk about it at this time. But so you look at their block diagram of how Cosmos works, and all they've really done is they've sort of replaced like applications with the word agent, and then added like 15 more blocks on top of that, that are basically like, we hear you speak, and then we understand what you want, and we go to one of these agents. And the part where you replace the application layer with agents is a is a big deal. If that's the thing that's going to happen, that is like a 50-year industry-wide project, not a thing you can ship to HP to put in a car, which is kind of what the article says is gonna like, it's very confusing.

• 57:22David Pierce?

  Maybe.

• 57:23Nilay Patel?

  You still need applications.

• 57:25David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 57:26Nilay Patel?

  You still need a Spotify to exist, so you can like click on it.

• 57:31David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 57:31Nilay Patel?

  As long as you need Spotify to exist, the easiest way to play the music is to pay Spotify money to use the API to just play the music. Rivian's gonna get Apple Music. And you're like, cool. And I was like, here's how they're gonna do it. You're gonna ask Alexa to open a web browser, and open Apple Music and click on Apple Music and app. He'd be like, what? And it'd be like, or you can sign a deal with Apple to put the Apple Music app running on the Rivian, which is what they did, because that is sane.

• 58:01Speaker 04

  And there's no reason that you have to give up on the way that we've run computers up until now, just because you need to license your app. I'm deeply confused by this.

• 58:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, it's, I think the same argument we've had a lot about all of these AI devices is like, isn't this just another app on your phone? Like, is, could, could an AI system like credibly replace a lot of what you do in Android Auto or CarPlay over time? Like, yes, absolutely. Is good Siri the solution to CarPlay? Hundred percent. That is not the future of iOS.

• 58:38David Pierce?

  It's part of it, right? And I think there are, there are a lot of instances in which agents are going to be useful and powerful and valuable. But the idea that they're going to like immediately overthrow the whole ecosystem we currently have is just wrong. And so I think, again, if you're, if you're an OS maker, and if you're humane and you're desperate to have a reason to stay alive, you have to make this bet, right? Like, the, the big swing is we are going to be the one who controls all the agents. And if you're the one who controls all the agents, you become very powerful. The problem is there aren't any agents. The ones that there are aren't very good. And also, no one needs them yet. So like, it's a, it's a tough sled.

• 59:21Speaker 04

  I think the thing I struggle with every time we get into this discussion or we're talking about these things is, let's say that it works perfectly, that they get all the bugs out, that it's smart, it's fast, it's efficient. It's still like clicking around and using a thing. How many times a day do you click on something and like the page doesn't load?

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Like, and, and maybe they can make it smart enough to, okay, now I need to refresh, or I got an error and I need to go back and I need to do it again. But like, if I'm just sitting there saying, hey, man, I told you to do the thing. And it's like, yeah, the page isn't loading. Sorry, bro.

• 59:53David Pierce?

  Honestly, if my computer would be more honest with me about why it's not working in that specific way, in that specific tone, that would rule. Like, it was like, I'm sorry, bro. Like, this connection's shit. That's what Siri should do whenever, instead of being like, uh, here's some stuff I found on the web. It should just be like, sorry, bro. I don't know.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12David Pierce?

  I would like it better.

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

  Do you have Verizon? Cause AT&T's sucking right now.

• 1:00:17Nilay Patel?

  Incredible.

• 1:00:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  That's what AI is for.

• 1:00:20David Pierce?

  Think for a second and then it's just like, I don't know. Does it matter? Who cares?

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  The vibes are off. The vibes are off.

• 1:00:27Nilay Patel?

  I just like, I'm very curious about all these like AI agents. Everyone's pitching them now because they have to. Like, I, I really think the business imperative for why are we spending all this money? Why are we running all these GPUs all day and all night? Is not chatbots. It's not image generators. It's not disinformation at scale.

• 1:00:48David Pierce?

  It's a little bit disinformation at scale.

• 1:00:50Nilay Patel?

  That's like, that's like fun. You know, it's like, it's like a fun little, it's, it's like the garnish of the business. Like, do you want to see a picture of Elon Musk jumping up and down and turning into a monkey and then exploding? We can do that for you. Is that a business? I don't know. It does not appear to be paying anyone's bills. But I can make you an all powerful robot that can use a computer for you and fill out and do the spreadsheet work that you don't want to do. Maybe, maybe someone will pay a lot of money for that. And so you just like see them charging towards, well, hopefully we can pull this off. Hopefully we can get so good at this that the business pays us for it. And I, you're going to, we're going to cover it a lot because it, it is the dream, right? You just talk to a computer and it goes off and does something for you. I'm just not sure any of this technology can actually pull it off yet.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  And then underneath it, this is the next thing we should talk about, is the fact that all of this is built on a bunch of models that are trained in a bunch of copyrighted information that none of the lawsuits have been resolved yet. And more of them show up every day. So just this week, News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, it's Murdoch Empire, uh, company. They sued perplexity for infringing on all of its content. Perplexity gets to the paywall. Perplexity is sad. Perplexity is sort of like perpetually sad that it's getting sued for copyright infringement.

• 1:02:07David Pierce?

  Perplexity is the one that Wired and Forbes and others have repeatedly also pointed out is, uh, I think the Wired headline was perplexity is a bullshit machine, which is very good.

• 1:02:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17David Pierce?

  And then wrote another story about how perplexity stole the story about perplexity being a bullshit. It was just very good.

• 1:02:26David Pierce?

  This and perplexity so far has basically been like, ah, it's the internet. Everything's probably fine. We can just have it.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:02:33David Pierce?

  And it's really only been a matter of time until this came for perplexity in a pretty big way. I think it was, was it this week or last week that the New York Times sent a cease and desist to perplexity, essentially alleging the same thing.

• 1:02:45Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:02:45David Pierce?

  Was that last week? It was last week.

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  It was last week. And we should know the Times also sued OpenAI. That's an ongoing lawsuit. Our company Vox Media, the business side of the company, signed a deal with OpenAI, as did Conde Nast, as did a bunch of other publishers. Like, this is in the air.

• 1:03:01David Pierce?

  Like, yeah.

• 1:03:02Nilay Patel?

  That's the disclosure, by the way. You have nothing to do with that deal. But this is just like in the air. The Atlantic signed a deal like that and they actually have a cool set of OpenAI-powered tools on their website. One of which is just a Chrome plugin that as you click, like, as you browse the web, it shows you relevant stories from like the 150-year history of the Atlantic. Which is neat, like.

• 1:03:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Nilay Patel?

  I wouldn't read old Atlantic stories if not for an AI. Like, it works like C+. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But like, they're building stuff with it.

• 1:03:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Nilay Patel?

  But this is the, the foundation of this entire industry is like copyright infringement or alleged copyright infringement. Just this week as well, Kevin Bacon, Kate McKinnon, 11,500 other creators

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  just like issued a letter saying this is an unjust value transfer. We made all this work. We, this is our life's work. You've taken it all and now you're supporting these valuations without giving us anything in return. You can feel about that any way you want. I know a lot of people who feel like this is history's greatest crime and Sam Altman should be in jail. I know those people exist because they write to us every time we talk about this on the Vergecast. We, we welcome you here. Then there's another group of people who say, well, look, it's just a computer reading everything in the world. The same way that if you could read everything in the world and then summarize iMessage notifications, you would do the same thing, which is a stretch, but also an argument you can make. And I have no, this is a coin flip, pure coin flip. I have no idea how this is going to take off.

• 1:04:28Nilay Patel?

  But if you believe that the future of Alexa and Siri and Google Assistant and Humane and Anthropic is do like taking a million screenshots of your computers and clicking around for you. All of that is built on the foundation of copyright lawsuits that have not yet been resolved in any way, shape or form. And it's kind of like, you know, this industry is headed towards a cliff, like full cliff, like one way or another.

• 1:04:52David Pierce?

  The one other part of this backdrop that we should talk about is all of these companies right now are trying to raise gigantic, astonishing amounts of money. OpenAI just raised the biggest round of funding ever. Anthropic is out trying to raise a ton of money. Perplexity is out trying to raise a ton of money. Like, there's a real sense from all of these companies that they are going to need just vast oceans of cash to do some combination of build God, find a way to sell this stuff to enterprise customers, and protect themselves from lawsuits. Like, I think every one of these companies is trying to make the case that this stuff is going to

• 1:05:32David Pierce?

  be so big and so lucrative in order to be able to fund the fight to get there. And it's such a bizarre dynamic where it's like, they are simultaneously promising how great the world is going to be and like battening down the hatches, right? And they're like, Microsoft and OpenAI this week was another piece of news that they're giving a bunch of money to newsrooms to make them make more AI stuff. And it's just like, what a bizarre inversion of this same thing where they're like, we are going to give you money to take your stuff, or we're just going to take it for free, but here's some money to make AI stuff.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're giving some money. They announced $10 million and 5 million of it is in credits for the software.

• 1:06:16David Pierce?

  Oh, is it really? That's annoying.

• 1:06:18Nilay Patel?

  Which is not the same thing as money.

• 1:06:20David Pierce?

  No, it's not. It is super not. But all of this stuff is like, it's, everything is running as fast as possible in these like mutually exclusive ways, except that it sort of feels like if the money gets big enough, it'll just be okay.

• 1:06:38Nilay Patel?

  So this is, I haven't thought this all the way through, and I'm curious for Reader if you're back on this.

• 1:06:44David Pierce?

  What the first cast is for?

• 1:06:45Nilay Patel?

  If the money gets big enough, I think the judges and the copyright cases are going to be like, look at all of your money. Pay it to them.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  Like at some point, you're like, I made a thing so valuable by taking all of this stuff without permission. A judge is going to say, well, that that is actually a value transfer that doesn't make sense. Right? If you needed all of this to raise your $6.9 billion, OpenAI, then it stands to reason that that stuff is valuable. And you should take some of the money you raised and pay it to the people whose work you need to make your product that supports the valuation.

• 1:07:23David Pierce?

  But that's kind of my point, right? I think if you're OpenAI, you say, okay, listen, Judge, fine us, fine us $1 billion. That's so much money. One whole billion dollars. Oh, it's cool. We got five and a half. And this, this is what I mean. Like, I think there is a sense among these companies that if they can just build a big enough war chest, they can either buy out or wait out all of their problems. And those are tech problems, those are regulatory problems, those are fights with publishers, like, that just gives them the money to wait. And I, I, there's a reasonable evidence that they're going to be right about that. The, the wild card is, are we due for some kind of judicial end

• 1:08:05David Pierce?

  to this that just knifes through the whole industry? And that, I think, everybody is lying to you if they think they know the answer.

• 1:08:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's definitely coin flip.

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  The, the other thing that's happening is that they're also getting attacked from the other side, on the, the output side, not just the copyright infringement accusations of what they've done, but who is responsible for what these tools do? There's a lawsuit that has been publicized, written by New York Times and other outlets, we wrote about it, where Character AI and Google are being sued after this, this teen died. And one of the main questions about this is, so if I interact with your generative AI tool, and maybe I put in a prompt and it says something back to me, is anyone legally responsible for what happens next? Who, how much? What, what are you supposed to do? What, what should be the rules there? What should, what safety should you implement? Should these things be usable by children? None of these questions have been answered yet. And there, that could be another problem.

• 1:08:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that is the realist problem, especially for the character AI's of the world, where they're sort of like advertising that these are therapy tools. And it's like, well, If you lead people to these outcomes, you're probably responsible for them. And no one has thought any of this through. I'm just saying it's neat to talk about agents and Siri or Alexa that can just do stuff for you. And then there's like, oh shit, it's doing stuff for you. Also, the foundation of this might be Kevin Bacon gets a billion dollars. Like weird, weird outcome.

• 1:09:32David Pierce?

  Can I just read you the one sentence thing that they all signed on to?

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36David Pierce?

  It says, "The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works and must not be permitted." Okay, like, I'm just, I'm amazed they got 11,500 people to care about that enough to sign.

• 1:09:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, no, no. We could get 11,000 people to sign a statement like that tomorrow. The Verge commenters alone would sign that statement.

• 1:10:00David Pierce?

  It's just such a like, I don't know, it's just such a milquetoast way to be like, I am gently mad at the AI industry.

• 1:10:07Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that's gentle. It's a major unjust threat that must not be permitted. What do you want them to say? Sam Altman should be arrested. 11,000 people.

• 1:10:16David Pierce?

  It's just like money, please.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  No, it says must not be permitted.

• 1:10:21David Pierce?

  It says livelihoods. You know what that is? It's, this is not, it's not, it's money, money.

• 1:10:28Speaker 04

  The unfortunate part is that it already happened.

• 1:10:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, cat's out of the bag, Kevin. No dancing in this town, bro.

• 1:10:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, OpenAI raised $7 billion so that it can give Kevin Bacon one of them and then it can move on.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  The other thing that's going on in the AI world, which we'll just skim over because it is an election year and everyone can see the weird AI election misinformation for their own eyes, is that the companies that make these tools and have promised labeling and metadata for years and have done nothing, while all of this is getting fully out of control, are slowly starting to add labels and metadata to their own work. So, uh, Google is going to open source its watermarking tool for AI-generated text. We'll see how that goes. That one is, that's the hardest one. But Google Photos is now going to show AI-generated metadata in the photos. Like there'll be a label if you can detect the metadata. We're just, it's a slow. Slow burn. And then, oh, Apple, Craig Federighi, in that same interview at Trana,

• 1:11:27Nilay Patel?

  so that he wants photos to be photos. He doesn't want real photos to be fantasy. And they are also showing some information in the photos. This is not enough. Flatly, none of these companies are doing enough. They've all talked a huge game about things like C2PA and content authenticity. And we're kind of at like, we're gonna do XIF data and labels that people can change, while the misinformation is like running rampant everywhere. Has Craig Federighi seen that photo, the bridesmaid with like three arms? Because somebody should tell him about that. Yeah, that was like a panorama mode thing, right? It wasn't even AI. Wasn't even AI.

• 1:12:06David Pierce?

  It's just the pace of all of that is so backwards to me because what the logic for going slow on all of this from all of these companies is like, we have to really test this stuff and harden it and make sure it works and make sure it can't be, you know, easily removed. And we have to understand how it fits into the product. And absolutely none of that care is being taken with the tools that these same companies are making to make the things that are the problems in the first place. So it's like, it's very hard to take seriously this group of people who's like, we have to, we have to take our time and do this right. When the people who sit like three cubicles over are the ones being like, want to put guns in your pictures? Here you go.

• 1:12:45Nilay Patel?

  It's true. And, and that is the funnest team at Google, actually.

• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  Fire it up team at Google.

• 1:12:53David Pierce?

  One of the buildings in Mountain View is, is just the, the just add guns building.

• 1:12:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, very good. All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back with a lightning round, clear our palates. I'm very excited for the one that I've assigned to Richard. I'm gonna just be very honest with you. I'm very excited. We'll be right back.

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• 1:14:11Speaker 07

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• 1:14:39Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. It's the lightning round. Sponsored by no one. No one. For all of your not-money needs. See? See what it did?

• 1:14:48David Pierce?

  Yet.

• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  That's what it could look like if you paid us money. Someone money. Not me. We'll get there one day. All right, it's lightning round.

• 1:14:58Nilay Patel?

  David, I think you need to start with, honestly, the news that should have led the entire Vergecast.

• 1:15:04David Pierce?

  I just want you both to be very proud of me that I made it over an hour into the Vergecast and I have not mentioned the Books Palma 2 once. I haven't even, I haven't even teased it.

• 1:15:13Nilay Patel?

  The best thing about the Books Palma 2 is that we've entered the stage of covering this thing where we, there was a leak of it and we covered the leak and then the announcement of the tiny e-reader.

• 1:15:25Speaker 04

  We're deep in the weeds.

• 1:15:27David Pierce?

  The Verge is the official news source of the Books Palma, and I feel very good about this.

• 1:15:33Speaker 04

  What I like is that they got the sequel out fast enough that my pre-scheduled six-month-out tweet asking people if they know where their Books Palma is hasn't even gone up yet and they're already selling the sequel. They got me on this one.

• 1:15:45David Pierce?

  Somebody posted on threads today accusing me of being in league with books to get rid of all their inventory on the one before the two came out. They're like, you timed this on purpose, didn't you?

• 1:15:57Nilay Patel?

  Big Books is doing it.

• 1:15:58David Pierce?

  Big Books. Yeah, that's, that's, that's me. They, they fund everything, everything in the basketball hoop you see behind me. So Books Palma 2, still $280, which is still too expensive, but it's, it's still, it's a smartphone sized e-reader. To answer your question, Richard, I use mine every single day and I love it very much. It fixes a couple of the things that were wrong with the last one. Mostly it was a little slow and it ran a really outdated version of Android. Now I suspect it will be less slow and it runs a less outdated version of Android. It doesn't run a current version of Android, but it's better. It's still, it's the same size, it's the same screen. It has, I believe the same amount of RAM and the same amount of storage.

• 1:16:43David Pierce?

  It's just like a gentle upgrade of the same device.

• 1:16:50David Pierce?

  Which I think is fine. I, to me, honestly, the fact that Books just made another one of these is the thing that is most exciting and interesting. Books is basically like a spaghetti at the wall kind of company. They just make every single product size and SKU you can imagine.

• 1:17:06Nilay Patel?

  They're Dyson, but for e-ink screens.

• 1:17:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. And, and that's fine, right? Like you can go on their website and buy just about any dimension of e-ink device that you want. And I think just the fact that this one is getting a second rev suggests that it is successful and, and meaningful to people.

• 1:17:24Nilay Patel?

  Just by the way, just in case people are wondering what I mean by Dyson is if you want something with a fan in it, Dyson will sell it to you. Suck, blow, anything with a fan.

• 1:17:31David Pierce?

  However tall you'd like your vacuum to be, Dyson has you. They got you so good. There was, there's one, I believe that launched in just China that also doesn't have a camera.

• 1:17:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44David Pierce?

  Uh, which I think is pretty cool. And as a thing, uh, there were a bunch of people when I wrote about the Palma in the first place. Were like, I would love for one of these without a camera. For just a variety of, you know, security and privacy and family reasons, but the one that's shipping around the world still has a camera.

• 1:18:01Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 1:18:02David Pierce?

  I, they say-

• 1:18:03Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever used the camera on your Bookspalma 2?

• 1:18:05David Pierce?

  No, literally not once. Uh, when I wrote about it, I forgot it existed until somebody I was talking to asked me if I had ever used the camera. And I said, no, I forgot it had a camera. But their thesis is that you might use it for like scanning and digitizing stuff, which like, sure, but to me, it's like, get rid of the camera and knock the price down 40 bucks. Everybody wins.

• 1:18:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:18:26David Pierce?

  It's way better. But yeah, I, I think this thing is, I'm excited about it. I'm hopeful that they'll ship me one and I can review it. Uh, I think the thing Books is trying to do, it got kind of right the first time, like that combination of the size of the thing and the fact that it's e-ink and the fact that it runs Android apps is awesome. Uh, we tried to get Pano's Panay to look at one.

• 1:18:48Nilay Patel?

  He refused.

• 1:18:49David Pierce?

  He refused to do it on camera. It was very upsetting. Uh, and yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll see. I got a lot of people asking me, should I buy this one or the new Kindle Paperweight? People want e-ink devices, man.

• 1:19:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will say, I encourage everyone to pull over in your car and then look at our article with Bookspalma 2, click on it and scroll down and look at Books's own press photo of a guy holding the Bookspalma 2. He's very much like, what am I doing here?

• 1:19:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. He's, he's like, what is this thing?

• 1:19:18Nilay Patel?

  He's like, how did I get here? He's like, yep, I'm looking at a little phone with an e-ink screen.

• 1:19:24David Pierce?

  It's true. It's just a guy in a beige sweater who's like, why does this have no colors?

• 1:19:28Nilay Patel?

  It's like, his face is like, I, I hate this book. I don't want to be reading it. It's very, it's very much the face I imagine Richard made the first time he opened Bookspalma 2.

• 1:19:40Nilay Patel?

  Like this is the face that made you pre-schedule the tweet, like right here. It's good.

• 1:19:46Speaker 04

  And, and I'm, I'm glad that these things exist. Like someone should make like an Android thing with an e-ink screen that runs apps. It's great. I just think that people will probably put them down.

• 1:19:58Speaker 04

  And forget that they bought them.

• 1:19:59Nilay Patel?

  Just as I believe this gentleman put this one down.

• 1:20:02David Pierce?

  It's why, it's why the-

• 1:20:03Speaker 04

  If you asked him about it right now, he wouldn't be able to tell you what a book's called.

• 1:20:06Nilay Patel?

  What are you talking about?

• 1:20:07David Pierce?

  The what now?

• 1:20:08Nilay Patel?

  That was a job. Like, that's his face.

• 1:20:11David Pierce?

  This is why the problem is the price with, really with all of these devices. Like, the Palmo or something like it at 99 bucks, like, sold, right? Like, the Kindle succeeds for that same reason. It's like, if you buy a Kindle and use it a bunch and then forget about it for a while, and then use it a bunch and then forget about it for a while, you've paid the correct amount for it. 280 bucks is too much for that use case.

• 1:20:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:37David Pierce?

  That said, I will be purchasing one.

• 1:20:39Nilay Patel?

  I gotta go use my Books Palmo one at least one more time to make it worth it, apparently. All right, Richard, you've got the best one of all.

• 1:20:47Speaker 04

  Yes, senior citizens, very, very upset at T-Mobile of all companies because it won't honor its lifetime price guarantee. Turns out, um, they lived, I guess, longer than T-Mobile thought. When you, when you tell people that they're gonna, that you're gonna give them a lifetime price lock, you figure, how long could that last? Longer than you think, T-Mobile. They, they probably figured that out the same way they do security.

• 1:21:13Nilay Patel?

  That's rough. That's a rough secondary stab right there.

• 1:21:19Nilay Patel?

  Thousands of FCC complaints, uh, that, from people saying they, they signed up for price lock in, what, 2015? So 10 years ago. So T-Mobile assumed everyone would die within one decade.

• 1:21:32Speaker 04

  They had a senior plan that was marketed specifically to people 55 and up.

• 1:21:36Nilay Patel?

  With lifetime price lock.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  Yes, and it included this. And those are not people who you want to disappoint on a lifetime offer.

• 1:21:44Nilay Patel?

  They will remember.

• 1:21:46David Pierce?

  Has anyone ever not lived to regret the lifetime price guarantee? Like, this always makes me think of back in the day when the airlines would sell the people, like, the $250,000 lifetime fly wherever you want, first class thing. And then there were the people who were like, all right, challenge accepted, I live in the sky now.

• 1:22:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06David Pierce?

  And eventually all the airlines are like, well, you can't do that. And they're like- Remember when you said lifetime? And like the everyone is just don't do this. If you can't do it, just don't do it. And then there are the companies that offer a lifetime deal and then go out of business. And it's like, what are we doing, y'all?

• 1:22:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's a win. That means you outlived it.

• 1:22:28Speaker 04

  It's the lifetime of the executive who approved it.

• 1:22:30David Pierce?

  Right? Yeah, 100%.

• 1:22:33Nilay Patel?

  In the FCC complaints, there are some, some choice quotes. Ars Texan could dug them all up. One of them, "I am not dead yet." A customer in New York wrote bluntly.

• 1:22:45Nilay Patel?

  That's very good.

• 1:22:47David Pierce?

  There was one person who complained that their price is going up $50 a month because they had 10 lines. I'm like, wow, 10 lines?

• 1:22:54Nilay Patel?

  It's good. Well, you got that lifetime guarantee.

• 1:22:56David Pierce?

  That's, I mean, that's fair. I'd get everybody on that plan. You guys want to join my plan?

• 1:23:00Nilay Patel?

  I will, uh, take this opportunity to remind the Vergecast audience that T-Mobile exists in its current state because the government allowed it to buy Sprint in a deal, uh, which took our nation's number of viable nationwide wireless carriers from four to three. And to solve that problem, the government made Dish Network make a network. That network is called Project Genesis or Gen 5 SIS. That network does not exist. Just, I don't know what to tell you. You can go to the website. The website sometimes doesn't load when you go to the Dish Network project. It sometimes just isn't there.

• 1:23:37Nilay Patel?

  Just physically doesn't load. And then if you do get it to load, you can buy, uh, what is it? A Motorola Edge Plus, like a 2023 Motorola Edge Plus. That's the phone they sell. And that phone, if you go look at the subreddit, will mostly roam onto AT&T's network.

• 1:23:52David Pierce?

  Perfect. I don't see the, that's competition, baby.

• 1:23:56Nilay Patel?

  What I'm just saying, you know, I know it's election season. I'm, that was the deal, uh, negotiated by Donald Trump's antitrust division to preserve competition in the wireless market.

• 1:24:06David Pierce?

  We did it, y'all.

• 1:24:07Nilay Patel?

  When I think of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile and the biggest threats they face every day.

• 1:24:12David Pierce?

  Is that, can I just read you one paragraph from their story?

• 1:24:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15David Pierce?

  It's like an aside in the middle of the story, but it is, it is the best knife in the whole story. "Last year, T-Mobile notified some customers that it would automatically switch them to newer, more expensive plans unless the customers called the company to opt out of the change. T-Mobile customer service reps were instructed to tell users, 'We are not raising the price of any of our plans. We are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost.'" It's not whether the price is more or less, you guys. It's just different.

• 1:24:43David Pierce?

  It's just different.

• 1:24:44Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, and I'm just reading the Project Genesis subreddit. None of it's good, man. Anyhow, wireless carriers and ISPs, your favorite. Now, to further enrage you about our nation's wireless carriers and ISPs, I will inform you of my lightning round item, which is that the Federal Trade Commission passed what's called the click to cancel rule. This is the rule that says if you sign up for something, canceling it has to be as easy as signing up, right? So you can click on something to sign up for a subscription or yearly membership or whatever, to get out of it, you gotta be able to click one button. These are called negative option contracts and the whole thing. There's like three or four different laws to try to solve this problem, and the FTC put up a rule a while ago.

• 1:25:29Nilay Patel?

  Everyone complained about the rule, and now they passed the rule. This is like LinaCon's FTC saying, "This is bad for consumers to make people dance through cancel flows or to hide, you know, options where the price escalates. It's gotta be as easy to get out as it was to get in."

• 1:25:44David Pierce?

  This is an objectively correct stance, right?

• 1:25:46Nilay Patel?

  Everyone loves this rule.

• 1:25:47David Pierce?

  There's not like a secret thing that I'm missing about why this might sucks for consumers. This is just great.

• 1:25:52Nilay Patel?

  No, it's totally fine.

• 1:25:53Speaker 08

  This is what happens when you make millennials call the New York Times to cancel their subscriptions. Millennials hate phone calls. 100%.

• 1:26:01Nilay Patel?

  And so, you know, the LinaCon FTC is like doing its thing. Guess immediately who sued to stop this rule? If you guessed our nation's ISPs and wireless carriers, you would be correct.

• 1:26:14David Pierce?

  I was gonna guess gyms. That was gonna be my other...

• 1:26:17Nilay Patel?

  Gyms is in there. A bunch of advertisers are in there.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  ADT?

• 1:26:21Nilay Patel?

  ADT is in there. So it's, they're trade groups, right? So the NCTA, which is the ISP trade group, that represents Comcast, Charter, Cox. It represents streaming services like Disney, AMC, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Discovery, Disclosure, Comcast is an investor, our parent company.

• 1:26:43Nilay Patel?

  I take that for what it's worth. I think they suck in this case. The IAB, which is the advertising, the Internet Advertising Bureau, that's Google, Netflix, Amazon, Meta, Vizio, and the NFL. The ESA is ADT. So all these huge companies are through their trade organizations, basically suing the FTC and saying, no, we do not want you to make click to cancel mandatory. And the argument is, the FTC is trying to regulate consumer contracts for all companies and all industries across all sectors of the economy, from forbidding businesses from making customers cancel services using a method that differs from how they signed up.

• 1:27:24David Pierce?

  Yes, that is what they're trying. That's correct.

• 1:27:26Nilay Patel?

  And so the, the argument here is, freedom in America requires us to be able to fleece our customers. Like, get the nanny state out of here. It's wild. Underneath that, this is some real wonky legal stuff, is how they will probably attempt to go after this. So the FTC is a, you know, executive agency of the government. It has some powers or some powers it doesn't have. The main power is like its rulemaking authority. It's like ability to like, make decisions, basically. And that was basically just overturned by this Supreme Court. We'll link to it, but there was this concept called Chevron deference,

• 1:28:11Nilay Patel?

  where the courts would defer to the agency. Like, you know best. Like, you're staffed by experts. You made this decision. We will defer to your rulemaking process if you get sued. But this Supreme Court threw that out. So now the courts get to decide if these rules make sense. Which is basically just like an explosion of how our government works. Anyway, all that means is Comcast gets to sue Vinacon for making these sort of get out of your ISP agreement. And that is stupid. So that's, this is gonna, it's amazing that these companies are buying this amount of bad press. They should just make better products. But here we are.

• 1:28:47David Pierce?

  This always just makes me think of the, the place we've gotten to with streaming TV, where basically what we've done is just very slowly reinvent cable, but it's easier to cancel now. And in a very real way, that's a giant victory, that like, I pay as much, it's a worse user experience in a lot of ways, but at least I can cancel it. Success. And it is just bonkers how few things have gone that way.

• 1:29:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14David Pierce?

  Like it's, I, there are so many things I pay for because I just can't figure out how to cancel it. Like literally, the, the, just to name one, the Wall Street Journal, which I'm not important enough to need to subscribe to, if we're being honest with each other.

• 1:29:28Nilay Patel?

  You don't get a free journal subscription because you used to work there?

• 1:29:31David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:29:31Nilay Patel?

  Alumni Club?

• 1:29:32David Pierce?

  No, I barely got it when I was there.

• 1:29:36David Pierce?

  They were like, listen, you write about like smart home stuff, like don't, you, you don't need to read our journalism. But like, you, you have to call a number and find a person and I like, I sat on hold for a while one time and gave up. And it's like, this is not how this is supposed to work. This just sucks.

• 1:29:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:52David Pierce?

  And it is like that everywhere. I had to go to my gym to cancel. Like the third time ever I went to the gym was to cancel the gym. It's awful.

• 1:30:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, David, I think you should take better care of your health. So sign up for another gym membership and then never get out of it. Uh, that's it. We were way over. I'm furious that I can't cancel more things more easily. I don't even know my Hulu password, but I'd cancel that.

• 1:30:18David Pierce?

  If you want to cancel the Vergecast, you have to call Neely and we'll never tell you his number.

• 1:30:22Nilay Patel?

  That's it. Call the Vergecast line and explain to us why you need to cancel the show. That is a dangerous prompt. Think twice. Make it funny. That's it. That's the Vergecast rock and roll.

• 1:30:35Speaker 08

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:30:56Speaker 09

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• 1:31:26Speaker 10

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