What’s in store for the iPhone 16

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss previews for the Apple event, gadgets at IFA, the latest with Snap, and a whole lot more. Further reading: Apple’s iPhone 16 launch event is set for September Apple’s iPhone 16 event: how to watch and what to expect Apple’s rumored Mac Mini redesign may ditch the USB-A port Is our long FineWoven nightmare almost over? What Not to Expect at Apple Event on September 9: 'It's Glowtime' A new low-end Magic Keyboard may come next year. Apple Sports is ready for all kinds of football Inside Apple’s theatrical U-turn on Wolfs. Ted Lasso could come back for a fourth season Beats’ long-awaited Powerbeats Pro 2 earbuds are coming in 2025 Microsoft and Apple are arguing over cloud gaming apps again The Remarkable Paper Pro is as outrageous as it is luxurious Honor’s superthin foldable is another cool phone the US won’t get TCL’s new Nxtpaper phones have a dedicated button for maximum monochrome Our first official look at Huawei’s tri-fold. Acer’s first handheld gaming PC is the Nitro Blaze DJI’s $199 Neo selfie drone is going to be everywhere Acer’s Project DualPlay concept laptop has a pop-out controller and speakers Acer’s 14-inch laptops claim 24 hours of battery life from Intel, Qualcomm, or AMD Qualcomm’s new eight-core Snapdragon X Plus makes these Windows laptops cheaper IFA 2024: hands-on (and off) with Lenovo’s Auto Twist AI PC concept Intel strikes back against Windows on Arm Verizon looks to expand Fios with $20 billion purchase of Frontier Concord was worse than bad — it was forgettable Sony is taking Concord offline on September 6th after disastrous launch Snapchat to put ads next to chats with friends You’ll soon be able to Sony is taking Concord offline on September 6th after disastrous launch Sub.club is here to help the fediverse make money 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

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• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Richast, the flagship podcast with the Fine Woven Appreciation Society.

• 1:03Nilay Patel?

  There are no members.

• 1:04David Pierce?

  The wrongest one we've ever done.

• 1:07Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I don't want to be a member of that.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  We're still looking for our first member. If you could sign up today, that would be much appreciated.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  But we're not in it.

• 1:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, you have to join. We just cover the society. We are not members of the society.

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  We're the official podcast of the Fine Woven Appreciation Society, but we've never joined. Hi, I'm your friend Eli David Pierce is here.

• 1:29David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  Alex Trans is here.

• 1:31Alex Cranz?

  Hey, what's up?

• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  This is a big one. This is the Apple iPhone preview episode. Next week is the event. A bunch of us will be there. David nope'd out.

• 1:41David Pierce?

  That's largely correct.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  David was like, screw it, I've seen these phones before. The rectangles, he said angrily. But there's a lot to talk about. We're expecting a new iPhone, a new watch, AirPods. We're going to talk about all the rumors, all the things we're expecting. It's also IFA in Germany.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  I've covered this thing for 15 years. I'm like, it's Germany, right? We got a team out there looking at just a wild collection of gadgets, including, I just saw this laptop whose lid rotates by itself.

• 2:09David Pierce?

  Whoa, like Rainbow Room style? It just sort of slowly spins around as you use it?

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  It's like a classic 2-in-1 where you like open it, you can flip it around and turn it into a tablet. But they're like, what if that? But you didn't have to do it.

• 2:20David Pierce?

  I like that.

• 2:22Alex Cranz?

  And he just goes.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it doesn't, none of it seems reliable or good. But that's right. That's what's happening in Germany today. So we had a whole lightning round of gadgets and then we got a whole lightning round, unsponsored. Although I will say to the one person who sent a email saying, I now have an entire corporate marketing budget, we're going to spend your corporate marketing budget. This is what happens when you do a show for effectively 15 years. The people get jobs.

• 2:52Nilay Patel?

  So there's, there's some people who sent some emails. We're excited about this. All right, we got to talk about Apple. Let's start. There's, there's a lot of rumors, I would say. But we're at the, the top line is they're iterating all of their core products.

• 3:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a weird moment. So you said there's a lot of rumors and my, my immediate reaction was like, kind of, because it's a weird year in the sense that if there is something big coming, we don't know anything about it. Like there's not even, there's not even light rumors that there might be something big. And every year there's like the maybe this will be, and there's just none of that. So either this is going to be a pretty straightforward Apple event, or we actually don't have that much information. And obviously I hope it's the second thing.

• 3:38Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of rude though, because like action button on all models, that feels like a big deal.

• 3:42David Pierce?

  No, it doesn't.

• 3:43Alex Cranz?

  I don't have an action button on it. So it's huge for me.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  By a lot of rumors. I didn't mean a lot of important rumors. I just meant the volume of rumors is high. The number of things that people are saying will happen is larger than normal, in my opinion.

• 4:01David Pierce?

  I think that's right.

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  But none of them add up to like earth shattering.

• 4:06Alex Cranz?

  Except for the action button, which if you are on an iPhone 14 Pro like I am, is very exciting.

• 4:12Nilay Patel?

  Of all of the rumored buttons, you think it's that one?

• 4:15David Pierce?

  Okay, wait, can we actually talk about this for a second? So I, I posted on the site the other day, a really great shortcut that someone uses, I'm sorry, I'm forgetting who it was, where they had set it up so that like they figured out quicker than I did that you can use the action button to open the camera and then again to take a picture. So you can use it like as a basically press and hold and then press and you have immediately taken a picture. I think that's awesome. I, so I posted this on the site being like, this is a really cool use of the action button. Do you use the action button? And the overwhelming response I got from people is I never, ever, ever, ever use the action button. Cause they're cowards. I don't care about it at all. So Neelai, you I know, set it up to do a chat GPT thing. Do you actually like use the action button all the time?

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  It's, it has reached gimmick status.

• 5:02David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 5:03Nilay Patel?

  So we should just contextualize this. What I say of all of the rumored buttons, they're rumored to be adding a camera button, a dedicated camera button to the pro and then bring the action button to all the models. So we'll get to that. My use of action button right now is it's linked to the chat GPT shortcut. Where you press it and it's slow. There's nothing about this, it's fast. You press it, chat GPT launches, it flashes up some messages like checking connection and then a wheel spins and you're, it's already gone. You've already been like, I don't care about the question I was going to ask anymore. And then you can ask it a question and it can listen to you. That's a little dicey as well. If you're in a loud environment and people are talking, it's not great at that. But the thing, at the end of all that, you ask it a question, natural language, and then it just tells you an answer in natural language.

• 5:47Nilay Patel?

  And sometimes that answer is a pure hallucination and sometimes it's not. You can close that window and just read it, which is much faster than listening to the voice. And all of that feels like a little glimpse into the future. I'll give you an example. Max and I are playing Untitled Goose Game together, which is extraordinarily fun. If you don't know this game, it came out years ago, you're, you're just a, you know, a miscreant goose. Just getting into trouble, just honking at stuff. Enormously fun. It's like Grand Theft Auto, but you're a goose. I don't know how else to describe it.

• 6:17David Pierce?

  That belongs in that category of games that there is no way to say it in words that sounds good. But yet it is amazing.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  But if you have like a six year old, you're like, this is a great video game. Like one, you just like run around honking at stuff. It's great. So we're having fun and I, we couldn't figure out some puzzle and I just asked chat GPT, like where is this thing in this game? And it just told me the answer with like bullets.

• 6:39David Pierce?

  That's cool.

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  And there's a whole universe of moral complaints you could lodge at OpenAI for scraping all of the work and all of the labor of a million video game journalists who publish the explainers. And that's all in the background, but the thing just worked. And so that is really something. There's something there and I hope all the people get paid for all the work in whatever way. But that one use of the action button to me is the most important use of the action button. Like, can you have a natural language voice assistant? Can you actually add a new kind of input mechanism to a computer? Yeah, and that one's really janky and weird. But you can very, very clearly see how, oh, you can make that a million times better. And I think we're we're expecting to see Apple add these features to Siri. I don't know if it will be on this phone or at this event.

• 7:24Nilay Patel?

  But you can just see how it's gonna get there.

• 7:26Alex Cranz?

  So I think the reason I'm excited about it is because of the Books Palma, it also has a button like this. You can program. And because I have one, I've actually used it.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  We got the Books Palma so fast.

• 7:37Alex Cranz?

  I'm speedrunning. I'm speedrunning today.

• 7:39Nilay Patel?

  We started the show.

• 7:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we haven't gotten into the remarkable yet. Don't worry. I'm ready. But with the action button, can you do like, just go to home or go to, use it as a back button?

• 7:51Nilay Patel?

  No, so you can set it to run shortcuts. And then you can set it to run like, what, five or six different system level things like turn on the flashlight?

• 7:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it has OS level navigational capabilities.

• 8:03Alex Cranz?

  Never mind, I'm less excited. This button sucks.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  I think maybe with some of the assistive features in iOS, you might be able to do some of the stuff, but it's not like top level functionality.

• 8:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, you could probably rig up a shortcut to go home, but that's a deeply weird use case. Uh, but I think, yeah, like back as a system gesture. I'm not sure you could do. Maybe you could, but again, that would be a like weird shortcut hack. That's not just sort of a thing that you can attach it to.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  Or it's buried in some, some set of assistant technology.

• 8:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 8:31Nilay Patel?

  Assistant technology configurations. And a lot of times what Apple does, which I think is really interesting and honestly really cool, they pioneer or they test new ways of using the products as assistive technologies first. And then they bring them to everyone because. You know, the, the thing to say about assistive technology is, is making things more accessible is actually better for everybody. So the things like pinchy pinch on the watch started out as an assistive technology. And there's a bunch of other stuff across iOS that started off as assistive technology, and there's like a lot of them.

• 9:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like the mouse on the iPad started.

• 9:05Nilay Patel?

  Right, the mouse, yeah, definitely, that's a great.

• 9:08David Pierce?

  Double tap on the back to do stuff is also another one that started as an assistive thing. There's a lot of it.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a lot. So it's like, there's, that system is so configurable. I'm not, I'm just saying I'm not a hundred percent sure. But if it was going to be somewhere, it would be in there, I think.

• 9:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  But it's, they've limited what you can do with the action button in the system level. It's just a handful of things. And then you can run shortcuts. So when I push it, it runs the chat GPT shortcut. Right, which is fine, but it's not like I push it and the computer knows what I want. It's like, I'm going to run this shortcut that opens this other thing.

• 9:40David Pierce?

  This is where I say again that shortcuts is a failed experiment and Apple should be ashamed of itself for not doing better with shortcuts. Because what you just said is either you can do one of four things, or you have to have a master's degree in computer engineering to be able to do anything else with your phone.

• 9:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, what's supposed to happen, well, to be clear, what's supposed to happen is the, the app developer shipped the shortcuts, right? So the, my chat G B shortcut is from OpenAI. So here it is, we've added it to your system library shortcuts, and what they want you to do is map it to the action button. So like, they're using the, the pathway to get to that button that Apple provides. But you still have to know a bunch of things about shortcuts and that OpenAI built the shortcut and it is there. And you can, instead of being like, I'm looking at the list of things it can do, and one of them is open chat GPT.

• 10:28David Pierce?

  Right, right, exactly. Like, there's a, one of the things that you can do on the Mac that I think is the better version of this is basically just walk it through a menu set, like you can set up a keyboard shortcut to anything, any menu in any app on a Mac, just by saying, I want it to be this command. I'm like, that's how shortcuts should work, and it just doesn't. It's kind of like that, just way more complicated.

• 10:49Nilay Patel?

  So I'm looking at the actual list of the action button. You can turn on silent and ring, which is the classic mute button.

• 10:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, boring.

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  You can switch a focus mode, which is one of those. Features that other people are super into or do not care about.

• 11:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Nilay Patel?

  A classic. And by the way, focus ones have been this way since like Palmoliste devices. Cause that's where they came from.

• 11:09David Pierce?

  I had mine set up to turn do not disturb on and off. Uh, and actually that was great. Basically just as like a shut my phone up. Thing I like. I changed nothing in do not disturb, except I turn all notifications and sounds off.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So you can, and the idea that you're going to push a hard button on your phone to switch focus modes is like very. Fascinating to me, but sure. You can launch the camera, which is, I think this is the reason everybody sets it to camera. Cause of the default choices. It's the thing that makes the most sense for the most people.

• 11:36David Pierce?

  For sure.

• 11:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, you can have it turn on the flashlight, which is just like if you're, you want to seem like an old dad. Set that button to flashlight. Uh, you can launch voice memo, which is cool. Uh, you can run the translator. There's a magnifier, which was fun to play with for a day. And then it turned out you can do a shortcut. And then you can add the other accessibility features or you can set it to no action. So just of these choices. I think it makes sense why camera is by far the most important one.

• 12:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  And it also why it makes sense that Apple is rumored to be adding a dedicated camera button to the pro phone.

• 12:08David Pierce?

  But the, so this is the reason I ask though, is because I think. We're at a such a deep point of maturity with these devices that. Again, this is purely anecdotal, just based on my own experience of talking to other people, but I don't think the attach rate of the action button is that high. And I think in part because it's the button that is too high on the phone, like I will die on that hill. They put the button in the wrong place. But partly it's just because we all know how to do all those things on our phones already. Right? And. If I launch the camera a hundred times a day. Learning a new pathway to get there is actually more work than it's cracked up to be. And I think. One of the things that Apple is doing this year with its software is making all those bits and pieces more customizable.

• 12:51David Pierce?

  So you can do more stuff in the control center and you can do more stuff on the lock screen. And you can change the two things at the bottom that were flashlight and camera. Now those are customizable. And Apple has this idea that like, okay, we're going to give more people more tools to do stuff, however they want. And I wonder. How big the group of people who are going to make those changes and be thrilled about them is versus the number of people who are just like, you know what? We're 17 years into the iPhone. I kind of know how to do things. None of this actually matters. And I think the camera button is going to be the most interesting version of that, because if the rumors are true, it's not just going to be a shutter button. It's actually going to be like pressure sensitive. So you'll be able to like press once to press, half press to focus, and then press to take the photo, which is like a genuine

• 13:33David Pierce?

  value add on top of anything you can do on the phone now. It's just jankier to do it.

• 13:38Nilay Patel?

  There's a rumor that it'll be touch sensitive for zoom. So you can slide your finger back.

• 13:41David Pierce?

  I didn't see that. That's cool.

• 13:43Alex Cranz?

  Wait, they're gonna put in-

• 13:44David Pierce?

  You can slide on it to zoom.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that is the rumor. Like I said, there's a lot of rumors.

• 13:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Alex Cranz?

  Wait, but Apple's gonna put in like a fancy button. But no headphone jack.

• 13:56Alex Cranz?

  Like they found the room for the button.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  Just to hurt me.

• 13:58Alex Cranz?

  I did, I did.

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, at this point, the if you believe that the future of this, the technology industry is multimodal AI, then having immediate access to a camera so the phone can look at things. If you believe the future of the industry is AR, having immediate access to the phone. You can see why you're like, okay, I need, I need to make this a button.

• 14:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Nilay Patel?

  What's harder to understand is why the action button persists if the adoption rate is so low.

• 14:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Nilay Patel?

  And it, it's like funny to me that one of those options isn't just open an app. Right? If I had a button on my phone that just opened threes, I'd be like, this button rules.

• 14:35David Pierce?

  Well, and you can do that with shortcuts, right? But this is, this is where I go back to like shortcuts.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so you have to dive through this other system as opposed to, I don't know, like, I think a lot of people tend to use like one app a lot.

• 14:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  And the idea that this, you can't just like make this button open that app from the jump from your lock screen is kind of weird. And I, I think it's Apple is just sort of restricting that a little too much. And so I'm hopeful that what we see is the action button gets more useful in one way. And they move all the camera usage to the other button.

• 15:06David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 15:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because otherwise it's the touch bar again, isn't it?

• 15:10Nilay Patel?

  Otherwise you're gonna have two camera buttons on your phone. Like, there's just gonna be a lot of people with pro phones who have effectively two camera buttons on their phone.

• 15:17David Pierce?

  Right.

• 15:18Alex Cranz?

  They're like, this one's when I'm feeling spicy. This one, when I'm feeling not spicy.

• 15:22David Pierce?

  This is the nudies button and the non-nudies button.

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  Wow, guys. I mean, iOS 18, I, I believe that there's gonna be like password protected.

• 15:31David Pierce?

  There we go. We did it.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  We finally understand what's driving iPhone development. It's these two.

• 15:39Nilay Patel?

  Um, we'll be announcing some subscription offerings later in the show.

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  So those are the highlight features of the two buttons coming to phones. Like, I think that's what everyone is expecting. That's the leaks. We've seen case leaks where the case manufacturers are having to deal with this potential capacitive touch sensitive button on the Pro phones. Then obviously, we're seeing camera upgrades. Potentially, a new ultra wide camera on the Pro, potentially a big zoom upgrade on the Pro Max. I would say the thing that I'm looking for most is processing upgrades. I don't know if Apple's going to talk about this. I think iPhone photos are they're just starting to look a little wild. And I think people are noticing, I think lots of people are noticing. I think we talked to the Halide developers.

• 16:27Nilay Patel?

  Process Zero, their like minimal processing system in that app is like a huge hit. And I think it's because people are like, oh, photos or shadows are pretty.

• 16:38David Pierce?

  Like, what if my photo looked the way I thought it was going to look when I took it? Like, what a crazy idea that would be.

• 16:42Nilay Patel?

  So I'm really curious to see if Apple responds to any of this anyway, because of the trend for all of these cameras. I think they all kind of look the same now and they all, for a minute, do you remember when Google first did the pixel, they were talking about what artists they were inspired by?

• 16:56David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  And like they were like paintings and shadow and use of contrast. And there was this notion that cameras would have different looks. And they're like, wait a minute. What if we do Coney Island? And now they're all incredibly bright.

• 17:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  Across the board, there's like no dynamics. So I'm just interested to see if Apple starts to dial this back because I've heard the criticism. When the criticism is in both like Kyle Chayka writing in The New Yorker and Alex Earl saying her beach videos look great, like the criticism has hit like the full spectrum of American life.

• 17:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, one, especially for Apple, which has for so long kind of hung its hat on being the one down the middle, right? Where where Google and Samsung both got very kind of opinionated about what their photos were going to look like. Apple's whole thing was like realism and and beauty and everything was going to be great. And their idea was like, we're just gonna, we're gonna touch it up, but we're not going to change it. And I feel like they've tipped over that line over the last couple of years, particularly with the 15s, I think. Yeah. That like, I like the photos less on the iPhone 15 than almost any iPhone before it.

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have an upgrade. Becky has a 13 and it used to be that I made sure she had the new one every year because. We did. What do we do? We take pictures of our kid.

• 18:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  So there's like, we should always have the best one. And we just stopped at the thirteen. Like, it is the most restrained of the modern ones, but it's still not that restrained. So I'm just curious about this. Like you can, you can throw hardware specs at this camera, but it's the processing pipeline that is actually more interesting now. And I, I don't know how they're going to talk about it. I don't know if they're going to diverge on the regular and the pro. I'm, I'm just very curious to see where this goes.

• 18:36Alex Cranz?

  Can you imagine the pro like good photos? The regular is just like, no, day glow. We don't believe in highlights. We, we take the highlights crank all the way to the top.

• 18:45David Pierce?

  Well, honestly, there's a, there's a version of that that I think is completely possible because a bunch of the rumors about the camera are about the camera hardware that Apple is getting increasingly good at doing teeny tiny optical zoom lenses inside of the iPhone stack. And that it's able to actually build better optics into the phone. And in theory, if you can do better optics, you can do less processing, which gives Apple more leeway to say, we're going to do less and your photos are going to still look good. Whereas if you go down to the base level phones, it's just not going to be as good. And so it is by definition going to have to do more work. So like, if Apple's going to have a process zero type thing, I can absolutely imagine it being a pro only.

• 19:26Nilay Patel?

  So I have heard almost the exact opposite.

• 19:29David Pierce?

  Really? I just made that up. It just seems logical. But have you heard actual stuff about this?

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I've just been talking to some folks and we have to see how it goes with the new phone. You are correct that Apple's getting better at optics. We're getting better at doing the thing inside the phone, like building the actual camera hardware. But they're ruthlessly optimizing it to collect as much light as they can. And everything else are kind of letting go because they can fix it in the pipeline. So Apple's view of this is much like Google's view is they're not building a camera. They're building a whole integrated imaging pipeline. And, you know, has some goal. And if you can compensate. For everything else except light collection, then you should just ruthlessly prioritize light collection because that's the thing, it's the most important thing.

• 20:14David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 20:15Nilay Patel?

  And then you can fix fringing or distortion or whatever else might happen at your lens level because you have all the light, right? So you can, you can mathematically correct a bunch of errors that you get in the actual hardware, but you can never really mathematically correct for I didn't get enough light.

• 20:30David Pierce?

  That's fascinating. So you're basically just turning it into like a big data problem. And it's like, okay, the more, the more light we can throw at this problem, the better we can do, which I would not say makes me hopeful for the idea that we are going to get something that looks less processed.

• 20:43Nilay Patel?

  This is why I was having this conversation. So it was right after we published Sarah's piece about not being ready for AI image like editing everywhere. And you kind of get to this place where the iPhone is already like, kind of like doing a lot of sharpening in text and people see the text is weird. If you over zoom on an image, you can see it's like invents faces in weird ways or not quite faces. And people are like, what is happening here? And it's like, oh, that's just a bunch of image processing has gone awry. And so I'm just very curious with this phone in particular, Apple is not shipping a bunch of Apple intelligence, but they are right on the cusp of it. So this is kind of the last phone that's going to take pictures, right? Like straightforward pictures. And then every phone after this is going to be like pictures with Apple intelligence

• 21:28Nilay Patel?

  or whatever the next thing is. And I'm just curious to see if they pull it back a little bit so they can go forward in a different direction or if they just stay it with the like, have you seen the sky? Look at the sky.

• 21:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it all does make me think of like, do you remember that art project we talked about, I don't know, got a year or so ago, that it was, it was the camera, but it didn't have a lens, but every time you hit the shutter, it would like collect your location and mapping data about where you were in all the satellite imagery and then stitch that into a photo. That feels.

• 22:01David Pierce?

  Increasingly close to where all of this is going.

• 22:04Nilay Patel?

  I would like to remind you, specifically David Pierce, that when I wanted to spend five hours talking about Samsung taking photos of the moon, you were like, bah, and now you have just described the moon situation.

• 22:15David Pierce?

  No, no, no. When you said you wanted to do that, we all bought tacos and then did it at South by Southwest for an hour and a half.

• 22:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, I had to pour some tequila into David, and then we talked about Samsung generating images of the moon instead of taking photos of the moon. A philosophical conundrum, because every photo of the moon is technically exactly the same, because the moon doesn't change.

• 22:36David Pierce?

  Right?

• 22:37Nilay Patel?

  Again, we could spend five hours talking about the moon.

• 22:41David Pierce?

  But it really, all that stuff increasingly feels less like a weird thing and more like just where all of this inevitably is going.

• 22:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and like I said, I think this camera in particular is just a moment. Like, it is for sure that the next camera will have a bunch of AI stuff built into it. This one, they're not shipping a bunch of it yet. So what's it, what's it gonna be? What's, what does this destination look like? And is it the final destination?

• 23:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, and Apple's already starting to do some of the, the like AI post-processing stuff where you can move things around and remove them for photos. It's, it has a lot of the stuff we've been talking about Google doing, and I think it's, it's gonna be really interesting to see, A, how good that stuff is on this camera, and B, how close it is in the pipeline. Because like, Google and others have been putting it in other apps and, and making it like a slight sideline feature. Apple, we will see how quickly this becomes like just a normal part of the image-taking process. It's gonna be fascinating.

• 23:39Nilay Patel?

  And other stuff, we're seeing rumors, again, lots of rumors, that there's gonna be colors, like saturated colors, instead of all the pale stuff, particularly in the regular 16. I think the Pro price will come in some muted colors. Mark Erman thinks there's gonna be a gold.

• 23:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:56Nilay Patel?

  People have been wanting a gold iPhone back. Some minor improvements to screens, displays, is the rumor, but the big rumor is that everything's gonna get a little bit bigger. So 6.3 on the little iPhone, and 6.9 on, on the, on the Maxes, which is fascinating. You know, they already do the plus-size phones at 6.7, so we'll, we'll just see where they land on a bunch of screen sizes. But I think they're trying to differentiate the Plus from the Max, because I, big phones are just the thing people like, as much as we complain about them. People love a big phone.

• 24:28David Pierce?

  But that has to have a maximum, right?

• 24:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, people's hands have maximums. Like, we're not, we can't all palm a basketball.

• 24:36Nilay Patel?

  But some of us can.

• 24:38Alex Cranz?

  And they will have a phone, finally.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  Aspire to, apparently.

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, obviously, the next turn is folding.

• 24:45David Pierce?

  Oh, right.

• 24:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Well, that's what 25, 26, I think, was what they were saying.

• 24:49David Pierce?

  That's what we keep hearing, yeah. And that it might be a flip before it's a fold, because that is the correct and good thing. And flip phones are better than fold phones.

• 24:57Alex Cranz?

  They're different.

• 24:57Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we, uh, there's Pixel line fold in the office. Chris Welch has one, and I was looking at it the other day, and I was like, this phone rules. Like, it is a beautiful piece of hardware.

• 25:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, they got the aspect ratio on the front, right? And he was just like, yeah, I never unfold it. I was like, well, this is the problem.

• 25:12David Pierce?

  So, what's funny is I was, uh, I was at the doctor the other day, and when the guy checking me in found out what I did, we started talking about tech. And he had Motorola's new Razr with the big screen on the front. And he said exactly the same thing. He was like, this phone's so awesome, I never even open it up. And I was like, what?

• 25:32David Pierce?

  You just have, like, an original iPhone, basically.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you just want the binky of having a giant phone, if you need it. Just like everyone needs, has the binky of wanting an Android tablet. There's one thing that's deeply reassuring in all technology, it's the state of Android tablets. That, that will always work. It'll absolutely be great. That's, I mean, that's the phone, those are the phone rumors, right? We're, we're expecting slightly bigger screens, action button on the regular 16, camera button on the Pro, you know, some upgrades to Wi-Fi and blah, blah, blah. But really, it's, we're, we're adding buttons to everything.

• 26:06Alex Cranz?

  They might change the camera, right? Like, they might change the positions of the cameras?

• 26:09Nilay Patel?

  I, yeah, the rumor is that they'll do that to make spatial video support better. But like,

• 26:16Alex Cranz?

  You don't think that's a reason?

• 26:17Nilay Patel?

  I think they just rotate the cameras every couple of years.

• 26:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  I think there's just a wheel with three camera lenses on it, and they spin it. And I go, all right, that's it this year. Like, it looks different now. I mean, there's, there's reasons to orient these cameras in all kinds of ways, but I think they strive to make obvious visual changes more often than we think. Because the dumb consumer psychology is if it looks different, you think it's different. Then you open it up and it's iOS and you're like, well, nothing here is really changed. Um, so we'll see.

• 26:46David Pierce?

  I do think there are, there are two interesting AI upgrades that uh have been rumored. One is obviously the new chip. Um, we, we saw the M4 in the iPad and that was like a whole big AI story. The rumor for this one is that it's, it's still going to be a series chips, but presumably there will be a whole big like, oh my God, look how fast it is. AI story about this one. Uh, yet again, we're in a place where it's like, uh, when was the last time you needed all of the horsepower of your iPhone? Uh, no one does ever for anything. Who knows? And then the other one.

• 27:20Alex Cranz?

  The AI for chat GPT.

• 27:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, right. The shortcuts does take all of your processing power.

• 27:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:25David Pierce?

  That's real. Uh, and then the other one is a rumor I was just reading earlier about apparently there, there's some indication that there's going to be a much improved microphone. Uh, which for me as a person who uses Siri all the time for like reminders and random nonsense. And if indeed Siri is going to be like the core of Apple intelligence, as a lot of people are expecting and big redesign coming this year. Like better microphone goes a really long way towards making a lot of that stuff really work.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:55David Pierce?

  Which I think would be very cool, but like the question then is like, is it, have you, have you made like a very slightly better microphone? Did Apple like solve something here that I, I'm, I'm going to be very.

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  They're going to claim they solve something no matter what.

• 28:07David Pierce?

  For sure.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  I'll be clear about that. Um, but again, if you think the future of input is multimodal AI, where the computer, you can just talk to a computer where it can see stuff. These are little upgrades that actually add up to an idea, like a whole idea, which is there are more ways to communicate with this computer about what you want. And it will have more ways to communicate back at you. But Apple intelligence isn't shipping it. I mean, that's actually the question with these products, right? Is you're going to announce new iPhones, you're going to announce a basically a bunch of iterative upgrades. It seemed really nice. And then the big software turn that makes them worth buying, that Apple I think is banking on driving a huge upgrade cycle, isn't going to be here. Right, we're not expecting that into potentially all the way into next September.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  Like, the rollout of iOS 18 Apple Intelligence features is just gonna take a long time, particularly with like the big ticket ones. What now? Like, what are we gonna get today? Like, we're not getting the apps can plug into Siri so you can talk to Siri and have it execute a bunch of actions across your app. Like, that's not, that's probably a year, right?

• 29:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  So what are we gonna get today? Is it summarizing notifications? Like, I don't think that's gonna happen.

• 29:17David Pierce?

  Those are already, seeing people on the beta get the summarized notifications is so funny, cuz it's so not helpful. So many of these things are like, I send somebody a 70-word-long text message and it summarizes it in 58 words. Like, what have we accomplished here? This is nothing. We're not doing, we're not doing anything.

• 29:37Alex Cranz?

  Some copy editor is very pleased with that, though. Like, 20 words, that's a nice cut.

• 29:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think with all of this, again, like, we're still very much in this place of, what is any of this for? Right? And I think the thing that has been true about Apple forever is it has done a better job of telling the what this is for story than anybody else. And even with the iPhone, it does a very good job of explaining to you why you need all of the incredible processing power on your phone that you're never gonna use. It's why they have the games on stage. It's why they did the AR stuff on there for years. Like, they, they do a very good job of being like, here is a thing we built, and here's why it's going to matter in your life. And I don't think that quite landed at WWDC. Whatever did land is not shipping yet. And so, like, this is just another crack at that same story for Apple.

• 30:27David Pierce?

  And both how it has refined that story over the last few months and whether it has figured anything out, to me, is like the big question of this event.

• 30:35Nilay Patel?

  And I'll add one more thing to it. And the amount of times Apple and other companies have shot themselves in the foot trying to tell that story.

• 30:44David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 30:45Nilay Patel?

  Because, you know, Google got in trouble with, for the Gemini ad at the Olympics, where the dad asked the AI to write a letter on behalf of a little girl to an Olympian. And everyone's like, this is garbage. Like, don't do this. Apple has had a number of ad-related controversies lately. And then, one of their demos for summaries is Apple Intelligence summarizing.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  The Steve Jobs Think Different speech.

• 31:07David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  From the ad, you know, it's like, here's the crazy ones. Uh, what? Like, don't, don't summarize that.

• 31:14David Pierce?

  No.

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  That's the art, you know, like, even though it's a commercial, like, people regard that in a very emotional way. And being like, here's what we could do now, we can make that dumber. It's not actually the message you're trying to send.

• 31:26David Pierce?

  Right.

• 31:26Nilay Patel?

  And so I think Apple is looking at probably all of this and saying, okay, this is the real shot to communicate to customers. W W C is for developers and hardcore nerds, and you're listening to the show, and that's you. That's just you.

• 31:40David Pierce?

  But we love you, to be clear.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  Right? And that's the first cut where they can be technical and they can talk about token sizes and APIs and all the stuff they talk about W C. The iPhone event is, we're going to put this thing on local news broadcasts around the country to be like, look what it can do. And I don't think they know besides, like, read my boss's email and give me the bullet points of it.

• 32:05Alex Cranz?

  A race people.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  Right? If I had a shortcut, if I set the shortcut button to just be like, no, but nice. I can, I could just motor through my inbox.

• 32:15David Pierce?

  That's really good.

• 32:16Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, that'd be great. But can they tell that story? Like, I don't know. And so I think that's going to be a real question because the features aren't shipping yet.

• 32:24David Pierce?

  Right.

• 32:25Nilay Patel?

  And so you're still kind of concocting these demos about stuff that doesn't exist yet for a phone that might not be able to do it. And that is, I think, a real puzzle.

• 32:33Alex Cranz?

  But it also seems like they may potentially plow through a little bit of this because we're seeing like a lot of other devices rumored, like more than I usually think of for an Apple event.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? Okay, so that's the phone. So I just want to wrap up on the phone. Like, the phone has a question mark in it, which is like, how are they going to talk about A I features aren't there? The rest of them are, except for the AirPods, which I think we're expecting some amount of redesign. The Apple Watch seems like another bump.

• 33:02David Pierce?

  Right?

• 33:03Alex Cranz?

  But there may be three getting bumped.

• 33:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's the one spot where it seems like if there is going to be something new and exciting, it's going to be in the watch. Like, there's been some, is there a, you know, Apple Watch Series 10, Series X, wild thing to happen? I think that's just probably not, but there's been like a little bit of smoke around. Maybe there are some surprises in the Apple Watch line coming this year because it's the anniversary.

• 33:30Alex Cranz?

  Well, the big rumor was that they were going to get blood pressure monitoring or sleep apnea detection, and both of those are, sound pretty dead in the water for this year.

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  Because they're in a giant lawsuit with the company.

• 33:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because, because, because they're in a giant lawsuit and like, blood pressure monitoring, they haven't gotten FDA clearance or anything, right? And, and they have to. You can't just be like, yeah, we can test your blood pressure. No FDA approval. That's not gonna happen. So, yeah, it sounds like they, they were trying to line a bunch of stuff up for the, the 10, the Apple Watch 10, and it just sort of.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I guess it feels like what we're gonna get is a very minor bump to the Ultra, because basic, I mean, look, the, the Apple Watch has like the best lock-in story of all time.

• 34:14David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 34:14Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  If you have an iPhone, you can only buy this product.

• 34:18Nilay Patel?

  That's it. There it is. Unless you're, you know, unless you're one of the people who wants to buy a Garmin, in which case, you buy a Garmin and use it sometimes, but then you might still have an Apple Watch. Like, weird, right? So like, their need to competitively upgrade these products is very low. And then the products are really good, which is just a pretty disastrous one-two punch of wanting to see like huge upgrades.

• 34:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, it does seem like the, we're gonna get a bigger, regular watch to be the size of the Ultra, which is both cool and sort of alarming. Like, I hate, truly hate, that we are going to normalize these gigantic screens on our wrist. Like, Neely, I can read your watch through Riverside right now. I can see what's on your watch. That can't poss, this is not good. How are we doing this?

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  And yeah, this is just what we decided. I stare down Tim Cook's watch at every event. I'm like, what's on there, buddy?

• 35:13Nilay Patel?

  Look at it. I'm at like, make the Apple Watch Ultra black and I'll buy a new one. Great. That's what I want.

• 35:20David Pierce?

  Might happen. There's been some rumors about colors.

• 35:22Nilay Patel?

  Um, but yeah, there, there's this rumor that we'll see the Apple Watch Series 10 or the Series X, which is the 10th anniversary and have like magnetic bands and be thinner and be the design jump. And I, I strongly think that in a time of sort of like declining sales and up and like upward going services revenue, that Apple's desire to do that is quite low.

• 35:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:44Nilay Patel?

  Because again, the product is like perfect lock in. Like, what are you gonna do? Right? Like Tim Cook staring you down, be like, all right, you're leaving with an iPhone? Would you like to buy Apple Care, a set of AirPods and an Apple Watch? Because you can't buy anything else.

• 35:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, I doubt it's very popular to first buy a watch and then buy an iPhone. Right? So it's not like they're trying to sell some.

• 36:06Alex Cranz?

  Who is that person?

• 36:07David Pierce?

  This is what I mean. They're not like the, the, the impetus to get people in if you're trying to make the Apple Watch great is you're like, okay, there are a bunch of people who will switch for an Apple Watch. And I don't think that exists. I think like the, the Apple Watch is not the first thing. Right? So I feel like it's either the iPad or the iPhone.

• 36:23Nilay Patel?

  There's one tiny category, and I'm only saying this because it's like the third day of elementary school here. Um, parents are buying Apple Watches for their kids who don't have phones.

• 36:31David Pierce?

  Fair. That's real.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  Tracking devices, texting devices, and then you just, you're in the ecosystem. Um, then they got you.

• 36:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's something. And that is that, that I think is like the beginning of something potentially big and interesting. Uh, but that feels very new and.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like I said, I, I think we're gonna see upgrades to the Apple Watch. I just think it's all gonna be pretty. That is my bet. There is this rumor that you'll see the big upgrade. We'll see how it goes. The AirPods seem like the bigger change.

• 36:59Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 36:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? We're expecting new AirPods, um, AirPods 4, maybe Air, maybe new AirPods Pro. And it seems like that's where you're gonna get the design change. And I think that is partially because that there's still open competition. Like you can get other Bluetooth AirPods.

• 37:15David Pierce?

  And there are in fact lots of really good ones out there.

• 37:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So you can see a little competition and obviously AirPods haven't changed in a long time.

• 37:22Alex Cranz?

  But if they change the design, what are all of those like horrible knockoffs at 7-Eleven gonna do?

• 37:29David Pierce?

  Immediately change. The good news about that industry is boy, it is it adapt.

• 37:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. The, the factory in Shenzhen across from Apple's factory in Shenzhen is on red alert.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  So AirPods 4 might have noise cancelling. They'll be more of an open ear design. They'll sit on your ear instead of like all the way in the way that the pros do.

• 37:52David Pierce?

  Which would be a big deal, right? The ANC plus the like hang on your ear instead of stick in it. Super hard to do. Chris Welch was pointing out in our Slack the other day that lots of companies have tried this and basically no one has ever done it very well. As somebody who hates the ear blocking of the AirPods Pro, like I just don't, I just don't like them. Yeah, feels bad in my ear. They make my ears like hot and pressure. I don't like it. So I use the hangy ones, but then I don't get any of the noise cancellation. So if you can get, if you can get the best of both worlds there, that's pretty awesome.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:25David Pierce?

  But super hard to do technically.

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm looking and then the AirPods 3, maybe we'll see they'll add some more sensors to complete the health story that Apple's trying to tell all of this stuff. Potentially a new case. We'll see. What I don't know is whether they're going to upgrade the AirPods Max, which they have not touched in a million years.

• 38:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we'll use Lightning.

• 38:47Alex Cranz?

  Oh, there we go. So they'll just get like a USB C upgrade?

• 38:50Nilay Patel?

  Or they can make him not weigh 5,000 pounds. That's a choice.

• 38:53Alex Cranz?

  They'll take out some of those weights, those Beats weights.

• 38:57Nilay Patel?

  I forgot the Beats used to put weights in the headphones. Um, uh, they can make the case good. There are lots of things you could do with the AirPods.

• 39:03Alex Cranz?

  I love the little purse.

• 39:07Nilay Patel?

  Here, would you like our headphones to be dirty?

• 39:10Alex Cranz?

  They sure will.

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  We've, we've forgotten to put them in a case in this case. We'll see. I mean, there's a spatial audio story to be told here. But it seems like of all the things that we expect to change, the AirPods lineup is the most ripe for actual change.

• 39:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:25Nilay Patel?

  Because it's a thing that you can, well, one, people lose them. And then when you lose them, you might buy new headphones. And when you buy new headphones, you actually have choices in the market.

• 39:35David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and again, if Apple is trying to tell this like big multimodal AI story, headphones actually end up being really important. And my big hope for AirPods Max has been that like, that could be a place where Apple can start to do more like local AI processing inside of your headphones. Like, give me the the AirPods Max that can do some of that stuff just inside of the headphones. Like, I want an AirPods Max that has all the software of an Apple Watch in my headphones. That is that a bad idea? Probably. But that's what I want. I want to just be able to run with headphones and nothing else. And they could do that in the Max.

• 40:12Alex Cranz?

  Would you tap on the little ear cup and send a heartbeat to your wife?

• 40:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, I just send my heartbeat to Neelai like three or four times a day.

• 40:20Nilay Patel?

  It's true. It's really weird.

• 40:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:21Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever gotten a weird blacked out video of just thumps? And you're like, oh, David loves me.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  The other rumor is, I sincerely doubt this will happen, but an M4 Mac Mini is on the list of things.

• 40:35Alex Cranz?

  Like, that's October.

• 40:37Nilay Patel?

  That's October. I think I think we'll see new Macs in October. That's been the schedule, right?

• 40:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Alex Cranz?

  I'll be shocked. But you know, if they don't do anything with the phone, it would make sense to do the M4.

• 40:47David Pierce?

  There's just been a lot of smoke about the Mac Mini, which is weird. So I think, like, we're obviously due for a refresh of MacBooks, right? The M4 is out there. It's time for all of this from like the studio on down. But the Mini is the only one that anyone is talking about right now, which is maybe just like a function of the rumor mill and the way that these things work. And an October event is not that far away. So it could very well be. But this one is particularly just sort of out in the ether.

• 41:17Alex Cranz?

  The Mini is also the one that's getting a major case redesign, right? Like, the other ones aren't getting big case redesigns.

• 41:22Nilay Patel?

  And that is that if you believe it's going to get a big case redesign, it is definitely happening in October.

• 41:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:28Nilay Patel?

  Apple is very good at being like, look at this thing.

• 41:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Nilay Patel?

  One thing at a time.

• 41:33Alex Cranz?

  I think it's really likely that we're just seeing a lot of smoke right now because there's a lot of leaks because it's a whole new case, but it's going to happen in October or not.

• 41:41Nilay Patel?

  That's my bet is that Apple wants all of your attention to be on the iPhone, which makes all the money and services component of the iPhone, which makes all the money. And that is what you're going to pay attention to. And then in October, we can talk about whether or not they're going to make an M4 Mac mini or a 27 in Chi Mac or whatever. I'm just saying that because I desperately want a new 27 in Chi Mac. Just trying to speak it into the world.

• 42:01David Pierce?

  That's how I feel about the M4 Mac mini. Like, give it to me now, please.

• 42:06David Pierce?

  The rumor is that it's going to be like closer to the sides of an Apple TV and it's just going to have a bunch of USB-C ports. Like, yes, that's, yes.

• 42:13Alex Cranz?

  That's it. That's all you have to do.

• 42:14David Pierce?

  Inject that into my veins right now.

• 42:16Alex Cranz?

  Make it under $1,000, please.

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I use all the ports in this Mac mini.

• 42:22David Pierce?

  Oh, I use all the ports and I have a dongle in my Mac mini.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have a Thunderbolt 4 dock plugged into a Mac mini because I use all the ports in the Mac mini.

• 42:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll get, I'm telling you, that's October. We'll talk about this again another time.

• 42:32David Pierce?

  I think you're right.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  That is it. I mean, that's the list of things. David, you have some prompts here to which I will answer both with the same answer.

• 42:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is, well, so we, we play a version of this game every year, which is basically, uh, just before we get off the Apple stuff, we're, we're going to give ourselves something to be held to. So we, we each had to come up with a prediction that you think genuinely will happen, Neelai. You have to think it's going to happen.

• 42:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 42:58David Pierce?

  Uh, that we haven't yet talked about. And then, uh, one thing that you're desperately hoping for, but have no evidence is real. Uh, I'll go first and then, and then just to give you guys time to, to think about this. Um, my prediction that I think will happen that we haven't talked about is I think we're going to get a Ted Lasso season four trailer.

• 43:14Alex Cranz?

  God damn it, that was mine.

• 43:16David Pierce?

  I don't know what it's going to be. It might just be Jason Sudeikis just like saying four words because they haven't shot anything.

• 43:21Nilay Patel?

  This is how we do trailers now, right? It's like, it'll be the back of his head.

• 43:25David Pierce?

  I mean, do you remember the Apple event where like they all just stood on stage and said, we're making a TV show? I made fun of that for a year and then they made all of those shows. So.

• 43:32Alex Cranz?

  The rumor is, he's not going to be in it very much. He's, he, he apparently like.

• 43:37David Pierce?

  What's he doing now?

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  Do you think it's going to be called like Dead Lasso?

• 43:40Alex Cranz?

  What? The rumor is, it's probably, it's going to be about a woman's football team.

• 43:46Nilay Patel?

  It's just Ted Lasso in the Severance Universe.

• 43:51Alex Cranz?

  Dead. Uh, but yeah, I've just, I'm just very excited about Ted Lasso.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Alex Cranz?

  But he's not gonna be there.

• 44:00Nilay Patel?

  And, and like any good company, they're like, let's just go back to the well.

• 44:03Alex Cranz?

  They just signed all those people in the last few weeks. It feels like this is where they're gonna.

• 44:07David Pierce?

  Apple is just speedrunning the TV industry, right? Like they've pissed off George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Congratulations. Now they're bringing back the hits. Like this is just what you do. Great job then. Uh, and then the thing I'm desperately hoping for, but have no evidence is real. Uh, is I want a cellular connected set of AirPods. Uh, I, I want, I want a thing. I will switch to Apple Music. You like, as God is my witness, I will switch to Apple Music. If you just let me stream directly to my headphones. That's all I want. Is that a bad idea? Yes, but I want it anyway. I don't care.

• 44:38Alex Cranz?

  Would you, would you like text from it?

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  Directly to the brain.

• 44:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:43David Pierce?

  Uh, all right, Neela, you go. What do you got?

• 44:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, my prediction, uh, one thing that I'm hoping that will happen that we haven't talked about.

• 44:50David Pierce?

  No one thing you think will happen that we haven't talked about.

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I have.

• 44:54Alex Cranz?

  It has to be real.

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 44:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, you have to think it's gonna happen.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Apple TV home screen upgrade.

• 45:04Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 45:04David Pierce?

  Oh, okay.

• 45:06Alex Cranz?

  That's a good.

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're.

• 45:08David Pierce?

  They are.

• 45:08Nilay Patel?

  It won't do. They would have announced it at W W C, but they're way overdue on just scooting that stuff around.

• 45:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  Can I just say, by the way, I bought an Apple TV because it was on sale from Verizon for $90 for some reason. Plugged it into my crappy TCL Roku TV, set it so that it just goes straight to that input when I turn on the TV. And now suddenly my TV viewing experience is like 75% better.

• 45:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:34David Pierce?

  Uh, boy, is Roku bad now. Uh, and boy, did the Apple TV make it better.

• 45:38Nilay Patel?

  I don't think we've talked about this very much in the show, but our own Will Joel, our senior creative director, Will Joel, um, has a Roku TV and the thing happened to him where it just started motion smoothing. This also happened to me at my sister's house over the 4th of July where her Roku TVs just turned on motion smoothing. So he wrote about it and he wrote, the people in the forums are all mad about this motion smoothing just being turned on in Roku TVs. We have not yet written the follow-up, but they got back to him somewhat irritatedly. And they're like, we have not turned on motion smoothing. We've turned on. Like per frame interpolation, which is motion.

• 46:12David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 46:13Alex Cranz?

  It's the same thing.

• 46:13David Pierce?

  Same thing.

• 46:14Nilay Patel?

  It's the same. They're like, we're not motion smoothing. We're going into the spaces between frames and making up additional frames. And it's like, that's motion. So he's got to write it up. But Roku has secretly turned on motion smoothing on millions of TVs with no ways to turn off. And now they're denying they even did it. Throw them out. Get all that.

• 46:32Alex Cranz?

  Yep. They're too busy counting that ad money they get. They don't, they don't care.

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  Uh, all right. That's my prediction. We haven't talked about, but I, the, on the closest that I think is real. Can I say the one thing that will definitely happen?

• 46:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Nilay Patel?

  Apple will definitely not announce a single other car maker has taken them up on next generation.

• 46:50David Pierce?

  Okay. I like this. Is this the one that you're hoping for, but have no evidence is real? Someone please, dear God, do car play.

• 46:59Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I will say the decoder inbox right now is full of car makers who are like, let us justify why we won't, we're not doing this anymore.

• 47:05David Pierce?

  Which, who would you like it to be if you could, if you could be CEO for a day and make somebody adopt the new car play for either good or chaos reasons? Which car maker was you want it to be?

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  It would be Honda or Toyota, in my opinion, um, who have some of the ugliest in car interface designs. Of all the mainstream cars, it's like, just tell your designers that lowercase letters exist.

• 47:28Alex Cranz?

  They refuse.

• 47:29Nilay Patel?

  Like why, we're, we're just doing all cap software, everybody, all the time, like just lowercase. That's the level we're working at with Honda and Toyota.

• 47:39David Pierce?

  I like it. All right, friends, what do you got?

• 47:41Alex Cranz?

  All right. So my prediction that I think will happen was also Ted Lasso. So.

• 47:45David Pierce?

  Oh, okay. Well, now you have to come up with a new one.

• 47:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I wrote it. I wrote it down. I want to be very clear. I didn't make it up.

• 47:52David Pierce?

  Do you think Jason Sudeikis will be there? That's the.

• 47:54Alex Cranz?

  No, I don't think he will be. I think if they have anyone, it'll be Hannah Wattingham because like she has never turned down a, um, a press tour. That's she, if somebody's like, hey, you want to show up? She's like, I'm here for you.

• 48:04David Pierce?

  Maybe she'll be the musical act at the end.

• 48:07Nilay Patel?

  We should get Hannah Wat, can we get her to come up with her chest?

• 48:10Alex Cranz?

  She, yeah, she, I bet she would.

• 48:12David Pierce?

  She seems like good people. Yeah.

• 48:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, she seems fun.

• 48:14David Pierce?

  We'll make it happen. Liam, let's get that done.

• 48:16Alex Cranz?

  Chop, chop.

• 48:18David Pierce?

  All right. And one thing you're hoping for, but have no evidence is real.

• 48:21Alex Cranz?

  Uh, Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, but Apple.

• 48:25David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 48:26Alex Cranz?

  Just because I really like the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, but the Meta AI sucks. I want to talk to Siri. She's also suck, or excuse me, Siri also sucks and is not gendered.

• 48:40Alex Cranz?

  But it sucks in a more familiar way.

• 48:43David Pierce?

  Well, it sucks in a way that actually accesses other apps on my phone.

• 48:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, like I.

• 48:47David Pierce?

  Whereas Meta sucks like in its, on it all by itself. It just sucks over here.

• 48:51Alex Cranz?

  Meta's like, I can play your Spotify. That's it.

• 48:56Alex Cranz?

  Stop.

• 48:57Nilay Patel?

  I didn't do my, uh, no evidence for, which is the only thing I, every, I predict this at every Apple event I have for a decade. Just make a TV.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  Just make a TV. It's your, what are you doing, guys? You, you love services businesses. Do you know what every TV maker is doing right now? They're just doing services. They're giving them away for free. You could charge real money, Tim. You'd be like, I don't know, this TV costs $3,000 and people would buy it and still pay for your weird new cable bundle that you're making, but not saying that you're making.

• 49:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but they gotta spend all their money on the weird cable bundle. They can't afford the TVs.

• 49:31David Pierce?

  Apple releases an iPad at studio display size. Is that a television?

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  What is a TV?

• 49:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, every TV is just an Android tablet.

• 49:44Alex Cranz?

  Okay, but like, I feel like if the tablet is larger than the child holding it, it's, it goes into TV territory.

• 49:51Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty dependent on the size of the child.

• 49:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but like.

• 49:54Nilay Patel?

  So you're saying as my child gets older, it, at some point it stops seeing a TV?

• 50:00David Pierce?

  It's the tablet diagonal.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  Like size of child versus size of tablet. And age is like the Z axis.

• 50:10David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 50:11Nilay Patel?

  In four dimensional space, this is a TV is what you're trying to say.

• 50:14Alex Cranz?

  Exactly.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, make a TV. It is, it is almost comical that the one category that they could thoroughly dominate, they are just like, eh, healthcare.

• 50:27David Pierce?

  Well, and what's funny is for all the reasons it actually never made sense, given the company that Apple is to make a TV, it actually now kind of does.

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  Right. You're going to sell a giant computer that hangs on the wall and that people pay money every month to use.

• 50:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Nilay Patel?

  Just, just do the thing. Please, I beg of you.

• 50:48David Pierce?

  Gene Munster needs this.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  Panasonic is making TVs again.

• 50:54Alex Cranz?

  Somebody who just, who just owns the brand name is making those TVs.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, it's like, whatever, we'll do it. Do you remember us? I had a Panasonic, oh, it was great. Okay. Uh, we should take a break. We'll be back. We got an incredible catch of lighting around coming up. Stay tuned.

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• 52:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. We're already over. We've had a lot of people asking lately how long the show is supposed to be, and the answer is we're never gonna tell you.

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  That's the, it's the joke.

• 52:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:42Nilay Patel?

  You will notice the show is almost very consistently the same length. But we're always over our minds.

• 52:47David Pierce?

  We are always over.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  It's never as long as it's supposed to be. The other thing that is true is I make the show longer with this fan thing about how long the show is gonna be.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  When we make it shorter, everyone yells at us. But then when we ask people for feedback on the show, they tell us to make it shorter. So we're just trapped in like a paradox loop of feedback. Where the show can only ever be this long, but it's never long enough, and it's also too long.

• 53:10David Pierce?

  Yep. The other thing people need to understand is you're just doing this all the time. Like, Nilay is just sitting in front of a microphone, talking about things all the time. We just occasionally record it. And then, and then ship it. So it can be as long as we want, but it's also just always.

• 53:23Nilay Patel?

  Imagine what our meetings are like. Let's drop in on Nilay, verge casting a no one.

• 53:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, it's EFA, which is a German word for gadget show.

• 53:36Nilay Patel?

  Sure. We got a team there. There's a million gadgets being announced. I think we should do this as a lightning round. We should just go through them all. Except the first one, there's no chance we're gonna get through this in lightning round fashion. Because it is the Remarkable Paper Pro, which Alex's headline is, is as outrageous as it is luxurious. Alex, what is going on here?

• 53:56Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so they took the Gallery e Ink display.

• 54:01Nilay Patel?

  Everyone remembers.

• 54:02Alex Cranz?

  Everybody knows this. Everybody knows Gallery.

• 54:05Nilay Patel?

  People on the street all day talking about the Gallery.

• 54:08David Pierce?

  My mom called earlier and was like, oh, the Gallery. What's up with Gallery?

• 54:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like when I go to the grocery store, people are like, do you think Gallery is coming this year?

• 54:16Alex Cranz?

  And I can say, yes, it finally came. So, so there's two types, there's two ways to do color, color on e Ink. One is you push the black and white ink pixels in the e Ink against a color filter. That's how Kaleido works. That's how like anything from Books or Kobo, and probably if Amazon ever does it, that's what they'll use as Kaleido. Because it works really, really fast. Then there's Gallery, which looks way, way better. The color is way, way cooler. Because they get rid of the filter and all the, the pixels being moved are actual color pixels of cyan, yellow, and magenta. And that's what they did here. And usually you don't want to do that because it's slow and sucks. But it's fast.

• 54:57David Pierce?

  How'd they make it fast?

• 54:58Alex Cranz?

  They made it fast. When I asked, they were like, we can't tell you. Trade secret.

• 55:02David Pierce?

  That's like the magic sauce here is they figured out how to refresh it quickly.

• 55:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:07David Pierce?

  Their display has cocaine in it.

• 55:09Alex Cranz?

  They call it the canvas tech stack. Um, and, and I don't know, I'm not entirely, I have some theories of what they've done. I've been playing with it a lot. I'm going to keep playing with it, but it just, it works. But there's like a really obnoxious flashing problem with anything that you write in color. Anytime you write in color, it like has to refresh the entire display as soon as you stop writing. That sucks.

• 55:32David Pierce?

  Don't love that. Yeah.

• 55:33Alex Cranz?

  But then for just regular writing, it works perfectly.

• 55:36David Pierce?

  But it looks great. I mean, like you, you've just been like holding it up into the camera as we've been talking and like the screen looks awesome.

• 55:42Alex Cranz?

  Let me, I'm going to pull up another photo because I just keep doing that. Poor Liam was at the office the other day and I was like, Liam, look. And he's like, please just stop showing me color pictures from like, like that just looks like real nice art.

• 55:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's nice.

• 55:57Alex Cranz?

  It's just real pretty. Um, yeah, it's one of those, don't buy it. Please, please don't buy this. This is, this is not for normal people, but this is such like the fact that they pulled it off is really cool.

• 56:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. So to your don't buy it point. Like it's like, I'm going to buy this. I do, I, I want it more than I am proud of. So the thing Remarkable has done really well is like relentlessly focus on doing a very small thing really, really well, right? Like or the Remarkable tablet, all the way back to the first one is like a thoroughly mediocre reading experience and just like deeply lovely to write on. Uh, the, the keyboard case I have only used a little, you've used it a lot more, uh, is wonderful by all accounts. So it's like, as a, as a note taking machine, this thing is really expensive. It's what $579?

• 56:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it starts at $579 without the case, like the typing case is like $229.

• 56:52David Pierce?

  Yeah. So you're looking at like a $900.

• 56:54Alex Cranz?

  Don't, don't do that, but also do it.

• 56:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, but that's the thing. And I'm like, it, I just, I. Even if you don't buy it, I appreciate that remarkable is just like, we are going to make digital handwriting note taking awesome and have like done it like kudos to you remarkable. You did the damn thing. Great job. I have a remarkable two here and I love it. I never write by hand because my handwriting is awful and I find myself using this thing just because it's really nice to write on.

• 57:20Alex Cranz?

  Well, and it's actually pretty, I also have awful handwriting because as a child I wanted to be a doctor and I thought you had to have bad handwriting, but it actually does a really good job of, of, of taking that and putting it into text if you need to do it. Like it does, it sucks, it sucks a little bit, but not like awful. And it's just like, it does the one thing really, really, really well. And it does, it executes it so wonderfully and takes this technology that I never thought I would see being used this way and doing it remarkably very well.

• 57:51David Pierce?

  Very good. We're gonna move on now.

• 57:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It's great. I, I did, I did the dad joke. So.

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  That's good. Well, you're gonna review it, I assume.

• 57:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah. I did like kind of a mini review of it. I've only spent about six, six or seven days with it at this point. I want to spend more time with it, but it's, it's remarkable tablet. If you've used another one, it'll be the exact same thing. Only now it's color.

• 58:11Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Honor announced a super thin foldable IFA. It's very cool. And it, what we're seeing, and I'll, I'll put it right next to Huawei announced a tri-fold phone.

• 58:22David Pierce?

  And I forgot that the thing IFA does, like when IFA is at its best, IFA is the time where they're like, oh, you silly Americans, you don't get to have the good gadgets.

• 58:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:30David Pierce?

  And it always makes me sad.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like you have lockdown cell networks that prevent you from having the cool phones. You know, I, I think I said earlier that the Pixel nine fold is great. It's like the end of that road. I think the same with the newest Samsung folds, like they, they're done. They, we figured out how to do that thing. They look as good as they're gonna look. The hardware is great. The form factors are getting there. And now they're like, what if you folded it twice?

• 58:54Nilay Patel?

  Like, what if you made them thinner? Like, we're just adding these refinements now to the the form factor. I'm not sure that the form factors were the revolution in the phone industry that everyone was hoping they would be. But I think the tri-fold is really interesting, right? Like, what if you can get to a landscape tablet in this form factor is like, kind of wild? Especially if you can make it thinner, you can fold it yet one more time.

• 59:15Alex Cranz?

  They didn't actually show it, right? Like, they showed glimpses of it while Andy Lau is just thinking about how much he loves movies.

• 59:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think the the official reveal of it is, I think, the day after the iPhone event. So we'll, we'll have that to talk about next week also. But yeah, there's, there's a video that we'll, we'll put it in the show notes. You should look at it. It's just, you get a brief look at it closed and then a brief look at it open. And it's like, very thin and very cool and very futuristic. I have lots of questions.

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 59:44David Pierce?

  What about creases? What if instead of one crease, you had two creases? Wouldn't that be so fun? Probably not.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  The Vixen line definitely still has a crease. TCL, we love an E paper phone, apparently.

• 59:55Alex Cranz?

  It's not E Ink.

• 59:56Nilay Patel?

  Here in the Bookspalma fan club.

• 59:59David Pierce?

  Welcome.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  All right, Trans, this is just your segment.

• 1:00:02Alex Cranz?

  I know, I'm so happy.

• 1:00:03Nilay Patel?

  What kind of wacky inefficient display technology do we have here?

• 1:00:06Alex Cranz?

  They're, they're not the only ones doing this. Like, a whole bunch of people at EFA this year are like, we're doing color E Ink. And you're like, are you? And they're like, we're doing electronic paper. And you're like, okay, is that just an LCD? And you took the light out? And they're like, yes, that's, that's, that's what it is. Um, yeah, with Next Paper, Next Paper always loves to call it that. All they're doing is putting a matte finish on the display. That's about it. In this case, there's a button, and the button will turn everything monochrome and make it look more like a Bookspalma.

• 1:00:36David Pierce?

  Wait, but Alex, you, you forgot the best part. What is, what is the button? What is the mode the button engages?

• 1:00:41Alex Cranz?

  It's like maximum E Ink, right?

• 1:00:43David Pierce?

  It's maximum ink mode.

• 1:00:45Nilay Patel?

  Max ink mode.

• 1:00:46David Pierce?

  Max ink mode.

• 1:00:49David Pierce?

  Don't give me regular amounts of ink. Give me max ink.

• 1:00:52Alex Cranz?

  But then there's no ink at all. It's fine. I'm fine with it. Um, but, but yeah, TCL has been doing this next paper thing for five years now and it's, it's, it's not fancy.

• 1:01:05Nilay Patel?

  This is their moment. We, the, the bux palm, I finally kicked the door down and now the next cycle is everyone's going to have a max ink mode phone.

• 1:01:14Alex Cranz?

  But you are, you are seeing like, like I heard it when I spoke with the folks at Remarkable, we're seeing it in a lot of the announcements out of EFA, this idea of, of drawing our attention away from the screen and, and doing, doing a dumber screen, a, a simpler screen is, is really starting to take off.

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, and it's funny because the iPhone is like, what if your screen was alive?

• 1:01:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  It's trying to bang you. And then everyone else is like, what if it looked more like paper? And I'm not sure how that, those are two very different directions.

• 1:01:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I don't think they're ever gonna meet up. I don't, I think what's gonna happen is a bunch of old people are gonna get the ink stuff and a bunch of young people are gonna get the phones that bang you. Um, I got real ages there. I don't know where I am on that spectrum yet.

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  I would say my instinct is that recent history is that it's actually the old have weird relationships with technology. But we'll see how that goes.

• 1:02:03Alex Cranz?

  This is true.

• 1:02:04Nilay Patel?

  All right. One last gadget in this section, then we should talk about the wave of Lunar Lake laptops that just hit. Uh, this is my favorite one of all of EFA. It is DJI has a new selfie drone. It's a hundred ninety dollars. It's called the Neo. You can launch it from the palm of your hand, four K thirty. It can do pre-programmed stuff. Thomas Sercar has a video of it hitting a tree and staying alive and completing its little pre-programmed, do a circle around me, fly path. All that's whatever. Um, great. I mean, I'm, I'm a sucker for these. I will probably buy one. But it has voice controls and the voice, the act, the, the wake word for the voice controls is, hey, fly.

• 1:02:48Alex Cranz?

  So my brother said to a hamster one time before he threw it.

• 1:02:51Nilay Patel?

  I just love the idea, and it's really small. So like, there's a photo of Thomas putting it in his pocket. And the idea that you're gonna pull out a drone from your pocket, hold it out and be like, "Hey, fly!" And it's gonna take off and like do a 360 around you. This is all I've ever wanted from technology. I don't know if it's gonna work. You know, we gotta see it. But I love that that's the wakeboard they chose.

• 1:03:10David Pierce?

  It's very good. And I appreciate, like, Thomas wrote it as if it is, it's two separate sentences. It's like you're, you're, you point at it and you go, "Hey, fly!" Like, you're just, you are demanding that it fly. And I love that.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  Very confusing. Of course, it's DJI, so it's a drone itself is 199, but then you gotta buy the battery thing and the handheld controller, and you're gonna end up spending a lot of money. And this happens to me every two years on the dot. And then I use the thing twice and put it away, but that's life.

• 1:03:42David Pierce?

  It's so funny to me that this thing and the new GoPro launched in the same week because I have the exact same opinion about both of them, which is that no one cares. There's this like, small group of people, they have already hit whatever product market fit they are ever going to find. And we had this idea that action cameras were gonna be a mainstream thing. And then we had this idea that drones are gonna be a mainstream thing. And they just aren't. And that's okay. And I think this one will be fun because it's $200, and it seems to be very easy and very resilient. So like, if, if there's ever going to be a new group of people who buys these,

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I just wanna, I just wanna, I wanna push back just ever so gently in this, because I, I broadly agree with you. I watch a lot of car videos on YouTube, and the presence of action cameras and drones that you can destroy has made car videos on YouTube infinitely better. So I would just like to say, I think they should keep going.

• 1:04:29David Pierce?

  Oh, I think they should keep going also. But I think this idea that like, I mean, this, this thing that DJI just shipped is, is the Snap Pixie. Like, it just is that, but it works with not Snapchat, and thus will be more successful. But, like, there's this idea that, oh, if we just make a little flying selfie camera, easy to use, everybody will want it. Just not true.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Especially, just like, imagine, I don't know, Lollapalooza with 15,000 people at the chapel run show being like, "Hey, fly!"

• 1:05:00Alex Cranz?

  At once. You just get a as all those little inches take off.

• 1:05:07David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:05:08Nilay Patel?

  I hope it does. And I hope so. I hope they pay some artists to write a song called Hey Fly with for the drum. It's my dream. All right. Lunar Lake. So just to color in Lunar Lake a little bit, this is Intel's newest laptop chip. They need to compete with Windows going on ARM and the new Qualcomm chips, the AI PC that Qualcomm is doing. There's a lot of color about Intel, which is having its struggles lately. The most important thing to know is that I think Lunar Lake is being made by TSMC. Like Intel isn't making their own chip, which is a big deal. Like just a huge monumental deal, but like here's the next wave of these laptops. They have big promises about battery life and performance, obviously, and performance per watt.

• 1:05:48Nilay Patel?

  But the reason is because someone else is making chips on the on the most advanced process node. So just a weird. These are like historical computers because they're the ones that might signal like the end of Intel as we know it.

• 1:06:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Nilay Patel?

  Weird. And then I just need to point out the Lenovo Auto Twist AI PC is motorized two in one.

• 1:06:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, wait, I still I'm looking at a picture of this thing and I still don't understand how it works.

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  I think Lenovo was like, well, we've already put one gimmick in here with AI. What about a second gimmick?

• 1:06:21Alex Cranz?

  Lenovo just likes to see what they can do. Lenovo loves a gimmick sometimes, especially for a big show.

• 1:06:27David Pierce?

  Oh, wait. So this is basically like Apple's center stage thing where the camera will follow you, but it's for the whole screen.

• 1:06:34Nilay Patel?

  The whole screen just like spins around on the base, looking at you with a with the power of AI.

• 1:06:39David Pierce?

  Oh, man. Okay, now what needs to happen is Razer needs to make a circular treadmill desk that you just walk around all day while your screen slowly follows you in circles. And then everyone.

• 1:06:53Alex Cranz?

  If the treadmill also charges the screen, now we're talking.

• 1:06:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, hell yeah.

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  So our our folks spent time with it, and I just want to read the sentence. The concept unit responded to voice commands within a second or two, but the motors are slow, taking about 10 seconds to transform.

• 1:07:08Alex Cranz?

  If you watch the the video, it's just like, it's so slow. You're like, sure. Thanks Lenovo.

• 1:07:15Nilay Patel?

  And then Acer had a couple as well, right? Alex, what's going on?

• 1:07:18Alex Cranz?

  They have one that's called Project Dual Play. And Acer I love because I always forget that they're like, they make okay laptops. They make really wild gaming laptops. And this one has just got like a controller in it.

• 1:07:31Nilay Patel?

  No, sure.

• 1:07:33David Pierce?

  It's not even, Alex, you're not even doing it justice. Imagine if the trackpad underneath your keyboard on your laptop just popped out and became a game controller.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:07:44David Pierce?

  That rules, dude.

• 1:07:47David Pierce?

  No notes on that idea. I love it so much. Where do the joysticks go? What do you do with the buttons when it's docked? I have a lot of questions.

• 1:07:53Nilay Patel?

  There are no pictures of this thing with the controller docked as the mouse.

• 1:07:57David Pierce?

  I don't understand it at all.

• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  If you need to use a mouse while gaming?

• 1:08:03Alex Cranz?

  You don't. You just keep going.

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  I guess the middle of the controller is still a trackpad.

• 1:08:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, but again, amazing. I love it.

• 1:08:13Alex Cranz?

  It's my favorite thing that's happened.

• 1:08:15Nilay Patel?

  A button at the top of the keyboard releases the controller and causes two 5 watt speakers to pop out from the sides of the laptop. Oh, I thought those were like PC card slots.

• 1:08:25David Pierce?

  They're little, they look like little handles that you would grab.

• 1:08:28Nilay Patel?

  This is great.

• 1:08:28Alex Cranz?

  But this thing has to be so thick.

• 1:08:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't, that's not the point.

• 1:08:33Alex Cranz?

  I know.

• 1:08:34Nilay Patel?

  The point is that when you take out the game controller built into the keyboard deck, two little speakers pop out and RGB lights light up.

• 1:08:41Alex Cranz?

  I hope they go psh when they do it. I want to see the person playing this at Starbucks.

• 1:08:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:47Alex Cranz?

  Leaving their whole tower behind, they're ringing this thing, they're playing Fortnite with their friend.

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  Okay, and then here, I just want to end with talking about Intel and Qualcomm one more time. Acer announced a bunch of 14 inch laptops. Some have Lunar Lake, some have the new Snapdragon X, some have the AMD Ryzen AI 300, which is quite a name. It claims all of them have 24 hours of battery life.

• 1:09:08Alex Cranz?

  That's not surprising.

• 1:09:11Nilay Patel?

  Do you believe this?

• 1:09:13David Pierce?

  No. Big battery life has been like one of the ongoing claims at IFA. Like Dell has said its battery life is getting better with all these things. Like if this is true, it's awesome, right? Like if if we're going to get to the point where all of these things do these like table stakes things very well. But then in Intel, Qualcomm and AMD get to compete and sort of do the different things that each of them does well. That's amazing. I have absolutely zero reason to believe that that is actually the case.

• 1:09:41Nilay Patel?

  I also want to point out that these claims are fundamentally unmeasurable. And so for the Intel Swift AI Laptop, it's the quote is 29 hours of video playback, 23 hours of web browsing. The AMD is 19 hours of web browsing, 27 hours of video playback. And the Qualcomm one is 19 and a half hours of web browsing and 28 hours of video playback. I'm just pointing out, this requires someone to watch videos for over a full day. On three different computers and or browse the web for nearly a full day. And I don't, I'm very motivated to test these claims.

• 1:10:13Alex Cranz?

  Well, also, I think.

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if I can do it without breaking the labor law of the United States.

• 1:10:18Alex Cranz?

  I suspect.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  Some kind of Clockwork Orange situation.

• 1:10:20Alex Cranz?

  No, you use a GoPro. I used to have to do these tests and we would just point a GoPro at it. And then the next morning come in and like, be like, okay, let's see if it recorded it. Um, and sometimes it didn't. You're like, okay, I guess I test it again. This will be fun. Let's charge fast.

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  For GoPros, David.

• 1:10:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  He screamed, hey, fly.

• 1:10:40Alex Cranz?

  They just stares at a computer.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  Doing a video playback. I don't even know 24 hours of video playback is a useful stat for anyone in the world.

• 1:10:48Alex Cranz?

  I think it was once, and I think there was a lot of reviewing reviewers who were using video playback as like the primary way to do battery testing. It for a very long time. And so like, but also 24 hours isn't a lot nowadays. Like, given the size of these batteries, yeah, these things should be able to like. Do this. It should be relatively easy for them to do this if they put a big enough battery in the laptop.

• 1:11:12Nilay Patel?

  No, I, I, I, I certainly understand why in the beginning when video playback was like particularly

• 1:11:19Alex Cranz?

  chip bound. Yeah.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  It was hard to do. So it was like a very heavy task. All video playback now on these, on these computers is being routed to an ultra efficient, specialized part of a chip that is doing it for almost no power.

• 1:11:30David Pierce?

  Yep. Well, the only reason they're useful is because they're apples to apples, right? Like thi- this is a thing we've dealt with for forever. For like, as long as The Verge has existed, how do we benchmark battery life in a way that is both real and actually like objective apples to apples? It's impossible. You can't do it. There's just no way. So you have to do the thing where like I ran this test that doesn't mean anything, but is at least one to one. And then I just use it like a person and try to report battery life.

• 1:11:58Nilay Patel?

  This is, if you have ever angrily commented in one of our laptop reviews about why we continue to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it is exactly for this reason.

• 1:12:07David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  It's just, we, we just picked a game and that's the game.

• 1:12:10Alex Cranz?

  It works on everything.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  Monica picked. Quite honestly, Monica shouldn't pick that game. And now we're going to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider a couple of times a year for the rest of our lives.

• 1:12:18Alex Cranz?

  It had some challenging like graphic stuff. There was like the dress locks, the dress, the hair. Uh, geometry.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  I, I, I buy it all. I'm just saying like, these numbers, what they're meant to say is we are not competitive with Apple. But I think it is astonishing that it Acer is basically saying, it doesn't matter which chip you use. Within a few percent, we're getting the same battery life from not only two different Intel like x86 chips, but also the ARM chip. And the ARM chip is worse on the web browsing test. Weird.

• 1:12:55Alex Cranz?

  You see, I just don't think it is.

• 1:12:57Nilay Patel?

  It's actually worse than Intel on both tests. It's, it's an hour worse than the video playback test as well, which is not what you would expect.

• 1:13:03Alex Cranz?

  I don't think that is weird because I think all of these, they, they've all been kind of coming to the same conclusions on how to design these chips. They've all been designing the chips very similarly the last few years. They're putting these all in very similar devices. Like, it kind of makes sense that some would be a little better, some would be a little worse. Maybe somebody like just got hit with too many ads. On the AMD one in the Qualcomm one versus the Intel one for web browsing? And that's why the battery life is higher for Intel. But like, it's not super surprising. I think it is cool. I do think it's cool that they're claiming 24 hours because like, a couple of years ago, they'd be like, we got six.

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Alex Cranz?

  And that's, that's cool. Like four times more battery life in, in four or five years? That's awesome. But hard to test.

• 1:13:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, I think these laptops are a real make or break moment for Intel. But if they've actually managed to compete with ARM, compete with Snapdragon, that's a big deal, but it means that they are going to be dependent on TSMC. If they haven't managed, I don't know what happens next.

• 1:14:08Alex Cranz?

  Well, they're trying to not be dependent on TSMC, right? Like they, they said, we have to do this because we just aren't there yet, but we're going to go build all these new fabs and, and we're going to get there. So this is supposed to be like their, their placeholder.

• 1:14:22Nilay Patel?

  Right. Can Intel build the fabs and hit the process nodes?

• 1:14:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  Dicey. Well, we'll see. But I, so these are important laptops are going to have lots of reviews where Tom is going to write lots of notepad columns about what's going on with Windows and Intel because it, the industry is going to turn around these laptops and I'll put it away. All right, we gotta take a break. We're going to come back with a true lightning round, unsponsored. We'll be right back.

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• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  We're back with a lightning round. I'm going to start with the first one, which I think is very funny. As you know, we track connectivity here very closely at the first shot con. Verizon once decided that FiOS was not its future, sold off a bunch of FiOS assets and customers and bet everything on oil technology. We like to call five G, which you will recall was supposed to enable everything from robot surgery, which never happened to self-driving cars, which only happened in two cities with no five G involved. You just name it. You just name it. Remember, remember five G? By the way, the, the camera button on the iPhone 16 Pro is supposed to be where the millimeter wave antennas right now.

• 1:16:43David Pierce?

  Perfect.

• 1:16:44Nilay Patel?

  I don't know where the millimeter wave is going to go or if it's even going to still be there, but do you remember all this?

• 1:16:48Alex Cranz?

  Sure do.

• 1:16:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Turns out five G accomplished nothing. And now Verizon is going to spend $20 billion to buy Frontier, which it sold a bunch of FiOS assets to. Hans Vestberg, the CEO of Verizon says, "The acquisition of Frontier is a strategic fit. It will build on Verizon's two decades of leadership at the forefront of fiber, and it's an opportunity to become competitive in more markets of the United States." The two decades of leadership were building the network. It sold the Frontier and is now buying again.

• 1:17:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:17David Pierce?

  So Verizon was like, what if really fast wired internet was not important? And then realized a decade later that very fast wired internet is actually like pretty important.

• 1:17:31Nilay Patel?

  Indeed, they're an investor in a parent company, Vox Media. I am often accused of being hopelessly biased in favor of wired connections.

• 1:17:40Nilay Patel?

  It comes up on the show a lot that I think wired connections are good and reliable. Headphones, for example, as Alex painfully brought up earlier.

• 1:17:49David Pierce?

  I think two of the official stances of the Vergecast are more buttons are better and plug it in.

• 1:17:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, wired connections are better than wireless ones. When I covered Starlink, I was accused of being in the pocket of Bing Comcast because I pointed out that wired ethernet is more reliable than sending internet to space, which seems obvious on space.

• 1:18:09Alex Cranz?

  Big Comcast, gotcha.

• 1:18:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. So I basically Verizon was like all in on its own 5G bet, high in its own supply. They thought this was going to do whatever it was going to do. And they started selling off these assets because they thought they weren't durable. And the reality is, over and over and over again, that in particular wired internet connections are what people want. Like, if you give people the choice between some weirdo wireless line of sight IR tin can internet connection or like fiber to their house, they will always pick the fiber. And so it's just been more durable over time. And it doesn't, I don't think that actually is a knock on 5G. Like, I know we're going to get emails because we always get emails. People, a lot of people have like 5G home internet connections now because they have no access to the other thing.

• 1:18:56Nilay Patel?

  And the 5G home internet connection is an upgrade.

• 1:18:58David Pierce?

  It's the same thing with Starlink. If you had, if your options are nothing in Starlink, Starlink is great.

• 1:19:02Nilay Patel?

  But if your options are Starlink or 5G home internet or fiber, a lot of people pick the fiber and the fiber is really useful. So it's just like Verizon just got high and it's on supply and it's spending $20 billion to go in a circle.

• 1:19:13David Pierce?

  You know what's nuts? This is, this is a total tangent that we shouldn't go down. But just a thing I realized as you were explaining that is like, you just described what's happening to the whole tech industry and AI right now. Everybody's like, what if we threw away everything we were good at because AI is going to change everything about everything forever? And it's like, you want to know, you want to know what happens when it doesn't is this. You spend $20 billion to undo your own weird ideas.

• 1:19:37Nilay Patel?

  They sold these customers to Frontier in 2015 for $10.5 billion and it's rebuying them for $20 billion. Frontier may not like abandon.

• 1:19:46Alex Cranz?

  I mean, didn't they go bankrupt in the interim there and then have to go do a whole restructuring?

• 1:19:51David Pierce?

  Who among us hasn't gone bankrupt at one point or another?

• 1:19:54Nilay Patel?

  Especially if you, especially if you're a cable company CEO, this is just like what you do. Yeah, this is true. You're sending the bankruptcy forms from your yacht. You know, you're, you're fine. All right, David, what's yours?

• 1:20:05David Pierce?

  Um, I just want to talk briefly about Snapchat. So Alex Heath was on the show with me two weeks ago, I think. And one of the things he said was basically like Snapchat is both more popular than ever, and also maybe in more trouble as a business than ever. And I think there is no better way to look at that than a note Evan Spiegel posted on the company website that we reported on, that one of the things it's going to do is start putting ads in your chat lists, which to me is one of the things that has been like untouchable in a messaging app forever. Like ads in the messages and ads between the threads in my inbox have been two things that companies are very afraid

• 1:20:49David Pierce?

  of doing. Like Google does it in your Gmail a little and everybody hates it and it sucks. But like Snap is about to start putting ads in your chats, like with your friends. And basically, Evan Spiegel's reason for doing it was like, our business is bad and investors are mad at us about it. And it's just the whole thing just like reeks of desperation from Snapchat. And I just, I think that is fascinating. Like this company is absolutely ubiquitous among like a certain generation of internet users. It is everywhere among like my, my high school age nephews. Like Snapchat is how you live your life at that age right now. And yet this company just cannot figure out how to make any money. And it's, it's just a really, really strange.

• 1:21:33Nilay Patel?

  And they can't do the one thing that they should do, which is charge a fee.

• 1:21:38David Pierce?

  Right. Because my nephews are 17 and they're not gonna do that. And Evan Spiegel's quote is, "The growth of our digital advertising business is one of the most important inputs to our long term revenue potential, and investors are concerned that we aren't growing faster." Like, if you're a, if you're a CEO of a big tech company writing like a here's why we're doing a product thing, that's not what you say. And when you've gotten to the point where that's what you have to say, that like you are deep down the road of like, yeah, what choice do I have? Like, that is where Snap is.

• 1:22:09Nilay Patel?

  Put, put Snap on the good on you scale. The Go9 sale of Doom streaming services, I understand is not about Snapchat, but we're very close.

• 1:22:17David Pierce?

  Seventy-five.

• 1:22:18Nilay Patel?

  Seventy-five.

• 1:22:19David Pierce?

  I think, I think Snap, Snapchat as its own public company is, is at, is at a seventy-five. And I think if we were in a different world of antitrust regulation and big tech questions, Snap probably would have been bought by somebody at this point.

• 1:22:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. Google would have bought and killed Snapchat by now within a heartbeat.

• 1:22:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. So I, I think seventy-five might be a little high, but only because of like bigger macro reasons.

• 1:22:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to say sixty-five. I think, I think it's so sticky.

• 1:22:51David Pierce?

  It is so, it's you, like you cannot overstate how much people love Snapchat.

• 1:22:56Alex Cranz?

  But it's only sticky for the people who actually use it and not enough people use it. It's not growing.

• 1:23:01David Pierce?

  No, but like tons of people use it. It's again, it is more popular than ever. It's huge. It just can't make any money. Like this is, this to me is the fun.

• 1:23:09Alex Cranz?

  But it's not that huge, is it? Like how many people are using it?

• 1:23:12David Pierce?

  Eight hundred million. Like it's huge.

• 1:23:13Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that is.

• 1:23:14David Pierce?

  It is sufficiently large. It's just that teens sending each other silly selfies is not a monetizable business.

• 1:23:22Alex Cranz?

  Is that what they're sending each other?

• 1:23:24David Pierce?

  And so what they're going to do is they're going to ruin it.

• 1:23:26Nilay Patel?

  Comes back to this idea, doesn't it?

• 1:23:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. The question now is basically for Snap is going to be how bad can we make this before you leave? And that's like, that's a sad place for a company to have to get to. And it really feels like that's where Snap has gotten.

• 1:23:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will say if they don't light up some kind of actual subscription, it, they will be past sixty-five or seventy-five very quickly. I think they have to charge money.

• 1:23:49David Pierce?

  You know, Snapchat plus is like, it's a thing. Sure. But there, there's never really been any energy behind that.

• 1:23:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58Alex Cranz?

  Ugh, that's sad.

• 1:24:00Nilay Patel?

  All right, Kranz, what you got?

• 1:24:01Alex Cranz?

  Um, bringing on the sadness was Concord. Concord, you may have heard about in the last eight years, because it was, it was going to be a new live service game from Sony. And they spent over eight years making it. And then it came out and they've already pulled it within a month. Of it coming out because just nobody was playing it. It hit at the wrong time. It didn't have any of the cool features. Um, like when it started, I don't think Fortnite and Pub Underground were even really a thing for most people. And that's all happened. Since then. So it came out at the wrong time. It's been, it had a disastrous launch and

• 1:24:40David Pierce?

  Was it bad?

• 1:24:41Alex Cranz?

  Like Just boring.

• 1:24:42David Pierce?

  The problem, okay.

• 1:24:43Alex Cranz?

  It was just boring. Yeah. And it was just like, there's been such a glut of these free to play live services, video games. Everybody thought that this was going to be how they were going to make all of their money. And over time, it's been like, oh, wait, no, a few of them will do it. And some will carve out their little fiefdoms. Um, some will be Fortnite, which, you know, everyone under the age of 14 plays. And otherwise, it's like,

• 1:25:06Alex Cranz?

  there's not a lot of room for this because there's a finite number of people who want to play video games. And then that group gets smaller and smaller, the more specific the games are. And then you need a lot of people to play it in order to make it interesting. And then this happens.

• 1:25:19David Pierce?

  Well, but I also feel like i- if I rewind a few years ago, the big idea in the industry was like, okay, live service games are the thing. And what's going to happen is, is the same thing that happens in the gaming industry, right? There's going to be a big one, and then there's going to be a next big one, and then there's going to be a next big one, and there's going to be a next big one. And it turns out like, no, there's, it's just going to be Fortnite and League of Legends the whole time. And Minecraft is going to keep being huge and Roblox is going to keep being like, it's, it's just been the same handful of giants for so long now. And I like, it is, it is astounding to me how big those games still are and how much saying power they've had. And it just feels like all these companies made the right, they like bet on the right industry and were just completely wrong about how it was going to go.

• 1:26:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. In this case, they were just way too late, like Concord, eight years in development for a live uh, service

• 1:26:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Alex Cranz?

  video game is just, that's way too long.

• 1:26:13David Pierce?

  And also, isn't the lesson from PUBG just like ship your shitty game and it'll be fine?

• 1:26:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, ship it and go.

• 1:26:20Nilay Patel?

  Ship your game with an innovative new business model and a dynamic new gameplay mechanic before anyone else.

• 1:26:26David Pierce?

  And then you'll be fine.

• 1:26:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:26:27Nilay Patel?

  And then Concord Years doing this to not be as good as Fortnite is a different lesson.

• 1:26:32Alex Cranz?

  But it sounds like this may be like teaching, this may be that one of those learning moments for the video game industry. They may be going, oh, wait, we don't need to do this. But I mean, EA still exists. So presumably we will get a ton more of these.

• 1:26:44Nilay Patel?

  As someone who just bought the new Madden, which is so hard. Yeah. I will say that no one's learning anything. I will say Sony, by the time you're listening to this, Astro Bot will be out for the PS5, and that game, by all accounts, looks to be the game of the year. People are obsessed with this game.

• 1:26:59Alex Cranz?

  They love it.

• 1:27:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I bought the controller. I've been playing Astro's Player with Max. Oh, nice. So we bought the controller, she's obsessed, and I'm very excited by this game. And it's like a totally different lesson. Like, what if you made a jewel-like platformer with a lovable character that had innovative gameplay mechanics?

• 1:27:14Alex Cranz?

  The Nintendo playbook.

• 1:27:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's, what if we made Mario again? And I understand saying, make Mario again is like, fine. Nobody would have thought of that, that's weird. Have you thought of making Jurassic Park again exactly the way it was when I was eight? That's gonna save the movie industry. But it's funny that Sony is doing both things at the same time.

• 1:27:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Nilay Patel?

  And one of them is gonna be way bigger hit than the other. Yeah.

• 1:27:37Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:27:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's my last one. I just want to call this out. We are deeply committed to covering the Fediverse and all things open social web. And this one is very small, but I think it has glimmers of a big idea. It's called Subdot Club. It's from the company that makes Mammoth, the Mastodon client. It's paid social feeds. So one of the things I think about all the time is, people subscribe to, I don't know, Platformer, 44 Media, all of our friends who have Substacks or Ghosts or whatever. And the way that that dynamic usually works is the social media is the marketing to get you to subscribe to a newsletter. But the social media is often the content. Like, it's the thing. And no one has figured out how to monetize

• 1:28:17Nilay Patel?

  a feed at all. And, you know, you like paid Twitter posts like never took off like that. There was that button there, and there's some of this, on some of the platforms, there's some kind of premium subscription stuff, but none of it happens at scale, and certainly none of it supports anybody at scale. I think the idea of the open social internet, interconnected federated networks, having this built into them from the beginning is super powerful. And the idea that you subscribe to some creator, and as part of it, you get authenticated into one of their feeds that you can subscribe to anywhere, as opposed to just on Twitter, or just on YouTube, or just on Instagram, that's a big deal. Yeah. I don't know. This one's gonna go anywhere. I'm just excited to see the ecosystem is starting to generate these new ideas.

• 1:29:00Nilay Patel?

  About what could you do if all of these networks actually work together? And one of those ideas is like, what if you could pay creators directly? And what you've got is also their social media and not just like links to this stuff that you pay for somewhere else.

• 1:29:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. This ecosystem is like finally starting to productize in really exciting ways. And like the other thing that launched this week was Reader, the RSS Reader app, R E E D E R. The guy who made it, it's like the best RSS app that exists, made a new one that is all just following feeds. So you can like, instead of it being an RSS feed from a website, you can now follow, like you can get a YouTube subscription in there. And you can get Mastodon feeds in there. And it's, it's another one where like you, you put a bunch of feeds in that are all these different things. And it just renders in this one multimedia timeline. And it's one of those things that like turns your brain on to like, oh, I get it now. And like what you're talking about is the idea of like, what if, what if I could pay for just your stuff?

• 1:29:56David Pierce?

  Right? And it's like, you can put a podcast into an activity pub feed. You can put a video into an activity pub feed, like all this stuff I just, I subscribe to the things that you make. And then I get to consume them and you get to make them and everybody wins is like, that's, that's the stuff, man.

• 1:30:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09David Pierce?

  That's the thing that gets me really excited.

• 1:30:10Nilay Patel?

  And I know that people are going to point out, you can do some of this on Patreon. You can do some of this over here. And like, the thing is all of those are closed networks. Like you as a creator have to give all of your business to YouTube or all of it to Patreon. Or you have to manage lots and lots and lots of different platforms. And the idea here is that all of these platforms will support these core interoperable models. All that has to happen.

• 1:30:33Nilay Patel?

  None of this happened yet, but I just, I, we're committed to over covering it because these glimmers of what if it was different are starting to become real.

• 1:30:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:41Nilay Patel?

  Like you can just see them across the ecosystem like, oh, this is where investment is that isn't. We're going to spend a trillion dollars stealing everything on the internet to train. Oh, yeah. Like this is much more like, what if it was sustainable to make things for other people on the internet? Which is just not, there hasn't been this kind of very sincere engagement in that for a while. Okay. Uh, that's it. We're miles over. Six hour of our chest, it was real. We gotta, we gotta go. We gotta get on planes. We're at the Apple event next week. We got stuff to write about. Ifa is going to keep happening. There's, you can read coverage of the matter spec. It feels like every time Jen goes to a trade conference and a different matter executive

• 1:31:23Nilay Patel?

  shows up and promises her it's going to be better, that's on the website. There's more gadgets on the website because EFA is ongoing. Check it all out. But we gotta go. That's it. That's the Vergecast.

• 1:31:37David Pierce?

  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 Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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