Pod Insights The Vergecast WWDC 2021: Apple's iOS 15, spatial audio, macOS Monterey, and more About this episode Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Chris Welch discuss all the announcements from Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference that took place this week.
All the links:
COVID-19 hospitalization rates in adolescents went up during March and April
Where did the COVID microchip conspiracy theory come from anyway?
The pandemic might cut down e-waste but widen the digital divide
Apple WWDC 2021: the 15 biggest announcements
Apple previews iOS 15 at WWDC 2021
The best features of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that Apple didn’t announce onstage
Apple’s Siri will finally work without an internet connection with on-device speech recognition
Watch Apple’s Siri blaze through requests with on-device processing
You’ll soon be able to use your iPhone as ID at the airport
Apple adds welcome privacy features to Mail, Safari
Apple’s iCloud Plus bundles a VPN, private email, and HomeKit camera storage
With iCloud Plus, Apple’s privacy promise is paired with an upsell
Apple’s privacy-focused Private Relay feature isn’t coming to China
Apple Music’s spatial audio is sometimes amazing but mostly inconsistent
macOS and tvOS are getting spatial audio support with the AirPods Pro and Max
Apple Music begins rolling out lossless streaming and Dolby Atmos spatial audio
Apple introduces Siri for third-party devices
macOS Monterey lets you run Shortcuts and share files between Macs and iPads
Apple may have done the coolest drag and drop demo ever
How Universal Control on macOS Monterey works
FaceTime is coming to Android and Windows via the web
Apple is building video and music sharing into FaceTime
Apple announces watchOS 8 with new health features
Apple’s new health features bring new focus to elder care technology
Apple lets users see family members’ Health data
Apple announces iPadOS 15 with homescreen and multitasking improvements
Microsoft announces Xbox TV app and its own xCloud streaming stick
Facebook plans first smartwatch for next summer with two cameras, heart rate monitor
Sony WF-1000XM4 earbuds announced / review
Google’s first folding Pixel is apparently still on track for a 2021 reveal
Clubhouse and its clones have an accessibility problem
Biden revokes Trump bans on TikTok and WeChat
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Transcript 16,922 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? Coming up on the Vergecast, Alex Krantz and Chris Welch join us to talk about everything that happened at WWDC, including updates to iOS, iPadOS, and spatial audio everywhere. That's the Vergecast coming up now.
0:12 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:57 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:45 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of platform arbitration. That's, that's my new, this is a really technical administrative law podcast. I hope you enjoy it. Anyway, I'm Neil, I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. I am your bento box architect. Cool. Very good. We'll explain that reference in a bit. Alex Krantz is here again. Hey, Alex.
2:05 Alex Cranz? I am also here and I'm more a fan of a Lunchable. So, I don't know.
2:10 Nilay Patel? It is amazing that America took a hard look at the bento box and it's like Lunchables. We got this.
2:16 Alex Cranz? We got it. Crackers and cheese. Go.
2:19 Nilay Patel? Chris Welch is here. Good to be back as always. There's a lot going on in this episode. There's WWDC. I feel like Chris and I could just do a full hour on spatial audio because that got rolled out this week. We could do a full hour of Dieter just sighing about the new multitasking situation and the iPad. I'm so mad. It's, this one's going to be a ride, but I want to start where we always start. Covid, it's not over. It feels over. I will tell you this, where I live here in upstate New York, no one gives a shit anymore. Like, that's just where we're at. There's no masks. Like, everyone's inside. It's great. I had dinner inside the other day. It was amazing, but it's still happening. It's still raging around the world. The United States is, it's not
3:01 Nilay Patel? the only place in the world as much as Americans like to feel that way. And even inside the United States, things are all over the place. So we have a bunch of stories this week. Covid-19 hospitalization rates actually went up for adolescents in March and April, which is not a great sign. So please keep those vaccinations up. By the way, I want to call this out because it just makes me laugh so hard. The Biden administration set a vaccination target goal for July 4th. We might not hit it. It's like a real thing. Bud Light announced this week that they would buy everyone in America beer if we hit the goal, which is like the most American. Just that last push we really needed to get. It's like, who in the world is like, I've been on the fence, but can't turn on free beer.
3:44 Alex Cranz? A free Bud Light? Like, not even a good beer.
3:48 Nilay Patel? I applaud them. It just made me laugh so hard. Anyhow, it's still happening. Please, if you're not vaccinated, we have a lot of information on the site. There's a lot of other sites. Please get it done. I want this to be over very badly. Speaking of reasons people are hesitant to get vaccinated, we have a deep dive into where the Covid vaccine and microchip conspiracy came from. And it is just a ride. It started with a Reddit post. It spun out of control. It got picked up and mutated. It is one of those very verge stories about just a little piece of information spiraling into a big thing. It is, it's really, it's really great. You should just read it. It's on the site now. And lastly, if you're a Veritas listener,
4:30 Nilay Patel? you know, we cover the digital divide a lot, which is everything from the broadband gap to the devices people use to who gets to message who. The pandemic, lots and lots of second order effects, as we've discussed. One of them is e-waste might be going down. The other one is the digital divide might be getting wider. So one of those things to read, it's just, I think, oh, there's a lot of policy initiatives happening in the world that we always talk about, but broadband and infrastructure spending. The digital divide is one that cuts across both parties. It is staggeringly bipartisan. People thinking about how to get broadband in places, how to get students everywhere better devices. Go check it out because I think there's going to be a lot of action about this stuff in the years to come. Okay. But speaking of the far end of the digital divide, Apple Inc.
5:16 Nilay Patel? They're the fancy ones. That's how I think about it. It was WWDC. We talked about it a lot last week. Alex, in her first episode with us, we just like went for an hour and 40. It was great. Deep dives into old notification systems. We did, but then it happened. Yeah. I'm just going to say it directly. Wow, was that underwhelming?
5:37 Nilay Patel? I mean, like, and I think this is, a lot of people had this response to it. First of all, we were all hoping for a new MacBook Pro. It didn't arrive. Yeah. Sean Hollister did a great post. I think he just needed to like get it out of, get it out of his brain, like emotionally process the lack of a MacBook Pro. But Apple tagged its YouTube stream with M1X. Mix. And so like, people like overthought it to the point where like, oh, they, they've, they've acknowledged it. Yeah. And I, I don't know about that. I like, I understand why Sean did the story. Like, sometimes you just have to be like, I had all these feelings and I need to write them down. So that, but that didn't happen. There was no hardware of any kind, really. And then, you know, we went through what they could
6:22 Nilay Patel? do to the various platforms. We'll talk about what they announced. Everything is very iterative, except for some of the privacy stuff they've added, which is kind of a big step forward, but also very complicated in how it works.
6:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:32 Nilay Patel? So I just like, I don't know, Dieter, what did you think?
6:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think iterative is fair. The thing that struck me is it was really, really hard to suss out when they were announcing features, where they would go and what platform they were for. They like, it was like, every single feature is kind of for everything. The privacy stuff kind of works everywhere. The health stuff is kind of between the iPhone and the watch. The, it's all, all of the features are kind of fuzzy between platforms, which to me is a real metaphor for how all of the apps now are fuzzy between platforms.
7:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
7:05 Speaker 03 You know, there are Mac apps and iPad apps and iPhone apps and they're all different, but they're increasingly the same, but not. And that's how I felt like most of these announcements went.
7:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And it's kind of a, a function of all the apps are really just front ends for services now.
7:19 Speaker 03 Yeah. A lot of services.
7:21 Nilay Patel? But it's like in the background of everything. So like, if you announce an update to the iPhone health app, what you are really announcing is an update to health, a service provided from Apple that is exposed across all of your devices.
7:31 Speaker 03 Right.
7:31 Nilay Patel? And I, and the other thing I'll say is I think, um, Apple just, they've gotten very good at making these hour and a half long infomercials that take the place of their events. But here they didn't, they didn't follow like the rules of great public speaking. They didn't tell you what they were going to tell you and then tell you and then tell you again. It was just like, you were just off to the races. You had no idea what would happen next, which I think for a developer event, I think that feedback, we talked about the context of this event and the unhappiness in the developer community a lot. They didn't feel the pressure to like, address the elephant in the room. They waited quite a long time before they got to any developer stuff.
8:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
8:08 Nilay Patel? And I, I, I just think it was an odd event. Hopefully it's the last infomercial event that we have. Like, I'd really like to start going back to live events and like, seeing people and there's something really important that you get from these events in person. But I think here, it was just a flood of stuff. And Dieter, you're very good at, at calling out. Apple's great at writing narratives about itself and I didn't catch a narrative.
8:31 Speaker 03 There was very little narrative at all. Like the, the story coming out of this thing is they announced a bunch of stuff. And like, there were, there were so many missed opportunities. Like, they could have just done an entire narrative that they've done it before around like, privacy and AI, right? There's a bunch of new Siri updates that are actually really interesting. It's a little bit of catch up to Google Assistant, honestly. So it could do like, reading text, which is sort of like Google Lens. It can do on-device Siri stuff, which is actually a huge deal because that's been forever that you haven't been able to just use Siri when you were offline and it's way faster. And they could have just connected that to privacy.
9:12 Speaker 03 And they could just like, run through, run that thread through almost half or more of the things they announced. And people would have been able to like, understand where things were going. But instead, it was just a bunch of sort of disparate things. I don't know. I'm excited by, about a bunch of the stuff that got announced and I'm really excited to try a bunch of the stuff that got announced. But I'm, I don't see a vision for what Apple's stuff is for the next year here.
9:40 Alex Cranz? I kind of do, actually. I think, I think it was everything they weren't saying. I think, I think like, just the very structure of this WWDC. Like, it was so weird and all over the place. And I think this is part of them trying to like, part of Apple trying to do this, this, you know, it's moving from this company that sells software, this company that sells services. And we were, this was the transition, dub dub, for that. Like, where we were really seeing that. Like, we shouldn't have had an iOS and a macOS and an iPadOS. It should have been Siri, Home, TV, Health.
10:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I think it's just the growing pains of this transition we're seeing from Apple.
10:20 Speaker 03 Yeah. Let's talk about, let's talk about iOS. They did announce a bunch of new features. Some of, like, as Dieter was saying, some of them are just features for everything. But, you know, they're like, very specific. They, they're extending digital identity cards. It used to be able to put credit cards in Apple Wallet. Now you can put your driver's license in Apple Wallet.
10:39 Alex Cranz? I don't want to do that.
10:41 Speaker 03 I am not gonna do that, but like, they're extending the capabilities in the places you might use your phone. The on-device Siri stuff, right? That was a really good Siri demo of just like, it working really fast in a way that Siri doesn't work really fast right now.
10:59 Nilay Patel? What's that to you, Alex?
11:02 Alex Cranz? I liked all of the stuff. I gotta say, I downloaded the, I've got my developer account that I pay for, even though I have not even attempted to develop an app in like 10 years. And I downloaded it. I've been playing with it. And, and so far, it's all the tiny things. There's no like, I didn't download it and just go, wow, yes, I'm here. This is the future. I need to go actually put this on my, my regular daily driver phone. It was just like, okay, yeah, I've, I've, I've got iOS now and it's slightly tweaked in lots of little tiny ways. Like, I love that they've improved the print dialogue. I love that we've gone from you could never print on an iPhone.
11:41 Nilay Patel? You went to the print dialogue?
11:43 Alex Cranz? You can like, you can, the print dialogue is improved. Like, I think that's just neat.
11:47 Nilay Patel? First place.
11:48 Alex Cranz? That wasn't one of my first things. That was one of those things where I saw it online and I was like, ooh, I'm gonna go check that out.
11:54 Speaker 03 They also fixed the, well, they didn't fix, they, so with iOS 14, they broke the time thing where you like, enter a time, the time picker, where it like loses focus and you can't tab between them and you gotta like tap on this tiny little box and like enter in a number. And sometimes it just gets lost. And so they, they didn't, they kept that, but then they brought back the giant dials. So like now it's both of those things. So like, I'm glad, I'm glad they brought back the dials because that's easier to use. But there's just a bunch of like, oh, we tried some stuff and now we're, we're just gonna keep trying some stuff. Like, it was very, very Androidy in that way. Uh, there's a bunch of UI stuff that like, really? You just, you're gonna go that way? Okay.
12:34 Alex Cranz? It feels cleaner. It does feel like slightly cleaner. Like, when it booted up, I was like, new iOS. Heck yeah. Look at this. It's like, the bubbles have a little bit more shape to them and, and they're losing a little of like the shadow. And, and okay, we're transitioning in our, in our, in our design language, but like, it was, it's so, so tiny, the, the changes.
12:56 Nilay Patel? Okay, but some of the features are like huge underneath this like little coat of paint.
13:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of like stuff lurking under the surface. Like, I don't know, X, the, the XIF data, data thing is, is one that I was like, oh, that's awesome. Like, that's a very under talked about thing.
13:13 Nilay Patel? This is such an Apple move, right?
13:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
13:16 Nilay Patel? For years, people have been like, I'd like to see all of the info about my photos in the Photos app. And Apple's been like, no. And then there's like in our like a there's an entire economy of apps to do this very simple thing. And now they've added it and everyone's like, amazing. And it's like, no, dude, they you just got some water. You were just so thirsty and they just gave you some water.
13:40 Alex Cranz? I was absolutely parched. And now I can delete all of these apps I never used to begin with that like I had on my phone just to like be like, that'll show Apple. I do want this.
13:51 Nilay Patel? Let's talk about some of the highlight, some of the highlight features. I think we should, we should start with FaceTime in the, in the context of everything is the same across all of its platforms. And there's, they're just kind of exposing services. FaceTime took a gigantic step into being a competitor to Zoom in many ways and into a cross platform service in the sense that Android and Windows people can now participate in FaceTime calls. They cannot start them. They cannot write one, but they can join one, which is very strange. I think I said this in the live, Apple runs on WebEx and they like, I have any, if listeners have used WebEx, this is the worst software. There's a part of me that says that Tim Cook was like, I can't use this anymore. Like, we
14:36 Nilay Patel? got to do something. And then the FaceTime team was like, oh, crappy, he means us.
14:43 Nilay Patel? Just started like developing FaceTime. But so FaceTime, they've added some of the basics that you would expect. They went away from their, their weird bubbles view. There's just a straight up grid view in FaceTime. They needed to do that a long time ago.
14:54 Alex Cranz? Well, no, it's an option now.
14:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
14:56 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because, because there's, there's the bubbles and the bubbles will now have spatial audio and you'll be able to be like, oh, he's over there. Oh, she's over there. And or you can just do a grid and I guess they'll all just hit you in the face with their voices. I'm not sure how that parts worked. I had not done the FaceTime yet.
15:13 Nilay Patel? Well, it's interesting on the microphone side, if they're going to be able to capture that kind of depth, right, from the people in the room with you. So we'll see, like, there's a lot of questions about how spatial audio will work with FaceTime, but they have built it out into a more full featured Zoom competitor. I think fairly their assumption is, and this is true in my family, I'm not sending Zoom links when I want the grandparents to see my kid, right? Like, we're just like FaceTiming them. And if you can make that better, then you're going to eliminate an entire consumer use case for Zoom that people have started doing in the pandemic. Great. Then there's this send a link and it'll work on the web, which Dieter, I know you have just a litany of thoughts about.
15:56 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, so what you can't FaceTime call somebody on Android or Windows or whatever. You can, you can create the link and then that link allows other people to join. And I believe there's like some moderation stuff built into that. I mean, there would need to be.
16:10 Nilay Patel? There's like the not, it's like the, the waiting room, like you can join the link and whoever owns the call can invite, let you in or not.
16:16 Speaker 03 Yeah. You have to, you have to like get approved to get in and then they, I think they can boot you. And, you know, I'm sure it's just using WebRTC, um, which is how pretty much every video conference on the web works these days, which is great. You know, it, we've been dunking on Steve Jobs said FaceTime would be an open protocol for, what a decade.
16:36 Speaker 03 And, you know, uh, it would, it would be nice if this were, I don't know. I feel like FaceTime links and having Android and Windows users join them is going to be the video equivalent of green bubbles, right? You can't call them, you gotta like hit an extra button to bring up the link and then you gotta figure out how to text in the link and it's going to text them over green bubbles and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It is going to be another sort of subtle incentive for people to be like, ah, can you just get out an iPhone? This will be easier. That's like, I feel like it's great that they're opening up to other platforms, but I feel like they did it in the way that would be most likely to get people back onto their platform.
17:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And I, there's a part of it that's fair, right? Set Windows aside, like Apple making a full on FaceTime Windows app. Okay. That's like a.
17:23 Speaker 03 That's a high bar.
17:24 Nilay Patel? They're, they're not going to do that.
17:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:26 Nilay Patel? Apple making a FaceTime Android app makes sense. I think it seems like an eminently reasonable thing. They obviously make Apple Music for Android. If you make a FaceTime app, then you might as well just put iMessage on it. Like you're so close to having iMessage on Android and you can't do it. That's the end of that conversation. Because just a standalone app that only does video calling to iPhones is nuts.
17:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:53 Nilay Patel? So I think there's a reason they went with a web. I've, we don't know how it works yet on the web. I think there's a lot of question marks around like, what set of web technologies is Apple using to make this work? Because if it is the standards that we kind of suspect they might be using, that opens the door to a lot of other things happening.
18:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I will say that.
18:13 Nilay Patel? Dieter's, Dieter's making a face at me.
18:15 Speaker 03 I think I don't know what it's going to open the door to, honestly. Like, they're going to use like the standard that everyone's using. They use whatever RTC. There'll be some moderation stuff. Hopefully, they've thought through that. Yeah, I actually am like, I'm less enthused and think this is less big a deal than I think everybody else.
18:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's like, again, it's, you're so thirsty. It's like Apple did something cross-platform and you're like, oh, the world will reorder itself. And it's like, no, that, we'll see, we'll see how it goes.
18:39 Speaker 03 I don't think that Android and Windows users get to participate in share play. Alex, can you talk like, what's your perspective on this, this feature?
18:47 Alex Cranz? The, the share play, the, the way that you can now watch movies with your, your friends. I mean, like, I think it's, I think it's a really interesting idea. And I also think it's mainly so Apple, like, it's for Apple. I think it's less for the services because the services have all had this. They've all been able to do it. And now it's like, Apple's the first, you know, big phone operating system maker to, to kind of glom onto this and make an actual API that everybody can use. And, and Google and Windows are probably both like Microsoft, both kicking themselves that they didn't think of this first. So I think it's, I think it's really smart and I'll be curious to see who actually uses it. Because I've done the whole watching movies with a friend over the phone.
19:30 Alex Cranz? Like, you both have your phones and you started at the same time or whatever, and it's awful. It's just a really boring way. Like, it is not, it's like a Zoom call. It is not the same as being in the same room as somebody and like, watching it on the couch together.
19:44 Nilay Patel? What I'll put back in you is, uh, the Mayor of Easttown finale happened the other day. My wife wanted to watch it with her mom and I fell down just an insane rabbit hole of making a new HBO Max account on my wife's AT&T phone number, not ours, because we didn't want to like, because we both get it for free with our plans.
20:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
20:06 Nilay Patel? So we're not technically cheating. And like, I don't know if you've ever tried to walk your mother-in-law through, I need you to log in. First, I needed Becky to change her AT&T password so she could share it with her mom.
20:17 Speaker 04 Oh, my God.
20:18 Nilay Patel? And then her mom could log into her AT&T account and off HBO Max. Like, if I could just like, I need you to push this button.
20:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
20:25 Nilay Patel? And you can watch this show together. That would have been much better.
20:28 Alex Cranz? And my mom's had an Apple TV for three years now, and I think she's turned it on twice. So I'm not really, really pumped for her to, to, to fully embrace it. But I think it's, I think it is super, super easy. I think we're going to see more like younger people using it than us olds. I could be wrong about that, but I think it's just brilliant of them to do it.
20:48 Nilay Patel? I'm looking at the list of partners they've announced at launch. Disney Plus, Hulu, HBO Max. Makes sense. Twitch. Super interesting.
20:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
20:55 Nilay Patel? Because everyone's already watching Twitch. It's like, it's strange to think about watching more Twitch more together than you are already watching Twitch together. TikTok, which is a deeply fascinating psychological experiment into other people's TikTok algo. I'm not sure I want to open that door.
21:12 Alex Cranz? I don't want to open it. Close it immediately.
21:14 Nilay Patel? Masterclass, which is like, you're very hopeful. That is a very hopeful idea that we're not going to sit down and watch like Robert De Niro teach us to act together. NBA and ESPN Plus, that makes sense. Paramount Plus makes sense. Pluto TV makes sense. Chris, what's not on the list, man?
21:31 Speaker 04 The streaming company that now thinks it's too big to deal with any of these features from other companies. That would be Netflix.
21:38 Nilay Patel? I mean, just like a fascinating admission, right? Like, they, as I was saying, they do have, Netflix has its own version of doing this. It's a cross-platform. It works everywhere. If you're that big, you just don't need to use the system feature. And so we're just going to like, see how that works. We do have some information on like how share play operates. So the demo that they gave to developers was not a streaming video app. It was a whiteboard app.
22:00 Alex Cranz? Oh, really?
22:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Yeah. So there's an element of this where, you know, for the video apps, what they're really doing is they're just syncing video players. So if I try to share, let's, let's assume HBO Max is operating. It's a 50/50 proposition most days. But yeah, we're going to watch HBO Max together. I hit share play. It doesn't, I'm not like rebroadcasting the stream to you over FaceTime. Right? It's just sending a deep link into the HBO Max app. That app opens on your phone. You have to be authenticated to it. And then the video players are synced up. So there's like, there's something very simple underneath all of this that enables you to do a whole bunch of other stuff with apps, which I think is super interesting. But that means everybody has to have a Hulu
22:45 Nilay Patel? account or whatever. And it's kind of unclear. Like, you can have all these different tiers of these various things. Like, what if Chris has Hulu without ads and I have Hulu with ads? Oh, God. Chris has to just like, stop. Watch some horrible Hulu ad.
22:59 Alex Cranz? Chris, just like potty break every 10 minutes.
23:04 Nilay Patel? I'm like, oh, no, I'm watching the same commercial again. Chris, would you like me to tell you about it?
23:10 Nilay Patel? So I think there's like, some stuff in here that is like, fascinating to see how it plays out and how the services implement it. Because the API itself is kind of very simple. But it is very cool. I think a lot of people are going to try to use it. I think one of the big questions I have is, how discoverable is this UI? Like, there's a lot of floating iOS boxes that just like, show up on your screen. You can move them around. You can like swipe to pull them down. We'll see. I'm excited to use it, just because I did have this HBO Max experience the other day. And I was like, oh, man. If only I could have just pushed this button for that. I left the room. I was like, I've done my part. You're both watching the show. I can't. I don't.
23:49 Alex Cranz? One of you is five seconds ahead. Deal with it. I've left the room now.
23:53 Nilay Patel? I've gotten as close. I've gotten as close as I can get. That's super cool. I just will see how it plays out. Chris, anything stand out to you?
24:02 Speaker 04 I think the map stuff seems pretty cool. It seems like they are really, really focused on making maps really, really good. I mean, they did a lot of like visual stuff that looks really pretty. Like overpasses and stuff and maps. They stole that feature from Google where you point your phone at like a building to see which way you're facing. And so that's great. And it just seems like there's sort of like AR-ish kind of stuff in there. So you can see where that's kind of starting to come together. But yeah, I think they've got a pretty huge focus on that this year, too.
24:28 Nilay Patel? The power of Apple is that I'd forgotten Google has that feature. So like the next day I was like in New York City and I came up out of the subway and I was like,
24:37 Speaker 04 Worked super well.
24:38 Nilay Patel? And I was like, I'm gonna use this Google feature, I forgot.
24:41 Speaker 04 Find my phone compass, can't tell which way I'm facing in the year 2021, but sometimes it still happens. So.
24:47 Alex Cranz? I love it. It does a little circle over and over and over again. And you just like, you go with it. If you walk four blocks the wrong way, it's just a little exercise.
24:56 Nilay Patel? What do you think of the new look in maps? It's they, you know, Google kind of tends towards realism or very sparse like outlines of buildings. Like Google's either like full on street view, or it's like, here's some lightly rendered buildings to give you a suggestion. Apple's like, it's a cartoon.
25:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, you can zoom in and like see inside the Apple Store as you zoom in, zoom in close enough.
25:20 Nilay Patel? I don't know. How do you feel about, I think people really responded to it. How do you feel about it?
25:23 Speaker 04 I like it personally quite a bit, just because like you're saying, Google is kind of like basic and plain. And it's like very efficient, but like Apple's clearly going for some more visual flash and flourishes. And as long as like the data's there and that part's gotten a lot better too, of the last few years. I think it's gonna be pretty nice. And especially the turn by turn directions look a lot better now from what I saw. So.
25:44 Nilay Patel? Dieter, you called this out in the live one, right? They said, okay, here's the new turn by turn. They're very cool. They're like swoopy overhead. They show you the roads, do all this zooming. And they're like, we'll be on CarPlay in the next few months.
25:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:57 Nilay Patel? And I, that I don't understand at all because CarPlay fundamentally is just a second monitor for your phone. Well, there's not like a lot happening.
26:04 Speaker 03 Well, there's a lot happening graphically with some of these animations and some CarPlay.
26:09 Nilay Patel? That's all rendered on your phone.
26:10 Speaker 04 Right. Maybe it's too visually intensive now, like for a phone screen.
26:14 Speaker 03 Right. But if you've got CarPlay Wireless, maybe they're, you know, they did all this stuff knowing that how to do it on a phone with direct pipe, but they haven't thought through, how are they going to do it to make sure it works on a bunch of different car displays? I think that for all of Apple's strengths, one of its weaknesses is that it is, does not have the muscle of working with a huge open ecosystem of manufacturers. And so it might just take them a minute to get this for CarPlay.
26:40 Nilay Patel? I feel like sometimes I know how CarPlay works and then in moments like this, it's like, I have no idea.
26:48 Nilay Patel? My impression of CarPlay is that it's just sending, it's just a monitor. It's just sending a
26:53 Speaker 03 Yeah.
26:53 Nilay Patel? 60 frames per second video screen to your car display.
26:56 Speaker 03 That's essentially right.
26:56 Nilay Patel? All that processing is happening on your phone.
26:58 Speaker 03 Yep.
26:59 Nilay Patel? And you're just saying the sizes and shapes of other displays in the world have confounded Apple.
27:04 Speaker 03 I mean.
27:04 Nilay Patel? Which seems ridiculous.
27:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, but I mean, remember, like, the iPhone was, made you hard code to pixel dimensions for like, almost a decade before they're like, oh, wait, we might want to do different screen sizes. We should think about this a little bit more. Yeah. So, okay, I, I'm gonna, I want to change subjects. Can we talk about focus modes for like, three hours, maybe four? Because that's how many emotions I have about it.
27:27 Alex Cranz? Create a focus mode to talk about focus modes.
27:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'm gonna hit the button. All notifications have paused. Go ahead, dear. Okay, so they've created profiles. The way that you had profiles on your Nokia phone in 1997, you can now do them on your iPhone. So you basically can choose like, do not disturb, or sleep, or driving, or personal, or work, or you can make your own like, fitness, exercise, whatever.
27:54 Alex Cranz? Podcasting.
27:55 Speaker 03 Podcasting, yeah. When you turn on one of these modes, it changes all your notification settings. You can have custom settings for who and who is not allowed to contact you. You can have custom notification settings for which apps are and are not allowed to show up here. You can have custom home screens that appear or disappear depending on what focus mode that you're in.
28:12 Nilay Patel? By the way, Dina, I just want to correct you. Apple's official terminology is that you're in a focus.
28:18 Speaker 03 No.
28:19 Nilay Patel? Which is right next to like, do a blog, in terms of just like, I know what you're saying, but I need you to not say it anymore.
28:26 Speaker 03 Oh, God, in a focus sponsored by Ford.
28:28 Nilay Patel? Yes, go ahead. When you're in a focus.
28:30 Speaker 03 When you're in a focus. Oh, my God.
28:33 Nilay Patel? That's what they keep saying. It was, they just kept saying, I was like, I. I want to ask you about it, but I really don't want to know the answer.
28:40 Speaker 03 So you can already like show and hide different home screens. So different faux psy focuses can show and hide different home screens. And that means, by the way, that you can have more than one app icon on your different home screens. So you can have Twitter in like four different places and they can appear and disappear. So the number of calls that I'm going to have to deal with my relatives who aren't super tech savvy with like where'd my icons go is going to be off the charts. Now, I will say that there is, there is one thing I want to give Apple credit for with focus, focus modes is all, a bunch of these were already there in iOS 14. We already had drive mode, do not disturb mode and sleep mode. What they've done is they've actually just put a proper UI on it and they've subsumed all of those
29:22 Speaker 03 modes that were sort of weird before into this feature. So there's something smart about that, but I'd be very curious to see if anybody actually uses this, if anybody can actually figure out how to configure it. And if Apple's AI, which is going to automatically preconfigure the different focus modes when you turn them on, will actually do what you want it to do. So many feelings.
29:42 Nilay Patel? I feel like these are all connected to, I don't even, well, no, it's just like, all this is also connected to how they're handling notifications.
29:49 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:49 Nilay Patel? Which seems extremely complicated. And this is all stuff that works really well. When I reviewed the HomePod, I had in the back of my mind, like the Apple man, right? Like dressed in all black, wireframe glasses.
30:04 Speaker 03 Oh, that.
30:05 Nilay Patel? Has a design job.
30:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
30:07 Nilay Patel? You know, lives alone, only uses Apple services and is very demanding. And there's not a one straight icon on their desktop.
30:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:16 Nilay Patel? And it's like, they, they made the HomePod for that person. That market was small. They discontinued the HomePod. Right? Then there's like me and like, there's icons everywhere. Just screenshots for, from five years ago are still littering my screen.
30:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:29 Nilay Patel? And I'm not, I'm never going to sit here and like beat my way through all the settings for the focus modes.
30:35 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:36 Nilay Patel? AI is supposed to like somehow bridge that gap, right? And I, that's like the, the big question mark is whether you can deduce from my chaotic phone usage, some set of order and rules.
30:49 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:50 Nilay Patel? About how I might use my phone at any moment. And the answer's like, oh, just take Instagram off that thing. Just, just get rid of that icon and I will be more productive at work.
31:02 Speaker 03 So we should talk about the ecosystem for half a second too, because focus modes can automatically sync across all your Apple devices, Mac, yeah, watch, phone, iPad, whatever. And if you so choose, you can make your focus modes available to other iPhone, Mac, iOS, Apple users, so they can see your focus mode, they can see that you're in a do not disturb or whatever. And the time from, this is a cool feature that's sort of like an away message, I don't know, but it's not quite the thing, but maybe I'll use it to teenagers harassing each other by setting focus modes explicitly designed to tease their friends or enemies is going to be so short.
31:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but that's, I mean.
31:39 Alex Cranz? I mean, I'm doing it tonight.
31:40 Nilay Patel? On the scale of I've enabled malicious teens, like, yeah, focus mode billing is okay.
31:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay.
31:47 Nilay Patel? Can't hurt people too badly.
31:49 Alex Cranz? They gotta learn it somewhere.
31:50 Nilay Patel? One of the things that's really interesting about needing to be in the ecosystem, in several of the focus modes, they're like, we'll let notifications from certain people through.
31:58 Speaker 03 Right.
31:59 Nilay Patel? Which is like, conceptually great. There are many situations in which you'd like, I just want my family to get to me, but I need to focus otherwise. Unclear how they're detecting who is who inside of apps. So if I want, if, if I want to turn everything off, but Dieter can Slack me, I have no idea if that's possible, because I don't think Slack is exposing who messages are from to the notification system. It's just sending notifications. There's like another layer of data that has to happen here, and then another layer of app vendors not just lying, because I think, like, the New York Times were like, Dieter needs you to know about this breaking news.
32:37 Speaker 03 You can also, third-party apps can also read those focus statuses if they want. So in theory, if Slack wanted to, it could display your focus mode notification and have it change your Slack status, which I guess, when you think about it, you want your fundamental status to be handled by the platform, I guess, but there is sort of a potential future tussle for who's in charge of what status I'm telling other people I'm in.
33:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, we've written about the desire to have a universal, I mean, it's basically an away message. But I could set a system-wide away message and have a bunch of messaging apps respect it and like, use it. A, we would have brought back away messages, which would be great. And B, like, it would be tremendously useful. Now, do I want my Slack away message to be a bunch of emo song lyrics, the way that I want my iMessage away message to be that? I mean, that's, I don't know. I mean, that's how I ran with it in AIM in college.
33:35 Alex Cranz? I really want my mom to get a different away message than than work. Because she won't get that. She won't get the emo lyrics. She'll just be very confused and continue to like text or call.
33:45 Nilay Patel? I continue to be successful in my career.
33:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah, that's all I want for my mom. That's all she needs. Doing fine, can't talk.
33:56 Nilay Patel? I think this is, I mean, this is the reason they announce the stuff early. App developers have to build towards it. They have to use it. When it actually comes out and those apps are ready and they'll get updated, that is when we know how well it works. The ideas are there. I just, that one of like, I want to turn off all my notifications. Even now, when I do that, I end up enabling Slack, which is the most distracting one of all. Right? And it's like, I have to, because some of the people that need to be able to break through the wall, message me on Slack. Or I have to go to all of them individually and say, please text me for the next two hours, which makes no sense. We'll see. I'm very curious how this works. There's a lot of messaging apps, I think, that are going to try to find ways around it or through it, but we'll see. Do you want to talk about the privacy stuff real quick?
34:40 Speaker 03 So there's a bunch. There's an ancillary thing, which we should maybe circle back to, which is putting your ID on your phone. They're adding a sort of a, they changed the name from the paid version of iCloud to iCloud Plus, but it's just iCloud that you pay for. It now has this sort of double proxy that's not quite a VPN, but serves similarly the same sort of functions as a VPN, kind of. Makes it harder for people to track what you're doing on the web. They're finally doing something to try and stop tracking pixels in mail. Unclear how effective that will be and how similar it is to the thing that's Been on like Gmail for years upon years. And then the other thing they're doing is they're creating an app privacy report and they've also got an app privacy dashboard. So you could see
35:24 Speaker 03 when various apps are using various sensors. This is similar to what just got announced for Android 12. The app privacy report is sort of like the Safari report that like tells you how many trackers are on a web page. I think with app with the app privacy report, that might be a little bit more actionable than the Safari one. But I don't know, we shall see. But that's the big stuff is they're doing a little bit better, like obfuscating your activity online and they're doing a little bit better showing you what other apps are doing. And they're not making some of the stuff available in China.
35:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So the the relay thing is super interesting, because there's actually two relays involved. One is controlled by Apple and the other by a third party. The third party might change in different countries from what we understand. So far as people have been using it, I think it's been CloudFlare.
36:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:16 Nilay Patel? But basically, the first hop is to Apple, which obscures who you are. And the second hop is to the third party provider, which obscures where you're trying to go.
36:27 Speaker 03 Right.
36:28 Nilay Patel? That's a lot of hops, right? So like, I'm curious, will it be fast? Like, will it interrupt anything? Will it break anything? Like, you know, Apple's position is like, of course, we tested it. But yet we have to see. Then on the mail side, I think Casey wrote about this on the on the verge this week, because Casey's business is running a newsletter. He's very interested in how email analytics might be changed by this. He published this stat, which he sourced from Nieman Lab, which sourced it from a third party analytics company. 93% of mobile mail opens are in the mail app, which seems completely wrong to me.
37:02 Speaker 03 That can't be right. I mean, on iPhone, maybe, but. Yeah, it's definitely higher than I think I'm willing to admit to myself because I never used the mail app and I do not enjoy it and I haven't for many years, but I can't believe it's that high.
37:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah, if there's anybody out there in email marketing is panicking, please tweet us your, your Apple mail number or email us. I'm very curious. It's one of those stats that we just don't ever think about. And here it might have this like downstream impact.
37:30 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:31 Nilay Patel? The other thing that all this privacy stuff, why is Apple doing all this privacy stuff? Yes, they want to protect your identity, but the mechanism of like wanting to track you is all because of advertising, right? Like the reason that your privacy is under risk is because there's a gigantic advertising business model on the internet.
37:49 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:50 Nilay Patel? The advertising ecosystem really wants to know who you are so they can target ads at you and sell you things on Instagram. It works, people. Trust me. It's a real problem for me. But the other side of it is, is Apple closes the funnel of advertising and makes advertising businesses really hard. They're there, ready and waiting to take 30% from any other purchases you might make on the phone for things like newsletters or paid podcasts or anything like that. So there's, I think Apple's in a complicated situation here. Most of the media ecosystem, us included, I'm sure there's going to be some ads to read on this podcast shortly, but most of the media ecosystem runs on ads. The ads run on targeting. We just know how this works. If you want to change that, the burgeoning
38:35 Nilay Patel? way of changing that is direct payments, right? That is going and paying Casey for Platformer directly. That is tipping people in apps like Twitch and Twitter with super follows and all that stuff. That is platforms like OnlyFans and Patreon, all this stuff. And if you think of those as digital products, because it's all just digital products, right? You can't buy a Kindle book. What does it mean to buy a newsletter on the iPhone?
38:59 Speaker 03 Right.
39:00 Nilay Patel? Apps and services that produce that stuff are going to run into 30% tax. And so I think there's a little bit of a dilemma here for Apple, just in terms of they're shutting down, they're closing down a bunch of advertising stuff and rightfully so. I think people think that stuff is invasive. I think they have a great moral case for it. They're also the absolute toll booth for the creator economy. Unless the entire creator economy happens on the web, which would be cool. I just, it doesn't seem right.
39:26 Speaker 04 Well, also, I don't know if you noticed, but they, they sure didn't announce any big improvements to progressive web apps at the WWDC conference. So that's, that's a thing.
39:37 Alex Cranz? Didn't happen.
39:38 Speaker 04 No.
39:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And like their improvements to Safari are like, now it'll be harder to use because the address bar is going to float around all over the place. They mean, like, they didn't do any core web stuff. They made Safari like, look better.
39:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, they put the address bar on the bottom and like, hooray. That's great. That's a better place for it on a phone.
39:57 Nilay Patel? Cause the phones are huge.
39:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
40:00 Nilay Patel? They moved, they moved a bunch of UI to the bottom of the phone. So you can use it with one hand.
40:04 Alex Cranz? I can actually like, use it with one hand now because I have very, very small hands. And so before I, if I wanted to like, use the top, I'd have to like, get both hands out. And I'm very excited to just use it all with one thumb. It's going to be great. Whole new world for me.
40:19 Speaker 04 But back to the privacy thing for a second. There was one new feature that, not to get all morbid, but with iOS 15, there'll be a new feature that lets your family access your data and your photos, should you die? And they were super casual about this at the keynote, which came off a little strange, but they were like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So when you're gone, as you know, dropped it without any kind of like, but yeah, it's kind of surprising like this did not, was not there before. And now it will be, which is good, I think.
40:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And it's actually a big policy change for Apple because before that was it. If nobody had your password, like, all your stuff was gone. So they like, made this change. I think Joanna wrote a big piece and had a video about this. So like, but you're right, it was very casual. It was like, and now on to spatial audio. And it's like, wait, hold on.
41:07 Nilay Patel? I'm still grappling with my inevitable mortality because we just pumped the brakes for one second. We should take a break actually, and come back and talk about spatial audio. We'll be right back.
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42:26 Nilay Patel? Okay, we're back. Yeah, there's, there's more to talk about, but Chris, you've been living in a spatial audio universe for these past few days. Tell us what's going on here, because there's like a lot of spatial audio news. It was took, it was tucked into every nook and cranny of this announcement, and it's actually really hard to unpack it.
42:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, because now there are two kinds of spatial audio from Apple, which isn't confusing at all. There's the head tracking kind of spatial audio, which came out last year for movies and TV shows. So if you watch through certain apps and you have AirPods, you can turn your head and the sound will stay like planted or fixed like on your source device, like your iPad or your, or your iPhone, which is cool. That works super well. But this past week, they launched spatial audio for Apple Music, and that works with all headphones. So that's cool. But this whole thing about like surround sound music is not a new concept. I don't know how many of people listening to the show have heard like a super audio CD, but the music industry has been pushing this kind of thing for years and years and years. And so this is like the latest take on that.
43:28 Speaker 04 And that's all done through Atmos and certain tracks sound really special. But I'd say 70%, you're just kind of sitting there wondering what happened to the song that you knew before.
43:39 Nilay Patel? 70%? Really? Oh, it's so hit and miss, dude.
43:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
43:43 Nilay Patel? It's bad. So, so there's like a lot to unpack here. So the spatial audio with the video, the reason it does head tracking makes a lot of sense because. But it's basically just taking surround sound from a movie. We've got a center channel and the voices are always coming out of the center channel.
43:59 Speaker 03 Right.
44:00 Nilay Patel? And kind of recreating it in a 3D sound field around you. So if you turn your head, it still seems like the voices are coming out of the people on the screen. This, I totally buy it. It is one of the cooler sort of like AirPods demos you can do with someone. It's just very impressive. It has a utility to it like I, there's a part of me that's like, I, it's more fun to watch movies this way. Cause it's like, everything's all moving around, right? Um, and then I'm like, wait, I own several televisions. What am I doing? The music stuff is different. Like it's different from like a business way. It's different from a experience way. And then it's different, as Chris was saying, and like, nobody knows how to use this stuff yet. It is just a mess.
44:43 Nilay Patel? Like it, some of these tracks are really impressive and cool. And some of them, I think the joke I made is I listened to, uh, Simple Man by Leonard Skinnerd yesterday. And it just feels like the guitarist is like creeping up behind you.
44:59 Nilay Patel? Why are you over there, dude? Like the rest of the band is on stage. Get to work, man.
45:05 Speaker 03 Is it like a Looney Tunes? Like you're Bugs Bunny and the guitarist is Elmer Fudd and he's just getting closer and closer.
45:13 Nilay Patel? It's like, are we just late?
45:17 Speaker 04 Seems like newer albums are better because like now producers actually do mix like for Atmos. And so like newer albums, like the St. Vincent one that people have been talking about, I think. Some other stuff that's been out recently is all mixed for Atmos. So it sounds good. Uh, but if you go back to like, you know, old stuff, it's mostly like remasters. And that really comes down to like, how much people care about like making it sound good on Atmos. And it seems like if you're a fan of Blink 182, you're going to be disappointed.
45:45 Nilay Patel? That's really an evergreen statement there, Chris.
45:49 Speaker 04 But there were these songs that were like the ones to check out to hear it bad. And so I listened to Papa Roach yesterday for the first time in like 20 years because it was like particularly bad example of spatial audio. So I had to experience it.
46:03 Nilay Patel? Well, so what's really interesting with that, right? All those like big rock songs, pop punk songs, they were all mixed for two channels and they're all mixed to be pretty loud. Like all those sounds are, they're mixed like in the studio. They, they cut frequencies, they stack them to layer those sounds and make those songs sound huge. And like, right, they're just big sounding songs. If you like disassemble them and move all the instruments into corners of the sound field, like those songs start to sound really empty, right? And there's like, I think that's what most people have described it as. Like they feel really echoey and empty because you're not supposed to be able to pick out every little instrument. It's supposed to be like a big wall of noise. That like, right, we're just going to learn how it works.
46:48 Nilay Patel? And just like with stereo, like really, really early stereo records, like the producers were over excited. And we're just like hard pan the guitars all over the place and they don't do it anymore. Like they figured out how to use it. So we'll see, but there's just a part of this where Apple, Eddie Q gave an interview to Michael Singleton at Billboard. Like he used to work at The Verge.
47:10 Speaker 04 He was so mean about lossless, my heart was broken.
47:13 Nilay Patel? He was like, no one can hear it, your ears aren't good enough.
47:17 Nilay Patel? But he's like spatial is like HD. It's like, it's the jump to HD, everyone can hear it. And it's true, everyone can hear it because it sounds so different. But it's not like you're getting more necessarily, it's just a different kind of tool.
47:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, he had tried to sell it quite a bit by saying it sounded like you're like in the room with the band, which it's not that great. Even like, um, so you can listen, listen to it through headphones. But if you have like a fallen at most system, you can play it from the Apple TV 4K and there it sounds really, really nice. But I think like the bulk of people, how they hear this will be through the AirPods most likely.
47:47 Nilay Patel? Or any headphones, because you only need two channels. And all they're really doing is playing weird phasing and delay tricks. So like you can do it with any headphones because you're just sending the signal out. What's really interesting to me is that I think Apple's making a big deal out of it. They're like kind of owning it. Right? Like this, it feels like Apple announced spatial audio.
48:06 Speaker 04 Correct.
48:06 Nilay Patel? But like, it's actually Warner Brothers and Dolby and Universal.
48:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, just giving you these mixes they already have.
48:13 Nilay Patel? Right. Three years ago, they're like, this is the, this is the thing. And I think their hope was that everyone would charge more money for it and then pay them more money. Cause that's how the music industry works. So like, would you like to pay us for Dark Side of the Moon again? We know you would. And then like off, they're off to the races. But like, these Atmos files are the same files that Amazon Music has, that Tidal has, that, right? They're not getting special Apple remasters. So it's, I'm very curious to see if these things sound different across different services. Or if Apple's doing some system level spatial audio stuff, like there's just a lot of parts of the sort of signal chain. Where I'm not sure what, who's doing what, when.
48:55 Speaker 04 Right. And they said this fall, they are going to bring the head tracking stuff to Apple Music too. And so I think that's going to be pretty strange. I'm not sure why.
49:03 Alex Cranz? So you can like back up to the guitarist and get closer.
49:07 Speaker 04 You can turn around to that Skinner guitar.
49:09 Nilay Patel? I really want everyone, I'm sure you haven't listened to Skinner in a long time. It just feels like a fair bet. But Apple made a bunch of playlists. Right? Called like for Apple Music in spatial audio. And so there's a rock one and a hip hop one. So like just dive through them. They're fun to listen to. And like, just go into the rock one and like, just listen to this dude, just creep.
49:30 Alex Cranz? I'm so excited. Like, I'm honestly gonna do it after, after we finish this podcast. But, and it's only in those, like the spatial audio stuff's only in those specific playlist, right? Like you can't just, it's not like if you already had that song on a playlist, it's suddenly going to convert.
49:45 Nilay Patel? It depends.
49:45 Speaker 04 It does. Yeah.
49:47 Nilay Patel? If you have it downloaded, you have to delete it and re-download it, obviously.
49:50 Alex Cranz? Okay.
49:51 Nilay Patel? That makes sense. If it's just a playlist and streaming, it'll just play. One thing that's, I, Chris and I were talking about this yesterday. You can't turn it on and off in the app per song, which I would really like to be able to do. You're, it's either on for Apple Music or it's off. And like, there's one setting in the middle called automatic, which I don't quite understand, like. Chris, maybe you can explain it better. But either way, you're like enabling it all the time or you're disabling it. And like, there are some songs like, oh, this sounds great. Like classical music in spatial audio is like very cool sounding.
50:30 Speaker 04 Jazz too.
50:31 Nilay Patel? But any rock song just sounds empty. And like, I should just be able to turn it on and off, right?
50:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, you should. I think so. Oh, yeah. So the auto mode, I think that does actually look for Apple's own devices like the AirPods or certain Beats headphones. And so it'll just play those by default, which is kind of wild. They're like, millions of people are now just going to hear this by default for their music. So I guess that kind of shows how excited Apple is about it. We'll have to see where it goes. I mean, I've left it on and off to hear the difference. And there's one shortcut where you can like, use the control center and like turn off spatial audio real fast. And that'll like, switch the mix back to the stereo version. And so that's the fastest way I've found to go back and forth.
51:05 Nilay Patel? And that's in the control center of the phone.
51:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, so you can just pull that down and do that. But there should just be like a button to press to like switch between the two.
51:11 Alex Cranz? I don't know as much about music as you guys do because Neil, I started talking about like all the bandwidth and stuff. And I was like, oh, wow, I didn't know any of that. This is new information. I was just listening. Is it really like HD for, for video? Or is it more like when they started color, like colorizing black and white films? Whereas like, these things were never meant for this. And we're like, you know what? We're gonna, we're gonna put a little splash of color on here to get people excited about It's a Wonderful Night or whatever.
51:38 Nilay Patel? That's, I think this is like a very verged ass question. What is like HD for video implies so many things. It implies higher resolution, obviously. It also, for most people, implied a different aspect ratio. And then further implied a different form factor of a TV that got everybody to buy a new TV.
51:59 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
51:59 Nilay Patel? There were some very strange like HD CRTs. And they like roamed, they roamed the earth like a dinosaur. You know, I was like, but for most people, when you say HD, it's like, you might not have been seeing the extra resolution. You might have just been seeing that it was 16 by nine now. You might not have been perceiving 16 by nine. And I promise you, most people, when you start trying to explain aspect ratios to them, they very quickly stop dating you.
52:30 Nilay Patel? You might have just been perceiving that the TV was thinner and on the wall.
52:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:35 Nilay Patel? Right. So there's like a lot to unpack from HD and like what people really meant and why you want that because it drove this big buying cycle.
52:43 Speaker 03 Isn't the better analog just 3D, 3D TV? It was a desperate attempt to get people to buy stuff and remaster stuff.
52:50 Speaker 04 Maybe, but you had to buy stuff for 3D TV.
52:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
52:53 Speaker 04 Like here, it's just there and works.
52:54 Alex Cranz? And where are your little glasses?
52:56 Speaker 04 Yeah. So there are no glasses to buy or like TVs to buy, which was the worst part of the whole equation in that case.
53:00 Speaker 03 Yeah.
53:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But like, so higher resolution is the reason Eddie Q is dunking lossless audio? Or the reason that, you know, it's fun to laugh at audiophiles who buy $5,000 cables? It's because they, people swear they can hear it and most people can't hear anything.
53:16 Speaker 04 There's some old quote from Steve Jobs. I think it was like one of the all things D appearances where he said like, music is one of the first cases where people just settled and stopped caring about quality. Like whereas film, we just want like 4K and HD and it's gotten higher and higher. But for music, we just kind of settled on like MP3 and AAC. So I guess like the question is now, is spatial audio the thing that'll like send us to a new, new era of music?
53:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But the thing is like, what you perceive when you see something, like the delta between you seeing that it's different is like pretty small compared to music. Right? Most people are like, I'm very happy listening to the song I like on a very tiny AirPods. AirPods sound like garbage. People love them. What are you going to do? Right? Like they like them. They're happy. They're moving on with their lives.
54:00 Alex Cranz? It does the job.
54:01 Nilay Patel? It does the job. So you have to make it sound really different for people to notice it. And this sounds really different. And I think in some places, as Chris and I have both experienced, it sounds really cool. In some places it's just like, yo, Gary Rossington was late to the concert today. He's just soloing his way up to the stage. And in some places, it sounds, I've seen this on Twitter a few times now, like you're pushing the hall button, or the concert button, or the stadium button on an old receiver. You know, and you're doing that kind of crazy DSP effect, and you're just like adding a bunch of echo. And it's like, why did they build these features? Like, who, if you are out there, and your primary listening mode is like stadium, I just want, I want to know who you are.
54:45 Nilay Patel? Like, I'm so curious. Like, let's hang out. I'll buy you a beer. We can listen to some echoey music at your house together. But like, it does feel like one of those gigantic, permanent DSP effects. And I think maybe the industry has to like, catch up to it. But it's also fascinating to me that Apple has like, really grabbed it. It's a Marvin Gaye song, right? It's like, their big demo was Zayn Lowe.
55:10 Speaker 03 Yeah.
55:10 Nilay Patel? In one of the playlists.
55:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, they're like, here's the mono version, here's the stereo version, now here's spatial audio.
55:16 Nilay Patel? And it's a cool demo, and Zayn Lowe is very exciting. Like, he's just, when Zayn Lowe's excited, you're on that roller coaster with Zayn Lowe. Like, he's a compelling figure. It is also the exact same demo that Dolby does on its website with a less exciting person, right? Like, this is happening somewhere else in the industry, and Apple's just sort of grabbing it. So we'll see. I told you we could talk about spatial audio for an hour. Dieter, do you want to do iPad multitasking for the next hour?
55:40 Speaker 03 I do. Actually, I want to, I want to think about that a long time. I want to talk about Monterey before we get there. So here's what's new in Monterey. All the stuff that we talked about for the iPhone. So FaceTime stuff, the share stuff in FaceTime. Oh, by the way, whenever anybody sends you a link to anything now, if it exists in an Apple service, Apple's, all of Apple's news and video and whatever services will now have an extra tab saying, here's stuff that people shared with you. This is the social update to iMessage. I don't, I don't think that's going to work, but it's there. They have focus mode, they have the new Quick Notes thing, all that stuff. And then the coolest demo is universal control.
56:25 Nilay Patel? Oh, yeah.
56:25 Speaker 03 And there's a bunch of other stuff. You can AirPlay to a Mac now, but don't try and use it in a monitor, because AirPlay is not that good. I could talk about shortcuts for a long time. But like, universal control is, you start it from a Mac, and then you slide your mouse over to the left or right edge of the screen, and when you do that... The Mac is like, I bet you there's an iPad over there. And then it tries to put the cursor onto the iPad and then you keep sliding and then it gets accepted by the iPad and now your cursor's on an iPad. And your keyboard and mouse on your Mac control the iPad. And then, once you've made that connection, you know, they're just together. You can actually use the iPad's keyboard and mouse to control your Mac if you want. It just becomes like a mouse that you can move around with any of the attached, you know, mice controllers.
57:08 Speaker 03 And whatever, whatever screen the mouse is on, it's controlling that screen and your keyboard works on that screen. It's a very cool demo. And I made a video about it based on basically technologies that Apple's had for like three or four years. They just finally like put them together in the right way.
57:24 Nilay Patel? I love the fact that they're just sort of assuming that if you add a third screen, it's on the other side. Like, yeah, you know that they tried to whiteboard some extremely complicated technical solution. And then the one person in the back room was like, well, there's already one on the right. Isn't it probably just on the left?
57:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
57:40 Nilay Patel? And that was just like the end of that conversation.
57:43 Speaker 03 Here's the question for Vergecast listeners everywhere. If you are one of the people, and I respect you, I believe in your right to make this choice, even though I fundamentally disagree with it, having tried it myself for many years. But what if you are one of these people that puts your dock on the left or right of the screen? Ooh. What happens then?
58:04 Alex Cranz? Ooh, you're still around? I didn't know they, they existed still.
58:08 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. Don't, don't, again.
58:10 Alex Cranz? I think I used to do it when I had, when I, when I had two monitors, when I just had like two monitors. That, that was, it made sense then, because you would put it on one monitor to one side. And you'd be like, this is my big boy monitor. This is my, my main monitor. And then there'd be the other monitor, and that's just where you played all the anime that you got off like BitTorrent.
58:30 Speaker 03 If, if you're, if you're a dock on the side user, Alex's Twitter account is Alex H. Krantz, and you should let her know.
58:38 Alex Cranz? Just, just let me, what anime are you watching? And what torrent like site did you use to get it?
58:45 Nilay Patel? Amazing. I used to be a dock on the side person. Then I got a bigger laptop.
58:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You get a bigger screen. You get like, like the last time I did it, I think we all, we were still in like the full screen mode. You know, we were still doing the like, the, the little terrible squares. And so I'm like, who, I guess there are people still using those. I guess it makes sense, but I do, I am really like curious who's still doing it now. Cause it just.
59:11 Nilay Patel? Oh, we're gonna hear from some people.
59:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I like my DMs, I should probably close them.
59:16 Nilay Patel? It's gonna be like a 500 to one ratio of people who have the dock on the side to people who listen to everything in stadium mode. That's my, my current feedback ratio guess.
59:28 Speaker 03 Shortcuts is gonna sync between iPad and Mac and iPhone, which means that all the shortcuts you've set up on your iPhone will appear on your Mac. And then if you try and run them, they'll just error out if they don't work, because they don't have the appropriate app. They're keeping Automator around, but the future of shortcuts. So who knows how long Automator is gonna stick around, hopefully a while, probably a while.
59:52 Nilay Patel? They said multi-year process.
59:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. I'm excited for shortcuts on the Mac. I am, I'm excited for Apple to actually actively develop some sort of automation system on the Mac instead of, you know, ignore it, which is what they did with Automator for the past five years. So that'll be good.
1:00:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I think it's what's, I've seen people do amazing things with shortcuts on the iPhone. I think I am sort of excited about the idea that Apple's committed to an automation platform that works across devices. Because that means they might commit to it working in HomeKit better. Because right now that is a mess.
1:00:23 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:00:24 Alex Cranz? Please do it, Apple.
1:00:25 Nilay Patel? So this is just like a baby step towards acknowledging that sometimes you just want shortcuts in your house. And that maybe they should run on a HomeKit hub and that should not explode in your face every time you try to do it. That would be very cool. Also being able to edit that stuff, those kinds of shortcuts on a Mac. Way easier than doing it on a phone or iPad.
1:00:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure.
1:00:47 Nilay Patel? I do think that's pretty exciting. Okay, let's take a break and then we can talk about this iPad situation. How's that feel?
1:00:54 Speaker 03 Great.
1:00:55 Nilay Patel? We're gonna take a break. Dieter's gonna emotionally prepare himself. We'll be right back.
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1:02:18 Nilay Patel? Okay, we're back. Dieter, here's, wait, before, before we get all emo, one way to think about the iPad multitasking reboot is that you won.
1:02:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:02:30 Nilay Patel? Have you thought about considering this as a victory?
1:02:33 Speaker 03 Yes, I have.
1:02:35 Nilay Patel? Okay. How to go?
1:02:36 Speaker 03 It's a Pyrrhic victory.
1:02:41 Speaker 03 So two years ago, when they first unveiled the new way to move windows around on the iPad, I made a video suggesting that it was not discoverable or intuitive, that it's very powerful once you learn it, but you have to watch a bunch of how to videos in order to figure it out. And then once you do, it's great. And two years later, Apple was like, yep, that, that is true. And so they kept everything basically the same. But they added hamburger menus to the top of every single window on an iPad that you can now tap to bring up little window options to either move it left sub-screen on left or right, or turn it into a slide over or whatever. That's fine. It's great. People will find it that way more easily.
1:03:26 Speaker 03 I just can't help point out that this is the system that Samsung has used for years.
1:03:33 Speaker 03 Like, if you've given up and copied Samsung's windowing system, you've definitely failed. You've definitely given up.
1:03:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah, there's only so many ways for them to go, though, right?
1:03:45 Speaker 03 Well, here's a way. Windows. Just let me just pop it out. You can have a floating window for certain things inside certain apps, but it floats over the app itself. It's like you can, it only exists in like, like three or four different modes. And there's a new center mode for a window to exist in. So that's fine. I feel bad that they had to like make a button that you can see and tap, but it makes sense. I get it. I accept it in my heart. The thing that drives me batty is the shelf. So, apps on the iPad can have multiple windows. And before, if you wanted to get to one of them, you'd have to open the app. You wouldn't know which window would open. It would be the last one you used, but maybe you remembered.
1:04:30 Speaker 03 And then you'd have to like long press on the icon on the dock, and then it would show all the windows, and then you'd pick another window and you'd go. Now, what they've done is as soon as you open the app, it shows the shelf, which is all of the open windows for that app. Now, this is an app-by-app thing. So the shelf only exists for windows from a certain app, and it only shows up inside that app. Unless you're in split screen, then the shelf will show the windows from the two apps that are in split screen.
1:04:56 Nilay Patel? Wait.
1:04:57 Speaker 03 Yes. See? Exactly. That, I just explained it as succinctly and clearly as it is possible to explain it. And all of you are just like, wait.
1:05:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, what they took away was a bunch of hidden UI, right? They just like made a bunch of UI visible.
1:05:11 Speaker 03 Yep.
1:05:12 Nilay Patel? A bunch of windowing controls, basically. They have made it, I think, a little bit easier for this multi-window situation. Although the, one of the things that I've just like, I've never really been able to hear an iPad. Maybe this will make it simpler is like, I don't know which apps support multiple windows going.
1:05:31 Speaker 03 That's like, you know, you just gotta long press on some stuff in the app and see what happens. That's how you, that's how you pop out a new window from an app. You long press or drag on something and you just see like, you just grab a Safari tab and you just go.
1:05:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so I can, that makes sense. Like Safari is like, has like windows, like it, that has always made sense to me. The other apps, like, I don't even know, I'm not gonna try.
1:05:53 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:05:53 Nilay Patel? What if I'm disappointed? I don't wish to be disappointed today.
1:05:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:05:57 Nilay Patel? But like, that's like, that, that turn you're describing where like, and then you enter a split screen mode and these behaviors start to change. That's the one where I don't think they added any more visible UI to like, guide you through it.
1:06:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, no, it's, it's tough to figure out how that works. And like, it's a real pro user thing. And I think that popping open multiple windows from a single app on an iPad is genuinely a pro user thing. And so I am basically okay with it being a little bit complicated or hidden in some ways. Because, I mean, it's so rare that anyone actually uses that stuff that it's, it's fine. Like, the people that know that, that know it and need it, they can grab it.
1:06:34 Alex Cranz? I've only ever used it on accident.
1:06:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:06:37 Alex Cranz? I have opened new windows on Safari so many times. And then I'm like, I just want you to go. I don't, I don't want you here. And like, when you were telling us how to get to the shelf, I was taking notes so that I can actually go close some windows on my iPad after this. I had no idea.
1:06:55 Nilay Patel? The one thing I, I would really like, and I don't think they've added this, is like presets.
1:07:01 Speaker 03 Presets.
1:07:02 Nilay Patel? Once upon a time, when I would like, go on airplanes, remember those? They're great. iPads are great on airplanes. They don't use a lot of power a lot of time. And like, I'd be like, okay, here's what I want right now. I want Slack, I want a Safari window, and I want messages. Right? And like having to configure that every time always just seemed bonkers to me.
1:07:21 Speaker 03 Like, yeah.
1:07:22 Nilay Patel? Let that just be a button I can push. It's like, here's this app layout I want that's gonna make me like productive like right away. And I don't think they've solved that problem. And in some ways, they've actually made it more complicated. Cause now you have all these like, like split screen app instances all over the place. We'll see. I'm willing to give it a shot, but like, that's actually the thing I want is like, here are the three things I want to use. Just let me use them.
1:07:43 Alex Cranz? Couldn't you do a shortcut?
1:07:44 Nilay Patel? I guess you could. Gonna find out.
1:07:45 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:07:46 Nilay Patel? Can you do a shortcut that moves windows around on iPad?
1:07:49 Speaker 03 That I don't know. I haven't tried that yet. I'm sure Federico Vitici would be able to tell you. To that question.
1:07:56 Nilay Patel? Someone should start like a shortcut consultancy.
1:07:58 Speaker 03 Yeah. That's actually a really good idea.
1:08:01 Alex Cranz? I wouldn't pay, but I'd go to them.
1:08:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:08:03 Nilay Patel? So. You just like wait outside the door, please.
1:08:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Try to get some, some help from them when they're leaving.
1:08:11 Speaker 03 Yeah. I saved my other emotion for the iPad section, even though it could have gone to the Monterey section. What the hell have they done to Safari?
1:08:21 Alex Cranz? I think it looks cute.
1:08:22 Speaker 03 So what they, if you don't know, what they've done is they've introduced tab groups on the left, which is great. And then they have taken the entire toolbar and collapsed it into a single line. So on, on the iPhone, it's at the bottom and you have to hit extra buttons to get to share. That's fine. On the iPad and on the Mac, all the tabs are at the top and you, and the URL bar has been integrated into the tab. And so if you want to go click on the URL bar, you have to find where it is on the left or the right. The tabs are also floating. They're not actually attached to the page that's open anymore. They're just sort of up there in a different color. And so if you're on like fourth tab from the right and you want to go to the URL, you either got to remember the keyboard shortcut.
1:09:04 Speaker 03 Or if you go up to click, you gotta like, I don't know, like know it's a fourth tab from the right or happen to see a subtly different color. Cause that's the only visual indication that that is the tab URL that you're on. And then on top of all of that, because the URL has been integrated into the tabs themselves. The ability for you to like, do stuff with the URL has diminished even further. I fundamentally believe that Apple hates URLs and does not want anybody to ever see them. And it is trying to get there as quickly as it can, but it doesn't want anybody to like notice. So it's just doing it in baby steps.
1:09:37 Nilay Patel? To that, but the entire web.
1:09:40 Alex Cranz? It's just trying to AOL the entire internet.
1:09:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah, the, the part where the tab group, so really, what's the rule? Fitz's rule, Fitz's law.
1:09:49 Speaker 03 Fitz's law, yeah.
1:09:50 Nilay Patel? Right, where like fixed points on the screen are the easiest to get to and like require the least cognitive load. Like Wikipedia.
1:09:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's, it's the edges of the screen that's Fitz's law, but I get where you're going.
1:10:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah, right. So like right now in Chrome or even the current version of Safari, the top of your browser is like pretty fixed in space. Like things aren't moving around so much. And so like you know where things are, you know where tabs are, whatever. And you have this kind of like spatial relationship to them. And then the guitarist from Lynyrd Skynyrd sneaks up behind your browser. The new version of Safari, all that stuff is always moving. So when you switch a tab, like the address bar opens up and all of the other tabs like scoot over. So you have, you don't have this like fixed, like physical reference to where your things are. And I just don't know, like Apple is better at UI design than most companies most of the time.
1:10:46 Nilay Patel? And this one feels like they, they missed the basics of just let people know where things are in a predictable way.
1:10:53 Speaker 03 Right.
1:10:53 Alex Cranz? Can you imagine trying to walk someone who doesn't use their computer a lot through opening multiple tabs now? And like jumping between them? Can you imagine like I, I'm just not going to take phone support calls from family members for a while after this happens. Cause it's just going to be brutal. I think people are going to get lost, but I also think it's, I still think it's cute.
1:11:16 Nilay Patel? It does look nice.
1:11:17 Alex Cranz? It looks really nice.
1:11:19 Nilay Patel? And like, you know, they're, they're doing some syncing stuff. They are part of a, a new industry wide consortium with Google and Microsoft and others, Mozilla to do standardized web extensions, which I think is really cool and like a big move for Apple.
1:11:32 Speaker 03 It's very good that Apple did this. Let's not give Apple credit for it in the way that like they like, oh, matter like Apple. Everyone's basically adopting some home kit standards for the low level stuff for smart home stuff. That's like an Apple driven thing because they had to fix home kit. Apple adopting web extensions for Safari is like, oh, everyone else is doing this and no one's making stuff for our stuff anymore. We should probably get on board finally.
1:11:55 Nilay Patel? I just think like, we'll see. It's another one of those, I don't know that like really basic computer users even use tabs or know they exist or care about tab groups, right? And then like, we are, we exist in a community of very online people who are like, I have 500 tabs open today. One of my favorite newsletters is literally called Today in Tabs.
1:12:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:12:17 Nilay Patel? There's just a huge yawning chasm of expectations from computers here. So we'll see. I just, the fact that all the stuff is moving around seems like the, it's the, that's the basics, right? Is like, leave the UI alone and then let, let the, the content change. Don't have the content just like completely move itself around all the time.
1:12:38 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:12:38 Nilay Patel? All right. That's the iPad. That's also happening, by the way, on the, on the Mac version of Safari 2, which I think is going to be even yet another reason for me to not use Safari too often. You want to run through the, the, the watch real quick? It's like not a lot happening with the watch.
1:12:54 Speaker 03 There's not a lot. Like, the, the most interesting watch stuff is actually not watch stuff. So you can share health data with trusted family members. And so you could theoretically set up your parents or your grandparents watch to like, send you alerts when they have a fall or something else. There's a lot of privacy stuff related to that. They've added workout types for Tai Chi and Pilates. Okay. They, what else is on the watch? They have new photo stuff. So you can like browse through photos more nicely. And then there's a new photo watch face that like pops out the face and puts it over the clock. And it's like, you can scroll the digital crown to like make the face zoom if that's
1:13:34 Speaker 03 a thing that you want to do. And then of course, the most important feature that is only available on watch OS and nowhere else is you could set multiple timers.
1:13:48 Speaker 03 Oh my God. Finally. Finally. But of course, the iPhone, I don't think can do it. Just, just to watch. So, once again, the clock app on the iPhone continues to be hot garbage that Apple refuses to touch, and the clock app on the watch is good. Oh, we should also mention iPhone and watch are also getting a bunch of key stuff. BMW, once again, promises that you'll be able to unlock your car with your phone six months in the future. Feels like that's been going on for a while now, but they're adding NFC keys. And so they've got, they've got, I think they've got Schleg and another like Yale on board.
1:14:21 Alex Cranz? And Hyatt too, right?
1:14:23 Speaker 03 Hyatt, yeah. And there'll be a bunch of hotels as well. So.
1:14:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah, hotels, office buildings, all that stuff.
1:14:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's, it, we're long overdue for just, just use NFC all, it's fine. And yeah, so hopefully that gets out there really fast.
1:14:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah, we have not really talked about the, the ID card thing. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna say this very directly. If I'm pulled over and the cop wants my driver's license, the chance that I'm going to hand them my smartphone is zero, and it should be zero for you too.
1:14:53 Speaker 03 Yep.
1:14:53 Nilay Patel? Right? Like, that is just, it's just not acceptable. And so like, maybe there's gonna be this huge infrastructure of, I don't know, police technology that lets you like beep a smartphone to get your ID off it and onto there. Like, maybe that will exist.
1:15:08 Alex Cranz? You tap their phone.
1:15:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't, I don't, it's not, that doesn't seem likely.
1:15:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:15:15 Nilay Patel? Also, these phones unlock with your face. So even if you hand them a phone that's locked and like in that ID mode, their opportunity to unlock it just requires a clear view of your face. And they're the police, and they can definitely get you to give you a clear view of your face. So like, I just, this is one of those features where. The tech industry is just moving down the track, right? They want to replace your wallet, all the cards in it. I get it. I understand. There's a bunch of state by state level initiatives to do this work. Completely understand it. Down here on the ground, it's like, I am never, ever going to use this feature. I will always want a piece of plastic that I can hand to a,
1:15:57 Nilay Patel? a police officer or a TSA agent or something, because my life is on my smartphone and I'm not handing that over. Like, there's a night, like, that little Fourth Amendment vignette in 99 problems is like, just in my head all of the time, right? You're just not going to legally search my shit. Like, that's it. That's like, that's where your head should be at all the time. And your phone is like, the gateway to illegally searching you. So, I don't know, that's, I don't want to be on too much of a high horse. I'm certain, we're going to hear a lot about this. The chances of me ever using this feature are zero, and it's a very high bar to get me off of zero.
1:16:31 Speaker 03 Yep.
1:16:31 Nilay Patel? Okay. See, we needed to end with a lecture. It's not just web standards all the time here on the Vergecast. Sometimes there's strident lectures about privacy. There is a bunch of other news. We should just mention it very quickly. Microsoft today announced Xbox TV app. Actually, Phil Spencer was on Decoder and he hinted at this stuff, pretty clearly, a few months ago. So, XCloud is basically going everywhere. So, they're gonna do apps for smart TVs that at least stream Xbox games. They're gonna make their own streaming stick, which seems danger-acy. Like, why is that dangerous?
1:17:07 Speaker 03 What operating system is that strict gonna run?
1:17:09 Alex Cranz? Android. It's gonna be Android.
1:17:11 Nilay Patel? It's gonna be Android. It's like, they're gonna make a weird Fire TV that runs XCloud.
1:17:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, of course they are.
1:17:16 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's, it's gonna be your little, like, $50 Xbox on a stick.
1:17:21 Speaker 03 What's dangerous about this? This is great. I love it.
1:17:27 Nilay Patel? These devices are, Chris reviews a lot of them. Little, tiny, cheap streaming devices are harder to execute than you think.
1:17:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay, that's fair.
1:17:35 Nilay Patel? Microsoft making yet another fork of Android is like, what are we doing? Or they're gonna do an official, like, they're gonna do like a Chromecast one, which is less dangerous. But like, or they're gonna, it's gonna run Windows, which would be incredible, if Microsoft went to like, Disney and Netflix and is like, we need to make a Windows streaming.
1:17:54 Speaker 03 But you used to be able to buy a Windows computer and a stick, like, Intel sold a NUC that was literally a stick, that you could stick in the back of a TV.
1:18:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:18:01 Speaker 03 Back in the day.
1:18:02 Nilay Patel? The marketing genius of calling that a NUC.
1:18:06 Nilay Patel? Anyway, really bold stuff from Microsoft and it's the middle of E3s this weekend. So there's just like gaming announcements everywhere. Google is doing a deal with AT&T to get Stadia out in the world, which is sure.
1:18:17 Alex Cranz? Oh, that was like when when Quibi did partnered with T-Mobile.
1:18:22 Nilay Patel? Or when when AT&T partnered with Magic Leap, like, come on. Yeah. That's great. When AT&T does things that always works out and no one ever loses their job. And really bold stuff from Microsoft. This is what Stadia, like this is what Google wanted to be first to. And they didn't execute well and Microsoft is just showing up. And I think they're, I think they're, this stuff is gonna be really compelling, especially the apps on TV, other TV platforms.
1:18:47 Nilay Patel? Alex Heath, new Verge reporter, scoop machine, scoop that Facebook is playing a smartwatch for next summer with two cameras and a heart rate monitor. One of the cameras appears to like be like constantly taking, it's like very Facebook.
1:19:00 Alex Cranz? You can like detach one of the cameras, right?
1:19:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Facebook's goal is to make a piece of hardware that is so compelling, you will not use your phone to get around Apple. The Facebook Apple war is like building to a head. And so like, yep, there's some, some of this hardware stuff. Then there's like Facebook, it's gonna start telling creators and Instagram and on its other platforms, how much Apple is taking out of their digital services. When they sell things like ticketed events and like they're gearing up, but I don't know about Facebook's smartwatch. I don't know. I don't know, man. Chris, you reviewed the new Sony earbuds.
1:19:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's been a busy June for earbuds. Last week was the Google Pixel Buds A series, which were a nice set of $99 earbuds. Sony just put out these WF 1000 XM4 earbuds. And they're much better than the first pair were. These are now the best noise cancelling earbuds you can get. So, so if all you care about is music quality and noise cancellation, this is, this is the one. They cost $279, so they're not cheap, but they sound amazing. And, and yeah, the battery life is great and hint, hint, we're not quite done with earbud news. So maybe check out The Verge early next week and see what else is coming up.
1:20:13 Nilay Patel? I feel like I should send it there. I want to, but we think there's a folding pixel coming this year right here.
1:20:19 Speaker 03 I don't know about coming this year. The news is that Samsung is like ramping up supply to provide to Google this year. That to me suggests that it's more likely next year. We know they're working on it. So that's true. Whether or not they're going to have the guts or the ability to announce one this year. TBD. Also, it's Google, and so it would have leaked for real, like a visible thing this year. Just, you know, like, but it's definitely coming. I just, I am iffy on whether or not they're actually going to be able to announce it this year.
1:20:51 Nilay Patel? And then lastly, President Biden revoked the Trump ban on TikTok and WeChat, which I have to pay attention. Never actually banned anything. It's like one of, one of the extreme lowlights of like pandemic year was the Trump rally. And then, you know, the TikTok teams took credit for making no one come to it, which by the way, has never like been conclusively proven or disproven. We all, like, a lot of people want to believe it's correct, right? Like, it's a great story. I think the people on TikTok want to believe they disrupted this. I'm just telling you, it's, there's the causal link has never really been conclusively proven. It feels right. And like, I'm not going to tell you how to feel. I'm just going to tell you there's never been conclusive anyhow.
1:21:36 Nilay Patel? But that spiraling into Trump potentially believing it. And then a bunch of China hawks convincing Trump to ban TikTok. And then TikTok getting scared and then Trump requesting a finder's fee from Microsoft. Cause he was going to sell TikTok to Microsoft. Like, yeah, I'm saying this, it doesn't seem like it happened, but it absolutely happened. And we had to fucking take it seriously every day. And I just remember the look of pain on like Russell and McKenna's face. Because every morning we'd wake up and like another random company would be in the mix to buy TikTok. Remember, and then Julia was on the show every couple of weeks. And she'd be like, another Disney executive has been forced out and works for TikTok now, but he quit.
1:22:21 Nilay Patel? Anyway, Biden rescinded this order that never took any effect. TikTok was actually suing and kind of winning. But there's a new framework for evaluating how Chinese tech companies can work in the United States. The Biden administration does not want to see himself on China. So that will continue. But I just was remembering how much I had to think about TikTok and Oracle at the same time. Yeah, didn't Oracle, that was, that almost happened. We came like, maybe. But it's just like two great tastes that do not taste great together. Or TikTok and Oracle, like, what were you doing? Anyhow, all that news is on the site. There's a bunch of other W W C analysis on the site, a bunch of features we didn't have time to talk about in depth, plus all kinds of other stuff.
1:23:04 Nilay Patel? Also, if you're listening to this Friday, this comes out on Friday, this morning, as you listen to this, Ashley Carmen has a feature that she's been working on for months about a podcasting hype house from the depths of hell. It is one of the wildest stories we've ever published. So go read that. Okay, you can tweet at us. I'm at reckless theaters, at backlon. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. It's true. Chris is Chris Welch. It sure is. Decoder next week. It's a big one. Jamie Heineman, the CTO of John Deere. And let me tell you, did we ever talk about repairing tractors for hours? Tractors are crazy. Some of the wildest tech you could ever think. Do you know there's like, like Nvidia GPUs and modern John Deere tractors? They can identify individual plants. It's. Oh, it's amazing. Okay.
1:23:49 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it was a good one. That's coming on Tuesday. Okay, that's it. Rock and roll. Sip sip.
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