WWDC 2022: Apple's iOS 16, new M2 processor, macOS Ventura, and more

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss all the important announcements from Apple's WWDC. Also: USB-C will be mandatory for phones sold in the EU ‘by autumn 2024 and the Xbox game streaming TV app feels almost like the real thing All stories discussed this week: Apple announces new flagship M2 processor Apple announces redesigned MacBook Air with M2 chip and MagSafe MacBook Air and Pro (2022) versus MacBook Pros (2021): spec comparison Apple CarPlay is expanding with new features that can integrate deeper into the car Apple iOS 16 brings massive improvements to lock screen and messages Live Activities is a new iOS 16 feature meant to improve notifications Apple will let you edit and even unsend texts in Messages in iOS 16 Apple announces all-new Home app at WWDC iPadOS 16 takes a step closer to laptop-level multitasking Apple’s macOS 13 Ventura with new Stage Manager tool announced at WWDC You'll soon be able to use an iPhone as a Mac webcam Continuity Camera: Apple explains how your iPhone will become a Mac webcam watchOS 9 introduces new running metrics and medication reminders Apple's medication feature is a step in the right direction Apple's tvOS looks destined for a slow year after little WWDC attention Apple Pay Later is the company's take on a buy now, pay later service USB-C will be mandatory for phones sold in the EU ‘by autumn 2024’ What the EU’s new USB-C rules mean for the iPhone The Xbox game streaming TV app feels almost like the real thing Taco Bell opens its first ‘Defy’ restaurant that prioritizes ordering via app The year of the NFT What unions could mean for Apple with Zoe Schiffer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today on The Vergecast, we'll get into all things WWDC, redesigned MacBook Air, the new features coming to iOS and the Mac, and Neelai explains why he thinks the CarPlay feature's coming might actually be vaporware. And at the end, we'll talk about the Xbox TV app news and whether or not this is Microsoft's game streaming dream finally coming to reality. That's all coming up right after this.

• 0:22Speaker 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.

• 1:07Speaker 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.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Drag and Drop, the technology that you thought you knew, but which the richest company in the world demoed as though it was a startling innovation in 2022. That's the tagline for Drag and Drop. It's the Drag and Drop Alliance actually put out a press release. I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here.

• 2:13David Pierce?

  Hi, I'm your friend who will always remind you that command tab exists and that's actually just the best way to move around your computer.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  That's very true. Alex Trance is here. Hey, Alex.

• 2:23Alex Cranz?

  I'm still just thinking about Drag and Drop Alliance. Like, who all is in it?

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  There's gotta be one.

• 2:27David Pierce?

  It's like a pop punk band that I would very much listen to.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  There's someone has gotta like have tried to form an industry coalition about Drag and Drop.

• 2:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  But there was one for plugging in USB stuff into Windows and Microsoft was very proud of it. And I don't remember what it was called because it honestly, that was, I drank that information away. It was, that was in my twenties. It's against God now.

• 2:48Alex Cranz?

  You don't need it anymore. They don't need it anymore.

• 2:50David Pierce?

  If it wasn't called the Plug and Play Alliance, it should have been. So I think we can just, we can just go with that.

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  Lots of news this week. David and I were at W W C in person, which was very fun. We'll talk about that. There's some gadget news. There's a new Taco Bell that's on this list for some reason. There actually is a bunch of Xbox news. They're doing game streaming on Samsung TVs. We gotta talk about all that. I want to start by just saying something very cool. This is our 500th Friday episode of The Vergecast. So we've, Alex has done mini series and all this other stuff, but Friday episodes, the Vcast classic. Uh, this is episode 500, which is kind of incredible.

• 3:25David Pierce?

  It's crazy.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  Thank you all for listening for over 10 years. If you're with us from like the Engadget podcast, like 15 years of this podcast, which is crazy to think about. I drank most of those memories away too. But thank you all for listening. We've got like big upgrades for The Vergecast in store. We're very excited about them. We're not ready to talk about them. But I would say in the next couple of weeks.

• 3:45David Pierce?

  Soon.

• 3:46Nilay Patel?

  We've got some ideas that are coming and we're excited to share them all with you. I think it's gonna be a good time. But it's episode 500 of the Friday Vergecast classic.

• 3:56Nilay Patel?

  The upgrade is you're only going to be able to download it from the Windows App Store. On a Surface RT.

• 4:01David Pierce?

  And you can drag it from one place to another.

• 4:04Nilay Patel?

  Seamlessly drag it from one, one displayed to another. But yeah, it's been, I would say the show, we launched the entire Verge off the back of this show.

• 4:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  We brought that audience over and for the folks who've been there the whole time with us, that's incredible. If the folks who've joined us over the years, it's a pretty fun show to do. It's a pretty great community. So thank you all for listening. Okay. Now get out of here.

• 4:24David Pierce?

  We can talk about computers.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  It's like my, my dad instincts at like expressing affection kick in. It's like, now get out of here. Go make some money. Let's talk about WWDC broadly. David, I, we talked a little bit. It was great to be there in person. I know there was like a lot of donks about, Apple brought us all out there and then we watched a video. Like, yes, that's just like inherently optically silly that that occurred, but it's not like during a live WWDC, like I was raising my hand and being like, uh, Tim, number questions. It's always a presentation.

• 4:57David Pierce?

  I mean, in a funny way, you could actually argue it was better to watch the video live, like actually being there than sometimes it has been in the past to sit in the audience. Because there are a lot of things that like, when they do those AR demos, that's always my favorite. When it's just like a person walking around on stage with their iPad. To be on the stream, you can see what they're looking at and they cut around and it looks sort of cool. We're just watching a person wander around a stage looking at an iPad. So it definitely was like, we flew to Cupertino to watch a video, but A, that's only like a small part of what WWDC actually is. And B, like, the vibes were just so good. People were so happy to like be around these people again. It was actually at Apple Park in the spaceship in their

• 5:40David Pierce?

  like huge gorgeous cafeteria, which was really cool. It was just, I don't know, it was, it was fun to be back. I think in part just because it was fun to be back, but also like they did the event pretty well, I thought.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  They did a good job. Uh, David kept describing the vibe as the first day of summer camp.

• 5:56David Pierce?

  It was.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  Like everyone was just happy to be outside together, right? And then like, the point is like, not the presentation. The point is afterwards, we got to hold the computers in our hands and I saw Phil Schiller and Greg Joswiak and Tim Cook walked in like he was Ariana Grande, surrounded by security and everyone got very quiet. You know, like, it was just a very strange moment. Like first there was clapping and then there was a dead hush. And it's like, is he gonna like the MacBook Air? And he, you know, he went and looked at it as though he'd never seen it before.

• 6:23Alex Cranz?

  What if he just thrown it to the ground?

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  It would be amazing, like an amazing troll would be like, if he was like, what is this?

• 6:29David Pierce?

  Well, that's kind of what it felt like, because normally he used to have Johnny Ive, who would like give him the tour of Apple products. But this time he just sort of walked around by himself being like, hmm.

• 6:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, with a huge entourage of people. He was nowhere, he was nowhere near by himself.

• 6:44David Pierce?

  No, but there was no one to like, give him the, the, you know, dog and pony show. It was just Tim Cook sort of casually considering a laptop in front of hundreds of TV cameras.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  It was truly odd. There's that, and there's also like the event itself, like, I don't know. And it feels amazing to even remark on this, but we were all together. Like, we were sitting behind Marquez Brownlee and next to Renee Ritchie. And Joanna Stern was two rows in front of us and Jason Snow was there. And I, like, I high five Gruber, like, we were together and being able to watch all those people react to the news all at once is a very different feeling than watching a streamer be on Twitter. So yes, it's very funny that we went to Apple Park for the world's fanciest drive-in movie.

• 7:25Alex Cranz?

  I, I stayed home. I wore my pajama pants, just rolled over off of my bed to cover the event. It was great.

• 7:31Nilay Patel?

  It is easier to live blog at home, especially off the stream, like.

• 7:34David Pierce?

  Except for this one where the stream was like six minutes behind or something. We, we lived in the future by being there.

• 7:39Alex Cranz?

  No, no, you guys were almost exactly two minutes ahead of us. And so I kept like, I was like reading the live blog and be like, all right, next person, get ready. And they're like, how do you know? And I'm like, the live blog?

• 7:52Nilay Patel?

  Also, David and I are rusty, like, we invented a bunch of these moves and then we completely forgot them. I was like, did you bring a camera? And David was like, I did. And we had to like, go find fear in our video producer and like, get an extra camera off him. So we're gonna get better at it. But that part was great. I just like, want to say that, like, we haven't done events in like, three years. Google had like a handful of people at I O. There's been a handful of weird, like Samsung one in, one out moments. Apple just like, did it.

• 8:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  And it was great. So it was cool to be there. It was cool to be in the Steve Jobs Theater, although we didn't, weren't actually in the theater. We were just in like the beautifully lit, hands-on space above the theater.

• 8:29Alex Cranz?

  Is that where they showed off the, the laptop was in the, the lobby?

• 8:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, the wildest thing, and I've definitely mentioned this before, the wildest thing about the Steve Jobs Theater is there's speakers all around it, like hidden in the grass and you walk up a long path to it. And they just play like new age music. And it sounds, I kept describing it as like the wet, like the wedding march that like Tom Cruise would have played at his Scientology wedding, Katie Holmes. You know, like, it's like, it's like exciting, but at the same time, it's like, also, we might all die in a sentence, you know, or whatever. Like, it's like, really like, whoo, like music, and it just fills the space around the Steve Jobs Theater.

• 9:06Alex Cranz?

  It's always wild when you walk in to that, like, whole facility from the outside, because it is suddenly just like, suddenly music is playing. And like, you don't see the cars, you don't hear them, it's like gorgeous, like landscaping, and you're like, oh, okay.

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's like, is Johnny Ive gonna murder us all? Like, that's gonna happen in this environment.

• 9:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like, is someone gonna emerge from the brush and either show us a laptop or kill us?

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  It's not not like the circle, is what I want to say.

• 9:31David Pierce?

  Which Neel I did, in fact, say to an apple employee as we were walking around.

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  And she was like, hee hee you.

• 9:39Nilay Patel?

  All that was great, like, that's, but that's like the fun of it, like, you just don't get that at home. And like, it just made, I was rewatching the hands on videos, like, I am just like way more excited about a MacBook Air than legitimately a MacBook Air is exciting. Because I was just like happy to be there. Speaking of which, let's talk about the Air. So they announced the M2 processor. Well, they announced a bunch of stuff. They announced all their software stuff. We'll go through those in turn across platforms. Most of the stuff they announced is like massively cross-platform, which is interesting. But there was one big piece of hardware news, which I got right. All of you told me it was gonna be more M1 stuff, and I called it on the M2. New MacBook Air with an M2 chip. It feels like it wants, there's a lot to say. And then it's also a new MacBook Air with an M2 chip.

• 10:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, it's very, very interesting, because, okay, this is their second generation, technically, right? Like, we've gotten a bunch of different processors from them, but those are all kind of under the same general architecture and design and stuff. And this is slightly different architecture. It's a slightly different process that they're using, the five-in-P.

• 10:39Alex Cranz?

  Instead of like the five nanometer. So it's like a slightly enhanced process for slightly better speeds. And I just felt like that's like every processor announcement is that. It's always, hey, we got a new processor. Okay, cool. What's new about it? It's faster. Okay, cool. What else? Faster? So it was like, yes, this is very exciting. This is a huge monumental moment, but also like, okay, cool. It's faster.

• 11:05Nilay Patel?

  It's amazing that a Mac laptop has the same performance conversation problem as the iPhone has had for years.

• 11:12Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  Like the A series chips in the iPhones and iPads are so much faster than any competition that all you can say is like, I guarantee you that this will last for 10 years. Because you're, you don't, you're not going to need all of this overhead. And like 10 years from now, you'll be at the limit of this processor. Like, that's amazing for all these products. But like comparing it to a Windows laptop, which is almost certainly thicker, almost certainly has lower battery life and a performance penalty. It's like, well, now it's even better than that.

• 11:39Alex Cranz?

  It's like interesting because the M1s are kind of based on the A14. And the M2 is, is, appears to be based on the A15. And so we're seeing like the same kind of jumps there. But we're also, we'll see, we'll potentially see some downsides too, right? So a lot of the work that's gone into the M2 are on the, the power efficiency cores. So theoretically, this is going to be like much more efficient. But then they've also put a lot of work into the clock speed, although they didn't disclose those clock speeds, but it should like, it's going to run faster in that way. So it's like, it's interesting how they're doing it because usually it's, we're going to do more power efficiency and we're going to do better clock speeds, but it's all one processor. And here, because we have these like power efficiency cores, and then we have these other cores that are just to do like hardcore power.

• 12:24Alex Cranz?

  It's all split up and weird and wonky. I just want to get it in my hands and test it and see if it's actually better. Because we're also hearing that the GPU can actually draw more power. So the GPU theoretically, if you're playing a game, you could theoretically see less battery life on the exact same game between an M1 MacBook Air and an M2 MacBook Air.

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  So what we don't know about that is how big the battery is. So they were very clear in a variety of ways that they had designed the chip for this enclosure, which is funny because they're Apple. And like, if you didn't do it, like, what are you doing if you're not doing that? Like, if you're not designing the chip for your smallest enclosure, like, whatever. But so they were very clear they did that. And it's not, it's not that wedge shape anymore.

• 13:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 13:10Nilay Patel?

  Right. So it's like a traditional slab. It's thinner. And the answer is, you know, when we were talking to the executives wandering around, like, it was very much, the wedge shape is iconic, but getting away from the wedge shape made us, let us even out the thermals, let us put in a bigger battery and let us make it actually thinner. Cause we're not packing everything towards the back of that wedge.

• 13:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  So I think there's a balance between, yep, maybe the, maybe the chip can draw more power, but they've added more battery inside of that thermal envelope. You know, they also announced the 13 inch Pro with the M2 with no design changes whatsoever.

• 13:45David Pierce?

  Yeah. Announced is even like a strong term for what Apple did. Like they, they just sort of offhandedly mentioned that it existed and then moved on. Yeah.

• 13:54Alex Cranz?

  I just developed a theory. I've got a theory for why this exists now. Okay. So, so you can't actually do, if you were going to test the speed and the battery life and everything between the M1 MacBook Air and the M2 MacBook Air, you couldn't do it, right? Because totally different, like, designs, different batteries, everything. But you could do it with a MacBook Pro. So maybe it just exists. So we'll all buy it.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  So we'll benchmark the M2.

• 14:18Alex Cranz?

  It just exists for benchmarking.

• 14:19Nilay Patel?

  Let's, let's get to it in a second. So the, just to finish the battery life conversation, one thing about being there live and not doing it at home is I couldn't screenshot their graphs and then work myself up into a rage about the graphs. I had to like wait until I got back to the hotel, like hours later. And then I was like, do I have the juice to be mad about graphs? And it's like, let's see. And the answer was I did not.

• 14:42David Pierce?

  There weren't as many of them this time. There was one that just said 87% and had two lines. And that was, that was like, they were like, that's enough.

• 14:49Nilay Patel?

  The axes are completely, there is always, the axes are labeled in almost meaningless terms, like.

• 14:54Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 14:55Nilay Patel?

  Watts and then like relative performance. So we have no idea what they're measuring. Then the one that was useful was Photoshop times.

• 15:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  They said the new Air is 1.4 times faster than the outgoing. It's not outgoing technically than the old M1 Air. But we actually don't know which M1 they were measuring. So it might be the outgoing one, because only the base model remained. So it's like, who knows?

• 15:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  Right? It might be the fastest one and maybe the slowest one. We just like, don't know. And then their battery life claim. Is the one that is like the most bonkers because Apple historically has been so good at making battery life claims. All they said was 18 hours of video playback. And Joanna has like done an amazing video on this in the past and like diving deep into what Apple means by this. And what they mean by video playback time is you watch a video at like low brightness with all of the radios turned off on the computer over and over again for 18 hours until it dies.

• 15:52David Pierce?

  That's not how you use your computer?

• 15:54Nilay Patel?

  It's like at home, like in the dark.

• 15:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  So like, do I believe that Apple historically delivers great battery life across its products? I do, right? The M1 is spectacular with this. My M1 Pro, I have a 16 inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro. I got tripped up by optimized charging because I, I just plugged it in. I didn't open the lid and let it figure out that it was on Pacific time instead of East Coast time.

• 16:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 16:18Nilay Patel?

  It didn't charge to 100% in the morning. So I opened it to get ready and I was like, ooh, I don't have to spend the whole day at Apple with like 70% battery. So I charged it to 91%. I went to Apple. I live logged the whole event. I published the hands-on post. We airdropped a bunch of stuff. We're on the wifi. I came home. I worked a little bit. I watched two episodes of Stranger Things. I closed the lid. I worked again the next morning and like 24 hours later, the battery was at 17%.

• 16:48David Pierce?

  Insane.

• 16:49Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, this is ridiculous.

• 16:51Alex Cranz?

  And you had your radios on and everything?

• 16:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I was like, I was like using the hell out of this computer like for a day and a half, right? So like, do I, like, I'm pretty sure that Apple's good at this. I just think their stats are getting increasingly in the realm of like ludicrously useless.

• 17:06David Pierce?

  Yeah. They're just finding fancy ways to be like, it's very good. We're so much better than everybody else that it's not even worth comparing. Move on with your lives.

• 17:13Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's what they did in the phone space, right?

• 17:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Alex Cranz?

  Like the phone space for years, we all knew that they were better, but like they were never gonna like Qualcomm, they just left them in the dust. And so it's like, we're not even gonna bother. Like we got the new, the A15, go. It's great. Cool. Moving on. And, and they're kind of reaching that space. It seems like potentially they're going to be able to do the same for laptops. Maybe.

• 17:35Nilay Patel?

  It does not feel like anybody is competitive with this new air.

• 17:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Nilay Patel?

  We should ask Monica, Monica spends all her time reviewing laptops. We should like ask her when it's time for her to review this laptop. But just looking at it, looking at the performance claims, looking at, you know, it, we'll see. Like there's just a sense where they've taken another leap and we'll see. The thing about battery life measurements on the Mac, which is like particularly hard is on the iPhone. Their estimates are really accurate because they collect all of the usage telemetry from everyone's phones. And then they have like a model of an average day that is averaged across everyone's phone in the world. Like in, you know, Apple's like

• 18:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  differential privacy way of doing, and they can't, they can't quite do that with laptops that can run any arbitrary code. We've talked a lot like, how can I recreate your battery model? And they're like, you cannot.

• 18:20Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  And then with the Mac, they're like, it's 18 hours of video playback at two brightness with all the radio offs in the Apple TV app alone. And it's like, well, I can recreate that, but why? Who would do that? The next thing to talk about is the webcam, probably.

• 18:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, we can do that.

• 18:35Nilay Patel?

  It has one, it has a notch in the display. The display is bigger. It's a 1080p webcam. It's a 13.6 inch display, which is bigger than 13.3 on the new Pro. You can have feelings about the notch, but I don't see them on my laptop or my phone anymore. So like, whatever. The camera looks nice and my theory with that camera is that it's not cropping like all of Apple's center stage cameras do. So it might actually look good. Impossible to know until we get it.

• 19:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, the only thing we saw, I did think it was very funny that you and I, when we both walked up to the MacBook Air, instinctively did the same thing, which is open FaceTime and look at our own faces. Like independently of each other. This is the first thing we did when we both walked up to this computer. But yeah, it looked really good, but that room is, is like perfectly designed for great natural light. So it's, it's hard to know.

• 19:22Alex Cranz?

  It's the most nicely lit room in the world.

• 19:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, but it is definitely some measure of an improvement over what has come before. I think how much is, we're going to have to see in a review.

• 19:32Alex Cranz?

  Do you think it's notable that they didn't do center stage on it? Like, I mean, it is arguably for like why it looks better, but why didn't they do center stage?

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  Their laptops don't have center stage. iPads and desktop Macs have center stage, which I don't understand either, but so like, who knows?

• 19:48Alex Cranz?

  Feels like this could have been the moment to, to move it from the, the iPad.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  No, I think they should get rid of it entirely. I think they should find whoever invented center stage, break into his office and delete it.

• 19:58David Pierce?

  And then move the camera to the middle of the iPad and solve all your problems all at once.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  Like, center stage is a great idea in theory and it's a fun demo and then in practice, it's just like zooming all over the place and it makes your camera look worse.

• 20:11David Pierce?

  Well, it goes back to your point about the cropping, right? Like, so much of Apple's theory has just been ultra-wide cameras with tons of cropping. And I'm not even sure there's a version of the camera that is so good that that works, but with the camera quality that currently exists in these webcams, it just doesn't. And so you end up sacrificing actual good-looking picture for like, a nifty thing that follows you around. And my thing is like, I'm very happy to just like, swivel the screen of my iPad, but like, just make me look better in the camera.

• 20:39Alex Cranz?

  How many people were like, walking around their iPads in, in studio displays set in their homes?

• 20:46David Pierce?

  The only demo anyone ever gives is little kids running around the living room. That's the only one.

• 20:52Nilay Patel?

  Which obviously you never do with your laptop. That's only for the iPad people.

• 20:56David Pierce?

  And the iMac people, who plop it down on the coffee table.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying is, the, the story of the studio display, even after this update, it still looks bad. And it looks bad because they put a, a real camera in it and then they cropped it all the way down to nothing. So I'm hopeful that because there's no center stage here, this camera's an improvement. Am I expecting anything better than the 1080p camera on the 16-inch M1 Pro machine? I'm absolutely not. But in perfect light, it looked very nice. We should briefly talk about the 13-inch Pro, which, again, the chassis was designed for an Intel chip. So like, now it has an M2 in it, and it still has a touchbar for some baffling reason. And like, the answers were, we still make it, so we keep making it.

• 21:39David Pierce?

  The reason is not baffling at all. The reason is like, every, I think the simplest answer here is just, like, Apple has a bunch of these left and it's not that hard to just put an M2 in it and there are a bunch of people who will buy it. Like, yep. Like, oh, look, we have a way bigger enclosure than we need and it's a pretty good laptop that people mostly like, like...

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, their point was it's the second bestselling laptop in the world. The Air is number one and the 13-inch Pro is number two. And I want to be like, but because it's like, the slightly more expensive one.

• 22:06David Pierce?

  Even by that logic, you made the Air better, maybe now make the Pro better.

• 22:11Nilay Patel?

  But it's like, uh, Talladega Nights, it's like, keep, like, the air shake and Pro's bacon, it's like, that's how that's gonna work, you know? Like, you're just along for the ride, dude.

• 22:22Alex Cranz?

  Like, you're not listening for you.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  It does sound like eventually they'll change it, but I asked about the touch bar and they're like, "Yeah, we just didn't change the design." And that was the only answer any of them would offer. Okay, I'm being told we have to take a break and then I'm going to have a lot of feelings about CarPlay. Like, the rest of the show is just me talking about CarPlay.

• 22:39Alex Cranz?

  Buckle up.

• 22:44Speaker 05

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• 23:52Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. We do have to talk. It's not just gonna be CarPlay. I'm gonna try to hold it in.

• 23:57David Pierce?

  I just, I still hate Alex for saying buckle up. We moved past that way too fast. We had a whole ad break and I'm still mad at Alex for saying buckle up.

• 24:06Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 24:06Alex Cranz?

  You like drive us there.

• 24:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 24:09David Pierce?

  I have to go.

• 24:10Nilay Patel?

  We'll just start with CarPlay. So they announced a whole bunch of stuff, a bunch of iOS stuff, and at the end of the iOS segment, they're like, "And we've got the future of CarPlay. This is just a sneak peek." You know, in iOS 16, you get a bunch of widgets and all this stuff. And they're like, "Now what if your whole car was widgets?"

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  Right? And so like, they're like, you asked for it and you get it. And so the first thing they showed was like HVAC controls, which is like a perfect thing to add to CarPlay. Right? You're in CarPlay, you just want to like move the fan up. You've got one of those cars where they've taken the buttons away. I get it. Makes sense. And then they move over to the instrument cluster and they're like, display like the speedometer, the map. What if your RPM gauge looked like a progress bar from OS 10? Like old OS and like Aqua, like they're like, and themes, we'll do themes. And it's like, you don't even do themes in your other operator. Like, so like this all goes by in a flash. And then they put up this huge slide of carmaker logos. And they're like, our partners love it. These cars, this is just a sneak peek. Cars will be announced at the end of next year.

• 25:11David Pierce?

  There was one, one other beat of that before you get to how insane that whole thing was. They started the whole CarPlay thing by basically saying CarPlay is so good that people won't even buy a car that doesn't have it. I think that it was something like 79% of people that were surveyed said they wouldn't buy a car without CarPlay. And so it's like, the positioning here is like, Apple is basically like, we make the only car software anybody likes. Nobody will buy a car without CarPlay. So like, we're taking over, bitches. And that was like, that was the whole vibe of the rest of that presentation, which I thought was just fascinating.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  And those numbers are largely true. Like, every carmaker had, has had to get on board. Like Honda didn't do it for a long time and they had to do it. Mercedes didn't do it for a long time. They had to do it. BMW will sell you CarPlay as a subscription. They're like, yeah, you nerds will pay $39 a year for CarPlay. And like, that's how they sell it to people who, if you, um, you get it when you like lease it, but then if you like buy BMW, like it's crazy. But it's also just like not like, the tension in the auto industry is all these carmakers know that they want the steering wheels to go away. And then you're going to be trapped in their like Netflix cocoon where they want to like program advertising to you. And we would, on Decoder, we have all these car company CEO come on and they all say things like,

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  the way we're measuring the success of our, our car business is how many OTAs we deliver to our center stack. Cause we want to compete with Tesla. Tesla notably does not support CarPlay. Because for all of Elon's many faults, he knows that giving his interface away to Tim Cook is a bad idea. So it's true that carmakers make garbage software. And I keep making this joke, but like every car reviewer, if you watch the videos, they're like, just gesture at the screen and they're like, CarPlay and Android Auto. That's what that is for. But like, what that's really for is you get maps on it and you get your music on it. And those apps aren't even necessarily Apple's apps. Like, it's like Spotify and Google Maps show up on your center screen and that's what people use it for. They want the

• 27:11Nilay Patel?

  maps back, especially if they're going to do self-driving, especially if they're going to do advanced driver assist. They're not going to give you the instrument cluster. And like, so they put up the slide with the logos. Andy Hawkins goes and emails every company. None of them are committing to this.

• 27:27Alex Cranz?

  Well, Polestar did.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, let me just read some of them to you. So BMW, currently, we have placed a clear focus on further enhancing our iDrive user interface system. As part of this development, we will continue seamless integration of Apple's ecosystem. Integral to these efforts will be an evaluation of how the latest innovations announced at WWDC can be integrated in our solutions. Volvo, at this time, we have nothing to share. Toyota, we can't comment on future products this time. Ford, thanks for reaching out. We do not have any additional information. GM, GM has no commitments, Matt, this time. Mercedes is very good. Mercedes is the most polite German get the hell away from me I've ever heard in my entire life. In general, we evaluate all potentially relevant new technologies and functions internally. In this context, we also hold discussions with Apple.

• 28:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, so the the subtext of all of these, like, my my read of this is like, someone who gets emailed these statements all the time, is that like, the lowest level person on the CarPlay marketing team called the first phone number they could find at every one of these companies and was like, was like CarPlay, right? And the person on the other end was like, yeah, CarPlay. And then they were like, they're going on the slide. Done and done. Lock it down.

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  So then the two that are beyond this, there's Polestar, which Alex mentioned. By the way, Polestar and Volvo are like sister companies. There are Volvos that are like, literally, the Volvo XC90T8 powered by Polestar is like, that's the name of a Volvo you can buy.

• 28:50David Pierce?

  And isn't Polestar like an Android computer on wheels, basically?

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Polestar runs, I'll get to that in a minute. So but Polestar says, Apple CarPlay will come to Polestar 2 as part of an update later as well. So they don't even support it now.

• 29:03Alex Cranz?

  But it's coming.

• 29:04Nilay Patel?

  So they're just excited to say that Apple CarPlay is coming, period. And then we're also thrilled to announce that the next generation of CarPlay will be coming to Polestar cars in the future. Totally wide open. That could mean anything.

• 29:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Nilay Patel?

  But they're thrilled to announce it because they don't have CarPlay now. So that's Polestar like, okay, someone said something medium committal instead of in this context, we also hold discussions with them.

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  And then there's Stellantis, which makes Jeep and Ram and Fiat and all that stuff. And then there's Stellantis, which makes Ram and Jeep and Fiat and every this big European conglomerate. Their statement is, this is more of an Apple operating system for automotive applications rather than a CarPlay upgrade. We have not made any announcements regarding that system. So they're like, they're like Trojan horse alert. No, thank you. So Stellantis is interesting. Polestar is interesting. Ford is interesting. A bunch of companies have signed up to run Android on their cars. Ford, Google is just building it. Jim Farley was, I just talked to him and he's like, Google and Ford are working hand in hand.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  They're like making a custom version of this thing that's going to look like Ford Sync, which maybe they should reevaluate, whatever. But it's like Google runs on the car. Polestar just runs Android automotive.

• 30:26David Pierce?

  Does Polestar run gas?

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  That's the thing on top. Google Automotive Services.

• 30:31David Pierce?

  There's Android Automotive and gas runs on top of it. And then there's also Android Auto, which is a whole other, I'm dying.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  The CarPlay can better. It's very bad. It's very Google. All of them have their own messaging service.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  And then Stellantis just forked Android and is building its own Android thing with Amazon. So like you have this like mobile phone code running in cars all over the place. So it's very natural to assume what Apple showed with this version of CarPlay is like Apple code running on the car. But we asked about it and it is not. It's all running off your phone. And they didn't say whether it was wired or wireless. They're like, but all of this is on the phone. There's no code on the cars and that means your speedometer is running off of your phone. And I was like, what happens if the connection drops? And like, we'll have some fallback for it. It's like

• 31:17Alex Cranz?

  You just keep going.

• 31:20Nilay Patel?

  Pedal to the metal. So that's just like from a base technology perspective. Unclear how the thing will work. Unclear why those logos were in the presentation. When none of those partners want to commit to this at all. Maybe those are partners of the existing CarPlay. And Apple, just to David's point, just like upped the leverage on them. The other thing that's weird is that, you know, you might say, oh, this is just a preview of the Apple car. But the Apple car will almost certainly be an EV. This thing had like gas gauges and MPG figures. It's nuts. And then on top of all that, if you would look at the screenshot they showed you and you're like, this design is bonkers. Like, it makes no sense.

• 32:01David Pierce?

  No.

• 32:01Alex Cranz?

  The colors are nice.

• 32:03David Pierce?

  It's side scrolling widgets that go all the way over to the passenger seat. You know what I definitely want to do is reach all the way over to like where the glove compartment is to change the song that I'm listening to. Like, this is terrible.

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then they've got a calendar widget. They had a air quality widget that is separate from the temperature widget, which was on a different part of the screen.

• 32:21Alex Cranz?

  Like, air quality was higher. Like, if you're looking at your, you're gonna see air quality before you see what time it is. And also, the time is, is little analog clocks instead of just like numbers.

• 32:33Nilay Patel?

  No, those are the world clocks. So there is, there's a digital clock.

• 32:35Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  Uh, on the, on the, like, down. There's a little 9:41 PM digital, but then you have a big world clock for Tokyo and New York City.

• 32:44David Pierce?

  Cause that's what you always need in the car is to know several different time zones at a glance. But wait, Neil, I want you to explain something to me that you mentioned, just like in passing the other day that I still have been thinking about. Which is like the one screenshot that Apple showed of CarPlay where I was like, okay, this is like a genuinely good thing that I hope exists. Was the thing where it just had the, the heads up display and it just showed you the maps. And I was like, this is a thing that should obviously exist. And your response was that could already happen and just no one wants to do it? Is that true?

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  So CarPlay right now has the ability to support various sized screens and remapped it interface to different sized screens. And it also absolutely has the ability, since I was 13. To appear in the cluster or the heads up display. And a lot of some carmakers, maybe one or two have done it. So if you want, you know, your Apple CarPlay from Apple Maps to be in your center screen, the carmakers to enable it.

• 33:40David Pierce?

  So then how do you get from that exists and no one really wants to do it? To Apple taking over the rest of the instrument cluster also like that's the the leap. These companies are going to have to make is so enormous.

• 33:53Alex Cranz?

  I don't think you get there at all. I think this is the exact same thing we saw with Apple in entering the TV space. They were late there. They didn't want to like actually have their operating system be on the TVs natively. They wanted to sell their own hardware that runs the operating system that you plug in. And then they just got lapped again and again and again by Android. And the exact same thing is happening in the car space. And like, okay, yeah, like Ford is going to go build a whole big fancy tons of displays on their dashboard and they're going to put Android on it. And then you'll be able to plug your phone in and just switch over to Apple. Like, that's the plan as I understand it.

• 34:34Alex Cranz?

  And like, I mean, that's cool, but it's always you're always going to have those those weird interoperability things, right? You're always going to be like, well, I should actually use the Android version. Because if my phone runs out of battery or disconnects, I don't want to know. I would still like to know the speed limit I am going.

• 34:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the the idea, at least, again, I think this is all kind of like vapor. So the idea, as it was presented to us, was that the car is going to connect its internal systems to the phone. And the phone is just rendering the display and some of the controls. So a car is still going to know how fast it's going. Like the speedometer, your speed is not being calculated on the phone. It's the graphical display of the speed.

• 35:16Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  And there's like some bi-directional communication.

• 35:18David Pierce?

  But isn't it weird that you would have one speedometer when you don't have your phone with you in the car? And a whole other speedometer when you do? Like, just the idea that my driving experience completely changes based on whose phone is plugged in. And also like you and I were driving the other day, Neelai, and we used my phone for CarPlay. Or we so that like, it's like, this stuff just doesn't make sense with how people use their cars to me.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  There's a reason we keep asking car CEOs to come on Decoder, right? There's a reason they all want to be on Decoder. They are all trying to re-characterize themselves as effectively software companies.

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? And the car is a phone on wheels and like, there's all these endless cliches and you can, we did an entire roundup episode of what car makers say in Decoder. It, P Poo to Judd's on it. It's a great episode. You should go listen to it. But they all have the same problems, which is, they know that the primary user interface of the car has moved from the steering wheel to the center stack, right? And like, the steering wheel is becoming less and less important over time, and they have to add more and more driver assistance features, and eventually that steering wheel might go away. And then what you want to do is you want to program a bunch of entertainment in the car, or you want to change how you sell cars, or you want to sell advertising on those screens, or you want to take a 30% cut of every purchase that happens in the Instagram app on your car. Like, they see the revenue potential for all of these things. They want to strike

• 36:36Nilay Patel?

  the partnership with the EV charging networks and direct you to one and take a cut of whatever. Like, they see the money that can be made there. Are any of those ideas great? They are not. But they, like, all of them are basically advertising, or recurring revenue services, or whatever they are. But they see all that money that they've, the phone makers have made in these ways, and they're saying, well, our cars are phones on wheels. We're going to make that money, too. I think, like, a challenge they will have is people will still have their phones. So, like, I'm not sure that that will happen for them, but that's where they're going.

• 37:07Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's exact same as the TV space, right? Like, everybody, they saw the ad revenue, they saw all the things they could do. So they all went and said, well, we're going to build it here. And then ultimately, a lot of, not everybody, but a lot of us, just go get a set-top box.

• 37:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we get like a Roku or an Apple TV or something.

• 37:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's the same thing as a phone. Like, ultimately, people said, no, I'm going to bring my own operating system.

• 37:26Nilay Patel?

  The difference is when you're like, ties in TV crashes, or your Roku TV, or your Roku box doesn't play nice, you're not hurdling along the highway at 55 miles an hour, right? Like, it's just like a very, the stakes are very different.

• 37:40Alex Cranz?

  That's what kind of like blows my mind, that the plays that Apple is making, that Google is making, that the car makers are making, is so similar to the ones for TVs, because, one, we've already seen how it plays out on TVs. Like, you guys know exactly what's coming. You know exactly how this entire back and forth is going to play out. And, two, the stakes are so much higher. Like, actual lives on the line stakes versus just like, I was gonna eat my dinner and watch Obi-Wan and now I have to go restart the TV.

• 38:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, just think about it this way, like Ford right now sells Blue Cruise in it's F-150, a handful of like Lincolns and the Mustang logi.

• 38:16Alex Cranz?

  That's like it's auto.

• 38:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's it's advanced driver assistance system. It has mapped out a bunch of highways, split highways, split divider highways in America. That's the way it works. But you can take your hands off the wheel. The system monitors your eyes. If you look away for too long, it beeps at you. Put your hands away. And it works really well. People love it. Okay, like just think about the components of said system. Like it has a map of highways it works on. It is looking at you. It is driving the car. Like, what of those components are you gonna give to run on your phone? You're gonna give to Apple to take over? Are you gonna give them the Blue Cruise button to run on the iPhone? You gonna give them the map? Are you gonna let them drive the car? Like, are you just gonna let them re-render all of that UI however Apple wants? Like, they're they're never gonna do it.

• 39:03David Pierce?

  Well, and then the flip side question for Apple, which is notoriously unwilling to give its code to other companies. How much of that stuff is Apple going to be willing to give to car companies to put in the car? For fail safes and for when your phone Bluetooth dies and whatever, like neither side has any incentive to like play nicer than they have to here.

• 39:25Nilay Patel?

  And actually, Alex, your point about TVs, like this is the ultimate TV problem. Like, every TV maker has its own weirdo operating system now. So apt development has just like, it's a real fallback to like various weird HTML5 systems and extensions. Fine.

• 39:41David Pierce?

  So your HVAC system is going to be the HBO Max of your car.

• 39:45Nilay Patel?

  It's not a good plan.

• 39:47David Pierce?

  It's never gonna work.

• 39:48Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. Like, my thinking, just having asked around after this, is that Apple announced it to see what would happen. Right? To like, open the door, to put some pressure on those partners whose logos appeared on the thing. And that, you know, at the end of the day, they've got two moves. They can say, if you want CarPlay at all, you gotta support this. Seventy-nine percent of your buyers won't buy a car without CarPlay. And then see who breaks first. And then everyone also slowly follow along, just like Konda did back in the day. Or they're just gonna put out their own car. Right? And it's like, or we'll kill you. Like, we'll Zuckerberg you. And then the car industry is kind of like, but you've been threatening us with this car for a long time.

• 40:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, best of luck.

• 40:26Alex Cranz?

  So is this kind of them saying, don't go and partner with Unreal to have your weird, scum or fake car? UI, just partner with us.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Actually, that's a great, that comparison, we talked about this with Andy last time, right? Like, if you are Rivian, and you've just spent all this money on Unreal, and you're like, doing all this stuff, and you've built this UI, and you want to compete with Tesla, are you gonna hand it over to Apple? Well, you're absolutely not gonna do it. Like, that's your differentiator on top of the fact that you have a pickup truck that some people can, like, five people have, and Elon's still figuring out what to do with the wipers on the Cybertruck, like. Wiper? Actually, it's just, it's just the one wiper. There's an amazing picture of the Cybertruck that came out, and it's just got one wiper that doesn't go all the way up the windshield, and so like, your passenger gets nothing. And you, as the driver, by the way, also get nothing on that side of the windshield, and then it might not go all the way. It's a very good.

• 41:17Alex Cranz?

  Don't be tall in it.

• 41:18Nilay Patel?

  Other people focused on many other weird problems with this car, which, like, Tesla's in general have weird problems, but it's a pre-production, so you can't fault them. But like, the wiper is like, is that, you've been working on this wiper for like, eight months, dudes? And you only got to one. There's only one of them.

• 41:35Alex Cranz?

  It doesn't go all the way.

• 41:36Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't go all the way. There's someone, there's a lot of theories that the wiper telescopes all the way out, but it's like, why? Like, why? Why would you build that?

• 41:47Alex Cranz?

  And then it doesn't telescope out one day, and you're out in the rain, trying to pull it all the way out?

• 41:52Nilay Patel?

  What is the purpose of it? Why not just make the long wiper? It's very good. I encourage everyone to go look at this picture. It's incredible. Anyway, that's CarPlay. We will see. I told you I had a lot of feelings on it. But I said, end of next year. By the way, cars that are gonna be announced at the end of next year, they're already done. Car world is slow. So if you're talking about a car that we announced 18 months from now, like, that car is well in designed. Yep. It is in full, like, manufacturing ramp. The car makers are on like, four or five year cycles. So, we'll see. I think they just wanted to announce this and see what happens. That's very much the sense that I got from everybody. That was part of iOS. David, there's much iOS stuff that you're like, in love with.

• 42:28David Pierce?

  There is a bunch. So, I mean, the big announcements, if I had to like boil it all the way down, are basically new lock screen, bunch of wacky new ideas about notifications, and which I guess sort of goes hand in hand with the lock screen stuff. But basically, the idea is you can personalize the hell out of your lock screen. Now you can choose different fonts, you can have different pictures. It'll be sort of helpful in helping you figure out what looks good and what doesn't. But there's just like infinity new knobs to play with on how your phone looks, which I mostly think is great. I'm very curious to see like how that interface actually works, because the only thing Apple showed was just like swipe back and forth to change stuff. And I'm like, that seems like a giant pain in the ass, but who knows? So that's one thing. The second one is a bunch of new ideas about notifications.

• 43:11David Pierce?

  They're moving the, like, there's now a notification bundle down at the bottom of your screen that I don't totally understand. And there's also live activities, which was described to me as basically the notifications built on the tech stack of widgets. So you get that kind of like constantly updating information, but it lives in your notifications. So instead of like a new notification, my favorite example of this is like the one in my own life. It's like I get a notification every time somebody on my fantasy football team scores a touchdown. Instead of getting a new one every time, it'll just show me my fantasy football team score all day. Like, that's a good thing. And then the third thing is messages. I think like there's a bunch of other little things going on, but the big one was you can now mark a message as unread, which to me is like they could have just skipped the rest of WWDC,

• 43:55David Pierce?

  and I would have been happy because now I will remember to text my friends back. You can edit a message after you send it for a period of time. I think it's 15 minutes. And you can also unsend a message. So it's all like nothing sort of life changing and new. It's just a lot of these like little quality of life, make your phone make a little more sense to you stuff. Mostly, I'm into it. I'm very curious to see if anybody picks up live activities. And I know, Neel, it's a thing you have feelings about, too. Yeah.

• 44:18Alex Cranz?

  There's also improved haptics, too, right?

• 44:20David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. Dan Seifert on our team has basically not shut up about how excited he is that you get haptic feedback on the keyboard for like three days now.

• 44:28Alex Cranz?

  He's like, it's just a game changer. This changes everything. This is the biggest news.

• 44:32David Pierce?

  But Dan also still uses G-Board, which means I don't trust his opinions about phone keyboards. I turn off all the haptics on my phone. Same.

• 44:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:41David Pierce?

  Stop blessing me. Yeah, I don't like, I'm good. It shows me the letter after I type it. Like, that's pretty much all we need here.

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  Android phones used to like do haptics for real, but they had horrible haptic engines. So you like push a button, you're like, I hate this. I'll give it a try. Live, you're right. I'm very excited about live activities. Like it's the first new notification style we've seen in a long time. There's a lot of, I would say, Windows phone live tiles embedded in there.

• 45:07David Pierce?

  Also Android widgets, like these, these are things that have existed other places.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  Android doesn't send you widgets as notifications.

• 45:13David Pierce?

  That's true. Not this. Yeah, that is true. But like the interactive widget-y thing is more Android-y.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  So I think that's really cool. Like the thing that we have learned since is that only Apple's first party widgets get to be interactive and like have control, like music player will have like buttons and like whatever. And it's a live activity. Third party ones are just display. So sports scores and things like that. We'll see. I mean, I, I think first you have to see if anybody adopts it. Like really what you're saying is no one's going to use my app. This notification is going to send people into my app. It's just going to remain as a constant and as a information display surface that's related to my app. And we'll, we'll see. Like, I think that's a big decision for a lot of app makers.

• 45:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, that's kind of the weird tension, right? Like as, as Apple does, like it's rethinking notifications. It's, it's putting more information on your lock screen. It's like making the widgets more useful and putting them in more places. And the, the thrust of it is like, spend less time opening apps on your phone.

• 46:10Nilay Patel?

  Just look at your lock screen.

• 46:12David Pierce?

  Yeah. And like Apple even talked about it, the idea that like Craig Federighi, he was at the, the live recording of John Gruber's talk show, which was great. And I'm not sure when it's coming up, but everybody should watch it. And he was talking about the thing where you open your phone to do one thing and then sort of get lost in another app and how they want to start to solve for that. And I think one way you solve for that is to just like make your phone a little more glanceable. But you're going to do that at the expense of every developer who makes an app on your phone that requires you to actually look at that app from time to time. Which is like, that tension is really fascinating.

• 46:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think I do think like the ESPNs of the world will just do live activities like, I don't know, we'll see. I'm very excited for it. It's the first new notification idea in quite a long time.

• 46:47Alex Cranz?

  Who besides sports? Like, I keep trying to think of other ones and I like, all I've heard were sports. Like, they talked about sports, you guys talked about sports. What are the other, like, what would be a use case for live activities outside of sports?

• 47:00David Pierce?

  So, okay, so I'm looking at it. Here's one. I have five notifications on my phone showing me calendar events. And I think in a live activities world, it would just be a persistent thing that shows me my next calendar event.

• 47:09Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 47:10Nilay Patel?

  No, it's just a widget. No, that wouldn't be a live activity. That's just a calendar widget.

• 47:13David Pierce?

  Oh, you're right, because that's not changing.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  You want a notification of something that you're going to get another notification about. So Sports Scores is like the canonical one, because Eddie Q loves him some warriors. And so like, whatever. So that's like the easy one. I think if you want to monitor a stock price for a day, which if you're an Apple employee, like, maybe from time to time you want to monitor that stock price for a day. Anything that's going to change over time, but that you don't want to monitor permanently, is like a candidate for this.

• 47:42Alex Cranz?

  A really hopping WhatsApp group?

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  A really hopping, maybe. I mean, like, that would be like a thing to experiment with. Directions.

• 47:48David Pierce?

  Flight status?

• 47:50Nilay Patel?

  Flight status, direct, oh, that was, they demoed flight status.

• 47:52David Pierce?

  Oh, they did, okay.

• 47:53Nilay Patel?

  So travel stuff, right? You want to monitor it for a day, but you don't want a travel widget. You don't like monkey with adding and removing travel widgets, like.

• 48:00Alex Cranz?

  So it's like a temporary widget?

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like an ephemeral widget. And I think that's neat. Like, I don't, that idea has not existed. It's a combination of many ideas that have existed.

• 48:11Alex Cranz?

  You just did a much better job explaining it than any other way I've heard it explained, like the ephemeral widget.

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just like.

• 48:17Alex Cranz?

  I love that.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  It's, again, it's a remix of many ideas, including live titles, including much of Palm stuff. But it's one of the first truly novel UI ideas Apple's had in a long time. And I think there's a lot of surface there, but as they were saying, like, there's tension with app developers. Like if you're flight aware, you're not getting people to like open your app. Like you're just sending them a widget that goes away after a day. Like, what is the enduring value of that relationship?

• 48:43Alex Cranz?

  But theoretically, you still need to get the app. You still need to pay for the app and.

• 48:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, but flight aware doesn't get to show me ads if I'm not looking at the app all day.

• 48:53Alex Cranz?

  So that kind of those ad based developers are the ones who are going to like feel that sting.

• 48:59Nilay Patel?

  Or, I don't know, like ESPN, like they want you to open ESPN, like watch other streams, like read their content, like do all the stuff in ESPN. I guess that's unless you have ESPN plus that's ad based too. But you know what I mean? Like turning your app into a commodity information provider is like a real tension with these. But I think a lot of people are going to buy into them because the users will love you. And so like, that's a good thing, too.

• 49:19Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think the similarity there is like between media and aggregators, like news aggregators, right? Like it's, it's the exact same thing. Like we want you to click on our site and look at our ads.

• 49:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but would I, if in a world where we had an app, would I say we should do a live activity for all of our live logs? So I would be like, yes. And then like our business side would be like, but no, and we would have to like figure it out, right?

• 49:44David Pierce?

  Well, and the, the thing about that is like, it's not that hard to draw a line to like Apple's big theory about the future of everything from that. Right? Like Apple has not been unclear that it would prefer you did not have an ad based business model on your iPhone app. And Apple would really like you to charge a monthly subscription that it can take 30% of. So if it can like incentivize you to become that kind of provider that people will just pay for. And it just like pulls things to me at the best way. Like that's what Apple wants. So like it's, it's incentivizing this pretty heavily in a direction that also makes sense for Apple as a company.

• 50:18Alex Cranz?

  I thought it was interesting though, that does this mean like we're even less likely to get RCS?

• 50:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no mentions of RCS at all. There was a mention of Matter, the other standard.

• 50:27Alex Cranz?

  They said it out loud.

• 50:29Nilay Patel?

  They said it out loud. We've, we've joined the Matter consortium and then they said nothing about what that means.

• 50:34Alex Cranz?

  They kind of implied that they created it.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, cause Matter is basically HomeKit. So like, there's a lot of family resemblance there. So they're like, and we gave them HomeKit so they wouldn't steal your privacy. Cause that's what they would have done. So that's cool. They, one thing that's interesting is as of iOS 16, iPads can no longer be HomeKit hubs.

• 50:54Alex Cranz?

  I love this plan.

• 50:55Nilay Patel?

  Right? You need an Apple TV or a HomePod Mini. Probably because Matter needs thread and those devices have Bluetooth radios and thread radios in them.

• 51:05Alex Cranz?

  No, this is actually an improvement because right now, if you're maybe have a lot of Apple devices and you didn't understand what the hub was and you maybe activated on everything, not understanding what it is.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God, Alex.

• 51:19Alex Cranz?

  Then it would maybe always go to your iPad when you really didn't want it to. And you'd be like, stop it. Or it would choose like the one Apple TV that you never used.

• 51:29David Pierce?

  This feels like not a hypothetical example in your life, Alex. Do we need to talk about this?

• 51:33Alex Cranz?

  Just hypothetical. It's hypothetical. It's just out there in the world. No, I'm very, I'm honestly very excited that they're getting rid of it because I think like, I think how Apple has rolled out so much of like home has been really badly done. Like they have not explained it. The, how they explain everything about it, how to set it up. It is not super intuitive. I would not leave, I would not send my mom thread bulbs in a home pot and say, have fun. That would be hell. The calls would be nonstop. Like I can send her a laptop and be fine, maybe, but she can't set that up. And so like any move towards making it a little easier and getting rid of those excess choices in a really like choice fatigue scenario is great.

• 52:17Nilay Patel?

  The other thing they said in just along those lines were like an all new home app that's easier to use. And I'm looking, I'm like, they changed the wallpaper and some of the button shapes are different. It's very hard to see what the difference is.

• 52:30David Pierce?

  You can see cameras, that comes for something.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  No, you can see cameras in the current home app.

• 52:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, but they're higher now.

• 52:36Alex Cranz?

  They're not at the bottom.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  It's, I think it's clear, like something is happening in Matter and it's like some of this probably get, but there's just very little, there's very little there. So we'll see. I'm excited about the Matter call out. It's like when Apple says it, ideally that means it's close. It was delayed earlier this year, was supposed to launch already. So hopefully when this stuff comes out in the fall. So that's the iOS. What's really interesting is like, we talked about widgets. We talked about messages, which is on all the platforms. And we talked a bunch of stuff that's coming to every platform. Like iPhone stuff really is like the lock screen. They changed a lot. Themes, we didn't even talk about that. But yeah, you can change your clock font and you can, great.

• 53:16David Pierce?

  Which is, I should say, that's not nothing. Like the, the, there is this subset of Apple users that I think is probably most Apple users who just like want to turn their thing on and it works. Like the, the percentage of people I suspect who have all of the Apple icons in their same order on their home screen is like massively high. But then there's a subset of people and it's like a growing group of people who like go on TikTok and see all these crazy things you can do with icons and all the wacky stuff people are doing with widgets. And like, Apple is, I think, trying to give those people like more knobs to fiddle with without making the sort of default experience harder. And that's like, it's a good idea and I think it's the right one. I think it's going to be super, super hard to pull off.

• 53:58David Pierce?

  Cause the, the flip side of it is there's now a million buried cool features in iOS that iOS never tells you about. Uh, and so the only way to find them is to like discover them from some weird TikTok creator.

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  If you know one of the TikTokers who has built themselves a lucrative career being like, have you seen this setting on the iPhone? I want them on decoder, just like connect me. Cause I'm dying to know what their lives are like. Like, it's like another day in the Lambo, looking for settings that no one's ever heard about.

• 54:27Nilay Patel?

  Please tell me.

• 54:27Alex Cranz?

  Sitting in the Starbucks drive thru. Got a pup cup for the dog.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's take a break. We'll go through the rest of WWDC stuff and a little bit of lightning round on gadgets. We'll be right back.

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• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Should we just do the iPad and Mac together since Apple is smushing them together anyway?

• 56:05Alex Cranz?

  There's only one thing I want to talk about for either one of them anyway.

• 56:08David Pierce?

  Well, the story of both is Stage Manager, right?

• 56:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:11David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 56:12Alex Cranz?

  Stage Manager.

• 56:13David Pierce?

  Alex, you go first. I've had, I've been yelling about Stage Manager to like strangers on the street for the last three days. So like, let me not go first. Alex, you go first.

• 56:20Alex Cranz?

  I was just yelling at everybody in Slack the day of. Like, this is just, it's just another dock. It's basically just Expose, but then you have a whole other dock of Windows in addition to your dock of apps. And I really do question how many Windows the average user of iPad or macOS has opened at any one time that this is a super usable thing? Like that it fixes anything? Cause like, right? Like, I consider myself a fairly big power user and I don't have that many Windows open and I can look at them all on one screen. I just did it. You guys don't know it, but I just did it. Like, do people need more than that? Do people really have?

• 57:05Alex Cranz?

  Like, they were showing in the demo like 20 pages open. And like, do people really have that many open at all times? Tabs, yes.

• 57:12David Pierce?

  I'm the exact opposite from you. Like, I would, I would like to be able to see and interact with 11 different things simultaneously on my one screen. Like, is that a good use of my life and resources? No, but that is roughly how I try to use my computer at all times. And I think this is kind of the problem, right? Like, the forever challenge of the Mac is that everybody uses it slightly differently. And especially, it's now, it's very popular. A lot of people use it. And so Apple is perpetually trying to do new things. And it's now caught in this very Microsoft-y world where everybody is so set in their ways that, like, there was a time when I think what Apple would have tried to do is like, come up with something like Stage Manager, ditch everything else and be like, this is now the new way to use your Mac. We believe in it. We have killed Mission Control. We have killed Command Tab.

• 57:57David Pierce?

  Like, Stage Manager is the future. And now, Apple's response is basically like, we're going to give you all the ways to do everything, and you can just sort of pick from this grab bag whatever makes you happy. And to me, that's just a total cop-out. And what it actually leads to is people using none of these things and just continuing to be confused by how their computer is supposed to work.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, they got the real, they got the real Windows problem, right? They can't take anything away. Like, Alex is mission-controlling for days over here. Like, you can't be like, and we're taking that away from your work. Like, they cannot do that. So, this operating system is 20-something years old. It has some crufts, and Apple's better than most at removing crufts.

• 58:36David Pierce?

  True.

• 58:37Nilay Patel?

  But there's some cruft. I think they have Stage Manager on the Mac because they built it for the iPad. And if you have a bunch of iPad users, and you're like, and you should buy a Mac to do the things you can't do on your iPad. Like, you need a, you need like a windowing environment that's familiar to them. So now you have it, and that, like, whatever. Like, on the Mac, though, it just, it feels like Stage Manager is bizarre hybrid, where you want the Mac to be more of like a single-tasking operating system. It really is like, if you go back to the early, early days of OS 10, like, 2000's OS 10, there was a purple button in the menu bar that was called Single Window Mode.

• 59:12David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  And they announced it, and no one knew what it meant. And then Apple had to like, figure out what it meant. And it was like, we'll just make this window big. Like, it would, made no sense. And they eventually took it away. But it feels like we're back to Single Window Mode, where you're just going to hit a button and one app will take over your screen. And then you hit, like, pick another one, and like, another single app will take over your screen, which is how the iPad works. And then on the iPad, what that gives you is you've got more apps at once and you can like resize the windows and you know, it's beta. So that looks a little messy right now. So it's this weird tweener between making the iPad more like a Mac and making the Mac more like an iPad. And it's aimed at like a user base of maybe exactly four people

• 59:53Nilay Patel?

  who are Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi. Like I just, I don't know, like who is like clamoring for this. They were, I think we're all clamoring for Windows on the iPad. So they've achieved that in some strange way.

• 1:00:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Couldn't you just also command tab on your iPad? You can.

• 1:00:16David Pierce?

  You can.

• 1:00:16Nilay Patel?

  So it's. But when you do command tab on iPad, like literally like the whole thing like slides off. It's like a very dramatic, right? Like you're going from app to app. You're like moving. The iPad does not have the concept of spaces, right?

• 1:00:28David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:00:29Alex Cranz?

  So Stage Manager is about reducing the drama?

• 1:00:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34David Pierce?

  The way, the way Craig described it again at the talk show, which I thought was really interesting was basically like the problem with the Mac and the way he described it was that you're always cleaning up after yourself, which I actually thought was like a clever way of describing it. Right? Like the thing you do on your computers, like open a million tabs and apps and then just slowly prune and then open and prune. And it's like, it's, it gets messy. So you're cleaning up. And then on the iPad, people were running into like, I need to be able to see multiple things at a time. And I want to like, have the thing where I can be using a browser, but have an app behind it that I'm using for reference or whatever. And the thing that they designed to meet in the middle is Stage Manager. And I think Apple likes to have things that work in both places because I think people use both those devices. And the more Apple can like make the interfaces

• 1:01:16David Pierce?

  make sense, the happier it will be. But to me, it just feels like they made a thing that is the exact middle of the Venn diagram. And actually it doesn't solve anyone's problem in any particularly meaningful way. It's like a C plus on both sides. And they're like, great, we did it.

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  So what's fascinating about that is that's only available on the M1 iPads.

• 1:01:34David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  Because the M1 iPads now support virtual memory and like fast swap. So they can do it right before multitasking. And I've had had the great advantage or great disadvantage, depending on your point of view, of the iPad ruthlessly calling applications from memory. So it would just like sleep or suspend applications or quit them entirely just to preserve its memory because you're only doing one thing at a time. And then, yeah, you got slide over and the stuff, but now you're limited to three apps with M1 and swap and memory swap on iOS 16, you can do Mac like things like multiple live applications at once. So you're quickly switching before.

• 1:02:09David Pierce?

  I think it was eight at a time, right? Like eight, eight per pile.

• 1:02:13Nilay Patel?

  By the way, Craig referred to it as a pile of windows. And that's like, you guys, like, we're just quickly, the, they also announced a bunch of iPad stuff. They called it desktop class APIs and a desktop that files is getting improved to be desktop class. And then they announced real display support. So right now, when you plug a display into an iPad, it just mirrors your iPad. No matter how big the display is, you get like a four, three iPad in the middle of it. And that's what you get. Now it's a real extended display. And there's this whole sequence where he's like, and now I'm dragging one window from the iPad seamlessly to another display.

• 1:02:47David Pierce?

  I really wish you could all hear the noise that Neelai made in the middle of WWDC.

• 1:02:52Nilay Patel?

  Cracking up in the middle of this thing.

• 1:02:55David Pierce?

  Oh, my God. Had to, he had to apologize to everyone else in our row for his outburst.

• 1:03:01David Pierce?

  As Craig is going, I can drag my cursor seamlessly. Neelai just goes, ah.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  It's 2022, y'all. I've been dragging between displays for a long time. Yeah. And then he did another drag and drop gemmo. He's like, I found this file on my desktop. And I just on the Mac. Oh, by the way, if you click on the desktop now, all the windows go away, you get the desktop, which is great. Very exciting.

• 1:03:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Nilay Patel?

  Big improvement.

• 1:03:25David Pierce?

  Very good idea.

• 1:03:25Nilay Patel?

  But he's like, and then I picked up this picture and I just dragged it into this window. And everyone's like, ooh, I was like, that shit came out like 1988.

• 1:03:35David Pierce?

  What do we do? The Drag and Drop Alliance thinks about that.

• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  But it's real messy now, right? It's you've got the 329 iPad, which is an excellent Disney Plus machine for all the children in your life. You've got the iPad Air, which is, the iPad Air actually is more, it has an M1, so it can do all this stuff. Then you've got the Pros, which like add a stylus and all such stuff. But the app, like now you can window and you can do a thing. You've got Stage Manager and the apps run on a Mac. And it's like, it's real messy.

• 1:04:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Nilay Patel?

  And like, Apple's point to us every time we ask, like, I've literally started referring to this as like the Greg Joswiak memorial question is like, what's the difference between an iPad and a Mac? And the answer is always like, people buy them both. They have them both. They love them both. They should be easier to use together. Like, no one is making this decision the way that you think they are. And I buy it, but as they get closer and closer to each other, I think the risk of people actually making that decision gets much stronger. And I will say, I wandered around asking people like, did you just make a Surface RT? Like, did you make that weird, cut down version of Windows that only ran apps from the App Store? And it's like, well, it's the iPad, so it's way more successful than that. When

• 1:04:48Nilay Patel?

  you squint, there's Windows and there's Windows RT. And it's like, I don't, I just don't know how long it's going to take for Apple to just give in and let the iPad run Mac apps, or put a touchscreen on a Mac and let it go into iPad mode, right?

• 1:05:06David Pierce?

  I think the second thing is much more likely, personally. But yeah, I mean, your point about the iPad lineup, I think, is the right one. Because what's happened now is there is a version of the iPad lineup that makes sense next to the Mac, right? Like, the $329 iPad is a demonstrably different thing than any Mac. But if you're buying like the high-end iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard and a MacBook Air, like, those are damn close to being functionally the same device over time. Especially as like, your average user is going to use it, right? Like, the kind of person who is not mucking around in the terminal and editing video all day, that like, your experience of those two devices is going to be remarkably similar now, which I just think is fascinating. And it seems

• 1:05:48David Pierce?

  like Apple is doing that on purpose over time. And so I wonder, like, as those things get closer, how they're going to talk about it?

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, well, once or twice a year, I ask this question. And the answer is always the same. So we'll see. There's a little bit of other Mac stuff in this conversation.

• 1:06:03David Pierce?

  We have to talk about continuity camera. We have to.

• 1:06:05Nilay Patel?

  I love that they're calling it continuity camera. What an insane name for this feature. Like, like, what can we glue it on to? Continuity exists. So continuity is a feature that looks like you copy on a Mac and paste on an iPhone or use an iPad as a handoff.

• 1:06:17David Pierce?

  I did not put two and two together that that's why this is called continuity. I hate it even more now.

• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  Right. So, but that's like the overarching name for a bunch of all that stuff that like makes an iPhone and a Mac work together. It's continuity.

• 1:06:30Alex Cranz?

  And now it works with the camera on your iPhone.

• 1:06:32Nilay Patel?

  And now you've got continuity in the camera. So now you can plug, I think you can do it wired and wirelessly.

• 1:06:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  But now you can use your iPhone camera as your Mac webcam, which is hilarious because that's like, for years, like, why don't you just put an iPhone camera in a Mac? And they're like, we got you one better.

• 1:06:48David Pierce?

  Is better the word we would use?

• 1:06:50Alex Cranz?

  It's very specific iPhones, right? Like, it's only the iPhones that'll work with iOS 16. And they, they really pruned the number of devices being supported with this move. So, so your older iPhones aren't going to work with it. The ones you would be most inclined to like use as a webcam.

• 1:07:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, like that, the, the camo app has had a, a big run over the last couple of years because there were a lot of people who had, like you're saying, Alex, old iPhones sitting around that with that app, you could just plug straight into your computer and use it as a webcam. And now the pitch is much closer to like, attach your actual phone that you use every day to your laptop, which strikes me as a much bigger, more complicated thing to ask people to do.

• 1:07:33Alex Cranz?

  I feel like I wouldn't want to do that unless like, if somebody said, Alex, you have to go on BBC America in an hour. I'd be like, okay, I might do it for that.

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  I bought camo the other day because I was in my hotel room after W W C the next morning and I had to be on CNBC and I had looked at the webcam. I was like, I respect myself too much and I spent the money on camo.

• 1:07:52David Pierce?

  It's a good app.

• 1:07:53Alex Cranz?

  That's a great reason to use continuity. How many people needed a camera for an emergency for a TV op?

• 1:08:01David Pierce?

  Tim Cook sometimes.

• 1:08:02Nilay Patel?

  The funniest thing about that is I didn't have a mount for my phone. So I ended up with my laptop perched on a nightstand on top of an overturned garbage can. And then I made like a triangle with the lid of the laptop and I wedged my phone in the triangle. And like, if you watch that CNBC hit, it's just me looking terrified. Cause one, I can't see what's on the screen. Cause my, my, right. And it was nuts. And I was like, is this phone gonna fall over? So Apple has to solve this problem of like phone mounts. So they said there's going to be a Belkin mount. The phone mount they're showing that's stuck to the back of all these laptops is ugly.

• 1:08:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Nilay Patel?

  And it's ugly.

• 1:08:40David Pierce?

  I just keep thinking it looks like a, like a little kid suction cup that they just like ripped off of something and just went like onto the back of your Mac.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  Mounting your phone on the back of a laptop is difficult. Phones are heavy. So like your laptop lid is gonna like go in that direction.

• 1:08:56David Pierce?

  My one piece of advice for people who actually want to do this is buy a teeny tiny tripod and just stick that behind your laptop at a height where it just like, if you sit at the same place with your laptop all the time, which most people do, buy a tiny tripod and stick it behind there. It'll work much better.

• 1:09:12Alex Cranz?

  So Tim Cook, please go buy a tiny tripod.

• 1:09:16Nilay Patel?

  So see, this is fascinating. It's a good idea. Another laugh moment in the crowd was like, here's a mount we're making for the Pro Display XDR, because it doesn't have a camera. And then everyone was like, well, I could use that with my studio display.

• 1:09:29Nilay Patel?

  Sounds pretty good. We'll see. That's exciting. Like, that's a very obvious thing for Apple to do. I'm glad they did it. They announced Safari Pass keys they're doing with the FIDO Alliance. Google and Microsoft are doing that. That's very exciting, too. That's basically using your devices as passwords and getting rid of passwords entirely. That's a big deal. And then this is really cool. Both iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, they're getting a thing called Rapid Security Response where they can issue security updates without issuing operating system updates, which is cool.

• 1:09:56David Pierce?

  Wait, can I say one other really quick thing about the Mac that I think is fascinating? And this is also like, speaking of things that are sort of coming to all these platforms, Apple seems to be really interested in upgrading Spotlight as a thing. There's now going to be a little button on the bottom of the iPhone that says search, like where, where the little dots are that show your home screens. If you hit that, it'll bring up spotlight instead of having to drag down from the middle. And also they're adding all kinds of like image indexing on the web to spotlight. You're going to be able to do more actions in spotlight. Like, there have been rumors for years that Apple is going to build a search engine. And I actually think this is probably what that search engine looks like. Like, rather than trying to knowledge graph the web the way that Google did, Apple's just gonna like index your stuff and all the stuff you care about and just pull it all into spotlight so you can do stuff.

• 1:10:38David Pierce?

  And I just think that's kind of fascinating. Spotlight is one of those like under-loved features on a lot of these things that I think most people like don't know exists or how to use it.

• 1:10:47Alex Cranz?

  Every time I show it to somebody, they're delighted. They're like, wow, you can do that? You can just like hit Apple in space and find an app?

• 1:10:54Nilay Patel?

  I will say that Apple putting a search button at the bottom of the phone looks an awful lot like Android.

• 1:10:59David Pierce?

  Yes, it does.

• 1:10:59Nilay Patel?

  Like, the most like Android.

• 1:11:01Alex Cranz?

  Like, more than the lock screen and widgets.

• 1:11:04David Pierce?

  The other part of it that's interesting to me, though, is that there was a, there was a time when I would have assumed that that button would have been called Siri. And my, my pet question every WWDC is how often does Siri come up? And that number has just been dwindling and dwindling and dwindling. To the point now where like, all the things I thought would one day just be like Siri are now not Siri. And it's like, it's like search and it's spotlight and it is like Siri is being sort of slowly like ridden out of the stuff that you should be doing all day, every day.

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  There were some Siri mentions here, like, you know, conversational queries in the sessions. There were some Siri stuff.

• 1:11:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it's still around, but there was a minute where it was like, like in the way that Google is trying to sort of make assistant take over your entire Google life. Like Siri is very clearly not doing that within the Apple universe.

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'll mention TVOS quickly, only to say that no, nothing happened there. We had Neil Mohan, the chief product officer of YouTube on. I was like, where's my YouTube TV 5.1 audio support? So they announced it for Google TV, Android TV, and Roku. And they said, we're still waiting on our other platform partners to give us what we need. And then Apple announced TVS 16. I was like, that's happening. And then nothing. And virtually nothing else in tvOS 16. The only thing of note is that it's going to support HDR 10 plus now. If you're a Samsung TV owner and you don't have Dolby Vision, that's it. That's the big update. But there's like no content in HDR 10 plus. So, hooray.

• 1:12:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. The Watch OS stuff was was kind of interesting. Like, they're going to do prescription tracking now. So you'll be able to track your prescriptions. And as a warrior with an old mom who lives by herself, I'm very excited about that. There's also the potential for privacy. And I'm very excited.

• 1:12:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that's like a health feature. That's across. This is like the one thing about W2C we really stood out. Like, that's a feature in Apple Health that is expressed across all the platforms. It's not a watch feature.

• 1:12:52Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 1:12:53Nilay Patel?

  That's really cool. I'm just saying, like, it's interesting to see how many features were best thought of as Apple features and not product features.

• 1:13:01Alex Cranz?

  This is super nerdy. Sorry, inside baseball. But when you're when you're planning to cover these these events, we usually will be like, okay, this person's on Mac OS, this person's on iOS. Okay, this person's going to be on these breakouts. And increasingly, in the last like, year and a half, you can't do those hard assignments anymore. Because you'll be like, okay, you're going to be on Home. Well, there's not actually a Home section. It's sprinkled throughout. Because this Home feature is going to be really important for the iPad. And this one's going to be really important for the HomePod. And this one's going to be really important for the Mac. And makes it super frustrating to cover this stuff. But it also is like, I mean, it's probably good in the long run because it's it's Apple like, kind of putting it on everything.

• 1:13:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:43Alex Cranz?

  All the features everywhere.

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  It's all features everywhere. The Watch is getting new running metrics. So if you are running, it can tell you like stride length and how efficiently you're running.

• 1:13:52Alex Cranz?

  Victoria is very convinced that this is all leading to a rugged Apple Watch in the fall.

• 1:13:58David Pierce?

  Oh, that is, that's a good idea.

• 1:14:00Alex Cranz?

  That's why we're getting all of this stuff now. So they can finally compete with Garmin and Polar.

• 1:14:04David Pierce?

  The thing Apple has figured out about the Watch, which I think is correct, and it doesn't always figure this out. Like, there was a thing where it was like, you can have Podcast Discovery on your Apple Watch. No one wants that. But the thing that Apple has figured out is that the watch, like by definition, is just like the fiddliest device it makes. And so it's like, do you want all of these super deep running metrics? And do you want like this medication reminder thing? It's like all those sort of little stuff that you can do. The watch is just like, it is for fitness and it is for health and it is basically for nothing else. And so Apple is just like, deep down both those rabbit holes now, which strikes me as the right answer. But then the other thing I thought was interesting, to your point about all

• 1:14:46David Pierce?

  features everywhere, was fitness, the app coming to the iPhone and actually being able to like, do the same, not the same, but like, a lot of similar fitness tracking stuff without a watch. I just thought that was very interesting. And like, that has been the watch's moat for so long, that it was interesting to see them actually pull it off and put it on the iPhone.

• 1:15:05Alex Cranz?

  I think it's like a key frustration for people, because battery life is still probably the number one concern for most people with the Apple Watch, right? Like, it's, battery life is nowhere near anybody else in the space. It's bad. And a lot of times you're like, okay, I gotta, I gotta close my rings. Hold on, I have to go charge my watch. So when I go for this walk, it counts. And now you can just go for your walk and not have to worry about it. So it like, I think it kind of is addressing those battery concerns. Not necessarily the way people probably will want, especially those like hardcore runners. That's not me. But they exist and they apparently want a watch that'll last an entire marathon. And the Apple Watch kind of struggles with that right now. And so this is like that

• 1:15:50Alex Cranz?

  nice little crossover for them.

• 1:15:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I make my watch battery survive by not doing anything all day. That's my strategy. I really care about the watch battery more than my personal fitness. So that's like WWE, like, there's other stuff like Apple did buy now, pay later, which is a little shaky in their financing themselves. They don't have like a bank partner, like the Apple card is Goldman Sachs, but Apple's doing its own.

• 1:16:10Alex Cranz?

  They don't have a bank charter, but they're basically a bank now.

• 1:16:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, we'll see. Their buy now, pay later is like, very interesting, because it's, it's four payments over six weeks with zero interest. And I just want to tell everyone, like, unless it's an emergency, and sometimes you're like, you need a laptop, now your phone broke, and you can't afford it right away. Okay, I get it. But for most situations, if you can do four payments over six weeks, you should just set the money aside for six weeks and make one payment at the end. Like, just a little tip. Like, it's, I don't understand why that's their structure for this. And buy now, pay later firms are like, a little shaky.

• 1:16:46Alex Cranz?

  This was a weird time for them to announce it because a lot of those firms are having difficulties right now. We've, we, we may or may not be heading towards a recession and that means all these people may or may not be able to pay all of these bills that they've now given themselves.

• 1:17:01Nilay Patel?

  The Apple Financial Services story is like there and I just, Apple's making great products. I don't think they're in any danger, but like GE turning itself into a financial services company is a thing that killed GE. Sony turning itself into an insurance company is a thing that killed, so like, danger, Tim Cook.

• 1:17:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but that's WTC and like buy now, pay later is like by far the smallest piece of news. And we gotta get this laptop, we gotta get this stuff, it's all coming out in the fall, we're excited about it. Let's do a little lightning round here.

• 1:17:29Nilay Patel?

  USBC mandatory for all phones sold in the EU by autumn 2024. So this rule goes into effect this year and then firms have 24 months to comply. Laptops get 40 months. So that's autumn 2024 is iPhone 16. And we've already heard rumors that Apple's doing it. This is like the greatest day for government regulation in history.

• 1:17:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, wait, okay, I need you to explain this to me because right before we started recording, you, you said, okay, I understand how this timeline is supposed to work. So I would like you to explain it to me because I do not understand how this timeline is supposed to work.

• 1:18:00Nilay Patel?

  So I don't understand how the European Union works. Like, I look at it and Europeans try to explain it to me. And I'm like, huh. It's like cricket. Like theoretically, I understand. Right. And my dad calls me and he's like, I need you to open Sling TV that I pay for on New York. So you can watch this cricket match with me. And I'm like, what is happening? So the European Union is gonna, they've passed this rule, but they haven't formally passed it.

• 1:18:23David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:18:24Nilay Patel?

  And they're gonna formally pass it in September. I don't understand how that part works, like, at all. And I think I just refuse.

• 1:18:30David Pierce?

  I think what, what, what literally seems to be happening is they're all about to go on vacation. And so they decided that as soon as they get back from vacation, they've like made a pact to pass this as soon as they get back from vacation. Like, I'd literally think that's what's going on and I respect the hell out of it. Okay, but then the other thing, and like, the idea is basically to debundle chargers from devices, which makes sense for a bunch of reasons, one of which is environmental. And then, like, this applies to basically everything that comes with a charger, right? Is that the, is that the idea?

• 1:19:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, anything that you you want to charge, you got a battery.

• 1:19:04David Pierce?

  That is the messiest definition you could possibly imagine, right? It's like this is this is why this is so much fun. Like, anything with a backup battery is now suddenly like subject to this rule. I this this, I don't know. My my home has a backup battery. Like, does my house have to be?

• 1:19:20Nilay Patel?

  It's very, I think like the what is a computer aspect of this is messy. But like what they mean is phones, laptops, things that you charge, right? Like, mobile devices that you charge. They're trying to cut down on e-waste to reduce the number of chargers in the world, which is like a noble goal. So I'm pretty sure like most things already charged via a USB standard because of the European Union. And I like, there's one.

• 1:19:46Alex Cranz?

  Once before.

• 1:19:47Nilay Patel?

  There's one electronics manufacturer that makes this not work. But if you just like look around the industry of computer stuff, it has been micro USB or USB C for a long time. So this is a kick to move the industry. That's great.

• 1:19:59Alex Cranz?

  It's not just Apple, though. We're going to get a lot of these smaller companies that have been sticking to their micro USB, finally going to USB C. So that's that's nice.

• 1:20:07David Pierce?

  Big win. Oh, yeah. All the like weird audio gear in the universe that has been on micro and occasionally even mini USB is all gonna it's gonna be great. Those that stuff I'm very happy about.

• 1:20:16Alex Cranz?

  It'll be interesting, though, because there's a lot of those companies. And they these very specifically are like, well, we haven't updated because it's costly for us to like move over to USB C. Like, we built on a micro USB. And now like, they're gonna have to spend that money, even if they maybe can't afford to.

• 1:20:30Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. I think Apple's gonna make some noise, but there's rumors that they're already working on this phone with the USB C, which is amazing.

• 1:20:36Alex Cranz?

  Do you think it'll be a EU only phone?

• 1:20:39Nilay Patel?

  No, no way. Like, I think that's a huge mistake. And I think Lightning has run its course. And if hey, if you want your phone to run an entire car dashboard, you need more bandwidth. So like, I will like, there's no way they can do that all over why it's carplay. So like, we'll see. But like, the future is the power and bandwidth of USB C, not Lightning, which is way over 10 years old. So we'll see. I also, I don't think they're ever gonna make a totally portless iPhone. I think that was a Johnny Ive dream. That like even MagSafe is like not fast enough and not well supported enough. Other big news, last lightning round thing, there's a Taco Bell store that you can order with an app in the drive thru in Minnesota. That's very important.

• 1:21:22Nilay Patel?

  No, uh, last lightning round thing, this is actually big news. It's like, I feel like, kit very quietly. Xbox announced a game streaming app that works on Samsung TVs are gonna come to other smart TVs.

• 1:21:32Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of huge.

• 1:21:33Nilay Patel?

  Huge, yeah.

• 1:21:34Alex Cranz?

  This is huge.

• 1:21:35David Pierce?

  It turns everything into a game console. That's crazy.

• 1:21:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think this was always kind of the plan for, for Microsoft versus Sony. Like Sony is like very, we're gonna just have the best console you can buy and Microsoft is like, we're just gonna be everywhere so you can always play video games. And that makes a lot more sense. I think there's still like a lot of things they haven't answered and they haven't addressed and they're very aware of like internet infrastructure in the United States just isn't there. And that's why we consistently, consistently see Microsoft releasing these, hey, the internet in the US sucks reports. Like, I think we're gonna continue to see those. If anything, they're gonna invest more over there to say, look how much the internet sucks. Because they need it to not suck to sell this stuff. But this is just like Microsoft's big grand plan finally coming to fruition.

• 1:22:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they've been hinting at it for a long, long time.

• 1:22:24Alex Cranz?

  They've been wanting to do this for ages and they're the first, I think, to really do it. Like Nvidia's been right there along with them. It would, it's really those two companies. We wanna talk about Google, whatever, but it really has been Nvidia and Microsoft chasing cloud gaming. And Microsoft has kind of finally gotten there, maybe. Cameron tested it out on the Samsung TV. He really liked it. That's obviously like in a very special setup. Everything's supposed to be working. We still have to test it. Anybody have a Samsung TV, let me know. But like, this is cool. This is just like, it's happening. They're finally doing it.

• 1:23:01David Pierce?

  It just makes me think that like the console is sort of heading up the video gamer level into like the world of PC gamers where it's like if you want the best performance, game streaming is almost certainly never going to be that thing, right? Like it's just, you literally just cannot compete with the thing that is just sitting in a box in front of you. And that can't compete with the thing that you're sitting in front of with a mouse and keyboard that is wired and costs many thousands of dollars, right? So like, but those two things I think are gonna like move way up the chain to the top. And now it's like, most gamers, like me included, I'm like sitting around playing FIFA. So like, getting 144 frames per second is like not interesting or necessary in my life. Suddenly, game streaming becomes the main thing. And I think that's like, Microsoft is actually headed

• 1:23:44David Pierce?

  there faster than I expected. And unlike Nvidia and like super unlike Google, has a really long path of like being able to pull it off on the content and game side.

• 1:23:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, they own all the game studios.

• 1:23:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, in a way that's just gonna be super hard for anybody to catch up to. And like, this is, this is always the thing that was gonna come together. And it's like.

• 1:24:03Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think Nvidia is not out of this, right? Like, like, obviously Nvidia doesn't have the same kind of backend infrastructure that, that Microsoft has with Azure. But it has a very powerful backend structure. Like, we don't talk about it a lot, but Nvidia's got a huge server business. And, and that's why they've been doing this stuff. So like, and they've also got those really great relationships with the, with the studios that Microsoft doesn't own, which is like four of them now. But they still got those relationships. Like, the reason Nvidia has been so big on PCs versus AMD, one, because AMD sucked for many years. But once it finally got better, Nvidia was still better because it had these really strong relationships. And so it could get all of these like software

• 1:24:44Alex Cranz?

  enhancements and stuff that on these games that AMD couldn't. So like, they're still very much in that running. And arguably, they have a much better library of games. But Microsoft is way easier to use, and now way more accessible.

• 1:25:01Nilay Patel?

  I think the thing that's really interesting here is there's a lot of rumors that they were going to announce a TV streaming device, like a stick or like a Roku competitor. And we don't know where that went. Like, there's been rumors, and maybe it's canceled, maybe it's been rejiggered. But that gets you, okay, this works okay on your smart TV as an app. And maybe it works really well if you buy this Roku thing. And then it works great if you buy the console, right? Like, suddenly, like, the idea that Microsoft can just do Netflix for games with Game Pass, and it can deliver to all the people at various levels of quality or buy-in, you don't have to, you don't have to find an Xbox, you don't have to do the blood

• 1:25:42Nilay Patel?

  sport of finding Xbox online. Like, that's wild. And I like, they're getting their way first, but I think that's where the whole industry is going. We've seen the attempts to disrupt the console. Stadium, like, what is that? What is Luna or whatever Amazon has? And Microsoft is like, we actually are just gonna do it well now. And like, I don't know what's happening at the stadium.

• 1:26:01Alex Cranz?

  The big question is like Sony, because Sony doesn't have their own cloud. I mean, they have a cloud gaming service. It's actually run by Microsoft. And they didn't even know that Microsoft was going to be running it until they found like, those deals were all made. And then they're like, oh, our cloud gaming is run by our chief competitor. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. But they're stuck way behind now, right? Like, how do they get there? Because they're not Nintendo. Like Nintendo is always going to have a really strong console business. It doesn't care about cloud gaming. Its audience is very different. How its audience plays, interacts with these things. Microsoft and Sony are neck and neck for the most part, usually. And now, like, a kid can say, hey, Mom, I want to play Halo. I need, like, can you download this on the TV? Boom. Versus the

• 1:26:44Alex Cranz?

  other kid who's like, hey, Mom, I want to play, I don't, what's, what's a Sony game that's appropriate for a child?

• 1:26:53Nilay Patel?

  No, I feel you. But they're both going there, right?

• 1:26:56Alex Cranz?

  They're both going there. Just Microsoft got there so much faster. And that could be a big change for them. They've historically been behind Sony in the last couple of console generations, like just in sales, in uses. People, people will buy it to be like Halo, and that's about it. And now, like, there's a lot of other games that it supports that you can just go play. And you don't have to go spend $500 to find a PS5 to play on your TV that can't even support all the cool stuff that it does.

• 1:27:26Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I just think it's fascinating that this dongle didn't come out, because that's the real, it's like, it's just on Samsung TVs. It's very, it's a very small, it's only on a subset of Samsung TVs. So like, there's a reason it's not lying around. It could be earth shattering news, but it definitely isn't.

• 1:27:40Alex Cranz?

  When the dongle happens.

• 1:27:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like when, when there's like a cheap Xbox device, or it comes to lots and lots of TVs, or heaven forbid, the Apple TV, which that will never happen.

• 1:27:50Alex Cranz?

  I think you could probably get it now on a lot of the Android TVs if you like messed around with it.

• 1:27:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's on Samsung TVs, which runs Tyson.

• 1:27:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but you can get like, like, you can get the cloud program now, kind of on some Android.

• 1:28:03Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you can get like the APK from Android to an Android TV?

• 1:28:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you can do a lot of like backend.

• 1:28:08Nilay Patel?

  That's very Alex Cranz. Like, that's, that's like you, like, you're in the Shield forums.

• 1:28:13Alex Cranz?

  Me and Sean, me and Sean playing on our Android TVs. Suck at the rest of y'all.

• 1:28:18Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's a great place to end this episode. Krantz has to go reboot her Nvidia Shields. She can run pirate Xbox games on it. We've gone way over, I think you were listening, 500 episodes. We had to go over. It was a good one. Some stuff to promote. Like I said, we're gonna be rebooting the show in the next few weeks. Look forward to that. It was NFT week on the verge, the background of all this. You know, NFT is a big rise and fall. Great special issue. We have some interviews with artists who feel like they got ripped off. We have some rise and fall of the NFT marketplaces stuff. We've got a copyright explainer, which makes me very happy. It's very complicated. It's very good. Decoder this week was Zoe Schiffer talking about unions at Apple. That's a really fun episode. We did like a union explainer

• 1:29:00Nilay Patel?

  kind of thing, because it's so complicated. We want to like give people the basics. You can tweet at us. I'm at reckless, David's at Pierce, Alex is Alex H. Krantz. Yeah, 500 episodes. We did it, y'all. Rock and roll.

• 1:29:14Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. And if you liked the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:29:39Speaker 07

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