The Vergecast - Adobe Max 2019 announcements, AirPods Pro, and missed texts from Valentines Day

Episode Date: November 8, 2019

This week on The Vergecast, everything that happened at Adobe Max 2019, reviews for the Microsoft Surface Pro X and AirPods Pro, and missed text messages from Valentines Day. Stories this week: Adobe Max 2019: all the top announcements Adobe’s Photoshop for the iPad is finally here, with more features to come  Adobe is developing Illustrator for the iPad, to be released 2020 Adobe Aero turns Photoshop layers into interactive AR experiences Adobe’s Fresco drawing app arrives on Windows Photoshop adds an extremely helpful AI subject selection tool  Adobe previews an AI feature that can tell when an image has been manipulated-  Adobe’s AI-powered video framing tool is available now in Premiere Pro Adobe is launching a free AI-powered Photoshop Camera app Adobe is building live-streaming into Creative Cloud apps Adobe’s Premiere Rush can now publish directly to TikTok Microsoft Surface Pro X review: heartbreaker Microsoft's Edge Chromium browser will launch on January … Microsoft unveils new Edge browser logo that no longer looks ... Microsoft’s new Office app for iOS and Android combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Microsoft previews the future of Office documents with Fluid Framework for the we A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day Somehow, Android's messaging mess is about to get even … AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile have finally agreed to ... Apple AirPods Pro review: perfect fit Google buys Fitbit for $2.1 billion Google is buying Fitbit: now what? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we're talking about everything that happened at Adobe Max. The new Microsoft Surface ProX came out. Microsoft Ignite happened. We talked about what is going on with missed text messages showing up from Valentine's Day. That's all coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data

in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.

And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome the Virchcast to the flagship podcast of the ever-growing Vox Media Empire. Someone's going to eventually talk to us about that. I can just feel it. The company's getting bigger.

Yeah. Someone's going to be like, Neelai, you have to stop that. But not today. Today, we are still the flagship podcast of the situation. Today, yeah, the situation. There are basically two weeks of news here. A lot going on. First of all, I'm your friend, Eli.

Hi, Eli. That other voice is Deider Bone. I'm here. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dami Lee is here. Yo. How's it going, Dami?

Good. You're back from L.A.? Just flew in. Boy, my arm's tired. Oh, boy. Oh, my God. It's already off the rails. There's a lot going on.

We basically have two weeks of news. We're not going to get it all. Like, there's stuff that's just hitting the floor. Yeah. We actually just made a bunch of cuts. But I want to start with something new, I think, for The Verge in general. So, Domit, you just came back from Adobe Max. Yeah.

Basically, we created a team of people who cover, like, the creator sphere about a year ago, somewhere around there. And so, like, we have Julian to talk about, like, YouTubers. And sometimes we have Ashley on and talk about Instagrammers. But a thing that we noticed is that all of these creators have their own monopoly problem. basically, which is that everyone in this industry is reliant on Adobe. It's this huge company. I think it's a little bit undercover. Yeah.

I mean, basically every YouTuber uses like Premiere to edit their videos. Every Instagrammer is using Photoshop or Lightroom to make their photos look great. Every artist author is using Photoshop or, you know, illustrator. So Adobe Max is this huge creativity conference that they have every year. And it's basically the only place in the world where you can get a room of 15,000 people all cheering for a selection tool or content-aware fill. I mean, the air was... Why have we not gone there?

It was, the air was electric. Like, people were going nuts. Like, they would announce something on stage and they'd be like, yeah, like, we love Sensei, which is like their AI platform, which basically is in like every single thing they announced this week. So they announced, like, the big one, which is Photoshop for iPad, and they announced that they're bringing Illustrated to the iPad. had like they announced like 15 different things so there's a lot to talk about.

Yeah. Is it like a bunch of like engineers? Is it a bunch of creative people? Is it a bunch of nerds? Is it all the above? Like what's the crowd like? Pretty much. So a lot of designers and the conference is open to anybody, but you know, it's like really

expensive tickets I think are like 300 or more. So it's basically companies that are like sending teams of designers to go and like learn stuff. They have workshops. And it's like really global too. Like I saw a lot of like like like. foreign press and people being fed like the Japanese translations of like what was going on on the stage. So yeah, just like a ton of people all packed into like the LA conference,

like the convention center. Yeah. Why was John Mullaney there? So that is a part of an annual event they do called Sneaks where they preview a bunch of like experimental new features that are coming. So I think they previewed Adobe Fresco there last year. And they always have a celebrity host. So last year, I think it was like Tiffany Haddish and this year they had John Mullaney. And it's kind of like, I think it's at like 6 p.m. or so. And so they're like handing out drinks and like getting people like excited about these new features that could probably like take over their jobs later at some point. So it's kind of like buttering them up. It's like, hey, we got this cool celebrity hosts.

Like this is a fun event. Like no no worries here. Yeah. You wrote a whole post based on the one that can I think do can detect like image manipulative? Yeah, so there's a lot of AI features like that. So there's one that's really cool or scary, depending on how you look at it, where it can track your body movements. So it sees like the subject in a video and it automatically generates like 18 different body joints.

So you can make a character animate like really fast and mirror your body movements. There's another one that might take Andrew's job. It just cleans up a lot of like background noise or it can take out like all the um, and Oz of your speech. So a lot of scary stuff out there. Let's start with like the news news. Because the sneaks are really interesting and they kind of show where Adobe is going. Like once I think a company like Adobe hits that point of massive saturation industry,

they can roll out a feature and then everyone, like it changes the nature of what we make. But the big one here is actually not new features. It's actually a much smaller set of features on the iPad, which is Photoshop on the iPad. So when the iPad Pro was coming out, I think you had Photoshop. for iPad, Adobe was like pre-releasing it. They gave you an exclusive. We had Scott Belsky on the podcast. We talked about it. It's been a long time. It's out now. It's getting bad reviews in the app store. Currently it's at 2.3. And people are mad that it doesn't have a lot of basic features like the Magic Wand tool, which I got a lot of flack for when I did the review because, the video,

because I tried to Photoshop a sword into Carly Wade-Jepson's hand. Like you do. And yeah. And usually you would just do like a click of the Magic Wand. button to erase the background, but it didn't have that feature at the time. That's what we thought, like, oh, they're going to add it later. So, like, I just had to use the eraser tool. And people were like, yeah, why aren't you using the magic wand tool? You're so dumb. And then it's like, it doesn't even, it's not here on the final version. So they said that I talked to the Photoshop product manager and she said they are going to be much more aggressive with bringing updates to Photoshop on the iPad because it's mobile. So they're going to try to do it like maybe once a month.

Yeah. So hopefully we'll see that feature coming soon. but a lot of people aren't happy that it's not like the exact desktop experience on the iPad. There's the exact recreating all the features of Photoshop. And then there's the Magic Wand tool. Like, you know, like I understand that you can't bring all of Photoshop in one go. That's all it's a lot of work. But doesn't that seem like it's one of those bare minimum features? Like what is Photoshop-y?

I know you said in your write-up you talk about how the code is coming from the real Photoshop. What are there features that make it feel like you have the real Photoshop? They said they definitely focused on the compositing workflows first. So on stage, they're like, we're going to bring in this mushroom from Adobe Stock, and we're going to make it glow, and we're going to put it in this forest. So it is good at, like, you know, putting these pieces together, but it's not so good at other workflows like maybe illustration. So for that, they were like, why don't you try Fresco?

That's our other app for illustration. Wait, is it the magic one tool, like, really important in compositing work? Right. Okay, so there's this whole debate about is this real focus? Photoshop or not, it's based on the real code. But like, with the USB port on the iPad, it's like, is it a real USB port until you can plug a USB drive into it and do something useful? The answer is no.

It is not real. Well, Dieter went straight to USBC. I was not expecting that turn coming, but I definitely should have been. Is it Photoshop if it doesn't have a magic wand tool? Is that the thing? Or is there some other thing? Well, so the thing they are focusing on are the cloud PSDs, which is you can basically start a file on the desktop, and then you can continue working on that same file in the iPad.

and vice versa. So that's the thing that they're focusing on first. This is what I have been trying to like muddle towards is the cloud PSD is like the heart of this whole enterprise. And when they first announced Photoshop for iPad, they like half mentioned it to us. Now they're like, here it is. Like here's the real deal. Like you're going to run this real Photoshop on the iPad.

But really the thing is it's going to use the same files that sync across creative cloud to your desktop and to your other devices in the future. Right. I'm just going to, that is ecosystem lock-in. You have to pay them forever to use this cloud file. Right. And you have to, you have no choice but to pay them however much they decide to charge for cloud storage. And last time I checked, Photoshop file's not small.

Yeah. So the cloud PSDs are also really important because they are making, they're introducing new apps that kind of rely on these Photoshop files. So they also announced Adobe Arrow, which is this like AR authoring app. And it basically uses layered PSD files. So it's like it's it's it's let's people make AR experiences like without knowing how to code without knowing unity. It's like all you need is Photoshop and it's like well great. So now I have this Photoshop.

I got to like rely on this to make this AR experience. And there's also a new app called Photoshop Camera and that also uses Photoshop layers so you can make filters for you know like Instagram or TikTok. So yeah. So it seems like there's two kind of big ideas here. One is related to the thing that we're always talking about, which is when our tablets going to just supersede laptops. And D.D.R. you reviewed the Surface ProX this week. So there's just a lot of lines converging here, right? So when are like mobile processor-based tablets going to supersede sort of Intel laptops? It's there. It's there. And so one of the key apps in this world, in this conversation is Photoshop. Right? Like, there's no way for, a ton of creative people

that you can switch to an iPad if Photoshop isn't there. So now you've got a thing that is called Photoshop and Adobe insists is real Photoshop, but it's like one quarter of Photoshop with a wacky new file format. Yeah. And eventually they're going to build it out to be the whole thing.

It's at least one quarter of Photoshop that it's the same file when you're at your real Photoshop desk. So if you like get stuck, you don't have to do anything except turn on your computer and open Photoshop. Yes, the essence of the iPad experience is getting stuck and then opening your laptop and having the fan turn on and the battery die. I brought this up a little bit ago, but I've been doing a lot of music stuff on the iPad.

And music on the iPad is all about, with the exception of a couple apps that do everything all in one, most of the ecosystem, it is all about bopping from app to app. So like, it makes sense, like, I would work in Photoshop and then like, ah, I need kind of a drawing feature. I'll work on the same file and fresco. are like, ah, now I need to make it AR. And so, you know, and then like, ah, well, but now it's not really ready for print. And I want to work on it on my desktop.

So then I, you know, jump over. Like for music on the iPad, a lot of people bounce something. You know, they just use the iPad as sort of the place to be creative and free. And then you finish it on your desktop. I think that's a pretty common workflow. So it kind of makes sense with Adobe approaching it this way. scary to have it be one Adobe file format instead of something that could be, you know, interoperable. Well, to be fair, the, like, the PSD file itself is not like a paradigm of interoperability.

Yeah. Well. Well, you can also, yeah, you can open PSD files on them, I think, is it affinity? Yeah. I was going to ask you about that. Like, I don't really dislike Adobe as a company, but I hate their stupid creative cloud app that takes over your computer and you can't. stall. Oh, but now it's an experience. I'm going to read about this too. Yeah. Creative Cloud is no longer, it's like, it's like a social network now. It's a whole thing now. I have like pixel

mater on my Mac, but I don't really do a lot of photo stuff. I use Figma for vector and like design kind of stuff. And I use DaVinci Resolve for video editing. I've like tried to extricate myself from Adobe. I wonder if that's like a, I don't know if Adobe's afraid of that or if they're just like, ah, we're so fun. I mean, they are kind of already going after Figma now, because, um, Figma's whole thing of like multiplayer editing, which lets people work together on the same file. It's like they announced that same feature at AdobeXD. So Figma, you're in danger, girl. Okay, so there's Photoshop and they know it's getting kind of trounced in reviews.

They seem to be okay with it. Yeah, so Scott Belski tweeted today, you know, it was like, the hardest journeys or... Oh, God. Yeah. I mean, they know the first version is going to be, you know, not the best. It's not going to get the best reviews. And I think for them it's going to be a process. And I do believe them that when they say they're going to bring the magic wand tool,

like in a couple months or whatever that might be. Personally, like, I am, I do a lot of work where I, like, translate comics. So that's something that I can do on the iPad where I couldn't do before. It's like all I need to do is just, like, import font. into the iPad and I can use like the text tool on Photoshop. So it's like a lot of little things like that that I can like do on a plane like on the go that I would use this for. I don't think I would use Photoshop on the iPad for like drawing because I don't do that on the iPad to begin with. I use my computer.

So I was actually going to ask you about that. So how much of your creative workflow with your comics like could you move to the iPad or would you want to do on the iPad? It sounds like a little bit here or there but like fundamentally Adobe hasn't convinced you to like throw your computer away. Right. See, like, I wouldn't use Photoshop on iPad at all for drawing comics because I've never used the iPad for drawing comics. Like, I've tried Procreate and it's really hard for me to just, like, switch up my workflow. But, yeah, like the thing with translating text, like that I can see myself using Photoshop for. So they also announced Illustrator. So they got, they announced Photoshop ages ago. It's out now.

Scott Belski. I like Scott. He was like on our show. I hope we have him again. He's fun to talk to. He is a thought leader, and sometimes he tweets like a thought leader, and he's like, the journey just beginning. Mobile is a new dawn. Like, okay, so they're on the journey. But then they also announced Illustrator, which is obviously the other big app and like the duo of Adobe apps. Is it going to be the same cut down thing? Are they going to, is it going to have a magic wand tool? It's going to have, it's the same concept where you can take the same illustrator file and open up on the desktop and continue working on it.

I do think, so I got like a preview of it, and I do think that people are going to be a lot happier with Illustrated when it launched on day one than they were with Photoshop because I don't think there's, like the only important thing in Illustrator is the pen tool. And that, like the demonstration we saw, it was like very impressive. It looked complete. It's got all these features where it uses AI where to take a photo, you can import a photo of like a sketch that you did. And then it automatically like creates these paths. and you don't have to, like, add anything to it, or you can, like, tweak it if you want, but for someone like me who doesn't use Illustrator on the desktop, the iPad version just looked a lot easier to use for beginners, and they've just, like, simplified the UI, so it's just, like, anyone with an Apple Pencil could, like, probably learn to use it really quickly. Is Illustrator, does it get its own, like, dot AIC files? Yeah, I think that's what's going to happen.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, the stuff about using the Apple pencil to draw paths and adjust paths and making that easier than doing with a mouse was completely fascinating because every time I try and deal with any kind of path, like I've used Illustrator a handful of times. And every time I get anywhere near those little anchor points and like twitch my hand, the whole drawing just like explodes in front of me. I used to do a lot of Adobe Illustrator and it is all about having your hands on the keyboard and there's like two or three or four different modifier keys that you're always pressing to switch between modes. But on the iPad, it's like a row of buttons that you tap with your second hand. There's like a touch modifier, which they also have on their other apps. And it's like the equivalent of holding down the shift key.

And so they acknowledge that Illustrator has a huge learning curve. And it's just like mystifying to like learn how to use it. And it's easier on the iPad because when you press, when you tap like the pen tool, it opens up like a contextual like sub tool menu. And it just knows like what the next move you're going to do is. It's like, so you drew a path and it's like you want to like remove these points and it's like all you got to do is like click on it and it just automatically knows. Yeah. So it illustrated to me every time I try to use it, I'm like, I don't know enough math to draw at this point in time.

Like it is the most frustrating app for me. Like I don't understand it at all. But the iPad, it looked easy. Yeah, so this is the opportunity, right? They're going to rethink all these interfaces on this place. They're going to cut down the feature sets and build them back up around new interface paradigms. I think the hard part is, again, in the context of, can you move your work to this other place,

this other kind of computing, they have to get, I mean, Photoshop, it has like the Microsoft Word problem where every feature is important to 25 people and it's mission critical to 25 people. And those 25 people are very important. And like, I don't know, like,

it's a long road to catch up to that. We actually don't have time for it in the Vergecast, but one note just ran into this problem. They, like, they've reverted and they're going to continue developing the old version instead of working on the new new good one that they made, it's a whole mess, and it's because of this 25 people problem.

Anyway. So I want to talk about one other answer, and then I want to talk about sneaks. So the sneaks are really fun. But they're building two features into sort of the video world. One, Premier Rush can now publish directly to TikTok. Okay. Yeah.

Which, it's adorable. Like, Premier Rush is like adorable, like, just as a concept. Like, what if we made an I movie that was different? Yeah. Fine. But it can publish directly to a social platform, I love Premiere Rush. Don't be mean. I think it's important.

You love clips. I'm sorry, sure. Dieter's like a bad video editing tool. I'm in. Anyway, so they're publishing directly to TikTok. And then they're building like the ability for you to live stream directly into their apps, which seems wild. Yeah. So that is still in beta. Right now they're exploring it with Fresco.

So you can just like press a button to go live and then it generates a link for people to like click on and they can like write comments on it. Wait, so it's not live on, like, Twitch or YouTube. It's live inside of, like, the Adobe ecosystem? Something like that. It's still very new, but they're thinking about bringing a built-in live-streaming feature into Creative Cloud apps. So maybe one day in the future, it's like you could press a button to go live from Photoshop, and then people will be able to, like, follow along and see what you're doing. But they're doing this with, like, a learning component.

So they do this thing right now called Adobe Live, and it's on B-Hans. And it's like you can just watch an artist work. for like three hours at a time. And some streams have it. So you can actually see which tools they're using at that time. And it's like a tool timeline. So it's like, oh, they cropped this. They made this selection here.

And it's just done with the purpose of like learning step by step how this piece was created. So it is going to be really helpful for designers because that's how you learn. Basically, it's like more helpful. It's more helpful than art school. You know, it's like whenever you want to learn a new skill, you just go on YouTube. But this is the like Adobe equivalent of that. Yeah, that's like the really interesting part of this, is they're aware. I think Adobe is super aware that there's a generation of creators who are coming up on their products

and teaching them to use their products and specifically their products and like building a full ecosystem around them from like literally learning how to use it to publishing directly to TikTok. I mean, it's just brilliant. I can't tell if it's evil. Scott Belski said that it's like what Twitch did for gamers, he wants this to do for artists. So they know that their products are like really hard to use. And you could, it would take literally like hundreds of thousands of hours to like learn how to use it. And that's why Adobe Alive exists.

So people can learn to use their products. Yeah. I mean, and they are hard to use. But like they should be because they're very powerful. Yeah. Like I don't think this is an argument to like cut down how hard they are. Right. It's just like you can do a lot with it.

But there are competitors. And like affinity exists. Luma Fusion. What's, is that the video one? Procreate is really good. Procrate is super powerful, yeah. Procreate, I would imagine, is way more popular than anything Adobe does for artists on the iPad, right? Right.

People love Procreate. It's only, like, a $10, like, one-time purchase, and it's super powerful. And they're going to bring the ability to import Photoshop brushes into it. And they're bringing animation. Like, they have animation already, but they're going to bring it to Procrate 5, which is, like, the next version that's coming out. So, yeah, like, I don't know. Maybe Adobe should be afraid of Procrate. Well, I guess I saw Affinity, like, is doing a 50% off sale, like, this week.

Right. Like, there's competition now for these apps that have kind of been the only things you can use on the iPad. You were saying, like, Figma's in danger. Like, is, like, is Adobe so big that it's going to run over this, like, a little indie creator scene on these, on the iPad in particular? I don't know. Well, Figma is, it's interesting. It's, like, a fairly new company, but a lot of, like, huge companies, I think. I think Slack and Dropbox have moved their entire teams over to it.

And I think it also has like a free plan. So like anyone can basically like use Illustrator like for illustrator tools like on the web. So it's got its advantages. I don't know if like Adobe XT adding like a co-editing feature is going to like ruin Figma. But yeah, I mean it's kind of scary that they have modeled that feature after Figma. Does Figma said anything about it? Because usually small companies like do a bunch of like very subtle sub-tweets. You get that nice snarky tweet.

Yeah. Welcome Adobe. Really? Oh, yeah. The surest sign that Microsoft is about to destroy you. Slack just decided about Microsoft Teams. The first one was Apple ran it about IBM when IBM put out a personal computer. It was Steve Jobs ran Welcome IBM.

You will note that IBM went on to dominate the Macintosh. Then there was one that was Welcome Apple, and I think that was. about streaming services. And then Slack just ran the welcome Microsoft about teams. I'm not saying Figma has done this. I'm saying there's a long tradition of greeting your giant competitor by welcoming them, only to have them like come into your house and destroy you. Has any executive in the history of tech ever said a rising tide lifts all boats

and been in business five years later? No, definitely not. Okay. Right. This big company has validated the market and people see that we have a secure product. You should just start, you should get on LinkedIn that day if you work at that company. I don't think that's going to happen. This ecosystem of smaller competitors on the iPad.

One, people have already bought the thing. Yeah. So I've got the apps on their computer. Two, Photoshop just isn't there yet. Like feature-wise? Yeah, like it's not a full competitor yet. Yeah. I mean, so the thing is it's only included as part of a Creative Cloud subscription.

So I don't think this is going to be the thing that gets people to sign up for a Creative Cloud account. it's just for people who already have Photoshop and it's just like an added benefit. Yeah. And that's like Paul, to your point, about Creative Club. Like, it does take over your computer. It's a big app now.

But it's also like a lifestyle. It's a personality. Yeah, it's like, I've got out of Creative Cloud membership. And you've got all the apps. You're like, one day I'm going to use Adobe X-D. I'm going to make that website. That's me. Like, I just download stuff in the hopes that maybe I'll learn to use it

someday and it's just like sitting in my computer. Yeah. You can get all the icons there all in a row. It looks nice. Do you see the one person who tweeted? us that was like the Photoshop icon is roundbacks? Yes. So that actually, there's a reason for that. It's like... Wait, can I just tell

people? All the app icons on the Mac are squares and the Photoshop icon is rounded off and it looks, if you notice it, you will never unnotice it. It got, it graduated to a rounded... It graduated? I mean, that's, yeah, because the explanation is that once

the app becomes cloud aware was the word they used, they become rounded. Oh my God. That is the most subtle. Yeah. I love it. That's incredible. All right, let's talk about these sneaks.

The sneaks are based on something else Adobe is doing, or most of them, which is they have their own AI platform called Sensei. I'm unclear whether Sensei is like one AI platform, like a singular AI that is smart or whether it's like branding for all their efforts the way that like Watson is at IBM. Yeah, I'm not really sure either. They just call it their AI platform and it's part of like. features like content aware fill in Photoshop where you do like a circle around something that you want to remove and it just like takes it away and it just showed up a lot

in most of the sneaks and I think let's see what's one that was pretty good there's one yeah oh go ahead there's one called all in where it's for those moments when you're trying to take a group photo but the person who's taking the photo like wants to be in the group photo so it's like you take two photos like one without you and where you're in it and then the AI kind of like pieces the two photos together so you're kind of like everyone's like in the photo together.

Yeah, it's like it's a vanity fair mode. Yeah. No, it's like AI compositing. Yeah. You need a magic wand. The AI's going to do it for you. So I mean that to me is like these products aren't real yet right? Like that's the John Mullaney. Everyone's having a drink. Check it out. We're like compositing you in a photo.

But they're saying sense, I mean it's already in content where Phil is already in Photoshop. Sensei's all over Lightroom, like, you can, like, search for faces and things already. But it seems like the next turn for them is we're going to start doing a lot of stuff for you. Is that, was that a sense that you got from them, or is that just we're seeing it kind of on the outside? They've already kind of acknowledged that this work is really powerful, but they don't want to, like, scare creatives into thinking, like, we're going to take your jobs. Instead, they're trying to make it so that, oh, we're going to get rid of, like, the tedious tasks for you and, like, make it.

it really easy. So you can have more time to be creative. But I also think they're kind of starting to realize that the stuff they're unleashing into the world could have like very negative consequences. So they also previewed this feature that tells when a photo has been manipulated. So it gives you the probability that like these pixels have been moved and shifted around. So that also is kind of related to this new initiative that they brought up in its content authenticity initiative. And they're doing it with Twitter and the New York Times. And And there's not really a lot of details about it yet, but it's just like a thing that they're acknowledging. It's like, hey, we kind of have this role in like responsibility now to acknowledge that this stuff is really powerful.

I like the manipulation detection, which is like effectively like people in forums being like, I've looked at a lot of shops in my day. And I can tell by the pixels that this is. It's like, yeah, we can actually, we can do that. I mean, it's great that Adobe is making the tools to alter photos. can't tell, then it's making the tools to tell if the photos have the ultimate. They have both sides of it. It's great. There's a real duality inside of Adobe.

I just realized that this image verification thing that they're doing with the New York Times and Twitter is the end of this story is someone who's going to do watermarks, but it's blockchain? Yes. Like, that's just coming for all of us. That's okay. We do not know what is happening with this. I can rant and ready about this all day and all night, but we don't know any details.

so I will cut myself short because we're going to find out what is actually happening. I just don't think, there's two ways to authenticate anything. One is to have a server and a certificate and then like ping the server and say, I've got this hash. Is this the right?

Right? That's like the number one way that you do it. That's how everybody does everything. Once you do that, you can say, don't display the image and you've got DRM. Like, that's how DRM works. like, hey, I've got this content, can you authenticate it? Yeah.

Okay. The other way is to do some crazy-ass blockchain shit. Those are your two choices. And I just don't think Adobe and Twitter are going to do some crazy-ass blockchain shit with images. Right. I don't think New York Times just put all of its images on the blockchain. So it's going to pull you towards the server. And once you've got an authentication server, it's like, okay, I'm done now.

We'll find out. I just, once you have an authentication server, you have the beginnings of a digital rights management platform. The two things that the sneaks that I was most interested in were the video framing tool and the Photoshop camera, but especially the Photoshop camera. Like that thing looks amazing. Yeah, it's basically lightroom for people who don't know how to use Lightroom. And that's like me. So if I have a photo, it just tells you based on what's in the subject. So it's like, oh, I took a photo of some peep and pop.

it's like, that's a food, by the way. It's like, okay, the A.I. knows that it's a picture of food, so it'll do, like, the right filters for the food. Or it's like you can add, like, a bouquet effect so the AI will identify the subject, and it'll just, like, blur out the background, like, on its own. So you can also create filters for it. So you can make a filter in Photoshop, and somehow that gets onto the Photoshop camera app. I'm not really sure.

I haven't tried it out yet. That to me is, you know, what they haven't done yet, I don't think has, like, formally created the sort of, like, preset store. Like, there is sort of a secondary economy of, like, lightroom presets for mobile. It sounds like you could do a bunch of Photoshop camera presets. Yeah, that's a good point, because, like, people are already selling Photoshop brushes on Gumroad. Yeah. So maybe in the future, people will be able to buy, like, filters for Photoshop camera. Yeah.

They're probably just trying to figure out ways to avoid the Apple Tics. I want the live journal aesthetic Photoshop filters. You know, do you remember the live journal look? You're on your own, buddy. No, I've been on live journal. I had a lot of channel. I don't know what that means, though. You're making a strip of photos of like all your favorite Twilight characters,

but you have to decis. It was before Instagram filters are just, you know, the, the apified version of what the live journal aesthetic. And you know what? No, my. I feel like we just learned an awful lot about how you spend your time. So, you know, it's really interesting. We obviously just had the podcast last week with Instagram and the pixel camera team,

and we were talking about how their looks affect each other. The Lightroom Auto button, since the iPhone 10S came out, has radically changed how it works. It now pushes highlights way down and shadows way up. So it makes Roth photos look more like iPhone photos in a way that it didn't do before. And so like this Photoshop camera, like Lightroom, people use Lightroom, they're now going to be in control of like a look, like a very obvious look that happens. And it's funny because I've noticed the auto button in Lightroom has like subtly changed. It's like, what if this photo is a lot flatter like your phone?

Which I just think Adobe is like creative company is probably less interested in having a defined look of its images. They were saying how they think that like the camera improvements and all these new phones. just like it's just happening so fast that they think that they could do software better than these platforms, better than like, you know, Google pixel phones or like iPhones. So I think stuff like the bouquet effect, it's like that could be really useful for people who don't have the latest iPhone. Yeah. The one feature of Lightroom that I've never understood on a phone is that it's also a camera.

Like I don't love that the image editing app and the camera app are the same. It's like it's just a whole thing inside a Lightroom that I've never understood. I can talk about Lightroom all day long. I have a difficult relationship with Lightroom. It's a monopoly. Yeah. I'm going to pay for Lightroom for the rest of my life. So last question about Adobe, because we are talking about this company.

I'm really happy you went. I'm really happy you're on the beat. I think it is an undercovered company. It's so important to this entire ecosystem. It actually doesn't get covered as, I don't know, critically as we cover Apple or Facebook or whatever. You come out of Macs. You've been talking a bunch of people there. You're talking to the creators.

What is the vibe around Adobe? It just seems more mysterious than other companies we talk about. The vibe of the people who are there? Yeah, I mean, do people love it? The vibe is electric. They're cheering for content-aware fill. But it seems like people have a very up-and-down relationship with this company in its products. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the people who are there are only there because their companies

paid for them to be there. So these are people who don't have to think about paying. $10 a month to the company because it's already provided to them by their companies, which is sort of like the situation I'm in, you know, with Vox Media. And it's all, it's only online that you see, like, all these criticisms that, you know, you shouldn't be charging $10 a month. Like, that's way too much for a service that is, you know, only $10, like, for a lifetime of pro-creator affinity. I'm starting to see a lot more tweets from people being like, this is it for me. Like, I'm soaring off Adobe now and now that I have all these other alternatives. So I've,

do think maybe we'll start to see more of that happening. Yeah. To me it feels like to switch to an iPad, they needed Photoshop on the iPad. Like Apple needed Adobe to make this product. And they finally relented and that's going to open up a wave of conversations about this set of tools that is otherwise sort of under remarked upon. Is that a phrase? Yeah. Under remarked upon? It is now. Okay. You're playing a dangerous game when you decide your business model is some sort of lock-in.

Because if people find the key, and that key is a free app called DaVinci Resolve that works on Linux, you know, like all of a sudden it's like, oh, wow. Like, goodbye, goodbye handcuffs made by Adobe. Wow. I don't think that a free app that works on Linux is the thing. Historically not the thing. Adobe. Just pretty sure. You lost me.

Go on YouTube. No idea. I left Adobe Premiere for. DaVinci Resolve. Just search that on YouTube. It's a million people. A million. A million. It's like 25 people. Yeah, I mean, look, that's what

fundamentally what I'm excited about is we this was a moment to be like, okay, that we're covering the hell out of Adobe, here's 95,000 stories that they're going to produce, new products, new features. I think the goal is, I want to track them as carefully as we track these other companies because you're not

going to get a bunch of people shift their primary computing platforms if Adobe doesn't take them there. And that, to me, is remarkable. I mean, I have a whole story about this, which we can talk about after the ad break. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO,

not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash verge for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge.

Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic, can be getting lost in the shuffle. Gramerly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging.

No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerley's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Gramerley has saved. them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will.

Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All right, Deeter. Yeah. Surface Pro, X. X, not 10. X. Yeah. By the way, I tweeted this. What does X mean in Microsoft World?

There's the Xbox. There's the Xbox 1X. There's Windows 10X. There's the Surface Pro X. And near as I can tell, all those Xs mean different things. In my opinion, unless you're Apple and you explicitly tell me it's pronounced 10, I think X stands for extreme. Yeah. Expanded.

Extra. I don't know. Can you spell the word disappointing with an X? Because that's how I feel about the Surface Pro X. Oh, boy. Ex appointing. Ex appointing? Yeah.

We're going to do an entire long extra podcast on this. I've got Tom. who has the Surface ProX and also Dan, who has been testing the other services. We're, like, going to talk about this for God knows how long pretty soon. And so I don't want to go super deep on this. I just want to say two things. Service Prox runs Arm, and I love it. It is the prettiest computer.

I think it is way, way better looking than an iPad. And if you can find only Arm apps for it, you can get incredible battery life. And it's fast and it's great. But those apps don't exist. And so you end up having to use emulated apps and then it's slow and gets bad battery life. And you can't run Lightroom at all. And that is why I bought it and then returned it. Twice.

Twice. I bought it ahead of time. And I was like, no, this is a bad idea. I'm going to cancel it. And then I was like, but what if I got it anyway? And then I did it again. And then I canceled it. And then the review unit came.

And then I discovered that you just can't install Lightroom. And I was like, thank God. And then I bought a Surface Pro 7 and I'm happy. Have you tried using lightroom on the web on it? That's the ultimate hack. It's to get that computer. Lightroom on the web is fine. Yeah.

For web stuff. Yeah. I do that on ChromeBOS all the time. Yeah. But I'm saying the ultimate move to kill the battery life on a Service ProX is to install Chrome and then use Lightroom on the web in Chrome. And then that's like 25 minutes and you're done. There's clearly a pain knob here controlled by app incompatibility.

Yeah. How far would the pain knob have to be turned down for? you to buy a pro X a third time? If they made Lightroom available, even emulated, I would probably do it. Wait, so explain the, so we had Panos on the show, and he said to me and Tom, our team has done an amazing job with emulation, anything you want. iTunes and Chrome, those are the bellwethers. We got them. They do.

But where are the breakdowns? Like, why do the breakdowns exist? So there's two kinds of ways to make an X86 app. There's make a 32-bit app. And if you use Mac, you know that a bunch of 32-bit apps stop working in Mojave, right? So the new architecture is 64-bit, which is better in ways because there's more bits, whatever. It's better. They can emulate 32-bit using what I forget what it's called.

And those run better than you expect. But I didn't expect mock, but they run okay. But Arm 64 cannot emulate 64-bit X-86 apps. So if an app doesn't have a legacy 32-bit version hanging around or hasn't updated to 64-bit, then you're fine. But a bunch of apps are like, oh, well, we're just going to make the best one. We're going to make the good one that runs the best, and that's a 64-bit one, and we're not going to bother maintaining the 32-bit one. And so the best-most forward-looking Windows apps don't work. That seems a little upside down.

Isn't the whole point of the best-most-forward Windows apps? that they're processor agnostic, right, that they're modern. Is it easy to port from Intel 64 to Arm 64? I don't. I'm not a developer. I don't know. I think that for some apps, especially like the UWP apps or like whatever, it is relatively easy to port.

In fact, UWP should just work in 64-bit arm natively across most of these in the first place. So for relatively simple apps, I think it's pretty straightforward. But for apps that, like, directly, like, need to talk to the GPU or directly do processor stuff, I do not think it's a simple transition to go from X86 to Arm. You can't just like check a box to compile to Arm and you're done. So is this just a bunch of weird Microsoft decisions coming home? Right, because UWP as a platform is a mess. It is one more, yet one more decision in a chain of decisions that Microsoft has made since,

let's just go, how far back do you want to go? Let's go back to Windows RT, where Microsoft says, you know what, we've really got to get off of this classic, you know, Windows NT code base. We got to move the world forward. Here's the new kind of Windows. Please make apps. They did that with RT. They did that with, I mean, Windows 8 doesn't really count, but they started to mess around with what Metro turned into.

Then there was S mode. I'm probably forgetting something somewhere. And now there is Windows on Arm. And I just think there's just a lot of developers that are like, why would I take a flyer on Microsoft? the latest attempt to get us to try a new version of Windows that's wacky. Like, I'll wait and see what happens. And it's a totally rational decision. Apple's version of this is like, we're going to be harsh but fair.

Like, we are absolutely doing this new thing, which, you know, now that we're seeing this arm laptop from Microsoft, it makes more sense like why Apple wouldn't do this yet, because they can't say for certain that this can be the future. I could imagine Apple saying, we aren't going to release. arm laptops until we know we can do all arm laptops and give sort of developers like an end of life on on intel stuff right whereas microsoft is clearly not certain what the future will be well i mean so one question i have i'm also not a developer is like whether arm 64 emulating until 64 is just a hard like a hard limit like you just can't do it no matter what architect

like what operating system you're on or that's a windows problem everything's possible it's if it's A touring machine can simulate another touring machine. You can do turtle all the way down and you could do anything if you wanted to. It's just how much of a performance hit. Like there are certain like X86. Imulating X86 is really efficient. You can you can do that. So there are things that are going to be faster and slower, but it's definitely not impossible.

Right. So, I mean, Apple has the, I mean, we'll use Photoshop as an apple. They can't put out an arm laptop and then be like, here's this weird version of Photoshop that doesn't have a magic wand. People are just going to want to run Photoshop on their fun new arm machine. And that's just the end of that question. Like, either that works or it doesn't. Yeah. Right.

And I think Microsoft has decided, well, what if some stuff doesn't work? Dieter, you described it as a CEO's computer. And I just want you to unpack that a little bit. If you only use Office and you never need to edit a photo and, like, you can afford to have the little people do the hard work, then you're going to love this thing. It's also a CEO's computer because only a CEO can afford it. Like, you have to spend, like, there's a $1,200 version with the keyboard, which you shouldn't get. Like, the good one with 256 gigs of storage is like $1,800. And if they had just re-released the Surface Go with an arm chip in it, I might actually be interested in it.

Because, like, $600, it's a little bit slow. And it doesn't run all the apps, but it's $600. Like, yep, sign me up. I will experiment in this wacky future with you. But $1,800, that is just way too much money to take a flyer. So the other interesting thing, and I know you're going to do a whole thing with Tom and Dan, so we don't have to keep drilling at it, is this is the same but nicer form factor than the Pro 7, which can just do everything.

But a year from now, they're going to put out the Neo, which is the big dual screen, like Windows 10x computer, that runs Intel. And it seems like the big form factor shift would have been a great time to do a processor shift and say, you need to rewrite your apps for this new dual screen paradigm. You know what would happen, though? The dual screen one would fail. I think the stakes are too high for the Neo from Microsoft to risk not having the apps for it. So they have to go with Intel because they know that if they don't, it will absolutely bomb.

Wow. I mean, it's tough. It just seems all of that seems very hard. Yeah. Anyway. Super hard. I'm happy I'm not in charge of solving this problem. And we've seen Microsoft try to solve this problem over and over again.

Remember when they threw money at the Windows phone problem? They just pay developers just make apps. I could sit here and make the list of things I wish Microsoft had done to make more RMaps available on this computer. And literally everything I could think of, like Microsoft has already tried it and hasn't worked. So I don't know. I mean, well, I mean, the main thing they tried was just paying people. And they can't like pay Adobe. Like, Adobe's like, whatever.

We got $10 a month from everyone forever. They could pay Adobe. Put that on, I don't know. Could they? They could pay Adobe. Yeah. The next time we get Scott, we're going to be like, how much does it cost to make a Windows app?

Okay, so can we talk for, by the way, you brought that up tonight. I'm thinking about it. Can we talk for two seconds about Bill Gates saying we'd all be using Windows mobile, if not for antitrust in the 90s? I don't even know how to unpack. So Bill Gates is on stage with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times Dealbook conference, and he says, I took my eye off the ball because of antitrust.

It was my mistake. But if I hadn't done that, we would all be using Windows Mobile instead of Android. Which he has said to me on this show in a slightly different way before. This is the most directly that he said it. Yep. But this is what I wanted to ask you about here. He said we were three months away from a Motorola deal that would have changed everything. We were just too late.

That if I have my timeline correct. And I think his timeline is really wrong. that would have been the deal, the droid deal on Verizon. So the deal that killed WebOS. I really wish that you hadn't brought this up on the Roachcast because like this is my big reporting project. Is somebody inside Verizon was playing Microsoft, Palm, and Google off of each other for like six months, keeping like them all on the hook thinking that they were going to be able to be the big iPhone competitor killer because the storm had clearly failed. The Blackberry Storm.

Verizon had anointed the Blackberry Storm, and it was a disaster of a phone. The only person who liked the BlackBerry Storm was Paul Miller, who thought, I believe in a review, said, this screen is great. A brief hands-on demo. I was misled into liking the BlackBerry Storm, and I have repented for that many times on this podcast as you are well aware. Yeah, but now both Microsoft and Palm CEOs have said, well, if we had gotten the deal that Verizon said, they were going to give us, that we would be Android today. So I want to know who in Verizon is like that,

just that stone cold Machiavellian manipulator that had all three of these companies and, like, competing, you know, meeting rooms. Lowell McAdam, the genius who also launched Go-90. It's a real hit or miss situation in France. Okay, okay, but doesn't the Blackboard Storm kind of disprove that a little bit? If Verizon's such a kingmaker,

and they put their Verizon cash behind a prospective king, from a vaunted smartphone manufacturer, the smartphone manufacturer, Blackberry, and that failed, it kind of does matter how good the thing is, right? It does matter how good the thing is. If they had put all their money behind Windows mobile,

I don't know that it would have succeeded. I do think if they put all their money behind Palm behind WebOS, of course. Absolutely. Because it was the best thing ever. Of course you think that. No, here's what I'll say. Bold proclamation.

Windows phone, WebOS, and Android at that time were all, as good as each other. Yes. Although at that time, Windows phone didn't exist. It was still Windows mobile. It was bad. Which was bad, but was more capable.

And if they had just had, I don't know, they could have fixed it in theory. They didn't. And I don't know that they absolutely could have. But I will say that it turns out that Microsoft employed a lot of people, not just Bill Gates. And they were trying to and couldn't. So I don't think Bill Gates' attention would have seen. solved that problem immediately. Also, Bill Gates didn't, wasn't the CEO at the time.

And also, Bill Gates was making bad UIs at the time. He wasn't the CEO either. Yeah, like there was a whole lot of things that weren't going, going, doing well. Yeah, it seems, I would say that quote is very interesting. He was probably half joking because he was half joking when he said something to me. But that timeline's real messy. And also, uh, David Pierce beat me to this tweet. If your argument is it antitrust regulation is the reason we're all using Android instead

of Windows mobile like that is the best argument for antitrust regulations? I've ever heard in my entire life. Like, yes, you created the opportunity for a new competitor to come in with a much better product than Windows mobile. Like, yeah, break them all up. Just go nuts. Let's see what happens. This reminds me another quote, by the way, of this time, which is when, uh, along the lines of Welcome Apple, uh, Vic Gundotra, when Microsoft, he was at Google, when Microsoft bought Nokia, he just tweeted two turkeys do not make an eagle, which remains one of the most esoteric burns I've ever heard my entire life. and I just I think we should all talk about it more often.

And accurate. He invented that saying? No, I think it's like one of these like weird sayings that like European wireless carriers are to say to each other all the time. Like European executives like wander around like dissing each other as mergers by saying two turkeys don't make an eagle. And he like pulled it back out to like say it again. But like I had never heard it before because I was like a baby reporter.

Yeah. And I was like what is this? And like literally people pull me aside at conferences be like this is a famous saying from a 1947 merger between Siemens and the tire manufacturer. What are you talking about? Okay, do you want to talk about Ignite for a couple minutes and then we can move on?

Just a couple. I mean, it's Microsoft's big enterprise conference and you think, oh, Microsoft IT Enterprise Conference, snore. But no, they announced a ton of shit. Like, here's the date for Edge going, you know, here's a release candidate, and here's when it's going to be official,

Edge Chromium. Here's like a whole thing about Office. Now all the Android apps are just one Office app. Here's blah, blah, blah, blah. They had a whole ton of stuff. And then they basically are pushing this idea of the fluid framework, which is like the cloud PSD. It's the new way that they want files to work, which is a proprietary thing in the cloud.

There's a very good quote on this. What if there was no more document? Instead, this is a canvas and the canvas is smart. I feel like that's just a great way of saying now you have to subscribe to your file system. Probably. Probably. You need to unlock the full paid Office 365 for the canvas to be smart. The problem is they don't have good language for it yet.

So they're trying to do to basically like Google Docs sharing, what Google Docs sharing did to like emailing word attachments or like, you know, floppy disk. Word files, right? If you had a word file, you'd somehow have to get that to somebody else, and they'd mess with it, and they'd have to give it back to you, and then you have to make sure you've all got the right versions or whatever. And the reason that Google Docs, when it first came out, was so innovative and so interesting,

wasn't the quality of the word processor, or even the fact that it was on the web. It was that entire problem of dealing with files and which version of the file you have and blah, blah, blah, blah. It just made it go away because, like, here's the dock. We all work on the dock. when you open it up, it's always the right version, the most recent version of the doc.

And if it's not, you can go back and look. So Microsoft is trying to go one step beyond that, but I don't know what the hell they mean by it. So, yeah, so like the canonical document is like a URL. I think that's the what if there was no more document aspect, right? Yeah. Instead, this is a canvas, right? The canvas, you find the canvas because you know the URL.

So you could drop this URL into a Slack, and this canvas pops into the Slack or probably Microsoft Teams and other people can see. that right? This canvas drops into Slack and reminds you that Microsoft Teams is a superior product that's included in your 365. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the canvas is smart aspect, I think, is kind of to do with like embeds.

And I think it kind of, it kind of makes sense why all the office apps are merging. I think what Microsoft is doing with this is like, what if you, an Excel spreadsheet, you know, no more document, this is a canonical URL for an Excel spreadsheet, was embedded in a word document. Are you going to say O-Lay, Deeder? And Apple, they have invented Apple's open dock. No, no, no, no. You think that, but you're wrong because it's a canvas.

You don't have to pick what kind of file you're using. Everybody can collaborate on it. You can chat next to it. Microsoft is trying to reinvent Google Wave. Oh, wow. We all went three different doomed technologies. Deider picked Google Wave. I picked Microsoft's doomed OLE, and you picked up the doc.

Oh, I forgot OLE. It was pronounced OLE. Yeah, yeah. Look, the 90s are back. This is all a bunch of bad early 2000s, late 90s technology. The last thing to say about Ignite is whatever hope you have, like the idea that Office is, I don't know, they're pushing that onto the web. They're working way harder to make web apps happen than Universal Windows Platform apps happen.

If the answer to this whole arm problem is Microsoft just has everybody install. PWA's or just like make, you know, Edge browser windows into apps or like, you know, whatever Microsoft's version of Electron might be someday. And it's not, we actually have apps in the Windows App Store. I think Microsoft would be fine with that. In fact, I think they're pursuing both of those tracks and we'll see which one wins. Is that kind of, I think, what the strategy is. You think this is why they moved to Chromium inside of Edge? I think that Chromium is a much better app platform than whatever Edge was using. And they knew it. And they need to have some sort of hedged bet to be able to make web apps just in case.

I do think that there's a little piece of this where Microsoft is trying to claw back a little bit of control of the web and control of how people use the web from Google. And Google's happy to let them because then they seem less like monopolist. And by the way, they're also using chromium anyway, so hooray. I love that we've now come to the point where Google's like, yeah, take some web market share. That would be good for us to Microsoft. Yep. I don't know.

That's exactly where we live. That's just a bizarre, a bizarre time in history. Deider, do you know what's going on with Electron apps in the Mac App Store? No, it's very strange. So if you haven't heard, there are some Electron apps that were rejected because they were using private APIs. And so Electron just works by using these private APIs, undocumented APIs, however you want to refer to them. And you're not supposed to do that in App Store apps, so they got rejected. And this is very odd because there are a ton of very, very, very popular apps that happen to be electron apps like Slack that continue to be accepted.

And so the big question is, is Apple making a grand new policy that it's trying to kill electron apps to move everything over to Catalyst apps because of those are great? Or and then if so, are they applying those rules like capriciously and like letting the big guys in? So that's bad. Or is it like the Boggs standard like an app reviewer like followed the letter of the law and they shouldn't have and like they, they. They forgot the unwritten rule that you're supposed to let a bunch of apps through just because I lean towards the ladder. But there's been actually surprising little chatter about it. So I kind of think the latter is the case. But from where I'm sitting, it's still like a developing story as of today.

Well, I feel like if Apple was to ban electron from the app store, that's like a nuclear. Yeah, for sure. And they would have to be way better at Catalyst. And they are not. But you can see where it's going, right? You could if the catalyst was any good or if Swift UI was any good. Like there's a whole lot that's not good on the Mac. Like, again, I hate to just quote my own tweets, but like the thing that's wild about the world we live in right now is when you use Windows and you run into like the old version of Windows, like the Windows 95 UI, like the three, you know, nested menus in deep in settings, you get annoyed.

Like this doesn't look like Windows 10. What the hell? When you use a Mac, you get annoyed whenever you run into anything that's new. Anything that Apple has tried in the past three years, like, what the hell is this shit? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We'll see.

All right, but you're going to do a long, deep dive on surface stuff. Yeah, we're going to talk all the surface stuff, Surface laptops, Surface Pro 7, Surface ProX. We'll probably talk a lot more about some of this Ignite stuff. Teaser, Tom Warren, has been using the leaked Arm 64 version of Edge and changes things. changes things a lot. All right. So if we haven't sated you with this deep dive

into chromium trivia, that's coming up. All right, we're taking a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge.

You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what

you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's w-h-h-a-t-n-O-t-com-slash-sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems,

you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems

that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.a.ai slash vergecast. That's Claude.a.ai slash Vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. com. I.com.

Paul Miller. Hello. The consistency that holds our nation together. In a segment that is always called. Uh-oh. We have a time hole. It's not great. So a ton of people have received text messages that were originally sent on Valentine's Day.

And I have, this is happening across a bunch of major U.S. carriers. So it's not just one one-off technical glitch. So I have applied Occam's Razor and have I've also read Harry Potter. And in Harry Potter, the most magical, powerful magical force is love. The day of love is Valentine's Day. So a time hole was created on Valentine's Day. And now the carriers are trying to cover it up, right? And so how are they going to cover it up?

Well, guess what was announced one week or two weeks before? CCMI. Oh, my God. Now, if anything has been made clear over the past couple of years about RCS, the carriers care nothing for our texting ergonomics or for RCS. So I think only the discovery of this time hole in an attempt to cover it up has brought the carriers together to create a new integrated conglomerate. I don't know what CCMI is, but they're going to work together very hard and they're going to provide us RCS in order to, hopefully fix the time hole, but probably around February of 2020, we will, you know, a great, a great price will be asked of all of us to really heal the world.

I feel very strongly that I should apologize to the listener for saying this is a segment that holds America together. And then you immediately drove into Harry Potter. Like, no hesitation. Like, you were like, yes, I hold America together. I've read Harry Potter. So for just an apology from all of us to you. listener. But I think you're right. That divisive book series, Harry Potter. I feel that you are, well, it's more divisive over time. If you want to make a hard left turn on Harry Potter, I'll go there with you.

But I don't think that we should do that. I think you're right. Okay, good. But I think something else is happening. I think this is a breaking point for SMS. So Jake, like we noticed that all these text messages are coming. People are like weirded out. Jake talked to somebody who got a message from like a dead friend.

That's horrible. Yeah. Yeah. We saw a bunch of people getting texts from their exes and then me like I started chatting again. That seems different. My theory is that lots of people are faking it and just sending the U-ups and being like, oh, that was from Valentine's Day. I mean, that's, I'm like over a decade out the game, but that's what I would do. I was a bad person.

All the carriers have like blamed each other now and blamed an unnamed third-party texting provider. Yeah. Well, not only that, but their statements like, Both T-Mobile was heard of the only ones that have said anything, and they both have said, this is resolved. Like, we know this happened, and it's fixed now. It's like, or you could keep talking. Yeah.

Tell us what the hell. Tell us who this third-party provided. So I think there's, like, some third-party service that you've never heard of, that your texts go through, which is already a problem. Did you know that Sprint and T-Mobile and 18T and Verizon all just send, route your text through another company that you've never heard of? You're completely unencrypted texts, by the way? Yeah, that's great.

It's at Markslock, I work his house. It's Zucktex.com. He's just doing it for you. They need to break that contract. So they created a problem. And now you can tell this company that they're out of their like SLA agreement so they can launch their bad texting platform. That's my theory, Paul. Okay.

It's more of conspiracy theory than the world is there's a love time hole. But that's my, that's my conspiracy theory. It's about the same. I mean, you may recall that I emergency ran out of the Vergecast two weeks ago to go report this story. about the carrier consortium. I forget what CCMI even stands for, but all carriers are, all the four U.S. carriers are making a joint venture,

a brand new company to make RCS a reality, and they're going to give you an app, which is just the worst timeline. And Google's whole reaction has been like, hey, we're glad they're paying attention, which seems like positive, but also scary. I don't where any of this is going. My conspiracy theory is they,

that SMS and RCS are like in a box and you don't want to touch the box because the box is very fragile and like nobody really knows how anything works. And so somebody walked up to the box and like, oh, we got to get RCS going. And they like opened up the lid and that shook the box. And that's where all these texts came from. They like just you just, they shook the box that runs SMS. Well, so do the carriers not notice that a bunch of messages didn't go through on Valentine's Day? It's odd, right? It can't be a problem that happened today if the texts are from February.

The problem had to have occurred in February. And then today, like, the problem was fixed. Because they're not rescinds as far as we understand. These are texts that were delayed for a period of months. So for them to be like, this is a problem, but we fixed it. It's like the problem is from February. But, like, do you think anybody anywhere in any of the carriers has any idea what is actually going on with SMS, which is a technology that was built to work on the transport, like, meta-communication layer?

Here's my question. How many people broke up on Valentine's Day because they're texting going through? I was going to say this sounds like a viral marketing stunt for a movie. Yeah. So they paid a bunch of random Twitter people to randomly tweet. Like, hey, this text, I didn't get it. And we're going to find out tomorrow. It's like hijinks.

Jake said most of his reporting on the story was making sure it wasn't a viral marketing stunt. Notice his first instinct. But he's now talked to many, many, many people. And if it is viral marketing stunt, more power to you, you've now convinced every news organization in the world that Sprintimo will suck. We should let them merge. That'd be great.

And if it is a marketing stunt and you haven't written the movie yet, please call it time hole. How wild is it that it's like Valentine's Day? Like what? Why? How? Valentine's Day, that one. It's not like we're exactly six months away from Valentine's Day.

Why not the day before? Why not three days after? Why not exactly six months ago? What if somebody used like a rare heart emoji and it gummed up the system? It's horrible. All right. Two more things talk about. Google is buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion.

Yeah. It's going into the hardware division. Under Rick. Under Rick. Ostrillo, who knows what's going to happen to Fitbit software. They're adamant that you're going to be able to go delete your data if you're not comfortable with Google having it. They're adamant. It won't be used for ads.

the WareOS people are like, we look forward to working with Fitbit people, which is like the saddest. Welcome Fitbit. Yeah. I, man, I, I don't even, we need to do like three more Vergecast for me to work through my emotions on this one. The bottom line is like, I would not expect anything to happen with this acquisition for like two years. Like it's going to take them two years to like navigate this thing. Rick has done a good job buying other companies. He did a good job buying HTC, but this is going to take a minute.

Two years from now Our Fitbit device is better, worse, or non-existent? And then our wireless device is better, worse, or non-existent? I don't know, Paul. So I have a slightly different theory. Google has to make a watch

to complete its ecosystem that can compete with the Apple Watch. They have to. Like the Apple Watch is extraordinarily popular. It sells a lot of units. People are wearing them. They now have like the 199 model, which is the like,

I'm related to you and I need to buy you a present, but I don't actually know you. So here's this thing. it looks like I love you. Like, that's a very important price point for Apple. What is more important for that category? The AirPods Pro or the Apple Watch? No, regular AirPods Pro are in that zone.

You only buy AirPods Pro if you really love someone. Gotcha. Okay. That's great. That's where I live. It's the holiday season and you can tell them I'm thinking about this. Like, you can, if you get noise cancelling, I know you. If you get the regular, it's like, you're great.

You got my last name. Let's not overthink this. I'm going to be a great dad. But the watch is, like, critically important in that zone, right? It's a great product. It works really well. It's integrated with the operating system. There's no denying that it is like a tremendous boon to Apple.

It locks you in the whole thing. Yeah. Google has nothing. They got a bunch of weird fossil designs that, like, run a bad processor and they don't have flat tires. Like, that's, like, the main thing. Yeah. If you're interested in Android where what you're really interested is, like, a circle. That's your main design consideration in this product.

And you should just buy a Samsung's watch instead. Yeah. So Google has to like finish their ecosystem because now people want to buy a watch that connects to their phone. Like if you buy a pixel, you don't have like some great analog to the Apple watch that I buy. I think this is their move to do it. And Fitbit, because they don't run on hopeless Qualcomm processors, because they're good at health tracking, because they have like the social network of competition, all the stuff. Google can just like make it less ugly, make it so that it's easier to like action and notification on the Fitbit operating system connected to Android. and just move the hell on. Well, so that's the question.

The number one question is when Google makes its watch hardware under Rick Osterlo, are they making a Fitbit or are they making an Androidware that uses Fitbit's hardware chops? Why wouldn't you keep the Fitbit name? They kept the Ness name in the way. It's going to use Fitbit OS. You know, there's 15 versions of Fitbit OS, but it's basically an RTOS. It's like based on what Pebble did. It's not that powerful, right?

It's not that extensible. WearOS is very powerful, very extensible. Maybe Qualcomm will have a chip.com. So did they buy Fitbit because Fitbit has a bunch of people that know how to make good wearables and then they're going to have them make a good wearOS device? Or did they buy Fitbit and they're just going to like run out the clock on Fitbit's platform? But they're, you know what I mean? Like what are they going to make?

Are they going to make a Fitbit watch or are they going to make a WearOS watch? Fitbit watch. I could go either way. Like why would you buy Fitbit if you didn't want their actual stuff? because they've got people that know how to make a watch. That's like it. Yeah, I just, I think they'd be foolish to walk away from, like, the more successful product in favor of their own not successful product.

Do you think they'll open source Fitbit stuff? Who knows? Yeah. It's all very confusing. Like, I, I landed on, don't overthink it. Like, Rick just wants people that know how to make a watch. Yeah, just like, that was what the HTC acquisition was? Like, I was like, oh, what do they do with HECC?

Do they want the blockchain phone? What's happening? blah blah. It's like, no, he just wants people that don't suck at making phones. That's all. Yeah. And they can just like just do it themselves. Yeah. Like we heard about the Pixel 3.

Like they just like did it. Yeah. Okay. The Nest pixel phone. Watch. Sorry. So the next, let me try that joke again. The Nest pixel watch.

You're done. Yeah. That's it. That's a broadcast everybody. No, the last thing we talked about is in fact Airpods Pro. We didn't talk about them last week when they came out. I have them. I'm wearing them.

Chris Welch reviewed them. Here's what I'll say about them. They are the thing that AirPods should have been from the start. They sound fine. I tried it out in the office. And having never worn noise-canceling headphones before, it was incredible. Like, our open office plan where you can hear, like, everybody talking about four different things all at the same time, like, I put it in the AirPods. And it was just like they all started whispering.

That's what it sounded like. I was like, this is crazy. So I can never have them because if I wear them in public, I will die. I will get hit by a bus and I will drop them out to the subway tracks Well you can put them into the weird mode Yeah transparency mode People are freaking out about transparency mode

Yeah So I spend a lot of time on planes Dator you spend a lot of time on planes I do Noise cancelling headphones are how you survive life If you spend this much time on planes And like my Sony ones have the bad transparency mode Where you like cup your hand over your ear

Which just makes you look like an asshole Like someone's talking and you're like I'm not going to take off my headphones I'm just going to go like this. Every time I've tried it, I'm like, I apologize. Like, I tried this for the fourth time. Transparency mode does not feel that way to me. Why don't you just take off the headphones?

No, that's what I'm saying. But like, Sony wants you be like, you know, the flight attendant comes by and says what you want to drink. You're just going to go like this and you're like, a Diet Coke. And you're just like, I'm a horrible person. There's no way to do that without feeling waves of guilt. Transparency mode is for spying on people while looking like you're listening to music. Yes. There's a whole social construct around transfer. But normal AirPods, you can just hear everything.

So, like, whatever. Yeah. I will say that the difference in transparency mode of, like, my Sony cans and these AirPods is very minimal. The AirPods pro are a classic example of Apple taking a technology that has long existed and then being like, we invented it. Yeah. Like, when they're like, in their description on the website, when they're like, we add

anti-noise to the noise. I'm like, guys. Like, literally Bose was doing this. 20 years ago. Like, what are you doing? But they're very good. They sound fine. I just want to put this out there.

Deeply fine. They do not sound great. They're deeply fine. Well, I haven't tried them yet. What's this thing with, like, they're not as, because it sometimes bothers me in your headphones will have that seal, right?

Yeah. Like, and there's, these have slightly less of a seal? No, the seal is still there, but there's a vent, so you don't have that weird popping feeling. like when you put them in your ear. If you have a vent, don't you have a seal anymore, right?

I'm just, I'm really confused by this. So you need the seal for base response. So you do have a seal, right? It's sealed, but there's a vent so it equalizes the pressure inside your ear versus outside. So while it whubs, it lets in air as appropriate so that it doesn't push on your... Yeah, so like the most amazing moment of AirPods Pro, like when you get them, you put in one. And when you put in just one, it doesn't go into noise canceling. It goes into transparency.

So the mics are lit up and it vents. So you put in one and it instantly feels like you haven't done anything. Yeah. Which is like a remarkable feeling. And then you're like, wow, now I'm just a guy with a Bluetooth headset. Let me put in this other one. And then it goes in noise cancelling. And then you're like sealed out.

And that's like very cool. But the vent just is there to equalize the pressure and it works really well. I think they're great. I don't know if it's the vent, but I will say that compared, I haven't tried the Sonies yet, but compared to like over-ear Sony noise-canceling headphones, the AirPods are not effective at drowning out incredibly loud noise.

They make it slightly less noisy and slightly less annoying, but like it's still there. Like I'm talking about like on the train, right? Yeah. On the subway where there's like just horrific screeching at 95 decibels. Yeah, or a plane.

So last week I flew to California and then I flew to Chicago and I was on a lot of planes last week. Yeah. And I gave up on the AirPods and I put on my sonys. Really? They were way quieter. Yeah, they just can't roll with a plane.

Like, there's, planes are real loud. Yeah. And, you know, putting something over your ears to block out even more, actually more effective. I have purchased the most scary, it is going to find a way to transmit a virus 3.5 millimeter Bluetooth transmitter. I could find an Amazon. It's not like the one with the extra cable. It's literally just like a headphone jack with a thing stuck onto it. Oh, yeah.

I'm really excited to try it. That thing's going to hack your car. Just straight up. It's going to detect, like, this is a Honda Civic. I know how to hack it. You're going to get poned by the government. It's going to be fun. No, I think they are very good.

Like I said, they're actually great in terms of how they work. I think they are, like, proof positive that Apple's tight control of its ecosystem lets them do stuff that no one else can do, which is either great, and that's great, or it's horrible. Right? I think the noise-canceling technology in the Sony wireless buds is probably better because it's the Sony stuff, which is very good. They probably sound better, depending on how you feel about how things sound. But there's no way Sony can match the pairing.

There's no way Sony can match the battery life. There's no way Sony can integrate their controls right into the control center. The control center. Like that stuff, it's starting to border on. It's a little unfair. Yeah. I asked Apple, by the way, if they were going to roll any of their improvements to Bluetooth into the standard. And their answer was, hmm.

So I'm just going to accept that as a no. Yeah. All right. That's it. It's a Vodcast. We did the whole thing. Domi, thank you for being here.

Cool. I am very excited that we're covering Adobe this much. I think they're just, honestly, I think they're undercover. Anyway, we have a bunch of stuff to tell you about. The week before Thanksgiving and the week of Thanksgiving,

the birchast is going to go a little sideways. We're doing a big feature on pirate radio, which still exists. It's still vibrant. There'll be stuff on the site. We're actually going to print it as a zine. in the spirit of, like, pirate radio. But Andrew, our producer, has been working on some special feature podcasts

that we're going to run that week. There are three of them. The first one is about DJs in Afghanistan who work for the United States military, spreading military messages. We're profiling one of those DJs. We've got among people who have a phone conference line that they just, like, play their own pirate radio on so people just dial into a party line, which is hilarious. And the last one, we can't not yell at Congress on the verge cast.

So a bill called the Pirate Act in Congress that actually comes. cracks down on pirate radio and that actually is going to have ripple effect so three special episodes the week before thanksgiving Tuesday of Thanksgiving week and we're off for Thanksgiving although we might have a little surprise in blackfoot think about it we'll let you know but I want you know that's coming I want you to look forward to it's going to be really fun and I want you to buy our zine when we put it out I'm very excited we're going to it's our first print product no it's a zina about pirate radio uh the first episode of the pirate series is Tuesday 19 so stay tuned for that I also want you to go listen to Reset with Ariel de Hem Ross.

For a Verge Reporter and at Recode doing a three-times weekly tech show called Reset. It's about a broad definition tech. It looks at science, medicine, politics. It's out now. It comes out on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Go subscribe to that. Where we get a podcast. Teeter, you want to tell about command line?

It's a newsletter about computers. It comes out pretty much every weekday. Sometimes I write something longer in it. Sometimes I don't. But if you miss me tweeting opinions about tech, it's because it's all in the newsletter. So you should go subscribe to it, Theverge.com slash newsletters. Also, I want you to check something out on our sister show Today Explained. Sean Womisaram and Vox Critic at Large.

Emily Vanderworth are discussing the streaming war is one of our favorite topics. Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, HBO Max, and Peacock, which is NBC's entry, what it all means for the future of TV? They're calling the episode streaming explained. That's in the Today Explained feed wherever you get your podcast. And then you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at Future Paul. Dieter's a backlog.

Tommy, what's your Twitter? Tommy underscore Lee. Perfect. All right. That's the Vergecast. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Well, promo code.