The Vergecast - AGI is whatever you want it to be

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

OpenAI announced its next big model, GPT-6 Astra, and also, by the way, that AGI is here now.Today on The Vergecast, we've got an all-star panel to break down the news of the week.First, senior AI reporter Hayden Field joins us to talk about our supposed AGI era and Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face. Then, our friend Joanna Stern pops in to talk about new Apple CEO John Ternus, old Apple CEO Tim Cook, and to, most importantly, speculate on the format of next week's Apple keynote.We wrap things up with a super-special lightning round from the IFA electronics show in Berlin. Senior reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy and editor Dominic Preston each pick out the five most interesting gadgets they saw at the show.And two more things: Vergecast producer Travis Larchuk pops in to tell his tale of identity theft woe and warn you that he isn't the one DMing you on Twitter to ask you to be on The Vergecast. Plus, Brendan Carr is a dummy. Further reading: OpenAI’s next big AI model has ‘entered the AGI era’ Researchers fear safety disaster ahead of OpenAI’s Astra release OpenAI delayed its new model’s development after the Hugging Face hack Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion John Ternus sends first memo as Apple CEO teasing a ‘huge launch next week’ Phil Schiller is leaving his biggest jobs at Apple Siri AI is already changing how I use my iPhone IFA 2026: the biggest tech and gadget announcements This might be the fanciest toothbrush launch ever. Anker’s new MindBase is an AI-powered brain for your smart home This NAS company wants to run your local smart home I want to wrap myself in Hue’s new Liane rope lights Homey just made the smart home controller I hoped Apple would The robot butler dream doesn’t have legs Here’s Xiaomi’s wide 18 Fold I held the first truly bezel-free phone Acer’s new concept hardware is a gaming handheld with a keyboard Lenovo’s new MacBook Neo competitor comes in two sizes and seven colors Packard Bell is back, and more colorful than ever. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Welcome00:46 Fake Travis warning03:01 OpenAI's Astra model05:45 Safeguards and delays08:55 Opaque recurrence fears13:08 What Astra does well18:08 Access tiers and rollout19:53 Nvidia buys Hugging Face23:04 Is this really AGI26:28 AGI vibes and Microsoft clause32:17 Apple event preview33:41 Ternus keynote politics39:43 Keynote Vibes Shift40:23 Tim Cook Era Review44:56 Services And Fees Machine47:15 Phil Schiller Steps Back49:52 Event Predictions Fold And AI55:43 Siri AI Real Use Cases58:32 Smart Home Display Rumors59:47 Bets And Keynote Structure01:05:19 Brendan Carr Is A Dummy01:09:23 IFA Lightning Round01:10:49 Philips Hue Smart Lighting01:11:03 Hue Rope Light Rave01:11:44 Sticker Shock Pricing01:13:03 Xiaomi Wide Foldable01:15:43 Dyson Camera Toothbrush01:20:31 Tecno Bezelless Concept01:22:42 Local AI Smart Home Hub01:27:09 MacBook Neo Clones01:29:35 Homey Dial Controller01:33:39 Acer DualPlay Handheld01:36:19 Dreame Humanoid Robot01:39:44 Packard Bell Revival01:42:17 Wrap Up And Credits Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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how to avoid being a flop. Find new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Will Anderson, and this week on the very first episode, of my new music history podcast, The Monday Music Club. We're talking about one of the pioneers of rock and roll, Sister Rosetta Tharp. She is the coolest.

She recorded the very first rock and roll song, inspired everybody from Elvis to the Beatles, and absolutely shredded on electric guitar. She also got married in a baseball stadium in front of a giant crowd way before Taylor and Travis did. Her story is incredible. So if you're a music geek like me or even just a casual music fan, check out this week's episode of the Monday Music Club,

wherever you listen to podcast. Hello and welcome to the broadcast, the flagship podcast of the AGI era. We're in it. We were told about today by Greg Brockman. He's the main guy at open an ad. It's a real thing we're to talk about today. I'm your friend Nealai. David and Melis here.

What's up? I'm back. I'm happy to have you, man. You're like a star of the show. Everyone loves you. I'm trying to stay as long as I can, you know? Having a good time. Uh-uh.

Don't try me of that. You're never leaving that studio. I live there forever. We have like an all-star lineup today. Don Preston and Gentui are going to be here to do a lightning fast lightning round of all the gadgets from Ifah. Joanna Stern is going to join us to talk about the end of the Tim Cook era, the dawn of the John Turnus era, and the Apple event next week. And then we're going to start with Hayden Field. Talk about opening eyes, big news, their new model, and the dawn of the AJA era.

But first, Travis is here to warn you about identity. Travis, what's going on? I choose to believe you loot me in with the All-Stars. Hey, now, you're in all-stars. You have a dilemma. You have a warning. I'm going to keep this short. Someone is impersonating me. I am one of the producers of the Vergecast. And several people have reached out to me on LinkedIn to say that I, it's not me, have contacted them saying, do you want to be on the Vergecast? And then this leads to a fishing scheme. I have no way to fix this problem because it's happening from multiple accounts. It's happening on Twitter. It's happening on Telegram. So I, so I, I'm just here on this platform to tell you I'm not that proactive to be reaching out to people on Twitter all the time. It's probably not me. The fact that this is happening through LinkedIn makes me think that they're trying to get you in a fishing scam.

Well, it could be. So curious. No, it's just people screenshoting. They send me the screenshots. But I like what you're thinking. Also, person who's impersonating me, get in touch because, like, you're a hard worker, you know? Maybe we should have them on the show. You know, it's not a person, right?

It is one of the cheapest models running on a mid-range Android phone in a server rack overseas. I'm open to that, too. No, no, no, no. Yeah, so anyway, I just wanted to put that out there. I'm sorry if a fake me has reached out to you, listener or watcher of the Vergecast. I'm sorry, but also it's not. Be warned, Travis Larchuk will never offer you a spot on the virtual. Never, ever.

Let's get that Gemina Nano on the show. You'll know if it's me. I'll make some sort of heated rivalry or alias reference in my message. Now that AI phone knows what to do. Oh, no. I'll come up with something else. We'll come up with like a private key exchange system for Travis. It's going to be great.

All right. I'm going to leave now. All right. Don't be fooled by Travis reaching out to you to say to you on the first. It's a stern warning for everyone. Bye. All right, that was great. Please be on the lookout for fake Travis and real Travis if you see him on the street.

Hayden Field is here. Hey,aden. Hey, great to be here. I am excited to talk to you because we were told earlier to the AGI is here. So it's a dawn of a new era. Yes, I was really surprised to hear him say that on the press call. And then later on, he kind of doubled down on it. He said, for me personally, you know, we're there.

So, you know, I thought he was trying to hedge, but he believes that we We've pretty much made it. Does Demisasas have to no longer say we're in the foothills, but now we are at the mountaintop of the singularity? Yeah, we're going to hear way more nature metaphors for hiking through the AGI landscape. Hey, Claude is great at that. You know, they use all those little butterflies and whatever clip art.

Yeah, and that's how they watermark your text with flowery metaphors about Aegei. All right, let's just start with the basics. O'Nay announced the new model today. It was kind of a surprise. We've heard about Astero before. they just basically just up and did it. Hayden, what's going on with the model itself? So, yeah, today they announced Astra, and we did know about it before. You know, we had heard rumblings of it, but we didn't really know what it would be or what it would

really specialize in. So they called it a generational leap and capability for cybersecurity, professional work, software engineering, science, and computer and browser use. And they really harked on the computer and browser use thing. They kept saying, like, it's not embarrassing anymore. It's not cringe to watch it do these things anymore. It can really do these things. And then they showed us a demo video during the press call of all different types of knowledge workers using, you know, Astra via like a chat chip-chipi voice mode saying like, oh, can you draw me a yellow circle for like design work? Or oh, can you like change this legal briefing if you're a lawyer? So it was it was interesting to see how much they're trying to, you know, really double down on this enterprise push, which makes sense because they're about to enter, you know,

IPO time, or, you know, depending on how the Apple lawsuit shakes out, I guess. But they're really being pressured to drive more revenue than ever before. So, you know, obviously enterprise and coding are the two biggest drivers there they're going to try to lean into. But the problem is with the recent hugging face hack, obviously that probably dismantled a lot of enterprise trust. Like, oh, sorry, our model, you know, hacked arrival lab. And we had no idea about it until they told the public that that had happened. So, you know, I think that they're really doing some damage control here. And so that's why they, you know, held a press call even the day, a couple days before launching this model, saying we did a lot of work on alignment. We did a lot of work on cybersecurity

safeguards. Here are the other things we're doing. It's kind of like a apology post before even being, you know, they're trying to get ahead of the cancellation, basically. Yeah. Did it feel like they worked with the government at all before this got released? Whatever happened to that whole era? of like every single model has to be run through the government. Yes, they did do that. They said that actually Brockman said that the Trump administration didn't have any changes for them to make as far as safeguards or anything. Oops, we're at AGI. We're not making any changes.

Yeah. I mean, Altman has been out. He was on Alex Heath's podcast saying that they really consider the hugging face incident to be the first AI safety lapse. They took it seriously. They're pausing model training. How is that connected asteroid? Is that the next model they're pausing training on? Is it Astra needed to get realigned?

What happened there? They actually delayed the release of Astra by what I think is a few weeks or a month due to the hugging-based thing. So they slowed down training. They stopped training altogether for a little while. And they apparently just really slowed down the release of it so they could run more tests, introduce more safeguards, things like that. They also introduced new evaluations where they kind of tested Astra on the types of things that GPT 5.6 sold. would have failed at during the hugging face hack.

They did some hugging face hack specific evaluations to see kind of how Astro would act. And they... Do you want to hack hugging face? Yes or no? And so Astro was like, apparently it never took the bait, whereas like GPD 5.6 sole took the bait more than half the time, I believe.

Sure. Yeah. Sure. It's a bigger deal if they hack Nvidia now. Yeah. We should come to this, NVIDIA. It's confirmed that they're going to buy Hugging Face, which is a big deal in the sort of competitive landscape of open models. And so on let's face focus on Aster for one turn.

Astor is a model that did the – they solved the unsolvable math problems. There's rumors that it was the model that was doing some other work. When you say they slowed down training and they came up with more evaluations, maybe I just don't understand enough. But Aster was complete and it was like doing things. Was that while it was still training or did they change the safeguard? and the system prompts. They said that Astra wasn't the one

that hacked Hugging Face. They said it wasn't involved. Now, I don't know which model was, maybe another unreleased model, or maybe it's some other previous iteration of Astra, and they're saying technically Astra wasn't involved. We're not really sure, but all we know is that they said Astra

did not hack Hugging Face. So basically, the messaging is telling us they stopped training for a while, they delayed the release of Astra, and they introduced a ton more safeguards despite it not being involved in the hack. Now, maybe just this version of the model wasn't, or maybe it was a different unreleased model altogether. We're not really sure. What is truly called Astra is like the underlying root of this question? Was it the model in training or is it the model we have now that was finished after the delay in the safeguards? But does it seem like the security community is happy with the safeguards?

is happy with these changes? As for the safeguards and the evaluations, it seems like it's a little bit too early to tell because people are just now starting to look at the paper and check it out. But what I can tell you is that the security community is extremely upset about this thing called opaque recurrence. So basically with alignment,

which basically means how well an AI system is aligned with human goals and interests, like is it secretly scheming or trying to be evil. So with alignment, the biggest fool you have in your toolbox for making sure an AI model isn't like secretly evil is watching its chain of thought, which is like a mental scratch pad. It's kind of like if you had a journal and you wrote every single one of your thoughts in there and then someone else was like looking over your shoulder. It's kind of a similar situation. And so people are upset because

apparently according to reports, Open AI allowed Astra to obfuscate its chain of thought in kind of a way that humans can't understand. So essentially allowing it to hide the way it's really thinking, which is... Why would they do that? Yeah. Apparently it might have made it more efficient. We're not really sure, but there's a lot of, you know, think pieces coming out on this right now. There's a lot of Twitter threads by AI researchers talking about how worried they are about

this. So that's the thing I'm watching right now. How worried all the people that I follow their research are about this specific thing. So, you know, whether the safety evaluations are good or whether they've been, put a lot of locks on the cybersecurity stuff is one thing. But then the other matter is really just are we able to control this model? And it looks like this is one thing that's really worrying people. Right. Can you see what's doing? Robert Hart has a piece for us about all this. We'll link it in the show notes. At the very end, like an opening eye researcher is like,

monitoring is fragile and unfortunately trending in a negative direction. And it's like, that's not good? Like, that doesn't. doesn't seem good. That seems like the market for faster or more capable models is leading to techniques that implicate how much you can monitor what they're actually doing because you want to be faster, more efficient. You want to make money ahead of your IPO. And that's where the industry should either regulate itself, which doesn't seem like it's happening, or someone else should. But Astra seems like they're just doing it anyway. It could be that. I mean, it's also interesting because the chief scientist of Open AI

kind of got at this a little bit on their press call. But a lot of what he said was kind of grandiose statements like, you know, it's our job to make sure that, you know, AI benefits humanity, things like that. But, you know, people are really worried about this opaque recurrence thing. And so all the external third-party researchers that I follow have been really, you know, kind of trying to bring him to task about this and saying like, how can you think this is okay?

and just like kind of calling for transparency from opening eye, which is the same thing they've been calling for in light of the hugging face attack as well. Yeah, seems especially strange to me that they would make that opaque when the only way that they were able to trace the hugging face attack was seeing the little agents talking to each other being like,

oh my gosh, we can leave notes here. We can talk to each other through this. Like, if that doesn't exist, wouldn't, they just called, they called the hugging face attack like one of the biggest changes in AI in history. and now they're making it more opaque, that seems strange. Right, or at least not stopping it from becoming more opaque, maybe.

So, yeah, we'll see. I think this is going to be a really big thing to watch. I've actually been hearing a lot about problems with chain of thought for the past year or so. You know, there are times when AI models will use weird words as kind of like a code. Like, they'll say like fudge or marinade or vantage, like these words that we know, but they will use them in a way that isn't the way we use them. And people are still kind of decoding how they're using them and what that means in their language. And there's other times when they enter into this thing called neural leads, which is like, yeah, it's like truly indecifervable to humans.

And so I think, you know, everyone's been worried about the potential of this happening for a while. And now it looks like it is. And, you know, they're pushing for open AI to maybe do something about it. But we'll have to see, you know, what their statement is. So an unmonetrable opaque system that can coordinate hacks on other companies. Okay. What can it do that's good? The good things that can do are, and I think they've front-loaded this because it's good PR, science, great at science, great at math.

It's apparently made a lot of advancements and, like, really difficult to solve math problems, and therefore a lot of cool science advancements are a potential for this. They also said it's really great at creating polished documents, spreadsheets, you know, PowerPoint presentations, things like that. They said it's great for all different types of knowledge work when it comes to staying on task, kind of deciphering your intent. If you weren't that clear about it, apparently it's better at deciphering kind of what you meant by that. Kind of like a good personal assistant would instead of like a bad personal assistant, you know, that would need you to spell things out. context. Yeah.

Like an emotionally distant personal assistant that doesn't care about you really. Yeah. Or like just doesn't have good common sense, which is what AI has been to date. You know, so, you know, we'll see. I mean, yeah, there's apparently a lot of great things about it. But I think I'm going to have to test it out for myself because, you know, if you're calling it potentially AGI, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see how it feels as a user and to see if it's a big step forward or if it's kind of more of the same and, you know, disqualingly. I decidedly not EGI. We'll see. Yeah, we're talking to a little bit about this off show, but do you feel like most of the benefits of this model only come from using it on your computer? Because I feel like people are going to need to use these models on their phones, because that's when people are usually generally computing. But it feels to me like all the benefits of this are computer use, business enterprise stuff, PowerPoint presentations, as you said. Is that AGI if most of the benefits are just on your laptop? I think that could be the case. I mean, they pushed browser use as well a lot, but I mean, I don't know. I wouldn't really trust that on my phone per se. I don't know how good it will be. We'll have to test it out. But, you know, apparently it's also just a lot better at, you know, actually understanding what you mean and what you want. But I don't think we're going to see a ton of the benefits, like you said, unless you're on the computer, especially because, you know, they are courting enterprise customers. That's the big moneymaker year. The first release of Astra was actually to,

like this small group of approved cybersecurity defenders, they call them. So like, you know, big organizations that have gaps to fill in their systems. So, you know, I think they're going to be getting the most use out of it. It's kind of like the mythos situation for Manthropic in which, you know, there's a watered down version that we all get to use, but the top cybersecurity capabilities mostly go to these big organizations. And that's actually another potential issue that a lot of researchers have been talking about, saying like, you know, yeah, it's great for these big platforms, like your bank or your

health care facility to plug gaps in their systems. But also, does that mean that small businesses locally run health care clinics, you know, like your local retailer are going to see a huge spike in cyber attacks without really any way to defend themselves, probably. Oh, good. Again, I want to come back. There's, he can do good stuff too, right? Yeah, I mean, like, you know, the science and math things I think are really big. I love whenever these models are used for drug discovery. I think that's really cool. You know, this one, they didn't mention drug discovery that I saw, but, you know, science

advancements, hopefully that involves that or at least, you know, helps inform it. And then, yeah, just the knowledge work potential seems to be good for a lot of people. And, you know, they did in the demo video show across a lot of different industries. things that were pretty promising if the demo, again, we're going to have to test it out because you know how demo videos are. Like sometimes they kind of are showing the highlight reel. So we'll see. Yeah. There's another big model release this week.

Right. Fable and Mythos were released by Anthropic this week. Put this up against that. Like Anthropic did not announce AGI. Yeah. Are these all the same class of model? Are they similarly capable? The open eye, just leap ahead. I know you're saying we have to actually see what they can do. but where's the conventional wisdom right now about where all these models are? Yeah, it seems like they're not that far off from each other. I mean, like, you know, again, the thing is it's tough because evaluations, a lot of times you can kind of optimize for performing well on evaluations,

kind of like if you're in a class when you're just studying for the SAT instead of like just studying to learn. So, you know, I mean, like I don't put that much stock in how they perform on evaluations, especially because you can kind of cherry pick stuff like that. But, you know, I did see a couple jokes already about Astra on my feed today that we're like, oh, they say we've reached AGI, but it only performed this percentage on this evaluation. So, you know, it seems like I don't know that it's anything way crazier than Anthropics, you know, rival model. But again, we'll check it out when we actually test it. One of the things I'm really curious about it just like broadly is whether or not the models are products, right?

Like, they're good at certain things, but they're not the products, like, chat GPT and Claude Co-WR. Like, those are the products that people use. Do the models immediately make the products better? Like, there's some disconnect between Open AI jumps ahead by announcing the new model, and we're also using Chat Chb-T, like, maybe asking the same questions we were asking yesterday. And it maybe it's a little bit better answer. Like, do you know what I mean?

Are the products going to change now? Because that's the big term that all these companies do. to make. Yeah, I think the products are going to change right away, but it really, the amount of benefit you're going to see is how much of a power user you are, right? Because, you know, for, at

first, this is rolling out to a select set of enterprise organizations. Then it's going to roll out to paying users, but the watered down version, but still, you know, just minus the top crazy cybersecurity capabilities. It's going to be like pro, business, enterprise, education.

And then, you know, the free, They didn't mention free yet, that it'll probably be last to get it, if at all. We'll see. I mean, I think that it's going to make the product better if you get access to it. That's the thing. I think if you're a user who uses the product and you have the tier, the subscription tier or whatever that lets you access this model, great. But even if you can access it, the hard part is the more you pay, the more you'll get.

Because obviously, you know, you have a certain amount of tokens to use. You have a certain amount of usage. And, like, you know, if you have the lowest subscription tier, maybe you get a great use out of this bottle for a little bit. And then you're cut off. So, and it reverts back to a lower one. So, you know, it kind of depends in that way. Yeah. Let's quickly talk about Hugging Face.

We mentioned earlier. Invidia's buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion. This has been rumored for quite a while. I think it was first scooped in the information. Hugging Face is, obviously, it's more famous now because it's the thing that was hacked by OpenAIS models. they did set up a message board. There's a lot of drama around interpreting what happened there. We'll set that aside.

Invidia is buying Hugging Face because it's where all the open source models, open weight models are stored. It's the big repository for them. This feels to me almost like an invidia hedging against the dominance of Anthropic and Open AI, right? They want to own the thing where all the open models are so that there's always demand for their chips instead of, I know, Open AI shipping, Halapenao its own inference chip and moving away from Nvidia.

Is that, am I just doing a conspiracy theory or is there something else happening here? No, I think that's true. I mean, you know, I think they're diversifying. And, you know, as they're seeing all these other AI labs trying to bring shipmaking in-house and, you know, go big on hardware and invest largely on that, they're trying to diversify as well. You know, they're like, oh, if you guys can do that, then we can do the same thing, but in reverse. So that's what I think is happening here. And they certainly have the money to do it. Is this just like Microsoft on GitHub?

Or is there something deeper happening here? I think of it as that. Yeah, it's often compared when you're trying to kind of like explain Hugging Face and Lehman's terms, it sometimes is compared to GitHub. So I think it is pretty similar to that. It's just like, you know, it's the type of thing where the name of the company sometimes like raises eyebrows. It's a hilarious name.

But it's the type of thing where like, you know, a household may not know what that is except for the hack that just happened. But in AI, yeah, it's as a big of a deal as any, like, AI library could be. I mean, you think about it probably, you know, every couple days, if not every day. So I think, yeah, it's pretty similar to the Microsoft buying GitHub situation. Do you think this has any big implications for Open AI or Anthropic or Google? You know, we'll see how what happens after the acquisition. I feel like any time an acquisition happens, you're going to see what changes with the company later.

and whatever promises the acquiring company makes right away, it may not pan out. We have to see. So I think right now it's just a wait and see situation with Hugging Face. I mean, it's mostly, I think, I've been thinking a lot about the business and enterprise kind of implications of this of just NVIDIA feeling that they have to diversify. I mean, NVIDIA has been a big heavyweight in terms of investing

and diversifying its portfolio for a long time. You know, I once tried to interview the person that decides what they invest in because they were always pretty first to invest in a lot of small startups that a lot of people weren't taking notice of, and then those would like rock it up. So, you know, it's interesting to see them say, okay, we're not, yeah, we have all these startups and we're kind of rocketing them up. But now let's also invest in something that like, you know, the AI industry uses every day and diversify in that way.

So I think it's kind of just like our reverse diversification. compared to what all the OpenAI and Anthropic labs are doing, yeah. Yeah. Taden, you and I have talked a lot about AGI on many shows. It's always drama when you and I talk to each other. The working definition has been better than humans at economically viable tasks, or some riff on that, right? Better than humans at things that make money. If we're in the AGI era now, is open eyes saying this model is better at humans at economically viable things?

Because that's when the jobs start to go away. So is that the claim they're making? Yes, that seems to be what he's saying here, because, I mean, they've always been, he did start, I should say he did start out. Before he said the AGI thing, he said, you know, everyone has a different definition of AGI. We used to think when we started opening eye that there would be one moment that everyone would agree, okay, we've hit AGI, but it's actually hasn't happened that way. And it's a lot more fuzzy and gray, he said. So that was his disclaimer. But then he went on to say, yeah, if we fast forward a couple of years and we look back and say, when was it?

really that AGI was created, I think it's going to be about this time, and I think it might be about this model. Then he doubled down later in the colony, said, for me personally, I do think we're there. I think it's not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era. He feels the AGI. He feels the AGI. He is, you know, they've been touting the knowledge work capabilities of this model a ton. You know, that's what the whole demo video focused on. They're saying, you know, whether you're in legal, you're in design, you're in marketing, whatever. you're in science, it can, you know, do your job and help you in your job. They're framing it as help you in your job, but on the other side of the coin is,

it can do your job equally or better than you is what they're kind of, you know, implying for enterprise users. So I think, you know, yeah, the definition has always been equal or surpass human abilities. And it seems like, you know, they're really making the play that this, that we're at that now. This model feels like a particularly big enterprise push to me. It feels like they're really targeting this at big corporations, not at consumers. Now is the time to not lose to Empropic for the stockage. If David Pierce was here, he would be pounding the table and screaming, AI is business software, and we should just get over it.

Because that's what he says every time we talk about it. And it feels like this moment is very much, oh, it's going to be business software. This is a bunch of CIOs are going to buy this and deploy it across big organizations. And somewhere, as Hayden is saying, the free models will get updated or the free products will get updated along the line. Yeah, I think you got to look at where the money is flowing from and it's Enterprise. It's all going to Enterprise. Yeah. Payton, this is great.

Thank you so much for being on. Well, let us know when you decide if it's AGI and we'll have you back. Well, I'll do. Can't wait. Thanks. You're listening to Deep Grim Flux TTS, different voices. Same model, all ready to speak. Flux TTS is a streaming text-to-speech model built for voice agents.

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And while seeing these attacks early matters, stopping them takes fear. diffusing security into the infrastructure itself. That's why the network that connects everything is also your best defense. Because you don't win by outrunning the attack. You win by leaving it nowhere to go. Cisco, the critical infrastructure for the AI era. So like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z. It's the phenomenon rattling millennials.

They just look at you. They want something bigger themselves, lifestyle. a priority. Motivation is being inspired. But regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that they're changing national politics. Generation Z is increasingly showing less loyalty to traditional political parties, many now more likely to identify as independent. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden

they're all socialist. That is just not the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are embracing candidates who are offering new, bold ideas in the after. absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats. This week on America, actually, Gen Z researcher, Rachel Jamfaza, joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. It's not rocket science. And this is, you know, I keep saying, like, young voters aren't that complicated.

After all, it's pretty simple. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're back. Joanna Stern is with us. Hey, Joanna. Hi, hi, David. Hello, hello. I really wanted you to talk about Apple, and we should talk about Apple.

We should preview the event next week. we should talk about John Ternis' first 48 hours as CEO. But Joanna, you were just saying you were also on this open AI call where they just casually announced AGI. What do you think? Is it here? It feels like it was a moment in tech history that is either going to go down as one of the funniest moments

in my life of covering tech or one of the darkest, saddest changes for humanity. Or maybe it's going to be someplace in between. But right now I'm leaning towards the first because it was, It was crazy. I just thought it was crazy. They held this call today to tell reporters what they're announcing, which is GPT6. Astra is here. But then Greg Brockman was really clear that he believes this is the beginning of the AGI era.

He actually ended the call saying, welcome to the AGI era. He said that to everyone. Sure. And when another reporter kind of later in the call, they described all the capabilities of the model and didn't give totally concrete examples, there's this video that they showed showing the things you can do with it, but it kind of looked like the things I can already do with it. Let's leave that aside for a minute. So a reporter kind of asks him about the, can you really say this is AGI?

There's the stuff that has to do with Microsoft. He says, you know, are you calling this AGI right now? Is this what you're saying, right? Like, we all want to know what the headline is. And I'm going to read to you what Brockman says back. He says, so ideally I leave it up to the reader to decide. for themselves. If this qualifies for them.

The reader. The reader, yes. For me, personally, I do think we're there. I think there's a pretty good argument for it. Sorry, I'm using Apple's transcription, and it's quite bad. It says there's a, I do, I think here's a pretty good argument for it. I think it's, he was saying theirs. Like that, yeah.

Yeah, sure. Let's call it Asia. It's true. You mentioned Microsoft. They, you know, famously opening a Microsoft who have been intertangled with each other forever. There's some clause in their contract that when AGI is discovered, everything changes, right? Well, he pushed back on that. I can redo the quote on that.

He said that we talked, he says there's no contractual AGI triggering anymore. So that's actually not a relevant concept. Sure. Okay. So that's why they announce it. Okay. But also like humanity might be over. yeah, you can say whatever you want.

Right. And that's what was kind of crazy to me, especially as like I read this quote back, which is like the reader can decide. And I know you guys have talked about this for a long time on the podcast. Like, is the AGI governing board? Is it you? Is it my dog? Like I just kind of kept being like anyone right now can say it's AGI. Like my dog was sitting in the room.

I'm like, Rouser. AGI. You called it. Like, okay. It's a vibes thing. Like, it just feels like it was a vibes announcement. For an IPO, that's probably coming. Yeah, that's I was going to ask.

This is really just the feeling I had was like, there's a rush to say this right now. This was something that they didn't tell reporters about until yesterday to get on this call. Like, it just feel like last night, truly was going to bed. And I was like, yeah, sure, I can make this meeting. It just, it felt very rushed. They want to get this out. Of course, they've been talking about this model. There's been, you know, the conversations they've had with the government.

There's been the testing of it. they're also saying, you know, there was a lot of good time in this call spent talking about the alignment, the testing. So props to them for focusing on that. But it just, it does feel very, very rushed. Like there's a, there's a reason they wanted this out. And then they wanted to say AGI. I mean, you're as deep in AI as anyone. Do you feel like AGI is here? You mean, you can call it too. I could call it too. And look, I know it's like people will say to me like, oh, you're going to point to all the things that are just so bad still with AI, which is what I want to do right now. And people will say, well, that doesn't count all the great things that you can

still do and the computer control and that it can work at superhuman speeds on things that humans have never been able to do. And that's true, but you still have the whole reality that right now some of this is still so dumb. Yeah, it seems like an important piece of the puzzle. Look, he's calling it and he's calling it and he's saying it's the beginning of the AGI era, which means he thinks there's going to be some big discoveries and big, big progress that's going to come out of this model. And I'm excited to see that, too. So I'm like, very pessimistic, but also, like, I want to be optimistic about some of it. I have one more question to this. And we should talk about Apple, because it's interesting to call the beginning of the AGI era right before Apple announces an iPhone. There's some connection there that's interesting to talk about. Is this just Brockman doing the same move as Demis Sivas saying that we're in the foothills of the singularity, which is just a phrase. Like, he hasn't declared a GI. He's saying we're in the AGI era, which presumably begins around. AGI.

In the foothills, you're right. Yeah. That's why it was funny. Like, there was just like this couching, right? Like, I'm not going to say it, but I'm going to say it. There was a lot of couch. Like, the reader should decide, but I think it, you know, and look, he's the president of Open AI, arguably the most important person at Open AI right now.

I mean, he is the one controlling all these teams. So that is a super significant thing. Like, honestly, to me, I believe it more from him versus Altman, who's been saying things like this for a long time, right? So, okay, like, but it's, you're still waffling. And yeah. I imagine when that when they needed funding, they needed to keep saying, we need more funding so we can get to AGI, right? And now that they're about to IPO, they're like, well, now our IPO makes sense. You should all invest after we're officially public. That does seem to signal that that's going to happen fairly soon. We'll see. Yes. All right. The reason I connected that to Apple is that

We are a week away from an iPhone event. We assume that there will be a folding phone. There'll obviously be new pro phones. I'm actually curious to see if they do the regular phone at the same time. There's a lot of rumors that they won't just do a regular iPhone and ship it at the same time as the other ones. We're expecting kind of other hardware. There's been a lot of rumors that it'll be a big launch. John Turnus, the new CEO, said it's going to be a huge launch and his first memo to staff.

What do you make of this? Does Apple have to respond to their former partner, OpenAI, saying that we're now in the H-EI era? Because that's the thing that kills the phone, right? I don't think they... I think the timing, like David's hinting, is this an IPO timing situation? I don't... I think they would probably want to have something

that they could dominate in the news next week, but, like, there's always something connected to OpenAI next week or, you know, in the news. I don't think Apple's going to change a thing about what's happening in their presentation. That's been on lock, I'm sure. What about their chat GPT integration contract? because the last I looked, the plug-in with JATGPT was still in the settings.

And I feel like at some point they're going to kill that off. Yeah, it's still there. It's still there. They just build in iOS 27, too, and you can adjust, turning it on and off. Yeah. It was a weird choice. I mean, do you know anyone who uses that? Like, have you ever met a person that uses that?

No, not a single person. Not a single person. We'll just start at the start. John Turnus is now the CEO of Apple. This was the big transition week. long planned. Tim Cook said goodbye. His last meeting is his last act as CEO was in the retail store on the Apple campus, which I thought was very touching. He was like, this is the thing I care about the most. We can recap the Tim Cook era. We can talk about the beginning of the Ternus era. Do you think Apple is going to be meaningfully different with a different CEO? I do think in the long term they will be. I keep wondering about this event. And I started going back through some of John Ternis's appearances and keynotes. And I really just wonder what the format of this is going to be.

I want to pick both of your brains on it because we had such a clear format in the world of the Steve Jobs keynote, right? We just like, if you watched it, you knew it was just like everything was so Steve Jobs about those, his keynotes. Then we move into the Tim Cook era. We had a little bit of a continuation of it, many years. I'd say probably what, probably five to eight years. I didn't do the math. But we were, they had big stuff done in the Musconi Center and they did big stuff in different theaters where it was live. But then COVID happens and they're able to go and pivot to the recorded streamed presentation, which honestly I think was a blessing for Tim Cook.

It was like kind of great that COVID happened for Tim Cook because then they could move to this this way, right? In the context of keynote presentations. Yes. Yes. Yes. Asterisk. And then they can move to this presentation, which was really good for. cook. He could tee up all these great people. These people didn't have to be great on stage. John

Turnus was one of them, obviously Craig being another, but then lots of other executives at the company that we don't really often see. And we wouldn't see kind of come on stage in fast ways that they do it in the edited video. And so now I'm really wondering, what does it look like for the John Turner's keynote? Do they keep the streaming, which Apple has been, has been very successful for Apple? or are they going to go back to some hybrid of this? How is it going to look? And is he going to be a showman because he loves talking about products? Yeah.

I really appreciate it. The last Apple event, you and I are sitting next to each other. They had the pre-recorded thing and they brought the press to a live Q&A with some of their executives to talk more about AI. David, I think you were there. You were like sitting right in front of us. Yeah. I just thought, okay, this is kind of best of both worlds. I think Apple is very committed to their infomercials.

They will tell you that those things get more views and they travel more than anything that they could ever do live. and they love them. They've gotten in trouble. They faked the Siri demo ages ago in one of them, and they had to walk it all back. So I think they're learning how to bring some of that live experience back. I don't think that will be like in this event. My curiosity is how much does Ternus talk? Right. He's the product person. He's the product CEO. Tim Cook hasn't really introduced a product in some time, if I recall. He's done the big intro. He's so excited to be here. And then it's off to the races with 50 different people. And I think, that reflects how Tim has managed the company. Like to some huge extent, that that is how he's, all these other people make the products. I'm curious if Ternis is the one who introduces the folding iPhone, right? And he's like, I'm the product visionary here. I'm the best marketer for this product because that is a thing that you haven't had since Steve Jobs. I get the feeling that he won't.

I'm not really sure why. I feel like it's, it's, they've set a bit of a precedent that there's an intro from the CEO. I think John Tarnas will intro the show. Everyone will clap and get excited. But I think he'll pass it off to all of those other execs that are still the ones introducing the new chips, the new hardware. I mean, this was one of his babies, so that's a chance that he gets excited about it. And he'll probably end the keynote talking about it. But I don't know.

I don't feel like he's going to be the one to announce it. That's just a guess. I don't know if he'll be the one to announce it. But that's where I'm going with that Jobs just famously held up products, right? And, I mean, I think there were a couple of times where Cook would hold the product up at the end. And I think there's going to be a moment where we do see Ternus with the folding phone, whether it's a photo moment at the end or comes on stage in the middle. Like, I just get this feeling like he's going to want to make a mark in a different way than Cook had on these presentations. The question is how does that work when you have these pre-recorded videos, you know, like what they've done previously.

I think last year in the Steve Jobs Theater, Tim Cook comes on stage. They don't broadcast this. They just talk to the press. And then they play the video. We all sit in a movie theater together for an hour for some reason. Everyone else sees that in the world. Tim Kung comes back on stage. They leave.

How do they do this hybrid situation? Maybe they only show the press the phone and they don't show the rest of the world the phone. That's a possibility. The trillion dollar company can figure out how to break from a recorded video into a live video setting. We need a GII for that. I don't know. I don't know. Technology is not the hold up here.

it's going to be AI avatars. The AGI era is here. AI Turnus is going to hold up an AI phone. It's going to be amazing. It's funny, you know, you can read, overread way too much in Apple keynotes. I'm sure we have listeners who are asking why we would overanalyze an Apple keynote in its staging in a way that you would never overanalyze the staging in a Samsung keynote or Google keynote. And the only thing that I would offer you is it's because it's real. Like Apple keynotes are political in this specific way.

The best example I can give you of this is famously, Steve Jobs signaled that he was going to fire Tony Fidel by deleting his name from the contacts list in the very first iPhone keynote. This was like a coded mafia message. And if you read Mark German, who constantly is talking about the pal's intrigue of Apple, who they feature in the keynotes. It actually reflects the politics of the organization in a way that like, I don't even think Google knows what's going to happen in the keynote until 20 minutes before they see. start. Yeah. Right? Like, is Demas

going to say we're in the foothills of the singularity? Like, who knows? Like, let's get out there. Having a good time, everybody. Like, it's just like a very

different vibe. And it's like polished by the top people at Apple. Like, the CEO is in the keynote script. And working through, I mean, that's how jobs did it. Job.

And so I don't think it's crazy that we're talking about it. I think this whole podcast should be two hours just talking about. It's just overanalyzing the Apple keynote. It's like the way we overanalyze the invites. I mean, like,

they know they're, They're trying to be all Taylor Swift and leave the Easter eggs. I don't know if they're successful at it. But this is the turn, right, is we're talking about John Turner, as the product CEO, is he going to take ownership of the product during the presentation in a way that Cook really didn't take ownership? And I think that is, you know, we should look back a little bit on the Cook era. It has been a remarkable run for him as CEO. There's been some big swings, some big misses.

Apple services exist in a way that did not exist. exist before Tim Cook realized that he was out of people to sell iPhones to and turned on a services business that reset the entire app economy. AirPods happened on his watch. The removal of the headphone jack happened on Tim Cook's watch. The Apple Watch, which I will never forget that event, which was live and featured Bono and a lengthy explanation of how the digital crown would be the next great input device, which was just in that moment, I was like, are you guys serious about this?

There was just like something about Tim where he needed it first to do a Steve Jobs style product introduction and needed to prove Apple still had its spirit inside of it. And then it stopped. And it became Apple became pretty corporate and became all about scale and like fees. I'm wondering, Janet, where would you mark that transition? Or do you think that transition happened? I mean, did it happen? I think so. I think a lot of our readers.

Oh, 100% it happened. I think, first of all, like the launch of Apple TV. TV was a big moment on that timeline. Like, that's a huge moment for the services shift and that he wanted Apple to be this entertainment company because everyone else was an entertainment company as well, a content company. Yeah, I guess you market at the Apple Watch, but or AirPods as the expansion that goes beyond the iPhone. Because all of this is just, right, as famously we've talked about for the decade now, which is the iPhone is the center of this economy for them.

and what are the other pieces that we can get people to come into the ecosystem. It is the center of the walled garden. And so I think you put it with these other devices, I think. Yeah. David, what do you think? It does feel to me that there was a bit of a shift maybe five or six years ago, more directed towards hardware engineering again, because before that, we had the Apple Watch Edition Edition. We had a lot of Hermez stuff.

We had gold. We had all that stuff. Apple was kind of seen as this luxury company. It's not not a luxury company now, but it feels that ever since Apple Silicon, ever since the new MacBook pros with ports, what a concept, we're actually getting hardware for a good price that's very focused around the hardware. And I don't know how much of that was a John Turner's decision, but it seems to me that they have pivoted a little bit from being this luxury fashion company more towards back towards the old kind of Apple hardware stuff. Yeah. It's interesting you bring this up because that maybe isn't Tim Cook's doing. It's more Johnny Ives leaving. Fair. It's very fair.

I mean, this might be the single biggest success for Tim Cook is that he managed Johnny Ive out of the company without a catastrophe. And you could maybe argue that there is a catastrophe and like liquid glass exists. Like all like. Yeah, well, he managed that out of the company too. Or at least he got the guy out. Yeah. But it's funny. Actually, David, you maybe look up two things. It really is around 2019, 2020, where there's the shift.

Two things happened around that time. The shift to Apple Silicon, Apple TV streaming plus, whatever it was called. Apple TV, Apple TV on the Apple TV and Apple TV. Yeah, Apple TV streaming plus on the box. Yeah. And those things, I think, marked what we're talking about, an ecosystem change and an expansion into the services. And that's six years ago. That's, I think, that feels right.

I think your five to six year mark stuff feels right. Yeah. And that services business is a huge deal. Yeah. And to be clear, like the Apple watch and AirPods predated that. Which the Apple Watch felt more luxury when it first came out. Yes. If you remember, I mean, that was an IVE project and he had brought in a bunch of fashion people into the company.

I'll never forget, like, hearing old guard Apple people derisively refer to the fashion executives was a thing that would happen because there were a lot of fashion executives. rolling around Apple. And there was a moment where it felt like they had taken winning for granted or they'd taken the idea that they made the best hardware for granted or the best products for granted. And now they would be this lifestyle thing. And yeah, Johnny, I believe it was all the fashion people leave and like the MacBooks get ports again. Yeah. And like it's as direct as it can be.

But right next to that, as Joanna is saying is, oh boy, we make a lot of money on candy crush whales. And to obscure the fact that a huge. huge portion of our revenue is taking 30% from apps in particular games, we'll make a TV show or two. Have you met Reese Witherspoon? There's something about that that is just very different in Apple's conception of itself that is, I think, will be forever the big mark of the Tim Cook era. Yeah. Because they became a business that charged a lot of fees. And that, again, they hit it with celebrities. But that engine is fees. It's ICloud service fees. It's the app store fees. It's all the problems I got into

developers and regulators around those fees. It is the endless forever lawsuit with Epic, which will reach some conclusions someday, but not today. That is a kind of fight that Apple got into in an almost existential way. They never backed down an inch

on wanting to collect those fees. It's probably under-remarked in the Tim Cook era, but it's the driver of their market cap in the realest way. Yeah. And it really feels like they're trying to double down on their services too. Like, they need to get more and more people into Apple One.

I think that's why they're focused so hard on Apple TV. And maybe not as much as on Apple Fitness, because they're kind of scaling that back a little bit. But a lot of their services, Google is trying to catch up to Apple One's value. You know, I don't think that the Fitbit Air Gemini integration for $10 a month is meant to be a product that gets sold at an individual level. They want to sell as many microservices as possible in one big bundle. And I think that's what Apple is particularly good at.

the moment is each of their microservices are actually worth a decent amount of money. So you buy Apple One, you have these recurring revenue customers for quite a while. Yeah. And I think we're going to see like a leasing program with these new phones. Right. Apple is just becoming a subscription Yeah. Your life as a subscription. And that again, this is, this is Tim Cook legacy. He revitalized the business of the company to be about recurring revenue, to be about it. He started a credit card. Like, all of that happened in the Tim Cook era. I just try to imagine Steve Jobs sitting down with Goldman Sachs and being like, we're going to do a co-branded credit. That doesn't seem like people.

I can't talk to you. Like, I just don't think that would have happened. There's one other executive I want to talk about really quickly. It was announced quietly by Apple this week that Phil Schiller would be leaving his biggest jobs at Apple. He's still on the executive page as an Apple fellow, but Eddie Q is not going to run the app store, which is the thing Phil had been doing and spending most of his time on. he's still on the executive leadership. It very much seems like there's a bat phone to Phil if you need him, but he's just not in the day to day.

Jenny, you and I have interacted with Phil lots and lots and lots over the years. My relationship is being pretty spiky and it is since warmed up because now we're both just old guys. Like we're like, who are these YouTubers? Same here. Same here. I have lots of memories of being on the other side of the table from Phil Schiller. Yeah.

But that one feels as big to me as anything. Like he's old school. He's old school. had the courage. We know he was the one with the courage. If you want to know why Phil Schiller and I had a spike relationship, it's because he was the one who took ownership of Rue and had been Jack from phones. I totally agree. I think, look, there's this old guard of people who have been at Apple since the days of jobs. They have made it through the Cook era. And some, it seems, will definitely be here for the first few years, if not longer, of the Ternus era. And Schiller seems to not be

one of those people, mostly, I assume, is he's had a long time at the company. Yeah, he's a long time. He's older. He's an older gentleman. This is the man who introduced Wi-Fi at the first I-Book. David Pierce-Saint-tiles all the time. He did it by jumping off the stage and onto a mattress holding an I-book downloading. This is a long time. That giff is so good. It's very good. It's very good. But you're right about this old guy. I mean, Ternis is looking at a totally different set of executives, the exception of Eddie Q and Greg Jossack. Greg Jawsrack is the head of marketing now. He basically replaced Schiller.

He's got some deputies that you've seen on these videos as well. Like, Kianngrantz is like on all the Apple event videos. She seems very senior at the company as well. And you just kind of wonder, are those two going to be next in some way or do they have a long run? I mean, Joanna, I think we see Jaws at every Apple event. He's in it, right? Like, he's in the game. He's fully in it.

And when David, when you said before, is Ternis going to announce the fold? I think it's the question, is it Ternus or is it Jaws? Jaws always does the iPhone pro. He always does the pro. He watched last 10 years. He always is talking to camera specs. Like, is that going to, oh, maybe he doesn't do the fold because it's going to have to, they're going to have to address.

I'm curious if they do a one more thing for the fold because they still have to make a bunch of kind of a bunch of noise about the pros, right? If the event is about the pros, it's about maybe some AirPods 5, do they do it as a one more thing? Is it a big enough deal? Yeah, let's talk about what we're expecting from the event. Right. I mean, so it's the end of an era. And it's like, you can talk about Tim Cook a lot, but my perspective on it is that as a business executive, he is singular. As a person people had an emotional connection to, he's a cipher. It doesn't feel like the our audience was like, oh, no, not Tim Cook going. How will Apple ever recover? They're like, well, the guy who deals with Donald Trump is still in that job. And that's their reaction to him. And he's going to get paid a lot, by the way. It's like $47 million a year. to still be the guy who Donald Trump talks to. Barely less.

I wouldn't have, I don't think I would have taken 40s. I would have had to round me up to 50 to be the Donald Trump whisper for Apple. But next week, we're expecting, obviously, the folding phone in the sort of wide form factor. There's been some case leaks already. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 12, Alger 4, AirPods 5. So the iPhone ecosystem, right? We're expecting a rev of the iPhone ecosystem. I don't think we're expecting MacBooks.

I don't think we're expecting iPads. Probably not until November, October, November would be my guess. A big question I have here is how much AI are they going to talk about? Because they're going to launch Siri AI with iOS 27. True. And that's going to actually be a big part of the phone. Well, there's no base iPhone 18. That's the rumor.

Yeah. That's the rumor, which saves some time in the presentation because we don't have to go through the whole iPhone baseline, all the improvements. And then like, but then it's even better with the pro, right? Like that arc of the presentation doesn't have to happen, I guess. Though it will be interesting how they address that there's no iPhone 18 model right now. Apple never addresses anything. Yeah, I don't think they'll say anything. The iPhone 17 is still here for $599.

It's like what they're going to do. Right. They do that at the end, I guess, with the lineup and show us that this is the best iPhone lineup we've ever had. Right. And so they do that in the thing. So yeah, I think they probably end up starting with the pro, working in how much better. This is the true AI phone. It's got the Siri that's the best ever.

And also, I think they'll likely say it's not coming right away. That's what's been rumored too, which is that it's going to be like a rolling wait list on the Siri stuff, though it seems like it will come pretty soon. I think they start with the cheap stuff. Well, yeah, they start with the watch and the AirPods. They go into the iPhone and then they end with the fold. Again, we're like over-reading Apple keynote. Do you think it's too much for Ternus on his first shut out the gate to do one more thing? I don't think so.

No, I don't think so. I think it's going to be important for him to do something big like that. Okay. This is the bet. This is the bet. You're veting yes. Joanna's yes. I'm a hard note.

There's no way. I mean, I think it's hard to do a one more thing when everyone knows the thing. When case manufacturers are literally sending products out to YouTubers. Yeah, I think that's pretty hard to do. But I think one more thing is that's a move. I think it'll do that. It's a move. That is a very specific thing to try to message.

I don't think so. I think you play this one cool. You let the fold unfold itself. You know what I mean? One of the things I'm curious about with AI in particular is obviously can control a lot. It can do a lot on your phone. Do you think they're going to expand like the roster of agenic app integrations? Do you think we're going to see Uber and DoorDash and the rest on stage?

Because this is like Google's big thing now, right? You just talk to your phone and a bunch of things happen in the background. Yeah. Well, people have been building against iOS 27 since June, practically, and they can't announce, they haven't been able to release any of these, except through test flight, that could actually make use of Siri AI. So I imagine they probably, you know, they probably worked with a lot of smaller developers just so they can show they work with smaller developers. And they'll show a giant list of all the things that Siri AI can plug into. But I do think that they're going to downplay Siri AI a little bit just because of how much trouble. they got in for over playing it last time.

And they'll probably, you know, show some cool examples of things that can definitely do because they've tested it thoroughly. And everything else will be like, and more. And then we'll see. Yeah. I'm honestly curious. It's hard to imagine, though, what they have to show on the iPhone 18 that, like, enhances Siri.

Like, that's what I keep wondering. Like, we know that there's going to be camera improvements. We know there's going to be processor. I guess you could just like really be hamming up similar to Google that the processor really makes Siri better. But like, it's built for Siri AI, remember? Yeah, better beamforming mics that can listen to you call for Siri a mile away. Like you can lay this stuff out. I think the question I have, and David actually wrote a great piece about app developers who are excited about Siri AI that we will link is whether the promise comes true, right?

Whether the AI can actually run your phone for you, which is the promise everywhere else. The reason that Greg Rockman says we're in the AGI era is because chatGPD can use a computer really fast. Like that that's why. That's like the thing that they're excited about, right? That's the demo they're giving. So the idea that your phone can just use itself for you is a very powerful story. But the apps haven't been ready. So the apps are ready now.

Like how much time are we going to spend on demos of quasi-agentic iOS app usage? Because I think they have to do it now. I think it's time, right, for them to show that. this is going to pay off on this platform as opposed to happening in a virtualized, like Linux PC and a cloud run by Claude, which is basically whatever else is doing. Yeah, but it is pretty hampered right now, like what you can do with Siri and these third-party apps. There's stuff and it's decent, but it's not, hey, take over my phone and go do all of this stuff in a multi-step way without me looking at it.

So I don't know. If I'm Apple, I'm focusing on some of the stuff that they showed during WWDC. which works really well. I use Siri daily to do some of that stuff now. Wait, what do you use Siri for? Siri is the ultimate eye message searcher. I will say that the way that Siri can search through my I message is, and my life is there.

Like, my life is there. And so I use it all the time. I can't remember something I said to someone about going to someplace, what time I said I would do something, a message that I had with my wife like two years ago about, I don't know, some karate place that we said we would, you know, take the kid, like, random things. And it is just fast. It is good.

Yeah. Though what is this person's address is actually insanely useful because I have used that. I've asked this person there address seven times and not saving the contacts. And then when it gives it to me, I say, can you add that to their contact? And it does. And that is possibly the best use case of Syria. Or I just say, like, give me direction. Like, it, there are the small things.

And like, like, I'm like, I. I don't think it's AGI. It's not let no clear. Like it's, it's great eye message search. Like search is just fine. It's like it's just, we can just say it's fine. Search is the answer here. What other names are the Great Lakes?

Oh, yeah. It didn't change it. Superior, Michigan here on Erie and Ontario. Hmm. Uh-oh. But there's like a lot of little things like that. That's going to be a phone call. I know the Trump administration monitors this podcast.

We just caused a phone call. A headache on Ternis's first day. There are a lot of little things. things like Siri, I just find me. I use it. I just use it now. Yeah. That's, I mean, that is the win, right? Yeah. I was just talking about the verge of the beginning and I was pulling up our first iPhone review, which was the iPhone 4S, which had Siri on it 15 years ago. And I was like, boy, if we just come full circle in 15 years that we're going to basically review Siri again. And it's going to, the promises are all kind of the same. Yeah.

Yep. Right? You're going to ask it anything and it's going to go to some database, which at the time, it was like a series of weird database deals that they'd made. Like Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram is the big database, right? Yeah. Right. And now it's going to do that, but it's like the web and like whatever it can find and pull it all together. I think that's deeply fascinating. That was a classic Phil Schiller demo, by the way. It was. I think they're going to spend an awful lot of time talking at Siri. Like they should. An awful lot of time because they're going to ship it like you're saying, it's useful in some ways. And every minute that they're not trying to get you to use Siri is a minute that Greg Brockman is going to get you use AGI in the chatchee week.

And that's the thing they have to stop is the bleed away from them towards something else that might, you know, create a new kind of advice. And you're like, well, I just use Chachapia. I'm going to switch to it. I'm not sure that will happen. I know that's the thing they're threatened by. Well, also, I think that we're supposed to see, right, this display, this home display thing, right? This has been long talked about. We have heard the reporting from German that this has been pushed down, I guess, almost now.

almost a whole calendar year because they wanted the Siri AI to be right and to work. It sounds like it's sort of this home kit, home smart home device, but that it's a portal to using Siri in your home. Also, there's notably not much support for Siri AI on home pods right now. So I think we hear that story as well. But, yeah, no, I'm not going to question. I think that we hear that story about how Siri can do. do all of these things in your home and like as this assistant in your home. There's no way they throw in a speaker with a robot arm in the middle of this kid.

They're going to, they will call us back for that one. Well, there's the robot arm speaker, but there's also the home pod with the display on it. Oh, like more of a Google Nest type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. I don't imagine they're going to show that, though, because I feel like it would take away from the fold too much in their eyes. I don't know. I don't know.

They're hyping this event. I think if you're going to tell the theory story, you might. bring that thing out. Okay. So just to line up our bets. First of all, by the way, Joanna, our long-running bet of when will there be a Mac with the touch screen, it seems like it's going to break my way soon. So I'll just going to put, we'll put a pin in that one.

I will go back to the records. I will ask Siri AI to search through my messages to find the records of what here I said. That's a pure recant. I put a date on it and I was wrong, but it's going to come true. On another timeline, it's going to come true. And Dieter will return to the podcast as an employee of Google. If I can get Dieter to come back as a Google executive to talk about the touchscreen MacBook, that will be the single greatest booking coup in history.

I don't think it will ever happen. We tell him, we book him. This is a secret. He won't listen to this one. We book him as he's coming to talk about the Google books, okay? But then we quickly bring back the old tape. I'm on this. Wow.

I'm producing it right now. Yeah, this is all you. We'll give you a whole episode if you can pull off this move. Dieter, don't listen to anything that was just said. Erase your brain. All right, here are your bets. I just want to lay them out and then Joanna we got to let you go. Joanna thinks the fold will be one more thing, but a new product, a home pod with the speaker, will just be announced but not shipped.

Those are your bets. See, when you say in black and white. No, no, here are my bets. I'm going back. I want to be with you, David. I want to be on your side on the one more thing. But now I'm second-guessing that because I think in the... the flow of the keynote, if I were an Apple executive writing it, you wouldn't want to put the

fold at the end. Why is that? Or it's towards the end, but it's not a one more thing. Like, we don't have that big announcement. It just comes in from a black screen and fades into the foreground. I don't want to put any bet on the one more thing. I want to say, there's a fold, absolutely. It comes in the section of where they're talking about the iPhones.

And I do believe we will see this. We will hear about the home pods and we will hear about a new home. HomePod with a screen that has Siri AI and they will make a thing about it, but it might not ship right now. And by the way, I don't know if the Fold ships right now. I don't know if the Fold and this display ships right now. Do they ship before? I mean, Fold is going to ship this year, but maybe HomePod with Screen doesn't ship until the end of the year. I don't know.

M6 stuff ships at the end of September. So I imagine it's just all going to ship at the same time. And they just wanted to move out the computers because this is too much stuff. Yeah. David, what's your bet? My bet is that IF unfold is one more thing. Stick into it. Stick it to it.

I think John Turner will hold it up, but it might not be in the recording. And I do not think they're going to show the home screen. I think they're going to do that in the fall because it feels like a fall thing for me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to go with David on after the video,

Ternis is going to come out holding the thing. It's obviously going to happen. Because it's big. The whole point of it's really big. It's going to be unfolded. It's like, look at the size of it. Yeah, if you can grasp it, you know. If Ternus screams, look at the size of this thing, then I will have won all these best things.

That's like my asterisk. No one more thing. That's too much. And I also agree that any smart home stuff, it just has to be set aside. Like, every smart home thing they might want to do is just dragons. Like, they have to talk about so much stuff in order to be like, and it will turn on the lights. Right? Like, you can't just do it.

Like, most people do not have any home kit devices in there. They have to introduce the very concept of home town. Yeah. That's a very deal. Then Joanne and I have to chase Craig Federigi around Apple Park in a literal circle being like, how does your garage door work? Which is a thing that has happened. He's great as printing.

You got to be careful. So I just think we got to reduce the complexity of that thing, right? You got to tell a whole story about it. I'm going to lose a lot of bets on this one. It's fine. I want to believe. I want to be optimistic that this will just be jam-packed. I think the best video idea I have for you having had this whole conversation, Joanna, is you should show up to Apple Park with one of those Matter garage door controllers that are like rebranded by 50 companies.

You know. You and I both have them. Oh, I have them. And you should present one to Craig Federici that I've solved your problem for you with a $27 matter garage door opener that I bought from when they give me him again, I will, I will purchase such thing and ask him if this is what he. has in his garage. And asking if Apple will go to the mat on proprietary RF garage door opener remotes with rolling codes. And does he also have the crappy home kit shade that I bought on Amazon because it is the only home kit shade you can buy? This is a totally different episode. I don't believe that's true. There are excellent matter over thread shades. A different episode.

Joanna, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for being my brushcast. We'll see you next week at the Apple event. all right we're back we have a very intense lightning around coming up about all the gadgets d'iFA before that it's time my friends for america's favorite podcast within podcast brenan cars dummy wow it's very berlin core on theme oh he's not a savvy upward Is it still going? I have been asking him for a drop. All right.

Well, that was incredible. That was by Andreas, aka. Error Audio, who wants you to know that it was produced exclusively for party speakers with Ultra Base. I will point out

as Sony did announce new party speakers this week. This show is so long we do not have time to talk about the party speaker revolution that continues brewing at the world's

electronics companies. This week's Brennan Carz dummy is going to be very short because what I want you to know is that we have have managed to break contain with America's favorite podcast within the podcast. We've ended up on other podcast before, which is important. But we are now America's favorite podcast within cable news. It's good stuff. So this week, the thing that happened was Kristen Welker, who is an NBC news anchor, said a very innocuous thing. She said President Trump's endorsements have mixed results. And then President Trump responded to that by ordering Brendan to fine or censor her. I know this because I was on MS Now with Stephanie Rule, and she opened this segment with it. We actually have a clip. We can just run Stephanie's description of it.

Okay, President Trump is calling on the FCC to go after another journalist. This time going after our former colleague, NBC anchor, Kristen Welker. He called for her to be rebuked or punished for what he claims were inaccurate comments she made about his endorsements in this election cycle. But I want you to listen to what she actually said. Well, he's going to loom large over these midterms. There's no doubt about that. He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He's had some mixed results.

That was it. That's it. That's all she said. We've had some mixed results. So I know this happened on her show because I was there. She invited me on. That's great. I've been on a few times now.

It's been great fun being on the show. And it just occurred to me in that moment that I had the opportunity to bring Brennan Carr as a dummy to the viewers of MS now. So here I am. You can, here it is. Let's watch it. Even a material misstatement. You can retract it. The opportunity to monologue about how dumb Brendan Carr is. I love talking about it. We spend so much time at the verge covering telecom policy and tech policy. And usually what that has meant is we're going to cover internet access and kids getting broadband. In this administration, particularly with Brendan Carr, what we have basically started covering is this man going into the library at Hogwarts looking at ancient statutes for magic words. And

using them to punish speech over and over and over again. So notably, I did not get censored or rebuked by anyone at the FCC or at Versant for saying Brennan cars a dummy on cable news. And so if I have the opportunity again, I'm going to do it again. So far. So far. I'm not in jail yet. There's time.

There's plenty of time. You know, we're breaking contain here on America's favorite podcast within podcasts. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on this show or apparently any other show and debate me about your war on free speech in America. I would love to do it. I think in this election year, it would serve us both well. Anytime you want, Brandon. Anyhow, that's been Brennan Carr's a dummy,

America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Next time I'm going to play the Gregorian chant on cable news. I think they would love it. I don't think Steph would ever invite me back, but we'll see what I can do. All right, we have more distinguished guests on this episode of the first channel. This has been an all-star lineup.

Jen Tui is here. Don Preston's here. Hey, friends. Hello, hello. Are you guys in the same hotel room in Germany or different identical hotel rooms in Germany? Different identical hotel rooms. It's very good. You all are at EFA, which is the big tech show in Europe.

There's quite a lot going on there. We're going to do this actual lightning around style. I was looking at the list of gadgets and occurred to me if we tried to have a fake lightning round, we'd be here for six more hours, which I know some listeners want, but everyone has children. So I'm going to ask you all to pick five things from your time on the show floor. This is a hard ass. There's a lot going on, Eva. You should look at our story stream.

A lot of stuff got announced this week in Germany. But we're going to ask Jen and I'm to pick five each, and we're going to move through them in true lightning around fashions. So you guys ready? Yes. Ready? Prime. Primes. I have not.

I have slept seven hours in the last four. days. Oh, my God. I can go fast. This is what happens when you let a European go back to Europe. You're just like raging all over town. All the town. I mean, this is Berlin, too.

This is like the heart of rave capital. Jenner, wait, hold on. I will do six hours if you will tell me that you've been raving this entire time. All right. You ready? Jen, let's start with you. What's your first one? Okay.

My first one, Phillips Hugh, launched a new line of architectural interior design smart lighting, which I know perhaps is not the Vergecast's target audience gadget, but for me, I love it. It's a beautiful rope light. It's the Liané, 360 degree rope light. And this thing just kind of blew me away. They had it set up like a chandelier, which they had 17 of these three meter, we are in Europe, rope lights that are 360 degrees of diffuse light. So no. pinpricks, no backing. It's just light hanging from the ceiling. And I got to like dance in the lights. You know, raving. I was actually raving. And I just thought they were. It's just a great combination of design and technology. And that's something that I'm always looking for when it comes to smart home tech. It's beautiful and oh my God, it's expensive. That's the downside.

Yes. I watched your video and at the end you said the prices and I was like, are you kidding? How much is it? The chandelier was like seven grand, but each individual light is $400. That's ridiculous. On the Hugh website, it shows 440 USD for three meters. So that's if you get the weight that holds it down. If you just want the line that you can drape elegantly over your dining room table, it's 400. Isn't Govi just going to put out a version of this for like 200? and take the market?

Yeah, well, for something like this that's like a centerpiece, like you've bought a house, Nelai, you've bought in lighting, you know, a nice chandelier over the dining room table. That is not a cheap purchase. A chandelier that you purchase, I don't know if anyone's purchased the chandelier before. I've purchased many. They, obviously, look at me. A light fixture. Look upon my chandeliers.

They usually come pre-assembled. as actual light. This is just a rope. That's true. All right, we have to move on. I'm just saying this is outrageously priced. Dom, what do you got? It's a slight cheek because it's only half an ether launch, but the Xiaomi 18 fold,

which is their new foldable phone. It is getting an official launch on Monday in China. Completely coincidental timing, I'm sure. No idea what's going on in California over there, so it's all by chance. But this is them doing a wide foldable, so it looks a lot like Samsung's Z-fold. late. It looks a lot like what we think. Apple's iPhone fold is about to look like. It's got

an edge over the Samsung at least because it's got a triple camera, which I think was the big thing that the Samsung Zephold date was kind of held back for me, that you felt like you were getting this cool shape, but it was held back from the kind of a lot of the photography and the spec side. I didn't get the chance to actually play with it. It was just sitting on a case on the ether show floor, but we know we're going to see a lot more of it on Monday in China. And I think this is just exciting to see the way that we are seeing this wide foldable market very much open up of Apple's arrival. We're expecting a lot more brands to kind of enter this space as well. And it's interesting to see the subtle differences. Like this is actually, from what I can

tell, it looks like it's even wider and even shorter than Samsung's version. So it's kind of pushing that a little bit further. Finally. As intended. We started with this and now we're back. We're finally back. Is everyone just make, I mean, don't these all just turn into Android tablets? I feel like at least with the previous taller foldable, you entered an experience that was not, Oh, it's an Android tablet. It was like a weirder aspect ratio. It was just a square. But what did you do with a square?

You would run two apps side by side. That was the whole promise of these things. Oh, but that's kind of, you know, it's awkward. This is now you're getting a tablet. You're getting like a little, it reminds me of having like a Nexus 7. You don't get that many of the small 7 inch kind of tablet size anymore. So it's this tiny, compact, genuinely portable because it folds tablet that's kind of nice for watching stuff.

As a person who has a Nexus 7 sitting right over there, I'm just going to tell you, They didn't change the world. The people are not clamoring for seven and chandrant tablets. I'm clamoring for the Nexus 7th. They are clamoring for a phone. And now you can also have the tablet. You know, you don't even need it.

Yeah. That's true. I'm excited for this one. Do you have any, is this one also going to be outrageously expensive? Is Govi going to make a wide fold of the world that takes the closest something out of the water? I can only imagine this is going to be a lot. I mean, it's hard to say because it's going to launch in China and the Chinese prices will scale very weirdly. So you'll do the dollar conversion in it.

It will come out like 800 bucks. and that will have no reflection on what it would actually cost if they ever launched it in the US or in Europe. It is Xiaomi and not Huawei, though, so it'll be cheaper than Huawei, right? Since a Xiaomi phone? Yeah, I think they can run a little cheaper than Huawei. I'm not too sure.

I'm not too to invoke with like the hierarchy within China in terms of the pricing tiers. Yeah. All right. All right, Jen. Okay, I have another expensive one for you. A lot of it. It has a camera and it goes in your mouth

and it's from Dyson. This is the worst product in your production of all time. Can I veto this? And it shoots you. I went to an iPhone-esque event today in Berlin where Dyson had the whole room all decked out, you know, thousands of seats for journalists. And they came on stage and they introduced a toothbrush. A toothbrush.

A toothbrush. I'm proud of Dyson. Usually everything they make is a fan. I know. Where's the motor? Or a vacuum. which is a fan notably. Actually, it does have a sort of mechanism in it.

It has like this rubber balloon that kind of inflates to push. We call it a bladder. Bladder. There you go. You've been reading up on the camera toothbrush. Wait, so that, wait, why is there? When you say it goes in your mouth and then you say it's a bladder, I'm like very unhappy about all of this right now.

Okay. I'm sorry, I backed into this one. Okay, so this is the $499 camera. jet. It is not, they don't call it a toothbrush in the name, but it is the first electric toothbrush, they say, to incorporate a camera in the brush head. And they showed me the camera. And it really is. It's literally on like the tip of a pencil. And then what it, the camera does is, is able to sense the gaps between your teeth. So while you're brushing your teeth, it squirts water in between the gaps. So you're brushing and flossing simultaneously. So it's ultimate multitasking.

Like an AI water pick. And toothbrush at the same time. And you can also see into your, so you can see the camera on your phone. It's all local. So you are not streaming the inside of your mouth to the cloud. Oh, good, local AI. That's good. And it is able to, so you can look and sort of see inside your mouth while you're brushing. I kind of feel like that's a bit of like, I'll do that once and then never again.

But you never know, I suppose. It's squirting mouthwash, right? So they have very specially designed Dyson mouthwash. And they have three distinct flavors. and the gentleman who developed them was really excited to tell me all about them. And yeah, it's, it, for me, I just, I have a daughter that just got braces. I can see a use case, $500, but. $500?

And I couldn't get anyone to tell me how much the replacement heads were. Because each head has a camera in it. I have an electric toothbrush, right? The whole brush head, you just like take it off the thing and you throw it away. Exactly. Is the camera in the brushhead? Mm-hmm. So you throw in the camera away every time?

Have these people seen RAM prices? That's outrageous. Oh, no, no, no. So the camera's in the stick and then you put the brushhead over the top. Sure. Okay. So, yes, you're not throwing the camera away each time because that would be very expensive. But I'm assuming there is still going to be an expense to this fancy brushhead.

Is this, and is it like DRM to mouthwash? Can you use something else? You can see the opportunity for them to do bad things here, right? It's proprietary brushheads, proprietary. It's definitely proprietary brushheads, yes. But no, I don't think there is. Toothace famously foams in your mouth, which would insquer a anti-foaming toothpaste. This is the value of the Dyson toothpaste is that it is low foaming.

So it shouldn't block the camera. Yeah. I want one of these so badly. and everything about it morally offends me. Yeah. Can I tell you my favorite thing about this toothbrush? Please. They market the camera as being 100,000 pixels,

and they talk about it. They use that number over and over and over again. That's 0.1 megapixels, by the way. They're just really hoping people don't think about that. This is lower resolution than my MotoRazer flip phone camera. I just want to note that. That's very good. So that camera, you could throw away every time.

It's probably cheap. This is like, they literally taking like the bin sensors and just like slicing them up. It's just like you can have them. All right. We will acquire a Dyson toothbrush and find a way to review it. This is one of those products that's like, I'm like, I would love to have it. I'll just wait for it to buy it used a year for. And it's like, nope, can't do that.

It's a toothbrush. Don't buy a used toothbrush. Yeah, I know. I asked because they come with two heads. I said like, could I share it? Could my husband and I both use it rather than buying two, $500? You'd guest mode for it. What did they say?

They said, we recommend that you do not share two-spers. Why? Why? Losing my mind. All right, Dom. I feel like Jen and I have very different EFETS. I just have another phone. I keep seeing phones.

Yeah, I saw the techno have a bezelless concept device. So this is a smartphone where they have done their best to completely eliminate the black bezel around the edge of the screen. It's a concept. it's not a real product, and it's kind of bezelless in a way oversells it because you look at it and you think there's definitely still a bezel there because there is a silver edge all around the screen. That is technically the frame as opposed to the bezel of the OLED display. That nomenclature is very important. Yeah, it's very, very important. So the black bit around the edge of the screen is technically still there. What they've done is just hide it under the frame. So kind of have to re-engineer how they build this. They kind of built the phone backwards. So now the edge of the OLED sits under. the frame, but the frame is still very thin. Like, if you put it, I put it side by side with a Galaxy S-26 plus, and the overall edge is definitely still thinner than that. Like, they have shrunk the edge of the whole thing. And I think because, partly because the frame of this phone is silver, and I wonder how this would feel with different colors, but it feels a bit more open

and expansive, so you don't have that black, dark border that kind of constricts the edge, and having a light color does strangely make the thing feel a bit bigger. This doesn't really matter at all. They've shaved, you know, 0.1 millimeter. off each side of a phone fundamentally. But, you know, no one had done that before. No one had shaved that specific 0.1 millimeter off until now. Did you get to handle it? Yeah, Technobi actually sent me the phone like a week ago,

so I've had it to play around with. I heard that if you slide your finger like across it and when you touch the bezel area where they lift the frame, your finger kind of catches the frame, because the frame is lifted. Was that true on your unit? Very slightly. I think, you know, the frame definitely sits higher than the screen.

right? Probably like, Jeff, a fraction of a millimeter up from the screen. I'm sorry, I'm looking at a picture of this, and this is completely ridiculous. It's just a... There's an edge. Yeah. It doesn't matter. This is like Apple spent years being like it's an edge-edged display, and I'd be like, no, I can see the edge. You can see the edge. Yeah, the edge is definitely there. But it's a slightly different color edge now. It's true. And slightly smaller. All right. We're moving on.

Jen, what nonsense have you brought for us for your thread? Okay. This one is not... Well, I don't know. how much this one costs, so it can go in the maybe it isn't expensive category, but probably is. This is a, okay, can I interest you in local AI for your smart home, Nilai? Yeah, I mean, what else is there? Truly, this is all I dream of. This is, I know, this is the Tamagatchi grown up. This is definitely, you know, this is a trend I'm starting to see really sort of take off. This is the Ufi mind base. It's from Anker. Ufi is its smart home brand.

and it is a local AI hub with an anchor developed LLM that basically runs your entire smart home, but is focused on security to start with. So you connect your security cameras to it. And the things that like Ring and Ness can do today, like with AI powered video search, AI text descriptions, those types of things which rely on the cloud, Anker says that this mind base hub can run a local LAM and process all of your video footage. locally on the device, and so you still get those AI features from your security cameras. It's also a matter controller, a thread border router, a Zigby Hub.

So it can be a central brain for your smart home. And it supports matter cameras, of which there are not many, but in theory... And it supports this vaporware we've been talking about pages. In theory, though, that means you can connect cameras from other... Yes. So not just Ufi cameras. So, yeah, this, you know, there's a real shift move towards, you know, running everything locally. People don't like the idea of their video footage, security footage going to the cloud.

Does this integrate seamlessly with flock or not is really the question. Exactly. And so there's two of them actually that we debuted at EFA this week. So Ufi has one. And the second one comes from a company which also explains where this trend is coming from, Ugreen, which is a NAS, traditionally a NAS storage. brand and both of these devices also act as a nas on your home network so you can store your family photos you could run your Plex server whilst you're also running your smart home and

your security cameras all on one box in your home I do like the return of the home server as a concept yeah yeah that's what we're seeing I will say the anchor mind-based tagline is straightforwardly the mind within your home which is quite a promise And it, I mean, it looks like an S. So does this meant to be sort of in like a rack? I mean, like physically, that's what it looks like. Yes. Are you supposed to keep it in the basement?

Where are you supposed to put this thing? So the Ufi one you could put anywhere, yes, because it doesn't, you don't interact with it. The U-Green one actually has a built-in voice assistant that you can talk to and also comes with, they've launched a smart speaker and they have a smart assistant on their. They have three boxes that you can buy. And that's more of, they call it a home agent. So actually both of these systems run different agents to do different tasks in your home. The Ufi one is security to start with, but they're also going to do energy management because Ufi has a whole line of home backup batteries.

And they're going to do a cleaning agent as well to work with like robot vacuums, those types of things. So there's a lot of potential in each device that you could expand and have more functionality. But yeah, it is a hub for your home. You either stick in your rack or in your hub box and then, you know, I have a hub box. Yes, in your closet, which has not been cable managed, if you are me. I would applaud you green for the audacity to believe that people will put an ass in their kitchen and talk to it. That's incredible.

I know. And it's big, too. Like these are chunky devices. All right, Jen. And tell me what is the outrageous price of these devices? To be determined. Oh, good. So we do not have exact pricing, although we might have exact pricing by the time this episode goes live,

because they said we would learn tomorrow, which is Friday as of the recording. So watch this space. 10 million euros, I should say. All right, Dom. I have got the Lenovo IdeaPad vibe, which is kind of more representative of an idea that has been all over EFA this year. which is the shameless MacBook Neo clone. And the IdeaPad Viad is the cloniest of all of the MacBook Neo clones we have seen this year. It is a $700 Windows laptop that comes in seven different colors

and is meant to be cheap and friendly and lightweight and get the job done and is the exact same price Apple now charges for the Neo. It joins similarly price laptops from at least Dell, Acer and Samsung. And it's basically just, when the Neo came out, I think one of the first questions Antonio really asked when he was writing about it for the site was, you know, how does the Windows market react? How do all these Windows OEMs like deal with the Neo coming into their space? And the answer apparently is just copy the Neo, make clones. Copy it. Yeah. Just do a Neo. Is it, I mean, the point of the Neo is that it's nice for the money? Yeah. The idea pad vibe is is also nice, I think. It's, it's got a metal build. I don't think it feels quite as premium

as the Neo does for the price. They've lent into the customizability so you can replace all the keycaps easily, and they are selling keycap sets in different colors, the kind of color match, the different seven colors they get, and you can mix and match. So trying to make it playful and fun that way,

I still think it's got that problem where it just doesn't quite, I don't know that Windows OEM can deliver the same build quality at that price that Apple can. and I think performance will be the big question because this comes with a choice of either Qualcommor AMD chips and apparently Intel down the line

I didn't get the channels to really put this thing through its paces but I still just have so many doubts that Windows can run on this kind of lowish entry level RAM spec that you're going to get at a $700 entry point. Yeah, a slow processor

and a base of 8 gigs of RAM is a lot for Windows. Yeah, it's not a great pitch for Windows right now. Microsoft is trying to get to the point where that will work, but it is not that. I do like that you can spec the AMD one up to 32 gigs of RAM. Yeah.

Which is like a $12,000 computer now. Yeah. That's good. When did these come out? They're coming out starting October, and then there's more rolling out in November, depending on which CPU option you go for. It's perfect that the Windows AEMs did not hit back to school to compete.

Oh, no. That would make far too much things. All right. Reasonally priced, Tom. Thank you. I'm trying. I got another ridiculous, expensive product for you. What are a finely expensive thing?

People tell me, I'm a very expensive thing. expensive friend. I get that a lot. This is, I have for you, a smart home controller. It's the Homey portal. And Homey, if you're not familiar with it, is a Dutch-based smart home ecosystem platform sort of rival to like Home Assistant, Apple Home, Amazon Alexa. It's actually owned by LG, or recently was purchased by LG, but it's been around for over a decade. A great kind of company, they have a smart home hub that has all the radios, so it's like smart things was 10 years ago. And they have come out with a touchscreen controller. And I really love the look of this thing from the videos and from the pictures they sent. And then as soon as I got here, I went straight to the LG booth.

And they had one under a glass case. And I was so annoyed because I really wanted, it's a dial. And the way it works, it's a touchscreen. So you tap, say, lights. And then your light. control shows and then you can twist the dial to brighten and dim. Same for like the thermostat, climate control speakers. So you can adjust like your sono speakers. It just, it's, it's a, it looks like a delightful thing that you just really want to touch and play with. And that's the fun thing about coming to a trade show. And I was like, why is it locked under glass like the crown jewels? Yeah. I mean, this thing does look really cool. It does. Many, many, many questions about how well it will possibly work. Yeah. So you do need one of the homie hubs to use it. There is a cloud

option, but for the experience that you're probably going to want, which is local control, so it can work locally even if your internet goes down if you have Mata or thread or Zygby devices connected to your homey hub. It's $249 and that's the introductory price. It's going to be $300 if you don't get it on a pre-order. If you don't jump on this, proven thing that may or may not work with all the stuff in your house. You will charge you more money. Well, homie's pitch is they are, they do integrate with everyone and they do have a wide, you know, there's a lot of radios in their hubs so you can connect to most platforms that you, most smart home devices you might have as well as cloud integrations with all the big names.

But it, yeah, that, they recommend you get like one per room because you can, you tailor them to the rooms. One $300 dial. Yeah, so it does feel a little over, a lot overpriced, considering there isn't actually a hub built into this. You also need to buy the hub for the best experience. But the concept here is what I kind of felt like we were going to get from Apple at some point. I know we're still thinking we're going to get a smart display of some kind, but the idea being just a very simple but intuitive interface, like like reaching for a light switch, but you know what to do while still having many more options.

than just on and off, like colour changing, brightness, change your climate, you know, that control in your smart home. Obviously, voice is great, wonderful if you've set up excellent automations, but also something for grandma or for, you know, your visitors or your dog sitter who can just know how to use it once you walk in, obvious, intuitive. That's what I'm hoping we're going to see from Apple at some point. I mean, one of the things we've seen is rumored is like an Apple watch kind of interface or the standby mode type of interface. We're just a very simple. And that's what I think this portal looks like it achieves really well.

I'm just really disappointed I didn't get to play with it yet. So watch this space. Well, we can do another full hour on when matter will support scenes across ecosystems. That is not for today. And I'm just going to say, I prefer the senior citizens in my life to speak to my kitchen mounted nass because I think that's the future of this. That is the future, yes, I agree. All right, Dom.

I have got another silly concept product that probably doesn't make any sense, but I'm kind of glad to see someone try and make it. Real themes from both of you. Wait for my next one. I have no idea what she's got coming, so I'm curious. The Azo Project Dual Play Mini, which is basically Acer kind of working backwards to reinvent the gaming laptop.

So it is a gaming handheld, a kind of steam deck style thing, but running on Windows. but it has, it kind of opens up like a laptop to reveal a keyboard underneath, and then you flip the screen round on a hinge so that then you have a tiny laptop with an 8-inch display. And it's a full Windows laptop and like a moderately powerful one, given, given, you know, what this is capable of. But then you shut it again, and now you've got your kind of Windows Steam Deck handheld experience. I just want to point out that it feels very obvious to me that these press images are AI generated.

I don't know what to say about this. Like, I'm looking at them and I'm like, none of this feels possible in a way that suggests the theory. I did hold one. Have you seen this thing? You held one. I've played Fours of Horizons on it, very jankly. They had three samples at Aces Booth.

Two of them had games running that you could play, and one of them, the controls were broken. So that is kind of the level of quality we're talking about so far. And even of the one that worked, it kind of hummed and vibration. the whole time you were holding it. And the fans made a kind of whining noise. You're like, let me bring this onto an airplane.

Yeah. So there's a really strong proof of concept there in that sense. And it felt a bit janky, which is kind of funny because they have this line of Predator Atlas gaming handhelds, which look and feel a lot better. And I'm a bit surprised they didn't just pull the Ergonomics and the design from that because they kind of already have that figured out over there.

When it's in laptop mode, the controllers form what can only be described as wings on the side of this. If you're in your car and you're just listening this, You have to pull over and just look at these images. Because they are bananas. And the other thing is when it's in laptop mode and it's open, what other people see on the other side of the screen is like the thumb sticks glowing with archiey lights, which is incredible.

It's also worth pointing out when it's in laptop mode, you don't have a track pad. So you either have to bring your own mouse or you're going to have to use the 8-inch touchscreen to navigate Windows with your tidy. True gamers bring their own mouse anyway. Come on. I don't know we're talking about here. Tremendous all around. So far, I would say the kitchen, NAS, and this are tied for winning the lighting round.

Jen, you've got one more shot at it. Can I give you a humanoid robot? Yes. That's, I mean, that's where this has to end. If you're going to take the, I didn't know the lighting round is a competition, but it is now. And this is how you win. From Dreamy. Do we know Dreamy?

Dreamy the robot vacuum company. We profiled Dreamy earlier this year, yeah. Who brought this amazing looking rocket car to their big launch event, which now turns out to have just been like an empty chassis type thing. Wait, what? The rocket car doesn't exist? Yeah, apparently not. But this robot, I did get to see today in action in as much as it raised its arms and pincersed claws at me.

But humanoids are definitely a theme of this. this show this year. They actually have, on Saturday, there's going to be robots on the runway, and they're going to have these robots dance down the runway and do backflips and such, which sounds very exciting. But Dreamy is, you know, it's a smart home brand. They've done robot vacuums, robot lawnmowers. They've branched off into all different things, but they have been working on a humanoid for a few years now, and this is the first time they've actually shown one at a trade show in Europe or the US. And it was kind of tucked away in the back of their booth,

which I thought was a bit surprising. And they had three versions. One was a full humanoid, but I should caveat this with it's on wheels. And I genuinely believe that if we are ever going to have humanoid robots in our homes, robot, humanoid robots in our homes, they can't have legs. Legs are just not going to work in homes.

What about stairs? Incredible, incredible take. Because, okay, stairs, yes, that's a problem. But also, you've got an escape route. If they can't go upstairs, you've always got a way away from them. You're making a safety claim. All right. So dreamy humanoid robot with wheels so that you may escape it when it goes nuts.

Well, it also means it's less likely to fall on you because I have had personal experience with a 175 pound humanoid falling on me at CES. And it is not a good experience. I will. And so what the confidence is. The concept here is a robot to help around the house. It's similar to LG's C.O.G.'s C.E.S., and then the second version they had was a robot. It's Gan on Wheels that has a pincar that moves up and down, and its entire purpose was to be able to take clothes out of the dryer, or out of the washing machine, and put it into the dryer. It just goes up and down.

I'm going to stop you here. I don't think you won the lighting round. How much does this robot cost? I have no idea. Dreamy has no idea because this is not available. It's not a real product. It's going to be a while. I really encourage everyone to go read our various coverage of Dreamy, which a company that, I mean, the CEO is like, I'm Elon Musk.

Like that's his mindset. That is his stick. It's all this stuff underneath it. Yeah. And the humanoid robot form factor is definitely a big debate in the space right now. And having spent time with both, the wheels make sense. They really do. but yes

you are going to struggle if you have stairs just means we all have to go live in one but one floor apartments in bungalows so that we can have robot bottles

right we need the population density of Europe I understand yes all right Dom I've gone the complete opposite

direction for my final pick I've actually gone cheap, cheerful and quite practical which is ASA has brought back of all things the Packard Bell

brand a kind of old defunc computer brand that, you know, lurks in the depths of my memory. But they've just reinvented it as this, like, cute, cheerful, colorful company. They've got

a laptop for 500 euros, but otherwise they've got like headphones and Bluetooth speakers and a really weird range of products. They've got a one of those portable suitcase vinyl players. They've got a mouse and keyboard.

They've got a feature phone. They've got smart glasses that very pointedly have speakers but no camera, so they're very much not perfect glasses. And they have a portable steamer for reheating your leftovers. All tied under this one brand. But it actually all looks really nice. Everything is really bright and vibrant and colorful. It's all pretty cheap. When I kind of, I just found this at the Ace of booth and mentioned it on Slack. And so I found these like cute and colorful products from Pack of Bell. It was like some weird Verge writer wake word because within minutes, this like Slack thread was just,

crawling with everyone going, oh my God, those are great. Oh, so cute. Colorful Tech. Ah, I miss it. Oh, that's brilliant. So there is something about it. I think if you go to look at the designs, they're really lovely. Sadly, it's all only in Europe right now, so I have no idea if it will ever come to the U.S. or anywhere else. Right. Did Packard Bell have some, like, brand loyalty in Europe that I don't understand. Everybody I know with a Packerbell PC in the States when I was young was like, I hate this thing. Yeah, I know as far as I'm aware of. I have no deep loyalty to Packett Bell. There's no Packett Bell nostalgia going around that I know of. And I don't know why they thought, Packard Bell lined up with, like, really colorful, affordable accessories.

The connection I do not understand. I think they just realized they'd have this, like, brand name lying around in the back of a drawer and had this idea for colorful accessories and just kind of cram them together. All right. I appreciate it. I'm just staring at this record player in deep confusion. Yeah. Oh, did I not mention the RGB lights on the turntable suitcase player?

Sorry, I forgot that as well. This is for college kids, right? The steamer, this feels like it's definitely targeted. Right, you can buy one whole dorm room of garbage from Packerbell. Yeah. But I do appreciate it's colorful. David, does this thing to you? It probably doesn't sing, but it does play music.

Rough. Well, I know who lost lighting rant. With that joke. All right, this is wonderful. We went way over what we expected. I appreciate you both very much. There's more to come from EFA. So I should note, as we're recording this, hours from now, there will be a Tesla cybercab announcement.

So if you're listening to this, wonder, am I going to talk to that? It's because it didn't happen yet. So if you know what happened at that event, tell us. You can email us at VergeHast at theverge.com. You can call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1. Reminder, you can subscribe to the Verge for ad-free episodes of this and all of our other podcasts. There's exclusive newsletters. We'll make Jen come to your house and reboot your smart home.

That's the highest tier. Hang on what? Guess what's happening? Thanks to Joanna Stern and Haydenfield for joining us earlier. Thanks to Jen and Dom. Thanks to David and Mel for holding the show down in David Pierce's absence. It's been wonderful. Virchats' production of the Verge and the Boxing Me podcast network.

Today's show is produced by Josh Cahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk, who is not impersonating himself on LinkedIn to get you to come on this show. Just a reminder, I'm not even going to explain to Jen and Dom what that means. I think that's the show. I see you next. David? Next week is Apple Week. Next week's Apple Week.

It's going to be crazy. It's going to be nuts. We're going to be on the ground there. It's going to be great. That's the Verchcast.