The Vergecast - Apple announces macOS Big Sur, new silicon chips, and iOS 14

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn welcome back Verge alum and Wall Street Journal columnist Joanna Stern to discuss the big announcements from Apple's developer conference this week. Verge news editor Chaim Gartenberg joins in the second half to discuss the Apple updates you may have missed. Stories discussed this week: Fire and plague prepared these teens for the world New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut will quarantine travelers from states with surging COVID-19 cases The EU plans to ban US travelers indefinitely after haphazard COVID-19 response The healing power of Black art Big Sur is officially macOS 11.0 as Apple finally leaves OS X behind  Macs with new Apple-built chips will natively run iPhone and iPad apps Apple’s new ARM-based Macs won’t support Windows through Boot Camp Apple details iOS 14, its next major software update iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 will let you set default email and browser apps watchOS 7 announced with sleep tracking and rebranded Fitness app Apple TV 4K will at last play YouTube in 4K with tvOS 14 update AirPods updated with automatic switching and a new ‘Spatial Audio’ feature Apple teases new tracking protections and an approximate location feature in iOS 14 Apple approves Hey email app, but the fight’s not over After outcry, Apple will let developers challenge App Store guidelines Hey opens its email service to everyone as Apple approves its app for good Microsoft is shutting down Mixer and partnering with Facebook Gaming Mixer failed — here's why Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, WVTC, Apple's moving its Macs to arm. Our friend Joanna Stern joins us to talk about the event, the big move. We'll make a little bet when touch screens are coming to Mac. Then Heim Gartenberg joins us to dive into all the rest of the news from Apple's WWC. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, Anne Mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Ann Mom, a community for athletes, game

changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vodgast, the flagship podcast of seamless platform transitions. Huh? Wow. I prepared this week, Deeder. Is that a joke about food delivery? It is. It's, um, well, Yeah. I take just an enormous cut from small businesses around the country. I'm your friend, Eli. Deider Bone is here. Also your friend. We got kind of a great show this week. It's WWC week. Obviously, Apple had a lot of announcements with the future of its operating system. Operating systems, there's 12 of them, 14, that was interlaced with some drama around the app store, which we can get into. But our friend Joanna Stern is going to join us, Joanna Stern, co-founder of the Verge, actually, and now personal

Technology columnist, the Wall Street Journal. She's going to join us for a bit. And then Hime Gartenberg from our staff is going to join us, and we're going to get deep into the news, the big news, which is Apple's move to arm processors, its own silicon for Max. Before we do that, every week, I do like to just give an update on our coverage of the virus of various racial justice initiatives that are going on in the world. I say every week, those are the two biggest stories going. The virus in particular, I think, will be the dominant story of our lifetimes. So we've got to keep tabs on it. I don't want to shortchange the great work our team is doing. So I just want to call some stuff out. It has been 15 weeks. This is important for a very

specific reason this week. It has been 15 weeks since Trump and Dr. Deborah Berks held up a flow chart promising a website that Google was going to make. This all happened. 15 weeks ago, this actually happened. Trump said, thank you Google. Thousands of Google engineers are working on a website and they held up a flow chart and you're supposed to go to the website. The website would be a symptom checker and then it would direct you to the parking lot of a major retailer. They'd all the CEOs of the retailers. This actually happened within our memory 15 weeks ago. This occurred. Yeah. And then you would get a test, a drive-through test in a parking lot. You'd go home, you'd log on the website and it would tell you the results of the test.

15 weeks later, that website, that national testing apparatus embodied in a website built by Google, not exist. There is a website being built by a division of alphabet called Verily. They've got, you know, a couple dozen testing sites open across the country. Access to testing in general is up, which is good. We also, not good, have more positive results this week in the U.S. than any week previous. Yeah, I would say that we have not done a good job. Particularly in the South, the percentage of positive tests, testing numbers are going up. The percentage of positive tests also skyrocketing. And that's a lagging indicator, right? That's, that data tells us what happened like two to three weeks ago. So we're, we're just seeing Texas thinking about shutting down again.

New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are going to quarantine travelers coming from states with surging cases. That's all happening. Apple's closing yet more stores again. Apple's closing in stores again. But that website does not exist. That was 15 weeks ago. That's a real thing that happened. And I, Deeter, I know you were, you and I were just like, like on the phone at 11 p.m. every night for a week being like, what's up with this website? A lot of people were very angry that we were pointing out that usually when Google puts 10,000 engineers on a project. It was 10,000?

Whatever the number. It was some absurd number. 1,500, I think it was. Usually when they do that and they have a big announcement, they make the announcement. Right. And Google's approach to hearing the president say it was just outright surprise in silence for a while. And everyone told us we were overreacting, but I'm telling you 15 weeks later that number numbers are rising, that website is not doing the thing it said it was. And the reason I said

it's particularly important this week is not just the skyrocketing numbers are seeing in other parts of the country. But yesterday NBC News reported that the White House is going to pull back from federal support for testing and leave most of it to the states. Further pulling back. So we're all the way at, we're working with Google on a website 15 weeks later, they are saying we're pulling back from this testing. I promise you that the country will not get the virus under control before a vaccine without an organized testing apparatus, testing and tracing, we just don't have one. I'm just going to keep counting the weeks because it's the form of accountability that I can do. I can't walk up to Jared Kushner and be like, what's up with the flow chart? If I could,

I'd have to remain six feet away and yell through a mask. It wouldn't be, you know, it wouldn't be as as effective as me just counting, I think. Anyway, so that's that. I'm just going, like I said, I'm just going to keep counting. I'm sorry if it's tiresome. There's a button in your podcast player. You can just scoot right by it. But I'm definitely going to keep counting. Some other stories. I want to call it Justine Kalma on our team. She is our great science reporter.

She just profiled this high school in a town that's called Paradise California, which is just deeply ironic. Last year, the students in the Paradise California High School graduated into the campfire wildfire. The town was devastated by this wildfire. The students graduated into that. This year, they're graduating into the pandemic. The town is being decimated by that. It is just an incredible story of how resilient the teenagers are. You read it.

Their town has been devastated two years in a row. Their school has been disrupted two years in a row. They just sound like the most resilient. We're going to get through it, a group of people. So it's very touching in that sense. But it is also a story about how the pandemic and the environmental factors that cause the wildfires are interacting with this community. It's really eye-opening.

She did a great job. It's her first feature for the site. So I want to call it out. Like I said, we have some news on New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. that's on the site. You can get some details on that. The EU is planning to ban U.S. travelers indefinitely because of our COVID-19 response. That's on the site. You can read about that. And then lastly, the other big story in the country is about racial justice. It's about the protests. It's about how we're going to solve systematic racism in the country. We have a lot of stories

about that. Casey had a scoop over the weekend about Snapchat's like disastrous Juneteenth filter. There's a letter. You can read it. I want to, focus on something else that we did, which is our illustrator Alex Castro, who's amazing, just wrote a story for us over the last weekend called The Healing Power of Black Art. And it's just a lot of, I mean, it's a lot of beautiful things to look at made by Black artists and his experiences as a black person, looking at those things, understanding the part of a community. It was great. I just like, there's another side to this that I wanted to call out. And Alex just did an amazing job with that piece. I wanted to call it out.

On that piece in particular, like if you catch yourself doom scrolling, which is my favorite new word everyone's using lately, just like just going through Twitter, just, you know, looking for more bad news, even though you don't know that's what you're doing, stop and go look at his piece. And instead of just scrolling through it, like stop on something that you see that interests you and then sit with it. Watch the video, look at the art, whatever it might be. It's a, it's actually a much nicer way to use your phone or your computer than just seeing. what the latest bullshit out of Congress is. Yes. With that said, we will now do two hours of bullshit out of Congress. No, no. That's for next week. No, in all seriousness, Alex did a great job of that piece. I want to call it out specifically.

So go check that out. Okay, that's the big stories. Like I said, those are the two biggest stories in the world. I don't want to take our eyes off of it. Our team is doing just an incredible job covering those stories. Our priority is really those stories. But at the same time, Apple had a gigantic event. We got to talk about it.

So without further ado, let's bring on Joanna Stern. Joanna Stern, you are, I think, most famously a co-founder of The Verge. Most famously. Second, most famously, you were the world's premier netbook reviewer. That's true. I think most famously you were the netbook diva at Laptop magazine. That's the real title that you held. Then The Verge.

And then personal technology columnist to Wall Street Journal. Welcome. It is a pleasure to be here. It sounds like it. All right. With that intro, where else could I possibly want to go? There's like massive news from Apple about Arm and Max. That's like the thing I want to talk to you about.

But we all have been to like dozens of WWDCs now, dozens of Apple events. What was your sense of this one? I missed you. Yeah. And you too, Dieter. I do miss Deeter too. But he's usually really running around like his head, like complete cut off. And Neil is just chilling in the corner.

It's talking to everybody. That's very accurate. Yeah. My job is to schmooze on our little planning dock. It's like Dieter 15 hands-on, Nilai Shmooze is like over there. I will say I absolutely missed that sense of community. I mean, it's not anyone's fault, right? It's the way they had to do it.

But I think really change the nature of the event. What do you think of the pre-recorded TV show keynote? Oh, I loved that part. You did? I loved that part for. I think, you know, two reasons. One, it's been a really long time since I've sat in my home and watched one of these. The crazy high pressure situation around getting into the theater and getting all your equipment set and all of those things, which really I do really love about the job. And I think we're also like experienced at it now for a decade of doing it. It's sort of second nature, but you still get nerves and freaked out about do I have all my equipment? Am I going to be able to do this? Not having. having that, though, and just sitting right here in my elastic pants with my dog right here with ice coffee and quiet was pretty nice. Yeah. You know, just that atmosphere. Like, I miss the

it. It's a double-edged sword. I missed it, but also I really didn't miss it. But then I would say from the second thing, like, it was a really slick event. I thought it was very clear. I thought you really, I'm not sure I really took it all in better because it moved so fast. I think it moved way too fast. Move way faster than it does than they do when they're actually on stage, like way faster. You know the transitions, first of all, they talked faster, but the transitions, there's this clip, but I have to find that section with Federigi. He just, he must have had to practice him saying these crazy words so fast.

Like, I would have to say five times. I mean, he's a robot and a magical man. So maybe he didn't have to. You know, he probably just nailed it the first time. But they were fast. And also on top of that, there's that spacing as when you're blogging or you're writing or taking notes of one person enters the stage, does their thing, leaves the stage and gives you like two minutes in a way to like kind of readjust and catch up.

But you didn't have that here. They had crazy flash pans and steady cam movements to the next thing. And they were like, there you were. were in a lab across the world in secret Appleville. It is actually true that in our planning document, we sketch out who will do what in the life log, and we model it after like sports announcing. So we have a play-by-play and I call our commentator. Like, that's how we think of it.

So Dieter and Walt are usually, well, Walt joined us to sign, which is great. Dieter's usually the caller commentator. Walt was a caller commentator. And my job is always to transcribe as fast I can. Usually at an Apple event, they talk so slow. We should get to the substance of the announcements. I just go back and watch it. Watch like last year's WWC and then watch this one.

Tim Cook gets on stage and he's like, welcome to Apple. We make the iPhone. And like it repeats everything twice and they like hammered on because it's a live audience and that's what you get. This they made for streaming and like talked three times faster than normal. Also, the audience pauses for the applause also give you a lot of time. Yeah. So it's like third party apps are coming to CarPlay.

Here you go. Five minutes of applause from very excited CarPlay fans, which frankly, honestly, I would have clapped if it was appropriate. You would have clapped? For a CarPlay third party, that was a J. That was game changing. You're a capital J Wall Street Journal journalist. You're not a clap at events.

It's true. But when we got Google Maps on CarPlay, it was fucking huge. Okay. So that's right. The thing was different. It felt different in just, we were all at home, the presentation was much different. I thought the organization was good, right?

They're like, here's all of our OSs. We're just going to bang through them. We got to start with the biggest news of all, which is the Mac. They're going to use their own chips. They're putting out this developer kit, which is a Mac Mini with an iPad chip in it. What do you make of it, Joanna? How do we know that as the biggest news of all? What do you think, like, using your iPhone as a car key is bigger news than the Mac moving to arm?

emoji masks. Yeah, emoji masks. obviously the biggest news changed the culture. We're all going to warp around it. We're finally all going to wear masks because our iPhones have emoji masks in it. But the arm, I mean, the arm news, like, one of the reasons I want to talk to you about it is, I mean, still at the verge to this day, we joke that every laptop review ends with for $200 more you can buy a MacBook Air.

Because that set, which was your line in every review you did for us for like four years, that particular computer set just the standard of performance in battery life. That was why. It was a nice enough computer. after a while, it had not had a retina screen, and that was its big failing. But it was the combination of performance battery life that you wanted from a computer in a size. We've steadily gotten away from that. You and I actually both reviewed MacBook errors this year, right?

And we're like, it's fine, but the battery life is medium. The webcam is horrible. The webcam is horrible. You will note that Apple did not use any built-in webcams for any of its WC presentation. No, I mean, I wrote today. I said, I'm so excited for this future laptop. that has this arm chip, but also better webcam. We'll see.

I think they're so constrained and how thin the lid is that they don't really know what to do. Well, but there's one way to make that lid thicker. Yeah. Put a touchscreen in there. Yep. Thicking it up a little bit. Yeah, making an iPad. Do you think this is the, right?

I mean, this is the question, the Mac and the iPad on a collision course with this processor switch. Do you think they're going to be able to get back to that moment where their laptops set an absolute standard? I think it's interesting you bring up the air because there hasn't been any laptop as groundbreaking since the air. And Dieter, we talked about this earlier this week on our informal podcast about what we were thinking would be the first system that would have the chips. And I thought, okay, it's something new.

It's not an air. It's not a pro. It's like a MacBook, which I did not like. I know you loved it. I deeply loved it. I miss it so much. I really disliked that laptop because it did not match the air or what the air stood for ever. So there was also somebody, I can't remember who said this to me this week, but when Jobs decided to switch from PowerPC to Intel, what was the type of system he had in his mind that would be enabled?

Because if you go back and you look at all the PowerPC, the transition stuff and the marketing messages, it's very similar to now, which is we can't make these great products we want to. with this processor or with this chip set. We need to move ahead into the future. So I keep thinking, what is the system that they want to make? What are the changes they want to make, at least on mobile? There's obviously a lot of other reasons for them wanting to make this move. And what does that system look like? What does that machine look like?

Yeah. And there's a part of me that says it just looks like today's MacBook Air with a 13-hour battery life. Yeah. Right? It could just be that simple. They just want to get back to that industry-leading power. performance mix that they had, but run a retina display, which takes a lot more power, but keep the size down, plus Thunderbolt 3, all the other stuff they want to do.

And it can run iPad apps, right? Like, that could be it. I think this idea of a tweener, that really runs you into the iPad Pro. Like, I had my iPad Pro and it's magic keyboard today. And I was like, what if this was just a Mac? I don't understand the iPad Pro anymore. Right? It's kind of like why, it's at the end of this all, when you can buy a Mac that can run native iPad apps on its faster arm processor, they can run iPhone apps and run macOS apps and open the terminal and run like be the whole computer, why would you buy the constrained iPad Pro except maybe it has a touchscreen and a pencil?

A pencil and a touch screen. And that seems like the worst choice to force people into. I know. I think these are like by far the open questions, I think of this entire transition. I wrote in this just a quick piece off today about what Apple products to buy and not buy. And because I felt what happened this week in terms of software shifted so much of what Apple had just released in the spring. So it was like, I was thrilled actually with the Mac lineup till like four days ago. Till four days ago, I was like, okay, I can highly recommend that you go get an air.

I can highly recommend you go get this brand new. It's got great keyboard now. I could finally say this keyboard is great. It's got good new processors. these are solid systems. And then it's like... They refreshed everything in like the last year. It was wild because they had to get those new keyboards in.

And you had the pro, which like I've been using. I never did a full review on it, but I've been using it and I really like it. And now I'm looking and I'm like, but why? This is going to be better very soon, I think. I have the same 16 inch MacBook Pro. I really like it. It's very fast. It's very capable.

Why would I buy a computer? I think it has, you spend this much money, $2,500 on computer. That is a four-year investment for most people. people at the at the low end I still have that tiny little one port MacBook that you hate that's six years old and I I use it all the time so at the low end you spend this much money on a computer that's four years well at the end of this year they're going to make a Mac that can run iPad apps why would I invest this much money and then find myself two years from it and they said the transition is going to end in two years so the entire line will be transitioned over in two years

and then the entire future of the Mac is like going that way why would you at this moment by any Mac unless you desperately need one. Well, I mean, a lot of people desperately need them. That's what I wrote in this piece. Like, you know, you have a lot of kids going off to school and they need to get laptops and they should get an air or they should get a pro because, like, you shouldn't be waiting around for something that we don't know and how it's going to work. And I don't think this is coming in October.

I think this is probably coming November, December. So you're sort of stuck. But if you can wait, yeah, you should be waiting. And that's like the weird thing. It's like, you just had these great Macs and you just had these great iPads. And they're not on, like, they're not on, like, the iPhone schedule or the watch schedule. These were mid-year products. They are actually beginning of the year products.

So, like, it's just a weird time. It's like the worst time to buy Apple products, as I said. What's wild to me is they also said, like, explicitly in the keynote, there are more Intel Macs coming. Like, they're, like, we're waiting for that redesigned IMac. Oh, yeah. That's also very confusing to me. So that's what makes me think that maybe this is going to be a MacBook error or, like, bring the MacBook back.

because like the people, they're going to, they're going to, for the next couple of years, like, if you need serious horsepower and you don't care about power, get an Intel. That's like our desktop chip for the next couple of years. If you want long battery life, get Apple Silicon. Yeah. And one thing that you guys, I did a lot of reading of The Verge this week, the Intel question mark I think is really interesting, too, is how windows will run on Arm. And they're not saying boot camp is gone, which that part makes sense. They're not saying how virtualization will, would, or if it would. will work with Windows. Microsoft is not saying anything yet. So there's a lot of big question

marks and how long they have to keep Intel around is one of them, I think. I wonder honestly how many, and if you are listening to this and this is you, let me know, how many people are like honestly regularly using boot camp except for games, right? Like, you have to think that's like the lowest thing on Apple's priority list is like work with Microsoft on their weird arm version of Windows. And Microsoft has a weird licensing requirement. Like, I'm sure if everybody wanted to do it, they could easily do it. But there's not like, like an Intel Mac, especially the very early ones,

were basically PC architecture, right? They were just a modernized. They've strayed from that pretty dramatically now with the T2 chip and all the other stuff they're doing for security. But they still enable Windows because they can just kind of do it and Windows is built to sort of accept drivers for all that custom

stuff. There are architecture isn't based on some standardized architecture because there isn't one. So I think Microsoft has a slightly different riff and Apple a different riff and it could bridge that gap, but like, what in the market is pushing them to do that? Like, until there's a reason. I suspect they won't. My, my big question is really, as we look at this transition, we look at how confident they are on it. Dieter, you brought up on this show a while ago in your newsletter, Apple is no longer good at admitting when things might not go according to plan.

Yeah. I didn't see a crack. They didn't even make mention of any cracks in this plan, where it might be slow to emulate software or where something might not work or, I mean, the power PC to Intel transition had some bumps in the road. And famously jobs put up the emulation side. And he was like, Rosetta is fast parentheses enough. Right. Like he was like, it's going to be fine, but what you really want is this. Apple's like, here's Maya. Rendering in 3D and emulation. It's great. Did you see any cracks in any, any of these promises where this first set of systems might not do everything I said it might or what everyone hopes it might do? I mean, I didn't.

And I honestly, it makes me think of what is significantly different about this transition than the transition from OS9 to OS10 or the transition from PowerPC to Intel. I wasn't around for the old, old original processor transition. And that's that those first two Mac transitions were existential for Apple. If they didn't pull off OS10 or if they didn't pull off OS10 or if they didn't pull off Intel, the company was toast and everybody knew it. This one, it's not existential at all. It's just like, this is what they want to do.

They want to have a nicer processor in their Macs, and they want them to, they want to be less dependent on Intel figuring it out, which maybe they never will. It's kind of what Apple is assuming at this point. And so I think that they don't have to be, they don't have to have that much humility, because, like, it'll be better. And if it turns out that there are some bumps in the road, Like, I don't know. They can power through it because they're Apple and they all live in a beautiful spaceship.

Yeah. And also, like, it's not like Intel's going away. Right. If they're like, we screwed it up, can we have some more core I5 chips? Like Intel's going to be like, yeah, that's great. AMD is right there. They screw it up and they need to stay on X86 that could be there. You know, it's like they're buffered in some ways.

They're very confident about it. There are many, many, we don't even know what the name of the chip is going to be, right? They're just calling it Apple Silicon. Yeah. They haven't even branded the thing yet. I would say, Joanna, you said, like, you missed that in-person element. One thing that I really missed was there was no unguarded time with developers,

with Apple executives, with anyone to kind of get a sense of how we think it's going to go. Or to get a... There's just so much that happens in side conversations and hallways and events at a regular WWDC where you fill in the picture. And all of that, because we're all remote, has to be so structured that it's a it's like, I still just have a bunch of questions. I don't even really have a lot of hints, right? Like, we kind of know what that developer transition kit is going to be.

It's a Mac Mini with an iPad shoved into it. But Apple is very clear. Like, do not look at this product as a window into it. It's just here's the chip so you can develop on it. We have no, there are no big hints about what that next set of products will be. Yeah. Though, going back to the, I was doing, again, a lot of reading, a historical reading about that power PC transition.

the first laptops to come after that were MacBook Pros, 15-inch MacBook Pros. The Titanium books. Love that. That was the laptop that made me start using the Mac. No, the titanium was a G4. That's right. They moved to aluminum, and then they switched it from Powerbook G4 to MacBook, and they switched to Intel. And that 13-inch Pro is like a real sweet spot for them. They sell a lot of those. So that's a real, I think the air and the 13-inch Pro are where the energy will be. However, Joanna, I know we don't have a ton of time with you. The reason I wanted you on here, because you referenced our informal podcast, which was not actually a podcast. You cannot listen to it. I would never let anybody listen to it.

Also, we didn't record it. Although maybe Walt recorded it. Very private things. Usually at WWDC, we all get to hang out and like have a dinner and a drink. Then we weren't able to do that. So we had, we just hung out with me, Joanna, Dieter, Walt, Lauren Good from Wired. But Joanna, in order to troll this conversation, insisted that we all bet, And when the first touchscreen Mac will be.

Because you look at those screenshots of MacOS Big Sur. They look like they're for touching. They just look like they're made to be touched. The control center, the volume dial, the Wi-Fi icon. I mean, they're harmonizing the iOS and MacOS user interfaces. Definitely more towards touching stuff than not. A computer you could touch. More like Big Surface, am I right?

Oh, my God. Have you been holding on to that all week? No, I tweeted it. It's fine. Yeah, he did. I'm just repeating a joke I've already made. All right. Save it for the podcast, either.

Anyway, Joanna, issue your challenge, and then I will issue my prediction. That's the whole reason I wanted you on here so we can make this bet in public. It's not my challenge. I don't know why, and maybe listeners, maybe you would like to go in on this bet for me. We can make the pool huge. When are we putting our money on the Mac getting a touchscreen? I'm not saying we need to go into specifics on which model and what kind of form factor.

I'm going to say what at some point a Mac is going to get a touchscreen. I feel certain in that. Yeah, I do too. The question is when. Here's my answer. And when we have to figure out the pool of money, but let's just hear what your predictions are. My answer is I'll put 20 bucks this year, that first one. They said the first our Mac is coming out at the end of this year.

I strongly feel it will have a touchscreen. You're strongly wrong. I do not know how you're going to enable iPad apps on this Mac unless you can touch them. What do you mean? They just rolled out. this new fancy little circle cursor. Yeah. I mean, they got Catalyst.

No, Catalyst is to make your iPad app a Mac app. Catalyst is proof that Apple is willing to have a kind of a crappy app experience on the Mac. And so they will let, you know, native iPad apps have kind of a crappy experience. I feel strongly. It's the first one. Why not take the shot? Come out strong. All right.

You know what? You're probably not, I mean, like maybe just 100% wrong, not 150% wrong. I'm betting $20.22. cents on 2022 because then we'll have a couple of years of Apple trying to say that there's no collision between the Mac and the iPad and they're totally different. Nobody believing them and them giving up and putting a touchscreen on the Mac. See, I think Dieter's really close and I wish I had said 2022 when we were doing this and not said $20 and $23 and $23. Yeah. All right. So those are their predictions. I have right away, Deeter has two years and

Joanna has three years. You can tweet at us with your predictions. I don't know how we're going to collect this money. Someone invets some Bitcoin system for us, please. Just like, do some Bitcoin stuff. It'll be great. But those are the bets. You heard him here. But let's go back one more time to what you're saying will be in this first one. Because there is a chance they just take the 13 inch pro or air and just put in the chip because that like that does some marketing for them. They're like, look, this is just a Mac and it can do it. I still think they'd make something new. But I think they have to add some things to show off why this is better. So I've been like trying to think of what that list of things is. And I, that's where I have a lot of questions is like battery life,

sure, right? Battery life is something. Cellular. Well, the cellular, they'll add cellular, but it'll be a 13-inch trackbook pro, but they're going to take away one port because the battery life lasts so long, you don't need to plug it in. A zero-port 13-inch macquick pro with a cellular chip. And no touch bar because they just want to make some of us happy. That'd be great. Take away the touch bar and give me a touchscreen. Maybe this is why I want it so bad because then you would move the touch interface up there. Also, I want a U1 chip.

In a Mac? Yes. For what? So you can unlock your car? So many things. I want the U1 chip and everything now. Do you want to tell us about your TV remote, Joanna? I want it in my TV remote so badly and I do not understand why it is not what I have a lot of feelings about the TV remote this week.

But the Apple TV remote? Yes, the Apple TV remote. By the way, most of what you ran and I talk about is parenting toddlers. You said your son had hidden the remote someplace spooky, but you wouldn't tell you where. Where was it? Under the couch. That's a spooky spot. All right.

Fair enough. I mean, that remote, they didn't talk about the Apple TV hardly at all. They showed off one trailer for a show, and they said some videos on YouTube would be in 4K, and notably refuse to answer any clarifying questions about it when we asked about it. just said no, we're not answering that question. So we don't know how that's going to work. That was the only update to the TV. I think if they released a new Apple TV,

they have to change that remote. There's been too much outcry about it. But my feeling very strongly is the thing they will add is a touchscreen to the Mac. I mean, they just have to do it. You cannot look at that volume slider and say, Alan Dye designed that, their new head of design for this stuff.

Did he design that and thought to himself? This is great for clicking. It's super not. You designed it for reaching up to the screen sliding around. It's going to be great. Touchscreen iMac, you know, it's all coming. Intel Macs will not have touch screens. Our Macs will have touch screens.

Oh, that's something. And the trackpad is also three times as big. And it just takes up the entire keyboard deck. Yeah. Exactly. All right, Joanna. We did not talk about the iPhone or iPadOS, but I know you've got to go. Do you have any parting thoughts on Apple's actually big platform?

No. I'm actually more interested in the, the watch stuff that's going to come in the fall, than the iPhone I've decided. I'm excited about the iOS stuff. And I liked Dieter's first look at the widget stuff, and I think it's good. Yeah, I'm excited for the,

I think Deeter your point was it's getting more complicated. Yeah. But like, these platforms need the additional complexity now. As they take over as everyone's computers, you should be able to pull them towards you instead of adapting to them. Plus, you don't have to make it complicated, which was, I think, another point Deeter made,

which is like what I can tell on my, readers who write to me every time I tell them Apple's moving their cheese again and just say, you don't need to deal with this. Keep it the same. Yeah. You don't need a widget, even though you should want a widget. I love the idea of Joanna's Wall Street Journal, like mailbag column being like, you don't, sir, you do not need a widget at this time.

Moving on. It's okay. That's great. Well, Joanna, thank you for joining us. I love having you on our show. We'll talk to you soon. I miss you guys. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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With Gramerly, you never will. Download Gramerly for free at Grammarly. dot com. That's grammarly.com. Hi, I'm Gartenberg. Welcome to the Vergecast. Hello. It's been a minute since we've had you on, man.

Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Always glad to be here. Yeah, the reason we wanted you on, you are the Verge's premier reporter on software version names, and now that we can't talk about Android dessert names anymore, we thought we'd want you to rant for about 45 minutes

about how they changed the version number from MacOS, from 10 to 11. Do you have any thoughts? So many thoughts. I mean, first of all, to change at OS 10.16 is just really, you know, just poor planning. They could have, they could have waited for a round number. They could have done this five years ago at OS10. And made decimals make sense again.

It's just, it's just deeply upsetting. All right. OS, MacOS 11.0, big sir. Obviously, the big news we were just talking about it, which is they're going to support arm chips. I'm curious for your thoughts on two things in particular. One, Apple's made a gigantic bet on Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt 3. I also think of you as our premier USBC emotions have her. Like above Dieter, it's the time. I'm really powers a lot of it.

So there's a lot there on the connectivity side. And then there's kind of this big question around GPUs. Like Apple's going to make its own GPUs. They talked about it. But they've got to compete with some heavy hitters in the GPU world. And I'm curious how they might ramp to that. But let's start with the connectivity. Thunderbolt 3 is an Intel standard, right?

Thunderbolt 3 is an Intel standard, and you can only use it with Intel stuff. That's a fundamental thing. USBC is not an Intel standard. So you can still have USBC ports, and that part's fine. But if you want it to be a Thunderbolt 3 spec with all the benefits and advantages that you get from Thunderbolt 3, it's just with Intel. Right now, if you buy a MacBook, You get an Intel chip and an arm-based, like, T-3 chip to run the touch bar and the fingerprint sensor. What if they flip it?

And they put just, they just buy a bargain basement Intel chip so that they can slap Thunderbolt in their arm max. I would be deeply frightened to see that, but it's possible. Well, so, like, importantly, the comparison here is the iPad Pro, right, which has a USBC port that is not Thunderbolt 3. It's just straight USBC. Yeah. I mean, there's a simple, and I use simple in the loosest possible terms when talking about anything related to USBC, but the simple solution is actually a new USBC spec, because of course it is, which is never going to make anything more complicated. But there is a USB 4 spec, which would use USBC physical ports, but it's a new standard. And the goal of USB 4 is to bring Thunderbolt 3 light.

capabilities without requiring that Intel licensing. So maximum speed is a 40 gigabit per second, up to 100 watts of power, ability to power to 2, 4K displays or a 5K display, external graphics card, everything. But the trick is you don't have to pay Intel or have Intel's chips anymore. So if you had, if I had to guess, my bet is that Apple will do that. And because of the nature of USBC, it'll be backwards compatible in theory, a lot. allegedly with other Thunderbolt stuff. So if you have a Thunderbolt 3 display, it should work with USB 4 ports.

Why would USB 4 be backwards compatible with Thunderbolt 3? So that I'm not entirely sure, but apparently they're designing to do that because at a certain point, it won't be compatible with Thunderbolt specific features. So if you're doing anything, you know, weird that relies on Thunderbolt, that won't work. But most of the Thunderbolt spec is just allowing for higher data throughput than. than the minimum specs from USB 3, USB 3.2. And just by raising the floor on USB 4, it apparently gives enough. I honestly don't have a lot of details because no one's actually done this yet.

But this is what the USB Innovators Forum says, or at least that's what the post on the verge about this says. Intel says that they'll still coexist and that Thunderbolt 3 will still stick around because Intel provides other service. that go beyond hardware. Again, we're really going to have to wait and see what this looks like when they start rolling around, which could be as early as Apple's laptops. The other answer is that Apple has no answer, and they're just going to wing it, and they're going to break all your accessories again. Which a healthy portion of our business is selling your ports back to you at $29 apiece. This is the best argument for dongle life, right? You have all of your accessories and they're not obsolete. It's just the intermediary dongles that connect them to your

computer. So you just have to buy another $200 for the dongles and you're good. Yeah. I don't know that I love that as an answer. It's just one possible future. Well, Apple sells cables and, and accessories. So I'm sure Apple would love to sell you a new $1,000 monitor because your old $1,000 monitor doesn't work with the Mac Pro 2022. Do you really think Apple will ever sell a monitor again that costs as little as $1,000? Like, is that ever going to happen for us? Maybe. Yeah, we'll Okay, so that's one open question. There's a, you know, obviously layers of complexity there. Is Apple going to somehow retrofit Thunderbolt 3 onto their new RMAX?

Are they going to move on to the new USB? Will that be cross-compatible? That's one big thing, and we'll find out. The other big thing is right now Apple uses Intel's integrated GPUs, and then in some machines uses AMD's GPUs. Where do you see that going? because they did talk a lot about how they're going to make their own GPUs now. I mean, on the one hand, there's already, like, Apple already makes its own GPUs.

Like, they make their own GPUs for iOS. They make their own GPS with the iPad. The iPad can run some, you know, fairly beefy applications, fairly beefy games, you know, fairly intensive video editing. And for, you know, lower-powered laptops, for anything that's already using integrated Intel graphics, I suspect isn't going to be too much of an issue. issue, and I suspect is also going to be the first computers that Apple's going to replace. I doubt you're going to see, you know, anything with the word pro in the name, certainly on

the desktop side, the IMac Pro, the Mac Pro getting replaced until the end of this cycle. It would be a big shift in how just like graphics and video editing work, which is really the question for Apple here. It's not so much about gaming, especially after the arm transition. But Apple is selling these as pro computers and pro apps. It's Photoshop and Final Cut. I assume that they're obviously testing this already, and I'm very curious to see when this early Mac Mini unit ships what that looks like.

But I think it's possible. There's a part of me that says it's possible. And the reason that Apple has been so stubborn about metal and deprecating OpenGL is that they have been abstracting developers away from the hardware so they can make this switch more seamlessly. Their big tech demo at the event was that backwards compatible version of Tomb Raider running with Rosetta 2 on metal or something. So it's definitely a key part of their strategy is trying to shift the conversation a bit away from just raw GPU specs. Is it going to be successful in practice? Is it a very good question?

Well, at the top end of their line is the Mac Pro, which has multiple GPU options in. slots, which has a custom connector for specialized GPUs, has a custom connector for the afterburner card, which is a PG, like, there's a modularity at the top of the line where it's like, what is the point of the modularity if your choice is one of two Apple GPUs? Yeah. And like that, that to me is like, well, you should also be able to drop in doubt Apple and Nvidia will ever come to a conclusion. But you should be able to drop in like the top.

and AMD GPU because AMD has a market beyond Apple that incentivizes their investment in research and research. Right, right now Apple's GPUs are pointed at phones and iPads. They're not pointed at the kind of like compute

on GPU that AMD is involved in that it's happening over there. Is that something Apple you think can slide into that kind of bigger horsepower? Or is it they're just differently architected? I honestly don't know the answer to that. I think it's possible. You'd have to, you know, I'd have to do more research. And I suspect AMD has to do more research to build something like that. I assume that

this is something Apple's thought of, right? Like they're, they're not launching a $20,000 Mac Pro and then telling everyone, guess what, this is obsolete in a year. At least I don't think they are. Yeah. Like, that's like a, it's a real, we don't know how they're, they're planning that, right? They just made a big deal out of it. They put it out. I mean, the last Mac Pro had this exact problem of being too limited in your CPU choices, being too limited in your GPU choices. It was built like a small Apple products. And the new one's supposed to be the opposite of that.

I can't see them ping ponging back and being like, okay, that was a fun two years. Now we're back to, you know, tiny custom Apple GPUs that are very limited in what they can do. So these GPs, they're made obviously to work with X-86 systems. How hard do you think it would be to make them work with an arm? Right. Like, would you, do you have to build an emulator in between to make them talk to each other? Like, that's like a core question. Like, is it even possible?

I don't think you need a core emulator. I mean, we have, there are plenty of instances of companies mix and matching, you know, arm chips with other GPs like, you know, Samsung phones, not all Samsung phones on, on Samsung's, you know, Xenos chips use arm-based or use different arm-based they mix and match, you know, arm GPUs with their own GPUs and multiple cores. It's possible there's something in deeper underlying, you know, code architecture that I just don't know of, but it seems to be that it at least be possible to leverage, you know, some aspect of it.

And the last question on this, as you look at this transition, what's kind of your biggest, what's your biggest question mark? My biggest question mark is, is not so much selling the development. it's selling everyone else. You have a certain thing that you come to expect when you buy a laptop and you're looking at a Mac or a PC, but at a certain point, you're looking at design and software, but they'll kind of work pretty much the same. This is like a very radical shift.

The apps that are available are going to be a radical shift. You're going to see a lot more iPad, iOS stuff transitioning on. And the question is, do people want computers that look less like? computers. I mean, that's my whole thing. Like, my biggest question, I can't start asking, I can't start saying what my biggest question is without like flying into all the other questions. So like, I want to say my biggest question is what's going to have, what platform should developers develop to if they want to be like ready for the future? Should they make iPad apps because they don't work on Mac? Should they use Swift? Should they just keep on going,

on going on making classic Mac apps? Is Apple really going to want them to do that? Should they actually pay attention to Catalyst? Because then they can like still work on Intel Max, which aren't going away. And to try and answer that, you start flipping into, well, we actually got to talk about how fast this arm transition is going to happen and how good the GPUs will be. And then you want to talk about that. You end up, like,

flipping all the way back. But then again, look at the design of Big Sur. Everything here is designed to be touched. They also, like, updated all the sidebars on iPadOS so that they would look more like Mac sidebars and the buttons too and vice versa. And, like, you just end up, like, spinning, trying to figure

out, like, what is the clear path forward? Because at the end of it, the world either looks like everything is an iPad and the Mac happens to have a non-detachable non-touch screen, or I don't even know. Right? It's like you can't disconnect any of this stuff. It's really frustrating. I mean, there's like an end of the road where it's just an Apple OS that runs the same on all three devices and you're choosing a form factor. Like, that's a very feasible thing in five years for it to just Apple OS. Have you heard of Dex? Oh my God. It's coming. Apple's version of Dex. You're going to plug your iPhone into your $1,000 USB4 Apple display. It's going to light up and be a Mac. And then Apple's going to look across

the ocean to South Korea and say, we did it. It's going to be weirdest keynote of all time. Apple just Tim Cook just facing the direction screaming, we did it. I don't think that they would have renamed iPad OS to iPad OS. Like, they are trying to create space between those OSs. They're trying to let the iPad be more of itself and the iPhone be more of itself. Federigi said on John Gruber's podcast from WWC, the Mac is a Mac. It's going to stay a Mac. You're always going to be able to launch terminal on it.

Like, we know what a Mac is. Where they're crossing over is the design of the operating system. Big Sur looks more like iOS than ever before. you know the one thing they kept saying to us over and over again they're like we know it's a mac we know they change it but we've kept the mac icons as beautiful as ever and it was every time they said it

I was just like that's not the thing yeah also the icons are not great I do not love the new icons it was just it was such they it was they they'd obviously all been like trained in our conversations to like mention the icons and I went back and I was like they'd

that's not the thing that made a Mac a Mac is like the system preferences icon is not why I'm like, oh, this is the most Mac part of it. But they're obviously bringing them together. And I think the real question is just once you've got a Mac, it is all the way a Mac, you can run terminal, can run applications, it's got a fast processor and good battery life, potentially as a touchscreen, and you can run native iPad and iPhone apps on it. Doesn't that squeeze out like an entire middle class of iPads? Like, why would you... I just keep looking at my iPad Pro right now

and be like, just make it a Mac. Just let me turn it into whatever Mac you're going to make it. It's already the developer kit. It already has that processor in it. Like, why not just let it go? And I think that more than anything will be that... First of all, if they don't do it openly, if they don't just let people do it,

it will be the thing that jailbreak community wants to do the most of all. Right? They just set up a new goal for all jailbreakers in the world run macOS on an iPad. Yeah, so we're losing the Hackintosh community because there's no way that Apple's arm silicon is going to be as easily hackintosh. You know, you can't go out and buy Apple's processor.

So all Intel-based hackintoshes are going away, but instead we're going to start hackintoshing iPads. That's like a super fun trade. It's a pretty good trade. Like, if you can get MacOS to run in like a $329 iPad, it's like pretty good. Yeah. We'll see if anybody can ever do that.

But I suspect that'll be the first thing that sort of jailbreak Hackintosh community wants to do. And then the second part of it is like the identity of the iPad Pro like quickly becomes like the entire is it a computer can it replace your laptop conversation goes away. In one case in a very positive way, right? It is a computer. It's just it's a more limited, more focused, better interaction for a computer. And the more negative one is it's not a computer because the computer is right over there. and it actually has a bigger app library and is more functional and feasible and the file system makes sense.

And like, I couldn't tell you which way that's going to go. But you can see where they're cruising towards that moment. Yeah. I mean, at a certain point, if you have an iPad that's, you know, a 12.9 inch screen with a keyboard with a mouse that has the same hardware as whatever MacBook they release at the end of this year, what's the difference other than that you can take the keyboard off on the iPad? Right. And they have to, I mean, we're saying this because we're reacting to it in real time. They have been talking about this for years and years and years. Yeah.

So when they released that magic keyboard with a track pad, they had to know, one hopes that Craig knew the other part of the company was doing. They knew that they were about to do this other thing, and that the question on convergence was coming for them. The only question is, what is the answer? Their consistent answer is stop overthinking it. Everybody knows the difference intuitively. Right. And like, on the one hand, I'm like, yeah, no, that's true. Like, I'm actually not confused by what I want to use my Mac for and what I want to use my iPad for. That's right. But in the, it almost the exact same breath. I'm like, actually, hang on, though, because I have to put something in my bag. And part of me wants to just put the iPad in there. And I have to, like, sit there and think about it for a minute. And, like, the answers are changing over time. So I think that their answer is going to continue to be, don't sweat it so much. Just use the one that you like better. which is a weird thing to do, but like there might just not be a grand master plan here. They might just have two teams that are like kind of competing with each other a little bit,

but also using each other's stuff. Cats in a bag. Cats in a bag. Do you know this reference time? I do not know this reference. There's a very famous story about Michael Bloomberg when he was in charge of Bloomberg media and his management philosophy was cats in a bag that he at all times wanted his executives infighting. and then when the cats in the bag

killed themselves, he threw them out and would get some new ones and let them fight some more and cats in a bag. That could just be Apple's strategy right here. I think that they have a clearer plan. For all of their flaws, or whatever, Apple is, right, they put one foot in front of the other and they build to a vision consistently.

And I really think their vision is the Mac is the more powerful, more open superset of Iowa. right there's ios which is their big volume consumer product and then the mac is going to sit next to it can do all of those things and then a bunch of mac stuff that quote unquote power users need to do so then the fundamental question becomes will there be a time when are you are you envisioning a future where will you ever be able to say there's something the iPad can do that the Mac cannot in your vision of the long-term future that apple's building here yes uh the iPad can have 45

five cameras and a time of flight sensor on the back of it. Right? That's just one thing it can do right now that no Mac can do and no Mac maybe ever will. The iPad has a bunch of sensors in it. The iPhone has a bunch of sensors in it that I very much doubt any Mac will ever have. What Mac is ever going to support rotation? Yeah. I mean, that was the that was the asterisk on the our Macs will be able to run all iPad and iOS apps that they can. Like if your app is built around, you know, motion controls or hardware that's exclusive to an iPhone, then presumably you can't run.

And if you have a game that requires, you know, tilt sensing, you're going to have, you know, no luck playing that on a Mac. If it's built around the time of flight sensor, if you have some AR apps, those aren't presumably going to work on your arm Mac. Yeah. Poor Quibi.

They finally got that pathway straight to the Mac app and it's not going to work out for them. In the middle of this just like Quibi is the thing you're thinking about. I'm always thinking about Quibi. It's the fire on the horizon, man. It's it's right there. Yeah, look, I think that stuff is really interesting.

Like they're obviously making a gigantic push in AR. That push right now is expressed on the iPad and on the iPhone. It is nowhere expressed in the Mac. Does this let them do that? Or does that become the stuff that those devices do that the Mac, doesn't do. Or is your next Mac going to have a camera on the back of the lid? That would be insane. I feel like if you open up a laptop and it had a camera on the back of the lid, like, people would like run you out of the coffee shop. Yeah. Just like fully run you out of the coffee shop.

It's weird that that's not a norm around the iPad, but that's just way it is. But like, if you've got like a 16 inch power book and you open the lid and it's just got that huge array of cameras on that, people like, get out of here. I do not trust this for one second. There's definitely a prototype in a lab somewhere at Gupertino that has an iPad camera array on the back of the lid. If they're going to put that array in the back of the lid, they should at least upgrade the front-facing camera, so it's not garbage. Oh, no, that's, it'll stay 720P. 720P FaceTime forever.

For sure. All right, well, that brings us to the phone. Dieter, you have more thoughts on complexity in the home screen than anybody. What do you think? I mean, go watch a preview, but I think that it, I wish that Apple had just, you know, started slowly introducing some of these new concepts to the home screen over time, over like the eight, 10 years that we've been waiting for this stuff. Instead of just in one fell swoop being like, all right, the iPhone home screen has been

the same and you can't change it forever. And then all of a sudden, right now, you can put widgets wherever you want. You can turn off pages. There's app clips. So like there's these new temporary apps that people are going to have to figure out. And what's the fourth thing? Oh, the app library, which is, I think, the biggest thing at all of all, because historically, like, the thing that differentiated an iPhone from an Android phone in terms of, like, how do you use it was Android phones were confusing because they had a separate app drawer from the home screen. And iPhone people are like, why do you accept that complicated thing?

Mine's really simple. Everybody understands what happens when hit the home button. And now, like, maybe not. You can hide apps on an iPhone. There's a hide button. Yeah, the hide button is great. although it's like a minus button and then it pops up a dialogue box.

It's so confusing. There's that. The fact that you can't you can't change the categories in the app library. You can't? So I just assumed it was like an automatic version

of the existing foldering system. Right? You like a fun game to play in the iPhone is you take any two apps totally disparate. Right? The Hertz rent a car app and Dropbox. And you like put them together

and iOS will like make up a category for them that makes no sense. It's like romance. Yeah. And it's like this is all confusing. As far as I could tell, they pull all of the folder names out of like the App Store categories. But like ERO is in the lifestyle category. Why? Why? And you can't rename them. No. That makes no sense. I mean, I get why you do it. If you do have like 4,000 apps and some of them are old, the iPhone is very much about like automatic management of things. It doesn't want you to think about managing it as a computer. So we'll just like slide some of them away and you can find them if you need them. But this like main interface is like clean, consistent. All that makes perfect sense to me. The idea that you cannot then

impose your own categorization system on sort of like the back half of your apps. I mean, that's that's iOS 15 in like in Apple's way, right? But it's like it should be there from the jump. Well, I mean, you also can just like make your own folders on the more traditional home screens. Here's my question. They added the ability to put widgets anywhere you want, just like Windows phone and Windows phone sizes and blah, blah, blah, blah. Developers have to remake their widgets, by the way, in order to work with the system. We can get into that if you want. They've added the app library.

They've added the ability, like, the thing where you can turn pages off is like actually genuinely useful in a thing that I'm probably going to do where like I'll have a work page and I'll turn it off for the weekends. they added all of this stuff, all this complexity, and I still can't place an icon on the bottom right of my screen and have blank space above it. What is the deal? The magic of the grid, Deeter.

No, but it could stay on a grid. Just let me put it in the grid in the lower right. We need to make you an app icon that's just like a clear PNG, like a transparent P&G. Oh, I've done this. You go to a website and then you upload your wallpaper

and then they map every little thing on the wallpaper to an icon, and then you make a web shortcut, and then you set the icon for the web shortcut to the icon that you download from this custom website, and that's how you get blank spaces. I mean, you could just get a big, big empty blank space widget. Oh, that's a really good idea. Oh, I like that idea. If you make a widget and then you upload your background wallpaper, it should be able to just display it to a point.

you'd have to turn off the moving home screen. Yeah, I'm definitely doing that. So these are all bad ideas, and I love you both, and this is why I love you. I'm just telling the listener, don't do any of this. Do the widgets on iOS run on Intel Big Sur? Yes. Okay. They should.

They do. So you only have to develop them once, but you know, you need to like figure out how to get your Big Sur app, your Mac app, to talk to a widget. But they're built you using Swift, you, And they got into this in the state of the union, which is the second developer conference. So right now, like a widget on the iPhone is basically like a little tiny app, right? And they didn't want little tiny apps running on the home screen because that eats battery and eats memory. So they want them to basically be static, you know, like widgets, like web pages, like the dashboard on the Mac.

You remember that? This is where I'm going. Yes, rest and beats. So what they've done is like you have to use Swift UI. You make a relatively static widget. And then iOS has a timeline where it's like every couple of... a couple of minutes, it says, hey, widgets, it's time to update. You got anything? And the widgets can be like, I should be updated every seven minutes. So now I've got something. And then it'll get

updated. And then in that process, those widgets can also say, my shit's really high priority. And that's what puts them at the top of the widget stack, which is another level of complexity that we haven't even gotten into. No one will ever abuse the ability to set your own shit as high priority. No developer will ever say, my update is medium priority. No, but, Nilai, if someone does abuse it. Apple's never fail, no errors ever crack team of App Store reviewers will catch it and do something about

it. I mean, I love, I mean, the entire idea is good. It references, I think Tom wrote about it, references live titles on Windows phone, there's a little bit of palm DNA in there. There's a little bit of like early Android DNA in there. If you work at HTC, here's what I want from you.

I want a widget for the iPhone that is the HTC Android clock. You know that big flip clock? It was in every early HDC phone. I want that. That shit was originally from Windows mobile. Fine. Bring forward.

And they brought it over to Android. Make the circle complete. Bring me the original Windows Mobile widget. Get it running in SWIFUI. Like you need that widget. Like that literally the circle of life. Like all of the operating systems that the iPhone destroyed, the widgets here. H.D. steals in the game.

I mean, that stuff is great. That DNA is long. Why do you think it took them so long to put it in here? Apple is afraid of letting people make choices about the iPhone. I mean, Apple, the iPhone is too big and too important to its bottom line to risk people breaking things. It has been for a long time. It's the reason behind the app storecating. It's the reason behind the restrictive controls, or at least part of the reason, is, it is just too important to Apple to risk.

Like, you need to be able to give an iPhone to a 12-year-old and to an 80-year-old and to everyone in between and have them all know how to works and not get lost in, you know, an app library trying to find where FaceTime is. The calculus has been we need to keep it simple for the masses rather than give options for complex, for the people who want to switch Gmail to be their main browser. Sure. Oh, we got to get into default. the apps. But I don't, like, they, the solution was making an option and then don't have a million

options, have a few options, but don't have it be the default. And that's where they landed. And that's not like a genius, oh my God thing. They could have figured that they could have just done it three years ago. That's what I don't get. And I, I never will. I don't think there's a good answer. I mean, you wrote that 72 and sunny piece like six years ago. Eight years ago, Dieter wrote a piece for us that I recall Apple was very very, very, very much. I mean, you wrote a piece for us that I recall Apple was very unhappy with. They weren't super pleased. They were very, very mad because Deeter pointed out the, I mean, like the heart of that

piece. It's very good. You go read it. Dieter was just as smart, if not smarter, eight years ago. Wow. Time has dulled us all, my friend. But it's very good. And the heart of it is the weather icon on the iPhone always tells you it's 72 and

sunny, 73 and sunny. And it's like, that is the dumbest thing to change. Just make that alive. and now we're like full-on widgets that are like smart detecting the priority of data. That's great. You could have iterated there through eight years. But I'm glad they finally did it. It's very exciting.

And this other piece of default apps is buried news across all of their platforms in a way. So the iPadOS and iOS, you can set default browser and mail clients. The apps have to be updated for that in some way. We don't know how. You cannot delete Safari and mail. I think you can tuck them away and hide them. You can't hide them. Yep.

You also can't use your own web rendering engine. You have to still have to use WebKit from Safari. All iOS browsers are just Safari in disguise. Yeah. Yeah, but like you get Chrome syncing or Firefox like does its thing. Like great. Different tracking protection, different UI. But you can do it now.

We were not able to do it before. The HomePod is going to let you use other music services. All of this is buried in their keynote. It's buried in the slides with all the features. These are some of those monumental changes in the platform that can exist, actually. The HomePod that doesn't require Apple Music is a fundamentally different product. I don't think the home pod you can set it as the default. I think it's like the current, you know, Spotify integration with Siri on an iPhone now,

where you can ask, you know, Siri to play a song on your HomePod, but you still have to add with Spotify at the end. But I think they're going to change it for HomePod because, No, HomePod can't do it at all right now. Can't do it at all. I'm guessing you're going to be able to say just use Spotify. If you have a HomePod, you don't have Apple music and you have Spotify, and then you are required to say play it on Spotify, that is a horrible user experience that even Apple's thirst for services revenue cannot overcome, right?

One hopes. One hopes. One hopes, but I'm still skeptical. But setting a new browser on the iPhone is a monumental shift. setting a new mail client. It's a monumental shift. These, to me, like the fact that they just skimmed over them implies they know they're going to be popular. They want to tell people about it. They don't want to say it out loud. They're not enthusiastic about it. I saw this. I saw a bunch of people talking about this, so I don't know who I'm supposed to cite it to. I kind of thought something similar myself, but this keynote, maybe it's because it was, you know, only online or whatever. But it really felt like Apple is more and more living in its own world. And it's more and more of the hero of its. own story. And so it's harder for Apple to, like, I don't know, like not be the center of attention. Like, this is the developer conference is supposed to be about a whole lot of other developers. And maybe, again, it was because of the COVID-19. But normally at WWDC, there's a section

about two-thirds of the way into the keynote where it is just a parade of third-party developers showing you their app, you know, running on whatever, you know, the new software is. And we got to try the thing. And we managed to develop it. And just. a week. Isn't this amazing? Right? Like, we didn't get a Lego AR demo for the first time in five years. And so part of me is like they didn't bring it up because like it doesn't occur to Apple that they should admit that you could leave Apple World, at least in the context of this particular keynote. Yeah. I mean, Apple thinks it makes the best email and the best web browser on, on iOS or on Mac. That's always been Apple's party line. That's very confusing to me because everybody knows

It's not true. Their party line is a little... The browser's great. The browser's good. Their party line... The email app is not. Their party line has been, it's very hard to undo this, right?

The whole OS is built around knowing that Safari is your browser. I imagine this is why other vendors have to update their apps. We've gone very long in this section. Let's take a break. Come back. We've got to talk about watchOS,

TVOS, AirPods. There's a whole bunch of other stuff to talk about in this five-hour Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether you're selling online, or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge.

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Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud. A.I. slash vergecast. That's Claude.a.ai slash Vergecast. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. All right. So we talked about the Mac, it length, the arm transition.

We talked about iPadOS, iOS. Turns out Apple has 45 other operating systems that also got updated. Deeter, I want to start with something that I know is near. and dear to your heart, which is smart home alliances. Oh, my God. There are so many little things that I could just pop off on right now. We haven't even talked about the fact that Safari now uses the standard web API for extensions, but they're doing it in a very app away.

There's like a whole lot of Safari stuff I want to get into. But, okay, so they announced that there's a smart home alliance, and they're working with Amazon and they're working with Google because developers are being forced to, like, redo work for all these platforms. and we're like, whoa, why didn't they mention Samsung? Well, it turns out that Samsung is also in this alliance. And then keynote gets over, and I'm like, wait a minute, there already is a smart home alliance with all these companies.

It's called the Connected Home Over IP Alliance. Choip. So I'm pretty sure that this is just the same alliance, but it's unclear. But regardless, the idea is that if you make hue light bulbs or a thermostat or whatever, if you want it to work with Alexa and Google Assistant and Apple, you have to do some pretty fundamental things multiple times. And the idea of CHOIP is like, do it all over IP via these standard protocols, and like we're going to pull a bunch of this stuff from HomeKit.

HomeKit's going to be open sourced in some ways. And then you just do that and then everything will work with it. And I think that they basically just announced that thing again, themselves on stage, is my hope. There is a tiny chance that there's like a whole, other smart home alliance that like yeah we're just going to have to live with that but i'm like i'm like fairly confident it's just choice i think it is too my evidence is very different than yours which is that if apple were to announce a new smart home alliance with google and amazon in it google and amazon

would have also told us about it right they wouldn't have been like yep apple's got this one they would have like also sent a suppress release they would have done a whole thing and they had already done that with Troip. So I think it's just Troip. HomeKit is open sourced. HomeKit is getting some new features. They're going to be able to do local face recognition for doorbells. Okay.

It's like HomeKit continues a pace. It's still, in many ways, it's the best one. Like, it's the fastest. It does the most stuff locally. It's obviously the most privacy-centric. And then in many ways, it's the worst one because the least amount of stuff works with it. Also, Siri. also Siri is involved.

It's controlled by one drunk person who means so well. Siri got top billing this year. Like showed up pretty early. Siri got top billing because they said, here are the things I said about Siri. Siri now knows 30,000 more facts, which is just an insane idea. Like that there is a quantifiable number of facts. Like Siri is moving towards the goal of all facts, right? Or there was a baseline number of facts.

which was acceptable, but now we got 30,000 more. The very confusing thing to say. Also, definitely not as many facts as Google knows. Whatever number Google knows is definitely higher than serious. That's one. That was it in terms of Siri being smarter. They announced that the interface for Siri would like, we didn't even talk about compact UI in the iPhone.

Many iPhone UI elements are getting much smaller. On the iPad, when you invoke Siri, instead of taking over the whole screen, there's just a little circle at the bottom, which could be really cool if that. was like an always on voice assistant that was like you were talking to while you did stuff. But so far in the beta, the circle comes on the screen and the entire touchscreen of the iPad is unresponsive. And if you tap on the screen, the bubble goes away. So some things to work out there. When you get a phone call, more compact UI instead of taking over the whole screen, you can the notification.

That's very cool and very useful. But those are the Siri improvements. It's like now it's a little bubble in the corner and it knows 30,000 more facts. It takes a while to write 30,000 facts. It's all facts about the spaceship campus. It would have been 60,000, but all the facts had to go through App Store review. So Siri did get top billing, and they're still proud of it, but they weren't like it can now answer complex queries or like 30,000 bucks. Real quick on iPad, just because we shouldn't forget.

They didn't get any of the home screen improvements. No widgets on iPad is very strange. And then they have got this new thing called scribble where you can just use the pencil to write text when you see a text field, which is pretty cool. So you could, like, we finally achieved the dream of just having a tablet you can write on and it'll handle all your text fields. It's the revenge of the Newton. In practice, it's like, so it's the revenge of the Newton. Yeah, well, no.

So the handwriting recognition is pretty good. It uses machine learning, but it doesn't learn your handwriting over time, which is a bad idea. And when you start in a text field, you can, like, start, you can, like, roam over the whole screen and it knows to keep writing in the text field. but it's not instant instant. And so if it gets it wrong, you get like enter a hell world of scratching stuff out. So it still works better to write notes with handwriting in the notes app. And then it can copy and paste that into plain text if you want it later. How good is it at like bad handwriting?

Because I have abysmal handwriting. Like I've had teachers in high school reject essays I'd written because they were too impossible to read. I have bad handwriting and it's only gotten worse over time. and it is okay. But again, like, when it gets it wrong, the hassle of fixing it if you're in the scribble mode is very high. So, like, if you're using it,

just, like, reply to a text or, like, jot down a quick-to-do item or something, it's fine. But, like, you're not going to be taking notes in class with this thing. You should still do that by actually doing it in the notes app and, like, having it save the ink so you can figure it out later.

So, sorry, I just, like, the iPad stuff is, like one other thing on top of all of this that was easy to get lost. But we should talk about watching TV. Yeah. Take me away and watch. I think you spent more time thinking about that stuff this week than I did. I mean, they added more, like, elegant ways to detect what the accelerometer is doing

so they can detect more things you're doing when you're dancing for fitness. So you can do all sorts of dance fitness stuff. And then they added sleep detection, which great. Like, good. Finally, like about time. Didn't they buy a sleep tracking company? They did. Yeah, but that's like the thing on the mattress that like the mattress detects your movement.

And they, I think they're actually using some of that in terms of like sound and in general to do some sleep detection stuff. Oh, and they added hand washing detection. That's actually really. That's pretty cool. That's a moment where like we had to listen to them talk about the sound of water and soap squishing and that's what the thing detects. That's clever. I like that. I really, I love that.

I mean, I've given up in all the cute hand washing stuff. I no longer like sing the chorus to landslide or whatever. I just count to 10 twice. Yeah. It's fine. You know, it's boring. Like, I mean, this watch is telling me what to do. And I could think about anything else for this 20 seconds.

I'd be very happy. That's what technology is for. You give you back that little slice of time. Landslide? That's your hand washing song? No, my hand washing song is now me counting to 10 twice. Uh-huh. Because I'm just done with the games.

I'm like, I just need to get through this. And then also the two-year-old is there and I help her count to 10. Right. But at one point it was landslide. It was, that's what Liz told me to do. So I did. Okay. There are many songs. There was like a website of songs. Yeah. But now it's like, I'm just fully here. I'm like, I don't. This isn't like a fun game anymore.

Right. Except for the teaching the two-year-old the count to ten. But that's not every, you know, you see what I'm saying? The technology exists to give you back productive time in your life. That's what automation is for. And that's what I'm very excited about it. Yeah. We already talked about the Apple TV. The only thing of interest, I can get into the nerdyer details here on the YouTube 4K stuff. Yeah. So they, it's just, you know, they didn't announce it. They didn't, they said nothing about the Apple TV, right?

They're like, TVOS. Here's a trailer for a show we made. Like, there were literally no announcements of TVOS, right? Nothing is really changing. They didn't fix the remote. The UI is still bifurcated between, whatever. It's all the same. But then there, you know, here's a TVO slide.

Here's the announcement. It's like a little side. YouTube in 4K. It says the latest YouTube videos can now be in 4K. That is an extremely important clarification, right? That narrows the scope of what you get to watch to just new stuff. My theory is that right now the reason YouTube doesn't play in 4K in sort of any Apple rendering software. So Safari on the iPhone, Safari on your Mac, the Apple TV, whatever.

Safari and the iPad is because Apple doesn't support YouTube's VP9 codec, which is what they deliver 4K in. They just don't do it. They don't want to do it. It's never made any sense at all. They just don't want to pay the patent license. Whatever it is, they don't want to do it. Well, YouTube and Apple and a bunch of other companies, Netflix, they've all come together. They made a consortium, our favorite.

New video codec called AV1. Netflix has started rolling at AV1. Android TV plays some YouTube videos in AV1. Hey, did you guys, are you supporting AV1, the newest best codec? And maybe YouTube has encoded its newest videos in AV1 first. And then it's going to go back through the library. Just refuse to say. Yeah.

Just flat out, I will tell you, I've, uh, I just, just didn't say. Like, as explicitly dodged as any question has ever been explicitly dodged. So we're going to find out. But that is my theory is they've, they've added codec support. And it's the new one. It's not the old one. want to use. But it's a big deal, but I think it's going to mean until YouTube back encodes its entire library in AV1, it will just be new stuff from like today on. So there is another Apple TV

thing, which is interesting, which they also didn't talk about it all. They just like casually added multi-user support to the Apple TV, like a whole UI. They added a whole UI because multi-user was there before, right? Right. It's like a whole UI. It's like a slide-out thing. It's built into control center, it's like really easy to switch between accounts, but you can just use it for Apple Arcade and nothing else. That's what they added. Yeah. So they had multi-user support so that if you were, and they added it because they have a

recommendation engine in the TV app. So the idea was that you would switch over and then you can see how the TV app should be the interface for the whole thing. Yeah. And they can't get there. So they added multi-user support so that your recommended shows or whatever would be yours and your kids are watching. They would be theirs.

I think now they've added it just so you can switch between games and have different game saves, which is very clever. Yeah. You know what would be great to have multi-user support is the iPad, but we can move on from that. They just don't want to do it. They're like, you can get multi-user support for the iPad by spending $329 on another iPad. That is there. Have you heard about our great family sharing app plans? That's the only difference between the Mac and the iPad in three years is the Mac lets you log in as somebody else, and that's it.

Or in three years, or in three years, you have to buy a second Mac. Oh, my God. And it's a 300, you see where this is going. Other little stuff, I thought this was very funny. I actually got a text from our friend Michael Singleton in the middle of this announcement. They're like, we're updating the AirPods. We now do automatic detection. We can switch devices they're connected to across ICloud.

And then they're like, have you heard of spatial audio? And the actual tech demo was like really cool, right? They're going to do motion detecting using the AirPods and. your phone so that it's like a like a sort of baby version of head tracking so they know where your head is in relationship with the phone you're all moving and like the sounds are whizzing around like it's the whole thing this is the whole promise and they're like it's a they just kept on calling it spatial audio yeah the only the most popular spatial audio that apple delivers is in atmos yeah and they just like wouldn't say it and so my could text me it's like how burned is

Dolby right now and then at the very end at the very And they're like it supports 5.1.7.1. So they're supporting it, but they've built their own entire spatial audio system with one supported format, which I think is interesting because all the 3D audio stuff from Sony and Amazon is like, it's coming, you know? There's that one Amazon speaker that does like 3D audio. So maybe like Apple's building a world where, you know, you're going to listen to landslide and 3D audio. I just went back to landslide. But you understand what I'm saying. I actually don't even like Lance. I don't know why I keep bringing up this song. I don't like it.

So that was a good one. And then lastly, Deere, you wanted to talk about Safari. We could do an entire show on Safari, but they are doing some of the most aggressive moves against tracking and extension lockdowns that anyone is doing. So, okay, real quick, they are switching to the web API for extensions. The current app extensions for Safari still exist, so they're going to have both. But you can't just go to the Chrome store and install like you can on Edge or Chrome. or, you know, whatever, you need to go through Apple's app or app review process to get the extensions in. Cool.

They're putting smartphone style permission warnings on those extensions. So you can, like, grant permission once, grant permission just for this website or grant a total permission. Because, you know, turns out that most of your extensions, if you don't, aren't paying attention to them, can like literally see everything you do on the web. You should check your extensions. Just take a look at them. They're highly recommend it. And then the other thing they're doing is they have this thing called intelligent tracking protection. and it is a huge combination of like cookie blocking

and they also like stop tracking pixels and they also prevent figure printing by randomizing certain things and like it's a whole it's a lot of stuff and they've bundled all that up into a number for every website you visit that will just tell you how many trackers were prevented. Not blocked. Some of it's blocking but some of it's just like they stop the tracking

they like prevent the tracking but they don't actually block it because if you block it then JavaScript is like oh this doesn't work I'm going to break the way website. But if you just like trick JavaScript and prevent it, it's a whole thing. But now, every single website visit, it will tell you how many trackers were prevented. And with that information, you are able to do nothing. You can, you can email us and tell us what the number is on the verge and shame us. And you could do that with every website. You can, if a website has a bunch of them, you can be like, I don't feel good about this website. But the button doesn't actually,

you can't click on anything and be like, no, actually I'm okay with this tracker, or no, block this more or whatever. It's literally just a button so that, like, you become more aware that tracking exists on the web, which is interesting. And, like, it's great, like, good, good service. And, like, I'm actually, like, Chrome is, like, slow rolling its privacy stuff. And, you know, there's, like, every browser's in a different place. And Apple is by far the most aggressive at protecting privacy and preventing tracking. And, you know, the flip side of that is they don't. allow single site browsers still so you can't just make a Gmail app out of a web page.

They say that's a privacy thing too. I don't agree. But yeah, it's all great. I'm very fascinated that they wanted to put this tracking number in front of people very, very prominently. Here's my frame for all of this. Because on the iPhone, they're also blocking. They have a little identifier, IDFA identifier for advertisers. that a bunch of apps on the iPhone use,

and they're being very aggressive with it on iOS 14. So anytime an app wants to use it, you have to give it permission. You can limit that permission. You can turn it off. That's going to wreck, like all those free-to-play games that have bad ads in them, this is what they're relying on, right?

This is going to wreck those games. They won't be able to do personalized advertising and scale. A bunch of ad tech companies are freaking out. Like, Apple's position towards tracking is noble, and I like it, and that's like one of the reasons I use an iPhone. It is also colored by the fact that the web, in general, is Google's revenue platform. Yeah. So every shot Apple gets to take against advertising, it's tracking, it's all the stuff.

It's a direct shot at Google's business as its primary revenue line. And it is super interesting to watch that play out, particularly in browsers. Less so on the, do I want crummy games to track me? I don't. those games can go away. To be perfectly honest, they can all go away. I'd much rather be in a market where I'm paying five bucks for a game than not knowing that free games are tracking me for garbage ads. Me personally, but other people feel differently. But that's the choice Apple's making. That's where they're pushing that market. When it comes to the web, it's like, in order for websites exist,

candidly, here's a disclosure. Our website has a lot of trackers on it because we run ads to pay our bills. it would be happy to find a different business model. What Apple is doing with its browser is forcibly constraining sort of the web business model of advertising. And they're saying the way it works is bad. Presumably, some people innovate. They have lots of incentives to innovate and save their jobs. But it is very interesting to see when you say Google's slow rolling it. I think Google also thinks it's a little out of control and bad.

But they also make all of their money doing it. So, like, you just see the digital. different incentives where Apple's like, we're just going to burn this forest down and a new beautiful private forest will grow. And Google is like, what if we trim a little bit? Have you thought about a new layer of mulch? Like, they're just like, we're just radically different perspectives. We'll see. I think the tracking identifier stuff on the iPhone is actually great. It's going to freak a lot of people out in the early going, the sort of notifications Apple doing. Did you see the TikTok thing that went around today? No. So,

there's a new notification or like a banner slide down when an app pulls your pasteboard so if you copy something it goes into the clipboard oh yeah no i've seen i see this yeah so if an app hits takes what's in the clipboard or checks the clipboard you get a notification so lots and lots of apps check the clipboard for like all kinds of reasons nefarious and not right like they might check to see if you have a link in your clipboard so it can pre-fetch the link and do a preview it might pre-fetched, if you have an email address in your platform, it might prefetch it to see if it's in the contact database and fill out a card. Like,

it might just want to enable the paste option. Yeah. Right? I've got an app called shop, which is that's terrible, it's called shop, but it checks the clipboard for tracking numbers. And if it sees a tracking number, it just gives you a button to be like track this thing. Yeah. So apparently TikTok

on every third or fourth key press, if you're typing in a comment, checks the clipboard for some reason. Wow. So as you're typing, you just get the string of notifications. Beep, beep, beep, beep, TikTok pulled from the clipboard. TikTok pulled from it.

And it's like TikTok is already a Chinese company with already weird privacy concerns. And like, that's just going to freak people out until it is clear why all these apps are checking the clipboard or they're able to do more data. I think that's, and maybe for all I know TikTok's being super nefarious, although I don't know what from the clipboards of millions of teenagers the Chinese government wants.

Who knows? Yeah. But it's one of these norms that's going to shift on the phone that, you know, when they started doing like enable Bluetooth access, here's why. Like, everybody quickly figured out they had to explain, like, we're just looking for a Chromecast. Like, they got added to like every video app. Like, we're just, we only want Bluetooth because we're looking for a Chromecast. All of these other notifications are going to have to get more detailed so they don't free people out. I think that is unequivocally a good thing.

What do you think of the, the RDA nutrition label style privacy report that every app maker, is required to build now that's also self-reported. You know, this is one of those things. Remember Casey two years ago, like interviewed this guy, Tristan Harris, who's all about digital well-being and the dark patterns and it's all about addiction. And like he had a whole moment, Tristan Harris had a whole moment. And then within like 18 months, every major platform had digital well-being in it. Yeah.

Right? Like it just was the fastest take up of an idea that we've seen across, at scale across all the platforms. I think this nutrition label thing is the same stuff. It's a fattish idea that you should package concisely the most important information in a consistent way so that consumers can parse and understand it. Apple does not have the power to check everything, nor the scale to do it, and I don't think they want to. So it's a good first step. But it's only valuable if every app that you use on all of your platforms do it.

And then people like us tell you how to read that stuff. and about like that's agree to continue in a more standardized or agree to continue where we we where wherever we review a product whenever we review a product we list all the things you have to agree to was it's the same idea right which is cool like i please build an idea and do it at the system level that's great i just think there's another level of education that makes that label powerful and like is that going to be right like last year carbs were bad but this year they're better in moderation. And next, you know, it's like we, there's just an entire world of consumer understanding

has to come along with it. But you can't do it unless you have the structured data. And I think it's a good move towards structured data. All right. Did anything else happen? At WWC, no. The biggest story at the verge.com on WWC day was Microsoft just like gave up on mixer and gave it to Facebook.

But that's another show. That's a whole other show. Bejohn, Stephen, and Andrew Webster have been doing a great job on that. story, really pulling apart what made Mixer bad. There's another whole story happening in gaming on game streaming platforms around harassment. Jake Castanakis actually has a great story up on that today. So we don't have time for it, but it is true. That was actually one of the most popular stories was Mixer shutting down on WDBC Day, so check that out. I want to just give a quick update on the Hay app. So you might recall last week before WDWC kicked off, we had David Handemeyer

Hansen from Basecamp, the developer of Hay, and Congressman David Cicillini from Rhode Island. He's the chair of the House Anti-Trust Subcommittee, yelling about Apple's apps for policies because Hay had been rejected. Hay is now approved. There's a lot of back and forth. I cannot at all go into it in detail. Basically what happened was Apple said, it can't do nothing when you first light it up. That is just a random rule, I promise you. It came out of nowhere, basically. But Hay said, fine, they made a version of Hey, when you first light it up, you can get a burner account with a random email address

that will last for 14 days. That was enough to meet the rule. They're back in the store for good. And also, Hey, has no invite codes left. So you want to go check out a cool new email service. Go check out Hay. That has colored all of WWDC. And because we're not there in person,

because the developers aren't in bars, because we're not at parties and events, it's hard to know if the temperature has really, really come down on Apple and its developer relationships. It certainly has not come down from the regulators at all. There was just this week reports of the Justice Department thinking about antitrust actions against Apple. This particular Justice Department under Trump is a lot of smoke and no fire. But we'll see, like there's that noise. It's there. It's not going away. So that story

is going to keep playing out. And it was hard to get any reporting about how developers felt this week because we weren't there. But I suspect it's not going away, even though, Hay is in the store now, even though Apple changed its rules to let you appeal, not just to your rejections, but the rule itself, which is either monumental or the biggest Dodge ever. We just have to see if they actually take that seriously and change the rules and response to developers. But that was the big color over at all. But the outcome today is there's an interesting new email service. You can download the app and use it for 14 days with a burner account. All right. It was a lot. Hi, man. Thank you so much for joining us. That was great.

Anytime. Thank you to Joanna Stern for joining us at the beginning. You can find her on Twitter. She's at Joanna Stern. Thanks to Hime. He's at C. Gartenberg. Deeter's at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. On Tuesday, we got a special drop in the feed. It's the new episode of Recode's Land of the Giants, all about Netflix. That's hosted by Peter Kafka and Ronnie Mola. That's going to be great. We're taking next week off for the chat show. It's the holiday. But we'll be back after that. We love hearing from you. That's it. Rock and roll. I like how Joanna came back into the end of Trollo. That's it. That's the end of show. Goodbye. I win. And I also win the bet.