The Vergecast - Apple announces Watch Series 6 and new iPad Air / PS5 reveals price tag / Oculus announces Quest 2

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

Nilay, Dieter, Chaim, and Nicole discuss Apple's newly announced products including the Apple Watch Series 6 and the new iPad Air. Also discussed: the PS5 announced pricing, Oculus has a new headset, and TikTok acquisition news continues to brew. More stories from this episode: Apple Watch’s blood oxygen monitor is for ‘wellness,’ not medicine Apple is creating a fitness subscription service called Fitness Plus The new Apple Watch Series 6 has blood oxygen monitoring The Apple Watch Series 6: first impressions of a very good smartwatch The Apple Watch SE is a new lower-cost Watch New Apple Watches won’t have a USB power adapter in the box Family Setup lets you manage multiple Apple Watches from one iPhone There’s a new iPad Air that looks a lot like an iPad Pro The updated eighth-generation iPad has a familiar design but a new processor New Apple One subscription bundles pack multiple services together Nvidia is acquiring Arm for $40 billion  The PS5 will launch on November 12th for $499.99 PS5 Digital Edition launches November 12th for $399.99 Connect 7: All the news from Facebook and Oculus’ big VR / AR event Oculus Quest 2 review: better, cheaper VR Oculus’ new Quest 2 VR headset starts at $299 and ships October 13th Mark Zuckerberg on why he doesn’t want to ‘put an Apple Watch on your face’ Google to launch Pixel 5, new Chromecast, and smart speaker on September 30th Oracle reportedly wins deal for TikTok’s US operations as ‘trusted tech partner’ Trump to decide on TikTok Oracle deal with Walmart as an … We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk all about the new Apple event. Nicole Wetzman joins us to talk about blood, oxygen measurement, and the new Apple Watch series six. We get into the new iPad, the 814 chip with Heim Gartenberg. Then we talk about the PS5. Pricing has been released. We get into a little bit of the Oculus Quest 2. That's coming up on the Vergecast now.

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We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBI. All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast, a blood measurement. It's like a vampire. It's like I made a blade joke, Deere. Yeah. It wasn't good. but I'm trying to keep. The effort is what matters. I'm Neil Yv Tal.

I'm your friend. Dieter Bon is here. I'm your day walker. That's good. See? Heimgartenberg is here. I am not a vampire, but I have been accused of being one.

Wow. I'm very pale. It's been a very, very inside, you know, summer. And for our opening segment, Nicole Wetzman is here. Hey, Nicole. Hello.

So I want to start where I always start. It's been 27 weeks since our nation's president offered a testing and tracing plan that started with a website. It was built by 65,000 Google engineers last count, I believe. 27 weeks. That's more than half a year. Still doesn't exist.

That's bad. There's no getting through it without that. I know that Nicole wrote a great piece about how testing needs to work. There was a lot of noise this week about vaccination timelines. That's still the heart of it, right? He made a big promise about a gigantic plan that never revealed itself. I think, if you're, Nicole, I would say if you're evaluating the vaccination claims, that there's going to be a website is like a really good piece of context.

Yeah, definitely. And you should listen to only vaccine experts to tell you about vaccine timelines. And you will probably not be able to get one this year. So don't hold your breath. Last I checked a vaccine was harder to make than a website. It seems like it would be the case. Well, given the case with this website. Anyhow, Nicole actually, Nicole and Marybeth and I actually spoke to a vaccine expert this week.

That's on the interview show. You should go listen to it. That was great. Dr. Natalie Dean. I'm not going to race through the usual set of updates. We have a lot of tech news this week, but Nicole in the rest of our science section is doing amazing work on COVID.

The rest of our teams are doing amazing work on the push for racial justice now that's affecting everything and the second order effects of both of those huge stories. Please look at the site for that. They're very top of mind for us. There was a lot of tech news this week.

So there was an Apple event. We'll save some of the mechanics of the Apple event for a little bit later because iOS 14, A14, it's all wrapped up into that. But top line, they had an event. You heard from us, what was the last week? They managed expectations around this event very carefully. Well, carefully after the fact.

They very carefully managed their post-event announcement expectations. So there's going to be an iPad and there's going to be a watch. And indeed, there were some iPads and there were some watches. They announced the Apple One service bundle. They said all the OSs are coming tomorrow. Developers freaked out. We'll talk about those. And they said there's a new A14 in the iPad air.

So let's start with the watch. That's why I wanted Nicole on to begin with. Apple Watch Series 6, Deere, you have one. I do. Tell us about it and tell us about your blood. So I have the product red one. And it is very pretty. The red is very, I don't know, rich and complex, like a fine Merlot.

It's a good looking red. And if you didn't give me the red one and you asked me to tell the difference between this and the series five, I would fail. Just straight up. The screen is brighter, and it's especially brighter, 2.5 times brighter in the always-on standby mode,

and that's the only discernible difference unless you look specifically at the back to look at the sensors, or you know specifically that the altimeter is always on. So it's the U-1 chip, the altimeter, the blood oxygen sensor, the slightly brighter screen, and there might be one other small difference

that I'm forgetting. Now, the new chip inside is faster. What does it mean for an Apple Watch to be faster? It's like a very open question. So what's ironic about that is it's the only question when it applies to Androidware. Wear OS watches. They all need to be faster. But yeah, it's fine.

So really the news here is the blood oxygen sensor. It's like the big new thing. Everything else are like nice pip year-over-year updates. But the blood oxygen sensor is really like the big deal here. So, Nicole, you've done a little. research into it, its potential applications. I thought your headline was kind of just like an important statement of fact. Apple is marketing it as a wellness device, not as a medical device. They did say during, I thought this was really interesting way of kind of just like threading the

needle. They're like, you might have heard about blood oxygen during all this COVID stuff. And then they didn't like close that loop. But Nicole, even looking into it, what do you know about it? What should people think about it? Yeah. So the reason that they're talking about it. Yeah, so the reason that they're talking about it as a wellness device is because they cannot talk about it as a medical device without, you know, clearance from the FDA to do so. So we're sort of in this spot where pulse oxymeters or blood oxygen sensors are in like a weird in between with the FDA where like you can sort of have them on devices without getting clearance from the FDA. But if you're trying to do some things that you have to, Apple has not done that for their pulse oxymeter on the watch yet. But this isn't something new to this. smartwatch, like Garmin has had a pull socks for a while. Fitbit has like sort of quietly activated their feature, I think, last year. And they've sort of been interesting to like people for working out and getting a sense of kind of where your blood oxygen is during exercise. But they've taken on a new role during the pandemic because monitoring blood oxygen levels is an

important way to monitor the progression of COVID-19 because people can be up and walking and talking and have very low blood oxygen levels, and you wouldn't necessarily know that just by looking at them, which is unusual. Usually, like, very low blood oxygen is matched with, like, you're gasping for breath and you can't really walk up the stairs. So that's why they've been important recently. But the way that the product is on the Apple Watch is it's not, it can't be used to actually diagnose any illness and it shouldn't be used to do so. It is more of kind of an interesting thing that you can look at, but we don't actually know, like, how well-valed it is against sort of more standard pulse oxymeters that could be used in hospitals or

could be kind of more medical grade devices because they haven't gone through the FDA process. They don't have to necessarily release some of that validation information at this point. So the whole time you were talking, I've been trying to measure my blood oxygen on this thing, and I've had three unsuccessful attempts so far. Maybe it's because the battery level is low in the swatch. I haven't plugged it in for 24, 36 hours or something. But yeah, it's not working. But the question I have is there are some sensors on the Apple Watch that are like,

you might get lucky to get an early warning on something you didn't realize you had. It's not really a medical device, but like it can tell you if it detects something like AFIB and you're like, oh shit, and then you go to the doctor, they verify it, and then your life is saved or whatever. There's other sensors that are just straight up stats for fitness nerds, right? I want to know my run steps. I want to know how high I ran in altitude and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. blah, blah. Do you think that the pulse oxymeter in the Apple Watch is, like, where in that spectrum?

Is it like stats for fitness buffs? Is it just like more health information for people that want to be, live the quantified self? Remember that term? People used to say quantified self all the time. Or is it like an early warning system? Or is it everybody else has got one. And so Apple felt like they had to do it too. Like, where do you see it on that spectrum? I think it probably falls closer to the like quantified self, get some health data. It's not. like the EKG feature, which does have FDA clearance and can be used, sort of, they can market it as more of a medical function. But, you know, I think that this is something that could follow a similar trajectory that that did. You know, like a lot of people were very skeptical of Apple's EKG when it first came out, like doctors and cardiologists. And then you saw some validation and, you know, people looked at

the studies and they said, okay, like maybe this can be something that's useful. And I think we might see a similar trajectory with pull socks on wearables now that they're on a couple of devices and we'll probably see a little bit more attention to them. But it's sort of interesting because the way that a pull socks works on your wrist is different than the way it works on a finger. And there's sort of a little bit of question as to the difference and accuracy between the way you measure things at two different places. And that is also like there isn't a ton of research on that either. Like this is an area or there isn't a ton of validation studies. You're sort of going off a little bit of like what little research you do have and then we're

kind of waiting to see if more validation studies, like, end up being done. Just real quick, how does a pulse ox ever work on a finger versus a wrist? Yeah, so a pulse ox works with light. So it sends out light through like a body part. And the idea is that your blood, your red blood cells absorb different wavelengths of light when they're carrying hemoglobin, which is like carrying oxygen and when they're not. So you're looking at sort of the difference between your oxygenated and non-oxygenated blood through the, like, like this sort of intermediary of absorption to figure out what your percentage blood oxygen is. And at the fingertip, that happens by sending light through the tip of your finger and then reading it on the other side.

Whereas on a wrist, it's reflective. So it's bouncing the light back up to itself. And so it's like a reflective versus transmitted light. And that's sort of part of the question with like accuracy there. You'll also have different amounts of blood close to the surface of the skin and your finger versus the top of your wrist. So, like, some of the issues could come with where it's positioned and if it's not actually, like, on your, the artery, your rate, I think it's the radial artery. I'm watching, Dieter. He's still trying to do it. I got two out of, like, the six I've been doing here. They take 15 seconds apiece. One said 96, which is like, a little little bit okay. One just said 90, which is like, I think I would feel that. So that can't be right. And most of them are unsuccessful.

So I need to figure out how to get this thing to, like, be placed to be accurate. So there's a lot of, I'm actually concerned about the same here. I've got, like, a consumer-grade finger oxymeter, so I'm going to, like, be doing them, like, next to each other all weekend. So expect me to be terrified on Monday. So the light thing, it has more, like, little light things on the back than Apple Watch up until now. And it uses red light, I think, for the pulse exhibitor. and it also does it during the day and during the night just sort of ambitably so you can see what it was throughout the course of the day and not just sit there and test it and freak yourself out. Interestingly, by default, the checking throughout the day turns off when you're in theater mode, which turns the screen off because like you can see it in the dark.

You could just see your wrist like turn red when this thing is shining on it. That's wild. The EKG point you brought up was really interesting to me because we wrote those stories, right? They put out an EQG. Doctors are skeptical. We want to see it proven out. They did manage to prove it out. They did get the clear. Like, they went through the process. One of the things about Apple entering health, and I think about Tim Cook saying Apple's big legacy in the world in history will be in health. That's the CEO of Apple. That's the thing he says about his company. They always were the tech company entering the heavily regulated health devices space with this watch. And it seems like they've kind of inverted the, the slow, right? Usually you would get that clearance, and you put up the first generation, and you would fix it. They're starting with, here's some stuff you can measure. We don't know what it means. We've signed up 45 world-class hospitals to do some tests with it. And they just, like, sort of build their data. They build their credibility. And then they go and get their

validation and say, now it's medical. That seems like the reverse of how it normally is. It also seems like a very clever strategy, because they have the scale to pull it off. Yeah, it's sort of interesting because they can, you know, the way that medical device regulations work, it's this like very weird space, right, like in terms of regulations. So they're able to put this sensor on the watches and then sort of like go from there and test it. And like then they can, you know, partnering with sort of the universities to try this out over time. Like hopefully it will mean that we'll see it'd be interesting because we might then see data before. it gets submitted for clearance for whatever kind of function they're aiming for, which I think will be interesting to see as well. You know, they're partnering with a university just to look at asthma, which I thought was interesting because a lot of the other wearables are focusing their pulse ox research on sleep apnea. So that sort of, I think, is a potential indication of a way that they could go in maybe a slightly different direction, although I would assume that they're

also going to be pursuing the sleep stuff as well. So it'll be. curious to see how that shakes out. I mean, they bought that sleep tracking company and then nothing else has ever happened, right? Like, do they still, it was a sleep track company that like put the, like the thing under your mattress, right? Yeah, bet it. Does bet it still exist? They still sell that thing? Yes. Okay. You can still buy one. That's like one of the few products that Apple just hasn't like memory hold after acquisition. But like they don't have, no one competes with their weird sleep tracker. Nicole, when you look at sort of the suite of sensors on the watch and the places where Apple is pushing and kind of study is, do you see a holistic picture of what it's all supposed to do? Or is it

different bites that things are capable of doing? Well, I think it sort of fits under the bigger umbrella of the idea of being able to monitor your own health at home and that sort of general trajectory that a lot of the health landscape seems to be moving towards. And there's like that sort of conversation's been accelerated because of all the telemedicine during the pandemic. And I think getting in on a couple of key areas that are things that are pain points for physicians to regularly monitor is kind of an interesting, like, entry into that conversation. Because, you know, it's hard to get regular heart rate measures on people if you have to hook them up to an EKG and you can only do that at like X amount of times during the day. And it's kind of like cumbersome and maybe challenging to get people to comply. but if you have it built into a wearable you're wearing all the time, you can get a more regular reading on something like that, which is useful to a clinician who otherwise could be working with far less information.

So that I think is the space that you can see some initial benefits, but I think that that's sort of the direction a lot of this is moving in. And it's challenging a lot of clinicians with how they think about their relationship with patient data and where the data they get on patients is. coming from. I think a lot of clinicians are excited about this and the possibility to be able to, you know, reach people and get information that they wouldn't get otherwise, but they're still, you know, waiting to see if the possibility is borne out. Yeah. And I think because it's Apple, I think there's a presumption that all the data will be clean. Like the product works well, but I think that's still, we still don't know, right? The thing is still pretty new. And I think a lot of skepticism I hear is we don't know if you're wearing your watch tightly.

enough, right? We don't know if your kid or your dog ran away with it and you like show more movement than like there's just like a when you have to do the formal compliance and like actually sit down and take the reading at home like you're trying to you're trying to get a good result. Yeah. Whereas these all these ambient measurements I think and I know Apple's thinking about it but I think that's just like a really interesting piece of this puzzle. Yeah. And then there's a when you look at research studies, a self-report is always considered to be slightly less reliable than something that's collected by a researcher and things like that. I also just wanted to say that, you know, the other thing,

when a company like Apple enters the medical landscape is that their information is proprietary, so their algorithms and all of that stuff is not accessible to just your average everyday doctor. So doctors also have to trust the black box that is the product without knowing where anything, any of the information it's spinning out comes from. And that is a really hard sell, I think, for a lot of clinicians. And I think if this is going to move towards, like continue to move forward, I think it's going to be interesting to see the amount of transparency that that actually comes up around some of those questions. Yeah. Two more pieces of health news from the Apple event I want to talk to you about specifically.

One, they launched their new fitness service called Fitness Plus. It is like an all-encompassing Apple ecosystem Death Star. Right? You're like put your iPad and you link it with your watch. Then ICloud streams a video and there's real-time data. fundamentally a fitness plus is DVDs of exercise videos that you can put your Apple Watch data on top of that that's that's all it really is well I was saying it in a more exciting way that's what I was doing but yes it's video on demand nothing's live but you know like the the streaming the linking all that stuff is is neat do you see that when in the context of our greatest contribution to the world will be health do you see that as meaningfully moving the company forward are they just like Like whatever, we're going to make Peloton stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think that exercise is a big part of health.

And that's something that, you know, people care a lot about. But if it's collecting, like, the information on your, like, how much you're working out in the same place that it's collecting your heart rate data and your blood oxygen. And that's something that your doctor, like, wants to see how much exercise you're doing. Like, sure, that could be a convenient way to sort of, like, get evidence to your doctor that you're working out X amount. and if you have questions about like any of that stuff. But I also think that fitness is like a huge industry. And I mean, if they're trying to take over the world,

having a fitness product that you can do at home during a pandemic is probably a good thing, I would say, for the product. On the product side, I think it was honestly, yes, it's kind of like just DVDs with Apple Watch data over the top of it. But what was their newest, most interesting idea? It was this fitness service, right? Like everything else was sort of iterative, like in many cases, extremely iterative over the old one. This was a new thing.

But I guess what I'm pushing at is, has Apple's health thesis come into focus for you as our health reporter, for anybody just listening? Like, I think about Tim Cook saying our greatest contribution will be in health. And then it's just bits and bobs, right? And I couldn't quite link them all together. Yeah, I mean, I think it gets at sort of the idea of like the holistic picture of health care in terms of, you know, we need to look at all elements of your life in order to be understanding kind of how healthy you are as a person and kind of what you need to be doing. And also on, you know, the early intervention prevention side of things as well, if we think about exercise in that sort of context. The, you know, the EKG feature is the whole

kind of selling point is that this is something that you can use in the background that will give you an early hint that something could be wrong. And so if we're thinking about, you know, preventing illness rather than treating illness, I would think it kind of, could fit under that umbrella. And it also, you know, fits under this general conception of wellness that everyone is very interested in, which, you know, could have a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people. But if you're packaging medicine as wellness with sort of the connotations that comes with in

terms of like investment and money and status and all of these different, like more cultural ideas, fitness definitely fits, fits under that. for sure. All right. Last little thing, they put out iOS 14. It came out today. Exposure notification now built into the operating system. You can just turn it on in settings. I encourage you going to go turn it on. I went to turn it on and said, where do you live? I said New York State and said New York already has an app. Go get that app. That app doesn't exist yet. Woof. So Apple's like leaking some Cuomo app that doesn't exist or they're a little shaky.

But so that's rolling out. Obviously testing, tracing, we start to show with it. week for a reason. Have you seen any, there's like seven states that have it now, the app. Have you seen any results from it? Have you seen, has that built to any conclusion? I think it's that they've only really been out for like a couple months, two months, month and a half. So I haven't seen any kind of data from any of the states yet. I mean, it's not something I've actively looked for recently, but it's not something that I've seen a whole lot of results from yet. A thing that is, I think it really struck me when I was installing, you know, up to the software and, you know, your phone lights up again. It's like, type in your password again. And you're just like back. And then you're,

where's the, where's the at launch you've installed iOS 14 turn on your exposure tracking? Like, it should be there. It's not. It's just like, it's crazy. They built all this. They made all this noise with partnership with Google. It's unprecedented. They roll it out in the operating system. And they didn't say a word about it. And that to me is like nuts. I mean, do they not want to freak people out? people are easily freaked out by stuff like that. I think it's a regional problem. So I just checked mine and I tried to turn it on and I'm in California and has said your area, it has not on for your area.

So I've got the thing that checkbox to give me notification when it's available, but I can't just turn on the exposure notifications directly yet. Yeah. That to me is it was an announcement made with some fanfare, right? The two big companies collaborate. They don't like each other. And it just seems to have, they're obviously working on it. We get regular updates.

It's in the operating systems now. And it as yet has seems to have come to nothing. So I was very curious to ask you, Nicole, for your perspective on that. Well, I think it's interesting that the announcements are coming from the states and from the state health departments rather than from the tech companies. I think that sort of is probably a good public health strategy. But, you know, if it's sort of a more generalized feature, I mean, like the strategy of that, I think is sort of interesting and could be explained in a lot of different ways. but like the announcements have been coming out locally when there's a new app in a different area.

Yeah, that was the thing that got me. I was like, there's an app for New York, and I haven't heard. That seems crazy. But it turns out, Tim Cook is just poking at Cuomo. That's my theory. Okay.

Oh, hey, one more thing. Every review I've been doing lately, I've got the Wivings, HR, steel, whatever, smartwatch, which is the old version. They've got a new version coming out called the Scanwatch, I think. It's out in the UK and Europe, but it's not here in the U.S. Nicole, you have one.

Can you just like, Real quick, like, what is it and do you like it? Because everyone's asking me and my answer is I don't know. Yeah. So it's not out in the U.S. yet because it is waiting for FDA clearance because it is doing the thing that Apple is not doing, which is linking its pulse ox to a medical feature, which is sleep apnea. Right. So they sort of have jumped into that, you know, pool of things. So it's still waiting FDA clearance.

Like, who knows when that's going to happen? Who knows when you're able to get your hands on it? I have been wearing it. I like it. I like that it just looks like a watch and does not look like a computer and that it doesn't give me any notifications at all if I don't want it to, which is great. For me, a person who doesn't like smart watches. But it also has a pole socks feature. And like you, I have been testing it out and it has been giving me a lot of inconglusives and telling me that I am dying a lot of the time with like 89% pole socks. And I have a fingertip thing too and I've been comparing them as well. well. So I think I have the same feedback on that that I do with the Apple Watch, which is that if and when it gets cleared by the FDA here, it still probably serves a similar functionality. But I do really like it. It's great. It looks really nice. It's not too big and pretty kind of simple and straightforward. So they're good. I like them. I like the Wethy's watches. Okay. Cool. Great. Well, thank you so much, Nicole. We're going to have to have you back soon.

Thanks for having me. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back. Hym is going to walk us through all the rest of the things that Apple announced, which was quite a bit. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify.

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That's Grammarly.com. We're back. I'm Gartenberg. Hello. Tell me everything. No, let's start. There's a little bit more App Watch stuff. Dieter, you want to run through the SE. It's basically SE and the family stuff, right?

Yeah, so in addition to the Series 6, they also released the SE, which is, it's like they've got the Series 3 around as a cheap one. And there's the SE, which is like a series four, series five. They took out the EKG, but they put in the always on, no, they also took out the always on screen. It's like the lower cost version that isn't the low, low cost version. It's like in the middle. And I kind of don't get why it exists, except I totally get why it exists because Apple needs to have one in the middle, a good, better best. And that's where they want this thing to land.

And the thing that I think is the most interesting about the Apple Watch is called family setup. So if you have a kid or a, I don't know, elderly parent, you can set up an Apple Watch for them on your iPhone. And then you manage it as though, you know, it's somebody else's device that they don't even have an iPhone, but you get to like see where they are on GPS. There's lots of limitations on what the kid is allowed to do. so they don't get to track their calories, they track their movements, which is the right call. They turn off a bunch of other stuff like the ECG probably wouldn't be accurate for a kid so they can't do that.

I think they also turn off like low heart rate notifications and, you know, a bunch of other stuff is off. But it basically takes that like kid tracker, kid watch tracker market and just like just hits it with a big hammer, a big apple-sized hammer. It's expensive. You're going to have to pay for carrier. You have to get the GPS,

or I'm sorry, the LTE version, in order to use this feature. So there's a lot of things that, like, put it into a much higher price tier. But I'm just saying, when kids go back to school and, like, one kid has got, like, the, I don't know, whatever, they're called Archangel or whatever, like, the Cheap-O GPS watch and one kid has the Apple Watch. Like, that kid with the Cheapo tracker watch is going home and having a conversation with their parents. There's a reasonable, oh, we don't go anywhere anymore. But in the before time, when I would, like, go to work and the nanny would, like, take MaxPlay. or like I was always in the hunt for a stroller tracker and I could never like just because

Max is she's baby wasn't going to yeah on her but like I always wanted like a GPS tagger for the like I was like I'll put it on the stroller and I could never find one that like made sense that didn't cost a million dollars that wasn't like a sprint exclusive yeah and now I'm like I should buy an Apple watch and I'll just like tie it to whatever I want to track and it'll be like a real computer from a Rebid will brand. I know the cell modem will work. That you have to charge every two days. Get alerts that your stroller is dying

of low blood oxygen. It's like freaking out. But it's just like that market, you know, if you don't have a kid, like you don't know that the carriers are constantly bombarding you with kid tracker stuff. Yeah. And like Apple really to just blow up that market. I think the SC is really like Apple is no longer able to

just sell the old one for cheaper. Yep. They have to make them look new. They have to say they are new products. They have to market them as new products. I think they want to make more ads, right? Like fundamentally, they just want to be in your face more. And they could not be like, the Apple Watch Series 4 again. And like confuse you against the Series 6, which is they're going to market in a different way.

I mean, the S-E just doesn't make sense to me on a lot of levels. Like, I don't understand why it has an S-5 processor at all because the S-5 processor is the exact same thing as the S4 processor. The only difference is it has, I believe, slightly more system memory for like storage of apps and the display controller that allows you to have the in the always on display. So Apple like went out of its way to get this more expensive chip set that is identical to their old chip set on the series four, which this effectively is and then disabled it. I had question. So I was, I wrote this thing where I was like, the SC doesn't, I the idea of SE doesn't make sense because on the iPhone line, the SE is a low end. And on the Apple watch

line, the SE is the one in the middle. So what's the deal? And so then, you know, this whole thing that like Apple needs to have a good upsell from good, better to best. And so they're trying to make their middle upsell slightly nicer. So that's why those, that's why those cadences exist. But then I realized what SE means is, oh shit, we have a lot of extra chips and we don't want to keep making the old ones. We want to stop making the old ones. It should be SP, spare parts. It should just be a like overstock of processors. The iPhone OS. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that we should start calling in the spare parts. So that's, I see. Honestly, that's the most interesting thing about it is basically a series four. Yeah. But at a much lower price. There's no power adapter in the box, except for the most expensive ones. Ridiculous.

Which is the dumbest. I am so mad about this. The person who has the most USB power adapters in the world is the person who buys the Apple Watch edition. I mean, the person buying an Apple Watch edition doesn't know what a USB power adapter is because I assume that they do not handle the charging of their own devices. They just like put it down on a table somewhere and someone else just like puts it back in the morning recharge. This is my new thing. On the new interview show, when we get billionaires, I'm going to ask something about USBC. Be like, what is your favorite USB standard? Because I guarantee you they're

all frustrated by it. Anyway, so no power adapter is in the box. I think that is a clear sign that the iPhone don't have it. They made a big. big show about how that's for environmental reasons. Lisa Jackson, who's their executive in charge of environmental initiatives. But they didn't lower the price when they took it out of the box, did they? You got to get those points somewhere, man. I'm just saying. You got to keep the street happy. Also, if Apple was really concerned about environmental things, it's possible they could have used the universal charging standards used by every other manufacturer instead of insisting on producing its own cables. Hypothetically.

The Apple Watch still doesn't support Chi charging. Does not support Chi charging. The Apple Watch doesn't support you charging. The new iPad that they announced, one of them still has a lightning port. Like, okay, so let's, let's do let's get out of the watches. I try to go fast, but it's like everything. There's, there's too much. New iPads. There's a new iPad

air with USBC, which last week, we were like, this is going to be nuts. It's basically an iPad for. Let's set that one aside for one second because I want to say 814 to let's start with a lightning iPad. There's a new eighth generation iPad that is a processor bump. That's

it's a spare parts iPad. That's it. And it still has lightning. And I think I understand why it still has lightning. Why do you think it still has lightning? Because it's the one that you give to your kid. It's the Chromebook competitor. Like, it's there to meet the ecosystem as it is.

It is not the product that pushes anything forward. Chromebooks use USBC too. Every, Android phones use USBC. I think it has lightning because it would have cost too much to redesign it for USBC. and they're just waiting until they can take the air, the pro and air thing all the way down to the low end. Like, the reason that thing is cheap is because they literally don't have to change anything

about the factory that makes it, except, like, have the person that puts in the chip, like put in a different chip. It dumps in a different barrel of chips into the hopper. The reason it doesn't have USBC is because they didn't redesign it. But they redesigned it last year. They redesigned it last year.

A little. You have to put it, no, you have to put a new display, and that's a different size screen. I'm not mad about lightning. Do not get me wrong. I'm mad about lightning. I'm also mad that there's a different smart connector standard

for the different iPad lines. And I'm also annoyed that there's a different Apple Pencil standard for both the iPad lines now. And so knowing what keyboard to get or what pencil to get requires like double checking and that's annoying.

Yeah, I just, I don't know. Again, I think this is just like me, like my kid's centric view of the world now. We have last year's 320. $29, iPad. It's in a gigantic, hot pink foam case.

Yeah. Cannot be destroyed. And I'm like, I don't care what ports this has. Also, any charger in my family's, in any of our family's houses, is guaranteed to charge it.

Right. Right. It's because it is fundamentally that thing runs Disney Plus in YouTube kids. So you think it has lightning because the iPhone has lightning? Yeah.

I think it, when I say it meets the ecosystem where it is, it's a product that demands virtually nothing from you if you have a bunch Apple stuff. There is one ecosystem that it's not meeting and that's education.

They didn't do anything to improve its standing in education. It's like iOS 14 doesn't really help with management or multi-user in a serious way. You can do it for education, but it's me. When they did family sharing on the phone and I was like, come on. Yeah. This is the first time Apple has ever admitted that families exist. Ever. And they did it on the watches.

Yeah, man. Every time I tried to, we had to turn off. air drop on Max's iPad because she kept on getting whatever it's air dropping Becky. Oh no. And she would just go, uh-oh, and we couldn't figure out what was wrong. They're getting closer. The Apple TV has vague family stuff now. Yeah, yeah.

At the going great, in like two or three years, you'll be able to never know. Anyway, the other thing about education is they all have Chromebooks, and so they always use USBC to charge those Chromebooks. And so, like, they have to get a whole other charging thing if they want to get out. iPads into the school. So like, yeah, anyway, that's it, that's my rant. All right, iPad air. There's more to ran about with the air. Oh, yes. You air, this is, they should have called the iPad SE. If you're going with their new names, what do they do? And they said this, and I'll say this, they said this line, which I thought was new. The point of the iPad air is to bring pro features to a more

accessible price point. And I was like, that's new. And then I was told very sharply, No, we said that last year, too. You just didn't believe us, which is hilarious. Because last year they didn't have all the pro features. But this year, it looks the same as the pro. Has now a faster, well, maybe. That's why I want Hyam to talk about it. Has an A14, which is a different chip than the pro.

The current pro is the A12Z. Slightly different screen. It gets less bright. Stereo speakers instead of quad speakers. No pro motion, no 120 hertz promotion. No LiDAR sensor. That is a list of things I think most people do not care about. So the error is like really emerged.

It got more expensive. It's $100 more expensive. It comes in this range of colors. Can use all the same keyboards and stuff. That is more expensive, I think, is a ding. But it is now it's the most compelling iPad. Oh, and USBC. And that to me feels like they've made,

they've made the concession that USBC is what the iPad needs because the iPad is computer, right? It's a weird spot for the iPad line, but the air is, I think, emerged as the one to get. Yeah. It's a tough argument. Did the 2019 iPad Air have a headphone job? I can't even remember. It did.

It did. Because it was the old design. Yeah. So that's something. So, Hym, talk to me about A14. It seems they went to five nanometer ahead of everybody else. Yep. So, I mean, yeah, it's next generation chip. They're saying, you know, 40% more transistors, twice as fast for graphics. A lot of it is just, you know, this is a new processor. But this is particularly important for two reasons.

One, all the iPhone's going to have it. Two, I don't know. if you can make a direct comparison between this and the A12Z, just because they're fundamentally different chips. This is a six-core CPU, four-core GPU. The A-12-Z is still eight-core GPU. It supports more RAM than, like, the regular A-12. I have to, like, dig up and see how this compares.

At tasks, it's going to be hard to compare just because they're fundamentally different chips. But what this does say is a couple things that are interesting, which are, first of all, Apple and by extension, TSM, are able to make five nanometer chips, which is good for everyone who makes five nanometer chips, except for Intel. And the other thing is that Apple really was emphasizing,

they have a redesigned GPU and twice as faster, big boost in performance, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that's very interesting for the iPad. I mean, just because, you know, they've bumped the processor. It's going from, you know, the A12 to the A14, big generational jump, because they also kind of took last year off when it came to actually making. Like, there was no A13X processor.

The only difference between the A12X and the A12Z was Apple unlocked another GPU core that was already on. So they went from seven to eight. It was a pretty incremental upgrade. Yeah. Do we need to get into that drama or people, like, to get, we have to talk about binning and like not all eight of those cores in the old, okay, good. I refuse. The other interesting thing for the A14, though, is. This is Apple's first processor from its new generation of stuff.

And the processors that Apple is making and the things that it's focusing on on the processors that it's making is a lot more important right now with Apple about to release computers that are going to be using. If not this processor, a processor built on this. Haim, are you saying the iPad isn't a computer? Oh, my God. Poor Heim. I walked right into that one. Like, there will presumably be an A14X of some sort that is going to use this new GPU engine, this new CPU. And the fact that Apple is, is, you know, at this new generational point, I mean, they are at a new, you know, node.

They can, they're more power efficiency with less battery consumption are effectively the same. The things that they straight up said on stage, these are what we wanted from Intel and Intel wasn't doing. And it was the same things. These are what we wanted from PowerPC. So we're going to Intel. So this is sort of a preview. Like they went, I don't think it's a coincidence that Apple's like, you know, this is two to three times faster than the most popular Windows laptop, the three times faster than the Android tablet and the Chromebook. And like, this is very much setting the stage for that.

The thing that jumped out of me about that, they ran all those stats, right? It's faster than the most popular Windows laptop. It's faster than it's on Chromebook. It's faster than a game console. And they didn't name them, which is kind of them. They did eventually show an HP laptop. Oh, man. And like the guy at the HV office was like, oh, it was us.

I died. On the one hand, it must be nice to be the most popular Windows laptop. It was just like the subtlest shot. I feel like we could talk about the arm based Mac. The chip in the arm based Mac is right now the 812Z. I would presume that whatever arm based Mac comes out at five nanometers on the new node, they've built the thing out. I also expect them to rename it, to not. do an A series.

Right, because they keep calling it Apple Silicon. Like, I think they want to get bigger. They need to support more kinds of features on a Mac. Let's talk about the iPad itself, though, for a second. Here you've got the headroom on an iPad is always really interesting to me. Because it doesn't really matter how powerful my iPad has been ever, right? Like, I never push it. Those workloads, as much as Apple wants them to exist and insists that they exist

and will hire influencers to show me they exist, they still don't exist at scale. And so the point, even in the iPhone, the point of having the fastest iPhone is that it will last a much longer time. Do you think this chip in the iPad, compared to the A12Z or whatever, has that similar kind of had room potential,

or is it, this is just, we had to put it out because the iPhone's coming out? I mean, I think it's very much that. I mean, first of all, I don't think Apple was going to put the, an X or Z class chip in this iPad. The iPad error is the middle option. And, you know, best, better, best, or good better best,

it needs this to be the better one. So, like, it could have made this. There's a world where this event is just, this is the new 11-inch iPad Pro, where, you know, putting a fingerprint sensor on it and we're calling it a day and we're dropping the price. That's a world that exists. I don't think it's a likely one

because Apple wants this mid-level step. Yeah. And as such, it wants that mid-level step to last. I mean, Apple's, you know, longevity of product is always sort of one of the big advantages it has. Like, this iPad's going to get updates for what, four or five years, probably longer? Yeah. You mentioned touch ID, by the way.

We didn't talk about that at all. It does not have face ID. The fingerprint censored Apple says it's quite fast. And I desperately hope that comes to all their products. Yeah. Yeah. Put it on the iPhone, please. Well, I mean, we'll see how small they can make it for an iPhone, right?

That's a tough thing to make that smile. Power button on the iPhone is pretty big. Yeah, okay, that's fair. Also, thank you for calling it the power button. No one, everyone else called the sleep wake button now, or the side button or the top button. It's the power button. We all know it. You remap it to Siri or Bixby or whatever the F, but it's the power button, and we know it in our hearts.

The last thing I want to talk about the iPad is, unless you have more to say about touch ID. No. No. I could talk about where the webcam is, but you got it. Oh, good. God, what are they doing? Yeah, a bunch of kids in Zoom school looking sideways and up with their noses. That's why you should buy a Chromebook because a webcam respects you as a person.

Yes, agree. 100% agree. Did you notice that they made a specific, special point to say that more than half of all new iPad buyers, 53 or 54% or something, are first-time iPad buyers. They really, really still want to make the case that, like, this thing is in on the PC market. It's faster than a Windows laptop. It's faster than a Chromebook.

And so that tension between like the iPad is running into the Mac is still there. And the iPad team still thinks that they can like grab PC market share. And I just like, sure, I believe you probably can. I just wish you'd do more with it once you had it. You know, I haven't done any betas of iPad OS 14. I feel like I want to come back to that after. because they've pushed it a little bit farther again.

Yeah, but the iPadOS beta, like the headline feature there is the scribble stuff where you can use the pencil to jot in any text field anywhere or anywhere on the screen. It's good for like four words and that it falls apart, but it's great for those four words to just be able to like write your search

in the search field or whatever. Beyond that, like, it's not as big a deal on the iPad as it is on the iPhone in terms of like overall UI and overall change. changes. Scribble is not turning this into a Chromebook. Well, we got to review these things.

We will argue about the iPad being a computer at that time. Last thing I want to talk about in this section, before we take a break, Apple One is out. Hyam, you actually wrote the breakdown of all the bundles. Walk us through it. So, Apple One. First of all, first of all, there are three of them, which I think is an immediate failure of naming or branding or something. That should have been a red flag somewhere. Apple one is Apple's subscription bundles, and the cell is that you get Apple One, and you'll get all of the Apple stuff for less.

It sounds, there's three plans. There's an individual one, which is a lie. But it's $15 a month. It's not a digital plan. So the individual plan gets you an individual Apple Music, an ICloud storage for 50 gigabytes, which are individual. But it also gets you Apple TV Plus and Apple Arcade, which go to everyone in your family group. So it is technically individual, but half of this stuff is a family plan. Oh, it's, it's, it's Apple Music and plus some stuff.

That's the individual plan is Apple Music for you plus some stuff. So it's Apple Music for you and ICloud for you, uh, plus some stuff for $4 more than those would cost on your own. The theme here is that you want ICloud and Apple Music. Like this is what the numbers, Apple doesn't give great numbers on this, but like the numbers that exist, there's like 160 plus million paid ICloud subscribers. There's like 68 million Apple Music subscribers. And then there's like 10 million Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus. And a lot of the Apple TV plus people are on their year-long free thing. I want to come back to this you want thing,

but let's get through the rest of the plans. Okay. So like numerically, there are people who are playing for Apple Music and there are people paying for ICloud. And Apple would like those people to also be paying for TV Plus and arcade. So the goal is to upsell you. The family one is the same thing. It's the family shareable iCloud, which is 200 gigabytes, and family Apple Music. So it's, again, it's 15 for the Apple Music, three for that. And then there's a $2 price difference. And if you pay the extra $2, you get Arcade and TV Plus.

So you're paying $4 on the individual plan for the TV Plus and arcade, $2 on the main plan for TV Plus and arcade. And then if you had the terabyte one, assuming you are already paying for Apple Music family and the terabyte, You're paying $5 or more, $5 more, but that gets you TV Plus, arcade, fitness, and news plus. And there's a, the one concession I will give them to having multiple plans is fitness is only in English, and they don't have licenses for News Plus around the world. So they can't offer those plans globally. So they needed some initial set up, which, fine. But as you just walk up those tiers, it really feels like the next one is like Apple one premier, unlimited,

5G. Like, it's that level of complication. Yeah. Honestly reminds me of cell carrier plants. I mean, I've been getting, like, tweets from people all day of, like, you know, I would really have liked to get, you know, just ICloud 1 terabyte and fitness for, like, $15 a month. But Apple will let me, like. You can do that for $20 a month, right?

Because you can't, you, in my, like, what I would like is to be able to mix and math. I mean, this is more complicated and we're already complaining that it's complicated. So hypocrite. but like you said what you want is Apple Music and ICloud. I don't want Apple Music. I want Spotify. And so Spotify, Spotify said a very strange statement. They're very angry about this bundle.

Let me read this statement. It's so good. Let me just finish the thought. But what I do want is more I cloud. Not so much that I want it, but that I have to do it because it's the only way to like reliably backup my iPhone and I just need more than 200. So like I back into, well, I'm going to be buying two terabytes of I cloud anyway. So that's 10 bucks a month.

Well, okay. Well, what else in that package do I want? Well, I don't know, maybe something, something. But like, the calculation of figuring out which of Apple services you actually want and then building your own bundle versus just buying theirs, you spend like 15 minutes going, okay, if I did this, well, maybe I want that, I don't know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then like, and then you're paying them $360 a year for the Premier 5G Max Plus plan because it's just like easier to think, do it.

And that is the number that you should do. You should do the times 12 number for all of these plans. It's like it's a better way for your human brain, which is dumb and stupid, to think about the value you're getting for your money. It's $360, which is the cost of an iPad. Okay, let's hear Spotify's ridiculous statement. I'm going to read it, but I would encourage the listener as you listen to it. Identify the thing they're mad about that like specifically Spotify is mad about. Okay.

From Spotify spokesperson. Once again, Apple is using its dominant position and unfair practices to disadvantage competitors and deprive consumers by favoring its own services. We call on competition authorities to act urgently to restrict Apple's anti-competitive behavior, which, if left unchecked, will cause irreparable harm to the developer community and threaten our collective freedoms to listen, learn, create, and connect. I read this. I was like, that is storming. They're very mad about these confusingly named bundles. Yeah. Does Spotify know that it's like the market leader?

There are more people who use Spotify than Apple music. We did a little reporting and Apple responded. I think I understand what they're angry about. I think the statement just doesn't say it out loud, which is a mistake. What they're saying is what do you have? you have iCloud you need iCloud data yep apple's going to market you iCloud data maybe you want tv you got all those other stuff this fitness thing looks hot they're obviously going to sell a lot of it they're going to sell you apple music and once you're bundled in once you get that and that's

part of your bundle maybe you'll cancel Spotify yep no i mean that's that's exactly where literally where that's where i am i was like i'm going to say screw it and get the premier super plan and then once i'm paying for the premier super plan maybe i should cancel Spotify because i'm getting Apple Music is part of the Premier Superplan that I just like backed into because I didn't want to think about it. And that is why Spotify is buying every podcast in the world. Straight up. That's what they're doing.

That's what they're creating exclusives the way that the TV streaming services have exclusives. They're just doing it up front with gigantic checks, which is like a way to do it. So, I mean, I don't, it's crazy for me on this show to be like, I don't see the problem here, but I just thought this statement was very funny because the bundles have to be successful before they're harmful. And just because Apple is big and they're excited about something. does not mean it will be successful. I would point you to several of the services in the bundle

is evidence of this fact. Neil, are you implying that Apple TV Plus is not? April will get Oprah and Jennifer Aniston, like, whatever. And they will be like, look at these elephants. And like their services nowhere. Ted Lasso is a good show. Ted Lasso is actually surprisingly good. Wait for the season to finish and then pay for a month of Apple TV Plus

and binge Ted Lassoe that'd cancel it. That is my advice to you. No, pay $360 a year and play one arcade game and be like, I don't know what I'm doing it. Yeah, I understand where they're doing it. I wish that what they had done, and I, you know, I think this would have increased the complexity of this even further, but once you decide to be complicated, just be all the way complicated.

They should have done it with the phone. They already have the iPhone upgrade plan. They already have a credit card. Just say, you're going to buy a new phone and you're going to pay us, what is it? $300 a year and it's $1,000 a month for a phone, you're going to pay us $200 a month, right? And you're going to get the best phone we make in all of our services. And every two years we'll give you a new phone.

And, like, that would have been compelling. It would have actually been more costly. Yeah. But it would have made sense. And I think just that it makes sense. And it feels like you're getting a lot for that payment because you're getting a phone out of it would have carried the day. I just think their carriers would have hated them actually executing that worldwide.

have been impossible, and they have 45 upcoming phone skews. Yeah. And like how on earth do you manage it? But man, that would have been way more compelling than what you really want is some more than our stingy five gigs of iCloud storage. It's manageable. Like, they already do most of this. Like, if you buy an iPhone in the iPhone upgrade program, it is the cost of the phone divided by 24, plus the cost of Apple care for that phone divided by 24. And that's your monthly payment. And that changes from phone to phone and it's tied to your iCloud account like they're close they could easily throw this in and knock off like a dollar on each of these things and it would be you know gangbusters yeah there were definitely some some like there was trump thrown in the water at us i would say that

this is their first cut at it and more stuff might happen but i can't imagine recommending because they're going to push it i just can't imagine when i get the question should i sign up for apple one that'd be like yes the same when people are like should i sign up for google one? I'm like, what is it? Yeah. Like, I have Google One. It's storage. It's not even YouTube, which is like the best money you can spend is turning ads off on YouTube.

Anyhow, that is the bulk of it. Let's take a break. There's still a lot more to talk about. A lot happened this week. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in.

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com. That's cloud.a.ai slash vergecast. and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Okay. Hi. The other thing I really want to talk to you on the sort of the chip side, but then we've got to talk PS5 Oculus Quest to you. A lot happened this week. But on the chip side, there was the A14. Right next to the A14, Nvidia announced its deal to buy Arm for $40 billion.

Do you see those things connecting? So not really is the honest answer. Arm still has, like, this isn't going to drastically change any of like Arm's business with Apple or Qualcomm or any of those companies, at least not in, you know, the immediate term, like these companies have long-term contracts with Arm already. A new boss isn't going to change it just like SoftBank owning it didn't really change it. I do think that this is, you know, this could potentially set up some interesting things for Nvidia stuff down the road. InVIDIA is an armed customer. Like, Nvidia makes tegra chips.

There's one in like your Nintendo Switch. there's one in your Nvidia Shield set top box that people really, really love. Don't say anything being about it. I might buy one soon because YouTube is such hot garbage

on the Apple TV because the DP9 Kodak isn't working. I've been sending Nilai pictures of what YouTube looks like on my TV. If you want to see some photos of chunky black compression artifacts, Dieter's got you covered.

Okay. Anyway, sorry. So I agree with you. So Apple's fine. because I think they don't license the instruction set or something, but not the actual design. The question is, like, long-term, will NVIDIA mess with arms, like, neutrality? Long-term, will NVIDIA be able to hold itself back from trying to take another run at Qualcomm on cell phone chips? Do you really think that, like, in five years, that there's not going to be some tomfoolery, some skullduggery, some shenanigans?

There could be. I don't know if Nvidia has the motive. Invidia also, at least for now, is really pushing this at areas of like, you know, AI and data center stuff and energy efficiency. What I do think is you're going to eventually start to see, you know, the cortex

GPU that you get in your, that, you know, Qualcomm, you know, licenses is going to be, you know, an RTX. They're going to slap some good Qualcomm, some good Nvidia branding on there. Yeah. There could be stuff down the road where, you know, Nvidia, you know, starts to trickle back their GPU stuff to work with arm-based chips.

I think we're still very, very far from any of that being the case. Arm has existed for years and has been doing this for years. I don't think a new owner is necessarily going to mean, you know, suddenly your next Nintendo Switch is going to have, you know, a giant RTX 3080 strapped onto it built into. That would be incredible. I think the RTX 3080 is bigger than the switch, actually. I think it's a physical. bigger than the switch. I don't think it's that. I will say whenever I hear the new owner isn't

going to do it. I'm like, oh, they're going to mess with it. SoftBank didn't know what to do with it. SoftBank was just collecting companies, which turned out to be a disastrous idea. SoftBank arguably didn't do anything with it because I don't think they made any money on this. Yeah. I mean, they were a different kind of owner. InVitia bought this stuff for a reason. I think know what to do with it. Yeah. And I like, who are the players that are affected by it? It's Apple, which has one kind of license. And they don't really, you know, they design their own chips from scratch. But they need the instruction set.

So that's one set of challenges, interactions. Apple and Nvidia don't get along as companies. That's a lot to think about. Samsung makes chips. Yep. Samsung, Huawei, like every, basically every mobile chip. Qualcomm. Yeah.

Qualcomm. Is Qualcomm have a history of, I don't know, lawsuits? Do you think that could be interesting? Qualcomm's like, we don't all the IP. Like, give it to. Like, there's a lot. here that I think Nvidia because it is a motivated owner

Maybe they went monkey with it Immediately but they are motivated to do things with the asset Yeah in a way that soft bank was motivated to just collect Collect profit and I think that's like a very different We'll see how it goes let's skip all the chip news. Let's talk about PS5 We know what the next gen of consoles is like it's like bottom of the show Yeah, it's a huge news also huge physically huge yeah It's so big.

Hi, I'm walking. Walk us to these price points. Okay. PS5 Digital Edition is 400. PS5 is 500. 500. Most expensive PC is the most Xbox Series X. The Xbox Series S is still $100 cheaper than the PS5 digital edition, but not as powerful.

But the PS5 is not as powerful in turn as the Xbox Series X, at least in some things. It has a faster SSD, which will be. maybe impact some Sony exclusive games. At the end of the day, though, like, you know, EA and Ubisoft and everyone still have to make a game that runs on all three of these different boxes at this point. So, like, it might look slightly nicer on one or on the other. But, like, I don't think we're going to see too big of drastic differences between these three, at least from third party stuff.

And then, like, you know, God of War is where, you know, Sony can flex or, like, Ratchet and Clank, which they've already been showing off. It's like, look how fast we can switch between levels. What I like about this pricing the most is that it absolutely implies that a Blu-ray drive in 2020 costs $100. Part of it is the Blu-ray drive is expensive, but also part of this, and Sam Bifert wrote a really great piece on this, is Sony doesn't really need to charge you more. When Sony's charging you more for the Blu-ray drive, it's charging you that $100 up front because it's going to lose money on games on you. Because I can buy your used copy of God of War when you're done with it. I can go to GameStop and get a used copy.

And Sony doesn't get a cut of that. If I buy a PS5 digital edition, every dollar of every game that I spend is going to go through Sony. So what do they care if they lose $100 up front? They're making pure profit on me for the entire life of the machine in the way that they're not necessarily going to do on the disc one. Yeah. I think that's super.

I mean, this was the fight about this last generation of Xboxes, right? And they, Microsoft had to walk it all back. But we're also on the cusp of, massive game streaming services becoming mainstream, particularly with XCloud. Stadia exists. Continues to exist. But like,

that is the future. Everyone sees that future. And it's interesting that the, the disc one here is like, we're still having this conversation, which I love. Like, I love that people are still like,

I'd rather buy you use disk than completely give in to digital transactions. But at the same time, there's no way any of these, the next generation of this has a distrive. And that's like the, weird line in the sand that's being drawn. Like the most expensive Xbox is like the Uber most powerful thing is like a doubling down on you must have this giant ultra powerful, you know, GPU, CPU.

It has to run all the things. It has to have a disk drive. The Xbox Series X is interesting because it's in many ways like the antithesis of what Microsoft says is the future of games. Like the Xbox series X is like, you're going to buy a copy of Halo on a disc and you're going to put it in this Xbox. And it's going to run in your living room and it's got big fans. And that's kind of been Sony's approach for the whole time. Like, Sony's been like, this worked super well for us on the PlayStation 4. You're going to buy God of War and you're going to buy Ratchet and Clank.

And you're going to buy Horizon. Go to the West. Go West Young Horizon. Wow. Like, Sony has always been there. And like the PS5 just being a big, more powerful PS4 kind of makes sense. Microsoft is like, game streaming is the future. but also buy this Xbox.

Well, but they also have the, you know, the plan where you can like pay an installments and it actually ends up being a little bit cheaper, which is really fascinating. Yeah. To me, like Sony's like, but you still have to have, you still have the box.

Right. You still have the box. Can I just point out that Microsoft's installments are about as much as Apple One premiere? Yeah. But you can get a whole ass Xbox and X cloud in GamePass Ultimate 5G or whatever the fuck is called. Or you can,

get Apple Music and Apple Those Apple arcade games, though. I mean, I think Halo Infinite and that one Game of Thrones game they released. There are some good. There aren't some good games. Come on. You're right that Sony is like, well, last time we just made a really powerful

console and got the best game exclusives and that worked really well. So we're just going to do that again. Xbox and Microsoft's like, we're going to bet on the future again. And last time they did it with Connect. and I are Blasters. And this time, they're just, they're doing it with, like, game streaming and, you know,

the, like, the subscription plan, right? And I think that the difference from the last gen to this gen is we have more faith in Microsoft's bet because, like, it seems like a better bet than we're going to become the, like, console that runs your TV. Yeah, but they're, but they're, it's like Microsoft is betting on that. But then they're also, like, just to cover our bases, here's the console that runs your TV. Like, here's two of them.

Here's one that's so cheap that you can't not pass it up. Yeah, but they're not saying this is your cable box, right? Right, they're not. But I don't think Sony's saying that either. No, but Microsoft did say it last time with the original Xbox One. They like made it look like a VCR. Well, neither of them looks like a VCR now. The PS5 absolutely does not look like a VCR.

I will say that just from a pure design point of view, I'm like, I should get a Series X. Yeah. That's the thing I want. Like, obviously that's a thing I want. The Series X looks very cool and Sony's looks like a mutated space blob. I respect the space blob, but. We did that when they announced it, we did the whole post with what people thought it looked like.

You know, it was very funny. You should read it. But my favorite one was like, this looks like the performing arts center for an overfunded Midwestern college. Like, that is 100% what it looks like. Yeah. Well, I'm very excited about it. It's coming. This fall, hardware review season, right?

5G iPhones, two new consoles, whatever. There's a bunch of Google stuff coming. Yeah, the Google announced that they're doing the Nest speaker, the Chromecast, and pixels, two pixels. So we got some stuff. All right. Let's wrap it up. There's an Oculus Connect event. There's an Oculus Quest 2 out.

Adi reviewed it for us. Hyam, what did you think? This is also just interesting. Like, Facebook consolidated its whole lineup. Like there's no Quest S and Quest and Quest and Rift. Like you just, you buy the Oculus. This is the thing. It works on its own.

If you want to plug it into your, your gaming laptop and have it be better, you can. But it's one thing, which I think is like a big leap forward for it and just like simplifying this. Also, it costs like, you know, $300, which means that like this is a console. Like you can buy this and use this as a console. It has, you know, the controllers and the stuff. it has, you know, internal storage. Like, it comes in 64 gigabyte and 250 gigabyte, like, skews. And if you're just, you know, trying to, if you're trying to say that, you know, VR is here and VR is having its moment, like, having one consolidated thing that you can just be like, that's the thing you need is, I think, like a big step.

I think this is the one that gets me to actually buy one. Every previous one, I'm like, I don't know. It's like, am I really, this is more like, this product feels refined. It feels extensible. It feels like it has a shelf life. Yep. And then, you know, the faster refresh rate is great. You know, high resolution is great.

Like they made good improvements. It's apparently more comfortable. Like all the things that it needed, it got. Yeah. Okay. The last thing I want to say, Casey interviewed Zuckerberg on VR and AR. You should read it. It's a compelling interview.

Every time I read Zuckerberg talk about AR. And Zuckerberg had this quote. He's like, HEDs are not the future. I don't want to put an Apple watch on your face, which is a good line. Also, have you noticed Zuck feels way more just free to dunk on Apple lately. Like Facebook executives, Instagram, Adam Aseri dunked on Apple for advertising stuff the other day.

That war is heating up. Like, it's there. But anyway, so it's actually, I don't want to put it app watching your face. Every time I read about VR and AR, and we've heard a lot about Apple's efforts in VR and AR, particularly AR, when it's Mark Zuckerberg, the first thing I think about is, who will be the content moderator for AR, right?

When you're literally augmenting reality, who gets to decide what information is displayed on top of reality as reality, and I am desperate for someone to start asking a question. It should probably be us because I'm in charge of a technology newsroom. But you understand what I'm saying is that we can ask the questions on the virtual ask, but I think it's time for this moment of development. It's, I think it is better to ask those questions early before the products are released. And the first nut job walks in front of a courthouse and sees like,

this is where the deep state is and does something stupid. Because you can see that coming from a mile away. And I don't think it's been contented with it. That's it. That's my little AR speech. Yeah. And you're already getting that with the Facebook stuff, right? Like the big downside, and we should have mentioned this earlier, the big downside of the Quest is like Facebook's like, this is our first one that you're going to have to have a Facebook login. You can't use their separate Oculus login. They did all the right things he needs

to do on hardware and price and specs, but like there's this like looming specter of Facebook. And at a certain point, it becomes, you know, how much do you trust Facebook with your login? and how much do you trust Facebook with your data? And there's going to be a bunch of people who are going to be like, who cares? We have a Facebook account. Don't care. And there's going to be a lot of people who, you know, rightfully so,

are going to be like, I don't necessarily want to be, you know, feeding the inputs of my eyes to Mark Zuckerberg's, you know, server farm. And that's a legitimate concern. I don't know how Facebook reconciles with this other than being like where a hardware company deal with it. Like people do not, you know, you want to use, you know, Apple fitness. you're going to need an Apple account. And Nicole and everyone had kind of discussed, you know, who gets this data and who gets to use it.

It's just Facebook in particular has such a bad rep here in a way that, you know, Apple and even Google doesn't. That putting this requirement on making it a mandatory thing, just it doesn't feel great. Yeah. It's funny because they had already owned Oculus, but like actually making it formally your Facebook account really set off a lot of people. I think what's instructive here is the portal, right? Like, we had all but written off the portal, and then the pandemic hit, and the portal actually got not very popular, but more popular. And you saw tech journalists who were very skeptical of Facebook say, oh, this is actually a good product right now. Yeah, but the portal is a great example because, like, two months ago, during all the pandemic stuff, Facebook released an update for the portal that lets you use it with, like, a standalone Facebook workplace account for, like, the Facebook Slack.

That's not tied to your personal Facebook account. It's the opposite. And like, that's what this, that's what people want for this and don't have. Yeah. The portal also works with Zoom. They're making that more of a general purpose, kind of space computer. I don't know what you would. I say space computer.

The reason I said space was I was thinking of space heaters because it looks like a space. Like, it's a, it's a physically, anyway, it's a space heater at the end. All right, that was a lot of stuff. We did briefly mention the Google stuff, September 30th, Pixel 5 and you Chromecast and a smart speaker so that's coming i'll end by just gesturing broadly at the disaster that is tictock which also just had an entire news cycle this week of ups and downs i can't even there's no way to even condense it because just today the deal might get blown up again but microsoft pulled out of the deal to buy ticot oracle was going to step in as a trusted technology partner that just appears to have gone to

hell already so we still don't know what's going on in ticot and the deadline hasn't been extended we're just going to keep tracking it if we had to recorded this a day ago, I would have been like, here's what's happening with TikTok. But like, one more day has gone on. Because like, as we record this right now, like, Walmart was like, maybe we'll join in. And like the people are waiting on Trump, but it's a mess. I love the idea of Walmart buying TikTok. I love it so much. They did just fine with voodoo. Actually, there's one little piece of breaking TikTok news. TikTok has approached Kevin Sistram, former founder and CEO of Instagram to run TikTok. Oh, like that's because he was mad at it. It's okay.

Yeah, that's pretty good. All right, we have gone long, as always. I don't know why I say we've gone the normal. We've done it again. Thank you to Heim. Thank you, Nicole. You can tweet at us. Heim is C Gartenberg.

Nicole is at Nicole Wetzman. Dieter's back on. I'm at Reckless. We're running a survey right now, boxmedia.com slash pod survey. We love your feedback. It helps us make decisions. Please go take the survey.

We will not send your eye data to Mark Zuckerberg's server farm. Or will we? We won't. Deater's got a newsletter at the word.com slash newsletter called processor. I've got a new podcast coming out in October called Decoder. Very excited about that. Love your few that tweeted me about that.

Dieter, you've got a show on Tuesday? What's happening here? Oh, so Neli is off developing his brand new show, Decoder. But we still ought to break you Tuesday episodes. And so for the next few weeks, I'm going to try some stuff on the Tuesday episodes. It's going to see what happens. It's going to be exciting. The next week, we're going to do a really big deep dive on the

surface duo and the Galaxy Z Fold 2. A little review Redux. I like it. All right. That's it. Thank you to everybody. Thank you for listening. We're out. Rock and roll. You know what you should do? What's that? You should wear a mask.