The Vergecast - Apple’s AI moment is coming

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss what they expect to see next week at Apple's WWDC, or "dub dub" as it's more affectionately known. But first, we take you through all the gadgets previewed at Computex. Further reading: This is Lunar Lake — Intel’s utterly overhauled AI laptop chip that ditches memory sticks Humane is reportedly trying to sell itself to HP for $1 billion Humane, the startup behind the AI Pin, in talks with HP, telecoms to sell  Humane warns AI Pin owners to ‘immediately’ stop using its charging case Even the Raspberry Pi is getting in on AI  Apple put a Thread smart home radio into its newest Macs and iPads Apple just corrected the M2 iPad Air’s core count  Samsung leak reveals a cheaper Galaxy Watch Meta is fixing three of the biggest Quest 3 annoyances with v66 update  Nothing’s Phone 3 will be all about AI apps  The Asus ROG Ally X is official — and I took a peek inside Palmer Luckey is now selling pixel-perfect ultrabright magnesium Game Boys for $199 iOS 18 (and AI) will give Siri much more control over your apps Apple’s non-AI WWDC plans include Settings and Control Center revamps Apple might bring AI transcription to Voice Memos and Notes Apple’s WWDC may include AI-generated emoji and an OpenAI partnership Apple’s WWDC 2024 is set for June 10th Think inside the box Max raises prices across its ad-free plans We tested Aptoide, the first free iPhone app store alternative Google acquires Cameyo to integrate Windows app virtualization into ChromeOS Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the first cast, the flagship podcast of defense contractors selling Game Boys. There you go.

It's a weird time we live in. That's a real thing that I said. Yeah, Northman. Northman. It's doing it. I've been meeting for years to like keep track of on a scale of one to ten, how plausibly we could be the flagship podcast of whatever thing we are the flagship podcast of. 10 out of 10 out of 10 today.

Easy 10 out of 10. We have no competition on this particular front right now. And I'm very excited about it. The other one I was going to say is the flagship podcast of multiple device management solutions. See, there I think we have some competition. There's definitely other MDN podcasts in the world. And if you're out there, please keep doing what you're doing because we are not going to. Serve your market, you know, by all means.

Let's talk about lots of things. not connected into any coherent hole, which I think is choice for us. That's where we shine. Next week is WWDC. We got to do a preview of what we think Apple is going to do. And then another disconnected set of news to talk about. Yeah. I'm your friend, Eli.

Alex Cranes is here. I'm your friend who's just excited. Yeah. Just thrilled to learn more about defense contractors who also moonlight as game designers. This is a real thing, and I promise you're going to talk. If you can already guess what it is, God bless you. because you are spending too much time on the internet, which means you are people.

David Pierce is here. Hi. How's it going, buddy? It's good to be here. Are you excited to manage multiple devices in an enterprise environment? Listen, I did choose one of the stories in here that is about Windows app virtualization,

and I am surprisingly excited to talk about it. So I'm going to say I'm a hard yes on that front today. All right, so we're opening with a lightning round, the gadget lightning round. I have proposed that we do it a little differently, than normal. Usually when we have a lightning round we have a bunch of stuff

and then we all pick one. Rest assured, that's how we're doing the third lightning round. I got my name next to my little thing and everything. I feel like that is not how lightning rounds work. Like we have just made up

an alternative to lightning rounds. Really what we're supposed to do is look at all the headlines and go through them as fast as we can. And I suggest we do this and then David poo pooed me. It's not so much that.

It's just that. You have many skills in life. And one of them is not doing several things in a row quickly. And so we have, I would say, I don't know, probably 10 headlines here. This is going to take us four and a half hours. And everybody should just buckle up for this. People love buckling up. I'm not mad at it.

I just, you claim to have a train to catch. That's true. I do. I'm supposed to leave today. I'm just saying, I'm going to quote our transportation editor, Andy Hawkins, who every time he puts the phrase buckle up in a headline, the story goes viral. And then he says, people love buckling up. So buckle up.

Buckle up. That's what I got for you. It's lightning round time. All right, we're going to go through these as fast as we can. Okay. Like speed run them? Yeah, it's CompuTech's week this week. Intel showed up after NVIDIA announced all of its new chips and announced something

called Lunar Lake. And the thing that I understand it from this, Kranz, is that they're trying real hard, but they've also gotten rid of, of, gradable memory. Yeah. So they're typical way of building chips wasn't working for them. So they've gone a whole new route and this is Lunar Lake. It is just for mobile devices.

It's not going to be in big desktops and stuff like that. Wait, wait, laptop mobile devices or phone mobile devices? Laptop. Okay. Laptops. Because Intel being like, we're doing phones again is like that's a straight line down. Yeah, straight line down. Like I would say maybe 80, 90% of what is in this chip, like the little chips within

the chip, not made by Intel. Like, it's based on like a TSM node. So they just fully were like, yeah, we can't do it. You do it. So there's all of that. Then they've just changed it all up. And one of their big things is like, we needed to be faster. So we're going to put the RAM on the chip, which will make it faster.

Yeah. The famously Apple's move? Yeah. People like to upgrade the RAM on their devices. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah, the PC market less compliant than I think Mac users. Yeah, so we'll see how it goes. They're claiming 48 tops for their AI chip, the MPU specifically, 48 tops.

Trillion operations per second. Yes, trillion operations per second. And this only matters because everybody has decided that this is the way we're going to calculate how good things are at processing AI workloads. Has anyone figured out what to do with AI on these computers? you can take a thing in a photo and move it over here yeah i think that's about as far as we've gotten and now you can do it very fast and some of them have like a little chat bot powered by chat gpt and you can be like hey it'll be like hey that runs in the cloud that's not even that's all that's not even anything that's fine but that's like over there it could one day it could run on a

laptop powered by lunar lake when oregon trail tries to bang you that's happening in adjurer I'm just putting, I'm just saying. Yeah, there's no like local banging happening. Intel, we got a new marketing message for you. We helped. This computer will try to get it on with you. No internet required. Local dimming is out.

Local banging is in. I'm just like, so far, the biggest consumer success of the AI industry has been the fact that it's a little bit horny. Fine. Yep. Okay. Do we think lunar, based on what we saw from Qualcomm in Windows, and then Nvidia, Nvidia was not a Computextor event was just before they announced like 500 new chips, like a whole roadmap and they said, we're doing this every year. It was very aggressive. Jensen Wong looked very proud of himself. Is this competitive from Intel or no?

This is different. So this is not like, Nvidia and Intel don't compete in this space. No, I meant with Qualcomm. Like, we're seeing this thing happen. With Qualcomm, definitely. Like, Microsoft wants to say these new Qualcomm Windows laptops are faster than the MacBook error. They're better than the MacBook error. They've got AI built into them. And then our data centers full of Nvidia chips are rocketing into the future.

And none of that has intel in it. Yeah. This is definitely their attempt to, like, catch up with everybody else. because I think they just got bodied by Apple for a long time in this space, in this laptop CPU space. And so they've just changed their whole strategy. It's all about power efficiency first, soldering the RAM directly onto the chip, so it'll go even faster. Everything is about how can we get every single piece of power out of this thing while also keeping it as energy efficient as possible. And their claims are really big, right?

They're saying like 50% better GPU performance. They're saying 60% better battery life, which is huge, if true. Yeah. But it's also if true. We still have to see these chips. We still have to see them in a laptop. We still have to test them. There's a lot more to come.

Intel always likes to make huge claims. And then it's like, okay, but what is reality? Yeah. Intel has even less credibility for making some of these claims right now than Qualcomm does, which is tough because. We're still in the, you know, let's see if it's real phase for what Qualcomm just launched. And Microsoft also at that event was like, we have stuff coming from AMD and Intel too. This copilot plus PC thing is going to be real.

Everything's going to be great. I found myself reading about all of this from Intel going like, yeah, okay, sure. And I hope it's great. Like I really do. And I think Intel is right to do it this way. And I think the overlap of people for whom this chip would be useful and people who upgrade their RAM is like, zero, so I think that's actually fine, but I just, I think Intel is lying until proven truthful in a pretty real way about some of its chips right now. Yeah, I also want to know

what I can do with 40 tops that I can't do with 25, or two. Right? Like, what is it? Is it something? Because we seem to be in a spec war over nothing. And I love a spec work. Don't get me wrong. You want to take me from 12 to 14 megapixels. I will talk to you all day about that. You want to go from H.DMI 2.1 to 2.1A. We'll give you an hour. That's what we do here. I just, what

is it? Like, I don't need generative fill in Photoshop to go that much faster. And on my computer anyway, that's CPU bound. It's not even GPU bound. So, like, what is the thing? And I don't think there's

a great, broad consumer answer to that question. Yeah, I would say 100% you're correct. I think most of the answers are for like engineers and stuff like that. They'll probably see some advantage from this. By the way, not generally Phil. AID noise and lightroom. That's the one on my computer anyway. That's a CPU bound. Surprisingly good too. That works like remarkably well every time I use it. Every time I do it, I realize I'm committing like here or see against what is a photo. The Pope should come to my house and bless me. But it's only like gentle, Harris. You know what I mean?

Yeah. It's a little harded heresy. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. I have, we should keep going. We're already. We're going to get right down. All right.

Who knows? Question mark. Number two. Humane is trying to sell stuff to HP for a billion dollars. This is perfect. David, the reporting from CNBC says there's also at least one telecom company in the mix. Yeah. So one of the things that Humane needed really early on was,

Telecom support and it has been working with different telecoms around the world. I think it made a deal in Japan fairly recently to launch the device over there. Like getting the AI pin on these networks is crucial to it working. So in a certain way, like if you're Verizon, you're like, oh, all we do is sell other people's stuff. We are desperate to be more than a dumb pipe. Like you can see how you have that meeting, right? And I think I would not- This is how Verizon ended up buying blue jeans.

That's what I mean. And like they will keep- We will keep buying startups until morale-impeer. proves, you know what they do. So I would not be, I would not be shocked by that at all. The HP one seems very strange to me. HP just can't do this and seems to have finally understood that being cool is not HP's thing and that's fine. And yet here we are. Yeah. You know what? You never like, as you get older, you always have those moments where you're like, yeah, I can pull that off. Right? Like, no, HP already had that moment. I want to be very clear.

We all have that moment. I thought I could pull off a leather hat. I couldn't do that. When did you think you could pull off a leather hat? It was like three days ago. Last week. Tuesday. Last week.

I thought I could pull off skinny jeans. Like you always have these moments. So I just want to point out in this comparison very directly. Yeah. I'm comparing buying humane to buying skinny jeans. And that's great. I'm running with you. I'm just saying HP went through with skinny jeans phase.

when it bought Palm and had an entire event that I went to in San Francisco. On the water, it was beautiful. No, this is like... Where they were like, here's the HP Touchpad, our WebOS tablet

that will compete with the iPod. Jimmy Iveen was there and he got on stage and was apparently so blown away with the level of innovation on display that he just went off script for like 10 minutes. Yeah.

Paul Jacobs, who's the CEO of Qualcomm, spoke right before. This is a real... I want you to go watch this video. I remember. He was like, Dr. Paul Jacobs was incredible. I was supposed to say something about music, but, you know, what's beats?

We don't make chips? Like, it was nuts. Nuts. And then they canceled the touchpad. No one has one except for Dieter. And I don't think he's allowed to admit it anymore because he works at Google now. I would say that this is like... Those were the skinny jeans.

Yeah, that's skinny jeans. This is like when you hit like your 60s and you get the motorcycle and you're like, I'm going to be a guy that does motorcycling on the weekends. They're going to be a company that does. humane. This is the midlife crisis. This isn't the cool kids phase. This is the midlife crisis. No, that's the skinny jeans was the midlife crisis.

This is your in retirement. It depends on when you think you're, the 60s are. Fair. I would say it's midlife, you know, that I mean my 40s. This is, you're saying this is the Harley with a windshield. Yeah. That's humane. Yeah.

In this context for H.P. I understand. Totally nailed it. Understood. Harley with a windshield. I grew up in Wisconsin. There were a lot of Harleys with a windshield. It's like, look at that lawyer ago.

He bought that Harley last week. If you're a Harley person, you have a windshield. I want, it's America, you know, live your life. You go real fast. I'm a sportser person. Okay. They also, Humane, the gift that keeps on giving, recalled their battery cases this week.

It's a really tough week for Humane. And it's actually Humane has entered that rare phase where everyone has gone from making fun of them to feeling bad for them. And it's a tough time at Humane. But yeah, they had what sounds like, like one incident with a charging case, which is a little like egg-shaped thing

that they ship with the AI pin because the battery life is awful. And because of that one incident, they are getting rid of that supplier and giving all of the AI pin owners two extra months of service. What they're not saying is whether they're going to replace anybody's charging case,

how they're doing better with the charging case. Like it just seems like this company is scrambling in a really bad way and I think correctly realized like, oh, something bad happened, it could happen again. We have to stop it from happening and did that before it made any other plan because I don't think there is another plan because I think they're just trying to sell as fast as they can and get out. It's just bad times all around. There's a very long Times article about the inside of Humane during this period.

And there's a lot of people saying, this isn't as good as we think. Should we launch it now? And apparently being shut down. Slash fired. Slash fired. Yeah, fired. of either of the founders of humane working for Verizon. Very funny.

Very funny. Or AT&T. And I will say just, I know we have to move on because it's lightning around. I will say once again, a workable antitrust policy for the United States is to prevent AT&T from buying anything. But if you give a humane, it's like an anti-monopoly because it will just drag it down into the muck. It's fine. That would work. You could, Joe, if you're listening, Donald.

You know, you're in the mix. Let's see what happens. Yeah, let's get after. You didn't want them to buy Time Warner, and you were right, my friend. Do you think Donald Trump has ever watched the 4-3 Snyder cut and Grace? He's going on. Wait, before we do move on, I'm just curious. The number in the Times story was that Humane has sold 10,000 AI pins.

They were hoping to sell 100, but they have 10. And my question for the two of you is that more or less than you would have guessed? More? More. Same, actually. What I wonder is how many of those were pre-orders and how many of those came after the reviews and after the thing shipped. And I would be shocked if a thousand people have bought that thing since it shipped. Wasn't 10,000 the number of rabbits too?

No, they sold like 100,000 rabbits. Oh, because they were cheap. Yeah. I think you said on the show when we heard the rabbit number the first time, like you could probably sell that number of $300 anything. Yeah, I really believe that. It's orange. Speaking of extremely odd AI news, someone just explained this to me.

Raspberry Pi is getting AI features? Yeah, they're getting, I believe, they're going to have a little, like, add-on accelerator that's going to give you 13 tops. Again, someone tell me what to do with one top. Wait, no, but Nelai, the thing that's great about this is now every other chipmaker on Earth is going to have to convince you that they can do more

than your Raspberry Pi. This is perfect. Raspberry pie is the thing is $70. And this is the bar now. In order for me to buy your thing, you have to be more compelling than a raspberry pie, which I love. I love this because if anyone can figure out why tops matter,

it's people using like raspberry pies for stuff. All that's going to happen is a bunch of people are going to hook a raspberry pie up to their video doorbells. Yeah. It's like unhinged LLM horny responses from video doorbells will happen. Or what if like pie hole? gets better? What if, like, Pie Hole can do something with AI? With AI. I don't know what. I'm just saying... What if the routing on your network was a

little bit less reliable than it was today? Yeah, it's just going to start making stuff up. It's going to be like, eat the cheese, Alex. It's got glue in it. Like at the network level, it's telling lies. I'm into it. It does feel like the $70 for Raspberry Pi is expensive. That's not where they started. Yeah. And so it feels like this push is just, it's making everything more expensive. I'm just begging for one, what's it, 18 tops? 13. 13. Just tell me what 13 tops are for. If you want to max out in a Raspberry Pi compute environment, 13 tops. I mean, I do know what 13 tops are for, but it's a different time of tops. The trading cards are actual spinning tops. We'll keep going. All right, moving on. Liam's going to love that.

is maybe a perfect verge scoop. I'm very happy, Jen, too, we got this scoop. Yes. When I think of reasons the verge exists, we found a secret thread radio in every Mac. It's right at the top of the list. Like, we had to manufacture the reasons people care about this. But Jen noticed in a bunch of FCC documents that there are, in fact, thread radios in a bunch of Macs and iPads. This follows on Apple announcing a thread radio in the iPhone 15 in 15 Pro, which they've never done anything with as far as we can tell. Yeah. Or even explained why it would be there. Well, what they said about the iPhone was this is for future home app integrations. Right.

Cool. Sure. This sort of like makes sense like in the world of chip design at Apple scale. Maybe you just bought a bunch of Wi-Fi chips and they have thread radios and might as well have them. but they've said nothing. They tested them, which means they can be used. They're not just dark on the chip die. But why?

Apple said nothing to Jen. Jen ran around and asked everybody what it's for. There's a bunch of reasons. You could have faster setup. You could have a low power thread network in your house. That'd be cool. That'd be neat. And have the devices serve as border routers between Wi-Fi and thread.

Although you want that usually to be stationary. Like having your thread border router leave your heart. home with your laptop or your iPad not great or your iPhone um there's a bunch of other little like ideas people have but apple hasn't said anything i'm kind of hoping we find out at w wc that that's gin's hope too we'll see it also it there is like we're going to talk about this in the next segment but if you like push this into the big like AI makes your life easier narrative of apple like pushing into smart home stuff and like sensors and letting your devices talk to each other makes a lot of sense. I still think the like Occam's razor explanation here is that they got that chip for free

inside of these tri-band chips that are in a lot of devices. But I hope it's more cool, more interesting than that. I was just trying to see if thread radios have tops in them. So far it seems no. Not even a single top. No tops. And also very few uses for thread. We have to create the conditions by which people care about these scoos. But a perfect verge scoop from Jen. Speaking of Apple, another weird one. They misstated the core count, the number of GPUs on the M2 iPad error. They said it was 10, it's actually 9. How do you make a mistake like this?

Yeah, that's just the thing. This was very surprising to see from Apple because they have a whole marketing department, a very good one when it's not like crushing all of art. So to screw up, which I think. think is fair to say that's a screw up is to put the wrong number of cores on all of the marketing materials. That's a pretty big one. Yeah. And you think that the engineers, the chip designer? I mean, because the way these work is they pixel bin the chips.

Yeah. So they try to make the chips with the most number of cores. Some of them don't get, don't work. And they pixel bin them and they cut down the number of cores that are active to just the ones at work. And off you go. Every manufacturer does this stuff. Maybe someone just like forgot to be like, yo, we pixel bin, bin, that one. And then it was up on the screen and they're like, oh, dang. I forgot to send that email last week. Right.

And then Apple's email system is like archaic. Yeah. And they just didn't go through approvals. WebEx was down that day. They do use WebEx. I will say this is not in our show in our later. We had the CEO of Zoom on Decoder and he used to work at WebEx. And I asked him if he used WebEx in the past year.

And he was like, I don't. No. Truly weird. They haven't said they're going to make it right because they say the performance that they're offering is the same as what they said. So they just got the number wrong. but the performance right. Well, and even apparently the listed performance is right. So, like, the only mistake that they made was a 10 instead of a 9, which if that's true,

is like, mostly it's just weird that it happened. Yeah. But I do, yeah, it's just like how. I do typos all the time. This is what happens when you let the AI write your spec sheets for you. It just made stuff up and I'm like, oh, crap. See, lightning around. This is all the more needs to be said.

Moving right on. Samsung had a leak, potentially. cheaper Galaxy Watch. Yeah, yeah. Samsung loves to leak things. They're not as bad as like Google, but they're up there. So there's new Galaxy Watch. It's going to be like their Founders Edition.

So the FE Edition could cost about $200. Has a lot of really pretty colors. Seems really neat if it's real and it probably is. So I think like Galaxy Unpacked is happening very, very soon. So we should know a lot more very, very soon. But now we know a lot. it's going to probably be $199.9. It's got an Exenos W920 chip in it, 1.5 gigabytes of RAMs, 16 gigabytes of storage.

What do you do with 16 gigabytes of storage on a smartwatch? You put only music. I think that's the real answer. All the time. You just download a bunch of playlists and you're off and running. People need their, like that was always a weird thing when I was reviewing watches years ago. People would always be like, yeah, how many songs can I get on that watch? No, because you want to go for a run without your phone.

And I'm like, why are you running? Why are you running? And then you're just going to use your watch? That's on. People do it. Yeah, a lot of people do it. And I respect them for it. This is why we have V on our staff.

Yeah, that's why V runs. Thank you, V. V begrudgingly runs, which is the correct way to review products, I think. And I love that about V. Unpacked is usually, what, like early August, right? Yeah. I think it's going to be a really interesting one. Like the Galaxy Ring seems like it might be a pretty cool.

This is coming. You know. Oh, Samsung is going to have hundreds of thousands of weird ideas about AI. Samsung will answer your tops questions, Nelai. Samsung is going to figure out what to do with tops. Will they be good ideas? I don't know. Will they be branded milk?

Like, maybe. But they will use those tops. And I think it's going to actually be a really fun event this year. They're going to have the most unhinged digital assistant. Right? Like it's going to have like a face. Like Bigsby with a face. Yeah.

It's going to talk to you. It's going to make you feel very uncomfortable. I am so excited. I feel like this WWC, and we'll talk about that next time. We're leading into what I have begun to think of as the what is a photo apocalypse because Apple's just going to let people start. But it's when Samsung is like, this is what the tops are for. All bets are off.

We just made a new moon. Just straight up. Like two moons, fine. That's what the tops are for. Each tops gives you another moon. Speaking of AI, more AI, nothing. It has the phone three. David, you looked at it

apparently just AI apps for days. Yeah, did you guys see this teaser that Carl Pay, the CEO of Nothing, put up? He basically, it's like him sitting in an armchair being like, we believe that smartphones are the future of AI and it's like, cool, Carl, like great job. But then they show off a couple of things they've been working on and one of them is just like

straight up like GPT40 rip like push the button, talk to the assistant. Looks very cool. But they also had this prototype they've been working on of a dynamic personalized home screen, I guess you'd call it. It's like a little bit news feed, a little bit sort of live updating widgets with all the information you care about. And Carl has been saying for years, including on this show, I think almost exactly a year

ago, that their big idea is like, okay, smartphones are still the thing, but the app model is wrong. And how do we start to push past this idea that all of life is just silo off into a million apps? And I happen to agree with that more and more every day. And so I think it was interesting to see what they were working on. And he just sort of said, we're going to start working on this stuff on the phone three. Like, not surprising that there's going to be a thing called the phone three, but interesting that he said it.

And presumably it's going to be launched this summer, very curious to see what they do. Because they've been kind of like forward looking in some of their designing stuff, but have mostly just made like pretty straightforward cell phones and headphones. Like it's a, it's a design around a pretty straightforward product. but if they're going to start doing this stuff, it might be more of a push into something different in the Android world, which I think would be pretty cool. Does it give you guys kind of like a Windows phone vibe? Yes. I was going to think this is the episode of our test where I brought up the fact that I lived through the touchpad, and now I have to be here being like, this is Windows phone. Yeah.

Like we're just, we're just doing and gadget again. Yeah. This is how I spent my time back then. A, it is just 2004 again. I would point that out. It just is. But also, like, it's really, it's long past due for us to just admit that live tiles were a good idea and Microsoft should have stuck to them. They should have stuck to Windows.

They should have stuck. No, no. They should have changed every other thing about what they were doing except for live tiles, which were a good idea. It's a real, like, baby bathwater situation. Like, this is, like, less attractive live tiles. There was a Microsoft event in Vegas where they announced, like, the next. version of the app model Windows phone. I'm just saying that's where I fell in love with Teeterbone.

Aw. We were there being like, are they going to say anything? Like, Matt, we drank a lot. We drank a lot. And I was like, we will be friends now. You belong to me. We lasted a lot longer than Windows phone. I'm just saying. It's beautiful. It's true. It's true.

But the idea that Microsoft should have stuck to Windows phone because Carl Pay is out here with nothing. I mean, like, what if we did this idea? again. What if we expose the apps to another interface on the home screen? Yeah, man, I don't know. Like, everyone wants to do this, but the app makers don't want to do it. They want you in their app. Right. I mean, it's, we've seen this even, like, again, WWDC is going to be interesting in that respect because we spent a lot of time last year talking

about these live updating widgets and the interactive widgets and the dynamic island and this idea that like, oh, you can pull information out of the apps and onto the home screen of your phone. I think we've gotten to like a two out of ten on where that could have gone. And it's been a year. And like, I don't know how many live activities you all interact with every day, but my answer is pretty damn close to zero. Once a week when I get Uber Eats. Yeah. There's a countdown timers for various things that are going to happen.

Yeah. All very good. Yeah. But it's also kind of like, yeah, I super know the plane is going to land in 45 minutes. I mean, like the Uber Eats one is great. I'm like, wings almost here. Yeah. And then sometimes it goes up and I'm like, wings took a wrong turn.

Come back wings. All right. We're going to get through this whole area. We're almost there. We got two left. The Assuse Rogue ally X. Sean looked at it. Alex, what do you think?

I love Sean's enthusiasm for this thing. Because he went to look at it originally. Rog? Or rogue? Rog. I know. I know. It stands for Republic of Gamers.

I'm aware of that. Which was a gaming company that Assues bought because all of the cool ones. All of this stuff is in my brain. It's just right next to Windows Phone. Yeah. Windows Phone was really loud. You got to spin up. the drive.

Just really loud. No, I, like, I'm really optimistic. I mean, we both talk about this a lot, like Sean and I's DMs are just like more Steam Decks and more Steam Dex clones. We've designed about four of our own. This is how it starts. Yeah. Someone call us, we've got great ideas.

This thing is definitely still pretty heavy. It's definitely beefy in a way that I think people will not find always so pleasing. Is the Steam Deck still just? just the prototypical one of these? Yeah, and it's primarily because... Yeah, because most of these run on Windows. Yeah. And that's not very good for this platform, right?

Like, I think that's the thing that Steam Deck has done really, really well, is they built this really, really good platform. So you can just pop in and start downloading games and go, whereas everybody else, you have to, like, futs with it. There's always something. This is, like, a sneakily exciting reason to be optimistic for all these new chips, right, that if they are as good as advertised, suddenly building a device like this that is light and good

and lasts a long time and still does, the stuff you want it to do becomes a lot more plausible. Whereas right now you basically have to just shove as much of a gaming PC as possible into as small a box as possible, and that is just physics, and physics is hard. But I will say on this front... And all the while, Microsoft is like,

what if Windows just watched everything you did and wrote it down in a plain text database? And it's like, I don't... It'll be fine. But that's one of the reasons... That's the advantage the Steam Deck has is they were able to cut down the operating system. Right. And this one, like, their way of doing it is like, well, we're not going to fix Windows.

But we're going to make the battery a lot bigger. So that could be really cool. Like, this thing should have probably, I think, the biggest battery of all of these kind of deals. But we'll see. Like, every time I get one of these in, I'm like, oh, this is going to be rad. And then I meet Windows. and I'm having to use a joystick to move a mouse around the screen, and it stops being rad real fast.

All right, let's end it where we need to end it with the promise we made at the top of the show. There's a defense contractor who made a Game Boy. It's Palmer Lucky, everybody. What a surprise. Of course. This is a long and twisted tale. Palmer Lucky, we met when he was a literal child.

Speaking of things that happened a million years ago, We saw the first Oculus prototype in our, like, trailer at CES. 2012, right? 100 million years ago. It was a young, fresh-faced Palmer Lucky, showing us a thing talking about OLED refresh rates and how he'd built the thing in forums and met John Carmack in the forums of the OLED nerds. This is a very verge. Many things have happened to both Oculus and Palmer Lucky in that time.

He grew a little mustache. The facial hair is we're going to set it aside. You're allowed to make whatever choices you want with your facial hair. It's true. If you want to make those, we will just note them and set them aside. Meta bought Oculus. It turned into the quest line. They fired Palmer Lucky for being kind of weird.

Palmer Lucky made a bunch of weird donations to the Trump campaign, mostly in the form of inflammatory billboards, I believe. This is all real. It's just like in the past. And then he started a defense contractor named Andrew, which makes drones with guns on them. And is also named after like a JK, no, not a JK Rowling. Named after a J.R. Tolkien. Oh, sure. He also has cosplayed.

Like Lord of the Rings stuff. He's also cosplayed as quiet from Metal Gear series. One of the real thing that you can go look at a photo. One of the great sightings of my life was in San Jose. I was at a bar with my wife watching the NBA playoffs and Palmer Lucky comes walking in with a tail on and just sits down at the bar and orders a drink. just a delightful day. He's been spiky with us. Whatever.

This is all Palmer Lucky stuff. And it's in the, like, people arguing about the merits of spending money on Palmer Lucky devices in our comments. But it is true that he's made something called the Chromatic. And it looks sick. Which is $199.

And apparently is just like, what if you finished a Game Boy? Like, what if you took a Game Boy to the most Game Boy conclusion it could be? Yeah. What if you took all of the technology we have in 20? and made a Game Boy from 1989.

That plays Game Boy cartridges. Like it's, it is exactly what I want it to be. And it's like, or excuse me, Game Boy Color too. You're right. Yeah. It has a, it has a color matched screen to the Game Boy Color, right? Super bright, really good screen. The colors look awesome. Like this, this thing, yeah, you're right.

All the pedigree of it aside, this thing looks awesome. And it's 200 bucks and I think like people like people love the stuff that analog makes, and at least from the little bit we've seen so far, this belongs like right there. Yeah, like analog, I would say, is for modern nerds who want to, like, get into retro gaming. This is for, like, you are in retro gaming. Because this is, like, what if we could make it as accurate as possible, but modern. So, like, the pixels and everything, you know, it's not a super high resolution display or

anything like that. It is meant to be the same resolution as the Game Boy color, which came out. And then also it comes with a side of deep moral ambivalence. There you go. Don't forget Tetris. And Tetris. Very confusing product. Just all the way around.

I don't know that I'm going to spend $200 on it. I know that, boy, would I love to spend $200 and something just like it. Yeah. Yeah. Deep moral ambivalence. That's what I have said. A defense contractor. Although if Lockheed Martin was to make a $200 game boy, would we cover it?

I think the answer is assuredly yes. Yeah. Locky, do you have your orders? Yeah, agreed. I mean, it is interesting. Like, Palmer Lucky is documented as having been into this for a really, really long time. Like, I, again, all of all of the feelings about Palmer Lucky aside, he's actually a person you would think would probably do a very good job of this.

Yeah. It's going to be, it's going to be really interesting to see. He's also apparently about to launch some new headset. Like, Palmer's, he's just running around doing stuff now. It's very odd. Yeah. I mean, that defense contractor money really helps out. Yeah, seriously.

But that's the challenge of trying to wear as many hats as he does is that people don't like sell out of those hats. And one of those hats is reprehensible politics. Okay, that's the lightning round. We finished it. We did it. I don't know how long. It took 45 minutes.

You did a good job. It was so long. I only had to delete two things from the list. That was really good. Because we went. All right, we have to take a quick break. We'll be back. Preview of WWDC.

And then a second traditional lightning round. for you traditionalists. We'll get back. All 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.

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That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to short-listing candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent.

And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. We got to talk about it. WWDC. Yeah. I was at a conference earlier this week and I called it dub-dub and someone looked at me and said you actually call it dub-dub. It's so much easier. Like my friends roasted me about this last week too. I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to dub-dub. And they were like, you called it that? And I'm like, look. They really did make it happen.

They manufactured calling it dub-dub. And it's less syllables than WWDC. That's true. But it's coming. We're going. We'll be there. We're going to verge cast from there. Apparently there's a sick house we're going to verge cast from there.

Very excited about this. And then I'm told that we're going to have tacos. This is all of them we're planning for WDC. That's their WWDC preview. It's going to be great. This feels like a big one. So there's been a bunch of reporting leaning up to it. Obviously some news about AI and all the platforms.

potentially an open AIA partnership. Mark German reported there'll be no hardware, which is really interesting. Traditionally, we've seen Mac pros, other sort of developer look-ahead hardware happen at WWC. We also got MacBook errors a couple of years, didn't mean? That was like... Well, that's when they did chip bumps.

They were just like... Oh, yeah, that's true. Right? This is a moment to just like get some stuff out in the world and make some noise. And it seems like they did the hard... This is where you would have done the iPads. True.

This would be a great place for iPads. But they move that stuff out of the way. I will say Apple will keep. advertising the new iPad is the thinnest iPad, the thinnest Apple product ever, which just really implies there's not much else to say. Like that's the advertising. Just iPad. Yeah, here it is.

It's thin. It's iPad. It makes sense there's no hardware at this one, because you want all of the focus to be on what the software can do now, if you're going to put AI all through the software. And you certainly don't want to tie that to the idea that you need new hardware to do it, right? Because Apple has been on that cadence in the past where they're like, here's a new iPhone. We've gated some camera feature that you could definitely own the old iPhone to the new iPhone. But here, this is about the future of iOS.

It's about the future of Siri. It seems like you need all of the focus to be like a great upgrade that's coming to everybody with a recent iPhone AI. Yeah, Apple does not want to be talking about tops. I mean, not just because their processors have the fewest. But yeah, that's not a thing they want to. They never want to talk about specs. Yeah, they never want to talk about specs. But Alex, that's true and it isn't, right?

Because it is true that Apple is maybe losing the tops where it's also definitely true that Apple is going to have the most devices that this stuff can run on by a million miles on day one. And that is like, that's the flex Apple is going to want here. Not we launched a new AI thing, but like we made all your things AI things. And if you're Apple and the world feels like you need to catch up in a. AI, that's how you do it. Yeah, I totally, totally agree. And especially because, as we know, we have no idea what tops actually do, so they don't need to care about it. Well, so, like, what are tops for?

A good question. Apple has an opportunity to answer that question, maybe not by saying tops. But by saying, like, here are a bunch of features in the operating system. Apple very famously has so much headroom in terms of performance that it can just put. put out features. It can weigh cycles, basically. Again, to just sound like an old man, when OS 10, Apple first danced OS 10, and it was like beautiful and had extra animations, everyone would complain that they were just like running a processor all the time. And Apple is like, yeah, it's pretty. That's what we do here. It's delightful. That's what the processors are

for. And now they have so much headroom. They can do a bunch of stuff. So there's just a bunch of stuff. There's AI generated emojis. rumored to be announced. There's AI-powered voice transcription in voice memos and in notes, which sounds great. I love it. Put that in the operating system. Sorry, a bunch of indie apps that are offering that right now. The idea that Siri will be able to just go into your apps and do things.

An idea that we have talked about for a long time, programmatically with Bixby, programmatically with Siri, with shortcuts, implausible and ultimately fake ways with Rabbit. a large action model. Like the idea that an assistant can just use a computer for you, that is the dream. Apple can get to somewhere farther than we are now with Siri on the phone. That's a huge step forward. If I can just go, because we all have like what, four different music and podcasting and audiobook apps on our phones.

And so when you're like, yeah, I just want to listen to my book, it's like, okay, would you like to buy it from the Apple store? And you're like, no, I have it in, like, Libby, you're. Libro FM or whatever. And the idea to just be like, hey, play that. Go do it. Go do it. And it would just do it?

Oh, my God. That would be incredible. Will that actually happen? No. Or will Apple still try to get you to buy a book from the eyebook store? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's going to be the real issue for that particular use case.

So I think the question is exclusively what you just said, Nelai, which I think is really fascinating, right? Because until now, there have been a million problems, right? one of which is the like underlying machine learning technology is not very good. One of which is that Siri is not historically very good at speech recognition. One is that the processing stuff has not been as fast as it needs to be to be useful for stuff. But the biggest one has just been that Apple won't let developers do stuff. And if you're Apple, the question now is like, what are we going to expose to developers?

Because the way it's been for a long time is developers would have had to do all the work. Right. So Apple just says like, here's what Siri can do. plug it into your app however you'd like. But if this new AI thing can work the way that it might, or at least that it's been reported to work, all developers have to do is basically just like expose their app to Siri in a way that could become very powerful.

In the way that it's like, I don't know, Google search is a good example of this, right? Like if you just write a recipe on your website in a certain way or you structure the page a certain way, like Google can understand it and index it and do stuff with it. And if Apple can say, hey, Spotify, Libby, whoever else, you want somebody to just be able to listen to their podcasts in your app, just turn these three flags on that say, here's how you play a podcast in our app,

and we're off and running. Like, if everybody wants this to happen, it could happen. But that's not the AI of it. No, that's... Like, that exists short of today. Like, you can kind of get there. My favorite example of this, I'm just going to admit to being a dad who buys chicken nuggets in the McDonald's app all the time.

It's like a real thing that happens. I'm counting those points. We're going to get six free nuggets one of these days. And every time I make this order, it's like, do you want to make a serious shortcut for this order? And I have like a total moral crisis about voice ordering chicken nuggets. Like, but it's like those flags already exist. No, but this is my point. Walk me through that process.

Tell me every step you take to do that. You literally hit a button in the app that's like, just say this as a favorite and then you can be like Siri. No, I mean to order Siri or to. Oh, wait, wait. You order McDonald's and then it says, do you want to order McDonald's with your voice and you can't bring yourself to be that? If you make me open this app on this podcast right now.

I would like you to do that very much. My God. I would like you do that very much. No, because one thing I should have said this at the beginning is there are going to be a lot of people listening to this who are like, shortcuts solve this. And no, it doesn't. No, it doesn't.

Shortcuts is a bad app that no one can figure out. And if you figured it out, congratulations, and I'm proud of you. Shortcuts is not the solution to this problem. I say shortcuts is a solution if you're a programmer and you have a really strong grass. for programming. Yeah, if you want to write code, you can solve a lot of your problems, including in shortcuts.

Absolutely true. I don't want to write code. If you know what an X callback URL is, congratulations, you can use shortcuts. Most people don't. And that's fine. I don't think you can set up Siri on the McDonald's app unless you order McDonald's. That's how they get you. But it is true that you can set up a Siri thing.

It might use shortcuts in the background. Right. But like the hooks for have Siri do stuff in the app, programmatically, semantically, like you're talking about with Google, they exist. The opportunity for Apple is to say, we control this operating system top to bottom. We control the app store top to bottom, at least in this country. And we can now use your phone for you, which is more or less the promise Samsung made with Bigsbee a million years ago. And more or less the promise Microsoft is starting to make with Windows. Yeah.

right we we just sit over the top of everything and we'll click around for you and if apple can get there which i don't know if they can but it's certainly the promise that's been reported by german and others they will get there in their own apps that you will just be able to talk to syria and it will take action in apple's own apps and there's obviously privacy and security concerns all this stuff but if they can get even a little bit farther there on the phone with AI so it's not this like very manual set the flags of what you're allowed to do and here's how works, but much more the computer is going to use the computer for you. That's a huge deal. Oh, I agree. I don't know how much processing power you need for that. I don't know if you want. You're also going to run into Apple's like desire to have you use their stuff so that they get money. Right.

And once you're using Apple stuff in Apple's ecosystem, whether or not it even is AI, like starts to get fully obfuscated. Because you don't, you can just, once you control everything, you just like fake it more or less. Yeah. So there's a million questions in there. And then there's obviously the big problem of how many tops do you need to pull that off? Can they run locally on the phone, which is power constrained, network constrained, all the stuff. Heat thermal constrained. Yikes.

And then do you want your phone watching everything you do? Like just like a series of escalating yikes problems. I'm very curious to see how Apple talks about this stuff. Because this sort of like chatbot-esque part. where you're like make a custom emoji for me or like do a voice transcription like these familiar things all make sense to do

the part where they're like we control everything and we can do things that no one else can do wild I'm also going to be curious if they can even like roll it out as fast as they want to right because I think technologically they can but I'm just thinking of what we've seen again and again and again

is that these companies are pushing these things out and not considering the edge cases because I was just sitting here being like oh man I'm totally going to have have it make an ugly Sonic the hedgehog emoji that looks like raccoon girl, which is like, that is a whole thing that would see. I think any AI would struggle with that. Siri would struggle with that. There's a red team at Apple right now listening to this podcast being like, did we test?

I hope you guys did. Please hire Alex Kranz for all your edge case red team. That's a service we can provide on this show. The glue thing happened because they were like, how do I get the cheese to stick to the pizza? Can I say the funniest thing about the glue thing? What? Did you do it? I have not.

Katie and Adpolis, Insider, did it. She said it was fine. But, you know, you have to trust for it that it was fine. So Google is manually deleting the bad results or Google contractors and some other country are manually deleting the results as people see them. But because so many people have now searched for how to keep pizza, the cheese. on pizza and then proactively clicked on Fuck Smith's comment on Reddit about the glue. The regular Google search algorithm now is like, that's the answer. So Google AI, Google bombed Google.

Yes. Yes. If you, at least I have a screenshot of it, but when I searched for it the other day, no AI result. But straight up, it was like, here's a Reddit answer from 11 years ago by a user named Fucksmith, who's like put the glue on pizza. You got it, didn't you? Yep, it just immediately got it. It's like the regular Google algorithm is now broken.

It brings me so much joy. It's like, what are you going to do with this, man? You can put the glue on the pizza. And it's funny because with the Google leak that we were talking about last week, we know it's because of the clicks. Yeah. We know that so many people have clicked on this answer as a goof that regular Google got confused. Yeah.

Oh, it's beautiful. It's good. Anyway, back to Apple. But can Apple's brand sustain that kind of error? It seems like they're not going to do an open chat button this way. But that brings us to whatever this Open AIA partnership is going to be. I feel like I'm going to disclose now that Fox Media has a content deal with Open AI. It's the first time we've done it in the course of the show, like in the flow.

Quick, somebody bring up Netflix. I made a Netflix show. Hi. Hollywood Mattel over here. It's called The Future of. It's a great show. I encourage you to watch it. It was number one for five minutes.

And then immediately other shows were number one. Anyhow, what are they going to do with Open AI? It feels like this is where Open Eye launches a search product or another kind of integration. Who knows? David, do you have an answer? It's going to be a chatbot. You think it's just a straight chat bot? Well, no.

So there's a bunch of things going on here. One is that like... No multimodal for the search. There's going to be some of that, right? And to your point about how Apple does this on-device Siri thing, there's this research paper that Apple put out, I think earlier this year, it was either very late last year or early this year,

about this thing called Ferret, which is basically the academic version of some of what we're talking about. It's basically how to teach a language model, how to understand what's on a screen. And one of the things they say in that paper is that GPT4 is very good at sort of conceptually understanding a page. Right? Like you show it something,

that says this is an image of people on the beach. But if you zoom all the way in and you're like, what's this little thing on the sand? GPT4 is not good at that. So what they built is this thing ferret that is very good in these small spaces. And what they say in the paper is this combination is going to be very useful for us

because we have this one simple system that can just say, this is the Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify. And then you have this thing ferret that can drill down and be like, okay, that's the song that they're looking for. And so I think that is probably more what you're going to see that GPT4 and this Open AI partnership is sort of the big,

broad strokes, like let's do the first 80% of the AI job with a lot of the stuff. And then Apple's job underneath it is going to be to fix all of the things that GPT4 either can't do or doesn't do very well, which actually in a lot of ways is really smart because you don't need to reinvent all the, you know, quote unquote easier stuff. Apple can just like build features on top of it. It's like all the browsers building out of chromium now. It's like we don't, we've more or less finished the job of like how to do the very small, simple basics.

All the interesting stuff is like the interface and the last mile stuff. And so I suspect that's what we'll see a lot of all over iOS. But where is it going to happen? Because if you're relying on GPT40 to do some aside, you have to go to the cloud. You probably have to go to Microsoft servers, right? Because most of that runs an Azure. If you want the full model, yeah, I also, I don't, I don't. don't pretend to have a ton of knowledge, but I'm confident that Open AI is working on

smaller versions of its stuff that works on device and locally and all that stuff. But I think if you look at something like, what's a good example? Voice transcription. We were just talking about why on earth, if your Apple, would you try to rebuild Whisper when Whisper is really good and Open AI made it already? Whisper is maybe a bad example because it's actually open source and Apple could just take it. But that's the sort of thing that's like Open AI is sitting on a lot of very good technology that is not being made into very good products.

And I think if I'm Apple, what I'm doing is looking at them and saying, I know how to make products. I'm just going to take your sort of base level infrastructure technology and build on top of it. I do think the what's going to happen on device versus what's going to happen in the cloud thing is going to be messy for Apple at first and has been messy with Siri over the years, right? Like for a long time, one of the things that sucked about Siri was that it went to the cloud for basically everything. And progressively over time, Siri has gotten to do more stuff locally and has gotten better and faster as a result. And so I think we're going to see a lot of that sort of calibration of that sliding scale again from Apple here.

But if they get to the point where they're sending what's happening on your device to a cloud server, especially one that Apple does know. That's a that is Apple walking away from some of its privacy promises. They made a Google deal, dude. Like, this is what happens. Yeah, but I'm saying, if they do the thing where you're like, play spot, Discover Weekly and GPT4. and an Azure server is looking at your screen, and then locally it's something else? Like, no. Like, there's a level, there's a line that I think Apple will cross.

I think we don't know the full terms of the OpenAI partnership, right? And Apple would be very, very, very, very, very stupid to throw away that privacy marketing that they have. So I could totally see them be like, yeah, we're going to have Open AI, but we're going to use it on our servers. And it will go through our stuff. and it's all going to be through your iCloud and and all of that stuff i think that's probably what it is i think i think this is going to be less like we want to run this stuff on the back of open a i's server infrastructure which is literally as you said azure and more like we're going to take some of their technology and we're going to run it on our servers and it's just going to be like a white

label licensing deal and we've we've heard rumors about apple having like building their own processes and they're putting m2 ultras yeah that's it that's it yeah and that's what it's for How many tops on M2 Ultra? Some. Some. I mean, look, if there's one company, like you said, David, that can say, like, this is what all the headroom on the phone is for. 31.6 tops. It's pretty good.

That's an amount of tops. That is more than a raspberry pie. Two and a half raspberry pies right there. That's brutal. If you can tell us what incremental tops are for, please leave us a note. But you can't be an AI researcher. Like if you are building a consumer application, we're like, oh man, when phones have at least 27 tops, like the world will, like, you let us know. I'm dying to know the answer to this question.

It's writing you as we speak to be like, we can put, we can map weird stuff to your face so well with more tops. But if Evan Spiegel is like up at night because the average phone has 20 tops and he needs 20. Like you, that's what I'm looking for, Evan. I love it. This is such a good conversation for the beginning of pride. I love it so much. Oh, my God, Alex. I just had to say.

What's randomly hornyer? Alex Cranes, Renee. Only a top. We'll find out. That's going to be a head-to-head on a later verge cast. All right. What do we think is like the big thing that we're looking for from W.A.? Let's wrap it up this way.

What's yours? Like wishless style. Ooh. I don't even know. Because I like, as David well knows, I started using ARC. And so now that's all I care about on my Mac. So, like, I'm like, yeah, I just wanted to like look nice. I want better control over my, the appearance of my device.

I would love if the AI would just, I'd be able to be like, I want it to be like cool cyberpunk green. And it would just be like, got you. That's my wish list. A cyberpunk green. Yeah, I want it. I want Mac OS and Siri to make my computer. look as ugly as possible.

AI powered theming is an incredible. I'm not, I don't think it's Apple. That was like a Samsung Saturday day. There has been some reporting that Apple is going to like really open up the possibilities for what you can do with your home screen. Like they're going to let you put app icons wherever you want, which like, oh my God, how did no one think of this before? It's unbelievable, incredible.

But like, maybe we're not that far away from you just being able to tell Siri like just hug up my phone. It's no big deal. And it'll just happen. That'd be amazing. That's what I want. That's the dream. All right. That's Alex's David. All of my stuff is spotlight, which I would very much like to, that's where I want all the AI stuff to go. I think the like little AI features, voice transcription, all that stuff is going to be very cool. For me, it's like, if it can get very good at me just being like, what was that picture of the sign that I took a few days ago? And it'll just be like, this one. or like the thing in Google photos

where you can just ask it about things in your photos. Like I want that locally on my phone. And also with access to all of my stuff, right? Like Spotlight knows everything. It sees the internet. It has all the stuff on your device. There's been some reporting, I think, from Mark German at Plumberg,

that it's gonna be able to do more stuff inside of files and with documents. And I just wanna be like, I wanna just live my life inside of that spotlight search and just have it understand everything on my phone all the time. Like that's, that would be cool too. the AI job here as far as you want rewind basically but and it's just sitting here this here one of the

people who's like just do all right it already does neelai it's already like do you know what already knows everything that's happening on my phone is my phone like just do it for me and again like i think the the interesting thing about the recall thing is that it's like the worry is that somebody can get all the stuff on your device right malware exists on windows that just let somebody look at that plain text database that is sitting on your device. Way less of a threat on the iPhone. And so for me, like, all my stuff is already here. And if you get my phone and my passcode, I'm screwed already.

So I'm like, let's at least make use of the fact that this device essentially contains every piece of my life in existence and make it useful to me because I can't help what it already is. I love this because I have like a whole reservoir of horrible photos and gifs. And it would be real, it would rule to just be like, hey, Siri. Again, if Apple's red team is available, Alex Cranes is also available. If I could just be like, where's the Wilmer-Volderama gift where he does the I love you with his hands, and it just shows it to me, like, that's what I want. That's the dream.

Yes. Yeah, that's, that, I love this dream. Okay, I'm on board. I switched mine to David's. But also I want to make my phone ugly with one command. I'm with Alex too. Nealai, what's yours? I feel like the, hey, don't share Wilmer-Volderavorama gifts anymore.

warning is something that you need from an AI system in this context. Like, hey, you're a little out of date. There's been some news. Just helping you out there, bud. Okay, mine is very small. It's not really a wish list of a future. Okay. I am dying to see how Apple addresses adding RCS to messages.

Oh, yeah. Is it an announcement? Is it a bento box slide? Is it the world's smallest type? Is it just Cred Feggeridi being like, and we've added the letters. And it's like moving on. Like, it could go a million different ways.

It's going to be bento. It could be a full thing. Like, we've now added support for the standard that everyone's been making for. Right? I figured it out. They're going to talk about the emojis that they can make with AI. And then be like, and you can even send them to your friend on Android because we've introduced RCS. Right.

Any number of ways. Will they show green bubbles on that stage? Yeah. Anything could happen. Oh, it's going to rule. And I'm just like, that's the thing that I'm, or they could do nothing. I love this, Alex, because like, do you remember a million years ago when Paul Pierce sent that tweet where he tried to send an emoji, but he actually sent a picture, like a JPEG

of the rocket chip emoji? That's what it's going to look like when you make a custom emoji on an iPhone and send it to an Android person. And that is how Apple gets to support RCS and still kind of knife all the Android users all the same time. Yeah. That's good. These new features are for message users, messages users, and for Android users.

You get JPEG. JPEG. I love this. Like, I've just, anything could happen. Like, literally, anything from that, like, open, cutting warfare, all the way down to, we've put three letters in, like, the tiniest box of the other features in iOS. They might not even call it RCS. Right. Yeah.

Rich messaging. they call it on the Apple Home app like new architecture? Maybe they'll just call it new architecture. Rich complex messaging. Yeah, so whatever. They'll just literally anything is possible. Yeah. But like I cannot wait

because they've announced they're going to do it. Yeah. And this is when they roll out the new operating systems. This is when they might do it. They just don't say anything. I'm on pins and needles. It is really interesting, by the way, how little we've heard about non-AI stuff coming this year. Like the non-AI reporting so far is basically like new settings menu and some more native apps for the Vision Pro.

And all that stuff is well and good. But there is surprisingly little, at least from what we've heard so far, that is not going to be about AI. And I think both for just how the presentation goes, but also what these things are, it's going to be really interesting to see if basically whatever 12 months ago, Craig Federigi was like, we only do AI from now on. or not. Like, it's just, it's, that's the thing I'm going to be watching the most for is like, how much non-AI stuff is there, which I think is very telling for how much AppleA is going to feel like it has to do with AI. Yeah.

I'm telling it's going to be RCS. All right, we got to wrap this up. We're going to be at WWC. He's so sad. What? I was going to get in there. Oh, yeah. William's got one.

Okay. All right, Liam, we, we bonus round. Okay. This one has technically been announced already, but the thing I'm most excited to try next week is the motion sickness feature. Oh, yeah. I'm one of those people that like when I'm in an Uber, I can't read my phone for more than a few seconds because I get horrible motion sickness.

So I really want to try this if it's in beta and hopefully it works. Yeah. All right. We're going to get Liam in a car. She's zooming around. I'll drive. This is a verge cast that we should do. Liam and I are going to get in the back.

We're going to both look at our phones and we're going to see who pukes first. And that's the verge cast. I'm just going to be doing figure eights in a parking lot. That's also Sponsorable. You've been considering Lightning Rats. Who boots first?

All right. That's it. We're going to be there next week. Sick house. Again, I've been told there will be tacos. I'm not 100% sure how we're going to work the tacos.

A lot of horses are going to be everywhere. It's just what I know. I'm excited to see everybody. I'm excited to be out there. We've got to take a break, though. We're going to come back with Lightning Round. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic.

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and check out Claude Pro which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash verge cast. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard

the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees American and French have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning.

And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain, drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people,

all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected? officials and what it means to the people. So money is essentially the root

of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. That's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. All right, we're back. Yeah. This has been a very family-friendly episode of the Verchast. There are no Alex Cran's moments to speak of.

None. But we got to talk about HBO Mac, so it's Zaddy Report. I'm sorry. Zaddy report, I should say, also responsible, but only by one company. You know who you are. One. I want to see the check

handwritten. It's a traditional lightning round, which means we have a list and each of us is going to pick one thing. And then we're going to get out of here. Alex, I think we just got to get this off our plates.

Just move it on down the line. What's your lightning round on? Max, sorry, not HBO Max. Max is about to be a lot more expensive. I mean, she already was. Yeah. But my daughter's name is Max, by this is a horrible situation for me. Yeah.

She's like, she's going to be able to afford a lot more chicken nuggets because she's going to be charging $16.99 a month. That is too much money for Max. Yeah. Straightforwardly too much money. Does that get me 4K? Uh, no. The 4K plan is 2099 a month. 2099 for 4K.

So it goes up about a dollar. Everything's just going up a dollar. dollar, but it's at $1. It's like how when you get a, when you got a 92. $21 a month for HBO Max. Yeah. Because you have to have the 4K plan in my opinion. What are you doing?

It's the only rate of watch. That's too much money. No, yeah. It is a lot. And it's set off a lot of people just very upset and their feelings about how expensive all of this is. And no, it's not going to stop anytime soon. Yeah.

Is the unfortunate reality streaming as your? just going to continue to get more expensive until they figure out how to make money. Yeah, I don't think they know. It also just seems like at some point paying 80 bucks a month or whatever YouTube TV is just becomes the better deal. Yeah, but that's not where all the content is, right? Like so much of this content now is exclusive to these streaming services. So. Right, but you're still just like, I'm going to, like HBO or Max, I'm sorry, is now just full of a bunch of weird discovery reality shows. Like that's the value for dollar there.

Yeah. It's like you want to watch house hunters. Here it is. And that stuff is still super available on a cable package. Yep. And the cable package is probably going to be a nicer experience where it'll be easier to find the episode you want to watch and get started because the max UI is still hot, hot garbage. So my max is still paid for because, as you know, AT&T.

A T&T bought That's not why That'd be incredible If everyone named Max Got Free Max That would actually be great Yeah It would justify the bad name

No as you are aware AT&T bought Warner Brothers I did know that yes A deal which led only To the release of the 4-3 Snyder cut Sigh But also a bunch of grandfathered plans

And I have one That is the same money As a new AT&T plan It just includes Max But in 1080P Oh, that's brutal. And so I'm just like stuck with free

1080 PMAX until someone will notice it at AT&T which they never will. Yeah. They're just not going to notice. They're like, you enjoy 1080. Yeah, no, they're going to be like a grandfathered AT&T plan.

You're not churning. You may have it forever. Yeah. Until they get to 6G. That's when they churn you. Yeah, you're done then. But I'm stuck with this horrible plan. I'm sorry.

David, are you paying $21 bucks a month? No, I'm switching to ads over and over again. and it's just it's just fine. And the thing that I have realized increasingly is that the idea that people are churning is less real than people think. And I think these services are stickier than people give them credit for. Like I was reading something the other day about how one of the big reasons these companies get sports is that people sign up to watch one game and then like an overwhelmingly

large percentage of those people keep the service. Like it's actually this idea that people are coming. watching the thing and then canceling until that thing comes back a year later is largely not the behavior. And as a result, once you're in, you're kind of in. And I think these companies have figured out that a dollar at a time is not terrifying. Like I think if Max suddenly went up $10 a month, people would freak out and leave. Right. Like I think I've been watching Evernote for this. I don't know why this just came into my head. But I've been watching Evernote of Elasco Beers. They basically just doubled their subscription price. And we're very honestly like this.

is the only way this is a sustainable business. Here we go. And people freaked out. That's how you churn people. But a dollar a month at a time, just there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that that costs them anything and it gets them more money. And also what they want is either for you to pay $50 a month or get ads. And they will they will keep raising the price until those are the only two options left.

I really believe that. I totally agree with you. I mean, it's just the frog and the, the, boiling pot, right? Like, it's the water. Yeah, I'm stuck with an AT&T plan. You're stuck with 1080P forever. I'm sorry.

Bah. All right. David, what's yours? Mine is maybe the wonkiest thing I've picked on the Vergecast in a while. Google bought this company called Cameo with a Y, not the cameo where you can get famous people to, like, tell you you're terrific. It's a, it's a company that does Windows app virtualization on Chrome OS. And I thought this was very funny because this happened this week after I had a very

related cameo experience. My wife is in grad school and she's taking like a statistics class right now and she had to download this unbelievably like esoteric old app called R Studio, I think, that looks like it has not been updated since 1994, runs on Windows, Linux and Mac and not ChromeOS and she has a Chromebook for her like personal use and so she spent I would say the better part of a day trying to install Linux on her Chromebook in order to do this and was as she got like most of the way down I was actually very impressed with how far down the like running a Linux distro on a Chromebook she got and then eventually just gave up and was like it's not worth a doable Windows computer I can use but the thing that we found was like oh the best answer to this is

this app called Cameo which just lets you run Windows apps on your Chromebook but it's prohibitively expensive and like explicitly not designed for just like regular people. But now as part of Google, I think this is super interesting. It gives Google like a new inroad into businesses with Chromebooks where it has traditionally had trouble. It gives Chromebooks a lot more to do because if this works well, you could start to just do more window stuff inside of Chromebooks. There's a lot left to shake out here.

This acquisition just happened. But I actually think it's super interesting. And as like the one person on earth who still really, really, really, really, really wants Chromebooks to be cool and succeed, this makes. makes me happy. Yeah. The best thing I've ever bought for my mom is a Chromebook. Really?

Yeah, because a regular computer, a regular Mac or Windows PC is like 55 different operating system metaphors all at once. This is called Launchpad. Why? And you get a Chromebook, you're like, use this browser. They just use it, and it's like fine. Does your mom know when you say... I wrote a whole article about it ages ago.

Does she know like what the box is to where to type things in? Yeah, it's just a browser. It's like this is Chrome. You like Chrome, right? right? Go to YouTube. Your mom is so much more advanced than my mom. But like now what I worry about with Chrome OS is they added Android apps.

Now they're adding cameo. They're getting the same place where you're like, oh, there's multiple competing application metaphors at once. Yep. Okay. But I still love a Chromebook. Oh, and Chromebook pluses now have all the Gemini stuff. Man.

It's like, I just want a browser, man. That pixel book was such a good device. It was very fun watching everybody argue in our comments about sort of the, the overall Chromebook thesis. And like one of the things obviously Chromebooks have done is they've been hugely successful in schools. And there were a lot of people in our comments who were like, yeah, I had a Chromebook in high school

and it ensured that I will never ever buy myself a Chromebook because it was a piece of junk. And it's like, yeah, maybe at some point Google and others should have invested in making Chromebooks good and then people would want them. Like what a crazy idea that would be. Yeah. They should put Arc on it.

I had a, I bought my mom a Chromebook piece. A $1,000 Chrome laptop, people thought I was nuts. It's still rocking because it has like 16 gigs of running. Yeah, that thing has 10 times the power it needed. Such a good laptop. Like an I-7, it was amazing. It's still going because it just runs around. It rules.

All right. Mine is a last-minute game time decision. We just put this story up. The chair of the Tesla board is warning shareholders today that if they don't approve Elon's $56 billion pay package, he might leave Tesla. Oh, no. Oh, that's terrible. Elon is not a typical executive, and Tesla is not a typical company, he says in the letter, which is filed to the SEC. So the typical way in which companies compensate key executives will not drive results for Tesla, motivating someone like Elon requires something different, he says.

To be fair, I would also be very motivated by $56 billion. I don't know that that's different. That's the same. So somehow, he says, and it's not about the money. It's like following up, you ought to motivate Elon somehow, and then it's not enough the money when the letter is about approved the pay package. Didn't he just like. Threaten the needle there, buddy. Didn't he just screw over Tesla by having a bunch of like H-100s from Nvidia shipped to X instead?

This Matt Levine at Bloomberg made what I thought was a very good point about this, which is that what this, the initial read on that is like, oh, this is a sign that Elon Musk is not paying attention to Tesla. why would you give him the money? The galaxy brain take is, oh, this is a threat that if you don't give Elon Musk his money, he will stop paying attention to Tesla and this is what will happen. And I think that is a fun, like, war games version of this story

that is just going to keep getting worse. He's obviously going to get the money, right? Like, you don't think so? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, this vote doesn't even guarantee that he gets money. He could win this vote and still not get the money. Okay, that's fair. I think he'll win the vote.

Maybe. I think they're worried. I don't think the chairman of your board sends letters about how you have to motivate Elon, which, by the way, is hilarious. That's a letter you send about, like, me in eighth grade. Yeah. Do you think $56 billion would have done it for you? I don't know. I was not a typical eighth grader, and I did not respond to typical motivations. Right, we have to challenge him. We got to keep him involved. otherwise he's going to light yet another classroom on fire. Like, that's a crazy letter. Yeah, it really is.

That's too much. And I will point out, Chancery Daily has been in great work on this. They've followed a lot of the Tesla and Twitter back and forth. Yeah, like the court in Delaware said this pay package is illegal. Like, this vote doesn't cure the problem, actually. It's like a weird dance. Who knows, man? I just think he, the thing that caught my eye here is all this preamble about how it takes

something special to motivate Elon. It's not money and it's like, and also vote for the money. Yeah. It's very good. All right. We're going to WWC. We got to get out of here. That vote, by the way, is June 13th where Andy and Liz are primed to, as you can imagine,

primed to cover it. It's going to be, I think it's going to be wild. I think the future of Tesla and X and SpaceX kind of all tied up in this one little very odd moment. Yeah. So they'll be covering that next week while we are headed back from Dub-Dub. I think there's going to be a lot of stuff to cover out of Dub-Dub. I was saying this to our team today. People have a lot of feelings about AI.

Yeah. And Apple putting AI all over its operating system. If you just look at the response to that ad that Alex mentioned before the Crush ad, that ad was not about AI. That was just about iPads. You actually do the thing where the photo editing gets easier or the copy is easier to write. I think people, Apple has a lot of creatives who care a lot about this company. It's going to be a weird time next week, I think.

Yeah, I would agree. So all that covered, that's why the Verge exists. Why do we exist? That's why. To figure out why we make art with computers. And the answer, according to our trans, is do weird, horny stuff. Yeah. That's the Vergecast, rock and roll.

And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.