The Vergecast - Apple's new iPad mini and Google's Stadia gaming platform

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

A rundown of Apple's latest product updates including the new iPad mini, iPad Air, and AirPods. The Vergecast crew Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller also discuss Apple's upcoming event on Monday and what their new services may contain. Second half of the show features Google's announcement of their new game streaming platform Stadia. Links: - Facebook stored hundreds of millions of passwords in plain text - Apple updates $399 iPad mini with Apple Pencil support -Apple’s new iPad mini is a terrific small tablet with no competition -Apple brings back the iPad Air with 10.5-inch display and Smart Keyboard support -Apple’s new AirPods come with a wireless charging case, Hey Siri support, and more battery life -Apple will let you add 256GB of RAM to an iMac Pro for $5,200-Apple updates iMacs with new Intel processors and AMD GPUs -A brand-new AirPower image has appeared on Apple’s Australian site-What to expect from Apple’s TV and news service event -Apple’s plan for its new TV service: Sell other people’s TV services - gone90.biz -Here are the shows and films coming to Apple’s streaming service - Is this robotic therapy pet the uncanny valley of dog?-Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service, launches in 2019 -Google Stadia uses a custom AMD chip to offer 10.7 teraflops of cloud gaming power-Oculus unveils the Rift S, a higher-resolution VR headset with built-in tracking Thanks to Microsoft Azure for sponsoring this episode. Get started with a free account and 12 months of popular free services at Azure.com/trial today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Real quick, before we start, do me a favor. Go to Voxmedia.com slash pod survey. Our company's doing a little survey about what podcast you listen to, which ones we can make better. I would love it if you took that survey and plug the Verge. This week on the Vergecast, we talk about Apple's enormous number of announcements, new IMAX, new iPads, AirPods, no airpower. We preview Apple's streaming TV event next week, and we talk a lot about Google Stadia. It's new streaming service.

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And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, 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 Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vod. media network, which I said out loud, it's South by Southwest. No one stopped you. Vox Media executives all over the place. Nobody rushed the stage. I still work here. Does that make it true?

It's true now. It's as true as it's ever been, which is a medium amount of true. Anyway, hi, I'm Neely, your buddy. Deidre Bonne is here. Your pal. Paul Miller. Hello. It's a wild week of news. There's a lot going on. An overwhelming amount of things going on.

Non-stop. Non-stop. And so Paul suggested that we do this. and I think it's a good idea. We're going to not talk about Facebook in content moderation and data leaks and that stuff this week.

We do it almost every other week. There was actually just another huge Facebook scandal. Facebook apparently stored hundreds of millions of passwords in plain text, accessible by a wide range of employees. So what's new? There it is again. And obviously, you know,

there was the horrific shooting in New Zealand. There's a lot of tech and platforms, moderation. What do we keep up? How do we get it down? All of that's happening in the world. I don't want to ignore it. But there's a bunch of tech news that it's worth talking about as well. So if you want to get in depth on that stuff, there's only one place to go. It's the verge.com slash the interface. That's Casey Newton's newsletter. It comes out every day. It covers social media and democracy. Casey does a great job. He's been on this show a bunch. He actually interviewed Alex Tamos, Facebook's former head of security on this show on Tuesday. So you can listen

to Casey and Alex talk about that stuff. So if you want to get into that stuff, that's what you want this week, listen to that episode. Go to The verge.com slash the interface. Casey's your guy. The three of us are going to talk about some gadgets this week. Nothing but. There's just a lot of gadget news. Apple literally released one product a day this week, which was...

Well, for three days. And then today we're recording on Thursday. We're all like, uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And there was not a... But today was the iPad mini review day. Uh, Google announced Stadia, which...

is their cloud gaming service, which seems insane. Call your doctor if you experience, you know, dry mouth or other symptoms. It's true. It's not a great name. And then on Monday, Apple's having a gigantic streaming event. So let's just start with the Apple stuff. I reviewed the iPad mini this week. That's out today.

It's on Theverge.com on YouTube. You can read that, watch that. Dieter, you've got the iPad Air. I do. A lot of the YouTube commenters made fun of me because I said your name like 10 times in that video. I was like, he's got the air. Yeah, you're like, and Deeter's going to review the air. I'm like, watching the video.

The way we make the videos is we like shoot them in sections. And I just sort of forgot that I'd said it, but I forgot it again. So we just kept saying it. A lot of pressure on me, man. You better review the fucking air. People are counting on you. Anyways, I've got the mini. So on, what was it, Tuesday?

Apple announced a new iPad Mini, a new iPad Air. They've got basically the same spec. The main difference is the size and the air has a smart keyboard keyboard connector. So H-12 processor, true tone displays, medium cameras basically, lightning ports, not USBC,

bezzles touch, I mean, these are old designs. The mini in particular, the design is seven years old. Yeah. Which is crazy. I don't even know where to start. The bezels, like, like everyone's saying these are parts bin devices and yeah, sure. But also, you said this in the mini review.

like, so what? Who else is making tablets of this class? Yeah. Well, which parts bin do you go to to find an iPad mini screen with pencil support? Well, no, I think pencil support is like, it's the first-gen pencil, right? I don't mean parts spin in the sense that Johnny Ivelick literally walks into a room with, like, a wall of blue bins and assembles a modular iPad. I mean, this is a remix of technologies Apple has already developed. Yeah, they didn't fundamentally change to the camera.

casing. They didn't make the screen bigger and get rid of the bezels. They, it's, it's like parts been insofar as, like, they used a bunch of, like, established technologies and established, like, you know, bodies. They did, it is genuinely hard, uh, I assume to take an A12 processor and put it in a box that was previously designed for whatever the iPad mini had before, an A3. I mean, and A8 is, I don't know. A8. Okay, sorry. Um, same thing. Actually, iPad air is a whole other ball wax which we should get to. But the point is whether or not you're salty about them

not changing the overall design of the thing, it doesn't really make a huge difference because what other tiny little tablet is anywhere in the ballpark of this good? Who do they have to compete with? Yeah, so I said that, and I said Android tablets don't have a great app ecosystem in the review. And then like you do, and the thing

publishes at 7am and 10, 715 rolled by, and I was like, I wonder what the Android fanboys are mad about. And I went and checked. And they're all like, the Galaxy Tab, S5E is a competitor to this. And that might be true. They just didn't ask it. The S5E has a 10.5 inch display.

It's not. It's just the only other like premium Android tablet in the world. Right? And there's a weird Lenovo one that turns into an Alexa with a screen when you put it in the dock. It's like 150 bucks. There's a Huawei media pad, something, something. But all like Android tablet apps, this is just true. Android tablet apps suck.

don't exist. And they really do look like gigantic phone apps. And the iPad app ecosystem, which I think runs into problems on sort of the iPad

pros, is kind of great on the mini. Yeah. And like, so what I was saying before we started was I cut a bunch of stuff out of the

mini review because I realized it's all just reflective of like the mini being damning about the other iPads. Right? So it's not about the mini,

but the mini exists with an A12 processor and like, iOS 12 on the mini is fine because there's no way you're going to replace your laptop with this. There's no way you're going to replace your phone with this. Like just by the nature of its size,

it's a secondary computing device. And so iOS 12 is a secondary computing environment is great, right? You can kind of like make it do a bunch of stuff. You're like, I'm watching a video. I want to browse the web. I'm going to throw the video in a PIP window. I'll bang around here for a while.

Oh, I want to listen to some music. I'm going to throw that window out the way. I'm going to like pop over this app. Like all that's cool. Like it's super cool. And then you try to like extend it onto a pro and you're like, this is my computer now. And you're like, this is broken. So just to clarify, it's not damning of the other iPads as far as their features and then they exist and their size and stuff.

It's damning of their aspiration. Yeah. Like I think the fact that the mini doesn't carry any expectations. Like it's just so obviously a secondary device. Like no one in the world buys an iPad mini and is like, this is my only. computer the way that lots of people in the world buy a phone and like this is my only computer and lots of people have a laptop and that's their main computer and some people have an iPad like no one is buying a mini or at least I haven't heard from them they're about people by people

love the mini this is a true story actually let me let me say this first so I'm talking to I'm like why did you update this thing I thought it was going away I thought you know smart like phones are getting bigger everyone just assumed the mini would die you haven't updated in like three and a half or four years and they're like yeah we that's kind of what we thought too but then people kept buying them. And then Apple, like, and so they did all this research and they realized that the mini, I think, when it was first put out, was the cheapest iPad. Where I'd say, they cut the screen size down. It was the cheapest one. It was the entry point of the ecosystem. And they realized that some people were buying it because it was cheaper, but the vast majority of many owners were buying it because they

wanted the size. And they realized the size was the primary determinant of the purchase. So they're like, look, the people who want the cheap one, we think they're better served with the $329 9.7-inch iPad. And I think that we, I think we've now seen this over and over again. Price-conscious buyers want bigger screens, right? So like across the Android ecosystem, you can buy any number of cheap phones with huge screens. It's just a thing. That iPhone 10R, bizarrely has one of the biggest, bigger screens in the lineup is the cheapest phone. So we know that people who are price-conscious want bigger screens.

So they made this iPad, the 9.7-inch iPad, which has a big, albeit not as good screen. And they're like, but people want the size. So we're just going to keep making the thing at the size, and people are going to keep buying them. I think the design comes down to we got to hold the price point. We can make a lot of margin on this thing. Two, like, Home Depot ships, like, thousands of these to customer service agents every year, like, come to your house and, like, show you a kitchen. Pilots use them. like it's a drop-in replacement for all these enterprise applications.

Oh, and so like they can't change the form factor too much because there's a whole bunch of like point of sale boxes that the old ones slotted into and they need the new one to slot into. It's kind of the vibe I got, right? But then it's like, yeah, but you could have probably gotten rid of the bezels and kept the physical. You know, like, but I think there's like an element here where you can just keep the cost. And then I honestly think that A8 processor, the iPod Touch and the iPad Mini were sort of like the last standing A8. devices. And like, it's got to cost more to keep building old chips than to just take some A12s off the iPhone line, right?

Like, you're going to make a billion iPhones this year. Surely you can spare a couple million A12s. So I think there's like, I think there's just some economy of scale. Like, people are still buying this product. We can, we can actually reduce costs by using a bunch of existing technologies, make the thing a little bit better. We don't have to overthink it. People will just keep buying it.

Then I think that's just where the mini landed. They didn't invent anything. I think the first-gen pencil is ridiculous. It is a ridiculous thing. It has always been a ridiculous thing. I've never liked it. I've always thought the charging is stupid. But it's there.

It works. If you want to do that thing, you can do that thing. Yeah. Here's some breaking news. They told me when iOS, the next version of iOS 12 comes out, presumably next week to support the streaming service, the Logitech crayon will work with the iPad pros. Really?

If you want to break some news right, now you heard it here first on the Verstcast. This is very exciting. I don't know who's buying a $1,500 iPad Pro and Logitech crayon. Will it work with last generation iPad pros? Because, like, the crayon is a genuinely better design than the Apple Pencil. It doesn't roll off the table. It's easier to charge.

I have no idea. Okay. I mean, look, if you want to start your Logitec crayon blog and break it down, I support you. There was a time when every individual tech product had, like, a micro blog devoted to it. But anyway, so the thrust of my review is basically like, I'd forgotten how much I liked having an iPad mini. And the main thing that I like about it is that I don't feel rude using it. It's an unquantifiable thing.

But I go to a lot of meetings. I try not to take my laptop to meetings. I want to be focused. Laptops are very distracting. And then every night again, I'm like, I need to look at something. I need to take a note. I pull up my phone and I feel instantly rude. This happens all the time, right?

And like, Dieter sends me a Slack. I just want to quickly answer the Slack. I pull up my phone. Just feel super rude. Someone says something like, I have a terrible memory. I need to write that down, pull my phone. I feel super rude. But the mini is just like, I'm going to pull out this thing.

It's like pretty purpose driven. You can see what I'm doing, more or less. And I'm just like get this thing done and like come back to you. And it's not a laptop. It's not a big iPad with like all this like crazy. It's just like the size of a notebook. The way you're describing it kind of sounds like it's a big phone for you. Yeah.

But so here's the other damning thing. So there's like iOS 12 on the mini. Right. is damning to the big iPad because I think it works great on the Mini because it doesn't have these aspirations to replace a laptop so it works. And then it's damning to the phone because it's an A12 processor with a lower resolution screen. It has less pixels on its screen than the iPhone 10S, right? And it has more multitasking features. So why can't I run a PIP window for YouTube on my iPhone 10S Max?

Like, just can't do it. And like this iPad Mini can do it. And I think that's ridiculous. So it's like damning kind of like both directions. Right? Like, why can't I just split screen two apps on this iPhone 10S max? There's honestly no reason I could. I shouldn't be able to do that.

But you're right. And I kind of feel like it's a giant phone, but the phone just has so much cultural baggage when you pull it out. Like you're in a meeting, you're talking to someone, you're like start using your phone. You're, you know, like what, it's a cliche. Like my face is buried in my phone all day long. I literally don't feel that way when I use the iPad many. I feel like it's just so much more purpose-driven because it is so obviously not my primary computer. And that's as, it's as squishy of a reason to like a tech device as anything.

But I certainly felt like I'm using my phone less. I don't feel compelled to use my laptop for this X set of things. And when I'm done, I'm going to be done. My strange idea is if you pulled out your phone during a meeting and that was rude, and then you unfolded it and it was about the size of an iPad mini would it become less root? Yeah, probably.

Okay. But I want to know. Yeah, I mean, look, everyone else is showing off foldable phones that are about this size. Apple's like, check out these bezels. It has an 8 megapixel camera with an F2.4 lens.

Like, yeah, you're absolutely right. But it's also $3.99. Yeah. Right? And, like, that's, I said this in the review and I'll say it again, like, every iOS device I've reviewed for the past two years

has been like skyrocketing in price. The iPad prior reviewed, I think was spec at $2,200. The iPhone 10S max that I reviewed is like, expected $1,200. So you're like, I'm always just like doing the stance.

Like, is this worth it? Like, did this ambition get realized? Will this last? Is this random feature that Apple, like, then we do this with, uh, expensive Android phones too, right? Everything's just getting bigger,

more complicated, more expensive. I bet many is like, It looks the same as it did seven years ago. This, the processor in it, well, the last one lasted for four years. This will probably last you for four years. It costs $400. Do you want a tablet of this size?

This is the only one you can buy? It's just so simplified my thought process of the review. Like, do I want a tablet of this size? Well, and everybody that looked at it, touched it, thought about it, was like, oh, yeah, small tablets are really neat. Which made me think of, do you guys remember? from 2011, the HTC Flyer. Oh my God, yes. So the reason I thought of this is the HTC flyer came out about a year before the original iPad Mini.

It was an Android tablet, like seven inches or so, and you could use a stylus with it. And one of our producers, Creighton, DeSimone, great guy, was obsessed with this thing. Carried it around. It was like, I'm doodling. I'm like being really productive. I've got all my stuff on it. And then I could hold it in one hand. And then the iPad Mini came out of year later and it didn't have stuff.

but it like had that like oh yeah small tablets are great and then it like slowly disappeared to both out of most people's minds except for uh walter s mossberg who still used and loved his that now that it's come back everyone's like oh yeah this is great like i i actually do like having a device this size and that social thing that you've been talking about nelai like the the one handiness of it the notebookness of it and potentially the stylousness of it having to be able to use a style of it if you want to um it has a different effect on the room. It doesn't carry that social baggage. And it reminds you of like, it was really convenient to have like a little tablet. Yeah. Now, honestly,

I think everyone just forgot about it. Like, maybe Apple didn't do a bad thing by letting the old ones sit for almost four years. Yeah. So like everyone forgot that it exists. You know what? A group of people is bizarrely excited about this.

They like been tweeting me is like pilots. Like pilots are like, yep, this is the best thing for the cockpit that's ever existed. We just want iPad minis. We finally have them. We're going to buy new ones. We're super into.

it. So there's all these like weird little use cases and corners. But for for me, it's literally comes down to I don't, I can't care, like I just can't work on iPad Pro. It's like never worked out for me. I'd be able to different experiences. And I just think it's rude to have my phone all the time. So what, what fits in this middle zone, it's this product and it's 400 bucks. And at 400 bucks, it's hard to like over nitpick it. Right. Okay. So let's talk about the iPad air for a second. Yeah. I'm working on the review. It will include the phrase.

It's an iPad, but I don't actually think it's just an iPad. I think it's something more interesting. But I tweeted this thought, and I've been rolling around in my head, and I think I know the answer now. But I want to hear from you guys. We just had the re-release the reintroduction of the MacBook Air, and now we have the reintroduction of the iPad error. What do you think Air means now? The middle. That's what it means.

Right? It means the middle one. Well, but it's interesting because at one time it was aspirational, and now it means middle. It was ever really aspirational. Like, it was aspirational for the first ever MacBook Air, which was ridiculously expensive. Right. It was aspirational for the first iPad Air. No, the iPad Air was not priced like the pro.

Like, it came out at the same price points as the iPad 4 Retina. Was there an iPad 4 Retina? There was. But it was the best thing. It was the best thing. Yeah, it was the best one. It was the newest one. It was the best iPad, and for a while, the iPad or the MacBook Air was this thing that was way expensive for what you'd get, but you aspired to have it because it was ridiculously thin.

And now it's a boring computer, and iPad Air is a boring iPad. Well, no, but it's not as boring as the iPad iPad. It's a little bit more expensive. I think what Air means is it means the middle one, and it means you take a pro and you pull out a lot of the stuff that makes it super expensive, and then it becomes. an error. So a MacBook Pro has a, you know, a brighter screen, a couple more ports maybe, depending which one you get, it's got the touchbar, it's got, you know, really high-end GPU, it's got a decent processor. Well, so then Apple's, okay, so take all the stuff that a normal person won't notice day to day when they're like browsing the web and checking email.

Yank that out, it becomes the error. I think the same thing applies to the pro. What do you lose? Well, the screen is, I think, slightly worse on the air compared to the pro. I at least in terms of it doesn't have that like, you know, that nice, rounded stuff. And it doesn't have promotion. It doesn't have promotion, but it sells true tone. You lose a couple extra speakers and you get a step down and processor. Will the average iPad user miss any of that? I think that you also lose USBC.

The average iPad user will not. The one step down that I've noticed going from a pro back to an error is, oh, God, the sounds coming out of one side of it, which is, like, really weird. I didn't think I cared about that. But once it's gone, you're like, oh, that sounds weird. But other than that, like, whatever. And the other nice thing about the air is the iPad error is before, if you wanted to buy an iPad, you had an incredibly terrible choice in front of you.

You can buy a $330 iPad, and then if you want to type something, you've got to find like a Bluetooth keyboard or, nah, and you're like, I just want, I want that keyboard connector. I want to be able to have a keyboard if I want it. And in order to get there, you would have to spend $3 to $400 more. Just a ridiculous choice. You either have to get a Bluetooth keyboard or you have to spend like $3 to $400 more. And now you're looking at the base iPad and you're like, what if I want just a little bit nicer one? It's sitting right there.

It's like $100, $150 more. And there you go. I think they're going to sell a ton of these. Maybe not a ton on like the grand scale of consumer electronics because we know that iPad sales aren't as gangbusters as they. once were. But I think that a lot of people who would have otherwise bought the cheap iPad and been kind of bummed a little bit and they weren't sure why, but they knew that the keyboard thing was there, will buy the more expensive iPad and be super happy. So Apple told me that the $329.9 iPad is by far the best-selling iPad, which is super

interesting to me. Okay. Makes sense. Cheapest one. What is most interesting to me is the amount of people who are currently cross-shopping the old 10.5-inch air with the new, or the old 10.5 inch iPad Pro with the new 10.5 inch air. That's impossible. They're the same. I mean, they're so close to being the same. People will come at me about the processor, but I don't care, man. They're the same freaking thing. The box that Apple gave us to review the key for the keyboard was the iPad Pro keyboard. It says I've had pro keyboard on the box. It's just like, and I use the 10.5. I bought the 10.5 pro, and it's been my iPad. So I'm trying to review the iPad air, and it's actually really

difficult because it's just my iPad. It feels exactly the same. It's, I mean, it's defined, and that's kind of like the part spin idea again. Yeah. They took it on a 10.5 inch iPad air. They took out two speakers. They gave it a slightly worse display. No promotion.

And they added an A12 instead of A10X. I think the A10X versus A12 is like kind of a wash. I don't know. Like, I literally do not think anyone will ever notice. Probably, yeah. But like, the move that made with the MacBook Air was they took a MacBook Pro, And they took out a bunch of stuff and replaced some stuff and put some, you know, less expensive parts in it. And then they gave it a wedge because people like the wedge. Yeah.

Same great keyboard, though. Like, just looking around, tons of places, Best Buy, what have you, are selling the old 10.5-inch pro for $4.99. If you're like the iPad Air at $4.99 is the thing I'm going to, you should just buy the old pro. I'm just telling you right now. You will like having ProMotion and the two extra speakers more than you like eight more months of iOS 16 support or whatever. It's like, that old pro is going away, though. Like, it's not, yeah, you got to catch it while it's hot. But I think that's like a, it's just there.

Right now it's there. And it's a better product at that price than the air. The thing that bothers me about the new iPad era, new iPad Mini, is that this is Apple's old design language. And they've already shown their new design language. So it feels like when you're buying this, like, yeah, Apple's a little slower to update iPad. So maybe it'll be two years until there's a refresh. But you know this is, it's sort of the last of the breed. I mean, Neel, you guys.

got a little bit into the fact that this is lightning instead of USBC, you know, there's a lot of this that's like backwards looking. And so as much as these seem like great buys, if you actually need them right now, it is definitely one of those cases where there is something much better seemingly, theoretically, around the corner. I think I've come around the idea that lightning is never going away. Go ahead, Deuter. Yeah, I was just going to say, that's the dark thought is these aren't backward looking at all. These aren't back because lightning is never going away. The next iPhone is going to have. These iPads make me think the next. next iPhone's going to have lightning?

Oh, you know why I think that? Because the new AirPods have lightning too. Yeah. Right? Like, Lightning is he... Apple had an insane answer. I asked him, you know, 10 different ways. Like you do.

Like, you know, you're like a journalist. Like, sneaky. You're like... Don't say that. You like ask them, you like go through the front door and then you try to sneak in the window if you can't get into the front door. Why not lightning? I was like, let me throw some letters at you.

You, just smile if you like. these letters. No, I asked him like five different times, right? And their answer was we think USBC is a pro feature which I understand in the context of an iPad. What they're talking about is this

enables you to plug your fancy digital camera right in and get a high transfer speed. This enables you to plug in a 4K display or whatever you're going to do with it. Yeah. I get it. It does enable me to do

is tether my camera to it and do live shooting the way I kind of back at it anyway. Yeah, right. First of all, USBC on the iPad is like so limited anyway. But they're like, the higher throughput of the bus is like why it exists and why we want it there. We want to enable all these use cases.

It's pro pro pro pro, only pros want to do this stuff. Everything else is why. And then they're like, no one's going to do that stuff on these iPads. But the idea that USBC, which like literally every phone except for Apple phones has as their charging standard is a

pro feature is fundamental. mentally ridiculous. So I, you know, I think it's a distinction they're making between sort of like, what do the, what does a big base of consumer iOS devices use? It is lightning. And then we have this like middle ground of the iPad Pro that's closer to the MacBook and we're going to put USBC on it. But I think, I just think lightning is going to be here for a long time.

I think the iPhone going to lightning or the iPhone going to USBC is a beautiful dream that will never, ever, ever become reality. Yeah. Like, lightning is a nicer port fundamentally, too. It's smaller. So we'll just see. Maybe I'm wrong, but based on that answer, and again, I really did ask them, like, 10 different ways. I was like, what does pro mean to you?

Like, it was like every which way I could get at it. And they weren't having it. Speaking of the AirPods, we should talk about the AirPods. Yeah. By the way, Dieter, in case you missed it 15 times in my video, Deeter will have an iPad Air Review next week. God. So then the AirPods come out.

That was Wednesday. That's Wednesday. So we're going in like a weird. We're starting in the middle. We're going to the end and then we'll jump back to the beginning. Well, because they also then max the in the middle. But like the mat and whatever. The Mac briefing was crazy.

But AirPods. So AirPods come out. They've changed the chip from W1 to H1, which stands for headphones. The W chips will remain in the watch where it has gone, I believe, from standing for wireless to watch. There you go. H1 chip basically does a couple of things. It pairs faster. It is Bluetooth 5 now.

But still running apples, like if you, to use it with an Apple device, it's still run some custom Apple stuff on top of Bluetooth 5. But it's Blue 2 5 now, so it'll work about other. Will it let me be paired to two devices at once and know where the audio is coming from? I don't. I don't know. Okay. We'll see.

We're going to get them soon. We'll find out. So has faster pairing, both like out of the box of the thing, faster switching between Apple devices. So it's two times faster a switch from like a phone to a Mac. back again, faster out of the box to pair. And it has a better, basically, DSP, like, noise cancellation for the mic. So when you're outside and you're on a call, it'll sound better. And then to the person that you're talking to, not to you. This is like, I realize it's very confusing to describe.

It has better noise cancellation on the microphone. So that when you're talking, the other person can hear you better. And then it has, obviously, Hey, Siri support. So you can say, hey, Siri, it'll, like, let up. Hooray. Like, you know your thoughts. Big news is, um, you're a lot. And, um, wireless charging case, which is Chi, which is cool. LEDs on the front now, lightning on the bottom. So you get that package for $200. You can get it without wireless charging for like $130, $150, something like that. I think it's, maybe $160.

Anyway, yeah, yeah. Some number of bucks, the middle number of bucks. And you can just, if you already have AirPods, you can get just the wireless charging case for existing AirPods for $80. I asked them about recycling AirPods. 160, yeah, sorry. $160. C-box. And they're like, yep, just bring them in. We'll recycle them for you, which is a bit a big question out in the world. So I want to dig a little bit deeper on that because they're

basically made of glue. It's just like, Air pods are like 100% glue. So I kind of want to know what they mean by recycling, but, you know, they feel disposable and I think it's Apple has a commitment to recycling, so they say they're going to recycle them, which is cool. Notably, they're Chi. They are not meant to be charged by air power, which is the wireless charging that Apple announced in 2017, and everybody thought it would come out this week. There was a rumor. I think the Wall Street Journal published something. Why does Chi make that true? Wasn't Airpower going to be Chi compatible? That was, it was built on Chi. There was some story about, like, the Chi people fighting

with the Apple people. I just think, like, the Apple watches in Shee, right? So I think if Apple's going to put out its new wireless charging AirPods, the most Apple move is to say it charges WRLC over airpower. Airpower can also charge your other Chi devices, but the AirPods charge, like, that's the most Apple thing they would do. Yeah, okay. Like, the phone is Chi,

because, you know, you got Chi stuff everywhere, but the AirPods and your watch, you've got to buy the air power. But now, in the second I saw the AirPods charge over Chi, I was like, air power is not coming this week. There's no way to give up all of those attached sales of new AirPods to, like, some garbage Chi pads on Amazon. Do you think we dreamed Apple's announcement of the air power?

It's like a collective fantasy. No, because it's all over the place. It's like, there's like pictures of it. Like people keep finding on like random international Apple websites. There's like a new one today on the Australian website. There's code out on iOS 12 that like obviously shows air power. Yeah, but you could say there's a lot of evidence of like a Roswell like government conspiracy to cover up aliens and stuff like that, you know. Yeah.

There's a lot of evidence out there. The Wall Street Journal did say that they've approved the manufacturer of air power. Yeah. Yeah. And there's been analyst reports, but look, we're recording this on Thursday. Tomorrow is Friday. By the time you're listening this, we can be totally wrong. Airpower could be out.

So just go ahead and tweet at Deeter if that happens. He's out back on. You know what I'll do if it comes out and you tweet at me? You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make a face. I'm going to air glower. Air glower. It's good.

It's good, Dieter. You did a great job. Your mother's very proud of you. Anyway, it didn't come, but charge over Chi. AirPods sound bad. I just need to say it as much as I can. They don't sound great. And I don't know how we went from the,

they sound exactly like ear pods. Remember those, the wired ones? Yeah. Everyone in the world knew earpods sounded bad, but then we cut off the wires. Now everyone's like, these are the best product apples ever made. And it is true.

They are very convenient. They pair very nicely. It is fun to flip the case. All the sort of like cultural aspects of it great. It's a meme. People love them. But I just need to tell you it's a very good meme. Yeah. And it's also, I

like seeing stuff like the H1 chip in the sense that like tech companies do lots of different things. But a lot of times it looks like the thing that this tech company has done was dreamed up by some people in a boardroom trying to figure out how they can capture a market. And then there's other

things that tech companies do that were obviously some engineers in a basement with a stopwatch. And that's, seems like a lot of what this H1 stuff is. Like, it's going to pair faster and switch between devices faster and the battery's going to last longer. Like that, I mean, you know, there's also just the march of Moore's Law that also helps them out.

But that's really exciting because it's just quality of life improvements for something that a lot of people use all day. I think the Apple story fundamentally is they have their chip design team, right? Like they bought some small chip companies and they made them a big chip company inside of like a huge company and that pushes them forward in a way that no one else has really been able to match. So like if there's a reason for Apple's dominance, it's like their in-house chip design team, which is doing the A-series processor, which is like lapping the field, which is doing these custom controllers like the H-1, like all that stuff is cool. Like no doubt. I just think maybe

they should, you know, Dr. Dre works there. They could be like, do you sound good? And you might be able to tell them. That'd be cool. Like, just a fact. Trent Reznor, on the Apple payroll. You just ask him. Do you sound any good? Like, maybe he would tell you.

Lady Gaga, she's not Polaroid's creative director anymore. She should bring her in. Free agent. Free agent creative director, Lady Gaga rolls in, drives on some air pods. Some people think they sound great.

I just, and a lot of, whenever I tweet about that, people are like, they're great for phone calls and they're great for podcasts, which is true. But every time I'm on an airplane and I see somebody walk in wearing AirPods. I'm like, you're not going to be able to hear shit because they don't cancel anything.

Like, you're going to hear engine noise and like a little bit of a podcast. And then every now and again, I watch those people try to turn on the movie on their seatback display and then look at their AirPods in despair and then ding the light because they need my iPhones. Just a fact. All right, last thing, Apple announces a week, new IMAX.

This is all chip stuff. Paul, tell me it's eighth generation Intel chips and some medium good. Vega graphics? And a couple of ninth generation chips. Typically, you have to, like, custom configure. Apple has taken the past, I'd say, four years of computer technology, mostly from the laptop world, and smeared it over its IMAQ line.

You know, like, you can get a really messy bagel, those IMAX. Yeah, you know, those spreads that, like, they're really tasty and flavorful, but they kind of rip up the bread a little bit? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the iMac Pro, you can now get a Radion Pro Vega 64X with 16 gigabytes of RAM, which is a two-year-old GPU. Wait, the IMAX pro or the IMAX? In the IMAX pro, there's a $700 upgrade option, which is the Radion Pro Vega 64X. And that is a GPU that came out two years ago.

Right, but the new IMAX that came out, those are new Vegas or old Vegas? I mean, there's a lot of like 2018 type GPUs. There's nothing new in these. There's a, I mean, there are new er chips. They are an upgrade from existing IMAX and existing IMAX pros. But there is nothing like that's that exciting. It's mostly 8th gen. There's a little bit of 9th gen in IMAQ.

And mostly you have to pay for, you know, really crazy upgrades to get truly new stuff. Yeah. So Apple, when they were, like, telling me about these, they basically were just like, people use IMAs in ways that you don't expect. And it was fine. And they were like, you know, people use them in businesses. And, like, kids use them to learn to code. And, like, families use them to look at photos. And just by the end of it, it's true.

By the end of it, I was like, yes, the IMA exists. But, like, it was just one of those moments where, like, Apple world is so disconnected from the rest of computing. because there are lots of other good-looking all-in-ones now that people just buy. It's not like everyone in HP just fell off the face of the earth. They looked at the IMAC and were getting our ass kicked. And they made a computer that looks pretty good. And it's true.

The new HP all-in-ones look fine. The Surface Studio exists. Also full of laptop parts. I've got to be honest with you. But it exists. It's like a really interesting all-in-one. And so at some point, you've got to wonder, like, does Apple feel that competition?

It's the same thing with the mini. we don't have any competition so they're just kind of like here's some new stuff like we just like bump the chips in it and that with the iMac it's like you do have competition are you just not feeling it at all

like I kind of wonder I don't know every time I see someone with an iMac other than I understand there are certain people who are constrained to the Mac platform and need like an iMac pro for some very specific reason other than that it's just a but why why why do you have this

overpriced bin of laptop parts on your desk with a non- un-upgradable screen. Well, because I will say I have such a bin of non-upgradable laptop parts in my desk at home. That 5K display is amazing for the price point. Yeah. You can't really get that display elsewhere. You can go out and buy a screen and you've almost spent as much money as the iPad.

Like, you're basically getting a free laptop glued to the back of your 5K display. Okay, fair. It's like a weird way to think about it. And that's great. Like from Paul's perspective, the laptop is smeared on. And from your perspective, it's slathered. Like it's like a smear of laptop over the back of a 5K display. That's great.

I mean, like, what do I use my laptop for at home? I like do some work. I edit a lot of photos of the baby. And the 5K display is like tremendous for that. It's like, I have it. But once you configure it to the top end, you're like, this is crazy. Like, this is legitimately ridiculous. Where is the modular?

Mac Pro Apple's been promising for over a year. It's not yet available. I imagine we'll see it at like WWVC in some way. You can spec up an iMac pro with 256 gigs of RAM and it only cost you an extra $5,200. That's ridiculous. And on the other end, the IMac, the 21-inch IMac starts at $1,300. Yeah, that's a little.

That's way crazy. You would struggle to spend more than $600 on an all-on-one at Best Buy. that would most likely be fairly similar in performance. Yeah, but I bet they were there, or every PC manufacturer cheaps out as a display. It's true. Like that display would be like milky blue, right? Like you would watch a video on it and like half the pixels

were just like hold in place while the other half like up to, you know, like they all cheap out in this way. Apple rarely cheaps out in display. I was going to say never, but that 329 iPad is like a cheap death display. rarely cheaps out on display. So like, there's something there. All right.

We've gone on for way longer. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about the event next week, which, if you may have noticed, Apple cleared the decks for by announcing everything else this week. We'll go right back.

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You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-rk.com. Upwork.com. We're back. Like I said, every day this week, there's been some Apple news. Right. You had your iPads.

You had your Macs. You had your AirPods. You had your iPad embargo for the reviews. Tomorrow's Friday. Who knows what will happen tomorrow when you're in your car? Macarena. You could be driving along and suddenly air power just drops out of the sky. You never know.

But presumably Apple released all this stuff because they didn't want to talk about it at their event that's on Monday. It is, look, that list of things I said in years past would have just been an Apple event. New iPad Air, right, new model of air, updated IMAX, updated iPad Mini, new AirPods, all that stuff. That's four new products. Apple would have happily thrown an event for four new products. Apple, Steve Jobs once made the entire tech press come to California to introduced the iPad or the iPod hi-fi, which was just some speakers. There was a time when this stuff would have- It did blowback when they do that. This would have been a disappointing

Apple event. They can't. They've got to at least redesign one thing or launch some one all new product. If they had had air power I bet this would have been like its own little hardware event. Yeah. Right. And they would have set expectations and so nobody, yeah. I mean

they, when they introduced the iPad iPad last year, the new version it was like an education focus and so they had a whole bunch of education stuff, but they just had the one thing. Yeah, they made an entire school full of children missed school for a day so they can talk about how great they were in education. Anyways, but in years past, this would have been an event.

It wasn't, right? It's a slow drip of news all week, this week, so that on Monday, everyone can be focused on their big event to announce their streaming TV service and their paid news bundle and Apple News. Yeah. And maybe some other stuff. We'll see. But I think it's just those two things.

and what we keep hearing over and over again is this is a new kind of event for Apple you can tell they're like the pressure's on like they're feeling it so they cleared the decks they don't want anyone to be distracted get all that stuff out of the way they don't want people to show up and you're like

where are the new AirPods like it's done it came out in a press release on Thursday it's got she shut up by this TV show we're done with this like focus on this in this event what's

particularly weird about it is I think we already know most of the stuff. Yeah. And it's not like rumors necessarily. It is literally Apple has been putting out press releases about famous people they're giving money to for TV shows for like a year. Yeah. And if it's not Apple, it's, you know, their producer or the studio that's making the thing or whatever. Hollywood has a different PR cadence. And so we like we know the names of a lot of these shows.

We know the concepts behind them. We know who stars in them. We just don't know when they're coming out, how it'll be packaged, and how much it'll cost. Right. And if they'll be any good. There's that of key point. So there's a show about like the morning news, like an office comedy starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. There's a show where Snoopy plays some sort of detective, I believe.

That's a real fact that I heard today. Maybe an astronaut? An astronaut. Is he a detective or an astronaut? Snoopy teaches. STEM science technology. Well, that's like being a detective. Enjoying a myth.

Yeah. You're discovering the world. You're looking for clues about how it all works. I'm not going to help you with this one. Whatever air glower. So there's just a long list of shows. And then there's like, you know, the Peter Kafka is the world who know all the network executives. And so Peter wrote a story for a re-code this week that's like, we kind of know what

this looks like. Their goal is not to compete with Netflix. Apple's goal is not to get you to sign up for. 10 bucks a month to stream a bunch of their original content. They have nowhere near enough original content to do that. They haven't licensed a massive library of old TV shows and movies the way Netflix did to launch.

Their goal is we're going to bring you in with these exclusives inside of the Apple TV app, and then we're going to go to partners like stars and showtime and whatever, HBO, and we're going to make it easier for you to subscribe to them and we'll take a cut off of that, which is very much an app store pricing

model, right? Right. Doesn't Amazon already do that? Amazon absolutely already does that. And so Kafka, one of the cable executives on background as piece, is like, this is just very incremental. Like, this is, we understand this model. What Apple doesn't have is a partnership with Netflix. They're not going to sell Netflix.

They're not going to sell Netflix content in their TV app. There are some other big players out there who are apparently not participating. We don't think HBO is going to participate, do we? Or do we know? I think HBO will participate. Okay. But so you get the shape of it, which is. you know, the Apple TV has always had this weird TV app on it. That TV app is in all the other devices as well, or iOS devices as well. You make that the home screen of the Apple TV, and you start to say, do you want to look at HBO? Like, subscribe to HBO through Apple for $4 a month. Subscribe to a bundle of HBO and Showtime and Stars for $8 a month. And then you push the button and then, like, those shows start to populate this TV app alongside Apple's originals.

Right? And like that's a big model. Peter also reported that Apple's going to host the streams now. So you're not going to get kicked out into some other app. Like the TV Apple starts to do the work of streaming the content to you. That's actually kind of a big deal. That's a big deal. Because like a bunch of these other apps, like they've been using BAM to stream or they, they rolled their own and it sucked.

Or they used BAM because BAM was good. Bam is the one that did the good version of HBO, you know, wrestling, blah, blah, blah. But Disney bought them. And, like, all of those contracts are like, they happen to be expiring right now. So Apple handling the streaming means that, like, you can trust that you don't have to go to another crappy app. And you can trust that the stream will actually, like, stay up during Game of Thrones, which nothing else does, except for BAM. Anyway. Yeah, so I just feel like we have the shape of it.

The big question is, what's it really going to look like? How are the apps across all these devices going to, like, operate? Are they going to release a version for the Mac? There's no TV app for the Mac. Are they going to do something on the web? Are they going to update the iTunes app that they just shipped for Samsung TVs to be called something else other than iTunes? Which is ridiculous. So there's stuff to be learned at this event.

But there's a part of it's like this is going to be, you know, 45 minutes of watching TV show trailers. Or like having famous people will be like, we're so excited to work for Apple. Yeah, no, that's, there's going to be a lot of famous people in the room, I'm sure of it. What happened to the dream of this being, like three years ago or whenever? rumors started of this being like for cord cutting. Like is, there no live TV play in here at all? You know, so right now the TV app sends

hilariously delayed push notifications. So like, it, you know, like it'll send you notifications like, the Golden State Warriors are mounting a furious comeback in the fourth quarter and you're like, look at, and it's like the games went over for three minutes. Like,

they have this thing where they do want to kick you to ESPN. They do want to kick you to, So I think sports in particular, because Eddie Q loves sports, but I think that'll be like, we're going to disaggregate the ESPN app and like layer that through here. Or we're going to have you push a button and go to that. I don't think they're going to do like the Sling TV, the PSVue, sort of like streaming service cord cutter thing. Because honestly, those products are just not great, right? Yeah. And they're also not consistent across the country.

You never know what you're going to get. Like hard to use DVRs in your web browser. Yeah, which at one point was my dream. Don't get me wrong. Like a complicated web-based DVR was once the pinnacle of technology. We've just moved on. How about this? After 45 minutes of watching trailers for PG and PG-13 rated TV shows.

Ooh, PG-13, I don't know, man. That might be a little bit risque for Apple. Sorry. I don't want to push it. PG-rated TV shows, the lights dim, and then Jane Munster walks out and announces an Apple television. Yeah, that's what I want most of all.

There's just like no way that's going to happen. I don't think they put the iTunes app on Samsung TVs that they're getting ready to release their own TV. What I think is crazy is like, you know, the Apple TV story starts sort of in like the modern era with Steve Jobs telling Walter Isaacson that he's like, quote, cracked it. He's going to build the simplest TV.

He's like, finally figure it. it out. And like, we've just not, just stumbled our way to this place where they're going to sell, like, a showtime subscription in this TV app. And like, I have a lot of doubts. I'm just going to be really honest. Like, I always have a lot of doubts of streaming services. Like, we're in the, we're in the moment with streaming wars, you know, and like, I do think we should make the Go-90 tracker of success. And, like, I do think the Warner one is going to go 90. And I do think, you know, like Disney Plus will be a success. I built the tracker. I built the tracker. Yeah. You go to Gone 90. You have to use a desktop because I don't have

Drag and Drop working on mobile. It's gone 90. Biz and then you just drag all the different streaming services and you make it your own scale. So if you put Netflix on the left and then Go 90 on the right and so it's on a scale of Netflix to go 90. There's also a Queeby mode and it just turns everything into Queeby logos. I love that you add there's an ad piracy option and that's what adds Plex.

Yeah, Plex and Plex and Plex and Plibex. Offboard time. That's just tremendous. All right, go. Gone 90. And yeah, tweet a screenshot of your rankings and also there's probably a lot of things I should have. What's the scale on the left and the right? What are the labels?

You choose. Okay. So I put Netflix on the left and Gone 90. I feel like that is the spectrum of streaming properties. Yeah. Why does Quebe get such a giant logo on everybody else's small? Because I ran a script to auto resize everything to like, 100 pixels wide.

And so it depends on the aspect ratio. Gotcha. This is tremendous. Well, I think you should fix Go 90 and Netflix on the scale to make it clear for people. Oh, just always put them there? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

All right, I'll try to do that before we release. The Go 90 scale of success. Maybe that'll be a button. Recommended scale of success. Are you saying that, like, other people might potentially pick the crunchy role to criterion channel scale of success? Yes. I want to know what you think.

Anyhow, I'm the only reason I'm so skeptical is it doesn't sound simple, right? It sounds like another thing that you have to pay for that's going to ask you to pay for more stuff that we don't have all the stuff. And I already pay for all sorts of stuff. What if it just becomes, like, Amazon's thing isn't simple either, but it is because I get it through Amazon Prime, which I use to pay for other services and then it's just kind of there. and it's another thing that keeps me in prime. What if Apple just does the bundle and makes Apple Prime and you get iCloud storage that isn't ridiculously low, which you have to pay for now,

and you get Apple music, and you get the news thing, and you get the TV thing. Yeah, but what's in the TV thing? Well, who cares? If it's got like enough, it's got like five things. Yeah, you're buying it for the iCloud storage. And then so maybe you get a subscription to HBO? Well, no, that's extra.

Like, what do you get? Like, that's what I don't understand. Like, what are you going to get? Like, you get the morning show. You get, like, Apple's eight shows that are good. But that's insanity. Well, I mean, it works for Amazon. No, Amazon bought another library of stuff.

Yeah, but, like, you, on Amazon, you get, like, The Marvelous Smith-Bazel, and you get John Krantz-Krasinski's, you know, Tom Clancy Punch People TV show. And you get, you know, some other, like, specific Amazon Prime movies. It's nowhere near the library that you'll get from, you know, Netflix or HBO or whatever, but like there are a few exclusive shows on Prime. Yeah, I just want to point, but Amazon also made like Manchester by the Sea. Yeah. Right.

They're like, they're playing at that level. Right. And they bought this huge library of other stuff where they're like, do you want to watch The Martian? It's free on Prime streaming right now. Apple just has its like 25 shows where Tim Cook is giving notes like, please make them less mean. and don't show Apple products in a negative light. What I'm saying is the Amazon strategy makes sense because you buy Prime,

and then you get a reasonably good Netflix clone along the way. Right. And then they're going to make some more originals. By the way, Amazon's originals program, like it's TV studio, film studio operations. Notable disaster. Like not going well, falling apart, executive turnover. Jeff Bezos is like,

we got to make more mass market stuff. We can't just do all this niche, meme stuff. But then they also have like the library of TV shows and movies that like is fake Netflix. Or then you have Netflix where you just like pay 12 bucks a month and literally any interest you might have, there's at least a C plus show you can watch. Yeah. Like just down the line. And then there's also Schitt's Creek, which is a delight. But like literally you're like anything. I want to see dogs and it's like here's 50 shows about dogs. We just made them like I don't even know who did them. Here they are just like all day and all night. You're like I want to watch

Spunky children fighting aliens And Netflix is like Here's some remix stuff we made Here's the Punisher Nothing happens for the middle four episodes But you're gonna like it Like I just I don't see Apple doing that

Apple doesn't need to do that They don't need to defeat Netflix They just I guess I don't know what they want people to do They need to they want people to just live In their little bubble In the little Apple bubble And hang out there more time in the Apple Apple land

Yeah, I mean, their whole pivot is to services revenue. So they want you to spend more time on their devices in Apple services where you will spend more money. Got it. Nailed it. Right. If they, if 10% of iPhone owners spend $1, right, they've made $100 million. Like, it's fine. Like, but I just, it's just, to me, it's crazy that they haven't, this is what they're going to have. Maybe they, maybe they did buy a big old, you know, old library of stuff. And that, you know, that's possible. Maybe that's why Netflix has no old movies on it. Apple owns them all.

Yeah, maybe. It's like possible. The reason I'm saying, like, they haven't in a definitive way before the event is what Deeter was talking about before. The cadence of Hollywood is so different. We already know. Like, there's a post on our website. Here are the shows Apple's going to launch.

Like, just confirmed over and over again. Like, we kind of know what that catalog looks like. We don't know is like what's the sell to the average iPhone owner. How are you going to buy it? And then that sits next to pay for Apple News now, and you'll get access to, like, a range of paywalled magazines and potentially the Wall Street Journal. And that, to me, is, like, actually sounds pretty good, right? Like, no ads, no tracking, like, a bunch of high-quality magazine stuff that I don't like running into the paywall. Like, I'll take it.

But how much is that going to cost on top of everything else? I like this Apple Prime idea. Yeah, I mean, there's also rumored they're going to put out credit card next week with Goldman Sachs. What if you could buy groceries at Apple stores? Think about it. That would be incredible. The genius bar is replaced by the snack bar. Yeah, I mean, we'll see.

I think Monday's going to be a big day, but I think you just look at this week where they just cleared the decks of every other question that people had about their existing line of products, right? Are you going to update air power? What's going on at the iPad Mini? What's going on? These IMAX had been updated in like 600 days. Like, I just like did it. Like, here's a bunch of new stuff.

We're going to own this week of news. we're going to take the focus off the gadgets and we're going to talk about ourselves as a services company with our big streaming service and new service launch. There's also a little bit of a rumor that they're going to do something with games, but I got my debts.

Yeah. Gene Munster, Apple, television. We've remastered all your shows in 5K. I mean, it's kind of like they should just make a TV. At the end of this is all. Oh, here's another question. Are they going to lower the price

to the Apple TV. Yeah, they need to. It's really expensive. Roku's killing them at like $39. Are they going to make a little stick? Like, I doubt we'll hear about any of that stuff on Monday, but they need scale for these services. I don't think they can just count on like iPhone owners to watch, you know, whatever shows they make on their phones. Like, they got to hit TVs. I walked you through my parents like Apple TV upgrade saga, right? They, they were going to get a new Apple TV because the old Apple TV was dying because Apple stopped still supporting it. So go to Best Buy to get a new Apple TV. Oh, those are like $200.

Well, you could get a whole TV for like $2 or $300. Yep. So they got like a $600 busi-oh. That's like enormous. Yeah. But it all started with just wanted to get a new Apple TV, but they're real expensive. Yeah, no, that's right. You go in, you spend, you know, $800 in like the TCL with a Roku.

It's got Dolby Vision. It looks beautiful. It's like one of the best TVs that's reviewed. it will track the shit out of you until the day you die but it does the job and like I think most people don't care like I think that's just the answer

like most people just want the big screen and so now you gotta convince them I think Apple has to find a cheap way into that and I don't think it's just Airplay 2 on a Vizio like if their solution in getting people to watch this reboot of amazing stories is to have everybody with a Vizio TV

airplay it from their iPhone I think they've probably made it. It's probably a miss. It feels like a miss. The rumor is that they gave Samson the exclusivity and they'll roll out the app to everybody else over time. But that's just a rumor. Who knows?

All right. Real quick. Are you, you know, like, Insta sign up for the streaming service? No. Absolutely not. He's clicking the piracy mode button right now. I have this feeling that some of these shows are going to be bad enough to be, like, memeable. Like, it's going to be like a can't miss cultural event.

of like Apple trying to entertain you with television. And so that I'll be sad about, but I don't think I'm going to pay for it. I'm very excited for this event. I'm very excited for this pivot. I'm very excited for Apple to like confront what it means to put actual cultural products into the world as opposed to just talking about like AirPods

as being the culture. Right. Like Apple believes that it's like a fashion and culture company. Like the ecosystem of Apple Watchers believe. Apple loves musicians and artists. Well, Spotify steals from them and sues them. I can't. Oh, that story is so annoying.

I said we weren't going to do tech policy on this show. But if you want a hot 10-minute rant about Apple and Spotify, I can deliver. You know, we're... Break him up. That's all right. All right. I won't do it. Maybe I'll do it after this.

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Mm-hmm. Every week. Always. You bring the Vergecast home with a segment that you like to call. I believe I have met this robot dog before in a past life. Deja Dog.

Have you guys seen this? This Tombot? Yeah. So, so, you know, there's that therapy seal, I think kind of started it all. all. It's like, so this idea that there are people who, for whom it is therapeutic to have something

like a animal to pet and to hug and to love, but they, for whatever reason, can't have a real animal, so they have a robot. And this is just, you know, moving along that, that spectrum, this is a robot that was designed by the Jim Hinson creature shop. And that's possibly why this dog looks so. familiar to me, but I cannot put my finger on it. Like, it kind of looks like, I mean, there is like a Muppet aspect. Like, maybe there's a little bit of Ralph.

Yeah. But also, it's like one of like the Chris's and the Avengers maybe, or like Matthew McCona. I can't, I can't decide what robot. You can't decide if this robot looks like Matthew McConaughey, Chris Hemsworth, or a Muppet. Yeah, well, like, Dami mentions, who's the, what's the, from Neverending Story, the Dragon thing? Yeah, I see that in there. Falcour.

Yeah. But it's just, I don't know. It's like someone I know very well from many blockbuster films has put on a mask and is now a robot dog that's therapeutic. Here's my question. Yeah. Why isn't there? Oh, there is. I was going to say, why isn't there a Falcour technologies?

because that sounds like the name of an evil company in a movie. Yeah. But did you know that Falcour is the innovated data platform that powers the Netflix UI? I actually think I did know that. Well, I love this dog. This dog called it was a sensation on the internet. Also, surprisingly affordable. How much is a dog?

Less than, it's like $300 for early backers. So it's probably a $600 dog. But like, Ibo is almost $3,000. Yeah. All right, I'm buying this dog. But he's wanting a dog for a long time. And I think this Matthew McCona Hay dog is the way to go. Very obviously.

All right. Dieter, tell me about Stadia. Oh, my God. What symptoms can it... What symptoms do will it cause? I think that was a Steven Sinovsky joke on Twitter, by the way. So I just give full credit there. So Google announced a streaming service with one game.

They haven't announced all the games for the price. It has one game, but there is another game that... will also come to it. Yes. So it is a video game streaming service that has the following advantages. It sits in Google's data centers where they stream the games to you, which means that they theoretically will have better latency than other gaming streaming services of the past. You can buy a Stadia controller for an undetermined price,

and it actually connects via Wi-Fi directly instead of like through a console, which means that that will also theoretically help with latency. It will be streamable to Chrome browsers, Android tablets, Android phones, unclear if it will stream to, say, the Chrome browser on an iPad, my hunch is no. Or a Chrome browser on like an iPhone, my hunch is no. Because it's basically just a streaming video and all this stuff happens in the cloud, you get a bunch of advantages. So one, if you're playing it on your phone, it's the same hit on your battery as though you were streaming a video. so you can play for longer.

It saves states across devices. Wait, can we just back up for one second? I can keep going. No, I want you to keep going. Yeah. I just want you to unpack that real quick because I think the fundamentals of game streaming

are much simpler than people think. Right. So basically all that's happening here is your controller talks to a game running in the cloud. Right. And they've managed to minimize latency between your controller and the cloud

and the video streaming to your Chromecast or whatever. Right. So that it looks like you. your controller is controlling something that's happening locally. So they're just streaming a video to you. They're just streaming a video to you, and you're controlling the video with your control. And you're controlling the video with your controller.

It's like band or snatch, but faster. And no one's ever managed to pull this off before, I think is the key. Correct. And we would be filled with unending levels of skepticism and doubt if Google hadn't done this project stream beta earlier in the year, where we were like, oh, actually, this is okay. But that doesn't mean that we are fully bought in and we think that latency won't be a problem because I'm not. I think that you'll be able to play a bunch of games that'll be super fun. But I think that if you're a twitchy first person shooter kind of person, I think you're going to have slightly more problems with the latency here. You also need like the, they said like also it plays great on terrible connections. Like look at look at it on this 15 meg down connection.

It's like, have you been to America where 15? Meg Down is like pretty good in a lot of places. Most places, in fact. I think they're recommending 25 down. Anyway, there's the nerdy stuff of what are the actual gaming, like, hardware that they're going to put in their data centers. And I think Paul can tell us about that. And then there's a very, very complex discussion about its interaction with YouTube.

You can save stuff directly to YouTube. You can, like, click a button to get YouTube, like, tutorials on the thing you're stuck on. And if you're watching a game on YouTube, they will just. litter the YouTube web page with Play Now buttons. There's just going to be links everywhere, but instead of opening up a web page, it's going to open up a game in Google service. I'm like super into that.

I think that's cool. I will say my big question here is, one, why do they name it's stadia? Yeah, I don't know. It's not great. And two, like, again, this works in theory. There's actually been some companies that have done it before. You're on lives or what have you.

Didn't Sony bought Gamefly or whatever? What was it called? Was that what it was called? Yeah, I think so. And then Microsoft is going to be doing this later this year or two. Like they're coming next. Anyway. And Microsoft's one is called XCloud.

They say they're going to go big at E3. So it's coming. My major question is like the economics of how games work doesn't really match up with like a subscription like this. So like a Halo game. I don't know that it's a subscription. You don't know that. You could have to pay for each game individually. We have no idea what the pricing model is. You could still be 60 bucks a game. I just fully assume it's going to be a subscription. I don't know why. I just fully assume it's going to be a subscription. How does the gaming not line up with subscription? Well, if you want to play Assassin's Creed 3 or 5 or whatever the latest one is, Assassin's Creed, pick your historical context. The latest one I think is Greece. Do you have to buy Assassin's Creed or does it part of a subscription. Or is it, like, Xbox gives you, you know, in their thing.

And even Sony does this a little bit where you get, like, a bunch of old games and, like, random indie games, but then you buy the AAA games. If there's a subscription here, I think that's more likely. Or it could just be that, like, you've got to pay the subscription to get, like, your save states in the cloud and just have access to the service, and then you have to buy the games on top of that. Unclear which of those are. But, like, people pay for PlayStation Pro and Xbox Live subscriptions.

all the time. And Nintendo Switch subscriptions. Like, that's just part of the industry. And the only question is, will that subscription for Stadia give you access to games or not? Yeah. And I just,

for whatever reason, I think I just assumed, just the way that Google works and the way that they want to make it easier to play games, I don't think you can put up that subscription. I don't think you can have, you know,

you're watching some streamer on YouTube playing some AAA game with like play now buttons and you hit it and Google's like, that'll be. $60 please. Like that doesn't feel in line

with that goal of we're going to blur the line between watching and playing. Because they were talking about all kinds of crazy shit. Like you're watching your favorite streamer play a game. You push the button, you're in the queue, you're going to play against them next. Like that is awesome. Like that's a cool idea.

But the idea that you're also going to just like discover games this way and constantly be purchasing. Those are, they left a lot of questions wide open. Basically. I mean, that said, if people are using these a significant fraction of the time they're playing games,

let's say like an average gamer probably plays video games, at least like four hours a day. And so if someone's playing, you know, two or three hours on stadia a day, and, you know, Google listed their specs. The one thing that they were weirdly detailed about was some specs. Like they've got a custom GPU that is equal to the PS4 Pro

and the Xbox 1 X combined combined 10 terraflops they've got a custom x86 processor which is wild and 16 gigabytes of RAM but in a sense that almost doesn't matter because it's I don't know it's instanced

right that machine isn't dedicated to you it's hard to describe so they have this phrase we're giving the entire data center to the developer yeah and I feel like Google's actual vision here is not that you will rent from a library of old games, right?

Like, it's not, it's not the old-timey Netflix model where a lot of movies exist and we will allow you to watch them easily. It's a new timing model where we think that there are new types of experiences that would be possible. One thing they mention is something like an order of magnitude or definitely a lot more people in the same multiplayer game at the same time because everything is running all in the same place. Like the data center that is the multiplayer server is also the data center that is the computer that is going to blast the video of the game. And there's conceivably a lot of other

possible video games that aren't really about running one game on a machine, but you're just looking at views on a game. If that makes sense. Like, like, it, a typical multiplayer game like Overwatch, right? You have like however many people are since I think it's five on five. It's been a while since I've played Overwatch. You have five on five people, right? So that's 10 people playing a game, right? Yeah.

So that's 10 machines, 10 instances of Overwatch. And then there's a server and that's running one instance of Overwatch and that everybody's connected to that server for that one match. But in the stadium model, it's possible that you could just run one game. and blast out 10 video streams of that game, 10 different perspectives of that game as just streaming video. You know what I mean? So it's almost irrelevant what these specs are

because it's not like all the experiences they are expecting to do are just dedicated playing Assassin's Creed by yourself. Yeah, and obviously multiplayer is a much bigger deal than, right? Like, that's what people are watching other people stream on Twitch and on YouTube. it's rarely like I'm going to watch this full let's play of Assassin, like one person slowly grinding through Assassin's Creed.

I do it, but I, like, that's where the action is, Paul. And so I think you're right. The specs are irrelevant because they have nothing to do with you. You're not buying those specs. Next year they're going to change. Yep. Right. Right. Like, they're going to swap in some new cards. It's going to be fine. Like, uh, I

think they said that just because it's gaming and like that's flashy and fun. Right? And like, the old consoles are at the end of their life cycle and the new consoles are going to come out. I think the bigger point here is exactly what you described, which is can we re-architect games, especially these like huge

multiplayer games, like run in this world? And can we re-architect games so that it's a platform lock-in like the world has never seen before? So I will say that Tim Sweeney, who's the CEO of Epic, has just like been arguing with fools and my mentions

for like three days. It's great. Tim, come on the Vergecast anytime you want, instead of just tweeting with and around me. But, you know, there's, like, a lot of competition in PC gaming stores, which is great to see. Yeah. Right. Especially when, like I was saying, like, I can rant about the App Store versus Spotify all day and all night. The problem is there is Spotify is nowhere else to go.

They want to be on the iPhone. Apple sets the terms. The, you know, the Epic store is like, what is? It's like 8812 is the split for developers versus a store. They're not even trying to make money. Steam is something different. Like, they're all over the place. I think that's great, right?

Like, you're seeing this bifurcation. On the console side, Microsoft does not seem to care about where Xbox Live goes anymore. It's on the switch now with Cuphead. Like, that's cool. And then Google's like, we're going to have exclusives and you only be able to play for it. It's like, this is insane. I don't like, it's so weird because exclusives are simultaneous, like my love. least and most favorite thing as someone who plays video games.

Because exclusives mean that like mom and dad are fighting and now half of the good things will not be available to me. But exclusives also mean that this is a really hot market that, you know, companies are willing to sink a lot of upfront investment in to make a lot of games and entertainment to try to grab market share. Console exclusives are the presence you get when your parents are divorced. because they're really trying to impress you. Dieter, I'm going to go with this

and we'll just take this next logical step. This implies that Sony and Microsoft were once married. Google is your prospective stepdad who's trying to win your love. I truly, as someone who is married to a divorce lawyer, I'm going to tell you, none of this is correct. Zero percent of this is accurate.

My parents have made it a loving relationship for my entire life. So one last thing, which we're going to get into way more once this thing gets released later this year for whatever it costs and, you know, whatever games happen to appear on it besides Doom Eternal, is I'm just going to quietly mention that here is a Titan of Industry, a company that like has a dominant share in online. video, YouTube, slightly threatened by an upstart competitor that got bought by another giant Twitch, using its market dominance in video to push a new service in a slightly different domain. Yeah, I think that's out there. I was arguing with Russell Branden about this yesterday, or whatever day studio came out. Yeah.

You're making the antitrust argument, right? Like, they're a giant, they're going to leverage YouTube to kill Sony. Yeah. Break him up. No. No, I'm actually, I'm less sympathetic to it in this case. Like, their competitors are Microsoft and Sony, a little bit of Nintendo, right? That is fundamentally already a duopoly, right, in console games. In PC games, it's basically a monopoly, right?

There's, like, these additional stores, but it's all running on Microsoft's. Oh, John Porter, our reporter from the UK, pointed out, you know, like, one piece, one way you could use this technology is, you know, run a desktop. and that if this thing works, you know, Stadia runs on Linux, and so Linux gaming will finally become a thing, and that means that this is the year of the Linux desktop. Right.

Okay, so I think that... For Linux gaming. It really is. So you pull that all the way out there, and suddenly where, like, Linux desktop is going to... They've got to do it. I don't think our antitrust conversation in tech, I think it is great to say

Facebook is buying Instagram, which is a legitimate competitor. We should prevent that because we don't want them to like monopolize upstart competition. But Google like spending a shitload of money next to YouTube to say people on YouTube are already doing this thing

and now we're just going to let them do it here. It just seems fine to me because it's not like I don't think they're going to kill Sony and Microsoft. I really don't. Like Microsoft is going to release a competitive service to this in a matter of months. Right.

And it's going to be. pretty good probably because Microsoft is good at video games and they're good at cloud stuff Google's really good at cloud stuff extremely medium at video games yeah right like there's like I don't know I'm just like yeah I'm not saying like

this is the one where like to Paul's point the giant tries something and just like falls off the cliff you know like Stadia is the thing that leads Larry Page to like quit Google like Sergey Brain is like you know he's sitting at the edge of a trash dump holding a stadia controller being like this could have worked Like you never know

I mean I'll be very sad in five years If I'm complaining that like My whole gaming library is stuck in stadium I'm trying to leave stadium because they're spying on my children But I can't leave stadia because they have my you know Like that would be annoying But if all they do is just add more competition And flexibility and like more options to an already

Like I think that's one thing that's just really wonderful about gaming is there are so many choices you can play in so many different ways, especially on the PC, especially if you run Linux, and it's got your graphics card has good Vulcan support. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Paul, if this is the thing that makes Linux on the desktop, like super happen, I will be so happy for you. I will come out there. We're going to do, we're going to make some Linux PCs together. It's going to be great. I will say, this is the best thing ever happened to Android games ever because nothing like gaming on Android relative to iOS has always been kind of eh despite the fact that there's been many attempts to make Android gaming

phones I think this is the best shot at making a really good Android gaming experience that we've seen in a long time but it's just going to stream the video yeah but you you need a connection to do that yeah it's 5G bro if this stuff works on like go go Wi-Fi 5G at the edge actually the one thing Google did not talk about was 5G and this is like the prototypical 5G example, right? Everyone talks about VR blah because of latency. But this thing that they're describing a zero latency high bandwidth application is a, this is 5G. This is 5G stuff.

And by the way, 7,500 data centers or whatever with high-end Linux PCs and custom GPUs, that is not cheap. And so Google either is going to need to charge a lot of money for a subscription or, It's going to need to charge per game and also charge money as I don't know or this is a lost leader for something else That's evil nefarious or just a typical Google. I don't know Somehow organizing the world's information because isn't that what they're always trying to do? You know what? Secretly scan your books. If they bundle Google Reader with Stadia, I'm in. You can run a local instance of Google Reader and it's doing the RSS scraping in your local in your Linux desktop in the cloud?

Or is at the edge. Well, so here's the thing. Google Cloud is like not as much of a competitor to Azure or AWS as like Google wants it to be. This is a way for them to just instantly drop a massive successful application on Google Cloud. They just do it. Yep. And they can go out to all these other customers.

So, of course it's Google. Like, do you know how they're paying for those 7500 data centers at first? The money they make on Google search. which is also how they pay for Android. Like, it's fine. But at some point, this probably has to look like a business for them. Otherwise,

you know, they're a public company. They can't just be like, we made Stadia because we're a bunch of nerds. We love it. We're just going to lose money on it forever. Well, that's just,

I feel like in the back of their mind, is there this thing where it's like, well, even if the gaming thing doesn't work out, we need to deploy all this edge computing hardware anyways. Yeah, because 5G is coming. I think we've determined

this is a giant conspiracy to own the 5G. 5G cloud. Is that true? I don't know. That's definitely not true. Yeah. I'm not going on. KAAA. Well, here, I'll tell you this. You know, Google and Sony are a partner in a lot of things. Sony is not good at software. Just a fact. I can, I can tell you all about that for my experience today, if you'd like, but yeah. Yeah. Not great as software. I mean, like, but Sony TVs run Android TV. Sony, you know, make some phones every now and again just for the sake of doing it. There's a world in which, you know, PS5 has like Stady integration.

I mean, kind of cool. PS5 is just a Chromecast. That'd be amazing. They're like, we didn't get this right. It's a Chromecast. I mean, I'd be into that. I mean, look, I was saying last week I set up PS4 remote play and I bought a controller and I use it. Well, this week I have used it.

And it's pretty fun. It's pretty cool to just be able to play like PS4 games on my phone with a, like, a steel series controller. it's not perfect, but it works just fine on Wi-Fi. There is an enormous amount of lag, and because it's like this weird, it talks to the PlayStation network stuff, and then it connects directly to the PS4 and the PS4 streams.

So just like making it connect is a lot of Sony software, just like having to do stuff. Like steam whistles are going off. Like the factory foreman's like, get that connection. Like 25 minutes later you're playing a game. It's like not smooth.

But it's pretty cool, man. And so, like, if Google can do this faster, I'd be super into that. All right. Paul, one last thing, Oculus Rift S. Yeah, this was a nice little surprise. Maybe everybody knew this was coming. I didn't know this was coming. Oculus is upping the resolution.

This matches. It's basically Oculus took their upcoming standalone quest headset, right? which has higher resolution screen and inside out tracking. So you can have hand controllers without having to put up those little cameras on your desk. And then you can never stand far enough away from the little cameras because you have a small apartment. And so VR turned out to be a $2,000 investment down the drain. So you got inside out tracking. And so modified controllers to work with inside out tracking and high resolution display.

And so it's basically a quest if you have a PC. And the same PC specs, they like lowered the refresh rate on the screen so that even though you're driving higher resolution display, you can use the exact same minimum spec that worked with the original Oculus Rift to power the new headset. All the games work. But yeah, it's $400 and they're phasing out the old original Oculus Rift. But they wanted to be pretty clear that this is the $400.000. their evolutionary move for the Rift. This is not their revolutionary. I don't know, whatever,

whatever is actually revolutionary in their eyes, but this isn't it. There's a wave of these like higher-res headsets coming out, right? It's an HPD one this week. Yeah, there's an HP one. I mean, this one is actually built by Lenovo, and I think Lenovo's done some Windows mixed reality stuff, and so Oculus partnered with Lenovo on this one. Um, And then I think there's some other, I think there's some vibe stuff coming out. I'm not sure. I haven't paid too much attention. But I was not expecting a Rift-Dast.

Yeah, it's cool. Dieter, do you want to make your disclosure just so you've done it. My wife, my wife works for Oculus. We have to do it. Someone will call us out if we don't do it. Can I tell you guys my favorite thing from GDC? Unless you want to talk more of Oculus. No, no, favorite thing with GDC, we should wrap this up.

Okay. A few months ago, NVIDIA, shows up with FizzX 4.0. It's so exciting. It's so much more accurate. It's simulation. It's going to be so much better physics. So physics is the physics engine in Unreal and Unity, obviously the two most popular game engines. So come to GDC and Unity gets on stage and they're like, we're making our own physics engine called Unity Physics. And also we're partnering with Havoc to use their physics engine too. And then Epic gets on stage and says, Unreal is going to have its own new physics engine called Chaos. And so neither engine has announced official support for PhysX 4.0. So I think there's a big beef brewing in the physics of game engine space. The reason it's really exciting to me is because multiplayer physics is a really rare thing still in video games.

It's kind of a next-gen thing. And to do it, you need deterministic physics, which is one of the features of unity physics because floating point numbers are weird on different hardware. There's a lot of stuff to it. But I'm excited that, I'm hoping that that's one reason why these multiplayer experiences that are being pushed by Epic and Unity

are going to have more physics in them, and that's why they needed their own physics engines. I could be totally off on that, but that's my hope. Is it just like the race? Like the cool thing to do is say you have a physics engine now? Like the cool thing last year was big AI. I feel it feels like a beef. I feel like what it feels like is that

Nvidia's been puttering along with FizzX and either FizzX 4.0 went in a different direction than these engines wanted or is like has a wrong sort of architecture or something. Didn't match the specs that they have. I like it. And so... I like a beef.

Yeah. Beef, the original competition. The theme of the Vergecast, is there enough competition? That's another app we should make. Like, is there enough competition? And we just like label markets. Put the iPad mini all by itself in the corner. Yeah.

All right, we got to wrap up. We've gone way over time. Apple's having that event on Monday. That's going to be a thing. We're going to get into it. There's been all kinds of coverage all over the Verge. Dieter and Nick are going to be there. That's going to be super fun.

We'll follow up. I'm actually going to be at the Winter Music Conference in Miami Beach at the end of next week. I'm giving out an award with Danny Deal, best DJ technology. It's maybe super fun. We'll do some demos on stage. So I'll be, I'm going to try to find a way to be back on the show, but there's a chance I won't be. But there's streaming stuff. I want to talk about it.

So I'm going to try to figure it out. You can also listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka, which I assure you next week will be very interesting because we all this stuff. Recode decode with Kara Swisher, Pivot with Kara and Scott Callow. and all three seasons of why you push that button are out in the world, and I will tell you we're talking about that next season right now, so it's very exciting. Listen to those.

You can tweet us. I'm a reckless steers at back lawn, Paul's, at Future Paul. We do love to hear from you. Pull over in your car. Send that tweet right now. And give us five stars wherever we can. And go to voxmedia.com slash pod survey and just tell the people you love the verge cast.

Just do that for me. It'll be great. Everyone will love you for it. I'll love you for it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. promo code