The Vergecast - Gadgets are getting weird — and so are iPhone homescreens

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

Nilay, Alex, and David talk about what's happening on social media — and around the web — in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Then they talk about their early impression of Apple's public betas, from the redesigned homescreens to the iPad's fancy new math abilities. After that, it's time for a bunch of gadgets all asking the same idea: is this anything? Then it's off to the lightning round, filled with 4K streams and leaky infinity pools. Further reading: A custom sticker printer infuriated clients with a pro-Trump mass text message Shooting conspiracies trend on X as Musk endorses Trump Donald Trump likes TikTok, not Zuckerberg. The FBI said it found the Trump rally shooter’s Steam account, then took it back The Trump rally shooter had a Discord account, company says The Trump rally shooting is a cash cow for the dropshippers  The FBI says it has ‘gained access’ to the Trump rally shooter’s phone  J.D. Vance likes Lina Khan and crypto, hates ‘Big Tech’ Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, and tech elites back a pro-Trump super PAC Apple’s public betas: all the news on iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and more Apple is finally embracing Android’s chaos iOS 18 might help you rescue photos you thought were gone forever The watchOS 11 beta slowed me down, in a good way RCS in iOS 18: Apple’s new messaging standard almost solves the green-button problem Testing Math Notes and the Calculator app in iPadOS 18 Phone mirroring on the Mac: a great way to use your iPhone, but it’s still very much in beta Canon’s long-awaited EOS R1 and R5 Mark II have eye-controlled autofocus Dyson unmasks its super customizable OnTrac headphones A long-delayed hands-on with Essential’s skinny Android phone This case turns your Apple Watch into a tiny iPod Google solves its Pixel 9 Pro leaks by just showing the phone early Leaked photos reveal Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold Xreal Beam Pro review: an AR tablet with good ideas but not enough power The OnePlus Pad 2’s vibrating stylus simulates writing on paper Sling TV adds 4K streaming for free Comcast will have high bitrate, low latency 4K feeds of the Olympics OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s $27 million mansion is a ‘lemon’ with a leaky pool, lawsuit alleges 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. Hello and welcome to Verchcast, the flagship podcast of buying a $27 million mansion that sucks. We're going to get to it.

We're going to explain that idea in detail. It is very good. It is also just a tiny little symbol of the moment that we live in now. What if we didn't think this through? and then spent $27 million anyway, and then blamed everyone else. It's all right there. I'm not going to tell you yet. It's all right there.

I'm a friend, Nealai. David Pierce is here. Hi. I also very much enjoy that story. I was putting together the rundown for today. And one of the nice things about putting together the rundown is I get to just decide in the lightning round what I want. And I put my name next to it in bold with great enthusiasm.

And it is one of those things. I love a thing that's a metaphor for something. but you don't know what, but it is for sure a metaphor. Yeah, like a vibes of four. Yeah. That's pretty good. Yeah, that's right. It's just like, oh, this story is the correct vibe for this moment of America.

Alex Cranes is here. Yeah, I don't own a house. But if I did, it wouldn't be that one for a variety of reasons. All right. There's a lot to talk about the Apple Betas came out this week. We've got a what David is calling an is-this-anything gadget bonanza. And then we got the lightning round. Unsponsored.

At this point, someone just started a company called Unsponsored. Just putting that out there. That's pretty good. But we should start with what is arguably the biggest story in the world, which is the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. And then the RNC in which Trump was nominated and announced J.D. Vance as his running mate, as the vice presidential nominee. And I want to spend a lot of time on this. It feels important to talk about. It is the biggest story in the world.

And there are lots of verge stories in this story. For example, I think as we learn more about the would-be assassin, who was 20 years old, it feels likely that his digital footprint will reveal a bunch. And that means things like hacking his phone were immediately important. We've talked a lot about cops trying to hack phones on the show and on the verge over the years. And they got into it almost immediately. And that's because they've just gotten good at it. The FBI isn't running to Apple to ask them to break the phone open. So there's that sort of stuff happening as that investigation goes forward.

more immediately important in the context of the verge, and the Verge cast is what happened to the social networks afterwards. We've talked a lot about content moderation on the show and whether or not social networks have a duty to the truth. Mark Zuckerberg has famously said he doesn't want to be the arbiter of truth and set up a weird fake Supreme Court for content moderation on Facebook platforms. We're at a place now where they appear to have given up. Right?

You would put COVID. It's sort of the high point of content moderation, controversies and discussion and interest from the platforms. Maybe not in terms of success, but certainly in terms of volume. It was the moment everyone was most aggressively on it one way or another. Yeah. And whether, you know, like, are you going to amplify conspiracy theories?

And there was just a lot there that has resulted in major lawsuits. And one of them just hit the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court said, no. The government's allowed to talk to the social networks. Like all of that happened. And it feels like it's in the past. And we've been sort of talking about it. But then the shooting happened.

And you just saw in real time the social networks, Twitter, X, whatever it's called, threads. They were good at it for one second. They were like, this thing happened. And here's video of it. And here's some photos of it. and here's everyone just reacting to it for like one second. You could verify that a thing had happened and they were ahead of the major news networks, which are very, very cautious in breaking news events like that.

So if you just wanted a shot of pure adrenaline, they would give it to you. Well, and this was actually an unusually perfect case in that sense because you had a televised event, right? Like he's on stage talking as all of this is happening. Like the person this is happening to is right there in front of the camera. camera, you have what turned out to be some like truly historic photographers out there working, taking shots that ended up being really important really quickly, and that stuff gets uploaded faster than ever. So we had this like primary source material faster and more sort of remarkably

than almost anything I can ever remember. Like the speed with which what you would call like the photo of the thing started floating around the internet was just unbelievable to me. It was like seconds. Yeah. And it just was there. And then you saw the sort of like weird everyone quoting the like CNN or New York Times headline that was more cautious than the rush to judgment on the social networks and be like, why this is they it's like the big networks are cautious. The rigor is the point. And like there's a gap here. And that gap has only gotten wider, which is utterly fascinating to me. There's no attempt to moderate pictures of a shooting. Like, A guy got shot and there's pictures of it everywhere and there's no attempt to moderate it. On top of that, there is just an explosion of conspiracy theories from everyone. Everyone is a conspiracy theorist right now and they're all just like flooding onto these platforms, particularly X. And there's no attempt to slow it down or fact check it or anything like that. And you can just see like, oh, the knob got turned.

We're just not doing content moderation. We don't care about this. We're going to do the really bad stuff. You talk to people who are still working in the industry. They're going to continue to not, they're going to continue working against child sexual abuse material or just like abject pornography and platforms that aren't supposed to have it. They will forever and ever copyright infringement will be everything that the platforms care about. But this, they're just like over it, right? The idea that harmful information can spread on social networks and the platforms of any responsibility, it's gone.

And I think this one's a marker. Like, it feels like a real marker to me that that's where the information environment is now. And for all the other stuff, we talk about, like, AI or sludge or fake photos. Yeah, it all happened immediately after this event. And nothing happened. You know what I think a lot about in these events now is the sort of public. turn Mark Zuckerberg made over the last several years where he went from being the guy who was talking really earnestly about how hard meta and Facebook in particular was trying with content

moderation and saying things true things like the reason we get so much crap for this is because we're the ones trying the hardest and the most transparently like I think that's basically true and even he eventually was just like you know what this is actually not worth it like all I'm doing is signing myself up to get yelled at I'm going to go back to posting about new WhatsApp features and cool stuff in the Metaverse. And I'm going to go back to being the product guy. And Nick Clegg, who nobody cares about, gets to be the one who talks about content moderation.

And I think that is, to me, is so indicative of how we've gotten to this place of like, it's somewhere between like resignation and nihilism, where there is a sense that this isn't going to get better. So why even try and what does better even look like? Because no one agrees on what it's supposed to be anymore. So it just feels like at some point the only like rational thing to do is just throw up your hands to be like, you know, whatever, you guys do whatever you want, I'm out. And it really, really feels like that's where everyone has landed. Yeah, it's a value proposition, right?

Like there is no value in content moderation for them at this point. And in maintaining that theater of content moderation, the value has just vastly diminished over the last few years. So it's like, okay, I don't need to do it anymore. I can move on to other stuff. And we've seen that a lot of things, a lot of these kind of theatrical moments, particularly in big tech where they're like, like, oh, yeah, we, you know, we care about being good. We care about doing all these things. They no longer have to.

They realized that actually doesn't net them as much as they need it. They thought it would. And so they've just kind of said, nah, never mind. Yeah, it's just fascinating to me because, you know, the immediate reaction from everyone, I was like, tone down the rhetoric, be good to each other. We're all Americans. And then a day later, all of the social platforms are flooded with conspiracy theories. My favorite one is the shooter was in a video that was an act.

ad for Black Rock, which is a private equity company that is an investor in, like, gun companies. And they did something at a school. And he was like, in the background of the video that they did about the teacher at the school. And so now there's a Black Rock conspiracy theory. Okay. And it's like, even that is like, fine, fine. You should be able to post that to social media. Like, whatever.

You want to have some wack-a-dews, like, idea. But you look at Twitter and it's like, because of the volume and because Twitter has driven away so many otherwise sane people. or X has driven like so many other. It's not just like sort of conventional wisdom, right? And it's like, oh, this is the stuff that actually poisons the discourse, right? This is a thing that actually makes it harder to bring people together and actually creates the social division. And the platforms have basically given up.

You can see it on TikTok, too, in a very different way, right? It's just people yelling each other all day about this and, like, insisting that one side or the other has it out for each other. And the platforms have basically given up trying to stop it. And I, there's, it's an election year. It's bound to be polarized. But that's, to me, that's the big verge story here is there was a moment several years ago when the platform was really wanted to create healthy conversations.

That was Twitter's metric. And now they're over it. And like meta is like threads is a place for conversations. And what that amounts to is people just asking questions where they appear to be idiots. So people will yell at them for engagement all day long. Yep. Like everyone's like people on like three open threads and like every third post is Someone's like, I just took a bite of an orange without taking the peel off.

Did you know that that's bad? It's like, what the fuck? Like, truly, what are you talking about? I posted on Threads the other day that Amazon is a terrible website because Amazon is a terrible website. And I had a bunch of people accuse me of engagement bait for it, which I really enjoyed. It's the first time in a while I've been accused of engagement bait. It made me very happy.

Dreads is the first platform that has completely dissentivized people from asking questions. because no matter what you seem like you're Jason Clout. It's very good. It's good stuff. But no, I think to your point about the like matching all of that sort of giving up on content moderation with the fact that what like the FBI does immediately is try to get into the shooter's phone is like it's it's both getting worse and higher stakes all the time. Right. And so much of what we've been seeing over the last few days is like Discord. released a statement that the shooter had a Discord account.

Like that, that is news that he was on Discord. And there, there's been this weird back and forth on whether there was some kind of like, not manifesto, but like hint as to what was coming on a Steam account that seems like it was and it wasn't. And so we're in this place where it's like,

this stuff matters more than ever as they try to figure out what happened. And yet the ability to figure out what is actually going on feels like it's getting further and further away from us. Yeah. And especially if you're just a normal person who's just opening an app on their phone. Right. Yeah. So that's that.

We're going to cover a lot of that. It seems important. I'll give you one other example, which is just a very neal example. These photos that we're all talking about. Those photos were taken by professional photographers who are in the pit to get paid to do a job with very expensive cameras. People have sort of arguing with the settings of the cameras, by the way, which is very nerdy, a thing to do online. those photos are owned. They're copyrighted images.

One of them is owned by the New York Times. I think the other one's owned by the AP. They're everywhere. There's just straight copyright infringement. All the merch are seeing, the hats with the photos on them, it's a straightforward copyright infringement. The photo agencies and the Times and all those other companies, they're going to have to issue a bunch of taketowns.

We went out and asked them, and basically all of them were like, we are evaluating our options. Weird. Weird. Like that photo feels like it immediately belongs to the world, right? But it's super doesn't. Well, and in part it feels that way because all of these other machines move so much faster than the lawyers for those news organizations, right? Like the Etsy's popular page was filled with that kind of merch that you're talking about.

Like Amazon has a thing that you can print on demand. Like literally all you have to do is upload a photo to Amazon and boom, you're selling merch. like it is crazy how quickly that stuff is able to happen now, and it's happening faster in every other part of the system than within these organizations that are actually trying to figure out what to do about it. And so they all figure, you know, I'm going to go, I'm going to make my money, I'm going to sell my t-shirts, and I'm going to get out before anybody else has even, like, figured out what their first move is.

And I would just wrap this up. We sent a lot of time talking to AI. And boy, do I get the emails when we talk about AI and hint even a little bit that AI might be useful or interesting. That it's stealing work, that it's stealing creativity. If you have those feelings about the AI companies, and you can and should, I won't stop you. How do you feel about someone whose job it is to stand in a place where you might get shot at, take some of the most historic photos in the world, and immediately watch that stuff get stolen by very opportunistic merch vendors on Amazon?

Is that bad? Like, maybe, but I don't think anybody has the same immediate reaction to it, the way they, that I know they do when we talk about opening eye. Like, there's something there that's weird. We spend a lot of time talking about how copyright is the only functional regulation in the internet because it's effectively a speech regulation. And you're about to see it used in a way that feels very much like a speech regulation. You want to sell a hat with this photo on it.

Some photo agency is going to come and tell you that you can't. And like, reckoning with that is right next to the content moderation question. Because a lot of people are going to lose their minds because they feel like that photo belongs to the world, or those photos belong to the world. Anyway, lots of verge stories there. I'm confident. You remember the Shepard Ferry picture of Obama? We covered the copyright case around that photo of Obama for like 10 years. And we did a story on it like six months ago. It's going to be that again, right? Just like, what does it mean for these images to exist on the internet and the way they do? And who gets to make money on them? It's like kind of one

question. And the second question is like, that is content moderation and the content moderation apparatus or information environment is it's in a I think as Alex was saying like in a pretty nihilistic space yeah like you have to make sure there's not the worst thing be clear that bar it's like a free for all yep all all right so that is that event immediately thereafter uh the Republican National Convention this week uh it was not a quiet week for politics in America president Biden has COVID it's like chill times all around yeah uh not a quite weak by any socialization. The only news of the R&C that's worth talking about is Trump picked J.D. Vance,

who's senator from Ohio is his running mate, his vice presidential nominee, and then a million people in tech came out in support of Trump. Elon Musk, the Andresden Horowitz partners, Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Just like, every crypto bro you can think of is pro-Trump. They love J.D. Vance, who was a venture capitalist, took a lot of money from Peter Thiel over the years. There's just a reactionary right wing crypto bro situation there. There it is. We will cover it more. We don't run out and talk about it in the Veritas now. I want to make sure we do some like reporting on it. Yeah. But Jadie Vance is a really interesting character. And I

I don't mean that in the like you should read his book, which is bad. I mean that in the it's not good. And the movie's worse. I mean that in the the, the maliability of his positions is really interesting. His relationship to the power of big tech is interesting. He was just at a conference that Aaron Lauren Finer was at called Remedy Fest, where he said, I think Lena Khan's doing a good job. Why does he think Lena Khan's doing a good job? Because he thinks they should break up Google. Why does he want to break up Google so he can push weird right-wing conspiracies on the internet? Like, you start at, oh, we agree, and then you like drill down and it's like, oh, the flow of information is not going the way that some of these people want.

So we will use the power of the state to break these companies up. And you just end up in this is like total horseshoe theory, strange bedfellous moment. So we're going to cover a lot of that. I'm just warning the Verchchast listener, like, it's coming because it's so much. There's so much weird Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel, crypto tech money now involved in this presidential election that it's impossible for us not to cover it. Because Peter Thiel famously stayed out of the last one, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, he said he was.

He said he would, yeah, yeah. It's out of control. All right. I just, you know, I'm like a cranky gen X-Rey. Imagine how I feel what this entire situation, but here it is. Anyway, iOS 18 betas. They're out. They're here.

No, David's been checking a bunch of them out. Like, David, you risked your phone. You took the hit for the rest of us. Yeah, I started with the iPad because I was like, that's safe. it's just an iPad. I have thousands of them. What could possibly go wrong? And now somehow I'm running iPad OS 18, iOS 18, MacOS Sequoia, and the new TVOS.

Like, how is, how is this my life? Everything is broken. My batteries have just absolutely gone to hell. But I get to use the cool new stuff. It's fine. It's a trade. I will say, the single most important thing that has happened to me in my technology life this year, I'm not exaggeration.

is having RCS on the iPhone. Well, it's like saving your marriage, right? Like, literally. My wife uses an Android phone. She's a pixel bro for life. And steadfastly refuses to understand that when she sends me a video, it looks like a potato every single time.

So, like, what will happen is the woman who runs our daycare will send Anna an adorable video of my child, and Anna will forward it to me. And I literally can't see it because it just, just eight pixels stacked that sort of looks like blonde hair. Like that's just all it is. Yeah. But now I have RCS.

The photos are big. The videos are big. Like it works correctly. I don't have to like make every make her send me Google Photos links anymore. It's the best. And it's like a little wonky and it falls back to SMS too often. It's getting better as time goes on. I think like the networks and the carriers are all kind of figuring it out.

But RCS on iPhone, like huge win. And to all the people who. have been in my mentions telling me like, oh, you silly Americans, we all use WhatsApp. First of all, congratulations. Like, I don't know what to tell you. Great job. Second of all, making people switch messaging apps is impossible. It's just, I don't care what messaging app you use.

Try your best to get all your friends and family to use a different one. Just try. Best of luck, it's not going to work, no matter what it is that you use. And so for us here in the good old US of A, we're stuck with text messaging. So anything that makes text messaging slightly better, humongous victory. I'm excited for this to roll out wide and for people to... I'm excited to see if when RCS rolls out wide with iOS 18, if the green bubble stigma reduces. Yeah.

I actually think it's going to. I really do. I do. Because the main things that it improves are, what I haven't done is like really stress test group chats with this. So that is like the main problem, right? So I'll have to see how that does. But the ability to get read receipts and the ability to send high-res, images and videos, and the typing indicators.

Those are like the three things that immediately my messaging system with my wife got better. Also, the tapbacks work a little better. But now that you can use any emoji, it's still kind of wonky on the Android side. Because if you'd use one that it doesn't recognize, it just punts it through as a text message. but it's like it's not all the way better and there's all the new i-message stuff the like animations and the text decorations and all that that you can do that you still can't do in android but it's much closer and i think it's like it's not going to get all the way better but i think it's going to get a little better is this going to work in messages on a mac yes i have been rcsing

from my mac but only because it's linked to your phone just forwarding to your phone does it break as often as like i feel like when you're just text messaging it breaks all the time. It was actually worse at first. Like when I first downloaded all the betas, it was really slow and was occasionally just failing to send messages at all. But in the last, I would say, week it's been super stable.

So I have high hopes for where this is going to land. But it was definitely won't be won't have to do endless follow up once this hits wide if people like it. Yeah. You even try the phone mirroring on the Mac too. That seems amazing. It is. It is and it isn't.

Like it is because it works, right? It's like it's like continuity camera in the sense that like it just, it just mostly does the thing. And every once in a while it doesn't for some indiscernible reason. Like Liam, our producer, we were on a call the other day and he just for the whole call couldn't get continuity camera to work. And then like the next time you tried it works. And phone mirroring is a little like that.

But the biggest problem is you can't change the size of the window. So if you're on a laptop. screen. It shows up like relatively close to kind of real size of your iPhone, which I think is what they were going for. But if you're on a big, densely pixel display, it shows up teeny tiny. It's like, I'm on a pretty, I'm on a 27 inch screen here. And the iPhone on my screen is like half the size of my actual iPhone and there's nothing I can do about it. And it drives me nuts. That is great. I'm sorry. That's, that's great. It's like, I know that's like a beta bug. Like they have to know and they'll do something. But it's actually just, just, just.

window. It's just hilarious. We solve it. It's such a stage manager problem where they're like, what if we give you a new way to do, like, no, let me drag the corner of my window to make it bigger. This is not complicated. It's very good. Does it, it's, you don't have a touch screen on a Mac. So it doesn't like do that. If you have the magic mouse or the magic track pad, it's great. It just like maps all the gestures the same way. You swipe and you scroll and everything else. On a, I use a Logitech mouse and it's basically unusable. You, you like, click on the bar at the bottom to go to the home screen. Some things will scroll. Some things don't scroll. You can't scroll left and right. So on Instagram, if there's a gallery, I just can't do it. I think some of these

things will probably get better over time. I also think Apple, it's really, it's like on a laptop, it's solid, right? Because you have the trackpad, you have the gestures, it all works fine. But Apple is just not interested in you if you don't use exclusively Apple gear. And so I think this is like, for all of us Logitech fans out there, this is going to be. be problematic. Yeah, I was going to say this is this is kind of common for all Apple integrations on the computer. You're just like, okay, cool, I can't do any of this unless I buy a magic track pad. And then I have to use that instead of a really good mouse. I don't want to. Yeah, pretty much. I hate the magic track pad. Like, I know there are a lot of people out there who really like it.

I hate it. Yeah. Like, I get the idea of it, but because it's so far away from the screen, it's so divorced from what's actually going on that it feels like it's trying way too hard. and it just feels bad at the angle my hands are at all the time. I hate it. No, I can't stand it. That's why I use a track ball. Because the track ball, you can sometimes set like a key, so you can still get a lot of the gestures in by, like, hitting a key and using the ball.

But with a regular mouse, you're just like, well, I guess I don't, I don't, horizontal scroll ever again. Cool. Can't do it. I'm out. I can't waste to try this. A tiny little phone monkeying with a mouse. Oh, it's going to be great. Just truly for me, I suspect there are going to be lots of little things.

do with it. Like for me, like the one I wrote about in the story is my thermostat only works as a mobile app. So just being able to like fire that up from my laptop is really handy without getting my phone out of my bag or whatever. But truly for me, it's just going to be a way to drag and drop things from my computer to my phone and vice versa. Like it just solves the airplay problem of I have a photo here and I need it to be over here. And it's easier and faster. And that feature's not out yet, but it's apparently coming. And just as a drag and drop machine, I'm very excited. about it. Yeah. You got to get home bridge, dude. No. I'm telling you. You need a little raspberry pie that just bridges your thermostat into home kit. You'll be great. Then you get home assistants

to also be a bridge into home kit. We could do this for you. Alex and I are waiting. Yeah, we're here. We're coming down. We can put a little Tomogachi home bridge server in your house. I'm stuck at trying to get a lock for my front door that I can open with my fingerprint. And even that, Anna's like, no. Keys are great. She's not wrong. Keys are great. Somebody like hawks a luggy on it and you're just like, I guess I don't get in my house ever again. Exactly. Once you get to, you can unlock this door by beeping your phone at it. Then the flip is my wife is like, I don't ever want to see again a key again in my life.

Don't you dare. It's not a choice that we have. We need Becky and Anna to hang out. Can we make this happen? We were test driving in Rivian. So next week on Decoder, it's a Sierra Ravian, RJ Scringe. And so we had a Rivian to test drive. and they didn't give us the keys.

Rivians do come with a regular key fob, but they just gave us the cards. And I showed them to, I was like, these are the keys. And she was like, no, they're not. Just rejected. She was just like, I'm never going to draft that card. No, thanks.

She's like, I don't want to know anything about that at all. Like, zero percent interest in your dumb key cards. All right, we got to talk about the biggest thing in the beta, which is a calculator in the iPad. Yeah, that is it. I mean, when I think about WWDC, like, what did they announce? Some bullshit and then a calculator app for the appended. I mean, that's basically right.

Change your life? Is it like a whole new world? No. I confess I am slightly disappointed by the whole calculator thing. You haven't been doing like high school algebra this whole time? Wow. So I think Apple really thinks that if you're like a graduate student studying math, that you're going to love this.

And I think Apple also thinks there's like tens of millions of those people in the world. And they're wrong on both counts. But the weird thing is so like the calculator app is fine, right? It's a calculator app. And I think it's so funny that Apple is like, we wanted to really take the time to get this right. It's like, no, dude, you shipped the calculator app and then you also made another feature. Like you could have just shipped the calculator app. It's just the calculator app with bigger buttons.

I don't know how to be clearer about that. That's what it is. but the cool thing is is math notes right and it's like that is both it's the thing inside of notes where you can you can handwrite stuff and it'll do the equations for you and that thing is incredible when it works which is a lot but also missing some sort of obvious stuff like you write a list of numbers and then you draw a line underneath and it'll automatically sum those numbers up for you right and then you can actually tap on one of the numbers and drag a slider to make the number go up and down

super cool and it attempts to do it in your handwriting which failed spectacularly for me but i think that's just because my handwriting is so bad it's like borderline unreadable i've talked to some other people with pretty good handwriting and they've said it works much better so your mileage i think will vary depending on your handwriting uh but there's just little things so right so like one of the use cases i've heard a bunch is like you're you're totaling up expenses for a weekend right i'm in the middle of planning vacation and we're trying to like total how much everything is going to cost so you write a bunch of numbers down, it'll total them all up for you. But then if you go next to it and you write like food colon next to the, you know, $225, the whole thing falls apart. It just like

doesn't understand what your equation is anymore and it won't total anything up for you. So it's like you have to, you have to operate under these very like specific confines of what it understands as an equation. And it's awesome. And as long as you do that. So this is what I mean by like graduate math, right? Like if you're sitting there doing math problems as math problems, it's awesome and it works really well. But if you're like a person taking notes and you want to do math inside of them, it doesn't work quite as well. Does that make sense? So it's for like just kids who have homework. It's for doing math.

Like I, it's like that really is what it is. It's like what I want it to be is like do the math inside of my notes as I take notes. And it is not for that. It's for doing math problems. Do you think that the iPad Pro is now? going to become two like mathematicians and scientists what the iPad mini was to pilots. I need to write this story. I am so convinced that this pilot thing is a lie.

And I have no evidence for this, but I'm so sure that like three Delta pilots got iPad minis. And then Apple was like, yes, this is it. Every time I fly, they're still bringing on briefcases for. a paperwork. Like, if this got replaced by iPads, I don't know where it is. But anyway, all that aside, I do think Apple really, really, really, really wants the iPad to be an education device. Like, I think the way that a whole generation grew up with Macs in the classroom, and basically the generations recently have grown up with Chromebooks, Apple is, like, desperate for that thing to be iPads. And I think it sees the pencil in particular as a way to get there.

I don't necessarily know if it's going to work. I'm also not the target demo, so I don't know. But it's very clear that that is, like, even going back and looking at the demos, they're doing really sophisticated math, like, not the kind of thing that a normal person does in their day-to-day life. And I think for the sophisticated stuff, it works better than for just, like, trying to make sense of my notes. I'm going to miss Texas instruments when the TI83 gets killed by the iPad Pro. There's a store in my little town. I'm not sure if they make any money selling anything other than T83s to high schoolers.

They just have a wall of T83s and then all the high schoolers in town go to that store to buy their T883. And it's just so confusing. The whole thing is confusing to me, especially because when I was in high school, 20 years ago, we were using T83s. Yeah. 25 years ago. Is that the most enduring technology of the last two decades? I feel like it is. Here's what I learned about the TI-82.

The 83 is different. The case of a TI-82, the shell, was exactly the right size to fit a Game Boy pocket. So you could just slide a Game Boy pocket up into that shell. And the thing that we had to figure out was how to hide the sound the game. You know, did you're teacher's like, gosh, and you guys really doing some calculations over there. Furiously calculating. Dude, we were just fully playing Game Boy in the back of that. He is math in so hard.

His parents are going to be so proud. But the problem, you had to turn it on before, before he walked in, because you can't shut off the startup beep of a Game Boy Pocket. Yeah. Ding. Definitely not caught at least once. All right, two other Apple things I want to talk about.

One, very funny. Apple has partnered with Tabula to put ads in Apple News. You don't know what Tabula is, except you obviously do. It's the chumbox provider in every website in the world. including our own. We don't like it, but we don't work for free. So there's some tabula ads at the bottom of our pages.

They make our company some money and then they pay the bills. It's famously the belly fat ads, right? For years, that was who was serving the belly fat ads. And we've written stories about the belly fat ads. I think it was Caitlin Tiffany wrote a story for us that like chased all the way down what the one weird vegetable is. Oh, no way. It's corn.

It's nonsensical. Yeah. all bad but apple doesn't want to do ads they had a partnership with NBC to sell ads in Apple news it didn't work I don't think they got the scale and now they have this partnership with Tabula and it's like what what kind of ads are we going to see in Apple News now and then you look and Tabula is actually a huge company like massive company because they just put the garbage across the entire web and wait did Tabula buy Outbrain the other Chumbox or was it vice versa?

No, it didn't happen. It got broken. Oh, it was so big it wasn't allowed. Yeah. The FTC said, no, only we must have competition in the Chumbbox industry. I can't believe we didn't do features on Chubbox warfare. Oh, my God. Anyhow, very bad.

One of the least on brand deals in Apple history. Yeah. And I think they're going to keep it because what are you going to do? I think Apple is at the, what are you going to do, phase of this, where they were just like, yeah, whatever, it's money. What are you going to do? You're going to go somewhere else. You're going to not read Apple News. Publishers are going to respond to chumboxes and Apple.

Well, look at your sites. And I think they're just going to take the money. There's no way that, unless it's like egregiously bad, which with Tabula could be egregiously bad. Yeah. I don't know. Just a weird deal for them all the way around. Like people reacted to it so negatively. I don't think we give a shit.

Yeah, I think that's right. It's just Apple being a content creator, right? Like, they're in the industry of content now in a way they haven't been for a long time, and this is just like finalizing the form for that. Yeah, it's just if you think about Apple's pitch to everyone. This is not it. This is like putting the ads back in the games. This is the premium experience.

This is trusted publishers. It's not just garbage, and then it all the tabula ads. Yeah. I mean, this is what, this is what endlessly chasing services revenue eventually leads you to, right? Like, it just, it just gets uglier and uglier as time goes on because you have to keep finding ways to turn pennies into dollars and turn free things into pennies. And it's, it sucks. And like, this is going to go in the news app. It's going to go in the stocks app. Like Apple has gotten slowly sort of frog-boilingly aggressive about advertising all over. IRS and this just feels like it feels like it's about this will not be the last thing we see from Apple with ugly ads I don't think but but don't worry David because in just seven days you too can lose seven inches off the waistline but not if you eat corn stay away from corn the one vegetable you have to avoid why don't we hawk supplements we could all we could be doing the show on a boat uh the other piece of Apple news was much more like I don't think wherever

We're going to hawk supplements. You all know that I want a boat, but there's a line. And that's it. The lightning round remains unsponsored. If you want to buy Nelai a boat called supplements, though, that's pretty funny, and I will allow that. Still on the table. That's still on the table.

And there's one last piece of album. I think is really interesting and sort of like in a tangential way related, which is the sort of competitive pressure put on the app store by the, the DMA and the EU and buy emulators means that Apple has now approved the first, like, 90s PC emulator for iOS. So it can, it's UTMSC. It can run Windows XP. It looks like Windows XP.

Mac OS sign in Linux. If you want to run Linux on your phone, which I think you do. This was, they rejected it. It was going to go into Alt Store and then Apple approved it. And you can see just that competitive dynamic occurring where they do not want the other store to be good. Yep. So they are loosening the rules of their own store over and over again, and that competition is working. It rules.

I think it was Riley Testit, who runs Alt Store and does Delta and has been on this show a couple of times. I think it was him that posted basically, it turns out the best way to get your app onto the app stores is to threaten to be on Alt Store. That's exactly. Yeah, he did. It's true. Like, it is real that like any, it is increasingly clear that if you want to get something on to an iPhone, there are going to be other ways to do it. And Apple is so desperate to keep you in the app store that it will bend its rules in any direction it has to to keep you there. I believe I owe somebody some money because I said on this show not that long ago, I would be shocked if we got a full PC emulator. Because Apple's rules have been very clear that it is, it is like, it's, it's, like, it's, it's for retro games, right?

Like that was clearly what Apple wanted these things to be for. So this strikes me as yet another goalpost move that I didn't even expect for what Apple will allow. Is it a PC emulator? It's XP. So UTM will let you emulate all the way up through Windows 11. So I have not tried it in the app, so I don't actually know what's possible. But West Davis was trying out XP and it took him like two hours to install. Yeah, these things are not easy.

But you can emulate an x86 PC. Like, I think with some work, there's probably a lot more you can do here than gets credit for. Also, you could emulate XP and then emulate a Windows 11 computer with an emulator on Windows XP just turtles all the way down this bitch. Yes, hell yes. So there's a reason they've not wanted, like, general purpose computer emulators because they don't want people to run apps on them.

Right. It's a big, complicated loophole, but it's a loophole. You put a general purpose PC emulator on the phone, and then anyone can just run whatever software they want without paying Apple 30%. Not a loophole that Apple will allow. But now they've allowed it. And what's fascinating to me about this is like, maybe on the phone this isn't such a big deal because whatever, it's a phone. An iPad running macOS 9 or even Windows XP is like, wait, does this rule? Like, is that, I did a lot of work in MacOS 9.

I, like, many things happened in my life in the context of MacOS 9. Like, yeah, I'll just run MacOS 9. It has better multitasking the iPad does today. Yeah, that's real. More customization, too. Yeah. The app still just quit in the background on you all the time in MacOS 9. Windows XP actually has technically more advanced multitasking than MacOS 9.

So it's just like you just like find yourself running in the circle. We're like, wait, does the window management and multitasking of an emulated operating system from 20 years ago? Is that a better iPad experience? I mean, it honestly might be. Do you think we're going to get to the point where you can emulate a Mac on your iPhone and then mirror your phone to that Mac that's being emulated on your iPhone and then use that phone? God, I hope so. That's the dream right there. That's the dream.

I want to use my phone three levels deep on my phone. That's what I'm going for here. I think you just invented Atrix, the Moorola Atrix. Oh, man, the thing ruled. It did not. It did not. Anyway, I'm very excited for this emulation scene, in particular to hit the iPad, because this is the thing that Apple has feared. And if you get to a place where it's just like easy, where it's like push a button and turn your iPad into a Windows PC, and people start doing it, that's the thing that makes Apple take iPad multitasking seriously.

I don't know where you get there. It just, there's a glimmer of it now, which is fascinating. Competition, it works. Yeah. All right, we got to take a break. We are just, I don't even know. We're way over. It's next week already.

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or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. All right. We're back with what David has called the Is This Anything gadget bonanza. David, what does that mean exactly? So one of my favorite kinds of gadgets is when somebody makes something and then just sort of of hands it to you and they're like, is this? Did I do anything here? Like, is this something? Do you like this? Does this solve any problems for you? And this week was an unusually good week for,

is this anything gadgets? And I mostly mean that as a compliment. I love gadgets that are like, I have a weird new idea about the future. Let's see if it works. That is like the verge is built on those gadgets. We love that stuff. But this is an unusually weird week of is this anything gadgets. But first, the first one of them, it's good that we're running over already because we have a real, what is a photo apocalypse to talk about here. Which, Nelai, you came in real hot about this before we started recording. So we should just talk about this. There are these new Canon cameras that have a lot of AI things that have made you feel a lot of feelings. Yeah.

So there's a new Canon EOS R1 and R5 Mark 2. And they are some of the first cameras, especially pro cameras like this, from brands like this, that just have AI features in them. And the AI features are fine. They're fine. They have noise reduction that gets you two more stops. So you can run the ISO a little bit hotter and the noise direction is good. That's AI powered. And then they have 400% image upscaling, which is bananas.

So if you just think about it, they've got a sensor in them. Light hits the sensor. That makes the image. The sensor is usually what determines the size of the image. Now the cameras can just make you an image that's four times bigger. The image is however big you want it to be. And it's just in the camera. And it is based on the fact that the camera knows everything about the light hitting the sensor.

It knows the lens you're using. It knows the settings you're at. And so, you know, the argument is their AI upscaling will be better in camera because it's all one closed ecosystem than if you take it out to one of the many, many, many software upscalers that exist out in the world. Weird, right? Weird to have the camera itself generate pixels that weren't there. I mean, this is the stuff we've been talking about with smartphones for like two years now, right? And we're now at a point where this feels like it's about to become unavoidable. And there was a thing where it was like, okay, the last bastion of photograph or photographic honesty is going to be these fancy high-end cameras.

And even that is going away, like really, really fast. I'm just so surprised it's canon doing it and not like Sony. or Panasonic or anybody else who's been in the mirrorless game. This doesn't seem like a Panasonic move. They're like, do you want on cameras now? How about this? Yeah, right? Like Olympus.

Like, these companies have all been here doing mirrorless cameras for a lot longer than Canon and messing with like computational photography a lot longer than Canada. And Canon was like, nope, we're doing it now. Yeah. That's exactly how Canon talks, by the way. I agree. Thomas Cannon. Thomas Cannon.

Just out there yelling. So it's wonky. You got to use some Canon menus. The cameras can only do it with pictures they've taken themselves. Oddly, the upscaling only works with JPEGs and HGIFs in case you're sort of monster shooting heaps on your TXOR. I wonder if that's an intentional choice that they're like, we have to preserve the sanctity of the raw file.

But we can start to do weirder stuff with some of these other things. Well, yeah, Canon's also always done kind of weird stuff with the regular ones, right? Like the JPEGs, they would make them warmer too. Like it was noticeably warmer on a Canon JPEG. Yeah, I mean, like, going from a raw to a JPEG is a processing step. There's stylistic choices you can make. It is, if you have a modern DSLR and you shoot raw at high ISOs,

the pictures are going to be noisier than the JPEGs because the JPEGs have noise reduction built into them. But, like, that is usually taking detail out, not adding it in. And so, like, you're like, yeah, I personally love the AI noise removal in Lightroom. I use it all the time. I think I've said on the show, like, it has changed my relationship to some of my older cameras because it's so good.

But now the camera's doing it itself. And there's none, as far as I can tell, none of the AI metadata that everyone has been talking about putting into these things to indicate that some of these pixels are fake. Like the computer just made up some of these pixels. Some of these details might not have been there. Like, we don't know in the examples I've seen. It's kind of accurate,

but then you're like, ah, is that right? Like, we just don't know how it's going to work in every case. And then the chain of, like, metadata that you would need to verify this as a real image, no, it just isn't, it just doesn't exist. And actually, you know, we were talking about the images

of the Trump shooting, immediate AI generated images from that, AI modifications, lots and lots of weird images. They changed the Secret Service agents to smiling and, like, all this, like, crazy stuff. and all of the stuff that we have talked about for years about content authenticity, about labels, about blah,

which is just out the window. Yeah, nowhere to be found. None of that worked. Like, you're like, we're going to build in all these save cards. Like, are you using any save cards? It's like, no. Like, we were overwhelmed by sheer volume of crap. And so, like, it's fascinating the cannons

putting it in the camera. Now, it is buried in the menu system of a professional Canon TSA. It is not, the apocalypse is not totally here yet, but it's like staring us in the face. That's kind of the thing I've been thinking about with this this week is the thing you said, and I think it was around the pixel last year, about like the question is where in the pipeline do you encounter this ability? And that ends up being really important. Like in, in Lightroom,

that's an app you downloaded onto your computer that you brought your phone in or your photo into and you pressed a button on purpose to do it. And that that feels like one thing, as opposed to having it happen, you know, in Google Photos, where your photos live. Or in the app on your phone where the photos go, like the camera, roll. And this goes even further to, okay, now it's a setting on your camera. What if you move it to being a button on your camera to what if you move it to just being there on your camera by default? Like where this goes from a thing I'm doing to you've just completely changed what is happening without me even being aware of it, all just feels very weird. And as soon as you move it to the

device, it feels like you've shifted that threshold in a pretty meaningful way. Because now I think like what a lot of people want reasonably is to be able to just take photos on. off of their camera and have them be good, right? Like that's a good outcome. I don't think most people want to muck around with their photos in Lightroom. So in a certain way, it makes sense to say, okay, this thing that you're doing that we can actually do very well with AI, we're just going to do it for you because it's a good thing. But it changes that to this is now something you've done to my photos rather than something

I am able to do. And it does change things. I can't wait for the first like wedding photographer who uses this and gets a whole new like set of lace detailing on a wedding dress. Or just like a new bridesmaid. Yeah, yeah. There's an extra one there now. What's up, girl?

I mean, look, the R1 is 6299. The R5 Mark 2 is 4299. If they could be like, add bridesmaid. Yeah. That's the money. I pay that money. Just add a bridesmaid to all of my photos. Just a picture of your kid and a bridesmaid.

There she is. Different one every time. Yeah. Let's go for it. Yeah. You know, there are professional photographers right now who have basically pushed meta into changing the made with AI label that they were putting on Instagram. So you would export a photo from Lightroom or Photoshop. It would take some metadata that's like used

AI to edit this image. They would put it on Instagram and Instagram would like add a label that was like made with AI when maybe all they had done was the Denoise or maybe all they had done is like a little generative fill or something like something that is becoming very commonplace where the photographers were like, no, this image is not just. generated with AI. I edited it with AI and that is meaningfully different when I communicate with the audience and Meta was like, yeah,

we agree with you. That's weird. And we're just at a place where actually we might need 50 labels to explain to people what all the different things you can do. Upscale in camera with AI. Is that meaningfully? Bridesmaid added. Right. Versus I typed a prompt and now here's a picture.

Right. There's a big range of possibilities. It's a perfect segue into the Samsung thing that Allison Johnson wrote about this week. It rules. I love it so much. It's so stupid. This is the most Samsung caution to the goddamn wind. I can't tell if I'm mad about this or impressed or whatever.

I was mad about it reading it until you get to where like she tried to make the Loch Ness monster come out of a lake. And instead it was just a giant green. green bear with like super shredded green bear. And she tried to make like the Pope as a rabbit. Like she took a photo of a rabbit and tried to be like, make this the Pope in a Pope mobile. And it was just like, we're going to put a giant rabbit head inside a car. Okay, so just to quickly explain what's going on here.

Samsung's image generation software is bizarrely woke. Yeah. Wokeness has infected Samsung Galaxy folds. And they will not let you generate the Pope. That's probably it. Yeah. Allison Johnson is testing Samsung's new phones, the flip six and the fold six. Nobody listened to what Neely is saying.

It's very important that you never listen to what Nealai says. And I think the fold six has a feature called sketch to image, which is you can take a photo, draw pretty crudely a thing you want on that photo, and it will generate that thing onto your photo. So I think the first one I saw her do was it's a picture. of like a harbor with a port and some flowers in the foreground. And she draws this like adorable little cartoon bee. And I guess prompts it to be out of focus. She didn't prompt it.

Oh, she didn't prompt it. Oh, she just said, give me a bee. Oh, and she put it on a part of the photo that's out of focus. And so it generated an out of focus bee in that spot in the photo. And if you just look at the photo, there is not a single chance in hell. you would think that that B was not part of the setup. There's a tiny little watermark in gray and the bottom left that says AI generated content.

If you squint. I have looked at this photo a hundred times I hadn't seen that until just now. It is Samsung being like, I can't tell if I'm upset or I'm just impressed at the, fuck it. Like, yeah. Like, let's just do disinformation.

Would you like to draw some disinformation? Not the Pope, sir, but any other thing is fine. And it is crazy. Like she, look at the pictures in the article that she put a ship in a harbor. It is true that she drew a green fair. She's got a hat on a bunny. And then the water, if you look at the picture of the hat on the bunny, the watermark is invisible. It's there.

It's just totally blended in the grass. And Samsung is like, why wouldn't you just make that bigger for people? You also just crop it out. It's not in the photo. Right. This is what I mean by the what is a photo apocalypse. Like this is full what is a photo apocalypse. So you are giving people the tool to just generate fake imagery based on real imagery

and then send it out in the world with nothing. Yep. They can just lie. And like we're going to get to a place, I think more quickly than people want to where no one trusts any image. And then we're going to have to work backwards from there. Or the alternative, which is very scary, where everyone trusts every image. There's not going to be like some middle ground, right? Yeah, I don't think the middle ground exists.

You either just say, oh, sure, it's probably all real and let the chips fall where they may, or you trust nothing. And trusting nothing requires a lot more work. And so I think it's actually easier to just say, oh, sure, it's probably real. And I'll be wrong sometimes and that's fine. And I think, like, nihilism kind of leads you there in a way that's pretty scary. I just, I'm going to reserve my judgment on how, how panicked me about this until we find out, like, if you can just draw abs on someone and it gives them abs. In which case, you'd be pro. I'd probably be con, because I don't want to see if I'm just, like, I want the abs to be real.

Like, don't fake, no fake abs here. Only real abs. So, so I'm very curious to see. It's good to have moral boundaries, cramps. I appreciate that about you. Yeah. Small six pack of a moral boundaries. And that moral boundary is shredded abs.

That's it. Don't fake me out. Watchboard or nothing. So interestingly, Samsung is not doing this locally. The picture gets sent out to the cloud, which is where some of the content moderation seems to come in, right? Like once you go away from your phone and into a cloud server, everyone wants to take responsibility for it, which is good. Yeah. Tech company is taking responsibility.

unclear how long it will take over time. You know, these systems aren't being stressed yet. Data usage, power usage, all this stuff. But boy, did Samsung just be like, fine, just draw on the photo. And like, we'll just make a fake photo for you. Yeah, you want the lockness monster? Have the lockness monster. Or a green bear.

Or a green bear. All right. Is this, if you're calling it the Is This Anything Gadget Bananza? Is this anything? This is something. Yeah. I don't know what, but it is something. But I would like to, I would like to segue to one that is the most is this anything of anything,

which is that years after Essential, the once promising Andy Rubin-led phone company went away, we finally are starting to get information about the second thing they were building. There was a lot of, like, I think at the time we saw like renders of this very tall sort of remote control-y-looking phone. but somebody found one on eBay and got a hands-on. I think this is the most interesting phone I've seen in years, and it also might be so stupid. It looks so dumb. Yeah, I love stupid tech, so I adore this thing.

I don't understand how you would use it long-term. It's basically the best way I can describe it is, like, imagine two iPod nanos stacked on top of each other, but it's all screen. It's just a remote control. And it looks like it's basically just a bunch of widgets, which perhaps unsurprisingly, makes me very excited. I love a good widget. I think that my big call out for this one is that it was obviously made before TikTok

was a thing. No, but on this, you could open TikTok on the bottom and then TikTok again on the time. A little tiny TikTok. Yeah. It would be dope. I could make a TikTok and watch a TikTok all at exactly the same time. I bet it would be really good for fidgeting, like just kind of flipping it around in your hand, the whole phone.

because it's so long. So if you will recall, Essential's plan was to do ambient computing. They were going to put stuff in your house. The phone was just the first thing. So maybe this really was just a remote control. That's very possible. Yeah,

that it was like they were making a home device. I wrote a whole thing about this one back when I was at Wired that they were, their big plan was like you said to have, they were doing sort of an Alexa thing, but we're promising to do it in a much more elegant way. And even just looking, at some of the stuff here, it is very much like get quick information and see what's going on

rather than like endlessly scroll on Instagram, which like, I'd take that. That works. But I just, I miss this thing where there were people asking questions about what size of phone was supposed to be. And now, no, we've just decided that phones should be huge and leave weird divvets in your pinky from trying to hold them. I'm going to say this isn't anything. Okay. Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. Conclusively is not anything. Can I interest you in the tiny, the tiny pot?

Is this anything? Which one? Let me, let me back this up. Instead, can I interest you in a little silicon case for your Apple Watch that gives it a scroll wheel that appears to just mechanically move the digital crown? Yes. Very good. I mean, perfect. I wish it wasn't $80.

No, that's the right price. You wish it was more? That's the price of hubris. They have a version without the wheel for like $30. Oh, come on. And I'm just like, what's the point of that? Who wants that? Okay, so I will just remind everyone that when the Apple Watch was launched, you can go back

and watch this video. Bono was there. They built a tent at a community college in California. This is a real thing that happened. And they sat us all down. And they were like, with every new Apple product comes a revolutionary input device. You'll recall the mouse. here's Steve Jobs in a mess.

You recall the click wheel on the iPod, the multi-touch on the iPhone. And now with the Apple Watch, the digital crown. And I just think a device that's like, no, actually click wheel. What if we just use a click wheel

to turn the digital account? It's perfect. I will pay $80 just for that. Are you going to put your watch in it? I mean, I have so many old Apple watches. I can just shove one in here. It does look delight.

I don't know why they've exposed the heart rate sensors on the back. Like, are you supposed to hold it to press it to your neck? No, okay, wait, I have one. Oh, it's for charging. It's for charging. Oh, sure. That makes sense. My stupid usability question about this is the watch, every time you take it off, it locks.

Like, the way it authenticated is by staying on your body and then you turn it on. Are you going to have to enter your passcode every single time you want to touch this? thing because that sounds awful. I think you used to be able to disable. Can you turn that off? Okay. Yeah, you should be able to turn the watch stuff off. I never do this thing. Okay, if that's the case, I'm going to buy the hell out of this thing. Also, it will decimate the battery life because you're absolutely not supposed to actively

use the watch very much, but I don't care. I'm going to use it. Yeah. Okay, this is something. Love it. I will say that between the weird Bukes Palmer news cycle that you and Craig Mott have kicked off and the, the, the, the, the, the, the. the interest in these things, something's happening out there. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's measurable.

I don't know if anyone's actually giving up their phone. But people are very much like, I'm sick of these rectangles. What about? Dumber, worse rectangles. There is a moment of phone disintermediation that is happening that I think is very exciting. Let's see.

Oh gosh, there's so many. Let's do the Dyson on-track headphones. This is nothing. That's the first time I've said that name out loud. like it. It's not on track. Bad. Bad.

They're very, Dyson made very customizable headphones. That's cool. I'm super down with it. And they don't like a bayon mask, which I would argue is a tremendous improvement. And they cost $500. Less improvement. Yeah. That is good.

Yeah. Well, I'm really curious to see how they, they work out. I know Chris Welch is going to probably review them, call them in, but yeah. They do look cool. They're just expensive. Did the Bain one sound good? I don't remember. They sounded okay.

But this is giving real skull candy. And I don't know if that's a derogatory skull candy or a positive, it's just skull candy. It's a little derogatory. For $500, it's derogatory. Yeah. I think my issue with these, and I, you know, I know people love Dyson products. I just want to sit on an airplane with headphones and say Dyson on them in this way. Yeah. Also, there's no fan.

Where is the fan? You've got one core technology, Dyson. Gosh. Yeah, okay. I want to, maybe there's something, but I don't think there anything. The way you just said, Nilai, Dyson in this way, makes me think you, like, bring your vacuum on the plane and you're, like, happy to show that off,

but you don't want to rep Dyson in this way. That's what I'm saying. It's very confusing. Eli, with his air wrap style, they're just, like, killing it on the plane. I don't know, and you, like, opened a box of food and had a Chevy logo. I think, what is happening here? This makes no sense.

Yeah, I can give you that. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I think Dyson just had a bunch of headphone parts. left and just ship them. That's my theory. Let's do the last one and then I have I have more. I have we could do this forever, but let's just do one last one.

And then we should go. And I think it is the most is this anything of all the major phone companies right now. And it's that Google just leaked its own pixel nine. Yeah. Google was just like, here's the pixel nine pro. Is this anything? I like they asked. I don't know.

That should be the title of the YouTube video. They're like, do you like this? They did this. Was it last year? Was it last year that they leaked the pixel? Is this a leak? Can we stop calling this a leak? They just posted it.

They just posted the phone. I mean, like, a high-res photo. They're like, here it is. They did a video that just says introducing the Google Pixel 9 Pro. You're right. They just launched the damn phone. That's not a leak. You're absolutely right.

Yeah. They just were like, here it is for now. The camera bump is outrageous. It's huge. What are we doing, guys? Yeah, I... The camera bump is like starting. to be the size of a phone.

Like that, the little, I, I, Apple, what's the Apple Watch phone called? Tiny pod. Yeah, the tiny pod. I'm curious if the tiny pod with the Apple Watch in it is as big as the bump on the. Okay, so pixel 10, you make the bump removable. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, now we're talking to you what I'm saying? Now we're talking.

That's the good stuff. We just did it. It's really like the whole story of this thing is going to be it runs Gemini fast. It's like it's very clear that is the wholesale pitch here. Yeah, which what else is Google? I do not find that. And do people want this? But I'm not convinced Gemini is doing all the things Google wants to do.

We'll get to that later. But if that's the whole pitch here, it has to be good. And what have we learned about AI hardware? It's probably broken. And I don't believe you. So, yeah, we're going to say that launch is August 13th, right? Mm-hmm. So TBD, but I'm going to say tentatively it is not anything.

We should take a break, but the last one is the one plus pad two has a vibrating stylus for reasons. This is an idea. You know what? You're writing utensil to vibrate? A linear motor inside that makes the tip vibrate to give you that feeling of a pen writing on paper. Because you know how your pen vibrates. Yeah. That's what I expect.

I think we should do is anything every week. This isn't anything. This is great. Yeah, okay, great. That's it. We're done. And seen. The tiny pod, I think, is the big winner.

The already successful Apple Watch now in a weirder case. That's something. That's something. All right. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no.

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We have to deliver on the $27 million house that sucks. But I think we should close with that. So, David, you're going last. I'm so excited. Okay. I'll just start with my favorite, extremely silly story of the week. Comcast, investor in Vox Media, our parent company. They don't like me.

They don't like me because of the way I'm going to tell the following story. Comcast owns NBC, which has the Olympics, right? Yes. Comcast loves this because every year the Olympics is like a big deal for Comcast and NBC. They get all the programming. People are jumping and they're flipping. They're swimming. You know, the Olympics.

Those are the three things typically. This year they have break dancing. Which is, to be fair, kind of jumping and running. Every Olympic sport is one of those three. Jumping, flipping, and swimming. As you know, sports in America are basically. in 720P and have been forever because there's no competition with

broadcast. Comcast is going to do the Olympics in 4K. But they're only going to do it. Comcast is going to do the Olympics in 4K, probably in Peacock, but probably like the horrible, upscaled 4K that they do. If you have a Comcast cable

box, you will get a high bit rate, low latency 4K feet of the Olympics. Yeah. So if you have an XI6, a G6, I don't know what kind of cablebox that is, because I live here in the future. But if you have one of their cable boxes, you can get hi-fi audio and a 30 megabits per second low latency 4K stream of the Olympics, which sounds awesome. Frankly, that sounds awesome.

It is just ridiculous that they're eliminating it to their cable blocks, which they say they have to do because of their custom network, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's absolutely no reason they have to do this right. Yeah, why didn't they put those resources into Peacock and letting Peacock? and letting Peacock do it. I will say this is going to work for Comcast. Like the obvious move here is to get people who don't have this box but have a Comcast account to upgrade to this box. And it's going to work.

Like the sporting events that make people go out and buy new higher-res televisions, like it's the same push. It's going to work. Are the Olympics that? Yeah, dude, it's the Olympics. The Olympics are huge. Sometimes. So you get a,

get WVision, HDR, and Atmosimmercive sound. And then channel 1350, which is USA4K, will get the... Wait, it's just the one channel? It's not all of the Olympics, it's just USA? And then enhanced 4K. So you get the Olympics and Monk reruns. Yes. Congrats.

Yes. It's 24-7 access to the national stream. Oh, that's worse. I take it back. No, but, yeah. Peacock. Just, Peacock. Like Peacock, they seem to have been doing a really smart design for it.

I got an email this morning telling me that my peacock price is about to go up. And guess when my price changes? Oh, it's in the middle of the Olympics. Surprise. You can test and see if it like, which is better with or without paid peacock. I am required to keep paid peacock because it somehow has all my shows. We've talked about this. This is true.

I don't know why I suggested that to you. Peacock is weirdly like central. to my day-to-day existence. But I try not to think too much about that because it just makes me sad. You get all the girls five-Evo though, so. I do like that. If you have a compatible streaming device,

you will get Dolby Vision HDR and Atmos, but you don't get the enhanced 4K. This is very complicated. Yeah. All I'm saying is Sony Pictures Corps, the rebranded Sony Abravia Corps that I have on my Sony TV. Still showing me Madam Webb at 80 megabits per second. The finest streaming experience you can have.

have an American city. All right, Cranz, what's yours? Also 4K related, because Sling TV is adding 4K streaming for free, unlike everybody else who is charging before it. Where's sling on the Go 90s sale, would you say? With this? At least in the 70s. Yeah, this is like a Hail Mary.

Yeah, this is help. They've already done it once. They did it. They did a couple of days ago with the Fox Sports All-Star Game, and we all immediately win. to social media to talk about watching 4K. Yeah, that was huge news. Everybody knew that. On Sling TV, on their Roku

or Amazon fire device. But they didn't, partially because it's pretty much limited to Sling Blue subscribers, because there's two versions of of Sling, only in a couple of major cities. They're fully in an 80. They're fully in 80. This is so complex.

I care about this so much, and it's so hard to understand what you're saying. But if you're in Gainesville, Florida, you can get it. And you don't have to pay extra. Okay. So it's, yeah. Big up to Gainesville.

I will say if you run a streaming service and you're out there, 4K streaming as a as a like free up service to keep people engaged is going to work. Someone needs to go out and just be the one that's like, yes, you can have 4K for no more money because we love you. Besides Sling? It will work. Sling did it for what sounds like 11 people. So great. I'm thrilled for those 11 people.

Gainesville, I'm sure, is, you know, happy rioting in the streets. Like, that's great. But this is a feature that could work. Like, this is the kind of thing that people want. And someone who wants their customers to be happy should give this to them. Again, I have said many times YouTube should just pay to produce all the games in 4K and then just have 4K games on YouTube TV. Yeah.

And it's too, like, they have the money. And I'm pretty sure they will. It's Google. They're like, whatever. I think it's too complicated. Yeah. All right, David, bring us home. Oh, my God.

27 million dollar mansion that sucks. This is the best news. So Sam Altman bought a house in 2020 for $27 million that was, I don't know if it was when he bought it, but it was at least at one time the most expensive San Francisco real estate listing ever. And it sucked. And he sued, or his people through a series of weird corporate things that was fighting another series. of weird corporate things on the side of the developers sued because basically they built him what what his lawyers are alleging was a lemon of a $27 million house.

This whole story is bananas. So the Architectural Digest made an 11 minute long video. I'll link it in the show notes going through the house before it was sold. And the house is it's not beautiful, but it's like incredible, if that makes sense. It has it has a gym. It has a massage room. It has a closet that is larger than most houses. It has a wellness cottage, right?

It has a wellness cottage. Thank you. That's the phrase I was looking for. It has three ovens in the kitchen, which seems like one more than even like the very extravagant amount of ovens to have. But it's real like show stopping piece was this cantilevered infinity pool that kind of looked out over San Francisco. It's gorgeous.

According to the lawsuit, the people who were. building the house were involved in a bunch of like corporate and financial shenanigans that led to them doing a crappy job and not paying contractors who then as a sabotage move did things like shove bags and debris into drains which then clogged those drains which did things like cause a ceiling to collapse in the gym in the house it caused there were there were like inches of standing water under some of the walkways. There was apparently mold everywhere. Let's see, what else do I have? Numerous leaking irrigation lines that were incorrectly installed on the rooftop garden. Failure of the treadlights in the exterior staircase, which were repaired but then failed again.

Defects in the design and waterproofing of exterior planters just over and over and over again. Big giant pool basically leaking into and rapidly destroying the rest of the house. And the estimates were that the price to fix all of this is going to be more than $4 million. which is a number for repairs that I cannot fathom. And so basically the lawsuit now is saying that Sam Altman was essentially duped into buying a $27 million piece of crap. Who made it? It was it so funny.

Was like D.R. Horton behind it? Because that's just one of the other big builders. I'm just saying sometimes you get duped into spending a lot of money on an engineering Marvel that can't actually do all the things people say it could do. It's just one of those things. What if the capabilities of this cantilevered pool do not match with the staggering amount of hype that has come with said pool? Do you think the pool helps you send like slightly better business emails? The pool has already tried to have sex with Kevin.

But yeah, I should say on the one hand, I love you, Kevin. On the one hand, like, this sucks. I don't mean to like particularly make fun of Sam Altman. Like as somebody who just went through a much less expensive and problematic. house renovation. This sucks. And like the idea of spending all of this money on a house and then basically discovering it is literally collapsing inside of itself, that sucks.

I don't wish that on anybody. In another way, it's very funny. The metaphor here is very good. Also, he was just driving around like a $5 million cunning sign. He's fine. And the house is so ugly. Like, it's just like incredibly, incredibly unattractive house. So good for him. He can go get it redone, like take his earnings from the lawsuit, make it look like a real house. It'll be great.

Yeah, it's just, I would encourage everyone to go read the lawsuit. I'll link it. It's 38 pages. And the first like 10 pages are just explaining the structure of the company that built this house and how insane it was. And there was like they lost a $50 million judgment against them for other shoddy work that they did. And they were like, the company was. like running out of money so they stopped funding their projects while also at the same time doing marketing about how like their whole thing was detail and 25% of their work went into things that the owner would never see because they just cared that much and that's how it's 27 million. I love it. It's so, so funny. The whole thing is just like there will be a documentary about this and I will watch every single second of it. And a documentary will be made by Sora. And most of it will be lies. It's going to be great. Yeah. I'm excited. All right. We are way over. Like, it's already next week. It was next week at the end of the first segment.

Now it's September. The iPhones are here now. Let's talk about that. Oh, no. All right, you got to go. But before we do, I just want to call it one story on the side. This is incredible. If you were an old head gadget blogger like me, Sean Hollister and John Porter wrote about the stream deck, the Algado stream deck and where it came from, which is this legendary gadget blogger obsession, the Art Lebative Optimus keyboard. Turns out, by the way, Art Lebitiv turned into like a very weird hard right Russian nationalist, which we had to add to the story. Oh boy. Which was not what I wanted out of this very innocent story about the stream deck, but that is such as 2024.

But if you were like me, you're like reading and writing gadget blogs like 20 years ago, this keyboard just kept coming up as the thing everybody wanted. And it turns out the company that made the actual display has kept going. And that turned into the stream deck. And it's just like a winding tail of some people really believe in the key should light up. And I love it. And the design is incredible. So go read that. And then we have just tons and tons of stories. There was a great week on the side, actually. And then I promise you we'll moderate the politics, but they're here. So just get ready. It's election. And I will say we're going to and everybody should hold us to this. I want to spend a lot of time talking about like policy and less talking about like horse race shenanigans. What did the poll say today? Yeah. So like hold us to that. And that is that is the thing we're going to try to do. Because this stuff, this stuff matters. It matters a lot and it matters right now, but we also don't need to spend a lot of time, like, ranting and raving about who said what on the campaign trail, and we will not.

That's for our other show, 24-7 politics, Fridge. You can watch on Roku devices tomorrow. All right, that's it. That's the Verochcast, 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 Verge 1-1. The Verge cast 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.