The Vergecast - HomePod, WWDC 2017, and DJI Spark

Episode Date: June 8, 2017

This week, it’s Apple’s turn to take over The Vergecast. Dieter and Jake have just come back from WWDC while Nilay and Paul watched from afar so the gang has a lot to talk about with the new products announced. We also have Ben Popper stop by the show to talk about DJI’s newest drone, the Spark. There’s a whole lot more in between that so listen to it all you get it all. 04:56 - Apple announces HomePod speaker to take on Sonos 32:14 - DJI Spark review with Ben Popper 47:22 - Apple announces new 10.5-inch iPad Pro 1:02:51 - Apple is launching an iOS ‘ARKit’ for augmented reality apps 1:06:05 - iMac Pro introduced / macOS High Sierra 1:18:37 - watchOS 4 brings new Siri watchface, fitness coaching, and a new app-browsing UI 1:21:32 - Paul’s weekly segment “Gates-all-around, all around” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Theverge.com. The dot com is a reference to our website, but The Verge actually exists on multiple media channels. We're on Peach. Do you think of Theverge as Theverge.com or do you think of it as The verge? I think of it as The verge. But I think all of us canonically think of it as Theverge.com. Was there any question that you would go with dot com? Did you ever throw around dot org?

There is a real moment when we weren't going to get that domain name. Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah. There's a whole... Was there like somebody squatting on it? The domain name we wanted was verge.com. Okay. Well, so we were...

This is my... This is not news. There was... There was... W.W.C. happened this week. Yeah. The DJI Spark was reviewed. We're going to talk about all that.

But first, a long digression into us naming the site five years ago. No, we wanted... This is actually Apple News. Related to Apple News. We were called This is My Next. So we're like, we should buy next.com and just call the site next. Next. It turns out Apple owns Next.com.

Due to their company resurrecting purchase of Next from Steve Jobs, they were not willing at that time to sell the domain. I wrote like an email. I was like, hey guys. This is actually not about review units. I was wondering if we could buy Next.com. It didn't. They said no.

Anyway, and then verge. com was owned by another magazine company. And then The Verge was an internet ISP, like an ancient dial-up, like defunct ISP. You just bought the ISP out. All of their modems. That is how we started servicing. There's actually a closet full of sportser 56K modems that we got in the deal. Anyway, look, it's the Vergecast.

It's starting. I'm Neil I Patel. You might have noticed Jake Castanakas is here. Hello. Thank you for having me. Teeter Bone is on the phone. Hey. Hello.

How we never made that rhyme before. We're never going to make it again. We'll see. And Paul Miller is here. Hello. I really wanted to have Lauren good on the show because she was at WWC with you guys. Yes. I couldn't make it this year, so she was there.

Well, all of you were there. But I'm actually going on Lauren's show too embarrassed to ask to talk about WWC, and we're taping that like two hours from now. So Lauren should be here, but if you want to hear, Lauren and I talk about WWC. Tune into her show. Carol will be there. It'll be fun. But anyway, here's our crew.

Dieter, Jake, you were at Dubdub. Jake, this was your first Apple event. This is also the first time that I found out that people just colloquially call it Dub Dub. Which I'm not on board with it. People do not do that, like, elsewhere. And I swear I've not heard that outside of it. They will break you. I fought it as well.

Somebody had a shirt that said Dubdub on it. Why? I also fought this. Is WRA that hard to... Yes. Well, first of all, yes. and two, they will just, you can't fight it. Yeah, like the next, it just happens.

Not happening. It's like calling him neck buds. It's just, there's no way around it. Yeah, you just have to take it. Anyway, but it was your first apple event. Yeah, it was. First Apple event, period. Which is crazy because I've been obviously watching the keynote streamed for years and years and years.

The in-person experience is dramatically different. It is like so energetic and also very heavy. ecptic at times, just enormous amounts of people, all trying to get to the same space at once, but also a ton of actual in-person energy. It's very strange. Is the energy coming from the developers or from the stage? They're definitely like playing off each other once you get into the room, but it's weird because by the end I think people are like wiped out. I was like sweating. I had to unbutton my shirt.

But then I don't know. there's like this buzz going on once people have stuff to talk about after the entire event is done. Yeah, it's like it was, this is the first one I haven't gone to in ages. So I was here in the office and I, my body was having like physical reactions. Like I was all ready to live blog. I was like, I was hearing music. And I was like, I don't have anything to do. So what I did instead was I incessantly bothered Jake about the photos.

Yeah. I know, Nilai was like, it's as though we were like in a sports car and I'm driving and he was like, pedal to the metal, gutting, faster, faster. Like seriously, he does every 30 seconds, he'd be like, crank the shutter speed. Don't be afraid. You can do this. That's accurate. That's super accurate.

Anyway, let's talk about the news. A huge show. That's enough, verge digression. But here's five more minutes of Verge to make a purchase history. No, no, let's talk about the news. Tons of news. We got to start with it. HomePod.

Home pod. Dieter, you, under some very strange rules, were allowed to listen to the HomePod. But tell us what it is and what happened in the small room that you were ushered into and out of. So the HomePod is a speaker. And I'm actually at a loss to describe the size of it. I said it was the size of like two grapefruit stacked,

but it might be a little bit bigger than that. And it's a speaker that is basically designed for music and then Apple's like, oh, wait, we should put Siri on here too. Or at least that's my impression, because they talked about music in, you know, forever and talked about the quality of the speakers and the seven tweeters and one big subwifor and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not big. It's not even a subwifer.

It's a four-inch wuffer. They call it a high excursion wuffer. I will tell you it produces more base than it has any right to given its size. Those are audio tricks made by the A8 chip driving seven independent tweeters. Oh, my God. That's my firm belief. minute. Anyway, it is a speaker, which I think, at least in the control demo in which I heard it, sounds pretty good where they're doing lots of audio jiggery pokery. It also is a Siri smart speaker.

The interesting thing about what they're doing with Siri, it felt really tacked on in the keynote, and we haven't seen it demoed. It has, and we should talk about this, it has a thing on the top that isn't an LCD, but does appear to be a touch panel and does light up. So, I guess it's like a one pixel touchscreen. One gigantic pixel. Yeah. But it does like the little Siri waveform. But what Apple is doing is somewhere sort of in between what Amazon is doing with Alexa,

where they'll just let anybody do anything and figure out your keywords and you're on your own. And Google is trying to make Google home into basically like the web where like you nothing gets like specifically programmed into it. You don't turn on apps. You just ask for what you want. And it like goes out onto the internet and tries to figure it. it out. Apple's in the middle where they say they're going to have specific quote unquote domains of things that Siri can do. And those include like setting alarms, checking the weather, setting a timer, asking a general question about, you know, how tall is LeBron James, you know,

stuff like that. What's not clear is how many of those domains are going to be open to third-party developers and how quickly they're going to expand it into other stuff like, I don't know, Spotify. Yeah. You can play Spotify over AirPlay 2. And as far as As far as I know, the only interesting Airplay and Airplay 2 is there's a two on the end of the word? There are literally no technical documentation. I mean, look, I will say this before we talk about the rest of the ABC. There's a whole conference still going on. There's sessions.

Developers are learning things. Apple's redesigned its documentation site. I think it looks pretty nice. Yeah. So, like, there's a bunch of, they didn't say it. It's not particularly public right now. But I will say the amount of time they spent on Airplay 2. as a concept was nil, right?

Like they just announced that there's Airplay 2 now. Well, Airplay 2, I think the thing that's new in Airplay 2 is like the speakers become aware of what room they're in and aware of each other. So if you have two home pods, they can turn into stereo speakers. And you can tell the home pods, you're in the living room and I have another one in the bedroom. And then Airplay 2 can manage where the sound is going, you know, what room it's in. And how many speakers are in each of those rooms.

The other thing that's interesting about Airplay 2 is it's on. the Apple TV properly. So you can now, like, stream music more easily to the Apple TV, if, you know, when it's hooked up to your TV. There's, like, and it also becomes aware where it is. There are third-party speakers with Airplay, too, just as they're a third-party speakers with Airplay, but, like, a large open question about Airplay 2 is whether they have rethought it conceptually to match what Google Cast does or Spotify Connect does, which is

instead of you streaming bits of audio from your phone to a speaker. what you're actually doing is sending a URL, and the speaker is retrieving that URL from the internet and playing it back, which has, at least in my experience, proven to be a much more robust idea for how we should control things. Googlecast has wacky problems where your phone forgets that it ever said that.

It, like, gaslights you. It's like, I don't know. I didn't tell anyone to play any music. Whatever. And then you just have to pretend that you know what you're doing. Anyway, the HomePod. But I want to finish Airplay 2 for one second. All of that is confusing because of what you're about to say, which is the home pod is a computer.

It has an A8 chip in it. Yes. And it has Siri so you can tell it to play the music. Right. But right now, I believe it only directly supports Apple Music when you tell it to play the music. Sure, but it still has to know the URL taxonomy of Apple Music. So when you say play a song, it understands how to find it. is the Bowers and Wilkins speaker that has AirPlay 2 going to do the same thing? Very unclear.

That's true. I have no idea. Right. So that's kind of the open issue with Airplay 2, at least in mind. I think Airplay 2 has nothing to do with like asking Siri to do stuff. Airplay 2, if you have a speaker with Airplay 2 that doesn't make it a smart speaker. If you have a speaker with Airplay 2, it means you can send music to it and we don't know if it means it's grabbing the URL or not. Right. But if you have a speaker with Googlecast or Spotify Connect and you send tell it to play a song, it will go fetch the song. Correct. Because it's a Wi-Fi speaker, and so is the home pod. Yeah. So the demo that I heard was a home pod up against Alexa playing over Bluetooth and up against

the Sonos that I feel pretty strongly was mistuned. But obviously I can't prove that. I don't want to, like, you use Apple who set up the demo of intentionally like nerfing the Sonos. It was a Sonos 3. But, you know, obviously the HomePod sounded best. better because that was the intention of the demo. But like we actually do need to test it out ourselves. In terms of sound, like here are the two interesting things. I already mentioned that if you separate, if you have two of them, it'll do like proper stereo separation and like you

really hear it. If you just have one in the room, Apple is not using those seven tweeters around in a circle to like send, you know, some music to the right, some music to the left. What it does is it listens to the audio that's playing and then it can guess the shape of the room based on, you know, the echoes. And then it will send different frequencies of the music to different tweeters to try and create a more like bigger immersive sound. And the terminology here is very fuzzy, but it's like if there's a song with like strong vocals and a piano, they'll shoot the piano to bounce off the back wall. So it sort of feels like it's ambient. And the beam form the vocals directly into the center of the room so you can hear them a little bit more

crispy, crisp, crisply. Yeah. Deater and I got no huge argument about. We're getting Huge argument. I will say, like, it sounds good, but if, like, you care very much about, like, tweaking exactly how your surround sound works and where, like, different things come from, you're probably not going to be happy because Apple has made very specific audio choices with this thing. That's probably going to please the vast majority of people. But if you're the kind of person who, like, actually has, you know, eight speakers in your living room and a subwoofer and you, like, tune them all and do all the crap with them, uh, it's probably going to annoy you. This to me is...

I am that person. It's very exciting, but I also would be really annoyed by it. Like, this is like showing up somebody's house and their TVs on 120 hertz. It's like, I get it. It's doing more. Yeah. It's showing you so many more screens. There's more technology happening.

Yeah. It's not what it's supposed to be. I'm just going to turn this off. I'm just going to. What is doing about? We had a whole conversation about when it's except, like how good of a friend you need to me to turn that off for somebody. Well, the link will be in the show notes. I'm sure.

Yeah. But this idea, like, a lot more can be done with this, like, room mapping. Because the best way to listen to music is two speakers, two nice bookshelf speakers with an amplifier that are aimed pretty much at your head. And you sit at a fixed distance from them. And one kind of hits one ear and one kind of hits the other ear more or less. And that's because that's what people in studios do to, like, engineer music. And so you can hear music how it was engineered. And so you actually hear what it was supposed to sound like.

But if you aren't doing that, music is bouncing around your room and it's messing up. Yeah. So there is real potential for like a detailed map of a room and understanding the materials in a room and really good bounce shots to actually make. And like also tracking where you are to make music. Yeah. Like, sound really good. I'm just going to briefly say a thing and then watch Paul and Niela's head explode. I fundamentally think that the myth of the authorial intent also applies to audio.

And the idea that we should try and perfectly match whatever an sound engineer heard is ridiculous. You experience music in the moment you hear it in the same way you experience a book in your own particular context. And trying to get back to the perfect intent of what the person who created the thing was is a mistake. But that is like a wrong. No, no, no, no. I agree with you. I just think, this is going to be really weird. That is like very raucist.

Like you're having an argument with like an imaginary rockist from the past. That's not how modern music is made at all, right? Like Bruno Mars keeps an escalate in his driveway to master his albums on because he knows most people. He's like, there's a great Rolling Stone profile of him where he's like, I need a new car, but I'm going to keep this car forever. because this is the car that I make my music in. Right? Like, they're not, they know that people listen to it on shit headphones. They know that people listen to it on a laptop speakers. Like, the goal of the audio engineer is to, like, make it sound good wherever you are.

So there's a little, like, that's a modern, I don't know, like, Jimmy Plant was like, you have to buy the speakers. Like, that's like a whole thing in the past. But I love, I love that I've thrown this firebomb into Deli's brain and he wants to move on and talk about the iPad and he just can't. I think you put in the exact right framework, but we don't have to argue all day, but you put, you teed it up right. But there are some like questions of what it's doing. And then we should, we have to talk about Siri on this thing. Yeah, that's actually more important. But in terms of what it's doing with sound, it's got these seven tweeters, it can be informed the tweeters.

Lots of things can do that, right? Like, that is not a particularly novel. Like, you can buy a Yamaha soundbar with like 140 speakers in it. and it can create surround sound in your home. It can do virtual seven channels. The sonos that they had in there, every sonos has Trutone, which I believe was designed to make you appear to be a complete buffoon

because you start it, and the speaker starts chirping at you, and you are supposed to walk around your room with your phone, and there's a video, and you're just waving at the phone up and down in the air as you do laps of your room, and your phone collects all the data, and sends it back and it tunes.

So, like, tuning the speaker to sound good in a room has been done. It's probably a little bit clunkier than this because it sounds like Apple is doing it in real time. Creating virtual sound spaces with a single speaker has been done, probably a little bit clunkier because, you know, this only has seven tweeters. So there's, I just have a lot of questions about what methods they're using if they represent massive changes over existing methods. And fundamentally, if, like, that sounds good. Like, if that sounds the way you want. I think they're banking on people trusting out. Apple to make something that sounds the way they wanted to sound.

Right. No, I don't doubt it. It's just the way that they're talking about it is though no one has ever considered using multiple drivers to tune audio to a room is very Apple. It's just, this is very Apple. But there are known issues with doing that. So, like, I have seven speakers in my house. And if I play music and turn on virtual surround, it will do the thing. It will wrap the vocals to the center speaker.

It'll play some guitar tinkles over the back speakers. Does that sound better than just two speakers? Has that been done in this kind of solo form, though? Like what you're describing is mostly stuff to augment your TV or multi-piece surround sound systems. Like Apple, yeah, it can do stereo, but I feel like they're pitching this as like, hey, you kind of want a speaker that's going to sound good like somewhere in your house. Just buy this. Don't think about it.

Yeah. If I have an Apple TV, can I replace my soundbar with this thing? And had the Apple TV, or write all the audio to it. Completely unknown. So again, so there's like a lot of unknowns there. And that's just the audio side.

We have yet to talk about the Siri side and the controls on top of the thing. But, Nelai, it's not Siri. I mean, it's Siri, but don't think of Siri as an assistant. Think of Siri as a musicologist. I know we just had this conversation, but it's almost unacceptable to me. I'm not going to talk to your assistant

if your assistant has multiple personalities depending on which device I've picked up to talk to that. Like my mom is my mom with her, emailer, text her, call her, talk to her in person. It's the same person. Yeah. She doesn't get different capabilities depending on which device she had. Or different interests. No, that's true. If your mom's in a car, she's a driver.

You can't be like driving to the store if your mom's in a plane. It got you. Wait, I can't be driving to the store. If your mom's in a car, you tell her to drive you to the store. But if her mom's in, like, a passenger on a plane, you can't go driving to the store. You're right. I take off the back. Depending on what she's in, this is way off the rails.

If you, Paul, she's the same woman. If you're in this room, I can be like, please podcast with me. But if you and I were, like, in a bar, I couldn't be like, let's start podcasting. Yeah, it's called Anchor. Oh, man. All right. Anyway, see, see her keep going. That's all I got it.

Hmm. I'm going to make this. It has to see different things. I don't know what to tell you. It has Siri. They're focusing more on, like, it can plug into Apple TV's, like, smart playlists. It's unclear if they're any different than Apple Music on your phone. I don't really think they are. And then you can ask it assistant stuff. And to me, the most interesting part of this is I think they said it was coming out in December. Is that right? When does this be coming out? It's coming up. And that is unclear. But they obviously won it out for the holidays. Yeah. And it's $350.50. Right. So that's a price worth talking about. The way that Phil Schiller did the math on stage was... Made no sense.

It made a little bit of sense. They're like... He pointed out the Sonos plate. He brought up both the Sonos and the Echo on a slide on stage. And he was like, the Sonos cost $2.99. And the Echo costs $109. And if you just add that together, you get $3.29. Like, that was basically his math, right?

And he was like, and our price is better. But obviously those are like radically different products. It is worth noting, although the prices are close, so it's fair to compare, but it is worth noting the Sonos Play 3 is their oldest product, generally regarded as the worst sounding Sonos product. The Play 1, I think sounds better. But I don't think that's why people buy Amazon Echoes. I don't think they buy it for great music. I don't think that's why people got Google Home. When they announced the Google Home, Google said it sounds better than the Echo, literally because anything can sound better than the Echo.

Okay, so that's a really good question, though, right? If Apple is selling a speaker, how many people want a $350 speaker, right? I think a lot of people want a $300.50s. I feel like people would just want, like, a speaker. How many people are going to, I don't know. The UE Megabomb is like one of the most popular Bluetooth speakers. It is $2.99, right? Like Apple stores are like wall-to-wall full of $200 to $400 speakers.

It just seems like a very hard sell if you're like, well, I'm. can get an echo for what, 179. It does basically the same thing. It's clear to me now that we have no idea how much of the Amazon Echo. Because they're always changing. The classic, like the Bose wave radio,

I feel like is the classic item in this genre. That was then, like, the iPod hi-fi was 350. But the Bose wave radios have been around that price. My one thing is people like these little pill Bluetooth speakers they carry around. but also a lot more people right now than ever have wireless headphones. Yeah. And in their home are listening to music on headphones.

Yeah. I think those are just deeply different use cases. Like I think being able to say to an echo or home right now, hey, play some music is really valuable. That's true. Being able to say that and then have the music sound great is really valuable. You know when the echo got really useful? when they turned on Spotify by default, right?

And I think I've said this on the show like a hundred times. Apple Music is great. It's actually the thing I use. I have no problem with this thing defaulting to Apple Music. I think it has become, I need to write this post. Maybe now is a good peg for it. Is it the big fonts that really push you over it? I have a huge font.

No, it's the only service that respects the idea that you might have local music. It's the only the service that respects the idea that you have a collection, a library. Right? Spotify is like totally playlist-based. Title is like very confusing in my mind. But like Apple is just really good at saying this is your library. Right. And whether that library is in the cloud or on your phone, it all logically is the same thing.

And then it's good at saying, here is a view of your library as it exists on your phone, which is very useful to me because I'm always on a train airplane. So I'm fine with that. But that means their total addressable market for this product is like 27 million Apple Music people, which is not the normal size of an Apple market. Right. Like the Apple market usually is like, all 6 billion people on Earth will eventually have this product, right?

So they have to figure that out. They have to figure out how to get Siri to address Spotify, which maybe they could do. Or they have to figure out how to make Apple Music much bigger. And maybe that is going to happen because everyone is going to want this product. But that little part of the loop, to me, is not closed. And also the whole HomeKit side of what Siri can do with this thing. Again, it's WWC, so they're rolling out new things. I think Jake, you talked to them about HomeKit probably a little bit.

I did not actually catch up with them on this stuff, but they talked about it a little bit on stage. So I think it can control all the basic stuff that your phone can control for HomeKit. It's a general HomeKit controller, which is nice. It's a nice bonus. But I also think that, like, unlike the Echo Dot, which you can just put like a ton of the around your house if you have a bunch of smart home stuff. I don't imagine that people are going to have like a ton of these things in their home because they're $350 speakers.

You don't need a $350 speaker in every room. So I think that makes the smart home proposition a little bit harder. What happens if you say, hey, Siri, I'm sure this has been solved. I just thought of it now. What happens if you say, hey, Siri, in your phone and your speaker are right there? Do they both try to answer you? Oh, no, Apple, they talked about this. I heard, I think, Craig Feigree and Phil Schiller were on Grubber's podcast, John Grubber's podcast.

They do the same thing as Google. They just do it locally. So every device listens to you, and then they negotiate as to which one's closest to you, and one lights up. So they know that's a problem. This is like Apple's thing, right? They're trying to do as much of this locally as they can. Which I appreciate it. Yeah, and that's to save your privacy all this.

Wait, but if they're choosing which one, not all series can do the same things. Right. Some series are in a boat. Right? Yes. Some series are on a plane. Or a mom on a pole. Yeah, I mean, who knows?

Right? I find it very puzzling that the Siri and HomePod is more limited than the series elsewhere. That does not make sense to me. Google does the same thing, though. Google's like notoriously doing the same thing with the home. Like what you could, like up until very recently, like you couldn't like set a reminder on the Google home. You couldn't like make a reminder. calendar appointment. Because they had to enable multiple voices and we have no idea if HomePod

will support multiple voices. That is a great point. No one knows. Deider, can you talk about the top of the HomePod? Can you address this burbling controversy that exists in our world? I have seen two different versions at the top of the HomePod. The version they showed on stage and the version they had in the big public demo room had a circular, like, glowy zone that like waves around a little bit. It almost looks like, imagine. if you were trying to project like that classic Siri waveform with like a literal projector

like underneath it, it kind of looks like that. So it moves, but it's not like a screen. I saw another version which was clearly more pre-production that had a giant plus and minus button on top of it.

And I was like, what's the deal with that? And I'm told that like you will be able to adjust the volume directly on the thing. You don't just have to ask Siri. So it will be a touch panel. It's unclear if you're going to be

tapping those zones or if you're going to like, you know, rotate your finger on it like you do on the Google Home. But it looks to me like what it is, is a touch panel that lights up. Yeah. On the website,

I let you know what it's active. On Apple's website, it says you can touch the top for volume and playback. Yeah. So, but we don't know, but it, we don't know if it's screens.

Will it be, I don't think it's a screen. It doesn't look like a screen to me. Right. So you'd say, Hey, Siri. The thing doesn't go out until December.

They could change your mind. But it looks like a touch panel that lights up and, but it can't like literally show you information other than like, I'm here and listening. Yeah. couple different states. Like it might turn blue or, you know, whatever. I don't know. Yeah. But it's a very simplistic. It's not going to display. What is a screen really? Well, no, this is like, there's an argument out in the world, right? Like, the Echo Show came out with

the touchscreen. Then there was a bunch of rumors about the home pod that said it won't have a screen. Phil Schiller has said, we don't think these devices or we think these devices should have a screen. And then now it has a display. And we are arguing semantic. over whether that constitutes a screen. The echo has a display. Right. Yeah. Right.

The light. Yeah. It's got a ring of light. And then it changes color. It provides information. And in fact, it's a lot easier to see information on the side of a thing than on the top of a thing. So you're saying the echo is a touchscreen. Yeah.

Basically. I think the whole lot is slightly domed on top. It is slightly domed. Yes. You can sort of see it from the side. Yeah. But my point here, regardless of this very entertaining semantic argument is what most people think of a touch screen is like the iPhone screen, right?

A big display that shows you interface elements that you can touch and interact with. Or like a palm trio. Or like a palm trio. This does not appear to have that. This does not appear to have that. Right. Why didn't they put a physical keyboard on the home pod? That's what I wanted to.

Oh, it doesn't have a line in. That is true. It does not have a line in. Are you kidding? Of course it doesn't have lightning. It doesn't have lightning? It doesn't have Bluetooth? Does it have USB?

No, it's AC powered. And it doesn't have Bluetooth. From what we know at this moment, it does not have Bluetooth. So the ways you can get this thing to play music are limited to Siri activating Apple music locally on the thing, which is fine. So it definitely couldn't work as a home movie speaker. No, but it has Airplay too. Oh, of course.

So whatever that. is, yeah, that may work. This gets to Nelai's point that the addressable market for this thing are iPhone users

that have Apple music or are willing to switch to Apple music right now. Like if you're an Apple music user on Android, first of all, call me.

I'm very curious to hear what your life is like. It's great. I love it. Okay. I love everything about it. It's like, sorry for your luck.

Like this thing is not designed for you. It's designed for iPhone people. That's fine. That's like, that's a totally legitimate thing Apple to do, but it is curious. Can you clarify? You can't set it up without an iPhone.

Well, you maybe could, but you can't say, hey, Siri, play some music unless it's, like, I guess you could set it up without an iPhone, but like, then you can't play Spotify on it, right? Because you can't airplay it. If you have an Android phone with Apple music, right? The step between you taking this thing out of a box and pairing it to your Wi-Fi is unclear because the setup they demoed was like you wave your iPhone near it and it takes the pairing information. But if you have Apple Music, the thing will work. So you could buy Apple Music just for this thing. Here's what I'm trying to get the audience to understand. This thing looks neat. Yeah. It is just an endless series of questions about how it will work in practice after that.

And Dieter's heard one demo. It sounded great. That's cool. But all the little bits and pieces that make it work in your life are kind of trailing off into question marks. Would you say it's the size of a basketball or smaller? No, it's smaller in a basketball. Like a woman's basketball? Smaller than that. Hmm. I feel like I should read an ad. Yeah.

And then we should talk about iOS. Or High Sierra, or the new iPads, or the new Macs, or the IMac Pro. There's so many things. All right. This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Norton. Do you have the internet at home? I'm just guessing you do. It's just, if you're listening to this show, I bet you do.

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and Apple News. I wanted to make sure we talked to Ben Popper about the DJ Spark, which is DJ's newest drone. It's $500. It's super cool. Ben did a whole review of it. So we're going to talk to Ben for 15 minutes or so, and we'll come back, finish up with all the Apple News. A little break, just pure gadget bliss with Ben Popper.

All right. I have Ben Popper. Hello, everybody. How's it going? This is a special interlude. That's right. We did a Vlad interlude a couple days ago, but the Vlad interlude was like free association. flat.

Yes. But you... I have a product to talk about. A product that is so interesting and important to me that I wanted to interrupt the WWDC Vergecast special. That's right. And do this segment just focused on it. DGI Spark.

It's a magical little product. I had it here in the office. I know it attracted your attention. And then we had Ezra Klein from Voxin and you kind of like wanted to show it off to him. I wanted to show it off to everybody. That's the experience of it. So you're taking it out and you can just sort of like pull it out of a pocket. Like nobody knows you have a journey.

like, oh, I have a drone. They're like, whoa. And then you like put in your hand, you're like, you want to see it? And they're like, what do you mean? You just like take off from your hand. Yeah. And then you go into Jedi mode. You start moving it around. And then immediately they're like, can I try? And you're like, yeah, you can do that. And then somebody who knows nothing about technology or drones like puts their hands up. And then they're like flying a drone. Yeah. That's crazy. It's amazing. Poor Ezra. He, I mean, obviously vox.com is like in the middle of the most morale draining administration in political history. And he, we're just like playing with drones. And he goes, man, the verge just has the most fun. Hey, it's good for traffic.

Trump Air is good for traffic. Can't complain. Tell the listener what this product is and like why, what is going on in DJI. Sure. So, you know, DJI back in 2013 released the Phantom, which was kind of the first drone that made it pretty easy to fly. Or that's what it felt like in 2013. You took it out of the box. You didn't have to like assemble it or like. screw something on or, you know, fix some crazy wires. And then you got it up in the air and it could do some smart things like hover in place and, you know, go out and then return to home. This is the first phantom. The first phantom.

And so I'm like, wow, that's such an accessible consumer product. Now, you know, fast forward to 2017 and the phantom looks like this crazy big thing that you would only use if you were professional. Yeah. And you've got, you know, the DGI MAVIC that came out in March of last year. And everyone was like, wow, this drone is so small and accessible. You know, like, you know, we've really come a long way. And then, you know, six months later, you've got the spark. And you're like, wow, this thing is like the size of a cell phone, the weight of a soda can.

And, like, you can fly it with no remote and no phone. Like, we're getting closer and closer to that sort of, like, actual consumer drone, meaning, like, any consumer could pick it up and use it with no training and get some interesting results and really great results. I mean, I would say, like, this is the drone that finally DJ, I was like, all right, we're going to compromise a little. Like we're going to have worse video quality, less range. A couple of things we'll have to cut back if we want to hit a $500 price point and, you know, 300 gram weight. So like with the MAVIC, they made it smaller and they did all these things. But actually it was like arguably better than the Phantom at the time.

Like I had more range, you know, more features. This is so sad for me. Because I bought a Phantom for like three weeks before the MAVIC came out. My fault. We always have a few things in the reviews closet for you to take out on the weekends. But yeah, you know, I think this is one that where, It works just as well, maybe even arguably better as kind of a toy. Like, the best way to use it is the, you know, pull it out, fly it in a gesture mode,

snap some great selfies, and you're done. You know, you can then extend that connected by Wi-Fi to the phone and get more epic stuff. They're eventually going to sell it with a remote and you could fly it a mile and a half off, which I would never do for the drone this small because it will never come back to you. Maybe it will. But, you know, like you're starting to be able to, and this feels like one you could definitely use indoors. You know, like it's very safe. It's very small.

Even flying it indoors a ton. Constantly. Flying all over the office. Yeah, it feels like the kind of thing you're going to see at like clubs in Miami or something. Right? Like it would just be like, you know, like over the dance floor, take the picture or whatever. And, you know, like I watch WWDC and there's obviously new product. You know, the speaker coming out that I think, you know, might do well, might do poorly.

Who knows? But like, it's interesting. It's new product or whatever. But like, I didn't really see any like, you know, it didn't make big leaps over other smart speakers or whatever. You know, with drones. And I think this is probably really something you know a lot about. phones for a while got smaller and smaller and smaller. And then we got to a point we're like, well, we kind of want to put the screens on them.

Let's make them like bigger and bigger and bigger. We like figured out, well, there's a certain size of phone and screen that you want. And you don't want to make it any smaller. Then, you know, you're like kind of missing out. With drones, we haven't really hit the point where we're like, well, we don't want to make them any smaller. So like the Phantom came out. Then the Phantom 4 came out. Then the MAVIC came out.

That was half the size of the Phantom. And then the Spark came out. That was half the size of the MAVIC. They could definitely and probably will make a like a little matchbox-sized nanodrome for this coming Christmas. knocked over in the wind. I mean, even the spark. I watched your review video today. You can see the shake from the wind.

Yeah. You know, again, like, right, it kind of depends on what you want to do, right? I mean, you know, if you're flying indoors, the nano is going to be ideal. Yeah, a drone that small probably not going to want to fly it outdoors. There's always a tradeoff, right? Like, the smaller drone has less battery life. It has less range. But you might actually end up using it a lot more.

Like, that was my experience with the spark was like I ended up using it every day, which I don't think I've done with the drone before because of it. like I could always just throw it in my bag. I went to the acupuncture for my like pinched nerve. She was like, what do you do? And I was like, I'm a tech reporter. What do you work on? Oh, a drone review. And I was like, you must see? And I like pulled it out right there in the acupuncture office and like launched it. And then she flew ingested. I mean, you know, like, and it was just kind of this amazing moment. I was like, this is a drone. Here you go. I mean, to me, I mean, you're absolutely right. So I have a Phantom 4. I love it. It's the most fun.

Right. But it is a huge project. Right. To take it out, charge the massive battery. plug the iPad into the controller. Totally. Launch the, it's like, it's not complicated. It's just many steps. Right. And then when you launch it, like, it's an event, right? And people are afraid to fly it.

And I, it's, again, I love the thing. But it's big and heavy and it's a project. This seems like not a project. Yeah. I mean, I think we're still learning sort of like, what is the optimal form factor for a drone that the most people will use. Like, for some people, I mean, an interesting comparison would be for $499. the price of the spark, you could also now get the Phantom 3 standard.

So if you wanted a drone that goes really far and has a three-axis gimbal and shoots 2.7K video, you can get that for 500 bucks. But you might not use it that much and you might not want that. If you want the drone that does great selfies and is safe to fly indoors and can be controlled with your hand, go get the spark, right? Like it's the exact same price point. So really now you have just a choice of, you know, what lifestyle, like, you know, what are you looking to accomplish with this drone?

And I guess, you know, the other thing I would say is like, the spark is something where I feel safe flying it around people, and I don't always feel that way with the phantom. You know, like, you have to get people to, like, give you a lot of room, and that makes it, like, less, it just makes it more difficult to use. It's less social. It's not as fun. You know, like, you don't want to, like, crash into somebody. You don't want to injure somebody, and that's not the way I feel when I'm using the spark. You mentioned the power up thing, so I took the spark on a trip, and I'm halfway then. I'm like, oh, my God, I forgot the wall charger. Normally that would mean one flight, and then, you know, I'm done for the weekend,

vacation ruined or whatever. This one you can just charge up with the micro USB. They had that at the house. What is the battery left for this thing? It's rated for 16 minutes. If you put it in the air and just hovered it there, you would get 16 minutes. If you're actually flying it around, probably more like 14 minutes, and then if they're strong winds, 10 to 12 minutes.

Yeah. And how long does it take to charge over, like, a tablet charger? So in the wall, it takes 45 minutes. Okay. And then with the micro USB, it takes. more like two or three hours. Wow. So, you know, like use it, drive somewhere, or use it and charge it overnight with the

micro USB. But you could have the spark and three batteries and it would still be less weight than the Mavik, right? So you could bring a whole bunch of batteries with you and they sell it with a charger that does three batteries at once. I know a lot of people who bought the Mavik. They love the Mavik. What's interesting to me is people mostly use the Mavik the same way they use the Phantom.

It's just a little more convenient. it. This to me feels like a, I don't know, not quite a step change, but a massive enabling change where the classic phantom footage is over a beach in the mountains, following a car down a twisty lane. This feels like the footage is going to be another type of footage entirely. Yeah, I think that's right. I wouldn't feel comfortable sending this out over the ocean. Right. The way that a phantom, you're like, yeah, go find some dolphins. Right, right. Yeah, I think that's totally right. I mean, I think you can see. the limitation. So, like, they have a bunch of pre-programmed shots on there. You know, it'll do

the classic droney flyaway, the rocket up in the air, the circle around you or what I like to call like the Michael Bay, like ever-expanding, you know, helix of, helix of epicness. But if you use those pre-programmed shots with the Wi-Fi and the phone, the remote actually isn't available for purchase yet, it often just disconnects. Like, it starts doing the cool move and then it gets about two, 300 feet away. And it's like, oops, got to come back home now, you know. And it comes back home really safely and it lands perfectly. But, you know, if you're a beginner, that's like a terrifying moment. And even if you're not, that's kind of annoying that, like, it doesn't know its own limitations, right? Like, I feel like it should get out there. And if it's like, well, I'm about to

lose signal, it should probably stop doing what it's doing and, like, you know, give you the chance to check in and maybe change. But yeah, I think that that is definitely, you sort of nailed it, which is to say, like, the MAVIC did just what the fandom did with a really cool form factor that was much smaller. And the MAVIC is now going to be sort of like their leading consumer drone. The Phantom, they're moving up to be like a more professional thing, charging more by adding, like, more sensors and higher-end cameras and all this jazz. And then the Spark is, you know, way more of a consumer drone, almost a toy. And I think that, you know, their strategy now is let's get as many products in the market

at possible at different price points. And then you're going to find, you know, one that matches you. And then you're going to be in the DGI ecosystem and maybe end up buying more than one. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's why I want to end this. DJI, I was just the code conference. Intel was there. Yes.

They were shown off a bunch of their drone stuff. they have a super cool industrial drone. It is probably the coolest, fastest, most responsive drone I have ever flown. They won't even disclose the price because you actually don't buy the drone. The people who buy this thing are like BP or Exxon buys this and they fly it out over oil rigs. And Scott, you know, they mount literally, I'm not even kidding, a full-on Sony A7S to the front of this with like a custom firmware controller. But you don't buy the drone. What you actually end up buying is like data processing for all the drone captures. And that is their market. They're very confident. They're going after it.

And then right next to it, they had like unique typhoons with Real Sense cameras. And it just feels like that is they cannot win against DGI. No. Who is DGI's real competitor? Are they just competing against themselves? Are they going for full dominance? Are they just super excited about drones? They can't stop making them? Yeah. I mean, I think on the consumer side, I would say that they don't have any real competition except for themselves. I mean, like, you know, there will always be other options. And when, you know, people who run a hobby shop or even a best bar or whatever, they want to have multiple choices up on the wall. But for a long time, DGI consumer drones have been the best. On the industrial, commercial sort of industrial side, DGI is now making that stuff. But I don't think that they have the expertise in terms of, right, selling to big enterprise and handholding and all that stuff. Like, I think on the hardware side, they're probably making enterprise drones now. that are just as good. But yeah, I think that that is a place where an company like Intel could come in a challenge. Until also smartly bought Movidius, which is the chip company that powers the Phantom Boron

the Malik in the Spark. So there's Intel inside, even though you may not know it. I mean, and I guess the other thing is like there's just this really interesting happening where the, you know, I mentioned how the size of the drones got smaller so quickly and the quality of the drones has gotten better and the computer imaging computer vision. I just read this crazy story about how the Israeli defense forces, the military there, are now going to start buying Mavics and giving them out like standard to every like cohort of troops and they will learn how to use them and take them out. And that's kind of the thing where I feel like that's DGI's opportunity is if the consumer drones get good enough,

somebody might decide, hey, let's buy a hundred of these $1,000 drones instead of buying one $100,000 drone and see what we can do with that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just, the Mavik in particular, it is just in that complete sweet spot. Like if you are, if you're a Vergecast listener, the spark is fun. and I'm sure you would love it if you bought it. Right. But I bet that you're just nerdy enough to want to buy the magic, right?

And, like, that's their whole game. They're just stepping you up $500 at a time bigger. I gotta sell this. If you were interested in buying a Phantom 4, just tweet at me. I've got one. It's maybe flown two dozen times. Neer meant. Yeah, it's almost in perfect condition.

I'll even, I'll throw in an SD card. Right. I bought a foam case. Anything you want. Just get this thing off my hand. Who are their competitors, though? Who are DGI's competitors? Yeah, I mean, again, with Intel, what they're selling is a data center.

They have a great drone, but the thing they're actually selling to you is data center capability. DGI is not going to do that. Yeah. I mean, on the consumer side, they don't really have great competition. You know, where competition is coming has always been to sort of say, well, DGI hasn't been making this form factor. So let's do that. Like, let's make the more heavy-duty, you know, rainproof drone. They haven't done that.

Or in the case of CES this year, it was, hey, let's make the really small sub-500 drone that launches from the palm of your hand. DJ hasn't done that. So that's some green feel we can go to. The problem is six months later, DJI will do that. But that is your opportunity. You have a few months before DJGI makes that kind of drone you can get in there and sell some units. I mean, are we going to see us every year.

And it's two years ago, everyone was just making clone, literally clones the Phantom. Right. Is that, I mean, is this just another, like the Facebook of drones? They're just going to eat everyone until they're. Yeah. Or the iPhone of drones when it comes to like cloning, right, the design and the look and the feel. Yeah. I mean, the Phantom came out.

of nowhere. Like, DGI was just like a, you know, a person make, a company making flight controllers for other drone manufacturers and drones that you were supposed to attach your GoPro to, right? I mean, there was this moment in time right before they released the Fenton where it's going to be like, GoPro drone made by DGI branded GoPro. And they were like, actually, maybe we should just do this ourselves. And, you know, the rest is history. So, yeah.

Poor, poor GoPro. So what's the future? What should people be looking forward to other than yet another smaller drone? Yeah. I mean, I think the future is really the computer. vision, that's the exciting part to me, is that that's what enables it to do things like Palm takeoff and landing and gesture control. And I do think that, you know, there are some things that can't change. So like the battery life can't change. The smaller the drone gets,

the lower the battery life. That's the, you know, constraint you have to work with. The wind, right? Like the smaller the drone, the harder is for it to fight the wind. But the other stuff, like the processing power on board and the, you know, the computer vision, that continues to improve at such a rate that we're going to have smaller and smaller drones that can do cooler and cooler stuff. Yeah. The vision part to me seems we almost didn't talk about it enough. Yeah. Right. I mean, what they're able to do in that tiny, what everyone is now able to do with computer vision is enabling more and more and more of these things to be wilder and rather. Anyway, again, if you'd like to buy a Phantom 4, it's a nearly perfect condition. Right. We'll

trade for MAVIC. Just let me know. I'm available. Ben, thank you so much for being on, man. Of course, my pleasure. Okay. Deeter, we're back. Hey, how's it going? Let's start with the iPad. Let's talk about the iPad. big news is there's a new iPad Pro. They've replaced the 9.7 with a 10.5. Basically, imagine an iPad and then just stretch the screen out so the bezels on the sides, not the top and bottom, unless you're holding it goes on. It's really confusing. It's iPad. You can hold it any way you want. The screen is slightly bigger. The bezels are slightly smaller. And the whole device is actually slightly bigger, so you need a whole new keyboard. It has the A10X, I believe,

processor. So it's a stupid fast processor. It has the same camera as an iPhone 7. That's kind of what you need to know. 120 hertz refresh rate. It's got promotion. I thought it was 240. It can go up to 240. No, 120.

It's 120. Yeah. Okay. But it's adaptive. It's adaptive. And they actually use an image or an ISP like you do for a camera. They use a signal processor, an image processor to dynamically change the refusers. rate based on what's on the screen.

So it's not always at the max refresh rate. It saves battery. I imagine it also prevents motion spoofing. So basically, like, and it has true tone as well. So bonkers good screen. A screen that's so good, I'm almost like, why are you, why are you, you're already ahead on tablet screens? Why do you keep doing this?

You could have stuck. So that's the hardware side of it. And, you know, I held it. It's fine. It's a, it's an iPad. To me, what's radically more interesting is what they did with iOS 11 for the iPad. It is crazy. They added a file system that is completely open.

Any app developer can plug in. So Dropbox, Box, ICloud, Google Drive. Which, to be clear, it's an app called files. It's an app called files, but any app can access it. So it's basically just a, they finally decided to surface a file system. They also completely changed the interface. Now there's a dock, just like there is on a Mac. It's on the bottom.

You swipe up from any app to display it. You can add a bunch of icons to me, presumably as many as you want. If you swipe up again, or if you swipe up from the home screen, which is still just a bare grid of apps, you get the new multitasking view where all of your apps are laid out in a grid with the new bonkers control panel on the right. And then you can like swipe through and tap them. And because they're so like good with split view now, if you have two apps in split view when you swipe up into that multitasking view, those two apps that you had in split view together stay together.

So it's they, it's like a space. Yeah, they've added spaces to this thing basically. It's spaces basically. Yeah. But that means that like the classic like card thing that you swipe through is gone. It's just like these little things showing up on a grid. But the last piece that's also interesting, especially when you pair it with the new file system, is they've enabled drag and drop in ways that are like fascinating and confusing. So you can drag and drop some stuff, but like not everything.

You can drag and drop with multi-tux. So like you highlight your text. You start to drag. Use your other finger to go to the home screen. Open up the app you want and you drag it into the app. Or you can drag it across a split view. Or you can start to drag, open up split view, pull in another thing. and then drag it into the thing

that you just opened up and split view. Like, just bonkers stuff that you can do with drag and drop that I think is going to be cool but also probably a little bit confusing for some people. Drag drop is my number one from Dub Dub this year.

Oh my God. I'm trying to read a piece on it. It's kind of hard. So, you know, on the desktop, right, you got a thing, you want it to be another place. You got to prep your launch pad and your target. You got to get your windows

kind of in the right zones because once you start dragging, you basically have very little control over your operations. The most you can do is maybe like command tab or something like that. Right. So you basically just got to be ready to do it in one shot. Here, in iOS 11, you pick up a thing. By the way, you can't do all of this on the phone.

A lot of these things, the multi-app type stuff is very iPad-specific. But you pick up a thing, go to other views in that app, pick up some other things Adobe did this demo where they have their what's it called keep no keep

hold on to inspo they're like inspo app we have so many one word apps I cannot come happy hands it's like that you went with hold on to it

you know Adobe hold on to it now comes with Creative Cloud I'll figure this all out before I put a post on the website so you like grab a bunch of different colors that you've picked that are beautiful.

Then you go to another tab in that same app and grab a couple of brushes that you've created in there. Then you drag them into the Sketch app, Adobe Photoshop Sketch, is what it's called. And you place those into the palette and now they're usable in that palette. Then from Sketch, you can select layers,

select them, alt tab over to Comp, I think it's called. I think what I'm learning here is you don't really know what any of these apps are called. Like, how much Adobe stuff do you use every day? None. Okay. That much is clear. I hate Adobe.

They make slow, bad apps, but they have really captured the spirit of what's possible with drag and drop and iOS 11. Yeah. And that is why I am going to learn the names of these apps. No, I get what you were saying. It's a new... Here's the thing. Are you going to put the thing down on a flat on a table and, like, two-hand drag the way that they were... You could do most of that with one hand?

You think so? Yeah. You put the thing you want under your index finger. Now that's like your drag center. Your drag center or finger. Yeah. It's your bad motor finger. It's just loosing it.

All right. And then you navigate around with your other fingers. Yeah. with multi-touch, and you tap other things, maybe use your middle finger or your thumb. You tap other things that you want and kind of stack them under your next thing. Here's what I want to see. Here's what I would like, where I'd like this to go. I want to see YouTube videos of kids doing fucking drag moves on an iPad.

Like trick shots. Like trick shots, drag and dropping on an iPad. Like, you didn't even think this is possible. I drag five things into five different apps. I switched to space. all with like, I'm holding a fidget spinner in the other hand. I want to see it.

No. You remember those little skateboards that you could do like tricks with your fingers with, you know, those tiny little skateboards? I want someone to make one of those but with capacitive wheels and then I want to see Dragon Drop done

with little tiny trick skateboards. You can, developers, so that Apple's doing this with an API and it's really cool that they like they re-implemented their own like home screen with the Dragon Drop API. Like they've done it in a lot

in their calendar app and reminders. So they're using a lot of places. But developers, have a lot of flexibility. So there's dragging, like, text. Most of what we do on the desktop is we drag images, we can drag text. That's pretty much like, or you can drag a specific file format to, like, Photoshop,

if you know, it can handle it. But this API makes it a lot more flexible so developers can use kind of any custom data type if they want to or use just the standard ones. But they can also customize animations for drag and drop. so you could have like a fidget spinner drag and drop you serious why would you do

why I don't know can I say this I used a fidget spinner for the first time just before I came on the show shit's boring it is really boring it's really boring

it's really boring it went over like a lead balloon in the office here anyway we're not going to talk good fidget spinner spins for like four minutes what are you supposed to do for four minutes? Dragon drop

Dodder I got to ask you so you have been on the future of computers kick longer than anybody I know. Yeah. Where does iPad iOS 11 fall into your rubric? On the scale of like, I don't know,

original iPhone to a full-on Windows 10 Pro or Mac, I'm going to put like Chrome OS at a, or put like the iPad iOS 10 at like a five Chrome OS with Android apps, assuming it finally works at like a six and a half. I'm going to put the iPad with iOS 11 right now, having only used it in the hands-on. area. It feels like an eight. Wow. And Windows 10S is like a nine. Yeah. But I except that Windows 10 has, you know, like who knows if the apps are any good. Right. I mean, they're coming out from

radically different. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, like, I wasn't, this isn't quite like reality distortion feel talking, but it was a sort of thing where like I'm still in like the, the, the Twitter meme of like the stages of like your mind exploding. Uh, where I, like, things that I didn't think I was going to be able to do on an iPad, I could do on an iPad now. Like, If you really want to, you can sort of get three, like, apps running on the same screen on an iPad pro now. Because you can have your split screen and then you can, like, pull up a slideover app that is, will, like, stand over one of the other two apps just to take a quick peek at it and then get rid of it. Which is, I mean, you could also just leave it there, but then it's hiding half of one of the apps. So, like, a file system.

So, like, I don't have to, like, okay, I have this thing. What do I do? I don't know. how do I open this thing? I don't know. It's like just works the way that you expect files on a computer to work. The other thing,

which isn't necessarily a future of computer thing, but is like pretty cool, is they change the way that screenshots work. When you take a screenshot now, it puts a little thumbnail of the screenshot down on the lower right hand corner and you can immediately tap on it, open it up, annotate it,

crop it to what you actually want to show, and then save it or share it. So like, and so like we already, communicate through screenshots nonstop and I do it on my computer all the time and we do it on phones all the time. But now it's going to be even easier to like take that stuff and actually crop it to what you want to share it. So we're going to be sharing out images all the time now. Yeah. I mean I by the way just so the listeners know, Deeter's scale was not a numerical

ranking scale. No, not quality scale. On the left was the original iPhone and on the right was like a PC and you're just putting them along that line. So it actually makes sense that Windows 10S would be closer to the PC. Right. I'm just trying to save you some email, man. But Dieter's Twitter handles on the backline. You can tweet at him whenever you want. All of this stuff, by the way, is totally provisional.

Because when we're talking about this, like, the future, this idea of the future computers is your operating system becomes, like, managed and becomes more limited, but is still powerful enough for you to do the stuff that you want. So iOS, like, you can only get stuff from the app store. Apple, like, strongly dictates how Windows work in a very serious way. so you can't just put Windows wherever you want. They also strongly dictate

a whole bunch of other things about the platform. But the tradeoff is the battery lasts longer. It's more secure. It's more stable. Windows 10S is the same idea. You can't install any old app from the internet, but you can't install stuff from the Windows store. But otherwise, it just looks like Windows.

Chrome OS, same thing. Google handles all of the updates automatically. They happen every six weeks on the dot, you know, down the line, bam, bam, bam. And so like, there's like a bunch of stuff about this. that like the neck beard in me is like, oh no, my operating system should be completely free and open and do whatever I want.

But there's another part of me that's like, you know what, I'm ready to like not worry about viruses anymore. That would be pretty great. You know what? I might put Windows 10S down to an 8 because even though you can do windowing however you want, you can only use the edge browser, which... Anyway, the point that I was trying to get to is

nobody has used any of this stuff. in its final form, not 10S, not iOS 11, and not ChromeOS. So, like, this is all, like, we're talking in terms of, like, potential, not actual, like, judgment of using the thing. Right. Makes sense. I have the same first impressions as Deeter, though. Yeah.

I am also getting this thing where, the second you start using iOS 11 on the iPad, something just sort of clicks that was not there before, where it feels, at least if you're somebody coming from a desktop, which I think is, like, most humans. Like, things are where they should. You're able to move around as you'd expect. Like, it feels like an interconnected, you know, world of a computer, not just like these siloed apps where you're like, okay, I guess I'm going to trudge over to the browser now,

and now I'm going to hit, like, five buttons, and then I can get this file over here. It's definitely starting to feel like a more mature system. It's clear that they're letting these things develop along their own. Athstown a way that they weren't necessarily before. Yeah. It initially felt like the iPad Pro was Apple sort of just like throwing it in being like, well, the server seems to be doing well.

I guess we should do something. But now it seems like they have actually taken that and run with it. And that is forcing them to make iOS more complicated. I probably for the better. I mean, we could probably do an entire show about how the Service RT was at. actually the product that everybody wanted, but we shouldn't do that show. Okay, let me read an ad, then we're going to talk about Max. This episode of Verchast also brought to you by The Art of Shaving.

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Okay, we're back. Deidre reminded me, we didn't talk about AR kit on iOS at all. Which is, Paul? I think it's really good. Yeah. I think they did a really good job, and it's like really freaking simple to use. And so what we're going to see is 100,000 apps that are basically, here's a collection of 3D models, some may be animated,

that you can put on this table. Isn't this fun? And then you'll probably screenshot it, mark it up, share it on Twitter. I think making it that accessible to developers so that any dummy can do it is probably going to lead to some experimentation that will probably find something new and interesting

to do with AR. Because it's not going to out-compete Snapchat, obviously. I feel like Apple's going to build these right into the camera app and people are going to, like, just world lenses right from the iPhone camera, and Snapchat's going to hate it. Right? Because if you don't have to open Snapchat and you can get all kinds of crazy effects. But that's, will they do, though?

Why not? But you have a network. Snapchat has an insulating network effect of your friends being in it. How many, like, copies of Instagram has Apple layered into the photos app that have gone nowhere? That is true. Clips. They made clips for God's like. There's also clips.

I have two things real quick. One, the interesting, Addy wrote an incredibly good explainer of like how this works and what it can and can't do. And the one interesting thing is that unlike Project Tango from Google, it doesn't actually create like a 3D virtual map of the world. It just, it sort of recognizes surfaces and like tracks things. But turns out that's like what you need for what most of us are thinking of doing or what would, you know, well, what makes sense to do right now, I think. Yes. And the interesting thing about that, sorry to interrupt, but the, the definitely. depth camera on the 7S is now available to developers to talk to you.

The depth camera, if you haven't seen, it creates an image that's very much like the connects depth image, right? Things that are closer are white, things that are further away are gray, things that are too far are black. So, like, they have their other, like another thing for developers called vision that can automatically do stuff like occlusion. So like replace the background. of the subject that's right in front of you.

So they can't put that into the AR stuff yet because they want the AR stuff to be super available to basically any device with the A9 or a better processor. But if the next generation of iPhones all have dual cameras, then it's really possible that that could become a default thing and make a slightly closer to Tango level of world mapping. Did you guys watch Planet of the Apps last night?

I did. No. You notice that, like, the, the, spoiler, the guy who, like, bombed out at the end basically made AR kit and tried to sell it. And they're like, I bet a big company's going to do this. Okay, let's talk about the Mac. By the way, you should watch Planoly Apps just because Gary Vaynerchuk, like, literally waves the verge on a phone at the start of his coaching, which is my favorite part.

He's the best part of that show. Anyway, the Mac, talk about all of the Mac news. They put a new generation, current generation, KB Lake processors across the laptop line. So MacBook Pros and the MacBook. Although with the MacBook, you should be aware that even though you can spec it up to an I5 or I7, it is the mobile version, which Jake can explain because it makes me sad and tired. They also introduced an IMac Pro, which I'm sure Paul has lots of feelings about. it's very bonkers. And then just because they just can't kill it,

because it's a laptop everybody actually wants, they slightly increase the processor speed on the MacBook error. And then there's also a new operating system called High Sierra, H-I-G-H, not High Siri, which, I don't know, it's like better. It supports better video codex. It does some other stuff, but it's like, it's a refinement release, not to, like, change the Mac release. Totally cool with that. I submit to you.

Those are always the best ones. That Snow Leopard represents the high point of MacOS to this day. So a couple big things with MacOS. APFS, which is very exciting. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. That's a big deal. Which is, as far as I know, and I'm going to, I might do a deep dive on it.

This is a really good dub-dub for me. Oh, yeah. Okay, so Apple file system, what does that do for me as a consumer? Like, it sounds cool. I'm thrilled. I have zero idea what I mean. There's like, you'll be able to copy files faster. Oh, not like instantly.

That's a big deal. So just boom. So think of a typical file system. There's a bunch of files. There's those little DS store files, right, that have the metadata of what's in a folder and stuff like that. It's all kind of spread out over a hard drive. if you're looking for something, you've got to kind of dig through it. The, like, more modern file systems are a lot more like GitHub, where they're basically

versioned and have are kind of tracked in almost like a database. So if you want to duplicate a file, well, so I just need new, they're like aliases, but they work like really natively. So if you want to make duplicates, you can do that instantly because you're just making aliases. if you want to make like a change to something that can be like, I mean, again, I don't know everything about APFS, but like some of these newer file systems have these things where it's like you can store kind of just the changes. And so you don't have to store like an entirely new copy of a file. Okay.

So there's. And Jake, you already have, well, you don't because you use an Android phone, but Apple has successfully switched over like every iPhone from HFS to or whatever they're using before to APFS and like nothing broke. But like, did anybody notice a difference when that happened? I don't know. Nah, I mean, things, like, battery life was supposed to have gotten slightly better, you know, like a little bit faster. But, like, the core of iOS, like, it became, like, easier to manage, I think, because of the reasons Paul was talking about. Yeah, and it definitely makes a lot more sense on a system that you're dealing with a lot of files. And, you know, there's a lot of file integrity, like, guarantees they make.

like there's a lot less of a chance for corruption. This system matches a lot better to something like an SSD than a typical like spinning hard disk. It's really, it's, I'm pretty glad they went with, although they should have gone with, was it ZFS? That was, ZFS in the Mac has been like a 15 year saga, right? Has it been that one? Yeah. It's been like, John Syracuse has been writing ZFS on the Mac since I think he was like 10 years old. It's just now getting adopted in some Unix's anyways.

The first ever Ars Technica article was actually entitled ZFS happening tomorrow. It was published in 1974. It just represents a further divergence of Mac OS from Unix. Yeah. It's like same ideas, totally different names for things and incompatibilities. Yeah. But it's who cares? It's fine.

It's fine. Right. I mean like the Mac from most people's perspective is like it doesn't matter, right? Like you are rarely in our, if you're in an all Mac environment, you're rarely interoperating with other things, right? That's completely not true. As far, for like any programmer, you're basically talking to Unix all the time, either internally to your Mac or a virtual machine on your Mac or a server somewhere. Right. But I was like, I just said the word consumers.

Oh, right. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I jumped down. I feel bad. That's cool. Developers are consumers too, Neelai. Are they? No, I'm saying, but like, if you are the pro customer, not the developer that Apple is trying to address, they've made your life easier by making easier to, like, manage your files in this way on the types of devices you have.

But what I really want to talk about with Paul is EGPUs, because you wrote a storming piece about QPUs on computers. Yeah, so that's something that people point. So I wrote something that I said that Apple should come out with a $1,000 computer with a good, GPU and not reserve that special favor to $5,000 computers. And a lot of it's jumping off of what they actually did update in High Sierra. They are supporting VR now. They've got Metal 2, which sounds even more like Vulcan. Developers obviously use Macs, especially to compile to like iOS.

So even though gaming is not huge on the Mac, you still want Unreal Engine and Unity are going to support Metal 2, obviously, so that you can make fast iOS games. So there's a lot more of an emphasis on graphics. Also, they've got this CoreML stuff that they're doing, which has machine learning, like, trained models that you can load onto an iPhone and call almost as functions. I think it's a really nice abstraction for developers. But you can also train those models on a Mac if you had a GPU. Otherwise, you're just going to, like, just go off to the cloud.

to do everything. So they really, really emphasize the GPU in what they put into MacOS. And then they said, and we care about pro people. So we created a $5,000 computer to take advantage of these features. And it's just insane to me. There's this wide range of consumer parts that are like often called like enthusiast components of GPUs and processors that out. almost completely ignores. They put good

Intel processors into iMacs, but you can't get them without like a 5K screen. The external GPUs are really exciting for some uses on a laptop. But you're

going to have a laptop processor. So you don't get that performance ceiling. Again, that you can get with like a $1,000 PC can blow away almost any Mac at a lot of tests. all tasks, and there's a lot of niceties about the Mac. And, you know, they put serious workstation components in this IMac Pro that do sound like very high quality.

And it might actually be hard to build your own computer that would match this spec for spec for $5,000 by December. But there are a lot of computers you can build that are way better than most Macs and are way cheaper. And Apple just completely... I didn't put this line in my piece. because I couldn't figure out a phrase of Apple. To me, it's like an old man who I've been yelling at, GPUs exist. And the old man finally went to his mailbox and pulled out a postcard from me that said GPUs exists. And like, GPUs?

All right, let's get on. But they still don't seem to really understand, like, the core of that market. Yeah. I mean, I think that they. How much of this is them? Well, no. Sticking with AMD. No, no, no, well, I think there's that.

But there's what they're doing with the IMAQ. Then there's what they're doing with the IMA Pro. I think those are the, like, the industrial designs that they have. What they admitted was the Mac Pro is a straight up piece of industrial design was not appropriate for this particular era of GPUs. So they've got a Mac Pro coming out. That will be modular, supposed to. So you can get it without the 5K screen.

Presumably you can put a variety. of GPUs in it. Who knows if they'll open the doors to Nvidia versus AMD? So I think this is just a transition point. You don't think that they're going to,

I mean, what do they use to charge for the Mac Pro? There's, like, there's no way it's going to be a $1,000 machine like Paul's talking about.

I mean, Apple's not going to sell anything for that. What if they, like, reimagine the Mac Mini as like, take the Mac Pro,

take the GPU out of it and put like, you know, like just a, you know, uh, standard Intel six whatever into it.

Like, all right, this is the base thing. It's basically a Mac Mini, but you can spec it up to a killer processor and feel free to plug in whatever external GPU that you want. We just saved you $2,000. You've got to go spend it yourself. But like here's a thing that like is basically scales from a basic Mac Mini all the way up to insane Mac Pro in like, you know, a single enclosure.

Sounds fine to me. But you have to plug stuff into it. Sure. however they want to do it I'm fine I'm fine they just have another turn coming

that's my only point there's another turn coming for them with the MAC line and maybe that will be the more mob it's just they haven't talked about it a little bit

that they're going to do it but this was their like I don't know let's just shove all the chips in an IMac and the IMac pro looks cool as hell it's just very expensive

it's unclear like we are video editors sit on IMAs all day here so like maybe this will be great for them but it's way more expensive than IMAX that we're currently kidding out. Well, one of our new video people, Alex just

messaged me as like, I agree with your piece. You're the smartest man at the verge. Paul, favorite editor. Alex Markins. That's why we hired him just to validate Paul. He didn't say all those things, but he did say, for the very reasons I listed, he built a Hackintosh. Oh, interesting.

And now he's thinking about switching it over to Windows, which is exactly why I think Apple, it would serve Apple to address this. Like, I get it that I'm writing very selfishly, but Apple, I think, is losing a market. Paul made a really good point in his piece that its products are just not accessible for the up-and-coming creators, right? Like people who are vlogging on YouTube? Which Mac are they supposed to buy that's going to let them easily edit 1080P or 4K

footage? Like, you have to spend what, like at least 1,800 or something? like that before you get a discrete graphics card. Right. Like that seems a little crazy when you can do that for $1,000 on a Windows laptop. At like much, the $2,300 IMac is like their top of the line. The RX580 is definitely inferior to what you could get in a PC you build yourself for $1,000. And it's just like, it's just, it's kind of obvious to me, but.

No, I agree. It's frustrating. And it's like, for someone like me, I like MacOS enough that switching to Windows just does not, is not something I want to entertain. But at the same time, it's like the Macs they're trying to sell me right now are not doing all the things that I want them to do. And, you know, you look at the Windows side of things. And on some level, maybe it's always been this way. But I feel like it's becoming more and more obvious that Apple is just like doing its own thing. And they're like, well, look, if you want to spend this much, then you're getting this computer.

But if you want to actually create things, you're going to have to go way up. Like, that's your only option. Yeah, this is the myth that creative people are rich. Okay. I think that's it, unless we miss some things. WatchOS 4. I'm sure we have, but there's a lot. Oh, yeah, watchOS 4.

No, I don't want to talk about watchOS 4. They keep changing the interface, the core interface of what watchOS is. No, but they just added a new Siri face. Did you see? No, no. If you swipe, there's a whole new dock system. Like, you don't hit the button and get, like, you're vertically scrolling things.

You, like, scroll up through it. I think they might have gotten rid of, like, time travel. Oh, dear. I'm not sure. I don't know. I didn't get to play with it. I think there's an option. They changed the app browsing UI.

Well, the only reason I want to point out that watch what's four was announced was they started the whole thing by being like, here's our core platforms. TVOS, watchOS, iOS, iOS, and then they were like, okay, TVOS, we're adding one new app to it, goodbye. And watchOS, they brought out Kevin Lynch. And he was like, here's some new,

literally the way that he was presenting to it. I think this is the difference between being there and watching it from a distance. Because when you were there, you got to go play with it, you were like looking at it. From a distance, Kevin Lynch was like, yeah, here's some toy story watch faces.

No, that was the same vibe. That was definitely the same vibe. And he's got, like, his hair's long, he's grown a beard. Like, he's just entered the, like, I don't... Have you ever not been skeptical when he comes on stage? I'm always like, I do not trust whatever he's going to show us. And that has always helped true.

He's a smart guy. I will give him enormous credit for completely rebooting that product. Right? Like, they got it way closer to right. I think they're still refining it. Dieter, I'm very curious about these, like, underlying changes. But from my perspective, it was like, here's a new series. home screen and toy store stuff.

Siri really wants you to get fit, Neely. Siri's like, you're fat. That's what's going to tell me. I was just a simple mode for Apple Watch for like, you know what? I want like one app weather. I want notifications and just leave the screen

on so I can see the goddamn time. Yeah. Like make it a dumb smart watch. Like give me a dumb mode that just shows me the time without having to well there's nothing. I mean they're going to probably have it September. I mean they got to put out the iPhone.

They're probably going to do another piece of hardware here. Watch with all it. But it just seemed like, watchOS and TVOS got the least amount of attention. I still don't know why anyone would build an app for the watch, but they did some API stuff. Is that it now? There's probably a bunch of other iOS 11. iOS seems huge.

We'll tear it all to shreds. Yeah, it's very clear that iOS is 95% of what Apple cares about. Yeah. And also just putting GPUs and everything now. They're like, we figured it out. Okay, and that is the show, I think. Well, I want to talk about something that I talk about. Every week?

Every week. And it just hurts that you forget sometimes. I'm sorry, Paul. Also, I'm just stalling to find the tab of the thing. All right, all right, Paul. Every week you do a segment. It's called Gates All Around, All Around. IBM announced that it has figured out how to make a five nanometer chip.

So right now, the best we've got is basically 10 nanometers. That's what Samsung's shipping. And he uses FinFET technology, which is when there's a little fin sticking up so that the processor is not perfectly 2D anymore. There's a little fin sticking up. This is Gaffet, G-A-A-F-E-T, gate all around. Gate all around. So there's not like a roll of Gaffer tape sticking up. No.

It's really hard to understand. I spent like way too much time writing this up to try to, like, I want to get it. But there's the silicon nanosheets. And then literally the gate material, the gate material is what like switches the silicon from being, you know, allowing electricity. On or off. Yeah, thank you. Conductive is what I was going for. The gate material surrounds it.

And I don't know, it's pretty exciting. So I just, I knew FinFet was dying and was basically at the physical limits. Like maybe they can do seven nanometers or five, or they can do seven nanometers. They might do five nanometers, but there's really diminishing returns. But this seems like there's some new life in it and it could maybe get down to three nanometers. And so once again, Moore's law, apparently. Just doing it. Still working.

Circles instead of fins. Circles? You said gates all around. No, not They're like silos. Yeah, I don't know how to... You just have to look at the website. I look at the post.

It looks like a dental x-ray. I have to say it for something... They kind of look like beehives. That is named every week and I believe named Gadget Corner. I thought this was a weekly update on Moore's Law. How often do you to check in on that? Still going. You're good.

Okay. So that now is the show, unless Paul as an actual gadget he'd like to talk about. Next week, I'll talk about more gadgety gadgets. Can you talk about a gadget that is Moore's law? Think about it. But not too hard. I just broke Paul's brain.

All right, that's the show. It was long, I think is one way to describe it. But tons of news. I forgot to mention this to the top. But on Friday, it was our last ever episode of Control Walt Delete. Dieter is coming to New York. We'll be taping that. I would tell you to buy tickets, but it turns out they're all sold out.

but we'll be having the audio of that coming out very soon afterwards. We're in the market for more new podcasts, as I think you've been hearing me say. We're already starting to play with some ideas on a platform called Anchor, which lets us do things a little more easily than trying to put podcasts in, like, podcast stores. So go check us out on Anchor. Let me know what you like. Let us know what you want to hear from us. We've gotten some good ideas.

We're going to be playing with them. The Virtually have more than one podcast. But in the meantime, RICO has a bunch of great podcasts. So Lauren Good, our very own senior editor, is too embarrassed to ask. Turns out, I will be on too embarrassed to ask with Caroushisher and Lauren Good talking about Apple this week. So you can listen to that. Cariswisher has Recode Decode, which is wonderful. Peter Kafka has Recode Media, which is also wonderful.

Listen to that stuff. We'll come up with a new podcast. It'll be great. You can follow us on Twitter. I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backlon. Jake, Jake underscore K. Paul is at Future Paul.

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Go to Norton.com slash Vergecast. You save $30 if you pre-order by July 1. Thanks, Norton. Thank you, everybody. That's Vergecast, rock and roll. All. Step, step.