The Vergecast - Live from WWDC and E3

Episode Date: June 17, 2016

Another week on the road for Vergecast; we recorded from WWDC and we have (cross off your bingo square) special guests! All together in the same room again, Nilay and Dieter bring back the ever-wise Lauren Goode and Walt Mossberg, with first-time Vergecaster and co-anchor of CNBC's "Squawk Alley" Jon Fortt. Also, Paul Miller's weekly segment "Games are Gadgets Too" calls Casey Newton live from E3 to talk about the newest demos on the show floor. watchOS 01:58 macOS 17:39 tvOS 28:31 Paul’s Games are Gadgets Too: 43:43 iOS: 58:31 Final thoughts 01:27:50 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dido doder, doder, doer, doer, do it. What is that? It was her open music. I heard it's her open music. I pretty sure the opening music isn't dider, deeter, deeter, deer. Yeah, that's what it was like last week. It did. That's what we did.

All right. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, flagship podcast, theverge.com. I just like saying that. This episode, The Vergecast, brought to you by my fake vodka. Cezer vodka. Cut through the night. Also, someone please invest to my fake vodka company. FYI, Nelai still makes the finger, scissors.

Panama every time he says I do a lot of miming. Something I've noticed about myself. Anyway, look, it is WWC, it is literally the day of WWC. We're here in San Francisco in CNBC's beautiful Recode and CNBC's beautiful one market offices.

I'm staring out the window at the bay. It's gorgeous. I'm joined by what I would call an all-star panel of Vergecast guests. Dieter Bone is here. Hello, hello. Walt Mossberg is here. Hello, hello.

Lauren Good is here. Hey, everybody. And CNBC's John Fort is here. Surprise. We weren't expecting John, were you? You never expect John.

Well, John, we've been hanging out a lot lately and I've been trying to get him on the show and he was at Dubdub today. And so we made him stick around for hours to put him in the corner. Pretty sure he's been up since about 3 o'clock in the morning. Is that right? I mean, I could make this worse. I could tell people

John's in the hype desk but I won't do it. I don't bruise easily either, so that's good. No, that's just, it wouldn't bruise you. You would just think it was I'm going to ignore it. Anyhow, so today was WWDC. We're all there. Tons of announcements. One of the most fast-paced Apple events I've experienced in a long time. No hardware. All software. No one more thing. Nope. There was one more thing was I forgot to run the video. The one more thing was Craig Federici just saying, peace out everybody and riding off in an Apple car

into the sunset. Never to be seen again. Generally, just a very fast-paced event. Tons of I thought from the jump, one of those interesting things was the way Tim Cook framed each of Apple's four platforms. So obviously, you know, he's like iOS, completely changed the phone, macOS, redefined the personal computer. He, I would say he sort of didn't have a great line about TVOS. He was like TVOS, the future of TV, his apps. And then he completely reframed the watch and said watchOS, the greatest device for your health, which is a totally new reframing. And Lauren, hopefully by the time this podcast is out in the world, Lauren will have published a piece, I'm actually sure of it. Groundbreaking.

Groundbreaking piece. Talking about how Apple's completely. But I just have to say that in Tim Cook's mind and in the mind of Jeff Williams, the number two guy there who headed up the watch project, it was always a health thing and fitness thing. Yeah. But you're right. They never framed it quite as on the nose as they did today. But in their heads, that's what it was. You don't, but I agree, but they, this is the first time that they've basically said that's what it's about instead of, it could be a lot of things.

No, no, no, I completely agree with you. I'm just saying if you talk to them off a stage, off the record, that's basically what they've always thought it was, because that's really what the two of them care about. I thought one of the greatest ironies today was that Tim Cook talked about the four platforms that people are developing for now, five if you separate iPhone and iPad, but it's, It's really iOS, Mac, TV, and Watch, as Neil has said. But Watch is really the one I think that is still least reliant or maybe least useful around third-party apps. And that was the one they talked about first. Really, people are using it for native apps, right? They're using it for IMS or using it for their native health apps because the third-party app experience has been so poor to date.

It doesn't feel like a full platform to me. It still relies on Mac OS or on mainly. on iOS to get what it needs to get going. I wore the Apple Watch for a while and eventually ditched it because it, for whatever reason, can't read my heart rate accurately and consistently every once in a while. It just starts reading

every other heartbeat. And when I'm going at 150 beats per minute, I hate looking down and seeing 75. I'm like, curse you. Are you saying, let me just get this straight. Are you saying it's reading other people's heartbeats? Maybe.

Or a walking really. Really slowly? There's a slow, lazy dude. You know a lot of calm people in the news. It's me. That dude was me. Incredible. Last week, you had a great,

Lauren had a great feature about Apple redoing the app store and how it works and subscriptions and trying to build a business around that. Which, by the way, they didn't mention it all. Other than to say there were two million apps. Right. But I think they did all that before because they wanted to focus on the platforms here and kind of the consumer news here. But what was really interesting is I still don't know how you build a business developing

watch apps. It's still a sideline to whatever's happening. Right. It's still developers are saying, here's my cool app, and maybe I should optimize this for Apple Watch. For the most part, I do talk to some health and fitness developers

that are very specifically focused on wearables because that's where the sensor set is and that's where it makes the most sense. But largely you're talking about developers who are saying, just like they say, should I optimize for iPad now? should I optimize for TV now? A lot of times it's still originating from just iOS and then building out from there.

I think Apple wants to change that. I think that's obvious from the way they're sort of segmenting out these platforms right now. But I mean, yeah, I mean, watch right now. When you talk to people about watch who have it, they say I really like being able to see my eye messages on my wrist. I talked to a lot of people in like service industries who say that because they're on their feet all day

and they can't look at their phones or healthcare. Right. Right. But even, I mean, some of the third party notification experiences really aren't that great. Or they say they like health and fitness, and that's pretty much all native. The one thing that Jay Blonick did say today, Deeter's playing with her. Deeter's sending us heartbeats right now.

He's sending us thirsty notification. I'm sending a thirsty rando emoji to our producer who's mad at me for not speaking closely enough to the microphone. Oh. Deeder, go ahead. Speak closely to the microphone. That's both of you. But you know what, Lauren, we're going to cut all this out, by the way.

I think just to repeat what John said or to back up what John said and what I know you know because you probably are closer to this than any of the rest of us. It is different than optimizing for the iPad. And the difference is the iPad is an independent device. The question is only do I build a universal app, which when it is downloaded to an iPad will look different than an iPhone, but not depend on the iPhone. The iPhone can be completely turned off and it worked just perfectly fine on the iPad. The watch is not that yet. Having said that, I think it's really important to note that this company introduced this, what was Tim Cook's first big new category since the passing of Steve Jobs, the watch. It has, I guess they're the biggest seller of a very

small market of smart watches now, but it's not a big, it's not a success by any means. It hasn't moved any needle sprapple. And today what we saw, at least on the software front, we still I've seen the new version of the hardware is a complete, what I called a rescue. They're rescuing this essentially failed ma'a product, which is not their standards. No, I actually completely agree with you. Oh, that wasn't as strong. Read the live blog. Read the bird's live blog today.

I'm hoping that I have all these thoughts formulated by the time this podcast comes out. But I actually see what they show today as an admission that Apple Watch 1.0 was totally wrong. I completely agree with you. But at the same time, they're really underscoring their commitment to the thing. The fact that they completely revamped the software for it, there might be new hardware coming out in the coming months, and yet

they said, you know what, we're just, we're going to fix this one right now. We're going to try to do that. What we know so far is that they've taken the connect button and taken it away from, like, send heartbeats and drawings to your friends and has it launch, an app doc, which is like kind of the apps themselves,

but also like you can tap into the full thing. But glances are weird. But glances seem to be gone. They're totally gone. Who knows if there's still like the weird app icon screen. This thing took me... I think that's gone. I think you have to assume that's gone.

It took me three months to understand all the 50 different ways you use to interact with watchOS. 1.0 and 2.0. We're what, a year and a half into this thing. We're coming up on watchOS 3.0. And they're like, they're changing the whole UI paradigm again. Wait, sorry. They didn't use the digital crown once. Yeah, they didn't talk about the digital crown once.

Which was the centerpiece of their introduction. Yeah. So, John, you don't think this is a rescue. Why's that? I don't think it's a rescue. A rescue? No, I think it kind of is a rescue, but Apple has argued that this thing for anybody else would be a success. And I guess maybe they have a point.

Like, if you look at Amazon Echo, people say, oh, Amazon Echo is a success. Well, compared to what? It may not have sold any more than this Apple Watch. Exactly, exactly. But for Amazon, like that at a lower price. After that Amazon phone, the Echoes is, my goodness. Pretty much anything looks like by your phone. That's what you want to set a low bar.

Anyway. But, I mean, I would take my questions around the watch and all this stuff in an entirely different direction. We'll get to this later maybe, but who's going to pay for all this in terms of developer time, right? Like, who's got developers to tweak things for Siri, to come out with the new Apple Watch app? By the way, we also want you to do iPad stuff. I mean, Swift is going to help. But they're also tweaking, as you guys reported, the business model around this entire ecosystem because some would argue there's some payment fatigue. Advertising isn't what it used to be.

Maybe people, individuals are actually going to start paying for this stuff now by subscription, not just once. Who knows if that'll work? So I think you're getting at what I think is like the secret biggest story of this keynote, which is that Apple is doubling down on apps. they're doubling down on their platforms. They're not talking about the cloud. They're talking about doing everything on device. And developers can talk to Siri now. We'll talk about that later.

Developers can make stuff for Messenger now. And maps. And maps. There's no I message for Android, which was a big room for Android. But every single one of those things got put in terms of you can make apps for Messenger. You can make apps for Messenger. I message.

Whatever. Facebook just said yes Yes you're saying. They're called bots now. But everybody else calls us saying bots or just like general like floaty, you know cloud stuff.

But with Apple... General floating clouds stuff. Yeah, Google is not good at naming. Wasn't that the name of a website you used to have? But Apple is saying... General floating cloud stuff Central was actually the name. And like that to me is like a little surprising because right now

like the new subscription model notwithstanding, we'll see how that goes. There's not a ton of excitement about, like, the app economy. Yeah, I couldn't help thinking when they did the traditional Apple Sly with that traditional, you know, drop down and smoke rises from it, a fact that Steve Jobs loved, and so they kept it. Boom, comes down the number two million. There are now two million apps.

I mean, there were 100 million five just like, it seemed like four months ago. Now they're two million. and I'm thinking, but every study shows that no one's downloading any apps. So it's really, Deeter, I think you're absolutely right. However, I will just say I was waiting for an Uber for an interminable amount of time on the corner, and a bunch of developers came over to me and started chatting. Did they ask for a photo with you? I'm not commenting on that part.

That happened a lot this morning. That's $5 per morning. He needs to start charging a lot. There just be a Mossburg selfie app. Yeah, WALB accepts Apple Pay. You've got a cardboard cutout and go around. Well, they're all around already. But here's the thing.

So they said to me, well, what did you think? And I didn't want to answer. So I said, well, what did you think? And they said, we're really psyched. These were, I don't know, five white males. Of course. And they said. The diverse developers are only in the videos.

Five white males under the age of 26, basically. All of them from Australia. or somewhere, and they said... That's getting fun. And they said we're super excited about building apps for all those things Dieter just listed.

So, the distortion field extends quite far. So I would say this, and John actually talked to us for two seconds earlier. It's, I don't think this stuff is designed to sell more phones, or more iPads, or more whatever.

It's designed to get for the consumer more value out of the devices, at whatever rate they keep selling them, and for Apple to start getting more money out of each device. Because that is what Tim Cook has been talking about, right? Maybe we are at peak phone or peak iPad, and we've got to start making more money inside a bunch of these places. So if you expand the surface area for apps,

if you say there's an app store and now there's an I-Message app store, and now there's a watch app store. A Siri app store. But now you have platforms on your platform. And bots, you're supposed to program for all. If you're eBay right now, it's like, wait a second. I'm supposed to program for Facebook Messenger and IMessage and Siri and, you know, maybe home. You know, if I want to be able to talk to something.

All these different things, there's no way that you can have the resources to place bets on all these things. So what I think will happen is there will be a shakeout. There won't be one giant massive. Like those two million apps won't each have a. version for each of these different sub-platforms. And we're going to see over the next X-years, also on Android probably, a divergence into camps. There will be apps that seem to work.

We already have a little of this with the iPad, if you think about it. If you go to the apps during the iPad, you automatically are put into a category if you look at the little text on the top that says iPad only. And you can say, show me everything, and you'll see a bunch of blown up. phone apps that you probably don't want, but I think you're already going to see subsets. And Lauren's right. There are things that I actually think it will go beyond fitness. I can't tell you what exact categories.

But what I saw today in the watch finally made me think somebody is going to want to put certain things on the watch that wouldn't have worked before. I still have. So I agree with Lauren. They've rebooted this thing. They've got rid of glances. God only knows the digital count is for. but they've made it about apps, right?

You push the button, you get your app dock, the apps are instant now. God only knows what this is going to do for battery life. Do you believe them that they're instant? No, no, no, no, no. Okay. I think it'll be instant on the next version of watch that is presumably coming in September. With watchOS2, I'll say, when watchOS2 rolled out last fall,

they did say that their performance times were supposed to be better because some of the app logic was being moved onto the device itself rather than everything loading from the phone and all that, yad, yeah, yeah. And in my experience, it has been a completely mixed bag. I wouldn't say that anything has gotten that much noticeably faster. And so I think that... So we don't trust them. Well, I don't necessarily...

Well, they put out the new OS and they release the new hardware later. We will judge. We will judge. We will judge. Which may be soon. I feel like I'm being judged right now. There was a bell that rang in the distance. What the hell just happened there?

Chimes of doom as Mossberg speaks. No, that's the bill for the... That's the bill for the court of Judge John Tort. Judge John Ford. I don't know what happened there. So that's the watch. And I think that this is the thing. They're retrying the watch, and it's not clear.

I will say... Oh, you can scribble on it. You can scribble on it. You can send letters. Android wear now, too? You've been to Android wear, actually, you could do it first. But, I mean, this wouldn't be a Vergecastless. I pointed out that you could actually do it first on old PDAs.

What version of POMB? Yeah. There is actually, Palm has an unreleased watch that's been in Deeter's basement for five years. Imagine if they licensed graffiti. Oh, I was going to come to their graffiti clip. I have to come to Deeter's defense. Because even though Deeter and I did not know each other at the time. It's true.

Deeter and I, you have sitting right at this table, the entire marketing department of Palm and Hanspren. That is very true. I mean, they used to, they used to, you would go to their booth that are. trade show and they would have glossy printed reprints of my columns and I probably you're no no they actually just had eight by tens of a young Dieter it was very strange actually Dieter was working the boot anyway not we could just do 30 minutes on palm right now if you want to I think their move is to say to Walt's point not every thing that you want to build needs to be a full iPhone app there's surface area and maybe eBay needs to be full iPhone apps there's surface area and

Maybe eBay needs to be full iPhone app, but maybe they don't need to be a Siri app. But maybe there's another kind of thing that needs to be a Siri app, which I think we should transition very neatly into the big kind of Mac OS news, which was Siri hit the Mac. What do you just think? The more I think about it, the more worried I become. I'm sure it's going to work fine. But the fact that Siri sits next to Spotlight and they basically did, as far as I could tell, did no integration work with them whatsoever. there's a bunch of continuity stuff that they've also done with Mac to connected to

iOS and even the Apple Watch. And I know that there's a new Apple file system that I need to dig way into. Everybody's very excited about it. There's a new Apple file system? Yeah, it's going to replace HFS Plus. Oh my gosh. That can only mean Doom.

When I saw those two icons next to each other, I was like, oh, so MacOS is going to be just like iTunes. They're going to just layer features on it and not pay attention to how it all should be integrated into a single cohesive hole. Well, somebody on Twitter complained, and I think correctly, and I hadn't thought about the whole session. Because as you said, Nila, they were just like,

it was like a gaddling gun of stuff. There was no mention of mail. And mail is something that really needs to be working. Oh, you should, the biggest news of the whole thing. Yes. Single sheet threads. That's not it at all. Yes, it is.

You don't have to. Wait, I missed this. Opposite of that news. All your conversations are in a single-scrollable pain now. Okay, that's cool. But the biggest news... It was one of the things that flashed by. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

The biggest news is the whole thing. What is it? Eli, what is it? You can delete the default apps from iOS. You can delete mail and stocks and podcasts. The fact that that makes us so happy? The fact that that makes us so happy is a problem, right? Can you make other things the default?

And if you can delete them, does that mean that they have gotten them unbundled from the Kores far enough where if they wanted to, they could just update the damn things instead of waiting for the next OS update. Yeah, because they're in the app store. Because they're rolling updates. They're just in the app store. Well, that's good news. And I think this actually...

There's some ones you weren't ready to say what you can do with it. We just rolled right on past MacOS. Which is basically what Apple did. Apple's like, here's Mac OS. Here's a new version of Siri for Mac OS. They did that cut and paste stuff. Yeah, they did a cut and paste. There's some new continuity stuff.

Right. Yeah, you did mention... You were talking about Siri. And, you know, watching this unfold, I thought, well, it would be great if they rolled out Siri more broadly once everybody felt a little better about Siri. And I was slightly annoyed that they're rolling out Siri more broadly before they

fix search in mail. Right. Like, fix So you're a mail user. Well, I mean, you have to be, right? Okay, you don't have to be. John, we work at the fucky startup. Yes. You guys are clearly more high of your wallet.

Like, in my shop... Hey, but I still have a couple of old email accounts that I use mail for. If I want to get corporate mail, it's, you know, it works white-listed. in the mail app if I try to get it in Outlook, just in the corporate, it doesn't work

so well, so I use multiple mail apps and I have to go back to mail eventually. If I'm trying to search for something, my goodness. I am so with John. I still use mail. This is specific to mobile and desktop. And just this past weekend I had to actually, I was on my way somewhere, couldn't find the address because it wouldn't

pull up in mobile, had to sit down, open my laptop, connect my laptop to Wi-Fi, find the paperless post invitation. That is the Apple Nightmare's scenario. Okay, so can I go further that They haven't fixed search and other things in mail. They haven't fixed the way their mail client handles Gmail, which I have had hours of conversation with both companies about,

and I've come to believe it is largely Google's fault. Even on Android phones, you know, there are two email clients. They want their email system to work in a particular way. But the problem for Apple is that Gmail is the biggest email. service in the world by far, and it is their responsibility as the maker of devices and software to make it work with with Gmail. And as far as I, did you learn something about that? No, but this was, I think, the thing about the Mac section that really hit me.

First of all, they renamed OS 10 to Mac OS. Yep. So it's... By the way, they told me at a meeting later. Yeah. That within Apple, they have a large number of people who called it OSX, which drove them crazy. I was thought it was fun. I'm guilty of saying that by accident.

So they renamed it MacOS. They didn't give it a number. They didn't give it a number. Cred Fagorey said something very strange, which if anybody knows the answer to, I would love to know. Why, it's obvious that it's Sierra? Yes. I've come up with something poetic. So he was just like, obviously, you know, we have to give it a name, and it's clearly Sierra, and they just like moved on.

Yes. I think it's because it's a metaphor for the PC market being in a drought. And Sierra is where the snow-capped mountain. still are and it's a source of water. I think when you say the reason it's obvious is that it's a metaphor for drought, you're like, you're just very hard. I'm sorry, I need a ruling on that from Judge John Ford. Absolutely.

I mean, because we all live in Northern California. That was a huge blunder for bottom of my point. I should have remembered that he's in the doghouse with Lauren, so he'll agree with their name. No, but I mean, Apple is so California. Every time Apple does demo, they're like, look it, we're going to Tahoe. City and then we're going to our company offsite in Big Sur and after that we might stop in snow. And then our beautiful children will make a movie

of this adventure. Right, right. That's way better than mine. I was going for Sierra, the 1970s and 80s game developer that published the King's Quest series. Oh. There's a metaphor there too. If anyone knows why it's obvious, no. I'm sticking with my theory. I'm stuck up Sierra

Mountains. But why was the mountain orange? I don't know. Walt mumbled a couple times next to me. He didn't like the desktop back. So get it together, Apple. Anyway, let me make this point, and then we can move on for MacOS. Everything they demoed in MacOS locks that ecosystem down farther. So if you want to use the new series stuff and say, show me all the JPEG images John emailed me,

you have to use mail in OS10 because you can't talk to anything else. If you want to use Apple Pay on the web, which is not a big announcement, have to use Safari. They're getting to a place where they're- And Safari on the Mac. Safari on the Mac. Yes. Which is, that's a choice. I don't use it.

I use it. I use it. Well, use it. Sorry, I use it. But, like, that's a choice. They're doing this thing where every new big feature requires some amount of ecosystem market. I use it because I like battery life. Unless these Siri apps take off and this is why it's so weird that they're called Siri apps.

A Siri app is a thing that lives on the Siri platform. But if they just would, like, Siri APIs and stuff, then maybe it could talk to other apps that aren't Apple defaults. But nobody knows. So it's just, that to me is, you know, I always. The MacOS, they've been veering towards each other for a while. And it's interesting to me that as they unbundle the core apps from iOS, the ecosystem on lock-in on the Mac, it seems to be getting a little bit tighter. But here's something you've got to bear in mind.

This could change. It may even, we may even see it in some very, in the next quarterly report, I don't, I'm, listeners, I have no idea. That was just me spitballing. But they've done very well with the Mac as it is. They don't have a lot of outside incentive to change, I mean, they have a lot of outside incentives to change certain things like mail.

Because when I talk about mail, I don't just mean on iOS. I mean on the Mac itself. Search doesn't work very well there. Maybe better than on iOS, but not as good as it used to do. Gmail doesn't work very well there either. But overall, they don't have a high incentive

to change the OS on the Mac. Because last time I looked, the Mac was a $26 billion business that is just a footnote when we talk about Apple that would be like 130th in the Fortune 500 or something. And it is, if it were a separate business. And it has outgrown the overall PC market. What do they like to say? 30 quarters out of the last 35 or something, you know. They don't have a high incentive.

They're not under pressure on that. I think of my Mac is the thing I use to open a web browser and then use the rest of the services. I understand, but that's the overall PC situation. And when you consider that of all the PC companies, they're in pretty good shape. They feel pretty good about it. Apple's got a couple of different. The way I see it, ecosystem moves that they do and do well. One is this type of move where it's like, hey, this feature is really great for you if every single thing that you use, not just hardware-wise, but software two, is ours.

and then this works for you. Otherwise, we're not even thinking about that because, of course, you use everything Apple. I don't. The other move that they have is when they open up and pull people into their ecosystem, they did it with iTunes, when they made iTunes for Windows

and made the iPod relevant for people outside the Mac ecosystem. They did it with retail when they started putting stores in places where people didn't tend to see Macs and iPods and their wares. Then they started pulling people in they were able to tell the story, hey, we had so many customers who've never owned a Mac before. My concern is that with this move, with all of this stuff working together, but only if you're on, only Apple stuff, it's too similar to what Microsoft was doing with Office and other stuff where they were reserving it for their own platform.

And they limited their growth that way. They waited too long to open up. Now, I've been wrong before about Apple being too closed. Sometimes they succeed wildly with being closed. But in this case, I wonder, because I... Wait, but that was... That was a winning strategy for Microsoft forever until they got disrupted by the phone. Right?

I mean, Microsoft. Well, they got disrupted by the web. By the phone. Yeah. Well, stupid well, I wouldn't. I hope it dies. It's going to. Don't worry.

Wait, wait. First, we're going to take a quick break. Dieter's going to read an ad. Yes. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about iOS, the big one. And then my personal favorite one, the big change to TVOS, which I think will revolutionize the world.

But first, to the money, bone. In 1873, Golden Colorado was home to miners searching for gold. And when the miners sat down for a well-deserved banquet, Mr. Coors brought a beer worthy of the occasion, a beer that came to be known as Coors, the banquet beer. Also, the lawyers require me to say that Coors Brewing Company is in Golden, Colorado, and with great beer comes great responsibility, which is a weird way to talk about that, but whatever.

So we're back. What a wonderful advertising that was. That's the phrase I'm using from now on. So Apple blew through TV. So brought out at EQ. He's like, we put out of the TV. We believe that Lauren is doing the NICU dance right now. The most detail-oriented guy in the company. Yeah, right?

He's distracted. Look, the Warriors are up 3-1. Any moment, Steph Curry, like, shoot a three-pointer, and they could win the series. He came out and said, we believe the future of TV is apps. We have so many apps. They're great. Here's a new, here's a quote from the CEO of Stars. Here's a new Sling TV app.

And the big news, very quickly, we're enabling single sign-on so you don't have to log in every app every time, every TV app. And then audience goes nuts and he's like, all right, that was the TV, and they moved right on. I think that that move is the beginning of Apple actually realizing their desire for the Apple TV to be a single, the single box you have under your TV to be effectively your cable box

and for them to disrupt the entrenched TV system in the United States. Walt is looking at me like, I am crazy. But hear me out. Right now, in this industry, there's like a war going on. The FCC is saying you have to open up the cable box, Comcast, other cable providers are saying, no, that's stupid, the future of TV actually is apps.

We're putting apps everywhere. The big thing blocking that from happening is you have to log into every network app on a TV, on a TV streaming box. Whether I have Roku, Apple TV, whatever it is. You have to sign on. You have to enter a code. You have to do this and that.

What Apple is going to do in the next version of TVOS is you buy it. You plug it into your internet. You say, I'm a Verizon customer, whatever. You log it in. They will know what apps work with Verizon. They'll show them to you on the TV screen. Presumably you'll be able to download them as a bundle of everything that works. And then Siri lets you search into all of them.

You can say into Siri now with LiveTune in, turn on CBS, and it'll flip on CBS for you. They've made a cable box. It's just going to work like that. The only thing it's missing is a guide of live TV. That's kind of a major thing, though. Yeah, that's like two seconds away. Yeah, but Neli.

There are like one phone call, the Gem Star, whoever makes a guide away from having that. First of all, they've already built a guide, I believe. This was all part of their plan. which they have tremendous trouble with to the point of, I think, putting it on the shelf for the moment of doing their own service. So I don't think the guide is the obstacle, but because they don't have it, it's not a cable box. It may be that they think of it as the one box, although I have to say this, I'm sorry, there is a one box, everyone ignores it. I have one, too.

It has an entire control and it has all of cable, and it has the top five or six over the top. services on it and that's called Tibeau and it's there and it was just bought right I forgot who bought it. I thought you were going to say the I thought you were headed in the XFINITY X1 direction. The X1 has no over the top on it. Yeah it doesn't. Although it can. It was

built to allow it but it doesn't yet. Who makes that, John? Judge John. Some some some disclaimer. You know we're in their building right now. We're in their building they owe 30% of our company

but we still make fun of them just because we're friends and that's what friends are. I think they're friends with me. But the single sign-on is a brilliant thing whether or not it makes them the

cable box. And it's so cool because it again, like other things, we haven't talked about their privacy getting around plan,

but so you sign it once to your cable provider. when you encounter the first app that requires that. And they then create a token, which has none of your personal information in it. And they send it up to the cable provider, or I think Neli learned a lot more detail. There's a company that cable providers use. But it goes up there.

They don't know who you are. They may know what they're streaming to you, but they don't know your details. and certainly Apple doesn't know your details so like once again poor Comey became to Apple and said I want to know everything about Neili's Tee watching they go well here's the token good luck you know and

and that's the basis for single signing the thing is if you have if you are a TV customer and that number is falling but then Comcast says to you hey we're going to lower the rates for a TV because we are no longer going to least you a box, just go by a $99

Apple TV, and that will get the majority. Not $99. It's $1.69 now? 16. But the cheap one, there's still a little one. Yeah, but that's not going to do all the time. That's not going to do these things. So. Anyway, but whatever, my point is,

I want you to know that I'm placing my hand over Neely's heart. Because I'm not wearing the Apple Watch. I have seen this thing that my hand is over, Neelai's heart, be broken. Over and over again. So many times, by so many companies presenting such good plans for fixing TV.

It's happened at least a half a dozen times where Eli raised his back from things like, these people have figured it out. And then he explains the plan and we all go, yeah, that plan could totally work. And then within a year, the plan is in shambles. And this isn't fixing TV, right? I mean, I've been amazed at Apple's incrementalism in TV. It's like they don't want to, for some reason, it seems to me, They don't want to pay what it would cost to get all the content they would need to actually deliver their own sort of over-the-top streaming service.

Maybe they feel like it would be too expensive, too similar to what's already out there. So they're doing these kind of... I don't think it's money. I think in order to justify what they would have to pay. In other words, the media companies are saying to them, oh, we'll be happy to treat like Comcast. I'm sorry, Xfinity. Comcast, whatever the hell their name is. We're happy to treat it like Comcast.

pay us what Comcast pays us, and then the economics are they have to offer those giant bundles because that's the only way to make the money back. So that would just make – why bother doing that? That's not revolutionizing anything. It's just becoming another cable provider. I think John is right in that it's – these are incremental moves. It's not like Apple is handling the billing for how you're paying for these specific cable apps or cable services.

But all I'm saying is they were willing to do something. something much more radical and they just haven't been able to get the life. Right, on their terms. And I think they're talking about apps being the future of TV, but it's not even clear to me that apps are the future of apps. Right. Right. I mean, there's so many app developers who are saying,

eh, I'm not sure there's a future business model-wise in this. There certainly is one for Apple and for Google because it's like they're sucking the oxygen out of the room to a large extent. I mean, you don't have to actually tap on the app icon and go into OpenTable nearly as often now because you can just either ask Siri or go into Apple Maps and book your table. OpenTables business models to take a spiff off the reservation, right? I mean, they don't need you to open the app. That's what it is now, but they might have had other ideas or plans that involved opening up their app,

but now that's blown to the – now they're a feature. They're not an app. They're not – they don't have a direct relationship with you. They're a feature inside of the app or inside of the series. I mean, I've used this through Siri or – I might have used it through Alexa or Google or one of the others, or all of them. And what happens is they just do what would happen if you open their app, but they send it to you an email. Whether you ask for it or not, all of a sudden you get an email with like here.

Some other restaurants you want to go to and all the other crap they would have put in the app. Please rate this restaurant. Yeah, but the big question for the TV is HBO builds HBO Go and CBS builds CBS Now and ESPN builds watch ESPN. They spend all the money to build the apps and then you get single sign-on a guide and Siri

voice search and you never open those apps again, right? The content gets totally disemmediated. I don't know about you or how much you use your Apple TV. I use mine a lot. I almost never bother opening them. I just say...

Yeah, watch chef's table or something like that. But the single sign-on thing to me or show me a game or thrones or whatever. But the single sign-on thing to me is just right now when you are using a TV and you're having a traditional cable experience, you don't go to a channel and then are prompted to enter in something for that channel, right? So in a way, Apple is just kind of replicating the experience that we already have,

but they have to do it at an app by app basis. And so this is their solution for that. And I know you're doing a lot of reporting on this, and I'm really looking forward to reading this and hearing more about it. But at the surface level, that's kind of what I see it as right now. I am your person. That's true, but the relationship and the leverage has had at a level above the person who's actually watching the content, though.

HBO has that relationship with the cable provider. I mean, they're really having a balanced, negotiated relationship. If this goes to the app economy, you think they're going to have that relationship with Apple where they actually have leverage or are they just another? They're not until they feel that they can make money off of it. That's what it comes down to. Yeah, I mean, but they can make money off it. They can sell, I mean, I don't know what the numbers are.

Maybe you do, John, lately, but they have HBO now, which does not require any of this single sign, in this authentication stuff. stuff. And what do they charge? $15. But isn't HBO now, aren't apps like HBO now still seen as supplemental to the main cable experience? So it's an incremental thing, right? But until they can make the bulk of their money off of this sort of over the top model. This is an old story, and you've heard it before, but it's true. And I think it's interesting. I just spent the weekend, as I do every five or six weeks, at my son and daughter-law's. house where my granddaughter lives, that's the most important thing, in Boston.

They have a big TV. They just have a Roku. They don't have a cable subscription. They would, I mean, it's so far down their list of priorities. It's like, it's not even there. My other son who lives in Texas, it's the same thing. And yet, they watch, he's totally up to date on Game of Thrones. He's totally up to date on everything.

And he added up what he pays for all these services. And he still saves about, I think he said, 70 bucks a month. But I'm saying this is the move, right? These incremental steps are sort of classic Apple. They put out the device, it got the apps. The single sign-on is a big enabling step, in my opinion. And the next move is for Verizon Charter Comcast to say, you know what? We're lowering the price of the bundle because all we have to support now is your internet connection.

We're still doing all the content. Put your hand back over. It's beating. I'm telling you. We're going to do all of this. And we're going to sell you the Apple TV user, the, Apple skinny bundle that has your four broadcast networks, HBO, and ESPN. So you're saying that...

And that will be way cheaper. It will be the same price as if you buy them all individually. So you're saying you agree with John that it's incremental, but it has an end goal. It's working. And it's basically a replacement. You know, they tried to do the big bowl thing. They tried. Peter Kafka, I think, documented every single twist and turn of it.

It didn't work. through forces they couldn't control. So now you're saying they're doing this other thing and they're going around a different way, step by step by step to this goal. I think this thing is rolling and this single sign on to me is it gathering a significant amount of momentum

because everyone, for the first time in the TV industry, everyone agrees this is the move we need. We're going to move to it very quickly and it will change the dynamic of the industry. And a big pressure on that is if they don't win this race, the FCC is going to, come in and say you gotta blow it all up anyway and they do not want that they are desperate to

not be regulated by the FCC in that way so they can show congress so they have they have the american public yeah tom wheeler or tim cook yep and they're gonna they're definitely gonna pick tim cook without question you're definitely gonna have your heartbroken oh i know remember when the Xbox was gonna save to yeah yeah yeah i know new Xbox is a fucking iron but here here but here's the thing Peter, neither you nor I will be in New York when his heart gets broken. That's true. This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by Warby Parker. They say they have a new concept in eyewear.

It's contemporary eyeglasses that are extremely affordable and fashion forward. I think glasses should be viewed as a fashion accessory, but they should not cost as much as a plane ticket or a new iPhone. Glasses start at $95, and that is including prescription lenses. And sunglasses also start at $95. including polarized lenses. And with a prescription, you can get sunglasses starting at $175. Warby Parker makes buying glasses online easy and risk-free. They have a home try-on program that allows you to order five pairs of glasses

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to begin your free home try-on experience today. And again, when you do buy a pair of glasses, they will distribute another pair to somebody in need. Once again, I'm going to just keep saying it. I can't stop saying it. It's Warby Parker, W-A-R-B-B-Y-P-A-R-K-E-R dot com slash Vergecast. and check it out. All right, I'm going to do another transition.

It's who knows to what it is. Something pre-recorded will happen now where you come back and talk about the phone. Hi, I'm Paul, and every week I like to do a little section called Games Are Gadgets 2. And joining me this week is Casey Newton straight from, like literally live from the E3 show floor. Hi, Casey.

Hello, Paul. How are you doing? I'm doing fantastic. We are sort of in the home stretch here at E3, but we've definitely seen a lot of cool stuff. Are you staying hydrated? I am. Honestly, I have not had a drink of water in like four hours.

Oh, man. Please, please rectify that right after you've done talking to me. I will, I promise. Thank you. So, so yeah, what are your highlights? Well, I think virtual reality made a big splash this year. at least in terms of how many different publishers were showing off new experiences. And obviously there's been a slow burn for the past few years,

but now with the systems actually hitting retail, publishers are having to figure out how to make these commercially appealing games. And so some of my favorite things at E3 this year have just been seeing what publishers are doing with VR to try to make it appealing to us. This is like the E3 of the AAA VR. Yeah, I mean, at the Sony demo or the Sony press conference when they said you're going to get to see Batman in VR this year, that felt like a pretty huge moment to me. You know, like so much of the VR up until now has been a little, you know, silly one-off games. Obviously, the Batman Arkham series is probably one of the most commercially successful in the past five years.

And the fact that Sony built an experience for that at the show this year, I think shows you how seriously they're taking it. Yeah, I'm stoked about Fallout. Yeah. And Star Trek. Yeah. Well, I can definitely tell you about Star Trek. Yes, please. So Star Trek is a game, the official name of the game is Star Trek Bridge Command.

Ubisoft is making it, and it's supposed to come out later this year. It's a four-player cooperative game where you choose one of four roles on the bridge of a starship. There's a captain, a tactician, or a tactical person who does kind of the shooting. There's a helm person who does the steering, and then there's an engineer who does nerd things. And in the demo that we played, four of us had to communicate constantly so that we could. rescue a bunch of people from some space pods and then escape the galaxy before the Klingons blew us up. And it was a really fast-paced game. It definitely was frenetic and scary as we were sort of trying to all coordinate while we were using all these brand new virtual

reality user interfaces. But ultimately, it was a lot of fun. You know, on the flip side, I will say that graphically, none of the VR that I've seen is really stunning. I think there's just a kind of general muddiness to the field of view on every VR system that I've tried. The way that Star Trek deals with this is by making it a bit more cartoony. It's not meant to be sort of hyper-realistic. And so you can just kind of lose yourself in the fun of piloting and enterprise like Starship for a few minutes. So you think publishers are kind of ratcheting their system requirements for console VR? I think that is true.

I will say that the other VR experience that I tried today was the Batman VR, and that was of much higher quality. I mean, I think it was a quality that would be familiar to anyone who played the Arkham games on the console. The only difference was that the, the screen display on the PSVR, it's just a lower resolution than you would get on, you know, a 4K TV or something like that, or even a 1080p TV.

So you played Batman on PlayStation VR. Did you play Star Trek on PlayStation VR as well? Star Trek was on Oculus. Okay. Yeah. And then what do you think about Xbox? I mean, there's no Xbox VR headset, but they have weirdly announced an upcoming console that will support VR.

What do you think about that? It seems like a logical step for them to take, right? It would be like the crazier story would be Xbox saying we're not even going to try VR. And frankly, it might behoove them to wait and let this first generation kind of have another, you know, six or eight months out there in the public while we'd be learned, you know, what, works and what doesn't work for these kinds of games. One point that a lot of commentators have made is that most of these things that we're playing, they might be called games, but there's not a lot that's game-like in them. A lot of them feel more like interactive experiences where you're pressing a button or you're

picking up an object and moving it across a desk or something. You know, the number one problem that VR games still have is movement, right? Most of the things that we're playing require you to be stationary. And it's sort of funny what these games go through to, like, sort of explain the fact that you can't move. You know, like, in Star Trek, it's that you're seated at a desk on a starship. In Batman, for the first part of it, while you're, like, calibrating your bat suit, it's because you have to, like, stand on the circle with the bat on it as it descends down. through Wayne Manor into the bat game.

So they kind of have to contrive these like silly situations why you can't move around. I'm not saying that's something that, you know, Xbox is going to figure out in the next eight months. But hopefully by the time their VR headset lands, we'll have done some more thinking about the way we move in these VR games. No one, fallout, you just teleport. Yeah, and that's exactly the way.

So in the second part of the Batman demo, you're investigating a crime scene. and they have these like super awkward move controller, like PlayStation move controller icons in the environment. And in order to move, you have to look at one of those icons and then press the trigger. And then Batman just teleports to that place. So it's like missed.

Yes. You're not even choosing the exact spot on the floor you want to go to. You get to go to one specific little 360. Yeah, it's like VR has reinvented at the point and click adventure. Right, Riven was like that. Rivin had the 360 look, I think. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

But, you know, that's set. I mean, I want to say, you know, one nice thing about the Batman VR experience, which is that that's sort of the first part that you play. You know, you're in Wayne Manor, like sitting at a piano, and Alfred comes in and tells you, you know, somebody's calling for help. He hands you a key. You know, you sort of grab it from him using these move controllers.

you turn the key in the piano, and next thing you know, you're descending down into the Batcave, and after you calibrate your suit, you descend again down presumably toward the Batmobile, although you don't see it. But as you're, like, making that descent, you have this 360-degree field of vision,

you have these, like, sort of really lush, like, waterfalls inside the Batcave. There are bats flying everywhere around you. And just for a moment, you really do trick your brain into thinking, And I'm standing in the Batcave, even though I'm in this sweaty box inside the LA Convention Center. And that is like the magic and the promise of VR, right? It's just the feeling that you could be utterly transported.

And so there's still a lot of work to go on the gaming front. But just in terms of its ability to take you somewhere else and make you feel like you're there, that is really exciting. And I think that's what's driving forward, you know, so much of the interest in VR this year. So on like a gadget nerd end of things Yeah There's the Xbox S The slim down

Which also has some more processing power It's got 4K support And it's got a beach body That's the to me that's the important thing It's been in the gym and it is ready for summer It's just man I have a PlayStation 4 and Xbox 1 at my primary hangout spot.

And the PlayStation 4 is such dramatically better hardware. Yeah. So it just feels like Microsoft's just catching up. But Sony is apparently working on a more advanced version of PlayStation 4 as well. Are people freaked out about this? Like, is this destroying the whole concept of a console? Do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the people here could not be more excited, right?

These are industry people. Anything that sells more consoles is going to get them excited. And for people here who are essentially just video game fans who've figured out some way to get a pass, these are the kinds of people that would easily spend another $400 on a console anyway. It's like what? Like a higher frame rate of here's $400, right? Like I'll pre-order it. So like if people are going to be upset, it's not here.

You know, I mean, as a longtime console player myself, I have very mixed feelings about it. Because on one hand, like the glory of consoles is that you just buy it once and then you don't think about it for the next five years or so, right? Or unless it, like, dies because of like a red ring of death or something. Yeah, but hopefully you'll get at least four or five years. And I've had really good luck with all my consoles. So there's something great about that. At the same time, as you well know, Paul, we're in an era now where many of us are replacing our phones at least once a year. And we're happy to pay $500 or $600 or even more for that privilege.

And so the idea is that our phones are iterating faster than games, when games typically have much higher requirements from the hardware, it does start to seem a little bit ridiculous. So I think it's inevitable that if consoles are going to remain competitive, that they're going to need to iterate more quickly. I just think it is a very delicate dance because, you know, most people can't afford to spend $400 or $500 a year on a new console, and I hope it doesn't get to that point.

So it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out. But I mean, I have to say, I suspect this will be successful because, you know, the hardcore gamers are going to spend that extra money and I think the masses will follow them in due time. I'm really excited about it. I do think it's going to work out for some reason. Yeah. Like, based on your dedication to gaming,

whether you upgrade or not, you're still going to have the experiences that you prefer. But also, like, I'm, like, I haven't managed to scrape together the $2,000 I need for the VR rig and the VR headset yet. And so maybe one of these consoles will come out before I've done that. And then it's like, oh, well, here's a way cheaper entry into the world of VR. So I'm excited about it from that perspective. And I mean, honestly, I think that the console experiences I've had on VR, I would say they're roughly on par with the sort of PC-driven VR experiences I've had. And that's pretty exciting too. I also think that just like aesthetically, like PSVR is the best looking. Like, yes, it's still a ridiculous mask that you're putting it on your face. But it has these like weird blue lights. And the rest of it's just this like kind of, you know, like simple white. I don't like there's, there's something that very appealing about it. So I actually wouldn't be surprised if, um, if VR breaks through not on the PC, but on the console. I've also heard it's like by far the most comfortable.

Yeah, it's, it's very light. Apparently they've like, they've balanced it so that there's a bit of a kind of counterbalance on the back of the headset. So it kind of sits a little bit more comfortably on your head. And then, yeah, there's like kind of a nice foam padding around it. So, you know, I wouldn't say there's an enormous difference in comfort between that and the Oculus. but if people are going to take sneaky picks of me wearing one of them, I would much rather they take sneaky picks and be wearing the PSVR.

All right. That's good to know. Anything else you'd like to add about your general feelings and emotions at being at the game trade show of the year? I tell you, man, I just, I love it. Like, this is one of the times where I feel lucky to do my job. I love video games. I don't usually love trade shows. but every year, like, I leave E3, like, ready to go out and spend four or $500 on video games, like, by the end of the year, you know? I really like third-person action adventure games, so for me this year was all about, like, playing the demo of the new Deus X game that's coming out in August,

dishonored two, like, has some amazing mechanics. And so just, like, getting to spend some time in those worlds, like six months before the rest of the world is going to get to, just like really felt like a true privilege. So if you love video games, I think you have a lot to be excited about in the next six months. And of course, we'll be bringing all of that to you

and more on the bruce.com. That's a wonderful note to end up. I wanted to add that my gadget pick of the week is this Fallout Pit Boy. When they first announced Fallout, they showed a case for your phone. They could turn your phone to a pit boy, but now they just made an actual gadget.

I'm really proud of them. I wanted to thank them, Bethesda, for doing that. Yeah, check out more E3 coverage at the Verge. We also have a sister site called Polygon. They also cover a lot of video games, so that's cool. And I'm guessing we're going to talk a lot more about E3 on next week's Vergecast. I just didn't want to miss this opportunity to have somebody, you know, with all the energy. I can hear the show for behind you.

People are just so excited about waiting three hours to play Zelda right now. I know it. And they are. It's the last day of the show. And that light is still a mile long. That's wonderful. Well, thank you, Casey. Thank you, Paul.

Let's talk about the phone. Biggest news, obviously, the entire event. Ten big announcements. Tim Cook called it the mother of all releases. They ended with a big note about the privacy on the iPhone, the way they're going to do AI, the way they're going to learn stuff. Differentiated privacy, I think is what?

Differential. Differential. privacy, short-term, long-term memory was another key word. Lots of stuff to unpack. But, John, what do you think the biggest phone news was today? Differential privacy, though? Like, yeah, John. That's right up there with unapologetically. John, I promise you, you'll be using differential privacy within two weeks on the air. I mean, I love that John Ford, but every time it's on the air, he's talking about differential privacy. I know. Saving some unknown academic. You know, it's like our friend Carl has that. Her girls.

series binge, yours will be differential privacy. Differential privacy. When you say differential, I think you're going to say equations now. Then you surprise me. Yeah, there may be equations in there. I'm confident of these equations. Anyway, John, go ahead. It's a relatable word. I love what they're doing with iOS in general. I think the I message stuff in particular is going to be, it's going to have a good effect on keeping people in the ecosystem and getting people, especially teens, I imagine, and tweens to all stay in the fold. I mean, some of the stuff that they're doing around the lock screen wasn't as interesting to me

because I don't like so much information showing up on a lock screen where I don't know who might try to pick up my phone and look at it. So, I mean, a few different things. I know people have different settings on their lock screens, for instance, and that's going to appeal to some people. But, I mean, interesting stuff. I'm an iPhone user. have been since almost the beginning

since I ditched my handspring trio yes me too now you want to hear about Dieter's heart because it's still it's going it's elevated you know how much trios I have is it fewer than Deeter I don't know but I know that

Dieter I don't have that many Dieter like tweeted a picture of me that Rico had random me holding a trio just to just to tweet it every time again Dieter tweets an old Palm picture Anyway, so... John, please continue.

Here's what I saw about the phone, John. Well, I want to hear... So, bottom line, you thought it was a good bunch of improvements in iOS? I thought they were good improvements. I am scared of the next phone update in John... I didn't see specific things in this iOS update that I expect to lead to hardware changes. And so I'm still curious about that. Like, what exactly is all of this leading to in terms of what we're going to see in the iPhone 7?

And we know about the dual lens potential and all that. But I'm wary of this next phone update. I'm afraid they're actually going to take away the headphone. Yeah. I got a big. John, be afraid. I'm very afraid. Because I use that for more than headphones now.

I mean, microphones. There are other things you do with that thing. And if you start taking away ports on something so small. John, you don't understand. The digital port can be used for everything. I know it can't, but there's only one. the price of only a few adapters. I know.

Which will include a pastoral. I mean... But give me too. Because I might want to plug in a microphone and plug in a battery to that lightning port

at the same time. I can tell you all about that. Listener, if you're in your car right now, I want you to imagine Walt Mossberg with a beautiful view of the bay behind him,

threateningly brandishing a single port MacBook Harry and John. Just trying to show John, just trying to remind him of the single port.

It was rather sharp. It is. You should never chimes of doom ringing in the background. Yeah, Lauren's slipping on the playing the time. Oh, yeah, where the bells? Where's your like Zew Crew sound port, Lauren? Now I really want a sound effect for control all to leave.

We'll come up with sign. Here's what I, the thing I saw with the phone, they made a bunch of incremental improvements. They did a bunch of things where I literally wrote in the live blog, finally, or I thought to myself, this is what they should have done when they released the success. So they leaned very heavily into the faster touch ID sensor. They came up with new lock screen because they said, we've noticed it's so fast we never even see the lock screen anymore. So they revitalized the lock screen in a variety of ways.

They moved Siri around. They made Siri obviously smarter. They put 3D touch all over the place in really interesting ways. All stuff they should have done when they put out the phone with a faster fingerprint sensor and the 3D touch as far as. I mean, that was a bunch of finally stuff. But at the time, they were selling 76 million iPhones a quarter, so it seemed so urgent. I don't think, no, I mean, like, even Apple Music, and I'll get you to agree with me on this one.

Apple Music was a mess when they launched it. It still kind of seemed like that. Oh, I'm on record. I'm not sure. I mean, how did everybody else feel about the version? I wasn't sure I was convinced that Apple Music is all fixed up now. No, so I'm not convinced either. But what I'm saying is it would have been better if the version of Apple Music they released from the get-go looked like this.

It's like the world we said about the watch, or much earlier in this podcast, which is live. It's happening right now. Somewhere in time, something was said. It's what version one probably should have been, except we know even less about it. We're all going to have to try it. But, yeah.

They put out a revamp of Apple News to which the crowd went, and then announced they have like 60 million users. Well, now it doesn't look like it was built by Monkey News. on crack. Now it looks like the Wall Street Journal. It does push alerts. It does push alerts. It does subscriptions. They've reinvented Zite, which is fine, which I like.

They've almost reinvented Flipboard. They're close. They should have just bought Flipboard. They should have. I mean, by the way, the highest level of Apple, both under Jobs and Cook were and I think are still close to Flipboard unless something has happened. So they... Well, it was one of the first grade iPad apps.

right. The home kit stuff, the new home kit. So that's a big one. So the big ones are obviously, and they save these for last, right? I message.

I message is a platform. And then Home finally gets this dedicated app. Not only a dedicated app, but a dedicated spot on the core UI of the OS. So they shuffled some stuff around in iOS. Yeah, you should go through that. Photos.

They took widgets out of the drop-down notification panel, and they moved it over to the left of the home screen and the left of the lock screen, which means it got rid of that Siri predictive garbage that nobody uses. Control panel is now three panes. You swipe up, you get your main control panel. I'm sure you can't control,

like do as much as you ought to with it, but whatever. You swipe that control panel over, and you get your music controls, and then you swipe it over again, and you get all your home kit controls. So, like, they have made home automation, like a thing that you can get to from anywhere in the operating system,

which is a huge bet. I don't think it's a huge... I mean, it should be a first-level system service. Yeah, but nobody. has home automation stuff to use with their first level. I mean, I can't wait to do this. I find so strange about all this is it's so hard to find a comprehensive list

of things that are currently available that are home kit compatible and really work well. I mean, Apple has this list and it's surprisingly short and it makes me wonder when you announced home kit to begin with why wasn't home at the center of it

and why didn't you have some device that catalyzed the whole market? Because they were a They finally admitted it today that the Apple TV is the thing you use. They were requiring device makers, smart home device makers, to have a specific hardware set in order to work with Apple HomeKit. It wasn't just a software thing. It wasn't just, oh, work with our software platform now. For security reasons, they required device makers to have a certain, I want to say it was a certain type of wireless chip sets.

It was a chip. And so what happened was at the time that they announced HomeKit, you know, you look at some of the smart locks or smart cameras or smart thermostats or whatever. they were already out on the market, they weren't going to go back and retroactively add, you know, this chip set to their existing devices. They had to wait for the next product cycles in order for things to become HomeKit compatible. So it's been this kind of slow and, it's kind of painful rollout. The things that actually work with homesick. I don't want to see you doing that.

You do that behind the scene, so I don't have to see it. It just wasn't already at once. Just tell me what it's done. You say, here's our couple of partners. Here's Disney and their new. And they didn't do that even today. They didn't bring anybody. Despite the fact that.

They made it a central feature of iOS. There were no home kit people up. I hear what you're saying about Apple TV, but it's called Apple TV, not Apple Home. It's an enabling thing. It's not like, hey, look, look at my Apple TV. It can open my door. Actually, it can't. It can sit there and wait for the device to show up that I'm going to be excited about,

but it's not the device on the side of that. It just sort of sits there. First is something like the Amazon Echo, which just required a software integration. Like they went from having, you know, 300 skills, quote, unquote, to a thousand skills. But this is that, John. Smart home controls because all the smart home makers had to do. The app makers would say, okay, sure, yeah, you can use Alexa to control the Phillips few light bulbs now. Is an Apple just going to put out a Siri box in September and call it a day?

That is one of the rumors, right, that they're working on. There's a rumor, but nothing happened. No, I meant they'll do it in September. The problem here or the non-problem, the wonderfulness, whatever you want to call it. The problem or the wonderfulness? It really depends on your point of view. Let me finish and you'll see. is that Apple actually cares about and I think has decided to build a big part of its reputation on security and privacy.

And these IOT things can be hacked. That's why they required a chipset. And that's why they're slower. You know, I take nothing away from the Echo and Alexa and Amazon. Nothing away from Jeff Bezos. I just came off a pretty great interview with him a couple of weeks. ago, but... Recode.net.

Recode replay. Listen to it free. You're welcome, Mossburg. Finally a business model. And there it is. Bezos mentions on the verge cast. But Lauren speaks. But the level of security that they're willing to settle for, which I'm sure is not nothing. I'm not accusing them having no security.

And the level of security that Google is willing to go for, which I'm sure is not nothing, is not. nowhere as high as the level Apple typically insists upon them. People can call it control or whatever they want, but security and privacy matter. And that's why you will be saying differential privacy. I mean, I wrote a piece that I don't think they were very happy about, wondering aloud whether they could compete in the next era, which is, I believe, is the AI era.

We've talked about this on CNBC, watch it daily. Squawk alley. Every morning. We get like 10 cents every time we do one of this. So just keep them rolling in, guys. John Ford and I and John Ford and many other people. But here's the thing. So I wrote a piece saying, and actually our friend Joanna Stern wrote something similar,

that because they are so fanatical about privacy, they won't be able to scoop up all the information that Google can scoop up from searches and from map things and that Facebook can scoop up from the source. social graph that will let them become smarter and smarter about you and about people like you and whatever. And today I think we saw something interesting, which is they kind of came up with loophole is the wrong word because it implies something sneaky. An explanation. Well, no, it's a way. They kind of came up with a technique that I'm pretty sure nobody in the room had heard of called differential privacy, which I have yet to have time to study up.

But I did have time to talk to their chief privacy person afterward who tried to explain it to me on a fourth grade level. And which I'm not blaming him for. He's a very nice man and I am at a fourth grade level when it comes to this. But basically it's – he said it's been around a long time in analog things and has to do with – they take all of the – like, let's take the case of what words, what you're new kind of interesting, contextually appropriate word should we be suggesting for you in our keyboard? How do we learn that as the language changes? Well, Google learns it, I presume, from knowing what people are searching for, from knowing what people are typing, going up to the cloud, and they have the keys to decrypted, which, of course, Apple has famously taken away from itself.

Facebook learns it because people are posting every second on Facebook. Apple, with this differential privacy, as best I understand it, they're getting it off the local devices. They're hashing it up in some way that even they can't disassemble it. And when it gets to their servers in the cloud, they are still able to detect what they called a nuance or a bias toward certain new terms and certain new things that allows them to fill in that dictionary. and keep it alive and keep it intelligent. Yeah. They should have called it toddler learning. Because if you've ever sent a toddler to school or, you know, they come back and they're saying these, where did you hear that?

I don't know. And that's essentially what Apple's doing. Well, it's learning, but it's not telling you where it learned that. It's just getting smarter. That may be at a sixth grade level. I like that. So Tim, if you're listening, toddler learning. But the point is it is kind of similar.

It can't be, like, you can't unpack it and track it back to Lauren Good. You just know. And it's not just the words in the dictionary. It's other places. Well, they're doing it. They're making everything. So they're like having, they're imposing on themselves a couple of extra steps, which presumably Google and Facebook don't have to do.

I don't know how, but Amazon, because mostly, don't they mostly know what you are buying? Amazon knows everything. Okay. No, they know. They know what you're buying. Amazon is literally installed an array of far-filled microphones in my home. Yeah, but the way they do it, it's not creepy

because they actually sent a butler to help you and ask what you want and notice what you're wearing. The butler works for KGB, though. You don't know. Mr. Mousberg, should I find those boxers for you in another size? Yes, thank you. How do you know I'm wearing boxers? But here's the point.

The point is Apple has been, I mean, to me, again, maybe I'm on a fourth-giver. grade level. Deeter's right. They kept saying, we're focused on the local phone. But they admitted today that there are some things for which it's helpful to know what all the local phones are doing, and they claim to have figured out a way to do it through this thing called differential privacy. And it's simpler to what Steve Jobs told you years ago they were doing with maps, right? When he talked about how they're getting smarter around traffic patterns, but not tracking exactly where an identifiable individual person is every moment of the day.

That's right. And so, it does put a couple more steps in their path than their competitors might have, although we'll probably hear from their competitors that they're super private. Yeah, they're also differentiated. Okay. But anyway, that's, that was an interesting. So that was a big one. And then we got to do, we're running out of time.

We have to talk about, I think, the biggest announcement of all, which is iMessage, turning into a platform, having an app store, new ways to draw in it. All of digital touch appears to have been subsumed. into messages. So that was their, waltz again staring at me like I'm a crazy person. They tried to launch with the watch

an entirely new messaging platform. Did it work? No, because no one wants to draw things on this tiny, tiny, like watches don't make very good input devices. But the phone actually makes

a pretty good input device. Right, so that whole panel... Are you going to start, like, texting me drawings? You just wait, Mossberg. You just wait. The stuff that is sort of table-stakesy with messaging apps now,

but has a padat message. So there's sticker things. There's giant emojis. There's giant emojis. There's secret messages. There's secret messages. You can swipe to reveal. There's like likes.

You know, it's like Facebook reactions. You can put a heart over some things. You know it's table stakes? What's that? Working on either the web or Android. Dieter's bringing the web bell. No, no, Andrew, just you don't have to go on the web. That's fine.

I know you hate the web app. That's cool. Just put it on Android. Right. Literally. literally, literally before we walked in there, I put in the live blog, if they put I message on Android,

I'm switching to a Nexus phone. And that's why it's not on Android. I mean, really, though? Really, if they're not lying to me offstage when I talk to them afterward, their explanation was, we have a big base. It may not be as big as Facebook's,

but it's actually closer to Facebook Messenger than you think no number is offered. And we're pretty happy with our base, and we still think it helps us sell our device. and we don't see the game from putting it in Android. Now, I'm sure they had an, I can't believe, since they are human beings, that they didn't have a debate, don't ring the bell, that they didn't have a debate about it because it's a logical thing to think about.

But, and I'm, my reciting this to you doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it because I, too, said in the live blog that I, and I think I said it on CNBC this morning, that didn't I? I think I did. You said many brilliant things on CBS. This is long ago. All the most brilliant things I heard you say outside of this podcast were on CNBC. I think at 8 o'clock this morning on CNBC I said they should, or 840, that they, that I thought that it was possible. They would put it on Android or probable. But to my surprise, they didn't.

And when I asked why not, this is the answer. We have a big base, and we're still interested in using this all as a differentiator to keep people buying our products, our hardware products. But, I mean, does everything need to be? I mean, Apple Music isn't a differentiator. They've got that on Android. Is that just because it was on Android already and they didn't want to pull it off? It is. That was a complicated part of the deal with beats.

That bums me out. It was also why the app was so terrible at first, I think, made by a committee. As for iTunes, I raised that issue in the discussion with the person I was talking to, and the answer was, we had the iPod, and for the iPod to succeed, we needed a broader base. The implication being we don't need that anymore. Well, I think with Apple Music, the big difference is you can't roll up to a Beyonce or a Taylor Swift and say, give us an exclusive unless you can go to everybody, right? And

it's, maybe you can pay them more and only hit iPhone users, but I think those artists they want, they want the model, the Apple music model of the pricing, the per-stream pricing, the ability to go to iTunes and actually purchase the album, whatever, they want that everywhere. And the only competitor they have

that's wide is Spotify, and nobody likes to Spotify model. You also value these things differently. People pay for Apple Music, people pay for iTunes, right? These are just very, these are upfront costs that people have to pay to sort of participate in the service. Nobody pays for iMessage in that traditional sense. They pay for it when they buy Apple hardware. They pay for it when they're a part of iCloud, let's say, but it's a different value proposition for that value proposition is... Right, but it's a platform now. They're telling app developers, we want you to sell apps into iMessage.

You can charge for those. We're going to take a cut of that, I assume. So they say there are services company. They're actually going to take a cut of things that transactions through my message. I assume. I don't know. It's an app drawer. It's a drawer. It's a lot of that. It's a They made that distinction. There's an App Store. There's an IMessage app store. You can develop apps for IMessage. I watched

in their little State of the Union thing. They made a sticker app. Please explain the State of the Union. The State of the Union, I'm sorry. It's the super nerdy, like, developer-focused thing where they talk about new ways that X-Code can understand aspect ratios, and everybody cheers.

The MacLEST of OECD on one side and the iOS developers sit on another. And there's a TBOS developer sitting in the basement crying. But even that analogy, John, the app stores are only something you can get on Apple devices. No, but that's the thing. So if Apple says, I messaged on, they didn't do this. I don't even want to talk about this. But if they put an Android, then they can put an app store on Android and start collecting revenue out of it theoretically.

But don't they lose control some of the security? I can make a very cogent argument joined by my friend Judge John Ford that they should have. And by Dieter. Nicknames and sound effects. The Verchast. That around this table, that they should have put it on Android. Particularly, here's another reason. Google's weak in messaging.

This might be a good moment to seize it. Well, they're weak in terms of quality, but not in terms of number of messaging apps in which they best Apple handling. I messages actually a good, was a good messaging app yesterday. Today, it's a really good message. I think what I'm doing on Android. The day that Allo gets released, I flip on iMessage for Android and just sit back and laugh. Yeah.

Well, no, I mean, I think, look, we want it. I want it because I have 90 phones. I think the average iPhone user does not give a shit. And I think the average Android user maybe consistently thinks, well, if I get an iPhone, I get the blue bubbles. And now I'll get shiny backgrounds full of fireworks and new kinds of bubbles and whatever else it is. I mean, there are, the bet here is that it's a long game. and maybe the smartphone market is being reset at a lower level, but it's still a lot of smartphones a quarter,

and they still make a lot of money off them, and it's worth it to do something that this highly improved eye message, sorry, that will keep people buying iPhones and iPads and Macs. That's basically the bet. If they're in it to collect this data from people, if they want to hear our voices and see what we message about, Why not get as broad a swath of people as possible? Because the answer is they think they have a huge base.

They believe they have a huge enough base to do this differential privacy, you know, hashed up, whatever it is thing and figure out what we're talking about. Facebook's is bigger, though. It's bigger, but at some point there's diminishing returns. At some point you have enough, and they think they have enough. I'm just telling you. And also Apple's business is still selling phones, ringing revenue out of the phones.

Facebook's business, they need that bigger base because they just get a small slice. They are not going to know what India's working class is talking about on messaging, you know,

but by voice, if not written, because maybe the literacy, they're not going to know what those people are talking about because they are absolutely not going to use eye message because...

Given Tim Cook's focus, I have to assume that was part of this discussion, this imaginary discussion I had inside. Eli, can I say one more thing? Yes. I was

disappointed today, and this may not be something they do at a keynote. Maybe it's something we'll find out about and we finally get our hands on this thing, that they didn't talk about having done a lot more work to fix the core apps, which I think have fallen behind. They're allotted you delete them. We talked about mail, but this goes for others as well. I was thinking about this, and maybe this is a thing. They're going to make the team that works on mail, if they put that thing in the store, they will now be able to track the number of people that download Apple Mail, right? The team that works on the stocks app.

They're going to be able to track downloads. Those teams now have to compete against Outlook, Gmail, maybe that's their solution rather than saying, here's a new version that we've done, is to say we're unleashing it into the world as if it was a third part of that. An Apple Mail team, if you're getting your ass kicked in the store by Air Mail or Gmail,

you better way in or go. If I appoint you the head of the Apple Mail team and you have to compete in the store, probably the first thing you're going to do is either make it work great, with Gmail or make sure fix search yeah i mean i think that is their solution is not we're going to do these monolithic releases it's we're unbundling the stuff we're letting people delete it you can download it if you need it and if those teams don't win we're going to get new teams because that's that's the

right solution right it's compete so i want to ask Lauren one question because you you and i were talking about messaging as we're leaving it's been you know silicon valley major company month and a half is over every company has talked about intelligence every company has talked about intelligence every company has talked about messaging. Do you think Apple's conversations and message was their big highlight. I mean, that was the grand finale today. Do you think that they talked about that stuff

at the same level as Google, Facebook, Google Facebook. They didn't talk about bots. That's what I was leading up to you. So it was the one word that they didn't, we didn't hear once throughout this developers conference that we've heard at almost every other. Facebook, Google, who else?

Microsoft, of course. Microsoft builds was a big one. Racist spots at Microsoft. Yeah. No, but even bots and Skype. I mean, accidentally racist. The accidentally racist. Toddler-learning racist boss.

Where did you learn that word? Tay was a six-year-old toddler. Just learning terrible things. No, but Apple didn't talk about bots at all. And that's probably for one of two reasons or both reasons. The first is that Apple tends to not use jargony things with the exception. I'm sorry, there's my eye message speak of the devil, with the exception of differential privacy or whatever it is.

Right. But they tend to not use things. that maybe would be over like the average average consumers just don't care about. And so bots kind of fall into that category. And the other thing is that the way that I think that they're allowing third-party apps to work within I-Message is very different

from this idea of the transactional bots are going to be working in some other messaging apps. So there was that. And then what was the other question that you asked? You were going to say something about... Oh, and then how it compares to... So I'll let Dieter talk about this because you wrote so many great pieces

about messages around Google I.O., that one in particular. But, you know, Apple's iMessage experience still is really streamlined. When people think of Apple messaging, they think I message as the only app. They know about certain levels of security. They know what it can do. They know where they can get it. It's, you know, for better or worse, it's a very streamlined experience. Whereas Google, you know, is saying like, here's this video app and here's this messaging app. And Google Hangouts didn't really work out as well for us as we hope. But you can still use that, by the way. And by the way,

you know, here's this app. And it just gets to be a little bit confusing and a little bit convoluted. And so I think relative to that, I don't know, at least in the U.S., I think IMessage is still the one I'm going to use a lot. I can tell you that. I think you're exactly right to point out that they refuse to talk about bots and instead talk about apps. Because for Apple apps fits into Apple's power base of their platforms, right? And so when you say bots aren't ready, they're really transactional, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. that's a fuzzy mess that Apple doesn't want to put into their user experience. But if they can take those things and say, hey, I know you've made a bot that'll talk to anybody.

Instead of doing that, make an app that'll talk to iMessage. That's a huge win for Apple. So I think that's exactly right. And I also think you're right that, yes, all of the other messaging options on Google are just not going to beat iMessage in the U.S. even if people get, you know, annoyed that you can do slightly more things with bots on those other platforms. Like, I message will be cleaner. It won't have quite the huge, crazy Wild West feature set of those other messaging apps, but I don't think Apple cares.

And I don't think most consumers in the U.S. are going to care. It's the most likely to succeed business model-wise, right? Because in terms of how Apple is monetized, the App Store, the seamless way that you pay for things through Apple versus other ecosystems, If I'm a developer and I'm going to develop it, and I want to make money, and I'm going to develop some kind of an add-on for messaging, I'm sure going to try it on my message. Like square peer-to-peach. Absolutely.

Or even just cute stickers of cats playing with yarn and typing on keyboards. Are they wrong with this? I got which one, Ben-time. I don't want to name. Maybe I'm using the wrong name. One of the well-known analysts tweeted, remember, stickers is a big business. Yeah.

As well, Apple said you can do, you can be a sticker developer without even writing a lot of code. I never knew it was a big business. but apparently it is. You open up X code. You click Make Sticker Project. You drag your images into where you want the stickers to be. You click publish and you're done.

Well, I'm leaving this. This garbage. I'm drawn stickers for the rest of my life on my iPad Pro. All right, let's wrap this up. Let's do final thoughts real fast. You get one sentence. John? Why do I have to go first?

I'm the new guy. Yeah. That's why you got to go first. Final thought. Looking forward to Apple, expanding the ecosystem. Not sure they did that here, but as somebody who's already in it, I'm excited about what they announced. Lauren. I'm going to broaden it out a bit.

Final thought for today is that given all of the other really crappy news that's been out there lately, I was pretty happy to be at WWDC today. And I think it was overall a fairly eventful keynote in a good way. Yeah. I think the most important thing is that Apple is amping up its efforts in AI without violating privacy, at least as far as we know and I think that was good. You can do split screen safari windows on the

iPad. I'm pretty excited about that. It was really a mix of like really high-minded stuff and like we cleaned up this button that you've hated. We didn't talk about Swift, but that's another conversation. We've been doing this for 90 minutes. So mine is actually it's important. This is the first

time in a long time that Apple to me has felt intentional and confident and I think for the past year they've just been firing half-baked ideas. out in the world. And this time they kind of know what they're doing. It's still a little half fake. But it's the tech in his cheek.

All right, that was Verchast. John, do you want to plug your show again? Do you have another thing you want to plug? Anything you want, really. What? Did you have a breakfast this morning? Like, whatever you're into. I really don't need to talk about Squawk Alley on CNBC at 11 a.m. Eastern 8 Pacific.

Because just kind of mentioning product placement, I think this podcast is way above. that sort of thing. Yeah. So, yeah. You know, I know.

Personally, I'm a little too embarrassed to ask for the opportunity to promote my podcast, which happens to you go. Take it away, Walter. Take up that baton and rub.

Deer just left. I think he just went to watch Squawk Alley on Apple TV because you can watch past episodes. And let me just point out that any time you want,

you can hear Neela and I any time of the day night on many different podcast, Podcatcher apps. I think we're on Stitcher now. You can just get it. Stitcher.

We're on Stitcher. We're on Stichers. Sowing machines. We're everywhere. We're everywhere. Smart connected sewing machines. Podcast apps. That's great.

Control and delete preloaded. That's our market. Control wall delete. Yeah. The completely unscripted podcast by Nila and me. Unlike this one. If you love scripted podcast,

the Vergecast is for you. you. But if you like crazy, control out deletes where you want to go. I'm going to point out that unlike all the other busters at this table, I do not have a side hustle. You just follow me on the Vergecast. Oh, my side hustle is just irritating Walt for 30 minutes and control on delete.

I don't do a lot. All right, that's it. There's also a bunch of other great podcasts. There is What's Tech with Chris Plant. There's Verge ESP with Emily Ashita and Liz Zapato. There's Recode decode with Carrey and my favorite mall, actually, Recode Media. Peter Kafka.

And Recode, Repode. where you can hear all the code conference interviews. There doesn't have a host that I'm accidentally insulting by not mentioning. So, record, replays, whatever. It's a bots. It's bots. They don't have feelings. All right, that's it.

There's so much social media, the shit out of this. Let's just wrap this up. Ring the bell, Lauren. We're down here. So earlier, you may have heard my sweet ad for Coors where I drop my voice down, but I don't know if I can keep that up. Instead, I'm just going to tell you that there's this town in Colorado. called Golden. I've actually been there. It was founded during the gold rush and was home to miners

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