The Vergecast - Microsoft announces Surface event for Sept. 22nd / Apple concedes to let apps link to the web sign up / iPhone 13 could have satellite connectivity

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

The Verge's Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Chaim Gartenberg discuss a bunch of new Apple App Store policies, the upcoming Microsoft Surface event, and some fun strange new gadgets from this week. Further reading: Reddit bans anti-vaccine subreddit r/NoNewNormal after site-wide protest Ivermectin misinformation has poisoned Amazon’s platform, with few fixes planned Apple’s $100 million settlement agreement “clarifies” App Store rules for developers, but doesn’t change much Apple concedes to let apps like Netflix, Spotify, and Kindle link to the web to sign up Apple and Google must allow developers to use other payment systems, new Korean law declares Apple will ask before it targets you with its ads in iOS 15 Apple says Arizona and Georgia will be first to add state IDs to iPhones Microsoft announces Surface event for September 22nd Microsoft will release Windows 11 on October 5th Windows 11 won’t include Android app support at launch The Windows 11 upgrade situation just got less and more confusing Microsoft won’t stop you installing Windows 11 on older PCs Microsoft is threatening to withhold Windows 11 updates if your CPU is old Microsoft is kicking unsupported PCs out of Windows 11 testing The iPhone 13 could have satellite connectivity The iPhone 13’s rumored satellite link sounds like it’s just for emergencies The next Apple Watch may be delayed due to manufacturing issues Apple reportedly wants a Watch with more health tracking and could ship one next year Apple buys classical music streaming service Primephonic Midrange Samsung Galaxy S21 FE appears again in leaked manual Samsung adds new foldable features to its older Z Fold and Z Flip phones with One UI 3.1.1 Fashion follows function: what’s next for the phone industry TV streaming service Locast suspends service after court ruling This chainless drive system could revolutionize e-bike designs  Sony’s new PS5 model weighs less because it has a smaller heatsink Bose announces QuietComfort 45 noise-canceling headphones with 24-hour battery life Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we have a bunch of new and strange Apple App Store policies. We have a new Surface event and Windows 11 coming from Microsoft. And I promise a bunch of fun, strange gadgets at the end. That's all coming up on the Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools

means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data

in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star,

Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Clause 3.1.3A of the App Store Rules. I am your friend, Dieter Bone.

The fact that you're listening to my voice probably gives you a hint that, Nilai is not here. He had to go deal with some Ida stuff, but don't worry, he, his family are okay. But that means that we are without him. But we've got Alex Krantz here. Yes, I am the one 5G band you didn't know existed. Oh, my God. We also have Heim Gartenberg. Hello. I will probably be ranting about USBC at some point in this podcast. It's not even on the docket. I will make it on the docket. You knew what you were getting into.

Yeah. Beyond USBC, we have a lot to talk about Apple changed 50 app store policies. We have a Surface event and a Windows 11 release to get through. And apparently we're going to talk about some USBC. But first, as always, COVID-19 is still one of the biggest stories in the world. We've got a few things that have been going on. There has been a bunch of drama over at Reddit. There was a bunch of Reddits that sort of went dark.

And Reddit finally went and banned. and an anti-vaccine subreddit called No New Normal. I noticed that if you typed IV into Amazon, it auto-completed a whole bunch of Ivermectin results so you could go and buy Horsescu. That seems bad. I was very angry about that. So I asked for comment about 12 hours later.

They got back to me and they said they're going to fix it. I actually haven't checked to see if they fixed it today. But what they're not fixing is if you land in one of those Ivermectin pages to buy for veterinary reasons, there's no information boxes there. If you search for it, there's no information boxes on the search results. You have to know the secret code. You have to search for ivermectin for COVID, and then they will show you a link to the FDA saying, don't do it.

That seems helpful. That's how I search it when I go to get my horsy warmer. Also, there's apparently a liquid oxygen shortage in certain areas for safe sex and also water utilities because so much is needed for hospitals because that's happening. again, there are lots of surges and hospitals are on the verge of being overrun in lots of areas. We also have kids going back to school and there's mask mandates and like anti-mask mandates. And it's all a big mess. And if people would just go get vaccinated, we could have our party in October.

And wear a mask. Yes, and wear a mask. Get vaccinated. Wear a mask. Just do the basics for just a little more. We're so close. Please. And we really want to have this party that we're throwing in October.

you can still go get tickets for that. And we're still planning on doing it. So please get vaccinated, get the second Vax, wear a mask. Yes. But I have no transition for this. We're going to talk about Apple's App Store policies and sort of Apple stuff in general because they also had this thing with state IDs.

So let's start with the first thing. So Apple did like two things and there's a third thing about to happen related to the App Store. start with the first one, which was Apple settled a $100 million lawsuit. Hime, can you walk us through what was this lawsuit and what was this settlement? So Apple, there was a class action lawsuit from a variety of developers who said that the App Store was a monopoly, that Apple was, you know, being unfair. It was an improper monopolization of the market.

It was filed in 2019. And Apple is settling that lawsuit this week with $100 million settlement. That includes clarifying some of its policies about some rules on iOS. They're making a $100 million fund to developers, $30 million of which is going to be used to pay lawyers. And if you're a smaller iOS developer, you'll probably get some money out of this. They're also going to do things like not change how App Store works for a minimum of, I think, three years. And they're going to keep the small business, the App Store Small Business program, which says that if you earn less than $1 million a year, you can apply to get 15%

cut of your sales instead of 30%. So that will stay unchanged for the next three years also in its current form, which is if you make less than a million and you can do that, the day that you go over and you make a million and $1, you're once again subject to the 30 million, the 30% cut. So that's not changing in either direction. And there will be more price points for apps. So instead of selling an app for like a dollar,

you'll be able to, in theory, sell for like a $1.50 or $1.80. there's like, you know, more than 500 price points coming. Right now there's 100. I see. Okay. Well, before we like talk about it, is this a good thing? We should just talk about how this settlement got announced. So reportedly they gave some reporters a heads up that there was going to be an announcement.

This is a thing that all companies do, Apple included. And then so everyone showed up to the call. And typically when you get on one of these calls, like, all right, here's the announcement. You're under bargo. You can't tell anybody. We're going to talk about it so you understand what's going on. and then you'll have some amount of time, which can vary, honestly, from minutes to hours to days before you write about this thing. Less often, although it's not completely unprecedented, you get on the call and the moment you're on the call is when the press release goes out.

Those are my favorite. That is apparently what happened. We were not on this call. And so it was a late night sort of mad scramble to understand how big a deal this was, what the rule is, what's changing, how much money, et cetera, et cetera. And I will admit that I got snowed. I tweeted that this was a big deal, specifically that Apple said that they were going to let developers tell their customers that there were other ways to pay them outside of the app store. I don't know why that's funny to be. It's just like people, people, you can pay for apps outside of the app store. There are other ways,

but I love that there was just like this idea that like, no, it's forbidden. Forbidden knowledge. Well, the thing that was forbidden is actually even wilder because the thing that was forbidden is before, if you have an app, you have an app and customers sign up in that app and they give you that email address, the app store rules before, like, and you check the box and you know, I'm giving you my email address, you can contact me. The app store rules before was if you used your app to get that contact information, you could not use it to contact customers outside of the app. And that was the big thing that they clarified was now you are. Yeah. And that doesn't feel like a win for me, personally speaking. Well, so that's the thing, right? But a lot of people saying it's not a change.

But like Apple said it was a clarification. It is in fact a change, a very tiny change. But previously, like Time said, if you got the email from the app, you were not allowed to use that email to email your customer and say, hey, if you want to pay me directly, you can. And now they are allowed to send that email outside of the app. to tell customers that there are other ways to subscribe to their service. This is not, you know, if you're just selling an app, an alternate way to pay, this is if you've got just a service like, I don't know, Netflix or Joe's cool ebooks.com, pretend we live in a world where there's not an ebook monopoly, you know, whatever.

You, in theory, could now email your customers because of this settlement. That's nice. I mean, a lot of them have already kind of got around it by making you do. an account, right? Right, but that gets complicated for other reasons. Okay, this does actually sound kind of nice, maybe, because now I don't have to sign up for an additional account that you're forcing me to sign up to so you can farm my email. You just get it directly to send me emails. You have to sign up for the account, though, because otherwise, how are they contacting you in the first place to tell you that there's another way to play? Like, you have to sign up through the app first

such that if they already had your email address, like if you had gone to Joe's cool you books.com ready and like Joe knows you exist, he would not have been subject to the original rule anyway. This is for people who have like signed up in the app, giving you their email address. And then, you know, you wanted to reach out and be like, oh, you can pay a different way. Okay. It's a very fine hair, Apple's splitting here. The finest of hairs, baby fine. Yeah. So this was August 26th.

And then, just like days later, I want to say it was like a day later, but it was not. It was September 1st. The next shoe dropped. And it is related to the very topic that we were talking about. So what happened next? Next, there was a whole thing in South Korea. There was a new bill that had passed for Apple and Google, which will relate to this. Come in a minute.

Yeah. But the next big thing was that Apple announced in response to an investigation from the Japan Fair Trade Commission that it would now be allowed. reader apps, which are apps like Netflix or Spotify or Amazon's Kindle apps, which let you view content but without payments in them, can now directly link their customers to their own sign-up website within the app. So right now today, if I open Netflix and I am not a Netflix customer, there is no way for me to find out from that app page that there is any way to pay for Netflix from an iOS perspective. There's no link saying, go here to sign up. It is an app that assumes that you already subscribe and pay Netflix in some way that Apple does not know exists,

and then you can log into that account and view it. So the new thing is you're allowed one link. Yep. One link. Just one? One link. And, you know, you can find out through whatever link that you can sign up there and then come back to the app and sign in and watch your, watch The Witcher, your Netflix show. So it's only to sign up for an account.

if you don't already have an account to something like some of the largest services in the world. Well, it's not necessarily the largest services in the world. It's anything that's a reader app. Right. So we need to – there's a bunch of layered things to discuss here. The very first thing, before we get into the legalese and reading the press release, which is not, by the way, a legal document, it's a press release. Before we get into that,

we get into 3.1.3A and the difference between A and B and C, because not only the reader apps, there's also other things, before we do all of that, let me just ask a fundamental question. On April 26th, Apple made a tiny concession that developers were allowed to say to their customers, hey, we exist and you can pay us in ways outside of the app store, but only via email outside of their app. And then, math, four or five days later, they then, in the same category, say that around the world, you are allowed to admit that you can make and set up accounts outside of the app store and have a link to do so. Basically, the same issue. Why are they doing this so piecemeal?

The best answer I can give you is that these are specific changes that are being made to very specific investigations. Uh-huh. Like the $100 million payout was a very specific thing to address very specific concerns in that law. And this one is a very specific change that is being made to close the investigation from the JFTC. Like the JFTC wrote in their press release that this agreement, this moved by Apple, eliminates the suspected violation anti-monopoly app, which it's been investigating for over five years. And, you know, Apple doing this is good. All is forgiven. They're making the changes that they have to to keep the app store running broadly the way that it does.

Mm-hmm. So did the JFTC just kind of say the monopoly is, there was a monopoly that the monopoly is now over? Or there was just a very specific part of the monopoly that offended them and now that one very specific part is over? So remember how we talked about how we got a bunch of people got snowed by the original small change here? We thought it was bigger than it was. With this change, we chose to wait for the Japan Fair Trade Commission to post its statement on this settlement. We have Sam Biford in Japan, so he could like read it in the original Japanese. We do have a translation here.

They said the move would, quote, eliminate the suspected violation of the Anti-Monopoly Act, and that Apple is also going to need to, you know, check in, I think, once a year to like make sure that, yep, no, you're still not doing bad stuff. You monopolizing? All right. You're good to go. But again, I just like, sometimes there are lawyers. All the time, actually. All the time.

And when there are lawyers, they have a job. And their job is to keep you from doing stupid shit you're going to get sued for. And they're very good at it. And so when the lawyer says, easy there, it is smart to be like, okay, we're not going to, we're going to listen to the lawyer. And that's what this feels like to me, that there's an overall thing that, Apple wants to do with the App Store policies. And that thing is not change them, I guess, but they know they need to. And so to me, the answer here is make a decision as a leader and say, this is what we're

going to do. And then when the lawyers say, ah, ah, you can override them if you want to, or you can work with them to do the thing. But instead, we're just getting these little tiny piecemeal changes. here and there and here and there. And it's just, it's hard to know, like, is this meant to, like, be part of an overall evolution of the app store policies? Or is it just, like, we got to do these things because of these specific little, you know,

this lawsuit and that regulator in Japan. And we're going to talk about Korea in a minute. And, like, we're just going to make these little concessions in the tiny places where we are forced to, but we're not going to change the overall structure. To me, the answer is, like, change the overall structure. inside that rubric you make some changes here that appease a bunch of the different things that are going on and then everybody feels good to me right now everyone feels bad i don't know who's happy right now i mean presumably apple right yeah they don't they don't seem happy i don't know i'm reading their

stuff and it's like oh well apple is very happy because like they're being dragged kicking and screaming from this monopoly they've created and they're going to fight it to their last dying, they won't die. They're going to fight into their last app store monopoly breath. You know, like this makes total sense to be just because they don't want it to change. They're only going to change when somebody's like got them against the wall and they're like, you can't operate in Japan anymore. And they're like, okay, okay, what's this tiniest, tiniest amount we can change to operate in Japan? And like, okay, you can do this. Like, that seems to be what the thing is. they're like, okay, we'll do the tiniest effort.

And then we'll announce it because we have to announce it. And then we'll hope that you're so confused and baffled by all of it, that you just get really excited for the next Apple event. It's putting out the small fires before any of them turn into like a much bigger problem. You need to concede this organization because Apple wants, you know, the Japan Fair Trade Commission to be happy now while it's still investigating, not after it's concluded that Apple is, you know, a legal monopoly and that it needs to radically change the app store. Yeah, I suppose.

But, I mean, I don't know, if we're going to do a fire metaphor, which, by the way, it's a little close to home out here in Northern California, the answer to solving little fires is you make sure that they don't spread. And so you do a systemic solution of, like, making sure that the fires, like, the forests are managed in such a way that the fires don't, I don't know, anyway. Do you think there's like, because there's also, I also keep thinking about like the Apple versus epic trial. We're expecting to hear back on that any day now. And this feels like going to be an impact to that. And I wonder if like part of this is, well, we're doing this because we have to because

the JFTC is right here, right now. We have like a deadline. Right. But the original, the actual plan is like staying as condensed as possible, changing as little as possible. Yeah. Until this thing comes out and they either have to change it or they can continue on. Well, and there's the there's the Apple versus an epic trial, there's also any number of bills coming out, you know, running through Congress right? No, no, like, you know, Apple shouldn't be allowed to sell apps on the same thing that it makes a platform on, right? Like, like, there's all sorts of stuff that's being proposed right now, some of which is more serious than others, but all of which is about putting pressure on Apple to do something with the app store. And it just all, it all feels like a defensive crouch to me.

It's shocking a little, too, because Apple is so good at PR. Like, they know how to get a message across when they want to convey it. They know how to shape the story, generally speaking. And here it feels like really there's almost something at odds internally in the company because you're like, okay, who's driving this particular ship? This has a massive impact on the company overall. And it's just like, I'm not used to seeing Apple be dragged, kicking in screaming like this.

It's unpleasant to watch. Well, speaking of kicking and streaming, screaming, kicking and streaming, because we're going to talk about streaming apps. Speaking of kicking and screaming, I do want to briefly point out the thing that Apple said in its press release about allowing developers to have a link out to create an account. Before this change, grows in effect, in early 2022, not yet, Apple will update its guidelines and review process to make sure users of reader apps

will continue to have a safe experience. Well, and app purchases are the best, you know, blah, blah, blah, Apple will also help developers of Reader apps protect users when they link them to an external website to make purchases. I don't know what any of that means, but it definitely is not just, yep, you can have a link, you can have a link out to make accounts if you want to. Like, it is, there is some sort of guideline and review and approval process still happening here. And we've seen what that looks like with these so-called reader apps before. When you open up Netflix, Netflix is like, hey, we don't work.

We know that sucks. And then that's it. They don't say you could go make an account. They just like, this doesn't work, sorry, because that's all they are allowed to do under the current rules. So what will the rules be for the link out? It's very unclear. We don't know yet. And I don't know if Apple knows yet, but it seems like there's going to be rules.

Yeah. Also, like, how does this affect, like, some quote-unquote reader apps do let you purchase things? Like, Disney Plus, not on, not an OS, I think, but like, Disney Plus is a surface, lets me buy movies sometimes. Like, that's a digital good that I can buy and attach to my account. Like, does that mean Disney won't be allowed to link out or be allowed to do a link thing for here? Like, there's rules and hairs to be split in Apple's court of App Store. Yeah. I mean, the original thing that happened here, if you go way back, is if you were in like, say, the Kindle app and you wanted to buy a book, they wouldn't let you do it in the app. So they would just open up a web view and or they would kick you over to Safari, you know, and then you'd buy it in Safari, you go back and you're done. And Apple didn't want that. And so they were disallowed from doing that. And so you just couldn't buy books in the Kindle app and they couldn't, there was just no buy link there. You just had to like know. You just had to know. And you can continue. you to buy books in Kindle, right?

Like, that's a thing that is available to you, just not on iOS. And so, you know, what qualifies as a reader app and how Apple has actually, like, split out the idea of reader apps into, like, lots of different things has gotten more and more complicated over time. And to me, the fundamental question there is, like, well, hang on, like, this category exists because you made it. Right? Yeah.

No, it does. Like, like, this all exists. This is all Apple's own doing. This isn't a big government that's being forced into these weird arbitrary, like, rules. This is a giant company that can do what it wants and has done what it wants. This was the whole hey drama, like last year was, hey, was like, you let all these other apps exist and people can go to the website and sign up there and log in. And Apple was basically like, yes, those are special apps for rules. reading things, and email apps are not reader apps.

And they had to, the end of it was, hey, added some quote unquote function so that the app did something when you downloaded it, which was the distinction that Apple required for non-reader apps. And like that faded out, but it's arbitrary. Well, it's been messy over the years. A related thing is like Steamlink, like apps that lets you access your desktop remotely have been, you know, sort of in this zone, and they had to, like, amend the rules around that.

I mean, back way up, there's an argument to be had about whether or not there should be competing app stores allowed. There's an argument to be had about whether or not side-loading should be allowed. But, you know, wherever you land on those arguments, I think it's pretty clear that whatever path Apple

is currently on with the app store is making everybody miserable, except for Apple who is making somewhere above $10 billion a year on app stores. Minimum. Yeah. I bet there are some miserable people at Apple over this. I bet the lawyers who are having to come up with these rules. The lawyers love it. Are you kidding me? Where do you think that's $20 billion a year from the app store goes?

They get to add letters to clauses. Oh, man. They're just having a blast. There's somebody. I refuse. There's at least one person at Apple who's like, ugh. You know how I like to argue about whether or not things are computers and what the definition of computer is. Lawyers get to argue about what an enterprise service is. They want nothing more than to just spend all day getting high talking about what constitutes a difference between an enterprise service and a person-to-person service. I do not want to sit in on that conversation. Okay, so we mentioned South Korea. We should close that circle as well.

So this was the, in theory, biggest thing, although it hasn't quite happened yet, which is that the South Korean government passed a bill, which has not used. yet been signed into law, but it is expected to be that would require that major platform owners, including Apple and Google, would no longer be allowed to restrict app developers to built-in payment systems. So in theory, that would require Apple or Google to, at least in South Korea, to offer some sort of alternative payment method, either within their app stores or outside of their app stores. And if they fail to comply with that law, they could face fines of up to 3% of their South Korean revenue. Which is a lot. That's a lot. I mean, it's not as much.

just 30%, but I don't know if that applies to hardware and software or just software. But yeah, so Google has said, you know, that it costs the money to maintain the store, that it's going to figure out how to reflect on how to comply with this law while maintaining its model. Oh, my God. Hang on how to comply with this law while maintaining a model that supports a high-quality operating system and app store and will share more in the coming weeks. I mean, share more in the coming weeks is like, that's like, I mean, they may as well

set its early days with this new law. man, we'll reflect on how to comply with this law. It's like, man, you just got smacked by an entire country and your answer is we're going to go like. We'll think about it. I mean, if the fine is only to software and the fine is up to 3%, and you make 30%, then that math doesn't quite work out. And then what was Apple's reaction? I'm sure they were also very pleased. So Apple's reaction, they've given us a statement before the law was passed.

They didn't respond to requests afterwards, at least in this post on The Verge. But the response before was they were protesting it. They said it would undermine privacy protections, make it difficult to manage purchase, and make all the things that make the App Store good less effective, that App Store purchases will decrease, and there will be fewer opportunities for the 400,000-plus developers in Korea who make trillions of Korean won with Apple to date. So they're not happy either.

They haven't said what they're going to do or how they're going to do it. I imagine like Google, they're probably figuring something out. But again, if this does pass, it would only be in South Korea. But it could be the sort of thing that could very much influence legislation in other countries. If it does pass, if it does force the kind of changes that, it sounds like it will. Will we get a Samsung app store on the iPhone? Well, so that's not what this is quite about. I mean, this is like an anti-Google bill primarily.

But it's also like this is about you could maybe use Samsung pay inside the App Store. That could be fun. This is like when you're checking out at the App Store instead of paying through Apple, you'll. Oh, it's just the payment systems. It's not the whole App Store. It's that you won't be restricted to using built-in payment platforms. So if you're, you know, buying a thing, you'll be able to use a different payment solution in theory. Right.

Do you think they could like in order to get a payment solution on your app store, it has to be approved? And if the process of getting approved, they still get a cut. That could be it. Like, I assume that the lawyers at both Apple and Google are enjoying themselves immensely trying to figure out. Picking through the opportunities. Picking through the way that this will go down. But if nothing else, it's definitely a very interesting development and probably the biggest

concrete development from like an actual government that is passed as a bill that will likely be signed into law to, you know, start to regulate this. Yeah, a very real regulatory. that they're going to have to react to, and I do not think either company is going to react by, like, just bailing on the country, right? They're going to have to do something. And so we will have a real concrete example in the world of an app store

on one of these two giant platforms that accepts payments that aren't run by that platform. And, like, we'll just be able to point to that whenever we feel like it, whenever it makes an argument, it would be like, yeah, but they're doing it in Korea. I mean, they also do a lot of things in Korea, like have cheap Internet that we don't do. So it's possible that won't be that compelling of a thing to cause change.

But, you know, hopefully it will. I mean, look, we will build trains that, you know, go fast and we'll have infrastructure and then we'll also have multiple payment systems in app stores someday. Someday. Oh, by the way, as long as we're talking about app stores, I do need to disclose that my wife works for Oculus and in particular on their app store. I have no idea what she does. But now I've just, I've said that.

You get to mark that off your bingo card. The other sort of app policy thing, which is, I guess, not really related to any of this at all, but we could draw lines if we really wanted to, is Apple started showing a pop-up in its own apps asking permission to show personalized ads, which is different from the pop-ups as they are making third-party apps do for app tracking. So there are different pop-ups. Apple has let you opt out of this before. Like, this has been a thing you could do before.

you just had to like dig through menus and now it is putting it up front in front of everyone similar to how it does for other developers. Again, it's a different type of tracking, tracking because Apple by default doesn't share it with third parties, like hadn't been doing that before because it's a first party. Right. So this is just Apple giving itself its own version of this, which is a positive change. Like when it released the thing last year, it was like, we don't need to put one of these for our apps because we don't do that. And the, you know, right argument was, well, you do do this. And it's just good that they're putting it, putting it more front and center after, you know,

making everyone else ask last year for their type of tracking. What apps would you see it in? So it was for things like the App Store. App Store will use personalized ads, Apple News, personalized ads based on the things that you search for in the app store, based on the news that you search for reading Apple News. Yet another thing that makes lots of people, developers, especially very angry, the policies and the way that works. But I don't think we have time to get into that. All right. Very last thing. Apple has announced that Arizona and Georgia are going to be the first states that are going to enable the ability to use your iPhone as your ID when you go through the airport at TSA. Absolutely not. This hasn't launched yet. This hasn't happened yet.

But, Alex, you just said absolutely not. Tell me more. I just, that terrifies me. One of the things I've always been told is you never give your, if you get pulled over by the cops, you never give them your whole wallet, right? Yep. You give them your whole wallet, because if you give them your whole wallet, they can take your money, they can look through all your cards, they can take whatever's in there. You've given it to them.

It's the equivalent of saying, sure, officer, come into my house and look around. Technically, this thing with the phones is they're, it's not supposed to be quite the same, right? Like there's protections in place. You unlock, you have to biometrically unlock the phone to show the ID. Yep. And then the rest of it's still biometrically locked. I got a chance to ask Apple some questions about this. Some of which are, we'll tell you later the answers, and some of which helped clarify things now.

So the way that this is meant to work is you do a special scan of your driver's license. You do a special scan of your head where you're moving your head around so they can prove your real person and someone didn't just steal your driver's license or you're not being held hostage or something, I don't know. And then you get this ID on your phone that is secure, stored locally on your phone, and doesn't display any information whatsoever. And then when someone wants to check your ID, they have a reader with an NFC chip on it, and you tap your phone on the NFC chip, and the reader says, I would like to know this person's name, their date of birth, and their age.

Or I would like to know this person's name and their eye color, right, or whatever it is. And then your screen pops up and says this terminal is requesting this information. And then you have to use a biometric unlock. Now, what's interesting about this is it only works with one finger. And so it is a different sort of, it's still using a bunch of the same security stuff as like a standard touch ID or face ID. But it's not like you can like enter your pin. It's a little bit more locked down than that. It will only work with one biometric key, like one face or one finger.

And then when you do that, only that information gets transferred. And so like in theory, if you're getting carded, you know, to buy alcohol, the only thing it would know is that you're over 21 and no other information will get transferred. Now, okay, this all sounds nice. Like, we have this idea that we should get rid of the wallet and put it on the phone. And so Apple built a bunch of ideas and protections around how to do this. They're following a standard. There's an ISO standard that they're following to do this.

and Google's actually working on similar things on a similar standard. But one thing that Google has said is that built into their spec on Android is that when you start this procedure, your phone goes into lockdown mode so that your biometric cannot unlock the phone. And it's unclear whether that or not

that happens with this process. Oh, okay. Now, this is my whole thing, especially with iPhones with Face ID or iPhones with Face ID where you've got it paired up to your Apple Watch, I would say that nine times out of 10 the phone was just unlocked and I don't know how it happened.

Right? It's just like, oh, duh, the phone's unlocked. That is the opposite of what I want to happen when I'm anywhere near a cop or a TSA agent. I want to know that phone is locked and it's not going to get unlocked unless I do a very intentional, specific action to unlock it. Yeah. And it's only biometric, right? So you can't do, because I know a lot of people don't have biometrics on their phone.

They don't use that for this purpose because they don't want a copse to be like, face, go. It will be an accessibility option to use a pin for this process if you would prefer not to use biometric. And Apple is positioning it as specifically an accessibility option, not a, you know, if you hate using biometric option. Okay. So we can actually, like, that makes me feel a little better, but still, that just, I don't want my phone, my whole phone with all of my data and stuff. I'm not doing anything weird on it, but, you know, I still don't want that cops having access to it. There's also nothing weird in my wallet. I'm still not going to give them my whole wallet if I get pulled over.

Yeah. Like there's a built-in feature on iOS to, like, disable face ID temporarily. If you hold the power button and one of the volume buttons and it pushes you to the power menu, like it will disable face ID and you have to use a passcode. But it's interesting that it doesn't sound like this will work for that. Well, it's unclear. And we've got time before it rolls out. And from speaking to Apple, I get the impression that they're aware of this thing and they want to make sure that there's no accidental unlocks. But fundamentally, there's so much information on your phone.

Anytime it gets anywhere near law enforcement, I think there's reason to be very, very concerned. And the dream of getting rid of your wallet, I don't know if it rises to the level of, sure. Yeah, no, I definitely hate carrying my wallet. Like, I tried to not carry, like, house keys for a minute. I was like, yeah, I'm going to use smart locks. It'll be great. Yeah, that lasted about three days. And now I have a house key on me because you never know, like the Bluetooth that might fail or whatever.

You know what the real solution here is, a wallet case for your phone. It sticks on with magnets. Yeah. Like, it's right there. The magsave is right there. Come on. Do it. So there's one other piece of this, which is the TSA.

When you scan your phone, that's a computer. And so the TSA's computer knows that you were there. When you just hand your driver's license over, you're in an airport, you're being tracked in a thousand different ways or whatever. You've done a boarding pass. But in other contexts, just flashing your driver's license to a human is not sufficient to log your presence at that place and time. And this scan could be.

And so there's a whole back end to this of who's making these scanners. Is there a secure supply chain? Do you trust the companies that run the software to not keep logs on that stuff? I don't know. Is it possible to make a skimmer? Like, probably not because it sets up an encrypted Bluetooth connection, but I don't know. People are smart and clever. So there's an entire other part of this conversation that has nothing to do with the weird practicalities of whether or not your phone is unlocked in the presence of a TSA agent that we don't have the complete answers to. There's like there's an industry group for this.

And I think it's called Kantara. And there's like, there's a whole bunch of stuff there. but explaining all of that is work that hasn't been done to a sufficient level that I think the average citizen should be comfortable with this. Yeah. Well, on that bright and shiny note, we're going to talk about more exciting things like surfaces. We're going to be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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With Gramerly, you never will. Download Gramerly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. We're back. And we have fall hardware season. Samsung has kicked it off a little bit with its folding stuff, but the rest of it is just in gear we're expecting. iPhone announcements soon.

Google had rumors that was going to launch the Pixel in September, but that was ridiculous. So that'll happen when it happens. But we have official announcements. There's going to be a Surface event on September 22nd. And there's going to be a Windows 11 release on October 5th. And I'm very hyped, I think. I'm not sure.

What are we expecting at the surface event? It sounds like we're going to get the duo two. The two-oh. Okay. And I like- Oh my God. Hang out. Bye,

I just say that again. It's the Surface Duo. So sorry, everybody. No. I mean, I'm the one that called attention to it, so I'm obviously happy. But, okay. All right.

So the Surface Duo, it's done, and it's over. You can use that for free, Microsoft. It's not too late. But, I mean, what else? What else we got coming? There must be new surfaces, right? Just plain old surfaces.

Okay, so there's rumors that there's going to be a new surface book. The laptop, laptop, laptop. The laptop, laptop, laptop. Yeah. The laptop, laptop, laptop. And there won't be called the surface book four because we're on the fourth one. And this is the part that really had me staring off into the distance. It won't have a detachable screen, which is like the reason the surface book exists, right?

So the rumor is not a detachable screen, but it will have, like some sort of tilting, flipping forward, cool, pull forward kind of to screen similar to the Surface Studio is the rumor, and that it might not necessarily be called the Surface Book. It might be called the Surface Laptop Pro to go along with the Surface laptop, which is the laptop, laptop, laptop, whereas this is the laptop tablet laptop. I had that wrong before, right? Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm all for wacky screen designs. Go for Microsoft. This has never been a device you like buy because you just need a laptop. This is, the Surface Book has always been something you buy because it's really cool. And it's like, it's trying something different. Yeah. And I love the aspirations. So the Surface Book had the snake hinge, the metal snake hinge.

What animal is going to inspire the, the flippy, you know, twisty thing on the new one? Ooh. Maybe like a... An Oscelot. Just cause. Just cuss. They seem fun. It'll be an otter.

They're flexible. Yeah. Like a snake. Like a, no, we did snake. Like a cartoon giraffe with like a, with like a. What's, what's bindi? It'll be something. It'll be, I think it'll be, I honestly think it'll be kind of neat.

I'm, I'm a little excited about it. Just because I love when Microsoft kind of swings for the fences. And the two-oh doesn't sound like a big swing for the fences. Despite the, I think, well, it existing is a swing. for the fence because the duo was not great or not great enough. Nobody really liked it. So, like, its existence is kind of impressive, but, yeah. Yeah.

It is impressive that they're taking another swing at it. It's funny that I'm bummed about the fact that the rumor is that there's going to be, like, a camera bump on the back with, like, proper cameras because the camera on the first duo was utter trash. But you can't have a bump on the duo. Well, yeah, because the whole point is you're going to, like, set it down, right? You're going to do stuff with it. You need a surface pin on it.

and you got to fold it all the way around into phone mode and then the bump is there. And then you won't. You'll have the little gap and now you're just this flip. Nobody did it, right? Nobody must have used it in like single screen mode because otherwise they would they would know not to put a bump there, right? Or there's a cutout on the on the other back. There's like a dimple and then it can lie flush again. Absolutely not. No, I don't want that. I'm willing bad hardware designs into existence.

Oh, my God. I don't like it. Stop it. I'll be curious to see what they do with multitask. They had the most promising idea of how to move Windows around and the worst implementation. And Samsung really upped their game with the ZFold 3 in terms of moving windows around. It's not perfect. It's still sometimes hard to grab those lozenges or whatever.

But I hope that what Microsoft does feels about as good as what Samsung does and that they, like, operate in similar ways because, like I said before, I think I said this last year, we're cruising towards fragmentation and like multi-screen and weird screen Android devices, where they just operate completely differently, and that is terrifying. Is that going to be a segue into talking about Windows 11? No, we need to just point out that there's going to be a Surface Pro. It's in the teaser image. Please just make two things.

One, what I want in my heart is just another version of the Surface ProX with a good arm processor, but we all know that's not going to happen, right? Let it go. Maybe. Apple figured it out. Someone else is going to maybe figure it out eventually. Where are they going to get that process? because Qualcomm has to figure it out.

Well, and Windows has to figure it out working faster on it as well, and its various emulation modes. Microsoft makes Windows. They have smart people, like they've designed chips before. Like, they designed chips for an Xbox. They can figure this out, maybe. I mean, we're on, it'll be the third one if they do one. But they'll be just a standard Surface Pro.

And if I can't have the one thing I want in my heart, what I want is the Surface ProX design, but with an Intel processor, just kill the bezels, give us a bigger screen, give us sicker-looking hardware, but keep the same basic idea of the Surface Pro with the hinge and the keyboard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not looking to reinvent the wheel. I'm just looking for a much, much prettier wheel.

Right. And no AMD, right? I haven't heard anything about AMD for this one. I think we're still in Intel land. Maybe, probably. Maybe. Microsoft did have, like, AMD versions of some of the other Surface laptops. So, like, it's possible, but.

I would take it. Yeah. I would absolutely take it. Okay. So they'll be launching all these surfaces and they'll be showing off Windows 11, but Windows 11 will officially launch a couple weeks later on October 5th. And when that happens, you'll be either buying a brand new computer to get Windows 11, updating your very recent computer you bought for the pandemic to Windows 11, or...

You can do an ISO. Or what? Oh, my God. Walk us through what has been going on with the Windows 11 update situation. This is just a rolling fiasco. You know, I'm still trying to grasp it myself. Hi, me, please feel free to correct me as I go on this journey, as I take us on this journey. I'm not confident of it, but it's okay because Microsoft isn't confident of it.

I think Microsoft is figuring out day to day what's going to be happening with it. Windows 11 was announced months and months ago, and they announced these really, really complex system requirements. It was just you have to be a computer engineer basically to understand if your computer was going to work or not. not very consumer friendly. And they then said, well, the reason that this isn't consumer friendly, the reason why so many of these old computers aren't going to be working is because we want Windows 11 to be more secure. We want it to work with these TPM modules that are only found on later products. Okay.

Great. That made sense. But then they said, but actually, you know, maybe we can get Windows 11 running on these older devices. And, you know, if you were on the beta, you can actually run Windows 11 on a lot of these older unsupported devices. This week, they told all the Windows 11 folks that are running on unsupported devices that, hey, the beta's ending, go back to Windows 10. You definitely won't be able to do this in the future. They then said, but also we found from this beta that actually some stuff that we said couldn't run can probably run. And it was some old zion processors and I think Intel 7, some Intel 7 chip.

Intel Core X, X series and Intel ZonW series are now both supported officially. And the chip that's in the Surface Studio too, which is probably a good one to have if you're Microsoft. So that's, yeah, because that was the, that was a wild thing about this. Like, their own stuff, like built by Microsoft to show how good Windows works, couldn't run this new system. them. So they figured out that that can all work. Right. Which is a wonderful situation. I have completely lost my thread. Well, I think Microsoft has lost a thread. Yeah. Like, it's just all over the place. And this is something, Hym and I were talking about the other day with like the Nintendo switch or something like that and Bluetooth, right? And how Bluetooth can maybe work better on a switch,

but maybe Nintendo, we don't know for sure. We don't have any conversation. But maybe it can't actually because that would be too complex. There would be too much fragmentation. It would be too difficult for the consumer. And then over here is Microsoft saying, nope, nothing is too difficult for the consumer. We believe in your ability to parse all of these really confusing things we're releasing out into the space. Which is like, thank you for the confidence.

But I don't think most consumers are going to. get this. And they're they are doing, they're making some attempts, right? They've got new software out that will say if your device will run on it, which is really nice. They should have probably released that months ago when they announced this. I think when I went to see if my, the computer I built would work on it. I had to go find some guy on like GitHub who'd built a little software. It worked great. I think. I haven't muted my Windows 11 computer in a while. Yeah. I may have been kicked out of the beta. We'll find out. But yeah, this was just an absolute mess.

And then they were doing some like back and forth on it this week as well. Yeah. Microsoft told everyone that it won't stop you from installing Windows 11 on older PC. So if you use the upgrade tool and, you know, it says that you're good and you have a new chip or whatever, you're good to go. You hit the button. It downloads the update. You'll get Windows 11. Everything will be great.

Sweet. But if you don't, if you have an old computer, Microsoft was like, today. guess what? You can download an ISO file and you know you can install it manually and put it on like 50 floppy discs spread across run through the installation process awesome. And then so long as you have a 64 bit one gigahertz processor with two or more cores four gigabytes of RAM and 64 gigabytes of storage you can install Windows 11 great it'll suck but you're on your own and go for it. It gets it gets better.

No wait but we're no we're an awesome land stop. No no no no no. Because Microsoft then told us shortly after that while you'll be able to do that, you won't get Windows updates from that copy of Windows 11. It's totally undisupported. Potentially even security updates. So they had a whole briefing where they told Tom, like, you know, you'll be able to install it on an ISO. And then like they just said later, like not mentioning this, by the way, there won't be security updates.

Maybe. I just spend a lot of time thinking about the philosophy behind this. Because the whole philosophy behind we are limiting what we can update was security. Right? Like they said it was all about security. And now they're saying, but actually it isn't about security. Put it on what you want. And it seems like this was a lot about the impact of users who were complaining, right?

Like they were saying, let me put it on whatever I want. And so they're finally giving us that. but also making a much more unsecure ecosystem, which means all these computers that do get it, although how many people are going to actually go out and download an ISO? Well, it's unclear. But the other thing you're not getting is Android apps, right? Because they're not going to have that at launch.

Yeah, that was the other thing. They said, okay, we're going to do Android apps. They're going to be great. This was a big part of the Windows 11 announcement. And now they've come back and they said, it's still coming. It's just not coming immediately. And that's kind of a big launch thing to hold back. It's not like, it's probably, I feel like it might be worse than when Apple was like,

Deep Fusion's coming. Well. Well. I mean, if we're talking about Apple, there's also a lot of stuff that they've been slowly but steadily cutting from iOS 15 for lunch. But that might be a different, different conversation. But yeah, they're saying that they'll start with a preview in the coming months. And they haven't even said when, like, for Windows insiders and then like, you know, the mass general

roll out sometime probably months after that. So we're probably looking sometime in 2022 before even like, you know, the early testing. Yeah. And then even later. You know what? Good. Having having lived through all of the betas and iterations of Android and Chrome OS, do not ship it until it is very good. Just don't do it. We'll be fine without Android apps on Windows. I want them. They'll be fun. I want to watch me. some TikTok on my desktop. Don't get me wrong. You can do that now anyway, but whatever. But just don't launch it until it's ready. I beg you. And then for, you know, older computers, the thing I don't understand is, why not just make like Windows 10 super cool final edition?

You get these four features that are going to be in Windows 11 so you don't feel left out. And we're going to support it for as long as we will support Windows 10. And then, you know, Like, call it Windows 10 instead of Windows 11 to sort of denote that it doesn't have the higher security level and the other things that are in Windows 11. But just like toss a couple of Windows features its way and call it like the end-to-life edition or whatever. Why not do that? Because that's not going to get you to buy a new computer, which is the business that Microsoft and its OEM partners are in. But see, that's the thing, though. If that was the reason, then why not just stick to your guns and say, no, you can't do it.

We're not putting it on this old stuff. It's not secure. We don't feel comfortable. You don't like it. Buy a new computer. Like, they just went to this weird wishy-washy. I mean, they're pretty much still saying that. They're basically saying, well, if you really want to and you're willing to risk maybe not getting security updates, ominous music, then you can try it.

But really, just buy a new processor, buy a new laptop. Maybe one of these new surfaces that were announcing. It's like a corny horror movie where they're just like Microsoft just sitting in the audience yelling, don't go in there. But really, they want you to go in there and get murdered. Okay, well, we are going to see what the surfaces are. I am excited for them. I'm also excited for Windows 11. We had promised at the beginning of the show that there would be fun stuff, and it's time to talk about the fun stuff when we come back.

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Satellites. Yeah. I love it. What is going on with this rumor with the iPhone 13? This was my favorite rumor to find on Sunday. I think it came out of Ming Chi Kuo, I believe it's how you say his name. He's an analyst. And he said that there's going to be satellite connectivity and the iPhone 13 probably.

And he's a very well-noted analyst. He's up there with German and his ability to like kind of anticipate what Apple's going to do. So usually if he says something's going to happen, it's very likely it's going to happen. Even though eventually. He was saying satellites on the iPhone. phone 13. And a lot of people ran with it. We covered, I personally wrote a story about how maybe they were coming. And I remember that day I was, I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out how that was going to work. And I spent a lot of hours searching, trying to understand what was

happening here. And I put the story up and about two hours later, everybody started pointing out that actually, it was all wrong, which is really great to find. But I'm glad we learned. I'm glad we, I was a learning experience for me and a lot of other people, mainly our readers, thank you all. You're wonderful. But then there was another turn. There was another turn. This was my favorite part is we were sitting there. We're working on it. We're writing this, we're writing this like corrected story, updated story because we had new information saying, okay, maybe the satellite is definitely not coming to the iPhone 13. And then German, speak of the devil, says, actually satellites are coming to the iPhone.

And there was a brief moment we were like, are we about to have a story saying satellites are not coming to the iPhone on the website? And immediately above it, a story that says satellites are coming to the iPhone. Space phone. Space. But there's a way to square the circle, right? When people think sat phones, they think giant honk and bricks. But there may be a way to talk to a satellite that isn't just, you know, you think, like getting full data and phone calls, right? Right. That's how we square the circle. Right. This is the thing. There's this company called Global Star. And right now, a lot of their

business is in these low earth orbiting satellites. And that was where a lot of the initial confusion kind of cropped up from was that they have this other thing as well. They're really into satellites. They've got this whole satellite technology. They also own this one band of internet that will eventually be used for 5G. It's been approved for 5G, but nobody's using anything for it. Qualcomm earlier this year said, we'll build a modem that will use this band. But it's a terrestrial band. It's not in space at all. It is totally on the ground. And so they have these two competing things. And that, I think, is what led to a lot of my confusion and a lot of out of the general public's confusion on this subject.

But it seems as though it might be used for like emergency texting, which is a thing that is theoretically possible on something the size of an iPhone? That's different. That's different. Oh, God. That's something completely different. Yeah. So the N53 is just a terrestrial band of 5G. And probably iPhone might be able to speak with it with the new iPhone 13 might have a customer. Qualcomm modem that will be able to speak with this totally terrestrial, not in satellite band.

So fundamentally boring story. Satellite band getting reapportioned to 5G, the iPhone will be able to talk to at the end. Yeah. Global Star. Great. But earlier this year, Global Star had also signed a contract with someone to do satellite communications. And they didn't say who.

And German came out and it was probably Apple. and Apple, because Apple has been working on this other thing, where you'll be able to send texts. Right. In a future iPhone, definitely, almost certainly, probably not the iPhone 13, but an iPhone down the line that has a lot more power because you need a lot of power to actually reach space, even with just frequencies, that will get the ability to sort of communicate maybe via satellite, probably. Possibly. Yeah.

Well, I look forward to texting, using IMessage on my phone to get emergencies long, long, long before Apple supports communicating with Android phones via RCS. Yeah. I'm sorry. It's all right. We've got like more watch rumors. We finally are like, it seems really clear that the early rumors, including from John Prosser, credit we're due, that it's going to be like a squarish design or looks true. Squarespace design, bigger screens. Yeah, 41 and 45 millimeters.

So their second design really ever for the watch, or the third design really for the watch after the original version and then the bigger design introduced with the series four, I want to say. Am I the only one getting upset by the size creep? Is this just a me problem? It depends on if the casing is bigger. If the case is about the same size and they just managed to make the screen bigger by reducing bezels, then I don't have a problem with it.

I thought the 41 millimeter, I thought that's usually referring to the case itself. Yeah, so Bloomberg says that it does refer to the physical dimension of the case. Blomp on. So the 45 refer to the vertical dimension of the case. So it'll be, I mean, the current one's 44 millimeters, so it's going up to 45. It's so too much. But it'll have, it'll have a bigger screen. So we'll have to see how it looks is the thing.

And we might have to wait a bit because apparently they're having trouble making them. Chip shortage. comes for us all. Not necessarily chip shortage. It is complexities in its design and manufacturing issues and that they've just been having issues with satisfactory performance, production performance. Oh, so the air power team got reassigned to the Apple Watch is what you're saying. NICKE says that production has been temporarily halted and that Apple might actually be, you know, delaying them towards later in the year. So it could be like the opposite of last year where the iPhones were delayed. from, you know, various COVID and manufacturing things.

So we had an Apple Watch event without an iPhone. So this year it's possible we have an iPhone event first without an Apple Watch. Right. Sure. Okay. Or maybe that's why we haven't heard of an Apple event yet. I think we normally would have heard by now. It's got to be real soon, right? Yeah. It's got to be really soon. And it's going to be not in person. It has to be.

I can't imagine they're going to do it in person. Microsoft doesn't take it in person. I don't think they're ready. No. Apple also bought a classical music streaming service called Prime Phonic. I am very dumb about classical music and also classical music streaming services, so I cannot speak to the implications of this. But if you care, I'm just saying that we are where it happened.

And I don't know. Hi, I'm Alex. Do you have any feelings on this? I know that classical music fans are very picky about music streaming services and, like, the way things are sorted. Apple music and the app formerly known as iTunes did have, like, additional views and fields that you can use. You have like composer fields.

There's like sorting fuse that you can only use that are like designed for classical music to like show you based on composer. So I assume this is more of that. And I think it's great for classical music fans and fans of classical music. I mean, I'm a classical music fan that I didn't know this existed. But I've spent the last many, many years being upset with how all of the streaming works with classical music. Because a lot of times you care about the composer, but you also care about.

who's performing and where they're performing. Those are all matters. And a lot of times I'll be like, oh, man, I really want to listen to Rock Mononov's number two or whatever. And it's all the garbage recordings. And I'm like, no, I just want to find this one specific recording. And it's a nightmare to do. So if this in any way helps that and makes it more viable, so I don't have to continue

to use music files that I definitely acquired legally in the 2000s, long, long time ago? Great. I want to put Samsung to bed. I put up my take on the Z Flip 3. Samsung took some of its good software stuff and backported it to older folds and flips. But the thing that's interesting to me is one, it looks like they might be making a Galaxy

S-21 FE, which is hilarious because they weren't supposed to need to do that because they made the regular Galaxy S-21 relatively low-end, which is another sign that the S-21 has not been selling well. And I think Samsung is just going to become a folding phone company. That's what they want in their hearts. They said that they had more pre-orders for the Z-Fold 3 and Z-Flip 3 than they had total sales for other Galaxy Z devices. Wow.

Yeah. So relative hit. I mean, these are Bezos numbers. We have no idea. But if they've had, like, tanking sales on their, like, classic flagship phones and they're finally having something happen here with their folding phones, I have to imagine. and they're just going to go all in. Yeah. I mean, the two questions are, can you make it cheap enough?

Right now, right now the cheapest one of these is still in a thousand dollar phone. And like, Samsung does really great business with its, you know, mid-range and budget phones. So, like, you have to get to that point. And it took a while to get there for regular smartphones. And I think it's going to take some time before they get that down there, too, just because I think folding screens are expensive. Yes, they're very expensive. They sound expensive. I like it as a delineation between like your mid-range phone and your flagship.

Because right now the big thing for me, at least, was the flagships just had better cameras. And I'm like, okay, now there's something actually cool. This feels flagshipy to me. This feels like, you know, when I go and meet up with my friends, I can't be like, look how cool this camera is. I mean, I can. But that's much less entertaining. And then she will ignore you. Yeah.

But like, look, it flips. They're going to be like, yeah, I'll buy you a drink. Yeah, I definitely know that feeling. of trying to make people be impressed with things, and they're not. I actually, can I just say, I once tried to impress a professor in like 2000, 2001 with a camera module for a handspring visor,

and it was like a black and white screen, and they were not having it. They were like, that's great, Dieter. I'm like, no, this is the future. And they're like, sure it is. I was right. You were right. You're vindicated.

It didn't matter because it was 2000. You did it. I mean, this is my whole thing about, like, our talking about fashion and gadgets is if all phones basically do the same thing, eventually differentiating on camera quality and build quality for flagship phones gets less interesting. And so we might be going back to a place where you can actually differentiate on form factor and look. Yeah. And that is actually good news. It's not just like a surface. Oh, they, when companies used to try and do fashion, HTC did this.

They made like the purple phone. I forget what it was called. It was gorgeous. It was pink washing. They were like, oh, yeah, no, it's fashion because it's got a color and it's going to appeal to women. And we're like, yeah, but you're not actually thinking this through very well, are you? And so it failed.

And now I think that we're getting to a place where maybe these companies sort of understand the way the fashion industry works and they understand how like, you know, capitalism and consumerism works. And they might be able to actually do something interesting with making phones that have a differentiator that's other than just their camera and their process. or speed. That's something about the way they look or the way they function in like a fashionable way instead of just a bigger screen way. I love it. You did a whole blog on it too. The great one. I did a blog. Yeah. I love it. It was good. Go read it guys. All right. Lightning round. I think we each

get like one or two fun things and we can't do sad things. I refuse to do sad things. We're not going to talk about low cast having to get shut down. I loved it. It was such a cool service. So if you're not familiar, it was a service where you could stream your local TV. TV stations and they took donations and they got sued into oblivion because those donations were, you know, they're saying, well, you're making a profit off of it. What makes me mad about this is I always knew the service exists and I was like, oh, I should use that. And then I never got around to it and now it's gone. It was built right into the channels app, if you've ever used that. It's a DVR for Apple TV. And I actually interviewed the CEO of Lodcast months and months ago

before I worked at The Verge. And it was just a really cool guy. He was just out there trying to like stick it to the man while also providing reasonably affordable TV streaming. And he absolutely knew this. He never said this. But I definitely got the sense he knew this was a possibility and a probability. Yeah. So. Heavy sigh.

Heavy sigh. Let's talk about there's a slightly new PS5 model that weighs less. So there's a slightly new PS5 model that weighs less and has a smaller heat sink, which is like big news over the weekend. That seems bad. It's not entirely clear, like, if this is bad, there were people doing analysis back and forth. So it comes a lot down to, like, how this will actually, you know, work in practice. There was people arguing back and forth both ways.

I don't think there's really any, like, anecdotal things yet because these are still, the new model is still very much, like, shipping out. So we're either, like, a couple months away from, like, mass. Oh, my God, my new model PS5 burst into flames. or this being a total non-issue. My gut is that Sony probably knows what it's doing. Like, they didn't just stick a smaller heat sink in here so this thing will burst into flames for no reasons. What?

Did they stick it in there? Like, is it just cheaper for shipping? I assume cheaper for shipping, maybe cheaper for manufacturing. Hopefully I won't be able to bake cookies on it. Yeah. Hopefully your PS5 won't burst into flames. But if it does, and you bought a new one in Japan in the last week.

You might have a reason. That might be why. All right. Bose is made new headphones? Bose got the new QuietComfort 45s. Okay. And it's Bose, so guess what you can't hear? Anything when you wear these headphones.

It's going to be great. But what really appealed to be was 24 hours of battery life. I think that's something we've really kind of struggled to see from Bluetooth headphones, and especially from these. Big ones. Their classic quiet comforts, not like their new 700 series. So a little more plastic-y, the lower end. These are still the plastic-y that design, but...

These look like the ones you see every guy in business class settling onto his head as you walk by him, annoyed that you're not in business class. And yeah, for me, it really is that better 24-hour battery live. Chris Welch also actually thought the noise cancelling was better in this and the transparency mode, which I haven't personally gotten to check out, but anything can be better than what's currently happening in all headphones in the transparency mode space, because they're all terrible. Wait, wait. I get one thing, which is that the QC 45s of USBC. That's all. Oh, no, no, no. You're missing the most, you all have missed the most important feature of these

headphones. They have a physical, god damn, on-off switch. They have physical buttons for volume and all the other stuff, but you could just turn them off without doing a long press dance and listening for the tone and whatever, whatever, you can just flick the switch and you're done. I love it. Very exciting. This is Sony, your move, Sony. Something for everyone in this one. I want to talk about, for the last thing for me, Schaefer, Schaffler, it's German, has made a new kind of bike component.

It is a chainless drive system, and it is the cleverest thing that I have seen in a month. So you got your pedals, you know, at your crank, and you pedal them. And instead of peddling and having, you know, a cog that moves a chain or a Gates Belt Drive or even a drive shaft, which is a thing that can happen on bikes, it is connected to nothing but wires because it's connected to a generator. Your pedaling powers a generator. And then it sends electricity to either a battery or a motor that's on your hub, on your wheel. or, you know, both. And so it's bike by wire. You are literally, there's no moving parts except for, like, the wheels, you know, the, you know, the steerer.

The steer. Oh, my God, the handle bars. And, but there's no chain. There's no, there's no gears. There's no cogs. There's no thing that you've got to make sure you've got, you know, the right kind of, you know, oil on or whatever. It's just, it's literally just 100% electric for the drive train. And I think that is amazing.

you just like bike it mechanically? Like if you turn the motor off, you can't bike anymore then. There's no mechanical connection between the pedals and the wheel at all. So like if the motor, if the battery die, no, I guess the battery can't die because it's a generator. But like if you don't want to use the motor, you can't move or the assist, you can't move.

Here's the crucial thing. You know in the movies where you always see somebody and there's a bike attached to generator so they can power their whole house? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you just attach this to the generator? Oh my God, yes. You can use this like, attach it to like your Tesla power wall, you know, so you're set up for life. Think about it.

But how heavy is it going to be? Well, and to Himes's point is if the battery is, in fact, truly dead, how much power can actually get from your pedaling from the generator through the wire to the wheeled hub to actually get you moving? Is it efficient enough to like not have too much power loss, not lose too many watts? People ride bikes, literally think in watts. to move you. And that, who knows. I love this because you're getting all of, like, the benefits of riding a bicycle, you know, the exercise and all of that.

But you're also getting, like, it's going to be way easier to go up a hill. Yeah. You're not going to have to pedal faster. You're just going to pedal. That is cool. Yeah, that's very cool. When does it come out? When it gets put in a bike, which bikes are dealing with the same supply chain problems

as everything else. So who knows? Forever and ever from now. But good news. exists and it's a clever idea. And we're going to end on good news. That, my friends, is the Vergecast. You can follow us on Twitter. I am Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Kranz with the Z. Heim is Cartenberg. Yep. Correct. Neely will be back next week. You can follow him. Of course, too, he is reckless. However, on Decoder, speaking of chip shortages,

is Nilai spoke with a Harvard professor named Willie Shee about the multifarious causes of the chip shortage. It is the most fun and most cogent explanation of what is actually going on with chips that I have heard. You know, everything else is like shruggy, we don't know, chips. And this one, we actually get into like the real reasons that there's a chip shortage and how we're going to get out of it. And the answer, spoiler alert is slowly. That's it. On a personal note, it's been a hell of a couple of weeks here in the United States with hurricanes and fires and COVID outbreaks. And for a lot of people here in the U.S., we've got a long weekend ahead of us. And if you're lucky enough to be in that group, just take a minute to like take care of yourself, take care of one other person and just we're going to get through this.

Rock and roll.