The Vergecast - The AI garage door mystery

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Nilay and David discuss a big week in AI news, including the new web search features in ChatGPT and the reporting that Meta is working on something very similar. They also briefly talk about this quarter's tech earnings, and what they say about the ways AI is really being used. Then, Wall Street Journal columnist Joanna Stern joins the show to talk about Apple Intelligence, Apple's week of Mac launches, and why Siri still can't open her garage. Finally, in the lightning round, the hosts talk about Netflix's gentle push into social features, Tony Fadell's AI thoughts, and our endorsement of Kamala Harris. Further reading: OpenAI’s search engine is now live in ChatGPT Meta is reportedly working on its own AI-powered search engine, too Microsoft’s gaming revenue keeps going up, even though hardware sales are down Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users Snap Inc. - Financials - Quarterly Results Apple’s Mac week: everything announced Apple announces redesigned Mac Mini with M4 chip — and it’s so damn small Watch Apple show off the M4 Mac Mini in its reveal video - The Verge Apple’s new Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad have USB-C Apple put the Magic Mouse’s charging port on the bottom again Apple updates the MacBook Pro with M4 Pro and M4 Max chips Apple updates the iMac with new colors and an M4 chip Apple’s first smart home display could pay homage to a classic iMac Apple Intelligence is out WSJ: Apple’s Craig Federighi Explains Apple Intelligence Delays, Siri’s Future and More Netflix is making it easier to bookmark and share your favorite parts of a show Tony Fadell calls out Sam Altman Tim Walz and AOC are going to play Madden together on Twitch The Verge’s guide to the 2024 presidential election Tech leaders line up to flatter Trump’s ego Jeff Bezos is no longer relentlessly focused on customer satisfaction “You have a Washington Post problem.” From The New York Times: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the Billions of Ways to Influence an Election Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Joanna Stern is going to join the show in a little bit. There's a lot of news this week. Search GPT is here. That's OpenAI's competitor to Google that's built right in the chat. We've got to talk about that. Meta is apparently announcing AI-powered search. iOS 18.1 with Apple intelligence arrived with something. It did arrive.

We can say that with certainty. With a puff of smoke. And then there's just like earnings to talk about. We got a lightning round. I'm very excited about some of the lightning round items. Yeah. Oh, and we should mention Apple also announced a whole bunch of new Macs. Yeah.

So we're going to save a bunch of the Apple conversation for when Joanna joins us. We should start with the news. Search GPT launching or I guess search in chat, gbt is how they're framing it. It's funny how much we talked about Google and Google search changing and the web and whether AI would kill Google and here it is and it's kind of like, huh. Yeah, I'm actually really glad that was your reaction because that was mine too. It's like if you just imagined what a, I don't know, three quarters baked search product

would look like from open AI, you would have gotten it almost 100% exactly right. And I think two things about this are really interesting to me. One is that, A, this is the thing that Open AI has been signing publisher deals for disclosure, Fox Media, the Virgins Parenth Company, signed one of those deals. That's all I know about it. It exists. But they've signed lots of these deals in recent months. They've had this web crawler doing stuff for a long time now.

That web crawler has been really controversial. It's all been building to this. And in Open AI's sort of typical fashion, they don't make a giant deal. out of their biggest launches, but like this is a big one for OpenAI. It is the thing that gives chat GPT real-time information, which is, I would say, the single biggest hole it has had so far. I also think it's fascinating that they just built it into chat GPT. Like when it first was a thing, it was going to be, you know, search GPT. And I think OpenAI has struggled to figure out how exactly to package and productize all of this stuff. And just shoving it in all inside of the chatbot

has turned out to be the answer. And I think this thing looks fine. I think Open AI is making some wild, obviously incorrect claims about it. But the idea of what it is seems pretty straightforward and useful. The shove it all in the chat pot is super interesting, right? Because Google and Open AI are coming at the same problem from radically different directions. They have kind of the same idea.

And they're arriving at very different rifts on the same core user. face. So Google's, right, Google wants to be an answer engine. They've talked about Google search that way for such a long time. So you ask Google a question and 10 blue links and then answer cards and knowledge panels and now you get AI overuse, which are still kind of a mess. But the idea that you, you just ask a question in Google and it delivers you an answer has been the core thesis of Google search for quite some time. And they're getting there, but it's still very structured. But you are not supposed to chat with Google search. Right. But it's still like ask a free form question in this text box and Google search will figure it out and deliver you some answer.

Open AI started not with the web, but with just like freeform chat. Right. Just like talk to this robot. It might try to bang you. Let's find out. Where did this information come from? Who knows? Right?

Like here's just some weird stuff. And they're adding all of this structured information to it with search now. Right. By crawling the web. And so they're just coming at it from two, like two radically different. positions and they're they're closer to each other than I think they want to admit. I think that's right. And I think it's because in a lot of ways, there just aren't that many answers to this. I will say one of the things that strikes me just looking at even some of these

early screenshots of what Open AI is doing, Open AI actually appears to be a better citizen of the web than Google in the way that they're implementing the AI search stuff. So like, we'll put the link in the show notes to Kylie Robinson's story. She saw it, got a demo of it, talked to the folks who were making it. But let me just describe like this one screenshot in the middle of her story. So on the left side, which is the sort of open AI chat GPU chat window, this person has typed, what are some great ways to fix up a backyard? And it goes out and looks at the web and then comes back and...

By the way, totally normal query. Yeah. It's not... That's how everyone talks about fixing up the backyard. Backyard, what do? Question mark. All right. But I think about sitting down to my computer for search.

That's exactly how I would phrase it. Go ahead. But so the first thing it delivers is a thing that appears to be an article from the spruce.com called 54 backyard ideas to upgrade your outdoor space, which A is very funny because that headline is so clearly written for Google that it is borderline nonsense. Yeah. 54 backyard ideas doesn't mean anything. But anyway, so it's...

I just want to say, within the first two lines of this demo, we've just left the English language. Oh, yeah, we're gone. This is... Yeah. But it has, it says the spruce.com right underneath it, it has the spruce's logo right next to it, the little favicon, and then four images underneath it that I assume are pulled from that article.

And then basically a sort of multi-step summary of some of the stuff in that article. Then off to the right, it has a whole sidebar that says citations. And then here it has five links to a bunch of different websites showing similar stuff, right? 50 stunning backyard ideas that fit every kind of space. Your DIY guide, do a backyard makeover on a budget. Like, all of this is just Google Ease. It's so funny. And it's just being surfaced in these new ways.

But like in the guise of being like a publisher who cares about having your stuff surfaced and not just like stolen and repackaged looking like a chatbot. This is actually pretty good. This is just one screenshot. And I am confident that OpenAI is going to pick the things that make it look good in its marketing. But like, it's not a particularly attractive user interface, but it's pretty honest about the web. Yeah. Again, we don't know anything about our deal.

We had Nick Thompson, who is CEO of the Atlantic, the former editor of Wired on Decoder. And he talked about what he wanted out of the Atlantic's deal with Open AI. And a lot of what he talked about was, I want, I want influence over what these results look like. Right. Right. So the publisher deals, a lot of, a lot of it is they, they all gave up too much to Google. It was too much for a free-for-all. They were mad about it.

Now they have a licensing deal. They have a contract, presumably they have points of contact. And there's some back and forth here about how to make this best for everyone. And so I think you can see that here. I will also, just to keep harping on this one example, point out that. that for all this AI, for all these millions of GPUs running nuclear hot, boiling the ocean, the answers the most cutting edge AI in the entire world came up with for what are some great ways to fix up a backyard are create a seating area, incorporate outdoor lighting, and add a fire pit.

That's what we got. Boom. That's incredible. So it's chairs, lights, and fireplace. We did it, everybody. And maybe, look, maybe the person doing this demo has never been in a backyard before. I come back to that all the time. That's really where the, huh, came from for me, is that, yeah, I mean, maybe if you ask Google this question a few years ago and you got one of these extremely over SEOed articles that are loaded up with affiliate links and not really written for people, that's a worse experience.

and so maybe just presenting these extremely basic ideas and a nicer experience is all the innovation we need. But then you're like, so all we did was we just cleaned up a little bit. We just took out some of the chum boxes. Like there's not a belly fat ad in here. Right. That took all of the GPUs in the world. Sam Altman is literally traveling the world asking kings and queens for billions of dollars to build chip fabs so the robot can say incorporate outdoor lighting. That's what we're doing?

Okay. A, I think the answer is closer to just straightforwardly yes than anyone would like to admit, which we're going to get to in a minute when we talk about earnings. But the fact that this thing is just a slightly cleaner interface on top of roughly the same information is kind of what everyone is landing on, right? Like whether your perplexity or what Bing has been trying to do or now OpenAI, like even Google's thing is like, yeah, we agree that the search page is kind of a mess. let's do something better.

And the question then of how do you monetize any of that, who knows, the open AI wouldn't really tell Kylie. They're only rolling it out now for paid chat GPT users. So that's one pretty straight path. But eventually this will be available to free people and how that makes money, especially because this is very expensive. Yeah. It's not easy to run these kind of searches in real time.

in like it's expensive to run inference on an existing model it's a whole other thing to go get real-time information from the internet like that's a much harder problem to solve computationally i yeah we will see if this becomes a thing that actually works at any scale for any of these companies but like it is so so straightforwardly just a slightly better interface on top of things and you even listen to these companies talk about it and it's like oh clicking is so arduous you have to find information for yourself And there are certain things in which, sure, like, sometimes there is a piece of information buried at the bottom of a support document.

And what I would like my search results to do is just pull that piece of information out and give it to me, right? Like, I need to know how to hard reset a gadget. I just want to know the answer. I don't want to. And often you do have to look on 10 websites to find how to hard reset your gadget. This one, what are some great ways to fix up a backyard? This is like very slightly better than,

what you would get just by clicking any of these web pages on Google. Yeah. And I will say, you know, we're cherry picking the one example, but it's the example they gave us. Right. Like, there are other things. We have to use it. We have to, it's interesting to try to review search engines. We've, like, had this concept for a long.

We should review Google. And then it doesn't mean anything. Like, try to give Google a score out of 10. It's seven. Like, that's the answer. Yeah. Like, so I think we have to find some ways to evaluate these tools. to actually like address the breadth of how people use them.

But right now, it is very much, we just got rid of the ads. Like this market had a monopoly player, the monopoly player basically insidified the whole thing. The entire economics to make the content are people will click on one web page on your entire site, maybe once a year because they search for backyard ideas. So that web page has to make all of the money all at once. That's weird. So that's how we've loaded up all the pages of ads and chum boxes and that da-da-da. and like maybe this breaks it. This isn't going to send a lot of traffic to the spruce or whatever sources are in here.

We don't know. So there's just a long road to come. Yeah. Well, and I think your point about the tension they're feeling with these publisher deals, I think probably says more about this design than you then Open AI would like it to. Because like, this is what's happening with meta too, right? There was news this week that meta is working on a search engine of its own. Partly just to reduce reliance on Google and Bing, because I think everybody would like to reduce

reliance on Google and Bing, but also because as meta AI gets more useful, they announced it as 500 million monthly active users. Like, it's big. It's working. People are using it. Having good real-time internet information just allows you to do lots of new things, right? And I have to assume, if I'm open AI, the best case scenario here would be something that doesn't feel anything like search at all and is not a list of links.

but just has this giant new capability of real-time information, which just opens up a huge set of things you can suddenly do with chat GPT that you couldn't before because its information ended. Like, it literally would tell you I only have information up to, I think it was like mid-20203 the last time I checked. Once you get rid of that cap and I can just start to ask questions about like the world as it is happening, chat GPT becomes much more powerful. it also runs you into lawsuits from every publisher on planet Earth, which is what has happened.

And so you can see how like Open AI kind of lawyered its way into this design where it's like, okay, we're going to do some AI stuff. But also there's going to be a bunch of big ass links on the right side. Like, is everybody happy now? I don't know if they will be. We paid you money. Will you shut up? Right.

And that's the back and forth here. And I think, you know, Kylie asked the questions in the briefing and you can see it in the story that we'll link. but they're like, we're working with our publisher partners. And now the game is instead of doing SEO to get to the top of the rankings, it's due deals with Open AI to get in the list and get the money and hopefully have influence over what these things look like. And that's just going to be a whole different world. We look at meta and meta doing search.

I think one, this is just evidence that AI, regardless of whether it's good or bad or whether it works or doesn't, has created the feeling that search is now a competitive market. Yes. If the Google antitrust case, you know, goes the way that we think it will go on appeal and Google remains unable to just pay its way into default payments, well, that means a lot of people could get placement in iOS to be the default search engine. Those browser ballots that have not worked in Europe for a decade, but like might get imposed on Android in this country as well, maybe you want to put the meta logo there. and say meta-powered AI search or OpenAI chat, GPT powered search to say, there are other options for you for search engines beyond Google.

And so the market is opening. Some combination is just like regulatory effort and the existence of AI as a whole, plus Google search as a product having plateaued into whatever it was last year. All of this is just conditions for web search to change. Yeah. The question that I have,

very like existential, essentially is does any of this create incentives for people to put information on the web? Because right now all the incentives are for you as a creator or a publisher, whoever, to put new information on TikTok or Instagram Reels or YouTube, where you might actually make some money. Like the A to B of I made some information on the web and made some money is as fuzzy as it has ever been. Yeah. I've spent a lot of time talking to and reading kind of OG bloggers recently.

we just did the Vergecast about the origin of the word podcast and a lot of the folks involved with that were also like really early bloggers. So I ended up sort of back in this sphere and the overwhelming thing I keep hearing from these early bloggers is like we blog because we want to. It's not about the money.

It's about it's about having something to say. And it's like that's well and good that the like number of people for whom that applies is this big. And it is like a, In a lot of ways, it's like a bunch of dudes who sold startups in the 90s and needed something to do all day. Like, not be an asshole about it, but like, that's what it was. And you're right.

And the idea that I'm going to be able to do this open web something, blog, find other ways to make content. There is not any more a sort of obvious or even like straight line to I can make a business out of this. because all of the interface is just getting subsumed. And even if you're competing to be a link in chat GPT, you don't have the lawyers to make the deal with OpenAI. So you may not show up in there. So suddenly the list of even available sources to you might be much smaller than it once was

because you just don't have the engine with which to play the game. And OpenAI might decide that it's easier to just shut everybody else out than to fight the fight website by website all around the internet. And the weird danger of this is that we'll go back to a media ecosystem that looks like the one we had before the internet, which is, I think, hard for a lot of people to understand or see. But what I'm describing is you'll have a lot of people who write paid newsletters or have small audiences that pay money behind paywalls or even medium-sized audiences behind paywalls because that's the best way to make the money. And we can see that all over the place. Creators are just making money directly. Casey Newton, a great friend of the verge.

Platformer's doing great. But he, that's the size of the audience, right? And like there's a lot of newsletters that have hit escape velocity like Platformer has. And they're doing really, really well. But that they're just paywall. They're just that. And that's how big they're going to be. Or, and there are some that are even smaller.

And then you have the mass outlets that are free that are gate kept by weird deals. Yeah. And that is cable news or like whatever other big free distribution, wherever it has made the deals to support that. And so most people will experience the things that can be subsidized in that way. And then a lot of people are going to have small magazines or small blogs that are paywalled. And that weird thing that the internet did, which is let everyone just sort of compete freely against each other,

is kind of just like getting crushed by all of this. What amounts to just a bunch of interface changes. Right? Like it's a cleaner search. interface and then behind that is like a total reordering of the internet into paywalls and not I think the question implicit in that is how different is at least for writing I want to be clear that's for writing yeah the video side is just very different on the podcasting side it's very different well but even even on that side I think the question the question I was about to ask is

like how different is kind of the unknowable TikTok algorithm versus like the unknowable guy in the corner office who decided what was fit to print, right? Like, it is, it is rules. It's just a question of which rules and how transparent are they? And do they make sense to you? And the idea of there being this ecosystem that was too big for any one player to control, that's gone, right? Like, that's long gone.

And I think it's been gone longer than a lot of people realized. It's just that now we're getting new interfaces to see some of this stuff. and it's making it really obvious how hard it is to make it. If you don't have either the sort of unknowable blessing of an unknowable algorithm or some big thing to fight on your behalf in some way or another. Well, I'll give you an example. And so when I think about it all the time. So Becca Fersacha was just on the Wayform podcast with Marquez and David.

We wish Becca all the best with her YouTube channel. I hope she does really great. It's a good podcast. You should go listen to it. And they had just a brief, conversation about a thing that I've heard so many tech YouTubers talk about all the time, which is the audiences on tech YouTube are overwhelmingly male. And even getting to 10% female audience, breaking two digits on tech YouTube is like hard. Like people talk about it.

I think Mark has said, I've never, I've only seen one. And there might be another one. Like, but that's true for our channel as well. It's impossible. That is not reality. Right. That is an algorithmic truth of YouTube. The YouTube algorithm has decided that women are not interested in tech videos. And so it doesn't show them to them. And so all of these channels have these horrible skews. And you have to fight it. I don't know how to fight it. I know that this is an algorithmic truth because we run a giant website where our gender breakdown on our website of people who come to our website directly looks nothing like that. It is way closer to 5050 because that is fucking true. Like everybody likes technology.

like a stat from our sales team all the time is like women make like 80% of technology purchasing decisions in the average household. That's just a real thing that we think about all the time and we are able to address it. And yes,

we are buffeted by algorithms. We're buffeted by search. We're buffeted by all this stuff. But the algorithm of truth of YouTube is that that's your whole audience. And you will have to fight it. And I hope that all of them fight it. I'm glad they're all talking about it.

It's good that they're transparent about it. Hopefully there will be some change. but that is the that's the mass media now is like algorithmic media and so I'm just hopeful that as AI search and all these other

kind of distribution algorithms hit the mix there's some resorting in a way that makes more sense yeah right like there's some resorting in a way that allows small players to not have to chase scale

which was the big that was the big miss of like the Facebook video era is like the small recipe site was like now we make Facebook videos too something horrible was happening there It was the big miss of the search era where everything got blended down into this weird semi-robotic English that makes no sense to anyone. And if the next turn is the AI can just read everything as it's written and make it sensible and still distribute it well, that will allow things to be more different.

But the danger is you're going to end up with small to medium-sized paywall media and then mass algorithmic media. And the middle of that will be, I don't know what the fuck the middle of that will be. It will be weird. Like that's what I got. And it will feel like all. you're doing is feeding some AI system more training data. Yeah. Can I give you a better case scenario in news this week that makes me very excited about

AI search? So Google just launched a new thing in Google Maps that it calls Ask Maps. And I think this rules. And it's basically, it's just Gemini Search, but pointed only at Google Maps data. And so you can start to do things like Ask It. the example they give is things to do with friends at night, which again, not English. By the way, the range of answers to that question, acceptable to unacceptable is wild. Okay, but like, think about your own Google Maps usage, or at least the one I encounter all the time,

is I'm like, okay, we want to go out to dinner, right? I want to like find a place that I've been before, which is in theory information Google has, or like, what's the best pizza place around here? But does Google know about me? Is it using my previous Google search? history. Like if I'm out here, like it's Halloween. So I'm out here searching for like masks, black clothing. And I'm like, what to do at night? And it's like, Rob bank. Things to do with friends at night. Rob several banks. I don't know. I doubt it. That's everybody's long term

plan. But what I think is happening here is that Google is actually just doing this with the existing maps data, which is basically like all the place data it has, all the navigation data it has and crucially all of the like reviews and stuff that are in there. So a thing that I encounter all the time is looking for a place to eat dinner and then I find myself combing through reviews looking for one of two things. Either there is good outdoor seating or it is meaningfully kid friendly in some way. And just the ability to like ask that question at the top of the search becomes incredibly useful. And this I feel zero qualms about because no one is on Google Maps for the purpose of being on Google Maps, right?

Like Google Maps is a means to an end every single time. And all of these places that put their information on Google Maps do it so that I will go to a place. And the goal is to get me to the place I want to be more quickly. And I think there are lots of interesting, complicated, like, bias problems to figure out with all of this AI stuff. But the idea of just being able to be like, what kid-friendly place can I go to this weekend that isn't likely to be super busy on a Saturday night? Like, having you just described Yelp?

I've described what Yelp would like to be and has pitched itself as for forever. But what I just described on Yelp involves opening a filters menu and selecting 31 things and coming through 100 listings and like... Right, but the whole point of the LLM is like, it will understand natural language.

And it will be able to communicate in a more naturalistic language. Yeah. I mean, we get comments on our site And I almost a 10 out of 10 can tell when they've been written by it. Oh, yeah. There's a stilted form that is just the way it goes. But the idea that the input and output of the computer is much more natural language.

That's the thing everyone's freaking out about, right? That's the platform shift. That's your click wheel. It's not your digital crown. I'm sorry. But, right, that's your multi-touch. That's the thing people are freaking out about. And so you get to, okay, I can just talk to Google Maps.

and Google Maps and just talk back to me, you're still just looking at a database of information inside of Google, right? Yeah. And it's still, you're clicking the filters, but just with natural language. Right, but that's the thing, right? Like, that changes the whole interface.

Like, they have a GIF in this story that Emma Roth wrote, that it opens up a bars page on Google Maps, and then you type in under a thing that says, ask maps about this place. You say, do they have a full bar? and what it appears to be doing is it looks at the menu to see that it serves beer, wine, cocktails, and liquor, and then looks at the reviews to see what people like and just puts that

into three sentences and hands it back and says, yes, it is a full bar. Some people say, what, the cocktails are delicious. Like, that's excellent. That is an extremely good user interface that takes something that would have taken a bunch of filtering and collating and searching through reviews and just answers the question. And that is like, that's always been there inside of Google Maps. And they've just never quite put it all the way together before. And if they have this time, I think that's awesome.

It's funny because I think Amazon is watching that same feature for ask questions about this product and it will search reviews and stuff. And my experience with that is, yeah, you can do it and it work. And everything is so depressingly averaged out. Yeah. Like the AI generated summary of the average set of Amazon reviews. Or it's like, some people liked it. Some people said it set their house on fire. Right.

What am I supposed to do it? Yeah. Well, and again, it's AI all the way down, right? Because you get more and more people who are using AI to write these reviews. The AI is like naming the products for God's sake. Like the promotional images are being made by Gen AI. So it's like there is a mess that gets created in all of this if it doesn't go well. But I think the idea of it. And same on Amazon. Nobody cares about the content of their Amazon page. They want me to buy their thing. And so I think the extent to which AI search can get down to that. more quickly, that's the stuff I think is really exciting. Yeah. Well, it's very obvious that the race is on. Like, we have spent so much time talking on Google and pissing up so many SEO people. By the way, the SEO people have all come around. They know.

They know. And it is very funny. They were all real mad. And now they're like, oh, shit, you were right about the comment. A Google this week, by the way, in a workshop basically said, we don't know if search traffic is going back to small websites. And that you should prepare for it not to. Yeah. Everyone's just saying it.

Everyone yelled at me. Now everyone's just like, here it is. So we're going to track this very closely. David, you have been making the point that the money behind this is just all over the place and no one really knows how it's going to go. And there was a lot of earnings this week. Google had earnings, Microsoft had earnings. Reddit is profitable first time ever. Snap, not so much.

What do you see in here? So, okay, I took a bunch of notes on the earnings reports this week. And I think as everyone knows, we kind of hate talking about earnings on this show and also in general because who cares? Companies make money. It's fine. But going through the earnings reports and listening to the calls and stuff, just a bunch of the same things kept jumping out to me. And so I want to just throw a couple of the things I have noticed at you. And I'm curious how it makes you feel.

The thing number one that just jumps out to me over and over and over again is that the thing that AI is being used for is to make everybody's very good ad businesses even better. That actually, it might be true right now that the single thing AI does best, and I mean best in the terms of like most money making, is connect an ad to a person, right? Which is like fundamentally a big data problem. And ad targeting has been a question on the internet for forever. And that Google talked about this, about how YouTube advertising has gotten better. Meta talked about it about how its own advertising has gotten better.

Their revenue is going up as a result. But the fact that AI is being fundamentally monetized as an ad targeting thing is just so fascinating to me. And I think we're due for a long run of that. What it is is there is a mountain of data about me. There's an advertiser who is looking for me. And AI can find me faster than any database software we've had before. Oh, that's just scratching the surface. That's just step one.

Because step two is what ad are you going to see? Right. Totally. And every one of these companies is explicitly talking about, well, we'll just have the AI generate a custom ad for you. Yep. Millions and millions and millions of iterations of the same creative generated for people. Specific taglines or specific needs. We know you were searching for capes and black boots.

Have you thought about grappling hooks? Like exactly that thing. It's going to be weird. And there's a reason that they're all chasing video generation because the thing they absolutely want to do is make video ads with influencers in them. Yes. And they are already, they're they are priming. And I don't mean to sound this in a conspiracy way. I mean, this is the reporting and this is what is happening.

They are priming the creators and their audiences to interact with AIs. Meta has a thing where if you're an Instagram influencer, you can have people. talk to your AI trained on your Instagram data, which by the way, includes your threads posts, which is wild. So our friend Katie Nautopoulos, a business insider, she's been engagement baiting threads just as a bit forever. And she lit up her Instagram bot and it trained on her threads. So her Instagram bot is just an engagement bait bot.

It's like perfect. That's perfect. YouTube has this thing, right? They say out loud to creators. Don't worry about all this fan audience engagement. We want you to make videos, make great content. We'll let the bot chat with your, with your viewers. The turn to you can make the branded content with an AI video of yourself is it's not, that's not a conspiracy theory.

That is the plan. No. And I think that's from one perspective that is fascinating. Will the verge have something to write about for the next 10 years? Yes. Go get it. Like I'm, there'll be a lot to unpack with all that. But you just see where it's going.

It is all of this effort right now is pointed at advertising. Let me just do one more thing really quickly on the earnings thing because I don't want to talk about earnings because I hate earnings. But I found this fascinating quote from Jen Wong, the CFO of Reddit, talking about exactly the thing you're describing. Let me just read you this quote. She says, so we launched a couple of quarters ago a headline generator using Gen AI where you can just put in the URL from your website and it actually gives you Redity headlines

that actually drive improved ad performance and having Redity type headlines in your ads really does make a difference in the ad resonance. So that's just an example of, I think, what's possible in terms of ad creative. And that is actually such a simple version of the thing that is just like, here's a Reddit bot that you can just plug a headline into and it will teach you how to Reddit.

And like I just think about all the brands who did all that like awful cringy stuff on Twitter for all those years. This is about to get so horrible and so AI driven in so many ugly ways. By the way, Mark Zuckerberg said more AI generated content is coming to Facebook. and Instagram and maybe even threads.

Yeah, and they're fine with this. This is a feature, not a bug. Like, it's so, it so is, and everybody is fine at this. So that's one thing is the ads. And then just the two other things I just want to say out loud, because I feel like I'm losing my mind talking about AI with people. One is that I think we all still massively underrate how expensive the infrastructure for all of this is.

Almost every one of these companies has, like, gone out of its way and its earning reports to talk about the increased, cost just of physical infrastructure of supporting AI. And so, like, Sam Altman was out there being like, I need $7 trillion to build data centers to make all this AI stuff possible. Like, the money is going to be crazy. And the numbers are only going up. And I think, like, anyone who wants to say we're in an AI bubble, like, those are the

costs that are going to pop the bubble. So that's thing number two. And then thing number three, and this is just the most important point in the thing I want everyone to remember about AI is that anything other than. and back-of-house AI that is doing, like, data analytics and helping customer service and all that stuff, anything other than that is a total money pit that there is very little evidence is actually working for anyone in the world. Like, go read these earnings reports.

They all start with the CEO being like, here are some cool, magical things that we think we're inventing. And then the CFO comes on and is like, all of that has cost us $16 billion this year. Here's how we've made our money. Like, over and over and over, that's what it is. All of this other stuff is being built in service of like being cool and exciting and getting in front of users. All of the actual utility and more importantly, all of the actual money here is the boring B2B crap that nobody wants to talk about. That is the AI story.

If you want to hear more about how AI is flipping over the advertising industry and creators in general, you should go listen to the Decoder episode with Amy Lanzi, who is the CEO of Digitos. Oh yeah, that was a good one. And we did that in front of an audience. There was a lot of, like, ooh, moments, and that was fun. And I asked her, what is the difference between a creator and an influencer that got nowhere? Great icebreaker, by the way, if you're ever an ad world, because no one really knows. But inside of that, we talked about this boring B-to-B stuff and what they're using AF for. And it, yeah, there's a big, there's the we're going to have AGI, like, flashy noise.

And then there's the like, we're doing better ad targeting reality. Right. And to be clear, the ad targeting reality is fine, right? Like all of that is well and good. And those things are going to be very meaningful to a lot of people in their jobs. They're going to make a lot of companies. Like that's all great. Let's just talk about what it is.

Right? Like Open AI makes most of its money from that stuff. Not by building digital God. By the way, open. They haven't actually made more money than they spend yet. So it's, they got a waste to go. Close. Not anywhere close.

And by the way, what they will disrupt is Google Search, which is one. of the richest businesses in the history of the world. Right. Pure margin businesses that has ever existed. Like I said, I know what we're going to be doing for the next 10 years, assuming that there are still websites. Important qualification. This is why we have a podcast, Neal. You can't kill podcasts.

And people have tried. All right, we've got to take a break. We're going to be back with you and a stern and talk about all the Apple News. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS,

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We're excited to talk to you. There's, I mean, it's Apple Intelligence has arrived with iOS 18.1. All of our lives are different. You're a robot now. I am. There was what came before, and now there's today. Tim Cook did tell the Wall Street Journal that it did change his life. He did.

So there is actually a lot of Apple needs to go through with you. Apple had its Mac Week. They announced a Mac Mini with an M4 chip. It's tiny and cute. We've got to talk about it. Everything's on the bottom. Power button's on the bottom on the Mac Mini. The USBC port is still on the bottom on the new Magic Mini.

magic mass. There's an iMac, very colorful, also has an M4 chip in it, and then iOS 18.1 hit on Monday with the first shreds of Apple Intelligence. And it is true, Tim Cook said that having his email summarized for him changed his life. Let's just start with Apple Intelligence, because honestly we can get through it in 30 seconds, David. It took me three and a half days after installing iOS 18.1 to realize that I had it on my my phone because I opened up the mail app to look for something and was like, oh, it's doing some of the things. And that's the extent of my experience so far with the mail app.

There's been a lot of like productivity apps out there that are very excited about integrating all of the writing tools. I'm sure they are fine and useful for some people. The notification summaries seem fine. I like I cannot. I was prepared to be disappointed by how little was actually going on in this first round of Apple intelligence. and it's actually even less exciting than I was afraid of.

Wait, but you use the Apple Mail app? No, I use it when occasionally I have to search and Gmail is busted. Gmail search is sometimes very good and sometimes a nightmare. And for whatever reason, Apple Mail search is actually occasionally very good. So every once in a while, I just wander through my inbox. I don't use the Apple Mail app and I'm always, it's just wild to me that if you use Gmail, you use the Apple Mail app. But that is not the point of this conversation.

Well, but it kind of is. And I think I've been thinking about this Tim Cook thing a lot since that story came out. And we made a lot of fun of Tim Cook on this show for saying he uses every Apple product every day. But the thing about Apple intelligence is I think if you religiously and exclusively use Apple apps, it is probably appearing in your life in some way. You're getting some of the writing tools. The keyboard stuff is popping up. it's at least like maybe slightly more present. But like I do most of my email in Gmail, which offers me lots of other weird AI things

that I don't need, but has essentially no awareness of Apple intelligence, which is just like the splitting of this ecosystem is just getting weirder and weirder. Well, I think that's one of the reasons the notification stuff did kind of go so viral because it's like right there on your lock screen and you have AI straight in your face summarizing things in a funny or disappointing way. Right, but like what an incredible example of how AI is not actually intelligent. That's the first thing that everyone is experiencing is notification summaries that have literally no context or relevance or understanding of what is happening.

Like my ring camera every morning, the notification summary is just crack me up because it It sounds like there's a home invasion every single day in my house. What was the one you shared yesterday? It was like people at the front door and back door and inside. Several people at the front door, back door, and driveway. Mine is right now, literally. So I actually, this is why I'm here. Let's be honest.

I'm here to talk about the ring notifications that I, that I talked about with Craig Federici. Well, that was the garage notifications, but the smart home notifications are the best part. I don't care if they're not intelligent. They're amazing. This is mine from Ring right now. I'm going to, we should, we should bring up the screenshot. Missing Dog with 99 on its back.

Multiple people at the front door. Two minutes ago. Multiple people are there. Now, it is Halloween as we're taping this, but there's no, I'm looking at my camera, no one is there. And one person showed up. Yeah. Well, it's because, yeah, it's because there were, you know, people going in and out of the house from 8 a.m. on. And it's summarizing it.

So there was one person and there was one person and there was a dog. And it goes, there are multiple people. and a dog outside of your house. Yes. And it's funny because that is, if there was actual intelligence, sort of noisy smart home sensor notifications are exactly what you would want that intelligence to help you sort through. My back door opens and closes 500 times a day.

And I only want notifications sometimes. And you would think in AI would be like, okay, like we see this pattern. we're going to pair this down and be like, the normal stuff happened this morning. This one didn't happen at the right time. And maybe that should be in ring. Maybe the smartphone vendor should do it. Maybe it should be somewhere else. But Apple intelligence, as it summarizes notifications, it's just the clearest demonstration

that it doesn't actually know any. Like these LLMs don't actually know what they're talking about. The part that I talked about with Federegi in my interview was the example I gave him, which was working really well for me and still does is the garage. because it's very, it's open and close, and that's it. It open and closes all day long. And then there's a summary. It says it repeatedly opened and closed and then it was recently closed.

And that usually is like, that's very helpful to me. Yeah. Isn't that exactly the same thing as just putting the one that says it's closed at the top of the stack, which is what it would chronologically do? Like, what new problem is this solving for you? That I know it was open. and closed a lot of times by my family. And then it was recently closed. I guess here's the question that I've been thinking a lot about.

And it groups them together nicely. Every time I'm forced to reconsider the amount of smart home notifications I get, I ask myself, do I need to know this? Do I need to know that Max went in and out of the house 50 times to the back door? Like, that's just my parents didn't know that in the 80s. They had no idea where I was, to be clear. And I'm like, actually, I don't need all this additional. help. And this AI, and we should get off the smart home notification because it's a little corner case. It is very funny. I do think it's a good demonstration of the fact that LMs don't actually know what they're talking about. But in this case, it's almost blinding how useless most of these notifications are. And the only thing that's happened is because they're slightly different, you're paying attention to them again. And you're like, oh, this is still useless. And I will just quickly start tuning them out the way that I tune out most of my smart home notifications. I was just on the road for 10 days.

And I didn't turn off my smart home notifications. And maybe there's an emotional attachment. Like I feel deeply emotional with these because I'm not at home. Not deeply emotional. Some emotional attachment to these smart home notifications. Your only connection to your family. My only connection to my family for 10 days. And that's where I'm going with this, was seeing these smart home notifications.

And so dark. This is really symbolic and they mean a lot to me and I'm not going to let them go. And I would like to thank Apple Intelligence for resurfacing them in my life. Like my children are here. You give a speech at a wedding that's like, you know. Joanna is like, oh, 20 years ago when I saw that first smart home notification with your partner, I knew they were the one. Joanna, I'm going to make you like a yearbook of your kids, but it's just going to be smart home notifications about what they're doing. It's so true.

It'll be like, it'll be like, child playing basketball on front garage. Child's now driving to prom. Yeah. Childs now bringing home man or woman. And they're going to play that one Green Day song in the background as we do a slideshow. It's going to be amazing. And Apple intelligence will slowly get more intelligent. As Craig Federigi said, this is a decades-long arc to getting it better.

That's a direct quote. So I want to come back to that conversation I had to Craig, which was a couple weeks ago at the WSJ Tech Live conference. I just want to say a notification summaries for one more second. Outside of the smart home stuff, the other promise is we're going to summarize your emails. We're going to summarize Slack,

whatever other notifications you are getting. Has that been useful? Because I will tell you I laughed at it for a day or two and then turned them off because I actually found those notifications because I actually found those summaries to be more confusing. Like ultimately they were more.

distracting because I was like, what is going on here? I got one from the family group chat that just said my niece was jealous and felt left out. And all it was was her friends were going to an event. She was just saying, they're going and I'm jealous and I'm not going to this concert. And that was it. And it was like otherwise totally normal, except the summary made it seem like the highest stakes thing in the world. Yeah, my mom sent me like a really emotional text. She had to go to a funeral and it was a whole thing. And then it just said, expresses gratitude. And it was like really, really long, like very long amount of text. And I was like, oh, okay.

I mean, I think the question is they're funny. And the point of them is to save time, but they're not saving any time because you then go and read the full thing anyway. So it doesn't really achieve anything. Well, it's that, it's that, uh, okay thing that is actually, I think, in a weird way, like the intended response and is also why I hate it for texting. I actually think it's useful for email in the sense that you get a lot of email and a huge portion of it all you really need to know is that it exists.

Yeah. Right? Like, it is some piece of information that you need to be made aware of or some kind of like confirmation or status check. And that's the kind of thing you can take from a giant long email into eight words

and I can just be like tight and go on living my life. What I have discovered with the AI summaries for text messages is they've made me such a worse text. Really? And I'm a bad texter anyway. But just the, the thing where I have to open a message in order to understand what is in the message

goes a long way toward me being a reliable responder to that message. And so now I'm getting a lot of things where it's just like, the message is just like, mom, on her way. And I'm like, all right. And I just move on. And I'm like, no, crap, I have to respond to that.

All you are to me is a status update. Right. It's like, it's not even as good as like the tap back emojis. It's just, it's just me saying, okay, I can now move on because I've been given this personality-free piece of information. And then it's like, oh, no, that's a text from my mom. I should go respond to that.

And that is, I turned that off immediately because it was like preventing me from actually engaging with messages. And to that point, so I found the text from my mom. It was really long. It was, you know, it's like one of those from your parents. It's like, you know, they don't send it in chunks. They just send it all. Like they wrote a long, long letter.

I don't know if. Does she sign her messages at the end? She does. She's better about that. But it just said reflecting on life, expressing gratitude. and wishing a safe trip home. And I found that so funny that I sent her the summary and said, look how this summarized it.

And I never actually responded to her long, thoughtful note. You just sent her a screenshot. I was like, look how it edited you. You're like, this is so meaningful to me. And she wrote back, she's like, I guess I could have been shorter. You know, like. So, you know, it's funny. It's a bigger feature in iOS 18 for me is send later in messages.

Oh, yeah. because I never want to be the person or replies instantly, even though I see a lot of things. And just being able to like send this in five more minutes makes me reply to more messages. It's a little hidden. They got it wrong. They got the UI wrong. They should have done it the way that Slack does it, which is you just hold down the send button. And once you schedule it, you got to like dig through the menus and find it.

You got to go to the plus button. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little messy, but it works. And that is like, to your point, David, it makes, it takes me. out of this is a status message. I've like seen and done it. I've taken the action and then I've moved on.

And because there's, I might be bonkers about this, but my feeling is like if there's a little delay in the response, it makes it so that we are not about to have a conversation. Like I've just answered your question. That's so smart. I was about to say like, who are you playing it cool with? I play cool with everybody all the time. Yeah. All of Neil's text say send this in three days.

Sorry I didn't see this. I write, sorry I didn't see this immediately. and then schedule it for a couple days from now. But actually, that's genius because you are indicating to the receiver, hey, I'm not like available right now. Like, oh, like I'm in the middle of something super important, even though I just sat here and scheduled my message. But you're unavailable, like you're available, but you're not available, is your signal,

which is right. I'm being responsive, but this is not about to be a chat. Like, I'm just letting you know that. And I have an infinite amount of incoming where I just need to deliver an answer and not. have like a 25 minute conversation. And that's fine. Like people always see screenshots of my home screen and it's always just like so many on reds. And it's like this is what the AI should help me do is be like,

you're just going to parse through all of these. We figured out the ones you need to answer. We're going to help you get through it. And instead these summaries I think are just not useful. And I keep coming back to like we've invented LLMs. We are desperate for them to solve problems. This problem seems solvable. And then you like sit here.

holding the solution in your hand. And you're like, yeah, the door open and closed a lot. You know, like actually send later, which we could have invented 10 years ago, is much more useful than the notification summary. Apple intelligence does include in this the prioritize priority notifications where it is supposed to help. I haven't used it a lot. In fact, I probably should have turned that on here instead of Do Not Disturb for the podcast.

I used it once, I was on a video shoot. And it did, I mean, it did send. It did prioritize, like, notifications from my wife and family and, like, group chats over slacks. Children continue to grow up in the background. Over my ring notifications that I am deeply emotionally attached to. Yeah, I'm going to put that on right now. Have you used any of the other iOS 18.1 Apple Intelligence features for real? I believe the notifications are the ones everyone's using for real because of what you said, Joanna.

They're just in your face. but the writing tools, the image tools, fine. Like, I'm a very precious writer. I'm not really fond of letting AI write for me. I've avoided them mostly. They're a little buried. They're not in your face. No, they're not.

But I will say, I've just come to realize that I'm not the target audience for the writing tools, and that's fun, right? Like, we're three people who write sentences for a living, and that is not actually most people. And so, like, I'm, that's just, that's fine. Yeah, I've used it like in notes. Like I'll sometimes draft like PR notes and stuff in notes. And so I've used it there, but I don't find it that it's like doing much for me.

I mean, I use notes a lot. I use the notes app a lot. But that's another place like like I felt I felt like the list and the summarization tool might be helpful. Because sometimes I like make sloppy lists and like, okay, clean up the list. But then it just like it adds bullets in front of my dashes. And like I've already had dashes in my. list and then I just had These are problems that the very

basic algorithms in Microsoft Word solved 25 years ago. But then it added bullets in front of my dashes and that's, I never used it again. I'm just telling you, like, if there were podcasts in like 1986, we would have been like, I don't know, it's this new Mac. Like, it's adding dashes to the bullets.

I have used the call recorder with the AI transcription. It's very good. It's really, very. That was the one I was going to say too. And you can do a voice memo and dump it into notes with the transcription, which is very handy. That stuff is very cool. Well, I would say the summary is not good. I don't know if you found the summary to be good, which is the actual intelligence, but

just having the transcription there, which is not an Apple intelligence feature, and you can get that, I think, going back to iPhone 13s or something like that. There's a cutoff on those. They're not using any LLM stuff to make the transcriptions better because, like, you know, like Open AI has whisper, which is its AI power transcription. and there are some reports that it's inaccurate in some of its cases. I think there's one about people using hospitals. In hospitals.

Yeah. It's not being great, which is not great. And also just a classic AI story. But it's better. I think the stat I saw is that the AI transcription systems are now on average better than the worst human transcriptions. Whisper's really good. Like I've been using Whisper a ton.

We use it a ton for Virchcast stuff. And it's really good. I'm not surprised. Like a hospital is the ultimate. stress test of anything. It's just full of words that don't exist outside of hospitals. And so that's always going to be tough. And you should never rely on these systems 100%. But like all of this speech to text and even basic summarization stuff has gotten pretty good. Apple intelligence, I would not say, is leading the summarization game. But a lot of that stuff

is pretty good at this point. I mean, this is, I do think that there's no AI and that, I mean, there's obviously an AI model that is on device that's doing the transcription. But like, anyone, you don't need Apple intelligence to do that. Right. As that's what I'm reading right now, just to confirm what I said before. So, yes, the summarization part is Apple intelligence. And that's the part that's not very good. And that's the part that's not very good.

But the part that is really good, that is, it really is a game changer for me. It's like, yeah, some, you know, source just calls or I'm doing a quick and I'm just, oh, hit record. It works great. And the transcription's fine. Yeah. You at least can go, like, it's great for scrolling. and saying, oh, that's the part I need to talk. Yeah, to find the audio I need.

Right. Yep. And this is very, again, to David's point, this is three people who just like do this task all the time and this is very useful. But it is a useful upgrade to iOS 18. Everybody who has a pixel phone or an Android phone, I'm aware that these phones have had this stuff and it has been great for a long time. I'm just looking at the sweep of things that have been added to my phone with iOS 18.1 and Apple Intelligence. And it's like this stuff, which I just keep coming back to, is the basics. Yeah.

Should we be able to figure out when to add bullets instead of dashes instead of adding them both? Solved problem. Should we be able to send messages later? Solved problem. Should my phone app have a call recorder? And if it does reasonably go transition, solve problem. But now we're bundling them all up into Apple intelligence. Right.

Obviously, the developer betas of iOS 18.2 out at the same time. So there's a real mismash of what people are looking at, what people are talking about. The more interesting features are an 18.2, visual intelligence, chat, CBT, integration. I guess we'll wait on that, but it's here. You know, we, a big conversation we were having, and Joanna, I'm curious how you have thought about this, is we reviewed the phones without Apple intelligence in them because of our rule, review what's in the box, and then we're like, maybe we have to re-review them now that it's here. And I'm kind of like, but you don't. Because there's nothing. Like, I don't know what to say about that. What are you going to do?

Oh, no, I'm, I'm done with coverage. We've done now. We're done now. All done. 18.2, yeah, I'll revisit. And maybe there's some significant stuff there. Let's just talk about the most important thing that was added in 18.1. And I mentioned this when I did your installer. What's my installer thing that I submitted?

Anyway, I don't know. Just your home screen. My home screen. Yeah, that section. In 18.1, you can finally, in Control Center, add a Wi-Fi widget. or control. So again, probably something they would have talked about in, what was it, 86, you mentioned on the podcast. Had a Wi-Fi widget to home screen.

You can actually just do the Wi-Fi, and now you can just do the Wi-Fi, and it's amazing. Strongly agree. It's Control Center, I set mine up after you sent me your home screen, being like, Control Center is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I was like, all right, cool, whatever, Joanna. You're right, it's great. I now spend a lot of time just like mucking around and control center doing stuff. Because smart-com stuff.

I feel like the control center is Apple. They're like, fine, you want customization? Here's what it's like. And then next year they'll be like, we're going back to telling you exactly how this works because it's obviously crazy to do it this way. Well, there's one like meme or video going around. It's very much you're getting what you wished for. And somebody's just put Wi-Fi controls, the entire control center's Wi-Fi controls.

And it's like, that's exactly what you're talking about. They're like, you wanted customization. Look at this, look at this asshole. Look what he's done. Oh, yeah. It's the same with all the colors and stuff. Oh, they're like, oh, you want your phone to be ugly? Knock yourself out.

Have an ugly phone. Finally, enjoy your ugly phone. Finally, the iPhone is brown. You'll never, ever figure out how to do it except by accident. But Godspeed. All right, that's iOS 18. Way 1 Apple Intelligence. It is a baby step, as Craig told Joanna. You should go watch that video of that interview.

It's very good. We got to mostly talk about his garage door open our situation, but we'll come to that. The other Apple news is the week of Macs, which is mostly just spec bumps. The new IMAX have an M4 chip in them. They're very nice. The new MacBook Pros have M4 Pros and M4 Max chips in them. Very nice. There's new colors on the MX, which are very bold.

They have some beautiful pictures that Viren went and took of them. You know, look at those. But they're just spec bumps, right? New chips. It's the Mac Mini that's got everybody just raving. It's like little baby Mac, M4. chip in it. It's very small. It's the same volume, I think, as the outgoing Mac Mini, but it's taller instead of, it's like they unsmushed the pancake. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I did put on

the priority notifications or the whatever it is reduced interruptions where Apple Intelligence is supposed to then surface the important notifications. And this is just a chain of moms talking about when we are going trick-or-treating. And that's a priority to interrupt our whole show with. And I never, ever respond quickly to these chain of moms, to be clear. I mean, if the chain of moms are listening to this, I'm sorry that I usually mute the channel. Joanna, first of all, I don't think you understand how many New Jersey moms listen to our show. I thought that's why I'm here. I'm here to bring them to the show.

Also, chain of moms sounds like a doo-wop group, and you should absolutely start that immediately. Anyway, if we were doing a live review of Apple Intelligence, which I thought we were doing on this show, I interrupt the show to tell you this chain of moms. It's now blowing up my phone and Apple intelligence seems to think I care. It says maybe important. It's actually really not important. I do like our new segment where you just read us your notifications from time to time on the air. We're going to keep that going.

It's the new Joanna's on the case. Joanna's on the case with New Jersey moms. I'm realizing you both get a lot more notifications than I do. Maybe it's just because I don't have the smart home stuff. But I have like systematically turned off basically every notification that isn't texts from people responsible for the life of my child. Like, that's essentially it. Almost no one else gets to send me a notification.

I'm going to install a ring camera in your house just to send you notifications so that you can, it feels like a home invasion every single morning. We need to talk about the Mac Mini, which is actually the new to you. I'm very sorry. We're going back. It's fine. Tell the New Jersey moms that you're about to talk about the MacMini. I'm going to buy them all one for saying that I never respond to them and muting their

chain all the time. Okay. And you can. It's only $599. Right. So, David, the thing. about this Mac Mini, you have been talking about wanting to upgrade your M1 Mac Mini that I basically cajoled you into buying for a long time. Is this going to do it? Yeah. Oh yeah. This is, I mean,

this is the Mac Mini people wanted. There are a couple of little less than ideal things. I think it's a bummer that it doesn't have an ST card reader. You'd obviously like there to be more I.O. All the time. This one has three USBC ports on the back and two USBC ports on the front. Well, no, it's Thunderbolt on the back, Thunderbolt 4 on the back, and USBC in the front, which is very confusing because the ports are at the same. Yeah, okay. That's actually a good distinction. I was about to make a face at you for trying to distinguish all the dumb Thunderbolt stuff, but that's a good distinction. but anyway, kill me. So like more IO would be good. I personally, there are two things about this thing that I don't care about at all.

And I would just like to say them out loud so that we can then move on. I don't care that it's smaller. The Mac Mini, the size that it was, was fine. And I guess if you're like rolling giant stacks of them into a server array so you can run a weird third-party messaging app, hypothetically, this would be very useful to you. I don't care. I'm going to stick it where my current Mac Mini is. It's going to take up slightly less space. It will be fine.

That's thing number one I don't care about. Thing number two I don't care about is that the power button is on the bottom. I just, I just don't care. I should say this out loud, don't care that you charge the Magic Mouse on the bottom. Don't care about that either. These are not problems.

This is, we can argue about all these things. Let's separate these two. Yeah. So the power button is on the bottom of the Mac Mini. That is fine. Agreed. Would it be cooler if it were,

on the front, sure. Do I have any feelings about it at all? No. What I think is great is that this thing is still $599. It now starts with 16 gigs of RAM, which is awesome. It has an M4 chip, which is awesome. This thing is just what it is supposed to be, which I think is the thing that Apple is starting to do really well with Max, is it just gives you the computer that you feel like you should have. Right. Like this is the one with the newest chip. It has most of the I that I want, it still has an Ethernet port, it'll still plug it into the HTML. Like, this is just the computer that I want. And that is delightful. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because they spent so much time

trying so hard to reinvent Macs or to kill them in favor of the iPad or whatever they were doing. Just scattershot Mac ideas. What if the keyboard sucked? Like, just what if they were so thin? The batteries only lasted five minutes. And now they're just like, they're really good computers and we're just going to keep iterating them, which is all they needed to do. It's also kind of a sign that all of their most innovative ideas are pointed elsewhere,

which is kind of weird, right? Like, you would like them to have one Mac that was just bananas. But I don't think that Mac should be the Mac Mini, to be clear. The thing you're talking about is just very obvious to the point where the new MacBook Pros

they didn't even update the wallpapers. They were just like, here it is again. You know, like, and all that's fine. Like, I'm with you. I think this Mac Mini is great. I do, I will say there are a lot of people who deploy Mac minis in things like RACs in other weird places where having to take the thing out and turn it over in case something goes wrong and reboot it will be a pain in the ass. Sure. Fair. Yeah. Totally agree.

But that's not like not the complaint. Like I tweeted about this and I always regret that. But, um, and also on threads. Like, I mean, just the anger of some people being like that this is on the bottom and that like, because I just asked a basic. question, which is how often are you people restarting or turning off your Macs? And it turns out, like, there's a lot of people that turn off their Macs. I don't know why. I mean, these are not built to be turned off every day at the end of the day. This is, again, not a podcast in 1986. But people do it and seem very angry about the location. Yeah. I don't get it. I will say I briefly went

through a phase where I would shut down my computer at the end of the day, just as a like symbolic my computer day is now over thing. And it was kind of great, to be honest. There is something nice about, like, I have now turned my computer off, even though it takes a grand total of like six seconds to boot a Mac now. Like, it's not slow.

It's fine. But I don't know. I probably restart my Mac Mini once every two weeks, and I do it by software. Like, I don't ever hit the... I can't reach the power button on my Mac Mini from where I'm sitting right now. How do you turn it on?

I restart it. I literally don't think I've turned it on from dead. Oh, like you haven't turned it shut down. You haven't done like shut down. No. Yeah. In a year maybe? Yeah.

Sometimes the power goes out and I have to like pull the thing out so I can reach behind. But that's it. Like I just don't think this is a real problem. And again, for the people who use these things in server racks and stuff, I grant that it's an issue. You're not the target customer, right? Like this is not, that's not who Apple is making this thing for. No, actually for the mini, the mini is the one. where everyone is the target customer.

In Apple's own marketing kind of demonstrates this, right? They're showing, here's this modular little box that you can put in all these different environments, and they can't, they have to, it's Apple, right? So it has to be like a person with a guitar and a person who's drawing, and it's never like the person who's running the third-party messaging service that hijacks I message. But like, there are a lot of Mac minis and server racks. This is a thing that these computers are used for. And fine.

My thing that I don't understand about turning off the computer, is it actually whenever I cold boot a Mac, it takes forever for it to just be fast again. Do you guys not notice this? You got to delete some login items, my man. Yeah, I have the same, but it's because I, yeah, I have some startup items that I just like, it's starting.

Yeah, whatever. I was just like, it's slower. I do think the idea that I should keep my computer in like a library room or like a computer room with like that weird 80s oak furniture and I should turn it off every time I'm done using it. that might make me healthier. That might be better for all of us.

That will save America. Yeah, that's David's version of the emotional notifications. 100%. Yeah, I get to walk into my computer room and sit down at my computer chair in front of my giant computer box, and it's great. Wait, the point you just made about the way Apple is talking about this thing, did that feel really different to you? Because my memory of the Mac Mini was that it was always like kind of the iPhone

SE, that it's just like a thing that some people like, but it's kind of over here. and we're never going to really talk about it or pay much attention to it. Whereas this time it feels very like front and center, this is a mainstream Mac. Like they talk about this thing and marketed and are putting it in pictures

the way that they do with like the MacBook Air. Yeah, which just really surprised me. I think that's a weird post-pandemic work from home change. There are lots of people out there who bought three monitors to work from home in the pandemic.

There are, we cover desk setups on our own site all the time. There are lots of people who spend a lot of time buying mechanical keyboards and like cool aesthetic monitors. And I think how do you put a Mac into that mix? This is the answer. You can just swap out whatever you have and here's this little modular Mac and now it's part of a whole lifestyle. And I think that the Mac mini before was like a utility computer and now it is a lifestyle

computer. And it's because, I really do think that's just a change. Like, even when I've had like CEOs from peripheral companies like Logitech or whatever on Decoder, they are talking about this as a market. Like people are building desk setups. They're building a gaming PC setup next to a productivity setup. They want them to be beautiful. It's just people spend all day watching movies in these setups now. It's like there's a lot going on in the computer room, which is now every room.

Yeah. I also think one thing that happened was that they discontinued the 27 inch iMac. And so when that happened, and they just went to 24 inches, I heard from a lot of readers who were pissed. And so the best option was a Mac mini and a big monitor versus getting a Mac with a studio, was it the Mac studio? The studio display. Yeah. Well, and I don't think a lot of people are buying, like if you're getting a Mac mini and you wanted a like an IMac competitor, either you're getting a studio display or just getting a cheaper 27 inch display or bigger display. And I think that kind of took that market.

So that kind of became the- Yeah, I did that for my in-laws maybe a year ago. They had like an ancient 27-inch I-Mac and really did not want to go down to 24-inches. And so like every three months, my father-in-law would hit me up, he'd be like, so, 27-inch I'm-inch, when's it going to happen? And I eventually was like, I was like, Roger,

I don't think it's going to happen. No, do you remember Apple gave us the rare on-the-record statement? Right, saying no. Yeah, saying we're not making another 27-inch I-Mack. But think about it. You're that person. What was his name? You're Roger. Roger. You're Roger. And a lot of Rogers read the Wall Street Journal. And they really want a new desktop. And they are not going to go get the Mac studio, which costs $2,000. But they're going to get an IMac. So, okay, makes it more mainstream. They're going to pair that with a display that they, you know, buy on Amazon of Samsung or whatnot. Done. Yeah. Well, and it was very funny going to that process with him because he was really annoyed by the fact that the computer inside of the iMac was old and slow and outdated. But the screen was awesome. He was like, why can't I just put another computer inside of the screen? And I was like, what a terrific point that you're making. And so it made it actually easier to sell him on the idea of like, okay, we're going to buy you a Mac Mini and we're going to buy you a really nice 27-inch monitor. And this monitor is going to sit here for a very long time. And you can just upgrade this little computer as you need to. And he's,

he's been very happy. My 2015 IMA is in the corner over there. And I have all the parts to turn it into just a monitor. And I have to sit around and get it unglued and do all the stuff. And I'm going to do it one day. But that is the plan for that machine. Actually, we should just have a party. We should have a bringing your IMA to turn it into a monitor.

That's a very nerdy kind of vertishtas party. But I think we could get people to come to it. And I know a lot of people who are sitting around with old 27-inch IMAs. We're like, I can just turn this in this way because the panel is the same as the panel in the studio display. Apple has not meaningfully updated that LG panel for the studio display. It's the same as the 27 inch iMac, which I think we should talk about the 24 inch iMac, which was also just rubbed to have an M4 chip in it. It's kind of weird that they just landed this thing at 24 inches. It is very colorful.

It is very thin. In many ways, it's like an apex idea of the iMac. like I don't know where you go after this. Like it is as thin as any computer can be to be that thing. But I feel like if they just made it 27 inches, like lots of more people would just buy them. Like you would just buy you would this would be the thing you would buy. And at 24 I think everyone has that. I don't know.

It has to just be a price thing, right? Like I think keeping the iMac as relatively speaking affordable as possible is very important. Because this thing is like, it is such a family computer. It's a, it's a like thing on the reception desk at fancy doctor's offices. Like, it's in so many of those places that I think if you have a bigger screen, that's good. But if it's suddenly $500 more expensive, you've kind of killed the value prop of the thing. And I was so surprised when they made this change in the first place, because my assumption would have always been anybody wants an IMA is going to want the bigger one. And that, I mean, Apple is not like, phasing.

famous for making stupid business decisions. So I think clearly that was not the case. But the fact that it is so locked in on this one thing at this one size, and especially with these colors, like it just indicates there is this is a very different Mac that serves a very different kind of person than anything else in the Mac lineup at this point. It's interesting the way you describe it because it, let me just throw this idea out here. It sounds like we're describing the Mac Mini is the go-to Mac desktop, the lifestyle computer, and the IMac. is the weird utility computer that goes in the receptionist desk?

Maybe. It's certainly the like plug and play simplest version of that for Apple. Right. Like there is no easier Mac to just insert

into a receptionist office at a doctor's appointment at a doctor's office than an IMac. You don't need other peripherals. You just sit the thing down, plug it in and turn it on. And I think that's really enticing

to a lot of people. I think it's also limiting and problematic in the ways that we're just talking about. But I get the appeal. What I don't understand is why this is the only one that comes in purple, right? And it's like, who is this? And not just because I want them all to come in purple, but like what is so different about the IMAC audience

that it gets such an unbelievably different set of like aesthetic decisions than any other Mac? Well, I think that's like where if they were to go to the 27 inch, I think they would want to attach a pro name to it. And a pro isn't come in purple. Because only professionals need slightly more screen. Because a pro does not come in purple. Yeah. No, definitely not.

That's a tagline there. So they... That's how you know that you work at the Wall Street Journal and we work at the verge because I'm like, our professionals come in purple. That's what we do here. We're purple to the Wall Street Journal's oppressive gray. I love purple. Purple for everyone. Joanna, you and I have kids around the same age.

Are you going to... I'm assuming they will just be sort of like given Chromebooks in your school district that will happen. Right. And so, okay, there's your like laptop for school. I've been asking myself, am I going to get Max a laptop? Or would I want a desktop like this to be like, this is here? And then when you go to your room, it doesn't go with you. It's not a portable computer.

And maybe coming back to that like computer room idea. And I feel like that's part of this, right? It's all part of that mix is like people are expressing. what they want computers to be and how they want them to use very differently than just a few years ago. Yeah. Like obviously very differently than just a few years ago. And part of this is like this computer is stationary and friendly, but it doesn't go with you.

And your laptop has to be rugged. If a laptop was purple, it would probably look like crap after a while in a way that aluminum just looks worn in a nice way. I don't know. I've been thinking about this a lot. Like, oh, maybe I'll just get the IMAC the first time out. And the fact that it's purple makes it friendly and like, that'll be fun. I think that's the move personally.

I mean, you even look at the way Apple is marketing this thing. Like I'm just on the IMac page on Apple's website. And the images are like an IMac on a counter in a coffee shop or in a bakery. There's one that looks like it's in some cool like surfboard sales shop. There's one that's clearly in a living room right next to the couch. It's like these are furniture in a way that no other Mac is furniture. which I just find fascinating. And I have like, the older I get, the more I believe in the idea of a computer as like a place

rather than a thing you carry around. So like bring back the computer room, honestly, as far as I'm concerned. Actually, the time when Vergecast listeners were sending us pictures of their computer rooms was the best. Joanna, you're going to- Please keep doing that. Vergecast at theverge.com. In 1986, they sent this computer room picture?

No, we asked people for pictures of their computer rooms when they're kids, and we got so many of them and they're all so cool. And then when they all look the same, everybody had the same computer. Everybody went to, had the same sourd or woodworking computer hutch. Like down the line. It was great. Okay, I want to end by talking about two things. One is a rumor that is my favorite rumor.

And two is Joanna's garage door. The rumor is Apple is working on a smart home display. Mark Herman has also reported that they're really going to do it in the smart home now. They're going to, they got matter out the door. The standard is there. Everyone's using it. the array of accessories you can buy, all the stuff, and they're going to go for it. Sure.

But then they'll have a smart home display, and the other rumor is that it will have, the display will be on an arm like the IMAG4, which is the single greatest IMac ever made. The G4 is the one that kind of looks like the Pixar lamp, right? Where it has a sunflower at the bottom and then the, I loved it. That was the best one. So if they make one of those, I'll buy that right away. And then I will give my entire smart home to Apple. My question is actually much simpler about this.

What can Apple actually do with a smart home display that hasn't been done by every other company except have it be made by Apple? Because I have thought about what I use my nest hubs for. I've got the Alexa displays for a while when we were renovating the kitchen. I was like, I'll put a tablet in the wall. Then I was like, I will never use this tablet and I just didn't do it. I don't know that smart home displays are actually a thing. I don't know if they're actually that useful. I mean, I guess I don't have a smart home display.

Everything is audio. It's mostly through Sonos or my phone. I don't have any like what are you looking on on the display? I mean, I guess like your camera feeds if you wanted to see them. Sure. And whatever it wants in the middle of their kitchen is like a like a security guard shack showing you like. And also how many camera feeds can actually go into home kit and into the home app? Quite a few.

But like, but that's the. That's the problem is like if Apple, like if I were to Galaxy Brain this moment, right? Like if you want to look at what is the closest to where the cell phone market was right before the iPhone, it's definitely smart home. Right? Like there's tons of stuff out there. People are interested, but it is just abject chaos everywhere you look. There are a million competing operating systems. And like in theory, someone could come in and put it all together and everything would be amazing.

except the difference is you can't. You can't. It's not, it's just not possible. The difference is that we have old crap that just doesn't work with different stuff. Thus. Apple would have to immediately turn HomeKit into the most wildly compatible open and yet perfect and closed and correct ecosystem in history. And that is not possible. Like, I just don't, I literally don't see how anyone, Apple or otherwise,

can like wrap their arms around the entirety of the smart home right now in such a way that it's going to work, which is why matter is in theory like the answer because it means you don't have to because it means it all sort of sorts itself out. But like it doesn't though. So I really doesn't. I run what is effectively a home kit house because if the controls are not on Becky's phone, they don't exist. So if I if I want her to be able to change the temperature in our house, it's got to be home kit. Your point about ring, Joanna, like I, I bridge. everything through Homebridge. I bridge it too.

So do I. And you bridge it in Hoobes, right? Yes. Yes. And it fails. And we have, you got to switch to Homebridge. I'm just telling you right now. Do you think if I name this episode, I bridge it in Hoobes that anyone will listen to it?

That's like when Neil and Joombe and we talk about the word hoobes a lot. We talk about hoops a lot. I talk about I used to love Hoobes and now I don't love hoops. I'm so sorry. And now I'm in a deep. I mean, I'm really just emotionally, so emotional on this podcast about my hoobes, about my notifications. I think Joanna, like, didn't they give you like an exclusive on like Hoob's Pro? So just the brief history here is that if you want to get stuff that isn't supported in a HomeKit and a HomeKit, there's just a bunch of like middleware adapters.

One of them is called Homebridge. That's the one I use. And then Hoobes is like a commercial fork of Homebridge. So there's a little open source fight. And everybody makes the plug-ins. And they kind of work on both. And I think a lot of the plugins are secretly made by Apple engineers because they all want to use their stuff in HomeKit. I'm just saying.

We should report that out. It's just a rumor that I've heard a lot. The three of us. And so I have a Raspberry Pi and it's sitting right in front of me that runs Homebridge. It has my ring off in it. It has my extremely garbage honey well thermostat for the heaters in the basement. Fine. It has some other stuff in it.

And all that stuff shows up in HomeKit. It shows up in Control Center on my phone. And that is the problem. I would have to tear out all that stuff and replace it with matter-compatible accessories. And I have no inclination to replace the garbage Honeywell thermostat in the basement with a new matter thermostat for no upside. Like there's just no upside of me doing that. So I have to run the Homebridge. Joanna has to deal with Hoobes.

This is very funny. Sorry to cut you off here. Is HomeBridge better than Hoobes right now, is what you're telling me? Homebridge is more stable. Okay. So I've got to get rid of my hoops. But you can just install it on the same raspberry pie. It's fine.

And we, and this is all like whatever. But then you get to other stuff like garage door openers where Chamberlain, which is the garage door monopoly in the United States, which is ridiculous, wants everyone to use my cue. My cue. And they have canceled.

We actually, Gen 2, we broke the story. They canceled not only their home kit support. They made a little adapter. They broke the MyQ API so that the HomeBridge adapters, the Hube adapters, the plugins, would stop working so that you would have to pay a subscription for MyQ. That's like, that's where we're at in this smart home market.

So Apple can show up with like a beautiful screen and be like, matters the real deal. And then you're stuck with even the hacks to make it all work together are being broken. so you have to pay a subscription fee to your garage door opener. My dream in life is just to be able to drive away from my house and say, Siri close the garage. I can. You can help me with that. I know.

I can solve this problem for you. So the best hack to solve this problem, and this is where I want to get to your Craig Federii conversation. But let's second. I just want to, before you get to what could. I used to have this. I had this when home with when Hoobbs was working with what you just described. then Chamberlain breaks that and now I have to use their

I will not insert the word app okay and so I can no longer do this now you can go on right so the solution all these little adapters you can buy on Amazon they're mostly made by a company called me Ross it seems like this is one of those situations

where one company made the thing and then 500 other companies rebrand it do you know what I'm talking about you go on Amazon you're like Homebridge or you go on Amazon, you type in like HomeKit adapter for garage store. And then they all look the same. You see the same product from 50 companies. Mee Ross is the one that everybody uses.

And it is just a little relay with a Wi-Fi chip in it that connects to HomeKit. And all it does is it connects the two wires and pushes the button on your garage door for you. Okay. Am I installing this? I have to get up on a ladder and put it on to my lift master. No, you have to invite your friend, Neli to your house. And Neli will get on to the ladder. I will do it.

I mean, we can do it together as. is a service we provide for all Vergecast listeners, by the way. Here's my true payment for appearing on here. Exactly. So, but you have to plug it in your garage door opener. I'm going to get on a ladder. You get on a ladder. You got to find the screws.

You got to plug it into the terminals. And you got to run a sensor wire to the door itself. So it knows when the door is opener closed. You can't possibly think that is like a reasonable thing for a person. But I'm saying that's where we're at. When Craig Federici is telling Joanna that he uses Siri to open. his garage door. You got to watch this video. Joanna is like, how's Siri doing with Apple Intelligence? And he's like, Siri's great. A billion queries a day. I use it to open my garage door.

Well, that's because I had also asked about the garage. I'd given the example of the garage because, again, I do think Apple Intelligence is very helpful for the garage. But I'm saying, if you just sit in the guy who runs all of software at Apple is asking his phone to open his garage door, what it takes to actually get there is so complicated. But Craig and I did talk after, but he did say it has home kit integrated, which leads me to believe that he had an old model that when Lyftmaster was like friendly. No, they did. They had some old model that had some home kit integration.

All right. So here's my two theories, and again, Virchcast listeners can help me figure this out. We believe there are only a few options here. Craig has a secret model of garage door opener, like the big motor thing that has home kit in it that no one else has ever had. in their lives. Right? He's got a custom,

custom garage door opener. Two, he's got a home bridge in his house, which would be hilarious. Truly hilarious. Like, he's running a little raspberry pie tomogachi. Or three, some Apple engineer came to set up Craig's house,

put in one of these mirrors and never told him about it. Those are your choices. Because there isn't a garage door opener with home kit built into it. There wasn't, like, I don't know, seven years ago and they were like, hey, you can get Home Kidd and they had the nice little logo on everything. I'm pretty sure there was a, either it was a Lyftmaster or something that had that.

I'm asking the listeners. This is what the Vergecast is for. We are crowdsourcing whether or not the big motor thing with Home Kitten and it existed. Because, look, I should have gone further in my 20-minute's garage door interview. And the other thing is, like, can you imagine Craig's garage door? Like, do you think it like opens with like a light display? It's like Batman's house? I should have out.

I'm now regretting that I did not spend the 20 minutes that I had with him really going deep on this. But I did ask him at the end. And he said, yeah, I've had one with HomeKit integrated. Yeah. Craig, if you're listening and I know that you are, as you always do, hi, Craig. Come on the show and tell us about your garage door. Or just write us an email, just telling us how the whole, how it's integrated. There's only three options.

He has one that no one's ever heard of. No, four options. He's got one that no one's ever heard of, which would be incredible. Craig, please come on the show and tell us about your custom engineered home kit garage opener. He has the discontinued MyQ home kit bridge. He's got a home bridge or hoobes or he's got one of these mirrors adapters. Those are the only choices. Oh, the bridge.

So sorry, choice number two is that who made that bridge? MyCube, but they discontinued it. So it doesn't work with the API anymore. Right. So if you're going to be like, I use it open. my thing all the time. You can't get it. It's not a choice anymore. Because they cut that off. Because they cut it off. This is the worst smart home commercial in the history of the universe. You can make the display and then you get all the way to-

I also talk about this with my boss, by the way, all the time. The deputy editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal also has this problem. I really think a lot of people have this problem. And they're not talking about it. Right. We need to talk about it. We need to raise awareness, Joanna. We need to talk about this more. And we need to talk about the symbolic. like, I just want to drive away and not have to tap a button. Let's just be clear, by the way. Like, they did solve this problem decades ago with a button. Okay, we got to wrap this up.

I'm starting a small consulting company to help people get their garage doors in the home kit. And I'm his first client. This is my exit plan. Joanna, we were going to have you a friend for the lighting round, but we did this for so long that you have to go. I'm sorry. I have to go see my child in a parade at Halloween. parade. All right.

Well, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll figure out how to fix her garage door till later time. And I just also want to say that I have gotten many notifications in this podcast that were not important to me and we're not a priority. All of them were from Liam, the producer being like, stop talking about the garage door. So reduce interruptions in Apple intelligence is not very intelligent. All right. Thank you. Goodbye, Joanna.

have you back again soon. You're not, I mean, you can't come back until you figure out. I am not sure your listeners want me to come back soon. Well, we'll see. Well, they will let us know and we'll we'll let the AI figure out which ones to send you. I would like them to come to my house to fix my garage. Goodbye. We'll get back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies.

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slash vergecast. That's Claude.aI slash Vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. unprecedented the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatic. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus.

And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. and we assess that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain, drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics.

But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over, against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo.

And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually.

Let's dig in. All right, we're back. I don't know what you heard in that last segment. I don't know how much we're going to keep. I just want you to know that the garage door conversation with Joanna went on for so long. Oh, my God. Like, however long you think that actually went for or whatever you just experienced, it was at least three times as long.

Yeah, we made Joanna late for her child because we were talking about garage door. The child that she only experiences through smartphone notifications. Who is named child according to her phone. All right, that also means the show is way too long. So we got to get through this lightning iron real fast. David, you want to start? Yeah, so I just want to really quickly mention this new thing Netflix launched called Moments, which basically lets you just link to a specific part of a TV show.

show or movie. And on the one hand, incredibly boring feature, right? Netflix launches Anchor Links. Yeah. 1984. Yes. Very true.

Completely agree. On the other hand, Netflix has been so incredibly averse to any kind of social interaction with its product over the years that I just find the existence of anything like this really fascinating. We've talked many times on the show over the years

about how weird it is that you can't screenshot a net. Netflix show. Like in the world in which we live on a phone. Right. Sure. Yeah. You can you can do it. You can hack your way into it. But like if I'm watching something on Netflix and I'm like, whoa, and I want to send it to someone, you can't. It's it's illegal and not allowed and impossible. People do it on lap. I just want to be clear on mobile devices and TV devices. On laptops, people are screenshoting and sharing Netflix all over the place. Sure. I don't think that's the primary place most people are interacting with Netflix. I guess there's like a weird measurement bias there because the only screenshots I see of Netflix are from people with apps. This is,

this is the point, right? But I think, and I think if Netflix had better tooling to prevent you from doing it on a laptop, it would do so too. That is all neither here nor there. Just the fact that Netflix is engaging more in society in this way, I think is really interesting, right? Like, there's an alternate future of Netflix where it engaged much, more and there was like shorts inside of Netflix that creators were starting to do. And Netflix just like leaned into like, we're going to be premium TikTok in a way that Netflix really talks about itself now as premium YouTube. Even on their earnings calls, like that's how the company frames itself in very real ways. It's how they're selling ads. It's like Netflix sees itself as

high end YouTube in so many real ways. And yet has tried so hard to be this little tiny insular like this is where you watch shows and nothing else universe. And so any tiny moment where you can like capture something else and take it out of Netflix, I just think is really interesting. I don't know if anyone will use this feature, but I think it's really interesting. Here's my conspiracy theory.

This is pure conspiracy theory. Love it. The single best discovery app Netflix could launch would be TikTok for Netflix. Right? Where you just flip through clips. Yeah. And it just shows you this way that people are watching pirated movies on TikTok today. And they don't know

what clips to pick. And they can't go through the whole catalog and pick everything. So you watch a feature like this where people are bookmarking their favorite parts of shows and suddenly you have a library of places to clip from. And then that becomes the thing also when you go to the home screen and it like, you know how it starts playing? Maybe it starts playing a clip that everybody likes. That's a good theory. If Netflix isn't doing that, they should be and they should pay it as a consulting firm. Yes. I'm going to go to Ted Strandos's house. We're going to work on the garage opener. I'm going to pitch him TikTok for Netflix. We had Greg Peters, the product CEO of Netflix on Decoder.

Every time I have a streaming service CEO, I asked him about TikTok and piracy to TikTok and whether there's a TikTok to streaming service pipeline or whether they would build a TikTok. And they all just sort of, you know, they westworld at me. They're like, doesn't look like anything to me. And I'm going to break through one of these days. Yeah, there's just no way it's true. And you would think I have watched. So here's a fun example.

I was home from work sick on Monday. and I watched the movie in time with Justin Timberlake. Oh, man. That's a great movie. Do you know why I watched that movie? Because I've seen so many 60-second clips of it on TikTok that I was like, I literally I got to the point. It was like, I need to just watch this damn movie.

So I was at home and I watched it and it rips and everyone should watch it. It's possible that I was just sick and delirious. But the movie moves. You have to be slightly altered to be like this movie rips. Like it's a good, it's an underrated gem of a movie. The central conceit is good. the jokes are good, and then the cars are awesome. And I'm pretty confident Hyundai is designing all of its cars to look like they can

remember the movie in time. Oh, they are. Whoa. That's totally true. But I think that connection is real. And I think it's in the same way that with music, right, that it's always like, why isn't there just to listen to this on Spotify button next to every TikTok video? And TikTok is, in fact, building a music app to do just that.

There is connection there that should exist. And it makes sense that Netflix might want to do more of it on purpose. Yeah. All right, what's yours? Mine is just a clip of our friend Tony Fidel. So it was TechCrunch Disrupt this week, big conference, famous. Matt Mollinweg was on stage there. He said a fork of WordPress would be fine.

We're going to keep covering that somehow. I'm letting you. These are the other things that happen to TechCrunch Disrupt. And then Tony Fidel, who works at Apple for ages, was one of the contested fathers of the iPod. That's a big fight that's fun to talk about. but he did the bringup of the iPod. He worked on the iPhone for several generations, and he left,

he founded Nest, he sold it to Google, he fought with everybody at Google, and now he's a VC. This is the short version of Tony Phil. Tony's a character, he's been on Decoder a number of times. We've known TOTI forever.

He's on stage, a tech scientist rep, talking about AI, and he basically says Sam Altman is full of shit. We're just run the clip. Just run the clip. We are using this stuff, and we don't even know how it works,

and believe me, I understand. I've been doing AI for 15 years, people, so I'm not just spouting shit. I'm not Sam Altman, okay? So, so seriously, you've got to know what you're hiring here. You've got to know what you're using. Yeah. And if we don't have transparency on data, we don't have transparency on hallucinations,

you're setting yourself up for a fucking disaster. So I want to be clear, I love Tony Fidel. My only note on this would be that when we were talking about this link in Slack, And I forget who it was, but somebody was like, is this, is this like what Tony is always like? And without missing a beat, Neil, I just goes, yeah, this is Tony. This is what Tony is what Tony is always like. This is it, Tony. I had Tony Undecoder and talk about his book about how to be a good leader and it was this.

Yeah. You should go listen to an episode. He's not wrong. He's not wrong, right? Yeah. I keep describing the current state of AI. We talked to us all the beginning of show, but I keep describing the currency of AI is like, we are spending billions of dollars to build Bluetooth.

And no one knows what the headphones are going to look like. Like no one can be like, I'm going to make really good headphones out of this. It's more like, these headphones might kill you. We have to build Bluetooth as expensively as possible. It's a great clip. Reader is going to say, what does Tony know about it? Fine, whatever. I don't think my nest thermostat is a platform shift that threatens Google.

It did threaten Google for other reasons. It was a disaster of an acquisition. Yeah, it did do that. Effectively comes to nothing for that company. but Sam Altman's spouting shit, man. That's some fighting words. It's pretty good. And you could tell he knew it was a line too.

He said it and then like kind of grins and sort of leans back in his chair a little bit. And he's like, yeah, got him. Yeah. And then he stands up and starts screaming again. That's right. All right. We got to end with this one. Tim Walls and AOC played Madden on Twitch together last week.

I, whatever. You got a campaign, however are we getting campaign. Everyone's going on podcasts. I run doing anything. I just want to point out, And I just want to say this because I know David understands this as deeply as I do. Playing Madden with an audience is one of the most high stakes things you can do because Madden 24 is so hard. It really, it is such an intricate game that it's like, they should have just played Overwatch.

Like it would have been less complicated. They did. At the end, they started playing Crazy Taxi. After my prediction came to pass, Tim Wals threw an interception. Didn't neither of them score? Like, it's pretty embarrassing. game is too hard. I play this game almost every night to unwind. I've been playing it since I was a child. I've won a GameCube playing Madden in a Madden tournament in a bar hammered. I was good at this game. The new version is so long. Yeah. Yeah. I just thought it was the, the riskiest campaign event I've ever seen. And indeed, Tim Wall's Vikings fan tried to gun into Justin Deverson and immediately through an interception, which is I can't encapsulate what the new Madden is like more than. that. It was very good. I appreciated both the, like, effort and the immediate understanding of,

oh, this is not going to go very well. You shouldn't do this. They just bailed. They didn't even finish the game. They just gave up, which is I've done that many times. We are so over. We got to wrap this thing up. Before we go, though, one, what, we should just talk about this real fast. It's an election on Tuesday. We did a whole package of election stuff. The package is very good. you wrote a big fiery endorsement that has caused a lot of feelings on the internet. Should we talk about that? I'm like, I'm both, I want to and I don't want to at the same time. We can talk about it for a minute.

Okay. I got a lot of notes that are like, let politics bleed into the Virtchast more, and sometimes they do. There was a net neutrality hearing today. I can talk about that all day long. That's very political. But in this case, I will just say two things about the endorsement. one, we, like every news organization, we actually like went back and forth and whether it did it do it. But that's just a thing that happened. Those were meetings we were in. We published a lot of them before. So I think we endorsed Obama in 2012. We endorsed Biden last time. I wrote those. We did not endorse Hillary or Trump in 2016. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that outcome. I think I could have swayed that election. I would have really bounced out the Comey letter. I don't know. We didn't. That's the history. Those are the ones we've done in the past.

You can read the ones in the past. The one of Biden in 2020, very similar to the one ever today. It's just the thing that got me and the thing I've been thinking about, we write about policy all the time in the verge, all the time. And they are just systems, right? Like the legal system is a system and Congress is a system. And when we describe the systems to the audience of the verge, who is, who are, which is comprised of a lot of people who build things and make things and care about how things are made it,

fine, everyone gets it. And then the turn is, but these aren't computers. They're not predictable. For any given set of inputs, you don't get a predictable set of outputs. And now in the age of AI, who knows, but for the most part, people who like work with computers expect the systems to be predictable. And the government isn't. The legal system isn't.

So that is always, that's always been the key to how we cover policy here. We describe the system and then we point out, like, this isn't predictable. Like, actual people have to just keep doing it. And it just really occurred to me that for all of the babbling about democracy that everyone is doing, no one has explained like why it's important or like why that's the system. Yeah. So that was the approach I took with F bombs because I, you know, me. I hope it worked. The feedback was great.

I was expecting chaos, a nightmare. And I am just very encouraged and heartened that what I got was the most comments on any article since we switched to coral. mostly entirely respectful. Obviously, we did some moderating into our house. We keep it clean, but mostly respectful, mostly engaged.

The feedback from the social networks was mostly good. Obviously, it's very distracting at there, like there are other things to talk about. But I'm just, I was very proud of our audience for engaging with the thing. And I know I gave it this incredibly spicy headline,

but I stand by that headline. The argument in the piece is the headline. Yeah. And so I'm just happy people took it seriously. They read it. They're paying attention. and they're bought into America, which is, I think, important.

So, yeah, that's, I don't, I don't, I don't want to, like, overdo it. I said what I needed to say. I published in text because I'm still a writer at heart, and I hope the internet continues to be a place for text to live. Yeah, I don't know if there's much more to say. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, it's, we'll link all the stuff in the show notes. The package is really great.

Gabby Del Valle, just one other shout out, wrote a piece for us today, Thursday, about all the tech leaders who have basically fallen all over themselves to cozy up to Trump, just in case he wins. That is something we could spend many hours talking about, and I super don't want to, so let's not, but go read that piece.

It's very good. We'll put all that in the show notes, too. But yeah, it was good. I really liked the endorsement. It was a, it was a project for you to get that thing done and out. And I think saying all those words in a row takes a lot out of you sometimes. But it was very good. It's good stuff.

You know, it's funny. I'll just end on this note. And just there's like, we have a lot of friends and call. who have gone off to go be indies on various platforms in various ways. And we wish them well. I hope people can see. We actively try to support all of our former co-workers who've gone on to start things. I want them to succeed.

And that's a trend, right? Everyone's talking about that trend. This is what you should go do. For me to do this, like if I ran a substack, I think it would be pretty empty. I don't know if it would go anywhere. Like, you need the platform. You need the group work. I needed an art department that went and hired an amazing artist to put

that piece of art at the top of that and every other part of our package. And I desperately needed a huge group of editors who I trust to fight with me on almost every single sentence to make sure the sentences were great. And that's, and then we needed the, you know, the Verge logo and our big website and all the stuff. And that is important. And like, that's, I just, we've talked a lot about both garage doors and the future of media on this episode of podcast. That's what we took here. That's, that's us. We published a president. intentional endorsement on the same day as a new Mac Mini, right? That's the Verge. It's a big thing that we do here. And that, to me, was if we have the platform, we should use it. For as long as we're going to have

platforms like this, we should use them. And getting to use it with a bunch of people who, like, make sure it's good is like, it's good. And then to give it to an audience that responded to heartwarming. Yeah. It's a cool week on theverse.com. We'll put a lot of links in the show notes, but folks should go read it. And also, go vote on Tuesday. That's the, that's the note to leave you with. Go vote. Or now.

Or now. Yeah, vote whenever you want. Whatever makes you happy. Just show up. You know, don't do anything illegal. All right, that's it. That's Virgcast. And that's it for the Vergecast this week.

Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866, Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Pore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.