The Vergecast - What’s in store for the iPhone 16

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss previews for the Apple event, gadgets at IFA, the latest with Snap, and a whole lot more. Further reading: Apple’s iPhone 16 launch event is set for September Apple’s iPhone 16 event: how to watch and what to expect Apple’s rumored Mac Mini redesign may ditch the USB-A port Is our long FineWoven nightmare almost over? What Not to Expect at Apple Event on September 9: 'It's Glowtime' A new low-end Magic Keyboard may come next year. Apple Sports is ready for all kinds of football Inside Apple’s theatrical U-turn on Wolfs. Ted Lasso could come back for a fourth season Beats’ long-awaited Powerbeats Pro 2 earbuds are coming in 2025 Microsoft and Apple are arguing over cloud gaming apps again The Remarkable Paper Pro is as outrageous as it is luxurious Honor’s superthin foldable is another cool phone the US won’t get TCL’s new Nxtpaper phones have a dedicated button for maximum monochrome Our first official look at Huawei’s tri-fold. Acer’s first handheld gaming PC is the Nitro Blaze  DJI’s $199 Neo selfie drone is going to be everywhere Acer’s Project DualPlay concept laptop has a pop-out controller and speakers Acer’s 14-inch laptops claim 24 hours of battery life from Intel, Qualcomm, or AMD Qualcomm’s new eight-core Snapdragon X Plus makes these Windows laptops cheaper IFA 2024: hands-on (and off) with Lenovo’s Auto Twist AI PC concept Intel strikes back against Windows on Arm Verizon looks to expand Fios with $20 billion purchase of Frontier Concord was worse than bad — it was forgettable Sony is taking Concord offline on September 6th after disastrous launch Snapchat to put ads next to chats with friends You’ll soon be able to Sony is taking Concord offline on September 6th after disastrous launch Sub.club is here to help the fediverse make money Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Redcast, the flagship podcast with a fine woven appreciation society.

There are no members. The wrongest one we've ever done. I was like, I don't want to be a member of that. I don't want that flag. We're still looking for our first member. If you could sign up today, that would be much appreciated. But we're not in it.

Yeah, you have to join. We just cover the society. We are not members of the society. We're the official podcast. of the fine woven appreciation society, but we've never enjoyed. Hi, I'm a friend Eli David Pierce is here. Hello.

Alex Trans is here. Hey, what's up? This is a big one. This is the Apple iPhone preview episode. Next week is the event. A bunch of us will be there. David noped out. That's largely correct.

David was like, screw it. I've seen these phones before the rectangles, he said angrily. But there's a lot of talk about we're expecting a new iPhone, a new watch, AirPods. We're going to talk about all the rumors, the things we're expecting. It's also EFA in Germany. I've covered this thing for 15 years.

I'm like, it's Germany, right? We got a team out there looking at just a wild collection of gadgets, including, I just saw this, a laptop whose lid rotates by itself. Whoa. Like Rainbow Room style, it just sort of slowly spins around as you use it. No, it's like a classic two and one where you like open it, you can flip it around and turn it into a tablet. But they're like, what if that? But you didn't have to do it.

Oh, I like that. And you just goes, Yeah, it doesn't, none of it seems reliable or good. But that's, right, that's what's happening in Germany today. So we get a whole lightning round of gadgets and then we got a lighting around unsponsored. Although, I will say to the one person who sent a email saying, I now have an entire corporate marketing budget. We're going to spend your corporate marketing budget. This is what happens when you do a show for effectively 15 years.

The people get jobs. So there's some people who send some emails. We're excited about this. All right. We got to talk about Apple. Let's start. There's a lot of rumors, I would say. But we're at the top line is they're iterating all of their core products.

Yeah. It's a weird moment. So you said there's a lot of rumors. And my immediate reaction was like, kind of. Because it's a weird year in the sense that if there is something big, coming. We don't know anything about it. Like there's not even there's not even light rumors that there might be something big and every year there's like the maybe this will be and there's just none of that. So either this is going to be a pretty straightforward Apple event

or we actually don't have that much information. And obviously I hope it's the second thing. It's kind of rude though because like action button on all models, that feels like a big deal. No, it doesn't. I don't have an action button on it. So it does. It's huge for me. I meant by a lot of rumors. I didn't mean a lot of important rumors. I just meant the volume of rumors is high. The number of things that people are saying will happen is larger than normal, in my opinion. I think that's right.

But none of them add up to like earth shattering. Except for the action button, which if you are on an iPhone 14 pro like I am, is very exciting. Of all of the rumored buttons, you think it's that one? Okay, wait, can we actually talk about this for a second? So I posted on the site the other day a really great shortcut that someone uses. I'm sorry, I'm forgetting who it was, where they had set it up so that they figured out quicker than I did that you can use the action button to open the camera and then again to take a picture. So you can use it like as a basically press and hold and then press and you have immediately taken

a picture. I think that's awesome. So I posted this on the site being like, this is a really cool use of the action button. Do you use the action button? And the overwhelming response I got from people is I never, ever, ever, ever use the action button. Because they're cowards. I forgot that it existed. I don't care about it at all.

So, Nilai, you I know set it up to do a chat GPT thing. Do you actually like use the action button all the time? It has reached gimmick status. Okay. So we should just contextualize this. What I say of all of the rumored buttons, they're rumored to be adding a camera button, a dedicated camera button to the pro. And then bring the action button to all the models. So we'll get to that.

My use the action matter right now is it's linked to the chat GPT shortcut where you press it, and it's slow. There's nothing about this. It's fast. You press it. ChatGB launches, it flashes up some message. It's like checking connection and a wheel spins and it's already gone. You've already been like, I don't care about the question I'm going to ask anymore. And then you can ask you the question and you can listen to you.

That's a little dicey as well if you're in a loud environment. People are talking. It's not great at that. But the thing, at the end of all that, you ask it a question, natural language. and then it just tells you an answer in natural language. And sometimes that answer is a pure hallucination. And sometimes it's not. And you can close that window and just read it,

which is much faster than listening to the voice. And all of that feels like a little glimpse into the future. I'll give you an example. Max and I are playing Untitled Goose game together, which is extraordinarily fun. If you don't know this game, it came out years ago, you're just a miscreant goose, just getting into trouble, just honking it stuff.

It's enormously fun. It's like Grand Theft Auto, but you're a goose. I don't know how else to describe it. That belongs in that category of games, that there is no way to say it in words that sounds good, but yet it is amazing. But if you have a, like, a six-year-old, you're like, this is a great video game. Like, one, you just like run around honking and stuff. Yeah. It's great.

Rules. So I haven't fun. And we couldn't figure out some puzzle. And I just asked Chad GAPT. Like, where is this thing in this game? And it just told me the answer with, like, bullets. That's cool. And there's a whole universe of moral complaints you can.

Lodge at Open AI for scraping all of the work and all of the labor of a million video game journalist who published the explainers and that's all in the background, but the thing just worked. And so that is really something. There's something there, and I hope all the people get paid for all that worked in whatever way. But that one use of the action button to me is the most important use of the action button. Like, can you have a natural language voice assistant? Can you actually add a new kind of input mechanism to a computer? Yeah, and that one's really janky and weird.

You can very, very clearly see how, oh, you can make that a million times better. And I think we're expecting to see Apple add these features to Siri. I don't know if it will be on this phone or at this event, but you can just see how it's going to get there. So I think the reason I'm excited about it is because of the Books Palma, it also has a button like this. You can program. And because I have one, I've actually used it. We've got it. We've got it.

We've got it's the Bucs Palma. I'm speed running. I'm speed running today. It's seven minutes since we started the show. Yeah. We haven't gotten into the remarkable yet. Don't worry. I'm ready.

But with the action button, can you do like just go to home or use it as a back button? No, so you can set it to run shortcuts. And then you can set it to run like five or six different system level things. Like turn on the flashlight. Yeah. I don't think it has OS level navigational capabilities. Never mind. I'm less excited.

This button sucks. I think maybe with some of the assistive features in iOS, you might be able to do some of the stuff, but it's not like top level functionality. Yeah, you could probably rig up a shortcut to go home, but that's a deeply weird use case. But I think, yeah, like back as a system gesture, I'm not sure you could do. Maybe you could. But again, that would be a weird shortcut hack. That's not just sort of a thing that you can attach it to.

Or it's buried in some set of assistant technology. Yeah, that's fair. System technology configurations. And a lot of times what Apple does, which I think is really interesting and honestly really cool, they pioneer or they test new ways of use. using the products as assistive technologies first. And then they bring them to everyone because, you know, the thing to say about assistive technology is making things more accessible

is actually better for everybody. So the things like pinchy pinch on the watch started up as an assistive technology. There's a bunch of other stuff across iOS that start off as assistive technology. And there's like a lot of them. Yeah, like the mouse on the iPad started. Great, the mouse, yeah, definitely that's a great one. The double tap on the back to do stuff is also another one that started as an assisted technology. There's a lot of it that starts to be.

Yeah, there's a lot. So it's like there's, that system is so configurable. I'm not, I'm just saying I'm not a hundred percent sure, but if it was going to be somewhere it would be in there, I think. Yeah, that makes sense. But it's, they've limited what you can do with the action button in the system level. It's just a handful of things and then you can run shortcuts. So when I push it, it runs the chat GPT shortcut, right?

Which is fine, but it's not like I push it and the computer knows what I want is, it's like, I'm going to run the shortcut that opens this other thing. This is where I say again that. shortcuts is a failed experiment, and Apple should be ashamed of itself for not doing better with shortcuts. Because what you just said is either you can do one of four things, or you have to have a master's degree in computer engineering to be able to do anything else with your phone. Well, to be clear, what's supposed to happen is the app developer shipped the shortcuts, right? So my chatGB shortcut is from OpenAI.

Right. Here it is. We've added it to your system library shortcuts, and what they want you to do is map it to the action button. And so, like, they're using the pathway to get to that button that Apple provides, but you still have to know a bunch of things about shortcuts. And that opening, I built the shortcut, and it is there. And you can, instead of being like, I'm looking at the list of things it can do, and one of them is open chat GPT. Right.

Right. Exactly. Like, there's a, one of the things that you can do on the Mac that I think is the better version of this is basically just walk it through a menu set. Like, you can set up a keyboard shortcut to anything. any menu in any app on a Mac just by saying, I want it to be this command. I'm like, that's how shortcuts should work. And it just doesn't.

Yeah. It's kind of like that just way more complicated. So I'm looking at the actual list of the action mode, by the way. You can turn on silent and ring, which is the classic mute switch. Yeah. Boring. You can switch a focus mode, which is one of those features that other people are super into or do not care about.

Classic. And by the way, focus months have been this way since like Palm OS devices, because that's where they came from. I had mine set up to turn Do Not Disturb on and off. And actually, that was great. Basically, just as like a shut my phone up thing, like I changed nothing in Do Not Disturb except I turn all the notifications and sounds off. Yeah.

So you can, and the idea that you're going to push a hard button on your phone to switch focus modes is like very fascinating to me. But sure. You can watch the camera, which is, I think this is the reason everybody sets it to camera. Because of the default choices, it's the thing that makes the most sense for the most people.

For sure. You can have it turn on the flashlight, which is just like if you're, you want to seem like an old dad, set that button to flashlight. You can launch voice memo, which is cool. You can run the translator. There's a magnifier,

which was fun to play with for a day, and then it turned out, you can do a shortcut, and then you can add the other accessibility features or you can set it to no action. So just of these choices, I think it makes sense why camera is by far the most important one.

Yeah. And also why it makes sense that Apple is rumored to be adding a dedicated camera button to the pro phone. But so this is the reason I ask, though, is because I think we're at such a deep point of maturity with these devices that, again, this is purely anecdotal just based on my own experience and talking to other people, but I don't think the attach rate of the action button is that high. And I think in part because it's the button that is too high on the phone, like I will die on that hill. They put the button in the wrong place. But partly it's just because we all know how to do all those things on our phones already. Right. And if I launch the camera 100 times a day, learning a new pathway to get there is actually more work than it's cracked up to be. And I think one of the things that Apple is doing this year with its software is making all those bits and pieces more customizable. So you can do more stuff in the control center and

you can do more stuff on the lock screen and you can change the two things at the bottom that were flashlight and camera. Now those are customizable. And Apple has this idea that like, okay, we're going to give more people more tools to do stuff however they want. And I wonder how big the group of people who are going to make those changes and be thrilled about them is versus the number of people who are just like, you know what, we're 17 years into the iPhone. I kind of know how to do things. None of this actually matters. And I think the camera button is going to be the most interesting version of that because if the rumors are true, it's not just going to be a shutter button. It's actually going to be like pressure sensitive. So you'll be able to like press once to press,

half press to focus and then press to take the photo, which is like a genuine value add on top of anything you can do on the phone now. It's just janky to do it. There's a rumor that it will be touch sensitive for Zoom. So you can slide your finger back. I didn't see that. That's cool. Wait, they're going to put in.

Like you can slide on it to Zoom. Yeah. That is the rumor. Like I said, there's a lot of rumors. Wait, but Apple's going to put in like a fancy button. But no headphone jack. Like they found the room for the button.

You did that just to hurt me. I did. I did. Yeah. I mean, at this point, the, If you believe that the future of the technology industry is multimodal AI,

then having immediate access to a camera so the phone can look at things, if you believe the future of the industry is AR, having immediate access to the phone. You can see why you're like, okay, I need to make this a button. What's harder to understand is why the action button persists if the adoption rate is so low. Yeah. And it's funny to me that one of those options isn't just open an app. Right. If I had a button on my phone, they'd just open threes, I'd be like, this button rules.

Well, and you can do that with shortcuts, right? But this is where I go back to, like, shortcuts as a fake experiment. You have to die through this other system as opposed to, I don't know, like, I think a lot of people tend to use, like, one app a lot. Yeah. And the idea that this button, you can't just like make this button open that app from the jump from your lock screen is kind of weird. And I think it's Apple is just sort of restricting that a little too much. And so I'm hopeful that what we see is the action button. gets more useful in one way, and they move all the camera usage to the other button.

Because otherwise it's the touchbar again, isn't it? Otherwise, you're going to have two camera buttons on your phone. There's just to be a lot of people with pro phones who have effectively two camera buttons on their phone. Right. They're like, this one's when I'm feeling spicy. This one when I'm feeling not spicy. This is the nudies button and the non-nudies button.

Wow, guys. I mean, iOS 18, I believe that there's going to be like password protected. There we go. We did it. We finally understand what's driving iPhone development. It's these two. We'll be announcing some subscription offerings later in the show. So those are the highlight features of the two buttons coming to the fence.

I think that's what everyone is expecting. That's the leaks. We've seen case leaks where the case manufacturers are having to deal with this potential capacitive touch-sensitive button on the pro phones. then obviously we're seeing camera upgrades, potentially a new ultra-wide camera on the pro, potentially a big zoom upgrade on the Pro Max. I would say the thing that I'm looking for most

is processing upgrades. I don't know if Apple's going to talk about this. I think iPhone photos are just starting to look a little wild. And I think people are noticing. I think lots of people are noticing. I think we talked to the Halide developers, process zero, their minimal processing system in that app, is like a huge hit. And I think it's because people are like, oh, photos or shadows are pretty good.

Yeah. Like, what if my photo looked the way I thought it was going to look when I took it? Like, what a crazy idea that would be. So I'm really curious to see if Apple responds to any of this anyway, because the trend for all of these cameras, I think they all kind of look the same now and they all, for a minute. Do you remember when Google first did the pixel they were talking about what artists they were inspired by? Oh, yeah.

And, like, they were, like, paintings and shadow and use of contrast. And there was this notion that cameras would have different looks. And they're like, wait a minute. What if we do Coney Island? And now they're all incredibly bright. Yeah. Across the board, there's, like, no dynamics. So I'm just interested to see if Apple starts to dial us back, because I've heard the criticism.

When the criticism is in both, like, Kyle Chaka writing in The New Yorker and Alex Earle saying her beach videos look gray. The criticism has hit like the full spectrum of American life. Yeah. One, especially for Apple, which has for so long kind of hung its hat on being the one down the middle, right? Where Google and Samsung both got very kind of opinionated about what their photos were going to look like. Apple's whole thing was like realism and beauty and everything was going to be great.

And their idea was like, we're just going to touch it up, but we're not going to change it. And I feel like they've tipped over that line over the last couple of years, particularly with the 15. I think. Yeah. That like, I like the photos less on the iPhone 15 than almost any iPhone before it.

Yeah, I have an upgrade. Becky has a 13. And it used to be that I made sure she had the new one every year because we did, what do we do? We take pictures of our kid. Yeah. So there's like,

we should always just have the best one. And we just stopped at the 13. Like, it is the most restrained of the modern ones, but it's still not that restrained. I'm just curious about this. Like, you can throw hardware specs at this camera. But it's the process.

processing pipeline that is actually more interesting now. And I don't know how they're going to talk about it. I don't know if they're going to diverge on the regular and the pro. I'm just very curious to see where this goes. Can you imagine the pro like good photos? The regular is just like, no, day glow. We don't believe in highlights. We take the highlights crank all the way to the top.

Well, honestly, there's a version of that that I think is completely possible because a bunch of the rumors about the camera are about the camera hardware that Apple is getting increasingly good at doing teeny tiny optical zoom lenses inside of the iPhone stack and that it's able to actually build better optics into the phone. And in theory, if you can do better optics, you can do less processing, which gives Apple more leeway to say we're going to do less and your photos are going to still look good. Whereas if you go down to the base level phones, it's just not going to be as good. And so it is by definition going to have to do more work.

So, like, if Apple's going to have a process zero type thing, I can absolutely imagine it being a pro only. So I have heard almost the exact opposite. Really? I just made that up. It just seems logical. But have you heard actual stuff about this? Yeah. I've just been talking to some folks.

And we have to see how it goes to the new phone. You are correct that Apple's getting better at optics or getting better at doing the thing inside the phone, like building the actual camera hardware. but they're ruthlessly optimizing it to collect as much light as they can. And everything else, they're kind of letting go because they can fix it in the pipeline. So Apple's view of this,

as much like Google's view, is they're not building a camera, they're building a whole integrated imaging pipeline and has some goal. And if you can compensate for everything else except light collection, then you should just ruthlessly prioritize light collection because that's the thing,

it's the most important thing. And then you can fix fringing or distortion or whatever else might happen at your lens level because you have all the light, right? So you can mathematically correct a bunch of errors that you get in the actual hardware, but you can never really mathematically correct for I didn't get enough light. That's fascinating. So you're basically just turning it into like a big data problem. And it's like, okay, the more light we can throw at this problem, the better we can do, which I would not say makes me hopeful for the idea that we are going to get something that looks less processed over time. This is why I was having this

conversations. It was right after we published Sarah's piece about not being ready for AI image like editing everywhere. And you kind of get to this place where the iPhone is already like kind of like doing a lot of sharpening in text and people see the text is weird. If you over zoom on an image, you can see it's like invents faces in weird ways. They're not quite faces. And people are like, what is happening here? And it's like, oh, that's just a bunch of image processing just gone awry. And so I'm just very curious with this phone in particular, Apple is in the, not shipping a bunch of Apple intelligence, but they are right on the cusp of it. So this is kind of the last phone that's going to take pictures, right?

Like straightforward pictures. And then every phone after this is going to be like pictures with Apple intelligence or whatever the next thing is. And I'm just curious to see if they pull it back a little bit so they can go forward in a different direction or if they just stay it with that like, have you seen the sky? Look at the sky. Yeah. I mean, it all does make me think of, like, do you remember that art project we talked about, I don't know, got a year or so ago, that it was, it was the camera, but it didn't have a lens,

but every time you hit the shutter, it would, like, collect your location and mapping data about where you were in all the satellite imagery and then stitch that into a photo. That feels increasingly close to where all of this is going. I would like to remind you, specifically David Pierce, that when I wanted to spend five hours talking about Samsung taking photos of the moon, you were like, bah, and now you have just described the moon situation. No, no, no. When you said you wanted to do that, we all bought tacos and then did it at

southwest by southwest for an hour and a half. Yeah, that's true. All right, I had to pour some tequila and a day. And then we talked about Samsung generating images of the moon instead of taking photos of the moon. Philosophical conundrum, because every photo of the moon is technically exactly the same because the moon doesn't change, right? Again, we could spend five hours talking about the moon.

But really, all that stuff increasingly feels. feels less like a weird thing and more like just where all of this inevitably is going. Yeah. And like I said, I think this camera in particular is just a moment. Like, it is for sure that the next camera will have a bunch of AI stuff built into it. Yeah. This one, they're not shipping a bunch of it yet. So what's it going to be?

What does this destination look like? And is it the final destination? Yeah. Well, and Apple's already starting to do some of the like AI post-processing stuff where you can move things around and remove them for photos. It's, it has a lot of the stuff we've been talking about Google doing. And I think it's, it's going to be really interesting to see, A, how good that stuff is on this camera and, B, how close it is in the pipeline. Because, like, Google and others have been putting it in other apps and making it like a slight sideline feature.

Apple, we will see how quickly this becomes, like, just a normal part of the image-taking process. It's going to be fascinating. Other stuff, we're seeing rumors. again, lots of rumors, that there's going to be colors, like saturated colors, instead of all the pale stuff, particularly in the regular 16. I think the pro will probably still come in some muted colors. Mark Herman thinks there's going to be a gold. Yeah.

People have been wanting a gold iPhone back. Some minor improvements to screens, displays of the rumor, but the big rumor is that everything's going to get a little bit bigger. So 6.3 on the little iPhone and 6.9 on the maxes, which is fascinating. You know, they already do the plus size phones at 6.7. So we'll just see where they land on a bunch of screen sizes. But I think they're trying to differentiate the plus from the max because big phones are just a thing people like.

As much as we complain about them, people love a big phone. But that has to have a maximum, right? People's hands have maximums. Like, we can't all palm a basketball. But some of us can. And they will have a phone, finally. Many people aspire to, apparently. Well, obviously, the next turn is folding.

Right. Yeah. Well, like, that's what, 25, 26, I think, was what they were saying. That's what we keep hearing. Yeah. And that it might be a flip before it's a fold, because that is the correct and good thing. And flip phones are better than fold phones. They're different.

We, there's a pixel line fold in the office. Chris Welch has one. And I was looking at it the other day. I was like, this phone rules. Like, it is a beautiful piece of hardware. Yeah. And I was like, they got the aspect ratio on the front right. And he was just like, yeah, I never unfold.

bit. I was like, well, this is the problem. So what's funny is I was, uh, I was at the doctor the other day and when the guy checking me and found out what I did, we started talking about tech. And he had Motorola's new razor with the big screen on the front and he said exactly the same thing. He was like, this phone's so awesome. I never even open it up. And I was like, what do you have? You just have like an original iPhone basically. Yeah, you just want the binky of having a giant phone. Right. Just like everyone needs, has the binkie of wanting an Android tablet. There's one thing that's deeply reassuring in all technology.

It's the state of Android tablets. That will always work. It absolutely great. That's, I mean, that's the phone. Those are the phone numbers, right? We're expecting slightly bigger screens, action button on the regular 16, camera button on the pro,

you know, some upgrades to Wi-Fi and blah, blah, blah. But really, it's, we're adding buttons to everything. They might change the camera, right? Like, they might change the positions of the cameras. The rumor is that they'll do that to make special video support better. But, like, I think. You don't think that's a reason? I think they just rotate the cameras every couple of years.

Yeah. I think there's just a wheel with three camera lenses on it and they spin it. And I'm like, all right, that's it this year. Like, it looks different now. I mean, there's reasons to orient these cameras in all kinds of ways. But I think they strive to make obvious visual changes more often than we think. because the dumb consumer psychology is if it looks different, you think it's different. Then you open it up and it's iOS and you're like, well, nothing here has really changed.

So we'll see. I do think there are two interesting AI-e upgrades that have been rumored. One is obviously the new chip. We saw the M4 in the iPad and that was like a whole big AI story. The rumor for this one is that it's still going to be A-series chips, but presumably there will be a whole big. like, oh my God, look how fast it is, AI story about this one. Yet again, we're in a place where it's like, when was the last time you needed all of the horsepower of your iPhone?

No one does ever for anything. Who knows? And then the other one- For chat TPT. Yeah, right. Shortcuts does take all of your processing power. That's real. And then the other one is a rumor I was just reading earlier about apparently there's some

indication that there's going to be a much improved microphone. which for me is a person who uses Siri all the time for like reminders and random nonsense and if indeed Siri is going to be like the core of Apple intelligence as a lot of people are expecting and big redesign coming this year like better microphone goes a really long way towards making a lot of that stuff really work which I think would be very cool but like the question then is like is it have you made like a very slightly better microphone or did Apple like solve something here

that I'm going to be very curious to say. They're going to claim they solve something no matter what. For sure. Yeah. But again, if you think the future of input is multimodal AI where the computer, you can talk to a computer, where it can see stuff, these are little upgrades that actually add up to an idea, like a whole idea, which is there are more ways to communicate with this computer about what you want, and it will have more ways to communicate back at you.

But Apple intelligence isn't shipping it. I mean, that's actually the question worth these products, right, is, You're going to announce new iPhones, you're going to announce basically a bunch of iterative upgrades. It's really nice. And then the big software turn that makes them worth buying that Apple, I think, is banking on driving a huge upgrade cycle, isn't going to be here. Right? We're not expecting that into potentially all the way into next September. Like, the rollout of iOS 18 Apple intelligence features is just going to take a long time, particularly the big ticket ones.

What now? Like, what are we going to get today? Like, we're not getting the apps can plug into Siri so you can talk to Siri and have it executed a bunch of actions across your app. Like, that's not, that's probably a year, right? Yeah. So what are we going to get today? Is it summarizing notifications?

Like, I don't think that's going to have. Those are already, seeing people on the beta get the summarized notifications is so funny, because it's so not helpful. Yeah. So many of these things are like, I send somebody a 70-word-long text message, and it's, summarizes it in 58 words. Like, what have we accomplished here? This is nothing. We're not doing, we're not doing anything for anyone. So copy editor is very pleased with that. Yeah, I guess. Like 20 words, that's nice cut. Yeah. And I think with all of this, again, like, we're still very much

in this place of what is any of this for, right? And I think the thing that has been true about Apple forever is it has done a better job of telling the what this is for story than anybody else. And even with the iPhone, it does a very good job of explaining to you why. you need all of the incredible processing power on your phone that you're never going to use. It's why they have the games on stage. It's why they did the AR stuff on there for years. They do a very good job of being like, here is a thing we built and here's why it's going to matter in your life.

And I don't think that quite landed at WWDC. Whatever did land is not shipping yet. And so, like, this is just another crack at that same story for Apple. And both how it has refined that story over the last few months and, whether it has figured anything out to me is like the big question of this event. And I'll add one more thing to it. And the amount of times Apple and other companies have shot themselves in the foot trying to tell that story. Totally. Because, you know, Google got in trouble for the Gemini ad at the Olympics where the dad asked the AI to write a letter on behalf

of a little girl to Olympian. And everyone's like, this is garbage. Like, don't do this. Apple has had a number of ad-related controversies lately. And then one of their demos, for summaries is Apple intelligence summarizing the Steve Jobs think different speech. Oh, yeah, that's right. From the ad, you know, it's like, here's the crazy ones. What? Like, don't summarize that. No.

That's the art, you know, like, even though it's a commercial, like, people regard that the very emotional way and being like, here's what we can do now. We can make that dumber. It's not actually the message you're trying to send. Right. And so I think Apple is looking at all of this and saying, okay, this is the real shot to communicate to customers. WWC is for developers and hardcore nerds

and you're listening to the show and that's you. That's just you. But we love you. We love you. It's us. Right? And that's the first cut where they can be technical and they can talk about token sizes and APIs and all the stuff they talk about WC.

The iPhone event is we're going to put this thing on local news broadcasts around the country to be like, look what it can do. And I don't think they know besides. like read my boss's email and give me the bullet points of it. Erase people. Right. If I had a shortcut, if I set the shortcut button to just be like, no, but nice, I could just motor through my inbox.

That's really good. Right. Like, that would be great. But can they tell that story? Like, I don't know. So I think that's going to be a real question because the features aren't shipping yet. Right. And so you're still kind of concocting these demos about stuff that doesn't exist yet for a phone

that might not be able to do it. it, and that is, I think, a real puzzle. But it also seems like they may potentially plow through a little bit of this, because we're seeing, like, a lot of other devices, rumored, like, more than I usually think of for an Apple event. Right, okay, so that's the phone. So I just want to wrap up on the phone. Like, the phone has a question mark in it, which is, like, how are they going to talk about

AI features aren't there? The rest of them are, except for the AirPods, which I think we're expecting some amount of redesign, the Apple Watch seems like a, no, another. bump, right? But there may be three getting bumped? Yeah, that's the one spot where it seems like if there is going to be something new and exciting, it's going to be in the watch. Like there's been some.

Is there a, you know, Apple Watch Series 10 series X wild thing to happen? I think that's just probably not. But there's been like a little bit of smoke around. Maybe there are some surprises in the Apple Watch line coming this year because it's the anniversary. Well, the big rumor was that they were going to get blood pressure monitoring or sleep apnea detection, and both of those are sound pretty dead in the water for this year. Because they're in a giant lawsuit with a company. Yeah, because they're in a giant lawsuit.

And like blood pressure monitoring, they haven't gotten FDA clearance or anything, right? And they have to. You can't just be like, yeah, we can test your blood pressure. No FDA approval. That's not going to happen. So, yeah, it sounds like they were trying to line a bunch of stuff up. for the Apple Watch 10 and it just sort of... Yeah.

So like I said, it feels like what we're going to get is a very minor bump to the ultra because basic... I mean, look, the Apple Watch has like the best lock-in story of all time. Yes. Yep. If you have an iPhone, you can only buy this product. That's it. There it is.

Unless you're, you know, unless you're one of the people wants to buy a garment, in which case you buy a garment and use it sometimes, but then you might still have an Apple Watch. Like... Good luck. Right? need to competitively upgrade these products is very low. And then the products are really good, which is just a pretty disastrous one-to-punch of wanting to see like huge upgrades.

Yeah, it does seem like we're going to get a bigger, regular, regular watch to be the size of the ultra, which is both cool and sort of alarming. Like, I hate, truly hate, that we are going to normalize these gigantic screens on our wrist. Like, Nilai, I can read your watch through Riverside right now. I can see what's on your watch. That can't possibly, this is not good. How are we doing this? It's just what we decided.

I stare down Tim Cook's watch at every event. What's on there, buddy? I'm at like, make the Apple Watch Ultra Black and I'll buy a new one. Great. That's what I want. Might happen. There's been some rumors about colors. But yeah, there's this rumor that we'll see the Apple Watch Series 10 or the series X,

which is the 10th anniversary. and have like magnetic bands and be thinner and be the design jump. And I strongly think that in a time of sort of like declining sales and up and like upward going services revenue that Apple's desire to do that is quite low. Yeah. Because again, the product has like perfect lock-in. Like what are you going to do? Right.

Like Tim Cook's staring you down me like, all right, you're leaving with an iPhone. Would you like to buy AppleCare a set of AirPods and an Apple Watch? Because you can't buy anything else. Yeah, I doubt it's very popular to first buy a watch and then buy an iPhone, right? So it's not like they're trying to sell some... Who is that person? This is what I mean. They're not, like, the impetus to get people in if you're trying to make the Apple Watch great

is you're like, okay, there are a bunch of people who will switch for an Apple Watch, and I don't think that exists. I think, like, the Apple Watch is not the first thing, right? So I feel like it's either the iPad or the iPhone. There's one tiny category, and I'm only saying this because it's like the third day of elementary school here. Parents are buying Apple Watches for their kids who don't have phones. Fair. That's real.

Tracking devices is texting devices. And then you just, you're in the ecosystem. Then they got you. Yeah, that's something. And that is that, that I think is like the beginning of something potentially big and interesting. But that feels very new. Yeah.

Like I think we're going to see upgrades to the Apple Watch. I just think it's all going to be pretty iterative. That is my bet. There is this rumor that you'll see the big upgrade. We'll see how it goes. The AirPods seem like the bigger change. Yes. Right?

We're expecting new AirPods. AirPods 4. Maybe new AirPods Pro. And it seems like that's where you're going to get the design change. And I think that is partially because they're still up in competition. Like you can get other Bluetooth earbuds. And there are, in fact, lots of really good ones out there. Yeah.

So you can see a little competition. And obviously AirPods haven't changed a long time. But if they change the design, what are all of those like horrible? knockoffs at 7-11 going to do? Immediately change. The good news about that industry is, boy, does it adapt? Yeah. Exactly.

The factory in Shenzhen across from Apple's factory in Shenzhen is on red alert. So AirPods 4 might have noise canceling. There'll be more of an open ear design. They'll sit on your ear instead of like all the way in the way that the pros do. Which would be a big deal, right? The ANC plus the like hang on your ear instead of stick in it, super hard to do. Chris Welch was pointing out in our Slack the other day that lots of companies have tried this and basically no one has ever done it very well.

As somebody who hates the ear blocking of the AirPods Pro, like I just don't, I just don't like them. It feels bad in my ear. They make my ears like hot and pressure. I don't like it. So I use the hangy ones, but then I don't get any of the noise cancellation. So if you can get the best of both worlds there, that's pretty. awesome.

Yeah. But super hard to do, technically. I'm looking, and then the AirPods three, maybe we'll see they'll add some more sensors to complete the health story that Apple's trying to tell of all of this stuff.

Potentially a new case, we'll see. What I don't know is whether they're going to upgrade the AirPods max, which they have not touched in a million years. Yeah, right?

Which will use lightning. Oh, there we go. So they'll just get like a USBC upgrade? Or they can make them not weigh 5,000 pounds. That's the choice. take out some of those weights, those beats weights.

Oh, my, I forgot the beats you've put weights in the headphones. They can make the case good. There are lots of things you could do with the AirPods.

I love the little purse. It's adorable. Here, would you like your headphones to be dirty? They sure will. We've forgotten to put them in a case in this case. We'll see.

I mean, there's a spatial audio story to be told here, but it seems like of all the things that we expect to change that AirPods lineup is the most ripe

for actual change. Yeah. Because it's the thing that you can, one, people lose them. And then when you lose them, you might buy new headphones. And when you buy new headphones, you actually have choices in the market.

Yeah. Well, and again, if Apple is trying to tell this, like, big multimodal AI story, headphones actually end up being really important. Yeah. And my big hope for AirPods Macs has been that, like,

that could be a place where Apple can start to do more, like, local AI processing inside of your headphones. Like, give me the AirPods Macs that can do some of that stuff just inside of the headphones. Like, I want an AirPods Max that has all the software of an Apple Watch in my headphones. Is that a bad idea? Probably.

But that's what I want. I want to just be able to run with headphones and nothing else. And they could do that in the max. Would you tap on the little ear cup and send a heartbeat to your wife? Yeah. I just send my heartbeat to Nelai, like three or four times a day. It's true. It's really weird.

Yeah. Have you ever gotten a weird blacked out video of just thumps? And you're like, oh, David loves me. The other rumor is I sincerely doubt this will happen, but an M4 Mac Mini is on the list of things. Like, that's October. That's October. I think we'll see any Macs in October. That's been the schedule, right?

Yeah. Oh, we shocked. But, you know, if they don't do anything with the phone, it would make sense to do the M4. There's just been a lot of smoke about the Mac Mini, which is weird. So I think, like, we're obviously due for a refresh of MacBooks, right? The M4 is out there. It's time for all of this from, like, the studio on down. But the mini is the only one that anyone is talking about right now, which is maybe just like

a function of the rumor mill in the way that these things work. And an October event is not that far away. So it could very well be. But this one is particularly just sort of out in the ether right now. The minnie's also the one that's getting a major case redesign, right? the other ones aren't getting big case redesign. And that is that if, if you believe it's going to get a big case redesign, it is definitely happening in October.

Yeah. Apple is very good at being like, look at this thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's really likely that we're just seeing a lot of smoke right now because there's a lot of leaks because it's a whole new case, but it's going to happen on October or not. That's my bet. Yeah.

Is that Apple wants all of your attention to be on the iPhone, which makes all the money and the services component of the iPhone, which makes all the money. And that is what you're going to pay attention. to. And then in October, we can talk about whether or not they're going to make an M4 Mac or a 27-inchimack or whatever. I'm just saying that because I desperately want a 27-in-Chimack. Just trying to speak it into the world. That's how I feel about the M-4 Mac Mini. Like, give it to me now, please. The rumor is that it's going to be like closer to the sides of an Apple TV and it's just going to have a bunch of USBC ports. Like, yes. That's yes. That's it. That's all you have to do.

Inject that into my veins right now. Make it under $1,000, please. I feel like I use all the ports in this Mac. mini. Oh, I use all the ports and I have a dongle in my Mac mini. Like it's a Thunderbolt four doc plugged into a Mac mini because I use all the ports of the Mac mini. Yeah. All right. I'm telling you that's October. We'll talk about this again. I think you're right. That is it. I mean, that's the list of things. David, you have some prompts here to which I won't answer both with the same answer. Yeah, this is, well, so we play a version of this game every year, which is basically, uh, just before we get off the Apple stuff, we're going to give ourselves something to be held to. So we,

we each had to come up with a prediction that you think genuinely will happen, Nilai. You have to think it's going to happen that we haven't yet talked about. And then one thing that you're desperately hoping for but have no evidence is real. I'll go first and then just to give you guys time to think about this. My prediction that I think will happen that we haven't talked about is I think we're going to get a Ted Lassow season four trailer. God damn it, that was mine. I don't know what it's going to be.

It might just be Jason Sudecis just like saying for. four words because they haven't shot anything. This is how we do trailers now. It's like it'll be the back of his head. I mean, do you remember the Apple event where like they all just stood on stage and said, we're making a TV show? I made fun of that for a year and then they made all of their shows.

So the rumor is he's not going to be in it very much. He's, he apparently like, what's he doing now? Do you think it's going to be called like dead lasso? The rumor is it's probably it's going to be about a woman's football team. It's really, it's just Ted Lasso in the Severn's,

universe and it's called dead lasso. It's just dead. But yeah, I'm just, I was very excited about Ted Lassow. Yeah. But he's not going to be there. And like any good company, they're like, let's just go back to the well. They just signed all those people in the last few weeks. It feels like this is where they're going to announce it.

Apple is just speed running the TV industry, right? Like they've pissed off George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Congratulations. Now they're bringing back the hits. Like, this is just what you do. Great job them. And then the thing I'm desperately hoping for but have no evidence is real. is I want a cellular connected set of AirPods.

I want a thing. I will switch to Apple music. As God is my witness, I will switch to Apple music if you just let me stream directly to my headphones. That's all I want. Is that a bad idea? Yes, but I want it anyway.

I don't care. Would you like text from it? If you directly to the brain. All right, Nilai, you go. What do you got? My prediction. One thing that I'm hoping that will happen that we haven't talked about.

No one thing you think will happen that we haven't talked about. It has to be real. Right. Yeah, you have to think it's going to happen. Okay. Apple TV home screen upgrade. Oh. Oh.

Okay. That's a good thing. It won't happen. They are due. They won't do. They would have announced it at WWC, but they're way overdue on just scooting that stuff around. Yeah. Can I just say, by the way, I bought an Apple TV because it was on sale.

from Verizon for $90 for some reason, plugged it into my crappy TCL Roku TV, set it so that it just goes straight to that input when I turn on the TV, and now suddenly my TV viewing experience is like 75% better. Boy, is Roku bad now. And boy, did the Apple TV make it better.

I don't think we've talked about this very much in the show, but our own Will Joel, our senior creative director, Willjol, has a Roku TV, and the thing happened to him where it just started motion smoothing. This also happened to be at my sister's house over the 4th of July where her Roku TV just turned on motion smoothing.

So he wrote about it, and he wrote the people in the forums are all mad about this motion smoothing just being turned on on Roku TVs. We have not yet written the follow-up, but they got back to him somewhat irritatively, and they're like, we have not turned on motion-smoving. We've turned on, like, per-frame interpolation, which is motion-smoving. Yep. It's the same thing. Same thing.

It's the same. They're like, we're not motion-smoving. We're going into the spaces between frames. and making up additional frames. And it's like, that's motion smoothing. So he's got to write it up. But Roku has secretly turned on motion smoothing on millions of TVs with no ways turn off. And now they're denying they even did it.

Throw them out. Get olets. They're too busy counting that ad money they get. They don't care. All right. That's my prediction we haven't talked about. On the closest that I think is real. Can I say the one thing that will definitely happen?

Yeah. Apple will definitely not announce a single other carmaker has taken them up on next generation. Okay. I like this. Is this the one that you're hoping for, but have no evidence is real? Someone, please, dear God, do car play. I mean, I will say the decoder inbox right now is full of carmakers. We're like, let us justify what we're not doing this anymore. Wait, who would you like it to be if you could, if you could be CEO for a day and make somebody adopt the new car play for either good or chaos reasons, which car maker would you want it to be? It would be Honda or Toyota, in my opinion, who have some of the ugliest in the,

car interface designs. Of all the mainstream cars, it's like, just tell your designers that lowercase letters exist. They refuse. Like, why? We're just doing all cap software, everybody, all the time. Just lowercase. That's the level we're working at with Honda and Toyota. I like it.

All right, friends, what do you got? All right. So my prediction that I think will happen was also a Ted Lassow. So we cover it. Well, now you have to come up for the new one. Yeah. I wrote it down. I want to be very clear.

I didn't make it. up. Do you think Jason Sudeikas will be there? That's the real question. No, I don't think he will be. I think if they have anyone, it will be Hannah Wottingham because, like, she has never turned down a press tour. If somebody's like, hey, you want to show up, she's like, I'm here for you.

Maybe she'll be the musical act at the end. We should get Hannah Watt. Can we get her to come over chest? Yeah, I bet she would. She seems like good people. Yeah, she seems fun. We'll make it happen. Liam, let's get that done.

Chop, chop. All right. And one thing you're hoping for would have no evidence is real. Rayban meta glasses, but Apple. Just because I really like the Rayban meta glasses, but the meta AI sucks. I want to talk to Siri. She's also suck.

Excuse me. Siri also sucks and is not gendered. But it sucks in a more familiar way. Well, it sucks in a way that actually accesses other apps on my phone. Yeah. Whereas meta sucks like in its, on it all by itself. It just sucks over here. Bet it's like, I can play your Spotify.

That's it. I'm like, well, stop. I didn't do my no evidence for, which is the only thing I, every, I predict this at every Apple event I have for a decade, just make a TV. Just make a TV. What are you doing, guys? You love services businesses. Do you know what every TV maker is doing right now?

They're just doing services. They're giving them away for free. You could charge real money. Tim, you'd be like, I don't know, this TV costs $3,000 and people would buy it and still pay for your weird new cable bundle that you're making, but not saying it that you're making. Yeah, but they got to spend all their money on the weird cable bundle. They can't afford the TVs. Apple releases an iPad at studio display size. Is that a television? What is it? I mean, every TV is just an Android tablet. Okay, but like, I feel like if the tablet is larger than the child holding it,

it goes into TV territory. That's pretty dependent on the size of the child. Yeah, but like most... So wait, you're saying as my child gets older, at some point it stops seeing a TV? It's the tablet diagonal. Like size of a child versus size of tablet. Exactly.

And age is like the Z axis. Okay. In four-dimensional space, this is a TV is what you're trying to say. Exactly. I'm just saying, make a TV. It is almost comical that the way. one category that they could thoroughly dominate, they are just like, eh, health care. Well, and what's funny is for all the reasons it actually never made sense, given the company

that Apple is to make a TV, it actually now kind of does. Right. You're going to sell a giant computer that hangs in the wall and that people pay money every month to use. Yeah. Just do the thing. Please, I beg of you. Gene Munster needs this. Panasonic is making TVs again. Somebody who just owns the brand name is making those TVs. I'm just saying it's like, whatever, we'll do it. Do you remember us?

I had a Panasonic. It was great. Okay. We should take a break. We'll be back. We got an incredible gadget lighting around coming up. Stay tuned. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, we're back. We're already over. We've had a lot of people asking lately how long the show is supposed to be, and the answer is we're never going to tell you. That's the joke. Yeah.

You will notice the show is almost very consistently the same length. But we're always over in our minds. We are always over. It's never as long as it's supposed to be. The other thing that is true is I make the show longer with this fan thing about how long the show is going to be. When we make it shorter, everyone yells at us. But then when we ask people for feedback on the show, they tell us to make it shorter. So we're just trapped in like a paradox loop of feedback where the show can only ever be this long, but it's never long enough and it's also too long.

Yep. The other thing people need to understand is you're just doing this all the time. Like, Nilai is just sitting in front of a microphone talking about things all the time. We just occasionally record it and then ship it. So it can be as long as we want. Yeah. But it's also just always. Imagine what our meetings are like.

Let's drop in on Eli Vergecasting the no one. All right. It's EFA, which is a German word for gadget show. Sure. We got a team there. There's a million gadgets being announced. I think we should do this. is a lightning round.

We should just go through them all except the first one. There's no chance we're going to get through this in lightning round fashion because it is the remarkable paper pro which Alex's headline is

is as outrageous as it is luxurious. Alex, what is going on here? Okay. So they took the gallery e-ink display and then they... Everybody remembers the gallery.

Everybody knows this. Classic gallery. Duff. People on the street all day talking about the gallery. The mosque earlier and was like, oh, the gallery.

what's up with gallery? Yeah. Like when I go to the grocery store people are like, do you think gallery is coming this year? And I can say, yes, it finally came. So there's two types, there's two ways

to do color on e-ink. One is you push the black and white ink pixels and the e-ink against a color filter. That's how Colido works. That's how like anything from books or Kobo and probably if Amazon ever does it, that's what they'll use

is collido because it works really, really fast. Then there's gallery, which looks way, way better. The color is very, Ray-Way cooler because they get rid of the filter and all the pixels being moved are actual color pixels of cyan, yellow, and magenta. And that's what they did here. And usually you don't want to do that because it's slow and sucks. But it's fast.

They made it fast. When I asked, they were like, we can't tell you. That's like the magic sauce here is they figured out how to refresh it quickly. Yeah, yeah. The display has cocaine in it. They call it the canvas tech stack. And I don't know, I'm not entirely, like I have some theories of what they've done. I've been playing with it a lot.

I'm going to keep playing with it. But it just, it works. But there's like a really obnoxious flashing problem with anything that you write in color. Anytime you write in color, it like has to refresh the entire display. As soon as you stop writing, that sucks. Don't love that. Yeah. But then for just regular writing, it works perfectly.

But it looks great. I mean, like, you've just been like holding it up into the camera as we've been talking. and like the screen looks awesome. Let me, I'm going to pull up another photo because I just keep doing that. Poor Liam was at the office the other day. And I was like, Liam, look. And he's like, please just stop showing me color pictures from like, like, that just

looks like real nice art. Yeah, it's nice. It's just real pretty. Yeah, it's one of those, don't buy it. Please, please don't buy this. This is not for normal people, but this is such like the fact that they pulled it off is really cool. Yeah.

So to your don't buy it point Like It's like I'm gonna buy it I do I I want it more than I am proud of So the thing remarkable has done really well Is like relentlessly focus on of doing a very small thing really really well right? Like the remarkable tablet all the way back to the first one is like a Thoroughly mediocre reading experience and just like deeply lovely lovely to write on

The the keyboard case I have only used a little you've used it a lot more is wonderful by all accounts. So it's like as a note-taking machine, this thing is really expensive. It's what, $579? Yeah, it starts at $579 without the case. Like the typing case is like $2.29? Yeah, so you're looking at like a $900.

Don't do that. But also do it. Yeah, but that's the thing. And I'm like, it, I just, I, even if you don't buy it, I appreciate that remarkable is just like, we are going to make digital handwriting, note-taking awesome and have like done it.

Like, kudos to you, remarkable. Yeah. Did the damn thing. Great job. I have the remarkable two here, and I love it. I never write by hand because my handwriting is awful. And I find myself using this thing just because it's really nice to write on. Well, and it's actually pretty, I also have awful handwriting because as a child,

I wanted to be a doctor, and I thought you had to have bad handwriting. But it actually does a really good job of taking that and putting it into text if you do to do it. Like, it sucks a little bit, but not like awful. And it's just like, it does the one thing. thing really, really, really well. And it does it, it executes it so wonderfully and takes this technology that I never thought I would see being used this way and doing it remarkably. Very well. Very good. We're going to move on now. Yeah. It's great. I did, I did the dad joke, so. That's good. Well, you're going to review it, I assume. Yeah, yeah. I did like kind of a mini review of

it. I've only spent about six, six or seven days with it at this point. I want to spend more time with it. But it's a remarkable tablet. If you've used another one, it'll be the exact same thing, only now it's color. Okay. Honor announced a super thin foldable, IFA. It's very cool. And it, we're seeing, and I'll put it right next to Huawei announced a trifold phone. I forgot that the thing IFA does. Like, when IFA is at its best, ifa is the time where they're like, oh, you silly Americans, you don't get to have the good gadgets. Yeah. Yeah. And it always makes me sad. Right. It's like you have locked down cell networks that prevent you from having the cool funds.

You know, I think I said earlier that the pixel line fold is great. It's like the end of that road. I think the same with the newest Samsung folds. Like they're done. We figured out how to do that thing. They look as good as they're going to look. The hardware is great. The form factors are getting there.

And now they're like, what if you folded it twice? Like, what if you made them thinner? Like, we're just adding these refinements now to the form factor. I'm not sure that the form factors were the revolution in the phone industry. everyone was hoping they would be. But I think the trifold is really interesting, right? Like, what if you can get to a landscape tablet in this form factor is like kind of wild? Especially if you can make it thinner, you can fold it yet one more time.

They didn't actually show it, right? Like, they showed glimpses of it while Andy Lau is just thinking about how much he loves movies. Yeah, I think the official reveal of it is, I think, the day after the iPhone event. So we'll have that to talk about next week also. But yeah, there's a video. that we'll put it in the show notes. You should look at it. It's just you get a brief look at it closed

and then a brief look at it open. And it's like very thin and very cool and very futuristic. I have lots of questions. Yep. What about creases? What if instead of one crease, you had two creases?

Wouldn't that be so fun? Probably not. The Vigel line definitely saw as a crease. TCL, we love an e-paper phone, apparently. It's not e-ink. Here in the Gooks Poma fan club. Welcome. All right, friends.

This is just your segment. I know. I'm so happy. kind of wacky, inefficient display technology do we have here? They're not the only ones doing this. Like a whole bunch of people at EFA this year are like, we're doing color E ink. And you're like, are you? And they're like, we're doing electronic paper.

And you're like, okay, is that just an LCD and you took the light out? And they're like, yes. That's what it is. Yeah, with Next Paper. Next Paper always loves to call it that. All they're doing is putting a matte finish on the display. That's about it. In this case, there's a button.

and the button will turn everything monochrome and make it look more like a books palma. Wait, but Alex, you forgot the best part. What is the button, what is the mode the button engages? It's like maximum e-ink, right? It's maximum ink mode. Max-ink mode. Max-ink mode.

Don't give me regular amounts of ink. Give me max ink. But then there's no ink at all. It's fine. I'm fine with it. But yeah, TCL's been doing this next paper thing for five years now, and it's, it's, it's not fancy. This is their moment.

The Bookes Palmer finally kicked the door down, and now the next cycle is everyone's going to have a max incommode phone. But you are, you are seeing, like, I heard it when I spoke with the folks at Remarkable. We're seeing it in a lot of the announcements out of EFA. This idea of drawing our attention away from the screen and doing a dumber screen, a simpler screen, is really starting to take off. Yeah, it's ever. And it's funny because the iPhone is like, what if your screen was alive?

Yeah. It's trying to bang you. And then everyone else is like, what if it looked more like paper? And I'm not sure how that – those are two very different directions. Yeah, I don't think they're ever going to meet up. I think what's going to happen is a bunch of old people are going to get e-ink stuff, and a bunch of young people are going to get the phones that bang you. I got real ages there.

I don't know where I am on that spectrum yet. I would say my instinct is that recent history is that it's actually the old. have we have relationships with technology, but we'll see where that goes. This is true. All right, one last gadget in this section, then we should talk about the wave of lunar and lake laptops that just hit. This is my favorite one of Olavifa. It is, DGI has a new selfie drone.

It's a $190. It's called the Neo. You can launch it from the paw in your hand. 4K30. It can do pre-programmed stuff. Thomas Rikers a video of it, hitting a tree and staying alive and completing its little pre-programmed, do a circle around me, fly path. All that's whatever.

Great. I mean, I'm a sucker for these. I will probably buy one. But it has voice controls. And the voice, the act, the, the, the wake word for the voice controls is, hey, fly. That's what my brother said to a hamster one time before you through. I just love the idea. And it's really small.

So like, there's a photo Tom is putting it in his pocket. And the idea that you're going to pull out a drone from your pocket, hold it out and be like, hey, fly. And it's going to take off and do a 360 around you. This is all I've ever wanted from technology. I don't know if it's going to work. You know, we got to see it. Yeah.

But I love that that's the wake word they chose. It's very good. And I appreciate, like, Thomas wrote it as if it is, it's two separate sentences. It's like you're, you point at it and you go, hey, fly. Like, you're just, you were demanding that it fly. And I love that. Very confusing. Of course, it's D.J.

So it's a drone itself is $1.99, but then you got to buy the battery thing and the handheld controller and you're going to end up sending a lot of money. And this happens to me every two years on the dot. And then I use the thing twice and put it away. But that's like, it's so funny to me that this thing and the new GoPro launched in the same week because I have the exact same opinion about both of them, which is that no one cares. There's this like small group of people. They have already hit whatever product market fit they are ever going to find. And we had this idea that action cameras were going to be a mainstream thing. And then we had this idea that drones are going to be a mainstream thing. And they just aren't. And that's okay. And I think this one

will be fun because it's $200 and it seems to be very easy and very resilient. So like if there's ever going to be a new group of people who buys these, this is the one. I just want to, I want to push back just ever so gently in this. Because I broadly agree with you. I watch a lot of car videos on YouTube and the presence of action cameras and drones that you can destroy has made car videos on YouTube infinitely better. So I would just like to say, I think they should keep going. Oh, I think they should keep going also. But I think this idea that like, I mean, this, this thing that DJ I just shipped is is the Snapixie. Like it just is that, but it works with not Snapchat and thus will be more successful. But like, there's this idea that, oh, if we just make a little flying selfie camera

easy to use, everybody will want it. Just not true. Yeah. Especially, just like imagine, I don't Lollapalooza with 15,000 people at the chapel run show being like, Hey, Fly. At once. You just get a boom as all those little engines take off. No. I hope it does. And I hope so I hope they pay some artists to write a song called Hey Fly with for the drone. It's my dream.

All right. Lunar Lake. So just to color in Lunar Lake a little bit, this is Intel's newest laptop chip. They need to compete with windows going on arm and the new Qualcomm chip. the AIPC that Qualcomm is doing. There's a lot of color about Intel, which is having its struggles lately. The most important thing to know is that I think Lunar Lake is being made by TSM. Like Intel isn't making their own chip, which is a big deal.

Like just a huge monumental deal, but like here's the next wave of these laptops. They have big promises about battery life and performance, obviously performance per watt. But the reason is because someone is making chips on the most advanced process node. process node. So just a weird, these are like historical computers because they're the ones that might signal like the end of Intel as we know it. Yeah. Weird. And then I just need to point out the Lenovo auto twist AI PC is motorized two and one. Yeah, wait, I still, I'm looking at a picture of this thing and I still don't understand how it works. I think Lenovo was like, well, we've already put one gimmick in here with AI. What about a second gimmick? Linova just like,

likes to see what they can do. Lenovo loves a gimmick sometimes, especially for a big show. Oh, wait. So this is basically like Apple's center stage thing where the camera will follow you, but it's for the whole screen. The whole screen just like spins around on the base looking at you with a, with the power of a. Oh, man. Okay, now what needs to happen is Razor needs to make a circular treadmill desk that you just walk around all day while your screen slowly follows you in circles.

And then everyone If the treadmill also charges the screen Now we're talking Yeah, hell yeah So our folks spent time with it And I just want to read this sentence The concept unit responded to voice commands Within a second or two

But the motors are slow Taking about 10 seconds to transform If you watch the video is just like It's so slow You're like sure Thanks Lenovo All right And then Acer had a couple as well right

Alex what's going on piece They have one that's called Project dual play. And Acer, I love because I always forget that they're like, they make okay laptops. They make really wild gaming laptops. And this one has just got like a controller in it. No, sure. Like you do. It's not even, Alex, you're not even doing it justice. Imagine if the track pad underneath your keyboard on your laptop just popped out and became a game controller. Yes. That rules, dude. Like, no notes on that idea. I love it so much. Where do the joystick's go. What do you do with the buttons when it's knocked? I have a lot of questions.

There are no pictures of this thing with the controller docked is the mouse. I don't understand. Also, what happens if you need to use a mouse while gaming? You don't. You just keep going. I guess the middle of the controller is still a track pad. Yeah, but again, amazing. I love it. Yeah. It's, it's my favorite thing that's happened. I kept thinking you had to display in it. A button at the top of the keyboard releases a controller and causes two five-watt speakers to pop out from the sides of the laptop. Oh, I thought there's no PC card slots. They're little, they look like little handles that you would grab.

This is great. I would buy this tomorrow. But this thing has to be so thick. Oh, yeah. That's not the point. I know. The point is that when you take out the game controller built into the keyboard deck, two little speakers pop out and RGB lights light up.

I hope they go when they do it. I want to see the person playing this at Starbucks. Yeah. Leaving their whole tower behind. They're ringing this thing. They're playing Fortnite with their friend. Okay. And then here, I just want to end with talking about Intel and Qualcomm one more time.

Acer announced a bunch of 14-inch laptops. Some have Lunar Lake, some have the new Snapchat and X, some have the AMD Risen AI300, which is quite a name. It claims all of them have 24 hours of battery life. That's not surprising. Do you believe this? No. Big battery life has been like one of the ongoing claims at EFA. Like Dell has said its battery life is getting better with all the.

these things. Like, if this is true, it's awesome, right? Like, if we're going to get to the point where all of these things do these like table stakes things very well, but then Intel Qualcomm and AMD get to compete and sort of do the different things that each of them does well, that's amazing. I have absolutely zero reason to believe that that is actually the case. I also want to point out that these claims are fundamentally unmeasurable. So for the Intel Swift AI laptop, it's the quote is 29 hours of video playback, 23 hours of web browsing. The AMD is 19 hours of web browsing, 27 hours of video playback. And the Qualcomm one is 19 and a half hours of web browsing and 28 hours of video playback. I'm just pointing out, this requires someone to watch videos for over a

full day on three different computers and or browse the web for nearly a full day. And I don't, I'm very motivated to test these claims. Well, also, I think probably... I don't know if I can do it without breaking the labor law of the United States. in some kind of clockwork orange situation. No, you use a GoPro. I used to have to do these tests, and we would just point a GoPro at it, and then the next morning come in and be like, okay, let's see if it recorded it. And sometimes it didn't.

You're like, okay, I guess I test it again. This will be fun. Let's charge fast. This is the market for gopros, David. Yeah, that's the market. You scream, hey, fly. They just stares at a computer. A laptop doing a video playback test.

I don't even know 24 hours of video playback is a useful stat for anyone in the world. I think it was once, and I think there was a lot of reviewing reviewers who were using video playback as like the primary way to do battery testing for a very long time. And so like, but also 24 hours isn't a lot nowadays. Like given the size of these batteries, yeah, these things should be able to like do this. It should be relatively easy for them to do this if they put a big enough battery in the laptop. No, I certainly understand why in the beginning when video playback was like, part of the time. particularly chip-bound. It was hard to do, so it was like

a very heavy task. All video playback now on these computers is being routed to an ultra-efficient, specialized part of a chip that is doing it for almost no power. Well, the only reason they're useful is because they're apples to apples, right? Like, this is a thing we've dealt with for forever.

For like, as long as the verge has existed, how do we benchmark battery life in a way that is both real and actually like, objective apples to apples? It's impossible. You can't do it. There's just no way. So you have to do the thing where I ran this test that doesn't mean anything but is at least

one to one and then I just use it like a person and try to report battery life. There is a thing that does both. If you have ever angrily commented in one of our laptop reviews about why we continue to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it is exactly for this reason. Totally. It's just we just picked a game

and that's the game. It works on everything. Monica picked. Quite honestly, Monica shouldn't pick that game and now we're going to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider a couple times a year for the rest of our lives. It had some challenging, like, graphic stuff. There was, like, the tress locks,

the hair. Yeah. I buy it all. I'm just saying, like, these numbers, what they're meant to say is we are now competitive with Apple. But I think it is astonishing that Acer is basically saying

it doesn't matter what ship you use. Within a few percent, we're getting the same battery life from not only two different Intel, like x86 chips, but also the arm chip. And the armed chip is worse on the web browsing test. Weird. You see, I just don't think it is. It's actually worse than Intel on both tests. It's an hour worse than the video playback test as well, which is not what you would expect. I don't think that is weird because I think all of these, they've all been kind of coming to the same conclusions

on how to design these chips. They've all been designing the chips very similarly the last few years. they're putting these all in very similar devices. Like, it kind of makes sense that some would be a little better, some would be a little worse. Maybe somebody, like, just got hit with too many ads on the AMD one, in the Qualcomm one versus the Intel one for web browsing, and that's why the battery life is higher for Intel. But, like, it's not super surprising. I think it is cool, I do think it's cool that they're claiming 24 hours,

because, like, a couple of years ago, they'd be like, we got six. Yeah. And that's cool. Like four times more battery life in four or five years. That's awesome. But hard to test. I'm just saying, I think these laptops are a real make-or-break moment for Intel.

But if they've actually managed to compete with Arm, compete with Snapdragon, that's a big deal. But it means that they are going to be dependent on TSMC. If they haven't managed, I don't know what happens next. Well, they're trying to not be dependent on TSMC, right? They said, we have to do this because we just aren't there yet, but we're going to go build all these new fabs, and we're going to get there. So this is supposed to be like their placeholder. Right.

Can Intel build the fabs and hit the process nodes? Yeah, we'll see. Dicey. We'll see. But so these are important laptops. We're going to have lots of reviews where Tom is going to write lots of notepad columns about what's going on with Windows and Intel. Because the industry is going to turn around these laptops and not a particular way.

All right, we've got to take a break. We're going to come back. with a true lightning round on sponsor. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns.

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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 assessed 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 begin. We're back for the lightning round. I'm going to start with the first one, which I think is very funny.

As you know, we track connectivity here very closely at the first shopcom. Verizon once decided that Fios was not its future, sold off a bunch of Fios assets and customers, embed everything on a little technology we like to call 5G, which you will recall was supposed to enable everything from robot surgery, which never happened, to self-driving cars, which only happened in two cities with no 5G involved. You just name it. You just name it. Remember 5G?

By the way, the camera button on the iPhone 16 Pro, it's supposed to be where the millimeter wave antenna is right now. Perfect. I don't know where the millimeter wave is going to go or if it's even going to still be there. But do you remember all this? Sure do. Yeah.

Turns out 5G accomplished nothing. And now Verizon is going to spend $20 billion to buy Frontier, which it sold a bunch of Fios assets to. Hans Vesberg, the CEO of Verizon, says, the acquisition of Frontier is a strategic fit. It will build on Verizon's two decades of leadership at the forefront of fiber, and it's an opportunity to become competitive in more markets in the United States. The two decades of leadership were building the network.

It sold the frontier and is now buying again. Yeah. So Verizon was like, what if really fast wired internet was not important? And then realized a decade later that very fast wired internet is actually like pretty important. Indeed, they are an investor at our parent company, Box Media. I am often accused of being hopelessly biased in favor of wired connections. It comes up on the show a lot that I think wired connections are good and reliable. Headphones, for example, as Alex painfully brought up earlier.

I think two of the official stances of the Vergecast are more buttons are better and plug it in. Yeah, wired connections are better than wireless ones. When I covered Starlink, I was accused of being in the pocket of Bing Codcast. because I pointed out that wired Ethernet is more liable than sending Internet to space, which seems obvious on space. Big Comcast, gotcha. Yeah, right. So basically Verizon was all in on its own 5G bet, high in its own supply.

They thought this was going to do whatever it was going to do. And they started selling off these assets because they thought they weren't durable. And the reality is over and over and over again that in particular, wired Internet connections are what people want. like if you give people the choice between some weirdo wireless line of sight IR tin can internet connection or like fiber to their house they will always pick the fiber and so it's just been more durable over time

and it doesn't I don't think that actually is a knock on 5G like I know we're going to get emails because we always get emails people a lot of people have like 5G home internet connections now because they have no access to the other thing and the 5G home internet connection is an upgrade It's the same thing with Starlink. If your options are nothing in Starlink, Starlink, Starlink, starlink, or 5G home internet, or fiber, a lot of people pick the fiber, and the fiber is really useful.

So it's just like Verizon just got high, and it's unsupply, and it's spending $20,000 in a circle. You know what's nuts? This is a total tangent that we shouldn't go down, but just a thing I realized as you were explaining that is like, you just described what's happening to the whole tech industry and AI right now. Everybody's like, what if we threw away everything we were good at because AI is going to change everything about everything forever. And it's like, you want to know, you want to know what happens when it doesn't is this. You spend $20 billion to undo your own weird ideas.

They sold these customers to Frontier in 2015 for $10.5 billion, and it's rebuying them for $20 billion. Frontier made out like a bandit. I mean, didn't it go bankrupt in the interim there? And then have to do a whole restructuring. Who among us hasn't gone bankrupt at one point or another? Especially if you're a cable company CEO, this is a, just like what you do.

Yeah. This is, you're sending the bankruptcy forms from your yacht. You know, you're fine. All right,

David, what's yours? I just want to talk briefly about Snapchat. So Alex Heath was on the show with me two weeks ago, I think. And one of the things he said

was basically like Snapchat is both more popular than ever and also maybe in more trouble as a business than ever. And I think there is no better way to look at that than a note Evan Spiegel posted on the company website that we reported on, that one of the things it's going to do is

start putting ads in your chat lists, which to me is one of the things that has been like untouchable in a messaging app forever. Like ads in the messages and ads between the threads in my inbox have been two things that companies are very afraid of doing. Like Google does it in your Gmail a little and everybody hits it and it sucks. But like Snap is about to start putting ads in your chats, like, with your friends. And basically, Evan Spiegel's reason for doing it was, like, our business is bad and investors are mad at us about it. And it's just the whole thing just, like, reeks of desperation from Snapchat.

And I just, I think that is fascinating. Like, this company is absolutely ubiquitous among, like, a certain generation of internet users. It is everywhere among, like, my high school age nephews. Like, Snapchat. is how you live your life at that age right now. And yet this company just cannot figure out how to make any money. And it's just a really, really strange.

And they can't do the one thing that they should do, which is charge a fee. Right. Because my nephews are 17 and they're not going to do that. And Evan Spiegel's quote is, the growth of our digital advertising business is one of the most important inputs to our long-term revenue potential and investors are concerned that we aren't growing faster. Like, if you're a, if you're a CEO of a big tech company, writing like a here's why we're doing a product thing that's not what you say and when you've

gotten to the point where that's what you have to say that like you are deep down the road of like yeah what choice do i have like that that is where snap is put snap on the go 90 scale the go 90 sale of doom streaming services i understand is not about snapchat but we're very close 75 i think i I think Snapchat as its own public company is at a 75. And I think if we were in a different world of antitrust regulation and big tech questions, Snap probably would have been bought by somebody at this point. Oh, yeah. Google would have bought and killed Snapchat by now within a heartbeat.

Yeah. So I think 75 might be a little high, but only because of like bigger macro reasons. I'm going to say 65. I think it's so sticky. It is so sticky. You cannot overstate how much people love Snapchat. But it's only sticky for the people who actually use it and not enough people use it. It's not growing.

No, but like tons of people use it. Again, it is more popular than ever. It's huge. It just can't make any money. Like this is this to me is the fun. But it's not that huge, is it? Like, how many people are using it? I think it's like 800 million.

Like, it's huge. Oh, that is. It is sufficiently large. It's just that teens sending each other. silly selfies is not a monetizable business. Is that what they're sending each other? And so what they're going to do is they're going to ruin it. It all comes back to this idea, doesn't it?

Yeah. The question now is basically for Snap is going to be, how bad can we make this before you leave? And that's like, that's a sad place for a company to have to get to, and it really feels like that's where Snap has gotten. Yeah. I will say if they don't light up some kind of actual subscription,

it, they will be past 65 or 75 very quickly. I think they have to charge money. You know, Snapchat plus is like, it's a thing. Sure. But there's never really been any energy behind that. Yeah. Ugh. That's sad.

All right, Kranz, what you got? Bringing on the sadness was Concord. Concord, you may have heard about in the last eight years because it was going to be a new live service game from Sony. And they spent over eight years making it. And then it came out. And they've already pulled it within a month of it coming out. because just nobody was playing it.

It hit at the wrong time. It didn't have any of the cool features. Like when it started, I don't think Fortnite and Pub Underground were even really a thing for most people. And that's all happened since then. So it came out at the wrong time. It's been, it had a disastrous launch.

And it's been poor bad. It's just boring. What was the problem? Okay. It was just boring. Yeah. And it was just like there's been such a glut of these free-to-play live

services video games. Everybody thought that this was going to be how they were going to make all of their money. And over time, it's been like, oh, wait, no, a few of them will do it. And some will carve out their little fiefdoms. Some will be Fortnite, which, you know, everyone under the age of 14 plays. And otherwise, it's like, there's not a lot of room for this because there's a finite number of people who want to play video games. And then that group gets smaller and smaller, the more specific the games are. and then you need a lot of people to play it in order to make it interesting and then this happens.

But I also feel like, if I rewind a few years ago, the big idea in the industry was like, okay, live service games are the thing. And what's going to happen is the same thing that happens in the gaming industry, right? There's going to be a big one, and then there's going to be a next big one, and then there's going to be a next big one,

and there's going to be a next big one. And it turns out, like, no, it's just going to be Fortnite and League of Legends the whole time. And Minecraft is going to keep being huge and Roblox is going to keep me. Like, it's, it's just been the same handful of giants for so long now. And I, like, it is, it is astounding to me how big those games still are and how much saying power they've had.

And it just feels like all these companies made the right, they like bet on the right industry and were just completely wrong about how it was going to go. Yeah. Yeah. In this case, they were just way too late. Like Concord eight years in development for a live service video game is just, that's way too long. And also, isn't the lesson from PubG just ship your shitty game and it'll be

fine? Yeah, ship it and go. Sort of. Ship your game with an innovative new business model and a dynamic new gameplay mechanic before anyone else. And then you'll be fine. Yeah. Sure. And in Concord. Eight years doing this to

not be as good as Fortnite is a different lesson. But it sounds like this may be like teaching this may be that one of those learning moments for the video game industry. They may be going, oh, wait, we don't need to do this. But I mean, EA still exists so presumably we will get a ton more of these. If someone who just bought the new Madden,

which is so hard. Yeah. I will say that no one's learning anything. I will say Sony, by the time you're listening to this, Astrobot will be out for the PS5, and that game, by all accounts, looks to be the game of the year. People are obsessed with this game.

They love it. Yeah, I bought the control. I've been playing Astros Playroom with Max. Oh, nice. So we bought the controller, she's obsessed, and I'm very excited by this game. And it's like a totally different lesson. Like, what if you made a jewel-like platformer

with a lovable character that had innovative gameplay mechanics. The Nintendo. Yeah, then it's a, what if we made Mario again? And I understand saying

make Mario again is like, fine. Nobody ever thought of that. That's weird. You thought of making Jurassic Park again exactly the way it was when I was eight. That's going to save the movie industry.

But it's funny that Sony is doing both things at the same time. Yeah. And one of them is going to be a way bigger hit than the other. Yeah.

All right, here's my last one. I just want to call this out. We are deeply committed to covering the Fedover. and all things open social web. And this one is very small, but I think it has glimmers of a big idea.

It's called Sub.com. It's from the company that makes a mammoth, the Massone client. It's paid social feeds. So one of the things I think about all the time is people subscribe to a platform or 44 media

or all of our friends who have substacks or ghosts or whatever. And the way that that dynamic usually works is the social media is the marketing to get you to subscribe to a newsletter. But the social media is often the content. Like, it's the thing. And no one has figured out how to, like, monetize a feed at all.

And, you know, you, like, paid Twitter posts, like, never took off. Like, there was that button there. And there's some of this, on some of the platforms, there's some kind of premium subscription stuff. But none of it happens at scale. And certainly none of it supports anybody at scale. I think the idea of the open social internet, interconnected, federated networks, having this built into them from the beginning is super powerful. And the idea that you subscribe to some creator, and as part of it, you get authenticated

into one of their feeds that you can subscribe to anywhere as opposed to just on Twitter or just on YouTube or just Instagram. That's a big deal. I don't know if this one's going to go anywhere. I'm just excited to see the ecosystem is starting to generate these new ideas about what could you do if all of these networks actually work together. And one of those ideas is like, what if you could pay creators directly? And what you've got is also their social media and not just links to this.

stuff that you pay for somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah. This ecosystem is like finally starting to productize in really exciting ways. And like the other thing that launched this week was, uh, reader, the RSS reader app, R-E-D-E-D-R. The guy who made it, it's like the best RSS app that exists, uh, made a new one that is all just following feeds.

So you can like, instead of it being an RSS feed from a website, you can now follow. Like you can get a YouTube subscription in there and you can get Mastodon feeds in there. And it's, it's, it's a, another one where like you put a bunch of feeds in that are all these different things and it's just renders in this one multimedia timeline. And it's one of those things that like turns your brain on to like, oh, I get it now. And like what you're talking about is the idea of like, what if, what if I could pay for just your stuff, right? And it's like you can put a podcast into an activity pub feed. You can put a video into an activity pub feed. Like all this stuff I just, I subscribe to

the things that you make. And then I get to consume them and you get to make them and everybody wins. It's like that's the stuff, man. Yeah. That's the thing that gets me really excited. And I know that people are going to point out, you can do some of this on Patreon. You can do some of this over here. And like the thing is all of those are closed networks. Like you as a creator have to give all of your business to YouTube or all of it to Patreon. Or you have to manage lots and lots and lots of different platforms. And the idea here is that all these platforms will support these core interoperable models.

All that has to happen. None of that's happened yet. But I just, we're committed to over covering it because these glimmers of what if it was different are starting to become real. Yeah. Like, you can just see them across the ecosystem. Like, oh, this is where investment is that isn't, we're going to spend a trillion dollars stealing everything on the internet to train.

Oh, yeah. Like, this is much more like, what if it was sustainable to make things for other people on the internet, which is just not, there hasn't been this kind of very sincere engagement in that for a while. Okay. Yeah. That's it. We're miles over.

Six hour of our chest. It was real. We got to go. We got to get on planes. We're at the Apple event next week. We got stuff to write about. Ifa's going to keep happening. You can read coverage of the matter spec.

It feels like every time Jen goes to a trade conference and a different matter executive shows up and promises her it's going to be better. That's on the website. There's more gadgets on the website because Ifa is ongoing, check it all out. But we got to go. That's it.

That's the Virgcast. Bye. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.