The Vergecast - Widgets are back, and everything else from WWDC

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss all the updates to Apple's iOS, macOS, watchOS, and iPadOS announced at WWDC this week. Later, Verge senior correspondent Liz Lopatto joins the show to explain the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suing crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase, and what it means for the future of crypto. Further reading: Apple WWDC 10 biggest announcements: Vision Pro, MacBook Air, iOS 17, and more watchOS 10 is bringing back widgets in a big way Apple’s iPadOS 17 adds personalized lock screen and interactive widgets Apple’s Siri will soon handle multiple smart home commands Apple’s iPadOS 17 adds personalized lock screen and interactive widgets Apple announces iOS 17 with StandBy charging mode and better autocorrect  Standby is a new iOS 17 feature for your iPhone that could be great for Apple Home users Online age verification is coming, and privacy is on the chopping block Hands-on with the new 15-inch MacBook Air  Apple announces macOS Sonoma with game mode and support for desktop widgets Mac Pro with M2 Ultra first look: boy, that’s a big chip All the features Apple didn’t mention in its WWDC 2023 keynote The SEC is suing crypto giant Binance, here’s all the details The SEC is trying to freeze Binance’s assets The SEC sues crypto exchange Coinbase for breaking US securities laws 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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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of Confabulator. Remember Confabulator. Confabulators is 2004. That time zone. And then Apple Sherlocked it with a dashboard. The developer sold it to Yahoo. And it became the Yahoo widget library, which I think we all agree, saved Yahoo.

Stunning. That's why Yahoo's still with us today. That's why they're still here as part of Verizon. Who's the widgets? It would be amazing if there's like a director of widgets at Verizon. I hope there is. I know there is. Come on decoder, director of Verizon widgets.

That person's job is to just make weird, like mid-range Android phone home screen widgets that charge you by accident. Anyway, I'm your friend Eli. Hi, David. Hi. I guess I'm I Google in this conversation. I'm like the new cool upstart, just showing up, screwing everything up for everybody. There was a time when Google was like, people will come to Google.com directly and we'll show them page called on Google full of widgets.

That time passed very very. That time was eight minutes long. Been gone. By the way, I keep bringing up widgets because we're going to talk about widgets a lot today. Apple's back to widgets. But we've lived the whole cycle. Like Apple killed confabulator, the introduced dashboard,

the killed dashboard, and now they're bringing it back. Alex Kranz is here. Hi, Alex. I'm missing growl still. Growl, the notification system. That was good. Like, if we're in 2008, I want growl back. You know how like a 90, fashion trends are back. Yeah.

Same with widgets. It's really, it's going to be the theme of this episode. So we are back. I'm back in New York City. I need like a dopamine fast like the tech pros do. Yeah. I am over stimulated. It has been a rocking five days for me, starting with a Taylor Swift concert.

Oh my niece and nephew graduating from high school. That was very emotional. Congratulations. Very emotional. And back-to-back days. Yeah. Which one did you cry more for the graduation or the Taylor Swift performance? So I will say that we watched my sister because, you know, it's the heiress tour.

Yeah. So she was like reliving the memories for children growing up, era by era. Oh, Lord. It was a lot. No dry eyes. It was a lot. It was a lot. The children at high school graduation were like, we're out of here.

Like, it was impossible to be emotional. It was great. And then straight from there. To WWDC. And then after WWC, we were. We did the Verchast with the waveform crew, which was incredible. That was a lot of fun. We were real punchy by that point, but it was a lot of fun.

But Alex, Alex, you'll appreciate this. Nelai landed in San Francisco, comes to Cupertino. Our hotel is essentially across the street from Apple Park. But because of the way Apple Park works and because its security is intense. Like, Neelai, I would suspect out of all of the things that you went to, Apple Park had more security than TSA, Taylor Swift, any of it. Wait, can I just say this after all the Ticketmaster stuff? All that stuff. I made a decoder about Ticketmaster.

They did not check our tickets at Soldier Field. Oh my God. We just walked in very confidently, went through a bunch of metal detectors. They looked at my bag and we went and sat down. And I went and asked someone, hey, do you want to check my ticket? No. And they're like, no one ever narcs on themselves. We believe you.

You're good. We sat down. It's amazing. But anyway, so, Nilai gets there and we have to go to Apple Park the next morning. And Nelai just looks at me very seriously and goes, David, I can't walk. I have walked too much. I had to walk to and through Soldier Field. I can't do it.

So we took several lifts, literally just from one side of the Apple Park to the other side of Apple Park. David did make me walk twice. It's true. I did. Twice? That's too many times. He just saw Taylor. One of our favorite things to do was ask random Apple employees if they were filling their rings on WWDC days.

It was very good. There's no Twitter anymore. I didn't have any place to put this picture. But on the way to Soldier Field, it's like. There's neighborhoody. Mm-hmm. And all these kids had lemonade stands. And one of the kids was accepting Bitcoin.

And I was like, hey, what's up? I put it in Slack, but I didn't have any place to put it. There's no Twitter. That kid's on it. And I was like, what's up with Bitcoin? You know, they were like, yeah, we have Squares, so we have Bitcoin. We don't prefer it, though. There's too many transaction fees, and it's slow.

This is great. I was like, I'm going to pay you an actual cash. And they looked heartbroken because they had to flip it with all this cash. They're like, you can use a square app? Yeah, exactly. It was very good. Anyhow, so earlier this week, we did the full episode on the Vision Pro. We had Marquez, the waveform crew, come on for a lightning round.

That's already in the feed if you're here for Apple Vision Pro news. Go get it. Go get it. I will say after that episode, I've been pondering it a little more and I figure it out exactly what I want to say about the Vision Pro. Okay. It is a simulator of the thing Apple wants to build. Mm. It is very obviously not the thing.

It is just a very powerful hardware simulator of the thing. That's good. And in the same sense as like one of the things that's going to be interesting over the next six months or so is a lot of people are going to have to use Mac simulators to build stuff for the Vision Pro. And in the same way that you can't get the actual sense of the thing until you actually wear the actual thing, it is still that one leap removed from it. That's good. I actually like that a lot.

I think that's really true. And I should, I just want to say one thing in addition to a bunch of follow up I've gotten. There are a lot of people who are very curious about the field of view on this thing because it's sort of hard to describe in a way that makes sense. And the metaphor that I... Because they don't give you actual numbers, right? We've not yet cut in a number. You end up standing there with like your hands on your face going like, it's not this wide. It's not this wide.

It's kind of this wide. You know what I mean? And so, but the thing that I have heard, the metaphor I like best, and Nelai, I'm curious if you agree with this, is that it kind of looks like looking through the viewfinder of a camera where there are very clearly edges if you look for them, but you are all. also very much seeing the whole picture. But it still feels like you're looking through something and not as if there is an entire thing. Does that metaphor work for you? That really worked for me.

Yeah. I think I perceive the edges much more than other people. But, you know, again, given the circumstances that I was like using the thing, I was looking for them. Right. It's the sort of thing you would stop noticing pretty quickly, I suspect. Yeah. Well, we're on video.

Can you just wear? Hold your hands up. Now I have to do the hands. It's not. I'm making you do it. So 180 degrees is like a plane. Yeah. On your face.

Okay. It's not 180 degrees. Yeah, I don't know. 120. Okay. Somewhere in there. We did learn some important specs over the course of WWC. 90 hertz refresh rate on the displays.

Unless you are watching 24 frames for second video content. So it drops down. No, it goes up to 96, which is an even multiple. So every frame is on there four times. Which is very smart, very Apple. Apple is saying more things about the Vision Pro to its developers. over the course of WWC and some more technical information is coming out

that we didn't have when we did our episode. It's all on the site. All of it's varied, it's minutia. I love it. It's like frame rates of that thing. There's a developer kit. We didn't know this. If you submit to Apple,

they might send you a developer kit. That's interesting to know. I'm going to submit an app. You should submit an app. Of people mimicking the field of view of it. My app is where you can just pour a beer that's virtual in the pro and just sort of make it slosh back and forth.

And it cost $10. I'm going to make a million dollars. You're going to make so much money. There was that app in the very beginning of the iPhone app story. It was just like, I am rich. It just cost $100,000 and like people bought it. It's very good. Brilliant.

And it just displayed the words, I'm rich. Did you know that there are developers who literally refer to the fart app era of the iPhone? Like this is a term I heard unprompted from several people referring to like the early sort of halcyonde is where people will buy anything just to see how it works. They call it is like canonically known as the fart app. app era of the iPhone. I like that very much. It is very good. Again, whole episode on the Vision Pro, more minutia on the website that we still operate called Theverge.com, the last good website. This episode is all about the other stuff. The OS is, Apple has a 400 of them. They are masters of releasing a feature for one OS and then releasing the same feature for another OS a year

later and calling that new. So a lot of that to sort out. There are some new Macs we got to talk about. And then there's a crypto meltdown happening in the background of all this. And Liz Lapato is going to join us at the end of the show to tell us what is going on there. So let's start with the software. David, you have organized this by feature because I think that makes more sense than by OS. Yeah, I think for exactly the reason you're talking about that Apple tends to do this thing where it has kind of overlapping features that launch at different times on different devices and they kind of do the same thing.

If we were just to talk about this as OSS, as we would just talk about iOS 17 for a long time, and then kind of little branches into other things, which is sort of how Apple does its software now. But I went through and found, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven kind of categories of things that Apple talked about. Some are big, some are small, but in terms of like big new features that are either on one platform or several, I found a bunch, and I figured we can just go through a bunch of them. And widgets, as we've been talking about, is the first one. I feel like if I come out of WWDC 2023 with one thing, it's that widgets are back.

Right? Is this the takeaway? Yeah. After Apple killed them ruthlessly. And I think the actual cycle there, I think, is super fascinating, right? Because we've been on this 15-year run where Apple just said, everything is apps. And if you want to do things, the first thing you have to do is press on an icon and open an app. And every app became a universe unto itself.

And everybody built gigantic businesses out of keeping you inside of an app as long as possible. And then over the last few years, there's been this push back in the other way that's like, actually, if all I want to do is check off a thing on my to-do list, isn't it objectively insane that I have to like page over three pages on my home screen, open an app, wait for it to load and log in and then do it again. Like, yes, that is insane. And so we're finding these ways to like stitch things back together and Apple's trying to figure out how to do stuff on the lock screen. And it's like, this was a good idea 15 years ago, which is great. And they should probably have existed this whole time and been much better. But they're coming back in a big way now. Apple has really never liked the idea of having live data on the home screen of the iPhone for years.

And, you know, the joke is that the weather app icon was 72 and sunny for however long. They finally gotten past that. Now they've added widgets to the iPhone. And their, you know, their big announcements for the iPad was like, the widgets are interactive. And it's like, well, they should have been the whole time. So they went to just sort of like static display of data to now you can actually like mark a do. done on the iPad. And then they've got these, like, big ideas that connect to their other bits and bobs of

technology. Like, the widgets on your iPhone will somehow connect over continuity to your Mac and appear on your Mac in some way. I don't. Why? So that you don't have to set up your widgets twice. Okay. Oh, like.

And there's a huge number of things you are likely to do on your iPhone, like, that won't work the same way on your Mac. Wait, name one of those things. Apple, Class. music. Apple Music Classic? But that's not a widget. But it should be. And then I want it on my Mac. That's the only one.

What's one thing that you do on your iPhone that you shouldn't do on your Mac or you couldn't do in your Mac? That's a widget. That's like specifically a widget. I'm using my iPhone as my camera to do this show so I can't look at it right now, which is hurting me emotionally. But I do think like there is this thing that Apple is trying

to do, I think correctly, in which if I'm sitting at my computer and I have to pick up my phone that is bad. Like I would argue that is a bad user experience every time I have to look at my phone while I'm also using my computer. And to me, widgets is one small step back

in the direction of do computer things that are also phone things. And this is like what Windows and Android have been working towards together for a long time, right? And if you have a Chromebook and an Android phone, you've been able to do a lot of this stuff forever.

But this is like, they're just slowly getting a little closer together. And especially with these more interactive widgets, it's being able to have the same information accessible in all the places goes a very long way for me. I have no idea how this is going to work. And I will say my experience with things like continuity and handoff has not been good over time. So I don't have a ton of faith in this working super well. But it's at least an interesting idea.

Yeah, it's super inconsistent. Like continuity. Yeah. It's not reliable. Today I definitely tried to do the thing where you copy something from a phone and paste it on the Mac, which usually works perfectly well. It was like a TikTok from three days ago. Yeah.

It was a TikTok from three days ago about something else that Apple announced. But it just beach balled my back today. It was like, I don't want to do this. I'm tired of pasting things from three days ago. That said, the widget idea for Apple, just in terms of what an app is and how you should interact with it and what's happening on your phone, they were apps, apps, apps, apps, apps, apps, right? Your whole phone turns into a single-purpose appliance every time you open an app.

and now they're getting to we should have little bits of ui strun about your entire experience that you control things in the world which is pretty cool and I think especially in the iPad their view of the iPad home screen is like a control panel

but then there's actually a control panel and so like they're they're just running into some mixed metaphors here I think on the whole it's really good but it's just fascinating to see them sort of deconstruct the apps and lift the controls out of them into widgets.

Yep. Because then they get to do the next thing, which is the same widgets now run on the watch. See, I think they actually converted me to be anti-witchits during their long anti-wit campaign. Really? Yeah. I have some widgets on my phone, right? I have like a weather one and a calendar one.

But I don't actually want to interact with that stuff. I like having my little compartments. And so all of these widgets and all this excitement for it. And like, David, you're saying, oh, yeah, now you'll be able to have the exact same info on both your phone and your laptop. I was like, oh, I hate that. I want my separate spots. I just thought of my widgets example, which is smart home stuff. A, interactive widgets is an extremely good way to do things like control my lights.

If I just want to turn off the one light that I have connected, it's insane that I have to open an app every time that should be a button on my home screen. And now it can be. And that's also a thing I would like to be able to do in exactly the same way with exactly the system, the same system on my Mac that does not currently exist. I take it all back. Never mind. There it is. It just converted back to widgets. It's just done.

I'm like, oh, smart home, never mind, never mind. Let's do it. But I do think it, to your point, Alex, there is this interesting thing that Apple is trying to do, which is figure out how to give you more sort of tools and interactive stuff in widgets without it being overwhelming and annoying. Because what you don't want and what there is a version of that could exist is essentially full apps running in teeny tiny icons all over your home screen all the time, which is a UI nightmare. It's a battery nightmare. It's just, that's bad. And if Apple let developers do that, they would do that.

They would just surface the whole app onto your home screen. And so there's a middle ground somewhere that Apple is trying to find that I think is going to be really interesting. Yeah, because that's what I think of, like, Android in 2008, 2009. That was what the Android experience. And so I'm like, oh, I don't, it's not 2008. I don't want that experience. I want something nice. And, like, right now they're kind of clean.

And I don't want to go back to like, you can do everything right here. It's basically the whole app in a tiny, crummy scale. square that you can barely see. I think this is actually, now that you said Android, it's so indicative of where we are with these phones that Apple responded to the over widgetification of Android. By being like, ours is clean. We're not doing this. And now it's like, no one's going to yell at Apple for copying Android blatantly.

They just, no one cares. Yeah. And they're like, screw at widgets. You can have them back. Look, I'm excited. Package tracking. Oh, that's a good one. Oh, my case.

It's good. But you think about the combination of Apple stuff, live activities, the. dynamic island in widgets. There's a lot of ways to put stuff on your phone that's like little bits and bobs of information. Yeah. There's not, there's not, we'll just see how it all goes. But that was like, the theme of this whole thing was like a platform.

Have you thought about putting widgets on it? And then the entire watch is like a series of widgets now. Yeah. It looks very much the same. I don't think that the changes to the watcher as big as they made them seem. No. Because it was just like you want to go to the app. now you can go to the app but still be able to see the time.

And that's useful. But those are watch apps. Yeah. Like it's just like watch apps, but a little smaller and a little less ugly. And I'm like, oh, okay.

Well, ironically, the two cases Apple made are you can see apps smaller. Like exactly, you just said, and you can see apps bigger. Because they spent all this time talking about, remember how they redesigned the apps

so that they take up the larger screen on the new watches. So it's like apps bigger and also apps smaller. But apps fundamentally is still the same. That's the watch story. All right. Lots of changes to the phone app. Actually, that's what they led with. That connects to other changes in FaceTime and messaging.

What's going on there? So this is one that actually, I think, shows up across a bunch of different platforms in really interesting ways. And we should probably break it into two things. So there's the phone app and there's FaceTime, which I would have thought Apple would have tried to all sort of shove together, but it didn't really, which is weird. But on the phone call side, the two big things that I can think of, and again, it's been a long week. I may have forgotten, are that A, now you have these things called contact posters that you can sort of make a picture of yourself and have a font with your name that will now show up on other people's iPhones when you call them. I have a lot of questions about how that works, but it's kind of a

neat idea, I think. And then the other one is this like visual, real time voicemail thing, where now when somebody calls you, if you don't answer, it will start live transcribing the voicemail that they leave you. And you can press a button and pick up the phone. And Nilai, you and I spent some time digging into how all of this works and it is like truly bonkers right it's a hack but it uh and i and marquez rightfully pointed out on our last episode this is very much how pixel call transcriber works true yeah but it's more limited and it makes it's funnier because of just how it is limited so it's they made an answering machine so right now when you set up voicemail you record a voicemail greeting and it goes to your carrier and if you don't answer your phone your carrier's like cloud-based

voicemail system does a thing and visual voicemail happens. And I cannot tell you the last time I sent, listened to, or even acknowledge the existence of voicemail on my phone. I have 18 unlistened voicemails. Yeah, I delete a bunch every time somebody calls me and tells me my voicemail is full. And short of that, I never, ever check my voice mail. But some people use it. It's great. But whatever. The people who I care for, they get the voicemail and they hang up and they send me a text. Yeah. That's much far superior way of working through this. What Apple is doing now, you set your voicemail greeting, it goes to two places. It goes to your carrier, and it also lives on your phone. And when you get a call, your phone answers the call in the background,

in a process, plays your greeting. So the listener does not know. And then it records the incoming audio and live transcribes it on the screen. So it's a little answering machine app. That's cool. I mean, it's hilarious that they've turned the phone into an answering machine. If your phone is not there, it falls back to the carrier, cloud-based visual voicemail system. that they realized that we need better call screening. Well, because of all the robocall stuff. I mean, this is like the other piece of this is they did a bunch of work on robocalls, on letting you decide whether you even want to see them.

So if carriers flag something as a robocall, your phone will not even let you know what happened, which is fascinating because they built all those hooks for call screening into the OS. Like I use Robo Killer. It's an app I pay for. I'm kind of wondering, like, am I going to pay for this anymore? Because you built it in, you're banning Sherlock. They built all these hooks for these. products to exist and, like, do screening for you. And now they're slowly building it into the OS.

Is that who's in charge of those lists? Is that like a, is that a thing your carrier has? Is that a thing Apple does? Like, who, who is the one saying, this is probably spam? So that's, that was that industry. Like, Robo Killer has a list. And you can, like, add to the list. But even now, like, I don't have Robo Killer or anything. And I get calls that say, you know, likely spam or whatever. I assume that's the carriers who maintain that. Yeah, I think it's your carrier. But the carriers don't like lists of, like, bad number. or spam numbers. They have a product, they have stir slash shaken. Right, right, right.

Great standard. And they're doing authentication of the numbers in some way. So I think that's where they're, because the high volume call spammers are spoofing the numbers. So now if you're making a call to spoof numbers, the carriers can detect that in some way. Which is why all the robocalls you get come from your local area code. Yeah. Which is so funny to me because now I just absolutely, resolutely, do not answer the phone if it comes from my area code. which is hundreds of miles away from where I currently live and has nothing to offer me anymore. No one in the city of Chicago can call me.

Sorry. You're not allowed. I don't care what is your problem. It's your spam. So that's really interesting that they built a little answer machine. The call posters thing, the contact posters thing, also fascinating because it is unclear how the poster gets from my phone to your phone. And they haven't told us yet. So I call you on the regular old phone system.

And I'll see your face. You have AT&T, you have Verizon, whatever it is. I call from that. That's a regular phone call. There's no data channel in that phone call. Yeah. But suddenly I have data on you. But suddenly before the call is even connected.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. That's suspicious. I don't think you just have to tell. That's what they do with I message, for example, right? You try to send somebody a text message. They detect whether both numbers are the message.

No, but I message will detect. Like you're trying to text this number. Yeah. And it will go look for that number of the iMessage database. And then it will like change you over to IMessage. Getting out of that database. Oh no. They don't want you to do that.

Well, that's also how you get the thing that'll pop up at the top sometimes where it's like, you know, so and so has updated their contact photo. And you can say like share your contact information and you just sort of hit the one button and share. And that makes sense to me over IMessage, but you can't do that SMS to SMS. And this is sort of the equivalent, which is really interesting. Yeah. Which is kind of where the FaceTime thing gets confusing for me, because if they had just said this works via FaceTime, which is functionally I message for voice and video calls, that would make perfect sense. But yeah, but the fact that this is still ostensibly a carrier calling thing is very interesting and confusing to me. Yeah.

I'm guessing Apple is just extending that thing they do where they know what phone numbers or iPhone numbers. Yeah. And they're saying, okay, here's a contact poster. You've made the call. It doesn't update it until you make another phone call. Okay. So if you have my contact poster, I call you, you're going to see the old one until we connect and then it will send you the new. There's just like a lot going on here that I think is like...

Are the call posters? They're going to be your photo, right? Because like right now everybody's... I think you can set them to whatever you want. Does that mean we're just going to get a bunch of big emojis? Because right now everybody I know uses emojis as their face. Really? Sam, actually.

Fast majority of people. There's a one or two who don't. But the majority do because like Apple encouraged you to make a emoji. And so everybody did. And then it made the thing. So that means like we're going to have like giant emoji faces. Yeah. And then that's how they're going to bring us all slowly into Vision OS.

Yeah. But I also get the sense it's going to be. I mean, the way it looks is like a lock screen, right? It's got sort of your name at the top where the clock would be. It's got the big full screen picture. My guess would be there's going to be a flow in which Apple sets, like, asks you to set this up. Yeah. And prompts you to like pick a photo of yourself.

Mine is going to be me doing finger guns in like a super cool way. I'm going to be wearing a hat and doing finger guns. I'm pretty excited about it. I love this one. No, we're in the 90s. We're in the 90s in early 2000s. We're not really at trucker hats and finger guns. It's going to be me in low-rise jeans with a Nelly Band-Aid on my cheek.

That's what I'm saying. I'm going to have the Nelly Band-A-Band-A-Band-y. You're there. Beautiful. We're at Widgets in MacKi-O-Ext 10. We're not yet at Trucker Hats. The trucker hats are coming. You'll know this when Apple kills widgets the next time.

Okay. Contact Post, 3.0, David has a trucker hat. You cannot set different contact posters for different people or different lines. That's obviously the next turn. We're going to have to pretend to be excited about that next year. Mark my words. Next year, WWC, Apple will say, contact posters for different people and the crowd will go wild.

Just as the crowd, I will say, talking about the early 2000s, went wild for updated PDF support on the iPad. They did. Like, you could hear it over the recording. Because you guys, for our listeners, one of the ways that we cover the event is Sometimes there's like a little microphone and we can hear the keynote because you guys are there. And so we could hear like, ooh, when it happened. It was very, very good. It was good.

It was pretty funny. FaceTime updates. FaceTime basically just in more places. You can leave FaceTime voicemail now. I don't know how else to describe that. That is separate from the regular voicemail. Somebody was being very hostile to millennial women about that. They were like they're the ones most likely to abuse that with their parents.

and I was like, that's not absolutely true. That you're going to leave so many FaceTime voicemails? Yeah, with my parents. I was like never felt more called out and like seen at the same time. I'm definitely going to have my kid leave FaceTime voice smells from my parents. That's what they want. We already do it. It's just taking a video and sending it to someone.

Yeah. The thing that's weird about this and this, I'm just realizing this right now, is the way that Apple is doing this with like cool stuff on the phone side, cool stuff on the FaceTime side, cool stuff on the messages side, but none of these things interact with each other. This is a very like Googly way of handling this, where it's like separate teams that have nothing to do with each other that are all kind of arriving at the same idea. Like what if we could sort of talk synchronously but also asynchronously and we had a bunch of different ways to communicate? Like the fact that FaceTime voicemails and audio messages in IMessage are different things and are also different from phone calls, which now have live transcribed voicemails, doesn't make any sense.

There should be a thing like I message where it kind of fails gracefully from thing to thing depending on what device you have. And instead, now I'm like, okay, if I'm going to call you, do I call you on the phone and leave you a voicemail? Or do I call you on FaceTime and leave you a voicemail? Or do I send you an audio message in the messages app? This doesn't make any sense. David, if this was 2004, right now, what you just said would have raised you $100 million to build a universal messaging client. And then I would have sold to Google and there would have been one of the media. You know, like, why are there so many instant messaging services?

I mean, but right, like you can see this is the thing that ordinarily Apple is very good at is being like, okay, we've just made a system. It's called calls. I don't know. And it just works. And it's like, okay, if it's on iPhone to iPhone, we're going to default you to FaceTime audio because that sounds better and you have all these cool new features. If they're not in the iMessage database, it just works. They have too many users to do this. I'm telling you that I agree with you.

If you were clean sheeting this, like, well, it was John Doer was the VC who had the I fund. We sure. 2008, man. We would have raised so much money with exactly this pitch. We have sat through this pitch so many times. Apple has too many users to reboot this. They're like, this icon makes phone calls. This icon makes FaceTime calls.

This other icon is your voicemail. And this icon is some other stuff. And they're like, they have to educate 100 million people. And if you change the name of the phone app, you're going to freak everybody out. Yeah, you're probably right. Even the dumbest thing that I do. all the time, which is I call my parents on the phone, and then Max rolls up to me, and she's like, where are they? Because the idea of an audio-only phone call, she's like,

what stupid old people ideas is, why can't I see who you're talking to? And then I just push the button to turn into a face. Routinely blows everyone away. Right, the idea that the audio voice call can turn into the FaceTime call is a paradigm shift that is like routinely confusing to most people. My parents, when it's the other way around, I don't know this happens to everyone else's parents, my parents will hang up the phone call and call me back on FaceTime because they're like, we're switching modes. My parents just get upset. Well, my dad's fine with it.

My dad's fine with it. I don't want to look at you. He was watching the Vergecast's like live blog. He's like a nerd. That's where I get it from. But my mom was like, she routinely accidentally FaceTimes me when she's on the phone. She's like, butt facetimes me when she's just talking to me on the phone. And I'm like, there's just the side of your face.

Not your butt. Thank God. Cheek time. Cheek time. That works in both ways. Moving on. Moving on. I get your point, David.

I'm just saying, I think they're stuck by how many users they have. Yeah. I think you're probably right. They have to do this a lot slower. FaceTime is coming to the Apple TV. I very confidently told an Apple person,

I was like, can you just use the USB port on the Apple TV? And they looked at me. There's a USB port. Yeah. There was one in the first one on the bottom. It's gone now. There's not a lot of ports on there.

It was a service port. Do you remember, though? Finding the secret USB port is like always the great joy. Like there was a Nintendo that, had one. There was a Nintendo, like the Apple, obviously, like, everybody always has like jeeys. They were not excited that I knew about their secret port. Whatever.

They have. So it's continuity. So you can use your phone or your iPad to make FaceTime calls on TV. Lord knows how that's going to work, although I will say there's a really interesting new spec in iOS 17 that controls motorized docks. So you can see how you can, like, dock the thing. It'll, like, rotate. It'll tilt at you, whatever. The phone can follow you around.

So wait, could you face, if I have the phone on my bedside table because I'm sleeping in, could my boss then FaceTime me and then slowly make it like motor around? I'm like, wake up. I see you sleep in. Yes. Get your ass out of bed. Your boss. Your boss. Hypothetically, whoever that is.

Wake out balance. I'm here. I'm awake. No, but for FaceTime, that's really fascinating, right? You need some sort of, you got to prop up the phone somehow. And now there's all these other little. Yeah. There's other ways to control docs, which I think is fascinating.

I don't know if they're going to interplay, but you can see how they're coming together. We are kind of getting ahead of ourselves on that one, but I think the docs thing is super fascinating to me because it's been, I don't know, a decade since like the iPod doc phenomenon died, and we're going to get like a whole new dock phenomenon now that we have standby mode and we have this whole dock kit thing, which is what you're describing, where you can actually control the way a dock moves. Like, things you stick your phone on are going to be interesting again, and that makes me so happy. I'm telling you it's back. We're going to have to start a gadget blog again.

Are the hotels like budgeting for all of the docks they're going to have to add? Hotels are budgeting for nothing. I checked into my hotel in New York City last night and they looked at me confidently and said we're so excited. Room service is back. It was just like chicken nuggets. Yeah. It was like whatever. Some tindies. They're like they're not even budgeting. It's horrible. Last piece, they're adding USBC support for webcams on the iPad. and microphones. Very excited about this. And this goes in with the FaceTime coming to Apple TV thing.

It's just like more things get webcams. You can video conference on more things. That seems like a universally good thing to me. Why do you need one for your iPad? So if you have a display. So if you set up an iPad, you plugged in a display of USBC. And the display has a built-in webcam.

How many people are plugging their iPad into a display and then be like, boy, I really need a webcam on top of that? Alex, do you know the real reason? It's because the iPad's camera is in a stupid place and is not where it should be. And now you can put one in the middle like a normal person. This is the best news of all time. Now you can have a webcam where a webcam should have been for 12 years, Apple. Do you have some feelings there, David?

No. I can't wait for the first picture. Center stage is a great feature that doesn't cause any problems for anyone ever. It's great. I can't wait for the first picture of somebody with the iPad in a keyboard dock with like a logic camera mounted where it should be. In a coffee shop. It's going to be great.

Little Mike. And then the last piece, which we should talk about maybe a little bit more, they're bringing communication safety to FaceTime to photos to AirDrop. That felt like huge news. It's like huge news. They just slid in. I mean, this was like such a big deal that they had to pull it the first time. Yeah, because it's scanning your images to detect for nudity and then be like,

hey, did you know there's some nudes coming your way? And like, that shocks me. So the scandal with this was before. when they were doing it in the cloud, and they were doing the on-device hashing and passing it back and forth to the cloud. There was a secondary scan. There was another feature that had a secondary scandal where it was alerting parents. Yeah. About children potentially getting nudes.

That was a big deal. This is just on-device scanning. So a picture is coming in. Your iPhone looks at it locally. It says we think there might be some nudity here. Are you sure you want to see this picture? How many people are like, well, actually a lot of words. women are like, no. Yeah. Never mind. I forgot about dick pics. Yeah. It's like a real thing. That is a real thing that a lot of

women deal with. I'm so sorry. But they announced it. I think they, there was a lot of confusion about that first set of announcements and what it all entailed. They announced this. They did not do a great job of explaining what this is. They just like shot right by it. I mean, I think that was very deliberate, right? The louder Apple talks about this, the more people are going to ask questions about it. And I think like what you're saying, Eli, about this being on device, they have answered a series of the most complicated questions about it. But it is still true that your device is scanning your photos. And we can debate what that means, like your phone, the photos already on your device. Like, it's not like your device is not aware of what this photo is.

Yeah, your phone can happily search for things in your photos. Yeah. But then, and yeah, it'll prompt you if you get one, if like if a child receives a photo that it perceives to be problematic, one of the things that will give you is a pop-up. where you can either, I think, block the contact who's sending it. There's a thing that just says message a grown-up, which I think is very funny. It's just like a very funny way to name that particular feature. But it's the kind of thing that is like, it seems sort of like an obviously good idea at first. And then kind of the longer you think about it, the thorny or the questions get about what this knows and who it should notify and the difference between sort of protecting someone and letting them use their own device the way that they want to.

It's super messy. But Apple clearly thinks it's gotten this right because it's now starting to roll it out kind of everywhere you might see multimedia. Yeah. And this is way too much for this episode of the Vergecast. But just today, before we started recording, Louisiana passed a child safety bill. It says you can't sign up for services without parental consent. The parents can cancel your terms of service agreements from all the stuff. There are other bills in other states.

A thing that is happening across the tech industry and across tech policy is using children as a stand-end for very, very, very. aggressive surveillance and regulation. Yes. And we have pieces on it on site. We can link it in the show notes. But this is right on the edge of that where I think on balance it's fine, especially given Apple's history and privacy standards and parental control, like all that stuff. You're like, this is right on the line of fine.

Right? Like, you're a parent. You want to see if your kid's getting weird photos. You want your kid to be able to alert. Like, all fine. There are some cases in that. You're a kid. You have an abusive parent.

where it gets real dicey. Right. So, like, there's just some, there's some big questions in there, but on balance, I think it's on a line of fine. You also can't troll your friends with Goatsy anymore. Alex. Sorry. I mean, maybe you can.

We'll find out. It truly is the early 2000s again. Yeah, we're back to the early 2000s. Speaking on the 2000s tip, Alex's favorite feature. My favorite feature. Airplane hotels. No, no. Alex is banned from talking about this on the Vergecast.

I refuse. I will not tolerate it. You guys know this is, this is bullying. No. So they say that they're going to allow you to airplay in hotels. They could allow this today. Yes. This is my thing. It's like I think this is theoretically really cool feature that should already exist, but will never truly exist.

Because, again, I stated to Marriott recently, and there was still that I Home 2000's iPod dock in there. Like I'm not really confident that I'm going to be getting airplay in my hotel anytime soon. No. It's not going to happen. There's going to be like, do you remember all those years ago? And it's still true now. You like, you drive around and you see a hotel and they have the sign that says like vacancy, $149 a night.

And then it just says like has HBO. Like I wonder if airplay is going to be the new HBO that they'll just like put on the sign airplay. Well, that's what they're doing now. Like has Netflix. That's true. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm not signing into my Netflix on this account. Which is exactly why I want airplay.

That's the thing, right? It's like this, this in theory solves a lot of problems because I don't have to log in. I don't have to log in. I don't have to remember to log out when I check out. But they have to replace that lynxys B router from 2003. Everybody loves a captive portal. That's my, that's my feeling. I love a captive portal.

Yeah, this to me is like the best idea and most unlikely thing to actually take hold that I saw at WS. I swear, I'm just sitting here and Googling, I swear they've made the airplane hotels announcement before. It would not surprise me. I mean, like they announced Airplay in 2010. They probably said it then. I'm guessing in 2011. They're like, and it will be coming to hotel soon, like one year later. With our partners at Hilton.

And Hilton was like, no. Some of the Hilton person like wanders on stage. We love computers. They're our favorite. Chromecast had a big hotel partnership for a while there. Do you remember this? Yeah. And then it went away.

Every time you see a screen, there's someone who's like, if I control the screen, I will make the money. And then there's you being like, what if I just send my phone to that screen? That's the car play story that Apple has won much to society's detriment, and it is not the hotel story. The last time I was in a hotel, I literally went and unplugged the HDMI cable from whatever garbage hotel box and plugged it in my laptop. I just watch whatever is on Nick at night. That's become my main thing. It's usually friends. Sometimes it's the office.

I scroll through the guide until one of those two shows appears, and that is my hotel TV experience. And it's fine. I have no notes. I don't need anything else. All right. So that's Airplay. Another, again, vintage 2000s announcement. Another vintage 2000s announcement was the name drop where you can just walk up to someone

and like wave your phone at them. Did they let you just test that one? Like, did they have a very controlled demo for it? No. Again, the TikTok that I was sharing that Alex was laughing at me about was in 2013. Craig Federi was like, we've expanded contact sharing. Now you can just do it with a tap. You don't need to bump your phones together.

No, you got to bump up. You got to bump your phones together. Craig what? This was a whole startup. The startup was called bump. There have been many startups trying to do this. Like, there were so many years where everybody was like NFC is going to change the way we interact with each other and forever. And now, no, it didn't happen.

Most people don't know what NFC. Which is just NFC, but like it works. And now apparently we're getting the thing where you can bump your phones. Bump was number eight on Apple's list of all time most popular free iPhone apps by February 2013, it had been downloaded 125 million times. It was acquired by Google and subsequently shut down. Well, at least they had a nice, you know, at least they got some money before Apple Sherlock. And then it took Apple 10 years to replace it.

Just like acquisition by Google, this is just three sentences long. On September 16th, 2013, bump announced they'd been inquired by Google. On December 31, 2013, both bump and flock would be discontinued. The company subsequently deleted all user data. and shut down their servers, rendering all apps inoperable. This is the most Google acquisition story ever. Like, when you get acquired by Google, you should be forced to pre-announce that your service will be discontinued.

Don't worry, we're deleting all your data. Lena Con, you want to accomplish something? Write a law that's like, if you are acquired by Google, you have to pre-announce that your product is a failure and no one will ever get to use again. That's how you stop mergers in America. You just skip to the end. You got acquired by AT&T. Guess what?

Five years tonight? T&T's going to sell you for parts. Just pre-announce it. We did this for money. All right. That's enough. And then the last one was the expanded Airdrop, so it works over the internet, which is cool. Yeah, that's cool.

But only if you're, so you're both signed in, ICloud, you leave, it'll continue to transfer over ICloud. That's all I want. Get excited for Gritty. And you can now set up things like SharePlay and Airdrop by touching your phones together, which, sure. This is a sort of thing. So my, the only time I have ever been like, wow, AirDrop is an amazing magical piece of technology. And I think I've talked about this on the show. I was at the Formula One race in October.

And we were standing there waiting for all the drivers to come in. And we happened to be at the very front of a crowd of like 100 people. And so my friend Stephen had the best view and was filming everything as everybody came in. And then he would just open up AirDrop and just tap on every name he could find. And he would just send this video to all of the phones on all the people around us. And it was like, it was like the most incredible file sharing experience I have ever had. And ever since I'm now like an AirDrop, true believer, I just use it to like send stuff from my phone to my computer.

Yeah. To have it actually work socially, I was like, oh, this is, this is something. There's really something here. And that idea that I could just like, I have a thing that you want and you just sort of like boot my phone and you have it. I mean, it could work. Yeah. And that's why Google bought Bump in September of 2013.

10 years. And now nearby share exists. If you work at Google and you can tell me whether one letter of code from Bump made it into nearby share, that's it. That's the bar. One letter, one bracket of code from Bump is a nearby share. Let me know. I would love to know the answer to that question. Let's lightning around the rest of the stuff.

Stand by mode, probably everybody has seen if you're listening to the show that was Apple's big announcement in iOS 17. You put your phone when it's charging on its side. the OLED phones will just like always on to show you a clock. They made an alarm clock. Yeah. Another cool use of widgets, by the way. You can run both a clock and you can have widgets appear. So that's another, it's like a full screen widget experience.

Too much information. I'm not mad at it. Oh my God. What was the name of the thing that ran the widgets, the little guy? Chumby? Chumby. They made chumby. Yeah.

You know, the little guy. They sure locked chumby. He sure locked. Here's my social clip. Ready? I'm going to look right at the camera. I would say they Sherlock Chumby. That means something.

That means something to a lot of people. And if you're not one of them, stop scrolling and go do your research. They Sherlock Chumby. A million views on tape. I just went to Chumby's website. You can still buy a Chumby, apparently. Does it run confabulator widgets? I just want to read you several things that are on the Chumby website.

Unbrick your Sony Dash details here. Activated Chumby. deactivated chumpy. These are, these are some of the largest and most important things on the Chumpy website. That's very, very good. God, it's beautiful. Siri can now handle multiple smart home commands in a row.

That's great. They cut it to just Siri, which whatever, I don't, hey, Siri wasn't that hard to say. So the thing that's actually interesting to me about this, and the reason I put it on here, because I agree that the features themselves are kind of whatever. You can have longer conversations. It's slightly easier. I expect Siri to be 1,000 times worse with the false positives than it has been before. That's going to be awful. But are you guys slightly surprised that Apple is continuing

with Siri as kind of an ongoing concern? I kind of thought Siri was being phased out and there was eventually going to be some other... Too many users. You think? Yeah. Yeah. But Siri sucks. It has this like... People are setting timers and asking for music all the time. Yeah, that's all you need for. Even Craig said that on stage. He was like when he was giving the examples for what Siri can do, now it can do multiple timers. Foray. But he literally was like, people you'd love. to use Siri for, you know, playing music and setting timers. And it was like, oh, so Craig knows the only two things that anyone ever does with their voice assistance. Apple is trapped in a prison of its own success. And it can only leave that by leaping headfirst into the Metaverse.

I mean, that is, that is perfectly fair. But I kind of thought Apple might take the like AI revolution as a chance to do basically what Microsoft did and be like, forget all these things we've done before. Like, Siri is clippy with another name, right? It's like a thing that seemed nifty and is bad tech and everybody hates it. And you would think they would have taken this moment as a possible opportunity to rebrand. And I'm just surprised they did it. They need to do the big change, right? You can get rid of Siri. You need to replace it with like, here's the generative AI chatbot assistant of your dreams that is taking actions on your behalf. And they don't have it. The only mentions they had of generative AI in this whole keynote were in the keyboard.

Can I give you a theory that I think I'm absolutely right about? That generative AI chatbot exists. and it's called Spotlight, that is going to be the thing. Like, over the next three years, spotlight is going to be a more and more important part of all of these platforms. And that's where all of the actual AI focus is going to be. Because it's the search box. It's the search box. They're increasingly putting, like, actions into Spotlight so you can do stuff right from the search results. It's how you open apps.

It's how you find things. It's like that is where, if I'm Apple, that's where all the AI stuff is going to go. Not Siri. Spotlight. So they're going to Sherlock Alfred. Yeah. Like, I mean. Sherlock Chumby.

Yeah. God, no. Do you think at Chumby headquarters? They were like, it finally happened. Do you think if we called this episode, they Sherlocked Chumby, anyone would listen to it? I think that we have only one choice at this point in time. Look, Alex Heath just put up a story about Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to the Vision Pro. I think it is incumbent upon us.

If you're out there, you're a young reporter and you're trying to break onto the verge, send us a note about how you. you're going to get the Chumbi reaction to standby mode. I'll run it. We'll pay market rate. We'll run that story. What's going on inside a Chumby HQ? Bring me pictures of Spide. Is there a Chumby HQ?

I was like, is there a Chumby HQ? All right. Last few things. Last few things are mostly on the watch side. The side button now opens a control center for watch, which is cool. They're updating the polling rate for motion to enable new kinds of apps for golf, for hiking, for cycling, tennis. You're your computers and stuff for cycling now, so you can have, like, cadence monitors and stuff. Yeah.

The Sherlock's Peloton. They Sherlocked Peloton. Good. Yeah. But, no, I think that one's super useful because it's been, like, a holdback if you want to go ride your bike out in the world and check your cadence. You can't do anything with Apple on it. It sucks. David has written here, add a watch to group FaceTime.

I am so excited about this. Just purely as a trolling mechanism. Like, you get to be the person everybody is on FaceTime, and you just show up on your watch. That's both like a power move and the cruelest thing you can possibly do to somebody. That is all my mom is going to do. That's great. The watch now have maps in general has offline maps, which is a huge way late edition. You can do that partially on the watch now.

And then we mentioned this very briefly on the last episode in the waveform segment. But when you go on a hike, the watch will set a waypoint for the last place that you had cell signal. And the last place that you had any cell signal from any carrier, she could place an emergency call, which is really smart. Just smart stuff all around. Okay, that's it. I mean, that's not it. There is so much. Yeah, Apple announced so much stuff.

All kind of quality of life features all the way around. Very cool. But we got to take a break and talk about these Macs. We'll be getting back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work.

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That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWRK.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. Now, I want to tell you some very important news that happened while we were in break. I went to chumby.com as well. And I just want to read you this list of the most popular Chumby widgets. It's weather, obviously.

Of course. I can hash cheeseburger. Oh, very important. The failed blog, Lifehacker News. Okay. And our friends at Dig. Early 2000s, man. Yeah, man.

I wonder if that LifeHacker widget still works. works. You got to get a chumby, and you can buy a used chumby still on the site. This is your new project, Alex. This is my new project. Can you run Plex on a chumby? No, probably. That's probably true.

All right, let's talk about the Macs real quick, and then talk about some good stuff that didn't hit the keynote. Then we're going to bring Liz on Talk Crypto. The Macs, I feel like they're not a complicated story. 15 inch MacBook error. Big cheap Mac. Big, yeah, well, it's cheap-ish. Right. 15-inch screen.

It feels like they pulled the rip cord on the last category of laptops. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, like, everybody bought their upgrades in the pandemic. Mac sales have slowed way down. They're like, big cheap screen. Do you want it? It looks great. We saw it.

We got to play with it. It's a 500-knit display. It's not going to blow anybody away. But it's so pretty. It's pretty. It's very thin. It's fast. They did a thing where they calibrated the battery life to be exactly the same as the 13-inch.

So it's 18 hours of video playback, whatever that means. Instead of like... Vastly more. battery life? Yeah, that's, maybe we'll run faster because of that. I don't know. But they just picked that number and they went towards it. Have fun, Monica, whenever.

Yeah. I don't think there's a lot to say about the MacBook error. I mean, to be fair, that's a lot of battery life. I don't know that, like, I would rather have more, you know, performance on a bigger display as opposed to going to, like, 20 hours of battery life. It's already, like, you can use it all day and it will be fine. And that for a laptop is better enough for me. I want two days.

Let's just push it. See what happens. I just feel like at this point, I'm so conditioned to bring my laptop charger and charge it obsessively that like laptop battery life is almost meaningless to me at this point.

I have 10% battery life right now. I completely disagree. I never charge this laptop. Really? Yeah, I mean, I used it all day at the Apple event. Can I tell my story about the photos? I got the first photos of the Vision Pro.

You did. In the world on the web. Neil I ran around saying old man still got it the rest of the day. The rest of the day. Just shouting it as you're shooting famous. Years of being a baby blogger with no access. I'm like, whatever, get out of my way.

I pushed Alex Heath out of the way to take this photo with my 11-year-old Nikon D-7500 with a 40-millimeter microlens. The single greatest hands-on photo setup of all time cannot be replaced. Don't even try me. And you know what? You want to talk? I still beat you. I got that photo up.

I broke the only rule that we have, which is don't open lightroom at the event. I opened Lightroom and made it good. I was eating cookies. I was done. Anyhow, they did all of that. Process the photos, whatever. Didn't plug in my laptop until I got home that night. I live logged the thing. I did the photo hands-on of the Vision Pro and the Mac Pro. Whatever other coverage, it wrote as fast as I could that Vision Pro hands-on. That night I got home. I still had 15% battery.

What if I'd had a whole other day? How much more 11-year-old camera is you? could I have gotten out of this computer. No, to be clear, I'm pro as much battery life as possible. But I think in this case, especially with the M2 air, we've seen it hit the like throttling threshold earlier than we might like. And I think in this case, I'm maybe happy to make a little bit of a battery life trade, given how good the battery life already is, in order to eke out a little more performance. We don't know that that's the case.

Yeah, we're going to have to find out. We'll have to see when we review the thing. But if that's the trade they made, I'm okay with that trade. Apple very much also sticking with 8 gigs of RAM and the base models of these things, which they have more or less been proven. Like it's fine. You can definitely hit the swap on these computers. Pretty fast, yeah. I'd like them to go up on that.

But we'll see what happens. They announced macOS Sonoma. We've already talked about most of the features in there. Game mode is really interesting. Yeah, I think the big surprise here was that they just kind of skated right by it that you can now just play Windows games on this. Like they're using the emulation software, they're kind of the emulation back end that crossover uses to run kind of wine-based emulation of Windows games.

And essentially it's so that developers can test it and see if it works. It just works. Yeah, we're already seeing people. There was somebody who was tweeting, I think they got Cyberpunk 2077 running on a Mac with basically no work. Yeah, for like 15 FPS, but on an M1 like MacBook Air. So I'm really, really curious to see kind of what's going to happen there. I'm definitely not going to be putting a beta on my SSD to test it out this weekend.

No, definitely not. No, who would do that? Totally not. Who would do that? Sonoma also has new support for WebKit-based apps. You can just put them in the dock. They can send notifications. I'm very excited about this.

No one else cares. I'm telling you this is... We were all excited, just not as excited. The politics of web-based apps and desktop operating systems. are the future. And then there's obviously the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio, which we should spend a lot of time on. I think we will in the next coming weeks. The Mac Studio basically gets the M2 Ultra, which is two M2 Max chips put together up to 192 gigs of RAM.

The interesting thing, we were told repeatedly with 100% confidence. The M2 Ultra in the Mac Studio has the same performance as the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro. So if you don't need PCI slots. So the only reason you're buying the Mac Pro is PCI slots. There's no more thermal headroom in that chassis. We were told that if you attempted, if you wrote like a power virus, the Mac Pro's additional cooling capability might. But like only in that most extreme circumstance, are you going to see it? Yeah.

But like in almost every situation, the performance is exactly the same. And it's very clear to us. Like, Alex, what you just said is exactly right, that if you have pre-existing expansion slot PCI needs, the Mac Pro is for you. It's in the same chassis as before. Dan was very annoyed that it's in the same chassis before. It's a beautiful chassis.

I think it's great looking. I don't know why Dan was so annoyed, but Dan is very annoyed. I think the cheese just... The cheese grates, it's beautiful. But it is functionally exactly the same computer just in a bigger thing with some USB ports and expansion slots.

And the Mac Studio, I think Apple seems to think that if you are sort of starting from scratch, you are vastly more likely to start with the Mac Studio. But if you're, like, dropping into a bunch of existing equipment, which lots of people are, A, there's a good chance you're upgrading an old Mac Pro, and you're just going to drop this in. And B, this is a thing you need. So it's kind of like if you know for sure that you need it, the Mac Pro is for you, and it's also $7,000. If the Mac Pro isn't the thing you know for sure, you obviously need, the Mac Studio is probably for you.

Like, that seems to be very clearly how Apple thinks about this. Yeah, and I think that's always been true, the Mac Pro. The fascinating thing is a lot of slots. If you look at the pictures when it's open, there's two cards in there already. The first card's kind of a fake. It's not actually in a slot. It's just sort of like at a 90 degree to give you basic I.O. The second slot, the second card is a slot.

So you can pull that out and take out like the HDMI connectors and put in whatever else you want. And then there's the six slots below it. The six slot is a compatibility slot for older PCI cards that don't play well with the new standards. It's all like backward compatible focused, don't way that Apple. is not often backwards compatible focused. But they have to be for pros. But for pros, the thing is, like, you cannot put a GPU in there. Yeah.

It's not allowed. That's the thing I keep thinking about, like, what are the PCI slot us in this case? It's so much pro stuff. It is ultra-fast networking. It is ultra-fast SSDs. It is SDI connectors for displays and cameras. 99% of us don't need or care about. Yeah.

You are working in a gigantic video editing house, a post-hast. and you have effectively turned 60 Mac pros into a single Mac Pro using SDI and, like, networking standards. And now you can do it again. And now you can do it again, right? Like, there's stuff here that you want. It's not an accident that the demo Apple uses is Avatar, the way of water. It's like it is deliberately for people way at the end of any spectrum you can think of.

And if you're making, if you're James Cameron, you're probably going to buy one of these. And one of my favorite things that happened at WDC was Neelai asked. Apple people, have you considered the societal implications of giving James Cameron this much computing power? Which I think is a very important thing that we are still not spending enough time talking about. But like it's for James, it's for the James Cameron's of the world and kind of nobody else at this point. But the two interesting parts are one, you have to do a big paradigm shift. How much GPU do you need? There's two GPU options. Which one you're not, it's not the same as your AMD and your Nvidia GPUs. What if you want to use some of the cool Nvidia stuff

they're doing around machine learning and generative AI and training. Nope, that's not going to happen on this platform. And then how much RAM do you need? Because guess what? You have to decide it purchase. That's brutal. And it's not a terabyte and a half, which is what you can get in an old night. Does that equal 192 gigs of RAM?

It's unified on the chip between. And their argument is the SSDs are fast. Having unified memory means the CPU gets memories that's as fast as GPU memory. And the GPU memory gets as much memory as CPUs normally get. That tradeoff is worth. And it's like, we're just a little. I mean, the M1's been out for a while now, but we're still pretty early in the overall experiment of unified memory. Yeah.

Especially for these kinds of applications. And I just don't know the answers. So, like I said, I think we are going to need to spend a lot more time talking with these computers and what they mean. Because a split that is occurring is between Apple's ideas about GPUs and Nvidia's ideas about GPUs. And they're just – Nvidia is much more in charge of the PC ecosystem right now than Intel, in my opinion. 100%. They're in charge of like half of the gaming industry too, just for PC gaming, of course. But yeah, they have really outsized role and hate Apple. Oh, these companies hate each other. It's so bad. So much. All right. There's still a lot of stuff. David has promised me that he can lightning fast get through all the cool stuff that Apple didn't announce the keynote that happened to WDC. David, go.

This was an unusually non-keynotee WWDC in the sense that they had so much to get through and they spent so much time on the Vision Pro. that there wasn't even time to get through all this stuff. What they did announce in the keynote is one of my favorite genres of Internet article right after WWDC, and this year is a good one. So here are a bunch of the ones that I think are very cool. You can now clean up verification codes in mail and messages. They'll auto fill even if you get them in an email, which is awesome. You get EV charging with real-time availability.

So if you're driving an EV, you'll get more information in Apple Maps than before. There's pet recognition in photos in iOS 17, so you can search for like the name of your pet or my dog as opposed to having to dig through just like it works with people now. You can put people's pronouns in your contact info, which is great. You can ping your watch from the control center, which is awesome because I constantly leave my watch places. You can link to notes in other notes, which all my productivity nerds will understand is very exciting. You can automatically categorize your grocery lists and reminders, which Dan talked about for six and a half hours in the last episode. Thank you, Dan.

Multiple people can share air tags, which is cool. So if you have like a thing you want to track, multiple people can track at the same time. You can toggle settings and shortcuts within a spotlight search. So if you search for Wi-Fi, you can actually turn Wi-Fi on and off right from the spotlight search results. You get a thing called visual lookup in paused video frames. So you can pause a recipe and you can pull the thing you're making out of it and actually use it to look it up from YouTube, which is very cool. You can share passwords and pass keys across devices and with other people. You can use any email address or phone number in your I-Cloud account to log into your I-Cloud account so you don't have to remember which is

like your official iCloud password. Stage manager is much better. There's some like free form windowing that's much closer to what we've been looking for for a long time. And finally, there is a thing if you have Apple TV 4K and a HomePod that just enhances dialogue so you can actually hear what the hell is going on in all of your TV shows. There's more, but that's all my favorite stuff. I have to say saying stage manager is much better.

Bold, David. We'll see. We will see if stage manager is much better. I would say I am on the record more than most as someone who thinks stage manager sucks and should be killed and buried. But they said free windowing several times to us. That's true. So I am hopeful that Apple has finally done the thing it obviously should have done the whole time.

I hope it's the jankiest free windowing ever. Just because I want to see David's face. Just to torture me. Yeah, thank you. Here's what I want to say. I've been thinking about this a lot as I was going through that list. One, as they add free windowing to the iPad, just turn the iPad into a Mac. It's fine.

Second, they are almost completely out of excuses to add a touch screen to the Mac because they always complaining that people have their hands tired holding them up in the air, and they announce the Vision Pro where you control it by waving your hands around in the air. Just saying, everybody. Let me touch my screen. All right, we got to take a break. That's enough Apple talk. We're going to bring on Liz.

We're going to talk a little crypto and we're going to be out of here. We'll get back. It's a virtual cast. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love.

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cloud.AI slash vergecast and check out cloud pro which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode clod dot a i slash verge cast all right we're back liz lapato is here hey liz hey liz hey i'm operating as a fucking unlicensed security exchange in the u s a bro oh my god well it's first we're gonna do we need to know so before we get started with liz talking about it's going with Binance, literally as we've been recording, Alex Heath is live blogging and internal meta all hands. Very good. I just want to read you two quotes. Here's Zuckerberg on the Apple Vision Pro.

I really think their announcement showcases differences in the values and vision that our companies bring to this in a way they think is important. The quest is about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer and doing things together. By contrast, every demo Apple showed was a person sitting on a couch by themselves. That could be the future of computing. But like, that's not the one I want. The like is important. I think that's very important. Yeah.

That's so good. Like, it's really good. It's a good, Zuck response. And then they showed the Twitter competitor, Project 92. We think it's going to be called Threads. Surprise. It looks like an Instagram comment section. Oh, my God.

Because it's being built by the Instagram team. Shocked. I'm very excited about this. It's going to be interoperable with Activity Pub. The joy on your face just now. Yeah, I'm very excited about this. But that is really, like, I cannot overstate the extent to which it just looks like the Instagram comments, which is fine. It's super looks like the Instagram.

The question is whether they're going to activity pub the rest of Instagram, which I think would be very fascinating. But that's on the site. You can go look at that picture. You can go read the Zuck quotes. Alex is not more in command line. He is, we just spent a bunch of time with him at the Apple event. Alex Heathen Reporter Mode, very good. It's good.

Very good. A burst of pure energy. Anyway, that's that. Go look at it on the site. Liz. Hi. Speaking of Reporter mode, there's been a lot of crypto news this week happening in the background of the Apple event. And it appears that people are going to go to jail.

What's going on? Well, we only have civil suits so far, though I have to say the Binance civil suit kind of looks like they've stapled a criminal complaint to a civil suit. So I'm very excited for whatever the DOJ is going to do. But there are a couple of things. The first thing is that Binance and Coinbase have both been accused of operating as unlicensed securities exchanges in the U.S. Now, obviously, Coinbase is going to fight this because it's an existential threat to their business model. And they're like the good boys or like the wannabe good boys. They're the wannabe good boys. And like to be clear, the facts, like the fact pattern in the cases are really different. So like if you look at the, the Coinbase complaint, it's pretty buttoned up and it's a little bloodless. And that's fine. That's kind of what I expected out of Coinbase. I didn't expect any like group chats called wired fraud or like, you know, exciting things from the chief compliance officer where he talks about using VPNs to get around geo fencing. you know, like the fun stuff that we've seen already from the CFTC complaint against finance. But at the same time, doesn't the SEC basically also just kind of say Coinbase is illegal? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So it's like it's a very like kind way of being like your business is a bad one. Stop doing it. Well, so here's the thing is like how I'm looking at it or how I'm thinking about it anyway. Like to the degree that Coinbase has done anything illegal, it's like a procedural crime. Like they're not screwing their customers. There's no wash trading. They're not being accused of like any of a variety of things that would make you lose confidence in Coinbase as a company of custodying your tokens, right? We just call those things FTXing now.

They're not FTX. Right. You know who is FTXing, though, is fucking Binance. Right. So the Coinbase one is like the SEC is basically saying most crypto tokens are securities to run a security, to run an exchange. you need to be registered and follow those rules. None of you have done that illegal. Yeah, right.

And Coinbase is like, we don't think that's illegal. And like, that's like a good natured sort of like university debate club argument. And they have known for a long time the argument is coming. Binance, I mean, I saw one note from like their chief compliance officer that's like, bro, we're running a fucking unlicensed six-year-dose range, which is how Liz started the episode. Like, that's crazy. His name is Philip Lim. He's like not named in this complaint, but he is named in the CFT.

Or sorry, not Philip Lim. Samuel Lim. He's named in the CFTC complaint. There's like a bunch of stuff here where like it's trivially obvious who likes talking, even though it's like, oh, it's CEO A, it's CBOB, who by the way, singing like, I don't know if you were catching that, but they are already testifying. So I thought the Binance complaint was like really interesting because I think there must be a criminal case coming because so much of what's happening here does seem like.

DOJ stuff. And we've already heard a little bit about like, Binance sanction evasion stuff. And like, there was a Reuters report last year about like, Binance coming in to meet with the DOJ to talk about maybe doing a plea deal. And like, we haven't seen a plea deal. So maybe the DOJ is amassing more information. I don't know. But like, to me, these are, these are, there are several remarkable things going on. Thing one is that, um, we had a bill introduced, uh, last Friday. So, right. before both of these complaints dropped by House Republicans to deal with this sort of token issue and decide whether they're securities or commodities. And if they are securities, giving them a route to become commodities. And frankly, I don't think this bill's going to go anywhere because the Democrats

control the Senate. But it is really curious timing to drop both of these suits immediately afterwards. And the Coinbase suit was dropped the same day that Paul Gruel, who I think is their chief legal officer, was testifying. So, you know, that's like a cute little present from the SEC. Very polite. So that's interesting to me. But both of these are massive cases. And both of them have the possibility of setting policy about what is and is not a security when it comes to digital assets. And I don't necessarily know that the SEC has the resources to try them both at the exact same time, which makes me very suspicious about like a forthcoming criminal complaint with finance. Because the DOJ is so well-staffed and under no pressure at all.

Faces no political headwins whatsoever. Definitely not busy with some other stuff. But the case against Binance is essentially, like, it's amazing how similar it seemed to me to be the case against FTX, which is essentially we have a lot of money and we're using it in thoroughly bonkers, totally inappropriate, extremely illegal ways. But Binance didn't run out of money. But Binance was also a big part of the reason FTX ran out of money. money. Right. Like, Binance started the run against FTX that led to all of this in a very real way.

And now is kind of being chased down the same road, it seems like. Not to say I told you so, but I did point out at the time that CZ had basically painted a gigantic target on his back by kicking all of this off. And like, this is like the first of what I think is going to be several arrows getting fired at because, like, yeah, you're right. Like, they absolutely, like, that absolute, like, Twitter beef, the run that then revealed the fraud, like, intimately involved. But what's interesting here is that there seems to be a bunch of allegations that feel pretty FTX-like. So all of these, there are all of these corporate entities that are controlled directly by CZ.

You have CPCZ holdings. You have Binance Holdings Limited, which is what runs Binance. You have Sigma Chain. You have Merit Peak. and you have coin market cap. And the ones that matter for our purposes are Sigma Chain and Merit Peak, because some of the allegations in here involve stuff that feels very familiar. So, like, for instance, we have Binance transferring $17 million from BAM trading,

and that's the parent company for Binance U.S. to Merit Peak. And then the BAM CEO being like, where did you get that money? And where is it going? You don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Yeah, just keep going. The literal quote is, I'm on a wild goose chase to make sure that we have knowledge of where $17 million is moving around. Wow. So let's zoom out.

We all lived through Crypto Summer. Expressing any skepticism about crypto at that time was met with a just open hostility that we were stopping the future of all finance. And the questions we were asking, I would say, we're not overly skeptical. It was more like, hey, doesn't it seem like your trading securities? Right? Like, doesn't it seem like these are all just Ponzi schemes? The line's going up for no reason. What's the utility of these, like, pretty basic questions?

And it feels like maybe that industry has come to its logical end point, right? Where, like, they are almost like banks or almost like stock exchanges, and now they're just going to have to be those things if they want to survive at all. Yeah. I mean, look, here's the thing. It's funny you mention things going up for. no reason because we have allegations of wash trading in this complaint. And for those of you who are maybe not familiar with wash trading, it's when I buy an asset from myself for an increased

price to make the asset price go up. And it is like illegal. Like that's like that's not a question. We have we have laws about that. It's illegal. And so one of these entities, Sigma chain, is alleged to have been involved with wash trading on Binance.U.S. And, And there were a couple of periods where that seems to have been a big deal. And there's, again, a quote here where they're talking about volume and one employee messages, the CEO and is like, FYI, these are all Sigma Chain and then lists 20 account numbers. Oh, no. So that's not great.

So when we say things went up for no reason, I'm not convinced there was no reason. I think there may have been some market manipulation involved. And you may in fact remember, like, when we were talking about NFTs during this time, one of the use cases I suggested was money laundering. And money laundering and wash trading often go hand in hand. So I am, like, very interested in all of this because reading between the lines, it seems like there's some like real wild shit going on at Binance. And right now, Binance, CZ is obviously under fire. And he's saying that this might affect Binance U.S. but not Binance overall, correct? Like, What happens? This is my favorite thing you did all week, Liz. I just want to give you credit for this because what that tweet is is the tweet that everyone sends right before it all falls apart where they say, this only affects our stuff in the

U.S. Most of our stuff is elsewhere. It's no problems. Everything's going to be fine. Or they say the reverse. Like this will affect everything, but our customers in the United States will be fine because whatever it's regulated. And what almost always happens right after that is absolutely everything collapses spectacular.

And you just, you did this quick post on the site that was basically like that tweet and then a bunch of links to all of the bad things that happen to people right after they tweet this. And I just very much enjoyed that. Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's, you know, you wind up with these weird grooves in your brain after like covering this beat for too long where you see one of those tweets and you go, uh-oh. Um, although I will say that like, again, if there is a ton of wash trading going on and a lot of this stuff is CZ himself, then maybe it doesn't collapse because CZ doesn't want his own business to collapse. I don't know. Um, there are just like a lot of lot of question marks to me now around Binance period that, you know, didn't necessarily exist

before. Like, you know, I gossip a lot. That's like one of my favorite things to do. I grew up in a small town. Like, it's just one of my hobbies. And even the people I talk to who like CZ think he's pretty cutthroat. So I'm interested to see how this all plays out because I think that he is kind of getting painted into a corner here. And what happens after that is like Question mark, question mark, question mark. And he's not going to do the altruism. Let me go on the New York Times stage to talk about all of my crimes. The code conference is coming up, Cez.

Hey, Cecee, you want to come on the verge cast? Bring it on. Cizzi on the verge cast, are amazing. All right. Sold. Screw crypto. Let's talk USBC. I just want to come back to that big zoom out question again.

We went through the crypto hype cycle. We are now in very much crypto winter. Even like Andresen Horowitz, Mark Andrewsson's like publishing long screeds about why AI is fine, actually. just let it have your job. Is it over? Is it coming back? What's going to, what's going on here? It's a good question. I don't know if it's over. I will say that one thing that I think about a lot is that crypto launched into an extended period of low interest rates when there was a lot of free money like flopping around. And we're now back in a normal interest rate environment. And so that's affected a lot of stuff in tech. It's affected a lot of startups. It's affected a lot of VCs. Obviously it's like affected some of the banks. And I'm interested to see what happened. happens to crypto in a normal interest rate environment because it has never existed in one before.

Do I think all crypto is over? Probably not. I have a hard time imagining that like as entrenched as Bitcoin and maybe even Ethereum are, that they they go to zero anytime soon. But I do think there's a lot less, there are going to be a lot fewer token projects. And I think a lot of these token projects are going to have trouble continuing. So we'll see. You know, crypto people like to talk about going through cycles and of like crypto winter and like we rebuild during crypto winter. And it's true. There have been like periods of like serious dips in the market where like people stop being as interested and then there's another bull run. But all of those things happen in a previous interest rate environment that we are no longer in. Yeah. The thing I've been trying

to figure out is I think on the one hand, if you're a crypto true believer, there have been so many versions of this already that you're just sort of immune to it. Like, If you've gone through all of this over the last 18 months and you still believe in crypto, I don't know that this is going to blow up that belief in any kind of meaningful way. But at the same time, if ever there were going to be two dominoes that topple the rest of them, I would think it would be Binance and Coinbase. That they're kind of, as it has been set up, Binance in particular has been so ruthless in order to be kind of the biggest last thing standing.

And you would think if it collapses or even, just sort of takes a real meaningful hit, that that might scare people again. I don't know. I've been, I'm like, I'm torn between those two ideas. Well, there's that, but it's worth keeping in mind that defyy is also a thing. So there are decentralized exchanges that are difficult to meaningfully shut down, even if you decide that they're illegal. There are like technical ways to get around some of this stuff. But I agree with you. I think, you know, there's one possibility is that crypto like quits, and that's the end of it. One possibility is that like, you know, there's no more crypto in the U.S. continues elsewhere in the world. And, you know, some of the best arguments I've heard for the

existence of crypto have to do with countries outside the U.S., basically. I'm not sure that crypto is a perfect solution for some of those problems, but I understand where people are coming from when they find it interesting. Okay. You know, it's something we could argue about. That seems like a reasonable topic for debate. So those are two possibilities that could happen. There are a couple of other possibilities. So one of them is you may know that there, again, I mentioned legislation early here. There is a possibility that because this litigation takes so long, we get some kind of legislation that renders these lawsuits moot, which is the best case scenario for Coinbase. Because Coinbase, I don't think is going to settle. I think this is an existential threat

to them. They're going to fight it all the way. That's going to be years. Like the big ripple case, which was one of the previous things about whether crypto is or is not a security, is still ongoing. like from the previous, you know, iteration of the SEC pre-Gensler. And even Coinbase's response to the lawsuit was very funny because they essentially said, like, please just tell us what the rules are. And I don't know how genuine that is or not. And I think they'd obviously happily exist in a world without rules for as long as possible. But their response is basically like, just stop yelling at us and just tell us what to do.

And I kind of get that. I'm a little sympathetic to that, actually, because they were allowed to go public. And one of the things that the SEC does is review all of the disclosures of, you know, what the risks are. And like if you're a marijuana company, because the SEC lets a marijuana company go public, even though it's illegal, there is a disclosure that marijuana is federally illegal in the filing, right? There are disclosures in that filing, if you go back and look, that suggests that there is regulatory uncertainty. But the disclosure is not we're running an unlicensed exchange and the SEC may crack down. and you know the SEC got a chance to take a look at that. So I kind of am a little sympathetic to them feeling jerked around.

Yeah. And like I said, Brian Armstrong and Coinbase, they're the ones who've been like, they've been the good boys. Yeah. They're trying to be. Yeah. I mean, like, he's like made a documentary about how hard it is to be good. You know, like about himself. No one should watch it.

It was just like, but like that's like when you're trying the most hard, right? And whereas like I think CZ and finance were like, where the renegades and no one can stop us, which I, you know me. That's my son. You love a pirate ship. But that's the one that the King of England comes and shoots your pirate ship at the end. Like Coinbase was like, what if I've got colonial metaphors for days and I'm just going to stop it. But it's like, what if we were the ambassadors of the crown? Like that's the game that they were trying to play.

I do think that the FTX collapse significantly changed the political environment around cryptocurrency. in such a way that may have influenced this particular lawsuit. I don't know whether that's just that it sort of lit a fire under the ass of the SEC or something else occurred. But I do know there's been a longstanding turf war between a lot of these federal agencies about who actually is in charge of regulating crypto. And it's part of the reason that we haven't seen a ton of action until relatively recently. So I'm really curious to see how this plays out politically, separately from how it plays out legally because the political factor is, I think,

undeniable here. Yeah. All right. We'll see what happens next. Liz, quit posting away during the Apple event when finance was collapsing. It was so good.

One of the funniest dual, like the Verge contains multitudes. It was beautiful. Deeply entertaining. Liz, always great to have you on. Oh, thanks for having me, guys. We got to wrap this thing up.

We've done a lot of Vergecasting this week, I want to say. We've also made Nelai a full half hour late for a meeting, which I'm very proud of. It's so good. I feel good about that. I would rather be hanging out with you guys and any of my suit stuff that I got to do.

But great to see you, Liz. Thank you both. That's it. That's a Vergecast. Dopamine fast. I'm going to do it. I'm going in the darkness like Aaron Rogers when I come out and play for the Jets.

It's going to be great. That's it. Rock and roll. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media podcast network. The show is produced by a.

me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Mentors. That's it. We'll see you next week.