The Vergecast - WWDC 2022: Apple's iOS 16, new M2 processor, macOS Ventura, and more

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss all the important announcements from Apple's WWDC. Also: USB-C will be mandatory for phones sold in the EU ‘by autumn 2024 and the Xbox... game streaming TV app feels almost like the real thing All stories discussed this week: Apple announces new flagship M2 processor  Apple announces redesigned MacBook Air with M2 chip and MagSafe MacBook Air and Pro (2022) versus MacBook Pros (2021): spec comparison Apple CarPlay is expanding with new features that can integrate deeper into the car Apple iOS 16 brings massive improvements to lock screen and messages Live Activities is a new iOS 16 feature meant to improve notifications Apple will let you edit and even unsend texts in Messages in iOS 16 Apple announces all-new Home app at WWDC iPadOS 16 takes a step closer to laptop-level multitasking Apple’s macOS 13 Ventura with new Stage Manager tool announced at WWDC You'll soon be able to use an iPhone as a Mac webcam Continuity Camera: Apple explains how your iPhone will become a Mac webcam watchOS 9 introduces new running metrics and medication reminders  Apple's medication feature is a step in the right direction Apple's tvOS looks destined for a slow year after little WWDC attention  Apple Pay Later is the company's take on a buy now, pay later service  USB-C will be mandatory for phones sold in the EU ‘by autumn 2024’ What the EU’s new USB-C rules mean for the iPhone The Xbox game streaming TV app feels almost like the real thing Taco Bell opens its first ‘Defy’ restaurant that prioritizes ordering via app The year of the NFT What unions could mean for Apple with Zoe Schiffer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on the Vergecast, we'll get into all things WWDC. A redesigned MacBook Air, the new features coming to iOS and the Mac, and Eli explains why he thinks the carplay features coming might actually be vaporware. And at the end, we'll talk about the Xbox TV app news, and whether or not this is Microsoft's game streaming dream finally coming to reality. That's all coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets,
Starting point is 00:00:28 Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in.
Starting point is 00:00:54 Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar 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.
Starting point is 00:01:23 Tap in with us. Hello, welcome to the broadcast. The flagship podcast of Dragon Drop. the technology that you thought you knew, but which the richest company in the world demoed, as though it was a startling innovation in 2022. That's the tagline for Dragon Drop. It's the Dragon Drop Alliance actually put out of press release. I'm your friend, Eli.
Starting point is 00:01:45 David Pierce is here. Hi, I'm your friend who will always remind you that Command Tab exists, and that's actually just the best way to move around your computer. That's very true. Alex Tranis is here. Hey, Alex. I'm still just thinking about Dragon Drop Alliance. Like, who all is in it?
Starting point is 00:01:59 There's got to be one. It's like a pop punk band that I've. would very much listen to. Someone has got to have tried to form an industry coalition about drag and drop. Yeah. But there was one for plug-in USB stuff into Windows, and Microsoft was very proud of it, and I don't remember what it was called, because honestly, that was, I drank that information away.
Starting point is 00:02:17 That was in my 20s. It's against God now. You don't need it anymore. They don't need it anymore. If it wasn't called the Plug-in-Play Alliance, it should have been. So I think we can just, we can just go with that. Lots of news as week. David I were at WWC in person, which.
Starting point is 00:02:32 was very fun. We'll talk about that. There's some gadget news. There's a new Taco Bell that's on this list for some reason. There actually is a bunch of Xbox news. They're doing game streaming on Samsung TVs. We've got to talk about all that. I want to start by just saying something very cool. This is our 500th Friday episode of the Vergecast. So we've, Alex has done miniseries and all this other stuff, but Friday episodes, the Vcast classic, this episode 500, which is kind of incredible. It's crazy. Thank you all for listening for over 10 years. If worth this from like the InGadgett podcast like 15 years of this podcast which is crazy to think about. I drank most of those memories away too. But thank you all for listening. We've got like
Starting point is 00:03:11 big upgrades for the Vergecast in store. We're very excited about them. We're not ready to talk about them. But I would say in the next couple weeks soon. We've got some ideas that are coming and we're excited to show them all with you. I think it's going to be a good time. But it's episode 500 of the Friday, Vergecast classic. The upgrade is you're only going to be able to download it from the Windows app store on a surface RT. And you can drag it from one place to another. Seamlessly drag it from one display to another. But yeah, it's been, I would say the show, we launched the entire verge off the back of this show. Yeah. We brought that audience over. And for the folks who've been there the whole time with us, that's incredible for the folks
Starting point is 00:03:50 who've joined us over the years. It's a pretty fun show to do. It's a pretty great community. So thank you all for listening. Okay. Now, get out of here. We can talk about computers. It's like my dad instincts. like expressing affection kick in. It's like, now get out of you. Go make some money. Let's talk about WWC. Broadly, David,
Starting point is 00:04:08 we talked a little bit. It was great to be there in person. I know there was like a lot of donks about Apple brought us all out there. And then we watched a video. Like, yes, that's just like inherently, optically silly that that occurred.
Starting point is 00:04:21 But it's not like during a live WWDC. Like I was raising my hand and being like, Tim, number of questions. Like, it's always a presentation. I mean, in a funny way, you could actually argue it was better to watch the video live, like actually being there, than sometimes it has been in the past to sit in the audience. Because there are a lot of things that, like, when they do those AR demos, that's always my favorite when it's just like a person walking around on stage with their iPad.
Starting point is 00:04:47 To be on the stream, you can see what they're looking at and they cut around and it looks sort of cool. We're just watching a person wander around a stage looking at an iPad. And so it definitely was like we flew to Cupertino to watch a video. But A, that's only like a small part of what WWDC actually is. And B, like, the vibes were just so good. People were so happy to like be around these people again. It was actually at Apple Park in the spaceship in their like huge gorgeous cafeteria, which was really cool.
Starting point is 00:05:16 It was just, I don't know, it was fun to be back, I think, in part just because it was fun to be back. But also like they did the event pretty well. thought. They did a good job. David kept describing the vibe as the first day of summer camp. It was. Like, everyone was just happy to be outside together. Right. And then, like, the point is, like, not the presentation. The point is afterwards, we got to hold the computers in our hands. And I saw Phil Schiller and Greg Jawswiak and Tim Cook walked in, like, he was Ariana Grande, surrounded by security, and everyone got very quiet. You know, like, it was a very strange moment. Like, first there was clapping and then there was a dead hush. And it's like, is he going to like the
Starting point is 00:05:53 MacBook air? And he, you know, he went, looked at it as though he'd never seen it before. What if he'd just thrown it to the ground? It would be amazing, like an amazing troll would be like if he was like, what is this? Well, that's kind of what it felt like, because normally he used to have Johnny Ive who would like give him the tour of Apple products. But this time he just sort of walked around by himself being like, hmm. Well, no, it was a huge entourage of people.
Starting point is 00:06:14 He was nowhere near by himself. No, but there was no one to like give him the, you know, dog and pony show. It was just Tim Cook sort of casually considering a laptop in front of. of hundreds of TV cameras. It was truly on. There's that. And there's also like the event itself. Like, I don't know. And it feels amazing to even remark on this. But we were all together. Like, we were sitting behind Marquez Brownlee and next to Renee Richie and Joanna Stern was two rows in front of us and Jason Snow was there. And I, like, I high five gruber. Like, we were together and being able to watch all those people react to the news all at once is a
Starting point is 00:06:50 very different feeling than watching a streamer and be on Twitter. So yes, it's very funny that we went to Apple Park for the world's fanciest drive-in movie. I stayed home. I wore my pajama pants, just rolled over off of my bed to cover the event. It was great. It is easier to live vlog at home, especially off the stream. Except for this one where the stream was like six minutes behind or something. We lived in the future by being there. No, no. You guys were almost exactly two minutes ahead of us. And so I kept like, I was like reading the live blog and I'd be like, all right, next person, get ready. And they're like, how do you know? And I'm like, the live. And also David and our rusty.
Starting point is 00:07:26 Like we invented a bunch of these moves and then we completely forgot them. Uh-huh. Like I was like, did you bring a camera? And David was like, I did. And we had to like go find fear in our video producer and like get an extra camera off him. So we're going to get better at. But that part was great.
Starting point is 00:07:39 I just like want to say that like we haven't done events in like three years. Google had like a handful of people at I.O. There's been a handful of weird like Samsung one in one out moments. Apple just like did it. Yeah. And it was great. It was cool to be there. It was cool to be in the Steve Jobs Theater, although we weren't actually in the theater.
Starting point is 00:07:58 We were just in, like, the beautifully lit hands-on space above the theater. Is that where they showed off the laptop was in the lobby? Yeah. Well, the wildest thing, and I've definitely mentioned this before, the wildest thing about the Steve Jobs Theater is there's speakers all around it, like, hidden in the grass and you walk up a long path to it. And they just play, like, New Age music. And it sounds, I kept describing it as, like, the wedding march that, like, Tom
Starting point is 00:08:22 Cruz would have played at a Scientology wedding. Katie Holmes. You know, like, it's like, yeah, it's like exciting, but at the same time, it's like, also we might all die in a sense to Zeno or whatever. Like, it's like really like, ooh, uh, like music. And it just fills the space around the Steve Jobs Theater. It's always wild when you walk in to that like whole facility from the outside because it is suddenly just like suddenly music is playing.
Starting point is 00:08:46 And like you don't see the cars. You don't hear them. It's like gorgeous like landscaping. And you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, but it's like, is Johnny I've going to murder us all? Like, that could happen in this environment. Yeah. Is someone going to emerge from the brush and either show us a laptop or kill us?
Starting point is 00:09:01 It's not, not like, the circle is what I want to say. Which Nil I did, in fact, say to an Apple employee as we were walking around. And she was like, he, he, he, you. All that was great. But that's, like, the fun of it. Like, you just don't get that at home. And, like, it just made, I was rewatching the hands-on videos. Like, I am just, like, way more excited about a MacBook error than legitimately a MacBook
Starting point is 00:09:23 error is exciting. because I was just, like, happy to be there. Speaking of much, let's talk about the air. So they announced the M2 processor. Well, they announced a bunch of stuff. They announced all their software stuff. We'll go through those in turn across platforms. Most of the stuff they announced is, like, massively cross-platform, which is interesting.
Starting point is 00:09:37 But there was one big piece of hardware news, which I got right. All of you told me, it was going to be more M1 stuff. And I called it on the M2. New MacBook error with an M2 chip. It feels like it wants there's a lot to say. And then it's also a new MacBook error with an M2 chip. Yeah, like, it's very, very interesting because, okay, this is their second generation technically, right?
Starting point is 00:09:57 Like, we've gotten a bunch of different processors from them, but those are all kind of under the same general architecture and design and stuff. And this is slightly different architecture. It's a slightly different process that they're using, the 5 in P instead of like the 5 nanometer. So it's like a slightly enhanced process for slightly better speeds. And it just felt like that's like every processor announcement is that. It's always, hey, we got a new processor.
Starting point is 00:10:26 Okay, cool, what's new about it? It's faster. Okay, cool, what else? Faster? So it was like, yes, this is very exciting. This is a huge monumental moment, but also like, okay, cool, it's, it's faster. It's amazing that a Mac laptop has the same performance conversation problem as the iPhone has had for years. Yes.
Starting point is 00:10:45 Like, the A-series chips and the iPhones and iPads are so much faster than any competition that all you can say is, like, I guarantee you that this will, last for 10 years because you're, you're not going to need all of this overhead. And like 10 years from now, you'll be at the limit of this processor. Like, that's amazing for all these products. But like comparing it to a Windows laptop, which is almost certainly thicker, almost certainly has lower battery life and a performance penalty. It's like, well, now it's even better than that. It's like interesting because the M1s are kind of based on the A14.
Starting point is 00:11:15 And the M2 is, is, appears to be based on the A15. And so we're seeing like the same kind of jumps there. But we'll potentially see some downsides too, right? So a lot of the work that's gone into the M2 are on the power efficiency course. So theoretically, this is going to be like much more efficient. But then they've also put a lot of work into the clock speed, although they didn't disclose those clock speeds. But it should like, it's going to run faster in that way. So it's like, it's interesting how they're doing it.
Starting point is 00:11:43 Because usually it's we're going to do more power efficiency and we're going to do better clock speeds. But it's all one processor. And here because we have these like power efficiency cores, and then we have these other cores that are just to do like hardcore power. It's all split up and weird and wonky. I just want to get it in my hands and test it and see if it's actually better. Because we're also hearing that the GPU can actually draw more power. So the GPU theoretically, if you're playing a game,
Starting point is 00:12:10 you could theoretically see less battery life on the exact same game between an M1 MacBook error and an M2 MacBook Air. So what we don't know about that is how big the battery is. So they were very clear in a variety of ways that they had designed the chip for this enclosure, which is funny because they're Apple. And like, if you didn't do it, like, what are you doing if you're not doing that? Like, if you're not designing the chip for your smallest enclosure, like, whatever. But so they were very clear they did that. And it's not a, it's not that wedge shape anymore.
Starting point is 00:12:42 Right. Right. So it's like a traditional slab. And it's thinner. And the answer is, you. You know, when we were talking to the executives wandering around, like, it was very much the wedge shape is iconic, but getting away from the wedge shape made us let us even out the thermals. Let us put in a bigger battery and let us make it actually thinner because we're not packing everything towards the back of that wedge. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:13:04 So I think there's a balance between, yep, maybe the chip can draw more power, but they've added more battery inside of that thermal envelope. You know, they also announced the 13-inch pro with the M2 with no design changes whatsoever. Yeah, announced is even like a strong term for what Apple did. Like they just sort of offhandedly mentioned that it existed and then moved on. I just developed a theory. I've got a theory for why this exists now. Okay. So you can't actually do if you were going to test the speed and the battery life and everything between the M1 MacBook Air and the M2 MacBook Air, you couldn't do it, right?
Starting point is 00:13:39 Because totally different like designs, different batteries, everything. But you could do it with a MacBook Pro. So maybe it just exists. so we'll all buy it. So we'll benchmark the M2. Just exist for benchmarking. Let's go in a second. So just to finish the battery life conversation,
Starting point is 00:13:57 one thing about being there live and not doing it at home is I couldn't screenshot their graphs and then work myself up into a rage about the graphs. I had to like wait until I got back to the hotel like hours later. And then I was like, do I have the juice to be mad about graphs? And it's like, let's see. And the answer was like, did not. There weren't as many of them this time. There was one that just said 87% and had two lines.
Starting point is 00:14:20 And that was like, they were like, that's enough. The axes are completely there. As always, the axes are labeled in almost meaningless terms. Like, watts and then like relative performance. So we have no idea what they're measuring. Then the one that was useful was Photoshop times. Right. They said the new air is 1.4 times faster than the outgoing.
Starting point is 00:14:43 It's not outgoing technically than the old M1 error. but we actually don't know which M1 they were measuring. So it might be the outgoing one because only the base model remains. So it's like, who knows? Yeah. Right? It might be the fastest one. And maybe the Celest one we just like don't know.
Starting point is 00:14:57 And then their battery life claim is the one that is like the most bonkers because Apple historically has been so good at making battery life claims. All they said was 18 hours of video playback. And Joanna has like done an amazing video on this in the past and like diving deep into what Apple means by. this. And what they mean by video playback time is you watch a video at like low brightness with all of the radios turned off on the computer over and over again for 18 hours until it dies. That's not how you use your computer. I don't understand. It's like at home like in the dark.
Starting point is 00:15:30 Yeah. So like do I believe that Apple historically delivers great battery life across its products? I do. Right. The M1 is it's spectacularly this. My M1 pro, I have a 16 inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro. I got tripped up by optimized charging because I just plugged it and I didn't open. open the lid and let it figure out that it was on Pacific time instead of East Coast time. Oh, no. It didn't charge to 100% in the morning. So I opened it to get ready. And I was like, ooh, I don't have to spend the whole day to Apple with like 70% battery. So I charged it to 91%. I went to Apple. I live logged the whole event. I published the hands on post. We air dropped
Starting point is 00:16:06 a bunch of stuff. We were on the Wi-Fi. I came home. I worked a little bit. I watched two episodes of Stranger Things. I closed the lid. I worked again the next morning. And like, 24 hours later, the battery was at 17%. Insane. And I was like, this isn't ridiculous. And you had your radios on and everything. Yeah, I was like, I was like using the hell out of this computer, like for a day and a half, right? So like, do I believe, like, I'm pretty sure that Apple's good at this.
Starting point is 00:16:32 I just think their stats are getting increasingly in the realm of like ludicrously useless. Yeah. They're just finding fancy ways to be like, it's very good. We're so much better than everybody else that it's not even worth comparing move on with your lives. I mean, that's what they did in the phone space, right? Yeah. Like the phone space for years, we all knew that they were better, but like they were never going to like Qualcomm, they just left them in the dust. And so it's like, we're not even going to bother. Like,
Starting point is 00:16:58 we got the new, the A15, go. It's great. Cool. Moving on. And, and they're kind of reaching that space seems like, potentially, they're going to be able to do the same for laptops, maybe. It does not feel like anybody is competitive with this new error. Yeah. We should ask, you know, like, Monica spends all over time reviewing laptops. We should like ask her when, it's time for her to review this laptop, but just looking at it, looking at the performance claims, looking at, you know, we'll see. Like, there's just a sense where they've taken another leap and we'll see. The thing about battery life measurements on the Mac, which is like particularly hard, is on the iPhone, their estimates are really accurate because they collect all of the
Starting point is 00:17:33 usage telemetry from everyone's phones. And then they have like a model of an average day that is averaged across everyone's phone in the world. Like, you know, Apple's like differential privacy way of doing it. And they can't, they can't quite do that with laptops that can run any arbitrary code. We've talked a lot. Like, how can I recreate your battery model? And they're like, you cannot. Right. And then with Mac, they're like, it's 18 hours of video playback. It's too brightness with all the radio offs in the Apple TV app alone. And it's like, well, I can recreate that, but why? Who would do that? The next thing to talk about is the webcam, probably. Yeah, we can do that. It has one. It has a notch in the display. The display is bigger.
Starting point is 00:18:11 It's a 1080p webcam. It's a 13.6 inch display, which is bigger than 13.3 on the new pro. You can have feelings with a notch, but I don't see them on my laptop or my phone anymore. So, like, whatever. The camera looks nice. And my theory with that camera is that it's not cropping like all of Apple's center stage cameras do. So it might actually look good. Impossible to know until we get it.
Starting point is 00:18:36 Yeah, I mean, the only thing we saw, I do think it was very funny that you and I, when we both walked up to the MacBook Air, instinctively did the same thing, which is open FaceTime and look at our own faces. Like independently of each other. This is the first thing we did when we both walked up to this computer. But yeah, it looked really good. But that room is like perfectly designed for great natural light. So it's hard to know. It's the most nicely lit room in the world.
Starting point is 00:18:57 Yeah. But it is definitely some measure of an improvement over what has come before. I think how much is we're going to have to see in a review. Do you think it's notable that they didn't do center stage on it? Like, I mean, it is arguably for like why it looks better, but why didn't they do center stage? There are laptops don't have center stage. iPads and desktop Macs have center stage, which I don't understand either. But so, like, who knows?
Starting point is 00:19:21 Feels like this could have been the moment to move it from the iPad. No, I think they should get rid of it entirely. I think they should find whoever invented Center Stage, break into his office and delete it. And then move the camera to the middle of the iPad and solve all your problems all at once. Like, Center Stage is a great idea in theory. and it's a fun demo, and then in practice, it's just like zoom it all over the place and it makes your camera look worse.
Starting point is 00:19:44 When it goes back to your point about the cropping, right? Like so much of Apple's theory has just been ultra-wide cameras with tons of cropping. And I'm not even sure there's a version of the camera that is so good that that works, but with the camera quality that currently exists in these webcams, it just doesn't. And so you end up sacrificing actual good-looking picture
Starting point is 00:20:04 for like a nifty thing that follows you around. And my thing is like, I'm very happy to just like swivel the screen of my iPad. Like, just make me look better in the camera. How many people were like walking around their iPads in, in studio displays set in their homes? The only demo anyone ever gives is little kids running around the living on. That's the only one.
Starting point is 00:20:25 Which obviously you never do with your laptop. That's only for the iPad people. And the IMac people who plop it down on the coffee table. All I'm saying is the story of the studio display, even after this update, It still looks bad, and it looks bad because they put a real camera in it, and then they cropped it all the way down to nothing. So I'm hopeful that because there's no center stage here, this camera's an improvement. Am I expecting anything better than the 1080P camera on the 16-inch M1 Pro machine? I'm absolutely not.
Starting point is 00:20:53 But in perfect light, it looked very nice. We should briefly talk about the 13-inch pro, which, again, the chassis was designed for an Intel chip. So, like, now it has an M-2 in it, and it still has a touchbar for some baffling. reason and like the answers were we still make it so we keep making it the reason is not baffling at all the reason is like every i think the simplest answer here is just like apple has a bunch of these left and it's not that hard to just put an m2 in it and there are a bunch of people who will buy it like yep like oh look we have a way bigger enclosure than we need and it's a pretty good laptop that people mostly like yeah their point was it's a second best selling laptop in the world the air is
Starting point is 00:21:33 number one and the 13-inch pro is number two. And I want to be like, but because it's like the slightly more expensive one. Even by that logic, you made the air better. Maybe now make the pro better. But it's like Talladega nights. It's like keep like the air shake and pros bake. And it's like that's how that's going to work. You know, like you're just along for the ride, dude. Like you're not listening for you. It does sound like eventually they'll change it. But I asked about the touch bar and they're like, yeah, we just didn't change the design. And that was the only answer any of them would offer. Okay, I'm being told we have to take a break, and then I'm going to have a lot of feelings about CarPlay. Like, the rest of the show is just me talking about
Starting point is 00:22:11 car play. Buckle up. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of helpful tools you can take advantage of,
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Starting point is 00:24:29 Upwork.com. Okay, we're back. We do have to talk. It's not just going to be carplay. I'm going to try to hold it in. I just, I still hate Alex for saying buckle up. We moved past that way too fast. We had a whole ad break and I'm still mad at Alex for saying buckle up.
Starting point is 00:24:47 All right. Neil I drive us there. Oh my God. I have to go. We'll just start with CarPlay. So they announced a whole bunch of stuff, a bunch of iOS stuff. And at the end of the iOS segment, they're like, and we've got the future of Cardplay. This is just a sneak peek.
Starting point is 00:25:01 You know, in iOS 16, you get a bunch of widgets and all the stuff. And they're like, now what if your whole car was widgets? right? And so like, they're like, you asked for it and you get it. And the first thing they showed was like HVAC controls, which is like a perfect thing to add to carplay. Right? You're in carplay. You just want to like move the fan up.
Starting point is 00:25:21 You've got one of those cars where they've taken the buttons away. Again, it makes sense. And then they move over to the instrument cluster. And they're like display like the speedometer or the map. What if your RPM gauge looked like a progress bar from OS 10? Like old OSU and like, Aquas. and like Aqua. Like they're like, and themes, we'll do themes.
Starting point is 00:25:39 And it's like, you don't even do themes in your other operator. Like, so like this all goes by in a flash. And they put up this huge slide of carmaker logos. And they're like, our partners love it. These cars, this is just a sneak peek. Cars will be announced at the end of next year. There was one one other beat of that before you get to how insane that whole thing was. They started the whole car play thing by basically saying car play is so good that people
Starting point is 00:26:03 won't even buy a car that doesn't have it. I think it was something. like 79% of people that were surveyed said they wouldn't buy a car without car play. And so it's like the positioning here is like Apple is basically like we make the only car software anybody likes. Nobody will buy a car without car play. So like we're taking over, bitches. And that was like that was the whole vibe of the rest of that presentation, which I thought was just fascinating.
Starting point is 00:26:26 And those numbers are largely true. Like every car maker has had to get on board. Like Honda didn't do it for a long time and they had to do it. Mercedes didn't do it for a long time. They had to do it. BMW will sell you carplay as a subscription. They're like, yeah, you nerds will pay $39 a year for carplay. And, like, that's how they sell it to people who, if you, um, you get it when you, like, lease it.
Starting point is 00:26:47 But then if you, like, buy a BMW, like, it's crazy. But it's also just, like, not, like, the tension in the auto industry is all these carmakers know that they want the steering wheels to go away. And then you're going to be trapped in their, like, Netflix cocoon where they want to, like, program advertising to you. And we would, on decoder, we have all these car companies CEO come on. And they all say things like the way we're measuring the success of our car business is how many OTAs we deliver to our center stack because we want to compete with Tesla. Tesla notably does not support car play because for all of Elon's many faults, he knows that giving his interface away to Tim Cook is a bad idea.
Starting point is 00:27:25 So it's true that carmakers make garbage software. And I keep making this joke. But like every car reviewer, if you watch the videos, they're like just gesture at the screen and they're like, carplane Android Auto. That's what that is for. But what that's really for is you get maps on it and you get your music on it. And those apps aren't even necessarily Apple's apps. Like it's like Spotify and Google Maps show up on your center screen and that's what
Starting point is 00:27:50 people use it for. They want the maps back, especially if they're going to do self-driving, especially if they're going to do advanced driver assist. They're not going to give you the instrument cluster. And like, so they put up the side with the logos. Andy Hawkins goes in emails every company. None of them are committing to this. Well, Paul started.
Starting point is 00:28:09 Well, let me just read some of them to you. So BMW, currently we have placed a clear focus on further enhancing our IDrive user interface system. As part of this development, we will continue seamless integration of Apple's ecosystem. Integral to these efforts will be an evaluation of how the latest innovations announced that WWC can be integrated in our solutions. Volvo, at this time, we have nothing to share. Toyota, we can't comment on future products this time. Ford, thanks for reaching out. We do not have any additional information.
Starting point is 00:28:34 GM. GM has no commitments to announce this time. Mercedes is very good. Mercedes is the most polite, German get the hell away from me I've ever heard in my entire life. In general, we evaluate all potentially relevant new technologies and functions internally.
Starting point is 00:28:51 In this context, we also hold discussions with Apple. So the subtext of all of these, like my read of this is like someone who gets emailed these statements all the time is that like the lowest level person on the car play marketing team called the first phone number they could find at every one of these companies and was like was like car play right and the person on the other end was like yeah car play and then they were like they're going on the slide done and done like lock it down so then the two that are beyond this there's pole star which Alex mentioned by the poll star in Volvo are like sister companies there are volvos
Starting point is 00:29:25 that are like literally like the Volvo Xc90 T8 powered by Polestar is like that's the name of a Volvo you can buy. And isn't Polestar like an Android computer on wheels basically? Yeah, Polestar runs, I'll get to that minute. So but Polestar says Apple CarPlay will come to Polestar 2 as part of an update later as well. So they don't even support it now. But it's coming. So they're just excited to say that Apple CarPlay is coming, period.
Starting point is 00:29:51 And then we're also thrilled to announce that the next generation of CarPlay will be coming to Polestar cars in the future. Totally wide open. That could mean anything. Yeah. But they're thrilled to announce it because they don't have car plane now. So that's Polestar like, okay, someone said something medium
Starting point is 00:30:08 committal instead of, in this context, we also hold discussions with Apple. And then there's Stalantis, which makes Jeep and Ram and Fiat and all that stuff. And then there's Stalantis, which makes RAM and Jeep and Fiat and
Starting point is 00:30:24 every, this is a big European conglomerate. Their statement is, this is more of an Apple operating system for automotive applications rather than a carplay upgrade. We have not made any announcements regarding that system.
Starting point is 00:30:37 So they're like, they're like Trojan Horse Alert, y'all like, no thank you. So Stalantis is interesting, Pulsear is interesting, Ford is interesting. A bunch of companies have signed up to run Android on their cars. Ford, Google is just building it.
Starting point is 00:30:52 Jim Farley was, I just talked to him, And he's like, Google and Ford are working hand in hand. They're like making a custom version of this thing. That's going to look like Ford Sync, which maybe they should reevaluate. Whatever. But it's like Google runs on the car. Polestar just runs Android automotive.
Starting point is 00:31:08 Does Polestar run gas? That's the thing on top. Google automotive services. There's Android automotive and gas runs on top of it. And then there's also Android Auto, which is a whole other thing. I'm dying. That's the car play can better. It's very bad.
Starting point is 00:31:20 It's very Google. All of them have their own messaging service. And then Stalantis just forked Android and is building its own Android thing with Amazon. So like you have this like mobile phone code running in cars all over the place. So it's very natural to assume what Apple showed with this version of CarPlay is like Apple code running on the car. But we asked about it and it is not. It's all running off your phone. And they didn't say whether it was wired or wireless.
Starting point is 00:31:47 They're like, but all of this is on the phone. There's no code on the cars. And that means your speedometer is running off of your phone. And I was like, what happens if the connection drops? And I'm like, we'll have some fallback for it. And it's like, you just keep going. Like, pedal to the metal. So that's just like from a base technology perspective, unclear how the thing will work.
Starting point is 00:32:09 Unclear why those logos were in the presentation when none of those partners want to commit to this at all. Maybe those are partners of the existing car play. And Apple just to David's point, just like up the leverage on them. The other thing that's weird is that, you know, you might say, oh, this is just a preview of the Apple car, but the Apple car will almost certainly be an EV. This thing had like gas gauges and MPG figures. It's nuts. And then on top of all that, if you look at the screenshot they showed you, and you're like, this design is bonkers. Like, it makes no sense.
Starting point is 00:32:43 No. The colors are nice. It's side-scrolling widgets that go all the way over to the passenger seat. You know what I definitely want to do is reach all the way over to, like, where the glove compartment is to change. the song that I'm listening to. Like, this is terrible. Right. And then they've got a calendar widget.
Starting point is 00:32:57 They had a air quality widget that is separate from the temperature widget, which was on a different part of the screen. Like, air quality was higher. Like, if you're looking at your, you're going to see air quality before you see what time it is. And also the time is little analog clocks instead of just like numbers. No, those are the world clocks. So there's a digital clock.
Starting point is 00:33:17 Oh, sorry. On the, like, down. There's a little 9.41 p.m. But then you have a big world clock for Tokyo in New York City. Because that's what you always need in the car is to know several different time zones at a glance. But wait, Neal, I want you to explain something to me that you mentioned just like in passing the other day that I still have been thinking about, which is like the one screenshot that Apple showed of CarPlay where I was like, okay, this is like a genuinely good thing that I hope exists, was the thing where it just had the heads up display and it just showed you the maps.
Starting point is 00:33:46 And I was like, this is a thing that should obviously exist. And your response was that could already happen and just no one wants to do. it? Is that true? So CarPlay right now has the ability to support various size screens and remap the interface to different size screens. And it also absolutely has the ability since iOS 13 to appear in the cluster or the heads up display. And a lot of some carmakers, maybe one or two, have done it. So if you want your Apple CarPlay from Apple Maps to be in your center screen, the carmakers to enable it. So then how do you get from that exists and no one really wants to do it to Apple taking over the rest of the instrument cluster also? Like that's the the leap these companies are
Starting point is 00:34:32 going to have to make is so enormous. I don't think you get there at all. I think this is the exact same thing we saw with Apple in entering the TV space. They were late there. They didn't want to like actually have their operating system be on the TVs natively. They wanted to sell their own hardware that runs the operating system that you plug in, and then they just got lapped again and again and again by Android. And the exact same thing is happening in the car space. And like, okay, yeah, like Ford is going to go build a whole big, fancy tons of displays on their dashboard, and they're going to put Android on it, and then you'll be able to plug your phone in and just switch over to Apple. Like, that's the plan, as I understand it. And like, I mean, that's cool,
Starting point is 00:35:18 but you're always going to have those weird interoperability things, right? You're always going to be like, well, I should actually use the Android version because if my phone runs out of battery or disconnects, I don't want to know. I would still like to know the speed limit I am going. Well, so the idea, at least, again, I think this is all kind of like paper. So the idea, as it was presented to us, was that the car is going to connect its internal systems to the phone. And the phone is just rendering the display and some of the. controls. So a car is still going to know how fast it's going. Like the speed your speed is not being calculated on the phone. It's the graphical display of the speed. Right. And there's like some
Starting point is 00:35:58 bidirectional communication. But isn't it weird that you would have one speedometer when you don't have your phone with you in the car and a whole other speedometer when you do? Like just the idea that my driving experience completely changes based on whose phone is plugged in. And also like you and I were driving the other day, Nilai, and we used my phone for car play. So that, like, it's like, this stuff just doesn't make sense with how people use their cars to me. There's a reason we keep asking car CEOs to come on decoder, right? There's a reason they all want to be on decoder.
Starting point is 00:36:27 They are all trying to recharacterize themselves as effectively software companies, right? And the car is a phone and wheels. And, like, there's all these endless cliches. And you can, we did an entire roundup episode of what carmakers say in Decoder. Pee-poo to Jed's on. It's a great episode. go listen to it. But they all have the same problems, which is they know that the primary user interface of the car has moved from the steering wheel to the center stack, right? And like,
Starting point is 00:36:53 the steering wheel is becoming less and less important over time. And they have to add more and more driver assistance features, and eventually that steering will might go away. And then what you want to do is you want to program a bunch of entertainment in the car, or you want to change how you sell cars, or you want to sell advertising on those screens, or you want to take a 30% cut of every purchase that happens in the Instagram app on your car. Like, they see the revenue potential for all of these things. They want to strike the partnership with the EV charging networks and direct you to one and take a cut of whatever.
Starting point is 00:37:23 Like, they see the money that can be made there. Are any of those ideas great? They are not. But they, like, all of them are basically advertising or recurring revenue services or whatever they are. But they see all that money that they've, the phone makers have made in these ways. And they're saying, well, our cars are phones on wheels. We're going to make that money too.
Starting point is 00:37:40 I think a challenge they will have is people will still have their phones. So I'm not sure that that will happen for them. But that's where they're going. It's as exact same as the TV space, right? Like everybody, they saw the ad revenue. They saw all the things they could do. So they all went and said, we're going to build it here. And then ultimately, not everybody, but a lot of us just go get a set top box.
Starting point is 00:38:01 Yeah, we get a like a Roku or an Apple TV or something. Yeah. It's the same thing as a phone. Like ultimately people said, no, I'm going to bring my own operating system to this. The difference is when you're like ties into it. TV crashes or your Roku TV or your Roku box doesn't play nice, you're not hurtling along the highway at 55 miles an hour. Right? Like, it's just like a very, the stakes are very different. That's what kind of like blows my mind that the plays that Apple is making, that Google is making,
Starting point is 00:38:27 that the car makers are making is so similar to the ones for TVs. Because one, we've already seen how it plays out on TV. Like, you guys know exactly what's coming. You know exactly how this entire back and forth is going to play out. And two, the stakes are so much higher. like actual lives on the line stakes versus just like I was going to eat my dinner and watch Obi-Wan and now I have to go restart the TV. Well, just think about it this way. Like Ford right now sells Blue Cruise in, it's a F-150, a handful of like Lincoln's and the Mustang Loggie.
Starting point is 00:38:58 That's like it's auto. Yeah, it's advanced driver assistance system. It has mapped out a bunch of highways, split-divider highways in America. That's the only way to work. But you can take your hands off the wheel. The system monitors your eyes. if you look away for too long, it beeps at you, put your hands right. And it works really well. People love it. Okay, like, just think about the components of said system. Like, it has a map of highways
Starting point is 00:39:19 it works on. It is looking at you. It is driving the car. Like, what of those components are you going to give to run on your phone? You're going to give to Apple to take over. Are you going to give them the blue cruise button to run on the iPhone? You're going to give them the map? Or you don't let them drive the car? Like, or are you just going to let them re-render all of the, of that UI, however Apple wants. Like, they're never going to do it. Well, and then the flip side question for Apple, which is notoriously unwilling to give its code to other companies, how much of that stuff is Apple going to be willing to give
Starting point is 00:39:54 to car companies to put in the car for fail safes and for when your phone, Bluetooth, dies and whatever? Like, neither side has any incentive to, like, play nicer than they have to here. And actually, Alex, you're pointing about TV. like this is the ultimate TV problem. Like every TV maker has its own weirdo operating system now. So app development has just like, it's a real fallback to like various weird HTML5 systems and extensions. Fine.
Starting point is 00:40:22 So your your HVAC system is going to be the HBO Max of your car. It's not a good plan. It's never going to work. So we'll see. Like my thinking, just having asked around after this is that Apple announced it to see what would happen. right to like open the door to put some pressure on those partners whose logos appeared on the thing and that you know at the end of the day they've got two moves they can say if you want car play at all you've got to support this 79% of your buyers won't buy a car that car play and then see who breaks first and then everyone also slowly fall along just like conda did back in the day or they're just going to put out their own car right and it's like or we'll kill you like will Zuckerberg you and then the car industry is kind of like but you've been threatening us for this car for a long time yeah best of luck so is this kind of of them saying don't go and partner with Unreal to have your weird schumorific car UI just partner with us actually that's a great uh just that comparison we talked about us with
Starting point is 00:41:19 andy last time right like if you are Rivian and you've just spent all this money on Unreal and you're like doing all this stuff and you've built this UI and you want to compete with Tesla are you going to hand it over to Apple like you're absolutely not going to do like that's your differentiator on top of the fact that you have a pickup truck that some people can like five people have and Elon still figuring out what to do with the wipers on the cyber truck. Like, wiper. Actually, it's just the one wiper. There's an amazing picture of the cyber truck that came out.
Starting point is 00:41:47 And it's just got one wiper that doesn't go all the way up the windshield. And so your passenger gets nothing. And you as the driver, by the way, also get nothing on that side of the windshield. And then it might not go all the way. It's a very good. Don't be tall at it. Other people focused on many other weird problems with this car, which like Tesla's in general have weird problems, but it's a pre-production so you can't fault them.
Starting point is 00:42:07 but like the wiper is like is that you've been working on this wiper for like eight months dudes and you only got to one there's only one of them it's not that hard it doesn't go all the way it doesn't go all the way there's someone there's a lot of theories of the wiper telescopes all the way out but it's like why why would you build that instead and then it doesn't telescope out one day and you're out in the rain trying to pull it all the way out what is the purpose of it tells Why not just make the long wiper? It's very good. I encourage everyone to go look at this picture.
Starting point is 00:42:40 It's incredible. Anyway, that's car play. We will see. I told you I had a lot of feelings on it. But they said end of next year. By the way, cars that are going to be announced at the end of next year, they're already done. Car World is slow. So if you're talking about a car that we announced 18 months from now, like that car is
Starting point is 00:42:55 well and designed. Yep. It is in full like manufacturing ramp. The car makers are on like four or five year cycles. So we'll see. I think they just wanted to announce this and see what happens. That's very much the sense that I got from everybody. That was part of iOS.
Starting point is 00:43:08 David, there's a much of iOS stuff that you're like in love with. There is a bunch. So, I mean, the big announcements, if I had to like boil it all the way down are basically new lock screen, a bunch of wacky new ideas about notifications, and which I guess sort of goes hand in hand with the lots screen stuff. But basically the idea is you can personalize the hell out of your lock screen. Now you can choose different fonts. You can have different pictures.
Starting point is 00:43:28 It'll be sort of helpful in helping you figure out what looks good and what doesn't. But there's just like infinity new. to play with on how your phone looks, which I mostly think is great. I'm very curious to see how that interface actually works because the only thing Apple showed was just like swipe back and forth to change stuff. And I'm like, that seems like a giant pain in the ass. But who knows? So that's one thing.
Starting point is 00:43:50 The second one is a bunch of new ideas about notifications. They're moving the notice, like there's a now a notification bundle down at the bottom of your screen that I don't totally understand. And there's also live activities, which was described to me as basically the The notifications built on the tech stack of widgets. So you get that kind of like constantly updating information, but it lives in your notifications. So instead of like a new notification, my favorite example of this is like the one in my own
Starting point is 00:44:16 life is like I get a notification every time somebody on my fantasy football team scores a touchdown. Instead of getting a new one every time, it'll just show me my fantasy football team score all day. Like that's a good thing. And then the third thing is messages. I think like there's a bunch of other little things going on. But the big one was you can now mark a messages on red, which to me is like, they're
Starting point is 00:44:35 could have just skipped the rest of WWC and I would have been happy because now I will remember to text my friends back. You can edit a message after you send it for a period of time. I think it's 15 minutes. And you can also unsend a message. So it's all like nothing sort of life changing and new. It's just a lot of these like little quality of life make your phone make a little more sense to you stuff.
Starting point is 00:44:53 Mostly I'm into it. I'm very curious to see if anybody picks up live activities. And I know it's a thing you have feelings about too. Yeah. There's also improved haptics too, right? Oh yeah. Dan Seaford on our team has basically not. shut up about how excited he is that you get haptic feedback on the keyboard for like three days now.
Starting point is 00:45:10 He's like, it's just a game changer. This changes everything. This is the biggest news. But Dan also still uses Gboard, which means I don't trust his opinions about phone keyboards. I turn off all the haptics on my phone. Same. Yeah. Stop blessing in me. I'm good. Like, I'm good. It shows me the letter after I type it. Like, that's pretty much all we need here. I'm good. Android phones used to like do haptics for real, but they had horrible haptic engines. So you like push the button. It like, I hate this. I'll give it a try. Live activity, you're right, I'm very excited about live activities.
Starting point is 00:45:41 Like, it's the first new notification style we've seen in a long time. There's a lot of, I would say, Windows phone live tiles embedded in there. Also, Android widgets. These are things that have existed other places. Android doesn't send you widgets as notifications. That's true. Not this, yeah, that is true. But like the interactive widget-y thing is more Android-y.
Starting point is 00:46:00 So I think that's really cool. Like, the thing that we have learned since is that only Apple, example's first party widgets get to be interactive and like have control like music player will have like buttons and like whatever and it's a live activity third party ones are just display so sports scores and things like that we'll see i mean i i think first you have to see if anybody adopts it like really what you're saying is no one's going to use my app this notification is going to send people into my app it's just going to remain as a constant and as a information display surface that's related to my app and we'll we'll see like i think that's that's
Starting point is 00:46:35 It's a big decision for a lot of admakers. Yeah, well, that's kind of the weird tension, right? Like, as Apple does, like, it's rethinking notifications, it's putting more information on your lock screen. It's, like, making the widgets more useful and putting them more places. And the thrust of it is, like, spend less time opening apps on your phone. Just look at your lock screen. Yeah, and, like, Apple even talked about it, the idea that, like, Craig Federigi, he was at the
Starting point is 00:46:57 live recording of John Gruber's talk show, which was great. And I'm not sure when it's coming up, but everybody should watch it. And he was talking about the thing where you open your phone to do one thing. and then sort of get lost in another app and how they want to start to solve for that. And I think one way you solve for that is to just make your phone a little more glancable, but you're going to do that at the expense
Starting point is 00:47:13 of every developer who makes an app on your phone that requires you to actually look at that app from time to time, which is like that tension is really fascinating. Yeah, I think, I do think like the ESPNs of the world will just do live activities. Like, we'll see. I'm very excited for it. It's the first new notification I'd in quite a long time.
Starting point is 00:47:29 Who besides sports? Like, I keep trying to think of other ones. And all I've heard were sports. Like they talked about sports. You guys talked about sports. What are the other, like, what would be a use case for live activities outside of sports? So, okay, so I'm looking at it. Here's one.
Starting point is 00:47:43 I have five notifications on my phone showing me calendar events. And I think in a live activities world, it would just be a persistent thing that shows me my next calendar event. Okay. No, that's just a widget. No, that wouldn't be a live activity. That's just a calendar widget. Oh, you're right, because that's not changing.
Starting point is 00:47:56 You want a notification of something that you're going to get another notification about. So sports scores is like the canonical one because Eddie Q loves him. some warriors. And so like, whatever. So that's like the easy one. I think if you want to monitor a stock price for a day, which if you're an employee, like maybe from time to time you want to monitor that stock price or a day, anything that's going to change over time, but that you don't want to monitor permanently is like a candidate for this. A really hopping WhatsApp group. A really hopping, maybe. I mean, like that would be like a thing to experiment with. Directions. Flight status. Flight status. Direct. Oh, that was, they demoed flight status. Oh, they did. Okay.
Starting point is 00:48:35 So travel stuff, right? You want to monitor it for a day, but you don't want a travel widget. You don't like monkey with adding and removing travel widgets. So it's like a temporary widget. Yeah. It's like an ephemeral widget. And I think that's neat. Like that idea has not existed.
Starting point is 00:48:49 It's a combination of many ideas that have existed. You just did a much better job explaining it than any other way I've heard it explain. Like the ephemeral widget. Yeah. I just like. I love that. It's, again, it's a remix of many ideas, including live titles, including much of Palm stuff.
Starting point is 00:49:04 but it's one of the first truly novel UI ideas Apple's had in the long time. And I think there's a lot of surface there. But as they were saying, like, there's tension with app developers. Like, if you're flight aware, you're not getting people to, like, open your app. Like, you're just sending them a widget that goes away after a day. Like, what is the enduring value of that relationship? But theoretically, you still need to get the app. You still need to pay for the app.
Starting point is 00:49:29 Yeah, but flight aware doesn't get to show me ads if I'm not looking at the app all day. So that kind of those ad-based developers are the ones who are going to, like, feel that sting. Or, I don't know, like, ESPN. Like, they want you to open ESPN, like, watch other streams and, like, read their content, like, do all the stuff in ESPN. I guess that's, unless you have ESPN Plus, that's ad-based, too. But, you don't mean, like, turning your app into a commodity information provider is, like, a real tension with these. But I think a lot of people are going to buy into them because the users will love you. And so, like, that's a good thing, too.
Starting point is 00:50:01 I mean, I think the similarity there is, like, between, media and aggregators, like news aggregators, right? Like, it's the exact same thing. Like, we want you to click on our site and look at our ads. Yeah. But would I, if in a world where we had an app, would I say, we should do a live activity for all of our life logs? I would be like, yes. And then like, our business side would be like, but no. And we would have to like figure it out, right? Well, and the thing about that is like, it's not that hard to draw a line to like Apple's big theory about the future of everything from that, right? Like, Apple has not been unclear that it would prefer you did not have an ad-based business model on your iPhone app. And Apple would really like
Starting point is 00:50:42 you to charge a monthly subscription that it can take 30% of. So if it can, like, incentivize you to become that kind of provider that people will just pay for and it just, like, pulls things to me at the best way. Like, that's what Apple wants. So, like, it's incentivizing this pretty heavily in a direction that also makes sense for Apple as a company. I thought it was interesting, though, that does this mean like we're even less likely to get RCS? Yeah, no mentions of RCS at all. There was a mention of Matter, the other standard. They said it out loud.
Starting point is 00:51:10 They said it out loud. We've joined the Matter Consortium and then they said nothing about what that means. They kind of implied that they created it. Well, because Matter is basically HomeKit. So like, there's a lot of family resemblance there. So they were like, and we gave them HomeKit. So they wouldn't steal your privacy because that's what they would have done. So that's cool.
Starting point is 00:51:30 Well, one thing that's interesting is, as of iOS 16, iPads can no longer be HomeKit hubs. Oh. I love this plan. Right. You need an Apple TV or a HomePod mini, probably because Matter needs thread, and those devices have Bluetooth radios and thread radios in them. No, this is actually an improvement, because right now, if you're maybe have a lot of Apple devices and you didn't understand what the hub was and you maybe activated on everything, not understanding what it is. on Alex. Then it would maybe always go to your iPad when you really didn't want it to.
Starting point is 00:52:06 And you'd be like, stop it. Or it would choose like the one Apple TV that you never use. This feels like not a hypothetical example in your life, Alex. Do we need to talk about this? Just hypothetical. It's hypothetical. It's just out there in the world. No, I'm honestly very excited that they're getting rid of it.
Starting point is 00:52:22 Because I think like how Apple has rolled out so much of like home has been really badly done. Like they have not explained it. how they explain everything about it, how to set it up, it is not super intuitive. I would not send my mom thread bulbs in a home pot and say, have fun. That would be hell. The calls would be nonstop. Like, I can send her a laptop and be fine, maybe. But she can't set that up.
Starting point is 00:52:48 And so, like, any move towards making it a little easier and getting rid of those excess choices in a really, like, choice fatigue scenario is great. The other thing they said just along those lines, like, an all new home app that's easier to use. And I'm looking at, I'm like, they change the wallpaper. And some of the button shapes are different. It's very hard to see what the difference is. You can see cameras. That counts for something.
Starting point is 00:53:14 No, you can see cameras in the current home app. Yeah, but they're higher now. They're not at the bottom. It's, I think it's clear. Something is happening in matter. And so, like, some of the stuff we get, but there's just very little, there's very little there. So, we'll see. I'm excited about the matter.
Starting point is 00:53:28 haulout. When Apple says it, ideally, that means it's close. It was delayed earlier this year. I was supposed to launch already. So, hopefully when this stuff comes out in the fall. So that's the iOS. What's really interesting is, like, we talked about widgets. We talked about messages,
Starting point is 00:53:44 which is on all the platforms. And we talked a bunch stuff that's coming to every platform. Like, iPhone stuff really is like the lock screen. They changed a lot. Themes. We didn't even talk about that. But yeah, you can change your clock font. And you can, great. Which is, I should say that's not nothing.
Starting point is 00:53:59 Like the, there is this subset of Apple users that I think is probably most Apple users who just like want to turn their thing on and it works. Like the percentage of people, I suspect, who have all of the Apple icons in their same order on their home screen is like massively high. But then there's a subset of people and it's like a growing group of people who like go on TikTok and see all these crazy things you can do with icons and all the wacky stuff people are doing with widgets. And Apple is, I think, trying to give those people, like, more knobs to fiddle with without making the sort of default experience harder. And that's, like, it's a good idea. And I think it's the right one.
Starting point is 00:54:38 I think it's going to be super, super hard to pull off. Because the flip side of it is there's now a million buried cool features in iOS that iOS never tells you about. And so the only way to find them is to, like, discover them from some weird TikTok creator. If you know one of the TikTokers who has built themselves a lucrative career being like, have you seen this setting on the iPhone? I want them on Decoder. Just like connect me because I'm dying to know what their lives are like.
Starting point is 00:55:03 It's like another day in the Lambo looking for settings that no one's ever heard about. Please tell me. Sitting in a Starbucks drive-thru. Got a pup cup for the dog. All right, let's take a break. We'll go through the rest of WDBC stuff and a little bit of a lightning around on gadgets. We'll get back. Support for this show comes from What Not.
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Starting point is 00:57:16 It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Okay, we're back. Should we just do the iPad and Mac together since Apple is smushing them together anyway. There's only one thing I want to talk about for either one of them anyway. Well, the story of both is stage manager, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:57:40 Okay. Stage manager. Alex, you go first. I've had, I've been yelling about stage manager to like strangers on the street for the last three days. So like, let me not go first. Alex, you go first. I was just yelling at everybody in Slack the day of.
Starting point is 00:57:53 Like, this is just, it's just another doc. It's basically just expose. But then you have a whole other. dock of Windows in addition to your dock of apps. And I really do question how many Windows the average user of iPad or MacOS has open at any one time that this is a super usable thing. Like that it fixes anything because right, right? Like I consider myself a fairly big power user and I don't have that many windows open and I can look at them all on one screen. I just did it. You guys don't know it, but I just did it.
Starting point is 00:58:31 Do people need more than that? Do people really have, like, they were showing in the demo, like 20 pages open. And like, do people really have that many open at all times? Tabs, yes. I'm the exact opposite from you. Like, I would, I would like to be able to see and interact with 11 different things simultaneously on my one screen. Like, is that a good use of my life and resources? No, but that is roughly how I try to use my computer at all times. And I think this is kind of the problem, right? Like the, the forever challenge of the Mac is that everybody uses it slightly differently. And especially it's now, it's very popular. A lot of people use it. And so Apple is like perpetually trying to do new things. And it's now caught in this like very
Starting point is 00:59:10 Microsofty world where everybody is so set in their ways that like there was a time when I think what Apple would have tried to do is like come up with something like stage manager, ditch everything else and be like, this is now the new way to use your Mac. We believe in it. We have killed mission control. We have killed command tab. Like stage. manager is the future. And now Apple's response is basically like, we're going to give you all the ways to do everything. And you can just sort of pick from this grab bag, whatever makes you happy. And to me, that's just a total cop out. And what it actually leads to is people using none of these things and just continuing to be confused by how their computer is supposed to work.
Starting point is 00:59:48 Well, they got the real windows problem, right? They can't take anything away. Like, Alex's mission controlling for days over here. Like, you can't be like in Nort Worth. taking that away from your work like they cannot do that so this operating system is 20 something years old it has some cruft and apples better than most removing cruft trail but there's some cruft i think they have stage manager on the mac because they built it for the iPad and if you have a bunch of iPad users and you're like and you should buy a mac to do the things you can't do in your iPad like you need a you need like a windowing environment that's familiar to them so now you have it and that like whatever like on the Mac though it just it feels like stage
Starting point is 01:00:26 manager this bizarre hybrid where you want the Mac to be more of like a single tasking operating system it really is like you go back to the early early days of OS 10 like 2000s OS 10 there was a purple button in the menu bar that was called single window mode and they announced it and no one knew what it meant and then Apple had to like figure out what it meant and it was like we'll just make this window big like it would make no sense and they eventually took it away but it feels like we're back to single window mode where you're just going to hit a button in one app will take over your screen and then you hit, you can like pick another one and like another single app will take over your screen, which is how the iPad works. And then on the iPad, what that gives you is you've got
Starting point is 01:01:04 more apps at once and you can like resize the windows and, you know, it's beta so that looks a little messy right now. So it's this weird tweener between making the iPad more like a Mac and making the Mac more like an iPad. And it's aimed at like a user base of maybe exactly four people who are Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Greg Padreke, and I just, I don't know who is like clamoring for this. They were, I think we're all
Starting point is 01:01:33 clamoring for Windows on the iPad. So they've achieved that in some strange way. Couldn't you just also command tab on your iPad? You can. You can. So it's, but when you do command tab and iPad, like literally like the whole thing like slides off. It's like a very dramatic
Starting point is 01:01:51 right like you're going from app to app you're like moving the iPad does not have the concepts of spaces right right so stage manager is about reducing the drama yeah I know it's just like the way the way Craig described it again at the talk show which I thought was really interesting was basically like the problem with the Mac and the way he described it was that you're always cleaning up after yourself which I actually thought was like a clever way of describing it right like the thing you do on your computer is like open a million tabs and apps and then just slowly prune and then open and prune and it's like it's it's it's it's gets messy so you're cleaning up. And then on the iPad, people were running into like, I need to be able to see multiple things at a time. And I want to like have the thing where I can be using a browser, but have an app behind it that I'm using for reference or whatever. And the thing that they designed to meet in the middle is stage manager. And I think Apple likes to have things that work in both places because I think people use both those devices. And the more Apple can like make the interfaces make sense, the happier it will be. But to me, it just feels like they made a thing that is the exact middle of the Venn diagram
Starting point is 01:02:53 and actually doesn't solve anyone's problem in any particularly meaningful way. It's like a C plus on both sides and they're like, great, we did it. So what's fascinating about that is that's only available on the M1 iPads. Right. Because the M1 iPads now support virtual memory
Starting point is 01:03:06 and like fast swap. So they can do it. Right before multitasking an iPad had the great advantage or great disadvantage, depending on your point of view, of the iPad ruthlessly calling applications from memory. So it would just like sleep
Starting point is 01:03:21 or suspend applications or quit them entirely just to preserve its own memory because you're only doing one thing at a time. And then, yeah, you got slide over in this stuff, but now you're limited to three apps. With M1 and swap and memory swap on Iowa 16, you can do Mac-like things, like multiple live applications at once
Starting point is 01:03:37 that you're quickly switching before. I think it was eight at a time, right? Like eight per pile. By the way, Craig referred to it as a pile of windows. And that's like, you guys, like, we're just quickly. They also announced a bunch of iPad stuff. They call it desktop class APIs and a desktop that files is getting improved to be desktop class. And then they announced real display support.
Starting point is 01:03:59 So right now when you plug a display into an iPad, it just mirrors your iPad. No matter how big the display is, you get like a 4-3 iPad in the middle of it. And that's what you get. Now it's a real extended display. And there's this whole sequence where he's like, and now I'm dragging one window from the iPad seamlessly to another display. I really wish you could all hear the noise that N Eli made in the middle of WWC. like cracking up in the middle of this thing. Oh my God.
Starting point is 01:04:24 He had to apologize to everyone else in our row for his outburst in the middle of crazy. As Craig is going, I can drag my cursor seamlessly. Neil I just goes, Ha! It's 2020, y'all.
Starting point is 01:04:37 I've been dragging between displays for a long time. Yeah. And then he did another drag and drop demo. He's like, I found this file in my desktop. And I just on the Mac. Oh, by the way, if you click on the desktop now,
Starting point is 01:04:49 all the windows go away. at the desktop, which is great. Very exciting. Yeah. Big improvement. Very good idea. But he's like, and then I picked up this picture and I just dragged it into this window. And everyone's like, ooh.
Starting point is 01:04:59 And I was like, that should came out like 1988. Like what are we doing? The Dragon Drop Alliance thinks about that. But it's real messy now, right? You've got the 329 iPad, which is an excellent Disney Plus machine for all the children in your life. You've got the iPad Air, which is, the iPad.
Starting point is 01:05:20 head air actually is more it has an m1 so you can do all this stuff then you've got the pros which like add a stylus and all this stuff but the app like now you can window and you can do a thing you've got stage manager and the apps run on a mac and it's like it's real messy yeah and like apples point to us every time we ask like i've literally started referring to this as like the Greg jawsweyak memorial question is like what's the difference between an iPad and a mac and the answer is always like People buy them both. They have them both. They love them both.
Starting point is 01:05:53 They should be easier to use together. Like, no one is making this decision the way that you think they are. And I buy it, but as they get closer and closer to each other, I think the risk of people actually making that decision gets much stronger. And I will say, I wandered around asking people like, did you just make a surface RT? Like, did you make that weird cut down version of Windows that only ran apps from the app store? And it's like, well, it's the iPad. So it's way more successful than that. When you squint, there's Windows.
Starting point is 01:06:20 and there's Windows RT. And it's like, I don't, I just don't know how long it's going to take for Apple to just give in and let the iPad run Mac apps or put a touchscreen on a Mac and let it go into iPad mode, right? I think the second thing is much more likely, personally. But yeah, I mean, your point about the iPad lineup, I think, is the right one. Because what's happened now is there is a version of the iPad lineup that makes sense next to the Mac, right? Like the $329 iPad is a demonstrably different thing than, any Mac. But if you're buying like the high-end iPad Pro with a magic keyboard and a MacBook
Starting point is 01:06:56 Air, like those are damn close to being functionally the same device over time, especially as like your average user is going to use it, right? Like the kind of person who is not mucking around in the terminal and editing video all day that like your experience of those two devices is going to be remarkably similar now, which I just think is fascinating. And it seems like Apple is doing that on purpose over time. And so I wonder like as the, things get closer how they're going to talk about it. Yeah. I mean, once or twice a year, I ask this question, and the answer is always the same. So we'll see. There's a little bit of other Mac stuff in this conversation. We have to talk about continuity camera. We have to.
Starting point is 01:07:34 I love that they're calling it a continuity camera. What an insane name for this feature. Like, they're like, what can we glue it onto? Continuity exists. So continuity is a feature that looks like you copy on a Mac and paste on an iPhone or use an iPad as a handoff. I did not put two and two together that that's why this is called continuity. I hate it even more now. Right. But that's like the overarching name for a bunch of all that stuff that like makes an iPhone and a Mac work together.
Starting point is 01:07:58 It's continuity. And now it works with a camera on your iPhone. And now you've got continuity in the camera. So now you can plug. I think you can do it wired and wirelessly. Yeah. But now you can use your iPhone camera as your Mac webcam, which is hilarious because that's like for years like, why don't you just put an iPhone camera in a Mac and they're
Starting point is 01:08:15 like, we got you one better. Is better the word we? would use. It's very specific iPhones, right? Like, it's only the iPhones that'll work with iOS 16. And they really pruned the number of devices being supported with this move. So, so your older iPhones aren't going to work with it. The ones you would be most inclined to, like, use as a webcam. Yeah. Like that, the, the, the Camo app has had a big run over the last couple of years because there were a lot of people who had, like you're saying, Alex, old iPhones sitting around with that app, you could just plug straight into your computer and use it as a webcam. And now the pitch is much
Starting point is 01:08:52 closer to, like, attach your actual phone that you use every day to your laptop, which strikes me as a much bigger, more complicated thing to ask people to do. I feel like I wouldn't want to do that unless, like, if somebody said, Alex, you have to go on BBC America in an hour. I'd be like, okay, I might do it for that. I bought camo the other day because I was in my hotel room after WWC the next morning and I had to be in CNBC and I looked at the web camo. I was like, I respect myself too much and I spent the money on camo. It's a good app. That's a great reason to use continuity. How many people needed a camera for an emergency for a TV op? Tim Cook sometimes. The funniest thing about that is I didn't have a mount for my phone. So I ended up with my laptop perched on a nightstand on top of an overturned garbage
Starting point is 01:09:39 can. And then I made like a triangle with the lid of the laptop and I wedged my phone in the triangle. And like if you watch that CNBC hit, it's just me looking terrified. Because one, I can't see what's on the screen because my, right? And it was nuts. And I was like, is this phone going to fall over? So Apple has to solve this problem of like phone mounts. So they said there's going to be a belkin mount. The phone mount they're showing that's stuck to the back of all these laptops is ugly. Yeah. Yeah. And it's ugly. I just keep thinking it looks like a like a little kid suction cup that's they just like ripped off of something and just went like through onto the back of your mac mounting your phone on the back of a laptop is uh difficult phones are heavy
Starting point is 01:10:22 so like your laptop lid is going to like go in the direction my one piece of advice for people who actually want to do this is buy a teeny tiny tripod and just stick that behind your laptop at a height where it just like if you sit at the same place with your laptop all the time which most people do buy a tiny tripod and stick it behind there. It'll work much better. So Tim Cook, please go buy a tiny tripod. Ha. So we'll see. This is fascinating. It's a good idea. Another laugh moment in the crowd was like, here's a mount we're making for the pro display XDR because it doesn't have a camera. And then everyone was like,
Starting point is 01:10:55 but I could use that with my studio display. It sounds pretty good. We'll see. That's exciting. That's a very obvious thing for Apple to do. I'm glad they did it. They announced Safari Pass keys that they're doing with the Fido Alliance, Google and Microsoft are doing that. That's very exciting too. that's basically using your devices as passwords and getting rid of passwords entirely. That's a big deal. And then this is really cool.
Starting point is 01:11:15 Both iOS 16 and MacOS Ventura, they're getting a thing called rapid security response where they can issue security updates without issuing operating system updates, which is cool. Can I say one other really quick thing about the Mac that I think is fascinating? And this is also, like speaking of things that are sort of coming to all these platforms, Apple seems to be really interested in upgrading Spotlight as a thing. There's now going to be a little button on the bottom of the iPhone that says search, like where the little dots are that show your home screens. If you hit that, it'll bring up Spotlight instead of having to drag down from the middle.
Starting point is 01:11:44 And also they're adding all kinds of like image indexing on the web to Spotlight. You're going to be able to do more actions in Spotlight. Like there have been rumors for years that Apple was going to build a search engine. And I actually think this is probably what that search engine looks like. Like rather than trying to knowledge graph the web the way that Google did, Apple is just going to like index your stuff and all the stuff you care about and just pull it all into Spotlight so you can do stuff. And I just think that's kind of fascinating. Spotlight is one of those like underloved features on a lot of these things that I think most people like don't know exists or how to use it. Every time I show it to somebody, they're delighted.
Starting point is 01:12:18 They're like, wow, you can do that. You can just like hit Apple in space and find an app. I will say that Apple putting a search button at the bottom of the phone looks an awful lot like Android. Yes, it does. Like the most like Android. Like more than the lock screen and widgets. The other part of it that's interesting to me, though, is that there was a time when I would have assumed. that that button would have been called Siri.
Starting point is 01:12:39 And my pet question every WWDC is how often does Siri come up? And that number has just been dwindling and dwindling and dwindling. To the point now where like all the things I thought would one day just be like, Siri are now not Siri. It's like search and it's spotlight. And it is like Siri is being sort of slowly like ridden out of the stuff that you should be doing all day every day. There were some Siri mentions here like, you know, conversational queries. In the sessions, there were some Siri stuff.
Starting point is 01:13:07 Yeah, I mean, it's still around, but there was a minute where it was like, like, in the way that Google is trying to sort of make assistant take over your entire Google life. Like, Siri is very clearly not doing that within the app universe. Yeah. I'll mention TVOS quickly, only to say that nothing happened there. We had Neil Mohan, the chief product officer of YouTube on, I was like, where's my YouTube TV 5.1 audio support? So they announced it for Google TV, Android TV, and Roku. And they said, we're still waiting on our other platform partners to give us what we need. And then Apple announced TVS16.
Starting point is 01:13:38 That's like, it's happening. And then nothing. And virtually nothing else in TVOS 16. The only thing of a note is that it's going to support HDR 10 plus now. If you're a Samsung TV owner, you don't have Dolby Vision. That's it. That's the big update. But there's like no content in H2R10 plus.
Starting point is 01:13:55 So, hooray. Yeah. The watchOS stuff was kind of interesting. Like, they're going to do prescription tracking now. So you'll better be able to track your prescriptions. And as a warrior, we're with an old mom who lives by yourself. I'm very excited about that. There's also the potential for privacy nightmares there.
Starting point is 01:14:12 Yeah, but that's like a health feature. That's across, this is like the one thing about WSU we were listed out. Like, that's a feature in Apple Health that is expressed across all the platforms. It's not a watch feature. That's true. That's really cool. I'm just saying, like, it's interesting to see how many features were best thought of as Apple features and not product features. This is super nerdy.
Starting point is 01:14:32 Sorry, inside baseball. but when you're planning to cover these events, we usually will be like, okay, this person's on MacOS, this person's on iOS, okay, this person's going to be on these breakouts. And increasingly in the last like year and a half, you can't do those hard assignments anymore because you'll be like, okay, you're going to be on home. Well, there's not actually a home section. It's sprinkled throughout because this home feature is going to be really important for the iPad and this one's going to be really important for the home pod. This one's going to be really important for the Mac. And it makes it super. frustrating to cover this stuff, but it also is like, I mean, it's probably good in the long run because it's Apple like kind of putting it on everything. Yeah. All the features everywhere. It's all features everywhere. The watch is getting new running metrics. Yeah. So if you are running, you can tell you like stride length and how efficiently you're running. Victoria is very convinced that this is all leading to a rugged Apple watch in the fall. Oh, that is. That's a good idea. That's why we're getting all of this stuff now so they can finally compete with Garmin and Polar.
Starting point is 01:15:32 The thing Apple has figured out about the watch, which I think is correct, and it doesn't always figure this out. Like, there was a thing where it was like, you can have podcast discovery on your Apple Watch. No one wants that. But the thing that Apple has figured out is that the watch, like, by definition, is just like the fiddliest device it makes. And so it's like, do you want all of these super deep running metrics? And do you want like this medication reminder thing? It's like all those sort of little stuff that you can do. The watch is just like it is for fitness and it is for health and it is basically for nothing else.
Starting point is 01:16:07 And so Apple is just like deep down both those rabbit holes now, which strikes me as the right answer. But then the other thing I thought was interesting to your point about all features everywhere was fitness the app coming to the iPhone and actually being able to like do the same, not the same, but like a lot of similar fitness tracking stuff without a watch. I just thought that was very interesting. And, like, that has been the watches moat for so long that it was interesting to see them actually pull it off and put it on the iPhone. I think it's like a key frustration for people because battery life is still probably the number one concern for most people with the Apple Watch, right? Like, it's battery life is nowhere near anybody else in the space. It's bad. And a lot of times you're like, okay, I got to close my rings.
Starting point is 01:16:49 Hold on. I have to go charge my watch. So when I go for this walk, it counts. And now you can just go for your walk and not have to. worry about it. So I think it kind of is addressing those battery concerns. Not necessarily the way people probably will want, especially those like hardcore runners. That's not me. But they exist and they apparently want a watch that will last an entire marathon and the Apple Watch kind of struggles with that right now. And so this is like that nice little crossover for them.
Starting point is 01:17:20 Yeah, I make my watch battery survive by not doing anything all day. That's my strategy. I really care about the watch battery more than my personal fitness. So that's like WWC. Like there's other stuff. Like Apple did buy now, pay later, which is a little shaky. And they're financing it themselves.
Starting point is 01:17:35 They don't have like a bank partner. Like the Apple card is golden sacks, but Apple's doing its own. They don't have a bank charter, but they're basically a bank now. Yeah. We'll see. Their buy now pay later is like very interesting
Starting point is 01:17:45 because it's four payments over six weeks with zero interest. And I just want to tell everyone like, unless it's an emergency. And sometimes there's an emergency. You need a laptop. Now your phone break. You need a phone.
Starting point is 01:17:54 And you can't afford it right away. Okay. I get it. But for most situations, if you can do four payments over six weeks, you should just set the money aside for six weeks and make one payment at the end. Like, just a little tip. Like, I don't understand why that's their structure for this. And by now, pay later firms are like a little shaky. This was a weird time for them to announce it because a lot of those firms are having difficulties right now.
Starting point is 01:18:20 We may or may not be heading towards a recession. And that means all these people may or may not be able to pay. all of these bills that they've now given themselves. The Apple financial services story is like there and I just, Apple's making great products. I don't think they're in any danger, but like GE turning itself into a financial services company is the thing that killed GE.
Starting point is 01:18:41 Sony turning itself into an insurance company is a thing that killed so like, danger, Tim Cook. Okay, but that's WDBC and like, by now pay later is like by far the smallest piece of news. We got to get this laptop. We got to get this stuff. It's all coming out in the fall. We're excited about it.
Starting point is 01:18:55 Let's do a little lightning around. here. USBC mandatory for all phones sold in the EU by autumn 2024. So this rule goes into effect this year and then firms have 24 months to comply. Laptops get 40 months. So that's autumn 2024 is iPhone 16 and we've already heard rumors Apple's doing it. This is like the greatest day for government regulation and history. Yeah, wait. Okay. I need to explain this to me because right before we started recording, you you said, okay, I understand how this timeline is supposed to work. So I would like you to explain it to me because I do not understand how this timeline is supposed to work. So I don't understand how the European Union works. Like I look at it and the Europeans try to
Starting point is 01:19:35 explain it to me. And I'm like, huh, it's like cricket. Like theoretically I understand. Right. And my dad calls me and he's like, I need you to open sling TV that I pay for on your, so you can watch this cricket match with me. And I'm like, what is happening? So the European Union is going to, they've passed this rule, but they haven't formally passed it. Right. And they're going to formally passed it in September. I don't understand how that part works at all, and I think I just refuse. I think what literally seems to be happening is they're all about to go on vacation. And so they decided that as soon as they get back from vacation, they've like made a pact to pass this as soon as they get back from vacation. Like I literally think that's what's going on. And I respect
Starting point is 01:20:12 the hell out of it. Okay. But then the other thing, and like the idea is basically to debundle chargers from devices, which makes sense for a bunch of reasons, one of which is environmental. And then like this applies to basically everything that comes with a charger, right? Is that the, is that the idea? Yeah. Anything that you want to charge, you got a battery. That is the messiest definition you could possibly imagine. Right. It's like this is, this is why this is so much fun. Like anything with a backup battery is now suddenly like subject to this rule. I, this, I don't know. My home has a backup battery. Like does my house have to be? It's very, I think like the what is a computer aspect of this is messy. But like what they mean is phones, laptops, things that
Starting point is 01:20:57 you charge, right? Like mobile devices that you charge. They're trying to cut down an e-waste to reduce the number of chargers in the world, which is like a noble goal. So I'm pretty sure, like most things already charge via a USB standard because of the European Union. And I, like, there's one- Because he did this once before. There's one electronics manufacturer that makes this not work. But if you just like look around the industry, computer stuff, it has been micro USB or USBC for a long time. So this is the kick to move the industry. That's great. It's not just Apple, though. We're going to get a lot of these smaller companies that have been sticking to their micro USB finally going to USB. So that's nice.
Starting point is 01:21:36 Big win. Oh, yeah. All the weird audio gear in the universe that has been on micro and occasionally even mini USB is all going to be great. It's going to be great. That stuff I'm very happy about. It'll be interesting, though, because there's a lot of those companies and these very specifically are like, well, we haven't updated because it's costly for us to, like, move over to USB. Like, we built it on a micro-USB. And now, like, they're going to have to spend that money, even if they maybe can't afford to. So we'll see. I think Apple's going to make some noise.
Starting point is 01:22:01 But there's rumors that they're already working on this phone with USBC, which is amazing. Do you think it'll be a EU-only phone? No, no way. Like, I think that's a huge mistake. And I think Lightning has run its course. And, hey, if you want your phone to run an entire car dashboard, you need more banned with. So like, we'll, like, there's no way they can do that all over why I was car play. So like, we'll see. But like, the future is the power and bandwidth of USBC, not lightning, which is way
Starting point is 01:22:33 over 10 years old. So we'll see. I also, I don't think they're ever going to make a totally portless iPhone. I think that was a Johnny I've dream that, like, even MagSafe is like not fast enough and not well support enough. Other big news, last lightning around thing, there's a talk about store that you can order with an app and then drive-through at Minnesota. That's very important. Woohoo. No, last light on anything, this is actually big news. It's like, I feel like hit very quietly.
Starting point is 01:22:56 Xbox announced a game streaming app that works on Samsung TVs are going to come to other smart TVs. It's kind of huge. It's huge. Yeah. This is huge. It turns everything into a game console. That's crazy.
Starting point is 01:23:06 Yeah. I think this was always kind of the plan for, for Microsoft versus Sony. Like, Sony is like very, we're going to just have the best console you can buy. And Microsoft is like, we're just going to be everywhere. So you can always play. video games. And that makes a lot more sense. I think there's still a lot of things they haven't answered and they haven't addressed. And they're very aware of, like, the internet infrastructure in the United States just isn't there. And that's why we consistently see Microsoft releasing these,
Starting point is 01:23:34 hey, the internet and the US sucks reports. Like, I think we're going to continue to see those. If anything, they're going to invest more over there to say, look how much the internet sucks, because they need it to not suck to sell this stuff. But this is just like Microsoft's big grand plan, finally coming to fruition. Yeah, and they've been hinting at it for a long, long time. They've been wanting to do this for ages, and they're the first, I think, to really do it. Like, Nvidia's been right there along with them. It's really those two companies.
Starting point is 01:24:04 We want to talk about Google, whatever. But it really has been Nvidia and Microsoft chasing cloud gaming, and Microsoft has kind of finally gotten there, maybe. Cameron tested it out on the Samsung TV. He really liked it. That's obviously, like, in a very special setup. everything's supposed to be working. We still have to test it.
Starting point is 01:24:22 Anybody have a Samsung TV, let me know. But like, this is cool. This is just like, it's happening. They're finally doing it. It just makes me think that like the console is sort of heading up the video gamer level into like the world of PC gamers where it's like if you want the best performance, game streaming is almost certainly never going to be that thing. Right.
Starting point is 01:24:44 Like it's just, you literally just cannot compete with the thing that is just sitting in a box in front of you. and that can't compete with a thing that you're sitting in front of with a mouse and keyboard that is wired and cost many thousands of dollars, right? So like, but those two things I think
Starting point is 01:24:55 are going to like move way up the chain to the top. And now it's like most gamers, like me included, I'm like sitting around playing FIFA. So like getting 144 frames per second is like not interesting or necessary in my life.
Starting point is 01:25:09 Suddenly game streaming becomes the main thing. And I think that's like Microsoft has actually headed there faster than I expected. And unlike Nvidia and like super unlike Google, has a really long path of being able to pull it off on the content and game side. Yeah. Well, they own all the game studios. Yeah, in a way that's just going to be super hard for anybody to catch up to.
Starting point is 01:25:28 And like, this is always the thing that was going to come together. And it's like... I mean, I think Nvidia is not out of this, right? Like, obviously, Nvidia doesn't have the same kind of back-end infrastructure that Microsoft has with Azure. But it has a very powerful backend structure. Like, we don't talk about it a lot, but Nvidia's got a huge server business. And that's why they've been doing this stuff. So, like, they're, and they've also got those really great relationships with the, with the studios that Microsoft doesn't own, which is like four of them now.
Starting point is 01:25:57 But they still got those relationships. Like, the reason Nvidia has been so big on PCs versus AMD, one, because AMD sucked for many years. But once it finally got better, Nvidia was still better because it had these really strong relationships. And so it could get all of these, like, software enhancements and stuff that on these games that AMD couldn't. So, like, there's still very much in that running. And arguably, they have a much better library of games. But Microsoft is way easier to use and now way more accessible. I think the thing that's really interesting here is there's a lot of rumors that they were going to announce a TV streaming device, like a stick or like a Roku competitor.
Starting point is 01:26:40 And we don't know where that went. Like, there's been rumors. Maybe it's canceled. Maybe it's being rejiggered. But that gets you. okay, this works okay on your smart TV as an app. Maybe it works really well if you buy this Roku thing. And then it works great if you buy the console.
Starting point is 01:26:57 Right. Like suddenly like the idea that Microsoft can just do Netflix for games with GamePass and it can deliver to all the people at various levels of quality or buy it. You don't have to, you don't have to find an Xbox. You know, to like do the blood sport to find an Xbox online. Like that's wild. And I like, they're getting their way. first, but I think that's where the whole industry is going.
Starting point is 01:27:18 We've seen the attempts to disrupt the console mall. It's stadia. Like, what is that? What is Luna or whatever Amazon has? And Microsoft is like, we actually are just going to do it well now. And like, I don't know what's happening at the stadium. The big question is like Sony, because Sony doesn't have their own cloud. I mean, they have a cloud gaming service.
Starting point is 01:27:36 It's actually run by Microsoft. And they didn't even know that Microsoft was going to be running it until they found like, those deals were all made. And then they're like, oh, our cloud gaming is run by our Q. competitor, cool, cool, cool, cool. But they're stuck way behind now, right? Like, how do they get there? Because they're not Nintendo.
Starting point is 01:27:53 Like, Nintendo is always going to have a really strong console business. It doesn't care about cloud gaming. Its audience is very different. How its audience plays, interacts with these things. Microsoft and Sony are neck and neck for the most part, usually. And now, like, a kid can say, hey, mom, I want to play Halo. I need, like, can you download this on the TV? Boom.
Starting point is 01:28:13 Versus the other kid who's like, hey, mom, I want to play. I don't, what's a Sony game that's appropriate for a child? There's no Sony games for a commercial. No, I feel you. But they're both going there, right? They're both going there. Just Microsoft got there so much faster. And that could be a big change for them.
Starting point is 01:28:33 They've historically been behind Sony in the last couple of console generations, like just in sales, in uses. People will buy it to be like, Halo, and that's about it. And now, like, there's a lot of other games. that it supports that you can just go play. And you don't have to go spend $500 to find a PS5 to play on your TV that can't even support all the cool stuff that it does. We'll see. I just think it's fascinating that this dongle don't come out because that's the real.
Starting point is 01:28:59 It's like, it's just on Samsung TVs. It's very, it's a very small. It's only on a subset of Samsung TVs. So like there's a reason something like around. It could be earth shattering news, but it definitely isn't. When the dongle happens. Yeah. It's like when, when there's like a cheap Xbox device or it comes to.
Starting point is 01:29:15 lots and lots of TVs, or heaven forbid the Apple TV, which that will never happen. I think you could probably get it now on a lot of the Android TVs if you, like, messed around with it. Well, it's on Samsung TVs, which runs Tyson. Yeah, but you can get like, like, you can get the cloud program now, kind of on some Android. Oh, you can get like the APK from Android to an Android TV. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not, that's not, that's not, that's very Alex Krantz.
Starting point is 01:29:38 Like, that's, that's like you, like, you're in the Shield forums. Me and Sean, playing on our. Android TVs. Suck it the rest of y'all. All right. That's a great place to end this episode. Kranz has to go reboot her Nvidia Shields. She can run pirate Xbox games on it.
Starting point is 01:29:56 We've gone way over. I think you were listening, 500 episodes. We had to go over. It was a good one. Some stuff to promo. Like I said, we're going to be rebooting the show in the next few weeks. Look forward to that. It was NFT Week on the verge, the background of all this.
Starting point is 01:30:10 You know, NFTs are a big rise and fall. Great, special issue. We have some interviews with Arboros. artists who feel like they got ripped off. We have some rise and fall of the NFT marketplaces stuff. We've got a copyright explainer, which makes me very happy. It's very complicated. It's very good.
Starting point is 01:30:24 Decoder this week was Zoe Schiffer talking about unions at Apple. That's a really fun episode. We did like a union explainer kind of thing because it's so complicated. We want to like give people the basics. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. David's at Pierce. Alex is Alex H. Kranz.
Starting point is 01:30:37 Yeah, 500 episodes. We did it, y'all. Rock and roll. Woohoo. Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email. at vergecast of the verge.com.
Starting point is 01:30:49 And if you'd like to the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of the Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino.
Starting point is 01:31:01 Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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