The Vergecast - WWDC, Sonos Beam, and Microsoft buys Github

Episode Date: June 8, 2018

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference happened this week, and Nilay, Dieter, Jake, and Ashley are on top of it. Second half of the show, we’ve got Dieter’s exclusive look at the Sonos Beam, Microsoft buying GitHub, a new Fire TV thingy, and breaking news for Essential. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like Paul’s weekly segment (hosted by Jake Kastrenakes) “Hey look at this thing I just found on theverge.com“ — so if you listen to it all, you’ll get it all.  02:48 - Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 04:35 - Siri will soon be able to pull off multistep routines through Shortcuts 15:40 - Walkie-Talkie on the Apple Watch is a clever riff on FaceTime Audio 19:01 - Apple’s Memoji lets you create an Animoji of yourself 23:35 - Apple CarPlay will soon let you use Google Maps, Waze, and other third-party maps 25:21 - Apple will let developers port iOS apps to macOS in 2019 33:51 - The Apple TV is finally getting Dolby Atmos support 38:56 - The Essential Phone’s first new module since launch is a magnetic headphone jack 41:02 - The Beam is Sonos’ ambitious attempt to win the living room 50:40 - Amazon’s Fire TV Cube is an Echo, streaming box, and universal remote in one 55:05 - Paul’s weekly segment “Hey look at this thing I just found on theverge.com” by Jake 57:30 - Microsoft confirms it’s acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion 1:00:07 - Facebook accused of giving over 60 device makers inappropriate access to user data 1:06:06 - Instagram might soon let you post videos up to an hour long 1:09:48 - California’s net neutrality bill could set a national standard Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. 16 million new collar jobs will be created by 2024 to help fill them. IBM's new education model gives high school students, workplace experience, and an associate's degree. 90 P-Tech schools are already preparing graduates for tomorrow's STEM careers. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at IBM.com slash P-Tech. Hello, welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Vox Media, a thing that I just keep saying, because no one stops me.

Seems true. If I keep saying it, it's true. You can sell off of that, too. Yeah. Are you an advertiser? Yeah. Would you like to be on the flagship? Anyway, I'm Nelai.

Paul Miller is on vacation this week. He's out, but Jake Hasdnerakis is here. I have mine melded with Paul and can fully serve his purpose. You're speaking to him right now. That's actually terrifying. This is some Westworld stuff. Knowing Paul as well as we all do, my melding with Paul would be a true experience.

I have a great segment to tell you about later. Oh, are you doing it? No. Well, you just signed up. This is Circuit Breaker editor. You're in it. I'll figure it out. Ashley Carman is here.

Hello. So it's like a little circuit breaker reunion. The reunion after we see each other every day. And Deeter is here. Can I just say, people ask me if I'm a Westworld fan, and my response is always the same. I watch Westworld. Yeah. West World is a truly confounding show.

Last season was the same thing. It's just not good. I'm just going to, I know you're supposed to suspend your disbelief with this show. And this is spoiler. So if you haven't been watching, just like, close your mind. Stuff your car, walk away for the next 30 seconds. They're in the cradle, right? Yeah.

And Ford's like, my brain only works in the cradle. But if I was in the real world, it would decay. And it's like, the fuck, that's not how computers work. Like, my brain can run on this simulation. But if I give myself some robot arms, I'll decay and fall. It's like, that's not how anything works. Okay. Spoiler over.

I can't believe that is your biggest problem. It's just... Yeah. But no, it's the one I can like focus on. Right? Like everything else is like a branching. I don't know when anything's happening. That one is just like, if you run the code on this computer, it's fine.

But if you run it on that computer, you go crazy. Yeah. You have to burn it with fire. Yeah. Because that's how you turn computer. Because that's just... Ah! Anyway.

There's a whole Marsupon. Marzapan metaphor from WWDC that I could make here, but I'm going to let that go. No, right. If you run the iOS app on your Mac, it decays, then you have to let your Mac on fire. I'm with you. Let's talk about WWDC. The spoilers are over. I promise to be no more Westworld spoilers. Except the hosts are alive.

All right, it was, there's actually a lot going on this week. But the whole show is going to be WWC. And then whatever other exclusives to eat are got as he roamed the world. A lot. A lot, a lot. No hardware. The only hardware was new watchpans and cases for the iPhone in what I will say are extraordinarily not good colors. Last year's pride bands were better than this year's pride bands by like a long shot. The hottest take. Yeah, they're just like pastels. Are those hot colors right now?

You know, I'm sure they went to Pantone and we're like, what should we do? And Pantone was like, do this. And they were like, okay, I'm sure if some moms out there, we'll dig it. Do you think Johnny Ive has a list of colors? And he's like, oh, I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel. He only likes space gray. That's his entire apartment, house, whatever, castle. Yeah. Gray. But that was the only new hardware.

Yeah. Which is surprising because all the chips and all the computers are extremely old, right? Yeah. I mean, they're well overdue for an update. That's not, I mean, Apple loves to hang tight and take its time on these things. But last year at WWDC, there was a lot of hardware. So this year, kind of weird. Yeah.

True developer conference. And Timcoe came on stage and said, it's all about software, and then we all kind of knew, and all of our pre-writes. They fixed the keyboard on the MacBook. It was gone. New iPhone. They aggressively didn't talk about hardware. Like, them not talking about hardware and saying,

we're not talking about hardware meant that they didn't have to bring up air power. They didn't have to bring up the keyboard. Like, all the things that people are kind of rah-ra-ra-ra-ra about Apple, Apple at this keynote just refused to address it. It does not live in a world where Siri is bad. Yeah. It does not live in a world where people are concerned about that. So let's start there.

So last week on the show, we did our little preview. We're like, they got to talk about Siri. I still don't have a word for this, but I was excited to be disappointed when people cheered for two timers at once. And I was like, that's going to happen. And then people are going to cheer. They didn't do it. As far as I can tell, Siri can still not set.

two-timers, which is insanity. But there's a custom macro language that you can use now called Shortcuts. What's going on there? Yeah. Shortcuts is basically just the workflow app that Apple acquired, but now it integrates with Siri, which is very, very smart because the workflow app, now that it's like a full first-party thing, can do a lot more interesting stuff, and you know it's not going to get as hobbled as it might have been.

Sorry. I'm getting there. Give me a second. It's a way for you to basically macro things together. It's like automator but for the iPhone. So you can tell it to tell me the weather and send a text and turn on maps and give me directions to a thing. And then just say, then you can set a custom keyword to that and in Siri and then go do it. And so they took this very nerdy thing of macros for your iPhone.

And then they made it accessible by integrating it as Siri shortcuts and letting apps say, do you want to make a shortcut for this? And so it gives power users a really cool deep thing to do. And it gives regular people, like, better ways to make Siri work. It's also, I think, an end around for the problems with Siri. Like, well, we're not as good as Google at AI stuff and figuring out what you're actually asking for. So instead, what we're going to do is we're going to make you just do it yourself. Yeah, the human algorithm. Yeah. Like, what would you like your phone to do? You can code this yourself. How hard is it to set up these shortcuts. So do you get to play with it at all?

I got to watch a shortcut get set up. They had like a food delivery one set up. And basically the app like throws up a like button that says, hey, you just ordered groceries. Do you want to make a shortcut for this? So then you hit the shortcut and then you record a hot word, a keyword for it and then you're done. What I don't understand is like why do I have to manually activate every single one of these shortcuts? It sounds like they're starting to give third party access to Siri. but rather than just doing it in like a normal, sensible, logical way, they're like, what if instead you could customize the command

and have to activate every individual one? So shortcuts, this is the same day this Vergecast is going up, I'm going to talk about this on the processor episode a little bit. Shortcuts on iOS are analogous to, quote-unquote, actions and slices on Android P. It's a way to take stuff that you do inside an app and embrace and extend it inside. inside a digital assistant.

For real. So instead of like, I need to order a lift, go open the Lyft app, find the button, blah, blah, blah, you just ask your assistant to order the lift. Now, the way Google does it is the apps basically tell Google, here's everything we can do. Here's literally everything that's possible. And then Google's like, cool, well, I'm going to figure it out. With Siri, you can tell it, here's everything I can do. But then it's like the short way to do it. And then if you necessarily do it, it opens the app and like goes, does it deep place.

link to that thing, or you can manually code these configuration things. And I think to answer your question, Jake, the reason that they're making users configure it is because they can't actually pull off what Google can pull off and let the assistant figure it out. And this goes back, I think, to that information story about how there's, like, real problems with the Siri development team where they, like, don't actually know what they want to do next. Yeah.

And it's like not there. But they hired the guy from Google. Right. Because X had a search to come around. I'm assuming he just got there so they couldn't at WWDC be like, he'll fix it. They had to like show some things. But it's wild to me that after all of the heat they've taken in the past year for extremely basic things, they didn't deliver any of the basic things. And they delivered a programming language.

That's fundamentally what it is. And I'm the sort of person who wants to screw with that. But compared to Alexa or Google Assistant, Apple's answer being, you can come. code your own hot word that kicks off fundamentally and if this, than that recipe. It just doesn't, it seems like a different company made that product. Right? Like, that's like Microsoft's answer to things. I mean, I was so surprised by that and the whole, what was the other thing they went

into that was just workflow? Was that a separate app? Was it the same thing? No, it's the same app. That's the same app? It took workflow and turn into shortcuts. In fact, if you are workflow user, your workflowses turn into shortcuts with iOS 12. They poured everything over, which is nice.

that's nice is this an app that's going to be installed by default in iOS 12 like yeah this seems way too complicated

for most people you can I think I'm I could be wrong but I seem to recalcuts serious shortcuts is right but like the

yeah series shortcuts that's that's that's series shortcuts workflow is turning into Siri shortcuts so in you don't think it's installed by default

but like all the functionality is there but it you have to like go and install it if you want to do like the crazy complicated macro stuff

I could be wrong about that, but I think I heard somebody say that. Okay, so developers are into this probably, because they want to mess around and be nerdy. But like most people, moms

and youths and whatever, have probably already gone all in on Alexa, right? Like, they're not using HomeKit. No, I think a lot of people use HomeKit because if you have an iPhone, you have HomeKit stuff, it's just sitting there on the control center. So you think people are of like...

But I think the home app, There's a split here. So it's very convenient if you have any home kit stuff in your house. So I have an August lock, which talks to HomeKit. I can just be like, Siri lock the door. And I'll just do it. And I can push the home thing on Control Center. It shows me the thing I can lock the door there.

So like that system integration of HomeKit, great. You go a little bit farther and you like want to set up a HomeKit scene. Like one of these like extended routines and then you're in hell. and I think, and you're hell on every platform, but Apple is like a particular hell. And I think Apple, I hate to anthropomorphize as a company, but I'm going to do it. Apple, like, it's inherently messy to show the user these things. It just is. Right.

And Apple, like, hates it. So they don't, like, try. They have no option. Right. Right. They just like, this is horrible. You're the asshole who doesn't want to, you know, like, like, Johnny Hav is like, this room is dirty. And it will always be dirty, and we're never going to clean it up. Just lock the door.

Right. And if some idiot wants to go in this dirty room, so be it. And that's like how Apple thinks about, like, notifications on the Apple Watch, they're all on by default. But if you have a lot of apps to turn them all off, you have to just like sit there clicking them all. Because Apple's like, no one should do this. Oh, but that's changing. iOS 12. Yeah? Yeah. So iOS 12 is doing two things notifications that I'm wildly excited about. The first is they're grouping them, both on the phone and on the watch. So if you've got 50 tweets, you just see the latest one, and then you can tap to expand it. And then they're also giving you on that weird slide over where it doesn't actually swipe

it away, but it like reveals buttons. There's now a button for manage. And then you can, I think the two options they gave you are turn off and send a notification center, which I don't love. Apple has this weird distinction between notification center. on lock screen. They're like the same thing, but they're not the same thing. But it basically makes your notifications appear silently. They don't buzz your, they don't buzz your phone, they don't buzz your wrist, but they're like there if you want to go looking for them. But the key thing

is you can manage a notification right there from the notification instead of having to go dig through it in settings. Yeah. I was talking about on the watch where when you don't want to send every notification to a watch, there's no button, just turn them all off. You just have to click a thousand radio buttons. And that to me is evidence that you could build more and more tools to make the inherently messy thing, not less messy, but to acknowledge the messiness, Apple rarely builds those tools. Right. And I think the Siri shortcut thing, like, that to me, when we were live logging it,

I was like, this is going to be a mess. Because workflow is good, but the second you get into that branching complexity, like, that's not where Apple shines. Apple shines at, like, no one wants to do that. Hiding the branching complexity from you. No regular person wants to do that, I don't think. I just can't imagine. that the answer to the regular person's problems with Siri is, like, write a macro.

But I do think it will give it more power for the people who are like, I can't do these things with Siri. So there's like an answer there. And I think Apple's whole move is to say, like, this isn't a mainstream product yet. Right. So we're going to satisfy these power users and then catch up for everybody else. Yeah. Like, I feel like most people I know who use Siri are just like, set alarm.

Yeah. Or they're like, set a timer. And then... But okay, so just to wrap this up, so Google has a search mentality. They don't make you figure out what the keywords are. You just ask for it, and Google figures it out what you want, right? Alexa has, like, whoever claims the hot word first gets it mentality. And so there's a million skills and you have to say these awkward things to make them happen.

So Apple can't pull off what Google wants to do. And it doesn't want to have the mess that Alexa is. So their solution is just set it up yourself. Yeah. I will say there's not to, I don't know which one is best. But here's what's interesting to me is Google's solutions are often completely opaque. You talk to Google. That's fair.

The cloud infrastructure has a lot of thoughts for you and it delivers some result out of a black box. You don't know what it's going to be. Hopefully it's right one. With Alexa, it's a little bit more straightforward because it's like, you're like, Alexa, talk to something else, which will do something else and have this result. Apple is like you're going to just set it up. So there's more transparency with Apple, which is like kind of vibes the company's ethos, but it's just more complicated.

All right. So that's Siri. Is there anything else in notifications? I bet you have a lot of thoughts about notifications. I mean, we got to see it. We got to try it. But like those are the things I mentioned already

are like the two big things, right? It's grouped and it's managing them directly from the thing. Like that's like the bare minimum that I expect from a mobile platform right now. I don't think it's as advanced as what you can do on Android. but it's richer than what you can do on Android. And like on the watch, you can, like, get, like, rich notifications that, like, have got stuff in them. Yeah.

We could get the watch out of the way. I think the most important thing on the watch is that you can load web pages on it now. Yeah, wait, why? Like, I was doing something else when they announced this, and I'm like, I clearly heard that wrong. No, the watch. So what we didn't talk about with iOS is the time well-spent stuff. Oh, yeah. So they're introducing all this stuff to iOS.

where it's, you know, put limits on your app usage, tells you what you're doing, when. If you've used Instagram for too long, it'll say you've got 10 minutes left, time to move on. But it's just like a little warning, right? Yeah, I will never hear that. You use Instagram for a while, but then you just hit a button and ignore it. Right. So on Android P, there's no button to ignore it. Right.

You have to like go. It just like locks you out. That's awesome. I'm not into it. No. I love it. I'm literally getting anxiety right now thinking I'm getting locked out of Instagram. That's why it's there.

And then with. with iOS. So both Android and iOS are like, we've got a manager time with the phone. We've got to calm the sound. And then the watch demo was just the opposite of that thing. Right? Yeah.

But Kevin Lynch came out. He introduced a watch designer. She got on an exercise bike. It was like the watch is automatically detected that I'm exercising. It's linked up to the bike. She started walkie talking to someone. She's like, I'm going to complete my rings today. Yeah.

She's like, I've got to get these rings. She's like looking furious. She's like, I'm talking to someone. They're sending me a menu. I'm loading the menu on an embedded web kit. It's like, this is the opposite. This is crazy. There was a notification on her watch.

I swear to God that said, remember to do yoga today to be 10% happier. That is insane. Like, there's like the phone. It's like, you got to stop using the phone. And there's the watch, which is like, are you the most frenetic person in the world? the watch is for you.

But I will say, they've circled all the way back around to the watch they wanted to put out in 2014 when U2 was there and they built this thing. They added the feature back. They announced Waki-Toki at that time. They never shipped it.

They added it back. They, you know, they were like, the watch will do everything. Now they've got a cellular-capable watch and they're adding more computer-like features to it. Right? That's about it. Yeah. But it still doesn't have any apps. There's a bunch of health stuff

that, you know, is like you can compete now and blah, blah, blah, blah, that's all fine. I'm not, I don't exercise and so it doesn't appeal to me, I guess. The walkie-talkie thing is clever because it's basically just FaceTime. You literally set up a call and then you just like push, it's pushed to talk, which is kind of funny. But yeah, this was not a huge year for the watch. And they definitely have stopped talking about third-party apps altogether. They're just done worrying about that. I feel like that's okay.

I have never used a single app on the watch that made me have. happy. Are you wearing one? No, mine broke. I've never seen you wear one. Dieter, are you wearing yours right now? Not at the present moment, but I have been when I wear the, when I use the iPhone, I have been using the iPhone for the last month or so.

I will say this stuff got me to reconsider wearing it. Yeah. There's two things. The podcast app is coming to the watch. And third-party audio apps will be able to work in the background. So Overcast will be able to make a new version if they want to that works on the watch. audible will be able to make a version that works on the watch. Because that was a huge problem.

It's like no third-party app could do audio. They're not going to let those apps stream, but they will be able to, like, you know, load up stuff on the watch and let you play it when you go for a run. Definitely what that watch demo needed was a podcast playing at 2X speed while she frenetically loaded web pages, walkie-talkie. For sure. Like, peddled furiously.

They've got to figure it. Okay, let's talk about it. Because it's so real. Memoji. Yes. It's so real. There's already like, Memoji, me. So Apple did an emoji with the iPhone 10 when it came out.

Then they were like, we've added some new an emojis. Animoji famously could not wink or stick their tongue out. iOS 10, they can do those things. But now you can capture your face and be a cartoon that yells at people. It's like Bitmoji, but map to your face. Yeah. Exactly that. Yeah.

And I feel bad for Bitmoji because I'm like, Bitmoji, if you had just done this, you would have been ahead of the game. So we were talking about this. The thing about Bitmoji that's great is you make an avatar and then like there's a team of Bimogy that's like we're going to make memes for you. Yes, but it's so much more awesome if I can just be my avatar. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's funny to send the memes for sure.

But you can also always just make stickers. Like Bitmoji could do the stickers and do this. And they could do it in Snapchat. Like Snapchat has this capability because they do the lenses. So it's like, oh, just make a lens of my face. Oh, man. They miss this boat. Yeah. Like it literally, I just want to know what that office is like right now.

The Snapchat office? Yeah, with Bitmoj is in Canada, but I want to know what's going on in Canada right now. I mean, they're on the phone to Evan Spiegel. I'm like, Evan, you got rocked. And Evan's like, I'm busy reinventing the interface again. I'm, oh, I want to know. But yeah. Are you, here's my question. Animoji, I was high on. They were everywhere for a hot minute. Then they disappeared. I haven't seen anybody using an emoji for anything. Do you think Memoji is going to be in a similar trajectory?

I don't think so. No, why? I just think because it's yourself. Like, it gets old to use the dragon emoji or whatever it is. Being yourself is, but Moji hasn't died yet. It's just, it's you. Yeah. I don't know.

I don't think that can get old. I could be wrong about this, but I think, so in the camera app, they now have this star button. It's not in the camera app. In the camera pop. One of the important things in iOS 12 is that AR is built. into the platform at like a platform level. So the same way any app can like call, ask for the camera and then the camera interface pops up.

Now any app could ask for AR and the AR interface will pop up and there's an AR camera interface, which I think means any app will be able to be like, hey, bring up the camera and then you'll be able to do, hit that star button and use your emoji on your head. And so I think it's not, it's not what we really want, which is just the floating emoji head. You know, you've got to like export that shit from my message and that's super annoying. So they didn't do that. I don't know why they didn't just make an app.

but they really still should. But I think you'll be able to, like, throw Memoji on anything that uses, like, the built-in, like, pull-up the camera app thing. Yeah, I don't know why. I just feel like Memoji is going to be really good for celebrities ranting about stuff. Like, in Instagram. They're just going to, like, they don't want to use their real face. They're just going to, like, this is me and this is my rant. Yeah.

I don't know why. I just feel like that's going to be the go-to for emojis, the rants. And they've got the filters for the camera now, like the built-in, like, non-filter. It got so extra up there. I was like, what is Apple doing? Those filters felt like the old school like photo booth filters.

Those have been on the Mac for like a decade and they still look exactly the same. And when they pulled it up with the group FaceTime and everyone was wearing their emoji or whatever, I was like, no. This is too much. No, but it's exactly what I want. Oh my gosh.

When a group FaceTime, it took him a decade straight up. Now it's here. Yeah. They used to have group iChat. These are like old Mac features coming to the phone. Because it's photo booth effects and group I chat. Now on your iPhone.

Do you all think that's going to kill House Party or whatever? I think House. Well, no, because House Party has a user base. Like, I don't know why they would move. House Party has Android version. It's like a whole thing, right? Yeah. But it's going to make my parents involved.

Yeah, no. I mean, it's great for family. I can't wait until Max gets her own phone. And then she's going to make. He can be part of the group FaceTime. My parents already feel left out when my sister is FaceTiming with my kid. They'll text me and I'll be like, sorry, my sister's on. And they're like, oh, call us next.

And now they can just roll in. And they're like, oh, you didn't call us first. But now it's like, it's a thing. It's a thing. It's going to be a thing. That's great. It's going to be super great. I'm really excited about it.

I am. Families are great. You should have one. Last few things here on iOS, or should we just move on to... Let me just mention that CarPlay is now with Google Maps, which is like the best thing. That's the best news ever. I actually put that second because it's my favorite feature. It's amazing.

That's the biggest complaint I ever had with CarPlay. All I want is Google Maps or ways, but for the same reason. I want Google's mapping. Yeah. And now... It's there. It's there. You know they gave up, too.

They were like, we thought we could get people to use these Apple Maps. And everyone hates it. It really felt like a huge concession. Eddie Q got lost in his Ferrari. He's like, guys, I was just like, what the fuck? Yeah, I felt kind of bad for Apple because I was like, they totally didn't want to have to do this. And they had to. Whenever you talked to anybody from Apple about it, they'd be like, yeah, so you could like do Waze.

And also Google Maps. Yeah, but Waze. It's like, did you know Ways is owned by Google? You're not getting around it. All right. So here's the big news. That's the phone. The phone's interesting.

Not a lot with the phone. Some stuff with the phone. Oh, they increase the performance, which is good. I would say my iPhone 10 is hitting that point. It's like midway through. I'm like, oh, this is getting a little clunky. Already? Already.

You're 10? My 10. That's crazy town. I'm on a 6S. Yeah. Your shit's right away slower. Hell over here. I'm waiting until fall when I will buy the iPhone 10.

Well, it'll be 11. Are you going to buy the 10? I'm going to buy the 10 because it'll drop in price, ideally. I got you. From $900? At least it's not down. So hang on. They're going to do.

They're going to do an iPhone 9, right? Yeah. And then why? No, who would want a 9? No, they'll never do a 9. You're saying they'll update the 8 to the 9. No, they're going to drop the 10 to replace the 8. They'll probably make the 8 even cheaper, and they'll do like an 11.

X2. X-S. He's going like Final Fantasy numbers. Extra. Yeah. It's out of control. Okay, let's talk about the Mac. So the Mac is a big deal with this Marsapan thing.

Deider, tell us what's happening. Okay, so first of all, dark mode, everyone's very excited. got lots of cheers. They did some stuff in the finder. They like made the get info window a pain in the finder. Fine. They pretended like coverflow never existed and they replaced it with a new

view called gallery view. They added stacks to the desktop. For you, Neely, to organize your messy-ass desktop. Your desktop is awful. It's just the worst. It's the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. So there was all that. Like here's all the stuff. And throughout the keynote, they're like, oh, we

all these apps that came to the iPad, they're also coming to the Mac. We're bringing the Stocks app and the Voice Memos app at Apple News and the Mac store is getting an update. And I was looking at these apps and I'm like, huh, these all look just like the iPad apps. And they're like, guess what? We're doing a thing.

So they won't give it a name. We know it's code named Marsapan, but Apple won't say so. They won't say that it's porting apps because they don't think it's that because they don't want people to think it's just iPad apps copy over to the Mac. So we have nothing to call this thing.

But it's basically you can take an iOS app and a bunch of the stuff that you, okay, let me start over. Are you ready? It's complicated. Heim wrote a really good piece. I threw in some thoughts in there. That piece was super helpful. Everyone should read that piece. Yeah.

So iOS and the Mac are both like Unix platforms, right? But then you have to build apps on top of it and you have to like create a user interface. And the way that you create a user interface on the Mac is traditionally this thing called AppKit. So that gives you your sidebars and your source. scroll bars and your menus and all the stuff. And then on iOS, it's this thing called UiKit, which gives you, you know, the slide over things and the, you know, tabs on the bottom and scrolling and touch buttons and blah, blah, right?

So what they're doing is they are saying if you make an iOS app, you can use UiKit to turn it into a Mac app and then it'll work on the Mac. And that'll let you have resizable windows and scrolling and clicking and right-clicking and the file view, edit menu, and all that stuff. But they're not letting developers play around with it, even though a bunch of developers have already figured out how to mess with it, until next year. And instead, Apple is eating its own dog food

by coding some of its own apps with this new thing right now. Yeah. I got to say that the people who make the Stocks app at Apple, this is as much public recognition as they have ever gotten in their entire life. First of all, it's the first update to the Stocks app ever. It's just straight up. And then it has a bunch of new features, as Apple News integration.

You just know the Stocks app is like Tim Cook's favorite app. And like every, every, you know, they have like a long, Apple famously has a long weekly senior leadership meeting. And you know at the bottom of his agenda is like always like stocks, question mark. And they just never get to it. And he's like, if we have time. He's like, it's like supply chain, future of the business, AR, privacy concerns, merging our platforms and like 50 more things.

Stocks. And they're like, see, we don't have time. Steve. Tim, we don't have time for this. Anyway, so I looked at the home app and it has like absolutely iOS sliders in it, like the set timers and things like that rolling cylindrical thing. So there's iOS elements here, right? Oh, the home app in particular, I played around with a little bit. It did a better job of resizing the window than Apple News, which I'll get to in a second. But you just want to touch those buttons because they just look like big old buttons that you touch

with your finger. Yeah. Like, if it's going to be a Mac app. It should have a drop-down. It should have keyboard shortcuts. It should, you know, have automator actions. All the stuff that makes a Mac app and Mac app. Only, like, a portion of that is here. Do we expect that to change? Like, is this because it's like pre-release of this Marzipan stuff? They haven't actually figured it out? Or is this the hellish future we have to look forward to? So I have two answers to that. One, I do expect it to change a little bit. So if you, like, I went to like look at the, you know, view menu and there were some like, keyboard shortcuts there, but it's clear they could have just added more.

So they haven't done all the work that I think they could do to make these feel more Mac-like. So that's one. Two, this is the hell's future you have to look forward to where it feels more like iOS apps. Like, for example, when I was resizing the Apple News app, it would like, the window contents would take a second longer than I expected to, like, reform to the window size. And it was really clear that it was using a different window set of layout tools. There was like a little spinner that showed up for half a second. Whoa. Yeah.

That's not good. It's not great. No. But they're a year away. It's hard to judge them on that. Yeah. They got a year. And I think so they can do more to make it feel more Mac-like.

But my second answer to that question is even if they don't, even if this is what we get, fine. Yes. Great. Do it. Love it. Awesome. So having used Android apps on ChromeOS, having cute little mobile apps on your desktop is the best. Except you can't touch them.

It's awesome. Except you can't touch them. So here's my question. So Twitter famously killed its desktop client like three weeks ago. How long was I out? There's two months of 10 years that just didn't happen. Really, they killed it like five years ago. So this is, not to float a conspiracy theory here, but if your Twitter, you know this thing is coming because you're on good grace with Apple.

You're like, let's kill this Mac app now. This is going to roll out. And then we'll just port the Twitter iOS app to the Mac. And that's the move for everybody. So a bunch of companies don't want to make Mac apps anymore, I don't think. But they do want to keep making iPhone apps and iPad apps. And so a bunch of companies are going to be like, and whatever, we'll just pour it over the iOS app. So does this, this is like dangerous.

There's like a deep danger here that eventually there will be no Mac apps. Right. But which danger is more likely that there'll be no Mac apps and everyone's going to make iOS apps and that'll be a hellish future? or that everyone's going to stop using Mac apps altogether because they're all just using Electron apps. Right. Electron apps are way more likely right now. If you are coming into the Vergecast cold,

we've talked about Electron for the last few weeks because it's basically the set of web technologies like Slack, if you use Slack on a Mac, is basically a web browser showing you a web view of Slack with a whole bunch of all that stuff behind it. So that is way more... Would you rather have a... Yeah, would you rather have basically Slack's iPad app

but on the Mac or Slack's... web browser-based app, which is more full-featured but also like a huge ram hog. And you know what? I think I'd rather have the iOS version on my back. So Walt tweeted, Walt Mossberg, our good friend, just won an award for mentoring young journalists, by the way, I love some word. But Walt tweeted, he's like, this is pure speculation, but he's like, this is a step towards what I want, which is an iOS laptop.

Is this that step? Yeah. So there's two possible futures that I see. One is it's a step towards. with you, man. I know. I'm sorry. It's a step towards arm-based Macs. Yeah. Because if you've got a bunch of iOS apps that work just fine on arm processor on the iPad, then you put it on a Mac, but then they could release an arm-based Mac. They could theoretically make a clamshell iOS device that has a touchpad on mouse because all these apps would support it because they've

been made for the Mac. I don't know. I know what I don't know. I don't believe that they're going to do that, but I don't know. I mean, I think that at some point that everybody has to confront the iPad Pro is like fun to use. I've been using one a lot. It's really fun. To load up Lightroom and then like edit a photo with a pen. That's just a good time. I'll say I'm older, like clearly very much a dad. It's like the coloring books. My definition of a good time has radically changed, but it's a good time. But every other computing thing I want to do, I'm like, I just need a computer, right? So there's something in the middle with the iPad that they're not getting right. The iPad needs a track pad. I'm just going

there. The iPad. Yeah. I'm not reaching up to scroll down every web page. Give me something. So they were talking to Lauren Good, she's a Wired now. She interviewed Craig Federigi. Great interview to read it.

Very light on details. Lots of dancing because they don't know. It's a year out, so they're not going to do a detail. Yeah. And I talked to her, by the way, light on details not through any fault of hers. Like they just didn't give her. Yes. Flaming anybody for Apple being vague and fucking weird is not their fault.

Guaranteed. But he's like, we're never doing a touchscreen laptop, which, you know, it's Apple, so they'll never do it until they do it. But they seem just dead set that the Mac is, they're going to do a touchbar, which is horrible. This to me is the thing that undoes that, right? Stefan, who I sit next to now, was using a touchscreen laptop yesterday. And I just watched him for like four minutes try to tap something and it not register. And I was just like, dude, that is why Apple's not going to make a touchscreen laptop. And he's like, yeah, it's really bad.

No, like, since he was using some garbage HP. I don't know what he was doing. All he knows, I saw him for a lot. And then he's, like, listening to the fans on his laptop all the time. I'm like, Stefan, what's going on over here, man? You're doing okay? This poor dude is on, like, a gaming PC beat. It's, like, not the right place to go.

All right, so that's the Mac. I feel like we talk about that forever. But, like, that's a big deal. I think we're going to see that play out a lot, basically. Right? Like, over the next year, more and more. hand-wringing about the future the Mac is going to come because the developers are going to start moving their iOS apps and they're going to hit their limits. They're going to say,

well, I just need a touch screen to make this work properly. And then a year from now, the apps are actually going to be here. And we're all going to realize like, oh, that moment when like you had a really beautiful sort of mid-level Mac app and it did one thing really great is gone. This makes me so nervous because some of the smaller apps I've tested on the iPad, we'll just poured over their iPhone app, and it's the worst experience ever, and I'm just so scared of reliving that, where they just, like, enlarge the thing. It looks blown up and terrible, and they're just like, oh, we'll put a scroll bar here, or whatever they're going to do. And that is going to be bad if they do that. It'll be the smaller developers, probably.

Yeah, the ones who don't have recently. Now we can get all the Mac people, too. Yeah. It's going to be a thing. So we're going to make a great time with all the configuration apps of, like, all these IOTE devices. It took Phillips, like, 15 years to update that hue app. I cannot wait for their Mac app to control heat lights. It's going to be a thing. All right, I'm going to read this ad. Oh, we should talk about that most on the Apple TV. It exists. The end.

They did it. They told me they were going to do it, and then they did it. The end. Everyone was very happy for you. I was very, to be in a position where the richest company on Earth announces a feature and strangers on Twitter say congratulations to me.

It's like extremely weird. I'll take it. I'm very excited for it. So it's not in the beta. It's not done yet. They haven't rolled it out. There's no content until the fall. So it's not here yet.

I am dying to know how they solve the Siri Atmos problem because that was the holdup as far as I know. Can I ask what the Siri Atmos problem is? So right now the Apple TV does all of its audio decoding internally. So you send it a Dolby Digital 5.1. You're watching a movie in iTunes and Dolby Digital. It decodes all of that audio. and then sends out five channels of PCM audio to whatever, right? So it does the surround processing for you,

and the reason it does that is so that when you hold down the button and call Siri, it can put the Siri audio and responses into the audio stream. That's, like, very complicated. They have to put Siri into the audio. They can't just pass, you know, your TV show or your movie or whatever straight to your soundbar. They have to decode the audio, mix Siri into it. Atmos is object-based, so they can't just get,

they can't just pick five channels of audio and put Siri wherever they want. They have to make Siri an object in the atmosphere. So that's like a big, complicated, how did you solve this problem? No one's ever solved it well. Who knows? I'm very curious to hear how they did it. So Siri could just like appear at some corner of your room. That would be the dream, right?

Like Siri's like swirling around you. But I'm very excited for that. That is true that the Apple TV now is the only, is the best streamer if you want, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. The Chromecast can do it, and I do it all the time like Chromecast, and it is the most knowing experience in the world.

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Right now, Vergecast listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash verge. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash verge, V-E-R-G-E. Once more, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash verge. ZipRecruiter says they're the smartest way to hire. It's a tagline. ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire. All right. I'm excited to go find a job.

No, I invite you. Oh, I post the job and then the robot invites you in a zip. It recruits you. He's recruited. That's not their tagline. All right, there's breaking essential news. Ashley, break the news. Essential announced on Twitter that its second module is a hi-fi headphone jack.

What up? All my dreams are coming through. They're bringing back the headphone jack as a mod. Yeah. No. That's what you want. What? They're going to support ESS Saber.

It's got an ESS Saber DAC. It supports, it's a hardware MQA rendering. These are just, and it's crafted with machine titanium. Here's what you need to know. They partnered with a title. The failed phone company and the extremely confusingly is it failed music service have brought you the ultimate endongles. Exclusive to Sprint.

So it's a magnet that sticks to your phone. Yeah. That is a head. Yeah. That's how they're, That's how their accessory thing works. It's a magnet. Gosh.

Ashley, I'm assigning a story on this podcast right now. Last week on this podcast, I laid out my conspiracy theory that Apple won't let anybody make headphone jack accessories for the iPhone. Oh, yeah. I know. I heard this conspiracy theory. Yeah. And yeah, I believe that.

All right. I've been trying. I've been trying to hunt this down. You know I happen. But I just, I hear the distaste that is Dane in your voice for this headphone magnet. Perfect for the fridge Now you can add a headphone jack To anything made of metal

Why would anybody Dieter essential's over right Like why are they even trying I mean they're not making a second phone right That's what we're thinking But they still want to get that home thing done I don't know man They want to do for the smart home

What Sonos is doing for audio They want to be the neutral translator Are you just segueing into the real story that you covered? No, I'm just saying that there's a, there's a parallel there, but like, Sonos is doing it, and Essential is promising that someday maybe it will do it. Yeah.

You're the last person I'm using an essential phone, so I just wanted, I just wanted to hear your emotions. I mean, I do have a... He sounds despondent if you ask me. Let's see if we can figure out what Dieter's feeling. Despair. All right, Dieter, you had the big product exclusive on the new Sonus Beam.

What's going on at this thing? Yeah. So it's a sound bar that has Alexa, which seems pretty straightforward. But what's clever about it is they decided to finally make the switch away from optical audio to HTML to audio input, which lets them, if you plug it into a TV, it means the TV should automatically recognize it and port all your audio over to the soundbar. And sometimes it works.

Sometimes it doesn't. You got to configure it. And sometimes you don't want to give up an HTML port. So they are shipping a dongle that has Optical audio to HTML. But as a smart speaker, as Alexa speaker, it's pretty good, right? It does all the Alexa stuff, and it recognizes my voice pretty well. It's a small sound bar. It's $400, which is, like, important because I think it's going to help them expand their market.

And it's sort of meant for, I don't know, name your demographic, urban hipsters, something, something. Yeah. It's small. It's cute. It's a baguette. Here's what I think it's for. Here's my take. I think lots of people have smart TVs, and they just use.

Netflix on their smart TVs. They don't have a box. Smart TV sound horrible. And so this is like, you ought, and Alexa, just put this under your smart TV, plug it in with one cable. It'll just work. Your TV is sound good. And then you get this like Alexa streaming speaker. And now when you listen that one Jay-Z song, where he's like, Frank Sinatra on my sono, you're like, I have one of those.

Wait, I've been bewildered by this. So because there's only one HD mic port, you cannot use this with a Roku and Apple TV. No, you'd plug those into the TV. You can? Yeah, you plug it in. Yeah, you put it in the TV. Okay. Yeah, so it's, it's, it's, it's the HTML

and the return channel. And the return means that it, the TV does audio out through HGMI to the soundbar. Okay. Got it. So you plug everything into the TV and then you use one of the H.D.MI ports to send audio down to the soundbar. And then because it's hooked up over H.D.MI, it can use H.D.M.C. to turn the TV on and

if you happen to have a fire TV, you can use Alexa to like control the fire TV. And later on, when you have a Chromecast, you can use Google Assistant to control a Chromecast. Is Google Assistant ever coming to Sonos? We've even saying that shit for a year. They said it's coming this year. Okay. That's all I got.

The pitch here is you want an Alexa in your living room, but you don't want another freaking speaker. And you definitely want a soundbar because your TV sounds like garbage, but you don't want a big honking one. So get this cute little sound bar. It sounds better than an echo. It may be comparable to a home pod.

I don't know. Well, I don't know. I'm not going to get into too many comparisons because I haven't been able to list them. I have a guess of what the comparison is going to be like. But you get a really good speaker for music in your room. You get a smart speaker in your living room without having to have another thing plugged in somewhere. And you get better sound from your TV.

$400 and it's small and cute. That's the idea. And most TVs will work with it, right? That's the only thing I was wondering. Yeah, I think most new TVs. You have a 15-year-old plasma that's like generating heat in your apartment. This feels targeted at me. Do you have a 15-year plasma in your apartment?

I have a 3D TV. Do you really? No. Wow. Well, I have a 3D TV. I've only ever watched one thing. My dad has a 3D TV. Does you have the Gravity Blu-ray?

Because it is worth it. It's super worth it. I don't know what he's doing. I don't ask. I'm saying, a great present is the Gravity Blu-ray because it's in 3-D. We're the glasses as a family. I'm not even going to respond to this. It just seems fine.

It seems like this is the product Sonas should have made with the play base they put out last year. Yeah, the fact that the playbase still. Yeah. The fact that the playbase still. doesn't have Alexa is still just dumb. So this is like the first problem. A lot of people love it. Walt Mossberg has a play base.

Producer Felicia Schimkmar has a playbase. They love it. It sounds great. It's got a lot of base. It's really, really good. You can just buy an echo dot and everything works the same.

But I don't know. It takes them two years to make one of these speakers. At least the Sotos Beam was two years in development. It's just, it's really dumb to me that they didn't find a way

to cram Alexa onto the play base. Yeah. Because it just came out. But this is the first product from the new CEO. The new CEO is trying to like make the company go faster. Here's what I think is super interesting.

Right before they announced this, they announced that they are partnering with a bunch of AV receiver manufacturers so that their sonous stuff can turn those on and off by themselves so more things can be Sonas-like. And then today, IKEA put out a teaser

that they're going to make their own Sonos speakers, which are even cheaper than the $150 play one. So they're just getting bigger. I think Sonos wants you to have Sonos speakers in your house. Their pitch, I think, is good. So if you are, right now, if you're like, when you buy one of these things, you have to be an Alexa person,

or you have to be a Google person. And that, you know, it's a lot. It's a lot to be like, I bet that Amazon's going to win, and I've installed all this stuff in my house. But if you buy Al-Sano stuff and, like, five years down the road, you're like, oh, man, Google One, you're like switch it over. Yeah. I think it's also works with AirPlay 2.

And I think it does, like, room syncing. So, like, you said for Sonos rooms and then Airplay 2 can see them. Man, I got, I got doubts. Yeah. Well, I mean, we've got to try it, right? But it also does clever shit, like, When you send a song over Airplay 2, it also sends the name of the song. And so you can start a thing with Airplay 2.

And then you can ask Alexa what's playing. And then Alexa will tell you what's playing because it knows. Because Sonos knows. Sonos tells Alexa. And then you can play pause or whatever. So, like, normally if, like, you're doing airplay stuff, you've got to find the person with the phone and ask them to do something. Change it, right? Change the volume, change the song, whatever.

But when you send it to a Sonos speaker, you can, like, start an AirPlay 2 song. and then you can go Alexa next track, and it'll jump over to the next track, even though you started it on Airplay, too. So they do a pretty good job of, like, translating between all these services. Yeah. At the end of the day, it's a soundbar for $400. Like, Sonas is very good at making its announcements seem huge. Just, like, commend them for that. Like, they're an important company that people care about.

People get... But, like, they made one more Sonos speaker. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I think a lot of people are going to buy this thing, which is their goal. But in terms of, like, pushing the state of the art forward... What is Sonas' game with opening up the ability to connect other speakers to Sonos? Because this is very surprising to me. It seems like Sonos's business was, we sell you a bunch of extremely expensive speakers,

and they all work together. Yeah. And now they're saying, I mean, it's great if you can connect cheaper speakers. I think their game ultimately is like, you know, you're going to... I think I said this on the show, like, a week ago, two weeks ago, the time is relative. It's a construct. The host for our life. I think Sonos optimistically believes every single one of its customers is going to get richer and have a bigger house over time.

So you buy one and then you're going to be successful. Oh, my God. They're investing in your future. And then you're going to have a room with two, you're going to house with two rooms. And you're like, I should buy another sono speaker. And then you're going to have house with like five rooms. 38% of Sonos customers end up buying another sono speaker. Right, because they were successful.

Because they had a good sense to buy a sono speaker. People who don't buy a sono speaker, they fail in life. It's smaller houses. This should be... I don't think this is their pitch. You know me to break your spirit? Yeah. They sent this on stage.

Fortunately, they didn't try and sell me on this concept when I went down to their offices. In beautiful Santa Barbara, where I'm going to retire someday. Sonos believes that it is the best platform for the... You ready? Yeah. This is what they call it. Oh, God. Everyone, everyone prepared for the Sonic Internet.

The Sonic Internet? Yeah. Wait. Where? What is the Sonic Internet? Is that literally all sound? The Internet of Sounds. It's the newest, hottest internet.

Look, Jake, just buy a cellar speaker and then think about how to get yourself into a bigger house. That's their business model. What if they're right? What if this has all been a Sonic Internet? Like, is this a Sonic Internet? Yes, dude. Oh, my God. You're all on the Sonic Internet right now.

This is why Sonas makes so much money. Yeah. They have these. It's all hidden Jake right now. You buy a son of speaker, you're just a regular guy, and you open that app, and you're like, oh, man, I wish I could use some of this multi-room functionality. And you're like, I got to work harder. I got to hustle. I got to drive.

And then you're like, I need two rooms. And then, like, you're motivated. You're listening to Gary Vaynerchuk tapes every morning. You're like, on that boosted board, suddenly you got 15 rooms in your house. And you're like, it's all because I just wanted multi-room streaming capability. Sonos, thank you for the kick in the ass I needed to be the best Jake I could be. Sonos is the ultimate peddler of capitalism. Yes, that's right.

So Adam Smith was like, one day there'll be a wireless speaker company that really pakes my theories to the max. That's how we told. He was a weird Victorian. I mean, I'm glad Sonos could finally bring this to reality. Here's, yeah, here's the big problem for Sonos. They're going to have an IPO pretty soon. Yeah.

And all of a sudden, they're going to have to start giving quarterly reports. And Sonos likes to talk about a 10-year time span, not a three-month-old. month time span. And so when they start getting pressure from investors to start doing stuff more quickly, when what they really want to do is make a speaker that you'll buy and use for 10 years, that's going to be rough for them. The Sonos subscription service of some kind is coming. That recurring revenue thing where they charge you $10 a month for something to happen on the Sonic Internet. Especially if they're opening this up to third-party speakers. There's no way that's not. Well, then they get licensing revenue. That's a good recurring revenue stream, right?

Like, IKEA sells so many speakers a month. They all have sent a technology that's like, you know, $3 a patent licensing fees or whatever the hell it is. Okay. One more thing, and then we got to read a break, and then you are in charge of the gadget segment, my friend. Okay. Amazon's Fire TV Cube is an Echo Streambox and Universal Remote in one. Here's what this is. This is an all-black cube with two very smart things in it.

It's a combination of Fire TV Streambox and an Echo. Lights up. Listen to it. All four sides of this cube have an IR blaster to control. to control your cable box. And there's an IR extender, too, if you want it. This is a hellish idea. This is a great-ish idea.

I thought this... Dude, you were going to be more excited about this than... Everything. At most. Like, isn't this your dream product? No, it's just... This is my nightmare.

You have to move away from this garbage standard. At least five IR blasters, by my count. Yeah, there's five. There's one on each side. I don't want to put one on the top and the bottom, too. This is incredible. What can't you do with this? Infrared is great.

It's reliable. It's great. It's reliable. It's fine for things that don't require state. So you're like volume up, and volume just go up. But you can't be like volume 50%, which I don't know why you do. But you can't because I will never know what's happening. So that means you definitely can't say something like change the channel to HBO.

And it will like tie up with fight not to a cable box. It will fail. Yeah, no, it understands the cable box and it'll send the channel number to the cable box. there's a graveyard of idiots who've tried this before with this exact technology like Google TV the Mark Whitten who is a lovely man I don't mean to integrate him literally tweeted me I've been arguing with you about this in 2013 because he was in charge of the Xbox One and I was like the fuck are these IR Blasters he's like I need to have them but one day everyone will understand the Xbox One is the ultimate TV device for living room and I was like I don't think so I think your IR Blasters is going to fail and people are going to turn off and now it doesn't work for Microsoft anymore and I'm just saying that's maybe not percent what happened there but love you mark okay i'm done talking about so sonos thinks cable

boxes are dead and amazon is like no like we think people still have them yeah so i think most people just buy the smart tv by the way i don't mean to like harsh on mark i'm just telling jokes mark's a good guy he actually used to work at sonas he was a yeah there's a thing do you want for microsoft sonas good smart guy xbox one great prefer to thames six four you're wrong about that well i know now i'm just thinking about all of the hate that's going to flow my way because i hate the iron blaster and i of the Xbox. Anyway, I think streamboxes are coming to an end because smart TVs are pretty good. So you can just buy one and not screw with any other stuff and just like use Netflix.

Most people just watch the Netflix. They all have Netflix. A lot of them have Netflix buttons on their remote. So you buy the son hose. You plug it in. That same remote will control the volume of your sound host. You get Alexa, you get driven to be a capitalist murderer because you want more room. Jake.

Jake. Sheek. But if you, I think Amazon rightly sees that lots of people have a cable box. They want, their fire TV products are very popular. They have an old TV. They can just put all this stuff in there and then promise that you can say, Alexa, change the channel. And maybe it will do it. And that maybe is just very important because it never works.

I mean, if they can pull it off, this Alexa Echo box, what is it called? Fire TV box? Yeah. Fire TV, Cube. The cube. The cube. It does literally everything you could want in your living room except YouTube. Yeah. Womp-womp. Do you ever need to send money internationally? Jake? He's a capitalist. Of course he does.

Every day. Yeah, from one of the many rooms in your son-ness-enabled house. Especially over the Sonic Internet. I want to warn you against using your bank or PayPal, Jake. Sure they could get money for any to be, but that transfer will cost you more than should, a lot more. It's the old way. Let me tell you about the new way, transfer-wise. It's transformed by two friends, Tavit and Christo, who are, frustrated by the bank's bad exchange rate and high fees. They wonder, what if it could bypass the

bank's entirely. They built transfer-wise, the smartest way to spend money internationally. That was seven years ago. Today, more than two million people use transfer-wise, people sending money home, business-paying suppliers, freelancers getting paid. The list goes on. Transfer-wise, it's clever new technology, gives you a great exchange rate and a low fee, so it'll put some extra money in your pocket for the more important things because no one has ever said, it is important that my bank gets some extra money, except for presumably the CEO of the bank. But that's not you yet. By a son... Test out for free, transarise.com slash podcast.

Download the app. Once again, that's transorise.com slash podcast, the smartest way to spend money internationally. Jake, every week, Paul does a segment. Yeah. And I believe the segment is called, hey, look at this thing I just found on birch.com. That is actually really accurate. Well, what I wanted to ask is I actually just found two things that. are completely unrelated, but we're two of my favorite things this week.

And I want to know which one you want to hear about more. Talk to me. One of them involves routers with lots of antennas. Oh, yeah. Classic. The other involves fake technology that you can buy. Can you combine them? Let's go to fake technology.

Okay. Yeah. So you're a gamer. You love glowing stuff. Everything on your computer has to glow. Now here's the predicament. You have four RAM slots. You don't have the money to fill up four RAM slots.

No. That's expensive. But it would be so embarrassing if you had two glowing sticks of RAM and just two empty slots, right? Enter Gigabyte, which will now sell you two fake sticks of RAM that will glow alongside your real sticks of RAM. Are you serious? What? This is the future of gaming technology. It is.

So you're playing some games. A friend comes over. Maybe some of you're romantically interested in. Your room's aglow. And they're like, those empty RAM slots are dark. I'm getting out of here, Buster. But now they'll be like, oh, you've got 32 gigs in there. Yeah.

I mean, you can love how much RAM you've got. It's incredible. You can feel faster. That's important. How much do these cost? You can't really put a price on fake RAM. Oh, God. Wait.

No, because, so you got to buy them bundled with the real RAM at this point, and it's like $230. That's great. But in the future, they are considering selling the fake RAM entirely on its own. So you can just buy fake RAM. I'm so into this. No real RAM. I'm 100% buying gaming PC just so I can have fake RAM. I mean, this is maybe my favorite technology product in a long time.

It's good. It really speaks to where the gaming PC market has been and will stay. I don't know what to say about that. All right, a little bit more, when we wrap this up, I wish Paul was here because the actually bigger news in WWC, this is true, more popular on our site, move the market more, just in general, Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion.

If you don't know what GitHub is, it's because you're probably not a developer. GitHub is where open source developers predominantly post all their code to share and comment on open source projects. Microsoft is a major user of GitHub. You can also obviously have private repositories on GitHub. This is like a big deal. It's a big deal of the point where they're like tons and tons of like GitHub memes about Microsoft.

But Paul's not here and I feel like he's the one to really dive into the psyche here. What has kind of surprised me is Microsoft hasn't, I mean, at least as far as I've seen, really detailed what they plan to do with GitHub. Or even like necessarily promised like we're not going to mess it up. They've absolutely promised they're not going to mess it up. Okay. Without question, right? So, you know, Microsoft is old, hated open source. They want to kill Linux.

Right. That was Steve Balmer's Microsoft. The Sachianadella Microsoft is like... They love open source. They're putting out memes. They're like Microsoft Hearts Linux, right? Like, they have become a tool vendor. GitHub is an extraordinary important tool.

They did, I will say this. They drew some sort of line between GitHub and LinkedIn, where they were like, people on LinkedIn, show off their skills and GitHub is where the skills come. And it was like, I don't, please don't talk about LinkedIn in a positive way. Microsoft didn't screw up LinkedIn. Yes. They connected the acquisitions in a way that I just don't use LinkedIn.

Like it's just not a thing because I'm not out there trying to get more wins in my Sto's house. Yeah. But they connected the idea that they own LinkedIn, which is where professionals like do their networking and GitHub. is this place where software professionals literally do their work but also network. And I don't understand that link particularly well, but their whole thing is like, we're

going to leave GitHub alone. I think a lot of people are really nervous about this because with Microsoft's ownership comes more scrutiny of their behavior. There's a lot of weird stuff on GitHub. Like the code for like, make deep fakes in GitHub. So like will Microsoft take response? Like that's a lot.

Like it's a publishing platform if you think about it that way. And that means Microsoft going to care about what's published on there, but I don't think... I mean, and I've, like, looked through, like, leaked code that's sitting on GitHub. Yeah. And I assume that Microsoft will be less lenient about that. Yeah, so it's unclear. But it's a big deal when Paul comes back next week.

Next week, two weeks? How long is Paul going for? Whenever Paul comes back from his voyages. I want to have him to talk about that. Okay. Here's the other one. I just want to pull into this. It requires us to trust Facebook to make a claim, which is hard to do at this moment in time.

But the New York Times ran a story, a big story that they've been issuing multiple follows on because there's congressional interest in it, saying Facebook gave over 60 device makers inappropriate access to user data, which is a huge claim. Among those device makers, Huawei, ZTE, the Chinese companies that are going around is like shutting down because they, I don't know, sell secrets to Chinese government. Good secrets to Chinese government. But here's the thing. Facebook is saying, of course we did. And the big example in the Times is true. And I literally started laughing out loud when I got to this example because I was like, no one ever bought this phone.

So it doesn't matter. They're like a BlackBerry 10 phone when you like loaded up pulled in all this data from Facebook, including data about your friends that they hadn't consented to give, right? But nobody ever bought back. But Facebook's claim is we couldn't build apps for all the platforms. so we open the API hooks so these device makers could build their own apps

on the platforms including these like miniature versions of Facebook which at the time was a huge trend right? The Blackberry Hub we pull in your contacts

your Gmail, your Facebook, your calendar, one view of all the things. So in Facebook says we never sent any all the data was on the device no data and we monitor everybody

so it's fine. If you believe Facebook then this entire uproar is ridiculous because I don't know you can build an app for Twitter and just log into Twitter

and you get all the data from Twitter. It's just building apps. And Facebook said some people can build apps and some people can't, but that's how the apps work. Great. But if you don't believe Facebook, then it's like, okay, Huawei was scraping Facebook the whole time. I mean, the problem is that

it just shows how lenient Facebook is with giving this out, right? They do have deals with all these companies, and maybe they are monitoring them. But just the fact that so many companies, so many developers have access to such a huge amount of information. I mean, I think that is maybe just the thing.

Like, even if nothing wrong happened, we're realizing now just how much data Facebook is giving over to these companies. And even Facebook is saying we might have given too much data to them, right? Because it cut back on how much data it gives to app developers now. Right. So that was their app developers. Facebook's argument here is these weren't app developers. These were people who made cell phones.

We couldn't get our app on every one of their platforms. we allowed the platform vendors to build a Facebook experience. Yeah. But I mean, I feel like even if we're accepting that that is okay, it's still just bad that there's so much information that is available to them, right? Like, they didn't need to make that much information available to run Blackberry Hub. Did they? I don't know.

I mean, the answer is like if what you're trying to build is a cut down version of Facebook, then the future of that is to add more and more features to it. So eventually, you just have Facebook again. So, right? And I feel like the real thing we're getting at is reckoning with the size of Facebook's data set is like a weaponizable thing as opposed to several years ago when it was just like, you want access to Facebook. And Deeter, I'm interested for your take on this.

Here's my, if Facebook was open and anyone could have built a Facebook client, we would, a lot of people would have been happier, right? Because right now Facebook is this closed ecosystem. Yeah. And there are lots of- Facebook said that they were under a ton of pressure to open up and let other people make apps for them. Right. So a lot of-

It wasn't just Blackberry, yeah. So a lot of people previously have said Facebook should open up and become part of the web. And now they're getting all this heat because they opened up in this very selective way. So I kind of, it feels like the story is too much, but it's only too much if you absolutely believe that Facebook is telling a truth about data sharing. Well, it's not just, is Facebook doing the truth? It's, does Facebook actually know? So, all right. Anybody can make a Twitter app.

Presumably you can get a bunch of information about the people that you follow, you know, they haven't consented to share with that app, whatever. So anybody can make a Facebook app or these particular companies could make a Facebook app. Facebook was like, yeah, they just made an app. And when you make an app, you get to grab information about the friends. But we know with Cambridge Analytica, they said, yeah, we realized they had this data. We totally get rid of it. And then they didn't.

And so the thing about these other companies making Facebook apps is Facebook is Facebook is presuming to know what other companies have done with the data that they stayed on device, blah, blah, blah. And do we actually believe that back then and now Facebook was actually had the access to do the audits to make sure that the user data that they gave another company access to make an app out of was kept safe and secure? Right. Who knows? Disclosure. My wife works for Oculus. There it is. That's the one.

There it is. All right. I don't know. That story is out there, but I just wanted to underline the central tension of it, which is it's probably overheated, but to say that you have to truly believe Facebook. And Facebook has gotten itself a new position where I'm absolutely uncomfortable going out of that line. Even though it seems extremely reasonable that they're like, we're not going to build a BlackBerry app. BlackBerry.

Just go ahead. Here's some maybe I hooks. Okay. One more Facebooky thing. I just want to say, I think it's funny because it's like, most people probably think of hackers, and they're like, oh, I don't want the hackers to hack into Facebook and steal my data. What we're really just talking about now is just Facebook not knowing what they're doing with data. Like having this huge repository of information, be like, eh, we're good. The hackers can't get to us.

But everyone else. Everyone else. Just show up and say you're a phone company. Yeah. Hi, I'm Steve's phones. Cambridge, Adelinaica. I'd like deep access to your. Okay, I'm asking you this question.

Yes. Instagram, teasing, hour-long video support, which seems crazy to me. I saw someone say this is like a supposed to be a Snapchat Discover competitor. No. There is no way I want to watch an hour-long newscast, I don't know, in Instagram. I was like, is this supposed to be like Vimeo? Do the influencers want this? I don't know.

I mean, I guess if you're a YouTuber. Yes, we do. Okay. Lincoln, bio, I'm sure I'll find out what you're selling. Buy my merch, yo. Sorry, I don't have anything. That is not true. But it's not like personal merchia.

You do dictate it a lot of it. I do capriciously run our merch store it. But you don't think anybody will view it. I mean, that just seems like, not what people, I don't think people are, I mean, maybe people are sitting on Instagram and want to watch an hour video. I don't know anyone who would. That seems just like a sentence. Are they doing too much with Instagram right now? I think what's going on is that Facebook has such a bad rap. I think Facebook is big in other countries, for sure. But I think in the U.S.,

which is kind of, you know, like what Facebook probably makes most of its money and whatnot, but like, I think in the U.S. people aren't using Facebook. So Facebook's like, hey, we got Instagram here. People like Instagram. Why don't we just stuff all of the features into Instagram and see how that goes. And I just think that is a terrible play. Instagram succeeded because it was just photos. Everyone liked photos. I really want them to spin out

original Instagram and then just have new Instagram. That would be great. When was the last time you posted a photo versus a story? Okay. I'm back with the grid now. Oh, you're back in. Yeah, because I made my Instagram public and I get a lot of likes. If I'm being honest, guys,

I just went through a breakup. I need likes, okay? I got you. It's for my ego. Do you want to pimp your Instagram on the show right now? Follow me. Okay, we can buy it. No, but I literally think the stories, Katie and I

Paulus wrote a great piece about this for BuzzFeed. Stories mean that I think way harder about putting shit in the grid. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm not posting every day or anything like that. It's like once a month. Yeah. But yeah, back in the day, it was like, you posted the grid all the time. Multiple times a week even. Back in the day.

It was like last year. Stories coming out last year. Feels like ages ago. I will say this, especially because I know a lot of people want to see my kid, but I don't want to, I know the stories will go away unless people are like really creepy. And I don't think, I don't think my Instagram followers that creepy. I'm crazy. But if I put it in the grid, it's like they are permanently, like I don't want that. Like people just want to like see like Max did a thing today.

So it's wild to me that I'd never think about posting like real photos. That is kind of crazy. It's got to be like a real moment that I'm trying to keep you kicked. Well, when Max rose up, you can tell her that she wasn't real enough for the grid. Max has a shout-out Instagram. She has a Finsta. I haven't done anything with it yet. You need to get that up and running so I can follow it.

I know. It's going to happen. One of our coworkers just that kid a little bit older than Max, and he and his wife have an email account. They basically are journaling in this email account so that when she's older, she can open these emails. and it's like, today you walked. Wow. That's horrible. That's, whoa.

So they're basically like emailing her every day. Huh. That's crazy. Okay, that's it. My parents gave up on my baby scrapbook two days in. Oh, no. Yeah. They were like, we tried.

All right, let me just say one more thing, and we can wrap this up. Net neutrality is over on Monday. Well, Pye's order goes into effect. Yeah. There's a lot of heat out there in this world. I think you're going to see some protests. The Democrats are running on net neutrality in the midterm elections. So I think just going to be.

ready for that coverage to come back to the verge cast because it's going to now that's over the changes are here only like a hundred signatures or something like that away from a vote in the house so that's right around the corner elections are common and the states are passing that your trial bill so California just passed one which is by the way prohibited by the order so if you are into legal drama well California's going to succeed so that'd be cool all right that's it Ashley's here so I'm going to tell you you can listen to both seasons why you push that button all at once you can listen on your sono soundbar in any room of your increasingly larger house or over your essential headphone mod through your refrigerator. Actually, here's what I'll say. Why did you push the button is so good that if you listen to it on anything but an extraordinarily high quality accessory headphone jack on your

doomed custom phone, you're doing it wrong. Okay. I'm fine with that. Yeah. Good job. Elevate. That sells it. That's every podcast are. Converge with Casey Newton is up and running. This week's episode, he interviewed the person who runs spam at Google. A great interview. I gave Casey compliment last week. I'm going to give it to him again, even though it's not here. Casey's interview style is such that when he's done, I feel like I am best friends with that person. And like, I almost tweeted at this person at me like, hey man, cool joke. And I was like, wait, I don't know you at all. But you should listen to converge. I admire his passion for spam. He loves spam. He hates it. He loves to hate. Yeah. Yeah. He's in a fight for his life.

He's a warrior. He's going to clean up that inbox. There's also other great podcasts out there in the world. Recode decode with Kara Swisher, Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That stuff is growing great. Kara, by the way, she's got that MSNBC show Revolution. They're going to run a whole bunch of code interviews on MSNBC. That's coming up. So check that out. That's it for us.

Can I say everyone should watch Deeter's YouTube show? You watch Processor. Yeah, it's amazing. It's great Deeter. Thank you. You have an episode coming out, the same day of this is coming out. Yeah, we're doing a bonus episode this week. Yeah.

About WWDC. You want to hear it? You want me to tease it? Yeah. The WWC-2018 keynote was the most Google keynote Apple has ever given. Oh, boy. Wow. Someone just crashed a car in you.

That's your fault. Okay, that was it for the Vergecast this week. I know we went a little long. Thank you for sticking with us. We'll be back next week. Thank you so much for this thing. Rock and roll, Paul. Snip.

This episode of VergeCast was brought to you by IBM. Technology today has never been smarter, but smart only matters. When you put it to good use together, we can build. the smarter future for all of us. Let's put smart to work. Find out how at IBM.com slash smart.