AGI is whatever you want it to be

24:26You know, I once tried to interview the person that decides what they invest in because they were always like pretty first to invest in a lot of small startups that a lot of people weren't taking notice of and then those would like rock it up. So, you know, it's interesting to see them say, okay, we're not, yeah, we have all these startups and we're kind of rocking them up. And now let's also invest in something that like, you know, the AI industry uses every day and diversify in that way. So I think it's kind of just like a reverse diversification compared to what all the open AI and anthropic labs are doing.

24:56Tayden, you and I have talked a lot about AGI on many shows. It's always drama when you and I talk to each other. The working definition has been better than humans at economically viable tasks, or some riff on that, right? Better than humans at things that make money. If we're in the AGI era now, is OpenAI saying this model is better at humans at economically viable things? Because that's when the jobs start to go away. So is that the claim they're making? Yes, that seems to be what he's saying here because, I mean, they've always been, he did start, I should say he did start out before he said the AGI thing.

25:32He said, you know, everyone has a different definition of AGI. We used to think when we started opening AGI that there would be one moment that everyone would agree, okay, we've hit AGI, but it's actually hasn't happened that way. And it's a lot more fuzzy and gray, he said. So that was his disclaimer. But then he went on to say, yeah, if we fast forward a couple of years and we look back and say, when was it really that AGI was created? I think it's going to be about this time. And I think it might be about this model. Then he doubled down later in the call and he said, for me personally, I do think we're there.

26:01I think it's not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era. He feels the AGI. He feels the AGI. He is, you know, they've been touting the knowledge work capabilities of this model a ton. You know, that's what the whole demo video focused on. They're saying, you know, whether you're in legal, you're in design, you're in marketing, whatever, you're in science, it can, you know, do your job and help you in your job. They're framing it as help you in your job. But on the other side of the coin is it can do your job equally or better than you is what they're kind of, you know, implying for enterprise users.

26:36So I think, you know, yeah, the definition has always been equal or surpass human abilities. And it seems like, you know, they're really making the play that this that that we're at that now. This model feels like a particularly big enterprise push to me. Right. It feels like they're really targeting this at at big corporations, not at consumers. Now is the time to not lose to Anthropik. If David Pierce was here, he would be pounding the table and screaming, AI is business software and we should just get over it. Because that's what he says every time we talk about it. And it feels like this moment is very much, oh, it's going to be business software.

27:11This is a bunch of CIOs are going to buy this and deploy it across big organizations. And somewhere, as Hayden is saying, the free models will get updated, or the free products will get updated along the line. Yeah, I think you got to look at where the money is flowing from and it's enterprise. It's all going enterprise. Yeah. Hayden, this is great. Thank you so much for being on. Well, let us know when you decide what fits AGI and we'll have you back. We'll do. Can't wait. Thanks. I've got a text. The summer might be almost over, but a new bombshell has entered the villa. Meet the voices of DeepGram Flux TTS.

27:44I'm Drew. Low-key casual. I'm Alexis, an upbeat morning person. I'm Haley. Always cheerful. Flux TTS has some real personalities that are ready to speak. You can interrupt, pause, and keep talking without losing the plot. Fancy a chat? Come try all the voices free through September 12th at deepgram.com slash keep talking. Terms apply. Frontier AI didn't just accelerate cyber attacks. it multiplied them. Before an attack shows up, it's already moved through the network. And while seeing these attacks early matters, stopping them takes fusing security into the infrastructure itself. That's why the network that connects everything is also your best defense.

28:28Because you don't win by outrunning the attack, you win by leaving it nowhere to go. Cisco, the critical infrastructure for the AI era.

28:41So like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z. It's the phenomenon rattling millennials. They just look at you. They want something bigger themselves. Lifestyle is a priority. Motivation is being inspired. But regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that they're changing national politics. Generation Z is increasingly showing less loyalty to traditional political parties, many now more likely to identify as independent. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden they're all socialists.

29:17That is just not the case. They are embracing candidates who are offering new, bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats. This week on America Actually, Gen Z researcher Rachel Jambaza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. It's not rocket science. And this is, you know, I keep saying like young voters aren't that complicated after all. It's pretty simple. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

29:48All right, we're back. Joanna Stern is with us. Hey, Joanna. Hi, Neelai. Hi, David. Hello. Hello. I really wanted you to talk about Apple and we should talk about Apple. We should preview the event next week. We should talk about John Ternus's first 48 hours as CEO. But Joanna, you were just saying you were also on this open AI call where they just casually announced AGI. What do you think? Is it here? It feels like it was a moment in tech history that is either going to go down as one of the funniest moments in my life of covering tech or one of the darkest, saddest changes for humanity. Or maybe it's going to be someplace in between.

30:23But right now I'm leaning towards the first because it was it was crazy. I just thought it was crazy. They held this call today to tell reporters what they're announcing, which is GPT-6, Astra is here. But then Greg Brockman was really clear that he believes this is the beginning of the AGI era. He actually ended the call saying, welcome to the AGI era. He said that to everyone. And when another reporter kind of later in the call, they described all the capabilities of the model and didn't give totally concrete examples. There's this video that they showed showing the things you can do with it.

30:57but it kind of looked like the things I can already do with it. Let's leave that aside for a minute. But so a reporter kind of asks him about the, can you really say this is AGI? There's the stuff that has to do with Microsoft. He says, you know, are you calling this AGI right now? Is this what you're saying, right? Like we all want to know what the headline is. And I'm going to read to you what Brockman says back. He says, so ideally I leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves if this qualifies for them. The reader. The reader, yes. For me personally, I do think we're there. I think there's a pretty good argument for it.

31:38Sorry, I'm using Apple's transcription and it's quite bad. It says there's a, I do, I think here's a pretty good argument for it. I think it's, he was saying theirs. Like that. Yeah, sure. Let's call it AGI. It's true. You mentioned Microsoft. They, you know, famously opening Microsoft have been intertangled with each other forever. There's some clause in their contract that when AGI is discovered, everything changes, right? Well, he pushed back on that. I can read you the quote on that. He said that we talked, he says there's no contractual AGI triggering anymore. So that's, and this is a quote, so that's actually not a relevant concept.

32:20Sure. Okay. So that's why they announced it. Okay. But also like humanity might be over. yeah you can say whatever you want right and that's what was kind of crazy to me especially as like i read this quote back which is like the reader can decide and i know you guys have talked about this for a long time on the podcast like is the agi governing board is it you is it my dog like i just kind of kept being like anyone right now can say it's agi like my dog was sitting in everyone like browser agi you called it like okay um it's a vibes thing like it just feels like it was a vibes announcement for an ipo that's probably coming yeah that's i was gonna ask this really just the feeling i had was like there's a rush to say this right now um this was something that they didn't tell reporters about till yesterday to get on this call like it just feel like last night truly i was going to bed and i was like yeah sure i can make this meeting um it just, it felt very rushed.

33:17They want to get this out. Of course, they've been talking about this model. There's been, you know, the conversations they've had with the government. There's been the testing of it. They're also saying, you know, there was a lot of good time in this call spent talking about the alignment, the testing. So props to them for focusing on that. But it just, it does feel very, very rushed. Like there's a, there's a reason they wanted this out. And then they wanted to say AGI. I mean, you're as deep in AI as anyone. Do you feel like KGI is here? I mean, you can call it too. I could call it too. And look, I know it's like people will say to me like, oh, you're going to point to all the things that are just so bad still with AI, which is what I want to do right now.

33:53And people will say, well, that doesn't count all the great things that you can still do and the computer control and that it can work at superhuman speeds on things that humans have never been able to do. And that's true. But you still have the whole reality that right now some of this is still so dumb. Yeah, it seems like an important piece of the puzzle. Look, he's calling it and he's calling it and he's saying it's the beginning of the AGI era, which means he thinks there's going to be some big discoveries and big, big progress that's going to come out of this model. And I'm excited to see that, too.

34:24So I'm like very pessimistic, but also like I want to be optimistic about some of it. I have one more question. And we should talk about Apple because it's interesting to call the beginning of the AGI era right before Apple announces an iPhone. There's some connection there that's interesting to talk about. Is this just Brockman doing the same move as Demis Asabas saying that we're in the foothills of the singularity, which is just a phrase? Like he hasn't declared AGI. He's saying we're in the AGI era, which presumably begins around AGI. In the foothills. You're right. Yeah. That's why it was funny.

34:57Like it was just like this couching, right? Like I'm not going to say it, but I'm going to say it. There was a lot of couch, like the reader should decide. But I think, you know, and look, he's the president of OpenAI, arguably the most important person at OpenAI right now. I mean, he is the one controlling all these teams. So that that is a super significant thing. Like, honestly, to me, I believe it more from him versus Altman, who's been saying things like this for a long time. Right. So, OK, like, but you're still waffling. And yeah, I imagine when that when they needed funding, they needed to keep saying, we need more funding so we can get to AGI, right?

35:35And now that they're about to IPO, they're like, well, now our IPO makes sense. You should all invest after we're officially public. That does seem to signal that that's going to happen fairly soon. We'll see. Yes. All right. The reason I connected that to Apple is that we are a week away from an iPhone event. We assume that there will be a folding phone. There'll obviously be new pro phones. I'm actually curious to see if they do the regular phone at the same time. There's a lot of rumors that they won't just do a regular iPhone and ship it at the same time as the other ones. We're expecting kind of other hardware.

36:07There's been a lot of rumors that it'll be a big launch. John Ternus, the new CEO, said it's going to be a huge launch and his first memo to staff. What do you make of this? Does Apple have to respond to their former partner, OpenAI, saying that we're now in the AGI era? Because that's the thing that kills the phone, right? I don't think they... I think the timing, like David's hinting, is this an IPO timing situation? And I don't, I think they probably want to have something that they could dominate in the news next week. But like there's always something connected to OpenAI next week or in the news.

36:42I don't think Apple's going to change a thing about what's happening in their presentation. That's been on lock, I'm sure. What about their ChatGPT integration contract? Because the last I looked, the plugin with ChatGPT was still in the settings. And I feel like at some point they're going to kill that off. Yeah, it's still there. It's still their latest build in iOS 27 too. And you can adjust turning it on and off. Yeah. It was a weird choice. I mean, do you know anyone who uses that? Have you ever met a person that uses that? No, not a single person. Not a single person. We'll just start at the start.

37:15John Ternus is now CEO of Apple. This was the big transition week. Long planned. Tim Cook said goodbye. His last meeting, his last act as CEO was in the retail store on the Apple campus, which I thought was, it was very touching. He was like, this is the thing I care about the most. We can recap the Tim Cook era. We can talk about the beginning of the Ternus era. Joanna, do you think Apple's gonna be meaningfully different with a different CEO? I do think in the longterm they will be. I keep wondering about this event. And I started going back through some of John Ternus's appearances and keynotes.

37:48And I really just wonder what the format of this is gonna be. I wanna pick both of your brains on it because we had such a clear format in the world of the Steve Jobs keynote, right? We just like, if you watched it, you knew it was just like, everything was so Steve Jobs about his keynotes. Then we move into the Tim Cook era. We had a little bit of a continuation of it, many years, I'd say probably what, probably five to eight years. I didn't do the math, but they had big stuff done in the Moscone Center and they did big stuff in different theaters where it was live. But then COVID happens and they're able to go and pivot to the recorded, streamed presentation, which honestly I think was a blessing for Tim Cook.

38:32It was like kind of great that COVID happened for Tim Cook because then they could move to this way, right? In the context of keynote presentations. Yes. Just, yeah. Yes, asterisk. And then they could move to this presentation, which was really good for Cook. He could tee up all these great people. These people didn't have to be great on stage. John Ternus was one of them, obviously Craig being another, but then lots of other executives at the company that we don't really often see. And we wouldn't see kind of come on stage in fast ways that they do it in the edited video. And so now I'm really wondering, what does it look like for the John Ternus keynote?

39:08Do they keep the streaming, which Apple has been very successful for Apple? Or are they going to go back to some hybrid of this? How is it going to look? And is he going to be a showman because he loves talking about products? Yeah, I really appreciate it. The last Apple event, you and I are sitting next to each other. They had the pre-recorded thing and they brought the press to a live Q &A with some of their executives to talk more about AI. David, I think you were there. You were actually right in front of us. Yeah. I just thought, okay, this is kind of best of both worlds. I think Apple is very committed to their infomercials.

39:37They will tell you that those things get more views and they travel more than anything that they could ever do live and they love them. They've gotten in trouble. They faked the Siri demo ages ago in one of them and they had to unlock it all back. So I think they're learning how to bring some of that live experience back. I don't think that will be like in this event. My curiosity is how much does Ternus talk? Right. He's the product person. He's the product CEO. Tim Cook hasn't really introduced a product in some time, if I recall. He's done the big intro. He's so excited to be here. And then it's off to the races with 50 different people.

40:12And I think that reflects how Tim has managed the company to some huge extent. That is how he's all these other people make the products. I'm curious if Ternus is the one who introduces the folding iPhone. Right. And he's like, I'm the product visionary here. I'm the best marketer for this product, because that is a thing that you haven't had since Steve Jobs. I get the feeling that he won't. I'm not really sure why. I feel like it's it's they've set a bit of a precedent that there's an intro from the CEO. I think John Ternus will intro the show. Everyone will clap and get excited. but I think he'll pass it off to all of those other execs that are still the ones introducing the new chips, the new hardware.

40:49I mean, this was one of his babies. So there's a chance that he gets excited about it and he'll probably end the keynote talking about it. But I don't know. I'm, I don't feel like he's going to be the one to announce it. That's just a guess. I don't know if he'll be the one to announce it, but that's where I'm going with that. Jobs just famously held up products, right? And I mean, I think there were a couple of times where Cook would hold the product up at the end. I think there's going to be a moment where we do see Ternus with the folding phone, whether it's a photo moment at the end or comes on stage in the middle.

41:21Like I just I just get this feeling like he's going to want to make a mark in a different way than Cook had on these presentations. The question is, how does that work when you have these pre-recorded videos, you know, like what they've done previously? I think last year in the Steve Jobs theater. Tim Cook comes on stage. They don't broadcast this. They just talk to the press and then they play the video. We all sit in a movie theater together for an hour for some reason. Everyone else sees that in the world. Tim Cook comes back on stage. They leave. How do they do this hybrid situation? Maybe they only show the press the phone and they don't show the rest of the world the phone.

41:56That's a possibility. Or the trillion dollar company can figure out how to break from a recorded video into a live video setting. We need AGI for that. I don't know. Technology is not the hold up here. It's going to be AI avatars. The AGI era is here. AI Ternus is going to hold up an AI phone. It's going to be amazing. It's funny, you can read, overread way too much in Apple keynotes. I'm sure we have listeners who are asking why we would overanalyze an Apple keynote and its staging in a way that you would never overanalyze the staging of a Samsung keynote or a Google keynote. And the only thing I would offer you is it's because it's real.

42:37Like Apple keynotes are political in this specific way. The best example I can give you of this is famously Steve Jobs signaled that he was going to fire Tony Fidel by deleting his name from the contacts list in the very first iPhone keynote. Like this was like a coded mafia message. And if you read Mark Gurman, who constantly is talking about the palace intrigue of Apple, who they feature in the keynotes, it actually reflects the politics of the organization in a way that like I don't even think Google knows what's going to happen in the keynote until 20 minutes before they start. Yeah. Right.

43:11Like is Demis going to say we're in the foothills of the singularity? Like, who knows? Like, let's get out there. Have a good time, everybody. Like, it's just like a very different vibe. And it's like polished by the top people at Apple. Like the CEO is in the keynote script and working through. I mean, that's how Jobs did it. And so I don't think it's crazy that we're talking about it. I think this whole podcast should be two hours just talking about Keynote. Just overanalyzing the Apple keynote. It's like the way we overanalyze the invites. I mean, like they know they're trying to be all Taylor Swift and like leave the Easter eggs.

43:42I don't know if they're as successful at it. But this is the turn, right, is we're talking about John Tarnas, the product CEO. Is he going to take ownership of the product during the presentation in a way that Cook really didn't take ownership? And I think that is, we should look back a little bit on the Cook era. It has been a remarkable run for him as CEO. There's been some big swings, some big misses. Apple services exist in a way that did not exist before Tim Cook realized that he was out of people to sell iPhones to and turned on a services business. That reset the entire app economy. AirPods happened on his watch.

44:21The removal of the headphone jack happened on Tim Cook's watch. The courage. The Apple Watch, which I will never forget that event, which was live and featured Bono and a lengthy explanation of how the digital crown would be the next great input device, which was just, in that moment, I was like, are you guys serious about this? There was just like something about Tim where he needed it first to do a Steve Jobs style product introduction and needed to prove that Apple still had its spirit inside of it. And then it stopped. And it became, Apple became pretty corporate and became all about scale and like fees.

44:58I'm wondering, Joanna, where would you mark that transition? Or do you think that transition happened? That's, I mean, did it happen? I think so. I think a lot of, I think a lot of our readers. Oh, 100 % it happened. I think, first of all, like the launch of Apple TV was a big moment on that timeline. Like that's a huge, a huge moment for the services shift in that he wanted Apple to be this entertainment company because everyone else was an entertainment company as well, a content company. Yeah, I guess you mark it at the Apple Watch or AirPods as the expansion that goes beyond the iPhone because all of this is just, right, as famously we've talked about for the decade now, which is the iPhone is the center of this economy for them and what are the other pieces that we can get people to come into the ecosystem?

45:41It is the center of the walled garden. And so I think you put it with these other devices, I think. Yeah. David, what do you think? It does feel to me that there was a bit of a shift maybe five or six years ago more directed towards hardware engineering again. Because before that, we had the Apple Watch Edition edition. We had a lot of Hermes stuff. We had gold. We had all that stuff. Apple was kind of seen as this luxury company. It's not not a luxury company now, but it feels that, you know, ever since Apple Silicon, ever since the new MacBook Pros with ports, what a concept, we're actually getting hardware for a good price that's very focused around the hardware.

46:22And I don't know how much of that was a John Ternus decision, but it seems to me that they have pivoted a little bit from being this like luxury fashion company more towards back towards the old kind of Apple hardware stuff. Yeah. It's interesting you bring this up because that maybe isn't Tim Cook's doing. It's more Johnny Ives leaving. Fair. It's very fair. I mean, this might be the single biggest success for Tim Cook is that he managed Johnny Ive out of the company without a catastrophe. And you could maybe argue that there is a catastrophe, like liquid glass exists. But not a catastrophe. He managed that out of the company, too, or at least he got the guy out.

47:03But it's funny. Actually, David, you maybe look up two things. It really is around 2019, 2020, where there's this shift. Two things happened around that time. The shift to Apple Silicon, Apple TV streaming plus whatever it was called. Apple TV plus, right? Apple TV on the Apple TV and Apple TV. Yeah, Apple TV streaming plus on the box. Yeah. And those things, I think, marked what we're talking about, an ecosystem change and an expansion into the services. And that's just six years ago. I think that feels right. I think your five to six year mark stuff feels right. Yeah. And that services business is a huge deal.

47:41Yeah. And to be clear, like the Apple, the Apple Watch and AirPods predated that. Which the Apple Watch felt more luxury when it first came out. Yes. If you remember, I mean, that was an Ive project and he had brought in a bunch of fashion people into the company. I'll never forget, like hearing old guard Apple people derisively refer to the fashion executives. What was a thing that would happen because there were a lot of fashion executives rolling around Apple. and there was a moment where it felt like they had they had taken winning for granted or they taken the idea that they made the best hardware for granted or the best products for granted yeah and now they would be this lifestyle thing and yeah johnny i've leaves all the fashion people leave and like the macbook skip ports again yeah and like it's it's as direct as it can be but right next to that as johanna's saying is oh boy we make a lot of money on candy crush whales and to obscure the fact that a huge portion of our revenue is taking 30 % from apps, in particular games, we'll make a TV show or two.

48:43Have you met Reese Witherspoon? There's something about that that is just very different in Apple's conception of itself that I think will be forever the big mark of the Tim Cook era because they became a business that charged a lot of fees. And that, again, they hit it with celebrities. But that engine is fees. It's iCloud service fees. It's the App Store fees. It's all the problems I got into with developers and regulators around those fees. It is the endless forever lawsuit with Epic, which will reach some conclusions someday, but not today. That is a kind of fight that Apple got into in an almost existential way.

49:21They never backed down an inch on wanting to collect those fees. It's probably under-remarked in the Tim Cook era, but it's the driver of their market cap in the realest way. Yeah. And it really feels like they're trying to double down on their services, too. Like they need to get more and more people into Apple One. I think that's why they're focused so hard on Apple TV and maybe not as much as on Apple Fitness because they're kind of scaling that back a little bit. But a lot of their services, Google is trying to catch up to Apple One's value. You know, I don't think that the Fitbit Air Gemini integration for$10 a month is meant to be a product that gets sold at an individual level.

49:58They want to sell as many microservices as possible in one big bundle. And I think that's what Apple is particularly good at at the moment is each of their microservices are actually worth a decent amount of money. So you buy Apple One, you have these recurring revenue customers for quite a while. Yeah. And I think we're going to see like a leasing program with these new phones. Right. Apple is just becoming a subscription company. Yeah. Your life as a subscription. And again, this is Tim Cook legacy. He revitalized the business of the company to be about recurring revenue, to be about it. He started a credit card.

50:32Like, all of that happened in the Tim Cook era. I just try to imagine Steve Jobs sitting down with Goldman Sachs and being like, we're going to do a co-branded credit. That doesn't seem like people. Like, I can't talk to you. Like, I just don't think that would have happened. There's one other executive I want to talk about really quickly. It was announced quietly by Apple this week that Phil Schiller would be leaving his biggest jobs at Apple. he's still on the executive page as an Apple fellow, but Eddie Q is not going to run the App Store, which is a thing Phil had been doing and spending most of his time on.

51:02He's still on the executive leadership page. It very much seems like there's a bat phone to Phil if you need him, but he's just not in the day-to-day. Joanna, you and I have interacted with Phil lots and lots and lots over the years. My relationship with me has to be pretty spiky, and it has since warmed up because now we're both just old guys. Like, we're like, who are these YouTubers? Same here, same here. I have lots of memories of being on the other side of the table from Phil Schiller. Yeah. But that one feels as big to me as anything. Like he he's old school. He's old school. He had the courage.

51:32We know he was the one with the courage. If you want to know why Phil Schiller and I had a spiky relationship, it's because he he was the one who took ownership of the headband jack from phones. I totally agree. I think, look, there's this old guard of people who have been at Apple since the days of jobs. They have made it through the Cook era. And some, it seems, will definitely be here for the first few years, if not longer, of the Ternus era. And Schiller seems to not be one of those people. Mostly, I assume, is he's had a long time at the company. He's older. He's an older gentleman. This is the man who introduced Wi-Fi at the first iBook event.

52:09Dave Pearson, I tell you this all the time. He did it by jumping off the stage and onto a mattress, holding an iBook, downloading. This is a long time. That gif is so good. It's very good. It's very good. But you're right about this. I mean, Trenus is looking at a totally different set of executives, the exception of Eddie Q and Greg Josrak. Greg Josrak is the head of marketing now. He basically replaced Shuler. He's got some deputies that you've seen on these videos as well. Like Kyan Drance is like on all the Apple event videos. She seems very senior at the company as well. You just kind of wonder, are those two going to be next in some way or do they have a long run?

52:42I mean, Trenus, I think we see Jaws at every Apple event. he's in it, right? Like he's in the game. He's fully in it. And when, David, when you said before, is Ternus going to announce the Fold? I think it's the question, is it Ternus or is it Jaws? Jaws always does the iPhone Pro. He always does the Pro. You watch last 10 years. He's a camera nerd. Yeah, he always is talking to camera specs. Like, is that going to, oh, maybe he doesn't do the Fold because it's going to have to, they're going to have to address. I'm curious if they do a one more thing for the Fold because they still have to make a bunch of kind of, a bunch of noise about the Pro.

53:16right if the if the event is about the pros it's about maybe some airpods five do they do it as a one more thing is it a big enough deal yeah let's talk about what we're expecting from the event right i mean so it's the end of an era and it's like you can talk about tim cook a lot but my perspective on it is that as a business executive he is singular as a person people had an emotional connection to he's a cypher it it doesn't feel like the our audience was like oh no not tim cook going, how will Apple ever recover? They're like, well, the guy who deals with Donald Trump is still in that job.

53:50And that's their reaction to him. And he's getting paid a lot, by the way. It's like $47 million a year to still be the guy who Donald Trump talks to. Fairly less. I don't think I would have taken 40. He would have had to round me up to 50 to be the Donald Trump whisperer for Apple. But next week, we're expecting obviously the folding phone in the wide form factor. There's been some case leaks already. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 12, Ultra 4, AirPods 5. So the iPhone ecosystem, right? We're expecting a rev of the iPhone ecosystem. I don't think we're expecting MacBooks. I don't think we're expecting iPads.

54:24Probably not till November. October, November would be my guess. A big question I have here is how much AI are they going to talk about? Because they're going to launch Siri AI with iOS 27. True. And that's going to actually be a big part of the phone. Well, there's no base iPhone 18. That's the rumor. Yeah. That's the rumor. which saves some time in the presentation because we don't have to go through the whole iPhone baseline, all the improvements and then like, but then it's even better with the Pro, right? Like that arc of the presentation doesn't have to happen, I guess. Though it will be interesting how they address that there's no iPhone 18 model right now.

55:02Apple never addresses anything. Yeah, I don't think they'll say anything. The iPhone 17 is still here for$599. It's like what they're going to do. Right. They do that at the end, I guess, with the lineup and show us that this is the best iPhone lineup we've ever had. Right. And so they do that in the thing. So, yeah, I think they probably end up starting with the Pro, working in how much better. This is the true AI phone. It's got the Siri. It's the best ever. And also, I think they'll likely say it's not coming right away. That's what's been rumored, too, which is that it's going to be like a rolling wait list on the Siri stuff, though it seems like it will come pretty soon.

55:37I think they start with the cheap stuff. Well, yeah, they start with the watch and the AirPods. They go into the iPhone and then they end with the Fold. Again, we're like over-reading an Apple keynote. Do you think it's too much for Ternus on his first shout out to Gate to do one more thing? I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I think it's going to be important for him to do something big like that. Okay, this is the bet. This is the bet. You're betting yes. This is the bet, but... Joanna's yes. I'm a hard no. There's no way. i mean i think it's hard to do a one more thing when everyone knows the thing when case manufacturers are literally sending products out to youtubers yeah i think that's pretty hard to do um but but i think one more thing is it's a that's a move i think that's a it's a move that is a very specific thing to try to message and i don't think so i think you play this one cool you let the you let the fold unfold itself you know what i mean one of the things i'm curious about with ai in particular is obviously can control a lot it can do a lot on your phone do you think they're going to expand like the roster of agentic app integrations you think we're going to see uber and doordash and the rest on stage because this is like google's big thing now right is you just talk to your phone and a bunch of things happen yeah well people have been building against ios 27 since june practically and they can't announce They haven't been able to release any of these except through TestFlight that could actually make use of Siri AI.

57:03So I imagine they probably, you know, they probably worked with a lot of smaller developers just so they can show they work with smaller developers. And they'll show a giant list of all the things that Siri AI can plug into. But I do think that they're going to downplay Siri AI a little bit just because of how much trouble they got in for over playing it last time. and they'll probably, you know, show some cool examples of things they can definitely do because they've tested it thoroughly and everything else will be like, and more. And then we'll see. Yeah. I'm just, I'm honestly curious. It's hard to imagine though, what they have to show on the iPhone 18 that like enhances Siri.

57:44Like, that's what I keep wondering. Like, we know that there's going to be camera improvements. We know there's going to be processor improvements. I guess you could just really be hamping up, similar to Google, that the processor really makes Siri better. It's built for Siri AI, remember? Yeah, better beamforming mics that can listen to you call for Siri a mile away. You can lay this stuff out. I think the question I have, and David actually wrote a great piece about app developers who are excited about Siri AI that we will link, is whether the promise comes true. Whether the AI can actually run your phone for you, which is the promise everywhere else.

58:17The reason that Greg Rockman says we're in the AGI era is because ChatGPT can use a computer really fast. Like that's why. That's like the thing that they're excited about, right? That's the demo they're giving. So the idea that your phone can just use itself for you is a very powerful story. But the apps haven't been ready. So if the apps are ready now, like how much time are we going to spend on demos of quasi-agentic iOS app usage? Because I think they have to do it now. I think it's time, right, for them to show that this is going to pay off on this platform as opposed to happening in a virtualized, like, Linux PC in a cloud run by Claude, which is basically what everyone else is doing.

58:56Yeah, but it is pretty hampered right now, like, what you can do with Siri and these third-party apps. There's stuff, and it's decent, but it's not, hey, take over my phone and go do all of this stuff in a multi-step way without me looking at it. So I don't know. If I'm Apple, I'm focusing on some of the stuff that they showed during WWDC, which works really well. I use Siri daily to do some of that stuff now. Wait, what do you use Siri for? Siri is the ultimate iMessage searcher. I will say that the way that Siri can search through my iMessage is... And my life is there. Like, my life is there.

59:35And so I use it all the time. I can't remember something I said to someone about going to someplace, what time I said I would do something, a message that I had with my wife like two years ago about, I don't know, some karate place that we said we would, you know, take the kid, like random things. And it is just fast. It is good. Yeah. The what is this person's address is actually insanely useful because I have used that. I've asked this person their address seven times and not say it in their contacts. And then when it gives it to me, I say, can you add that to their contact? And it does. And that is possibly the best use case of Syria.

1:00:11Or I just say, like, give me direction. Like, there are these small things. And, like, I don't think it's AGI. It's great iMessage search. Like, search is just fine. It's like, it's just, we can just say it's fine. Search is the answer here. What other names are the Great Lakes? Oh, yeah. It didn't change it. It's Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. Uh-oh. But there's, like, a lot of little things. It's going to be a phone call. I know the Trump administration monitors this podcast. We just caused a phone call. A headache on Ternus' first day. There are a lot of little things like Siri.

1:00:47I just find me. I use it. I just use it now. Yeah. I mean, that is the win, right? Yeah. I was just talking about The Verge at the beginning, and I was pulling up our first iPhone review, which was the iPhone 4S, which had Siri on it 15 years ago. and I was like boy have we just come full circle in 15 years that we're gonna basically review siri again and it it's gonna the promises are all kind of the same yeah yep right you're gonna ask it anything and it's gonna go to some database which would at the time was it was like a series of weird database deals that they'd made um like wolfram alpha the big day yeah right um and now it's gonna do that but it's like the web and like whatever it can find and pull it all together I I think that's deeply fascinating.

1:01:30That was a classic Phil Schiller demo, by the way. It was. I think they're going to spend an awful lot of time talking about Siri AI. Like an awful lot of time because they're going to ship it. Like you're saying, it's useful in some ways. And every minute they're not trying to get you to use Siri is a minute that Greg Brockman is going to get you to use AGI in the chat. And that's the thing they have to stop is the bleed away from them towards something else that might create a new kind of device. and you're like, well, I just used Chachapi anyway, I'm going to switch to it. I'm not sure that will happen.

1:02:00I know that's the thing they're threatened by. Well, also, I think that we're supposed to see, right, this display, this home display thing, right? This has been long talked about. We have heard the reporting from Gurman that this has been pushed down, I guess, almost now almost a whole calendar year because they wanted the Siri AI to be right and to work. It sounds like it's sort of this home kit, home, smart home device, but that it's a portal to using Siri in your home. Also, there's notably not much support for Siri AI on HomePods right now. So I think we hear that story as well. But... And yeah, no, I'm not going to I'm not going to question.

1:02:42I think that that we hear that story about how Siri can do all of these things in your home and like as this assistant in your home. But there's no way they they throw in a speaker with a robot arm in the middle of this can. They're going to they will call us back for that. Well, there's the robot arm speaker, but there's also the HomePod with the with the display on it. Oh, like more of a Google Nest. Yeah. Yeah. I don't imagine they're going to show that, though, because I feel like it would take away from the fold too much in their eyes. I don't know. I don't know. They're hyping this event.

1:03:14I think if you're going to tell the Siri story, you might bring that thing out. So just to line up our bets. First of all, by the way, Joanna, our long running bet of when will there be a Mac with a touchscreen seems like it's going to break my way soon. So I'm just going to put, we'll put a pin in that one. I will go back to the records. I will ask Siri AI to search through my messages to find the records of what here I said. That's a pure retcon. I put a date on it and I was wrong, but it's going to come true. On another timeline, it's going to come true. And Dieter will return to the podcast as an employee of Google.

1:03:45If I can get Dieter to come back as a Google executive to talk about the touchscreen MacBook, that will be the single greatest booking coup in history. I don't think it will ever happen. We tell him, we book him. This is a secret. He won't listen to this one. We book him as he's coming to talk about the Google Books, okay? But then we quickly bring back the old tape. I'm on this. I'm producing it right now. Yeah, this is all you. We'll give you a whole episode if you can pull off this move. Dieter, don't listen to anything that was just said. Erase your brain. All right, here are your bets. I just want to lay them out and then, Joanna, we've got to let you go.

1:04:20Joanna thinks the Fold will be one more thing, but a new product, a HomePod with a speaker, will just be announced but not shipped. Those are your bets. See, when you say it in black and white. No, no, here are my bets. I'm going back. I want to be with you, David. I want to be on your side on the one more thing. But now I'm second guessing that because I think in the flow of the keynote, if I were an Apple executive writing it, you wouldn't want to put the fold at the end. Why is that? Or it's towards the end, but it's not a one more thing. Like we don't have that big announcement. It just comes in from a black screen and fades into the foreground.

1:05:00I don't want to put any bet on the one more thing. I want to say there's a fold. Absolutely. It comes in the section of where they're talking about the iPhones. And I do believe we will see this. We will hear about the HomePods and we will hear about a new HomePod with a screen that has Siri AI. And they will make a thing about it, but it might not ship right now. And by the way, I don't know if the Fold ships right now. I don't know if the Fold and this display ships right now. Do they ship before? I mean, Fold is going to ship this year, but maybe HomePod with screen doesn't ship till the end of the year.

1:05:32I don't know. m6 stuff ships at the end of september so i imagine it's just all gonna ship at the same time and they just wanted to move out the computers because this is too much stuff yeah david what's your bet my bet is that iphone fold is one more thing um sticking to it sticking to it i think john will hold it up but it might not be in the in the recording and i do not think they're going to show the uh home screen i think they're going to do that in the fall because it feels like a fall thing for me yeah yeah yeah i'm gonna go with david on the after the video turnus is gonna come out holding the thing it's obviously gonna happen right because it's big the whole point of it's really big it's gonna be unfolding he's like look at the size of this thing yeah if you can grasp it you know if turnus screams look at the size of this thing then i will have won all these that's that's like my asterisk to do that uh no one more thing that's too much and i also agree that any smart home stuff, it just has to be set aside.

1:06:30Like every smart home thing they might want to do is just dragons. Like they have to talk about so much stuff in order to be like, and it will turn on the lights, right? Like you can't just do it. Like most people do not have any HomeKit devices in their house. They have to introduce the very concept of HomeKit. Yeah. That's a hard deal. Then Joanne and I have to chase Craig Federighi around Apple Park in a literal circle being like, how does your garage door work? which is a thing that has happened. He's great at sprinting. You gotta be careful. So I just think you gotta, we gotta reduce the complexity of that thing, right?

1:07:03You gotta, you gotta tell a whole story about it. I'm gonna lose a lot of bets on this one. It's fine. I wanna believe, I wanna be optimistic that this will just be jam-packed. I think the best video idea I have for you, having had this whole conversation, Joanna, is you should show up to Apple Park with one of those Matter garage door controllers that are like rebranded by 50 companies. You and I both have them. Oh, I have them. And you should present one to Craig Federighi that I've solved your problem for you with a$27 Matter garage door opener that I bought from Amazon. When they give me him again, I will purchase such thing and ask him if this is what he has in his garage.

1:07:42And ask him if Apple will go to the mat on proprietary RF garage door opener remotes with rolling codes. And does he also have the crappy HomeKit shade that I bought on Amazon because it is the only HomeKit shade you can buy? This is a totally different episode. I don't believe that's true. There are excellent matter-over-thread shades. A different episode. Joanna, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for being on the BridgeCast. We'll see you next week at the Apple event. Every living cell in every living thing is related. We're all part of the same tree of life. Now, scientists are trying to make a new tree of life, building their own cells out of non-living chemical parts.

1:08:25And hope that it comes to life. To create new technologies that will help our economy, that will help the climate. But they have to navigate the risks. There is the potential in what we do to be mad scientists. If you have a cell that can be engineered to do whatever you want, you could make something harmful. Suddenly, we're talking about something which could be a catastrophic threat to life on this planet. So do you fear us more than the people who made nuclear weapons? Life from Scratch is a new three-part series from Unexplainable. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch us on Netflix.

1:09:10Hustle Culture told us to grind 24-7 and we would become overnight millionaires and a lot of us believed it. But this week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm making the case that the grind might actually be making you broke. Because between the DoorDash orders and the Ubers and the sent out laundry, the hidden costs of overworking add up faster than you think. I'm breaking down the real financial toll of burning out, why trading sleep for side hustles is often the wrong math, and what Gen Z quietly quitting actually gets right. Plus, I'm answering your questions, including how to tell if your business idea is actually good, whether to cash out your vacation days or take them, and how to actually grow your wealth without destroying yourself in the process.

1:09:46Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash yourrichbff.

1:09:53All right, we're back. We have a very intense lightning round coming up about all the gadgets he had before that. It's time, my friends, for America's favorite podcast within podcast, Brennan Carr's dummy.

1:10:10Wow. It's very Berlin core on theme. Oh.

1:10:24Is he still going?

1:10:39I have been asking for a drop. All right. Well, that was incredible. That was by Andreas, aka Error Audio, who wants you to know that it was produced exclusively for party speakers with Ultra Bass. I will point out, Sony did announce new party speakers this week. This show is so long, we do not have time to talk about the party speaker revolution that continues brewing at the world's electronics companies. This week's Brennan Carr's Dummy is going to be very short because what I want you to know is that we have managed to break contain with America's Favorite Podcast within a podcast. We've ended up on other podcasts before, which is important, but we are now America's Favorite Podcast within cable news.

1:11:18It's good stuff. So this week, the thing that happened was Kristen Welker, who is an NBC News anchor, said a very innocuous thing. She said President Trump's endorsements have mixed results. And then President Trump responded to that by ordering Brendan to fine or censor her. I know this because I was on MS Now with Stephanie Ruhle and she opened the segment with her. We actually have a clip. We can just run Stephanie's description of it. OK, President Trump is calling on the FCC to go after another journalist, this time going after our former colleague, NBC anchor Kristen Welker. He called for her to be rebuked or punished for what he claims were inaccurate comments she made about his endorsements in this election cycle.

1:12:02But I want you to listen to what she actually said. Well, he's going to loom large over these midterms. There's no doubt about that. He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He's had some mixed results. That was it. That's it. That's all she said. We've had some mixed results. So I know this happened on her show because I was there. She invited me on. It's great. I've been on a few times now. It's been great fun being on the show. And it just occurred to me in that moment that I had the opportunity to bring Brendan Carr as a dummy to the viewers of MSNOW. So here I am.

1:12:40You can, here it is. Let's watch it. Even a material misstatement. You can retract the opportunity to monologue about how dumb Brendan Carr is. I love talking about that. We spend so much time at The Verge covering telecom policy and tech policy. And usually what that has meant is we're going to cover internet access and kids getting broadband. In this administration, particularly with Brendan Carr, what we have basically started covering is this man going into the library at Hogwarts, looking at ancient statutes for magic words and using them to punish speech over and over and over again. So notably, I did not get censored or rebuked by anyone at the FCC or at Versant for saying Brendan Carr is a dummy on cable news.

1:13:18And so if I have the opportunity again, I'm going to do it again. So far. So far. I'm not in jail yet. There's time. There's plenty of time. You know, we're breaking contain here on America's Favorite Podcast Within Podcast. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show or apparently any other show and debate me about your war on free speech in America. I would love to do it. I think in this election year, it would serve us both well. Anytime you want, Brendan. Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's Favorite Podcast Within Podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:13:53Next time I'm going to play the Gregorian chant on cable news. I think they would love it. I don't think Steph would ever invite me back, but we'll see what I can do. All right. We have more distinguished guests on this episode of our chat. This has been an all-star lineup. Jen Tui is here. Don Preston is here. Hey, friends. Hello, hello. Hey. Are you guys in the same hotel room in Germany or different identical hotel rooms in Germany? Different identical hotel rooms. That's very good. You all are at IFA, which is the big tech show in Europe. there's quite a lot going on there we're going to do this actual lightning round style I was looking at the list of gadgets and it occurred to me if we tried to have a fake lightning round we'd be here for six more hours which I know some listeners want but everyone has children so I'm going to ask you all to pick five things from your time on the show floor this is a hard ask, there's a lot going on you should look at our story stream a lot of stuff got announced this week in Germany but we're going to ask Jen and I'm to pick five each and we're going to move through them in true lightning round fashions.

1:14:54So you guys ready? Yes. Ready. Primed. Primed. I have slept seven hours in the last four days. Oh my gosh. So I can go fast. This is what happens when you let a European go back to Europe. You're just like raging all over town. All over town. I mean, this is Berlin too. This is like the heart of rave capital. Wait, hold on. I will do six hours if you will tell me that you've been raving this entire time. All right. You ready? Jen, let's start with you. What's your first one? Okay. My first one, Philips Hue launched a new line of architectural interior design smart lighting, which I know perhaps is not the Verticast's target audience gadget.

1:15:41But for me, I love it. It's a beautiful rope light. It's the Liane 360-degree rope light. And this thing just kind of blew me away. They had it set up like a chandelier, which they had 17 of these three-meter, we are in Europe, rope lights that are 360 degrees of diffuse light. So no pinpricks, no backing. It's just light hanging from the ceiling. And I got to, like, dance in the lights. You know, raving. You were, in fact, raving. I was actually raving. and I just thought they were it's just a great combination of design and technology and that's something that I'm always looking for when it comes to smart home tech it's beautiful and oh my god it's expensive that's the downside yes I watched your video and at the end you said the prices and I was like are you kidding how much is it?

1:16:32well the chandelier was like seven grand but each individual light is$400 That's ridiculous. On the Hue website, it shows 440 USD for three meters. So that's if you get the weight that holds it down. If you just want the line that you can drape elegantly over your dining room table, it's 400. Oh, my Lord. Is it Gobi just going to put out a version of this for$200 and take the market? Yeah, well, for something like this that's like a centerpiece. like you you've bought a house nila you've bought in unfortunately you know a nice chandelier over the dining room table that is not a cheap but a chandelier that you purchase i don't know if anyone's purchased a chandelier before i've purchased many they uh obviously look at me look upon my chandeliers uh they usually come pre-assembled as actual light this is just a rope.

1:17:35That's true. All right, we have to move on. I'm just saying this is outrageously priced. Dom, what do you got? It's a slight cheek because it's only half an ETH launch, but the Xiaomi 18 Fold, which is their new foldable phone, it is getting an official launch on Monday in China. Completely coincidental timing, I'm sure. No idea what's going on in California over there, so it's all by chance. But this is them doing a wide foldable, so it looks a lot like Samsung's Z Fold 8. It looks a lot like what we think Apple's iPhone Fold is about to look like. It's got an edge over the Samsung at least because it's got a triple camera, which I think was the big thing that the Samsung Z Fold 8 was kind of held back from for me, that you felt like you were getting this cool shape, but it was held back from the kind of a lot of the photography and the spec side.

1:18:19I didn't get the chance to actually play with it. It was just sitting on a case on the IFA show floor, but we know we're going to see a lot more of it on Monday in China. And I think this is just exciting to see the way that we are seeing this wide foldable market it very much open up ahead of Apple's arrival. We're expecting a lot more brands to kind of enter this space as well. And it's interesting to see the subtle differences. Like this is actually, from what I can tell, it looks like it's even wider and even shorter than Samsung's version. So it's kind of pushing that a little bit further.

1:18:48Finally, as intended. We started with this and now we're back. We're finally back. Is everyone just, I mean, don't these all just turn into Android tablets? Like I feel like at least with the previous taller foldable, you entered an experience that was not oh it's an android tablet it was like a weirder aspect ratio it was just a square but what did you do with a square you would run two apps side by side that was the whole promise of these things oh but that kind of you know it's awkward this is this is now you're getting a tablet you're getting like a little it reminds me of having like a nexus 7 you don't get that many of the small seven inch kind of tablet size anymore so it's this tiny compact app genuinely pocketable because it folds tablet that's kind of nice as a person who has a Nexus 7 sitting right over there.

1:19:30I'm just going to tell you, they didn't change the world. The people are not clamoring for 7-inch Android tablets. I'm clamoring for the Nexus 7. They are clamoring for a phone. And now you can also have the tablet. You don't even need it. I'm excited for this one. Is this one also going to be outrageously expensive? Is Govee going to make a wide foldable that flows this thing out of the water? I can only imagine this is going to be a lot. I mean, it's hard to say because it's going to launch in China and the Chinese prices will scale very weirdly. So you'll do the dollar conversion and it will come at like 800 bucks and that will have no reflection on what it would actually cost if they ever launched it in the US or in Europe.

1:20:06It is Xiaomi and not Huawei though. So it'll be cheaper than Huawei, right? Since a Xiaomi phone? Yeah, I think they can run a little cheaper than Huawei. I'm not too sure. I'm not too invoked with like the hierarchy within China in terms of the pricing to us. Yeah. All right. All right, Jen. Okay, I have another expensive one for you. A lot of stuff. It is, it has a camera and it goes in your mouth and it's from Dyson. This is the worst product in your production of all time. Can I veto this? And it shoots you. I went to an iPhone-esque event today in Berlin where Dyson had the whole room all decked out, you know, thousands of seats for journalists and they came on stage and they introduced a toothbrush.

1:20:53A toothbrush? A toothbrush. I'm proud of Dyson. And usually everything they make is a fan. I know. Where's the motor? Or a vacuum, which is a fan, notably. Actually, it does have a sort of mechanism in it. It has like this rubber balloon that kind of inflates to push. We call it a bladder. Bladder. There you go. Bladder. You've been reading up on the camera toothbrush. Wait. Wait. Why is there a bladder? Why is there a bladder? When you say it goes in your mouth and then you say it's a bladder, I'm like very unhappy about all of this right now. Okay. I'm sorry. I backed into this one. Okay. So this is the$499 camera jet.

1:21:32It is not, they don't call it a toothbrush in the name, but it is the first electric toothbrush, they say, to incorporate a camera in the brush head. And they showed me the camera and it really is, it's literally on like the tip of a pencil. And then what the camera does is, is able to sense the gaps between your teeth. So while you're brushing your teeth, it squirts water in between the gaps. So you're brushing and flossing simultaneously. So it's ultimate multitasking. Like an AI water pick. And toothbrush at the same time. And you can also see into your, so you can see the camera on your phone.

1:22:07It's all local. So you are not streaming the inside of your mouth to the cloud. Oh, good. Local AI. That's good. And it is able to, so you can look and sort of see inside your mouth while you're brushing. I kind of feel like that's a bit of like, I'll do that once and then never again. But you never know, I suppose. It's squirting mouthwash, right? So they have very specially designed Dyson mouthwash. And they have three distinct flavors. And the gentleman who developed them was really excited to tell me all about them. And yeah, for me, I have a daughter that just got braces. I can see a use case.

1:22:43$500. $500? And I couldn't get anyone to tell me how much the replacement heads were. because each head has a camera in it. I have an electric toothbrush, right? The whole brush head, you just like take it off the thing and you throw it away. Is the camera in the brush head? So you throw in the camera away every time? Have these people seen RAM prices? That's outrageous. Oh, no, no, no. So the camera's in the stick and then you put the brush head over the top. Sure. Okay. So yes, you're not throwing the camera away each time because that would be very expensive. But I'm assuming there is still going to be an expense to this fancy brush head.

1:23:26Is this and is it like DRM to mouthwash? Can you use something else? You can see the opportunity to for them to do bad things here, right? Like proprietary brush heads, proprietary. It's definitely proprietary brush heads. Yes. But no, I don't think. Toothpaste famously foams in your mouth, which would. So this is the value of the Dyson. toothpaste is that it is low foaming so it shouldn't block the camera yeah i want one of these so badly and everything about it morally offends me yeah can i tell you my favorite thing about this toothbrush please they market the camera as being a hundred thousand pixels and they talk about it they use that number over and over and over again that's 0.1 megapixels by the way they're just really hoping people don't think about that this is lower resolution than my moto Razor flip phone camera.

1:24:21I just want to note that. That's very good. So that camera you could throw away every time. It's probably cheap. This is like they literally taking the bin sensors and just slicing them up. It's just like you can have them. All right. We will acquire a Dyson toothbrush and find a way to review it. This is one of those products where it's like, I'm like, I would love to have it. I'll just wait for it to buy it used a year for it. And it's like, nope, can't do that. It's a toothbrush. Don't buy a used toothbrush. Yeah, I know. I asked because they come with two heads. I said, like, could I share it?

1:24:54Could my husband and I both use it rather than buying two$500? You'd guest mode for it. What did they say? They said, we recommend that you do not share toothbrush. Why? Why? I know. Why? Losing my mind. All right, Dom. I feel like Jenna and I have had very different e-frood experiences so far. I just have another phone. I keep seeing phones. Yeah, I saw the Tecno have a bezel-less concept device. So this is a smartphone where they have done their best to completely eliminate the black bezel around the edge of the screen. It's a concept, it's not a real product, and it's kind of bezel-less in a way oversells it because you look at it and you think there's definitely still a bezel there because there is a silver edge all around the screen.

1:25:36That is technically the frame as opposed to the bezel of the OLED display. That nomenclature is very important. Yeah, it's very, very important. so the the black bit around the edge of the screen is is is technically still there what they've done is just hide it under the frame um so kind of have to re-engineer how they build this they kind of built the phone backwards so now the edge of the oled sits under the frame but the frame is still very thin like if you put it i put it side by side with a galaxy s 26 plus and the overall edge is definitely still thinner than that like they have shrunk the edge of the whole thing um and i think because partly because the frame of this phone is silver and i wonder how this would feel with different colors, but it feels a bit more open and expansive.

1:26:17So you don't have a black dark border that kind of constricts the edge and having a light color does strangely make the thing feel a bit bigger. This doesn't really matter at all. They've shaved, you know, 0.1 millimeters off each side of a phone fundamentally. But, you know, no one had done that before. No one had shaved that specific 0.1 millimeter off until now. Did you get to handle it? Yeah, Techno actually sent me the phone like a week ago. So I've had it to play around with. I heard that if you slide your finger like across it and when you touch the bezel area where they lift the frame, your finger kind of catches the frame like because the frame is lifted.

1:26:53Was that true on your unit? Very slightly. I think, you know, the frame definitely sits higher than the screen, right? Probably like a fraction of a millimeter up from the screen. I'm sorry. I'm looking at a picture of this and this is completely ridiculous. It's just there's an edge. Yeah, it doesn't matter. This is like Apple spent years being like it's an edge display and I'd be like, no, I can see the edge. You can see the edge. Yeah, the edge is definitely there. But it is a slightly different color edge now. Right. It's true. And slightly smaller. All right. We're moving on. Jen, what nonsense have you brought for us for your thread item?

1:27:24Okay. This one is not, well, I don't know how much this one costs, so it can go in the maybe it isn't expensive category, but probably is. This is a, okay, can I introduce you in local AI for your smart home, Neelai? Yeah. I mean, what else is there? Truly, this is all I dream of. This is, I know. No, this is the Tamagotchi grown up. This is definitely, you know, this is what this is a trend. I'm starting to see really sort of take off. This is the Eufy Mindbase. It's from Anka. Eufy is its smart home brand. And it is a local AI hub with an Anka developed LLM that basically runs your entire smart home, but is focused on security to start with.

1:28:06So you connect your security cameras to it. And the things that like Ring and Nest can do today, like with AI-powered video search, AI text descriptions, those types of things which rely on the cloud, Anka says that this MindBase hub can run a local LM and process all of your video footage locally on the device. And so you still get those AI features from your security cameras. It's also a Matter Controller, a Thread Border Router, a ZigBee hub. So it can be a central brain for your smart home. And it supports Matter cameras, of which there are not many. But in theory... And it supports this vaporware we've been talking about for ages.

1:28:50In theory, though, that means you can connect cameras from other... Yes. So not just Eufy cameras. So yeah, there's a real shift move towards running everything locally. People don't like the idea of their video footage, security footage going to the cloud. Yes. Does this integrate seamlessly with Flock or not is really the question. Exactly. And so there's two of them, actually, that debuted at IFA this week. So Eufy has one. And the second one comes from a company which also explains where this trend is coming from, Ugreen, which is a NAS, traditionally a NAS storage brand. And both of these devices also act as a NAS on your home network.

1:29:32So you can store your like family photos. You could run your Plex server whilst you're also running your smart home and your security cameras all on one box in your home. I do like the return of the home server as a concept. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we're seeing. I will say the Anchor mind-based tagline is straightforwardly the mind within your home, which is quite a promise. And it, I mean, it looks like an S. So is this meant to be stored in like a rack? I mean, like physically, that's what it looks like. Yes. Are you supposed to keep it in the basement? Where are you supposed to put this thing?

1:30:09So the Eufy one, you could put anywhere, yes, because you don't interact with it. The Ugreen one actually has a built-in voice assistant that you can talk to and also comes with. They've launched a smart speaker and they have a smart assistant on their three boxes that you can buy. And that's more of, they call it a home agent. So actually both of these systems run different agents to do different tasks in your home. The Eufy one is security to start with, but they're also going to do energy management because Eufy has a whole line of home backup batteries. And they're going to do a cleaning agent as well to work with like robot vacuums, those types of things.

1:30:52So there's a lot of potential in each device that you could expand and have more functionality. But yeah, it is a hub. A hub for your home, you either stick in your rack or in your hub box. And then, you know, I have a hub box. Yes, in your closet, which has not been cable managed, if you are me. I would applaud you, Green, for the audacity to believe that people will put a NAS in their kitchen and talk to it. That's incredible. I know. And it's big, too. These are chunky devices. All right, Jen, tell me, what is the outrageous price of these devices? to be determined. Oh, good. So we do not have exact pricing, although we might have exact pricing by the time this episode goes live because they said we would learn tomorrow, which is Friday as of the recording.

1:31:44So watch this space. 10 million euros, I should say. All right, Dom? I have got the Lenovo IdeaPad vibe, which is kind of more representative of an idea that has been all over Ether this year, which is the shameless MacBook Neo clone. And the IdeaPad Vibe is the cloniest of all of the MacBook Neo clones we have seen this year. It is a$700 Windows laptop that comes in seven different colors and is meant to be cheap and friendly and lightweight and get the job done. And it's the exact same price Apple now charges for the Neo. It joins similarly priced laptops from at least Dell, Acer and Samsung.

1:32:24And it basically just, when the Neo came out, I think one of the first questions Antonio really asked when he was writing about it for the site was, you know, how does the Windows market react? How do all these Windows OEMs deal with the Neo coming into their space? And the answer apparently is just copy the Neo, make clones. Copy it. Yeah, just do a Neo. I mean, the point of the Neo is that it's nice for the money? The IdeaPad 5 is also nice, I think. it's it's got a metal build i don't think it feels quite as premium uh as the neo does for the price um they've lent into uh the customizability so you can replace all the keycaps easily and they are selling keycap sets in different colors the kind of color match the different seven colors they get and you can mix and match so trying to like make it playful and fun that way um i still think it's got that problem where it just doesn't quite i don't know that a Windows OEM can deliver the same build quality at that price that Apple can.

1:33:23And I think performance will be the big question because this comes with a choice of either Qualcomm or AMD chips and apparently Intel down the line. I didn't get the chance to really put this thing through its paces, but I still just have so many doubts that Windows can run on this kind of like lowish entry-level RAM spec that you're going to get at a$700 entry point. Yeah, slow processor and a base of eight gigs of RAM is a, that's a lot for Windows. Yeah, it's not a great pitch for Windows right now. Microsoft is trying to get to the point where that will work, but it is not there yet. I do like that you can spec the AMD one up to 32 gigs of RAM.

1:33:56Yeah. Which is like a$12 ,000 computer now. Yeah. That's good. When did these come out? They are coming out starting October, and then there's more rolling out in November, depending on which CPU option you go for. It's perfect that the Windows AMs did not hit back to school. Oh, no. That would make far too much sense. All right. Reasonably priced, Tom. Thank you. I'm trying. Another ridiculously expensive product for you. What horribly expensive thing. People tell me I'm an expensive friend. I get that a lot.

1:34:28This is, I have for you a smart home controller. It's the Homey Portal. And Homey, if you're not familiar with it, is a Dutch-based smart home ecosystem platform, sort of rival to Home Assistant, Apple Home, Amazon Alexa. is actually owned by LG or recently was purchased by LG, but it's been around for over a decade. A great company. They have a smart home hub that has all the radios, so it's like SmartThings was 10 years ago. And they have come out with a touchscreen controller. And I really love the look of this thing from the videos and from the pictures they sent. And then as soon as I got here, I went straight to the LG booth and they had one under a glass case.

1:35:13Sure. And I was so annoyed because I really wanted, it's a dial. And the way it works, it's a touchscreen. So you tap, say, lights, and then your light control shows, and then you can twist the dial to brighten and dim. Same for like your thermostat, climate control, speakers, so you can adjust like your Sonos speakers. It just, it looks like a delightful thing that you just really want to touch and play with. And that's the fun thing about coming to a trade show. And I was like, why is it locked under glass like the crown jewels? Yeah. I mean, this thing does look really cool. It does. Many, many questions about how well it will possibly work.

1:35:51Yeah. So you do need one of the homey hubs to use it. There is a cloud option, but for the experience that you're probably going to want, which is local control so it can work locally even if your internet goes down, if you have Matter or Thread or Zigbee devices connected to your homey hub, it's$249. And that's the introductory price. It's going to be$300 if you don't get it on a pre-order. If you don't jump on this unproven thing that may or may not work with all the stuff in your house, it will charge you more money. Well, Homey's pitch is they do integrate with everyone. And they do have a wide, you know, there's a lot of radios in their hubs.

1:36:32So you can connect to most smartphones, most smart home devices you might have, as well as cloud integrations with all the big names. but it yeah that they they recommend you get like one per room because you can you tailor them to the rooms one three hundred dollar dial per room yeah so it does feel a little over a lot overpriced considering there isn't actually a hub built into this you also need to buy the hub for the best experience but the concept here is what i kind of felt like we were going to get from apple at some point. I know we're still thinking we're going to get a smart display of some kind, but the idea being just a very simple but intuitive interface, like reaching for a light switch, but you know what to do while still having many more options than just on and off, like color changing, brightness, change your climate, you know, that control in your smart home.

1:37:27Obviously, voice is great, wonderful if you've set up excellent automations, but also something for grandma or for, you know, your visitors or your dog sitter who can just know how to use it once you walk in. Obvious, intuitive. That's what I'm hoping we're going to see from Apple at some point. I mean, one of the things we've seen is rumored is like an Apple Watch kind of interface or the standby mode type of interface where just a very simple. And that's what I think this portal looks like it achieves really well. I'm just really disappointed I didn't get to play with it yet. So watch this space.

1:38:01Well, we can do another full hour on when matter will support scenes across ecosystems. That is not for today. And I'm just going to say I prefer the senior citizens in my life to speak to my kitchen mounted NAS because I think that's the future. That is the future. Yes, I agree. All right, Dom. I have got another silly concept product that probably doesn't make any sense, but I'm kind of glad to see someone try and make it. Real themes from both of you. yeah uh wait for my next one i have no idea what she's got coming so i'm curious uh the project dual play mini uh which is basically acer kind of working backwards to reinvent the gaming laptop so it is a gaming hand tail the kind of steam deck style thing but running on windows but it has it kind of opens up like a laptop uh to reveal a keyboard underneath and then you flip the screen round on a hinge so that then you have a tiny laptop with an eight inch display and it's a full windows laptop and like a moderately powerful one given given you know what this is capable of but then you shut it again and now you've got your kind of windows steam deck handheld experience i just want to point out that it is it feels very obvious to me that these press images are ai generated i don't know what to say about this like i'm looking at them and i'm like none of this feels possible in a way that suggests the reality i i did have you seen this thing i've played forza horizons on it um very jankily they had three samples at aces booth uh two of them had games running that you could play and one of them the controls were broken um so that is kind of the level of quality we're talking about so far and even of the one that worked it kind of hummed and vibrated the whole time you were holding it and the fans made a kind of whining noise like let me bring this onto an airplane yeah so there's a really strong proof of concept there in that sense uh and it felt a bit janky which is kind of funny because they have this line of predator outlas gaming handhelds which look and feel a lot better and i'm a bit surprised they didn't just pull the ergonomics and the design from that because they kind of already have that figured out over there when it's in laptop mode the controllers form what can only be described as wings on the side of this if you're in your car and you're just listening you have to pull over and just look at these images.

1:40:16You've got to look at it. Because they are bananas. And the other thing is when it's in laptop mode and it's open, what other people see on the other side of the screen is like the thumbsticks glowing with Archie lights, which is incredible. It's also worth pointing out that when it's in laptop mode, you don't have a trackpad. So you either have to bring your own mouse or you're going to have to use the eight inch touchscreen to navigate windows with your tiny... True gamers bring their own mouse anyway. Come on. I don't know what we're talking about here. Tremendous all around. So far, I would say the kitchen, NAS, and this are tied for winning the lightning round.

1:40:56Jen, you've got one more shot at it. Can I give you a humanoid robot? Yes. I mean, that's where this has to end. If you're going to take the... I didn't know the lightning round is a competition, but it is now. And this is how you win. from dreamy do we know dreamy dreamy the robot vacuum company which profiled dreamy earlier this year yeah who brought this amazing looking rocket car to their big launch event which now turns out to have just been like an empty chassis what a surprise wait what the rocket car doesn't exist yeah apparently not but but this robot um i did get to see today um in action in as much as it raised its arms and pincered claws at me.

1:41:41But humanoids are definitely a theme of this show this year. They actually have on Saturday, there's going to be robots on the runway and they're going to have these robots dance down the runway and do backflips and such, which sounds very exciting. But Dreamy is, you know, it's a smart home brand. They've done robot vacuums, robot lawnmowers. They've branched off into all different things, but they have been working on a humanoid for a few years now. And this is the first time they've actually shown one at a trade show in Europe or the US. And it was kind of tucked away in the back of their booth, which I thought was a bit surprising.

1:42:18And they had three versions. One was a full humanoid, but I should caveat this with it's on wheels. And I genuinely believe that if we are ever going to have humanoids in our homes, humanoid robots in our homes, they can't have legs. Legs are just not going to work in homes. What about stairs? Well. Incredible, incredible take. Because, okay, stairs, yes, that's a problem. But also you've got an escape route. If they can't go upstairs, you've always got a way away from them. You're making a safety claim. All right, so dreamy humanoid robot with wheels so that you may escape it when it goes nuts.

1:42:56Well, it also means it's less likely to fall on you because I have had personal experience with a 175-pound humanoid falling on me at CES. And it is not a good experience. And so what the concept here is it's a robot to help around the house. It's similar to LG's cloid, which we saw at CES. And then the second version they had was a robot, again on wheels, that has a pincer that moves up and down. and its entire purpose was to be able to take clothes out of the dryer or out of the washing machine and put it into the dryer. It just goes up and down. I'm going to stop you here. I don't think you won the lightning round.

1:43:34How much does this robot cost? I have no idea. Dreamy has no idea because this is not available. It's not a real product. It's going to be a while. I really encourage everyone to go read our various coverage of Dreamy, which a company that, I mean, the CEO is like, I'm Elon Musk. Like that's his mindset and it's all this stuff underneath it. Yeah. And the humanoid robot form factor is definitely a big debate in the space right now. And having spent time with both, the wheels make sense. They really do. But yes, you are going to struggle if you have stairs. It just means we all have to go live in, you know, one floor apartments and bungalows so that we can have robot butlers.

1:44:16Right. We need the population density of Europe. I understand. Yes. All right, Dom. I've gone the complete opposite direction for my final pick. I've actually gone cheap, cheerful, and quite practical. Yay! Acer has brought back, of all things, the Packard Bell brand. A kind of old, defunct computer brand that lurks in the depths of my memory. But they've just reinvented it as this cute, cheerful, colorful company. They've got a laptop for€500, but otherwise they've got headphones and Bluetooth speakers. and a really weird range of products. They've got one of those portable suitcase vinyl players.

1:44:58They've got a mouse and keyboard. They've got a feature phone. They've got smart glasses that very pointedly have speakers, but no camera. So they're very much not perfect glasses. And they have a portable steamer for reheating your leftovers. All tied under this one brand. But it actually all looks really nice. Everything is really bright and vibrant and colorful. It's all pretty cheap. When I kind of, I just found this at the Acer booth and mentioned it on Slack. And so I found these like cute and colorful products from Packer Bell. It was like some weird Verge writer wake word because within minutes, this like Slack thread was just crawling with everyone going, oh my God, those are great.

1:45:38Oh, so cute. Colorful tech. Ah, I miss it. Ah, that's brilliant. So there is something about it. I think if you go look at the designs, they're really lovely. Sali, it's all only in Europe right now. So I have no idea if it will ever come to the US or anywhere else, but. Right. Did Packard Bell have some like brand loyalty in Europe that I don't understand? Everybody I know with a Packard Bell PC in the States when I was young was like, I hate this thing. Yeah, not as far as I'm aware of. I have no deep loyalty to Packard Bell. There's no Packard Bell nostalgia going around that I know of. And I don't know why they thought Packard Bell lined up with like really colorful, affordable accessories.

1:46:10The connection I do not understand. And I think they just realized they'd have this like brand name lying around in the back of a drawer and had this idea for colorful accessories and just kind of crammed them together. All right. I appreciate it. I'm just staring at this record player in deep confusion. Yeah. Oh, did I not mention the RGB lights on the turntable suitcase player? Sorry, I forgot that as well. This is for college kids, right? The steamer. This feels like it's definitely targeted. You can buy one whole dorm room of garbage. Yeah. Yeah. but I do I do appreciate it's colorful David does it sing to you it probably doesn't sing but it does play music rough well I know who lost lighting around with that joke alright this was wonderful we went way over what we expected I appreciate you both very much there's more to come from Aoife I should note as we're recording this hours from now there will be a Tesla Cyber Cab announcement so if you're listening who's wondering why we're going to talk that.

1:47:12It's because it didn't happen yet. So if you know what happened at that event, tell us. You can email us at vergehouseatheverge.com. You can call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Reminder, you can subscribe to The Verge for ad-free episodes of this and all of our other podcasts. There's exclusive newsletters. We'll make Jen come to your house and reboot your smart home. That's the highest tier. Hang on, what? Guess what's happening. Thanks to Joanna Stern and Hayden Field for joining us earlier. Thanks to Jen and Dom. Thanks to David and Mel for holding the show down in David Pierce's absence. It's been wonderful.

1:47:46Verge has a production of the Verge and the Boxing Me Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk, who is not impersonating himself on LinkedIn to get you to come on the show. Just a reminder, I'm not even going to explain to Jen and Dom what that means. I think that's the show. I think that's the show. We'll see you next week. Next week's Apple week. It's going to be crazy. It's going to be nuts. We're going to be on the ground there. It's going to be great. That's the Verge Cast.