Apple OS betas, how to talk about AI, and our video game picks

25:00But have you had anything that's jumped out to you in iOS 17 you don't like so far? Not terrible. I'm running it, I've used it a little bit on a 14 Pro, but I have it on my own 13 mini. So when the battery life is kind of crummy, I'm like, this could be because the battery life is sort of crummy on my phone. But yeah, just a couple of bugs and things, as we've observed getting onto threads, there's some weird bug where you couldn't post a photo. But the app would instantly crash every time you tried to post a photo on threads. Yeah, it was fun. The first thing you do is get in there like, I'm going to post a photo.

25:37Nope. Try it again. Yeah. No, overall, it's been a really positive experience. And I'm excited. Like, I'm excited for people to download it. And then they can see what I'm talking about. Because right now I'm just telling my friends, like, stickers. And they're like, what? Yeah, this is that awkward time of year where you're sending people like broken things that they can barely see. You're like, look at this sticker. And they're like, what is this tiny image that you just sent me? I kept trying to put them in Slack and they just look like the grossest little PMGs. I was like, you guys have to trust me.

26:11It looks cool. All right. Awesome. Well, yeah, there's lots more to talk about in iOS 17. So we'll have to come back to lots of this. But good luck with betas and Godspeed as always. Thank you. The iPad. The last one we should talk about quickly is iPadOS 17, which is the one I've been goofing around with. I have it installed on an iPad mini and an iPad pro. There are lots of little new things here. Most of them borrowed from iOS 16 and 17. So if you use an iPhone, most of the stuff on the iPad will not be surprising. But there are two things on the iPad that I want to mention. The first is the lock screen.

26:44iPadOS 17 lets you customize your lock screen mostly like you can on the iPhone with different fonts and colors and stuff. but you also get a rail of lock screen widgets on the left side which is super useful and you can actually fit a lot of widgets there because you just have more screen space i would much rather have more of them though since there's so much screen space here it's just kind of being unused putting just the tiny widgets on the left give me full-size widgets give me the new interactive widgets on ios and ipad os let me like really do stuff from my lock screen but hey some widgets is better than no widgets, so I'll take it.

27:19The other thing is Stage Manager. If you're a longtime Vergecast listener, you know that last year when Stage Manager came out, I hated it. Like, hated it. Stage Manager is the multitasking feature that lets you switch between collections of apps so you can have a few things on the screen at a time, but mostly it's buggy and bad and pointless. I don't know. I don't get it. But this year, Apple did make some big improvements, and I still don't think it's great, but I at least see the potential. The big change is that you can now move apps more or less freely around the screen. They can be almost any size and go almost anywhere on your iPad instead of just having to fit into these predetermined slots like before.

27:57That alone makes it feel much more like actual multitasking and makes Sage Manager way more useful. If you're the kind of person who uses their iPad with a mouse and keyboard and external monitor, Sage Manager really is for you. It's a decent system for managing multiple apps on multiple screens, and it's a lot better now than it was. But it's still just awkwardly implemented on the iPad. You can't command tab between stages. You can only have four apps in a stage. You can only have one app in a single stage and you can't save stages as they are. So everything just kind of ends up awkward and strewn about unless you set up your stages and then never ever change them or download new apps or anything.

28:36It's just still too much work for not that much gain, I think. I still don't plan to keep using Stage Manager but I do at least think there's maybe a future in the idea as Apple figures out ways to integrate it more and more with the rest of the iPad. I still don't plan to keep using Stage Manager, but I at least think there's maybe a future in the concept as Apple keeps working to integrate it better and better with the rest of the iPad. Otherwise, on the iPad, there's a health app now, which is nice, and iPadOS 17 actually does make the iPad maybe the best PDF editing device I've ever used. It actually automatically detects all the fields you can fill in and you can either just type or scribble to fill it out.

29:14It's awesome. But mostly, you know, the iPad is the iPad is the iPad. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about how we talk about AI. We'll be right back.

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30:46Sometimes the difference between success and failure comes down to one chance encounter or following a counterintuitive instinct or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision. Like when the founders at Palo Alto Networks wanted to redefine cybersecurity for the modern age. Everybody thought we were crazy. Nobody would use the cloud for cybersecurity. And when I hear something like that, I say, of course I'm going to do it. If everybody believes it shouldn't be done or it cannot be done, then it's a good reason to do it. Or when mobile gaming giant Supercell could only rewrite the rules of the industry after failure in the company's formative stages.

31:22Many of the best things we've learned have actually come through failures. These are Crucible Moments, turning points in a company's journey that made them what they are today. Hosted by Sequoia Capitals, Rulof Botha, Crucible Moments is back for a new season with stories from Zipline, Stripe, Palo Alto Networks, Supercell, and more. Subscribe to Season 3 of Crucible Moments. New episodes are out now and you can catch up on seasons one and two at cruciblemoments.com on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Listen to Crucible Moments today.

32:03Welcome back. One of the weird things that has happened over the last, let's say, nine months is that all kinds of AI terms have found their way into our vocabulary. GPT, LLM, transformers, hallucinations, all these things that no reasonable human knew about before are just words we use now. But are we using them the right way? And does it matter how we use them as we talk about AI and as AI changes so fast? I can't stop thinking about this. So I called up The Verge's James Vincent to help me sort it out. Hi, James. Hi, David. How are you doing? I'm good. You're now three days into book leave on a very mysterious book that you're not willing to tell anyone about.

32:43How's it going to miss us terribly already? I miss you terribly. I wake up every day. I see things in my feeds, in my Twitter follows. I genuinely have been lurking on Slack. This is so terrible. I've had Slack open. I'm already regretting somewhat my decision to take leave, but I'm trying to make predictions, write some stuff down now, what I think is going to happen the rest of the year. And then six months time, I'll check in and be like, oh, was that right? Was that wrong? Once you finish that list, come back on the show. We should do that in public so we can shame you for this. But the reason I've dragged you here today is because I want to talk about how we talk about AI.

33:22And I've been thinking about this for a while, but this has really sparked for me listening to a podcast a couple of weeks ago where they had this otherwise very interesting conversation about AI, but kept talking about it in just the worst ways. And it was talking about like when you do something with the AI and it just it makes me cringe every time that happens. And then I've been reading all this stuff and we're using all these terms like AI and machine learning and LLMs and chat GPT and chat bots. And all this stuff just becomes so sort of interchanged to the point of being meaningless. So what I want to do here with you, my British pedantic friend, is try and sort this out a little bit.

34:02Because I actually think it's really important. We're in this moment where this stuff is moving really fast and it's so transformative that I actually think the way we talk about it matters. And so I want to just not exactly like define terms, but I want to just sort of think through how we talk about this stuff. Does that sound good? Is that a good plan? Yeah, perfect. Loved it. Loved to be pedantic. I love it. So let's just literally start with the term AI, which is a thing we force ourselves to use and have to use all the time. It gets used for everything. It is like so broadly defined as to be almost sort of meaningless now.

34:35It's not quite a technical term because it's like just to call something the AI is to refer to like the code, which is just not how we talk about things. But I am curious, like as you think about what you mean when you say AI at this point, both for you as a reporter reporting on this stuff and for you as just a person in the world living with this stuff, where does it fit into kind of your vocabulary correctly? You're completely right in that the definition of AI is so diffuse as to be sort of useless. It is such a broad term. It applies to so many different specific applications, technological methods, ideas, concepts, that it's very difficult to say what it is.

35:14What I like to do is not think about necessarily what the strict definition is, but think about how we use it in terms of how it fits into other frameworks and how we think about it conceptually. So you mentioned just now one of the things you dislike is talking about the AI. The AI did this. The AI did that. I hate that too. You know, I've spoken to Verge staff people about this, and I try to sort of give a Verge framework on it. And there's no official policy, but one of my big no-nos for covering AI is anthropomorphizing the AI. And that involves turning it into this discrete entity that happens when you use the grammatical form, the AI, an AI.

35:54AI did this. So I don't really mind the term. I know some people, some researchers are really critical of it. And they're like, you know, they put artificial intelligence in inverted commas and they really hate seeing it used. And I respect that as a viewpoint, but it is not the one I think is the right approach. Because I think there has to be a language for people who are non-experts to talk about this stuff. And AI has become the phrase we use. Fine, let's just go with it. If we've accepted it is the phrase we use, then what becomes important is, yes, as I say, how we conceptualise it. So we don't want to anthropomorphise it.

36:31we don't want to give it agency when it has none. So I think we can talk about AI as much as we like, and we can talk about what people are doing with it. But that is the thing. Yeah, we need to remember how it is being used and who is ultimately responsible for it. You know, there's that great, it had been a bit of a meme on Twitter for a while, a presentation card from an IBM sort of slideshow given to management in the 1970s. This is a great old looking presentation card, that old sort of courier type font being used. And it says machines must never make a management decision because machines can't be held responsible for management decisions, something like that.

37:06I think something similar applies to AI in that we may say casually AI is doing that or AI is doing this, but we need to remember who put those systems in place, who bears responsibility. You know, we live in a society where machines cannot be responsible, humans can be responsible. And if there is to be justice, if there is to be, you know, a sort of fair society to live in, then we need to remember the humans at the heart of it, not AI. So that's a terribly conceptual over the top approach to that question. But in short, I don't think definitions matter so much as the context that you put those terms in.

37:44Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think as we talk about the AI, I've come to think of it as sort of synonymous with like the technology that it's a thing that you use if you don't sort of immediately further define it. You're just telling on yourself as somebody who doesn't understand what the hell you're talking about, because what it is is like technology is not a thing. It's an umbrella term for lots of things. Right. And I think AI is the same way. Like AI is not a thing, but it is it is a category of things. But if you're going to talk about it, you have to then talk about the more specific things right away or else I'm just going to assume you have no idea what you're talking about.

38:17Yeah, I agree with you. It's fine. You can use the term and maybe you're against using the term. No, I'm actually with you in the sense that I think there are lots of interesting arguments to have been made a very long time ago about whether artificial and intelligence are the right words. At this point, I think it's like the toothpaste is out of the tube. It almost doesn't matter. That just is the term. And I think my hope would be that we kind of get to the point where AI is like, it's like SAT or MTV in that kind of the original definition gets lost and AI just means AI. And we all kind of know what it means, but artificial and intelligence doesn't really matter anymore.

38:51But again, I think I'm with you in the sense that like the time to have had that debate was a long time ago and it's over and it really doesn't matter anymore. Yeah, I mean, I think there is one argument to make, perhaps, that AI is in many ways a fitting term, in that it is as diffuse as the entity it describes in the world. And it also reflects and embodies grammatically the problems we have talking about AI. You know, AI is a difficult thing to describe because it is so multi-formed. It has so many different variations. And in a way, just doing what we're doing now, I'm going to give both of us a big pat on the back right now.

39:28There we go. You know, talking about this stuff is useful. It puts it in context. People think about it and you, obviously, you know, the worst, not the worst sin, but the sin with using words every time you use them, no matter what you're talking about, is using them thoughtlessly and not thinking about the words you're using. And I think if we think about them, we're okay. AI can be okay. I like it. On the AI front, the other one that I have come across a bunch in trying to report about this is AI versus machine learning. And I think they get used interchangeably in part because I think machine learning is perceived to be the less kind of magical sounding version of it.

40:03It's like, if you want to make AI seem real, you just call it machine learning. But that's not quite the right distinction, I don't think. Where do you draw the line between those things? Are they synonymous with one another? Yeah, I mean, the thing is that there are distinctions to be made. So you could distinguish between machine learning methods and stuff like expert systems methods, which were based on creating AI. Both of them fall under the AI category, but were more about structuring and sort of hard coding the rules that were being used in these systems. And expert systems had a vogue decades ago.

40:38And, you know, well, they're still used now in many places. It's not fair to say they've gone out of use. But it's been overtaken by the learning, quote-unquote learning methods, the deep learning methods, the machine learning methods, which are more reliant on letting systems, you know, learn on their own. Not on their own, but, you know, look at data and find rules in there under the guidance of humans. I think machine learning as it's used generally now is just like being a little bit more fussy, a little bit more, as you say, a little bit more correct as well to be like, well, let's just take some of the energy out of the room.

41:10Let's take some of the hype out of the room and call it machine learning instead. Yeah, it's when you want to remind people that this isn't some fake thing that's happening. It's just you're just letting machines do things for you. It's a reminder that this is just a thing that happens on a computer. It's fine. Yeah, but arguably it's also sort of inflationary in terms of what it draws our expectations from. You know, you talk about machines, you think about physical machines, you don't often think about software. That's one mistake and that plays into AI myths. You talk about learning and then you imagine an autonomous system that is able to read and engage with and analyse information in the same way as a human does.

41:46But that's a poor elision of terms as well because conceptually these things work very, very differently. You know, and then you have the sort of self-directed aspect of learning. And then we've had this wonderful piece up on the site last week, Josh Jezja, this fantastic piece looking at the huge amount of human labour that goes into it. Is that machine learning? If you need to employ thousands, tens of thousands of people around the world to click on pictures of fire hydrants and captures day after day. You know, is that machine learning or is that human rulemaking turned into machine decision making?

42:19So yeah, machine learning is, to all intents and purposes, the less hyped way of saying AI. But again, I think defining the term is perhaps less important than the context within which you use them and talking about these other parts of the systems. Right. Yeah, I found myself trying to use machine learning less unless I am specifically referring to a type of system that is machine learning. Yeah. Because it is a thing that has a sort of strict, simple definition in how it is used in some of these systems. And I think I've definitely fallen under the trap of using machine learning as the less sexy term for AI.

42:59And I'm trying not to do that because I think it's unhelpful sometimes. What would you give us the definition for machine learning? I think it's what you said at the beginning, right? It is these automated systems by which a huge amount of training data is fed in and algorithms run and they learn what fire hydrants look like, right? And I think, frankly, in my world, mostly covering products, I have very little actual reason to use machine learning as a term. So I'm just trying to use it less and less, right? I think you're right to say it is more useful as a way of talking about how these systems are built than the actual output of these systems.

43:35Which brings me to my next question. And this is the one that I have struggled with the most as a reporter, which is terms like LLM, large language model, and GPT, which is generative pre-trained transformers. These are things that if you had asked me a year ago, would I ever use these terms in a story? I would have said, no, you're insane. Absolutely not. Never. and all at once these feel like they have become like mainstream terms i don't think anybody knows what gpt stands for but i think everyone has heard the phrase chat gpt now and it's just kind of in the lexicon now and i find myself wondering like are we good with this like like are we just gonna are we gonna get to a point where i can just say llm and assume most of our audience and most of the people in the world know what i'm talking about i mean yeah these you know oh god this is a lovely conversation about language.

44:22I love these discussions. I'm sorry to be discursive in them. But you know, I am very much a descriptivist when it comes to language. Words are what we say they are, and they are the context they're used within. GPT, you're right, has become this completely denatured term. You know, I made a joke when I had my last day that you guys were going to train a language model on all my articles, and you'd obviously replace me in my absence. And And GPT is a sort of suffix now just means a program you talk to. Totally. It just means like a chatty program, which is very unusual. And LLM is another one in that, you know, the large in it is completely subjective as a value.

45:02And the importance of having a large language model as opposed to a small one. You know, no one you can speak to in AI will give you a clear cutoff about what makes the difference between a large and a small one. especially as scales go up and down and size itself, which is we measure a number of parameters, the connections within the model, has sort of become more and less important. There was this push where you would scale it up and we just got larger and larger models. And now it's sort of going the other way and there are different methods of training them using fewer parameters. So maybe the large isn't important at all.

45:37And actually, I think there's probably a good argument there to get rid of large and just call them language models. And that is, to me, usefully generalised as an approach. The underlying methodology is advancing and mutating so rapidly that any term, any descriptive term, GPT or otherwise, is bound to become obsolete in a matter of months. But I think GPT will hang on because it's become a marketing term. And like AI, the point at which something becomes a marketing term, you know, you may as well give up on a technical definition. And then it just becomes about, well, what type of story you're trying to tell?

46:11What information do you need to give to your reader, whoever they may be? You know, I feel like ChatGPT, Neelai has said this in the past. He just thinks it's an awful name. Oh, it's objectively a horrendous product name. One of the things you're making me realize with all of this is that we kind of don't have middle-sized terms in AI right now. We either have these incredibly small descriptive things like large language model and machine learning or GPT, or we just call it AI. And there's nothing in between. And I wonder if the thing in between is we'll end up just calling it software because fundamentally it's just software created in a different way.

46:47And we're pretty comfortable just calling things software at this point. But it does occur to me that even as I'm describing this stuff, I don't have an answer to if I'm not just going to refer to it as a large language model powered chatbot, which is messy and I think not how we should talk about this stuff forever. All I call it is AI and that's too much. And so I wonder, we're sort of stuck between these two poles for now and I wonder if our vocabulary needs some stuff in the middle. I think that's a really good point. I think something about the dilemma you're describing is due to where we are in the product cycle.

47:19You know, I've been covering AI for not too long, five, six years or something like that now. And before this last year, the amount of products I talked about was fairly small. And, you know, it used to be a thing where I would, some archive paper would be going around with some new sort of GAN technique involved with image synthesis generation, whatever it was. And we'd write that up. And we'd talk about whatever the specific name for that neural network architecture was. But it would never really be important again. And the realise was, was there was no continuity to those stories. That term, you know, unless it became a very successful model or approach like GAN itself, which started off as this, you know, obscure, well, not obscure, you know, it became very popular very quickly.

48:04but in terms of public knowledge, obscure term, and then, you know, I think many of our listeners would recognize the term GAM and know it has something to do with image generation. But my point is that when we cross over from the research stage to the product stage, A, the idea of marketing gets involved in how you sell it, but B, you have these now narratives about these technologies, and that takes on a life far apart from the research itself. And some terminology sticks around. I think a really interesting example is hallucinations. So hallucinations for listeners who are not aware is a sort of name given to essentially the mistakes made by language models.

48:45You know, you give them a question and they come up with an answer that is, you know, not derived from anything directly in their training data, derived from the patterns within it, but it's wrong in some way. It's factually incorrect. And a lot of scientists, a lot of researchers dislike the term hallucination because they think it implies a mental model that is akin to a human mind. Humans hallucinate, conscious beings hallucinate, machines do not hallucinate, they just make mistakes. But I think that's a really interesting example of how a term that starts off as something within the research world then takes on this greater meaning because it happens to describe something that is very common to people using these products.

49:23I love your suggesting that we need more middle terms. But I think, again, another reason for this, apart from the fact that we're in the sort of productisation stage of this development cycle, is that actually a lot of attention is being focused on a relatively small zoo of different technical animals, as it were. You know, a lot of it comes down to language models, the differences between them, if we want to talk about, you know, specific structures with how they're trained, it's really just not relevant to the general population. You know, if we're talking about the difference between how gpt3 3.5 and 4 were trained we're talking about transformer heads and all this sort of stuff attention heads i've definitely got one of those terminologies wrong i apologize you know this is what i mean like but a lot of that stuff is really not relevant unless you are you know you're sitting in a data center somewhere or not sitting in a data center you're trying to train this stuff yourself right are there particular areas of ai that you think we are deficient in language to describe that we're missing terminology i think you're right that right now we're doing an okay job just because there aren't that many things to do.

50:25But the thing that catches me the most, the two things everybody thinks about with AI are sort of generative image platforms. And I think that's a slightly messy term, but is at least kind of understandable, right? It's like use AI to make new art out of nothing. I can sort of understand what that is. I suspect we'll have pretty good vocabulary for that pretty fast. And then the other one is the chatbots. And I actually think chatbots is like a fine term for that. It may not be perfect, but it works and everybody kind of understands what it is. And that's the other side of things. The one where I get tripped up is like, I feel like I read a hundred press releases every day that a company is like, we put AI into our product.

50:58And I'm just like, what does that mean? And, and, and to me, it's like, I just read that now is like, we put technology into our product. Congratulations. Like, I don't know. Did we, is that anything? And so I think, and that's where I get to the point where it's like, okay, I think we, we might just need more words for this. and maybe what'll happen is we'll get to the point where this stuff is just sort of unsexy enough that we don't talk about it it's like it's like talking about like you added a new file to your code base like it's that's nothing right and this was back when everybody was saying like we're all in on web 3 and i was like well what does that mean and they're like we don't know either and so maybe this is just kind of how the hype cycle works but it does feel to me like we just need a larger set of ways to talk about what it means to put some of these tools into your product because what you're not doing is putting chat gpt or an image generator into your product and if you're not doing either of those things we need a third thing to call it and i just don't know what that is yet but okay i have i have two more things i have two more terms i'm gonna throw at you and then i'm gonna let you go here sure one is where are we on spicy autocomplete as a descriptor for some of this ai stuff i've been seeing this for months i loved it at first i like it less and less over time but i want to know what you think okay so i mean i think this is again a fascinating example of the limits the benefits the drawbacks of certain terms so autocomplete as a way of describing language models and their abilities i actually i tweeted about this a few a few months ago because i was trying to i was trying to work out where the term fast first started getting applied to these and actually i think it was robin sloan i don't know if you know him at all he is an author he wrote sourdough mr penumbra's 24-hour bookstore but he also has a fantastic newsletter he does and he's very like involved in technology he's done like he's got a side music project that uses ai you know he's been experimenting with these tools for ages this was the first instance i could find of it being applied to language models i think it was like 2016 2017 something like that a while ago then of course it became attached to essentially criticisms of these models.

53:05I mean, particularly the Stochastic Parrots paper, I think, did a lot about connecting these things. And because it got attached to criticisms of these models, it's then become a somewhat politicised term within AI communities. And if you use it, it can put you in camps in people's mind, camps of political or ideological belief or thought. So it's a very interesting term now. And if you're someone who derides language models as just fancy autocomplete or whatever it is. Some people in the AI community who, let's just say, are more likely to believe in existential risk problems, for example, will be quite dismissive, or they can be quite dismissive because they'll think you don't fully understand the qualities that these systems have.

53:49And the thing is, I think it was a really useful term for a long time. It was a really useful way of quickly explaining, communicating, sorry, the abilities of these systems and also something about the way they're trained. You know, it is a statistical predictor, that is definitely true. The problem with the term, and I'm still, I don't have a decision, I haven't, you know, made a decision in my head about this, is that it doesn't quite convey to people now the full capabilities of these systems, which, you know, you get something like the famous Sparks of AGI paper, the one that came out from the Microsoft Research.

54:23And I say famous, also very controversial. A lot of people disagree with the contents, the conclusions of that paper, which was basically saying that GPT-4 had abilities in it which were not adequately described by our current mental models of language models. And it was something perhaps closer to, as the title suggests, sparks of artificial general intelligence. And I haven't come down on a side on that. I still think autocomplete is a useful term in many contexts when talking about language models. But it's also sort of lacking now, because it does underplay the fantastic breadth of capabilities that these systems have, and the fact that there may be, you know, aptitudes within them that just don't apply to our model of what autocomplete software does.

55:06So I think it's a term that we're going to see phased out in the years to come because it's been slightly lacking. Or perhaps it's a term that's going to become increasingly politicised in that using it will align you with one or other political camp of beliefs or research camps of belief. But a really fascinating term. Do you like it still, Spicey Autocomplete? I liked it at first because I think it's a really helpful kind of kindergarten level understanding of what's actually going on, right? Like it's because everyone has had that experience and you type something and it throws up the three options and sometimes they're insane and sometimes they're great.

55:38And it's like, that is not a terrible metaphor for what's happening in a lot of these systems. I think it's becoming an incomplete enough metaphor as to not be useful very, very, very quickly. So I kind of like it less over time. And I agree, I think the way that people use it has gotten, people are either very dismissive when they use it or very dismissive of people who use it. And I think both of those are kind of annoying. And for that reason alone, I'm ready to move on to something else. But as a first run at making this stuff really understandable to people, I think it kind of worked. It got us six months of decent metaphors, so I'm not mad at it.

56:14no absolutely i'm glad to hear we're staking out the radical centrist ground here absolutely we're annoyed by people on both sides of this argument i'm really the the verge cast's official position is everybody should just calm down for five minutes i think uh but here's here's one i suspect you and i uh will aggressively agree on and then we can go okay which is the the term magic to describe ai like in magic eraser and magic editor and magic whatever that needs to die in a fire as quickly as possible right like yeah we got to stop with the magic there's no magic here i'm done with this there's no magic we're good on this well but you know when you deliver a product david david listen to me listen to me for a second dave when you deliver a product that uplifts your customer's heart that brings delight to them when they get rid of that obnoxious pug dog that was leering at them in that family photo in the background is that not magic is that not a type of wizardry of sorcery no you sorry did johnny ive just come into your room where how did that that was amazing terrible um yeah but but the context you've just described it within a purely marketing context so i think people already know that magic is bullshit for want of a more polite term yeah yeah that's fair hopefully it stays that way all right james you got a book to write we need to take a break but thank you as always thanks guys bye all right we gotta take one more break and then we're going to come back and talk about all the video games we cannot wait to play.

57:38We'll be right back.

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1:00:22We're back. So usually the gaming world has a couple of big moments a year, with the E3 conference usually in June being the biggest by far. But E3 is no longer. So instead, we've had a string of announcements from Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft. There was the Summer Game Fest and a bunch of others, all detailing what's coming to a console and computer near you. This year is actually a big year for games, it turns out. And it's a lot to keep up with. So I asked The Verge's Ash Parrish and Polygon's Chris Plant to come on the show and tell me all the new stuff that they're most excited about.

1:00:56Ash, hi. Hi. Great to be back. It's good to have you back. And speaking of coming back, Chris Plant, welcome back to the Vergecast. It's been a while. Hi, thank you. It's been six years, seven years. Obviously, you missed me, and you're just so happy to have me. Listen, you were just here. I don't know. I opened up the link, and you were just here, and we're just rolling with it. It's fine. Okay, so the way we wanted to do this is basically there's been a lot of video game announcements. There was no E3, so there was no one moment for video games. Instead, it's been the summer of video games. and I just want to like rattle through some of the coolest stuff that people have been talking about so the way we set this up is the the homework we each had is we each had to come with two games that we are excited to play this summer um ideally brand new games but if you want to cheat on that one I'll allow it and then two games you're excited about coming this fall so games you can't play yet but will before the end of the year are you guys prepared are you ready.

1:01:53Does this sound like a plan? This sounds like a tentative plan. I think we're gonna maybe be okay. This is the Verge cast. Maybe be okay is the best we're ever gonna do. Great. Let's start with this summer and we'll just we'll just go around in circles here. So Ash, you go first. What's the first game you're excited about this summer? So my first pick is Baldur's Gate 3.

1:02:17I am really excited about this game. It has been in early access for about forever. I remember the first time it went to like early access and I got to play like an early build of it. And I've never played the Baldur's Gate games before. I kind of really haven't dabbled with like the Dungeons and Dragons games that have been, you know, made into video games. But Baldur's Gate was like the first time I had an experience with a game like that. And I loved it. It was really fun. I got such a kick out of not like doing anything for like my class. I think I played like a Paladin or something like that.

1:02:47I don't remember if that's not one of the classes. Don't don't at me on that. But I got more fun out of like pushing people off of things and lighting them on fire than I did doing anything else that was like class-based because they just do so much damage and it's so much fun being a little chaos gremlin that like pushes people off buildings and stuff like that so I'm really excited to see what a full version of that game looks like especially because there's romances and I haven't had a good game with romance in it since Mass Effect 3 so I'm really excited to get back into that like real crunchy crpg type experience that has like 50 million lines of voice dialogue and 20 million different things that you can do i am jazzed about that i love that chris any feelings about balder skate i mean i'm just intimidated you know intimidated by what it could do to me if i allow myself to enjoy a game like that because it's definitely one of those games that you start playing i'm like you know i'll put 20 hours into it that's a reasonable amount of time to play a video game and then 300 hours later you're like what did i do yeah um you know and that's not to say that's a bad use of time it just uh it slips away i i played a little bit of divinity original sin 2 same kind of game and um yeah it was definitely that thing where i thought i had only played for 10 hours and it had been about 40 or 50 yeah that feeling of oh god i cannot afford to lose my life to this game is a running theme through all of my picks, which you will see very shortly.

1:04:20But Chris, what's your first one? What are you excited about this summer? So I'm cheating and I'm using California summertime, which means it goes to the end of October. And hasn't started yet. Exactly. I mean, definitely correct. So there is a week in October that has like three huge releases and I'll be picking two from them. One of them is just a very old video game, which is the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection. Yes. Coming out on October 24th.

1:04:49Okay, are we giving you that first? That feels like October 24th is a stretch. I said the end of October. I created the rules, and then I used the rules. That's how this game works. You were just here when I clicked the link, man. That's all I know. Here's why it matters. There are a bunch of flashier games coming out. Metal Gear Solid is one of the most important video game franchises in the history of the medium and you effectively cannot play it right now legally and that is absolutely absurd there was a documentary at Tribeca Film Festival about Hideo Kojima he has new games coming up with Death Stranding 2 and yet if you wanted to go play Metal Gear Solid or Metal Gear Solid 2 or 3 or any of the original games good luck you will need to go get an original system because they're no longer They're available on Windows PC.

1:05:38They used to be on good old games. And they're not on modern consoles. It doesn't make sense how hard it is to play these games. And this isn't exclusive to Metal Gear. But I think it is kind of the shining example of video games' terrible habits of erasing or legally blocking out its past. And I am very glad that this is going to become available. And then everybody can play it and realize, you know what? Death Stranding is actually a better game than all of them. oh that's a that's big yeah and this is is it the whole collection coming to basically all of the major platforms so this is metal gear solids one two and three okay um and some i believe like the nes or metal gear not the solid just metal yes thank you thank you but sadly i do not think metal gear solid for the game boy color is part of this despite being a delightful game and metal gear solid four and five are not on this though i think it's pretty safe to assume that there will be a sequel collection in the next year or two to make sure that people can buy those too.

1:06:39And then he's and Kojima's very busy getting all his stuff to work on a Mac. So it's gonna it's it's all gonna be very exciting. It's all coming up Metal Gear. All right, my first pick is comparatively very small. It's the new Mario Kart DLC for the Nintendo Switch, Wave 5.

1:06:59Mario Kart is the only game I can play for any amount of time, whenever, for any reason, and be very happy about it. It's a very good appointment game. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah, you can just sit down, pop in, have like a bespoke 20-minute experience, get everything, like experience an entire gameplay loop and stop and you don't have to worry about falling behind or anything like that. Mario Kart is a perfect game for that. And the thing that they've done really well is I feel like every Mario Kart game before, I feel like I've sort of played through and then it gets a little bit repetitive and I have to kind of take a break and go.

1:07:32But they're doing these waves at just the right cadence where it's like, oh, I have a new character. That kind of makes everything feel new. And then, oh, there's a new course. That makes everything feel kind of new. And this one, there's a handful of new characters and it's going to give me endless reasons to play this game a lot more. You buried the lead. Kamek is one of the new characters. and this is huge in the plant house because my five-year-old thinks comic is the star of Mario. He's very misguided. You know what? I would believe that. If I had not ever played Mario, if I didn't know what Mario was, I would 100 % believe that because this is the guy that comes in on the cloud, right?

1:08:08He's Bowser's Herald, right? This is the first person who shows up and is given this outsized importance. He is talking to you. I would 100 % believe that. Your kid is 100 % right and you can tell him I said that. Wow. That's kind of deep, honestly. Like I was about to come out firing about how wrong that opinion is, but I think you might be right. I take it back. All right. Ash, what's your next one for the summer? Ghost Trick. Oh.

1:08:36ghost trick is a switch game it's kind of like like a like a phoenix right kind of game where you go through and you have to like solve mysteries and things like that and this has this weird mechanic where like you're a ghost and you have to stop people's untimely deaths and you have like these weird rube goldberg like device way of going about that and i'm looking forward to getting into that because that looks like a fun nifty little game that'll scratch that uh Ace Attorney itch. I had not seen this before, and I'm looking at it now, and also has this amazing kind of retro animation style that I'm very into.

1:09:07Yeah. Yeah, for people who want to try it right now, it's on iOS. And yeah, it is a delight. All right, well, there goes my summer. Chris, what's your second one? I'm going to follow the rules this time. My pick is myhouse.wad or myhouse.wad.

1:09:27and it is a mod for doom oh i'm just targeting the verge audience wait tell me everything about this i don't know about this it is an absolutely bonkers mod that in the canon of the forum post where it was published two friends were making it in 1999 and then they grew apart and more recently one of those friends passed away so the friend who is still alive found this mod that they were working on and decided to like touch it up and just release it out onto the world and it is just their house it is it is the pastway friend's home that is not the mod at all and you should keep playing it um it is a very different thing and it is it is the kind of like prize you know nesting doll toy is it inscription is it like inscription i mean as somebody who didn't like inscription after the first act, I would say it's better than Inscription.

1:10:22Oh, you know what? That's okay. I admire Inscription a lot. I think the first third of that game is fantastic, but I think what this is doing is, I hate doing a Lynchian thing because that is such a meaningless comparison, but it is not trying to ascribe a meaning to every decision that it makes. It is, I think, a lot looser and more playful than that, which is why it's a mod and not a retail game because it probably would make a total of$5. but instead just show up for random insanity and see what happens. Yeah. I love that. I do really appreciate it. I'm just reading about this now, and one of the things it says is, are you expecting to battle demons?

1:11:00Yes, this will happen, but first you must uncover the secrets of what seems to just be a suburban house. Yes. That sounds amazing. That does sound amazing, especially because this is in Doom. Sold. I'm in. I will play this. Can I give you, like, one little spoilery thing? Sure. This is, like, no story or anything. There is a point in the game where you come across two dogs. And one of the dogs is like a three-headed hell beast with like borderline infinite health. And the other dog is like a cute puppy with like two health. And whichever one you kill, it kills the other. And that's the only way to move on.

1:11:35Oh, no. Which really puts a like choice on your platter. Wow. Yeah, it's like it's not even a trolley problem. It's just an awful problem. i swear the game is not that dark in general uh but that that certainly um yeah it leaves a funky taste in the uh in the palette yeah real real summer vibes coming out of that one my pick because unlike the two of you i followed the rules is out now and it is f123 the racing game oh wow specifically because well a i love racing games as you can tell from my two picks so far and I like them because I can just like sit down for 10 minutes and do it like in between things or go somewhere else like the main thrust of my life right now is I have a six-month-old kid so I get like 15 free minutes at various times and I'm like I'm gonna sit I had a friend who bought me a steering wheel for these games and I love them but f-123 has this new mode called f-1 world which is basically for anyone who's ever played like 2k or like FIFA ultimate team it's one of those where you get to just like build up your team and you play over time and instead of just like beating the game over and over and over again which most of these games just make you do in career mode this one you can just like hang out in the world and keep racing and getting better and doing new things which again for me will keep me interested much longer than just like trying to kind of achieve the same goals over and over again and people seem to really like f1 world so i'm very excited about it have you you gotten into many of these that this always just seems so so intimidating intimidating not in the i'll get sucked in forever it more intimidating in the like where do i even start yeah the challenge i have with these games is that if i don't get in early i'm so far behind everybody else like i've been playing sports video games for a very long time i'm like pretty good at most sports video games but i just don't grind like the people who grind and i think this is true of sort of any competitive like play to pay to win games to some extent there's just like people with credit cards who are just like buying their way to the top of all of these things.

1:13:37So I've had to learn to just have a very zen approach and I lose most of the time and it's basically fine. And I just like tell myself stories about these all being teenagers with their parents' credit cards who are beating me and I'm morally superior to them. I had lunch at a friend's house last night and he is the person who is always beating you in this game. I had no idea. These friends, they build decks and I didn't even know that they like video games because they never have talked about video games. And then he showed me his garage and he's like oh by the way i do play one video game i play f1 and here's like a steel rig i built oh boy like a like full like it's like half their garage and it's like oh this is who this is who plays this game yeah it's like uh fighting game fans they're like that hardcore i bought a steering wheel and like anchored it to my desk and i thought that was like very impressive and then and then i had the same experience people are like here's the ten thousand dollar rig with three giant wraparound screens that i got and i was like oh you're gonna you're gonna beat me in all of our races aren't you one of the things that i remember most about attending summer games fest last year was they had this like rig set up i don't even remember what game it is now now feel bad where you kind of like it mimics sitting in an f1 car so it's really low to the ground on the floor like you're fully like recumbent and you use like your feet to press the pedals and everything and it like it had a line like really long for people to try it out and I just was so intimidated for trying it out because Summer Games Fest or at least what it was last year was like it's this open space where all these game demos are so people are like walking around and you've got like Twitch influencers on those like little standing like Roomba things where they have like a Roomba attached to like a screen so like influencers who are not there can walk around the floor and like look and like oh this is cool you know that kind of stuff and there were so many people there with like cameras and stuff and I was just so super intimidated of getting in that thing and looking like an idiot.

1:15:30That's so I never tried it, even though I was deathly curious about it. And that's one of my bigger regrets. Those games are tough. They do a better job now of making the racing simulators a little more sort of approachable to get into. But like, they're so accurate at this point that every time I play one of these games, I sit down and the very first thing I do is crash my car like 30 to 60 times. So you're saying they don't send 30 streamers to your house with video cameras to shame you. great great great thing i'm on board now all right let's shift and go to this fall which i guess for chris plant means the months of november and december yeah but any any game that's not out yet or won't be out until the end of the summer we'll say is fair game here ash what's your first one so this is what i was holding on to from the previous segment thing that i'm looking forward to the most that is supposed to come out by the end of 2023 is sonic superstars

1:16:31big huge sonic fan i was jazzed as hell to see that they're making another 2d sonic platformer i'm not really a big fan of the 3d sonic platforms uh sonic frontiers broke my heart famously because it was like i was so excited for this game and then i played it and it was just like such a mess in terms of how they implemented systems that it it literally broke my heart like because I wanted to like this game so bad. So I'm really excited to see that, you know, even though Sega won't give me Sonic Mania 2, they'll give me Sonic Superstars, which, you know, I consider that a fair trade. So I'm really excited to get back into like these 2.5 2D side-scrolling Sonic platformers because those are just fantastic, perfect games in every way and I can't get enough of them.

1:17:16I almost picked this one too. I'm very excited about this. And I was trying to think, when was the last really great Sonic game? I feel like it's been a really long time since true Sonic fans have had a real winner. Sonic Mania was 2017. Okay. Yeah. Okay. This is the controversial thing amongst Sonic fans. We're a Sonic house out here. And the truth is, you could both say that there have never been good ones. Because going back and playing Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 and Sonic 3, they're designed to be headaches. The pleasure of the game is to get your speed going right. You're getting a flow. and the game does everything it can to prevent that and i feel like my i was a diehard sonic kid as a kid then really really fell off it and now like with my kid now i'm like re-falling in love with it kind of meeting it on its own terms i'm like oh it's actually just a traditional platformer and i think once you start thinking about it like that a lot of these recent sonic games have been pretty okay sonic colors it happens i think that there's kind of like weird some weird rose colored glasses for what people think sonic was in the past worse what it actually was but also the short answer like actually it's just sonic mania i guess that's true i was thinking mania was longer ago than it actually was and i guess mania did what i hope superstars does which is just be a sonic game yes like like you're saying ashley don't don't try to do other things just give me more sonic yeah give me more sonic and knuckles 3 and we're good you can keep making that game forever and ever with new stuff and i will always buy it and i will always be happy and you barely even have to update the graphics no not at all exactly all right chris What's your first one?

1:18:52Super Mario Brothers Wonder. Nice.

1:18:58Which actually comes out before Metal Gear, so I am seeing the flaw in my plan. It comes out on October 20th, and I just love that this is the most Nintendo thing to do on the planet, that Nintendo spends decades making a, and like refining an image of Super Mario to the point where they finally make a movie, and they're like, cool, great, we nailed it. Now we're going to change the entire aesthetic. And they're like, no, are you sure you don't want to make a game that looks like, you know, Mario? Like that movie that just made a gajillion dollars? Like, no, no, no. We're going to make it look like a DreamWorks movie now instead.

1:19:32And they're like, goddammit. I am so excited. I am so glad that Mario was going to turn into an elephant. It's going to be a delight. And I kind of don't want to see another image or trailer or anything from this game. because, as the wonder in the subtitle suggests, I think the surprise of it all and the hint that it could be a little bit like Super Mario Bros. 2 in the U.S., that's enough to get me to play it. I wanted to ask, how do you feel about people saying, this just looks like an updated version of new Super Mario Bros., which, you know, I was a Sonic household. I was not a Mario household.

1:20:07So looking at this from the outside, this just looks like a new version of new Super Mario Bros., But instead of, I don't know, being a cat, I know that's not New Super Mario Brothers, don't at me. I know that's not it. Instead of being a cat, Mario just gets high, right? Like, it just seems like, okay, Mario drops acid. That's what the thesis of this game is versus something like Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario Odyssey, or, you know, where they definitely innovated on that formula. This just looks like a newer game was not that new of a game, rather, with like slightly updated graphics and maybe one twist that doesn't really feel as different as it should, which, though, sounds exactly what Tears of the Kingdom was.

1:20:52And then you played it, and it was a completely different experience on the level that is, like, media shifting, like, earth shattering. So I hope you're right in that we don't get to see anything else about it, and they just release it, which is kind of what Nintendo kind of does. It's like, okay, yeah, wait till they see this shit. We'll knock the fucking socks off of them. So, yeah. I think also to your point that loving video games is a lot like being a wine connoisseur, no matter what your franchise is. So if you're inside of it, you're like, oh, I love Sonic or I love Mario. And you taste the difference and it feels more substantial than it probably is.

1:21:28like if every Mario game is a red wine this is like Lambrusco or like something sugary and like bubbly and it's like I didn't know that a wine should do that I don't know that much about wine so I'm kind of flying by the seat of my pants here but I yeah I think I think we search for those those like slight variations because we both want the thing that we're familiar with but also want just a little hint of something new I mean it also feels like we're I don't know if this is a bigger trend or not, but there is definitely in a lot of these franchises a sort of pull back to like, let's do the thing that works.

1:22:01I think everybody has been brought in by the lure of the battle royale and the open world everything. And now everybody's just like, what if we just made a cool game that's fun to play? Which is why you're going to tell us about Mortal Kombat 1? Is that an alley-oop? No, it's why I'm going to tell you about Assassin's Creed Mirage. You're right, the other one doing it. the two series i have played most completely in the course of my life are the the arkham games of batman which i absolutely love to pieces uh and i'm very excited that they're coming to switch and the assassin's creed games and the thing that happened with the last two with the last few really assassin's creed games was they just got too big everything got too open world and it was just like do you just want to be on a ship for the next five days i was like no i don't like give me something to do give me a task let me go and actually play this game instead of just sort of aimlessly wandering yet another ancient town like i don't know that got old for me and the story about mirage so far is that it is a return to form in the sense that it is still big and interesting but more sort of straightforward and it's like a game you play rather than a world you explore and i've just never been the like wander the world video gamer i like appreciate those games and i understand why people like them.

1:23:13It's just never been for me. And Assassin's Creed is like a puzzle solving game at its best. And I'm very excited for that to happen again. I'm very hopeful for Mirage. The last two have been very disappointing, but I have high hopes for Mirage. No, you're out on Mirage? I mean, it's a Ubisoft game in the year of our Lord 2023. I hate to do that because a lot of talented people work at this publisher and everybody's trying their absolute best. But everything coming out of Ubisoft right now just feels so completely mismanaged. I would love for it to work. I really, really would. And it might be like my surprise there because everything you're saying is like spot on.

1:23:50That is what I want. I just feel like I keep getting burned every time I let myself get excited for one of their games. It's fair. And the worry would be that this is basically just they just release, you know, a 10 year old game with slightly better graphics because they're like, well, we couldn't forget a new story. People like the old one will just do that again and you're not wrong that that would be potentially the most obvious thing for ubisoft to do here so we'll see um all right let's keep going through last round here ash what do you got so i have a couple things that i want to mention so the one thing was the prince of persia side scroller that was announced at the ubisoft direct that looks really really cool the prince has been kidnapped and taken to a forbidden land i don't really jive with the prince of persia games like the newer ones.

1:24:37I kind of really like the Xbox one where the girl like shoots flowers out of her butt when, you know, you unlock a thing. That was fun. That was a fun game. But beyond that, like the Prince of Persia, like that original trilogy and all that, it really didn't jive with me. But seeing like the side scroller, I guess there's something about like side scroller platform puzzle solving action that just really gets me. And seeing that game was like, oh, okay. Yeah. I think I would like that a lot. So I'm really excited about that. There was another game that was kind of like that but gives me more hades vibes it was shown during summer games fest it's from this i don't know actually where it's from it's just like this it had this like one-off thing it's called lishfanga the time shift warrior it has this like prince of persia like aesthetic but this woman can like split herself into different copies of herself to like solve puzzles and stuff like that and fight enemies.

1:25:31It looks really cool. It was one of the coolest things that were shown off during Summer Games Fest and like one of the only games that like featured a woman. Sorry, I had to get that in there. And then finally, this one really does not fit within the purview that you set out for us, but it is a thick game that is always on my I cannot wait for this list. And that is Dragon Age Dread Wolf. But now he wanted to tear down that veil and destroy the world. and we're the only ones who can stop him. We have been waiting for this game forever. Every so often, Bioware will pop up and be like, hey, we're still working on this game.

1:26:10It's still coming. Development is fine. We promise. Here's a little tidbit. And then they go back into their hole for like another three years. And we're about that time where it's time to pop out of their hole and say, hey, this game is still in development and it's still coming. here's crumbs for you Dragon Age freaks and then go back into their hole. So I'm really excited to see what that next little tidbit is. But I'm excited. Dragon Age is a series that saved my life in so many ways. So I'm really excited to get a chance to play another one. All right. I like that. That one isn't like a game you're excited about so much as it is like a YouTube video that will happen at some point that you're excited about.

1:26:48Eventually, yes. Okay. All right. Well, yeah, none of those count technically under the rules. but I'll allow it. It's okay. Chris Plant, last one. What do you got? I have one that's in the rules and one that transcends the rules. It transcends. It doesn't break the rules. It transcends the rules. Yeah. Okay. The one that follows the rules is Alan Wake 2. Yep. I'm trapped here in this nightmare. I write to escape. Because Remedy makes interesting games. They made Control a couple years ago which I think was one of the top five games for Polygon's end of the year list and Alan Wake continues creator of the Alan Wake game Sam Lake's fascination with Stephen King and by fascination I mean borderline stalking obsession I just think the games are a delight and I think that they understand the limitations of video game storytelling while actively wanting to push them I think video game stories tend to have a bad reputation pretty understandably and that's because they have a really tough task of both giving the player some sense of freedom and choice while then also having authorial intent which those things seem to conflict and i think that they enjoy toying with that knowing that like almost thinking of story as an experiment and less is like oh i need to make the greatest thing ever because they kind of know from the beginning that that's not entirely possible within the strictures of a video game wait just real quick how do you feel about the fact that alan wake looks absolutely exactly like bradley cooper what are your thoughts i like that but i like max pain better because max pain actually has the face of the creator of alan wake has his face and he looks like he's painting like the world's biggest dump oh my god it is such a good good thing and then my like transcending the rules is i am ready for the game of capitalism to come to an end and for this microsoft ftc charade to just be absolutely over with because i am just so done with you care at all i care because living in irvine there are so many blizzard and activision people in this area and my personal stance on this is i i think it's like a parody of uh government action uh where things were not done when they mattered so now it's going to be done over the people who make call of duty and diablo um and i think it's going to blow up in the ftc's face um which is bad and embarrassing for them the good news is i think a lot of people who already work at a place that is notorious for being a difficult place to work can like get out of this like purgatory period and start moving on with their lives which i think is like a better thing than whatever the past six months has been for all these people fair enough that does in fact transcend the rules i will grant that one uh my last one is spider-man 2 because i love spider-man 1 venom is the villain you can play as multiple characters it's just one of those things where they're like we took a game that you love and we made it slightly better would you like to play it again and my answer to that is yes always every single time yeah and they're gonna be like we made swinging through buildings six percent more fun and i'm like yes i will play it 500 percent more often now he just flies right like i feel like on that trailer that's like but what if he just flies and i was like yeah he has like flying squirrel wings now it's like i don't think that's canon but i'm cool with it as a across the spider-verse per enjoyer person i who did not play uh spider-man one or the miles morales dlc i well i can't say i'm excited for spider-man 2 I'm excited to, I guess, try it to see if it can sell me on what it is because it seems like a good experience.

1:30:40But beyond that, like, I don't know, man. I get it, but I just don't get it. It's a certain type of game, right? Like, I mean, we were talking about the Ubisoft thing earlier. But I feel like it demands a certain thing of the player, both in terms of like, well, the politics. It would also be like the open world of the game and the kind of to-do list. But that said, I get it as somebody who I feel like I could really use a good to-do list game. I cannot. I should have said this earlier. I'm so excited to get deeper into Final Fantasy XVI because after Zelda, I am so happy to have a game that's like.

1:31:15You are on rails. You cannot go anywhere except where we tell you to go. You'll do this and it will be pretty. And you will like it. And it will confuse you. And yeah. Exactly. Totally get it. Yeah, I'm glad to have a game that doesn't feel like a creative exercise all the time sometimes. Yes. All right. Well, we need to take a break, but thank you both for doing this. This was really fun, and we're going to have to do this periodically because God knows the games don't keep coming. But thank you both. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

1:31:49all right before we go let's get to the verge cast hotline as a reminder the hotline number is 866 verge 11 call and ask us all of your deepest most personal most chaotic tech questions we love it here's one that seemed fitting for today's episode from aj hi verge cast this is aj from minneapolis i'm curious to know what advice do you have to keep an iphone feeling fresh and performing well as it gets closer to its third year and beyond. A little background, I've been a mostly happy owner of an iPhone 13 Pro since that device launched about a year and a half ago, but the battery quality has gotten significantly worse recently.

1:32:28Some days I'm charging it twice fully just to make it through one day. I've made all my past smartphones last at least three years, but I am not looking forward to another year and a half of this phone. I'll probably be tempted to buy their latest device in the fall. Any advice to keep my battery in tip-top shape and keep this iPhone 13 Pro going strong? Thanks. AJ, I asked around, did some research, and I have good-ish news, I would say. The first thing that I tell everyone to do and is just generally good advice is reboot your phone more often than you think. Every few days, just turn it off and turn it back on again.

1:33:01It's good advice, frankly, for any gadget that you own, but you'll be amazed at the number of things that stop running in the background, that stop trying to access your location, that stop trying to access your microphone. These things just drain battery and they really add up. So reboot your phone every once in a while. A clean start always helps. Also, to the same end, delete some apps. Apps you don't use might be running in the background, might be refreshing every now and then. Apps that you genuinely don't use or care about, just get rid of them. The Ticketmaster app on your phone that you use two times, you're better off just downloading that and re-logging it every once in a while than letting it linger on your phone.

1:33:33If you ask Apple how to help your battery, the first two things it will tell you are use Wi-Fi whenever possible and turn down the brightness on your screen. Those are only really doable things in certain situations, but take that for what it's worth. As little brightness as you can, Wi-Fi whenever possible. The thing I do to save battery life that I've had really good luck with is turning on low power mode on the iPhone. In theory, it turns some stuff off, mostly background refreshing and push email and that kind of thing. The place I notice it is it turns off background iCloud syncing. So if you use apps that sync through iCloud to other devices, you might notice it not syncing quite as often or successfully.

1:34:10But otherwise, I can have low power mode on all day and frankly barely notice the difference but actually get significantly better battery life. One thing you should do for sure is make sure that on your iPhone you have optimized battery charging on. It's a setting, I think, under battery health in the battery settings in the settings app. And basically what that does is not fully charge your iPhone until you're gonna need it. And there are a lot of people who will tell you that leaving your phone at 100 % for a long time especially plugged in can be bad for your battery health. So turn that on.

1:34:41I'm generally not of the mind that you need to like really babysit the way that you charge your phone. I just think that's too much work, but you can at least turn that setting on and have the device do it for you at some point. But ultimately, the honest truth is you're just going to have to get a new battery at some point. I think we keep our phones longer and longer. And the idea that you can keep your phone for several years, but replace the battery somewhere in the middle of that range is not a terrible trade-off. I checked Apple's thing and it said that it'll be about$89 to put a new battery in the 13 Pro, which to me is totally worth it and certainly a lot cheaper than buying a new phone if you're otherwise happy with your phone.

1:35:18I think it's a bummer that you're already experiencing battery troubles with a 13 Pro, which is not an old phone. But if that is the case, you can check the battery health also in the battery settings in the settings app. And if it's below 80 % of its original capacity, that's when Apple recommends and will actually work with you to replace it. So get a new battery, low power mode, reboot your phone every once in a while, and otherwise, good luck. You can be one of those people who obsessively charges your phone between 40 and 80%, which is what a lot of people will tell you to do. I think that's too much work.

1:35:50Do without what you will. All right, that is it for the VergeCast today. Thanks to everyone who was on the show, and thank you, as always, so much for listening. There's lots more from everything we talked about about AI, Apple stuff on theverge.com. Lots of Apple things coming in the next few days, I think. We'll put some links in the show notes, but also, you know, read theverge.com. It's a website. We like it. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other tips on how to make your battery work better, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE-11.

1:36:21We are already building a bunch of episodes based on your hotline questions. So thank you so much for that. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about Threads, Reddit, Apple, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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1:37:32This message comes from AT &T. America's first network is also as fast as the most reliable. Based on RootMetrics United States Root Score Report, First Half 2025. Tested with best commercially available smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types. Your experiences may vary. RootMetrics rankings are not an endorsement of AT &T. When you compare, there's no comparison. AT &T.