Apple’s AI moment is coming

29:18And it's been a year. And like, I don't know how many live activities y 'all interact with every day, but my answer is pretty damn close to zero. Once a week when I get Uber Eats. Yeah, there's countdown timers for various things that are gonna happen. Yeah. All very good. But it's also kind of like, yeah, I super know the plane is going to land in 45 minutes. I mean, the Uber Eats one is great. I'm like, wings almost here. And then sometimes it goes up, and I'm like, wings took a wrong turn. Come back, wings. All right, we're going to get through this whole thing. We're almost there. We've got two left.

29:49The Asus Rogue Ally X. Sean looked at it. Alex, what do you think? I love Sean's enthusiasm for this thing. Because he went to look at it originally. ROG or Rogue? ROG. I know, I know. It stands for Republic of Gamers. I'm aware of that. Which was a gaming company that Asus bought. All of this stuff is in my brain. It's just right next to Windows Phone. Yeah. Windows Phone was really loud just then. You've got to spin up the drive. Just really loud. I'm really optimistic. We both talk about this a lot. Sean and I's DMs are just more Steam Dex and more Steam Dex clones. We've designed about four of our own.

30:32This is how it starts. Yeah. Someone call us. We've got great ideas. This thing is definitely still pretty heavy. It's definitely beefy in a way that I think people will not find always so pleasing. Is the Steam Deck still just the prototypical one of these? Yeah. Is it the one to beat? Yeah, because most of these run on Windows. Yeah. And that's not very good for this platform, right? I think that's the thing that Steam Deck has done really, really well, is they built this really, really good platform. So you can just pop in, start downloading games and go. Whereas everybody else, you have to like futz with it.

31:12There's always something. This is like a sneakily exciting reason to be optimistic for all these new chips, right? That if they are as good as advertised, suddenly building a device like this that is light and good and lasts a long time and still does the stuff you want it to do becomes a lot more plausible. Whereas right now, you basically have to just shove as much of a gaming PC as possible into as small a box as possible. And that is just physics. Yeah. Physics is hard. But I will say. And all the while, Microsoft is like, what if Windows just watched everything you did and wrote it down in a plain text database?

31:47and it's like I don't it'll be fine but that's one of the reasons that's the advantage the Steam Deck has is they were able to cut down the operating system right and this one like their way of doing it is like well we're not going to fix windows but we're going to make the battery a lot bigger so that could be really cool like this thing should have probably I think the biggest battery of all of these kind of deals but we'll see like I would love every time I get one of these in I'm like oh this is going to be rad and then I meet windows and I'm having to use a joystick to move a mouse around the screen.

32:20And it stops being rad real fast. Yeah. All right. Let's end it where we need to end it, with the promise we made at the top of the show. There's a defense contractor who made a Game Boy. It's Palmer Luckey, everybody. What a surprise. Of course. This is a long and twisted tale. Palmer Luckey, we met when he was a literal child. Speaking of things that happened a million years ago, we saw the first Oculus prototype in our trailer at CES. 2012, right? 100 million years ago. It was a young, fresh-faced Palmer Luckey showing us the thing, talking about OLED refresh rates and how he built the thing in forums and met John Carmack in the forums of the OLED nerds.

33:03It was very virtual. Many things have happened to both Oculus and Palmer Luckey in that time. He grew a little mustache. Facial hair is, we're going to set it aside. You're allowed to make whatever choices you want with your facial hair. It's true. If you want to make those, we will just note them and set them aside. Meta bought Oculus. It turned into the Quest line. They fired Palmer Luckey for being kind of weird. Palmer Luckey made a bunch of weird donations to the Trump campaign, mostly in the form of inflammatory billboards, I believe. This is all real. This is like in the past. and then he started a defense contractor named Andrew which makes drones with guns on them.

33:45And is also named after like a J.K. No, not a J.K. Rowling. Named after a J.R.R. Tolkien. Oh, sure. He also has cosplayed. Like Lord of the Rings stuff. He's also cosplayed as Quiet from the Metal Gear series. A real thing that you can go look at a photo. One of the great sightings of my life was in San Jose. I was at a bar with my wife watching the NBA playoffs and Palmer Luckey comes walking in with a tail on and just sits down at the bar and orders a drink. Just a delightful day. He's been spiky with us. Whatever. This is all Palmer Luckey stuff. And it's in the, like, people arguing about the merits of spending money on Palmer Luckey devices in our comments.

34:22But it is true that he's made something called the Chromatic. And it looks sick. Which is$199. And apparently it's just like, what if you finished a Game Boy? Like, what if you took a Game Boy to the most Game Boy conclusion it could be? Yeah. What if you took all of the technology we have in 2024 and made a Game Boy from 1989? That plays Game Boy cartridges. It is exactly what I want it to be. Or excuse me, Game Boy Color 2. You're right. Yeah. It has a color matched screen to the Game Boy Color, right? Super bright, really good screen. The colors look awesome. Like this, this thing. Yeah, you're right.

35:04All the pedigree of it aside, this thing looks awesome and it's 200 bucks. And I think like people love the stuff that analog makes. And, and at least from the little bit we've seen so far, this belongs like right there. Yeah. Like analog, I would say is for modern nerds who want to like get into retro gaming. This is for like, you are in retro gaming because this is, this is like, what if we could make it as accurate as possible, but modern. So like the pixels and everything, you know, it's not a super high resolution display or anything like that. It is meant to be the same resolution as the Game Boy Color, which came out.

35:41And then also it comes with a side of deep moral ambivalence. There you go. And Tetris. Don't forget Tetris. And Tetris. Very confusing product. Just all the way around. I don't know that I'm going to spend$200 on it. I know that, boy, would I love to spend$200 on something just like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Deep moral ambivalence. That's that's what I say. A defense contractor. Although if Lockheed Martin was to make a two on our Game Boy, would we cover it? I think the answer is assuredly yes. Yeah. Lockheed, you have your orders. Yeah. Agreed. I mean, it is interesting. Like Palmer Luckey is documented as having been into this for a really, really long time.

36:21Like I again, all of all of the feelings about Palmer Luckey aside, he's actually a person you would think would probably do a very good job of this. Uh, yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be really interesting to see. He's also apparently about to launch some new headset. Like Palmer's, he's just running around doing stuff now. It's very, I mean, that defense contractor money really helps out. But again, that's the, that's the challenge of trying to wear as many hats as he does is that people don't like sell out of those hats. And one of those hats is reprehensible politics. Okay. That's the lightning round.

36:52We finished it. We did it. I don't know how long. You know, I'm really proud of you. You did a good job. It was so long. I only had to delete two things from the list. It was really good. Because we went. All right, we have to take a quick break. We'll be back. Preview of WWDC. And then a second traditional lightning round for you traditionalists. We'll be right back.

37:15All right, we're back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. it. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or paid to promote.

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38:28Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with, hey, where are you going?

39:03To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade-in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just$25 a line. with 24-month legal credits and four eligible portings on essentials for well-qualified customers auto pay plus taxes fees and$35 device connection chart credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier cancel contact us finance agreement 256 gigabytes 830 dollars required visit t-mobile.com support for this show comes from linkedin when you're a small business owner your business is on your mind 24 7 so when you're hiring you need a partner that works just as hard as you do that hiring partner is linkedin jobs when you clock out linkedin clocks in.

39:44LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high quality candidates.

40:21Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. We got to talk about it. WWDC. Yeah. I was at a conference earlier this week and I called it Dub Dub and someone looked at me and said, you actually call it Dub Dub. It's so much easier. Like my friends roasted me about this last week too. I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to Dub Dub. And they were like, you called it that? And I'm like, look.

40:57They really did make it happen. They manufactured calling it Dub Dub. And it's less syllables than WWDC. That's true. But it's coming. We're going. We'll be there. We're going to VergeCast from there. Apparently, there's a sick house we're going to VergeCast from. Yeah. Very excited about this. And then I'm told that we're going to have tacos. This is all the more planning for WDC. There's your WWDC preview. It's going to be great. This feels like a big one. So there's been a bunch of reporting leading up to it. Obviously, some news about AI and all the platforms, potentially an open AI partnership.

41:30Mark Gurman reported there'll be no hardware, which is really interesting. Traditionally, we've seen Mac Pros, other sort of developer look-ahead hardware happen at WWDC. We also got MacBook Airs a couple of years, didn't we? That was like – Well, that's when they did chip bumps. Oh, yeah. That's true. Right. This is a moment to get some stuff out in the world and make some noise. And it seems like they did the – this is where you would have done the iPads. True. This would be a great place for iPads. But they moved that stuff out of the way. I will say Apple keeps advertising the new iPad. is the thinnest Apple product ever, which just really implies there's not much else to say.

42:07That's the advertising? Just iPad. Yeah, here it is. It's thin. It's iPad. It makes sense there's no hardware at this one because you want all of the focus to be on what the software can do now if you're going to put AI all through the software. And you certainly don't want to tie that to the idea that you need new hardware to do it. Right. Because Apple has been on that cadence in the past where they're like, here's a new iPhone. We've gated some camera feature that you could definitely do on the old iPhone to the new iPhone. But here, this is about the future of iOS. It's about the future of Siri.

42:42It seems like you need all of the focus to be like a great upgrade that's coming to everybody with a recent iPhone AI. Yeah. Apple does not want to be talking about tops. I mean, not just because their processors have the fewest, but yeah, that's not a thing they want. They never want to talk about specs. Yeah, they never want to talk about specs. But Alex, that's true and it isn't, right? Because it is true that Apple is maybe losing the tops where it's also definitely true that Apple is going to have the most devices that this stuff can run on by a million miles on day one. And that is like, that's the flex Apple is going to want here.

43:20Not we launched a new AI thing, but like we made all your things AI things. And if you're Apple and the world feels like you need to catch up in AI, that's how you do it. Yeah, I totally, totally agree. And especially because, as we know, we have no idea what tops actually do. So they don't need to care about it. Well, so like what are tops for? Good question. Apple has an opportunity to answer that question. Maybe not by saying tops. Yeah, we don't care. but by saying like here are a bunch of features in the operating system Apple very famously has so much headroom in terms of performance that it can just put out features.

43:58It can waste cycles basically. Again, to just sound like an old man, when Apple first announced OS X and it was like beautiful and had extra animations, everyone would complain that they were just like running the processor all the time and Apple was like, yeah, it's pretty. That's what we do here. It's delightful. That's what the processors are for. And now they have so much headroom they can do a bunch of stuff. So there's just a bunch of stuff. There's AI-generated emojis rumored to be announced. There's AI-powered voice transcription in voice memos and in notes, which sounds great. I love it.

44:35Just put that in the operating system. Sorry, a bunch of indie apps that are offering that right now. The idea that Siri will be able to just, like, go into your apps and do things. An idea that we have talked about for a long time, programmatically with Bixby, programmatically with Siri, with shortcuts, in implausible and ultimately fake ways with Rabbit and the large action model. Like the idea that an assistant can just use a computer for you, that is the dream. Apple can get to somewhere farther than we are now with Siri on the phone. That's a huge step forward. If I can just go, because we all have like what, four different music and podcasting and audio book apps on our phones.

45:20And so when you're like, yeah, I just want to listen to my book. It's like, OK, would you like to buy it from the Apple store? And you're like, no, I have it in like Libby or Libro FM or whatever. And the idea to just be like, hey, play that. Go do it. Go do it. And it would just do it. Oh, my God. That would be incredible. Will that actually happen? No. Or will Apple still try to get you to buy a book from the iBook store? Yeah. Yeah. I think I think that's going to be the real issue for that particular use case. So I think the question is exclusively what you just said, which I think is really fascinating, right?

45:54Because until now, there have been a million problems, right? One of which is the like underlying machine learning technology is not very good. One of which is that Siri is not historically very good at speech recognition. One is that the processing stuff has not been as fast as it needs to be to be useful for stuff. But the biggest one has just been that Apple won't let developers do stuff. and if you're Apple the question now is like what are we going to expose to developers because the way it's been for a long time is developers would have had to do all the work right so Apple just says like here's what Siri can do plug it into your app however you'd like but if this new AI thing can work the way that it might or at least that it's been reported to work all developers have to do is basically just like expose their app to Siri in a way that could become very powerful in the way that it's like, I don't know, Google search is a good example of this, right?

46:44Like if you just write a recipe on your website in a certain way, or you structure the page a certain way, like Google can understand it and index it and do stuff with it. And if Apple can say, Hey, Spotify, Libby, whoever else you want somebody to just be able to listen to their podcasts in your app, just turn these three flags on that say, here's how you play a podcast in our app. And we're off and running. Like if everybody wants this to happen, it could happen. But that's not the AI of it. No, that's that exists sort of today. Like you can kind of get there. My favorite example of this, I'm just going to admit to being a dad who buys chicken nuggets in the McDonald's app all the time.

47:24It's like a real thing that happens. Counting those points. We're going to get six free nuggets one of these days. And every time I make this order, it's like, do you want to make a serious shortcut for this order? and I have like a total moral crisis about voice ordering chicken nuggets. Like, but it's like those flags already exist. No, but this is my point. Walk me through that process. Tell me every step you take to do that. You literally hit a button in the app that's like, just say this as a favorite and then you can be like Siri. No, I mean to order Siri or to, oh, wait, wait. You order McDonald's and then it says, do you want to order McDonald's with your voice and you can't bring yourself to do that?

48:02If you make me open this app on this podcast right now, to do that very much. I would like you to do that very much. No, because one thing, I should have said this at the beginning is there are going to be a lot of people listening to this who are like, Shortcuts solves this, and no, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. Shortcuts is a bad app that no one can figure out, and if you figured it out, congratulations, and I'm proud of you. Shortcuts is not the solution to this problem. I was like, Shortcuts is a solution if you're a programmer and you have a really strong grasp of programming. If you want to write code, you can solve a lot of your problems, including in Shortcuts.

48:31Absolutely true. I don't want to write code. If you know what an X callback URL is, congratulations, you can use shortcuts. Most people don't. And that's fine. I don't think you can set up Siri on the McDonald's app unless you order McDonald's.

48:48That's how they get you. But it is true that you can set up a Siri thing. It might use shortcuts in the background. Right. But like the hooks for have Siri do stuff in the app, programmatically, semantically, like you're talking about with Google, they exist. the opportunity for Apple is to say, we control this operating system top to bottom. We control the App Store top to bottom, at least in this country. And we can now use your phone for you, which is more or less the promise Samsung made with Bixby a million years ago. And more or less the promise Microsoft is starting to make with Windows.

49:23Right, we just sit over the top of everything and we'll click around for you. And if Apple can get there, which I don't know if they can, but it's certainly the promise that's been reported by Grimm and others. They will get there in their own apps that you will just be able to talk to Siri and it will take action in Apple's own apps. And there's obviously privacy and security concerns, all this stuff. But if they can get even a little bit farther there on the phone with AI so it's not this like very manual set the flags of what you're allowed to do and here's how it works but much more the computer is going to use the computer for you, that's a huge deal.

49:58Oh, I agree. I don't know how much processing power you need for that. I don't know if well you're also gonna run into to apples like desire to have you use their stuff so that they get money Right and then once you're you once once you're using Apple stuff in Apple's ecosystem whether or not it even is AI Like starts to get fully obfuscated Because you don't you could just fit once you control everything you just like fake it more or less. Yeah So there's a million questions in there and then there's obviously the big problem of of how many tops do you need to pull that off? Can they run locally on the phone, which is power constrained, network constrained, all this stuff, heat thermal constrained?

50:37Yikes. And then do you want your phone watching everything you do? Like just like a series of escalating yikes problems. I'm very curious to see how Apple talks about this stuff because this sort of like chatbot-esque part where you're like, make a custom emoji for me or like do a voice transcription, Like these familiar things all make sense to do. The part where they're like, we control everything and we can do things that no one else can do. Wild. I'm also going to be curious if they can even like roll it out as fast as they want to. Right. Because I think technologically they can. But I'm just thinking of what we've what we've seen again and again and again is that these companies are pushing these things out and not considering the edge cases.

51:16because I was just sitting here being like, oh man, I'm totally going to have it make an ugly Sonic the Hedgehog emoji that looks like Raccoon Girl, which is like, that is a whole thing. I think any AI would struggle with that. Siri would struggle with that. There's a red team at Apple right now listening to this podcast being like, did we test Raccoon Girl? I hope you guys did. Please hire Alex Kranz for all your edge case red teaming. Yeah. That's a service we can provide on this show. The glue thing happened because they were like, how do I get the cheese to stick to the pizza? Can I say the funniest thing about the glue thing?

51:55What? Did you do it? I have not. Katie and Adapalos, Insider, did it. She said it was fine. But, you know, you have to trust her that it was fine. So Google is manually deleting the bad results. Or Google contractors in some other country are manually deleting the results as people see them. But because so many people have now searched for how to keep the cheese on pizza and then proactively clicked on fuck Smith's comment on Reddit about the glue, the regular Google search algorithm now is like, that's the answer. So Google AI, Google bombed Google. Yes. Yes. At least I have a screenshot of it, but when I searched for it the other day, no AI result, but straight up it was like, here's a Reddit answer from 11 years ago by a user named Fucksmith who's like, put the glue on pizza.

52:48You got it, didn't you? Yep. I just immediately got it. That was the first thing I got. The regular Google algorithm is now broken. That brings me so much joy. It's like, what are you going to do with this man? You can put the glue on the pizza. And it's funny because with the Google leak that we were talking about last week, we know it's because of the clicks. Yeah. We know that so many people have clicked on this answer as a goof that regular Google got confused. Yeah. Oh, it's beautiful. It's good. Anyway, back to Apple. Can Apple's brand sustain that kind of error? It seems like they're not going to do an open chatbot in this way.

53:26Yeah. But that brings us to whatever this open AI partnership is going to be. I feel like I'm going to disclose now that Fox Media has a content deal with OpenAI. It's the first time we've done it in the course of the show, like in the flow. Quick, somebody bring up Netflix. I made a Netflix show. Hi. Hollywood Patel over here. It's called The Future Of. It's a great show. I encourage you to watch it. It was number one for five minutes. And then immediately other shows were number one.

53:58Anyhow, what are they going to do with OpenAI? It feels like this is where OpenAI launches a search product or another kind of integration. Who knows? David, do you have any inkling? It's going to be a chatbot. You think it's just a straight chatbot? Well, no. So there's a bunch of things going on here. One is that like - No multimodal 4.0 search? There's going to be some of that, right? And to your point about how Apple does this on-device Siri thing, there's this research paper that Apple put out, I think earlier this year. It was either very late last year or earlier this year about this thing called Ferret, which is basically the like academic version of some of what we're talking about it's basically how to teach a language model how to understand what's on a screen and one of the things they say in that paper is that gpt4 is very good at sort of conceptually understanding a page right like you you show it something and it says this is an image of people on the beach but if you zoom all the way in and you're like what's this little thing on the sand gpt4 is not good at that so what they built is this thing ferret that is very good in these small spaces and what they say in the paper is this combination is going to be very useful for us because we have this one simple system that can just say this is the discover weekly playlist on spotify and then you have this thing ferret that can drill down and be like okay that's the song that they're looking for and so i think that is probably more what you're going to see that gpt4 and this open ai partnership is sort of the big broad strokes, like let's do the first 80 % of the AI job with a lot of the stuff.

55:28And then Apple's job underneath it is going to be to fix all of the things that GPT-4 either can't do or doesn't do very well, which actually in a lot of ways is really smart because you don't need to reinvent all the, you know, quote unquote, easier stuff. Apple can just like build features on top of it. It's like all the browsers building out of Chromium now. It's like we don't, we've more or less finished the job of like how to do the very small simple basics all the interesting stuff is like the interface and the last mile stuff and so i suspect that's what we'll see a lot of all over ios but where is it going to happen because if you're relying on gpt 4.0 to do some of that you have to go to the cloud you probably have to go to microsoft servers right because most of that runs in azure if you want the full model yeah i also i don't i don't pretend to have a ton of knowledge but i'm confident that open ai is working on smaller versions of its stuff that works on device and locally and all that stuff um but i think if you look at something like uh what's a good example voice transcription we were just talking about why on earth if you're apple would you try to rebuild whisper when whisper is really good and open ai made it already uh whisper is maybe a bad example because it's actually open source and apple could just take it but that's the sort of thing that's like open ai is sitting on a lot of very good technology that is not being made into very good products.

56:47And I think if I'm Apple, what I'm doing is looking at them and saying, I know how to make products. I'm just gonna take your sort of base level infrastructure technology and build on top of it. I do think the what's going to happen on device versus what's going to happen in the cloud thing is gonna be messy for Apple at first and has been messy with Siri over the years, right? Like for a long time, one of the things that sucked about Siri was that it went to the cloud for basically everything. and progressively over time, Siri has gotten to do more stuff locally and has gotten better and faster as a result.

57:18And so I think we're going to see a lot of that sort of calibration of that sliding scale again from Apple here. But if they get to the point where they're sending what's happening on your device to a cloud server, especially one that Apple doesn't own, that is Apple walking away from some of its privacy promises. They made a Google deal, dude. This is what happens. Yeah, but I'm saying if they do the thing where you're like PlaySpot Discover Weekly and GPT-4 in an Azure server is looking at your screen and then locally it's something else? There's a level, there's a line that I don't think Apple will cross.

57:52I think we don't know the full terms of the OpenAI partnership, right? And Apple would be very, very, very, very, very stupid to throw away that privacy marketing that they have. So I could totally see them being like, yeah, we have OpenAI, but we're going to use it on our servers and it will go through our stuff and it's all gonna be through your iCloud and all of that stuff. I think that's probably what it is. I think this is going to be less like we wanna run this stuff on the back of OpenAI's server infrastructure, which is literally, as you said, Azure, and more like we're going to take some of their technology and we're going to run it on our servers.

58:29And it's just gonna be like a white label licensing deal. And we've heard rumors about Apple building their own processors and stuff. No, they're putting M2 Ultras. Yeah, that's it. In Iraq. Yeah, and that's what it's for. How many tops on M2 Ultra? Some. Some? Some to favor. I mean, look, if there's one company, like you said, David, that can say, like, this is what all the headroom on the phone is for. 31.6 tops. That's pretty good. That's an amount of tops. That is more than a raspberry pie. Two and a half raspberry pies right there. That's brutal. If you can tell us what incremental tops are for, please leave us a note.

59:11But you can't be an AI researcher. Like if you are building a consumer application where you're like, oh man, when phones have at least 27 tops, like the world will, like you let us know. I'm dying to know the answer to this question. Snapchat is writing you as we speak to be like, we can put, we can map weird stuff to your face so well with more tops. But if Evan Spiegel is like up at night because the average phone has 20 tops and he needs 27, like you, that's what I'm looking for, Evan. I love it. This is such a good conversation for the beginning of Pride. I love it so much. Oh, my God, Alex.

59:48I just had to say. What's randomly hornier? Alex Kranz or Renee High? Only a topspin star. We'll find out. That's going to be a head-to-head on a later Verge cast. All right. What do we think is the big thing that we're looking for from WDC? Let's wrap it up this way. What's yours? Like wishlist style. Ooh. I don't even know because I like. As David well knows, I started using Arc. And so now that's all I care about on my Mac. So I'm like, yeah, I just want it to look nice. I want better control over the appearance of my device. I would love if the AI would just – I'd be able to be like – I want it to be like cool cyberpunk green.

1:00:29And it would just be like, got you. That's my wish list. A cyberpunk green. Yeah, I want Mac OS and Siri to make my computer look as ugly as possible. AI-powered theming is incredible. I don't think it's Apple that's going to give it to you. That was like a Samsung Saturday day. There has been some reporting that Apple is going to really open up the possibilities for what you can do with your home screen. They're going to let you put app icons wherever you want, which, oh my God, how did no one think of this before? It's unbelievable, incredible. but like maybe we're not that far away from you just being able to tell Siri like just ug up my phone.

1:01:10It's no big deal and it'll just happen. That'd be amazing. That's what I want. That's the dream. All right, that's how Alex is. David? All of my stuff is Spotlight which I would very much like to, that's where I want all the AI stuff to go. I think the like little AI features, voice transcription, all that stuff is gonna be very cool. For me it's like if it can get very good at me just being like, what was that picture of the sign that I took a few days ago? And it'll just be like this one, or like the, the thing in Google photos where you can just ask it about things in your photos. Like I want that locally on my phone and also with access to all of my stuff, right?

1:01:49Like spotlight knows everything. It sees the internet. It has all the stuff on your device. There's been some reporting, I think from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg that it's going to be able to do more stuff inside of files and with documents. And I just want to be like, I want to just live my life inside of that spotlight search and just have it understand everything on my phone all the time like that's that would be cool that's the ai job here as far as you want rewind basically but and it's just sitting here this you're one of the people who's like just do already does it's already like do you know what already knows everything that's happening on my phone is my phone like just do it for me and again like i think the the interesting thing about the recall thing is that it's like the worry is that somebody can get all the stuff on your device right malware exists on windows that just lets somebody look at that plain text database that is sitting on your device way less of a threat on the iphone and so for me like all my stuff is already here and if you get my phone and my passcode i'm screwed already so i'm like let's at least make use of the fact that this device essentially contains every piece of my life in existence and make it useful to me because I can't help what it already is.

1:02:59I love this because I have like a whole reservoir of horrible photos and gifs and it would be real, it would rule to just be like, Hey Siri. Again, if Apple's red team is available, Alex Kranz is also available. If I could just be like, where's the Wilmer Valderrama gif where he does the, I love you with his hands and it just shows it to me. Like, that's what I want. That's the dream. Yes. Yeah. That's that. I love this dream. Okay. I'm on board. I switched mine to David's. but also I want to make my phone ugly with one command. I'm with Alex too. Neelai, what's yours? I feel like the, the, don't share.

1:03:35Will her Valderrama gifts anymore. Warning is something that you need from an AI system in this context. Okay. You're a little out of date. There's been some news just helping you out there, bud. Okay. Mine is very small. It's not really a wishlist of a future. Okay. I am dying. to see how Apple addresses adding RCS to messages. Oh, yeah. Is it an announcement? Is it a bento box slide? Is it the world's smallest type? Is it just cred figurine being like, we've added the letters and just moving on? It could go a million different ways. It's going to be bento. It could be a full thing. We've now added support for the standard that everyone's been waiting for, right?

1:04:18I figured it out. They're going to talk about the emojis that they can make with AI and then be like, and you can even send them to your friend on Android because we've introduced RCS. Any number of ways. Will they show green bubbles on that stage? Yeah. Anything could happen. Oh, it's going to rule. And I'm just like, that's the thing that I'm, or they could do nothing. I love this, Alex, because like, do you remember a million years ago when Paul Pierce sent that tweet where he tried to send an emoji, but he actually sent a picture, like a JPEG of the rocket ship emoji? that's what it's going to look like when you make a custom emoji on an iphone and send it to an android person and that is how apple gets to support rcs and still kind of knife all the android users all at the same time yeah that's good these new features are for for message users messages users and for android you get jpeg i love this like i've just anything could happen like literally anything from that like open cutting warfare all the way down to we've put three letters in like the tiniest box of the other features in iOS they might not even call it RCS like right yeah just like rich messaging what did they call it on the Apple home app like new architecture maybe they'll just call it new architecture rich complex messaging yeah so whatever they'll just literally anything is possible yeah but like I cannot wait because they've announced they're going to do it yeah and this is when they roll out the new operating systems this is when they might do it they just don't say anything i'm on pins and needles it is really interesting by the way how little we've heard about non-ai stuff coming this year like yeah the non-ai reporting so far is basically like new settings menu and some more native apps for the vision pro and all that stuff is well and good but there is surprisingly little at least from what we've heard so far that is not going to be about ai and i think both for just how the presentation goes but also what these things are it's going to be really interesting to see if basically whatever 12 months ago craig federighi was like we only do ai from now on or not like it's just it's i that's the thing i'm going to be watching the most for is like how much non-ai stuff is there which i think is very telling for how much apple is going to feel like it has to do with AI.

1:06:45Yeah. I'm telling you it's going to be RCS. All right, we got to wrap this up. We're going to be at WWDC. He's so sad. What? I was going to get in there. Oh, yeah. Liam's got one. Okay. All right, Liam, bonus round. Okay, this one has technically been announced already, but the thing I'm most excited to try next week is the motion sickness feature. Oh, yeah. I'm one of those people that when I'm in an Uber, I can't read my phone for more than a few seconds because I get horrible motion sickness. so I really want to try this if it's in beta and hopefully it works. Alright, we're going to get Liam in a car.

1:07:20Zooming around. I'll drive. This is a Vergecast that we should do. Liam and I are going to get in the back. We're going to both look at our phones and we're going to see who pukes first and that's the Vergecast. I'm just going to be doing figure eights in a parking lot. That's also sponsorable. Brought to you by Pental Bismol. Who boots first? Alright, that's it. We're going to be there next week. sick house. Again, I've been told there will be tacos. I'm not 100 % sure how we're going to work the tacos. A lot of horses are going to be everywhere. It's just what I know. I'm excited to see everybody.

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1:11:00All right, we're back. Yeah. This has been a very family-friendly episode of The Vergecast. There are no Alex Kranz moments to speak of. None. But we got to talk about HBO Max, so it's Zaddy Report. I'm sorry. Zaddy Report, I should say, also responsible, but only by one company. You know who you are. One. I want to see the check handwritten.

1:11:29It's a traditional lightning round, which means we have a list and each of us is going to pick one thing. And then we're going to get out of here. Alex, I think we just got to get this off our plates. Yeah. Just move it on down the line. What's your lightning round, Alex? Max. Sorry, not HBO Max. Max is about to be a lot more expensive. She already was. Yeah. But my daughter's name is Max, by the way. This is a horrible situation for me. She's going to be able to afford a lot more chicken nuggets because she's going to be charging$16.99 a month. That is too much money for Max. Yeah. Straightforwardly too much money.

1:12:07Does that give you$4K? No. The$4K plan is$20.99 a month. $20.99 for$4K. So it goes up about$1. Everything's just going up$1, but it's at$1. It's like how when you got a$92. $21 a month for HBO Max. Yeah. Because you have to have the 4K plan, in my opinion. What are you doing? It's the only rate of watch. That's too much money. No. Yeah. It is a lot. And it's set off a lot of people just very upset in their feelings about how expensive all of this is. And no, it's not going to stop anytime soon. Yeah. Is the unfortunate reality. streaming is just going to continue to get more expensive until they figure out how to make money.

1:12:53Yeah, I don't think they know. It also just seems like at some point paying 80 bucks a month or whatever YouTube TV is just becomes the better deal. Yeah. But that's not where all the content is, right? Like so much of this content now is exclusive to these streaming services. Right, but you're still just like, I'm going to, like HBO or Max, I'm sorry. is now just full of a bunch of weird discovery reality shows. Like that's the value for dollar there. Yeah. It's like you want to watch House Hunters. Here it is. And that stuff is still super available on a cable package. Yep. And the cable package is probably going to be a nicer experience where it will be easier to find the episode you want to watch and get started because the max UI is still hot, hot garbage.

1:13:42So my max is still paid for because, as you know, It's a child. AT &T bought. That's not a lie. That would be incredible. If everyone named Max got free Max, that would actually be great. Yeah. It would justify the bad name. No, as you are aware, AT &T bought Warner Brothers. I did know that, yes. A deal which led only to the release of the 4-3 Snyder Cut. Sigh. But also a bunch of grandfathered plans, and I have one that is the same money as a new AT &T plan. It just includes Max, but in 1080p. Oh, that's brutal. And so I'm just like stuck with free 1080p max. Nope. Until someone notices at AT &T, which they never will.

1:14:25Yeah. They're just not going to notice. They're like, you enjoy 1080. No, they're going to be like a grandfathered AT &T plan. You're not churning. You may have it forever. Yeah. Until they get to 6G. That's when they churn you. Yeah, you're done then. But I'm stuck with this horrible plan. I'm sorry. David, are you paying$21 a month for 18? No, I'm switching to ads over and over again. uh and it's just really it's just fine um and the thing that i have realized increasingly is that the idea that people are churning is less real than people think and i think these services are stickier than people give them credit for like i was i was reading something the other day about how uh one of the big reasons these companies get sports is that people sign up to watch one game and then like an overwhelmingly large percentage of those people keep the service like it's actually this idea that people are coming watching the thing and then canceling until that thing comes back a year later is largely not the behavior and as a result once you're in you're kind of in and i think these companies have figured out that a dollar at a time is not terrifying like i think if max suddenly went up ten dollars a month people would freak out and leave right like i think i've been watching evernote for this i don't know why this just came into my head but i've been watching Evernote of Alaska beers.

1:15:42They basically just doubled their subscription price. And we're very honestly like, this is the only way this is a sustainable business. Here we go. And people freaked out. That's how you churn people. But a dollar a month at a time, just there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that that costs them anything and it gets them more money. And also what they want is either for you to pay $50 a month or get ads. And they will keep raising the price until those are the only two options left. I really believe that. I totally agree with you. I mean, it's just the frog in the boiling pot, right? Like it's the water.

1:16:17Yeah, I'm stuck with an AT &T plan. You're stuck with 1080p forever. I'm sorry. Bah. Bah. All right, David, what's yours? Mine is maybe the wonkiest thing I've picked on the Verge cast in a while. Google bought this company called Cameo with a Y. not the cameo where you can get famous people to like tell you you're terrific it's a it's a company that does windows app virtualization on chrome os uh and i thought this was very funny because this happened this week after i had a very like related cameo experience my wife is in grad school and she's taking uh like a statistics class right now and she had to download this unbelievably like esoteric old app called our studio i think that looks like it has not been updated since 1994 uh runs on windows linux and mac and not chrome os and she has a chromebook for her like personal use and uh so she spent i would say the better part of a day trying to install linux on her chromebook in order to do this and was as she got like most of the way down i was actually very impressed with how far down the like running a linux distro on a chromebook she got and then eventually just gave up and was like it's not worth it do you have a windows computer i can use but the thing that we found was like oh the best answer to this is this app called cameo which just lets you run windows apps on your chromebook but it's prohibitively expensive and like explicitly not designed for just like regular people but now as part of google i think this is super interesting it gives google like a new inroad into businesses with chromebooks where it has traditionally had trouble it gives chromebooks a lot more to do because if this works well you could start to just do more windows stuff inside of chromebooks uh there's a lot left to shake out here this acquisition like just happened but i actually think it's super interesting and as like the one person on earth who still really really really really wants chromebooks to be cool and succeed this makes me happy yeah the best thing i've ever bought for my mom is a chromebook really Yeah, because a regular computer, a regular Mac or Windows PC is like 55 different operating system metaphors all at once.

1:18:27This is called Launchpad. Why? And you get a Chromebook, you're like, use this browser. They just use it, and it's like fine. Does your mom know when you say – I wrote an article about it ages ago. Does she know like what the box is to where to type things in? Yeah, it's just a browser. It's like this is Chrome. You like Chrome, right? Go to YouTube. Your mom is so much more advanced than my mom. but like now what I worry about with Chrome OS is they added Android apps now they're adding Cameo they're getting the same place where you're like oh there's multiple competing application metaphors at once yep okay but I still love a Chromebook oh and Chromebook pluses now have all the stuff man yeah it's like I just want a browser man that pixel book was such it was very fun watching everybody argue in our comments uh about sort of the the overall Chromebook thesis and like one of the things obviously Chromebooks have done is they've been hugely successful in schools and there were a lot of people in our comments who were like yeah I had a Chromebook in high school and it ensured that I will never ever buy myself a Chromebook because it was a piece of junk and it's like yeah maybe at some point Google and others should have invested in making Chromebooks good and then people would want them like what a crazy idea that would be yeah they should put arc on it because I had a I bought my mom a Chromebook pixel,$1 ,000 Chrome laptop.

1:19:44People thought I was nuts. It's still rocking because it has like 16 gigs of RAM. Yeah, that thing has 10 times the power it needed. That's such a good laptop. Like an i7. It was amazing. It's still going because it just runs. It rules. All right. Mine is a last minute game time decision. We just put this story up. The chair of the Tesla board is warning shareholders today that if they don't approve Elon's$56 billion pay package, he might leave Tesla. Oh, no. Alex. Oh, that's terrible. Elon is not a typical executive, and Tesla is not a typical company, he says in the letter, which was filed to the SEC.

1:20:23So the typical way in which companies compensate key executives will not drive results for Tesla. Motivating someone like Elon requires something different, he says. To be fair, I would also be very motivated by$56 billion. You see? Like, I don't know that that's different. That's the same. So somehow, he says, and it's not about the money. It's like following up, you got to motivate Elon somehow, and then it's not about the money when the letter is approved to pay package. Didn't he just like— Thread in the needle there, buddy. Didn't he just screw over Tesla by having a bunch of like H100s from NVIDIA shipped to X instead?

1:20:57Yeah, he sent them to X instead. Matt Levine at Bloomberg made what I thought was a very good point about this, which is that what this—the initial read on that is like, oh, this is a sign that Elon Musk is not paying attention to Tesla. why would you give him the money the galaxy brain take is oh this is a threat that if you don't give elon musk his money he will stop paying attention to tesla and this is what will happen and i think that is a fun uh like war games version of this story that is just going to keep getting where he's obviously going to get the money right like oh no you don't think so no no no no no no no no no this vote what doesn't even guarantee that he gets he could win this vote and still not get the money.

1:21:40Okay, that's fair. I think he'll win the vote. Maybe. I think they're worried. I don't think the chairman of your board sends letters about how you have to motivate Elon, which, by the way, is hilarious. That's a letter you send about me in eighth grade. Yeah. Do you think$56 billion would have done it for you? I don't know. I was not a typical eighth grader and I did not respond to typical motivations. Right, we have to challenge him. We've got to keep him involved. Otherwise, he's going to light yet another classroom on fire. That's a crazy letter. Yeah, it really is. That's too much. And I will point out, Chancery Daily has been doing great work on this.

1:22:23They've followed a lot of the Tesla and Twitter back and forth. Yeah, the court in Delaware said this pay package was illegal. This vote doesn't cure the problem, actually. It's like a weird dance. who knows man I just think he the thing that caught my eye here is all this preamble about how it takes something special to motivate Elon it's not money and it's like and also vote for the money it's very good alright we're going to WWDC we gotta get out of here that vote by the way is June 13th where Andy and Liz are primed as you can imagine primed to cover it it's gonna be I think it's going to be wild.

1:23:07I think the future of Tesla and X and SpaceX kind of all tied up in this one little very odd moment. So they'll be covering that next week while we are headed back from DubDub. I think there's going to be a lot of stuff to cover out of DubDub. I was saying this to our team today. People have a lot of feelings about AI. And Apple putting AI all over its operating system. If you just look at the response to that ad that Alex mentioned before, the Crush ad, that ad was not about AI. that was just about iPads. You actually do the thing where the photo editing gets easier or the copy is easier to write.

1:23:43I think people, Apple has a lot of creatives who care a lot about this company. It's going to be a weird time next week, I think. Yeah, I would agree. So all that covered, that's why The Verge exists. Why do we exist? That's why. To figure out why we make art with computers. And the answer, according to Al Trans, is to do weird, horny stuff. Yeah. That's it. That's The Verge Cast. Rock and roll.

1:24:07And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.