Big screens, bigger screens, suitcase screens

26:50That's going to happen to HBO Max. That's going to happen to Disney+. They're all running at these ad tiers. And that is the thing that is going to provide one set of pressures to release standardized metrics so the ad market can decide where to spend their dollars. And the other thing that's going to happen is in the strikes, one of the demands from all these unions is tell us what shows are successful so we can calculate our residuals more accurately and get more money. And I think that's going to place another amount of pressure that might finally break this fever. But I have no idea how it's going to play out.

27:20Well, it sounds like that was some of the big news this week was that the producers said, oh, yeah, we're now going to give you more access to data. We don't know all the details yet, but they finally agreed to like, yeah, it makes sense that you guys should probably have more data, which everyone knew before this. But it's nice that they agree finally. Not to get into the mechanics of that negotiation, but the streamers were going to have to give up this data to advertisers. Like it was going to happen just because of the nature of that market. So I think this is like the concession they were most willing to give because they needed to standardize and synthesize all that data.

27:56The question is whether it's Nielsen or paired analytics or whatever. Who knows? But the idea that the data needs to be standardized so everyone can understand it, that's coming from the ad market. That's not coming from that negotiation. I think it is a good concession and a useful one to all of us. But eventually an advertiser is going to say, how many people saw my ad? You just have to have a real answer. Okay, we should take a break. It's been a wild ride in the first segment, I have to say. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to dip 25 years into the past and talk about the iMac with Dan Sievert.

28:28Get your brains ready. We'll be right back.

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30:32All right, we're back. Dan Siefert is here. Hey, Dan. Hello. Welcome back to the show. You had a big package this week. Our friend Jason Snell contributed. Staffer's from Around the Verge contributed. This week was the 25th anniversary of the iMac. There's a lot to unpack. That means a lot of things. Yeah, it means we're old. It means we're old. It is incredible to think that the Mac was a younger platform when the iMac came out than the iPhone is now. John Gerber pointed out when he linked to Umar's visual history of the Mac. So the Mac was 14 when the iMac came out. the iPhone today is 16, which is just bonkers to think about where these respective products are and their impact on the world.

31:16But the iMac really changed a lot of things. Tell us about this package, Dan. Yeah. So, you know, 25 years since the first iMac went on sale, it was like August 15th, 1998. The iMac, as Jason really pointed out really well in his piece, it was the product that really turned around the company's fortunes. It allowed them, it was successful and popular enough to basically develop the iPod, which then became successful, popular enough to develop the iPhone. And then, you know, Apple becomes$3 trillion company. So without the iMac, like you don't have any of that. And Apple at the time was like very on the brink of not existing anymore.

31:56And, and all of the products that had been developed in the nineties were like these kind of beige boxes very typical looking not a whole lot of creativity or design were put into them but then when jobs came back and teamed up with ive and they brought out the iMac and just kind of like changed everything in terms of like the perspective of what like a home or a consumer electronic in your home could look like it had this like radical design it was a thing that was like people looked at it and they wanted it whereas if you looked at a pc at the time you looked at it to maybe want to use it and like do things on it, but you didn't want the object itself.

32:33It was just a box. Whereas the iMac was an object. And then that design was so influential. It not only permeated throughout Apple's lineup, influencing the design of what the software looked like on Macs and then further on down the line, but it also made translucent plastic products really popular at the turn of the century, all the way down to the infamous George Foreman girl that looks like an iMac. I had never seen that before until this package became a thing. And I'm now obsessed with this translucent George Foreman grill. It is the thing I want most in the world. If anyone listening wants to buy a new one.

33:10Do not buy a used George Foreman grill. What if it's in mint condition and then it's got the bun warmer? A product that can never be cleaned. No one has ever perfectly cleaned a George Foreman grill. It cannot be done. I clean ours constantly and it's just fully disgusting. Wait, you have today in 2023 a George Foreman grill? I am reasonably confident that the George Foreman grill I have is older than both me and my wife. It was like my wife's grandma's and it just somehow was in our house. I don't know how it got here. Maybe we should just switch this segment to George Foreman grill. It just, I use it all the time.

33:50It's great. What do you use it for? Are you making like stuffed burgers like George Foreman? Yeah, constantly. No, it's like, I'm just saying, if you have leftover chicken breast and some cold bread and you want to throw it on the foreman grill for 90 seconds to eat lunch, Bob's your uncle. It's your panini press. Yeah. No, but back to the IMAX. Listen, David's recipe blog is another story for another day. Oh, yeah, that's going to be a success. Talk about getting the views. Put some cold chicken on a 30-year-old George Washington. I want to hear the story about how your wife's grandmother grew up building with the George Foreman grill.

34:29Will we live or die today at lunchtime with David Pierce? Do you know those things that just end up in your house? You're like, I didn't buy this. I never asked for this. I just have this now. That's the Foreman grill in my house. George Foreman himself might have brought it to our house for all I know. I sincerely don't know. But the thing about the iMac that most blew my mind, Dan, was like reading Jason's piece, the full like YOLO energy of this thing from Apple in 1998, where they're just like, oh, you want a floppy disk? Screw you, USB. You want a thing that looks like a computer? No, here's this weird Pixar looking piece of nonsense.

35:08there's just like you just get this vibe from apple that i kind of love where they're like look we know if this doesn't work we're screwed and realistically we're probably screwed anyway so like here's the weirdest thing we can think of do you like it's got a handle and people did well so i was talking about this on instagram threads with a few people you know people are keep saying they want a desktop version of instagram threads this is like the thing everyone says we say it mark zuckerberg is replying to jay peters saying it's coming soon because we say a lot That's a real thing that happened this week.

35:40What they mean is a web version, right? The desktop application default that most people think about is a web app, especially for a platform like Instagram threads. No one is out here asking for, like, a native Win32 Instagram threads application. I mean, I would like a native app. Yeah, but that's, like, a very small. It's just, like, not the thing people are asking. If Instagram's response was you can run the iPhone app on your Mac using Apple Silicon, some nerds would be very happy. And most people like, what the hell is this? I just want to run it in my browser. And Apple in particular with the iMac, that was the moment that that began.

36:19Right. Until that computer, desktop applications on computers were, one, generally not connected. Right. The web was just starting. That was the Wintel monopoly, the height of the Wintel monopoly. Even like AMD in that moment was not like a serious competitor to Intel. So you had Win32 and you had Intel, and that was the application environment for 99 % of everything. And the Mac was this like rump platform that Microsoft sort of openly talked about supporting so they wouldn't be a monopoly. Like they're like, as long as we have this competitor, we won't get sued by the Justice Department. Little did they know.

36:53This is like, this is a lot. Like in that moment, Apple basically said there's this idea of a network computer. and the original vision was like a$500 terminal with just a web browser, which we had finally gotten to with like Chromeboxes. But that was like sort of the genesis and it got bigger because it couldn't really build it then. But no floppy drive was so you could send files. Radical idea at the time. There were like entire issues of Macworld that were like, how will we survive? I think that was like Walt Mossberg's one criticism of it in his review was like, no floppy disk, this is bullshit.

37:26And then importantly, the reason that it was a viable product to sell to people was that they were like, you can just plug it into the internet and use the web, which is the thing you want. You don't want Microsoft Word running on an Intel processor on Windows. You want a web browser that can bring you all this cool web stuff. And if not for the web and web standards, this computer is a gargantuan flop, right? It looked cool as hell. It dropped all the bullshit. that you only really had to plug in, what, two wires? That was a very famous commercial. You plug it in and there's no step three, Jeff Goldblum, that whole thing.

38:04It signed you up for internet access through an ISP, and then you could just run a web restaurant. And now we're just 25 years later, people are like, I want a desktop version of Instagram threads, and they mean a web app. And there's just a straight line from that idea to this idea that I think we often underestimate. That's the revolution. The phone is very important. It just came at the, it's just the last piece of that puzzle. The first one was, oh, we can sell a computer that basically runs a web browser. And like, if we do a good job of that, we can become the Apple that we are today. Which is why like the Johnny Ive thing became so important, right?

38:42Like they timed giving a new crap about design perfectly because like, I think Jason has this line in his piece that's like on the internet, nobody knew you were using a Mac. and i love that because it's it's true and it's like oh you could just buy the computer that looked cool and was blue and had a handle and all the stuff you wanted to do on the internet you could still do and it was like apple being a hardware company worked for it in a sort of unique way in that moment because it had no ecosystem play it was like we all we can do is build a cool thing and hope that people want to use it because we don't have any other moves yeah the power pc g3 have you heard of it it's uh we're gonna we're gonna walk away from this as fast as we can and you know all that stuff is really hard for them like i i think we underestimate how apple's very good at processor transitions now we take it for granted like we're gonna run the max on apple silicon we're like oh you're good at this in that moment right they were stuck on the g3 architecture they were stuck with oh the i'm at launch with os9 which if you i'm old uh that That was not a good operating system.

39:47It was sweet. What are you talking about? You could customize your text. You could. This is an operating system that famously until the very end, you could bring the entire OS to a dead halt by holding down the mouse button. And that was like by design. It was not a native multitasking, multi-threaded OS. I think until the very, very end of OS 9. You could be like, you know what? I just need to, everyone stop for a second. You just like hold down the mouse button and be like, we're waiting. We're waiting. Everyone chill the fuck out. Like we're waiting. And they had to do OS 10, like all this stuff they had to do, but they needed to sell enough iMacs to get there.

40:29That kind of brings us to where the iMac is today, right? That's a history. I will say that you should look at the visual history that we did and we should all stop and take a moment and recognize the iMac G4 as the pinnacle of computer design. Are you crazy? Wait, can I tell you a story about the iMac G4? Yeah. So I bought, let's see, this is probably 2011. I bought an iMac G4 because it was the only Mac I could afford, which you will realize if you do math that it's a nine-year-old computer that is long since out of date and no one is caring about it. This is the only Mac I could afford. I bought it from a stranger on Craigslist.

41:06we met in uh i believe it was union square and he literally like went through an existential crisis giving me this computer that i think i paid like 150 for yeah because he wanted it so bad and regretted so immediately selling this thing to me that literally like as he was handing it to me was like ah but it's so i just i don't need it but like ah i love it and it's just i was like yeah like that's that's why i want it too like i want this old ass computer because it's so cool looking the the g4 was my first ever mac period and it was so old and so useless at that point and i loved it to pieces because it was so cool looking it was just it i genuinely think it i agree with you i think it's the best looking computer ever made i loved that thing it's a shame they only did it for one generation like it was it lasted for like a year and a half or so and then boom right on to what ultimately looked like a big iPod.

42:04Oh, yeah, I have a story to tell about that. But Kranz, I want to hear your bad opinion about the iMac G4. Like, did you guys have to use that G4 iMac? Yeah, David used it. I mean, he still used it. It's right next to his George Foreman grill. It's a family heirloom. At the time, because it was not great. Like, I don't know. The G3 was just, there was something much more charming about the G3 iMacs, like the big CRTs and everything. Well, I think the G3 was almost like cartoon-like. And then the G4 was a much more serious, this is the future looking thing. Hold on. We got to get this timeline right.

42:41There's the original IMAX, which is bonded blue. Then there is the rainbow ones, the five colors. Those are the ones you might be talking about, Alex. That's the G3. That's what I had, yeah. That's the IMAX G3. Then there is a bizarre interregnum where Steve Jobs got on a stage and said, we have some exciting new IMAX to offer you today. And everyone thought he was going to do a flat panel iMac. And he was like, these motherfuckers are called Dalmatian and flower power. Yeah. What? Literally, people were like, what are you talking about? And that was like the last gasp of that shape. Go look at a blue Dalmatian iMac.

43:17It's beautiful. They cannot be found. Oh, my. This is the ugliest thing I've ever seen. Like Apple went across the world and country, collected them all and was like, you memory hole this. Steve Jobs famously walked off of stage when he announced those things after sensing the vibe in the room and said it should have been fucking ready. And what he meant was the flat panel iMac should have been ready. Yeah. This is a real thing. You can go look this up. I just Googled this and I'm looking at these for the first time in my life. And first of all, everyone should do this and look at these because these are incredible.

43:48And what these look like to me is if somebody took a normal iMac and then like, you know, those really awful like$1.99 skins you can buy on your phone that like from Amazon that you just like apply to the back of your phone and they don't quite stick right. And it's very clear that somebody just like took a picture of a picture of a picture of a wallpaper and then put it on this. That's what this looks like to me. They are nuts. We had them in my computer lab in college and they are nuts. So I was going to say, I was in college around the same time, and I had to do IT, so I had to work on everybody's computers.

44:22That's what my piece on the iMac is about. Is this why we vibe? Because we were both college IT people? Yeah, we were both like... I don't think we've ever really talked about this, but I've known it in my heart for quite some time. Yeah, that's why. That's why we always judge David. He was in high school being like, oh boy. Jesus, where did that just come from? Damn, that's just like David took a shot. I was out just like partying and getting laid. Sorry, guys. We had computers to talk about. We were having a great time over there. Dan, suspiciously quiet on what he was doing in this period. I was an IT person in high school.

45:01There we go. We were the cool kids. I had a job, a high school job as a PC tech for a local hospital. I think it's very obvious that this group of people was nerds in high school. Alex, continue your story. And David. But no, you could tell basically how much people's parents spent on them for school based on which generation of IBAC they had. So if somebody comes in with a Bondi blue, you're like, ooh, you got the hand-me-down, huh? They had the blueberry or something. You're like, okay, okay. And then they had that Dalmatian one. You were like, wow, you're loaded. This is a straight class system based on iMac colors that you have imposed on your customers in the college IT shop.

45:44There was like a middle period that we haven't talked about, like the iMac TV where the shelves got clear. It was all cool. But I'm saying that was the last version. And then this is the thing I wanted to say about the G4. It was a Steve Jobs moment unlike any other where they released the iMac G4 and he was like, everyone else solves this flat panel computer problem by putting the computer behind the display. And he did the thing. He like put up a bad version of that drawing. And he was like, this isn't the right idea. We made it a sunflower. And the thing was on the cover of Time Magazine I think it was a Stephen Levy piece on cover of Time Magazine.

46:17And Jobs and Johnny, I've told an entire story in Time Magazine about how they were trying to solve this problem of where the computer should go with the flat panel. And they were walking and they saw a sunflower and the birds sang and Johnny looked at Steve and Steve looked at Johnny. And they were like, we did it. And then 18 months later, like we put the computer behind the display. They kissed passionately in front of the sunflower. but it's like they sold that thing so completely until they were ready to do it the right way and then they dropped it like a stone they were like we actually solved the problem and here's the thing you've always wanted and it has been that thing ever since and just that thing where they so completely bought into the solution they had at the minute until they were ready to do it the way they wanted and then they never talked about it again they dead dead to the world like No company can do that now.

47:11Like even Apple basically cannot do that anymore. Right. There are too many installed devices. There are too many old things to support. They're like all this stuff to be like for 18 months, we talked about sunflowers. Never remember that again. Erase the sunflowers from your brain. Now it's a white piece of white rectangle. And that's the future of the iMac. To me, in the history of the iMac, that moment is more about Apple's culture than anything else. And it's sort of unremarked upon because they successfully memory-hold the iMac G4. But it was that shift that I was like, oh, they are ruthless.

47:48They are ruthless about getting to the right answer as fast as they can and not talking about everything they did in the past. To this day, you think about a car company. Ford's like, we made another Bronco. It looks like the old Bronco. Here's yet another Mustang. Most companies are very excited to trade on their past in a way that Apple, maybe a little bit more recently. But you will note, Apple said nothing about 25 years to the iMac. It just came and went. They had two opportunities to say it this year. The announcement in May and then the in-store in August, which is when we turned our package.

48:24But yeah, not a peep. Yeah. And I think it's all of that Apple culture is pinpointed in that moment where literally this computer was on the cover of Time magazine. And then 18 months later, they're like, here's the white one you wanted. And like, that was it. Like, the end. We have this other piece here. It's really about the future of the iMac, right? Where does it go now? It's in a weird spot. Yeah, yeah. So Monica wrote a really great piece on, you know, nowadays Apple's Mac business is 75 or 80 % laptops. and then the rest is like really niche computers. The Mac Studio, the Mac Mini, and then there's the iMac, which was updated in spring 2021 with the M1 chip.

49:06It's got that new design and it's basically just been parked for like two and a half years now. We've got M2 chips and other laptops or other Mac computers. It's not in the iMac for whatever reason. But like the iMac has been this kind of thing that just kind of ebbs and flows for the past decade or so. Like Apple will release an update and then ignore it for like four years. And then we get an iMac Pro and then it gets ignored for four years. And then we get a new M1 iMac and then it gets ignored for however many years. So Monica's takeaway was ultimately that like Apple isn't dishing the iMac or getting rid of the iMac.

49:41That's just kind of the way the place that the iMac sits in today's Apple is just much less prominent and less influential than it was two decades ago or certainly two and a half decades ago. So it's just like a different product. What's interesting to me is that the original iMac that we talked about and all the generations after that were basically, save for the iMac Pro, pitched as consumer products and consumer computers. And the current iMac is still kind of pitched as that consumer computer, whereas the other Mac desktops are really pitched towards professional, creative, niche use cases.

50:18But Apple doesn't really talk about the iMac all that often outside of its initial launch when they showed yellow iMacs in kitchens, which is a very odd place to put an iMac. Especially that it doesn't have a touchscreen. Doesn't have a touchscreen, yeah. You need your touchpad, your trackpad, and keyboard in addition to your iMac in your kitchen. Can I run a theory by you guys that I think is right but have no actual data for just lots of anecdotal evidence? I would bet that people keep iMacs longer than any other single Apple product. Like, I would bet the average use lifespan of an iMac is the longest of any other Mac.

50:59Because the screen is very good. The thing works relatively well. You're not going to notice when the battery starts to give out, which is often the first thing that goes in a lot of laptops. And the, like, inertia of upgrading is so big because it's just the whole thing. If I have a desktop, if I, like, want to upgrade the Mac Mini I'm sitting here with, I can keep everything else I have and just slot in a new Mac Mini. Upgrading your iMac is like upgrading your whole office all at once. And also, like you said, Dan, these are consumer things that people are like, this is like the familiest computer that Apple has, right?

51:31And I think if you have like a 2011 iMac that's just like sitting in your den, the like leap to upgrade that is huge. And the reasons to upgrade that when it's like a pretty good screen and the only thing that's really wrong with it 12 years later is that it's like pretty slow. My guess would be that like the average lifespan of one of those things is just absolutely off the charts. And if I'm Apple, I'm looking at that and saying, well, I'm going to sell people a computer. They're going to upgrade once every 11 years. i'd rather sell them a macbook that they're going to want a new one in three yeah you know people do with their macbook airs they drop them they spill things on them the battery part of this is is the big like that's a big part of this is because those batteries go and and you can't replace them on on newer laptops and stuff so it's just like your food barred whereas your imac can go forever i think somebody on this call might be recording with like an ancient iMac.

52:27I'm looking at it right now. It's a 2015 27-inch iMac. I will say that I... And you're you. Name another gadget you own that is eight years old. The cameras are coming up on that. The D7500 coming up on that. But that's like an emotional... I should upgrade the camera. I take a lot of shit from this team for still having that camera. But it's never done me wrong. Old man still got it. This computer I basically use for this. I run one web app on it. I run Riverside to do this show, and it's this setup, and everything plugs into it, and it's fine. It is radically over spec. So our studio, Vox Media Studios, was upgrading their computers many years ago, and they were just going to recycle this.

53:14And I was like, I'm taking it because we're just, like, sitting on the curb. And I was like, can I just, I don't know more. And they were like, don't tell anyone. Now I've told everyone. so it goes but it has it has the key is it has 32 gigs of ram and this is like the key to longevity of every computer in my opinion is like it is just it has massively more ram than it needed in its time and that means it stays forever which is why i tell everybody who buys a mac now that eight gigs of ram is not enough like that to me is more of the evidence of apple's planned obsolescence than anything else is eight gigs of soldered ram like no no no no don't do that and it's just weird And I think, David, you're right.

53:53The iMac sits in a lot of places. My parents have an ancient one. They refer to it as the mainframe. It's very good. And they go to it when they want to do anything serious, like logging into the bank. Yep. Because they want a big screen and a browser that feels safe. Because you can't use your phone. Why don't parents like bank apps? Because they feel like their phone is not serious enough for logging into the bank. Yeah. Okay. I think that what you're describing, Eli, and what, David, you described as it's sitting in a den, that is the original concept of the iMac. It was a shared family computer.

54:31And it's just that at this point, at this time, that doesn't exist as a product for a lot of people in functional ways in their lives. If you've got kids in school, they're not coming home and sitting at a desktop to do their homework. They're doing it on a Chromebook that links up to their school's network and goes with them to school. or they have their own personal devices, an iPad or an iPhone or whatever smartphone. The shared concept of a family computer is not something that really fits into the modern day life. Whereas the other desktops in Apple's lineup, the Mac Mini, the Mac Studio, etc., they have purposes that fit into people's lives as devices that they work on all day.

55:09But the iMac as the family thing doesn't really exist anymore. That was like, I mean, the iMac itself was a response to everybody had family computers. Like in the 80s and 90s, if you had a computer, it probably wasn't in your room unless you were like just richy rich, right? Like you had a lot of money. Alex was like, get that Blue Dalmation computer out of my face. Yeah, right? Like you didn't have that. Like everybody. So the iMac, when the iMac came out, it was like, oh, this is a computer where it's not just the parents using a beige box. Like the kids can interact with this. which is why my brother watched A Bug's Life on repeat every day over and over and over again on the damn thing.

55:47And nowadays, computers are cheaper, they're more affordable. And laptops have become much, much more affordable than they were at the time. A laptop was still insanely expensive at the time. I think all of my laptops until I got out of college were hand-me-downs because my parents were like, absolutely not. You do not get a brand new laptop you're going to drop on its face and break. And then we have to pay for it? Get out. But the prices have come down. So it's like, it's much more affordable. It's much easier to go and buy a Chromebook for a kid than be like, okay, everybody's going to use this communal computer in the living room.

56:19And also like, we have to have a space in our living room carved out just for the computer. And then you got one kid on the computer, another kid watching TV, and they're all yelling at each other. And now they can just all have phones and be quiet in another room. Or the school dictates that they have a Chromebook, which like takes the decision out of your hands entirely. And then like that iMac that you have sitting there is like not used by them because it's not the tool that fits into the rest of their curriculum. Alex just made a striking case to bring back the computer room. I was just going to say, I'm in on this.

56:49Yeah. I want a computer room. That was the best. Like you were always sitting in like a dining room chair that you should not be sitting in hunched over it. Everybody had that horrible office max furniture. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? The desk and the hutch and the whole thing. Here's what I want. Virgcast listeners, send me photos of your computer rooms. Yes. Not your modern gamer rooms. I mean your childhood computer rooms. If you have such a photo, I just want to look at them. And maybe we'll run like a thing about computer rooms. Who knows? If they're good enough. Mine's cursed.

57:22Again, I do not want your weird gamer den with your LED lightings and your Wi-Fis. I want your 486 tower with a turbo button with Encarta open on a CRT. Hell yeah. That's the room I'm looking for. Like poorly exposed photo. Yeah. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Show me where you came from. I had a gateway with the cow logo. Those were the days. Yeah. Give me your origin story in a photo of your computer room. All right. We've talked about the iMac quite a bit. There is an Apple event coming up. We're assuming in September for iPhones. That's a pretty solid guess given the decade plus of iPhones coming out in September.

58:01iOS 17 betas are out. Dan, any thoughts here? They keep moving the end call button, which seems to be driving people wild. I think, you know, other than that, I think iOS 17 is going to be for a lot of people. And we've kind of said this in our preview coverage already that it's going to be a pretty small update across a lot of things. And some people are really going to appreciate little things like interactive widgets. I was going to say my one quibble with the characterization of small update is that every app developer that exists on the Internet will not shut up about how excited they are about interactive widgets.

58:33It's going to get full crazy with the interactive widgets, and I'm very excited about it. Maybe it'll just be more exciting when it launches and those app developers can actually put out their work. Whatever, Dan. You're going to check off a to-do on the home screen of your iPhone, and you're going to freak out. It's going to be a great day. It's going to be so great. I can't wait. At the grocery store, checking off to-dos on my widget, like I could have been doing on Android since 2010. Coming. But yeah, I mean, other than that, it's going to be the 17th version of iOS. It's like, what are we expecting to change here?

59:06I'm excited because the autocorrect situation is bad. It has, now that people have pointed out so consistently to us, it has gotten worse in a way that is impossible to measure, but it's definitely worse. And I just, I'm just looking forward to this update. The vibes are off. Give me your LLM-powered autocorrect. Like, I'll take it. Anything has to be better than this. It's weird, right? If you guys notice, it's gotten worse. Everybody judges me. They always know when I'm on my phone because there's always at least one horrible, confusing typo that Apple was just like, no, I got you. I'm going to change this word.

59:38It totally makes sense. I was like, no, it doesn't. It's a terrible context. My theory is that Apple is just trying to push us towards that humane AI pin. They're like, what if you don't use this computer? What if you just talk to your hand instead? Just, hey, guys, what's up? I have thoughts about the show we're watching. By the way, the humane AI pin, this is totally random. They announced this week that they're going to launch or do something in October on the day of an eclipse. That's what I got for you. They put out a video. You should watch the video. They call out our friend Sam Schaeffer in the video.

1:00:11That always makes me smile. It's like the only time they all light up is when they talk to Sam. Sam's not even in the video. He's behind the camera. And they're like, Sam, and they all smile, and that just made me happy. But they're like, a momentous day is coming when the sun will be blacked out forever, and then you will talk to your hand. And that's like, okay. So sometime in October, they're going to release this pin and we can all see what's up. The talk to the hand puns. We just got to get those out of our systems. Or it's probably just me. I just got to get that out of my system until that's announced.

1:00:41I did the post about Pornhub MindGeek suing a restaurant in New York City called Donor House. It's a kebab restaurant. And I was like, don't make the joke, please. And everyone in the comments made the joke. You just let other people do it. Like, it's right there. It's like, OK, I'm going to resist. Just do it for me. I was like, I'm just begging you. And everyone's like, here it is. We said it. Fine. Okay, we got to take a break. We're gonna come back and do a lightning round with Dan. We'll be right back.

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1:03:42we're back it's lightning round time there's a lot going on in this lightning round it's so much good stuff and some like sad stuff mainly good stuff there's also an email where the subject line is hgmi disgusts me which is just we have found our perfect i was like they get us they get us i keep i i use this line that i ruthlessly stole from casey newton all the time which is anybody can get traffic, but it's impossible to get an audience. And it's like, oh, we have an audience. You have to trust us to send us that subject line. That's a relationship. And I appreciate you, Sal, from Sal. Anyway, his point is that DisplayPort is superior to HDMI because of a piece in Hackaday.

1:04:25Hackaday, by the way, I personally have a long history with it. There's a long intertwining of Hackaday and Gadget back in the day. We'll link the Hackaday piece about DisplayPort being better, but HDMI disgusts me. Sal ends his email by saying, I feel like I've been red-pilled by DisplayPort, which is unbelievable. It's very good. Look, DisplayPort is packet-based, and I understand the point. Fine. Okay. Lightning round. Kranz, you've got the best one. Take us away. Are you ever having a dinner party with your friends outside, and you're like, I really want to watch some TV? So you go get your little suitcase out of the closet and you put it out and you watch your TV because it's in the suitcase.

1:05:06And then later you're like, oh, man, I'm going camping with the buddies. I need to watch TV on my camping trip. So you bring your little suitcase with you. LG was like, everybody needs to be able to do that. Not just people who built a suitcase TV. The rest of us need to be able to do it. So there's the 27-inch Stand By Me Go. To be clear, not Stand By Me, which would make sense. Stand By Me. And not Mego, the Intel-based mobile platform. I'm going to say Stand By Me, Mego. I refuse to break it out into multiple words. It's beautiful. It can last three hours on a charge so you can get through one of the Lord of the Rings movies.

1:05:51There's so much room for it. It's a suitcase. Wait. But it's a 27-inch screen. It's huge. You guys, I have a revolutionary idea. Make the suitcase bigger. Give me more screen and more battery in a bigger suitcase. My 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip has a bigger battery life than this television. 11-inch smaller screen. You're telling me that it's just the pixels, but it can run an M1 chip. Well, it runs WebOS, which is probably the reason it only gets three hours. My favorite part of LG's promotional images of this is there's two young, very fashionable hip people sitting by a pool. Yes.

1:06:40And the guy is using the TV to skip a track on the world's largest music widget because it's 27 inches in size to just go to the next track. And then they didn't pay for any licensing. so the song is song title by artist name if you it's a pop by the way this is what i was going to call out to perfect call out from dan if you're in your car pull over now what the link is in the show notes go look at this picture when when marketing agencies come up with briefs for products they're like we here's what we want people to feel here's how we're going to execute it. I want to know what they wanted you to feel when they executed this photo, right?

1:07:26They had to do it. They had to, they had to get some tables. They had to get a lady with a book. They had to buy white linen clothes for this gentleman. He has a drink here. They put a lemon in it. They opened the suitcase. They were like, they instructed him to be pointing at the next track button and what looks like a clone of Apple music, but is not Apple music. All of that happened Like a series of decisions happened with intent. And I'm just dying to know. Like, I don't believe this TV is a touchscreen. I think it is, actually. It is a touchscreen? In other points about this TV, one, it can rotate 90 degrees so you can watch TikToks on it.

1:08:06Oh, it is a touchscreen. It has table mode. Yes. And then you could play chess on it with the touchscreen as they show in other photos. It's got Dolby Vision. It's got Dolby Atmos with four speakers. It's 1080p Dolby Vision. Oh, it's going to be, yeah. Like, you're going to watch your half hour of a show because you probably forgot to charge it. So you've only got 30 minutes of time. And you're going to watch your 30 minutes of The Nanny in Dolby Vision. And it also has to get bright enough so you can actually see it outside. So it's got to run at like 1200 nits. It has an outdoor picture mode, which acknowledges the fact that you are out in the world.

1:08:43So like, Neel, if we're just going to go down the road of like, how are we marketing this thing? The idea that they are giving is you're going to bring this thing. You're going to put it in the trunk of your car. You're going to go camping. You're going to open up the trunk of your car. You're going to open up the suitcase. You're going to swivel up the screen, turn it on. And you're going to put on a video of a, quote, cozy, crackling fireplace while you're out camping. Is that not what you do when you camp? You don't put the iPad out? Like, oh, we could make a fire. And you say, what do you mean?

1:09:13I've already made a fire. And you just pull the screen up. And that's it. I just want to point out, if you watch their video, they're all sitting around an outdoor dining table. And she opens the suitcase and opens the screen showing the fire. And then makes you watch a YouTube video. It's all very good. You say, I have made fire every time. It's amazing. Every single person on our staff wants to buy this TV. I don't know why. It's only$1 ,000. That's the wrong way to think about money. It's only$1 ,000. Like an iPhone is$1 ,000. Every outdoor dinner party is just transformed with this$1 ,000 device.

1:09:49But if you pre-order it, you get a free X-Boom 360 speaker, which is$250. So really, it's like the TV is free. Wait. Basically, yeah. Again, if you know what the intent of the man changes track on music player picture is, just like, please let me know. Touch. I'm just dying to know. I'm also dying for the first person to take this as a carry-on on a plane and just bust it out of the tray table. Yeah, just like it's going to happen. The TSA will never let you get on a plane with this thing. They are going to look at this thing and detain you for the longest time ever. Yeah, they're going to be like, what is this music widget?

1:10:28We need to know right now. But then you show them the fire, and it's going to be fine. All right. Dan, what's your lightning round? I'm going to plug myself. I reviewed the three Galaxy Tab S9 tablets today on the site, and I'm just going to say it. Android tablets are interesting this year. Really? Yeah, they're back, baby. Finally. Android tablets. It's the year of Android tablets. When you say they're back, do you mean that they are back in a way that is competitive with the iPad or back in the sense that someone is releasing them? I would say that they are actually pretty interesting and good.

1:11:07The interesting part about it is Samsung's been releasing high-end Android tablets that have been pretty decent for a few years now, but it's been only Samsung. And now there's actual competition within the Android space. You could buy a Pixel tablet, or you could buy a OnePlus tablet, or you could buy a Lenovo tablet or something like that. Samsung still makes the best ones, but it also makes the most expensive ones. So there's actual variety. There's different ideas happening. There's different experimentation. The software has gotten a lot better. There are actual ecosystems that have been built out.

1:11:40If you're a Samsung phone owner, it makes a lot of sense to use a Samsung tablet because it works together in the way that an iPhone works with an iPad. Wait. Dan, aren't you a Samsung phone owner? I am. Do you use a Samsung tablet or do you use an iPad? I would say that nobody should buy their purchase decisions based on my own personal device choices. Attracts. Because you will be entering regret. I've seen Dan use Dex. I use Dex. Dex is fascinating and surprisingly capable at this point. It used to be a hot mess. But I wrote this entire piece on Dex. And I spent quite a few days actually working on Dex to test the tablets and stuff.

1:12:24And it's, you know, pretty, pretty good. Dex is good now. I spent a decade going to meetings with Samsung being like, you know, Dex exists, right? What if you did anything to it? And they were like, meh, it's Dex. It's like a thing we put in slides, but no one actually uses. And now they've like made it into a thing. You can actually like have multiple windows in a way that isn't bad on your tablet. Like what a concept. It feels like a stage manager. if you took all the binders off of Stage Manager and all the restrictions off of Stage Manager and you did the thing that you want to do with Windows on a screen.

1:12:59That's what DEX is. Okay, I'm just going to... Dan, I'm just looking at your scores. I'm just evaluating Android tablets are back. So you are a commenter on the website. Yes. I am the people. So you gave the Tab S9 an 8, which is fair, although 16 by 10 is... Yeah, that's my main complaint with the S9 is 16 by 10 is still a little blah. And then the S9 Ultra, which is the one that, like, you know, the YouTubers just waved around in TikToks and be like, look at this. And I got it. I was like, yep, look at that. But you gave that one a six because it's gigantic and ridiculous. Yeah. And$1 ,200. It's more expensive than the suitcase TV, too.

1:13:40Yeah, that's true. Well, it has a processor. Yeah, it does anything. Outrageously priced. and then the s9 plus you gave a six and this one just like i don't even like looking at it i feel like there's there's required to be one tablet in every lineup that just makes no sense and no one should buy it yeah yeah i you know in a vacuum the s9 plus is great you know it's got a great screen great performance it's got all the benefits that the others have it's just it's too big to like comfortably use for tablet stuff and then it's like if you are going to buy it for productivity just buy the ultra because that gives you the space to really be productive in a way that the plus doesn't for for 200 more you can have the one that people go whoa right i mean that's like that's this product like you look at an s9 ultra you're like holy shit that that's a thing that exists you look at the s9 plus and you're like well i'm gonna buy an ipad Like, that's that product.

1:14:43It's like, this is the one that is the most head-on with an iPad. The bezels are big. I would say that the bezels are not that big. Oh, and this photo, it looks like they're huge. Maybe they look that way in the photo. You know what it is? It's because that photo is a photo of a video in 16x9, so it's making it look bigger. But if you look at the side, you can see the bezels on the side. They're not that big. So if you watch anything, if you watch the vast majority of TV today, it'll look like it has huge bezels. yeah because it's great on an ipad four three movies that's my favorite okay um this is my defense of four three four three is the god's chosen aspect ratio uh for portable computers our lord and savior four three i'm saying 69 and 1610 screens are horrible 1610 is the worst of all worlds right because you watch a movie you still get the weird letterboxing and then you try to do any work and or hold it god forbid in portrait and you're like well i'm just a guy with a rectangle.

1:15:39Everyone look at me. An iPad. Like 4.3 is like you make one compromise on watching video. You make one compromise and everything else is great. 16.9 you make one compromise which is useful for it which is that it's useless for anything but watching video. Oh my god. The thing is enormous. See that? Good lord. That's a thing. It's a platter. This is the ultra. We have not spent enough time on the show. just we look the audience has grown we've added a second episode we got to do an entire episode that's just like there's one correct aspect ratio no you're wrong the correct aspect ratio is three two on laptops that's it there's no other good answer four three you just said the only compromise with four three is watching video which is the main thing most people do all the time it's like remember when max were good except the keyboard sucked like it turns out keyboards are pretty important to samsung's credit these devices are phenomenal for watching video like the screens are tremendous the sound is tremendous like these are entertainment machines it's just personally if i'm going to spend 1200 on a device i'm going to want to do more than just watch a movie once a week or whatever on it and so like i do want to get more out of it when do we get like a 2.39 aspect ratio like that Toshiba laptop that had the 21 by 9 I want to feel like I'm watching a movie in the 60s on Cinerama like I just want it wow Christopher Nolan was like I made a laptop you're not going to believe how wide it is it's all I want alright David what's your pick mine's quick it's I've been following all this Google SGE AI search stuff for a while and And Google this week, in the guise of relatively minor feature update, rolled out a thing where you can now use SGE as you look at webpages, and it will summarize them for you.

1:17:38And you can interact with webpages through Google's AI. And that's not a small thing. That's an enormous leap in Google making Chrome the AI hub of the internet, which is messy and weird and complicated and fascinating. And they're also putting more AI stuff in the sidebar of Chrome. So it's like very quietly, AI is coming like front and center to the entire web browsing experience through Google. And like you talk about kind of AI all the way down, like we're going to get to the point where Google's AI is summarizing AI generated web pages that you found through Google's AI powered search. And it's just all going to get real, real, real weird.

1:18:20But Google, like Bing has been so loud about like, we are putting Bing everywhere. Like Google is being very quiet about it, but it's basically doing the same thing. Yeah. Especially the sidebar stuff. The interesting thing about SGE right now is Google featured snippets are still often superior to SGE. Like the AI will like overwrite, you know, like a precocious seventh grader. And it's like, no, I just needed the answer to the question. I don't need all this preamble. It can't answer a question. Like if a question has a simple answer, it can help you like explore the universe of your question.

1:18:55But it can't just be like seven. It just can't do that. This thing, though, this SGE features where it's summarizing pages, there's something going on in the background. I don't know what it is. If you work in New York Times, please tell me what it is. There's something going on with the New York Times and Google and OpenAI that I have not been able to piece out. But if you look at New York Times' robots.txt, it allows everything. It allows Google, it allows OpenAI. Literally, it's star, dot, whatever, all out. Very few things are blocked, which is fascinating. We got actually a question from a reporter when OpenAI rolled out its crawler that once you have a crawler, you can block it.

1:19:35So they just rolled it out, and someone asked us, hey, why do you block it? And the reason is actually contained in a piece David wrote about Neva, which is the internet has been so fixed for so long that most places only allow Google and Bing because Bing powered all the other search engines for so long. So you only needed to allow Google and Bing and everything else was just cost, right? Like an infinite amount of crawlers coming over your pages is just server cost. You don't need to pay because there's Google and there's Bing. So most publishers, most pages only allow that. So OpenAI, now that they have a new crawler, they've got to go get permission from everyone.

1:20:11The Times allows everything. But then there was a report this week that they might sue OpenAI because they're really mad at them and they want a deal. And they have a deal with Google that no one knows the terms of. I'm telling you, this thing that is happening with AI on the web and all these features that are quietly rolling out, in the background of it is like a nuclear explosion of lawsuits. It is just coming. And it's going to be wild. And we're going to talk about it at the Code Conference, September 26th and 27th. California. It was good. I got there in the end. Actually, my lightning round ones are all AI2.

1:20:44You'll notice, yeah, Neelai said ones, because unlike the rest of us, Neelai is incapable of following the rules. Well, it's two that are the same one. It's two that are the same thing. So OpenAI rolled out GBT4 to do content moderation, which is terrifying. But everybody treated this like it was a new thing they were like oh they're gonna have humans looking at the production of the algorithm and then they're gonna feed it back into the algorithm what a novel concept and it's like that's how it has worked forever yeah like facebook and youtube in particular have been like this is a problem and maybe ai can solve like do you think google has not been trying to do ai and content moderation youtube for ages like they've been doing it That said, Casey asked a bunch of experts about it in Platformer.

1:21:31You go read it. The experts seem to really like this idea. They think it is faster. They think they can build some tools. Importantly, they think a bunch of startup social networks can use tools like this. You don't need the resources of a Microsoft. You don't need the resources of a Meta or a Google or whatever. There's something there. Importantly, if you go to Europe and all these other places, they have laws in the books now that say you have to be able to explain your content moderation decisions. and it's not clear if GPT-4 can do that. It can't. Or they got to build it. Yeah, it's like, it can't yet.

1:22:04Yeah, part of what they said they're doing is part of the process is asking the model to explain itself. And as we've seen, the more recursive you get with these LLMs, the weirder and worse they all get. But it's an interesting road to go down. And I think you're right. Even if all this does is get everybody to, you can plug and play C plus content moderation, Like that's already a huge win for the internet. Are we going to have a point where the content moderation, like where they ask the chat GPT to explain itself and we're going to have to talk about how it just claimed that it was like a unicorn that longs for death?

1:22:40I don't know. I think we'll see. I mean, the flip side of this, which we're talking about putting a robot in a position to censor content, is in Iowa school district, there are book bans across this country right now. This is a real problem. they decided they weren't going to read the books. They were just going to ask chat GPT to summarize all the books in the library and tell them which ones to ban, which is like a pure abdication of duty. Like that is the laziest shit I have ever heard in my entire life. If you are going to ban books, don't right. Like first second, like do, do the work be like, we, we asked a robot to tell us what books to be.

1:23:21Like, this is the beginning of the use of the tool beyond just the cool demos you see on TikTok. It's, oh, lazy people are going to make stupid decisions with it that impact, like, lots of things. I mean, this was also kind of a protest because they're being required. They have to go do it all themselves. Like, they weren't given a list of books. They basically said, you'll be, like, subject to big fines and stuff if you don't put together your list of books and have it done by a certain time. So that's why they were like, okay, well, we'll just do it fast and have ChatGPT do it because you don't care about the kids.

1:23:55So why should we? It was kind of like my read of why they were doing it. A protest ChatGPT ban. Still not great. Still books getting banned and kids don't have access to important media. Well, it got attention from us. So there's that. But I would say this is the flip side of we want it to be able to explain itself. when you start making decisions like we'll let the robot summarize the book so we can ban it from our library you really need that robot to be able to explain itself and so that's why i said it's two things that are kind of the same thing like we're gonna put it in charge of speech on the internet it should really be able to explain itself because people once you start saying this is an acceptable thing to do with it people are going to use it in truly bizarre ways last two things we mentioned this briefly at the top of the show.

1:24:42The special counsel, Jack Smith, has obtained Trump's DMs from Twitter. We won't go into it except to say this is why we are constantly banging on about encryption. And if this brings our two parties into alignment on the need for end-to-end encryption on our platforms, I'll take it because that's why you have it. Also, your Twitter DMs have never been deleted. They just get hidden when you hit delete. Use encrypted platforms, people. Use them. Don't DM people on Twitter. All right. Last one. Kranzer's a Microsoft event in New York coming up. Yeah. September 21st, we're going to get a Microsoft event.

1:25:18Sounds like we'll probably get some surfaces because they frequently do one in like September, October. There's usually a big surface event. So it sounds like we'll get some of that. Who knows what else? Microsoft's been very busy this year, so I wouldn't be surprised if we see other stuff. But who can say? I believe they're going to talk about AI would be my guess. Yeah. If I had to just kind of wildly stab in the dark, I think it's possible that the word co-pilot will be mentioned. When you turn on the new Surface, it's like, have you broken up with your wife yet? I'm here for you. Yeah. Speaking of Microsoft AI, a code conference, September 26th, 27th, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott.

1:25:56Definitely going to talk about AI. September, by the way, is going to be nuts. We assume there's going to be an Apple event the second week of September. There's going to be an Amazon event on the 20th. This is going to be on the 21st. Code is then Meta Connect, I believe, is at the end of September. It's going to be full crazy coming back. For all the VergeCast listeners who are like, oh, talk about more gadgets. Oh, it's coming, y 'all. It is coming. Yeah. These August VergeCasts were just like, here's a grab bag of cool stuff to talk. No, no, no. Dead focus. Yeah. It's coming. It is coming.

1:26:30Don't you worry. All right. Speaking of which, everyone go get some rest. pull over in your car, take a nap by the side of the road, and get ready for September. Put the fire on your suitcase TV and take a nap. All right, we got to wrap up. David, you've got a new newsletter called Installer. Tell people about that. Yeah, it's basically just designed to point people towards all the cool things that exist on the internet. We've put out one issue so far. The second one's coming out this weekend. It's been really fun. A lot of people got really mad, which I assume is a sign that it's fun and interesting and things are going well.

1:26:58We're changing up a bunch of stuff, learning new things all the time. the virtual.com slash installer and also send me all the cool things. The best thing about this newsletter has been that everybody now tags me in funny things on the internet. It is awesome. I love it very much. Go subscribe to Installer. It is very fun. I will say I will not apologize for not deleting two-factor notifications. The number of people are like, why do you have all these on Reddit? I'm like, they're like five-year-old two-factor notifications. I typed in the code already and they're like, go delete it. I'm like, I'm not using my time that way.

1:27:28You can come over to my house and blow an hour deleting old notifications. Iowa 17 is here to save you, Eli. Yeah, man. It will delete them automatically. It's going to be beautiful. I cannot wait. The number of emails I get where I'm like, yep, I saw that subject line and I refuse to take... If the phone could just read my mind that it's like your order is ready is not a thing that I need to take any further action on. You need like Superman's laser eyes and just like blast them. Yeah, I just need to be able to squint at the phone. That's what Humane's going to do. Don't worry. You just tell your hand, like I got it.

1:28:03Delete all the bad emails. All right, that's it. That's AvergeCast. Send us photos of your computer rooms. I'm dying to see. The good ones. Not your modern garbage ones. They're probably great. In a couple weeks, we'll ask her those too. Yeah, but I'm looking for, you know, that tone of wood that was sold in the office, Mac? That. I want that. All right. We love you. That's AvergeCast. Rock and roll.

1:28:29And that's a wrap for VergeCast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecastattheverge.com. The VergeCast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.