In short
The Vergecast Episode Summary: Gadgets are getting weird — and so are iPhone homescreens
Episode Overview In this episode of The Vergecast, hosts Nilay Patel, Alex Kranz, and David Pierce discuss a variety of topics surrounding the latest technology news, including social media reactions to political events, Apple's public betas, new gadgets, and more.
Key Topics Covered
- Political Events and Social Media Reactions
- Discussion about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and its implications on social media.
- Analyzes how platforms like Twitter and Threads reacted in real-time compared to traditional news outlets.
- Highlights the shift in content moderation practices post-event, suggesting a decline in diligence regarding harmful information.
- Apple's Public Betas
- Overview of Apple’s newly released public betas for iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and watchOS 11.
- Key features discussed:
- Redesigned Home Screens: Aesthetic and functional changes to iPhone screens.
- New Math Abilities in iPadOS 18: Introduction of a calculator app and features for mathematical calculations.
- RCS Messaging: Major improvements in messaging quality and inter-device communication.
- Gadgets Galore: "Is This Anything?" Segment
- A collection of gadgets discussed, emphasizing their utility and whether they serve a purpose:
- Canon EOS R1 and R5 Mark II: Introduction of AI features for image enhancement that raise questions about authenticity in photography.
- Google Pixel 9 Leak: Google's accidental unveiling of the Pixel 9 Pro, illustrating the company's ongoing struggle with leaks.
- Samsung's "Sketch to Image" Feature: Allows users to draw on photos, generating AI-enhanced images, but raises concerns about misinformation.
- Dyson OnTrac Headphones: Customized headphones that stir discussions on brand relevance in new categories.
- OnePlus Pad 2's Vibrating Stylus: A stylus that simulates the feeling of writing on paper, but questions its actual usefulness.
- The $27 Million Mansion that Sucks
- A detailed account of Sam Altman’s legal battle after purchasing a mansion for $27 million that turned out to be riddled with construction defects.
- Allegations of negligence against the builders and the extensive list of issues including mold, water damage, and inadequate drainage.
- Humorously likened to a metaphor for overhyped products in tech, reflecting on the expectations vs. reality.
- Lightning Round
- Quick-fire stories on technology and culture, including:
- Sling TV’s Free 4K Streaming Offer: A competitive move in the streaming market.
- Comcast’s 4K Olympics Coverage: Conditional availability based on subscription, raising eyebrows about accessibility in sports broadcasting.
Key Takeaways
- Content Moderation Decline: The conversation highlighted a significant retreat from responsible content moderation on social platforms, particularly post-traumatic events.
- Apple's Innovations: While Apple continues to innovate, the practical application of new features like RCS and iPad enhancements signals a shift towards user convenience.
- Gadget Culture: The discussion of various gadgets illustrated a blend of excitement and skepticism within tech culture, prompting reflections on genuine innovation versus gimmicks.
- Real Estate as a Metaphor: Sam Altman’s mansion lawsuit serves as a cautionary tale about the intersection of wealth, technology, and consumer trust.
Concluding Thoughts This episode of The Vergecast encapsulates the chaotic yet fascinating landscape of technology, politics, and culture, combining humor with critical insights into the implications of our rapidly evolving digital environment. The hosts encourage listeners to consider the broader impacts of technological advancements while navigating their everyday lives.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00When will AI finally make work easier? How about today? Say hello to Gemini Enterprise from Google Cloud, a simple, easy-to-use platform letting any business tap the best of Google AI. Retailers are already using AI agents to help customers reschedule deliveries all on their own. Bankers are automating millions of customer requests so they can focus on more personal service. And nurses are getting automated reports, freeing them up for patient care. It's a new way to work. Learn more about Gemini Enterprise at cloud.google.com.
0:39Hello and welcome to Rich Cast, the flagship podcast of buying a$27 million mansion that sucks. We're going to get to it. We're going to explain that idea in detail. It is very good. It is also just a tiny little symbol of the moment that we live in now. What if we didn't think this through? and then spent 27 million dollars anyway and then blamed everyone else it's all it's all right there i'm not going to tell you yet it's all right there i'm your friend nila david pierce is here hi i i also very much enjoy that story i i was putting together the rundown for today and i one of the nice things about putting together the rundown is i get to just decide in the lightning round what i want and i put my name next to it in bold with great enthusiasm uh and it is one of those things i love a thing that's a metaphor for something yeah you don't know what but it is for sure a metaphor yeah like a vibes of four yeah that's pretty good yeah that's right it's just like oh this story is the correct vibe for the this moment alex kranz is here yeah i i don't own a house but if i did it wouldn't be that one for a variety of reasons all right there's a lot to talk about the apple betas came out this week we've got a what david is calling an is this anything gadget bonanza, and then we got the lightning round.
1:58Unsponsored. At this point, someone should start a company called Unsponsored. Just putting that out there. That's pretty good. But we should start with what is arguably the biggest story in the world, which is the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and then the RNC in which Trump was nominated and announced J.D. Vance as his running mate, as the vice presidential nominee. And I want to spend a lot of time on this. It feels important to talk about. It is the biggest story in the world. And there are lots of Verge stories in this story. For example, I think as we learn more about the would-be assassin who was 20 years old, it feels likely that his digital footprint will reveal a bunch.
2:33And that means things like hacking his phone were immediately important. We've talked a lot about cops trying to hack phones on this show and on The Verge over the years. And they got into it almost immediately. And that's because they've just gotten good at it. The FBI isn't running to Apple to ask them to break the phone open. So there's that sort of stuff happening as that investigation goes forward. More immediately important in the context of The Verge and The Verge asked is what happened to the social networks afterwards. We've talked a lot about content moderation on the show and whether or not social networks have a duty to the truth.
3:07Mark Zuckerberg has famously said he doesn't want to be the arbiter of truth and set up a weird fake Supreme Court for content moderation on Facebook platforms. We're at a place now where they appear to have given up. right like you would put COVID it's sort of the high point of content moderation controversies and discussion and interest from the platforms maybe not in terms of success but certainly in terms of volume it was the moment everyone was most aggressively like on it one way or another yeah and whether you know like are you going to amplify conspiracy theories and there was just a lot there that has resulted in major lawsuits and one of them just hit the Supreme Court.
3:49And the Supreme Court said, no, the government's allowed to talk to the social networks. Like all of that happened and it feels like it's in the past. And we've been sort of talking about it, but then the shooting happened and you just saw in real time, the social networks, Twitter, X, whatever it's called, threads, they were good at it for one second. They were like, this thing happened, and here's video of it, and here's some photos of it, and here's everyone just reacting to it for like one second. You could verify that a thing had happened, and they were ahead of the major news networks, which are very, very cautious in breaking news events like that.
4:30So if you just wanted a shot of pure adrenaline, they would give it to you. Well, and this was actually an unusually perfect case in that sense because you had a televised event, right? Like he's on stage talking as all of this is happening. Like the person this is happening to is right there in front of the camera. You have what turned out to be some like truly historic photographers out there working, taking shots that ended up being really important really quickly. And that stuff gets uploaded faster than ever. So we had this like primary source material faster and more sort of remarkably than almost anything I can ever remember.
5:08Like the speed with which what you would call like the photo of the thing started floating around the Internet was just unbelievable to me. It was like seconds. Yeah. And it just was there. And then you saw the sort of like weird everyone quoting the like CNN or New York Times headline that was more cautious than the rush to judgment on the social networks. And you're like, why? This is like the big networks are cautious. The rigor is the point. And like there's a gap here. And that gap has only gotten wider, which is utterly fascinating to me. There's no attempt to moderate pictures of a shooting.
5:46Like a guy got shot and there's pictures of it everywhere and there's no attempt to moderate it. On top of that, there is just an explosion of conspiracy theories from everyone. Everyone is a conspiracy theorist right now. And they're all just like flooding onto these platforms, particularly X. and there's no attempt to slow it down or fact check it or anything like that. And you can just see like, oh, the knob got turned. We're just not doing content moderation anymore. We don't care about this. We're going to do the really bad stuff. You talk to people who are still working in the industry, they're going to continue working against child sexual abuse material or just like abject pornography on platforms that aren't supposed to have it.
6:32they will forever and ever copyright infringement will be a thing that the platforms care about. But this, they're just like over it, right? The idea that harmful information can spread on social networks and that the platforms have any responsibility, it's gone. And I think this one's a marker. Like it feels like a real marker to me that that's where the information environment is now. And for all the other stuff we talk about, like AI or sludge or fake photos, yeah, it all happened immediately after this event and nothing happened. You know what I think a lot about in these events now is the, the sort of public turn Mark Zuckerberg made over the last several years where he went from being the guy who was talking really earnestly about how hard meta and Facebook in particular was trying with content moderation, uh, and saying things, true things like the reason we get so much crap for this is because we're the ones trying the hardest and the most transparently like i think that's basically true and he even he eventually was just like you know what this is actually not worth it like all i'm doing is signing myself up to get yelled at i'm gonna go back to posting about new whatsapp features and cool stuff in the metaverse and i'm gonna go back to being the product guy and nick clegg who nobody cares about gets to be the one who talks about content moderation and i think that is to me is so indicative of how we've gotten to this place of like it's somewhere between like resignation and nihilism where there is a sense that this isn't going to get better so why even try and what is better even look like because no one agrees on what it's supposed to be anymore so it just feels like at some point the only like rational thing to do is just throw up your hands and be like you know whatever you guys do whatever you want i'm out and it really really feels like that's where everyone has landed yeah it's a value proposition right?
8:23Like there, there is no value in, in content moderation for them at this point. And in maintaining that theater of content moderation, the value has, is just vastly diminished over the last few years. So it's like, okay, I don't need to do it anymore. I can move on to other stuff. And we've seen that a lot of things, a lot of these kinds of theatrical moments, particularly in big tech where they're like, oh yeah, we, we, you know, we care about being good. We care about doing all these things. They no longer have to, they realized that actually doesn't net them as much as they need it. They thought it would.
8:50And And so they've just kind of said, nah, never mind. Yeah. It's just fascinating to me because the immediate reaction from everyone is like, tone down the rhetoric. Be good to each other. We're all Americans. And then a day later, all of the social platforms are flooded with conspiracy theories. My favorite one is the shooter was in a video that was an ad for BlackRock, which is a private equity company that is an investor in gun companies. And they did something at a school. and he was like in the background of a video that they did about the teacher at the school and so now there's a black rock conspiracy theory.
9:24Okay. And it's like even that is like fine, fine. You should be able to post that to social media, like whatever. You want to have some wackadoos like idea but you look at Twitter and it's like because of the volume and because Twitter has driven away so many otherwise sane people or X has driven away so many other, it's not just like sort of conventional wisdom, right? And it's like, oh, this is the stuff that actually poisons the discourse, right? This is a thing that actually makes it harder to bring people together and actually creates the social division. And the platforms have basically given up.
9:56You can see it on TikTok, too, in a very different way. It's just people yelling at each other all day about this and insisting that one side or the other has it out for each other. And the platforms have basically given up trying to stop it. And it's an election year. It's bound to be polarized. But that's to me that's the big verge story here is there was a moment several years ago when the platforms really wanted To to like create healthy conversations that was Twitter's metric and now they're over it, you know and like metas like threads is a place for conversations and what that amounts to is People's just asking questions where they appear to be idiots.
10:34So people will yell at them for engagement all day long Yep like everyone's like people on like three open threads and like every third post of someone's like i just took a bite of an orange without taking the peel off did you know that that's bad it's like what the fuck like truly what are you talking about i i posted on threads the other day that amazon is a terrible website because amazon is a terrible website and i had a bunch of people accuse me of engagement bait for it which i really enjoyed it's the first time in a while i've been accused of engagement bait it made me very happy threads is the first platform that has completely incentivized people from asking questions because you no matter what you seem like you're Jason Clout it's very good it's good stuff but no I think to your point about the like matching all of that sort of giving up on content moderation with the fact that what like the FBI does immediately is try to get into the shooter's phone is like it's both getting worse and higher stakes all the time right and so much of what we've been seeing over the last few days is like Discord released a statement that the shooter had a Discord account.
11:41Like that is news that he was on Discord. And there's been this weird back and forth on whether there was some kind of like not manifesto, but like hint as to what was coming on a Steam account that seems like it was and it wasn't. And so we're in this place where it's like this stuff matters more than ever as they try to figure out what happened. and yet the ability to figure out what is actually going on feels like it's getting further and further away from us yeah and especially if you're just a normal person who's just opening an app on their phone right yeah so that's that we're going to cover a lot of that uh it seems important i'll give you one other example which is just a very neil example these photos we're all talking about those photos were taken by professional photographers who are in the pit to get paid to do a job with very expensive cameras.
12:31People have started arguing about the settings of the cameras, by the way, which is a very nerdy thing to do online. Those photos are owned. They're copyrighted images. One of them is owned by the New York Times. I think the other one is owned by the AP. They're everywhere. There's just straight copyright infringement. All the merch you're seeing, the hats with the photos on them, just straightforward copyright infringement. The photo agencies and the Times and all those other companies, they're going to have to issue a bunch of takedowns. We went out and asked them and basically all of them were like, we are evaluating our options.
13:04Weird, weird. Like that photo feels like it immediately belongs to the world. Right. But it's super dozen. Well, and in part, it feels that way because all of these other machines move so much faster than the lawyers for those news organizations. Right. Like the Etsy's popular page was filled with that kind of merch that you're talking about. Like Amazon has a thing that you can print on demand. end like literally all you have to do is upload a photo to amazon and boom you're selling merch like it is crazy how quick how quickly that stuff is able to happen now and it's happening faster in every other part of the system than like within these organizations that are actually trying to figure out what to do about it and so they all figure you know i'm gonna go i'm gonna make my money i'm gonna sell my t-shirts and i'm gonna get out before anybody else has even like figured out what their first move is and i would just wrap this up we spend a lot of time talking an AI, and boy, do I get the emails when we talk about AI and hint even a little bit that AI might be useful or interesting, right?
14:01That it's stealing work, that it's stealing creativity. If you have those feelings about the AI companies, and you can and should, I won't stop you, how do you feel about someone whose job it is to stand in a place where you might get shot at, take some of the most historic photos in the world, and immediately watch that stuff get stolen by very opportunistic merch vendors on Amazon. Is that bad? Like maybe, but I don't think anybody has the same immediate reaction to it the way that I know they do when we talk about opening. Like there's something there that's weird. We spend a lot of time talking about how copyright law is the only functional regulation in the internet because it's effectively a speech regulation.
14:40And you're about to see it used in a way that feels very much like a speech regulation. You want to sell a hat with this photo on it? some photo agency is going to come and tell you that you can't. And like we reckoning with that is it's right next to the content moderation question because a lot of people are going to lose their minds because they feel like that photo belongs to the world or those photos belong to the world. Anyway, lots of Verge stories there. I'm confident we remember the Shepard Fairey picture of Obama. We covered the copyright case around that photo of Obama for like 10 years.
15:13And we did a story on it like six months ago. It's going to be that again. Right. Just like what does it mean for these images to exist on the Internet in the way they do and who gets to who gets to make money on them? It's like kind of one question. And the second question is like that is content moderation and the content moderation apparatus of our information environment is it's in a I think as Alex was saying like in a pretty nihilistic space. Yeah. Like you have to make sure there's not the worst thing. You clear that bar. It's like a free for all. Yep. All right. So that is that event. immediately thereafter the Republican National Convention this week it was not a quiet week for politics in America President Biden has COVID, it's like chill times all around yeah not a quiet week by any the only news on the RNC that's worth talking about is Trump picked J.D.
16:05Vance who's a senator from Ohio is his running mate, his vice presidential nominee and then a million people in tech came out in support of Trump Elon Musk the Andreessen Horowitz partners Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz every crypto bro you can think of is pro-Trump they love J.D. Vance who was a venture capitalist took a lot of money from Peter Thiel over the years there's just a reactionary right wing crypto bro situation there there it is we will cover it more we don't want to talk a lot about it in the Vergecast now I want to make sure we do some reporting on it But J.D. Vance is a really interesting character.
16:46And I don't mean that in the like, you should read his book, which is bad. I mean that in the – it's not good. And the movie is worse. I mean that in the malleability of his positions is really interesting. His relationship to the power of big tech is interesting. He was just at a conference that Aaron Lauren Feiner was at called Remedy Fest where he said, I think Lena Khan is doing a good job. Why does he think Lena Khan is doing a good job? Because he thinks they should break up Google. Why does he want to break up Google? So he can push weird right-wing conspiracies on the internet. Like you start at, oh, we agree.
17:23And then you like drill down and it's like, oh, the flow of information is not going the way that some of these people want. So we will use the power of the state to like break these companies up. And you just like end up in this like total horseshoe theory, strange bedfellows moment. So we're going to cover a lot of that. I'm just warning the Vergesh listener like it's coming because it's so much. There's so much weird Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel, crypto tech money now involved in this presidential election that it's impossible for us not to cover it. Because Peter Thiel famously stayed out of the last one, right?
18:02Yeah. Well, I mean he said he was. He said he would. Yeah, yeah. It's out of control. All right. But I just, you know, I'm like a cranky Gen Xer. You can imagine how I feel about this entire situation. But here it is. Anyway, iOS 18 betas. They're out. They're here. No, David's been checking a bunch of them out. Like, David, you risked your phone. You took the hit for the rest of us. Yeah, I started with the iPad because I was like, that's safe. It's just an iPad. I have thousands of them. What could possibly go wrong? And now somehow I'm running iPadOS 18, iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and the new tvOS.
18:41Like, how is this my life? Everything is broken. My batteries have just absolutely gone to hell. But I get to use the cool new stuff. It's fine. It's a trade. I will say, the single most important thing that has happened to me in my technology life this year, I'm not exaggerating, is having RCS on the iPhone. Well, it's like saving your marriage, right? Like, literally. My wife uses an Android phone. She's a Pixel bro for life. And steadfastly refuses to understand that when she sends me a video, it looks like a potato every single time. So, like, what will happen is the woman who runs our daycare will send Anna an adorable video of my child.
19:23And Anna will forward it to me. and I literally can't see it because it's just eight pixels stacked that sort of looks like blonde hair. That's just all it is. But now I have RCS. The photos are big. The videos are big. It works correctly. I don't have to make her send me Google Photos links anymore. It's the best. And it's a little wonky and it falls back to SMS too often. It's getting better as time goes on. I think the networks and the carriers are all kind of figuring it out. but rcs on on iphone like huge win and to all the people who have been in my mentions telling me like oh you silly americans we all use whatsapp first of all congratulations like i don't know what to tell you great job second of all making people switch messaging apps is impossible it's just i don't care what messaging app you use try your best to get all your friends and family to use a different one just just try best of luck it's not going to work no matter what it is that you use and so for us here in the good old us of a we're stuck with text messaging so anything that makes text messaging slightly better humongous victory i'm excited for this to roll out wide and for people to how to put this i'm excited to see if when rcs rolls out wide with ios 18 if the green bubble stigma reduces yeah i actually think it's going to i really do i do because the the main things that it improves are what I haven't done is, is like really stress test group chats with this.
20:55So I, that is like the main problem, right? So I'll have to see how that does, but the ability to get read receipts and the ability to send high res images and videos and the typing indicators. Those are like the three things that immediately my messaging system with my wife got better. Also the tap backs work a little better, but now that you can use any emoji it's still kind of wonky on the android side uh because if you'd use one that it doesn't recognize it just punts it through as a text message uh but i it's like it's not all the way better and there's all the new iMessage stuff the like animations and the text decorations and all that that you can do that you still can't do in android but it's much closer and i think it's like it's not going to get all the way better but i think it's going to get a little better is this going to work in messages on a mac yes i have been rcs-ing from my mac but only because it's linked here just forwarding to your phone does it break as often as like i feel like when you're just text messaging it breaks all the time it it was actually worse at first uh like when i first downloaded all the betas it was really slow and was occasionally just failing to send messages at all but in the last i would say week it's been super stable uh so i i have i have high hopes for where this is gonna land but it was definitely wonky at first all right i there's we're gonna have to do endless follow-up once this hits wide if people like it yeah um you can try the phone mirroring on the mac too that seems amazing it is it is and it isn't like it is because it works right it's like it's like continuity camera in the sense that like it just it just mostly does the thing and every once in a while it doesn't for some indiscernible reason uh like liam our producer we were on a call the other day and he just for the whole call couldn't get continuity camera to work and then like the next time you try it.
22:44It works. And phone mirroring is a little like that. But the biggest problem is you can't change the size of the window. So if you're on a laptop screen, it shows up like relatively close to kind of real size of your iPhone, which I think is what they were going for. But if you're on a big, densely pixel display, it shows up teeny tiny. It's like I'm on a pretty I'm on a 27 inch screen here. And the iPhone on my screen is like half the size of my actual iPhone. And there's nothing I can do about it. And it drives me nuts. That is great. I'm sorry. That's, that's great. And it's like, I know that's like a beta bug.
23:17Like they have to know and they'll do something, but it's actually, it's just hilarious. It's such a stage manager problem where they're like, what if we give you a new way to do it? And like, no, let me drag the corner of my window to make it bigger. This is not complicated. It's very good. Does it, it's, you don't have a touch screen on a Mac. So does it like do, if you have the magic mouse or the magic track pad, It's great. It just like maps all the gestures the same way you swipe and you scroll and everything else on a I use a Logitech mouse and it's basically unusable. You like click on the bar at the bottom to go to the home screen.
23:51Some things will scroll. Some things don't scroll. You can't scroll left and right. Like so on Instagram, if there's a gallery, I just can't do it. I think some of these things will probably get better over time. I also think Apple it's it's really it's like on a laptop. It's solid, right? Because you have the trackpad, you have the gestures. It all works fine. but Apple is just not interested in you if you don't use exclusively Apple gear. And so I think this is like for, for all of us, Logitech fans out there, this is going to be problematic. Yeah. I was about to say, this is, this is kind of common for all Apple integrations on the computer.
24:26You're just like, okay, cool. I can't do any of this unless I buy a magic track pad. And then I have to use that instead of a really good mouse. I don't want to. Yeah, pretty much. I hate the magic track pad. Like I know there are a lot of people out there who really like it. I hate it. Yeah. Like I get the idea of it, but because it's so far away from the screen, it's so divorced from what's actually going on that it feels like it's trying way too hard. And it just it feels bad at the angle my hands are at all the time. I hate it. No, I can't stand it. That's why I use a trackball because the trackball, you can sometimes set like a key so you can still get a lot of the gestures in by like hitting a key.
25:01Oh, that's cool. But with a regular mouse, you're just like, well, I guess I don't I don't horizontal scroll ever again. Cool. Can't do it. I'm out. I can't wait to try this with tiny little phone monkeying with a mouse. Oh, it's going to be great. Just truly for me, I suspect there are going to be lots of little things people do with it. Like for me, like the one I wrote about in the story is my thermostat only works as a mobile app. So just being able to like fire that up from my laptop is really handy without getting my phone out of my bag or whatever. But truly for me, it's just going to be a way to drag and drop things from my computer to my phone and vice versa.
25:35like it just solves the airplay problem of i have a photo here and i need it to be over here and it's it's easier and faster and that feature is not out yet but it's apparently coming uh and just as a drag and drop machine i'm very excited about it yeah you gotta get home bridge dude no tony you need a little raspberry pi that just bridges your thermostat into home kit you'll be great then you get home assistance to also be a bridge into home kit we could do this for you that alex and I are waiting. Yeah, we're here. We're coming down. We can put a little Tamagotchi home bridge server in our house.
26:07I'm stuck at trying to get a lock for my front door that I can open with my fingerprint. And even that, Anna's like, no. Keys are great. She's not wrong. Keys are great. Somebody like hocks a loogie on it and you're just like, I guess I don't get in my house ever again. Once you get to, you can unlock this door by beeping your phone at it. Then the flip is my wife is like, I don't ever want to see again. I don't ever want to see a key again in my life. Don't you dare. It's not a choice that we have. We need Becky and Anna to hang out. Can we make this happen? We were test driving a Rivian. So next week on Decoder, it's a CEO of Rivian, RJ Scringe.
26:46And so we had a Rivian to test drive. And they didn't give us the keys. Rivians do come with a regular key fob. But they just gave us the cards. And I showed them. I was like, these are the keys. And she was like, no, they're not. Just reject it. She was just like, I'm never going to drive that car. No, thanks. She's like, I don't want to know anything about that at all. Like 0 % interest in your dumb key cards. All right, we got to talk about the biggest thing in the beta, which is a calculator and the iPad. Yeah, that is it. I mean, when I think about WWDC, like what did they announce? Some bullshit and then a calculator for the iPad.
27:26I mean, that's basically right. change your life is it like a whole new world no i i confess i am slightly disappointed by the whole you haven't been doing like like high school algebra this whole time wow so i think apple it really thinks that if you're like a graduate student studying mathematics that you're gonna love this and i think apple also thinks there's like tens of millions of those people in the world uh and they're wrong on both counts but the weird thing is so like the calculator app is fine right it's a calculator app and i think it's so funny that apple is like we wanted to really take the time to get this right it's like no dude you shipped the calculator app and then you also made another feature like you could have just shipped the calculator app it's just the calculator app with bigger buttons i don't know i don't know how to be clear about that that's what it is uh but the cool thing is is math notes right and it's like that is both it's the thing inside of notes where you can you can hand write stuff and it'll do the equations for you and that thing is incredible when it works which is a lot but also missing some sort of obvious stuff like you write a list of numbers and then you draw a line underneath and it'll automatically sum those numbers up for you right and then you can actually tap on one of the numbers and drag a slider to make the number go up and down.
28:47Super cool. And it attempts to do it in your handwriting, which failed spectacularly for me. But I think that's just because my handwriting is so bad. It's like borderline unreadable. I've talked to some other people with pretty good handwriting and they've said it works much better. So your mileage I think will vary depending on your handwriting. But there's just little things. So one of the use cases I've heard a bunch is you're totaling up expenses for a weekend. right i'm in the middle of planning vacation and we're trying to like total how much everything is going to cost so you write a bunch of numbers down it'll total them all up for you but then if you go next to it and you write like food colon next to the you know 225 the whole thing falls apart it just like doesn't understand what your equation is anymore and it won't total anything up for you so it's like you have to you have to operate under these very like specific confines of what it understands as an equation and it's awesome and as long as you do that so this is what I mean by like graduate math, right?
29:43Like if you're sitting there doing math problems as math problems, it's awesome. And it works really well. But if you're like a person taking notes and you want to do math inside of them, it doesn't work quite as well. Does that make sense? So it's for like just kids who have homework. It's for doing math. Like I, it's like, that really is what it is. It's like, what I want it to be is like, do the math inside of my notes as I take notes. And it is not for that. It's for doing math problems. Do you think that the iPad Pro is now going to become to like mathematicians and scientists what the iPad mini was to pilots?
30:21I need to, I need to write this story. I am so convinced that this pilot thing is a lie. And I have no evidence for this, but I'm, I'm, I'm so sure that like three Delta pilots got iPad minis and then Apple was like yes this is it every time I fly they're still bringing on briefcases full of paperwork like if this got replaced by iPads I don't know where it is but anyway all that aside I do think Apple really really really really wants the iPad to be an education device like I think the way that a whole generation grew up with Macs in the classroom and basically the generations recently have grown up with Chromebooks Apple is like desperate for that thing to be iPads.
Read the full transcript
31:06And I think it sees the pencil in particular as a way to get there. I don't necessarily know if it's going to work. I'm also not the target demo. So I don't know. But like, it's very clear that that is like, even even going back and looking at the demos, they're they're doing really sophisticated math, like not the kind of thing that a normal person does in their day to day life. And I think for the sophisticated stuff, it works better than for just like trying to make sense of my notes. I'm going to miss Texas instruments when the TI-83 gets killed by the iPad Pro. There's a store in my little town.
31:40I'm not sure if they make any money selling anything other than TI-83s to high schoolers. Like they just have a wall of TI-83s and then all the high schoolers in town go to that store to buy their TI-83. And it's just so confusing. The whole thing is confusing to me, especially because when I was in high school 20 years ago we were using TI-83s. Yeah. 25 years ago we were using Is that the most enduring technology of the last two decades? I feel like it is. Here's what I learned about the TI-82. The 83 was different. The case of a TI-82, the shell was exactly the right size to fit a Game Boy pocket.
32:20So you could just slide a Game Boy pocket up into that shell. And the thing that we had to figure out was how to hide the sound the game you know didn't your teachers like gosh Neil is really doing some calculations we were just fully playing Game Boy he is math and so hard his parents are gonna be so proud but the problem was you had to turn it on before before he walked in because you can't shut off the startup people the Game Boy Pocket yeah definitely not caught at least once all right two other apple things i want to talk about one uh very funny um apple has partnered with tabula to put ads in apple news you don't know what tabula is except you obviously do it's the chum box provider on every website in the world including our own we don't we don't like it uh but you know we don't work for free so there's some tabula ads at the bottom of our pages they make our company some money and then they pay the bills it's famously the belly fat ads for years that was who was serving the belly fat ads and we've written stories about the belly fat ads I think it was Caitlin Tiffany wrote a story for us that chased all the way down what the one weird vegetable is oh no way it's corn
33:36it's nonsensical
33:40all bad but Apple doesn't want to do ads they had a partnership with NBC to sell ads in Apple News it didn't work I don't think they got the scale. And now they have this partnership with Taboola. And it's like, what kind of ads are we going to see in Apple News now? And then you look, and Taboola is actually a huge company, like massive company, because they just put the garbage across the entire web. And wait, did Taboola buy Outbrain, the other chum box provider, or was it vice versa? No, it didn't happen. It got broken. Oh, it was so big it wasn't allowed. Yeah. the FTC said no only we must have competition in the chum box industry I can't believe we didn't do features on chum box warfare oh my god anyhow uh very bad one of the least one of the least on brand deals in Apple history yeah uh and I think they're gonna I think they're gonna keep it because what are you gonna do I think Apple's at the what are you gonna do phase of this where they were just like, yeah, whatever, it's money.
34:43What are you going to do? You're going to go somewhere else? You're going to not read Apple News? Publishers, you're going to respond to chum boxes and Apple? Well, look at your sites. And I think they're just going to take the money. There's no way that, unless it's like egregiously bad, which with Taboola could be egregiously bad. Yeah. Just a weird deal for them all the way around. People reacted to it so negatively, and I don't think they give a shit. Yeah, I think that's right. It's just Apple being a content creator, right? They're in the industry of content now in a way they haven't been for a long time.
35:18And this is just like finalizing the form for that. Yeah, it's just if you think about Apple's pitch to everyone. This is not it. This is like putting the ads back in the games. This is the premium experience. This is trusted publishers. It's not just garbage and then taboo ads. Yeah. I mean, this is what this is what endlessly chasing services revenue eventually leads you to. Right. Like it just it just gets uglier and uglier as time goes on, because you have to keep finding ways to turn pennies into dollars and turn free things into pennies. And it's it sucks. And like it's this is going to go in the news app.
35:57It's going to go in the stocks app. Like Apple has gotten slowly sort of frog boiling Lee aggressive about advertising all over. IRS and this just feels like it feels like it's about this will not be the last thing we see from Apple with ugly ads I don't think. But don't worry David because in just seven days you too can lose seven inches off the waistline. But not if you eat corn. Stay away from corn but get this great supplement. Why don't we hawk supplements? We could be doing the show on a boat. The other piece of Apple news is much more I don't think we're ever going to hawk supplements you all know that I want a boat but there's a line and that's it the lightning round remains unsponsored if you want to buy Neelai a boat called supplements though that's pretty funny and I will allow that still on the table that's still on the table and there's one last piece of Apple news I think is really interesting and sort of like in a tangential way related which is the sort of competitive pressure put on the App Store by the DMA and the EU and by emulators means that Apple has now approved the first like 90s PC emulator for iOS.
37:16So it's UTMSC. It can run Windows XP. That looks like Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. If you want to run Linux on your phone, which I think you do. uh this was they rejected it it was gonna go into alt store and then apple approved it and you can see just that competitive dynamic occurring where they do not want the other store to be good yep so they are loosening the rules of their own store over and over again and that competition is working it rules i think it was riley tested who who runs alt store and does delta and has been on this show a couple of times uh i think it was him that posted basically it turns out the best way to get your app onto the app store is to is to threaten to be on alt store that's exactly yeah he did it it's true like it is it is real that like any it is increasingly clear that if you want to get something on to an iphone there are going to be other ways to do it and apple is so desperate to keep you in the app store that it will bend its rules in any direction it has to to keep you there.
38:23I believe I owe somebody some money because I said on this show not that long ago, I would be shocked if we got a full PC emulator because Apple's rules have been very clear that it's for retro games, right? Like that was clearly what Apple wanted these things to be for. So this strikes me as yet another goalpost move that I didn't even expect for what Apple will allow. Is it a PC emulator? It's XP. so utm will let you emulate all the way up through windows 11 so i don't i don't i have not tried it in the app so i don't actually know what's possible but west davis was trying out xp and it took him like two hours to install it yeah these things are not easy but like it'll you can emulate an x86 pc like i think with some work there's probably a lot more you can do here than gets credit for.
39:16Also, you could emulate XP and then emulate a Windows 11 computer with an emulator on Windows XP. It just turtles all the way down this ditch. Yes! Hell yes! So I think it's interesting. So there's a reason they've not wanted, like, general purpose computer emulators. Because they don't want people to run apps on them. Right. Like, it's a big, complicated loophole. But it's a loophole. Right? You put a general purpose PC emulator on the phone and then anyone can just run whatever software they want without paying Apple 30%. Not a loophole that Apple will allow. But now they've allowed it. And what's fascinating to me about this is like maybe on the phone this isn't such a big deal because whatever, it's a phone.
39:57An iPad running Mac OS 9 or even Windows XP is like, wait, does this rule? Like is that? I did a lot of work in Mac OS 9. Like many things happened in my life in the context of Mac OS 9. Like, yeah, I'll just run Mac OS 9 on my iPad all day. It has better multitasking than the iPad does today. Yeah, that's real. More customization, too. Yeah. Mine was neon green. The apps don't just quit in the background on you all the time in Mac OS 9. Windows XP actually has technically more advanced multitasking than Mac OS 9. So it's just like you just find yourself running in this circle where you're like, wait does the window management and multitasking of an emulated operating system from 20 years ago is that a better ipad experience i mean it honestly might be do you think we're going to get to the point where you can emulate a mac on your iphone and then mirror your phone to that mac that's being emulated on your iphone and then use that phone god i hope so that's the dream right there i want to use my phone three level steam on my phone that's what i'm going for i I think you just invented Atrix, the Motorola Atrix.
41:10Oh, man, that thing ruled. It did not. It did not. Anyway, I'm very excited for this emulation scene, in particular to hit the iPad, because this is the thing that Apple has feared. And if you get to a place where it's just easy, where it's like push a button and turn your iPad into a Windows PC, and people start doing it, that's the thing that makes Apple take iPad multitasking seriously. I don't know where you get there. There's a glimmer of it now, which is fascinating. Competition, it works. Yeah. All right, we got to take a break. We are just, I don't even know. We're way over. It's next week already.
41:45We'll be right back. 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. 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 pay to promote.
42:22Promoted 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. Find out why more than 2.5 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.
43:01All right, we're back with what David has called the is this anything gadget bonanza. David, what does that mean exactly? So one of my favorite kinds of gadgets is when somebody makes something and then just sort of hands it to you and they're like, is this, did I do anything here? Like, is this something? Do you like this? Does this solve any problems for you? And this week was an unusually good week for is this anything gadgets. And I mostly mean that as a compliment. I love gadgets that are like, I have a weird new idea about the future. Let's see if it works. That is like the verge is built on those gadgets.
43:33We love that stuff. But this is an unusually weird week of is this anything gadgets. But first, the first one of them, it's good that we're running over already because we have a real what is a photo apocalypse to talk about here. Which, Neelai, you came in real hot about this before we started recording. So we should just talk about this. There are these new Canon cameras that have a lot of AI things that have made you feel a lot of feelings. Yeah. Okay. So there's a new Canon EOS R1 and R5 Mark II. And they are some of the first cameras, especially pro cameras like this from brands like this, that just have AI features in them.
44:10And the AI features are fine. Like, they're fine. They have noise reduction that gets you two more stops. So you can run the ISO a little bit hotter and the noise reduction is good. That's AI powered. And then they have 400 % image upscaling, which is bananas. So if you just think about it, they've got a sensor in them. Light hits the sensor. That makes the image. The sensor is usually what determines the size of the image. Now the cameras can just make you an image that's four times bigger. The image is however big you want it to be. And it's just in the camera. And it is based on the fact that the camera knows everything about the light hitting the sensor.
44:48It knows the lens you're using. It knows the settings you're at. And so the argument is their AI upscaling will be better in camera because it's all one closed ecosystem than if you take it out to one of the many, many, many software upscalers that exist out in the world. Weird, right? Weird to have the camera itself generate pixels that weren't there. I mean, this is the stuff we've been talking about with smartphones for like two years now, right? And we're now at a point where this feels like it's about to become unavoidable. and there was a thing where it was like, okay, the last bastion of photographic honesty is going to be these fancy high-end cameras and even that is going away really, really fast.
45:34I'm just so surprised it's Canon doing it and not like Sony or Panasonic or anybody else who's been in the mirrorless game. This does seem like a Panasonic move. They're like, do you want our cameras now? How about this? Yeah, right? Like Olympus. These companies have all been here doing mirrorless cameras for a lot longer than Canon and messing with computational photography a lot longer than Canon. And Canon was like, nope, we're doing it now. Yeah. That's exactly how Canon talks, by the way. I agree. Thomas Canon. Thomas Canon. Just out there yelling. So it's wonky. You got to use some Canon menus.
46:13The cameras can only do it with pictures they've taken themselves. oddly the upscaling only works with jpegs and hif's in case you're a sort of monster shooting heaps on your teeth so hard i wonder if that's an intentional choice that they're like we we have to preserve the sanctity of the raw file but we can start to do weirder stuff with some of these other things well yeah canon's also always done kind of weird stuff with the the regular ones right like the jpegs they they would make them warmer too like it was noticeably warmer on a Canon JPEG. Yeah, I mean, like, going from a RAW to a JPEG is a processing step.
46:49There's stylistic choices you can make. If you have a modern DSLR and you shoot RAW at high ISOs, the pictures are going to be noisier than the JPEGs because the JPEGs have noise reduction built into them. But, like, that is usually taking detail out, not adding it in. And so, like, you're like, yeah, like, I personally love the AI noise removal in Lightroom. I use it all the time. And I think I've said on the show, like, it has changed my relationship to some of my older cameras because it's so good. But now the camera's doing it itself. And there's none, as far as I can tell, none of the AI metadata that everyone has been talking about putting into these things to indicate that some of these pixels are fake.
47:28Like, the computer just made up some of these pixels. Some of these details might not have been there. Like, we don't know. In the examples I've seen, it's kind of accurate. But then you're like, is that right? Like, we just don't know how it's going to work in every case. and then the chain of metadata that you would need to verify this is a real image, no, it just doesn't exist. Actually, we were talking about the images of the Trump shooting. Immediate AI generated images from that, AI modifications. Lots and lots of weird images. They changed the Secret Service agents to smiling and stuff.
48:05All this crazy stuff. and all of the stuff that we have talked about for years about content, authenticity, about labels, about blah, it's just out the window. Yeah, nowhere to be found. None of that worked. You're like, we're going to build in all these save cards. Are you using any save cards? It's like, no. We were overwhelmed by sheer volume of crap. And so it's fascinating that Canon's putting it in the camera. Now, it is buried in the menu system of a professional Canon DSLR. The apocalypse is not totally here yet, but it's like staring us in the face. That's kind of the thing I've been thinking about with this this week is the thing you said, and I think it was around the pixel last year about like the question is where in the pipeline do you encounter this ability?
48:47And that ends up being really important. Like in Lightroom, that's an app you downloaded onto your computer that you brought your phone in or your photo into and you pressed a button on purpose to do it. And that that feels like one thing as opposed to having it happen, you know, in Google Photos where your photos live or in the app on your phone where the photos go like the camera roll. And this goes even further to, OK, now it's a setting on your camera. What if you move it to being a button on your camera to what if you move it to just being there on your camera by default? like where this goes from a thing I'm doing to you've just completely changed what is happening without me even being aware of it all just feels very weird and as soon as you move it to the device it feels like you've you've shifted that threshold in a pretty meaningful way because now I think like what what a lot of people want reasonably is to be able to just take photos off of their camera and have them be good right like that that's a good outcome I don't think most people want to muck around with their photos in Lightroom so in a certain way it makes sense to say, okay, this thing that you're doing that we can actually do very well with AI, we're just going to do it for you because it's a good thing.
49:50But it changes that to this is now something you've done to my photos rather than something I am able to do. And it does change things. I can't wait for the first wedding photographer who uses this and gets a whole new set of lace detailing on a wedding dress. Or just like a new bridesmaid. Yeah, yeah. There's an extra one there now. What's up, girl? I mean, look, the R1 is$62.99. and the R5 Mark II is$42.99. If they could be like, add bridesmaid. Yeah. That's the money. I would pay that money. Just add a bridesmaid to all of my photos. Just a picture of your kid and a bridesmaid. There she is.
50:29Different one every time. Yeah. Let's go for it. Yeah. You know, there are professional photographers right now who have basically pushed Meta into changing the Made with AI label that they're putting on Instagram. So you would export a photo from Lightroom or Photoshop. It would take some metadata that's like, you used AI to edit this image. They would put it on Instagram. And Instagram would add a label that was made with AI when maybe all they had done was the denoise. Or maybe all they had done is a little generative filter or something. Like some thing that is becoming very commonplace where the photographers were like, no, this image is not generated with AI.
51:08I edited it with AI and that is meaningfully different when I communicate with the audience and Meta was like yeah we agree with you that's weird and we're just at a place where actually we might need 50 labels to explain to people what all the different things you can do upscaled in camera with AI Bridesmaid added Bridesmaid added right versus I typed a prompt and now here's a picture there's a big range of possibilities It's a perfect segue into the Samsung thing that Allison Johnson wrote about this week. It rules. I love it so much. It's so stupid. This is the most Samsung caution to the goddamn wind.
51:50I can't tell if I'm mad about this or impressed or whatever. I was mad about it, reading it, until you get to where she tried to make the Loch Ness Monster come out of a lake. And instead it was just a giant green bear with like super shredded green bear. And she tried to make like the Pope as a rabbit. Like she took a photo of a rabbit and tried to be like, make this the Pope in a Pope mobile. And it was just like, we're going to put a giant rabbit head inside a car. Okay. So just to quickly explain what's going on here. Samsung's image generation software is bizarrely woke. Wokeness has infected Samsung Galaxy Folds.
52:30and they will not let you generate the pope that's probably it yeah uh the alison johnson is testing samsung's new phones the flip six and the fold six nobody listen to what nila is saying it's very important that you never listen to what nila says uh and i think the fold six has a feature called sketch to image which is you can you can take a photo draw pretty crudely a thing you want on that photo and it will generate that thing onto your photo so i think the first one i saw her do was it's a it's a picture of like a harbor with a port and some flowers in the foreground and she draws this like adorable little cartoon b uh and i i guess prompts it to be out of focus and she didn't prompt it oh she didn't prompt it oh wow she just said give me a b yeah oh and she put it on a part of the photo that's out of focus.
53:25And so it generated an out of focus bee in that spot in the photo. And if you just look at the photo, there is not a single chance in hell you would think that that bee was not part of the photo. There is a tiny little watermark in gray in the bottom left that says AI generated content. If you squint. I literally, I have looked at this photo a hundred times. I hadn't seen that until just now. It is Samsung being like I can't tell if I'm upset or I'm just impressed at the fuck it. Let's just do disinformation. Would you like to draw some disinformation? Not the Pope, sir, but any other thing is fine.
54:06It is crazy. Look at the pictures in the article. She put a ship in a harbor. It is true. The bear is very good. She's got a hat on a bunny. and then the water if you look at the picture of the the hat on the bunny the watermark is invisible it's there it's just totally blended in the grass and samsung is like why wouldn't you just make that bigger for people you also you just crop it out it's not in the photo right this is what i mean by the what is a photo apocalypse like this is full what is a photo apocalypse so you are giving people the tool to just generate fake imagery based on real imagery and then send it out into the world with nothing.
54:48They can just lie. And we're going to get to a place, I think, more quickly than people want to, where no one trusts any image. And then we're going to have to work backwards from there. Or the alternative, which is very scary, where everyone trusts every image. There's not going to be some middle ground, right? Yeah, I don't think the middle ground exists. you either just say, oh, sure, it's probably all real and let the chips fall where they may, or you trust nothing. And trusting nothing requires a lot more work. And so I think it's actually easier to just say, oh, sure, it's probably real and I'll be wrong sometimes and that's fine.
55:26And I think nihilism kind of leads you there in a way that's pretty scary. I just, I'm gonna reserve my judgment on how panicked me about this until we find out if you can just draw abs on someone and it gives them abs. in which case you'd be pro I'd probably be con because I don't want to see a bunch of I want the abs to be real no fake abs here only real abs so I'm very curious to see it's good to have moral boundaries I appreciate that about you small six pack of moral boundaries and that moral boundary is shredded abs that's it don't fake me out Watch board or nothing. So interestingly, Samsung is not doing this locally.
56:14The picture gets sent out to the cloud, which is where some of the content moderation seems to come in. Right. Like once you go away from your phone and into a cloud server, everyone wants to take responsibility for it, which is good. Yeah. Tech companies taking responsibility. Unclear how long it will take over time. You know, these systems aren't being stressed yet. Data usage, power usage, all this stuff. but boy did samsung just be like fine just draw on the photo and like we'll just make a fake photo for you yeah you want the locknest monster have the locknest monster or a green bear or a green bear yeah all right is this if you're calling it the is this anything gadget bonanza is this anything this is something yeah i don't know what but it is something but i would like to i would like to segue to one that is the most is this anything of anything uh which is that years after essential the the once promising andy rubin led phone company went away uh we finally are starting to get information about the second thing they were building there was a lot of uh like i think at the time we saw like renders of this very tall sort of remote control-y looking phone but somebody found one on ebay and got a hands-on uh i think this is the most interesting phone i've seen in years and it also might be so stupid it looks so dumb yeah i i love stupid tech so i'm just i adore this thing i don't understand how you would use it long term it's basically the best way i can describe it is like imagine two ipod nanos stacked on top of each other but it's all screen it's just it's just a remote control and it looks like it's basically just a bunch of widgets which uh perhaps unsurprisingly makes me very excited i love a good widget I think that my big call out for this one is that it was obviously made before TikTok was a thing.
58:07No, but on this, you could open TikTok on the bottom and then TikTok again on the top. Little tiny TikTok. Yeah. It'd be dope. I could make a TikTok and watch a TikTok all at exactly the same time. I bet it would be really good for fidgeting, like just kind of flipping it around in your hand, the whole phone, because it's so long. so if you will recall essentials plan was to do ambient computing they were going to put stuff in your house the phone was just the first thing so maybe this really was just a remote control that's very possible yeah that it was like they they were making a home device i wrote a whole thing about this one back when i was at wired that they were their big plan was like you said to have they were doing sort of an alexa thing but were promising to do it in a much more elegant way uh and even just looking at some of the stuff here it is very much like get quick information and see what's going on rather than like endlessly scroll on instagram which like i'd take that that that works but i just i miss this thing where there were people asking questions about what size a phone was supposed to be and now no we're we've just decided that phones should be huge and leave weird divots in your pinky from trying to hold them now i'm gonna say this isn't anything Okay.
59:19Yeah, you're right. Sorry. Well, it is objectively not anything. Can I interest you in the tiny pot? Is this anything? Which one? Which one? Let me back this up. Instead, can I interest you in a little silicon case for your Apple Watch that gives it a scroll wheel that appears to just mechanically move the digital crown? Yes. Yeah. Very good. I mean, perfect. I wish it wasn't$80. No, that's the right price. You wish it was more? That's the price of hubris. They have a version without the wheel for like$30. Oh, come on. And I'm just like, what's the point of that? Who wants that? Okay, so I will just remind everyone that when the Apple Watch was launched, you can go back and watch this video.
1:00:07Bono was there. They built a tent at a community college in California. This is a real thing that happened. And they sat us all down, and they were like, with every new Apple product comes a revolutionary input device. You'll recall the mouse. Here's Steve Jobs and a mouse. You'll recall the click wheel on the iPod, the multi-touch on the iPhone, and now with the Apple Watch, the digital crown. And I just think a device that's like, no, actually, click wheel. What if we just use a click wheel to turn the digital crown? It's perfect. I will pay$80 just for that. Are you going to put your watch in it?
1:00:47I mean, I have so many old Apple watches. If I can just shove one in here. It does look delightful. I don't know why they've exposed the heart rate sensors on the back. Like, are you supposed to hold it, press it to your neck? Yeah. No, okay, wait. I have one. Oh, it's for charging. It's for charging. Oh, sure. That makes sense. That makes more sense. my stupid usability question about this is the watch every time you take it off it locks like the way it authenticates is by staying on your body and then you turn it on are you going to have to enter your passcode every single time you want to touch this thing because that sounds awful you used to be able to disable can you turn that off okay yeah you should be able to turn the watch stuff off okay if that's the case I'm going to buy the hell out of this thing also it will decimate the battery life because you're absolutely not supposed to actively use the watch very much, but I don't care.
1:01:41I'm going to use it. Okay, this is something. Love it. I will say that between the weird Bux Palma news cycle that you and Craig have kicked off and the interest in these things, something's happening out there. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's measurable. I don't know if anyone's actually giving up their phone, but people are very much like, I'm sick of these rectangles. Dumber, worse rectangles. There is a moment of phone disintermediation that is happening that I think is very exciting. Let's see. Oh, gosh, there's so many. Let's do the Dyson OnTrack headphones. This is nothing.
1:02:20That's the first time I've said that name out loud. I don't like it. The OnTrack? Bad, bad. Dyson made very customizable headphones. That's cool. I'm super down with that. And they don't look like a band mask, which I would argue is a tremendous improvement. And they cost$500. Less improvement, yeah. Not as good. Yeah. I'm really curious to see how they work out. I know Chris Welch is going to probably review them, call them in. But yeah. They do look cool. They're just expensive. Did the Bane ones sound good? I don't remember. They sounded okay. But this is giving real skull candy. And I don't know if that's a derogatory skull candy or a positive.
1:02:56It's just skull candy. It's a little derogatory. For$500, it's derogatory. Yeah. I think my issue with these and I know people love Dyson products I just want to sit on an airplane with headphones that say Dyson on them in this way yeah also there's no fan where is the fan you've got one core technology Dyson gosh yeah okay maybe there's something but I don't think there's anything the way you just said Dyson in this way makes me think you bring your vacuum on the plane and you're happy to show that off but you don't want to rep Dyson in this way. That's what I'm saying. It's very confusing. Eli with his air wrap styler just like killing it on the plane.
1:03:37It's like if you sat down on an airplane, I don't know, and you like opened a box of food and had a Chevy logo. What is happening here? This makes no sense. Yeah, I can give you that. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I think Dyson just had a bunch of headphone parts left and just shipped them. That's my theory. Let's do the last one and then I have more. I have we could do this forever but let's just do one last one uh and then we should go and I think it is the most is this anything of all the major phone companies right now and it's that Google just leaked its own Pixel 9 yeah Google was just like here's the Pixel 9 Pro is this anything I like they asked I don't know yeah that should be the title of the YouTube video they're like do you like this they did this was it last year was it last year that they leaked the Pixel like it's just a leak can we stop calling this a leak they just posted it they just posted the phone that's in like a high-res photo they're like here it is when there's a they did a video that just says introducing the google pixel 9 pro you're right they just launched the damn that's not a leak you're absolutely right yeah they just were like here it is for now the camera bump is outrageous it's huge what are we doing guys yeah i the camera bump is like starting to be the size of a phone like that the little i i apple what's the apple watch phone called tiny pod yeah the tiny pod i'm i'm curious if the tiny pod with the apple watch in it is as big as the bump on the okay so pixel 10 you make the bump removable that's what i was gonna say yeah now we're talking yeah now we're talking that's the good stuff we just did it it's really like the whole story of this thing is going to be it runs gemini fast that's like it's very clear that is the whole sales pitch here yeah which what else does google i do not find any people but i'm not convinced gemini is doing all the things google wants to do we'll get to that later but if that's the whole pitch here it has to be good and what have we learned about ai hardware it's probably broken and i don't believe you uh-huh so yeah we're gonna say uh that launch is august 13th right uh so tbd but i'm gonna i'm gonna say tentatively it is not anything uh we should take a break but the last one is the the oneplus pad 2 has a vibrating stylus um for reasons this is not anything you know what you're writing utensil to vibrate a linear motor inside that makes the tip vibrate to give you that feeling of a pen writing on paper because you know how your pen vibrates yeah that's what I expect I think we should do is this anything every week this isn't anything this is great yeah okay great that's it we're done the tiny pod I think is the big winner the already successful apple watch now in a weirder case that's something that's something all right we'll be right back 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.
1:07:00LinkedIn 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.
1:07:37Find 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.
1:07:58All right, we're back. This is a complicated lightning round. Yeah, we got a lot to do. We do. We have to deliver on the$27 million house. It sucks. But I think we should close with that. So, David, you're going last. I'm so excited. Okay. I'll just start with my favorite extremely silly story of the week. Comcast, investor, invokes me, our parent company. They don't like me. They don't like me because of the way I'm going to tell the following story. Comcast owns NBC which has the Olympics right? Yes Comcast loves this because every year the Olympics is like a big deal for Comcast and NBC they get all the programming people are jumping they're flipping they're swimming you know the Olympics those are the three things typically this year they have break dancing which is to be fair kind of jumping and every Olympic sport is one of those three jumping, flipping, or swimming
1:08:56as you know Sports in America are basically in 720p and have been forever because there's no competition for broadcast Comcast is going to do the Olympics in 4k but they're only going to do it Comcast is going to do the Olympics in 4k, probably in Peacock but probably like the horrible upscaled 4k that they do if you have a Comcast cable box, you will get a high bit rate, low latency 4K feed of the Olympics. Yeah. So if you have an XI6, a Xi6, I don't know what kind of cable box that is because I live here in the future. But if you have one of their cable boxes, you can get hi-fi audio and a 30 megabits per second, low latency 4K stream of the Olympics, which sounds awesome.
1:09:46Frankly, that sounds awesome. It is just ridiculous that they're limiting it to their K-Lux, which they say they have to do because of their custom network, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's absolutely no reason they have to do this. No. Why didn't they put those resources into Peacock and letting Peacock do it? I will say this is going to work for Comcast. Like the obvious move here is to get people who don't have this box but have a Comcast account to upgrade to this box. And it's going to work. Like the sporting events that make people go out and buy new higher res televisions. Like it's the same push.
1:10:19It's going to work. Are the Olympics that? Yeah, dude, it's the Olympics. The Olympics are huge. Sometimes. So you get Dolby Vision, HDR and Atmos Immersive Sound. And then channel 1350, which is USA 4K, will get. It's just the one channel. It's not all of the Olympics. It's just USA. So you get the Olympics and Monk reruns. Yes. Congrats. Yes. It's 24-7 access to the national stream. Oh, that's worse. I take it back. Never mind. Yeah. Peacock. Just Peacock's going to like Peacock. They seem to have been doing a really smart design for it. I got an email this morning telling me that my Peacock price is about to go up.
1:11:05And guess when my price changes? Oh, it's in the middle of the Olympics. Surprise. you can test and see if it like which is better with or without paid peacock i i am required to keep paid peacock because it somehow has all my shows we've talked about this this is true this i don't know why i suggested peacock is weirdly like central to my day-to-day existence but i try not to i try not to think too much about that because it just makes me sad you get all the girls five ever though so i do like that if you have a compatible streaming device you will get Dolby Vision HDR and Atmos, but you don't get the enhanced 4K.
1:11:45This is very complicated. All I'm saying is Sony Pictures Core, the rebranded Sony Abravia Core that I have on my Sony TV. Still showing me Madam Web at 80 megabits per second. The finest streaming experience you can have in America today. Alright, Kranz, what's yours? Also 4K related, because Sling TV is adding 4K streaming for free. Unlike everybody else who is charging Where's Sling on the Go90 sale, would you say? With this? At least in the 70s. Yeah, this is like a Hail Mary. Yeah, this is help. They've already done it once. They did it a couple of days ago with the Fox Sports All-Star Game, and we all immediately went to social media to talk about watching 4K.
1:12:31Yeah, that was huge news. Everybody knew that. On Sling TV and on their Roku or Amazon Fire device. but they didn't partially because it's pretty much limited to sling blue subscribers because there's two versions of sling only in a couple of major a few major cities fully at an 80 they're fully at an 80 this is so complicated i care about this so much and it's so hard to understand what you're saying but if you're in gainesville florida you you can get it and you don't have to pay extra okay so it's yeah it's to gainesville i will say if you run a streaming service and you're out there 4k streaming as a as a like free up service to keep people engaged is going to work someone needs to go out and just be the one that's like yes you can have 4k for no more money because we love you besides it will work sling did it for what sounds like 11 people so great i'm thrilled for those 11 people gainesville i'm sure is is you know happy rioting in the streets like that's great but this this is a feature that could work like this is the kind of thing that people want and someone who wants their customers to be happy should give this to them again i have said many times youtube should just pay to produce all the games in 4k and then just have 4k games on youtube tv yeah and it's too like they have the money and i'm pretty sure they will it's google they're like whatever um i think it's too complicated yeah all right david bring us home oh my god 27 million mansion that sucks this is the best news so sam altman uh bought a house in 2020 for 27 million dollars that was uh i don't know if it was when he bought it but it was at least at one time the most expensive san francisco real estate listing ever uh and it sucked and he sued or he his his people through a series of weird corporate things that is fighting another series of weird corporate things on the side of the developers sued uh because basically they built him what what his lawyers are alleging was a lemon of a 27 million dollar house this whole story is bananas so the architectural digest made an 11 minute long video i'll link it in the show notes uh going through the house before it was sold and the house is it's not beautiful but it's like incredible if that makes sense uh it has it has a gym it has a massage room it has a closet that is larger than most houses uh it has a wellness cottage right it has a wellness cottage thank you that's the phrase i was looking for uh it has three ovens in the kitchen which seems like one more than even like the very extravagant amount of ovens to have uh it but it's real like show stopping piece was this cantilevered infinity pool that kind of looked out over san francisco It's gorgeous.
1:15:24According to the lawsuit, the people who were building the house were involved in a bunch of like corporate and financial shenanigans that led to them doing a crappy job and not paying contractors who then as a sabotage move did things like shove bags and debris into drains, which then clogged those drains, which did things like cause a ceiling to collapse in the gym in the house uh it caused there were there were like inches of standing water under some of the walkways there was apparently mold everywhere uh let's see what else do i have numerous leaking irrigation lines that were incorrectly installed on the rooftop garden uh failure of the tread lights in the exterior staircase which were repaired but then failed again defects in the design and waterproofing of exterior planters just over and over and over again big giant pool basically leaking into and rapidly destroying the rest of that and the the estimates were that the price to fix all of this is going to be more than four million dollars which is a number for repairs that i cannot fathom and so basically the the lawsuit now is saying that uh sam altman was essentially duped into buying a 27 million dollar piece of crap who made it was it so funny was like dr horton behind it because that just one of the other big builders I'm just saying sometimes you get duped into spending a lot of money on an engineering marvel that can't actually do all the things people say it could do
1:17:01it's just one of those things what if the capabilities of this cantilevered pool do not match with the staggering amount of hype that has come with said pool do you think the pool helps you send like slightly better business emails the pool has already tried to have sex with kevin but yeah i should say on the one hand i love you kevin on the one hand like this sucks i don't mean to like particularly make fun of sam altman like as somebody who just went through a much less expensive and problematic house renovation this sucks and like the idea of spending all of this money on a house and then basically discovering it is literally collapsing inside of itself.
1:17:48That sucks. I don't wish that on anybody. In another way, it's very funny. The metaphor here is very good. Also, he was just driving around a$5 million Cunningham. Yeah, he's fine. And the house is so ugly. It's just an incredibly, incredibly unattractive house. So good for him. He can go get it redone, take his earnings from the lawsuit. make it look like a real house. It'll be great. Yeah, it's just I would encourage everyone to go read the lawsuit. I'll link it. It's it's 38 pages. And the first like 10 pages are just explaining the structure of the company that built this house, and how insane it was.
1:18:29And there was like, they lost a$50 million judgment against them for other shoddy work that they did. And they were like, the company was like running out of money. So they stopped funding their projects, while also at the same time doing marketing about how like their whole thing was detail and 25 % of their work went into things that the owner would never see because they just cared that much and that's how it's 27 million dollars it's so so funny the whole thing is just like there will be a documentary about this and I will watch every single second of it and the documentary will be made by Sora and most of it will be lies it's gonna be great I'm excited alright we are way over like it's already next week it was next week at the end of the first segment now it's september yeah the iphones are here now let's talk about that oh no all right we gotta go but before we do i just want to call it one story on the site that's incredible if you're an old head gadget blogger like me uh sean holster and john porter wrote about the stream deck the elgato stream deck and where it came from which is this legendary gadget blogger obsession the art lebedev optimist keyboard it turns out by the way art lebedev uh turned into like a very weird hard right Russian nationalist which we had to add to the story which is not what I wanted out of this very innocent story about the stream deck but that is such as 2024 um but if you were like me you're like reading and writing gadget blogs it like 20 years ago this keyboard just kept coming up as the thing everybody wanted and it turns out the company that made the actual displays kept going and that turned into the stream deck and it's just like a winding tale of some people really believe in that key should light up and i love it and the design is incredible so go read that and then we we have just tons and tons of stories it was a great week on the site actually um and then i i promise you we'll moderate the politics but they're here so just get ready it's it's election year and i will say we're gonna and everybody should hold us to this we i want to spend a lot of time talking about like policy and less talking about like horse race shenanigans What do the polls say today?
1:20:32Yeah. So like hold us to that. And that is the thing we're going to try to do because this stuff matters a lot. It matters right now. But we also don't need to spend a lot of time like ranting and raving about who said what on the campaign trail. And we will not. That's for our other show, 24-7 Politics Verge. You can watch on Roku devices tomorrow. All right, that's it. That's the Verge Cast. Rock and roll.
1:20:57And that's it for the Verge Cast 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.
1:21:15Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded, so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like Tea Time U. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. Sad you hear about Dave. Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great.
From the publisher
Nilay, Alex, and David talk about what's happening on social media — and around the web — in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Then they talk about their early impression of Apple's public betas, from the redesigned homescreens to the iPad's fancy new math abilities. After that, it's time for a bunch of gadgets all asking the same idea: is this anything? Then it's off to the lightning round, filled with 4K streams and leaky infinity pools.
Further reading:
A custom sticker printer infuriated clients with a pro-Trump mass text message
Shooting conspiracies trend on X as Musk endorses Trump
Donald Trump likes TikTok, not Zuckerberg.
The FBI said it found the Trump rally shooter’s Steam account, then took it back
The Trump rally shooter had a Discord account, company says
The Trump rally shooting is a cash cow for the dropshippers
The FBI says it has ‘gained access’ to the Trump rally shooter’s phone
J.D. Vance likes Lina Khan and crypto, hates ‘Big Tech’
Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, and tech elites back a pro-Trump super PAC
Apple’s public betas: all the news on iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and more
Apple is finally embracing Android’s chaos
iOS 18 might help you rescue photos you thought were gone forever
The watchOS 11 beta slowed me down, in a good way
RCS in iOS 18: Apple’s new messaging standard almost solves the green-button problem
Testing Math Notes and the Calculator app in iPadOS 18
Phone mirroring on the Mac: a great way to use your iPhone, but it’s still very much in beta
Canon’s long-awaited EOS R1 and R5 Mark II have eye-controlled autofocus
Dyson unmasks its super customizable OnTrac headphones
A long-delayed hands-on with Essential’s skinny Android phone
This case turns your Apple Watch into a tiny iPod
Google solves its Pixel 9 Pro leaks by just showing the phone early
Leaked photos reveal Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold
Xreal Beam Pro review: an AR tablet with good ideas but not enough power
The OnePlus Pad 2’s vibrating stylus simulates writing on paper
Sling TV adds 4K streaming for free
Comcast will have high bitrate, low latency 4K feeds of the Olympics
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s $27 million mansion is a ‘lemon’ with a leaky pool, lawsuit alleges
Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices