Liquid Glass, Spotlight, and the rest of WWDC 2025

27:09Because if you pick up a new phone and you can't use the camera, you're done. And they know it. Sam Biford actually wrote a great piece for us ages ago about the ruthless copying of the camera app on Chinese Android phones in particular. And the reason is we've seen this, I think, with celebrities taking selfie. I can't remember who it was. But there's some video of a celebrity trying to take a selfie with a fan and she can't figure out the Android camera. Oh yeah, I remember this. Oh yeah, who was that? All the Android manufacturers know what's going on. They know that if you pick up a new phone and the camera app is too different and you can't just figure it out, you're done.

27:44You're not even thinking about buying that phone for one more second. So they've all ruthlessly copied the camera app. Apple doesn't have this problem. They can ruin the camera app and you're not going to leave the iPhone, right? Like they've got to ruin 10 more things on top of it for you to consider switching it. So I think this is them taking advantage of their sort of market position and saying, okay, we can, we can clean up this app in some ways that make sense. And really I think most people think about it as video and photo. And then they have added the formats back to the top, which I think is tremendously useful.

28:17Yeah. But again, you've got more, you know, when they announce it, they're like, and to go to these other modes, it's just like one tap away. and it's like oh so one more tap are you suggesting it's one more tap right we'll see i hope they kind of offer a simple mode and a pro mode but that's a dream who knows yeah i mean i i wonder with all of this stuff like how much the design sort of accrues back to like attach rates like should i just assume that the fact that there's photo and video and nothing else means that almost nobody touches anything other than photo and video and i think intuitively that's probably true and so So there is something to like, let's just put the two buttons everybody touches in front of them.

28:57And people who want to find other buttons will find ways to find other buttons. Yeah. Like you can make your picture a portrait mode photo after the fact. So you don't need to go looking for that. They'll just, you know, you can decide what your photo is after you take it. It's the dream. I like default to shooting in portrait because I forget that all the time. And that's a useful tip that I should remember. What did you guys hear from folks about liquid glass? I would say the internet's reaction was kind of all over the place. Some people who were like, this is the most beautiful thing Apple has ever done.

29:32Look at this water droplet. And other people who were like, liquid ass was a phrase a lot of people were using that I very much enjoyed. What was it like in the room? Like, was this a stand up and cheer liquid glass moment? Like, what did it feel like? To me, it kind of felt like, well, this is what we're doing. You know, there's a little bit. I don't think I got a sense of like, you know, wild appreciation for it or like dislike of it. It just it feels like a reality of like Apple is going to show you how you're going to redesign your app and you're going to find a way to do it. That was just my read on the room today.

30:15there was just a lot more general sarcasm from the developers i talked to at dub dub this time there there's you know what apple that is not the normal vibe at dub dub dub is a very like earnest place although i did yeah i was texting back and forth briefly with walt mossberg um mostly he was like what was that song at the end which we should talk about um but i was like there's some you know they're not 100 happy here and he was like in my long experience covering apple the developers are never 100 % happy. So take it for what it's worth. That's my shout out. But like Apple didn't talk about app store rates.

30:52They didn't talk about coming off of 30 or 15%. They didn't talk about web links. There's a whole universe of stuff that developers aren't happy about that they did not hear about. Apple talked about running models locally on the phone. Developers are happy about that because that's faster, right? There's lower latency if you're doing the AI stuff on the phone. It's free, which is cool. They like that. But now everything has to look different. They're like, I don't know. We're kind of building everything in React on the web and shipping them in wrappers and get over it. And there's just some real questions over whether this stuff comes for free or whether you have to redesign your entire situation from the ground up for a set of iOS customers in a design language they may not like very much while 80 % of the world has Android phones.

31:38Right. Right. And that's a bigger set of question marks than, oh, on iOS, like we can just run some of the stuff on that local AI models for free, which is just a different set of incentives. Right. Yeah, it seems like the upside, if you're a developer, is in a liquid glass world, everything runs everywhere, right? Which is very clearly what Apple's trying to do here, right? Like, they talked about this over and over and over. Like, this is a broad, system-wide redesign to bring all this stuff together and all this stuff. And, like, fine, all of that makes sense so you can ship an iPhone app and it'll work on tvOS and look more or less right is something.

32:14How long is the tvOS section of this conversation in your notes, David? it is it more than two seconds would you like to hear all of the notes that i wrote for tv os we can do this part right now you're ready yeah uh more notifications new screensavers connect to a speaker that's all i wrote that's all i got for you but but the the flip side then is i think i think as far as i can tell and from the little bit i've talked to folks today this actually is going to ask a lot of people because it's not just like new you know animation styles or how you move from place to place it's like you have to move where the buttons are in your app and that's that's like a real meaningful thing and the they're going to look different and the way that people navigate them is going to be different and you're going to look at the way that something scrolls under your button and you're not going to like it and you're going to have to change where the menus go and i think this is like to users it's going to feel really sort of like a coat of paint, but for developers to do it properly, I think is going to actually take kind of a lot of sort of architectural work, unless Apple has done a really good job of building this stuff into its development kits in a way that you kind of get it for free.

33:23And I have not heard a ton of optimism that that is the case. Yeah, especially because, you know, they're going to change it over the next six months. Like if you're designing your app and you're like, well, everything is clear now, so you need to make this make sense. And then Apple makes everything slightly more frosted over the next six months like right i think we're in for a long period of wait and see here yeah did you guys see the the home screen mock-ups with the clear icons not a fan not yeah i don't want that to actually more directly answer your question i think the vibe online was much meaner than the vibe there okay in the way that everything online is always meaner and you show up in person and everyone was like, well, it turns out I'm a bit of a coward.

34:05That's the nature of every online bully that is forced to contend with the real world. Like, oh, it turns out I'm going to wuss right out. I mean, you're in Apple's house. Everyone's like sort of happy. They're playing new age music all over the place. It's very odd. Yeah. And the people who are there, the people want to be there. But then I went online. I was like, oh, people are tearing this to shreds. And so I think we're just we're just in for a period of cooling off. And I do think they just have to change it. If they don't change it, I will come, we can rerun this podcast and I will eat my words.

34:39There's no way they're not going to change it. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And one of the things I've enjoyed is there's an accessibility feature in the developer beta that I think it's just called high contrast mode. And it just undoes all of it and looks a thousand times better. It's like, it just frosts the glass. And it's like, guys, just frost the glass. It's like, it's fine. What if there was a little bit of color, but it didn't put the words behind the words so that I couldn't read any of the words anymore. Like, wouldn't that be great? What we need is a slider. How much how much frost in the glass?

35:08I like that idea. Or like a like a clicker you can use to frost and unfrost the glass. Oh, that'd be great. Like a like a privacy screen. Yeah, exactly. Like those windows they have. This is what I'm saying. This is a good idea. So, OK, before we before we get into the specific platform stuff, Neela, you made a face at me earlier when I said they didn't even talk all that much about Apple intelligence. uh how what's what's your sort of overall read on like how much today was an ai day like did it feel like an ai day to you maybe in the way that it should have the first time okay right so everything they announced had some little component of machine learning smarts built into it right so so much of what they announced across the board and their operating systems are like the phone app is a lot smarter now it you know like and these are again these are android features but like it'll wait on hold for you and then when that person on the other end picks up it'll say like i'm coming and like ring you you just need some ai-ish features to pull that off right to detect the hold music and wait and like do the thing there's just so much of that throughout the operating system now you're like oh this is this is these are table stakes ai features for a phone operating system at this point what they didn't announce was apple intelligence the part where you just talk to Siri and it like does stuff for you.

36:27Right. Which I'm just going to keep hammering this point home. That's what people want AI to be. They're talking to chat GPT all day long and thinking it's alive. Yeah. So you're like, we did AI too. And it's like, what is it? And it's like, well, you can screenshot a webpage and then buy a lamp. And it's like, well, that's not what we were thinking about. Right. Genmoji is not digital God. What was the one today with the two? they're like we combined a sloth with a light bulb slather the light bulbs to indicate that i was slow to get the joke yeah guys like first of all this is a great phd thesis in modern communication like this is a trillion dollar company it's one it it depending on the stock price it is the richest company in the history of the world like on any given day and you're like we did a sloth and a light bulb to indicate that i was a lot to get a joke what is going on like Stop it.

37:22Don't do this. What people want is to talk to the computer in a natural language interface and have it talk back to them and do stuff for them. That's the only thing they can ever deliver on the promise of something called Apple intelligence. It just is. And so all this other stuff, it is AI. You look down the list of features. There are AI features through and through. There are machine learning features through and through. So the reason I made the face is, one, every time you speak, I make a face. and I often have to hold myself back from revealing it. But I'm quite tired today, so just kind of.

37:53That's the track. But they screwed up last year by just sort of like mashing up like text generators and writing tools with like, you know, Super Siri. And this year, they just talked, they didn't talk about that at all and they gave you a sloth with a light bulb and like AI is here. And it's like, we have to get ourselves straight. there's exactly one big thing that it is going to do and no company has shipped it yet at scale in a way that works and we're all just going to keep working on it and that's fine or whatever you can have whatever feelings you want about it in the meantime all of this other stuff is actually quite useful and it's it's kind of like unfair to punish it with this isn't digital god like it is genuinely useful that the phone can detect more scams in messages on and in the phone app and like shunt those people off into like a waiting like you can't be too mad at that stuff especially when it's happening locally on the phone so i think you see more and more of that happening on the phone they're finding more and more places to use the tools they're just the only real way you can deliver on something called apple intelligence is by letting you talk to siri and having it talk back to you right yeah i mean i think i was thinking about this a lot with all the translation stuff which kept showing up across a bunch of these platforms so they're doing like real-time on-device cross-app translation stuff, whether it's like, you know, translation of lyrics in Apple Music, I think was a neat one, or translation on calls.

39:21It's like, that's pure AI. Like for that stuff to work is pure AI. That is the stuff. And it's like, I think, I like the phrase, we shouldn't punish it for not being God. It's like, it's true. That stuff is like, but it is just, it's just software. Like before chat GPT, we would have just called this software, right? And it's like machine learning has been around for a long time. We've been doing this for a long time. This stuff is cool and interesting and useful. And it is better because these large language models exist. That stuff has been like a leap in a lot of that technology, but it's not God.

39:57And so I think you're right that like Apple should have talked about a lot of this stuff this way last year. And I think the vibe probably would have been really different. But instead you promised God, You can't walk back from promising God. Yeah, you're going to talk to Siri and it's going to remember who you had a meeting with while you're like cowering in the antechamber of the coffee shop. That's the ad that they had to pull, right? And it remembered. That's a lot. There's a lot of steps between here and there to pull that off. And that has nothing to do with whether you can incrementally improve the experience you're using the phone today.

40:32But that's what everybody wants. And when I say that's what everybody wants, what I mean is ChatGP is one of the most popular consumer apps ever. like maybe the most popular consumer app ever. People just want to talk to their phone in that way. And Apple's argument is, well, great, they're doing it on the iPhone today. They're downloading the ChatGPT app, and when you subscribe to it, we take 30 % of that, and we're good. Like, what more do you want from us? And the pressure is, everybody understands, well, maybe I can get you to buy a different device if that actually occurs. Google very much is like, maybe you'll just say stuff to Google, and we'll go and do everything for you, and that's the app platform of the future.

41:07Apple has to make the turn, and they haven't expressed how they're going to make the turn. Right. Yeah, if they had kind of set up the Siri remembers who you talk to at a party stuff as like, future, you know, this is kind of the North Star where we're headed. I think that would have been one thing, but they literally presented it like, it's here. It's going to do this, you know, any minute now. And that's why it just feels weird to kind of go back into like, oh, these are machine learning updates. It was like, okay, you had us going all the way to like Siri fixes your social life to like we're back at square one now.

41:49Like if it had all kind of built in a more linear fashion, I think it would have made sense. But it's a little like whiplashy right now. Well, so that's, I mean, we'll probably come to this when it gets to the Mac, but if you look at what they were showing off in Spotlight, it's right there. Right? You can just search across your Mac. You can type in shortcuts to get it to send emails. Like all this stuff you can do where the puzzle pieces are very clearly in place. But they just haven't been put together. And in the new Spotlight, you can sort of put them together yourself. I don't think that's going to work either.

42:26Yeah. Yeah, let's start talking about the platforms. We should get into all of that. But first, let's take a break. We're going to go summon V song. We're going to take a break and then we're going to talk. Nilay, because I love you, we'll talk about the Mac first. We'll be right back. Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown or one we never wanted in the first place. But still, we stick it out. And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse?

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45:59All right, we're back. V song is here. Hi, V. Welcome. Hi. You made it out of Apple Park. We're very happy you're here. In one piece. it's not a small task sometimes wait can i tell a story about uh being at apple events with with v when you're live logging oh my god okay sure normally everyone's like you know busy they're focused they're looking down v is like a like a mystery science theater 3000 but of size and moans just like oh and it like especially in like the fitness segments where they're like, a personalized health coach will walk you through all of the data we've been scanning from your body and he's just like, the whole time.

46:43It's very entertaining. It's true. Well, at least it's entertaining. I am not aware that I'm making those noises half the time. No, that much is also very clear to everyone. Involuntary, full-body reactions to what is happening next to each. V is like the real-time audience reaction meter from one to ten at all times. It's very good. again if you have the means i highly recommend it you know i think someone reached out to me on blue sky and i was like it's been an honor watching you live blog and i was like oh my god what it's terrifying uh my experience of what it looks like to watch someone live blog is they just sit there until they sunburn typing on their computer in apple park and that's the oh no i had three bottles of sunscreen and i was making several pale white men who did not bring sunscreen put sunscreen on their face today i can confirm both both alice and v said it was their mission to get people who are sunscreen today yeah and we did it i'm very proud of both of you yeah um all right let's talk about platforms so we we've talked about the big picture stuff v you missed us having a lot of feelings about liquid glass uh i suspect there will be ample time to have more feelings about liquid glass which again i hate more every single time i say it out loud uh let's talk about the mac first i have this in rough order of how interested i am in it personally uh but nila for you i switched one and two because you you are just dying to talk about spotlight so the the big news mac os 26 it's called tahoe uh it has the new design it has all the liquid glass stuff but the big new feature and i would say potentially the like most universally exciting thing at all of WWDC was new spotlight.

48:27Do you want to explain what new spotlight is and why you're excited about it? Yeah. Although I think it's a tie. I think it's new spotlight and the iPad stuff. Those are the things that I heard about, but that was going to be my number one. We were going to do that first, but for you, we're doing spotlight. I think we can move through the new spotlight pretty quickly. So spotlight is when you hold down command space on a Mac. It initially just started as like a search of all your files. and then they started adding more features to it and they could search the web and now they're just adding the capabilities to take actions across your computer to it in weird ways.

48:59Like you can launch shortcuts from it, which implies that you have a library of shortcuts, which implies that David has to talk about shortcuts, which implies that David is going to receive hate mail from many dozens of shortcuts fans that exist in this world. Just know that I hear you and that you're wrong and that's okay. And then, you know, they've added stuff they should have had from the beginning. Like all of the menu items and whatever app you're using are now available on Spotlight. So you can just like start typing a menu command and issue a menu command. And then there's, you know, because shortcuts are more powerful and have access to some amount of AI, you can start to take more complicated commands that feel more natural language.

49:38And you're just inching towards what I keep describing as like a magic command line on your computer where you can just open it and type it and tell it what to do. and then it goes off and does something. And that is so close to just saying what you want to Siri to the point where like the technology mechanisms behind the new Spotlight are the same is what they talked about with Super Siri last year. It's the app intense framework where Spotlight is just talking to apps through this new framework that eventually Siri will use to talk to apps. And so they're inching towards a place where you have like a command line that is not just like a take properly formatted commands, command line, but just you open it up and you start typing and stuff starts happening.

50:22And that's awesome. Whether any of this will work or any of developers will support App Intents or importantly, whether anyone is using applications on a Mac that aren't just web apps in a web browser, all of this remains to be seen. David, I'm very curious for your take on this because apps like Raycast have existed forever. Like there's a universe of apps that take over command space to do stuff in the productivity world. And I can't tell if all of them just got Sherlocked or none of them feel competitive at all or what the overlap really is. They will tell you things like, we're so glad the space is expanding and we think this really validates our thesis.

51:01The last thing you see before you die. That's right. We're so glad that others are really believing in this thing that we've been doing. They are all going to be petrified because this is the thing that is now good enough that people might not switch to Raycast or Alfred, right? So like based on what we've seen, these other apps, specifically Raycast and Alfred, which are like the two biggest ones in this space and have been around for a long time and are like enormously powerful, right? They have these huge extension libraries that let you essentially like plug them into all kinds of other apps and all kinds of other uses.

51:34And you can essentially do anything on your computer through one of these apps if you program it correctly enough. And now Raycast in particular is also like deep into AI stuff. So you can interact with AI models just right through Raycast that way. But it's a lot of that is predicated on the fact that Spotlight is really, really bad. And it's like Spotlight is pretty bad. It's a useful like meh search engine for the stuff on your computer. That's like as good as it has been for a very long time. And now it's going to be much better than that if this stuff works. to the point where, A, it might teach people that this is a thing you can do.

52:11I don't know if y 'all have this experience, but like on my phone, I use Spotlight all the time to like find and open apps. But most of the other people in my life, when they take my phone, don't just like instinctively pull down and search for Spotify. They go like hunting for the Spotify logo. And I'm just like, this is just not an ingrained use case. Like Spotlight is not a mainstream tool on any of these platforms. And I think this might be the turn that helps it start to get there. And I just think that's super interesting. Like forget what people actually use it for. The idea that this is now like a text box becomes the way I interact with my computer.

52:47It's the first time that's been true in 40 years. And I think that's really fascinating. Like V, are you a Spotlight person? I am. And I was a really big Alfred person for a long time. And then I just stopped one day. I don't really know why I did, but I just did. So yeah, to your point, I use Spotlight. non-stop on my phone and it's because I have too many freaking apps. So like I, we were talking about how bad my eyesight is. I'll have time to look at my giant iPhone screen to find a tiny little app on the whatever page. So yeah, I'm a big spotlight user. So I mean, it does suck. Alfred is better.

53:28I'm sure I haven't used Raycaster, but I'm sure that's also better. So So, yeah, I'm kind of excited to see how it works. I'm just super skeptical that it will work the way I want because I just feel like any time they say it's going to make your life better, I'm like, yeah, I can't wait. This isn't what I wanted. Close, but so I'm reserving judgment. But this is the peril of the magic command line, right? Right. To make it work in a way that makes it useful, you have to be able to type anything you want into it. this is why like my like windows and mice and graphical user interfaces took over from old school command lines because you like show a blinking cursor to people that could only accept certain commands like that just made computers inaccessible you're like here's some pictures you can move them around like okay everybody can use this you want to bring it back it has to be able to take whatever you put into it which is where llms and all this ai stuff should shine and like that's the gap and that's why i keep saying like they talked about that stuff and they showed you how it would work and then they didn't connect it to siri because it they can't make that promise again because that's also how siri should work where you just say whatever you want like figures it out i think it's partly that i also think i'm realizing more the more we talk that like the the siri reputational hole is so deep for all of this stuff for Apple that if it were to have connected that to Siri and it was like, oh, you know, Spotlight is going to let you through Siri.

54:58So everybody would have immediately been like, oh, this will never work. There's no chance. Tomatoes thrown at the screen. So I think I think like I'm starting to realize maybe Apple is going out of its way to not connect this stuff back to Siri in order to maybe convince you that it can actually still work because the the brand hole that siri has just like burned through apple is pretty nuts and siri just went off two times while i was saying that so i'm sorry to everyone watching and listening this is what we do here um but no i i think i think you're right that spotlight could like it could feel that way now and there's nothing sort of technically impossible about a lot of the stuff apple is trying to do here like the app intense thing is very smart if developers get on board.

55:43The commands it was doing are mostly pretty easy. What was the example he gave? He typed SM to send a message. That's solved technology. This stuff works. It's important to kind of pull this apart. There's SM to send a message was they had made a quick key shortcut, which you can do right now. It's like a text expander, but they had mapped it to a shortcut, and then the shortcut could do stuff. So this is like their layers of automation in the Mac that they're like, Like, look at what you can do as a Mac Power user. So that was hitting Spotlight and shortcuts? I was thinking that was just like a system-level thing.

56:19Okay, that makes me like it. Well, so the system-level thing, this is where I think it got particularly confusing. The demo on their website, right now, if you go to apple.com slash OS slash macOS, you scroll down, you can like look at this thing. They open Spotlight. It says biggest Spotlight ever. And here's the graphic that's animating on the screen. And it types send, and that brings up a list of commands. And so one of them is send in messages and you like click that and then you type, let's meet at the studio and you type two and then it has a list of like your contacts. So you see like it's prompting you to issue a command that looks an awful lot like a shortcut.

57:00this is a lot of like puzzle pieces right and so what you what they're getting at is okay all the apps your system will tell Spotlight all of the things they can do. And you'll start typing some stuff you want done. And we'll auto-complete the actions you want taken, the data you want taken, and the recipients of your message, which is another data in another field. And then we'll send that command to messages, which will then send this thing off. And that is just a hop away from making a shortcut, which is itself a hop away from having a quick key assigned to it. And so you're, oh, we're just stacking all of these capabilities and we're making the interface spotlight.

57:41And eventually, you're going to be able to just say out loud, send this to whoever at what time, and we'll just parse it all and do it correctly. And there's a little turn in there that's the natural language turn. But in the meantime, as you start typing, it pre-populates all the commands and prompts you for what you want to put, what variables you want to pass through. This is all very smart. It's very clever. If they announced this stuff five years ago, They would be like, this is the future of computers. Here in 2025, Johnny Ive and Sam Altman are like, what we're doing is we're going to put Jesus in a necklace.

58:16And it's like, you're just in a whole different context. And I think it's very clever. The idea that all the commands that are available from all the applications on their computer are sort of just available in a command line that is universally accessible is wild shit. Yeah. But all those application developers have to do it, and then people have to use it. And the thing that's staring them in the face is literally ChatGPT being like, say anything, and I'll lie to you until you're happy. That's just a radically different context to be in. So I will say, by the way, what you just described is pure Raycast.

58:54You just described Raycast. And the thing that Raycast did that was so smart is you can build extensions that plug into other apps. And when you do that, it sort of declares a bunch of specific actions you can do and things that you can look for. And you can map those things to keyboard shortcuts. And it is both very complicated and also kind of very simple at its core. None of what you just described requires groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence. That's just computer stuff. It's just here. And there's another thing Spotlight can do where when you're in an app, you can invoke Spotlight to search the menu inside of that app.

59:31which like every Photoshop user is going to be thrilled about, right? Because suddenly instead of navigating through six trees of menus, I can just search for the menu item I want to click and press enter and click it. But the problem with that is every Photoshop user also now largely a Figma user. And Figma as an app is expressed inside of a web browser that has no idea that any of this shit is happening, right? And every Electron app, which is like a cheap and dirty way of getting web apps to look native on a Mac or PC. And I know the Electron, there's some very good Electron apps out there.

1:00:05There's some very bad Electron app apps. They're not going to know about this stuff. They're not going to do this stuff. And so you really just, Apple's betting on developers, particularly on the Mac, participating in an ecosystem that right now they have no incentive to participate in. Right. This whole thing makes way more sense to me on an iPhone, honestly, as both as like a way I want to use it and as a place you can actually do it because they don't, that same problem does not exist in the same way on the iPhone. Because Apple has militant control over its platform. Look, you can feel about it however you want, but the facts on the ground are it's all native apps.

1:00:41And like to V's point, I have a million apps. I don't know where any of them are. I would actually like to not have to organize them. And I would like to not have to go to them and open them and look for them. I would like to just pull down and say, play the song and it'll play the damn song. That's how it should work on my phone. I firmly believe that. It kind of works that way on your phone today. You can just say play a song. Play the song. I gotta test this now too. It wants me to play the... It just started playing play that song by Trane on Spotify. So touche. Oh, I'm sorry about that. You win this round.

1:01:21The computers work today. That one might have been a bad example. But if you want to play any song other than play that song, This is why we need to build Digital God. Can I have$1 trillion, please? I'm sort of reminded of the Google search bar and how that kind of changed over the years where it was, you know, you would just type things to it and search Google. But then we all learned eventually like, oh, it'll do a math equation for you or you can just convert currency. And it's sort of like the scope of what the search bar became changed. I don't know. I can see that happening with Spotlight.

1:01:59Like I had to train myself to use it. I just had the muscle memory of like looking for my apps. And then once you use it, it's like, no, this is better. And other things pop up too. And if it's going to start prompting me to like do the thing I was trying to take three steps to do and it'll do it in one tap. Like, yeah, I'll come back to that. So what I actually use Spotlight for most on my Mac is doing equations. Sure. There you go. Yeah. How about that? I don't want to open a calculator app. I don't want to type it into another thing. I'm just going to write my little equation while calculating various debts in Spotlight.

1:02:42It's my little calculator friend. Yeah. That works. And that's like, yeah. And again, there's so much stuff you can plug into this if you can get people, A, to put their apps into it. and B, to use it. And I think like the reason I'm so interested in this is this feels like the biggest bet on Spotlight as an interface in kind of that I can ever remember from Apple. Spotlight has just like been there for a long time. And it's just like, what if there was a plan for this? And this feels like a plan, which I think is very cool. Other Mac stuff before we move on, stop me if any of this is interesting to any of you.

1:03:15Shortcuts, automations, which means you can run, you can set a shortcut to run at a time or when an event happens on your computer. All my shortcuts nerds get excited. Sorry to everyone else because you'll never learn how to build shortcuts. The journal app coming to the Mac. People excited about that. Wait, can I say one thing about shortcuts? Please. There are new shortcuts that are like LLM based. Yeah. So really interesting ideas. Like if an image matching this description shows up in this folder, take this action. Requires the computer to be able to look at an image and decide whether it has a tree in it or whatever you specified.

1:03:51fascinating then you can be like take my notes from the notes app and look at the text and then transcribe it if it matches whatever and then summarize that like just interesting shortcuts that require you to have access to an lm in specific ways are now just like there whether or not they will be useful or function on time right which is a major criticism of shortcuts that some people have and some people do not apparently uh well remains to be seen but that kind of stuff is like pretty interesting like image-based workflows that require the computer to understand the contents of the image that's a whole universe of of new things that people be able to build totally i think my problem with like the shortcut stuff is that it's still not smart enough for me uh because you still have to be the person putting all of the components together you have to be the one defining what things are going to be used and then of course you can prompt the shortcut, but then you have to be, you just have to use too much of your brain to make the shortcut work, which is the current problem that I think a lot of people who don't have functional developer brains and are like good at coding or these like different logic trees have with shortcuts because you just don't know what you can do with it.

1:05:08You don't know how to think in that way, which has been my problem with shortcuts this entire time. I want to use shortcuts. I love it. Like when you go into the little gallery and you're like, oh, I could do this. This is a little fun. There's no like, you know, I asked Apple and I was just like, hey, so can the Apple intelligence just see the things that I do and what I'm doing on like a bit regular basis and make that suggestion for me? Is that what we're having here? And they're like, no, you still got to use your little brain and then have the AI help you. It's supplemental. And I was like, but that's not what I want.

1:05:41I want to turn my brain off and have the shortcut happen. Yeah, you want the thing that's like every time you download a picture of this, you put it over there. Do you want me to just start doing that for you? Like that's just sitting right there. That's just super clippy. Yeah. I mean, that's where we've been going. That's what I want. That's what we're doing. No. That's what we want. And you still have to make the super clippy. You can't just like offload the making of the super clippy. So I think that's the most disappointing thing about it so far. It's a step in the right direction. It's just not where I want it to be yet.

1:06:13Well, you know what? I agree that either you have automation brain or you don't. When I get home, turn on all the lights. You can just say it out loud and then actually programming any smart home platform to make that happen requires you to understand if-then statements in a way that some people are like, I'm just never going to do this. And some people are like, that's my whole personality. And it's one or the other from what I can tell. And the dream is that even when you talk to the Alexa people or whoever, that the smart home platforms will start to do that for you. It's still not the case.

1:06:47And even if you look at sort of where the cutting edge of AI agent stuff is and kind of these new look platforms like N8N, which I'm a little bit obsessed with, it's not you don't have logic gate automation brain. it's that the stuff you can put like the legal blocks of the if then statements are vastly more powerful than they were before and you have all these kids making TikToks using NNN to like create agents doing all kinds of wild stuff because the tools even given are more powerful not the tool to author the automation and that dynamic I think will always exist and here I think you're just seeing it play out in shortcuts where they haven't figured out the technology problem of making the people who don't have automation brain find this to be a rewarding experience.

1:07:32And maybe they never will. But they're giving more and more powerful tools to people who are like, I love this. And somehow that has to come together because it does feel like the future of all computing is just telling computers what to do and assuming that they will do it. And that requires the backend to work in this way. But in the meantime, they're just like, here's some more powerful Legos. Like go build whatever weird Lego structure you want out of if-then statements. Right. And then two-thirds of the world looks at those and goes, why do I have all these Legos in front of me? I'm going to leave.

1:08:02And then one third of those people sends David angry emails about shortcuts. And I welcome them. I will, as I like to do, show you the opening screen of a new shortcut and you can tell me what to do about it. The first word is scripting and we're done. All right, let's talk about the iPad, which I think was the other kind of big hit moment and is also the thing I have been playing with for the last couple of hours and have a lot of feelings about already. um ipad os 26 the same thing liquid glass uh lots of new apps but like v they kind of just made this thing a mac did they just kind of make this thing a mac they did they made a mac you know like we've been talking for years about just let me use mac os on the ipad and they were like no but kind of so you know i was watching that uh through the live vlog and i was like david pierce's like screeching at this moment somewhere in the US.

1:08:54Is it a happy screech or is it an angry screech? I don't know, but it's a screech. The screech is happening. I've just been burned so many times, V. Do you know what I mean? Every time Apple is like, we've invented a new way to move Windows around. And I keep being like, what if you, we already invented the only one that needs to exist and it's just put them wherever you want. So I don't know, whatever you invented, I like it less. But they did it better this time. By the way, I have an answer from some, on-the-ground conversations about why they tried everything else first. You're not going to like it, but this is the answer I was told.

1:09:27Because they hate me personally. Yes, they're like, we've run out of ways to torture David Pierce. No, the iPad is a touch device, and they were never, ever, ever going to trade away against the zero-lag responsiveness of the touchscreen on the iPad. And so they were like, it would be too hard to allow full Mac like multitasking and multi-windowing and apps all running at once because we can trade away against the latency of the Mac's interface. Like, this happens. You can click on stuff on a Mac and, like, nothing happens. You're like, oh, that's weird. If you touch a screen and nothing happens, you're like, this thing's dead.

1:10:02Right? Like, you can see the mouse pointer always moves on a Mac. When the mouse pointer stops moving, you're like, my Mac is dead. The mouse pointer moves and you click on stuff and nothing happens. You're like, oh, this thing's being slow. You touch an iPad screen and nothing happens, Rick. It's dead. And there's no other indication that it's still alive. so their their argument was we we needed this much horsepower on the latest blah blah blah generation blah blah blah so that we could finally allow you to do full window multitasking in this way i didn't say you were gonna like it and i can already see david's face but i'm telling you this is a thing that a few people there told me i buy the premise i don't buy that the technology did not exist before today do you know what i mean just like sure uh but so the the new multitasking system is like it's almost freeform multitasking.

1:10:49It is not exactly. There are a couple of rules you have to follow. And it also a lot of it as ever depends on the actual design of the apps themselves. I installed the beta and I've been playing around with it. And if you want to just pull 12 apps in and have them all sitting on top of each other, you can. And it's awesome. And no one should do it because it breaks immediately and doesn't make any sense. I was going to ask, what is the maximum window count that you can have on an iPad? I believe I've had eight at once on the screen so far, which is already three or four more than makes any plausible sense to have.

1:11:29But I did it, and it was there, and it was working, and that is something. It's a little confusing now because there are – so the framework is basically you have your home screen with the app icon. and then the sort of mental model is there is now just like a screen over here that you put apps on. You can either open an app full screen or you can you tap the little bar in the corner and drag it to whatever size you want it to be. And then it sits there. You can drag another one on top of it. You can change the size depending on how they've laid the app out. Some of them will only do like iPad size, smaller iPad size and iPhone size.

1:12:06Some will only do one. Some you can like free for and move around as you want to. but they all just kind of live on this one screen together right all the apps and then if you if you tap on the new little menu it gives you the the red yellow green buttons you hit the green one it full screens it if you hit the yellow one it minimizes it and if you hit the red one it closes it and if you were to say david what's the difference between minimizing an app on an ipad and closing an app on an ipad i absolutely could not tell you no idea in both cases it just like animated retreats back into the icon.

1:12:39And then when you tap it, it opens again. And I don't, I don't know what the difference is. I will say Apple has never, from the beginning of the three, the stoplight metaphor for the windows, they've never really known what the other two buttons are for. No. Like they've always known what red is for. Yes. And the other ones are like, well, we have the stoplight stuff. They're for stuff. It's like when I, you know how you have there's clean clothes in your house there's a dirty clothes and then there's the like uh you know i'm i might not be done with this that's like the yellow light one that's just a little pile on the dresser of like maybe i'll use that it's the one you smell and you're like i can get away with it yeah you're like yeah this is still okay yeah the green button in particular for a long time on the mac was just like a whatever we think this time like didn't it just sort of my memory of it is it just randomly changed the size of the app to whatever it felt like yeah that's what it's just like green means go you know i mean like whatever you think go means in this context it's that's what might happen yeah and i think on the ipad you have the same between red and yellow it's fine it's fine sure it's whatever but there are a bunch of things about it that i think are pretty clever like it has a little they demoed this the sort of little flick gesture that you can do to to anchor it to one side of the screen or the other uh that works well but like a lot of apple things you have to like really learn how to do it it's like a you have to do kind of a half flick to like the middle of the side if you flick it too hard it just like bounces off and comes back wait do you are you flicking with your finger or using the mouse so you can do it with the mouse but i i've just mostly been doing it with my thumbs so you've been like steam decking apps all over yeah absolutely uh but now to your point about the the mouse there is now like an honest to god pointer uh which makes such a bigger difference than i realized like there's been you could you could move a cursor around but it was a little little circular thing yeah now it feels like you have a mouse on the computer and you can click small things now uh and it really like those two things plus there's now a preview app which is just for pdfs which speaking of like a whole industry that just immediately got sherlocked like sorry to everybody who built the ten dollar app for editing pdfs because you're out of business you're fine you deserve to die and you know it that's fair i don't feel that bad weird subscription nft pdf viewer like you should have been dead a long time ago yeah all the free trials i have signed up for to get acrobat for one day to be able to edit a pdf i no longer feel bad you're not seeing the first batman movie the 89 batman where the joker says i'm glad you're dead and starts cackling i want you to picture my face to do an ai of my face doing that a pdf love that for you um so yeah put those things together and then there's a bunch of changes to the files app uh where now there's a list view they made a big deal out of a list view what once a year there is a thing at wwdc where they're like we've invented a computer feature from the 70s can i say they did a whole screen that was just files in the dock like like just in bold like beautiful print and i was like oh well that's going in the live blog because it's so silly yeah and then they're like oh do we're gonna explain to you how it works and how it works is exactly like it does on the mac you tap on it and it opens up and shows you the files and then you can click the files and drag them somewhere like nila what was the what was the thing last year where they were they were showing some kind of multitasking thing and craig fitterigi was like he dragged something from one screen to another on it was like the external display thing and he like was it was he was just his mind was blown that you could have something on one display and then you could have it on the other display and then it's just like we're just doing this again there's most of the ipad features where they just made the ipad a mac were i think targeted specifically at me and my complaints about the ipad over the years like let's talk about files and it's like yeah dude i told you you do this a decade ago um but they ended it all by you know like a very self-deprecating way right they're like can you imagine a pointer and a menu bar and windows who would have thought of these ideas like that's true they know yeah they know what they're doing but you know the opportunity with the ipad is you get to have these ideas from a fresh start because every year you can change them apparently you know and like the thing that's holding the ipad back is not the multi-window model it's that iPad apps are bad and until they open up the app store in some way to solve that problem well the iPad apps are still going to be bad and you can have as many you know sort of like cut down versions of real apps as you want in your iPad and as many windows as you want but that's your problem and they did nothing to address that no that I mean that has forever been the thing Apple just can't figure out how to do for some reason is convince anyone other than like a very specific set of creative tools.

1:17:32Like you can get honest to God, like professional class creative tools on the iPad. They're very good. And you can, if you are a creative person, you want to do your job. Ironically, it is easier to do your like fancy 3D modeling job on the iPad than it is to send emails all day on the iPad. Like it's crazy. This is where we are. But I think you're right. But I also think to the extent that what maybe has been gating people from doing that is the sense of like, I can do a lot of stuff at once and move quickly between things and sort of feel powerful on an iPad the way I feel powerful on a Mac.

1:18:12This, theoretically, at least, we'll see how it all actually works, but like this kind of solves all of my problems in a way that I have not experienced before with an iPad. I look forward to the years worth of I try to use an iPad to replace my Mac coverage to come. Yeah. I suspect everyone's going to end up right back on their Macs, but yeah. Yeah. I, I, I inevitably I am going to write that story in the next three months. So I shouldn't, I shouldn't really give anybody any crap. Like I had a second kid and decided to go all in on an iPad. It's like a thing that's coming for me. Let's see other stuff in the iPad.

1:18:47There again, also got a phone app. Is it weird that there's just now a phone app everywhere? I've been having a lot of like galaxy brand feelings about this, but maybe it doesn't matter. Just make phone calls. Who cares? Yeah, I think Apple realizes that messaging is like a core use case of every kind of computer now. And it's weird to only tie their ecosystem to the cell voice network that exists on the phone because they also have messages and FaceTime and all this other stuff. And they control your phone and they can just pass real phone audio to it. No one else limits themselves in this way.

1:19:21Can you imagine the phone app going off on all of your Apple devices at the same time because it's there. That happens today. Yeah, it already does. Do you not, does 10 things not ring when you get a phone call? I know, but like even more. Yeah, by the way, the thing they didn't solve anywhere is like notifications or prioritizing which devices get notifications. Like the main problem in their ecosystem, as expressed, V, to your point, like the phone app goes off everywhere without any sense of what you are or like where you are or what you're doing. It would be nice if they were like, also, we've made it so that notifications consistently show up where they need to be.

1:19:56No mention of that. The other thing was local video and audio capture. They made like a real outreach to podcasters in this one. They're like, if you want to record all your stuff locally while you're on video calls, now you can. I think this is a main complaint of creators who use iPads a lot from what I gather. That's true. Because we're recording this in this app called Riverside and that just is not a choice on an iPad. You're running a local recording while you're doing that. It's interesting that they didn't express some API to let two apps pull audio and video and record them themselves, which is what every Mac in the world can do.

1:20:31But they're like, we'll do it for you. And then they made a big demo. They made a big deal out of like, and then you can share your local files. And it's like, yeah, that's what you would, if you recorded my local files, you'd let me share them. That makes no sense. But you know, what they did is they came after platforms like Riverside with that. That is the thing that a Riverside would do. There's a bunch of other ones there. But that's what they, that's what a lot of creators have asked for on the iPad. This is a great mobile podcasting setup, but for the fact that I can't actually record locally, well, they've solved the problem.

1:21:05And yeah, there's a real like, do any creators actually use iPads? Road, we could go down right now, but let's avoid that. Allison, you are a creator who uses an iPad for everything, right? This is like, you did not seem as excited as I was about multitasking. So like, let's just, how do you feel about the iPad? You know what? So many, many years ago, I was between jobs and I had to like give away my work computer and didn't have a computer for a while and went to Best Buy. I was like, iPad and a keyboard. This is computer, right? It was like all the pieces are here. I like bought it all and went back home and I was like, oh, no, this is not a computer.

1:21:51This doesn't let you do the thing you need to do. It's just like, it's so funny, like, how many ways Apple will give you this and give you that. And they're like, well, you can record locally because you're a creator who's traveling with an iPad. So you can do this computer thing on your iPad. We'll give you the red, green, and yellow buttons. But, you know, won't go up to the line of this is a full computer. It's just, it's a very interesting kind of dance, I think, to see them do. Somebody once described the difference to me, and this is years ago, but I think it's still true, is when you buy a Mac, you buy a computer.

1:22:30And when you buy an iPad, you buy a list of things you're allowed to do. And I think about that all the time. And I think it's so true that it's like, and the list is getting longer. And to Apple's credit, the list is more sort of power user friendly than ever, but it is still a list of things you can do. and it is not a computer in that same way. Let's talk about iOS, which is shockingly third on the list for me. And I went through this list and was like, iOS is kind of not that exciting. To me, the Messages app is the most interesting thing happening in iOS 26. Well, you don't think the dynamic clock on the lock screen is worth five minutes of keynote time?

1:23:10Long clock. Get ready for long clock. Long clock. yeah i mean it's the clock gets dynamically less long when you get notifications dynamically less long is as a that's a that's a shirt that's a bad date that's what that is oh no now we're gonna make that shirt i love that dynamically less long 20 2026 Vote the verge.

1:23:44Well, first of all, shout out to Joanna Stern, who was on this podcast on Friday demanding typing indicators in group chats. And she got that's chaotic. Yeah. OK. You said this in the live blog and I assumed everyone would be happy about this feature. Why are you not happy about this feature? Do you do you not have group chat drama happening all the time? Have you seen this TikTok series of this woman who just she is acting out nine people in a group chat and just like the social dynamics that happen in this group chat typing indicators? What's going to happen is you're going to have the group chat and the side chats going on and everyone's going to be ganging up on.

1:24:23Let's call her Betty. And Betty is just going to put a little question in and then she's going to see 5000 different people doing the typing indicator. Stopping, typing, stopping, typing, stopping. I think Betty's going to have an anxiety attack breakdown. And then, you know, the group chat is going to implode and someone is going to just friendships will end over typing indicators, as will family relationships, because you're just going to see someone typing for a really long time. And two family members are going to go, oh, my God, what's she? She's typing forever. What's she going to say something?

1:24:54And then they're going to put it in the wrong group chat. Friendships and families will end. I am telling you right now, typing indicators are dangerous. I've never been happier to be an old dad. Yeah, my group chats are not that dramatic. You know what? I love this for you. I think that's blessed. My group chats are cursed. We're going to find out if we can turn them off or somehow make them bigger and louder. Because I think you want to go in one of two directions. I think four dots for V's group chats. I think the angrier your message, the bigger the indicator gets. It can be really chaotic.

1:25:30I think just like where are we safe from typing indicators? Like they've crept into so many messaging apps. It's like everybody's got to know when I'm typing a message in Slack and I change my mind. Like I have to consider that. Now it's going to be in the group chat and you have to think about that dynamic. Yeah, I think I side with V on this. That's exactly it. You know when you're in Slack and then someone says something and then you just see several people are typing. Thanks. You're bringing that to the group chat on your phone now. It's going to be something. Someone's going to say something controversial and then several people typing indicators are happening.

1:26:07And then it's just. But that's that's Neelai's dream. Just drop a bomb in the group chat and cause a several people are typing. And he's just like, I did it. Wait, real quick poll of the group here. Are y 'all read receipts people? Do you read receipts on or off? No, no. I had one instance where I didn't realize they were on. and I left someone on red and they crashed out so hard. And let me tell you, this was not someone I was seeing. This was not a friend. This was my father's friend. And I just didn't have an answer for her. And I'll be like, I'll answer this later. She crashed out and sent me so many screenshots going like, I see that you read my message.

1:26:43You didn't say anything. And I was like, after that, I've never had red receipts on because I was just like, there are some people who don't need this knowledge. No, my dad was dead. So this was after his funeral, which made it even more insane. So it was just like some people, they don't need to know what you're doing. They don't need to know. That's how you would turn off read receipts forever, I think is the, just walking through that situation mentally. Yeah, that's, you would, you would turn that off. Yeah. Yeah, I just don't want people to know. I prefer to operate with an air of history.

1:27:15Yeah, I think it accomplishes nothing. I cannot think of one good thing that would happen in my life because of read receipts. And I it's but I most people anecdotally based on like what I see texting with people, most people have them on. And I can't tell if that's just like you don't see your own read receipts. So people probably don't know or think about it or lots of people that are like choosing to do it. Allison, you're the only one who hasn't answered yet. Suspiciously quiet about readers. I have them on and I think I don't know. I feel like I've kind of tuned them out. I sort of appreciate the Android like little checkmark.

1:27:50It's like, it feels friendlier, I think, to have the little checkmark of like, yes, you sent this message. And yes, they received it and looked at it. I'm like, okay, let's leave it at that. We don't need to get involved in like, who read what, you know. V and Allison are a real like, inside of us all there are two wolves kind of situation right now. What I'm telling you is that tech billionaires have taught a generation of Americans to be surveilled and to surveil one another. And you can fight back. I agree. I like, you don't need to know if I read the message because you can just send another one.

1:28:27You don't need to know when I read something. You don't need to know how bad my ADHD is. Some things should just be private. Also, sometimes I just want to clear the little red notification badge and I'm just like, that's just what I want to do. I'm not slighting you. People just read too much and don't read receipts. Yeah, I agree. All right. We need to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we're going to do what I'm calling all the rest of the stuff. It's going to be great. stick around. We'll be right back. Every great company story is defined by moments when the founders make bold decisions.

1:28:58These are high stakes moments that risk the business, but can lead to greatness. I'm Rulof Boeta, managing partner of Sequoia Capital and the host of Crucible Moments. We're returning for a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell, and more, share what it's actually like to navigate the make-or-break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on Seasons 1 and 2 wherever you find your podcasts.

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1:30:24You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. All right, we're back. Let's talk watch OS. And V, the floor is yours here. Would you like to talk about Workout Buddy for no more than 72 minutes. Again, I just want... Alice and I experienced sitting next to V in real time while this was being announced. It was literally like another show was taking place. It was very good. It was a roller coaster. So watch OS 26, same new design, liquid glass, lots of stuff going on, gets a bunch of stuff from other ones, and then there is Workout Buddy.

1:31:09V, how do you feel? That's how I feel about it. But, like, I don't know if you've ever seen Bob's Burgers and Tina in Bob's Burgers, how she just, like, sits there sometimes and just makes a low-grade home. Like, ah, that was me. That was what was happening while Workout Buddy was. So, like, okay, you hear the size now. So, it makes sense that Workout Buddy is happening just because if you look at any major fitness app, the AI is there. It is there and it is there to tell you how you're doing based on your data, because the thing about fitness tracking is that it generates a lot of data, but no one knows what to do with that data without the context.

1:31:52And so everyone is just for years now struggling how to give context to your fitness data and help you interpret it. So this is like the latest take about shoving AI into fitness tech. Carmen just introduced a subscription and shoved AI summaries in there. Anyone who has been using Strava has been like roasting Strava's implementation of AI summaries in that platform. So, you know, Whoop has an AI coach. Aura has an AI advisor. There's just AI buddies everywhere in the fitness tech world. It is very annoying because most of it is just Captain Obvious insights. so it's just like you did a run okay cool great love that for me specifically was the demo of the work i buddy we spent apple spent minutes of its developers keynote making us watch a video of a woman running while a voice was like you're doing great that was the whole that was the expression of the product that we all watched yeah yeah so that's workout buddy kind of but um so what i was told is basically that at the beginning of your workout, it's going to give you some motivational pep talk at the end of the workout.

1:33:08It's going to give you a summary of what happened, which you're going to have in your workout app anyway. I don't understand why we need to have these audio cues. But if anything significant happens in the workout itself, like if you reach a milestone or something, you get the little workout buddy going like, hey, great, you did a PR or something like that. It's meant to be motivational and positive, which was a question I asked because I was like, like, you know, different people respond to different types of training and workout motivations. I, for example, bristle at every single workout instructor who has had the drill sergeant thing going like, come on, pick it up.

1:33:51You can do it faster. I will go slower because I'm like, F you, you don't get to tell me how this run is going to go. This is my run, buddy i'm imagining what works for you is is just someone just very quietly being like you're the worst just give up who even cares why why are you even trying just go home and you're like shut up i'm gonna run 70 miles yeah you know is there a workout buddy that just like gently negs you the whole time oh no does workout buddy have personalities or is it always just like chipper or apple fitness instructor uh it's i think it's the the concept is based around different types of Apple fitness instructor personalities.

1:34:27So that like 50 shades of gentle motivation is what I think the concept is there. Because, you know, anytime when we talk about Apple's approach to fitness, it is meant to be inclusive. It is meant to be they don't really go into the drill sergeant. Come on, run faster, buddy, like kind of motivation, which personally, I appreciate because that's rude. I'm just sort of like when I'm running and I'm in the zone, when I'm listening to my stray kids talking about God's menu and do, do, do, doing, I don't want to hear, hey, you did a PR. Yeah, that's a later insight. I don't need that while I'm running, but I'll give it a try.

1:35:09I'll say maybe I will change my mind. I have changed my mind before. But what's the connection to like, hey, you did a PR or like, here's your time to a mile, run a little bit faster. Like that's just a combination of like doing some math and then having a text-to-speech model. What's the connection to like we're collecting a bunch of data about you? Right? Like that's what – I hear what you're saying. Like fitness tracking generates a bunch of data that no one knows what to do with. Isn't that where you would have an AI being like, here are some patterns. Do some stuff. Like ostensibly. Don't only run downhill, Eli.

1:35:44Like, you know, like stuff. But it depends on your goals, right? Because maybe if your goal is to run a half marathon and the half marathon is really hilly. Yeah, maybe you want an AI saying like, hey, so I see that you are avoiding hill intervals. Maybe don't do that if you want to have a good time on your run. Yeah, ostensibly that could be something that you want. But if the goal is to just be active, do you really need that? Do you really need to chase PRs? Because I can tell you from a lot of people, you are going to get injured if you do any sport for any period of time. And if you're only chasing PRs, if you're only chasing these goalposts, you will burn out and you will feel terrible about yourself because you will fall off at a certain point in time.

1:36:29It's a very delicate balance about what actually motivates people. And like, it's sort of also just like taking your historical data into context being like, congratulations, you ran three times and this route and this is the second best thing that you've done on this segment of this route. Do you really meet? Is that really something that you want to hear during your run slash walk slash cycling segment? There's some psychos out there who do love this kind of granular data. I will also say, I think a thing that we are quickly learning about AI interactions in general is that that kind of stuff is more meaningful to more people than I expected.

1:37:04And I say that with as little judgment as possible, that like having having a fake voice in your ear telling you that you're doing a good job actually means a lot to a lot of people. and I am still trying to figure out what to make of that as like a person but I think it's true and I think there's something to it and I also really like the idea of something that would be like just gently rude to me the whole time like what would really work for me is if my workout buddy was just like sort of sarcastically be like oh great job David what a good workout you just did you ran so fast I try to use my iPad as a real computer feature we're gonna run I fell in love with my workout buddy oh no workout buddy tries to convince David Pierce to leave wife and family it's okay my wife is already successfully mean to me all the time so it's no I know you're tight which is why you suggested that a robot tell you to run faster in that exact personality I became worried for you listen I am who I am we'll see I asked if you could I asked if you could like calibrate the workout buddy I didn't really get a clear answer there but I think if you could calibrate your workout buddy to be your ideal companion while you do a workout sure that might help a bunch of people uh because i don't know exercise is one of those things is it for all the no no it's for walks it's uh walking you can have it i believe you can do it with cycling so it's it's multiple different workout feet exercises yes all done feet cardio exercises which because it makes sense These are generally solitary activities.

1:38:42You can turn it on and off. It's not like mandatory. Can you be like, workout buddy, I want to get jacked? And then, so just cardio, just foot-based cardio. I think it's just, like what I will say is that no, very few apps actually do strength training well. Because it's just one of those things that is repetitive and boring if you're doing it well. and also very different depending on everyone's needs and equipment issues. So I think maybe exactly one app does it well, and that's Ladder. But yeah, I don't think strength training is – I don't even know what a strength training workout buddy would be like because what you would want from an AI buddy is prompt cues or like form check prompt cues.

1:39:30So how does it know what you're doing? Just be like, yo, bro, you need a spot?

1:39:38Before we move on, anything else in WatchOS 26 do you think is interesting? You know, the one thing that stood out to me was the smart stack, because it's just like a really funny paradoxical thing, because they're saying that the smart stack is going to get even smarter with Apple intelligence, so that when you look at the stack, it'll surface the things that are most useful to you at any given one point in time. and that's such a hard thing to judge because if it's doing its job really well you will never notice it so that's just like a i was sitting there going like how am i gonna test if this is actually useful to me i have no idea how i would even notice it but maybe that's just how i know it'll be doing its job so smart stack let's see what was the like flippy thing they were like and Oh, it's a new gesture.

1:40:28Okay. It's a new gesture. Wrist flick. We got to workshop a new name for this gesture. I like flippy flip. Double tap is pinchy pinch. Flippy flip? Yeah. Okay, so in the live blog I was like twisty twist, but I think I like flippy flip better. Pinchy pinch and flippy flip. Pinchy pinch and flippy flip. That's good. Yeah, there we go. I love it. All right, well, problem solved. All right, now TVOS we already did. I will remind you. More notifications. New screensavers. Connect to a speaker. The end. that's it that's all I got for you fully out of ideas no one has any more ideas for TV UIs literally they like they do the bento boxes at the end of everyone that just has a bunch of the features and like half of them were just shows on Apple TV Plus what are we doing Vision OS is the last platform we should talk about the big thing here I think is widgets oh I was going to say connect to a speaker connect to a speaker question mark V I would like you to just briefly convince me as probably the person among the four of us who has spent the most time in a vision pro yes widgets is cool and good I will allow you 11 seconds okay I guess okay so I guess the one thing is that every single time you have a you know what I can't do it I guess the widget wall clock yay the widgets are a little like augmented reality like they're not augmented reality you know that's a new term I just made up augmented reality yeah like they look like they're on the wall but they're not actually augmented reality they're just like you know I mean they're just like pictures they don't yeah do you remember that they're not interacting with reality they're just stuck up there you know do you remember that Facebook event a bunch of years ago where Mark Zuckerberg was like Like the future is you're not going to have a TV on your wall.

1:42:23You're going to have an AR TV that you look at through your glasses that you're going to like buy for a dollar in the app store. And you'll put that on the wall. Yeah. I saw this and I was like, oh, my God. Was Mark Zuckerberg right? Like is the future of wall clocks widgets in my vision pro? This is what we're doing here. There's one big vision OS feature that we should talk about for just like half a second. And it is actually the feature they needed to launch with, which is guest access and like shared support. So now you can, like, let someone else set up the Vision OS device for themselves.

1:42:54All of those settings, it's saved to their phone. And then if they go to any other Vision OS device running what is now called Vision OS 26. We just skip 24, 24 different Vision OSes straight to Vision 26. They can say, I've got one, and, like, send the data from their phone to the headset, and it will just be ready for them. And they should have had this from the beginning. And what's amazing about this is that they announced this feature in the context of enterprise use. Because it's enterprises who want this feature. Businesses were like, we have lots of shared headsets that go out in the field.

1:43:31People need to switch between them all the time. We're not buying one for everybody. But it's also for consumers. I made sure that it's also for consumers. But you can see where the action is on the Vision Pro. It's in the enterprise. It's like fancy architecture firms, I assume. That's what I think of when I think of the Vision Pro. This is so funny because I literally just got a text message from our dearly departed Wes Davis, who is a Vision Pro owner with his own money, and he said, the widgets are good. So there you go. Think of all the money he's saving on wall clocks. You know what I mean?

1:44:04The wall clocks are – That's how you pay for the Vision Pro. You can buy now by up to 350 fewer wall clocks. I mean, to be fair, one of the issues that I've had with the Vision Pro is, like, let's say I have all my big screens in the room that I want and in the perfect allocation, I have to kind of re-put them up every single time I put the headset on, which is annoying. and the fact that it can remember where things are supposed to go now. I do think for the Vision Pro power users is a good thing. But what I am actually most excited about are the persona updates because I really just want to see how cursed or how much more or less cursed the new personas are.

1:44:46That got a huge round of applause from the audience during the keynote. But I really just, as soon as I get home and I get that headset, I'm going to call Wes and I'm just going to be like, is your mustache finally capable of moving? Is it free? Because is it finally capable of moving? Can your mouth now move without your mustache being a static, weird thing? I'm excited. The folks on the ground there are very excited about the persona updates. I did not get to see them, but people are very excited about them. I think even if they're better, they're worse in a way. I don't know. What they showed us was like, like rendered better.

1:45:28It looked more like a person, but it was also creepier. Oh, they're deep in the uncanny valley. Also, the demo was two people sitting next to each other on a couch, wearing headsets, watching a show together and interacting with their personas. Which is just full dystopia. Like. Yeah, that sucks, man. That's so weird. I'm out on that. That's some real alone together stuff. That's$7 ,000 worth of equipment so that we don't have to talk to each other. You have widget wall clocks and then a persona of your partner that you can look at instead of looking at their own face. So, okay. Every part of the Vision Pro from the very beginning has required Apple to take itself deadly seriously in a way that is incompatible with the reality of people wearing headsets with external battery packs connected with the water.

1:46:13to them. One of my first briefings with them when they were talking about it, I was like, have you guys ever talked to each other, both wearing headsets with the eyes on? Was it funny? And they're like, we don't laugh at each other's work. And I was like, I don't know, people laugh at my work all the time. What are you talking about? It's a workplace. Have you seen The Office? The culture of laughing at each other at work is like, well, it's... But the Vision Pro rejects that as a product because it's so inherently silly, Apple has to take it deadly seriously and be like, yes, two people will sit together on a couch wearing their Vision Pros, watching a show together, and conducting business in their personas.

1:46:55And you're like, good luck. Sure. Oh my God. Wes just tried to FaceTime me from his Vision Pro. Oh God. He's so excited. Anyway. You're going to have to report back. This is going to be great. All right. bunch more things then we're gonna get out of here uh we talked a little bit about the airpods camera control thing um i missed this part of the keynote did we get a sense of how you take the picture with your airpods no nothing no this is more creator stuff where it's like you can start the capture by clicking your airpod and then immediately begin talking to camera so i think we when we were talking about last we were thinking about it because we're old dads about like taking a group photo of the Grand Canyon.

1:47:40And what they were talking about is a bunch of zoomers who are like, Hey guys, how to start the tick tock. Right. Yeah. Okay. Um, it also, they introduced studio quality recording for the AirPods, which I will just say as someone who makes a podcast on which we use AirPods, uh, you're lying and I don't believe you. Uh, the claim there wasn't even what you would expect the claim to be. You, cause if they had just been like, here's what we're going to do, we're going to take your AirPods audio. We're going to AI the shit out of them and make them sound good. You'd be like, all right, that's gonna be weird there might be some artifacts like whatever we'll like check it out but they were just like no we just made airpods 2g quality it's like how did you just turn up the bass slider like what did you do yeah they just magically sound better they got one of those like 1980s like 24 band parametric eqs and just like turned up out of the whole right side like how not unclear don't believe you um all right next one uh there's the new games app which they kind of skimmed past in a way i was a little surprised by we expected there to be a lot of noise about like apple's you know annual huge play into gaming and this kind of was that but i don't know i didn't get the sense that this was a huge new initiative from apple to try and make gaming work so much as it is just like a place to find all the games you haven't sold so there's a john gruber posted his read on this which lightly tracks with mine which is they are making the games app like a separate app store and app experience so that eventually when the regulators come for app store fees they can be like game we're going to treat games differently and all the other apps differently because we know when because candy crush whales because they compete with xbox playstation and yeah and those are all the same fees and they made this tiny distinction in the keynote it was it went by in a flash but they made a distinction between app store games and apple arcade games oh interesting like even games from the app store versus apple arcade games and it's like oh you think you think about these differently which kind of makes sense because apple arcade games are another subscription and all this other stuff but there's just the the first hints that they're they're peeling things apart yeah interesting uh okay um the tabs came back to the photos app announced by the way joy in the streets of the internet yeah Craig Fennery was like many of you enjoyed tabs in the old I'm just the the Satan Elmo gif where he's just like the fires behind him and the arms are up that's I just I really hated how they changed the photos up so thank God yes many people enjoy tabs I am one of them and I'm happy happy I won't we'll see I think I'll be happy with it so yay we enjoyed knowing how to look for the thing we're looking for yes man i don't this this whole backlash has made me absolutely convinced that i'm using photos wrong because i opened the app it showed me all my photos and that was fine and now now i open the app and it shows me all my photos and it's still fine so like i'm i'm doing it wrong and we'll figure this out together i think but i'm i'm lost All right.

1:50:54We're almost done here. Apple Maps will now learn the routes you take on your commute and such and will try to automatically help you with them. When like if you're going to hit traffic you don't know about, even if you don't plug in the directions, it will try to alert you to take a different route. I think that's very cool. I also don't use Apple Maps for anything ever. So here we are. The one place Apple Maps is absolutely superior to Google Maps is the state of New Jersey. and if they could just get Apple intelligence to force me to use Apple Maps when I travel to New Jersey, that's all it's for.

1:51:30I live in New Jersey. I'm sorry. Against my will. But I don't think that Apple Maps is good in New Jersey. No, it's good in one specific way. I'm just putting this out there. It's good in one specific way. Google could catch up tomorrow. Driving in New Jersey is a series of nonstop events. You're like, merge right on this highway. immediately change five lanes to merge onto another highway, then another highway, then a 15th highway. We've named this place the Garden State for some unbelievable reason. But this is the experience of being here. And Google Maps just does not acknowledge that every action will be followed by a series of 45 other actions.

1:52:08Two seconds later, yeah. Google is always like, turn in 100 feet, and then you turn. And then it's like, oh, 75 feet ago, you were supposed to turn again. And so at least Apple Maps is like, some things are going to happen to you and you're going to get through them together as a family. And it's like, this still sucks. I still hate it. Sorry. Every time I've ever driven New Jersey, my wife and I have gotten into a fight and Apple Maps has reduced the fights like by 10%. This is fascinating data because obviously my spouse and I drive in New Jersey all the time and they switch between Apple Maps and Google Maps and And it's a lot.

1:52:52The only thing I think actually Apple Maps has over Google Maps is that if you have an Apple Watch, it'll give you have to cues for when you're supposed to take the next action. So, yes, in that sense, it is superior, especially in Jersey, where there is a right lane exit every five seconds. And you have to know the difference between this right lane exit versus the one right before you. Driving in Jersey is just a shit show. Do you see what I'm saying? And so if Apple could use its trillions of dollars and its data centers and its intelligence to somehow improve this, I think they would take massive share in one state in the union from Google.

1:53:29That's all I'm saying. I have a very V-specific question. When it's doing that haptic thing on your wrist and it's, like, tapping you, is there different taps for the direction you're supposed to turn? It, like, freaks me out a little bit. I'm like, is this supposed to be telling me, like, turn left or turn right? I don't use Apple Maps when I drive. The spouse does because they swear it will reduce the number of times that they miss the exit, which, you know, this is getting too much into my marriage. But I think if they just turned on the audio cues, they would miss 20 % fewer turns. Well, you're right.

1:54:08They insist. They insist. You are also in my marriage. Driving buddy. Did you just read my marriage? Driving buddy, absolutely. And every time you get the term, right, it's like you did great. You're so good. Yeah, you know what? It's a personal record. We didn't need workout buddy. We needed driving buddy specifically from marriages in Jersey. Just anybody in a marriage in Jersey trying to get somewhere on time, you need driving buddy. I can feel David like knowing that this podcast needs to wrap up because V and I are just complaining about New Jersey now. But that's the kind of day it was. The show ended like a half hour ago.

1:54:42Yeah. no it's I this is this is I'm learning a lot about why I need to just switch to Waze is the thing that I'm taking away from all of this Waze just has me drive through neighborhoods and everything is fine um uh the there was some new stuff for like digital IDs in Apple wallet which I bring up only so that Neelai can remind people never never hand your phone to a cop don't do it there you go uh that's a good one uh I also have another one for our good friend Neelai Patel uh We got some CarPlay updates. Are you so excited about CarPlay? Neil Patel, America's number one lover of CarPlay. Do you have any thoughts?

1:55:20I've asked Apple to send me home with an Aston Martin. For journalism? So far, they haven't said no. I would not say that they have said yes. But we're in a liminal place where hope is alive. Schrodinger's Aston Martin. CarPlay Ultra is its own beast. and I don't know what's going to happen there. By the way, Jeep, Stellantis, the company that owns Jeep, broke its software relationship with Amazon a couple weeks ago. And of all of the companies that should just screw it, just glue an iPhone to your dashboard, call it a day, they should just do it. Most of the other car companies are still in a real wait and see.

1:56:01But the CarPlay updates, they're fine. They're good. You get tap back emojis. Mostly what you should send as a response or text message while you're driving is a thumbs up. Yes. If they made that easier, that's great, right? To just emoji respond to texts so you're not like talking and, you know, screwing around with Siri and all that stuff. But it's never been more clear that CarPlay is just a second monitor for your phone than looking at the set of updates. Because they're just like, we changed how the phone looks, so CarPlay looks different now. Like, we've made some widgets move around and added some features.

1:56:33Like, oh, this is just a second monitor for your iPhone running on your car display. And, like, that's what it is and it's what it should be. and I think people are generally happy with that. But the fact that CarPlay Ultra is over there and it's like we've added the climate controls to it has never seemed less important. It just doesn't matter. What you want is a second monitor for your phone running in your car display. It is more of that than it has ever been before. I'm hoping to go home with an Aston Martin and Apple if you want to convince me otherwise. Black is great. I will accept silver.

1:57:07We've been looking for a reason to do a Vergecast Road trip and i'm just saying that the aston martin with carplay ultra is is the solution to all our problems the whole we have an ethics policy i can't actually accept the aston martin you understand what it's a joke we can't have it forever but you can long-term loans exist there are review units of cars so that's true i know that people i know that the review there's like a review warehouse in in the northeast i'm friendly with him but if you think about it like you have to drive it long enough that you're no longer amazed by the novelty of an aston and that's like at least a year before you can even really properly review carplay ultra yeah as as software divorced from the existence of the aston so it's it's going to be fine we're going to make this work for you um all right we need to get out of here but i i do just want to just check in one last time y 'all were there y 'all y 'all have been through all this we've talked through a lot of the news there was a lot of stuff my sort of overall takeaway is that like if it if it wasn't in the shadow of last year and it wasn't in the shadow of sort of everything else that's been going on with apple that like from a pure here's the new stuff coming to your devices world this was like a fine wwbc yeah not not the greatest we've ever seen not bad and and what makes all of it weird is all of the other stuff happening around apple which is really unusual for apple which is a company that has like lived in its own bubble for as long as we've all been doing this was that your read too like good not great your phone's probably going to be fine once they walk back all the liquid glass yeah like a like a off year where you are just going you're following up vision pro you're following up apple intelligence and now it's this stuff that's just kind of how it felt like the big three yeah vision pro bad siri windows vista is the true legacy of moist vista moist Vista.

1:59:02Oh, no.

1:59:06Moist Vista is not a great... We will not be making that t-shirt, I can tell you that. I'm really unhappy about that actually the more I think about it. I don't think you can ignore the other stuff. The rest of this industry is chasing an uncertain technology that might not be the future. It just might not be. But which has a lot of capabilities towards like an entire new model of applications. That's just a thing that's happening out there. Like Sundar Pichai coming into Coder, I mean, like the web is a series of databases and like my agents can just go ping the databases and Kevin Scott from Microsoft coming on and being like MCP is the future and I can re-architect the open web based on these new protocols and the kids on TikTok using NAN to make new automations out of all these tools.

1:59:53Like there's something actually happening there. Like some big thing is actually happening there And all of the app action and app development right now is happening with those kinds of tools on the web in really weird ways. It might come to nothing. And I think Apple's point of view is like, we don't do comes to nothing. like they're like we make great products when they're finished we ship them except for the fact that like for over a decade now, all of the hottest apps have launched on the phone. And at a developer's conference, what you want is lots of new reasons to make cool apps on the phone.

2:00:36And I don't know. There's just a gap there that is worth thinking about longer than it was just fine. Yeah, they just did. They revved all the stuff. Here's all the stuff they worked on for the last year. Here it is. The last year, they're like, Siri will be your best friend. Right. And they haven't shipped it yet. And meanwhile, like, you know, coming off of IO, you're like, here's Google being like, here's all these new ways to think about using your computer. All like, and it's a bunch of Google stuff. Some of it will just come to nothing. Project Mariner where they run Chrome in the cloud and click around the web for you.

2:01:09Like, I don't know, man. but like there's just all these shots at what are new ways of using computers that are taking place including johnny i've going to go work on new devices at open ai like all that stuff is happening people see a way around the next turn i don't know like i don't know if lms are the way through it i really don't but apple just being like yeah we're we're taking a beat it's just kind of off like there's something there that i don't know how anybody makes the next great device but everyone else is taking shots at it and apple's like no no the phone will win yeah it's weird like this this part of the reason i asked this question is that apple is sort of it felt like a return to like pre-pandemic apple wwdc's uh and apple is the only company left on this particular island like it is so unlike every other conversation we're having about technology.

2:02:04Allison, what was your read? It just kind of like, I understand why Apple had to jump headfirst in AI last year and like make the big Apple intelligence announcement. But it does feel backwards now that I think about it. Like if this had been our kind of first step into like, you know, it's not just machine learning, it's intelligence and it's going to do these things for you and you're going to take a screenshot and it's going to put it on your calendar. And be like, great, I'm on board, you know, and then work up to the Siri is your best friend stuff. It couldn't be that way. You know, and Google has shipped a ton of stuff that is in the Gemini is your best friend track.

2:02:50um so it's just a weird kind of a no win position for apple i guess but um some interesting stuff i'm like excited to play with i think yeah i like we the idea that gemini is going to win the race to be your best friend is a deeply terrifying state of affairs but you might not be wrong um all right you guys have been sitting here with me long enough you need to go do other things in Cupertino. I think you're going to see the F1 movie. This is the thing that's going to happen. It's the rumor. Not today. This is what they say. All right. Thank you all for being here. Safe travels home. We will have lots more to talk about.

2:03:33Hit us up on the hotline. Tell us all the stuff that we missed, all the weird, tiny, bizarre features on all of these platforms. Tell David how much you love shortcuts. Tell me all of your favorite shortcuts. Send me links so that I can click them and add them to my own shortcuts and use them every single day. until then that's it that's the Vergecast rock and roll

2:04:17Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.