The AI garage door mystery

33:07Will The Verge have something to write about for the next 10 years? Yes. I think we're going to be okay. Go get it. There'll be a lot to unpack with all that. But you just see where it's going. And all of this effort right now is pointed at advertising. Let me just do one more thing really quickly on the earnings thing, because I don't want to talk about earnings because I hate earnings. But I found this fascinating quote from Jen Wong, the CFO of Reddit, talking about exactly the thing you're describing. Let me just read you this quote. She says, So we launched a couple of quarters ago, a headline generator using Gen AI, where you can just put in the URL from your website and it actually gives you Reddity headlines that actually drive improved ad performance.

33:46And having Reddity type headlines in your ads really does make a difference in the ad resonance. So that's just an example of, I think, what's possible in terms of ad creative. Yeah. And that is actually such a simple version of the thing that is just like, here's a Reddit bot that you can just plug a headline into and it will teach you how to Reddit. it. And like, I just think about all the brands who did all that, like awful cringy stuff on Twitter for all those years. This is about to get so horrible and so AI driven in so many ugly ways. By the way, Mark Zuckerberg said more AI generated content is coming to Facebook and Instagram and maybe even threads.

34:20Yeah. And they're, they're fine with this. This is a feature, not a bug. Like it, it's so, it's so is, and everybody is fine with this. So that's one thing is the ads. And then just the two other things I just want to say out loud, because I feel like I'm losing my mind talking about AI with people. One is that I think we all still massively underrate how expensive the infrastructure for all of this is. Almost every one of these companies has like gone out of its way and it's earning reports to talk about the increased cost just of physical infrastructure of supporting AI. And so like Sam Altman was out there being like, I need$7 trillion to build data centers to make all this AI stuff possible.

34:59Like the money is going to be crazy. and the numbers are only going up. And I think like anyone who wants to say we're in an AI bubble, like those are the costs that are going to pop the bubble. So that's thing number two. And then thing number three, and this is just the most important point and the thing I want everyone to remember about AI is that anything other than like back of house AI that is doing like data analytics and helping customer service and all that stuff, anything other than that is a total money pit that there is very little evidence is actually working for anyone in the world.

35:31like go read these earnings reports they all start with the ceo being like here are some cool magical things that we think we're inventing and then the cfo comes on and is like all of that has cost us 16 billion dollars this year here's how we've made our money like over and over and over that's what it is all of this other stuff is being built in service of like being cool and exciting and getting in front of users all of the actual utility and more importantly all of the actual Well, money here is the boring B2B crap that nobody wants to talk about. That is the AI story. If you want to hear more about how AI is flipping over the advertising industry and creators in general, you should go listen to the Decoder episode with Amy Lansey, who is the CEO of Digitas.

36:14Oh, yeah, that was a good one. And we did that in front of an audience. There was a lot of like, ooh, moments. And that was fun. And I asked her, what is the difference between a creator and an influencer? That got nowhere. Great icebreaker, by the way, if you're ever in Adworld, because no one really knows. But inside of that, we talked about this boring B2B stuff and what they're using AI for. And it, yeah, there's a big, there's the, we're going to have AGI, like flashy noise. And then there's the, like, we're doing better ad targeting reality. Right. And to be clear, the ad targeting reality is fine, right?

36:44Like all of that is well and good. And those things are going to be very meaningful to a lot of people in their jobs. They're going to make a lot of companies. Like, that's all great. Let's just talk about what it is, right? Like, OpenAI makes most of its money from that stuff, not by building digital god. By the way, OpenAI, they haven't actually made more money than they spent yet. So it's, they got a ways to go. Not anywhere close. And, by the way, what they will disrupt is Google Search, which is one of the richest businesses in the history of the world. Yeah. Like, pure margin businesses that has ever existed.

37:20But like I said, I know what we're going to be doing for the next 10 years, assuming that there are still websites. Important qualifications. This is why we have a podcast, Neal. You can't kill podcasts. And people have tried it. All right. We've got to take a break. We're going to be back with Joanna Stern and talk about all the Apple news. We'll be right back. Adobe Acrobat Studio. So brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do. Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need. Do hours of research in an instant. With key insights from an AI assistant. Take a template with a click.

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39:52We're back. Joanna Stern is here. Welcome, Joanna. I'm here. Thank you for having me. We're excited to talk to you. There's, I mean, it's Apple intelligence has arrived with iOS 18.1. All of our lives are different. You're a robot now. I am. There was what came before, and now there's today. Tim Cook did tell the Wall Street Journal that it did change his life. He did. So there is actually a lot of Apple needs to go through with you. Apple had its Mac week. They announced a Mac Mini with an M4 chip. It's tiny and cute. We got to talk about it. Everything's on the bottom. The power button's on the bottom of the Mac Mini.

40:29The USB-C port is still on the bottom on the new Magic Mouse. There's the iMac, very colorful. also has an M4 chip in it. And then iOS 18.1 hit on Monday with the first shreds of Apple Intelligence. And it is true, Tim Cook said, that having his email summarized for him changed his life. Let's just start with Apple Intelligence because honestly, we can get through it in 30 seconds, David. It took me three and a half days after installing iOS 18.1 to realize that I had it on my phone because I opened up the mail app to look for something and was like, oh, it's doing some of the things. And that's the extent of my experience so far with the mail app.

41:13There's been a lot of like productivity apps out there that are very excited about integrating all of the writing tools. I'm sure they are fine and useful for some people. The notification summaries seem fine. I like I cannot I was prepared to be disappointed by how little was actually going on in this first round of Apple intelligence. And it's actually even less exciting than I was afraid of. Wait, but you use the Apple Mail app? No, I use it when occasionally I have to search and Gmail is busted. Gmail search is sometimes very good and sometimes a nightmare. And for whatever reason, Apple Mail search is actually occasionally very good.

41:52So every once in a while, I just wander through my inbox. I don't use the Apple Mail app. And I'm always, it's just wild to me that if you use Gmail, you use the Apple Mail app. But that is not the point of this conversation. Well, but it kind of is. And I think I've been thinking about this Tim Cook thing a lot since that story came out. And we made a lot of fun of Tim Cook on this show for saying he uses every Apple product every day. But the thing about Apple intelligence is I think if you religiously and exclusively use Apple apps, it is probably appearing in your life in some way. You're getting some of the writing tools.

42:25The keyboard stuff is popping up. it's at least like maybe slightly more present but like i do most of my email in gmail which offers me lots of other weird ai things that i don't need but has essentially no awareness of apple intelligence which is just like the splitting of this ecosystem is just getting weirder and weirder well i think that's one of the reasons the notification stuff did kind of go so viral because it's like right there on your lock screen and you have ai straight in your face summarizing things in a funny or disappointing way. Right. But like what an incredible example of how AI is not actually intelligent.

43:05That's the first thing that everyone is experiencing is notification summaries that have literally no context or relevance or understanding of what is happening. Like my ring camera every morning, the notification summaries just crack me up because it sounds like there's a home invasion every single day in my house. What was the one you shared yesterday? It was like people at the front door and back door. Several people at the front door, back door and driveway. Mine is right now, literally. So I actually, this is why I'm here. Let's be honest. I'm here to talk about the ring notifications that I talked about with Craig Federighi.

43:41Well, that was the garage notifications, but the smart home notifications are the best part. I don't care if they're not intelligent. They're amazing. This is mine from ring right now. We We should we should bring up the screenshot missing dog with 99 on its back. Multiple people at the front door two minutes ago. Multiple people are there. Now, it is Halloween as we're taping this, but there's no I'm looking at my camera. No one is there. And one person showed up. Yeah. Well, and that's because. Yeah, it's because there were, you know, people going in and out of the house from 8 a.m. on. And it's summarized.

44:15So there was one person and there was one person and there was a dog. And it goes, there are multiple people and a dog outside of your house. Yes. And it's funny because that is, if there was actual intelligence, sort of noisy smart home sensor notifications are exactly what you would want that intelligence to help you sort through. My back door opens and closes 500 times a day. And I only want notifications sometimes. times. And you would think an AI would be like, okay, like we see this pattern. We're going to, we're going to pare this down and be like, the normal stuff happened this morning.

44:54This one didn't happen at the right time. And maybe that should be in ring. Maybe the smart home vendor should do it. Maybe it should be somewhere else. But Apple intelligence, as it summarizes notifications, it's just the clearest demonstration that it doesn't actually know. Like these LLMs don't actually know what they're talking about. The part that I talked about with Federighi in my interview was the example I gave him, which was working really well for me and still does, is the garage. Because it's open and close, and that's it. It open and closes all day long. And then there's a summary.

45:26It says it repeatedly opened and closed, and then it was recently closed. And that usually is like, that's very helpful to me. Yeah. Isn't that exactly the same thing as just putting the one that says it's closed at the top of the stack, which is what it would chronologically do. Like what, what new problem is this solving for you? That I know it was opened and closed a lot of times by my family. And then it was recently closed. I guess here's the question that I've been thinking a lot about. And every time I'm forced to reconsider the amount of smart home notifications I get, I ask myself, do I need to know this?

46:03Do I need to know that Max went in and out of the house 50 times through the back door. Like, that's just, my parents didn't know that in the 80s. They had no idea where I was, to be clear. And I'm like, actually, I don't need all this additional help. And this AI, and we should get off the smart home notification because it's a little corner case. It is very funny. I do think it's a good demonstration of the fact that LMs don't actually know what they're talking about. But in this case, it's almost blinding how useless most of these notifications are. And the only thing that's happened is because they're slightly different, you're paying attention to them again and you're like, oh, this is still useless.

46:40And I will just quickly start tuning them out the way that I tune out most of my smart home notifications. I was just on the road for 10 days and I didn't turn off my smart home notifications. Oh my God. And maybe there's an emotional attachment. Like I feel deeply emotional with these because I'm not at home. Not deeply emotional. Some emotional attachment to these smart home notifications. Your only connection to your family, to your two children. My connection to my family for 10 days, and that's where I'm going with this, was seeing these smart home notifications. And so this is really symbolic and they mean a lot to me and I'm not going to let them go.

47:21And I would like to thank Apple Intelligence for resurfacing them in my life. Like my children are here. You give a speech at a wedding that's like, you know, Joanna's like, oh. 20 years ago when I saw that first smart home notification with your partner, I knew they were the one. Joanna, I'm going to make you like a yearbook of your kids, but it's just going to be smart home notifications about what they're doing. It's so true. It'll be like child playing basketball on front garage. Child's now driving to prom. Yeah. Child's now bringing home man or woman. And they're going to play that one Green Day song in the background as we do a slideshow of them.

48:03It's going to be amazing. And Apple Intelligence will slowly get more intelligent. As Craig Federighi said, this is a decades-long arc to getting it better. That's a direct quote. So I want to come back to that conversation with Craig, which was a couple weeks ago at the WSJ Tech Live conference. I just want to say a notification summary for one more second. Outside of Smart Home stuff, the other promise is we're going to summarize your emails. We're going to summarize Slack, whatever other notifications you are getting. Has that been useful? Because I will tell you, I laughed at it for a day or two and then turned them off because I actually found those notifications because I actually found the summaries to be more confusing.

48:41Like ultimately they were more distracting because I was like, what is going on here? I got one from the family group chat that just said my niece was jealous and felt left out. And it all it was was her friends were going to an event. She was just saying, they're going and I'm jealous that I'm not going to this concert. And that was it. And it was like, otherwise totally normal, except the summary made it seem like the highest stakes thing in the world. Yeah, my mom sent me like a really emotional text. She had to go to a funeral and it was a whole thing. And then it just said, expresses gratitude.

49:12And it was like really, really long, like very long amount of text. And I was like, oh, OK. I mean, I think the question is, they're funny. and the point of them is to save time, but they're not saving any time because you then go and read the full thing anyway. So it doesn't really achieve anything. Well, it's that, it's that, oh, okay thing that is actually, I think in a weird way, like the intended response and is also why I hate it for texting. I actually think it's useful for email in the sense that you get a lot of email and a huge portion of it, all you really need to know is that it exists, right?

49:48Like it is some piece of information that you need to be made aware of or some kind of like confirmation or status check. And that's the kind of thing you can take from a giant long email into eight words. And I can just be like tight and go on living my life. What I have discovered with the AI summaries for text messages is they've made me such a worse texter. And I'm a bad texter anyway, but just the thing where I have to open a message in order to understand what is in the message goes a long way toward me being a reliable responder to that message. And so now I'm getting a lot of things where it's just like the message is just like mom on her way and i'm like all right and i just move on and i'm like no crap i have to respond all you are to me is a status update right it's like it's it's it's not even as good as like the tap back emojis it's just it's just me saying okay i can now move on because i've been given this personality free piece of information and then it's like oh no that's a text from my mom i should go respond to that and that that is i turned that off immediately because it was like preventing me from actually engaging with messages.

50:53And to that point, so I found the text from my mom. It was really long. It was, you know, it's like one of those from your parents. It's like, you know, they don't send it in chunks. They just send it all. Like they wrote a long, long letter. I don't know. Does she sign her messages at the end? She does. She's better about that. But it just said, reflecting on life, expressing gratitude and wishing a safe trip home. And I found that so funny that I sent her the the summary and said, look how this summarized it. And I never actually responded to her long, thoughtful note. You just sent her a screenshot.

51:24I was like, look how it edited you. You're like, this is so meaningful to me. And she wrote back. She's like, I guess I could have been shorter. You know, like. So, you know, it's funny is a bigger feature in iOS 18 for me is send later in messages. Oh, yeah. Because I never want to be the person who replies instantly, even though I see a lot of things. And just being able to send this in five more minutes makes me reply to more messages. It's a little hidden. They got it wrong. They got the UI wrong. They should have done it the way that Slack does it, which is you just hold down the send button.

51:58Once you schedule it, you got to dig through the menus. You got to go to the plus button. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little messy, but it works. And that is like, to your point, David, it takes me out of the this is a status message. I've seen and done it. I've taken the action, and then I've moved on. And because there's, I might be bonkers about this, but my feeling is like, if there's a little delay in the response, it makes it so that we are not about to have a conversation. Like I've just answered your question. That's so smart. I was about to say like, who are you playing it cool with? I play it cool with everybody all the time.

52:30Yeah. All of Nealai's texts say, send this in three days. Sorry, I didn't see this. I write, sorry, I didn't see this immediately and then schedule it for a couple of days from now. But actually that's genius because you are indicating to the receiver, hey, I'm not like available right now. Like, oh, like I'm in the middle of something super important, even though I just sat here and scheduled my message. But you're unavailable, like you're available, but you're not available is your signal, which is like - Right, I'm being responsive, but this is not about to be a chat. Like I'm just letting you know the thing.

53:01And I have an infinite amount of incoming where I just need to deliver an answer and not have like a 25 minute conversation. And that's fine. And like people always see screenshots of my home screen and it's always just like so many unreads. And it's like this is what the AI should help me do is be like you're just going to parse through all of these. We figured out the ones you need to answer. We're going to help you get through it. And instead, these summaries I think are just not useful. And I keep coming back to like we've invented LLMs. We are desperate for them to solve problems. This problem seems solvable.

53:36And then you like sit here holding the solution in your hand. You know, like, yeah, the door opened and closed a lot. You know, like actually send later, which we could have invented 10 years ago, is much more useful than the notification summary. Apple intelligence does include in this the prioritize priority notifications where it is supposed to help. I haven't used it a lot. In fact, I probably should have turned that on here instead of do not disturb for the podcast. I used it once during I was on a video shoot. And it did, I mean, it did send, it did prioritize like notifications from my wife and family and like group chats over Slack.

54:13Children continue to grow up in the background. Over my ring notifications that I am deeply emotionally attached to. Yeah, I'm going to put that on right now. Have you used any of the other iOS 18.1 Apple intelligence features for real? I feel like the notifications are the ones everyone's using for real because of what you said, Joanna. They're just in your face. but the writing tools, the image tools, fine. Like I'm, I'm a very precious writer. I'm just, I'm not really fond of letting AI write for me. I I've avoided them mostly. They're a little buried. They're not in your face. No, they're not.

54:51But I will say I've just come to realize that I'm not the target audience for the writing tools and that's fine. Right. Like we're, we're three people who write sentences for a living and that is not actually most people. And so like, um, that's just, that's fine. Yeah, I've used it like in notes. Like I'll sometimes draft like PR notes and stuff in notes. And so I've used it there, but I don't find it that it's like doing much for me. I mean, I use notes a lot. I use the notes app a lot. But that's another place like I felt like the list and the summarization tool might be helpful because sometimes I like make sloppy lists and like, okay, clean up the list.

55:27But then it just adds bullets in front of my dashes. And I've already had dashes in my list. And then I just had put this. These are problems that the very basic algorithms in Microsoft Word solved 25 years ago. But then it added bullets in front of my dashes. And I never used it again. I'm just telling you, if there were podcasts in 1986, we would have been like, I don't know. It is new Mac. It's adding dashes to the bullets. I have used the call recorder with the AI transcription. It's very good. It's really good. That was the one I was going to say too. And you can do a voice memo and dump it into notes with the transcription, which is very handy.

56:06Yes. That stuff is very cool. Well, I would say the summary is not good. I don't know if you found the summary to be good, which is the actual intelligence. But just having the transcription there, which is not an Apple intelligence feature, and you can get that, I think, going back to iPhone 13s or something like that. There's a cutoff. They're not using any LLM stuff to make the transcriptions better because OpenAI has Whisper, which is its AI-powered transcription. And there are some reports that it's inaccurate in some of its cases. I think there was one about people using hospitals. In hospitals, yeah.

56:39It's not being great, which is not great. Also just a classic AI story. But it's better. I think the stat I saw is that the AI transcription systems are now on average better than the worst human transcriptions. Whisper's really good. Like I've been using Whisper a ton. We use it a ton for Vergecast stuff. And it's really good. I'm not surprised. Like a hospital is the ultimate stress test of anything. It's just full of words that don't exist outside of hospitals. And so that's always going to be tough. And you should never rely on these systems 100%. But like all of this speech to text and even basic summarization stuff has gotten pretty good.

57:19Apple Intelligence, I would not say, is leading the summarization game. But a lot of that stuff is pretty good at this point. I mean, this is, I do think that there's no AI in the, I mean, there's obviously an AI model that is on device that's doing the transcription. But like, you don't need Apple Intelligence to do that. Right. As that's what I'm reading right now, just to confirm what I said before. So yes, the summarization part is Apple Intelligence. And that's the part that's not very good. And that's the part that's not very good, but the part that is really good, it really is a game changer for me.

57:51It's like, yeah, some source just calls or I'm doing a quick, and I'm just like, oh, hit record. It works great, and the transcription's fine. You at least can go, like, it's great for scrolling and saying, oh, that's the part I need to talk to. Yeah, to find the audio I need. Right. And this is very, again, to David's point, this is three people who just, like, do this task all the time, and this is very useful. But it is a useful upgrade to iOS 18. Everybody who has a Pixel phone or an Android phone, I'm aware that these phones have had this stuff and it has been great for a long time. I'm just looking at this sweep of things that have been added to my phone with iOS 18.1 and Apple Intelligence.

58:25And it's like this stuff, which I just keep coming back to, is the basics. Should we be able to figure out when to add bullets instead of dashes, instead of adding them both? Solved problem. Should we be able to send messages later? Solved problem. Should my phone app have a call recorder in it that does reasonably go transition. Solve prop, but now we're bundling them all up into Apple Intelligence. Right. Obviously, the developer betas of iOS 18.2 out at the same time, so there's a real mishmash of what people are looking at, what people are talking about. The more interesting features are in 18.2, visual intelligence, chat, GBT integration.

59:01I guess we'll wait on that, but it's here. A big conversation we were having, and Joanna, I'm curious how you have thought about this, is we reviewed the phones without Apple intelligence in them because of our rule, review what's in the box. And then we're like, maybe we have to re-review them now that it's here. And I'm kind of like, but you don't because there's nothing. Like, I don't know what to say about that. What are you going to do? Oh, no, I'm done with coverage. We're done now. We're done now. All done. 18.2. Yeah, I'll revisit and maybe there's some significant stuff there. Let's just talk about the most important thing that was added in 18.1.

59:41And I mentioned this when I did your installer. What's my installer thing that I submitted? Anyway, I don't know. Just your home screen. My home screen. Yeah, that section. In 18.1, you can finally in Control Center add a Wi-Fi widget or control. So again, probably something they would have talked about in, what was it? 86, you mentioned on the podcast. Add a Wi-Fi widget to home screen. You can actually just do the Wi-Fi and now you can just do the Wi-Fi and it's amazing. I strongly agree. It's Control Center. I set mine up after you sent me your home screen being like Control Center is the greatest thing that ever happened to me I was like alright cool whatever Joanna you're right it's great I now spend a lot of time just like mucking around in Control Center doing stuff because Smart Home stuff I feel like the Control Center is Apple they're like fine you want customization here's what it's like and then next year they'll be like we're going back to telling you exactly how this works because it's obviously crazy to do it this way well there's one like meme Like it's very much you're getting what you wished for.

1:00:51And somebody's just put Wi-Fi controls. The entire control center's Wi-Fi controls. And it's like, that's exactly what you're talking about. They're like, you wanted customization? Look at this. Look at this asshole. Look what he's done. Oh, yeah. It's the same with all the colors and stuff. Oh, they're like, oh, you want your phone to be ugly? Knock yourself out. Have an ugly phone. Enjoy your ugly phone. Finally, the iPhone is brown. You'll never, ever figure out how to do it except by accident. But Godspeed. All right. That's iOS 18.1 Apple Intelligence. It is a baby step, as Craig told Joanna.

1:01:21You should go watch that video of that interview. It's very good. We got to mostly talk about his garage door opener situation, but we'll come to that. The other Apple news is the week of Macs, which is mostly just spec bumps. The new iMacs have an M4 chip in them. They're very nice. The new MacBook Pros have M4 Pros and M4 Max chips in them. Very nice. There's new colors on the iMacs, which are very bold. We have some beautiful pictures that Viren went and took of them. You know, look at those. But they're the same. They're just spec bumps, right? New chips. It's the Mac Mini that's got everybody just raving.

1:01:55It's like little baby Mac M4 chip in it. It's very small. It's the same volume, I think, as the outgoing Mac Mini, but it's taller instead of – it's like they unsmushed the pancake. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I did put on the priority notifications or the whatever it is, reduced interruptions where Apple intelligence is supposed to then surface the important notifications. And this is just a chain of moms talking about when we are going to be going trick or treating. And that's a priority to interrupt our whole show with. And I never, ever respond quickly to these chain of moms, to be clear. I mean, if the chain of moms are listening to this, I'm sorry that I usually mute the channel.

1:02:35but Joanna first of all I don't think you understand how many New Jersey moms listen to our show that's I thought that's why I'm here I'm here to bring them to the show also chain of moms sounds like a doo-wop group uh and you should absolutely start that anyway if we're doing a live review of Apple intelligence which I thought we were doing on this show I interrupt the show to tell you this chain of moms is it's now blowing up my phone and Apple intelligence seems to think I care. It says maybe important. It's actually really not important. I do like our new segment where you just read us your notifications from time to time on the air.

1:03:09We're going to keep that going. It's the new Joanna's on the case. Joanna's on the case with New Jersey moms. I'm realizing you both get a lot more notifications than I do. Maybe it's just because I don't have the smart home stuff, but I have like systematically turned off basically every notification that isn't texts from people responsible for the life of my child. Like that's essentially it. Almost no one else gets to send me a notification. I'm going to install a ring camera in your house just to send you notifications so that you can, it feels like a home invasion every single morning. We need to talk about the Mac mini, which is actually very, very sorry.

1:03:41We're going back. It's fine. Tell the New Jersey moms that you're about to talk about the Mac mini. I'm going to buy them all one for, for saying that I never respond to them and muting their chain all the time. Okay. And you can, it's only$599. Right. So David, the thing about this Mac mini, you have been talking about wanting to upgrade your M1 Mac mini that i basically cajoled you into buying uh for a long time is this gonna do it yeah oh yeah this is i mean this is the mac mini people wanted um there are a couple of little less than ideal things i think it's a bummer that it doesn't have an sd card reader you'd obviously like there to be more io all the time uh this one has three usbc ports on the back and two usbc ports on the front well no it's thunderbolt on the back thunderbolt four on the back and usbc on the front which is very confusing because the ports oh that's yeah okay that's actually a good distinction uh i was about to make a face at you for trying to distinguish all the dumb thunderbolt stuff but that's that's a good distinction but anyway kill me so like more io would be good i personally there are two things about this thing that i don't care about at all uh and i would just like to say them out loud so that we can then move on i don't care that it's smaller the the mac mini the size that it was was fine and i guess if you're like rolling giant stacks of them into a server array so you can run a weird third-party messaging app hypothetically this would be very useful to you uh i don't care i'm going to stick it where my current mac mini is it's going to take up slightly less space it will be fine that's thing number one i don't care about thing number two i don't care about is that the power button is on the bottom i just i just don't care i also i should say this out loud don't care that you charge the magic mouse on the bottom don't care about that either these are not problems this is we we can let's separate these two yeah so the power button is on the bottom of the mac mini that is fine agreed would it be cooler if it were on the front sure do i have any feelings about it at all no what i think is great is that this thing is still 599 dollars it now starts with 16 gigs of ram which is awesome it has an m4 chip which is awesome like this this thing is just what it is supposed to be which i think is the thing that apple is starting to do really well with Macs is it just gives you the computer that you feel like you should have, right?

1:05:57Like this is the one with the newest chip. It has most of the IO that I want. It still has an ethernet port. It'll still plug into HDMI. Like this is just the computer that I want. And that is delightful. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because they spent so much time trying so hard to reinvent Macs or to kill them in favor of the iPad or whatever they were doing, Just scattershot Mac ideas. What if the keyboard sucked? Like just what if they were so thin the batteries only lasted five minutes? And now they're just like they're really good computers and we're just going to keep iterating them, which is all they needed to do.

1:06:31It's also kind of a sign that all of their most innovative ideas are pointed elsewhere, which is kind of weird, right? Like you would like them to have one Mac that was just bananas. But I don't think that Mac should be the Mac Mini, to be clear. It's just the thing you're talking about is just very obvious to the point where the new MacBook Pros, they didn't even update the wallpapers. They were just like, here it is again. You know, like, yeah. And all that's fine. Like, I'm with you. I think this Mac Mini is great. I do. I will say there are a lot of people who deploy Mac Minis and things like racks in other weird places where having to take the thing out and turn it over in case something goes wrong and reboot it will be a pain in the ass.

1:07:15Sure. Fair. Totally agree. But that's not the complaint. I tweeted about this and I always regret that. And also on threads. I mean, just the anger of some people being like that this is on the bottom. Because I just asked a basic question, which is how often are you people restarting or turning off your Macs? And it turns out there's a lot of people that turn off their Macs. I don't know why. I mean, these are not built to be turned off every day at the end of the day. This is, again, not a podcast in 1986, but people do it and seem very angry about the location. Yeah. I don't get it. I will say I briefly went through a phase where I would shut down my computer at the end of the day just as a like symbolic.

1:07:59My my computer day is now over thing. And it was kind of great, to be honest. There is something nice about like I have now turned my computer off, even though it takes a grand total of like six seconds to boot a Mac now. Like it's not slow. It's fine. but I don't know. I probably restart my Mac mini once every two weeks and I do it by software. Like I don't ever hit the, I can't reach the power button on my Mac mini from where I'm sitting right now. How do you turn it on? I restart it. I literally don't think I've turned it on from dead. Oh, like you haven't turned it shut down. You haven't done like shut down.

1:08:34No. Yeah. In a year maybe? Yeah. Sometimes the power goes out and I have to like pull the thing out so I can reach behind, but that's it. Like, I just don't think this is a real problem. And again, for the people who use these things in server racks and stuff, I grant that it's an issue. You're not the target customer, right? Like, this is not, that's not who Apple is making this thing for. No, actually, for the Mini, the Mini is the one where everyone is the target customer. And Apple's own marketing kind of demonstrates this, right? They're showing, here's this modular little box that you can put in all these different environments.

1:09:07And they can't, they have to, it's Apple, right? So it has to be like a person with a guitar and a person who's drawing. And it's never like the person who's running the third-party messaging service that hijacks iMessage. But like there are a lot of Mac minis and server racks. This is a thing that these computers are used for. And fine. My thing that I don't understand about turning off the computer is that actually whenever I cold boot a Mac, it takes forever for it to just be fast again. Do you guys not notice this? You got to delete some login items, my man. Yeah, I have the same, but like it's because I, yeah, I have some startup items that I just like it's starting.

1:09:43Yeah, whatever. I'm just like it's slower. I do think the idea that I should keep my computer in like a library room or like a computer room with like that weird 80s oak furniture and I should turn it off every time I'm done using it. That might make me healthier. That might be better for all of us. That will save America. Yeah, that's David's version of the emotional notifications. 100%. Yeah, I get to walk into my computer room and sit down at my computer chair in front of my giant computer box. And it's great. Wait, the point you just made about the way Apple is talking about this thing. Did that feel really different to you?

1:10:19Because my memory of the Mac Mini was that it was always like, kind of the iPhone SE, that it's just like a thing that some people like, but it's kind of over here. And we're never going to really talk about it or pay much attention to it. whereas this time it feels very like front and center this is a mainstream mac like they talk about this thing and market it and are putting it in pictures the way that they do with like the macbook air yeah which just really surprised me i think that's a weird post pandemic work from home change there are lots of people out there who bought three monitors to work from home in the pandemic.

1:10:57We cover desk setups on our own site all the time. There are lots of people who spend a lot of time buying mechanical keyboards and cool aesthetic monitors. And I think how do you put a Mac into that mix? This is the answer. You can just swap out whatever you have, and here's this little modular Mac, and now it's part of a whole lifestyle. And I think that the Mac Mini before was like a utility computer, and now it is a lifestyle computer. and it's because i really do think that's just a change like even when i've had like ceos from peripheral companies like logitech or whatever on decoder they are talking about this as a market like people are building desk setups they're building a gaming pc setup next to a productivity setup they want them to be beautiful it's just people spend all day watching movies in these setups now it's like there's a lot going on in the computer room which is now every room yeah Yeah.

1:11:48I also think one thing that happened was that they discontinued the 27-inch iMac. And so... That's fair. I, when that happened and they just went to 24 inches, I heard from a lot of readers who were pissed. And so the best option was a Mac mini and a big monitor versus getting a Mac with a studio. Was it the Mac studio? The studio display. Yeah. Well, and I don't think a lot of people are buying, like, if you're getting a Mac Mini and you wanted a like an iMac competitor, either you're getting a studio display or just getting a cheaper 27 inch display or bigger display. And I think that kind of took that market.

1:12:27So yeah, that kind of became it. Yeah, I did that for my in-laws maybe a year ago. They had like an ancient 27 inch iMac and really did not want to go down to 24 inches. And so like every three months, my father-in-law would hit me up. He'd be like, so 27 inch iMac, when's it going to happen? And I eventually was like, I was like, Roger, I don't think it's going to happen. No. Do you remember Apple gave us the rare on the record statement? Right. Saying no. Well, yeah. Saying we're not making another 27-inch iMac. But think about it. You're that person. You're, what was his name? You're Roger.

1:12:59You're Roger. Shouts to Roger. And a lot of Rogers read the Wall Street Journal. And they really want a new desktop. And they are not going to go get the Mac Studio, which costs$2 ,000. But they're going to get an iMac. So, okay. Makes it more mainstream. They're going to pair that with a display. Okay. that they buy on Amazon, a Samsung or whatnot, done. Yeah. Well, and it was very funny going through that process with him because he was really annoyed by the fact that the computer inside of the iMac was old and slow and outdated. But the screen was awesome. He was like, why can't I just put another computer inside of the screen?

1:13:35And I was like, what a terrific point that you're making. And so it made it actually easier to sell him on the idea of like, okay, we're going to buy you a Mac Mini and we're going to buy you a really nice 27-inch monitor. and this monitor is going to sit here for a very long time and you can just upgrade this little computer as you need to. And he's been very happy with it. My 2015 iMac is in the corner over there. And I have all the parts to turn it into just a monitor and I have to sit around and get it unglued and do all the stuff. And I'm going to do it one day, but that is the plan for that machine.

1:14:07Actually, we should just have a party. We should have a bringing your iMac to turn it into a monitor. That's a very nerdy kind of virtual party, but I think we could get people to come to it. And I know a lot of people who are sitting around with old 27-inch iMacs who are like, I can just turn this into the display because the panel is the same as the panel in the studio display. Apple has not meaningfully updated that LG panel for the studio display. It's the same as the 27-inch iMac, which I think we should talk about the 24-inch iMac, which was also just rubbed to have an N4 chip in it. It's kind of weird that they just landed this thing at 24 inches.

1:14:41It is very colorful. It is very thin. In many ways, it's like an apex idea of the iMac. Like, I don't know where you go after this. Like, it is as thin as any computer can be to be that thing. But I feel like if they just made it 27 inches, like, lots more people would just buy them. Like, you would just buy – this would be the thing you would buy. And at 24, I think everyone has that. I don't know. It has to just be a price thing, right? I think keeping the iMac as, relatively speaking, affordable as possible is very important because this thing is like it is such a family computer. It's a it's a like thing on the reception desk at fancy doctor's offices.

1:15:23Like it's it's in so many of those places that I think if you have a bigger screen, that's good. But if it's suddenly five hundred dollars more expensive, you've kind of killed the value prop of the thing. and I was so surprised when they made this change in the first place because my assumption would have always been anybody wants an iMac is going to want the bigger one and that I mean Apple is not like famous for making stupid business decisions so I think clearly that was not the case but the fact that it is so locked in on this one thing at this one size and especially with these colors like it just indicates there is this is a very different Mac that serves a very different kind of person than anything else in the Mac lineup at this point.

1:16:03It's interesting the way you describe it, because it, let me just throw this idea out here. It sounds like we're describing the Mac mini as the go-to Mac desktop, the lifestyle computer, and the iMac is the weird utility computer that goes in the receptionist desk. Maybe. Yeah. It's certainly the plug-and-play simplest version of that for Apple, right? Like there is no easier Mac to just insert into a receptionist's office at a doctor's appointment at a doctor's office than an iMac. You don't need other peripherals. You just sit the thing down, plug it in and turn it on. And I think that's really enticing to a lot of people.

1:16:42I think it's also limiting and problematic in the ways that we're just talking about. But I get the appeal. What I don't understand is why this is the only one that comes in purple, right? And it's like, who is this? And not just because I want them all to come in purple, but like what is so different about the iMac audience that it gets such an unbelievably different set of like aesthetic decisions than any other Mac. Well, I think that's like where if they were to go to the 27 inch, I think they would want to attach a pro name to it. And a pro isn't come in purple. Because only professionals need slightly more screen.

1:17:16Because a pro does not come in purple. Yeah. That is the tagline there. So they. That's how you know that you work at the Wall Street Journal and we work at The Verge because I'm like, our professionals come in purple. That's what we do here. We're purple. You do have a lot of purple. Oppressive gray. I love purple. Purple for everyone. Joanna, you and I have kids around the same age. I'm assuming they will just be sort of like given Chromebooks in your school district. Yeah, they were already. Right. And so, okay, there's your laptop for school. I've been asking myself, am I going to get Max a laptop or would I want a desktop like this to be like, this is here.

1:17:59And then when you go to your room, it doesn't go with you. It's not a portable computer. And maybe coming back to that like computer room idea. And I feel like that's part of this, right? It's all part of that mix is like, people are expressing what they want computers to be and how they want them to use very differently than just a few years ago. yeah like obviously very differently than just a few years ago and part of this is like this computer is stationary and friendly and it but it doesn't go with you and your laptop has to be rugged if a laptop was purple it would probably look like crap after a while in a way that aluminum just looks worn in a nice way i don't know that's i've been thinking about this a lot like oh maybe i'll just get the iMac the first time out and the fact that it's purple makes it friendly and like that will be fun i think that's the move personally i mean you even look at the way apple is marketing this thing like i'm just on the imac page on apple's website and the images are like uh an imac on a counter in a coffee shop or in a bakery there's one that looks like it's in some cool like surfboard sales shop there's one that's clearly in a living room right next to the it's like these are these are furniture in a way that no other mac is furniture yeah which i just find fascinating and i i i have like the older i get the more i believe in the idea of a computer as like a place uh rather than a thing you carry around so like bring back the computer room honestly that's as far as i'm concerned actually the time when verge cast listeners were sending us pictures of their computer rooms uh so good was the best johnny you're gonna please keep doing that verge cast at the verge.com in 1986 they sent this computer room picture no we asked people for pictures of the computer rooms when they were kids and we got so many of them and they're all so cool and then when they all look the same everybody had the same computer everybody went to had the same souder woodworking computer hutch like down the line it was great okay i want to end by talking about two things one is a rumor that is my favorite rumor and two is joanna's garage door uh the rumor is apple is working on a smart home display there is mark german has also reported that they're really going to do it in the smart home now.

1:20:05They're going to, they got matter out the door. The standard is there. Everyone's using it. There's the array of accessories you can buy, all the stuff, and they're going to go for it. Sure. But then they'll have a smart home display. And the other rumor is that it will have, the display will be on an arm like the iMac G4, which is the single greatest iMac ever made. The G4 is the one that kind of looks like the Pixar lamp, right? Where it has like the bulb at the bottom and then the, I loved that. It was the best one. So if they make one of those, I will buy that right away. And then I will give my entire smart home to Apple.

1:20:38My question is actually much simpler about this. What can Apple actually do with a smart home display that hasn't been done by every other company except have it be made by Apple? Because I have thought about what I use my Nest hubs for. I've got the Alexa displays. For a while when we were renovating the kitchen, I was like, I'll put a tablet in the wall. Then I was like, I will never use this tablet. And I just didn't do it. I don't know that smart home displays are actually a thing. I don't know if they're actually that useful. I mean, I guess I don't have a smart home display. Everything is audio.

1:21:13It's mostly through Sonos or my phone. I don't have, like, what are you looking at on the display? I mean, I guess, like, your camera feeds, if you wanted to see them. Sure. And whatever it wants in the middle of their kitchen is like a security guard shack showing you like camera feeds. So how many camera feeds can actually go into HomeKit and into the Home app? Quite a few. But like, Ring doesn't. That's the problem is like, if Apple, like if I were to Galaxy Brain this moment, right? Like if you want to look at what is the closest to where the cell phone market was right before the iPhone, it's definitely smart home, right?

1:21:51Like there's tons of stuff out there. People are interested, but it is just abject chaos everywhere you look. There are a million competing operating systems. And like in theory, someone could come in and put it all together and everything would be amazing. Except the difference is you can't. You can't. It's just not possible. The difference is that we have old crap that just doesn't work with different stuff. thus Apple would have to immediately turn HomeKit into the most wildly compatible open and yet perfect and closed and correct ecosystem in history and that is not possible like it's I just don't I just I literally don't see how anyone Apple or otherwise can like wrap their arms around the entirety of the smart home right now in such a way that it's gonna work which is why matter is in theory like the answer because it means you don't have to because it means it all sort of sorts itself out but like it doesn't though close to it really doesn't i i i run what is effectively a home kit house because if the controls are not on becky's phone they don't exist so if i if i want her to be able to change the temperature in her house it's got to be home kit your point about ring joanna like i i bridge everything through i bridge it too so do i but you bridge it in hoobs right yes yes um and it fails and we have you got to switch to home bridge i'm just telling you right now do you think if i name this episode i bridge it in hooves that anyone will listen to it that's like when nila and johanna get together we talk about the word hooves a lot we talk about hooves a lot i talk about i i i used to love hooves and now i don't love hooves and now i'm in a deep i mean i'm really just emotionally so emotional on this podcast about my hooves about my notifications i think joanna like didn't they give you like an exclusive on like hoobs pro so just the the brief history here is that if you want to get stuff that isn't supported in home kit in home kit there's just a bunch of like middleware adapters one of them is called home bridge uh that's the one i use and then hoobs is like a commercial fork of home bridge so there's a little open source fight and everybody makes the plugins and they kind of work on both and i think a lot of the plugins are secretly made by apple engineers because they want to use their stuff in HomeKit.

1:24:10I'm just saying. We should report that out. It's just a rumor that I've heard a lot. For the three of us. And so I have a Raspberry Pi and it's sitting right in front of me that runs HomeBridge. It has my ring off in it. It has my extremely garbage Honeywell thermostat for the heaters in the basement. Fine. It has some other stuff in it. And all that stuff shows up in HomeKit. It shows up in Control Center on my phone. And that is the problem. I would have to tear out all that stuff and replace it with matter compatible accessories. And I have no inclination to replace the garbage Honeywell thermostat in the basement with a new matter thermostat for no upside.

1:24:51Like there's just no upside in me doing that. So I have to run the Homebridge. Joanna has to deal with hooves. This is very funny. Sorry to cut you off here. Is Homebridge better than hooves right now is what you're telling me? Homebridge is more stable. Okay. So I've got to get rid of my hooves. But you can just install it on the same Raspberry Pi. It's fine. And this is all like whatever. But then you get to other stuff like garage door openers where Chamberlain, which is the garage door monopoly in the United States, which is ridiculous, wants everyone to use MyQ. MyQ. And they have canceled.

1:25:31We actually, Gen2, we broke the story. They canceled not only their HomeKit support. They made a little adapter. They broke the MyQ API so that the home bridge adapters, the hoob adapters, the plugins would stop working so that you would have to pay a subscription for MyQ. That's like that's where we at in this smart home market. So Apple can show up with like a beautiful screen and be like matters the real deal. And then you're stuck with even the hacks to make it all work together are being broken. So you have to pay a subscription fee to your garage door opener. My dream in life is just to be able to drive away from my house and say, Siri, close the garage.

1:26:13I can. So I can. You can help me with that. Look at me, Joanna. I can solve this problem for you. So the best hack to solve this problem, and this is where I want to get to your Craig Federighi conversation. But one second. I just want to, before you get to what could. I used to have this. I had this when Hoobz was working with what you just described. then chamberlain breaks that and now i have to use their i will not insert the word app okay and so i can no longer do this now you can go on right so the the solution are all these little adapters you can buy on amazon they're mostly made by a company called miros it seems like this is one of those situations where one company made the thing and then 500 other companies rebrand it do you know what i'm talking about you on amazon you're like home bridge or you go on amazon you type in like home kit adapter for a garage door and you see they all look the same you see the same product from 50 companies miros is the one that everybody uses um and it is just a little relay with a wi-fi chip in it that connects to home kit and all it does is it connects the two wires and pushes the button on your garage door okay am i installing this i have to get up on a ladder and put it on to my no you have to invite your friend neil to your house And Neelai will get onto the ladder.

1:27:29I will get on the ladder. And I will do, I mean, we can do it together. This is a service we provide for all Vergecast listeners, by the way. Neelai will come to your house. Here's my true payment for appearing on here. Exactly. So, but you have to plug it into the ladder. You have to wire it into your garage door opener. I'm going to get on a ladder. You get on a ladder. You got to find the screws. You got to plug it into the terminals. And you got to run a sensor wire to the door itself. So it knows when the doors open or closed. You can't possibly think that is like a reasonable thing for a person.

1:27:56But I'm saying that's where we're at. When Craig Federighi is telling Joanna that he uses Siri to open his garage door, you got to watch this video. Joanna is like, how's Siri doing with Apple Intelligence? And he's like, Siri's great. We have a billion queries a day. I use it to open my garage door. Well, that's because I had also asked about the garage. I'd given the example of the garage because, again, I do think Apple Intelligence is very helpful for the garage. But I'm saying if you just sit in the guy who runs all of software at Apple is asking his phone to open his garage door, what it takes to actually get there is so complicated.

1:28:31But Craig and I did talk after, but he did say it has HomeKit integrated, which leads me to believe that he had an old model that when LiftMaster was like friendly. No, they did. They had some old model that had some HomeKit integration. All right. So here's my two theories. and again, Verge House listeners can help me figure this out. We believe there are only a few options here. Craig has a secret model of garage door opener, like the big motor thing that has HomeKit in it that no one else has ever had in their lives. He's got a custom garage door opener. Two, he's got a home bridge in his house, which would be hilarious.

1:29:13Truly hilarious. He's running a little Raspberry Pi Tamagotchi. or three, some Apple engineer came to set up Craig's house, put in one of these Miros adapters and never told him about it. Those are your choices because there isn't a garage door opener with HomeKit built into it. There wasn't like, I don't know, seven years ago and they were like, hey, you can get HomeKit and it had the nice little like logo on everything. I'm pretty sure there was a, either it was a LiftMaster or something that had that. I'm asking the listeners. My, this is what the Verge cast is for. We are crowdsourcing whether or not the big motor thing with HomeKit in it existed.

1:29:54Because, look, I should have gone further in my 20-minute interview. Yeah, actually, and the other thing is, like, can you imagine Craig's garage door? Like, do you think it, like, opens with, like, a light display? It's like Batman's house.

1:30:10I, he, I should have, I'm now regretting that I did not spend the 20 minutes that I had with him really going deep on this. But I did ask him at the end and he said, yeah, I've had one with HomeKit integrated. Yeah. Craig, if you're listening and I know that you are, as you always do. Hi, Craig. Come on the show and tell us about your garage door. Or just write us an email just telling us how it's integrated. There's only three options. He has one that no one's ever heard of. No, four options. He's got one that no one's ever heard of, which would be incredible. Craig, please come on the show and tell us about your custom engineered HomeKit garage door opener.

1:30:44He has the discontinued MyQ HomeKit bridge. He's got a HomeBridge or a Hoobz, or he's got one of these Miros adapters. Those are the only choices. Oh, the bridge. So, sorry, choice number two is that who made that bridge? MyQ, but they discontinued it. So it doesn't work with the API anymore. Right. So if you're going to be like, oh, you see it open my thing all the time. You can't get it. It's not a choice anymore. Because they cut that off. Because they cut it off. This is the worst smart home commercial in the history of the universe. This is what I'm saying. You can make the display and then you get all the way to.

1:31:15I also talk about this with my boss, by the way, all the time. The deputy editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal also has this problem. I really think a lot of people have this problem. They're not talking about it. Right. We need to talk about it. We need to raise awareness, Joanna. We need to talk about this more and we need to talk about the symbolic. I just want to drive away and not have to tap a button. Let's just be clear, by the way. Like they did solve this problem decades ago with a button. Okay. We got to wrap this up. I'm starting a small consulting company to help people get their garage doors in the home kit.

1:31:50And I'm his first client. This is my exit plan. Joanna, we were going to have you around for the lightning round, but we did this for so long that you have to go. I'm sorry. I have to go see my child in a parade, a Halloween parade. All right. Well, we'll figure out how to fix your garage door until later time. And I just also want to say that I have gotten many notifications in this podcast that were not important to me and were not a priority. All of them were from Liam, the producer, being like, stop talking about the garage door. So reduce interruptions in Apple intelligence is not very intelligent.

1:32:31All right. Thank you. Goodbye, Joanna. We'll have you back again soon. You're not. I mean, you can't come back until you figure out. I am not sure your listeners want me to come back soon. Well, we'll see. They will let us know and we'll let the AI figure out which ones to send you. I would like them to come to my house to fix my garage. Goodbye. We'll be right back.

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1:35:06I don't know what you heard in that last segment. I don't know how much we're going to keep. I just want you to know that the garage door conversation with Joanna went on for so long. Oh my God. Like however long you think that actually went for whatever you just experienced. It was at least three times as long. Yeah, we made Joanna late for her child. because we were talking about garage door. A child that she only experiences through smart phone notifications. Who is named child according to her phone. Yeah. All right. That also means the show is way too long. So we got to get through this lightning round real fast.

1:35:48David, you want to start? Yeah. So I just want to really quickly mention this new thing Netflix launched called Moments, which basically lets you just link to a specific part of a TV show or movie. And on the one hand, incredibly boring feature, right? Yeah. Netflix launches Anchor Links. Yeah. 1986. Yes. Very true. Completely agree. On the other hand, Netflix has been so incredibly averse to any kind of social interaction with its product over the years that I just find the existence of anything like this really fascinating. Like, we've talked many times on this show over the years about how weird it is that you can't screenshot a Netflix show.

1:36:32like in in a in the world in which we live on a phone right sure yeah you can you can do it you can hack your way into it but like if i'm watching something on netflix and i'm like whoa and i want to send it to someone you can't it's it's illegal and not allowed and impossible but people do it on life i just want to be clear on mobile devices and tv devices on laptops people are screenshotting and sharing netflix all over the place sure i don't think that's the primary place most people are interacting with Netflix. I guess there's like a weird measurement bias there because the only screenshots I see of Netflix are from people with labs.

1:37:07This is the point, right? But I think, and I think if Netflix had better tooling to prevent you from doing it on a laptop, it would do so too. That is all neither here nor there. Just the fact that Netflix is engaging more in society in this way, I think is really interesting, right? Like there's a, there's an alternate future of Netflix where it engaged much more. And there was like shorts inside of Netflix that creators were starting to do. And Netflix just like leaned into like, we're going to be premium tech talk in, in a way that Netflix really talks about itself now as premium YouTube, uh, even on their earnings calls.

1:37:41Like that's how the company frames itself in very real ways. Uh, it's how they're selling ads. It's like Netflix sees itself as high-end YouTube in so many real ways and yet has tried so hard to be this little tiny insular like this is where you watch shows and nothing else universe and so any tiny moment where you can like capture something else and take it out of Netflix I just think is really interesting I don't know if anyone will use this feature but I think it's here's my conspiracy theory this is pure conspiracy theory love it the single best discovery app Netflix could launch would be TikTok for Netflix.

1:38:18Right? Where you just flip through clips and it just shows you the way that people are watching pirated movies on TikTok today. And they don't know what clips to pick. And they can't go through the whole catalog and pick everything. So you watch a feature like this where people are bookmarking their favorite parts of shows and suddenly you have a library of places to clip from. And then that becomes the thing also when you go to the home screen and it like, you know how it starts playing? Maybe it starts playing a clip that everybody likes. That's a good theory. If Netflix isn't doing that, they should be and they should pay me every consulting firm yes i'm gonna go to ted shrandos's house we're gonna do we're gonna work on the garage door opener i'm gonna pitch him tiktok for netflix we had greg peters the the product ceo of netflix on decoder every time i have a streaming service ceo i ask him about tiktok and piracy to tiktok and whether there's a tiktok to streaming service pipeline or whether they would build a tiktok and they all just sort of you know know they they westworld at me they're like doesn't look like anything to me and i'm gonna break through one of these days yeah there's just no way it's true and and you would think i have watched so here's a fun example i was uh home from work sick on monday and i watched the movie in time with justin timberlake oh man do you know why do you know why i watched that movie because i've seen so many 60 second clips of it on tiktok that i was like i literally i got to the point i I was like, I need to just watch this damn movie.

1:39:38So I was at home and I watched it and it rips and everyone should watch it. It's possible that I was just sick and delirious, but the movie was - You have to be slightly altered to be like, this movie rips. Like it's a good, it's an underrated gem of a movie. The central conceit is good. The jokes are good. And then the cars are awesome. And I'm pretty confident Hyundai is designing all of its cars to look like they came from the movie in time. Oh, they are. See what I'm saying? Whoa, that's totally true. But no, but I think that that connection is real. And I think it's in the same way that with music, right?

1:40:11That it's always like, why isn't there just a listen to this on Spotify button next to every TikTok video? And TikTok is, in fact, building a music app to do just that. There is connection there that should exist. And it makes sense that Netflix might want to do more of it on purpose. Yeah. What's yours? Mine is just a clip of our friend Tony Fidel. so it was tech crunch disrupt this week big conference famous uh matt mollenweg was on stage there he said a fork of wordpress would be fine we're gonna keep covering that somehow i'm just i'm letting you know these are the things that happen to tech crunch disrupt and then tony fidel who uh works at apple for ages uh was one of the contested fathers of the ipod that's a big fight that's fun to talk about um but he did the bring up of the ipod uh he worked on the iphone for several generations and he left he founded nest he sold it to google he fought with everybody at google and now he's a vc this is the short version of tony phil tony's a character he's been on decoder a number of times we've known toady forever uh he's on stage at tech conscious rap talking about ai and he basically says sam altman is full of shit we're just running the clip just running the clip we are using this stuff and we don't even know how it works and believe me I understand.

1:41:22I've been doing AI for 15 years, people. So I'm not just spouting shit. I'm not Sam Altman, okay? So, seriously, you got to know what you're hiring here. You got to know what you're using. Yeah. And if we don't have transparency on data, we don't have transparency on hallucinations, you're setting yourself up for a fucking disaster. So I want to be clear. I love Tony Fidel. My only note on this would be that when we were talking about this link, in Slack and I forget who it was, but somebody was like, is this, is this like what Tony's always like? And without missing a beat, Neil, I just goes, yeah, this is Tony.

1:42:00This is what Tony is always like. This is Tony. I had Tony on Decoder talk about his book about how to be a good leader. And it was this. Yeah. You should go listen to that episode. He's not wrong. He's not wrong. Right. We, we, we, I keep describing the current state of AI. We talked about this all at the beginning of the show, but I keep describing the current city of AI is like, we are spending billions of dollars to build Bluetooth and no one knows what the headphones are going to look like. Like no one can be like, I'm going to make really good headphones out of this. It's more like these headphones might kill you.

1:42:30We have to build Bluetooth as expensively as possible. It's a great clip. I, I, you know, readers are going to say, what does Tony know about AI? Fine, whatever. It's not, I don't think my Nest thermostat is a platform shift that threatens Google. It did threaten Google for other reasons. It was a disaster of an acquisition it did do that effectively comes to nothing for that company um but sam altman's spouting shit man that's uh some fighting words it's it's pretty good and you could tell he knew it was a line too he said it and then like kind of grins and sort of leans back in his chair a little bit and he's like yeah got him yeah and then he stands up and starts screaming again that's right all right we got to end with this one uh tim walls and aoc played madden on twitch together last week uh i whatever you got a campaign however you can campaign everyone's going on podcasts or anything i just want to point out and i just want to say this because i know david understands this as deeply as i do playing madden with an audience is one of the most high stakes things you can do because madden 24 is so hard it it really it is such an intricate game that it's like it they should have just played overwatch like it would have been less complicated they did at the end they started playing crazy taxi after after my prediction came to pass tim wallace threw an interception didn't neither of them score like it's it's pretty this game is too hard i play this game almost every night to unwind i've been playing it since i was a child i've won a gamecube playing madden in a madden tournament in a bar hammered i was good at this game the new version is so yeah yeah i just thought it was the the riskiest campaign event i've ever seen and indeed tim wall's vikings fan uh tried to gun into justin deferson and immediately threw an interception which is i can't encapsulate what the new madden is like more than that it was very good i i appreciated both the like effort and the immediate understanding of oh this is not going to go very well you shouldn't do they just bailed they didn't even finish the game they just gave up which is i've done that many times we are so over we gotta wait before we go though one what we should just talk about this real fast it's an election on tuesday uh we did a whole package of election stuff the package is very good uh you you wrote a big fiery endorsement that has caused a lot of feelings on the internet uh should we talk about that i'm like i'm both i want to and i don't want to at the same time we can talk about for a minute okay um well i got a lot of notes are like let let politics bleed in the rich cast more.

1:45:04And sometimes they do. There was a net neutrality hearing today. I can talk about that all day long. That's very political. But in this case, I will just say two things about the endorsement. One, we, like every news organization, we actually went back and forth and wanted to do it. But that's just a thing that happened. Those were meetings we were in. We published a lot of them before. So I think we endorsed Obama in 2012. We endorsed Biden last time I wrote those. we did not endorse Hillary or Trump in 2016. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that outcome. I think I could have swayed that election.

1:45:37I would have really bounced out the Comey letter. I don't know. We didn't. That's the history. Those are the ones we've done in the past. You can read the ones in the past. The one of Biden in 2020, very similar to the one I wrote today. It's just the thing that got me and the thing I've been thinking about, we write about policy all the time in The verge which is all the time and they are just systems right like the legal system is a system and congress is a system and when we describe the systems to the audience of the verge who is who are which is comprised of a lot of people who build things and make things and care about how things are made it fine everyone gets it and then the turn is but these aren't computers they're not predictable for any given set of inputs you don't get a predictable set of outputs and now in the age of AI, who knows.

1:46:24But for the most part, people who work with computers expect the systems to be predictable. And the government isn't. The legal system isn't. So that's always been the key to how we cover policy here. We describe the system and then we point out this isn't predictable. Actual people have to just keep doing it. And it just really occurred to me that for all of the babbling about democracy that everyone is doing, no one has explained why it's important or like why that's the system yeah so that was the approach i took with f bombs because i you know me um i hope it worked the feedback was great i was expecting chaos a nightmare and i am just very encouraged and heartened that what i got was uh the most comments on any article since we switched to coral um mostly entirely respectful obviously we did some moderating into our house we keep it clean but mostly respectful mostly engaged the feedback from the social networks was mostly good.

1:47:22Obviously, it's very distracting out there. Like there are other things to talk about, but I'm just, I was very proud of our audience for engaging with the thing. And I know I gave it this like incredibly spicy headline, but I stand by the headline. The argument in the piece is the headline. Yeah. And so I'm just happy people took it seriously. They read it. They're paying attention. They're bought into America, which is I think important. So yeah, that's, I don't, I don't, I don't want to like overdo it. I said what I needed to say. I published in text. because I'm still a writer at heart and I hope the internet continues to be a place for techs to live.

1:47:54Yeah, I don't know if there's much more to say. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, we'll link all the stuff in the show notes. The package is really great. Gabby Del Valle, just one other shout out, wrote a piece for us today, Thursday, about all the tech leaders who have basically fallen all over themselves to cozy up to Trump just in case he wins. That is something we could spend many hours talking about and I super don't want to, so let's not, but go read that piece. It's very good. We'll put all that in the show notes too. but yeah it was good I really liked the endorsement it was a project for you to get that thing done and out and I think saying all those words in a row takes a lot out of you sometimes but it was very good you know it's funny I'll just end on this note there's like we have a lot of friends and colleagues who have gone off to go be indies on various platforms in various ways and we wish them well I hope people can see we actively try to support all of our former coworkers who've gone on to start things.

1:48:50I want them to succeed. And that's a trend, right? Everyone's talking about that trend. This is what you should go do. For me to do this, like if I ran a sub stack, I think it would be pretty empty. I don't know if it would go anywhere. Like you need the platform. You need the group work. I needed an art department that went and hired an amazing artist to put that piece of art at the top of that and every other part of our package and i desperately needed a huge group of editors who i trust to fight with me on almost every single sentence to make sure the sentences were great and that's and then we needed the you know the verge logo and our big website and all the stuff and that is important and like that i just we've talked a lot about both garage doors and the future of media on this episode of for chest so we took care that's that's us we published a presidential endorsement on the same day as like a new Mac mini, right?

1:49:42That's the verge. It's a, it's a big thing that we do here. Uh, and that to me was, if we have the platform, we should use it for as long as we're going to have platforms like this, we should use them and getting to use it with a bunch of people who like make sure it's good is like, it's good. And then to give it to an audience, uh, that responded waited, uh, heartwarming. Yeah. It's a cool week on the verse.com. We'll, we'll put a lot of links in the show notes, but folks should go read it. And also go vote on Tuesday. That's the note to leave you with. Go vote. If you're here in the US, go vote.

1:50:12Or now. Yeah, vote whenever you want. Whatever makes you happy. Just show up. You know, don't do anything illegal. All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. Knock and roll.

1:50:26And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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