Welp, I bought an iPhone again

24:00David Pierce:We're doing great, everybody. You live there forever now. Yeah, apparently. All right, let's take a break and then we're going to come back and I have some more fiery takes to throw at Allison. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a new business, it could be a lonely endeavor, especially in the beginning. And if you're just starting out, it's more important than ever to make sure you have the right tools at hand. If your business includes e-commerce, a great next step is to try Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that millions of businesses around the world rely on to sell their products online.

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25:10David Pierce:Go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's shopify.com slash vergecast.

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27:01All right, we're back.

27:02David Pierce:So back to my phone journey. All of the little AI nudges inside of Android, I think are awesome. Like, and they're getting increasingly useful, especially for me in like text messages, where if I'm talking to somebody about a thing we're going to do that evening, it just pops up a little thing that's like, add this to calendar. Yeah. Like those, just these little sort of subtle nudges about like how to go find more information or add this to something or send this to somewhere or whatever. Like, that is the kind of stuff that it just makes my whole phone make more sense to me. And instead of me having to, like, open up an app and then open up the other app just so I can swipe back to that one, look at the information, and then you do the thing where you sort of half swipe so you can see both apps simultaneously so that you can remember the information to type it into the first app.

27:52David Pierce:Just to be able to hit the thing and hit add to calendar and it just moves the information over to the Google Calendar app and starts a new event. Yeah. Terrific. Like insane that phones have not worked like this the whole time. I know. I love it. And yeah, on Pixel, it's called like Magic Q. And it's been a minute since I used it like regularly. But you get some funny kind of false positives where it's suggesting like, oh, you have a ticket to go park at the zoo parking lot in a week. Like here, do you want that? But you just ignore it. And yeah, they're tiny little they're like a little little badges that pop up.

28:29David Pierce:I have not found a nuisance at all. Exactly. And when it's helpful, I'm like, oh, this actually is helpful because I was going to forget to put it on the calendar or I was going to put it on the calendar wrong. It sort of feels like when you see it work all the way through correctly, it feels like the first time you saw like a one time password fill in by itself and then just like submit. it you're like oh this yeah this is easy like do this for me i love it a thing by the way that google does not do as well as ios like oh yeah the the android thing is fine you get the text message notification and it prompts you to copy the the code which is fine but just the thing where it pops up and it's like copy for messages and you just go and it pop it pops it into the thing and presses enter for you it's like ios is vastly superior in that way but authentication is the next thing on my list.

29:25David Pierce:This is maybe my most esoteric phone theory at this moment, which is, I think, authentication is the biggest problem with day-to-day life of using a mobile phone. And this just has come up for me so often because I've had to log into things a million times. But one thing I love about the Pixel, again, in particular, like, again, I'm being very nice to the Pixel, and I thought for a very long time I was going to end up picking a Pixel because I I actually like this phone a great deal. It has both face unlock and a fingerprint reader, which I think is awesome. Having that fallback before you get to your passcode is really useful.

30:01David Pierce:A lot of other phones have like less secure face unlock, which I've mostly found really annoying. They're like, we'll unlock your phone, but we can't do anything actually important with your face. What are we accomplishing here, guys? Yeah, then you have to reenter your pin if you're going to order some food or something. I don't care for any of that. But having the multiple things is great. But across the board, the password app integration is messy and not very good. Sometimes it pops up a suggestion. Sometimes it pops up a like open one password. Sometimes it pops up nothing at all. You just don't know.

30:35David Pierce:And so the actual experience of trying to log into something is really annoying. And then when I'm in, like I log into a bunch of things with an Amazon account for whatever reason. Like I use the Kindle app. I use the Amazon app. I use Readwise Reader, which logs in with an Amazon account. Those things are all entirely unaware of one another in a way that doesn't make any sense to me. It's like this phone has, I just typed in my Amazon password. This feels like it should make sense. And if I'm in the Amazon app and then it punts me to Amazon.com for some reason, we have to start this whole experience over.

31:09David Pierce:At least Android's browser is more aware of itself across apps. The whole like in-app browser thing that on iOS, every app has a different browser and you have to log into everyone separately. Yeah. Full nightmare. But I think so many like little bits of friction for me in every phone experience has been just trying to be logged into things is so much harder than it should be. Right. It's one of those places where I try to calibrate myself because I'm constantly annoyed by logging into things. and I'm logging into things way more than any normal human should. Yeah, I've used eight phones in the last two months.

31:46David Pierce:This is not a normal. You spent 30 % of your waking hours logging into things. I've adjusted to the Android way of things, which is kind of wonky. It's like sometimes you have to tap the password field or long press it to get the autofill option and then maybe the 1Password chip will show up. Maybe it's not and you're going to have to go copy and paste it. But yeah, every time I switch back to iOS, that is one of the things I'm like, oh, this is so much smoother. Like it just the apps know when I'm trying to log in. I always get the pop up for one password and it's yeah. Life is easier. OK, I have three more.

32:24David Pierce:We're getting to the end here. OK. One, I think messaging lock in is massively overblown as as a problem for switching. Leaving iMessage was not hard and none of my friends are mad at me about it. OK, good. Which is not a problem. Yeah. I missed a couple of texts. Our friend David Amell sent me a screenshot of a couple of text messages that he tried to send me that failed. But by and large, I went to the website. I deregistered for my message. I switched my phones. It helps that a lot of my group chats have already moved to platforms like Signal and WhatsApp that are just better for those things anyway.

33:02You have better friends.

33:04David Pierce:I do. Yeah. Honestly. And the thing that really helps, honestly, and this is very specific to me, is that my wife uses an Android phone. So we've already broken all of our group chats together. So I think it's definitely a your mileage may vary kind of situation. But at least for me, ditching iMessage was not a problem. Yeah. And in fact, in a lot of ways, it was great. I switched out of iMessage and started using the Beeper app, which integrates really well with Google Messages. and that's like an all-in-one messaging app that I found really useful and was able to port across phones. The Google Messages web app is really good.

33:38David Pierce:So like I didn't miss iMessage at all and no one yelled at me about it. It was fine. Nice. Yeah, it's way better than it was even a few years ago. And yeah, the group chats all basically work. RCX I think has done a lot of the job. Like you can send good pictures. You get the typing notifications. Like this stuff works. Yeah, we're going to tell our children one day about the days before RCS. All the grainy pictures of them we sent to their grandparents. Truly. Okay, the last two, and this is where we come to why did David buy an iPhone? I think on balance, I like Android better than iOS. And I don't actually think it's super close.

34:21David Pierce:Like just at a pure, out-of-the-box operating system perspective. A thing that this whole experience made me realize is that notification management is like half the experience of using a phone. And Android is really good at it. It's very good at understanding what is and is not an important notification. It's very good at categorizing things for you in such a way that you can triage it in a way that's useful. It's very good at letting you manage what does and doesn't send you notifications in a way that iOS is awful at. There's just a lot of little things like autocorrect on Android is better than autocorrect on iOS.

34:56David Pierce:I think this sounds stupid, but the fact that you swipe down to get the notification shade and you swipe up to get the apps makes a lot more sense than swiping down from the top and down from the corner and down from the middle. Like there's just little, little tiny usability things about Android that just make more sense. I think iOS is a much more sort of aesthetically consistent operating system, but I don't care about that. Like, yeah, Android is easier to use. Like I really earnestly believe that and I think is actually a saner operating system. Like I looked at my phone less on Android than I did on iOS.

35:31David Pierce:It bothers me less and that it means something to me. Am I crazy here? No, the iPhone on my desk has been buzzing this whole time. Nothing important is happening. Yeah, I totally feel the notification thing and it is one of those like you just get used to it on Android and there's less things bothering you and you kind of don't even register it because they'll they'll just appear as you know in the silent notifications yeah I really like I open it up and I swipe down and it's like you got these 11 notifications from ESPN that we didn't buzz your phone with every single time but here's some stuff that's happening that is like that's actually a thing about push information that I like and it's like here look here's a list of stuff that this app thinks is important but we didn't bother you with it but when you want to check here's a little digest.

36:19David Pierce:That's a good thing. Like, yes, this is what notifications were supposed to be. And then we ruined it. Yeah. I think Apple is just kind of pretending there's not a problem and they're waiting until they can fix it with AI because they're like they have that. Yeah, there's some kind of AI focus mode, right? Where it's like, we'll just figure it out for you. You know, don't worry about it. Summaries are bad. Apple intelligence is bad. All of it is bad. Yeah. I would rather have the deluge of notifications and not miss something important than trust Apple intelligence right now. Yeah. But yeah, one fun thing about this project was this was the first time in a long time I have really settled into Android.

37:00David Pierce:Even when I've used other Android phones, it's like for a couple of days for something. This was like I spent I spent months using Android and like really got comfortable with it again. And it is better than iOS. Like I really, really believe that it is. except and here is the thing that did it for me. Android apps are bad and iOS apps are good. It's the whole, it was astonishing to me how many times I encountered an app that exists on both platforms and it is always better on iOS, always. Like there are, the only exception is there are a bunch of things you can do on Android that you can't do on iOS.

37:36David Pierce:So like the Pebble app for the smartwatches is better on Android because it just has a level of permissions you can't get on iOS. There are apps like Tasker that let you do things to the operating system that you're not allowed to do on iOS. That's all fine and good, and I think a good case for Android, again, being better than iOS. But any one-to-one comparison, I literally have never found an Android app that is better than the iOS app just on balance. And then there are a million great iOS apps that don't even exist on Android. This is why I'm back. Half the apps that I like and use every day straight up do not exist on Android or their web apps or they're like half baked.

38:17David Pierce:You can tell somebody vibe coded it in an afternoon and they were like, this is for Android. Like the app discrepancy there, I think, shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did, because I talked to a lot of app developers who were like, well, there's a big audience on Android, but there's no business in the Play Store. All of the money is on iOS. And like I intellectually knew this, but it feels sort of disastrous in comparison. Yeah, it is a thing you like viscerally feel. And it is another thing I feel when I'm on Android for a while and I switch over to iOS and I'm like, oh, I see. OK, like this is your app and you just kind of update the Android app like when you get around to it.

39:01Yes. I am constantly the person like the Android version of the daycare app will break in some way. And I am the person who fills out the feedback form to be like, hey, there's this bug. I'm not getting these notifications. And like, I don't hear anything back. Someone fixes it. But it's like they don't, you know, they are developing for iOS and things look beautiful and work, you know, wonderfully on iOS. And then it's like the Android app is broken until someone is like, could you guys fix this? I can't buy. I can't check out. Yeah, and there's so many examples.

39:44David Pierce:Like the built-in video players on Android are mostly bad. The like little camera things inside of a lot of apps don't work super well. Like you're talking about. To me, there's so many apps that look like somebody built them for iOS and then like uploaded them to a website that was like make your iOS app work on Android.com. And just sort of did whatever happened there. They just shipped it as an APK and never thought about it again. And I don't know if that's because they think people who use Android don't have any taste or that they won't spend any money or what. But it is like the discrepancy in quality just absolutely blew my mind.

40:24David Pierce:And leaving aside the fact that like I read a newsletter about new apps and the single biggest piece of feedback I get from people is why don't you cover Android apps? And the true answer to all of them is that everybody builds their iOS app first and all of the good apps are only on iOS. And it's just people don't like that. I don't like it. It's not the answer I was hoping for. But like in this period, probably a dozen apps launched that I was like into and excited about and couldn't test because they didn't work on Android. So like my iOS test flight is just like teeming with cool stuff that I haven't been able to touch in.

41:01David Pierce:Yeah. And that's the thing. Like I came to the end of this and I was like, I would rather on balance, like if you were just like David, you have to take a phone out of the box, download nothing and use it forever. I think I would have picked a Pixel 10 Pro. That is just out of the box. I think that is my favorite phone of all the ones that I've tried. Yeah. But that's not how it works. And in fact, what I have is 200 apps on my phone that are actually my experience of using my phone. And 195 of those are either better than what's on Android or straight up don't exist on Android. And that was the decision.

41:34Yeah. And it's like a hate the game, not the player kind of thing where we're like, there's only so much that like Google and Android can do and they can make the system, the operating system as wonderful and as useful as we want. But then, yeah, once you open an app, you're at the mercy of whether that developer was given any time to work on the Android app when thought about all the different formats and screens and hardware that Android presents. And I think it is it's I have sympathy for them. I have sympathy for Android, but it does that the sum total of it is like it is cleaner and easier and works better on iOS.

42:26Just like just living your life. Yeah.

42:29David Pierce:One thing I think I do blame Google for in all of this is Google has spent a lot of time trying to convince people to make an Android app that works everywhere on all screens and all devices forever, no matter what, without giving people the requisite tools to do that very easily. I think from what I understand from developers, it's very easy to make an Android app that sort of expands and contracts to screen sizes. And how to make an Android app that is sort of cleanly, successfully usable in all of those places, not so much. Whereas Apple is the exact opposite, right? Apple is like incredibly opinionated about how you're supposed to make everything for every platform, which drives some people crazy.

43:11David Pierce:Because if you want to do something new and interesting, you actually have to fight this sort of system that is thrust upon you. I would argue that is a better outcome if what you want to get is a lot of at least pretty good apps than to just be like, God help all of you. You can either have the outside of a Razer Ultra or an 85-inch television. You figure it out. Yeah. Like, that's not it either. Yeah, yeah. And like maybe Google needs fewer screen sizes to care about, or maybe it needs to just actually go all the way in on picking one between foldables and flippables and actually start to develop some opinions about how these things are supposed to work.

43:56David Pierce:Because until then, like, I don't know, the sense I get from every app developer is they have a whole team of people working on iOS and then just like Richard over there on the side building the Android app. And Richard is like a high school student who's there for the summer. And they're building the Android app. and he has an iPhone. He's building it on his Mac and then just porting it to Android at the end. He's mad. Yeah. Yeah. It's just bad. So that's, this is essentially where I've landed. Do you think, did I miss any phones? Did I land in the wrong place? What do you think? What a journey.

44:28It's been a time. I, yeah. I mean, the iPhone 17, the base iPhone 17 is so good right now and it is such a, I have people in my life who are they've they've bought Samsung phones for the past 15 years and that's just what they're going to do I'm like great okay I know that that's where you stand and that's what you want if you are in the iOS ecosystem it's so hard to argue for anything but like stick with it yeah it's it's comfortable all your stuff is going to work exactly the same way as it did on the last phone and and the base model is finally like very good um i'm not ready to to uh declare the death of the the book style folding phone yet

45:17David Pierce:but i'm glad now this is this is a good hill for you to die on and i do believe you will die on it but i respect the we all need one yeah yeah mine is that somewhere inside of this razor is the phone that I want to use. Yeah, right. And no one will give it to me. No. And it's just a race to see if either you or I is right or if we just don't have on iPhones again. I'm bored by this outcome. Like for all the people who are going to send emails and call the hotline and yell at me about this, please understand this is not the outcome I was hoping for. But I hit a point where there's a bunch of apps I want to use and I have to use the phone that runs the apps.

45:54David Pierce:Yes. It's not my fault. It's theirs. That's right. This is where we are. All right. Allison, thank you. I needed to just get some of this off my chest. And I appreciate you being here to do this with me. I've been dying to know. I'm so happy to, like, absorb all the emotions. And if you do want to send me that Z Fold 7, please do. And I really hope that just blows my mind to pieces and we get to do this all over again. Yeah, you're going to have to start all over again. Yeah, it's going to be great. All right, we got to take one more break. And then we're going to come back and do a question from the broadcast hotline.

46:25David Pierce:We'll be right back. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the$1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hank's has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at m365copilot.com slash work. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns.

47:08David Pierce:Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer-first, asset-compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongodb.com slash build. Right now at the Home Depot, shop Spring Black Friday savings and get up to 40 % off, plus up to$500 off select appliances from top brands like Samsung.

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48:24All right, we're back.

48:25David Pierce:Let's get to a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecasttotheverge.com. I'm davidpierce.11 on Signal. Find us any way you want. I have Threads DMs now. I just downloaded the Threads app for the first time and discovered a pile of DMs. Sorry to everybody who's reached out that I haven't gotten back to. I have Threads DMs now, so get at me. We're easy to find. This week, our hotline question, as so many of them have been these last few weeks, is about AI. Let me play it for you. Hey, David, this is Dax. So I work at a pretty big tech company or a company that is pretty big involved, pretty involved in tech.

49:05And so anyway, the point is I have to work on,

49:08David Pierce:I use AI models pretty much every day to help me with my code, to automate stuff that I used to have to do manually. and that's all well and good. But often I'll be screen sharing with coworkers of mine and I realize they actually don't really know the basics of Mac OS. Like I had to show someone the other day how to like swipe up three fingers on a trackpad to go to Mission Control because they probably have never heard of that in their lives. And I think I had to tell them, here's how you make a new desktop. And that's fine, I like to do that. But it made me realize that maybe am I just like the weird one for knowing how these things work or is there something to be said, I guess, for a lot of tech companies hiring people to work with like Mac OS or Windows or any of these, you know, OSs that have been around for so long and yet the people using those tools and using those new AI tools can't actually tell how to use something efficiently.

50:00David Pierce:You know, I don't know. I've been echoing this all day. What good is a cloud code workflow automating like a bunch of stuff if you have like five screenshots open and a bunch of stuff all over your desktop, you know who you are. And like, you know, you don't have like multiple desktops. You just have one desktop with a bunch of things. I just, it drives me, I don't know. It's maybe it's like, maybe I'm thinking like abundance politics here. It's like, you know, abundance is like, you gotta make government work for you. Maybe I'm like, why don't I make my computer or my technology work for me? Otherwise, what's the point?

50:34David Pierce:You know, I don't know. Okay. I love this question with my whole heart. And if you know me or have followed anything that I do, you know that as a true like productivity computer hack nerd, this speaks to me. So I have two big thoughts on this that I just wanted to share that this hotline question made me think about. The first is this interview I did about two years ago with this woman named Laura May Martin, who was at the time the executive productivity advisor at Google, which is a very cool title. But what it means essentially is she was like an internal consultant helping people be more productive inside of Google.

51:12David Pierce:And one of her biggest theories is that everybody should spend 10 minutes, 10 minutes learning how to use their software. Like she had this idea that maybe when you download an app, you should be required by the app to spend 10 minutes mucking around in the settings to get it set up the way that you want. Or going through a really elaborate setup flow that actually teaches you all the features. It's the sort of thing that I think resonates with me still to this day because of questions like this, right? Most people don't know how to use most of their things, right? You set up Slack, you learn the very bare minimum number of things required to Slack successfully with your colleagues.

51:51David Pierce:And then you kind of never think about it again. And what you end up with is this weird mishmash of lots of tools that all kind of do the same thing, but do it slightly differently. And you're not making full use of anything. So I think I am a big believer in actually it is worth taking the time to learn how something works. One thing I recommend to lots of people and to all of you is go to the YouTube channel of whatever app you download. Any sufficiently complicated piece of software these days seems to have a YouTube channel where they do a bunch of, you know, explainers or they'll interview users about how they use the app.

52:28David Pierce:Raycast, which I think I've mentioned on the show a few times before, does a particularly good job of this. Notion does it really well. Just like helping you understand what this app is and some reasonable, maybe non-obvious ways to use it. Do I think every piece of software should be a lot more obvious about how it works and how you can use it? Yes. But I also loathe the scourge that is like tooltips and pop-ups telling you about all the new features and having it both ways is very hard. So I think spending a few minutes, forcing yourself to spend a few minutes to say, okay, how does this thing work and what can I actually do in it goes an incredibly long way.

53:07David Pierce:This also happens to be a thing that AI is actually unusually well suited to do. One thing I think about AI is that it is very good at finding and reading and synthesizing the manual. And I mean the manual in like the broadest possible way, right? If you have a literal manual for a dishwasher, it can find things in that manual very quickly. I know this for a fact because my dishwasher sucks and this happens to me all the time. But you can also get an AI tool like Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT to just give you a sense of what is possible inside of a tool. So like one thing I've been doing a lot is just asking, you know, I need to do X, Y, Z.

53:48David Pierce:Here are the apps that I use every day. Are any of these apps well suited to doing that thing? I need to I need to a way to quickly text myself reminders. What's a good way to do that? And it'll actually be like, oh, actually, Slack is very good at this because you can just set yourself reminders for Slack messages inside of Slack and it will send you reminders. Cool. Feature most people probably don't know about. Super useful. So asking a tool like this what is possible and how you can do things best with the tools you already have goes a long way towards starting to solve some of this problem, right?

54:17David Pierce:And the thing like mission control on the Mac is really complicated because on the Mac there are a thousand ways to switch between apps, right? You can go to the applications folder, you can go to the dock, you can do command tab, you can do mission control, you can go to launcher, like, it's feature creep in a way that I don't think is actually very useful. And in general, if you don't know mission control exists on the Mac, I don't know that your life is any worse or you're any worse that you're using your computer. But if you are finding little tiny problems that you have, things that you're doing over and over that don't feel right, small things where you're like, how do I get from here to here?

54:53David Pierce:Why am I constantly, you know, copying and pasting, why can't I find XYZ? Those are good problems to work with chatbots on because A, again, they're very good at finding needles in haystacks. Like if AI large language models are good at one thing, it is searching through haystacks to find needles. You have to verify that the needle is real and correct, but it's very good at that process in a way that humans, I think, are not. And frankly, it's not a good use of most people's time. or a thing that I've discovered is that you can actually start to build tiny bits of software with some of these tools to solve some of these problems for you.

55:33David Pierce:In general, a thing that I need a lot is I need markdown links from web pages. Just a small thing I need. I'm constantly pasting them into other Google Docs where I want them better formatted than just like a bare link. There are a bunch of wacky tools and Chrome extensions and stuff for this. But in five minutes and like three prompts, I was able to make one of these with Cloud Code that now just sits on my computer and I just drag a link into it and it gives me a markdown link. Like, it's great. I drag a tab. It gives me a markdown link in the clipboard. I put it wherever I need. Perfect. No notes.

56:08David Pierce:I spent a lot of time working on different kinds of productivity tools. Like I got really excited about, I'm just going to vibe code my perfect productivity app. And that went terribly for reasons actually I should talk about on the show, but not here. But then I found something like there's this app called Raindrop, which is a bookmarking app that just lets you save links. Again, I don't know if you've noticed this. A lot of my life is just like moving links from one place to another. Raindrop is great. I think the app itself is really ugly. It's like really good, really stable infrastructure.

56:37David Pierce:It saves all the right stuff. It does everything you need. I just don't like looking at the app. But Raindrop has an API. So I just went to Cloud Code in this case and was like, hey, I don't like the way Raindrop looks, but I want to use the API. I'm a paid customer. I have all the access I need. Can you just build me a very quick, simple front end? And now I have a web page that is literally just a super simple front end to Raindrop that just makes the thing look better and gives me the two keys I need in order to manage the links in my list. This is the scope of software that I think is really interesting for AI for most people.

57:10David Pierce:Like to sit down and say, okay, I'm gonna rewrite my whole company's HR software so that we don't have to pay for it anymore, like Saspocalypse stuff, is all fine and good. And I think A, largely impossible for most people and B, largely irrelevant for most people. But the idea that you can build a little bookmarklet or a little menu bar app or a little tiny utility to accomplish something for you that you do all the time, is real. I've done it over and over again, and it works. And as long as the scope is pretty narrow, and you're very clear on exactly what you need to do, these tools can do it.

57:46David Pierce:So I think to the extent that AI can actually help you a figure out how to use your devices, and be kind of use them for you and start to solve some of the problems that your devices have. I think that's really powerful. I do believe everybody should spend some time looking at the settings menu, understanding how it works, watch the YouTube videos, watching it like 2x speed, even like breeze through a bunch of YouTube videos. But you'll just get a sense of sort of the list of features that exist that you can start to mess with and play with and think about. That is the stuff that I think goes a long way towards making your computing life better.

58:20David Pierce:We tend to sort of reinvent wheels over and over and try to build new tools, because the existing tools don't quite work. When at least in my case, most of what it is, is I don't completely understand how to use the existing tools. Or with some tiny tweak, the existing tools can work for me. That has made my computing life a lot easier. I find myself blowing everything up much less often and instead just doing little tiny tweaks. Also, I should just say, before we get out of here, shout out to Bixby, the Samsung AI assistant that many years ago was based on the idea that actually what your assistant on your phone should do is help you use your phone.

58:57David Pierce:It should make it so that you don't have to dig through the settings to find Bluetooth. It should make it so that you don't have to figure out where notification settings are and how to turn them off. It should make it so that you just tell your phone what you need it to do and it can take you there. That is a good and correct and right way for AI to work. And I think the tools that we have now are actually delivering on that idea that Bixby had a long time ago. My computer and the AI on my computer should help me use my computer, should teach me how to use my computer. And as much as they are learning how to use my computer for me, they should just take all of the steps in between me scrolling around and finding things and just take me where I need to be.

59:40David Pierce:These LLMs can do that. Claude can do that. Gemini can do that. ChatGPT can do that. It requires a little bit of trust in the system to allow it to sort of run rampant all over your computer. But at least in my case so far, it's been really great. So, you know, shout out to Bixby. You were right, just way too early and way too weird. Anyway, that's it for the show today. Thank you as always for watching and listening. Thank you to Allison for being here, listening to my bonkers takes about phones. If you have thoughts about which phone I should have picked, if you're very upset with me for picking an iPhone, please know that A, I understand, and B, I want to hear from you about why and what you think I got wrong.

1:00:17David Pierce:As always, the email is vergecastatheverge.com. The hotline is 866-VERGE-11. Call, email about anything and everything. We absolutely love hearing from you. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. Neal and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news. We've got some Apple 50 next week stuff to tell you about to get ready for. Go listen to Decoder. Go listen to The Verge Cast. Go listen to Verge in history. All of it's ad-free if you subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com slash subscribe.

1:00:45David Pierce:We'll see you next time. Rock and roll. Baby Novi