What’s in store for the iPhone 16

28:40These are little upgrades that actually add up to an idea, a whole idea, which is there are more ways to communicate with this computer about what you want and it will have more ways to communicate back at you. But Apple Intelligence isn't shipping it. I mean, that's actually the question with these products, right? Is you're going to announce new iPhones, you're going to announce basically a bunch of iterative upgrades that seem really nice. And then the big software turn that makes them worth buying that Apple, I think, is banking on driving a huge upgrade cycle isn't going to be here. We're not expecting that potentially all the way into next September.

29:15The rollout of iOS 18 Apple intelligence features is just going to take a long time, particularly the big ticket ones. What now? What are we going to get today? We're not getting the apps can plug into Siri so you can talk to Siri and have it execute a bunch of actions across your app. That's probably a year, right? What are we going to get today? Is it summarizing notifications? Like, I don't think that's good enough. Those are already seeing people on the beta get the summarized notifications is so funny because it's so not helpful. So many of these things are like I send somebody a 70 word long text message and it summarizes it in 58 words.

29:55Like, what have we accomplished here? This is nothing. We're not doing we're not doing anything. The copy editor is very pleased with that. Yeah, I guess. 20 words. That's nice cut. Yeah. And I think with all of this, again, like we're still very much in this place of what is any of this for? Right. And I think the thing that has been true about Apple forever is it has done a better job of telling the what this is for story than anybody else. And even with the iPhone, it does a very good job of explaining to you why you need all of the incredible processing power on your phone that you're never going to use.

30:29It's why they have the games on stage. It's why they did the AR stuff on there for years. Like they do a very good job of being like, here's the thing we built and here's why it's going to matter in your life. And I don't think that quite landed at WWDC. Whatever did land is not shipping yet. And so like this is just another crack at that same story for Apple and both how it has refined that story over the last few months and whether it has figured anything out to me is like the big question of this event. And I'll add one more thing to it. And the amount of times Apple and other companies have shot themselves in the foot trying to tell that story.

31:06Totally. Because, you know, Google got in trouble for the Gemini ad at the Olympics where the dad asked the AI to write a letter on behalf of a little girl to an Olympian. And everyone's like, this is garbage. Like, don't do this. Apple has had a number of ad-related controversies lately. And then one of their demos for summaries is Apple Intelligence summarizing the Steve Jobs Think Different speech. Oh, yeah, that's right. From the ad. It's like, here's the crazy ones. What? Don't summarize that. No. That's the art. Even though it's a commercial, people regard that in a very emotional way and being like, here's what we can do now.

31:44We can make that dumber. It's not actually the message you're trying to send. Right. And so I think Apple is looking at all of this and saying, okay, this is the real shot to communicate to customers. WWC is for developers and hardcore nerds and you're listening to the show and that's you. That's just you. But we love you, to be clear. We love you. It's us. It's us. Right? And that's the first cut where they can be technical and they can talk about token sizes and APIs and all the stuff they talk about WC. The iPhone event is we're going to put this thing on local news broadcasts around the country to be like, look what it can do.

32:20And I don't think they know besides like read my boss's email and give me the bullet points of it. Erase people. Right. If I had a shortcut, if I set the shortcut button to just be like, no, but nice, I could just motor through my inbox. That would be great. But can they tell that story? Like, I don't know. So I think that's going to be a real question because the features aren't shipping yet. Right. And so you're still kind of concocting these demos about stuff that doesn't exist yet for a phone that might not be able to do it. And that is, I think, a real puzzle. But it also seems like they may potentially plow through a little bit of this because we're seeing, like, a lot of other devices rumored.

33:03Like, more than I usually think of for an Apple event. Right. Okay. So that's the phone. So I just want to wrap up on the phone. Like, the phone has a question mark in it. which is like, how are they going to talk about AF features aren't there? The rest of them are, except for the AirPods, which I think we're expecting some amount of redesign. The Apple Watch seems like another bump, right? But there may be three getting bumped. Yeah, that's the one spot where it seems like if there is going to be something new and exciting, it's going to be in the watch. Like there's been some, is there a, you know, Apple Watch Series 10, Series X wild thing to happen.

33:45I think that's just probably not, but there's been like a little bit of smoke around. Maybe there are some surprises in the Apple Watch line coming this year because it's the anniversary. Well, the big rumor was that they were going to get blood pressure monitoring or sleep apnea detection. And both of those sound pretty dead in the water for this year. Because they're in a giant lawsuit with the company. Yeah, because they're in a giant lawsuit and like blood pressure monitoring, they haven't gotten FDA clearance or anything. Right. And, and they have to, you can't just be like, yeah, we can test your blood pressure.

34:16No FDA approval. That's not going to happen. So yeah, it sounds like they, they were trying to line a bunch of stuff up for the, the 10, the Apple watch 10 and it just sort of. Yeah. So it feels like what we're going to get is a very minor bump to the ultra because basic, I mean, look, the, the Apple watch is like the best lock in story of all time. Yes. Yep. If you have an iPhone, you can only buy this product. that's it there it is unless you're you know unless you're one of the people wants to buy a garment in which case you buy a garment and use it sometimes but then you might still have an apple watch like weird right so like their need to competitively upgrade these products is very low and then the products are really good which is just a pretty disastrous one-two punch of wanting to see like huge upgrades yeah it does seem like the we're gonna get a bigger regular watch to be the size of the ultra which is both cool and sort of alarming like i hate truly hate that we are going to normalize these gigantic screens on our wrist like nila i can read your watch through riverside right now i can see what's on your watch that can't possibly this is not good how are we doing this and yeah this is just what we stare down tim cook's watch at every event what's on there buddy um look at it i'm at like make the apple watch ultra black and i'll buy a new one great that's what i want might have a product there's been some rumors about colors um but yeah there's this rumor that we'll see the apple watch series 10 or the series x which is the 10th anniversary and have like magnetic bands and be thinner and be the design jump and i i strongly think that in a time of sort of like declining sales and up and like upward going services revenue that apple's desire to do that is quite low yeah because again the product is like perfect lock-in like what are you gonna do right like tim cook's staring you down like all right you're leaving with an iphone would you like to buy apple care a set of airpods and apple watch because you can't buy anything else yeah i doubt it's very popular to first buy a watch and then buy an iphone right so it's not like they're trying to sell some who is that person this is what i mean they're not like the the the impetus to get people in if you're trying to make the apple watch great is you're like okay there are a bunch of people who will switch for an apple watch and i don't think that exists i think like the the apple watch is not the first thing right so i feel like there's either the ipad or the iphone there's one tiny category and i'm only saying this because it's like the third day of elementary school here um parents are buying apple watches for their kids who don't have phones fair that's real tracking devices as texting devices and then you just you're in the ecosystem um then they got you yeah that's something and that is that that i think is like the beginning of something potentially big and interesting uh but that feels very new and yeah like i think we're gonna see upgrades to the apple watch i just think it's all gonna be pretty iterative that is my bet there is this rumor that you'll see the big upgrade we'll see how it goes yeah The AirPods seem like the bigger change.

37:21Yes. Right? We're expecting new AirPods, AirPods 4, maybe new AirPods Pro. And it seems like that's where you're going to get the design change. And I think that is partially because they're still up in competition. Like, you can get other Bluetooth earbuds. And there are, in fact, lots of really good ones out there. Yeah. So you can see a little competition. And obviously, AirPods haven't changed in a long time. But if they change the design, what are all of those horrible knockoffs at 7-Eleven going to do? Immediately change. The good news about that industry is, boy, does it adapt. Yeah. Exactly.

37:58The factory in Shenzhen across from Apple's factory in Shenzhen is on red alert. So AirPods 4 might have noise canceling. There'll be more of an open ear design. They'll sit on your ear instead of all the way in the way that the pros do. which would be a big deal right if the the the anc plus the like hang on your ear instead of sticking it uh super hard to do chris welch was pointing out in our slack the other day that lots of companies have tried this and basically no one has ever done it very well uh as somebody who hates the ear blocking of the airpods pro like i just don't i just don't like them yeah it feels bad in my ear they make my ears like hot and pressure i don't like it so i use the hangy ones but then I don't get any of the noise cancellation.

38:43So if you can get, if you can get the best of both worlds there, that's pretty awesome. Yeah. But super hard to do technically. Um, I'm looking at, and then the AirPods three, maybe we'll see, they'll add some more sensors to complete the health story that Apple's trying to tell all of this stuff, potentially a new case. We'll see. What I don't know is whether they're going to upgrade the AirPods max, which they have not touched in a million years. Yeah. Right. Uh, Or she'll use lightning. Oh, there we go. So they'll just get like a USB-C upgrade? Or they can make them not weigh 5 ,000 pounds.

39:15That's the choice. They'll take out some of those weights, those Beats weights. I forgot the Beats used to put weights in the headphones. They can make the case good. There are lots of things you could do with the AirPods. I love the little purse. It's adorable. Hey, here, would you like your headphones to be dirty? They sure will. We've forgotten to put them in a case in this case. We'll see. I mean, there's a spatial audio story to be told here, but it seems like of all the things that we expect to change, the AirPods lineup is the most ripe for actual change. Yeah. Because it's the thing that you can, one, people lose them.

39:51And then when you lose them, you might buy new headphones. And when you buy new headphones, you actually have choices in the market. Yeah. Well, and again, if Apple is trying to tell this like big multimodal AI story, headphones actually end up being really important. and my big hope for airpods max has been that like that could be a place where apple can start to do more like local ai processing inside of your headphones like give me the the airpods max that can do some of that stuff just inside of the headphones like i want an airpods max that has all the software of an apple watch in my headphones that's is that a bad idea probably but that's what i want i want to just be able to run with headphones and nothing else and they could do that in the Macs.

40:35Would you tap on the little ear cup and send a heartbeat to your wife? Yeah, I'd just send my heartbeat to Neelai like three or four times a day. It's true. It's really weird. Yeah. Have you ever gotten a weird blacked out video of just thumps? And you're like, oh, David loves me. The other rumor is I sincerely doubt this will happen, but an M4 Mac Mini is on the list of things. Like, that's October. I think we'll see new Macs in October. That's been the schedule, right? Yeah. I'll be shocked. But, you know, if they don't do anything with the phone, it would make sense to do the M4. There's just been a lot of smoke about the Mac Mini, which is weird.

41:13So I think, like, we're obviously due for a refresh of MacBooks, right? The M4 is out there. It's time for all of this from, like, the studio on down. But the Mini is the only one that anyone is talking about right now, which is maybe just, like, a function of the rumor mill and the way that these things work. and an October event is not that far away. So it could very well be. But this one is particularly just sort of out in the ether right now. The Mini is also the one that's getting a major case redesign, right? Like the other ones aren't getting big case redesign. And that is that if you believe it's going to get a big case redesign, it is definitely happening in October.

41:50Yeah. Apple is very good at being like, look at this thing. Yeah. One thing at a time. I think it's really likely that we're just seeing a lot of smoke right now because there's a lot of leaks because it's a whole new case. but it's going to happen in October or not. That's my bet, is that Apple wants all of your attention to be on the iPhone, which makes all the money, and the services component of the iPhone, which makes all the money, and that is what you're going to pay attention to. And then in October, we can talk about whether or not they're going to make an M4 Mac Mini or a 27-inch iMac or whatever.

42:19I'm just saying that because I desperately want a new 27-inch iMac. Just trying to speak it into the world. That's how I feel about the M4 Mac Mini. Like, give it to me now, please. The rumor is that it's going to be closer to the size of an Apple TV, and it's just going to have a bunch of USB-C ports? Like, yes, that's, yes. That's it. That's all you have to do. Inject that into my veins right now. Make it under$1 ,000, please. I feel like I use all the ports in this Mac Mini. Oh, I use all the ports and I have a dongle in my Mac Mini. Yeah, I have a Thunderbolt 4 dock plugged into a Mac Mini because I use all the ports in the Mac Mini.

42:51Yeah. All right, I'm telling you that's October. We'll talk about this again another time. I think you're right. That is it. I mean, that's the list of things. David, you have some prompts here to which I won't answer. both with the same answer yeah this is well so we we play a version of this game every year which is basically uh just before we get off the apple stuff we're gonna give ourselves something to be held to so we we each had to come up with a prediction that you think genuinely will happen neilai you have to think it's going to happen uh that we haven't yet talked about and then uh one thing that you're desperately hoping for but have no evidence is real uh i'll go first and then and And then just to give you guys time to think about this.

43:32My prediction that I think will happen that we haven't talked about is I think we're going to get a Ted Lasso season four trailer. God damn it. That was mine. I don't know what it's going to be. It might just be Jason Sudeikis just like saying four words because they haven't shot anything. This is how we do trailers now. It'll be the back of his head. I mean, do you remember the Apple event where like they all just stood on stage and said, we're making a TV show. I made fun of that for a year and then they made all of their shows. So the rumor is he's not going to be in it very much. he's he apparently like he doing that do you think it's gonna be called like dead lasso what the rumor is it's probably it's gonna be about a woman's football team it's just ted lasso in the severance universe it's just dead uh but yeah i've just i'm just very excited about ted lasso yeah and and like any good company they're like let's just go back They just signed all those people in the last few weeks.

44:28It feels like this is where they're going to Apple is just speed running the TV industry, right? Like they've pissed off George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Congratulations. Now they're bringing back the hits like this is just what you do. Great job them. And then the thing I'm desperately hoping for but have no evidence is real is I want a cellular connected set of AirPods. I want I want a thing. I will switch to Apple Music. you like as god is my witness i will switch to apple music if you just let me stream directly to my headphones that's all i want is that a bad idea yes but i want it anyway i don't care would you would you like directly to the brain yeah all right nila you go what do you got uh my prediction uh one thing that i'm hoping that will happen that we haven't talked about no one thing you think will happen that we haven't talked about oh it has to be real right yeah you have to think it's gonna happen

45:23okay apple tv home screen upgrade oh okay that's a good they're they won't happen they are they won't do they would have announced it at wwc but they're way overdue on just scooting that stuff around yeah can i just say by the way i bought an apple tv because it was on sale from verizon for $90 for some reason, plugged it into my crappy TCL Roku TV, set it so that it just goes straight to that input when I turn on the TV, and now suddenly my TV viewing experience is like 75 % better. Boy, is Roku bad now. And boy, did the Apple TV make it better. I don't think we've talked about this very much in the show, but our own Will Joel, our senior creative director Will Joel, has a Roku TV, and the thing happened to him where it just started motion smoothing.

46:10This also happened to me at my sister's house over the 4th of July where her Roku TV is just turned on motion smoothing. So he wrote about it and he wrote, people in the forums are all mad about this motion smoothing just being turned on on Roku TVs. We have not yet written the follow-up, but they got back to him somewhat irritatedly and they're like, we have not turned on motion smoothing. We've turned on like per frame interpolation, which is motion smoothing. Yep, it's the same thing. Same thing. It's the same. They're like, we're not motion smoothing. We're going into the spaces between frames and making up additional frames.

46:44And it's like, that's motion-sweeping. So he's got to write it up. But Roku has secretly turned on motion-sweeping on millions of TVs with no ways to turn off, and now they're denying they even did it. Throw them out. Get O 'Latts. They're too busy counting that ad money they get. They don't care. Alright, that's my prediction we haven't talked about. On the closest that I think is real. Can I say the one thing that will definitely not happen? Yeah. Apple will definitely not announce a single other car maker has taken them up on next generation.

47:13Okay. I like this. Is this the one that you're hoping for, but have no evidence is real? Someone, please, dear God, do CarPlay. I mean, I will say the Decoder inbox right now is full of CarMakers for like, let us justify why we're not doing this anymore. Wait, who would you like it to be? If you could, if you could be CEO for a day and make somebody adopt the new CarPlay for either good or chaos reasons, which CarMakers you want it to be? It would be Honda or Toyota, in my opinion, who have some of the ugliest in-car interface designs. Of all the mainstream cars, it's like, just tell your designers that lowercase letters exist.

47:50They refuse. Like, we're just doing all-capped software, everybody, all the time, just lowercase. That's the level we're working at with Honda and Toyota. I like it. All right, friends, what do you got? All right, so my prediction that I think will happen was also Ted Lasso. so we covered it. Well, now you have to come up with a new one. Yeah. I wrote it. I wrote it down. I want to be very clear. I didn't make it up. Do you think Jason Sudeikis will be there? That's the real question. I don't think he will be. I think if they have anyone, it will be Hannah Waddingham because like she has never turned down a press tour.

48:24That's right. If somebody's like, hey, you want to show up? She's like, I'm here for you. Maybe she'll be the musical act at the end. We should get Hannah Waddingham. Can we get her to come up with her chest? Yeah. I bet she would. She seems like good people. Yeah. Leah, let's get that done. Chop, chop. All right. And one thing you're hoping for but have no evidence is real. Ray-Ban metaglasses but Apple. Just because I really like the Ray-Ban metaglasses. But the meta AI sucks. I want to talk to Siri. She's also sucked. Excuse me. Siri also sucks and is not gendered. But it sucks in a more familiar way.

49:05Well, it sucks in a way that actually accesses other apps on my phone. Yeah. Whereas Meta sucks all by itself. It just sucks over here. Meta's like, I can play your Spotify. That's it. I'm like, well, stop. I didn't do my no evidence for, which is the only thing. I predict this at every Apple event I have for a decade. Just make a TV. Just make a TV. What are you doing, guys? You love services businesses. Do you know what every TV maker is doing right now? They're just doing services. They're giving them away for free. You could charge real money, Tim. You'd be like, I don't know, this TV costs$3 ,000 and people would buy it and still pay for your weird new cable bundle that you're making, but not saying that you're making.

49:50Yeah, but they got to spend all their money on the weird cable bundle. They can't afford the TVs. Apple releases an iPad at studio display size. Is that a television? What is a TV? I mean, every TV is just an Android tablet. Okay, but like, I feel like if the tablet is larger than the child holding it, it goes into TV territory. That's pretty dependent on the size of the child. Yeah, but like most... So wait, you're saying as my child gets older, at some point it stops seeing a TV? It's the tablet diagonal. Like size of child versus size of tablet. Exactly. And then age is like the Z axis. okay in in four-dimensional space this is a tv is what you're trying to say exactly i'm just saying make a tv it is it is almost comical that the one category that they could thoroughly dominate they are just like yeah health care well and what's funny is for all the reasons it actually never made sense given the company that apple is to make a tv it actually now kind It kind of does.

50:59Right, you're gonna sell a giant computer that hangs on the wall and that people pay money every month to use. Yeah, just do the thing. Please, I beg of you. Gene Munster needs this. Panasonic is making TVs again. Somebody who just owns the brand name is making those TVs. I'm just saying. It's like, whatever, we'll do it. Do you remember us? I had a Panasonic, it was great. Okay, we should take a break. We'll be back. We've got an incredible gadget lighting right now coming up. Stay tuned. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7.

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55:09Okay, we're back. We're already over. we've had a lot of people asking lately how long the show is supposed to be and the answer is we're never gonna tell you that's the it's the joke yeah you will notice the show is almost very consistently the same length but we're always over our minds we are always over it's never as long as it's supposed to be the other thing that is true is i make the show longer with this fan thing about how long the show is going to be um when we make it shorter everyone yells at us but then when we ask people for feedback on the show they tell us to make it shorter so we're just trapped in like a paradox loop of feedback where the show can only ever be this long but it's never long enough and it's also too long yep the other thing people need to understand is you're just doing this all the time like nila is just sitting in front of a microphone talking about things all the time we just occasionally record it and then and then ship it so it can be as long as we want yeah but it's also just always imagine what our meetings are like let's drop in on nila verge casting the no All right.

56:11It's IFA, which is a German word for gadget show. Sure. We got a team there. There's a million gadgets being announced. I think we should do this as a lightning round. We should just go through them all, except the first one. There's no chance we're going to get through this in lightning round fashion because it is the Remarkable Paper Pro, which Alex's headline is, is as outrageous as it is luxurious. Alex, what is going on here? Okay. so they took the gallery e-ink display and then they everyone remembers everybody knows this everybody knows gallery it's a well on the street all day talking about the gallery and was like oh the gallery what's up with gallery yeah like when i go to the grocery store people were like do you think gallery is coming this year uh and i can say yes it finally came so so there's two types there's two ways to do color color on e-ink one is you push the black and white ink pixels and the e-ink against a color filter.

57:07That's how Kaleido works. That's how anything from books or Kobo, and probably if Amazon ever does it, that's what they'll use is Kaleido because it works really, really fast. Then there's Gallery, which looks way, way better. The color is way, way cooler because they get rid of the filter and all the pixels being moved are actual color pixels of cyan, yellow, and magenta. And that's what they did here. And usually you don't want to do that because it's slow and sucks but it's fast they made it fast when i asked they were like we can't tell you trade that's like the magic sauce here is they figured out how to refresh it quickly yeah yeah that's totally cocaine in it they call it the canvas tech stack um and and i don't know i'm not entirely i have some theories of what they've done i've been playing with it a lot i'm gonna keep playing with it but it just it works but there's like a really obnoxious flashing problem with anything that you write in color anytime you write in color it like has to refresh the entire display as soon as you stop writing that sucks don't love that yeah but then for just regular writing it works perfectly but it looks great i mean like you you've just been like holding it up into the camera as we've been talking and like the screen looks awesome let me i'm gonna pull up another photo because i just keep doing that poor liam was at the office the other day and i was like liam look and he's like please just stop showing me color pictures from like like that just looks like real nice art yeah it's nice it's just real pretty um yeah it's one of those don't buy it please please don't buy this this is this is not for normal people but this is such like the fact that they pulled it off is really cool yeah so to your don't buy it point like it's like i'm gonna buy this i do i i want it more than i am proud of so the thing remarkable has done really well is like relentlessly focus on of doing a very small thing really really well right like the remarkable tablet all the way back to the first one is like a thoroughly mediocre reading experience and just like deeply lovely to write on uh the the keyboard case i have only used a little you've used it a lot more uh is wonderful by all accounts so it's like as a as a note-taking machine this thing is really expensive it's what 579 yeah it starts at 579 without the case like the typing case is like 229 yes you're looking at like a 900 don't don't do that but also do it yeah but that's the thing and i'm like it i just i even if you don't buy it i appreciate that remarkable is just like we are going to make digital handwriting note taking awesome and have like done it like kudos to you remarkable You did the damn thing.

59:51Great job. I have a remarkable two here, and I love it. I never write by hand because my handwriting is awful, and I find myself using this thing just because it's really nice to write on. Well, and it's actually pretty – I also have awful handwriting because as a child I wanted to be a doctor, and I thought you had to have bad handwriting. But it actually does a really good job of taking that and putting it into text if you need to do it. Like it sucks a little bit, but not like awful. and it's just like it does the one thing really really really well and it does it it executes it so wonderfully and takes this technology that i never thought i would see being used this way and doing it remarkably very well very good we're gonna move on now yeah it's great i i did i did the dad joke so that's good well you're gonna review it i assume yeah yeah i did like kind of a mini review of it i've only spent about six six or seven days with it at this point i want to spend more time with it.

1:00:45But it's a remarkable tablet. If you've used another one, it'll be the exact same thing, only now it's color. Okay. Honor announced a super thin foldable IFA. It's very cool. And what we're seeing, and I'll put it right next to Huawei announced a trifold phone. I forgot that the thing IFA does, like when IFA is at its best, IFA is the time where they're like, oh, you silly Americans, you don't get to have the good gadgets. And it always makes me sad. Right. It's like you have locked down cell networks that prevent you from having the cool phones. You know, I think I said earlier that the Pixel 9 fold is great.

1:01:19It's like the end of that road. I think the same with the newest Samsung folds. Like, they're done. We figured out how to do that thing. They look as good as they're going to look. The hardware is great. The form factors are getting there. And now they're like, what if you folded it twice? Like, what if you made them thinner? Like, we're just adding these refinements now to the form factor. I'm not sure that the form factors were the revolution in the phone industry that everyone was hoping they would be. But I think the trifold is really interesting, right? Like, what if you can get to a landscape tablet in this form factor?

1:01:52It's, like, kind of wild. Especially if you can make it thinner, you can fold it yet one more time. They didn't actually show it, right? Like, they showed glimpses of it while Andy Lau is just thinking about how much he loves movies. Yeah, I think the official reveal of it is, I think, the day after the iPhone event. So we'll have that to talk about next week also. But yeah, there's a video that we'll put it in the show notes. You should look at it. It's just you get a brief look at it closed and then a brief look at it open. And it's like very thin and very cool and very futuristic. I have lots of questions.

1:02:24Yep. What about creases? What if instead of one crease, you had two creases? Wouldn't that be so fun? Probably not. They disagree. Definitely still has a crease. TCL, we love an e-paper phone, apparently. It's not e-ink. here in the Bukes Poma fan club welcome all right Franz this is just your segment I know I'm so happy what kind of wacky inefficient display technology do we have here they're not the only ones doing this like a whole bunch of people at IFA this year are like we're doing color e-ink and you're like are you and they're like we're doing electronic paper and you're like okay is that just an LCD and you took the light out and they're like yes that's what it is yeah with next paper next paper always loves to call it that all they're doing is putting a matte finish on the display that's about it in this case there's a button and the button will turn everything monochrome and make it look more like a books palma wait but alex you forgot the best part what is what is the button what is the mode the button engages it's like maximum e ink right maximum ink mode max ink mode max ink mode don't give me regular amounts of ink give me max ink but then there's no ink at all it's fine i'm fine with it um but but yeah tcl's been doing this next paper thing for five years now and it's it's it's not fancy this is their moment we the the books palma finally kicked the door down and now the next cycle is everyone's gonna have a max ink mode phone but you are you are seeing like like i heard it when i spoke with the folks at remarkable we're seeing it in a lot of the announcements out of Aoife, this idea of drawing our attention away from the screen and doing a dumber screen, a simpler screen, is really starting to take off.

1:04:11Yeah, and it's funny because the iPhone is like, what if your screen was alive and it's trying to bang you? And then everyone else is like, what if it looked more like paper? And I'm not sure how that... Those are two very different directions. Yeah, I don't think they're ever going to meet up. I think what's going to happen is a bunch of old people are going to get e-ink stuff and a bunch of young people are going to get the phones that bang you. I got real ages there. I don't know where I am on that spectrum yet. I would say my instinct is that recent history is that it's actually the olds who have weird relationships with technology, but we'll see how that goes.

1:04:44All right. One last gadget in this section, then we should talk about the wave of Lunar Lake laptops that just hit. This is my favorite one of all of IFA. It is, DJI has a new selfie drone. It's$190. It's called the Neo. You can launch it from the palm of your hand 4k 30 it can do pre-programmed stuff thomster cars a video of it hitting a tree and staying alive and completing its little pre-programmed do a circle around me flight path all that's whatever um great i mean i'm i'm a sucker for these i will probably buy one but it has voice controls and the voice the act the the wake word for the voice controls is hey fly

1:05:28that's what my brother said to a hamster one time before he threw it i just love the idea and it's really small so like there's a photo of thomas putting it in his pocket and the idea that you're going to pull out a drone from your pocket hold it out and be like hey fly and it's going to take off and like do a 360 around you this is all i've ever wanted from technology i don't know if it's going to work you know we got to see it yeah but i love that that's the wake word they chose it's very good and i i appreciate like thomas wrote it as if it is it's two separate sentences it's like you're you point at it you go hey fly like you're just you are demanding that it fly and i love that very confusing of course it's dji so it's a drone itself is is 199 but then you gotta buy the battery thing and the handheld controller and you're gonna end up spending a lot of money and this happens to me every two years on the dot and then I use the thing twice and put it away but that's life it's so funny to me that this thing and the new GoPro launched in the same week because I have the exact same opinion about both of them which is that no one cares there's this like small group of people they have already hit whatever product market fit they are ever going to find and we had this idea that action cameras were going to be a mainstream thing and then we had this idea that drones are going to be a mainstream thing and they just aren't and that's okay and I think this one will be fun because it's$200 and it seems to be very easy and very resilient.

1:06:47So like if there's ever going to be a new group of people who buys these, this is the one. I just want to push back just ever so gently on this because I broadly agree with you. I watch a lot of car videos on YouTube and the presence of action cameras and drones that you can destroy has made car videos on YouTube infinitely better. So I would just like to say I think they should keep going. Oh, I think they should keep going also. But I think this idea that like, I mean, this thing that DJI just shipped is the Snap Pixie. Like it just is that, but it works with not Snapchat and thus will be more successful.

1:07:22But like there's this idea that, oh, if we just make a little flying selfie camera easy to use, everybody will want it. Just not true. Yeah. Especially just like imagine, I don't know, Lollapalooza with 15 ,000 people at the Chapel Run show being like, hey, fly. at once you just get a as all those little engines take off I hope it does and I hope they pay some artists to write a song called Hey Fly for the drone it's my dream Lunar Lake, so just to color in Lunar Lake a little bit, this is Intel's newest laptop chip, they need to compete with Windows going on ARM and the new Qualcomm chips, the AIPC that Qualcomm is doing there's a lot of color about intel which is having its struggles lately the most important thing to know is that i think lunar lake is being made by tsmc like intel isn't making their own chip which is a big deal like just a huge monumental deal but like here's the next wave of these laptops they have big promises about battery life and performance obviously performance per watt but the reason is because someone else is making chips on the on the most advanced process node so it's just a weird these are like historical computers because they're the ones that might signal like the end of intel as we know it yeah weird and then i just need to point out the lenovo auto twist ai pc is a motorized two-in-one yeah wait i still i'm looking at a picture of this thing and i still don't understand how it works i think lenovo was like well we've already put one gimmick in here with AI, what about a second gimmick?

1:09:01Lenovo just likes to see what they can do. Lenovo loves a gimmick sometimes, especially for a big show. Wait, so this is basically like Apple's center stage thing where the camera will follow you, but it's for the whole screen. The whole screen just spins around on the base looking at you with the power of AI. Okay, now what needs to happen is Razer needs to make a circular treadmill desk that you just walk around all day while your screen slowly follows you in circles and then everyone if the treadmill also charges the screen now we're talking not yeah hell yeah so our our folks spent time with it and i just want to read this sentence the concept unit responded to voice commands within a second or two but the motors are slow taking about 10 seconds to transform if you watch the video is just like it's so slow you're like sure thanks lenovo all right then And Acer had a couple as well, right?

1:09:57Alex, what's going on with these? They have one that's called Project Dual Play. And Acer I love because I always forget that they're like, they make okay laptops. They make really wild gaming laptops. And this one has just got like a controller in it. No, sure. It's not even, Alex, you're not even doing it justice. Imagine if the trackpad underneath your keyboard on your laptop just popped out and became a game controller. Yes. That rules, dude. like no notes on that idea. I love it so much. Where do the joysticks go? What do you do with the buttons when it's docked? I have a lot of questions.

1:10:33There are no pictures of this thing with the controller docked as the mouse. I don't understand it at all. Also, what happens if you need to use a mouse while gaming? You don't. You just keep going. I guess the middle of the controller is still a trackpad. Yeah, but again, amazing. I love it. No notes. It's my favorite thing that's happened. I kept thinking it had a display in it. A button at the top of the keyboard releases the controller and causes two 5-watt speakers to pop out from the sides of the laptop. Oh, I thought there were, like, PC card slots. They're little. They look like little handles that you would grab.

1:11:08This is great. But this thing has to be so thick. Oh, yeah. That's not the point. I know. The point is that when you take out the game controller built into the keyboard deck, two little speakers pop out and RGB lights light up. I hope they go, psh, when they do it. I want to see the person playing this at Starbucks. Yeah. Leaving their whole tower behind. They're bringing this thing. They're playing Fortnite with their friend. Okay. And then here, I just want to end with talking about Intel and Qualcomm one more time. Yeah. Acer announced a bunch of 14-inch laptops. Some have Lunar Lake. Some have the new Snapdragon X.

1:11:42Some have the AMD Ryzen AI 300, which is quite a name. It claims all of them have 24 hours of battery life. That's not surprising. Do you believe this? No. Big battery life has been like one of the ongoing claims at IFA. Like Dell has said its battery life is getting better with all these things. Like if this is true, it's awesome, right? Like if we're going to get to the point where all of these things do these like table stakes things very well, but then in Intel, Qualcomm and AMD get to compete and sort of do the different things that each of them does well. That's amazing. I have absolutely zero reason to believe that that is actually the case.

1:12:21I also want to point out that these claims are fundamentally unmeasurable. So for the Intel Swift AI laptop, the quote is 29 hours of video playback, 23 hours of web browsing. The AMD is 19 hours of web browsing, 27 hours of video playback. And the Qualcomm one is 19 and a half hours of web browsing and 28 hours of video playback. I'm just pointing out this requires someone to watch videos for over a full day on three different computers and or browse the web for nearly a full day. And I don't – I'm very motivated to test these claims. Well, also, I think probably – I don't know if I can do it without breaking the labor law of the United States.

1:12:58I suspect – In some kind of clockwork orange situation. No, you use a GoPro. I used to have to do these tests, and we would just point a GoPro at it, and then the next morning come in and be like, okay, let's see if it recorded it. And sometimes it didn't, and you're like, okay, I guess I test it again. This will be fun. Let's charge fast. See, this is the market for GoPros, David. Yeah, that's the market. You scream, hey, fly! And then it just stares at a computer. A laptop doing a video playback test. I don't even know 24 hours of video playback is a useful stat for anyone in the world. I think it was once.

1:13:29And I think there was a lot of reviewers who were using video playback as the primary way to do battery testing for a very long time. But also, 24 hours isn't a lot nowadays. Like, given the size of these batteries, yeah, these things should be able to, like, do this. It should be relatively easy for them to do this if they put a big enough battery in the laptop. No, I certainly understand why in the beginning when video playback was, like, particularly chip-bound. Hard, yeah. It made sense to us. It was, like, hard to do, so it was, like, a very heavy task. All video playback now on these computers is being routed to an ultra-efficient, specialized part of a chip that is doing it for almost no power.

1:14:10well the only reason they're useful is because they're apples to apples right like this is a thing we've dealt with for forever for like as long as the verge has existed how do we benchmark battery life in a way that is both real and uh actually like objective apples to apples it's impossible you can't do it there's just no way so you have to do the thing where like i ran this test that doesn't mean anything but is at least one to one and then i just use it like a person and try to report battery life. If you have ever angrily commented in one of our laptop reviews about why we continue to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it is exactly for this reason.

1:14:47Totally. We just picked a game, and that's the game that Monica picked. Quite honestly, Monica shouldn't pick that game, and now we're going to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider a couple times a year for the rest of our lives. It had some challenging, like, graphic stuff. There was, like, the Tresslocks, the hair geometry I buy it all I'm just saying these numbers what they're meant to say is we are not competitive with Apple but I think it is astonishing that Acer is basically saying it doesn't matter what chip you use within a few percent we're getting the same battery life from not only two different Intel x86 chips but also the ARM chip and the ARM chip is worse on the web browsing test weird you see i just don't think it is it's actually worse than intel on both tests it's an hour worse than the video playback test as well which is not what you would expect i don't think that is weird because i think all of these they've all been kind of coming to the same conclusions on how to design these chips they've all been designing the chips very similarly the last few years they're putting these all in very similar devices like it kind of makes sense that some would be a little better, some would be a little worse.

1:16:02Maybe somebody just got hit with too many ads on the AMD one and the Qualcomm one versus the Intel one for web browsing, and that's why the battery life is higher for Intel. But it's not super surprising. I do think it's cool that they're claiming 24 hours because a couple of years ago, they'd be like, we got six. And that's cool. Four times more battery life in four or five years? That's awesome. But hard to test. I'm just saying, I think these laptops are a real make or break moment for Intel. But if they've actually managed to compete with ARM, compete with Snapdragon, that's a big deal. But it means that they are going to be dependent on TSMC.

1:16:45If they haven't managed, I don't know what happens next. Well, they're trying to not be dependent on TSMC, right? Like they said, we have to do this because we just aren't there yet. But we're going to go build all these new fabs and we're going to get there. So this is supposed to be like their placeholder. Right. Can Intel build the fabs and hit the process nodes? Yeah, we'll see. Dicey. We'll see. So these are important laptops. We're going to have lots of reviews. Tom is going to write lots of notepad columns about what's going on with Windows and Intel. Because the industry is going to turn around these laptops in a particular way.

1:17:20All right, we've got to take a break. We're going to come back with a true lightning round. Unsponsored. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from 1Password. Think for just a moment about the Herculean tasks that your IT security department has to handle. There's keeping identities, devices, and applications safe. Then there's dealing with shadow IT, securely onboarding and offboarding employees. Oh, also there's meeting compliance goals. The point is, it's a lot. If you want to help lighten that load, you can try Trileka by 1Password. Trileca by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance, and it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security.

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1:20:53All right, back for the lightning round. I'm going to start with the first one, which I think is very funny. As you know, we track connectivity here very closely at the Verge.com. Now, Verizon once decided that Fios was not its future, sold off a bunch of Fios assets and customers, and bet everything on a little technology we like to call 5G, which you will recall was supposed to enable everything from robot surgery, which never happened, to self-driving cars, which only happened in two cities with no 5G involved. You just name it. You just name it. Remember? Remember 5G? By the way, the camera button on the iPhone 16 Pro is supposed to be where the millimeter wave antenna is right now.

1:21:32Perfect. I don't know where the millimeter wave is going to go or if it's even going to still be there. But do you remember all this? Sure do. Yeah. Turns out 5G accomplished nothing. And now Verizon is going to spend$20 billion to buy Frontier, which it sold a bunch of Fios assets to. Hans Vestberg, the CEO of Verizon, says, the acquisition of Frontier is a strategic fit. It will build on Verizon's two decades of leadership at the forefront of fiber. And it's an opportunity to become competitive in more markets in the United States. The two decades of leadership, we're building the network. It sold to Frontier and is now buying again.

1:22:06Yeah. So Verizon was like, what if really fast wired internet was not important? And then realized a decade later that very fast wired internet is actually like pretty important. Indeed, they are an investor at our parent company, Box Media. I am often accused of being hopelessly biased in favor of wired connections. it comes up on the show a lot that i think wired connections are good and reliable headphones for example as alex painfully brought up earlier i think two of the official stances of the verge cast are are more buttons are better and uh plug it in it'll be fine wired connections are better than wireless ones um uh when i covered starlink i was accused of being in the pocket of bink podcast because i pointed out that wired ethernet is more reliable than sending internet to space, which seems obvious on space.

1:22:58Big Comcast, gotcha. Yeah, right. So basically Verizon was all in on its own 5G bet, high in its own supply. They thought this was going to do whatever it was going to do, and they started selling off these assets because they thought they weren't durable. And the reality is, over and over and over again, that in particular, wired internet connections are what people want. Like, if you give people the choice between some weirdo wireless line of sight IR 10 can internet connection or like fiber to their house they will always pick the fiber and so it's just been more durable over time and it doesn't i don't think that actually is a knock on 5g like i know we're gonna get emails because we always get emails people a lot of people have like 5g home internet connections now yeah because they have no access to the other thing and the 5g home internet connection is an upgrade it's the same with Starlink.

1:23:48If your options are nothing in Starlink, Starlink is great. But if your options are Starlink or 5G home internet or fiber, a lot of people pick the fiber and the fiber is really useful. So it's just like Verizon just got high in its own supply and it's spending $20 billion on the circle. You know what's nuts? This is a total tangent that we shouldn't go down, but just a thing I realized as you were explaining that is like, you just described what's happening to the whole tech industry and AI right now. Everybody's like, what if we threw away everything we were good at because because AI is going to change everything about everything forever.

1:24:18And it's like, you want to know what happens when it doesn't is this. You spend$20 billion to undo your own weird ideas. They sold these customers to Frontier in 2015 for$10.5 billion, and it's rebuying them for$20 billion. Frontier made out like a bandit. I mean, didn't it go bankrupt in the interim there? And then have to do a whole restructuring? Who among us hasn't gone bankrupt at one point or another? Especially if you're a cable company CEO, this is just like what you do. Yeah. You're sending the bankruptcy forms from your yacht. You know, you're fine. All right, David, what's yours? I just want to talk briefly about Snapchat.

1:24:58So Alex Heath was on the show with me two weeks ago, I think. And one of the things he said was basically like Snapchat is both more popular than ever and also maybe in more trouble as a business than ever. And I think there is no better way to look at that than a note Evan Spiegel posted on the company website that we reported on that one of the things it's going to do is start putting ads in your chat lists, which to me is one of the things that has been like untouchable in a messaging app forever. Like ads in the messages and ads between the threads in my inbox have been two things that companies are very afraid of doing.

1:25:38Like Google does it in your Gmail a little and everybody hates it and it sucks. But like Snap is about to start putting ads in your chats like with your friends. And basically Evan Spiegel's reason for doing it was like our business is bad and investors are mad at us about it. and it's just the whole thing just like reeks of desperation from snapchat uh and i just i think that is fascinating like this company is absolutely ubiquitous among like a certain generation of internet users it is everywhere among like my my high school age nephews like snapchat is how you live your life at that age right now and yet this company just cannot figure out how to make any money and it's it's just a really really strange and they can't do the one thing that they should do, which is charge a fee.

1:26:27Right. Because my nephews are 17. And Evan Spiegel's quote is the growth of our digital advertising business is one of the most important inputs to our long term revenue potential. And investors are concerned that we aren't growing faster. Like, if you're a if you're a CEO of a big tech company writing like a here's why we're doing a product thing. That's not what you say. And when you've gotten to the point where that's what you have to say that like you are deep down the road of like yeah what choice do i have like that is where snap is put put snap on the go 90 scale the go 90 scale of doom streaming services i understand is not about snapchat but we're very 75 75 i think i think snap snapchat as its own public company as is that is that a 75 and i think if we were in a different world of antitrust regulation and big tech questions snap probably would have been bought by somebody at this point oh yeah google would have bought and killed snapchat by now within a heartbeat yeah so i i think on 75 might be a little high but only because of like bigger macro reasons I'm going to say 65.

1:27:37I think it's so sticky. It is so sticky. You cannot overstate how much people love Snapchat. But it's only sticky for the people who actually use it. If not enough people use it, it's not growing. No, but tons of people use it. Again, it is more popular than ever. It's huge. It just can't make any money. This, to me, is the fun. But it's not that huge, is it? How many people are using it? I think it's like 800 million. It's huge. Oh, that is huge. It is sufficiently large. it's just that teens sending each other silly selfies is not a monetizable business it turns out without ruining it and so what they're going to do is they're going to ruin it it all comes back to this idea doesn't it yeah the question now is basically for snap is going to be how bad can we make this before you leave and that's like that's a sad place for a company to have to get to and it really feels like that's where snap has gotten yeah i will say if they don't light up some kind of actual subscription it they will be past 65 or 75 very quickly i think there's like there's you know snapchat plus is like it's a thing sure but there's never really been any energy behind that yeah that's sad all right kranz what you got um bringing on the sadness was concord concord you may have heard about in the last eight years because it was it was going be a new live service game from sony and they spent over eight years making it and then it came out and they've already pulled it within a month of it coming out because just nobody was playing it it hit at the wrong time it didn't have any of the cool features um like when it started i don't think fortnight and pub underground were even really a thing for most people and that's all happened since then so it came out at the wrong time it's been it had a disastrous launch and was it bad like just boring the problem okay it was just boring yeah and it was just like there's been such a glut of these free-to-play live services video games everybody thought that this was going to be how they were going to make all of their money and over time it's been like oh wait no a few of them will do it and some will carve out their little fiefdoms um some will be fortnight which you know everyone under the age of 14 plays and otherwise it's like there's not a lot of room for this because there's a finite number of people who want to play video games and then that group gets smaller and smaller the more specific the games are and then you need a lot of people to play it in order to make it interesting and then this happens well but i also feel like if i rewind a few years ago the big idea in the industry was like okay live service games are the thing and what's going to happen is is the same thing that happens in the gaming industry right there's going to be a big one and then there's going to be a next big one and then there's going to be a next big one and there's going to be a next big one and it turns out like no there's it's just going to be fortnight and league of legends the whole time and minecraft is going to keep being huge and roblox is going to keep me like it's it's just been the same handful of giants for so long now and i like it is it is astounding to me how big those games still are and how much saying power they've had.

1:30:44And it just feels like all these companies made the right, they like bet on the right industry and were just completely wrong about how it was going to go. Yeah. Yeah, in this case, they were just way too late. Like Concord, eight years in development for a live service video game is just, that's way too long. And also, isn't the lesson from PUBG just like ship your shitty game and it'll be fine? Yeah. Ship it and go. Sort of. Ship your game with an innovative new business model in a dynamic new gameplay mechanic before anyone else. And then it'll be fun. Sure. Spend eight years doing this to not be as good as Fortnite is a different lesson.

1:31:21But it sounds like this may be like teaching, this may be that one of those learning moments for the video game industry. They may be going, oh, wait, we don't need to do this. But I mean, EA still exists. So presumably we will get a ton more of these. As someone who just bought the new Madden, which is so hard. Yeah. I will say that no one's learning anything. I will say Sony, by the time you're listening to this, astrobot will be out for the ps5 and that game by all accounts looks to be the game of the year people are obsessed with this game love it yeah i bought the control i've been playing astro's playroom with max uh so we bought the controller she's obsessed and i'm very excited by this game and it's like a totally different lesson like what if you made a jewel like platformer with a lovable character that had innovative gameplay mechanics the nintendo yeah but it's a what if we made Mario again.

1:32:07And I understand saying make Mario again is like fine. Nobody ever thought of that. That's weird. Have you thought of making Jurassic Park again exactly the way it was when I was eight? That's going to save the movie industry. But it's funny that Sony is doing both things at the same time. Yeah. And one of them is going to be a way bigger hit than the other. Yeah. All right. Here's my last one. I just want to call this out. We are deeply committed to covering the Fediverse and all things open social web. And this one is very small, but I think it has glimmers of a big idea. It's called Sub.Club.

1:32:38It's from the company that makes Mammoth, the MassZone client. It's paid social feeds. So one of the things I think about all the time is people subscribe to, I don't know, Platformer or 4.4 Media or all of our friends who have Substacks or Ghosts or whatever. And the way that that dynamic usually works is the social media is the marketing to get you to subscribe to a newsletter. But the social media is often the content. Like it's the thing. And no No one has figured out how to like monetize a feed at all. And you know, you like paid Twitter posts like never took off like that. There was that button there and there's some of this on some of the platforms or some kind of premium subscription stuff, but none of it happens at scale and certainly none of it supports anybody at scale.

1:33:22I think the idea of the open social internet interconnected federated networks having this built into them from the beginning is super powerful. and the idea that you subscribe to some creator and as part of it, you get authenticated into one of their feeds that you can subscribe to anywhere as opposed to just on Twitter or just on YouTube or just Instagram. That's a big deal. I don't know if this one's going to go anywhere. I'm just excited to see the ecosystem is starting to generate these new ideas about what could you do if all of these networks actually work together. And one of those ideas is like, what if you could pay creators directly and what you've got is also their social media and not just like links to this stuff that you pay for somewhere else.

1:34:02Yeah. Yeah. This ecosystem is like finally starting to productize in really exciting ways. And like the other thing that launched this week was Reader, the RSS Reader app, R-E-E-D-E-R. The guy who made it, it's like the best RSS app that exists, made a new one that is all just following feeds. So you can like, instead of it being an RSS feed from a website, you can now follow, like you can get a YouTube subscription in there and you can get Mastodon feeds in there. And it's another one where like you put a bunch of feeds in that are all these different things and it just renders in this one multimedia timeline.

1:34:36And it's one of those things that like turns your brain onto like, oh, I get it now. And like what you're talking about is the idea of like, what if I could pay for just your stuff, right? And it's like, you can put a podcast into an activity pub feed. You can put a video into an activity pub feed. Like all this stuff, I just, I subscribe to the things that you make and then I get to consume them and you get to make them and everybody wins. It's like, that's the stuff, man. Yeah. That's the thing that gets me really excited. And I know that people are going to point out, you can do some of this on Patreon.

1:35:01You can do some of this over here. And the thing is, all of those are closed networks. You as a creator have to give all of your business to YouTube or all of it to Patreon. Or you have to manage lots and lots and lots of different platforms. And the idea here is that all of these platforms will support these core interoperable models. All that has to happen. None of that's happened yet. But we're committed to overrecovering because these glimmers of what if it was different are starting to become real. You can just see them across the ecosystem. Like, oh, this is where investment is that isn't we're going to spend a trillion dollars stealing everything on the Internet to train.

1:35:39Oh, yeah. This is much more like what if it was sustainable to make things for other people on the Internet, which is just not – there hasn't been this kind of very sincere engagement in that for a while yet. okay uh that's it we're miles over six hour of our chest it was real we got it we got to go we got to get on planes we're at the apple event next week we got stuff to write about ifa is going to keep happening there's you can read coverage of the matter spec it feels like every time jen goes to a trade conference and a different matter executive shows up and promises her it's going to be better that's on the website there's more gadgets on the website because ifa is ongoing check it all out but we gotta go that's it that's the first class

1:36:26And 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 Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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