Widgets are back, and everything else from WWDC

24:54My guess would be there's going to be a flow in which Apple sets like asks you to set this up and prompts you to like pick a photo of yourself. Mine is going to be me doing finger guns in like a super cool way. I'm going to be wearing a hat and doing finger guns. I'm pretty excited about it. I love this. No, we're in the 90s. We're in the 90s and early 2000s. We're not really at trucker hats and finger guns. So it's going to be me in low-rise jeans with a Nelly Band-Aid on my cheek. That's what it's going to be. That's what I'm saying. I'm going to have the Nelly Band-Aid. You're there. Beautiful.

25:23We're at widgets in Mac OS X. We're not yet at trucker hats. The trucker hats are coming. You'll know this when Apple kills widgets the next time. Okay. Okay. Contact posters 3.0. David has a trucker hat. You cannot set different contact posters for different people or different lines. That's obviously the next turn. We're going to have to pretend to be excited about that next year. Mark my words. Next year at WWC, Apple will say contact posters for different people and the crowd will go wild. Just as the crowd, I will say, talking about the early 2000s, went wild for updated PDF support on the iPad.

25:58They did. Like you could hear it. Yeah. Over the recording, because you guys, for our listeners, one of the ways that we cover the event is sometimes there's like a little microphone and we can hear the keynote because you guys are there. And so we could hear like, ooh, when it happened. It was very, very good. It was good. It was pretty funny. FaceTime updates. FaceTime basically just in more places. You can leave FaceTime voicemail now. I don't know how else to describe that. That is separate from the regular voicemail. Somebody was being very hostile to millennial women about that. They were like, they're the ones most likely to abuse that with their parents.

26:36And I was like, that's not absolutely true. That you're going to do so many FaceTime voicemails? Yeah, with my parents. I was like, never felt more called out and like seen at the same time. I'm definitely going to have my kid leave FaceTime voicemails for my parents. That's what they want. We already do it. It's just taking a video and sending it to someone. Yeah. The thing that's weird about this, and I'm just realizing this right now, is the way that Apple is doing this, with like cool stuff on the phone side, cool stuff on the FaceTime side, cool stuff on the messages side, but none of these things interact with each other.

27:06This is a very like Google-y way of handling this where it's like separate teams that have nothing to do with each other that are all kind of arriving at the same idea. Like what if we could sort of talk synchronously, but also asynchronously? And we had a bunch of different ways to communicate. Like the fact that FaceTime voicemails and audio messages in iMessage are different things and are also different from phone calls, which now have live transcribed voicemails, doesn't make any sense. There should be a thing like iMessage where it kind of fails gracefully from thing to thing, depending on what device you have.

27:36And instead now I'm like, okay, if I'm going to call you, do I call you on the phone and leave you a voicemail? Or do I call you on FaceTime and leave you a voicemail? Or do I send you an audio message in the messages app? This doesn't make any sense. David, if this was 2004, right now, what you just said would have raised you$100 million to build a universal messaging client. And then I would have sold to Google and there would have been one of 80 of them. And it would have gone away. You'd be like, why are there so many instant messaging services? I mean, but right, like you can see, this is the thing that ordinarily Apple's very good at is being like, okay, we've just made a system.

28:11It's called calls. I don't know. And it just works. And it's like, okay, if it's on iPhone to iPhone, we're gonna default you to FaceTime audio because that sounds better and you have all these cool new features. If they're not in the iMessage database, it just works. They have too many users to do this. I'm telling you that I agree with you. If you were clean sheeting this, like, well, it was John Doerr was the VC who had the iFund. Sure. 2008, man, we would have raised so much money with exactly this pitch. We have sat through this pitch so many times. Apple has too many users to reboot this.

28:45They're like, this icon makes phone calls. This icon makes FaceTime calls. This other icon is your voicemail. And this icon is some other stuff. And they're like, they have to educate 100 million people. And if you change the name of the phone app, you're going to freak everybody out. Yeah, you're probably right. Even the dumbest thing that I do all the time, which is I call my parents on the phone. And then Max rolls up to me. And she's like, where are they? Because the idea of an audio-only phone call, she's like, what stupid old people ideas is. Why can't I see who you're talking to? and then I just push the button to turn into a FaceTime.

29:21Routinely blows everyone away. Yeah. Right? The idea that the audio voice call can turn into the FaceTime call is a paradigm shift that is like routinely confusing to most people. My parents, when it's the other way around, I know this happens to everyone else's parents, my parents will hang up the phone call and call me back on FaceTime because they're like, we're switching modes. My parents just get upset. Well, my dad's fine with it. My dad's fine with it. I don't want to look at you. He was watching the Vergecast live blog. Like he's like a nerd. That's where I get it from. But my mom was like, she routinely accidentally FaceTimes me when she's on the phone.

29:54She like butt FaceTimes me when she's just talking to me on the phone. And I'm like, there's just the side of your face. Not your butt. Not your butt. Thank God. Cheek time. Cheek time. That works in both ways. Moving on. Moving on. I get your point, dude. I'm just saying I think they're stuck by how many users they have. Yeah. I think you're probably right. They have to do this a lot slower. FaceTime is coming to the Apple TV. I very confidently told an Apple person I was like can you just use the USB port on the Apple TV and they looked at me. There's a USB port? Yeah. There was one in the first one on the bottom.

30:25It's gone now. There's not a lot of ports on there. It was a service port. Do you remember though? Finding the secret USB port is like always the great joy. Like there was a Nintendo that had one. There was a Nintendo, like the Apple obviously. Everybody always has like genies. They were not excited that I knew about their secret port. Whatever. They get mad. So it's continuity so you can use your phone or your iPad to make FaceTime calls on TV. Lord knows how that's going to work, although I will say there's a really interesting new spec in iOS 17 that controls motorized docks. So you can see how you can dock the thing.

30:59It will rotate. It will tilt at you, whatever. The phone can follow you around. So wait, if I have the phone on my bedside table because I'm sleeping in, could my boss then FaceTime me and then slowly make it motor around and be like, wake up. I see you sleeping. Yes. Get your ass out of bed. Your boss. Your boss. Hypothetically, whoever that is. Wake up, Alex. I'm here. I'm awake. No, but for FaceTime, that's really fascinating, right? That you need some sort of, you got to prop up the phone somehow. And now there's all these other little, there's other ways to control docs, which I think is fascinating.

31:35I don't know if they're going to interplay, but you can see how they're coming together. We are kind of getting ahead of ourselves on that one. But I think the docs thing is super fascinating to me because it's been, I don't know, a decade since like the iPod dock phenomenon died and we're going to get like a whole new dock phenomenon now that we have standby mode and we have this this whole dock kit thing which is what you're describing where you can actually control the way a dock moves like things you stick your phone on are going to be interesting again and that makes me so happy i'm telling you it's back it's you're we're gonna have to start a gadget blog again just cover are the hotels like budgeting for all of the docks they're gonna have to add hotels are budgeting for nothing I checked into my hotel in New York City last night and they looked at me confidently and said, we're so excited.

32:17Room service is back. It was just like chicken nuggets. Yeah. It was like whatever. Some tendies. They're like, they're not even budgeting. It's horrible. Last piece, they're adding USB-C support for webcams on the iPad and microphones. Very excited about this. And this is like, this goes in with the FaceTime coming to Apple TV thing. It's just like more things get webcams. You can video conference on more things. That seems like a universally good thing to me. Why do you need one for your iPad? So if you have a display. So if you've set up an iPad, you plugged in a display or USB-C and the display has a built-in webcam.

32:54How many people are plugging their iPad into a display and then being like, boy, I really need a webcam on top of that? No, Alex, do you know the real reason? It's because the iPad's camera is in a stupid place and it's not where it should be. That's what I assume. And now you can put one in the middle like a normal person. This is the best news of all time. Now you can have a webcam where a webcam should have been for 12 years, Apple. Do you have some feelings there, David? No. I can't wait for the first picture. Center stage is a great feature that doesn't cause any problems for anyone ever.

33:24It's great. I can't wait for the first picture of somebody with the iPad in a keyboard dock with like a Logitech camera mounted where it should be. Like in a coffee shop. It's going to be great. Little mic. And then the last piece, which we should talk about maybe a little bit more, they're bringing communication safety to FaceTime to photos to airdrop. That felt like huge news. It's like huge news. They just slid in. I mean, this was like such a big deal that they had to pull it the first time. Yeah, because it's scanning your images to detect for nudity and then be like, hey, did you know there's some nudes coming your way?

33:55And like that shocks me. So the scandal with this was before when they were doing it in the cloud and they were doing the on-device hashing and passing it back and forth to the cloud. There was a secondary – there was another feature that had a secondary scandal where it was alerting parents about children potentially getting nudes. That was a big deal. This is just on-device scanning. So a picture is coming in. Your iPhone looks at it locally. It says we think there might be some nudity here. Are you sure you want to see this picture? How many people are like – well, actually a lot of women are like, no.

34:32Yeah. Never mind. I forgot about dick pics. Yeah. It's like a real thing for a lot of people. That is a real thing that a lot of women deal with. I'm so sorry. But they announced it. I think they – there was a lot of confusion about that first set of announcements and what it all entailed. They announced this. They did not do a great job of explaining what this is. They just like shot right by it. I mean I think that was very deliberate, right? Right. Yeah. The louder Apple talks about this, the more people are going to ask questions about it. And I think like what you're saying about this being on device, they have answered a series of the most complicated questions about it.

35:06But it is still true that your device is scanning your photos and we can debate what that means. Like your phone, the photo is already on your device. Like it's not like your device is not aware of what this photo is. Yeah, your phone can happily search for things in your photos. Yeah. But then, and yeah, it'll prompt you if you get one, if like if a child receives a photo that it perceives to be problematic, one of the things it will give you is a pop-up where you can either, I think, block the contact who's sending it. There's a thing that just says message a grown-up, which I think is very funny.

35:37It's just like a very funny way to name that particular feature. but it's the kind of thing that is like it's it seems sort of like an obviously good idea at first and then kind of the longer you think about it the thorny or the questions get about what this knows and who it should notify and the difference between sort of protecting someone and letting them use their own device the way that they want to it's it's super messy but apple clearly thinks it's gotten this right because it's now starting to roll it out kind of everywhere you might see multimedia. Yeah. And this is way too much for this episode of the Vergecast, but just today, before we started recording, Louisiana passed a child safety bill that says you can't sign up for services without parental consent.

36:16The parents can cancel your terms of service agreements from all this stuff. There are other bills in other states. A thing that is happening across the tech industry and across tech policy is using children as a stand-in for very, very aggressive surveillance and regulation. Yes. And we have pieces on it on the site. We can link it in the show notes, but this is right on the edge of that where I think on balance it's fine, especially given Apple's history and privacy standards and parental control, like all that stuff. You're like, this is right on the line of fine, right? Like you're a parent.

36:47You want to see if your kid's getting weird photos. You want your kid to be able to alert you, like all fine. There are some cases in that. You're a kid. You have an abusive parent where it gets real dicey, right? So like there's just some, there's some big questions in there, but on balance, I think it's on the line of fine. You also can't troll your friends with Goatsy anymore. Alex. Sorry. I mean, maybe you can. We'll find out. It truly is the early 2000s again. Yeah, we're back to the early 2000s. Speaking on the 2000s tip, Alex's favorite feature. My favorite feature. Airplay in hotels. No, Alex is banned from talking about this on the Vergecast.

37:23I refuse. I will not tolerate this. You guys, this is bullying. No. So they say that they're going to allow you to airplay in hotels. They could allow this today. Yes. This is my thing. I think this is theoretically a really cool feature that should already exist but will never truly exist. Because, again, I stayed at a Marriott recently and there was still that iHome 2000s iPod dock in there. I'm not really confident that I'm going to be getting airplay in my hotel anytime soon. No, it's not going to happen. There's going to be like, do you remember all those years ago? And it's still true now.

38:02You drive around and you see a hotel and they have the sign that says vacancy,$149 a night. And then it just says, has HBO. I wonder if Airplay is going to be the new HBO that they'll just put on the sign, Airplay. Well, that's what they're doing now. Has Netflix. That's true, yeah. And I'm like, I'm not signing into my Netflix on this account. Which is exactly why I want Airplay. That's the thing, right? It's like this in theory solves a lot of problems because I don't have to log in. I don't have to remember to log out when I check out. But they have to replace that Linksys B router from 2003.

38:34Everybody loves a captive portal. That's my feeling. I love a captive portal. Yeah. This to me is like the best idea and most unlikely thing to actually take hold that I saw at WCC. I swear. I'm just sitting here Googling. I swear they've made the airplane hotels announcement before. It would not surprise me. I mean, like they announced AirPlay in 2010. They probably said it then. I'm guessing in 2011. They're like, and it will be coming to hotels soon. Like one year later. With our partners at Hilton. And Hilton was like, no. Some Hilton person like wanders on stage. We're like, we love computers.

39:08We love Wi-Fi. Chromecast had a big hotel partnership for a while there. Do you remember this? Yeah. And then it went away. Every time you see a screen, there's someone who's like, if I control the screen, I will make the money. And then there's you being like, what if I just send my phone to that screen? That's the CarPlay story that Apple has won, much to society's detriment. And it is not the hotel story. The last time I was in a hotel, I literally went and unplugged the HDMI cable from whatever garbage hotel box and plugged it into my laptop. I just watch whatever is on Nick at night. Like, that's become my main thing.

39:44It's usually friends. Sometimes it's the office. I scroll through the guide until one of those two shows appears, and that is my hotel TV experience. And it's fine. I have no notes. I don't need anything else. All right. So that's AirPlay. Another, again, vintage 2000s announcement. Another vintage 2000s announcement was the name drop where you can just walk up to someone and, like, wave your phone at them. Did they let you test that one? Like, did they have a very controlled demo for it? No. Again, the TikTok that I was sharing that Alex was laughing at me about was in 2013. Craig Federighi was like, we've expanded contact sharing.

40:21Now you can just do it with a tap. You don't need to bump your phones together. Now you gotta bump them. Now you gotta bump your phones together. This was a whole startup. The startup was called Bump. There have been many startups trying to do this. There were so many years where everybody was like, NFC is going to change the way we interact with each other forever. And now, no, it didn't happen. Now it's like QR codes, which is just NFC, but it works. And now apparently we're getting the thing where you can bump your phones. Bump was number eight on Apple's list of all-time most popular free iPhone apps.

40:52By February 2013, it had been downloaded 125 million times. It was acquired by Google and subsequently shut down. Well, at least they had a nice, you know, at least they got some money before Apple short-elect them. And then it took Apple 10 years to replace it. Just like acquisition by Google. It's just three sentences long. On September 16th, 2013, Bump announced it had been acquired by Google. On December 31, 2013, both Bump and Flock would be discontinued. The company subsequently deleted all user data and shut down their servers, rendering all apps inoperable. This is the most Google acquisition story ever.

41:29It's beautiful. Like when you get acquired by Google, you should be forced to pre-announce that your service will be discontinued. Don't worry. We're deleting all your data. Lena Khan, you want to accomplish something? write a law that's like if you are acquired by google you have to pre-announce that your product is a failure and no one will ever get to use again that's how you stop mergers in america you just skip to the end you got acquired by at &t guess what five years from at &t is going to sell you for parts just pre-announce it we did this for money all right that's enough and then the last one was they expanded airdrop so it works over the internet which is cool yeah that's cool So you're both signed into iCloud, you leave, it'll continue to transfer over iCloud.

42:10That's all I want. Get excited for Gritty. And you can now set up things like SharePlay and AirDrop by touching your phones together. Which, sure. This is the sort of thing. So the only time I have ever been like, wow, AirDrop is an amazing, magical piece of technology. And I think I've talked about this on the show. I was at the Formula One race in October, and we were standing there waiting for all the drivers to come in. And we happened to be at the very front of a crowd of like 100 people. And so my friend Steven had the best view and was filming everything as everybody came in. And then he would just open up AirDrop and just tap on every name he could find.

42:45And he would just send this video to all of the phones on all the people around us. And it was like it was like the most incredible file sharing experience I have ever had. And ever since I'm now like an AirDrop true believer, I just use it to like send stuff from my phone to my computer. But to have it actually work socially, I was like, oh, this is something. There's really something here. And that idea that I could just like, I have a thing that you want and you just sort of like boop my phone and you have it. I mean, it could work. Yeah. And that's why Google bought Bump in September of 2013.

43:16Ten years ago. And now Nearby Share exists. Just now. If you work at Google and you can tell me whether one letter of code from Bump made it into Nearby Share. one like that's it that's the bar one letter one bracket of code from bump is a nearby share let me know i would love to know the answer to that question let's lightning around the rest of the stuff standby mode probably everybody has seen if you're listening to the show that was apple's big announcement in ios 17 you put your phone when it's charging on its side the oled phones will just like always on show you a they made a alarm clock yeah another cool use of widgets by the way You can run both a clock and you can have widgets appear.

43:56So that's another, it's like a full screen widget experience. Too much information. I'm not mad at it. Oh my God. What was the name of the thing that ran the widgets? The little guy. Chumby? Chumby. They made Chumby. Yeah. You know, the little guy. They Sherlocked Chumby.

44:14Here's my social clip. Ready? I'm going to look right at the camera and say, they Sherlocked Chumby. That means something. that means something to a lot of people and if you're not one of them stop scrolling and go do your research they sure lock chumby a million views i just went to chumby's website you can still buy a chumby apparently does it run confabulator widgets doesn't i just want to read you several things that are on the chumby website okay uh unbrick your sony dash details here. Activate a Chumbie. Deactivate a Chumbie. These are some of the largest and most important things on the Chumbie website.

44:55That's very, very good. Siri can now handle multiple smart home commands in a row. That's great. They cut it to just Siri, which whatever. Hey Siri, wasn't that hard to say. So the thing that's actually interesting to me about this, and the reason I put it on here, because I agree that the features themselves are kind of whatever. You slightly easier i expect siri to be 1000 times worse with the false positives than it has been before that's going to be awful but are you guys slightly surprised that apple is continuing with siri as kind of an ongoing concern i kind of thought siri was being phased out and there was eventually going to be some other many users you think yeah siri sucks it has this timers and asking for music all the time yeah that's all you need it for even craig said that But on stage, he was like when he was giving the examples for what Siri can do.

45:44Now it can do multiple timers. Hooray. But he literally was like, people, you love to use Siri for, you know, playing music and setting timers. And it was like, oh, so Craig knows the only two things that anyone ever does with their voice assistants. Apple is trapped in a prison of its own success. And it can only leave that by leaping headfirst into the metaverse. I mean, that is that is perfectly fair. But I kind of thought Apple might take the like AI revolution as a chance to do basically what Microsoft did and be like, forget all these things we've done before. Like Siri is clippy with another name, right?

46:16It's like a thing that seemed nifty and is bad tech and everybody hates it. And you would think they would have taken this moment as a possible opportunity to rebrand. And I'm just surprised they didn't. They need to do the big change, right? You can get rid of Siri. You need to replace it with like, here's the generative AI chatbot assistant of your dreams that is taking actions on your behalf. And they don't have it. The only mentions they had of generative AI in this whole keynote were in the keyboard. Can I give you a theory that I think I'm absolutely right about? That generative AI chatbot exists and it's called Spotlight.

46:49That is going to be the thing. Like over the next three years, Spotlight is going to be a more and more important part of all of these platforms. And that's where all of the actual AI focus is going to be. Because it's the search box? It's the search box. They're increasingly putting actions into Spotlight so you can do stuff right from the search results. It's how you open apps. It's how you find things. It's like that is where if I'm Apple, that's where all the AI stuff is going to go. Not Siri. Spotlight. So they're going to Sherlock Alfred. Yeah. Sherlock Chumby. Yeah. God, no. Do you think at Chumby headquarters, they were like, it finally happened.

47:28Do you think if we called this episode They Sherlocked Chumbie, anyone would listen to it? I think that we have only one choice at this point in time. Look, Alex Heath just put up a story about Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to the Vision Pro. I think it is incumbent upon us. If you're out there, you're a young reporter, and you're trying to break onto the verge, send us a note about how you're going to get the Chumbie reaction to standby mode. I'll run it. We'll pay market rate. We'll run that story. What's going on inside of Chumbie HQ? Bring me pictures to spot. Is there a chubby HQ? I was like, is there a chubby HQ?

48:02All right. Last few things. Last few things, mostly on the watch side. The side button now opens a control center for the watch, which is cool. They're updating the polling rate for motion to enable new kinds of apps for golf, for hiking, for cycling, tennis. You can plug in your computers and stuff for cycling now. So you can have cadence monitors and stuff. Yeah. The Sherlock Peloton. The Sherlock Peloton. Good. Yeah. But no, I think that one's super useful because it's been like a holdback if you want to go ride your bike out in the world and check your cadence. You can't do anything with Apple on it.

48:33It sucks. David has written here, add a watch to group FaceTime. I am so excited about this. Just purely as a trolling mechanism. Like you get to be the person everybody is on FaceTime and you just show up on your watch. That's both like a power move and the cruelest thing you can possibly do to somebody. That is all my mom is going to do. That's great. The watch now have – maps in general has offline maps, which is a huge, way late addition. You can do that partially on the watch now. And then we mentioned this very briefly on the last episode in the waveform segment. But when you go on a hike, the watch will set a waypoint for the last place that you had cell signal and the last place that you had any cell signal from any carrier so you could place an emergency call, which is really smart.

49:15Yeah, that's good. Smart stuff all around. Okay, that's it. I mean, that's not it. There is so much. Yeah, Apple announced so much stuff, all kind of quality of life features all the way around. Very cool. But we got to take a break and talk about these Macs. We'll be right back.

49:33Support for this show comes from Shopify. One of the most exciting parts of starting a business is when the sales start coming in. If your business is looking to start selling online, Shopify has everything you need to create your online store. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the U.S., from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. And Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography.

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51:00Like when the founders at Palo Alto Networks wanted to redefine cybersecurity for the modern age. Everybody thought we were crazy. Nobody would use the cloud for cybersecurity. And when I hear something like that, I say, of course, I'm going to do it. You know, if everybody believes it shouldn't be done or it cannot be done, then, you know, it's a good reason to do it. Or when mobile gaming giant Supercell could only rewrite the rules of the industry after failure in the company's formative stages. Many of the best things we've learned have actually come through failures. These are crucible moments, turning points in a company's journey that made them what they are today.

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52:06All right, we're back. Now, I want to tell you some very important news that happened while we were in break. I went to Chumbie.com as well. And I just want to read you this list of the most popular Chumbie widgets. It's weather, obviously. Of course. I can hash cheeseburger. Oh, very important. The fail blog. Life Hacker News. Okay. And our friends at Dig. Early 2000s, man. Yeah, man. I wonder if that Lifehacker widget still works. You got to get a Chumbie and you can buy a used Chumbie still on the site. This is your new project, Alex. This is my new project. Can you run Plex on a Chumbie? No, probably.

52:44That's probably true. All right. Let's talk about the Macs real quick and then talk about some good stuff that didn't hit the keynote. Then we're going to bring Liz on Talk Crypto. The Macs, I feel like they're not a complicated story. 15-inch MacBook Air. Big cheap Mac. Yeah. Well, it's cheap-ish. Right. 15-inch screen. It feels like they pulled the ripcord on the last category of laptops. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, like everybody bought their upgrades in the pandemic. Mac sales have slowed way down. They're like, big cheap screen. Do you want it? It looks great. We saw it. We got to play with it.

53:18It's a 500-nit display. It's not going to blow anybody away. But it's still pretty. It's pretty. It's very thin. It's fast. They did a thing where they calibrated the battery life to be exactly the same as the 13-inch. So it's 18 hours of video playback, whatever that means. Instead of like... Vastly more battery life. Yeah, that's... Maybe it'll run faster because of that. I don't know. But they just picked that number and they went towards it. Have fun, Monica, whenever. Yeah. I don't think there's a lot to say about the MacBook Air. I mean, to be fair, that's a lot of battery life. I don't know that...

53:50Like, I would rather have more, you know, performance on a bigger display as opposed to going to like 20 hours of battery life. It's already like you can use it all day and it will be fine. And that for a laptop is good enough for me. I want two days. Let's just push it and see what happens. I just feel like at this point I'm so conditioned to bring my laptop charger and charge it obsessively that like laptop battery life is almost meaningless to me at this point. I have 10 % battery life right now. Oh, I completely disagree. I never charge this laptop. Really? Yeah, I mean I used it all day at the Apple event.

54:24Can I tell my story about the photos? I got the first photos of the Vision Pro. You did? In the world on the web. Neil, I ran around saying old man still got it the rest of the day. The rest of the day. Just shouting it as you were shooting famous. Years of being like a baby blogger with no access. I'm like, whatever, get out of my way. I pushed Alex Heath out of the way to take this photo with my 11-year-old Nikon D7500 with a 40-millimeter micro lens. The single greatest hands-on photo setup of all time cannot be replaced. Don't even try me. And you know what? I still beat you. I got that photo up.

55:01I broke the only rule that we have, which is don't open Lightroom at the event. I opened Lightroom and made it good. It's fantastic. I was eating cookies. I was done. Anyhow, I did all of that. Processed the photos, whatever. Didn't plug in my laptop until I got home that night. I live-logged the thing. I did the photo hands-on of the Vision Pro and the Mac Pro, whatever other coverage. I wrote as fast as I could that Vision Pro hands-on. That night I got home. I still had 15 % battery. What if I'd had a whole other day? How much more 11-year-old camera usage could I have gotten out of this computer?

55:37No, to be clear, I'm pro as much battery life as possible. But I think in this case, especially with the M2 Air, we've seen it hit the throttling threshold earlier than we might like. And I think in this case, I'm maybe happy to make a little bit of a battery life trade given how good the battery life already is in order to eke out a little more performance. We don't know that that's the case. Yeah, we're going to have to find out. We'll have to see when we review the thing. But if that's the trade they made, I'm okay with that trade. Apple very much also sticking with 8 gigs of RAM and the base models of these things, which they have more or less been proven.

56:09Like, it's fine. You can definitely hit the swap on these computers. Pretty fast, yeah. I'd like them to go up on that. But we'll see what happens. They announced macOS Sonoma. We've already talked about most of the features in there. Game mode is really interesting. Yeah, I think the big surprise here was that they just kind of skated right by it. that you can now just play Windows games on this. Like they're using the emulation software, kind of the emulation backend that Crossover uses to run kind of wine-based emulation of Windows games. And essentially it's so that developers can test it and see if it works.

56:47But it just works. Yeah, we're already seeing people. There was somebody who was tweeting, I think they got Cyberpunk 2077 running on a Mac with basically no work. Yeah, for like 15 FPS, but on an M1 MacBook Air. So I'm really, really curious to see kind of what's going to happen there. I'm definitely not going to be putting a beta on my SSD to test it out this weekend. No, definitely not. Who would do that? Totally not. Who would do that? Sonoma also has new support for WebKit-based apps. You can just put them in the dock. They can send notifications. I'm very excited about this. No one else cares.

57:23I'm telling you, this is— We were all excited, just not as excited. The politics of web-based apps and desktop operating systems are the future. And then there's obviously the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio, which we should spend a lot of time on. I think we will in the next coming weeks. The Mac Studio basically gets the M2 Ultra, which is two M2 Max chips put together, up to 192 gigs of RAM. The interesting thing, we were told repeatedly with 100 % confidence, the M2 Ultra in the Mac Studio has the same performance as the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro. So if you don't need PCI slots. So the only reason you're buying the Mac Pro is PCI slots.

58:02There's no more thermal headroom in that chassis. We were told that if you attempted, if you wrote like a power virus, the Mac Pro's additional cooling capability might. but like only in that most extreme circumstance are you gonna see it yeah but like in almost every situation the performance is exactly the same and it's very clear to us like alex what you just said is exactly right that if you have pre-existing expansion slot pci needs the mac pro is for you it's in the same chassis as before dan was very annoyed that it's in the same chassis before i know it's a beautiful chassis i think it's great looking i don't know why Dan was so annoyed, but Dan was very annoyed.

58:43The cheese grates, it's beautiful, but it is functionally exactly the same computer, just in a bigger thing with some USB ports and expansion slots. And the Mac Studio, I think Apple seems to think that if you are sort of starting from scratch, you are vastly more likely to start with the Mac Studio. But if you're like dropping into a bunch of existing equipment, which lots of people are, A, there's a good chance you're upgrading an old Mac Pro and you're just going to drop this in and B, this is a thing you need. So it's kind of like if you know for sure that you need it, the Mac Pro is for you and it's also$7 ,000.

59:19If the Mac Pro isn't the thing you know for sure you obviously need, the Mac Studio is probably for you. That seems to be very clearly how Apple thinks about this. Yeah, and I think that's always been true to the Mac Pro. The fascinating thing is a lot of slots. If you look at the pictures when it's open, there's two cards in there already. The first card is kind of a fake. It's not actually in a slot. It's just sort of like at a 90 degree to give you basic IO. The second slot, the second card is a slot. So you can pull that out and take out like the HDMI connectors and put it in whatever else you want.

59:48And then there's the six slots below it. The sixth slot is a compatibility slot for older PCI cards that don't play well with the new standards. It's all like backward compatible focused. Only that Apple is not often backwards compatible focused. But they have to be for pros. But for pros, The thing is, you cannot put a GPU in there. Yeah. It's not allowed. That's the thing I keep thinking about. What are the PCI slot usages in this case? It's so much pro stuff. It is ultra-fast networking. It is ultra-fast SSDs. It is SDI connectors for displays and cameras. 99 % of us don't need or care about.

1:00:23Yeah. You are working in a gigantic video editing house, a post house, and you have effectively turned 60 Mac Pros into a single Mac Pro using SDI and like networking standards. And now you can do it again. And I can do it again, right? Like there's stuff here that you want. It's not an accident that the demo Apple uses is Avatar the Way of Water. It's like it is deliberately for people way at the end of any spectrum you can think of. And if you're if you're making if you're James Cameron, you're probably going to buy one of these. And one of my favorite things that happened at WWDC was Neil I asking Apple people, have you consider the societal implications of giving james cameron this much computing power which i think is a very important thing that we are still not spending enough time talking about uh but like it's it's for james it's for the james camerons of the world and kind of nobody else at this point but but the two interesting parts are one you have to do a big paradigm shift how much gpu do you need there's two gpu options which one you're not it's not the same as your amd and your nvidia gpus what if you want to use some of the cool nvidia stuff they're doing around machine learning and generative AI.

1:01:29Nope, that's not going to happen on this platform. And then how much RAM do you need? Because guess what? You have to decide at purchase. That's brutal. And it's not a terabyte and a half, which is what you can get in an old night. Does that equal 192 gigs of RAM? It's unified on the chip between. And their argument is the SSDs are fast. Having unified memory means the CPU gets memories that's as fast as GPU memory. And the GPU memory gets as much memory as CPUs normally get. That tradeoff is worth. And it's like, we're just a little, I mean, the M1's been out for a while now, but we're still pretty early in the overall experiment of unified memory.

1:02:02Yeah. Especially for these kinds of applications, and I just don't know the answers. So, like I said, I think we are going to need to spend a lot more time talking about these computers and what they mean. Because a split that is occurring is between Apple's ideas about GPUs and NVIDIA's ideas about GPUs. And they're just – NVIDIA is much more in charge of the PC ecosystem right now than Intel, in my opinion. A hundred percent. They're in charge of like half of the gaming industry too, just for PC gaming, of course. But yeah, they have really outsized role and hate Apple. Oh, these companies hate each other.

1:02:37It's so bad. So much. All right. There's still a lot of stuff. David has promised me that he can lightning fast get through all the cool stuff that Apple didn't announce the keynote that happened at WDC. David, go. This is an unusually non-keynote-y WWDC in the sense that they had so much to get through and they spent so much time on the Vision Pro that there wasn't even time to get through all this stuff. What they did announce in the keynote is one of my favorite genres of internet article right after WWDC, and this year is a good one. So here are a bunch of the ones that I think are very cool.

1:03:07You can now clean up verification codes in mail and messages. They'll autofill even if you get them in an email, which is awesome. You get EV charging with real-time availability. So if you're driving in EV, you'll get more information in Apple Maps than before. There's pet recognition in photos in iOS 17. So you can search for like the name of your pet or my dog, as opposed to having to dig through just like it works with people. Now you can put people's pronouns in your contact info, which is great. You can ping your watch from the control center, which is awesome. Cause I constantly leave my watch places.

1:03:37You can link to notes in other notes, which all my productivity nerds will understand is very exciting. You can automatically categorize your grocery lists and reminders, which Dan talked about for six and a half hours in the last episode. Thank you, Dan. Multiple people can share air tags, which is cool. So if you have like a thing you want to track, multiple people can track at the same time. You can toggle settings and shortcuts within a spotlight search. So if you search for Wi-Fi, you can actually turn Wi-Fi on and off right from the spotlight search results. You get a thing called visual lookup in paused video frames.

1:04:06So you can pause a recipe and you can pull the thing you're making out of it and actually use it to look it up from YouTube, which is very cool. You can share passwords and pass keys across devices and with other people. you can use any email address or phone number in your iCloud account to log into your iCloud account so you don't have to remember which is like your official iCloud password. Stage manager is much better. There's some like free form windowing that's much closer to what we've been looking for for a long time. And finally, there is a thing if you have Apple TV 4k and a HomePod that just enhances dialogue so you can actually hear what the hell is going on in all of your TV shows.

1:04:40There's more but that's all my favorite stuff. I have to say saying stage manager is much better. Bold, David. Let's see. We will see if stage manager is much better. I would say I am on the record more than most as someone who thinks stage manager sucks and should be killed and buried. But they said free windowing several times to us. That's true. So I am hopeful that Apple has finally done the thing it obviously should have done the whole time. I hope it's the jankiest free windowing ever. Just because I want to see David's face. Just to torture me. I've been like, whoa. Here's what I want to say.

1:05:12I've been thinking about this a lot as I was going through that list. One, as they add free windowing to the iPad, just turn the iPad into a Mac. It's fine. Second, they are almost completely out of excuses to add a touchscreen to the Mac because they always complain that people have their hands tired holding them up in the air. And they announce the Vision Pro where you control it by waving your hands around in the air. Just saying, everybody. Let me touch my screen. All right. We got to take a break. That's enough Apple talk. We're going to bring on Liz. We're going to talk a little crypto and we're going to get out of here.

1:05:38We'll be right back. It's the first cast.

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1:08:11All right, we're back. Liz Lopato is here. Hey, Liz. Hey, I'm operating as a fucking unlicensed security exchange in the USA, bro. Oh, my God. Well, it's the merch cast, everybody, with Liz on it. Yeah, what else do we need to know? So before we get started with Liz talking about what's going on with Binance, literally, as we've been recording, Alex Thief is live blogging and internal meta all hands. Very good. I just want to read you two quotes. Here's Zuckerberg on the Apple Vision Pro. I really think their announcement showcases differences in the values and vision that our companies bring to this in a way they think is important.

1:08:43The quest is about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer and doing things together. By contrast, every demo Apple showed was a person sitting on a couch by themselves. That could be the future of computing, but that's not the one I want. The like is important. I think that's very important. Yeah. That's so good. It's really good. It's a good Zuck response. And then they showed the Twitter competitor, Project 92. We think it's going to be called Threads. Surprise. It looks like an Instagram comment section because it's being built by the Instagram team. Shocked. I'm very excited about this.

1:09:13It's going to be interoperable with ActivityPub. The joy on your face just now. Yeah, I'm very excited about this. But that is really like I cannot overstate the extent to which it just looks like the Instagram comments, which is fine. It just super looks like the Instagram comments section. Yeah. The question is whether they're going to activity pub the rest of Instagram, which I think would be very fascinating. But that's on the site now. You can go look at that picture. You can go read the Zuck quotes. Alex is going to have more in command line. We just spent a bunch of time with him at the Apple event.

1:09:39Alex Heath in reporter mode, very good. It's good times. Very good. A burst of pure energy. Anyway, that's that. Go look at it on the site. Liz. Hi. Speaking of reporter mode, there's been a lot of crypto news this week happening in the background of the Apple event, and it appears that people are going to go to jail. What's going on? Well, we only have civil suits so far, though I have to say the Binance civil suit kind of looks like they've stapled a criminal complaint to a civil suit. So I'm very excited for whatever the DOJ is going to do. But there are a couple of things. The first thing is that Binance and Coinbase have both been accused of operating as unlicensed securities exchanges in the U.S.

1:10:18Now, obviously, Coinbase is going to fight this because it's an existential threat to their business model. And they're like the good boys or like the wannabe good boys. They're the wannabe good boys. And like, to be clear, the facts, like the fact patterns in the cases are really different. So like if you look at the Coinbase complaint, it's pretty buttoned up and it's a little bloodless. And that's fine. That's kind of what I expected out of Coinbase. I didn't expect any like group chats called wired fraud or like, you know, exciting things from the chief compliance officer where he talks about using VPNs to get around geofencing.

1:10:55You know, like the fun stuff that we've seen already from the CFTC complaint against Binance. But at the same time, doesn't doesn't the SEC basically also just kind of say Coinbase is illegal? Yeah. Yeah. OK. OK, 100 percent. So it's like it's a very kind way of being like your business is a bad one. Stop doing it. Well, so here's here's the thing is like how I'm looking at it or how I'm thinking about it anyway. Like to the degree that Coinbase has done anything illegal, it's like a procedural crime. Like they're not screwing their customers. There's no wash trading. They're not being accused of like any of a variety of things that would make you lose confidence in Coinbase as a company custodying your tokens.

1:11:38Right. We just call those things FTXing now. They're not FTXing. You know who is FTXing, though, is fucking Binance. Right. So the Coinbase one is like the SEC is basically saying most crypto tokens are securities to run an exchange. You need to be registered and follow those rules. None of you have done that. Illegal. Yeah, right. And Coinbase is like, we don't think that's illegal. And like that's like a good natured sort of like university debate club argument. And they have known for a long time the argument is coming. Binance, I mean, I saw one note from their chief compliance officer that's like, bro, we're running a fucking unlicensed security change, which is how Liz started the episode.

1:12:20Like, that's crazy. His name is Philip Lim. He's like not named in this complaint, but he is named in the CFT. Sorry, not Philip Lim. Samuel Lim. He's named in the CFTC complaint. And there's like a bunch of stuff here where like it's trivially obvious who likes talking, even though it's like, oh, it's CEO A. It's CEO B. Who, by the way, singing like birds. Like, I don't know if you were catching that, but they are already testifying. So I thought the Binance complaint was like really interesting because I think there must be a criminal case coming because so much of what's happening here does seem like DOJ stuff.

1:12:56And we've already heard a little bit about like Binance sanction evasion stuff. And like there was a Reuters report last year about like Binance coming in to meet with the DOJ to talk about maybe doing a plea deal. And like, we haven't seen a plea deal. So maybe the DOJ is amassing more information. I don't know. But like, to me, these are these are there are several remarkable things going on. Thing one is that we had a bill introduced last Friday. So right before both of these complaints dropped by House Republicans to deal with this sort of token issue and decide whether they're securities or commodities and if they are securities, giving them a route to become commodities.

1:13:38And frankly, I don't think this bill is going to go anywhere because the Democrats control the Senate. But it is really curious timing to drop both of these suits immediately afterwards. And the Coinbase suit was dropped the same day that Paul Gruhl, who I think is their chief legal officer, was testifying. So, you know, that's like a cute little present from the SEC. Very polite. So that's interesting to me. But both of these are massive cases. And both of them have the possibility of setting policy about what is and is not a security when it comes to digital assets. And I don't necessarily know that the SEC has the resources to try them both at the exact same time, which makes me very suspicious about like a forthcoming criminal complaint with Binance.

1:14:24Because the DOJ is so well staffed and under no pressure at all. Faces no political headwinds whatsoever. Definitely not busy with some other stuff. But the case against Binance is essentially like it's amazing how similar it seemed to me to be the case against FTX, which is essentially we have a lot of money and we're using it in thoroughly bonkers, totally inappropriate, extremely illegal ways. And Binance didn't run out of money. But Binance was also a big part of the reason FTX ran out of money. Right. Like Binance started the run against FTX that led to all of this in a very real way and now is kind of being chased down the same road, it seems like.

1:15:04Not to say I told you so, but I did point out at the time that CZ had basically painted a gigantic target on his back by kicking all of this off. And like this is like the first of what I think is going to be several arrows getting fired at him. Because like, yeah, you're right. Like they like that absolute like Twitter beef, the run that then revealed the fraud, like intimately involved. But what's interesting here is that there seems to be a bunch of allegations that feel pretty FTX-like. So there are all of these corporate entities that are controlled directly by CZ. You have CPZ Holdings, you have Binance Holdings Limited, which is what runs Binance.

1:15:49You have Sigma Chain, you have Merit Peak, and you have CoinMarketCap. market cap. And the ones that matter for our purposes are Sigma Chain and Merit Peak, because some of the allegations in here involve stuff that feels very familiar. So like, for instance, we have Binance transferring$17 million from BAM Trading, and that's the parent company for Binance US, to Merit Peak. And then the BAM CEO being like, where did you get that money? and where is it going? You don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Yeah, just keep going. The literal quote is, I'm on a wild goose chase to make sure that we have knowledge of where$17 million is moving around.

1:16:34Wow. So let's zoom out. We all lived through crypto summer. Expressing any skepticism about crypto at that time was met with a just open hostility that we were stopping the future of all finance. And the questions we were asking, I would say we're not overly skeptical. It was more like, hey, doesn't it seem like you're trading securities? Right? Like, doesn't it seem like these are all just Ponzi schemes? The line's going up for no reason. What's the utility of these? Like, pretty basic questions. And it feels like maybe that industry has come to its logical end point, right? Where, like, they are almost like banks or almost like stock exchanges.

1:17:13And now they're just going to have to be those things if they want to survive at all. Yeah. I mean, look, here's the thing. It's funny you mention things going up for no reason because we have allegations of wash trading in this complaint. And for those of you who are maybe not familiar with wash trading, it's when I buy an asset from myself for an increased price to make the asset price go up. And it is like illegal. Like that's like that's not a question we have. We have laws about that. It's illegal. And so one of these entities, Sigma Chain, is alleged to have been involved with WASH trading on Binance.us.

1:17:51And there were a couple of periods where that seems to have been a big deal. And there's, again, a quote here where they're talking about volume. And one employee messages the CEO and is like, FYI, these are all Sigma Chain and then lists 20 account numbers. Oh, no. So that's not great. So when we say things went up for no reason, I'm not convinced there was no reason. I think there may have been some market manipulation involved. And you may, in fact, remember, like when we were talking about NFTs during this time, one of the use cases I suggested was money laundering and money laundering and wash trading often go hand in hand.

1:18:32So I am like very interested in all of this because reading between the lines, it seems like there's some like real wild shit going on at Binance. And right now, Binance CZ is obviously under fire, and he's saying that this might affect Binance U.S., but not Binance overall, correct? Like, what happens? This is my favorite thing you did all week, Liz. I just want to give you credit for this, because what that tweet is is the tweet that everyone sends right before it all falls apart, where they say, this only affects our stuff in the U.S. Most of our stuff is elsewhere. It's no problems. Everything's going to be fine.

1:19:07Or they say the reverse, like this will affect everything, but our customers in the United States will be fine because whatever, it's regulated. And what almost always happens right after that is absolutely everything collapses spectacularly. And you just you did this quick post on the site that was basically like that tweet and then a bunch of links to all of the bad things that happen to people right after they tweet this. And I just very much enjoyed that. Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's you know, you wind up with these weird grooves in your brain after like covering this beat for too long where you see one of those tweets and you go, uh-oh.

1:19:37Although I will say that, like, again, if there is a ton of wash trading going on and a lot of this stuff is CZ himself, then maybe it doesn't collapse because CZ doesn't want his own business to collapse. I don't know. There are just like a lot of question marks to me now around Binance period that, you know, didn't necessarily exist before. Like, you know, I gossip a lot. It's like one of my favorite things to do. I grew up in a small town. Like, it's just one of my hobbies. And even the people I talk to who like CZ think he's pretty cutthroat. So I'm interested to see how this all plays out because I think that he is kind of getting painted into a corner here.

1:20:18And what happens after that is like question mark, question mark, question mark. And he's not going to do the altruism. Let me go on the New York Times stage to talk about all of the crimes. The co-conference coming up, CZ. Hey, CZ, you want to come on the Verge cast? Bring it on. CZ and the Verge cast would be amazing. All right. Sold. Screw crypto. Let's talk USBC. Liz, I just want to come back to that big zoom out question again. We went through the crypto hype cycle. We are now in very much crypto winter. Even like Andreessen Horowitz, Mark Andreessen's like publishing long screeds about why AI is fine, actually.

1:20:49Just let it have your job. Is it over? Is it coming back? What's going on here? It's a good question. I don't know if it's over. I will say that one thing that I think about a lot is that crypto launched into an extended period of low interest rates when there was a lot of like free money like flopping around. And we're now back in a normal interest rate environment. And so that's affected a lot of stuff in tech. It's affected a lot of startups. It's affected a lot of VCs. Obviously, it's like affected some of the banks. And I'm interested to see what happens to crypto in a normal interest rate environment because it has never existed in one before.

1:21:23Do I think all crypto is over? Probably not. I have a hard time imagining that like as entrenched as Bitcoin and maybe even Ethereum are that they they go to zero anytime soon. But I do think there's a lot less there are going to be a lot fewer token projects. And I think a lot of these token projects are going to have trouble continuing. So we'll see. You know, crypto people like to talk about going through cycles and like crypto winter and like we rebuild during crypto winter. And it's true. There have been like periods of like serious dips in the market where like people stop being as interested and then there's another bull run.

1:22:03But all of those things happen in a previous interest rate environment that we are no longer in. Yeah. The thing I've been trying to figure out is I think on the one hand, if you're a crypto true believer, there have been so many versions of this already that you're just sort of immune to it. Like if you've gone through all of this over the last 18 months and you still believe in crypto, I don't know that this is going to blow up that belief in any kind of meaningful way. But at the same time, if ever there were going to be two dominoes that topple the rest of them, I would think it would be Binance and Coinbase that they're kind of as it has been set up.

1:22:39Binance in particular is like has been so ruthless in order to be kind of the biggest last thing standing. And you would think if it collapses or even just sort of takes a real meaningful hit, that that might scare people again. I don't know. I've been like I'm torn between those two ideas. Well, there's there's that. But it's worth keeping in mind that DeFi is also a thing. So there are decentralized exchanges that are difficult to meaningfully shut down, even if you decide that they're illegal. There are like technical ways to get around some of this stuff. But I agree with you. I think, you know, there's one possibility is that crypto like quits and that's the end of it.

1:23:14One possibility is that, like, you know, there's no more crypto in the U.S., but it continues elsewhere in the world. And, you know, some of the best arguments I've heard for the existence of crypto have to do with countries outside the U.S., basically. I'm not sure that crypto is a perfect solution for some of those problems, but I understand where people are coming from when they find it interesting. OK, you know, it's it's it's something we could argue about. That seems like a reasonable topic for debate. So those are two possibilities that that could happen. There are a couple of other possibilities.

1:23:45So one of them is you may know that there again, I mentioned legislation early here. There is a possibility that because this litigation takes so long, we get some kind of legislation that renders these lawsuits moot, which is the best case scenario for Coinbase because Coinbase, I don't think, is going to settle. I think this is an existential threat to them. They're going to fight it all the way. That's going to be years. Like the big ripple case, which was one of the previous things about whether crypto is or is not a security is still ongoing. And it's like from the previous, you know, iteration of the SEC pre-Gensler.

1:24:19And even Coinbase's response to the lawsuit was very funny because they essentially said, like, please just tell us what the rules are. And I don't know how genuine that is or not. And I think they'd obviously happily exist in a world without rules for as long as possible. But their response is basically like, just stop yelling at us and just tell us what to do. And I kind of I kind of get that. I'm a little sympathetic to that, actually, because they were allowed to go public. And one of the things that the SEC does is review all of the disclosures of, you know, what the risks are. And like if you're a marijuana company, because the SEC lets a marijuana company go public, even though it's illegal, there is a disclosure that marijuana is federally illegal in the filing.

1:24:59Right. There are disclosures in that filing, if you go back and look, that suggest that there is regulatory uncertainty. But the disclosure is not we're running an unlicensed exchange and the SEC may crack down. And, you know, the SEC got a chance to take a look at that. So I kind of am a little sympathetic to them feeling jerked around. Yeah. And like I said, Brian Armstrong and Coinbase, they're the ones who've been like they've been the good boys. Yeah, they're trying to be. I mean, like he like made a documentary about how hard it is to be good. You know, like about himself. No one should watch it.

1:25:31It was just like, but like that's like when you're trying the most hard. Right. And whereas like I think CZ and Binance were like, we're the renegades and no one can stop us, which I, you know me. That's that's my son. You love a pirate ship. But like that's the one that like the king of England comes and shoots your pirate ship. at the end. Coinbase was like, what if I've got colonial metaphors for days, I'm just going to stop it. But it's like, what if we were the ambassadors of the crown? That's the game that they were trying to play. I do think that the FTX collapse significantly changed the political environment around cryptocurrency in such a way that may have influenced this particular lawsuit.

1:26:15I don't know whether that's just that it sort of lit a fire under the ass of the SEC or something else occurred. But I do know there's been a longstanding turf war between a lot of these federal agencies about who actually is in charge of regulating crypto. And it's part of the reason that we haven't seen a ton of action until relatively recently. So I'm really curious to see how this plays out politically, separately from how it plays out legally, because the political factor is, I think, undeniable here. Yeah. All right. We'll see what happens next. Liz quick posting away during the Apple event.

1:26:50It was incredible. It was so good. One of the funniest dual, like the Verge contains multitudes. It was beautiful. Deeply entertaining. Liz, always great to have you on. Oh, thanks for having me, guys. We got to wrap this thing up. We've done a lot of Verge casting this week, I want to say. We've also made Neelai a full half hour late for a meeting, which I'm very proud of. It's so good. I feel good about that. I would rather be hanging out with you guys than any of my suit stuff that I got to do. But great to see you, Liz. Thank you both. That's it. That's a Vergecast dopamine fast. I'm going to do it.

1:27:19I'm going in the darkness like Aaron Rodgers when I come out and play for the Jets. It's going to be great. That's it. Rock and roll.

1:27:30And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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