Previewing Apple's 2025 WWDC
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Hello and welcome to the Verge Cast, the flagship podcast with Davos Chatter. You'll see what I mean. Hi, I'm your friend Neil. David Pierce is here. Hello. Joanna Stern is here. Hello. Hello.

Joanna is live from her office at the Wall Street Journal. It's very fancy. This might be the fanciest situation we've ever had in the British Coast. We have a map.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you should know that just outside of Joanna's frame is like 6,000 square feet of her office with several couches and a bunch of like glass statues. Like that's the image I want you to have in your mind. Have you ever seen Succession? And we also have a bunch of typewriters. This is a newspaper. We have newsprint everywhere. Can you yell stop the presses right now? What would happen?

All the people that work on video will stop their presses because they sit right out my office. It's very good. The people who are tasked with like Joanna YouTube stunts will be like, what presses? Were we supposed to get a press?

They're like, we did get that press two years ago. Yeah. It was a sandwich press. Like the person holding the kayak for your next trip to an island with a robot. We'll be like, I don't, is this a press? We haven't done that in like three years. It's still the best stunt you've ever done. I know. Go, if you're listening to this, just type Joanna Kayak Island and you'll find it.

Lots of stuff to talk about. Next week is WWDC, so we're going to preview that. Elon and Trump are in some sort of fight, but we're not going to talk about it too much. I just want to bring that up in the context of what's going on with Starlink. There's a lot going on with Starlink, actually. The Switch 2 launched, and David has one. I do. So we've got to talk about that. But I want to start with a little Verge news. We won some awards this week.

It's a real thing. We won best news and entertainment design. The American society of magazine editors gave us the award for best news and entertainment design for our 2004 package of which I would say David is at fault for, because it was his idea. And then everyone had to think about 2004 for like six months. That's basically how that turned out. But that had incredible art. We'll link it. You can go see it. It's one of the best interactions ever done. Our incredible creative director, Kristen and our art director, Kath worked on that really hard. They got to accept the award and,

The award, by the way, is spectacular because they just printed out the top of the website and put it onto like a glass plaque and gave it to Kat. Well, in a glass plaque. It's not like rubber cemented on the top. It's in it. Fair. But it's just like a printed piece of paper inside the glass plaque. It's very good. And then Miyasato won the ASME Next Award, which is for the best reporters under 30.

I want to be careful to distinguish it from 30 under 30. If you win 30 under 30, you go to jail. Yes. Yes. You,

You get handcuffs, golden handcuffs. That's the fast track to being incarcerated. Mia just won it for being a great young journalist. And actually announced it by saying this is the future of journalism. And then I heckled her for being the future of journalism for the rest of the night. It's very good. Congratulations to them. Incredible work from our team. I will remind you that the way to support our team and all that work is by subscribing to The Verge. It's developer conference season is almost over. Our sale is almost over. Right now they're 40% off. Go to TheVerge.com slash subscribe.

I'm getting better at pitching the subscriptions, Joanna. I've never been made to sell anything. You know, that's just not what we do here. You just sold me, but I already paid, so. Cheaper than the Wall Street Journal. That's what I mean. That is a good sale right there. Yeah. All right, let's start. It is developer conference season. We've had Microsoft. We've had Google. There's been some other ones in the backdrop. Anthropic had its first one just to

Join the fun. The last one, traditionally sort of a big one, is Apple's WWDC. It's coming up next week. I just want to start with the context of WWDC. So this week there was a huge court ruling that said Apple can't block web links in the App Store.

So, right, Apple had the big case with Epic. They went back and forth for five years. Eventually, the judge in that case got fed up with Apple, accused it of lying on the stand, of having executives lie on the stand, referred that executive for criminal contempt proceedings and said, screw it, we're done here. You have to allow alternative payment systems in the App Store. This is a huge threat to Apple's business. They immediately appealed and said, stay the ruling while we appeal how wrong this is. And they lost that fight.

So the ruling is in effect while Apple goes through a field, which effectively means for years now Apple is going to have to allow links in the App Store, allow payment links in the App Stores. It feels like that's

done now. Like I'm sort of at the point where the and we talked about this before that like even if Apple had gotten this particular victory, it would have felt like putting toothpaste back in the tube in a certain way. And I think we've already seen so many of these apps update to go with other systems of linking out. And all of a sudden you realize like, oh, I can click the button in the Kindle app and go buy the Kindle book.

Like, what a world. And I think it was always going to be very hard to go back from that. And I feel like now at this point, it feels very hard to me to imagine Apple winning and undoing all of this. Like, it's so crystal clear how crappy a move that would be for Apple that I think like even the company that is seems increasingly clear being or increasingly happy being the bad guy.

I don't know how you do that one. Yeah. And Fortnite is back in the store. They had a big fight and the judge basically said, figure this out. I'm going to figure out for you. And Apple said, we figured out. Fortnite's back in the store. We have an interview actually with Tim Sweeney. Jay Peters interviewed Tim Sweeney this week. And he said, I thought this would be two weeks and it was five years, but we were happy to wait it out because they won.

Of course, he's happy to wait it out. Tim Sweeney is so full of shit. Yeah. Can we just say that? Tim Sweeney, who has at every point of this process been like, well, we're just over here trying to do our best and we just want to do what's right. And it's like, no, no, no, no. What has actually happened is you have found every single way to pick a fight with Apple in court that you have been able to for five years. You have decided that it is worth all of the money that you make from V-Bucks.

to just knife Apple over and over for five years. So it's like if they had put him back in the store, he would have found something else to do to get kicked out of the store. I just don't believe him for one second. Why don't you interview Tim Sweeney?

I feel like that would have been the best interview there. You are full of shit, Tim Sweeney. Yeah. I'd like to open with that. Tim, who else would you have sued? When you send the pitch emails to book the episodes, you're like, here's our angle. You're full of shit. I mean, it's worth a shot. We'll send that email at the end of the show. I mean, I agree with that. I also think they did think the fight would be over sooner. I assume that Epic thought they would win faster than they did.

And it only is because Apple was so noncompliant for so long that they've gotten to this resounding victory. I do agree that the toothpaste is on the tube. If Apple succeeds in this appeal and they borrow Lynx again, well, it turns out now there's a lot of data about how much money was going to Apple instead of the app developers that different countries and regulators around the world can all look at.

Right. And that's going to be the case in the EU. It's the case in Japan. It's like all over the place. We're running this big A-B test and the data shows, oh, Apple kept a lot of money that could have gone to developers and created jobs and all this stuff. Right. And now like the Amazons and the Spotify's of the world will have the other data that says, look how much money. Yeah. And this is just a big deal. The reason I bring this up ahead of WWDC preview conversation is because.

This is the developer conference. This is where Apple says, look at all these new capabilities of our next generation operating systems. Can't you get excited? Won't you get excited about building your apps using our new APIs and features and hooks and like, look at all the cool new stuff you can do in the iPhone. This is why it's worth paying us 30% of every in-app purchase because our operating system is better developers.

And I think they're coming into this totally on their back foot with developers who are by and large unhappy, who are already starting new kinds of companies and organizations to manage payments differently. Right. You're seeing an alternative payment ecosystem develop who are pretty annoyed about the AI stuff. Right. Like the energy is elsewhere in AI. Right.

and who are also just like, we're tired of this company, this heel turn that Apple is doing, saying we're definitely going to yell at everyone. And we have all these emails from inside of Apple basically being like, how do we squeeze our developers from these court cases? And I just think it's a weird spot for Apple to begin this developer conference season. I agree. And I think

the tide has turned for Apple not only in the space of the developers and the 30% and the 70% and all of the money, but also just in terms of the fanfare for the company and the product, which as we all have gone to these conferences for, I don't know, 150 years now, like there's the excitement there not only about like, oh, I'm going to build this app. It's just like, I'm excited about Apple, right? Like people are just excited about the devices. They're excited about the software. And

And to your point, like they're very right now there's this big shift towards these AI platforms. What can we do with AI? And Apple's been out of that conversation. I know you guys have been discussing on the podcast, too, like the IVE and Altman partnership. I mean, there's there's this appetite and excitement for something else right now. And it's not Apple that seems to be delivering it. Yeah. And Apple's on this.

kind of sneakily bad run recently of a mix of launching things with incredible fanfare that it claims are going to be the next big thing that either aren't or don't exist at all. And so I think, like, I think about that. We've always talked about WWDC differently than some of the other ones. And like the, the rap on Google for a long time was we would go to Google IO and they would show us science projects. And then we would go to WWDC and they would show us

products. And they were like, Apple was unusually clear at showing things that were finished, that were going to ship, that you were going to use. And

we've had a bad run of that with all of the, there's been the CarPlay stuff that lingered a long time and then changed and got weird. Siri, which is the biggest story of this year's WWDC, because I would bet you $500 it's just not going to be there. Nope. Is it now a year old? And we have not seen one lick of what it's supposed to be. Then throw in the Vision Pro, which was supposed to be the next big thing that was going to change Ruby's mind. That hasn't really worked. There's just this sense of like,

I think WWDC was sort of the year Apple set agendas for a long time. And it really doesn't feel like that is what's coming anymore. And it's a very strange shift. And I would add to that, they set design agendas for the year, right? Because they would show you app designs and new features and new modes of interactions and

animation flourishes and all this stuff and everyone would copy it. And I, I don't know, we, you know, we're hearing that there's going to be a big redesign of other operating systems this year. We've, we, and I think Greg Jaws, I tweeted some joke about the word sleek.

Right. Like it's coming. Yeah. And they sent it out in an email like a sleek. It's like a sleek peek. And those are the invites, right? Yeah. I didn't like that. They're hinting that there's going to be some some big visual redesign. And it's fascinating because they're diverging from the rest of the industry.

And I'm not sure the rest of the industry is going to follow them into their like glass based redesign language. Maybe, maybe they will. People tend to copy Apple quite a bit, but you can just see the rest of the industry is kind of headed back towards skeuomorphism, which is wild. And like, well,

weird. That's just weird. You know, like, like even Apple not as design leader is truly novel. But I actually think, I mean, we'll, we'll learn about this. And I, I keep having like a little bit of this nightmare that it, that it launches in September, that operating cell operating system itself, like,

looks great and, you know, hopefully works. Fingers crossed everything sort of works. We don't have this buggy situation. But then the apps you're in just look completely different. I mean, we had this with when the iPhone X came out, right? There was like that gap in time that the apps had to catch up and it looked like garbage on the phone. You remember that time that like

I don't know, it's probably like six months, right? Where the app developers had to update for the update with like the no home button design and all that. And it's like, kind of like cringed at the apps that didn't have the update. Like there's a possibility that

some of these developers don't get on board or they don't get on board right away because they put their resources into something else. But I'm sure we're going to hear a lot about how easy it is to do X, Y, and Z. I mean, two clicks and Xcode, all of those types of things. Yeah. But it does seem like to that point, this is another thing where it's going to be an interesting test for Apple because again, it has spent the last...

few years, just pissing off developers left and right, and essentially telling developers that they don't matter that Apple's in charge that it can do whatever it wants. And then also asking developers to do more all the time. And I think this is a thing I've heard a lot from folks over the last year or so is this question of, okay, I'm being asked to make a really great iOS app,

And last year, it was all of the new like color tinting and all the dark mode stuff. And so they're like, OK, well, now I have to rethink the way that my widgets work and the way that my home screen stuff works. And there's the new control center stuff and there's the new lock screen stuff. So I have to build this whole new controls thing. But then there's also all of this new stuff being done so that I can port my iOS app to other platforms, which is extra work that I have to do. And now Apple also really wants me to build an app for the Vision Pro. And it's like if you're

like Netflix, you can like figure out how to make apps for lots of platforms. But if you're like one person or a small team of developers, which is most of the apps in the app store, that's a giant amount of work to give people. So what's fascinating about that is how did that, how did that problem get solved most often is they started using web frameworks to do all that stuff, to get the app logic in more places. And then you can just skin the sort of app logic and the web framework. And so many apps now are just like

like web apps and wrappers, which is fine and great and fascinating, but it means all the actions on the web. Yeah. And that's where all of the AI apps are being developed. Like fundamentally, all of the best AI apps are starting as...

deployed on the web. Because, you know, the backend is in the cloud anyway. Right. Which you talked about with Sundar in your interview, which was really fascinating to me. Like, that's where people are going to launch their apps. Sundar said that he had vibe coded in Replit and the CEO of Replit clipped that and he got a million views and he's just the happiest. I was actually just thinking, like, maybe we should just show up to WWDC as developers and just be like, no, I'm a vibe coder now. I'm going to sit with the developers. Yeah.

I watch a lot of TikToks of people one-shot coding iOS apps. It's just like, here it is. And I don't know if that's good or bad. I just, I know that the action isn't on Apple's platforms. The action of where's my app being first developed? It's kind of on the web.

And that is remarkable. I continue to think the web is a miracle. But it just means the part where you make it pretty for iOS is like a second order phenomenon. And it used to just be the first thing. The first order bit was like, do I have a great iOS app? Because that's how I make all the money. Yeah. I mean, there are legions of Android apps that are just...

iOS apps. Because Apple was able to lead that for so long, the assumption was that your Apple version of your app was going to be the best one. And then you would scale that in whatever way you needed to off to other platforms. And to your point about Apple sort of skating in the other direction from all these companies, that's a big swing because if you're not leading now...

it's going to feel bad. And it's like there is a real perception that like people with great taste use Apple products because they are cohesive and you can lose that really quickly. I'll make a bet here. And I think, again, in our 150 years of going to WWDC, we know that Tim Cook usually opens talking to the developers and like highlighting how much money they made for them. Right. Like so to play the other side of this, like Apple's

Apple still makes a lot of money for these developers, probably the most. And so they'll lean into that. People aren't going to go anywhere. Maybe they won't update as quickly. But Tim Cook will still be up there talking about how much money he made for developers. Right. I know they're going to do that because Apple keeps putting out press releases saying how much money they put out for developers. So there's no bet here because we all agree. I mean, like literally today, they're like, look at how big the global app store ecosystem is. The answer is $1.3 trillion in developer billings and sales. Yeah.

That's going to be on a slide. 90% of buildings and sales went to developers with no commission paid to Apple. These are the first two bullet points. What are they trying to point out, right? They're like, we don't take any money from... Look at all this money we didn't take. And it's like, well, the 10% you did take is still a huge amount of money. Right? I don't know what to tell you. Yeah, that's going to be the slide. That's like one of the first slides. You're right. Yeah. And so you can just see that they're trying to make the case they're providing all this value. I wanted to start there, not to just be negative, but...

to point out this is the context. Like the audience at WWC is developers who are feeling these pressures. The point of this conference is sometimes to launch a Mac pro, right. And to get some flash of consumer recognition. And obviously Apple has a lot of fans, but the point is to get developers excited about building for Apple's platforms as opposed to Microsoft or Google's or open as or whoever. And they're just in a weird spot. Like I think,

I think that will be an undercurrent of this entire thing next week that developers are, they need to be convinced in a way that hasn't been true of Apple in a very long time. I do think though, to Joanna's point, there is a real like,

where else are you going to go thing that Apple continues to have going for it. And this is, again, like a lot of the sort of developer energy I hear around AI stuff is like, maybe that's the platform shift, right? It was like, there was a minute where everybody was like, maybe we'll investigate the metaverse. And then that wasn't it. And then everybody's like, is it web three? And they're like, no, that's not it. And now there is the sense that, okay, maybe AI is the thing that I can build something into that will not come with

all of the problems and restrictions of iOS. But like the people who have been making iOS apps for 20 years and are really pissed at Apple are going to keep making iOS apps. And the problem is Apple knows that and is going to continue to bleed that fact and those developers for as long as it is able to. Well, except they can't take the money from the web links anymore. So they have to fight. Yeah. Right. Like this is the dynamic. There's where else you're going to go. And the answer is, well, somewhere else.

I can go somewhere else now. Have you considered that, Tim? For that thing, for sure. But that's the money. So I think that brings us to the operating system updates and a bit of the preview here. We're expecting some visual refresh across the operating systems. We are expecting them to mention the Vision Pro, which continues to exist, obstinately continues to exist. They're going to rename them all to iOS 26 or whatever, an ear thing.

Then there's like... Wait, can we talk about that? Joanna, I want to know how you feel about this. We've talked a lot about this on this show, but you are a person who cares deeply about version numbers. I care a lot about this. I have a lot of thoughts. I tweeted this. Okay. First of all, I get the year thing, but it is 2025 right now. This is what I said. So there are still a number of months...

Where we have to process that. And I'm still writing 2024 on my checks. Oh, my God. Yes. How many checks are you writing? I write checks. I knew you were going to ask that. And I would like to talk about my checks. This is what happens when you work at a print newspaper run by reporters. No, it isn't what happens when we're sitting in front of a newspaper. Okay.

It's what happens when you have an accountant who is old school and will only take checks. It's when you have a lighting guy for your house and he only takes checks. Your lighting guy doesn't want you to pay him on Zelle under the table. I've learned that this is what Zelle is for. I do so much Zelle under the table. I mean, I don't. If you're listening to this, someone who's trying to audit all the people I pay for things for houses stuff. Yes, so much Zelle. Anyway.

I still write some checks. Okay. It happens. Yeah. Mostly for house stuff.

Yeah, it seems real. Zell under the table. I feel like I need a spinoff of the Verge cast, which is just about my house and the things that I do in my house. I would host that show with you. We could stop this right now if you just want to talk about your house. We did the garage. That was a great hit. I feel like that was a great hit. We still get emails about the garage, and I delete them before Neil can see them. I know we had, you know, we did a postmortem on that. I think there were ways we could have done it better, but we'll work on that for our next project. Anyway, I'm worried about the year thing. I will get over that.

It's also so many numbers. My annual tradition is to do the number of tips to correspond to the iOS version. And so there's just no way I think physically I can do 26 tips for iOS 26. Oh, this is your problem. I'm going to try. I'm up for the task. I'm not.

too old to do it. I think I can, I can overcome, but that's a lot of tips to do. It is a lot. They, they jumped you by like eight. Yeah. It's going to get into like new formatting tricks in Apple notes and it's like, it's going to be at the bottom where, but what I, my challenge to you, Joanna is, is to do 26 tips for TVOS 26. That's the one. If you can do that,

You deserve all 8,000 square feet of your office. For all 26 viewers. Isn't this what ChatGPT is for?

I need eight more tips, buddy. Get out there. You know, ChatGPT tends to be wrong on the tips. They'll be like, you need to adjust this settings menu and this. And it's like, that doesn't exist. Okay. I've tried it. That's the foundational stuff. And obviously Joanna is very annoyed because she has to do slightly more work than last year. Great. We should talk about the actual features. Here's the thing that I'm most interested in, in the context of making developers excited.

The iPhone has an incredible fast processor, right? It is the best mobile processor on a phone. Qualcomm has caught up in some ways. I'm sure we'll get some emails about someone's Nvidia Shield that they're powering with a USB battery pack or whatever. Like, it's all happening. It's great. But they've got the neural engine. They've got a best-in-class mobile processor. They can run local models. Do you think that they're going to find a way to tell developers, like, just do the AI stuff here instead of...

on Azure using an opening. I'm like, cause that is the game, right? Where your AI app logic is running right now is going to tell us a lot about the future of this industry writ large. And Apple hasn't made a big play for, uh,

Well, actually, a bunch of the stuff you want to do, you can do locally on the phone because we have the processors to do it. And all of the built for Apple intelligence stuff came to nothing. But if they actually did build the phone for Apple intelligence, well, maybe they built the phone to run some models that are useful for app developers.

And private cloud compute, which like I think they want to keep selling. They obviously put a lot of investment, we think, into that. So I think that that's like one way they get into the AI story this year without getting into Apple intelligence, right? Like to all of our conversation about the developers, they try to say, hey, we're going to give you access to small language models that run on device. We're going to give you large language model access and private cloud compute. And you can build great things. We don't even know what you're going to build. You go, go build it.

My issue there and like, you know, it's like, are the models any good? Good is a, has a relationship to cost. So if the model on the phone is like kind of crappy, but it's free to use, well, it's fine. You know, like I think that that's the case for them to make. Cause I don't think that they can run a GPT-4 class model on private cloud compute right now. Maybe they will. Maybe that's what they're going to announce. But like, that's your problem. If you, if you want that thing, um,

You got to go pay OpenAI or you got to pay Google for Gemini or whoever. Like, that class of model exists on someone else's data centers right now. But even, like, just all of our complaints that we probably have about Apple intelligence, the issues are largely because the models just don't feel that smart, right? Like, you even just take the, you know, the image editing, right, where you want to get something out of the background. That is not as good as what you see from a Google-level type of model.

experience or model or whatever, take summaries and notifications. Those summaries make very little sense. And to the point where most people have turned them off, like, yeah, that's the intelligence. And so if the intelligence that they're going to give access to isn't actually all that intelligent, I'm not sure what the sale is. Cheap. It's really interesting because in theory, if Apple were good at this, it is actually like

perfectly positioned to do this in a really cool and coherent way where like, like you said, it has more stuff to work with locally than almost anybody. And there are a lot of good and useful things you can do on your phone with local AI models, right? Like it solves a lot of search problems. It solves a lot of like, how do I do small things on my phone? Like what if it made timers faster? Like there's just a lot of things you could do. Wait, David, can we just unpack what if it made timers faster? Yeah.

Okay, I didn't want to cut you off. I was like, transcription. What a sped up time. You're like, 30 seconds now goes by in 25. No, I'm talking about the gap between me saying timer and the timer start. Oh, I see. There have been these moments with Siri in particular in the past where they took a thing that had to go to the cloud and they made it run on the device and it immediately feels better. Sorry, I just know all three of us are parents and we've often all made pasta. And it's like, if I could get this done in six minutes instead of nine, we're gold, you know? I would buy...

Every iPhone. The power of Apple intelligence. Bath time just gets going from like 10 minutes to two and you're like, it's 10 minutes, I swear. Yeah, we just solve some things. Get on it, Craig. Timers faster.

What was that quote was like time is not a Trump's like head of like, yeah, White House technology was like, we can now travel through time and space. Yeah. Are you sure? That's it. That's exactly what I'm thinking of. Because I'm good on space. I know we can travel through space. Yeah, we're doing that already. Very confused about time. Sorry, David. Go on.

Well, now we'll come back to that. That's a Verge cast. But you start with that, right? And you have this sort of base layer of on-device private stuff. Apple gets to tell its big story about privacy and all this stuff. Like that all works great. Then the second thing is the private cloud compute stuff that Apple, like by all accounts, the infrastructure for that is actually pretty good. We have not seen it do anything interesting, but like as a theory and a product, it seems to be

Pretty interesting to a lot of people. That's where you can do a lot of stuff. And then for the most aggressive, impressive, sort of needy stuff, you have this seamless integration out to ChagGPT. And one of the rumors this time is that they're going to bring more partners into that. So you could route to Gemini. You could route to Claude. Like you basically have this thing where you need your phone to do something. And it has every available option to choose from, from ChagGPT.

fast to slow and from cheap to expensive, right? That's very cool. Except that Apple sucks at this. And it's like, and there is just, it's so frustrating because like you can see the idea being right and the execution just being a disaster over and over and over again. And so with all of this, I do think one of the things Apple is going to do is, you know,

point some of the Apple intelligence stuff at developers as a bunch of APIs you could call, right? That like it's going to bring them in as features, but it's also, I think, going to start to give developers more access to the underlying models and technology. And that's

again, potentially really interesting. And it is a very Apple-y thing to do, to be like, hey, you know, rewind all the way back. And Apple's like, you don't have a phone with a camera that knows where you are. What do you want to do with that? And people found really interesting stuff to do with that, because there's interesting stuff to do with that. But the

Product sucks. So it's like Apple's going to be like, hey, here's a bad model that doesn't do anything. Is this interesting to developers? And I think developers are just going to be like, no. Yeah, because they can just go build on the cloud on GPT-4 or Gemini or Cloud or anything else. And that part to me is fascinating because the history, the reason Apple has all this clout with developers is because you got a bunch of stuff in the 80s and 90s developing for the Mac, got you a bunch of stuff for free.

That like you had to basically hard code into Windows and then nothing was cohesive. Right. So you got like proportional fonts. This was like Steve Jobs' favorite thing to talk about. He did proportional fonts and Windows proportional fonts. And Windows proportional fonts were like really bad for a long time. You got that stuff for free. So a bunch of developers like, oh, I want to make beautiful stuff here.

You can go on and on and on down the line. All the way to on the iPhone, you got iPhone's theming toolkit for free. They would upgrade to iOS 7 and everyone ran to use iOS 7's design language and that was cool. Here, the capability you're talking about, the thing you're supposed to get for free is like, oh, there's a bunch of AI on the phone that I can use. I'm going to build the next class of applications. I think developers are like, yeah, but I can just...

use Gemini on the web. Right. And then that rules. I can get that from other places. Apple is by a mile not the best provider of that stuff right now, even if you're building iOS apps. But they do, to your point, they do own the phone. So until someone displaces the phone, I think they do have a little bit of where you're going to go. So we should go through the other features that are rumored. As David mentioned, more integrations with outside AI partners. I'm actually really looking for how they integrate Google Gemini.

I think it's in both Apple and Google's interest to move the money from Google paying Apple for Google search to be the default in Safari to something else, because that is under antitrust pressure. There's this stat about Google searches and Safari falling anyway that Sundar basically doesn't want to talk to him about. So if you move that money to a Gemini integration,

Interesting, right? Maybe you escape the problem. We'll see. But I'm curious how that plays out. Have you guys changed your search default on Safari to anything? It still goes to Google? Yeah. No, I just added ChatGPT to my action button. Okay, so I changed my Safari search to ChatGPT.

And it's a really poor experience. Like ChatGPT has this extension, so it's there as an extension. And so I think there's a lot of potential for them to change that to tap into, and we know they're talking to Perplexity, we know they're talking to these other companies, but

Whether they do it as default or, you know, they could keep Google as a default because there's all that baggage. But they could make it considerably easier for you to use the address bar in Safari to get to an AI chatbot, which I would love to see. What I was going to jump in and say is like the chat GPT integration with Siri is terrible. It's awful. It's very bad. Yeah. So either they have to improve that considerably and...

add extra partners, like if they do add an Anthropic and they do add a Google there, like they say, you know what, just like we let you change your whatever default of whatever over the years, they've given us more of those options. We'll let you change the default on the, you know, Siri will default to go to Claude or Gemini, but they have to improve that experience because otherwise it's like no one, there's no benefit in it. Well, the baggage you're describing to be clear is literal bags full of $20 billion. Yeah.

Yes. Right. So, like, they have to move that money, right? And to say to Google, OK, you were paying us to be the default search provider. We might change that to perplexity because it's a better experience. We would still really like your $20 billion. Here's this other integration. And that integration is a Siri? I don't know the answer. I just I suspect because there's antitrust pressure on the deal as it exists now, they will find some other place to make Google and Gemini the default. Right.

that lets them preserve $20 billion. But then while this is happening, you also have the DOJ pointing at that possibility going, we cannot allow that to happen, right? That is like, they're like, we have to get this trial done now so that Google can't make this next deal with Apple the way that it is currently attempting to do with everybody. Yeah. But it's like, you know, I've seen like the action button opening chat, this is a very dumb example, but because whenever

whenever Joanna's on. We only talk about home repair. I hung up a light fixture yesterday and it had weird connectors for the LEDs inside. And one of them broke and I hit the action button and I took a picture of the weird connector and I said, how do I fix this? And ChatGPT just told me how to pry out the little pin that was broken, re-crimp it and stick it back in there and it was fixed. And I was like, oh, this is very useful. Yeah, but you're not using Apple's visual intelligence to do that, which could do it. But I'm using Apple's buttons.

button. It's like if Apple can get $20 billion to set that button to Gemini instead of chat GBT, we're like they're in business. Well, and the visual intelligence taps into Google. So maybe that's another place. And we've heard about that, I believe, a little bit in the trial that that's another place that they're building that.

future of the relationship. So that's one aspect. We're looking for those integrations and who will be the providers and who will be the defaults. I'm very curious about that. The second one that's on the list is this idea that they're going to redesign shortcuts and that Apple intelligence will help you like write better shortcuts, which is super fascinating. Not because I think it will be any good. David, you actually, when you worked at the Wall Street Journal, did a column on shortcuts and I'm still go back to that column to try to figure out how the fuck to use shortcuts. Yeah.

OK, so the thing I say on this podcast sometimes that I get emails about every single time is that shortcuts is a bad app and a failed experiment by Apple and everyone who made it should feel bad. And people get very upset with me about that. But also, I am completely correct. Yes. Yeah. But like the potential of it is amazing. Yes. It's such a good back to home stuff. I know there's so many home things I can do with shortcuts.

None of them work because the phone forgets to run your shortcuts. Yeah. And David didn't write about it like six years ago. And I don't know how to do it. Yeah. You don't have a PhD in software engineering, so you can't possibly use the shortcuts app. So this is what AI should fix. You have this automation engine inside the phone already.

And then you're like, robot, do something. And it's like, I'm going to use this automation engine. And so much of AI stuff right now is just basic automation wrapped up in a natural language interface. Yeah. Like, it's not...

It's complicated as anybody is making some of this stuff. I will say you say that like it's it's a small thing, but that's actually a huge thing. Like automation, natural language automation, if that's the extent of what AI ever turns out to be, is still like an enormously huge deal in how we use computers.

which is the thing that drives me so crazy. It's like, it's just, it's sitting right there. It's also the easy part. Like you, all the developers have said, here are all the building blocks that I have. And you have a thing that in theory is very good at assembling those building blocks all by itself.

What are we doing here? You know what I'm sort of thinking? I know I'm cutting off your list. The rest of the list, I would say, is bad. I have one more. This conversation has made me feel like maybe Apple really isn't going to fail at AI in the same way like Apple failed at MobileMe but still pulled through on cloud. Let me go a little bit to explain that a little bit more. Apple intelligence as a term...

is a thing that is not good or associated with good things with at least our community of people that work and think about tech a lot. No, and everyone. I don't know anyone in my life who has, who is like, you know, what's tight is Apple intelligence. Well, I think actually those people in your life, like they didn't even know it was there. Right. And so like, maybe this is Apple's like mobile me moment in AI and maybe

Now we're going to they will unlock the things that where I will actually play a big difference on the iPhone and this race towards making Siri like maybe we let them go for a little bit and go and hopefully fix that. It's very important. Don't let me say like it isn't important is absolutely important. If they do not get Siri right, they will lose to these other companies that are building great conversational AI. But like I have hope in the things we were talking about right now.

I do too. And it's actually, it's the kind of thing Apple historically does really well, including with like machine learning and the neural engine stuff. Like so much of what everybody is now calling AI features, we used to just call like features. It's just software in so many ways. It's like stuff you use. Yeah. And so I think there's a bunch of things, right? Like the idea that you can essentially prompt your way through shortcuts is fundamentally just a

an AI feature, but we don't think about it the same way. And like one of the big things that has been rumored is AI powered battery management, which is also just called battery management. Like it's just it's just software, but it is using went through this with the cloud, too. Like this is where I'm going with the mobile me iCloud situation, right? Like mobile me was not good. Mobile me famously prompted a meeting where Steve Jobs said, well, Mossberg said we were bad. Whose fault is this? And everybody. Right. Not great.

But when you say they came around, they did iCloud, and then a big innovation in iCloud is not giving you enough storage by default so that you have to pay them more money every month. I don't know. Photos iCloud works pretty great. Except it fills up your storage, and you have to pay them more money. That's what they solved in the cloud, right? They backed everybody up, and they made a business out of it by selling. It's capitalism. I don't know what to tell you. But it's true. It's not broken the way that MobileMe was. The problem you have with shortcuts with a –

you know, a prompt engineering interface is shortcuts doesn't work. Right. Right. So it would be really cool to be like, Hey, every single day when I wake up, I check these four apps. I need you to just go check them for me and tell me if anything good happened. Right. This is like a thing that a lot of people would love to automate and shortcuts today will be like, I am drunk and I didn't do it.

Like, well, you are a bad friend. Like, you're just untrustworthy. And I'm going to check the apps on my own. And you can put a whole layer of AI on top of that. But the core engine of that product doesn't work.

And like, I don't know if Apple can solve that. I'm not even going to see what my shortcuts are. Do you have shortcuts? I have short because I've tried over the years. Like I have. Do you know the only shortcut I ever had that was any good? It was, it was, I would say Verge cast famous in like the mid 2010s when Mike McCarthy was the coach of the Packers and would consistently lose in the playoffs. Sure. I had a shortcut on my home screen that just tweeted the words fire Mike McCarthy. And I pushed it with every Sunday. That's pretty good.

Okay, this is amazing. This is very weird. All my failed shortcuts are for the garage. I tried so hard. I must have tried so hard.

Siri, where are my keys? Yeah, I've got some stuff. We're going to fix Joanna's garage one of these days. No, we fixed it. My garage is great. I'm killing it. My garage is great. You saw my garage. It's great. I did. I was there. It worked. Hey, Siri, I'm going to say it on the podcast so everyone's garages will open or like the two people that set up their garages. Every time I say, hey, Siri, open the garage, it works. I'm the other one of those people and my garage is open. Opening the garage. Did it actually just do it? Yeah.

Yes. And my wife is going to text me and say, there's somebody in the house who opened a garage. Yep. Just got an alert. All my devices just said smart garage door opener. This is great radio. Hey, Siri, close the garage. Oh, my God. Closing the garage.

Very good. Two things on the list are kind of the same thing. One on the iPhone and one on the iPad. And they're basically it's every, every year it's rumored that they will fix the iPad in some way. Yep. And by fix, I mean, just make it a Mac or add better multitasking. So there's either they'll add a menu bar, they'll add free form multitasking. And then on the iPhone, there's the idea that they will add like stage manager or make it more like decks that lets it, the iPhone itself connect to a monitor and be a computer. If they did no AI stuff,

And they were just like, you can plug your iPhone into a bigger monitor and use it like a computer. I think people would lose their minds. I would just die of happiness that day. It would be managed so badly. It would be such an unusably chaotic feature. And I would love it to absolute pieces and use it every single day. But isn't that what they did last year? No. So now you can have it so that you have a separate monitor when it's plugged in. But you're essentially just moving an app. Yeah.

And that's only on the... The iPad is slightly better at this. You can do stage manager on an external display. It's all well and good. Sorry, I guess I mean iPhone mirroring. You can plug a mouse into your iPhone and look at it on a monitor. You have multiple monitors on an iPhone. And then ideally what you have...

Google basically announced a riff on this. Like Samsung said decks for a while where you like plug your Samsung phone into a monitor and a keyboard and you get like a Linux desktop with a weird Samsung browser. Neil, I valiantly tried to do it. This is my dream. I tried to use this for a while. It was not good. Um, but Google's going to do it. And I think that might be really interesting if that's part of Android, we actually get proper Chrome instead of weird Samsung stuff. I mean, plug your phone in and it becomes a Chromebook is like the dream. Like,

Like it would work. It's just sitting there. Just like this doesn't make any sense for Apple. They want you to buy a Mac. They want you to buy the iPad. So why would they want you to plug your iPhone into a monitor? Because they got to compete. They got to do stuff. I don't think so. The behind over here. What about your phone's a banana? Like they got to come up with ideas. Let's do it. I just think there's like no there's no upside for them here on this.

Yeah, I don't believe it.

believe apple when it says these things that that it perceives the devices to be differently but i also think it is so obstinately clinging to that idea that these devices cannot run into each other that they're leaving like obviously good ideas on the table i think the ipad is fully in the where are you gonna go zone yeah like they don't need to have more ipad ideas because like someone's gotta watch disney plus it's like where are you gonna go and like

So it goes. And eventually, I think it will just ease its way into being more Mac-like. I think that's just happening every year. But the idea that the phone itself would get this tech stuff, kind of interesting. It would be super interesting. There's other stuff. We can just go through them. You're going to get chat GPT access on watchOS, maybe. We'll see. There's literally no rumors about macOS except they're going to name it Tahoe, which...

Mark Gurman reported like it was a big deal. He's like, they've been waiting for this one to use the name Lake Tahoe because they all have houses in Lake Tahoe. They all have houses there. They always are on vacation there. I think they should start naming them after small Midwestern towns. Mac OS for Scene Wisconsin is available, Craig. There's a bunch of AirPod rumors, sleep detection, camera control. Sure. I mean, what they...

The AirPod update everyone wants is you can just talk to a voice assistant. Yeah. Still waiting on that. The camera control thing is neat, I will say. I think that would be just from like a pure...

UI perspective, I'm fascinated to see that one because it's like, are we going to get to a point where half of everybody's photos now just have them with like two fingers on one of their ears? Or is there going to be like, we're going to get the new like millennial pause while everybody clicks the thing and then waits for it to start the video? Like, I don't know. I have so many questions, but it's like it's a smart idea to let you have a remote on your AirPods. I would use this feature once a year at like

Our family, you like you do the big family picture and you set your like right behind you, David, you set your like camera up on the like above the fireplace on that little mantle. And then you have to like like struggle with your watch to figure out how to take the photo. I don't know why I would have my AirPods on. It's because you're not a cool zoomer who just wears AirPods all the time. Yeah, I guess. Like, but when am I ever going to want to take a photo? I guess like you want to take a selfie. Yeah.

But you have your arm out. I don't know. I'm really interested to see the video that they like show this feature in or like the still shot. Like what is the real life scenario when you want to touch your iPod, your AirPod to take a photo? A bunch of people in our Slack were suggesting that

Apple should let you just hold it in your hand and do it and just have it as like a little clicker. That would be very cool. Oh, like the selfie clickers that they like sell the little like cheap China button with a little camera button. All right. Fine. I can't think of a more dad situation than me being like, get this out and we get my air pod out of its case, hold it upside down.

As opposed to just being like someone else will take this photo. We'll see. I don't know. Joanna's out here going everywhere in meta smart glasses so she can take pictures of her kids on another AirPods. Oh, I love my meta smart glasses. I don't think we're talking about that here. All right. Last one. There's like half a rumor. I just want to do a time check on it. People think we might see Apple smart home device.

I think this is 0% happening. What do you guys think? Same. I'm pretty close to zero. I think the only thing I can think of is if you're Tim Cook right now and you've gone through all this stuff and you've said, we need...

We need a thing. Because there isn't a thing in here. Unless the redesign... I think the redesign is the thing. It's the thing. I assume it'll be the thing that they mostly talk about. And it probably... But like, I don't know. Maybe my hopes should be higher. My hopes are not super high for what that's going to turn out to be. But like, maybe you're Tim Cook and you look at this and you're like, we need a one more thing to just like get everybody's minds going. And they just...

preview it in some way. And they're like, Apple has gotten increasingly comfortable being like, here is a thing that's coming later. And I could see it. I wouldn't bet on it, but I also like, I could see the logic for like running the video at the end of the keynote. Yeah. I just think they got really burned with Apple intelligence last year.

And they can't do that again. Yeah. I also think the point of the smart home device is... Siri. Is Siri. Is to say, like, you can just talk to this thing and it'll talk back to you. And you can do automations by just saying out loud, like, when Joanna gets home, just open and close the garage door 50 times in a row. Just to, like, and celebrate that it does it. Do a dance. We'll see. I mean, it would be exciting. Joanna, are you going to be there? You're going to be there. We're going to be there. I'm going to be there. I have...

I have made a list of three things I would like to see. Would you guys like to hear that? Yeah. Maybe you guys can share your lists. We should have prepared this. But my number one want is an iMessage, in group messages, typing indicators for everybody. Oh, that'd be good. Like multiples. Each person gets a typing indicator. Yes. Just like every other chat app has, basically. I would love them to fix this reactions problem on the Mac. It's happening to me right now.

Why does this pop up come up all the time? I don't know what's a pop up. What are you talking about? The one where you do a thumbs up and it does the wild thumbs up emoji? Or it just like has an alert here that says like your reactions are enabled. Yeah. It sucks. Just turn it off. No one wants this. This has a 0% approval rate, this feature. Just turn it off. Is this a real like COVID idea that just needs to go away? I know what you're saying. Yeah. 100%. My last thing is a Siri thing because this happens to me every morning when I want to ask

the HomePod to do something, but all the other Siri devices are doing them, like my iPhone or my watch. And I just think like some improvement. And I actually think that's one of the main reasons. There's a lot of reasons people hate Siri, but I think that's one of the most frustrating things

real like consumer pain points of Siri, which is like you want your Siri here to do a thing, but the Siri in the next room is doing it or your spouse's Siri or whatever is doing it. You're like a Siri power user. Yeah. I mean, I have that problem with Google Assistant, but I don't have a problem with Siri. I'm so sorry to everybody whose devices just went off 25 times. Yeah, I'm sorry. Open the garage door. Yeah, like I have HomePods, I've got iPhones, I've got watches, I've got iPads.

Anyway, I have Siri wake words disabled on all of those. I have a multiple device wish list, too, which is if they just spend an hour being like we've made it so that the important notifications come to your actual phone instead of disappearing into the void on whatever other device we think is alive there. Yeah, that would make me very happy. Yeah, this it would be an interesting version of.

This year's WWDC, if instead of like announcing, you know, big giant sweeping changes to how everybody is going to do everything, they were just like, hi, we spent a year just fixing things. Snow Leopard, baby. Yeah, this is Snow Leopard. We're just doing it again. And because there's so many little things, it's like for me, it's like fix headphone routing so that when someone calls me on my phone, it doesn't ring every device and decide to put my AirPods on my MacBook, which is closed in my backpack. Like, what if we did that?

Wouldn't that be cool? There's just so many of those little things that it's like, actually, if put enough of those together, and I think you might win a lot of people over in the course of like an hour. Can I just issue my wonkiest feature request related to headphone routing? Yes. You ready? So I've got, I have a computer. As many people know, I have a computer. And my computer has multiple monitors. And one of the monitors is like the video conferencing monitor. And it's got like a little Logitech speakerphone dealie.

And I can't be like the windows on this monitor. The audio needs to come out of that thing. And the windows on this monitor needs to use these speakers. That's a good one. If I could just assign speakers to a display so that audio playing from a Chrome window on this screen came out of these speakers and audio playing on this screen came out of it, I would just be, that's it. That's WDC. I'd be like Apple stock price should go up 30 to 40% today. Like, don't worry about this AI stuff they fixed. I can assign speakers to displays.

And I think I might be the only person in America with this problem. No, I have this problem. Not as like I don't have as many monitors as you, but I feel that problem. I this this should be the one more thing that Tim Cook announces. It's a you know, they did all the stuff around the calculator last year. Was that last year? It's a tariff calculator. Right.

The numbers just magically change every five minutes for no reason. It's like you wanted to calculate it today. Here you go. That's what AI is good for is non-deterministic math. We're like, how much does this cost? It's like I made up an answer. It's very good. All right. We should take a break. Speaking of tariffs, we got to come back. We got to talk about the switch too. And we'll see how much David paid for this. We have to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for The Verge Cast comes from Shopify. When it comes to growing your business, you need a partner you can count on. A partner like Shopify.

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Yeah, Switch 2 launch week. We started with Apple rumors because it's developer season and there's a lot going on over there. And also the Switch 2 literally came out this morning. So there's not much to say except David has one. I do. Lots of people on our staff have them actually. What's it like? Are you happy? I really like it so far. So let me tell you, I had a really interesting experience trying to get it.

So it launched at midnight and we've been covering kind of the run up to it. And there are like discords upon discords of people trying to figure out how to get one and gaming the system and keeping an eye on what's in stock and when. And there are I live in a pretty sort of dense urban area. So there are lots of places around me that were open at midnight. But there are two, two doors apart from each other. There's a Best Buy and a Target. And I was like, all right, one of them.

will have it for me. So I went over it like 1030 last night just to see. I was like, if the line seems plausible, I'll sit in it and try and get one at midnight.

like 100 plus people in line super nuts so i just turned around and bailed uh came home and i was like well i guess i'm not getting a switch uh i won't have one to talk about on the podcast today and then this morning uh i'm sitting around looking at my phone ignoring my child as i want to do from time to time uh and i was just like went to target.com and was like i wonder if they and it just said like oh in stock at the target right next to the best buy so i

literally just drove to Target and bought a Switch 2. It was like, it was the most mundane launch day experience you could possibly imagine. And I got there and there

There was a steady sort of rush of people. Like as I was walking in, two people walked out with switches, both of whom were like clearly pumped that they had scored a switch. But then I went over and there was a case full of them. There were probably 15 of them just sitting in this case. They had three bundles left. The woman in front of me bought one for her 13 year old son for his birthday and was like,

the relief on her face that she had managed to get like i cannot describe to you how happy this woman was and then i got one and then the person behind me got the last bundle and nobody wanted anything other than the bundle that comes with mario kart world and so there's just a bunch of them lying around and so i just like shot just sort of without even meaning to just like came home with a switch to uh set the thing up giant pain in the ass um

And then, like, posted something being like, I can't believe how easy this was. And I have heard from so many other people who were like, yeah, Nintendo put us through this weird rigmarole for months trying to, you had to get an invitation from Nintendo for a specific time to, like, insanity. And then you could just wake up and go to Target and get one. Like, truly bizarre launch day experience. Should I get one? You should definitely get one. What accessories does the bundle come with? The bundle comes with, it comes with the dock,

It comes with the weird...

controller-y thing that I can't find. It comes with that pillow. Amazing. It comes with a pillow. I also bought the camera. You bought the camera. I was going to ask. So you have to buy the camera separately, right? I have not set this up yet. This was the Switch 2 camera. I think it was like $55, which is absurd for like a little camera on a stick. And then there's the Pro Controller, which everybody on our team tells me I need to buy, which is $85. So I'm like $650 deep on this thing by the time I actually get it

fully like up and running. But I will say, I played it a bunch this morning because...

it was it was journalism for work and my like the first game i played was was fifa which is technically called eafc 25 and i get emails every time i don't say that i'm aware of the name of the game it's still called fifa unbelievably faster like night and day faster from the switch that i was using and that was the main thing i was wondering about like there's lots of new games uh mario kart world is is big and very fun and i've played a

but just the like raw speed upgrade of the old games that I had been annoyed by on an eight year old console like it like new games which is very exciting to go buy one I don't want to buy my

My seven-year-old is, like, he doesn't actually know that there's a new Switch out, I don't think. But it is a maddening experience downloading games on his Switch. The slowness, everything is just like, the parental control. I mean, talk about software that needs a refresh. Like, I don't know if that's been done. Is that done on the 2? Yeah.

It's sort of stylistically similar, but it's clearly not the same software, if that makes sense. Like they didn't blow up the model, but it is noticeably better and faster in basically every interaction. That might be worth it. I've been very impressed so far. But what's been really interesting is like the vibes around this launch are not that good, I don't think. We've been talking a lot about this internally, but also like...

There were these big lines, but also Nintendo didn't do reviews ahead of time for a couple of different reasons, which is fine. But I think also there is something to the coverage in the lead up to this thing that would have been exciting for people.

But then also everybody I talk to is like, ah, I'll buy it when there's better games. Yeah, that's kind of how I feel. You're 650 deep into Mario Kart world. I'm like, eh, I can wait. So that's where a surprising number of people seem to have landed. And I think there's the Donkey Kong game coming. Like they had the announcement that the Nintendo Direct of all these games, what, in April? And people came away from that being like, great, there's an awesome slate of games. Lots of stuff is coming. But on day one, it really is a $500 Mario Kart machine, like in a really real way.

With a bigger screen. With a bigger screen. I mean, that's a big boy. Hold it up again. Yeah. It is big. So this is the Switch 2. Oh, yeah. And just to compare, this is the regular Switch. So it is like a meaningfully bigger thing. Yeah. I mean, the only game we play on the Switch is Untitled Goose Game, and I think we'll make it through. Think about how fast the goose will go. We play a ton of Mario Kart.

My son's obsessed with Among Us. Oh, I got to start doing that with Max. Obsessed. So, I mean, like, that, like, very simple 2D game, I'm sure, is not necessarily any better on the Switch 2. So, we're good. All right. We're going to have lots of Switch coverage coming because, like, so much of our staff has a Switch 2 game.

They want to talk about it a lot. I suspect next week, David, you're going to have a whole Switch 2 situation. So, yeah, I can just tell people the schedule here. So Tuesday is going to be our big post-WWDC episode. And then I would say most of next Friday and then all of the following Tuesday is all going to be Switch stuff. Because that's when we'll have reviewed the thing, we'll have played all the games, we'll have tried all the accessories, like...

we're sort of deliberately waiting a minute to like really do this thing big. So we will, we have a lot more coming. And also call the hotline and send us emails if you have questions, because like two thirds of our staff has one of these. So we're going to get a lot of them on to talk about it with us. Yeah. All right, Jen, I know you got to, you got to jump out here real quick before you go. There is a bunch of new news, but meta is like experimental smart glasses, Aria. You are like, you're, you know, you're the meta glasses stand on the show.

What do you think? Am I? And then they're going to start doing, I mean, you wear them and you take pictures. I do. That's more than I do. I do wear them. I bought the clear Ray-Bans when they announced them and I was so excited to get them and I bought them and I put them on my face and I was like, no, thank you. And I sent them back. You're mad that you have a big head.

It's fine. They were not big enough for a head, like even a little bit. I also have a big head, like I get it, but it's not Meta's fault that we have big heads. I was just like, I have good cameras that are fun to use. And this is, I don't know, what am I doing? And then they, there's some Quest stuff coming along. Like there's a little bit of armistice between Apple and Meta about like exclusive VR content.

I don't know. What do you think of these new glasses? Because it seems like no one has solved the display issue for augmented reality glasses, but we're adding more and more sensors to the prototypes every single day. Well, I feel like this is what, like a step towards more towards the Orion type of dream. And Orion were the augmented reality glasses that cost $10,000 a unit that Meta could not manufacture at scale. Right. And this is what a...

something that's supposed to come out later this year for researchers to work with and developers to work with, I believe. So there's like some real actual movement towards this, which I think has like been what Meta does that I think, and I think intentionally does that Apple doesn't, right? They're like building out in front and they're just saying, hey, here's where we're having issues. Here's where we're trying to build. I think we're seeing Google try to do that to a degree right now with,

I get very confused. The XR glasses, which are not the XR headset that's supposed to come out this year. Is that right? Right. Yeah, there's the headset, which is Project Muhan, which I always remember because it's such a stupid name. It's a very bad name. Also, Sundar referred to the headset as goggles, which is an incredible term. Well, I loved that actually from him. He was like, we're going to have goggles or we're going to have glasses. Do you think he knows that Google already made a thing called goggles a long time ago? Of course they did.

No, no, no. Moohan. But Moohan, back to Moohan. Moohan is also like considered under Android XR. Is that right? Like, is that, yeah? Yeah. Very confusing. But what's happening, like,

it's like everyone has these two paths going, right? Google, Meta, Apple. We think Apple, at least on the glasses, but for sure they do. There are some efforts that are going towards the goggles, as Sundar said, and some efforts that are obviously going towards the glasses. And hopefully, eventually, they think these things will converge and they'll come together. But like the focus on the goggles right now is really interesting. The journal had this story that Meta is trying to go after Disney with exclusive content. It's like,

Is this a world like we're going to probably hear more about the Vision Pro last year? Like where you just feel like no one's really using that type of device at scale. I mean, not not we don't feel like it is. It's true. The numbers are there, right? Like the number of people aren't. But yet they still keep pushing into those directions. My guess, though, is like for the hope that eventually that stuff comes when we're down the path that it comes to the glasses. Well, so you look at these new glasses.

And I mean, it's just a bunch of sensors really, right? They've added more spatial mics. They've added ambient light sensors, more track movement trackers, more eye tracking cameras. Like no one has solved the problem of the display, right? The Meta's Orion glasses were an attempt to solve the display problem, which is why they were so expensive and unmanufacturable at scale. So like we can put stuff in front of your eyes. The Google glasses we just saw are,

We're like, we're going to put stuff in front of your eyes, but they were teeny tiny field of view. And it wasn't like maps to reality in any way. It was just, it's basically a screen in front of your face. There's this big problem where no one has solved the core component of augmented reality glasses, which is putting stuff on a screen that is like mapped to the world.

And I think that's why everyone is doing these like ski helmets. Because they can do it there. You can do right camera pass through VR, XR. And then it's like you've built a simulator of the thing, but at least you're working on it. Well, you know, some mad scientist is solving your display problem.

But it's none of it's convincing. Well, that's how I know, like how we all felt about the Vision Pro. But it's like they still keep going at it, which I guess if you're the size of these companies, you can. Well, David, you were saying this. The sensor problem is so big that maybe they're just focused on that while someone figures out the display problem. Yeah. I mean, I think the thing I keep hearing about smart glasses is that the people who are making them are like everybody is wildly underestimating how hard every single part of this problem is like.

I remember years ago, some of the folks who were running this at Google were like, you don't understand how different a thing it is that I have to make a product that if it gets in your way at the wrong moment, once it has ruined the success of that product. Like if I, if I push a notification while you're asleep or like, I don't know, whatever, having sex, like,

once the whole thing falls apart. And they were like, the bar for the user interface is so high. And what it means is I have to have perfect awareness at all times of both you and the world. And both directions of that are incredibly hard. And so I think what's interesting to me about this meta thing is like, uh,

The idea of how do we put all this stuff in these glasses that can just look at your eyes all the time, right? It's like blink detection and directional, like following your eyes where you go and looking at per eye detection. Like this stuff is so hard and it's such cutting edge science and it is just one piece of the equation here.

I just have this. You said this. And now I have to think about Mark Zuckerberg is like, I need to know if you're banging. We got a hotline question maybe 10 days ago that I will we will answer on the show from somebody who was like, I have smart glasses. Do I need and they have my prescription. Do I have to take them off before I have sex? Otherwise, there's cameras on my face while we're having sex. And I have been not I have not been able to stop thinking about it ever since. Yeah, I was wondering where that came from, David. Get some other glasses, bro. It came from nowhere in your example.

That was the question. Do I need dumb glasses for the bedroom and smart glasses everywhere? Out of nowhere, it's like your Instagram followers have sent you three messages. It's like, no.

Yeah. Pretty sure you're throwing those things in the trash the first time that happens. You know what I mean? Like a pure growth hacky Instagram notification would be horrible. V-Song heard that hotline question and immediately demanded to talk about it with me on the show, as did my wife. So we will come back to that. But the idea that like getting all the sensors, I mean, we've gone through this list so many times. You need the display. The displays are impossible. Literally no one has built one that works at scale that is manufacturable.

you need to put compute in there.

That you need a lot of it to detect the world and then like immediately overlay graphics. And then you need connectivity and then you need a battery that can support all that compute and that connectivity in real time that is running all the time. And then you need like a content moderation system. So if you're looking at the United States Capitol on January 6th, it doesn't tell you like this was the site of Donald Trump's greatest triumph. Like you've got a million problems to solve. And bang detection apparently is very important to everyone. It's a big one. Yeah.

I don't, we're just years away from this. I think this is why you get, I think it would be better if the industry is like these mixed reality VR headset. Oh, they are the simulators.

Like, if everyone was honest that these are not products meant to scale, but this is how we're going to work our way towards building the appropriate applications, it might just like change how everyone perceives them. But I think like also to your point, Joanna, about the content thing, I think one of the reasons everyone is chasing that idea so hard is that it feels doable, right?

Right. If it's just we're going to build all this wild stuff. But if the first thing we can build is just like a sick personal television that you wear on your face, maybe that'll work for people. And I'm suspicious of the idea that that's a thing anybody wants. But I think it is it is at least like.

It is a version of this that feels achievable for these companies. And so they are like pushing relentlessly after it. Yeah. And I mean, obviously, that's what Apple's been marketing still with the Vision Pro, right? It's like your personal TV. Have you seen an ounce of Vision Pro marketing in the past five months? They just put out like a Bono video that nobody's seen.

No one watched. Vano's everywhere right now. Any of the pitches you get from PR, anything they post to the newsroom, like, is all about the content. It's really not beyond that at this point, right? Watching sports, watching this, watching that, like, maybe...

Maybe using your Mac, right? They had the improvement or the Apple intelligence came for that. I mean, yeah. Did you see the prices right clip where people try to guess the price of the Vision Pro? Yes. Amazing. It was very good. People were like $100. It's funny. Somebody, I believe, wrote about these there. You've seen these? These are the X-Real glasses with the space top. Yeah.

I can't get them on right now. Those are pretty hot, I have to say. Yeah, I mean, they look pretty sick. I mean, they look like Wayfarers, but they are very, very chunky. Yeah, they look awesome. Everyone here keeps telling me that I look like, you know, one of those like glasses with a mustache. But they have a cord. That's a cord. Yeah, the cord connects to the laptop. Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and say we're far away from air glasses. I will say the only use of those that I do, like there's,

everything aside, I do like having multiple monitors when I don't have, when I'm away from my computer. Yeah, that's fair. Joanna, you have to go and we should also take a break here, but I, we have not,

heard what you think Johnny Ive and OpenAI are building. And we got a little bit of stuff this week. There was like Johnny Ive did an interview with Lorraine Prowell Jobs talking about the unintended consequences of the iPhone and how they wanted to fix all the harms that smartphones have done. And ChatGPT wants to be like a universal life assistant, but we still don't know anything. What do you think they're building?

I don't think they're building glasses. I mean, they've basically said that, right? There was a lot of chatter at Davos this year, like before this deal was announced, but there was a lot of chatter already about the partnership between these two. Yes, in the Swiss Alps. Everybody's clinking champagne glasses and talking about opening up. Yeah, we're like, what are they building? What are they building? There was chatter about the headphones, like earbuds with cameras or like, which would make sense, but...

I believe now, like, people have shifted and said they don't think that. I've been straight up told it's not headphones. Interesting. I'll just, I don't think, I think it's like a, I think it's like a necklace. Oh, I hope it's not a necklace. But I will say, so I did a piece a few weeks ago on these recording devices. Neil, I went to a dinner with me and I was wearing the recording device. And I tested both the Limitless and the Bee. These are both like AI recording devices. They listen all the time and they summarize and make notes and to-do lists for you.

And I will say there were some very positive uses of those. So if they can figure out the privacy stuff and they can do this in a smart way where like you can talk to your chat GPT assistant all the time, but it's also listening, maybe looking.

And again, they need to get the privacy stuff right. There's a lot of potential there. But all those things had phone apps, right? The interface was a phone app. They all had phone apps. It was just a little piece of hardware. But you don't have to be looking at that. You just live your life with the device listening all the time. Yeah. I just don't think Johnny Ive and Sam Altman are building a device whose...

fate lies with an iOS phone app. Yeah. Yeah. That just seems really hard to me. So by the way, it's all the same problems minus the display. They need compute. They need connectivity and they need a battery. It needs to be unobtrusive. And then I think they've got this other problem, which is

If at the end of the day, the way that you set it up and use it is by configuring it on an iOS device, like you've accomplished very little. I think that though he said that in the video. He said that in the I love San Francisco. I want to have sex with San Francisco video. Why did this podcast get so horny in the past? I know. Well, I just, David, so we can say sex. So here we are. This is the energy I bring. This is what we're doing.

All right, so Johnny Ive wants to bang San Francisco, and he said something about the iPhone during that time? They said about the laptop that we've moved beyond. They call those legacy products. Legacy products that are still staples in your life. I mean, I don't remember exact wording. I don't have the transcript, but there was a lot of implications. We're not going to replace those things. We will still have them. This is the new thing. Yeah. We'll see. The only thing I know is...

I heard a lot of chatter about headphones and I was kind of told it wasn't headphones. And there's a lot of chatter about a pendant and I have no idea if it will be a pendant. That's it. That's what I got. I love a new necklace. I think they've got, I think they have to build something that does not rely on a phone. If they build basically a phone accessory, um,

they're not going to get to where they want to go. But then you have the same issues of the humane pin, which we, I, you guys have talked about, but like that had cellular built in and that was a big problem. Yes. It was a big problem for that device. It might've been the biggest problem for that device. There was a lot of, sorry, let's not, it's a long list. It's a long list. It's very high up on the list is the fact that there was cellular in there and that ran hot and it was caused the bad. Yeah. Anyway, it's,

It's a big set of problems. And the way you solve it is by offloading all those problems to a phone, which has already solved them at scale, right? Yep. But if you do that, you're not like, you know, you're not taking the big next step. You're like, I made AirPods, but weirder. And like that, I don't think that's the ambition. Though I spend a lot of time talking to ChatGPT now, and I would be happy if they were on my headphones. Like if they were in my AirPods and could work well, like we talked about, like that would be great for me. Also, like...

Sam Altman listens to this, right? Like the only thing I want is a CarPlay ChatGPT app. I know. That makes sense. I was like, please, no, please. You could be one of those people who instead of talking to their friends on car rides, just talks to ChatGPT, which is cool and not bleak at all. I'm already that person. This is why, and I'm just worried about you as a friend. Yeah, no, you should be worried about me. I am available to you if you would like to talk to someone. Well, this is why we have to podcast with Joanna. It's the only time she talks to humans. It's the only time I talk to people. It's the only time I talk to people.

It's only time. I'm just saying, if you want to talk to a confident liar, you can just call me and I'll just make shit up at you and it will sound super real whenever you want. Eli, please prepare me for this meeting I'm going to. Honestly, that would be far better. Yeah, and I'll be like, here's what you do. You say, Rupert, double the salary, I'm out the door. You say, Siri. Okay. Thank you guys for having me. See you at WWDC. It's a delight. We'll see you soon. Bye, guys. We'll be right back.

And let us know what you build.

Yeah.

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I'm excited to see Joanna and just mumbling to chat GPT in the corner of WWC for a couple of days. That'll be good. It's really like give it to Joanna. She's like, she doesn't half-ass things. You know what I mean? Like when Joanna decides to make AI her life, she goes for it. She's going for it. I mean, she's writing a book about it, making AI her life. So she's going for it. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, which I am told is sponsored. As you know, we exist free of the business pressures of our company. We just spend the money.

Eric, what's going on here? That's right. This week's lightning round is presented by Google Gemini. Eric, that was great. Great job. I'm really proud of you. Good work. That's the information. Still flavorful, I would say. Very flavorful. And in fact, I know it's going to be flavorful because, David, it's time. It is. It's once again, it's summer, but it is still time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Future Webby award-winning.

podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Eli, how does this keep happening? Like every week I'm like, I have a line in the rundown that just says Brendan Carr is a dummy. And I'm like, oh God, there's not going to be any links. This is going to be so great. We can finally not talk about this stupid man. And yet here we are. We do this every time. We do. And there's no shortage of it. I will say this week, usually we get notes like he's not a dummy. He's a threat to free speech. And I agree with those people. The thing is that he's also very stupid.

Right. Right. So he does all these investigations and threatens the companies for not being racist enough. But he's also not good at executing or thinking more than one step ahead.

He's a dummy. I can't say this clearly enough. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, the regulator in charge of our nation's communications infrastructure, is a dummy. And sometimes it just expresses itself because the only thing he succeeds in doing is shooting himself in the foot. And I think it's starting to weigh on the other people at the FCC because they're all quitting. So we're down. We're supposed to have five FCC commissioners.

And depending on the president's party, you're supposed to have three of the majority party and two of the minority. Right. And then, you know, you kind of, the votes go either way, but you have this like bipartisan vote.

agency committee that like makes decisions all together. And ideally they make them unanimously because they've done the hard work of hashing out good policy from both sides out, you know, stuff. Yeah. Government stuff. Government stuff. The thing you're supposed to do. Brendan is such a dummy that he's not doing that at all, where he's just like issuing proclamations about how there should be more censorship in America or whatever he wants. And I don't know what he's doing. So this week, two different FCC commissioners from different parties just resigned.

Jeffrey Starks, who has been on the Verge cast before, as a guest, Democratic commissioner, quit. Goodbye. I think people kind of knew he was going to leave, but he's gone. And then surprisingly, Nathan Symington, who is sort of just like another Toadie, like another revolving door Verizon Toadie. He's just been there for a while. He was an assistant to Pye and Carr in different ways. And then he became a commissioner. He bailed too. He was appointed by Trump in the first Trump administration, wasn't he? Yep. Yeah.

I don't have a high opinion. These guys are all just sort of like, we're here to do what the cable company tells you. Like, fine. Like, you're interchangeable toadies. But you would think that he'd be riding high in a car FCC.

Because, you know, he gets rubber stamp stuff, too. But no, he's gone. And the reports are that he wants to do other things. Presumably, he's going to go work for one of our nation's solicoms. Like that revolving door is just going to spin really fast and spit out millions of dollars in lobbying fees. And Nathan Simington is going to collect them.

I know this is what happens to all of them. It's a lie. G.P.I., the CEO of our nation's preeminent wireless industry lobby right now. That's how it goes. But so we're down to two. We're supposed to have five in a Trump administration. You have three Republicans and two Democrats. And we're down to one Democrat, Ana Gomez, who is literally touring the company saying that Brandon Carr is a threat to democracy and free speech right now. And it's also like operating under the assumption that she's going to be fired at any minute. I think she's trying to get fired. Yeah.

So, and to prove a point, which is, I think one of the reasons they're not fighting. What if it's just Brendan? Do you see what I'm saying? And then there's Brendan. Oh my God. And he's, he's pushed everyone else out. And the government is such a disaster right now because Elon and Trump are fighting that like, there's no chance we're going to nominate four more FCC commissioners, two of whom have to be Democrats by statute, but it's not going to happen. No. So we're, we're down to Brendan and Anna.

They don't even have a quorum. They can't do anything anymore because they don't have enough of them. Right, because it'll be one-to-one on everything and they just leave. And there's a lot of stuff to get done. There's broadband to roll out in America. There's spectrum auctions to be held. There's all this stuff to do. And Brendan is so distasteful and so stupid that he Brendan'd his way into not having a functional FCC. Very good, Brendan. You succeeded.

And the only other person who works there now hates you so much that she is literally touring the country calling you a threat to free speech. Well done. When I think of pure political operators, people who really work the system like they're playing a video game, it's not Brendan Carr. Whatever this is, is not that outcome. So that's one.

Very funny. Just like pure idiocy. So distasteful that everyone else quit, including the other Republican who is himself kind of a toey. Insane. Then there's like this one is a winding road, but it might be even funnier.

So you will recall Brendan launched an investigation into Dish Network's use of spectrum to build what was supposed to be a nation's fourth wireless network. And he said, you're not using the spectrum. I'll come to why they are not using that spectrum. But the reason he launched that investigation is because Starlink put out a report saying it had investigated Dish all by itself and they weren't using the spectrum. Right. That is just corruption. That's not how it's supposed to work.

straightforwardly, that's not how that's supposed to work. You're not like, oh, Starlink has a good point. We should trust them and take the spectrum away from another private company. I'm doing a great job, says me. So they launched this investigation. Now, I believe wholeheartedly the DISH network is not using the spectrum appropriately because it turns out there is not a fourth wireless network in America. Correct. If you see it, if you see the fourth nationwide wireless network that is striking fear in a T-Mobile, you let me know.

But I've looked around, and by look around, I meant waved my phone in the sky. However you look around. It's not there. It's not there. It's supposed to be there because Brendan's predecessor, Ajit Pai, allowed T-Mobile to buy Sprint, consolidating the wireless industry, rubber stamping some telecom stuff. This is what these guys do.

and made them promise they would turn over spectrum to EchoStar dish network. And they would light up a fourth wireless network, a 5g network. And EchoStar made all these promises about how they're going to take over boost and then use these MVNO agreements with AT&T and T-Mobile and use that to bootstrap a network while they built a cutting edge 5g network using open RAN technologies running on AWS. We've covered this at length and Ajit Pai,

Hood winked fully into believing this and said, okay, we're going to let T-Mobile buy Sprint. We're going to cut the amount of competition in America in wireless. I'm sure prices go up, but Dish Network will show up to save the day and restore competition. It is 100 years later. They have 20 subscribers. They still run Boost Mobile, but they're constantly roaming on AT&T. None of this exists. Just none of this exists. This is failed Republican policy from the first Trump administration. Okay.

Starlink has said they're not using the spectrum. We'd like it. No process. Brendan's like, yeah, I'll give it to my buddy. Elon. Elon has now fallen completely out with Trump. Like as we are speaking, they continue to tweet at each other about how much they hate each other. It, that seems like a poor political move from Brendan who can't see two feet in front of his face.

And EchoStar, Dish Network, what have they decided to start doing? They're going to start missing their interest payments on the loans they took out for the Spectrum so they can declare bankruptcy and get out of this whole deal. Wow. They're actively missing their payments on the Spectrum now. And they're doing it in response to this investigation. They're saying, you investigated us. We're headed for the exit. So, Brandon...

who, again, threw his lot in with Elon Musk to take Spectrum from a company that wasn't using it under a plan that his own predecessor launched, has now put himself on the wrong side of Donald Trump, his putative boss, and in a position where Echo Star might outplay him by just declaring bankruptcy. We will still not get a fourth wireless network in America out of this.

Super not going to happen. But we'll burn a bunch of money and jobs in the process. We're going to burn a bunch of money and jobs. And I think Brendan, because he's so dumb, didn't see the two moves ahead of him that perhaps Charlie Ergen, the CEO of Echo Store, the parent of Dish, would have another card to play. He's just a moron. Right. This is just what we're doing here. That's been Brendan Carr's Dummy. As always, Brendan, if you can show up on the podcast and defend these moves or any others, you're welcome to come. We'd love to have you.

You're not doing anything else. All of your coworkers quit. There's literally no one else. Anna Gomez is on tour. Go on tour. Go on tour to the Verge cast. This is what we ask for. Make the case that you didn't just get thoroughly outplayed by like a wildcat satellite operator who's going to declare bankruptcy and you're going to have to resell the spectrum. And you're probably not going to be able to just give it to Starlink the way they want.

I also I was just reading Brendan Carr's blog post on the FCC website that he wrote sort of announcing these changes. He's just so annoying. Let me just read you a paragraph. There's a lot of time between now and our scheduled June 26th commission meeting. So I wanted to lay out a couple of items that I would like to get done at the meeting if we can stay tuned on that front.

what does he mean by that i just said stay tuned that's all i just read words that's what he wrote that's what he wrote he wrote what does he mean by that in the third person tuned on that front and then in italics what does he mean by that end italics i just said stay tuned we always make a final decision about the commission meeting and its agenda closer to the meeting date we will do so again here that's a whole paragraph of no words what are we doing brendan

He's again, he's not smart. I know a lot of people are like, you should call the segment something else. You know, you should really, we do get this out. You should really make sure that people understand the threat. Yeah. There's some threats. I've called him a traitorous moron many times on our podcast, which is not regulated by the FCC. Sorry, buddy. But he's just stupid.

Yeah. And like you, you see it play out, but he doesn't, he can't think two moves ahead. Anyway, again, I repeat, Brendan, you're, you're welcome. I know you listen. I know that you hate it. If you can show up, you can show up on decoder. You know, people come on decoder all the time. They answer the questions. They do their best. They leave, you know, they can show up here. David will tell some jokes about you to your face. I just read him blog posts. You can yell at him. I'll just edit his writing on his stupid website. Yeah.

Anyhow, that's been Brennan Carr is a dummy. America's favorite podcast.

That was beautiful. David, I think we need a little bit of a palate cleanser. You want to talk about the Fediverse for a minute? Yeah, I would love to. It's my favorite thing. So Fediforum, which is like a big Fediverse event, is this week. But did you see the news about this tool called Bounce? Oh, this is the one that lets you move things around? Yeah. So Bounce is basically, it's pretty straightforwardly just like a migration tool from BlinkPage.

Blue Sky to Mastodon. Not all that exciting. It's built on top of this thing called, I think it's called Bridgy Fed, which is some like underlying work that ties the two things together. But it basically connects these two accounts so that you can move all of your stuff from one to the other and still be able to post where you were. This is like, this is the stuff, right? It's just like every once in a while we get an announcement or a new product or a thing that people are explaining that it is like,

This is the stuff. This is what we're doing when we talk about the Fediverse and like bounce a in the fact that it is kind of messy to explain. And the reason they call it bounce is because they're trying to get you to bounce from blue sky to mastodon, which is like pretty good. Yeah.

But it's like the idea that I can just pick up my stuff on a social network and put it down on another social network. Like that's it, baby. That's the stuff. And we're like starting to see this. There's a bunch of stuff out of Fedora forum where it's like new ways of thinking about the protocols. I really broadly, I think we spent the last year or so thinking

talking about capabilities. Like here are some technologies that will enable capabilities. And the Fediverse is absolutely that thing. ActivityPub, App Protocol, whatever. It's like, look at these core technologies and you got to build them. And now, same as Trevea, look at these models and how they can lie to you. And now we're in the products phase. And like, you can see the Fediverse products are coming pretty fast and furious now. It's taking a little longer than I would have hoped, I will say. I think there's been...

There was so much energy 18 months ago that I think got a little bit wasted is too strong, but didn't quite get fully utilized. And I think a lot of people were excited about what Threads is doing and the Threads Fediverse momentum seems to have slowed pretty aggressively. Blue Sky is doing great. Blue Sky is a version of the Fediverse, but is not sort of the whole story in a way. So it's like,

we continue to be like right at the edge of the thing, but I think you're right that the answer is just people just have to start building things people like to use. And then, and then we're going to start to be there. And it is like every, every version of this that,

comes out where it's like we're getting another piece of the puzzle together. And I think especially the stuff that touches Blue Sky, because it's just the one with the juice right now. And so any piece of it that is like, let me just attach a little bit of the open web to Blue Sky, I think is super exciting. And I suspect there'll be more stuff coming out of the FedEx Forum. There was a lot of news at the last one. I suspect there'll be more this time. But it is like...

The momentum is still there. I just wish it were like shipping a little faster. You know what I mean? I feel like there was the momentum slowed because you had the VHS versus beta moment with at protocol and Mastodon and ActivityPub and Threads. And everyone thought Threads would just make ActivityPub win. And then it turns out Meta runs it.

Yeah. And that just made people be like, what if I choose blue sky, which exists and it's just a different protocol. And so I felt like Bridget fed is really interesting because it, it shoves that down. And like part of the promise, a lot of stuff we've seen on a federal farm is like we made interoperability happen, but those still aren't products. Right. And I think now we're just headed towards like surf social is like fascinating. It's just an app that like connects to all these services. Yeah.

So I'm excited for these products. We still have big ideas about how we will integrate the Virgin to them, but you know, you got to pick VHS for paid and like, we'll get there. Yeah. We'll get there. I'm excited about it. And I think there was another one at FedEx forum. I think it was called like channel.org or something. That's poking it. Some of the same stuff that surf is doing where it's like, how do I take a bunch of different feeds from a bunch of different places and make them one

packageable thing that you can then like share to lots of different places and read from lots of different apps. And it's like,

big idea is like everything is just going to be feeds and you can create feeds from anywhere you can consume feeds from anywhere and feeds can be anything and it's like that is an incredibly powerful idea that we have like only just begun exploring and so i think every again every every piece of that that i see i'm like this is this is the stuff yeah it's gonna get there yeah this is it's product time you gotta you gotta make some products everybody yeah maybe

It'd be great if Apple's like, we're going to do a full hour in the Fediverse. We're bringing back ping and it's the Fediverse this time. That'd be great. All right. We are at WWC next week. We'll have lots of that. We have lots of switch coverage to come. Oh, we should say, by the way, our, our WWC episode is going to be late on Tuesday, just because the way WWDC works, we're not going to get to record until late on Monday. And then we will, we will have it as up as early as we can on Tuesday. But if you're like waiting for the episode for your morning commute, we're,

Just know that I'm sorry, and it will be an afternoon commute kind of show for you. Yeah. I mean, I have to get to a hotel room and record the episode after WWDC. Exactly. Lots to come. That's VergeCast. Thanks to Joanna. And that's it for The VergeCast this week. And 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 the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week. ♪

And let us know what you build.

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Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea. When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back. You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea. It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine. You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next. The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea. Time for a tea break? Time for a Pure Leaf.