Liquid Glass, Spotlight, and the rest of WWDC 2025
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Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of liquid glass. And you have to say it like that every single time. I'm your friend, David Pierce. Nilay Patel is here. Hi, Nilay.

Hello. Here I am. Nila's doing great, everybody. We're having a day. Allison Johnson's also here. Hi, Allison. Hello. You guys are in Cupertino for WWDC. Keynote was today. V-Song, who was also there, is going to join us in a little bit. She's still at some meeting, but is going to show up. But it was, today was WWDC day. I found myself sadder not to be there than I expected. So just give me the vibe check-in. How's the day been? How do you guys feel?

Are you alive? Are we okay? We're alive. It was a loose day. There was like not a lot going on. Right, like the number of new ideas that we have been forced to contend with are fairly limited. There's a lot of new future ideas and a lot of stuff to talk about, but there's no grand big thing that we all have to be like,

Let me wrap my head around this. There's a menu bar on the iPad, David. So, A, I would argue that is very much a big thing. But be like last year, that thing was Apple intelligence, right? They were like, this is this is the grand new way of thinking about technology that is going to change everything forever. This year, there was there wasn't even all that much Apple intelligence this year, which we should talk about. Allison, how did you feel? What were the what were the vibes like in the room?

The vibes are kind of like, there was a lot of curiosity, I think, about how Apple would handle or like address any of the

Siri, Apple Intelligence stuff, which was it was interesting. They didn't shy away from saying Apple Intelligence, which was a little surprising to me. Yeah, they kind of sprinkled it in throughout rather than the big like it's an Apple Intelligence show. But we did not hear Siri's name, I don't think, a single time.

Correct me if I'm wrong. I think the answer is once. Maybe. Yeah. Okay. I would not swear to this, but I think ironically, right at the beginning, basically explaining why they weren't going to talk about Siri more. I think Craig Federighi said Siri once. Yeah. At the very beginning, they said, you know, all of our plans will come true. Right. In the coming year. Here's what I can tell you, just based on vibes and the ground. They are furious that people think that last year they showed a fake Siri.

Oh, interesting. So they want people to know that they're going to do it. It's coming. And like what they showed was real and they just weren't happy with it. And so it's coming. But it's actually, I feel like it's worse if it worked, right? Because it's one thing to be like, here's a cool concept video we think we can make. It's another to be like, here is the product. It's done. We've made it. And then...

At some point, somebody's like, never mind. Actually, it sucks. Like that's that it all it's it's weird either way. I don't like again, the vibes, right? What are the vibes? The vibes are everyone knows that this is the elephant in the room that last year they announced this thing. They didn't ship. They were going to talk about Apple intelligence this year. You know, Apple is the royal family. Never complain. Never explain. Like that's just how they roll.

And so they confidently muscled their way through their presentation. They showed off liquid glass, all the stuff they're going to show off. They showed off a bunch of artificial intelligence features that are expanding. And the fact that they didn't ship Siri, they are willing to own up to. But the answer is it wasn't good enough. And we only ship things that are good enough. And what I would connect that to is the fact that no products that have made the same promises about being able to do stuff on your phone for you are good enough.

We haven't seen the smart assistant be good enough anywhere in the industry. Right. And whether or not you think that connects to whether AI, as we understand it today, can actually do it, or whether you think everyone is just kind of dumb, there's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B at work here. But they're...

They want you to know that their goal is making great products, and that's what they're going to do. And that, I saw some, you know, some folks in the press just like milling around, and like there's some quiet tension and uncertainty here because no one knows how they're going to address it. And then they just muscled through their thing. I mean, I was, I will say I was sort of impressed that they at least like half acknowledged it at the beginning. The like, we're still working on it. It's taking longer than we thought.

In the coming year is like even that is more than I expected Apple to do. Like traditionally, Apple would just memory hole the whole idea that it had ever spoken the word Siri aloud in history and just keep going. And we'd all be like, do you know that Siri exists? Well, you know, they walked right. I'm sure we're going to talk about this, but they walked right up to the line of all the things they said Siri would be able to do.

but in like other formats. So if you look at spotlight search and what it can and can't do now, you're like, Oh, why wouldn't I just talk to this? That's the Siri. Yeah.

And they just didn't connect the dots. Yeah. Or they'll, like, take a screenshot and add something to your calendar. I'm like, that's Siri, right? We're just calling it something else? It feels like they were a little bit hesitant to kind of be like, look, look at this intelligence. They were sort of, like, sprinkling it throughout rather than making such a big show of it this time. Maybe just...

They felt burned by how everything went last year. It is fair to say they feel burned. I could feel that from 3000 miles away. But also, Allison, I was thinking about you all day today because you and I have been arguing about AI devices for like two years. And you keep being like, I don't care about any of the rest of it because phones exist.

And phones are good at doing phone things and phones exist. And it's fine. If you want to do AI stuff, do it on your phone. And there was so much of that energy.

To that point, like you're talking about Apple was like, we didn't, everybody else is out here being like, we've invented a new paradigm for everything. Johnny Ive and Sam Altman like own San Francisco together now. And Apple's just like, do you know what's cool is your iPhone? What if your iPhone could do more stuff? Have you heard of the iPhone? And there's like, it's like, guys, where was this energy last year? Like the iPhone also existed then. But it's like, this was, it was sort of a very Apple-y way of thinking about this stuff again after such a weird diversion last year.

I think, like, the... Not to jump the gun, but, like, the screenshot kind of visual intelligence things is, like, really telling to me. So their new thing with visual intelligence is it can see what's on your screen, and you just summon it by taking a screenshot. You already know how to take a screenshot with your phone. Like, it's a thing you do. And then they kind of go from there, and that's where you can add something to your calendar or whatever. That just feels like...

that's where these things should kind of live and belong. And I think that's how AI, you know, as a tool on our phones makes sense to me. I do think it's going to beat, you know, whatever pendant screenless thing is coming next, but who knows? Well, a lot of the features they announced today are features that got approximately zero people to switch to an Android phone over the past five years. Sure.

Like just straightforwardly, these are features that exist on Android phones. Circle the search exists on Android phones. Like we've covered the Android can now look at what's on your screen and do a Google search based on it. Like so often that my joke is that Dieter wrote about it in hieroglyphics. Yeah, was Google now like 2012? Yeah. I was like, this idea has been around. We've been doing this. So yeah, I mean, just a lot of these features are...

old Google ideas about new ways to kick off searches and see what's on your screen and take action on it, which are cool and which are useful. But when they announced Apple Intelligence, I think the reason people were focused on the Siri part of it is because that's what looks like the platform shift, however you want to define that, where instead of touching a screen or using a mouse, you just talk to the computer and it does stuff.

And they're still nowhere from that.

They're a little bit closer to you type to the computer and it does stuff. Yeah. OK, so I want to get to all the sort of individual platform stuff, but I feel like there were a couple of kind of bigger, broader ideas Apple had here that we should start with. And the first one is obviously liquid glass, which every time I say it is a phrase I hate a little more. I'm realizing this now as I say it out loud. I just don't enjoy saying that phrase. I don't like it. Allison, can you you were you were sitting there taking pictures of this thing. Can you explain what liquid glass is and looks like?

having seen it in person? Yeah, well, imagine everything on your phone screen is like kind of transparent. I think the idea is like, you know, you pull down a notification shade or the control center and instead of like a blank slate that sort of launches you into somewhere else on your phone, it's transparent glass now and you can still see what was behind there. So we saw all kinds of little like

menu bar things popping up and you can still see the apps and the home screen behind them. Um,

I mixed feelings about how that all looks. You know, it's all in like early beta right now. But it's clearly something Apple is like pushing into full force. And it's coming to the iPhone, whether anybody wants it or not. Whether you like it or not. Neal, if I remember the timing correctly, the iOS 7 launch,

was like a seminal verge moment in the early days. Did Liquid Glass feel like that all over again? Were you like, we're so back, we're doing this again, everything's better? I think the answer is no. iOS 7, remember they went from skeuomorphism and texture to nothing. To like, what if your phone was...

indecipherable like if you look at our coverage of ios 7 we came out it's harsh but time has judged it to be fair because i walked it all back over the course of the next year and then you know to where we are now there's a lot more texture and dimension to ios like they've just added it back they've let people figure out what they're looking at on their screens

And I get what they're trying to do with Liquid Glass, which is reset it once again. Not for no reason. A lot of their arguments, a lot of their arguments for even the iPad stuff is we have so much more processing power now. So I get where they're coming from. We have a lot more processing power. We can rethink this interface. We don't have to throw everything out. We're not going from felt textures and literally wooden...

Like that wooden texture you get in like 1970s rec rooms, which was part of iOS for a minute. The notes app was a literal torn off legal pad. Like that's what we were doing before iOS 7. And there were some arguments there for why that was good at that time. But iOS 7 was supposed to be a clean break. Like digital interfaces are here now. This is the primary way. We should not be stuck in the past. Liquid glass has nothing to do with not being stuck in the past. In many ways, it's very much a reflection of the past in like Windows Vista. Yeah.

Like this thing has been tried before in this way. I suspect there's a ton of refinement to come between now and September and Apple sort of purposefully announces the most extreme version of the idea. And what they announced today was the most extreme version of the idea. Like everything is so transparent, it's almost unreadable. Yeah. And all the effects are totally overdone and control center looks at bananas. Like there's no way they're launching this version of liquid glass.

The thing I don't understand is like, what is the point of it? Right. What is this for? Other than looks different. They did not make a case for why it looks different. No. And there are. So it was funny. I went back and was reading a bunch of our old Vista coverage. And the thesis then was the same as the thesis now for Apple, which is basically like you do this kind of translucency stuff in part to sort of anchor people in.

where they are in a space, right? Like when you can see the things behind and you get these sort of live updating previews and like it just puts you in a place that is a little more understandable. You can kind of figure out where you are. And like a lot of this, they said this, this is all coming from the Vision Pro, right? Which is a device with a very specific need, which is to... Yeah, but why? Well,

Well, yeah, I mean, I wrote this in a piece today. Like, I think it is truly wild to be like, we made a Vision Pro. No one bought it. It's way too expensive. Let's reorient our entire design system around it, which is insanity. But like, if you are Apple and you're betting that the next decade is smart glasses or whatever, then sure, it does not make sense to me to do this on an iPhone. But again, on a Vision Pro...

The idea of like, OK, I need to I need to both show you digital information in the real world, but not obscure the real world for the digital information. So I have to do this kind of glassy, translucent thing that feels a little more physical. Right. Like we've talked about this bunch. Everybody's doing this in some direction or another. Spaceshippy glass is what Apple has chosen. Fine.

The way all of this stuff is implemented is just bonkers. Like you mentioned the control center and stuff, and there have been all these screenshots going around of the dev beta, which everyone immediately installed and started playing with.

It's just imagine if you just took the icons from the control center and just shoved them onto your home screen. Like that's all it is. There's nothing. There's no design. There used to be like the blur behind it. It would blur your home screen. None of that. It's just like, here's some icons. It looks awful. It's so bad. And I'm sure you're right. And I'm sure they will frost the glass and everything will be fine.

But even some of these ideas where they're like you pull, you know, as you're scrolling the URL bar down at the bottom will sort of the scroll will go underneath it. So it will actually like reflect the light underneath it. All it does in all of the videos that Apple showed is make that bar completely unreadable. Yeah. So the argument for skeuomorphism is that by making things reflect real world objects and textures, you assign those things those same qualities.

So you open the notes app, it looks like a legal pad. You assigned it the same quality as a legal pad. You open the games app and it's on a felt background and you think I should smoke a cigar, like whatever, whatever those things mean to you. The weird thing about this approach is that it breaks all those conventions and it literally posits a world in which everything is made of glass to the point where in the video they were showing the designers in the studio. And if you believe Apple's video, well,

Apple's designers in their studios printed out like giant lucite blocks and put the icons in them to see how they would reflect in the real world. I didn't even track that as weird watching that video. And it's like, oh, this is very backwards. Like you reverse skeuomorphism the world. Like you're manufacturing lucite blocks of icons. Like don't do that. Because in the real world, not everything is translucent.

And you get depth and texture by putting things over each other all the time. And you're like, this is on top of that. And it will remain the same color no matter what happens. And on the new iPhone, it's like everything is changing color all the time. Because everything is over everything else, but still transparent or translucent. And there's just something wrong about that. Like your brain doesn't accept that. The example I'll give you, which is like ancient history.

but I think very like funny and appropriate ancient history. When Steve Jobs first announced Mac OS 10, the interface back then was called Aqua. And his joke was that it looked so good it was lickable. And all the buttons were like pulsing blue and like kind of watery. And all of these people on the internet made themes for the old version of Mac OS to look like OS 10.

So you could buy these theme packs for your 90s Mac. And I ran them, and every single one of them had a blue menu bar. Because I hadn't realized that when he was showing it, the menu bar is transparent, and he just had a blue background. Interesting. So for a year, we were all running these themes with this blue menu bar, and then we actually got OS X. The first public beta is OS X. We installed our things, and we went, oh shit, the menu bar is translucent. That's awesome.

And then Apple realized this was a bad idea. And now the menu bar is translucent again. And you just go back and forth between these themes and design. And one of the reasons you make things not translucent is to give them weight in the design. It's to say, this is always going to stay the same. And this is an anchor for your eyes. And you can just see with liquid glass, that's just out the window. And they're going to have to put it back. They're going to have to give you some places to anchor your eyes just to get around the phone.

Well, that's the thing, right? Because they're...

I think like you were talking about with iOS 7, the idea was like digital interfaces are now interfaces. I wonder if part of the theory here is like you already know how to do everything. Your muscle memory is so good that we don't even have to remind you where the URL bar goes because your thumb is there. So actually, we're going to hide all of the interfaces best we can in order for you to just see the beauty of the web page that you're looking at. And...

Boy, is that a bad theory if that is, in fact, the theory. But that is a theory that would lead you to make something like liquid glass. I think just being at Apple Park today, too, kind of reminds you that Apple is just so committed to a look sometimes where it's like, is a giant circle made of glass? Is that the most practical way to organize an office building? Yeah.

No. You can see into all parts of it from the outside. That's kind of weird, but they're just like, that's their look and they love it. You didn't enjoy your 15-minute golf cart ride from the front door to the place you were going? The golf cart today had party speakers. The woofers under the seats and the woofers had LEDs in the rims. And we all, like the first thing Alex Heath said was, look, party speakers. Incredible. I'll actually, Allison, I will extend your metaphor because it is...

A hundred percent on the nose. They built Apple Park and then a little bit later they had to put stickers on all the windows because people kept walking into them. And this is like a main thing of Apple Park now. You like to see all these little dots that they're going to have to do this with liquid glass. They're going to have to put stickers on the windows. Yeah. So you know where they are in space. Control center is just going to have some stickers behind it. So we don't run into it. People are just bonking in control center for about a year. And they're like, Johnny, put the stickers on the thing and it's going to be fine. Yeah.

But that's where we are. And I do think they announced them in a state that's a little bit more extreme than they understand where they're going to have to go. I think Apple wants to be in that position where they want people to react to an extreme version of it so then when they walk it back, one, they get the big reaction in the beginning, but then it seems like they're taking the feedback into account.

It's like, what do they say? The, the, the thing you say to your kids where it's like, Oh no, your mom's dead. And they're like, what? And you're like, just kidding. But we are getting divorced. And it's like, you soften the blow that way. I've met your parents. They're very happy. They're lovely people. Yeah. I have, they're, they're, they're doing great. That was just, that's a story I've heard, you know, secondhand. Uh,

But I think it's an interesting theory, and I have wondered about it a lot, whether this was deliberately too much. Because I do think with a lot of this stuff, you just can't look at Control Center and be like, yes, that's correct. And so there's some of it that is maybe just like, well, this is as far as we got. We have to ship the developer beta because WWDC is when it is. But there's also something like I keep going through the thing trying to find...

Sort of what is what is the thing here? And the only one I've landed on is I think the the way that they've rearchitected the menus where like when you tap something to open a menu rather than like opening up a new page, it just sort of opens in place. It like radiates out and then you tap it again and it goes back in. That I think is very cool and is like in service of like anchoring you in place and sort of keeping you where you are without suddenly dropping you into another menu that looks different only to have to go back.

That makes a lot of sense to me. That is the only thing about liquid glass so far that feels like thoughtful and good to me. Oh, I have a totally different opinion than you. No, you don't like them? I saw this in your piece when I was like on my way back to the hotel to record this. And I was like, I'm going to disagree with David about this. Okay. That's just dynamic user interface. Sure. This is another dream that this industry has been chasing for years, that everything will happen in context.

Right. Like all the buttons will be there when you need them and I'll go away when you, when you don't want them or don't need them. And the reality is fundamentally that always confuses everyone.

So you have this idealistic user interface designer who's like, I hate that I've cluttered up the screen with all this UI. Microsoft Word has too many menus and buttons in the toolbar. We're going to get rid of all of them. And then we will intelligently discover what you need exactly when you need it. And then you'll push the button. It'll be right there. And you'll think, I'm a genius. Me, Steve, user interface designer, is a genius. And then the reality is you try to do this.

And you've, you always guess wrong. And then there's no anchors. So people don't know where to find the thing unless the object that usually triggers the context is on the screen, which gets people all turned around, not having used like a glass. I don't know that this will be the problem, but I was watching the demo and I was like, Oh, we were doing the thing.

Every user interface company walks down this path where they're like, it'll just happen in content. You'll push the button and all the right menus will be there and then the button will go away when you don't need it. And on a desktop computer, this problem is a long salt. Just have a menu bar and

And we'll just get over the toolbar and we won't try this anymore. And I think on mobile, because you have the constrained screen size, the temptation is too great. Like, can we make everything disappear? If you really look at what Apple is saying about liquid glass, if what Google is saying about expressive material explosion or whatever it's called, material, expressive material three,

Listen, I was going to leave you with material explosion, but it is material three expressive. There you go. See, I knew all the – I had most of the phenomes right at the very least. The ingredients were there. If you look at all of it, what they're trying to do is get rid of the interface because the screen is so small compared to everything else. So get rid of these elements. We'll bring them back when you need them. And I understand the temptation and I – again, not having used it.

And the thing that always confuses everyone in the end is that the tools go away unless a certain object is on screen. And that thing is not never guaranteed to be on the screen. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, and I think, again, it goes back to this question of like, does Apple just think we all know how to do everything? Because like I even think about the camera app in a bunch of these and we were going to get to this later, but we can talk about this for a minute now. The.

super sparse new iPhone camera app that is just like a photo button and a video button. And then they're like, oh, do you want all the other stuff? That's somewhere else. I'm like, where? I would like those things. I don't know. Allison, how did what did you think of that thing?

I welcome it. I think that the camera app is confusing as hell lately. So maybe it was time to kind of reset and maybe it is a thing of like, we'll take it one step too far and then kind of like relent a little bit. But is it less confusing now or is it just fewer buttons? I, you know, I think it will be one of those things you have to try out. Like the thing I'm definitely on board with is the kind of like toggle between, you know,

still photo capture and video capture. So you're not like scrolling around trying to switch to a video mode. I think that makes a ton of sense. The thing that irritates me is that sometimes the setting I'm looking for is

is in the settings menu under camera and it's the, you know, the like HDR and 4k or whatever option. And sometimes the setting I'm looking for is in the camera app in one of those weird, like tap up here on this little arrow kind of deals. So I don't know if they address that in this redesign camera app, but.

I think it is due for a shakeup. It just turns into a like never ending kind of like sideways scrolling list of modes if you just let it, you know, go year after year. Apple's in a really unique place with the camera app, like industry wide.

Because one of the ways the Android side of the house tries to lower the switching cost from iPhone to Android is by just ruthlessly copying the camera. Because if you pick up a new phone and you can't use the camera, you're done.

And they know it. Sam Byford actually wrote a great piece for us ages ago about the ruthless copying of the camera app on Chinese Android phones in particular. And the reason is we've seen this, I think, with celebrities taking selfies. I can't remember who it was. But there's some video of a celebrity trying to take a selfie with a fan and she can't figure out the Android camera. Oh, yeah. I remember this. Oh, yeah. Who was it?

And all the Android manufacturers know what's going on. They know that if you pick up a new phone and the camera app is too different and you can't just figure it out, like you're done. You're not even like thinking about buying that phone for one more second.

So they've all ruthlessly copied the camera app. Apple doesn't have this problem. They can ruin the camera app and you're not going to leave the iPhone, right? Like they've got to ruin 10 more things on top of it for you to consider switching it. So I think this is them taking advantage of their sort of market position and saying, okay, we can clean up this app in some ways that make sense. And really, I think most people think about it as video and photo. And then they have added the formats back to the top, which I think is tremendously useful.

yeah but again you've got more you know when they announce it they're like and to go to these other modes it's just like one tap away and it's like oh so one more tap are you suggesting it's one more tap right we'll see i i hope they kind of offer a simple mode and a pro mode but that's a dream who knows yeah i mean i i wonder with all of this stuff like how much the design sort of

accrues back to like attach rates like should I just assume that the fact that there's photo and video and nothing else means that almost nobody touches anything other than photo and video and I think intuitively that's probably true and so there is something to like let's just put the two buttons everybody touches in front of them and people who want to find other buttons will find ways to find other buttons yeah like you can you can make your picture a portrait mode photo after the fact so you don't need to go looking for that they'll just you know

You can decide what your photo is after you take it. It's the dream. I like default to shooting in portrait because I forget that all the time. And that's a useful tip that I should.

What did you guys hear from folks about liquid glass? I would say the Internet's reaction was kind of all over the place. Some people who were like, this is the most beautiful thing Apple has ever done. Look at this water droplet. And other people who were like, liquid ass was a phrase a lot of people were using that I very much enjoyed. What was it like in the room? Like, was this a stand up and cheer liquid glass moment? Like, what did it feel like?

To me, it kind of felt like, well, this is what we're doing. You know, there's a little bit. I don't think I got a sense of like, you know, wild appreciation for it or like dislike of it. It just it feels like a reality of like Apple is going to show you how you're going to redesign your app and you're going to find a way to do it.

That was just my read on the room today. There was just a lot more general sarcasm from the developers I talked to at DubDub this time.

You know what Apple didn't talk about? That is not the normal vibe at DubDub. DubDub's a very earnest place. Although I did, yeah, I was texting back and forth briefly with Walt Mossberg. Mostly he was like, what was that song at the end, which we should talk about. But I was like, there's some, you know, they're not 100% happy here. And he was like, in my long experience covering Apple, the developers are never 100% happy. So take it for what it's worth. It's my shout out to him. But like Apple didn't talk about

app store rates. They didn't talk about coming off of 30 or 15%. They didn't talk about web links. There's a whole universe of stuff that developers aren't happy about that they did not hear about. Apple talks about running models locally on the phone. Developers are happy about that because that's faster, right? There's lower latency if you're doing the AI stuff on the phone. It's free, which is cool. They like that.

But now everything has to look different. They're like, I don't know, we're kind of building everything in React on the web and shipping them in wrappers and get over it. And there's just some real questions over whether this stuff comes for free or whether you have to redesign your entire situation from the ground up for a set of iOS customers in a design language that they may not like very much while 80% of the world has Android phones.

Right. And that's a bigger set of question marks than, oh, on iOS, like we can just run some of the stuff on that local AI models for free, which is just a different...

set of incentives right yeah it seems like the upside if you're a developer is in in a liquid glass world everything runs everywhere right which is very clearly what apple's trying to do here right like they talked about this over and over and over that like this is this is a broad system-wide redesign to bring all this stuff together and all this stuff and like fine all that makes sense so you can you can ship an iphone app and it'll work on tv os and look more or less right on

is something great. How long is the TVOS section of this conversation in your notes, David? Is it more than two seconds? Would you like to hear all of the notes that I wrote for TVOS? We can do this part right now. You ready? Yeah. More notifications, new screensavers, connect to a speaker. That's it. That's all I wrote. That's all I got for you. But, but the flip side then is I think, I think as far as I can tell, and from the little bit I've talked to folks today, um,

This actually is going to ask a lot of people because it's not just like new, you know, animation styles or how you move from place to place. It's like you have to move where the buttons are in your app. And that's that's like a real meaningful thing. And they're going to look different. And the way that people navigate them is going to be different. And you're going to look at the way that something scrolls under your button and you're not going to like it. You're going to have to change where the menus go. And I think this is like.

To users, it's going to feel really sort of like a coat of paint. But for developers to do it properly, I think it's going to actually take

Kind of a lot of sort of architectural work, unless Apple has done a really good job of building this stuff into its development kits in a way that you kind of get it for free. And I have not heard a ton of optimism that that is the case. Yeah, especially because, you know, they're going to change it over the next six months. Like if you're designing your app and you're like, well, everything is clear now, so we need to make this make sense. And then Apple makes everything slightly more frosted over the next six months. Yeah.

I think we're in for a long period of wait and see here. Yeah. Did you guys see the home screen mockups with the clear icons? Not a fan. Not a fan. Yeah. I don't want that. To actually more directly answer your question, I think the vibe online was much meaner than the vibe there. Okay. In the way that everything online is always meaner and you show up in person and everyone is like,

Well, it turns out I'm a bit of a coward. That's the nature of every online bully that is forced to contend with the real world. It turns out I'm going to wuss right out. I mean, you're in Apple's house. Everyone's sort of happy. They're playing New Age music all over the place. It's very odd. Yeah. And the people who are there, the people want to be there. But then I went online. I was like, oh, people are tearing this to shreds. And so I think we're just...

We're just in for a period of cooling off. And I do think they're, they just have to change it. If they don't change it, I will come. We can rerun this podcast and I will eat my words. There's no way they're not going to change it. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And one of the things I've enjoyed is there's an accessibility feature in the developer beta that I think it's just called high contrast mode. And it just undoes all of it and looks a thousand times better. It's like it just frosts the glass and it's like, guys, just just frost the glass. It's like it's fine. What if there was a little bit of color, but it didn't put the words behind the words so that I couldn't read any of the words anymore? Like, wouldn't that be great? What we need is a slider. How much how much frost in the glass?

I like that idea. Or like a clicker you can use to unfrost and unfrost the glass. Oh, that'd be great. Like a privacy screen. Yeah, exactly. Like those windows they have. This is what I'm saying. This is a good idea. So, okay, before we get into the specific platform stuff, Nila, you made a face at me earlier when I said they didn't even talk all that much about Apple intelligence. Yeah.

How what's what's your sort of overall read on like how much today was an AI day? Like, did it feel like an AI day to you? Maybe in the way that it should have the first time. Okay. Right. So everything they announced had some little component of machine learning smarts built into it. Right. So much of what they announced across the board and their operating systems are like the phone app is a lot smarter now. It's like.

And these are, again, these are Android features, but like it'll wait on hold for you. And then when a person on the other end picks up, it'll say like, I'm coming and like ring you. You just need some AI-ish features to pull that off, right? To detect the hold music and wait and like do the thing. There's just so much of that throughout the operating system now. You're like, oh, this is, these are table stakes AI features for a phone operating system at this point.

what they didn't announce was Apple intelligence, the part where you just talk to Siri and it like does stuff for you, right? Which I'm just going to keep hammering this point home. That's what people want AI to be. They're talking to chat GPT all day long and thinking it's alive. Yeah. So you're like, we did AI too. And it's like, what is it? And it's like, well, you can screenshot a webpage and then buy a lamp. And it's like, well, that's not what we were thinking about. Right. Right. Gen Moji is not digital God. Yeah.

What was the one today with the two? They're like, we combined a sloth with a light bulb. Sloth with a light bulb. To indicate that I was slow to get the joke. Yeah. Guys, like, first of all, this is a great PhD thesis in modern communication. Like, this is a trillion dollar company. It's one of it. It depending on the stock price, it is the richest company in the history of the world.

On any given day, and you're like, we did a sloth in a light bulb to indicate that I was a lot for him to get a joke. What is going on? Stop it. Don't do this. What people want is to talk to the computer in a natural language interface and have it talk back to them and do stuff for them. That's the only thing that can ever deliver on the promise of something called Apple intelligence.

It just is. And so all this other stuff, it is AI. You look down the list of features. There are AI features through and through. There are machine learning features through and through. So the reason I made the face is, one, every time you speak, I make a face. And I often have to hold myself back from revealing it. But I'm quite tired today, so it just kind of – That's attractive. But they screwed up last year by just sort of like mashing up like text generators and writing tools with like –

you know, super Siri. And this year they just talked, they didn't talk about that at all. And they gave you a sloth with a light bulb and like AI is here. And it's like, we have to get ourselves straight. There's exactly one big thing that AI is going to do. And no company has shipped it yet at scale in a way that works. And we're all just going to keep working on it and that's fine or whatever. You can have whatever feelings you want about it. In the meantime, all of this other stuff is actually quite useful because

And it's kind of like unfair to punish it with this isn't digital content. Right. It is genuinely useful that the phone can detect more scams in messages and in the phone app and like shunt those people off into like a waiting room.

You can't be too mad at that stuff, especially when it's happening locally on the phone. So I think you see more and more of that happening on the phone. They're finding more and more places to use the tools. They're just the only real way you can deliver on something called Apple intelligence is by letting you talk to Siri and having it talk back to you. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think I was thinking about this a lot with all the translation stuff, which kept showing up across a bunch of these platforms. So they're doing like real time on device stuff.

cross app translation stuff, whether it's like, you know, translation of lyrics in Apple Music, I think was a neat one or translation on calls. It's like that's

Pure AI. Like for that stuff to work is pure AI. That is the stuff. And it's like, I think I like the phrase, we shouldn't punish it for not being God. It's like, it's true. That stuff is like, but it is just, it's just software. Like before, before chat GPT, we would have just called this software. Right. And it's like machine learning has been around for a long time. We've been doing this for a long time. This stuff is, is cool and interesting and useful. And it is better because these software,

Large language models exist. That stuff has been like a leap in a lot of that technology, but it's not God. And so I think you're right that like Apple should have talked about a lot of this stuff this way last year. And I think the vibe probably would have been really different.

But instead you promise God. How do you, like, you can't walk back from promising God. Yeah. You're going to talk to Siri and it's going to remember who you had a meeting with while you're like cowering in the antechamber of the coffee shop. Yeah. That's the ad that they had to pull. Right. And remember, that's a lot. There's a lot of steps between here and there to pull that off. And that has nothing to do with whether you can incrementally incrementally improve the experience using the phone today. But that's what everybody wants. And when I say that's what everybody wants, what I mean is ChachiP is one of the most popular consumer apps ever.

Maybe the most popular consumer app ever. People just want to talk to their phone in that way. And Apple's argument is, well, great, they're doing it on the iPhone today. They're downloading the ChatGPT app, and when you subscribe to it, we take 30% of that, and we're good. What more do you want from us? And the pressure is, everybody understands, well, maybe I can get you to buy a different device, if that actually occurs. Google very much is like, maybe you'll just say stuff to Google, and we'll go and do everything for you, and that's the app platform of the future. Right.

Apple has to make the turn and they haven't expressed how they're going to make the turn. Right. Yeah. If they had kind of set up the Siri remembers who you talk to at a party stuff is like the future, you know, this is kind of the North star where we're headed. I think that would have been one thing that they literally presented it. Like it's here. It can, it's going to do this, you know, any minute now. And that's why it just feels weird to kind of go back into like,

oh, these are machine learning updates. It was like, okay, you had us going all the way to Siri fixes your social life to we're back in square one now. If it had all kind of built in a more linear fashion, I think it would have made sense, but it's a little whiplashy right now. We'll probably come to this when we get to the Mac, but if you look at what they were showing off in Spotlight, it's right there.

Right? You can just search across your Mac. You can type in shortcuts to get it to send emails. Like all this stuff you can do where the puzzle pieces are very clearly in place, but they just haven't been put together. And in the new Spotlight, you can sort of put them together yourself. I don't know if any of that's going to work either. Yeah. Let's start talking about the platforms. We should get into all of that. But first, let's take a break. We're going to go summon V-Song. We're going to take a break, and then we're going to talk about

Nilay, because I love you, we'll talk about the Mac first. We'll be right back. We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at Schwab.com.

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for your Emmy consideration in all categories, including Outstanding Drama Series. All right, we're back. V-Song is here. Hi, V. Welcome. You made it out of Apple Park. We're very happy you're here. In one piece. It's not a small task sometimes. Wait, can I tell a story about being at Apple events with V when you're live-logging? Oh my God. Okay, sure. Sure.

Normally, everyone's like, you know, busy. They're focused. They're looking down. V is like a mystery science theater 3000, but of sighs and moans. Just like, ugh. And especially in the fitness segments, where they're like, a personalized health coach will walk you through all of the data we've been scanning from your body. And he's just like, meh, the whole time. Yeah.

It's very entertaining. It's true. Well, at least it's entertaining. I am not aware that I'm making those noises half the time. No, that much is also very clear to everyone. Involuntary, full-body reactions to what is happening on stage. V is like the real-time audience reaction meter, like from 1 to 10 at all times. It's very good. Again, if you have the means, I highly recommend it.

You know, I think someone reached out to me on Blue Sky and was like, it's been an honor watching you live blog. And I was like, oh my God, what?

It's terrifying. My experience of what it looks like to watch someone live blog is they just sit there until they sunburn typing on their computer in Apple Park. And that's the live blog experience. Oh, no. I had three bottles of sunscreen and I was making several pale white men who did not bring sunscreen put sunscreen on their face today. I can confirm this. Both Allison and V said it was their mission to get people to wear sunscreen today. Yeah. And we did it.

I'm very proud of both of you. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about platforms. So we've talked about the big picture stuff. V, you missed us having a lot of feelings about liquid glass. I suspect there will be ample time to have more feelings about liquid glass, which again, I hate more every single time I say it out loud. Yeah.

Let's talk about the Mac first. I have this in rough order of how interested I am in it personally. But Nilay, for you, I switched one and two because you are just dying to talk about Spotlight. So the big news, Mac OS 26, it's called Tahoe. It has the new design. It has all the liquid glass stuff. But the big new feature, and I would say potentially the most universally exciting thing at all of WWDC was new Spotlight.

Do you want to explain what new spotlight is and why you're excited about it? Yeah. Although I think it's a tie. I think it's new spotlight and the iPad stuff. Those are the things that I heard about. That was going to be my number one. We were going to do that first, but for you, we're doing spotlight.

I think we can move through the new spotlight pretty quickly. So spotlight is when you hold down command space on a Mac, it initially just started as like a search of all your files. And then they started adding more features to it and I could start like search the web. And now they're just adding the capabilities to take actions across your computer to it in weird ways. Like you can launch shortcuts from it.

Which implies that you have a library of shortcuts, which implies that David has to talk about shortcuts, which implies that David is going to receive hate mail from many dozens of shortcuts fans that exist in this world. Just know that I hear you and that you're wrong. And that's okay. And then, you know, they've added stuff they should have had from the beginning. Like all of the menu items and whatever app you're using are now available on Spotlight. So you can just like start typing a menu command and issue a menu command and

And then there's, you know, because shortcuts are more powerful and have access to some amount of AI, you can start to take more complicated commands that feel more natural language. And you're just inching towards what I keep describing as like a magic command line on your computer where you can just open it and type it and tell it what to do. And then it goes off and does something. And that is so close to just saying what you want to Siri. Yeah.

To the point where the technology mechanisms behind the new Spotlight are the same as what they talked about with Super Siri last year. It's the app-intense framework where Spotlight is just talking to apps through this new framework that eventually Siri will use to talk to apps. And so they're inching towards a place where you have a command line that is not just like a...

take properly formatted commands, command line, but just you open it up and you start typing and stuff starts happening. And that's awesome.

Whether any of this will work or any developers will support app intents or, importantly, whether anyone is using applications on a Mac that aren't just web apps and a web browser, all of this remains to be seen. David, I'm very curious for your take on this because apps like Raycast have existed forever. There's a universe of apps that take over command space to do stuff online.

in the productivity world. And I can't tell if all of them just got Sherlocked or none of them feel competitive at all or what the, what the overlap really is. They will tell you things like, uh, we're so glad the space is expanding and we think this really validates our last thing you see before you die. That's right. We're so glad that others are, are, you know, really believing in this thing that we've been, they are all going to be petrified because this is, this is the thing that,

that is now good enough that people might not switch to Raycast or Alfred, right? So like, based on what we've seen, these other apps, specifically Raycast and Alfred, which are like the two biggest ones in this space and have been around for a long time and are like enormously powerful, right? They have these huge extension libraries that let you essentially like

plug them into all kinds of other apps and all kinds of other uses. And you can essentially do anything on your computer through one of these apps if you program it correctly enough. And now Raycast in particular is also like deep into AI stuff. So you can interact with AI models just right through Raycast that way. But it's a lot of that is predicated on the fact that Spotlight is really, really bad. And it's like Spotlight is pretty bad. It's a useful like

meh search engine for the stuff on your computer. That's like as good as it has been for a very long time. And now it's going to be much better than that if this stuff works.

To the point where, A, it might teach people that this is a thing you can do. I don't know if y'all have this experience, but on my phone, I use Spotlight all the time to find and open apps. But most of the other people in my life, when they take my phone, don't just instinctively pull down and search for Spotify. They go hunting for the Spotify logo. And I'm just like, this is just not an ingrained use case. Spotlight is not a mainstream tool on any of these platforms. And I think...

I think this might be the turn that helps it start to get there. And I just think that's super interesting. Like forget what people actually use it for. The idea that this is now like a text box becomes the way I interact with my computer. It's the first time that's been true in 40 years. And I think that's really fascinating. Like V, are you a spotlight person?

I am. And I was a really big Alfred person for a long time. And then I just stopped one day. I don't really know why I did, but I just did. So yeah, to your point, I use Spotlight nonstop on my phone. And it's because I have too many freaking apps. So like I, we were talking about how bad my eyesight is. I'll have time to look at my giant iPhone screen to find a tiny little app on the whatever page. So yeah, I'm a big Spotlight user. So yeah.

I mean, it does suck. Alfred is better.

I'm sure I haven't used Raycaster, but I'm sure that's also better. So yeah, I'm kind of excited to see how it works. I'm just super skeptical that it will work the way I want. Cause I just feel like anytime they say it's going to make your life better. I'm like, yeah, I can't wait. This isn't what I wanted close, but so I'm, I'm reserving judgment, but this is the peril of the magic command line, right? Right. To make it work in a way that makes it useful. Yeah.

You have to be able to type anything you want into it. This is why like my, like windows and mice and graphical user interfaces took over from old school command lines. Cause you like show a blinking cursor to people that can only accept certain commands. Like that just made computers inaccessible. You're like, here's some pictures you can move around. Like, okay, everybody can use this. You want to bring it back. It has to be able to take whatever you put into it, which is where LLMs and all of this AI stuff should shine. And like, that's the gap. And that's why I keep saying like,

They talked about that stuff and they showed you how it would work. And then they didn't connect it to Siri because they can't make that promise again. Because that's also how Siri should work, where you just say whatever you want and it figures it out. I think it's partly that. I also think... I'm realizing more the more we talk that the Siri reputational hole is so deep for all of this stuff for Apple that if it...

if it were to have connected that to Siri and it was like, oh, you know, spotlight is going to let you through Siri. So everybody would have immediately been like, oh, this will never work. There's no chance. Tomatoes thrown at the screen. Yeah. So I think, I think like I'm starting to realize maybe Apple is going out of its way to not connect this stuff back to Siri in order to maybe convince you that it can actually still work because the, the brand whole, uh,

that Siri has just like burned through Apple is pretty nuts. And Siri just went off two times while I was saying that. So I'm sorry to everyone watching and listening. This is what we do here. But no, I think, I think you're right that spotlight could like, it could feel that way now. And there's nothing sort of technically impossible about a lot of the stuff Apple is trying to do here. Like the app intense thing is very smart. If developers get on board, the commands it was doing are mostly pretty easy. Like what was the example he gave? He typed Apple,

SM to send a message like that's solved technology this stuff works it's important to kind of pull this apart there's SM to send a message was they had made like a quick key shortcut which you can do right now it's like a text expander but they had mapped it to a shortcut and then the shortcut could do stuff

So this is like there are layers of automation in the Mac that they're like, look at what you can do as a Mac power user. So that was hitting spotlight and shortcuts. I was thinking that was just a like a system level thing. Okay, that makes me like. Well, so the system level thing, this is where I think it got particularly confusing. The demo on their website right now, if you go to apple.com slash OS slash Mac OS, you scroll down, you can like look at this thing.

They open Spotlight. It says biggest spotlight ever. And here's the graphic that's animating on the screen. And he types send. And that brings up a list of commands. And so one of them is send in messages. And you click that. And then you type, let's meet at the studio. And you type two. And then it has a list of your contacts. So you see it's prompting you to issue a command that looks an awful lot like a shortcut.

This is a lot of like puzzle pieces, right? And so what you, what they're getting at is, okay, all the apps in your system will tell spotlight all of the things they can do. And you'll start typing some stuff you want done. And we'll like auto complete the actions you want taken, the data you want taken and like the, the recipients of your message, which is another data in another field. And then we'll like send that command to messages, which will then send this thing off.

And that is just like a hop away from making a shortcut, which is itself a hop away from having a quick key assigned to it. Like, and so you're, oh, we're just stacking all of these capabilities and we're making the interface spotlight. And eventually you're going to be able to just say out loud, send this to whoever at what time. And like, we'll just, we'll just parse it all and do it correctly.

And there's like a little turn in there that's the natural language turn. But in the meantime, it's type, as you start typing it, like pre-populates all the commands and prompts you for what you want to put. Like what variables you want to pass through. This is all very smart. It's very clever. If they announced this stuff five years ago, like this is the future of computers. Here in 2025, it's,

Johnny Ive and Sam Altman are like, what we're doing is we're going to put Jesus in a necklace. And it's like, you're just in a whole different context. And I think it's very clever. The idea that all the commands that are available from all the applications on your computer are sort of just available in a command line that is universally accessible is wild shit. But all those application developers have to do it

And then people have to use it. And the thing that's staring them in the face is literally chat GPT being like, what would say anything? And I'll lie to you until you're happy. Yeah. Like that's, that's just a radically different context to be in. So I will say, by the way, what you just described is, is pure Raycast. Like you just described Raycast. Um,

And the thing that Raycast did that was so smart is like you can build extensions that plug into other apps. And when you do that, it sort of declares a bunch of specific actions you can do and things that you can look for. And you can map those things to keyboard shortcuts. And it is both very complicated and also kind of very simple at its core. Right? Like what you, none of what you just described requires...

groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence. That's just computer stuff. Yeah. It's just it's just here. And there's there's another thing Spotlight can do where when you're in an app, you can invoke Spotlight to search the menu inside of that app, which like every Photoshop user is going to be thrilled about. Right. Because suddenly, instead of navigating through six trees of menus, I can just search for the menu item I want to click and press enter and click. But the problem with that is every Photoshop user

also now largely a figma user and figma is an app is expressed inside of a web browser that has no idea that any of this shit is happening right and the every electron app which is like a you know cheap and dirty way of getting web apps to look native on a on a mac or pc and i know the electron there's some very good electron apps out there there's some very bad electron apps so they're not going to know about this stuff they're not going to do this stuff

And so you really just, Apple's betting on developers, particularly on the Mac, participating in an ecosystem that right now they have no incentive to participate in. Right. This whole thing makes way more sense to me on an iPhone, honestly, as both as like a way I want to use it

And as a place you can actually do it because they don't, that same problem does not exist in the same way on the iPhone. Yes. Apple has militant control over its platform. Look, you feel about it however you want, but the facts on the ground are it's all native apps. And, and like to V's point, I have a million apps. I don't know where any of them are. I would actually like to not have to organize them. And I would like to not have to go to them and open them and look for them. I would like to just,

pull down and say, play the song and it'll play the damn song. That's how it should work on my phone. I firmly believe that. It kind of works that way on your phone today. You can just say, play a song. Play the song. I gotta test this now too. It wants me to play the...

It just started playing Play That Song by Train on Spotify. Oh, no. Oh, I'm sorry about that. The computers work today. That one might have been a bad example. But if you want to play any song other than Play That Song, you're in trouble. This is why we need to build digital God. Can I have $1 trillion, please? I'm sort of reminded of the Google search bar and how that kind of...

changed over the years where it was you know you would just type things to it and search google but then we all learned eventually like oh it'll do a math equation for you or you can just convert currency and it's sort of like the scope of what the search bar became you changed i i don't know i can see that happening with spotlight like i had to train myself to use it um

I just had the muscle memory of like looking for my apps. And then once you use it, it was like, no, this is, this is better. And other things pop up too. And if it's going to start prompting me to like do the thing I was, I was trying to take three steps to do and it'll do it in one tap. Like,

Yeah, I'll come back to that. So what I actually use Spotlight for most on my Mac is doing equations. So that's Tetris. There you go. Yeah, I like that. I don't want to open a calculator app. I don't want to type it into another thing. I'm just going to write my little equation while calculating various things.

in Spotlight. It's my little calculator friend. Yeah, that works. And that's like, yeah, and again, there's so much stuff you can plug into this if you can get people A, to put their apps into it and B, to use it. And I think like the reason I'm so interested in this is this feels like the biggest bet on Spotlight as an interface in kind of that I can ever remember from Apple. Spotlight has just like been there for a long time. And it's just like, what if there was a plan for this? And this feels like a plan.

up plan, which I think is very cool. Other Mac stuff before we move on. Stop me if any of this is interesting to any of you. Shortcuts, automations, which means you can run or you consider shortcuts to run at a time or when an event happens on your computer. All my shortcuts nerds get excited. Sorry to everyone else because you'll never learn how to build shortcuts. The journal app coming into Mac. People excited about that. Wait, can I say one thing about shortcuts? Please. There are new shortcuts that are like LLM based.

So really interesting ideas. Like if an image matching this description shows up in this folder, take this action requires the computer to be able to look at an image and decide whether it has a tree in it or whatever you specified. Fascinating. Then you can be like, take my notes from the notes app and look at the text and then transcribe it if it matches whatever.

And then summarize that like just interesting shortcuts that require you to have access to an LN in specific ways are now just like there, whether or not they will be useful or function on time, right? Which is a major criticism of shortcuts that some people have. And some people do not apparently, uh, well remains to be seen, but that kind of stuff is like pretty interesting. Like,

Image-based workflows that require the computer to understand the contents of the image, that's a whole universe of new things that people will be able to build. Totally. I think my problem with the shortcut stuff is that it's still not smart enough for me because you still have to be the person

putting all of the components together. You have to be the one defining what things are going to be used. And then, of course, you can prompt the shortcut. But then you have to be you just have to use too much of your brain to make the smart shortcut work, which is the current problem that I think a lot of people who don't have functional developer brains and are like good at coding or these like different logic trees have with shortcuts because you just

don't know what you can do with it. You don't know how to think in that way, which has been my problem with shortcuts this entire time. I want to use shortcuts. I love it. Like when you go into the little gallery and you're like, oh, I could do this. This is a little fun. There's no like, you know, I asked Apple and I was just like, hey, so can...

the Apple intelligence just see the things that I do and what I'm doing on like a bit regular basis and make that suggestion for me? Is that what we're having here? And they're like, no, you still got to use your little brain and then have the AI help you. It's supplemental. And I was like, but that's not what I want. I want to turn my brain off and have the shortcut happen. Yeah, you want the thing that's like every time you download a picture of this, you put it over there. Do you want me to just start doing that for you? Like that's just sitting right there.

That's just super clippy. Yeah. I mean, that's where we're, that's where we've been going, buddy. That's what I want. That's what we're doing. No. That's what we want. And you still have to make the super clippy. You can't just like offload the making of the super clippy. So I think that's the most disappointing thing about it so far. It's a step in the right direction. It's just not where I want it to be yet. Well, you know what? I agree that like either you have automation brain or you don't.

When I get home, turn on all the lights. You can just say it out loud and then actually programming any smart home platform to make that happen requires you to like

if then statements in a way that some people are like, I'm just never going to do this. And some people are like, that's my whole personality. Right. And it's one or the other from what I can tell. And the dream is that, you know, even when you talk to the Alexa people or whoever, that the smart home platforms will start to do that for you. It's still not the case. And even if you look at sort of where the cutting edge of AI agent stuff is and kind of these new look platforms like N8N, which I'm a little bit obsessed with, it

It's not you don't have logic gate automation brain. It's that the stuff you can put, like the Lego blocks of the if-then statements, are vastly more powerful than they were before. And you have all these kids making TikToks using NNN to create agents doing all kinds of wild stuff. Because the tools they've been given are more powerful, not the tool to author the automation. And that dynamic, I think, will always exist. And here, I think you're just seeing it play out in shortcuts where the

They haven't figured out the technology problem of making the people who don't have automation brain like find this to be a rewarding experience. And maybe they never will. But they're giving more and more powerful tools to people who are like, I love this. And somehow that has to come together because it does feel like the future of all computing is just telling computers what to do and assuming that they will do it. And that requires the back end to work in this way.

But in the meantime, they're just like, here's some more powerful Legos. Like, go build whatever weird Lego structure you want out of if-then statements. Right. And then two-thirds of the world looks at those and goes, why do I have all these Legos in front of me? I'm going to leave. And then one-third of those people sends David angry emails about shortcuts. And I welcome them.

I will, as I like to do, show you the opening screen of a new shortcut and you can tell me what to do about it. The first word is scripting and we're done. All right. Let's talk about the iPad, which I think was the other kind of big hit moment and is also the thing I have been playing with for the last couple of hours and have a lot of feelings about already. iPadOS 26, the same thing, liquid glass, lots of new apps, but like,

V, they kind of just made this thing a Mac. Did they just kind of make this thing a Mac? They did. They made it a Mac. You know, like we've been talking for years about just let me use Mac OS on the iPad. And they were like, no, but kind of.

So, you know, I was watching that through the live blog and I was like, David Pierce is like screeching at this moment somewhere in the US. Is it a happy screech or is it an angry screech? I don't know, but it's a screech. The screech is happening. I've just been burned so many times. Do you know what I mean? Every time Apple is like, we've invented a new way to move windows around. And I keep being like, what if you we already invented the only one.

that needs to exist and it's just put them wherever you want. So I don't know, whatever you invented, I like it less, but they did it better this time. By the way, I have an answer from some, you know, on the ground conversations about why

Why they tried everything else first. You're not going to like it, but this is the answer I was told. Because they hate me personally. Yes, they're like, we've run out of ways to torture David Pierce. No, the iPad is a touch device, and they were never, ever, ever going to trade away against the zero lag responsiveness of the touchscreen on the iPad.

And so they were like, it would be too hard to allow full Mac multitasking and multi-windowing and apps all running at once because we can trade away against the latency of the Mac's interface. This happens. You can click on stuff on a Mac and nothing happens. They're like, oh, that's weird. If you touch a screen and nothing happens, they're like, this thing's dead.

Right? Like you can see the mouse pointer always moves on a Mac. When the mouse pointer stops moving, you're like, my Mac is dead. The mouse pointer moves. You click on stuff and nothing happens. Like, oh, this thing's being slow. You touch an iPad screen. Nothing happens. Rick, it's dead. And there's no other indication that it's still alive. So their argument was we needed this much horsepower on the latest blah, blah, blah generation of blah, blah, blah, blahs so that we could finally allow you to do full window multitasking in this way. I didn't say you were going to like it. And I can already see David's face.

But I'm telling you, this is a thing that a few people there told me. I buy the premise. I don't buy that the technology did not exist before today. Do you know what I mean? Just like, sure. But so the new multitasking system is like, it's almost free form multitasking. It is not exactly, there are a couple of rules you have to follow. And it also, a lot of it as ever depends on the actual design.

design of the apps themselves. I installed the beta and I've been playing around with it. And if you want to just pull 12 apps in and have them all sitting on top of each other, you can. And it's awesome. And no one should do it because it breaks immediately and doesn't make any sense. I was going to ask, what is the maximum window count that you can have on an iPad? I believe I've had eight.

at once on the screen so far, which is already like three or four more than makes any plausible sense to have. But I did it and it was there and it was working and that is something. It's a little confusing now because there are

So the framework is basically you have your home screen with the app icons. And then the sort of mental model is there is now just like a screen over here that you put apps on. You can either open an app full screen or you tap the little –

bar in the corner and drag it to whatever size you want it to be. And then it sits there. You can drag another one on top of it. You can change the size depending on how they've laid the app out. Some of them will only do like iPad size, smaller iPad size and iPhone size. Some will only do one. Some you can like freeform move around as you want to.

But they all just kind of live on this one screen together, right? All the apps. And then if you tap on the new little menu, it gives you the red, yellow, green buttons. You hit the green one, it full screens it. If you hit the yellow one, it minimizes it. And if you hit the red one, it closes it. And if you were to say, David, what's the difference between minimizing an app on an iPad and closing an app on an iPad? I absolutely could not tell you.

No idea. In both cases, it just like animated retreats back into the icon. And then when you tap it, it opens again. And I don't know what the difference is. I will say Apple has never, from the beginning of the three, the stoplight metaphor for the windows, they've never really known what the other two buttons are for. No. Like they've always known what red is for. Yes. And the other ones are like, well, we have the stoplight.

stuff they're for stuff it's like when i you know how you have there's clean clothes in your house there's a dirty clothes and then there's the like uh you know i'm i might not be done with this that's like the yellow light one that's just a little pile on the dresser of like maybe i'll use that it's the one you smell and you're like i can get away with it yeah you're like yeah this is still okay yeah the green button in particular for a long time on the mac was just like a

whatever we think this time like it didn't it just sort of my memory of it is it just randomly changed the size of the app to whatever it felt like yeah that's what it's just like green means go you know what i mean like whatever you think go means in this context it's that's what might happen yeah and i think on the ipad you have the same between red and yellow

It's fine. It's fine. Sure. It's whatever. But there are a bunch of things about it that I think are pretty clever. Like it has a little, they demoed this, the sort of little flick gesture that you can do to, to anchor it to one side of the screen or the other. Uh, that works well, but like a lot of Apple things, you have to like really learn how to do it. It's like a, you have to do kind of a half flick to like the middle of the side. If you flick it too hard, it just like bounces off and comes back. Wait, do you, are you flicking with your finger or using the mouse?

So you can do it with the mouse. I've just mostly been doing it with my thumbs. So you've been like Steam Deck and apps all over again. Absolutely. But now to your point about the mouse, there is now like an honest to God pointer, which makes such a bigger difference than I realized. Like there's been, you could move a cursor around, but it was a little circular thing. Now it feels like you have a mouse on the computer and you can click.

Small things now. And it really like those two things. Plus, there's now a preview app, which is just for PDFs, which speaking of like a whole industry that just immediately got Sherlocked, like, sorry to everybody who built the $10 app for editing PDFs because you're out of business. You're fine. You deserve to die and you know it. That's fair. I don't feel that bad. You're a weird subscription NFT PDF viewer. Like,

You should have been dead a long time ago. Yeah. All the free trials I have signed up for to get Acrobat for one day to be able to edit a PDF. I no longer feel bad. You're not seeing the first Batman movie, the 89 Batman, where the Joker says, I'm glad you're dead and starts cackling. I want you to picture my face. Do an AI of my face doing that.

And PDF apps. Love that for you. So yeah, put those things together. And then there's a bunch of changes to the Files app where now there's a list view. They made a big deal out of a list view. Once a year, there is a thing at WWDC where they're like, we've invented a computer feature from the 70s. Can I say, they did a whole screen that was just...

files in the dock like just in bold like beautiful print and i was like oh well that's going in the live blog because it's so silly yeah and then they're like oh do we're going to explain to you how it works and how it works is exactly like it does on the mac you tap on it and it opens up and shows you the files and then you can click the files and drag them somewhere

Like, what was the what was the thing last year where they were they were showing some kind of multitasking thing? And Craig Federighi was like, he dragged something from one screen to another on. It was like the external display thing. And he like it was he was just his mind was blown that you could have something on one display and then you could have it on the other. And then it's just like, we're just doing this again. Most of the iPad features where they just made the iPad and Mac.

were, I think, targeted specifically at me and my complaints about the iPad over the years. They're like, let's talk about files. And it's like, yeah, dude, I told you to do this a decade ago. But they ended it all in a very self-deprecating way. They're like, can you imagine a pointer and a menu bar in Windows? Who would have thought of these ideas? That's true. They know. They know what they're doing. But the opportunity with the iPad is you get to have these ideas from a fresh start.

Because every year you can change them, apparently. You know? And, like, the thing that's holding the iPad back is not the multi-window model. It's that iPad apps are bad. And until they open up the App Store in some way to solve that problem, well, the iPad apps are still going to be bad. And you can have as many, you know, sort of, like, cut-down versions of real apps as you want on your iPad and as many Windows as you want. But that's your problem. And they did nothing to address that. No. I mean, that has forever been...

The thing Apple just can't figure out how to do for some reason is convince anyone other than like a very specific set of creative tools. Like you can get honest to God, like professional class creative tools on the iPad.

They're very good. And you can, if you are a creative person, you want to do your job. Ironically, it is easier to do your like fancy 3D modeling job on the iPad than it is to send emails all day on the iPad. Like, it's crazy. This is where we are. But I think you're right. But I also think to the extent that what maybe has been gating people from doing that is the sense of like,

I can do a lot of stuff at once and move quickly between things and sort of feel powerful on an iPad the way I feel powerful on a Mac. This theoretically, at least we'll see how it all actually works. But like this kind of solves all of my problems in a way that I have not experienced before with an iPad. I look forward to the years worth of I try to use an iPad to replace my Mac coverage to come. Yeah.

I suspect everyone's going to end up right back on their Macs, but yeah. Yeah. I, I, I inevitably, I am going to write that story in the next three months. So I shouldn't, I shouldn't really give anybody any crap. Like I had a second kid and decided to go all in on an iPad. It's like a thing that's coming for me. Um, let's see other stuff in the iPad. Um, there again, also got a phone app. Uh, is it weird that there's just now a phone app everywhere? I've been having a lot of like,

Galaxy brand feelings about this, but maybe it doesn't matter. Just make phone calls. Who cares? Yeah, I think Apple realizes that messaging is like a core use case of every kind of computer now. And it's weird to only tie their ecosystem to

the like cell voice network that exists on the phone because they also have messages and FaceTime and all this other stuff and they control your phone they can just pass like real phone audio to it like no one else limits themselves in this way but can you imagine the phone app going off on all of your applications

devices at the same time because it's there. That happens today. Yeah, it already does. Do you not, does 10 things not ring when you get a phone call? I know, but like even more. Yeah. By the way, what the thing they didn't solve anywhere is like notifications or prioritizing which devices get notifications. Like the main problem in their ecosystem as expressed the, to your point, uh, like the phone app goes off everywhere without any sense of what you are or like where you are or what you're doing.

It would be nice if they were like, also, we've made it so that notifications consistently show up where they need to be. No mention of that. The other thing was local video and audio capture. They made like a real outreach to podcasters in this one. They're like, if you're if you want to record all your stuff locally while you're on video calls, now you can.

I think this is a main complaint of creators who use iPads a lot, from what I gather. That's true. Because we're recording this in this app called Riverside, and that just is not a choice on an iPad. You're running a local recording while you're doing that. It's interesting that they didn't express some API to let two apps pull audio and video and record them themselves, which is what every Mac in the world can do. But they're like, we'll do it for you.

And then they made a big demo. They made a big deal out of it. And then you can share your local files. And it's like, yeah, that's what you would-- if you recorded my local files, you'd want to share them. That makes no sense.

But what they did is they came after platforms like Riverside with that. That is the thing that a Riverside would do. There's a bunch of other ones there. But that's what a lot of creators have asked for on the iPad. This is a great mobile podcasting setup, but for the fact that I can't actually record locally, well, they've solved the problem. And yeah, there's a real...

Do any creators actually use iPads? We could go down right now, but let's avoid that. Allison, you are a creator who uses an iPad for everything, right? You did not seem as excited as I was about multitasking. So how do you feel about the iPad? You know what? So many, many years ago, I was between jobs.

and I had to like give away my work computer and didn't have a computer for a while and went to Best Buy. I was like, iPad and a keyboard. This is computer, right? It was like all the pieces are here. I like bought it all and went back home and I was like, oh no, this is not a computer. This doesn't let you do the thing you need to do. It just like, it's so funny. Like

how many ways Apple will give you this and give you that. And they're like, well, you can record locally because you're a creator who's traveling with an iPad. So you can do this computer thing on your iPad or we'll give you the red, green and yellow buttons. And, but yeah,

you know, won't go up to the line of this is a full computer. It's just, it is a very interesting kind of dance, I think, to see them do. Somebody once described the difference to me, and this is years ago, but I think it's still true, is when you buy a Mac,

you buy a computer and when you buy an iPad, you buy a list of things you're allowed to do. And I think about that all the time. And I think it's so true that it's like, and the list is getting longer. And to Apple's credit, the list is more sort of power user friendly than ever, but it is still a list of things you can do. And it is not a computer in that same way. Let's talk about iOS, which is shockingly third on the list for me. And I went through this list and was like,

iOS is kind of not that exciting. Like, to me, the Messages app is the most interesting thing happening in iOS 26. Well, you don't think the dynamic clock on the lock screen is worth five minutes of keynote time? Long clock. Get ready for long clock. Long clock.

Yeah. I mean, it's, the clock gets dynamically less long when you get notifications. Dynamically less long is, as a, that's a, that's a short, that's a bad date. That's what that is.

Oh, no. Well, now we're going to make that shirt. I love that. Dynamically less long. 2026. Vote the Virgin. Well, first of all, shout out to Joanna Stern, who was on this podcast on Friday demanding typing indicators in group chats. And she got them. That's chaotic. Yeah, okay. That's so chaotic. You said this in the live blog, and I assumed everyone would be happy about this feature. Why are you not happy about this feature? Do you...

Do you not have group chat drama happening all the time? Have you seen this TikTok series of this woman who just she is acting out nine people in a group chat and just like the social dynamics that happen in this group chat typing indicators? What's going to happen is you're going to have the group chat and the side chats going on. And

Everyone's going to be ganging up on, let's call her Betty. And Betty is just going to put a little question in and then she's going to see 5,000 different people doing the typing indicator, stopping, typing, stopping, typing, stopping. Betty's going to have an anxiety attack breakdown. And then, you know, the group chat is going to implode and someone is going to just friendships will end over typing indicators as well. Yeah.

relationships because you're just going to see someone typing for a really long time and two family members are going to go, oh my God, what's she type? She's typing forever. What's she going to say something? And then they're going to put it in the wrong group chat. Friendships and families will end. I am telling you right now, typing indicators are dangerous. I've never been happier to be an old dad. Yeah.

Yeah, my group chats are not that dramatic. You know what? I love this for you. I think that's blessed. My group chats are cursed. We're going to find out if we can turn them off or somehow make them bigger and louder. Because I think you want to go in one of two directions. I think four dots for V's group chats. I think the angrier your message, the bigger the indicator gets, it

It can be really chaotic. I think just like, where are we safe from typing indicators? Like they've crept into so many messaging apps. It's like, everybody's got to know when I'm typing a message in Slack and I change my mind. Like I have to consider that. Now it's going to be in the group chat and you have to think about that dynamic. Yeah, I can...

I think I side with V on this. That's exactly it. You know when you're in Slack and then someone says something and then you just see several people are typing. You're bringing that to the group chat on your phone now. It's going to be something. Someone's going to say something controversial and then several people typing indicators are happening. And then it's just... But that's Nilay's dream. Just drop a bomb in the group chat and cause a several people are typing. And he's just like...

I did it every day. Wait, real quick poll of the group here. Are y'all read receipts people? Do you read receipts on or off? No, thank you.

No, I had one instance where I didn't realize they were on and I left someone on read and they crashed out so hard. And let me tell you, this was not someone I was seeing. This was not a friend. This was my like father's friend. And I just didn't have an answer for her. And I'll be like, I'll answer this later. She crashed out and sent me so many screenshots going like, I see that you read my message. You didn't say anything. I was like, after that, I've never had read receipts on because I was just like, there are some people.

Did you tell your dad? No, my dad was dead. So this was after his funeral, which made it even more insane. So it was just like some people, they don't need to know what you're doing. They don't need to know. That's how you would turn off reader seats forever, I think is the...

Just walking through that situation mentally. Yeah, that's, you would turn that off. Yeah. Yeah, I just don't want people to know. I prefer to operate with an air of history. Yeah, I think it accomplishes nothing. I cannot think of one good thing that would happen in my life because of read receipts. And I, it's, but I, most people, anecdotally, based on like what I see texting with people, most people have them on. And I can't tell if that's just like, you don't see your own read receipts, so people probably don't know or think about it.

Or lots of people that are like choosing to do it. Allison, you're the only one who hasn't answered yet. Suspiciously quiet about readers. I have them on and I think I don't know. I feel like I've kind of tuned them out. I sort of appreciate the Android like little checkmark. It's like it feels friendlier, I think, to have the little checkmark of like.

Yes, you sent this message. And yes, they received it and looked at it. I'm like, okay, let's leave it at that. We don't need to get involved in like who read what, you know?

He and Allison are a real like inside of us all. There are two wolves kind of situation. What I'm telling you is that tech billionaires have taught a generation of Americans to be surveilled and to surveil one another. And you can fight back. I agree. I like you don't need to know if I read the message because you can just send another one. You don't need to know when I read something. You don't need to know how bad my ADHD is. Some things should just be private. Yeah.

Also, sometimes I just want to clear the little red notification badge and I'm just like, that's just what I want to do. I'm not slighting you. People just read too much into read receipts. I agree. All right. We need to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we're going to do what I'm calling all the rest of the stuff. It's going to be great. Stick around. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

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Let's talk watch OS and V this. We're just, the floor is yours here. Would you like to talk about workout buddy for no more than 72 minutes? I just want Alice and I experienced sitting next to V in real time while this was being announced. It was,

Like literally like another show was taking place. It was very good. It was a roller coaster. So watch OS 26, same new design, liquid glass, lots of stuff going on, gets a bunch of stuff from other ones. And then there is workout buddy. V, how do you feel? That's how I feel about it. Like, yeah, I don't know if you've ever seen Bob's Burgers and Tina in Bob's Burgers, how she just like sits there sometimes and just makes a low grade home like, oh.

That was me. That was what was happening while Workout Buddy was... So, like...

Okay, you hear the sighs now. So it makes sense that Workout Buddy is happening just because if you look at any major fitness app, the AI is there. It is there and it is there to tell you how you're doing based on your data because the thing about fitness tracking is that it generates a lot of data, but no one knows what to do with that data without the context. And so everyone is just

for years now struggling how to give context to your fitness data and help you interpret it. So this is like the latest take about shoving AI into fitness tech. Garmin just introduced a subscription and shoved AI summaries in there.

Anyone who has been using Strava has been like roasting Strava's implementation of AI summaries in that platform. So, you know, Whoop has an AI coach. Aura has an AI advisor. There's just AI buddies everywhere in the fitness tech world. It is very annoying because most of it is just Captain Obvious insights. So it's just like, you didn't run.

Okay, cool. Great. Love that for me. Specifically was the demo of the work I put in. Apple spent minutes of its developers keynote making us watch a video of a woman running while a voice was like, you're doing great.

That was the whole – that was the expression of the product that we all watched. Yeah. Yeah. So that's workout buddy kind of. But so what I was told is basically that at the beginning of your workout, it's going to give you some motivational pep talk. At the end of the workout, it's going to give you a summary of what happened.

which you're going to have in your workout app anyway. I don't understand why we need to have these audio cues. But if anything significant happens in the workout itself, like if you reach a milestone or something, you get the little workout buddy going like, hey, great, you did a PR or something like that. It's meant to be motivational and positive, which was a question I asked because I was like,

Different people respond to different types of training and workout motivations. I, for example, bristle at every single workout instructor who has had the drill sergeant thing going like, come on, pick it up. You can do it faster. I will go slower because I'm like, F you. You don't get to tell me how this run is going to go. This is my run, buddy. I'm imagining what works for you is just someone just very quietly being like...

you're the worst. Just give up. Who even cares? Why are you even trying? Just go home. And you're like, shut up. I'm going to run 70 miles. Is there a workout buddy that just gently nags you the whole time? Oh, no. Does workout buddy have personalities or is it always just like Chipper or Apple Fitness Instructor?

I think the concept is based around different types of Apple fitness instructor personalities. So that, like 50 Shades of Gentle Motivation is what I think the concept is there. Because, you know, anytime when we talk about Apple's approach to fitness, it is meant to be inclusive. It is meant to be, they don't really go into the drill sergeant thing.

come on, run faster, buddy, like kind of motivation, which personally I appreciate because that's rude.

I'm just sort of like when I'm running and I'm in the zone, when I'm listening to my stray kids talking about God's menu and do, do, do, doing, I don't want to hear, hey, you did a PR. Yeah, that's a later insight. I don't need that while I'm running, but I'll give it a try. I'll see. Maybe I will change my mind. I have changed my mind before. What's the connection to...

Like, hey, you did a PR or like, here's your time to a mile run a little bit faster. Like that's, that's just a combination of like doing some math and then having a text to speech model. I haven't, what's the connection to like, we're collecting a bunch of data about you, right? Like that's what I hear what you're saying. Like fitness tracking generates a bunch of data that no one knows what to do with. Isn't that where you would have an AI being like, here are some patterns, do some stuff. Um, like,

Ostensibly. Don't only run downhill, Nilay. Like, you know, like stuff. But it depends on your goals, right? Because maybe if your goal is to run a half marathon and the half marathon is really hilly, yeah, maybe you want an AI saying like, hey, so I see that you are avoiding hill intervals. Maybe don't do that if you want to have a good time on your run. Yeah, ostensibly that could be something that you want. But if the goal is to just...

be active, do you really need that? Do you really need to chase PRs? Because I can tell you from a lot of people, you are going to get injured if you do any sport for any period of time. And if you're only chasing PRs, if you're only chasing these goalposts, you will burn out and you will feel terrible about yourself because you will fall off at a certain point in time. It's a very delicate balance about what actually motivates people and like

It's sort of also just like taking your historical data into context, being like, congratulations, you ran three times on this route, and this is the second best thing that you've done on this segment of this route. Do you really mean, is that really something that you want to hear during your run slash walk slash cycling segment? There's some psychos out there who do love this kind of granular data. I will also say, I think a thing that we are quickly learning about

AI interactions in general is that that kind of stuff is more meaningful to more people than I expected. And I say that with as little judgment as possible, that like having, having a fake voice in your ear telling you that you're doing a good job actually means a lot to a lot of people. And I am still trying to figure out what to make of that as like a person, uh,

But I think it's true. And I think there's something to it. And I also really like the idea of something that would be like just gently rude to me the whole time. Like what would really work for me is if my workout buddy was just like sort of sarcastically be like, oh, great job, David. You're...

What a good workout you just did. You ran so fast. Back for David Zand. I tried to use my iPad as a real computer feature. We're going to run I fell in love with my workout buddy. Oh, no. Workout buddy tries to convince David Pierce to leave wife and family.

It's okay. My wife is already successfully mean to me all the time. No, I know you're tight. You suggested a robot tell you to run faster in that exact personality. I became worried for you. Listen, I am who I am. We'll see. I asked if you could calibrate the workout buddy. I didn't really get a clear answer there, but I think if you could calibrate your workout buddy to be your ideal person,

companion while you do a workout sure that might help a bunch of people because I don't know exercise is one of those things is it for all the workouts no no it's for walks it's walking you can have it I believe you can do it with cycling so it's multiple different workout types so all done feed exercises

Yes, all done feet cardio exercises, which, because it makes sense. These are generally solitary activities. You can turn it on and off. It's not like mandatory. Can you be like, workout buddy, I want to get jacked? And then...

So just cardio, just foot-based cardio. I think it's just cardio. What I will say is that very few apps actually do strength training well because it's just one of those things that is repetitive and boring if you're doing it well and also very different depending on everyone's needs and equipment issues. So I think maybe exactly one app does it well, and that's Ladder. But yeah.

I don't think strength training is, I don't even know what a strength training workout buddy would be like, because what you would want from an AI buddy is prompt cues or like form check prompt cues. So how does it know what you're doing? Just be like, yo, bro, you need a spot? Yeah. Before we move on, anything else in WatchOS 26 you think is interesting?

You know, the one thing that stood out to me with the smart stack, because it's just like a really funny paradoxical thing, because they're saying that the smart stack is going to get even smarter with Apple intelligence so that when you look at the stack, it'll surface the things that are most useful to you at any given one point in time. And that's such a hard thing to judge, because if it's doing its job really well, you will never notice it. So.

So that's just like a – I was sitting there going like, how am I going to test if this is actually useful to me? I have no idea how I would even notice it, but maybe that's just how I know it will be doing its job. So SmartStack. Let's see. What was the like flippy thing? They were like – Oh, it's a new gesture. Okay. It's a new gesture, wrist flick. We got to workshop a new name for this gesture because double tap is –

Pinchy pinch. Flippy flip? Yeah. Okay, so in the live blog I was like twisty twist, but I think I like flippy flip better. Pinchy pinch and flippy flip. Pinchy pinch and flippy flip. That's good. I love it. All right, well, problem solved. All right, now, tvOS we already did. I will remind you, more notifications, new screensavers, connect to a speaker. The end. That's it. That's all I got for you. Fully out of ideas. No one has any more ideas for tvOS.

Literally, they do the bento boxes at the end of every one that just has a bunch of the features, and half of them were just shows on Apple TV+. What are we doing? Vision OS is the last platform we should talk about. The big thing here, I think, is widgets. Oh, I was going to say, connect to a speaker? Connect to a speaker? Okay.

V, I would like you to just briefly convince me as probably the person among the four of us who has spent the most time in a vision pro. Yes. What an honor. Widgets is cool and good. I will allow you 11 seconds. Uh,

Okay. I guess... So I guess the one thing is that every single time you have a... You know what? I can't do it. All right, cool. Widgets. I guess the widget wall clock. Yay. Clock. The widgets are a little augmented reality-ish. They're not augmented reality. That's a new term I just made up. Augmented reality-ish? Yeah. They look like they're on the wall, but they're not actually augmented reality. They're just like...

You know what I mean? There's like pictures. They don't. Yeah. Do you remember that? Interacting with reality that they just, they're just stuck up there. You know, do you remember that Facebook event a bunch of years ago where Mark Zuckerberg was like, the future is you're not going to have a TV on your wall. You're going to have an AR TV that you look at through your glasses that you're going to like buy for a dollar in the app store and you'll put that on the wall. Yeah. This, I saw this and I was like, Oh my God, was Mark Zuckerberg right? Like is the future of wall clocks widgets in my vision pro?

this is what we're doing here. There's one big Vision OS feature that we should talk about for just like half a second. And it is actually the feature they needed to launch with, which is guest access and like shared support.

So now you can let someone else set up the Vision OS device for themselves. All of those settings get saved to their phone. And then if they go to any other Vision OS device running what is now called Vision OS 26. We just get 24, 24 different Vision OSs straight to Vision 26. They can say, I've got one and send the data from their phone to the headset and it will just be ready for them.

And they should have had this from the beginning. And what's amazing about this is that they announced this feature in the context of enterprise use.

Because it's enterprises who want this feature. Businesses were like, we have lots of shared headsets that go out in the field. People need to switch between them all the time. We're not buying one for everybody. But it's also for consumers. I made sure that it's also for consumers. But you can see where the action is in the Vision Pro. It's in the enterprise. It's like fancy architecture firms, I assume. That's what I think of when I think of the Vision Pro. This is so funny because I literally just got a text message from our dearly departed

Wes Davis, who is a Vision Pro owner with his own money, and he said, the widgets are good. So, there you go. Think of all the money he's saving on wall clocks. You know what I mean? That's how you pay for the Vision Pro. You can now buy up to 350 fewer wall clocks.

I mean, to be fair, one of the issues that I've had with the Vision Pro is, like, let's say I have all my big screens in the room that I want and in the perfect allocation, I have to kind of re-put them up every single time I put the headset on, which is annoying. And the fact that it can remember where things are supposed to go now, I do think for the Vision Pro power users is a good thing. But what I am actually most excited about are the persona updates because I really just want to see how cursed it is.

Or how much more or less cursed the new personas are. That got a huge round of applause from the audience during the keynote. But I really just, as soon as I get home and I get that headset, I'm going to call Wes and I'm just going to be like, is your mustache finally capable of moving? Is it free? Yeah.

Is it finally capable of moving? Can your mouth now move without your mustache being a static weird thing? I'm excited. The folks on the ground there are very excited about the percent updates. I did not get to see them, but people are very excited about them. I think even if they're better, they're worse in a way. I don't know. What they showed us was like,

like rendered better it looked more like a person but it was also creepier oh they're deep in the uncanny valley also the demo was two people sitting next to each other on a couch wearing headsets watching a show together and interacting with their personas which is full dystopia like

Yeah, that sucks, man. That's so weird. I'm out on that. That's some real alone together stuff. That's $7,000 worth of equipment so that we don't have to talk to each other. We have widget wall clocks and then a persona of your partner that you can look at instead of looking at their own face. So, okay. Every part of the Vision Pro from the very beginning has required Apple to take itself deadly seriously in a way that is incompatible with the reality of people wearing headsets with...

external battery packs connected with the water to them. Like, in one of my first briefings with them when they were like talking about it, I was like, have you guys ever like talked to each other both wearing headsets with the eyes on? Was it funny? And they're like, we don't laugh at each other's work. And I was like, I don't know, people laugh at my work all the time. Like, what are you talking about? Like, it's a workplace. Like, have you seen the office? Like, they didn't talk. The

The culture of laughing at each other at work is like, well, it's, but like the vision pro rejects that as, as a product, because it's so inherently silly. Apple has to take it deadly seriously and be like, yes, two people will sit together on a couch wearing division pros, watching a show together and conducting business in their personas. And you're like, good luck. Like, sure. Yeah.

Oh, my God. Wes just tried to FaceTime me from his Vision Pro. Oh, God. He's so excited. Anyway. You're going to have to report back. This is going to be great. All right. Bunch more things, then we're going to get out of here. We talked a little bit about the AirPods camera control thing. I missed this part of the keynote. Did we get a sense of how you take the picture with your AirPods?

No, nothing? No, this is more creator stuff where it's like you can start the capture by clicking your AirPod and then immediately begin talking to camera. So I think we, when we were talking about it last, we were thinking about it because we're old dads about like taking a group photo of the Grand Canyon. And what they were talking about is a bunch of Zoomers who are like, hey guys. How to start the TikTok video. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. It also, they introduced studio quality recording for the AirPods, which I will just say as someone who makes a podcast on which we use AirPods, you're lying and I don't believe you. The claim there wasn't even what you would expect the claim to be. Because if they had just been like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to take your AirPods audio, we're going to AI the shit out of them and make them sound good. You'd be like, all right, that's going to be weird. There might be some artifacts or whatever. We'll check it out. But they were just like, no, we just made AirPods to do quality. It's like,

How did you just turn up the bass slider? What did you do? Yeah, they just magically sound better. They got one of those like 1980s, like 24 band parametric EQs and just like turned up the whole right side. Like how not unclear.

Don't believe you. All right, next one. There's the new games app, which they kind of skimmed past in a way I was a little surprised by. We expected there to be a lot of noise about like Apple's, you know, annual huge play into gaming. And this kind of was that. But I don't know. I didn't get the sense that this was...

a huge new initiative from Apple to try and make gaming work so much as it is just like a place to find all the games you haven't saw. So there's a John Gruber posted his read on this, which lightly tracks with mine, which is they are making the games app like a separate app store and app experience. Um,

So that eventually when the regulators come for app store fees, they can be like, we're going to treat games differently and all the other apps differently because we make all our money on Candy Crush Whales. Because they compete with Xbox and PlayStation and yeah. And those are all the same fees. And they made this tiny distinction in the keynote. It went by in a flash, but they made a distinction between app store games and Apple Arcade games.

Oh, interesting. So like even games from the app store versus Apple arcade games. And it's like, Oh, you think you think about these differently, which kind of makes sense because Apple arcade games are another subscription and all this other stuff. But there's just the, the first hints that they're, they're peeling things apart. Yeah. Interesting. Uh, okay. Um, the tabs came back to the photos app announced by the way, the streets was like many of you enjoyed tabs in the old, right?

I'm just the Satan Elmo gif where he's just like the fires behind him and the arms are up. I really hated how they changed the photos up. So thank God. Yes, many people enjoy tabs. I am one of them and I'm happy. Happy. We'll see. I think I'll be happy with it. So yay. We enjoyed knowing how to look for the thing we were looking for. Yes.

Man, this whole backlash has made me absolutely convinced that I'm using photos wrong because I opened the app. It showed me all my photos and that was fine. Now I open the app and it shows me all my photos and it's still fine. So like I'm doing it wrong and we'll figure this out together, I think.

But I'm lost. All right. We're almost done here. Apple Maps will now learn the routes you take on your commute and such and will try to automatically help you with them when like if you're going to hit traffic you don't know about, even if you don't plug in the directions, it will try to alert you to take a different route. I think that's very cool. I also don't use Apple Maps for anything ever. So...

Here we are. The one place Apple Maps is absolutely superior to Google Maps is the state of New Jersey. And if they could just get Apple intelligence to force me to use Apple Maps when I travel to New Jersey...

Huh. That's all it's for. I live in New Jersey. I'm sorry. Against my will. But I don't think that Apple Maps is good in New Jersey. No, it's good in one specific way. I have a lot of thoughts. I'm just putting this out there. It's good in one specific way. Google could catch up tomorrow. Driving New Jersey is a series of nonstop events.

Yes. You're like, merge onto this highway. Immediately change five lanes to merge onto another highway. Then another highway. Then a 15th highway. We've named this place the Garden State for some unbelievable reason. But this is the experience of being here. And Google Maps just does not acknowledge that every action will be followed by a series of 45 other actions. Two seconds later. Yeah. Google is always like, turn.

in 100 feet and then you turn and then it's like, oh, 75 feet ago you were supposed to turn again. Yeah. And so at least Apple Maps is like, some things are going to happen to you and you're going to get through them together as a family. And it's like, ah, this still sucks. I still hate it. Sorry. Every time I've ever driven New Jersey, my wife and I have gotten into a fight and Apple Maps has reduced the fights like by 10%. This is fascinating data because

obviously my spouse and I drive in New Jersey all the time and they switch between Apple Maps and Google Maps and it's

It's a lot. The only thing I think actually Apple Maps has over Google Maps is that if you have an Apple Watch, it'll give you haptic cues for when you're supposed to take the next action. So yes, in that sense, it is superior, especially in Jersey, where there is a right lane exit every five seconds, and you have to know the difference between

This right lane exit versus the one right before you. Driving in Jersey is just a shit show. And so if Apple could use its trillions of dollars and its data centers and its intelligence to somehow improve this, I think they would take massive share in one state in the union from Google. That's all I'm saying.

I have a very V-specific question. When it's doing that haptic thing on your wrist and it's, like, tapping you, is there different taps for the direction you're supposed to turn? It, like, freaks me out a little bit. I'm like, ah, is this supposed to be telling me, like, turn left or turn right? I don't use Apple Maps when I drive. The spouse does because they swear it will reduce the number of times that they miss the exit, which...

You know, this is getting too much into my marriage, but I think if they just turned on the audio cues, they would miss...

20% fewer turns. Well, you're right. They insist. They insist. You are also in my marriage. Driving buddy. Driving buddy, actually. And every time you get the turn right, it's like, you did great. You're so great. Yes. You know what? We didn't need workout buddy. We needed driving buddy. Driving buddy just for New Jersey. Specifically for marriages in Jersey. Just anybody in a marriage in Jersey trying to get somewhere on time.

You need driving, buddy. I can feel David, like knowing that this podcast needs to wrap up because V and I are just complaining about New Jersey now, but that's okay. The show ended like a half hour ago. Yeah. Uh, no, it's, I, this is, this is, I'm learning a lot about why I need to just switch to ways is the thing that I'm taking away from all of this ways just has me drive through neighborhoods and everything goes fine. Um, uh,

There was some new stuff for digital IDs in Apple Wallet, which I bring up only so that Nilay can remind people. Never hand your phone to a cop. Don't do it. There you go. That's a good one. I also have another one for our good friend, Nilay Patel. We got some CarPlay updates. Are you so excited about CarPlay? Nilay Patel, America's number one lover of CarPlay. Do you have any thoughts? I've asked Apple to send me home with an Aston Martin.

For journalism. So far, they haven't said no. I would not say that they have said yes.

But we're in a liminal place where, you know, hope is alive. Schrodinger's Aston Martin. CarPlay Ultra is its own beast, and I don't know what's going to happen there. By the way, Jeep, Stellantis, the company that owns Jeep, broke its software relationship with Amazon a couple weeks ago. And of all of the companies that should, like, screw it, like just glue an iPhone to your dashboard, call it a day, like they should just do it, most of the other car companies are still, like, a real wait-and-see.

But the CarPlay updates, they're fine. They're good. You get tap back emojis. Like mostly what you should send as a response or text message while you're driving is a thumbs up. Yes. If they made that easier, that's great. Right. To just emoji respond to texts. So you're not like talking and, you know, screen on a serial and stuff. But it's, it's, it's never been more clear that CarPlay is just a second monitor for your phone than looking at the set of updates.

Because they're just like, we changed how the phone looks. So CarPlay looks different now. Like, we've made some widgets move around and added some features. Like, oh, this is just a second monitor for your iPhone running on your car display. And like, that's what it is. And it's what it should be. And I think people are generally happy with that. But the fact that CarPlay Ultra is over there, and it's like, we've added the climate controls to it, has never seemed less important.

Like, it just doesn't matter. Like, what you want is a second monitor for your phone running in your car display. And now it is more of that than it has ever been before. I'm hoping to go home with an Aston Martin and Apple. If you want to convince me otherwise, I'm, you know, black is great. I will accept silver.

We've been looking for a reason to do a Vergecast road trip, and I'm just saying that the Aston Martin with CarPlay Ultra is the solution to all our problems. We have an ethics policy. I can't actually accept the Aston Martin. You understand what it is. It's a joke. We can't have it forever, but long-term loans exist. That's what you're saying. There are review units of cars, so. That's true.

I know that people, I know that the review, there's like a review warehouse in the Northeast. I'm friendly with them. But if you think about it, like you have to drive it long enough that you're no longer amazed by the novelty of an Aston. And that's like at least a year before you can even really properly review CarPlay Ultra as software divorced from the existence of the Aston. So it's going to be fine. We're going to make this work for you. All right. We need to get out of here. But I do just want to just check in one last time. Y'all were there.

Y'all, y'all have been through all this. We've talked through a lot of the news. There was a lot of stuff. My sort of overall takeaway is that like if it if it wasn't in the shadow of last year and it wasn't in the shadow of sort of everything else that's been going on with Apple that like from a pure here's the new stuff coming to your devices world. This was like a fine WWDC.

Yeah, not not the greatest we've ever seen. Not bad. And and what makes all of it weird is all of the other stuff happening around Apple, which is really unusual for Apple, which is a company that has like lived in its own bubble for as long as we've all been doing this. Was that your read to like good? Not great. Your phone's probably going to be fine once they walk back to all the liquid glass. Yes.

Is it like an off year where you're following up Vision Pro, you're following up Apple Intelligence, and now it's this stuff? That's just kind of how it felt. The big three. Yeah. Vision Pro, bad Siri, Windows Vista is the true legacy of Apple. Moist Vista. Moist Vista. Oh, no. Gross.

Moist Vista is not a great. We will not be making that t-shirt. I can tell you that. I'm really unhappy about that actually the more I think about it. I don't think you can ignore the other stuff. The rest of this industry is chasing an uncertain technology that might not be the future. It just might not be. But which has a lot of capabilities towards an entire new model of applications. That's just a thing that's happening out there.

Like Sundar Pichai coming into Coder, I mean, like the web is a series of databases and like my agents can just go ping the databases and Kevin Scott from Microsoft coming on and being like MCP is the future and I can re-architect the open web based on these new protocols and the kids on TikTok using NAN to make new automations out of all these tools. Like there's something actually happening there.

Like some big thing is actually happening there. And all of the app action and like app development right now is happening with those kinds of tools on the web in like really weird ways. It might come to nothing. And I think Apple's point of view is like, we don't do comes to nothing. Like they're like, we make great products when they're finished, we ship them. Except for the fact that like,

And for, you know, over a decade now, all of the hottest apps have launched on the phone and that at a developer's conference, what you want is lots of new reasons to make cool apps on the phone. And yeah, I don't know. There's just a gap there that is like worth thinking about longer than it was just like, yeah, they just did. They revved all this stuff. Here's all the stuff they worked on for the last year. Here it is. The last year they're like, Siri will be your best friend.

Right. And they haven't shipped it yet. And meanwhile, like, you know, coming off of IO, you're like, here's Google being like, here's all these new ways to think about using your computer. All like, and it's a bunch of Google stuff. Some of it will just come to nothing. Project Mariner where they run Chrome in the cloud and click around the web for you. Like,

I don't know, man. But like, there's just all these shots at what are new ways of using computers that are taking place, including Johnny Ive going to go work on new devices at OpenAI. Like all that stuff is happening. People see a way around the next turn. I don't know. Like, I don't know if LMs are the way through it. I really don't. But Apple just being like, yeah, we're, we're, we're taking a beat. It's just kind of off. Like there's something there that

I don't know how anybody makes the next great device, but everyone else is taking shots at it. And Apple's like, no, no, the phone will win. Yeah, it's weird. Part of the reason I ask this question is that Apple is sort of, it felt like a return to pre-pandemic Apple WWDCs. And Apple is the only company left on this particular island. It is so unlike every other conversation we're having about technology. Allison, what was your read?

It just kind of like, I understand why Apple had to jump headfirst in AI last year and like make the big Apple intelligence announcement. But it does feel backwards now that I think about it. Like if this had been our kind of first step into like,

It's not just machine learning. It's intelligence. And it's going to do these things for you. And you're going to take a screenshot and it's going to put it on your calendar. And you're like, great. I'm on board. And then work up to the Siri is your best friend stuff. It couldn't be that way. And Google has shipped a ton of stuff that is in the Gemini is your best friend track. So...

It's just a weird... Kind of a no-win position for Apple, I guess. But some interesting stuff I'm excited to play with, I think. Yeah, like... The idea that Gemini is going to win the race to be your best friend is a deeply terrifying state of affairs. But you might not be wrong. All right, you guys have been...

sitting here with me long enough you need to go do other things in Cupertino I think you're going to see the F1 movie this is the thing that's going to happen it's the rumor not today this is what they say alright thank you all for being here safe travels home we will have lots more to talk about

Hit us up on the hotline. Tell us all the stuff that we missed, all the weird, tiny, bizarre features on all of these platforms. Tell David how much you love shortcuts. Tell me all of your favorite shortcuts. Send me links so that I can click them and add them to my own shortcuts and use them every single day. Until then, that's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll.

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