We unfolded the iPhone Duo

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We're going to go into the iPhone Duo. We're going to talk about the Apple watches. We've got a special segment with the Neelite Patel and David Amell talking about running local LLMs on your Mac. And then, the Thunderround returns. But first, we're starting things off with Alison Johnson, who is here joining us from California, where she's just been at Apple's event.

Alison, so glad you're here. Hello. We have so much to talk about. We're going to get to the duo, but to me, this is so much bigger than the duo, right? This is John Turnes's first event as Apple CEO.

And I think the thing that most people don't see is that they stop doing the live events. But before they air the video for everyone in person, Tim Cook has traditionally come out and said, good morning and all that and said a little thing. And John Turnes did that this year. And I'm curious how it felt seeing him and what that presentation was like, because this was really his first, I think, public-ish appearance as Apple CEO. Yeah, it was.

There's a lot of anticipation for it, I think. And we do that thing where, you know, the inside base ball is we kind of file into the Steve Jobs Theater. And we're way up in the nosebleeds, not that it's a big theater, but the execs are kind of milling around down by the stage. And it was so, I think it really hit me when we saw Tim Cook down there, kind of with, you know, Jaws and everybody, wearing like a leisure jacket. I was like, you look in super relaxed.

It was like, oh, wow, this really isn't his show anymore. So Turnes came out. You know, I thought he didn't say a whole lot. He was out there to kind of tee everything up and cue up the video that we were all going to sit and watch. But, you know, there was a lot of confidence in energy.

And I think it's kind of a, he's setting a vibe, I think, for the Turnes era. I first off, I love it as a whole new visual style for the retired ish Tim Cook. I'm looking forward to seeing what he busts out now that he's not CEO. But yeah, it was interesting. So Turnes, in the video, he also opened with some remarks kind of reflecting on the privilege of being Apple CEO.

It's very interesting. In the video, he did not, it doesn't say, I'm John Turnes, the new Apple CEO. He doesn't say, I'm the CEO now. They kind of just throw to him and he's not labeled and he just gives these remarks. And he says, I want to take a moment to express what an extraordinary privilege it is to represent the team here at Apple.

I was going to read, you know, a very brief, and I think like slightly rough transcript, but he mentions, you know, that he's been there for 25 years and that he could never have imagined being up there as CEO. And there's a thing he says where, you know, I love the idea that the things we make make people more productive and let them do things they never thought possible before. And, you know, he gets almost in that sort of like Johnny Ive headspace of, you know, we imagine new things and make them real and put these new things into people's lives. And, you know, I think maybe they don't have that many opportunities to do that. Maybe it feels, this would feel tired if he said it every single year, but it feels, you know, nice to hear from the new guy that he's taking that, I think, apple creative spirit forward.

Yeah, and there was a lot of emphasis on the phone and the technology as the, they called it the personal intelligent hub or something like that. And I think trying to like set the stage ahead of all the specs and all the things we were there for to kind of remind everybody, you know, the apple ethos, at least the one they project on stage at Aquino is like, this is here for you. It's, you know, it's centered around you and your needs. And, you know, he got up and said it. So there's that was that was the tone he said, you know, apple has a funny way of like tiptoeing around things when they want to, but yeah, for him to come out and was like AI, you know, he wasn't talking about apple intelligence only was interesting.

And I think it was they understand the difficult position that they're in, you know, they want to push these features, the new series is like actually finally good. All the stuff on the watch that he's going to have some existential feelings about later. So many feelings. Yeah. So I think maybe that it was kind of to get ahead of that and be like, we are going there.

We're getting into the AI. We know it's messy right now. That's kind of how I read it was sort of like a you, you say that thing that everybody's kind of nervous about and then break the ice was what he was up in. I also thought they did this really interesting structure to the event this year within all of the products. And you noted this in the live blog.

They started with the iPhone pro, right? And they opened all software, right? And they did this with the watches too, the first half of the presentation, all software. They don't, they barely tell you what's new about the hardware. And I can't remember them doing it to quite this extent before.

Can you? No, and to be, I don't know what the time was. We were definitely less than like 10 minutes in and it was like iPhone 18 pro. Here it is. And we're like, oh my God, that's usually we have to wait till the very end for this usually.

So it did feel like, whoa, we're off to the races. And then it was like, okay, we're seeing a bunch of stuff. We saw it, you can change the series. Well, it's great. Cool.

People probably didn't tune in to that who are maybe paying attention now. It was a little bit of a whiplash for us. It makes sense that, you know, there's there's frankly not a ton to talk about hardware wise, particularly on the pro that they wanted to be like, and by the way, remember all this stuff that you're going to see for the first time. I know it's so painful for us because I'm like, tell me about the dual aperture camera. It's like a very blabber.

This is the thing they've gotten in early. I would have gotten this right. But instead they're, and I think this probably makes sense from them from a marketing perspective. They're focused on the experiences that their software can create, which is often Apple's advantage. Let's talk about the pro a little bit because that's where the event started.

Thoughts on the pro? You excited? Well, I have complicated feelings about, I mean, to a camera nerd, I'm excited for, you know, we have, for the first time, like pro actual manual exposure controls in iPhone camera app. Like, amazing. I'm here for it.

We have the variable aperture on the main camera lens. I have questions and thoughts about that. But, you know, it's a cool camera feature. And then outside of that, it was, there was so little, you know, there's a little bit of, I mean, obviously the A20 Pro in both the phones and then some improvements to battery. It sounded like the, the pro max is getting a slightly bigger battery, maybe dependent on if you have an easy model.

So that's a, that's a real tangible benefit. So it was kind of like, well, that's sort of it. Hardware wise. Yeah. It feels like a very, I think like very polished version of the 17 Pro.

It looks great. Like, I think the colors are delightful this year. But you're right. It's, there are these very advanced and nuanced camera features that I think are like truly for professionals in like a serious way. And that's, that's sort of it in terms of very high level hardware features that are going to get people excited.

So the variable aperture, you can move from, what's, it's around like F 1.4 up to F4 or down to F4, I should say. And that lets you let less light in and get more in focus, which is a genuine photography tool. But to me, that sounds a little dicey because if you're doing that on a sensor this small, my guess is you're going to run into some possible issues. With, with noise. Yeah, exactly.

That's where I'm a little puzzled. So they're like, the lead that they buried is that the aperture is actually brighter now. It's F 1.48, I think is the, the brightest stop. So that's cool. That lets in more light.

That'll be a benefit in your low light photos. But then they have the ability now, you can stop it down manually down to F4. And yeah, I'm a little perplexed. I can see that maybe like going to that very bright F 1.48 was not going to be ideal in every situation. If you are, you know, the depth of field is just that much narrower, could cause problems if you're trying to take a picture of something like closer and low light and only the very top of the thing is in focus or taking pictures and multiple people.

I don't know. So I think that's why they introduced this ability to stop down and to extend the depth of field. But for the most part, your most things are in focus when you're taking pictures with the phone. The sensor is tiny. The lens is tiny.

So the aperture is tiny. If you're talking about it in terms of full frame equivalence, you're already at something like F7. When you started that F1.48, it introduces all kinds of wild things of, you know, we have the fake portrait mode that we've all been using for years. I use it a ton of my kid. It sort of fudges those F stops in terms of a full frame camera.

So you go to F1.8, you get a beautiful blurry background. All of a sudden you're having physical aperture on the camera lens. You go to F1.8, you're like, this is nothing like the portrait mode photo. It's just, I could spiral about the aperture, but I won't do that right now. It is very fascinating because again, it's like this is a thing that I carry around a camera all the time.

And man, half the stuff is like over my head. I'm not sure that the average person is going to be able to take advantage of this. There is an auto mode, but to me, the variable aperture makes the most sense when you pair it with all the software stuff they're doing for the pro camera, which is the most important thing. And I think it's a very good camera, which legitimately looks quite detailed and quite impressive, right? They're letting you dial in white balance and shutter speed and things of that sort.

Obviously the aperture, again, that stuff is really pro level. I think it takes a long time to use those controls on the phone screen. But Apple's pretty serious about this stuff, right? They film all of their events on their phones. And I think there is a subset of people who are really going to make use of that.

And perhaps the very black picture is for that group of people. I'm not sure how it's going to be useful day to day, but when you look at it as a suite of pro camera features, that sort of makes sense to me. So I think that's sort of the high level for the pro. Let's talk about it. The iPhone deal.

It starts at $1,999 for the 256 gigabyte model, gets up to $3,199 for the two terabyte model, which please, if you're somebody who's going to get a two terabyte model, email me and tell me what you're going to do with that storage. That is bananas. Yeah. So 5.4 inch outer display, 7.6 inch inner display. It's got two cameras on the back, one on the inside that's under the display and one on the outside on the front.

I think that's the high level. Allison, you actually got to see us in person. You've handled a bunch of foldables before. What are your impressions? It's really nice.

You know, I think when the rumors start getting serious about Apple doing this wide format foldable, we start seeing them over the summer from different competitors and the Z Fold 8 is obviously the big wide fold thing. You look at any of them, at least I did, just like the pictures and the renders and you're like, that looks weird. That looks like just like a weird phone. And then you go pick it up and you're like, no, actually this feels very nice. It feels kind of natural and I'm not bothered by this kind of unusual wider aspect, coverage screen.

You know, opening it up. The iPhone Duo in particular has the matte display on the inside, which is super nice. I think it's just a good idea on the inside of a folding phone like this. It really cuts down on the glare, gives it more of like a, I am now using a tablet feel, you know, that was very pleasant. The crease is hard to see though, you know, we were sort of seeing that devices that had been folded more times than the ones we were using in the hands-on area were showing a little bit more of a crease.

But again, like I'm not personally bothered by the crease on any foldable. They've definitely gotten a lot better. But this one seems very acceptable, definitely to my eye. It just seems like a nice polished device like so far. The hardware on Foldwool's as a category has gotten so dramatically nicer over the past five or so or however many years it's been at this point.

You know, starting with like this thing is fragile and if I look at it wrong, it's going to break. I literally just today held a Z Fold 8 and it is a gorgeous piece of hardware. It feels really, really elegant. I think you look at, I unfortunately haven't had a chance to hold the iPhone Duo yet. I've seen the photos, the videos.

It looks fantastic. It looks like a really nice device. You've held the Z Fold 8. Are they similar? Because they're both, the Z Fold 8 seems quite polished actually for, I think we expect Apple to kind of come in and show everyone how it's done.

And I actually think Samsung may have gotten there the same summer or perhaps earlier. Yeah, it's a very similar experience. Z Fold 8 I think is a bit thinner and lighter in the Duo. It is that weird experience of you're having such an out of body. You know, you watch the keynote, you have to run over to the devices.

It was crazier than ever this year, which is not a surprise. But you finally get the thing in your hands and you have to sort of like come back to it. You know, after the initial, I got to get the photos. I got to get some thoughts together on this. It wasn't until they're basically trying to kick us out.

I was like, let me hold the Duo one more time. And just kind of like thinking about it and not in isolation. I was like, this is a little bit heavier. Like this will be a consideration for how people want to, it's just a different form factor. It's a different kind of distribution of the way.

I think one thing that I'm kind of stoked about is that it has MagSafe and I can put the friggin popsocket on the back of it when I want a little like support with a form factor. So I'm excited there are magnets in the back of this wide foldable. That's a big one. It is interesting. I think, you know, usually these differences in hardware are kind of marginal.

And I think on the foldables, it's actually still a big deal. And you mentioned it, the iPhone Duo is a touch heavier than the Z Fold 8. It's a touch thicker than the Z Fold 8. And I think at that size, these things do still matter. But the question is, do they matter as much as the experience of using it?

And I think a big part of the story on the Android side is that the software is not always there to make it a fantastic experience or to sell this. You got to see this. Obviously, Apple's very, very polished curated environment. How was the software? Did it feel like this is going to be something that is meaningfully better or different than using a standard iPhone or just using an iPad Mini to you?

This I think will be a little bit more of foldable on training wheels, which makes sense, I think, for the iPhone. We've had eight years of Samsung foldables and inner screens and in Samsung's typical way. You can run four apps on this thing if you want. And I think the target audience for that phone is like, great, that's what I want. I want to be able to do all my things and I'm okay with a little wonkiness.

Sometimes you have to fucks with it a little bit. The Duo is going to let you run two apps as a maximum. You can have that floating picture in picture video if you're watching a video also. But it seems like they've just taken a lot of care, particularly with the continuity of how it is when it's folded versus how it is when you open it up. And it sounds like they really didn't want it to feel like two different experiences, which is a very Apple approach to it all.

I think I think the more common approach for the Android devices has been getting the hardware to the point where it is now, elevating it and it's more sophisticated than it was. And then sort of building on the software capabilities every year by Apple coming out of the gate, late to the full-able game, relatively speaking, they have to do that thing where it's like super polished and it's going to be very friendly to someone who's maybe just familiar with an iPad and doesn't want to be running for apps at once. They just kind of want it to work and play videos when they want videos and do FaceTime and something else when they want it to do that.

It seems like it will be that device, you know, pending actually using it a lot. Software so often is where Apple has the advantage and, you know, watching videos, watching people's hands-ons, iOS looks, I think, so polished for this experience, it looks like they really did do a lot to make it look natural and fluid. Dare I say liquid glass looks good here? Right. I'm like, oh, maybe there's something, like I haven't turned all the way down in the beta and I look at it on the duo and I'm like, oh, there's something here.

But you're right, like it is very interesting. You mentioned it's like a full-blown training wheels and I'm so curious what the trajectory of this is going to be because if you look at the iPad, they're like one app, one app, one app and then they're like, one app, you can slide one over, two apps and you can slide one and then now it's like, we have three different multi-tasking models. You can choose whichever you'd like. And like, you know, this is V1 of an Apple foldable. I suspect it will get more complicated over time.

But I don't know, I know that's a bad thing that Apple is being opinionated and being specific about how you should use the iPhone duo in V1, particularly as they're trying to get app developers on board. Apple made a big point about how they went back through all of their apps to optimize them for the duo's display. And they made a bunch of changes to iOS, right? The dock is perpetually on the right. The settings and whatnot are in the top right corner, which I actually think looks really natural and great.

Did you have a chance to play around with any of that? Just kind of picking it up and looking at the home screen, you're like, this is different. This is a little bit of a different experience. Yeah, having a little toolbar on the side of the screen and you open it up and you're like, that's where you're like, oh, okay, this was designed to make this feel like just one experience and not like one phone over here and one phone over here. I think it sort of faded into the background pretty quickly for me, just kind of like doodling around on the device.

I guess we'll see how people react to it. It's kind of the obvious thing, but it is a huge deal when Apple messes with the iPhone in any way. This is their first new form vector for this device and it's the pillar of their business. And so I think they recognize that and really carried that all the way through. Like, how should this be when it's closed?

How should it be when it's open? What are the software changes that are going to make it feel better? Absolutely. And I think by virtue of this being Apple, they will probably sell quite a few of these. It's also not necessarily a bad thing for them if this is not a total blockbuster because it does take time to get the app developers on board.

It does take time to polish every corner that they might have overlooked in operating system. And those are things that happen with time. And I think Apple is better at that than other companies at getting the developer ecosystem to come on board and to make sure that everything is eventually in place. Alright, we've got a ton more to talk about. We're going to take a break.

When we're back, these songs are going to join us and we're talking all about the Apple watches. For the show comes from Canva Enterprise.

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Welcome to the Tiger fam. Alright, we're back and Vsong is here to join us to talk about the new Apple watches V. Glad you're here. I thought I'd say V here. So, there are two new watches, the Apple watches series 12, the Apple watch ultra 4.

They were so similar over last year's models that Apple just sort of bundled them when they announced the two of them. They were like, we've got these watches, here's the whole family. And now we're just going to tell you what software features because that's most of what's new here. So, I kind of want to break it down because as far as I see it, there's sort of two big chunks of new features here. And one is a big hardware feature, but one that you're not necessarily going to see and that's the improved sensor array.

And the second is AI and ambient listening, which is wild. Yes. There's a lot of unpacked there. So, let's start with the hardware because I think that's more straightforward. So, V, what's new here?

There's the sensor array that touches your skin. It has been upgraded on both watches, correct? Yes. So, it's been a while since the sensor array has been upgraded at all. I would say, I think since the series six, maybe it was the last time the sensor array changed.

And there's been a lot of like engineering done to be different. So, basically the crystal is a bit larger, although the case footprint is the same, like we're not going up in size. And that's to ensure better skin contact, the electrode for the EKG. It used to have like two spokes coming out of it, they're calling them pedals. But like these two lines that would come out and now it has 32.

So, more data in that way. And the arrangements of the LEDs, which emit light and the photo diodes, which receive light because that's how the optical sensors work, have been kind of condensed. The TLDR is that it's supposed to be a lot more accurate. We got a lot of questions about tattoos online and in our comments. And what I'm going to say is that it's going to depend on your tattoo and the placement of your tattoo because the fundamental underlying technology that it relies on light, how it reflects into your skin and reflects off of your skin, that has not changed.

Like the new sensor placement, depending on your tattoo and the darkness of your tattoo, that may help. It might not. So, like the problem with this technology isn't like making light better. It's just like, that's just kind of the fundamental flaw of that technology. And the rearranging of all of this stuff says that they can now flash the lights more frequently.

So, it will take more continuous heart rate measurements. So, previously it used to be that when you were working out, yes, it would sample pretty frequently. But when you're just doing your day to day, it would be like once every five minutes or so, not very often. It's changed throughout the years because it wasn't, they were trying to preserve battery life because if it was flashing more often, you would have more battery drink. Now, they're going to be sampling once every five seconds, which is a 60 times increase in frequency.

And they're also now going to be sampling recovery, HRV, heart rate variation, which is the difference between heartbeats and is a proxy for how to cover you feel. That's something that a lot of other wearables like the oring or whoop or garment, all these other devices have been measuring for a very long time. Apple has also been measuring heart rate variability for a while, but it's differentiating it as recovery. So, this is enabling a new readiness feature, which, you know, again, the wearable nerds out there will be like, everyone else has had a readiness feature for like five, six, seven, forever ago. There's no new sensor, right? It's not like this unlocks some new thing that they can track.

But because they have more data, they actually are able to interpret it in new ways and get stuff like heart rate variability and this readiness scores. They went hard on heart rate variability. Is that a big deal? The thing about wearables and that I want to read or understand is that a lot of those times it's not measuring anything super directly. So, you're giving your heart rate with the optical sensor to measuring it directly.

It's shining light into your skin, finding out the rhythm of your pulse based on how the light reflects back. And from that, an algorithm is estimating your heart rate. We've gotten to a very high degree of accuracy with optical heart rate sensors compared to when wearable technology first came out. But heart rate variability as a metric, it's a proxy for your autonomic nervous system, which is kind of like a stress indicator how covered you are for certain things. And as wearable shifted towards sleep and recovery over the last several years, it's become a more prominent metric, especially among athletes.

Okay, while we're talking about mysterious health metrics and uncertain science, some of this stuff sounded scary. They were like, we'll tell you your longevity. We'll tell you the age of your body. And I'm like, oh, God, can it actually tell that stuff? Does that mean anything?

Basically, these companies are all measuring different metrics and they're waiting them in different ways in their proprietary algorithm to basically kind of give you an estimate as to whether your physiological age matches your chronological age and the idea is you want to be younger or on par or younger. And if you are older, then maybe you want to change certain levers in your health so that you can be physiologically younger than your chrono. I think it's a little crock. If you're using it in the way that I think it was originally intended to see areas of your life that statistically, with the literature, we can say gives you a better chance of living longer.

Okay, sure. You can be like, oh, maybe I'm not doing enough in terms of sleep. I should really change my sleeping habits so that it's more regular. Oh, I'm really kind of eating pizza and fried chicken all day. Maybe I should eat a vegetable every now and then. And that sense, it's fine.

But you know, you kind of get into it. Like, I've talked to several readers, several people out in the wild who are just like, my whoop age, I got obsessed with lowering my whoop age. And then, you know, I had one commenter who was just like, and then I got a blood test and I was really not doing so hot on that blood test. So it's like, your health is holistic, but it's just very much like, guys, let's use common sense eat nutritionally, most of the time exercise regularly and try and sleep consistently. And your health age should be fine. Like, you could hit by a truck tomorrow and it won't matter that your health age was like 10 years younger than your parents.

This is the thing. Every single year I watch these Apple Watch presentations and I'm like, oh, man, this is a major improvement over last year. And I've got to wear one of these things or else I'm going to know nothing and I won't be healthy. And then like three days later, I'm like, this is probably fine. I probably don't need them.

Does this seem like a big level up to you? Does this seem like it's going to change what the Apple Watch can do? Is it going to displace the whoop for whoop diehards or is this actually just like another iterative? Okay, they're adding more expected health features kind of year. I think it's more towards the latter with an Apple twist. Like, Apple doesn't really care about being the first to these health features.

They care about executing it in a way that they think is scientifically valid and actionable. So like in last year, they introduced a sleep score, right? Every other wearable is out of sleep score for like ages now. Like it's not new. And so like this health app redesign that's coming later in the year is very much kind of bringing it more in line with what we're seeing from other health companies.

So in a sense, it's catch up, but within Apple twist. So one thing I do give them credit for is that they do try and take a much more conservative approach so that you can just engage with it to your degree of comfort. You know, I'm looking at their longevity tab that was in the keynote and it's less objectionable than some of the other ones that I've seen in this space, which are really just kind of pushing you to the frontier edge. It's a lot more like, Hey, we're going to take the generalized approach. It's going to be a lot more holistic top level, which I think for the average person is the right choice.

But you know, yes, you can see there's so much stuff in there now. So those are the helpful updates to me that the more unexpected and more differentiated and wild update was what they did with AI. So Apple announced this thing called audio intelligence, which is just another AI acronym. And there are a bunch of sub features in this, but the two that I think are most striking are called live rewind and Siri recap. V, can you can you teal the R what these two are for me?

Yeah, so live rewind is if you're in a situation and you're like, Oh, what did someone just say? You press the crown twice and it like goes back 15 seconds in time and produces a transcript of what was said. So you can just check it on your wrist and if you choose to save it, it will go into the Siri AI app. They there's a new hardware chip that is recording nonstop to enable these features. Kind of there's like the way that it's described in like the privacy documents that it's come out that's come out because I feel like Apple was very like people are going to have questions.

So here's a white paper that was ready to go by the time the keynote had ended. There is something that they call a secure exclave on this chip that the audio is processed through supposedly Apple can't access it. You can't access it. There are no audio recordings saved. So the raw audio file gets sent to this exclave beboop, AI processing happens.

That's a scientific term, people about AI processing. And then that audio file is immediately deleted. There is a visual cue that is recording that you are recording something on the wrist when it pops up as well as an audio chime that also happens at the same time so that people around you are supposedly aware that this feature has been enabled and you have to manually enable it at all time. So at no point are you going to be able to be like, what did someone say 30 seconds ago? Like that's you're not going to be able to pull up a transcript of that. It's just that.

You got 15 seconds. That's right. You're like, oh, I didn't catch that. You have to activate it for this thing to come up. And who knows if it's going to be any good, right? Because it's a mic on an Apple Watch. It has to be kind of, it doesn't have long range frequency.

It's not like you're going to be able to point this thing at something someone said very far away. It's kind of more what's in your immediate vicinity. The social use case for this is very mysterious to me. Like I both intuitively understand it where I'm like, oh, yeah, there are definitely times when I'm like, I could not get that word. But what is the use case for? And so I will press a button on my wrist, which will then announce that I missed what you said and then read what you said instead of just asking you to say it again.

I'm sure there are some accessibility use cases there. That feels very clear and Apple did highlight that. Right? For the, you know, day to day for the millions of people have these, that feels very strange. And that's only one of them. So then there's Siri Recap, which I think takes us to a much grander level.

Basically, like when it's on, you'll get a recap of the conversations that you have. So like it'll detect that that a conference. It's not fully accurate to say it's always on recording because you can customize when this feature works. So you can customize it to be like only during work hours or never on during later hours. So like you have some customization there.

It is opt in. So it's not turned on by default. So it wouldn't be accurate to say that every Apple Watch that's out there is suddenly listening to everyone. That that is not necessarily the case. But it has the ability, correct? You could set it to always listen.

You could set it to always listen. And when it detects that a conversation is happening, it'll produce high level meeting summaries that then appear in your Siri app and then auto deletes after seven days. So it's kind of like, you know, how you're on a zoom or a Gemini or a Google me call and Gemini just like produces a summary of that meeting. That's kind of, I love that. I like those are really helpful.

Like in certain contexts, I think there's going to be a lot of people who find value in that particular thing. It's just and this is a kind of a existential question that's been on my beat is there's, I know that I'm using it for a non creepy method. People around me don't know the parameters that I've defined that this feature will work. They don't know how I've configured it. They don't even know whether I have a model that's compatible with this feature because it does require the secure x-claves on the chip.

So it's not coming to previous models. And so in the whole world of Apple Watch users, the best majority of people who will not upgrade. This particular year because they have perfectly fine and functional Apple watches, they don't have this capability on their device. So it's only people who get the new ones that have the potential to do that. And even then it has to be opt in.

So there's just like a lot of calculation that's going on in my brain right now as to how this feature will work for most people. But as I understand it, it's not a transcript. They strip attribution out. They don't differentiate speakers. So like us as journalists, you can't record a meeting and be like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go find quotes in there now.

You can't get to this weirder place where it's like, okay, so you get this generic summary of all the conversations you had throughout your experience. And so I'm going to get a summary of being like, you told somebody at length about GTA six, they didn't care. Like, what am I going to do with that? Like, I just, on one hand, I find this so wildly impressive from a technological standpoint. The fact that we're at a point where we can just leave a microphone running nonstop, we can use AI just to make sense of it and summarize.

Like, that's very cool. Whether that actually produces useful insights, like, I don't know that we're there yet. This feels like a we're doing it because it's cool. It's very much a thing that I think is useful in a work context or in a planning context. Like, if you're a parent and you have a lot of kids, you have to attend a lot of meetings for kids that have a lot of action items that come out of it.

In these contexts, I think it can be useful. And we already have the kind of technology in like this particular context where you're a video conference saying, you're like, what was the action item from this meeting that I need to do? Like, in those contexts, I think that's what it's meant for. Like, you attend the lecture and you want to know what the notes from that lecture are in the points that we're seeing. But from our like day to day conversations where you're just talking with friends, do you really need like a bullet point of what we're like, not really?

And also, again, like, no attribution is going to be given in these notes. So the way I understand it is like, I say something that the meeting notes from the Siri recap is never going to say V said this. There's no said in there. If there is a name that pops up, it'll be like Amanda did her homework. It's just so interesting that they're like, we're not going to make it too useful because then it would be really creepy. And so we don't want to go too far.

But that is the risk here, right? Like, this is the summer that the meta-ray bands switched from being this, you know, kind of hot up and coming product to being called perv glasses, like quite widely. And now Apple is like, oh, by the way, you know, the smartwatch we make that millions of people buy every year? All of them now have the potential to record audio 24 seven. I don't know how people are going to feel about that.

Based online, not particularly happy about it, which is sort of like interesting because in my comments, everyone has been like, meta glasses, not well meta makes them. Oh, wait for Apple's version, which, you know, like, is sort of like a soft launch here with a device that is like already used by a lot of people trusted by a lot of people with a lot of sensitive information, right? Like smartwatches, I've learned a lot about you in terms of your health and like a lot of data is collected from them. So in one sense, Apple is sort of testing that philosophy, I think, about AI wearables and like, if we come out and have a very strong privacy first thing here, we have a secure ex-clay. We're not recording audio, everything auto-deleads. We're trying to keep in mind it's not only your privacy, but the privacy of bystanders around you.

Like, it is one of the most thoughtful implementations of a privacy policy that I've seen in this class of device. And at the same time, I'm like, how, I mean, obviously they kind of want the press to communicate how it works and educate people. But I'm like, it's very difficult to have that stick in the public's mind. It's very hard to communicate this feature. And I think there's this important distinction between can Apple keep your audio secure? I fully believe they can, right?

I'm sure that this is quite well thought through. That's one side. The other side is do people want to be recorded. And I think for Apple, this is like, this is an area that they're stepping into in a big way. We're expecting them to release a pair of air pods that have cameras on them next year that are going to probably do a very similar thing.

And I think that's going to make people uncomfortable in a very new and unusual way. They're allegedly tinkering with an AI pin in their labs too, which is a thing that it's different when humane does it and they sell a couple hundred of them. Versus when Apple does it and this thing becomes a true mainstream product. I think this is actually going to make the Apple Watch as one of the most interesting products of the year. So V, I'm very excited for you to test these and see whether this stuff even works at a basic level.

I think there's going to be so much more to talk about here. I think it's also very telling that these features don't launch until later this year. So like, that is interesting. Yep. Some of the audio intelligence features are launching, but it's kind of like the lower stakes ones.

Like Shazam is going to work better. Yeah. Or like audio, like it'll be able to tell in a doorbell rank. Yeah. Like, okay, the pixel has had like a 24 seven inches am feature for like a decade now.

And it is like one of the single best features in the pixel. If they had just said the Apple Watch now is 24 seven inches am, maybe I think they would have sold so many new Apple Watchers off that. They should have kept it simpler. It's still the underlying concept, right? It's the same underlying concept that it's always saying that it's always just telling me who's song.

It's just telling me who's song. I'm not that one I'm not stressing about this. It's but you're right. They've all been listening the whole time. All of our I'm not going to say it, but you know that wake word like your phone is listening to you right now.

It's very weird. And there's a gradient and like Apple just took a large step forward. It just did a push. Yeah. It's I have to say that I really feel like they are so aware of the conversation that's happening right now because of the documents.

Those documents were ready to go. Right. They put a white paper. Yeah. Before the keynote ended, they're like, and here's how it works in here's how it's private and here's how it's secure.

And it's sort of just like, oh, they're aware. And I think they're trying to do the thing that I've been asking me to do for two years, which is to lead and show how to do that. And show how privacy can be done. Whether or not it's going to be effective in the court of public opinion is something that I'm going to be watching just because it's hot privacy summer, hot surveillance summer with the flat cameras and all of the stuff. It's all related.

And so this is how I feel for the last 24 hours. I think it's going to be so interesting to test these things and see what actually happens, but particularly to see how people respond once during the wild. Thank you so much for joining us to break this stuff down. I'm sure we're going to have a lot more discuss later this year. All right.

We've got more Apple to talk about, but not about this week's event. The other week, Apple announced some new Macs and they went all out marketing them as AI powerhouses, which we thought was probably just a marketing bluster. And some listeners told us maybe it's not. So you like to tell and David and Mel called up an AI researcher to break down what's real and what type. It's like a week ago, we did the virtual and we were talking to the next studios and in the way that we are off to do, we dismissed Apple's marketing as out of hand.

They're like, these are the best computers for AI. Now, they're not silly and video because I'm team Jensen as everyone knows. And all these people told me I was wrong. Look at that. So I was like, OK, we got to get this right.

I'm clearly missing something. The virtual audience doesn't often just tell us we're wrong for no reason. Well, usually there's something there. So we called up CJTrowBurgers and AI researcher. I've been following his TikTok for ages.

He's really smart. And he is going to explain to us what's going on in local AI. It is more surprising than you think. And whether or not Apple's claims, what he's actually called up. CJTrowBurgers and AI researcher, you have one of my favorite TikTok accounts about AI specifically locally.

Welcome to the virtual audience. So that's to be here. Nice to meet you. I am a huge fan. I'm very happy to have you here.

So here's the main couple. Last week, we were talking about the new Mac mini and Mac studio in Apple's very hypey press release about how to the best computers for AI. And I said something along the lines of, I've been in video has something to say about that because probably in video chips and the desktop PC are better. And then we got 10 million comments saying I was wrong, which I appreciate a lot of them about unified memory, something about daisy chaining, all these maps together on thunderbolt. There's some reports that open AI and a topic are actually buying these devices and the tens of thousands.

So I figured I should bring on someone who knows a lot about locally and city out there to explain exactly how I got this wrong. And if Apple's claims are true, tell me, is Apple correct here? Are they the best devices for all of that? What is the city out there? I think they're one of the only options for a specific use case that most people don't have alternatives for, especially for people who are trying to run large models at home.

And you can see it in the price pressure around those particular SKUs versus the high end consumer and video SKUs. It's interesting because people are, there are all these class action lawsuits against Apple for misrepresenting their AI capabilities. And I think that has fed into a lot of the speculation that their hardware is all bad at AI. And it's true for the phones. Their phones are not very good at running AI.

But for these computers that specifically have hundreds of gigs of RAM, they can't. Apple is now finally starting to market these Macs as the best Macs for AI that they have made. So I think my question here is like, they've had the back many for a while now, right? The M4s are the ones that went crazy for Open Claw. Now they have M6.

Why is the M6 tangibly better? Or is it? Because it seems like, okay, because Apple is starting to actually market it as the best AI inference computer that they have. So is it, it's not better? So like the inference happens using typically it's integer 8 math or smaller, which there are a lot of structural issues that pop up around that.

And so like for one of them with Apple, they actually don't have the capability of doing integer 8 math. So like they copy an integer 8 number into the register and have to like convert it to 16, which is true for many GPUs as well. And they did that because it cuts the memory bandwidth in half. So you can advertise twice as much, right? So a lot of these, I think like theoretically you can say this is a single digit percentage improvement over the previous generation.

And it's like, well, yeah, that's true. It is the best. It's better than the last one, but like 3% or whatever. So head to head with an NVIDIA GPU. What would you take a new Mac studio or a PC with NVIDIA GPU?

It depends on what you want. If you're trying to run a single model that's like less than 24 gigs, then something like an R66000 Pro is going to be a lot faster, like a lot faster. But if you want to run something that's bigger than 24 gigs, it's not going to work at all. Right. Like it'll run in the system RAM, at the speed of system RAM.

Yeah. So I think that's the big advantage that they have is like if they want to put a lot of RAM, you can put bigger models in the RAM, but it's not going to be fast. Let me ask you a really dumb question. And this is like a root of this whole thing. Maybe I've just been poisoned by the hype.

But you know, a big part of the modern AI moment is NVIDIA saying these GPUs are not just for graphics. They're for accelerated computing. This is like Jensen speech. And it turns out AI really needs to start computing for training inference. And we need to build, we need all the electrons in the world to achieve AGI because only NVIDIA GPUs can do it.

And we're going to buy hugging face and all this stuff. Like, right, NVIDIA is on this terror because of the power of their GPUs. Right. That is the message they are sending. And, you know, again, maybe I just bought the hype.

But I don't associate Apple with super powerful graphics. Is it just the memory architecture? I mean, Apple famously went to unified memory ages ago. They did it with the M1s. Is it just that they got lucky in picking memory architecture?

I don't think it's even that. I think, like, for example, when you look at the secondary market for used enterprise inference cards, even the ones from 10 years ago are hard to get. Because chips really haven't changed that much in the last decade in terms of the capability at the tasks that they were already doing 10 years ago. The performance is like a single digit improvement since then. There's no extensions.

There's new shortcuts. There's new duct tape for really specific applications where you have like new kinds of tensor cores, stuff like that. But the actual like raw compute capacity is not super different with the 10 years ago cards versus today. And actually the inference cards, like a P40, for example, has more compute power than any of the M series max chips. And these are 150 bucks.

But there are cycles and sometimes it's like you can't get them. I think the big difference there is that it gets you from not being able to do it at home to being able to do it at home. So it's true that there are better ways. There are more expensive ways you could get like an RTX 6000 Pro versus a max studio and it's going to be a lot faster. But it's much more limited in the RAM.

So you can potentially get much, much larger models that will run on a max studio with 500 gigs of RAM versus something like even the highest end RTX 6000 Pro that only has 96 gigs of RAM. So I don't think it matters as much the memory architecture, although they do have high memory bandwidths and many of the other chips are available. But the reality is any CPU can do anything that any CPU can do, or any GPU can do. GPUs can do more things at once. They're faster with certain kinds of tasks like matrix multiplication.

But if you look at like a pixel 2, a pixel 2 gets like 5 tokens per second on many of the new Quinn models. That doesn't sound like a lot, but that's a quarter of a million tokens a day. So like how many old phones do you have in a drawer somewhere that you could be getting a quarter million tokens a day out of? You can run the newest AI models on like those never obsolete machines. It's a CPU, it's got storage, it's going to be really slow, but like really any computer would work.

So there was this article recently that came out that said a 10 year old Xeon is all you need, right? Like a play on the original Transformer's paper because those old trash can Mac Pros are like a couple hundred bucks on eBay. And they have 128 gigs of RAM on some of them. And they have a Xeon and they have two GPUs and they're like small GPUs, but it's big enough that you can put the parts of the model that need to go fast on there. So something like Olama or Llama.cpp, they'll do that automatically.

They'll take the encoder, the decoder layers, the KV cache and stick that on the GPUs, run everything else out of the system RAM. And suddenly you can run these huge models or even from the hard drive, right? You don't even need the RAM to hold the model. But do you say that this frenzy to buy all these Mac minis and Mac studios is overblown? Because I see so many AI influencers, if that's what we're going to call them.

Daisy chaining all of these Mac studios together. They're buying $10,000 Mac studios, five of them put them together. You're saying the speed, if the speed is not the most important thing in the world to you, you can ostensibly run these just while you're sleeping. And eventually on your pixel too. Do you think that we don't really need these Mac studios in these Mac minis?

It's all about how long you're willing to wait. Yeah, 100%. So especially the idea of like the easy chaining, like doing multi-system clusters to do inference is insane because it's going to run at the speed of your network, which is like slower than just running it off of an SSD. Well, Apple wants you to use Thunderbolt, which is reasonably fast. That's a PCI level connection.

Well, still, I mean, PCI is so much lower than RAM. Fair. Right. If you've got it, if you can put it in RAM, that's like neat. But at the same time, you can get superior results with these much smaller and more efficient models that are distilled and focused on the particular task that you're trying to tackle.

So I always say like, don't try to cluster for inference. So if better means, can I solve the problem? Can I do the task? You don't need the big models. You don't need to do to Daisy chain multiple systems.

You just need to figure out how many tokens a second do I need to reach my deadline or whatever? Like how fast do I actually need this to go? And I think what I found is that for most people, it's really a question of their interaction with the model, is the speed that they're concerned with. Is there a benefit to buying cutting edge hardware to run these models? Because that would be why you would buy a new Mac Studio.

And we are seeing, I mean, there's a headline in the information that's like Apple accidentally won AI, because to your point from the very beginning, the demand is actually very, very high for these cutting edge systems. Is that being driven by anything or such? Well, so like the MBA answer is like VCs don't want to pay for for Kebex, right? So like all these companies that are doing AI stuff are supposed to be renting services instead of buying equipment. And so if you want to rent, you have to rent from any of these inference providers in the cloud.

Versus, I think it's a different perspective is people, especially at home, people who are technical, maybe they're laid off, typically like all kinds of different use cases where there is this feeling that they want to be able to rent themselves. For whatever reason, right? Because you don't see, I think a lot of software startups doing that. I think it's more consumers doing that. And to some degree, people are buying it.

But the difference with Kebex versus Abex there is that if you're doing, if you're renting in the cloud, you're buying it. If you're renting in the cloud, you're renting something that's subsidized. So if you have transaction economics where it's like, I want to buy a million tokens as cheaply as possible and get them used, like in the cloud, you're going to get a lower unit price from renting. But if you're someone who wants to be able to do it at home and you can afford a couple hundred watts of electricity or the difference is huge. If you can pay $150 and get a P40 card and have competitive performance with the cloud models just with the cost of electricity, that doesn't make sense for a company, but it makes sense for an individual.

Because the unit economics are totally backwards for Kebex versus Abex considerations and the same kind of consideration for a person at home. Where it's like, I don't really care about a little bit of electricity. I want 50 tokens a second at home without having to pay 20 bucks a month for it. And I think there's this like, particularly in the American cultural context, there's this like sovereignty thing. People want to have a garden. People want to do inference at home.

Like it's the same kind of mindset. Like, why am I renting that from some sketchy person and it goes down when I need it? I could just do it at home. Americans want to do inference at home is like a political slogan that will completely scramble the data center debate in a selection cycle. We got to get t-shirts printed.

100%. I've heard you talk about your thesis for it. I know your other big prediction is that these frontier labs are just not sustainable. All of this will come back and be run locally in different ways. Put a time on that for people because I know you've talked about that a lot.

Well, maybe. If they were serving the best models we have, the Chinese models, they could have favorable unit economics. And I think the question, when you look at like, for example, there was this recent report from Dirac about open router and you see this like 60, 40 swap of like people were using 60% of their tokens going to the US labs for a time. The US labs, 40% to open source models and it swapped in the last six months. And so now the vast majority of the market is for these open source models being served on open router by various inference providers at favorable unit economics, which is something the US labs are not capable of doing.

So I think it's that same divergence between like we want to serve, you know, trillion parameter models and lose 40 times what we make versus like people who are actually getting serious about inference as a commodity business. The question becomes like, well, okay, is it easier for me to run when models on open router and pay whatever it costs to do that? Or should I buy a trash can Mac and do it in my garage? I think that's sort of the tension that will continue to emerge because these frontier models are the open tiny models at this point, right? And it's only going to keep you in true and getting more true.

All right, we're going to have to have you back after I built a trash can AI rig in the garage. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for being on the show this. Yeah, thank you. Nice to meet you guys.

Thanks, Nylion, David. We're going to take a break. When we're back, Allison is joining us again. It's time to return on the Thunder Zone. What if we told you that there was one thing you could eat to reduce your risk of death by about a quarter?

Interested? And what if we added that this magical substance can dramatically lower your cholesterol, improve your mood, and keep your weight stable? No, it's not protein. It's actually fiber. The least sexy, most overlooked nutrient of all.

But what is fiber? How could one nutrient do all those amazing things? And how can you get enough? Is it powder you start into some water going to do it for you? All that plus the strange tale of the Gorilla poop obsessed, father of cornflakes, in the latest episode of Gastropod.

Find Gastropod and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back and Allison is back with us. But you know he's not here. You know why and David. And that means that I have unlimited power once again, which means Allison, it is finally time for the return of the Thunder Round.

Oh my gosh. That is right. It's back. One night only the Thunder Round returns. No one can stop us. This is also good because we have a time crunch Allison needs to get to the airport.

That's right. The Thunder Round differs from the lightning round in this way. We go through stories quickly. There is a timer and our producer Eric Gomez will strike us down with the power of Thunder if we go too long. Let's do this. Okay, Allison, I have to tell you about the open AI math drama that happened this week. Have you heard about this? I have not.

This is bananas. Robert Hart has been covering it on Virgcom. I encourage everyone to go read that. He's much more thorough than I'm going to be here. But there's this mathematics competition known as the Millennium Prize.

In the year 2000, they picked a bunch of very difficult and complicated math problems that they would award a million dollars to the person who solved them. And they're supposed to advance mathematics and encourage new discovery. So open AI, not thinking about Millennium Prize at all. And then on September 1st, so about a week ago, they hear some rumors that one of them might be solved or close to solved. And so they go, huh, let's see what we can do. And so they decide to throw at like 10,000 agents at solving all of the Millennium Prize problems that are still open.

And they get kind of close on one of them. And then they're like, let's throw the entire swarm at that problem. And then they solve this problem. But in doing so, they scoop the mathematician who had made a major advancement here. So not to the mathematician had not solved the entire thing. He had solved a sub problem of it.

But now they're in a beef because the mathematician had used Codex for part of his work. And so he's like, yo, did you guys maybe train on my work in your system? And they're like, oh, we can't rule that out. Oh my gosh. It's really nasty. It's really weird.

I don't like this at all. First of all, the thought of a math problem, he can't solve makes me feel crazy. And I don't even want to look at it. That's all of them for me. Directly. Yeah. Very simple math problems that I need AI to help me with. Okay, that's wild. I'm so mad for that mathematician.

Yeah, it's really weird. There are lots of like very messy ethical questions here. And I think like the math world is, I think, like rightly kind of outraged right now. It's this weird thing where on one hand, very cool and good that we can advance mathematics in roughly a week from a group of people who don't care that much. And we're just like, let's see if we can do this. Like, that's cool and powerful. And on the other hand, the mathematics community is like, hey, normally we work together.

Right. Normally we share research and support each other. And yeah, that did not happen here. It's really what we're going to. All right, Alison. What have you got?

Well, we're going to talk about the Trump phone. I'm so sorry to our colleague Dominic Preston, who probably thought he was done writing about the Trump phone. The Trump phone is $250 more expensive. It is a victim of Ramageddon. It was $4.99, which was the launch pricing.

It felt kind of unexpectedly generous. I think it's how Dom describes it. Because it comes with 512 gigs of storage and 12 gigs of RAM. That stuff doesn't grow on trees. And sure enough, Trump mobile had to, well, they raised the price. So it's $750 now.

It's $754. What is effectively a two-year-old phone? Because it came out this summer, but it was supposed to come out a year before. So it's actually, like at least a year old or more. And now it's $750 and it's already a bad phone.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the gist of it. He does know, so it's already $150, which is a lot of money to pay for a phone running software that's two years old. But Dom was pleasantly surprised that the phone got a security patch. Yeah.

It was moved forward from the February 2026 security patch is now on the May 2026 security patch, which is one more than we thought it would get. The horrifying thing about this is that raising a price implies that people might still be buying this phone. That's not good. Oh, my God. No, I... We must emphasize, even as a joke, it should not be done. It's not good.

Please don't. Please don't. There are so many phones. You can even in this economy. For $750, you can get a good phone.

Wait a second. Does that mean, like, we are apologies. We bought a few of these. We have to find out. Does that mean we can flip these?

What? What? Let's just pull out the RAMs. I don't know. Okay. Allison, are you an over-ear noise canceling headphone fan?

I feel neutral towards over-ear headphones. Oh, my. Okay. Well, I think the legends in that space are the Sony WH-1000 XMs. It is that lineup. I think they really came in and I think kicked bows aside and I have to find that space.

They're now up to the WH-1000 XMs 6s, but people loved the WH-1000 XMs 4s. And so, Sony announced this week, they're gonna bring it back. There it is. People don't like this 6 that much. We'll bring back the 4s.

So, they're bringing back the 4s at a lower price point, which actually just kind of rules. I'm super into this fan favorite gadget re-release. Yeah. I have a laundry list of digital cameras. I'd like companies to do that with. Let's bring back the Panasonic GM5.

Shout out to that one. I know I love it. It's such a, like, sorry, guys. We did screw up. Here's the one you liked.

Please do that more tech companies. Yeah. I mean, this is like just a total win. It's like people like this before. John Higgins, who reviews headphones and TVs for the Verge.

He's still like, yeah, no, I would tell people to get the XM4s over the XM6. He's such an XM4 fan. Now, personally, I think the design of the XM4, I don't like them as much as XM6. But I think I'm the outlier here, clearly, by virtue of Sony bringing them back. So, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna say this is a win.

And I'm also gonna take it up with a win that Eric has not struck me down yet. I'm gonna pass it back to you. Allison, close us out. What's our last story? Okay. Oh, right on cue. All right. We saved the best for last.

We are going to talk about the Ocarina of Time. So, Ocarina of Time remake is coming for a switch to every elder millennial who was socially awkward. And spent a lot of time playing Ocarina of Time instead of going outside, not speaking from a series. We're delighted. Thank you, Nintendo. So, we're going to have this feature of being able to rather than just tap the buttons,

home and play the songs that are integral to the Ocarina of Time that I'm sure are ingrained somewhere in my brain matter. But, so playing instrument is hard. It turns out. So, if you were challenged by a manual Ocarina, this company called Hori is going to have an electronic one that may be to face a purpose, but is a physical object shaped like an Ocarina. It takes double A batteries, I believe, and will cost $50, but you'll be able to. Almost as much as the game. Yeah, when you put it like that.

They're gonna sell so many of these. I think this is utterly genius. It's so, there's something sweet about this. It's like, you remember playing the Ocarina on the controller and you kind of knew it by memory. And now we're making it like an analog experience. And then, but it's like, no, let's go back to the digital experience.

But in a different, weird way, I love it. I get that anxiety that's also like talking on the phone in the presence of other people. I don't really want to like interact vocally with a video game. So. I fully wanted an Ocarina back in the day. I think like probably for the best that I do not get one.

Yeah. Same. My impression is those things are not easy to play for the person who just wants it as a video game accessory. So I'm like so in on digital Ocarina as an accessory. Yeah.

Convenience. I wonder where it ranks against a recorder. Did you do the recorder in school? Oh, naturally. Yeah. Yeah. Because we can't sell as many recorders as specific accessories to a game.

There's two widely available. Awesome. All right. Allison, thank you so much for joining us talking all about the iPhone, going through the thunder round for the Viva Long Weighted Banks of fans who have demanded its return. That's it for this week's Vergecast.

Remember to subscribe to the Verge for every episode of all of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters and so much more. I'd love to hear from you. Email us, Vergecast at Verge.com or call the hotline 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Box New Podcast Network. This shows to be by Josh Cauhas, Ercoma, as we're in key for In-Trivs Lorejuck.

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