Widgets are back, and everything else from WWDC

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Introducing Odoo, it's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

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Hello and welcome to VerChast, the flagship podcast of Confabulator. Remember Confabulator? Confabulator is 2004. It's got time zone, and then Apple Sherlocked it with a dashboard.

The developer sold it to Yahoo, and it became the Yahoo widget library, which I think we all agree saved Yahoo. Stunning. That's why Yahoo's still here today. That's why they're still here.

It's part of Verizon. There's the widgets. It would be amazing if there was a director of widgets at Verizon. I hope there is.

I know there is. Come on Decoder, director of Verizon widgets. That person's job is to just make weird mid-range Android phone home screen widgets. They'll charge you by accident.

Anyway, I have a friend, Eli. Hi, David. Hi. I guess I'm iGoogle in this conversation.

I'm the new cool upstart, just showing up, screwing everything up for everybody. There was a time when Google was like, people will come to Google.com directly, and we'll show them a page full of iGoogle full of widgets. That's how it passed. It was eight minutes long.

I keep bringing up widgets, because we're going to talk about widgets a lot today. Apple's back to widgets, but we've lived the whole cycle. Like, Apple killed Confabulator. They introduced Dashboard.

They killed Dashboard. And now they're bringing it back. Alex Grant is here. Hi, Alex.

I'm missing Growl still. Growl, the notification system. That was good. Like, if we're in 2008, I want Growl back.

You know how, like, 90s fashion trends are back? Yeah. Same with widgets. It's really going to be the theme of this episode.

So we are back. I'm back in New York City. I need, like, a dopamine fast, like the tech grows to. I am overstimulated.

It has been a rockin' five days for me, starting with a Taylor Swift concert. Oh, my God. I need some nephew graduating from high school. That was very emotional.

Congratulations. Very emotional. And back-to-back days. Yeah.

Which one do you cry more for, for the graduation or the Taylor Swift performance? Uh, so I will say, I will say that we watched my sister, because, you know, she's the heiress to her. Yeah. So she was, like, reliving the memories of her children growing up, era by era.

Oh, Lord. It was a lot. Oh, my God. No dry eyes.

Incapable. It was a lot. The children at high school graduation were like, we're out of here. Like, it was impossible to be emotional.

At this place. It was great. And then straight from there. To WWDC.

To WWDC. And then after WWDC, we did, we did, uh, the Verge House with the Waveform Crew, which was incredible. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. We were real punchy by that point, but it was a lot of fun.

But Alex, Alex, you'll appreciate this. Neil, I landed in San Francisco, comes to Cupertino. Our hotel is essentially across the street from Apple Park, but because of the way Apple Park works, and because its security is intense. Like, Neil, I would suspect out of all of the things that you went to, Apple Park had more security than TSA, Taylor Swift, any other.

Wait, can I just say this? After all the Ticketmaster stuff, all that stuff, I made a decoder about Ticketmaster. They did not check our tickets at Soldier Field. Oh, my God.

We just walked in very confidently, went through a bunch of metal detectors, went to my bike, and we went and sat down. And I went and asked someone, hey, do you want to check my ticket? And they're like, no one ever narcs on themselves. We believe you.

You're good. We sat down. It's amazing. But anyway, so Neil gets there, and we have to go to Apple Park the next morning.

And Neil just looks at me very seriously and goes, David, I can't walk. I have walked too much. I had to walk to and brew Soldier Field. I can't do it.

So we took several lifts, literally just from one side of the Apple Park to the other side of the Apple Park. David didn't make me walk twice. I did. Twice?

That's too many times. You just on paper. One of our favorite things to do was ask random Apple employees if they were filling their rings on WBCT. It was very good.

There's no Twitter anymore. I didn't have any place to put this picture. But on the way to Soldier Field, it's like, there's a neighborhood. And all these kids had lemonade stands, and one of the kids was accepting Bitcoin.

And I was like, hey, I put it in Slack. I didn't have any place to put it. There's no Twitter. The kids on it.

And I was like, what's up with Bitcoin? And they were like, yeah, we square sweet Bitcoin. We don't prefer it, though. There's too many transaction fees, and it's slow.

No, this is great. I was like, I'm going to pay you an actual cash. And they looked heartbroken because they had to put it on this cash. They're like, you can use a square app?

Come on. Yeah, exactly. It was very good. Anyhow, so earlier this week, we did the full episode on the Vision Pro.

We had Marquez, the waveform crew come on for lightning round. That's already in the feed. If you're here for Apple Vision Pro news, go get it. I will say, after that episode, I've been pondering it a little more, and I figured out exactly what I want to say about the Vision Pro.

It is a simulator of the thing Apple wants to build. It is very obviously not the thing. It is just a very powerful hardware simulator of the thing. That's good.

And in the same sense as, like, one of the things that's going to be interesting over the next six months or so is a lot of people are going to have to use Mac simulators to build stuff for the Vision Pro. And in the same way that you can't get the actual sense of the thing until you actually wear the actual thing, it is still that one leap removed from it. That's good. I actually like that a lot.

I think that's really true. And I just want to say one thing in addition to a bunch of follow-up I've gotten. There are a lot of people who are very curious about the field of view on this thing because it's sort of hard to describe in a way that makes sense. And the You end up standing there with your hands on your face going, like, it's not this wide.

It's not this wide. It's not this wide. You know what I mean? And so, but the thing that I have heard, the metaphor I like best, and I'm curious if you agree with this, is that it kind of looks like looking through the viewfinder of a camera where there are very clearly edges if you look for them, but you are also very much seeing the whole picture.

But it still feels like you're looking through something and not as if there is an entire thing. Does that metaphor work for you? That really works for me. Yeah, I think I perceive the edges much more than other people.

But, you know, again, given the circumstances that I was, like, using the thing, I was looking for them. Right. It's the sort of thing you would stop noticing pretty quickly, I suppose. Yeah.

Well, we're on video. Can you just, where? No, I have to do with the hands on your face. So 180 degrees is like a plane on your face.

It's this. It's not 180 degrees. Yeah, I don't know. 120?

Okay. Somewhere in there. We did learn some important specs over the course of the WC. 90 hertz refresh rate on the displays, unless you're watching 24 frames per second video content.

So it drops down. No, it goes up to 96, which isn't even multiple, so every frame is on it four times. Which very smart for Apple. Apple is saying more things on Vision Pro to its developers over the course of the WC.

And some more technical information is coming out that we didn't have when we did our episode. It's all on the site. All of it's very, it's minutiae. I love it.

I got so many. There's a developer kit. We don't know this. If you submit to Apple, they might send you a developer kit.

That's interesting to know. I'm going to submit an app. You should submit an app. People mimicking the field of view of it.

My app is where you can just pour a beer that's virtual in the pro and just sort of make it slash back and forth. It costs $10. I'm going to make a million dollars. You can make so much money.

There was an app in the very beginning of the iPhone episode. It was just like, I am rich. It just costs $100,000. And people bought it.

It was very good. And it just displayed the words, I'm rich. Did there are developers who literally refer to the fart app era of the iPhone? This is a term I heard unprompted from several people referring to the early sort of halcy on the website that we still operate called TheBird.com.

The last good website of this episode is all about the other stuff. The OS's, Apple has 400 of them. They are masters of releasing a feature for one OS and then releasing the same feature for another OS a year later and calling that new. There's a lot of that to sort out.

There's some new Macs we got to talk about. And then there's a crypto meltdown happening in the background of all this. And Liz Lopato is going to join us at the end of the show to tell us what is going on there. So let's start with the software.

David, you have organized this by feature because I think it makes more sense than by OS. Yeah, I think for exactly the reason you're talking about that Apple tends to do this thing where it has kind of overlapping features that launch at different times on different devices and they kind of do the same thing. If we were just to talk about this as OS's, we would just talk about iOS 17 for a long time and then kind of little branches into other things, which is sort of how Apple does its software now. But I went through and found let's see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 kind of categories of things that Apple talked about.

Some are big, some are small, but in terms of like big new features that are either on one platform or several, I found a bunch and I figured we could just go through a bunch of them. And widgets, as we've been talking about, is the first one. I feel like if I come out of WWDC 2023 with one thing, it's that widgets are back, right? Is this the takeaway?

Yeah, after Apple killed them ruthlessly. And I think the actual cycle there, I think is super fascinating, right? Because we've been on this 15 year run where Apple just said everything is apps. And if you want to do things, the first thing you have to do is press on an icon and open an app and every app became a universal to itself and everybody built gigantic businesses out of keeping you inside of an app as long as possible.

And then over the last few years, there's been this pushback in the other way. It's like, actually, if all I want to do is check off a thing on my to-do list, isn't it objectively insane that I have to like page over three pages on my home screen, open an app, wait for it to load and log in and then do it again? Yes, that is insane. And so we're finding these ways to like stitch things back together and Apple's trying to figure out how to do stuff on the lock screen.

And it's like, this was a good idea 15 years ago, which is great. And they should probably have existed this whole time and been much better. But they're coming back in a big way now. Apple has really never liked the idea of having live data on the home screen with the iPhone for years.

And you know, the joke is that the weather app icon was selling you in sunny for however long. They finally got past that. Now they've added widgets to the iPhone. And they're, you know, the big announcement for the iPad was like, the widgets are interactive.

And it's like, well, it should have been the whole time. So they went to just sort of like static display of data to now you can actually mark it to do done on the iPad. And then they've got these like big ideas to connect to their other bits and bobs of technology, like the widgets on your iPhone will somehow connect over continuity to your Mac and appear on your Mac in some way. I don't, why?

So that you don't have to set up your widgets twice. Okay. And there's a huge number of things you are likely to do on your iPhone, like that won't work the same way on your Mac. Wait, name one of those things.

Apple classic music. Apple music classic. But that's not a widget. But it should be.

And then I want it on my Mac. That's the only one. What's one thing that you do on your iPhone that you shouldn't do in Mac or you couldn't do in Mac? That's a widget.

That's like specifically a widget. I'm using my iPhone as my camera to do this show. So I can't look at it right now. It's hurting me emotionally.

But I do think there is this thing that Apple is trying to do, I think correctly, in which if I'm sitting at my computer, and I have to pick up my phone, that is bad. Like I would argue that is a bad user experience every time I have to look at my phone while I'm also using my computer. And to me, widgets is one small step back in the direction of do computer things that are also phone things. And this is like what Windows and Android have been working towards together for a long time, right?

And if you have a Chromebook and an Android phone, you've been able to do a lot of this stuff forever. But this is like, they're just slowly getting a little closer together. And especially with these more interactive widgets, being able to have the same information, accessible in all the places, goes a very long way for me. I have no idea how this is going to work.

And I will say, my experience with things like continuity and handoff has not been good over time. So I don't have a ton of faith in this working super well. But it's at least an interesting idea. Yeah, it's super inconsistent.

Like continuity. It's not reliable. Today, I definitely tried to do the thing where you copy something from a phone and paste it on the Mac, which usually works perfectly well. It was like a TikTok from three days ago.

Yeah, it was. It was a TikTok from three days ago about something else that Apple announced. But it just beat you off my back today. It was like, I don't want to do this.

I'm tired of pasting things from three days ago. That said, the widget idea for Apple, just in terms of what an app is and how you should interact with it and what's happening on your phone, they were apps, apps, apps, apps, apps. Your whole phone turns into a single purpose appliance every time you open an app. And now they're getting to, we should have little bits of UI strewn about your entire experience and control things in the world, which is pretty cool.

And I think especially on the iPad, their view of the iPad home screen is like a control panel. But then there's actually a control panel. And so they're just running into some mixed metaphors. I think on the whole, it's really good.

But it's just fascinating to see them sort of deconstruct the apps and lift the controls out of them into widgets. Because then they get to the next thing, which is the same widgets I run on the watch. See, I think they actually converted me to be anti-widgets during their long anti-widget campaign. Really?

Yeah, I have some widgets on my phone, right? I have a weather one and a calendar one. But I don't actually want to interact with that stuff. I like having my little compartments.

And so all of these widgets and all this excitement for it. And like, David, you're saying, oh, yeah, now you'll be able to have the exact same info on both your phone and your laptop. I was like, oh, I hate that. I want my separate spots.

I just thought of my widgets example, which is smart home stuff. A, interactive widgets is an extremely good way to do things like control my lights. If I just want to turn off the one light that I have connected, it's insane that I have to open an app every time there's a button on my home screen. And that's also a thing I would like to be able to do in exactly the same way with exactly the same system on my Mac that does not currently exist.

I take it all back. Never mind. It doesn't bring it back to widgets. I'm like, oh, smart home, never mind, never mind.

Let's do it. But I do think, to your point, Alex, there is this interesting thing that Apple is trying to do, which is figure out how to give you more sort of tools and interactive stuff in widgets without it being overwhelming and annoying because what you don't want and what there is a version of that could exist is essentially full apps running in teeny tiny icons all over your home screen all the time, which is a UI nightmare. It's a battery nightmare. It's just that's bad.

And if Apple let developers do that, they would do that. They would just surface the whole app on your home screen. And so there's a middle ground somewhere that Apple is trying to find that I think is going to be really interesting. That's what I think of like Android in 2008, 2009.

That was what the Android experience. So I'm like, oh, I don't. It's not 2008. I don't want that experience.

I want something nice. And like right now, they're kind of clean. And I don't want to go back to like, you can do everything right here. It's basically the whole app in a tiny crummy square that you can barely see.

I think this is actually now that you said Android, it's so indicative of where we are with these phones that Apple responded to the over widgetification of Android. I think like ours is clean. We're not doing this. And now it's like no one's going to yell at Apple for copying Android blatantly.

There's just no one cares. Yeah. And like screw it, widgets. You can have them back.

I'm excited. Package tracking. Well, that's a good one. But you think about the combination of Apple stuff, live activities, the dynamic island in widgets.

There's a lot of ways to put stuff on your phone that's like little bits and bobs of information. Yeah, there's not. We'll just see how it all goes. But that was like the theme of this whole thing was like a platform.

Have you thought about putting widgets on it? And then the entire watch is like a series of widgets. Yeah, it looks very much the same. I don't think that the changes to the watch are as big as they made them seem.

Because it was just like, you want to go to the app? Now you can go to the app and still be able to see the time. And that's useful. But those are watch apps.

Yeah, like it's just like watch apps, but a little smaller and a little less ugly. And I'm like, okay. Well, ironically, the two cases Apple paid are you can see apps smaller, like exactly you said, and you can see apps bigger. Remember how they redesigned the apps so that they take up the larger screen on new watches.

So it's like apps bigger and also apps smaller. But apps fundamentally still the same. That's the watch story. All right.

Lots of changes to the phone app, actually. That's what they led with. Yeah. That connects to other changes in FaceTime and messaging.

So this is one that actually I think shows up across a bunch of different platforms. So there's a phone app and there's FaceTime, which I would have thought Apple would have tried to all sort of shove together, but it didn't really, which is weird. But on the phone call side, the two big things that I can think of, and again, it's been a long week, I may have forgotten, are that A, now you have these things called contact posters that you can sort of make a picture of yourself and have a font with your name that will now show up on other people's iPhones when you call them. I have a lot of questions about how that works, but it's kind of a neat idea, I think.

And then the other one is this like visual real-time voicemail thing, where now when somebody calls you, if you don't answer, it will start live transcribing the voicemail that they leave you, and you can press a button and pick up the phone. And Eli, you and I spent some time digging into how all of this works, and it is truly bonkers, right? And I think Mark has rightfully pointed out on our last episode, this is very much how Pixel call transcriber works. True, yeah.

But it's more limited It's funnier because of just how it is limited. They made an answering machine. Right now, when you set up voicemail, you record a voicemail greeting that goes to your carrier, and if you don't answer your phone, your carrier is a cloud-based voicemail system that does a thing, and a visual voicemail happens, and I cannot tell you the last time I sent to listen to or even acknowledged the distance of voicemail. I have 18 un-listened voicemails.

Yeah, I delete a bunch every time somebody calls me and tells me my voicemail is full, and sure, I got it. But some people use it, it's great. But whatever. The people who I care for, they get the voicemail, and they hang up, and they send me a text.

Yeah. That's a much sparse, superior way of working through this. What Apple is doing now, when you set your voicemail greeting, it goes to two places. It goes to your carrier, and it also lives on your phone.

And when you get a call, your phone answers the call in the background, in a process, plays your greeting, so the listener does not know, and then it records the incoming audio and live transcribes it on the screen. So it's a little answering machine app. That's cool. I mean, it's hilarious that they turn the phone into an answering machine.

If your phone is not there, it falls back to the carrier cloud-based visual system. I love that they realize that we need better call screening. Well, because of all the robocalls. I mean, this is like the other piece of this is they did a bunch of work on robocalls, on letting you decide whether you want to see them.

So if carriers flag something as a robocall, your phone will not even let you know what happened, which is fascinating, because they build all those hooks for call screening into the U.S. Like, I use RoboKiller. It's an app I pay for. I'm kind of wondering, am I going to pay for this anymore?

Because you built it in Sherlock's. They build all these hooks for these products who exist and do screening for you, and now they're slowly building it into the U.S. Who's in charge of those lists? Is that a thing your carrier has?

Is that a thing Apple does? Who is the one saying, this is probably spam? So that was that industry. RoboKiller has a list, and you can add to the list.

But even now, I don't have RoboKiller or anything, and I get calls that say, you know, likely spam or whatever. I assume that's the carriers who maintain that. Yeah, I think if you're a carrier. But the carrier's not a list of bad numbers or spam numbers.

They have a stir slash shaken, great standard, and they're doing authentication of the numbers in some way. So I think that's where they're, because the high-volume call spammers are spoofing the numbers. So now if you're making a call to spoof numbers, the carrier's going to take that in some way. Which is why all the robocalls you get come from your local area code.

Yeah. Which is so funny to me, because now I just absolutely, resolutely do not answer the phone if it comes from my area code, which is hundreds of miles away from where I live and has nothing to offer me anymore. No one in the state of Chicago can call me. Sorry, you're not allowed.

I don't care what your phone is spam. So that's really interesting that they built the low-answer machine. The call posters thing, the contact posters thing, also fascinating, because it is unclear how the poster gets from my phone to your phone. They haven't told us yet.

So I call you on a regular old phone system. And I'll see you. I have 18C, you have Verizon, whatever it is. I call from that.

That's a regular phone call. There's no data channel on that phone call. Yeah, but suddenly I have data on you. But suddenly before, the call is even connected.

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. That's suspicious.

I think you just have to tell. This is scary. If you do iMessage, for example, right, you try to send somebody a text message, they detect one of those numbers of the iMessage data. No, but the iMessage will detect.

Like, you're trying to text this number. Yeah. And it will go look for that number in the iMessage database. And then it will, like, change you over to iMessage.

Getting out of that database. Oh, no. Well, that's also how you get the thing that will pop up at the top sometimes where it's, like, you know, so-and-so has updated their contact photo or you can, like, share your contact information and you just hit the one button and share. And that makes sense to me over iMessage, but you can't do that SMS to SMS.

And this is sort of the equivalent, which is really interesting. Yeah. Which is kind of where the FaceTime thing gets confusing for me, because if they had just said this works via FaceTime, which is functionally iMessage for voice and video calls, that would make perfect sense. But, yeah, but the fact that this is still ostensibly a carrier calling thing is very interesting and confusing to me.

Yeah. I'm guessing Apple is just extending that thing they do where they know what phone numbers are iPhone numbers. Yeah. And they're saying, okay, here's a contact poster.

You've made the call. It doesn't update it until you make another phone call. Okay. So if you have my contact poster, I call you.

You're going to see the old one until we connect, and then it will send you. There's just, like, a lot going on here. But I think it's, like, cool. Are the call posters, they're going to be your photo, right?

Because, like, right now everybody's... Does that mean we're just going to get a bunch of big Memojis? Because right now everybody I know uses Memojis as their face. Same, actually.

The vast majority of people. There's one or two who don't. But the majority do, because, like, Apple encouraged you to make Memojis and everybody did, and they made the thing. So that means, like, we're going to have, like, giant Memoji faces.

Yeah, and then that's how they're going to bring us all slowly into Vision OS. Yeah. But I also have a sense it's going to be... I mean, the way it looks is, like, a lock screen, right?

It's got... So your name at the top of the clock would be, it's got the big full screen picture. My guess would be there's going to be a flow in which Apple asks you to set this up and prompts you to, like, pick a photo of yourself. Mine is going to be me doing finger guns in, like, a super cool way.

I'm going to be wearing a hat and doing finger guns. I'm pretty excited about it. No, we're in the 90s. We're in the 90s and early 2000s.

We're not really at trucker hats and finger guns. We're just going to be me in low-rise jeans with a Nelly band-aid on my cheek. That's what I'm saying. I'm going to have a Nelly band-aid.

You're there. We're at Widgets. We're not yet at trucker hats. The trucker hats are coming.

You'll know this when Apple kills Widgets the next time. Okay. Contact posters 3.0. David has a trucker hat.

You cannot set different contact posters for different people or different lines. That's obviously the next turn. We're going to have to pretend to be excited about that next year. Mark my words.

The next year's WWC app will say, contact posters for different people, and the crowd will go wild. Just as the crowd, I will say, talking about the 2000s, went wild for updated PDF support on iPad. They did. Like, you could hear it over the recording.

Because you guys, for our listeners, one of the ways that we cover the event is sometimes there's like a little microphone, and we can hear the keynote because you guys are there. And so we could hear, like, ooh, when it happened. It was very, very good. It was good.

It was pretty funny. FaceTime updates. FaceTime basically just in more places. You can leave FaceTime voicemail now.

I don't know how else to describe that. But it's separate from the regular voicemail. Somebody who's being very hostile to millennial women about that, they're like, they're the ones most likely to have used that with their parents. And I was like, that's not absolutely true.

I'm going to do so many FaceTime voicemails with my parents. I was like, never felt more called out and seen at the same time. I'm definitely going to have my kid leave FaceTime voicemails with my parents. That's what I want.

We already do it. It's just taking a video and sending someone. Yeah. The thing that's weird about this, and I'm just realizing this right now, is the way that Apple is doing this with like cool stuff on the phone side, cool stuff on the FaceTime side, cool stuff on the messages side, but none of these things interact with each other.

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

There should be a thing like iMessage where it kind of fails gracefully from thing to thing, depending on what device you have. And instead now I'm like, okay, if I'm going to call you, do I call you on the phone and leave you a voicemail? Or do I call you on FaceTime and leave you a voicemail? Or do I send you an audio message in the messages app?

This doesn't make any sense. David, if this was 2004, right now what you just said would have raised you $100 million to build a universal messaging client. And then I would have sold to Google and it would have gone away. You'd be like, why are there so many instant messaging services?

I mean, right? Like you can see, this is the thing that ordinarily Apple is very good at, is being like, okay, we just made a system. It's called calls. I don't know.

And it just works. And it's like, okay, if it's on iPhone to iPhone, we're going to default you to FaceTime audio because that sounds better and you have all these cool new features. If they're not in the iMessage database, it just works. They have too many users to do this.

I'm telling you. I agree. If you were queenshooting this, like, well, it was John Doerr was the VC who had the iFund. Sure.

2008, man. We would have brought so much money with exactly this pitch. We have sat through this pitch so many times. Apple has too many users to reboot this.

They're like, this icon makes phone calls. This icon makes FaceTime calls. This other icon is your voicemail. And this icon is some other stuff.

And they're like, they have to educate 100 million people. And if you change the name of the phone app, you're going to freak everybody out. Yeah, you're probably right. Even the dumbest thing that I do all the time, which is I call my parents on the phone, and then Max rolls up to me and she's like, where are they?

Because the idea of an audio on the phone call, she's like, what stupid old people ideas is, why can't I see who you're talking to? And then I just push the button to turn into a face. Routinely blows everyone away. The idea that the audio voice call can turn into the FaceTime call is a paradigm shift that is routinely confusing to most people.

My parents, when it's the other way around, I don't understand if it's everyone else's parents, my parents will hang up the phone call and call me back on FaceTime because they're like, we're switching modes. My parents just get upset. My dad's fine with that. My dad's fine with that.

He was watching the Vertecast live blog. He's a nerd. That's where I get it from. But my mom was like, she routinely accidentally FaceTimes me when she's on the phone.

She's like, butt FaceTimes me when she's just talking to me on the phone. And I'm like, there's just the side of your face. Not your butt. Not your butt, thank God.

Cheek time. Cheek time. It works in both ways. Moving on.

Moving on. I get your point. I'm just saying, I think they're stuck by how many users they have. Yeah.

FaceTime is coming to the Apple TV. I very confidently call an Apple person. I was like, can you just use the USB port on the Apple TV and they look at me? There's a USB port?

Yeah. There was one on the first one on the bottom. It's on now. There's a service port.

Remember though, finding the secret USB port is always a great choice. There was a Nintendo that had one. There was a Nintendo, like the Apple, obviously. Everybody always has one.

They were not excited that I knew about their secret port. Whatever. They have. So it's continuity.

So you can use your phone, your iPads, and FaceTime calls on TV. Lord knows how that's going to work. Although I will say, there's a really interesting new spec in iOS 17 that controls motorized docks. So you can see how you can dock the thing.

It'll rotate. It'll tilt you. Whatever. The phone can follow you around.

So wait. Could you face... If I have the phone on my bedside table because I'm sleeping in, could my boss then FaceTime me and then slowly make it a motor around? Wake up.

I see you sleeping. Yes. Get your ass out of it. Your boss.

Your boss. I don't know who it is. Wake up, Alex. I'm here awake.

No, but for FaceTime, it's really fascinating, right? You need some sort of... You got to pop up the phone somehow. And now there's always other little...

Yeah. There's other ways to control docks. I don't know if you're going to interplay, but you can see how it's coming together. We are kind of getting ahead of ourselves on that one, but I think the docks thing is super fascinating to me because it's been, I don't know, a decade since the iPod dock phenomenon died, and we're going to get a whole new dock phenomenon now that we have standby mode, and we have this whole dock kit thing, which is what you're describing, where you can actually control the way a dock moves.

Things you stick your phone on are going to be interesting again, and that makes me so happy. I'm telling you, it's back. We're going to have to start a gadget blog again. Are the hotels budgeting for all of the docks they're going to have to add?

Hotels are budgeting for nothing. I checked in my hotel in New York City last night, and they looked at me confidently and said, we're so excited. Room service is back. It's just like chicken nuggets.

They're not even budgeting. It's horrible. Last piece, they're adding USB-C support for webcams on the iPad and microphones. Very excited about this.

And this goes in with the FaceTime coming to Apple TV thing. It's just like, more things get webcams, you can video conference on more things. That seems like a universally good thing to me. Why do you need one for your iPad?

So if you have a display. So if you set up an iPad, you plug in the display of USB-C. The display has a built-in webcam. How many people are plugging their iPad into a display and then being like, boy, I really need a webcam on top?

No, Alex, do you know the real reason? It's because the iPad's camera is in a stupid place, and it's not where it should be, and now you have some feelings there, David? No. I can't wait for the first picture.

Center Stage is a great feature that doesn't cause any problems for anyone ever. It's great. I can't wait for the first picture of somebody with the iPad and a keyboard dock with a logic camera. Like in a coffee shop.

It's going to be great. Little mic. And then the last piece, which we should talk about maybe a little bit more, they're bringing communication safety to FaceTime to Photos AirDrop. That feels like huge news.

It's a huge news. They just slid in. I mean, this was like such a big deal. They had to pull it the first time.

Yeah, because it's scanning your images to detect for nudity, and then be like, hey, did you know there's some nudes coming your way? And like, that shocks me. So the scandal with this was before, when they were doing it in the cloud, and they're doing on-device hashing and passing it back and forth to the cloud. There was a secondary scandal.

There was another feature that had a secondary scandal where it was alerting parents about children potentially getting nudes. That was a big deal. This is just on-device scanning. So a picture's coming in.

Your iPhone looks at it locally. It says, we think there might be some nudity here. Are you sure you want to see this picture? How many people are like, well, actually, a lot of women are like, no.

Yeah. Never mind. I forgot about dick pics. Yeah.

It's a real thing that a lot of women deal with. I'm so sorry. But they announced it. I think there was a lot of confusion about that first set of announcements and what it all entailed.

They announced this. They did not do a great job of explaining what this is. They just shot right by it. It was very deliberate, right?

Right, yeah. The louder Apple talks about this, the more people are going to ask questions about it. And I think what you're saying about this being on-device, they have answered a series of the most complicated questions about it. But it's still true that your device is scanning your photos, and you can debate what that means.

Like, your phone, the photo's already on your device. Like, it's not like your device is not aware of what this photo is. Yeah, your phone can happily search for things in your photos. Yeah, yeah.

But then, yeah, it'll prompt you if you get one. If a child receives a photo that it perceives to be problematic, one of the things it will give you is a pop-up where you can either, I think, block the contact who's sending it. There's a thing that just says message a grown-up, which I think is very funny. It's just a very funny way to name that particular feature.

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

The parents can cancel your terms of service agreement, all this stuff. There are other bills in other states. A thing that is happening across the tech industry and across tech policy is using children as a stand-in for very, very aggressive surveillance regulation. Yes.

And we have pieces on it on the side. We can link in the show notes, but this is right on the edge of that, where I think on balance it's fine, especially given Apple's history and privacy standards and parental control, like all that stuff. You know, like, this is right on the line of fine, right? Like, you're a parent, you want to see if your kid's getting weird photos.

You want your kid to be able to alert you, like, all fine. There are some cases in that. You're a kid, you have an abusive parent, where it gets real busy, right? So, like, there's some big questions in there, but on balance, I think it's a lot of fine.

You also can't curl your friends with Goatsy anymore. Sorry. I mean, maybe you can. We'll find out.

It truly is the early 2000s again. Yeah, we're back to the early 2000s. Speaking of the 2000s, Alex's favorite feature. My favorite feature.

Airplane in hotels. No, Alex is banned from talking about this on the first cast. I'm sorry. I didn't talk about it.

You guys are, this is bullying. No, so they say that they're going to allow you to AirPlay in hotels. They're going to allow this today. Yes, this is my thing.

I think this is theoretically a really cool feature that should already exist, but will never truly exist. Because, again, I stayed in a Marriott recently, and there was still that iHome 2000s iPod doc in there. Like, I'm not really confident that I'm going to be getting AirPlay in my hotel anytime soon. No, it's not going to happen.

There's going to be, like, do you remember all those years ago? And it's still true now. You, like, you drive around a new hotel, and they have a sign that says, like, you can see $149 a night, and it just says, like, has HBO. Like, I wonder if AirPlay is going to be the new HBO, that they'll just, like, put on the sign, AirPlay.

Well, that's what they're doing now. Like, it has Netflix. That's true, yeah. And I'm not signing into my Netflix on this account.

Which is exactly why I want AirPlay. That's the thing, right? It's like, this, in theory, solves a lot of problems, because I don't have to log in, I don't have to remember to log out when I check out. But they have to replace that Linksys B router from 2003.

Everybody loves Captive Portal. That's my thing. I love Captive Portal. Yeah, this to me is, like, the best idea and most unlikely thing to actually take hold that I saw.

I swear, I'm just sitting here Googling. I swear they've made the AirPlay and Hotels announcement before. It would not surprise me. I mean, like, they announced AirPlay in 2010.

They probably said it then. I'm guessing in 2011. They're like, and it will be coming to a hotel soon. Like, one year later.

With our partners at Hilton. Hilton was like, yeah. The whole Hilton person, like, wanders on stage. We love computers.

We love Wi-Fi. Chromecast had a big hotel partnership for a while there. Do you remember this? Yeah, and then it went away.

Every time you see a screen, there's someone who's like, if I control the screen, I will make money. And there's you being like, what if I just send my phone to that screen? That's the CarPlay story that Apple has won, much to society's detriment. and it is not the hotel story the last time i was in a hotel i literally went unplugged the HDMI cable from whatever garbage hotel box and plugged it in my laptop i just watch whatever is on nick at night like that's become my main thing it's usually friends sometimes it's the office i just i scroll through the guide until one of those two shows appears and that is my hotel tv experience and it's fine i have no notes i don't need anything else all right so that's airplane another again vintage 2000s announcement another vintage 2000s announcement was the name drop where you can just walk up to someone and like wave your phone at them do they like test that one like they have a very controlled demo for it no uh again the tiktok that i was sharing i was laughing about was in 2013 craig fattery was like we've expanded contact sharing now you can just do it with a tap you don't need to bump your phones together now you gotta bump your phones together the startup was called bump there have been many startups trying to do this like there were so many years right because like nfc is going to change the way we interact with each other and forever and now no it didn't happen which is just nfc but like it works and now apparently we're getting the thing where you can bump your phone bump was number eight on apple's list of all-time most popular free iphone apps by february 2013 it had been downloaded 125 million times it was acquired by google and subsequently shut down well at least they had a nice you know at least they got some money before apple and it took apple 10 years to replace it just like acquisition by google this it's just three cents as long on september 16th 2013 bump announced it inquired by google on december 31 2013 both bump and flock would be discontinued the company subsequently deleted all user data shut down their servers rendering all apps inoperable this is the most google acquisition story like when you get acquired by google you should be forced to pre-announce that your service will be discontinued don't worry we're deleting all your data like lena con you want to accomplish something write a log it's like if you were acquired by google you have to pre-announce that your product is a failure and no one will ever get to use again that's how you stop mergers in america you just skipped again you got acquired by 18t guess what five years from now 18t's gonna sell you for parts just pre-announce it we did this for money all right that's enough and then the last one was they extended airdrop so it works over the internet which is cool yeah that's cool but only if you're so you're both signing iCloud you leave it'll continue to transfer that's all i want get excited for gritty and you can now set up things like shareplay and airdrop by touching your phones together which sure this is the sort of thing so my the only time i've ever been like wow airdrop is an amazing magical piece of technology i think i've talked about this in the show i was at the formula one race in october and we were standing there waiting for the drivers to come in and we happened to be at the very front of a crowd of like 100 people and so my friend steven had the best view and was filming everything as everybody came in and then he would just open up airdrop and just tap on every name he could find and he would just send his videos all of the phones on all the people around us and it was like it was like the most incredible file sharing experience i've ever had and ever since i'm now like an airdrop true believer i just use it to like send stuff from my phone to my computer yeah to have it actually work socially i was like oh this is this is something there's really something here and that idea that i could just like i have a thing that you want you just sort of like boot my phone and you have it i mean it could work yeah and that's how google bought bump in september of 2013 and now your share exists if you were to google and you can tell me what a one letter of code from bump made into nearby share one like that's it that's a bar one letter one bracket of code from bump is a nearby share let me know i would love to know the answer to that question let's lightning around the rest of the stuff standby mode probably everybody's seen for listening to the show that was apple's big announcement in ios 17 you put your phone when it's charging outside the oled phones will just like always on show you they made a long clock yeah another cool use of widgets by the way you can run both the clock and you can have widgets appear so that's another it's like a full screen widget experience too much information i'm not mad at oh my god what was the name of the thing that ran the widgets the little guy chumby chumby they made chumby you know the little guy here's my social clip ready i'm gonna look right at the camera and say they sure lock chumby that means something that means something to a lot of people if you're not one of them stop scrolling and go do your research they sure lock chumby a million views i just left the chumby's website you can still buy a chumby apparently doesn't run confabular widgets doesn't it unbreak your sony dash details here activate a chumby deactivate a chumby these are some of the largest and most important things on the chumby website that's very very good siri can now handle multiple smart home commands in a row that's great they cut it to just siri which whatever hey siri wasn't that hard to say so the thing that's actually interesting about this and the reason i put it on here because i agree that the features themselves are kind of whatever you can have longer conversations it's slightly easier i expect siri to be 1,000 times worse with the false positives than it has been before that's gonna be awful but are you guys slightly surprised that apple is continuing with siri as kind of an ongoing concern i kind of thought siri was being phased out and there's eventually gonna be some other too many users you think yeah and siri sucks it has like timers asking for music all the time you didn't have to use it before even craig said that on stage he was like when he was giving the examples for what siri can do now it can do multiple timers right but uh he literally was like people love to use siri for you know playing music and setting timers and it's like oh so craig knows the only two things that anyone ever does to their voice assistants apple isn't trapped in it's a prison of its own success and can only leave that by leaving headfirst into the metaverse i mean that is that is perfectly fair but i kind of thought apple might take the like ai revolution as a chance to do basically what microsoft did and be like forget all these things we've done before like siri is clippy with another name right it's like a thing that seems nifty and is bad tech and everybody hates it and you would think they would have taken this moment as a possible opportunity to rebrand and i'm just surprised they need to do the big change right you can get rid of siri you need to replace it with like here's the generative ai chatbot assistant of your dreams that is taking actions on your behalf they don't have it the only mention that of generative ai in this whole keynote uh we're in the keyboard can i give you a theory that i think i'm absolutely right about that generative ai chatbot exists and it's called spotlight that is going to be the thing like over the next three years spotlight is going to be a more and more important part of all of these platforms and that's where all of the actual ai focus is going to be because it's the search box it's the search box they're increasingly putting like actions into spotlight so you can do stuff right from the search results it's how you open apps it's how you find things it's like that is where if i'm apple that's where all the asset is going to go not siri spotlight so they're gonna sherlock alfred yeah like sherlock chumby god no do you think at chumby headquarters they're like it finally happened do you think if we call this episode they sherlocked chumby anyone would listen to it i think we have only one choice at this point in time look alice just put up a story about mark zuckerberg's reaction to the vision pro i think it is incumbent upon us if you're out there you're a young reporter you're trying to break onto the verge send us a note about how you're gonna get the chumby reaction to standby mode i'll run it i'll we'll pay market rate we'll run that story what's going on inside chumby hq bring me pictures is there a chumby hq all right last few things last few things most in the watch side uh the side button now opens the control center for watch for school they're updating the polling rate for motion to enable new kinds of apps for golf for hiking for cycling your computers and stuff for cycling now so you can have like cadence monitors yeah the sherlock peloton they sure like peloton good yeah but like no i think that was super useful because it's been like a whole back you want to go ride your bike out in the world and check cadence you can't do anything with apple on it it sucks david has written here add a watch to group facetime i am so excited about this just purely as a trolling mechanism like you get to be the person everybody's on facetime and you just show up on your watch that's what the power move and the cruelest thing you can possibly do that's all my mom is gonna do that's great the watch now have maps in general has offline maps which is a huge way late edition you can do that partially in the watch now and then we mentioned this very briefly in the last episode uh in the waveform segment but when you're go on a hike the watch will set a way point for the last place that you had cell signal in the last place that you had any cell signal from any carrier she could place emergency call which is really smart okay that's it i mean that's not it there's so much the apple announced so much stuff all kind of quality of life features all the way around very cool but we gotta take a break and talk about these next we'll be back hey i'm happy shell comedian writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your for you page and i'm starting a brand new podcast wait wait don't swipe away it's called that sounds like a lot as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning you read three headlines and you immediately think oh that sounds like a lot i can't deal with all this but guess what i can deal with it and i'm gonna get this is happening in the world then i'll sit down with a comedian you can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying maybe an actor feminism is gone too far you go why because the sadie hawkins dance maybe a filmmaker since leaving that show i'm challenged to sparing i just gotta hang out give them a little bit of the charm line could be a politician basically anyone who responds to my cold dms we're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio so yes you can watch it on youtube or you can listen wherever you get your podcast this is not the place to get the news but this is the place to feel a little better about it that sounds like a lot part of the vox media podcast network this week on networked and shell i'm joined by tank sinatra the meme king with over 15 million followers across tank's good news influencers in the wild and his personal account tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is how much a single sponsor post pays why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes and how mean culture think preparation age starter packs and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value get ready for a conversation that'll change the way you scroll make you rethink what going viral is really worth and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash your rich bff all right we're back now i want to tell you some very important news that happened while we were in break i went to chumbie.com as well and i just want to read this list of the most popular chumbie widgets it's it's wetter obviously of course i can hatch cheeseburger oh very important the failed blog lifehacker news okay and our friends are big yeah man i wonder if that lifehacker widget still works uh you gotta get a chumbie and you can buy a huge chumbie still on the site this is your new project can you run flex on a chumbie no probably that's probably true all right let's talk about the max real quick uh and talk about some good stuff that didn't hit the keynote then we're gonna bring liz on talk crypto the max i feel like they're not a complicated story 15 inch macbook error big cheap mac big yeah well it's cheap ish right 15 screen it feels like they pulled a ripcord on the last category of laptops yeah that makes sense you know like everybody bought their upgrades in the pandemic max sales are slowed way down they're like big cheap screen you want it it looks great we saw it we got to play with it it's a 500 nit display it's not gonna blow anybody away but it's pretty it's pretty it's very thin it's fast they did a thing where they calibrated the battery life to be exactly the same as a 13 inch so it's 18 hours of video playback whatever that means instead of like vastly more battery life yeah that's maybe we'll run faster because of that i don't know but they they just picked that number and they went towards it half on monica whenever yeah i don't think there's a lot to say about the macbook error i mean to be fair that's a lot of battery life i don't know that like i would rather have more you know performance on a bigger display as opposed to going to like 20 hours of battery life it's already like you can use it all day and it will be fine and that for a laptop is two days for me i want two days let's just push it i just feel like at this point i'm so conditioned to bring my laptop charger and charge it obsessively that like laptop battery life is almost meaningless to me at this point i have 10 percent battery life i never charge this laptop really yeah i used all day at the apple event can i tell myself photos i got the first photos of the vision pro you did in the world on the web you know i ran around saying old man still got it the rest of the day the rest of the day shouting at us years of being a blog like a baby blogger with no access i'm like whatever get out of my way i pushed alex out of the way to take this photo with my 11 year old nikon d7500 with a 40 millimeter micro lens the single greatest hands-on photo setup of all time cannot be replaced don't even try me and you know what i still beat you i got that photo up i broke the only rule that we have which is don't open light room at the event i open light room and maybe good cookies i'm done anyhow they did all of that process the photos whatever didn't plug in my laptop until i got home at night i live logged the thing i did the photo hands-on of the vision pro and the mac pro whatever other coverage it wrote as fast as i could the vision pro hands-on that night i got home i still had 15 percent battery what if i'd had a whole other day how much more 11 year old camera no to be clear i'm pro as much battery life as possible but in this case especially with the m2 air we've seen it hit the like flowing threshold earlier than we might like yeah i think in this case i'm maybe happy to make a little bit of a battery life trade given how good battery life already is in order to eke out a little more performance we don't know that that's the case yeah we're gonna try that we'll have to see when we review the thing but that if that's the trade they made i'm okay with that trade apple very much also sticking with 8 gigs of ram and the base models of these things which they have more or less been proven like it's fine you can definitely hit the swap on these computers pretty fast yeah i'd like them to drop on that but we'll see what we'll see what happens they announced macOS and we already talked about most of the features in their game mode is really interesting yeah i think the big surprise here was that they just kind of skated right by it that you cannot just play windows games on this like like they're using they're using the emulation software kind of the emulation backend that crossover uses to run kind of wine-based emulation of windows games and essentially it's so that developers can test it and see if it works it just works they were already seeing people there was somebody who was tweeting i think they've got cyberpunk 277 running on a mac with basically no work you have like 15 fps on an in one like macbook air so i'm really really curious to see kind of what's gonna happen there i'm definitely not gonna be putting uh beta on my ssd to test it out this weekend that would be probably not no who would do that probably not who would do that sonoma also has new support for webkit-based apps you can just put it in the dock and send notifications andre excited about this no no scares i'm telling you this is we were all excited just not as excited the politics of web-based apps and desktop operating systems are the future and then there's obviously the macro mac studio which we should spend a lot of time on i think we will next coming weeks the max studio basically it's the m2 ultra which is two m2 max chips put together up to 192 gigs of ram the interesting thing we were told repeatedly with 100 confidence this the m2 ultra in the max studio has the same performance as the m2 ultra in the mac pro so if you don't need pci slots so the only reason you run the mac pro is pci slots there's no more thermal headroom in that chassis we were told if you attempted if you were like a power virus yeah the mac pro's additional cooling capability might but like only in that most extreme circumstance are you gonna see it yeah but like in almost every situation the performance is exactly the same and it's very clear like alex what you just said is exactly right that if you have pre-existing expansion slot pci needs the mac pro is for you it's in the same chassis before dan was very annoyed that it's in the same chassis before it's a beautiful chassis it's great looking i don't know why dan was so annoyed but dan was very annoyed the cheese just the cheese grates it's beautiful but it is it is functionally exactly the same computer just in a bigger thing with some usb ports and expansion slots and the mac studio i think apple seems to think that if you are sort of starting from scratch you are vastly more likely to start with the mac studio but if you're like dropping into a bunch of existing equipment which lots of people are a there's a good chance you're upgrading an old mac pro and you're just gonna drop this in and b this is a thing you need so it's kind of like if you know for sure that you need it the mac pro is for you and it's also 7 000 if the mac pro isn't the thing you know for sure you obviously need the mac studio is probably for you like that seems to be very clearly how apple thinks about this yeah i think that's always true the fascinating thing is a lot of slots if you look at pictures when it's open there's two cards in already the first card is kind of fake it's not actually a slot it's just sort of like a 90 degree to give you basic i-o the second slot the second card is a slot so you can pull that out and take out like the hdmi connectors and put it in whatever else you want and then there's the six slots below it the six slot is a compatibility slot for older pci cards that don't play well with new standards all it's all like backward compatible focus only that apple is not often a backward compatible focus but they have to be for pros but for pros the thing is like you cannot put a gpu in there yeah that's the thing i keep thinking about like what are the pci slot usages in this case it's so much pro stuff it's ultra fast networking is ultra fast ssds is it's like 99% of us don't need to care about yeah you are working in a gigantic video editing house a post house and you have effectively turned 60 mac pros into a single mac pro using sdi and like networking standards and i can do it again right like there's stuff here the one it's not an accident that the demo apple uses is avatar the way of water it's like it is deliberately for people way at the end of any spectrum you can think of and if you're if you're making if you're james cameron you're probably gonna buy one of these and one of my things that happened at wwc was neil i asking apple people have you considered the societal implications of giving james cameron this much computing power which i think is a very important thing that we're still not spending enough time talking about uh but like it's it's for james it's for the james cameron's of the world and kind of nobody else at this point but the two interesting parts are one you have to do a big paradigm shift how much gpu do you need there's two gpu options which one you're not it's not the same as your amd and your nvidia gpus what if you want to use some of the cool nvidia stuff they're doing around machine learning and generative ai nope that's not gonna happen on this platform and how much ram do you need because guess what you have to decide to purchase that's brutal and it's not a terabyte and a half which is what you know does that equal 192 gigs of ram it's unified on the chip between and the other argument is yes these are fast having unified memory means the cpu gets memory that's as fast as gpu memory and the gpu memory gets as much memory as cpus normally get that trade-off is worth and it's like we're just a little i mean anyone's been out for a while now but we're still pretty early in the overall experiment of unified memory yeah especially for these kinds of applications and i just don't know the answers so i think we're gonna need to spend a lot more time talking about these computers and what they mean because uh a split that is occurring is between apple's ideas about gpus and nvidia's ideas about gpus and they're just nvidia's much more in charge of the pc ecosystem right now than intel in my opinion 100 they're in charge of like half the gaming industry too just for pc gaming of course but yeah they have really outsized role and hate apple no these companies hate each other it's so much all right there's still a lot of stuff david has promised me that he can lightning fast get through all the cool stuff that apple didn't announce the keynote that happened wdc david go this is an unusually non-keenote wdc in the sense that they have so much time on vision pro that there wasn't even time to get through all this stuff what they did announce in the keynote is one of my favorite genres of internet article right after wdc and this year's good one so here are a bunch of the ones that i think are very cool you can now clean up verification codes in mail and messages they'll autofill even if you get them in email which is awesome uh you get ev charging with real-time availability so if you're driving ev you'll get more information in apple maps than before there's pet recognition in photos in ios 17 so you can search for like the name of your pet or my dog as opposed to having to dig through just like it works with people now uh you can put people's pronouns in your which is great you can ping your watch from the control center which is awesome because i constantly leave my watch places you can link to notes in other notes which all my productivity nerds will understand is very exciting you can automatically categorize your grocery list and reminders which dan talked about for six and a half hours in the last episode thank you dan uh multiple people can share air tags which is cool so if you have like a thing you want to track multiple people can track at the same time you can toggle settings and shortcuts within a spotlight search so if you search for wi-fi you can actually turn wi-fi on and off right from the spotlight search results you get a thing called visual lookup in paused video frames so you can pause a recipe and you can pull the thing you're making out of it and actually use it to look it up from youtube which is great well you can share passwords and pass keys across devices and other people you can use any email address or phone number in your iCloud account so log into your iCloud account so you don't have to remember which is like your official iCloud password stage manager is much better there's some like free form windowing that's much closer to what we've been looking for for a long time and finally there is a thing if you have apple tv 4k and a home pod that just enhances dialogue so you can actually hear what the hell is going on in all of your tv shows there's more but that's all my favorite stuff i have to say saying stage manager is much better bold dude let's see we will see if stage manager is much better i would say i am on the record more than most as someone who thinks stage manager sucks and should be killed and buried but they said free windowing several times to us that's true so i am hopeful that apple has finally done the thing it obviously should have done i hope it's not i hope it's the jickeyest free windowing ever just because i want to see david just here's what i want to say i've been thinking about this a lot as i was going to list one is i had free windowing the ipad just turn the ipad into mac it's fine second they are almost completely out of excuses instead of touching the mac because they always complain that people have their hands aren't pulling up in the air and they announce the vision pro where you control it by waving your hands around in the air just saying everybody let me touch my screen all right we're gonna take a break that's not apple talk i'm gonna bring on liz we're gonna talk a little bit later we're gonna get out of here we'll be right back let's go hey i'm operating as a fucking unlicensed security exchange in the usa bro so before we get started let's talk about finance uh literally as we've been recording here's zuckerberg on the apple vision pro i really think their announcement showcases differences in the values and vision that our companies bring to this and what i think is important the quest is about people interacting in ways and feeling closer and doing things together by contrast every demo apple show was a person sitting on the couch by themselves that could be the future of computing but like that's not the one i want the light is important i think that's very important yeah it's so good it's really good it's a good response and then they showed the twitter competitor project 92 we think it's gonna be called threads uh surprise it looks like an instagram comment section i'm very excited about this it's gonna be the joy on your face just now yeah i'm very excited about this but that is really like i cannot overstate the extent to which it just looks like the instagram comments which is super yeah the question is whether they're going to actually the rest of instagram which i'm very fascinating but that's on the side now you can go look at that picture you can go read these up quotes alex and i'm wearing command line he is we just spent a bunch of time with him at the apple event i'll see you in reporter mode very good it's very good a burst of pure energy anyway that's that look at it on the site liz hi speaking reporter mode there's been a lot of crypto news this week happening in the background of the apple event and it appears that people are gonna go to jail what's going on well we only have civil suits so far though i have to say the finance civil suit kind of looks like they've stapled a criminal complaint to a civil suit so i'm very excited for whatever the doj is gonna do but uh there are a couple of things the first thing is that finance and coinbase have both been accused of operating as unlicensed um securities exchanges in the u.s now obviously uh coinbase is gonna fight this because it's an existential threat to their business model and they're like the good boys or like the wannabe good boys they're the wannabe good boys and like to be clear the facts like the fact patterns in the cases are really different so like if you look at the um the coinbase complaint it's pretty buttoned up and it's a little bloodless and that's fine that's kind of what i expected out of coinbase i didn't expect any like group chats called wired fraud or like you know um exciting things from the the chief compliance officer where he talks about using vpns to get around uh geofencing you know like the fun stuff that we've seen already from the cftc complaint against finance but at the same time doesn't doesn't the sec basically also just kind of say coinbase is illegal yeah okay so it's like it's a very like kind way of being like your business is a bad one well so here's here's the thing is like how i'm looking at it or how i'm thinking about it anyway like to the degree that coinbase has done anything illegal it's like a procedural crime like they're not screwing their customers there's no wash trading they're not being accused of like any of a variety of things that would make you lose confidence in coinbase as a company custodian your tokens right we just call those things fcxing now they're not fcxing right you know who is fcxing the coinbase one is like the sec is basically saying most crypto tokens are securities to run security to run exchange you need to be registered in public rules none of you have done that illegal yeah right and coinbase is like oh we don't think that's illegal like that's like a good natured sort of like university debate club argument and they have known for a long time the argument is coming finance and i saw one note from like a chief compliance officer that's like bro we're running a fucking license which is how this started the episode like that's crazy his name is philip lim he's like not named in this complaint but he is named in the cft or sorry not philip lim samuel he's named in the cftc complaint there's like a bunch of stuff here where like it's trivially obvious who likes talking even though it's like oh it's coa it's coa by the way singing like birds like i don't know if you were catching that but they are already testifying so i thought the binance complaint was like really interesting because i think there must be a criminal case coming because so much of what's happening here does seem like doj stuff and we've already heard a little bit about like binance sanction evasion stuff and like there was a reuters report last year about like binance coming in to meet with the doj to talk about maybe doing a plea deal and like we haven't seen a plea deal so maybe the doj is amassing more information i don't know but like to me these are these are there's several remarkable things going on thing one is that um we had a bill introduced uh last friday so right before both of these complaints dropped by house republicans to uh deal with this sort of token issue and decide whether they're securities or commodities and if they are securities giving them a route to become commodities and frankly i don't think this bill's gonna go anywhere because the democrats control the senate but it is really curious timing to drop both of these suits immediately afterwards and the coinbase suit was dropped the same day that um paul gruel who i think is their uh chief legal officer was testifying so you know that's like a cute little present from the sec very polite so that's interesting to me but both of these are massive cases and both of them have the possibility of setting policy about what is and is not a security when it comes to digital assets and i don't necessarily know that the sec has the resources to try them both at the exact same time which makes me very suspicious about like a forthcoming criminal complaint with binance because the doj is so well staffed and under no pressure at all faces no political heads whatsoever definitely not busy with some other stuff but the case against binance is essentially like it's amazing how similar it seems to me to be the case against ftx which is essentially we have a lot of money and we're using it in thoroughly bonkers totally inappropriate extremely illegal ways and finance didn't run out of money but finance was also a big part of the reason ftx ran out of money right like finance started the run against ftx that led to all of this in a very real way and now is kind of being chased down the same road it seems like not to say i told you so but i did point out at the time that uh cz had basically painted a gigantic target on his back by kicking all of this off and like this is like the first of what i think is going to be several arrows getting fired at him because like yeah you're right like they absolutely like that absolute twitter beef the run that then revealed the fraud like intimately involved but what's interesting here is that there seems to be a bunch of allegations that feel pretty ftx-like so all of these there are all these corporate entities that are controlled directly by cz um you have cpz holdings you have binance holdings limited which is what runs binance you have sigma chain you have merit peak and you have coin market cap and the ones that matter for our purposes are sigma chain and merit peak because some of the allegations in here involve stuff that feels very familiar so like for instance we have binance transferring 17 million dollars from bam trading and that's the parent company for binance us to merit peak and then the bam ceo being like uh where did you get that money and where's it going take a look at gift course in the mouth yeah just keep going the literal quote is i'm on a wild goose chase to make sure that we have knowledge of where 17 million dollars is moving around wow so let's just let's zoom out we all live through crypto summer expressing any skepticism of crypto at that time was met with a just open hostility that we were stopping the future of all finance and the questions we were asking i would say we're not overly skeptical it was more like hey doesn't it seem like you're trading securities right like doesn't seem like these are all just ponzi teams the ones going for no reason what's the utility of these like pretty basic questions and it feels like maybe that industry has come to its logical end point right where like they are almost like banks are almost like stock exchanges and now they're just gonna have to be those things if they want to survive at all yeah i mean look here's here's the thing it's funny you mentioned things going up for no reason because we have allegations of watch trading in this complaint and for those of you who are maybe not familiar with watch trading it's when i buy an asset for myself for an increased price to make the asset price go up and it is like illegal like that's like that's not a question we have we have laws about that it's illegal and so one of these entities sigma chain is alleged to have been involved with wash trading on binance.us and there were a couple of periods where that seems to have been a big deal and there's again a quote here where they're talking about volume and one employee messages uh the ceo is like fyi these are all sigma chain and then lists 20 account numbers oh no so that's not great so when we say things went up for no reason i'm not convinced there was no reason i think there may have been some market manipulation involved and you may in fact remember like when we were talking about nfts during this time one of the use cases i suggested was money laundering and money laundering and watch trading often go hand in hand so i'm like very interested in all of this because reading between the lines it seems like there's some like real wild shit going on at binance and right now binance cz is obviously under fire and he's saying that this might affect binance us but not binance overall correct like what happens this is my favorite thing you did all week list i just want to i just want to give you credit for this because what that tweet is is the tweet that everyone sends right before it all falls apart where they say this only affects our stuff in the u.s most of our stuff is elsewhere it's no problems everything's gonna be fine or they say the reverse like this will affect everything but our customers in the united states will be fine because whatever it's regulated and what almost always happens right after that is absolutely everything collapses and you just you did this quick post on the site that was basically like that tweet and a bunch of links to all of the bad things that happen to people right after they tweet this and i just very much enjoyed that oh thank you yeah so you know you wind up with these weird grooves in your brain after like covering the speed for too long where you see one of those tweets and you go uh-oh um although i will say that like again if there is a ton of watch trading going on a lot of this stuff is cz himself then maybe it doesn't collapse because cz doesn't want his own business to collapse i don't know uh there's just like a lot of question marks to me now around binance period that you know didn't necessarily exist before like you know i gossip a lot it's like one of my favorite things to do i grew up in a small town like it's just one of my hobbies and even the people i talk to who like cz think he's pretty cutthroat so i'm interested to see how this all plays out because i i think that he is kind of getting painted into a corner here and what happens after that is like question mark question mark question mark and he's not going to do the altruism let me go on the new york times stage to talk about all of the conference coming up cz cz you want to come on the bird cast all right let's talk to usbc i just want to come back to the big zoom out question we went through the crypto hype cycle we are now in very much crypto winter even like andreason horowitz mark andreason's like publishing long screens yeah it's fine actually just let it have your job is it over is it coming back what's going on here it's a good question i don't know if it's over i will say that one thing i think about a lot is that crypto launched into an extended period of low interest rates when there was a lot of like free money like flopping around and we're now back in a normal interest rate environment so that's affected a lot of stuff in fact um it's affected a lot of startups it's affected a lot of vcs obviously it's like affected some of the banks and i'm interested to see what happens to crypto in a normal interest rate environment because it's never existed in one before do i think all crypto is over probably not i have a hard time imagining that like as entrenched as bitcoin and maybe even ethereum are that they go to zero anytime soon but i do think there's a lot less there's gonna be a lot fewer token projects and i think a lot of these token projects are going to have trouble continuing so we'll see you know crypto people like to talk about going through cycles and the crypto winter and like we rebuild there in crypto winter that's true there have been like periods of like serious dips in the market where like people stop being as interested and then there's another bull run but all of those things happen in a previous interest rate environment that we are no longer in yeah the thing i'm trying to figure out is i think on the one hand if you're a crypto true believer there have been so many versions of this already that you're just sort of immune to it like if you've gone through all of this over the last 18 months and you still believe in crypto i don't know that this is going to blow up that belief in any kind of meaningful way but at the same time if ever there were going to be two dominoes at the top of the rest of them i would think it would be finance and coinbase that they're kind of as it has been set up finance in particular is like has been so ruthless in order to be kind of the biggest last thing standing and you would think if it collapses or even just sort of takes a real meaningful hit that that might scare people again i don't know i'm like i'm torn between those two ideas well there's there's that but it's worth keeping in mind that defy is also a thing so there are decentralized exchanges that are difficult to meaningfully shut down even if you decide that they're illegal there are like technical ways to get around some of this stuff but i agree with you i think you know there's one possibility is that crypto like quits and that's the end of it one possibility is that like you know there's no more crypto in the u.s but it continues elsewhere in the world um and you know some of the best arguments i've heard for the existence of crypto have to do with countries outside the u.s basically i'm not sure that crypto is a perfect solution for some of those problems but i understand where people are coming from when they find it interesting okay you know it's something we could argue about that seems like a reasonable topic for debate so those are two possibilities that could happen there are a couple of other possibilities so one of them is you may know that there again i mentioned legislation early here there is a possibility that because this litigation takes so long we get some kind of legislation that renders these lawsuits moot which is the best case scenario for coinbase because coinbase i don't think is going to settle i think this is an existential threat to them they're going to fight it all the way that's going to be years like the big ripple case which was one of the previous things about whether crypto is or is not a security is still ongoing and it's like from the previous um you know iteration of the sec pre-gensler and even coinbase's response to the lawsuit was very funny because they essentially said like please just tell us what the rules are and i don't know how genuine that is or not and i think they'd obviously happily exist in a world without rules for as long as possible but their response is basically like just stop yelling at us and just tell us what to do and i kind of i kind of get that i'm a little sympathetic to that actually because they were allowed to go public and one of the things that the sec does is review all of the disclosures of you know what the risks are and like if you're a marijuana company because the sec lets a marijuana company go public even though it's illegal there's a disclosure that marijuana is federally illegal in the filing right there are disclosures in that filing if you go back and look that suggests there's regulatory uncertainty but the disclosure is not we're running an unlicensed exchange and the sec may crack down and you know the sec got a chance to take a look at that so i kind of am a little sympathetic to them feeling jerked around yeah like i said brian armstrong they're the ones who've been like they've been the good boys yeah they're trying to be yeah i mean like he like made a documentary about how hard it is to be good you know like about himself no one should watch it it was just like like that's like when you're trying the most hard right and whereas like i think cc and finance are like we're the renegades and no one can stop us which i you know me that's that's my thing you love a pirate ship yeah but like that's the one that like the king of england comes and shoots your pirate ship at the end you know like like coinbase was like what if i've got calling a lot of fortune days i'm just gonna stop it but it's like what if we were the ambassadors of the crown like that's the game that they were trying to play i do think that the ftx collapse significantly changed the political environment around cryptocurrency in such a way that may have influenced this particular lawsuit i don't know whether that's just that it sort of lit a fire under the ass of the sec or something else occurred but i do know there's been a long-standing turf war between a lot of these federal agencies about who actually is in charge of regulating crypto and it's part of the reason that we haven't seen a ton of action until relatively recently so i'm really curious to see how this plays out politically separately from how it plays out legally because the political factor is i think undeniable here yeah all right we'll see what happens next liz quick posting away during the apple event so good one of the funniest like the verge contains multitudes it was beautiful deeply entertaining liz always great to have you on we gotta wrap this thing up we've done a lot of purchasing this week i want to say we've also made me like a full half hour late for a meeting which i'm very proud it's so good i'd rather be hanging out with you guys any of my sweet stuff i gotta do but great to see liz thank you both that's it that's a purchase dopamine fast i'm gonna do it i'm going in the darkness like aaron rogers it's gonna be great that's it and that's a wrap for verge cast this week we'd love to hear from you shoot us an email at vergecast at the verge.com the verge cast is a production of the verge and the box media podcast network the show is produced by me liam james and our senior audio director andrew marino our editorial director is brook minters that's it we'll see you next week you you you you you