Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of companies front running other companies announcements before the second company has a very large event. I'm your friend, David Pierce. Alex Kranz is here. I'm your friend who also has an AR headset. They really want to talk to you about this week. Just everyone who has an AR headset. Tell us about it right now. If you've ever even thought about it, now is the time.
Addy Robertson's here. Hi. Can you lie as out forever? No, he'll be back next week. He's on vacation doing God only knows what. He's mostly still in Slack, so I don't think he's actually on any kind of vacation. I was like, he's just on vacation slacking all of us, but knowing that he can ignore the slacks afterwards. It's honestly kind of the best vacation. It's just like a no-responsibility work. It's beautiful. I can do work if I feel like it, and I can yell at everyone in Slack if I want to, but I don't have to do anything. That's vacation right there. I mean, the goal.
All right, we have a lot to get to this week. It's WWDC next week. We're going to talk a bunch about that. There's a lot of stuff coming. But first, we should talk about the front run to end all front runs, which was Meta announcing the Quest 3 VR headset. This is just transparently meta saying, please, Apple's about to launch a headset. We beg you, do not forget that we also make headsets by our headsets. We love you. Mark Zuckerberg.
Oh, absolutely. What's going on here? Tell us about this thing. So yeah, the Quest 3, which was very widely rumored. It's not like this is some shock. Everybody's known it's been coming for a long time. But there was one lone hands-on with it last week. And then now we've gotten a full announce. Its deal is that it is slimmer and lighter than the Quest 2, the way that the Quest 2 was slimmer and lighter than the Quest. There are color passed through cameras. So it's got these three things that look kind of like these little pills on the front of it. And they are dual camera arrays. And then there's a depth sensor, which was supposed to be on the MetaQuest Pro, but got dropped.
And so that gives it the sort of quasi augmented reality capabilities that the Quest Pro has. But it's much cheaper. It is $499. And then they're also going to keep the Quest 2 around. But they're going to drop the price point back down to what it was before, which is $299.
The pricing of the Quest never stops confusing me. And on the one hand, the Quest 3, $499.99 is both a lot and a little in the scheme of VR headsets. The old one is getting a big software update they talked about and is going down in price. The Pro exists. I think they've sold zero of them as far as I can tell.
This thing fits into kind of an awkward space. The vibe I got, this is basically just a teaser, right? I don't think it does. Does it? This works for you? Yeah. Because the original, I mean, I don't necessarily think it's the best idea. But the original, the Quest 2, so compelling, was everybody really liked it. And it was cheap. It was $300. And so you're like, oh, I want to spend $300 to try out really good VR. That sounds great. And I don't have to put a bunch of crap in my house to do it.
And so that made sense. They never really got really pissed when they increased the price last year. I know they've dropped the price again. And I think the higher storage one is actually now cheaper than it was when it initially launched. But it sounds like the Quest 2 is still, this is still their beginners. You just want to get a taste. And then, OK, you want full color pass through, but without the garbage that is the Quest Pro, you can get it for $100, $200 more. It makes a little sense.
Everything about this makes sense, right? It makes sense that the one hands-on went to Mark Gurman, who is a very well-known reporter on things happening in Apple. So of course, that's who they go to to front-run Apple. It could not have made it any clearer that that's what they were doing by going to Gurman. Like everything about this makes sense, but also presupposes that we all care enough about full-color pass through VR to want to spend $500. This is the question.
The other problem is that anytime you add more cameras to a thing, you make that thing heavier. And I'm kind of annoyed by that. It could turn out this thing is great. But I would actually just prefer a headset that has very rudimentary pass through but is lighter to a thing that is trying to implement this use case that maybe someone could do well. The Quest Pro did not do well. I still do not see a really compelling option for a really compelling reason why I should want it.
Yeah. And so I'm going to be annoyed if there's a better version of this headset that I could have gotten for cheaper that it's just saddled with this quasi-augmented reality. Right. So that's where I land when I say this is confusing to me is the Quest 2 still seems like it's going to be a very good option for most people. And Meta just had this big Quest gaming showcase. A lot of that stuff is coming to the Quest 2. It just sort of keeps being a better thing. That's great. But the Quest 3, and again, this is just a teaser. It's launching in the fall. We'll see more. This was clearly like they made this video in like an hour and a half in order to front run Apple is pretty clearly what happened. So we don't know everything.
But to me, it's exactly what you're saying, Addy. It's like the Quest 2, a little later, a little more powerful. Those are all good things. But then the big new thing is this pass through. And A, I'm suspicious that this pass through is going to be any good based on what we've seen from the Quest Pro. And B, there's really no evidence anywhere yet of like a useful app for this. All the stuff they show is just like, look at this nifty thing you can put on your table. And it's like we're still in the like see the Ikea sofa in your living room before you buy it. Phase of all of this stuff. And to me, that's just like, that's nothing.
And so I'm kind of of the mind that like, where is the thing that's going to make me spend $200 extra dollars on this? Because I just, I don't necessarily buy that it's passed through. Every time I say I don't like some feature on the VR headset, somebody's like, this is the exact thing I needed. I love this. I've probably accept that. That's great. As someone who does like this thing mostly for gaming though, and who does general purpose computing, I feel like meta has not made a very good pitch for Pastor to me. What would that pitch look like?
Like in your wildest dreams. This is the part I have trouble with is I'm not even sure what I want from this. Short of some of the like, truly amazing, like probably still 10 years away, incredible epic AR experiences. Like what is, what does good even look like here? I don't think full color pass through can be good. Because at the end of the day, because full color pass through means that, okay, now I'm going to be able to wear this around my house doing other things. But I'm still going to look like a jackass.
I think my entire career is a testament to the fact that I don't care about that. But I think that all of the compelling uses I've seen for augmented reality so far are things that happen outside my house. They're things that are smartphone ask. And I think that is hard to pull off here. Like I think home AR so far I haven't heard a lot of really great takes on it. Like I want to be able to look at a sign that's in a language I don't speak and see that sign translated, things like that. That's cool. Real life Google Maps.
I know there are a lot of people who like the idea that you know you could use this instead of a big monitor or a big screen. I don't think the tech is there yet. So that's basically all I got. Yeah, I really loathe this road that we're going down where everybody is like, oh use it to get a bunch of computer monitors and you can read books with your AR headset. And I'm like, have you seen like the resolution of a piece of paper? Like it's very good. It's very good. And it turns out that that's nice to read on. And if you want it to be like blurry and bad and give you a headache after 15 minutes, like by all means read in a headset. But that to me is so far away from being an actual use case for most things. It's just mind blowing to me.
I figured it out. Okay, you're going to put it on and you're going to go in the kitchen. And then it's going to give you recipes that float in front of you. That's honestly a very good idea. So I tried that when the Oppo glasses came out, I love that you already tried it. You're right. That reminds me cooking is one of the rare use cases where I think this could actually be good because you're like, it's like being a surgeon, you want your hands free. Right.
But would you want to wear this? Yeah, like I don't know if I would want to wear this to cook. I like cooking. I would love to be able to not have to like wipe my hands off and go look at my iPad. But I also would not like, there's just feels like there's so much potential for failure there. I don't trust the cameras. Yeah.
One of the things I've been hearing, I've been talking to analysts and like developers about this. And the big thing they point out is the problem is that pass through has a really bad fail state. If your air glasses go dead and they're just glasses that have a projector, then you have no glasses. If this goes dark, then you're blind. Oh, that's such a good point as you're like flipping the pancake. Like that's part of the reason why you can't really use it outside very well because if say it freezes up for a second and you're crossing the street as the example that I heard, then wow, you are going to die. It's like the the Mitch Hedberg joke about like when if when the escalator dies, it just becomes stairs. Like that's what you want. Escalator not temporarily stares. Right. This is not temporarily stares. This is temporarily black hole. Like it's not it's not what you're looking for.
That's really interesting. But then to your point about the killer app, so this like meta still sees this as a gaming device, right? I hope it is clearly they did this announcement right before they did a big gaming showcase. They showed off a bunch of stuff. There's a stranger things VR game. There's an Assassin's Creed VR game coming that I'm very excited about, which has been in the works in theory for like years at this point. I'm really curious about that. Really? Should I not be getting my hopes up about this? I in the last few minutes have really gotten my hopes up. They announced Assassin's Creed and Splinter sell like years ago, but isn't it also like Ubisoft anytime someone announces anything game related? They're like, don't worry. Assassin's Creed is coming to this product. Oh, yeah. Assassin's Creed was on the like when Google was testing game streaming before Project or before Stadia even existed.
Assassin's Creed was like, sure, play Assassin's Creed on your Chromebook over the Internet. You go for it. Here you go. I got that set. I still want one. Addy, was there anything in this showcase that jumped out at you? Like are we are we moving ahead with metaverse games in any kind of cool exciting ways? So with the full caveat that I haven't I've mostly looked at J is very good announcements post. There's stuff that could be cool. And also power wash simulator is kind of neat. Yes. In VR. I like that. It wasn't anything where I looked at and I was like, this is the most exciting thing ever. This looks fantastic. It seemed like a solid gaming showcase and Assassin's Creed could be good, but I wish we could actually see them demonstrate something.
Power wash simulator is such a good example to me because the thing that amazes me about VR and the thing that continues to give me hope about this is that it just is fun to do stuff. Like yeah, cooking simulator is fun. There's this very dumb game gorilla tag where like the graphics kind of suck. The game barely works, but it's super popular and very fun. And it's like it's just fun to do things in VR. And that's not going to be enough forever. It's probably not even enough now to really like sustain this thing as a mainstream, you know, prospect. The power washer is coming. It's so these games are so fun and so stupid. I want that. Yeah. I just want to do chores in my living room that are deeply satisfying, but not actually productive chores. Like yes, perfect. No notes. Yeah. Absolutely.
Now, VR is really it's really, really good at physical game stuff. I also, I love it for shooters for that reason. I think it's really cool. I think there's a lot of great stuff you can do in VR gaming and I'm really happy that the next product we get from meta is a gaming device. And I hope they lean into that so hard. I am not totally sure how what them leaning into it really hard looks like for me and AR because I do not have a lot of very large clean surfaces that I can project things onto. Fair. Yeah. I mean, if I'm meta, like, if the big goal of the company is to, you know, connect people and bring new things together and give people stuff to do, like the future looks like Roblox and Fortnite and that kind of stuff, like they should be building towards that and you can have a gaming machine that turns into all of the other stuff that you want over time. But like stop trying to do all of this other weird stuff in the interim.
It's like you can back from games into the metaverse and I feel like, if I'm meta, that's clearly the way I would go because that's the thing that's working for now. Apple seems to be on the road to trying something very different. So and that's that's the other headset thing we should talk about here is WWC is next week on Monday.
What would we say? It's like 99% chance at this point we're going to get a headset. I would be shocked at this point if we don't get a headset. It would be pretty weird for them to have invited the VR headset people just to be like psych. It would be an amazing head fake. Just bring a bunch of them and they're like, let's talk about car play. The Elay is just like vibrating in the front row. Yeah, it would be unprecedented levels of tech company cruelty. It really would.
But so Adi, you've been following this thing forever. You've been talking to folks this week about how folks are feeling about the headset. Like what's your level of interest and excitement and curiosity about what else going on here? I don't know how to deal with the cognitive dissonance of everyone being incredibly excited by this headset and all of the people in an industry that I've followed for a very long time being extremely optimistic about it and then me looking at it and going, I still don't know what I want to do with this, which maybe Apple is it's great at being the I know now what to do with this company, but it's hard.
Yeah, but yeah, to your point. Yeah, a lot of people in AR, they feel like this is the point where maybe it could be cool. Maybe there's going to be a company. It is going to do a product that does actually just work that you're going to have something where you if you want to use your desktop with it or an app, you don't have to go through this really complicated sinking process of like downloading another client and setting up another account.
You already have all of that, you could just drag a window from your iPhone to your headset or something that their discompany that has this really strong record with design, with making things very approachable, that it's going to be high end, but it sounds like from all the specs we know it's going to have just this ridiculously high end screen to the extent that might actually manage to sell pass through AR as something that feels kind of like looking at the real world.
And so I think that all those things do feel like they're meaningfully different from what same meta is doing just because Apple is in a position to have advantages that meta doesn't have right now.
Yeah, I think I've gone back and forth on how I feel about the fact that this thing is reported to cost $3,000. So much money. I've actually come around to a place of like weird optimism about that fact because what it means in theory is that Apple can basically afford to throw every bit of power and spec and capability that it has into it. It can use Apple.
It's capable of making very good screens. It's capable of making like unparalleled processors in this space. It's capable of having really great cameras, right? Like if you just spare no expense and put all of that into one thing, like you can see how a lot of the pieces might actually come together in a cool way. The downside is it's going to cost $3,000. But maybe the upside is that as a result, it can actually like be good.
I don't know, Alex, where's your head at right now? What are you thinking about? I think that this is like a turning point for ARVR regardless, like however, either way, this comes out, right? If this comes out and everybody's like, wow, this screen is really good. It turns out when you don't put a garbage screen in these things, it's an incredible experience and it makes everything better. And that could be really extraordinary, right?
And that could put more investment into better displays because the displays on every single headset out there right now is hot, hot garbage, even the really expensive ones, right? I don't think that's universally true, but for the, like VARJO. Yeah, VARJO is good. But if you're just talking about stuff that you're probably going to buy off the shelf as a consumer, a lot of it's not great.
Yeah. And so I think like the opportunity to show that and prove that actually displays to make these, that could be really, really cool. But also the other side of this is if that's not enough, then VR is kind of dead and Apple looks really stupid. It's kind of where I'm sitting with it, like, because everybody, it's so many people.
I mean, Addy, correct me if I'm wrong, but so many people are like, well, it's Apple. Apple doesn't come into these things without knowing what to do. Apple is really good at making up use cases for products when other people have struggled at it. But even Apple, like all the reports we've gotten about this product so far have been like, even Apple is worried about what the use cases are. It feels a lot like the watch where the watch came out and it took them a couple of years to figure it out. And like, they can't afford to do that with VR because VR, because at least with watches, other people have figured stuff out. There was enthusiasm behind these products with VR. It's not quite the same. So I'm actually really curious what they do with the VR side of the spectrum because if they made just a really good VR headset with good VR controllers, then people have figured out some compelling things to do, which are games. If you put Beat Saber on this, then, okay, it's not $3,000 worth of a thing. But it is you get to pick it up day one and there's something fun to do on it.
I don't know how Apple's going to control these things. That is my biggest open question. If it is just hand tracking, then that automatically locks out the vast majority of things that people have discovered are fun in VR headsets. I'm just thinking about playing Beat Saber with my hands and anyone walking in on that. I really appreciate the extent to which your life in VR is governed by what if someone opens the door into my living room while I'm playing VR. Because one time I was playing Beat Saber and really working up a sweat and I had the window open and on a ground floor apartment, everybody saw.
No, see, I'm with Addie. You just have to lean into the pure chaos that is this. Like Mark Zuckerberg, when he posted about this this morning, the day that I was playing there's a thing buried in a six slide long thing that he posted on Instagram that's just him shadowboxing with the new headset on. He looks stupid because you have to look stupid in this thing. I genuinely believe that the only way forward is just not to care. This thing is just a shame defeating device and it's going to be healthy for all of us in that sense. But I think that's a hard sell for the vast majority of the human population.
Shappell's going to resurrect the iPod headphones ad from 2007 or whatever and then we'll finally make these things cool. I think that is genuinely what a lot of people are really hoping is that. Finally, okay, well everything Apple does, someday you're going to look cool. Like, did you look objectively really terrible in AirPods? Yes, they looked dumb. But now we all have to accept that sometimes you'll look dumb because they're good. Yeah, I really think that is the thing people are most looking to Apple to do here. Like, the tech is one thing and I think bigger than just the like, how do you make one of these things good is the question of like, what do I do with this? And I think there are a lot of people who are going to be watching on Monday saying like, what is the killer app that Apple identifies?
My overwhelming theory is that it's FaceTime that I think Apple is going to spend a tremendous amount of time talking about FaceTime because like, good video chats is just like a thing that a headset can do very well now and that Apple is going to talk a lot about. But I totally agree. I think the single most like valuable thing Apple could and will try to do for this industry is make it less embarrassing to be seen in a headset. I don't know if that's possible. Like some of the rumors that have been out there are like the thing where it's going to have an outward facing display that shows your face. It's going to have your eyes on the front of it. Yeah. That is the most like dystopian thing I can possibly imagine. I am thrilled. I'm so excited. The way you just lit up at it, just thinking about it. I cannot imagine a worse idea like truly, like I would rather paint my own eyes onto the other side of it. But what if it's cool? It's like something from like a Terry Gilliam film or something. It's impossible for it to be cool. Alex is the answer to your question.
What if you're there you plan Beat Saber with your hands, not controllers and your eyes just staring vacantly out through the little external display and somehow Apple has made that cool. Like that would be incredible. I bet you could put on little fake glasses. You could put a little flair on them. Could do so many things with them, which brings me to my actual other question, which is you mentioned FaceTime.
What does that look like? Do you have like a emoji that is representing you and because it can track your face, you're doing FaceTime because it's clearly not an un just a clear video of your face. There's not a camera that can take a full video of your face. You don't want just like a super zoomed in just like this frame of your eyes. It can be your eyes. It's going to be really interesting to contrast the response to that to the almost universal derision of Meta's avatars. Yeah.
I don't know. I feel like you guys actually used Memoji. Like, Memoji never appear in my like actual day of life. But maybe some people use them. I don't know. I made a Memoji of, remember Creepy Sonic? I love Creepy Sonic. Creepy original when they made the Sonic movie, when they first came out with the trailer, Sonic was creepy. And I immediately made a Memoji version of him. And I used it for ages until like my mom's best friend in their 70s messaged me something. And then she was like, why is your Memoji a little blue man? And I was like, oh, I should have dropped a clue. So now it's me with a cowboy hat. Why am I being haunted by this thing that you sent me? Yeah, but it's like, I don't know.
I use it with a lot of people who aren't like always online. We're not always in this space. And they all use it just so earnestly and so delightfully that I'm like, oh, that's kind of charming. And I could totally see like that friend of my mom's who thought I was messaging her from a little blue man being like, oh, it's a delight. Look at your little cartoon you with a cowboy hat on. You wear your little $3,000 headset. Me too. Like, I could see that happening, which is going to be great until you have to tell someone that like their dog died and you have to do it as a cartoon face. He's ruined now. Just creepy sonic.
Sadly telling you your dog is dead. Like you basically you have creepy sonic telling you your dog is dead or you do the thing that met has been trying to work on for a while, which is to create these hyper realistic avatars that then you map your expressions onto and it just looks like a recreation of you. So it's like the final fantasy movie telling you your dog is dead. Yes. I mean, ideally without that part without the uncanny valley part, which is the big risk. So yeah, I just I think the how do you tell someone that their beloved pet is dead is like a difficult test for VR FaceTime. Can we make that a like a law like Addie's dead beloved dead pet law? If that's how I get my name to attach to a law, sure.
It must be able to adequately say this without me going, oh, that's weird. I mean, yeah, you have to be able to say a serious thing over mass communication without it coming off as deeply inappropriate. Yeah. And sometimes we will still mess it up. I love that. Yeah, I think the other thing and we should we should switch gears here in a minute. But I think the other thing I'm trying to figure out and Addie having used all of these headsets, I'm curious what you're thinking about on this front too is like the question to me is what happens when you turn it on, right?
Like I think it's there's a pretty good chance that Apple is going to have made good hardware, right? Like all the pieces are there. It's been a long time. I think there's a pretty good chance that this thing is going to be like a nice device. I have no idea what the software is going to look like. Like everything Apple has built is basically just like different size screens on which you run apps. And this thing which presumably it sounds like is going to be called XROS, which is a odd name, but there we go.
The naming people on this thing have not done a great job. If it's really the reality pro and it runs XROS, like we blew it y'all. But anyway, this question of like what what happens when I put it on my face? And this is sort of true of all AR things. Like what is it supposed to show me? How does the how does it boot? Where does it go?
Like what what what is the right answer here? You've used all these things is like the meta home, the best thing we've done so far. The big question to me is whether you have to sync it with something.
Oh, interesting. Huge numbers of headsets right now either there's no other option or it's the best option is you install a phone app and the phone app handles stuff like logging into an account. And then it switches you over to the headset and you boot up and you see something like home. So I'm really curious what kind of dependencies it's going to have to other products and particularly other Apple products.
And then yeah, I mean, there's the option that's home like an apps green home is the most attractive thing to me. There are people who have tried to do these sort of skeoomorphic you feel like you're in a real place. Like your own little home. I feel like no one's quite pulled that off. But I don't know. Maybe Apple has something else.
You're cool. If it just boots into what looks like a really big like iPad home screen. It's just like you're you're inside of your iPad. This is what I'm used to doing with the quest. Yeah, basically. I mean, technically my the quest has like a little home screen, but it's a row of icons to me. What would you want it to be otherwise? Like a house? I don't know.
I just this is why this is such an interesting question to me, right? Because I think the thing I believe strongly is that if the best we can do is basically port. iPad apps over so that they sort of appear in a window next to your face. That is failure. And we have ruined it. I think there's a decent chance that's what it's going to be at first, but like God help us if that's the best we ever figured out how to do because that's just Google Glass again.
What was the HoloLens UI like? I look at because I remember I for me, HoloLens always feels like the North Star for user interface in AR feels like it. They solved a lot of the problems and a lot of the issues. Somebody at Microsoft is like fist pumping aggressively hearing you say that you guys did it. I mean, you didn't do it in that HoloLens never really left like development and being sold to the military, but you did it. You figured out like how to make the stuff work, but I genuinely can't remember what the startup situation was like.
The HoloLens is a lot of like kind of floating elements in front of you in the world. It's like it just kind of it just like decorates your space with some stuff, which I think works more or less. Okay. I mean, that would make sense for something like this. I realized what the third option is. It's the fake watch. And I think that's what HoloLens ended up doing eventually, which is the you lift your wrist and contextually because there's cameras and they can tell that your wrist is there. They open up a thing that looks like a little fancy display with icons. That's not cool.
I want that. I just think that's neat. Like it's just like if I'm going to be wearing it on my head, I want something different than what if I strapped a giant iPad to my face? I just feel like that's what it's going to be. That's what a lot of the reports have said. Yeah. And to some extent that's fine for the first one, right? Like it's it's a nice piece of hardware. It will run apps. It'll do the pass through video. You'll be able to like throw a big Netflix screen up here.
Like I was thinking this morning about the thing. Mark Zuckerberg said it at I think it was back when it was called Facebook Connect a bunch of years ago about like the north star of this is you can just project a television onto your wall and you just have like a virtual TV that sits there. I kind of think that is the vibe that we're going to get from the first run of Apple's headset that is just like, I just want to watch Netflix and just like Netflix.
Question for this is how do you end up? How do you watch Netflix with like your roommate or your kid? Because you're both watching different Netflix's. Do you have a way to sync them up? Like I think that Apple has to be just normal enough to recognize that people are maybe going to want to watch things with other people and that they're going to want to come up with the situation and we'll let them do this. You buy a headset precisely so you never have to speak to your children again.
Like that's that's just what it is. They can't admit that. No, but they can't because a friend a friend of mine this morning sent me a photo and she's like babysitting her two nephews and she's got two sons. She sends me a picture and it's all four boys in her kitchen all on their own iPads, all with their own headphones and all doing their own thing. And I was like, that is totally foreign to me.
Like one, nothing like that before breakfast, but two, like usually the TV would be on and we'd all be watching Arthur or whatever cartoon was on or news if my mom vetoed us. And they don't do that as often anymore, right? Like a lot of people don't do that. They go and they watch their own things. The kid everybody sits down for family time and it's we're physically in the same room as the family time. I don't want to watch the Little Mermaid movie. You watch that and I'm going to go watch succession with my headphones on.
Okay, maybe I should be more clear in that I don't know about kids. I do definitely watch Netflix with my husband. Okay. This isn't for you. Yeah, it's a lot of people have like people that they love that they want to share experiences with that. Okay, but even if we're not in with it, have you ever watched like a tech company? Any keynote they posit all kinds of social uses for things that make me feel like some kind of horrible shut in everything they announce is like, so you know when you have your 30 friends over from potluck, like they have to find some way to make that play.
Yeah, or like when they when they do the iPad AR stuff and they're like, you know how you and your friends gather around a table and play Dungeons and Dragons through your iPads? It's like, yes, me and my friends, we do that for sure. All the time. 100% of the time. Only thing we do. Yeah, that's that is fair. I guess that plays into what they're going to do with FaceTime too, right? Like it's that same it's that same situation of how do we make this social without being weird and creepy and hopefully Apple figured that out. Right guys? Yeah, we'll see.
All right, we're we need to switch gears and take a break. But before we go, you each have to give me one prediction about something that's going to happen with the headset on Monday. Ideally, something that has not been reported or talked about. I'll go first while you guys think I think they're going to be colors. I think this thing is going to come in like a wide, maybe not that wide, but in a variety of like cool, interesting colors, there might be a purple, like it's going to be very important to Apple that this thing is like nice to look at and wear. And so they're going to do a lot of the same stuff they did with the watch and try to make a case that this is like a lovely fashion object and it won't work, but they're going to try. That's my theory.
Addy, what's yours? I think my theory is very similar to yours, but which is that they will have faces the way that they have for Apple Watch, but it will literally be on your face. And that that will be what the front screen is for. And like if you are out in full AR mode, then it will be your face and maybe you can, I don't know where funny glasses. Otherwise it's off to signal that you are dead to the world, but you can put something really cool that looks on it. I like that. You can put something that looks really cool on it. That's a good idea.
Addy,你呢?我认为我的理论与你的很相似,但是我认为他们将会像 Apple Watch 一样拥有面部屏幕,但实际上将出现在你的脸上。这也将是正面屏幕的用途。如果你是在完全的增强现实模式下,那么它将展示在你的脸上,也许你需要戴上一些有趣的眼镜。否则,它将关闭,以示你与这个世界无关,但你可以在上面放置一些非常酷的东西。我喜欢这个想法。你可以在上面放置很酷的东西。这是个好主意。
So we got. The controller will be the iPhone. I think somebody already reported this, but I still think it's true. Like you're going to hold it in your hand. Yeah. You will play Beat Saber with your iPhone, which means we'll probably at some point get a little MagSafe strap for your iPhone. I have my iPad in one hand, my iPhone in the other, and I'm just going to be crushing Beat Saber. It's going to be unbelievable. Flinging things into the TV at all times. I can't wait to like punch a wall with my phone. It's going to be great. Then you have the new one. It's going to be great.
We need to take a break. Addy, thank you. I suspect we will be regrouping a week from now to talk about all this stuff and all the things we got wrong. But thank you and we'll see you then and we will be right back.
Alright, we're back. Dan C for tier. Hi, Dan. Hello. We have a lot to talk about. I went through and like tried to make a list of all of the rumors and reporting that there have been for WWDC and it's it's a lot. Do you guys want to do software first or max first because those feel like kind of the two big categories here? I like Max more. We should do software. Those are the two big categories. That's what's been rumored for WWDC. Well, we already talked about the big category. You're coming in for the scraps here, Dan. I hate to break down into you.
Let's do max first because I think this is not normally a super hardware event. We'll get like the occasional thing we got an M2 MacBook Air last year. Right. But it comes in. I'll say HomePod. Yeah, like I said, normally not a hardware event. I would just say nothing would make me happier than if Apple spent like two hours telling us about a headset and then Tim Cook is like and also a HomePod and then just leaves. That's what the HomePod deserves as far as I'm concerned. Figures cost. We made the HomePod even smaller. Goodbye.
But there are a bunch of slightly conflicting rumors about what's coming high end Max, low end Max, Dan. Yeah. Dan, do you have a good grasp on the situation here? I think we're in a weird position this year because normally by June, Apple has already announced new Max. Well, that's true. There's usually that March event, right? Right. We didn't have a spring event. We had this weird announcement in January for the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, which were in the Mac mini and then new MacBook Pros that we didn't have anything happen in the spring.
And here we are in June. It's WWDC. And the rumors have been for a long time that Apple has been working on a 15 inch MacBook air that it also has been working on an M3 chip because the M2 chip is now a year old. And now most recently, the rumors are that an updated Max studio with M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips, Ultra being the newest one that hasn't yet been announced, maybe announced as well. What's weirdly missing from all this is a Mac Pro. Yeah, which hello, let's see. It's been a year in change since they said that's for another day about the Mac Pro.
I think they're kind of screwed on the Mac Pro. Why? Because they want to announce it with the fanciest processors, right? But the fanciest processors always come second. They always announce the M2, then the M2 Max, the M1, the M1 Max. And they took a long time to get these M2 Max Pro versions out, right? Like the M2 was last WWDC, it debuted with the MacBook Air. And then it was until January that we got the M2 Pro and M2 Max. And now we're here a year later expecting possibly to get an M2 Ultra. So it has taken them a long time to get these like iterations of the M2 base chip out. And the way that the pace of their development goes is like the M3 is if you read the tea leaves and believe the rumors right around the corner. So they set themselves up because now if they release the M2 Ultra with a Mac Pro, okay, cool. Oh, now you're just going to announce the M3 in six months. Why should I get it?
And then also, oh, you're going to announce it first with the studio, which in many respects is kind of the pro. It's very, very good. I've got one. I podcast on it right now. It's wonderful. Like there's stuff that professionals certainly need better in outs like stuff like that. Expandability, yep. But is that going to be enough? Yeah, I don't know. Like if they come out with an M2 Ultra next week and stick it in the on a refreshed Mac studio, it was an open question of like what is there for the Mac Pro to have, right? Like is there like what's above Ultra, right? And I think that's what you're driving at right now.
And I think the one thing about the Mac Pro that you kind of alluded to is that is different from the Mac studio is expandability. And nobody has really even like none of the rumors, none of the reporting has really kind of alluded to how Apple might address that in the M architecture world where RAM is like basically all on the same die. They don't support third party GPUs. You're not sticking an AMD GPU in it. There aren't expansion cards for audio drivers or whatever professional stick in a Mac Pro. Like none of that exists and there hasn't been any reporting around it. So like it's very unclear. And their solution is just thunderbolt, right? Like the last time they did the Mac Pro, there was some pretty cool stuff there even if it was super expensive and majority people didn't have any use for it.
It was still cool. You could run a lot of GPUs at like very high bandwidth. You could run GPUs. They had accelerator cards. You could add more thunderbolt ports. So like you could expand it a lot. And in this case, it's like, well, their solution right now for expandability is thunderbolt.
Yeah. And you don't need a tower for that because of thunderbolts, just a little USB-C style plug. So where do you go? And if you don't need the GPUs. And if this other stuff, they're so reluctant to work with other people, the whole point of expandability is that you can work with other products. You don't have to rely entirely on one company. And that's kind of the antithesis of what Apple's computer philosophy is at this point. So how does that work? And I think this is a can. They're going to kick down the road for a very long time until they then invite a bunch of Apple bloggers to show off and be like, we really care about the pro community.
And look at this new one that nobody else can see yet. It'll come out in six years. Yeah, you basically only have to do that once every five years, it seems, and people will get on board. But I think you're exactly right. Because to me, the thing about the pro was always that they could get away with it because the pro would just continue being a very good computer for a very long time.
In part because it was expandable. Well, you know, they had that whole 2013 model. Well, unless. I love that trash can. Except when Apple ruined it on purpose for some reason. But like the towers lasted a long time because you could add stuff they were expandable.
As long as the processor was enough, you could add everything else that you needed. And I believe that even for the 2019 model, which is the most recent one that has the cheese grater front end and stuff like that, the M series chips now are probably outpacing the Intel Zions that are in there. But because of that expandability, if you needed a lot of GPU grunt, you can still beat the best M2 Max chip on GPU horsepower in a Mac Pro by just sticking more cards in there and running them together and things like that. And so like it is still got an edge over, even though the processor is probably not as good.
It certainly is using more power off the wall and all those things, the RAM is not as fast, whatever it might be. But for those very specific use cases, yeah, to your point David, it's still relevant and fast and powerful.
Have we heard anything from Apple from rumor sites about modularity in the processors for the M series? Because of the way my understanding at least, because of the way the M processors. They're like soldered on.
Yeah, it's not just the processor, right? It's the whole system. And like unified memory is really kind of like the thing that nobody knows how Apple is going to address for something like a Mac Pro where you could have terabytes of RAM.
是的,这不仅仅是处理器的问题,对吧?整个系统也是很重要的。就像统一内存这种东西,大家都不知道苹果如何解决像 Mac Pro 这样的设备,它可能配备了几TB的RAM。
What if the Mac Pro ends up being like, you just buy additional Mac studio boards and just plug in board after board, then they make a ton of money, but also theoretically that makes a really super fast. Yeah, I mean, that would be that would be very cool. That would be the ultimate dream of modularity.
如果Mac Pro变成这样,你只需要购买额外的Mac studio board,并且一块块地插入就可以了,这样他们会赚很多钱,但理论上也会变得非常快。是的,我的意思是,那将是非常酷的。那将是模块化的终极梦想。
20,000 dollars base model price. I have no idea what kind of interface would allow for that kind of bandwidth. They'd have to build it, right? Like they'd have to do it all themselves. So that's what they did with the previous ultra, the M1 Ultra that's in the current Mac studio.
It is two M1 Mac chips with a special interconnect between them talking to them. That is all on like the board level though, that is not like a modular thing that you can pull apart. So it would be an interesting thing. But again, I think to what everyone here is saying is that it's kind of a little bit of like a pipe dream wish casting for the Mac Pro because there just hasn't been any evidence in terms of like what they're going to do with it.
Well, it also makes me wonder if part of what Apple is stalling for here is to own even more of the ecosystem. Like I don't know that Apple wants to be a company that like sells RAM on its own separately. But like, I mean, it would love to mark it up. It sure would. Yeah. But like does Apple want to be a GPU company that starts to put some of that stuff in?
Like do they is the ultimate goal here to give you that extensibility and modularity, but it's all Apple products all the way down? That to me feels like at least as far as like Apple considers itself as a company, kind of the most on brand path forward. It's a hell of a lot of work and involves getting into a lot of businesses. Apple has not traditionally been in, but like they got a big team with a lot of track record building really great chips now.
这句话的意思是,像“Like do they is”这样的技术目标的最终目的是为了给你提供更高的扩展性和模块化,但它只使用苹果的产品。对我来说,这至少在苹果公司自己的看法中是品牌推进的最好方式。这需要大量的工作,涉及很多苹果传统上没有涉足的业务领域,但他们现在有一个庞大的团队,拥有大量建立卓越芯片的经验。
Like I would not be shocked if they're like, here are all these extra pieces, but we sell all of them and they all cost $8,000. I just wonder if this delay with the Mac Pro just kind of speaks to how small of a business it actually is for Apple. And like it's clear that like the M series chips are not either Apple's not able to produce them as fast as it wants to or develop them as fast as it wants to. And so it's putting all of the weight of its development stuff into the computers that people are actually buying.
Like it's putting, it puts the M2 first in a MacBook Air. It's the most popular laptop in the world. The M3 is probably going to show up in a MacBook Air again, the most popular laptop in the world. And then it will trickle down the line. It'll get to the MacBook Pros, which are the next line. And then it will make it to the studio. And then if there's enough left in the supply chain, maybe one day for those four people that want a Mac Pro.
Well, I mean, that's kind of, that's what Intel and AMD do, right? Like they typically, their releases are typically like the, I think it's usually the desktop gaming GPUs are announced first. And that's because that's where a really big market for them is. And they switch this around sometimes, they do do their super low energy processors first because laptops and they want to sell a lot of laptops. But they do think a lot about that market and like, where's our biggest market? Let's focus there first.
So I don't think it was ever confusing that Apple was like, yeah, we're going to do our cheapest, fastest, easiest, produced thing. Sure. In our cheapest, most popular device. Sure. It's just we are now about to be on the cusp of a third generation of these chips. And still nothing at that Mac Pro level. So I just wonder, like you said, Alex, is it just going to keep getting kicked down the road because the priorities are always going to go towards making sure they are satisfying demand for the things that the vast majority of people are buying? We will see a second generation of the mixed reality headset before we see a Mac Pro. I'm just, I am happy to put money on that right now. Oof, there are a bunch of video editors who just got real sad listening to that. I'm sorry. Sorry to all of you video editors.
But I do think the other part of this, and then we should get back to the stuff that's actually real I'm going to watch. Sorry, Mac Pro. The studio, at least from what I've heard anecdotally, for most people was a pretty clean replacement and in many cases, improvement on the Mac Pro. It's stupid, powerful. It's much smaller. It's much easier to like run and manage. It's a lot cheaper and it's like the studio plus studio display thing seems to have made a lot of really high-end needy Apple users really, really happy.
And it's fast. I remember talking with Chris Person, who's been on the show before, friend of the Verge, and he's a video editor and I was like, yeah, I got a Mac studio and I was kind of like, uh, because I'm talking to you and your video editor and you know what you're talking about. So you probably think this is dumb. And he's like, no, I just got one. It's the most incredible thing in the world. I can do everything so much faster than I could do with any home built computer. This has changed my entire workflow. It's really is the hype cannot even begin to compare. And I was like, well, you're not a dude prone to hyperbole. And that sounded really hyperbolic. So holy crap. And that's what I've heard over and over and over again from other people too, is just like, no, the thing just flies and it does what they need so well. And yeah, you've got Thunderbolt for when you need to, when you need that like grunt work, I got to just move files and stuff like that.
I will say if they are going to bump the chips on the studio, which it seems like by all accounts, the rumors are pointing towards there's no real design changes or anything like that. It will be a little disappointing if they don't address some of the complaints been with the studio. There's been a lot of user complaints about the fan noise. Alex, I don't know if that's been an issue for you. I got the base model. A lot of very particular people don't like it. Wait, they don't like that there's too much of it or they don't like the like specific sound of the fan. Apparently, it sits at a low RPM of like 2000 RPM constantly. It does not show. I see. And so like that's really weird for the M series MacBook Pros, which almost never turned their fans on. The next studio constantly has its fan on.
And some people in quiet environments, maybe they're particular about the sound of it or whatever, don't like it. Hold on. Hold on. No, nothing. Alex's hearing is too damaged. And then I think, you know, things like the HDMI port, if I'm not mistaken, is 2.0 and so 2.1 stuff like that where like they could upgrade it and make it better.
But yeah, it seems like to, you know, what you were saying, Alex is like, there really isn't much to do to the Mac studio to make it better other than bring it up to the next generation, make it even more powerful than it already is. Give me two HDMI ports. No, because I'm tired of having to use a weird Thunderbolt. If I know one thing about Apple, it's that giving you more ports is not what Apple is interested in. They did put a lot on the studio to be fair. That is true. It's got an SD card slot. So like listen, we'll take what we can get.
But I think that the 15 inch era, I think to me is fascinating because I think back to last year and the M2 air comes out, they do kind of a like gentle redesign of it that I still don't love. I still think the wedge is like one of the greatest. I think it was a big redesign. I mean, that was a pretty significant redesign. Yes. In as much as you can redesign a 13 inch laptop that still looks like a 13 inch laptop, you know what I mean? It's like, we're not sort of reinventing the wheel here, but it did change what like a 11 year old idea about how the air works. So like I'll give you that. It was a big change. Yeah, it went from a wedge to a square. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
But really the story of that laptop and what you found when you reviewed it then is that the M2 was not such a meaningful upgrade over the M1 as to make it like a must buy. And I think I came out of that basically telling everybody over the last 12 months to buy an M1 MacBook Air because I like the shape of it better. The processor had a bigger battery. Yeah. The M2 air came with a lot of quality of life improvements, bigger screen, better speakers, you know, they had the max safe charging, other things that like better camera, things that like you used or experience interact with daily or make it better. But in terms of performance, you're right, David, it was like a modest bump in performance. And depending on which spec level you got, there was the whole controversy around the SSD being slower and things like that, probably for most people buying a base level MacBook Air, they would never notice and not really matter.
But you can get a lot of that battery life and performance out of the M1. And you know, we've seen over the past year or so, those are constantly going for like $800 brand new, which is a smoke and deal. And I agree, I would totally recommend if someone is like, I want a good Mac for the least amount of money, then like absolutely M1 era all the way. But it wasn't that huge generational leap that we got from going from Intel to the M1 chip at all. And I don't think we are ever really going to see that again unless they go to a different architecture beyond, right? Like that that was the big jump and then everything else is going to be iterative.
But we could see a really big battery life jump with the 15 inch MacBook Air, right? So that's what I was going to say is I think the smart thing that Apple is doing this here is actually making a change that is going to feel like a bigger change to people because it's going to have, it's just going to have more space for battery. I assume the battery life on this thing is going to be ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know anyone who's complaining about the M1 or M2 battery life. Like it's not a problem. No, it still feels like magic.
Honestly, the thing where I can just sit on a plane all the way across the country and my battery is still at like 65% is just like it's, I'm two years into having this computer and it still feels like magic. How long it lasts? I wanted to be more absurd than that though. I want you to be able to go like, Oh yeah, I went three days without looking for my charger because I have a Mac, a 15 inch MacBook. I mean, it might happen. Like if that doesn't happen, that I'll be disappointed.
I think that the 15 inch MacBook Air will be transformative, but not because of the battery, but just because it has a bigger screen and people love bigger screens and they will always go for bigger screens. And then so like if you look at Apple's laptops for, I don't know, ever, you, the 13 inch one was the accessible one. And then if you wanted any bigger screen, you are spending two thousand plus dollars, many times a thousand dollars more. If you want to go from a 13.5 inch M2 MacBook Air to a 16 inch MacBook Pro is a thousand dollar jump. And for most people, the rest of that difference is all stuff you don't care about. Exactly. Everything else is stuff you don't care about.
So I think that Apple can screw this up and they screwed it up with the iPhone 14 plus by pricing a 15 inch MacBook Air too close to two thousand dollars because if you think about like the 13 inch MacBook Air starts at $1,200 now, I think if they, if they price the 15 inch model in that $1,500 range, I think it'll be gangbusters and people will go nuts for it. If they're pricing it at $1,800 to $2,000, it's the iPhone 14 plus all over again, where it is just too close to the price of the Pro models and people will just ignore it and either go cheap because they're on a budget or go up because they want something better.
我认为苹果可能会弄糟这件事,在 iPhone 14 Plus 上,他们就因为定价一款 15 英寸的 MacBook Air 太接近两千美元而失败。如果你想想,13 英寸的 MacBook Air 起价现在已经是 1200 美元了,如果他们把 15 英寸的机型定价在 1500 美元左右,我认为销售会像疯了一样。但是,如果他们的定价在 1800 美元到 2000 美元之间,那就又是 iPhone 14 Plus 的情况了。对于消费者来说,这个价格距离 Pro 模型太近了,人们会忽视它,要么因为预算而选择便宜的,要么选择更好的。
And so like Apple could screw this up. I'm not like like, like I think that they do have the potential to do a really awesome job with it, but like they screwed it up with the 14 plus.
Does it need to be cheaper than the Mac book pro? Either either size. Yeah. Yes. So it needs to be cheaper than the 13 inch. Also like the 13 inch MacBook Pro is that weird curveball that ruins everyone's predictions and models. I don't think it has to be cheaper than that. I think it has to be cheaper than the 14 inch MacBook.
But it has to be significantly cheaper than the 14 inch MacBook Pro, which a 14 inch MacBook Pro lists price starts at $2,000. You can find them all over the place for $1,800 and that will offer more power because it's going to be an M2 Pro chip. It's going to have that mini LED screen. It's going to have ports and stuff like that. There's going to be a lot of reasons for people to buy that one instead of a 15 inch MacBook Air. But if all they want is a bigger screen and really a MacBook Air is the computer for them that a 15 inch MacBook Air price correctly would be like gangbusters.
Like if you look at like what people buy Windows laptops. So what you want to happen is a 15 inch MacBook Air priced at like $1,500. 16 gigabytes of RAM standard. I don't even think they need to do that. They won't. How big is storage? They're going to do 8 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage at 1500 bucks. And you know what? It's going to be really popular. If they do it at 1500, if they do it at 17 18 19 2000, like too much. Hey, if you do a $1,700 device with 8 gigabytes of RAM, like I think you'll lose everybody.
Oh, no, completely disagree. Well, that's true. But not because of the RAM. I think it's that's purely a price thing. I think 8 gigs of RAM is more than enough for most people. It's just like if you can afford 16, get 16 at all times. Yeah, get as much as you possibly can afford. But but yeah, I totally agree.
Like if they can get this thing at like 13 99 or 14 99, it's going to be a monster success. But then anything more than that. And you have to do this thing that you have to do way too often with Apple now. Like the iPad is the worst offender of this, right? Yeah. Where it's like everything you do is like, well, for $100, I could just get this one. And then suddenly you're buying the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. Well, they put that 64 gig base board in and now I need to jump 150 bucks and like, oh, I wanted cellular. Yeah, I just wanted an iPad mini. It's like optioning a luxury car. Just keep going up and off. That's exactly right. Which to be clear, Apple is doing extremely on purpose and is very good at. But but yeah, I agree. I think the iPhone 14 plus is very much like the the problem child of this strategy and it'll be interesting to see if Apple gets away with it.
Yeah. Let's talk about software. So there's there's a lot of rumors out there. iOS 17 seems like it's going to be the most interesting one just because it usually is. It seems like I don't know what what y'all's feeling has been so far, but it seems like because the headset is such a big deal and because we're going to get these devices, there's going to be kind of less wacky, funky new software stuff than usual. Like a lot of the reporting has been that it's some sort of quality of life improvements, couple of new apps that we can talk about. There's some big stuff coming next year because of regulatory stuff with, you know, side loading and app stores and all that stuff, but that might get pushed off to next year. But the biggest things I've seen so far this year are things like, well, actually here, I made a list of all the things that are reported to come becoming an iOS 17 to hear the list.
Yeah, let's hear and hear the list. Okay. I want it.
好的,让我们听听清单。好的,我想听。
I think improvements to control center, whatever that means, improvements to the wallet app, which thank God, and also location services, which is an interesting one. Apple's done a bunch of interesting things with like find my and the air tags stuff and all that. So there's apparently more coming in that realm.
More interactive widgets so that you can actually like do something on a widget without just tapping into open the app. More and better stuff to do in the dynamic island, improvements to the always on display, airplay upgrades so you could in theory send stuff from your phone to a TV or device, even if you don't own it, which I think would be very cool.
Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who we should say is basically responsible for the vast majority of the good reporting about what's going on at Apple in the world. So good job, Mark. What he said is basically Apple has been talking to like hotels about how to enable airplay so that I can send stuff from my phone to my hotel TV, which would be awesome. You don't travel with an Apple TV in your suitcase. I travel with a Roku for exactly this reason and I hate it the most and I would love to not have to do that anymore.
But then the biggest thing, or at least what I think is the biggest thing is that Apple's apparently working on a way so that when you dock your phone when it's off and horizontal, so it's like put down in landscape mode, it'll turn into essentially a smart display that it'll be sort of the always on display, it'll show information, I don't know what else it photos, whatever, and that it's a precursor to like what Apple wants to do with smart home displays. But it's basically it's like what we've seen with the Pixel tablet and the Echo devices and the Nest stuff. It's a sort of ambient display that just shows you information. Perfect. I love that. I think that makes a lot more sense on an iPad, but sure. They're going to do it on the iPhone.
Can we go back to the hotel thing though? Because that means that the hotel Wi-Fi has to not suck. And I can't really see like Hilton and Marriott and everybody being like, oh man, we have to go finally make this not be garbage, just the hottest garbage on the planet. But what if it could make a direct Wi-Fi ad hoc connection from your device? Which I would assume that that's where it'll actually land. Do you think Hilton and Marriott are going to pay?
我们能回到酒店的问题吗?因为这意味着酒店的无线网络不能太差劲了。 我无法想象希尔顿和万豪酒店会像这样说:“哦,天啊,我们必须要把这个网络给修好,不能再是全球最差劲的网络了。”但如果它可以直接从你的设备建立Wi-Fi ad hoc连接呢?我认为那就是它实际上将会落脚的地方。你认为希尔顿和万豪会出钱吗?
You know what? And then the other guy, they're going to fill their rooms with those tele-TVs because they can get them for free and they're going to have to look at ads the whole time. You already have to do that. I have to tell you turn on the TV in a hotel and it's like, do you want to hear all about our great restaurant options? Guys, it's okay. I bring my tele-TV with me to host house. So it's no problem. It's under your arm. Yeah, it's fine.
But again, like the sum of all of that stuff is like fine, right? It's like good new things. But nothing in there feels like a sort of big explosive new idea about iOS. And maybe that's just where we are. Yeah, I mean, I think that's like what iOS 17 and it's like, you know, they're going to talk about iOS. They have to talk about iOS because it is like they're bread and butter now.
It is the majority of the company. And at the same time, they have the Facebook problem where they can't change too much because they will disrupt however many billions of existing users. And you know, we're ironically 10 years out from iOS 7 when they really last blew it all up and then that didn't go so well.
Well, they also a couple of years ago famously slowed down on the stuff they rolled out for each of these updates because they were cramming so much stuff in that it was a big buggy garbage mess. And so they're like, oh, maybe that's a bad tack. So I think we're still seeing that on all of these products where it's like, sometimes we're going to do really cool stuff and sometimes we're not because it needs to work.
And you can see where Apple's kind of weird energy goes instead. Like, because they can't blow up iOS because it would make a lot of people incredibly angry. Instead they're out here being like, what if we just took over all the software in your car? And apparently there's going to be some more car play stuff coming this year that presumably automakers will not be interested in because they've spent the last year being not interested in what Apple did last year.
We're going to make Neelai review whatever it is. In the one car it's some day shows up on. Review the slideshow because that's all it ever ends up being. Neelai, look at this picture. Tell us what you think. And yeah, but I think to me the smart display thing could be cool. There's apparently going to be a journaling app that I think could be nifty. There's going to do some stuff with the health app. But I don't know, Dan, is there anything in these rumors that excites you about what's coming in iOS?
Yeah, it'd be nice for them to do more with the dynamic island. The rumors, the future rumors for the rest of the year are that the dynamic island will be on the entire line of iPhones in the fall. So if they are bringing more features to it, they really haven't done too much with it since it came out on the 14 Pro. There's room to grow there. So it'd be interesting to see how they do that there. I like the idea of the ambient lock screen display, but like I said, I want that on an iPad more than I want it on my phone. Yeah.
It's weird in general that the always on display stuff has not come to the iPad. It's such a natural thing for it. Well, yeah, but like if you have it charged, I would assume this is only going to work if it's charging, right? Like if it's on a MagSafe dock or whatever, and you've got it rotated horizontally. But it's ugly on a dock because you have to do it horizontally and then the charger's sticking out the butt. Well, I mean, on an iPhone, you could put it on a MagSafe puck and turn it horizontally and there's nothing sticking out the side of it, right? You can't do that on an iPad. That's why that's funny. That's why it's not on the iPad is because the iPad will be aesthetically ugly. Listen, listen, Apple, if that's your reason, I urge you to take a look at the magic mouse and how that thing charges and you have lost all leg to stand on about how things look when they are plugged in. Different teams, different teams. That was hardware. This is software.
What's interesting to me about this software story, at least so far from the rumors is we haven't talked about a lot to us. I think we are expecting big changes to watch a watch, which are long overdue. But as you mentioned earlier, David, there's not a lot rumors coming for Mac OS and there's not a lot rumored coming for iPad OS. Yeah, we've heard almost nothing. Mac iPad and TVOS, there's been almost deep goal reporting at all so far. Yeah, it could be so much better. Yeah. Like the fact that they haven't done any attempt to make live non-Apple TV plus content readily available, like you see on Android and some of the other products, there's just so much they could be doing.
对我来说,这个软件故事中有趣的地方,至少从谣言中到目前为止,是我们还没有听到很多关于我们自己的东西。我认为我们期待着观看手表的巨大改变,这已经迫在眉睫了。但正如你之前提到的,大卫,目前并没有太多Mac OS和iPad OS的谣言。是的,我们几乎没有听到什么消息。到目前为止,Mac iPad和TVOS几乎没有深入的报道。是的,它本应该更好。比如,他们没有做出任何努力使非Apple TV Plus内容像在Android和其他一些产品上那样随时随地可用,他们可以做的太多了。
Alex, if you're about to go on a fast TV rant, you're just adding the podcast. The podcast is over. Dan, did you see how David clocked me? And just like. As soon as you said the word live TV is like, oh no. He's like, oh, here it's coming. Alex is trying to fast move over here. Let's just start the ads coming in here. But wait, Dan, Dan, we cut you off. What were you saying?
I don't remember. You were going to talk about the iPad. Yeah, so the iPad, I think there's a lot of work that can be done. Obviously, Stage Manager still a mess. They kind of biffed it last year with their launches and it still doesn't have features that the iPhone has. Like we talked about always on display is not there. Other like widget-y features, stuff like that still aren't on the iPad. But it doesn't seem like it will get the new apps, right? So this journaling app will be available on all three platforms. And maybe a health app will be on the iPad, which would be a nice addition because it's weirdly not there now.
But like beyond that, there hasn't been any rumors or any reporting in terms of like them rethinking Stage Manager or coming out with new ideas or software for the iPad, which is a little bit of a bummer. And then like you were saying the Mac, like, what are they going to call it is the big question.
Yeah, like what we joke is Craig Federighi going to make is now like the most interesting thing about the Mac every year. So excited. But WatchOS 10, rumored to be a big, pretty big redesign, maybe the biggest redesign since the watch came out. It's been long overdue. New faces.
Yeah, I haven't read as much about the watch. What's the theory about what's coming with the watch? So the big theory with that has been rumored is that we are getting a take on widgets for the watch. These complications now, but they're pretty static. They don't update very often, things like that.
So the idea is that there will be new widget interfaces that update more frequently or more customizable, which would be great. Maybe a rethinking of the Honeycomb, whatever they call that, the app launcher thing, which is kind of a disaster and always has been just a refresh of the user interface of the watch, which we haven't seen.
It's basically been the same thing since 2015 with really minor iterations since then. So it's long overdue for it. It's a little interesting for them to do it this year if they are launching a new platform that's going to get all the attention, but whatever, if it's happening, I'll take it.
So is it kind of like there's that Siri face that is just kind of a scrollable set of things? Is it kind of a play on that that we might be getting? It could be, but I think that if that would work a lot better as a module on a different watch face and a module that updates based on context and things like that.
So right now, if you mess around with focus modes on your iPhone, you can tell it when I'm changing focus modes to change my watch face to whatever I set, just like you can change your wallpaper on your iPhone and your home screen. What if you took it a little bit further and used a little bit more context with where you are, what you're doing and things like that. And the watch can be a little bit more adaptive. That would be nice.
It'd be cool. It's kind of probably a nerdy level thing because you're going to have to tweak it and tinker with it and stuff like that, but I'm into it. One thing I've heard, I've been talking to a bunch of developers this week about just like what they want from Apple.
And for the most part, it's pretty straightforward. I've had a bunch of people say we want SwiftUI to be better so we can better build cross-platform apps. But the number of people who have brought up the watch to me has been really interesting because on the one hand, the watch is kind of better and more mature than ever, but also to your point, it is the same damn thing it has been since 2015.
And especially now that we have the Ultra and these things have more performance and they have more battery, more screen than ever. Yeah, developers are just like, give us more to do. They're so hamstrung.
The Ultra has this huge screen and it uses the exact same interface as the rest of the watch. So it doesn't even take advantage of the fact that it's got this big screen. Right. And Apple has always really aggressively limited the stuff you can do on those devices because it's so worried about battery life and performance. But now as those become less of a worry, there are a lot of people who are like, Apple, like loose in the reins a bit, let us do more stuff on the watch.
And I'm hopeful that that's going to be one of the things that starts to happen because the Ultra in particular is so much more powerful than it is allowed to be by the way watch OS works right now. It's crazy. Yeah, let us do something with that button.
Yeah. It's a button you can barely do anything with it. Yeah, it's exactly right. Anything else? Any other rumors? We should take a break here in a sec, but have I missed anything? What are we?
What else are we expecting? Alex, do you want to talk about FastTV? I feel bad that I cut you off talking about FastTV. I'm fine. They're not going to do anything with it. And so why even get my hopes up? I wonder how much of these things are going to be in the keynote and how much is just going to be relegated to developer sessions or press releases or things like that. I mean, that's what they've done with TVOS the last couple of years. Yeah, they don't even mention it on stage, poor TVOS. The like bento box slides they show at the end of everything are going to be, I suspect, like particularly full of stuff this year. Yeah, that they didn't mention because they've got to spend all this time on a new platform or a new device and I expect this to be like a two hour keynote. And even then, how are they going to touch everything? Yeah, Dan, you, Niele, and I are going to be there. So everyone, please start praying for us now. It's going to be a long, long day. Pray for our bladders. Have fun. Wear diapers.
All right, we need to take one more break and then we're going to come back and do a lightning round and then get out of here. We'll be right back.
好的,我们需要再休息一下,然后进行一轮快速问答,然后就要结束了。稍等片刻,我们就回来。
We're back. I just looked at what Alex picked for the lightning round and I just want to apologize to everybody in advance. Alex, you don't get to go first. Oh, Dan, you go first. What's your lightning round pick? So my lightning round pick is the Amazon Echo Pop, which Jen reviewed this week. It is Amazon's cheapest Echo speaker now. It's 40 bucks. It comes in pretty colors. It's very cool. And it also tries to upsell you on alarm sounds. But when you say set an alarm, it is the most bonkers thing ever. And it's just like the like, it just blows my mind.
So if you are familiar with Alexa and you used echoes, you've probably gotten used to Alexa saying to you, by the way, do you want to do this, this, this, and this every single time you ask it a command. And no, you don't. You never do. You never ever do. You just wanted to turn the lights off. Jen asked it to set an alarm while she was testing this. And it said, by the way, do you want to buy a louder alarm sound after setting an alarm? And I just was like, I just like, the user experience of that is just so mind-blowingly awful and like, just like a cynical that I just like, I couldn't believe it.
That's really like down the middle of like the sci-fi dystopias about all of this stuff is it's just like in, in you watch Blade Runner and it's like, what if everything was just ads and it's like, that's everybody watch these movies and was like, Oh, what a good product idea. And it's like, no, you missed all point of all of that. Yeah, I mean, this is why it's $40, right? Yeah. See, the thing about Amazon and I is that like, there are times when I don't mind that stick like the special offers thing on the Kindle where it's like, when you turn it off, it'll show you ads for things you should buy. I actually don't mind that at all. And that's fine. But things like this are just gross and hostile and like should not be allowed in a product. Yeah. And because the because of the voice assistant is like actively trying to engage you, it's what makes it worse with the Kindle. It's like you're turning it off, you put it down, you walk away, you don't look at it again. Right.
So like you don't even have to interact with it that the voice assistant calls to you and speaks to you and continues speaking to you. And you just want to go off and do something else where you want to go to bed because you set an alarm to wake up at six in the morning. It's just so bad. And it's like, it's the next step of this that it's like, okay, for free, I'll wake you up somewhere between five, 30 and seven. But if you pay me $9 a month, I'll wake you up on time. Like, how are we actually far away from it? Precise alarm isn't in that purchase. You only get fuzzy alarms. It's cable company, right? Like, it's like when you call your cable company to cancel your cable and they're like, but what if for $100 more, we give you showtime and cinemax and you're like, that's not what it. No, just do what I ask.
Sorry, I cannot complete this prompt as I cannot see the complete text of the English sentence. Please provide the full sentence for me to translate.
Yes, fine. You go second. That way I can go last and we can cut you off when this gets horrible. Again, I'm sorry to everyone in advance for what's about to happen on the perch cast.
Okay. So, so there was a company a few years ago that was trying to like make video games more immersive. And their idea was like, what if we put speakers in the seats? What if we, what if we surrounded you with speakers and stuff? So you would really feel it when you get fragged. I will just point out that like Disney World has been doing this for decades. If you go to the Honey, I shrunk the kids exhibit, like that's just, this is what that is. Movie theaters have been doing it for decades. Like it's a very common thing, but they're like, but what if we did it in your home? Wouldn't that be cool? And everybody said no, it would not. And everybody said no.
And they still need to make money. So apparently they had some friends over at Land Rover and Land Rover was like, yes, what if we put speakers in the seats of our cars so that you could really feel the music? Oh, God. And I think we all know where my head is going, but I'm trying to keep things PG rated. I promise, David, I would keep it PG rated. I don't think this is as wild as you're making it sound of simply because massage seats have existed in luxury cars for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. But I just, you know, it's like it's music and it's in your car. You're just, yeah, I want to listen to some hopping tombs.
Here's a pitch for you. Maybe they feel like if the speakers are in the seats and you're feeling the music or whatever, you don't have to turn it up as loud. So if you got kids sleeping in the back, you can still experience the music as a driver without turning up the volume too loud. Now what this is is you pull up to a red light, you find just the right beats per minute and you for sure miss the green light. You know what I mean? You do not know when the light changes. 100%. This is giving you a distraction when you're waiting in line at McDonald's for your chicken nuggets. Yeah. Those chicken nuggets are never, ever coming out to you. Don't worry about it. But if they do, they're going to taste great.
Yeah, I appreciate your optimism. Thank you, Dad. I tried. He kept us good. Yeah. No, listen, car companies continuing to flail to find things to charge you money for is my favorite story in the tech industry right now. It's, I hope there's a subscription for this, by the way, I hope the hardware is there. And then they're like, oh, but you have to pay us $12.99 a month for you is the vibrating seats. And if you stop paying, it'll vibrate like offbeat and horribly and it'll just ruin your entire experience. Yeah. I see drive down the road.
By the way, right. Did you know that you could pay for your seat to vibrate with the music? God. So mine is a very new phone, the Motorola Razer Plus, which is the latest in Motorola's like reboot of the flip phone. This one feels like much closer to getting it right. The big new thing is it has, instead of a teeny tiny little stripe of a screen on the outside, it has, what does it down? Like 3.6 inches. It's like a whole phone on the outside. It literally, it's like, yeah, it's just like a little phone. It's $1,000, right? I mean, yeah. The phone is in $1,000. I thought there were like 1,500.
Well, these flip styles that go normal size to small are about 1,000 bucks. Right. Yeah, the Galaxy Z Flip, I think, is the same price. But they usually don't look this cool. Well, yeah, I mean, they're, well, they look cool and they get like compact. But they don't look this cool. Right. This looks cool because like David said, there's a whole phone on the outside of it. It's sick as hell.
这些可翻转的款式,从正常大小到小型的价格大约在1000美元左右。是的。是的,我想Galaxy Z Flip的价格也是一样的。但它们通常看起来不这么酷。嗯,是的,它们看起来很酷而且很紧凑。但他们不会看起来这么酷。对。这看起来很酷,因为像David说的,整个手机都放在外面。它太棒了。
The thing that this solves for me is the number of times that I'm like, I just need to respond with an emoji to this text message. But if I open my phone, I will then open Instagram and I will be using my phone for 45 minutes. Like this neatly solves that very specific problem for me in a way that makes me very happy. Does it? What if you just open Instagram on the outside? No, because it's too tiny. Because I think you can. It's too tiny. You'll get annoyed. I don't know. You go look at Elson's article. He's got a whole maps on there and it's got a keyboard. What if she has to do anything down where the camera bump is? That's just a black hole. They built games that like use the camera bump. You like a little more will go into the camera bump. Go into shady places.
Yeah. I think this is cool. I agree with David. I think that this is finally the flip that actually looks good. Yeah, you're probably right that this solves none of my like existential problems about using phones. But it's cool. A phone that is small and folds out to be big but is useful in both ways. Like good job Motorola. You got it right.
So, Elson had a piece this week before this announcement talking about it's going to be hot foldable summer. This is like the first way. We're still waiting for the pixel fold to come out after its announcement. Sam's like to remember to be announcing stuff in June or July I think.
But you know, the way that she described these style phones is like a combination of this specifically the flip style is like a combination of a smartwatch and a normal cell phone. And then this outside display lets you do all the things that you might do on a smartwatch reply to messages, look at directions, control music, maybe smart home stuff or whatever.
And this looks like definitely much more usable, especially then like Sam's like tiny little strip of a display that's very limited in what it will show. Yeah.
这看起来明显更容易使用,特别是与萨姆的微小显示条相比,它的显示内容非常有限。是的。
Flip funds given to me all of them. I love them all. Right. We need to get out of here. Thank you both. This is this is right fun. We're going to have oh, so much more WWDC stuff. It's just like the headset is our life for the foreseeable future. So if you don't care about headsets, I'm so very sorry.
Lots of good stuff on the verge this week. We had our Lisa documentary that everybody should watch about the Apple Lisa. We talked a bunch about that on the Wednesday show, but the documentary is amazing. It's like the best half hour you'll spend this week next time you're waiting for your chicken nuggets, watch the documentary. It's excellent. We also our feature team ran a thing about a kid who kept impersonating cops in Chicago and kept getting with it. It's deeply weird and excellent. Lots of good reviews and stuff on the site this week. It was really good week.
Like the thing that happens before WWDC is everybody just tries to like dump all their news because then Apple kind of eats the news cycle for two weeks. So there's all kinds of stuff going on. It was very good.
在 WWDC 之前发生的事情就像大家试图把所有的新闻都倒出来,因为接下来两周 Apple 会占据所有的新闻周报。所以有各种各样的事情发生。这非常好。
The one last thing I want to point everybody to is this device made by a designer called Paragraphica, which is just an AI camera. I can't believe none of us picked this as our. It was my pick and tell. I remembered Range Rover. Sorry.
We're just going to call this a bonus lightning round item before we go here. So this thing, it's a camera, but when you press the shutter instead of actually taking a picture, it collects a bunch of data about the location, the current weather conditions, what it's looking at, all this kind of stuff feeds all of that to an image generator and then spits back an AI generated image theoretically of the thing that you were just looking at. It's like a camera, David. What's a photo, you guys? This is like, it's honestly, it's so good that Neeliah is not here because this would have been the entire show. We would have spent two hours just debating this thing.
I don't want to disparage the designer that made this because I think it's super creative and very interesting. I just, the concept of it makes me very sad. I will say they will agree. They meant this as an art project to start conversations, not the gadget of the future. So I think in that sense, I think it's totally fascinating. But yeah, I think it's very possible to like viscerally hate this thing and be totally correct if that was an interesting one. I hate it and I love it at the same time. Like I'm truly torn by it. Yeah, I think it's fascinating.
But there's a thing, we'll put the link in the show notes. There's actually a site you can go to and you just sort of like mad libs your way through some of the information that it needs. And then it spits back an image to you. It's like, it's cool. The weirdest, trippiest thing of all time. It's very fun. I highly suggest everybody do it. Are they real photos? Let us know. Yeah, who knows. If you get a good one of us, let us know. Please feed us to all images generators and let us know how it goes.
Anyway, we're going to be back on Wednesday. We have a bunch of post WWDC stuff planned. It's all going to be very fun. We have some cool, collab-y stuff going on with some friends that we've been working on. That's going to be really great. We'll be back here for the show next week once we've digested. It's going to be very fun. A lot of Apple stuff going on.
If you have questions, call the hotline. We're going to try to answer as many questions as you can. 866-Verge-1-1, if you have Apple questions now or after the keynote, let us know. Dan, Neil and I will be there live. It's going to be really fun. We will see you all in Cupertino next week.