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- [00:01]
David Pierce
So good, so good, so good.
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- [00:57]
David Pierce
Welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of Corner Radii. I'm your friend David Pearce and on today's show we are going to answer a bunch of your questions about wwdc. Wwdc. Apple's big developer conference started on Monday. We got a lot of new announcements, lots of new stuff for all kinds of Apple devices. Big new Siri AI, Apple Intelligence. The phrase private cloud compute was used 450,000 times. You all had a lot of questions. We have lots of answers. Neil Ipatel is going to join me from his hotel room somewhere in the Bay Area and we're going to go through as many of your questions as we can. It's going to be great. But first, here is everything else happening on the Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, June 10, 2026. Users are starting to get access to a new Anthropic model called Claude Fable, a very good name for an AI model. It's based on the Mythos model that Anthropic previously said was too dangerous to release to the public. And now basically two months, a bunch of hemming and hawing about security, and one giant hack of Mythos later, here we are. It's being released to the world. Anthropic says the model is particularly good at software engineering knowledge, work and vision, which makes sense. Those are the three of the things that Anthropic is very focused on in enterprise AI. But it's also double the price of the company's other flagship model, Opus 4.8. Use those tokens wisely, my friends. Meanwhile, Xbox leaders have said that they're exploring radically different, that's a direct quote, radically different business models for the Xbox. Basically, with RAM making everything so expensive. Microsoft Seems worried that not everyone will be able to afford a console going forward, especially not the one we know of as Project Helix, which is apparently just a super high end gaming PC. What are radically different business models? Maybe it'll be ads, maybe it'll be even more focus on game pass and streaming on any kind of hardware. Maybe it'll be lots of companies making lots of different kinds of Xboxes. Right now under new leader Asha Sharma, it seems nothing is off the table for Xbox. And finally we have our first look at the Social Reckoning, the sequel to the Social Network coming later this year. And more importantly, we got our first look at Jeremy Strong trying to look and sound like Mark Zuckerberg.
- [03:01]
Nilay Patel
People around here understand that when I say no, that's the end of the debate. I'm not two years out of a dorm room anymore, Charlie. Look around.
- [03:08]
David Pierce
The Francis Haugen story is an important and big and fascinating one. But I'm not so sure about this movie, you guys. We'll see. You can read more about all of this@theverge.com that's it. That's 90 seconds. On the Verge for Wednesday, June 10th. All right, now let's get to your questions from wwdc. We had the live stream on Monday where we gave kind of our first thoughts on everything. It was pure chaos. But Nilay, you are here. Welcome, Nilay Patel.
- [03:39]
Nilay Patel
What's up?
- [03:40]
David Pierce
From. I would say looking at you, you're in an Aloft hotel. Like that's, that's the distinct vibe that
- [03:46]
Nilay Patel
I'm getting from your. This is definitely the Marriott competitor to an Aloft hotel. It's an AC hotel. I've never been. It's very corporate.
- [03:53]
David Pierce
Yeah, I love it. I assume every single person who is in your hotel is WWDC related in some way.
- [03:59]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, there's a lot of software developers just looking furious at their agents in the world.
- [04:04]
David Pierce
That sounds about right. So we have a bunch of questions that people sent us about wwdc, about some of the announcements. But first I just want to get a vibe check because one of the things we talked a lot about on Monday's show was how different and sort of bizarre the keynote was like just a very different presentation from Apple than we're used to @wwdc. What was it like in the room at Apple Park?
- [04:27]
Nilay Patel
You know, it's really interesting. I saw all the commentary about how the video was different online. No one there actually experienced the video that way. Like we were outside, we're watching it together. But we, it's, it's just in that environment, like you're watching a giant projection of a video. You don't spend time being like, well, that lighting's kind of blown out. Or like, this is obviously handheld shot on an iPhone.
- [04:48]
David Pierce
Like, why is everyone walking so much? Yeah, right.
- [04:50]
Nilay Patel
Like, it just. It kind of doesn't happen to you. Especially for me, because I'm live vlogging, so I'm just typing furiously. I have to go back and watch the video every time to figure out what happened. So in the space, what you are really getting, and especially as you walked around and, you know, we did a bunch of reporting and went to briefings afterwards, you really got the sense that Apple wanted to prove it. Like, that was by far. The vibe was, this stuff is real. It works. We're doing the live demos. They had a tech talk with Craig Federighi afterwards and Mike Rockwell and a bunch of the team. They were doing the live demos in that room. They were standing up in front of a room for reporters, like, gesturing at architecture slides. The vibe was, this works now. We got caught with our pants down two years ago, and now we are only talking about things we are shipping that works and we're being responsive to criticism. Look, by the way, the first thing they announced was an opacity slider for Liquid Glass on macOS. Like, literally the first announcement of wwc. So that was the vibe there. I wouldn't say serious. It was like a party vibe. Like, they were in full celebration mode because the thing was working and it was shipping. But it was very. It wasn't as goofy as years passed. Like, they weren't covering anything up with theatricality or production value. And I think that came through on the video. I think everyone saw that in the video. Like, there wasn't a lot of special effects for CGI Craig Federighi in the space. It was just very different. Like on campus, walking around Apple park, it was very. We did it right. You like it. Would you like to see another live demo of it working? And that we just kind of like, lived through that over and over again.
- [06:22]
David Pierce
Yeah, I saw a lot of people talking about the slowness of the demos and the fact that you actually got to sort of watch it think every time. And I had the same reaction you did, which is like, this is Apple making damn sure that you can't accuse it of not showing real demos, like, out of its way to be like, no, no, no, this is how long it takes.
- [06:42]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, without question. And even the demos that we actually saw, things took a while and I think part of that in real time, in person, was all the developers had downloaded the betas and private Cloud compute was just on fire. Like some of the demos just didn't work. And the people doing the demos were like, yeah, PCC is on fire today. Like, sorry about that. We're going to try again. And I very much appreciated that, you know what I mean? Like, the notion that Apple had built this stuff, that it was working, that the demos were experiencing real failure as opposed to everything being on Rails, you know, it's in beta. There was something about that, that it was just honest in a way that lots and lots of Apple presentations have just been infomercials for years. This one was very much like, we made products, we're shipping it, we have a point of view about what it can and can't do and we really want you to talk about it. Even down to Craig and team doing the live briefing for journalists afterwards, which it was good. You know, they know their stuff and they were there and Tim Cook was sitting in the front row. And it just struck me that they were a little nervous, not in a bad way. They weren't off their game at all. They were just out of practice. They hadn't done it in so long. Talking to real people, talking to real people and completing sentences without getting to retake it. There was just an element of Craig getting on stage and being like, hey, everybody, this is what this is like. I'm feeling this for the first time in ages. Yeah. Which I thought was good. I think it's good for Apple to be in that position of saying we have to prove that the thing works this time.
- [08:19]
David Pierce
Yeah, I think that's right. All right, let's get into some questions. And actually the first question is about the structure of the keynote itself. Here's the first question.
- [08:28]
Listener Caller
Hey, this is Gabe from dc. I had a question about your thoughts on the WDC keynote. I noticed this year Apple like barely segmented out anything into a specific section on iOS, on WatchOS, on iPadOS, et cetera. There was like one small thing at Kos and apologizing for how bad the design was. But this struck me as a weird question. Is Apple moving to kind of a host OS specific product line? It seems like what Google does, they just kind of talk about features and the assumption is that all their platforms will get the features. So is Apple going to start like de emphasizing all of their operating system specific features and just kind of move to a general. This is what we're doing this year? I don't know, that seems like an interesting thing and a big shift for Apple. Here's some of your thoughts. Thanks so much.
- [09:22]
David Pierce
I just want to say using Google as the example of the assumption that all their platforms will get the features is so generous to Google that I appreciate that. But Nilai, this jumped out to me too. What did you make of, like the actual structure of the thing? We're so used to it going a very specific way. What did you make of the way this one went?
- [09:42]
Nilay Patel
I think the only feature of note that they announced was the Apple Intelligence stuff, and that does work across all the platforms. If they had gone platform by platform, I think just narratively they would have announced Apple Intelligence five times in a row. When we actually did go to the briefings and the demos, the way it works on different platforms is different. And they showed us Apple Intelligence working in different ways on the iPad. Like they're very proud that on the iPad you can swipe down from the top and there's a little animation that drops the sort of Spotlight pill down. It's very cool. By the way, it might be the single coolest thing in the 27 operating systems is a little swipe down on the iPad. On the Mac, there's context menus and they've rearchitected Spotlight in command space. And now you can hit Command shift space to take a context screenshot for Siri AI, which is just a new keyboard command, like operating system by operating system. There are differences. There are different features in the operating systems, but the things that they announced cut across. And most importantly, Apple Intelligence cuts across. And I don't think there's a way you can do that. And then go back through the operating systems. And if you look at the structure of the keynote and there are three pillars, the first thing they announced was refinement. Yeah, Mac OS 27 Golden Gate is, you know, it's the snow leopard of this era of macOS.
- [10:57]
David Pierce
Yeah, we fixed all the stuff we broke the last time was very much the vibe.
- [11:01]
Nilay Patel
And so I think they just didn't want to do lists of features. I think they wanted to talk about their core capability. Interestingly, the family stuff, the, you know, the child safety stuff, all of those features are out already. They re announced a bunch of tools that already exist. And the thing that's really different is the underlying architecture has been updated so that those tools might actually work now. And that to me is just a big section. Is Apple responding to regulatory pressure around the country in different states and around the world in different countries? Because there's so much of it and their products have existed and they paid no attention to them, that they essentially fixed it. So maybe they'll work. We have to do the testing. They don't work now, so maybe the architecture will make them actually work. And then they re announced a bunch of features to point out that they exist, which I thought was utterly fascinating.
- [11:57]
David Pierce
So. But you don't think there's some bigger sort of reshuffling in how Apple thinks about operating systems here? Because I think one line you could draw from the AI thing you're saying is that if you think Apple Intelligence and Siri AI are the sort of umbrella features across everything, then maybe spending a lot of time thinking about iOS and iPados andMacos as fundamentally different things is not useful anymore. And that maybe this becomes a more sort of, I don't know, like single OS company rather than being as individual silos as it has been over time. But it sounds like you're just saying this is more of like a keynote planning thing, not a giant rethink in how Apple thinks about software.
- [12:42]
Nilay Patel
It's true in the case of Siri AI, which is a cloud service. So Apple has instantiated Siri AI as a cloud service across all of its devices. And for all of the talk about on device processing they did, almost everything happens on private cloud compute. Even deciding where the request should go in many cases goes up to pcc. So you say something to Siri AI and it might decide the request itself is going to PCC and then PCC is going to tell your device, oh, I need more. I need you to give me the on screen context and then your device will decide what to do. And I think all of that is fascinating. I don't think that Apple's getting away from the app model on iOS or the sort of open run whatever you want model on macOS. They were very clear that the way these devices work is still different, that Siri is going to work on these devices differently. I think the mashing together that you're reacting to is because Siri AI is a horizontal cloud service. Like fundamentally it's a service and you can access it on different devices in different ways. But at the end of the day it's just a thing that now exists across the Apple ecosystem.
- [13:54]
David Pierce
Yeah, I think that's fair. That makes sense. All right, let's move on to the next question. This is just a very specific demand for you in particular. Nilay. Here it is.
- [14:02]
Listener Caller
Hi, David and the Vergecast, this is Drew. I'm actually Listening to the episode right now, like live. So like I'm like calling you and listening to you live right now. I'm turning it down. Apologies. Anyway, I just wanted to say, can we have me like do like a tight five on corner radii and how much it matters that Apple took a second in the keynote to talk about the radius of app corners. And I don't know, I mean, I almost never do the beta on my Mac, especially not day one. And I did for that because all of my family's transfer and WhatsApp, the corner radius was always different than everything else and it was such a nightmare. So if we could get some representation of this major success and major win from wwdc, potentially the biggest for me and people of my ilk, I would love it.
- [14:57]
David Pierce
Nilai, the floor is yours. Corner radii. The greatest day of your life.
- [15:01]
Nilay Patel
It was. It's very good that it's the first thing that they announced and to your theme of we fixed it, all the stuff was broken. All the people who ran those projects are gone. Alan Dye, the head of design, is gone. He works at Meta now. John Giandria, who was the head of AI who oversaw the broken Apple Intelligence launch, is gone. Now these are new people and they have the freedom to say the stuff was broken. And boy, was the stuff broken in Tahoe. Boy, did they get completely away from what in particular makes the Mac the Mac in Tahoe, which is an absolute laser focus on user interface design and human interaction design. So I was very pleased they led with it. I saw Jon Gruber walking around. He looks very proud of himself. He is fully taking credit for all of these changes. The Opacity slider for Liquid Glass is by default, it's set in the middle. And they asked me, where would you put it? And I was like, all the way to the right. As opaque as I can get it. I just want my buttons back. There was one part in the keynote where they announced that they're just adding colors back to menu items in Windows so that you know which window is the active window. There's an element that's very silly, right? All the corner radii are going to match. Now there's also an element of that, of that's what you are buying when you buy an Apple product. You are buying the attention to detail and the focus and the sense of design. And if you want chaos, you can go get Windows or you can go get a Samsung phone or something else. But what you buy from Apple is one very constrained vision of I'm glad they're back to it. I would also connect it to how they're thinking about Apple intelligence design. Right. You know, I just interviewed Sundar and I was like, do you want to look at the search result? And his response was, we have a very scientific way of measuring whether the search results are good. Like there's no qualitative design over there. That's just not how they think about their products. Apple is very happy to talk to you about Corner Radii and fixing it now that Alan Dye is gone. And, you know, as you kind of pushed on that in different conversations I was having, there's a reason why they haven't jumped all the way into agents. There's a reason why they haven't done all of the things that everyone else are doing. They want to be thoughtful about that. Now the uncharitable read is they're not ready for that. They had to reset the whole thing. And all the features are basically free ChatGPT from two years ago in a more privacy focused way. But their argument is no one knows how any of this should work. And Apple's point of view is, yes, we will be two years late and get it right. And like, that's Apple. That's, that's the thing that they are doing right now. And I think Corner Radi is just evidence that they want to be that company.
- [17:36]
David Pierce
Yeah. And I think, like, again, I'm, I'm trying not to read too much into Keynote structure, but leading with that, I think you're, you're exactly right. It's like we are back to attending to detail in a way that I think made a lot of people very happy. Like an easy win with all the Apple nerds out there to just do that. And it is, it is one of those things that once you notice it, you can never, ever stop seeing it. So I'm very glad that they fixed this.
- [18:00]
Nilay Patel
I mean, I never installed Tahoe. It was not. It was not you.
- [18:03]
David Pierce
You managed to avoid it entirely.
- [18:05]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. I go two years on installing OS update.
- [18:09]
David Pierce
Genuinely really impressive.
- [18:11]
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Exclusions apply seehomedepot.com Pricematch for details. All right, let's get to the next question. This is from Conlin who says what for you is the best feature that would normally be a big deal in a WWDC keynote that would send developers wild, yet this year was swallowed by all the time given to AI Nonsense. For me, it would be marked down in the Notes app. Do you have one off the top of your head? Like would have been a huge deal any other year except all they wanted to talk about was Siri.
- [21:04]
Nilay Patel
Well, so it is marked down in the Notes app that did get a little cheer. Like it was, it was there. People saw it on the bento box. Like that's cool. The one that like they talked about it but it was just like the wrong moment in time to get the cheer was the agentic coding in Xcode. Like they're very proud of it and the fact that you can swap the models out to codecs and Claude code and all the other ones. There's something big brewing in Xcode that gets no attention and they talked about it more in the developer state of the union. But Xcode is becoming a big agentic coding platform for Apple developers, or at least they're trying to and they know they have to keep up. And so I think from like the developer perspective the idea that they're just going to lose to Claude code is not an option and they're going to have to push Xcode down that direction.
- [21:57]
David Pierce
That's a good one. Can I give you two? Well, I have two and a half.
- [22:01]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [22:01]
David Pierce
Because one of them you're just going to make fun of me for. So I've been going through. They put up this slide at one point that was just like a billion words of like here are the improvements that we're making and I've been going through and trying to pull out the ones that are in there that didn't get talked about a lot. One that I personally am very excited about is audio scrubbing in the now playing screen in CarPlay to be able to actually just use your finger to move audio. As somebody who has to play the same song over and over and over for my 3 year old that's going to change my life. One that I think actually might qualify as like would have been a big deal any other time is extra large widgets. They introduced a new widget size that is now basically the full size of your home screen. I've only seen screenshots, I don't have it on my phone yet. But it is just a widget that takes up the whole space that your entire app grid would and it becomes essentially an interactive app on your home screen. And, and I think like if you want to get real Galaxy brained about that, there's something really interesting happening and like how do we just elevate some of your most used apps to your Home screen.
- [23:04]
Nilay Patel
Like, I mean, I would connect that directly to. In the developer State of the Union, they announced the ability to resize iPhone apps in a simulator to like a landscape orientation. How do you get two apps on a wide screen?
- [23:16]
David Pierce
Oh, and then clearly in the middle, it's just a folding phone. Yeah, yeah.
- [23:19]
Nilay Patel
It's like. And how do you get two apps at once on a widescreen? Maybe we just have full screen widgets that go side by side a hundred
- [23:24]
David Pierce
percent and then the other one. And this. This definitely does not count as would have been a big deal. But is natural language calendar input. Are you a calendar person? I don't know that I actually know this about you. Like, are you somebody who lives out of your calendar?
- [23:35]
Nilay Patel
My entire life is a calendar.
- [23:37]
David Pierce
Okay, what calendar app do you use?
- [23:40]
Nilay Patel
Notion Calendar.
- [23:42]
David Pierce
Notion Calendar is like the most medium of calendar apps. It's also the one I use. But the now in the Apple Calendar, you'll be able to just natural language type. You know, like podcasts with Neelie 2pm at weird hotels and it'll just do it for you. Like that. That is such a giant leap forward in calendar management that it is insane that it took this long. Like fantastical. One of the great calendar apps has been doing this forever and is the only reason I use that app because it just lets me type the thing that's happening. It's just. It's just a very good thing. But I think there were. There were tons of these. We should just like turn that graphic into like a spoken word poem and just read all of them out loud
- [24:22]
Nilay Patel
because there's hundreds, but only for subscribers. You have to pay us monthly for David to just read you every feature.
- [24:27]
David Pierce
Yeah, I will dramatically read improved unread badge accuracy in mail.
- [24:31]
Nilay Patel
That'll be great.
- [24:32]
David Pierce
All right, let's get to the next one. This is from Ishraq. I'm sorry if I'm getting that wrong. Ishraq says one thing that's been bothering me about Apple's messaging for its new AI features running on private Cloud compute is that it's completely private. And none of your data will be used for training, except the training data will have to come from somewhere. And then I realized that this data is coming from Google, whose data was used to train Google's foundation models that Apple is paying to use. Doesn't that feel a bit misleading?
- [24:56]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [24:57]
David Pierce
It isn't Apple doing the data scraping, but the sausages have to be made somewhere and it's being outsourced by others to do the dirty work. I'M not sure there's even a question here, but thought it's an interesting discussion point. Thanks. This is something I saw come up a bit, actually, over the last couple of days is this question of, like, Apple really wants you to believe that it's the good guy in AI and yet it's just sort of sitting on top of like everyone else's kind of original sin of training. And however you want to feel about the way Google accumulated the data to make Gemini, Apple now gets to benefit from that without having to have done any of the dirty work. How do you feel?
- [25:31]
Nilay Patel
Oh, sure. I can just add to this. When you ask Siri, you know, what's the tallest mountain? It goes and searches the web and then you ask them, how is it searching the web? Because they've made it very clear that it's not using Google's web index. They put up a whole slide. They're like, we're not using any of this Google stuff. We're running on Google Cloud, on Nvidia hardware with our models that have been refined with Google's models, which is what they keep saying. I'm pretty sure that means they distilled Google's models. That's where you teach your model to be better by asking the bigger model lots of questions, but they won't say. But when you go get world knowledge in Siri, it returns a very familiar list. If you use any of these AI tools, like, here's a summary and then here's some sources at the bottom plus
- [26:12]
David Pierce
two that you won't click on.
- [26:14]
Nilay Patel
And you're like, where is that coming from? Where's your web index? And they're like, we have our own index. And it's like, okay, are you indexing the web? That's a big deal. To date, there have only been two. There's been the Bing Index and the Google Index. You said you're not using the Google index. You've historically used the Bing index for Siri. Are you using the Bing index? And they just won't tell you. So it's right there, right? I mean, this is the same issue that everyone has. Okay, you're going to scrape and summarize the web to return knowledge from around the web. Is Siri gonna send a bunch of traffic to websites? Like, I don't know. They don't have an answer for that. And they're just brushing by, like, this just doesn't matter to them. It's the same with training. Like, how are these models trained? Is the refinement with Gemini a Distillation. Is it actually referring to the Gemini models? They're not running Gemini in the way that everyone thinks that they are. That much is clear. They have made that abundantly clear.
- [27:08]
David Pierce
It's not just pinging the Gemini model on Google Server somewhere. Yeah.
- [27:12]
Nilay Patel
Craig Federe step in a, you know, in front of all the reporters at the tech talk and said, here's literally he put up the slide. This is how Google's model works. And then he put up the Apple model and he said, as you can see, we're using zero of Google's model. We trained our own model, we refined it with Gemini, we're running it on Google Cloud. But like, here's our whole system and it does not work in any of the same ways that Google or OpenAI or anyone uses their system. And we're not using Google's models directly in this way. I think there's a lot of questions to be asked about that. They want researchers to push on private cloud compute and make sure that it's safe and secure and all the ways they're claiming it's safe and secure. But you get the real sense that there's separation between what Google is doing with Gemini and what Apple is doing with Apple Intelligence. But the problems are still the same problems. Where is the training data from? Did you pay all the right people at all for the training data? If you just distilled Gemini now you're, you are in fact trading on the fact that Google scraped the entire web to train Gemini. And then if you have an index of the web and you're summarizing all these websites, what happens to those websites if they don't get any traffic from you? Is there going to be any exchange there? And Apple just sort of does not have answers to that. Not even being able to say what the web index is or if Apple has actually indexed the web itself, which would be a huge deal. That means Apple runs a search engine.
- [28:35]
David Pierce
Yeah. It wouldn't be terribly surprising, but it would be new for sure.
- [28:40]
Nilay Patel
Do we think Apple built a web index and this continue update like Apple Bot exists? There is a web crawler that Apple runs.
- [28:45]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [28:45]
Nilay Patel
But to do it at the scale that would support answers and Siri, that's a big deal. It's just unclear if that is the thing that they are doing right.
- [28:55]
David Pierce
And I think it is in Apple's interest to keep that whole system as obfuscated as possible.
- [29:01]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [29:02]
David Pierce
All right, let's, let's keep going. I have, I have a heady one and a less heady one sure to end with here. Let's, let's start heady. We're gonna, we're gonna talk about our feelings here for a minute. I'm really excited about it.
- [29:15]
Mark
I'm listening to the live stream. By the way, it's Mark. What's up? Keep in the woods. Right now I'm listening to live stream after wwdc and Jake is saying he's not sure why they don't just say, hey, download the apps, yada yada. The truth is that they want to own the top of the funnel. Obviously this is all opinion, but they want to own the top of the funnel, right? They want to be the one that you go to when you ask the question. So when these models get better and when there is some shift in the interface that they have control of it, because once they lose control even a little bit, that's when things get harder.
- [29:45]
Nilay Patel
Right?
- [29:45]
Mark
I use all the AIs and sometimes I'm just like, I'm just going to ask Siri because my phone's not nearby and I need to yell, hey, Siri. Or like I just have that button and I'm so used to pressing it. I'm driving and it's just easy. There's a bunch of times when my phone and Siri are the only things I have. And touching and typing is not what I want to be doing. And just asking Siri to open up anything. And they know that. They know that the usage is there. So this is my long ramble. That is to say, Jake, they just want to maintain that ownership of their behavior that they set up so many years ago because they can't lose it.
- [30:21]
David Pierce
Okay, my only response to this, Nilai, is this is right, right? Like that's that. That correct. That is what Apple is assuming is that it can play catch up and because it is right there in front of you, it will win. Right. Like, is it actually more complicated than
- [30:37]
Nilay Patel
that in the short term? I think that's exactly right. All they announced this week was that they have Sherlocked the free version of ChatGPT. Yeah.
- [30:47]
David Pierce
With fewer buttons.
- [30:48]
Nilay Patel
With fewer buttons. There's not a single thing here that goes beyond what anyone was doing with the free version of ChatGPT. They had a demo in the keynote where they were like building a shed for a makerspace and they had a bunch of quotes to make the shed and all these very contrived situations. Here's all the PDFs in a finder window and we just selected them all and it made a table and helped you pick the shed. I negotiated a car lease with free ChatGPT a year and a half ago.
- [31:15]
David Pierce
Nice.
- [31:16]
Nilay Patel
The exact same way. I just uploaded a bunch of PDFs and handwritten screenshots of deal terms from car dealers and it just figured it out and helped me. This is the free version of ChatGPT. There's not a single thing they announced. Apart from it has a little bit more personal context. It's literally running on your phone and can read your messages in mail and photos. But all the capabilities are the free version of ChatGPT. And all they've done is they've sherlocked OpenAI in that very specific way. Will the billion weekly active users of free chatgpt go down because it's just there on your iPhone? Probably, yeah. That's the short term. I don't think that matters to anyone. The long term is. Is this a platform shift? Are you going to invoke apps by just talking to Siri in your earbuds and letting it go out and do things for you in the world? Because that platform shift has gotten everyone very excited. Meta is killing itself, firing everyone to buy more GPUs to build the next version of the platform because they think that's it, that's the thing you're going to do.
- [32:19]
David Pierce
And in large part, they're all excited because they think they can use this platform shift to disintermediate the iPhone in particular.
- [32:25]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, they can get away from the Apple tax. Yeah, I think if Apple dropped the 30% tax, they would all be fine. You know, like, if the iPhone was like open access, maybe they would all quit and it would just like build their businesses. But they have all run into that wall in very specific ways. They want to get around it. Or they want to get around it and then build their own platform and then charge everyone else 30% fees, which is probably the long term view of all these companies. Boy, that's a good business to be in. So I think in the short term, I mean, they just made a chatbot, David. I don't know what your view of it was, but I was like, oh, this is just. They've just built an equivalent to the free chatbots that everyone is using right now with a little bit of it's running on your phone, so it already has your data. And great, they've sherlocked free chatgpt. The next step, where it opens the Uber app and calls an Uber for you, is nowhere to be seen on this roadmap. They've said it could happen, but that's the thing that disintermediates the app model entirely, that gets rid of the iPhone. And I think Apple is going to find ways to make sure that doesn't happen. But it's not the thing that they're protecting against right now.
- [33:24]
David Pierce
Yeah, and I think Apple, if that does happen, is very helpful that Siri becomes the system and then all you have to do is buy AirPods and you've still solved your problem.
- [33:34]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [33:34]
David Pierce
Like the iPhone eventually just becoming like a brick of compute that you talk to with other things is eventually going to be a perfectly fine outcome for Apple because they will continue to sell you iPhones.
- [33:45]
Nilay Patel
I don't know. I think this is the remains to be seen part. Why do those apps need to run locally on your phone in that case?
- [33:52]
David Pierce
Maybe they don't. I mean, I think Apple just spent a long time talking about all the privacy implications of why they should be and is like deeply invested in on edge AI processing. But there are a lot of people who are on the exact opposite end of that debate.
- [34:06]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, but all of your stuff is in icloud. Yeah, you know, it's in icloud. If the government wants to serve Apple a warrant, they can do it. They can get your icloud. Like people buy their iPhones and they download a bunch of apps from Google and meta and Apple does nothing about your data going to those companies, like nothing at all. So they're in a dance where they're claiming all these privacy protections. Just like the dance they are in with photos where they've said, you know, a photo is a representation of reality and then the competitive landscape has drawn them inexorably to AI photo editing in like, I think really damaging ways. We'll see. But it is not clear that the app model, where the apps live on your phone and they are just a viewport to a cloud service is actually the model, like maybe you don't need the viewport to the cloud service. Uber is just a cloud service. Nothing important about Uber actually happens on your phone.
- [34:56]
David Pierce
It's true. Except for the ads.
- [34:58]
Nilay Patel
At some point the agent might just go to the cloud and talk to that service directly. Yeah, it shows you ads. That's about it.
- [35:03]
David Pierce
They're very happy to do that. No, I think that's right. But I think I do agree that short term the biggest success here for Apple, like the biggest possible success is that it built free ChatGPT. And that is extremely not nothing like that would be catching up in a very real way that has a bunch of gigantic interface advantages. Um, but I, I, I, I don't see anything that goes beyond that yet. Um, all right, one more question, and this is me summarizing a surprisingly large number of questions that we got both in the live stream chat on Monday and in our various inboxes, which is basically just HomePod with several question marks afterwards. Uh, I don't think it came up at all. And, and we got a call from Jack who pointed out that given all of the Siri stuff they're talking about, actually the HomePod is sort of a perfect device for this. Like, where is the HomePod? Where's the HomePod? Nilay?
- [35:58]
Nilay Patel
Where's the HomePod? Where was any mention of TVOS? Where's the new Apple TV?
- [36:02]
David Pierce
Another thing like Siri on your television is a thing that would make a lot of sense.
- [36:07]
Nilay Patel
What it.
- [36:07]
David Pierce
Everybody else is desperately trying to put voice assistants on your tv.
- [36:10]
Nilay Patel
Everyone else is just trying to get away from the iPhone. They're like, is this a screen fair? What's the next thing in your house that looks like an Android tablet? Let's put our assistant on that thing. Like, great, Apple has your phone. If they win there, everything else is kind of sideways, Right? And that's just extra space to be won, which is how they treat a lot of the rest of their ecosystem in big ways. Like, if you have an iPhone, they're very happy with you. If you don't have an iPhone, almost nothing works well. So they're trying to get. They got to solve problem one. I'm guessing that in September or around it, we will see new hardware for the home. Right? These are the rumors.
- [36:52]
David Pierce
Yeah. We've been hearing about this little, like, home robot iPad thing for years now.
- [36:56]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, they need to introduce new hardware for the home. I don't think the existing HomePods are it. I think the existing Apple TV is. The chip is too old to support some of the features they're announcing. There's just a lot they want to do, but it's not time yet to announce it because the hardware to support it doesn't exist. By the way, the hardware to support Apple Intelligence at its full throat doesn't exist on many of the devices that are shipping today. My Apple Watch Ultra one is gonna cut off a WatchOS. That sucks. This thing was expensive.
- [37:25]
David Pierce
People are mad.
- [37:26]
Nilay Patel
People are mad. The iPhone 16, which was announced as built for Apple Intelligence, is not getting the full suite of Apple intelligence features in iOS 27. There's a lot going on here in terms of, oh, what does it actually mean for these devices to have enough memory, enough bandwidth, enough processing power to do the orchestration of what goes where and have the context. I think Apple has really underplayed it to begin with and now they have to catch up on the hardware side too.
- [37:54]
David Pierce
Yeah, I think you're right that I would say basically between this iPhone event in September and the next iPhone event next September, which is the 20th anniversary of the iPhone, I suspect we are due for a pretty aggressive rev of a lot of Apple hardware and by all accounts a bunch of new devices, including a foldable phone.
- [38:13]
Nilay Patel
Yep, that seems right.
- [38:14]
David Pierce
It's gonna be interesting. All right, Nilay, thanks for hanging out. You'll be back on Friday's show. You've got meetings and stuff to go do, cool couches to hang out on.
- [38:22]
Nilay Patel
I'm on the red eye again. The Friday show is gonna be bananas as usual.
- [38:26]
David Pierce
Very much looking forward to it. Good to see you, buddy.
- [38:28]
Nilay Patel
I'll see you.
- [38:29]
David Pierce
All right, that's it for the show. Thanks to Nili for being here. Thank you to everybody who emailed us questions and called the hotline and yelled at us during the livestream on Monday. We appreciate hearing from you at all times. If there's still stuff you want to know about wwdc, I would say there is a strong chance we're going to talk more about it on Friday. So keep calling the hotline. 866-verge11 email us vergecasthevirge.com Also, if you wanna know anything about anything else, hit us up. We love hearing from you and as always, the best thing you can do to support all of this is to subscribe to the Verge. Theverge.com subscribe gets you ad free podcasts, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our Apple coverage. It gets you everything the verge does for one subscription. Theverge.com subscribe thank you in advance. Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk and Aaron Locasio. We will be back tomorrow with some more fun stuff. See you then. Rock and roll. The right window treatments change everything.
- [39:29]
Nilay Patel
Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels.
- [39:32]
David Pierce
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