Siri AI, Screen Time, and the rest of WWDC 2026: The Vergecast Livestream

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: hello and welcome to the verge cast the flagship podcast of private cloud compute a phrase we heard 650 000 times at today's wwdc i'm your friend david pierce joining me all the way from new york jay castranek is in hayden field hi friends hey good to be here i'm confused to be here david just to be totally candid this is good i'm glad you brought this up this was okay i've been covering wwdc i think i did the math it's either 14 or 15 years i can't remember which one this is the weirdest wwdc i have ever participated in in my life this was the strangest keynote ever so just a brief bit of inside baseball uh for anyone who is curious we prepare for these aggressively um jake do you do you want to just like this is a fun little inside baseball verge game how does the verge approach a wwdc day we don't know what's coming from apple we often get briefed and we often get embargoes from other companies we never know what's coming from apple and so we and specifically you spend a lot of time preparing for how this is going to go what just will you describe what a [00:01:07] Speaker 2: normal prep process looks like yeah i mean so this happens for every apple event and you we know the general scope of what they're going to announce right at an iphone event there's going to be an iphone so we prepare to write that wwdc is usually usually a very easy one that you you prepare you assign a writer to prepare a story for every single operating system because that's what they do they start with ios they go to ipad os they go to mac os oh here's a little thing about watch os they uh they remember they had vision os maybe we get tvos maybe we don't but they just go down the list and you know we've got some extra uh leeway built out because sometimes they'll sneak a little surprise in there or have some uh exciting new feature that crosses all these platforms but basically it's it's we have a story for every single operating system and they go in order and they spend a few minutes [00:01:59] Speaker 3: on each operating system it's very very very very predictable and for reference usually i can like pre-write part of my story and then i just write it during the keynote and then i can like zone out for part of it not a big couldn't do that today could not uh yeah so this is this i just this is a good [00:02:16] Speaker 1: way i think to get into why this is such a strange keynote because traditionally what happens is one of these starts we have everybody in a slack channel everybody is assigned to a specific story so somebody is like you're writing the ios story and you go in and you fill out the details as they're talking about it you you add some analysis as it's useful and we publish as we go like we try to be very fast on these days like four minutes into today's wwc jake and i were slacking in the background being like oh this is all blown up everything is about to be different this is this is completely unlike any [00:02:48] Speaker 2: other wwdc we've covered this was total chaos i mean they they announced they both announced all the operating systems at once like two minutes in and also didn't announce them at all like didn't say their names they were just like here's the number 27 and then they just started talking about different things they're just like all over the place they were yeah and there was a hippie bus involved you know [00:03:09] Speaker 1: live yeah so the there were basically they framed it in three ways right so one was like operating system improvements uh one was trust and safety and one was ai um i think we can dispense with the operating system improvements pretty quickly frankly because they were basically like all the things we broke last year we are trying to fix now um they spent a lot of time talking about how it's going to be faster they're fixing the rounded corners in uh in tahoe which is now called mac os golden gate which is very exciting they are un-glassing liquid glass which is just a terrific victory lap for me because five minutes after wwdc last year i wrote that liquid glass sucked and was a bad idea uh good call by me and then eventually everybody um but we have to talk about ai right like ai was the story of the thing siri was the story of the thing my siri just went off i'm so sorry to everyone who this is going to happen to uh i'm just gonna i need to turn off all of my devices very quickly but the the big push here right two years ago apple launched apple intelligence big promises about siri big promises about ai and then it all sort of collapsed uh but now they're back announcing essentially that stuff again right yeah this felt did this feel like the same stuff they [00:04:27] Speaker 3: announced two years ago which i hayden like that yeah it was a lot of that exactly like some of it was announced even in 2024 via tv ads and now we're seeing it finally happen so it was interesting to see like it would have been really really impressive like two years ago or one year ago it's still impressive but you know it's like it's the game of playing catch up and it was funny to see how much of it was announced even in 2024 not even in 2025 totally so yeah i want to talk about the playing catch up of [00:04:57] Speaker 1: this because i think the most straightforward way i can describe this uh and hayden you should gut check me on this is it seems like apple basically and i mostly sort of mean this as a compliment like went around the rest of the ai product industry and caught up it just it announced everything every other product already has it has a bunch of stuff that's in claude it has a bunch of stuff that's in chat gpt it has a bunch of stuff that's in gemini the big overarching pitch was but it's apple is that i mean is that and again like i think there's something to that and we should talk about it because again this is where we get back to private cloud compute and apple talked a lot about privacy and apple is like very much trying to present itself as the good guy in the technology space but hayden i want to know your your read on this as somebody who follows all of this really closely like did apple do anything from a feature perspective that struck you as sort of new and fascinating [00:05:54] Speaker 3: the only stuff that really struck me as new and fascinating was just how these tools interact with apple's already existing products so it's more just like the way it's going to impact a user's everyday life nothing crazy in terms of you know groundbreaking besides that and you're absolutely right like a lot of this is just playing catch up like i have a list of like 12 to 18 things they said that were just them copying competitors which i mean they should be give us give us some of the list what's okay let me let me scroll down here we have um adjusting expressivity and tone kind of like open ai announced um you know a few months ago uh we have like auto deleting chats and like some of the encryption stuff that meta was talking about we have like right with siri which everyone offers um viewing old conversations like in a list or a grid of um some sort kind of like open ai they even said like open ai when they were announcing this um you know coding assistant stuff um and also uh yeah like ask siri uh certain like in-house web search products which we've seen from others um and like a dedicated app which a bunch of competitors have launched in recent years or non-recent years and uh yeah a bunch of other stuff that's just like the the first oh multimodal stuff like inserting a photo into your search so yeah basically just catching up with all three main competitors uh open ai anthropic and google and you know also integrating a lot of their products somehow into siri so they're really going at it from both ends here they're trying to work on their own stuff and then also being like you know what let's also bring in every competitor just so we can try to catch up in some way and this is my [00:07:40] Speaker 2: question too right like they they they sort of tried to act like there's something new and novel and apple here right there are apple foundation models underpinning all of this but actually those models were created using gemini and basically what they announced everything is is mostly just a gemini feature right like it seems to me that a lot of what apple intelligence now is is gemini with apple branding and and there's clearly some distinctions but it's very hard to tell where they are and exactly what they are and apple has all these different tiers of what's available where to which platforms to which you know power of device um it's like weirdly complicated for an apple product i mean i think i agree sort of [00:08:24] Speaker 1: infrastructurally but i think the big bet here if you're apple is we can solve a the user experience and be this pervasive feeling of creepiness that people have when they use ai right and i think like that so much of the message of this keynote was apple being like we can do ai in a way that doesn't have to make you feel bad and a big part of that is again it's about private cloud compute and it's about the fact that apple is able to use all of your queries and information when it's useful and it's in context and then delete it all as soon as it's done right like this is this is a way that apple is able to do something that others are not they are desperate to store all of your stuff on the cloud and apple can be like we don't do that we just want to sell you iphones that's all fine right like i actually think apple's ability to take this stuff and do it in a more private way is is is real and true and good that's all fine i think the question of like a is there anything here that you couldn't do already on your phone i think is an interesting and complicated question and well i guess i should say that definitely is there anything here that you couldn't do on your phone except that uh apple is giving itself special privileges which is what apple always does right like this is the stuff that if you're somebody who thinks apple is a monopoly that turns off all of its features for all of its competitors you're open ai or anthropic looking at this being like we have all the same technology why won't you let us have access to these same sorts of things but i i don't know i'm so torn coming out of this this is why i'm so confused like either this was very smart and apple said we're going to do the thing that we always do which is build the features in a way that is integrated and thoughtful and smart or this is apple like completely failing to have a single new idea [00:10:09] Speaker 2: about ai i mean i this is where i i'm so interested in the gemini of it all because we know what gemini is capable of on android phones and on the pixel and it's like it can do a little bit of some of this right with magic q it can it can occasionally pull up things that are useful but um google which is i i think is fair to say farther ahead than apple when it comes to ai stuff um has not by any means nailed the integration of ai and your operating system and now apple is mostly re-announcing stuff they announced in 2024 saying that they can actually do it presumably using gemini technology and so the question is can they actually do it this time because i do think they are saying that they have a deeper integration than any other platform is offering and if they actually do that and they can actually pull it off um and do it accurately and not feel creepy about it like that is it's a lot of ifs but like that that would be a really big deal that's exactly what i just wrote um i was [00:11:09] Speaker 3: writing like in my notes like oh if they can do it it'd be amazing if blank blank and blank and that's a big if i literally wrote that because that's the thing i mean a lot of these are more um you know intense promises like we've seen before so we're gonna have to actually test it when it comes out i mean some of the stuff they showed would be really impressive if you could actually do it like um you know and creepy it's it's worth saying like like david said um you know like uh and like writing an email to your boss or writing a text to your friend and analyzing the way in which you usually communicate with them and mimicking that tone pretty creepy apparently you know maybe you don't have to worry about it privacy wise as they kept harping on but if you if you can do that it's interesting um also like things like uh you know deciding which photos have who in them and automatically uploading them to a shared album um that's a problem i had last weekend when i went to a wedding it took me forever and it was really annoying so if you could actually do that with an agent feature great um also things like vibe coding as type of tools in safari like describing an extension you want for a web page and that creates it for you so it's kind of at the like we said just copying a bunch of competitors here but if you could actually do it on your iphone and this i think that's the main thing here it's just that apple has an advantage because it has a lot of captive users who if you integrate these stuff deeply enough they're going to use it especially when it comes to ask siri and all these new like drop down menus and um automatic like stuff in the dynamic island [00:12:44] Speaker 1: that they announced yeah i think the the thing that i expected coming into this was that apple would be uh maybe slightly more reserved because obviously it it screwed up so badly two years ago that it wound up causing huge ramifications around the company right like there were big leadership changes i think uh this company blew it in a way that it is not accustomed to blowing it two years ago and so i figured that apple would come in and you know start relatively small and just sort of do things that they knew they could do in the right ways and i think there's something to that um but then i look at things like image playground where like we are forever debating you know what is a photo and we're always in this question of like apple has done a better job of outwardly saying like we care that photography is photography and that when you take a picture it should be the picture that you take we want to just collect more data to do more stuff and then they show a demo that's like i have a uh photo that i am going to reframe and when i reframe it it's using the spatial data that it used to take the photo in order to reframe it and then it generates new things from the new perspective and it's like oh you just you just fell over the line like now we've we've gone from you are doing a really interesting idea of how to honor a photograph by also adding the data that you're able to collect with these new kinds of cameras into you're just generating stuff with ai and it's like we've just you you almost had it apple and there's so many moments like that to me here and i think like hayden what you're talking about with even the the sort of mimic my own tone of voice thing feels like the the line between something feeling really cool and something feeling really creepy is very fine in ai and i think what you would hope given apple's reputation is that it would have done a better job than most of staying on the right side of that line of of doing useful things without a with ai without doing creepy things with ai and there are a lot of useful things like i got a lot of notes as soon as somebody on stage said tab management it's like this is this is my time to shine and the stuff in safari is very cool right like the ability to understand what's on a web page which of course your browser can do and group your tabs in a way that is easier for you to manage fabulous like that is a good use of ai and that is the kind of thing apple does better than most the the image generation stuff just felt gross and some of the ways that it's like we're going to seem like you and your device just feels gross and like agentically [00:15:23] Speaker 3: changing all your passwords again in theory good it just feels creeped that that's a feeling i got throughout it's like there were some things it's extremely useful am i going to change my own passwords [00:15:36] Speaker 1: no that's why i'm all in faith i'm all for agentically changing my passwords like everyone's password hygiene is so bad that there's no chance ai is going to do it worse yeah that's just go change [00:15:48] Speaker 3: everybody's it's gonna be fine but yeah it was interesting just seeing like you know some things were just slightly over the line like it reminded me of reading like the circle by dave eggers you know because even some of the kids stuff like very very helpful and useful in many ways but then the amount the way that they describe some of this stuff with like the data that they may have on like a kid's usage habits for example they say they're not going to save it but it's just the data that is available there is is a little scary when it comes to hourly usage daily usage what time of day kids are using what it's just there is a lot of data there that apple has at their disposal and as we've seen in the past can we always trust tech companies to do what they're going to say what they say they're going [00:16:31] Speaker 2: to do with data no so it creeped me out a little bit served from a big picture strategic standpoint i i'm actually like so curious about apple's decision to go hard on ai here um you know like the the deep integration with the os that is something that you need apple to enable for you but there's a whole lot of this stuff that is just like you can download a bunch of different apps and get access to it right if you want a chat bot you chat bot you can download claude you can chat download chat gpt grok whatever the heck you want you can get these image tools yourself you can get the chat features yourself um apple could have just said go ahead do that it's fine it's in the app store we have that if you want ai you can get it particularly given all the very strong feelings around ai right now and so i'm kind of curious you know i i think a couple years ago it felt like they want to be there they want to be a first mover they want to be seen as aggressive and ahead of the curve and now they're behind the curve and everyone is really mad about ai and i'm wondering you know if if what are they trying to achieve here right because they're uh kind of just throwing themselves into the same position as everybody else now where they they're more i mean we haven't tested this yet i could be wrong but i think more than likely they're going to end up with a product that is good but very very very imperfect in some really problematic ways and that's just going to lead to the same frustrations that i think uh bother people on every other platform but now apple is really putting it in everybody's face [00:18:09] Speaker 3: i think the problem here is going to be or i think what they're banking on here is that they are going to have a whole new market because you know with ai assistance in general and voice assistance like there is a totally different demographic that is a super loyal users of siri in my experience like my anecdotal experience in my personal life it's a lot of my friends parents my parents ask siri this ask siri that they're like extremely loyal users and none of my friends do that and so i think that what apple is banking on here is just getting the ai assistant experience into a totally new demographic and market one that's kind of impossible to ignore and they're going to have to be careful because they don't want it to be like a windows microsoft 11 situation where it's just forced into everything but it seems like i think their biggest boon here is going to be that talking to siri as a chatbot looks like an i message um there's a automatic voice mode button at the bottom of the message like there's a lot of ways that anyone could easily use this without any friction at all which is a good and a bad thing and i think they're just banking on the fact that more than the people that are really mad about ai right now there may be even more people in the untapped market that just don't use it and may fall in love with it at a moment's notice with zero friction which again may not be good but i think that's what they're banking on yeah and this is [00:19:26] Speaker 1: this is access apple has to your information and devices that nothing else has right like jake that's the counter to your why not just download a bunch of apps thing and also like bold strategy to be like you can why fix siri when you can just download grok like i love that take from you [00:19:42] Speaker 2: jake like i really do i mean like if they could just wash their hands of ai and be like this stuff isn't ready yet download grok if that's what you're you want okay i i would like to make a [00:19:53] Speaker 1: different case which is that some of it is is ready like there were a bunch of features like take a screenshot of this calendar lineup for a music festival and it will add it all to your calendar is ready that technology is ready it works you you can do it on android like it's it's a thing that's out there and there there were a bunch of those in here the kind of thing that i think is interesting like you can you can see uh stuff in your email that it can go through and be like oh look it's a thing that you can add to your calendar do you want to add this to your calendar again a thing you can do in google products but that's the sort of thing that i think is is really productive like you hayden you mentioned the photos thing in iMessage somebody's like hey can you send me that photo being able to automatically go parse and find that photo great good useful ai technology um this is the sort of thing that like if ai wasn't the buzzword that it was apple would never tell you the technology behind it it would just be a software feature and it would be a good one and people would like it and i think where we get tripped up in how we talk about so much of this stuff is how we we put the image generation stuff next to the chat bot that's your best friend stuff next to the take a screenshot of this thing and it will find the times and put it on your calendar those are not the same software but we talk about them the same because everything has gotten like lumped into this idea of just ai is [00:21:17] Speaker 3: everything to everyone at all times and i think apple struggles with this now it's yeah it's completely [00:21:23] Speaker 1: it drives me insane but i think apple is struggling with this too because like ai is so buzzy that you have to call it ai in order to get anybody excited about anything supposedly uh even though i think frankly like we made apps open faster turns out to be pretty exciting to a lot of apple users um but to then get to the point of saying well we we just want this stuff to work now but it's ai you like you just wind up having to play this very challenging game if you're apple that i think they just kind of didn't play [00:21:55] Speaker 3: correctly i don't know yeah there was um there are a couple interesting moments too with like ai generated text um you know and right now it's like a trend that a lot of people are using chat gpt to write like breakup texts and things like that and now you can yep cursed but now don't do that like people do that but like don't don't don't do it um and now you know you can say hey send a message to my group chat and see if everyone wants to come over for a world cup match and send them a new and like they did that as an as an example the text did look ai generated for sure maybe some people wouldn't care and yes you can edit it but i think we're all going to see an an uptick in ai generated messages coming our way many of which will be able to clock um there is also an interesting moment that i thought was just so like apple marketing just typical apple apple marketing kind of trying to make sure that everyone knows oh like even though we made a mistake it's actually a good thing so they said some appear to be racing forward pursuing ai for the sake of ai at apple our mission has always been to turn the potential of advanced technology into helpful and intuitive products for everyone so basically they're saying like oh like we didn't rush see like we're two years late but we didn't rush and we were working on something that's human centric and even that is pretty late because we saw microsoft and a ton of other companies rebrand agi last year to be power like human centric ai and they all coined these terms to kind of make ai look less scary it didn't really work um but yeah it's just funny how apple saying oh it's good that we're late and we're doing this new thing making it about humans which is the marketing tactic that every single ai company is using right now yeah it's good that we're late on these [00:23:39] Speaker 1: things that we promised you two years ago and have since been sued over uh yeah any the apple's ability to turn totally blowing this into a marketing victory never not impressive just mind-blowingly great um can we talk about the new siri voice for just a minute i have a clip of the the new voice of siri which i actually think this is like a meaningful part of the thing like the the actual experience of talking to these assistants is really important this is the thing i kept hearing from people even in the very early days of chat gpt that's like if you make these things fun to talk to you solve most of your other problems like they don't actually have to do anything if they're fun to talk to um can i play you this clip of the voice and and then i would i just want to litigate if this voice is actually a good siri voice let me see if i can do this said team these apricots are peak [00:24:31] Speaker 4: have they always been this good why has no one told me i'm telling you man i've been changed clear the fridge no clear all the fridges on it jaws and you can customize siri's voice like never before [00:24:47] Speaker 5: adjusting expressivity and pace until it clicks hi let's find the right voice for you i'll practice [00:24:55] Speaker 4: some things i like to say while you listen let me try this one out you have one new message here's another one your timer is set for one minute now for some directions at the next stop sign turn right [00:25:10] Speaker 1: okay our chat is as thrown by this as i am um hayden i want these apricots are peak i want to [00:25:15] Speaker 3: know what you think how do you feel about the apricots i i cringe so deeply hearing this live like during the keynote i i couldn't i had to stop writing and just stop i couldn't handle it also i think it it combines the worst most cringe part of people trying to adopt like slang and the worst parts of like the millennial voice of yesteryear you know like the buzzfeed style like what did it say after the apricots being peak it was like um clear the fridge no clear all the fridges it reminds me of like it's just like the old like youtube like i don't know it just it's very stuck in the past and very cringe just like what i'm what i'm sure they whatever [00:25:58] Speaker 1: voices they trained it on you know uh decidedly not scarlett johansson on this one just decidedly not yeah i think i don't know jake what's your read on this it is undoubtedly better than old siri like [00:26:12] Speaker 2: for for that you when they played this the first time i we were all in slack chatting about about it and i was like i think my headphones messed up like that couldn't have been right like uh but no yeah that's i it's weird that they said it's more expressive and then they like immediately play something where the voice just like is supposed to get excited and then it's like i'm gonna stay really neutral like i were reading ad copy for a pharmaceutical and it's like i that was that is [00:26:43] Speaker 3: maybe that was part of the unnervingness it was like not not only was it trying to be like hip but also the vocal energy didn't match that either um so you didn't believe it it's like yeah like ad copy [00:26:56] Speaker 2: that's what it read as and it kind of was which i don't know so maybe that's healthier for all of us yeah if we're like ah this thing's kind of stupid like that's that's what we need out of our ai [00:27:06] Speaker 1: assistance this year i'm not just imagining the like it's the voice reading the um side effects in every medication ad in history it would be perfect it's very good theory will destroy those jobs that that is yeah it absolutely will um i do love the idea that you can customize it actually um we just had a commenter saying that they they prefer that their robot voices sound like robots um i fully agree with that i want my robots i want my robot voices to either sound like a robot or like a 1920s newscaster with that like mid-atlantic accent and the sort of crackly staticky like give me one of those telling me what's going on all the time and and we're we're up to something for me it's like the robotic voice [00:27:47] Speaker 3: or if it's like a gps i needed to be a british man those are my only two that's my only mix [00:27:54] Speaker 1: just very gently telling you to when to turn left yeah i said if i'm gonna have a man yelling at me [00:27:58] Speaker 3: in my car it's gonna be a british guy that's what i always say i respect that i get that um the [00:28:07] Speaker 1: one other thing i want to talk about we should pivot off of ai because there's other stuff to talk about here but um this idea of sort of siri app intense and spotlight search and the idea that you can like pull everything into the ai strikes me as the place apple actually has a shot at doing something meaningfully different than what anybody else can do right you have like endless competition in terms of what thing can i ask questions to and i think a lot of people already have habit built there siri has been so bad for so long that a lot of people i think happily use gemini and claude and whatever like i talk to people every single day who have the action button on their iphone to voice mode for some ai thing but the idea like we're seeing here in the in the stream that you can grab a bunch of files and right click in the finder and ask siri about them is so much better than pulling it all into claude or chat gpt or something else that it's like these are the things where apple might have a real chance to win because it is just so seamless and when you go to spotlight and you just start typing and you ask a question having it ask siri that question and understand that you're asking siri a question rather than looking for you know just a file in your computer that's the kind of stuff where it's like okay if you believe in ai this is the stuff where apple has a real like user interface chance to win here uh am i am i crazy thinking that's the stuff [00:29:32] Speaker 3: that's actually exciting if you're apple i think that's true and i also think that a lot of these companies are just so divorced from like what consumers actually want um and in this case if apple can actually deliver on some of this stuff it is some of it as we said there's a big range here but some of it is really what consumers want like one example is you know the imessage search has been horrible the past year if i search for someone's address can't find it like i always have to ask again and then one of the examples they gave was oh like what's jeff's new address yeah like pull up the directions to this nature spot with a stop at jeff's so if it can actually deliver on that type of thing great we all have so much data right now in our lives that like searching through it in a better way is something that every consumer wants and gets extremely frustrated by so i think you know [00:30:21] Speaker 1: this is one of the areas where they can win yeah right right now as we speak craig federigi is giving some kind of like technical explanation of how this all works and i think every time you say hayden if it works i just keep thinking well it's going to work because it works when it gemini works and it's just gemini so i think to me this question of like to what extent is this just gemini and to what extent is apple doing its own thing trying to run stuff on device like this mix of private cloud compute and on-device processing and gemini feel it is unknown enough that we should probably still be skeptical that it's going to work but just the fact that gemini underpins it i feel like gives me vastly more confidence than i had in you know their ability to do this two years ago well that that was the only [00:31:07] Speaker 2: stuff we saw that was like fully new right it's like they kept doing these uh goofy demos that we've seen a hundred times before of planning a party or a trip or whatever and it's like okay like this this doesn't happen every day so this isn't very useful and we are fully aware that chatbots can pull together an agenda for you great it it is specifically highlighting files on your computer and having it go to a private server to give you an answer based on whatever's going on with them that's new that's unique and that's the thing that if apple can pull it off um this will actually be uh a somewhat at least more compelling product than a lot of the other things it's also why we don't [00:31:47] Speaker 3: know if it's actually going to work yet it's kind of like as we always say like or i always say this enterprise ai is like the most useful right now um for a lot of different reasons but this is kind of like enterprise ai for the consumer because it's like you can search your own data and files and query them so like i mean that's one of the main reasons enterprises pay big bucks for this stuff so if you can do it yourself on your own files great that will actually be a useful ai agent for one totally [00:32:16] Speaker 1: yeah i yeah i totally agree um okay the only other thing we should talk about on ai and i left this till the very end because i know i'm the only one of the three of us that cares you can now vibe code shortcuts and that is going to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me i'm going to ruin my phone trying to vibe code shortcuts uh and vibe code extensions for safari that let you do things but this idea of like you can you can do things on your phone just by asking your phone to do it is what ai is supposed to enable i think that that's one instantiation of it that i think is very cool [00:32:47] Speaker 2: actually i thought it was very bold of uh so it was surprising to see apple uh adding basic bits of vibe coding particularly they also added in safari you can vibe code extensions that like change individual websites which is like actually a very powerful little feature and i think uh among the many problems with ai it is taking this very uh kind of abstract uh product and productizing it and that's one thing where it's like okay this is still for power users but you can you can figure out [00:33:19] Speaker 1: ways to use that yeah yeah i think all of that stuff again remains to be seen how this is all going to work uh potentially very cool shortcuts my opinions about shortcuts are are well documented uh shout out to our buddy steven rogles who is in the the room at wwdc and i'm sure just like passed out out of joy [00:33:39] Speaker 2: that we can vibe code shortcuts now um sorry one more series i don't know how you skipped over this siri is now a little orb that on the vision pro you can talk to it's a 3d orb that like glows or wiggles or something and they're like you can put it wherever you want you can just you just look at it and start talking to it and that was my favorite part it was how it looked before when you turned it [00:34:04] Speaker 3: on right i mean but now it's 3d that's true yeah it was yeah but the thing is if you're apple there's [00:34:08] Speaker 1: nothing else you can do you can't do physical character because they that's been tried a bunch of times and it always gets weird and creepy and people you know do sex things with it uh you can't do clippy clip is ruined uh you can't just do lights because that's what they've been trying to do and that didn't really work so it's like you you at some point all that's left is gelatinous orb and i think we are in the like gelatinous orb era of ai products i did i did a video on i did a video [00:34:36] Speaker 3: on um like being interviewed by ai for jobs which is a whole other thing but the point is there were three different companies that i tried and the only non like they were all bad but the least bad one had a gelatinous orb because it wasn't as creepy as like talking to a fake person so i i'm a fan of the [00:34:54] Speaker 1: orb if it's how you get out of the like terrible uncanny valley of all of this stuff um i do think the i think it's it's sort of silly and overly physical on vision os i love the visuals on the iphone um they they showed a bunch but like the the new thing where instead of being sort of the light all the way around and then it's it's the ux is not super obvious now it's like it all just sort of exists it's like siri lives in your dynamic island and when you do it you get the little orb that comes out and then the information kind of comes down from the dynamic island and if you want to expand it then you're basically i think in the siri app that i'm not clear i have further complaints [00:35:34] Speaker 2: about this if i if can you tell me if i have this correct so now on the iphone there are different interactions if you swipe down from the top left corner from the top right corner and from the center those all do different things yeah yep that's correct this is not how it should and i assume [00:35:54] Speaker 1: you'll still be able to tap and long press on the dynamic island to do things so like is it possible they're going to be somewhere between five and ten different interactions that you can do with the top of the screen on your iphone absolutely yes there are nine different ways to access siri they they have [00:36:13] Speaker 2: got to cool it this is going to be the worst feature on the iphone and the most accessible i had to turn [00:36:19] Speaker 3: off siri for a while on my iphone because i've already like annoyed with actually pressing it all [00:36:23] Speaker 2: the time and now it's going to be even worse if i can just like dream re redo this keynote i want one hour dedicated to notifications and how they're going to fix it because this is how they fixed it in this keynote they went it's so bad you can only find it by swiping down from the top left corner that's that's what's happening don't worry about it just forget it's there you have to just shake [00:36:45] Speaker 1: your phone violently we've we've taken the undo shape it's not bad you get siri by shaking it as [00:36:51] Speaker 3: hard as you can that would be better i don't have notifications on any apps like literally i only have messages because they're so bad and i also check all like all the important apps enough that i don't need to be like prompting myself to check it more that's unhealthy as well yeah to be clear that's the [00:37:08] Speaker 1: correct way to live your life like congratulations on being a more well-adjusted human than either jake or i but also i'm sure we've both gotten hundreds of notifications since we've been sitting [00:37:16] Speaker 3: here no but also it's about that i check the apps enough that i don't need them you know so that's [00:37:21] Speaker 1: fair to each their own um let's talk about some of the trucks and safety stuff just for a few minutes because um i think a it was fascinating that apple spent as much time as it did on this stuff and b um i think the amount of time it spent and the actual stuff that's shipping were kind of not commensurate does that make sense right i think again i was so struck this whole time by apple is making a very clear messaging pivot to we are the good guys we we are the ones you can trust they've been doing this for a very long time but i think especially at this moment apple is sensing the backlash to ai this increasing sense among young people that they would like to be off of their devices um never mind i think it was v who said in the live blog that like gosh it's weird that apple feels that way given that they're literally called ipad kids like it's it's tim robinson in the hamburger suit being like we're all trying to figure out who did this um and and even given all of that i think apple is if apple is serious about this idea of we need to give people more tools to responsibly use their devices particularly kids i think that's great i don't think apple shipped that much here like they talked a lot about principles jake but they didn't give us that much new stuff it was as they [00:38:41] Speaker 2: were going through it it was really really difficult to to figure out what already existed and what they were projecting that they might do in the future and what was actually shipping you know this year um because i don't think it was that much there were there were a couple new things that did seem like uh they were they were going to be really useful um they allow scheduling in screen time now and i thought the most interesting thing that they sort of talked a lot about but didn't do a ton with is they're going to give expert recommendations about how much screen time you should allow for different types of apps i think that's like actually pretty interesting as a direction for them to go um now do you trust apple on how much you you know your kid should use their phone i you know that's we'll have to see what recommendations they come up with they probably want i mean your phone a lot but um yeah that's it that's an interesting idea that apple you know they're not saying that they're the x-rays they say they're partnering with experts none nonetheless it's apple taking some responsibility and saying um we're gonna try to guide you in the correct direction on how much tick [00:39:50] Speaker 3: tock your kid should be using i would love to hear like some middle schooler and high schooler reactions to this because i was just imagining their reactions like listening to this and it was just so funny because it's like yeah your parent can change the um recommendation or the lockouts on certain apps at any time with one tap like if they see you're using something too much it's over or like during school suddenly you're locked out of everything which i think is good but it would just be hilarious to see like i don't know it can it seems like it could go from like zero to 100 extremely quickly [00:40:22] Speaker 1: so we'll see how parents use this yeah i mean as ever i think whenever i talk to people about uh parenting limits and these kinds of controls the overwhelming thing you hear is these are much more parenting questions than they are tech questions right and it's like it's actually this is much more about your relationship with your children than it is about any specific technology but some of these things are i i would say like you know universally just a good idea right it's more options the the browsing stuff is really useful and important i think like that's been an easy way to get around a lot of the parental controls is the web exists um and this is going to give them more control over this stuff i think it's called ask to browse where they have to go on to some of the new websites um the strangest part to me though was apple basically abdicating all responsibility when it comes to third-party apps that they're like this is a company that has such incredibly iron-fisted control over its platform whenever it wants it but then i i think even the the phrase was something like um developers play an important role in ensuring kids are getting a good experience within apps which means nothing so they're like we're giving you a bunch of tools you can use them or not and i think that to me is like if if you're as serious about this as apple wants us to believe that it is you have to come into this with stronger opinions they didn't talk about parental controls to some of this ai stuff like are our kids going to have unfettered access to this new siri that changes the dynamic of what they can interact with in the same way that the web did so to me it's like again i'm just struck by what how much time apple devoted to this like this is not a company that picks the order of operations by accident right and the fact that they talked about trust and safety before they talked about siri is big and important and telling but then to just say like here's a bunch of apis we hope developers do the right thing was like that was it just didn't feel like enough to me it's very pick and choosy like do you [00:42:27] Speaker 3: remember when they were talking about like the nudity and violence controls was that something that and they said even if they're browsing it will automatically um you know blur stuff out i don't know if that was just across everything including external apps or if it was only across apple stuff and browsing um but yeah that was an interesting example like you know they have the ability to do that anywhere so why pick and choose and then also i thought it was very telling yes that you could they didn't mention doing this with their own ai and kids using ai it's like a huge talking point right [00:43:01] Speaker 1: now in terms of like the effects yeah yeah and i think apple is uh like jake you mentioned partnering with experts they did a lot of offloading to the i think it was the american academy of pediatrics that it was kind of like they make the rules we're just implementing them and so on the one hand it's like that's great and i think that's a good thing and i think uh apple should probably not be the arbiter of how kids should use devices that there are people who are better qualified to make some of those decisions the american academy of pediatrics is not an organization i know about but presumably is one of those things but then it's like to to make that kind of thing and then just say this is a thing we care deeply about we think it's super important we hope developers do it i mean i think you have to [00:43:48] Speaker 2: look through the lens uh of you know the the pressure on them from regulatory bodies and from you know advocates who want to see them be the arbiters here as we talk about all the time the only thing [00:44:00] Speaker 1: governments can agree on is that we need to protect children from technology like that's not the only [00:44:04] Speaker 2: bipartisan issue in the world right now well and to your point you know apple has positioned itself dead center here it is the source of power and so if you do want to regulate these things the the easiest way to do that is to go through apple and so i think does apple care legitimately about our children like like probably probably like i i think these are all very nice lovely features but i think that a lot of this also goes back to when apple gets called before the senate or wherever can they say oh actually we already provide the ability for apps to do x y and z we actually we have all kinds of tools for parents to limit their you know i i think a lot of this is based around potential to prevent them from having to do more right and that yes that is abdicating um but in in in avoiding that all out crackdown um they are at least adding some ability here uh but it's true they're not saying hey tick tock you you really better use the age api to uh tailor your content because you know they they don't want to be in the in the process of having to moderate and all of that yeah i mean there were protesters outside of wwdc [00:45:20] Speaker 1: uh it looked like handing out flyers uh about apple continuing to host you know things like grok and nudifying apps on the app store and uh it is increasingly hard to square those two things with each other and there's some real cognitive dissonance with watching apple talk about this stuff in the way [00:45:38] Speaker 2: that it does i mean i think apple it has put itself in a a tricky position that somehow it it manages surprisingly well but you know if you look i mean god all of all of elon's apps are really the uh the superstars here in terms of problematic but like if you look at the content on on x or on grok it's like does does some of this violate the app store's rules obviously yeah it is is apple going to get more heat for removing it or for leaving it there [00:46:09] Speaker 3: i remember when all the grok stuff was happening or the latest round uh we asked apple are you going to take this off the app store and they just you know pleaded the fifth they never responded and it was a question that it was amid all the um nudifying stuff so i mean yeah i think they're they'd rather just kind of stay out of the conversation they don't want to ruffle any feathers when they're so behind in the race they don't want to you know mess with the current loyal users of whatever app but is that [00:46:36] Speaker 1: a good thing probably not yeah i think we this is again it's this is sort of the uh it's a question that comes up a lot in the what will john turnus do as ceo kind of universe right now because the tim cook has been a person who has tried to uh walk a lot of lines and make a lot of people happy and has not taken a lot of what i would call very strong stances about much of anything um it'll be very interesting to see if the new ceo is willing to take bigger swings in the name of some of the values that apple talks about um let's talk about one more news thing and then i just want to talk about features we're excited about for 10 minutes then we're going to get out of here um this has been coming up a lot in the in the comments on the live stream too which is apple is kind of deliberately or otherwise treating the the 27 operating systems as like a real hardware dividing line uh it is dropping support for a huge number of um of apple watches it's dropping support for a lot of older macs when it comes to especially like the the series stuff that is just sort of a much larger set of devices being left behind for this rev of the software than i think we're used to um oh yeah right ipads too a lot of old ipads uh are are being dropped too and apple is a company that i think has a really strong track record of supporting its old devices and is just kind of clean breaking here on some level i think this is just technology right like you need ram in particular to do the kind of stuff apple's trying to do on devices here but jake were you surprised here that at the sort of [00:48:14] Speaker 2: sheer number of devices being left behind oh yeah i mean this this feels like way more than usual and and stuff that's pretty recent right like the first apple watch ultra isn't supported um like that that that's not something right that like that's really uh something's up here and i i think ai is probably the reason i assume there's probably some sort of ram limitations here um there's also this interesting thing where there's like two tiers of apple intelligence and you have to have enough ram to get the the better tier um but this is this is rough i mean i listen i personally i bought uh an m1 ipad air this time last year so that i could test the betas out and i have to get rid of it now because it's not supported um and those yeah it was a few years old at the time when i bought it which was a good deal but um you know i expected it to last for a few more years um because apple is apple is like famously good at supporting uh operating system updates for years and years and years and it was this funny thing where you know google and android for the longest time were a disaster um and then even when they started saying you know when they started saying oh we're gonna do five years we're gonna do seven years it was interesting because the defense you know apple didn't have these promises of oh five years seven years whatever um but it was like oh but they do it anyway they don't need to promise it they just do it yeah and here it's like oh like when did the apple watch ultra come out i don't what like it wasn't that long ago and that's that's a premium iphone 17 as one of our [00:49:43] Speaker 1: commenters just pointed out yeah this is wild this is and i think to me there's a really interesting thing happening here too which is not just that it's uh it's dropping a bunch of relatively recent devices but also that it is creating this sort of fragmented sliding scale of what can do what that may be probably not a super long-term problem eventually people will get powerful enough devices and it'll be fine but like how many years has apple spent making fun of the fact that not every android user is on the latest version of android and it makes it harder to develop apps because you don't know what you're developing for because a lot of people are going to be on older less powerful devices that run old software and actually can't run the new software so you're like do i leave a huge portion of my user base behind in order to support the new technology or do i risk being late to the new technology like this is actually a problem apple has been really good at avoiding with its products for a very long time and it feels like it is walking into at least a few years of really complicated [00:50:46] Speaker 2: fragmentation on that front there's a real like double whammy here too um of number one apple spent years being very very conservative with ram allocations there's a ton of apple devices out there with like eight gigs or less of ram um and now uh rampocalypse is upon us and so ram is freaking expensive and it's not like they can suddenly you know uh ship a bunch of devices that have tons of ram and you look at the macbook neo which is an uber hit and by all means a very great laptop um immediately losing access to to brand new features right and it's like what it's going to cost apple and or eventually probably consumers to upgrade the neo to get access like apple is creating problems for itself and uh you know the ai squeeze is creating problems for everybody and it's true um it's going to be very weird because having just like literally we just watched this keynote i couldn't tell you [00:51:44] Speaker 1: which features are part of which systems there's a very complicated very long verge story in our future that is just explaining what happens we need like a really messy flow chart of devices and features and all of the things that you can still do um it's gonna be it's gonna be complicated and i like and and what i wonder is how many people will bite the bullet and upgrade right because i think if if you're if you're a cynical apple watcher what you would say is this is just apple forcing everybody's hand to buy new devices uh and you know the the lifespan of these devices is getting longer that's a threat to apple so they are basically pulling the plug on everything and forcing you to upgrade um it's particularly rough [00:52:32] Speaker 2: that they open the keynote with we finally did it we took all the the hardware that's like running kind of slow and we sped it up by the way this isn't available on a lot of the old stuff and you can't [00:52:43] Speaker 3: have it yeah exactly and some of it like requires like interfacing with your friend right so it's like what if your your friend has the old one okay great like now you upgraded but still you it's just yeah there's a lot there yeah like yeah the 80 airdrop thing i was so excited about but now i'm like okay well all my friends have older phones than me um the tech the text message like thing where it shows which message sent via a specific bar on each portion of the message very helpful for when i'm in the subway every single day but who knows if others will be able to see it you know so yeah there's [00:53:17] Speaker 1: a lot yeah and we should say like there are a bunch of commenters talking about this and i think um frankly i don't have the exact list of supported devices in my head we'll figure all this out but what seems to be the case is that a lot of devices are going to get os 27 without a lot of the ai features um and we should also point out that siri ai is is in beta coming later this year um that is a bet i would have lost coming into wwc i figured coming out of 2024 the disaster that that was apple would not announce this thing until it had a thing to ship today and i was very surprised to see it not actually launched in a more finished available way um so we're still we're we're in this like liminal phase of ai for lots of people and lots of devices where in a in a sort of unreadable way it's going to be hard to figure out what your device is going to get and when and i think this is this is going to be this is just going to be a challenge for people um let's just we we should go here in a couple of minutes but let's just end on a happy note uh tell me features that apple announced that you're excited about cool things coming to apple devices in 2026 what year is it it's 2026 right yeah coming into the apple devices in 2026. i'll give you one i'll go first what you guys think the opacity slider on liquid glass i'm dead serious i think this is a great idea because uh apple has has spent a lot of time giving people more customization options on the iphone in particular and i think that's great if you want to make your iphone hideously ugly that is your right and and you should not have to live in a world created for you by apple's designers um there are people out there who like liquid glass you're you're all wrong but you are entitled to your wrong opinion and that is fine and that is that is a beautiful thing so the fact that rather than say we blew it we're scaling it back which in apple's way is what it said right like i i cannot overstate the extent to which apple saying we've heard your feedback in a wwdc keynote is them saying oh my god we know we screwed it up so bad we're so so so sorry um just let people customize just let people turn the thing off who don't like it and let people turn let people get more liquidy and glassy like what if you just couldn't see any of the buttons if you want that you should have that and i think it's great that that's what this is give me more liquid i want i want the buttons to [00:55:39] Speaker 2: start dripping and falling apart they need to like amplify the the like fluid effects here like what if everything why why is that operating system not unreal engine i want ray tracing there we go they [00:55:54] Speaker 1: got to go further yes uh jake what do you what do you like what are you excited about um okay we [00:55:59] Speaker 2: talked about this a little bit earlier but uh apple framed the uh well they had a whole bunch of screen time upgrades um and they framed a lot of the stuff around um child uh controls but um straight up being able to schedule specific times when apps aren't aren't allowed and how much time is allowed during those specific times um that that's actually really really useful i have uh i mostly mostly for tick tock uh but but having uh a screen time limit on apps that you know are just sort of like time killers is really really useful um but it's also very different uh during the week versus on the weekends or during you know work and school hours versus like at night when you really do have some time to kill um and so i think i thought that was a super smart addition and something that people will [00:56:50] Speaker 3: like legitimately get value out of totally my bricks are so popular yeah totally uh my only feature [00:56:57] Speaker 1: requests on that front and this has been true for a long time is i need the screen time limits to be meaner to me like when it just throws up the thing and is like put in your passcode and you can bypass it i i just will do that time limits have never worked for me for that reason but if siri would just show up as i was hitting the button then it was like like don't don't you do it you stupid idiot go play with your kids instead do you know how successful that would be for me oh my god i would [00:57:22] Speaker 2: never look at tiktok again i don't remember what exactly it is but google added something for android 17 where you like physically have to restart your phone if you want to like get rid of the the limit that [00:57:32] Speaker 1: you put on it and it's like that's that's that's a great idea that's effective honestly they're like [00:57:38] Speaker 2: they're screwing with you a little bit they're like yeah you're too lazy for this that's like that's why [00:57:42] Speaker 1: the brick works like you were saying hayden because it's like oh you want to look at tiktok walk over there and touch your fridge and then you can look at tiktok and i'm like fine i won't uh hayden what [00:57:52] Speaker 3: about you what are you excited about my favorites were just some of the like yeah really simple everyday things that i think will make my life a lot better like airdropping 80 faster um yeah the message bar telling you like what's been sent in a conversation there's so many times on the subway and i'm like talking to a friend and i'm i didn't anticipate that i would lose service even though i do every single time and so i'm like sending like five messages in a row but then she sends a message and then it looks like i didn't get hers like there's a weird like so it'd just be so great to you know have a bar showing what was sent what wasn't so there's no miscommunications um and then yeah like the wi-fi thing being smarter about when to stay connected and when not to like that always bothers me so much when i have to like manually disconnect from like the plain wi-fi or whatever um and yeah just like some of the in message ai features like oh like your friend says oh can you bring this thing that i forgot last week and you can click yes set reminder because i'm never going to go and set the reminder on my own it's just annoying and takes a lot of time but if it like if i could just do it with one tap or any of the other stuff in there like yeah sending the photos one tap or adding to a shared album you can decide exactly which photos of who are going to be in there stuff like that is just going to save me a lot of time so i really like like kind of the more boring like everyday stuff [00:59:14] Speaker 2: that will actually help me yeah wait the promise of them they did promise that they're going to fix [00:59:19] Speaker 1: voice dictation right because that that is so i i'm confused by this and chat please chime in on this by the way to all the people in the chat we are excited about the corner radii and the fact that don't worry about the corner radii we love a good corner radii that's true the dictation thing i couldn't figure out is um i've i've been reporting on these dictation apps like whisper flow a lot recently and uh people love them and they work really well and one of the things that has been astounding to me has been that apple's dictation remains so terrible it they said dictation and then that's about right yeah no they they said dictation and then the demo they showed and it's possible that i missed it but the demo that they showed looked like ai text generation which is not the same thing like they did a demo where it was like okay you you can you can open up a document and tell it what you want and it will write the first draft of the document for me that's a feature i i have no particular use for that but that's a feature what i want is we made the the actual speech to text dictation on the iphone better and that's what i thought dictation would mean maybe that's there and maybe i just missed the demo so please correct me if i'm wrong but i i started very excited about dictation and ended [01:00:35] Speaker 2: sort of disappointed unless i missed something okay that's that's devastating then if if they did not [01:00:41] Speaker 1: actually fix dictation listen it's it's like hilarious how bad the dictation is on an iphone on [01:00:47] Speaker 2: uh my pixel i'm i'm dictating text messages all day long people people hate getting them because my text messages are enormous but you know what i feel great i have one friend that sends me a dictation [01:00:59] Speaker 3: text messages all the time and as a recipient horrible horrible but i would love if they fixed it [01:01:05] Speaker 1: yeah that's good stuff um all right anything else we should talk about i'm still in this like crazy headspace of what on earth just happened uh anything else on y'all's mind before we get that theory is an orb screen time is better and ai might be here soon done ai is in beta on a wait list in some regions oh my god by the way siri ai terrible name just just call it siri people it's you did it it's just it's siri but it doesn't suck now siri ai is not going to bring back all the people who hate siri [01:01:37] Speaker 3: to siri but david you have to put the word ai in everything you do because it makes your stock [01:01:43] Speaker 2: price it is i really feel like they put together two words that people hate and try to make it seem like it's a better thing yeah i don't think that's gonna go well drives me nuts all right we should get [01:01:54] Speaker 1: out of here thank you both for being here this was this was a delight um we are going to be back on wednesday with much more wwdc stuff and so send us all of your questions um nila is flying a red eye home tonight and then he's going to be on with me tomorrow afternoon answering all of your questions so send them all in 866-VERGE-11 is the hotline vergecast at the verge.com is the email address uh there's a qr code on the screen i don't know what to do something do it qr code i don't know everything will be fine i promise um and we're gonna be back wednesday with that episode um i think one of the things we're doing right now is a bunch of reporters are going out looking for all of the features that are coming to these devices that didn't get talked about in the keynote because i think there's an unusually large amount of stuff coming to your phone and ipad and mac this year that didn't get any screen time in the keynote because it was a weird ass keynote and here we are but anyway we'll be back tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming thank you to travis and eric and brandon and denise and the whole team for putting all this together that's it that's the verge cast rock and roll