 Let's begin. Hello and welcome to the Verge cast. You may have noticed that something is different about the flagship podcast of the Verge dot Moby today. We've been raided by pirates. No, we are here, I'm very excited to say we are here in front of a live audience in San Francisco. It's the day after the iPhone event. Give yourselves a hand. And because it's the day after the iPhone event, we're going to talk about Windows Phone. Yeah, only Windows Phone. 90 minutes of pure Windows excitement. No, but these people, if you're listening in your car, just know that we'll be interrupted by the shouts of drunkards for the next hour to 90 minutes. But it's great. I would like, they are. I think everybody's drinking responsibly that I've seen so far. Is there like a keyword that we have that every time we say that you have to? I guess we're going to all figure it out together, Lauren. It's iPhone. It's not right. Anyway, I'm Nilay Patel, I'm the energy of the Verge. Dieter Bohn is here. Hello. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Lauren Good is joining us today. How are you doing, Lauren? Good. How are you guys? So we should just get into it. I need to say some things that I've forgotten. Here are the things I need to say. One, we are part of the Vox Media podcast network. We are the best podcast in that network, in case you were confused about that situation. Weeds fan out there. Yeah, the weeds is great. They're like a tank. We're like flagship. It's a very different situation. Just barreling over the landscape of policy. Good job, Ezra. But we sail through the water with the greatest of ease. Second, I want to just say thank you. T-Mobile is helping us present this live event today, so thank you to them. But that's enough business. Let's get on to business. Yesterday was the iPhone event. We were there. Dieter, Lauren, and I were there. Our talented video director, Phil Esposito, was with us. And there's lots of iPhone news. There's an iPhone X. There's an iPhone 8. It's not an iPhone 9. Nope. Troublesome. No SE news. There's a watch. There's Apple TV. But honestly, the biggest thing, literally, physically the biggest thing that happened was that we went to Apple Park for the first time. We were in the Steve Jobs Theater. And it was beautiful. It was breathtaking. It was also very strange. Lauren, I think you at one point described it to me as post-apocalyptic. Yeah, I had the distinct feeling that if anything were to really go down, you know, sometime soon, as you sometimes read about on Twitter. These days that we would have survived if it happened yesterday because we were in what felt like this, I don't know, hyper-realistic, surrealistic. Is that a word? Surreal? Hyper surreal. Hyper surreal postmodern bunker designed by Johnny Ive but dreamt up by Steve Jobs years ago. You know who's getting like the shaft and all that? It's Norman Foster, the very famous architect who designed the building. Johnny Ive's like, Norm, you're good. Just take a seat, buddy. Just circle. I've got it. Just to be clear, I was not there. And it's a circle that's above ground. Yeah. And then you go into that circle and then you descend into the theater. Yeah, you go into the lair. Well, that's just the Steve Jobs Theater. So the part where employees are going to be or I guess have started to populate is the big circle that you've all seen drone footage of. Spaceship. The spaceship, right. Seeing it from a distance, there's only one way to describe the actual Apple Park spaceship. It looms. Yeah, it just looms. It's pretty impressive. It's amazing. Then the Steve Jobs. What was that? Nothing. That's our first live event, everybody. That's absurd, everybody. How many times can you say looms? No, but the Steve Jobs Theater is the glass structure that has no apparent beam. So it's just this glass circle that's somehow holding up a ceiling. I guess they're load bearing glass panels. It's just remarkably beautiful. And then, yes, there is a staircase that kind of goes below and then you go into the Steve Jobs Theater and that's where we were. Yeah. And that first room that you walk into, we took a bunch of photos. There's photos everywhere. But it's eerie because they've aligned all of the buildings to look perfect in the morning sunlight. So everyone looks happy and beautiful and then it's a totally bare concrete floor and there's just Apple employees in white shirts smiling at you. Yeah. And it's like we're going to die here. There's no chance that we're not because it's too nice here. Everything's too nice. And then you go down and then you're in the theater and behind you, what you don't understand is that the middle of the circle is hidden from you. And while you're sitting there and Tim Cook is distracting you, the middle of the circle is opening to reveal the hands-on area where you saw all of our videos. And that just quietly, I mean it very much is like a cult. Yeah. It's like the whole campus is like a really super nice college. I think Jobs modeled it after Stanford. He loved Stanford. So he basically tore up a parking lot and then built hills in it, which is very Apple. We got, someone today told us all of the concrete they dug up was recycled into the building. So we're very proud of that. So it felt like we had arrived at college the first day. I took iPhone 101. How was the Wi-Fi? Oh my God, the Wi-Fi was great. I had very different opinions. I had zero problems with the Wi-Fi. I had all the problems. It's never happened to me at a tech event. I think it's because you have a newer Mac than I do. Yeah, it's because you were using your Mac Pro from like 2000. I was using a Mac Book Pro from 2012 and it worked fine. My theory is that they had detected my useful USB ports. SD card reader and workable processor and just shut me the fuck down. My favorite detail about the Steve Jobs Theater and the whole area, it's underground and every door is actually like 14 inches thick at minimum. It is ready for an apocalypse. It might cause one. There are little things too, like not to get too TMI, but like the doors to the bathrooms are really nice. You're like, oh, somebody thought about the bathroom doors. It was Johnny Ive. It was Norman Foster. Norman Foster is like easily the finest bathroom. You go to like Authenticate and the keypads and walls, you know, like normal office buildings are like these terrible, ugly things that stick out from the doorframe. And these are just like these beautiful white pads flush with the wall. Like where is the keypad? It's somewhat unfortunate that the movie The Circle came out before we went to a circle that looked like we were going to die. But it was very beautiful. And like one of the most stunning things that you can go see, you can actually go there. There's a visitor center that is a store. Go there and like you can. It's a town hall. The town square. The town square. It's a town square. You can have a civics situation there if you want. But anyway, so we're there. It's worth talking about because it was just so amazing to be there. We're going to go there a lot and it's going to get less amazing over time. But this time was amazing. But then they announced a whole bunch of stuff. Did they? Yeah, it was all leaked. You could read about it in the first cycle. But they actually announced the stuff. It was great. Where should we start? iPhone X. Is it? Yeah. What do you guys think? It's like some medium. What about Atmos support on the Dolby TV? Yeah, see, what they came here for. And I just want to point this out. The Verge has created a community where 200 people pay tickets to hear about surround sound formats. After that, headphone jacks. Let's just do, let's start with the Apple TV. Get it out of the way. And then we'll go to iPhone X. I just want the crowd, if you understand the following joke, I want you to yell and cheer. They're going to yell anyway. There are four lights. No. These guys aren't. You keep quiet, Joey. They're not, they're not. Was I supposed to yell? They're not Star Trek Next Generation fans. It really disappoints me. Yeah. Okay. So Apple TV was like, it was first up. Here's I think the most important thing to know about the Apple TV. It was when they were done with the event and they were like, go play with all the stuff. There is no Apple TV there. Like literally they were like, yeah, that didn't happen. Because the only update to it is the resolution update. No, no, no, the remote is. They put a ring around one of the buttons so that you could maybe know which way it was pointing when you picked it up. Yeah. They didn't mention it. Yeah. Like during the keynote or the thing, we had to ask them later. And they were like, yeah, we added a ridge of plastic. It's great. It's the biggest upgrade to the Apple TV in years, everybody. No, literally the one thing they added was 4K HDR and they came out and they did all the stuff. Yeah. And they, was it the founder or CEO of Dolby was there? CEO of Dolby was there. CEO of Dolby was there. And I think you all know this. I'm very excited about the idea of having both Dolby Vision, which is better than HDR 10, and Dolby Atmos, which is like object-based surround sound happening in my life. Yeah. The thing I want. Yeah. Because I don't want to go to the movie theater. You want all the lights to light up on your receiver. All of the lights. So did you get all the lights? No. I did not. Well, what happened? In fact, they were so confused about the lights that I assumed when I was talking to them afterwards. I can't imagine. I was like, this is great. It's a thing. And like you're going to, they also announced that all of your iTunes purchases that you did in HD will be automatically upgraded to 4K. Which is great. Which is great. It's a big deal. It's a big deal. They're going to be cheaper than like Vudu and Amazon and all the other people. All of that's great. Well, this is a huge win. I'm going to get all the lights. I'm going to save some money. Get all these free upgrades. I'm going to watch movies for days. Are you excited to spend $180 on it? And then I was talking to them later, and I was so excited that I just assumed that all the lights would light up. And I was like, how is the Atmos thing going? And they're like, yeah. And then like later on, they're like, we forgot to tell you something. This is a true story. Like later on, I got a note. And I'm like, the email had an emoji, an anemoji. Thank you. Tucking his hair behind his ear sheepishly. And they're like, yeah, we're just not doing it. And I was like, why? And they're like, we have nothing to say. They couldn't get the extra, the fourth light because they don't actually employ any Romulan torture. And they're going to make this joke app just happening. You're listening to this podcast in your car. Pull over and watch all the next generation. Which season and episode should I watch to be able to get this joke? I don't know. Which of the Star Trek's is it? I don't know. Somebody, somebody, somebody Google it for us real quick. We're sitting in front of computers. Speaking of computers, there's a mysterious, mysterious MacBook Air. It's been here all day. Are we going to open it? I think it's fine. It's fine. It's not bothering. No, this isn't a surprise. It's not a reveal. It doesn't have an iPhone in it. It's literally just someone's computer. I think it's one of Walt Mossberg's because he has like 15 MacBook Airs. Is there anything else to say about the Apple TV? Well, there's the one thing I will say about it. Okay. It's very expensive, right? It's like, it's really actually quite expensive. And I think that their intention for it is that all the people who have 4K TVs who have just held onto their Apple TVs because they have bought a lot of movies on iTunes already will get the upgrade and they'll be like so happy that their TV is 4K now because they haven't bought a Roku in the meantime. I think that is very hopeful of them. I think the enthusiast community that would have otherwise bought it is already disappointed. Yeah. I don't understand why you're putting, it's basically a home theater PC, right? It's more powerful than a Mac Mini. It has an A10 in it. The Mac Mini has like a Steam engine. Right? Like there's a world in which that thing is actually a computer and you run apps on it. And we're going to talk about the iPhone 8, too. They have entered a weird middle of the market where the bottom of the market is going to be very cheap that's useful and good and the top of the market is going to say this isn't the thing I want or they're going to buy something else that does more. So I don't know. We're going to get one. We're going to review it. See what lights I can get out of it. There's the potential that you do a software update and then… Get more lights. That's really emotional. Download the lights. You buy the thing and it has all the lights in the front. You just want to…you people understand, right? One guy understands. That's great. Okay. Let's talk about phones. Go ahead. So there's the 8 and there's the 10. Your thing. I had my thing. Okay. My sad thing. Okay. So the thing that I will say that is not popular is there's only two things different between the 8 and the 10 and the 8 is not getting enough respect. I think the 8 is an iPhone 10 for all intents and purposes except for the screen and the crazy selfie face unlock. Screen and the front camera. Yeah. Same processor. Back camera is just as good. The screen isn't like as amazing but like it's an iPhone screen. It looks fine. You know, you've got… Wait. You mean the plus? The plus. Yeah. The plus which it's a big dopey surfboard of a phone. Does the plus have…the plus doesn't have optical image stabilization for both cameras? It does. I think it does. No. No. It's not. Look at this. Just the one. Just the one. Whatever. But it does have wireless charging, right? It does. It does. It does. We have wireless charging. Everyone angrily Google. What are we doing? Just angrily Google. Trust our audience. You know, the problem with being at the event when you live log and take photos and do the things, you actually have no idea what happened. No. Information just goes into your brain and then goes out. And then turns into a live log. And then we have to go back and read our own live blogs later. I watched all the events in 3X speed afterwards which is very entertaining. I recommend this to everyone. No. I think we can get the 8 like the basic specs of it out of the way. You all know it. I forgot the bionic. It's the bionic sensor. Apple started naming their chips. I'm very angry that the processor is called A11 bionic. Wait. Tell them the reason. The reason is amazing. Yeah. So, I mean, every year there's an incremental process. I shouldn't say incremental. There's a significant processor upgrade and it's numeric. It's, you know, the A9 or the A10 or whatever it might be. And then the iPad, it's the X, right? But people weren't making as big of a deal of that as Apple wanted. So they started giving it away. Like fusion or bionic. And now we're all talking about it and saying, it's got a bionic sensor. Yeah. Because the numbers just weren't doing it. Right. But like fusion you get. It's taking two different things and using them together and you get both. That's great. But what were the two different things? Things that are different. Okay. Two of them. Just checking. The big and the small. Yeah. Yeah. Big and the small. Bionic either means electronic thing that is inspired by a biological thing, the original definition, or it means bionic man, a biological thing that is infused with technology. It's a chip for running machine learning algorithms. So it's therefore informed by the structure of our brain? Well, neural networks are basically inspired. Once again, they're inspired. Jeff Hawkins idea, by the way. We should invent. Jeff Hawkins did not invent neural networks. No, he just wrote a really good book that I highly recommend about how our brains work. Hawkins is the author of Palm, by the way, if you're not aware. Youngins. Wow. Youngins. Really pushing the fact that you're old today. Super old today. All right. Paul, go ahead. Okay. So, but 12 megapixel camera, the optical image stabilization on just the one. You're right. Everyone's right about the one camera. I should buy an iPhone X. Stereo speakers sound very good. It's like on the earpiece and on the bottom thing, it's I think a little bit overdue that we got that on an iPhone, but it's great. I'm happy to have it. And it feels better than you expect. Like I was expecting to walk and be like, oh, it's just another iPhone 7, which is just another iPhone 6, but it does feel significantly better. They did a better job with the glass back on the iPhone 8 than most other companies do. It's like Galaxy S8 quality in terms of its overall build. I read that when you guys wrote that for the verge.com. How can you tell that glass is better by just touching it? You touch it? Yeah, I dropped it. I threw it on the ground in a fit of panic. Yeah. No, I mean like, so the Galaxy has the weird curve and it comes to that edge because the front screen. And the S7 had like the rail that like stuck out and then the S8 had like flowed in a little bit better. These are features. You're talking about the flat surface. Yeah. So like as a physical object, just strictly as a physical object, yo, it's an iPhone. It's like got giant bezels. But it's like it's a very nicely made iPhone. It's also the one most people are going to get, I think. Well, that is a big question. So your argument is that there's really no need to get that excited about the, I want to say X all the time, about the X because the iPhone is just as good minus the display. I'm saying that. It's basically minus the display. I'm not saying that it's just as good, but I'm saying that if you go out and get an 8 or an 8 plus, you shouldn't feel bereft. You shouldn't feel like, oh, I didn't get the good one. Everybody else is better than me. You should feel like you got an amazing iPhone. Until you get your first Animoji. Yeah. Like I suck. I'm the lamest kid at this private school. That's your life now. You had $700 but not $1,000. That's who you are. You bought the V6 Mustang. That was me. That was my high school experience. Wait. Can you explain that one for me? You had a nice car in high school. It's a Mustang without an edge to edge screen. That's what that is. Wait, Paul, you actually wrote a... Wait. I want to stop doing this iPhone analysis. Let's talk about the X and what it is. Let's get into the tech. Lauren, you held it in your hand. You played with it. I did. It's beautiful. I am not the first person to upgrade to the newest phones. Or just in general, for a gadget reviewer, I tend to take my time. I am carrying the 6S right now. Headphone jack. With a headphone jack. RIP. My people love analog audio. Not in furniture. No. And I live blogged yesterday on a late 2012 MacBook Pro. So keys are missing. It's amazing. So I'm not the fastest person to upgrade. And I thought, well, I'm not...whatever this iPhone X is, if it's $1,000, I am a real human being and I immediately am going to be like, yeah, I don't know. I'll probably just go for whatever one is next. Beyond that. I saw it and I thought, that's a really beautiful phone. I thought the display was absolutely beautiful. I thought it was designed really nicely. The elongated camera on the back is a little jarring at first, but there's, of course, a design reason for that. The stuff that it appears to be able to do, which is very limited in the hands-on area, is impressive. So I'm still not rush out and buy this thing, but I don't know, it's a really nice looking phone. And I've brought this up a lot in the past few days and we've written about this, we did this in our Instagram Live, which you guys probably saw. Not that I expect anyone here followed our Instagram Live. You all did. But Apple is doing everything after everybody else. They're doing edge-to-edge OLED display. They're doing biometric unlocking. They're doing wireless charging. They're doing all this stuff after everybody else. But they just have such control over the full stack of everything that there are little things that they can do to make it better. And we're not going to know if it actually is better until we use the phone, but there's a good chance that there are certain things that are definitely better. I mean, just in the little bit of time I got to play with Face ID, it is miles better than any Samsung implementation of that. And that, you know... Did you get to set it up? You set it up. I set it up. It worked. I set it up, and I would say that it failed on me a couple of times. Not like the 10 times I tried it. But the times that it worked, it super worked. And I think it failing was me not knowing the precise angle to point it at. I think it failing was probably your hair was not quite as high as Craig Federighi's. And so it just... Probably true. Yeah, you just needed to adjust. It definitely feels more accurate than Samsung's face unlock, and it's 1000% more convenient than Samsung's iris scanning. So I think that in general, at least for just basic unlocking and using your phone, it's maybe gonna be like a half step back in terms of convenience from Touch ID, but that'll iterate over time, and you're not gonna suffer if you get this and don't have Touch ID. Or next year they're gonna figure out how to put the fingerprint sensor into the screen. Right. Right? I mean, that's like the big rumor. So the way it works, in case none of you... I could pull anyone up from the audience, be like, tell me how Face ID works. But if you're listening in a car, and this is how you catch the news. So it has an array of sensors they call TrueDepth at the top of the phone in the notch. The notch is very controversial. In that notch is all the sensors. There is an infrared camera, a flood illuminator, a proximity sensor, an ambient light sensor, a speaker, a microphone, a front camera, and a dot projector. So here's the thing about the dot projector. It's almost like a tiny Kinect, right? Yeah, it's a little tiny Xbox Kinect. And you can have it pause movies whenever you want. We need to have Han do a DIY with a Kinect. So here's the thing about... The difference with this and the Kinect is people will use this. How many people here have a Kinect under their TV right now? I can't see you, so it's just me from what I... Okay, yes, one yes. Here's the thing about this, and I will tell you, my family, about this, and we'll share our shame together. The dot projector, if you watch our hands-on video... I didn't see this, but our camera picked it up. It's constantly blinking at you because it's projecting IR dots on your face. It's a fucking IR blaster on the front of this phone, which makes me think that someone is gonna jailbreak the phone and turn it into a remote for the TV. And that's what I want. That's all I want out of this, is all of that design, all of that engineering, and you can be like, I turned the volume up with this jailbreak ad. But it works. It's like a Google Tango module for your face. Yeah, it's wild. So Dieter had it work on his face. When we rushed to do our video, I was not able to set up because there were so many people behind me. So I just had this poor gentleman from Apple whose job it is to walk you through the demos, and it was set up for his face. This poor guy's in our video. I kept pointing at his face, which is hilarious in this context, not so hilarious in the context of the cops. Yeah. Right? And you can't reset your face if it's your password. It doesn't work if your eyes are closed. So if you get pulled over, you just have to shut your eyes forever. Huh? What? Yeah. Okay, yes, you're a pirate. Great. That's an approach for you is to have an emergency security eye patch at all times. But it's also supposed to recognize as you age, if you grow your hair long, if you wear a hat, if you wear glasses, makeup. Unclear sunglasses will trigger it or not. So there's all this set of questions that I think remain unanswered about it. And Apple tried to address some of them in the presentation. I'm sure they're gonna address more of them over time. But they had the wall of Arya Stark masks showed. We've made all these faces. It didn't trick them. But then there were... A poster for the movie Face Off. Nicolaage Cage was there yesterday. It was very strange. Yeah, and then all of a sudden it was John Travolta. But they also are like, if you have a twin, you should probably just use your passcode. Which is a really weird thing for the richest and most powerful company in technology to say. We've solved every problem except twins. That doesn't happen. No one has those. So I think there's this whole set of questions about what it means for literally the most public part of you to be your password, because you can't constantly hide your face. You can't keep it a secret. You can't write it down on a piece of paper and tuck it away. And that's not great. I think all of us understand it's not a good solution, having a password. But to go from something that you can obviously keep a secret to something that can never truly be a secret, I think is very difficult. And that to me is a whole set of questions about Face ID. Can they navigate all those turns? Yeah, I mean, like, great, you can click. So people are yelling five clicks, two people. Two nerds who have drugs with them right now are yelling five clicks. Wait, can you explain to me why is it so fundamentally more easy to take a picture of a face than get your hands? I guess because you have to touch me to get my fingerprint? That's what I was wondering. Like in the point of sale situation right now, a lot of us are used to just going like this and then your thumb is already there. Now you're going to be like, if you have a $1,000 iPhone, you're a line at Whole Foods like all the other $1,000 iPhone people. Amazon's lowering prices. Hold on. Hold those avocados. Hold my beer. Yeah. Thank you very much. I'll take my kombucha now. I mean, it's like, you're right, like is it that much easier than just going like this? What Apple will tell you when you're like, do you really have to hold your face over the point of sale terminal? Like, no, no, just like double click the home, the side button. No, it's not called sleep wake button. It's called the side button now. The whole thing. Launches Bixby. Oh, God. Double click that. That turns on the face unlock thing. That turns on Apple Pay. Then you authenticate it. Then you tap the terminal, which is a very different sort of quick and easy workflow from just doing before. I can barely pay with my thumb already. The security stuff where you click it five times and you, I get it. But what I'm saying is, if you can actually beat it, the information that is required for you to input into the mechanism that beats it is the most public information about you that is commonly available. They have to make sure you can't beat it. The cops showing up and you click it five times and throw it in the air and run away. Great. We've all been there together as a family. I don't know. I travel through the TSA a lot with a bag full of wires, so I have a weird... But it's on my way here. I got stopped. Because I... I mean, honestly, I was carrying like 15 lithium ion batteries. I would have stopped. But if you can beat it, and there's like, Dieter yesterday was talking about, it has new vectors. So Touch ID only ever talked to the authentication chip in the phone. Never talked to anything else. But the front camera and all that tracking talks to Animoji. So you can get that data in other ways. Like the Snapchat filters we demoed are obviously mapping your face. So there are other ways to collect the data and then potentially... I'm sure immediately people are gonna try to beat it. But I actually talked to our security reporter, Russell Brando, about this a little bit. Presumably those apps that use the data that you can get from that to make crazy face filters, it's just working through an API and that stuff isn't lost. But the fear is somebody makes a random... What was the app that did the face filters that turned out to have a bunch of spyware in it? Oh, Me Too. Me Too. Yeah. Like that app makes cute face filters, but what it's actually doing is secretly recording your face data so they can build a mask to get you. It's probably through the standard APIs, they're not getting enough data to do that. We don't know. I love the idea of a person with both the capability of launching that app and making really high res masks. Right? Right. Like there's a mask maker out there who's like, I gotta fucking learn to code. This is my future. So Paul, you wrote... I wanna make sure you talk about the watch. I'm not gonna talk about how you think this is the best OLED screen ever made by human hands. I also wanna talk about the notch. There's like two things to talk about. Oh yeah. So long... Let's do this. Let's do the notch first and then I wanna ask Paul, because you wrote a piece today about why you wanna buy the 8 over the 10. But so the notch, I don't know if you guys have been following like the deep Apple nerd community that I'm forced to follow. I find it a pleasure. There, there. So there is like deep, meaningful, like controversy about the existence of the notch, what it means for developers. I think the thing that is really interesting to me is the screen is 5.8 inches. Like Dieter said, I think it is easily the best OLED screen I've ever seen. I've never really liked them. I think they're way oversaturated. I think most of them have weird pixel matrix issues. This one looks... He wants to say Pentile, but he knows that that time has passed, so he's not bringing it up. Over. It looks like Blackberry. It's fucking dead. Sorry, the one Blackberry person hissed at me. That was weird. But no, you're good. You're great. Thumbs up. TCL is gonna take care of you. No, so like it looks beautiful, but the notch, it's 5.8 inches, but the notch and then the rounded corners... Rounded corners I think are the big... And then the home area at the bottom that you have to protect. All of that means that the usable screen area is more like the iPhone 6, 7, 8 design than the Plus design. I heard a really good analogy for this. Do you remember like old cameras would have kind of a safe area, like show the corners of what's like... This will definitely show up on every CRT TV. That is what developers have now because there are rounded corners and a bunch of the screen is being wasted. Also Apple through the WebKit team asked the CSS committee to add safe areas to the CSS spec back in August. And then like on the GitHub comments, there's like a comment from yesterday. I was like, oh, so that's why Apple did that. They're trying to figure out how do you add this to CSS. Because if you look at your computer the next time, is there anything in the corners? There's lots of things in the corners. A lot of times the close buttons are in the corners. There's things that we put in the corners of our user interfaces all the time. And now you have to be cognizant as a developer both for the web and for apps. And there'll be some ways that it'll automatically kind of dodge them out of the corners. But like if you want to use the whole screen, you have to figure out how to not use corners because they're curved. The other thing about the safe area thing is in order to get the home bar that indicates that you swipe out to go home to work, it needs to cut that out from safe area. And when you rotate the phone, I tried this. What did I do? Nothing. What? Okay. It's projector shenanigans. Great. Everyone loves a projector shenanigans. When you turn the phone in landscape, the home button moves to the bottom of the landscape. You swipe up in landscape to go home. Which is cool. But also bonkers. By the way, I own swipe to go home.com now. Oh, God. Finally, a monetization strategy. Because you need that bar, the usable area for developers when you're in landscape mode is shorter than you get on an iPhone 678. It actually has less usable vertical space in landscape mode than like a regular iPhone. Also, if your app is not coded correctly and you turn it into landscape and you scroll, the scroll bar disappears behind the notch. And it shows up again. Hello. Really exciting. I think all of this doesn't matter. Because, one, I don't use any app except for video apps. I go 90. I'm not ashamed to admit it. Oh, God. This show is presented by T-Mobile. And go 90 is a terrible joke. So it all works out. So, like, video apps, you turn your phone. Videos are pillar boxed. So you don't actually see it. On the 10, they're pillar boxed? Yeah. You can still tap to get the full zoom in and have it notch cut out, but by default, they're boxed. So Apple just didn't show that yesterday. So I think everyone's assuming that videos are going to be cut off by the notch. But I think more importantly, this phone is designed to be held in portrait. Yeah. Which is actually the more natural way to hold a phone. And I think in portrait, the bottom is an issue, but the top is just not. The bottom is an issue in terms of the content getting cut off? Yeah, the corners and the bottom of the screen. That's like kind of the dead space you're talking about. That's where you're going to be doing the swiping up anyway, right? Like even when you're holding the phone, like your fingers are going to be sort of curling around it. So here's my big question. Like I'm, everybody's all freaked out. I'm fine with it because I've used a bunch of Android phones and they all have crazy UIs and like things will be different. It's cool. No. It's fine. No. It's cool. This has been Deeders Jam for like two days. Yeah. He's like, Android's a mess and everyone's alive. Yeah. You'll be fine. It's fine. And like swipe up to go home? Love that. That's some web OS shit right there. Around your people. There's notifications. That's fine. Although notifications on iOS are still a hot mess. Every app is a website. Yeah. The phone. Y'all are just mean. They're only available on Sprint. The phone is double tall. It's a super tall phone and they, because there's no home button to slightly tap with your finger twice, there's no more reachability to move half the screen down. And I think that kind of sucks. People use reachability. I use it all the time. I use it all the time. Really? Also iOS 11 has killed the 3D touch from the side for switching apps. The 3D touch does still exist on the new phone, but our understanding, and we don't have the deep dive into this yet, but our understanding is because the display is different. It's OLED, of course. The display stack is different, and so the usual mechanism that was created to make 3D touch work on the existing models, they had to do a bunch of new stuff to. I just kissed the microphone. I was so excited about this. They had to do a bunch of different stuff to in order to fit the 3D mechanism into the display stack. I don't know exactly where that is yet. It's different. They had to redesign 3D touch for the 10. And that might be why they are de-emphasizing in the software, because they're not... We used it a bunch. Yeah, it's there. It's almost like for a while, everyone said multi-touch every chance they got, and now it's just assumed. I think that we're getting to a point where for people who do use 3D touch, it's just kind of assumed it's part of your interface and your controls, and that's what you do. You also, on the home bar on the bottom, you can swipe to the right, and that is how you switch to the last app, and you can just switch through apps that way. And once you do it a couple times, you're like, oh, yeah, this is how it should work. It's great. Explain that again. On the home bar... On the home bar, you swipe up to home. You swipe up... Swipe to go home.com. Yeah. But if you just swipe over on it, it swipes the app over to your last app. So you just very quickly, without having to do any 3D touch shenanigans, you just swipe over and it's the last app you're using. It's great. It's a little grabber for your app. Yeah. And if you throw it up, you go home, and if you slide, you go... Okay. That works. The question is, why didn't they pull a Samsung and make it a 3D touch home button where you could just press on it really hard? Really hard, right. Here's my question. We have to wonder if they tried that and it just didn't work. That's your question, Paul. Why didn't they do something crazy and absurd down in the bottom portion of the phone? Like I was so stoked on all the wild UI concepts I saw that they're gonna basically use that portion to create like sort of a contextual UI. And now that I think about it, it is kind of stupid to have a software circle there all the time. Obviously, things change around. Yeah. But I don't know. I just feel like they've done more. A lot of Android fans here. They made... They're not gonna come out of you. Not only did they not like super utilize the bottom of the phone, they kind of made it like a safe area... Literally they call it a safe area because of that little bar that always has to be available for grabbing. So you can't have too many controls at the bottom of the phone. You're already getting more screen than you would have otherwise. You're already getting more screen just because they reserved a portion of it to work the phone. Like fine. I thought it might have something to do with drag and drop. You could have a dock that shows up there. You could make multitasking better somehow. I honestly think that their move here, they're not gonna sell very many of this phone. And the people who buy it, I think they're gonna be caught in the loop of, I spent a lot of money on this phone. Because to be honest, I think most people will buy the 256 gig version, which is $1,125. So really this phone costs $1,125. I think if you spend that much money on a phone that is actually a very beautiful physical object, your natural state of being is to be happy with it. It's like I bought a Ferrari and it gets terrible gas mileage. It's a fucking Ferrari. It's a Ferrari. It's true. That's how I would feel. Any Ferrari owners here? Dead silence. That's great. Or there's like two of them and they're like, we can't talk about it. I think they're able, because the scale is so much smaller, to do things like what if we completely change the home button control center swipe interface? What if we push it and then they have a year of seeing how that goes? They can either commit to it or change it in iOS 12 when that comes to the mainstream part of their lineup. But they do have this opportunity to screw around. And I agree with you. I don't know why they didn't screw on more. But they've created a space to a, revert if it's a huge fail, the amount of changes they've made, or to push it if it's a success. And I think that's cool. Okay, I want to make sure we talk about the watch. So Lauren, you have been cursed with wearable reviews. No, but you've reviewed the last few watches. I have. This one is the, it's the same watch with LTE basically. As expected. Everything really was leaked, wasn't it? Yeah. Everything was leaked. Yeah, so this Apple watch has LTE in it. It is not the first smart watch to have LTE. Some of you may have tried LG's LTE smart watch before. Also dead silent. The Atari owners and LG watch owners in this room currently. Perhaps Samsung's Galaxy Gear, was it the S2? It was the S3. Also crickets. Put me on the spot. Yeah. Gear had a better implementation. Okay, so here's the thing. When you're talking about these little wrist computers that are about yay big, and you start to add things like cellular modems and more stuff to them, is that the battery life generally suffers. So that was my biggest thing going into this, was like, how badly or how much is this going to impact battery life? We don't know yet. Stay tuned for reviews. I told a few people in the audience this earlier. But Apple is saying that they've managed to keep the 18-hour battery claim, even with an LTE modem. Which if they managed to do that is impressive. But I'm not wholly convinced. I'm not wholly convinced. Like there was this moment when during the introduction when they showed a woman on a surfboard and she was like catching this wave, and then all of a sudden she got a phone call. And it was supposed to be this lighthearted moment, but I was like, wow. That just like totally, I don't know. I just feel like there's some places still where you shouldn't have an LTE connection. There should still be some places in the world where you can escape from a cellular connection. For me the standout is seeing the number keypad on that phone display. That was terrifying to me. Yeah it's like, at the end of the day I think what's going to happen is people are going to use the LTE for true emergency situations. Like your phone battery died and you're like, I still need to call Lyft. Or you know. Why are we all laughing? I think the idea that your phone battery dies before you watch batteries. I thought you were laughing because I didn't say Uber. No, we call Lyfts, okay? We call Lyfts. Wow. And. Wait. I don't spend a lot of time in the Bay Area, but the idea of ride sharing service fans is terrifying. Leave California. Have you heard anything about what's going on at Uber? All right, so back to the watch. I think that it's going to be helpful in some situations. I think like once they get the music streaming thing down on it, that that could be a real value proposition for people who want to go out and about with a watch and they want to just like on the fly change their music selection and they happen to not have their phone with them. But the LTE watches we reviewed prior to this, it's been a little iffy. So it's still, yeah. I mean I think what Apple is doing is like it's kind of a classic product differentiation, right? That we no longer see the Series 2 available. So we've got the Series 3 with LTE. There's a Series 3 without LTE. That's the price of the Series 2. If you don't want LTE, you can still get GPS and waterproofing, which like work out people like. I say that like I'm not one of them. And then there's the Series 1 for people who just, which is the least expensive for people who just want kind of like a basic smartwatch that has like notifications and other cool things like that. So this is just like classic like, okay, if you want to pay the most, you're going to have this LTE thing and maybe you're not going to use it all the time, but it's like the feature. It's the thing. And they also, I mean there's a faster processor. They built the antenna into the face of the watch, which is interesting. That is really cool. They like figured it out. You have to imagine that that was, they had been thinking about that with the first watch. And by the way, Fitbit did something similar with their new like Ionic smartwatch. They did some fusion thing in the build where the antenna is actually like, anyway, we can get into Fitbit in another podcast. We could spend another entire hour on that. But let's talk about the red dot. Okay. A lot of feelings about that red dot. A lot of feelings about the red dot so far. So it's just cosmetic. My understanding, well, it's cosmetic to indicate the LTE. Yeah. It's to tell people I have a watch, but by the way, if my phone dies, I can call it Lyft. Which is when you're in line at Whole Foods and you've got that really heavy grocery bag of avocados. You're screaming at your wrist. And you left your $1,000 iPhone at home. It kind of looks like a record button. Yeah. Yeah. Or I think it looks like an SOS button, which is interesting because the watch actually has an SOS feature. Right. But to me, it looks like emergency. I'm rich. Oh, no. Would you guys get one? Would you get an LTE Apple Watch? If I had the money to spare, it's an extra $70 for the LTE version. It's $10 a month for the connection. Then I would not. That's a good point. Like the $10 a month, unless they make a Project 5 version because extra data sims on 5 are free. See? Cheers. But that's never going to happen. Yeah. I don't know that I want to pay $10 a month for my watch. Because the question about that, too, is not just that you're paying for LTE, but it's going to be how intelligently they manage the handoff. Because there's already like, right, you can use a lot of things with Bluetooth on the watch, or if you're in an area where there's a known Wi-Fi network, then the watch will connect to that. And then it's not like using the other protocols. And so they're going to do this handoff thing where it's going to go from different wireless protocols to LTE when you need it. And I think how well it works is all going to be dependent on that handoff process. Will it work as well as the lift your arm or tweak your arm gesture to actually have the watch face turn on? That's an excellent question. If it works that well, then it's doomed. So you've got to review the thing. But they're winning, right? So if they just make it incrementally better, they're just going to keep trucking along, basically. That's the thing. They presented a slide yesterday that I thought was fascinating. They're like, we're now the number one watch brand in the world. And they just listed all the... But the metric by which they're number one was not presented. And the second one that they listed was Rolex. And it's like, okay, there can't be number of watches sold. Right. So I think it's revenue. It's revenue. Rolex sells $4 million watches a year, and Apple sells that many number of $300 watches. And I go, we're number one. Right. They said their sales have increased 50% year over year. And then if you look at the latest IDC numbers, which puts out these reports of global wearable shipments every so often, they're actually now only number two to Xiaomi. So Xiaomi is beating them in volume, which is not surprising because it's Xiaomi. But Apple has now snuck ahead of Fitbit, which has had a lot of sales declines this year. It's ahead of Garmin, which is impressive because they're in that sports enthusiast category. And then Cook has said in vague terms, this business is the size of a Fortune 500 business on its own. So it's a real thing at Apple. But how many people here are wearing smart watches? Probably a lot in this crowd, right? Yeah, there's a good amount. Show him. Dude. Yeah, he's like, I have four. If it's more than 10, I'd be shocked. Thanks. You just boosted the average for the rest of us. I think for a lot of normal people still, they're like, I don't know if I need a smart watch. I still think that's a very real question. Apple watch for kids. Apple watch for kids, yeah. That's dystopian. And then you release them into the cement circle and just chase them around. Okay, we are... I told everyone that we were gonna go long and we have certainly gone long. We long. So Lauren, I really wanna thank you for coming to the event yesterday, for being on stage, seeing these people. It was super fun. I'm gonna go... All right, Lauren, clap for Lauren. Oh. Bye, guys. But I wanna bring out a dude right now, the only person I can think of to talk about Animoji with, Casey Newton. Hi, everybody. That's Steve Austin's music. Sure is. The Texas rattlesnake. I just say, the last time I was in this physical space, I saw Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announce a campaign to end all human disease. So it's great to hear you guys talk about the iPhone. But anyway, what were we saying? I just shook a bunch of strangers' hands and then ate food, so... Did that happen in this room? Yes, in this very room. And how's it going? As far as I can tell, cancer is still a thing, so... All right, Casey, before we begin, I don't wanna forget, that was dark, by the way. I'm just getting started. Casey's like a professional improv comedian now, and that was one of the roughest chuckles I've ever heard. I don't wanna forget. Paul? You're weak, buddy. Oh, we almost forgot. But we never forget. We never... You do a thing, segment. What's it called, buddy? It's called... Is there a refrigerator in this thing? I forgot to come up with a new title because it... It's not bad. This happens also, by the way. It's called, Is There a Refrigerator in This Thing? Well, edit it. Edit. The famous Vergecast segment. All right, this is burning up the internet today. It's something called bodega. And a chill filled the room. There is a refrigerator in this thing. No, no, that's... I'm pretty sure. They sell beverages in this bodega, but it does not seem to be refrigerated. So you can get a lukewarm vitamin water. Does anybody want... What the bodega is. So bodega, imagine a box in a building and you approach that box and you give that box money somehow and you receive a product from that box. What would you call that? A vending machine. Yeah. No, it's a bodega. And it's gonna disrupt the bodega industry and mom and pop and first generation immigrants are all gonna be out of business and destitute and Silicon Valley, meanwhile, is going to take all the money. Big bodega has it coming. Big bodega. Big bodega. I don't know. I think it's hilarious. These guys made a box that has some machine learning in it so that basically you unlock it with your phone, you open it up, you get a... You're listening in your car and making aggressive scare quotes at the words machine learning. Whatever. It's a real thing. People do it. It's a job. No, machines do it. You can get a Udemy course on machine learning. Right. So it's two ex-Google engineers. It's a talent. It's like a Codecademy course. Lawyer quotes. Oh, boy. Machines can do that now better than I ever could. All right. Go ahead. Don't be mean to Codecademy, by the way. No, they're great. They'll come at you. They will. That's a long story. So you unlock this box and then it sees what you take out of it and it charges it to your account and so the idea is that they're gonna put them in apartment buildings or gyms or kind of shared spaces that are relatively secure because this box doesn't look very secure. But there's just a huge controversy today because they called it Bodega and I think Bodega means a lot to a lot of people. They'd called it like Vendor with no E. Yeah, like Vendor with, yeah, exactly. No vowels, Vendor. Okay, so you're my resident Silicon Valley silliness reporter. Yes. Tell me about Bodega. The name was a really bad choice. What we learned today is that 80% of a New Yorker's identity is that they're friends with a cat in a convenience store. If you read Twitter today, man, did you hear about the deep, deep friendships that these rich people have with the people who work at their Bodega. I don't believe any of that, by the way. I think they buy Cheetos there and tell themselves they have a friend who's unlike them. That's not real. Here's the thing. What is real is that technology is displacing jobs and technology has no answer for that and Silicon Valley is extremely callous about that and its only alternative to jobs seems to be what if we just have the government write you a check. So Silicon Valley doesn't know the first thing to do about what is happening because of automation. So when things like Bodega come along with the implication that they're going to get rid of real people's jobs, then I think there is a justified backlash against it because it does come across as idiotic. Now the founders of Bodega said in a Medium post today, which was inevitable and had 241 claps the last time I looked. Oh my God. Stop clapping. Do not clap in the audience. Because it doesn't count. You have to clap on the website so no one gets paid. This is real. Stop laughing. Authors do not get paid unless you physically clap on the website. What the author said was essentially that they feel really sorry about the name because they never intended to go head to head with actual convenience stores. They just wanted to put vending machines in apartment complexes and apparently they did a bunch of market research that said that like immigrants did not object to this name. So anyway, the whole thing is a huge mess but I think if they had to do it over again, they'd pick a different name. Also I think that the Fast Company headline was like, this Silicon Valley startups wants to deport immigrants with their vending machine. They didn't write that. It's not fair for me to ever complain about headlines. Animoji. Yeah, Casey, that's why you're here. Let's get off this dark stuff and talk about talking foxes. So well, animoji. Which animoji are you? Well as far as I was able to ascertain yesterday, there is no eggplant animoji. Which feels like a missed opportunity to me. My thing is that the animoji are apparently in the iMessage app store. Is that right? You have to access the app store to use them or how does that work? Okay, so you have a keyboard. You do click on the app store icon. The first thing that opens is animoji. I see. Then you're another level away. Great. So they're training you to click on that button. That is true. But whether you will ever go to... I once hired a private investigator to find the iMessage app store and I'm still waiting to hear back. Look, I think these things are fun, but all of the recent kind of social enhancement to iMessage have felt a little bit either half-hearted or too late to me. How many times, if iMessage users out there in the past day has someone sent you something with lasers, right? This stuff is there, but I don't think it gets widely used. So I think you might see a few novelty foxes and panda faces in your iMessage, but I don't think this is going to become the new default way for teens to communicate. It's a bummer to me that it's locked to iMessage because I hate things that are locked to iMessage. Peter is just watching a GIF of the group smiling at him on his computer right now. I wanted to gaze upon the different emoji options and the GIF was the first thing that came up. So we got to try it though and I will tell you it is the most fun I've had with the phone in the past six months. It is wildly fun to talk to your phone and have an emoji literally beat for beat, no lag at all, become your face. I became a little dog yesterday. It was very cute. Sure, but if... Are you going to deny that that was cute, Casey? I would never deny that that's cute. It was very cute, but the thing is I've been using Snapchat for four years, right? And they have lenses that are not actually all that different. So I don't deny that the technology is cute. I think some people will have a little bit of fun with it and it is a novel demonstration of this technology that they built into this very expensive phone, but I don't know. I just think iMessage is such an amazing platform for Apple. I would love to see them invest like 10 times more in it because there's actually a lot of research out there that it's really the number one chat app for teens, right? Because for teens having iPhone is such a status symbol and it's where most of their communications are going on. So man, you could just imagine iMessage being so much more than it is right now. I think the thing about Animoji that gets me is the way they want you to use it is that you're going to record a movie. And I don't do that with iMessage ever. I never send the little audio messages. So the idea that I'm going to respond to someone instead of sending them one quick emoji, I'm going to pull up my phone and act out a quiet scene for them. Right. What if you were courting a lady, would you think you would maybe invest a little time in making a panda face? I will confidently tell you that if I send my wife a talking poop, I'm literally married to a divorce attorney. I will do this shit for free. So I don't think that's going to happen. I'll try it. We'll just see what happens. No, I mean, sure. But I think you're right. I think Snapchat is like, it's so much farther. And there's a huge incremental upgrade to Snapchat filters. That stuff when I tried that yesterday was also incredible. Okay, but what was the difference? I've watched this video. It looked like a Snapchat filter. What was the difference? So usually when I use Snapchat filters or Instagram filters, which I think are a little bit worse, there is a perceptible lag between what you're doing and what the computer is pasting onto your face. None of it is there. It just looks actually like it's applied to your face. You became the dancing hot dog. I was the dancing hot dog. That's my animoji. Just dancing away while the world burns. Yeah, I mean, that's great. Look, to the extent that all of this is making augmented reality a thing, I think it's really exciting. Something that did not get a lot of attention yesterday at the keynote, but that has been huge, particularly on Twitter, is all of these novel applications of ARKit. There are Twitter accounts where you can just see every day novel applications of ARKit, and it's some of the absolute coolest stuff that is being done with the iPhone. So I hope we see a lot more of that, and I hope Apple talks a lot more about that. So animoji, great use for that, but I think the AR stuff that is going to come out in the next six months is going to have nothing to do with animoji, and that's going to be the stuff we're talking about. Also, the limited amount of people who are going to have the 10, it's not going to be a huge number of people. It just isn't. But only because of supply constraints. This is where I differ from you guys. I think that it's the 8 that is not going to be a huge hit, and I think that Apple is going to sell every 10 that it makes. Because I think you either want the best iPhone or you want the iPhone that you can best afford, and the 8 is neither of those things. So, okay, let's posit that anybody who can spend $750, $800 for an 8 or 8 Plus. Or $50 a month. And if they could, would get the 10 because it's not that much more on an amortized carrier plan. So let's stipulate that that's true, and let's also further stipulate that it seems likely that Apple's not going to be able to make enough of these damn things. Resolve. The United Nations shall buy an iPhone X. So what happens on December 20th when my phone breaks, I need to go buy a phone, I've surveyed the market, I didn't buy a phone in the fall because I'm not an idiot. And you don't buy a phone until after all the phones are announced, that's what I mean. And I go and I discover that if I want to get an iPhone X, I have to wait until June. The backlog is that long. I waited six weeks for my AirPods and I still feel sad about it, but I waited. Do you think that most people are going to do that or are they going to quote unquote settle for an 8? I think that for so many people, like the current year iPhone, it's a status symbol, it's something they look forward to all year. I absolutely think that people are going to wait. Particularly those like us who are buying a new phone every year. Let's say there's a two month wait for the new phone, they'll wait because the phone they have in their pocket is a 7 or a 7S and it's fine, right? They only want it because it does some cool stuff, it's going to look cool when they bring it out at parties. I think people are absolutely going to wait for the X. Yeah, I think the question is are they going to wait so long that it's next September? It's like real. If it's true that there's a 12 month wait for the iPhone X, everything you guys have said is true. Yeah, I think that's the most interesting problem for them. I hung out by the way with a guy named Kunal Dua, today he was the editor in chief of Gadgets 360, which is the biggest tech site in India. It's actually bigger than the verge and it's just Indian audiences. He told me that Indian buyers on average buy a new phone every nine months. They cover two phone launches a day. There's an average of ten phones launched in India every week. All the companies have price segments that are like Samsung has a phone at every $8, which is every 500 rupees. It's from zero to the top of the line. The reason the iPhone 6S still exists is because it is the most popular phone Apple sells in India. It's the one that fits into that pricing strategy that's new and what people don't want there is refurbished phones. Apple has this, obviously we have a somewhat myopic view of our market and there's all of the, if you can afford 750, you can afford 1000, which I am pretty shaky on. I understand it's a big leap. It's funny how Apple also has to cater to these other huge markets that they are seeing where they have to show growth because if all that happens is the wave of carrier upgrade plans sweeps over America and everybody gets an iPhone 8 because it's the one that you've been paying on installments for this entire time, they will have zero growth. They have to find ways to capture new people, which means both going down market, which is not what we generally pay attention to, and it also means they've got to convert a bunch of Android high-end owners over, which means they have to appeal to note owners. So here's the thing. I don't know if the iPhone 10 appeals to the note owner who's like, what I want is a 400 horsepower engine and a stylus. So talking about myopia, you're getting a 10? That's the plan. Neil is getting a 10, I'm probably getting a 10. Paul is not. I want to hear about this. Why not? Cars. Cars. Yeah, I was up pretty late last night trying to make a car analogy. I don't know a lot about cars. Here's where I went with it. The iPhone 10 is like a Ferrari, but I just need a Honda. I just need something reliable and affordable and something that matches my actual use case. And it's not such a precious object in my life that I need the ultra luxury one. So I do like to have a really nice phone, and I like it to have a long-lasting battery life and be reliable and take nice pictures and stuff, but it's not the most important object in my life. See, if I'm Apple and I hear this, this terrifies me, because what Paul is saying is the iPhone 8 is a station wagon, right? And Apple has never been about that. They've always been about creating that sense of like, oh my God, the future has just landed in the present. That was the entire, I mean, that was the thesis of the event yesterday. Yeah. We're in the Steve Jobs Theater. This is his dream. He would literally, I've heard multiple Apple executives saying, we hope he's proud of us, right? Like they were, like, is the iPhone 10 to you the same as the iPhone? The answer to me is like, no, it just has an edge-shed screen. Well here's what I would say about it. The iPhone that I remain the most satisfied with in terms of like where it took me from where I was is the iPhone 4. The iPhone 4, every time you took it out of your pocket, it looked like jewelry. It looked like you were holding this just incredible object, right? And I haven't held the iPhone 10 in my hands yesterday, but looking at the video that you did looking at everything else, it looked like jewelry. And I haven't felt that way about the iPhone for a long time. As a piece of hardware, it is absolutely stunning. I think that's going to carry it so much further than the 8 being like, you know, the camera's mental. A lot of people tweeted me, tweeted this to me yesterday when I said, does anybody have thoughts about the 8? I've only heard about the X today. And like a flood of people tweeted, it's the iPhone 7S. Who here thinks it's the 7S they renamed the 8 to make it sound better? You're good. Joey's got nothing. So it's like a medium feeling that's out there in the world that I think they have to contend with. I think the vast majority of people who do not come to podcasts about surround sound formats are probably not thinking about. But actually, this leads me to my next question. It's like really what I want to talk to you about, which is what animoji are you? No. So you weren't there, but you are, you watched it, obviously, you paid attention. I felt like the vibe towards Apple and its self-regard yesterday was distinctly different than 10 years ago or last year or even the year before that, where it was seen as somewhat out of touch. Did you get that? Yeah, I mean, they said a couple of things that I would have personally advised them against. Like you can call a corporate retail space a town square. I think that it's, it actually, like it offends my sensibilities just because there's a lot of things that you can't do in a retail store that you can and should do in a town square, right? I also think there was a lot of talk about Apple as a company and having, like I saw Steve Jobs introduced the iPad too. And it was very, like the whole event was sort of about the iPad and what it could do for your life, not about Apple and what an incredible company Apple is, although of course Steve Jobs talked about that too. So I do think it was somewhat backward looking, but I can't fault Apple for that too much because they were there to inaugurate a new building that was named after their founder. So as somebody who has loved Apple products for a really long time, I did cut them a lot of slack to a degree that I think some other journalists would say that I was sort of going too soft on them. But stuff Apple has made has done really amazing things in my life. And so if they want to spend 10 minutes at the top of their show telling me about Steve Jobs' view on technology, I'm like, I'm super down for that. Like maybe in ways that are not flattering to me as a journalist, but like I was sort of there for it. But then when they sort of come around to like an Apple store as a community center, like I've been to their flagship store in Union Square and it's just like lines of people trying to buy AirPods. Yeah, to me the feeling I got was there's so much more attention being paid and actually in weird ways we talk about this on the show all the time between what our corporations should do, what they're free to do, and what our government should do and what our government is free to do. Does that make any sense? Sure, let's go with it. We've all been drinking. We talk about that. We do, we talk about it all the time. And Apple seems to be taking the position that it actually will be the greatest force for good in your life. Right? And the way it will do that is by selling you relatively expensive things. Yeah. I think it's actually fine for a company like Apple to say because their business is selling expensive things. But where they're not, I think, making the connection that people want, if they were actually going out into cities and spending their war chest of billions of dollars to build a library, like this is a town square, it's our gift to you. But they're not, right? They're like, we're going to capture an obvious return on investment in this space that is our retail space. Right. And that distinction is actually quite troublesome and they haven't quite thought about the messaging of it. Because and I don't mean to say this about this government, although I feel this very deeply in my heart about our current government, our current government is not like doing it. Right? And that is true. I think that'd be true whether we had a demo, like, but our current government is not doing it. Sorry. I was listening to another Vox Media podcast, Recode Decode with Kara Swisher who had Scott Galloway on. I believe it was this week. And he talked about the idea of what if Apple just used some of those many, many billions that it has in reserves to create a free online university and just sort of like put that out in the world and anyone could just study any subject that they wanted and Apple subsidize it. Right? Sort of bring, really like put your money where your mouth is when it comes to being like humanitarians at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. So I do think that there is a lot more that Apple can do there. I think that they're talking about themselves as humanitarians. It does get somewhat overwrought. But they do create creative tools that a lot of people in the creative arts do use to make very cool things. And that buys them a certain amount of leeway to do that kind of talk. I think for me, if they're still towing the line of, not towing the line, if they're still following the theme of talking more about Apple as a company and a concept instead of the things we made and what precisely it will do for you in six months or a year, that's a problem. You just built the most amazing corporate campus ever made. You built a thing that is insanely beautiful and cool. That does not have childcare, but go on. Does not have childcare. It's a fact. Very good point. The Tim Cook likes to work out, so it has a 10,000 square foot workout facility in it. It's your choices, right? You reflect yourself. I was just going to say, you can have that minute. You can have that introduction to the keynote. You can have the moment playing insanely creepy music in your atrium that we all sat there for, stood there for. You get that. I was unashamed about being Apple yesterday. They were not modest. They were unapologetically Apple. Unapologetically Apple. Right. That's fine. They just opened the Steve Jobs Theater. They just invited people over to the giant spaceship they built. They announced the most ambitious iPhone they've done in how many years, do you want to say? Several. Yeah. Take the moment. Five. If you do it again, if you're still acting that way in a year, then you're a little full of yourself. Right. Then they'll introduce an incremental upgrade and we'll sit here talking about how brilliant it was. Apple can't innovate anymore. No. I think it's less than that. I think they're so important. They broke through the noise of our current political discourse. They broke through the noise of whatever people were angry about on Twitter yesterday. They're able to do it with products. I think the big difference, and I think about this a lot, there's a great interview, one of the many great interviews Walt and Kara did with Steve Jobs at Code. I don't know what they were talking about, but Jobs said to Walt, we're going to make choices for people and if they like it, they buy it and if they don't, they won't and that's the best we can do. But he never talked about a larger mission. He was entirely focused on here's how I make choices about what products to make and I'm going to sell them to you for whatever price I think is fair and hopefully you like it. I think also, by the way, everyone else is a piece of shit. That's why we loved him. Apple right now keeps talking about their larger responsibility to the world because they are the most valuable corporation in the world. I think doing that without the corresponding action is what caused that other reaction we saw yesterday. Paul, I'm actually really curious in your take of this because we generally disagree on these sorts of things. I'm very curious what you think about this. I don't know how the federal government would be creating these public spaces. I'm not actually exactly sure. I do get what you're talking about with the store being like a town square. That bugs me as well. The idea that a company... To be honest, the thing I love about Apple is that it makes my decisions for me. I've signed up to be an Apple user so Apple can make all these decisions for me. I'll go along with them. If I have strong opinions about certain things like pages, I'll use Google Docs or whatever. For the most part, I'll just use the Apple stuff and it simplifies my life. The only person who has an opinion about pages, let alone a strong one. I don't want them to make my political decisions for me. They don't define my religion, my politics, my activism. It's fine for a company to go out and do that, but I don't want them to sell me that. I think that's actually the heart of this troublesome town square thing. This podcast got very deep. Everybody take a breath. Okay, we're going to keep going. Does everyone finish taking their notes? There will be a quiz at the end. At the end of it, they're a company and they have to sell to everyone. That means they will file the edges off their harshest opinions in a way the government doesn't. The government takes all the input, they take your tax dollars and make a bunch of policy decisions. Half of you hate them. That to me is the difference. I wanted to bring that up in this show in front of this audience that came here for a surround sound jokes. One of the choices that Apple has made for you is that you want to have fucking Atmos. I want to bring it up on the show because we spend so much time talking about their hardware, but so much of yesterday was also laced through with their social ambition and their policy ambition. Like Apple, for example, came out a few weeks ago and for the first time filed a brief in support of net neutrality. That's great. The largest, most powerful company in technology being like, here's a policy that I personally agree with. Paul doesn't agree with. But they're doing it because they're about to launch video content. They hired a bunch of Sony executives to make shows and if some carriers block those shows, Apple's at a disadvantage. Now they're making policy decisions that obviously serve their interests, I think serve everyone's interests, but they're using that weight to do it, but they only did it when it actually began to serve their interests rather than a larger interest. I think it's important to just take a half step back from arguing about notches and whatever and just point out that they talk a huge game, but there is actually a lot of dissent underneath that that I think is tied into a moment. The EU fined Google. There's a lot of talk about antitrust law coming after Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. Amazon now owns everything. They actually own this building. Are you sensing the sort of panic in the valley around the tech moment colliding with the, hey, you guys are a little too powerful? Yeah, and I think the writing has maybe been on the wall for a few months, but I think you're just starting to see it crystallize even within the last few weeks with the EU and Google. There is this sense that all of a sudden we don't feel the same way about tech companies that we once did. Now obviously, kind of the big four or five, Amazon, Google, Apple, et cetera, like those, I know I left out one, but we're doing it live. They're beloved consumer brands, and I don't think the average citizen is mad at them. In fact, they're probably the source of national pride, but at the same time, there are real threats. Probably the number one threat is that they are eliminating jobs. You think of Facebook as one of the biggest companies in the world, and it has 17,000 employees. I think of how many employees like Ford or General Motors had back in the day. Those jobs are going away. There's a sense that they're not coming back. The companies are growing ever larger. At some point, I think there is a thought that something has to give. I think you're going to see tech companies spend a lot more on lobbying, but maybe you'll even see them making some preemptive moves. Maybe they'll spin out one of their businesses. I think they'll do whatever they can to be the masters of their own destiny. You cover all the other companies here in the Valley pretty closely. How do they feel about Apple? When these moments happen and there's a big new piece of hardware, it's suddenly like Twitter is like, we figured out Nazis because we have corners on the screens now. How do they think it through? I think the rank and file employees get very excited about it. I was actually chatting with some folks in the audience here before, and they work for tech companies in Silicon Valley. They were all really excited to watch the iPhone event yesterday because they want to know what is this device that I use 90 times a day going to look like. I think at the individual level, they are largely fans of the product. At the corporate level, they will gripe about the same things that everybody gripes about with Apple. The partnerships can be hard. Apple says no to an awful lot of things. They can be difficult to work with. I'll just say personally, I'm far more worried about Facebook's effect on the public sphere than I am about Apple. Apple makes the tools, and Facebook is the stuff that we're actually looking at that appears to be warping all of our minds in frightening ways. I think Apple actually will get a pass. I think you'll see antitrust come for Amazon and Facebook and Google long before you see it come for Apple. I think it's interesting because Apple owns the store. They have in a real way far more power. I feel like we need to end this on an up note. You know how we're going to do that? I think I know how we're going to do it. We're going to take some questions from these people. Does that feel right to you? Joey, can you bring us up, buddy? Go nuts. Bring up that. That's our audience. I think there's microphones. You're like seven for eight. Oh, wow, lights. Hey, everybody. Oh, there you are. Hey. Hey, everybody. You're all so beautiful. Look at how beautiful they look. All right. By the way, I'm really grateful for people that came. Yeah, thank you all so much. It's really nice and validating of you to come to see us. I'm talking to somebody who came here from Singapore. Yeah. And he told me he was actually here to help with Hurricane Harvey relief, but then he came here. Thank you, sir. I talked to somebody who escaped from Mobile World Congress America, which is arguably even more difficult. It's rough. He's right there. Okay. I don't know how we have microphones. There are microphones or should we should we should... I think they're right in the front of the stage. Right here. They're disconcertingly close to us. Yeah. Can we do this? Can we move those back there? Is that a task we can perform, Zach? Thank you. It's not only terrifying, but it's also terrifying. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. It's not only terrifying for you to have to come all the way to us. I think it's terrifying for us for you to attack the stage. Rush the stage and ask us questions, please. Look, it's quite possible that we've already answered all of your questions because of our detailed and excellent analysis of the app element. All right. So if you have a question, just arrive. There we go. Hey, all right. There we go. I was really terrified. There would be a moment where I'd be like, yeah, no, we don't want to talk to you. You're great. What do you all think about the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus pricing considering the base models are more expensive than the 7 and 7 Plus? Inflation. Just go with it. Also, gas is more expensive now. It's the 70s. Actually, Lauren was saying this earlier. They have an average selling price problem. They also bumped the prices of the iPads quietly by 50 bucks yesterday. I think it comes down to if they show relatively flat growth but tons of revenue growth, they'll be okay. They'll be able to make that excuse. I don't know if adding a glass back and a bunch of Qi licensing for wireless charging costs that much money, but I do think there's a move to make all the products more premium. It's possible the processor was like a bunch more money. It's bionic now. It's bionic. Yeah. But, yeah, I will say I'm not super pleased by it. But, I mean, the iPhone 7 is also around. They could have dropped the price a little more maybe. I would pay another 50 bucks for a headphone jack. Yeah. Super would. All right, man. So, a hidden feature of that sort of an emoji style thing that they've got going on is actually that dot matrix is used in affective neuroscience to measure facial expressions and facial emotions. Do you think we're going to enter into a world where Siri starts interacting with us sort of in our own emotional context? And how long do you think it's going to be before Domino starts paying money to make sure we can get it to act to each other? You are making a lot of assumptions about Siri. Honestly, I think that will happen after you're able to use Siri to set a timer on your Mac. It's probably the dream. I'm sure someone else will do it first. All of that also is scary. I think to cross that wall where you're not just unlocking it by looking at it, but Apple saying to you, now we can read your emotions and adjust the color temperature of the display, because that's their best trick. It is, by the way, their best trick. But there's so much of just questions around we're looking at you that they have to answer with unlocking the phone before they can go all the way there. But also Siri. There is like a history of research, I think it's called affective computing. And there is a lot of interesting stuff around if your devices were more aware of you, like when you're perspiring or if you're getting mad or if you're happy or you're sad or something like that. But there might be, because obviously there's a lot of creepy ways you can go with that. But there also might be some really interesting ways like, hey, you should take a breather. There are ways that our devices could help us out by understanding our emotions better and giving us little cues. Or it could just be creepy. I just don't trust it to not be ham-fisted. I saw one of the guys, an Apple employee who works on a heart rate monitor, they released the watch, which is the most popular heart rate monitor in the world, and they released a feature, the new one, where it will measure your resting heart rate and when it's elevated abnormally, like when you're not working out. And one of the Apple employees was tweeting yesterday, I worked on this feature, my heart rate gets elevated when I'm on a date and when I'm stressed out. And I was like, yeah, and also when Trump tweets. If you know those two pieces of information, you should just shut my computer down. You should shut it, go outside. All right, what's up, man? All right, so the iPhone X is supposed to be the next decade for what the iPhone should be. Do you think there's enough courage there to really meet that? All right, Dr. Samsung. I'm on to you. Kevin Samsung is here. That's my whole answer. I can address this. The idea that the iPhone X has a bunch of new fundamental concepts of the way a phone should work doesn't ring true to me in the way that the original iPhone, original and then later on a couple iterations into Android, webOS, even Windows phone, all had brand new ideas of this is the way a phone should work and this is how you're going to interact with this device. And even though there's a couple new ways to swipe around and do whatever, and there's a bunch of new AR stuff, I think that a lot of that stuff feels more experimental and trying it out rather than a systematized thought process of this is the way that phones are going to work from now on. So yes, there are surely things in the iPhone X that are indicators of what the next 10 years of the iPhone are going to look like, but there's not a brand new big idea there. It is fundamentally iterative, and I know that tech reviewers and tech writers use the word iterative too often and it kind of doesn't mean as much as it used to, but they've introduced a few new concepts, but I don't think they've introduced a brand new foundation. So yes, screens are going to look like that from now on. That's just the default now. Phones are going to have cool AR stuff from now on. That's just the default now, but that doesn't mean that it's changed everything. So my answer is only slightly different in that the first iPhone was this absolute force of convergence. So it ate your MP3 player, it ate your camera, it ate taxi dispatch services. It just ate everything in its wake, and it was able to do that in a way that literally no other product before it was able to do. You can't do that again, so you're kind of limited in scope, but I do think that front camera stack, that is the beginning of something really, really important. I think we put this in the hands-on yesterday. The front camera on the X is way more important than the back camera, and that I think ushers in another set of uses for the phone that we kind of don't understand that could lead it to once again disrupting taxi services. Uber knows you're pissed off. Something interesting about the portrait lighting. Yeah. It was something I was trying to come up with, like what's another photographic technique that could be added as a technology? And I didn't think of lighting, but Apple thought of lighting and did a really cool technology. And if you combine that with that front sensor, if you think of where the phone is eventually going, it's something that you hold out, and it has a perfect 3D photorealistic map of everything around you, and then you can do things based on all of that information that's now on your phone. You can make a video game out of it and explore it, or you could get contextual information in AR, or you could Photoshop it like crazy and relight it and change everybody's faces. Yeah. I don't think we know, but if it comes from anywhere, I think it's that. Joey. What's up? Everybody give a hand for Joey. He had to deal with me. I made a lot of angry faces at Joey because he was literally the only person I could see. All right. So you guys have touched on this whole show in a few episodes back, but Apple's obviously in a kind of state of flux right now. We saw Apple as a company where they sold the best product at the highest price point for a long time. Now they're about to sell five different models of the iPhone, eight if you count the pluses. What does this mean for the next five, 10 years of Apple? Are they going to sell a $200, $100 iPhone? What is their future in terms of growth? Are we looking at the best phone forever? Are we really trying to get the entire world to buy an iPhone? Well, if I knew that, I would work in a circle. I will say, when I was writing my car piece, I got a feeling that it wasn't... I wasn't mad at Apple. I was kind of celebrating them. You made a good enough phone. I would love that these specs... someone tweeted at me, put these new specs in the SE. Apple is definitely in a position where they have the good enough, the camera good enough, screen good enough, software good enough. They can make smaller, cheaper phones that are good enough. And that's really exciting that this technology can keep on going down the price. I have no idea where to go in the high end at all. I think to me that that future of Apple is one a lot of people talk about and care about. The one that is always most important, one Casey was discussing earlier, is what Apple has historically done is democratize tools of creation. And so if you can get all of that in a cheaper phone, now you've got kids who are like, I'm going to shoot a 4K video. And like, now we have vloggers. So I guess that was a mistake. No. Just kidding. There's like 10 vloggers. No, it's like we have Instagram influencers. Can we agree that that is a mistake? No. Guess not. Okay. You know what I mean? But that's like, all of that jokes aside, all of that is super exciting. They have created an entirely new class of creators that have in turn created an entirely new world of business and commerce and culture. That's like Apple's move. I think if they continue to live there, the business stuff will actually sort itself out. The question of should they just have a four product matrix, I think is like long gone. Like they're too big for that. When they were doing that project, they were 90 days away from bankruptcy and like 10 people bought Macs and I was three of them. I also think that the question of will the iPhone become the best selling phone on the planet is kind of irrelevant. I don't think Apple even cares. They want to make the tools for creators and they want to make a ton of money and they don't have to beat Android to do that. Yeah. Over here. We can probably do two, three. Yeah, we're running out of time. Hello. Hello. Yeah, I think they'll make an iPhone SE as the iPhone X and also did 789? Security? Goodbye everybody. That was for chest. I don't think I was going to be able to. They might make another one but it's going to be one of those things where like every few years like, oh yeah, we forgot. We got to make a small one again and then they'll slightly update it. Yeah. I think they were surprised how many people bought the SE so they're going to keep all updated one more time. Like even they are like, yeah, we make it. People like that size but the whole goal of the X is to make it smaller so they can probably make a bigger screen in a smaller size and they might just do that. Yeah. So when you were seeing the iPhone X, the iPhone X yesterday, did you see anybody, did you see touch rather face ID fail? In particular, I'm concerned because I wear glasses all the time and I have Snapchat filters just straight up not work on me and also I'm of East Asian descent and I often have cameras tell me, did you blink? So is this like, did you see this at all? I failed for Dieter a couple of times, right? You were saying? Yeah. I was wearing glasses but it was also like I didn't know what I was doing and people were getting jostled and whatever. You were holding it wrong. We're going to have to review the phone. Holding it wrong. Yeah. We have to review the phone. We don't know. Yeah. But like literally, federal use first demo failed. Yep. So like, you know, like we're going to, we're going to all learn how to use it in the same way that we all learned how to use such ID and we'll review it and we'll find out. Yeah. All right. We'll do one more. So back to the monopoly stuff. Why do you think that tech's getting so much more attention than like Lockheed or like the ag tech companies, like the pharmaceutical companies that are much bigger and much more pervasive, just more behind the scenes? I think it's really a good question. I've seen a lot of people talk about it recently. I think part of it's related to what Casey was talking about. Those companies still employ a lot of people and they also price their products, right? So like the classic antitrust model, which is like the Chicago school and I went to University of Chicago. So like it's really great and we should stick with it. Yeah, but they screwed up our concept of monopoly and yeah. No, but it's a great school and you should all go there. Whatever. So the classic model is about price, right? So the way that you measure the effects of monopoly is like if consumer prices go up because now you know there's not pricing pressure in the market. I know it's like epipen. Argument is about that, right? So you can measure Lockheed's price. You can do all this stuff with their prices. All of these other companies give their stuff away for free generally or they provide an inordinate amount of value for a small amount of money. So like Prime, there's no competitor to Prime to measure its price against. I think what is happening is for at least in my opinion, the longest time the government regulators lawyers, they were not aware of how tech companies worked. But what happened was a lot of nerds went to college and became lawyers. So they're like really aware of how these companies work and they're looking at it and they're saying this model that I was trained in, we can never ever make it apply to Google. Like we just can't. So we need some other model that explains Google's market power and that is actually like to me that that's the engine that's turning all of the interest and the interest is turning into we should do something. No one knows what to do, but I think the amount of attention that you're seeing is a lot of very smart people who are intimately familiar with tech products, as familiar as anybody in this room are saying, hey, wait a minute. Right now our model does not allow the government to say anything about what they're doing and that is probably not the right place to go. And also Google as a search company does not have a competitor for you for us to even think about. And if we're in the absence of a competitor, the government should probably think about that in some way. Now, do I think they should regulate Google? Like no, right? Like probably not. Like Google makes a lot of products. They, Google feels like it has a lot of competitors and they give their shit away for free. So like I was trained in that school. I don't think that that's the first place we should go. I think the first place we should go is coming to the old Comcast. But that's another show. Tune in next time. Are we done? So now we have to do the wrap up. Peter, you were like trying to say something and I kept interrupting you. I was just going to say that the Chicago schools interpretation of how monopolies work based on price is fundamentally flawed and we should go back to a Rooseveltian version. I think monopolies are myth. But it's a great bargain. Anyway. The old trust buster, Dieter Bohn is here everybody. Watch out Carnegie, we're coming for you. Should we wrap up the show? What? Yeah. Do you want to threaten Andrew Carnegie some more? No. I hate you John Rockefeller. By the way, John Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago. You can understand why his school was opposed to monopoly regulation. Just our whole plan to end on an up note just totally destroyed. I feel like I learned something. I actually love a good John Rockefeller story. Can anybody just raise a hand if you didn't know there was this whole kerfuffle about let's sue all the tech companies. That's a kerfuffle. I wasn't aware. I'm sorry. Furfuffle. Real talk and fox situation. I want to ask this question. Here's our end on note. Make some noise if you're going to buy an iPhone X. Make some noise if you're going to buy an iPhone 8. 8 plus. Thank you. Dead silent for 8 plus. I'm so right about that. I think that's the real noise. In case you called it. In case you called it. In case you called it. Well, at least for these nerds. Anyway, here's what I'll say. I love all of you so much for coming. It is absolutely wild to us. This conversation I think for all of us was like when I was growing up there was no one to have this conversation with in Racine, Wisconsin. And now I get to do it with people that I love very much. And all of you came to see us. And that just makes my heart explode with joy. So thank you so much for coming. I have to plug some other podcasts. There's only one Virge podcast at this moment. This one, the best one. No other podcast exists in the world. But Casey is going to start a show soon. He keeps promising me. Stay tuned. A lot of exciting things coming later this year. You know, usually on the show, like, Dieter and Paul will tell me an idea they have. And I'm like, you have to write that story now. Now you've told the people you're starting a podcast. So we're raising the bar for the live show. That's what I like. Casey's going to do one. Our two great reporters, Ashley Carman and Caitlin Tiffany, have a new show that's coming soon. I can't give you a date yet. Called Why'd You Push That Button, which I'm really excited about. So look around for that. Lauren, who is on stage with us, has an amazing show called Too Embarrassed to Ask, which all of you should listen to. Lauren, who's your guest this week? Yeah, Dan. Everyone loves Dan. So Dan was also at the Apple event, so they're going to be presumably talking about Apple. So you should listen to Lauren's show, which is wonderful. She does it with Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher herself does a recode decode. And Peter Kafka does a recode media, which if you are a media nerd, which I suspect many of you are, you should absolutely listen to. Oh, Ezra Klein has the Ezra Klein interview show. He interviewed Hillary Clinton. Who's he? Just a guy. No, it's fine. All right. There's also, there's all kinds of other great Vox podcasts, including, I know some dude, Ezra. He's fine. We're actually friends. The fact that I'm starting a feud with Ezra on this show. I fully support it. I guarantee you, he does not know about and does not care about. It's my favorite thing right now. Also we're friends, so like whatever. But that's Ezra. Know what you are? Better than Ezra. Oh God. Can I, I will tell you this story now. Wait, I'm going to end the podcast. Okay. And then we can leak it. You can all leak it on your Snapchat or whatever. Is that what kids do now? Okay. So that's our show. We're going to keep the mics on when we're done because I'll tell the story. But that's our show. Thank you all so much for coming. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul. Paul.
 Let's begin.
 Hello and welcome to the Verge cast.
 You may have noticed that something is different about the flagship podcast of the Verge dot
 Moby today.
 We've been raided by pirates.
 No, we are here, I'm very excited to say we are here in front of a live audience in San
 Francisco.
 It's the day after the iPhone event.
 Give yourselves a hand.
 And because it's the day after the iPhone event, we're going to talk about Windows Phone.
 Yeah, only Windows Phone.
 90 minutes of pure Windows excitement.
 No, but these people, if you're listening in your car, just know that we'll be interrupted
 by the shouts of drunkards for the next hour to 90 minutes.
 But it's great.
 I would like, they are.
 I think everybody's drinking responsibly that I've seen so far.
 Is there like a keyword that we have that every time we say that you have to?
 I guess we're going to all figure it out together, Lauren.
 It's iPhone.
 It's not right.
 Anyway, I'm Nilay Patel, I'm the energy of the Verge.
 Dieter Bohn is here.
 Hello.
 Paul Miller is here.
 Hello.
 Lauren Good is joining us today.
 How are you doing, Lauren?
 Good.
 How are you guys?
 So we should just get into it.
 I need to say some things that I've forgotten.
 Here are the things I need to say.
 One, we are part of the Vox Media podcast network.
 We are the best podcast in that network, in case you were confused about that situation.
 Weeds fan out there.
 Yeah, the weeds is great.
 They're like a tank.
 We're like flagship.
 It's a very different situation.
 Just barreling over the landscape of policy.
 Good job, Ezra.
 But we sail through the water with the greatest of ease.
 Second, I want to just say thank you.
 T-Mobile is helping us present this live event today, so thank you to them.
 But that's enough business.
 Let's get on to business.
 Yesterday was the iPhone event.
 We were there.
 Dieter, Lauren, and I were there.
 Our talented video director, Phil Esposito, was with us.
 And there's lots of iPhone news.
 There's an iPhone X.
 There's an iPhone 8.
 It's not an iPhone 9.
 Nope.
 Troublesome.
 No SE news.
 There's a watch.
 There's Apple TV.
 But honestly, the biggest thing, literally, physically the biggest thing that happened
 was that we went to Apple Park for the first time.
 We were in the Steve Jobs Theater.
 And it was beautiful.
 It was breathtaking.
 It was also very strange.
 Lauren, I think you at one point described it to me as post-apocalyptic.
 Yeah, I had the distinct feeling that if anything were to really go down, you know, sometime
 soon, as you sometimes read about on Twitter.
 These days that we would have survived if it happened yesterday because we were in what
 felt like this, I don't know, hyper-realistic, surrealistic.
 Is that a word?
 Surreal?
 Hyper surreal.
 Hyper surreal postmodern bunker designed by Johnny Ive but dreamt up by Steve Jobs years
 ago.
 You know who's getting like the shaft and all that?
 It's Norman Foster, the very famous architect who designed the building.
 Johnny Ive's like, Norm, you're good.
 Just take a seat, buddy.
 Just circle.
 I've got it.
 Just to be clear, I was not there.
 And it's a circle that's above ground.
 Yeah.
 And then you go into that circle and then you descend into the theater.
 Yeah, you go into the lair.
 Well, that's just the Steve Jobs Theater.
 So the part where employees are going to be or I guess have started to populate is the
 big circle that you've all seen drone footage of.
 Spaceship.
 The spaceship, right.
 Seeing it from a distance, there's only one way to describe the actual Apple Park spaceship.
 It looms.
 Yeah, it just looms.
 It's pretty impressive.
 It's amazing.
 Then the Steve Jobs.
 What was that?
 Nothing.
 That's our first live event, everybody.
 That's absurd, everybody.
 How many times can you say looms?
 No, but the Steve Jobs Theater is the glass structure that has no apparent beam.
 So it's just this glass circle that's somehow holding up a ceiling.
 I guess they're load bearing glass panels.
 It's just remarkably beautiful.
 And then, yes, there is a staircase that kind of goes below and then you go into the Steve
 Jobs Theater and that's where we were.
 Yeah.
 And that first room that you walk into, we took a bunch of photos.
 There's photos everywhere.
 But it's eerie because they've aligned all of the buildings to look perfect in the morning
 sunlight.
 So everyone looks happy and beautiful and then it's a totally bare concrete floor and
 there's just Apple employees in white shirts smiling at you.
 Yeah.
 And it's like we're going to die here.
 There's no chance that we're not because it's too nice here.
 Everything's too nice.
 And then you go down and then you're in the theater and behind you, what you don't understand
 is that the middle of the circle is hidden from you.
 And while you're sitting there and Tim Cook is distracting you, the middle of the circle
 is opening to reveal the hands-on area where you saw all of our videos.
 And that just quietly, I mean it very much is like a cult.
 Yeah.
 It's like the whole campus is like a really super nice college.
 I think Jobs modeled it after Stanford.
 He loved Stanford.
 So he basically tore up a parking lot and then built hills in it, which is very Apple.
 We got, someone today told us all of the concrete they dug up was recycled into the building.
 So we're very proud of that.
 So it felt like we had arrived at college the first day.
 I took iPhone 101.
 How was the Wi-Fi?
 Oh my God, the Wi-Fi was great.
 I had very different opinions.
 I had zero problems with the Wi-Fi.
 I had all the problems.
 It's never happened to me at a tech event.
 I think it's because you have a newer Mac than I do.
 Yeah, it's because you were using your Mac Pro from like 2000.
 I was using a Mac Book Pro from 2012 and it worked fine.
 My theory is that they had detected my useful USB ports.
 SD card reader and workable processor and just shut me the fuck down.
 My favorite detail about the Steve Jobs Theater and the whole area, it's underground and every door is actually like 14 inches thick at minimum.
 It is ready for an apocalypse.
 It might cause one.
 There are little things too, like not to get too TMI, but like the doors to the bathrooms are really nice.
 You're like, oh, somebody thought about the bathroom doors.
 It was Johnny Ive.
 It was Norman Foster.
 Norman Foster is like easily the finest bathroom.
 You go to like Authenticate and the keypads and walls, you know, like normal office buildings are like these terrible, ugly things that stick out from the doorframe.
 And these are just like these beautiful white pads flush with the wall.
 Like where is the keypad?
 It's somewhat unfortunate that the movie The Circle came out before we went to a circle that looked like we were going to die.
 But it was very beautiful.
 And like one of the most stunning things that you can go see, you can actually go there.
 There's a visitor center that is a store.
 Go there and like you can.
 It's a town hall.
 The town square.
 The town square.
 It's a town square.
 You can have a civics situation there if you want.
 But anyway, so we're there.
 It's worth talking about because it was just so amazing to be there.
 We're going to go there a lot and it's going to get less amazing over time.
 But this time was amazing.
 But then they announced a whole bunch of stuff.
 Did they?
 Yeah, it was all leaked.
 You could read about it in the first cycle.
 But they actually announced the stuff.
 It was great.
 Where should we start?
 iPhone X.
 Is it?
 Yeah.
 What do you guys think?
 It's like some medium.
 What about Atmos support on the Dolby TV?
 Yeah, see, what they came here for.
 And I just want to point this out.
 The Verge has created a community where 200 people pay tickets to hear about surround sound formats.
 After that, headphone jacks.
 Let's just do, let's start with the Apple TV.
 Get it out of the way.
 And then we'll go to iPhone X.
 I just want the crowd, if you understand the following joke, I want you to yell and cheer.
 They're going to yell anyway.
 There are four lights.
 No.
 These guys aren't.
 You keep quiet, Joey.
 They're not, they're not.
 Was I supposed to yell?
 They're not Star Trek Next Generation fans.
 It really disappoints me.
 Yeah.
 Okay.
 So Apple TV was like, it was first up.
 Here's I think the most important thing to know about the Apple TV.
 It was when they were done with the event and they were like, go play with all the stuff.
 There is no Apple TV there.
 Like literally they were like, yeah, that didn't happen.
 Because the only update to it is the resolution update.
 No, no, no, the remote is.
 They put a ring around one of the buttons so that you could maybe know which way it was pointing when you picked it up.
 Yeah.
 They didn't mention it.
 Yeah.
 Like during the keynote or the thing, we had to ask them later.
 And they were like, yeah, we added a ridge of plastic.
 It's great.
 It's the biggest upgrade to the Apple TV in years, everybody.
 No, literally the one thing they added was 4K HDR and they came out and they did all the stuff.
 Yeah.
 And they, was it the founder or CEO of Dolby was there?
 CEO of Dolby was there.
 CEO of Dolby was there.
 And I think you all know this.
 I'm very excited about the idea of having both Dolby Vision, which is better than HDR 10,
 and Dolby Atmos, which is like object-based surround sound happening in my life.
 Yeah.
 The thing I want.
 Yeah.
 Because I don't want to go to the movie theater.
 You want all the lights to light up on your receiver.
 All of the lights.
 So did you get all the lights?
 No.
 I did not.
 Well, what happened?
 In fact, they were so confused about the lights that I assumed when I was talking to them afterwards.
 I can't imagine.
 I was like, this is great.
 It's a thing.
 And like you're going to, they also announced that all of your iTunes purchases that you
 did in HD will be automatically upgraded to 4K.
 Which is great.
 Which is great.
 It's a big deal.
 It's a big deal.
 They're going to be cheaper than like Vudu and Amazon and all the other people.
 All of that's great.
 Well, this is a huge win.
 I'm going to get all the lights.
 I'm going to save some money.
 Get all these free upgrades.
 I'm going to watch movies for days.
 Are you excited to spend $180 on it?
 And then I was talking to them later, and I was so excited that I just assumed that
 all the lights would light up.
 And I was like, how is the Atmos thing going?
 And they're like, yeah.
 And then like later on, they're like, we forgot to tell you something.
 This is a true story.
 Like later on, I got a note.
 And I'm like, the email had an emoji, an anemoji.
 Thank you.
 Tucking his hair behind his ear sheepishly.
 And they're like, yeah, we're just not doing it.
 And I was like, why?
 And they're like, we have nothing to say.
 They couldn't get the extra, the fourth light because they don't actually employ any Romulan
 torture.
 And they're going to make this joke app just happening.
 You're listening to this podcast in your car.
 Pull over and watch all the next generation.
 Which season and episode should I watch to be able to get this joke?
 I don't know.
 Which of the Star Trek's is it?
 I don't know.
 Somebody, somebody, somebody Google it for us real quick.
 We're sitting in front of computers.
 Speaking of computers, there's a mysterious, mysterious MacBook Air.
 It's been here all day.
 Are we going to open it?
 I think it's fine.
 It's fine.
 It's not bothering.
 No, this isn't a surprise.
 It's not a reveal.
 It doesn't have an iPhone in it.
 It's literally just someone's computer.
 I think it's one of Walt Mossberg's because he has like 15 MacBook Airs.
 Is there anything else to say about the Apple TV?
 Well, there's the one thing I will say about it.
 Okay.
 It's very expensive, right?
 It's like, it's really actually quite expensive.
 And I think that their intention for it is that all the people who have 4K TVs who have
 just held onto their Apple TVs because they have bought a lot of movies on iTunes already
 will get the upgrade and they'll be like so happy that their TV is 4K now because they
 haven't bought a Roku in the meantime.
 I think that is very hopeful of them.
 I think the enthusiast community that would have otherwise bought it is already disappointed.
 Yeah.
 I don't understand why you're putting, it's basically a home theater PC, right?
 It's more powerful than a Mac Mini.
 It has an A10 in it.
 The Mac Mini has like a Steam engine.
 Right?
 Like there's a world in which that thing is actually a computer and you run apps on it.
 And we're going to talk about the iPhone 8, too.
 They have entered a weird middle of the market where the bottom of the market is going to
 be very cheap that's useful and good and the top of the market is going to say this isn't
 the thing I want or they're going to buy something else that does more.
 So I don't know.
 We're going to get one.
 We're going to review it.
 See what lights I can get out of it.
 There's the potential that you do a software update and then…
 Get more lights.
 That's really emotional.
 Download the lights.
 You buy the thing and it has all the lights in the front.
 You just want to…you people understand, right?
 One guy understands.
 That's great.
 Okay.
 Let's talk about phones.
 Go ahead.
 So there's the 8 and there's the 10.
 Your thing.
 I had my thing.
 Okay.
 My sad thing.
 Okay.
 So the thing that I will say that is not popular is there's only two things different between
 the 8 and the 10 and the 8 is not getting enough respect.
 I think the 8 is an iPhone 10 for all intents and purposes except for the screen and the
 crazy selfie face unlock.
 Screen and the front camera.
 Yeah.
 Same processor.
 Back camera is just as good.
 The screen isn't like as amazing but like it's an iPhone screen.
 It looks fine.
 You know, you've got…
 Wait.
 You mean the plus?
 The plus.
 Yeah.
 The plus which it's a big dopey surfboard of a phone.
 Does the plus have…the plus doesn't have optical image stabilization for both cameras?
 It does.
 I think it does.
 No.
 No.
 It's not.
 Look at this.
 Just the one.
 Just the one.
 Whatever.
 But it does have wireless charging, right?
 It does.
 It does.
 It does.
 We have wireless charging.
 Everyone angrily Google.
 What are we doing?
 Just angrily Google.
 Trust our audience.
 You know, the problem with being at the event when you live log and take photos and do the
 things, you actually have no idea what happened.
 No.
 Information just goes into your brain and then goes out.
 And then turns into a live log.
 And then we have to go back and read our own live blogs later.
 I watched all the events in 3X speed afterwards which is very entertaining.
 I recommend this to everyone.
 No.
 I think we can get the 8 like the basic specs of it out of the way.
 You all know it.
 I forgot the bionic.
 It's the bionic sensor.
 Apple started naming their chips.
 I'm very angry that the processor is called A11 bionic.
 Wait.
 Tell them the reason.
 The reason is amazing.
 Yeah.
 So, I mean, every year there's an incremental process.
 I shouldn't say incremental.
 There's a significant processor upgrade and it's numeric.
 It's, you know, the A9 or the A10 or whatever it might be.
 And then the iPad, it's the X, right?
 But people weren't making as big of a deal of that as Apple wanted.
 So they started giving it away.
 Like fusion or bionic.
 And now we're all talking about it and saying, it's got a bionic sensor.
 Yeah.
 Because the numbers just weren't doing it.
 Right.
 But like fusion you get.
 It's taking two different things and using them together and you get both.
 That's great.
 But what were the two different things?
 Things that are different.
 Okay.
 Two of them.
 Just checking.
 The big and the small.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Big and the small.
 Bionic either means electronic thing that is inspired by a biological thing, the original
 definition, or it means bionic man, a biological thing that is infused with technology.
 It's a chip for running machine learning algorithms.
 So it's therefore informed by the structure of our brain?
 Well, neural networks are basically inspired.
 Once again, they're inspired.
 Jeff Hawkins idea, by the way.
 We should invent.
 Jeff Hawkins did not invent neural networks.
 No, he just wrote a really good book that I highly recommend about how our brains work.
 Hawkins is the author of Palm, by the way, if you're not aware.
 Youngins.
 Wow.
 Youngins.
 Really pushing the fact that you're old today.
 Super old today.
 All right.
 Paul, go ahead.
 Okay.
 So, but 12 megapixel camera, the optical image stabilization on just the one.
 You're right.
 Everyone's right about the one camera.
 I should buy an iPhone X.
 Stereo speakers sound very good.
 It's like on the earpiece and on the bottom thing, it's I think a little bit overdue that
 we got that on an iPhone, but it's great.
 I'm happy to have it.
 And it feels better than you expect.
 Like I was expecting to walk and be like, oh, it's just another iPhone 7, which is just
 another iPhone 6, but it does feel significantly better.
 They did a better job with the glass back on the iPhone 8 than most other companies
 do.
 It's like Galaxy S8 quality in terms of its overall build.
 I read that when you guys wrote that for the verge.com.
 How can you tell that glass is better by just touching it?
 You touch it?
 Yeah, I dropped it.
 I threw it on the ground in a fit of panic.
 Yeah.
 No, I mean like, so the Galaxy has the weird curve and it comes to that edge because the
 front screen.
 And the S7 had like the rail that like stuck out and then the S8 had like flowed in a little
 bit better.
 These are features.
 You're talking about the flat surface.
 Yeah.
 So like as a physical object, just strictly as a physical object, yo, it's an iPhone.
 It's like got giant bezels.
 But it's like it's a very nicely made iPhone.
 It's also the one most people are going to get, I think.
 Well, that is a big question.
 So your argument is that there's really no need to get that excited about the, I want
 to say X all the time, about the X because the iPhone is just as good minus the display.
 I'm saying that.
 It's basically minus the display.
 I'm not saying that it's just as good, but I'm saying that if you go out and get an 8
 or an 8 plus, you shouldn't feel bereft.
 You shouldn't feel like, oh, I didn't get the good one.
 Everybody else is better than me.
 You should feel like you got an amazing iPhone.
 Until you get your first Animoji.
 Yeah.
 Like I suck.
 I'm the lamest kid at this private school.
 That's your life now.
 You had $700 but not $1,000.
 That's who you are.
 You bought the V6 Mustang.
 That was me.
 That was my high school experience.
 Wait.
 Can you explain that one for me?
 You had a nice car in high school.
 It's a Mustang without an edge to edge screen.
 That's what that is.
 Wait, Paul, you actually wrote a...
 Wait.
 I want to stop doing this iPhone analysis.
 Let's talk about the X and what it is.
 Let's get into the tech.
 Lauren, you held it in your hand.
 You played with it.
 I did.
 It's beautiful.
 I am not the first person to upgrade to the newest phones.
 Or just in general, for a gadget reviewer, I tend to take my time.
 I am carrying the 6S right now.
 Headphone jack.
 With a headphone jack.
 RIP.
 My people love analog audio.
 Not in furniture.
 No.
 And I live blogged yesterday on a late 2012 MacBook Pro.
 So keys are missing.
 It's amazing.
 So I'm not the fastest person to upgrade.
 And I thought, well, I'm not...whatever this iPhone X is, if it's $1,000, I am a real human
 being and I immediately am going to be like, yeah, I don't know.
 I'll probably just go for whatever one is next.
 Beyond that.
 I saw it and I thought, that's a really beautiful phone.
 I thought the display was absolutely beautiful.
 I thought it was designed really nicely.
 The elongated camera on the back is a little jarring at first, but there's, of course,
 a design reason for that.
 The stuff that it appears to be able to do, which is very limited in the hands-on area,
 is impressive.
 So I'm still not rush out and buy this thing, but I don't know, it's a really nice looking
 phone.
 And I've brought this up a lot in the past few days and we've written about this, we
 did this in our Instagram Live, which you guys probably saw.
 Not that I expect anyone here followed our Instagram Live.
 You all did.
 But Apple is doing everything after everybody else.
 They're doing edge-to-edge OLED display.
 They're doing biometric unlocking.
 They're doing wireless charging.
 They're doing all this stuff after everybody else.
 But they just have such control over the full stack of everything that there are little
 things that they can do to make it better.
 And we're not going to know if it actually is better until we use the phone, but there's
 a good chance that there are certain things that are definitely better.
 I mean, just in the little bit of time I got to play with Face ID, it is miles better than
 any Samsung implementation of that.
 And that, you know...
 Did you get to set it up?
 You set it up.
 I set it up.
 It worked.
 I set it up, and I would say that it failed on me a couple of times.
 Not like the 10 times I tried it.
 But the times that it worked, it super worked.
 And I think it failing was me not knowing the precise angle to point it at.
 I think it failing was probably your hair was not quite as high as Craig Federighi's.
 And so it just...
 Probably true.
 Yeah, you just needed to adjust.
 It definitely feels more accurate than Samsung's face unlock, and it's 1000% more convenient
 than Samsung's iris scanning.
 So I think that in general, at least for just basic unlocking and using your phone, it's
 maybe gonna be like a half step back in terms of convenience from Touch ID, but that'll
 iterate over time, and you're not gonna suffer if you get this and don't have Touch ID.
 Or next year they're gonna figure out how to put the fingerprint sensor into the screen.
 Right.
 Right?
 I mean, that's like the big rumor.
 So the way it works, in case none of you...
 I could pull anyone up from the audience, be like, tell me how Face ID works.
 But if you're listening in a car, and this is how you catch the news.
 So it has an array of sensors they call TrueDepth at the top of the phone in the notch.
 The notch is very controversial.
 In that notch is all the sensors.
 There is an infrared camera, a flood illuminator, a proximity sensor, an ambient light sensor,
 a speaker, a microphone, a front camera, and a dot projector.
 So here's the thing about the dot projector.
 It's almost like a tiny Kinect, right?
 Yeah, it's a little tiny Xbox Kinect.
 And you can have it pause movies whenever you want.
 We need to have Han do a DIY with a Kinect.
 So here's the thing about...
 The difference with this and the Kinect is people will use this.
 How many people here have a Kinect under their TV right now?
 I can't see you, so it's just me from what I...
 Okay, yes, one yes.
 Here's the thing about this, and I will tell you, my family, about this, and we'll share
 our shame together.
 The dot projector, if you watch our hands-on video...
 I didn't see this, but our camera picked it up.
 It's constantly blinking at you because it's projecting IR dots on your face.
 It's a fucking IR blaster on the front of this phone, which makes me think that someone
 is gonna jailbreak the phone and turn it into a remote for the TV.
 And that's what I want.
 That's all I want out of this, is all of that design, all of that engineering, and you can
 be like, I turned the volume up with this jailbreak ad.
 But it works.
 It's like a Google Tango module for your face.
 Yeah, it's wild.
 So Dieter had it work on his face.
 When we rushed to do our video, I was not able to set up because there were so many
 people behind me.
 So I just had this poor gentleman from Apple whose job it is to walk you through the demos,
 and it was set up for his face.
 This poor guy's in our video.
 I kept pointing at his face, which is hilarious in this context, not so hilarious in the context
 of the cops.
 Yeah.
 Right?
 And you can't reset your face if it's your password.
 It doesn't work if your eyes are closed.
 So if you get pulled over, you just have to shut your eyes forever.
 Huh?
 What?
 Yeah.
 Okay, yes, you're a pirate.
 Great.
 That's an approach for you is to have an emergency security eye patch at all times.
 But it's also supposed to recognize as you age, if you grow your hair long, if you wear
 a hat, if you wear glasses, makeup.
 Unclear sunglasses will trigger it or not.
 So there's all this set of questions that I think remain unanswered about it.
 And Apple tried to address some of them in the presentation.
 I'm sure they're gonna address more of them over time.
 But they had the wall of Arya Stark masks showed.
 We've made all these faces.
 It didn't trick them.
 But then there were...
 A poster for the movie Face Off.
 Nicolaage Cage was there yesterday.
 It was very strange.
 Yeah, and then all of a sudden it was John Travolta.
 But they also are like, if you have a twin, you should probably just use your passcode.
 Which is a really weird thing for the richest and most powerful company in technology to
 say.
 We've solved every problem except twins.
 That doesn't happen.
 No one has those.
 So I think there's this whole set of questions about what it means for literally the most
 public part of you to be your password, because you can't constantly hide your face.
 You can't keep it a secret.
 You can't write it down on a piece of paper and tuck it away.
 And that's not great.
 I think all of us understand it's not a good solution, having a password.
 But to go from something that you can obviously keep a secret to something that can never
 truly be a secret, I think is very difficult.
 And that to me is a whole set of questions about Face ID.
 Can they navigate all those turns?
 Yeah, I mean, like, great, you can click.
 So people are yelling five clicks, two people.
 Two nerds who have drugs with them right now are yelling five clicks.
 Wait, can you explain to me why is it so fundamentally more easy to take a picture of a face than
 get your hands?
 I guess because you have to touch me to get my fingerprint?
 That's what I was wondering.
 Like in the point of sale situation right now, a lot of us are used to just going like
 this and then your thumb is already there.
 Now you're going to be like, if you have a $1,000 iPhone, you're a line at Whole Foods
 like all the other $1,000 iPhone people.
 Amazon's lowering prices.
 Hold on.
 Hold those avocados.
 Hold my beer.
 Yeah.
 Thank you very much.
 I'll take my kombucha now.
 I mean, it's like, you're right, like is it that much easier than just going like this?
 What Apple will tell you when you're like, do you really have to hold your face over
 the point of sale terminal?
 Like, no, no, just like double click the home, the side button.
 No, it's not called sleep wake button.
 It's called the side button now.
 The whole thing.
 Launches Bixby.
 Oh, God.
 Double click that.
 That turns on the face unlock thing.
 That turns on Apple Pay.
 Then you authenticate it.
 Then you tap the terminal, which is a very different sort of quick and easy workflow
 from just doing before.
 I can barely pay with my thumb already.
 The security stuff where you click it five times and you, I get it.
 But what I'm saying is, if you can actually beat it, the information that is required
 for you to input into the mechanism that beats it is the most public information about you
 that is commonly available.
 They have to make sure you can't beat it.
 The cops showing up and you click it five times and throw it in the air and run away.
 Great.
 We've all been there together as a family.
 I don't know.
 I travel through the TSA a lot with a bag full of wires, so I have a weird...
 But it's on my way here.
 I got stopped.
 Because I...
 I mean, honestly, I was carrying like 15 lithium ion batteries.
 I would have stopped.
 But if you can beat it, and there's like, Dieter yesterday was talking about, it has
 new vectors.
 So Touch ID only ever talked to the authentication chip in the phone.
 Never talked to anything else.
 But the front camera and all that tracking talks to Animoji.
 So you can get that data in other ways.
 Like the Snapchat filters we demoed are obviously mapping your face.
 So there are other ways to collect the data and then potentially...
 I'm sure immediately people are gonna try to beat it.
 But I actually talked to our security reporter, Russell Brando, about this a little bit.
 Presumably those apps that use the data that you can get from that to make crazy face filters,
 it's just working through an API and that stuff isn't lost.
 But the fear is somebody makes a random...
 What was the app that did the face filters that turned out to have a bunch of spyware
 in it?
 Oh, Me Too.
 Me Too.
 Yeah.
 Like that app makes cute face filters, but what it's actually doing is secretly recording
 your face data so they can build a mask to get you.
 It's probably through the standard APIs, they're not getting enough data to do that.
 We don't know.
 I love the idea of a person with both the capability of launching that app and making
 really high res masks.
 Right?
 Right.
 Like there's a mask maker out there who's like, I gotta fucking learn to code.
 This is my future.
 So Paul, you wrote...
 I wanna make sure you talk about the watch.
 I'm not gonna talk about how you think this is the best OLED screen ever made by human
 hands.
 I also wanna talk about the notch.
 There's like two things to talk about.
 Oh yeah.
 So long...
 Let's do this.
 Let's do the notch first and then I wanna ask Paul, because you wrote a piece today
 about why you wanna buy the 8 over the 10.
 But so the notch, I don't know if you guys have been following like the deep Apple nerd
 community that I'm forced to follow.
 I find it a pleasure.
 There, there.
 So there is like deep, meaningful, like controversy about the existence of the notch, what it
 means for developers.
 I think the thing that is really interesting to me is the screen is 5.8 inches.
 Like Dieter said, I think it is easily the best OLED screen I've ever seen.
 I've never really liked them.
 I think they're way oversaturated.
 I think most of them have weird pixel matrix issues.
 This one looks...
 He wants to say Pentile, but he knows that that time has passed, so he's not bringing
 it up.
 Over.
 It looks like Blackberry.
 It's fucking dead.
 Sorry, the one Blackberry person hissed at me.
 That was weird.
 But no, you're good.
 You're great.
 Thumbs up.
 TCL is gonna take care of you.
 No, so like it looks beautiful, but the notch, it's 5.8 inches, but the notch and then the
 rounded corners...
 Rounded corners I think are the big...
 And then the home area at the bottom that you have to protect.
 All of that means that the usable screen area is more like the iPhone 6, 7, 8 design than
 the Plus design.
 I heard a really good analogy for this.
 Do you remember like old cameras would have kind of a safe area, like show the corners
 of what's like...
 This will definitely show up on every CRT TV.
 That is what developers have now because there are rounded corners and a bunch of the screen
 is being wasted.
 Also Apple through the WebKit team asked the CSS committee to add safe areas to the CSS
 spec back in August.
 And then like on the GitHub comments, there's like a comment from yesterday.
 I was like, oh, so that's why Apple did that.
 They're trying to figure out how do you add this to CSS.
 Because if you look at your computer the next time, is there anything in the corners?
 There's lots of things in the corners.
 A lot of times the close buttons are in the corners.
 There's things that we put in the corners of our user interfaces all the time.
 And now you have to be cognizant as a developer both for the web and for apps.
 And there'll be some ways that it'll automatically kind of dodge them out of the corners.
 But like if you want to use the whole screen, you have to figure out how to not use corners
 because they're curved.
 The other thing about the safe area thing is in order to get the home bar that indicates
 that you swipe out to go home to work, it needs to cut that out from safe area.
 And when you rotate the phone, I tried this.
 What did I do?
 Nothing.
 What?
 Okay.
 It's projector shenanigans.
 Great.
 Everyone loves a projector shenanigans.
 When you turn the phone in landscape, the home button moves to the bottom of the landscape.
 You swipe up in landscape to go home.
 Which is cool.
 But also bonkers.
 By the way, I own swipe to go home.com now.
 Oh, God.
 Finally, a monetization strategy.
 Because you need that bar, the usable area for developers when you're in landscape mode
 is shorter than you get on an iPhone 678.
 It actually has less usable vertical space in landscape mode than like a regular iPhone.
 Also, if your app is not coded correctly and you turn it into landscape and you scroll,
 the scroll bar disappears behind the notch.
 And it shows up again.
 Hello.
 Really exciting.
 I think all of this doesn't matter.
 Because, one, I don't use any app except for video apps.
 I go 90.
 I'm not ashamed to admit it.
 Oh, God.
 This show is presented by T-Mobile.
 And go 90 is a terrible joke.
 So it all works out.
 So, like, video apps, you turn your phone.
 Videos are pillar boxed.
 So you don't actually see it.
 On the 10, they're pillar boxed?
 Yeah.
 You can still tap to get the full zoom in and have it notch cut out, but by default,
 they're boxed.
 So Apple just didn't show that yesterday.
 So I think everyone's assuming that videos are going to be cut off by the notch.
 But I think more importantly, this phone is designed to be held in portrait.
 Yeah.
 Which is actually the more natural way to hold a phone.
 And I think in portrait, the bottom is an issue, but the top is just not.
 The bottom is an issue in terms of the content getting cut off?
 Yeah, the corners and the bottom of the screen.
 That's like kind of the dead space you're talking about.
 That's where you're going to be doing the swiping up anyway, right?
 Like even when you're holding the phone, like your fingers are going to be sort of curling
 around it.
 So here's my big question.
 Like I'm, everybody's all freaked out.
 I'm fine with it because I've used a bunch of Android phones and they all have crazy
 UIs and like things will be different.
 It's cool.
 No.
 It's fine.
 No.
 It's cool.
 This has been Deeders Jam for like two days.
 Yeah.
 He's like, Android's a mess and everyone's alive.
 Yeah.
 You'll be fine.
 It's fine.
 And like swipe up to go home?
 Love that.
 That's some web OS shit right there.
 Around your people.
 There's notifications.
 That's fine.
 Although notifications on iOS are still a hot mess.
 Every app is a website.
 Yeah.
 The phone.
 Y'all are just mean.
 They're only available on Sprint.
 The phone is double tall.
 It's a super tall phone and they, because there's no home button to slightly tap with
 your finger twice, there's no more reachability to move half the screen down.
 And I think that kind of sucks.
 People use reachability.
 I use it all the time.
 I use it all the time.
 Really?
 Also iOS 11 has killed the 3D touch from the side for switching apps.
 The 3D touch does still exist on the new phone, but our understanding, and we don't have the
 deep dive into this yet, but our understanding is because the display is different.
 It's OLED, of course.
 The display stack is different, and so the usual mechanism that was created to make 3D
 touch work on the existing models, they had to do a bunch of new stuff to.
 I just kissed the microphone.
 I was so excited about this.
 They had to do a bunch of different stuff to in order to fit the 3D mechanism into the
 display stack.
 I don't know exactly where that is yet.
 It's different.
 They had to redesign 3D touch for the 10.
 And that might be why they are de-emphasizing in the software, because they're not...
 We used it a bunch.
 Yeah, it's there.
 It's almost like for a while, everyone said multi-touch every chance they got, and now
 it's just assumed.
 I think that we're getting to a point where for people who do use 3D touch, it's just
 kind of assumed it's part of your interface and your controls, and that's what you do.
 You also, on the home bar on the bottom, you can swipe to the right, and that is how you
 switch to the last app, and you can just switch through apps that way.
 And once you do it a couple times, you're like, oh, yeah, this is how it should work.
 It's great.
 Explain that again.
 On the home bar...
 On the home bar, you swipe up to home.
 You swipe up...
 Swipe to go home.com.
 Yeah.
 But if you just swipe over on it, it swipes the app over to your last app.
 So you just very quickly, without having to do any 3D touch shenanigans, you just swipe
 over and it's the last app you're using.
 It's great.
 It's a little grabber for your app.
 Yeah.
 And if you throw it up, you go home, and if you slide, you go...
 Okay.
 That works.
 The question is, why didn't they pull a Samsung and make it a 3D touch home button where
 you could just press on it really hard?
 Really hard, right.
 Here's my question.
 We have to wonder if they tried that and it just didn't work.
 That's your question, Paul.
 Why didn't they do something crazy and absurd down in the bottom portion of the phone?
 Like I was so stoked on all the wild UI concepts I saw that they're gonna basically use that
 portion to create like sort of a contextual UI.
 And now that I think about it, it is kind of stupid to have a software circle there
 all the time.
 Obviously, things change around.
 Yeah.
 But I don't know.
 I just feel like they've done more.
 A lot of Android fans here.
 They made...
 They're not gonna come out of you.
 Not only did they not like super utilize the bottom of the phone, they kind of made it
 like a safe area...
 Literally they call it a safe area because of that little bar that always has to be available
 for grabbing.
 So you can't have too many controls at the bottom of the phone.
 You're already getting more screen than you would have otherwise.
 You're already getting more screen just because they reserved a portion of it to work the
 phone.
 Like fine.
 I thought it might have something to do with drag and drop.
 You could have a dock that shows up there.
 You could make multitasking better somehow.
 I honestly think that their move here, they're not gonna sell very many of this phone.
 And the people who buy it, I think they're gonna be caught in the loop of, I spent a
 lot of money on this phone.
 Because to be honest, I think most people will buy the 256 gig version, which is $1,125.
 So really this phone costs $1,125.
 I think if you spend that much money on a phone that is actually a very beautiful physical
 object, your natural state of being is to be happy with it.
 It's like I bought a Ferrari and it gets terrible gas mileage.
 It's a fucking Ferrari.
 It's a Ferrari.
 It's true.
 That's how I would feel.
 Any Ferrari owners here?
 Dead silence.
 That's great.
 Or there's like two of them and they're like, we can't talk about it.
 I think they're able, because the scale is so much smaller, to do things like what if
 we completely change the home button control center swipe interface?
 What if we push it and then they have a year of seeing how that goes?
 They can either commit to it or change it in iOS 12 when that comes to the mainstream
 part of their lineup.
 But they do have this opportunity to screw around.
 And I agree with you.
 I don't know why they didn't screw on more.
 But they've created a space to a, revert if it's a huge fail, the amount of changes they've
 made, or to push it if it's a success.
 And I think that's cool.
 Okay, I want to make sure we talk about the watch.
 So Lauren, you have been cursed with wearable reviews.
 No, but you've reviewed the last few watches.
 I have.
 This one is the, it's the same watch with LTE basically.
 As expected.
 Everything really was leaked, wasn't it?
 Yeah.
 Everything was leaked.
 Yeah, so this Apple watch has LTE in it.
 It is not the first smart watch to have LTE.
 Some of you may have tried LG's LTE smart watch before.
 Also dead silent.
 The Atari owners and LG watch owners in this room currently.
 Perhaps Samsung's Galaxy Gear, was it the S2?
 It was the S3.
 Also crickets.
 Put me on the spot.
 Yeah.
 Gear had a better implementation.
 Okay, so here's the thing.
 When you're talking about these little wrist computers that are about yay big, and you
 start to add things like cellular modems and more stuff to them, is that the battery life
 generally suffers.
 So that was my biggest thing going into this, was like, how badly or how much is this going
 to impact battery life?
 We don't know yet.
 Stay tuned for reviews.
 I told a few people in the audience this earlier.
 But Apple is saying that they've managed to keep the 18-hour battery claim, even with
 an LTE modem.
 Which if they managed to do that is impressive.
 But I'm not wholly convinced.
 I'm not wholly convinced.
 Like there was this moment when during the introduction when they showed a woman on a
 surfboard and she was like catching this wave, and then all of a sudden she got a phone call.
 And it was supposed to be this lighthearted moment, but I was like, wow.
 That just like totally, I don't know.
 I just feel like there's some places still where you shouldn't have an LTE connection.
 There should still be some places in the world where you can escape from a cellular connection.
 For me the standout is seeing the number keypad on that phone display.
 That was terrifying to me.
 Yeah it's like, at the end of the day I think what's going to happen is people are going
 to use the LTE for true emergency situations.
 Like your phone battery died and you're like, I still need to call Lyft.
 Or you know.
 Why are we all laughing?
 I think the idea that your phone battery dies before you watch batteries.
 I thought you were laughing because I didn't say Uber.
 No, we call Lyfts, okay?
 We call Lyfts.
 Wow.
 And.
 Wait.
 I don't spend a lot of time in the Bay Area, but the idea of ride sharing service fans
 is terrifying.
 Leave California.
 Have you heard anything about what's going on at Uber?
 All right, so back to the watch.
 I think that it's going to be helpful in some situations.
 I think like once they get the music streaming thing down on it, that that could be a real
 value proposition for people who want to go out and about with a watch and they want to
 just like on the fly change their music selection and they happen to not have their phone with
 them.
 But the LTE watches we reviewed prior to this, it's been a little iffy.
 So it's still, yeah.
 I mean I think what Apple is doing is like it's kind of a classic product differentiation,
 right?
 That we no longer see the Series 2 available.
 So we've got the Series 3 with LTE.
 There's a Series 3 without LTE.
 That's the price of the Series 2.
 If you don't want LTE, you can still get GPS and waterproofing, which like work out people
 like.
 I say that like I'm not one of them.
 And then there's the Series 1 for people who just, which is the least expensive for people
 who just want kind of like a basic smartwatch that has like notifications and other cool
 things like that.
 So this is just like classic like, okay, if you want to pay the most, you're going to
 have this LTE thing and maybe you're not going to use it all the time, but it's like the
 feature.
 It's the thing.
 And they also, I mean there's a faster processor.
 They built the antenna into the face of the watch, which is interesting.
 That is really cool.
 They like figured it out.
 You have to imagine that that was, they had been thinking about that with the first watch.
 And by the way, Fitbit did something similar with their new like Ionic smartwatch.
 They did some fusion thing in the build where the antenna is actually like, anyway, we can
 get into Fitbit in another podcast.
 We could spend another entire hour on that.
 But let's talk about the red dot.
 Okay.
 A lot of feelings about that red dot.
 A lot of feelings about the red dot so far.
 So it's just cosmetic.
 My understanding, well, it's cosmetic to indicate the LTE.
 Yeah.
 It's to tell people I have a watch, but by the way, if my phone dies, I can call it Lyft.
 Which is when you're in line at Whole Foods and you've got that really heavy grocery bag
 of avocados.
 You're screaming at your wrist.
 And you left your $1,000 iPhone at home.
 It kind of looks like a record button.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Or I think it looks like an SOS button, which is interesting because the watch actually
 has an SOS feature.
 Right.
 But to me, it looks like emergency.
 I'm rich.
 Oh, no.
 Would you guys get one?
 Would you get an LTE Apple Watch?
 If I had the money to spare, it's an extra $70 for the LTE version.
 It's $10 a month for the connection.
 Then I would not.
 That's a good point.
 Like the $10 a month, unless they make a Project 5 version because extra data sims on 5 are
 free.
 See?
 Cheers.
 But that's never going to happen.
 Yeah.
 I don't know that I want to pay $10 a month for my watch.
 Because the question about that, too, is not just that you're paying for LTE, but it's
 going to be how intelligently they manage the handoff.
 Because there's already like, right, you can use a lot of things with Bluetooth on the
 watch, or if you're in an area where there's a known Wi-Fi network, then the watch will
 connect to that.
 And then it's not like using the other protocols.
 And so they're going to do this handoff thing where it's going to go from different wireless
 protocols to LTE when you need it.
 And I think how well it works is all going to be dependent on that handoff process.
 Will it work as well as the lift your arm or tweak your arm gesture to actually have
 the watch face turn on?
 That's an excellent question.
 If it works that well, then it's doomed.
 So you've got to review the thing.
 But they're winning, right?
 So if they just make it incrementally better, they're just going to keep trucking along,
 basically.
 That's the thing.
 They presented a slide yesterday that I thought was fascinating.
 They're like, we're now the number one watch brand in the world.
 And they just listed all the...
 But the metric by which they're number one was not presented.
 And the second one that they listed was Rolex.
 And it's like, okay, there can't be number of watches sold.
 Right.
 So I think it's revenue.
 It's revenue.
 Rolex sells $4 million watches a year, and Apple sells that many number of $300 watches.
 And I go, we're number one.
 Right.
 They said their sales have increased 50% year over year.
 And then if you look at the latest IDC numbers, which puts out these reports of global wearable
 shipments every so often, they're actually now only number two to Xiaomi.
 So Xiaomi is beating them in volume, which is not surprising because it's Xiaomi.
 But Apple has now snuck ahead of Fitbit, which has had a lot of sales declines this year.
 It's ahead of Garmin, which is impressive because they're in that sports enthusiast
 category.
 And then Cook has said in vague terms, this business is the size of a Fortune 500 business
 on its own.
 So it's a real thing at Apple.
 But how many people here are wearing smart watches?
 Probably a lot in this crowd, right?
 Yeah, there's a good amount.
 Show him.
 Dude.
 Yeah, he's like, I have four.
 If it's more than 10, I'd be shocked.
 Thanks.
 You just boosted the average for the rest of us.
 I think for a lot of normal people still, they're like, I don't know if I need a smart
 watch.
 I still think that's a very real question.
 Apple watch for kids.
 Apple watch for kids, yeah.
 That's dystopian.
 And then you release them into the cement circle and just chase them around.
 Okay, we are...
 I told everyone that we were gonna go long and we have certainly gone long.
 We long.
 So Lauren, I really wanna thank you for coming to the event yesterday, for being on stage,
 seeing these people.
 It was super fun.
 I'm gonna go...
 All right, Lauren, clap for Lauren.
 Oh.
 Bye, guys.
 But I wanna bring out a dude right now, the only person I can think of to talk about Animoji
 with, Casey Newton.
 Hi, everybody.
 That's Steve Austin's music.
 Sure is.
 The Texas rattlesnake.
 I just say, the last time I was in this physical space, I saw Mark Zuckerberg and his wife,
 Priscilla Chan, announce a campaign to end all human disease.
 So it's great to hear you guys talk about the iPhone.
 But anyway, what were we saying?
 I just shook a bunch of strangers' hands and then ate food, so...
 Did that happen in this room?
 Yes, in this very room.
 And how's it going?
 As far as I can tell, cancer is still a thing, so...
 All right, Casey, before we begin, I don't wanna forget, that was dark, by the way.
 I'm just getting started.
 Casey's like a professional improv comedian now, and that was one of the roughest chuckles
 I've ever heard.
 I don't wanna forget.
 Paul?
 You're weak, buddy.
 Oh, we almost forgot.
 But we never forget.
 We never...
 You do a thing, segment.
 What's it called, buddy?
 It's called...
 Is there a refrigerator in this thing?
 I forgot to come up with a new title because it...
 It's not bad.
 This happens also, by the way.
 It's called, Is There a Refrigerator in This Thing?
 Well, edit it.
 Edit.
 The famous Vergecast segment.
 All right, this is burning up the internet today.
 It's something called bodega.
 And a chill filled the room.
 There is a refrigerator in this thing.
 No, no, that's...
 I'm pretty sure.
 They sell beverages in this bodega, but it does not seem to be refrigerated.
 So you can get a lukewarm vitamin water.
 Does anybody want...
 What the bodega is.
 So bodega, imagine a box in a building and you approach that box and you give that box
 money somehow and you receive a product from that box.
 What would you call that?
 A vending machine.
 Yeah.
 No, it's a bodega.
 And it's gonna disrupt the bodega industry and mom and pop and first generation immigrants
 are all gonna be out of business and destitute and Silicon Valley, meanwhile, is going to
 take all the money.
 Big bodega has it coming.
 Big bodega.
 Big bodega.
 I don't know.
 I think it's hilarious.
 These guys made a box that has some machine learning in it so that basically you unlock
 it with your phone, you open it up, you get a...
 You're listening in your car and making aggressive scare quotes at the words machine learning.
 Whatever.
 It's a real thing.
 People do it.
 It's a job.
 No, machines do it.
 You can get a Udemy course on machine learning.
 Right.
 So it's two ex-Google engineers.
 It's a talent.
 It's like a Codecademy course.
 Lawyer quotes.
 Oh, boy.
 Machines can do that now better than I ever could.
 All right.
 Go ahead.
 Don't be mean to Codecademy, by the way.
 No, they're great.
 They'll come at you.
 They will.
 That's a long story.
 So you unlock this box and then it sees what you take out of it and it charges it to your
 account and so the idea is that they're gonna put them in apartment buildings or gyms or
 kind of shared spaces that are relatively secure because this box doesn't look very
 secure.
 But there's just a huge controversy today because they called it Bodega and I think
 Bodega means a lot to a lot of people.
 They'd called it like Vendor with no E.
 Yeah, like Vendor with, yeah, exactly.
 No vowels, Vendor.
 Okay, so you're my resident Silicon Valley silliness reporter.
 Yes.
 Tell me about Bodega.
 The name was a really bad choice.
 What we learned today is that 80% of a New Yorker's identity is that they're friends
 with a cat in a convenience store.
 If you read Twitter today, man, did you hear about the deep, deep friendships that these
 rich people have with the people who work at their Bodega.
 I don't believe any of that, by the way.
 I think they buy Cheetos there and tell themselves they have a friend who's unlike them.
 That's not real.
 Here's the thing.
 What is real is that technology is displacing jobs and technology has no answer for that
 and Silicon Valley is extremely callous about that and its only alternative to jobs seems
 to be what if we just have the government write you a check.
 So Silicon Valley doesn't know the first thing to do about what is happening because of automation.
 So when things like Bodega come along with the implication that they're going to get
 rid of real people's jobs, then I think there is a justified backlash against it because
 it does come across as idiotic.
 Now the founders of Bodega said in a Medium post today, which was inevitable and had 241
 claps the last time I looked.
 Oh my God.
 Stop clapping.
 Do not clap in the audience.
 Because it doesn't count.
 You have to clap on the website so no one gets paid.
 This is real.
 Stop laughing.
 Authors do not get paid unless you physically clap on the website.
 What the author said was essentially that they feel really sorry about the name because
 they never intended to go head to head with actual convenience stores.
 They just wanted to put vending machines in apartment complexes and apparently they did
 a bunch of market research that said that like immigrants did not object to this name.
 So anyway, the whole thing is a huge mess but I think if they had to do it over again,
 they'd pick a different name.
 Also I think that the Fast Company headline was like, this Silicon Valley startups wants
 to deport immigrants with their vending machine.
 They didn't write that.
 It's not fair for me to ever complain about headlines.
 Animoji.
 Yeah, Casey, that's why you're here.
 Let's get off this dark stuff and talk about talking foxes.
 So well, animoji.
 Which animoji are you?
 Well as far as I was able to ascertain yesterday, there is no eggplant animoji.
 Which feels like a missed opportunity to me.
 My thing is that the animoji are apparently in the iMessage app store.
 Is that right?
 You have to access the app store to use them or how does that work?
 Okay, so you have a keyboard.
 You do click on the app store icon.
 The first thing that opens is animoji.
 I see.
 Then you're another level away.
 Great.
 So they're training you to click on that button.
 That is true.
 But whether you will ever go to...
 I once hired a private investigator to find the iMessage app store and I'm still waiting
 to hear back.
 Look, I think these things are fun, but all of the recent kind of social enhancement to
 iMessage have felt a little bit either half-hearted or too late to me.
 How many times, if iMessage users out there in the past day has someone sent you something
 with lasers, right?
 This stuff is there, but I don't think it gets widely used.
 So I think you might see a few novelty foxes and panda faces in your iMessage, but I don't
 think this is going to become the new default way for teens to communicate.
 It's a bummer to me that it's locked to iMessage because I hate things that are locked to iMessage.
 Peter is just watching a GIF of the group smiling at him on his computer right now.
 I wanted to gaze upon the different emoji options and the GIF was the first thing that
 came up.
 So we got to try it though and I will tell you it is the most fun I've had with the phone
 in the past six months.
 It is wildly fun to talk to your phone and have an emoji literally beat for beat, no
 lag at all, become your face.
 I became a little dog yesterday.
 It was very cute.
 Sure, but if...
 Are you going to deny that that was cute, Casey?
 I would never deny that that's cute.
 It was very cute, but the thing is I've been using Snapchat for four years, right?
 And they have lenses that are not actually all that different.
 So I don't deny that the technology is cute.
 I think some people will have a little bit of fun with it and it is a novel demonstration
 of this technology that they built into this very expensive phone, but I don't know.
 I just think iMessage is such an amazing platform for Apple.
 I would love to see them invest like 10 times more in it because there's actually a lot
 of research out there that it's really the number one chat app for teens, right?
 Because for teens having iPhone is such a status symbol and it's where most of their
 communications are going on.
 So man, you could just imagine iMessage being so much more than it is right now.
 I think the thing about Animoji that gets me is the way they want you to use it is that
 you're going to record a movie.
 And I don't do that with iMessage ever.
 I never send the little audio messages.
 So the idea that I'm going to respond to someone instead of sending them one quick emoji, I'm
 going to pull up my phone and act out a quiet scene for them.
 Right.
 What if you were courting a lady, would you think you would maybe invest a little time
 in making a panda face?
 I will confidently tell you that if I send my wife a talking poop, I'm literally married
 to a divorce attorney.
 I will do this shit for free.
 So I don't think that's going to happen.
 I'll try it.
 We'll just see what happens.
 No, I mean, sure.
 But I think you're right.
 I think Snapchat is like, it's so much farther.
 And there's a huge incremental upgrade to Snapchat filters.
 That stuff when I tried that yesterday was also incredible.
 Okay, but what was the difference?
 I've watched this video.
 It looked like a Snapchat filter.
 What was the difference?
 So usually when I use Snapchat filters or Instagram filters, which I think are a little
 bit worse, there is a perceptible lag between what you're doing and what the computer is
 pasting onto your face.
 None of it is there.
 It just looks actually like it's applied to your face.
 You became the dancing hot dog.
 I was the dancing hot dog.
 That's my animoji.
 Just dancing away while the world burns.
 Yeah, I mean, that's great.
 Look, to the extent that all of this is making augmented reality a thing, I think it's really
 exciting.
 Something that did not get a lot of attention yesterday at the keynote, but that has been
 huge, particularly on Twitter, is all of these novel applications of ARKit.
 There are Twitter accounts where you can just see every day novel applications of ARKit,
 and it's some of the absolute coolest stuff that is being done with the iPhone.
 So I hope we see a lot more of that, and I hope Apple talks a lot more about that.
 So animoji, great use for that, but I think the AR stuff that is going to come out in
 the next six months is going to have nothing to do with animoji, and that's going to be
 the stuff we're talking about.
 Also, the limited amount of people who are going to have the 10, it's not going to be
 a huge number of people.
 It just isn't.
 But only because of supply constraints.
 This is where I differ from you guys.
 I think that it's the 8 that is not going to be a huge hit, and I think that Apple is
 going to sell every 10 that it makes.
 Because I think you either want the best iPhone or you want the iPhone that you can best afford,
 and the 8 is neither of those things.
 So, okay, let's posit that anybody who can spend $750, $800 for an 8 or 8 Plus.
 Or $50 a month.
 And if they could, would get the 10 because it's not that much more on an amortized carrier
 plan.
 So let's stipulate that that's true, and let's also further stipulate that it seems likely
 that Apple's not going to be able to make enough of these damn things.
 Resolve.
 The United Nations shall buy an iPhone X.
 So what happens on December 20th when my phone breaks, I need to go buy a phone, I've surveyed
 the market, I didn't buy a phone in the fall because I'm not an idiot.
 And you don't buy a phone until after all the phones are announced, that's what I mean.
 And I go and I discover that if I want to get an iPhone X, I have to wait until June.
 The backlog is that long.
 I waited six weeks for my AirPods and I still feel sad about it, but I waited.
 Do you think that most people are going to do that or are they going to quote unquote
 settle for an 8?
 I think that for so many people, like the current year iPhone, it's a status symbol,
 it's something they look forward to all year.
 I absolutely think that people are going to wait.
 Particularly those like us who are buying a new phone every year.
 Let's say there's a two month wait for the new phone, they'll wait because the phone
 they have in their pocket is a 7 or a 7S and it's fine, right?
 They only want it because it does some cool stuff, it's going to look cool when they bring
 it out at parties.
 I think people are absolutely going to wait for the X.
 Yeah, I think the question is are they going to wait so long that it's next September?
 It's like real.
 If it's true that there's a 12 month wait for the iPhone X, everything you guys have
 said is true.
 Yeah, I think that's the most interesting problem for them.
 I hung out by the way with a guy named Kunal Dua, today he was the editor in chief of Gadgets
 360, which is the biggest tech site in India.
 It's actually bigger than the verge and it's just Indian audiences.
 He told me that Indian buyers on average buy a new phone every nine months.
 They cover two phone launches a day.
 There's an average of ten phones launched in India every week.
 All the companies have price segments that are like Samsung has a phone at every $8,
 which is every 500 rupees.
 It's from zero to the top of the line.
 The reason the iPhone 6S still exists is because it is the most popular phone Apple sells
 in India.
 It's the one that fits into that pricing strategy that's new and what people don't want there
 is refurbished phones.
 Apple has this, obviously we have a somewhat myopic view of our market and there's all
 of the, if you can afford 750, you can afford 1000, which I am pretty shaky on.
 I understand it's a big leap.
 It's funny how Apple also has to cater to these other huge markets that they are seeing
 where they have to show growth because if all that happens is the wave of carrier upgrade
 plans sweeps over America and everybody gets an iPhone 8 because it's the one that you've
 been paying on installments for this entire time, they will have zero growth.
 They have to find ways to capture new people, which means both going down market, which
 is not what we generally pay attention to, and it also means they've got to convert a
 bunch of Android high-end owners over, which means they have to appeal to note owners.
 So here's the thing.
 I don't know if the iPhone 10 appeals to the note owner who's like, what I want is a 400
 horsepower engine and a stylus.
 So talking about myopia, you're getting a 10?
 That's the plan.
 Neil is getting a 10, I'm probably getting a 10.
 Paul is not.
 I want to hear about this.
 Why not?
 Cars.
 Cars.
 Yeah, I was up pretty late last night trying to make a car analogy.
 I don't know a lot about cars.
 Here's where I went with it.
 The iPhone 10 is like a Ferrari, but I just need a Honda.
 I just need something reliable and affordable and something that matches my actual use case.
 And it's not such a precious object in my life that I need the ultra luxury one.
 So I do like to have a really nice phone, and I like it to have a long-lasting battery
 life and be reliable and take nice pictures and stuff, but it's not the most important
 object in my life.
 See, if I'm Apple and I hear this, this terrifies me, because what Paul is saying is the iPhone
 8 is a station wagon, right?
 And Apple has never been about that.
 They've always been about creating that sense of like, oh my God, the future has just landed
 in the present.
 That was the entire, I mean, that was the thesis of the event yesterday.
 Yeah.
 We're in the Steve Jobs Theater.
 This is his dream.
 He would literally, I've heard multiple Apple executives saying, we hope he's proud of us,
 right?
 Like they were, like, is the iPhone 10 to you the same as the iPhone?
 The answer to me is like, no, it just has an edge-shed screen.
 Well here's what I would say about it.
 The iPhone that I remain the most satisfied with in terms of like where it took me from
 where I was is the iPhone 4.
 The iPhone 4, every time you took it out of your pocket, it looked like jewelry.
 It looked like you were holding this just incredible object, right?
 And I haven't held the iPhone 10 in my hands yesterday, but looking at the video that you
 did looking at everything else, it looked like jewelry.
 And I haven't felt that way about the iPhone for a long time.
 As a piece of hardware, it is absolutely stunning.
 I think that's going to carry it so much further than the 8 being like, you know, the camera's
 mental.
 A lot of people tweeted me, tweeted this to me yesterday when I said, does anybody have
 thoughts about the 8?
 I've only heard about the X today.
 And like a flood of people tweeted, it's the iPhone 7S.
 Who here thinks it's the 7S they renamed the 8 to make it sound better?
 You're good.
 Joey's got nothing.
 So it's like a medium feeling that's out there in the world that I think they have to contend
 with.
 I think the vast majority of people who do not come to podcasts about surround sound
 formats are probably not thinking about.
 But actually, this leads me to my next question.
 It's like really what I want to talk to you about, which is what animoji are you?
 No.
 So you weren't there, but you are, you watched it, obviously, you paid attention.
 I felt like the vibe towards Apple and its self-regard yesterday was distinctly different
 than 10 years ago or last year or even the year before that, where it was seen as somewhat
 out of touch.
 Did you get that?
 Yeah, I mean, they said a couple of things that I would have personally advised them
 against.
 Like you can call a corporate retail space a town square.
 I think that it's, it actually, like it offends my sensibilities just because there's a lot
 of things that you can't do in a retail store that you can and should do in a town square,
 right?
 I also think there was a lot of talk about Apple as a company and having, like I saw
 Steve Jobs introduced the iPad too.
 And it was very, like the whole event was sort of about the iPad and what it could do
 for your life, not about Apple and what an incredible company Apple is, although of course
 Steve Jobs talked about that too.
 So I do think it was somewhat backward looking, but I can't fault Apple for that too much
 because they were there to inaugurate a new building that was named after their founder.
 So as somebody who has loved Apple products for a really long time, I did cut them a lot
 of slack to a degree that I think some other journalists would say that I was sort of going
 too soft on them.
 But stuff Apple has made has done really amazing things in my life.
 And so if they want to spend 10 minutes at the top of their show telling me about Steve
 Jobs' view on technology, I'm like, I'm super down for that.
 Like maybe in ways that are not flattering to me as a journalist, but like I was sort
 of there for it.
 But then when they sort of come around to like an Apple store as a community center,
 like I've been to their flagship store in Union Square and it's just like lines of people
 trying to buy AirPods.
 Yeah, to me the feeling I got was there's so much more attention being paid and actually
 in weird ways we talk about this on the show all the time between what our corporations
 should do, what they're free to do, and what our government should do and what our government
 is free to do.
 Does that make any sense?
 Sure, let's go with it.
 We've all been drinking.
 We talk about that.
 We do, we talk about it all the time.
 And Apple seems to be taking the position that it actually will be the greatest force
 for good in your life.
 Right?
 And the way it will do that is by selling you relatively expensive things.
 Yeah.
 I think it's actually fine for a company like Apple to say because their business is selling
 expensive things.
 But where they're not, I think, making the connection that people want, if they were
 actually going out into cities and spending their war chest of billions of dollars to
 build a library, like this is a town square, it's our gift to you.
 But they're not, right?
 They're like, we're going to capture an obvious return on investment in this space that is
 our retail space.
 Right.
 And that distinction is actually quite troublesome and they haven't quite thought about the messaging
 of it.
 Because and I don't mean to say this about this government, although I feel this very
 deeply in my heart about our current government, our current government is not like doing it.
 Right?
 And that is true.
 I think that'd be true whether we had a demo, like, but our current government is not doing
 it.
 Sorry.
 I was listening to another Vox Media podcast, Recode Decode with Kara Swisher who had Scott
 Galloway on.
 I believe it was this week.
 And he talked about the idea of what if Apple just used some of those many, many billions
 that it has in reserves to create a free online university and just sort of like put that
 out in the world and anyone could just study any subject that they wanted and Apple subsidize
 it.
 Right?
 Sort of bring, really like put your money where your mouth is when it comes to being
 like humanitarians at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.
 So I do think that there is a lot more that Apple can do there.
 I think that they're talking about themselves as humanitarians.
 It does get somewhat overwrought.
 But they do create creative tools that a lot of people in the creative arts do use to make
 very cool things.
 And that buys them a certain amount of leeway to do that kind of talk.
 I think for me, if they're still towing the line of, not towing the line, if they're still
 following the theme of talking more about Apple as a company and a concept instead of
 the things we made and what precisely it will do for you in six months or a year, that's
 a problem.
 You just built the most amazing corporate campus ever made.
 You built a thing that is insanely beautiful and cool.
 That does not have childcare, but go on.
 Does not have childcare.
 It's a fact.
 Very good point.
 The Tim Cook likes to work out, so it has a 10,000 square foot workout facility in it.
 It's your choices, right?
 You reflect yourself.
 I was just going to say, you can have that minute.
 You can have that introduction to the keynote.
 You can have the moment playing insanely creepy music in your atrium that we all sat there
 for, stood there for.
 You get that.
 I was unashamed about being Apple yesterday.
 They were not modest.
 They were unapologetically Apple.
 Unapologetically Apple.
 Right.
 That's fine.
 They just opened the Steve Jobs Theater.
 They just invited people over to the giant spaceship they built.
 They announced the most ambitious iPhone they've done in how many years, do you want to say?
 Several.
 Yeah.
 Take the moment.
 Five.
 If you do it again, if you're still acting that way in a year, then you're a little full
 of yourself.
 Right.
 Then they'll introduce an incremental upgrade and we'll sit here talking about how brilliant
 it was.
 Apple can't innovate anymore.
 No.
 I think it's less than that.
 I think they're so important.
 They broke through the noise of our current political discourse.
 They broke through the noise of whatever people were angry about on Twitter yesterday.
 They're able to do it with products.
 I think the big difference, and I think about this a lot, there's a great interview, one
 of the many great interviews Walt and Kara did with Steve Jobs at Code.
 I don't know what they were talking about, but Jobs said to Walt, we're going to make
 choices for people and if they like it, they buy it and if they don't, they won't and that's
 the best we can do.
 But he never talked about a larger mission.
 He was entirely focused on here's how I make choices about what products to make and I'm
 going to sell them to you for whatever price I think is fair and hopefully you like it.
 I think also, by the way, everyone else is a piece of shit.
 That's why we loved him.
 Apple right now keeps talking about their larger responsibility to the world because
 they are the most valuable corporation in the world.
 I think doing that without the corresponding action is what caused that other reaction
 we saw yesterday.
 Paul, I'm actually really curious in your take of this because we generally disagree
 on these sorts of things.
 I'm very curious what you think about this.
 I don't know how the federal government would be creating these public spaces.
 I'm not actually exactly sure.
 I do get what you're talking about with the store being like a town square.
 That bugs me as well.
 The idea that a company... To be honest, the thing I love about Apple is that it makes
 my decisions for me.
 I've signed up to be an Apple user so Apple can make all these decisions for me.
 I'll go along with them.
 If I have strong opinions about certain things like pages, I'll use Google Docs or whatever.
 For the most part, I'll just use the Apple stuff and it simplifies my life.
 The only person who has an opinion about pages, let alone a strong one.
 I don't want them to make my political decisions for me.
 They don't define my religion, my politics, my activism.
 It's fine for a company to go out and do that, but I don't want them to sell me that.
 I think that's actually the heart of this troublesome town square thing.
 This podcast got very deep.
 Everybody take a breath.
 Okay, we're going to keep going.
 Does everyone finish taking their notes?
 There will be a quiz at the end.
 At the end of it, they're a company and they have to sell to everyone.
 That means they will file the edges off their harshest opinions in a way the government
 doesn't.
 The government takes all the input, they take your tax dollars and make a bunch of policy
 decisions.
 Half of you hate them.
 That to me is the difference.
 I wanted to bring that up in this show in front of this audience that came here for
 a surround sound jokes.
 One of the choices that Apple has made for you is that you want to have fucking Atmos.
 I want to bring it up on the show because we spend so much time talking about their
 hardware, but so much of yesterday was also laced through with their social ambition and
 their policy ambition.
 Like Apple, for example, came out a few weeks ago and for the first time filed a brief in
 support of net neutrality.
 That's great.
 The largest, most powerful company in technology being like, here's a policy that I personally
 agree with.
 Paul doesn't agree with.
 But they're doing it because they're about to launch video content.
 They hired a bunch of Sony executives to make shows and if some carriers block those shows,
 Apple's at a disadvantage.
 Now they're making policy decisions that obviously serve their interests, I think serve everyone's
 interests, but they're using that weight to do it, but they only did it when it actually
 began to serve their interests rather than a larger interest.
 I think it's important to just take a half step back from arguing about notches and whatever
 and just point out that they talk a huge game, but there is actually a lot of dissent underneath
 that that I think is tied into a moment.
 The EU fined Google.
 There's a lot of talk about antitrust law coming after Google, Facebook, Microsoft,
 Apple, Amazon.
 Amazon now owns everything.
 They actually own this building.
 Are you sensing the sort of panic in the valley around the tech moment colliding with the,
 hey, you guys are a little too powerful?
 Yeah, and I think the writing has maybe been on the wall for a few months, but I think
 you're just starting to see it crystallize even within the last few weeks with the EU
 and Google.
 There is this sense that all of a sudden we don't feel the same way about tech companies
 that we once did.
 Now obviously, kind of the big four or five, Amazon, Google, Apple, et cetera, like those,
 I know I left out one, but we're doing it live.
 They're beloved consumer brands, and I don't think the average citizen is mad at them.
 In fact, they're probably the source of national pride, but at the same time, there are real
 threats.
 Probably the number one threat is that they are eliminating jobs.
 You think of Facebook as one of the biggest companies in the world, and it has 17,000
 employees.
 I think of how many employees like Ford or General Motors had back in the day.
 Those jobs are going away.
 There's a sense that they're not coming back.
 The companies are growing ever larger.
 At some point, I think there is a thought that something has to give.
 I think you're going to see tech companies spend a lot more on lobbying, but maybe you'll
 even see them making some preemptive moves.
 Maybe they'll spin out one of their businesses.
 I think they'll do whatever they can to be the masters of their own destiny.
 You cover all the other companies here in the Valley pretty closely.
 How do they feel about Apple?
 When these moments happen and there's a big new piece of hardware, it's suddenly like
 Twitter is like, we figured out Nazis because we have corners on the screens now.
 How do they think it through?
 I think the rank and file employees get very excited about it.
 I was actually chatting with some folks in the audience here before, and they work for
 tech companies in Silicon Valley.
 They were all really excited to watch the iPhone event yesterday because they want to
 know what is this device that I use 90 times a day going to look like.
 I think at the individual level, they are largely fans of the product.
 At the corporate level, they will gripe about the same things that everybody gripes about
 with Apple.
 The partnerships can be hard.
 Apple says no to an awful lot of things.
 They can be difficult to work with.
 I'll just say personally, I'm far more worried about Facebook's effect on the public sphere
 than I am about Apple.
 Apple makes the tools, and Facebook is the stuff that we're actually looking at that
 appears to be warping all of our minds in frightening ways.
 I think Apple actually will get a pass.
 I think you'll see antitrust come for Amazon and Facebook and Google long before you see
 it come for Apple.
 I think it's interesting because Apple owns the store.
 They have in a real way far more power.
 I feel like we need to end this on an up note.
 You know how we're going to do that?
 I think I know how we're going to do it.
 We're going to take some questions from these people.
 Does that feel right to you?
 Joey, can you bring us up, buddy?
 Go nuts.
 Bring up that.
 That's our audience.
 I think there's microphones.
 You're like seven for eight.
 Oh, wow, lights.
 Hey, everybody.
 Oh, there you are.
 Hey.
 Hey, everybody.
 You're all so beautiful.
 Look at how beautiful they look.
 All right.
 By the way, I'm really grateful for people that came.
 Yeah, thank you all so much.
 It's really nice and validating of you to come to see us.
 I'm talking to somebody who came here from Singapore.
 Yeah.
 And he told me he was actually here to help with Hurricane Harvey relief, but then he came
 here.
 Thank you, sir.
 I talked to somebody who escaped from Mobile World Congress America, which is arguably even
 more difficult.
 It's rough.
 He's right there.
 Okay.
 I don't know how we have microphones.
 There are microphones or should we should we should...
 I think they're right in the front of the stage.
 Right here.
 They're disconcertingly close to us.
 Yeah.
 Can we do this?
 Can we move those back there?
 Is that a task we can perform, Zach?
 Thank you.
 It's not only terrifying, but it's also terrifying.
 It's terrifying.
 It's terrifying.
 It's terrifying.
 It's terrifying.
 It's terrifying.
 It's terrifying.
 It's terrifying.
 It's terrifying.
 It's not only terrifying for you to have to come all the way to us.
 I think it's terrifying for us for you to attack the stage.
 Rush the stage and ask us questions, please.
 Look, it's quite possible that we've already answered all of your questions because of
 our detailed and excellent analysis of the app element.
 All right.
 So if you have a question, just arrive.
 There we go.
 Hey, all right.
 There we go.
 I was really terrified.
 There would be a moment where I'd be like, yeah, no, we don't want to talk to you.
 You're great.
 What do you all think about the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus pricing considering the base models
 are more expensive than the 7 and 7 Plus?
 Inflation.
 Just go with it.
 Also, gas is more expensive now.
 It's the 70s.
 Actually, Lauren was saying this earlier.
 They have an average selling price problem.
 They also bumped the prices of the iPads quietly by 50 bucks yesterday.
 I think it comes down to if they show relatively flat growth but tons of revenue growth, they'll
 be okay.
 They'll be able to make that excuse.
 I don't know if adding a glass back and a bunch of Qi licensing for wireless charging
 costs that much money, but I do think there's a move to make all the products more premium.
 It's possible the processor was like a bunch more money.
 It's bionic now.
 It's bionic.
 Yeah.
 But, yeah, I will say I'm not super pleased by it.
 But, I mean, the iPhone 7 is also around.
 They could have dropped the price a little more maybe.
 I would pay another 50 bucks for a headphone jack.
 Yeah.
 Super would.
 All right, man.
 So, a hidden feature of that sort of an emoji style thing that they've got going on is actually
 that dot matrix is used in affective neuroscience to measure facial expressions and facial emotions.
 Do you think we're going to enter into a world where Siri starts interacting with us sort
 of in our own emotional context?
 And how long do you think it's going to be before Domino starts paying money to make
 sure we can get it to act to each other?
 You are making a lot of assumptions about Siri.
 Honestly, I think that will happen after you're able to use Siri to set a timer on your Mac.
 It's probably the dream.
 I'm sure someone else will do it first.
 All of that also is scary.
 I think to cross that wall where you're not just unlocking it by looking at it, but Apple
 saying to you, now we can read your emotions and adjust the color temperature of the display,
 because that's their best trick.
 It is, by the way, their best trick.
 But there's so much of just questions around we're looking at you that they have to answer
 with unlocking the phone before they can go all the way there.
 But also Siri.
 There is like a history of research, I think it's called affective computing.
 And there is a lot of interesting stuff around if your devices were more aware of you, like
 when you're perspiring or if you're getting mad or if you're happy or you're sad or something
 like that.
 But there might be, because obviously there's a lot of creepy ways you can go with that.
 But there also might be some really interesting ways like, hey, you should take a breather.
 There are ways that our devices could help us out by understanding our emotions better
 and giving us little cues.
 Or it could just be creepy.
 I just don't trust it to not be ham-fisted.
 I saw one of the guys, an Apple employee who works on a heart rate monitor, they released
 the watch, which is the most popular heart rate monitor in the world, and they released
 a feature, the new one, where it will measure your resting heart rate and when it's elevated
 abnormally, like when you're not working out.
 And one of the Apple employees was tweeting yesterday, I worked on this feature, my heart
 rate gets elevated when I'm on a date and when I'm stressed out.
 And I was like, yeah, and also when Trump tweets.
 If you know those two pieces of information, you should just shut my computer down.
 You should shut it, go outside.
 All right, what's up, man?
 All right, so the iPhone X is supposed to be the next decade for what the iPhone should
 be.
 Do you think there's enough courage there to really meet that?
 All right, Dr. Samsung.
 I'm on to you.
 Kevin Samsung is here.
 That's my whole answer.
 I can address this.
 The idea that the iPhone X has a bunch of new fundamental concepts of the way a phone
 should work doesn't ring true to me in the way that the original iPhone, original and
 then later on a couple iterations into Android, webOS, even Windows phone, all had brand new
 ideas of this is the way a phone should work and this is how you're going to interact with
 this device.
 And even though there's a couple new ways to swipe around and do whatever, and there's
 a bunch of new AR stuff, I think that a lot of that stuff feels more experimental and
 trying it out rather than a systematized thought process of this is the way that phones are
 going to work from now on.
 So yes, there are surely things in the iPhone X that are indicators of what the next 10
 years of the iPhone are going to look like, but there's not a brand new big idea there.
 It is fundamentally iterative, and I know that tech reviewers and tech writers use the
 word iterative too often and it kind of doesn't mean as much as it used to, but they've introduced
 a few new concepts, but I don't think they've introduced a brand new foundation.
 So yes, screens are going to look like that from now on.
 That's just the default now.
 Phones are going to have cool AR stuff from now on.
 That's just the default now, but that doesn't mean that it's changed everything.
 So my answer is only slightly different in that the first iPhone was this absolute force
 of convergence.
 So it ate your MP3 player, it ate your camera, it ate taxi dispatch services.
 It just ate everything in its wake, and it was able to do that in a way that literally
 no other product before it was able to do.
 You can't do that again, so you're kind of limited in scope, but I do think that front
 camera stack, that is the beginning of something really, really important.
 I think we put this in the hands-on yesterday.
 The front camera on the X is way more important than the back camera, and that I think ushers
 in another set of uses for the phone that we kind of don't understand that could lead
 it to once again disrupting taxi services.
 Uber knows you're pissed off.
 Something interesting about the portrait lighting.
 Yeah.
 It was something I was trying to come up with, like what's another photographic technique
 that could be added as a technology?
 And I didn't think of lighting, but Apple thought of lighting and did a really cool
 technology.
 And if you combine that with that front sensor, if you think of where the phone is eventually
 going, it's something that you hold out, and it has a perfect 3D photorealistic map of
 everything around you, and then you can do things based on all of that information that's
 now on your phone.
 You can make a video game out of it and explore it, or you could get contextual information
 in AR, or you could Photoshop it like crazy and relight it and change everybody's faces.
 Yeah.
 I don't think we know, but if it comes from anywhere, I think it's that.
 Joey.
 What's up?
 Everybody give a hand for Joey.
 He had to deal with me.
 I made a lot of angry faces at Joey because he was literally the only person I could see.
 All right.
 So you guys have touched on this whole show in a few episodes back, but Apple's obviously
 in a kind of state of flux right now.
 We saw Apple as a company where they sold the best product at the highest price point
 for a long time.
 Now they're about to sell five different models of the iPhone, eight if you count the pluses.
 What does this mean for the next five, 10 years of Apple?
 Are they going to sell a $200, $100 iPhone?
 What is their future in terms of growth?
 Are we looking at the best phone forever?
 Are we really trying to get the entire world to buy an iPhone?
 Well, if I knew that, I would work in a circle.
 I will say, when I was writing my car piece, I got a feeling that it wasn't...
 I wasn't mad at Apple.
 I was kind of celebrating them.
 You made a good enough phone.
 I would love that these specs... someone tweeted at me, put these new specs in the SE.
 Apple is definitely in a position where they have the good enough, the camera good enough,
 screen good enough, software good enough.
 They can make smaller, cheaper phones that are good enough.
 And that's really exciting that this technology can keep on going down the price.
 I have no idea where to go in the high end at all.
 I think to me that that future of Apple is one a lot of people talk about and care about.
 The one that is always most important, one Casey was discussing earlier, is what Apple
 has historically done is democratize tools of creation.
 And so if you can get all of that in a cheaper phone, now you've got kids who are like, I'm
 going to shoot a 4K video.
 And like, now we have vloggers.
 So I guess that was a mistake.
 No.
 Just kidding.
 There's like 10 vloggers.
 No, it's like we have Instagram influencers.
 Can we agree that that is a mistake?
 No.
 Guess not.
 Okay.
 You know what I mean?
 But that's like, all of that jokes aside, all of that is super exciting.
 They have created an entirely new class of creators that have in turn created an entirely
 new world of business and commerce and culture.
 That's like Apple's move.
 I think if they continue to live there, the business stuff will actually sort itself out.
 The question of should they just have a four product matrix, I think is like long gone.
 Like they're too big for that.
 When they were doing that project, they were 90 days away from bankruptcy and like 10 people
 bought Macs and I was three of them.
 I also think that the question of will the iPhone become the best selling phone on the
 planet is kind of irrelevant.
 I don't think Apple even cares.
 They want to make the tools for creators and they want to make a ton of money and they
 don't have to beat Android to do that.
 Yeah.
 Over here.
 We can probably do two, three.
 Yeah, we're running out of time.
 Hello.
 Hello.
 Yeah, I think they'll make an iPhone SE as the iPhone X and also did 789?
 Security?
 Goodbye everybody.
 That was for chest.
 I don't think I was going to be able to.
 They might make another one but it's going to be one of those things where like every
 few years like, oh yeah, we forgot.
 We got to make a small one again and then they'll slightly update it.
 Yeah.
 I think they were surprised how many people bought the SE so they're going to keep all
 updated one more time.
 Like even they are like, yeah, we make it.
 People like that size but the whole goal of the X is to make it smaller so they can probably
 make a bigger screen in a smaller size and they might just do that.
 Yeah.
 So when you were seeing the iPhone X, the iPhone X yesterday, did you see anybody, did
 you see touch rather face ID fail?
 In particular, I'm concerned because I wear glasses all the time and I have Snapchat filters
 just straight up not work on me and also I'm of East Asian descent and I often have cameras
 tell me, did you blink?
 So is this like, did you see this at all?
 I failed for Dieter a couple of times, right?
 You were saying?
 Yeah.
 I was wearing glasses but it was also like I didn't know what I was doing and people
 were getting jostled and whatever.
 You were holding it wrong.
 We're going to have to review the phone.
 Holding it wrong.
 Yeah.
 We have to review the phone.
 We don't know.
 Yeah.
 But like literally, federal use first demo failed.
 Yep.
 So like, you know, like we're going to, we're going to all learn how to use it in the same
 way that we all learned how to use such ID and we'll review it and we'll find out.
 Yeah.
 All right.
 We'll do one more.
 So back to the monopoly stuff.
 Why do you think that tech's getting so much more attention than like Lockheed or like
 the ag tech companies, like the pharmaceutical companies that are much bigger and much more
 pervasive, just more behind the scenes?
 I think it's really a good question.
 I've seen a lot of people talk about it recently.
 I think part of it's related to what Casey was talking about.
 Those companies still employ a lot of people and they also price their products, right?
 So like the classic antitrust model, which is like the Chicago school and I went to University
 of Chicago.
 So like it's really great and we should stick with it.
 Yeah, but they screwed up our concept of monopoly and yeah.
 No, but it's a great school and you should all go there.
 Whatever.
 So the classic model is about price, right?
 So the way that you measure the effects of monopoly is like if consumer prices go up because
 now you know there's not pricing pressure in the market.
 I know it's like epipen.
 Argument is about that, right?
 So you can measure Lockheed's price.
 You can do all this stuff with their prices.
 All of these other companies give their stuff away for free generally or they provide an
 inordinate amount of value for a small amount of money.
 So like Prime, there's no competitor to Prime to measure its price against.
 I think what is happening is for at least in my opinion, the longest time the government
 regulators lawyers, they were not aware of how tech companies worked.
 But what happened was a lot of nerds went to college and became lawyers.
 So they're like really aware of how these companies work and they're looking at it and
 they're saying this model that I was trained in, we can never ever make it apply to Google.
 Like we just can't.
 So we need some other model that explains Google's market power and that is actually
 like to me that that's the engine that's turning all of the interest and the interest is turning
 into we should do something.
 No one knows what to do, but I think the amount of attention that you're seeing is a lot of
 very smart people who are intimately familiar with tech products, as familiar as anybody
 in this room are saying, hey, wait a minute.
 Right now our model does not allow the government to say anything about what they're doing and
 that is probably not the right place to go.
 And also Google as a search company does not have a competitor for you for us to even think
 about.
 And if we're in the absence of a competitor, the government should probably think about
 that in some way.
 Now, do I think they should regulate Google?
 Like no, right?
 Like probably not.
 Like Google makes a lot of products.
 They, Google feels like it has a lot of competitors and they give their shit away for free.
 So like I was trained in that school.
 I don't think that that's the first place we should go.
 I think the first place we should go is coming to the old Comcast.
 But that's another show.
 Tune in next time.
 Are we done?
 So now we have to do the wrap up.
 Peter, you were like trying to say something and I kept interrupting you.
 I was just going to say that the Chicago schools interpretation of how monopolies work based
 on price is fundamentally flawed and we should go back to a Rooseveltian version.
 I think monopolies are myth.
 But it's a great bargain.
 Anyway.
 The old trust buster, Dieter Bohn is here everybody.
 Watch out Carnegie, we're coming for you.
 Should we wrap up the show?
 What?
 Yeah.
 Do you want to threaten Andrew Carnegie some more?
 No.
 I hate you John Rockefeller.
 By the way, John Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago.
 You can understand why his school was opposed to monopoly regulation.
 Just our whole plan to end on an up note just totally destroyed.
 I feel like I learned something.
 I actually love a good John Rockefeller story.
 Can anybody just raise a hand if you didn't know there was this whole kerfuffle about
 let's sue all the tech companies.
 That's a kerfuffle.
 I wasn't aware.
 I'm sorry.
 Furfuffle.
 Real talk and fox situation.
 I want to ask this question.
 Here's our end on note.
 Make some noise if you're going to buy an iPhone X.
 Make some noise if you're going to buy an iPhone 8.
 8 plus.
 Thank you.
 Dead silent for 8 plus.
 I'm so right about that.
 I think that's the real noise.
 In case you called it.
 In case you called it.
 In case you called it.
 Well, at least for these nerds.
 Anyway, here's what I'll say.
 I love all of you so much for coming.
 It is absolutely wild to us.
 This conversation I think for all of us was like when I was growing up there was no one
 to have this conversation with in Racine, Wisconsin.
 And now I get to do it with people that I love very much.
 And all of you came to see us.
 And that just makes my heart explode with joy.
 So thank you so much for coming.
 I have to plug some other podcasts.
 There's only one Virge podcast at this moment.
 This one, the best one.
 No other podcast exists in the world.
 But Casey is going to start a show soon.
 He keeps promising me.
 Stay tuned.
 A lot of exciting things coming later this year.
 You know, usually on the show, like, Dieter and Paul will tell me an idea they have.
 And I'm like, you have to write that story now.
 Now you've told the people you're starting a podcast.
 So we're raising the bar for the live show.
 That's what I like.
 Casey's going to do one.
 Our two great reporters, Ashley Carman and Caitlin Tiffany, have a new show that's coming
 soon.
 I can't give you a date yet.
 Called Why'd You Push That Button, which I'm really excited about.
 So look around for that.
 Lauren, who is on stage with us, has an amazing show called Too Embarrassed to Ask, which
 all of you should listen to.
 Lauren, who's your guest this week?
 Yeah, Dan.
 Everyone loves Dan.
 So Dan was also at the Apple event, so they're going to be presumably talking about Apple.
 So you should listen to Lauren's show, which is wonderful.
 She does it with Kara Swisher.
 Kara Swisher herself does a recode decode.
 And Peter Kafka does a recode media, which if you are a media nerd, which I suspect many
 of you are, you should absolutely listen to.
 Oh, Ezra Klein has the Ezra Klein interview show.
 He interviewed Hillary Clinton.
 Who's he?
 Just a guy.
 No, it's fine.
 All right.
 There's also, there's all kinds of other great Vox podcasts, including, I know some
 dude, Ezra.
 He's fine.
 We're actually friends.
 The fact that I'm starting a feud with Ezra on this show.
 I fully support it.
 I guarantee you, he does not know about and does not care about.
 It's my favorite thing right now.
 Also we're friends, so like whatever.
 But that's Ezra.
 Know what you are?
 Better than Ezra.
 Oh God.
 Can I, I will tell you this story now.
 Wait, I'm going to end the podcast.
 Okay.
 And then we can leak it.
 You can all leak it on your Snapchat or whatever.
 Is that what kids do now?
 Okay.
 So that's our show.
 We're going to keep the mics on when we're done because I'll tell the story.
 But that's our show.
 Thank you all so much for coming.
 Rock and roll.
 Paul.
 Paul.
 Paul.