Engadget Podcast: Motorola’s 2024 Razrs make a compelling case for foldables

Motorola is still trying to reclaim the glory of its original Razr phone with its latest foldables. The new Razr and Razr+ are more stylish than the previous models, and at $700 and $1,000 respectively, they're surprisingly affordable for devices with massive folding OLED screens. In other news, we chat about Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange being freed from prison, Rabbit's massive security hole in the R1 AI gadget, and a horrific Sora AI commercial from Toys "R" Us.


Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

  • Moto Razr and Razr+ first look: stylish and (somewhat) affordable – 0:51

  • Samsung announces its second Unpacked of the year will be in Paris – 13:14

  • Expect a bunch of new hardware at August’s Made by Google event – 19:56

  • Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is free – 24:38

  • U.S. Supreme Court rules the government can ask social platforms to take down posts – 31:22

  • Rabbit R1 modder group discovers massive security holes – 36:11

  • Uber blames NYC law for locking drivers out of its app, more cities could come soon – 39:22

  • Toys “R” Us released a creepy ad using OpenAI’s Sora video tool – 44:43

  • Working on – 49:15

  • Pop culture picks – 51:24

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

Devindra: [00:00:00] What's up Internet and welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar.

Cherlynn: I'm Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low.

Devindra: This week, we'll be chatting about Moto's new Razrs. There's new Razr and Razr+ and yeah, their foldables once again, they look pretty cool keeping very pretty affordable prices for foldables too.

So we'll be talking about that. We'll talk about Julian Assange being set free from prison, a couple of Supreme court rulings, and oh man, we're just gonna really look forward to events happening or at least one big event happening in August, which thank you, Google. We all want to do that. We all want to be traveling for work in August.

Thank you so much as always folks. If you're enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcaster of choice, leave us a review on iTunes, drop us an email at podcast@engadget.com. Cherlynn, I know you were very excited. You seem so excited about the new Motorola Razr and Razr+.

I'm, you they look really nice. I like the prices. What is it? [00:01:00] 700 for the Razr 1000 for the Razr+. These are nice looking foldables. What's up this year?

Cherlynn: Very excited is a very strong way to put how I feel about these things. I think are we no longer

Devindra: excited about foldables? Is it just

Cherlynn: I've always been, I think I was more excited for, and here's where you could use the right word.

And there's also a story behind this. Motorola did like a whole ass launch event. In Brooklyn for the motor Razr, 2024 lineup. This was this was earlier this week. The news was announced Tuesday. They also had their little event on little, it was more than little event on Tuesday and a featuring one Paris Hilton, who's apparently there's like Big fan of the pink Razr from way back when, right?

Like she was the whole that's hot. And then flip the pink phone thing. Anyway this event also featured a magician. So I was like, all right, look, I guess I'll go. And then I went

Devindra: and I was dragged. You heard there was going to be a magician.

Cherlynn: The main reason I was already out for a different meeting earlier that day.

[00:02:00] So I was like, all right, I'll just go to the office, chill, and then go to this event and see get some light of my own hands on time with the phones. Cause Sam took the hands on demo for us. I was like, all right, I'll go take a look at the phone, but also, yes. Okay. I was like, I'll try to get a selfie with Paris Hilton.

Why not? And it turns out I left the event before Paris Hilton even started to do her DJ set because I was just so impatient. Oh wait, she's doing a

Devindra: DJ set too?

Cherlynn: So she DJed at the launch event, but there was first like this magic show thing. I don't, please, if Lindsay Lohan can DJ in Mykonos Paris Hilton can for sure.

Are we going to have a fight here, Sherilyn? Because listen, if we're going to talk about somebody with, I don't know, talent of any kind, the ability to produce. I don't know if talent is a strong word. Lindsay Lohan is a good actor. I liked her until like her inevitable downfall. Yeah.

Devindra: Paris Hilton, not so much. Come on. Okay. So what was, what did you see at this event? Did you see the magician? Yeah.

Cherlynn: I will say the reason I keep bringing up the magician is because they used the magician to highlight a few of these features that are debuting on the new Motorola Razr and [00:03:00] Razr+.

And you pointed out rightly that the pricing is one of the outstanding things. Sam has it in his hands on headline that they might be the most stylish and affordable foldables of the year. The standard Razr starting at 700. I think the pricing is a little bit confusing because last. With the 2023 lineup, the Razr 40, as it was known, I think in the UK versus the Razr in the U S it was like, it costs about 800 pounds.

And that was quite a lot of money. That's close to a thousand in the U S and I don't know that it ever came to the U S. And so it's, I don't know about that one, but

Devindra: last year's Razr was also 700. So at least the base,

Cherlynn: I don't know, like I'm looking at our review of the Razr, 2023 and the hands on and it's they put Matt's review because Matt Smith who reviewed it for us is based in the UK says it was 800 pounds.

So that's like I'm just so

Devindra: before let me just fill you all in here as we were doing the planning for this because I was just Like looking like how do these compare to last year? It does seem like the pricing last year did launch at 700 and 1000 But what we weirdly happened and i'm sure the uk folks are annoyed [00:04:00]about this apparently the base Razr was on sale like a quote unquote on sale for 80 percent of last year for 500 Which is a crazy price,

Cherlynn: whatever it is, let's put it this way.

Motorola's pricing strategy is strange AF, but this year it seems like the base one starts at 700 and then the higher end, the Razr+ is a thousand to begin with. And for that money, you're getting like a larger external display than ever. You've got more app support on the external screen. You've got some colors like hot pink, which is like that original Razr flip phone. And then this like leather finish on the back. Sans pictures look great. The ones I saw at the event also looked really nice. And you have some AI features now. Look, I don't know how y'all feel about magicians and magic tricks, but they've all been ruined for me because I've read or watched too many, reveal the trick shows.

You did

Devindra: it to yourself. Okay. Yeah.

Cherlynn: And then like the magician was like, Oh everybody hold up your phone and [00:05:00] Google this or a calculator that, and everything, and I was like, all right, fine. And but for example, the motor Razr+ 2024 and the Razr all have new AI based features.

For example, you can take a photo of, by the way, listen to how, listen to this. You can take a photo of your outfit and the. Quote, AI unquote will generate color themes and wallpapers for you. I was like, Alcatel did this circa 2018. Stop it. This is not a new feature. Stop calling things new. But there is another thing called magic canvas on Motorola.

Motorola's AI suite that will let you type in a prompt and then it will create sort of a wallpaper for your phone. So if you like dancing puppies with balloons in the background, you can use that as your wallpaper, for example. And then there's a feature that's coming called catch me up. It will summarize all your notifications.

So you don't have to go through all of them individually and then see. Sam is excited about something called Remember This, which sounds a little bit like Microsoft's Recall. You can ask, or you can first prompt Modo to [00:06:00] be like remembering things for you, and then ask it to record a photo, screenshot, or some audio, and then it will repeat the important details back to you when you ask for those important details later on.

Oh what was in that photo? Or what date did I leave in that screenshot and something like that?

Devindra: So you have to actively tell it to remember things, which I think exactly

Cherlynn: you had to first be exactly. So it's not like in the background, constantly screenshotting and tracking your activity.

I just feel

Devindra: like people won't do a good

Cherlynn:differentiation

Devindra: because like you could just always just take a photo of something and be like, yeah, that's how we wonder if it's going to

Cherlynn: be a ram hog. Too. Yeah.

Devindra: Who knows? Who knows? I do have to say these things look really nice. Tri do they? As far as yeah, they

Cherlynn: look very cool.

Yeah, they

Devindra: look cool. I don't see a huge crease on these And the external displays, especially on the plus looks

Cherlynn: oh yeah. The, to quote Paris, so the other thing that Sam did point out is that the crease there is still there, but that it's very faint and he. Quote, he describes it as a shallow ripple that you only see at acute angles, which is wow.

We're getting somewhere with these things, right? It feels like from the 2023 lineup of the Razrs to the [00:07:00]2024, what we're getting is more refinement. Yes, a larger display, but I think the hardware feels like it's quite Like ready for, to settle, and in the like candy bar format that iPhones have been in for a while, I think many foldables like that are more or less mature in terms of hardware.

And now it's all about the software. And apparently AI is the way, which I have thoughts

Devindra: on. One thing that I've been thinking about is we still don't have a foldable iPhone. I feel like everyone's waiting for Apple to do something around that. The rumor was the iPad mini being some sort of like foldable tablet type of thing.

Yeah. But we've got several foldable Androids now, Cherlynn, and they seem pretty good. The prices are getting down there. At least like most of them are under the price of an iPhone pro max, even. If you're considering Android phone, why don't you just get a foldable? Unless you want something under 500.

Cherlynn: Yeah. I think the main concern has always been like durability and battery life on these things. And the, by the way, the light Razrs get like a slightly higher IP rating than before. And again, with the crease not [00:08:00]looking as bad, and then there's a new hinge on these new Razrs too. There's a lot of good things.

I don't know that we'll ever see a affordable iPhone. I think we see affordable iPad mini first,

Devindra: yeah,

Cherlynn: you're right. That there are cheaper now, a thousand dollars for the higher end ones for the flips anyway, not the bigger folds These are pretty feasible as your daily driver, if you're okay with your phone lasting only a day, not two.

How

Devindra: much is the Galaxy Flip now? Isn't that like 800?

Cherlynn: It's about 999 as well. Like it starts at and it does have that nicer cover display. I want to see Samsung do more with the Flip. I, and speaking of, we'll learn more come July. We'll get to that in a bit. We'll

Devindra: learn more from Samsung. We're also still waiting for Google is not doing like a top down fold.

The flip style, right? It's just, yeah. Yeah. The pixel fold opens up. So I could see them doing something. It just seems like I the main appeal of Android is like, you can get a really killer phone for 500 or less, but if you're willing to bump up a little more, it does seem like if you're going to spend 700 or a thousand [00:09:00]dollars on a phone, get a flippy,

Cherlynn: it seems like we've reached that point.

I do want to point out has Sam in the chat says that the issue with Modo has always been their horrible software update record, which

Devindra: yes,

Cherlynn: very good point. And again, Sam does point out that Motorola says that the Razrs will receive three major Android OS upgrades and four years of software support.

That's a jump from last year, but it's. It's still short of the 7 years you're getting from Samsung and Google's more recent devices. So for bumping the number of years of support up, Modo, but you're still so far behind the competition. That's

Devindra: not great. I feel like the thing when you mentioned Magician, Sherilyn, all I think about, I don't take Magician seriously.

I'm not super excited by them. But I think about Joe Bluth in Arrested Development, and I can imagine if they had gotten Will Arnett to come here and just do his Joe Bluth thing while being sarcastic about Samsung features, that would have been funny. I gotta

Cherlynn: say,

Devindra: I was

Cherlynn: looking around the event.

First of all, they were like, okay, so the event started at six and was going to [00:10:00] end at 10. I bounced before eight, by the way, because like

Devindra: at night,

Cherlynn: yeah, that's why I was able to go out. It was like after work. That's why I was like, all right, it's afterwards. So it's not really.

Devindra: And then you're really pushing it, Motorola you want people to hang out with you after you show up at eight or

Cherlynn: six that there was no food until after 7 45.

Nevermind. I showed up really for the food. But anyway, and then Perry Sildon was slated to show up at like It's eight or something, but I think she started after eight from,

Devindra: she's going to come in. I heard from friends afterwards. Yeah.

Cherlynn: Anyway, at six and then the wait, why was I starting? Oh, I was looking around.

I got in at six, 10 or something. And people, it was already like the seating area in front of the magician's performance area was already full. And I like, I was like, all right, these are the plants, right? These are the plants. These have to be, have you

Devindra: people never seen a magician before? I don't

Cherlynn: know.

I don't think it's I got, I think they were all plants. Like I, there's a lot of audience participation that all requires. I think if magic tricks, you will know that there's a lot of planted actors. Anyway, the,

Devindra: that [00:11:00] makes sense. Yeah, anyway, I was

Cherlynn: looking around and I was like, yeah, I noticed that there was a suspicious amount of people already there, but be, I was like, wow, does Motorola have a lot of money still?

Like what is going on? They've, got Paris Hilton. They got this magician. They got this big space. They got a magician,

Devindra: not even like a name. I got to say,

Cherlynn: I think they have a name and I just can't remember, which sucks. But there you go. So I don't know. Motorola must be doing something right.

Or Lenovo is financing it like crazy, cause Lenovo owns Motorola. I

Devindra: don't know. Paris Hilton is not a big pull. Paris Hilton, the last we saw with her was doing like an ad deal with Twitter, right? The last I heard of her is on her

Cherlynn: reality TV series where she's being a mom, but

Devindra: that's, it's even beyond that.

But d tier celebrity at this point. The Elon Musk will point to will like, Hey, you're not mad at me yet. Would you like to do something with Twitter? Yeah, I don't know. Okay. The phones look nice. The event seems they should get David Blaine. Like when they finally get the when they get rid of the bezel.

How do you make the bezel disappear? Oh God. Magic trick. That would be hilarious.

Cherlynn: Cringe. So much [00:12:00] cringe.

Devindra: Okay. Anything else on the Moto Razrs?

Cherlynn: No. I will say that it's, they're kicking off foldable season. And we're going to hear more about that just a little, in just a little bit.

Devindra: Foldable fall, as it were.

We are, cause summer just started. Oh my God. Okay. So Samsung is doing something in July. We thought we were a chill for the summer, at least for July and August, but no, never. So what are we, what's going on there?

Cherlynn: Samsung officially announced. The second unpacked of the year of every year is happening this year on July 10th.

Wonderful round of applause. July 10th is a lot earlier than we're used to, right? These second unpacks used to be, taking place either during IFA, which would be in September, or End or mid August. And it's just gone earlier and earlier. Now it's in the middle of July. Great. Hey, you know who else announced they're like important dates for July?

Amazon's prime day is going to be July 16th and 17th. So if you understand the consumer tech media business, [00:13:00]you'll know that's. It's really a lot of work for a lot of people. So I don't appreciate the timing here, but Samsung anyway, officially announced July 10th and it's holding his event in Paris of all places.

Now, earlier this year, when it hit, it had the S 24 unpacked Samsung did that in San Jose, which Silicon Valley, everybody was like, Oh yeah, it's linked to AI and that's why they chose Silicon Valley for that launch event. So if you think about Paris. Other than Paris Hilton, Paris and France.

Are you thinking fashion? Are you thinking bed bug controversy from last year?

Oh, yeah. Anyway, I won't be going. Thank goodness. I'm just not thanks for talking about bed bugs. Cause I know we'll have bed bugs, but I think Considering that this time of year, Samsung's always launching foldables and wearables and watches make sense for the fashion setting.

And then if they wanted to make their flip a bit more stylish and also, yes, we are expecting to see the galaxy ring that they teed up in [00:14:00] January. There's a lot to expect from Samsung. And like I said, it's going to be foldable fall, ben, our producer is pointing out that the Olympics are also in Paris.

But is it in July? I think it is. Also

Devindra: true. Late July. Late July. Okay, so they're trying to get

Cherlynn: out of there maybe before the Olympics really fully kick off.

Devindra: I guess getting, riding some of the fitness hype maybe. Like especially if there's a watch. With the

Cherlynn: galaxy ring. So a lot of potential tie in things.

Now we already have

Devindra: Oh! Olympics rings! Wow. Multicolored Samsung Galaxy rings with the Olympics colors. Can you imagine if they make that? Oh, I can't.

Cherlynn: Anyway, you heard it here first. Ben and Devindra both predicted it on the Engadget going to use the Galaxy Ring as the Olympics ring. Some kind of Olympics tie in.

Would not be surprised. The

Devindra: official Olympics wearable that nobody will ever buy, but yes. Will it

Cherlynn: get them all to not sleep? In the same rooms. Anyway, head on over to Engadget. com. We already have a what to expect out of Samsung sort of preview article up.

Devindra: Are we [00:15:00] excited about the ring yet? Like we, we talked about it.

I talk about my ambivalence around ring gadgets in general. How are you feeling now?

Cherlynn: I'm with you. Like I don't wear that aura ring anymore. I just will. have someone else who's more happy to wear rings, to, to review it. Like I really liked what the aura ring did in terms of the insights for sleep, because it's something I was happy to wear to sleep, even though I still didn't like it, I was like, all right, it's better than a watch.

But it also actually gave very good. and different information, the aura sort of system about my sleep than I was used to. So that was nice to see. But otherwise, no. I wash my hands too many times a day for a ring to be really a feasible thing to wear.

Devindra: You could wash your hands with the ring, can't

Cherlynn: you?

I can, but I don't like to. I don't like to have moisture retained around the ring. I would still take it off anyway.

Devindra: So it's mainly cooking is the time where you want to be like, I don't want to get sauce and oil and

Cherlynn: My comfort.

Devindra: I feel you. I feel like the only thing that I felt [00:16:00]that was good for sleep tracking back in the day.

We will Often bring this up but r. i. p jawbone r. i. p the job on a device that was too beautiful to survive in this world and also too bug ridden also r.

Cherlynn: i. p. The amazon had this Sleep tracking, halo rise. Gosh, that thing was great. I miss it. But I think maybe the,

Devindra: you miss Amazon staring at you and judging

Cherlynn: someone in our chat earlier today, when we were talking about that AI feature, where you take a photo of your outfit to generate wallpapers thing someone in our chat mentioned, didn't Amazon have a camera that you would take outfits?

I was like, yeah, I loved it. I will say that the person in the chat who said that who mentioned that feature was I. It wasn't a creepy when people realized they were undressing in front of an Amazon camera. I did not, I was not undressing in front of the camera to start. I would dress up somewhere else and then go in front of the camera thing.

But

Devindra: it sounds like a really easy to use device. I don't, I still

Cherlynn: have it at home. I don't, it doesn't work anymore. Like the halo rise. I have a little, my own personal graveyard of Amazon devices that you, I loved watching me.

Devindra: They just threw money at so many things, the fire [00:17:00]phone. All these dumb devices.

Oh my God. I can't

Cherlynn: wait to see what Panos Pane does with Amazon hardware. But we are digressing just so slightly. Back to the Samsung Unpacked event. I think, In addition to the, to the galaxy ring, we're expecting also just making an educated guess here, probably going to see the new galaxy Z fold as Z flip galaxy watch.

I think they had a watch pro in the past too. And then we still haven't seen new buds. So there's a lot, have we seen a new tablet in a while? I don't know. So that's a lot. That's a lot of things to expect Samsung to unveil. I will also say. That in that announcement about unpack Samsung also mentions the words galaxy AI is here.

Wonderful. Excellent. I yeah, I

Devindra: are they going to show Bixby just evolving into what is like Bixby is just

Cherlynn: running a baton relay Paris, that's part of their event.

Devindra: Oh boy. Okay. We'll see. Do you think it is wise? I could see August being a good [00:18:00] time to get away from the iPhone hype, have some time to yourself.

That's what Google's doing. But July. Nobody's thinking about updating devices everyone's waiting to see what the future things are, especially should I get an iPhone or iPad. July. I would not be surprised,

Cherlynn: now that you and Ben brought it up, that it is absolutely Olympics timing. They're timing it for, try to get ahead of the Olympics so that they can make their Olympics announcement, something like that.

Would not be surprised if that is like a part of the reason. So there you go.

Devindra: There you go. Let's talk about the Google thing because we're talking about like upcoming events and Google's announcing basically August 13th, is going to be the next Google, the made by Google event where we're expecting new pixels and stuff.

Do we feel differently about this? Because this is this is just gonna be their major device launch. It's not going to be tied to any events otherwise.

Cherlynn: So Google announced the meet by Google event is happening on August 13th. And like you [00:19:00] said, it's a bit of time for itself. And I want to go on a rant after this about all of this, not a rant, like a little.

sideways talk. Google traditionally, and it's like second half of the year event, it's hardware launch brings us new pixel phones probably a new pixel watch, maybe new pixel, but similar slate of devices, I would say as Samsung. Except for because. Google doesn't usually have a January event to launch its actual flagship devices.

It will have both like a standard phone and maybe a foldable as well. Or we might, we're probably due to see like a new pixel fold. As well as the pixel. It's been

Devindra: two years, right?

Cherlynn: Two or one, everything blends into one to me, but yeah, it could be Two years by now. But we really liked that thing, right?

Like we really liked it when it came out, it was very thin and how all that, it's one

Devindra: year, it's one year, it just feels it feels like too.

Cherlynn: So there's a pixel fold two, we're expecting to see, and then the pixel nine series of phones and then whatever the pixel watch three, I believe is also on the agenda, hopefully, probably.[00:20:00]

And then finally, maybe some other devices after. All of that internal reorganization under Rick Osterloh happened earlier this year that The Verge reported on. Maybe we'll see some other hardware from the Nest side of things? That's a lot of speculation on my end, but that's an educated guess, right?

Based on historical evidence, based on what's out there. And other stuff that I know.

Devindra: When those things. Okay. So July event that we'll be all planning for, I will be gone. Sorry guys. Also August. So it's there's no break during the summer. And then once this Google thing is done, we're all like, just thinking about iPhone and thinking about what's going to happen with Apple and the whole fall and everything.

No rest for us, what do you, are you looking to doing are you looking to covering things or. Focusing on any kinds of other stories in July and August, Ryland? I would always May have a little time to breathe. I would

Cherlynn: love to take a break, but in July I'm traveling. Right after Prime Day.

And the I don't know. I don't think I'll be able to escape any of the coverage. [00:21:00] And Google, by the way, is hosting this event in Mountain View. And as much as I would like not to travel, I do, want to say hi to some of the Google people I know that work there, get some FaceTime with some executives, because that's always good for making sure Engadget gets like good information and do some reporting from the scene.

So I might, yeah, exactly. So that's. It's possible. I don't know, but you haven't finalized our plans yet is the reason. I'm not being like cagey on purpose. I just don't have anything for him to say. But I did RSVP. I'm always like, invite me to things. I will always say yes, but I may or may not show up.

That's like my thing.

Devindra: Oh boy. Okay. Okay. So that's new Moto Razrs, which look pretty cool. Check out our hands on coverage and we're. I guess soon you're going to be prepping for the Samsung Galaxy impact and after that prepping for the Google Pixel event. Hey

Cherlynn: Kevin says in our chat asked, what about Fitbit?

And I would like to point out that Pixel Watch 3 is probably you can consider it almost a Fitbit device. Cause Google owns Fitbit and also Fitbit did [00:22:00] launch the Ace LTE wearable for kids last month. Fitbit is still doing its own thing. I don't know if they're going to do anything new for this made by Google event though.

So there you go. And they just say, yep, they had a big turnaround too of employees and things too. What is Fitbit even anymore? Man, I remember when we were excited about wearables. I remember when that stuff was cool and everybody was trying different ideas and Fitbit was not owned by Google and was a lot more nimble, yeah. Okay. We'll be looking forward to all this stuff and check out our coverage on the Motorola.

Devindra: All right, let's move on to some other news, and I think one of the surprise stories this week is that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been in prison for a few years, was hiding out In an embassy in London, right? After WikiLeaks put out the documents, like a lot of secret documents, classified documents around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.

S. did not like that. [00:23:00]So he is now free from prison. He pled guilty. To the espionage act at a courthouse in Saipan. He, I just saw the news. Like he has arrived back in his homeland of Australia. He's reuniting with his wife. He's not actually saying much except saying let me see here. The deal required Assange to plead guilty to conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the United States.

He did defend himself in court. He did say let me see here. Working as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide information that was set to be classified in order to publish that information. I believe the First Amendment protected that. And of course his source was Chelsea Manning too.

So she, they also went to prison for a while. There's a lot of, there has been a lot of discussion about how. Is this an unfair thing? Should we, should the government go so harshly against leakers, but especially if it's classified information, I think that's where it gets so messy, Chelsea Manning spent.

[00:24:00] Years in prison was like what six or seven years and then obama, I think commuted her sentence so that kind of worked out better there, but it is I don't know Do you have any thoughts on this sterling because we've been talking about the julian's on stuff for so long It felt like the story would never end and it's not done yet like he's gonna say things his supporters are gonna be out there trying to You know say that Spin this a certain way too.

I don't know. What do you think about it?

Cherlynn: I think You I mean, the question that you were getting at near the end of that portion there is that, does the penalty befit the crime and it's hard, right? It's, you have to talk about national security is one thing. We also have to talk about who was affected?

What's the net good or net harm? It's really hard to decide that there's a reason I'm not in the legal judiciary system to decide these things. But I don't

Devindra: know. It's a, I think like one major argument I've seen against WikiLeaks over time is that Hey listen, the leakers getting confidential government information out there has been hugely important [00:25:00] in the history of this country.

Like the Pentagon papers were like, that was classified information that was massively influential in terms of that's different. I'm going to get to that, but the Pentagon papers. That definitely helped us get a sense of what was actually happening in Vietnam and showed how bad the Vietnam war was for America and how a failed war it was.

Assange points out that he says the first amendment and the espionage act are in contradiction of each other. He accepts his actions were in violation of the espionage statute and that it would be difficult to win such a case, given all the circumstances, basically. If you leak anything, even if it's like you believe it's in, it's for the greater good, like the government will come down against you with the full weight of its justice powers.

The argument against Wikileaks is that they did not do anything to redact Confidential information, especially things around I believe it was like locations of agents and people working around the world. There were, there was a lot of like [00:26:00] really sensitive stuff. We're not like really redacted and what Snowden had done.

was a little different, like he had worked directly with Glenn Greenwald, who has now fallen far from like when we, from being played by Spock in the Snowden movie. Glenn Greenwald, you have fallen very far. But the Snowden stuff, they were working together with journalists who did a lot of that information, redacted a lot of confidential stuff.

And even he Ended up being, hounded and stuck in Russia and also not being like the hero of the left that a lot of people wanted him to be, but whatever that information is out there. Do you ever talk to people, Sherlina, around the Snowden reveals or Spectre, do you ever hear people actually talk about, wasn't it weird that we learned that the U S government and a lot of governments were like actively spying on citizens and we just don't talk about it.

I don't, have you ever encountered people actually discussing it in your daily life outside of tech circles? I don't

Cherlynn: think people like. Talk about any more like I think back in the day. Yes. I might've been a bit too.

Devindra: Did you have conversations back then with [00:27:00]people? I'm just wondering if you encountered this in the real world outside of the media world,

Cherlynn: no, because the people I was talking to back then were all media people. Like I didn't have many I think it was like early in my move to America days. So all my friends were my J school friends and it was like, yeah. And Singaporeans didn't really. They like, they knew the names. Oh yeah, you guys

Devindra: are used to it.

Yeah, we're just like, also, yeah, we're like, Oh, of course the government is

Cherlynn: spying on you. Everything, it's not, no, we don't think the government is spying on us, but we, it's ingrained in us to be careful what we say, because if the government overhears you talking shit about them, they just jail you.

But the thing is, I think the question here is, yeah, the responsible treatment of sensitive private information that could lead to harm of individual people, but also I don't know. Like people, wasn't there a Jimmy, a John Oliver segment on like people getting names confused of do you know who Julian Assange is?

Do you know who Edward Snowden is? And then people were like, Oh, the WikiLeaks guy. And they were like, no, Snowden's not the WikiLeaks guy. Like it's, there's a lot of confusion around all of this.

Devindra: There's a lot of confusion. In the moment we didn't have

Cherlynn:conversations as much around like what Snowden revealed, but [00:28:00] I think we're feeling the impact of it now where everyone is aware that there's a lot of stuff that's spying on you, whether it's your social media, whether your phone, whether it's the government and there's heightened, like antitrust sentiment, like just nobody trusts anyone anymore. So that's what we're feeling. I feel, I don't know.

Devindra: There has to be room like for people to actually divulge information.

They think things are going wrong, but yeah, unfortunately, yeah, that, that does not work with the way governments and classified information without retaliation

Cherlynn: is like a huge Thing that needs to be supported, but I don't know that it is. We're going

Devindra: to, we're going to be talking about the story for a while too.

Like Assange is not going to, he's going to be much louder now. He's going to be doing many interviews and probably going to have all sorts of like deals out of this. So we're going to be talking about the story for a while. And Certainly it's going to be worth diving deeper into it too. So I'm looking for a good guest to talk to around that stuff.

There are a couple other major bits of news we saw this week too. The Supreme court ruled that it allows the White House to request a removal of misinformation on social media. [00:29:00]This was I'm just reading out here from NPR. Basically, I believe this was a result of a conservative complaints.

Of the Biden administration going to social media companies and just asking them to remove specific bits of news around misinformation. I think one thing revolved around Biden's granddaughter. So just specific bits that they thought were being like put out there badly. And the government was essentially trying to stop what they called misinformation.

I've seen a lot of commentary. Where people are saying this actually does set a bad precedent because, okay, what is misinformation? Could a more nefarious regime, if there was another Trump regime or something, could a more nefarious administration use this badly and just define misinformation as stuff they just don't like?

That could be. A problem. I don't know if you, have you thought about this at all, Shirlen? If

Cherlynn: you just can't trust people, right? Like you can put something in place that's supposed to protect people. They tear it down because they think it's going to [00:30:00] be like abused, or you can put something in place that was bad and tear it down to protect other.

I don't know. It's I don't trust that like a specific administration anymore. You know what I mean? I. Sometimes they do bad things because they're dumb. Sometimes they do bad things because they're bad. Sometimes they don't think. I don't know. I have very little faith in a lot of these things.

So no matter how this falls, I feel like the outcome It's a ongoing and be like, I have very little faith. What's interesting

Devindra: about this case too, is it was Amy come at Barrett who, is a Trump appointee who really tore down this whole thing, because I think at some point the plaintiffs were saying the white house was bombarding Twitter with requests to set up a streamlined process for censorship.

And that never really happened. Let me see here. I'm going to read from NPR in her opinion for the majority court of the court. Majority Barrett said that at every turn, the alleged facts turn to dust and that the plaintiffs have failed to trace the past or potential harm to anything done by [00:31:00] officials at the white house, the CDC, the FBI, or key cybersecurity agencies.

So it's just like a lot of, it was thrown out because a lot of this was ruled as baseless. Just interesting, but I don't know what this sets precedence for. I think a lot of people are worried, especially people worried about Information overall freedom of information. So there is that.

We also saw another Supreme court story actually just hit this morning. The Supreme court has blocked the Biden administration's plan to curb air, so air pollution from basically key polluting States, I think in the Midwest and places like West Virginia, basically to stop them or at least help them prevent spewing.

Emissions that would go into other states. So here's the story right now. The Supreme court put a temporary hold on the EPA plan to do that. Basically to curtail air pollution, the drifts across state lines. I think the ruling before was that states. Essentially, we're going to have to deal with it themselves.

They would all have to come up [00:32:00]with their own plans for figuring out how do they would deal with their own messy air. And because that didn't happen, the EPA was trying to come up with rules to set it up so that they could actually help curtail this. It's just not going anywhere. This is another blow against the EPA.

And I can't think of another blow against the government to actually stop things like air pollution or things that would make the environment better. What's interesting is that Amy Coney Barrett was among the dissenters for this one too. She joined the three liberal members to push against this.

I don't know if you have thoughts on this, Cherlynn, cause this one just hit, but it is astounding. Like at every turn, it's basically, we have a very conservative Supreme court who will always lean on conservative values and states rights. Rather than something that could help people.

Cherlynn: Yeah. I don't know.

I think we've not given the EPA a lot of authority to do what it needs to do. Basically.

Devindra: Yeah. Basically taking it away at every single turn or at least blocking whatever plans, there's the other thing too, about the EPA can't [00:33:00] set what was it? Their own environmental yeah, protections.

Like they can't set standards. That was a whole other thing. So the EP just can't really do much these days. That's a pain. We're going to see more about that story too, and maybe there's going to be pushback against that. Let's talk about the rabbit R1 because there was a hilarious chain of events.

where the group, the Rabbitude community that is reverse engineering the Rabbit R1 software revealed that a, they found a security issue within the company's code that leaves sensitive information accessible to everyone. Did you see this thing show in? Because it just seems wild. It seems like there were API keys that were like open and vulnerable.

People could use it to see pretty much any information, like any response that the R1 device has given to people, including personal information. It could also be used to brick R1 devices, alter the R1's responses replace the device's voice. This seems bad. Dare you surprised that this company was not [00:34:00] really thinking about security very hard about the Rabbit R1?

Cherlynn: I love talking about Rabbit because every time something comes up with this company, I just start to laugh. Look, I, again, I was very like, I bought into the whole hype thing. I was like, Oh, this is so cool. The API stuff that they're trying to build to make their large action model work seems really intriguing.

And then, yeah, clearly haven't thought it through. Don't seem to have tested everything. I think the most egregious thing is that the Rabbitude people say that the company, Rabbit, has known about the issue for the past month and quote, did nothing to fix it. And then after they posted, they said that Rabbit revoked 11labs API key, even though it up, even though it broke R1 devices for a bit.

But Rabbit did haul in Gadget in an email or a statement that was only made aware of, quote, an alleged data breach, end quote, on June 25th. So two days, I, it's a, he said, she said almost, and I don't know.

Devindra: I would not trust rabbit trust. Yeah. Why?

Cherlynn: Look, maybe here's the thing. It's you can say that you inform [00:35:00]someone at the company and say that the company has known about the issue for the past month, but maybe that one person that you informed didn't tell the whole company, like there's so many like little nuances that can be missing this, that like they do have some gray area that they're playing in right now.

And both people could be like saying. Like the truth and it could be both correct. But

Devindra: I like how you're trying to be nice and fair here, but this company has produced one of the one of the worst devices we've ever seen, a thing that is functionally useless and I can't trust literally anything coming out of their mouth.

So I saw on the the rabbit, I'm still in the rabbit discord channel. They were doing some updates yesterday. They were like, Oh, we made a page to update all the all the news we have around this security issue. We're going to get to the bottom of this. And I just, I cannot trust. This, the silly company.

It's just such a, it's just such a hilarious thing. So anyway, massive data breach. If you have a rabbit device I would say maybe turn that into a nice accessory on your shelf. No some solidist

Cherlynn: tea in our chat said that someone is running [00:36:00]full Android on rabbit R1. Hey, go crazy.

Devindra: It's just a little, it's a tiny powerless Android device. So yes, I'm sure you could run full Android on it. Stop using the rabbit R1. That may be the main takeaway here. We also saw another story that Uber is apparently locking out New York drivers out of its apps. It seems like sometimes in the middle of their shifts.

Because of a city pay rule and Lyft is apparently threatening to, to do the same. This is a local story, but it's also a broader story too, because this kind of like ties into things where they were both both Uber and Lyft had lockouts in 2019. Around like the flat minimum wage requirement for drivers.

They threatened to pull out of Minneapolis because the city was trying to force a driver pay raise up. So these companies have generally done things that have been ruthless against the people working for them. And then they blame. City regulations or state regulations for that. What, I don't know if you saw the story showing, or do you have any [00:37:00]thoughts?

Yeah.

Cherlynn: I heard about like the past situation where there's like a minimum wage sort of situation that's caused some of this and it's not easy for companies like this to navigate. I'm not taking their side. I think it's silly, but they need to find a way to make it work. Not just lock people out of the apps that make the money, it

Devindra: seems, this is the way because they don't want to pay people, right? That's the problem.

Cherlynn: But the problem is like, if Uber starts to pay as drivers for like, when it doesn't have, they're not picking up actual rights and like, where does that money come from?

It's capitalism all over again, right? Capitalism is the problem because they want to, they're going to try to pass that on to consumers. And then we're going to start complaining that we were too expensive and then we're going to stop using it as much. And then less, it's like a cycle. Yeah.

Devindra: It's, we should, we also know we should remember it's hard to trust Uber.

It's hard to trust Uber given how ruthless this company was at the beginning and how it just flaunted its own service against regulations, especially in New York. So here

Cherlynn: they've had leadership change since then and the new like CEO is like a more grounded person. It seems and [00:38:00] I think that they're

Devindra: trying to be better, trying to be

Cherlynn: better, but I still think that.

It's more of an industry sort of shift, right? Where the gig economy is the way things are right now. I think I've seen some reports saying that 50 percent of the workforce is going to be freelance in a certain number of years, and we're already seeing the effects of this, we need to be.

Rethinking the entire system of how we pay people for gig work and for unworking hours, non working hours, that sort of thing. It's starting to show. It's not

Devindra: really, it's not really non working hours is the thing. Like I'm going to read from our story. The mid shift lockouts stem from a six year old NYC payroll that requires ridesharing companies to pay drivers for idle time between fares.

So I don't consider that non working hours. That is time you were driving around the city and like looking for fair, waiting for a fair to hit before you accept one. So going on with the story here, capping it, capped how long drivers without passengers can be paid means Uber's Uber is paying them less, but it also means that drivers are taking home [00:39:00] much less money for the same amount of time on the clock.

And they can't predict, they can't predict when they'll lose access to the app. One driver told Bloomberg that they used to work 10 hours and make 300 to 350. Now they're working 10 hours and barely making 170.

Cherlynn:Unpredictability is like one of the worst things of this whole situation, which is also, by the way, very surprising to me.

Cause every time I'm like in an Uber, I see like the driver gets a next ride before I'm even out of the car. You know what I mean? So I'm like, Whoa, there's people sitting around like looking for rides. So that's where my brain's at. Yeah. Yeah.

Devindra: I've seen drivers like running Lyft and Uber simultaneously and will pause one and take one of the other just so they keep themselves going.

But it does seem it's because like it's based on the amount of work you're doing and you're not working a set amount of time. That's the big pain. I don't know if you ever, if you've ever had a car accident. If you've ever worked like a, I don't know, like a simple service level job drilling, where like you had to rely on shifts being given to you.

And sometimes you would not get a shift or sometimes like you have to ask, or sometimes a shift would be put on you. This would happen to me. Like when [00:40:00] I was working in sales, like it's just, you have very little control over how much money you can actually make and it's all just capricious.

It depends on like your manager and your company doing it. I don't even know how the Uber thing is working. Cause Uber is so famously algorithmic, right? Most drivers do not have a human manager to talk to you. They put complaints in the app and the app will tell them, go here, take this direction or something.

So I almost wonder too, like this is likely an algorithmic lockout. That's happening. Cause that's how Uber works. So anyway, next time you have a cheap Uber, just just think about like the costs here and make sure to tip your drivers, cause I had a really long conversation with my last driver to the airport and they were just lamenting.

These companies are just paying us less and less like every year, every week, it seems like their pay is going down, even though they're doing the same amount of trips. So think of that folks. One thing I don't mind doing, especially at airports is like the Uber lines are a mess. You think you're booking a car, but then you have to run to the thing and [00:41:00] find it and.

Every time I go to an airport, like the taxi lines are just like full, completely full and waiting to pick up people. So there are way other ways to get around, take public transportation. You don't have to rely on Uber and Lyft for everything. One other thing we want to talk about, and we're going to do something special for the live stream here, Toys R Us or the folks who own Toys R Us right now has released a brand ad, like a brand film.

That was created entirely using open AI Sora and folks, it's a nightmare. It is an absolute nightmare. So we're going to play it here live in the stream and comment on it. And those of us in the, those of you in the chat can join us. You could go take a look, just Google this thing too. You can find it online.

So I'm going to kick off this video. Let's just take a look and Trillian, feel free to shout out like your emotions, like how you're feeling about this as we're seeing it. So let me unmute this tab. Did

Cherlynn: you ever wonder how Toys R Us and Jeffrey the Giraffe came to be? [00:42:00] That's a lot of cars. Charles Lazarus had a vision that would go on to change toy stores forever.

Devindra: That kid's head is just not shaped right.

Cherlynn: It's so weird. My gosh, this kid looks so strange.

This reminds me of that game I play called Match Factory, by the way.

Devindra: Don't you miss Toys R Us? Whose voice is this? It doesn't even look like Jeffrey. They're iconic Jeffrey. Too

Cherlynn: much stuff.

Devindra: This is a different looking Jeffrey. Now they can't keep the design right.

Cherlynn: Is this the same kid toys arrest?

Devindra: No, the Giraf is named Jeffrey.

Cherlynn: But also the kid looks different. Your dreams come

Devindra: true too. Yes,

Cherlynn: and the continue toys. With the toys Arrest at every [00:43:00]Macy's. They mean nightmare. Yes.

Devindra: They mean nightmare.

So I guess this is an ad meant to remind people that Toys R Us is not fully dead yet. The company that owns the assets of Toys R Us is now working together with Macy's and I don't know. Have you been to Macy's lately, Cherlynn? There are little Toys R Us sections there now. It's just it's not the same.

No, it's not the same as going through I did you guys have anything like Toys R Us?

Cherlynn: Toys R Us.

Devindra: So going through. The giant store filled with toys. My childhood memories is buying video games from Toys R Us, which was a weird thing. Cause you'd have to pull, you'd have to pull a paper and go up to the counter and hope that it was actually in stock.

But as a kid who only got one or two games a year. It was always like a monumental event to go to play games for free for demos. Those experience you will not get at the Toys R Us at Macy's. And this is one of the first Sora AI produced ads I've seen. I think it looks like a nightmare. Like the kid just looks [00:44:00] inhuman is the thing.

I'm getting a lot of revulsion. There's

Cherlynn: a lot of very uncanny value going on. Like the movement of the kid's neck when Like they reacted and recoiled almost a little bit, not in a bad way, but it looked a little robotic, very strange. And then yeah, their face would change depending on the angle that they were being shot from, according to the ad.

And then the ad has these very clear labels that this is made by not just AI, but also some VFX team on Toys R Us's side. So there's some cleaning up because I will say that for a Sora made video, It's just clean, right? There's not too many glaring like errors, like too much teeth or too many fingers, that sort of thing.

Devindra: They had to like likely redo things quite a bit. They probably had to

Cherlynn: clean it up.

Devindra: They likely had to clean it up, but also what we have read and seen from people testing Sora is that if you, the prompts like break down after a while. So you can do 10 seconds, second clips or something, but the longer you go, the crazier and like wilder it gets, it just can't like keep a story straight.

I'm like making a video in Sora's just like a lot of like little tiny prompts and [00:45:00] hope that You cross your fingers and you hope it's not a complete nightmare. This is, I'm getting a lot of people are bringing this up in the chat, but I'm getting a lot of like polar express and like the mocap stuff that Zemeckis was doing, but even I've seen all of those movies.

I saw Beowulf, which I think was one of the first ones he did. And those don't feel as weird and inhuman to me as this does. But I'm also somebody that likes genuine animation too. And those had like painterly animation. Whereas this is inhuman CG child trying to be human. It's just not quite right.

There's your nightmare feel for the week folks. Enjoy. Let's move on to what we're working on. Hey, I just produced the surface pro co pilot plus review that is out there. Video is going to be up on YouTube. I'm also currently testing a Kia's EV9, the three row SUV that Sam and I have been like eyeing for a while.

So I'm testing it. Hoping to write up something about using it as a family car. What's up with you, Cherlynn?

Cherlynn: Yeah, doing a lot of summer slash fall event planning. We're also doing some testing of the Apple [00:46:00] betas just to see just to get ready to, break out any sort of stories that might be interesting.

And hopefully get ahead of that crushing fall hardware season. So that's me.

Devindra: Lots of plans. Do you want to mention anything around the site, Trillian, because you dropped them in.

Cherlynn: Last week we had a story from Carissa Bell go up and it's titled, How Small Claims Court Became Meta's Customer Service Hotline where people are apparently having to go to court as a last ditch attempt to recover their accounts.

It's pretty incredible and the story did really well for us. I think there's some really interesting stories in here that you might want to take a look at and if you haven't already. It's really good reporting from Carissa. I just thought, it's worth shouting out here on the podcast so that people can go read it.

And if you've got, been locked out of your Meta account for some silly reason, or you got hacked or something, and you just, you're not getting help directly from Meta. Apparently there are people who are having some [00:47:00] success in small claims scoring, which is really ridiculous if you come to think about it.

Devindra: It's I guess it makes sense because these companies do not have often have like easy ways to get access to customer service. That was a complaint with the Amazon for a while. I think they've gotten better about that, but yeah. Man, just be persistent. If you have a lot of issues with these with these companies, also small claims court is like one of those things that is just like useful for people.

But you have to stick with it and you have to spend money to actually make that thing happen to, bring up your issues.

Cherlynn: And time, lots of time.

Devindra: Let's move on to our pop culture picks for the week. What do you have, Cherlynn?

Cherlynn: Two main things. One, I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but I've been watching Wild Isles.

Wild Isles. On Prime Video it is nature documentary stuff narrated by David Edinburgh about the British Isles and each episode is of the five limited series episode, like five episode limited series. Each episode focuses on a different type of wildlife. So the first episode is just like general wildlife.

The second episode is like forest. The third is like [00:48:00] fields. The fourth is like freshwater. The fourth is like Ocean, stuff like that. It's really cool because the footage is incredible. The BBC commissioned this TV series and, the team spent three years just camouflaged in the midst of bird poop infested woods to just get you really neat thermal image footage.

Footage of like a million birds roosting in this little patch and how they're picked off by owls. Yeah.

Devindra: Forever. Yeah,

Cherlynn: they have, but this is like the thermal image technology is according to the show, like new. And a lot of these, the footage to me is really cool because. I haven't never seen a slug.

I forget the full name of this slug, but like a slug in the middle of the night is glowing and it made it with another slug. So I've seen a slug's dick, just so you know.

Devindra: Okay.

Cherlynn: Yeah. And then I also saw two snakes going at it. Did you know that male snakes? Their sexual organs have things [00:49:00] on them that help them stay attached to the female snake.

Yeah. Anyway,

Devindra: I can imagine for

Cherlynn: that and more risque footage of animals going at it, you can check out wild isles on prime video. The other thing I will shout out. How do you explain

Devindra: this to kids? No,

Cherlynn: kids can watch it too. It's like animal sex,

Devindra: not a euphemism.

Cherlynn: I don't know. Anyway. And then also over the weekend I saw the bike riders in theaters.

It's that film about the motorcycle gang, the fictional motorcycle gang called the Vandals but stars Austin Butler.

Devindra: They're real. It's based on a whole real. It's based

Cherlynn: on a real thing. The name is not the Vandals though.

Devindra: The name may be different. Yeah, it was based on a picture book of an actual picture

Cherlynn: book by Danny Lyons.

And it stars Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer is amazing. And I love her. And I don't know if that's how you pronounce your last name, but And then also my boo, Norman Reedus shows up and I was like, yes, Norman Reedus. And he's unrecognizable when he first shows up. I'm like, this is Norman Reedus, right?

This is no. And

Devindra: with the teeth and he looks, God, yeah, he looks like [00:50:00]such a

Cherlynn: meth head from, yeah, dirty hippie from California and the show, but oh, amazing. And then, yeah, I'm very inspired to go check out the story now, the written and the pictures. So if you're interested in that type of history motorcycle gang stuff, go check it out.

But if not,

Devindra: it's more like motorcycle gangs in the style of like good fellas or something. I saw the movie and I reviewed it and it's it's good. I really like it. And I like the director. I feel like it was a little more push a little harder. Tell us more about these characters. What is up with the Jodi Comer's character who literally has no.

No inner life. What does she do for a living? I agree. What are her hopes and dreams other than Austin Butler, which he is? I

Cherlynn: don't, Oh God, I don't know why I'm so annoyed by Austin Butler, but I did really like Tom Hardy in it. And I will say that like Psycho in our chat says that they didn't like the ending of Bike Riders pissed them off.

And that Jonathan Anderson says that the Bike Riders was good, but had some slow parts. Fully agree with both of these things. I just thought Tom Hardy plays. Obviously the same [00:51:00]character over and over again, but he was quite good in this one. And then also with

Devindra: a different accent, slightly different accent.

I love this. I

Cherlynn: thought this one was good. I also Jodi Comer is like accident in this one as well. But yeah, I am obviously not like super into the ending. I feel like you said, DaVinci, they could have pushed harder on the storytelling here, but

Devindra: gotta push harder. Yeah, the ending feels like week.

It's just I watched a movie like this. I'm like, I want to just rewatch good fellas. You want to give me good fellas light. Just let's just go watch good fellas. Everybody go. Fellas is a perfect. Movie. I want to shout out real quick. I talked about the acolyte being great several weeks ago, and now we're at the point where my screeners have ended.

And episode five of the acolyte is one of those things that is just I was looking at this thing and like, how the hell does this exist? Something happens three minutes into this episode. And I shouted out loud and my wife had to come downstairs to be like, what, what's happening? Are you okay?

Because one of the wildest things I've ever seen in Star Wars happened within three minutes of this episode. There are prolonged fight scenes the, I'm not going to reveal like what the thing is, but there is a big [00:52:00] bad that everybody has been like talking around and they make their full appearance in this episode.

And the fights are insane. Like it is full on. I talked about this thing basically being Crouching Tiger and they lean more into a lot of that stuff. Just the way you shoot. A Hong Kong style fight scene and I'm all for it. Nice. The reveals are great. Cherlynn, I think for your life and for your interests, you really should be watching the show and I think you will be very happy where things go in episode five.

Keyword is arms. The arms in this episode are very good. If you're hanging around social media, the spoilers are out. Listen, you've got mostly arms, but there are some good arms in this episode. The spoilers are out there in social media. So I'm trying to, I'm not going to reveal things here and you'll probably see clips for Lynn.

Of certain actors who are revealed to be bad guys. I think you will really enjoy watching the acolyte so highly recommend it I know you like hong kong. Yes. I do. Yeah movies. I will watch this after [00:53:00] i'm

Cherlynn: done with all the animal porn

Devindra: yeah after the animal porn. It's good. It's so good I don't and now I go back and like i'm looking at like how people online are responding to the acolyte It's just Sure.

Trashfire. It is the fans who you don't, who like will reject anything made by women or featuring people of color, just like those bad Star Wars fans. They're still around, but also a lot of weird nitpicking over the series. I'm not giving full judgment on the narrative until it's done and I see a complete story, but what it is so far is fascinating and cool and action packed.

And I just fricking love it. Acolytes still good. Catch up folks, 'cause you're gonna be spoiled this weekend. I am sure of it. I'm already seeing the gif and the memes out there on Twitter.

Cherlynn: That's it for the episode this week everyone. Thank you as always for listening. Our theme music is by Game Composer Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terence O'Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Elman. You can find dendra online

Devindra: at dra on Twitter Blue Sky [00:54:00] Threads all over the place.

Mastodon and I podcast about movies and tv@thefilmcast.com.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-podcast-motorolas-2024-razrs-make-a-compelling-case-for-foldables-113027343.html?src=rss

Surface Pro Copilot+ review: The best Surface tablet ever made, no thanks to AI

It's taken 12 years, but Microsoft has finally made an Arm-powered Surface tablet that I don't want to toss out of a window. The new Surface Pro, one of the company's first Copilot+ AI PCs, is astoundingly fast and power-efficient, thanks to Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite chip. It can run native Arm apps well — but even better, it can also emulate older apps without much fuss. Basically, Microsoft has finally managed to do what Apple did with its M-series chips four years ago: Deliver killer laptops with power-sipping mobile chips.

Ironically, though, the Surface Pro's much-hyped AI features are far less compelling than the one-two punch of speed and solid battery life. At launch, the Surface Pro and other Copilot+ PCs can use the Cocreator in Paint to generate AI images alongside text prompts and doodles. They can also translate over 40 languages into English using Windows 11's Live Captions feature. The controversial Recall capability, however, is nowhere to be seen (Windows Insiders will be able to test it in the coming weeks, according to Microsoft, but there's no official public release date yet.)

Announced ahead of its Build developer conference last month, Copilot+ is Microsoft’s latest initiative aimed at getting consumers and device makers excited about AI PCs. Similar to Intel’s Evo PCs, Copilot+ systems need to meet a minimum range of specifications: They have to include a neural processing unit (NPU) with at least 40 TOPs (trillions of operations per second) of AI performance, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. While both Intel and AMD have tried to hype up the idea of an “AI PC” over the past year, there wasn’t much to actually do with them aside from using Windows Studio Effects in video chats.

To power the initial Copilot+ systems, Microsoft is partnering with Qualcomm to optimize Windows 11 for the chip maker's new Snapdragon X Elite and Plus models. Those processors are based on mobile Arm technology, instead of the x86 and x64 chips produced by Intel and AMD. Arm designs have typically led to poor performance and software incompatibility on Windows (see our reviews of the Surface Pro 9 5G and Surface Pro X as a refresher), but Microsoft says it’s finally optimized its OS to work better with the mobile architecture, and its new Prism emulator can also run older software far better than earlier solutions.

Recall is a clear example of Microsoft's reach exceeding its grasp. It was meant to help you find anything you were doing on your computer through a natural conversation with the Copilot AI assistant. But to do so, Recall continuously takes screenshots of your system, which are then stored on your hard drive. It didn’t take researchers long to find some obvious security gaps: it wasn’t tough for other accounts to get to your Recall data, and it was also easy pickings for remote hackers. Microsoft responded to the criticism by saying it would make Recall an opt-in feature, making it only accessible with biometric Windows Hello authentication and encrypting your database by default.

The lesson for Microsoft (and every other AI-hungry company) is that you have to build trust, ideally by prioritizing privacy and security, before forcing overbearing AI features onto your customers. The backlash against Recall comes from the company being blissfully unaware of how little people trusted it.

Surface Pro Copilot+ power connector
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

We’ve had many issues with the Surface lineup over the last few years, but the hardware has always been a step above typical PC laptops and tablets. That holds true for the new Surface Pro: It’s surprisingly thin and light, measuring 9.3 millimeters thick and weighing 1.97 pounds. Its recycled aluminum case makes it feel like a truly premium device, and the Surface Pro remains one of the most unique-looking devices on the market. I noticed plenty of furtive glances and curious faces as I tested it out in public — people were clearly intrigued by the way it looked. (Or perhaps they were just surprised to see one for the first time.)

As much as I like the Surface aesthetic, though, it’s hard to deny that Apple is bringing more significant stylistic breakthroughs with the iPad Pro. The new 13-inch model weighs just 1.28 pounds and is a mere 5.1mm thin — almost half as thick as the Surface Pro. From the start, Apple has had the advantage of designing the iPad Pro around efficient mobile chips, whereas the Surface Pro previously had to squeeze in laptop-grade Intel CPUs. Microsoft may be able to slim down the Surface Pro in the future, thanks to the advent of Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips, but for now buyers will have to live with new chips in familiar cases.

Surface Pro Copilot+ USB-C ports
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

And when I say familiar, I’m mainly referring to the Surface Pro’s built-in kickstand. It lets you prop up the tablet however you’d like, from a laptop-like angle to a nearly easel-like position when it’s completely opened. While it still gets the job done (and is something the iPad Pro and most other tablets don’t have), it also limits how you can use the Surface Pro. While you could always use it on a table, I’ve grown weary of balancing the metallic kickstand on my legs when working on the couch, hanging out in my backyard, or watching videos in bed.

Microsoft hasn’t updated the Surface Pro’s ports either: You’ve still got the magnetic Surface Connector for power, as well as two USB-C USB 4 connections on the opposite side. Sure, that’s more than you’d get on an iPad Pro, but that device isn’t being marketed as a full-fledged computer. There’s also no wired headphone jack on the Surface Pro, either, even though its case clearly has room for one. I’ve come to understand why some PC makers would rather have thin devices instead of a 3.5mm connection, but that reasoning doesn’t apply at all in this case.

Under the hood, the Surface Pro comes equipped with either the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus chip or the 12-core Snapdragon X Elite. The base $1,000 model comes with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, but you can upgrade that to a 1TB SSD and up to 32GB of RAM. Microsoft also made the Surface Pro’s SSD easily accessible under the kickstand, so it’s a cinch to upgrade storage on your own down the line. (I’d still like to see an SD or microSD card slot, though.)

The Surface Slim Pen 2 ($130) remains the go-to stylus for Microsoft's tablets, and it's still a great device for doodling or jotting down notes. I don't think it's nearly as essential to the Surface experience as Microsoft used to claim, but for some users it can be helpful. It's well-balanced and easy to hold, and it charges easily as long as you get a keyboard with a Slim Pen slot.

Surface Pro Flex Keyboard
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

Since the Surface is just a tablet, Microsoft doesn’t offer any of its keyboards in the box. So if you’re considering the Surface Pro, be sure to set aside at least $140 for the Pro Keyboard. If you’re interested in the Surface Slim Pen ($130 on its own), you can also get it bundled with the Surface Pro keyboard for $280. The new Surface Flex keyboard – which can still work when it’s detached from the tablet – is a whopping $350, or $450 together with the Slim Pen 2. That’s a hard price to stomach, admittedly, but I’ll explain later why the Flex may be worth it.

Surface Pro Copilot+
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

The PixelSense screens on all of Microsoft’s Surface PCs have always impressed us – but in the end, they were just finely polished LCDs. The Surface Pro marks the first time Microsoft has offered OLED, which delivers better contrast, bolder colors and inky dark blacks. You’ll have to pay at least $1,500 to get the OLED screen, but in my testing it’s well worth the premium, since it makes everything on the Surface Pro look incredible.

The benefits of OLED were particularly noticeable when I watched The Acolyte, a Star Wars show that features plenty of bright colors alongside dark backgrounds. I’ll never stop being impressed by seeing truly pitch black scenes on OLED – on an LCD, they typically look more dark gray due to their backlights. The new display tech also impressed me while I was streaming Forza Horizon 5 or simply browsing websites, since it made text a bit easier to read and also made colors pop off the screen. The downside of living with OLED? It will quickly make every LCD in your life seem woefully outdated.

PCMark 10

Geekbench 6 CPU

3DMark Wildlife Extreme

Cinebench 2024

Microsoft Surface Pro (2024, Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite)

12,615

2,769/13,842

6,430

120/770

Microsoft Surface Pro 10 for Business (Intel Core Ultra 5 135U, Intel graphics)

5,772

2,085/8,827

2,546

90/524

Dell XPS 13 (Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, Intel Arc)

6,806

2,276/11,490

4,579

90/453

Apple MacBook Air (M3)

N/A

3,190/12,102

8,310

141/490

It’s not too often that I’m genuinely shocked while testing a device – chalk that up to writing about technology for 15 years and working in IT for eight years. But I’ll admit, I was blown away by the Surface Pro the instant I started using it. As soon as I opened it up, it was ready to set up Windows and get to work. I didn’t notice any of the usual slowdown or app incompatibilities I previously encountered on Arm-based Surfaces. Everything simply felt zippy. It was the same feeling I got when testing the M-series MacBooks: The Surface Pro is so fast and responsive I forgot it was using a mobile processor.

Then I started running benchmarks, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Our review unit with the Snapdragon X Elite scored 12,615 points in PCMark 10 — the highest we’ve ever seen on a laptop. In comparison, the next fastest PCMark 10 result we saw this year was the Framework Laptop 16, which reached 8,129 points with its beefy Ryzen 7840HS chip. The Surface Pro was also more than twice as fast as the Surface Pro 10 for Business (now it’s clear why Microsoft didn’t want to push that model on consumers).

Surface Pro Copilot+ kickstand view
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

Now benchmarks aren’t everything, but the Surface Pro’s PCMark 10 score mirrored everything I was seeing during my usual workflow, which involves running dozens of tabs across Chrome and Edge, sending notes in Slack, editing images in Photoshop Elements 2022 and writing in Evernote. Most of the apps I used, including Slack, Spotify and Chrome, ran natively on the Surface Pro’s Arm chip, but I didn’t notice any hiccups on emulated apps like Evernote and Photoshop Elements.

Surface Pro Copilot+ AI features
The error message that appears when launching Fortnite on the Surface Pro.
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

Ideally, most users shouldn’t have to worry about the type of app they’re running – it should all just work, much like Apple Silicon Macs. Unfortunately, there are still some Arm issues on Windows. Both Fortnite (above) and League of Legends refuse to launch because they rely on kernel-level anti-cheat solutions, and Samsung has also warned its Copilot+ customers about issues with some Adobe Creative apps. It’s up to developers to update their apps for Arm hardware, so these issues aren’t entirely a knock against Microsoft. But if you’re interested in any Copilot+ system, make sure all of your commonly used apps are supported. (Or you could also wait for future Intel and AMD Copilot+ PCs, which won’t run on Arm.)

While nobody will confuse the Surface Pro with a gaming PC, I was able to play the indie adventure title 1000xRESIST smoothly with a paired Xbox controller. For more demanding titles, though, you’re better off streaming. The Surface Pro was able to launch Forza Horizon 5 on Game Pass streaming in 15 seconds, and it looked almost indistinguishable from having the game run locally. (The only thing you lose with Xbox streaming is HDR support, which offers a wider range of colors and brightness levels.)

Surface Pro Copilot+ with Surface Flex Keyboard
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

I won’t make any excuses for the Surface Pro Flex keyboard’s exorbitant $350 price. It’s $50 more than the latest iPad Pro Magic Keyboard, and its cloth-like covering doesn’t feel nearly as luxurious as Apple’s smooth metal case. But, I’ve grown to love yanking off the Flex Keyboard and typing my heart away. Instead of precariously balancing the Surface Pro on my lap, like I have for the past 12 years, I can just prop the screen up on a table and keep the Flex keyboard in my lap.

I wrote most of this review while reclining on my deck, with only the weight of the keyboard’s 0.75 pound frame on my lap. Honestly, I’m not looking forward to going back to a traditional laptop. The Flex keyboard also let me work in spaces where the Surface’s kickstand got in the way, like a cramped cafe table. I could easily see it being useful on planes too, where you could easily keep the Flex keyboard on your lap while the Surface sits on your tray table. (It would also be ideal for newer planes that don’t have any built-in screens and expect you to hang your own tablet on the back of the seat in front.)

Surface Flex Keyboard
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

While I’d still love to see Microsoft rework the Surface Pro’s kickstand, I’ll admit the Flex keyboard has opened up more ways for me to use the tablet. Instead of craning down at the Surface Pro’s screen on my kitchen counter, I can place it atop a few boxes and keep the keyboard lower for more ergonomic typing. Thanks to the Flex keyboard’s wireless versatility, I can be productive almost anywhere with the Surface Pro. The keyboard is also great for lengthy writing sessions, with a satisfying amount of key travel and a large haptic trackpad.

Surface Pro Copilot+ AI features
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

As I mentioned at the start of this review, none of the Surface Pro's AI capabilities are compelling on their own. It was fun doodling with Paint's Cocreator, but I found the resulting AI images (a combination of your drawings, text input and generative AI engines) to be far less compelling than asking Copilot to generate DALL-E 3 pictures. Copilot+ PCs can also make AI images from the Photos app, which also offers a slightly better interface for controlling the AI's creativity level and stylistic keywords.

It's still unclear what most people would do with these images, outside of sending them to friends or plugging them into boring presentations. Apple's upcoming Genmoji feature, which lets you create custom emojis with AI, seems far more useful in comparison.

Similarly, Microsoft's Live Captions feature seems like something people would actually want to use. Any Windows 11 PC running the 22H2 update (released in late 2022) can tap into its basic ability to subtitle video, but Copilot+ PCs can also automatically translate 44 languages into English. I tested it across a few anime shows and Spanish films, and the resulting captions were understandable but not as precise as properly translated subtitles. I could see these translations being useful in a pinch though, and they also work across video chats, so it may be helpful while working across language barriers.

Copilot+ PCs can also tap into a few new Windows Studio Effects, including a Portrait Light for brightening up your face and creative filters for illustrated, animated and watercolor effects. I found the latter filters to be fairly useless and a bit ugly, but the Portrait Light helped during video calls in my dark basement office. The existing Studio Effects, like automatic framing, eye contact adjustment and background blur options, will continue to work on older Windows 11 AI PCs as well as Copilot+ systems.

Surface Pro Copilot+
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

The Surface Pro lasted 12 hours and 15 minutes in the PCMark 10 Applications battery benchmark, which is a bit less than we've seen on comparable systems. The Surface Pro 10 for Business eked out a bit longer, 12 hours and 20 minutes, on the Modern Office benchmark, while the Dell XPS 13 hit 13 hours and 15 minutes. It's worth noting that PCMark 10 was being emulated on the Surface Pro, though its script launches native applications like the Office suite.

During my typical usage, I noticed that the battery life held strong for most of my workday. After eight hours of on-and-off work, it typically had around 40 percent of its charge left. Clearly, there's still room for optimization with the new Snapdragon processors, and Surface Pro owners will likely see better battery life as more apps gain native Arm support.

Unlike the recent MacBook Air models, the Surface Pro still has fans. And based on my testing, you'll hear them once you start downloading large files or running anything that taps into the GPU. The whirring noise isn't loud, exactly, but it's a noticeable in a quiet room. The Surface Pro also gets fairly warm during light gaming and software downloads — it's not enough to burn you, but it's not something you'd want on your lap during a hot day.

Surface Pro Copilot+
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

I’ll give Microsoft some credit for finally giving its base Surface Pro model 16GB of RAM. $1,000 is a surprisingly affordable entry point for the Surface Pro lineup, just remember you’ll have to spend at least $140 more for the companion keyboard. If you’re considering it as your primary computer, it’s worth spending $200 more for 512GB of storage. You could also jump straight to the $1,500 Surface Pro with the Snapdragon X Elite chip, OLED screen, 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD.

Our review unit, which included the OLED screen and Flex keyboard, would cost $1,950 altogether. That’s more than I’d want to spend for an ultraportable, so if you’re pinching pennies, the new Surface Laptop is a far better deal. It also starts at $999, but that includes a keyboard and a slightly larger screen than the Surface Pro. Sure, it won’t function as a tablet, but you could even buy an iPad or Android slate and still end up spending far less than $1,950.

At the moment, there aren’t any other Copilot+ PC-branded hybrid tablets on the market, but if you’re just looking for a new laptop, the ASUS Vivobook S 15, Dell XPS 13 (with Snapdragon) and HP Omnibook X 15 all seem to be solid options. We haven’t tested those Copilot+ systems yet, but we’re planning to get our hands on many of them soon.

Surface Pro Copilot+ kickstand view
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

The Surface Pro is fast, stylish and, together with the Flex keyboard, lets me work comfortably almost anywhere. While I'd love to see a different kickstand design eventually, and I think the keyboards should definitely be cheaper, Microsoft has done the impossible with the Surface Pro Copilot+ PC: It's created an Arm-based Surface I don't hate. I dare say, I love it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/surface-pro-copilot-review-the-best-surface-tablet-ever-made-no-thanks-to-ai-160039966.html?src=rss

Engadget Podcast: Surface Pro and Laptop Copilot+ Q&A

It's been a quiet week of news, but we've been feverishly testing Microsoft's new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Copilot+ AI PCs. In this episode, Devindra and Sam will answer your questions about Microsoft’s new hardware, and we'll deliver some of our first impressions. It turns out Microsoft may have finally gotten Windows on Arm support right! And some of the Copilot+ AI features are actually useful, surprisingly enough. But we'll have to wait a few months to test out the controversial Recall feature, which was pulled from the Copilot+ launch.


Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

  • Dev and Sam’s first thoughts and an AMA on the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Copilot+ AI PCs – 1:05

  • News from Nintendo direct: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Mario, and finally, Metroid Prime 4 – 25:46

  • Former OpenAI chief scientist launches Safe Superintelligence, inc – 35:02

  • Wired report: AI search engine Perplexity is ignoring robots.txt guidelines – 37:36

  • Listener question: What do you do with 8 gig fiber home internet? – 41:08

  • Working on – 46:51

  • Pop culture picks – 48:09

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Sam Rutherford
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

Devindra: [00:00:00] What's up, Internet, and welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar. Joining me today is Senior Writer from Engadget, Sam Rutherford. Hey, Sam. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing okay because we finally have some Copilot Plus PCs. Sam has the Surface Laptop, I have the Surface Pro.

And we've just started testing these things. They came in late and we're just like trying to get Arubia as quickly as we can for both of us, but we've got some impressions here. We're going to be taking some questions from our live stream. So that's the first step, a special episode for us.

Cause it's a pretty light news week, but yeah, if you join us Thursday mornings, around 10 30 AM Eastern on our YouTube channel. You too can participate and ask us questions. See us show off some gadgets. We'll show off some stuff live from the Surface Pro. So if you're listening to this in audio form, go back and watch the video, cause you can actually see us test out some features and show off the hardware too.

As always folks, if you're enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to us in iTunes or your podcatcher of choice, leave us a review in iTunes. That's always super helpful and drop us [00:01:00]an email at podcast at engadget. com. Question for you, Sam, what was your first impression upon tearing open the Surface Laptop?

Sam: Right away I think it's good they didn't mess with the design. The design was never the issue for the Surfaces, they're, very beautifully crafted. And, opening up and this is going to sound like silly, but it's it functioned exactly like a windows 11 laptop is supposed to.

It just works. Yeah. Yeah. It just worked. And that was like, Hey, this is actually an improvement from, previous attempts at windows on arm right away. It seems like they, Microsoft has nailed all the important aspects. Battery life so far seems very good. Performance is very smooth.

I'm still wanting to test, how far you can push it, but what Qualcomm has been saying about the Snapdragon X elite chip. It seems a lot more believable. I have, a lot more faith in this new chip than previous, the 8cx versions of that. And yeah, it seems like maybe Microsoft and Qualcomm had really put it all together for, this new attempt at really [00:02:00] pushing Windows on ARM.

Devindra: I feel the same way, right? Like I just got done basically doing a quick review of the Surface Pro 10 for business, which is Was just a straight up chip upgrade over the Surface Pro 9 stuff. And I was reminded, I like the way the Surface Pro feels, but there's so many things that annoy me about it.

Like the kickstand and everything that's all still here on the new Surface Pro, but there are a few things that make this whole experience a lot better. First of all, you feel that this chipset, I have the Snapdragon X Elite in mind, is just fast. It feels like when I first started testing the M series MacBooks, like the MacBook Air and the first MacBook Pros that had it.

Everything is fast. Everything is zippy. It boots up quickly. It certainly wakes up from sleep almost instantly. Which is nice. Battery life looks really good. And I think mostly coming I feel so burned, Sam, having reviewed the Surface Pro 9 with 5G with that weird, like the 8CX chip. Or even the

Sam: Surface Pro X before that was supposed to be like a really big coming out.

And that thing did not deliver.

Devindra: The Surface Pro X, you should go back, check out Sherilyn's review of that thing. But that was like [00:03:00] Microsoft's big design push. Hey, we have thinner bezels. We have a thinner machine running on this ARM chip. But it was a disaster. Because for years, Microsoft has done a bad job of making Windows actually work well on ARM and the chips themselves weren't that fast to I did you ever play with the Surface RT, Sam?

The first Surface they ever launched? Yeah. That I remember after the launch event, like this seemed like a really cool idea, kickstand hybrid tablet laptop PC, but the Surface RT was a disaster because it ran a really limited version of Windows RT. And the app ecosystem

Sam: wasn't there.

There was no

Devindra: app ecosystem, right? It couldn't run any older apps. There was no emulation. There wasn't even emulation. I think when the surface pro X launched and then they eventually added that, but it wasn't very good. Like even with the the last pro nine, five G everything felt slow. Even running Chrome felt crummy.

Like you could feel the

Sam: system crawl. If you were doing something, it wasn't native to arm.

Devindra: It just felt like I'm using a bad, slow computer. And worst of all, for that computer, you also have to pay like an extra 300, 400 bucks to get it over the typical surface pro. So [00:04:00] good news, this surface pro works really well.

The Hardaware is still good. Like I'm still amazed what they can fit into the surface, the size of a surface case, because it's a full PC, it's, it feels more impressive to me than even what Apple can do with an iPad or something, because those are, I guess now it's the same because this is a mobile chip too.

But. Just Hardaware wise, it still feels more impressive to me. And the thing, I think what I noticed, Sam is like none of the AI features feel like the actual things I'm loving about this machine. It's more that it's fast. It's running all the apps I'm used to. I don't really have to deal with much incompatibility.

There is some though, like you noticed League does launch at all.

Sam: Yeah. One of the, I play, League of Legends with my wife pretty frequently. So that's one of the first things I tried installing. And it's really frustrating because you can go through, you can install League just fine.

It installs normally, even though it's definitely not an ARM native game. And then when you try to actually play, you [00:05:00] can't. And it's not because League itself doesn't run. It's because Riot's anti cheat system, Vanguard, needs kernel level support. So they asked you, hey, go restart your system so it can install the Riot anti cheat.

And. You restart it and then you can go play and it tells you to restart the thing because the anti cheat doesn't work. They

Devindra: can't touch this kernel

Sam: basically. And it's so frustrating because this is more of a like a sad situation for riot than Microsoft, because they, and they implemented the system within the last two or three months.

And so it's like they implemented the system. It doesn't support the new chip architecture. And so you have a system that has enough power to run it. It should run great, and even in emulation, it should be just fine, but because of Riot's anti cheat system, it doesn't work, and this is actually something that, a lot of games with anti cheat protocols are gonna suffer from more of your competitive games I think you mentioned Fortnite doesn't quite work right either?

Fortnite

Devindra: doesn't work at all Sam, there was a story yesterday [00:06:00]from the Wall Street Journal that Samsung put a warning up on its website about Copilot Plus PCs, that Fortnite won't even launch. But this was a known thing. Fortnite does not support ARM processors on Windows because you have to run it through the Epic launcher and it's also using anti cheat and it doesn't even try to launch.

It's just Hey, we don't support Windows on ARM. Sorry. So that's a big deal. Certainly for people who play those games, that stuff can be updated. Like those developers maybe Epic will. Play nice with this stuff eventually, but there were also reports that some Adobe apps also don't launch.

So there is still some of that, but I think at least from my typical workflow I was launching like most of the apps I use really it's only Evernote is the one that's emulated from X 86, everything else, like Spotify, Slack, and all those. Yep.

Sam: The big apps, even, Photoshop, Lightroom, those are supported.

All of your major stuff just seems to play pretty nicely, and even when it's not native, it still seems to run pretty fast.

Devindra: It feels pretty good. And I did try out some of the AI features as well. The big one, of course, recall [00:07:00] was recalled by Microsoft because of glaring security holes that everybody questioned them about.

And that's the reason why

Sam: we're playing catch up on the reviews is that they, they made some changes to recall. It's now only gonna be available if you're a windows insider I believe is what, at least initially. And so that's

Devindra: from now too. It's not even soon. Yeah.

Yeah. We have not had a chance to test recall. I did see the hands on stuff with it and it looked fine, but that security stuff. It's like what we were talking about with Apple's intelligence. All those announcements like Apple at least thought a little harder about privacy and actual concerns people would have that security professionals would have.

And Microsoft just like totally, they were just like empty brain over here, like with a lot of these potential issues. So I did try out the co create feature, which I'll demo on the live stream in a bit. Which where you can do a little doodle and then type some text and it'll make some images for you.

It's fine. Like it's the images aren't that great. Honestly, it's not as GPT. And I'm still left with the questions. What the hell do I do with this thing? It's not like [00:08:00] the Genmoji stuff that Apple is showing off where you're like, Oh, you can make a fun thing based on a friend's face and have a yeast for it.

It's just like a crummy AI picture. Okay, fine.

Sam: To me, it feels like more of a bonus. And there's all, there's some weird situations where there's a new feature called image creator. And it's available in paint, but if I go and look at it in paint, I'm looking at it right now. It doesn't work. It doesn't work for me.

It doesn't work. And then there's also like a counter, like you can only use so many prompts and I'm seeing that go down, but I'm pressing it and the results are weird. But the, it, the funny thing is that if you go into the photos app, there's also a tab for image creator and it works way better in the photos app than it doesn't paint, which is and it doesn't seem to be like there's a token limit for the version in photos.

And so it's all there's some weird just like incongruities where you have the same thing. It's got the same name, but they work differently depending on which app you're using it in. And that's a little weird.

Devindra: That's a clear, like a sign that this is all coming in hot. And then Microsoft was really working on this stuff very recently.

[00:09:00] And to Microsoft's credit, like there

Sam: is a big, like yellow preview tag on the button. Sure. So yes, it's very clear that this is still like a, work in progress.

Devindra: It's just, it's a weird thing to see on like shipping Hardaware. Like it's like the Gmail beta label, which was, and Google did that for a lot of its products.

Hey there may be issues, but we were testing out some new stuff here in Windows. It feels like a bit of a cop out, I guess if it worked better, I'd have less of a problem with it. The one I really liked, I don't know if you've tried live captions yet, Sam, but that is a really cool feature where once you enable it, your computer will just say, basically caption any video that's playing and in many cases translate.

Language to English. The translation stuff is okay. It's it reads like bad subtitles to me. Cause I was playing some anime videos and like comparing subtitles to the like incoming translation and it was really messy at times. It's not like a miracle product, but it is cool. It's really for people with hearing impairments.

I do think that'll be a really, and you can

Sam: often get just enough from those transcriptions or other translations [00:10:00]that you can at least understand what's going on. It's not going to be super elegant, you're getting the basics down, mostly correct.

Devindra: Yeah. So I'm working on my review of this thing.

I've tried Oh, I did one benchmark that I was able to run. I don't know if you saw the score, Sam. But can you pop over to our benchmark database? Just look at the score I put down for the, for PCMark10 on this thing. And tell me what you think about that.

Sam: If that's the case, that's double pretty much anything else that we've tested recently.

Or maybe not between 50 percent and double double the score.

Devindra: The score is 12, 615 points in PCMark10. The fastest PC I've seen this year, which was the framework Laptop 16, which ran a really hot rise chip was 8,129. So this Surface Pro got a higher PC Mark 10 score than any laptop we've seen this year and by a significant margin by over 50%.

That's wild. I did double check like Qualcomm's what they were expecting from when they initially announced the Snap drug and [00:11:00] next leap. Yeah. And that's that's pretty on target for what they were in. That's insane to have that come out of the super thin laptop tablet hybrid.

I'd love to see you glad that like

Sam: those numbers are living up to the claims because that was the big thing is like Qualcomm was talking a huge game about, Hey, we have these new Orion architecture, we bought a company a couple years ago to completely read change how we build laptop chips for arm.

And so it's really good to see, Hey, Qualcomm did it.

Devindra: They totally did. What was the name of the company that they bought? Was it it wasn't Nuvia. I think Nuvia. Nuvia sounds right. Yeah. I'm trying to look it up now, but yeah, that was a big deal for them because it felt like they were also really limited by what ARM was giving them.

And Nuvia, I believe also comes from some like Apple Silicon former Apple Silicon engineers. So like some of that ingenuity that went into the A series chips and the early M series chips is also. happening over here and you can feel it. It's one of those things where it's as [00:12:00] soon as you like, start this thing up and start poking around, like it just feels fast.

So this isn't just synthetic benchmarks, like being blown up. So I'm excited by this. Yeah. I

Sam: can't confirm it was Nuvia and that acquisition was finalized back in 2021. Hasn't been that long from, That acquisition to okay coming out with a retail product.

Devindra: So early impressions, very good, very fast, good benches.

Also I'll mention this quickly. I got the surface flex keyboard with this and that's the one where you can actually remove it from the surface pro and still like type wirelessly. And that does alleviate. Some of my problems with working with the surface pro in general, like it's I'm so tired of having the kickstand on my lap because I have dents on my legs from testing so many services and it's uncomfortable.

It doesn't. It's not a great typing experience, but putting the surface on a table and having the keyboard in my lap. I was doing that yesterday. It just felt like it felt comfortable. Life changing, and something you can do with tablets already. That's not exactly a new thing, but to have that capability, [00:13:00] like baked into the surface, that's nice.

I wish this keyboard were cheaper. I believe it's 350. So like it is the price of the base iPad. And that doesn't include the

Sam: pen. If you want the pen, you're looking at 450 ish.

Devindra: As always, this stuff is way too expensive for Microsoft and they should just put it together. Especially now, because there is no tablet mode in Windows 11.

I was trying to hook around to find it and they basically just gave up on that. It is really weird to sell a Surface as a tablet, not include a keyboard, and then be like it's a full PC, right? It's a PC tablet. Except even you don't support tablet software very much or very well anymore.

But anyway, my first impressions are good. Anything else you want to add about the Surface laptop, Sam?

Sam: No, I'm just, really excited to see how Microsoft can take it from there and how, the big issue is that like a lot of companies, weren't supporting ARM the way that it really needed to be, at least from a consumer side.

So I'm really interested to see how that Hey, we have the Hardaware. We have great devices. Now, how are developers going to respond to supporting arm on windows? Because [00:14:00]Microsoft doesn't really have that like iron clad thing that Apple does was like, Hey, we are changing architectures, you do this, or we're not going to support you.

And In some ways that makes, Apple had a much cleaner transition because they have that iron hand on the ecosystem. Whereas, Microsoft is a little bit, less pushy when it comes to, these big transitions.

Devindra: Yeah. We've talked about this before. Like Apple, Apple is such a, it's a tight ship that runs the software.

The Hardaware has a full chain and also now the processor is they go wherever they want to go and everybody has to follow them. Whereas Microsoft is okay, guys, are we gonna, what's, what do you got today? Arm? You got these chips and then what can we do to get you

Sam: on board?

Devindra: Yeah. And then okay, who's going to build machines for Oh, only surface, only our surface team are making chips or laptops with these systems.

Okay. Windows software side. Are you ready to support this? They shrug their shoulders. So like it is so many. So many things have to align for this to work really well on the PC side. And I think four years after Apple Silicon debuted, it seems like we're [00:15:00]there. I've also seen the reviews of the the Asus Copilot Plus PC that seemed to be pretty impressive.

I'm hoping to get like, yeah, one of us will get our hands on that soon. The Dell the XPS 13, I want to see like how this kind of transforms how that thing works. So good news so far, all signs point to this being a very good thing. I do feel bad for people who bought the first batch of AI PCs from Intel and from from AMD too.

I've talked to Microsoft people. They said some of these features may eventually trickle down to those systems, which has much slower MPUs, but we don't know yet. Like stuff is in flux. You will, everybody gets Windows Studio effects, which is the cool background features. You may get some acceleration on older AI PCs in Adobe apps or whatever.

So there is some benefit, but. If you held off on buying a PC, now is the time to jump in because the Copile Plus stuff seems very good. Maybe not for a high end production machine yet, but for a really great ultra portable that you can take anywhere, certainly something like the Surface Pro or Surface Laptop, it's a good [00:16:00] sign.

Let's take some questions from the audience. Hello, folks. Podcast producer Ben is here, and I'm sure you've been looking at questions, and what are people thinking about these devices?

Ben: Yeah, so hey, everybody. There are a few questions. One of the big ones from Simon B. is, how do you guys feel about the reward system with the Edge browser?

Devindra: Oh, I saw that question. I don't, I'm not into any of that stuff. I don't know. I've seen people get like some trinkets or something like Xbox has had some rewards things for a while. The micro being and the Microsoft accounts have had some reward things. It just feels like they are just bribing you to use these services.

I don't care about the rewards. Have you touched them at all, Sam?

Sam: Yeah, it's and Google does this too. There's like an Android rewards thing that I, would. And it's it's good if you have it's more of a discipline thing where it's do you have 30 seconds out of your day to go do these like very simple prompts?

And then you can get, some, imaginary points. And then maybe in a year or two, you have enough points is like buy an app or something.

Devindra: You get some free labor from kids basically in teenagers. Yeah.

Sam: If you have the drive to [00:17:00] do that every day, that's cool. It's just something that like, I don't think about it unless I like, open up bing and I get the little prompt and I'll go do it.

It takes 10 seconds. Usually but

Ben: it feels a bit like When I was in elementary school and saving the like little cut out things from the back of my chip bag It's the internet version of that chester cheeto hat or something

Devindra: I remember I would try to I cut out a serial barcode to get like a batman frisbee after the first batman You I forgot my frisbee.

I'm still sad about it to this day.

Sam: Now, one thing I do think is interesting is that both of the new Microsoft machines have fans, as far as I know, which kind of puts it in a different category in terms of a pure MacBook Air rival, which in some ways, like I kind of respect that because If you were just like doing basic stuff, MacBook air is great, we've heard reports about, Hey, you go outside and the sun's beating down on the laptop and the laptop has no way to cool itself and so it'll shut down because it's [00:18:00] overheating.

So I'm like, I don't mind the fan. Yeah. Yeah. In theory, like the idea of a completely fanless machine is great because it's silent and less moving parts to worry about, but I think it's like a general work machine. I think having that on there. It is good. So I'm, that's one thing I like to work outside.

Devindra: Yeah. Like I do use, I've used the MacBook airs all over, but certainly I think it was like last year when I went to WWDC and you're just, you're outside and the sun is on you and it just starts to get a little freaky having a little fan in there that can kick in is nice. I will tell you all I was installing like three games at once.

So like sucking down maybe. 500 gigabytes or no, three to 400 gigabytes of like data all at once. And yeah, the surface got toasty. Like the fan kicked in. It wasn't super loud, but it was like, I am working here. I'm working to get all this stuff in quickly. And it did load pretty quickly. But

Ben: remind me again, was this in the sun or a bit

Devindra: outside and a bit inside, but basically once I got inside and was like next to my router, like it was just like sucking in data.

The SSD was doing a lot of work, the wireless chipset was doing a lot of work, and I could [00:19:00] hear the fan. It wasn't, it was noticeable, but it wasn't like noisy or loud or anything. It was just like a pleasant hum. Any other questions we want to tackle?

Ben: So DudeNameCharlie said rewards for your data in relation to reward system for Edge browser Dom Larry said here in Australia, the flex keyboard and pen is 7.

99 AUD. Don't do it! Australia,

Sam: I'm

Ben: so sorry.

Sam: Australia gets screwed so badly on pricing. Australia

Ben: gets extremely screwed because everything needs to get there on a boat.

Devindra: That's unfortunately, plus you have giant bugs and crazy wild animals, so I'm sorry Australia. And roving bands of marauders I've seen.

At least from what the Mad Max movie said.

Ben: Then we have like Chirag Arora who says, can we run Ableton? What do you think? Can we do a quick Google to see? I'm not a music guy. So that is not something I thought of. Released a like Ableton on arm situation. Because I imagine that.

They've already done this for the M1 chips. And [00:20:00] so would it be that you got to rebuild for windows?

Devindra: Like it's a whole thing. Yeah, it is a whole thing.

Sam: While you're looking that up, Mark was asking he was having issues on could install certain game pass games. There is no game pass.

Devindra: Computers because if you launch the Xbox app, it just shows you cloud streaming. That's weird.

Sam: And for and so you've got to look at two things. It's like the game streaming works just fine. And then if you download games from like the window store it looks like Microsoft, from what I can tell is doing a better job of labeling which games are and are not supported.

Unfortunately a lot of them are not, you will go in and you will see some games that are, so that's one thing I want to dive into more and see what's the percentage of like games that like, hey, work fine or just be, just don't run at all.

Devindra: I was thinking they were just blocking entirely.

Cause when I launched the Xbox app, that's normally where I go to look at game pass releases, there's no game pass section at all on these systems. It's just cloud streaming. But if you go through the store, yeah, you should technically the general

Sam: Microsoft store. It's a, you get a little bit different [00:21:00]information.

Devindra: I did. So I installed steam and I got a couple of games going. I have not been able to play anything yet, but I did run 3d mark a couple of times and actually. I have the the stats on that too. And 3dMark, look, it's fine. It's better than the Intel XE stuff has been running 3dMark Wildlife Extreme.

I got a score of 6, 430, which was on par with the HP Spectre X360 16, a 16 inch computer, so it was faster than that one. Faster than a lot of the Intel Arc graphics we've seen this year. Certainly not as fast as Nvidia stuff. Impressive for a system of this size and this slim.

Ben: Yeah, Jonathan Anderson says, let me know when this silly game pass thing comes to Nintendo until then Zelda. We'll get to that, actually. And Simon B has another question, which is there a cloud streaming that's any good from Microsoft? Yeah,

Devindra: really? The Xbox cloud streaming, which I think some of the best cloud streaming, to be honest.

Sam: And so this almost makes you wonder is this part of Microsoft strategy? Because, Hey, [00:22:00] they've been pushing, cloud streaming for a long time. And, and the cloud streaming works just fine. And so maybe this is their solution to Hey, you want a game. If you pay us a little bit extra money, you can, you can play all your games in the cloud.

Devindra: I think, that's part of, that's been part of the pitch for a while, but I don't think cause there have been reports that the cloud network has also been like slow to launch and stuff for people. So maybe they're, they don't want it to get too popular, but yeah, like the ability to just sit down and play a game on any laptop, as long as you can log into a web browser is fantastic and is a good thing with a system like this where you don't want all that Hardaware.

Maybe inside your laptop. But you have good internet and you want to play some games. I could see that being a thing.

Ben: Yeah. Lord Buckethead asks, does Doom run? If you can stream it, then yes, of course Doom runs.

Devindra: Anything can run. If you stream it, anything is possible.

Ben: That's how this

Devindra: works.

Ben: You'll be able to play the new Doom.

What is the Middle Ages? Primeval Doom? The Dark Ages. What a

Devindra: good title. Quick thing on this surface. This is the first surface with an [00:23:00] OLED screen and the screen looks fantastic and the speakers are very good too. So I've been using this as I, I just want to do a little writing. I'm going to go to bed, like just lay down, bed, rest my back a little, but I can still like watch stuff.

The speakers are surprisingly good. So yeah, I think overall I'm feeling like good. The Hardaware

Sam: generally has been, top notch from what I can tell.

Devindra: I think that's it that we have for questions today, but you know what folks, I always want to answer this stuff. So you can drop us an email at podcast on gadget.

com. I'm in the middle of my review. Sam's still working on his, but we definitely want to answer your questions. Send us some and we can answer them in the next episode.

All right, let's move on from all this Surface stuff. There was a Nintendo Direct this week. Which I think came as a surprise. We didn't get much of a heads up that was happening. But a few things we want to call out. New Zelda. With starring Zelda, that's good. The Legend of Zelda Echoes of [00:24:00] Wisdom.

How do you feel about this Sam? Because I've been waiting for this game for a long time.

Sam: I'm incredibly excited. So it has the, it's similar art style that they used for the Link's Awakening remake. Which I absolutely adored. I think it looks incredible. Yeah. And then obviously starring Zelda where you're, she's the main protagonist.

Link gets disappeared right in the beginning. Yeah. And that's fine. It's I think everybody has been really interested in to see like the series of the franchise is legends of Zelda and it's been how many years until she gets to like really take center stage. Every non

Devindra: gamer, every parent has been like, Oh you're Zelda, right?

That little guy running around, that's Zelda, the legend of Zelda.

Sam: And then on top of that, like the idea, like she does, she doesn't use a sword. She has this new echoes ability where she can basically capture like the essence of like inanimate objects chairs beds, whatever, but also enemies really.

brings a really interesting twist on the traditional like Zelda game style. I do wish they gave her just like a regular weapon. I don't think it has to be a sword, but I want to just see [00:25:00]Zelda run around and bonk people on the head with a giant hammer or something.

Devindra: Maybe we'll get something like that.

It does have a weird sense.

Sam: We've only seen a little bit from like the teasers and the preview. So hopefully she has her wand that makes echoes. And then, she gets a little bit of melee melee action in there too.

Devindra: I'm I think a bad interpretation of this is it's almost like they're saying, Oh, girls can't use swords, right?

Of course a girl can use a sword. And that reminds me of comments from the shadow of Colossus creator who I love his games, but he did say something weird at some point. It was like, Oh yeah, girls can't go on adventures like that. That's why his games are typically about young boys trying to save people.

I don't. Yeah, that's bad faith. I'd say here. It's what's interesting is that it is a really interesting mechanic and we've also seen Zelda in some games be kick ass. She's been a kick ass warrior in some games. And I'm not sure if the

Sam: Lord lines up, but like I'm, if we're going to see if like we get an appearance from Sheik, which was like, remember, Zelda had, it transforms into Sheik and she was like a mysterious character.

She was a ninja basically.

Devindra: Yeah.

Sam: Yeah. And so I think, if they can incorporate that in some way, [00:26:00]that way Zelda gets some melee abilities on top of her magic stuff. I think that would be really cool, but I, we'll have to wait to see how the game plays out.

Devindra: Yeah. I'm glad it's not just melee cause then it would feel like a palette swap to just Oh, it's another character hopping around doing Zelda puzzles. This seems like a fundamental rethinking of how this universe can work in the same way that Breath of the Wild was and Tears of the Kingdom was.

Gotta love it. Gotta love the people developing series producer. Yeah.

Sam: I was gonna say, and someone who like, Link to the Past is one of my favorite games of all time. So I love that they're, still continuing on with the top down quote unquote 2D Zelda games.

Devindra: I love it too.

I would, I need the art though. I need the sprites. I need me some sprites. Like as much as I like this little like cutesy 3d art style, but it doesn't hit in the same way. When I scroll tick tock, I often see people playing like older Zelda games. I'm like, it just feels good. And we don't get a lot of that from Nintendo.

We do get it from other companies trying to be Zelda like. That's a thing. So this game looks cool. The other thing that was really interesting is they finally fully showed us Metroid Prime. It's called [00:27:00] Metroid Prime 4. It has been years since they first announced this thing. was 2017 when they first announced that they were working on it.

And in 2019 they also announced a complete do over, like they were stopping development of that version of Metro Prime four and starting it over. So now here we are, it's 2024 and this game is coming next year. They say for the switch, but it's okay, or whatever else Nten has next year, right? This is a lot of this is prep for software for next year or for their new system.

Sam: It's interesting how they're setting up for this is like the end of the switches like era and then whatever the switch to whatever, they call it, we'll see. I'm curious to see how, what kind of support these games get in terms of will they be fully supported?

Will they be launched titles for a new Nintendo system? They're gonna

Devindra: carry the store over like the switch has been so successful. They can't do another Oh, this is a weird one off store and all the stuff you bought may die in a couple years or something Like the switch is forever.

Sam: Yeah, and I actually think this is like this is something [00:28:00]that like nintendo has a really big opportunity with if you look at like With the switch, they switched they, moved over to an arm based chip.

And so I'm really curious to see like what the continuity will be for this next system. Will it also be arm? I really hope so. Because it's it has like really big implications on hey, is it easier to pour older games over to the new title? Does this, there's been rumors that the new device will support game cartridges from the switch and stuff like that.

And then on top of that bringing back a lot of the virtual, quote unquote, virtual console titles where, Hey, we're having classics on the store and they run on the switch and they run on the new machine too, so you get to carry over your library as well too. And I think that's a really big.

Thing that, they could capitalize on with whatever the replaces the switch.

Devindra: There's no reason to do an architecture change. Like I'm just like looking at this on a strategic level, like they've done so much work to build emulators for the switch itself. Like that stuff will directly carry over to another arm system.

There was also like, I don't, what else would they go with? There's really nothing like PC [00:29:00]Hardaware with an, yeah, if they go back to power

Sam: PC, people will just go quake in their seats, but yeah,

Devindra: it's not. So yeah I fully expect them to stick with like arm and looking at what arm is doing now, like maybe relying on some good stuff.

And also, yeah, probably working together with Nvidia again, because nobody else really used the Tegra chipset. I think the Zune HD had the Tegra, which I really liked. But. That it's just like dead Hardaware. I do think a lot of these games will just work across both systems.

Like you wouldn't want people buying new games this year and by next year, like they just won't work. Did anything else jump out at you from these announcements? Yeah.

Sam: I thought gonna get a new Mario and Luigi game. It's called brother ship, which I think is actually. Sounds a lot, sounds really fun, but also could be like some sort of hidden pun, because it was like in the teaser it showed that I'm like, traveling around the world, maybe on a boat, so hey, this is gonna be cool, like Mario and Luigi capped in a boat together, that could be fun.

The

Devindra: art style is like almost a little cel shaded too.

Sam: Yep. Looks a little different, yeah. I'm always a sucker for a new [00:30:00]Mario Party game. Cause you get one like every five years at most. And so there's going to be a new Mario Party game called Mario Party Jamboree. And it's sad because like I bought the last one and I played it like a bunch when it first came out and then like I had a kid and I had no one to play it with cause I didn't ever do anything that wasn't kid related.

Devindra: And also you don't have people over to play Mario Party games. Yes. And so we had a pandemic, that's the whole thing. So I'm excited

Sam: for Mario Party Jamboree, even though I may have aged out of it.

Devindra: Maybe you're aging back into it though Like I am my daughter is now five and she's starting she's like big on Minecraft and some games So yeah, this is a good entry point.

She also watches me play RPGs. So and then likes the games Yeah,

Sam: you were talking about sprites Give me right gonna be a dragon warrior 3 HD 2d remake and so I mean I love the way that thing looks because it does capture more of that like spite inspired graphical quality.

And as someone who's like always appreciated dragon warrior, but it has never dived into it the way that like, I played every final fantasy game. This seems like a [00:31:00] really good place to jump on because it's like chronologically it's the first of the, dragon warrior trilogy games.

So it'll be really interesting. It's modern graphic style, but, with a more of a classic turn based RPG feeling, which is always, right up my alley.

Devindra: This looks really cool. I do at least HD 2D gets us some sprites alongside 3D engine stuff. But then I'm like playing Hades 2, and it's just oh, look at this glorious artwork.

Look at this. There's still some 3D work in there, but it's just mostly, beautiful illustrations. I don't know anything else from the Sam.

Sam: No, that was about it You know, there's a ton of stuff there. There's a new Metal Slug game That was like a some sort of like a tactics tower defense game

Devindra: They is it tower defense or is it metal slug tactics because they announced that no So

Sam: they showed the tower defense game On the stream, but Metal Gear, there's a perfect segue because the Metal Slug game that I'm really interested is Tactics, which is supposed to come out sometime later this year too.

So we'll see which one, if I play both or whatever, but yeah.

Devindra: Awesome. Yeah, good direct from Nintendo. Also like coming [00:32:00]after we were just like dying from so much stuff from summer game fest. So good time to play some games, folks. Let us know what you're playing or what you're excited for.

Podcast and gadget. com. We had a couple news bits. I just want to mention briefly we had talked about Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of open AI who left that company a couple of weeks ago. He has launched a new AI company called safe super intelligence, Inc, or SSI. That's all we know. He says he's working on, he's not working on like stuff, like open AI is he's going straight to super intelligence and he wants to build it safely.

It sounds like a lot of talk and not much details about this thing yet. Do you have any thoughts on the Sam? Because I have bad, I don't have great feelings when people talk about super intelligence.

Sam: Yeah. There's this whole section that like of the internet, that's like very wants to talk about artificial general intelligence as like a thing that will be here very soon.

And so the idea of Hey, someone's going to focus on the safety. And if you actually go, there's not a ton of details on it, but if you go to the safe superintelligence website, it's actually pretty funny because all I [00:33:00] do is our mission is to make safe superintelligence the name of the company is safe superintelligence SSI.

That's all we care about. That's all we want to work on. And so it's they are very focused on the, especially the safety part of AI. And so I appreciate that kind of directive, but like you said, there's, it's so early that it, there's really not much to talk about in terms of like actual deliverables just yet.

Devindra: I think even like John Carmack, like when he left meta and very loudly was like, I cannot work with like your weird corporate rules and stuff. He said he was going to go work on AGI. Like it is a thing smart people are focused on. I just feel like it feels like the time where the tech industry gets a little too religious about a thing that may never ultimately happen.

I've been reading about the singularity from Ray Kurzweil since the 90s and Michio Kaku was talking about it too. It's a thing they've imagined, like where our machines get super intelligent and then we won't be able to control them. I, I don't know if we'll actually get there and, I don't know if these companies actually building safety measures are going to be helpful at all.

[00:34:00] That's what OpenAI was supposed to be. That's why Elon Musk and Sam Altman and a lot of folks like put that company together as a non profit and they end up being just a thing, raising tons of money to make a lot of money selling AI. I feel like it's a lie they're telling themselves.

But yeah, I don't know. It's weird. We didn't, we were even talking about this. We didn't even cover the story in gadget because there's no detail here. It's, he's doing a thing called safe superintelligence and we don't know what that thing actually is. So to me, that is like a nothing burger, at least for something we'd write about.

Something I do want to talk about and shows like the immediate dangers of AI is perplexity. And wire just put up a piece called perplexity is a bullshit machine. If you've not heard of perplexity is like an AI search engine type of thing where you'd put in queries and it will just answer them.

The CEO calls it an answer engine, but what it really seems like What's happening is it's using different AI engines to basically answer your [00:35:00] questions, but also it's scraping. It is both scraping the internet and scraping websites and texts and then sending that to the AI engines and then sending a response to you and Forbes had reported that they were basically just like straight up copying.

Their reports. If you asked a question about an article, like it will just repeat the Forbes article at you with very little attribution or unclear attribution. So people have been mad at this company for a while. I think somebody, I don't know if it was Forbes, but they had said like perplexity is working on a licensing deal.

After they started stealing their stuff. And, they

Sam: have made some small changes to call out attribution a little bit better or make it more prominent or better yet cite their sources and link back to, where they're getting this info from. This all seems like a very much like a company that is, they did a thing without thinking about the consequences of the thing that they made.

And now they're trying to fix all the problems with the thing that they made. And it's I don't know, maybe you should have thought about that a little bit harder before you opened it up [00:36:00]to just users out there.

Devindra: It's like the thing tech companies do. Like people, you may not have noticed like what happened, like how Uber.

And how Lyft and a lot of these companies like rose to power. But a lot of it was just by a thing. Hey, we're going to deploy this thing, which is using tech. Oh, you have local laws about how people handle taxis or things like that, or share transportation. We're going to ignore those entirely. And just do our thing.

It's the mentality

Sam: of we're going to disrupt stuff by breaking things and fixing it later.

Devindra: Yeah. Or if you've been to a city recently and scores and scores of electric scooters, just littering the streets, it's because these companies have deployed the stuff and didn't think about where do you put it?

How do you keep it out of the way? Like, how do you actually maintain a decent public space, even though you're putting junk out there and these companies just didn't care. So it left it up to cities to do a lot of that stuff. So what Wired found. And this report is really interesting is that perplexity is straight up.

They have like secret Wired has already blocked perplexities like search crawlers, and then apparently this company has other secret [00:37:00] search crawlers that are out there that are ignoring the robots. txt file, which in a website tells the search engine, Hey, crawl me, or don't crawl me, or you don't have access to certain things.

This is just bypassing what. What publishers are actually saying these companies should have access to. So this company sucks. And this is to me the best example of just like AI hubris of just I can build this thing, look at all these tools, the web is right there. It's open. I can just grab this text and deliver something to you and raise a lot of money while doing it too.

I don't know how much of this seems like a legitimate business personally. Any thoughts, Sam, any thoughts beyond that?

Sam: No, you hit on the head. It's like they're priming themselves up to be the example of what not to do in terms of using AI responsibly. And so I guess we'll see how that fallout ends up.

Devindra: All right, let's move on to one listener question we got from Mark Dell, who's now watching our live stream. So thank you for being a loyal listener and watcher, Mark. But he said that recently he got Google Fiber at his apartment. He formerly had [00:38:00] 30 megabits up and down. He went all in on Google Fiber and got the 8 gigabit plan.

And just sucked it down, basically like having that full access, but he realized he's lucky to get 1. 4 gigs speeds over wifi, 2. 5 gigs over ethernet. That's the limit of most network cards. And now Google's also considering 20 gig fiber. He's wondering, is there any practical use for such fast internet for residents?

And you know what? No, not right now, but what's also great having more internet than, what to do with and being ready for whatever's happening 10 years from now. If you're streaming games, if you're doing stuff I have a gigabit up and down plan with AT& T fiber. It's incredible.

Like I was talking about getting a ton of steam games, like downloading three steam games at once. That stuff comes in a couple of minutes, like just. Sucks data down. Maybe Mark, you don't want to pay for the full eight gig plan. If you're not going to use it, do they have a four gig plan? Do they have a two gig plan or something?

Yeah, you need all the Hardaware to support it. And wifi seven is coming. It's going [00:39:00] to support faster Hardaware or faster speeds. Ethernet is always becoming a faster thing, but I think at best I see 2. 5 gigabit cards in most systems. I guess you could get 10. And yeah, there's some, you can

Sam: get 10 if you look for it.

And obviously it's a lot easier to like, if you have a desktop and you can get your own network card and all that, that the one thing that is like like an overlooked benefit is that, let's say you have eight, eight gig plan and you can only get 2. 5 gigs to a specific laptop or PC or whatever.

The one thing about having a huge. Bandwidth pipeline like that is that if you have a lot of people in your house, you can send multiple people can be sucking down 2. 5 gigs without impacting what other people are doing. And this is like one of the classic issues of if you have bad internet and someone who's watching Netflix and then someone else decides to watch, max or, they're downloading a game from steam.

Then you can start impacting what other people are doing. And they're, their stream is going to start buffering or shuddering or something like that. And so that's the nice thing about that. And that's part of the reason why I probably pay for more, [00:40:00]bandwidth than I need so that I just don't have to think about it.

I always know that I have way too many devices in my place and, I want to make sure that there's running smoothly connected to the internet, super fast all the time. And so it's nice to have that kind of Re bonus overhead is, one of the small fringe benefits.

Devindra: Especially for us, we occasionally have to upload tons of 4k video, so if I have to upload 50 to a hundred gigabytes of stuff, like I want that up quickly that was a real pain when I was traveling to WWDC and the Microsoft campus to get the stuff from the DJI Osmo pro up into the cloud.

It just took forever and I really killed my workflow a little bit. So you still need the internet sometimes. And if you can get that good internet internet, go for it. I see Mark Dell in the chat. He says he's already downgraded his Google fiber. He could do that in the app, so that's super useful.

And he got a 10 gig switch, so he has a decent backbone now too. This is great. This is great. And that's one of those things

Sam: you got to think about too. It's I have a new bandwidth and that's great. And if let's say you get your router from whatever ISP you're using or, you're getting your modem from whatever [00:41:00] ISP, then you have to like, make sure your router can handle all that.

And that's, where DaVinci was talking about Hey, Wi Fi seven is coming and more devices. And there are a handful of like smartphones on the market today that do support Wi Fi seven. But obviously you're not going to get Wi Fi 7 speeds if your router doesn't support it. And you got to think holistically about like how you upgrade the, the devices that you're using.

Devindra: What's funny is that I have the Surface Pro here. I think it has Wi Fi 6E and I noticed okay, I'm just gonna plug into ethernet to suck down these Steam games faster. I have gigabit. I think it's, no it's a gigabit, like ethernet connection over here. And I was still getting faster speeds over my wife.

The wifi was coming in faster, even though it's going through a repeater that's in my basement here. That's going, hitting the router, the wifi still came in faster. So we are at a weird place where yeah, you, if you want raw speed, sometimes wifi will be better. If you want like stable connections, like that's where you plug into ethernet.

So that's why I have on my desktop.

Sam: Yeah. If we, if you want to get into the really nitty gritty stuff, there's some interesting things that like net gear [00:42:00] and some of the other router makers are doing with wifi seven where they're doing like multiple channel aggregation. And so you can really pump up those speeds over wifi.

And it's For someone who remembers when wifi was just like very unreliable and spotty. It's Oh, this is so nice to not have to think about it. And a lot of these new wifi seven routers are really expensive, but Hey, when the prices come down, I think you just appreciate it from not having to like constantly babysit your wifi like that.

It's just, really nice to have.

Devindra: I remember when Wi Fi like barely supported a room Oh man, like I was the first person to put a Wi Fi router, like in my dorm room and I had to hide it from IT and all this stuff. Good stuff. Wi Fi is good. Anyway, if you have access to fiber folks, make that switch.

It may be a little more than what you're paying for cable in most cases, from what I've seen, it actually isn't, but the stability of the connection and the ability to not like actually share that connection with everybody in your neighborhood is super great. Like I. Yeah, fiber is just such a solid connection to the internet.

All right, let's move on to what we're working on. Hey, I'm [00:43:00] working on a review. Let's review the Surface Pro and I'm going to try to get some other Copilot Plus systems in soon. Sam, anything from you?

Sam: Yeah, obviously, working on the Surface laptop. But I have a review for the MSI Claw, which is MSI's attempt at making a gaming handheld, which, they went with an Intel chip instead of something from AMD.

And That makes a pretty big difference. Turns out who knew? Why would you do that? Why would you do that? Also at some point I'm trying to, squeeze in a review for the Keychron Q1 HE, which is sort of Keychron's attempt at making a Wooting clone. Cause it has the HE stands for Hall Effect switches.

You do get, full analog control and you get some of that like rapid trigger stuff that you see some on some gaming keyboards. I've been really enjoying it so far. I just got to find time to write it up.

Devindra: I just picked up one of those new fee keyboards. I think we've recommended the new fi or new fee.

Yeah, that was

Sam: the keyboard that I bought before this one. And it's really great. And they make some really good low profile keyboards. Which is actually my preference. Just 'cause, [00:44:00] years of typing on laptops. I prefer the, the more chit lower profile style keys. I'm

Devindra: using the low profile new V 96, I think.

And it just that, that's the one I got. Feels good? Yeah. Feels so good. Loving it. And yeah. Got any pop culture picks for us this week, Sam?

Sam: Yeah. I'm still watching star Wars, the acolyte. That's so good. I think we were talking about this in Slack the other day. It's I'm enjoying it a lot.

I just wish they hadn't done the evil twin trope. Just because it's I think that, that trope is played out. But yeah, aside from that, I've been enjoying it. And then I think the doctor who season finale is this weekend. And I, as someone who is definitely, I do not classify myself as a whovian.

That's, more of my wife's thing, the transition for this season, because now Disney's kind of running it. Yeah. The production quality is way up and things just look good, which is like old seasons of Dr. Who looks janky. The effects. Yeah it's rough. But the thing is that the show is like it's been very hit or miss.

I think like the first episode was good. And then the middle episodes were just like, They lost the whole idea. And then for the season finale, you finally [00:45:00] things, it seems like they're getting back to like core Dr. Who, which I enjoy more. But as someone who is not as invested into the franchise as some other people are I'm definitely not the target audience.

Devindra: That's why I'm like, I've never like fully gone into it. There's some stuff, the Matt Smith season, the first one, like that was good. But the writing and doctor who always seems like really hit or miss even when like they have a really talented person in charge. So and there was

Sam: there's two episodes.

I think the guy who plays the doctor had some commitment on another Film or something and so there's two episodes where the doctor is just not in doctor who and that's just a weird situation there are a lot of side characters.

Devindra: I guess I could see that happening. Yeah, shout out to Dr.

Who. I keep, that's one thing I keep like thinking I need to watch that because I do like the new doctor. I've seen him and it was sex education. Oh yeah, he's great. Yeah. Great show. That's on Netflix. And then it like evaporates from my mind because any, literally anything else in my life happens, I'm like, I forget about Dr.

Who. So glad you're digging it, Sam, even if it's messy. One thing I want to shout out is a show I think you will like, and a lot of people should be watching, Not Enough People are [00:46:00]watching Evil, which was a show on CBS by the Kings, people who did The Good Wife and The Good Fight. It is straight up X Files.

It's awesome. I watched the

Sam: first season of that. Yeah. And then there was like a long hiatus. It was either after season one or season two. And I keep meaning to go back to it. But yes that show is awesome.

Devindra: I'm shouting it down shouting it out now because season four is on Paramount plus, which I've been going through excellent stuff.

Like it's pretty much like when the X Files had hit its run and knew the characters and knew the tone and could be a little playful with things. The show is about a trio of people who are out to investigate miracles. Basically, but they're it's led by a priest played by name is escaping you right now, but he was Luke Cage,

Mike Coulter.

Yes. And there's also a tech guy who's a total like skeptic played by Asif Manvi. And a therapist who is just like looking at the human psychological side of things. It is X Files, but it's also these folks are a priest. Push basically working for the Catholic church to do this too, but it's not like a preachy religious show.

It's [00:47:00] using religious iconography to explore weird supernatural stuff. I think it has a lot of fun with that. The first three seasons are on Netflix now, so it used to be hard for people to see it. So if you wanted to see the show, if you've heard me talk about it before, check it out. Go to Netflix, just watch Evil.

If you liked The X Files, if you liked Buffy, if you liked a lot of those old shows where there was basically a mystery of the week there was a team of folks who would have to deal with those. It's funny. It's cool. It's super smart. I love the show. It's like one of the things I just sit down and love watching.

Sam: I'll also say Michael Emerson. He plays like Ben from Lost.

Devindra: Ben from Lost.

Sam: He is such a good bad guy. And I don't want to ruin the like reveal of like who his character really is. Yeah. But he is, he's he's so well cast and well equipped to play the role that he's doing in that is so I really think the performances in that show really make it just even if it is you're looking at a standard monster of the week episode.

Like you were, they're such, they do such a good job of like really getting you invested into it.

Devindra: They have a lot of fun. And yeah, poor Michael Emerson. I [00:48:00]remember during loss, he talked about being on the subway and nobody wanted to sit near him or stand next to him because they all saw him as this like evil man from TV.

So he's just a little typecast there, but now he's doing it again.

Sam: So I guess it worked out for him. It worked out for

Devindra: him. Like what Giancarlo Esposito ended up doing. He's just he's a villain everywhere, apparently, like doing the same thing everywhere. He hasn't worn it out like Giancarlo Esposito has.

So anyway, go watch Evil. It's on Netflix. The new season is on Paramount Plus. That's it for this week, folks. Our theme Is by Game Composer Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terence O'Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Element. You can find me online at dra on Twitter, blue Sky Mastodon.

Also talk about movies and TV at the film cast@thefilmcast.com. Where can we find you, Sam? You can find me on Twitter slash x at Sam Rutherford. Email us@podcastinggat.com. Leave us review on iTunes and subscribe on anything that gets podcasts. That's it folks. We're [00:49:00]at.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-podcast-surface-pro-and-laptop-copilot-qa-113046302.html?src=rss

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond lands on Switch in 2025

After 18 years and a complete reboot, Samus Aran will return in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond next year, Nintendo announced today. The company also gave us our first glimpse at the game, which sees Samus duking it out with alien hordes on distant planet. At first glance, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond could easily be mistaken for a Halo game, though there's a bit of enemy scanning and morph ball action, as you'd expect. The teaser ends with the reveal of a new big bad (wearing a suit like Samus's), flanked by two floating metroids. 

It's hard to read too much into a teaser, but as someone who adored the original Metroid Prime on the Gamecube, I'm certainly excited. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is currently slated as a Switch title, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it appear on Nintendo's Switch successor as well.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/metroid-prime-4-beyond-lands-on-switch-in-2025-145927227.html?src=rss

Engadget Podcast: The fallout from Apple’s WWDC 2024 and Summer Game Fest

This week has felt like a month worth of news, now that we've wrapped up Apple's WWDC 2024 and Summer Game Fest in LA. In this episode, Cherlynn and Devindra discuss their final thoughts on Apple Intelligence and the company's upcoming software, and they chat about some of our coverage highlights from the pseudo-E3 Game Fest. Also, we dive into X making likes private (what is Elon hiding?!) and the news around Sony buying the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain.


Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

  • Our final thoughts on WWDC 2024 – 1:31

  • Bloomberg Report: Apple isn't paying OpenAI a fee for ChatGPT, but will share profits – 12:18

  • Summer Games Fest highlights: Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, LEGO Horizon Adventures, and an Assassin’s Creed finally set in Japan – 25:06

  • X makes users’ likes private – 40:27

  • ChromeOS will soon run on Android frameworks, enabling more AI on upcoming Chromebooks – 44:40

  • Pop culture picks – 49:44

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

Devindra: [00:00:00] What's up, Internet, and welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar.

Cherlynn: I'm Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low.

Devindra: We are back from Apple's WWDC, and we have thoughts. Plenty of thoughts. And I feel like, It's just one of those whirlwind things. Both Trillin and I got back in from California yesterday.

After recording this, I still feel like my body doesn't know, like, where I'm in, Trillin, or what time zone. I don't know how you feel.

Cherlynn: I went to the gym at 8 a. m. Eastern. That's my best way of getting back on the Eastern time zone. There you go.

Devindra: I like how you fit in the humble brag there. Yes, congrats on going to the gym for Lynn.

Fantastic. We're also going to be talking about Summer Game Fest, folks. We weren't there for that and I was trying to get Jess Condit on, but she's super busy still writing up stuff from that. So we have got a lot of coverage around that and there's some stories I want to highlight that Engadget has done.

Also some games that looks pretty cool. Also joining us this morning is podcast producer Ben Ellman, who I'm sure has thoughts on Apple and the game stuff. Good morning. I sure do. Good morning. And [00:01:00] as always, folks, if you're enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcast or of choice, leave us a review in iTunes.

Drop us an email at podcast@engadget.com. I'm not seeing enough of those emails. I would love to answer some reader questions. You can also typically join us Thursday mornings around 10 30 a. m. Eastern depending on the timing, really. It's just like about scheduling, but that's about the time you can carve out in your schedule for us.

Join us. You could see us on video. Sometimes we'll demo gadgets and We'll just have a great Q and a session too. So it's a fun time. Join us for that. I do want to point out if you're just listening to this episode, we did do a bonus episode at Apple's campus and it actually turned out pretty well because for Lynn and I were like right outside the, was it the Mac cafe or cafe Mac?

But we were outdoors surrounded by traffic and other noise, but it actually ended up sounding pretty good. I'd say. And that was like our overall thoughts on WWDC. Two days of going through meetings, going through the keynote and everything. In this episode, I want to take like a, just a step back and do you have any final thoughts for Lynn?

Cause I know you did a piece about the undersung features. That [00:02:00] you appreciated that were announced. Anything else you want to shout out?

Cherlynn: Yeah, when we did our recording I don't think I had taken my demo of the new satellite messaging features just yet. So I wasn't able to talk about it. Plus it was under embargo, it turns out.

This morning, my article on the details of how messaging via satellite will work is on engadget. com if you want to head on over, but yeah, there's a lot of like under the radar things. I got at some of them during our. Recorded episode earlier this week. Maps, for example, I don't know if I mentioned, but like maps had some really cool routes, like hikes built in now, and you can create a custom route and then you can share them.

So my whole thing is I'm going to create these custom, like scavenger hunt trails, or like, how do you get from the train station to my favorite restaurant in the fastest way in my mind and share them with my friends. Or share my goal is one day to share the preferred route with my Uber driver.

Don't take this tunnel, take that tunnel. So that was one of them. I really like a lot of the other features that I found out after the fact, like iOS 18 [00:03:00] actually has some math notes embedded into the notes app where you can write a little list of expenses from a group trip, for example, and then, put an equal sign to equate them, the name of venue was 50, 000 and then I don't know, food was 10, 000. And then you can tally it by saying venue plus food equal, and then take that divided by however many people you have. How big of a trip

Devindra: were you having where you have 50, 000? I know, right? I was, I went,

Cherlynn: it's a, it was a wedding trip.

This was like, I was also on Brian Tong's podcast after where I made this exact same sort of like example, but instead of saying trip, I said wedding. So I'm using the same numbers from wedding planning. Okay.

Devindra: Okay. Except for,

Cherlynn: I said it was a trip. Listen, I travel bougie, I just go on boats my life.

Devindra: Yeah, we do. We are well aware. But I feel like that's a feature that could be abused also to hey hey kids, follow this path to my murder den.

Cherlynn: Sure. Or something like that. I don't know. I don't know. Create custom paths to lure people into your ice cream van. But that's obviously then on the person to decide whether or not to follow it.

It's not like telling you where to live [00:04:00] your

Speaker 3: life.

Cherlynn: Buddy three Oh five love in the chat asked if texting via satellite will be a paid service after a year. So Apple has literally no outright answer for it's a really shrug

Devindra: emoji on all the satellite services for less

Cherlynn: shrug emoji and more like. Like not sure yet.

I feel like the sense I'm getting is that they're playing their cards close to their chest. The satellite service provider for their satellite services is global star. And if I had to guess, I look at what global star charges and maybe do some math around like the package or whatever but it's,

Devindra: it's Apple.

If they were to do that, it would be like discounted somehow. It'd be right. Exactly. That's what I meant.

Cherlynn: Do the math to make it not. It's as expensive in assuming you already have sort of a device. Again I'm extremely extrapolating here. I'm not like, I don't have any insider info here other than I know there's no plan.

Devindra: I think it's funny. It's been like two years since Apple announced like satellite features. First of all, it was like the emergency SOS feature, right? If you're stuck in the [00:05:00] middle of nowhere, maybe you could send a short text somewhere to tell people where you are. And now it's like straight up, like more messaging features.

Cherlynn: No. Emergency SOS via satellite was just for emergency responders. So you were only alLowd to text it would be like when you're trying to dial nine one one, but you don't have a signal at all. Then you would be redirected to a service center. So Apple had these like middle people that it was helping relay these emergency SOS messages to either.

It would figure out where your closest nine one one slash emergency services situation is and route you there with your satellite message. Or have you like have they handle it themselves? Maybe if they like be the dispatcher or they get in touch for you. And it was like, yeah, only text messages.

This time around, yeah. Messages via satellite is different, right? You're not limited to who you can message over satellite this time. You can send it to pretty much anyone in your iMessage. IMessages are end to end encrypted. If you send that, you're also alLowd to send SMS, the. The stipulation that Apple has put in place is that [00:06:00] for SMS, only the person that's off grid is able to initiate a message over satellite because they want to prevent, promotional business messages from clogging up the congestion, the light, the network, the satellite network.

That

Devindra: makes sense. Yeah.

Cherlynn: Yeah, it absolutely makes a lot of sense. And I think that the inclusion of SMS here is good. So I asked, I was like, why not RCS? And I think the idea, I think what I'm getting is that like RCS messages are like bigger in terms of size to like compress over satellite.

Even if it's just text. So I think there's just challenges and complications there, but still, Cool too. Is it

Devindra: straight up just text is it the messages app, but doing multimedia stuff too? No, so it's just

Cherlynn: text and then with emoji as well as emoji tap back reactions. By the way, before this dubbed up, I did not know that those reactions are called tap back.

So thank you very much WWDC for Informing me. Yeah. Those, how, like when you're in a message with your friends and you like gray tap their double tap their balloon, I remember

Devindra: when they announced it,

Cherlynn: react, I [00:07:00] didn't know the name was tap back. I thought tap back was something else.

Devindra: This is sad.

We can't take the Android out of Cherlynn because yeah, that was a thing people were talking about on the Apple side. It's just funny when they talk about

Cherlynn: on your phone.

Devindra: No. You could apply so many memes to Apple's approach to the satellite subscription, right? Initially it was like, ask me in two years, please?

I have not figured this out yet. And then last year, they were like we're going to extend it for one more year. So I don't have to think about this. It's it is the ultimate can I extend the deadline for my book report, please? Professor? Can I, it's very much, it's hilarious.

So now it's a whole, yeah.

Cherlynn: I think it's interesting because it lines up with their approach to all of their Apple intelligence things where they're not charging people a fee. I think there's an unspoken yet in there. And I think Apple wants to be able to see if there's a. Reason to charge people before it charges people, which is not a bad idea.

I think right now, satellite services on iPhone 14 and later haven't seemed, [00:08:00] enough to justify paying an additional monthly fee for it, even if it's a dollar a month, like I just don't know yet, but with messages via Silhouette, I can see they're building their way there,

Devindra: yeah, it's also once you start being like, Okay, we're gonna start nickel and diming you for this stuff.

And I do feel like Apple is one of those companies. It's like that. Is that actually better for the customer experience? Do we actually does that actually mean people won't use it? If somebody has to subscribe to it, and then they're in an actual emergency, and they are going to subscribe to it on the go.

Is that person like, yeah, they don't know how to deal with that potential PR disasters. And now it's just like

Cherlynn: optics are awful. If you're suddenly just optics are

Devindra: awful. So now it's okay free for everybody. I think this is related to something we were talking about Trillian where I really did not want Apple to do like a paid AI service and they announced Apple intelligence.

And again, folks go back to our bonus podcast. You can hear our main thoughts about all the major stuff, but they specifically did not do Apple intelligence pro. Or plus or anything. It's just Hey, it's doing a lot of stuff that's baked into your devices. Either the iPhone 15 pro [00:09:00] max or the pro or the newer devices coming up or, M series max as well.

But it's what's on device, some Apple stuff in the cloud, which they're doing some cool privacy stuff with, and very little bits of chat GPT, like chat GPT when necessary, but nowhere along this point, are they like, please pay us more for faster. That's not happening, right?

Cherlynn: It's not seeming like it's happening.

And I think that's a good thing. And I think also the integration with chat GPT at no cost is a good idea on Apple's part. I do want to point out that CF five 42 in the chat that say that if satellite text is not available. It's going to cost, they would rather pay per use instead of a monthly amount.

Because you'd rarely use it. And yeah, that seems like maybe it will be the approach. It seems smarter to offer people that at a nominal one time fee when needed for something, that's an emergency thing, right? Like you don't have to pay for every single use, but we'll charge you per text. That makes a little bit more sense.

Even if it's very 1990s,

Devindra: I think that's the other thing like, Oh, we're [00:10:00] back to paying per text now. That's, I know,

Cherlynn: I know. Yeah. But that helps to, reduce or relieve the congestion, potential congestion on those networks that are so precious.

Devindra: Gotcha. Now that we've had some time away from WWDC, Sherilyn, and our coverage and all the meetings and everything do you have any thoughts about what is next for Apple for the year ahead or with their new software or anything?

Cherlynn: I'm looking to iPhone event for Surprises, I do think again, I'm keeping an eye on the chat and there are some things that like, it feels, so we talked about this on the episode that we prerecorded, but maybe for our like main audience, I want to repeat and reiterate the main takeaway.

It is that as usual, it seems like with some of these features, Apple is copying or doing things that other people have done before, right? AI. The chat is talking about the icon tints, like the customizable homepage, the RCS with support. These are things that Android has done for a while. Android has had material you and like the tinting of the icons.

But I gotta say, we said this the last episode, and Apple seems to do it a little bit better. It's [00:11:00] really it's more sophisticated. They took their time to do something better and they're slow. And maybe the implementation isn't all the way there, but what they have delivered works the way they say it will, and they don't make promises.

They don't. Really? Typically, I think that's the thing.

Devindra: Yeah. One thing I want to point out, there was news yesterday that basically Bloomberg reported that Apple is not actually paying open AI for using and also open AI is not paying Apple. It seems like a weird agreement where.

Basically, OpenAI will get money down the line from like revenue sharing. I guess that's like the plan moving forward. But it is to me that really describes what we were talking about before, Cherlynn, where Apple has been like, okay, we have all this AI stuff and here carved in a little island. Is going to be our little AI model friends, right?

Right now, our friend is chat GPT, but if that friend breaks this relationship, if like they do something bad or we don't want to like deal with them anymore. Do you just cut out that [00:12:00] friend, X them out entirely, replace them with another, with Google Gemini or something. It seems very like plug and play, like what Apple can put in there.

They also mentioned that they are, they would consider Gemini. They have not. made any formal deals or other models that are very specific. So if you're a health worker, maybe there's a metal medical AI model that would be better suited for helping you rather than to have GPT or something. So that is interesting.

Cherlynn: It was nice of them. Nice. It was like smart of them to be like, Oh yeah, we're supporting the best one out there. Who's a pioneer in the field of this open AI. And I'm like, I don't know, I'd argue with Best. It is a pioneer, certainly. And I, we'll see, right? And they never mentioned They actually in the panel after WWDC keynote, by the way, that I just seen moderated panel Craig Federighi did mention that like Gemini or John Andrea might be the one that said this, but yeah Gemini might even be supported in future if it gets to that point.

He

Devindra: said that. Yeah.

Cherlynn: Yeah. Yeah. So interesting,

Devindra: it's interesting. Also, by the [00:13:00] way, I just want to talk about like how weird that whole situation was. So after the WWDC keynote, Apple invited press to come to this talk between Craig Federighi, their head of software engineering, and John Gianandrea Gianandrea their head of AI, right?

Oh, this is gonna be interesting. This is gonna be informative. Or informative, but it was also moderated by iJustine and no shade to her. I think she's great, but it did feel like this was just a scenario where Apple wrote these questions and Hey, person who is media well known, please ask these questions that we've asked and do not stray from any of this.

Cherlynn: It's one step above when Samsung does it's like their own company execs interviewing their other company executives situation where like you're paid literally by Samsung to interview Samsung people. In this case, I don't know if iJustine was paid, but it definitely feels yeah, you're a bit more.

Most

Devindra: definitely.

Cherlynn: But someone that was more controllable than, say, a member of the press,

Devindra: it's just, it is interesting when companies do that, but Ben, go ahead.

Ben: So I was gonna say that it was also a little bit like how Disney does all of its PR stuff. [00:14:00] Actually this is on my mind because I saw the four hour long, was it?

It's four hours, the Star Wars hotel video. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So now people are talking about, Oh Disney does PR weirdly because it's also like really on rails. You have to say like the actual trademark name for everything. So was this similar?

Devindra: To me, I actually had that in my mind too, Ben. To me, it did feel like that.

It was yes, because of course branded content right here, blah, blah, blah. Everything we just said at the keynote, like it definitely felt on rails. It didn't feel like a natural conversation where. I feel like if one of us were to do that chat, we'd be like, yeah, but who, where are you, what are you training these models on?

What's going on here? Give us the full skinny and everything. And

Ben: yeah, can you tell us a little bit more about private cloud compute? Because that sounds like you're talking out of both sides. They

Devindra: did end up saying more about that, but even then I would have liked to be more. But that is funny.

I wrote up like what Apple and what specifically. I think Craig Federighi laid out for the whole Apple, the [00:15:00] private cloud compute thing too, but the really interesting there too is like Apple for years has been saying like, Hey, our stuff is on device. It's more secure than Google where you're sending all your photos to the cloud for processing or whatever.

And now they have to rely on the cloud a little. So they're like, okay. But is it a secure cloud? Is it a private cloud? Yes. Private cloud compute. Apple did say a few things that were interesting about that, Ben, where the information being sent, first of all it's tidbits, the little bits of information that you're, if you're asking Siri about something, we'll go there fully anonymized, like the private relay stuff that is already on iPhones and Apple services.

So that's helpful. Also the servers don't store anything. Which I think I'm sure the FBI is looking at this and no Apple, please, we need logs. We need data to see how people access things. And none of that is going to be on the servers. They say Apple has historically, like there was that whole thing, right?

About them fighting against the FBI that wanted to unlock. I think it was a shooter's phone at one point, right?

Ben: Yes, I remember that. That was like 2015, 2016 or [00:16:00] something.

Devindra: And then the, I believe authorities got into the phone in another way, but Apple for its part was like trying hard to push back against that.

So yes, it's a bad name. It's also like very marketing heavy, but also I don't know. They say they've they've laid out like the software that the servers are also using for security audits. Devices will only be able to talk to those approved servers. So it's not like somebody can intercept your question or something.

And the audit thing is something nobody else is doing for cloud security right now, at least from what I've seen.

Ben: The way it made it seem like, Like in the keynote though, was that like everyone gets their own like place in the server,

Devindra: which is impossible. That's certainly not true. But it's like, when you talk about the cloud the cloud is an amorphous thing.

It could be 10 servers. It could be 20 servers. But the point is, it's like this thing that can grow as needs require. That stuff is, that's just how we've been living with the cloud so far. But I. I certainly feel better about private cloud compute than I did about Microsoft recall right where [00:17:00] researchers were immediately like, Oh, you're just going to capture everything we do on your computer on our computers.

Okay. You're not graying out. You're not blurring out passwords or authentication or anything. And then people realize yeah, these are just a plain text database sitting in your hard drive. The other accounts on your system can access those very Easy to see security holes. I at least think like Apple has anticipated some of those on the server side.

So that's something. Yeah. Any other thoughts for Lynn out of WWDC?

Cherlynn: I honestly feel like I could talk about dub forever. But I will say that some people in our chat seem to be like underwhelmed by it all. I think I don't know about underwhelming. I think more, I was intrigued by a lot of the little things that seem to be coming to iOS 18 and watchOS.

I can't wait to try some of these features out for myself and see how my like more mainstream average friends, average Joe friends feel about AI. Like I was in the gym this morning to repeat that. And I was asking everybody, everyone's like, how was California? Cause you know, I didn't come to the gym for a few days and I was like, oh yeah, I learned [00:18:00] about this, learned about that.

And I'm waiting to see how people feel about it. And I think. I don't think we'll know until iOS and all the other software updates really roll out later this year. So we'll see.

Devindra: It's, it's certainly not as exciting as last year was. Like I went to, I went last year because there was new hardware and a whole new platform and a whole new vision of computing for Apple.

And now this is Hey we're just like catching up a little bit on AI. But also I think this this stuff is far more important in the long run for Apple than just the launch of vision pro because Apple intelligence covers everything. It's going to cover all their devices. It's also like a kind of like a reframing of how Siri will work, of how a lot of the, their apps will work like notes and everything, getting certain AI driven features.

Like briefly they had mentioned, Oh, you can, you could record calls on a, on voice memos and also have those automatically transcribed. And for some people like us. That's amazing stuff. That's tremendously useful. Also another example of Apple maybe putting a few apps out of business, I think call recorder and some of the other ones, like they, they may have some trouble.

[00:19:00] Yeah.

Cherlynn: Yeah,

Ben: they're putting my favorite tiny app out of business with Mac OS Sequoia, which one I love magnet and now they're going to do windows tiling like innately on the straight out of Windows 10

Devindra: baby. Apple's got it in 2024. Amazing. Amazing. Anything else you want to shout out, Ben? Because I know you had a lot of thoughts, too, on Apple's side.

Ben: The biggest thing was that it seems like a hidden app folder is going to be a problem in a lot of people's relationships.

Devindra: I, it's not that hard to bury an app into something right now, but yeah, that's certainly, what a targeted way to hide your Tinder,

Ben: yeah, and the way that these companies are going to pitch it is the same way companies pitched private browsing when private browsing started to be a thing, which is if you want to look for gifts for your loved ones or something, and you don't want them to know about it.

Yeah, sure. Sure,

Devindra: buddy. Sure. I like the app lock controls, that stuff looks cool. I don't know for

Ben: Oh yeah, I was thinking specifically about [00:20:00] you giving your phone to one of your kids. And then making sure that they can only watch a video or play that one game inside an That's super

Devindra: helpful and also shows Apple's kind of evolving its platforms for the way we actually use our devices.

Because you still can't do multi users on an iPad or something, right? So you have to hand an iPad with all of your stuff on it to a kid. And that's not great. And I don't, they probably will never do multi user. They'll be like, buy another iPad. That's how you do multi user iPads, right? Buy your

Cherlynn: mom an iPad.

You can't.

Devindra: And that's how I have ended up with three or four iPads in my house, and I'm already contemplating another one just because the ones I bought was like, Oh, we could share this. We could all use this. Now my daughter took this one. My wife took this one. This is now the baby video iPad.

It's tough.

Cherlynn: To repeat what Michael Coley in the chat said, I am adequately whelmed. This is absolutely true. I am not overwhelmed or overwhelmed. I am. By WWDC 2024, I will say though that Craig Federighi's all like his jokes and like the stunts or [00:21:00] what do you call them?

Gags. Yeah. Those are, I thought it was funny. And then the locked and hidden apps are a thing I have to it was going to make me feel even more like suspicious as a person. It's just not, it's going to trigger my suspicious nature even more than usual. But I like how, Oh, I'll vary. Also like Craig Federighi's hair styling pro app on his phone that he wants to hide was just such a funny thing to do.

I thought it was hilarious.

Ben: Also, the helmet that he was wearing in the skydiving scene that was literally just his hair. Just his hair. I didn't even notice that. I love the outfits,

Devindra: the skydiving outfits were like, Those were great,

Cherlynn: the jumpsuit with

Devindra: Suits almost like astronaut suits, but with like the colors and it was beautiful.

Those things were fun

Ben: and it made so much sense that it was like a hark back to the like Apple two. Yes. Era Apple two. Like

Devindra: white plus the colorful Apple app. Yep. Yep. I almost feel like they. They threw some shade at Google, right? They're like, Oh this was not on the live stream, but Tim Cook and Craig Federighi did get up on the stage at Apple Park.

And we're like, Hey, we're not going to have any fun. There's not going to be any stunts. [00:22:00] It's just going to be an hour of us. Just like delivering. It was very

Cherlynn: sarcastic. It was very sarcastic, but also.

Devindra: Literally what he was describing is what Google did just an hour of no fun delivering AI facts and I don't this is very boring and I don't care about all this.

And also, I don't know if I can trust half of this. I will say ultimately, between all the copilot stuff Microsoft has done between everything we've seen from open AI and chat GPT and the Google Gemini stuff. I at the very least feel like, Hey, we could trust Apple intelligence a little more because it's more focused on, Hey, I will do this thing within this app to make your life better and not, I am an overall assistant to do everything for you.

And I don't know what you're going to do with these AI generated images, but here they are. It feels more purposeful. Maybe not as exciting as it did last year for a lot of people, but this is how we will be using AI just like how we're using it right now for like occasional transcriptions and things like that.

That is useful functional stuff that doesn't require stealing, I don't know, resources from artists and also killing the environment in [00:23:00] the way that generated images can. All right, let's move on to Summer Games Fest. And while Sherilyn and I were in California doing all the Apple stuff, prepping for WWDC, another whole contingent of Engadget was in LA prepping for Summer Game Fest and getting ready for demos and briefings and all sorts of stuff.

There is no E3 this year because E3 is dead. We've talked about that, but Summer Game Fest is now like the, I don't know, the sort of new E3, like the, cause it's multiple streams. It's the Game Fest stream. With Jeff Keighley, but also Microsoft does a thing. Sony did their thing a couple weeks ago.

We see all these like cute things. I'm going to highlight some coverage here. Have you seen Lego Horizons Adventures, Shalyn? Do you understand what I'm talking

Cherlynn: about? Have not seen that I have not seen many of the Lego movies actually very recently I saw the it's not

Devindra: a Lego movie thing it's a horizon game thing So let me let's explain to what goes on here Cherlynn popular games and franchises occasionally get Lego fied So there's Star Wars Lego.

There's Harry Potter Lego [00:24:00] Basically, there's Marvel Lego stuff, right? This is the latest version of that stuff. So horizon You know, the zero, the horizon series on PlayStation from PlayStation four and five is now Lego formed. And I think it looks pretty adorable. I don't know, Ben, have you played the games?

Because I feel like the horizon games look really cool, but are really annoying to play. They feel like sub tier. AAA gaming for me where I'm like, I understand why you look so good, but I really wish I liked playing you better. And this game just looks like more fun than the actual horizon games.

Ben: I'm going to be real with you. I think there's a lot of stuff that is like Sony exclusive. That feels like a simulation of a AAA game. I am playing Ghost of Tsushima right now, and it. is fun, it's beautiful, but it's also surprisingly repetitive. Like every open world game. Yeah, I really understand where you're coming from.

But the new Zelda open world games, [00:25:00] like Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild, didn't feel quite as repetitive as like Ghost of Tsushima did. Like Tsushima?

Devindra: Yeah, I think

Ben: the

Devindra: thing like the Zelda stuff feels more alive and immersive, right? Like things just you stumble upon into things.

You're not like led from plot point to plot point. And I think the thing about Horizon is just, I don't, it plays very badly. It's like slow paced. There's a lot of like bow and arrow action. Whereas at least with Ghost of Tsushima, like you get cool samurai action. It's really fast. Like the actual action is fast.

But anyway, I'm not a huge fan of the Horizon games. Playing them, but Lego Horizon Ventures looks really cool. But,

Ben: and the really important thing about this being a Lego fied version of a Sony title is that the Lego fied versions of things are often like some of the first video games that kids play, period.

So that is their introduction to, Batman, that is their introduction to Indiana Jones. That's their introduction to Harry Potter when parents, yeah, when parents [00:26:00] think that maybe the real thing might be a little bit too advanced for them. Or, the idea of someone, falling down dead is scarier than, just Lego bricks, like they're

Devindra: also funnier.

These games tend to be like very comedic, very tongue in cheek. The Star Wars stuff. Like actively makes fun of Star Wars at times, which I think is hilarious. I need to play through those. Like they've done pretty much all the Star Wars movies, right? I need to play through those with my daughter. So this

Ben: is a great idea to introduce kids to one of Sony's like big franchises.

Oh

Devindra: man, they should do Lego Lego Last of Us. Oh no! This is such an SNL skit idea. Lego Last of Us would be amazing.

Ben: Oh. Lego Last of Us Part 2, where they try to lego fy the cycle of violence. What is the nature of revenge? They talk about, yeah, exactly. That would be beautiful.

Devindra: Aaron Suporius, Edding Gadget, calls Lego Horizon Adventure maybe Sony's most important game of the year.

Recall that Sony said that they're not going to have any major Basically [00:27:00] like studio titles happening this year. So this is a pretty big one for them. Some other stuff Kunitsugami, Path of the Goddess from Capcom. Yeah, from Capcom looks really cool. And it's like an action fantasy plus strategy game.

Jessica Condit previewed it. She says it feels as luscious as it looks. This is a weird looking game because it's like, it looks like a little bit. Almost Ninja Gaiden Actioner, but also there's like strategy stuff happening at the same time. I have no idea what's going on here, but this thing is coming on July 19th, so that is sooner than most of the games showing off at Summer Games Fest

Ben: yeah.

Yeah, from the screenshot, it looked pretty good. Souls like a little bit. And then I watched a bit of the trailer and I was like, no, this is Bayonetta. But then also what like strategy, it seems like it might be interesting. And if you're interested in any of those genres, then maybe it's two great tastes that taste great together.

Devindra: For sure. We're going to give all these games a Cherlynn scale. So I think the the Lego horizon game, maybe eight out of [00:28:00] 10 on the Cherlynn scale. Okay. This game. I would say zero out of 10, but I've got one for you, Cherlynn. Marvel Rivals, which is a team shooter using all the Marvel characters. I could see you getting into that.

I could see that being a 7 out of 10 on

Speaker 3: the Sherlock scale. It

Devindra: is like Overwatch, except it's all the, like literally all the Marvel people. So Iron Man, Hulk, I don't know, is Hulk blasting rays? I don't know how this is happening. Yeah, Vision also X Men stuff happening at the scene, like within it, from what I can see.

Spider Man's in here, Venom's in here, all the Marvel stuff. In a team thing, I would say,

Cherlynn: what I would play, not a team shooter. I would play a Marvel dating sim. Let's put Iron Man with like vision. Let's make them make out,

Ben: there was, if Marvel were cowards, that would do incredibly well.

Cause I was about to say something about how like Marvel has really infrequently had. A real like blockbuster franchise. Spider Man, I think does some of [00:29:00] the best for them. But if they were brave enough to do a dating sim where you could ship the characters.

Devindra: They did. They did.

Showing you, I think you need to play Marvel's Midnight Suns, which was a sort of like RPG strategy. Is it romance? There are romances within it, there are relationships, so you spend, it is a game where you have to fight big bad guys, but also you spend most of the time at a dormitory, just hanging out with Blade.

And everybody and just hanging out, having conversations for me, that was always like my favorite part of X Men stuff too, of just people talking to each other. So everybody yeah, go check out Marvel Midnight. I want to,

Cherlynn: I want to correct your scale a little bit. I think I don't know about eight out of 10 for the Lego Horizons thing.

I see it being good for you. I see it needed to be like extremely repetitive. Like this dude, hang on. Dude named Charlie in the chat was like Papa's. Pasta Perry or something. Pastaria. I don't know. It's if you put a word like a cute character, like a papa and you give me food like pasta, that's nine out of 10 on my scale.

Devindra: The thing about the Lego games is that they're all very repetitive. [00:30:00] Like it's about collecting stuff and just like very low difficulty things. So anyway, Marvel rivals Matt Smith wrote this up and he calls it like, yeah the biggest threat to this is all the other rival team shooters, like overwatch.

This thing looks cool, but I do not understand how they're balancing the various powers here. So I guess we'll see Matt Smith also covered Assassin Creed Shadow Shadows, which is the one set in Japan. And this one looks really cool. There's going to be a female assassin. Also the legendary black assassin or black samurai Yasuke is featured in this one too.

This game looks bad as hell or like badass in the way that Ghost of Tsushima does. I think it looks really cool. The only thing is, it's Assassin's Creed, and I don't know if we can trust Ubisoft to be super original lately, at least with the Assassin's Creed games. Thoughts? Ben? Zhilin?

Ben: So I remember, years ago, I looked up an article just now, Ubisoft said, In 2014, that they would never do an Assassin's Creed game [00:31:00] set in feudal Japan, but now that Assassin's Creed is basically releasing games, what, every year?

Every two years? So it's become like a 2K franchise. We have Assassin's Creed 2K24, we're finally getting Assassin's Creed in Japan.

Devindra: That's it was the most obvious thing in the world. Come on, we, a lot of us grew up playing Ninja Gaiden and a lot of similar games. Just give us open world, give us cool swords.

That's what, it's, we're begging you, begging Ubisoft to do it.

Ben: And that's what people were thinking about. Early on, they were saying, okay what assassins do we really know about? Perhaps the ones in Japan?

Devindra: Anyway, that looks cool. That looks, and that's also going to be on Apple hardware too.

Apple made a point to point out to show that's going to be running on Macs and also like iPads and stuff too. So this is another example of Apple getting like AAA games. I believe they also got the last couple Assassin's Creed. Yeah. The recent one set in the Middle East was also on Apple devices.

So that's all cool stuff. We actually saw some hardware. [00:32:00] From all these announcements to Microsoft announced. That

Cherlynn: was cool.

Devindra: I don't know if it's cool. Cool to me to see

Cherlynn: like hardware out of a gaming show,

Devindra: it's confusing because what we ended up getting is There's a 1 terabyte all digital Xbox Series X, which is not selling very well right now, but At $450, that's confusing because the MSRP for the Series X is still $500, but everybody has that thing on sale below four 50.

So for the longest time, you could have gotten the Series X for 400, I think at times. Occasionally I saw it's three 50. With a just drive in everything. There's no like hardware tweak for this. They're not making this any faster. So that is really weird, especially as we're hearing about the like.

PlayStation 5 Pro coming out there is a 600 two terabyte special edition Xbox Series X, which is baffling to me because nobody, very few people are buying the Xbox Series X. So presenting an even more expensive one show in. I [00:33:00] don't understand the capitalists more

Cherlynn: expensive. I will say I saw the headline and that's really the extent of it.

I was like, Oh, and all digital series X. Cool. I guess the series S doesn't need to exist anymore. I don't know. And also am I getting this one? Because I don't like to collect discs. I don't, but then you're saying it's more expensive than the, the previous series X.

Devindra: It depends. Like it's more expensive than the like MSRP.

So this is all very confusing. And Aaron Saporas wrote up a great piece about this is a little disappointing because we also saw from the whole Xbox leak stuff, and you can't always take that information, like to be completely legit, but we 500, two terabyte, all digital. Xbox Series X that was codenamed Brooklyn with faster Wi Fi and a lot of stuff and a new controller that had like Motion sensing like doing more stuff like that The DualSense controller is doing now on PlayStation 5 that controller is nowhere to be seen and instead We have a more expensive Xbox Series X that people already were not [00:34:00] wanting from Microsoft.

So that is weird Microsoft did show off like a whole bunch of cool games at their thing. Like we finally saw perfect dark We saw a bit of the new fable It has also been years since those things were announced and those games also aren't coming until 2025, I believe. So again I don't know what a difference is going to make for Microsoft, but so confusing when I look at Microsoft's problems, I'm like just you want to sell subscriptions, man, just make your shit cheaper, get, let people buy your box, and then they will subscribe to your thing.

Nobody's going to buy 600 Xbox. Maybe the weird, like the people who have already bought Xbox series X's may buy another one. I don't know. It's just baffling to me. So just does Microsoft not want the market for Xbox seems soft. It's super soft. My thinking is like Microsoft just doesn't want to lose more money on it.

Cause they're already losing a ton of money in Xbox hardware. So if you Lowr the price, then you're taking a bite out of potential revenues, right? But if you raise the price, then at least like maybe you'll make that up for the loyal fans who are already supporting [00:35:00] you, who are rebuying second consoles.

I don't know. That just seemed baffling to me. Another tidbit micro the Xbox head, Phil Spencer said I think we should have a handheld. I wonder what that means. Are they going to debut something this holiday season? Is that the thing they're really going to want people to push to?

Rather than a box into your TV, maybe a handheld that can be docked like a Switch, or a Steam Deck or something? To me, that seems like a logical path forward for Microsoft, especially if you want to sell Game Pass subscriptions. Yeah. Would you buy an Xbox handheld, Trillian?

Cherlynn: Bye is a strong word.

I will play on one depending on the software, I think. But I don't know. I have an INAO that I borrowed from Sam, I believe. And it's full windows. And after a while, I just basically sitting. Collecting dust. So I don't know that I'm the type of person that will get like a steam deck or whatever.

The steam deck

Devindra: is so much bigger too. So yeah. Okay. Okay. I think we know where it stands.

Cherlynn: I hook it up to my [00:36:00] TV. I think maybe if the Xbox gaming handheld could be hooked up to the TV, like a lot of them can, then I would be more inclined to, yeah.

Devindra: There's no reason they couldn't and right now that's another good use of the Steam Deck because it's like a portable console that you can play handheld, but bring it on vacation, dock it to the TV if you want to, and do some like big living room gaming too.

I remember you liked Arcane, right? Srillin, the series?

Cherlynn: The TV, the show? The

Devindra: League of Legends show? Yes. So we saw a trailer for Season 2? That looks fantastic. It seems like that's going to be the only other season of Arcane, so that looks cool. At least from what we've seen so far, that show takes forever to produce because the animation is so complicated and so in depth.

But I'm looking forward to seeing that. Yeah, folks, let us know what you like from all the gaming announcements. Like I was so focused on Apple. I only saw occasional trailers here and there, but perfect dark look cool. I am playing a bit of I am your beast, which is the demo. That demo is up now on steam and that's from the folks who did that max pain clone recently, which looked, that was a cool game.

[00:37:00] I really enjoyed playing that. And I'm your beast is just cool and stylish and violent and all the fun ways. So podcasts and gadget. com, let us know what you enjoyed from summer game fest and all the announcements recently.

Let's move on to other news. How do you think what do you think Cherlynnn? Currently as of now, I think X is officially making likes mostly private for everybody. Do you think this will hide your shame or do you not care?

Cherlynn: I saw, we were having a chat in the late afternoons, like of the team, the afternoon shift.

And I know that Pranav was like quite upset. He cannot no longer stalk some of the people that he would look at their likes. I think this is helpful.

Speaker 3: Yeah,

Cherlynn: it was helpful. I think it helped you understand what people were like in a way that their tweets or their retweets weren't going to show. For me, I.

Personally don't care. Like I don't didn't care if people saw my likes or not. Like I'm not going around liking salacious or like things. [00:38:00] But yeah, my take on this move is it's obviously protecting the people that Elon Musk wants to protect and himself included, right? What is he liking? The thing that makes me Like pause is like, what if what's what if a social platform, like Instagram starts doing this to hiding your likes, because you used to be able to like stalk people way more easily on Instagram, let's be honest.

And then now it's a bit more like of hoop jumping. And I know that. So all my experience of the internet is through the lens of Reddit, right? And Reddit, there's one that I follow. That's I don't follow it, but it pops up on my homepage. It's the Travis, I'm sorry, the Taylor Swift. And Travis Kelsey sort of subreddit where they're like, look at all the people he follows and look at all their posts he liked.

And I'm like,

Devindra: wow.

Cherlynn: Like it's not

Devindra: crazy. Yeah.

Cherlynn: I don't think it's telling really, I don't know, but it does. It is some data that you're now. That are now being hidden from you. So it is is like free speech, but hide your [00:39:00] shame. I don't know.

Devindra: That's what it is. Like every time Elon is yeah, we believe in total free speech, but also I don't want people to see what I truly believe in.

And the dude has been out there saying I dunno, racist and misogynistic things, and honestly, anti Semitic things at points too. So it's dude has actively supported neo nazis on his feed I wonder what, I almost look, I think like he, he just learned that likes are totally public and that people can hit a button and see everything you've liked.

And then it's just like a line of like porn and weird random stuff and weird racist stuff that he got

Cherlynn: called out. Or caught doing something recently that but the thing is we've all noticed that he does these things stupid like replies and whatnot And so like why is he only realizing now I think someone That he cares about the opinion of told him

Devindra: It's cat turd or whoever like one of those people that that also are Big fans of the former president.

I don't know. It's a very silly thing. Also we saw on the news this week that [00:40:00] Elon Musk withdrew his breach of contract lawsuit against OpenAI on Tuesday. The move came a day before a California judge was supposed to hear OpenAI's request for dismissal for that whole thing. That was the one he thought, he said OpenAI had become like a closed source, de facto subsidiary of Microsoft and was basically using OpenAI to make a lot of money and to license its services.

And he just pulled back on that. I wonder if the revelation about the Apple deal not being fully a thing that is making a ton of revenue could be part of that. But the other He's just jealous,

Cherlynn: he's just jealous Grok isn't getting more.

Devindra: He's all about, he wants to crock. He wants everybody to crock.

There was another report yesterday. The open AI's actual revenue is reportedly booming with annualized revenue of 3. 4 billion. That is, that's a lot of money. Where is that money coming from? Cause it's not just like chat GPT pro subscriptions. Revenue, because Microsoft owns 49%. I don't quite know.

So there's a lot of like weird, shady stuff happening.

Cherlynn: The paid subscription version of chat GPT alone. I don't, yeah. I don't [00:41:00] know if that's enough. It can't be billions. Like it's

Devindra: 20 bucks a month. And also I don't know how many people are actually doing that. Anyway. What did you think of this Sherilyn?

The news that Chrome OS will soon be leaning on the same technology that powers Android. That kind of makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

Cherlynn: I think it's interesting as to what it implies for the future of Chrome OS. I think we are, we've been waiting so long for this sort of like midway between Chrome and Android OS that could help Google better take on or better make better tablets or tablet software.

That's really all I could really think about. I don't know that it. Specifically

Devindra: right here, Google is saying you will be embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks as part of the foundation of Chrome OS. That's interesting, because before Chrome OS was like a Linux foundation plus Chrome, plus a lot of Chrome stuff, whereas Android was always like a Linux foundation, and now they're like Let's just smush the two together a little bit, right?

It

Cherlynn: feels as if it's building out the OS a bit more, like the Android kernel, the Android framework, that sort of stuff, like in the way it handles, maybe, [00:42:00] notifications or apps, maybe. And then like with Chrome running as a very like browser based sort of OS, like maybe it'll. Be on top of that Android framework even more.

Yeah, but here's the other thing too. Apparently this is going to take some time, but it will according to Google, enable more AI features on Chromebooks

Devindra: or at least enable. Yeah, it'll make it easier to develop because right now, if they want to do that, they'd have to build out the Chrome OS actual software base plus a separate stuff for Android.

And now Google can combine work a little more easily. So that makes sense.

Cherlynn: Yeah, and in the past Chrome OS has adopted quite a few Android features already yes, like I said, more Android app support, and then also the Android Bluetooth infrastructure was also baked into Chrome OS.

I can't tell you exactly when, but, somewhat recently. So yeah, it looks like definitely they want to put more AI in Chrome OS. I'm

Devindra: sure Google folks are looking at this and like, why are we managing two separate code bases for very similar products at times? Like ultimately Chrome OS could just end up being Android running like a full screen, [00:43:00] version of Chrome or something, or a slightly, I don't even know.

I don't even know why it should be a whole separate thing, except Chrome OS was a lot more secure than Android. So maybe this could open up security vulnerabilities. I don't know. We shall see final bit of news this week. And there's so much news this week. So we didn't get to have a chance to do everything, but I saw the news yesterday that Alamo draft house is being bought by Sony pitchers.

That is something

Cherlynn: I didn't know how to feel about this. Honestly I couldn't tell if it was a good thing net or not so great thing. We all love Alamo draft house, but yeah, it's huh.

Devindra: It's a whole thing. So in 2020, what was it? The Paramount decree ended. That was the thing that prevented movie studios from owning movie theaters, because that's how it used to be before the 1950s.

So like studios had direct control over cinemas and the experience of that meant they would like limit which movies could go where, or like really isolate things similar to how some games can only be on certain consoles, like how that all stuff is controlled. So this [00:44:00] is the first example we're seeing of that whole thing kind of Going away a little bit.

It's interesting because Alamo has been in trouble for a while. They declared bankruptcy a couple of years ago. I know their licensees have been shutting down in several states. Like people, people have been also talking about like bad labor practices and something from them.

This will financially help Alamo draft house. Help it survive longer as a brand. But I do wonder what this means. Like how will Sony picture integrations make their way into this chain? Will Sony like block things from other? That's what I was thinking. Other folks. There's nothing stopping them from doing that because the paramount decree is gone.

So that is weird. And I do wonder if we'll see more of that too, because before the whole like Reddit stock stuff happened, like AMC was tanking for a while. Regal was tanking and there was a thinking that in these companies, other companies, movie studios, and other companies may just start buying up theater change because these are big buildings that are already built with giant screens.

There's a lot you could [00:45:00] do with that infrastructure that isn't just Doing studio, studio movies and stuff too. So I guess we'll see. I'm just like really, I don't know, just really hesitant to celebrate this news at all. I know. Let's move on to what we're working on. Are you, is there, are you working on anything for Lynn?

Cause I'm dead right now.

Cherlynn: I am dead, but I have something like four edits on my plate today. So I got a. I got a power through and then and meetings and the work continues, even if you feel dead, sometimes

Devindra: the work continues. That's how it goes. We'll, we have devices that we'll be reviewing soon too.

So it'll, it just, it's an onslaught, like things just come at us folks. But yeah, when you get excited, we're going to reenergize after WWDC and get ready for all the new devices we're expecting any picks for us this week.

Cherlynn: I in the obviously I haven't been like. Doing any relaxing in the last few days, but today at last night, when I got home, I was like, finally, I am in my home.

I feel so good at home. I really like being in my apartment that I meet to order to feel good for me. [00:46:00] Finally sat back and turned on like my guilty pleasure. I saw on Netflix, perfect match season two is on. So I started watching perfect match. It is the trashiest stuff. The stuff that like, there's tLC and ABC and all of those quality, like quality, there's like reality TV. That's there's a standard, right? And then there's Netflix reality. And then there's Netflix reality in terms of perfect match where they basically pull people from their other reality shows, like the circle or love is blind or too hot to handle, and then they put them together in one space, I think it's in Tulum and then have them try to date each other.

And it is absolute trash and I am here for it. You know what I like? I like to watch people be bad or, go through these like struggles of like your self esteem and whatnot, and then psychologically tear them apart, but also compare them to people I know in real life, it is so somehow relaxing for me.

Devindra: It's like a brain massage for you. I get it. It's just it helps you chill out. That's [00:47:00] totally fine. I want to shout out. I've been reading or I guess listening to an audio book, which is how I can define reading at this point. Cause often my eyes are too tired to read cause I'm reading stuff all day.

But during our trip to WWDC and afterwards, I have been listening to the audio book for tomorrow and tomorrow. Have you heard of this, Cherlynn? No. This is a novel by Gabrielle Zevin. It's about two friends who bond over a love of video games and end up running a video game studio together.

But it's also, this novel about friendship and platonic love and romantic love and also finding a place for yourself in the world when you feel like the world is not meant for you to I think it's really fascinating and moving. It gets a little over the top at the end, but this is something people have been talking about recently because it is a, it is not like a tech centered book, but it is something that is well aware of like the culture of video games and what it means for us and how Things are built.

So I think you'd enjoy this one, Sherilyn. It's definitely going to become some sort of Netflix, I dunno, series or movie. I think a [00:48:00] movie is being planned. I know the rights were sold, but this thing is so like long and I wouldn't say quite epic, but it's about life. It's about a journey of life between friends.

And it would be really hard to contain this in like a 90 minute or two hour movie even. But anyway, I'm enjoying the audio book. I got that from Audible. But the book itself I'm sure would be a fun, easy, breezy read tomorrow and tomorrow. If you're listening to this show, I think you'd probably dig it.

So check it out. It's by Gabrielle Zeman.

Cherlynn: That's it for the episode this week, everyone. Thank you as always for listening. Our theme music is by game composer Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O'Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Elman. You can find DaVendra online at

Devindra: DaVendra on Twitter.

Wherever. Blue Sky, Mastodon, all over the place. And I talk about movies and TV at thefilmcast. com.

Cherlynn: If you want to send me some examples of mind numbing games or TV shows, like anesthetic for my brain send them to me on Twitter. I am at Cherlynn Lo over there. [00:49:00] Or on threads at Cherlynn Instagram, or just email CCHER at Engadget.

com. Email us your thoughts about the show at podcast at Engadget. com. Leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform and subscribe anywhere you get platforms, anywhere you get platforms.

Devindra: Yes. Thanks folks. We're out.

Cherlynn: Microsoft.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-podcast-the-fallout-from-apples-wwdc-2024-and-summer-game-fest-113057941.html?src=rss

Engadget Podcast: The fallout from Apple’s WWDC 2024 and Summer Game Fest

This week has felt like a month worth of news, now that we've wrapped up Apple's WWDC 2024 and Summer Game Fest in LA. In this episode, Cherlynn and Devindra discuss their final thoughts on Apple Intelligence and the company's upcoming software, and they chat about some of our coverage highlights from the pseudo-E3 Game Fest. Also, we dive into X making likes private (what is Elon hiding?!) and the news around Sony buying the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain.


Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

  • Our final thoughts on WWDC 2024 – 1:31

  • Bloomberg Report: Apple isn't paying OpenAI a fee for ChatGPT, but will share profits – 12:18

  • Summer Games Fest highlights: Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, LEGO Horizon Adventures, and an Assassin’s Creed finally set in Japan – 25:06

  • X makes users’ likes private – 40:27

  • ChromeOS will soon run on Android frameworks, enabling more AI on upcoming Chromebooks – 44:40

  • Pop culture picks – 49:44

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

Devindra: [00:00:00] What's up, Internet, and welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar.

Cherlynn: I'm Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low.

Devindra: We are back from Apple's WWDC, and we have thoughts. Plenty of thoughts. And I feel like, It's just one of those whirlwind things. Both Trillin and I got back in from California yesterday.

After recording this, I still feel like my body doesn't know, like, where I'm in, Trillin, or what time zone. I don't know how you feel.

Cherlynn: I went to the gym at 8 a. m. Eastern. That's my best way of getting back on the Eastern time zone. There you go.

Devindra: I like how you fit in the humble brag there. Yes, congrats on going to the gym for Lynn.

Fantastic. We're also going to be talking about Summer Game Fest, folks. We weren't there for that and I was trying to get Jess Condit on, but she's super busy still writing up stuff from that. So we have got a lot of coverage around that and there's some stories I want to highlight that Engadget has done.

Also some games that looks pretty cool. Also joining us this morning is podcast producer Ben Ellman, who I'm sure has thoughts on Apple and the game stuff. Good morning. I sure do. Good morning. And [00:01:00] as always, folks, if you're enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcast or of choice, leave us a review in iTunes.

Drop us an email at podcast@engadget.com. I'm not seeing enough of those emails. I would love to answer some reader questions. You can also typically join us Thursday mornings around 10 30 a. m. Eastern depending on the timing, really. It's just like about scheduling, but that's about the time you can carve out in your schedule for us.

Join us. You could see us on video. Sometimes we'll demo gadgets and We'll just have a great Q and a session too. So it's a fun time. Join us for that. I do want to point out if you're just listening to this episode, we did do a bonus episode at Apple's campus and it actually turned out pretty well because for Lynn and I were like right outside the, was it the Mac cafe or cafe Mac?

But we were outdoors surrounded by traffic and other noise, but it actually ended up sounding pretty good. I'd say. And that was like our overall thoughts on WWDC. Two days of going through meetings, going through the keynote and everything. In this episode, I want to take like a, just a step back and do you have any final thoughts for Lynn?

Cause I know you did a piece about the undersung features. That [00:02:00] you appreciated that were announced. Anything else you want to shout out?

Cherlynn: Yeah, when we did our recording I don't think I had taken my demo of the new satellite messaging features just yet. So I wasn't able to talk about it. Plus it was under embargo, it turns out.

This morning, my article on the details of how messaging via satellite will work is on engadget. com if you want to head on over, but yeah, there's a lot of like under the radar things. I got at some of them during our. Recorded episode earlier this week. Maps, for example, I don't know if I mentioned, but like maps had some really cool routes, like hikes built in now, and you can create a custom route and then you can share them.

So my whole thing is I'm going to create these custom, like scavenger hunt trails, or like, how do you get from the train station to my favorite restaurant in the fastest way in my mind and share them with my friends. Or share my goal is one day to share the preferred route with my Uber driver.

Don't take this tunnel, take that tunnel. So that was one of them. I really like a lot of the other features that I found out after the fact, like iOS 18 [00:03:00] actually has some math notes embedded into the notes app where you can write a little list of expenses from a group trip, for example, and then, put an equal sign to equate them, the name of venue was 50, 000 and then I don't know, food was 10, 000. And then you can tally it by saying venue plus food equal, and then take that divided by however many people you have. How big of a trip

Devindra: were you having where you have 50, 000? I know, right? I was, I went,

Cherlynn: it's a, it was a wedding trip.

This was like, I was also on Brian Tong's podcast after where I made this exact same sort of like example, but instead of saying trip, I said wedding. So I'm using the same numbers from wedding planning. Okay.

Devindra: Okay. Except for,

Cherlynn: I said it was a trip. Listen, I travel bougie, I just go on boats my life.

Devindra: Yeah, we do. We are well aware. But I feel like that's a feature that could be abused also to hey hey kids, follow this path to my murder den.

Cherlynn: Sure. Or something like that. I don't know. I don't know. Create custom paths to lure people into your ice cream van. But that's obviously then on the person to decide whether or not to follow it.

It's not like telling you where to live [00:04:00] your

Speaker 3: life.

Cherlynn: Buddy three Oh five love in the chat asked if texting via satellite will be a paid service after a year. So Apple has literally no outright answer for it's a really shrug

Devindra: emoji on all the satellite services for less

Cherlynn: shrug emoji and more like. Like not sure yet.

I feel like the sense I'm getting is that they're playing their cards close to their chest. The satellite service provider for their satellite services is global star. And if I had to guess, I look at what global star charges and maybe do some math around like the package or whatever but it's,

Devindra: it's Apple.

If they were to do that, it would be like discounted somehow. It'd be right. Exactly. That's what I meant.

Cherlynn: Do the math to make it not. It's as expensive in assuming you already have sort of a device. Again I'm extremely extrapolating here. I'm not like, I don't have any insider info here other than I know there's no plan.

Devindra: I think it's funny. It's been like two years since Apple announced like satellite features. First of all, it was like the emergency SOS feature, right? If you're stuck in the [00:05:00] middle of nowhere, maybe you could send a short text somewhere to tell people where you are. And now it's like straight up, like more messaging features.

Cherlynn: No. Emergency SOS via satellite was just for emergency responders. So you were only alLowd to text it would be like when you're trying to dial nine one one, but you don't have a signal at all. Then you would be redirected to a service center. So Apple had these like middle people that it was helping relay these emergency SOS messages to either.

It would figure out where your closest nine one one slash emergency services situation is and route you there with your satellite message. Or have you like have they handle it themselves? Maybe if they like be the dispatcher or they get in touch for you. And it was like, yeah, only text messages.

This time around, yeah. Messages via satellite is different, right? You're not limited to who you can message over satellite this time. You can send it to pretty much anyone in your iMessage. IMessages are end to end encrypted. If you send that, you're also alLowd to send SMS, the. The stipulation that Apple has put in place is that [00:06:00] for SMS, only the person that's off grid is able to initiate a message over satellite because they want to prevent, promotional business messages from clogging up the congestion, the light, the network, the satellite network.

That

Devindra: makes sense. Yeah.

Cherlynn: Yeah, it absolutely makes a lot of sense. And I think that the inclusion of SMS here is good. So I asked, I was like, why not RCS? And I think the idea, I think what I'm getting is that like RCS messages are like bigger in terms of size to like compress over satellite.

Even if it's just text. So I think there's just challenges and complications there, but still, Cool too. Is it

Devindra: straight up just text is it the messages app, but doing multimedia stuff too? No, so it's just

Cherlynn: text and then with emoji as well as emoji tap back reactions. By the way, before this dubbed up, I did not know that those reactions are called tap back.

So thank you very much WWDC for Informing me. Yeah. Those, how, like when you're in a message with your friends and you like gray tap their double tap their balloon, I remember

Devindra: when they announced it,

Cherlynn: react, I [00:07:00] didn't know the name was tap back. I thought tap back was something else.

Devindra: This is sad.

We can't take the Android out of Cherlynn because yeah, that was a thing people were talking about on the Apple side. It's just funny when they talk about

Cherlynn: on your phone.

Devindra: No. You could apply so many memes to Apple's approach to the satellite subscription, right? Initially it was like, ask me in two years, please?

I have not figured this out yet. And then last year, they were like we're going to extend it for one more year. So I don't have to think about this. It's it is the ultimate can I extend the deadline for my book report, please? Professor? Can I, it's very much, it's hilarious.

So now it's a whole, yeah.

Cherlynn: I think it's interesting because it lines up with their approach to all of their Apple intelligence things where they're not charging people a fee. I think there's an unspoken yet in there. And I think Apple wants to be able to see if there's a. Reason to charge people before it charges people, which is not a bad idea.

I think right now, satellite services on iPhone 14 and later haven't seemed, [00:08:00] enough to justify paying an additional monthly fee for it, even if it's a dollar a month, like I just don't know yet, but with messages via Silhouette, I can see they're building their way there,

Devindra: yeah, it's also once you start being like, Okay, we're gonna start nickel and diming you for this stuff.

And I do feel like Apple is one of those companies. It's like that. Is that actually better for the customer experience? Do we actually does that actually mean people won't use it? If somebody has to subscribe to it, and then they're in an actual emergency, and they are going to subscribe to it on the go.

Is that person like, yeah, they don't know how to deal with that potential PR disasters. And now it's just like

Cherlynn: optics are awful. If you're suddenly just optics are

Devindra: awful. So now it's okay free for everybody. I think this is related to something we were talking about Trillian where I really did not want Apple to do like a paid AI service and they announced Apple intelligence.

And again, folks go back to our bonus podcast. You can hear our main thoughts about all the major stuff, but they specifically did not do Apple intelligence pro. Or plus or anything. It's just Hey, it's doing a lot of stuff that's baked into your devices. Either the iPhone 15 pro [00:09:00] max or the pro or the newer devices coming up or, M series max as well.

But it's what's on device, some Apple stuff in the cloud, which they're doing some cool privacy stuff with, and very little bits of chat GPT, like chat GPT when necessary, but nowhere along this point, are they like, please pay us more for faster. That's not happening, right?

Cherlynn: It's not seeming like it's happening.

And I think that's a good thing. And I think also the integration with chat GPT at no cost is a good idea on Apple's part. I do want to point out that CF five 42 in the chat that say that if satellite text is not available. It's going to cost, they would rather pay per use instead of a monthly amount.

Because you'd rarely use it. And yeah, that seems like maybe it will be the approach. It seems smarter to offer people that at a nominal one time fee when needed for something, that's an emergency thing, right? Like you don't have to pay for every single use, but we'll charge you per text. That makes a little bit more sense.

Even if it's very 1990s,

Devindra: I think that's the other thing like, Oh, we're [00:10:00] back to paying per text now. That's, I know,

Cherlynn: I know. Yeah. But that helps to, reduce or relieve the congestion, potential congestion on those networks that are so precious.

Devindra: Gotcha. Now that we've had some time away from WWDC, Sherilyn, and our coverage and all the meetings and everything do you have any thoughts about what is next for Apple for the year ahead or with their new software or anything?

Cherlynn: I'm looking to iPhone event for Surprises, I do think again, I'm keeping an eye on the chat and there are some things that like, it feels, so we talked about this on the episode that we prerecorded, but maybe for our like main audience, I want to repeat and reiterate the main takeaway.

It is that as usual, it seems like with some of these features, Apple is copying or doing things that other people have done before, right? AI. The chat is talking about the icon tints, like the customizable homepage, the RCS with support. These are things that Android has done for a while. Android has had material you and like the tinting of the icons.

But I gotta say, we said this the last episode, and Apple seems to do it a little bit better. It's [00:11:00] really it's more sophisticated. They took their time to do something better and they're slow. And maybe the implementation isn't all the way there, but what they have delivered works the way they say it will, and they don't make promises.

They don't. Really? Typically, I think that's the thing.

Devindra: Yeah. One thing I want to point out, there was news yesterday that basically Bloomberg reported that Apple is not actually paying open AI for using and also open AI is not paying Apple. It seems like a weird agreement where.

Basically, OpenAI will get money down the line from like revenue sharing. I guess that's like the plan moving forward. But it is to me that really describes what we were talking about before, Cherlynn, where Apple has been like, okay, we have all this AI stuff and here carved in a little island. Is going to be our little AI model friends, right?

Right now, our friend is chat GPT, but if that friend breaks this relationship, if like they do something bad or we don't want to like deal with them anymore. Do you just cut out that [00:12:00] friend, X them out entirely, replace them with another, with Google Gemini or something. It seems very like plug and play, like what Apple can put in there.

They also mentioned that they are, they would consider Gemini. They have not. made any formal deals or other models that are very specific. So if you're a health worker, maybe there's a metal medical AI model that would be better suited for helping you rather than to have GPT or something. So that is interesting.

Cherlynn: It was nice of them. Nice. It was like smart of them to be like, Oh yeah, we're supporting the best one out there. Who's a pioneer in the field of this open AI. And I'm like, I don't know, I'd argue with Best. It is a pioneer, certainly. And I, we'll see, right? And they never mentioned They actually in the panel after WWDC keynote, by the way, that I just seen moderated panel Craig Federighi did mention that like Gemini or John Andrea might be the one that said this, but yeah Gemini might even be supported in future if it gets to that point.

He

Devindra: said that. Yeah.

Cherlynn: Yeah. Yeah. So interesting,

Devindra: it's interesting. Also, by the [00:13:00] way, I just want to talk about like how weird that whole situation was. So after the WWDC keynote, Apple invited press to come to this talk between Craig Federighi, their head of software engineering, and John Gianandrea Gianandrea their head of AI, right?

Oh, this is gonna be interesting. This is gonna be informative. Or informative, but it was also moderated by iJustine and no shade to her. I think she's great, but it did feel like this was just a scenario where Apple wrote these questions and Hey, person who is media well known, please ask these questions that we've asked and do not stray from any of this.

Cherlynn: It's one step above when Samsung does it's like their own company execs interviewing their other company executives situation where like you're paid literally by Samsung to interview Samsung people. In this case, I don't know if iJustine was paid, but it definitely feels yeah, you're a bit more.

Most

Devindra: definitely.

Cherlynn: But someone that was more controllable than, say, a member of the press,

Devindra: it's just, it is interesting when companies do that, but Ben, go ahead.

Ben: So I was gonna say that it was also a little bit like how Disney does all of its PR stuff. [00:14:00] Actually this is on my mind because I saw the four hour long, was it?

It's four hours, the Star Wars hotel video. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So now people are talking about, Oh Disney does PR weirdly because it's also like really on rails. You have to say like the actual trademark name for everything. So was this similar?

Devindra: To me, I actually had that in my mind too, Ben. To me, it did feel like that.

It was yes, because of course branded content right here, blah, blah, blah. Everything we just said at the keynote, like it definitely felt on rails. It didn't feel like a natural conversation where. I feel like if one of us were to do that chat, we'd be like, yeah, but who, where are you, what are you training these models on?

What's going on here? Give us the full skinny and everything. And

Ben: yeah, can you tell us a little bit more about private cloud compute? Because that sounds like you're talking out of both sides. They

Devindra: did end up saying more about that, but even then I would have liked to be more. But that is funny.

I wrote up like what Apple and what specifically. I think Craig Federighi laid out for the whole Apple, the [00:15:00] private cloud compute thing too, but the really interesting there too is like Apple for years has been saying like, Hey, our stuff is on device. It's more secure than Google where you're sending all your photos to the cloud for processing or whatever.

And now they have to rely on the cloud a little. So they're like, okay. But is it a secure cloud? Is it a private cloud? Yes. Private cloud compute. Apple did say a few things that were interesting about that, Ben, where the information being sent, first of all it's tidbits, the little bits of information that you're, if you're asking Siri about something, we'll go there fully anonymized, like the private relay stuff that is already on iPhones and Apple services.

So that's helpful. Also the servers don't store anything. Which I think I'm sure the FBI is looking at this and no Apple, please, we need logs. We need data to see how people access things. And none of that is going to be on the servers. They say Apple has historically, like there was that whole thing, right?

About them fighting against the FBI that wanted to unlock. I think it was a shooter's phone at one point, right?

Ben: Yes, I remember that. That was like 2015, 2016 or [00:16:00] something.

Devindra: And then the, I believe authorities got into the phone in another way, but Apple for its part was like trying hard to push back against that.

So yes, it's a bad name. It's also like very marketing heavy, but also I don't know. They say they've they've laid out like the software that the servers are also using for security audits. Devices will only be able to talk to those approved servers. So it's not like somebody can intercept your question or something.

And the audit thing is something nobody else is doing for cloud security right now, at least from what I've seen.

Ben: The way it made it seem like, Like in the keynote though, was that like everyone gets their own like place in the server,

Devindra: which is impossible. That's certainly not true. But it's like, when you talk about the cloud the cloud is an amorphous thing.

It could be 10 servers. It could be 20 servers. But the point is, it's like this thing that can grow as needs require. That stuff is, that's just how we've been living with the cloud so far. But I. I certainly feel better about private cloud compute than I did about Microsoft recall right where [00:17:00] researchers were immediately like, Oh, you're just going to capture everything we do on your computer on our computers.

Okay. You're not graying out. You're not blurring out passwords or authentication or anything. And then people realize yeah, these are just a plain text database sitting in your hard drive. The other accounts on your system can access those very Easy to see security holes. I at least think like Apple has anticipated some of those on the server side.

So that's something. Yeah. Any other thoughts for Lynn out of WWDC?

Cherlynn: I honestly feel like I could talk about dub forever. But I will say that some people in our chat seem to be like underwhelmed by it all. I think I don't know about underwhelming. I think more, I was intrigued by a lot of the little things that seem to be coming to iOS 18 and watchOS.

I can't wait to try some of these features out for myself and see how my like more mainstream average friends, average Joe friends feel about AI. Like I was in the gym this morning to repeat that. And I was asking everybody, everyone's like, how was California? Cause you know, I didn't come to the gym for a few days and I was like, oh yeah, I learned [00:18:00] about this, learned about that.

And I'm waiting to see how people feel about it. And I think. I don't think we'll know until iOS and all the other software updates really roll out later this year. So we'll see.

Devindra: It's, it's certainly not as exciting as last year was. Like I went to, I went last year because there was new hardware and a whole new platform and a whole new vision of computing for Apple.

And now this is Hey we're just like catching up a little bit on AI. But also I think this this stuff is far more important in the long run for Apple than just the launch of vision pro because Apple intelligence covers everything. It's going to cover all their devices. It's also like a kind of like a reframing of how Siri will work, of how a lot of the, their apps will work like notes and everything, getting certain AI driven features.

Like briefly they had mentioned, Oh, you can, you could record calls on a, on voice memos and also have those automatically transcribed. And for some people like us. That's amazing stuff. That's tremendously useful. Also another example of Apple maybe putting a few apps out of business, I think call recorder and some of the other ones, like they, they may have some trouble.

[00:19:00] Yeah.

Cherlynn: Yeah,

Ben: they're putting my favorite tiny app out of business with Mac OS Sequoia, which one I love magnet and now they're going to do windows tiling like innately on the straight out of Windows 10

Devindra: baby. Apple's got it in 2024. Amazing. Amazing. Anything else you want to shout out, Ben? Because I know you had a lot of thoughts, too, on Apple's side.

Ben: The biggest thing was that it seems like a hidden app folder is going to be a problem in a lot of people's relationships.

Devindra: I, it's not that hard to bury an app into something right now, but yeah, that's certainly, what a targeted way to hide your Tinder,

Ben: yeah, and the way that these companies are going to pitch it is the same way companies pitched private browsing when private browsing started to be a thing, which is if you want to look for gifts for your loved ones or something, and you don't want them to know about it.

Yeah, sure. Sure,

Devindra: buddy. Sure. I like the app lock controls, that stuff looks cool. I don't know for

Ben: Oh yeah, I was thinking specifically about [00:20:00] you giving your phone to one of your kids. And then making sure that they can only watch a video or play that one game inside an That's super

Devindra: helpful and also shows Apple's kind of evolving its platforms for the way we actually use our devices.

Because you still can't do multi users on an iPad or something, right? So you have to hand an iPad with all of your stuff on it to a kid. And that's not great. And I don't, they probably will never do multi user. They'll be like, buy another iPad. That's how you do multi user iPads, right? Buy your

Cherlynn: mom an iPad.

You can't.

Devindra: And that's how I have ended up with three or four iPads in my house, and I'm already contemplating another one just because the ones I bought was like, Oh, we could share this. We could all use this. Now my daughter took this one. My wife took this one. This is now the baby video iPad.

It's tough.

Cherlynn: To repeat what Michael Coley in the chat said, I am adequately whelmed. This is absolutely true. I am not overwhelmed or overwhelmed. I am. By WWDC 2024, I will say though that Craig Federighi's all like his jokes and like the stunts or [00:21:00] what do you call them?

Gags. Yeah. Those are, I thought it was funny. And then the locked and hidden apps are a thing I have to it was going to make me feel even more like suspicious as a person. It's just not, it's going to trigger my suspicious nature even more than usual. But I like how, Oh, I'll vary. Also like Craig Federighi's hair styling pro app on his phone that he wants to hide was just such a funny thing to do.

I thought it was hilarious.

Ben: Also, the helmet that he was wearing in the skydiving scene that was literally just his hair. Just his hair. I didn't even notice that. I love the outfits,

Devindra: the skydiving outfits were like, Those were great,

Cherlynn: the jumpsuit with

Devindra: Suits almost like astronaut suits, but with like the colors and it was beautiful.

Those things were fun

Ben: and it made so much sense that it was like a hark back to the like Apple two. Yes. Era Apple two. Like

Devindra: white plus the colorful Apple app. Yep. Yep. I almost feel like they. They threw some shade at Google, right? They're like, Oh this was not on the live stream, but Tim Cook and Craig Federighi did get up on the stage at Apple Park.

And we're like, Hey, we're not going to have any fun. There's not going to be any stunts. [00:22:00] It's just going to be an hour of us. Just like delivering. It was very

Cherlynn: sarcastic. It was very sarcastic, but also.

Devindra: Literally what he was describing is what Google did just an hour of no fun delivering AI facts and I don't this is very boring and I don't care about all this.

And also, I don't know if I can trust half of this. I will say ultimately, between all the copilot stuff Microsoft has done between everything we've seen from open AI and chat GPT and the Google Gemini stuff. I at the very least feel like, Hey, we could trust Apple intelligence a little more because it's more focused on, Hey, I will do this thing within this app to make your life better and not, I am an overall assistant to do everything for you.

And I don't know what you're going to do with these AI generated images, but here they are. It feels more purposeful. Maybe not as exciting as it did last year for a lot of people, but this is how we will be using AI just like how we're using it right now for like occasional transcriptions and things like that.

That is useful functional stuff that doesn't require stealing, I don't know, resources from artists and also killing the environment in [00:23:00] the way that generated images can. All right, let's move on to Summer Games Fest. And while Sherilyn and I were in California doing all the Apple stuff, prepping for WWDC, another whole contingent of Engadget was in LA prepping for Summer Game Fest and getting ready for demos and briefings and all sorts of stuff.

There is no E3 this year because E3 is dead. We've talked about that, but Summer Game Fest is now like the, I don't know, the sort of new E3, like the, cause it's multiple streams. It's the Game Fest stream. With Jeff Keighley, but also Microsoft does a thing. Sony did their thing a couple weeks ago.

We see all these like cute things. I'm going to highlight some coverage here. Have you seen Lego Horizons Adventures, Shalyn? Do you understand what I'm talking

Cherlynn: about? Have not seen that I have not seen many of the Lego movies actually very recently I saw the it's not

Devindra: a Lego movie thing it's a horizon game thing So let me let's explain to what goes on here Cherlynn popular games and franchises occasionally get Lego fied So there's Star Wars Lego.

There's Harry Potter Lego [00:24:00] Basically, there's Marvel Lego stuff, right? This is the latest version of that stuff. So horizon You know, the zero, the horizon series on PlayStation from PlayStation four and five is now Lego formed. And I think it looks pretty adorable. I don't know, Ben, have you played the games?

Because I feel like the horizon games look really cool, but are really annoying to play. They feel like sub tier. AAA gaming for me where I'm like, I understand why you look so good, but I really wish I liked playing you better. And this game just looks like more fun than the actual horizon games.

Ben: I'm going to be real with you. I think there's a lot of stuff that is like Sony exclusive. That feels like a simulation of a AAA game. I am playing Ghost of Tsushima right now, and it. is fun, it's beautiful, but it's also surprisingly repetitive. Like every open world game. Yeah, I really understand where you're coming from.

But the new Zelda open world games, [00:25:00] like Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild, didn't feel quite as repetitive as like Ghost of Tsushima did. Like Tsushima?

Devindra: Yeah, I think

Ben: the

Devindra: thing like the Zelda stuff feels more alive and immersive, right? Like things just you stumble upon into things.

You're not like led from plot point to plot point. And I think the thing about Horizon is just, I don't, it plays very badly. It's like slow paced. There's a lot of like bow and arrow action. Whereas at least with Ghost of Tsushima, like you get cool samurai action. It's really fast. Like the actual action is fast.

But anyway, I'm not a huge fan of the Horizon games. Playing them, but Lego Horizon Ventures looks really cool. But,

Ben: and the really important thing about this being a Lego fied version of a Sony title is that the Lego fied versions of things are often like some of the first video games that kids play, period.

So that is their introduction to, Batman, that is their introduction to Indiana Jones. That's their introduction to Harry Potter when parents, yeah, when parents [00:26:00] think that maybe the real thing might be a little bit too advanced for them. Or, the idea of someone, falling down dead is scarier than, just Lego bricks, like they're

Devindra: also funnier.

These games tend to be like very comedic, very tongue in cheek. The Star Wars stuff. Like actively makes fun of Star Wars at times, which I think is hilarious. I need to play through those. Like they've done pretty much all the Star Wars movies, right? I need to play through those with my daughter. So this

Ben: is a great idea to introduce kids to one of Sony's like big franchises.

Oh

Devindra: man, they should do Lego Lego Last of Us. Oh no! This is such an SNL skit idea. Lego Last of Us would be amazing.

Ben: Oh. Lego Last of Us Part 2, where they try to lego fy the cycle of violence. What is the nature of revenge? They talk about, yeah, exactly. That would be beautiful.

Devindra: Aaron Suporius, Edding Gadget, calls Lego Horizon Adventure maybe Sony's most important game of the year.

Recall that Sony said that they're not going to have any major Basically [00:27:00] like studio titles happening this year. So this is a pretty big one for them. Some other stuff Kunitsugami, Path of the Goddess from Capcom. Yeah, from Capcom looks really cool. And it's like an action fantasy plus strategy game.

Jessica Condit previewed it. She says it feels as luscious as it looks. This is a weird looking game because it's like, it looks like a little bit. Almost Ninja Gaiden Actioner, but also there's like strategy stuff happening at the same time. I have no idea what's going on here, but this thing is coming on July 19th, so that is sooner than most of the games showing off at Summer Games Fest

Ben: yeah.

Yeah, from the screenshot, it looked pretty good. Souls like a little bit. And then I watched a bit of the trailer and I was like, no, this is Bayonetta. But then also what like strategy, it seems like it might be interesting. And if you're interested in any of those genres, then maybe it's two great tastes that taste great together.

Devindra: For sure. We're going to give all these games a Cherlynn scale. So I think the the Lego horizon game, maybe eight out of [00:28:00] 10 on the Cherlynn scale. Okay. This game. I would say zero out of 10, but I've got one for you, Cherlynn. Marvel Rivals, which is a team shooter using all the Marvel characters. I could see you getting into that.

I could see that being a 7 out of 10 on

Speaker 3: the Sherlock scale. It

Devindra: is like Overwatch, except it's all the, like literally all the Marvel people. So Iron Man, Hulk, I don't know, is Hulk blasting rays? I don't know how this is happening. Yeah, Vision also X Men stuff happening at the scene, like within it, from what I can see.

Spider Man's in here, Venom's in here, all the Marvel stuff. In a team thing, I would say,

Cherlynn: what I would play, not a team shooter. I would play a Marvel dating sim. Let's put Iron Man with like vision. Let's make them make out,

Ben: there was, if Marvel were cowards, that would do incredibly well.

Cause I was about to say something about how like Marvel has really infrequently had. A real like blockbuster franchise. Spider Man, I think does some of [00:29:00] the best for them. But if they were brave enough to do a dating sim where you could ship the characters.

Devindra: They did. They did.

Showing you, I think you need to play Marvel's Midnight Suns, which was a sort of like RPG strategy. Is it romance? There are romances within it, there are relationships, so you spend, it is a game where you have to fight big bad guys, but also you spend most of the time at a dormitory, just hanging out with Blade.

And everybody and just hanging out, having conversations for me, that was always like my favorite part of X Men stuff too, of just people talking to each other. So everybody yeah, go check out Marvel Midnight. I want to,

Cherlynn: I want to correct your scale a little bit. I think I don't know about eight out of 10 for the Lego Horizons thing.

I see it being good for you. I see it needed to be like extremely repetitive. Like this dude, hang on. Dude named Charlie in the chat was like Papa's. Pasta Perry or something. Pastaria. I don't know. It's if you put a word like a cute character, like a papa and you give me food like pasta, that's nine out of 10 on my scale.

Devindra: The thing about the Lego games is that they're all very repetitive. [00:30:00] Like it's about collecting stuff and just like very low difficulty things. So anyway, Marvel rivals Matt Smith wrote this up and he calls it like, yeah the biggest threat to this is all the other rival team shooters, like overwatch.

This thing looks cool, but I do not understand how they're balancing the various powers here. So I guess we'll see Matt Smith also covered Assassin Creed Shadow Shadows, which is the one set in Japan. And this one looks really cool. There's going to be a female assassin. Also the legendary black assassin or black samurai Yasuke is featured in this one too.

This game looks bad as hell or like badass in the way that Ghost of Tsushima does. I think it looks really cool. The only thing is, it's Assassin's Creed, and I don't know if we can trust Ubisoft to be super original lately, at least with the Assassin's Creed games. Thoughts? Ben? Zhilin?

Ben: So I remember, years ago, I looked up an article just now, Ubisoft said, In 2014, that they would never do an Assassin's Creed game [00:31:00] set in feudal Japan, but now that Assassin's Creed is basically releasing games, what, every year?

Every two years? So it's become like a 2K franchise. We have Assassin's Creed 2K24, we're finally getting Assassin's Creed in Japan.

Devindra: That's it was the most obvious thing in the world. Come on, we, a lot of us grew up playing Ninja Gaiden and a lot of similar games. Just give us open world, give us cool swords.

That's what, it's, we're begging you, begging Ubisoft to do it.

Ben: And that's what people were thinking about. Early on, they were saying, okay what assassins do we really know about? Perhaps the ones in Japan?

Devindra: Anyway, that looks cool. That looks, and that's also going to be on Apple hardware too.

Apple made a point to point out to show that's going to be running on Macs and also like iPads and stuff too. So this is another example of Apple getting like AAA games. I believe they also got the last couple Assassin's Creed. Yeah. The recent one set in the Middle East was also on Apple devices.

So that's all cool stuff. We actually saw some hardware. [00:32:00] From all these announcements to Microsoft announced. That

Cherlynn: was cool.

Devindra: I don't know if it's cool. Cool to me to see

Cherlynn: like hardware out of a gaming show,

Devindra: it's confusing because what we ended up getting is There's a 1 terabyte all digital Xbox Series X, which is not selling very well right now, but At $450, that's confusing because the MSRP for the Series X is still $500, but everybody has that thing on sale below four 50.

So for the longest time, you could have gotten the Series X for 400, I think at times. Occasionally I saw it's three 50. With a just drive in everything. There's no like hardware tweak for this. They're not making this any faster. So that is really weird, especially as we're hearing about the like.

PlayStation 5 Pro coming out there is a 600 two terabyte special edition Xbox Series X, which is baffling to me because nobody, very few people are buying the Xbox Series X. So presenting an even more expensive one show in. I [00:33:00] don't understand the capitalists more

Cherlynn: expensive. I will say I saw the headline and that's really the extent of it.

I was like, Oh, and all digital series X. Cool. I guess the series S doesn't need to exist anymore. I don't know. And also am I getting this one? Because I don't like to collect discs. I don't, but then you're saying it's more expensive than the, the previous series X.

Devindra: It depends. Like it's more expensive than the like MSRP.

So this is all very confusing. And Aaron Saporas wrote up a great piece about this is a little disappointing because we also saw from the whole Xbox leak stuff, and you can't always take that information, like to be completely legit, but we 500, two terabyte, all digital. Xbox Series X that was codenamed Brooklyn with faster Wi Fi and a lot of stuff and a new controller that had like Motion sensing like doing more stuff like that The DualSense controller is doing now on PlayStation 5 that controller is nowhere to be seen and instead We have a more expensive Xbox Series X that people already were not [00:34:00] wanting from Microsoft.

So that is weird Microsoft did show off like a whole bunch of cool games at their thing. Like we finally saw perfect dark We saw a bit of the new fable It has also been years since those things were announced and those games also aren't coming until 2025, I believe. So again I don't know what a difference is going to make for Microsoft, but so confusing when I look at Microsoft's problems, I'm like just you want to sell subscriptions, man, just make your shit cheaper, get, let people buy your box, and then they will subscribe to your thing.

Nobody's going to buy 600 Xbox. Maybe the weird, like the people who have already bought Xbox series X's may buy another one. I don't know. It's just baffling to me. So just does Microsoft not want the market for Xbox seems soft. It's super soft. My thinking is like Microsoft just doesn't want to lose more money on it.

Cause they're already losing a ton of money in Xbox hardware. So if you Lowr the price, then you're taking a bite out of potential revenues, right? But if you raise the price, then at least like maybe you'll make that up for the loyal fans who are already supporting [00:35:00] you, who are rebuying second consoles.

I don't know. That just seemed baffling to me. Another tidbit micro the Xbox head, Phil Spencer said I think we should have a handheld. I wonder what that means. Are they going to debut something this holiday season? Is that the thing they're really going to want people to push to?

Rather than a box into your TV, maybe a handheld that can be docked like a Switch, or a Steam Deck or something? To me, that seems like a logical path forward for Microsoft, especially if you want to sell Game Pass subscriptions. Yeah. Would you buy an Xbox handheld, Trillian?

Cherlynn: Bye is a strong word.

I will play on one depending on the software, I think. But I don't know. I have an INAO that I borrowed from Sam, I believe. And it's full windows. And after a while, I just basically sitting. Collecting dust. So I don't know that I'm the type of person that will get like a steam deck or whatever.

The steam deck

Devindra: is so much bigger too. So yeah. Okay. Okay. I think we know where it stands.

Cherlynn: I hook it up to my [00:36:00] TV. I think maybe if the Xbox gaming handheld could be hooked up to the TV, like a lot of them can, then I would be more inclined to, yeah.

Devindra: There's no reason they couldn't and right now that's another good use of the Steam Deck because it's like a portable console that you can play handheld, but bring it on vacation, dock it to the TV if you want to, and do some like big living room gaming too.

I remember you liked Arcane, right? Srillin, the series?

Cherlynn: The TV, the show? The

Devindra: League of Legends show? Yes. So we saw a trailer for Season 2? That looks fantastic. It seems like that's going to be the only other season of Arcane, so that looks cool. At least from what we've seen so far, that show takes forever to produce because the animation is so complicated and so in depth.

But I'm looking forward to seeing that. Yeah, folks, let us know what you like from all the gaming announcements. Like I was so focused on Apple. I only saw occasional trailers here and there, but perfect dark look cool. I am playing a bit of I am your beast, which is the demo. That demo is up now on steam and that's from the folks who did that max pain clone recently, which looked, that was a cool game.

[00:37:00] I really enjoyed playing that. And I'm your beast is just cool and stylish and violent and all the fun ways. So podcasts and gadget. com, let us know what you enjoyed from summer game fest and all the announcements recently.

Let's move on to other news. How do you think what do you think Cherlynnn? Currently as of now, I think X is officially making likes mostly private for everybody. Do you think this will hide your shame or do you not care?

Cherlynn: I saw, we were having a chat in the late afternoons, like of the team, the afternoon shift.

And I know that Pranav was like quite upset. He cannot no longer stalk some of the people that he would look at their likes. I think this is helpful.

Speaker 3: Yeah,

Cherlynn: it was helpful. I think it helped you understand what people were like in a way that their tweets or their retweets weren't going to show. For me, I.

Personally don't care. Like I don't didn't care if people saw my likes or not. Like I'm not going around liking salacious or like things. [00:38:00] But yeah, my take on this move is it's obviously protecting the people that Elon Musk wants to protect and himself included, right? What is he liking? The thing that makes me Like pause is like, what if what's what if a social platform, like Instagram starts doing this to hiding your likes, because you used to be able to like stalk people way more easily on Instagram, let's be honest.

And then now it's a bit more like of hoop jumping. And I know that. So all my experience of the internet is through the lens of Reddit, right? And Reddit, there's one that I follow. That's I don't follow it, but it pops up on my homepage. It's the Travis, I'm sorry, the Taylor Swift. And Travis Kelsey sort of subreddit where they're like, look at all the people he follows and look at all their posts he liked.

And I'm like,

Devindra: wow.

Cherlynn: Like it's not

Devindra: crazy. Yeah.

Cherlynn: I don't think it's telling really, I don't know, but it does. It is some data that you're now. That are now being hidden from you. So it is is like free speech, but hide your [00:39:00] shame. I don't know.

Devindra: That's what it is. Like every time Elon is yeah, we believe in total free speech, but also I don't want people to see what I truly believe in.

And the dude has been out there saying I dunno, racist and misogynistic things, and honestly, anti Semitic things at points too. So it's dude has actively supported neo nazis on his feed I wonder what, I almost look, I think like he, he just learned that likes are totally public and that people can hit a button and see everything you've liked.

And then it's just like a line of like porn and weird random stuff and weird racist stuff that he got

Cherlynn: called out. Or caught doing something recently that but the thing is we've all noticed that he does these things stupid like replies and whatnot And so like why is he only realizing now I think someone That he cares about the opinion of told him

Devindra: It's cat turd or whoever like one of those people that that also are Big fans of the former president.

I don't know. It's a very silly thing. Also we saw on the news this week that [00:40:00] Elon Musk withdrew his breach of contract lawsuit against OpenAI on Tuesday. The move came a day before a California judge was supposed to hear OpenAI's request for dismissal for that whole thing. That was the one he thought, he said OpenAI had become like a closed source, de facto subsidiary of Microsoft and was basically using OpenAI to make a lot of money and to license its services.

And he just pulled back on that. I wonder if the revelation about the Apple deal not being fully a thing that is making a ton of revenue could be part of that. But the other He's just jealous,

Cherlynn: he's just jealous Grok isn't getting more.

Devindra: He's all about, he wants to crock. He wants everybody to crock.

There was another report yesterday. The open AI's actual revenue is reportedly booming with annualized revenue of 3. 4 billion. That is, that's a lot of money. Where is that money coming from? Cause it's not just like chat GPT pro subscriptions. Revenue, because Microsoft owns 49%. I don't quite know.

So there's a lot of like weird, shady stuff happening.

Cherlynn: The paid subscription version of chat GPT alone. I don't, yeah. I don't [00:41:00] know if that's enough. It can't be billions. Like it's

Devindra: 20 bucks a month. And also I don't know how many people are actually doing that. Anyway. What did you think of this Sherilyn?

The news that Chrome OS will soon be leaning on the same technology that powers Android. That kind of makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.

Cherlynn: I think it's interesting as to what it implies for the future of Chrome OS. I think we are, we've been waiting so long for this sort of like midway between Chrome and Android OS that could help Google better take on or better make better tablets or tablet software.

That's really all I could really think about. I don't know that it. Specifically

Devindra: right here, Google is saying you will be embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks as part of the foundation of Chrome OS. That's interesting, because before Chrome OS was like a Linux foundation plus Chrome, plus a lot of Chrome stuff, whereas Android was always like a Linux foundation, and now they're like Let's just smush the two together a little bit, right?

It

Cherlynn: feels as if it's building out the OS a bit more, like the Android kernel, the Android framework, that sort of stuff, like in the way it handles, maybe, [00:42:00] notifications or apps, maybe. And then like with Chrome running as a very like browser based sort of OS, like maybe it'll. Be on top of that Android framework even more.

Yeah, but here's the other thing too. Apparently this is going to take some time, but it will according to Google, enable more AI features on Chromebooks

Devindra: or at least enable. Yeah, it'll make it easier to develop because right now, if they want to do that, they'd have to build out the Chrome OS actual software base plus a separate stuff for Android.

And now Google can combine work a little more easily. So that makes sense.

Cherlynn: Yeah, and in the past Chrome OS has adopted quite a few Android features already yes, like I said, more Android app support, and then also the Android Bluetooth infrastructure was also baked into Chrome OS.

I can't tell you exactly when, but, somewhat recently. So yeah, it looks like definitely they want to put more AI in Chrome OS. I'm

Devindra: sure Google folks are looking at this and like, why are we managing two separate code bases for very similar products at times? Like ultimately Chrome OS could just end up being Android running like a full screen, [00:43:00] version of Chrome or something, or a slightly, I don't even know.

I don't even know why it should be a whole separate thing, except Chrome OS was a lot more secure than Android. So maybe this could open up security vulnerabilities. I don't know. We shall see final bit of news this week. And there's so much news this week. So we didn't get to have a chance to do everything, but I saw the news yesterday that Alamo draft house is being bought by Sony pitchers.

That is something

Cherlynn: I didn't know how to feel about this. Honestly I couldn't tell if it was a good thing net or not so great thing. We all love Alamo draft house, but yeah, it's huh.

Devindra: It's a whole thing. So in 2020, what was it? The Paramount decree ended. That was the thing that prevented movie studios from owning movie theaters, because that's how it used to be before the 1950s.

So like studios had direct control over cinemas and the experience of that meant they would like limit which movies could go where, or like really isolate things similar to how some games can only be on certain consoles, like how that all stuff is controlled. So this [00:44:00] is the first example we're seeing of that whole thing kind of Going away a little bit.

It's interesting because Alamo has been in trouble for a while. They declared bankruptcy a couple of years ago. I know their licensees have been shutting down in several states. Like people, people have been also talking about like bad labor practices and something from them.

This will financially help Alamo draft house. Help it survive longer as a brand. But I do wonder what this means. Like how will Sony picture integrations make their way into this chain? Will Sony like block things from other? That's what I was thinking. Other folks. There's nothing stopping them from doing that because the paramount decree is gone.

So that is weird. And I do wonder if we'll see more of that too, because before the whole like Reddit stock stuff happened, like AMC was tanking for a while. Regal was tanking and there was a thinking that in these companies, other companies, movie studios, and other companies may just start buying up theater change because these are big buildings that are already built with giant screens.

There's a lot you could [00:45:00] do with that infrastructure that isn't just Doing studio, studio movies and stuff too. So I guess we'll see. I'm just like really, I don't know, just really hesitant to celebrate this news at all. I know. Let's move on to what we're working on. Are you, is there, are you working on anything for Lynn?

Cause I'm dead right now.

Cherlynn: I am dead, but I have something like four edits on my plate today. So I got a. I got a power through and then and meetings and the work continues, even if you feel dead, sometimes

Devindra: the work continues. That's how it goes. We'll, we have devices that we'll be reviewing soon too.

So it'll, it just, it's an onslaught, like things just come at us folks. But yeah, when you get excited, we're going to reenergize after WWDC and get ready for all the new devices we're expecting any picks for us this week.

Cherlynn: I in the obviously I haven't been like. Doing any relaxing in the last few days, but today at last night, when I got home, I was like, finally, I am in my home.

I feel so good at home. I really like being in my apartment that I meet to order to feel good for me. [00:46:00] Finally sat back and turned on like my guilty pleasure. I saw on Netflix, perfect match season two is on. So I started watching perfect match. It is the trashiest stuff. The stuff that like, there's tLC and ABC and all of those quality, like quality, there's like reality TV. That's there's a standard, right? And then there's Netflix reality. And then there's Netflix reality in terms of perfect match where they basically pull people from their other reality shows, like the circle or love is blind or too hot to handle, and then they put them together in one space, I think it's in Tulum and then have them try to date each other.

And it is absolute trash and I am here for it. You know what I like? I like to watch people be bad or, go through these like struggles of like your self esteem and whatnot, and then psychologically tear them apart, but also compare them to people I know in real life, it is so somehow relaxing for me.

Devindra: It's like a brain massage for you. I get it. It's just it helps you chill out. That's [00:47:00] totally fine. I want to shout out. I've been reading or I guess listening to an audio book, which is how I can define reading at this point. Cause often my eyes are too tired to read cause I'm reading stuff all day.

But during our trip to WWDC and afterwards, I have been listening to the audio book for tomorrow and tomorrow. Have you heard of this, Cherlynn? No. This is a novel by Gabrielle Zevin. It's about two friends who bond over a love of video games and end up running a video game studio together.

But it's also, this novel about friendship and platonic love and romantic love and also finding a place for yourself in the world when you feel like the world is not meant for you to I think it's really fascinating and moving. It gets a little over the top at the end, but this is something people have been talking about recently because it is a, it is not like a tech centered book, but it is something that is well aware of like the culture of video games and what it means for us and how Things are built.

So I think you'd enjoy this one, Sherilyn. It's definitely going to become some sort of Netflix, I dunno, series or movie. I think a [00:48:00] movie is being planned. I know the rights were sold, but this thing is so like long and I wouldn't say quite epic, but it's about life. It's about a journey of life between friends.

And it would be really hard to contain this in like a 90 minute or two hour movie even. But anyway, I'm enjoying the audio book. I got that from Audible. But the book itself I'm sure would be a fun, easy, breezy read tomorrow and tomorrow. If you're listening to this show, I think you'd probably dig it.

So check it out. It's by Gabrielle Zeman.

Cherlynn: That's it for the episode this week, everyone. Thank you as always for listening. Our theme music is by game composer Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O'Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Elman. You can find DaVendra online at

Devindra: DaVendra on Twitter.

Wherever. Blue Sky, Mastodon, all over the place. And I talk about movies and TV at thefilmcast. com.

Cherlynn: If you want to send me some examples of mind numbing games or TV shows, like anesthetic for my brain send them to me on Twitter. I am at Cherlynn Lo over there. [00:49:00] Or on threads at Cherlynn Instagram, or just email CCHER at Engadget.

com. Email us your thoughts about the show at podcast at Engadget. com. Leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform and subscribe anywhere you get platforms, anywhere you get platforms.

Devindra: Yes. Thanks folks. We're out.

Cherlynn: Microsoft.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-podcast-the-fallout-from-apples-wwdc-2024-and-summer-game-fest-113057941.html?src=rss

Engadget Podcast: Recapping WWDC 2024 from Apple Park

There was no new Apple hardware at WWDC 2024, but Apple still had tons of news around AI and its upcoming operating systems. In this bonus episode, Cherlynn and Devindra brave the California heat to discuss Apple Intelligence and how it's different than other AI solutions. And they dive into other new features they're looking forward to, like the iPhone mirroring in macOS Sequoia and iPadOS 18's surprisingly cool Calculator app.


Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

Devindra: What's up, folks? This is Devindra here, and we are live at Apple Park. Cherlynn and I are in the middle of covering Apple's WWDC conference. Cherlynn, what's up? How's it going?

Cherlynn: We are, I feel quite zen right now, because even though I have a lot more meetings coming up, we are seated outside, it's nice out, and even though it's really hot, it's not dying. it's nice. I'm chill.

Devindra: It's nice we are both, we've gone through four to five meetings. For both of us. We've gone through the keynote. We're writing a bunch of news folks. So we're just gonna sit down and Give you our thoughts about what's going on. Cherlynn and I also did a video that's up on our YouTube channel recapping why we think Apple intelligence is doing things a little differently and maybe better than Stuff from Microsoft and Google, but yeah, Sherlyn, you've been talking with Apple a lot.

What is your general takeaway from this year's WWDC?

Cherlynn: Yeah, to set the stage a little, I think, this morning 8 a. m. I had my first meeting and then it's been four meetings like you said, Devendra, covering topics like Apple intelligence, privacy, iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 and watchOS 11 as well. My main thing is that yes, we have actually throughout the keynote, we heard things that we've seen in other platforms, right?

Like they're blatantly copying magic eraser from Google's editor on, this thing called cleanup and photos. and they're adding different things like, oh, you can now rearrange your apps and skin them the way you can in Android's material you. But, the way Apple's thought things through proves and continues to prove to be different from everyone else.

It's a bit more thoughtful, a bit cleaner, a bit more sophisticated. And, again, I think you see this most in Apple Intelligence. And, Devindra, you've been asking everybody here, can we say AI? Can we?

Devindra: I don't know. So one thing I started figuring it out, or at least as we were writing about Apple Intelligence, is that Making an acronym for it is tough because I can't just call it AI and then talk about That stuff versus Copilot or versus OpenAI and I've started using Apple AI as a way to shorten it But I have been asking Apple folks here basically everyone we've encountered about how they shorten Apple intelligence and the resounding response I get is like a data processing error.

It's like watching a human kind of just like stop being able to process information. They look over to the PR person. They're like, what do I see here? But the response I always get is, Apple intelligence. That's all we say. We only ever say Apple intelligence. One person said, personal intelligence, which is a phrase Tim Cook used.

But yeah, it is funny that it is, it seems almost like a corporate command not to call Apple intelligence AI or shorten it that way in any way.

Cherlynn: they think of the words AI, or the letters AI, to stand for Apple Intelligence, it seems And then the word that they fall back on when they don't want to say Apple Intelligence is just Intelligence. three syllables, is only one more than saying AI. Still, though, AI is so much easier to say, in my opinion.

Devindra: It just feels like they have stumbled themselves into this weird branding hole, where they took the letters A and I, but they can't use AI. But it is also an AI powered thing. I just think it's funny, and shows, like, how I don't know how absurd these companies can be at some points. but yeah, let's briefly talk about Apple Intelligence, Cherlynn. I'm more impressed by what Apple's doing here because it does seem like they're announcing features that we actually would want to use, and it's more centered on features within apps, stuff like making Siri better, rather than what Microsoft did.

Microsoft was just like, hey, nobody likes our search engine. Here we put AI in our search engine then everybody all of a sudden thought it was cool And then they put that copilot they rebranded as copilot They put that in Windows and it's like dot profit I don't think it actually led to anything.

I don't care about copilot in Windows It hasn't been functionally useful for me But just looking at the stuff here that Apple has shown off like I want to use this new Siri I want to use a lot of these new features that they're showing off. I don't know if you feel differently

Cherlynn: I think Siri is only one part of the Apple intelligence puzzle.

I think there's a lot of other stuff that they were, that they demoed that would be very intriguing. I do feel like a lot of their writing tools, things that we're going to see on Mac and iPad, are things we've seen elsewhere, like Copilot, like Gemini and OpenAI, have all offered some version of rewriting something for you, summarizing it for you, providing a TLDR.

Apple obviously being the sort of, vertical integration king that it is good at Bringing it so that when you highlight a body of text or something, you can see this like blue or yellow or whatever circle up here at the top left, where you find your copy and paste options, you might also go there to get a writing tool like, yeah, help me adjust the tone of this cover letter that I'm writing, for example. it's Stuff that we've seen, but yet applied a just a bit better, a bit more thoughtfully. the Siri stuff, they've redesigned Siri to better understand you if you, interrupting yourself in the middle of, issuing a command. if you're like, Oh, adjust this timer. Oh, sorry, set it for 15, not 20 minutes, that sort of thing. it will do it. It's smart enough. it is definitely, more thought out and more system wide and deeply integrated. And to use their own words, Personal, more personally, contextually aware than say, Gemini on a Pixel phone. And that's the only real other place I can compare it to because the Copilot on Surface PCs don't seem that deeply integrated just yet.

Devindra: It almost seems like Copilot is directionless. It's like Microsoft was just like, Hey, OpenAI is cool, do you like ChatGPT? look, we put it in Windows. are you not entertained? Aren't you happy about this? And I wasn't, I've tested this stuff for a while. I think Google's at least trying to be a little more, Thoughtful also about how it's doing it with Gemini.

Like it's trying to like hook into all the Google services and all the stuff you're already relying on. But Apple's whole thing is like they are building on the privacy standards that they have talked about before a lot of this Processing is happening on device with their local models They do go to the cloud for some of their like more complex things.

But we also read about the what is it the private cloud? connection that they were talking about and even that seems cool I'd recommend you all it's like weird to even discuss something like this, but they have basically Created a cloud solution that is they say is more secure You it's an anonymized connection.

Like when, first of all, Apple's models only send little bits of data to their cloud. It's anon anonymized in a way, like the, the VPN relay thing that they have on iPhones is, these servers don't save your data. They don't save logs. So that's also something that will prevent, authorities like police or the FBI from getting records of what you're doing. but Apple's just like keeping yourself out of that. And they also say that they're publishing the images. of the software being used on the servers for researchers to audit and to take a look at and your phone can only talk with basically servers running the exact software that they expect it to so your phone will have to keep getting updated there's like just multiple layers of security which is not the sort of thing I think most people think about when they're doing like cloud services, at least from what I've seen.

Cherlynn: I think, so one thing, the irony of Copilot being directionless is just quite funny to me. you don't want a Copilot or a Pilot to be directionless. But anyway, yeah, the private cloud computing is definitely something that, Apple is approaching differently compared to Microsoft and Google, where they explicitly lay out how anonymized and how protected and encrypted your data is. and true. Apple's point, which something that Craig Federighi pointed out during the keynote as well, they actually put it out there. They want independent verification and validation that their stuff is securely happening and all the transfer of your process. for example, right after the keynote, a certain co, CEO or owner of a certain social media network or platform was like, OpenAI integration with this thing is going to be a security risk, right? I am referring to Elon Musk's tweets on X. And, from my understanding, having taken a lot of meetings since, the OpenAI integration is happening like this. whenever you ask Apple Intelligence devices a query, Siri for example, the first thing it's doing is figuring out whether it can do it on device or if it needs to send through privacy cloud compute to the servers to process.

Then, on devices obviously like quite direct, right? But if it needs to pass your information on to chat GPT because you've asked it something that, whatever. It will first surface hey, do you want to pass your information to chat GPT? And it will do it every time. you're not going to say yes once and then afterwards never have to be asked chat GPT access again. and then there is a contractual thing between OpenAI and Apple which prevents OpenAI from storing your requests. and also Apple is just not handing any IP address information over. It is using that sort of private relay thing, to pass on like any IP address information needed. It's just hiding the actual info. and then once OpenAI has done chat GPTing your answers for you, It is supposed to erase your information or whatever and get rid of it. It is a contractual thing supposedly, and that remains to be seen, right? that's how much you trust OpenAI to do that. and then the similar sort of concepts for privacy, cloud compute here.

So again, very well thought out, right? just very Apple in its approach.

Devindra: Thoughtful, I think, is the word. I don't want to sound like I said this in the video. Not too much of a fanboy. We have not seen this stuff in action yet or in the wild. But, I think like the initial I don't know. Problems we saw was something like Microsoft Recall, which was a cool idea.

But Microsoft, it was like a blunt force approach to Hey, we're just going to remember everything you did on your computer by capturing everything we did on your computer. And we're going to serve it, we're going to save it in a database on your system that, Hey, anybody can apparently access with like very little protections around it.

And it literally took days for security researchers to even be like, what the hell is this? this is. Very easy to break through. Microsoft ended up having to, basically rework how that feature is. Initially it was, it was a feature that was always enabled and you had to opt out of it. Now it's opt in. people had to complain to alleviate these very obvious issues. And I think at the very least, I don't have that sense with Apple. Like I feel like they've at least sat down, maybe also talked with researchers and be like, is this cool? Is this actually copacetic in terms of like privacy and user safety and everything?

So I don't know if you have any further thoughts on that.

Cherlynn: Because Apple knows that the sort of price to pay if it's caught with egg on its face is so high and actually arguably higher for it than any of its other rivals to be, is all the more invested in making sure this is going and being done the right way and honestly I wish Google and Microsoft would take notes. I will say there's a lot of other privacy things that are very intriguing to me. I did, I am fresh from like a privacy related demo that, was very, so the passwords app is a new thing that I'm very excited about, I'm very welcome. I feel very welcome. Or I'm welcoming it? Whatever. they're also changing certain things like the allowing access to all your contacts or limiting access or whatever in the permission settings for various apps that need.

Like for example, if I'm playing Match Factory, why do they need to get all the access to all my contacts they don't need? I also think it's funny, no, maybe not funny. one of the new features coming to iOS 18 is locking and hiding. specific apps. locking makes sense. I get it. Hiding, though, seems like you're, like, Ashley Madison ing things for everybody, letting the cheaters of the world keep secrets.

I don't know how I feel about that, but, it's the, atomic bomb thing, right? Do you make it and then let people use it how they will, or, I don't know who at Apple decided this was a necessary feature. Are you going to use this feature Devendra?

Devindra: listen, I could have my Tinder account somehow.

I don't know. but I do think the app blocking thing is cool because parents often have to give their devices to kids and Oh, you don't want them to swipe away, you don't want them to do other stuff. So this way you can lock an app if you want to show off your photos or show off something to somebody and just have them not poke around, which has been.

It's also like a very common problem we see on like TV shows and movies where somebody would be like, Hey, can I take a look at this photo? And they're like, get all your personal data from your phone instantly because it's open. So it seems like a very smart way of dealing with privacy too.

Cherlynn: And very Apple esque in that, if you lock an app, say, your messages, for example, then it, also the contents of that app won't show up, and search won't show up, and series suggestions, or spotlight suggestions, or, even map suggestions. there's just a lot here. and, just to take away broader notes from WWDC2, like I said earlier, there's a lot of, small changes that, that make everything seem very meaty. iOS 18 actually might be a big upgrade. the messages updates that are coming. the new tap back, emoji.

Finally, we can do more than exclamation marks. Sometimes I just want to make a sad face. I can't do that. I have to do thumbs down. I like that they're coming. Oh, and I'm back to the Apple Intelli I know I'm jumping around a bit, but talking about emoji, another thing that Apple did right from the get, I think because it's been able to observe the pitfalls that other people have fallen into is to be like, okay, we're limiting it to these very obviously cartoonish sort of graphic like representation, so no photorealistic.

And then when it's creating images of people in gemmoji, you can only use your own creation. So you're basically choosing from a template or based on your like people that you have in your photos or your people gallery sort of situation. But because it's in a cartoonish representation, people are never going to mistake it for someone that's actually a real life.

You can't, for example, there are guardrails in place that like, prevent you from making the image playground generate something that looks harmful or violent or is exploitative. which again, goes to show, Apple's thought this through, right?

Devindra: And I think a lot of people are asking, what are, where, what are these models trained on?

Because Apple's talking about a lot of its own models, small ones that run directly on your device, larger ones that are in the cloud. And occasionally they'll reach out to OpenAI for chat GPT stuff. Apple has told us that they are training their models on licensed data, like images, things like that.

Some stuff from the open web, publishers can refuse to participate. Like they can say their site is not crawlable by Apple stuff. and they say that, Apple will, if somebody changes down the line, like what they want to be accessible to their own models, Apple will reflect that with further updates.

So again, it's opaque, but at least what they're telling us. To me sounds better than what I've heard from Google and certainly from open AI. so I think that's cool real quick. Let's talk about macOS Sequoia, which has most of the features again All these features pretty much come across all of its products.

So apple intelligence is going to be a thing that's by the way is going to be working on Max running Apple Silicon, so M1 to M4 No M4 Max yet, but M1, M series Max and also the iPhone 15 Pro Sherlyn you wrote a piece about the features people can expect if you have an iPhone 14 Pro Basically, you're sore out of luck.

You get some iOS 18 features, but not everything, right?

Cherlynn: Yeah, all the iOS 18 features, but none of the Apple intelligence features, unfortunately So that redesigned Siri with the glowing edges. That's not coming. It is so pretty I also want to say that the iPadOS things that seem really cool, all the pencil features, the handwriting stuff.

So a lot of the, Keynote or like in demos I've taken, some features will be like, this is ML power, it's like Smart Script, for example, is powered by ML, but it's not part of Apple Intelligence. So you are still going to get that in iPadOS, 18 when you upgrade, regardless of whether you have the M1 iPad or like an older one. but yeah, I gotta talk to you about MathNodes, Devindra. Were you blown away by that demo? Like, when they just draw the equal sign, then that, thing just sums itself. The solution just solves itself. It's Mean Girls Mathletes, but on a whole other level to me.

Devindra: It's, it's cool, and that's also something they say is ML powered, not necessarily Apple Intelligence powered.

So if you have older iPads, you will see some benefits of that. It's cool, but I also feel like, Bye for now. It's like a superpowered calculator. I don't know how many people have Apple Pencils and are like scribbling down math formulas, but it's cool. I dig it.

Cherlynn: I think to, to begin with the fact that an iPad never had a calculator app before this, it's like astonishing.

But then now that it's here, Apple's clearly thought about look, we're bringing this to the bigger screen. We want it to be pencil friendly. We want it to be big screen friendly. Let's really think about the layout here. And this is explains why there's been a delay. And I actually get it. there's you can go into the history tab to see your previous like calculations. There's a lot more calculations you can do on this calculator, A currency conversion, which I forgot to ask, like, how is it pulling the actual rate? But whatever, and then you can go into the notes section and then I feel like almost feel like calculator is a misnomer in this case because it's doing way more than calculating and solving equations.

It's like you can draw like a blueprint of a house and have it measure the areas like length and width, whatever, but at the same time, map that to like price calculations, like price estimates, like if you use this material. So something I saw happen was like you did Price equals X, area equals Y, and then price times area equals, and once you draw the area, it's like programming basically, but all done in the notes app.

And that's really it blew my mind a little bit, which I hate to admit because I don't like to be so like, fangirly, but damn, that was cool.

Devindra: It was cool. Maybe the excuse for not having a calculator app built into the iPad. one thing I want to mention about macOS Decoy is iPhone mirroring. Which was something I like half predicted.

Like I wrote a wish piece for what I would want to see in Vision Pro and Vision OS 2. And one thing was I would really love to be able to mirror the iPhone just the way like you can mirror a MacBook inside Vision Pro. have a full projection of the screen. That's not coming to Vision OS 2. Vision OS 2 is like very minor updates it seems.

But It is something coming to Mac Sequoia and to use that you need to use a phone, an iPhone. With I 18 A Mac with Mac, Sequoia, you get almost instantly. I haven't seen projected, like how it actually works in real time, but it does seem like you hit a button, you get a window view of your iPhone and you use it.

On your Mac as you would in real life you see your home screen you can scroll between apps You can your notifications like very smartly are reintegrated into the max notifications. That's fun you could play games on your iphone and when you launch a game, the window will go widescreen The audio seems to come through pretty quickly just seems like a really cool feature because At least on Macs, like I always have my phone nearby.

It's always like doing other stuff, but I would love to be able to like just have that open and also see other notifications coming in. It's just like very extensible in terms of like how you're interacting with your hardware. The iPhone, by the way, stay the screen stays locked. So it doesn't look like somebody is just like you're just like mirroring a direct computer or something.

One thing we learned from Apple because I've been asking around about this. If you mirrored your Mac inside of the Vision Pro, And then that Mac was also mirroring an iPhone. Would you actually be able to do the iPhone stuff from within the Vision Pro? And I've heard from a couple of folks that is basically not going to happen.

You can run one continuity feature. iPhone mirroring is part of continuity. So those features that let you like copy and paste across devices and stuff. You can only run one mirroring feature at a time. So basically you can't do that with the Mac. I'm still sitting here waiting for iPhone mirroring in Vision OS.

Clearly though, like they have the capability. The Vision Pro is running an M. 2 chip. If iPhone mirroring works on M. 1 and M. 2 Macs, there is no reason why that isn't going to be in Vision Pro eventually. So I'm kinda, I feel like we half won that bet, basically.

Cherlynn: I just gotta say that Windows and Android have been trying to do this forever.

I can remember like years ago though, when the first like Galaxy books try to do this. That's at least my earliest encounter with it. It works. I haven't seen this happen, yet on the iPhone side of things, as in I haven't personally taken a demo, so I couldn't tell you if it's actually better or more thoughtful. knowing Apple, knowing its deep integration prowess is probably gonna work better.

Devindra: probably. Apple also gives very good demos, so that's something we've learned. do you have any further thoughts about WWDC or what's ahead for Apple, Sherlyn?

Cherlynn: I have so much to dive into in detail, like the watchOS stuff, the iOS and iPadOS features.

I guess broad strokes. It's it feels almost revolutionary because Apple is finally jumping on board the AI train, and renaming the train, taking over basically. And you know what? The thing is, I hate this, but now people are going to pay attention. Because what? now my friends actually are going to realize what Genmoji is supposed to do, what you can actually do by, feeding AI, generator.

It's gonna, and we're gonna start seeing more, writing tool assisted emails and reviews, I think it's momentous. I think people are really going to start paying attention to what AI means and what it can do. I don't know if it's good for the world, but yeah, it just feels like big.

Devindra: We ran out of time talking to Apple people, but I did want to ask them, do you think these writing tools are actually helpful?

Because then it just, All our emails, all our conversations are going to start to sound like weirdly robotic or extra formal AI documents or AI texts and I'm not a fan of that, not too interested, but the Genmoji stuff is cool because it's like we have had Dali and other things like create these AI images, what do you do with them? post it on social media? I don't know. Genmoji is just if you want to create an emoji based on a specific feeling, you can create a thing to your liking. Just a really smart use of that. That technology, So anyway, I am in the process of installing the, the iOS 18 developer beta on my phone. I think according to the rules, you can't talk about that, but we can talk about it when they launch the public beta. So that's, later next month, I believe. But we're going to be testing this stuff out. We're going to be thinking about these features. any other takeaways from Apple, Sherlyn?

Cherlynn: No, send us your thoughts though, right? podcast@engadget.Com is the most direct way to reach us. but come back on, we do a Thursday livestream at podcast@engadget.com Eastern on our YouTube channel where we have direct Q& A sessions where we can probably answer your questions, in real time. And I'm pretty sure we'll still continue to dig deep into what we learned, this week on our episode, that drops on Fridays or Thursday nights, right? come back for all of that.

Devindra: Yeah, definitely. We're still gonna be doing a longer, a normal podcast episode this week. Cherlynn and I are in California now, but we'll be flying back tomorrow and ready to podcast on live stream on Thursday. So we'll be back folks. let us know what you think about all this news, podcast@engadget.com. Thanks folks. We're out.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-podcast-recapping-wwdc-2024-from-apple-park-011440662.html?src=rss

You can’t mirror your iPhone while mirroring your Mac on Apple Vision Pro

So close, yet so far. Ahead of WWDC 2024, I had hoped Apple would let you mirror your iPhone inside of the Vision Pro, just like how you can use your Mac on an enormous virtual display. Instead, we got iPhone Mirroring on macOS Sequoia. As the name implies, it will let you see everything on your iPhone from the comfort of your Mac.

But, I wondered, what if you mirrored a Mac that was mirroring an iPhone in the Vision Pro? It seems like the ideal workaround in theory, one that would solve the headset's annoying inability to play nicely with your iPhone. But, unfortunately, it won't work. We've heard from knowledgeable sources that Apple's hardware only supports one of its Continuity mirroring features at the time. So if you're sending your Mac's screen to the Vision Pro, you won't be able to mirror your iPhone at the same time.

We haven't heard the exact reason for that limitation, but I'd wager it comes down to networking limitations. Mirroring a sharp and lag-free version of your Mac's screen is difficult enough — juggling that alongside a perfectly rendered copy of your iPhone might be too tough for some Macs. Apple is already pushing beyond its current Continuity restrictions with visionOS 2, which will support higher resolution Mac mirroring, as well as the ability to virtualize an ultra-wide display. So perhaps there's room for multi-device mirroring down the line.

It's not hard to imagine Apple bringing the iPhone mirroring feature directly to the Vision Pro eventually, but ideally, it would also work alongside Mac mirroring in the headset.

Here are a few other tidbits we've learned about iPhone mirroring on macOS Sequoia while exploring WWDC: 

  • It requires both WiFi and Bluetooth to work, and the iPhone is projected at 60 fps.

  • When you launch a game, the iPhone window flips into landscape view on your Mac. The game's sound also appears to be synchronized well.

  • Mirroring will use around the same amount of battery life on your iPhone as typical usage.

  • If you unlock your iPhone directly, the mirrored window closes immediately on your Mac.

  • You'll eventually be able to drag and drop files and other content between your iPhone and Mac. This feature will also be available on third-party apps.

Update 6/12/24, 1:16PM ET: Early testers have discovered that visionOS 2 supports direct AirPlay mirroring from iPhones and iPads. This isn't the same as the Mac's iPhone mirroring feature, since you can't directly interact with the window within Vision Pro, but it's one way to keep tabs on your other devices. We've reached out to Apple for comment on this feature, which wasn't discussed during WWDC. 

Catch up here for all the news out of Apple's WWDC 2024.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/you-cant-mirror-your-iphone-while-mirroring-your-mac-on-apple-vision-pro-222021905.html?src=rss

Apple refuses to call Apple Intelligence ‘AI’

"How do you shorten Apple Intelligence?" That’s the question I’ve asked several Apple employees at WWDC 2024, and their practiced responses have become comically absurd.

“We just say Apple Intelligence,” they tell me. “Yah, but do you say that every time? The AI acronym is right there!” I’d retort. The usual response is a stiff smile and clenched teeth, like a human programming error in real-time. (Yes, I'm aware it's just overly aggressive media training in action.) One person suggested they also say "personal intelligence" — yes, a phrase that's longer than Apple Intelligence.

There's no doubt Apple Intelligence means many things to the company. It's an effort to compete with Microsoft's (still unproven) Copilot and Google's Gemini. It's a way to make Apple seem "hip" with ChatGPT. And it should enable a slew of new features for consumers. But Apple Intelligence is never "AI" to Apple.

Normally, I'd chalk this up to a silly branding quirk. But it becomes a problem as we cover Apple Intelligence. It's a long phrase that's just begging to be shortened to "AI," but then how do you distinguish that abbreviation from ChatGPT, Copilot and the general concept of AI? During the WWDC 2024 keynote, Apple only mentioned the phrase "artificial intelligence" three times: Twice while referring to its previous AI-powered features, and another while referring to "other artificial intelligence tools" like ChatGPT.

At this point, I've just decided to call Apple Intelligence "Apple AI." It's shorter and it differentiates the product from competitors. And yes, it just means "Apple Apple Intelligence," but everyone still says "ATM machine" and "PIN number." It's not my fault Apple decided to co-opt the acronym "AI."

Catch up here for all the news out of Apple's WWDC 2024.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-refuses-to-call-apple-intelligence-ai-195913202.html?src=rss

How does Apple send your data to its cloud AI servers? Very carefully, it claims.

For years, Apple has touted privacy as its major advantage over rivals like Google and Microsoft. Instead of relying on cloud processing to improve or organize your images, which requires sending your photos to Google's servers, Apple handles those tasks directly on your device. But with the advent of Apple Intelligence, the company's take on artificial intelligence, the company is stepping out of its comfort zone with "Private Cloud Compute." It says "private" right in the name, so it has to be secure, right?

While Apple AI will run some models locally, it will occasionally have to send data to Apple's servers for complex requests. So how is the company squaring this with its previous security stance? 

According to Craig Federighi, Apple's SVP of Software Engineering, the company is being very careful about how its sending your data to its servers. "You're putting a lot of faith in the cloud... with Private Cloud Compute, the stakes are even higher," he said in a WWDC 2024 conversation with Apple's AI head, John Giannandrea, and YouTube influencer iJustine.

During the WWDC keynote, Federighi showed off how Apple AI could help him reschedule a meeting and determine if he could still attend his daughter's dance recital. Apple AI was able to determine who his daughter actually was, where her event was located, and the estimated travel time from his meeting.

Federighi says Apple isn't sending all of your data to the cloud, instead it's only uploading the most important bits of information relevant to your Apple AI query. Additionally, your server request is anonymous, since it's using the same IP masking technology as iCloud Private Relay. Federighi also noted that Apple's cloud servers have no permanent storage and don't have the ability to keep logs. 

To make things even more secure, Federighi says Private Cloud Compute servers are running software with published images for security researchers to audit. Apple Intelligence devices can only talk with servers running those approved images — if there are any changes to the servers, the local devices will also need to be updated to see them.

That process may a bit restrictive, but that's precisely the point. Federighi calls it "a step up" in the level of trust you can have with server computing. "It's essential that you know no one—not Apple, not anyone else, can access the information used to process your request," he said.  

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-does-apple-send-your-data-to-its-cloud-ai-servers-very-carefully-it-claims-233312425.html?src=rss