Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of devices with two or more displays. I'm Jake Kastrenakes, executive editor of The Verge, and we have a very big and very fun show today. We're talking all about Apple's event. We're going to go into the iPhone Duo. We're going to talk about the Apple Watches. We've got a special segment with Nilay Patel and David Imel talking about running local LLMs on your Mac. And then the Thunder Round returns. But first, we're starting things off with Allison Johnson, who is here joining us from California, where she has just been at Apple's event. Allison, so glad you're here.
Hello. We have so much to talk about. We're going to get to the Duo, but to me, this is so much bigger than the Duo, right? This is John Turner's first event as Apple CEO. And I think a thing that most people don't see is that they stopped doing the live events, but before they air the video for everyone in person, Tim Cook has traditionally come out and said good morning and all that and said a little thing, and John Turner did that this year. And I'm curious how it felt seeing him and what that presentation was like, because this was really his first, I think, public-ish appearance as Apple CEO.
Yeah, there was a lot of anticipation for it, I think. And we do that thing where, you know, the inside baseball is we kind of file into the Steve Jobs Theater and we're way up in the nosebleeds. Not that it's a big theater, but the execs are kind of milling around down by the stage. And it was so, I think it really hit me when we saw Tim Cook down there kind of with, you know, Jaws and everybody, wearing like a leisure jacket. I was like, looking super relaxed. It was like, oh wow, this really isn't his show anymore. So Turner came out. I thought he didn't say a whole lot. He was out there to kind of tee everything up and queue up the video that we were all going to sit and watch. But, you know, there was a lot of confidence and energy, and I think it's kind of a, he's setting a vibe, I think, for the Turner era. I first off, I love that there's a whole new visual style for the retired-ish Tim Cook. I'm looking forward to seeing what he busts out now that he's not CEO. But yeah, it was interesting. So Turner, in the video, he also opened with some remarks kind of reflecting on the privilege of being Apple CEO. It's very interesting in the video. He does not say, I'm John Turner, the new Apple CEO. He doesn't say, I'm the CEO now. They kind of just throw to him and he's not labeled and he just gives these remarks and he says, I want to take a moment to express what an extraordinary privilege it is to represent the teams here at Apple. I'm just going to read, you know, a very brief and I think like slightly rough transcript, but he mentions, you know, that he's been there for 25 years and that he could never have imagined being up there as CEO. And there's this thing he says where, you know, I love the idea that the things we make make people more productive and let them do things they never thought possible before. And you know, he gets almost in that sort of like Jony Ive headspace of, you know, reimagine new things and make them real and put these new things into people's lives. And, you know, I think maybe they don't have that many opportunities to do that and maybe it feels, this would feel tired if he said it every single year, but it feels, you know, nice to hear from the new guy that he's taking that, I think, Apple creative spirit forward.
Yeah. And there was a lot of emphasis on the phone and the technology as they called it the personal intelligent hub or something like that. And I think trying to like set the stage ahead of all the, you know, the specs and all the things we were there for to kind of remind everybody, you know, the Apple ethos, at least the one they project on stage at a keynote, is like this is here for you. It's, you know, it's centered around you and your needs. And, you know, he got up and said it. So that was the tone he set. You know, Apple has a funny way of like tiptoeing around things when they want to. But he, yeah, for him to come out and really, and was like AI, you know, he wasn't talking about Apple Intelligence only, was interesting. And I think it was, they understand the difficult position that they're in. You know, they want to push these AI features. The new Siri is like actually finally good. All the stuff on the watch that V is going to have some existential feelings about later. So many feelings. Yeah. So I think maybe that it was kind of to get ahead of that and be like, we are going there. We're getting into the AI. We know it's messy right now. That's kind of how I read it. Was sort of like a, you say the thing that everybody's kind of nervous about and then break the ice was what he was hoping.
I also thought they did this really interesting structure to the event this year within all of the products, and you noted this in the live blog. They started with the iPhone Pro, right? And they opened all software, right? They did this with the watches, too. The first half of the presentation, all software. They don't, they barely tell you what's new about the hardware. And I can't remember them doing it to quite this extent before. Can you?
No. And to be, I don't know what the time was. It was, we were definitely less than like 10 minutes in and it was like, iPhone 18 Pro, here it is. And we're like, oh my god, that's usually, we have to wait till the very end for this usually. So it did feel like, whoa, we're off to the races. And then it was like, okay, we're seeing a bunch of stuff. We saw it at WWDC. You can change Siri's voice. Great. Cool. People probably didn't tune in to that who are maybe paying attention now. It was a little bit of whiplash for us. It makes sense that, you know, there's frankly not a ton to talk about hardware-wise, particularly on the Pro, that they wanted to be like, and by the way, remember all this stuff that you're going to see for the first time.
I know it's so painful for us because I'm like, tell me about the dual aperture camera. Sorry, not dual variable aperture. This is the thing. If they had gone in early, I would have gotten this straight. But instead, they're, and I think this probably makes sense from them from a marketing perspective. They're focused on the experiences that their software can create, which is often Apple's advantage. Let's talk about the Pro a little bit because that's where the event started. Thoughts on the Pro? You excited?
Well, I have complicated feelings about, I mean, to a camera nerd, I'm excited for, you know, we have for the first time like pro-level manual exposure controls in the iPhone camera app. Like amazing. I'm here for it. We have the variable aperture on the main camera lens. I have questions and thoughts about that, but you know, it's a cool camera feature. And then outside of that, there was so little, you know, there's a little bit of, I mean, obviously the A20 Pro in both the phones and then some improvements to battery. It sounded like the Pro Max is getting actually a slightly bigger battery, maybe dependent on if you have an eSIM model. So that's a real tangible benefit. So it was kind of like, well, that's sort of it hardware-wise.
Yeah, it feels like a very, and I think like very polished version of the 17 Pro. It looks great. Like I think the colors are delightful this year, but you're right. There are these very advanced and nuanced camera features that I think are like truly for professionals in like a serious way. And that's sort of it in terms of very high-level hardware features that are going to get people excited. So the variable aperture, you can move from what's, it's around like f1.4 up to f4 or down to f4, I should say, and that lets you let less light in and get more in focus, which is a genuine photography tool, but to me that sounds a little dicey because if you're doing that on a sensor this small, my guess is you're going to run into some possible issues with noise.
Yeah, exactly. That's where I'm a little puzzled. So the lead that they buried is that the aperture is actually brighter now. It's f1.48, I think, is the brightest stop. So that's cool. That lets in more light. That'll be a benefit in your low-light photos. But then they have the ability now, you can stop it down manually down to f4. And yeah, I'm a little perplexed. I can see that maybe like going to that very bright f1.48 was not going to be ideal in every situation if you're, you know, the depth of field is just that much narrower. Could cause problems if you're trying to take a picture of something like closer in low light and only the very top of the thing is in focus or you're taking pictures of multiple people. I don't know. So I think that's why they introduced this ability to stop down and to extend the depth of field. But for the most part, most things are in focus when you're taking pictures with a phone. The sensor is tiny, the lens is tiny, so the aperture is tiny. If you're talking about it in terms of full-frame equivalents, you're already at something like f7. When you start at that, like f1.48, it introduces all kinds of wild things of, you know, we have the fake bokeh mode, the portrait mode that we've all been using for years. I use it a ton with my kid. It sort of fudges those f-stops in terms of a full-frame camera. So you go to f1.8, you get a beautiful like blurry background. All of a sudden, you have a physical aperture on the camera lens. You go to f1.8, you're like, this is nothing like the portrait mode photo. There's, it's just, I could spiral about the aperture, but I won't do that right now. It is very fascinating because again, it's like this is a thing that I carry around a camera all the time and man, like half this stuff is like over my head.
I'm not sure that the average person is going to be able to take advantage of this. There is an auto mode, but to me, the variable aperture makes the most sense when you pair it with all of the software stuff they're doing for the Pro camera, which legitimately looks quite detailed and quite impressive, right? Like they're letting you dial in white balance and shutter speed and things of that sort. Obviously, the aperture, again, that stuff is like really pro-level. I think it takes a long time to use those controls on a phone screen, but Apple's pretty serious about this stuff, right? They film all of their events on their phones, and I think there is a subset of people who are really going to make use of that. And perhaps the variable aperture is for that group of people. I'm not sure how it's going to be useful day-to-day, but when you look at it as a suite of Pro camera features, that sort of makes sense to me. So I think that's sort of the high level for the Pro.
Let's talk about it. The iPhone. It starts at $1,999 for the 256 GB model, gets up to $3,199 for the 2 TB model, which please, if you're somebody who's going to get a 2 TB model, email me and tell me what you're going to do with that storage. That is bananas. So, 5.4-inch outer display, 7.6-inch inner display. It's got two cameras on the back, one on the inside that's under the display and one on the outside on the front. I think that's the high level. Allison, you actually got to see this in person. You've handled a bunch of foldables before. What are your impressions?
It's really nice. You know, I think when the rumors started getting serious about Apple doing this wide-format foldable, you know, we started seeing them over the summer from different competitors and the Z Fold 8 is obviously the big wide-fold thing. And you look at any of them, at least I did, just like the pictures and the renders, and you're like, that looks weird. Like that looks like just like a weird phone. And then you go pick it up and you're like, no, actually, this feels very nice. It feels kind of natural, and I'm not bothered by this kind of unusual wider aspect cover screen. You know, opening it up, the iPhone Duo in particular has the matte display on the inside, which is super nice. It, I think, is just a good idea on the inside of a folding phone like this. It really cuts down on the glare. Gives it more of like a I am now using a tablet feel, you know? That was very pleasant. The crease is hard to see though, you know, we were sort of seeing that devices that had been folded more times than the ones we were using in the hands-on area were showing a little bit more of a crease. But again, like I'm not personally bothered by the crease on any foldable. They've definitely gotten a lot better. But this one seems very acceptable, definitely to my eye. It just seems like a nice polished device, like so far.
The hardware on foldables as a category has gotten just so dramatically nicer over the past five or so or however many years it's been at this point. You know, starting with the like this thing is fragile and if I look at it wrong, it's going to break to, you know, I literally just today held a Z Fold 8 and it is a gorgeous piece of hardware. It feels really, really elegant. And I think you look at, I unfortunately haven't had a chance to hold the iPhone yet. I've seen the photos, seen the videos. It looks fantastic. It looks like a really nice device. You've held the Z Fold 8. Are they similar? Because they're both, the Z Fold 8 seems quite polished actually for, I think we expect Apple to kind of come in and show everyone how it's done. And I actually think Samsung may have gotten there this same summer or perhaps earlier.
Yeah, it's a very similar experience. Z Fold, I think, is a bit thinner and lighter, and the Duo, it is that weird experience of you're having such an out-of-body. You know, you watch the keynote, you have to run over to the devices. It was crazier than ever this year, which is not a surprise, I guess, but you finally get the thing in your hands and you have to sort of like come back to it, you know, after the initial, I got to get the photos. I got to, you know, get some thoughts together on this. It wasn't until like they're basically trying to kick us out and I was like, let me hold the Duo one more time. And just kind of like thinking about it in, not in that like isolation. I was like, this is a little bit heavier. Like this will be a consideration for how people want to, it's just a different form factor. It's a different kind of distribution of the weight. I think one thing that I'm kind of stoked about is that it has MagSafe and I can put the freaking PopSocket on the back of it when I want a little like support with the form factor. So I'm excited there are magnets in the back of this wide foldable.
That's a big one. It is interesting. I think, you know, usually these differences in hardware are kind of marginal, and I think on the foldables, it's actually still a big deal. And you mentioned it, the iPhone is a touch heavier than the Z Fold 8. It's a touch thicker than the Z Fold 8. And I think at that size, these things do still matter. But the question is, do they matter as much as the experience of using it? And I think a big part of the story on the Android side is that the software is not always there to make it a fantastic experience or to sell this. You got to see this obviously in Apple's very, very polished, curated environment. How was the software? Did it feel like this is going to be something that is meaningfully, you know, better or different than using a standard iPhone or just using an iPad mini to you?
This, I think, will be a little bit more of a foldable on training wheels, which makes sense, I think, for the iPhone. You know, we've had eight years of Samsung foldables and inner screens, and in Samsung's, you know, typical way, they're like, you can run four apps on this thing if you want. And I think the target audience for that phone is like, great, that's what I want. I want to be able to do all my things and I'm okay with a little wonkiness. You know, sometimes you have to fuss with it a little bit. The Duo is going to let you run two apps as a maximum. You can have that floating like picture-in-picture video if you were watching a video also. But it seems like they've just taken a lot of care particularly with the continuity of how it is when it's folded versus how it is when you open it up. And it sounds like they really didn't want it to feel like two different experiences, which is a very Apple approach to it all. I think the more common approach for the Android devices has been like, you know, getting the hardware to the point where it is now, you know, elevating it and it's more sophisticated than it was, and then sort of building on the software capabilities every year. But Apple coming out of the gate, you know, late to the foldable game, relatively speaking, they have to do that thing where it's like super polished and it's going to be very friendly to someone who's maybe just familiar with an iPad and doesn't want to be running four apps at once. They just kind of want it to work and play videos when they want videos and do FaceTime and something else when they want it to do that. So it seems like it will be that device, you know, pending actually using it a lot.
Software so often is where Apple has the advantage, and you know, watching the videos, watching people's hands-on, iOS looks, I think, so polished for this experience. It looks like they really did do a lot to make it look natural and fluid. I dare I say, Liquid Glass looks good here. Right. It's, I'm like, oh, maybe there's something. Like I have it turned all the way down in the beta, and I look on the Duo and I'm like, oh, there's something here. But you're right, like it is very interesting. You mentioned it's like a foldable training wheels. And I'm so curious what the trajectory of this is going to be because if you look at the iPad, they're like one app, one app, one app, and then they're like one app you can slide one over, two apps, and you can slide one. And then now it's like we have three different multitasking models. You can choose whichever you'd like. And like I, you know, this is V1 of an Apple foldable. I suspect it will get more complicated over time, but I don't necessarily know that it's a bad thing that Apple is being opinionated and being specific about how you should use the iPhone Duo in V1, particularly as they're trying to get app developers on board. Apple made a big point about how they went back through all of their apps to optimize them for the Duo's display, and they made a bunch of changes to iOS, right? The dock is perpetually on the right. The settings and whatnot are in the top right corner, which I actually think looks really natural and great. Did you have a chance to play around with any of that?
Just kind of picking it up and looking at the home screen, you're like, this is different. This is a little bit of a different experience. Yeah. Having the little like toolbar on the side of the screen, and you open it up and you're like, that's where you're like, oh, okay. This was designed to make this feel like just one experience and not like one phone over here and one phone over here. I think it sort of faded into the background pretty quickly for me just kind of like doodling around on the device. I guess we'll see how people react to it. It's, you know, it's kind of the obvious thing, but it is a huge deal when Apple messes with the iPhone in any way. You know, this is their first new form factor for this device, and it's, you know, the pillar of their business. And so I think they recognized that and really like carried that thought all the way through like how should this be when it's closed? How should it be when it's open? What are the software changes that are going to make it feel better?
Absolutely. And I think by virtue of this being Apple, they will probably sell quite a few of these. But it's also not necessarily a bad thing for them if this is not a total blockbuster because it does take time to get the app developers on board. It does take time to polish, you know, every corner that they might have, you know, overlooked in the operating system, and those are things that happen with time. And I think Apple is better at that than other companies at getting the developer ecosystem to come on board and to make sure that everything is eventually in place. All right, we've got a ton more to talk about. We're going to take a break. When we're back, V is going to join us and we're talking all about the Apple Watches.
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All right, we're back and V is here to join us to talk about the new Apple Watches. V, glad you're here. I'm glad to be here. So, there are two new watches, the Apple Watch Series 12, the Apple Watch Ultra 4. They were so similar over last year's models that Apple just sort of bundled them when they announced the two of them. They were like, we've got these watches. Here's the whole family, and now we're just going to tell you about software features because that's most of what's new here. So I kind of want to break it down because as far as I see it, there's sort of two big chunks of new features here. And one is a big hardware feature, but one that you're not necessarily going to see, and that's the improved sensor array. And the second is AI and ambient listening, which is wild.
Yes, there's a lot to unpack there. So let's start with the hardware because I think that's more straightforward. So V, what's new here? There's the sensor array that touches your skin has been upgraded on both watches, correct?
Yes. So it's been a while since the sensor array has been upgraded at all. I would say I think since the Series 6 maybe was the last time the sensor array changed, and there's been a lot of like engineering done to be different. So basically the crystal is a bit larger, although the case footprint is the same, like we're not going up in size, and that's to ensure better skin contact. The electrode for the EKG, it used to have like two spokes coming out of it. They're calling them petals. But like these two lines that would come out. And now it has 32. So more data in that way. And the arrangements of the LEDs which emit light and the photodiodes which receive light because that's how the optical sensors work have been kind of condensed. The TLDR is that it's supposed to be a lot more accurate. We got a lot of questions about tattoos online and in our comments. And what I'm going to say is that it's going to depend on your tattoo and the placement of your tattoo because the fundamental underlying technology that it relies on light, how it reflects into your skin and reflects off of your skin, that has not changed. So like the sensor, the new sensor placement depending on your tattoo and the darkness of your tattoo that may help, it might not. So like the problem with this technology isn't like making light better. It's just like that's just kind of the fundamental flaw of that technology. And the rearranging of all of this stuff says that they can now flash the lights more frequently. So it will take more continuous heart rate measurements. So previously it used to be that when you were working out, yes, it would sample pretty frequently, but when you're just doing your day-to-day, it would be like once every 5 minutes or so, not very often. It's changed throughout the years because it wasn't, they were trying to preserve battery life because if it was flashing more often, you would have more battery drain. Now, they're going to be sampling once every 5 seconds, which is a 60 times increase in frequency. And they're also now going to be sampling recovery HRV, heart rate variation, which is the difference between heartbeats, and is a proxy for how recovered you feel. That's something that a lot of other wearables like the Oura Ring or Whoop or Garmin, all these other devices have been measuring for a very long time. Apple has also been measuring heart rate variability for a while, but it's differentiating it as recovery. So this is enabling a new readiness feature which, you know, again, the wearable nerds out there will be like everyone else has had a readiness feature for like five, six, seven, forever ago. There's no new sensor, right? It's not like this unlocks some new thing that they can track. But because they have more data, they actually are able to interpret it in new ways and get stuff like heart rate variability and these readiness scores. They went hard on heart rate variability. Is that a big deal?
The thing about wearables and that like I want our readers to understand is that a lot of the times it's not measuring anything super directly. Like even your heart rate with the optical sensors, it's not measuring it directly. It's shining light into your skin, finding out the rhythm of your pulse based on how the light reflects back. And from that, an algorithm is estimating your heart rate. And we've gotten to a very high degree of accuracy with optical heart rate sensors compared to when wearable technology first came out. But heart rate variability as a metric, it's a proxy for your autonomic nervous system, which is kind of like a stress indicator, how recovered you are from certain things. And as wearables shifted towards sleep and recovery over the last several years, it's become a more prominent metric, especially among athletes.
Okay, while we're talking about mysterious health metrics and uncertain science, some of this stuff sounded scary. They were like, we'll tell you your longevity. We'll tell you the age of your body. And I'm like, oh god, can it actually tell that stuff? Does that mean anything?
Basically, these companies are all measuring different metrics and they're weighting them in different ways in their proprietary algorithm to basically kind of give you an estimate as to whether your physiological age matches your chronological age. And the idea is you want to be younger or on par or younger. And if you are older, then maybe you want to change certain levers in your health so that you can be physiologically younger than you're chronologically. I think it's a load of crock. Like if you're using it in the way that I think it was originally intended to, like see areas of your life that statistically with the literature we can say it gives you a better chance of living longer. Okay, sure. Like you can be like, oh, maybe I'm not doing enough in terms of sleep. I should really change my sleeping habits so that it's more regular. Or, oh, I'm really like kind of eating pizza and fried chicken all day and maybe I should eat a vegetable every now and then. In that sense, it's fine. But, you know, you kind of get into it like I've talked to several readers, several people out in the wild who are just like, my Whoop age, I got obsessed with lowering my Whoop age. And then, you know, I had one commenter who was just like, and then I got a blood test and found out I was really not doing so hot on that blood test. So it's like your health is holistic, but it's just very much like, guys, let's use common sense. Eat nutritionally most of the time, exercise regularly, and try and sleep consistently, and your health age should be fine. Like, you could get hit by a truck tomorrow, and it won't matter that your health age was like 10 years younger than your physiological age.
This is the thing. Every single year I watch these Apple Watch presentations and I'm like, oh man, this is a major improvement over last year and I've got to wear one of these things or else I'm going to know nothing and I won't be healthy. And then like 3 days later I'm like, this is probably fine. Like I probably don't need all. Does this seem like a big level up to you? Does this seem like it's going to change what the Apple Watch can do? Who is it going to displace, you know, the Whoop for Whoop diehards, or is this actually just like another iterative, okay, they're adding more expected health features kind of year?
I think it's more towards the latter with an Apple twist. Like Apple doesn't really care about being the first to these health features. They care about executing it in a way that they think is scientifically valid and actionable. So like they, in last year, they introduced a sleep score, right? Every other wearable has had a sleep score for like ages now. Like it's not new. And so like this health app redesign that's coming later in the year is very much kind of bringing it more in line with what we're seeing from other health tech companies. So in a sense it's catch-up but with an Apple twist. So one thing that I do give them credit for is that they do try and take a much more conservative approach so that, you know, you can just engage with it to your degree of comfort. You know, I'm looking at their longevity tab that was in the keynote and it's less objectionable than some of the other ones that I've seen in this space which are really just kind of pushing you to the frontier edge. It's a lot more like, hey, we're going to take the generalized approach. It's going to be a lot more holistic and top level, which I think for the average person is the right choice. But, you know, yes, you can see there's so much stuff in there now. So those are the health updates.
To me, the more unexpected and more differentiated and wild update was what they did with AI. So Apple announced this thing called Audio Intelligence, which is just another, you know, AI acronym. And there are a bunch of sub-features in this, but the two that I think are most striking are called Live Rewind and Siri Recap. V, can you TLDR what these two are for me?
Yeah. So Live Rewind is if you're in a situation, you're like, h, what did someone just say? You press the crown twice and it like goes back 15 seconds in time and produces a transcript of what was said. So you can just check it on your wrist and if you choose to save it, it will go into the Siri AI app. There's a new hardware chip that it's recording non-stop to enable these features. Kind of there's like the way that it's described in like the privacy documents that have come out because I feel like Apple was very like, oh, people are going to have questions. So here is a white paper that was ready to go by the time the keynote had ended. There is something that they call a secure exclave on this chip that the audio is processed through. Supposedly Apple can't access it. You can't access it. There are no audio recordings saved. So the raw audio file gets sent to this exclave, boop bop, AI processing happens. That's a scientific term, boop bop, AI processing. And then that audio file is immediately deleted. There is a visual cue that you are recording something on the wrist when it pops up as well as an audio chime that also happens at the same time so that people around you are supposedly aware that this feature has been enabled and you have to manually enable it at all times. So at no point are you going to be able to be like, what did someone say 30 seconds ago? Like that's, you're not going to be able to pull up a transcript of that. It's just boop.
You got 15 seconds. That's it.
You got 15 seconds. So it's like the second someone says something and you're like, didn't catch that. You have to activate it for this thing to come up. And who knows if it's going to be any good, right? Because it's a mic on an Apple Watch. It has to be kind of, this mic doesn't have like long-range frequency. It's not like you're going to be able to point this thing at something someone said very far away. It's kind of more what's in your immediate vicinity.
The social use case for this is very mysterious to me. Like I both intuitively understand it where I'm like, oh yeah, there are definitely times when I'm like I could not get that word. But what is the use case for? And so I will press a button on my wrist which will then announce that I missed what you said and then read what you said instead of just asking you to say it again. Very, I'm sure there are some accessibility use cases there that feels very clear and Apple did highlight that but I for the, you know, day-to-day for the millions and millions of people who have these that feels very strange and that's only one of them. So then there's Siri Recap which I think takes this to a much grander level.
Basically like when it's on you'll get a recap of the conversations that you have. So like it'll detect that conversation. It's not fully accurate to say it's always on recording because you can customize when this feature works. So you can customize it to be like only during work hours or never on during later hours. So like you have some customization there. It is opt-in. So it's
Not turned on by default. So it wouldn't be accurate to say that every Apple Watch that's out there is suddenly listening to everyone. That is not necessarily the case.
But it has the ability. Correct. You could set it to always listen. You could set it to always listen, and when it detects that a conversation is happening, it'll produce high-level meeting summaries that then appear in your Siri app and then auto-delete after seven days. So it's kind of like, you know, how you're on a Zoom or Gemini or a Google Meet call and Gemini just like produces a summary of that meeting.
I love that. I like those, they're really helpful.
In certain contexts, I think there's going to be a lot of people who find value in that particular thing. It's just, and this is a kind of existential question that's been on my beat, is there's, I know that I'm using it for a non-creepy method. People around me don't know the parameters that I've defined that this feature will work. They don't know how I've configured it. They don't even know whether I have a model that's compatible with this feature because it does require the secure enclave on the chip. So it's not coming to previous models. And so in the whole world of Apple Watch users, the vast majority of people who will not upgrade this particular year because they have perfectly fine and functional Apple Watches, they don't have this capability on their device, right? So it's only people who get the new ones that have the potential to do that, and even then it has to be opt-in. So there's that, there's just like a lot of calculation that's going on in my brain right now as to how this feature will work for most people. But as I understand it, it's not a transcript. They strip attribution out. They don't differentiate speakers. So like us as journalists, you can't record a meeting and be like, 'Oh yeah, I'm going to go find quotes in there now.' Like you can't.
Then it gets to this weirder place where it's like, 'Okay, so you get this generic summary of all the conversations you had throughout your day.' And so I'm going to get a summary being like, you told somebody at length about GTA 6. They didn't care. And like, what am I going to do with that? Like, I just, on one hand, I find this so wildly impressive from a technological standpoint. The fact that we're at a point where we can just leave a microphone running non-stop, we can use AI to make sense of it and summarize, like that's very cool. Whether that actually produces useful insights, like we're, I don't know that we're there yet. This feels like a we're doing it because it's cool. It's very much a thing that I think is useful in a work context or in a planning context, like if you're a parent and you have a lot of kids, you have to attend a lot of meetings for kids that have a lot of action items that come out of it. In these contexts,
I think it can be useful, and we already have the kind of technology in like this particular context where you're video conferencing and you're like, ah, what was the action item from this meeting that I need to do? Like in those contexts, I think that's what it's meant for. Like you attend the lecture and you want to know what the notes from that lecture are and the points that were salient. But from our like day-to-day conversations where you're just talking with friends, do you really need like a bullet point of who said what and where and why? Like not really. And also again, like no attribution is going to be given in these notes. So the way I understand it is like I say something, the meeting notes from the Siri recap is never going to say V said this. There's no said in there. If there is a name that pops up, it'll be like Amanda did her homework.
It's just so interesting that they're like, we're not going to make it too useful because then it would be really creepy. And so we're, it's like,
We don't want to go too far. But that is the risk here, right? Like this is the summer that the Meta Ray-Ban glasses switched from being this, you know, kind of hot up-and-coming product to being called pervert glasses, like quite widely.
And now Apple is like, 'Oh, by the way, you know, the smartwatch we make that millions of people buy every year, all of them now have the potential to record audio 24/7.' I don't know how people are going to feel about that.
Based online, not particularly happy about it, which is sort of like interesting because in my comments, everyone has been like, Meta glasses, not well, Meta makes them. I'll wait for Apple's version, which you know, like is sort of like a soft launch here with a device that is like already used by a lot of people, trusted by a lot of people with a lot of sensitive information, right? Like smartwatches, they learn a lot about you in terms of your health and like a lot of data is collected from them. So in one sense, Apple is sort of testing that philosophy, I think, about AI wearables. And like if we come out and have a very strong privacy-first thing here, we have a secure enclave. We're not recording audio. Everything auto-deletes. We're trying to keep in mind it's not only your privacy, but the privacy of bystanders around you. Like it is one of the most thoughtful implementations of a privacy policy that I've seen in this class of device. And at the same time, I'm like, how? I mean, obviously they kind of want the press to communicate how it works and educate people, but I'm like, it's very difficult to have that stick in the public's mind. It's very hard to communicate this feature.
And I think there's this important distinction between can Apple keep your audio secure. I fully believe they can, right? I'm sure that this is quite well thought through. That's one side. The other side is do people want to be recorded? And I think for Apple, this is like this is an area that they're stepping into in a big way. We're expecting them to release a pair of AirPods that have cameras on them next year that are going to probably do a very similar thing. And I think that's going to make people uncomfortable in a very new and unusual way. They're allegedly, you know, tinkering with an AI pin in their labs, too, which is a thing that it's different when Humane does it and they sell a couple hundred of them versus when Apple does it and this thing becomes a true mainstream product. I think this is actually going to make the Apple Watches one of the most interesting products of the year. So, V, I'm very excited for you to test these and see whether this stuff even works at a basic level. I think there's going to be so much more to talk about here.
I think it's also very telling that these features don't launch until later this year. So, like,
That is interesting. Yep. Still more to work on.
Like some of the audio intelligence features are launching, but it's kind of like the lower stakes ones. Like Shazam is going to work better. Yay. Or like audio, like it'll be able to tell when a doorbell rang. Yay. Like, okay, the Pixel has had like a 24/7 Shazam feature for like a decade now, and it is like one of the single best features on the Pixel. If they had just said the Apple Watch now is 24/7 Shazam, baby, I think they would have sold so many new Apple Watches off that. They should have kept it simpler.
It's still the underlying concept, right? It's the same underlying concept that it's always
fun. It's just telling me whose song I'm not that one. I'm not stressing about this. But you're right. They've all been listening the whole time. All of our, I'm not going to say it, but you know that wake word, like your phone is listening to you right now.
It's very weird. And there's a gradient, and like Apple just took a large step forward. It just did a push and
I have to say that I really feel like they are so aware of the conversation that's happening right now because of the documents. Those documents were ready to go,
right? They put like a white paper. Yeah. Like before the keynote ended, they were like, and here's how it works, and here's how it's private, and here's how it's secure. And it's sort of just like, oh, they're aware. And I think they're trying to do the thing that I've been asking Meta to do for two years, which is to lead and show how privacy can be done. Whether or not it's going to be effective in the court of public opinion is something that I'm going to be watching just because it's hot privacy summer, hot surveillance summer with the flat cameras and all of this stuff. It's all related. And so this space is how I feel for the last 24 hours. Like
I think it's going to be so interesting to test these things and see what actually happens, but particularly to see how people respond once they're in the wild. V, thank you so much for joining us to break this stuff down. I'm sure we're going to have a lot more to discuss later this year. All right, we've got more Apple to talk about, but not about this week's event. The other week, Apple announced some new Macs and they went all out marketing them as AI powerhouses, which we thought was probably just some marketing bluster. And some listeners told us maybe it's not. So Nilay Patel and David Al called up an AI researcher to break down what's real and what's hype.
So like a week ago, we did the Vergecast and we were talking about the new Mac Studios. And in the way that we are wont to do, we dismissed Apple's marketing out of hand. They were like, 'These are the best computers for AI.' And I was like, 'That's silly. Nvidia, because I'm team Jensen, as everyone knows.' And all these people told me I was wrong. Look at that. So I was like, 'Okay, we got to get this right. I'm clearly missing something.' The Vergecast audience doesn't often just tell us we're wrong for no reason.
Well, usually there's something there. So we called up CJ Trowbridge, who's an AI researcher. I've been following his TikTok for ages. He's really smart. And he is going to explain to us what's going on in local AI. It is more surprising than you think, and whether or not Apple's claims about these Macs actually hold up. CJ Trowbridge, you're an AI researcher. You have one of my favorite TikTok accounts about AI, specifically local AI. Welcome to the Vergecast.
It's nice to be here. Nice to meet you.
I am a huge fan. I'm very happy to have you here. So here's the May couple. Last week, we were talking about the new Mac Mini and Mac Studio and Apple's very hypey press release about how they're the best computers for AI. And I said something along the lines of, 'I bet Nvidia has something to say about that because probably Nvidia chips in a desktop PC are better.' And then we got 10 million comments saying I was wrong, which I appreciate. A lot of them about unified memory, some of them about daisy chaining all these Macs together on Thunderbolt. There's some reports that OpenAI and Anthropic are actually buying these devices in the tens of thousands. So I figured I should bring on someone who knows a lot about local AI and the state of the art there to explain exactly how I got this wrong and if Apple's claims are true. Tell me, is Apple correct here? Are they the best devices for local? What is the state of the art there?
I think they're one of the only options for a specific use case that most people don't have alternatives for, especially for people who are trying to run large models at home. And you can see it in the price pressure around those particular SKUs versus the high-end consumer Nvidia SKUs. It's interesting because there are all these class action lawsuits against Apple for misrepresenting their AI capabilities. And I think that has fed into a lot of the speculation that like their hardware is all bad at AI. And it's true for the phones. Their phones are not very good at running AI. But for these computers that specifically have hundreds of gigs of RAM, they can.
Apple is now finally starting to market these Macs as the best Macs for AI that they have made. So I think my question here is like they've had the Mac Mini for a while now, right? The M4s are the ones that went crazy for Open Claw. Now they have M6. Why is the M6 tangibly better? Or is it? Because it seems like, okay, because Apple is starting to actually market it as the best AI inference computer that they have.
So is it, it's not better.
So like the inference happens using typically it's integer 8 math or smaller, which there are a lot of structural issues that pop up around that. And so like for one of them with Apple, they actually don't have the capability of doing integer 8 math. So like they copy an integer 8 number into the register and have to like convert it to 16, which is true for many GPUs as well. And they did that because it cuts the memory bandwidth in half. So you can advertise twice as much, right? And Nvidia does the same thing. So a lot of these, I think like theoretically you can say this is a single-digit percentage improvement over the previous generation. And it's like, well, yeah, that's true. It is the best. It's better than the last one, but like 3% or whatever.
So head-to-head with an Nvidia GPU, what would you take? A new Mac Studio or a PC with an Nvidia GPU?
It depends what you want.
If you're trying to run a single model that's like less than 24 gigs, then something like an RTX 6000 Pro is going to be a lot faster, like a lot faster. But if you want to run something that's bigger than 24 gigs, it's not going to work at all, right? Like it's going to run in the system RAM at the speed of system RAM.
Yeah. So I think that's the big advantage that they have is like if they want to put a lot of RAM, you can put bigger models in the RAM, but it's not going to be as fast.
Let me ask just like a really dumb question, and this is like the root of this whole thing. Maybe I've just been poisoned by the hype, but you know, a big part of the modern AI moment is Nvidia saying, 'These GPUs are not just for graphics. They're for accelerated computing.' This is like Jensen's speech. And it turns out AI really needs accelerated computing for training and inference. And we need to build, we need all the electrons in the world to achieve AGI because only Nvidia GPUs can do it. And we're going to buy Hugging Face and all this other stuff. Like right, Nvidia's on this terror because of the power of their GPUs, right? That is the message they are sending. And you know, again, maybe I just bought the hype, but I don't associate Apple with super powerful graphics. Is it just the memory architecture? I mean, Apple famously went to unified memory ages ago. They did it with the M1s. Is it just that they got lucky in picking that memory architecture?
I don't think it's even that. I think like for example when you look at the secondary market for used enterprise inference cards, even the ones from 10 years ago are hard to get because chips really haven't changed that much in the last decade in terms of the capability at the tasks that they were already doing 10 years ago. The performance is like a single-digit improvement since then. There's new extensions, there's new shortcuts, there's new duct tape for really specific applications where you have like new kinds of tensor cores, stuff like that. But the actual like raw compute capacity is not super different with the 10 years ago cards versus today. And actually the inference cards like a P40 for example has more compute power than any of the M-series Max chips, right? And these are 150 bucks. But there are cycles and sometimes it's like you can't get them. I think the big difference there is that it gets you from not being able to do it at home to being able to do it at home. So it's true that there are better ways, there are more expensive ways you could get like an RTX 6000 Pro versus a Mac Studio and it's going to be a lot faster. But it's much more limited in the RAM, right? So you can potentially get much, much larger models that will run on a Mac Studio with 500 gigs of RAM versus something like even the highest-end RTX 6000 Pro that only has 96 gigs of RAM. So I don't think it matters as much the memory architecture, although they do have higher memory bandwidth than many of the other chips are available. But the reality is that any CPU can do anything that any CPU can do, right? Or any GPU can do. GPUs can do more things at once. They're faster with certain kinds of tasks like matrix multiplication.
But if you look at like a Pixel 2, right? A Pixel 2 gets like five tokens per second on many of the new Qwen models, right? That doesn't sound like a lot, but that's a quarter of a million tokens a day. So like how many old phones do you have in a drawer somewhere that you could be getting a quarter million tokens a day out of? You can run the newest AI models on like those never obsolete eMachines. It's like it's still, it's a CPU. It's got storage. It's going to be really slow, but like really any computer would work.
So there was this article recently that came out that said a 10-year-old Xeon is all you need,
