AirPods, Touch Bars, and the rest of Tim Cook's legacy

Welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of California's Laguna Seca Raceway, where new Apple CEO John Ternus apparently drives very fast, which is cool. Good for John Ternus. It rules. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neelay Patel is here. Hi, Neelay. Hello. How's it going? John Gruber from Daring Fireball, also here. Hello. So we have to start the show with just the obvious news of the week. John, this is why you're here, because, of course, you are here to talk with us about the succession at Apple. Tim Cook is out. John Ternus is in. Neelay, you and I did a live podcast sort of immediately reacting to this on Tuesday. We've had a couple of days to settle in. We've seen some more reporting. Both executives have talked a little bit. We have some new stuff to talk about. And I also made a list of every product Apple has released under Tim Cook, and we are going to debate his legacy as a product person, which I'm very excited about. But, John, I just want to start with you and go back to Monday for me when all of this started to happen. You've been covering sort of the rumors and speculation of the will they, won't they of this succession plan for a while. I'll ask you the same question I asked Neelay is, are you surprised this happened? And were you surprised it happened when it did? No, but it's a weird feeling where they prepared us, I think, clearly, about as much as they possibly could. And yet when the news hit the wire at 4:30 Eastern time, it was still like, holy crap, what's going on? Wow, what's going on? Right. And I'm thinking in context to, like, elections. And it's like, here in the U.S., we have a system where when the new president gets elected in November, they don't get inaugurated until January. And there is, like, the election results might be a surprise to people, but then there's, like, this period where, oh, you still have the old president and the new president's coming. Right? And they're kind of doing that with this, where Tim Cook is still the CEO until the end of August. But we didn't know, the difference is we didn't know when election day was going to be. Right? And then the U.K. has a really cool system where they have these parliamentary elections, and if there's a new prime minister, they move into 1 Downing Street the next morning. Right? And it's like, whoa, where did this happen? And so I'm not surprised, I guess. But it's like, we just didn't know when election day was going to be, and then it turned out it was Monday this week. And so it was a little surprising, like, oh, they're announcing it now. But what they announced, not surprising at all. Yeah, I think that's right. Neelay, do you feel any differently now with a few days of hindsight? We were both definitely caught off guard. Just a little bit of inside baseball. My favorite thing that happened here was Neelay was off recording. I think you were doing something for Decoder, right? I was doing software brain. I was in the middle of software brain. That episode just came out. It's very good. And when you do that, it's, like, the only time you're very hard to get in touch with. Because you have to, like, turn things off to go record audio for a long time. I had to call you. And you picked up and you were like, I think you think when I call you, it's like some horrible emergency is happening. Always. Every single time. I called and you picked up and you were like, hey, what's going on? And I was like, are you recording Decoder? And you were like, yeah. And I was like, you should stop because Tim Cook is leaving. And he just goes, okay, bye, and hangs up the phone. And then immediately started just being useless and slack. And now here we are. Yeah, how do you feel a couple of days later? The one thing that has truly surprised me in the sort of post-announcement period is Tim Cook had a, I think they had an event at Apple and he addressed everybody. And he, I think he realized he had to say out loud, I'm healthy and I will be the chairman of the board for a long time. You know, because it's Apple, because it's Steve Jobs. I think, like, that question was on people's minds, given the seeming suddenness of the timing, if not the John Ternus of it. So he did have to say, I'm very healthy and excited to be the executive chairman of the board for a long time. I think at least until the end of the Trump administration, he has no choice but to be the chairman of the board and just handle that problem. But that's the one thing that he, it felt like, oh, he had to, they were not expecting him to have to clarify it. So he had to say that out loud. Yeah, and I think that that comes back to a little bit of a whisper campaign about his health that people, and I think, I think Mark Gurman and, you know, Gurman Sam will probably come up a couple of times in this podcast, but I think Gurman had mentioned it, you know, that people have noticed that at least one of his hands shakes a little bit and people say. I've looked at the video and I don't really see it, that you could see his hand shaking in the rather infamous Oval Office event last summer where he gifted the president of the United States a gold Apple trophy that his hand was shaking. People have said that they've noticed it in private. And so there, you know, and I think, honestly, some of his competitors have sort of, if you added fuel to that whisper campaign that, hey, he's getting old. Can I just say old in American public life is not 65. Not anymore. Totally. Not anymore. Like there's a, there's a pretty yawning gap between 65 and old in American public life. Like Donald Trump is very old. Like, like Apple, I think they have a rule that their board members have to retire at 65. Nah, I forget how old because Levinson's like 75 and he's still there. He was the chairman until now. Um, I forget what the, what the age, it's, it's older than 65, I think, but Gore ran up against it. It might be 70. I don't know. And it doesn't say you have to leave. It just means you have to get an exception. Yep. And so I think overall, this was a, from Apple's perspective, an enormous comms success. I think whether their plan was exactly the way it should be, I think it went off exactly as they wanted it to come off. And I think one of the things, you know, there's always with a big announcement like this, some kind of, huh, we didn't think we had to dot that I or cross that T. And I think the, Hey, is everything okay with Tim health-wise was the one that they just didn't think they even needed to address. Do you think that's a Steve Jobs thing? Like Neil, you, you mentioned that, right? Then like, obviously the last time a CEO succession at Apple happened was because of Steve Jobs health. Do you think that's what's on his mind or are people just trying to figure out why is this happening now? Because again, like you and I have talked about this, Neil, like the, there was a sense when Trump was elected again, that all of the big tech CEOs were now essentially tied to their job through the end of the Trump administration because you just, you, you couldn't, it was the devil, you know. Right. Uh, so I think there, there was a little bit of surprise that this happened this way. And I think the way that Apple is managing it, uh, which is to leave Tim Cook as the person who has to, uh, in Trump's words, kiss Trump's ass. Um, yes, I know. Isn't it great? I mean, there is something great about the fact that Trump put those words out there and we can just say those are his words, not ours. Yep. Right. That is fantastic. That is journalistically honest. Now I can say kiss his ass because Trump's. That's what's happening. We all know it. Everyone knows it. Uh, I mean, again, I think that is just a huge part of the role. Like I do not envy Tim Cook's responsibility to manage a thing that is the global economy. Like it just looks like fractally looks like the global economy. You have software in the United States. You've got chips in Taiwan. You've got hardware in China that is moving to, like it's, it's the economy. It's just the, one of the biggest companies that does anything ever. And if the iPhone doesn't ship on time, maybe the global economy suffers. Like you can see it. And so he has to go be a politician. And I, even that Trump true social post, which is bananas. If you look at it, I'm saying American public life is very old. You look at that and you're like, wow, you just voice memoed that thing to hell and back and didn't give a shit. Um, Trump can't meet a new guy. Like it has to still be Tim Cook who calls him. It cannot be John Ternus being like, I need a tariff exception on this narrow class of goods that is necessary for the next MacBook. Like that's just not gonna happen. So I think that role is very important. I always actually, when he, when he said to Apple employees, I'm going to be here for a long They announced that, but let's just say something had happened and he had somehow in 2011 managed to stay ahead of the cancer for another year or two. He would have been a pretty influential chairman of the board at Apple, right, for however long he was around. How much of a role, like, what exactly? I mean, we know this geopolitical, not just Trump, but you know, China, I guess, everything else, you know, that Cook is still going to have his plate. But we don't know what kind of a role he's going to play in any other non-obvious decisions that perk up, percolate up to the top of the heap. I mean, there's a saying, I forget who said it about the White House, but I know I was watching Bill Maher in last week, and Rahm Emanuel was on, and he was the chief of staff for Obama, and had been in the White House before, and his description of it was basically, the only thing that comes to the Oval Office are problems. Because if it's not a problem, somebody deals with it before it gets to the president. That's it. It's just four years or eight years of just dealing with problems. That's it. And I think a CEO's office is kind of like that, too, right? If it's not a problem or a debate, why in the world is the CEO dealing with it? And are some of these things still going to go to Tim Cook, too? How much, you know? I don't think so. I think, if anything, because I think Tim Cook knows what it's like to have a level of responsibility with somebody over his shoulder, because he was doing it with Steve Jobs. So I don't think he would do this. I don't think he would. I think if he wanted to still be making the decisions and wasn't giving the true authority of the CEO office to turn it, he wouldn't be doing this right now. The thing I've been thinking about a lot is the Disney succession at the beginning of the pandemic, when Bob Iger, quote unquote, left and turned over the company to Bob Chapek. And then, by all accounts, spent all of his time systematically undermining and sabotaging everything Bob Chapek was trying to do. I would say there's nothing about Tim Cook that suggests he would do that. And there's nothing about the way this process has been run that suggests this was anything but Tim Cook's idea. And I think, to a large extent, like you mentioned this being a huge PR win. I think the way that this has sort of hit the world as smoothly as it has, unbelievable win from Apple's perspective. Like the stock market didn't freak out. There was this sense of like, OK, we're going to give Tim Cook his flowers. But also, isn't it cool that a product guy is going to be in charge again? Like everybody managed to immediately be excited about the new guy without there being any kind of referendum on the Tim Cook legacy. Like, it's just in the sort of public eye. Wait, I disagree with that a little bit. You don't think so? OK. I disagree with that a little bit. And not to hype my other show, but I spent a lot of time asking CEOs what kind of decisions they make and how they make them. And all of them want to pretend that the only thing they do is solve problems. And all of them want to pretend that they've empowered their teams and, you know, I shouldn't even be making decisions. Like if you just like take the gestalt of a decoder interview with a CEO, they're all like, I don't do anything around here. You know, like, I'm just slapping babies. Like, who knows? But like the reality is. That's the phrase, by the way, just slapping babies. It's slapping faces and kissing babies. No, slapping babies. That's good. Whatever. Just out here slapping babies. You can tell I pay a lot of attention during the CEO interviews on decoder. But the reality is they're making hard decisions about priorities and trade-offs. Like that is actually the job. And that is actually the problem that any company, even a company as laden with resources as Apple, and a joke I've been telling for years now is I've never even asked Andy Tim Cook on decoder. Because you can just imagine how he will answer all of the questions. You can imagine, you know, like, what's a big problem you have? And he's like, the problem, the products are too great. Like, I don't need to do it. Like, and I think this is the moment where there is enough pressure on whether Tim Cook can invent the next generation of products. That, oh, it's going to be very exciting that the product guy is in charge while the person who manages Xi Jinping and Donald Trump is still there. And if there's a blip in the supply chain, he can swoop back in. But actually what we need to do is look at the threat from the next generation of conversational interfaces dead in the eye and figure out what to do with it is a big problem. And the person making the trade-offs should be as deep in that problem as they can be. And I think if there's a referendum on Cook, it's that he was never so deep in the products. He could make those trade-offs. I'm looking at your list of products, and they're all pretty good. But like, they never figure out what to do with a car. They just spent however many billions of dollars letting Johnny Ive be like, I will reinvent the car. And anybody who's deep in cars is like, the best selling cars in America are midsize crossover SUVs. Do you want Johnny Ive to design the Toyota RAV4? Like, that's your market. New Ferrari looks sick. He designed a Toyota RAV4. Like, that thing looks more like a RAV4 than it should, right? Because that's the market for that kind of car. That, I think, is the referendum on Tim Cook, is that the products all got incrementally better. To some extent, they are all just extensions of the iPhone. But there is not the step change that reflects a vision of the future. John, I know you kind of disagree with this, but that would be my, like, look back. Oh, this company got way bigger in a way that almost no one else could have done. But there was never a step change. I want to get into the specific products. But John, I do want to know your thoughts on that. Because I also suspect you disagree. Yeah, but I disagree in a way that we're never going to settle it. And it's a wonderful podcast discussion point, because you can't really disprove it. You'd have to go back in time and re-roll the universe with different decisions. But I think one of them is that the iPhone is especially, particularly, not just because Apple made it, but it's the whole business Apple has been in since 1977. You know, as we all know, 50 years ago, making personal computers. And even Apple didn't know it. That that was the end point. The end point was a personal computer, something akin to the size of a wallet or a deck of cards that you could put in your pocket in your purse. And that would have a wireless network connection to a network that connects you to anybody around the world, right? And I know that sounds a little like, yeah, duh, that's what a phone is. But like in the early 80s, that sounds super sci-fi. And that's really what it took. And Ben Thompson and I say this over and over again on our podcast, Dithering, that it's really kind of a waste of the term that we started calling computers personal computers back in the late 70s and early 80s when the real personal computer was the smartphone. That's really when it became personal for everybody in the world. And, you know, and calling the Macintosh the computer for the rest of us. It was the computer for more of us, but the iPhone was the computer for the rest of us. And it's just so. And then ever since then, everything that's come out since, it's like, well, but it's not the smartphone. It's not the iPhone. It's not the smartphone. Well, there's no it's going to be a while, maybe a very long time, maybe after all of our careers before something really supplants the the smartphone just because it's the end point of a certain progress. And you can see the progression from 1976, 77 to the iPhone. And then you can see why it kind of stopped there and that you end up with things like in Tim Cook's portfolio, the Apple watch and the AirPods, which connect to guess what they connect to your iPhone, which is in your pocket. Like what else is going to come up like that? There is nowhere else to go. You can't make it smaller people. It turns out people, you know, even when they tried to make it a little smaller or at least back the way it used to be with the iPhone 12 and 13 minis, people didn't want to buy them. Like they've kind of figured out. They tried it. They actually tried the experiment. Like, what if we went back a little smaller and people didn't buy them? And it's like, okay, we know what size phones people want. Here they are. And we know what they want. They want better cameras and nicer screens and they want longer battery life. And that's it. No, so I agree with that fully. I think I, my hottest take is that there's not another thing after the smartphone. I don't think we're all going to run around in glasses in that way. But I think to Cook's credit, and this is where it's so different than Scully. I think Scully was a good CEO of Apple and as the three of us talked They wanted from the beginning. And you just don't see a lot of that in new categories with Apple. I think the last time we did a podcast together, Johnny, we were talking about the Vision Pro. Like a big question I have is whether John Turnus wants to iterate the Vision Pro. Because a VR headset might just have a limit. That might just be all anyone can ever do with VR headsets. And all of that time might be better spent elsewhere. And maybe you can't iterate it into a great product, or it has to become AR glasses, which is actually a totally different product. And I think there's a lot of those questions inside of Apple's product lineup right now where it's like, this is about as good as it can get. What's the- where are the new ideas that are green shoots that need to come up? And you just didn't see a lot of those in the Cook era outside of maybe, I think it might just be the Vision Pro. On the other hand, it's not like he missed anything. Like this to me is one of the things that I think goes back to John, what you were saying about the smartphone, is while everyone else flailed around uncontrollably trying to find the thing after the smartphone, like credit to Apple for just continuing to look around and be like, oh, we're the smartphone company? That's sick. And just not do anything except continue to entrench around the smartphone. And like, is is there something that they, you know, someone is doing that they, I don't know. But right now there is no evidence that Tim Cook missed anything. And I think that, that to me is like the thing about his product legacy that is probably the most positive. Including AI. We should, we should put that on the list, including AI. Yeah. I mean, there is, like, this is an interesting time for this to be happening because I would say if there is going to be some brand new hardware, AI is the best shot we've had to find it in a while. But that said, the single best AI device anyone owns right now is their smartphone. And I think that's going to be the case for some time. Or a Mac mini. Like those are your two choices. Or a Mac mini, which you literally can't even find anymore. I'll disagree with you there, though. I will disagree with you there, where I do think as I sit here and think, well, okay, I wrote a rather laudatory first take on the Cook era. And I've been thinking, and I'm not trying to find the, you know, well, you got to have a list of pros and a list of cons. What are the cons? The car is a good one because it was a lot of money, but it's, I still think it's maybe overall, even if $10 billion spent, it was like a kind of feather in his cap that he was like, you know what? I don't care if we spent $10 billion. This isn't worth shipping. At least he didn't rename the company after it and then screw that up horribly. The one that I think sticks out is AI. And I think you have to go back to before the whole LLM moment and just look at Siri. And that there was a time when it was like Steve Jobs's last obsession. He was the one who spearheaded. There was the famous story that just came out recently where Kitlaus. Yeah. It said that he met Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs was pretty interested in Siri and he wanted to buy it. And he said, no, I don't think I want to sell. And then Steve Jobs called him 50 days in a row. And for 50 days in a row, he's like, oh Christ, it's Steve again. Well, but it's Steve Jobs. I'm going to answer the phone. And for 50 days, Steve Jobs called him up and said, I want to buy the company. What do I, you know. And then eventually he's like, all right, fine. And he sold the company. And there was a time when you could say Apple was the leading AI company in the world. And I know it's crazy as that sounds today because everybody just universally says, well, of all the big tech companies, their own homegrown AI technology is by far the furthest behind, which is true. But there was a time, 2011, when they were clearly ahead of everybody else. And for a couple of years after that, they were pressing that lead. And I think Steve Jobs was clear and maybe Forstall. I don't know, you know, in the way that Forstall was aligned with Steve Jobs in terms of the way they saw the platforms evolving. But they, you know, Cook to adjudicate a clash of personalities that he could not keep aligned the way that Steve Jobs could. He had to make choices as to who was going to go and who was going to stay. And they couldn't all stay. And Forstall was the guy to go. He just dunked on Forstall again, by the way. Again, at the employee event, he was like, what's my biggest mistake? It was Apple Maps. But we fixed it. And it's like, oh, bye-bye, Scott Forstall. Like you pin it on Scott Forstall and out he goes. I don't think so. I'm going to say that that's one. My understanding of that whole thing was that Forstall and Maps was unrelated to Forstall's departure. It's people have hung on to it because of the timing. Because Maps came out the same year. And I think there was some dispute over who should apologize for what. But I think Apple Maps could have debuted 10 times better. And Forstall was still gone at the same time. It was because it was because I think fundamental, my understanding, I don't know if there were others, but Johnny Ive wouldn't take meetings with Forstall anymore. He would not sit in a room with him. And I don't know that Johnny Ive said it's either him or me. But I think it more or less came down to that. And I don't think the other people at that level, the level of having their picture on the Apple senior leadership web page, I don't know that there was anybody else who got along with Forstall other than Steve Jobs. I'm definitely enjoying in the course of Apple 15 and Cook leaving, you know, all these executives are posting pictures of them being young with like the original iMac. And you're like, wow, a lot of things happened between then and now with like just the four people in this picture. A lot of things have happened. Yeah. And I don't think it had anything to do with it. But I think when Forstall was pushed out of the company, the company was left with senior leadership. None of nobody was left who thought Siri is the future of the company, you know, or the future of technology, this sort of interface. And it just sort of fell by the wayside and actually got worse. It really did. People forget how much more useful Siri was around 2013 or so than it eventually got. It actually got worse. And, you know, you look back at some of the comments from or the, you know, it wasn't all on the record. It was mostly people secondhand about, but what Steve Jobs spent most of 2011 focused on, his last year, was Siri. And he was like, this is the next thing. Like he, he was he, you know, he'd shipped the iPhone and then he came back from a medical leave and focused 2009 on creating the iPad, which came out in 2010. And by 2011, he was like, okay, that's done. He could, you know, not that they were done iterating on it, but the new thing for Apple was going to be a, you know, the talking to your computer and doing things in an agent-like way. And we talk about agent, agent, agent now, but part of the stuff that Siri could do around like 2013 was like, get you movie tickets and stuff. It was a partnership with Fandango. And it had like a really cool pre iOS 7, you know, skeuomorphic interface. But you could like say to Siri that you want to go see the new Avengers movie and it would be like, here, here's a showtime near you. Do you want two tickets? And you'd say yes. And then you'd have them. I mean, that was 13 years ago and they just completely lost that under Cook. So I think that needs to be taught. I think that's worth breaking in to say, I don't know. I think that was a big swing and a miss. That is fair. I think, yeah, the whole question of there was that first era where everybody had a bunch of correct ideas about what voice was going to be. I mean, because you can tell a very similar story about the Alexa team at the beginning and the Google assistant team at the beginning. And like everybody kind of intuitively saw the future. And then for some combination of business reasons and technology reasons and focus reasons, all bailed on it until they lost to ChatGPT and then panicked and came back. But they're all back now. I will point out that when you say business reasons, the way they have solved their business problems now is they're like, screw you. We're not paying. We're just going to horsepower away into clicking around your website without permission. And that like, I don't know that any of those companies would have done that at that time, but that is what they're all doing now. Yeah. All right. We, we should move on from this, but I do, I made a roughly chronological list of all of the major products launched under Tim Cook. And I just want to read it to both of you and I want you to react because I thought it was really Provided them, like, just opportunity, but also focus in, in, like, the same breath. I will just say, I'll, I'll, I like Nilay's summation there, but I will just say, since you brought to mind my, this is how Apple rolls, that's the problem with the Touch Bar. The problem with the Touch Bar was that they never, the last Touch Bar they made was exactly the same as the first one they made. Except maybe they, remember, they, they added back a hardware escape key, like, everybody was... Probably because of you. That might have been, like, directly your fault, because they were like, okay. But that was not the mid, you know, that was not the problem with the Touch Bar. I think the overall idea, I think, is, still resonates, which is, wait a minute, hey, a series of F1, F2, F3, up to F12 keys at the top of the keyboard, isn't that, like, right out of, like, Unix in 1975? Why do we have these F keys? Why, you know, we have, you know, and it comes back to Steve Jobs' great explanation of why the iPhone didn't have hardware keys. We know how to solve this. It's software, right? Why don't we have software? People love their Steam decks, right? Where you have, like, a little thing with dynamic screens for the buttons. There's, there's something there of having something dynamic above the letters and numbers keys. The first Touch Bar wasn't it, and they never, they never iterated on it. I don't know. I, I, and I kind of feel like that's one of those things where if it was a good enough idea to ship, it was a good enough idea for somebody to come back and say, okay, we swung and missed on the first one. Let's come out with a second one, right? Oh, John, I love that you and I both think the Touch Bar could have been great. I really do believe that. I really do. And I also think that having a bunch of fiddly little buttons, and that the solution to let's make it useful to people is we'll just print a bunch of hardwired things. Screen brightness, Exposé, I'm looking at mine, the microphone on-off. All of those icons on top of the actual F key buttons on all Apple keyboards ever since they scrapped the Touch Bar, and before the Touch Bar, is exactly what Steve Jobs was talking about why the iPhone doesn't have a bunch of friggin' hardware buttons. Because once you put the icon on the button, it's set in stone. You're both so wrong about this. I don't know what you're talking, as a person who has a Stream Deck and thinks it rules, putting the fucking buttons back on the keyboard was the best decision, because you have a big screen above it. It was better than the Touch Bar as we knew it, but the potential for something good there, maybe something that would have needed a different name than Touch Bar because the first one was such a dud, but something dynamic, uh, something could be done there, and still might be done there. I don't know. I think we should sell tickets to a straight-up Touch Bar debate. Like, one hour, no holds barred. People would come. I'm so down. I could do this for the rest of the show. I think it's rather cookie and no, like, the worst solution is that they shipped one that very few people liked as it was, kept it for too long, and never iterated it. And it was the same with the butterfly keyboard. Yeah. There's a lot of this in this list, right, where it's like they fired off one idea that they thought was the future. They kind of didn't know where to go, and they just held onto it. And that's kind of what I mean about the Jony Ive uncontrollableness. He's, you can see it. He's like, I got it right. What do you mean I have to change it? Like, of course the phone should be too thin. They were like, what if we gave you a butterfly keyboard that was slightly better, and everybody's like, still bad. And then they're like, uh, this one? And they're like, nope, still bad. The Touch Bar, everybody was just like, what is this for? Why can't I press the escape key? And Apple just goes, never mind. We're done. Good call everybody. I feel like John and I were in a briefing where the big update to the butterfly keyboard was they added a rubber membrane to it. Yes, we were. To keep, like, one speck of dust from destroying the whole thing, which Casey Johnson pointed out. That was the problem. And it was like, are you guys sure? A rubber membrane is going to solve it? And they're like, we are pretty sure that that's going to solve it. And I remember that that was the off-the-record Apple, it was like, we are pretty sure. They weren't like, take it to the bank. And it was like, you know, it's, it's like the, uh, the Ron Howard narrator, you know, they were not sure. Yeah. Um, so I think we've successfully established that however you feel about the Touch Bar is how you feel about Tim Cook's legacy as a whole. Yes. No, but I do think, I do think there is, that is, it exemplifies a difference in the, the Cook versus Jobs mentalities where Jobs, Tim Cook seemingly never had his pants on fire about something, right? It's like, he was always calm, cool, and collected. And he did get everything more, much more organized and much more scheduled. Everything is annual. Both the hardware and software now are, are annual almost across the board. Um, and Apple's schedule was, you know, effectively erratic under Steve Jobs because his attention, you know, there was the very famous early in the iPhone where they were like, hey, we knew we told you we were going to come out with a new version of Mac OS X in June. Well, it's going to come out at the end of the year because we've taken all the engineers off it to ship a new update to iOS software. And it's, it's that important that we do it. And that was that. And it's like, okay, you know, but Apple doesn't do stuff like that anymore. Right. But sometimes that was actually called for. It was like, I think Steve Jobs would have looked at this, look at this and just printed out a bunch of things like, here, here's Joanna Stern, uh, making fun of our keyboard. You know, like, this is hilarious. Well, guess what? We're the butt of the joke. How are we shipping this? Fix it right now, tomorrow, you know, and I don't think that happened with the butterfly keyboards. I mean, they did fix it eventually, but I feel like it went through too many revisions and it was too much trust in the, uh, basically my understanding is sort of the, the obvious that the people who, the engineers who came up with the butterfly keyboard in the first place got like three swings at it. You know, like, okay, we got it this time. Okay, we didn't get it that time. Give us a third try. All right, we got a third try. And each of those tries was like a year plus of MacBook uh devices that had those keyboards. So you've got like three or four years of these keyboards in practice, and I don't think that that was a three strikes and you're out situation. That was more like a one strike and you're out situation. Like, the keyboard needs to work on a friggin' laptop. I mean, that is not a controversial statement. Yeah. And everybody knew from the very beginning. Yes. Yeah. So I think this is like another interesting sort of moment in the, in the Cook era because this is also the point where they believed that the iPad would take over everything. So the idea that the Mac had a weird bad keyboard was not the biggest problem in the world because of course the iPad's gonna get everything. This is also the period where they, they kept trying to kill the MacBook Air and they couldn't because people kept buying it, like over and over and over again. And that, like, eventually they could not just horsepower people into believing that the iPad was the future of all computing, which is not on your list here, but it is like a thesis of Apple in the Cook era that just came to an end with the resurgence of the Mac. Like, I think I said it on a show last week, the hottest gadget in the world right now is the MacBook Neo, which is an iPhone chip that just runs a real operating system. That's all, that's all it is. And it is easily, we can't write enough about the MacBook Neo on The Verge. Like every single story is explosively popular. And it's like, yeah, you just, I think, John, you called iOS a baby OS the other day. Yeah, baby computer. They just put a real OS on an iPhone chip and everyone's like, I love it. The best thing that's ever happened. Yeah. All right. Let me throw this out there. I've been thinking about this this week and I, I love your segue because I do think you're exactly right that the MacBook keyboard's literally stinking, just they were the worst keyboards anybody's ever shipped in a mainstream laptop for years, was seen as less of a crisis than it should have been because it coincides with an era at Apple where they were like, yeah, but the iPad's going to take over all this eventually anyway. I really do think, I, I really do think that was How are you seeing the future of design under Turnus? We don't know. I'm optimistic. And I do think in addition to the reliability of the hardware being better than the software, I think it's less debatable that the design of the hardware is superior to the design of the software. And after Johnny Ive left, they were very explicit about the fact that Johnny Ive wasn't being replaced by a new chief design officer and that the roles of software and hardware design were separate, you know, and that Alan Dye was brought in for software specifically. And there's no hint, no suggestion on, off the record, any role in any keynote that suggests that Alan Dye ever had anything to do with any hardware ever whatsoever. And I think you see post-Jony Ive this very clear fork in the road where their hardware is, if anything, better designed than ever. And the software is clearly worse designed, right? It really is. I mean, and I remember when I was, I'm still not done with it, but when I was really on like an extended weeks-long bender writing about Tahoe, macOS Tahoe in particular, not liquid glass overall, which I actually am kind of a fan of on the phone, kind of ambivalent about on Apple TV and iPad, and absolutely despise macOS Tahoe. I don't think it's liquid glass. I think it is just a complete ignorance of what the, all the nuances that the Mac needs to embrace. I can't help but think, though, that somebody who's overseen the hardware that's only gotten better since Jony Ive left and in the same direction is a very good person to oversee design going forward software-wise and sort of bring that back in alignment. And the thing that, when I was going with that bender is I looked back at like screenshots from macOS 10 or macOS, whatever the name was at the time, about 10 years ago, like right before they hired Jony Ive around 2014, 2015. And not only is it gorgeous, it's not gorgeous, it doesn't look retro at all. It looks like they could just ship that OS right now and it would look perfect for 2026. Wouldn't look 10 years old, wouldn't look dated, wouldn't look out of place with the way iPhones look right now. It would just look like, yeah, that's what Apple's desktop computer OS should look like. You know, it wasn't the skeuomorphic stuff. It was a look and feel that looked connected to the Mac's past, looked completely aware of all of the subtle nuances of human-computer interaction for desktop computer interfaces and looked very Apple-y. And it's all squandered over the last 10 years. Yeah. There was that period where they, they took all the color out of Aqua and made everything smoother and it was like perfect. Yeah. Right. And it was very connected to liquid glass because it was still was liquid. Like Aqua, like Aqua of the interface was supposed to be lickable. And so they, they desaturated it. I could go on about this forever. I think their mistake was they, they believe all the new customers are iPhone customers, and an iPhone customer who picks up a Mac has to be like, I know exactly how to use this. And that just doesn't need to be true. Like people are a little bit smarter than you give them credit for. Because it looks vaguely similar in terms of the style of the controls doesn't mean they know how to use it. You know what it's like? We'll see the touch, the touchscreen MacBook that is rumored is going to be a real test of all this. We'll see. And potentially, I mean, there's a fascinating run of hardware coming, right? Because it's the, the touchscreen MacBook has been rumored to be coming soon. There is a 20th anniversary iPhone theoretically, or I mean, it is coming next year. It will be the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. Apple loves an anniversary. What will they do there? There's just been a lot of questions, like you said, Nilay, about what the Vision Pro is going to be. So there's a lot of moments here where it's like, okay, actually Apple is going to sort of put a bunch of forks in the road all at once about what it thinks about hardware. And it's then the, like, first 18 months of Turnus's reign as CEO, which aren't even really his fault, are going to be fascinating. Like, he's going to have to launch a lot of things that he either loves or hates. And we're going to see what happens. But all right, we should take a break. Nilay, you and I actually have some breaking news to talk about. But John, you can go. You've got other stuff to do. You have to go be mad about Tahoe. I look forward to it. And we will be selling tickets to the great touch bar debate. Also, John, it's so important that you don't stop being mad about Tahoe. You can't. None of us can stop being mad about Tahoe until Apple fixes it. Well, speaking of pants on fire, I feel like my pants have got to be on fire between now and WWDC just to get it all off my chest because it's who knows what's going to happen there. But, you know, I would love it if all of my things that are igniting my pants are addressed. But just in case they are, I need to get them off my chest before they are. Yeah. Well, yeah, if you get a bunch of new things to light your pants on fire, you need time for new things to be mad about. This is just like the, like there's an Apple memo going out about this podcast, like to John Turnus, re John pants ignition. It's just a bullet list. All right, we should take a break. John, thank you for being here as always. Go read Daring Fireball. Go listen to The Talk Show. John, we'll see you soon. We'll take a break. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. 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Terms and conditions apply. Whoa. Okay. This one says you get a free phone if you switch. Hey, this one also says you get a free phone if you switch. Huh. Yeah. They all do one. Wait, wait, wait, wait. The T-Mobile one says families saved over $3,700 versus the other big guys in the past five years. And their experience plans have Netflix included plus a year of DashPass by DoorDash. Hang on. Let me see that. And a five-year price guarantee. Oh yeah, we're switching. That's what I'm talking about. Do we clap now or? I'm thinking high five. At T-Mobile, get savings that keep stacking up. That's value you can feel every day. Switch now at T-Mobile. Savings based on Harris X billing snapshots from Q3 2021 to Q4 2025 among accounts with three plus voice lines compared to AT&T and Verizon excluding discounts, credits, and optional charges. See HarrisX.com slash T-Mobile price guarantee on talk, text, and data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See T-Mobile.com. The playoffs are here and you can predict the action all the way to the finals with FanDuel Predicts. Predict the spread, total points, and even the game winner. Sign up and get a $25 bonus. Offered by FanDuel Prediction Markets, LLC, a registered futures commission merchant. 18 plus. Bonus is non-withdrawable and expires seven days after receipt. Trading derivatives involves significant risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Manage your activity with our consumer protection tools. Restrictions apply. See terms at fanduel.com slash Predict slash bonus dash offer dash terms. All right, we're back. So, Nilay, while we've been recording, a story that has kind of been burbling all week burbled in a bigger way. So we should talk about it. Yeah. We've talked a lot about the sort of rebooting of the Xbox team. New leadership, Phil Spencer retired. Asha Sharma is now in charge of all of Microsoft's gaming stuff. We've been talking about Microsoft's attempts to get Xbox stuff onto phones for years and there have been lawsuits about it. There was a memo today from Asha Sharma basically, I would call it like trying to reboot and reestablish what Microsoft is doing. And the sort of news here is that it is no longer being called Microsoft Gaming. It's just being called Xbox. Like we've been wondering whether there was a future for the Xbox brand going forward, which is in a pretty meaningful way the only consumer brand at Microsoft. Co-Pilot ain't it. But now it appears they are doubling back down on Xbox as a thing and as a culture. You and I both just read this memo that Asha Sharma sent to the team. What do you think? So I appreciate that she is a new CEO. She has to make some change. She has One of the things that is clearly happening under this new regime is they're trying to make the thing make more sense to people, right? And I think you look at what Microsoft's gaming things have become and like, there's, you can play some games in some places and some games in all places, but not all games in all places. And then there's Xbox Game Pass and there's cloud gaming and there's, there's just, there's too many things. And so I think, to me, there is something actually significant about this idea of like, we are Xbox. We are returning to being Xbox. My assumption would be, we're going to start to see fewer things with fewer names and that actually what they're going to do is try to turn that whole thing you just described where essentially you can play anything anywhere and it all moves and feels seamless, which I think is like transparently the correct idea, right? Like just in a vacuum, can you pull it off is one question, but like, is that what gamers want? They want to be able to play their games in all of the places, all of the yeah, yes, of course. That is the correct outcome of how Microsoft's gaming ambitions should go. And so I think this sense of like, we need to simplify what we offer and to whom and in what way is right. Again, that is not a vastly different idea than what Phil Spencer has been talking about for a long time. It just has fewer names, and that's something like it's that's genuinely, you deserve credit inside of a big organization for going for fewer names. It's like, that's a victory. But I think it's true that you look at all of this, and one of the things she has clearly identified is gamers don't understand what their Xbox is for and what is an Xbox, right? Like the whole everything is an Xbox, I think has backfired so spectacularly. It is like inside of everything that Asha Sharma is now doing. But what is different about everything is an Xbox and you can find Xbox everywhere you are. Xbox will be a global platform that connects players and creators everywhere. You can play where you want and your games progress, friends and identity stay with you across platforms. I get that that is a much tighter definition and maybe that's all you need to do. And again, the whole memo is a break with the past, which maybe that team desperately needs. I'm just saying that was Xbox everywhere. If you were to just walk up to any Xbox player and say, what do you think Xbox everywhere means? They'd be like, I could play Xbox on my phone. Like they would just say the thing that it's supposed to mean. And it's true in the Spencer era, they got totally sideways. They're like Candy Crush is an Xbox. Like I don't know what that is at all. Well, and they got so over their skis buying games that I think it reshaped everything that they were trying to do, right? And then it becomes an, okay, we have to start putting Xbox games on PlayStation because we have to figure out how to make money from these games. And so it's like, okay, if what you actually want to do is bet on Xbox, you stop doing things like that, right? And you start to say, okay, we are going to build an ecosystem. And I think they continue to believe they can build that system, not around a console, but around Game Pass. Like I think ultimately my my galaxy brain theory here would be that the center of Xbox is Game Pass. And that's why they continue to fight for, we want to be able to do this mobile store. It's why they continue to like, you know, get involved in these lawsuits. And uh, they said something about, you know, we, uh, in the memo, it says we will reevaluate our approach to exclusivity, windowing and AI and share more as we learn and decide. Exclusivity, windowing and AI is like a wild trio of things to name. It's just the stuff gamers hate. We will reevaluate our, our approach to things gamers hate. Yeah. What is true is I think Xbox is beyond the idea that the Xbox is a console that you have in your living room. Like, I think, I think Microsoft has been past that for a while, maybe to its detriment, because fundamentally for most people, your game system is the thing in your living room that you play games on. But they're, they're making this big bet. And I think they're just trying to make it more clearly because also like just the fact that you can play some Xbox games on a PC and you can play some PC games on a PC, but it is like more or less unknowable what you can actually play where it's just, like they've just lost the plot on this. And to me, it's like, okay, we need to center on our thing is Xbox, not fucking PlayStation. Like, and that's, that's what this says to me. There's a line in here I wanna quote, uh, here it is. We have to be honest about where we are. We're a challenger and meeting this moment will require pace, energy, and a level of self-critique that feel uncomfortable. So that's, I think that's just a culture change. He's just announcing a culture change. Yeah. And, you know, Phil Spencer used to say it in a way that was used to justify like the Activision Blizzard. He'd be like, we're number three. I have to spend $10 billion. She's like, we're number three. We have to like be better than number two and number one. We have to win. So that's like one thing. I think the other piece, you know, Phil spent a lot of time just integrating Activision. That was a huge acquisition. And the new boss doesn't have to keep any of those promises. Yep. And so you can see she's like, oh, we're Xbox. Like you don't get to be Activision anymore. Like you're just part of, I run you. Like no promises are, are, will be kept. And we'll just see how that goes. That'll be messy. The thing I want to ask you about specifically, because you and I have talked a lot about how when YouTube decided that its key metric was watch time, YouTube changed. And you, you can just every, everything about YouTube backs up into all they care about is watch time. It's their main metric. Okay. Well, she announced a new main metric. Our new North star will be daily active players. It's in the memo. This is the thing that she's saying. This is the new North star. This is the metric she cares about the most. How do you feel about that? I mean, it's, it's tricky because that's the kind of number you can, you can mess with any way you want. Like if somebody playing Indiana Jones on the PlayStation five, a daily active player for Microsoft, they might be able to argue that it is. But I think what that means is that you need to give people a sort of infinite availability of stuff to do, right? Like if daily active players is your goal, you sure as hell need a successful mobile strategy. You just, you can't win with this game. Candy Crush players count as daily active players for Microsoft. Maybe. I mean, in the Amicus brief, um, you know, you know, what comes up a bunch is Zynga, the company. Like it's, it's, it's a real part of Microsoft strategy here. And uh, I mean, obviously Minecraft has been a huge hit on mobile platforms. So I think like you might see Microsoft lean into getting its stuff on the devices in front of you more and more. It also means this company is going to have to learn new ways to engage gamers. And there's a bunch of that in here, right? There, there's a lot of focus on content and there's a lot of focus on marketing and there is a sense of like, we need to find new ways to reach people. And it's like, is, is Microsoft going to release a vertical video feed so that you'll go to the Xbox app more often? Probably. It's just sitting right there. And so I think to me, it's like that is, it's not, they're not after game sales in the same way. If, if all you want is daily active players, you think about the business model differently. You think about the hardware you sell people differently. It means something like a handheld makes more sense because again, you just start to put it in front of people in more places. Like it means to me, it means less interest in sort of huge triple-a culture shaking games and probably frankly, more investment in Candy Crush. Like I think you're not wrong. Yeah. And you know, there's the wreckage of the live service games in the past year and a half. Daily Active Players is all about, we want you online. You have to measure it. The idea that you're gonna play your Xbox offline is apparently gone because then you're not in the metric. Yeah, you don't count. You don't count. And so I'm just very curious to see how that goes. Yeah, I tend to agree. And I think, I don't know. I, we, we talked not that long ago about whether Microsoft was going to need to just walk away from this idea of being everywhere, that the mobile thing wasn't going to happen. VR is not the next thing that is going to obviate mobile gaming, that maybe this is just a losing battle. Uh, at the very least, it doesn't sound like Microsoft is done fighting this particular battle. Can it win the fight to sell Xbox games its own way on mobile phones? Who knows? Um, but it's still betting on that in a way that I'm frankly slightly surprised by. I think that they have to for as long as it even seems remotely viable. I mean, you know, these cases are ongoing and judges are real mad at Apple This is, Microsoft is still trying to kind of be everything all at the same time. But at least it's called Xbox now. This is what I mean about this memo. It's you read it and I get it. Like it is chest thumpy. They announced a name change. We're going to change the culture. That is as clear as day. And then you're like, so it's the same? And it's all in the execution. So we'll see. Yeah. There's also a line that just says, fix the fundamentals for players and partners. So that's good and specific. Should all be fine. You could probably just say that. All right, we we'll keep covering this. I think we should probably have Tom on at some point in the next couple of weeks. He's been covering all this. He's all over it. He'll help us figure out what's going on here. Let's take another break and then we're going to come back. We'll do a lightning round. Be right back. I'm mistagod like fuck skinny. I want to be jacked without context. Tone and sculpt are rooted in diet culture. We're inheriting a lot of nonsense that makes specifically women feel like they have to shrink in order to expand. And I'm just saying, no, let's just like lift heavy shit and like take up space. That's the expansion. I'm Robin Arson. And this week on project swagger, I break down the strategies that helped me build confidence and feel at home in my body, especially after two babies. Listen now at project swagger, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mitch first, two time Indy barcel champion, championship MVP and forward for the U.S. women's national team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology, which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there's a certain mentality you have to have. What people don't know is what that costs. In my podcast, Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology, mindset and unseen battles on the path to greatness. So take a seat and learn from the confessions of an elite athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. From Iran to Venezuela to China, what is driving President Trump's foreign policy? Both Russia and China are big losers if there's a transition in the nature of the of the Iranian government, which again is why I think we have to see this campaign through. I'm Jake Sullivan and I'm John Finer. And we're the hosts of the long game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, Trump's former national security advisor, HR McMaster and deputy national security advisor, Matt Pottinger, join us. The episode is out now. Search for and follow the long game wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, unsponsored for flavor. That felt like five or six dots that time. I tried to experiment with the number of dots in the ellipsis. Neal, are we doing this again? Oh, it's real bad this week. Oh, no. OK. It's real bad this week. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, which is not a Webby category, but soon. And we will win. We will sweep the Webby's for podcasts within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. OK, I have two bits of very exciting news about this. One, that is now the permanent theme song of Brendan Carr is a dummy. No, we're going to keep playing the other ones. We'll keep playing other ones, but we own this one. It's true. That's the other thing. That's the big news. This was made by Viola DeGumba. It is now our permanent theme. Guest themes may pop up. Things happen. We get new music for new vibes. But then the official music of Brendan Carr is a dummy, which I think you need to win the award for America's best podcast within a podcast. Is is Gregorian chant. Yes. So Travis reached out and we bought the theme song. It's ours now. Love it. So soon when we when we federate the show, when it appears on other podcasts, Kara Swisher is going to have to run the Gregorian chant. That's all I'm trying to get at. We'll just run the chant as an ad on other people's podcasts from now on. Keep them coming because I do want to run other ones. But that one, we've run it so many times, it did feel like we should pay some money for it in this age of stealing everything. It felt like we should, we should make the move. Brendan was particularly dumb and evil this week. So joy of licensing the Gregorian chant aside, this one's a little serious. So the FCC technically has oversight authority over the TV rating system because it shows up on broadcast. And so, you know, the TV rating system is basically a voluntary system. Like Netflix doesn't have to put ratings on things. Why Seven is the only one I know. And TVMA. I feel like everything is one of those two things. Yeah, it's like the five stars in the app store. It's either everyone's naked or it's for babies. And those are your choices and everything is kind of messy in between. Um, anyway, so, you know, all the streamers, everybody participates in it. This is an opportunity for our boy Brendan to mess around with speech. So he has had the FCC launch an investigation over whether kid shows that even have transgender or non-binary people in them are immature and inappropriate for kids. He put out a tweet. There's an official FCC request for comment. And it says, this is the whole justification for it. Recently, parents have raised concerns with the industry's approach, including with ratings creep. Specifically, they argue that New York and Hollywood programmers are promoting controversial issues in kids programming without providing any transparency or disclosures to parents. This undermines the whole point of the law and the rating system parents rely on. And then in the actual FCC document, those controversial issues are laid out. Controversial gender identity issues being included or promoted in children's programs without providing any disclosure or transparency to parents. Specifically, it calls out shows with transgender or gender non-binary programming as appropriate for children and young children. I think a lot of people listening to the show know that war on transgender people is just a war on anyone who doesn't conform with like basic heterosexuality. I think it is an affront to human dignity in general. The goal here is to make gay people illegal. Like it just, it's a hop from one thing to the other very quickly. You can see it across the Trump administration. There's a move to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that made gay marriage legal in this country. It's not quiet. It's just there. It is a loud undercurrent of the Trump administration's policies. And you have Brendan saying it is, we should go look at the rules, the programming for young kids and even the presence of somebody who's transgender or gender non-conforming is inappropriate for children. We're going to make these people illegal. We're going to make it so kids can't see them. That sucks. It sucks. Again, because the rating system is not like the FCC's true mandate, right? They just get to, they get to weigh in on whether it's effective in helping people. But it's a way for him to go regulate content on the internet platforms. This is a real thing, right? We've talked a lot about how he has a lot of power over broadcast television and that's a whole mess. And he uses that power indiscriminately. This is a way for him to get control over what's on Netflix and YouTube and all of the other streamers that the FCC has no authority over because there's a little bit of creep. So I would just argue, first of all, it does not say which parents and which concerns specifically. It just recently parents have raised concerns. Who, who are these parents? It's a real people are saying, which is like a hallmark of the Trump administration. Truly. So which parents? It's like, it's obviously not the parents of transgender children. I bet they have different concerns about the programming that kids are seeing. So to me, this is just a, it's nonsense. It is the continued Trump administration war on trans people, which is just naked. You can just see it everywhere. And then the, the creep to actually maybe gay people should be illegal fully. Cause that is in the Trump administration ethos. And then all the way to, we should regulate the speech on the internet platforms. So that's Brendan. I think this is all very dumb, especially because I don't know which parents have raised concerns and why those concerns are being weighed over the concerns of other parents. And two, as always, it's just the man keeps monkeying with the first amendment and then he's going to go. He's being invited to the white house correspondence dinner this week to celebrate journalism and the first amendment. Guess who he's an invitee of. Yep. He's sitting at the Paramount table, David. Oh God. Our boy, David Ellison. I was going to say Barry Weiss. And then I was like, he wouldn't have even asked if it was that obvious. Paramount. Anyhow, Brendan, if you're done partying with your corporate overlords, you're welcome to come on the show or really any podcast and let me ask you some questions about which parents are important to you and which children you think are important, if you can answer them, because I don't think you can. Or we can just, I can just yell at you. That's also a choice you can make. You can just sit there quietly and I'll just yell at you. Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr is a dummy. America's favorite podcast within a podcast. What do you think this podcast would be rated? I feel like we've got real like TV 14 energy. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like, it's pump up the volume. Whatever pump up the volume was rated. I think it's, they found old bugs that aren't even relevant in old software anymore. All the way to people being like, this is the end of the world. The spectrum has been wild. And this week, a couple of interesting things happened. One of which was that it came out that a group, we think associated with a vendor of Anthropic's, got access to Mythos and has been playing around with it, as far as we know, without any terrifying goals behind it, but they've been in there mucking around. Yeah, they've been making landing pages for web apps. That's what they've been doing, just to screw around with it. Mythos is also apparently, potentially Anthropic's way back into deals with the U.S. government. We've talked about this a lot. It's a big fallout with the Pentagon. It was classified a threat to the supply chain. Whole big mess. And evidently, this thing is so important and so powerful that the Trump administration has decided maybe this is how we become friends again. All of this is to say, I still have absolutely no idea how to feel about Mythos, whether it's literally the end of the world or just a bit of really great fear-based marketing from Anthropic. What is your read on it at this moment in time? First of all, I think it's very funny that the people who got illegal access to Mythos got it by looking at Anthropic's own leaked source code and figuring out the URL for Mythos. Yeah, they didn't hack it. They typed in some URLs. Literally, when I first heard the news, I went to our daily editorial meeting. I was like, how do you leak a model? Did they steal a data center? What happened here? No, they just found out the URL. That's hilarious. So your mother of all cybersecurity problems is coming from a company that has its own deeply hilarious cybersecurity vulnerabilities is, one, very good. The Trump administration, the Department of War, has designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk, but they've got a problem in their own supply chain because their vendor leaked the... This is all perfect. Yes. This is all just truly perfect. This whole industry is moving too fast. And it's a useful reminder. It's like, you know how we talk all the time, everybody gets these very intense cybersecurity trainings. And what it actually amounts to is, like, people are stupid about clicking links in their email. Every time. Fundamentally, people are idiots, is the main security problem. This is sort of how I feel about Mythos. It's like, actually, we have so many bigger security risks that are just all of us living our lives every day that I don't even know if I have time to be worried about what this model can do to my web browser. This is a very small inside baseball story, but one of the funniest days I have ever had at this company, Fox Media, was we got an email from IT to the whole company, and it basically just said, don't click this link. Like, everybody got this weird phishing email, don't click this link. And I won't say who, but someone replied to the whole company, and all it said, no period at the end, all it said was, I clicked the link. And you could just feel the panic. Like, holy shit, I clicked the link. Am I dead now? And I must have spent the entire day with our producer, our video producer, Diane Treeshallow, where we spent the entire day just yelling, I clicked the link at each other. Because that's it. Don't click the link. That's the only rule. Just don't click the link. And everybody always clicks the link. That's really good. So all that's funny, I do think Anthropic is going to end up back in the good graces of the Trump administration. Trump has basically said it's going to happen. They had a meeting with, I believe it was Susie Wiles and Scott Bessent. From all accounting, that meeting went very well. I think Pete Hegseth is kind of on the outs because he's kind of really bad at doing war, which is his only job. It doesn't seem to be going well. No, sure doesn't. And I think they're going to win that lawsuit. So I do think all of that is swirling around. Whether or not this is all just doomsday marketing, you know, I think OpenAI, Sam Altman needs to be able to say that. At the same time, if you release a model that has these capabilities and you're like, here it is, everybody use it, without even a lick of safety planning, you're doing something wrong. So somewhere in the middle of these two things is the right move. Where you're like, oh, this can be used for offensive cyber capabilities. We should probably make sure everyone's ready for it. So we're going to release it. And at the same time, we're winning, so we're going to call out how much we're winning by saying it's too dangerous for anyone to use. This model is so sick, you can't even use it. It's like an unbelievably great marketing line. I think that's right. Where I've landed talking to people is, whatever you believe about Mythos in particular, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the thing Mythos is doing is also possible for Opus and a lot of other models to do. That if you point these existing models at cybersecurity problems, they will also find bugs. That Mythos is maybe better at it, but it's not a step change better at it. But what is certainly true is that the AI models are getting better at cracking cybersecurity. That is just a true thing that is happening. And so even if you don't take Mythos as the end of the world, but just a step towards a thing becoming slightly more dangerous all the time, we're still right to sort of point at everybody and say, oh, my God, we have to take a giant deep breath here and figure out what to do. And Rafi Krikorian, who's the CTO at Mozilla, wrote a great piece, I think for the New York Times, basically arguing that the real problem here is with open source software. All of the everything runs on open source software. People don't realize this, but like every video you watch is based on some kind of open source system for showing video. Like, and all of those things are generally maintained by a person or a few people or an organization without anywhere near the resources of a giant tech company. And the Rafi's point was essentially that that is where we need to go focus our energy. That actually, we have these infrastructural risks that are not just a thing that you have to patch in your own code, but are things that could break the Internet. And knowing that these things are, if not all the way at the point of we've dissolved cybersecurity forever, but are sort of marching towards getting better at cracking these codes, that now is the time to start fixing it. So like, don't take this as the world has ended, but also don't take it as this is nothing, right? His point was like, we have to live somewhere in between that and start to make moves on this thing. We are clearly making progress towards that might someday be dangerous in the future. And that's way less sexy than our model is too dangerous to release, but I think it is probably closer to what's actually going on. Yeah, I mean, there's that famous XKCD of like all the software is held up by one person maintaining one line of code. Like, yeah, I like, I buy it. I think because there's so little safety culture in AI anymore, the idea that you would hold something back at all makes you seem like a doomer. And I, I just not right. Like there are all kinds of products where you're like, hey, we should evaluate the risks before we release them widely. It's pretty normal. It's what they should be doing. All of them should be doing. But I do think we're, I will, I'm just going to preview this. We have a story coming out next week called Attack of the Killer script kitties. I cannot wait for you to see this art. And it just kind of lays out all the problems to come. Yeah, it's good stuff. All right. What's your next one? My next one is a little power cleanser. I just want to show you a picture and get your reaction to it. So this week, BMW introduced the new seven series. It's in a new class design language, which is my, my like hottest take about cars right now is like everything is a cybertruck. Like everything is just like a low poly square now. That's a real bummer of a state of affairs. Like if you look at the new Kia Telluride, you're like, oh, they just, they, they're like rectangles. They looked at the, they were like, you're doing triangles. We're going to do rectangles. You look at this new BMW, like you're doing rectangles. That's not actually the thing I want to show you. It's a rectangle. It's fine. People are rich. People are going to drive around in the back of seven series. It's fine. I want to show you a picture of the interior of the front seat. I just want you to look at this. I just want you to tell me if this is good. This picture, this is BMW's own picture. What do we think is going on here, David? Wait, what? Okay. So I'm looking at the, in the interior of a car with a, it's a BMW. We have some like white seats with some weird texture on it. And we have a bunch of like rhombus shaped screens that don't look like they're in the car at all. This straight up looks like someone Photoshopped like a Juju tablet into this with cut off corners. And then there's a big, wide, long stripe of screen up at the top that I think is like pretending Technology than you needed, but it was all kind of, you know, put together thoughtfully. This literally, it looks like someone took a prototype of an Android tablet from 2012 and just like super glued it onto the dashboard of a BMW. It is one of the most confusing cars I've ever seen in my entire life. Like, and I apologize for the audio listeners. We'll have the links. You can click on it. I assure you, you will have the exact same set of reactions that David and I just had when you look at this picture. I also want to point out that in the backseat, like a giant TV folds down from the ceiling so you can watch TV. Cause this car is meant to be experienced in the backseat. You're not supposed to drive this car. Your driver's supposed to drive this car. Correct. And your driver will have just an array of confusing screens to deal with. Anyhow, I just wanted you to see this. I was like, I got a surprise, David, with this picture. Because it was like a jump scare when I scrolled the car and driver article. It literally, it shows you the song that's playing three times. This is the best idea they had for what to put on these screens. Let's just show them the song that's playing every 20 times. Every single CarPlay Ultra mock-up too, has the exact same problem. Like it's the weather five times, three songs, two maps. You're golden. This, this is terrible. I don't care. Again, I apologize to the audio listener, but I assure you when you pull over your car and you click the link in the show notes, you'll be like, This is really validating my purchase of a 2018 Hyundai Ioniq that gets 50 miles to the gallon and does nothing interesting. Can I interest you in a secondary USB-C monitor for your main screen? You sure can't. Sure can't. That's what my phone is for. And then my wife yells at me for looking at my phone while we're in the car. All right. My next one is a short one, and it is just, it's a real sign of the times gadget that I want to tell you about, which is a new thing called the Insta360 Mic Pro. It's the NAB is right now in Las Vegas, which is basically like a camera and audio show. It's like CES, but like much more niche and nerdy. NAB is a blast. But basically, they took Insta360 makes a lot of webcams and microphones and stuff like that. And like every other company that makes these things, they've been leaning further and further into creator devices. And this one, the Insta360 Mic Pro is designed very specifically to be prominently displayed. And the thing that it will let you do, it has a little screen on the side. It's a round microphone that you're supposed to clip to your lapel or your shirt or whatever. And you, it has a screen on which you are meant to put your brand. And this is like, I cannot describe to you a more 2026 story about a gadget than a creator microphone that you are going to pin to your shirt that is going to show your brand as you make TikToks. It's perfect. It's like they're going to do a partnership with whatever. What's that platform that Clothacular is on? Kick? Yeah, exactly. Like this is just a product for the live stream era. It's very good. They do have the fuzzy thing on top. I've noticed everyone loves the fuzzy thing on top. People do love the fuzzy thing. And I think I've been noticing a definite trend away from seeing these things. Maybe this is just my feed. And I'd be curious if others are seeing the same or different. But like we, we, we were on this run for a long time of everybody started holding the microphones. And then it was like, it's cool if you hold the microphone and also show the really long microphone cable. And then it was like, we all had the tiny lavalier microphones. And now we've gone back to them being a little less visible. And now you can tell people are starting to like do better audio and hide it. Like have a microphone out of frame is a thing people are starting to do. So it seems like microphone as prop for a lot of creator videos is going away. But again, maybe that's just my feed. And maybe that's just what I'm seeing. My feed is all people putting a clip on their brim of their hat, which is a move I want to get to. There is a lot of that. I think you could do that. Every day I wake up and I think to myself, is this the day that I do hat mic? It's not that day. Someday soon, though. I believe in you. We can do this for you. But yeah, I think this, this to me is like, just, it's the perfect creator gadget. And I think it will sell like crazy. And you're going to start to see a lot of people with what look like buttons with their logo on it. But it's actually a microphone. It's genius. That's a great idea. 100% buying this thing. Everyone should know. Neely walks around with at least one decoder button on 24 hours a day. I'm watching you. That's my transition. That's my last one. All right. In the never ending quest for training data of real things instead of just weird shit on the internet. Meta is going to track everything their employees do on their computers to make sure their AI agents can click around, like open windows, click on apps. They're going to harvest that as training data. Okay. Can I tell you my response to this? That's going to get me into a lot of trouble with a lot of people. Yeah. This is not a problem at all. Really? A, if you work at a large company and you don't think they're already tracking your keystrokes, you are all the way out of your mind. Like, I mean, they just are like, do you remember in the, in the sort of peak of the pandemic when Microsoft started talking like loudly and proudly about all the ways that it was able to monitor people who were working from home? Yeah. And people about mouse jigglers. Yeah. My, my, I might get in trouble for saying this too, but my wife works at a company where on Teams, you go idle if you don't type in Teams or on your computer for like three minutes. So sometimes what she'll do is she'll open up a spreadsheet and put like a, like a heavy thing, a rock on top of a slash key and just type a billion slashes into an Excel spreadsheet so that she stays active in Teams. This is what we've been reduced to. Like this, this is a disaster. Do I think this entire set of things is a horrific mess? Yes, of course. Do I think the idea that Meta is collecting this data to put into its training models for its AI agents is like a vastly worse intrusion on your privacy? No, I really don't. Like you, you can feel about this however you would like to. And I think there are a lot of people who are very upset about this, but I think in a lot of ways, this is just saying the quiet part loud. I'm just going to say, according to our friend Alex Heath and sources, Meta has experienced, quote, intense internal backlash to this program, which is called the model capability initiative. Horrible thing to call it. And Bose, Andrew Bosworth said, there's no option to opt out of this on your work provided laptop. I do think, I think I would be, I would be angrier about this if I thought that it was actually going to work. Like, because the reason to be mad about this, right? Is, is you are asking me to do my job while tacitly training a computer to do my job, right? Like that, that's now the trade. You, you are saying, do your job so well and so successfully that we can teach a computer how to do it and thus fire you. And this is happening right next to Meta preparing to lay off like 10% of the company, right? Like the, the macro of this is really, really, really ugly. And I think people are right to be mad about this. My thing is just everyone should have already been mad about this, I think is what I'm saying. Like the AI of it all is bad, but so is the fact that your boss has been able to use the number of keystrokes you enter in a day in your performance review. So to be clear, Meta, we did ask Meta about this. Their spokesperson said, uh, there are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content and the data is not used for any other purpose, including performance evaluations. They just need to get data for how people actually use computers, things like mouse movements, clicking buttons and navigating drop-down menus. Because every, like Meta, like every other company is like, oh, people won't do business deals with us. We're just going to open their websites and use them on behalf of the people. And there's something really gross about that. It is also the limit of the training data. The LMs, all they have is text files from the internet and every video on YouTube or whatever other stuff they've managed to scrape. And they don't actually know how to use computers. And you can see that hasn't been going great. And so you can, they need to get more data. This is why, you know, Joanna did the video of the guy in the suit remotely controlling the robot. That is just an attempt to get training data for how the robot should behave. It's just all this very silly. Like we've made a lot of promises about AI and what it can do. And to get there, we have to monitor every keystroke that every employee at Meta makes so that the computer can click a The People's Voice Award for Best Technology Podcast, which, if I'm being honest, is the only one of the two awards I care about. Congrats to Future Round and Find Out who won the other award for being a good podcast with a very funny name. But we won the one that I care about. And that is all thanks to you. So thank you to everybody who voted. Also, you have like a couple more days to send in questions for version history. We're doing a bunch of smart home stuff. Nilay, I have a really fun surprise for you on the Harmony remote episode next week. It's going to be great. We're going to have a blast. Very excited. Lots of that coming up. Nilay, you just put out the software brand decoder that you've been noodling on for a while. That, I think, turned out really well. People should go watch that and listen to that. What else is coming on Decoder? On Monday, it's a really fun one. We have the CEO of Underwriters Laboratories, UL Solutions. So the company that puts the stamp on everything that makes it not explode. I don't know how else to describe that. She's great. She's very smart. We talked a lot about the flood of electronics with like cheap batteries from China and whether or not those have labels, whether anybody cares anymore. And they're trying to safety label AI, which I had a lot of questions about whether anyone's going to participate. But it was a good one. We had a bunch of like, you know, pretty rowdy ones. And then this was like straightforward like, oh, you have a very complicated problem and you're good at solving it. That's fun. UL is one of those companies that is way more important in the world than anybody realizes. And that's probably how it ought to be. My favorite Decoder episodes I'm like, you take this thing for granted. And then it turns out to be this like very complicated thing in the background. It's one of those. I'm excited about it. As always, you can subscribe to The Verge to support everything we're doing and also to get all of our podcasts, these and those that we just talked about, ad-free, TheVerge.com slash subscribe. It's a great page. It's just nice to look at. Just go look at it for a while. Also, the new homepage is out. Speaking of good pages to go look at, we fixed the scroll bar. Thank you to everybody who's very upset with us about the scroll bar. Seems to be going great. Feedback's solid so far. People like the homepage. I'm happy about it. I have some notes, but I'll give those to you off air. It'll be fine. If you have notes on the homepage or anything else, you can always call the hotline at 866-Vergle11. You can email us, vergecast@theverge.com. We love hearing from you about anything and everything. It's the best part of the job. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Brandon Kieffer, Travis Larchuk, and Andrew Marino. We'll see you next time, Nilay. Rock and roll.