The Vergecast is the flagship podcast from The Verge about small gadgets, Big Tech, and everything in between. Every Friday, hosts Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz hang out and make sense of the week’s most important technology news. And every Tuesday, David leads a selection of The Verge’s expert staffers in an exploration of how gadgets and software affect our lives – and which ones you should bring into yours.
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Of the old version of Delta, which was an app called, GBA 4 iOS spelled just like it sounds, really folds off the tongue. And it event, it quickly got pulled from the App Store, and then another one came out. I think it was called Bimmy. It was out for a minute, and then the developer pulled it out of what the developer said was fear, which we should come back to, which I think is fascinating. And then like you said, Delta came out. We've talked to Riley on their before he was on the show last fall talking about emulators, he's been working on this forever. And at one point, a few years ago, thought he was gonna be in the app store, and then that got ripped away. And has come up with, I would say, increasingly creative ways if you wanna do some work to get this thing out as soon as The announcement came out that 3rd party app stores were gonna be allowed. He announced he's been working on 1. Like, this was always the plan, and then I think it seems like basically just out of nowhere, Apple was like, yeah. You're cool. You can do this. And he was like, sick. I've been building this for 10 years. Here it is. And it is like, I mean, it is a remarkably good app. For what it does, we can talk about the legality of roms and emulation. We should talk about all of that. I did a decoder episode with Sean Hollister on all of this, like, 2 weeks ago. It was very good, but it's it's just so funny. This is like a version 10 app. That just showed up on the app store all at once. Like, I think I can say this without getting me or Riley in trouble. This thing has been in test flight for a very long time because there's a lot less review on test flight. You can just test apps in beta. Some people can have them. I have had it. It's like, it's out there. And now all of a sudden, he was able to just flip the switch it is the number one app in the App Store. So much pent up demand for something like this. It's fascinating. So we should talk about legality of it, Alex. I know you've been tracking a lot of that stuff over time. There's a war on emulators generally occurring. Yeah. Yeah. Nintendo is Nintendo for the longest time was like, you know what? You do you because the emulator audience, I think,
Forces and sort of ocean engineering stuff to know how to, you know, pull up a cable from several miles to the bottom of the ocean without things snapping. You're dealing with these big metal hooks that are used to catch the cables, high tensions. It's like quite physically demanding work. And then at its heart, it's these various technical tasks that involved with figuring out where the fault is, splicing the fibers, which is just ultra precise work that's done. You know, you're fusing 2 strands of glass end to end with as perfect as you can get a connection. And that stuff is it's, you know, it's like neurosurgery. It's it's extremely delicate. And you have to do it on a ship in the middle of the ocean. Right. Yeah. On a on a rocking ship that is, in the middle of the ocean. This is like everything possible on incredibly hard mode at all times. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty as you see the the workshop zone is just like in the belly of a ship, sort of surrounded by tarps. It's really not, you know, it's not this fat precision factory that you would wanna be doing this work in. So now I can't help imagining the the, like, montage action scene of everybody snapping into action, one of these things happening. So, like, walk me through the process a little bit. I'm in port in some centrally located city somewhere waiting for a call. I get a call from I'm assuming it's like Google and Meta who seem to be the companies that own more and more of these cables over time. They own a lot of the cables. They've a lot of the newly built cables are coming from the big big, tech companies, Google and Meta, primarily. And then you have cables that are owned by, you know, dozens, sometimes, ISPs and telecom companies and things. Got it. Okay. And so each cable will have someone who's in charge of maintenance, and, you know, they'll get a message from their network operation center saying, hey, we've got a cable down. Here's what we know about it. That person will then call someone at the repair organization. They could be public
To ship the damn thing. Like, it's just really expensive to not ship a product, especially a product that a lot of people have given you money for and you have made many of. I think if you were to rewind a year and tell Humaine this is the point where they would be now, I would bet they would not be shipping this product right now. Because they also have, they claim, this gigantic software update coming this summer that adds really basic stuff like setting timers. You can't set a timer. That's, like, the joke about assistance is the only thing they can do is set timers. The joke about Siri is they told me I said 1. Humane can't set any. It can't set any. And so, look, AI systems are bad at math, I think, historically is a thing. And so just counting must be very challenging for you. It starts holding down even harder. But but yeah. So there's this big software update supposedly coming this summer that's gonna add some of that functionality and and fix some of the things that don't work now. So my guess would be they want to ship the, like, August version of this thing today, and that is just not where they are. But, like, there comes a time when for a variety of reason you're just locked in to when something ships, and it's really expensive and really hard, especially for a first generation hardware company to delay by months months. Yeah. It's just hard. Alright. Let's take it in pieces because there's a line in your review where you say none of this is ready, not the hardware, not the software, not the AI. That's a that's all of it. That's all the things. That's that's all of it. I'm ready. That's one thing. You very clearly are ready for this thing. David's a 10 out of 10. Yeah. He's he's ready to go. Yeah. There's a picture in the review of David using the thing where he just looks like the world's happiest secret service agent. You know, he's just, like, he's just beyond thrilled to be, like, tapping on his chest and whispering a secret, you know. So you're obviously ready, but the thing isn't ready. Let's start with the hardware. Three pieces. Right? Hardware, software, AI. Yeah. What about the hardware isn't ready? The hardware is kind of in the thing we see a lot with first gen
Which means 60% of Americans cannot have this unless they choose to vote with their dollars elsewhere, but all this lock in is keeping them from doing that. And then the other part of that is if you wanna send a message to your mom with a photo in it, that photo is now degraded because Apple has willingly chosen to degrade its services to keep people locked in. And those two things are, like, both existing at once. So it's like Apple won at capitalism and then made everything worse as, like, a victory lap is kind of part of this case. And that part, I'm like, yeah. I mean, maybe that should be illegal. Maybe that shouldn't be a thing that's happening. And that's a tension of the case. Right? The the tension of the case is like, is that allowed? And I think that's where, it becomes almost like a philosophical argument of, like, should that be allowed? And I'm on the like, I love consumers. I wanna help consumers. That's my job as a consumer technology reporter. I wanna make sure that they're protected. And so I'm like, yeah. We shouldn't make things measurably worse just because we win at capitalism. And a lot of people are like, yeah. But you win at capitalism, you get to do what you want. Yeah. By the way, this is like a tension of the American economy dating back a 100 years or or more. Right. Right? Like, the reason it's called rail roads. Yeah. Like, the reason it's called antitrust is because there was a form of business that called trusts, and we, like, knocked them all down and built antitrust law. Highly recommend reading, The Curse of Bigness by Tim Wu, which is a little it's like a booklet. It's not it's not even long. It's just like a fun, readable history of antitrust. But this is the idea is that you should have competition in our market. And if you don't protect the competition in our market, then you're gonna end up with a handful of big companies around everything, and they will not be as good for you. And by the way, I think a bunch of big companies in our markets right now would love to be regulated monopolies. Like, just up and down. They would love it. Facebook would love to be a regulated monopoly and be in charge of everything and make all the money and not have to compete. Mhmm. That's just I I don't know. It feels like key to me. I think with the iPhone in particular, you're right. It's, like, hard to point at one thing, but I'll give you one example. Sure. There are ads in the settings screen.
Self. You don't have to worry about somebody, like, customizing it and them adding a little shipping time to it. Just get happy. Yeah. Because what is it? You go from, 8 to 16 gigs of RAM, that's $200. Mhmm. You go from the base storage which is 256 to 512, that's another $200. So, already, you've just turned your $1,000 or your $1100 laptop in this case into a $1500 laptop. At which point, you're like, well, maybe I'll just get the 15 inch because it's not that much more expensive. Yeah. And then you get then you're up to there. And then it is, I mean, it is so perfectly calculated how to get you to buy like the mid spec MacBook Pro. It's just unbelievable. It's beautiful. Yeah. And it is not the computer anyone needs like I truly do not believe the premise that if you buy 8 gigs of RAM it's only gonna last you 2 years and it won't work. I think like if you're a person who like really heavily uses your computer, sure. I think if you're gonna spend money on one additional spec, RAM is always the thing. So this Totally believe that. I believe firmly that for most people, for most uses, the base configuration of the MacBook Air, storage, RAM, everything is fine. Crazy. You're a crazy person. It's so much computer. This is what I'm trying to But not enough RAM. Got it. Yeah. This is what I'm trying to understand is because, like, you said this and it was, like, just lobbing a bomb into chat in the office. Like like, you were like, yeah. Yeah. So mad at me. Yeah. I I resisted, like, telling anybody that you said that and that that you, like, you're like, yeah. I believe 8 gigs. And everybody's like, David, what are you doing? And is it because we're all people who use our laptops a lot and always have a bajillion tabs open that that we feel that need for the RAM? I mean that's part of it. Like is it is it like a verge? It's I think it's 2 things. I think half of it is what you just described. I think the other half is we are all literally professionally trained to be sensitive to our computers being slow. And then I look at like my mom who is on a 9 year old iPad and like does
