Just a few days before Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC 2024) kicks off, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has delivered his final round of party-spoiling details. The biggest takeaway: Apple will call its long-rumored artificial intelligence play "Apple Intelligence." (Leave it up to Apple to find some way to redefine the term "AI.") Don't expect the company to lean into generative AI features as much as competitors. According to Gurman, Apple's AI capabilities will focus on features with "broad appeal" — something I read as being more practical than creating psychedelic images on demand.

Apple Intelligence will be powered by a combination of the company's technology, as well as OpenAI's. Bloomberg also notes the AI capabilities will be mostly opt-in, and we can expect Apple to tout its security capabilities since it will also rely on a combination of on-device and cloud connectivity. Previously, Apple has bragged about the iPhone's on-device security being more effective than competitors like Android. 

As previously rumor, Gurman says that Siri will be able to control apps more directly using Apple Intelligence. You could potentially tell the assistant to summarize an article or edit a photo in a certain way. Notably, Apple reportedly plans to open up this capability to third-parties, and allow you to string together multiple commands — but those features won't be available until next year. 

As for other features, it sounds like Apple is trying to bake in AI smarts where it can. You'll reportedly be able to create AI emojis that you can customize with text strings, and you can expect to see AI transcriptions in Voice Memos and more AI photo editing capabilities.

We're gearing up to cover Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) next week! In this episode, Cherlynn and Devindra dive into everything they expect at WWDC: Tons of AI announcements; more on iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15; and hopefully some improvements for Vision Pro and visionOS.

In addition, we chat about what we expect to see at Summer Game Fest and demonstrate how we used an AI editing tool to clear up some awful podcast audio. Devindra also talks with Justin Samuels, the founder of Render ATL, about why he started a massive tech conference in Atlanta.

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

Topics

• WWDC 2024 Preview: Apple gets serious about generative AI – 1:16

• NVIDIA overtakes Apple to be the 2nd most valuable company in the US – 31:08

• Humane AI warns users its battery case “may pose a fire risk” – 34:36

• AI workers demand stronger whistleblower protections – 34:36

• Boeing’s Starliner has successfully launched astronauts to the ISS – 46:11

• AI audio cleanup has gotten really good and we have podcast clips to prove it – 48:25

• Working on – 58:09

• Pop culture picks – 58:45

• Interview with Render ATL founder Justin Samuels – 1:05:50

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Credits 

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

Transcript

Engadget Podcast WWDC 2024 preview

Devindra: [00:00:00] What's up internet. Welcome back to the Engadget podcast. I'm senior editor Devindra Hardawar.

Cherlynn:. I'm deputy editor Cherlynn Low.

Devindra: Hello, welcome back Cherlynn. This week we are getting ready for WWDC 2024 happening in a couple of days. Cherlynn and I are going to be going down there to do it just like we did last year.

But, I don't know, maybe it may be not as momentous as last year's WWDC where we got a whole new device, right? And a whole new platform for Apple, but we're expecting a lot of AI stuff. We'll dive into all of that. And we've got a bunch of news this week too, but as always, folks, if you're enjoying the show.

Please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice. Leave us a review on iTunes, drop us an email at podcast@engadget. com. And I'm sure you guys will have a lot of questions after this episode. So be sure to do that. And also you can typically join us Thursday mornings on our YouTube channel for our live stream around 10 30 AM Eastern.

It's a fun time. Join the crowd and you can see us on video and see us do very silly things. Cause we'll be doing some demos too, which may not show up as well in the in the audio [00:01:00]version of the show. Stay tuned to the end of this episode for my chat with Justin Samuels. He's the founder and CEO of RenderATL, which is a huge tech conference happening in Atlanta from June 12th to the 14th.

All right. Let's talk about WWDC. Cherlynnn, I feel like we are dead with events because we have come through Google and Microsoft and everything just back to back. And of course we knew WWDC was coming, but Apple only sent us invites like maybe a week ago. It's typically like a two week lead time that we get to actually jump into it.

How are you feeling? What are you looking forward to at DubDub? I,

Cherlynn: I like going to “DubDub”. I like visiting Apple's campus. It's one of the nicest I've been to. All three that I've been to are nice, right? Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but something about Apple's campus just really resonates in my, chestal region.

It's

Devindra: very, it is the nicest one. I haven't been to the main Google campus. And also you didn't see the new Microsoft campus. Oh, yeah, we saw it build and. They, these companies, they express their style in their campuses, in their [00:02:00] environments, right?

Cherlynn: Yes, but as for the actual news we're expecting out of WWDC, I don't know how hype I might be yet.

We'll dig into kind of what we're expecting, but it just sounds like from all the reporting and rumors and leaks and whatnot, AI is going to be a big deal. And I'm just like, Oh God. Like I always, we're

Yeah, we're so inundated with all of it.

Devindra: Also because that's what IO was about.

Was Google saying Hey, this is how we're AI ing everything. And Microsoft was also like, Yeah, here's a whole new AI platform for all PCs. So does the dream of AI stuff feel more real this year? At least for you, Shirlene, because last year it didn't feel real. I

Cherlynn: don't know about more real, right?

I don't know if I what do you what do we mean by real? But I will say that Google's been banging on about AI forever and Google has had and also the word AI itself, has been around for so long decades. Yeah. What are we really talking about this year is that generative AI is making its way into a lot of devices and whatnot.

With Google, it still felt a little bit like a mix of what we saw with the duplex announcement years ago with the restaurant [00:03:00] reservation, AI slash, whatever you would want to call that. But Apple. Actually coming out and using and uttering the word AI would be a big deal. I think I don't think Apple would say it as many times as Microsoft or Google did in their respective developer conference keynotes, but So if they say it at all, I would be like, wow, this is entering mainstream consciousness.

I would bet a table that Apple finds a way to rename it or say it in some way that's not the same as everyone else. But it's also a very classic Apple to enter the game extremely late, but maybe make the most waves, even if nothing they do is groundbreaking,

Devindra: We can't, we talked about that around the vision part, right?

That was definitely almost a decade late after all the VR headsets came out and Apple sat back and looked at AR and VR and everything. But I don't know if we can say that here, because based on the reporting we've seen and by the way, we have a great preview piece by Chris Holtz. So go check that out for all our [00:04:00] stuff.

We are expecting Apple to AI all the things, but the. Inner story here is almost one of failure by Apple. There was a report in the wall street journal last night detailing what went down here. And specifically it was that Apple just didn't really seem to have focus around AI stuff.

They they, in 2018, they had hired. A former Google engineer John Gianandrea to head all of their AI stuff. And according to that reporting, they, that team, which also included more Google people that he brought into Apple, never quite gelled with the rest of Apple, right? Because Google's like timeline and the way they develop things may take a long time.

And they don't like normally have to build products around, Hey, we got to release a new iPhone next year. Or a new iPad in a couple of years or something. So it seems like that team never fully gelled within Apple. And then most recently, like some of Apple's other executives, like when ChatGPT launched, got really enamored with that stuff and was like, Oh crap, we got to be doing this.

So [00:05:00] this year almost seems like Apple's proving that they are not totally behind because the story, at least since last year is that Apple is behind. Even though you could argue that they've been doing neural engine stuff since 2017, 2018, like they've been doing computer vision stuff, but they haven't done generative AI stuff.

And that's what we're expecting to see at DubDub next next week. Stuff that Apple itself has been doing. Cause there has been reporting about. An internal engine that they're working on for Siri to maybe do more things locally, but also partnerships, most likely with open AI, according to reporting from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, it seems like Apple has formed a partnership with them to do similar to what Microsoft is doing with open AI, although not to the same degree, like Microsoft is like half invested.

In open AI at this point. But basically being able to trigger open AI from Siri or maybe within iOS and macOS, it seems like something like that is happening. It does feel like Apple's behind, right? They have something to prove and they don't normally. They're not normally in the weak [00:06:00] position as a company.

Sherlin.

Cherlynn: Look I wanna point out that in the livestream video chat deep mindset. I a I, right? Are they gonna add an I-I-A-I-I-A-I. That's quite funny. And that, aI reality. Apple and all, according to DeepRow9, Apple always follows, never innovates. I don't know. I don't know if we can necessarily say that.

Devindra: That's not, absolutely not true because. Vision Pro is so different, you, you could argue Apple follows, but they follow with. innovation that typically like fixes a lot of the mistakes endemic to an industry. Yeah. Usually like a

Cherlynn: thoughtful implementation of something that's been trendy and hyped up for a bit, which makes sense.

And this one

Devindra: seems like they're following the trend. And this,

Cherlynn: it feels a little early. I can't say, right? Like we haven't seen what Apple is announcing. We haven't seen what Apple exactly is. It's exactly going to say or bring to Siri or iPhones or whatever. But yeah, it seems early for Apple to be jumping into this too.

Like you said, like it's only two years of Gen AI has been that much of a hype term. For Apple, [00:07:00] this is they haven't waited five years before jumping in. Wow. Like that's,

Devindra: wow.

Cherlynn: Kind of what I think. Yeah,

Devindra: part of the problem is that there's also been a lot of reporting, like Google has been working at this stuff for a long time.

Like I think the initial paper around the transformer model came out of Google's own AI research work. Microsoft has been working with open AI for several years. Copilot launched for, what is their programming thing called? Their programming system. I keep forgetting the name of that. Copilot

Cherlynn: thing?

Oh, I know what you're talking about. Yeah.

Devindra: Yeah. I'm sure somebody in chat will bring it up, but they, even Microsoft, like a company that is typically. Oh, a company that's bad with timing. Seems like they were right on schedule for taking advantage of this stuff. Now I think we could still argue like Cherlynn, do you think Apple really needs to compete with generative AI?

Because I think at this point I'm like, I don't, what do I do with these images? I really don't want things to write for me. But I, maybe other people will find that more useful. Do you think this is actually a problem for Apple or just like a marketing thing?

Cherlynn: I don't [00:08:00] think the lack of jumping into Gen AI hype is the problem for Apple.

I think the problem for Apple is that Siri is dumb.

Devindra: Oh, yes. Yes.

Cherlynn: And it definitely could benefit from some Gen AI base, like large language model learning type thing. Like that sort of thing, it's more sophisticated. Assistant whether it be in what, Siri can do, which by the way, it's a lot I got to say, I don't have that many complaints about Siri.

I think that a lot of these voice based assistants are dumb in some way or another, like with my Google ones, they're like so bad at responding to me from the correct device. And that might be because I have so many Google devices, but also like Siri is good at working with third party apps that you can morph, iOS has made it so much easier.

I feel

Devindra: Like as much as we talk crap about Amazon and the trouble within their whole Alexa division, like they haven't been able to make money off of that, but that whole the Amazon assistant, I think is fun, is a little more useful because they did better about integrating with third parties before Apple and before Google did.

Hey, I [00:09:00] have one of those devices, like almost, those are so

Cherlynn: good. Yeah.

Devindra: They do more, they listen better and Siri, I could have my phone on my table and I could be like, Hey, blank, Hey, nothing, absolutely no response from an iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Cherlynn: I think what I am most impressed by is that like with the jump to iOS 17, that like the hot word for the assistant on iPhone is Siri.

It's just a name now, and it's actually a terrible idea. No, it's actually worked really well for me. I can say the name in conversation and not have my phone respond. And yet when I'm directly commanding and saying just the name, it responds very quickly to what, look, we're at times

Devindra: I have said words like seriously, and my phone would be like, Hey,

Cherlynn: can I help you?

What phone is it? Not to shame you, like I

Devindra: got, I got the biggest and the bestest, so there's no shame here.

Cherlynn:Interesting.

Devindra: And. The cam, the microphone should be good. Even while I'm like wearing AirPods or something, which have the microphones right there and should be better with the, with Siri. [00:10:00] I turned off the plain Siri name thing because it happened so often.

It was just more frustrating to me. So I think for me,

Cherlynn: that's so strange. Yeah.

Devindra: I don't know. I don't know. But I also have to talk to a lot more people. I don't know. In my daily life, I'm not

Cherlynn: like yelling at people, but

Devindra: I agree. Siri has been good for some things and Siri was the first virtual assistant. So that was one of the things that was like one of Steve jobs final products that he was working on. It was his dream of having a thing you talk to and it helps you out. And I think that dream died, especially as Alexa came out and Amazon proved that like having actually a speaker in your room that listens to the entire room is more useful and can do more things.

Anyway my question for you, Sherilyn, is what do you want to see? Like we've seen all these AI tools. We've seen things from Microsoft, like recall, by the way, which is getting a lot of flack for being a potential security hazard. Actually we'll talk about that later, but we've seen companies try to do.

Gen AI stuff. I think Microsoft with [00:11:00]recall and like with some of the the stuff in paint where you can like doodle and also co-creator. Yeah. Type in text and do co-creator stuff like that's cool. What do you wanna see on iOS or iPad OS or Mac Os? Look,

Cherlynn: I will point out that Drew in our chat was one of the first comments there this morning saying that they want Mac Os on iPads.

And I think that's like definitely interesting and something that we've all been hoping some sort of desktop software comes to tablets, whether on the Android or Apple side. We've been hoping for that forever, but. I don't know at this point that as a user I have any requests other than obviously better understanding of dictation in messages sometimes.

Smarter Siri,

Speaker: yeah.

Cherlynn: Better Siri which by the way I just said that and none of my devices responded and I thought that was smart. Also the But the thing is, I will say this, as a reporter, as someone who's been covering the space for a while, I have different things I am hoping to see. I want to hear that RCS announcement.

I want to know more about that. I want to see what this AI announcement pans out to, and you know what? If Siri improves, it'll improve my life, too, probably. Updates [00:12:00] on maybe HomeKit? Will there be a HomePod update? I don't know. They're going to talk

Devindra: about HomeKit, they're going to talk about CarPlay, but I'm specifically wondering what do you want to see in the realm of AI or does it matter to you?

Do other features matter more at this point?

Cherlynn: I don't use, I still don't use generative AI features this much, right? When I think of generative AI features, I think of things like summaries. I think of things like better transcription maybe. And that I would love to see recorder on the iPhone, get transcripts, in the way that like voice messages already do in message. What else do they do? Image, clear the background and replace it with something better. That's another Gen AI feature that they're already

Devindra: doing that. Like the studio effects stuff or. Yeah, the camera effects, right? That's

Cherlynn: When I can contemplate the list of common AI based features that are available on competing devices there's not a lot that I want or use.

Devindra: I'm asking, think ahead, right? Like we know what AI can do. We know Apple loves to be like, Hey they left a yes. And everybody in the tech world yes. And we do this and therefore we're better. There was a reporting from German that Siri could just do anything. Basically, like it [00:13:00]can interact with any app that you're looking at.

And also maybe interact with apps that are like running in the background or something. So if you're checking email and it could be like, Hey, Siri, can you build a playlist for me and Spotify doing yada yada, maybe it could do that stuff, true multitasking. Cause we talked about that during the iPad pro, right?

Cherlynn: So I would be really interested to see that whole Rabbit with the R1 said they would have a large action model where it can use, Siri just woke up and started talking

Devindra: to me, by the way. Yeah. Oh,

Cherlynn: that's, yeah, because you used your And I didn't even say hey. No, you did. I didn't even say hey.

No, you did. I did? Okay. You did. I remember you said it, yeah. Because I would just say Siri, but So what happens is if they use that sort of, implementation that Rabbit is trying to do where like it's AI can actually speak on third parties on behalf of you, then that's great. I would like to see the limitations, right?

Like the same thing that you encountered with the Rabbit R1, where like the third party like integration was just limited. I assume that Siri's going to run into that as well.

Devindra: Rabbit was working off of websites. So if Uber [00:14:00]changed its website Rabbit would have to go back and reprogram how their like little integration with Uber worked.

And apparently Uber didn't work at all for me. So I think Uber had done something that screwed them up. With with iOS, at least apple has power. It's like apps. Apple has power. Apple has like more insight into what, how the apps run and things. And maybe developers can even put in like little hooks to be like, Hey, this is how you better work with this smarter Siri or something, but to have something like that runs entirely on device.

I think that would be useful. I just want to, I just, I think we all just want to talk to our computers and that is the goal, open AI. It's Google and even Microsoft is trying to push right here. So we all just

Cherlynn: want to delegate tasks to our assistance. We don't want to do things by hand anymore.

And I understand that, right? It's a vibe. I also, by the way, want to point out that I saw a either a thread or a tweet or whatever it is somewhere. Someone went, I want AI to do my laundry and chores so that I have time to do creation, creative stuff and art, not AI to do my creative stuff and art. So I can do my laundry and my chores.

And I thought [00:15:00] that was so accurate. Exactly. That

Devindra: is the perfect human example, and also yeah, we've been testing all this stuff. I don't have a huge use of the generative image stuff in AI, I will say. More recently, I've been looking closer and closer at like how transcription works with AI.

Cause that's been super helpful for us. And also like just. Online AI tools for like podcast editing and we'll actually do a little demo later on this episode to show that off to show like what is possible now. It is pretty wild. A lot of these AI tools can be useful, but yeah, it remains to be seen like how Apple's going to do it.

What about other products? Truland, like iPadOS? Here's

Cherlynn: the other thing I'm excited to see for no reason whatsoever.

Devindra: Oh, I know what you're going to say. You know what I'm going to say, right?

Cherlynn: Let's say it together on the count of three. One, two, three. Calculator.

Devindra: Calculator. Everybody, you were really like hesitant there.

No. Calculator. I want to see this calculator.

Cherlynn: I want to see this newfangled [00:16:00] calculator. What is it going to do? Is it going to Do my taxes. Okay. Calculator do my taxes. Get me a refund. That's what I want. Give me a big refund. You shouldn't need

Devindra: calculator to do that. You should need the government to put into it, destroy into it as a company, which has stopped us from having better tax preparation, but

Cherlynn: Different conversation.

So anyway yeah, I think, I'm excited to see that. I think iOS 18 is probably going to bring some changes where, by the way, according to some of the rumors we saw in our preview, we mentioned in our preview post there might be like, you may no longer be locked to a grid on your home screens where you're laying, when you're laying out the apps.

Yeah. So you could probably potentially drop them anywhere. Like you might be able to on, like you can on Android. I think that's interesting. I don't know if that's necessarily going to change my life. A messier

Devindra: home screen. Congratulations. Exactly. I would love

Cherlynn: to put a widget in the middle and then like apps somewhere else, like along the sides, flanking, I don't know, within reach of my fingers.

You know what I mean? The way it's currently built, I had to think what apps do I not want to use as [00:17:00]often versus the ones I want to use more often. So I'll put those nearer down into the sides and the middle ones. Do you how do

Devindra: you, or we should do like a phone comparison screen at some point, but do you care about anything beyond the home screen trilling?

Because like for me, page two and three and everything beyond, it's I don't care. I'm never going to swipe over there. I swiped down. I search for app. I

Cherlynn: rely on pages one and two. That's it. But I also rely on the bottom halves of the pages regardless, because I cannot for the life of me reach across cause I use a pro max now.

So the top half for me is for widgets and the bottom half is for the apps that I use. That's why it's like page one and two.

Devindra: That actually works out pretty well. Cause then you can reach that. Yeah. It's one swipe

Cherlynn: and tap away. As opposed to reach, drop your phone, crack the glass and then get your app, so that's how I design my app.

So this interesting, this is a. Interesting potential new iOS 18 thing. I don't care so much about iPadOS, even if

Devindra: Would you care if they were like, Hey, let's emulate macOS a little bit. Yes, I would. I think To give you more

Cherlynn: stuff. I think on a philosophical and theoretical front, yes, I care.

Functionally, no, because I don't [00:18:00]really use iPads a lot. But yes, as a news person, I care in the same way that like, do I use the calculator on Apple a lot? No, but do I care if they put out a graphing calculator on a phone? Yes. And can I type 8 0 0 8 5 on it? Yes. That's all I care about. Yeah,

Devindra: yeah, yes, we, yes, we love typing that.

The thing the complaints we had last week or whenever we were talking about the iPad Pro is like how limited it is, it can only do certain things, like only one app can access your microphone at one time, and may not be able to run a background process. I don't know if virtualizing macOS will be the thing to solve that, and I almost wonder like doing virtualized Mac OS on an 11 inch screen.

That's not going to be really super helpful to some people. It's not touch friendly,

Cherlynn: yeah.

Devindra: It's not super touch friendly. I think that's something Apple has totally avoided even thinking about. Whereas Microsoft, since windows eight has been like we got to make these stupid windows. I got to be able to put my fingers on them or something.

Whereas iPad OS was just like, we're never going to deal with, we never have to think about mouse and keyboards. We're just going to be [00:19:00] fingers. Then they with the whole keyboard. I feel like they started to emulate surfaces after a while and they just never talked about what they said previously about surfaces.

Yeah. That's funny.

Cherlynn: I do want to point out that some of the chatter in our live stream chat has been talking about what is there going to be a new name for the iPhone assistant, right? And it's, some people are like Siri Pro or Siri Plus or I don't know what else other than IAI we shall see.

Serai. Yeah. The, also want to say that Sir Holmes mentioned that you just search for the app from the home screen, which actually this is the other way I use the app. So anything beyond page two. I just do the search. Yeah. And search was, I think, an Android feature at first. I cannot remember.

But that's how I used it before.

Devindra: The iPhone search was very bad for a long time. So I think Apple did have to do some work to like, make that better. And also now search can pull up specific like settings. Can I just say,

Cherlynn: kind of nice.

Devindra: Yeah.

Cherlynn: Yes, that's true. I like the universal search by here. I love how my iPhone search, right?

Whenever you search something, I will find these random, like previous searches on there [00:20:00] or suggested searches that just don't make sense. One time I saw one of the previous searches cashed on there was like, and I was like, what the heck is that? And then recently, by the way, like right now, if I like scroll down on my Like home screen one of the apparently one of the recent searches is the letters POR on Wikipedia And I'm like, I never searched that but POR is what I called my grandmother

Devindra: Aren't you sure?

Maybe it maybe pick that up, but no like drunken late night No, why would I search for my

Cherlynn: grandma on Wikipedia? And what on earth is POR if not? I think

Devindra: you've made the new like horror movie Sherilyn The ghost horror movie,

Cherlynn: a love story. I would love for my grandma to visit me.

Oh,

Devindra: that's

Cherlynn: nice. Yes.

Devindra: That's lovely. Anything else we want to mention, I guess in terms of MacOS, like it just seems like at this point, MacOS gets features that were on iOS and we're on iPadOS, it seems like Apple's entire energy is focused on iPhones, a little bit less on iPads, and then. Max are just like, whatever, man, [00:21:00] we give you new chips.

Be happy.

Cherlynn: Vision pro.

Devindra: Yeah. How about vision pro? I'm thinking about that right now, because there are a lot of things vision pro can't even do. Like you can't rearrange the app icons and vision pro things. Just when you install them, they just get stack stack. And I feel apple, it's like somebody who's working on like a major report or something for school.

I was like, Oh crap I didn't really fully format this, but nobody's going to install that many apps. Who cares? So I feel like vision pro, like with every update we get from them, it was like, Oh yeah. Oh spatial personas for your FaceTime avatars. That should have been there at launch. Give us some extra month, give us an extra couple of months.

Okay. We really need time to do all this stuff. I feel like Apple was just super Vision Pro came out hot out of the gate and it's getting criticized for a lot of things because it's not fully baked and they're baking it in real time. What would I like to see? Faster performance, I think faster finger gesture stuff too which may require some hardware updates, maybe not just software updates, but I did notice like when I was testing that what if experience on the Vision Pro, [00:22:00] A lot of it, you're doing like hand gestures like like Dr.

Strange and like the people in the magicians there along with Wong. And. It's just like really inaccurate, because on the vision pro, you're doing stuff like okay, pinching and scrolling and zooming. It's not super. It doesn't have to be super timely. It's the latency. You can have a little bit of a lag.

But when you're playing a game, you want to be able to point at something and throw a fireball or a block of shield. And it seems like things were just so wishy washy that they were just like making those interactions sLowr to make up for the fact that they didn't. It's not as good as like a game pad or something.

It's not as instant. I don't feel the like visceral thing of throwing a fireball or crafting a spell or something. So I think the actual hand recognition stuff. They got to get better at I almost wonder like what they could do. Cause that thing has an M2 chip, which also has a pretty powerful neural engine.

I almost wonder like what else Apple's working on to take advantage of that. I believe the eye tracking and the hand tracking does like. tap into that for some of the underlying [00:23:00]stuff with InVision Pro. That's something the Oculus headsets can't do very well because they have much less powerful chipsets.

They're using Snapdragon hardware, which have their own like MPU stuff, but not, it's not the same. I think I just want more content, Trillian. I want more content and I want this thing to get cheaper so that people can actually start to use it. And it's still a little buggy. Like sometimes when I've been using it in the morning and I put it on the afternoon.

And I have the thing over my head. I'm like, are you going to boot up?

Cherlynn: Are you going

Devindra: to boot up? It's not just like your phone or your computer taking time. It's like complete darkness. You have to sit there in darkness. That's some humane eight

Cherlynn: level BS. No, not as there's a lot of,

Devindra: there's a lot of that.

So I feel like they got to iron out all these kinks deliver a lot more content that makes it more useful. And I don't know, court more developers to it. Give us more of a reason, give, I would actually love better integration with iPhone stuff. If I hold up my iPhone, give me my iPhone screen in a little window and just show it to me because right now, if I didn't like.

Respond to something on [00:24:00]my iPhone that is not within the vision pro. It's annoying because then you have to tap in you can't do face ID to log in, you have to tap in the pin code and everything. So yeah, I'm thinking of a piece of what I'd like to see on vision pro. I also don't know if anybody really cares because ultimately it's it's a very limited device at this point and Apple hasn't fully Fully sold it to developers or.

Or professionals either. So it's, I like vision pro. I just think Apple has to do a lot of work there. And the clearly all their attention is on the AI stuff because that's the stuff that looks the worst for them. Do you expect any surprises?

Cherlynn: God, who knows? I think there'll be like. Some kind of iterative hardware upgrade to one Mac product.

Maybe a max studio, maybe a Mac mini and that sort of thing. Also to your point about the Mac, the vision pro being expensive, depro nine was saying that, let me just go take out a 10 year loan to go buy a vision pro wow, that is what we're staring down with the price there. I do think though, I want to invite people listening or watching the podcast, send us an email podcasted and gadget.

com with your [00:25:00] idea of what you Of what the next version of Mac OS is going to be named after. Are they finally going to be like Mac OS Napa? Mac OS Wine Country? Mac OS Yosemite?

Devindra: We've had Yosemite.

Cherlynn: Have we had

Devindra: Venice yet? Have we had Venice yet? Ooh, maybe

Cherlynn: Castro? I don't know, whatever. Mac OS Frisco.

Everybody will hate it. Nope.

Speaker: Everybody will hate it. You

Cherlynn: can't do that. Send your guess, your best guess. It's a podcast that I

Devindra: think you guys should all come. Mac OS Petaluma. Mac

Cherlynn: OS Los Angeles. It's just a city.

Devindra: There's a lot of things. I want to briefly shout out that one surprise we could see is that we saw this report from German a while ago saying like Apple is dabbling in home robotics.

Home robots. And there is room like for this company that is certainly thinking hard about home automation and home devices and stuff to be like here's a, what if we turn the home pot into a thing that is more of a [00:26:00] little home robot that follows you around, can sit on your kitchen counter and move the camera around almost like that one of those Google tablets, right?

The one that moves the actual tablet screen. I almost wonder I think we had talked about this at the time, but I feel like the iRobot acquisition. failed. And yeah, Apple still seems like a good potential. If they just wanted IP and cool stuff. That would be a smart one.

Cherlynn: The real only thing like that prevents, I think Apple from truly just buying over Roomba slash iRobot is the fact that they probably never want to say the word poop or dirt.

They just don't want to deal with the idea that, Life can get messy and dirt is a real thing and stink sometimes happens. Michael Timpson says something that I actually wanted to say to Apple car. Didn't they like fire all kinds of people or something? There's

Devindra: no Apple car. Like the whole thing we talked about was like, seems like that project is at least on the back burner.

They did do a lot of work for it. So I almost wonder if if in a couple of years, like when EV batteries like [00:27:00]cheaper and it's easier for them to like. Design something like that. Maybe it could be resurrected in some form Maybe a self driving pod, but the tech wasn't there over the past decade for them to really do the car it seemed.

Cherlynn: Yeah, so that's probably not coming and it will be extremely surprising if it does some funny macOS names in the chat. Michael Coley says macOS Alcatraz, which I did drop last year Michael Timson says macOS Venice Beach, which I was thinking about and Michael Timson adds muscled software, which okay You know what I think maybe apple is gonna pull a 180 and be like MacOS Manhattan.

Devindra: No. MacOS SoHo.

Cherlynn: Oh, MacOS Rodeo Drive.

Devindra: MacOS Rodeo, MacOS Hollywood will be full selling out if they ever do that. Yeah,

Cherlynn: they did. I don't know. Anyway. MacOS The Hills. Lots of ideas, lots of potential there. Lots of ideas.

Devindra: Alright stay tuned folks yeah, we will have some more WWDC coverage coming up stay tuned, we'll do the live blog, Sherilyn and I will be live blogging together, Monday [00:28:00] morning, and we're going to have a whole bunch of coverage over at Engadget yeah, come support us, be ready, come support us, watch us live blog, share what you can, and yeah, we're going to be running around Apple's campus for two whole days.

Talking with people and demoing things. So I'm excited, but also not looking forward to all the running around. That place is very large. And also yeah, I don't know. We're going to have to write a lot. Trillian. I think it's going to involve a lot of work too. So we're going to try to have fun while doing it folks.

And maybe we'll do a quick podcast from Apple, like as soon as they do things or as soon as we get some hands on time. For sure. All right. Let's move on to some other news. Surprise news overnight. Nvidia has surpassed Apple. As the second most valuable U. S. company, it its market cap, let me just read here, it has, it hit a 3 trillion market cap.

NVIDIA had a market value of 3. 019 trillion Wednesday after I think right after close. Apple was at 2. 99 trillion. Couldn't do a little [00:29:00] better Apple to really take this on. Microsoft is currently the most valuable publicly traded company. It's market cap is 3. 15 trillion. As of Wednesday.

So I'm not too surprised, but this is certainly an example of like when there is a gold rush, you got to sell the shovels, and NVIDIA is selling all of the shovels, all the AI power, the gold, yeah. And

Cherlynn: that's so closely tied to our next, like other news item, which is that like Apple is slipping because of its inability to like really be at the forefront there.

Devindra: I think we pretty much mentioned like all of this story for one, but yeah, the story is like Apple slipping because of that. Google hire that they brought in. The Nvidia thing is still wild to me though. Did you, five years ago, Sean, what do you think Nvidia would be? Would be so powerful because, Hey, we knew GPUs were important then because the crypto bros and everybody were like all over GPUs, it was being used for GPU mining, GPU, like the crypto stuff still felt like a flash in the pan.

There is some like lasting stuff there, but Microsoft being the most valuable company that's [00:30:00]publicly traded now makes sense because they went all in on the cloud and Azure stuff. And then they started combining cloud plus AI. So they're like lead is probably going to be pretty strong for a while.

But NVIDIA just really lucked out because I remember five years ago, or even earlier, like I had to report on a lot of NVIDIA AI work and they talk about like self driving stuff that they were building and it looked cool, but it didn't feel real. This was not a product that people could actually use and it didn't feel like it actually existed in our dimension.

It existed in NVIDIA's dimension. Yeah. And now I guess it paid out for them. Jensen Wong, the CEO and founder of NVIDIA is just must be the happiest man on earth right now.

Cherlynn: I just want to say that. I think maybe I should have seen the writing on the wall for NVIDIA success when, and I don't know if that's the right thing, but I think when the, during the pandemic, they kept selling out, they were out of stock.

I think partly that was because of supply chain issues, but partly I've just, I don't think I personally have been, aware of the demand for NVIDIA's GPUs being as [00:31:00] high as it was during the pandemic with what RTX 4080 series. Yeah. They brought ray tracing five years ago. Was that what they did?

I don't know what it was, but

Devindra: that was like two or three years ago. Exactly. So like they've done so

Cherlynn: many different things to bring like new capabilities to their GPUs, their graphics cards, and I think, yeah.

Devindra: And even the ray tracing thing, I don't think has ever fully taken off. Sure. It's

Cherlynn: cool. But it's one thing that improved on the graphics cards the way I think, people just kept talking about.

Devindra: People, yeah, like the gamers were certainly all over it. And AMD, I think was failing to like, keep up in the high end GPU market. But then AMD is like, Hey, all our hardware is in Microsoft's console and Sony's console and not Nintendo's console, but. Their hardware is elsewhere. So AMD was like less worried about the high end market, but anyway, good news for Nvidia.

I don't know how long it's going to last. We should talk about this humane thing, Cherlynn, because there have been a couple updates and I guess I'm happy, Cherlynn, that your humane AI pin did not go up in [00:32:00] flames because that is apparently what they're warning people of they are warning that the battery case.

Was it the specifically the battery charging case, they received a report that could catch fire and they sent out a note to all customers that out of an abundance of caution they're telling people to stop using it. That seems bad.

Cherlynn: Yeah, funny. At 4 PM yesterday, I got this email and I immediately was like, yo guys, we need to like, cover this up.

And our team rightly asked me to ask Humane, will they be sending out replacements or will they be refunding people because these cases do cost you money? And our podcast producer, Ben did point out in the earlier part of this live stream that I am vindicated in a way, yes, that like I, that thing was burning me, right?

The pin itself the booster pack, not

Devindra: just the charging case, right? So the

Cherlynn: booster pack and the, it was running warm, the. had the like metal edges that would feel like they were [00:33:00] burning like hot for me to touch. And then when they sat in the carrying case, I never had it like on me.

So it's hard to tell whether it ever burned me, but the carrying case and when The pin came out of it after being in there and charging for a bit would just be warm as well. I also would like to point out that the carrying case, even with the pin inside or without, which is loose charge slowly throughout the day, just doesn't make sense that it wouldn't hold on to some of the juice.

to continue charging the pin anyway, it would just be dead after a while. I'm just like why is this not charging? Oh, because the charging case itself is also dead. Basically what Humane's email entailed was that they found like a quality issue with one of their battery vendors and. They didn't specifically say that anyone had caught on fire.

There was just one report that led them to investigate. And then they then found out that there was a quality issue that may be a fire safety issue. So okay, cool. Glad I [00:34:00]stopped using that thing. Glad that you

Devindra: needed another reason not to spend 700 plus a month. This garbage product. You should.

Another reason not to buy. And also there was a New York times piece that was like perfectly timed for this about how humane failed. And they talked to a bunch of people working there and also the CEO and the founders too. And reportedly they have only sold 10, 000 orders. But we have talked about the fact that they are also trying to sell themselves to other companies.

HP's name is up there for a billion dollars. I want to, I want that live show. And I want to sit and build a failed product. Fundamentally doesn't solve any problems is a disaster on every level. And then be like, Hey, give me a Billy for this. Give me a billion dollars for my failure. And I want to point out,

Cherlynn: This brings up, brings me back to the conversation of a, we have talked about how high this valuation is in previous episodes already, but be like when Ben said we were vindicated, I want to say that like the industry, all [00:35:00]of us tech reviewers and journalists and media and influencers, including Marquez of MKBHD were criticized.

On some level. MKBHD got a lot of like criticism around Oh my gosh, you single handedly would bring down this. How can you do that? And can you imagine had he not actually fairly addressed and criticized and brought up the fact that this thing runs hotter, this thing is. And then here we are one month down the road, nothing really has caught on fire yet.

But if these came to light after a row of unfairly positive coverage, then our, what kind of trust would we have? What kind of credibility would we have with our audience?

Devindra: The only people complaining were typically like the Silicon Valley bros and starter people. But in that New York times reporting, there are several instances of people at humane being like, this is not ready.

We have issues with how it's done and those people were reprimanded for saying anything negative about the product of the company. And that is a sort of it is a cult mentality that a lot of these companies operate on. It's we're [00:36:00] changing the world. We have hundreds of millions of dollars of funding.

Nobody has seen this tech before. Who cares if it isn't fully baked or if it's not solving a genuine problem? Who cares?

Cherlynn: Remember, I remember during the review process where I was like, I walked into the Humania office in New York to take my briefing and saw witness firsthand that all of the staff people there were wearing Humania pins and walking around the office.

And how could not a single one of them have found it? And turns out maybe they did. And maybe they were just reprimanded, and they literally

Devindra: just don't want to hear it. There's a great quote at the end of that New York times piece, which you should all read. But Bungiorno, the CEO says you don't know everything before you launch.

Yeah. No shit. Yeah, maybe if you don't want to hear everything before launch and Mr. Chowdhury, who is, he's not the CEO, but he's also one of the founders. He was the guy who did that whole TED talk said they definitely wish that it were able to resolve some of those things a little bit differently.

Specifically, he has a line, I'm going to pull this up here, but his line is hilarious because it's I just want to build things. [00:37:00] That's how it ends. I'm like, yeah, building things is nice. Yeah. Build something useful.

Cherlynn: I will say that whenever I'm like, when I met them and in my interactions with them, Bethany born, Jonah, I'm on chowdery.

They're like this couple. They're so nice, at least to me. And I think that I am aware that there is a privilege in terms of the relationship here that they have to be nice to me.

Devindra: And I don't care how nice they are too. It's great that they're nice. They could be great people.

They could be great people, but we are, I'm not talking about their personalities. I'm not trying to date these people. It's is your thing good? Is your thing good? And it wasn't, and it's sad. It's sad. And also the response from the tech industry of like, why are you going to be so mean, bro?

Cherlynn: That's not nice. Yeah. That was just, that's not fun.

Devindra: It's pathetic. Yeah.

Cherlynn: But what I mean is that yes, they seem like nice people to me, but it's really not nice to hear that they might have reprimanded some of the people who were trying to raise alarms or trying to be like, this is not ready for selling.

And you should not like, they could have been protected from all of this. Not even protected. They could have just had a bit of product that launched [00:38:00] had they listened to some of their own staff, if this report turns out to be true. While you look for that No, we're

Devindra: done. We're done. Okay. He basically said he just wants to build, but I do want to note that New York times piece does have apparently Chowdhury and Buongiorno had like a meeting before the launch being like, prepare for bad reviews.

Like really bracing the staff are like, this is not going to go well. I wonder why guys it almost seems like they were well aware. They knew because

Cherlynn: the reviews the process included them asking us what we thought and all of us reviewers were like, we're having all of these issues, what's going on.

The moon in our chat says, this is a problem in the industry, releasing products with future functionality promises is the new hotness. It can't be alLowd to continue. And yeah, we again have said this, god, episodes past. This has been

Devindra: done before too. This has been done before by other companies.

Cherlynn: It's not humane alone. Yeah. Like even sometimes when the Surface Duo was launched, it was like software updates are coming to make the experience better but buy it now though, no that's not gonna happen. That's not

Devindra: how we review things, we have to score things. This all actually ties into the next thing we want to bring up which is a story about AI [00:39:00]workers demanding stronger whistlebLowr protections in an open letter.

It includes it was signed by 13 current or former workers with ties to Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. We don't really talk about Anthropic very much, but they're also another major AI company. And specifically they're asking for here's a good quote from that letter. So long as there is no effective government oversight of these corporations, current and former employees are among the few people who can hold them accountable to the public.

Yet broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues. This is another example of these companies, like people at these companies, bringing up problems and then being reprimanded for it. And specifically there was another story one of the OpenAI people what's his name?

Leopold Aschenbrenner. Who on the recent Dwarkesh podcast, which is the thing I've never heard about, but apparently this guy does four hour long podcasts. They're deeply researched. So kudos to him. But he was saying like he brought up Ashenbrenner [00:40:00]brought up issues to the OpenAI board about security and safety and how they're deploying things.

And by bringing those issues up to the board, HR reprimanded him. Because of that, because OpenAI leadership didn't want the board to see that, and they called it a security incident, even though he's bringing up stuff that the board should know about, and also information that was publicly available, like when OpenAI said they wanted to do AGI, like a general time frame of 2027 to 2028 they were calling that confidential information.

They were saying that out in public. So it just seems like they wanted to fire this guy because he told the board something that kind of ruined the rosy image that Sam Altman wanted to build for it. That's what it is. That's what this letter is pointing to as well. What do you think about this, Jolyne?

Cherlynn: Honestly, I don't know. I think the best point that someone in our chat brought up, I think it was the moon, is that it seems like there's very dark in these AI companies with lots more of these stories surfacing, right? These things about HR oversight and all of that. Coming up I don't know.

I, I, [00:41:00] the, like you said, it's tied into that humane situation where reportedly people like, they didn't specifically whistleblow or it wasn't about like ethical type of stuff, but yeah, they're not being listened to. And I think this is a result or byproduct of hype of there's a hype train, everyone's jumping on board and we're the train has to keep going on.

And if you try to slow the train down, you're not going to be listened to, even though. There might be, like, an obstacle in the path. There might be, like, some kind of dangerous issue coming up. They're not listening. And I think this is all, again, I've said this over and over again. It's all capitalism's fault.

Devindra: And people are awful. It's all hyper capitalism's fault, which is like Silicon Valley is all about. It's all about we gotta build this thing that will get a ton of VC funding and we sell out, we cash out for at least a billion dollars and then we will be successful. Yeah. A pain.

That's

Cherlynn: wild to me. It's just wild. I'm so disappointed in humanity. And

Devindra: this is how we're entering WWDC, by the way, where Apple is partnering with this company, which is shady. It almost seems like they're making a deal with the devil just to be, so people will [00:42:00] stop yelling at them about being behind on generative AI stuff.

This is going to be an interesting WWDC to see how much Apple. Leans in on open AI and how much they want to do their own thing. All this is connected. It's all we've been saying, right? Like I think a lot of these companies can't be trusted. I don't trust like how they're handling information, like how they're pulling things in or how they're thinking about security.

Clearly their employees think the same thing. That's something to think about the next time you use chat GPT. Or any of these services. Yeah. Some quick updates. We did see that Boeing Starliner has finally lifted off and it's headed to the ISS. The latest update I saw is it is on track. They were dealing with like maybe some sort of helium leak.

So I'm hoping that's not gonna be anything major. Hoping they board and are able to return safely, but good on Boeing, because it seemed like they were having trouble with just planes recently. I was on one of those Alaska airline planes. I was looking at, I was like, wait a minute. 747 Max, that's not good.

Alaska Airlines. Probably where your windows

Cherlynn: really is the thing, [00:43:00] right?

Devindra: Boeing has seemed like it's been in trouble. The Starliner launch has been scrubbed several times because of weather and other difficulties. So it's cool. They launched, they're headed to the ISS. I'm hoping that all goes well.

In other news, we're also prepping for the Summer Game Fest 2024, which is also happening this weekend. Too much stuff happening. All at once. Summer Game Fest Live is June 7th at 5pm Eastern. I hate you so much, Jeff Keighley. 5pm Eastern on a Friday?

Cherlynn: Is it Eastern? Okay. I thought it was Pacific 5pm.

But no,

Devindra: no, it's Eastern. We all yelled at him for that. There's Day of the Devs on Friday. After that, which is more like developer oriented devolver has their thing. Also in June 7th, Xbox is June 9th. Ubisoft forward is June 10th. We'll be doing all this coverage. By the way, June 10th is up

Cherlynn: WDC just FYI.

Devindra: Yeah. That's great. That's great. We're not dying over here. We don't know when Nintendo is going to do their thing. We haven't talked about Sony's PlayStation Unveiling event that was last week. It was not very momentous from what I saw. We did a lot of coverage go check that out and gadget, but there was nothing that [00:44:00] really jumped out at me.

A weird thing. This is basically the sort of E3 season. E3 is not happening, but all these companies are getting together and having major game announcements. We'll see. We'll see.

Cherlynn: Come back to Wingadget. com for all of the updates. Our team is, we have people on the scene and we are also covering remotely, basically quite a lot of people will be writing stories.

So come check it out.

Devindra: And let's do something a little different, folks. We want to show off something that we did last week where we actually took advantage of AI. I've been using the online tool Descript quite a bit for some podcasts. Editing while on the go, just to make life easier. That's how I got that build interview out.

And Descript has a lot of automated tools that can just clean up your audio, give you studio like sound. We had a problem last week where my cohost, Nathan Ingram joined while at [00:45:00]Jackhammer, was right outside his window. Just the entire time. But

Ben: let's be like more accurate. Yes. He knew that street construction was happening on his street and we were all hoping and praying that it would not occur during when we were recording.

This is

Devindra: podcast producer Ben speaking about it. How stupid were we then?

Ben: Yes. How stupid were we though? Because how can we just expect construction workers to burn daylight? They're not

Devindra: gonna. We were hoping that it just wasn't gonna be that bad. It turned out to be pretty not great during the livestream.

You could go back and take a look at that. And we're like okay, what can we do to salvage this? Also, Nate muted as much as he could. It was just that it was a thing that was really constant whenever he was talking. And we thought his audio may have been unsalvageable. Ben? Podcast producer extraordinaire did a couple tweaks of his own to trying to clean up the audio.

And I spent 10 minutes, just, I dumped it into audio into Descripts, like audio cleanup stuff. I think I ran the compressor on it, which tightened it up a little. I will say like the Descript tool, it came out. What [00:46:00] ended up happening is like almost magical coming out of Descript, but let's play the original audio.

We're going to play a little game over here and we're going to see how this works. This is the original audio as we heard it from Nate.

Nate: But nonetheless, everybody communicates. Everybody sends emails. Everybody has thoughts in their head and you put them down and it sounds like you usually at the very least.

Whereas when you AI it, it doesn't sound like anyone.

Devindra: That's bad. Not good. Pretty bad. Pretty bad. It didn't sound as bad when on the stream, but I also think the stream may have quieted some of that. So we have three different versions of what Ben did to fix this. Okay. Here's version A.

Nate: But nonetheless, everybody communicates. Everybody sends emails. Everybody has thoughts in their head. And you put them down and it sounds like you, usually, at the very least. Whereas when you AI it, it doesn't sound like anyone.

Ben: Little better? Little cleaner? Yeah, that's pretty good. Version A is what I use to clean up.

All audio that comes into the podcast, that's isotope. [00:47:00] And I think I used the spectral de noise feature. This is not AI. This is just using trying to figure out where like background noise might be in the whole spectrum of the Hertz values. But the problem is that when you run that, there must be something about a jackhammer that sits in the same band that the human voice is in.

So it took a little bit out of Nate's voice. So why don't we try version B?

Devindra: Version B, let's go.

Nate: But nonetheless, everybody communicates, everybody sends emails, everybody has thoughts in their head, and you put them down and it sounds like you, usually, at the very least. Whereas when you AI it, it doesn't sound like anyone.

Ben: That's really good. Yeah, this one sounds a little bit better. This one is from Super Tone Clear, which is a new plug in that a lot of radio folks I know have used more as a A D reverb than anything, [00:48:00]because like isotope is one of the industry standard things that you find a lot of podcast engineers using, but isotope D reverb is not that great to be quite honest.

So when can you use it? clear came out. Everybody was like really excited. Everybody was jumping on the beta. I'm really happy that I got beta pricing on this, but you can still tell that there's some jackhammer in the background. So let's listen to the last version.

Devindra: Here's the last version folks.

Speaker 6: But nonetheless,

Nate: everybody communicates, everybody sends emails, everybody has thoughts in their head and you put them down and it sounds like you usually at the very least. Whereas when you AI it, it

Speaker 6: doesn't sound like anyone.

Ben: What happened? That's the version that ran on the podcast. I felt like I had to explain like, Hey, Nate is going to sound like a little bit weird, a little bit robotic, but it's entirely him.

And that. Is the D script cleanup. That's really good. That is D script. That's [00:49:00] crazy. AI enabled clean. It's just really good. It's insane.

Devindra: Insane.

Cherlynn: No. All I'm gonna say is it's insane.

Devindra: That's just gone.

Cherlynn: All I'm gonna say is this. Ben, what you're telling me is I can now record my podcast right next to a jackhammer and be okay.

It'll be totally gone. We're going to do all our recordings from the show floor from now on

Ben: if you feel the need. To have a hairdryer going on, you constantly, you can still record a podcast. Don't do my like my wind action

Cherlynn: fan. My like, we should have just,

Devindra: We should have just stopped Nate.

Like when we heard Hey, maybe there's outside construction. Should've just been like, no, thanks, Nate. It's okay. We'll just go. But we, Hey, we were brave. We thought it may get better. This descript tool took me, I dumped the audio in. I hit the studio effects button. I did I didn't put the compressor on, but I did the the thing where you limited low pass noise.

So high pass filter,

Speaker 7: high pass, let's high pass through low pass. Let's low pass through. But

Devindra: then people also call it like low pass cutoff, which is different. It's a [00:50:00] different thing. The cutoffs are different. Anyway, I did those two things. It took 10 minutes and I delivered this audio to Ben and I think Ben almost fainted.

Ben: Yeah, no, I was really surprised. I was also really relieved because most of the show was just Devindra and Nate talking. And so this pretty distinctly proves that AI noise reduction is a path forward. Forward. This is something that is genuinely useful for music producers, audio engineers people who work in radio.

You just have to get used to the weird robotic sound, and when we were talking about the weird robotic sound, we were also talking about showrunner AI Dev? Tell us more about that.

Devindra: Showrunner AI is kind of part of this, too. This was a thing that launched last week. I didn't have a chance to write it up.

But a showrunner AI they got a lot of buzz because they were like, Hey, you could type in a prompt, an AI prompt and produce a TV show and you can produce something that looks like South Park or something. And it [00:51:00] just all reminds me of this in a way. Yeah I don't think that's that product is very good.

I think it got a lot of flack for this too, but it just reminded me of it because it's like, Hey I think this cleanup tool. is a really good useful form of AI and by AI it is doing a low level process to basically take away every little bit of that jackhammering which is possible by a human but would probably drive you insane because it's doing a lot of like repetitive low level work and that is the sort of thing AIs are good at.

Whereas Showrunner is trying to sell you, hey, Let's let's build a whole TV show around this thing. Like with no work or anything, there are a couple of examples out there. And that is the sort of AI stuff where I'm like, I, it's not funny. I was actually talking to the to the CEO of this company too.

Like I heard the demos, I got the pitch. I was like, dude, this is not funny. This is not good content. People will rag on you for even producing this. And I got some feedback that was like, yes, I have been thinking about this too. They still went ahead and launched the thing. And. To me, that seems like a [00:52:00] failure of like how we think of AI.

Whereas, Hey, just giving people, giving actual artists the tools to make their art better or to do their things more easily is a better function of these tools rather than Just do the art,

Ben: right? Yeah, and I want to shout out a comment from our live stream that says sell your shares in high end microphone companies Ai is about to put them out of business That's not true What's going to end up happening is that the high end microphone companies are going to end up Selling you the same microphones and then maybe a little piece of software that either runs inside the microphone itself But also Or that you can use as post processing that makes your directional mics sound even more directional.

Devindra: They're already doing that. There's already a lot of mics with processing built in. They're not using AI or NPU stuff yet but certainly the door is open for that. I also want to point out folks, like I used this Descript tool when I did the the Pavin interview at micro with Microsoft.

I did that build. I shot the, I did that with the. [00:53:00] Just the iPhone voice for memo, app. So using my iPhone's mics and it was like, I can hear like how it's not great, but that. The tool, the Descript tool did a good job of making it feel more listenable. So I think that's cool. Anyway, we just want to shout out these examples.

And I

Cherlynn: also want to point out that we are not doing an ad for a Descript. Yeah, no, we are absolutely not doing an

Ben: ad for Descript or AI period. We're just saying Hey, here's some tools that actually are useful.

Devindra: Because I think there's a lot of knee jerk reaction right now and certainly aren't among artists and other creators.

It was like, Hey, all AI bats. Anything people talk about, especially during generative AI, mostly bad. And I tend to agree, but also we have to consider like that these tools exist and how they can also make our lives a little better. Just putting that out there. Let's move on to what we're working on.

Hey, WWDC prep. Anything else from your side?

Cherlynn: As we speak, I am working through an edit, so that's great. Check out if people on the live stream, see my laptop wobbling is because I'm typing. Yeah general [00:54:00] WWDC prep, like you said, but also lots of behind the scenes team planning type things and hoping to getting gadget better and better, and let us know what you think of all the products that we have, like the podcast, the live stream.

The website, what you would like to see, newsletters, columns, send me some of your thoughts. Very

Devindra: cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about my pop culture pick of the week then. Yes. Finish up this edit trill in, but I want to shout out The Acolyte, which is the new Star Wars show. I reviewed it on the site and it is Frickin fantastic folks.

And I'm happy to report that because I've suffered through pretty much all the star Wars shows. Like I've watched them all. I watched the book of Boba Fett, which nobody did. I don't know why I watched the book of Boba Fett. I watched the Obi Wan show, which is cool to see Ewan McGregor back in the role and Hayden Christensen, like back as Anakin too, like in, in certain respects, like it was cool to see that there was actually a pretty cool Vader fight in that.

But. It wasn't interesting or additive. It didn't really do much with Star Wars. Whereas the Acolyte, I won't say much about the plot of it, but it is [00:55:00] essentially Star Wars doing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon meets so many other things. And in fact, I love every time the show calls it out to, it opens with a fight scene.

A lone warrior stepping into a bar or a tea house, seeking out the strongest warrior there, who's a Jedi master played by Carrie Anne Moss, Trinity herself. And she's a Jedi master. The warrior is just like presents herself. It was like, let's fight. I have to kill you. At some point, carry on. Moss says, who trained you?

And I'm like, that's just gives me chills. Cause that is like the Michelle Yeoh conversation with Zhang Ziyi or I think even Chow Yun Fat said that, but it's who are you? Where do you come from? The choreography is so good. Like the action is the best I've ever seen in Star Wars. Just want to shout that out, but also this is I think a hundred years before the time of the original trilogy.

I think that's the high Republic time. I don't know what the actual timeline is, but there are no skywalkers. There are no characters you've ever seen before. It's just like a new story set in the star Wars universe with [00:56:00] people who have lightsabers and they have force powers. And I think this is the first Wookiee we see.

There's a Wookiee Jedi master, slight spoiler, but he's in the trailer. Cool stuff. Just really well done, written, I like the characters, it stars Amandla Stenberg, who has been she's been in a lot of things I like actually but she has to do, or they have to do a lot of like great action and great choreography Especially there's not a ton of fight scenes in the show, but the ones that are there that count also co stars, Mr.

Lee Jung Jae from Squid Games, also the Jedi Master, also essentially doing Chow Yun Fat in in Crouching Tiger. Like there, there's a point where like the attacker is like fighting him and he is like effortlessly, like just. Not even pulling his lightsaber, not even doing much, just like being chill about it.

It is a murder mystery. It is like a character study to an interrogation of like how the Jedi are like force gatekeepers. Like maybe they're not great. Maybe they're just like space cops who keep the force to themselves and uphold power. And maybe there are other people [00:57:00] who should have access to these things.

Like it is doing really interesting things within the Star Wars universe. I dig it. Yeah. Daphne Keene is also in this. Manny Jacinto, Charlie Barnett, who was also in Russian Doll. The show was co created by Leslie Handlin, who co created Russian Doll. And I love everything she does basically. But yeah, to see Charlie Barnett, who plays just like a nerdy guy.

In a, in Russian doll, be like cool, badass Jedi master. He's a prick. He's like a really uptight Jedi is you got to follow the rules. He's gonna, he's gonna rat out everybody, but also he's a powerful dude and he's strong and he looks cool. I think that's all kind of fun. So Cherlynn, I think you will have a lot to enjoy from this show.

It is good. It's good so far. The first two episodes are up. I've seen the first four episodes and it is fantastic. Anything you want to shout out, Cherlynn?

Cherlynn: I finally saw, finally, I saw Furiosa actually a couple of weeks ago.

I enjoyed it. I think it was really, it was like, I was very sucked into the story from the very beginning, but I was watching it with my boyfriend and he was like, the CGI is like [00:58:00]atrocious.

I was like, I didn't really notice.

Devindra: No. Maybe? I don't know. It's stylized, and I see people doing those complaints too. I have seen bad CGI. We've lived in a quantumania, and so much of that MCU stuff.

Cherlynn: So that I was just like, whatever. But so Furiosa was good so seconding your kind of recommendation in that, and then I went back and watched the Charlize Theron version of Sofuri Road.

And then something fresh that we haven't, I think, hopefully haven't mentioned on the podcast yet, but we've been around for a long time, so I don't know now but This last weekend I watched The Trip to Spain. It stars Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon. This is like the third installment in their sort of the trip, a series of movies.

You just miss

Devindra: Mobile World Congress, Jerlyn. Like you're like, I want to take a trip to Spain. And

Cherlynn: Like they, I don't think they, they, so they don't go to Catalonia, but they go to Barcelona at some point. And they, it's basically a story set within this journey to like Spain and so they hit a lot of the scenes are of Eating this beautiful looking food They have such gorgeous b roll of the preparation in [00:59:00] the kitchen and then the eating of the food And then they go visit historical and culturally significant places and just a sort of a smorgasbord, if you will, of like food, culture, tourism, story, comedy, because every time there is sitting down eating a meal, Coogan and Bryden are like doing impressions of this time around, they did a lot of impressions of Mick Jagger, for example, they did Michael Caine one of the older

Speaker: ones.

Yeah, that was a big

Cherlynn: one. Yeah, so if you're ready for, travel porn, basically, but with comedy and some sort of story in it I think that's a good one to watch. That's it for the episode this week, everyone. Thank you, as always, for tuning in. Our theme music is by game composer Dale North.

Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O'Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Ellman. You can find Devindra online

Devindra: at Devindra on Twitter or Blue Sky or Mastodon all over the place and at TheFilmCast. com

Cherlynn: If you want to send me [01:00:00] the actual locations of where they shot the trip to Spain or any of those nice food recommendations in Spain for if I ever go again you can send them to me on Twitter I guess I am at Cherlynnlo there or on threads I am at Cherlynnstagram You can always email me also C H E R at Engadget.

com works. Email us your thoughts about the show at podcasts at Engadget. com. Leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening and subscribe on anything that gets podcasts.

Devindra: Here's my interview with Justin Samuels. He founded RenderATL because he wanted to have a more inclusive developer conference that's very different. Then other conferences around the world and certainly those in Silicon Valley. Render takes place in Atlanta from June 12th to 14th. And I plan to be there to check out some of the events and here's Justin.

Justin Samuels. Thank you so much for joining us in the Engadget podcast. I [01:01:00]

Justin Samuels:appreciate y'all for having me.

Devindra: Happy to have you. And I'm just wondering. Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what you're doing with with RenderATL?

Justin Samuels: Yeah, so my name is Justin. I am the founder and CEO of RenderATL tech conference.

And that is my Batman job, as I call it. By a day, I am a senior engineer at Intuit.

Devindra: What is RenderATL? It's I've seen many tech conferences. I'm out of New York, too. So we have a lot over there. What makes render different than what we're seeing in Silicon Valley in New York and elsewhere.

Justin Samuels: So when people ask me, is the conference a tech conference? I always say no, it's actually a continuing education conference for technology professionals. Our goal is to be the premier place that people can come. Learn, grow and advance their skills and also their network, too. And if you're in the field of technology, get that from other [01:02:00]enthusiasts that are actually practicing in their field.

The thing that makes us unique is that we are doing it here in the Silicon South, here in ATL, and we do it from a very diverse lens where. We aren't just catering to one particular demo demographic, whether it's like a black people, whether it's Asian people, whether it's even white people, what we cater to is people from all colors, all creeds, all nationalities, because we understand that people have a lot of variety.

Other pers perspectives that everybody can learn from.

Devindra: Gotcha. Gotcha. I am, I'm down here, I'm outside of Atlanta. I'm in Peachtree Corners, but since I moved here it is fascinating to see like there is a lot of tech stuff happening in Atlanta. The yeah, the MailChimp acquisition happened while I was down here.

I think that was the unicorn acquisition. Yeah, a big deal. And I also see like Microsoft has a big presence here and everyone [01:03:00] else does too. What do you think makes, Atlanta as a tech center a little different than elsewhere, because this is something I noticed in New York too. I stayed in New York for a while.

And people kept trying to get me to come to San Francisco and Silicon Valley. And every time I visit there, I'm like, I, it's cool. I don't like the way you all think exactly the same. And that's a difference when you're in New York or outside of the Valley, right?

Justin Samuels: And that brings me to the genesis of the conference was I was constantly going across the country to go to tech conferences to help me learn and help me grow.

And I came to the revelation one day that if ATL has the busiest Airport in the whole globe we could compete just as good if not better here And we could do it from a lens where everybody here really believes that we are the next cultural melting pot of the entire country. Culture begins here.

Whether you [01:04:00] look at outcasts or you look at the punkiness that a military brings in the tech world. Everybody that begins a company here brings that particular cultural edge to their company, whether it's in a tech or it's in any other space at all. The thing about ATL though is that we all understand that it is a group project.

Everybody here wants to help add, advance ATL forward and advance the For a regional forward, and we share those commonalities where it allows us to then a balance ideas and a balance of failures and success is off of each other to help a propelled entire regional forward.

Devindra: Can you talk about I don't know how long you were at MailChimp, but MailChimp seems like a really interesting example of a tech company because you guys were out here doing cool stuff for around like mail distribution, email distribution, and then all of a sudden newsletters got hot [01:05:00]again.

Like in the past, like five years, but you guys were in it for a while. What made MailChimp different do you think than other startups? And maybe what was specific about Atlanta area stuff that kind of guided MailChimp?

Justin Samuels: Man, so I don't publicly talk about it much, but I was a part of the acquisition.

I was a part of like when the employees there, when the company got acquired and it's been a great ride. And the thing that. Made us really unique was that we came from a culture of hustlers and a culture of We will get the job done for the betterment of our clients that we really believed in a medium and small Size of businesses and that we really held them near and dear to our heart.

The thing that made us also unique was that we didn't mind getting our hands dirty as a company, meaning we always took a field trip. So we [01:06:00] always engaged a locally, hands on, head on, not just a person coming from the corporate office. It would be like me as an engineer, or it would be a person from like the marketing team or from tech help.

Would go out and meet the client where they are at to help make our products better. I don't think you get that out of silicon valley or out of the like northeast where our Traditional tech clubs are at people here have that southern flair in that Southern hospitality of we want to meet you where you are at And we also want to do it to help you be the best that you could be.

And that was radiated out of company, like a MailChimp, even when we were acquired to, it continues on now.

Devindra: Gotcha. I also think people forget this, like CES used to be in Atlanta or there were some CES events in Atlanta, E3. Had, expos in Atlanta too, like once upon a time. [01:07:00] So it's not like this is all new for Atlanta too.

Like when I moved here, I live near Norcross and I realized, I learned at some point that the inventor of the Hayes modem was based in Norcross. Like that whole piece of history, I don't think is ever really told. And that is the, the beginning of home internet, that technology.

Justin Samuels: It's not to cut you off, but I got an even crazier, like one.

AWS actually began here, was a smaller company, a black owned company. The guy that actually invented it, a black man. Came to the conference in the pass and he was telling me about how in the early days in like 2002, 2000 and like three a Bezos came to the office here and was like, this is gonna be the a future.

How can we work to together to also make that happen? And that isn't a thing that is told much or if. I truly think that everybody thinks, Amazon woke up one day and said, okay, [01:08:00]we're going to go into make the web happen. It's like a no. They acquired this company, this small company here. It was OTP outside the perimeter here.

And I forget the name, but it is a article on it. And I was like, and it, And I tell people, these are the type of stories that I'm trying to help highlight here. That ATL makes tech happen. The entire region does. We just haven't had an opportunity like a render come to help aglorify it, help amplify it.

Devindra: I just talked to the founder of MoviePass and the real founder of MoviePass. And that's a whole story of I've talked to that guy, Stacey Spikes, since 2012, like since he has been like pushing that he's a black founder. You don't really see that too often in the startup world. And then MoviePass, he was kicked out.

A CEO, MoviePass went over to two basically white leaders who drove it into the ground, hyped it up and drove it [01:09:00]into the ground. And that was such a sad story. There's a documentary that's on HBO now about it. To me, that seems like too often the story of tech in America is like the ideas are co opted and either the original founders are forgotten or the idea is driven into the ground.

Because you lose the founders. Yeah.

Justin Samuels: Oh, yeah, like I think you could even view that with what's happening at Instacart like Instacart began out great a founder a lead company and then One day they came and said hey You were a great, you need to go now, and the company has been teetering and tottering ever since then.

It's a tragedy when the founder gets ousted like that, because they are the whole entire reason, including their team of course, why the company is even a thing.

Devindra: Gotcha. Can you tell us more about Render ETL and just, I guess the sort of conversation you guys are having, I know the event is in a couple of weeks.

I'm hoping to stop by and check it out, but I've been to many conferences and I feel like I've been to so many. I'm [01:10:00]like, they're mostly snooze, right? People are having panels and. It's just the same people talking to each other about like the hype topics of the day. It's probably going to be AI at most conferences now.

Yeah, but how are you guys trying to be different in terms of who you're presenting, what you're talking about?

Justin Samuels: So We do not do anything at the surface level. Let's just be clear about that. Anybody that comes And speaks at our conference a day are a true practitioner, meaning they're an engineer or they're on the design team or they're on the like a product management team.

They are going to give you the. Rail on what is happening in a I or in engineering or in design. We have a total of four attracts engineering design management and also the A. I track this year and I'm using air quotes over here because the A. I doesn't mean artificial intelligence. [01:11:00] That actually means assessability in AI And our goal is that you could find a track that you could just lean on, but also find a track that you might be interested in learning more about a topic that you would like to go deeper in.

Like I, as an engineer, I'm going to say, Oh, I'm going to be on the engineering track, but I really want to be a better manager one day. I'm going to hop over there. And we also give you the opportunity to connect with these speakers to in a intimate setting afterwards so that you get your questions answered and all of the people that are coming for the expo hall.

Our expo hall exhibitors, they come with a dedicated head account, making sure that they can make hires like our title partner Zillow. They are coming in a huge way because they view ATL as the next wealth [01:12:00] economic opportunity where Zillow's whole goal is to drive a more economic impact through closing the home ownership gap.

And they are like, we're coming to your conference to do that twofold. We are going to make hires. And on top of that, we are also going to educate people on how they could be more involved in the home ownership process to create more wealth. But beyond that too, we also offer your evening events, like your net working events, all the parties, all the glitz, all the glamour.

And at the end of the year. We have an entire concert, which is headlined by DJ Peewee, AKA Anderson Outback. So there's a ton happening everywhere all throughout the entire week, which is also during ATL tech week or two.

Devindra: Gotcha. I'm wondering too, atlanta is becoming is basically like blowing up because of movies and Hollywood stuff to [01:13:00] like all the Marvel stuff is down here.

I tell people the headquarters of the Avengers is actually it's a Porsche dealership, that's all it is, but it's a cool looking building. You can go there and rent a Porsche. It's a cool thing. But do you think too much success is at all a problem for like the soul of Atlanta or like what the city represents?

Justin Samuels: I don't think too much success is a problem. I think we need to be more highlighted here. I feel like we have a true, a brain drain problem where people recognize we are talented. I recognize that the south is a place you could come make movies is this place that you could come find. Cool Tech is a place that you could find opportunity, but they don't re invest here.

They always take it out. They always pluck it away. And instead of that happening, if we're able to highlight our, wins, i. e. a military [01:14:00] champion getting acquired for 12 and a half a billion, it gives other people hope that I could also do that here. I could also build things that are going to be wildly successful here.

I don't think that too much success is going to be a up. A burden. I think it's going to be the fuel or the igniter that we need to really carve out what the next future is for the entire region as a whole.

Devindra: Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I would love to see things blow up more down here.

Certainly people paying more attention to, I guess everything. Cause it's not just tech, right? It's innovation, it's ideas, but it's art and music and stuff too. There's so much happening down here and I feel like, yeah, it never really got the respect people will, they love outcasts.

They love Donald Glover, but, and they love the show. But I think as a region, yeah, it's stuff that's exported out. It doesn't feel like people really pay attention to what's happening on the ground,

Justin Samuels: yeah, and it's like the saying one of my good friends here, Bam Joyner, he owns a brand called [01:15:00] Atlanta Influences Everything, and he always talks about how our number one X support is We export the hell out of our culture so that everybody can take a play on it and nobody pours back in.

We don't import it, which is a great thing. We just turn to, okay, cool. We're going to now create more. We need to also begin to highlight and make a, and put a spotlight on those that are also building the culture here too. So they could continue to amplify and build more.

Devindra: Gotcha. I almost wonder if the idea of the region of Atlanta should be just because it's a metro area, right?

Like I'm not in Atlanta, but I'm 20 minutes away. There is a huge population of immigrants and also people coming in with their own technical skills and everything. I almost wonder if we can broaden the idea and bring that all into Atlanta, proper. That would help to enrich the sea. That's the [01:16:00] sort of importing stuff back in because, man, that's I used to live in New York, right?

And I'm getting better, a lot of better, like Asian restaurants, Asian food. Yeah,

Justin Samuels: It's crazy. You say that I just got back from Singapore. And when I was over there, all of the food was amazing. And I said, I gotta now replicate this here. And it has been hard to replicate that here in Atlanta. You go to Food

Devindra: Terminal, is the thing.

Food Terminal is a Malaysian restaurant. And it's very similar. If you want that, the Hainanese chicken rice, which is my favorite thing in the world you go to Food Terminal. And that's all over Atlanta. It's out here on the suburb side. It's crazy.

Justin Samuels: Yep.

Devindra: Awesome. You know what, Justin?

Thank you so much for chatting with us. And, yeah, hope to see you at Render, okay?

Justin Samuels: Oh, yeah, absolutely, man. It's going to be an awesome time.

Cherlynn: Let's say it together on the count of three one two three Calculator

Who needs to save for college when your kids can enjoy the infinite contrast and eight million glorious points of light in Samsung's new MicroLED TVs, which now start at the low price of $110,000. Available in 89-inch, 101-inch ($130,000) and 114-inch ($150,000) sizes, MicroLED TVs offer all of the benefits of OLED — super dark blacks and bold colors — but without the reasonable price points reachable by lowly commoners. 

Envelope yourself with Samsung's 3D Arena sound, which includes Dolby Atmos, Object Tracking Sound Pro and AI powered voice amplification. Behold the MICRO AI processor, which upscales everything into 4K (never mind that every TV offers pretty decent upscaling today). When you proudly reveal the price of your MicroLED TV, remember your friends won't be laughing at you — they're just jealous. 

Unfortunately, Samsung isn't throwing in a $8,000 8K set and luxury hotel stay with these MicroLED TVs, as it did in South Korea.

Part wuxia epic and part pulp mystery novel, The Acolyte demonstrates what's possible when Star Wars embraces new characters and genres while abandoning the Dark Side of nostalgia. There isn't a Skywalker to be seen (at least in the four episodes I've watched), or any characters you've met before. It's not trying to fill gaps in pre-existing lore. It's simply a kickass Star Wars story, with perfectly executed action choreography, a bevy of talented actors and a story that feels genuinely fresh. And, best of all, you don't have to be caught up on The Book of Boba Fett or 208 episodes of animated shows to enjoy it.

A major reason why The Acolyte feels so unique is that it comes from Leslye Headland, a writer and director with no prior association to Star Wars. As the co-creator of Russian Doll, she proved that she could juggle a fantastical premise with rich, multi-layered characters. Her outsider perspective is exactly what Star Wars needs to avoid feeling stale. It's the counterpoint to the obsessive world-building from Dave Filoni, the George Lucas disciple behind The Clone Wars and many of the franchise's TV shows.

Lucasfilm Ltd.

The Acolyte begins with a scene right out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A lone warrior enters a bar, presents themself to the most powerful person there, and demands a fight. What follows is an expertly choreographed array of kicks, flips and Force-thrown knives, as the Jedi Master Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss), deflects her young attacker with effortless grace. "Who trained you?" She asks, echoing Michelle Yeoh's first confrontation with Zhang Ziyi in Ang Lee's film. (Yes, I got chills upon hearing that.)

I won't say too much about the plot of The Acolyte, but briefly it involves a former Jedi trainee, Mae (Amandla Stenberg), who is suspected of committing a series of crimes. Her former Jedi Master, Sol (played by Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae), is tasked with tracking her down and figuring out what's really going on. They're also joined by his new padwan trainee, played by Dafne Keen (Logan), and the over-eager, by-the-book Jedi Master Yord (Charlie Barnett).

Lucasfilm Ltd.

What makes The Acolyte truly intriguing is the way it explores the role of the Jedi and their chokehold (heh) on Force powers in the Star Wars universe. Are they actually the keepers of the peace, or a group of fanatical monks aligned with whoever happens to be in power? Is there a legitimate path beyond the Jedi for someone Force-capable like Mae, without turning to the Dark Side? I don't know how the series will answer these questions, but their existence alone is fascinating, as the broader franchise has seemed incapable of interrogating itself in recent years.

After The Rise of Skywalker brought the sequel trilogy to a disappointing close, Star Wars has mostly been mining nostalgia on Disney+ with varying levels of success. The Mandalorian started strong, but became bogged down with repetitive storytelling. The Book of Boba Fett was mostly forgettable, except for when it served as a bridge between season's two and three of The Mandalorian. Nobody needed the Obi-Wan series, but it was nice to see Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen back in action.

Lucasfilm Ltd.

Ahsoka and Andor were the most uniformly successful of the Star Wars TV projects, but they both also had to wrestle with pre-existing storylines. To truly understand Ahsoka, you needed to have watched over 200 episodes of The Clone Wars and Rebels, as well as several shorts and episodes from other Star Wars shows. Andor was the most mature vision of the franchise we've ever seen, thanks to creator Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, The Bourne Identity), but it was also a slow burn narratively. (And it was still about a character we briefly met in Rogue One, itself a prequel story about finding the Death Star's blueprints.)

The only baggage The Acolyte has to deal with is the trail of middling Star Wars shows behind it. That alone may turn off some audiences. But I'm hoping people recognize it as a fresh start, a world beyond Skywalkers and nostalgia bait. The Acolyte is a reminder of what makes Star Wars great: exciting and pulpy storytelling on a cosmic scale. 

Intel recently revealed that its upcoming Lunar Lake chips would be available this fall for Copilot+ AI PCs, but the company waited until Computex to give us more technical details. For one, they'll offer up to 48 TOPs (tera operations per second) of AI performance, thanks to an updated neural processing unit (NPU). In comparison, Intel's previous Meteor Lake chips sported a 10 TOPS NPU, while AMD announced its Ryzen AI 300 chips yesterday with 50 TOPS NPUs. The AI race is on, if you couldn't tell.

Intel will once again have to play catch up in the AI PC space: AMD's Ryzen AI 300 chips will be available in July alongside Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus. It's unclear when, exactly, Lunar Lake systems will launch this fall. Still, for the Intel faithful, Lunar Lake appears to be a major upgrade. It will also sport a new Xe2 GPU, which will offer 80 percent faster gaming performance than the last generation, as well as an AI accelerator with an additional 67 TOPS of performance. (We're still waiting to see how AMD's new Radeon graphics will compare.)

Additionally, Lunar Lake will have revamped performance and efficient cores (P-cores and E-cores), and it should also deliver up to 40 percent lower system-on-chip power than Meteor Lake. Intel also says the chip features an "advanced low-power island" for efficiently handling background tasks. Clearly, both Intel and AMD are going to do whatever it takes to combat Qualcomm's Copilot+ hardware. Those mobile chips are inherently more power efficient — they reportedly get over 20 hours of battery life on Copilot+ Surface devices (though we haven't tested them yet).

When it comes to connectivity, Lunar Lake will offer the updated standards you'd expect: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, PCIe Gen5 and Thunderbolt 4. (It's strange that Intel isn't committing to Thunderbolt 5 yet, since it plans to launch that standard later this year.)

Intel

Given just how far off Lunar Lake actually is, Intel didn't have more information to share about specific chip models or deeper specs. But judging from the company's benchmarks, released during a media briefing ahead of Computex, it'll should be faster than Meteor Lake while running Stable Diffusion.

Microsoft's Copilot+ initiative for super-charged AI PCs is becoming more of a reality at Computex 2024. Today, AMD announced its next major chip platforms, Ryzen AI 300 for notebooks and Ryzen 9000 for desktops, which respectively target beefier laptop AI performance and fast gaming on desktops. Notably, Ryzen AI 300 chips feature a revamped neural processing unit (NPU) with 50 TOPS (tera operations per second) of AI performance, more than three times AMD's previous laptop hardware. The new desktop processors, meanwhile, are reportedly 16 percent faster than their predecessors when it comes to overall performance.

The key takeaway from these announcements is that Qualcomm is no longer the only company able to gloat about fast AI hardware for Copilot+ PCs. That initiative, which Microsoft unveiled a few weeks ago, sets a new baseline specification standard for AI PCs. Copilot+ PCs require an NPU with at least 40 TOPS of AI performance, 16GB of RAM and 256GB SSDs to qualify as Copilot+ notebooks. Microsoft also tied together long battery life with the initiative, but it's unclear if the Ryzen AI 300 chips will be able to touch the reported twenty-plus hours from Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon processors. (We're also expecting Intel to respond with more details about its Lunar Lake Copilot+ chips later today at Computex.)

AMD

So far, AMD's new laptop chips include two models: The 12-core Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, and the 10-core AI 9 365. As usual, we expect the company to fill out its lineup over the next year with mid-tier and lower-end offerings. Both Ryzen AI 9 chips reach at least 5GHz max boost speeds, and they also feature built-in RDNA 3.5 Radeon 890M and 880M graphics. According to AMD's benchmarks, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is 98 percent faster than Apple's M3 chip in Blender, and it's 73 percent faster than Intel's Core Ultra 185H. (It's worth noting company tested its hardware with 32GB of RAM against Apple and Intel systems with 16GB of RAM, according to its testing footnotes.)

AMD

Powering both the Ryzen AI 300 and Ryzen 9000 chips is AMD's Zen 5 architecture, which is a "sweeping update" for the company, Senior Processor Technical Marketing Manager Donny Woligrosky said in a media briefing. He claims it offers better branch prediction (which helps with accuracy and latency), higher overall throughput and up to two times better instruction bandwidth. For regular users, that means you can expect Zen 5 systems to feel a bit more responsive and be better primed for handling large data loads.

AMD

While AMD's new AI chips are the star of the show, the company isn't leaving desktop users behind. The new Ryzen 9000 chips top out with the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X, which edges close to the 6GHz dream with 5.7GHz boost speeds. It's a power-hungry beast though, requiring 170 watts, so more reasonable hardware nerds might want to opt for the Ryzen 9 9900X (120W TDP) or the eight-core Ryzen 7 9700X (65W). These new chips don't include NPUs like the Ryzen 8000G, but at this point, gamers and demanding PC users can make do with the raw computational power from desktop CPUs and powerful GPUs. (NVIDIA is also trying to power some AI features with its RTX GPUs, which eschews the need for a standalone NPU.)

Alongside these new desktop chips, AMD is also unveiling the X870E and X870 AM5 chipsets. They include the next-gen PC features you'd expect, including PCIe 5, USB4, WiFi 7 and DDR5. For its older AM4 hardware, AMD also unveiled the 16-core Ryzen 9 5900XT and eight-core Ryzen 7 5800XT, which can both hit 4.8GHz speeds.

We're still awaiting pricing details on AMD's new hardware, but the company says we can expect to see Ryzen AI 300 systems and Ryzen 9000 chips in July. Those new laptops include the ASUS ZenBook S 16 and Zephyrus G16, as well as the MSI Stealth A16 AI+.

The Watcher stood tall in my family room, bald and berobed, nestled amongst my kids' toys, sleeping cats and TV. I was being asked to help save the multiverse! So began Marvel and ILM Interactive's What If...? on the Apple Vision Pro. Like the Disney+ series and comics of the same name, this interactive experience recontextualizes Marvel's characters in a variety of intriguing ways — what if the Allies never won World War 2 and the Captain America experiment was a failure, for example.

What If...? has always been a fun concept, but can it actually be transformed into a worthwhile augmented reality showpiece? Well, yes and no — at least, based on the hour I spent with it on the Apple Vision Pro.

Before I dive into major criticisms, I'll say up front that What If...? is clearly an experiment, so rough edges are to be expected. I give Marvel and ILM Interactive credit for making it completely free for Vision Pro users and for taking a sizable swing at a platform without many users. The entire experience also looks wonderfully detailed, thanks to the combination of Marvel and ILM's immersive environments and character animation, as well as the sheer power of the Vision Pro's M2 processor. It's the closest you'll get to living inside of a comic.

Marvel has already dabbled in virtual reality with Iron Man for the PSVR and Quest, as well as Marvel Powers United VR, but What If...? is an attempt to accomplish something even more immersive: What if you could interact with superheroes right in your home? Mostly, though, I found myself asking "What if this experience was actually fun to play?"

Marvel

You're placed in the role of a mystical apprentice, wielding powers similar to Doctor Strange. Initially you can hold up a fist to manifest a shield, or look towards objects to use telekinesis. But you eventually gain the ability to shoot mystical blasts and trap enemies. It all sounds incredibly cool in theory, but in practice it felt worse than the first-gen VR games I played a decade ago.

Mostly, that's because What If...? relies on your hands for everything. The Vision Pro doesn't have a dedicated VR controller like the Oculus Quest or HTC Vive, which offer instant button inputs and could be tracked through IR sensors. Instead, you have to wait a fraction of a second for Apple's headset to recognize your hands and determine what you're trying to do. Consequently, What If...? feels more like you're sitting through a Marvel theme park ride, moving from one scenario to the next without much active participation. It's a poor way to make you feel like a multiverse-hopping adventurer.

At the very least, What If...? shows off what Marvel could do if it focused more on the Vision Pro and whatever Oculus has cooking next. Like a campy 3D film, the game wastes no time trying to blow you away with its core gimmick. It kicks off with a remixed Marvel intro montage in 2D, floating in front of you in augmented reality. As Michael Giacchino's iconic score crescendoes, you're suddenly surrounded by clips of the series drifting in from outside your field of view. It's a brief moment, but it's the sort of thing that wouldn't be as impactful in a traditional VR headset, where you're immersed in an alternate reality from the start.

Marvel

The experience truly begins with the aforementioned Watcher — one of Marvel's cosmic beings who observe its many universes — roping you in for an adventure. You know the drill: Find all of the Infinity Stones and stop whoever is trying to destroy all known creation. Kids' stuff. Along the way, you'll run into alternate-universe versions of familiar characters: Thor's sister Hela, who only wants to save her beloved giant wolf Fenris; a version of Steve Rogers who looks eerily like the Red Skull; and a more sympathetic Thanos. 

What If...? moves between virtual environments that fully immerse you in the action and augmented reality scenarios, where The Watcher and a few companions putter around your room. You can do the same, sometimes, but within the VR segments, the game expects you to stay still. You'll also have to click through Vision Pro pop-ups about being mindful of your surroundings before every VR scene — a necessary evil for people unfamiliar with VR, but also something that kills immersion since it's not integrated into the game.

Marvel

Despite my issues with the gameplay, I ultimately had a decently entertaining hour with What If...? It was a quick Marvel fix in a time where I've grown tired of the onslaught of Disney+ MCU shows. I just can't help but wish it were more fun to play. I'm hoping this release helps Marvel and ILM Interactive get better at building AR and VR experiences. And for Apple, it's a clear sign that some sort of Vision Pro controller would be helpful down the line. 

This week, Devindra and Engadget's Nathan Ingraham discuss the new Max documentary "MoviePass, MovieCrash" and reminisce about the early days of that wild startup. It was a huge mess in the end, but we wouldn't have subscription plans in theaters without it. We also chat with MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes, as well as the documentary's director, Muta'Ali, about the film.

In other news, Nate explains why Google is adding a slew of AI features to Chromebook Plus notebooks, and we dive into the Fitbit Ace with LTE, which has the potential to be a very useful smartwatch tracker for kids.

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

Topics

• Moviepass, MovieCrash interview with CEO Stacy Spikes and director Muta'Ali – 1:33

• Chromebook Plus laptops are getting AI features soon – 41:43

• WWDC is scheduled for June 10 – 56:26

• Cherlynn’s Fitbit Ace LTE hands-on : a fitness tracker for kids! – 59:55

• Sony pulls “fabricated” interview with Last of Us creator Neil Druckman – 1:03:44

• Vox Media and The Atlantic magazine made content deals with OpenAI – 1:08:06

• OpenAI’s new safety team includes members of the company’s board and Sam Altman himself – 1:13:30

• Listener Mailbag: Windows screen readers on ARM and the iPad as a full-fledged work machine – 1:14:41

• Working on – 1:23:24

• Pop culture picks – 1:25:10

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Credits 

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Nathan Ingraham
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

Transcript

Devindra: What's up, Internet, and welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar. Joining me today is Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham. Hey, Nate.

Nathan: Hey, Devindra. Good morning, and good morning to our listeners.

Devindra: Good morning. Happy holiday week, too. It's a bit of a short week here. Not as much news as we typically get, but this is a good time to talk about this documentary that just came out on Max's MoviePass Movie Crash.

It's about that subscription movie theater startup, which I think everybody, a lot of people were into way back when, and I have a lot of fond memories about it too. We'll talk about that thing and also the story of MoviePass. And we also have an interview with the co founder and current CEO of MoviePass, Stacy Spikes and the director of the documentary, Muta'Ali.

So stay tuned for that. We'll also be talking about some Chromebook Plus news getting getting AI features. And Nate, I feel like you're the person to talk to about that because you love Chromebooks.

Nathan: I do. I still do. And I've been checking them out for a few days here. I was away. But got home to new hardware and I've been playing around with it and I have a few initial thoughts.

Devindra: Okay, we'll do that I feel like nate if you're gonna get any if you're gonna get a tattoo of any kind You would probably get a chrome symbol tattoo for chromebook chrome I would do a chrome

Nathan: next to an apple

Devindra: just to mess with people just to mess with people That would be the way to do it as always folks If you're enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us in itunes Or your podcaster of choice, leave us a review on iTunes.

Drop us an email at podcast@engadget.com. We've got some great reader emails this week too. So we'll talk about that towards the end of the episode. Let's talk about MoviePass Movie Crash. And this is a movie that's out now on Max, the one to watch for HBO. And I think it's pretty good. It's a good exploration of what the hell happened at MoviePass.

And. I'll tell you all I have I have a lot of feelings about Movie Pass because I'm also a movie critic. I've done a movie podcast since 2008. Movie Pass was also something I started writing about before they were even like a major thing. So in 2012, I met with Stacy Spikes, the one of the founders, and, we had a good discussion about movies and about his own background, because he was also a movie executive and a music producer too, or a music executive. So he's somebody from the movie industry who loves movies and wanted to like. Change the way the whole like movie paradigm work, especially how theaters work.

I feel like we may take it for granted today, folks, but if you look around, like every major theater chain has a subscription plan, for 20 or 30 bucks a month, you get all you can eat movies. Maybe some wiggle room around pricing and stuff there. Before MoviePass, none of that existed. And that the whole idea of paying a flat fee for all you can eat movies was just like something the entire industry was totally against.

When MoviePass launched it was like a 50 plan. You had to bring a sheet of paper to the box office and they tell like type something in to get you the ticket. It wasn't great. It took a while for things to get going. Then they did this thing where. They started, they had the card, they got the debit card going, and they got a patent for the ability to automatically fund the debit card based on your location.

And nobody had ever done that before. So like that movie pass app, 2013, 2014, that was the point where they were like, okay, you have to check into the movie theater and then pick a time. And then you get your ticket. That whole technique had never existed before. So that was like the thing that kind of got them to 500, 000 users.

The growth was not great for a while because it was still 40 to 50 in many places. Then Stacy spikes got pushed out. He was replaced by a new CEO named Mitch Lowe. He's a guy coming out of red box and Netflix. And then things got crazy because Mitch Lowe talked about, do you remember this Nate?

Like Mitch Lowe had the like 100 plan and the 50 plan. Yeah. Like as soon as he came on, it went nowhere. And then why do we know why I don't think anybody wants to pay a hundred bucks a month. I wasn't, I love movies. I love going to the theater. I would not pay a hundred bucks a month for this. Then they came up with the 10 a month, all you can eat movie plan, right?

That's

Nathan: when I remember starting to really hear about it. That's when the buzz broke out. Cause that was so cheap.

Devindra: That was the buzz. And that was pretty much, that was all Mitch Lowe and eventually his like co CEO Ted Farnsworth, who came from HMNY, which was this like. I guess it was like a private equity firm.

It was a whole thing. Things got really confusing, but explosive growth. That's exactly what startups wanted to see in the mid 2010s. Doesn't matter if your business model sustainable. It doesn't matter if they're paying full prices for these tickets, but they're losing money. They're burning, literally setting money on fire to get these users.

And I think a lot of people within the company raised concerns like, Hey, this is not sustainable. And Mitch Lowe and Ted's farm were were basically. Pedal to the metal. Let's just go all the way. See how far this goes. Is it fair

Nathan: to say that Stacy's plan was more sustainable and that's probably why it didn't get the big growth, but it could have just continued on.

At that point and possibly it could have found a smaller audience,

Devindra: as, so as I hear it and Hey, we have an interview with Stacey and the director of this documentary in this episode. But as I heard it, and as he explains it, like that was what he was saying. It was like, Oh, this 10 thing was going to be.

A temporary measure. Let's get those users. Let's get some buzz and then switch over to 20 or 30 a month and be more sustainable so we can actually afford to keep this business afloat and Mitchell and Ted's Farnsworth just never really did that. They kept getting more money and burning it all.

And watching this documentary just brought up a lot of feelings for me, namely, because I remember being really pissed off about this whole story, because first of all, Stacey Spikes is a rare black entrepreneur in the startup world, and you never really see that. So I was like, it's cool that MoviePass is a thing coming from black founders and was like finding some success.

He was pushed out for Mitch Lowe. All of a sudden the like demographic of the executive board looks very different. They get, they immediately get the funding that Stacey Spikes and his original founder couldn't get. They were struggling to even get documentary gets into this, I hope. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the whole thing.

And this is it's an infuriating documentary because it's just these guys made a really cool idea, like a really cool business that reshaped the theatrical model completely. They couldn't actually get the money for it because nobody was funding them. Which just really sucks.

Nathan: Yeah, I guess there's a lot of people only remember them from that sort of boom phase when it was 10 bucks a month and even then, people were asking like, how is this possibly going to be sustainable?

Cause I didn't know about that prior history so much. And so that makes me really intrigued to see the whole thing play out.

Devindra: It's the whole thing. It's a good documentary. I also wrote a piece like back then, Nate, adding gadget called movie past died so cinemas can live. And I feel like that still resonates today, to be honest.

This documentary is worth a watch. I think it's great where things are right now. C. Spikes ended up buying the like remnants of the company at auction for a low price and he's resurrecting it now. I think at a more sustainable price, it's 30 to 40 a month. It's run it using credits instead of just giving you the full money for a ticket.

So I've not used the new movie pass yet. We'll see where that goes. But hey, theatrical subscription plans. Like I think those are great deals. If you go to the movie theater two or three times a month. Yes, absolutely. You have one. Yeah. I use the my local theaters are regal. So I use it regal and limited.

I think they call it. But in New York, I was all about the AMCA list. Like that was the thing. If you go to a movie theater two or three times a month, these subscriptions are totally worth it. I have to go. Almost every, almost once a week, almost multiple times a week for things I need to review.

And I think this documentary is worth a watch. So here, check out our interview. Stacy Spikes and Muta'Ali. Thank you so much for joining us on the Engadget podcast. Thanks Devinder. I'm glad to be here. Happy to chat with you guys and Stacey, let me lay out some history for our listeners here. I remember sitting down with you in my office when I was working at VentureBeat, it was like 2012 and you were laying out the pitch for MoviePass for me.

I was a movie podcaster at the time, still am, but it was blowing my mind to see the convergence of my interests of the movie side and the tech side of things. So we have been talking a while. I've seen the ups and downs of MoviePass, I'm just wondering at this point, you have resurrected MoviePass, not to spoil the ending of this movie, but if people have seen the news, you've resurrected MoviePass, you're doing something new right now, how is the new iteration of MoviePass going?

Stacy Spikes: It's going great and yeah we have been talking and on this journey together for a while, but the The difference when we brought it back was we added some features that we knew we needed back in 2016 before the takeover, but hadn't had the opportunity to deploy. So one of the things was adding a credit system so that Where there's savings for the company, we're able to display that savings for the consumer and create alignment where the previous iteration really didn't share that you went in the app and you didn't know, Hey, is movie pass paying full price for this ticket or wholesale for that ticket?

And so now the credit system creates that alignment. And that was a really big differentiator from B1 to B2.

Devindra: Gotcha. Yeah, I've, I was noticed that I have not tested out the new version of MoviePass yet, and I also have a lot of questions about how the theater chains ended up responding to you guys too.

But let's talk about this documentary in particular MoviePass, MovieCrash. Devindra, I'm wondering what brought you to this project and this story?

Muta'Ali: It was the writing of Jason Guerrasio at Business Insider producer Scott Beltry gave me a call and asked me to read the article about MoviePass and I had heard about MoviePass but I was never a member.

And once I read his article and learned a little bit about Stacey and Aimee and the journey of MoviePass, I said, wow I'm surprised I didn't know this. I wish that I did. And I think a whole lot of other people would want to know more about this. And so that kind of got me my gears going and after a while, I, I took in a lot of information about when we did a lot of research and joined the team over at unrealistic ideas Mark Warburg's studio.

And together we developed a way to tell this story. And shortly within that period after a short period of time. I got to meet Stacey over Zoom and really was, obviously impressed by him, impressed by his journey and got a little bit more of an inside look at what had transpired and I was like wow, okay this story is definitely something that I think needs to be told.

Devindra: Yeah. Devindra, I have to wonder, where were you when MoviePass was at its rise? I'm wondering how you missed it. Were you, are you in New York? Everybody was talking about MoviePass. It was a wild time. But also, it felt wilder to me as somebody who was covering the beginning, too, and being like, this is a good idea.

It's struggling. It needs some legs. But it was wild to see it really take off. So let's talk about Kind of the history of MoviePass and how things started and your background, Stacey, too. I was fascinated to hear that you were a studio executive. Who came into this at Miramax, right?

And you had gained a reputation within Hollywood. You wanted to do something that's around movie subscriptions. And I think when we first talked, this was before the debit card idea. This was the idea that you would check in online and bring, I think it was like you had to bring a printout right to the box office to have them to do the Yeah, basically create a ticket for you.

We talked in 2012 about that idea. It was cool, but it was like 50 at the time. It was a little clunky, but then you guys did. The debit card idea, which I think was the killer thing that kind of helped make it all easier for consumers. But you also had some trouble with the movie theater chains I remember the back and forth like you guys would launch and then the theater chains would be like no We don't want this at all.

Can you talk about the early turmoil of even making movie past the thing?

Stacy Spikes: Yeah, so Really good History overview there. But so there was a few iterations. So the very first version we went through movie tickets. com and movie tickets was largely owned by AMC. And when we launched AMC got upset and turned us off.

Like we literally were born. On Thursday and got turned off by them on Friday. The next day we had done a premiere and a press event in San Francisco, and this was on a Thursday and we're going to let people in on beta. And then the next morning AMC released an announcement that slow, slow down.

You're I was a little confused by that, by

Devindra: the way, because like they had to approve this in the beginning. They had to know this was happening. I don't understand how it was like an overnight thing where they're like, Oh crap, what did we approve here?

Stacy Spikes: Yeah, because we couldn't, a lot of people said how did you do this without their approval?

You can't get API access to someone's code without their approval. So there was I think the left hand and the right hand had not communicated very well. And so I think the high, the lower end of the spectrum knew about it and thought, Hey, someone's helping to drive traffic to theaters. But I think when senior management got involved and they saw Netflix for movies, theaters splashed across headlines it was like, wait, how did we not know about this?

I think they just thought we were just going to buy some tickets through their API. And so we had to do some things in the interim, which were absurd. Like you would print out a single use credit card, which basically was, you were printing out a one time use number, going to the box office, having them punch that in manually.

On a Friday night when there's a line of people and theaters are like, we really don't like this idea. And then that's where the card got born. We knew we needed to create something that was an an OTT platform that would work seamless. And we knew credit cards or debit cards was the way in. Cause every theater had a kiosk or they

Devindra: couldn't really control that either.

Like you, Everybody needs to be able to use their debit cards at these things. Yeah.

Stacy Spikes: So that, that was really the the inflection point that it was unstoppable because every theater, a customer, so we're doing a deal with the customer, they get issued a card and they can go buy a ticket at whatever theater they want.

So really the theater would be rejecting their own customer, whether they were paying with their debit card. Their regular MasterCard or say a movie past MasterCard.

Devindra: And the theater is getting a full price ticket purchase too. So it's not like you were getting discounted tickets. I want to set up the context here too, because I think in 2024, the landscape of cinemas looks really different.

We are post pandemic. Cinemas are hurting, but there's also kind of people have a love for it now of like almost losing it. So people want to support the cinemas. Every major theater chain has their own subscription program. And I feel like that never, that wouldn't have happened if MoviePass hadn't come out and had shown them that there was a demand for this.

And also you guys had done a study that showed if people had like an all you can eat subscription, it actually drives up revenue for the theaters because people go and buy more concessions and it just ends up working out that way. Stacey, let's talk about the card in particular, and this is where we get a little nerdy, because I remember when you first presented the idea to me, the idea was, you have this debit card, the app knows your location, it knows you're at the theater, you say you're going to go see a movie, MoviePass puts money on the card at that instant.

And then you pay for your ticket and that's something that's like instant transactional stuff on to a debit card had never been done before you guys got a patent for it that seemed pretty fascinating at the time.

Stacy Spikes: Yeah, that's exactly right. So what we did was we needed to geolocate.

every single theater in North America, Alaska and Hawaii. And then we had to be able, so there was all of these challenges, like if the theater was inside of a mall, right? But the geolocation was to be able to say I am at this theater and in the app, you're corresponding. Your selection choice is that theater.

So that's one verification. The second verification is that there is an MCC code, which is a merchant category code that you're at a theater, not a gas station or a bowling alley or a pizza place. So that was the second thing you needed. And then. The third was that your account was in good standing and those three things cross referencing each other authorized the ability to get your ticket.

So for the first time no one had done real time geolocation based authentication to unlock currency. And so what we were doing was we really were a fintech company. Underneath we, cause you can use it for any industry. But companies like four square and other were using check ins, location check ins.

And so that was the beginning of what we started to use. And there was layers on top of it. The first version of the card, people could share the same card. So college students signed up and

Speaker: yeah,

Stacy Spikes: they would all log into the app with the same login. So we had to. We had to make it that the phone, not your account, went to the theater, your phone went to the theater, and then we saw fraud drop because people will give you their card, but they're not going to give you their phone.

Devindra: Yeah very smart idea. So at that point you had the fully formed idea of what MoviePass could be, and I think I was in New York at the time, it seemed hey, among the movie people I knew I knew pretty well, Pretty much a lot of the film critics, the young folks film Twitter, as they call it we were all about movie pass at the time, but growth for you guys as a company had stagnated and it seemed like your investors wanted to go a step further.

So that's where Mitchell appeared. Mitchell came in coming from red box. Supposedly with a Netflix background to you. I do like how you guys bring that up in the documentary. But Mitchell is this guy who basically created the idea that set movie pass on fire, the idea of a 10 subscription, unlimited movies, all you can eat.

And I remember the exact moment Stacey, when that news hit and I was like, Oh, that's cool. That's going to get hype, but that's clearly unsustainable.

Stacy Spikes: There's a step in between there. So when Mitch first came on, Mitch actually went in the other direction. He went up to almost a hundred dollar plan.

So the unlimited was a hundred dollars and then he put in. Some capped plans. And so he went totally in the other direction, right? I think we had launched at 50 and brought it down to 30. So he went totally in the other direction. Then when HMNY came in, Ted and that group said, We want to be the same price as Netflix.

It's all they cared about. And it was 95. And then boom, that was, and like you said, it was never meant to be permanent. It was meant to be a promotional announcement that. We did this deal in this merger and this is like our coming out and it's a temporary price point. And then what was going to happen was that was your first month.

And then you were going to normalize, but they said, wow, we did a hundred thousand people in 48 hours. Let's just keep it there. And that's when I was like, wait, but That's not sustainable. And that was literally, that was the moment the ship pointed towards the edge of the cliff. It seems like

Devindra: either it's like, they noticed it was now a runaway train thanks to this price and this growth.

But rather than be like let's stop before we fall off a cliff. They were like, let's keep going. This is the mentality, by the way, like I have been covering startups since 2010. Like this was the era of growth at all costs, right? User growth at all costs. Startups were getting money and this is a story of Uber and Lyft and pretty much all the major ones now to Facebook, the same thing they weren't actually making money, right?

They weren't making much revenue, but they were getting a ton of funding in to establish this user base. And for a lot of startups, that was what they wanted more than Actual, a functional business. And I think that's what they ended up turning into. Mutually. I have to ask you how did you guys get Mitch low to even cooperate with this documentary?

Because he does not come off looking good. And I think a lot of people can paint him as like a major villain in this story, actually.

Muta'Ali: Yeah. I don't think he comes off. The way he might want to have come off. At the time, Mitch was pitching a book, I forget the name of it, but he was in his book, I think.

Oh, of course he

Speaker: is.

Muta'Ali: Yeah, he was I think how he disrupted Hollywood or something like that. It was the whole vibe of the book. The

Devindra: Redbox plan, like his, the idea was like a dollar a disc, I believe that was his idea. The stuff from him. Yeah.

Muta'Ali: Possibly. Yeah. And so that he was on that sort of press run.

And so Jason again, at Business Insider connected our team with him because, as in a promotion of his book, he was talking to press and, This was before charges were filed though. And so he was less apprehensive as he would have been say we, if we approached him a week or so later.

So when we interviewed him none of the charges that you see listed on the screen at the end of the film were a reality. And so I think. He felt I, in my interpretation that he had reached a point in his life where he was wanting to atone. He had this sort of Zen sort of spirit about him and I, I appreciate that.

And so I think that put him in a position where he was like, sure I'll grant you the interview. And it was odd at the end of the interview, I had the sense that he was being honest with us to a certain degree, but I also had the sense that he might've been Less, less aware of the effect he had on things than I expected him to be.

Speaker: And

Muta'Ali: so that, that was a little bit off putting. And I think that comes across when I watch it in the theater with audiences, they're a little bit surprised at the stance he takes and how cavalierly he speaks about yeah. Certain turning points in MoviePass.

Devindra: Yeah, it's it's a bit baffling, basically as you talk more and more with him.

I have to say, I remember the first time I interviewed Mitch Lowe, too, I think it was after they pushed you out, Stacey. But sitting down, I was like, I was a little okay, who is this guy? I knew MoviePass. I know what MoviePass is about. I don't know this guy. I sit down and talk with him, and I know the difference between people who love the industry that they're in and who believe in the product.

And the marketing people and the marketing people who are just like, Oh yeah growth. We know exactly how we're going to attain the metrics we need to be more popular. And it felt like from the instant I started talking with Mitch was like, Oh yeah, he doesn't. Doesn't even actually get movies.

I think, I don't think he actually even loves the product. He just likes the fact that he's as part of this. So I think like when I saw that news, Stacey, it broke my heart because as somebody covering startups in tech, I don't see many startups founded by black founders, and this was one that had a great idea.

It was about something I personally loved, but I also knew there was potential to be great here. Can you talk about that moment? The moment of. Basically, when Mitch Lowe told you that you had to leave the own company, the company that you founded.

Stacy Spikes: Yeah, it was quite bizarre. So there were, there was over a two month period.

The first wave was they told Himay and I on our December board call we had just hit a million subs.

Devindra: That's co founder Humei Watt, by the way, yeah.

Stacy Spikes: Yeah. So yeah, my co founder Humei Watt. And so on that board call they said, listen, we really like what you guys have done. HMNY is coming in. There's a total of five seats and it was Mitch had one seat.

Chris Kelly had two seats and then there was Humei and I. And so they said, we're going to give your seats, to HMMY. And we said expand the board. Why are you going to take off the founders? And Mitch said I don't want anyone, he literally said, I don't want anyone who works for me on the board.

It was like, okay. That was a bizarre comment, and we just agreed to disagree, and then afterwards, we went into Christmas, and January 8th, When we came back from the holidays. So it was the first, I think, not on Monday, but Tuesday, the second day back, I literally got an email that said, thank you for your service at MoviePass.

You're you're no longer needed and there'll be someone coming into your office, so please pack up. We'll be in touch. That it was just an email that just said that. Not even in person, brutal.

Devindra: You also, you talked about I think something Mitch said to you coming up when he came on as CEO and you were basically, I think, demoted to CEO.

That's at least how it felt to me from the outside. He said you were on parole, like as if like he didn't know if we were going to keep you here.

Stacy Spikes: Yeah. Yeah. So the first meeting we had was with. We was in San Francisco and Chris Kelly was on zoom and we were in Mitch and I were in a conference room and then Mitch flew out to meet the whole team in New York cause the company was always New York based.

And when we get there, he said, I want to meet with you before we go. And I'm going to meet each of the members of the team individually. He said, so going forward I'm going to have you be the director of marketing. I'll give you a higher position if I feel that it's deserved. Ah, but consider that you're on probation at this point, and depending upon the performance.

I and I was just like, that's where when Ali's interviewing me and he talks about the the the peel sketch, the key and peel sketch, can

Devindra: you give us a, can you give us a glimpse of what you were actually thinking and feeling at the time?

Stacy Spikes: I think you, you just don't have to be a jerk, right?

We, there was Kumbaya. We were like, great. Maybe having some gray hair and he might bring like, why are you coming aggressive that way where we're already said, great. Come on into the company. It just seemed unnecessary. And. Like a bad start of something. And so they ended up realizing they needed me a lot more and there were some things going on and I decided I was going to walk away and exit.

And then they said no we'll make you COO. Just don't leave. And and, but it was just out of the gate. It was like just bad form in my head.

Devindra: Like you can certainly tell at that point. And we should talk about like, why is it's Chris Kelly, your investor who really wanted somebody else to come in and lead the company.

And he liked Mitchell coming out of red box and other things that he's done. But you guys had trouble. You had a lot of trouble getting funding early on, even though. I think you had worked on some really interesting tech. You had proven that the product was really viable too, and good for theaters.

Can you talk about that aspect of it, of not actually being able to get the funding and, Hey, a white CEO comes in along with, Ted Farnsworth down the line, And then all of a sudden it is, it's like money is being thrown at them, or at least they are getting a lot more funding almost instantly.

Like they could snap their fingers and get money. That just seemed wild to me.

Stacy Spikes: I think Devindra did, this was one of our biggest, both concerns, but needs is you have to tell. Different than a lot of tech stories. You've got to tell a bit of a layered story here that there's two stories happening all the time.

Founders get ousted. It can be from bad behavior or you just not hitting metrics and investors get a little tired of you. But Devindra had to walk this really fine line of telling a true fact that minority investors do not get access to capital in the same way. You just don't. And the numbers are like

Devindra: shocking, right?

It is like basically 3 percent for women and minority founders, right? It's women,

Stacy Spikes: women and minorities combined. Is only 3%. And so I may, and I were very seasoned professionals. And we talk about this in the doc. Between boys to men and my music career and my film career, I had gross more than 3 billion in sales across the assets I had done, all before I was, 30.

So that's that's, you were one

Devindra: of the 30 under 30 profile. Yeah.

Stacy Spikes: So you can walk in the room and at least get some respect. If you can say I grossed a billion, a 3 billion, but it was just like, wow, why we're creating a Netflix for movie theaters and Netflix was hot as hell.

And. There was this category in this lane and we had finally figured the tech out and you're just asking yourself why are we having such a tough time? And I think Devindra just does an incredible job about that. And he can talk about it, but he just walks the line that you don't feel.

You don't feel the volatility, but you do get the message that he's trying to deliver.

Muta'Ali: Yeah,

Devindra: can you talk about how you conveyed that, Motele?

Muta'Ali: Yeah, it was a balancing act in, in terms of what, how much do we put in about that subject. And I think speaking with Stacey and Jaume I think I checked in a couple times to see how they felt about things.

I, I didn't want the film to end and people get, get want to reverse engineer, like back up away from arguments people might have when the credits roll Oh, they made it all about race and all this stuff. And I didn't, and I don't think Stacey and Norha may. who walk into a room and, race is like the top of mind.

I do think though that the film conveys on a few sides that people's biases play a role in how they initially categorize somebody. And in the, I think Mitch's ability to come across a certain way in terms of his appearance, and also Ted Farnsworth's ability, gave them a benefit of the doubt when you could argue that they maybe didn't, that wasn't warranted.

It's just the

Devindra: ability to like, cosplay success, basically. Hey, walk into a room and be like, hey, I'm, look at me. I got all this money, I got this company, I'm successful, let's party. Whereas you guys were like, no. Stacey like you guys were hustling to get the thing done to make a viable product and you love movies and it couldn't Happen there

Muta'Ali: and I often told myself and I haven't said in a while But I felt like it was people pursuing the American dream Yeah people regardless and these people other people who came from another world where they took advantage of others who had something unique I think there's certain categories of people who come up with something extremely unique.

And Stacey and Hameid did that. And other categories of people, I know I'm being judgmental, just know how to exploit it. And I think exploitation can be positive, if you want to make the best of a product and take it to where it needs to go. But it also can be negative, especially if you know how to work around the financial system the way that some people know.

It

Devindra: just feels I don't know, I don't know if this phrase has been coined yet, but it feels like startup colonialism. In the way that there are all these resources and all these things happening. Wow. There's a lot of value here. Let's mine that value. Let's have a ton of parties. And that basically the movie really conveys this of Mitchell and Ted Farnworth basically spending a lot of the money and capital of movie past the brand within a year.

To the point where it had to declare bankruptcy. You brought up some interesting numbers in the movie, Stacey. Like how much money were they losing per month versus how much money you guys were losing per month when you were in charge?

Stacy Spikes: Yeah. So when we were in charge, our burn was 200, 000 a month.

And when Mitch and Ted were running it. It was around 34 million a month. And the crazy thing was the crazy thing was what there's only a month and a half difference. From when they announced that they were buying us to being able to raise 150 million, it's the same company. You scratch your head wait, the brand was that strong that they were able to raise that kind of money.

What changed? The only change was the melanin of two. So the company was still the same, that everyone running it was still the same, but these guys walked in the room and were like, we're here, and give us some money. And that was very eye opening. And I think you, you talked about colonialism, but I think it's very similar.

To the early days when you had Jackie Robinson or players starting to show up on the field that looked different than what people are used to seeing. And there's a harder road that those early guys have to go. But if you can create innovation, I think that the more you can People like him and I show up the more in the venture capital will become colorblind, but there's still a, you don't quite look the role of what we imagine.

And even if it's 50 or 60 years old and mentioned Ted, it was, that's closer than what we think you are. You definitely are much further away from this ideal of colorblindness. What we think success could look like.

Devindra: Gotcha. Gotcha. It is. That's a sad story. Basically, I think that's seeing the rise or like basically the rocket ship growth of MoviePass and realizing from the beginning that it wasn't sustainable.

I felt really bad, first of all, that they had pushed you out, Stacey, but also that they were just like running the idea of MoviePass into the ground. And then there were the issues of basically not not letting the tickets work for certain things, which is I think it was the Mission Impossible movie at the time.

That was probably Fallout. But that's part of where we are now. And where we are now is MoviePass declared bankruptcy Ted Farnsworth from HMNY who had basically acquired MoviePass, or absorbed it in a way, and Mitch Lowe are now, they've both been indicted, right? So we're still waiting to see what happens with them.

That's a whole thing, but I think The sort of phoenix rising out of the ashes story here is that you've brought MoviePass back, Stacey, you are doing your own thing with it I know it's only in limited markets right now, but can you tell us like how is, how are things going now with the new movie pass?

Stacy Spikes: Yeah, so 2023 we opened in May nationwide, so now you can get it anywhere in the country. And we ended 2023 at a 23% profit margin. It was the first time in the history of the company that we've had a profitable year. And it's all due to the machine learning and AI systems that we built in place, and we've always been.

A FinTech company under the hood. And so a lot of the tech that wasn't there. And like you talked about at the end, at the beginning, the theaters are also in a different place, post COVID everyone's willing to experiment. And I think film fans are also used to subscription now as a concept.

So the headwinds the same headwinds aren't there and you can get much more down to business of tightening the screws and making sure the plane flies. So it's quite extraordinary. We're out. Raising around and raising capital. And it's good to be in a market that we want to help the industry get back up on its feet and go back to our critical mission of what we're doing to build the largest out of home cinema subscription company that there is.

Devindra: I guess final question for you too. It's like I mentioned, like every major theater chain now has their own subscription plan and down here I have a regal close to me, so I'm using their thing, but AMC has had a list for a while. And even that kind of became a meme, at least among, I don't know, movie Twitter people.

This would not have happened with that movie pass. But how do you compete against that now? Because they can offer, I think, cheaper prices and it's less of a hurt for the theater chains to do it, right? Because it's their own money. It's not like they're, it's not like they're really giving up that much, I think, in the end, and they ultimately get more concessions out of it.

So how are you guys competing with the homegrown theater subscriptions?

Stacy Spikes: Yeah. So the way the marketplace looks at it is they are loyalty programs, so you can only use them at that theater. So with us, you can go wherever you want. So I can have my AMC Stubbs, but use my MoviePass MasterCard and I can still get my points.

So I'm a Regal Crown Club member and I am an AMC Stubbs member. And even though I'm using my MoviePass, I'm getting points. So from a marketplace perspective, we see ourselves like the Airbnb of sales. Cinema where on it's a market where there is a buyer and a seller. So there is the theater where you're going to go in the same way.

There is a home that you will rent and there is a person who wants to. go to a theater and you're going to rent that seat for two hours, let's say. So we're more like Airbnb where you can just go wherever you want. And then we drive that traffic on top of that. We're also partnering with certain theaters.

that we display in the app where you are, we are buying wholesale from them and we're driving traffic right into them. So think of the universe where AMC, Regal, and Cinemark make up 50%. The other 50 percent really don't have the money to put millions of dollars in to manage a app that lets you be a subscriber.

So we're their app. And then there's the big three. And you, in the MoviePass universe, you can use it all. So the stat that we found was 75 percent of customers said they'd rather a one size fits all app versus an app that they can only use for one theater. So that's our market position which is slightly different.

Devindra: Totally makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Looking forward to seeing where it goes, Stacy and Devindra. And anything else you want to mention about this project or what you're working on next?

Muta'Ali: No, I just want to encourage people to check it out on HBO and on, on Max, it comes out on May 29th. So I hope you enjoy.

Devindra: Thank you both so much for joining us and yeah, good luck with everything guys. Thank you. Divindra, thank you so much.

Speaker 6: Hey, Producer Ben here with a note. You might notice that there is something a little different about Mr. Nate Ingram's voice for the next 40 minutes or so. We had our fingers crossed that the construction outside his window wouldn't start until after we were done recording. But we didn't get that lucky.

There were big saws and a jackhammer. You could hear it on livestream. But you'll barely be able to hear it in the podcast because Audio Cleanup has gotten that good. We tried three different cleanup programs, two of which were powered by machine learning, and picked what sounded best. We'll talk more about Audio Cleanup next week, and you'll find out what app saved this nigh unsalvageable audio.

Thanks. Back to the show.

Devindra: Okay. Let's move on to some other news this week. And we got a bunch of news from Google. Apparently they're bringing a slew of AI powered features to Chromebook plus laptops that you're the perfect person here because, okay, first of all, remind us what Chromebook plus laptops are and also what are these features?

What's going on here?

Nathan: Yeah. So backing up a little bit last fall, Google and its hardware partners introduced Chromebook plus, which was basically a designation to say it meets a number of minimum specs, including at least an i3 processor, at least eight gigs of Ram. At least a 1080p display and there's a certain webcam spec it meets as well.

Obviously there's a million Chromebooks on the market varying price points, lots of really cheap crappy ones, a handful of more expensive, higher quality ones. And this is meant to say like this spec, you're getting a certain level of performance and so forth.

And. So I think that's a good thing. You know that if you're buying one of those, it should run pretty well. You're going to get the long, I think like 10 years of support they do now. At the time they announced, they were also going to bring some AI features to Chromebooks. And this month they actually released a lot of those.

There's basically three, there's three main things. One is like just a fun image generator you can use to make wallpapers and video backgrounds. There's like a handful of different styles and you just put in, I want a mountainscape with a purple lake in the front or that sort of thing.

Devindra: Okay, cool. Nate Chromebook plus also a style of Chromebooks that I was always a little skeptical about too. I don't think we have any sense of like how many people are actually buying these things. My thing is I know a thing is successful when I start to see it out in the wild with normal people.

I rarely see people outside of schools and businesses actually using Chromebooks, so certainly have not seen any Chromebook plus models either. In terms of these features, they seem cool, but also I guess I can't get really excited about it, right? Like I don't. Yeah. And Microsoft and all the other AI things are doing this too.

I don't know how useful the thing of just Hey, give me more texts. All right. Write this email for me, do this stuff for me. Is actually going to be because part of communicating is sitting down and thinking about getting those words. And I understand not everybody thinks they're a great writer or something, but I don't know if the AI will actually help or if people actually tap into it.

Do you have any sense of that, Nate? Have you used, you've been experimenting with some AI words lately we've seen in our Slack channel. Do you have a sense of like how people are using these things yet?

Nathan: Yeah. So what the feature is it's called help me write and it's system wide. So any text entry box, whether it's in a web app or an Android app or a, web form like LinkedIn or Twitter, you can write something in there and then click the help me write, and you can have it punch it up, or you can just give it a prompt and it'll fill in the text itself.

I agree with you. I don't, I just don't see it being useful. Like you said, part of the point of this is as you're writing, you sit down, you think about what you're trying to say. I think it's a little different for someone like you and me who make a lot of our living writing, but nonetheless, everybody communicates, everybody sends emails, everybody has thoughts in their head, and you put them down, and it sounds like you, usually, at the very least.

Whereas when you AI it, it doesn't sound like anyone. I don't really know what the point is of that.

Devindra: Yeah. So some of the AI texts you sent us Nate in Slack it just sounded like you were talking like Steve Rogers. You all of a sudden sounded like Captain America, hello team.

We're going to have a great day together. We're all going to accomplish all of our work and things like that. It just felt so disingenuous and unreal. I think the prompt there was like,

Nathan: send a heartfelt but slightly humorous greeting to my teammates as I get up this morning or something like that.

Basically, I could have just said, good morning, everyone. Not that I usually do that, I just thought it would be a funny way to kick off my little AI text experiment. I'm thinking so there's the, help me write, there's the AI background, which is just, for image

Devindra: generation,

Nathan: Although I'll be with a pretty narrowly defined set of rails, like you have to, you can't just put in whatever you want in this particular part of the tool.

But also the Chromebooks all have Gemini, the Gemini app built in now which is something, it's the same thing. I think you'd see if you go to the Gemini site and you start. Entering your text prompts. But what's interesting at least is that Google's also including, if you buy a new Chromebook plus they're including 12 months of their AI Google one plan.

So that's a 20 buck a month plan that gives you two terabytes of storage and drive as well as access to Gemini advanced. So just from a pure, monetary standpoint, that's a pretty good thing. And even if you never touched the Gemini advanced, The storage itself is worth, a hundred bucks a year.

So you're getting a decent little for a decent little boost there.

Devindra: Yeah. Just for when you're, I want to point this out and I don't want to sound like I'm just picking on Google because I love to pick on Google especially when they have expensive products that I think have a very limited appeal.

But the whole thing about like image generation as a con, as a background creation tool, or. Also seems like a nothing burger to me. And honestly, I feel this way about co pilot and the chat GPT all this stuff, Dolly, Dolly's like image generation too. Cool. Cool. That I can write a word, a string of texts and have a really interesting detailed image appear.

What the hell do I do with that? Am I going to use that for to send to my friends? I'm going to use it to create things, to plug into presentations. That's what Microsoft thinks you'll do. On Google sites, just Hey, cool backgrounds, man. Cool backgrounds for your, for your Chromebook, you could, you, five seconds, you can find a cool background image, online.

I was going to say that the

Nathan: funny thing is that I started playing around a little bit and got like a kind of a handful of kind of cool pictures, but. I would rather almost always use some of the other included wallpapers. They have a great on Chromebooks and on Android, they have an extensive image library with lots of like really gorgeous landscapes and cityscapes.

I've always actually really appreciated that about those devices. And so I'd much rather just use those. Then make anything with AI

Devindra: Windows and Macs, right? Like both Microsoft and Apple have done a good job of getting really cool. Nice. But photographic imagery that just looks cool. It looks chill.

Like I don't feel like the aerials

Nathan: that they added to Mac iOS last year. Super cool. Super cool. Huge file sizes that can quickly take up your hard drive. If you. Go ham like I did and download a ton of them, that's okay.

Devindra: Yeah, it's the idea of the aerial stuff is good because that was taken from Apple TV 4k, but that was just like, Hey, what if video screensaver melts into photorealistic wallpaper?

Beautiful stuff.

Nathan: There was speaking of images. There was one last tool they included here. Which is Google photos the magic editor, which I believe has been available on the pixel devices for a while. And then I think more recently it's moved to more Android devices and I think iOS as well.

But you haven't been able to use it on a laptop until now, because you can get the Google photos app on the Chromebook. And then there you can do things like, select certain parts of the photo and move them around or resize them, change the background or the the color of the sky, that sort of thing.

I have a real issue with that, just broadly speaking, because I don't like to Take photos and make it really easy to completely manipulate them into a reality that didn't happen. You're going to have a bad

Devindra: time over the next few years,

Nathan: Nate.

Devindra: Yeah. I know

Nathan: that people have been doing that on Photoshop for years, obviously.

But that takes skill and training to, to make something look good. Whereas now you can just like literally circle a person and delete them from the picture. And obviously your results will vary. I'm sure they're not as good in real life as they are in Google's highly controlled, demos and that sort of thing, but yeah.

Magic editor. It's a weird one. I haven't used it much yet. I'm going to play around that just so I can know more about it. But

Devindra: it is odd. It's it's odd. It's cool image editing. Easy image editing is something a lot of people would want. So I get that. I also feel like in Google and Microsoft and everybody opening eye to, they want you to pay these monthly fees.

They want you to have. Basically pay money to get cloud powered AI going. And when there's more stuff on device, like what Microsoft is talking about with their co pilot plus systems, maybe what we'll see from Apple in iOS and macOS this year you won't be paying a subscription for that. So that's a whole other like way of positioning this stuff.

They just want you to pay more money, right? That's it. They just want you to pay a recurring fee that you'll pay forever because you want to. Type a string of text and make a pretty image,

Nathan: yeah. And I'm going to play around with it because I now have Gemini advance, but I opened to Gemini and I look at it and I'm like, I have no idea what I want to do with this.

Like nothing pops into my head. It's a blank, it's a blank canvas and I have no tools at my disposal to go at it. And I suppose maybe that's my own limited thinking. But I just don't see it being something I would certainly, I wouldn't pay an extra 10 a month for. Yeah. On top of just getting Google drive storage, like right now not a factor whatsoever.

That's how I've been with all AI stuff. And I think, part of that is just like personal resistance too, because I don't see it being useful. And so I think I need to get over that a little bit and play with it more and start to try to understand what people do see in this. But, in terms of thing as a consumer product, I just don't think it's there yet.

It's not even close to being something that has a clear use case that people will want to spend money on.

Devindra: These companies really want AI to be the thing like that people get excited about in all their new platforms, but it's I don't know how useful any of this stuff will be.

Nathan: No, and I think we've seen, People discuss recently how it's really just been like a weird domino thing where it's somebody, open AI starts doing it and then Google and Microsoft scramble to catch up because, and then all of a sudden, once they're in, everybody's in and now everyone's trying to like air quotes catch up, but I don't know if they're trying to catch up to just, I, and I think lots of millions of other people just going on with their lives.

Doing using their computers the way they used to, this has not revolutionized anything yet. And this,

Devindra: this doesn't change it whatsoever. I think there may be more subtle tools going on. Like right now, what we're dealing with right now Nate, with your audio, actually your Mac, you're using a MacBook pro.

Has certain like voice isolation capabilities. We're not going to turn those on because our podcast editor wants clean audio to do their own. Their own edits on this stuff, but that's the idea is that you could do maybe real time transformations on things. There are currently jackhammers outside of Nate's window.

And if he could hit a button and just have those disappear because the the neural engine on his Mac can see that audio. We can actually do that stuff right now. And I feel like that sort of thing. It's going to be more useful to people the whole studio effects thing that Apple has and Microsoft is introducing to like the ability to do things that used to be complex and maybe hit your GPU quite a bit and also eat a battery life.

Those should be more efficient with an MPU, the neural processing unit that are on, new Intel laptops, new AMD laptops the neural engine that's on max. I guess that's the idea, but these like generative AI tools, I just don't know if those are the things, yeah.

Nathan: Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it because, I think the other thing that gets missed in this conversation so often is the fact that We have been, introduced to and using plenty of AI based tools, like what you mentioned for cleaning up audio automatically, or I think, maybe five years ago, I think Apple put the first neural engine in the iPhone, and none of us really knew what that meant at the time, but I think it's enabled a lot of things like the improvements they're seeing to photo processing, both, in Apple's phones as well as Google's phones, right?

There's a reason why the pixels are so good at producing great images. And that's because of the quality of the image, engine, I think. And like a lot of that stuff probably has to do with what's happened in the backend. So like that stuff, absolutely useful, but like generative stuff.

I still don't see it.

Devindra: Yeah, it's I guess it's tough to see it. Like the idea of Hey, I'm going to send you a 50 page PDF. Can you just get me a bullet point so I can feel like I'm up to speed with whatever this discussion is like that stuff could be useful, that stuff isn't fully available yet.

Open AI is multimodal. Like you can drop some things in there and ask you questions about it. I don't know how well it's doing with those sorts of summaries. That's part of the dream of copilot and copilot plus and everything that You could just send a PDF to Windows and have it deal with stuff.

I think one of the interesting features Microsoft showed off, Nate, is recall, which is the ability to just remember everything you've done on your computer because we're ba we have bad memories, but also it's rightly getting criticized for being potentially a huge invasion of privacy, potentially a huge security hold for a lot of people.

Do you have any thoughts on that, by the way, Nate, like just Of recalled you that was the thing announced last week and yeah, I remember huge fans of that.

Nathan: Yeah, that's really interesting. Talk to me a little bit about what the main, you alluded to it. But again, it's the kind of thing I could see being useful.

Also, yes I assume this is sending a lot of the data about what you do in your computer back to Microsoft. It's not sending it.

Devindra: It's not sending it. They say they're not sending it. It's local. But still, people are like even if it's like a local database of stuff, even if you've encrypted it with whatever, with the Windows stuff that's still a potential issue.

And also, it's enabled by default, and people may not be fully aware of what is captured. I see the issues there. Yeah. Yeah. The

Nathan: default is not a great move. They definitely, it's feature where if you like edit, you need to have a huge demo section. Like when you boot up after the update, like we have this new thing called this.

Here's how it works. And here's the privacy disclosures and. And here's where you can turn it on if you want and how to turn it off if you don't want, but I hear there is

Devindra: in the onboarding for when you get a new computer, I do hear that you will get an option to enable it there, but that's like when you do this on a Windows computer now, you get do you want to enable personalized advertising?

Do you want to tailor, location stuff? And I think most people don't even read those things and just click it to, I just want to use my computer. So that's fair. The bigger problem, hey, we don't know what's going to happen with any of this stuff, but all these companies are basically betting billions on the idea that we are going to really want AI tools and this stuff is going to make or break their I don't know their entire industries at this point.

So we'll be keeping an eye on it and actually related to this, Apple announced their WWDC 2024 plans. This week the keynote is going to be June 10th at 1 PM Eastern. I'm hoping to be there with at least one other person from Engadget. We shall see who we're still. Like finalizing our plans, but we're gonna, we're expecting to hear a lot more about AI.

There, there have been the reports about Apple essentially like working, trying to get deals with both Google and open AI about bringing their, generative search tools into Mac OS. Potentially even iOS too. So I think the latest rumor was that like, it seems like the open AI deal has happened or is happening.

We're also expecting Apple to talk more about their own, like built in generative, maybe not generative, but their own built in AI tools. Certainly some sort of like model some of their own local models is going to do some work. And I guess that stuff is cool, Nate. That's where I'm like, if CoPilot itself or Siri.

We're actually smart and I can actually say, Hey, can, what? What are my appointments right now? Can you reschedule this appointment and just talk to it naturally and have things get done? I feel like that is a useful thing for a lot of people.

Nathan: Yeah, and I think that's probably what's been missing most from Siri, et cetera over the years.

People love to smash Siri and I think that if, you know rightfully you

Speaker: can. Yeah.

Nathan: I think if you know what it can do and what you want to get out of it, it can work. But I think what you're saying is I'd love to say, Hey, what are my appointments today and have it understand that I have multiple calendar apps installed and to be able to look into those and say, yeah, okay, I can see all this stuff versus big you don't use Apple calendar.

So you're out of luck and I know that it's not that limited at this point. But it's also not that transparent to somebody again, that's the problem is like to get these like wonderful use case scenarios that all these companies like to show off, you've got to be like practically a software engineer yourself to to make it happen.

Devindra: Yeah, exactly. Hey, I think the idea of just wanting to speak to your computer and have it like we Google talked a lot about this to having a computer cater to your needs rather than you learning the behaviors of computer. I think that is a really interesting inflection point and it is something we're moving towards.

So we shall see,

Nathan: it's an, it's a noble goal that we are not yet there on do you think

Devindra: there's any hardware at this year? I feel like probably no, but probably no, but it is weird. I have not seen any rumors of M4 MacBooks at this point, because it also feels like we just got a lot of new hardware from Apple, but it is very strange that the iPad pro is the only M4 device right now.

I wonder if they're going to tease something. There have been rumors about other types of devices from Apple. But yeah, there's no real like hardware rumors leading into this WWDC. I think they're going to spend a lot of time talking about vision pro like vision OS and like the stuff they're doing around that.

And they've proven that, Hey, they can really reshape the way you know, the vision pro works just by software because they didn't have enough time to bake in all the features. I'm expecting to hear more about that. It's going to be all AI, most likely like all AI and how AI is going to build itself into iOS macOS and everything.

That's my guess. But we shall see. So you know what, folks, let us know. It makes me tired just thinking

Nathan: about

Devindra: it. Yeah. I'm so tired. I'm so tired at this point. Let us know folks what you want to see from DubDub this year. And yeah, how you think these AI tools are going to you. What will, what are the AI capabilities you're really looking forward to?

Drop us an email at podcastandengadget. com. Also sell this news. This week, the Fitbit Ace LTE Google's Fitbit division has basically produced this it's a wearable, like gaming smartwatch for kids, but it also has LTE and also has like tracking features for parents too. So it looks like something that can help kids get around.

Get outdoors and go have fun. And it's Tamagotchi like depending on their movement, but it also has like communication abilities. So kids can get in touch with their parents and parents can see where they are. I don't know if you have thoughts about this, Nate, but this happened and Trillian wrote up a really nice hands on this thing.

So I want to acknowledge that Google is making hardware again, a little bit.

Nathan: Yeah. I like this just from, again, I have no idea if this is going to where I'm sure it won't. It reminds me of how Apple introduced with the Apple Watch the sort of like family setup where you can have somebody who's got the master control over these connected devices so that kids can't like, go wild and whatever but the game stuff, I don't know, it just, it seems like a cheeky bit of fun that, Isn't trying too hard.

Like it seems like goofy and unique enough to be potentially fun. But again, like no idea what chance there is for this to reach an inflection point where enough people will be using these things of kids will be using these things that it goes anywhere. That said, one of our editors, Cheyenne McDonald, loves Tamagotchi.

She has a wrist worn one. She wears like a watch. And I would love to see her try this thing on and and see what kind of fun she can have with this thing, because she has already proven herself to be into quirky little games that you wear on your wrist, so I feel like she's the perfect one to check that out.

Devindra: This specifically does seem like a thing for kids, though, is the thing. Tamagotchi, I feel they were kids toys, but You could almost make it a little kitschy, right? As a teenager or even as a young adult? Or like actual, yeah, definitely. There's like a

Nathan: huge kitch factor. I dunno if that's sneer for this now, for this thing, no.

'cause there's no legacy, there's no, history, there's no oh, I have fond memories of this when I was, if there're a teen or whatever. So yeah it's, it is very much geared towards children. It says seven and up is what they're targeting on.

But, I feel like you look at this thing in the visuals and the way it looks and I'm like, this is a 7 to 11 or 12 device at best.

Devindra: Yeah. Which is fine. Yeah. It's like a time before your kids will have smartphones, most likely. Stuff like that. Exactly. Yeah. But you can get in touch

Nathan: with them if you need to.

You can, whatever. That's what I get Apple pitch with the watch LTE is that you can have a kid wear it and they can contact you, but no one else or whatever. Yeah,

Devindra: I think that's why this thing exists. Like Apple or Google doesn't really have a good option for you. It's just give your kid a thing and be like, okay, this will be part of our family plan.

And we know where you are. We can get in touch with you in case of emergency. Whereas I know a lot of people do that with the Apple watch, that is something yeah. My daughter is going to be going to like kindergarten and public school soon. Like in a couple of years, she'll be doing stuff in like lower grade levels.

And I don't want to like microchip my kid, but if my, if she could have a thing that could just keep her in touch with us, with my wife and I, like when we need to, I feel like I don't think that's too overboard parenting wise. And I think a lot of people would be into it and kids. Want to do it too. Like sometimes they need that reach out ability too.

So something I'm considering and that's what the Apple watch ended up being good for. I don't think Apple even considered that at the beginning of the night. So it's just how it worked out. So I guess once again Google's maybe a couple of years too late to offering something like this, but okay.

I could see how it could be useful. That's the whole thing. Nate, you wanted to talk about this interview, which I think is really wild. There was an interview published by Sony with Naughty Dog head, Neil Druckmann, where he talked about AI allowing us to do things. And then Sony ended up pulling that interview and Druckmann also, I think on Twitter was like, Hey, I, this is not the full extent of what I said.

Here's a direct quote from me. What the hell happened here?

Nathan: Yeah, this was wild. I pay a lot of attention to Naughty Dog, they make some of my favorite games. Oh, we know names, we know. As you, if you've listened to me talk before, you know this. And so yeah, Sony published this interview, it's like a big like studio show off our creative talents and talk about the future of interactive entertainment and that sort of thing.

So Druckmann obviously with the success of the HBO series as well as the games. Logical choice for this, right? And yeah, there were two things that got the internet mad, one of which is the AI bit you mentioned, and the second one's where he talked about how the new game Naughty Dog is working on would quote unquote redefine gaming as we know it.

Something to that extent. Very highfalutin, very made him sound like a bit of an egotistical maniac to some degree, if you want to look at it, through a sort of cynical eye. And then, yeah, a few days later, he goes on to, after there's been some backlash and some upset, talk around this, he goes on Twitter and literally drops the receipts.

He's here's the transcript of what I said 450 words, and then here's what it was condensed into 100 words. But to go even further, a gaming reporter his name has escaped me right now, but it's in our story. He went out there and looked at the transcript and compared it to the answer and bolded all of the words in the answer that didn't appear in what he actually said and it was almost the entire quote like it seems like Sony made up whole cloth some of these quotes, which is just bonkers.

And it's not often you see some, somebody like directly contradict like a giant corporate overlord like Sony, obviously Druckmann has tons of power on his own, but still to just go on Twitter and be like, no, this isn't what I said is a pretty like unusual move. And then it gets even better because Sony removed the interview, but instead of just like taking the page down and pretending it never happened, they actually put up an apology page saying we've removed this because it contained quote significant errors And yeah, and then, when he said like what the errors were there's a great, there's a great quote where it says We have found several significant errors and inaccuracies that don't represent its respective values, including topics such as animation, writing, technology, AI, and future projects, which is basically the entire

Speaker 7: interview.

Oh, yeah.

Devindra: I almost wonder what the hell happened here because, hey, these interviews are conducted by basically like in house media people. Sometimes they're former journalists. Sometimes it's just like a PR person that's like transcribing an interview. So It's tough to tell like how this stuff went down. I almost wonder if some of this was AI transcribed and they like just didn't do it or something like that.

That would be a

Nathan: conspiracy theory.

Devindra: That'd be the full thing to go around. But Hey, I will admit I use AI transcription tools sometimes too. Like it's a really good thing when it works, but you have to go over it and make sure the words actually are actually spelled right. And refer to the things you think they refer to.

This is just wild. Also speaking about

Nathan: Neil, if you're listening. I listen to the interviews I record and type them all out word for word. Happy to have a chat sometime about Naughty Dog's future projects. I will not make up entire

Devindra: quotes. I promise. You promise. Listen, you're like you are the Naughty Dog like fan right now, Nate.

So yeah.

Nathan: Yeah. We've got a Sony there's a Sony state of play tonight. So supposedly 14 new games in 30 minutes. I have my fingers crossed for some news on this new project, but not holding my breath. Also,

Devindra: let's briefly talk about this. There was the story too, that apparently both the Atlantic and Vox Media announced that they have made deals with OpenAI to essentially, what is it, allow their content to be absorbed, but also they'll be paid for it.

That's essentially. Yeah,

Nathan: They didn't talk about terms, obviously, but basically OpenAI has been making these deals with several large publications or publications, large and small say. Where they're, they will ingest their contents and, chat GPT will use it as a source for when you're asking questions and that sort of thing.

In this case for both Fox media and the Atlantic they made a point to note that there will be citations. So chat GPT will say, based on, this report from so and and with links out to the original sources which I sounds to me like a way of getting ahead of the whole concern of AI is going to kill, Publishing because it won't direct people to these pages anymore.

It'll just summarize the articles for you and no one will click on the actual article.

Devindra: Maybe it won't matter if you're getting paid, right? If the media companies are getting paid for that. And I actually don't see a huge problem with that because Google's doing it already. Google is crawling the internet, right?

And like every media company, everybody on the internet has like a deal with the devil with Google. You have to be good for Google's SEO. You have to be good to play nice with Google to rank well and stuff like that. And now it's yeah, the Google, that's a really good

Nathan: point. This is just a kind of a different flavor of that.

I suppose I feel like we are beholden

Devindra: to these companies that essentially control the internet or at least media on the internet. And people are looking at stuff like opening eyes, like summaries and everything as being like the next intranet in a way, or at least. It's the next way we engage with what's online.

Next it's the new search, right? It's the new search. Essentially. What is funny is that the Atlantic last week published the post called media companies are making a huge mistake with AI. And notably, this is not like by a staff writer. This is by Jessica lesson who like, this is some inside media stuff is she is the founder and owner of the information.

Which is a major technology news site. So this is almost like a guest piece, Yeah, it feels like an

Nathan: opinion. And of course, I appreciate the like separation of the newsroom and the business side of this case. It's interesting you mentioned that too, because I got a newsletter from Vox.

com, the news site, not the media organization, but they're flagship news sites and the newsletters, obviously, and they had a similar thing talking about all the risks of AI and how it's going to affect media and that sort of thing. Obviously the newsrooms are thinking about this whilst the business side of things goes ahead, and I was going to say that it feels like, you said you either make the deal with the devil if you're or if you're a powerful enough, like a New York Times, who is suing open AI for all this, you can sue them.

But I think most companies aren't in a position where they can do that. And now they're like, okay we'll get some revenue hopefully out of this. And of course, I actually don't fault Atlantic or Vox media or any of the other companies has done this because recognizing it's a difficult situation.

And it's easy for me to jokingly poke fun at these companies when, there's an equally a chance that our parent company will go ahead and do something similar in the next We have no personal

Devindra: say

Nathan: about what happens at Yahoo or No, this could easily happen.

Devindra: Yeah.

Nathan: And of course, I think again, worth noting that neither Vox nor The Atlantic talked about.

Generating articles or content with AI, right? It's not that kind of thing. I think that's the real,

Devindra: the real concern. Like the more of the clip, more closely you align yourself with these AI companies. Hey use some of our tools. Let's do some, Hey, you want some auto summaries of your stories? You can use our tools to do that.

And a lot of sites have auto summary stuff happening like already. But who knows? Who knows? That's eventually going to be a thing that. I, you could right now can get a simplified version of a webpage on iOS or I think even max now. So it's like a little bit of an AI engine in a future iPhone.

Just be like, Hey, just can you summarize this whole thing for me? That's like where we're going. So even if it's happening on device. Same kind of same problem, but maybe at least you get the ad revenue for that, Like maybe at least it sees the page at some point. We don't know how any of this stuff works It's all black magic folks.

I've been writing for the internet since 2009 And nobody has any clue about how it all works Unfortunately and

Nathan: to throw back to the the thing in chrome os the whole like help me write thing I'm like, okay, so we're gonna start using help me write to create, articles and then You know, Google and Gemini or chat GPT will summarize those AI created articles with a new summary.

And I'm like, Oh God, this is. Very much a snake eating its tail situation. We are clear. No, I'm, we're not using these things to create articles. We're not using these things yet,

Devindra: but maybe who knows, maybe we will use a summary thing. I just feel like for media companies who are currently facing some serious issues, Hey, we had our own round of layoffs.

Pretty much every major media site has dealt with this. They have to do something they have to do something to make money or to stay afloat while they figure out what to do with this whole new terrain of publishing, which will involve AI in some form. So it sucks. This is a crummy place to be folks, but we'll be reporting on it and let us know let us know.

Are you actually using the AI summary tools on some sites? The how are Google's recommended, search results and stuff that are up top their AI search results. Are those preventing you from clicking sites? Like I'd love to know how people are actually using this stuff. Nate, you know what?

Maybe we shouldn't be so worried about open AI because there's a new safety team. Led by its board members, including CEO Sam Altman, so therefore everything's fine.

Nathan: I'd love to have the CEO, whose only concern is the bottom line, also be involved with things like trust and safety.

Devindra: Yeah. They just two weeks ago, they dissolved the existing trust and safety team, which included people who may actually say no to some things.

And now this new one is just basically an opening eyes entire board and the CEO who was Again ousted last year for a weekend because the board could not trust the ceo. So I don't know. I don't know what's happening. This is

Nathan: a new this is a new board, right? That's now loyal to the ceo. It is a new board

Devindra: because yeah ilya satskever.

John likey ilya satskever was one of the people on the board who also voted to push sam altman out He apologized now he's off to do his own thing. But yeah, it is. You It's not exactly heartening Nate that such a powerful company in the media and technology landscape now is like a mess internally in terms of how it's being run.

That's not great.

We've got a couple of questions or some emails from listeners I want to shout out an email from Darren. I don't have your location here, but basically thoughts on Copilot Plus from a screen reader user. They write, I'm a screen reader user and notwithstanding the incredible leaps forward on built in accessibility features across most major platforms.

Windows is still the only desktop OS where there is a choice between multiple screen readers. A phenomenal productivity enabler when dealing with inaccessible websites or apps. So they're saying JAWS or job access with speech, which is a popular commercial screen reader natively supports arm. So they are looking forward to using a copilot plus PC that potentially has better battery life.

and performance. Also they're hoping that Microsoft will double down on supporting developers making native arm apps. We mentioned this x64 and x86 apps. It's the older stuff, like the older Intel chips and AMD chips aren't going away anytime soon, but arm seems like the focus. Darren writes overall, I'm not overly excited by AI itself, but if copilot plus brings about a more compelling windows on arm experience, that might be enough for me to go all in.

With my next laptop purchase. I think this is this is a good use case and certainly not a thing we talk about too much either. When I used to work in it, I've had to set up screen reader tools for people and it was always an interesting technology that barely worked. And I do think as we are, getting more powerful AI tools, potentially, like this is the sort of thing that could get better.

Do you have any thoughts on this, Nate?

Nathan: I think it's like a pretty important accessibility tool, right? So I think if ARM can make a difference there, like that sounds great to me. This made me just wonder have you gotten to use the new ARM based machines outside of the hands on?

At Microsoft,

Devindra: I've not seen the new ones yet, and I want to point out here specifically, Darren says they are hoping Microsoft will double down on supporting developers making native ARM apps. That's a big takeaway there. I don't want to. They should, I'm right, they

Nathan: have to if they're going to, if these computers are going to be successful.

They have to. Obviously the emulation is better this time than it was a few years ago. But that's not a long term solution.

Devindra: Yeah. So they say, but also this is Microsoft, like there, you can run some windows 3. 1 or like some really early windows apps still within windows, because that's, they have to support like a really wide range of like software and old stuff.

Do think like the prism emulator will probably be around for a long time. I don't know, like when will the arm version of windows be like the main version of windows? I don't know if that's ever going to happen just because this is like a specific question that there are, I think the last numbers I saw, there are like 1.

4 billion windows, like 10 and 11 devices out there. So that's a lot. That's good. It's gonna be a

Nathan: lot of right. And you can't cut support for those anytime soon. They're all running relatively modern versions of the OS. I think it's crazy that we still talk about like the idea of running a Windows 3.

1 or like even a little later application. I'm like, who the hell needs to do that? And I know there's some legacy industries where that's the case. But I think they're so specific that consumer wise, Microsoft would say, okay, we're just going to make this transition. And then if you're a weird legacy customer, then contact us and we'll have solutions for you.

But maybe that's not the most efficient way to do it.

Devindra: Absolutely. So anyway, we're, this is a certainly interesting sea change in the way, like Windows devices can work and what they'll support, and this could mean good news. Things for people who really depend on these devices too, for a lot of things.

So anyway, we have another email from Rohan who is I think following up a question or an email he wrote last year about using an iPad as a contributor as a computer. This is a very long email, but I'm going to read a couple of graphs here. When the original iPad was announced, he writes, it was clearly called out that the device needs to do a few things better than your iPhone and your Mac, or else it doesn't have to exist.

And that was like, Poking at netbooks back then. I remember that. However, when they launched the iPad nearly a decade and a half ago, it is precisely a burden of legacy that Apple is moving away from. To sum it up, every, anything and everything we dislike during the PC era cannot be repeated. And to be fair, the iPad did not repeat many of the mistakes.

Rohan is saying essentially this is the legacy of what's happening now is like Apple is still so beholden to the idea of not repeating the PC. It may not have like fully. Fully engaged, like how people may actually want to use the iPad. So Rohan points out just the idea of supporting like a real browser, a full on desktop browser, not just like a desk, like a quote unquote desktop class browser.

Nathan: I would love to dig into that bit particularly because. Obviously I use the iPad a lot. I, and I, this is a genuine question. I want to know what separates the iPad browser from a quote unquote real browser. Here's a,

Devindra: here's an example. His wife is working on a project in the company she's working with uses Google suite.

They sent her a survey for review. For some reason, she couldn't open it on her iPad on any browser, but it opened just fine on her iPhone running Chrome.

Nathan: So that doesn't make sense. Doesn't make sense.

Devindra: Cause.

Nathan: I'm not saying he's wrong, but I don't know why that would be we don't know There's I actually use and it's interesting.

I use the Google Apps on the iPad, but also I've used the web apps in Safari and they work fine

Devindra: It's like when it gets some more complicated like hey Dealing with multiple attachments and things like that because file system is our CMS

Nathan: also. Yeah RCM It mostly works on an iPad But there's like a weird scroll error where I'm looking at our list of stories.

I can't get to the bottom where we can go to the next page.

Devindra: The iPad is made to basically like you have to engage in things through an app. That was like the idea of the iPad. And I don't feel like they've ever really fully moved on from that. So Ron says, because of this issue, they had to purchase a refurbished Mac book that runs a proper version of Chrome.

Yeah, that is just a weird things. Let me wonder how

Nathan: this will change now that apple has to open up the web the web browser engines and Support things besides webkit like chromium the current chrome browser on ios and ipad is still running is running webkit. It's like a thing on top of webkit

Devindra: Yeah,

Nathan: right.

So but I think that soon if not I think it's not available yet, but I think at some point you'll be able to run the full, Chrome using their engine. And that'll be interesting.

Devindra: I think that'll be like, like a real computer rather than a closed off like specialized Apple ecosystem. I feel like that's only going to be a good thing for consumers as much as Apple hates it.

And I'm sure it's going to lead to like more like malware and junk and potential vulnerabilities on your iPad, but. That may be a thing we have to live with for a more open type of computing. Rohan points out a couple of other things here. Just issues they've noticed the health app on his iPad won't sync.

I guess like with his iPhone stuff, he's on M1 air. Hey, I've noticed that too. The health app just doesn't even track things properly for me. That's a, it's a weird thing. Apple news puzzles won't sync progress between iPad and iPhone. Don't get him started on iMessage sync files is broken, does not find a file.

If he enters a full name correctly, even if taking care of the case and everything, there are a lot of these weird software issues and they, I don't know if you've just learned to deal with them, but like we talked about during the iPad pro episode if you wanted to record that episode with us on our streaming platform right now, I don't think you could do it.

I don't think there's only one

Nathan: audio stream support at a time. I, so I don't know, again, not discounting his experience, but this just sounds like using technology issues. Like I don't have any problems that I message saying it could be the platform

Devindra: that it came through, but I see this all the time.

Here's the thing, like having worked in it, like this is it. This is the most annoying part of it. Everyone's got these random

Nathan: use cases. Everybody's got something that isn't working.

Devindra: And it doesn't make sense that something would work on the iPhone and not

Nathan: the iPad. No, I recently was trying to figure out something to this.

And I was like, where's all the storage going and looking at like my messages and, sync is fine. Like I get everything on all my devices. But like in terms of the storage it's using, I can't figure out why I'm like one machine is taking up 20 gigs and one machine is taking up 10. And, how do I How do I reduce this?

And yeah, the whole thing is just crazy.

Devindra: It's such a mess. Anyway, that's a cool, thank you for the emails, everybody. It's always good to talk about this stuff. Drop us more notes at podcasting gadget. com. We love your feedback. Let's move on to what we're working on. Anything you want to shout out, Nate?

Nathan: Yeah, I will probably be doing a lot of Chromebook stuff in the next few weeks as well as yeah, getting ready for WWDC and summer game fest. I don't. I think I'm attending of those in person, but certainly we'll be helping out on the home front with

Devindra: all the news. Cool, cool. Yeah, I'll also be, like, preparing for WWDC at this point.

Maybe another short trip, but looking forward to seeing things there. I'm also currently writing up a hands on the Vision Pro what if. Experience that whole thing. I was trying to get it done yesterday and just did not have time. It's interesting, but it's it's a mess.

It looks really cool because everything on the vision pro looks amazing. Thanks to those screens and like the power there, but playing it is not great. Because it, this thing was not made for, Games really. So like I'm saying,

Nathan: so it's both an, it's both like a air quotes movie and a game kind of it's like an interactive,

Devindra: it's like any VR experience you've had, which are some, sometimes you're watching something.

And sometimes it's Hey, you have to hold your fists up and point lasers. You're essentially like one of those people working who like the doctor strange people, like the, people with magic powers, you're one of those folks. You're collecting infinity stones. You have to use the shield and.

You go pew lasers and none of it feels very good because it's all controlled by hand tracking and it's like a mess, but it does look cool. And it's a cool, free experiment, I think from Marvel and the ILM interactive folks. So yeah. Could be a hint of what's to come. I think that's the best I could say about it.

Nathan: Yeah, for free too. I can't get too mad about it, right? Yeah, free if you have a vision

Devindra: pro,

Nathan: that's a fair caveat.

Devindra: Totally fair. Any pop culture picks for us this week, Nate?

Nathan: Yeah, so I there's this band out of the UK called Dotter. Last year they released their first album in six years.

And while unfortunately they didn't tour for it they just released this amazing thing. YouTube video of them performing the songs live with some of their friends And it's at this gorgeous studio in the middle of the uk somewhere like in this big farm what would love to go there and play some music myself someday and it's really cool because it's all shot, with one camera basically there's one guy who films each song moving throughout the room And and then each song is a new take or whatever, but like each song is its own take and it all culminates with the last tune where the singer she's singing in this room by herself the beginning of the song is very quiet It's just her and her guitar And then at the midway point this whole like Orchestral band comes in and she puts the guitar down and walks through the studio Into another room where the whole rest of the band is there playing and she joins them and it's just gorgeous song You Gorgeous filming really unique stuff.

If you like slightly sad, but really pretty indie music arcade fiery type

Devindra: stuff sounds like arcade fire type stuff maybe.

Nathan: Not as much bombast more you know quieter, like the national a little bit but That sort of thing. They're great. They're on the nationals label.

So there you go. I'm thinking that thank you for the whiny

Devindra: indie rock nate Yes. No, it's no she's she doesn't whine she emotes She emos. Close very close. I want to shout out a movie called hitman which is going to be on netflix soon This is not the adaptation the two adaptations of the hitman video games.

This is The Richard Linklater film, which is a ton of fun. Really? It's funny. It's romantic. It's just like genuinely endearing. It stars Glenn Powell, who's like the new it guy in Hollywood. He was in Top Gun 2. He's in a rom com this year that everybody loved. He's going to be in a, that Twisters sequel coming up.

And it's a fun premise. Twisters. I don't know if I'm going to be excited about Twisters, but he looks fun. Like I like him and pretty much everything. And the premise for this movie is really fun too. Cause he plays a professor who's like a boring dude, like a boring nerd. But he moonlights as somebody who helps police.

He's also like a tech guy. So he helps police like capture criminals. Like he helps with the wiring and stuff. And it gets to a point where essentially he. It's helping police by pretending to be a hired hitman and it's like a way to entrap people who would call up a hitman to murder family members or whatnot.

That's the premise and things get a little wild from there. I think this movie is a lot of fun. It's in not many theaters right now, but if you can see it there, that would be great. It's also going to hit Netflix on June 7th. Just a week

Nathan: then. And I was gonna say, yeah, it's been out for a little bit, right?

It's been out in theaters for a week,

Devindra: I think, at this point. But yeah, Glenn Powell's fantastic. Adria Orjana, who is who is in. What's the star Wars and or she's been a bunch of things. She's also fantastic in this great cast, really funny script, just a good time. Just like a good feel good movie that I think hits all the right notes.

So check it out, folks. That's hit man on Netflix. Now this all reminds me too, that I I finally started watching the pair. Obviously I'm late to the party, but damn, it's good. It's very good. Wait till you get to season two, Nate. That's it for this week, folks. Our theme music is by game composer, Dale North.

And our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O'Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Elman. You can find me online and at DaVentura on Blue Sky, Twitter, all over Mastodon. Where can we find you, Nate? I'm mostly on threads

Nathan: these days at Nate Ingram. I don't post frequently, but I lurk around and read.

And when I have. Stupid thoughts. That's where they end up.

Devindra: Not Twitter though. Yeah. Sorry. Not Twitter. Not Twitter. You can email us at podcastinggadget. com. Also say hi to Sherlynn. Tell her if you miss her or whatever, leave us a review on iTunes and subscribe on anything that gets podcast folks.

Thanks. We're out.

This week, Devindra and Engadget's Nathan Ingraham discuss the new Max documentary "MoviePass, MovieCrash" and reminisce about the early days of that wild startup. It was a huge mess in the end, but we wouldn't have subscription plans in theaters without it. We also chat with MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes, as well as the documentary's director, Muta'Ali, about the film.

In other news, Nate explains why Google is adding a slew of AI features to Chromebook Plus notebooks, and we dive into the Fitbit Ace with LTE, which has the potential to be a very useful smartwatch tracker for kids.

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

Topics

• Moviepass, MovieCrash interview with CEO Stacy Spikes and director Muta'Ali – 1:33

• Chromebook Plus laptops are getting AI features soon – 41:43

• WWDC is scheduled for June 10 – 56:26

• Cherlynn’s Fitbit Ace LTE hands-on : a fitness tracker for kids! – 59:55

• Sony pulls “fabricated” interview with Last of Us creator Neil Druckman – 1:03:44

• Vox Media and The Atlantic magazine made content deals with OpenAI – 1:08:06

• OpenAI’s new safety team includes members of the company’s board and Sam Altman himself – 1:13:30

• Listener Mailbag: Windows screen readers on ARM and the iPad as a full-fledged work machine – 1:14:41

• Working on – 1:23:24

• Pop culture picks – 1:25:10

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Credits 

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Nathan Ingraham
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

Transcript

Devindra: What's up, Internet, and welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar. Joining me today is Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham. Hey, Nate.

Nathan: Hey, Devindra. Good morning, and good morning to our listeners.

Devindra: Good morning. Happy holiday week, too. It's a bit of a short week here. Not as much news as we typically get, but this is a good time to talk about this documentary that just came out on Max's MoviePass Movie Crash.

It's about that subscription movie theater startup, which I think everybody, a lot of people were into way back when, and I have a lot of fond memories about it too. We'll talk about that thing and also the story of MoviePass. And we also have an interview with the co founder and current CEO of MoviePass, Stacy Spikes and the director of the documentary, Muta'Ali.

So stay tuned for that. We'll also be talking about some Chromebook Plus news getting getting AI features. And Nate, I feel like you're the person to talk to about that because you love Chromebooks.

Nathan: I do. I still do. And I've been checking them out for a few days here. I was away. But got home to new hardware and I've been playing around with it and I have a few initial thoughts.

Devindra: Okay, we'll do that I feel like nate if you're gonna get any if you're gonna get a tattoo of any kind You would probably get a chrome symbol tattoo for chromebook chrome I would do a chrome

Nathan: next to an apple

Devindra: just to mess with people just to mess with people That would be the way to do it as always folks If you're enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us in itunes Or your podcaster of choice, leave us a review on iTunes.

Drop us an email at podcast@engadget.com. We've got some great reader emails this week too. So we'll talk about that towards the end of the episode. Let's talk about MoviePass Movie Crash. And this is a movie that's out now on Max, the one to watch for HBO. And I think it's pretty good. It's a good exploration of what the hell happened at MoviePass.

And. I'll tell you all I have I have a lot of feelings about Movie Pass because I'm also a movie critic. I've done a movie podcast since 2008. Movie Pass was also something I started writing about before they were even like a major thing. So in 2012, I met with Stacy Spikes, the one of the founders, and, we had a good discussion about movies and about his own background, because he was also a movie executive and a music producer too, or a music executive. So he's somebody from the movie industry who loves movies and wanted to like. Change the way the whole like movie paradigm work, especially how theaters work.

I feel like we may take it for granted today, folks, but if you look around, like every major theater chain has a subscription plan, for 20 or 30 bucks a month, you get all you can eat movies. Maybe some wiggle room around pricing and stuff there. Before MoviePass, none of that existed. And that the whole idea of paying a flat fee for all you can eat movies was just like something the entire industry was totally against.

When MoviePass launched it was like a 50 plan. You had to bring a sheet of paper to the box office and they tell like type something in to get you the ticket. It wasn't great. It took a while for things to get going. Then they did this thing where. They started, they had the card, they got the debit card going, and they got a patent for the ability to automatically fund the debit card based on your location.

And nobody had ever done that before. So like that movie pass app, 2013, 2014, that was the point where they were like, okay, you have to check into the movie theater and then pick a time. And then you get your ticket. That whole technique had never existed before. So that was like the thing that kind of got them to 500, 000 users.

The growth was not great for a while because it was still 40 to 50 in many places. Then Stacy spikes got pushed out. He was replaced by a new CEO named Mitch Lowe. He's a guy coming out of red box and Netflix. And then things got crazy because Mitch Lowe talked about, do you remember this Nate?

Like Mitch Lowe had the like 100 plan and the 50 plan. Yeah. Like as soon as he came on, it went nowhere. And then why do we know why I don't think anybody wants to pay a hundred bucks a month. I wasn't, I love movies. I love going to the theater. I would not pay a hundred bucks a month for this. Then they came up with the 10 a month, all you can eat movie plan, right?

That's

Nathan: when I remember starting to really hear about it. That's when the buzz broke out. Cause that was so cheap.

Devindra: That was the buzz. And that was pretty much, that was all Mitch Lowe and eventually his like co CEO Ted Farnsworth, who came from HMNY, which was this like. I guess it was like a private equity firm.

It was a whole thing. Things got really confusing, but explosive growth. That's exactly what startups wanted to see in the mid 2010s. Doesn't matter if your business model sustainable. It doesn't matter if they're paying full prices for these tickets, but they're losing money. They're burning, literally setting money on fire to get these users.

And I think a lot of people within the company raised concerns like, Hey, this is not sustainable. And Mitch Lowe and Ted's farm were were basically. Pedal to the metal. Let's just go all the way. See how far this goes. Is it fair

Nathan: to say that Stacy's plan was more sustainable and that's probably why it didn't get the big growth, but it could have just continued on.

At that point and possibly it could have found a smaller audience,

Devindra: as, so as I hear it and Hey, we have an interview with Stacey and the director of this documentary in this episode. But as I heard it, and as he explains it, like that was what he was saying. It was like, Oh, this 10 thing was going to be.

A temporary measure. Let's get those users. Let's get some buzz and then switch over to 20 or 30 a month and be more sustainable so we can actually afford to keep this business afloat and Mitchell and Ted's Farnsworth just never really did that. They kept getting more money and burning it all.

And watching this documentary just brought up a lot of feelings for me, namely, because I remember being really pissed off about this whole story, because first of all, Stacey Spikes is a rare black entrepreneur in the startup world, and you never really see that. So I was like, it's cool that MoviePass is a thing coming from black founders and was like finding some success.

He was pushed out for Mitch Lowe. All of a sudden the like demographic of the executive board looks very different. They get, they immediately get the funding that Stacey Spikes and his original founder couldn't get. They were struggling to even get documentary gets into this, I hope. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the whole thing.

And this is it's an infuriating documentary because it's just these guys made a really cool idea, like a really cool business that reshaped the theatrical model completely. They couldn't actually get the money for it because nobody was funding them. Which just really sucks.

Nathan: Yeah, I guess there's a lot of people only remember them from that sort of boom phase when it was 10 bucks a month and even then, people were asking like, how is this possibly going to be sustainable?

Cause I didn't know about that prior history so much. And so that makes me really intrigued to see the whole thing play out.

Devindra: It's the whole thing. It's a good documentary. I also wrote a piece like back then, Nate, adding gadget called movie past died so cinemas can live. And I feel like that still resonates today, to be honest.

This documentary is worth a watch. I think it's great where things are right now. C. Spikes ended up buying the like remnants of the company at auction for a low price and he's resurrecting it now. I think at a more sustainable price, it's 30 to 40 a month. It's run it using credits instead of just giving you the full money for a ticket.

So I've not used the new movie pass yet. We'll see where that goes. But hey, theatrical subscription plans. Like I think those are great deals. If you go to the movie theater two or three times a month. Yes, absolutely. You have one. Yeah. I use the my local theaters are regal. So I use it regal and limited.

I think they call it. But in New York, I was all about the AMCA list. Like that was the thing. If you go to a movie theater two or three times a month, these subscriptions are totally worth it. I have to go. Almost every, almost once a week, almost multiple times a week for things I need to review.

And I think this documentary is worth a watch. So here, check out our interview. Stacy Spikes and Muta'Ali. Thank you so much for joining us on the Engadget podcast. Thanks Devinder. I'm glad to be here. Happy to chat with you guys and Stacey, let me lay out some history for our listeners here. I remember sitting down with you in my office when I was working at VentureBeat, it was like 2012 and you were laying out the pitch for MoviePass for me.

I was a movie podcaster at the time, still am, but it was blowing my mind to see the convergence of my interests of the movie side and the tech side of things. So we have been talking a while. I've seen the ups and downs of MoviePass, I'm just wondering at this point, you have resurrected MoviePass, not to spoil the ending of this movie, but if people have seen the news, you've resurrected MoviePass, you're doing something new right now, how is the new iteration of MoviePass going?

Stacy Spikes: It's going great and yeah we have been talking and on this journey together for a while, but the The difference when we brought it back was we added some features that we knew we needed back in 2016 before the takeover, but hadn't had the opportunity to deploy. So one of the things was adding a credit system so that Where there's savings for the company, we're able to display that savings for the consumer and create alignment where the previous iteration really didn't share that you went in the app and you didn't know, Hey, is movie pass paying full price for this ticket or wholesale for that ticket?

And so now the credit system creates that alignment. And that was a really big differentiator from B1 to B2.

Devindra: Gotcha. Yeah, I've, I was noticed that I have not tested out the new version of MoviePass yet, and I also have a lot of questions about how the theater chains ended up responding to you guys too.

But let's talk about this documentary in particular MoviePass, MovieCrash. Devindra, I'm wondering what brought you to this project and this story?

Muta'Ali: It was the writing of Jason Guerrasio at Business Insider producer Scott Beltry gave me a call and asked me to read the article about MoviePass and I had heard about MoviePass but I was never a member.

And once I read his article and learned a little bit about Stacey and Aimee and the journey of MoviePass, I said, wow I'm surprised I didn't know this. I wish that I did. And I think a whole lot of other people would want to know more about this. And so that kind of got me my gears going and after a while, I, I took in a lot of information about when we did a lot of research and joined the team over at unrealistic ideas Mark Warburg's studio.

And together we developed a way to tell this story. And shortly within that period after a short period of time. I got to meet Stacey over Zoom and really was, obviously impressed by him, impressed by his journey and got a little bit more of an inside look at what had transpired and I was like wow, okay this story is definitely something that I think needs to be told.

Devindra: Yeah. Devindra, I have to wonder, where were you when MoviePass was at its rise? I'm wondering how you missed it. Were you, are you in New York? Everybody was talking about MoviePass. It was a wild time. But also, it felt wilder to me as somebody who was covering the beginning, too, and being like, this is a good idea.

It's struggling. It needs some legs. But it was wild to see it really take off. So let's talk about Kind of the history of MoviePass and how things started and your background, Stacey, too. I was fascinated to hear that you were a studio executive. Who came into this at Miramax, right?

And you had gained a reputation within Hollywood. You wanted to do something that's around movie subscriptions. And I think when we first talked, this was before the debit card idea. This was the idea that you would check in online and bring, I think it was like you had to bring a printout right to the box office to have them to do the Yeah, basically create a ticket for you.

We talked in 2012 about that idea. It was cool, but it was like 50 at the time. It was a little clunky, but then you guys did. The debit card idea, which I think was the killer thing that kind of helped make it all easier for consumers. But you also had some trouble with the movie theater chains I remember the back and forth like you guys would launch and then the theater chains would be like no We don't want this at all.

Can you talk about the early turmoil of even making movie past the thing?

Stacy Spikes: Yeah, so Really good History overview there. But so there was a few iterations. So the very first version we went through movie tickets. com and movie tickets was largely owned by AMC. And when we launched AMC got upset and turned us off.

Like we literally were born. On Thursday and got turned off by them on Friday. The next day we had done a premiere and a press event in San Francisco, and this was on a Thursday and we're going to let people in on beta. And then the next morning AMC released an announcement that slow, slow down.

You're I was a little confused by that, by

Devindra: the way, because like they had to approve this in the beginning. They had to know this was happening. I don't understand how it was like an overnight thing where they're like, Oh crap, what did we approve here?

Stacy Spikes: Yeah, because we couldn't, a lot of people said how did you do this without their approval?

You can't get API access to someone's code without their approval. So there was I think the left hand and the right hand had not communicated very well. And so I think the high, the lower end of the spectrum knew about it and thought, Hey, someone's helping to drive traffic to theaters. But I think when senior management got involved and they saw Netflix for movies, theaters splashed across headlines it was like, wait, how did we not know about this?

I think they just thought we were just going to buy some tickets through their API. And so we had to do some things in the interim, which were absurd. Like you would print out a single use credit card, which basically was, you were printing out a one time use number, going to the box office, having them punch that in manually.

On a Friday night when there's a line of people and theaters are like, we really don't like this idea. And then that's where the card got born. We knew we needed to create something that was an an OTT platform that would work seamless. And we knew credit cards or debit cards was the way in. Cause every theater had a kiosk or they

Devindra: couldn't really control that either.

Like you, Everybody needs to be able to use their debit cards at these things. Yeah.

Stacy Spikes: So that, that was really the the inflection point that it was unstoppable because every theater, a customer, so we're doing a deal with the customer, they get issued a card and they can go buy a ticket at whatever theater they want.

So really the theater would be rejecting their own customer, whether they were paying with their debit card. Their regular MasterCard or say a movie past MasterCard.

Devindra: And the theater is getting a full price ticket purchase too. So it's not like you were getting discounted tickets. I want to set up the context here too, because I think in 2024, the landscape of cinemas looks really different.

We are post pandemic. Cinemas are hurting, but there's also kind of people have a love for it now of like almost losing it. So people want to support the cinemas. Every major theater chain has their own subscription program. And I feel like that never, that wouldn't have happened if MoviePass hadn't come out and had shown them that there was a demand for this.

And also you guys had done a study that showed if people had like an all you can eat subscription, it actually drives up revenue for the theaters because people go and buy more concessions and it just ends up working out that way. Stacey, let's talk about the card in particular, and this is where we get a little nerdy, because I remember when you first presented the idea to me, the idea was, you have this debit card, the app knows your location, it knows you're at the theater, you say you're going to go see a movie, MoviePass puts money on the card at that instant.

And then you pay for your ticket and that's something that's like instant transactional stuff on to a debit card had never been done before you guys got a patent for it that seemed pretty fascinating at the time.

Stacy Spikes: Yeah, that's exactly right. So what we did was we needed to geolocate.

every single theater in North America, Alaska and Hawaii. And then we had to be able, so there was all of these challenges, like if the theater was inside of a mall, right? But the geolocation was to be able to say I am at this theater and in the app, you're corresponding. Your selection choice is that theater.

So that's one verification. The second verification is that there is an MCC code, which is a merchant category code that you're at a theater, not a gas station or a bowling alley or a pizza place. So that was the second thing you needed. And then. The third was that your account was in good standing and those three things cross referencing each other authorized the ability to get your ticket.

So for the first time no one had done real time geolocation based authentication to unlock currency. And so what we were doing was we really were a fintech company. Underneath we, cause you can use it for any industry. But companies like four square and other were using check ins, location check ins.

And so that was the beginning of what we started to use. And there was layers on top of it. The first version of the card, people could share the same card. So college students signed up and

Speaker: yeah,

Stacy Spikes: they would all log into the app with the same login. So we had to. We had to make it that the phone, not your account, went to the theater, your phone went to the theater, and then we saw fraud drop because people will give you their card, but they're not going to give you their phone.

Devindra: Yeah very smart idea. So at that point you had the fully formed idea of what MoviePass could be, and I think I was in New York at the time, it seemed hey, among the movie people I knew I knew pretty well, Pretty much a lot of the film critics, the young folks film Twitter, as they call it we were all about movie pass at the time, but growth for you guys as a company had stagnated and it seemed like your investors wanted to go a step further.

So that's where Mitchell appeared. Mitchell came in coming from red box. Supposedly with a Netflix background to you. I do like how you guys bring that up in the documentary. But Mitchell is this guy who basically created the idea that set movie pass on fire, the idea of a 10 subscription, unlimited movies, all you can eat.

And I remember the exact moment Stacey, when that news hit and I was like, Oh, that's cool. That's going to get hype, but that's clearly unsustainable.

Stacy Spikes: There's a step in between there. So when Mitch first came on, Mitch actually went in the other direction. He went up to almost a hundred dollar plan.

So the unlimited was a hundred dollars and then he put in. Some capped plans. And so he went totally in the other direction, right? I think we had launched at 50 and brought it down to 30. So he went totally in the other direction. Then when HMNY came in, Ted and that group said, We want to be the same price as Netflix.

It's all they cared about. And it was 95. And then boom, that was, and like you said, it was never meant to be permanent. It was meant to be a promotional announcement that. We did this deal in this merger and this is like our coming out and it's a temporary price point. And then what was going to happen was that was your first month.

And then you were going to normalize, but they said, wow, we did a hundred thousand people in 48 hours. Let's just keep it there. And that's when I was like, wait, but That's not sustainable. And that was literally, that was the moment the ship pointed towards the edge of the cliff. It seems like

Devindra: either it's like, they noticed it was now a runaway train thanks to this price and this growth.

But rather than be like let's stop before we fall off a cliff. They were like, let's keep going. This is the mentality, by the way, like I have been covering startups since 2010. Like this was the era of growth at all costs, right? User growth at all costs. Startups were getting money and this is a story of Uber and Lyft and pretty much all the major ones now to Facebook, the same thing they weren't actually making money, right?

They weren't making much revenue, but they were getting a ton of funding in to establish this user base. And for a lot of startups, that was what they wanted more than Actual, a functional business. And I think that's what they ended up turning into. Mutually. I have to ask you how did you guys get Mitch low to even cooperate with this documentary?

Because he does not come off looking good. And I think a lot of people can paint him as like a major villain in this story, actually.

Muta'Ali: Yeah. I don't think he comes off. The way he might want to have come off. At the time, Mitch was pitching a book, I forget the name of it, but he was in his book, I think.

Oh, of course he

Speaker: is.

Muta'Ali: Yeah, he was I think how he disrupted Hollywood or something like that. It was the whole vibe of the book. The

Devindra: Redbox plan, like his, the idea was like a dollar a disc, I believe that was his idea. The stuff from him. Yeah.

Muta'Ali: Possibly. Yeah. And so that he was on that sort of press run.

And so Jason again, at Business Insider connected our team with him because, as in a promotion of his book, he was talking to press and, This was before charges were filed though. And so he was less apprehensive as he would have been say we, if we approached him a week or so later.

So when we interviewed him none of the charges that you see listed on the screen at the end of the film were a reality. And so I think. He felt I, in my interpretation that he had reached a point in his life where he was wanting to atone. He had this sort of Zen sort of spirit about him and I, I appreciate that.

And so I think that put him in a position where he was like, sure I'll grant you the interview. And it was odd at the end of the interview, I had the sense that he was being honest with us to a certain degree, but I also had the sense that he might've been Less, less aware of the effect he had on things than I expected him to be.

Speaker: And

Muta'Ali: so that, that was a little bit off putting. And I think that comes across when I watch it in the theater with audiences, they're a little bit surprised at the stance he takes and how cavalierly he speaks about yeah. Certain turning points in MoviePass.

Devindra: Yeah, it's it's a bit baffling, basically as you talk more and more with him.

I have to say, I remember the first time I interviewed Mitch Lowe, too, I think it was after they pushed you out, Stacey. But sitting down, I was like, I was a little okay, who is this guy? I knew MoviePass. I know what MoviePass is about. I don't know this guy. I sit down and talk with him, and I know the difference between people who love the industry that they're in and who believe in the product.

And the marketing people and the marketing people who are just like, Oh yeah growth. We know exactly how we're going to attain the metrics we need to be more popular. And it felt like from the instant I started talking with Mitch was like, Oh yeah, he doesn't. Doesn't even actually get movies.

I think, I don't think he actually even loves the product. He just likes the fact that he's as part of this. So I think like when I saw that news, Stacey, it broke my heart because as somebody covering startups in tech, I don't see many startups founded by black founders, and this was one that had a great idea.

It was about something I personally loved, but I also knew there was potential to be great here. Can you talk about that moment? The moment of. Basically, when Mitch Lowe told you that you had to leave the own company, the company that you founded.

Stacy Spikes: Yeah, it was quite bizarre. So there were, there was over a two month period.

The first wave was they told Himay and I on our December board call we had just hit a million subs.

Devindra: That's co founder Humei Watt, by the way, yeah.

Stacy Spikes: Yeah. So yeah, my co founder Humei Watt. And so on that board call they said, listen, we really like what you guys have done. HMNY is coming in. There's a total of five seats and it was Mitch had one seat.

Chris Kelly had two seats and then there was Humei and I. And so they said, we're going to give your seats, to HMMY. And we said expand the board. Why are you going to take off the founders? And Mitch said I don't want anyone, he literally said, I don't want anyone who works for me on the board.

It was like, okay. That was a bizarre comment, and we just agreed to disagree, and then afterwards, we went into Christmas, and January 8th, When we came back from the holidays. So it was the first, I think, not on Monday, but Tuesday, the second day back, I literally got an email that said, thank you for your service at MoviePass.

You're you're no longer needed and there'll be someone coming into your office, so please pack up. We'll be in touch. That it was just an email that just said that. Not even in person, brutal.

Devindra: You also, you talked about I think something Mitch said to you coming up when he came on as CEO and you were basically, I think, demoted to CEO.

That's at least how it felt to me from the outside. He said you were on parole, like as if like he didn't know if we were going to keep you here.

Stacy Spikes: Yeah. Yeah. So the first meeting we had was with. We was in San Francisco and Chris Kelly was on zoom and we were in Mitch and I were in a conference room and then Mitch flew out to meet the whole team in New York cause the company was always New York based.

And when we get there, he said, I want to meet with you before we go. And I'm going to meet each of the members of the team individually. He said, so going forward I'm going to have you be the director of marketing. I'll give you a higher position if I feel that it's deserved. Ah, but consider that you're on probation at this point, and depending upon the performance.

I and I was just like, that's where when Ali's interviewing me and he talks about the the the peel sketch, the key and peel sketch, can

Devindra: you give us a, can you give us a glimpse of what you were actually thinking and feeling at the time?

Stacy Spikes: I think you, you just don't have to be a jerk, right?

We, there was Kumbaya. We were like, great. Maybe having some gray hair and he might bring like, why are you coming aggressive that way where we're already said, great. Come on into the company. It just seemed unnecessary. And. Like a bad start of something. And so they ended up realizing they needed me a lot more and there were some things going on and I decided I was going to walk away and exit.

And then they said no we'll make you COO. Just don't leave. And and, but it was just out of the gate. It was like just bad form in my head.

Devindra: Like you can certainly tell at that point. And we should talk about like, why is it's Chris Kelly, your investor who really wanted somebody else to come in and lead the company.

And he liked Mitchell coming out of red box and other things that he's done. But you guys had trouble. You had a lot of trouble getting funding early on, even though. I think you had worked on some really interesting tech. You had proven that the product was really viable too, and good for theaters.

Can you talk about that aspect of it, of not actually being able to get the funding and, Hey, a white CEO comes in along with, Ted Farnsworth down the line, And then all of a sudden it is, it's like money is being thrown at them, or at least they are getting a lot more funding almost instantly.

Like they could snap their fingers and get money. That just seemed wild to me.

Stacy Spikes: I think Devindra did, this was one of our biggest, both concerns, but needs is you have to tell. Different than a lot of tech stories. You've got to tell a bit of a layered story here that there's two stories happening all the time.

Founders get ousted. It can be from bad behavior or you just not hitting metrics and investors get a little tired of you. But Devindra had to walk this really fine line of telling a true fact that minority investors do not get access to capital in the same way. You just don't. And the numbers are like

Devindra: shocking, right?

It is like basically 3 percent for women and minority founders, right? It's women,

Stacy Spikes: women and minorities combined. Is only 3%. And so I may, and I were very seasoned professionals. And we talk about this in the doc. Between boys to men and my music career and my film career, I had gross more than 3 billion in sales across the assets I had done, all before I was, 30.

So that's that's, you were one

Devindra: of the 30 under 30 profile. Yeah.

Stacy Spikes: So you can walk in the room and at least get some respect. If you can say I grossed a billion, a 3 billion, but it was just like, wow, why we're creating a Netflix for movie theaters and Netflix was hot as hell.

And. There was this category in this lane and we had finally figured the tech out and you're just asking yourself why are we having such a tough time? And I think Devindra just does an incredible job about that. And he can talk about it, but he just walks the line that you don't feel.

You don't feel the volatility, but you do get the message that he's trying to deliver.

Muta'Ali: Yeah,

Devindra: can you talk about how you conveyed that, Motele?

Muta'Ali: Yeah, it was a balancing act in, in terms of what, how much do we put in about that subject. And I think speaking with Stacey and Jaume I think I checked in a couple times to see how they felt about things.

I, I didn't want the film to end and people get, get want to reverse engineer, like back up away from arguments people might have when the credits roll Oh, they made it all about race and all this stuff. And I didn't, and I don't think Stacey and Norha may. who walk into a room and, race is like the top of mind.

I do think though that the film conveys on a few sides that people's biases play a role in how they initially categorize somebody. And in the, I think Mitch's ability to come across a certain way in terms of his appearance, and also Ted Farnsworth's ability, gave them a benefit of the doubt when you could argue that they maybe didn't, that wasn't warranted.

It's just the

Devindra: ability to like, cosplay success, basically. Hey, walk into a room and be like, hey, I'm, look at me. I got all this money, I got this company, I'm successful, let's party. Whereas you guys were like, no. Stacey like you guys were hustling to get the thing done to make a viable product and you love movies and it couldn't Happen there

Muta'Ali: and I often told myself and I haven't said in a while But I felt like it was people pursuing the American dream Yeah people regardless and these people other people who came from another world where they took advantage of others who had something unique I think there's certain categories of people who come up with something extremely unique.

And Stacey and Hameid did that. And other categories of people, I know I'm being judgmental, just know how to exploit it. And I think exploitation can be positive, if you want to make the best of a product and take it to where it needs to go. But it also can be negative, especially if you know how to work around the financial system the way that some people know.

It

Devindra: just feels I don't know, I don't know if this phrase has been coined yet, but it feels like startup colonialism. In the way that there are all these resources and all these things happening. Wow. There's a lot of value here. Let's mine that value. Let's have a ton of parties. And that basically the movie really conveys this of Mitchell and Ted Farnworth basically spending a lot of the money and capital of movie past the brand within a year.

To the point where it had to declare bankruptcy. You brought up some interesting numbers in the movie, Stacey. Like how much money were they losing per month versus how much money you guys were losing per month when you were in charge?

Stacy Spikes: Yeah. So when we were in charge, our burn was 200, 000 a month.

And when Mitch and Ted were running it. It was around 34 million a month. And the crazy thing was the crazy thing was what there's only a month and a half difference. From when they announced that they were buying us to being able to raise 150 million, it's the same company. You scratch your head wait, the brand was that strong that they were able to raise that kind of money.

What changed? The only change was the melanin of two. So the company was still the same, that everyone running it was still the same, but these guys walked in the room and were like, we're here, and give us some money. And that was very eye opening. And I think you, you talked about colonialism, but I think it's very similar.

To the early days when you had Jackie Robinson or players starting to show up on the field that looked different than what people are used to seeing. And there's a harder road that those early guys have to go. But if you can create innovation, I think that the more you can People like him and I show up the more in the venture capital will become colorblind, but there's still a, you don't quite look the role of what we imagine.

And even if it's 50 or 60 years old and mentioned Ted, it was, that's closer than what we think you are. You definitely are much further away from this ideal of colorblindness. What we think success could look like.

Devindra: Gotcha. Gotcha. It is. That's a sad story. Basically, I think that's seeing the rise or like basically the rocket ship growth of MoviePass and realizing from the beginning that it wasn't sustainable.

I felt really bad, first of all, that they had pushed you out, Stacey, but also that they were just like running the idea of MoviePass into the ground. And then there were the issues of basically not not letting the tickets work for certain things, which is I think it was the Mission Impossible movie at the time.

That was probably Fallout. But that's part of where we are now. And where we are now is MoviePass declared bankruptcy Ted Farnsworth from HMNY who had basically acquired MoviePass, or absorbed it in a way, and Mitch Lowe are now, they've both been indicted, right? So we're still waiting to see what happens with them.

That's a whole thing, but I think The sort of phoenix rising out of the ashes story here is that you've brought MoviePass back, Stacey, you are doing your own thing with it I know it's only in limited markets right now, but can you tell us like how is, how are things going now with the new movie pass?

Stacy Spikes: Yeah, so 2023 we opened in May nationwide, so now you can get it anywhere in the country. And we ended 2023 at a 23% profit margin. It was the first time in the history of the company that we've had a profitable year. And it's all due to the machine learning and AI systems that we built in place, and we've always been.

A FinTech company under the hood. And so a lot of the tech that wasn't there. And like you talked about at the end, at the beginning, the theaters are also in a different place, post COVID everyone's willing to experiment. And I think film fans are also used to subscription now as a concept.

So the headwinds the same headwinds aren't there and you can get much more down to business of tightening the screws and making sure the plane flies. So it's quite extraordinary. We're out. Raising around and raising capital. And it's good to be in a market that we want to help the industry get back up on its feet and go back to our critical mission of what we're doing to build the largest out of home cinema subscription company that there is.

Devindra: I guess final question for you too. It's like I mentioned, like every major theater chain now has their own subscription plan and down here I have a regal close to me, so I'm using their thing, but AMC has had a list for a while. And even that kind of became a meme, at least among, I don't know, movie Twitter people.

This would not have happened with that movie pass. But how do you compete against that now? Because they can offer, I think, cheaper prices and it's less of a hurt for the theater chains to do it, right? Because it's their own money. It's not like they're, it's not like they're really giving up that much, I think, in the end, and they ultimately get more concessions out of it.

So how are you guys competing with the homegrown theater subscriptions?

Stacy Spikes: Yeah. So the way the marketplace looks at it is they are loyalty programs, so you can only use them at that theater. So with us, you can go wherever you want. So I can have my AMC Stubbs, but use my MoviePass MasterCard and I can still get my points.

So I'm a Regal Crown Club member and I am an AMC Stubbs member. And even though I'm using my MoviePass, I'm getting points. So from a marketplace perspective, we see ourselves like the Airbnb of sales. Cinema where on it's a market where there is a buyer and a seller. So there is the theater where you're going to go in the same way.

There is a home that you will rent and there is a person who wants to. go to a theater and you're going to rent that seat for two hours, let's say. So we're more like Airbnb where you can just go wherever you want. And then we drive that traffic on top of that. We're also partnering with certain theaters.

that we display in the app where you are, we are buying wholesale from them and we're driving traffic right into them. So think of the universe where AMC, Regal, and Cinemark make up 50%. The other 50 percent really don't have the money to put millions of dollars in to manage a app that lets you be a subscriber.

So we're their app. And then there's the big three. And you, in the MoviePass universe, you can use it all. So the stat that we found was 75 percent of customers said they'd rather a one size fits all app versus an app that they can only use for one theater. So that's our market position which is slightly different.

Devindra: Totally makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Looking forward to seeing where it goes, Stacy and Devindra. And anything else you want to mention about this project or what you're working on next?

Muta'Ali: No, I just want to encourage people to check it out on HBO and on, on Max, it comes out on May 29th. So I hope you enjoy.

Devindra: Thank you both so much for joining us and yeah, good luck with everything guys. Thank you. Divindra, thank you so much.

Speaker 6: Hey, Producer Ben here with a note. You might notice that there is something a little different about Mr. Nate Ingram's voice for the next 40 minutes or so. We had our fingers crossed that the construction outside his window wouldn't start until after we were done recording. But we didn't get that lucky.

There were big saws and a jackhammer. You could hear it on livestream. But you'll barely be able to hear it in the podcast because Audio Cleanup has gotten that good. We tried three different cleanup programs, two of which were powered by machine learning, and picked what sounded best. We'll talk more about Audio Cleanup next week, and you'll find out what app saved this nigh unsalvageable audio.

Thanks. Back to the show.

Devindra: Okay. Let's move on to some other news this week. And we got a bunch of news from Google. Apparently they're bringing a slew of AI powered features to Chromebook plus laptops that you're the perfect person here because, okay, first of all, remind us what Chromebook plus laptops are and also what are these features?

What's going on here?

Nathan: Yeah. So backing up a little bit last fall, Google and its hardware partners introduced Chromebook plus, which was basically a designation to say it meets a number of minimum specs, including at least an i3 processor, at least eight gigs of Ram. At least a 1080p display and there's a certain webcam spec it meets as well.

Obviously there's a million Chromebooks on the market varying price points, lots of really cheap crappy ones, a handful of more expensive, higher quality ones. And this is meant to say like this spec, you're getting a certain level of performance and so forth.

And. So I think that's a good thing. You know that if you're buying one of those, it should run pretty well. You're going to get the long, I think like 10 years of support they do now. At the time they announced, they were also going to bring some AI features to Chromebooks. And this month they actually released a lot of those.

There's basically three, there's three main things. One is like just a fun image generator you can use to make wallpapers and video backgrounds. There's like a handful of different styles and you just put in, I want a mountainscape with a purple lake in the front or that sort of thing.

Devindra: Okay, cool. Nate Chromebook plus also a style of Chromebooks that I was always a little skeptical about too. I don't think we have any sense of like how many people are actually buying these things. My thing is I know a thing is successful when I start to see it out in the wild with normal people.

I rarely see people outside of schools and businesses actually using Chromebooks, so certainly have not seen any Chromebook plus models either. In terms of these features, they seem cool, but also I guess I can't get really excited about it, right? Like I don't. Yeah. And Microsoft and all the other AI things are doing this too.

I don't know how useful the thing of just Hey, give me more texts. All right. Write this email for me, do this stuff for me. Is actually going to be because part of communicating is sitting down and thinking about getting those words. And I understand not everybody thinks they're a great writer or something, but I don't know if the AI will actually help or if people actually tap into it.

Do you have any sense of that, Nate? Have you used, you've been experimenting with some AI words lately we've seen in our Slack channel. Do you have a sense of like how people are using these things yet?

Nathan: Yeah. So what the feature is it's called help me write and it's system wide. So any text entry box, whether it's in a web app or an Android app or a, web form like LinkedIn or Twitter, you can write something in there and then click the help me write, and you can have it punch it up, or you can just give it a prompt and it'll fill in the text itself.

I agree with you. I don't, I just don't see it being useful. Like you said, part of the point of this is as you're writing, you sit down, you think about what you're trying to say. I think it's a little different for someone like you and me who make a lot of our living writing, but nonetheless, everybody communicates, everybody sends emails, everybody has thoughts in their head, and you put them down, and it sounds like you, usually, at the very least.

Whereas when you AI it, it doesn't sound like anyone. I don't really know what the point is of that.

Devindra: Yeah. So some of the AI texts you sent us Nate in Slack it just sounded like you were talking like Steve Rogers. You all of a sudden sounded like Captain America, hello team.

We're going to have a great day together. We're all going to accomplish all of our work and things like that. It just felt so disingenuous and unreal. I think the prompt there was like,

Nathan: send a heartfelt but slightly humorous greeting to my teammates as I get up this morning or something like that.

Basically, I could have just said, good morning, everyone. Not that I usually do that, I just thought it would be a funny way to kick off my little AI text experiment. I'm thinking so there's the, help me write, there's the AI background, which is just, for image

Devindra: generation,

Nathan: Although I'll be with a pretty narrowly defined set of rails, like you have to, you can't just put in whatever you want in this particular part of the tool.

But also the Chromebooks all have Gemini, the Gemini app built in now which is something, it's the same thing. I think you'd see if you go to the Gemini site and you start. Entering your text prompts. But what's interesting at least is that Google's also including, if you buy a new Chromebook plus they're including 12 months of their AI Google one plan.

So that's a 20 buck a month plan that gives you two terabytes of storage and drive as well as access to Gemini advanced. So just from a pure, monetary standpoint, that's a pretty good thing. And even if you never touched the Gemini advanced, The storage itself is worth, a hundred bucks a year.

So you're getting a decent little for a decent little boost there.

Devindra: Yeah. Just for when you're, I want to point this out and I don't want to sound like I'm just picking on Google because I love to pick on Google especially when they have expensive products that I think have a very limited appeal.

But the whole thing about like image generation as a con, as a background creation tool, or. Also seems like a nothing burger to me. And honestly, I feel this way about co pilot and the chat GPT all this stuff, Dolly, Dolly's like image generation too. Cool. Cool. That I can write a word, a string of texts and have a really interesting detailed image appear.

What the hell do I do with that? Am I going to use that for to send to my friends? I'm going to use it to create things, to plug into presentations. That's what Microsoft thinks you'll do. On Google sites, just Hey, cool backgrounds, man. Cool backgrounds for your, for your Chromebook, you could, you, five seconds, you can find a cool background image, online.

I was going to say that the

Nathan: funny thing is that I started playing around a little bit and got like a kind of a handful of kind of cool pictures, but. I would rather almost always use some of the other included wallpapers. They have a great on Chromebooks and on Android, they have an extensive image library with lots of like really gorgeous landscapes and cityscapes.

I've always actually really appreciated that about those devices. And so I'd much rather just use those. Then make anything with AI

Devindra: Windows and Macs, right? Like both Microsoft and Apple have done a good job of getting really cool. Nice. But photographic imagery that just looks cool. It looks chill.

Like I don't feel like the aerials

Nathan: that they added to Mac iOS last year. Super cool. Super cool. Huge file sizes that can quickly take up your hard drive. If you. Go ham like I did and download a ton of them, that's okay.

Devindra: Yeah, it's the idea of the aerial stuff is good because that was taken from Apple TV 4k, but that was just like, Hey, what if video screensaver melts into photorealistic wallpaper?

Beautiful stuff.

Nathan: There was speaking of images. There was one last tool they included here. Which is Google photos the magic editor, which I believe has been available on the pixel devices for a while. And then I think more recently it's moved to more Android devices and I think iOS as well.

But you haven't been able to use it on a laptop until now, because you can get the Google photos app on the Chromebook. And then there you can do things like, select certain parts of the photo and move them around or resize them, change the background or the the color of the sky, that sort of thing.

I have a real issue with that, just broadly speaking, because I don't like to Take photos and make it really easy to completely manipulate them into a reality that didn't happen. You're going to have a bad

Devindra: time over the next few years,

Nathan: Nate.

Devindra: Yeah. I know

Nathan: that people have been doing that on Photoshop for years, obviously.

But that takes skill and training to, to make something look good. Whereas now you can just like literally circle a person and delete them from the picture. And obviously your results will vary. I'm sure they're not as good in real life as they are in Google's highly controlled, demos and that sort of thing, but yeah.

Magic editor. It's a weird one. I haven't used it much yet. I'm going to play around that just so I can know more about it. But

Devindra: it is odd. It's it's odd. It's cool image editing. Easy image editing is something a lot of people would want. So I get that. I also feel like in Google and Microsoft and everybody opening eye to, they want you to pay these monthly fees.

They want you to have. Basically pay money to get cloud powered AI going. And when there's more stuff on device, like what Microsoft is talking about with their co pilot plus systems, maybe what we'll see from Apple in iOS and macOS this year you won't be paying a subscription for that. So that's a whole other like way of positioning this stuff.

They just want you to pay more money, right? That's it. They just want you to pay a recurring fee that you'll pay forever because you want to. Type a string of text and make a pretty image,

Nathan: yeah. And I'm going to play around with it because I now have Gemini advance, but I opened to Gemini and I look at it and I'm like, I have no idea what I want to do with this.

Like nothing pops into my head. It's a blank, it's a blank canvas and I have no tools at my disposal to go at it. And I suppose maybe that's my own limited thinking. But I just don't see it being something I would certainly, I wouldn't pay an extra 10 a month for. Yeah. On top of just getting Google drive storage, like right now not a factor whatsoever.

That's how I've been with all AI stuff. And I think, part of that is just like personal resistance too, because I don't see it being useful. And so I think I need to get over that a little bit and play with it more and start to try to understand what people do see in this. But, in terms of thing as a consumer product, I just don't think it's there yet.

It's not even close to being something that has a clear use case that people will want to spend money on.

Devindra: These companies really want AI to be the thing like that people get excited about in all their new platforms, but it's I don't know how useful any of this stuff will be.

Nathan: No, and I think we've seen, People discuss recently how it's really just been like a weird domino thing where it's somebody, open AI starts doing it and then Google and Microsoft scramble to catch up because, and then all of a sudden, once they're in, everybody's in and now everyone's trying to like air quotes catch up, but I don't know if they're trying to catch up to just, I, and I think lots of millions of other people just going on with their lives.

Doing using their computers the way they used to, this has not revolutionized anything yet. And this,

Devindra: this doesn't change it whatsoever. I think there may be more subtle tools going on. Like right now, what we're dealing with right now Nate, with your audio, actually your Mac, you're using a MacBook pro.

Has certain like voice isolation capabilities. We're not going to turn those on because our podcast editor wants clean audio to do their own. Their own edits on this stuff, but that's the idea is that you could do maybe real time transformations on things. There are currently jackhammers outside of Nate's window.

And if he could hit a button and just have those disappear because the the neural engine on his Mac can see that audio. We can actually do that stuff right now. And I feel like that sort of thing. It's going to be more useful to people the whole studio effects thing that Apple has and Microsoft is introducing to like the ability to do things that used to be complex and maybe hit your GPU quite a bit and also eat a battery life.

Those should be more efficient with an MPU, the neural processing unit that are on, new Intel laptops, new AMD laptops the neural engine that's on max. I guess that's the idea, but these like generative AI tools, I just don't know if those are the things, yeah.

Nathan: Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it because, I think the other thing that gets missed in this conversation so often is the fact that We have been, introduced to and using plenty of AI based tools, like what you mentioned for cleaning up audio automatically, or I think, maybe five years ago, I think Apple put the first neural engine in the iPhone, and none of us really knew what that meant at the time, but I think it's enabled a lot of things like the improvements they're seeing to photo processing, both, in Apple's phones as well as Google's phones, right?

There's a reason why the pixels are so good at producing great images. And that's because of the quality of the image, engine, I think. And like a lot of that stuff probably has to do with what's happened in the backend. So like that stuff, absolutely useful, but like generative stuff.

I still don't see it.

Devindra: Yeah, it's I guess it's tough to see it. Like the idea of Hey, I'm going to send you a 50 page PDF. Can you just get me a bullet point so I can feel like I'm up to speed with whatever this discussion is like that stuff could be useful, that stuff isn't fully available yet.

Open AI is multimodal. Like you can drop some things in there and ask you questions about it. I don't know how well it's doing with those sorts of summaries. That's part of the dream of copilot and copilot plus and everything that You could just send a PDF to Windows and have it deal with stuff.

I think one of the interesting features Microsoft showed off, Nate, is recall, which is the ability to just remember everything you've done on your computer because we're ba we have bad memories, but also it's rightly getting criticized for being potentially a huge invasion of privacy, potentially a huge security hold for a lot of people.

Do you have any thoughts on that, by the way, Nate, like just Of recalled you that was the thing announced last week and yeah, I remember huge fans of that.

Nathan: Yeah, that's really interesting. Talk to me a little bit about what the main, you alluded to it. But again, it's the kind of thing I could see being useful.

Also, yes I assume this is sending a lot of the data about what you do in your computer back to Microsoft. It's not sending it.

Devindra: It's not sending it. They say they're not sending it. It's local. But still, people are like even if it's like a local database of stuff, even if you've encrypted it with whatever, with the Windows stuff that's still a potential issue.

And also, it's enabled by default, and people may not be fully aware of what is captured. I see the issues there. Yeah. Yeah. The

Nathan: default is not a great move. They definitely, it's feature where if you like edit, you need to have a huge demo section. Like when you boot up after the update, like we have this new thing called this.

Here's how it works. And here's the privacy disclosures and. And here's where you can turn it on if you want and how to turn it off if you don't want, but I hear there is

Devindra: in the onboarding for when you get a new computer, I do hear that you will get an option to enable it there, but that's like when you do this on a Windows computer now, you get do you want to enable personalized advertising?

Do you want to tailor, location stuff? And I think most people don't even read those things and just click it to, I just want to use my computer. So that's fair. The bigger problem, hey, we don't know what's going to happen with any of this stuff, but all these companies are basically betting billions on the idea that we are going to really want AI tools and this stuff is going to make or break their I don't know their entire industries at this point.

So we'll be keeping an eye on it and actually related to this, Apple announced their WWDC 2024 plans. This week the keynote is going to be June 10th at 1 PM Eastern. I'm hoping to be there with at least one other person from Engadget. We shall see who we're still. Like finalizing our plans, but we're gonna, we're expecting to hear a lot more about AI.

There, there have been the reports about Apple essentially like working, trying to get deals with both Google and open AI about bringing their, generative search tools into Mac OS. Potentially even iOS too. So I think the latest rumor was that like, it seems like the open AI deal has happened or is happening.

We're also expecting Apple to talk more about their own, like built in generative, maybe not generative, but their own built in AI tools. Certainly some sort of like model some of their own local models is going to do some work. And I guess that stuff is cool, Nate. That's where I'm like, if CoPilot itself or Siri.

We're actually smart and I can actually say, Hey, can, what? What are my appointments right now? Can you reschedule this appointment and just talk to it naturally and have things get done? I feel like that is a useful thing for a lot of people.

Nathan: Yeah, and I think that's probably what's been missing most from Siri, et cetera over the years.

People love to smash Siri and I think that if, you know rightfully you

Speaker: can. Yeah.

Nathan: I think if you know what it can do and what you want to get out of it, it can work. But I think what you're saying is I'd love to say, Hey, what are my appointments today and have it understand that I have multiple calendar apps installed and to be able to look into those and say, yeah, okay, I can see all this stuff versus big you don't use Apple calendar.

So you're out of luck and I know that it's not that limited at this point. But it's also not that transparent to somebody again, that's the problem is like to get these like wonderful use case scenarios that all these companies like to show off, you've got to be like practically a software engineer yourself to to make it happen.

Devindra: Yeah, exactly. Hey, I think the idea of just wanting to speak to your computer and have it like we Google talked a lot about this to having a computer cater to your needs rather than you learning the behaviors of computer. I think that is a really interesting inflection point and it is something we're moving towards.

So we shall see,

Nathan: it's an, it's a noble goal that we are not yet there on do you think

Devindra: there's any hardware at this year? I feel like probably no, but probably no, but it is weird. I have not seen any rumors of M4 MacBooks at this point, because it also feels like we just got a lot of new hardware from Apple, but it is very strange that the iPad pro is the only M4 device right now.

I wonder if they're going to tease something. There have been rumors about other types of devices from Apple. But yeah, there's no real like hardware rumors leading into this WWDC. I think they're going to spend a lot of time talking about vision pro like vision OS and like the stuff they're doing around that.

And they've proven that, Hey, they can really reshape the way you know, the vision pro works just by software because they didn't have enough time to bake in all the features. I'm expecting to hear more about that. It's going to be all AI, most likely like all AI and how AI is going to build itself into iOS macOS and everything.

That's my guess. But we shall see. So you know what, folks, let us know. It makes me tired just thinking

Nathan: about

Devindra: it. Yeah. I'm so tired. I'm so tired at this point. Let us know folks what you want to see from DubDub this year. And yeah, how you think these AI tools are going to you. What will, what are the AI capabilities you're really looking forward to?

Drop us an email at podcastandengadget. com. Also sell this news. This week, the Fitbit Ace LTE Google's Fitbit division has basically produced this it's a wearable, like gaming smartwatch for kids, but it also has LTE and also has like tracking features for parents too. So it looks like something that can help kids get around.

Get outdoors and go have fun. And it's Tamagotchi like depending on their movement, but it also has like communication abilities. So kids can get in touch with their parents and parents can see where they are. I don't know if you have thoughts about this, Nate, but this happened and Trillian wrote up a really nice hands on this thing.

So I want to acknowledge that Google is making hardware again, a little bit.

Nathan: Yeah. I like this just from, again, I have no idea if this is going to where I'm sure it won't. It reminds me of how Apple introduced with the Apple Watch the sort of like family setup where you can have somebody who's got the master control over these connected devices so that kids can't like, go wild and whatever but the game stuff, I don't know, it just, it seems like a cheeky bit of fun that, Isn't trying too hard.

Like it seems like goofy and unique enough to be potentially fun. But again, like no idea what chance there is for this to reach an inflection point where enough people will be using these things of kids will be using these things that it goes anywhere. That said, one of our editors, Cheyenne McDonald, loves Tamagotchi.

She has a wrist worn one. She wears like a watch. And I would love to see her try this thing on and and see what kind of fun she can have with this thing, because she has already proven herself to be into quirky little games that you wear on your wrist, so I feel like she's the perfect one to check that out.

Devindra: This specifically does seem like a thing for kids, though, is the thing. Tamagotchi, I feel they were kids toys, but You could almost make it a little kitschy, right? As a teenager or even as a young adult? Or like actual, yeah, definitely. There's like a

Nathan: huge kitch factor. I dunno if that's sneer for this now, for this thing, no.

'cause there's no legacy, there's no, history, there's no oh, I have fond memories of this when I was, if there're a teen or whatever. So yeah it's, it is very much geared towards children. It says seven and up is what they're targeting on.

But, I feel like you look at this thing in the visuals and the way it looks and I'm like, this is a 7 to 11 or 12 device at best.

Devindra: Yeah. Which is fine. Yeah. It's like a time before your kids will have smartphones, most likely. Stuff like that. Exactly. Yeah. But you can get in touch

Nathan: with them if you need to.

You can, whatever. That's what I get Apple pitch with the watch LTE is that you can have a kid wear it and they can contact you, but no one else or whatever. Yeah,

Devindra: I think that's why this thing exists. Like Apple or Google doesn't really have a good option for you. It's just give your kid a thing and be like, okay, this will be part of our family plan.

And we know where you are. We can get in touch with you in case of emergency. Whereas I know a lot of people do that with the Apple watch, that is something yeah. My daughter is going to be going to like kindergarten and public school soon. Like in a couple of years, she'll be doing stuff in like lower grade levels.

And I don't want to like microchip my kid, but if my, if she could have a thing that could just keep her in touch with us, with my wife and I, like when we need to, I feel like I don't think that's too overboard parenting wise. And I think a lot of people would be into it and kids. Want to do it too. Like sometimes they need that reach out ability too.

So something I'm considering and that's what the Apple watch ended up being good for. I don't think Apple even considered that at the beginning of the night. So it's just how it worked out. So I guess once again Google's maybe a couple of years too late to offering something like this, but okay.

I could see how it could be useful. That's the whole thing. Nate, you wanted to talk about this interview, which I think is really wild. There was an interview published by Sony with Naughty Dog head, Neil Druckmann, where he talked about AI allowing us to do things. And then Sony ended up pulling that interview and Druckmann also, I think on Twitter was like, Hey, I, this is not the full extent of what I said.

Here's a direct quote from me. What the hell happened here?

Nathan: Yeah, this was wild. I pay a lot of attention to Naughty Dog, they make some of my favorite games. Oh, we know names, we know. As you, if you've listened to me talk before, you know this. And so yeah, Sony published this interview, it's like a big like studio show off our creative talents and talk about the future of interactive entertainment and that sort of thing.

So Druckmann obviously with the success of the HBO series as well as the games. Logical choice for this, right? And yeah, there were two things that got the internet mad, one of which is the AI bit you mentioned, and the second one's where he talked about how the new game Naughty Dog is working on would quote unquote redefine gaming as we know it.

Something to that extent. Very highfalutin, very made him sound like a bit of an egotistical maniac to some degree, if you want to look at it, through a sort of cynical eye. And then, yeah, a few days later, he goes on to, after there's been some backlash and some upset, talk around this, he goes on Twitter and literally drops the receipts.

He's here's the transcript of what I said 450 words, and then here's what it was condensed into 100 words. But to go even further, a gaming reporter his name has escaped me right now, but it's in our story. He went out there and looked at the transcript and compared it to the answer and bolded all of the words in the answer that didn't appear in what he actually said and it was almost the entire quote like it seems like Sony made up whole cloth some of these quotes, which is just bonkers.

And it's not often you see some, somebody like directly contradict like a giant corporate overlord like Sony, obviously Druckmann has tons of power on his own, but still to just go on Twitter and be like, no, this isn't what I said is a pretty like unusual move. And then it gets even better because Sony removed the interview, but instead of just like taking the page down and pretending it never happened, they actually put up an apology page saying we've removed this because it contained quote significant errors And yeah, and then, when he said like what the errors were there's a great, there's a great quote where it says We have found several significant errors and inaccuracies that don't represent its respective values, including topics such as animation, writing, technology, AI, and future projects, which is basically the entire

Speaker 7: interview.

Oh, yeah.

Devindra: I almost wonder what the hell happened here because, hey, these interviews are conducted by basically like in house media people. Sometimes they're former journalists. Sometimes it's just like a PR person that's like transcribing an interview. So It's tough to tell like how this stuff went down. I almost wonder if some of this was AI transcribed and they like just didn't do it or something like that.

That would be a

Nathan: conspiracy theory.

Devindra: That'd be the full thing to go around. But Hey, I will admit I use AI transcription tools sometimes too. Like it's a really good thing when it works, but you have to go over it and make sure the words actually are actually spelled right. And refer to the things you think they refer to.

This is just wild. Also speaking about

Nathan: Neil, if you're listening. I listen to the interviews I record and type them all out word for word. Happy to have a chat sometime about Naughty Dog's future projects. I will not make up entire

Devindra: quotes. I promise. You promise. Listen, you're like you are the Naughty Dog like fan right now, Nate.

So yeah.

Nathan: Yeah. We've got a Sony there's a Sony state of play tonight. So supposedly 14 new games in 30 minutes. I have my fingers crossed for some news on this new project, but not holding my breath. Also,

Devindra: let's briefly talk about this. There was the story too, that apparently both the Atlantic and Vox Media announced that they have made deals with OpenAI to essentially, what is it, allow their content to be absorbed, but also they'll be paid for it.

That's essentially. Yeah,

Nathan: They didn't talk about terms, obviously, but basically OpenAI has been making these deals with several large publications or publications, large and small say. Where they're, they will ingest their contents and, chat GPT will use it as a source for when you're asking questions and that sort of thing.

In this case for both Fox media and the Atlantic they made a point to note that there will be citations. So chat GPT will say, based on, this report from so and and with links out to the original sources which I sounds to me like a way of getting ahead of the whole concern of AI is going to kill, Publishing because it won't direct people to these pages anymore.

It'll just summarize the articles for you and no one will click on the actual article.

Devindra: Maybe it won't matter if you're getting paid, right? If the media companies are getting paid for that. And I actually don't see a huge problem with that because Google's doing it already. Google is crawling the internet, right?

And like every media company, everybody on the internet has like a deal with the devil with Google. You have to be good for Google's SEO. You have to be good to play nice with Google to rank well and stuff like that. And now it's yeah, the Google, that's a really good

Nathan: point. This is just a kind of a different flavor of that.

I suppose I feel like we are beholden

Devindra: to these companies that essentially control the internet or at least media on the internet. And people are looking at stuff like opening eyes, like summaries and everything as being like the next intranet in a way, or at least. It's the next way we engage with what's online.

Next it's the new search, right? It's the new search. Essentially. What is funny is that the Atlantic last week published the post called media companies are making a huge mistake with AI. And notably, this is not like by a staff writer. This is by Jessica lesson who like, this is some inside media stuff is she is the founder and owner of the information.

Which is a major technology news site. So this is almost like a guest piece, Yeah, it feels like an

Nathan: opinion. And of course, I appreciate the like separation of the newsroom and the business side of this case. It's interesting you mentioned that too, because I got a newsletter from Vox.

com, the news site, not the media organization, but they're flagship news sites and the newsletters, obviously, and they had a similar thing talking about all the risks of AI and how it's going to affect media and that sort of thing. Obviously the newsrooms are thinking about this whilst the business side of things goes ahead, and I was going to say that it feels like, you said you either make the deal with the devil if you're or if you're a powerful enough, like a New York Times, who is suing open AI for all this, you can sue them.

But I think most companies aren't in a position where they can do that. And now they're like, okay we'll get some revenue hopefully out of this. And of course, I actually don't fault Atlantic or Vox media or any of the other companies has done this because recognizing it's a difficult situation.

And it's easy for me to jokingly poke fun at these companies when, there's an equally a chance that our parent company will go ahead and do something similar in the next We have no personal

Devindra: say

Nathan: about what happens at Yahoo or No, this could easily happen.

Devindra: Yeah.

Nathan: And of course, I think again, worth noting that neither Vox nor The Atlantic talked about.

Generating articles or content with AI, right? It's not that kind of thing. I think that's the real,

Devindra: the real concern. Like the more of the clip, more closely you align yourself with these AI companies. Hey use some of our tools. Let's do some, Hey, you want some auto summaries of your stories? You can use our tools to do that.

And a lot of sites have auto summary stuff happening like already. But who knows? Who knows? That's eventually going to be a thing that. I, you could right now can get a simplified version of a webpage on iOS or I think even max now. So it's like a little bit of an AI engine in a future iPhone.

Just be like, Hey, just can you summarize this whole thing for me? That's like where we're going. So even if it's happening on device. Same kind of same problem, but maybe at least you get the ad revenue for that, Like maybe at least it sees the page at some point. We don't know how any of this stuff works It's all black magic folks.

I've been writing for the internet since 2009 And nobody has any clue about how it all works Unfortunately and

Nathan: to throw back to the the thing in chrome os the whole like help me write thing I'm like, okay, so we're gonna start using help me write to create, articles and then You know, Google and Gemini or chat GPT will summarize those AI created articles with a new summary.

And I'm like, Oh God, this is. Very much a snake eating its tail situation. We are clear. No, I'm, we're not using these things to create articles. We're not using these things yet,

Devindra: but maybe who knows, maybe we will use a summary thing. I just feel like for media companies who are currently facing some serious issues, Hey, we had our own round of layoffs.

Pretty much every major media site has dealt with this. They have to do something they have to do something to make money or to stay afloat while they figure out what to do with this whole new terrain of publishing, which will involve AI in some form. So it sucks. This is a crummy place to be folks, but we'll be reporting on it and let us know let us know.

Are you actually using the AI summary tools on some sites? The how are Google's recommended, search results and stuff that are up top their AI search results. Are those preventing you from clicking sites? Like I'd love to know how people are actually using this stuff. Nate, you know what?

Maybe we shouldn't be so worried about open AI because there's a new safety team. Led by its board members, including CEO Sam Altman, so therefore everything's fine.

Nathan: I'd love to have the CEO, whose only concern is the bottom line, also be involved with things like trust and safety.

Devindra: Yeah. They just two weeks ago, they dissolved the existing trust and safety team, which included people who may actually say no to some things.

And now this new one is just basically an opening eyes entire board and the CEO who was Again ousted last year for a weekend because the board could not trust the ceo. So I don't know. I don't know what's happening. This is

Nathan: a new this is a new board, right? That's now loyal to the ceo. It is a new board

Devindra: because yeah ilya satskever.

John likey ilya satskever was one of the people on the board who also voted to push sam altman out He apologized now he's off to do his own thing. But yeah, it is. You It's not exactly heartening Nate that such a powerful company in the media and technology landscape now is like a mess internally in terms of how it's being run.

That's not great.

We've got a couple of questions or some emails from listeners I want to shout out an email from Darren. I don't have your location here, but basically thoughts on Copilot Plus from a screen reader user. They write, I'm a screen reader user and notwithstanding the incredible leaps forward on built in accessibility features across most major platforms.

Windows is still the only desktop OS where there is a choice between multiple screen readers. A phenomenal productivity enabler when dealing with inaccessible websites or apps. So they're saying JAWS or job access with speech, which is a popular commercial screen reader natively supports arm. So they are looking forward to using a copilot plus PC that potentially has better battery life.

and performance. Also they're hoping that Microsoft will double down on supporting developers making native arm apps. We mentioned this x64 and x86 apps. It's the older stuff, like the older Intel chips and AMD chips aren't going away anytime soon, but arm seems like the focus. Darren writes overall, I'm not overly excited by AI itself, but if copilot plus brings about a more compelling windows on arm experience, that might be enough for me to go all in.

With my next laptop purchase. I think this is this is a good use case and certainly not a thing we talk about too much either. When I used to work in it, I've had to set up screen reader tools for people and it was always an interesting technology that barely worked. And I do think as we are, getting more powerful AI tools, potentially, like this is the sort of thing that could get better.

Do you have any thoughts on this, Nate?

Nathan: I think it's like a pretty important accessibility tool, right? So I think if ARM can make a difference there, like that sounds great to me. This made me just wonder have you gotten to use the new ARM based machines outside of the hands on?

At Microsoft,

Devindra: I've not seen the new ones yet, and I want to point out here specifically, Darren says they are hoping Microsoft will double down on supporting developers making native ARM apps. That's a big takeaway there. I don't want to. They should, I'm right, they

Nathan: have to if they're going to, if these computers are going to be successful.

They have to. Obviously the emulation is better this time than it was a few years ago. But that's not a long term solution.

Devindra: Yeah. So they say, but also this is Microsoft, like there, you can run some windows 3. 1 or like some really early windows apps still within windows, because that's, they have to support like a really wide range of like software and old stuff.

Do think like the prism emulator will probably be around for a long time. I don't know, like when will the arm version of windows be like the main version of windows? I don't know if that's ever going to happen just because this is like a specific question that there are, I think the last numbers I saw, there are like 1.

4 billion windows, like 10 and 11 devices out there. So that's a lot. That's good. It's gonna be a

Nathan: lot of right. And you can't cut support for those anytime soon. They're all running relatively modern versions of the OS. I think it's crazy that we still talk about like the idea of running a Windows 3.

1 or like even a little later application. I'm like, who the hell needs to do that? And I know there's some legacy industries where that's the case. But I think they're so specific that consumer wise, Microsoft would say, okay, we're just going to make this transition. And then if you're a weird legacy customer, then contact us and we'll have solutions for you.

But maybe that's not the most efficient way to do it.

Devindra: Absolutely. So anyway, we're, this is a certainly interesting sea change in the way, like Windows devices can work and what they'll support, and this could mean good news. Things for people who really depend on these devices too, for a lot of things.

So anyway, we have another email from Rohan who is I think following up a question or an email he wrote last year about using an iPad as a contributor as a computer. This is a very long email, but I'm going to read a couple of graphs here. When the original iPad was announced, he writes, it was clearly called out that the device needs to do a few things better than your iPhone and your Mac, or else it doesn't have to exist.

And that was like, Poking at netbooks back then. I remember that. However, when they launched the iPad nearly a decade and a half ago, it is precisely a burden of legacy that Apple is moving away from. To sum it up, every, anything and everything we dislike during the PC era cannot be repeated. And to be fair, the iPad did not repeat many of the mistakes.

Rohan is saying essentially this is the legacy of what's happening now is like Apple is still so beholden to the idea of not repeating the PC. It may not have like fully. Fully engaged, like how people may actually want to use the iPad. So Rohan points out just the idea of supporting like a real browser, a full on desktop browser, not just like a desk, like a quote unquote desktop class browser.

Nathan: I would love to dig into that bit particularly because. Obviously I use the iPad a lot. I, and I, this is a genuine question. I want to know what separates the iPad browser from a quote unquote real browser. Here's a,

Devindra: here's an example. His wife is working on a project in the company she's working with uses Google suite.

They sent her a survey for review. For some reason, she couldn't open it on her iPad on any browser, but it opened just fine on her iPhone running Chrome.

Nathan: So that doesn't make sense. Doesn't make sense.

Devindra: Cause.

Nathan: I'm not saying he's wrong, but I don't know why that would be we don't know There's I actually use and it's interesting.

I use the Google Apps on the iPad, but also I've used the web apps in Safari and they work fine

Devindra: It's like when it gets some more complicated like hey Dealing with multiple attachments and things like that because file system is our CMS

Nathan: also. Yeah RCM It mostly works on an iPad But there's like a weird scroll error where I'm looking at our list of stories.

I can't get to the bottom where we can go to the next page.

Devindra: The iPad is made to basically like you have to engage in things through an app. That was like the idea of the iPad. And I don't feel like they've ever really fully moved on from that. So Ron says, because of this issue, they had to purchase a refurbished Mac book that runs a proper version of Chrome.

Yeah, that is just a weird things. Let me wonder how

Nathan: this will change now that apple has to open up the web the web browser engines and Support things besides webkit like chromium the current chrome browser on ios and ipad is still running is running webkit. It's like a thing on top of webkit

Devindra: Yeah,

Nathan: right.

So but I think that soon if not I think it's not available yet, but I think at some point you'll be able to run the full, Chrome using their engine. And that'll be interesting.

Devindra: I think that'll be like, like a real computer rather than a closed off like specialized Apple ecosystem. I feel like that's only going to be a good thing for consumers as much as Apple hates it.

And I'm sure it's going to lead to like more like malware and junk and potential vulnerabilities on your iPad, but. That may be a thing we have to live with for a more open type of computing. Rohan points out a couple of other things here. Just issues they've noticed the health app on his iPad won't sync.

I guess like with his iPhone stuff, he's on M1 air. Hey, I've noticed that too. The health app just doesn't even track things properly for me. That's a, it's a weird thing. Apple news puzzles won't sync progress between iPad and iPhone. Don't get him started on iMessage sync files is broken, does not find a file.

If he enters a full name correctly, even if taking care of the case and everything, there are a lot of these weird software issues and they, I don't know if you've just learned to deal with them, but like we talked about during the iPad pro episode if you wanted to record that episode with us on our streaming platform right now, I don't think you could do it.

I don't think there's only one

Nathan: audio stream support at a time. I, so I don't know, again, not discounting his experience, but this just sounds like using technology issues. Like I don't have any problems that I message saying it could be the platform

Devindra: that it came through, but I see this all the time.

Here's the thing, like having worked in it, like this is it. This is the most annoying part of it. Everyone's got these random

Nathan: use cases. Everybody's got something that isn't working.

Devindra: And it doesn't make sense that something would work on the iPhone and not

Nathan: the iPad. No, I recently was trying to figure out something to this.

And I was like, where's all the storage going and looking at like my messages and, sync is fine. Like I get everything on all my devices. But like in terms of the storage it's using, I can't figure out why I'm like one machine is taking up 20 gigs and one machine is taking up 10. And, how do I How do I reduce this?

And yeah, the whole thing is just crazy.

Devindra: It's such a mess. Anyway, that's a cool, thank you for the emails, everybody. It's always good to talk about this stuff. Drop us more notes at podcasting gadget. com. We love your feedback. Let's move on to what we're working on. Anything you want to shout out, Nate?

Nathan: Yeah, I will probably be doing a lot of Chromebook stuff in the next few weeks as well as yeah, getting ready for WWDC and summer game fest. I don't. I think I'm attending of those in person, but certainly we'll be helping out on the home front with

Devindra: all the news. Cool, cool. Yeah, I'll also be, like, preparing for WWDC at this point.

Maybe another short trip, but looking forward to seeing things there. I'm also currently writing up a hands on the Vision Pro what if. Experience that whole thing. I was trying to get it done yesterday and just did not have time. It's interesting, but it's it's a mess.

It looks really cool because everything on the vision pro looks amazing. Thanks to those screens and like the power there, but playing it is not great. Because it, this thing was not made for, Games really. So like I'm saying,

Nathan: so it's both an, it's both like a air quotes movie and a game kind of it's like an interactive,

Devindra: it's like any VR experience you've had, which are some, sometimes you're watching something.

And sometimes it's Hey, you have to hold your fists up and point lasers. You're essentially like one of those people working who like the doctor strange people, like the, people with magic powers, you're one of those folks. You're collecting infinity stones. You have to use the shield and.

You go pew lasers and none of it feels very good because it's all controlled by hand tracking and it's like a mess, but it does look cool. And it's a cool, free experiment, I think from Marvel and the ILM interactive folks. So yeah. Could be a hint of what's to come. I think that's the best I could say about it.

Nathan: Yeah, for free too. I can't get too mad about it, right? Yeah, free if you have a vision

Devindra: pro,

Nathan: that's a fair caveat.

Devindra: Totally fair. Any pop culture picks for us this week, Nate?

Nathan: Yeah, so I there's this band out of the UK called Dotter. Last year they released their first album in six years.

And while unfortunately they didn't tour for it they just released this amazing thing. YouTube video of them performing the songs live with some of their friends And it's at this gorgeous studio in the middle of the uk somewhere like in this big farm what would love to go there and play some music myself someday and it's really cool because it's all shot, with one camera basically there's one guy who films each song moving throughout the room And and then each song is a new take or whatever, but like each song is its own take and it all culminates with the last tune where the singer she's singing in this room by herself the beginning of the song is very quiet It's just her and her guitar And then at the midway point this whole like Orchestral band comes in and she puts the guitar down and walks through the studio Into another room where the whole rest of the band is there playing and she joins them and it's just gorgeous song You Gorgeous filming really unique stuff.

If you like slightly sad, but really pretty indie music arcade fiery type

Devindra: stuff sounds like arcade fire type stuff maybe.

Nathan: Not as much bombast more you know quieter, like the national a little bit but That sort of thing. They're great. They're on the nationals label.

So there you go. I'm thinking that thank you for the whiny

Devindra: indie rock nate Yes. No, it's no she's she doesn't whine she emotes She emos. Close very close. I want to shout out a movie called hitman which is going to be on netflix soon This is not the adaptation the two adaptations of the hitman video games.

This is The Richard Linklater film, which is a ton of fun. Really? It's funny. It's romantic. It's just like genuinely endearing. It stars Glenn Powell, who's like the new it guy in Hollywood. He was in Top Gun 2. He's in a rom com this year that everybody loved. He's going to be in a, that Twisters sequel coming up.

And it's a fun premise. Twisters. I don't know if I'm going to be excited about Twisters, but he looks fun. Like I like him and pretty much everything. And the premise for this movie is really fun too. Cause he plays a professor who's like a boring dude, like a boring nerd. But he moonlights as somebody who helps police.

He's also like a tech guy. So he helps police like capture criminals. Like he helps with the wiring and stuff. And it gets to a point where essentially he. It's helping police by pretending to be a hired hitman and it's like a way to entrap people who would call up a hitman to murder family members or whatnot.

That's the premise and things get a little wild from there. I think this movie is a lot of fun. It's in not many theaters right now, but if you can see it there, that would be great. It's also going to hit Netflix on June 7th. Just a week

Nathan: then. And I was gonna say, yeah, it's been out for a little bit, right?

It's been out in theaters for a week,

Devindra: I think, at this point. But yeah, Glenn Powell's fantastic. Adria Orjana, who is who is in. What's the star Wars and or she's been a bunch of things. She's also fantastic in this great cast, really funny script, just a good time. Just like a good feel good movie that I think hits all the right notes.

So check it out, folks. That's hit man on Netflix. Now this all reminds me too, that I I finally started watching the pair. Obviously I'm late to the party, but damn, it's good. It's very good. Wait till you get to season two, Nate. That's it for this week, folks. Our theme music is by game composer, Dale North.

And our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O'Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Elman. You can find me online and at DaVentura on Blue Sky, Twitter, all over Mastodon. Where can we find you, Nate? I'm mostly on threads

Nathan: these days at Nate Ingram. I don't post frequently, but I lurk around and read.

And when I have. Stupid thoughts. That's where they end up.

Devindra: Not Twitter though. Yeah. Sorry. Not Twitter. Not Twitter. You can email us at podcastinggadget. com. Also say hi to Sherlynn. Tell her if you miss her or whatever, leave us a review on iTunes and subscribe on anything that gets podcast folks.

Thanks. We're out.

Microsoft is leaning even more into AI after launching a new Copilot+ AI PC initiative earlier this year. It's a new set of standards for PCs with powerful neural processing units (NPUs), and it could be just as significant for Windows as Apple's move towards its M-series chips. In this episode, Cherlynn and Devindra discuss Copilot+ and the potential rise of Arm-based Windows systems, and we dive into the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop.

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

Topics

• Microsoft announces a new chapter with Copilot+ and NPU-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop – 0:51

• Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI is just getting started – 37:17

• Sonos Ace headphones take aim at Apple’s AirPods Max – 42:15

• US Department of Justice makes its first arrest for AI-generated CSAM – 45:50

• Bloomberg Report: Humane AI seeks a buyer for $700m–$1B, but will they get it? – 47:21

• Listener Mail: Could you port the new ARM-based Windows to your Android handheld? – 51:42

• Working on – 53:11

• Pop culture picks – 54:19

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Credits 

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