Apple Wants to Control Your Universe

AS: I think people would be genuinely disturbed about how much of Gadget Labs technical support is, “Have you tried turning it on and off again? Off and then on. Try it again. Just do it again, mom. It’s fine.”

MC: Log out, log back in. Restart.

JC: The scarier thing that I wanted to mention is with everyone … Obviously Apple promoting this interoperability is going to get people to buy and use more of its own services, but that also is going to create even bigger of a bubble that people live in. And you already see, we all know about the green bubble effect and iMessage, how people who use iPhones and they text Android users and they get the green bubble instead of the blue bubble, and sometimes they can treat those people differently than they would if they got a blue bubble.

AS: It makes me physically sick.

JC: Case in point: Adrienne. There’s this worry that the more people are becoming more tightly entrenched to this Apple ecosystem, if you give people a negative experience with people that because maybe they can’t afford to buy a Mac and they buy a Windows machine but if the experience there is annoying for that Apple user to interact with that other person, and then they might literally change the way they act toward that person. That is something that has happened and I think that is definitely some problem of how Apple decides to treat people that don’t buy its own devices.

MC: That’s a very good point.

AS: That’s a really good point, yeah.

MC: Well, look, we have to wrap this up. So let’s take another break, and when we come back, we’ll do recommendations.

[Break]

MC: All right. Here’s the last segment of our show, where we all give our recommendations for things that we want everybody to enjoy. Adrienne, you get to go first. What’s your recommendation?

AS: So just in this past week, there’ve been this whole slew of articles about how this summer is just going to be a hot mess for everyone. Nobody even knows what they’re going to be doing. So my recommendation is for everybody to just chill out and get themselves a two-piece bathing suit. Two people on at WIRED have bought this on Bay Swimwear, two-piece bathing suits. It’s women-owned company recycled, and they fit really well. They stay on. I don’t even know what you’re going to be doing with your vaccinated summer, but my recommendation is a swimsuit that’s actually going to stay on.

MC: Very nice. Should I also get a two-piece? Is that your advice to me?

AS: Yes. And then we’ll all wear our matching two-pieces out to brunch, Mike. It’s going to be awesome.

MC: Julian, what’s your recommendation?

JC: So I hate wires, which is weird working at WIRED. But generally, when I’m organizing my desk, I have a system where I try to hide as many wires as I can and I used to just use this a hundred dollar desk that I bought off of Amazon and I used duct tape to hide all the wires behind the walls. Again, terrible idea, because that’ll peel off your paint. So instead, I’m testing currently this desk from this company called Secretlab. They make gaming chairs and other home furniture equipment. This new desk though, is designed to hide and help you hide all of your wires. And there’s different accessories that you can get, with magnets that you can just clip onto the underside of the desk, and all of that just makes it super easy to hide everything and make it look very wireless and very clutter-free.