An Apple Shortcuts masterclass

Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of slightly too complicated programming languages. I'm your friend David Pierce, and for reasons you're going to hear about really soon, I am sitting here deep in Apple shortcuts on my computer. I... have been basically sitting here coming up with all of the things that I do over and over on my computer. And it turns out there's a lot of them, like renaming files and resizing images and all these like little sort of...

busy worky things that you just like don't think about, but you do over and over again. I'm trying to automate them all the way. Again, for reasons we're going to get into in this episode. In this episode, we're going to do two things. First, I'm going to talk to V song about her review of the meta Ray-Ban display. That's the the new meta smart glasses with the actual screen in the right eye. She's been wearing them.

and sort of freaking out everybody in her life with them. She's done a review and we caught her just before she went on vacation to talk about her experience. I'm fascinated by what it's actually been like to live in these things. We're also going to talk to Stephen Robles, who you might know from his work on YouTube or on his podcast. There's just a lot of stuff he and I need to talk about.

He and I have been fighting about Apple shortcuts for a long time publicly on the internet. We yell at each other in blue sky. He's going to come on and he's going to try to convince me that Apple shortcuts is a good thing and it's not going to work because it's not. But he's going to try, and I admire that. After that, we're going to take a question from the VergeCast hotline. Lots to do, lots of fun stuff coming up. But first...

I'm going to see if I can automate it so that it goes on do not disturb every time I turn on my microphone because that seems like it would be useful. Wish me luck. This is The Verge Cast. We'll be right back. When will AI finally make work easier? How about today? Say hello to Gemini Enterprise from Google Cloud, a simple, easy to use platform letting any business tap the best of Google AI.

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Listen to Crucible Moments today. Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Like your teenage son, who has sprouted the sorriest excuse for a mustache you have ever seen. Get him an electric razor. And with Amazon early holiday deals, you'll save big. All right, we're back. V song is here wearing the very glasses we are here to talk about. Hi, V. Hi.

How are you holding up? Last time I saw you, I feel like you were mid, am I wearing too many gadgets existential crisis. How are you doing? Well, I got to remove one. So I'm doing slightly better now. This is thrilling. Yeah, I got to remove one, but on my desk, I have four different glasses cases. So some of this is facilitated by the fact that I only have one face.

Upon which to wear glasses. What are the four glasses? So we have the rocket glasses. We have the case for the display. That's these. We have the Even Realities G1 case. And then we have this giant mega tambourine of a case for the Oakley meta vanguards. So I think it looks like a little clutch, a little purse.

It does. It actually looks like a little Bluetooth speaker. If you had just held that up and been like, what is this? I would have been like, it's a Bose Bluetooth speaker. Yeah, no, it's a glasses case. It has a little grippy thing. So I feel like I'm either carrying a purse or a tambourine. Can't decide. I like it. Okay, so I'm excited to know that you've been trying this many because I want to talk about... what you're learning about smart glasses as a whole. But I want to start with...

And please correct me if I get this name wrong. The meta Ray-Ban display. Did I say all those? I know those are the words. Is that the order of the words? That is the correct order of the words. So this is clearly, I would say, like the most. mainstream interesting pair of smart glasses maybe ever. And so I think I'm fascinated to know I have not read your review. I don't know anything about what your experience has been except a little bit. We talked about it a week or so ago on the show.

I asked you to come with three things you like and three things you don't like. And then we'll get to big feelings afterwards. But let's, for the sake of balance, let's go back and forth. Thing you like, thing you don't like, thing you like, thing you don't like. Let's start with the thing you like about the Meta Ray-Ban display. So, one of the things I genuinely like about this pair of glasses is ironically the neural band. The neural band is actually quite good. It's, you know...

kind of an interesting take on all of these smart glasses that have existed that have a display. Like, it's how do you trigger it? How do you control it? And, you know...

Ones in the past, like the, what was it called? The Focals by North. They had like a little ring type of situation. It was like a joystick on a ring, if I remember right. Yeah, yeah. And some other companies right now are also going that route. And I find... that um not that useful given the fact that i already have smart rings so you know and this has the same problem too in the sense that like

There's no other sensors on it, and yet it is taking up space on my body. So just having a single gadget that... It's only purpose is to control the other one, like an accessory from my accessory. This is what I mean by we're entering wearable hell in some respect. Yeah, you do need that. But when you do use it and you're just swiping to kind of control the displays and the control...

just the controls in general, because like if you pinch and you turn, well, that's how you zoom into photos. That's how you raise the volume. I feel like a wizard. I just feel like a wizard on the side of a road just going like. drawing shapes into the air and like wow i i'm doing things and you know we had a taste of that with like apple watch and other smart watches that have gesture controls like the pinchy pinch and the flicky flick um

But it just makes me go like every wearable should be seriously looking into gestures because they're so convenient. They're very like intuitive, if you get it right. flicking to get rid of a notification is just so easy and once you're in the habit of it it's super intuitive to do. And, you know, it takes a hot second to learn all of the controls because it's like, oh, this is back. This is summon the display. Here comes the display. This is dismiss the display.

It's not like sign language, but you sort of do sign languagey things with your hands, right? It's basically just like you make sort of different motions in different shapes with your hand in order to get it to do various things. Yeah. It gets very fluid at some point, and the really cool thing about this is that when you have the Vision Pro, when you have Oculus headsets,

You get very used to putting your hand out in front because you're like, oh, the camera has to see my hand. The camera does not have to see your hand for this to work. You can put it behind your back. You can put it behind your head. It still works. I was going to ask you about the Vision Pro because it's that to me is the thing that this is competitive with, because like the reason you don't do the thing the Vision Pro does is because you can't.

put a bunch of cameras and all of the requisite compute into the glasses that you're wearing in order for this to make sense so meta there's one way to look at this where it like okay we had this constraint in the actual hardware that we had to go solve by building another device. There's another version of it that is like, no, we actually don't think downward firing cameras are the right answer to this. This is a better way. So is it...

Is it like a good solution to a problem or is it an actual better way to do this? Like, should the Vision Pro have a neural band? I guess it's kind of the question I'm asking. I actually think it is better. But like, I don't know if that the Vision Pro needs a neural band. I'm sort of like the Vision Pro should just use your Apple Watch because your Apple Watch can also do.

many of the same things like assistive touch which is where double tap and wrist flick came out of you know you can do a bunch of different a lot of the same commands with with that um technology so you know there's also the mudra band which is another emg wristband for the apple watch so you could just make an accessory to enable different um gestures that way and

that case then you have a watch that can do fitness tracking and control your headset and i'm just sort of like well the vision pro doesn't need a neural band it just needs the apple watch to kind of have that functionality built into it and so you know And conversely, you could argue that Meta should just make a fitness tracker that can also do that, which I think is within the realm of possibility. I mean, the thing looks like a whoop. Just make it a whoop. Yeah, just make it a whoop.

Like, is it really going to drain the battery that much more to add a heart rate sensor on top of it? I don't think it would. It could just be a very simple step tracker. So, you know, in some ways, like adding... that aspect to it just so that it doesn't take up this much real estate because it has to be placed a certain way because of course this is a problem that i have as the wearable lady where i was like well you know i can't give up this real estate during um

tech review season so there still has to be testing done with multiple wearables and so i was wearing the pixel watch alongside it and if i put the pixel watch on top and the the neural band on the bottom It could work, but then the controls started getting wonky, so the placement really does need to be one finger length below the wrist bone right here, optimally. placed or whatever. And if you put it on correctly, it works like a dream. If you don't put it on correctly.

Like Neil, I tried it out in the office and his wrist is much bigger than mine. So I don't think this is his appropriate band size. And so he was having a little more trouble with it. So like when that happened, I was like, oh, sizing is actually really important. Placement is important because.

We moved it up to the appropriate placement on his wrist and it worked better. So it was like, okay, like it really does matter where it is. And if it is going to take up this exact position, which is like prime real estate on the body. I feel like it should do more than just one thing. Yeah, that strikes me as the kind of band that by like V3 is going to be something.

super duper compelling. And then the question of like, do I want to give my ongoing biometrics to meta becomes bigger and weirder and more complicated, but we will cross that bridge when we come to it. So that's the thing you'd like. I would say that was a somewhat... unenthusiastic pro for the display. What's the thing you didn't like? I would say it was enthusiastic, but a thing I didn't like was the weight.

of it uh so this is 69 grams and i feel it i feel it like i might not feel it if i'm only wearing it for about an hour or two a day but let's say i get into five six hour long territory I have to take it off. Like I have to take it off. I have to give my eyes a break. And when I wear it for a long time. It actually leaves marks on my—I don't know if I have marks right now, but it does leave marks on my skin there, and it takes a while for it to disappear. So it wears the weight kind of—

I feel like all these things wear weight differently. And this one you're saying sort of wears it right on the cheeks, like right at the bottom of the lenses. That's a bad place to have the weight. It's bad, especially for me. You have a very low nose bridge. You don't have it. There's no dimension to your face because of genetics. And you have a low nose bridge, like many of my East Asian brethren have and are constantly asking, does this fit a low nose bridge? Yes, it does.

After a while, you are going to have that problem because it is touching my cheekbone. Like ideally, it doesn't touch your cheekbone, but it does because they're gigantic. And so like the weight is one of the major things for me because what is the fundamental? fundamental principle rule of wearable tech. It has to be comfy. Must be comfy to wear. Because if you're not going to wear it, then your tech is going to collect dust at the bottom of a drawer.

That was a thing that was a little tough for me. And like related to that, I have garbage eyeballs. This does not support a wide range of prescriptions. It's negative four to plus four. So if it's a lot of people in that range, but not. People like me who are negative 10 and negative 9 in their eyes with gigantic Coke bottle glasses. This doesn't support that. So, you know, I have to wear contacts. Wearing contacts every day because I have dry eye.

My eyes are in a world of pain. I am carrying around sustained eyedrops all the time, just putting them in my eye. Because when you have display tech, your eyes are open longer. They get drier faster. So it creates like a... A bit of eye strain. It is heavy on my face in particular. And if I wear it for a really long time. I do start to feel a headache coming on. So I do have to take them off and be like, oof. So that's a big deal because that means these are not.

like, wear-all-day kinds of glasses for you. This is an episodic device. Yes, it's an episodic device, I think, for a lot of people. And I... Don't know that many people could wear it all day just for a number of factors, which might be like my number two dislike because it's, you know, the battery life, they say it's about six hours.

Yes, if you're just like doing the occasional maybe checking of your notifications or listening to audio, you're not doing anything too crazy or too intensive. But if, say, you go to a car show. and you summon meta-AI, and you just start— Hypothetically. Hypothetically, if a person were to do that in various states— Against your will if you are dragged to a car show. in two states over the course of two weeks, and you were to look at a Lamborghini and go,

What model am I looking at? Because, you know, the dads are revving in the background because they're, you know, living their best Dom Toretto fantasy. You might burn through the battery in about three and a half, four hours. I totally toasted the battery, just taking a lot of photos, taking a lot of video, using the AI a lot.

It gonna die fast. Yeah, that is very fair. And I think the thing about the battery to me is... uh it's the combo of battery and weight that is such a bummer to me because like do you know that mitch hedberg joke like escalators don't break they just become stairs it's like yes that's the that's what these things are supposed to do right they don't they don't die they just become glasses is like that

That's the point of smart glasses. That's why you go out of your way to make this Ezra Luxottica deal so that they look stylish and people want to wear them all the time. Best case scenario, these can't just be the sunglasses I wear all day because they're too uncomfortable. To me is a much bigger problem, actually, than the fact that the battery doesn't last all day. Like it's that combination of best or worst case scenario. I still don't want to wear these all day. That's tough. Yeah, it is.

Of course, it's going to depend on everyone's individual faces and their individual tolerances for these things. Mine is admittedly not high. I know there are people out here who claim that they can wear the Vision Pro for hours. I cannot. The most I've done is an hour and a half, maybe two hours. And I had a huge headache afterwards just because of the weight on my face. I didn't handle that well. I don't handle it well. So that's probably partly a me thing.

I know I'm not the only one out there that has that issue. So... It really is a thing that, one, you're going to spend $800 to try that out for yourself. And then if, like me, you do find it to kind of put pressure on your face and for it to not feel great. You know, that's that's not an all day device for you to wear. Like they've tried to mitigate it in a lot of different ways, like the hinges go out. So if you have.

a wider face it's not gonna press on it too hard but i do have a wider face i still kind of didn't feel great after long term wear like do i feel better having taken them off because i've been wearing these for the last couple of hours Yes, I do. The minute it feels like relief to take them off, that's a big loss for the product. And I just want to say, a thing I should have prefaced at the beginning is, good or bad, The fact that these things exist as they do...

is very impressive right 69 grams for a pair of smart glasses very impressive the the way that they look on your face which is basically like and you said this to me the last time we were talking about this on the show like they they are big and they are blocky and they are like noticeably larger They're somewhere between a regular pair of Wayfarers and costume jewelry. But you would walk past me on the street wearing them, and I would not clock them as anything unusual.

giant achievement right and so i think like all this is such an interesting moment because it is like it is clearer than ever that meta is on the right path with these the question with this one is just like did it

did it finish any of these jobs? And increasingly, it seems like the answer is no, right? Like the neural band is something, but it's not done yet. The size and shape of the thing is something, but it's not done yet. And that just, that increasingly feels like the story here to me. It is. a very genuine device and constantly while testing this device i was like the engineering is incredible

It is absolutely incredible. If you appreciate technology in any respect, you just hold this in your hand and go like, this is the fucking future. Like, oh my God, this is amazing. Like I am literally seeing a display and like I've been turned. Turning the display on and off throughout our call, you couldn't tell. You couldn't tell that I've been reading text messages on occasion. You might have seen my eye go a little bit like...

And that's my other dislike is that I look like a dead eyed freak if I do this for too long. Because like, what am I looking? What am I looking at? It's it's it's weird, right? But, you know, just generally speaking, you can't.

see anything whereas thankfully i have multiple devices on hand to show you the difference but you know i have the even realities g1 and if i angle it in a specific way you can defo see like i'm just not angling it the proper way or the lighting's not like like lighting's not right but when it's on you can see that there's like two displays on there it's like i think they call it rainbow artifacts

The lighting didn't show that here, but I was, oh, no, wait, now it did. Now it did. I was just going to say, I saw it. Yeah, now it did. You see it, right? So it doesn't take much with a lot of the... wave guides that are based on light diffraction to see the rainbow artifact, to see the outline of the display. And it really kind of takes you out because it's sort of like, oh.

what's this that I'm seeing? Are you a spy? It kind of breaks that illusion. But you really can't see that with this. You can see the waveguides sometimes if you're closely looking, and there's this weird thing where at the...

Bottom, sometimes it acts like as a rear view mirror because this is different because mirroring the light as opposed to diffracting it, which is why you can't see it quite as much. It's really fascinating. Like if you get into the engineering of this thing, you're just like. wow, a lot of brainpower went into this. A lot of thoughtfulness went into it. But like the software is another thing where it's like, oh, this is very first gen. It's magic.

when it works. You feel like a wizard. You feel a certain way. You are just wowed by the engineering. You're wowed by the possibility. You're like, oh, oh. And then you run into the, oh, this is a very first gen thing. Okay. And to its credit, Meta is pretty clear that this is a Gen 1 product, right? They're not making a ton of them. They're pretty expensive. This is like somewhere between a beta test and a mainstream product.

I think, again, I think meta actually seems pretty clear-eyed about where this thing is. But nothing you've said so far strikes me as like, this is either meta needs to pivot hard or... Something bad is going to happen. It's instead a lot of like meta needs to keep pushing on this stuff. Yes and no. So there are some times where I feel like a super spy and that can be cool.

And that can also feel terrible because why would you want to be a spy? There were some points when testing this where I felt like... A lot of what makes it so impressive, a lot of what makes it so mind-blowing is the fact that no one knows what I'm doing. And then you think about that. And then suddenly the magic feels like dark sorcery. And you're like, hmm.

Are we playing with fire in that sense? Because let's imagine a world where they figure this stuff out, where there's better interoperability, where there is a robust third-party app system, and you are on a first date. And the person across from you is wearing one of these. And, you know, you've noticed their hand twitching by their side. And you're like, are they on hinge? Are they swiping through their other matches?

while they're here with me, that's a thing that could happen. That's cursed. And you wouldn't know. Or, you know, we talk about wanting connection with our fellow humans and... Large purpose of this device is so that you look at your phone less and you stay more present.

Well, what happens when they eventually put Netflix on this thing and you're just watching your show while you're with your in-laws because you find your in-laws annoying and you're just like, I'm just going to pretend like I'm here, but really I'm watching. I don't know, Love is Blind season 487. That I feel is a little, it makes me feel uncomfortable.

The display opens up so many possibilities. You can frame, this is one of the other likes I was going to put, you can frame your photos and videos now. That's freaking amazing. No more Dutch angle.

Like I can see the viewfinder when I take a photo or a video. So like I can just basically see a preview of what it is so I can frame my shot. Is it kind of the equivalent of like holding a... DSLR up to your face where you just get like the little picture here and you sort of see the big picture, but you look at it through the lens that way.

Yeah, yeah. It's like when you have a digital camera and you can see a screen. And so you can frame up the shot and then you take the picture. You can do that. There's a tiny little screen that's in there. With the Ray-Ban metas, I was constantly taking Dutch angle photos with my bangs in the way.

That was not happening because I could see how things were framed. I could see what I'm looking at. I could zoom in if I wanted to. So those were mind-blowingly cool things. Except when you have the photo up and you're framing it, but you haven't taken... the picture or hit record yet, no one knows that that's what you're doing. And that feels sneaky. That feels not so great in a specific way because it...

only happens when you're recording. But let's say I'm taking a picture of a secret document that I shouldn't be having access to. Well, I can just frame it up and go boop and no one will notice. And I mean, that's a bad use case of it. That's a very bad use case of it. But the analogy I'm using is AirTags. 99% of people who use AirTags are going to use them in a really good intended way.

And then there's the rotten apples who are going to use it to stalk people and use them in horrible ways. And we've seen in the legal system that people have done murder, have stalked, and done horrible things with this. you know, by and large, innocuous tech. And we allow that to happen because, one, Apple took very progressive and proactive measures to have at least some sort of unwanted one.

unwanted stalking feature and two they're just so convenient they're just so convenient right um and i think with smart glasses the question is what is going to make this so convenient that we are not talking about the privacy stuff, that we're not bothered by meta's not-so-great... privacy reputation. Like, what is that?

use case could it be and i don't know that i found it during this i think maybe the closest thing was heads up navigation while i'm walking and i'm just like oh i can see a map i can figure out where i'm going And then the display goes away. But when I need it to tell me when I need to turn, it'll pop up again. And then I know where I'm going, but I can still see the world. Like that is genuinely very cool.

it feels like the most aha use case. Is it though? Yeah. Like, is it? I am so directionally challenged that yes, I... Fair enough. I am so bad at directions that for me specifically, that feels amazing. I mean, and this is like, that has been a quote unquote killer app of products all the way back to Google Glass, right? Like that was one of the big demos of Glass was that it'll...

tell you when to turn right. And Google has been trying to do augmented reality maps ever since. And this is like, in the same way that every AI tool fundamentally boils down to helping you book flights, every AR product fundamentally boils down to helping you navigate a busy city. and find coffee shops. Fine. I'm sure that is a use case. In no way is that enough to sell any of these products to anybody.

So have there been other things? This is the next thing I was going to ask you, and it feels like the answer might be more disappointing than I was hoping for. Any use cases that you've found that feel like they are sort of day to day?

useful in in the way that like having a camera on your face and having headphones in your glasses is day to day useful is there other stuff that the screen adds that you're like okay i would actually use this all the time I actually really like the live captions and the translate.

I'm going to be going to Italy, so I will be carrying these and trying to translate Italian when I'm trying to order stuff and whatnot. But the live captions are, I wish they worked a little bit better because of my demos. this is amazing. And in real life, I was like, oh, there's a lot of scenarios where this is actually a little finicky. How are they supposed to work? So when you're in a conversation with someone, they just live caption what you're saying. And so like I'm...

I've used them in various situations. And if you're hard of hearing or in your loud room, that can be really useful to kind of hear what someone is saying. But the reality of how we talk is very different from what. these devices need for the best case scenario of that. So the best case scenario is your one-on-one. It's maybe a little loud, but not too loud. And the person you're talking to enunciates and has great diction.

And it's not your spouse who mumbles at all. And you don't use a lot of slang. And, you know, you're not walking side by side because you have to really look at the person you're talking to. So if you're walking together and you kind of want captions because, again. There are some car dads really revving and you can't hear anything that's going on around you. And you're just trying to hear your family members talking to you. Well, and you're walking and there's cars around.

You can't just be looking to the person to the side of you the entire time just so the captions are accurate to the person you're talking to. You're walking, you have situational awareness, you're going to be looking around and all of a sudden it's going to be captioning.

Jimbo Bob over there and they feel like a spy again because you're not supposed to be listening in on Jimbo Bob's conversations so like with a lot of the use cases there's like oh there's a lot of great power that can come with this and then oh, here's a way that an asshole could truly make this horrible. And that's kind of what terrifies me about this technology, to be quite frank. What would an asshole do with it is like a...

key question that every product manager should ask about everything all the time and not enough people do it. No. Which is like the asshole test should be everywhere in the tech industry. Like, you really need to think about what having... a very discreet piece of what could be spyware on many people's faces will do. When an asshole comes to town, like I think earlier this month, San Francisco University had to issue a warning because some asshole in the Ray-Ban metas.

was going around trying to film young college girls for his live stream channel, asking inappropriate questions. And you're like, hmm, that's only one guy. Not great. There's a lot of people. Now, there's a lot of people taking innocuous concert footage out here with these glasses. Sure, that's an appropriate venue. Like, it makes sense. And then there's this guy being a jerk.

doing that. And there's increasing examples of that being reported upon because these are becoming increasingly popular. So it's one thing when you just have a first-gen device and not many people have them. You put them into the hands of a lot of people.

These are very powerful in certain ways. What is the asshole going to do? And how is Meta preparing for the assholes? Are they going to take a proactive stance? Or are they going to just point to their dinky privacy policy, which boils down to... there's a recording light and don't be a jerk. So it seems like you've come out of this process being like, it's impressive that these things are as good as they are, and yet...

They're still not that good. And we still haven't answered maybe the most fundamental question of all, which is, do we want these things? Like, is this a thing we want? Here's what I'm going to say. I've demoed this to very many people, double digit numbers of people. because they ask about it. And universally, every single interaction has gone this way. They've gone like, oh, wow, that's so cool. Too fucking bad meta makes it, you know?

And that, I think, is something that Meta really has to sit down and think about and do some soul searching. Will they? I don't know. But I really do think that they have to do that because, you know, Mark Zuckerberg came out on an earnings call and said that if you don't have these, you're going to be.

I believe the phrasing was significantly cognitively disadvantaged. And I was like, I don't like that. Because first of all, not everyone can wear this pair of glasses. The display is only in the right lens. So if you have any... problems in your right eye, they can't switch it to the left lens because the process is so complicated. So you are leaving out a little...

a decent swath of people that way. I have garbage eyes. If I wasn't capable of wearing contacts and not everyone is capable of wearing contacts, I wouldn't be able to use this display. My bestie came to visit me and she has a lazy eye. And so I put them on her and she's like, yeah, I.

actually can't view the display because it's monocular. So, you know, you're leaving a lot of people out and then saying that if you don't have one of these glasses, you're cognitively disadvantaged. That is putting your foot in it in a really... horrible way. It's also just dumb and wrong. Like, it's just, it's flatly incorrect.

It is incorrect. And then on the other side of things, I have said so many wonderful conversations with the disabled community, you know, blind and low vision people who really have had their lives. absolutely changed by the fact that you can use these to interact with Be My Eyes, to have AI narrate things so that they can live more independently. That is truly wonderful and moving and what we should be using this technology for. I talked to a...

Talk to John White, who is a triple amputee, and these glasses and the Oakleys, they allow him to do things and keep his hands free because he only has one hand and it's really valuable for him to. have that ability. So that's amazing. And I've talked to accessibility experts who are just like, actually, no. This thing is not okay. And just because I need this technology, I shouldn't have to compromise my privacy. And I was like, you know what? I hear you. You're correct. And like, I am not.

Part of that. I have garbage eyes, but I'm not yet part of that community. And so I'm just doing my best to listen to them. Is this what we want? I think the answer for a lot of people, not everyone, for a lot of people is yes. And so then the next question beyond that is. How do we want to use this technology? So yeah, it's a cursed category right now. It is so cursed. You have all these other glasses on the desk. Is there anything else in those glasses that you've seen?

that feels like a sort of clear push in the right direction in the way that the neural band is like, this is the early version of a thing. Is there anything in these other glasses that feels like that to you? No, not yet. Currently no cognitive disadvantage. Just so everyone's super clear. There is no cognitive disadvantage. No cognitive disadvantage. Don't worry about it. You're going to be okay. Don't worry about it. Just wear your normal sunglasses. You'll be all right.

You'll be fine. Honestly, oh, now it says that I'm low on battery, so I will take it off to charge it. All right, V, you have a vacation to go on. Go get out of here. Please take off your glasses and rings and all the other stuff. Go be in the woods for a while. We're going to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about Apple shortcuts. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab. At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs.

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You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. All right, we're back. So a thing that happens on this show every once in a while is... Apple shortcuts comes up for one reason or another. It's a way people do a lot of things, especially on their iPhones, but also on Macs and iPads and other Apple devices. I am of the mind and I'm on the record on this show many times that.

Apple shortcuts is sort of a failed idea. I think the thesis behind Apple shortcuts is really interesting. But the app is too hard and too complicated and just requires you to have like a PhD in computer science to do anything useful with your device. And so like, congratulations, you've created a... programming app. I don't know what we're accomplishing here. Every time I say this, there's one person who shows up in my replies and in the comments.

telling me I'm a moron. And that person is Steven Robles, who is the host of a very good YouTube channel with his name on it. who makes all kinds of really great, mostly shortcuts-based stuff, but he also talks a lot about Apple Gear and other things. He also has a podcast called Primary Technology, and also I think his full-time job is yelling at me on the internet about Apple shortcuts. So...

I figured we just needed to have this out once and for all. So I invited Steven to come on the show and we're going to see who is right. Is shortcuts bad or is shortcuts good? Spoiler alert, I'm going to win. Let's get into it. Steven Rolis, welcome to the Vergecast.

Thanks so much for having me, David. This is the prize fight people have demanded for a long time. One of my favorite interactions on the internet is that every once in a while, I go on the Vergecast and I complain about Apple shortcuts. And then...

Almost every time without fail, you say, no, you're very dumb. Apple shortcuts is great. Here are a bunch of cool things I have done with Apple shortcuts. We're just going to have this out once and for all right now. So, but I want to like, I want to basically. start with you which is you're a person who is like deeply invested in shortcuts and this is like a thing you have actually spent a lot of time working on and figuring out when did you become a shortcuts person

I used the workflow app when it first came out on iPhone because it seemed to do things that were just impossible. Like, how can Apple allow this? Turns out... They just bought it so they can say it's their app. But I did it all the way back then. And I followed great minds like Federico Vatici and Matthew Cassanelli, where I learned about shortcuts first. And as soon as you find one or two shortcuts that are genuinely useful to you.

I think you just get hooked. And so now I just check my library. I have 1100 many I've built for other people, which is what I kind of built my YouTube channel on and many that I use every day. Do you remember the first one that you were like, OK, I've done something here? I remember the first one that went viral because it was during the pandemic. And my first TikTok video, I made a shortcut that pulled images from Unsplash and set it as your wallpaper on your iPhone with just a tap.

And it blew people's minds. And that first just went everywhere. I was just surprised it actually worked. So that one was pretty cool. Okay. So that's actually like a perfect example of my issue with shortcuts. And I just, I think. I am on record as saying I hate Apple shortcuts, but I want to explain to you why I hate Apple shortcuts. And then I want you to refute it specifically and show me lots of examples because I think Apple shortcuts is a terrific and fascinating idea.

This idea that what you have is deep infrastructural access to all of the stuff happening on your phone and your devices is a cool idea. That's actually how computers should work. We should be able to program all of these things. such that they operate the way that we want them to and put them together in ways that they have not thought to put themselves together. The actual...

product itself, I think is a mess. And I think it asks way too much of you. It is vastly overcomplicated, even when you want to do very simple things. It just, it is a good idea that they should have given to a regular person ever anywhere in the process of creating workflow and then Apple shortcuts.

And instead, I think it's a developer tool and I think it's a good developer tool, but I think it is a developer tool masquerading as something else. And that that is the disconnect that has always driven me crazy is like this is not. This is not like a neat if this then that quick do make a thing, do a thing kind of app. This is a developer tool. Yeah, I think you're wrong, but I will say.

You know, I met some of the Shortcuts team when I went to WWDC. They're an amazing team. They're doing awesome work. Shortcuts is buggy. Things like syncing. actually across your devices. I shortcut my break after months of using it. So we'll fully admit there are some bugs there, but I think saying it is a developer tool.

It's a little too far because there are a lot of one action shortcuts that I've shared in Reels and TikTok that people go nuts for. Even simple things like toggling control center with a back tap on your iPhone. or unlocking your orientation on iPhone when you open the Photos app.

Those are one action automations that people find really valuable or enabling low power mode when your battery drops below a certain percentage. And it's something that I think most people, I show them step by step. I do it in under 60 seconds usually. that they end up doing it. And to Apple's credit, being able to share a shortcut with a link, downloading it and being able to run it on your device, even it could be super complicated on the back end.

That sharing system that Apple's built in there, I think it actually helps shortcuts be even more useful to more people. That I will give you. And I think that's actually, I give you a lot of credit for really like leaning into that where you're like, I.

And the, I will figure this stuff out for you. And I think like you mentioned Federico Patigi, he does a really good job of this too, of like, I have done the outrageous amount of legwork to make this incredibly complicated thing happen. One shortcut I use all the time. just it's specific to my own job is the the mac stories apple frames one which basically you take a screenshot of your iphone run apple frames and it will put that screenshot into a thing that looks like a picture of an iphone

And then have it that way. So instead of just sharing like a naked screenshot, you have what looks like a picture of an iPhone with the screenshot on the screen. It's the sort of thing that like I don't know the people who. you don't do what we do for a living need. But like for me, as somebody who publishes pictures of app screens all the time, that's very helpful. And it's like, I've actually looked at the actual like body of that shortcut. It is so unbelievably complicated.

But I just clicked a link and it showed up and it was a shortcut. So I think that the sharing mechanism there is awesome. But to me, that's like saying... there are apps in the app store. You know what I mean? Just because I can get it easily doesn't mean it's easy to do. But that's also the beauty of it because... Apps are really complicated to build. I tried to vibe code it and failed. But that doesn't mean apps shouldn't exist because most people can't build them.

Same way. And shortcuts, I think it's even more beautiful because you can have those super complicated shortcuts, even ones that access APIs, which I'll show you in a minute, and do all of that, share one link and someone downloads it. Or someone can have a really simple one. I'm going to show you a shortcut right now. Can I show you a shortcut? Yeah, please.

So one, I think, and this went viral a little bit, but if someone's commuting and they're going home and they text their partner every day, I'll be home in this many minutes. Well, you can create a simple shortcut. I call it my home ETA. And when you run it, it gets your current location, directions home,

And then auto creates a text, be home in 43 minutes. And that's it. And I can even have that send automatically and even run it from my Apple Watch. And so a simple use case like that, that applies to a lot of people, people are like, oh yeah.

I'll buy in. And that's like a three-step shortcut. I can show it in one screen. You just have to put in your home address and then you customize it for yourself. And so little things like that, that touch a nerve, something you do every day that you can now automate, I think people respond to.

Yes. And I think in a certain way, that is actually like the promise of Siri. And that's, I think, to be honest, part of what has always driven me crazy about Apple shortcuts is that the way that should actually work is I should just be able to. tell my assistant what to do, right? Like tell my wife, tell my wife when I'm going to be home is like a perfectly plausible thing that actually my phone contains all of the information to do and can't. And I think like.

This is, again, I think the underlying fascinating thing about shortcuts is that it is the only tool... really on the iPhone, but really kind of anywhere that has the access to all of those pieces in order to be able to do all of that stuff. Show me the back end of that shortcut.

When you say it's three steps and it's really simple, I just flatly don't believe you. So show me how this shortcut actually works. I'm going to go to my home ETA shortcut. And that's the thing. A lot of the shortcuts I make... They're just slight tweaks of it. So here's the, here's the shortcut you put in your home. That's not my home address. So you could show it on screen. You put in your address, another action, get driving directions from current location to that address.

I created this text, which you can customize, be home in so many minutes. And then I'm going to send the message. So four actions and that's it. And you can send this and you can put this on your Apple Watch. You can run it from wherever. And this one I used all the time when I was commuting. And so. That's pretty simple, right? In the scheme of things, yes. But again, even that is like, there's a certain set of, if you did those same steps in a different order, it would fail.

Yeah, well, again, that's the risk when you have something this powerful or capable of something that powerful, you could totally screw it up if you move things around. And I have so many people like when I share a shortcut, they're like, this didn't work. That didn't work. And it's like, OK, well, what iPhone do you like? One really cool action is.

You can toggle silent mode with a shortcut. So if you have an action button iPhone, you can create one. And I have one where when I put my iPhone on my charger, silent mode disables. This way I can leave the room and I'll actually hear a ringtone. But when I take it off the charger. silent mode toggled back on. That's a one step automation, one action.

The problem is if you have an older iPhone with a silent mute switch, you don't get that shortcut section because Apple doesn't want you to toggle silent mode when you have a physical switch that might be in the other orientation. So there's weird things like that. Sure. It actually won't let you do it. It's like having two light switches for the same light. And so one is always down and one is always up. And Apple's just trying to avoid that.

So I know that you're, I already know the answer, but I was, what iPhone do you have? And they'll say, well, I have an iPhone 14. I was like, okay, well, you can't do it. So there's stuff like that. And now with Apple intelligence, there is a whole other world of, do you have an iPhone 15 pro or newer?

Can you run Apple Intelligence and that? But some of the things you can do with that are super powerful. Can I show you one more example? Please. This one's using Apple Intelligence. Now, this one went real viral. So this is on Instagram.

And I see a lot of recipes on Instagram. And a lot of times you can save the reel, but then it just kind of gets stuck. Like it's in Instagram. You never actually use it. So this shortcut will actually take the Instagram reel. It pulls the raw HTML in the background. gives it to Apple Intelligence, and will pull the ingredients and steps if the creator put it in the caption of the post, and it's going to create an Apple note.

just that quickly. I did it in real time. So now I have the ingredients in a nicely formatted list, the steps, and an even link back to that reel if I want to go back and refer to the actual video. This one... Hundreds of thousands of views. People love this. This is complicated, not something most people are going to build on their own, and they can mess it up easily, but really useful. So why should that be a shortcut as opposed to...

a feature of an app. I mean, and it is like some of the like food specific apps do do that already. You can plug in an Instagram link and they've done some like interesting backend API work to pull that information out. Like, why is shortcuts the right venue to do something like that? Why shouldn't Instagram build that? Or why shouldn't that be a feature of Apple Notes?

It could be. And there are actually apps like I see Instagram ads for apps specifically for saving recipes. Guess what? They're subscription models and they're either like full of ads. So you can literally do the same thing. built in and that's kind of the advantage of shortcuts being first party has access to all of that but shortcuts is way more powerful than just doing what an app can do to your point apple frames which was an awesome shortcut fatici built

I actually use an app called ShareShot now, which is amazing, and I can frame screenshots from my control center. I'll actually show you this real quick. This is not a shortcut, but because you can actually put third-party actions in the control center, ShareShot has a one button. It takes my last screenshot and frames it that quickly. So, you know, some apps actually are better maybe than a shortcut. But with shortcuts, you can customize it. And I use ChatGPT the most.

in shortcuts. Like for my podcast, I will run a shortcut on a Safari tab group, which takes all my links, sends it to ChatGPT. I ask it for title and description suggestions in the background. It's all running in my Mac menu bar. And then I get all my show notes formatted because of a shortcut and ChatGPT built into that. That's not something a standalone app is going to do. And it would take a lot of time to do that manually.

So that's what makes it useful on a personal use case. I was going to ask you if. You thought that as these AI tools get better, even the foundation models on iPhones, but also ChatGPT and Claude and all this other stuff that is sort of increasingly being integrated onto the device. If that ends up obviating shortcuts, because again, you can just like.

declare your intention to chat gpt and it'll figure out how to go do it for you spoiler alert none of that works but like someday it might uh shortcuts doesn't either so you know whatever but But as AI stuff gets better, does it make shortcuts less necessary? Like, does it obviate the whole idea of sort of building the system yourself? But it sounds like actually you're seeing it more as like a tool inside of the tool.

Yeah, I think it's actually going to make shortcuts even more powerful. I recently did a video on macOS shortcuts because now you have folder automations built into Mac shortcuts. And so you can do things like whenever I drop an MP3 file into my downloads folder.

I want shortcuts to automatically transcribe, which is a built-in action, and then summarize it with Apple Intelligence or ChatGPT and create an Apple Note with a summary of that audio file. It happens all automatically, all in the background. And then you can build on top of that, even asking it for key points or write a blog post based on this podcast. And that makes those AI tools even more powerful because it's now built into my Mac on a folder automation. And I even showed in that video.

You can create a shortcuts automation that when I receive an email with this in the subject line, take whatever's attached to that email. summarize it and make an Apple note of that. So now there's zero action on your part. You just get an email. Maybe it's like monthly report. You know, you get that email every month and you can literally look in Apple notes in a few seconds later for a summary of that attachment and shortlist did it all behind the scenes.

That's very cool. So walk me through your creative process on this a little bit, because I think I'm realizing as you're describing some of these that part of my issue with shortcuts is it has a real kind of cold start problem that you sort of open up the app. And it doesn't give you a ton of ideas or guidance, right? You get the apps that sort of show you the basic stuff they can do, but there aren't a lot of sort of finished ideas for you.

sitting there that are like, you do this all the time, maybe make it a shortcut. So you're coming up with this stuff kind of as a real sort of creative endeavor. Like, what does your process look like? Well, I'm thankful because I've...

just shared shortcuts I've loved. And now my YouTube channel is basically just building shortcuts that people are asking for. So every time I post a video, you know, there's dozens of comments. I have my own shortcuts community where people request shortcuts. And so now I actually get requests that I never would have gotten before.

pilots will reach out to me and it's like, can I create a shortcut that when I start it, it logs, you know, the day, the time, the weather. And then when I tap it again at the end of the flight, it automatically logs the time in the air and all this kind of stuff. And so I'm inspired by my users to do that.

But if you're new to shortcuts, I will actually give the shortcuts team credit. The gallery of shortcuts, they update that a lot. There's even Apple intelligence examples in there now. There's easy shortcuts that are like make a meme from an image, you know, just fun things that you can try.

So if you're new, I would check the gallery. For me, I look to my viewers, my listeners and just my own workflow. Like when I think of I do a daily podcast now and I think, how can I get the daily news the fastest? Well, my first idea is just shortcuts.

And so I know shortcuts can pull from RSS feeds. I know it can summarize. I know it can create a note for me and basically create a whole podcast script in a few minutes. And so that's what I did. I figured out, can I build this to suit my work needs? But then also I'll learn that, oh, shoot, Movie Database has an API that I can tap into with shortcuts and I could suck down the rabbit hole. And I've created a custom.

chat gpt that's trained on shortcuts and trained on apis and so i'll ask it because i'm not a developer like you're saying i'll be like how can i pull the latest movie trailers from the movie database api and ChatGPT to its credit will give me the API URL. I can plug it into a shortcut.

And then I'll spend a Saturday afternoon building like four or five shortcuts just with movie database API stuff. And it's super fun. Let's talk through this one because one of the ones you recently were showing off in a video that I was watching is a movie trailer one. uh steven i say this with love youtube has movie trailers like this is a solved problem okay if you want a movie trailer it's so pretty easy to find a movie trailer but you built a thing that i actually think is like

a really fascinating interface on top of this. So let's walk through this one a little bit because I think it is just the right amount of complicated to talk through this. So start at the beginning. Like what was the beginning idea of the movie trailer shortcut? So I saw a TikTok. from a lawyer creator. I forget her name right now.

or read for the rebrand, I think is her name. But she said she used to love the trailers app, which if you remember like Front Row on Mac and the trailers app, it was an app just for movie trailers. And I love trailers. I would go there all the time. That app doesn't exist anymore. And yes, you can go on YouTube and search for trailers. But as you probably know, there's lots of random trailers besides like the official trailer. And so.

You know, it's just I want the official trailer, the actual one that people might have seen in theaters. So I thought, does Movie Database offer that as something I can pull from the API? And so I'll show you the whole back end because it's complicated. But this shortcut, it. It finds the movies that are either new releases, new trailers, or in theaters. And so there's a couple like get dates and format dates. And I'm using the movie database API to...

Give me a list to choose from. And so I actually get to choose from a list. I see the titles and the release dates. So I know what movie I'm choosing from. And then. Because there's dictionary actions and things I don't understand. I actually use some Apple intelligence actions to parse those dictionaries. And what it does is it finds the official trailer.

on YouTube. So when I run this shortcut, it will actually give me a list of the latest trailers. So you got Tron Aries there, which I heard is not very good. But when I tap that, it'll bring me directly to the official trailer on YouTube and I can start playing it. And so, yes, I can open the YouTube app. Tap the search field.

type in Tron, hit search, look for the official trailer. But we are talking seven or eight taps. Whereas if I just want this quasi app on my home screen, I can tap the shortcut, choose from the list, and now I'm watching the official trailer of some of the newest movies. I just Googled Tron trailer and it showed it to me. I'm just saying.

Okay, but it's also pretty cool. I'm just saying. But I created another one where you can actually search for a specific trailer. So if you wanted to watch the original Jaws trailer, you can run my shortcut and then place that. I bet you that's not going to show it first up. Probably not. And I do think the...

The first screen of that is actually the one that's most interesting to me. That's sort of like, here are new movies you might want to watch the trailer of. Because that, to your point, is not... That is not a solved problem on the internet anymore, right? Here's some movies with some trailers out that you might want to watch. That's new. So, okay, we go back to the actual making of this shortcut for me because this is...

Like for folks listening and not watching, just sort of not necessarily step by step, but like run through how this thing actually works and what it's doing. So basically, I formatted the date because the. API for through movie database, you can tell it like, look at this release date window. So I formatted the date so it has a beginning and end date. This whole long URL in the text block, I have no idea what that is. ChatGPT gave that to me because I asked it what the API is.

So I just copy and pasted. I did know where to put in the release date variables, which is a big thing in shortcuts. Get contents of URL is an action you would use with a lot of APIs. And basically, it's just pulling then from that API the results that that API gives you in different ways. And then I call it a second time to actually get the URL for that video. And so that's what it's doing. And a lot of shortcuts, once you get to more advanced levels.

repeat with each and so once it gets all the results from the api then i repeat the process of getting the title and the url with each so it can show you in that list and then it can quickly load it so You know, there's some advanced steps, but again, I use that with 11 Labs. You know, if I wanted to generate my voice in AI, I don't go to the 11 Labs website and paste text. I can literally run a shortcut and it will generate it with my custom voice in 11 Labs and just output an MP3 file.

And so that's an interesting one, actually, because that is just a pure you're taking a thing you could do on a website and you're doing it in shortcuts. Why do it in shortcuts? Because there's so much more to that shortcut ahead of the 11 labs part, like getting a full article, maybe summarizing it, inserting some of my language and then generating it. So that's like all the shortcuts I run for my podcast and like for my.

YouTube videos. It's all like RSS based. It's pulling things from the web and summarizing behind the scenes. All stuff that it would be like it would just. And when you have to repeat it, like with multiple articles, let's say, show me, you know, the top articles from The Verge. And because I subscribe, you know, I get the whole RSS feed. And so I can choose a few articles that I want, get the summary. It spits it out into.

a note, rather than having to go click around or even go to a great RSS reader, it all does it in the background for me. And then you click all the links six or seven times and click on all the ads. Yeah, no, I get it. That makes sense. No, I think... I mean, part of what you're making me realize is actually the thing Shortcuts does is like the promise of all of the agentic AI stuff, right? Which is just, I'm going to do a bunch of things in a row on your behalf.

Rather than jump around and do things that you can theoretically do, but it's a lot of like uploading and downloading and going from this tab to that tab and this tab to that app. It'll just do it. And I think the thing I like about shortcuts is when they're set up really well to just prompt you along the way that it's like, you know, this is where you record your voice, add this text, anything else you want. And it's able to actually walk you through a process.

That is very hard to do in software, especially like a cross-platform software just doesn't exist. And the closest thing we found is all of these like AI browsers now are like, we'll let you chat with you. This is when it works. a much actually more straightforward version of that user experience, which I think is very cool. And I will say Apple intelligence, you know, on the face of it, it's like Genmoji and it's visual intelligence.

But honestly, the models action and shortcuts is where the real power is. And I've shown a couple of shortcuts on my channel, but like you can auto sort your Apple notes. And Apple Intelligence can actually look at the content of each note, which that's what this shortcut does. It gets all my notes from the last week, repeats with each note. The use model action looks at the content, and then I tell it put it into one of these four categories, and it will automatically move my notes.

to certain folders in my notes app. Now I just screwed it up because I dragged the if statement and shortcuts is, you know, I was 26. It's too easy to drag stuff. But Apple intelligence can do that in the backend and it can do it to your Apple notes. It can do it to files. You drag on your desktop, automatically sort those. So actually, it's really powerful. Even photos, like you can give shortcuts, 20 photos and say the photos that are with people.

put them in this folder, the photos with no people, put them in this folder. And shortcuts with the Apple intelligence actions can even do that, image recognition with that use models action. That's pretty cool, actually. So you mentioned a lot of people are asking you for things and you're starting to build what people are asking for. Are there commonalities across those things? Like, is there a type of thing people are constantly asking for?

A lot of text message requests, which is difficult. I've had dozens of people ask me for WhatsApp automations. WhatsApp just doesn't provide shortcuts actions for really deep integration. But one that I keep getting in slight variance is. I want an auto text responder because they're a small business owner or, you know, maybe they're an electrician, plumber, and they want to be when they're on vacation to automatically respond to new messages.

from people that are not in their contacts. And you can actually do that with shortcuts. So I've shared many variations of this where if you have a focus mode enabled or if it checks if you're on vacation through your calendar events. that when someone texts you and they're not in your contacts, you can basically send an away response and say, hey, I'm on vacation. I'll be back soon. You can expect an answer from me here.

And that little kind of automation auto text thing, which, yeah, maybe that should be a built in feature of iOS with focus modes and things like that. But the fact that you could do it right now with shortcuts, that's really cool. Yeah. And I think it seems like. people are actually better at identifying the sort of tasks they do over and over and over again, then maybe I give them credit for it. Like a thing.

that we've talked about before on the show is that it's very hard to teach people new behaviors because it's very hard to make people understand what those behaviors are, right? Like, especially the things we all do 100 times every day. It's all such a like...

fish in water situation that we don't even necessarily realize here are the ways that this could be automated out and would make my life easier. But it seems like actually maybe there's a big community of people who are aware of this kind of thing and are like, well, here's an action I do 20 times every single day and it's four steps and maybe.

There is a way to just make it one or zero. There is. I mean, Reddit has a huge community. You know, obviously I have my community, but I think once people see, and if you look on TikTok and Reels, there's lots of creators that just share shortcuts and it blows people's minds. I did one recently where you can decide what the action button does depending on what app is on screen.

Which is kind of complicated. It involves an if statement, like if Instagram is open, then do this. If I'm on the home screen, do that. But once people see the power of that, they're like, oh, I can make this button actually useful on my phone. Yeah, I'll do that. And then they can just download the shortcut link.

But even something simple, like I get a lot of frequent travelers, they'll be like, what's an easy way to save my hotel room number? And like you might do the thing I do where you just take a picture of the hotel room number and just look at that.

But you could use a shortcut and you can use third-party apps, which there's an awesome ecosystem with apps like DataJar, Toolbox Pro, the Actions app. And DataJar, you can plug that in and say, run the shortcut. I type in my hotel room number. That's saved in DataJar.

And then when I go out to dinner, I can run a second shortcut that shows me my room number and gets me walking directions back to the hotel. So just those simple two or three step things that would normally be a couple apps swiping back and forth, trying to find that picture again, you can do it easily with shortcuts.

Yeah, I do think the one I find most compelling out of all of these use cases is the sort of not a button you press, but like a thing that happens in a certain situation. Like my old colleague Dan Siefert had a shortcut. that I believe all it did was put on Do Not Disturb as soon as he opened the Kindle app. Like, that was it. It just is sort of an instant pause of everything else.

as soon as I open the Kindle app. I don't have to remember to do it. I don't have to press even one shortcut button to make it happen. It just happens. And that's the kind of thing that I think is, A, has a real discovery problem because it's the sort of thing that you're like, I don't necessarily... process how this should be happening until it happens and i'm like oh i get it now but that's the kind of thing that i think becomes

really useful because then you don't ever have to engage with the programming language, right? You download the link, you set it up once, and it's done. And at that point, actually, I don't care how complex it is because I don't have to interact with it at all. So that to me is like that sort of shortcuts I think is really, really valuable.

And I think that's why people watch my videos. You know, they might not use the exact shortcuts that I put in the video description or whatever, but it inspires them to see what's possible and to say, oh, I can do that. And just like. Even random people, someone I was with, I found out. They write a journal entry every day in Apple Notes. And what they do is they go back to yesterday, select all, copy.

paste in a new note, delete what they wrote yesterday, and then start writing today. And I'm like, let me create you a shortcut. Person is not tech savvy, had no idea what shortcuts was, and all I did was create a quick shortcut, which gets today's date.

puts the sections that they like writing in for the day in the note, and it creates an Apple note in that folder in their Apple notes. I put it on their home screen as an icon they can just tap, and they're like... this is awesome and if that's the only shortcut they ever use i think it's still valuable that they can do it it's going to save them time it's easier

Plus all the automations, like you were saying, I'll show my automations. I have a ton of automations, but just simple things that does in the background. Like I changed my Apple watch face at different times of day. You can automate that with shortcuts. I have my orientation unlock when I open the photos app. I have one complicated one where I don't know if you've ever experienced this.

But maybe you open TikTok and Instagram and like your volume was all the way up. And then someone really loud is like yelling at you like Neelai on a decoder clip or something. Well, I have an automation here that when I open Instagram or TikTok, my volume goes to zero. So I never have to worry about those moments. Oh, that's smart. But... Does it go back up once you close the app?

That was the next request I got when I shared that on Instagram. This is the thing. You can do it, but you can do that. You would have to save that in data jar, but I'll build you one. I'll build you one. But what I do here is Toolbox Pro has an action that can check, is audio playing? Because one of the things that was annoying is every time I opened Instagram, the podcast I was listening to, like the Vergecast, would stop playing. So now I have an if statement. So it checks, is audio playing?

And if audio is playing, which means I already want the volume up, it's not going to do anything. So I can open Instagram. I'm still listening to my podcast. No problem. But if no audio is playing, like in the waiting room or whatever. Then it's going to set the media volume to zero. And Instagram and TikTok is not going to embarrass me by being super loud. That simple automation. Again, a lot of people immediately found value. Something I see I use every day.

That, okay, that to me is such a perfect example of, I'm realizing maybe my issue is not with shortcuts specifically. It's that Apple thinks that because shortcuts exist, it cannot. make a better phone. The thing where I'm listening to audio and thus the audio shouldn't play or it should avoid blowing out my ears because I don't have any headphones.

You should not have to sit there and think, what is every possible version of my audio situation when I open Instagram and how can I mitigate that every time I open the app? This is a thing your device should be able to do for you. To me, the idea that we are all expected to... The Apple Notes team...

owes you money. Like they just do because like Apple Notes gets to not ship features because you're figuring out how to ship features into Apple Notes with shortcuts. And that is like to ask people to do this kind of work. to solve for the fact that your phone doesn't work properly, I think just in principle drives me crazy.

I mean, to say it doesn't work properly, that's extrapolating that every use case that someone might have, aside from saving a recipe or logging their flight because they're a pilot, you know, you can't expect every feature, every scenario to be built into a stock app. But... Frankly, I'm glad that it's not because now I can build shortcuts for it. So I totally get it. But also like the volume thing, you know, if you raise the volume on your phone.

it's not going to lower it for you just because you opened an app. You know, it might be TikTok, YouTube, it might be Instagram. And so, you know, that's a preference. Not everybody wants the volume to go to zero if they open Instagram, but I do. And so for the people that do have that preference, like you can build a shortcut for it.

I don't know. Apple in particular is just such a hand-holding company that is like, we know best about everything. Except when it comes to all of this, when they're like, ah. do whatever you want. It's just going to take 68 steps in a shortcuts app. It's not even that many steps. But again, to Apple intelligence credit, well, a lot of times in the use models action for shortcuts, I use ChatGPT.

in that action. It works better than the ChatGPT shortcuts action, like from the ChatGPT app. It just doesn't error out as much. But private cloud compute and the local model for Apple intelligence, it can't. digest a lot of text so if i give it like a podcast transcript it'll just error out it doesn't on the mac so like there's some difference there that i'm not exactly sure what's behind the scenes

But I can use the ChatGPT extension and hopefully Apple actually builds in. Maybe Gemini, it's been rumored that that'll be part of an Apple intelligence extension. Maybe Claude. If they integrate those, like they have an Xcode, you can use Claw directly in Xcode. I think it's going to make shortcuts even more powerful. And you're not dependent on Apple. You can use these other models.

What does the next step for this feel like to you? Is there a ceiling for what you've been able to do in shortcuts that you're hoping gets taken away at some point? You know, I'm always looking for more actions from Apple, especially like in their first party apps. A lot of people ask me for automations like, can it automatically delete? mail, like emails that fit a certain criteria. There's no actions for deleting email or things like that. So new actions are always great.

Also, again, love the shortcuts team. You guys are wonderful. The syncing and some of the bugginess in like that, especially we have a large library like I do, that could be better. And I think people would depend on it and use it more when they can trust it.

I have lots of shortcuts that I trust on my Mac because they run every time, 95% of the time, and they are that useful to me. And so I think if it could get a little more reliable, more actions for first-party apps, and even things like, again, I have to use Toolbox Pro.

for an action that knows if audio is playing. Like, obviously, my iPhone knows. And so it would be nice if you could do that. So more first-party integrations, better automation triggers, and more of those. And yeah, I'd be happy. Okay. And do you think there is a version of shortcuts?

That is more sort of straightforwardly user friendly for people to do. I think what I'm asking for might be impossible, which is something that is just as powerful as you're describing, because I think the power is the thing. But that is. much more straightforward to do that like i should be able to just say to siri or chat gpt or whoever like i want it such that when this happens this happens and it just spits out the answer and the shortcut and

As far as I know, that doesn't exist. And so not only do I have to know what I want, I have to be able to do it so sequentially and in such small steps that I can figure it out. Is there a middle ground here that exists or am I wishing for something that's impossible? You know, I think that's like pie in the sky promise of Apple intelligence and the voice assistant on iPhone. You should totally be able to tell it.

When I open the photos app, unlock orientation. Like I just be able to tell my phone that and just creates that automation automatically. And then I can adjust it manually if possible. That's the dream. That's the dream. And maybe one day, which maybe I'll have less of a job then, so hopefully not too soon. But I think that would be ideal. And there'll always be a place for more advanced shortcuts.

But to Apple's credit, they have been adjusting some of the actions to be more user friendly, like the if action, which is something if you get into advanced shortcuts or even medium advanced, you're going to use the if action a lot. You used to not be able to have multiple conditionals, like if the time is 8 a.m. and is focus mode enabled. You couldn't do that until like iOS 18. So they are tweaking some of them so you can have less actions in a shortcut and still accomplish what you want.

Magic variables, which came out a few years ago, makes that easier. But I do think it's pretty close to the line of being extremely powerful and useful, but obfuscating that complexity. I'm very... into the idea of like personalized software. I think vibe coding is really powerful for that. I think shortcuts can be really powerful for that. I think the idea of like I can use.

AI tools to make the thing that I need, even though I'm the only one who needs this specific thing this specific way, I think that's very powerful. I just want it to be easier for everybody. This is the thing I keep landing on. And maybe the thing that I'm actually wanting is a...

an even bigger, broader, cooler, more discoverable ecosystem of the stuff that people like you have built. And like maybe what Apple needs to do is just replace the whole gallery with like cool stuff made by steven and his community like maybe that should just be the thing and there's something really powerful there but i think i don't know i'm torn between this should be easier for everybody to do

And maybe it's okay that it is like the app store and what we need is a better way to go find things that other people already did. I think the latter. You know, apps are complicated to build. I discovered that trying to vibe code. but that doesn't mean apps shouldn't exist. In the same way, shortcuts, they can be as easy for anyone to build and they can be super complicated, but that makes them powerful. And there can be a bunch of people that build them and you can access them like through.

communities like mine or whatever but yeah maybe apple can highlight shortcuts like that surface useful stuff or you know just go to my youtube channel there's like 60 videos there you can watch those there you go it's a good plug to end on uh all right you

I like shortcuts more than I did at the beginning of this, which I hate. And so we're going to stop doing this because this is becoming a real problem for me. We're going to take a break. Steven, thank you for snortering there. This is really fun. Thanks for having me, David. All right. We got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and do a question on the Verticast hotline.

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All right, we're back. Let's do a question on the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecastattheverge.com. I'm davidpierce.11 on Signal. You can email me davidattheverge.com. Just send all your questions. We want to hear everything you're thinking about, all of your feelings. Hit us up. This time we have a question that I want to answer in a slightly different way because I actually need your help to get this right. It's a question from Sean. Here it is.

Hey, Virtuous Crew, this is Sean calling in with a question that's been building for years, literally since the first AirPods were dropped in 2016. So here's the deal. I've never actually bought a pair of wireless earbuds. I've just coasted on whatever mediocre pair landed in my lap. I had a pair of Powerbeats 3 that crumbled literally from UV and sweat. The Aussie buzz that took a spin in the washing machine that I got on a trade-in promotion.

And now I have a newer pair of AirPods Pro that I treat like royalty because they were a holiday gift. But now I'm out of options. The gadget drawer is empty. The Galaxy Buds are toast. And the AirPods Pro are my nice earbuds for work calls, flights, and pretending I have my wife together. So for the first time ever, I'm about to spend my own money on wireless earbuds. And I need your help.

I'm looking for something that's certifiably good enough. Decent sound for listening to the birch cast while mowing the lawn. Noise cancellation that can handle the drone of a mower. and battery lights that last between hydration breaks. Read beer. My budget is around $120, ideally less. There's an endless sea of mid-tier earbuds on Amazon, and I'm drowning.

What are your picks for the best good enough wireless earbuds in 2025? Please help me make my first real purchase count. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate you taking my call and look forward to hearing from you. Bye. Okay, I have a bunch of thoughts on this, but I also want help because one of the things that is true, and this is kind of my first thought on the subject, is that actually good enough headphones are incredibly easy to come by at this point.

If you look at basically any brand on Amazon with like pretty good reviews for 80 bucks, it's probably going to hit those benchmarks. Decent battery life, decent noise cancellation. good enough sound to listen to a podcast and not want to tear your ears off your head. That's actually a really easy set of goals to accomplish. And you can do that for well under $100. So the problem with that setup is that there are a million

billion brands and product names that are all kind of roughly the same thing. Because the big change that has happened here is the sort of alphabet soup brands largely just coming directly out of...

factories in China, those headphones have gotten to the point where they are plenty good enough to hit this bar, but there's no useful way to differentiate them from one another. So if you go to the Wirecutters reviews, they're... best recommendation for a pair of headphones under $100 is a brand called EarFun, which is just a truly hilarious name.

I got a pair of headphones off the TikTok shop from a brand called Pickin or Pickoon. I don't know how everybody pronounces it. Everybody says it differently. They were $35 for over-the-ear headphones on TikTok. they're fine, right? Like there's nothing good or exciting about them. And they have a lot of weird features, but like good battery life, decent noise cancellation, good enough sound quality, like across the board, you can just get that.

If you are a person listening to or watching this who has bought a pair of these headphones and likes them, tell me what they are. Whatever weird brand you bought on a whim on Amazon or found on Alibaba or bought on a TikTok shop, if you just like... sort of closed your eyes and threw a dart at a pair of headphones and they happen to be pretty good. I want to hear about it because I think having a list of the ones that we can vouch for in that sea of stuff.

is very helpful. One brand I will shout out is this brand called Soundcore, which is made by Anchor, the company that makes all the like charging stuff and batteries and power banks and whatever. They have a brand of headphones. called Soundcore that is pretty cheap and generally pretty good. People seem to like it. They have solid reviews. They make a bunch of different kinds. So I think if I were to just send you one place, Soundcore is probably where I would send you to feel...

Pretty solid about product quality at a pretty good price. So that's one approach. But I think what I would actually tell you to do is try to get a more expensive pair of headphones at this price. Headphones go on sale constantly. And you can either... Do something like wait for the Pixel Buds 2A to get a little cheaper or the Pixel Buds...

Pro 2 to get a lot cheaper. I saw a sale on the Pixel Buds Pro where they're like 160 bucks. So like they're they're almost in your range already. And that stuff will get cheaper over time. Another way to do it is to get last generation headphones like you can get. Sony's very good over-ear headphones for pretty cheap if you're willing to go back a couple of generations.

There's also a pretty hefty used market for that stuff. But if I'm being completely honest, used headphones kind of freak me out. So do with that what you will. But I think in general, like being opportunistic about buying good headphones is pretty doable. if you're willing to wait and sales shop a little. It's late October now. By the time we get to Black Friday, there are going to be...

like huge screaming sales on some of these headphones that I suspect will get a pair of headphones that is currently way out of your price range into your price range. I think you own an iPhone. Sean didn't say, but I think based on, you know, the Powerbeats and AirPods Pro, like I think you probably own an iPhone. What I would say is the current AirPods, like not the AirPods Pro, but the base level AirPods.

are terrific and would hit all of your metrics except the lawn mowing noise cancellation. That might actually be the hardest part of this is not just regular noise cancellation, but you're going to be standing. two feet away from a pretty loud motor, I would say, A, if you can, get a pair of over-ear headphones, which again, you can find on Amazon and elsewhere for pretty cheap. But B... Like that's a reason to spend as much money as you can stomach on this stuff is like the noise cancellation.

you do kind of get what you pay for. I think sound quality and battery life plateau way before noise cancellation quality does. So that's the thing to spend the money on. But again, sale shopping and buy a couple of generations ago, like... All of the mid-range Sony over-ear headphones from three years ago are still great headphones. They're not the best ones anymore, but...

for the price that you're trying to spend, they'll be excellent. So you can shop around and find stuff that way. And I think you'll do really well. But the truest thing I can say here, and the thing I actually feel in my heart is you should just stop babying your AirPods Pro and use them for everything.

They're pretty resilient. The AirPods Pro in particular have gotten better at things like moisture control and doing noise cancellation. They hit all of your bars. And my experience has certainly been that they will either... die because of their battery uh or i will lose them or run them through the dryer which is a thing i did once uh before they fall apart because i've like overused them right like these are pretty durable headphones and

i would just use those you already have an awesome pair of headphones just be psyched about it put the 120 you have saved away for a rainy day when these break and you need to buy a replacement or upgrade the case or whatever you have an awesome pair of headphones. Use your awesome pair of headphones. So that's my advice. But truly, if you are a person out there who like...

on a whim bought a $60 pair of headphones on Amazon or a $19 pair of headphones on Timu, or you found something on the TikTok shop that you like way more than you expected. I want to know about it. I want to have a list of like those. alphabet soup hexadecimal names that we can be like, these are good headphones. Vergecast people say so. So get at me, 866-VERGE11, vergecastatheverge.com. Sean, I will follow up with more recommendations as soon as we get them.

Until then, though, that is it for the show. Thank you to Steven and V for being here. And thank you, as always, for listening. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, if you have more version history feedback, by the way, we're almost halfway through this first run of shows. And if you have ideas and things you want us to make shows about or you have different ideas for the version history questions or you have an actual idea.

about what the Virgin History Hall of Fame is supposed to be, get at us. We'd love to hear it. 866-VERGE11 is the hotline. Vergecast at theverge.com is the email. Keep it all coming. We love hearing it. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk.

It's a Verge Cast Diverge production. I'm part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I will be back with Neelai on Friday. It's still very exciting to say that. Talking about all the news, all the gadgets, all the everything. I think we're like slowly winding towards the end of gadget season. But I've said that before, and I've been wrong. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.