"After Steve" author Tripp Mickle / Fortnite’s back on iOS / Sonos’s voice assistant

Nilay Patel and David Pierce chat with Tripp Mickle, a New York Times reporter and the author of a new book titled After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost its Soul. They talk about the rise of Jony Ive and Tim Cook, the power struggle between the two, and how Apple is grappling with everything from building a car to managing its relationship with the Chinese government. After that, Verge managing editor Alex Cranz joins the show to talk about Starlink’s new Portability mode, HP’s super high-end new Chromebook, Fortnite coming back to iOS courtesy of Xbox Cloud Gaming, Sonos’s upcoming soundbar and voice assistant, and why Siri can’t seem to successfully close Nilay’s garage. After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul Starlink’s new Portability feature brings internet to vanlifers Now you can play Fortnite on iPhone or Android for free with Xbox Cloud Gaming Exclusive: Sonos’ next soundbar will be called the Sonos Ray Exclusive: Sonos is about to introduce its own voice assistant The HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook will start at $1,149 - The Verge Leak confirms Sony flagship headphone design, casts doubt on improved battery life Sennheiser’s Momentum True Wireless 3 earbuds have a fresh design and better ANC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This week on The Vergecast, author Tripp Mickle joins the show to tell us about his new book, After Steve. Is Johnny Ive his real source? Then Alex Kran comes on to tell us all about this week in gadget scoops. That's coming up right after this.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast. The flagship podcast, the form over function. It looks good. David, what's up, man?

• 1:57David Pierce?

  Hi, I'm David Pearson. I'm your friend who will always loan you a billion dollars when you want to buy Twitter.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  There you go. I'm, oh, by the way, I'm Neelai. I'm also your friend. I will not give you any money for any reason. We've got a great show for you today. David and I are going to talk to Trip Mickel, who just wrote a book called After Steve. We talked about in the show last week. It's all about Apple and the 10 years after Steve Jobs died. Very much focused on Tim Cook and Johnny Ive. And then a little later, Alex Cranz is going to join us with Talk Some Gadgets. David, you worked with Trip?

• 2:24David Pierce?

  I did. So we overlapped when we were both at the Wall Street Journal a few years ago, and I got to see him sort of spin up on the Apple beat. And Apple, as we have all found many times, is an absolutely impossible company to get inside. Like, it is, its culture of secrecy goes way back, and it is like based on this being this tiny insular thing where like even the people who work there don't know what the other people who work there are working on. So I got to watch him sort of piece by piece, like get inside the company and start to understand how it works. And I think he said he's been working on this book for like five years, which would track back to kind of when I started working with him. And he did a great job. Like, most books I've read about Apple are about a product, and they're, they have this

• 3:08David Pierce?

  sort of one very specific thread, right? And you talk to, you talk to suppliers, and you talk to people kind of around this thing to understand like how a product came to be. But he got into like how the company works and talked about org structures and relationships between people, and the kind of thing you just don't get a lot of. I really enjoyed the book, and I know you did, too.

• 3:27Nilay Patel?

  I did. I think, you'll hear it when we talk to Trip, but, you know, the book is structured around two big characters, Tim Cook and Johnny Ive, and you can read it in a couple of different ways. All of those ways will make people mad. You can read it as... Johnny Ive was the soul of Apple's design and he left and now Apple is this like services juggernaut financial company. I think a lot of people think that about Apple and that some of that, there's evidence for that in the book. But it's not the whole book. You can read it as Johnny Ive got disengaged and Apple's design went sideways with iOS 7 and the first generation watch, which was pretty messy. And then he left and everything got better. You can read it as Tim Cook grew into the role and became very confident after taking over for Steve Jobs. Like, there's all these ways to read this book.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  And like I said, I think all of them make everybody mad. But I think that's like the sign that it's, it has the reporting to back up all of those claims.

• 4:22David Pierce?

  Totally. And I think the other only one I would add to that is that there is just like, there's an unbearable hugeness of Apple now that like, the company just got so big and had so much money. And like, there's a, there's a bit in the book about when Warren Buffett invested in the company and there's this feeling of like, oh my God, this means like, regular people's money now depends on the stuff that Apple does. And just like what that did to the culture of the company and the fighting internally and all the people who wanted to be in charge of things and uh, everybody's making hilarious amounts of money along the way and it's, it's just wild. But yeah, you can kind of take anything away from it you want and you're probably right.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it's again, I think it's because Trip did a great job reporting it. That's enough of us. We should actually just talk to Trip. Here we go. Tripp Mickle.

• 5:06Nilay Patel?

  Tripp Mickle, you are the author of After Steve, a book which on this very show I described as making everyone mad. Welcome to the Vergecast.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Thanks so much for having me. I like, I like getting people riled up. That's why I'm here.

• 5:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, the book is absolutely fascinating. It is about effectively the relationship between Tim Cook and Johnny Ive, famous Apple. If you're listening to Vergecast, you know who these people are. Like, you just, I don't know, I know what you're doing here. But it's about Tim Cook and Johnny Ive and how they grew into their roles and out of their roles after the death of Steve Jobs. Why did you start chasing this book down?

• 5:38Speaker 04

  It's interesting. When I landed at The Journal in 17, after coming off what we called the Sin Beat, Alcohol and Tobacco, I had a cup of coffee with John Markoff. And he was like, you know, one thing you should really look into is Johnny Ive and the battery. And that's, that's about all John, John said. And I started asking questions and learned pretty quickly that Johnny was growing disillusioned with, with Apple. And I just thought that was so interesting. How could you, how could you help build this great company and then begin to kind of fall out of love with it, so to speak? It just made me wonder what was, what was behind that. And so I just kept asking more and more questions. And eventually he left in 2019.

• 6:15David Pierce?

  Did this start out to be kind of a Johnny and Tim story? Because part of what was so interesting to me about this is like, the, the initial frame is like, it's the sort of the story of Apple's decade, right? And then almost immediately, it's the Johnny and Tim story, which to some extent makes sense, right? Like, they're the two most important people at the company. But like, was it obvious at the jump that like, those were the two main characters of this story?

• 6:36Speaker 04

  The privilege that you're granted when you get to do a book is you, you're given time to, to think and let the story kind of unfold as you think through structure and you're, and, and what you're focused on. And from the outset, I was planning to do the decade at Apple after Steve Jobs. That was really the intention. But the more I looked at that, the more I felt like the best way to tell that story was by chronicling the history of, of Johnny and Tim. And so for a lot of readers who come to this, they're going to say, well, why am I getting the history of Apple all over again? I've, I've learned this from Isaacson's book, et cetera. But you, you're going to get a, a different window into that because you're going to be looking at Apple's history, history through

• 7:18Speaker 04

  Johnny Ive's work and then through Tim Cook's work. And it just, it just lent itself to tell the entire Apple story through these two characters and figures that are, that are so prominent at the company. And really, we're, we're who Jobs set up to lead the company forward. It kind of naturally evolved that way, honestly.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so one of the the central dynamics in the book and at Apple is before Steve Jobs dies, he anoints Johnny as the absolute head design and says, I set up the company so no one can get in his way. And then no one got in his way. And some of the products went completely sideways. Meantime, Tim Cook is casting about for Apple's next big thing. And I don't know if anybody remembers that first year, 2011, 2012, Tim Cook was like going on TV and saying, we're gonna do it, we're gonna do TV stuff. Because Jobs had ended the book by saying he'd finally cracked TV, which seems like just a masterful troll at this point. It is very unclear what he meant when he said to Walter Isaacson, I've

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  cracked it. And so Apple like chases after it for a year, and they chase after a car, and they do all this other stuff. And it seems like Tim Cook is looking over there, and he's given I've control over the product portfolio, which, I mean, Apple is like the most successful company in the world, but some of the products went completely sideways during this period, right? The butterfly keyboard, the phones got thinner, like, it just, there's a really weird moment for Apple design in there. That's my perspective from the outside. But reading the book, it seems like there's actually more tension between the two than once ever revealed.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Certainly. I mean, there's, it's, it's an unspoken power struggle, kind of over what will be core to the company's future. You know, Tim needs a new product category, essentially, after Steve Jobs' death, because that's what the outside world is demanding and pressuring Apple to deliver. There was a lot of expectation for that. And Johnny Ive was the natural person to, to bring that forward. And the watch was that answer. Ultimately, that's what they went with. And then, at the same time, Wall Street's never satisfied. So Tim Cook has to almost think about, well, what's the next thing beyond that? And the answer winds up being the services business that Apple unveiled, really officially

• 9:26Speaker 04

  in, in 2019, but was gradually building through the course of the Beats acquisition and some of the other product introductions along the way.

• 9:35David Pierce?

  I think power struggle is a really interesting way to put it because there's a weird dynamic between the two of them where they never seemed to fight. Like I kept waiting for like the meeting where Johnny and Tim like had it out and it never really happened. They just sort of increasingly like diverged paths and Johnny did his thing while Tim did his thing. And because Tim is CEO and because they were making a hell of a lot of money, Tim's way kept winning and Johnny just sort of fell further and further apart from everything that Apple was doing and then started to distance himself and everything went away. But it was it was just so interesting to me to watch just like Tim just sort of like subsume everything, at least as far as I could tell, without any particular like angry power grab over the design team.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Well, some of that's just a reflection of Tim's own inscrutability, right? I mean, there's there's this, there's a certain degree of unknowability about him. His relationships with people aren't as strong as, say, Jobs' individual relationships with a lot of people were. And so it's a it's a natural outgrowth of that. And then also, Tim's decision to be deferential to the creative people. He, the way Apple was structured when Jobs was alive was Jobs was at the at the center of it and the creative people were in the in the ring right around him. And that's what he was kind of migrating around. I mean, from meetings with design team to meetings with the software people, to meetings with the advertising people to come up with the next

• 10:57Speaker 04

  creative ads and everything else. And then beyond that, and the ring outside of that was operations and finance and legal and some of the other aspects of the company. And what happened when Jobs died and Tim Cook became CEO is all of a sudden the operations people came to the interior of the company. It's almost like throwing a rock into a pond and there were just ripples that kind of flowed across everything and everyone tried to reassess how they fit into this new world. And Tim's choice in that new world was not to try to replace Steve, not to get involved in product, because he didn't feel comfortable doing so.

• 11:35Nilay Patel?

  How do you see that playing out with things like Beats, right? Where he actually brought in some very powerful creatives. Like, the idea that Trent Reznor was ever an Apple employee is like, to me, very funny, right? It just doesn't track. But you're right, he buys his company because he wants to get into services and he sees that they've already built something they want. He's got a headphone company to deal with as well. That's a big integration. It's like still one of Apple's biggest deals ever. But he brought in these huge creatives that, from my perspective on the outside, never really did anything. But in your book, they're like in the background of a lot of things in complicated ways. Like, how did that dynamic play out?

• 12:14Speaker 04

  There's pressure at that point in time, right, to satisfy Wall Street, deliver more growth. And one of the easiest ways to deliver growth is to acquire it. The fascinating thing to me in reporting this, and the fascinating thing to a lot of the Beats staff who were acquired, was once they got inside Apple, they realized that Apple had been at work already on building out a subscription music business. But there was some, for whatever reason, there was some dissatisfaction internally with what that looked like, and a feel that they needed some help from the Beats creative team. So that's why they went out and they brought in Beats. They refashioned Beats, they released Apple Music. It's, of course, flawed.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  And then, you know, lo and behold, not that long afterwards, all of the Beats staff kind of peel away eventually because this is a giant company with very well-defined rules and it's not kind of the, I don't know, the kind of rambunctious or rebellious place that Jimmy Iovine had fashioned at Beats Music.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  But that to me is like, right, as Apple becomes this bigger content company and now they've got these big Hollywood ambitions, the interplay between the inscrutability of Tim Cook, the nature of Apple's brand, and then the reality of making good art, whether that's music or movies or whatever, those things are like in conflict. And that seems like one of the hardest challenges that Tim very personally has been dealing with outside of Johnny Ive making iOS 7 look insane, right? Like, it seems like that was more of a distraction than the product, which is really fascinating to me.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's an interesting point. I think while I was at The Journal, we had fun with a piece about Hollywood adjusting to Apple's arrival and its expectations for what content should look like and include. And there was some real trepidation inside Apple early on about showing anything with too much vulgarity, nudity, etc. They really wanted kind of a clean-cut image. And they've since abandoned some of those inclinations and they've adopted a bit more of an HBO style approach. There's obviously some, I don't know, some interesting content like within the morning show and everything else that suggests that they've made peace with

• 14:29Speaker 04

  being more dynamic. But I found it fascinating to see that they won a best picture for Coda, which for all intents and purposes, like Disney could have made that movie, right? I mean, it's a, it is a really feel-good film.

• 14:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's the exact kind of thing that I'm sure Tim Cook was like thrilled to win for. Whereas like I've been watching the show Shining Girls on TV plus, which is basically just all about women dying and being murdered. And going back and like thinking about that piece you did where Tim Cook is like mad that there's cursing in some of the shows is like, boy, things have changed.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  And part of that speaks to too, this, this kind of like persistence and cautiousness that they approach things with now. I think for a lot of people, that's, that's been the jarring thing about watching Apple lately is they remember the, the 2000s and, and kind of all the perfect products that they felt like they, they just arrived perfect. Some people forget that it took a little while for the iPod to be as great as it was, but they have this recollection of it being a perfect product. And they're watching and struggling with like, well, why are they only having like 10 shows on this new product that they've launched? You know, why is it taking so long to build this? Why is, why is Major League Baseball? Why are there three people in the booth and the, why are the,

• 15:42Speaker 04

  you know, why, why are they struggling to explain what's going on in the game? There are these like moments of imprecision that people are unaccustomed to, but I think that's emblematic of this giant company trying to get things right and having the leeway to do so because it's got so much great reach with how many people who have an iPhone and everything else.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  So the reason I wanted to start with like TV and content and just lay that foundation because right now it's very clear that Tim Cook cares about Hollywood and he wants celebrities on his streaming platforms. I think that's all just a cover for the real services revenue, which is in-app purchases and games. And he gets to talk about Reese Witherspoon said, but right, it's very clear that he's engaged that part. Of the industry like Hollywood and Apple are very close now. But a huge part of the book is Johnny Ive saying we're a fashion company now and bringing in a bunch of fashion people. Especially around the watch and losing focus on products like he's like. There's a line I actually sent it a screen. I took a picture of the book and sent it to Walt Mossberg. Where Johnny's like our future is in the hands of like Anna Wintour not Walt Mossberg.

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  And Walt was like, well, it turned out we're still pretty important. But that dynamic, right? You see, I'm just curious how you see that evolution that they they went really hard at fashion with the watch. You know, it distracted them from making their products really great, the watch in particular. But now they're back to Hollywood like they're back in that same cultural sphere. They they tried really hard with Johnny, but Tim has sort of like diligently got himself back into.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  It's interesting that you raise that and you bring up the fashion thing. I really wrestled with that and came into reporting on that with the same mindset that a lot of people. Look back on that period with this day and age where they say like, why the heck did they do that? And I was curious about that as I as I went into it and I left through my reporting somewhat persuaded that that actually was not a misguided focus. There's a scene that a lot of people point to who worked on the watch from the Devil Wears Prada where. The woman who's kind of playing the character of Anna Wintour upbraids the Anne Hathaway character over having on this. Cerulean blue sweater and not realizing that it was introduced in fashion two years earlier.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  And the entire reason that Gap is selling it is because that it was on a runway two years before. And internally inside Apple, for those who kind of were on the fashion leaning side of this thing. That was that was important because they were introducing a watch that was going to look identical. And if you if you think back to your early reviews of it, that was one of the things I think you struggled with was. Well, this this looks the same from from on everybody's wrist and that's not the way watches typically were. So they needed the endorsement of society's tastemakers in order to get that thing off the ground. The problem was that maybe they leaned too far into that. And they had to course correct relatively quickly and get into the fitness aspect of it so

• 18:38Speaker 04

  that people could use it. But really, ultimately, the problem was it just didn't have any battery life. Like, if you look back, you know, it just, you know, it was dead. Half the time it was on your wrist. Like, that's, that's not the most useful product.

• 18:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, the thing that really jumped out to me was that, like, there's a lot of the Apple marketing team in this book, which I think is appropriate. And like, I've had, I still remember a bunch of years ago, an Apple exec who was like, leaving the company was talking to me and they're like, yeah, the only smart people who work at Apple are all in the marketing team. And they're, they're kind of all over this book. And the thing that struck me about the watch thing was that, like, the fashion piece of it was smart marketing. I think you're right. And they were like, they're talking about it as like, the most personal device. They had all these different bands. And like, there's a world in which that could have worked. It's just that the product wasn't that good. And there's so much of it in this book where it's like, Johnny really wanted to build a watch. He didn't really know why. The health stuff didn't really work. The fitness stuff wasn't ready. The battery wasn't very good. It's just like, they, they didn't have the thing to sell in

• 19:33David Pierce?

  the same way that they did with the iPhone. So if they had like, had a very good product and then sold it as fashion, it would have worked. But that was the only thing it had going for it in those earliest days. And the only thing they were selling about it. And it felt like, that to me was where it was like, okay, this is just the part that they missed.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  And that's, that's some of the shakeout that you see kind of post Steve. There was, there's a great moment at the end of one chapter as they're about to launch the watch, where you have the lead engineer pull aside Jeff Williams and say, Jeff, I gotta ask you a question. If you came to work today, and you forgot your iPhone, what would you do? And Jeff said something to the effect of, I'd go home and get, get my iPhone. Like, I need my iPhone to make it through a day. And the engineer looks at him and says, well, if you forgot your watch, what would you do? He said, I guess I'd get it when I got home. And the engineer's point was, that's the reason we can't launch this product. It's not ready. It's not something people need to have. I think they've gotten there over time, but it's taken quite some time to get there.

• 20:29Nilay Patel?

  So two things. One, I love the Devil Wears product. I watch it whenever it's on TV.

• 20:33David Pierce?

  It's a good scene, too.

• 20:35Nilay Patel?

  It's a good scene. And I think that I'm Anne Hathaway. And my wife is always reminding me that I'm actually a master. It's a real problem. Explains a lot about how the verge works. But in that, I just want to like, put our focus on the watch as a gadget, right? My pushback, when I wrote the review of the first watch, was like, this thing is a mess. Right? It's actually not a very good gadget. And maybe you can talk all this game about fashion and you can tell me that the digital crown is a revolutionary input device on par with the mouse and the touch, which is what they said, right? But the underlying work to make this thing a great gadget, isn't there. And it's when they made it a great gadget, that it became this huge success. And they didn't actually need all the fashion focus.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  If they had just made a great gadget, from the jump, the fashion stuff would have just come along for the ride. That feels like, to me, where Apple got lost. When they started taking for granted, that they would make great gadgets and the industry would follow them. And what they really were, was like a lifestyle company, right? And that's where you get, at least from my perspective, is just someone who like, thinks about the products themselves. That's where you get, well, we're gonna take all the ports off the computer. And you're just gonna, Johnny Hyde is gonna change the industry because he wants fewer ports on the computer. Or the phone's gonna be a little too thin, and maybe it'll bend a little bit more easily than it should, or the battery life will be really low.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  And then he leaves, and like, Apple corrects that stuff really fast, right? They go back to making really great gadgets. Is that all Johnny, in that moment, that's like, pushing it towards more aesthetic features? Or is it a push and pull?

• 22:12Speaker 04

  It's certainly a consequence of his philosophy and a push gradually towards thinness. And a lot of people will come at this book and be like, why didn't you write about the butterfly keyboard and the fiasco there? And anytime you're a writer, you guys can appreciate this, you do this all the time. You gotta pick and choose, you gotta, you gotta make choices. And especially with something like a book, it's gotta connect across like, a long period of time. That was something that I chose not to focus on because in my reporting and you all's reporting may differ from this, I kept hearing that that was more of an engineering shortcoming than anything else and that engineers had allowed that to happen rather than the designers.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  Now philosophically, what were the engineers trying to do? Fulfill the expectations of designers who wanted things to be thinner, that those were kind of the marching orders? And is partly an outgrowth of this culture that was directly descended from Jobs empowering design so much and turning these guys into kind of the Jedis who can do no wrong inside of Apple, right? That worked when Jobs was there as an editor, but it got out of whack when they were, I guess, left to their own devices.

• 23:28David Pierce?

  Well, and wasn't it Jobs who always used to say, like, "Design is how it works", right? Like, it feels like that's the part that seemed like it just sort of fell apart over time to Neil's point that like, and I think you even kind of say it at the end of the book, that it became like a form over function company. And then Johnny is off, like, helping build an office where people keep running into the glass walls and which is just like, what a perfect metaphor for the whole thing right there. And he's spending his time on this like one Leica camera and worrying about the soap dispensers on his plane and it just, you could just sort of feel it fall away into like fashion, right? It's like, it's not about how the thing works.

• 24:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, so let me ask the hard question to follow up on David's point. I think everybody should read this book. It will make everybody mad in different directions. It's a good time. I would say the most, based on the excerpts that have been published in The Times and elsewhere, the thing that is like most focused, that sort of anger, is the sense that the book is about Tim Cook letting Johnny Ive get away, right? And that Johnny Ive drifting off and not feeling engaged is somehow an error and Apple has lost its magic because of that. I would argue that actually he should have clipped Johnny earlier and let him go when he was on his way out the first time and spared the company that weird middle period where his focus was split.

• 24:43David Pierce?

  That's my read too.

• 24:44Nilay Patel?

  But I think a lot of people are mad about that idea too. So like, where do you come down, having written this whole thing?

• 24:49Speaker 04

  I think that's a fair point. You can pick apart flaws in what both men did. And then you also have to ground those flaws in the fact that both men were grieving. And that's something that I think is just fundamental that gets misplaced whenever you talk about this company. Like for those who worked with Jobs, you know, his death and the fallout from that and having to come back to work and facing criticism and expectations externally, that's really hard. That's really hard to deal with. And in the wake of that, they galvanize themselves around the watch. And one of Johnny's errors in doing that is he takes on a bunch of other different projects concurrently with it.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  He takes on the watch. He does like a camera at the same time. He's working on Apple Park. And in addition to that, you know, Forstall is fired and he assumes responsibility for and influence over the software design and the user interface. And all of a sudden has dozens of more employees that he's responsible for. I mean, Jobs had kept his responsibilities pretty narrow in terms of like bureaucratic responsibilities of like HR and managing staff and so on, so forth, because he wanted him to focus on design and dreaming up products. Tim Cook allowed those things to happen. And also, if you talk to people at Apple on the creative side, one of their frustrations is

• 26:15Speaker 04

  that he didn't turn to people who had a sense of how to work with creatives and either listen to their advice when they said like, hey, go buy like C. Johnny in the design studio. Work with your talent and recognize that talent has different needs than some of the people you work with in operations. And so they were working inside the same company, but really just speaking a totally different language. And that's where the breakdown is. I think there's shared shortcomings in that. And you're probably right. In 2015, if Johnny Ive, if you were the Monday morning quarterback and Johnny Ive came to you and said like, look, I'm burned out. I'm tired. I want to leave. The better thing to do is probably just let him go. You're right.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  But Tim Cook was so afraid after taking over the reins of CEO that the core leadership group that Jobs had left behind would abandon him. That that was something that he was, he just couldn't stomach the idea of Johnny Ive going at the time. People said that he didn't want to be remembered as the CEO who let Johnny Ive walk out the door.

• 27:19Nilay Patel?

  So the interesting juxtaposition of your book coming out is it's coming out right next to Tony Fadell's book about building things. Fadell was obviously at Apple. He was just on Decoder last week and I, I asked him, you know, Steve Jobs managed this team of gigantic personalities, right? It's Scott Forstall and Tony Fadell and Johnny, and just down the line, these are huge, forceful characters. And you look at Tim Cook's Apple and it's not there anymore. That just feels like the, the best U2 fan club that has ever existed and they all drive their Aston Martins around together. Like, and that's obviously a very cultivated image. Fadell's point to me was, look, you just don't know about the, the absolute bloodsport politics inside of a big company unless you see it. But that is

• 28:03Nilay Patel?

  the image that Cook wanted. He did let go of Forstall, who was the biggest personality on that team, had the most forceful vision for how the software should work. And he has sanded off the, the rough edges of the company. Do you think that's, I mean, obviously Apple's like very successful. So by one metric, it's worked. But do you think it's worked?

• 28:22Speaker 04

  That's what you lost when you lost Jobs. Jobs, you lost an Uber ego who really enjoyed managing other egos and could do it because, because his word was final and everyone respected him. He was able to kind of balance those things. And what Tim Cook sought to create was a, a more egalitarian world where everybody had a voice and came to some consensus before charting a path forward. And for Johnny Ive, that was incredibly disorienting, right? He, he had historically been sheltered from those kinds of conversations and all of a sudden, somebody with artistic sensibilities and an aversion to conflict was thrust into a world where he had to build consensus to achieve what he wanted to do. It just stood

• 29:06Speaker 04

  in such contrast to what they were accustomed to. The Forstall bit, to me, is still fascinating. I don't know what the answer is to this, but, you know, not only had he jostled, as Tony Fadell put it, had some sense of bloodsport, political bloodsport behind the scenes before Jobs' death, but he was also understood by his peers to be the only one who considered himself to be capable of being the CEO of the company. So Tim Cook takes over and who's the first person out the door? It's the only other person who really considered himself potential successor as CEO. I don't know. I mean, I, I just think that's, that's a really interesting choice.

• 29:42Nilay Patel?

  We gotta take a break, but when we come back, we're gonna talk to Trip about how Tim Cook became adept at working over politicians. We'll be right back.

• 29:52Speaker 05

  Companies shouldn't have to choose between speed and control. Amex Corporate connects cards with flexible spending controls and real-time visibility to help teams adapt faster. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate. Get started at go.amex/ammexcorporate. Terms apply.

• 30:16Speaker 05

  If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 31:02Nilay Patel?

  We're back with Trip Mickle. A big piece of the book is Tim Cook having to become a politician. So I would, right, he's got to manage all these egos. He's got all this Apple stuff. He's handling the internal politics of Apple. But then there's this rising pressure for Tim Cook to handle actual politics and to be Donald Trump's best friend.

• 31:20David Pierce?

  It's a great moment in the book, by the way, when it just like, you just like, turn the page and all of a sudden, it's just like, oh, and then Donald Trump happened.

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Donald Trump happens. There's a trade war in China. There's a moment, which is not in the book, but- I think it's a signature moment of that Cook era where he allows Trump to announce a factory that already exists and it's just a dead lie, like the factory is there before, making the same product before and Trump got to re-announce it. And this is just him learning to play a game that maybe he didn't want to play, but now he has become quite expert at. How much of that, as you were reporting out, came to the fore? That this actually became existential for Apple and became more important than butterfly keyboards?

• 32:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's there for two reasons, because it is existential for Apple and in many ways it is more important than the butterfly keyboards. It's representative of what Apple's become, which is a $2.5 trillion empire unto its own. It's really a geopolitical force in the world, not unlike the US government or the Chinese government. Both are dependent on them, on Apple. The US government, because it's such a central part of our economy, and China, because it employs so many people in China, you know, who are working on the iPhones and everything else. My hope in people reading that is they have a deeper appreciation for what Apple is today versus what it was in 2011 when Tim Cook first took over.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  These are the type of concerns that are really taking up his day.

• 32:51David Pierce?

  There's a certain extent to that that just seems like it was coming anyway. Like, it's a really interesting sort of what-if to imagine, like, how Steve Jobs would have dealt with those same things, because...

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  You can't see Trip, he just shook his head very strongly.

• 33:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, because some of them were coming anyway, right? Like, I think there's a lot of Apple that has sort of led this to happen, like, the way that Apple decided to work in China and the way that it decided to think about privacy and stuff like that. But like, Donald Trump was gonna get elected president, no matter who was the CEO of Apple, right? And so I think it just is an interesting sort of sliding doors moment to see, like, how would that have gone under a different CEO? And would they have had to sort of learn how to play the same game?

• 33:30Speaker 04

  There are a lot of people who've worked closely with Tim and are just have complete admiration for the job he's done. And they just think that if Jobs were in charge, that the company probably would be much less valuable. And that everything that would have happened in the Trump years would have just been a total fiasco and disaster. So, full credit to Tim for being able to not only increase the company's value financially, but also navigate those political, those choppy political waters that he did in that period. And honestly, like, that's probably more urgent for the company going forward. You know, what they're gonna, what they face in relation to China, than whether or not they're gonna make a car. I know that's disappointing for listeners of the Verge

• 34:12Speaker 04

  Cast. But that's, I think that speaks to Apple's role in society today, in a way that you would have never imagined it would in the 2000 to 2010 Camelot era of Apple and all these amazing products.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  I'm just curious who you read on this. I would say that Cook's ability to manage Trump and China and the trade war, and the increasing political scrutiny and regulatory scrutiny of Apple, on one hand, his greatest success, right? He's done a masterful job at that. His, I think you called it his inherent inscrutability, I think is an amazing asset. Do you know what Elon Musk thinks? Do you know what Tim Cook thinks? You do not, right? And I think that's an asset for him. On the flip side, there are some values that he's very clear about, right? He very obviously believes in human rights. He very obviously believes in equality. He came out of the closet publicly to inspire young people. And then you're like, but you do all this business in China, and you just brush this stuff under the rug. And that, it might have been his greatest success, but you could

• 35:09Nilay Patel?

  also levy it as the greatest criticism of Cook, that he has made this deal, and he will bend to the Chinese government, because that's his only path forward. And I, because he's so inscrutable, like, I don't know how he feels about that. But does he like, walk the streets at night, like, contend with this deal that he's made? Or does he just like, go to bed on a, on a bed of money?

• 35:29Speaker 04

  It's impossible to answer without asking Tim directly, you know, about how he feels about that. It's not something I was able to get into from people around him. And I think it's become something that's become more pronounced as I've finished the book, because I think we have a deeper appreciation for the plight of the Uyghur community in China and the human rights violations that have taken place. That's become more pronounced over the past year, year and a half. Not to mention, like, we're seeing all these, like, severe lockdowns in Shanghai and some of the trauma that that's created as well. When it comes to that disconnect between what he says here at home and what, you know, their presence and dependency on

• 36:13Speaker 04

  China, that's going to be the one thing that they're going to really have their feet held to the fire over, especially if there's a change in congressional leadership in the coming months and next year. We're already seeing some of that from the FCC and Brendan Carr, who wrote a pretty critical letter about Apple and how it has this position on privacy and how there's a disconnect between that position on privacy and it not allowing Voice of America in China because the Chinese government don't want it to be available there.

• 36:43Nilay Patel?

  That to me is like very complicated, right? There's a long section in the book about the FBI and encryption. And then the out in that conversation all the time is, well, but in China, you just let iCloud be hosted by the Chinese government. Why wouldn't you just let us do that? Why wouldn't you provide us that kind of access? And their answer is always, well, because in America, we like really respect privacy and we would never let you do this. But in order to do business there, we have to accept the laws of the country, right?

• 37:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  But you never see Tim Cook, like, put those ideas together himself.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:14Nilay Patel?

  Right? You don't see him say that in the congressional hearing. You don't hear him grapple with the contradiction. And I'm just wondering, like, if you think that, like, having done all this reporting, when that moment comes, which it might if Congress flips or there's a new president in a few years or anything, Brendan Carr continues to write angry letters. I know, Brendan. It's fine. Well, how do you see the company contending with that and keeping focus on the stuff that makes Wall Street happy?

• 37:39Speaker 04

  Continuing to make the products they need to make, right? I mean, you're seeing them kind of wrestle with how to deal with that as they try to spin up manufacturing in India and Vietnam and elsewhere and really struggling with trying to find a way to move on from China and diversify their supply chain beyond China. That's really the only answer. I mean, because up to this point, there hasn't been a Plan B. But they've got to reduce that dependency. Otherwise, otherwise they're going to continue to run into the type of headaches that they announced in their most recent quarter where they're saying, we're going to have $4 to $8 billion less in sales because there's a COVID outbreak and people can't get into the Shanghai factories.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  You're looking for something more pointed, like when is Tim Cook going to comment on this?

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 04

  I mean, Tim Cook is fond of this turn of phrase often, particularly during the Trump years, you saw it around immigration where he would, he would say something to the line, to the extent of, I wish Trump would put more heart into this. There's, there's a great scene in the book, right? Where he goes in to meet with, with Trump as part of this giant CEO meeting. Or right before that meeting, Axios has a teaser story that says, Tim Cook's going to confront Trump on immigration. And so everybody from the Trump administration comes in there and is like wide eyed for this moment when Tim Cook is going to challenge Donald Trump about his immigration policy and totally afraid of what Donald Trump's going to say back to him.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  And they go through the whole meeting and never comes up. And then as Tim Cook is, is leaving, he kind of quietly says to Trump on his way out the door, I wish you put more heart into your immigration strategy. And the next thing everybody knew, that wound up in Axios. And that was what was kind of broadcast back to the work, you know, back to Apple workers, Apple customers was Tim Cook confronted Donald Trump. But for everybody who witnessed this, this was a far more subtle interaction and subtle episode than some big squeeze. And that's, that's just his style, right? We're not going to see him come out and say to Xi Jinping, like, I really wish you would

• 39:50Speaker 04

  shut down all those Uyghur camps that you have spun up in Jinggang, you know, so that we can continue to manufacture stuff there. Such a confrontation, we'd be, I don't know, naive to think that's ever going to happen.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  How do you think about the next CEO of Apple in that context then? Because. You know, he said to Kara Swisher, I think a few months ago, I won't be here in 10 more years. He's already started talking about it. Like, there's obviously a succession plan inside of Apple. It's what is the most fun game you can play in a podcast? It's talk about who might take over a company, right? It's right there with casting a movie. Who would play Johnny Ive? But when you think about the qualifications for the next CEO of Apple, right, that now it is just a company. They're not, you're not necessarily in the shadow of Steve Jobs in that way. It is very successful. The products are really successful. The services business is built out. I think a lot of people look and they think, oh, this is, it's a product person should run this company. But the argument you're making is,

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  actually, you need a politician. You need an operator and a politician to run a company of this size because it is effectively a state unto itself.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Yes. And that's what's interesting because the person who's most likely to step into that role hasn't demonstrated up to this point the type of statesmanship that we've seen from Tim Cook. He'd have to develop that. That's Jeff Williams, right? I mean, he seems to be the successor in waiting. He and Tim Cook have worked together since their IBM days. Granted, they're, you know, similar in age, so there's that to contend with. But he's still the most likely successor. The one thing that he has that Tim Cook didn't have, if he were to fill that role, is more product experience because he led the watch product and he's been deeply involved in their healthcare efforts. And he also, before

• 41:37Speaker 04

  that, was fairly involved in the iPhone. And when Tony Fadell was fired from the company, he filled Tony Fadell's seat in terms of making some product-related decisions on the iPhone. And a lot of people were quite impressed with the degree of savviness that he brought to kind of understanding both the engineering issues that they confronted, but then also some of the design sensibilities and aesthetic decisions that they were trying to make as well.

• 42:03David Pierce?

  In the realm of thinking about like where Apple goes next, the car comes up a bunch in the book, the like mythical Apple car that either will or won't exist.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  They just hired a new person. They just hired another Ford executive to run the car. It's a real pipeline from Ford to Apple, back to Ford. That's what you do.

• 42:18David Pierce?

  To Tesla, to, yeah, it's good, it's great. But so the, the car factors in pretty prominently. And then there's this like great what if moment where it was going to be the watch or it was going to be the TV and it turned out to be the watch. And it's like, it is now my favorite alternate history. Like what if instead of getting super obsessed with watches, Johnny and I have gotten super obsessed with TVs. But like as, as we're looking out towards sort of what's coming next, like my first question is, is the car ever going to happen? Like if you were a betting man, is there ever going to be an Apple car?

• 42:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 42:49David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  And, and the reason I think it'll happen is I think they've, they've got to move into a category that big. They just do. I mean, you know, the, the growth, the growth expectations of Wall Street will demand that they enter something that new and that ambitious. And we haven't, we've seen them kind of dabbling in healthcare for a long time, but we haven't seen them show the ability to, to turn healthcare into a real financial opportunity for the company yet, I would argue, beyond the watch. I mean, that's still the, the primary income stream for healthcare.

• 43:19David Pierce?

  And Apple's tried pretty loudly with the healthcare stuff, like it.

• 43:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Tim Cook has said our biggest contribution to the world will be in health.

• 43:25David Pierce?

  But that doesn't seem to be like, I think you're right that that is whatever that's going to be, it's not that yet.

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  I would say the COVID tracking initiative did not stop COVID.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  No, no. I mean, how many notifications did you get about your, you know, your close, close brushes with, with COVID through that? The one thing that the reason I'm, I'm more, I left reporting the book more optimistic about the possibility and potential of a car was weirdly because of what they did with Apple Park and what they pulled off there. I know this is going to sound like a bizarre leap. Why are we going from, from, from cars to, to construction? But the big feat with Apple Park is that they took this incredibly ambitious design to make this curved glass that had never been made before in the world.

• 44:11Speaker 04

  They persuaded a German manufacturer to build a giant warehouse to make this precisely curved glass. And then in doing so, they not only, you know, built this unique. Building for themselves, but they unlocked the possibility that architects and people in construction could start designing things with similar curvature. It's kind of radical to think about the idea that a company that makes electronics change the construction and architecture industry in a fundamental way. And so when you think about that and you think about like auto, you know, could they jump into the auto industry and change the way that's been done for some time? I mean, that's what, that's what makes me optimistic.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  It's weirdly, it's weirdly the design sensibilities and the design history, which is now, you know, Johnny Ive's departed. So TBD how that, that manifests itself going forward. But it's the operational sophistication and engineering talent of that company to pull off a feat like they did with a building that makes you, makes you look at the car thing and be like, they could, they came into this, they could do something that nobody else has thought of or done.

• 45:20Nilay Patel?

  But why have there been so many restarts along the way? Cause this is like, right, it's their white whale. It, I agree with you. It's, it's the next biggest market that they can enter, but they can't seem to figure out how or why or what they should do.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  It, it speaks to some of that, that political bloodsport that Tony Fadell was alluding to. The book, the book hits on this, but basically at the outset, you had these two competing ideas for what, what the car could be. One of those ideas was that we just jump in super efficiently and we displace Tesla with an electric vehicle. And the other idea was, well, if we're going to come in, we need to go full autonomy. And Johnny Ive was really the one who, who was pushing for that, that idea that we go full autonomy. And this was in the, the kind of go-go years where we were all going to be riding around in, in autonomous vehicles. And that's just, I mean, I don't know, you talk to anybody who really believed that around

• 46:15Speaker 04

  2015, they've given up and abandoned hope that that'll ever be a reality until there's a major breakthrough in AI. But they were all buying into the, you know, the promise and the illusion of that in 2015. So that, that's been the biggest holdup. That was a major problem.

• 46:31Nilay Patel?

  It feels like there's a third notion there, which was we'll just make an electric car like Tesla. We'll do this. There's a great scene in the book where Johnny Ive does like a fake Siri demo for, for Tim Cook with an actress pretending to be Siri in the car. That's just nuts. Like. Everyone should buy the book just to read that scene and be like, imagine that actually happening, because that is just nuts to me. But then there's like the third option, which is we'll just make software for everybody else's cars, right? And we'll, we'll just colonize all the other cars and Apple services will be in them. And they seem to have vacillated between all three of these things. Where do you think they are now?

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Right now, literally what they're doing is they're, you know, they have cars rolling around on the streets with these, these mattress pads. I don't know if you guys have seen those locally, but there are these mattress pads that are on a top the car and they look like giant iPhones in terms of, in terms of what, what's driving around. So they're still looking to refine the autonomous capability of it. And then I guess combine that with some of the battery pack sophistication that they've developed over the years.

• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  So you think they're going full autonomous car still? How long do you think that, do you think it'll be?

• 47:35Speaker 04

  God.

• 47:36Nilay Patel?

  And no one wants to make this bet. This is how you get fired from leading the Apple autonomous car project.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  Thank God, yeah. I mean, we should call the guy at Lyft, right? When, when are we gonna all be riding around with cars that, uh?

• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I interview a lot of autonomous car CEOs on Decoder and they're all like, I'm not, I'm not making a prediction, not at this time. But you think they're gonna do it? You think they're just gonna keep piling money into it and Wall Street's gonna let them keep piling money into it?

• 47:57Speaker 04

  There's no shortage of cash over there. I don't know if you've noticed that, but I think, I think, I think, I think they can afford to continue to bet on it. I think the bigger question is, and if you look back at the tension, it's like, who's gonna step into that void and, and provide some direction? That to me was the more interesting thing when you looked at the car project was, you know, during the Jobs era, Jobs could come in and chart a path forward and everybody could rally behind that. In his absence in this, in this age of consensus, you increasingly have conflict without resolution. And that's what I think has been the hangup.

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, we are running out of time with you. Thank you for giving us so much time. And just to wrap this up, you've now spent a lot of time paying attention to these two figures inside of Apple and how the company has worked. What do you think it's biggest, what do you think Apple's biggest challenge right now is?

• 48:46Speaker 04

  I think its biggest challenge, in particular for Tim Cook, is finding his next pair. I mean, when I look back at the history of Apple, it's really stunning when you analyze it. But Jobs built Apple with WAS, Jobs returned and kind of saved Apple with IVE. That was his key partner. And then IVE and Cook have been key to this past decade and the success that they've had, both in the development of services and the development of the watch and AirPods category. So who's Cook going to team up with now? I mean, if their pressing issues are China and figuring out how to reduce their dependency on that, that's certainly something that Tim and Jeff can work on. Is it Johnny Shruji?

• 49:28Speaker 04

  Is Tim Cook's Johnny, really Johnny Shruji? And it's going to be about chips that you can predict how much power is going to improve on machines on a given year? And you're going to be more focused on what goes inside the machine than how the exterior of a product looks? I mean, that seems to be the direction they're heading. But identifying that person and unleashing their talent is going to be key to their ability to get there.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  There's not a lot of chip talk in the book, right? There's not a lot of PA Semi or Johnny Shruji. But this is actually the engine of Apple's success over the last two years in particular, is that their chips, design, power, performance, power consumption far outpaces the entire industry. Their strategy to let TSMC build the chips while they design them, set the model for everybody else. And the Mac is having a renaissance because they've moved to their own chips and they brought them in-house. If I had to point to one, like, here's a criticism this book is going to get. It's not in there, right? Why is that not in there?

• 50:31Speaker 04

  This is, gets back to the choices that you have to make, right? You know, if you want to bring the reader along and keep the focus relatively tight, the company that I found myself following and the issues that Tim Cook was most concerned with. Were developing services, right? And then also dealing with these extraneous issues of the empire that he had built. Trump and China. They were less about about the product and where the product was going. And by that point, Johnny was gone. I mean, the book does end in 2019. So when you say like, the last two years, well, the book, literally, the last page is Johnny Ive walking out of the door. And that was summer of 2019. So you're highlighting a period that the book doesn't cover, and these are choices you have to make.

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And there's like, one line that you cut out at the end, which like, and then Johnny Shuji peeked over the bush. Watch Johnny Ive.

• 51:22David Pierce?

  The sequel is called New Johnny.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  Trip, this has been amazing. The book is really good. We could obviously talk for another hour. Like I said, it's gonna make everyone mad, which I think is the sign of success for a book like this. Everyone's mad in different directions. I have to ask this last question. You're not gonna like it, and you're not gonna answer it, but I have to ask. Is Johnny Ive the source for the scenes where Johnny Ive is standing alone in rooms, contemplating his own future?

• 51:47Speaker 04

  I can't get into the sourcing, but you guys know full and well, and it's been hilarious to watch Jonathan Martin and the guys who just came out with the book on Trump feel these questions like, who gave you the McCarthy audio? It's never who you think it is, right? It just never is. I mean, it's not the obvious person, and that's why people are having a hard time with the SCOTUS thing as well. Who leaked this? Like, nobody's got a clue. It's just not obvious.

• 52:12Nilay Patel?

  That was a really good deflection. I got, that's well-practiced. All right, Trip, it's great. I recommend everybody, if you're listening to this show, you're gonna love this book. You should go read it. Congratulations, Trip. It's great. We'll have to have you back on soon.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Thanks so much. I appreciate you having me.

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  We gotta take a break, but when we come back, Alex Cranz will join us for a gadget lightning round.

• 52:32Speaker 06

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/AF.

• 53:41Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Alex Krantz is here. Hey, Alex.

• 53:43Alex Cranz?

  Hey, I have no new news about Sexy Clippy. Sorry.

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  All right. There's some gadgets to talk about.

• 53:51Alex Cranz?

  There's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot of gadget news this week.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  There's, there's a bunch of gadget, like exciting, leaky gadget news. Well, let's start with my favorite, Starlink.

• 53:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  So I got an email. I think a lot of people got this email. If you're a Starlink customer, they will now let you move the dish around wherever you want and use it wherever you want, which is a big step.

• 54:09Alex Cranz?

  Huge step.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  Because before you kind of like the Starlink divides the world into like little hexagon shapes and your hexagon is where you could be. And if you left it, you got in trouble.

• 54:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:20Nilay Patel?

  But now you can go to any hexagon you want.

• 54:22David Pierce?

  As someone who has never used Starlink, define trouble. Like what, what would happen if you previously tried to move your dishy?

• 54:27Nilay Patel?

  They would shut you down.

• 54:28David Pierce?

  Oh, okay.

• 54:29Nilay Patel?

  Like first it wouldn't work. And then if you tried to move it on the website too many times, they would like catch you. And you, so you weren't allowed to like change your location on the website too many times because they, they were just protecting the network. None of this is nefarious. They're just like, but they've launched a bunch of new satellites. I think they have the capacity now. So they're enabling portability, which means you can take it anywhere. Here's, here's the, the rub, $25 a month.

• 54:51Alex Cranz?

  Oof. Are they, they're waiving that fee, I assume in Ukraine.

• 54:56Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what Starlink's pricing is like. They've raised the fees for everyone else. So they went from 90 to 110 for the base service. And now, if you want to move around with Starlink, you're at another 25. So $135 for your portable Starlink experience. You still can't like put it on a car, which I think a lot of people want to do. But anywhere you are in a service area, if you pay the extra fee, you can set the thing down and it'll point itself to the sky and go.

• 55:21David Pierce?

  And am I right in thinking that Starlink has said it's working on the like you can use it in motion thing? Because that seems like that's pretty clearly like the thing it ought to be, is that it just works.

• 55:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Again, the the technical limitation of Starlink every time is that even a single utility pole will degrade your service. But one tree will degrade. So yeah, you're driving around, but like if you drive next to a tall car, you drive next to a semi truck like.

• 55:49Alex Cranz?

  Or any 18-wheeler like.

• 55:51Nilay Patel?

  You're hooped. So I think there's there's a little bit of that for them to yet figure out. I'm pretty sure the answer, like all things Starlink, is more satellites. Like Tony Stark style, like a suit of armor around the world.

• 56:03Alex Cranz?

  They're just going to follow you. The satellites will just like be like drones. I think we just need to put satellites on drones. That's the next Starlink.

• 56:11Nilay Patel?

  They're launching more satellites, they're opening more service and now they've. This is a big step for them because this is the thing you were not allowed to do before. And when we reviewed it, I actually tried to give it to Monica where she had bad internet service at her parents' house. And Starlink was like, what are you, the police are coming. Stop that. And actually, part of the thing that people got mad at me in the review is like, you know, my house has got big trees. So to test it in a place where the installation worked, I drove down the street to where there were no trees. And so then the criticism is, well, you were out of your service area. And I was like, I was just down the street. But now for $25 a month, I can make that criticism go away. So watch out, Starlink fanboys. I'm paying the money and coming for you.

• 56:49Alex Cranz?

  Re-review.

• 56:51David Pierce?

  I find this super exciting. Like, as someone who does not have any need whatsoever in my life for Starlink, because I have, I mean, I was gonna say fast internet, but as Liam, our producer, can attest, it's not fast, but it's internet at home, and it works fine. Like, the appeal of Starlink has never actually hit me as a person. But like, now, Starlink goes from like, thing you get if it's your only way to get internet, because you're somewhere far with bad connectivity or no connectivity, to like, it now does things that my Comcast internet connection won't. Like, I can take it with me on vacation, which is like a meaningful, real thing that I think is kinda cool.

• 57:26Alex Cranz?

  Doesn't your phone also do that, though?

• 57:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, but if 5G was real, this would be, 5G would be cool and exciting, but here we are.

• 57:35Nilay Patel?

  Right. And Starlink doesn't have data caps yet. They're not doing, like, they are a better, they're still an ISP, and they, in their Terms of Service, have reserved the right to do all the bad things.

• 57:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? You do too much torrenting, Starlink is looking at your packets, and they will shut you down for hopper infringement, just like anybody else. But, right now, they're not doing any of it. I think the question is, does the network have capacity? And also, traveling with Starlink is, like, it's a unwieldy and complicated thing. Like, there's a dish, there's a power injector box, there's its own custom router. That's all a lot, you know? So, like, try to take Starlink through the TSA, like, let me know, because I want to be there on that day. Like, if you have an RV, or you're like, doing van life, I think this is like, ideal.

• 58:17Alex Cranz?

  I was like, those TikToks of people building their vans, so they can live off the grid. So excited for the Starlink episodes now.

• 58:25Nilay Patel?

  Notable Verge expat Evan Rogers, building a van on his Instagram right now. It's pretty good.

• 58:29Alex Cranz?

  Will he put Starlink in it?

• 58:32David Pierce?

  Probably. Knowing Evan, like, that's coming.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  We'll get him to review Starlink on the road. Next lightning round, item. This is actually really cool. So, you can now play Fortnite on iPhone or Android in the browser through Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is like, the browser's the out for all of these services and all this internet purchase stuff. It's pretty cool that you can do it.

• 58:51Alex Cranz?

  And this was like, after Epic pretty notoriously didn't want to work with Microsoft for a long time, because they're competitors. And they were like, we don't want you to, like, we compete with you. We don't want our stuff on your services. And then they're like, oh, in this particular instance, this is a win for both of us. And Microsoft gets to look very magnanimous.

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was like an enemy of my enemy is my friend move this one.

• 59:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  Pretty clearly. Like, they both have a lot to gain from screwing up this whole App Store thing Apple has going on. And this is like a pretty, it's a pretty good way to do it, actually. They're like, it's in the browser, it works, it's Fortnite magic.

• 59:28Alex Cranz?

  One of my favorite things is how Microsoft has just been egging everybody on in this whole saga. And, you know, they have, they have their stake, like, they want an Xbox Cloud Gaming app. They've tried repeatedly to do it, they can't, they're doing the browser. And so instead, they're like, just being friends with everybody else and being like, you know, that's right, that would be cool. We should be able to have our apps.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they're putting out open letters, being like, we're the most open company, except for the Xbox.

• 59:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's wonder, like, I just, I love Xbox, it's just like, don't, don't pay attention to that side of things.

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  So, but you wonder, right? Epic versus Google is marching right along. You have to think Google's gonna be like, well, why is this a problem? You can just play it in the browser on Microsoft's platform. Look at how competitive this is. If you're Google's lawyers and you just had that thought just now, I don't know what you're, like, you, come on. You should have thought about this already. You should be first on your list when you see news like this, but I imagine we're gonna hear this argument. So there's a little bit of, like, gamesmanship inside an announcement.

• 1:00:25Alex Cranz?

  What's the counter to that? I like, I know the counter in this room would be, well, have you played things on the browser versus an app? But like, what's the, the legal counter besides being like, Judge, Judge, please play Fortnite on an app right now while we watch?

• 1:00:39Nilay Patel?

  So for Apple, the counter to all the browser stuff was Apple nerfs the browser. Which is not really an argument you can make about Google. Right? Because, and then there's other browsers available. You don't need to use the Chrome engine on Android phones, you can download other browsers with other browser engines. So there's a lot, I think that case is gonna be the much more interesting one compared to Apple. Apple's interesting because you got, you know, Tim Cook on a stand and the judge is yelling at him and like, the Google case is like, it's all deals, right? Google licenses Android, the deals have the control embedded in the language of them. So like, I think there's more to come from that case. Like, I don't think the Safari team is like writing a contract with the App Store team. But like, that's how Android works. Like, they have a contract with, with Samsung and with the carriers and like all the stuff, so.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  We shall see. Chris Welch continues to just ruthlessly scoop the Sonos team about this new thing, the Sonos Ray.

• 1:01:31Alex Cranz?

  There will be nothing left for the actual announcement. They'll just refer to The Verge.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  I hope they go crazy at the actual announcement. They're like, "It's actually a TV!" And like, Patrick Spence like pulls up the... He's like, "Aha, I gotcha!"

• 1:01:43David Pierce?

  It's a projector screen that pulls up out of the soundbar.

• 1:01:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:47David Pierce?

  It's actually a good idea, I'm just gonna say. Like, a screen that pulls up out of your soundbar. It's a pretty good idea.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  It's a tiny little screen.

• 1:01:54David Pierce?

  But like, short throw projector in my soundbar, throws up on the pull-up screen like you used to have in middle school, is a good idea. I just invented something.

• 1:02:02Alex Cranz?

  With the name Sonos Ray, it could be a short throw projector. Cause like, Ray is kind of a silly name. Apologies to everyone named Ray listening to this. Ray for the name of a soundbar is a silly name. And like, maybe it's beaming rays of light onto a short throw projector screen. Yeah.

• 1:02:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's 250 bucks. It's supposed to go on sound a matter of weeks. But the more interesting piece, that also Chris Welch leaked, they're gonna introduce their own voice assistant, which is fascinating. So, as you know, Sonos and Google are tied up in patent litigation. It all started when Sonos wanted Alexa and Google Assistant to operate simultaneously. Amazon doesn't care, cause they're the winner. But Google apparently said no, like very vociferously. That led to patent litigation. Patrick Spence and the chief legal officer of Sonos were on Decoder talking about it. But you can see, they're like, "We'll just do our own to do the things we wanna do. So we don't have to extend your platforms." They are building this Home Theater OS. There's job listings for it. But here's

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  a really funny thing about this. So, Sonos Voice will be on all S2 Sonos devices that have microphones. So it will support Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Deezer, obviously Deezer, how could you forget Deezer, and then Sonos S10 Radio. But Spotify and YouTube Music are not on board. And it's like, well, yeah, obviously YouTube Music is not on board.

• 1:03:27David Pierce?

  So close.

• 1:03:28Alex Cranz?

  Spotify's a.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  Spotify's a big one.

• 1:03:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was like, maybe YouTube, like, I get it. People will survive, but Spotify, that's a, that's a really big one to not have on there.

• 1:03:38David Pierce?

  Spotify is an interesting one in that range, actually, because Spotify has its own voice search thing that it obviously has incentives to get people to use. But also Spotify has been pretty open in.

• 1:03:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49David Pierce?

  Working inside of this space, like Spotify Connect is very good. It's everywhere. My guess would be, and I have absolutely no inside knowledge on this, but my guess would be that that is a, like a timing thing rather than a philosophical difference. Because it, unless there's something we don't know about this voice assistant, it seems very surprising to me that Spotify would not be interested in being part of it.

• 1:04:09Nilay Patel?

  Or Spotify wants its voice assistant on there, too.

• 1:04:11David Pierce?

  Maybe.

• 1:04:12Nilay Patel?

  Right, because like, you know, Sonos is like, we'll have Siri on there if Apple would let us. And Apple's like, no, no, no, no.

• 1:04:16Alex Cranz?

  You won't.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  No, you don't need that.

• 1:04:20Alex Cranz?

  You don't want Siri on your speaker.

• 1:04:21David Pierce?

  Siri exists to be launched by accident on my computer while I'm downstairs. That's, that's what Siri is here for.

• 1:04:27Nilay Patel?

  My current Siri moment is I have a, I've installed a smart garage door opener. It's very fancy. So I leave the house and I say, close the garage. And Siri on my watch is just like, I'm working on it. And that's, it actually says that.

• 1:04:41Alex Cranz?

  It's the worst thing in the world.

• 1:04:44Nilay Patel?

  This is, this is the dumbest thing that you can do as a computer. You close a relay. That's all it's doing. Like, the box is very, it, it actually patches into the switch itself and just closes the wire. Like, it's not complicated.

• 1:04:58David Pierce?

  I'm just imagining Siri is like a very tiny person hanging from your garage door, being like, come on.

• 1:05:04Alex Cranz?

  Get it down.

• 1:05:05Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I'm working on it. I'm gonna just like, like, like Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Like, I got.

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  And then about 50% of the time, it fails.

• 1:05:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 1:05:17Alex Cranz?

  Whenever, whenever she says, I'm working on it, you're like, oh, I'm just gonna have to say this in 20 minutes, once you finish working on it and failing.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Alex Cranz?

  Like, every time.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  But it's funny, because it, Siri, it suggests all these, like, very optimistic automation routines.

• 1:05:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, when we detect that you've come home and we're paired to the car, we'll open the garage for you. And I'm like, you can't, you don't, you can't open the garage. Like, I don't.

• 1:05:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  What do you think you're gonna, that's like me saying I'm gonna run a marathon. Like, I'm definitely not gonna do that.

• 1:05:46Alex Cranz?

  I had her set up so where she was supposed to, whenever the camera detected motion and I wasn't home, it would turn all the lights red and sing that song, "I'll Be Watching You", to really creep freak out whoever had snuck into my home. But then it only activated when I would get home.

• 1:06:05Alex Cranz?

  It wouldn't like, the trigger that I was home would come later. So it'd be like, "I'm watching you." And I'm like, "No, I know. I mean, no, something's wrong."

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  Alex, you don't know this, but I have to remind, I'm obligated to remind you that Siri on our show is an "it". We do not gender robots on The Vergecast.

• 1:06:21Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, I apologize.

• 1:06:23Nilay Patel?

  It only comes up because Amazon is so insistent on gendering Alexa.

• 1:06:27Alex Cranz?

  It's rude.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  And it's like...

• 1:06:28Alex Cranz?

  They don't have gender. They're robots.

• 1:06:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Nilay Patel?

  And not very smart ones.

• 1:06:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're very stupid robots.

• 1:06:34David Pierce?

  But wait, I have a question about this Sonos thing. So I think, like, leaving aside whether Sonos can do this in a way that is good, which I would say, given Sonos's software experience, is just an absolute coin flip. Who knows? Sometimes Sonos does cool stuff, sometimes it's a total disaster. Coin flip, we'll see. I think this is a very good idea, both for like strategic reasons, because Sonos is just gonna like middle finger Google and Apple and Amazon and everybody else who doesn't work with them, but also because my, my like longstanding thesis about voice assistants is that actually we should have lots of them and not just one. Like, I wanna, I wanna talk to my TV by talking to my TV, not by talking to Alexa about my TV.

• 1:07:17David Pierce?

  And I think like Roku has worked on this in the past and, to be honest, has changed its plans so many times that I have no idea what Roku is doing with voice assistants anymore. But I think this idea that Sonos is like, "Okay, you want music, talk to Sonos. Don't talk to Alexa about Sonos. Talk to Sonos." I actually think is a really good idea for a bunch of reasons, especially as they wanna get people like used to the idea of using its products in lots of different places. So if they can pull this off, I actually think it's gonna be really smart. And music assistants work. They're good.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I also think they have a great, so I know, they've told us, they've told everybody, they make products that microphones because, oh... Huge segment of customers do not want microphones and everything.

• 1:07:54Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:07:54Nilay Patel?

  Because privacy implications. So if you're Sonos and you're like, this isn't Amazon, this isn't whatever else. This is us and what it does is it plays music, which is a thing you want to do. They throw in multiple timers like, whoo, watch out.

• 1:08:07Alex Cranz?

  Give you the weather, like.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Bezos, your empire will crumble. Yeah, maybe not even the weather. Like, maybe it's just that the things that people do is just set timers and play music.

• 1:08:17David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, this is what we do and it's private and, you know, we're not going to sell you ads or we're not going to pop up and say, like, have you heard about the games? Like, we're just going to do the two things. Very smart. Question is, are they going to make you pay for it?

• 1:08:29David Pierce?

  Oh, that's an interesting question.

• 1:08:30Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, I hate that question.

• 1:08:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, is this like a premium Sonos subscription situation?

• 1:08:35Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that makes a lot of sense for them, looking for like additional revenue streams. Like, everybody wants that consistent $5 a month. These customers all have money to pay, like, right?

• 1:08:45Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't love recurring revenue?

• 1:08:46David Pierce?

  Well, and especially as they're going to start to like, if they're going to make headphones and they have these Bluetooth speakers, like, being the thing that stitches everything together is Sonos' whole thing. And then add on to that, like, this amazing control system, I could absolutely see them charging for that.

• 1:09:01Alex Cranz?

  I feel like there's two things that will make this kind of dead on arrival. Not having Spotify.

• 1:09:07David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:09:07Alex Cranz?

  Like, that's a huge one. And also the fact that if you already have other smart assistants in your home, you're now having competing smart assistants and you have to remember their names and remember to activate the right one at the right time. Maybe that's just a me dead in the water thing, but I will forget the names immediately. I will absolutely call Siri when I mean to call Sonos and the other way around, because I do it with my dog and my brother now. Like, when one of them isn't even like a human being, I will mess it up constantly.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  I think I'm with David, though. I think that's just timing, given historically where Spotify is, or Spotify demanding that. They had their weird voice thing on there, too. We'll see. Um, this Chromebook seems amazing.

• 1:09:46Alex Cranz?

  It's amazingly expensive.

• 1:09:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm, but I'm like down with the $1,000 Chromebook.

• 1:09:51David Pierce?

  So I, I added this one to the rundown and it's, that's the exact conversation I want to have because this has been tried a bunch of times. And as far as I can tell, this, this new Chromebook, which is, it's called, uh, the HP Dragonfly.

• 1:10:03Alex Cranz?

  The HP Elite Dragonfly.

• 1:10:06David Pierce?

  You're right. I apologize. The Elite Dragonfly. It has, I mean, high-end chips. It has Intel's V Pro platform. It gets super bright. It has an HDMI port. It's like, it's a, it's a whole ass computer. Uh, and it starts at $1,149. And I think the question I have been wondering for years is like, will anyone want to pay this much money even for the best imaginable Chromebook? And I'm actually really excited for, at the idea that we're going to find out.

• 1:10:33Alex Cranz?

  They didn't do it with the Pixelbook. Why would they do it? What's the difference between this and the Pixelbook?

• 1:10:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, the Pixelbook was a little shaky. It was like a little too much.

• 1:10:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  Right. But I will say this. I bought my mom a Chromebook Pixel. It was a thousand dollars and it's the single best technology purchase I've ever made because you do not have to support that thing. It's a web browser.

• 1:10:55Alex Cranz?

  It just goes.

• 1:10:55Nilay Patel?

  And there's all the other stuff that Chromebooks can do now. Like they have, they can run Android apps for some godforsaken reason that hopefully Dieter will figure out. Hey buddy. But like, it's just a web browser and you like hand somebody a beautiful laptop that isn't like, have you heard about services revenue? We've opened the, the Apple TV app is on your laptop for some, like, none of that. No, no Windows garbage. It's just like, here's a web browser, but it's beautiful. Like it might, it's still my mom's like primary computer year and this is years now. Like maybe five years she's still using this thing. And I'm like, well, it's time to upgrade. Like here we go. You're an elite dragonfly now, mom. You're a real gamer.

• 1:11:34David Pierce?

  Uh, God, if only it wasn't called the Elite Dragonfly.

• 1:11:38Alex Cranz?

  I do love that this is the first one that's kind of like had a really good display, or sounds like it has a really good display. We haven't seen it in person, but a thousand nits, like, that's, that's nice.

• 1:11:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Pixelbook had those bezels. I wasn't about to put those bezels near my mother. I respect her. She's a brilliant and accomplished woman.

• 1:11:57Alex Cranz?

  I tried to say that I liked the bezels. And as I get older, I'm like, why did I say that? I was like, it's good for my fingers when I'm in-

• 1:12:04David Pierce?

  You said you liked the bezels?

• 1:12:05Alex Cranz?

  When I was in tablet mode, it was really nice. I played a lot of Fallout Shelter on the Pixelbook. And it was great for that. And that's it.

• 1:12:13David Pierce?

  That's a wild take.

• 1:12:14Alex Cranz?

  And then I tried to put fuchsia on it and broke it. So.

• 1:12:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm definitely gonna buy this one. I can see it coming.

• 1:12:21David Pierce?

  And this is like a thing. There's, there's, uh, these are starting to trickle out, these computers that are like very good computers that ordinarily like could have run Windows one day, and now are running Chrome OS. And I feel like if I'm Microsoft, that's real bad news. But as a person who loves Chromebooks, I think that's super exciting.

• 1:12:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just an I3.

• 1:12:39Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah, that's, it's-

• 1:12:41Nilay Patel?

  It's a Chromebook.

• 1:12:42Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it doesn't need a lot, but also, yeah, it's an I3. I think it even has less, it has not a lot of storage, eight gigabytes of RAM, 128 gigabytes of storage. So for the same price, you can get a MacBook.

• 1:12:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but the MacBook will like, the MacBook will just like find ways for Tim Cook to ask you for money at like the slightest provocation.

• 1:13:04Alex Cranz?

  The MacBook will, I mean, I got my mom one over Christmas, and the calls about that I get, I field.

• 1:13:11David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:11Alex Cranz?

  I'd still do it with a Chromebook, but that's just because my mom's annoying. But like, I love you.

• 1:13:16David Pierce?

  It's the iCloud troubleshooting for me.

• 1:13:17Alex Cranz?

  You're wonderful.

• 1:13:18David Pierce?

  It's the iCloud troubleshooting. I can't do it.

• 1:13:19Alex Cranz?

  Well, she doesn't, she doesn't want anything in, she's like, I don't want anything in the cloud.

• 1:13:23Nilay Patel?

  No one has ever cared about anything in my life as persistently as my MacBook has cared about turning on Wi-Fi calling. It's just like, I don't, I do not wish to ever receive phone calls on this device. Please stop it.

• 1:13:37Alex Cranz?

  So persistent.

• 1:13:39Nilay Patel?

  All right, last one. This is like leaks week.

• 1:13:42David Pierce?

  It was.

• 1:13:43Nilay Patel?

  And this leak actually blew up. So the Sony's got new headphones.

• 1:13:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  I always get the name wrong.

• 1:13:49Alex Cranz?

  The W H dash.

• 1:13:52Nilay Patel?

  1000 X M H 5.

• 1:13:54Alex Cranz?

  No, just XM XM 5.

• 1:13:56David Pierce?

  I think the H 5s are the earbuds.

• 1:13:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  I always get this mixed up. Anyway, I have the XM 2s. You know, they're great, but the battery's starting to go. And every year I'm like, should I get the XM 3? Should I get the XM 4? And like, no, because they're the same headphones, but these are appreciably different, which is all that matters.

• 1:14:13Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:14:14Nilay Patel?

  So I, these are still, I, these were my go to airplane headphones and I stopped wearing, or my XM 2s were my go to airplane headphones. And then I stopped flying airplanes. But now I'm on airplanes again. And I'm like, oh, the noise cancelling, like noise cancelling technology has improved dramatically.

• 1:14:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Nilay Patel?

  So I'm in it, but Sony still has a problem like everybody else does. If you have an iPhone, you're stuck with whatever Apple will let you do. So you can't do high quality audio. You can't do uncompressed like you're just kind of stuck at Apple's sound quality situation. Which I am sure the next versions of the AirPods will overcome in some proprietary way. And like, you just have to, you just have to look into your heart and be okay with that.

• 1:14:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. And truthfully, I think for most people, the like, the thing the Sonos have going for them, which is stupendously long battery life. If, especially if this leak is true and it's 40 hours, like that's, that's a crazy number. Really good noise cancellation. They're super comfortable. Like, that's the thing about the Sonos that always gets me is just the.

• 1:15:08Alex Cranz?

  They're like little clouds.

• 1:15:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, I can just wear them for like a eight hour journey and it doesn't feel bad, which I love. And I also think their, their microphone is really good, which is a thing that it's possible. I am the only person on earth who cares about, but uh, matters to me a lot. Yeah, I'm very excited about these Sonos, especially if they have, like the new design is a little sleeker. It has kind of a little sort of candy cane looking thing attaching the bands to the cups instead of just being like all band. And yeah, I, these Sonos I think have consistently been the best noise cancelling headphones for a bunch of years now. And the, the XM 5.

• 1:15:43Alex Cranz?

  Since the XM 2s.

• 1:15:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Alex Cranz?

  Right? Like I, I got the XM 3s. I love them. I wore them to Taiwan and back. Like with my glasses on, which is normally like a recipe for pain. Totally comfortable. It was great. I mean, 14 hour flight wasn't, but the rest was really great. Like, yeah, they just, and the noise cancelling, like, the way Sony does noise cancelling and their approach to it, where they don't kind of, the sound profile still, they still maintain quality in the sound profile, whereas Bose goes really flat. Apple goes really just expensive. Nobody wants to buy the Apple ones because they're, I don't even know how they sound because they're-

• 1:16:20Nilay Patel?

  They're also heavy and weird.

• 1:16:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and like, these are like-

• 1:16:22Nilay Patel?

  AirPods Max, I mean.

• 1:16:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. These are clouds. These are clouds that shut off the airplane for you. But still get you where you need to go.

• 1:16:31Nilay Patel?

  I haven't tried new Bose ones. I have QuietComfort 2s and they're so bad at low end that they're almost unlistenable to me.

• 1:16:37David Pierce?

  I have the QC45s, which are not like the highest end one, but are pretty recent ones, and it's exactly the same thing. Like, I, I love the way they sound, I love the way they feel, and if it is, like, if it's been, if it has been breezy in the last five days, my headphones will sound like trash, and it sounds like I am blowing away in a storm. It's awful. Otherwise, they're great, though. But no, I think that, like, yeah, these Sonos are very exciting, and I'm absolutely convinced that if they had a better, more memorable name, they would have absolutely already eaten the headphone market alive, but because no one can go Google them and find them, we still have to tell people they exist.

• 1:17:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I do this for a living, and I still can't say the product name correctly. All right, we went, we talked, we spent a long time talking to Tripp Mickle, so we are officially over on the Vergecast once again. Alex, thank you.

• 1:17:22Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:17:23Nilay Patel?

  Some stuff to plug. You should listen to Decoder this week. We had Tony Fadell. It was a real, a real ride. And then, obviously, the Fadell conversation and the Mickle conversation you just heard, like, play off each other. Fadell, by the way, there's some people who are like actively and aggressively fact-checking his conversation with me on Twitter right now. Like, ex-Dropcam employees. So that's pretty good. Alex has got her mini-series. What's going on with creators this week, Alex?

• 1:17:48Alex Cranz?

  So, this week, we, we talked to Jacob Alexander, who is one of, like, the first guys who started selling keyboards online, like, people were selling keyboards online, but he was selling them on Kickstarter, making his own keyboards, and we kind of talked about where the space is, and how we got there, and where it's gonna go next, and how it's like small creators like him who are doing it. It was very fun.

• 1:18:08David Pierce?

  It was a great episode.

• 1:18:09Alex Cranz?

  And next week, we're gonna talk to the guys from Ploopy.

• 1:18:11Nilay Patel?

  No, no follow-ups.

• 1:18:12Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna have to listen to find out why it's called Ploopy. It was the first thing I asked. It was great.

• 1:18:17Nilay Patel?

  Ploopy's coming, everybody. You can tweet at us. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. David is at Pierce. I am at Reckless. We'd love to hear from you. That's it. That's the Vergecast Rock and Roll.

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. And if you liked the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:18:56Speaker 08

  As a pioneer in the organic and natural food industry, the Whole Foods Market philosophy is rooted in a shared connection to people and to the planet. From farmland to stores, its products have always been a symphony of colors, textures, and flavors. In addition to its national brands, Whole Foods Market's team of local foragers continually scours the country to bring over 60,000 emerging and local products to its shelves each year. And they work with credentialed experts and top-of-the-line makers to offer customers the best possible variety. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online.

• 1:19:36Speaker 09

  Support for this show comes from CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is CoreWeave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose-built tech, building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI. Ready for anything? Ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to coreweave.com/readyforanything.