Gadgets are getting weird — and so are iPhone homescreens

Nilay, Alex, and David talk about what's happening on social media — and around the web — in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Then they talk about their early impression of Apple's public betas, from the redesigned homescreens to the iPad's fancy new math abilities. After that, it's time for a bunch of gadgets all asking the same idea: is this anything? Then it's off to the lightning round, filled with 4K streams and leaky infinity pools. Further reading: A custom sticker printer infuriated clients with a pro-Trump mass text message Shooting conspiracies trend on X as Musk endorses Trump Donald Trump likes TikTok, not Zuckerberg. The FBI said it found the Trump rally shooter’s Steam account, then took it back The Trump rally shooter had a Discord account, company says The Trump rally shooting is a cash cow for the dropshippers The FBI says it has ‘gained access’ to the Trump rally shooter’s phone J. D. Vance likes Lina Khan and crypto, hates ‘Big Tech’ Elon Musk, Joe Lonsdale, and tech elites back a pro-Trump super PAC Apple’s public betas: all the news on iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and more Apple is finally embracing Android’s chaos iOS 18 might help you rescue photos you thought were gone forever The watchOS 11 beta slowed me down, in a good way RCS in iOS 18: Apple’s new messaging standard almost solves the green-button problem Testing Math Notes and the Calculator app in iPadOS 18 Phone mirroring on the Mac: a great way to use your iPhone, but it’s still very much in beta Canon’s long-awaited EOS R1 and R5 Mark II have eye-controlled autofocus Dyson unmasks its super customizable OnTrac headphones A long-delayed hands-on with Essential’s skinny Android phone This case turns your Apple Watch into a tiny iPod Google solves its Pixel 9 Pro leaks by just showing the phone early Leaked photos reveal Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold Xreal Beam Pro review: an AR tablet with good ideas but not enough power The OnePlus Pad 2’s vibrating stylus simulates writing on paper Sling TV adds 4K streaming for free Comcast will have high bitrate, low latency 4K feeds of the Olympics OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s $27 million mansion is a ‘lemon’ with a leaky pool, lawsuit alleges Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Rich Cast, the flagship podcast of buying a $27 million mansion that sucks.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  We're going to get to it. We're going to get, we're going to explain that idea in detail. It is very good. It is also just a tiny little symbol of the moment that we live in now. What if we didn't think this through? And then spent $27 million anyway? And then blamed everyone else? It's all, it's all right there. I'm not going to tell you yet. It's all right there. I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here.

• 1:04David Pierce?

  Hi, I, I also very much enjoy that story. I, I was putting together the rundown for today and I, one of the nice things about putting together the rundown is I get to just decide in the lightning round what I want. And I put my name next to it in bold with great enthusiasm.

• 1:19David Pierce?

  And it is one of those things. I love a thing that's a metaphor for something. You don't know what, but it is for sure a metaphor.

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like a vibes a for.

• 1:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. That's really good. Yeah, that's, that's great.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, oh, this story is the correct vibe for this moment. Alex Cranz is here.

• 1:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I, I don't own a house, but if I did, it wouldn't be that one for a variety of reasons.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, there's a lot to talk about. The Apple betas came out this week. We've got a, what David is calling an is this anything gadget bonanza? And then we got the lightning round unsponsored. At this point, someone should start a company called unsponsored. Just putting that out there.

• 1:55David Pierce?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  But we should start with what is arguably the biggest story in the world, uh, which is the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. And then the RNC in which Trump was nominated and announced JD Vance as his running mate, that is the vice presidential nominee. I want to spend a lot of time on this. It feels important to talk about. It is the biggest story in the world and there are lots of rich stories in this story. For example, I think as we learn more about the would be assassin, who was 20 years old, it feels likely that his digital footprint will reveal a bunch. And that means things like hacking his phone were immediately important. We've talked a lot about cops trying to hack phones on this show and on The Verge over the years, and they got into it almost immediately. And that's because they've just gotten good at it.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  The FBI isn't running to Apple to ask them to break the phone open. So there's that sort of stuff happening as that investigation goes forward. More immediately important in the context of The Verge and The Verge asked is what happened to the social networks afterwards? We've talked a lot about content moderation on the show and whether or not social networks have a duty to the truth. Mark Zuckerberg has famously said he doesn't want to be the arbiter of truth and set up a weird fake Supreme Court for content moderation on Facebook platforms. We're at a place now where they appear to have given up. Right? Like, you would put COVID, it's sort of the high point of content moderation controversies and discussion and interest from the platforms.

• 3:22David Pierce?

  Maybe not in terms of success, but certainly in terms of volume. Yeah. Like, it was the moment everyone was most aggressively, like, on it, one way or another.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And whether, you know, like, are you gonna amplify conspiracy theories? And there was just a lot there that has resulted in major lawsuits. And one of them just hit the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said, no, the government's allowed to talk to the social networks. Like, all of that happened, and it feels like it's in the past. And we've been sort of talking about it, but then the shooting happened, and you just saw, in real time, the social networks, Twitter, X, whatever it's called, Threads, they were good at it for one second. They were like, this thing happened, and here's video of it, and here's some photos of it, and here's everyone just reacting to it, for, like, one second.

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  You could verify that a thing had happened, and they were ahead of the major news networks, which are very, very cautious in breaking news events like that. So if you just wanted a shot of pure adrenaline, they would give it to you.

• 4:27David Pierce?

  Well, and this is actually an unusually perfect case in that sense, because you had a televised event, right? Like, he's onstage, talking as all of this is happening. Like, the person this is happening to is right there in front of a camera. You have what turned out to be some, like, truly historic photographers out there, working, taking shots that ended up being really important really quickly, and that stuff gets uploaded faster than ever. So we had this, like, primary source material.

• 4:56David Pierce?

  Faster and more sort of remarkably than almost anything I can ever remember. Like, the speed with which what you would call like the photo of the thing started floating around the internet was just unbelievable to me.

• 5:09Alex Cranz?

  It was like seconds.

• 5:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Nilay Patel?

  And it just was there. And then you saw the sort of like weird, everyone quoting the like CNN or New York Times headline that was more cautious than the rush to judgment on the social networks and be like, why, this is the, it's like, the big networks are cautious, the rigor is the point. And like, there's a gap here. And that gap has only gotten wider, which is utterly fascinating to me. There's no attempt to moderate pictures of a shooting. Like, a guy got shot and there's pictures of it everywhere, and there's no attempt to moderate it. On top of that, there is just, I mean, an explosion of conspiracy theories from everyone.

• 5:53Nilay Patel?

  Everyone is a conspiracy theorist right now, and they're all just like flooding onto these platforms, particularly X. And there's no attempt to slow it down or fact check it or anything like that. And you can just see like, oh, the knob got turned. We're just not doing content moderation. Like, we don't care about this. We're gonna do the really bad stuff. You talk to people who are still working in the industry, right, they're gonna continue to not, they're gonna continue working against child sexual abuse material, or just like abject pornography on platforms that aren't supposed to have it. They will, for forever and ever, copyright infringement will be everything that the platforms care about. But this, they're just like over it, right?

• 6:35Nilay Patel?

  The idea that harmful information can spread on social networks and that the platforms have any responsibility, it's gone. And it, I think this one's a marker. Like, it feels like a real marker to me that that's where the information environment is now. And for all the other stuff we talk about, like AI or sludge or fake photos. Yeah, it all happened immediately after this event and nothing happened.

• 7:00David Pierce?

  You know what I think a lot about in these events now is the, the sort of public turn Mark Zuckerberg made over the last several years where he went from being the guy who was talking really earnestly about how hard Meta and Facebook in particular was trying with content moderation and saying things, true things, like the reason we get so much crap for this is because we're the ones trying the hardest and the most transparently. Like, I think that's basically true. And even he eventually was just like, you know what? This is actually not worth it. Like, all I'm doing is signing myself up to get yelled at. I'm gonna go back to posting about new WhatsApp features and cool stuff in the metaverse and I'm gonna go back to being the product guy and Nick Clegg, who nobody cares about, gets to be the one who talks about content moderation. And I think that is, to

• 7:45David Pierce?

  me, is so indicative of how we've gotten to this place of like, it's somewhere between resignation and nihilism, where there is a sense that this isn't going to get better, so why even try? And what does better even look like? Because no one agrees on what it's supposed to be anymore. So it just feels like, at some point, the only rational thing to do is just throw up your hands and be like, you know, whatever, you guys do whatever you want, I'm out. And it really, really feels like that's where everyone has landed.

• 8:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's a value proposition, right? Like, there is no value in content moderation at this point. And maintaining that theater of content moderation, the value has just vastly diminished over the last few years. So it's like, okay, I don't need to do it anymore. I can move on to other stuff. And we've seen that on a lot of things, a lot of these kind of theatrical moments, particularly in big tech, where they're like, oh, yeah, we, you know, we care about being good, we care about doing all these things. They no longer have to. They realized that actually doesn't net them as much as they need it, they thought it would. And so they've just kind of said, nah, never mind.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just fascinating to me because, you know, the immediate reaction from everyone is like, tone down the rhetoric, be good to each other, we're all Americans. And then a day later, all of the social platforms are flooded with conspiracy theories. My favorite one is, the shooter was in a video that was an ad for BlackRock, which is a private equity company that is an investor in, like, gun companies. And they did something at a school, and he was like, in the background of the video, they did about the teacher at the school. And so now there's a BlackRock conspiracy theory?

• 9:16David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 9:17Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, even that is like... Fine, fine, you should be able to post that to social media, like whatever. You want to have some wackadoodles like idea, but you look at Twitter and it's like because of the volume and because Twitter has driven away so many otherwise sane people or X has driven away so many other, it's not just such sort of conventional wisdom, right? And it's like, oh, this is the stuff that actually poisons the discourse, right? This is a thing that actually makes it harder to bring people together and actually creates the social division and the platforms have basically given up. You can see it on TikTok too, in a very different way, right? It's just people yelling at each other all day about this and like insisting that one side or the other has it out for each other and the platforms have basically given up trying to stop it.

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  And I, there's, it's an election year, it's bound to be polarized, but that's, to me, that's the big Verge story here is there was a moment several years ago when the platforms really wanted to like create healthy conversations. That was Twitter's metric and now they're over it, you know? And like Meta is like, Threads is a place for conversations and what that amounts to is people just asking questions where they appear to be idiots, so people will yell at them for engagement all day long.

• 10:29David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 10:29Nilay Patel?

  Like everyone's, like people on like three open threads and like every third post of someone's like, "I just took a bite of an orange without taking the peel off. Did you know that that's bad?" It's like, what the fuck?

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  Truly, what are you talking about?

• 10:44David Pierce?

  I posted on Threads the other day that Amazon is a terrible website because Amazon is a terrible website and I had a bunch of people accuse me of engagement bait for it, which I really enjoyed. It's the first time in a while I've been accused of engagement bait and it made me very happy.

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  Threads is the first platform that has completely dissentivized people from asking questions because you, no matter what, you seem like you're Jason Klout. It's very good.

• 11:06David Pierce?

  It's good stuff. But no, I think to your, to your point about the like matching all of that sort of giving up on content moderation with the fact that what like the FBI does immediately is try to get into the shooter's phone is like it's, it's both getting worse and higher stakes all the time, right? And so much of what we've been seeing over the last few days is like Discord released a statement that the shooter had a Discord account. Like that, that is news that he was on Discord and there, there's been this weird back and forth on whether there was some kind of like. Not manifesto, but like hint as to what was coming on a Steam account that seems like

• 11:47David Pierce?

  it was and it wasn't. And so we're in this place where it's like, this stuff matters more than ever as they try to figure out what happened. And yet, the ability to figure out what is actually going on feels like it's getting further and further away from us.

• 12:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And especially if you're just a normal person who's just opening an app on their phone.

• 12:05David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah.

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  So that's that. We're going to cover a lot of that. It seems important. I'll give you one other example, which is just a very Neil example. These photos that we're all talking about. Those photos were taken by professional photographers who are in the pit to get paid to do a job with very expensive cameras. People have started arguing about the settings of the cameras, by the way, which is very nerdy thing to do online. Those photos are owned. They're copyrighted images. One of them is owned by the New York Times. I think the other one's owned by the AP. They're everywhere. There's just straight copyright infringement. All that merch you're seeing, the hats with the photos on them, just straight forward copyright infringement. The photo agencies and the Times and all those other companies, they're going to have to issue a bunch of takedowns. We went out and asked

• 12:51Nilay Patel?

  them, and basically all of them were like, we are evaluating our options. Weird. Weird. Like, that photo feels like it immediately belongs to the world, right? But it super doesn't.

• 13:02David Pierce?

  Well, and in part, it feels that way because all of these other machines move so much faster than the lawyers for those news organizations, right? Like, the Etsy's popular page was filled with that kind of merch that you're talking about. Like, Amazon has a thing that you can print on demand. Like, literally, all you have to do is upload a photo to Amazon, and boom, you're selling merch. Like, it is crazy how quickly that stuff is able to happen now. And it's happening faster in every other part of the system than, like, within these organizations that are actually trying to figure out what to do about it. And so they all figure, you know, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna make my money, I'm gonna sell my t-shirts, and I'm gonna get out before anybody else has even, like, figured out what their first move is.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  And I would just wrap this up. We spent a lot of time talking AI. And boy, do I get the emails when we talk about AI and hint even a little bit that AI might be useful or interesting, right? That it's stealing work, that it's stealing creativity. If you have those feelings about the AI companies, and you can and should, I don't, I won't stop you.

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  How do you feel about someone whose job it is to stand in a place where you might get shot at, take some of the most historic photos in the world, and immediately watch that stuff get stolen by very opportunistic merch vendors on Amazon? Is that bad? Like, maybe, but I don't think anybody has the same immediate reaction to it, the way that I know they do. We talk about opening up. Like, there's something there that's weird. We spend a lot of time talking about how copyright law is the only functional regulation on the internet, because it's effectively a speech regulation. And you're about to see it used as, in a way that feels very much like a speech regulation. You want to sell a hat with this photo on it? Some photo agency is going to come and tell you that you can't.

• 14:45Nilay Patel?

  And like, reckoning with that is right next to the content moderation question, because a lot of people are going to lose their minds, because they feel like that photo belongs to the world, or those photos belong to the world. Anyway, lots of nerd stories there, I'm confident. You remember the shepherd fairy picture of Obama? We covered the copyright case around that photo of Obama for like 10 years. And we did a story on it like six months ago. It's going to be that again, right? Just like, what does it mean for these images to exist on the internet in the way they do? And who gets to make money on them? It's like, kind of one question. And the second question is like, that is content moderation, and the content moderation apparatus of our information environment is, it's in a, I think as Alex was saying, like, in a pretty nihilistic space.

• 15:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, you have to make sure there's not the worst thing. You clear that bar, it's like, free for all.

• 15:36Alex Cranz?

  Yup.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so that is that event. Immediately thereafter, there was a Republican National Convention this week. It was not a quiet week for politics in America. President Biden has COVID. It's like chill times all around. Yeah. Not a quiet week by any means, by the social organization. The only news on the RNC that's worth talking about is Trump picked JD Vance, who's Senator from Ohio, as his running mate, his vice presidential nominee, and then a million people in tech came out in support of Trump. Elon Musk, the Andreessen Horowitz partners, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, just like down, every crypto bro you can think of is pro-Trump. They love JD Vance, who was a venture capitalist, took a lot of money from Peter Thiel over the years.

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  There is just a reactionary, right-wing crypto bro situation there.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  There it is. We will cover it more. I don't, we don't want to talk a lot about it in the Vergecast now. I want to make sure we do some like reporting on it.

• 16:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  But JD Vance is a really interesting character and I, I don't mean that in the like, you should read his book, which is bad. I mean that in the, uh, it's, it's not good. And the movie's worse. Um, I mean that in the, the malleability of his positions is really interesting. His relationship to the power of big tech is interesting. He was just at a conference that, uh, Aaron Lauren Finer was at called Remedy Fest. Where he said, I think Lena Kahn's doing a good job. Why does he think Lena Kahn's doing a good job? Cause he thinks they should break up Google. Why does he want to break up Google? So he can push weird right wing conspiracies on the internet. Like you, it, you start at, oh, we agree. And then you like drill down and it's like, oh,

• 17:19Nilay Patel?

  the, the flow of information is not going the way that some of these people want. So we will use the power of the state to like break these companies up. And you just like end up in this is like total horseshoe theory, strange bedfellows moment. So we're going to cover a lot of that. I'm just warning the Vergecast listener, like it's coming because it's, it's so much. There's so much weird Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel, crypto tech money now involved in this presidential election. That it's impossible for us not to cover it.

• 17:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Cause Peter Thiel famously stayed out of the last one, right?

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, he said he was.

• 17:57Alex Cranz?

  He said he would. Yeah. Yeah.

• 17:58Nilay Patel?

  It's out of control. All right. I just, you know, I'm like a cranky Gen Xer. You can imagine how I feel about this entire situation, but here it is. Anyway, iOS 18 betas.

• 18:08Alex Cranz?

  They're out. They're here. No, David's been checking a bunch of them out. Like David, you, you risked your phone. You, you took the hit for the rest of us.

• 18:17David Pierce?

  Yeah. I started with the iPad because I was like, that's safe. It's just an iPad. I have thousands of them. What could possibly go wrong? And now somehow I'm running iPad OS 18, iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, uh, and the new TVOS. Like how is, what, how is this my life? Everything is broken. My batteries have just absolutely gone. To hell, but I get to use the cool new stuff. It's it's fine. It's a trade. I will say the single most important thing that has happened to me in my technology life this year. I'm not exaggerating is having RCS on the iPhone. Well, it's like saving your marriage, right? Like, like, literally. My, my wife uses an Android phone. She's a pixel bro for life.

• 19:02David Pierce?

  And steadfastly refuses to understand that when she sends me a video, it, it looks like a potato every single time. So like, what will happen is the, the woman who runs our daycare will send Anna a adorable video of my child, and Anna will forward it to me, and I literally can't see it. Because it just, it's just eight pixels stacked that sort of looks like blonde hair. Like, that's just all it is. But now I have RCS, the photos are big, the videos are big, like, it works correctly. I don't, I don't have to like make every, make her send me Google Photos links anymore. It's the best. And it's like a little wonky and it falls back to SMS too often. It's getting better as time goes on. I think like the networks and the carriers are all kind of figuring it out.

• 19:45David Pierce?

  But RCS on, on iPhone, like, huge win. And to all the people who have been in my mentions telling me like, oh, you silly Americans, we all use WhatsApp. First of all, congratulations. Like, I don't know what to tell you. Great job. Second of all, making people switch messaging apps is impossible. It's just, I don't care what messaging app you use. Try your best to get all your friends and family to use a different one. Just, just try. Best of luck. It's not gonna work, no matter what it is that you use. And so for us here in the good old US of A, we're stuck with text messaging. So anything that makes text messaging slightly better, humongous victory.

• 20:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited for this to roll out wide and for people to.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited to see if when RCS rolls out wide with iOS 18, if the green bubble stigma reduces.

• 20:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:37David Pierce?

  I actually think it's going to. I really do. I do, because the the the main things that it improves are, what I haven't done is is like really stress test group chats with this. So I that is like the main problem, right? So I'll have to see how that does. But the ability to get read receipts and the ability to send high res images and videos and the typing indicators. Those are like the three things that immediately my messaging system with my wife got better. Also, the tap backs work a little better. But now that you can use any emoji, it's still kind of wonky on the Android side. Because if you'd use one that it doesn't recognize, it just punts it through as a text message. But I it's like, it's not all the way better.

• 21:20David Pierce?

  And there's all the new iMessage stuff, the like animations and the text decorations and all that that you can do that you still can't do in Android, but it's much closer. And I think it's like, it's not going to get all the way better, but I think it's going to get a little better.

• 21:32Nilay Patel?

  Is this gonna work in messages on a Mac?

• 21:36David Pierce?

  Yes, I have been RCSing from my Mac, but only because

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  It's linked to your phone.

• 21:41David Pierce?

  Just forwarding to your phone.

• 21:42Alex Cranz?

  Does it break as often as like, I feel like when you're just text messaging, it breaks all the time.

• 21:48David Pierce?

  It it was actually worse at first. Like when I first downloaded all the betas, it was really slow and was occasionally just failing to send messages at all. But in the last, I would say, week, it's been super stable. So I have I have high hopes for where this is going to land. But it was definitely wonky at first.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, I there's, we're gonna have to do endless follow up once this hits wide, if people like it.

• 22:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Nilay Patel?

  You've even tried the phone mirroring on the Mac too? That seems amazing.

• 22:20David Pierce?

  It is, it is and it isn't. Like, it is because it works, right? It's like, it's like continuity camera in the sense that like, it just, it just mostly does the thing. And every once in a while, it doesn't for some indiscernible reason. Like Liam, our producer, we were on a call the other day and he just, for the whole call, couldn't get continuity camera to work. And then like, the next time you tried it, it works. And phone mirroring is a little like that. But the biggest problem is you can't change the size of the window. So if you're on a laptop screen, it shows up like relatively close to kind of real size of your iPhone, which I think is what they were going for. But if you're on a big densely pixelled display, it shows up teeny tiny. It's like, I'm on a pretty, I'm on a 27 inch screen here and the iPhone on my screen is like half the size of my actual iPhone and there's nothing I can do about it and it drives me nuts.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  That is great. I'm sorry. That's, that's great. And it's like, I know that's like a beta bug, like they have to know and they'll do something.

• 23:13David Pierce?

  Just let me resize the window.

• 23:15Nilay Patel?

  It's just hilarious.

• 23:15David Pierce?

  We solved, it's such a stage manager problem where they're like, what if we give you a new way to do? And like, no, let me drag the corner of my window to make it bigger. This is not complicated.

• 23:24Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Does it, it's, you don't have a touchscreen on a Mac, so it doesn't like do the...

• 23:29David Pierce?

  If you have the magic mouse or the magic trackpad, it's great. It just like maps all the gestures the same way you swipe and you scroll and everything else. On a, I use a Logitech mouse and it's basically unusable. You, you like click on the bar at the bottom to go to the home screen. Some things will scroll, some things don't scroll. You can't scroll left and right, like so on Instagram, if there's a gallery, I just can't do it. I think some of these things will probably get better over time. I also think Apple, it's, it's really, it's like on a laptop, it's solid, right? Because you, you have the trackpad, you have the gestures, it all works fine. But Apple is just not interested in you if you don't use exclusively Apple gear. And so I think this is like, for, for all of us Logitech fans out there, this is going to be problematic.

• 24:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was about to say, this is, this is kind of common for all Apple integrations on the computer. You're just like, okay, cool. I can't do any of this unless I buy a magic trackpad. And then I have to use that instead of a really good mouse. I don't want to.

• 24:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, pretty much. I hate the magic trackpad. Like, I know there are a lot of people out there who really like it. I hate it. Like, I get the idea of it, but because it's so far away from the screen, it's so divorced from what's actually going on that it feels like it's trying way too hard. And it just, it feels bad at the angle my hands are at all the time. I hate it.

• 24:44Alex Cranz?

  No, I can't stand it. That's why I use a trackball, because the trackball, you can sometimes set, like, a key, so you can still get a lot of the gestures in by, like, hitting a key and using the ball. But with a regular mouse, you're just like, well, I guess I don't, I don't horizontal scroll ever again. Cool.

• 25:00David Pierce?

  Can't do it. I'm out.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait to try this. With a tiny little phone, monkeying with a mouse.

• 25:06Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it's gonna be great.

• 25:07David Pierce?

  Just truly, for me, I suspect there are gonna be lots of little things people do with it. Like, for me, like, the one I wrote about in the story is my thermostat only works as a mobile app. So just being able to, like, fire that up from my laptop is really handy without getting my phone out of my bag or whatever.

• 25:22David Pierce?

  But truly, for me, it's just gonna be a way to drag and drop things from my computer to my phone and vice versa. Like, it just solves the AirPlay problem of I have a photo here and I need it to be over here. And it's easier and faster, and that feature's not out yet, but it's apparently coming. And just as a drag and drop machine, I'm very excited about it.

• 25:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You gotta get HomeBridge, dude. I'm telling you. You need a little Raspberry Pi that just bridges your thermostat into HomeKit.

• 25:48Alex Cranz?

  It'll be great. Then you get Home Assistant to also be a bridge into HomeKit.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  We could do this for you. Alex and I are waiting.

• 25:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we're here. We're coming down.

• 25:57Nilay Patel?

  We can put a little Tamagotchi HomeBridge server in your house.

• 26:00David Pierce?

  I'm stuck at trying to get a lock for my front door that I can open with my fingerprint. And even that, Anna's like, no. Keys are great. She's not wrong. Keys are great.

• 26:10Alex Cranz?

  Somebody like hawks a loogie on it, and you're just like, I guess I don't get in my house ever again.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  Once you get to, you can unlock this door by beeping your phone at it. Then the flip is, my wife is like, I don't ever wanna see again, I don't ever wanna see a key again in my life. Don't you dare.

• 26:30Nilay Patel?

  It's not, it's not a choice that we have.

• 26:31David Pierce?

  We need Becky and Anna to hang out. Can we, can we make this happen?

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  We, uh, we were test driving a Rivian. So next week on Decoder, it's a Sierra Rivian, RJ Scringe. And so we had a Rivian to test drive and they didn't give us the keys. Rivians do come with a regular key fob, but they just gave us the cards and I showed them to them. I was like, these are the keys. And she was like, no, they're not.

• 26:52Alex Cranz?

  Just rejected.

• 26:53Nilay Patel?

  She was just like, I'm never gonna drive that car.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  No, thanks. And she's like, I don't want to know anything about that at all. Like 0% interest in your dumb key cards.

• 27:05Nilay Patel?

  Uh, all right, we gotta talk about the biggest, the biggest thing in the beta, which is a calculator in the iPad.

• 27:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that, that is it.

• 27:12Nilay Patel?

  See, it's, I mean, when I think about WWDC, like what did they announce? Some bullshit and then a calculator app for the iPad.

• 27:19David Pierce?

  David, I mean, that's basically right.

• 27:20Alex Cranz?

  Change your life? Is it like a whole new world?

• 27:23David Pierce?

  No, I, I confess I am slightly disappointed by the whole.

• 27:27Nilay Patel?

  You haven't been doing like, like high school algebra this whole time?

• 27:31Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 27:31David Pierce?

  So I think Apple really thinks that if you're like a graduate student studying mathematics, that you're gonna love this. And I think Apple also thinks there's like tens of millions of those people in the world. And they're wrong on both counts. But the, the weird thing is so like, the calculator app is fine, right? It's a calculator app. And I think it's so funny that Apple is like, we wanted to really take the time to get this right. It's like, no, dude, you shipped the calculator app and then you also made another feature. Like you could have just shipped the calculator app. It's just the calculator app with bigger buttons. I don't know, I don't know how to be clearer about that. That's what it is.

• 28:11David Pierce?

  But the cool thing is, is Math Notes, right? And it's like, that is both, it's the thing inside of Notes where you can, you can handwrite stuff and it'll do the equations for you. And that thing is incredible when it works, which is a lot, but also missing some sort of obvious stuff. Like you write a list of numbers and then you draw a line underneath and it'll automatically sum those numbers up for you, right? And then you can actually tap on one of the numbers and, and drag a slider to make the number go up and down. Super cool and it attempts to do it in your handwriting, which failed spectacularly for me, but I think that's just because my handwriting is so bad. It's like borderline unreadable. I've talked to some other people with pretty good handwriting and they've said it works much better. So your mileage, I think, will vary depending on your handwriting.

• 28:56David Pierce?

  But there's just little things so right. So like one of the use cases I've heard a bunch is like you're totaling up expenses for a weekend. Right. I'm in the middle of planning vacation and we're trying to like total how much everything is going to cost. So you write a bunch of numbers down. It'll total them all up for you, but then if you go next to it and you write like food colon, next to the, you know, $225, the whole thing falls apart.

• 29:21David Pierce?

  It just like, doesn't understand what your equation is anymore and it won't total anything up for you. So it's like, you have to, you have to operate under these very like specific confines of what it understands as an equation. And it's awesome. And as long as you do that, so this is what I mean by like graduate math, right? Like if you're sitting there doing math problems as math problems, it's awesome and it works really well. But if you're like a person taking notes and you want to do math inside of them, it doesn't work quite as well. Does that make sense?

• 29:50Alex Cranz?

  So it's for like just kids who have homework.

• 29:53David Pierce?

  It's for doing math. Like I, it's like, that really is what it is. It's like, what I want it to be is like, do the math inside of my notes as I take notes. And it is not for that. It's for doing math problems.

• 30:04Alex Cranz?

  Do you think that the iPad Pro is now going to become to like mathematicians and scientists, what the iPad Mini was to pilots?

• 30:14David Pierce?

  I need to, I need to write this story. I am so convinced that this pilot thing is a lie.

• 30:23David Pierce?

  And I have no evidence for this, but I'm, I'm, I'm so sure that like three Delta pilots got iPad Minis. And then Apple was like, yes, this is it. Every time I fly, they're still bringing on briefcases full of paperwork. Like, if this got replaced by iPads, I don't know where it is. But anyway, all that aside, I do think Apple really, really, really, really wants the iPad to be an education device. Like, I think the way that a whole generation grew up with Macs in the classroom, and basically the generations recently have grown up with Chromebooks, Apple is desperate for that thing to be iPads. And I think it sees the pencil in particular as a way to get there. I don't necessarily know if it's gonna work.

• 31:07David Pierce?

  I'm also not the target demo, so I don't know. But like, it's very clear that that is... Like, even going back and looking at the demos, they're doing really sophisticated math, like, not the kind of thing that a normal person does in their day-to-day life. And I think for the sophisticated stuff, it works better than for just, like, trying to make sense of my notes.

• 31:26Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna miss Texas Instruments when the TI-83 gets killed by the iPad Pro.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  There's a store in my little town. I'm not sure if they make any money selling anything other than TI-83s to high schoolers. Like, they just have a wall of TI-83s, and then all the high schoolers in town go to that store to buy their TI-83. And it's just so confusing. The whole thing is confusing to me, especially because when I was in high school 20 years ago, we were using TI-83s.

• 31:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Nilay Patel?

  25 years ago.

• 31:55David Pierce?

  Is that the most enduring technology of the last two decades?

• 32:00Alex Cranz?

  I feel like it is.

• 32:02Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I learned about the TI-82. The 83 is different. The case of a TI-82, the shell, was exactly the right size to fit a Game Boy Pocket. So you could just slide a Game Boy Pocket up into that shell. And the thing that we had to figure out was how to hide the sound, the Game... You know, ding.

• 32:22David Pierce?

  Your teacher's like, "Gosh, Neil is really doing some calculations over there."

• 32:26Alex Cranz?

  Curiously calculating.

• 32:27Nilay Patel?

  We were just fully playing Game Boy in the back of the car.

• 32:31David Pierce?

  He is mathin' so hard, his parents are gonna be so proud.

• 32:35Nilay Patel?

  But the problem was, you had to turn it on before, before you walked in, because you can't shut off the startup beep of a Game Boy Pocket.

• 32:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  Ding. Definitely not a call at least once.

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, two other Apple things I want to talk about. One, very funny. Apple has partnered with Taboola to put ads in Apple News. You don't know what Taboola is, except you obviously do. It's the chum box provider on every website in the world, including our own. We don't, we don't like it, but we don't work for free. So there's some Taboola ads at the bottom of our pages. They make our company some money and then they pay the bills.

• 33:10David Pierce?

  It's famously the belly fat ads, right? Like for years, that was who was serving the belly fat.

• 33:14Nilay Patel?

  And we've written stories about the belly fat ads. I think it was Caitlin Tiffany wrote a story for us that like chased all the way down what the one weird vegetable is.

• 33:22David Pierce?

  Oh, no way.

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  It's corn. It's nonsensical.

• 33:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  All bad. But Apple doesn't want to do ads. They had a partnership with NBC to sell ads in Apple News. It didn't work. I don't think they got the scale. And now they have this partnership with Taboola and it's like, what, what kind of ads are we going to see in Apple News now? And then you look and Taboola is actually a huge company. Like massive company because they just put the garbage across the entire web.

• 33:57David Pierce?

  And wait, did Taboola buy Outbrain, the other chum box provider? Or was it vice versa?

• 34:02Nilay Patel?

  No, it didn't happen. It got, it got broken.

• 34:04David Pierce?

  Oh, it was, it was so big, it wasn't allowed.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Alex Cranz?

  The FTC said, no, only, we must have competition in the chum box industry.

• 34:15David Pierce?

  I can't believe we didn't do features on chum box warfare.

• 34:18Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, very bad. One of the least, one of the least on-brand deals in Apple history.

• 34:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  And I think they're gonna, I think they're gonna keep it because what are you gonna do? I think Apple's at the, what are you gonna do phase of this? Where they were just like, yeah, whatever, it's money. What, what are you gonna do? You're gonna go somewhere else? You're gonna not read Apple News? Publishers are gonna, you're gonna respond to chum boxes in Apple? Well, look at your sites. And I think they're just gonna take the money. There's no way that, unless it's like egregiously bad, which with Taboola could be egregiously bad.

• 34:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Just a weird deal for them, all the way around. Like people reacted to it so negatively and I don't think they give a shit.

• 35:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 35:03Alex Cranz?

  It's just Apple being a content creator, right? Like, like they're in the, the industry of content now, in a way they haven't been for a long time. And this is just like... Finalizing the form for that.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just if you think about Apple's pitch to everyone.

• 35:20Alex Cranz?

  This is not it. This is like.

• 35:22Nilay Patel?

  It's like this is the premium experience. It's this is trusted publishers. It's not just garbage. And then it all tabula heads.

• 35:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:31David Pierce?

  I mean, this is what this is what endlessly chasing services revenue eventually leads you to. Right? Like it, it just, it just gets uglier and uglier as time goes on because you have to keep finding ways to turn pennies into dollars and turn free things into pennies. And it's, it sucks. And like it's, this is going to go in the news app. It's going to go in the stocks app. Like Apple has gotten slowly sort of frog boilingly aggressive about advertising all over. I guess. And this just feels like it feels like it's about, this will not be the last thing we see from Apple with ugly ads, I don't think.

• 36:09Alex Cranz?

  But, but don't worry, David, because in just seven days, you too can lose seven inches off your waistline.

• 36:15Nilay Patel?

  But not if you eat corn.

• 36:17Alex Cranz?

  Stay away from corn.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  The one vegetable you have to avoid. Why don't we hawk supplements? We could all, we could be doing the show in a boat. Uh, the other piece of Apple news was much more, I, I don't think we're ever going to hawk supplements. You all know that I want a boat, but there's, there's a line. And that's it.

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  The lightning round remains unsponsored. I'll just put that out there.

• 36:39David Pierce?

  Buy Neelai a boat called supplements. So that's pretty funny. And I will allow that.

• 36:45Alex Cranz?

  Still on the table. That's still on the table.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  And there's one last piece of Apple news, which I think is really interesting and sort of like in a tangential way related. Which is the sort of competitive pressure put on the App Store by the DMA and the EU and by emulators. Means that Apple has now approved the first, like 90s PC emulator for iOS. So it can, it's, it's UTM SC. It can run Windows XP. It looks like Windows XP, Mac OS sign in Linux. If you want to run Linux on your phone, uh, which I think you do, uh, this was, they rejected it. It was gonna go into Alt Store and then Apple approved it.

• 37:29Nilay Patel?

  And you can see just that competitive dynamic occurring where they do not want the other store to be good.

• 37:37Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 37:37Nilay Patel?

  So they are loosening the rules of their own store over and over again. And that competition is working.

• 37:44Alex Cranz?

  It rules.

• 37:45David Pierce?

  I think it was Riley Testet who, who runs Alt Store and does Delta and has been on this show a couple of times. Uh, I think it was him that posted, basically, it turns out the best way to get your app onto the App Store is to, is to threaten to be on Alt Store.

• 37:59Alex Cranz?

  That's exactly, yeah, he did.

• 38:00David Pierce?

  It, it's true. Like it is, it is real that like any, it is increasingly clear that if you want to get something on to an iPhone, there are going to be other ways to do it. And Apple is so desperate to keep you in the App Store that it will bend its rules in any direction it has to, to keep you there. I believe I owe somebody some money because I said on this show not that long ago, I would be shocked if we got a full PC emulator, uh, because Apple's rules have been very clear that it is, it is like, it's, it's for retro games, right? Like that was clearly what Apple wanted these things to be for. So this strikes me as yet another goalpost move that I didn't even expect for what Apple will allow.

• 38:40Alex Cranz?

  Does it, is it, is it a PC emulator? It's, it's XP.

• 38:44David Pierce?

  So UTM will let you emulate all the way up through Windows 11.

• 38:48Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 38:48David Pierce?

  So I don't, I don't, I have not tried it in the app, so I don't actually know what's possible, but.

• 38:54Alex Cranz?

  Wes Davis was trying out XP and it took him like two hours to install it.

• 38:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, these things are not easy, but like it'll, you can emulate an x86 PC like, I think with some work, there's probably a lot more you can do here than gets credit for. Also, you could emulate XP and then emulate a Windows 11 computer with an emulator on Windows XP. Just, just turtles all the way down this bitch. Yeah.

• 39:19Alex Cranz?

  Yes, hell yes.

• 39:20Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so I think it's interesting. So there's a reason they've not wanted like general purpose computer emulators. Because they don't want people to run apps on them. Right? Like that, it's a big complicated loophole, but it's a loophole, right? You, you put a general purpose PC emulator on the phone and then anyone can just run whatever software they want without paying Apple 30%. Not a loophole that Apple will allow. Now they've allowed it. And what's fascinating to me about this is like, maybe on the phone, this isn't such a big deal, because whatever, it's a phone. An iPad running macOS 9, or even Windows XP is like, wait, does this rule? Like, is that... I did a lot of work in macOS 9. I have like, many things happened in my life

• 40:04Nilay Patel?

  in the context of macOS 9. Like, yeah, I'll just run macOS 9. It has better multitasking than iPad does today.

• 40:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's real.

• 40:15Alex Cranz?

  More customization, too.

• 40:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The apps don't just quit in the background on you all the time in macOS 9. Windows XP actually has technically more advanced multitasking than macOS 9. So it's just like, you just like, find yourself running in this circle. We're like, wait, does the window management and multitasking of an emulated operating system from 20 years ago? Is that a better iPad experience?

• 40:40David Pierce?

  I mean, it honestly might be. Do you think we're gonna get to the point where you can emulate a Mac on your iPhone and then mirror your phone to that Mac that's being emulated on your iPhone? And then use that phone?

• 40:51Alex Cranz?

  God, I hope so.

• 40:52David Pierce?

  That's the dream right there. I want to use my phone three levels deep on my phone. That's what I'm going for.

• 41:00Alex Cranz?

  I think you just invented Atrix, the Motorola Atrix stuff.

• 41:03Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man, that thing ruled. It did not. It did not. Anyway, I'm very excited for this emulation scene, in particular to hit the iPad, because this is the thing that Apple has feared. And if you get to a place where it's just like, easy, where it's like, push a button and turn your iPad into a Windows PC, and people start doing it, that's the thing that makes Apple take iPad multitasking seriously. I don't know where you get there. There's a glimmer of it now, which is fascinating. Competition, it works.

• 41:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. We are just, I don't even know. We're way over. It's next week already. We'll be right back.

• 42:13Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back with what David has called the "Is This Anything Gadget Bonanza." David, what does that mean exactly?

• 42:19David Pierce?

  So, one of my favorite kinds of gadgets is when somebody makes something and then just sort of hands it to you and they're like, "Is this? Did I do anything here? Like, is this something? Do you like this? Does this solve any problems for you?" And this week was an unusually good week for "Is This Anything" gadgets. And I mostly mean that as a compliment. I love gadgets that are like, "I have a weird new idea about the future. Let's see if it works." That is like, the verge is built on those gadgets. We love that stuff. But this is an unusually weird week of "Is This Anything" gadgets. But first, the first one of them, it's good that we're running over already because we have a real "What is a Photo?" apocalypse to talk about here.

• 43:01David Pierce?

  Which, Neelai, you came in real hot about this before we started recording. So, we should just talk about this. There are these new Canon cameras that have a lot of AI things that have made you feel a lot of feelings.

• 43:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, okay, so there's a new Canon EOS R1 and R5 Mark II. And they are some of the first cameras, especially pro cameras like this, from brands like this, that just have AI features in them. And the AI features are fine. Like, they're fine. They have noise reduction that gets you two more stops. So, you can run the ISO a little bit hotter and the noise reduction is good. That's AI-powered. And then they have 400% image upscaling, which is bananas. So, if you just think about it, they've got a sensor in them. Light hits the sensor, that makes the image. The sensor is usually what determines the size of the image. Now, the cameras can just make you an image that's four times bigger.

• 43:52David Pierce?

  The image is however big you want it to be.

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

  And it's just in the camera. And it is based on the fact that the camera knows everything about the light hitting the sensor. It knows the lens you're using, it knows the settings you're at. And so, you know, the argument is their AI upscaling will be better in-camera, because it's all one closed ecosystem, than if you take it out to one of the many, many, many software upscalers that exist out in the world. Weird, right? Weird to have the camera itself generate pixels that weren't there.

• 44:21David Pierce?

  I mean, this is the stuff we've been talking about with smartphones for like two years now, right? And we're now at a point where this feels like it's about to become unavoidable. And there was a thing where it was like, okay, the like last bastion of photography or photographic honesty is going to be these like fancy high-end cameras. And even that is going away, break really, really fast.

• 44:46Alex Cranz?

  I'm just so surprised it's Canon doing it and not like Sony or Panasonic or anybody else who's been in the mirrorless game.

• 44:55David Pierce?

  This does seem like a Panasonic move. They're like, do you want cameras now?

• 44:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, right? Like Olympus. Like, these companies have all been here doing mirrorless cameras for a lot longer than Canon and messing with like computational photography a lot longer than Canon. And Canon was like, nope, we're doing it now.

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Alex Cranz?

  That's exactly how Canon talks, by the way.

• 45:15Nilay Patel?

  I agree.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  Thomas Canon, just out there yelling.

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  So it's wonky. You gotta use some Canon menus. The cameras can only do it with pictures they take in themselves. Oddly, the upscaling only works with JPGs and HIFs, in case you're a sort of monster shooting heaves on your DSLR.

• 45:39David Pierce?

  I wonder if that's an intentional choice, that they're like, we have to preserve the sanctity of the RAW file. But we can start to do weirder stuff with some of these other things.

• 45:47Alex Cranz?

  Well, yeah, Canon's also always done kind of weird stuff with the regular ones, right? Like the JPGs, they would make them warmer, too. Like, it was noticeably warmer on a Canon JPG.

• 45:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, like, going from a RAW to a JPG is a processing step. There's stylistic choices you can make. It is, if you have a modern DSLR and you shoot RAW at high ISOs, the pictures are gonna be noisier than the JPGs because the JPGs have noise reduction built into them. But like... That is usually taking detail out, not adding it in. And so like, you're like, yeah, I like, I personally love the AI noise removal in Lightroom. I use it all the time. I think I've said on the show, like, it has re, it has changed my relationship to some of my older cameras because it's so good. But now the camera's doing it itself. And there's none, as far as I can tell, none of the AI metadata that everyone has been talking about putting into these things to indicate that some of these pixels are fake. Like the computer just made up some of these pixels.

• 46:42Nilay Patel?

  Some of these details might not have been there. Like, we don't know. In the, in the examples I've seen, it's kind of accurate, but then you're like, ah, is that right? Like, we just don't know how it's going to work in every case. And then the, the chain of like metadata that you would need to verify this is a real image. No, it just isn't, it just doesn't exist. And actually, you know, we were talking about the Trump, the images of the Trump shooting. Immediate AI-generated images from that, AI modifications. Lots and lots of weird images. They changed the Secret Service agents to smiling and some, like, all this like crazy stuff. And all of the stuff that we have talked about for years, about content authenticity, about labels, about blah, blah, blah, just out the window.

• 47:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, nowhere to be found.

• 47:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. None of that worked. Like, you're like, we're going to build in all these safeguards. Like, are you using any safeguards? It's like, no, like, we were overwhelmed by sheer volume of crap. And so like, it's fascinating that Canon's putting it in the camera. Now, it is buried in the menu system of a professional Canon DSLR. It is not, the apocalypse is not totally here yet, but it's, it's like staring us in the face.

• 47:48David Pierce?

  That's kind of the thing I've been thinking about with this, this week is the thing you said, and I think it was around the pixel last year, about like, the question is where in the pipeline do you encounter this ability? And that ends up being really important. Like, in, in Lightroom, that's an app you download it onto your computer that you brought your phone in or your photo into, and you pressed a button on purpose to do it. And that that feels like one thing as opposed to having it happen, you know, in Google Photos, where your photos live, or in the app on your phone where the photos go, like the camera roll. And this goes even further to, okay, now it's a setting on your camera. What if you move it to being a button on your camera? To what if you move it to just being there on your camera by default?

• 48:27David Pierce?

  Like, where this goes from a thing I'm doing to you've just completely changed what is happening without me even being aware of it? All just feels very weird. And as soon as you move it to the device, it feels like you've you've shifted that threshold in a pretty meaningful way. Because now I think like what what a lot of people want reasonably is to be able to just take photos off of their camera and have them be good, right? Like that, that's a good outcome. I don't think most people want to muck around with their photos in Lightroom. So in a certain way, it makes sense to say, okay, this thing that you're doing that we can actually do very well with AI, we're just going to do it for you because it's a good thing. But it it it changes that to this is now something you've done to my photos rather than something I am able to do. And it does. It does change things.

• 49:11Alex Cranz?

  I can't wait for the first like wedding photographer who uses this and gets a whole new like set of lace detailing on a wedding dress.

• 49:18David Pierce?

  Or just like a new bridesmaid.

• 49:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, there's an extra one there now. What's up, girl?

• 49:23Nilay Patel?

  I mean, look, the R1 is $62.99. The R5 Mark II is $42.99. If they could be like, add bridesmaid.

• 49:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Nilay Patel?

  That's the money. I'd pay that money.

• 49:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:32Nilay Patel?

  Just add a bridesmaid to all of my photos.

• 49:36Alex Cranz?

  Just a picture of your kid and a bridesmaid.

• 49:39Nilay Patel?

  Here she is.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  Different one every time.

• 49:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, let's go for it.

• 49:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the, you know, there are professional photographers right now who have basically pushed Meta into changing the made with AI label that they're putting on Instagram. So you would export a photo from Lightroom or Photoshop, it would take some metadata that's like used AI to edit this image, they would put it on Instagram and Instagram would like add a label that was like made with AI, when maybe all they had done was the D noise, or maybe all they had done is like a little generative fill or something like

• 50:12Nilay Patel?

  some thing that is becoming very commonplace where the photographers were like, no, this image is not generated with AI. I edited it with AI and that is meaningfully different when I communicate with the audience. And Meta was like, yeah, we agree with you. That's weird. And we're just at a place where actually we might need 50 labels to explain to people what all the different things you can do, upscaled in camera with AI.

• 50:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:39Nilay Patel?

  Is that meaningfully-

• 50:40Alex Cranz?

  Bridesmaid at it.

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  Bridesmaid at it, right? Versus, I typed a prompt and now here's a picture.

• 50:46David Pierce?

  Right.

• 50:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:46David Pierce?

  Well, which is a perfect segue.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  There's a big range of possibilities.

• 50:49David Pierce?

  It's a perfect segue into the Samsung thing that Alison Johnson wrote about this week.

• 50:52Alex Cranz?

  It rules. I love it so much. It's so stupid.

• 50:56Nilay Patel?

  This is the most Samsung caution to the goddamn wind.

• 51:01David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  I can't tell if I'm mad about this or impressed or whatever.

• 51:07Alex Cranz?

  I was, I was mad about it, reading it until you get to where like, she tried to make the Loch Ness monster come out of a lake and instead it was just a giant green bear with like, super shredded green bear. And she tried to make like, the Pope as a rabbit? Like she took a photo of a rabbit and tried to be like, make this the Pope in a Pope Mobile? And it was just like, we're gonna put a giant rabbit head inside a car.

• 51:30David Pierce?

  Okay, so just to, just to quickly explain what's going on here.

• 51:32Nilay Patel?

  Samsung's image generation software is bizarrely woke.

• 51:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 51:38Nilay Patel?

  Wokeness has infected Samsung Galaxy folds and they will not let you generate the Pope.

• 51:46David Pierce?

  That's probably it, yeah.

• 51:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:48David Pierce?

  Alison Johnson is testing Samsung's new phones, the Flip 6 and the Fold 6. Nobody listened to what Neelai is saying. It's very important that you never listen to what Neelai says.

• 51:58David Pierce?

  And I think the Fold 6 has a feature called Sketch to Image, which is you can, you can take a photo, draw pretty crudely a thing you want on that photo and it will generate that thing onto your photo. So I think the first one I saw her do was it's a, it's a picture of like a harbor with a port and some flowers in the foreground. And she draws this like adorable little cartoon bee, uh, and I guess prompts it to be out of focus.

• 52:29Alex Cranz?

  No, she didn't prompt it.

• 52:30David Pierce?

  Oh, she didn't prompt it? Oh, wow. She just said, give me a bee. Oh, and she put it on a part of the photo that's out of focus. And so it generated an out of focus bee in that spot in the photo. And if you just look at the photo, there is not a single chance in hell you would think that that bee was not-

• 52:46Nilay Patel?

  There is, and uh, there's a tiny little watermark in gray in the bottom left that says AI-generated content.

• 52:53Alex Cranz?

  If you squint.

• 52:55David Pierce?

  I literally, I had, I have looked at this photo 100 times. I hadn't seen that until just now, which is pointed out.

• 53:00Nilay Patel?

  It is Samsung being like, rrrr. I can't tell if I'm upset or I'm just impressed at the fuck it.

• 53:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, let's just do disinformation. Would you like to draw some some disinformation? Not the Pope, sir, but any other thing is fine.

• 53:18Nilay Patel?

  And it is crazy. Like she, look at the pictures in the article that she put a ship in a harbor. It is true.

• 53:25David Pierce?

  The bear is very good.

• 53:28Nilay Patel?

  She's got a hat on a bunny. And then the water, if you look at the picture of the hat on the bunny, the watermark is invisible. It's there. It's just totally blended in the grass. And Samsung is like, why wouldn't you just make that bigger for people? Also, you just crop it out. It's not in the photo.

• 53:45David Pierce?

  Right.

• 53:46Nilay Patel?

  This is what I mean by the what is a photo apocalypse. This is full what is a photo apocalypse. So you are giving people the tool to just generate fake imagery based on real imagery and then send it out in the world with nothing.

• 53:59David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  They can just lie. And like, we're gonna get to a place, I think, more quickly than people want to, where no one trusts any image. And then we're gonna have to work backwards from there. Or the alternative, which is very scary, where everyone trusts every image. There's not gonna be like some middle ground, right? Like.

• 54:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't think the middle ground exists. You either just say, oh, sure, it's probably all real and let the chips fall where they may, or you trust nothing.

• 54:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:30David Pierce?

  And trusting nothing requires a lot more work. And so I think it's actually easier to just say, oh, sure, it's probably real and I'll be wrong sometimes and that's fine. And I think like nihilism kind of leads you there in a way that's pretty scary.

• 54:42Alex Cranz?

  I just, I'm gonna reserve my judgment on how panicked to be about this until we find out like if you could just draw abs on someone and it gives them abs.

• 54:52David Pierce?

  In which case you'd be pro.

• 54:54Alex Cranz?

  I'd probably be con, because I don't want to see if I'm just, like, I want the abs to be real. Like, don't fake, no fake abs here, only real abs. So I'm very curious to see.

• 55:03David Pierce?

  It's good to have moral boundaries, Cramps. I appreciate that about you.

• 55:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Small six pack of moral boundaries.

• 55:15Nilay Patel?

  And that moral boundary is shredded abs. That's it. Don't, don't fake me out. Washboard or nothing. So interestingly, Samsung is not doing this locally. The picture gets sent out to the cloud, which is where some of the content moderation seems to come in. Right? Like, once you go away from your phone and into a cloud server, everyone wants to take responsibility for it, which is good.

• 55:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:37Nilay Patel?

  Tech companies taking responsibility. Unclear how long it will take over time. You know, these, these systems aren't being stressed yet. Data usage, power usage, all this stuff. But boy, did Samsung just be like, fine, just draw on the photo. And like, we'll just make a fake photo for you.

• 55:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. You want the Loch Ness monster? Have the Loch Ness monster.

• 55:56Nilay Patel?

  Or a green bear.

• 55:57David Pierce?

  Or a green bear.

• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  All right. Is this, if you're calling it the is this anything gadget bonanza? Is this anything?

• 56:05David Pierce?

  This is something.

• 56:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:07David Pierce?

  I don't know what, but it is something. But I would like to, I would like to segue to one that is the most is this anything of anything? Which is that years after Essential, the, the once promising Andy Rubin led phone company went away. We finally are starting to get information about the second thing they were building. There was a lot of, like, I think at the time we saw like renders of this very tall sort of remote control-y looking phone. But somebody found one on eBay and got a hands-on. I think this is the most interesting phone I've seen in years, and it also might be so stupid.

• 56:47Nilay Patel?

  It looks so dumb.

• 56:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I, I love stupid tech, so I'm just, I adore this thing. I don't understand how you would use it long-term.

• 56:56David Pierce?

  It's basically, the best way I can describe it is like, imagine two iPod nanos stacked on top of each other. But it's all screen. It's just, it's just a remote control. And it looks like it's basically just a bunch of widgets, which perhaps unsurprisingly, makes me very excited. I love a good widget.

• 57:13Alex Cranz?

  I, I think that my, my big call out for this one is that it was obviously made before TikTok was a thing.

• 57:19David Pierce?

  No, but on this, you could open TikTok on the bottom and then TikTok again on the top.

• 57:23Alex Cranz?

  Little tiny TikTok.

• 57:24David Pierce?

  Yeah. It'd be dope. I could make a TikTok and watch a TikTok all at exactly the same time.

• 57:30Alex Cranz?

  I bet it would be really good for fidgeting, like just kind of flipping it around in your hand, the whole phone, because it's so long.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  So, if you will recall, Essentials' plan was to do ambient computing. They were going to put stuff in your house. The phone was just the first thing. So maybe this really was just a remote control.

• 57:49David Pierce?

  That's very possible. Yeah, that it was like, they were making a home device. I wrote a whole thing about this one back when I was at Wired, that they were, their big plan was, like you said, to have, they were doing sort of an Alexa thing, but were promising to do it in a much more elegant way. And even just looking at some of the stuff here, it is very much like, get quick information and see what's going on, rather than like, endlessly scroll on Instagram, which like, I'd take that, that works. But I just, I miss this thing where there were people asking questions about what size a phone was supposed to be. And now, no, we've just decided that phones should be huge and leave weird divots in your pinky from trying to hold them.

• 58:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna say, this isn't anything.

• 58:31David Pierce?

  Okay, yeah, you're right.

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  Sorry.

• 58:33David Pierce?

  Well, it is objectively not anything.

• 58:37David Pierce?

  Can I, can I interest you in the tiny, the tiny pod? Is this anything?

• 58:43Alex Cranz?

  Which one? Which one?

• 58:44David Pierce?

  Let me back this up. Instead, can I interest you in a little silicon case for your Apple Watch that gives it a scroll wheel that appears to just mechanically move the digital crown?

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Very good. I mean, perfect.

• 58:59Alex Cranz?

  I wish it wasn't $80.

• 59:01Nilay Patel?

  No, that's the right price.

• 59:02David Pierce?

  You wish it was more?

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  That's the price of hubris.

• 59:07Alex Cranz?

  They have a version without the wheel for like $30.

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  Oh, come on.

• 59:10Alex Cranz?

  And I'm just like, what's the point of that? Who's, who wants that?

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so I will just remind everyone that when the Apple Watch was launched, you can go back and watch this video. Bono was there. They, they built a tent at a community college in California. This is a real thing that happened. And they sat us all down and they were like, with every new Apple product comes a revolutionary input device. You'll recall the mouse. Here's Steve Jobs in a mouse. You will recall the click wheel on the iPod, the multi-touch on the iPhone, and now with the Apple Watch, the digital crown. And I just think a device that's like, no, actually click wheel. What if we just use a click wheel to turn the digital crown? It's perfect. I will pay $80 just for that.

• 59:56Alex Cranz?

  Are you gonna put your watch in it?

• 59:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, I have so many old Apple Watches. I'd be like, just shove one in here. It does look delightful. I don't know why they've exposed the heart rate sensors on the back. Like, are you supposed to hold it?

• 1:00:10David Pierce?

  Press it to your neck?

• 1:00:14David Pierce?

  No, okay, wait, I have one.

• 1:00:16Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's for charging. It's for charging.

• 1:00:18David Pierce?

  Oh, sure, that makes sense.

• 1:00:19Alex Cranz?

  That makes more sense.

• 1:00:20David Pierce?

  My stupid usability question about this is, the watch, every time you take it off, it locks. Like, the way it authenticates is by staying on your body and then you turn it on. Are you gonna have to enter your passcode every single time you wanna touch this thing? Because that sounds awful.

• 1:00:35Alex Cranz?

  I think you used to be able to disable.

• 1:00:38David Pierce?

  Can you turn that off? Okay.

• 1:00:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you should be able to turn the watch stuff off. I never do.

• 1:00:42David Pierce?

  Okay, if that's the case, I'm gonna buy the hell out of this thing. Also, it will decimate the battery life because you are absolutely not supposed to actively use the watch very much. But I don't care. I'm gonna use it.

• 1:00:54Alex Cranz?

  Do it.

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, this is something.

• 1:00:56David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  I will say that between the weird Boox Palma news cycle that you and Craig Modd have kicked off, and the interest in these things, something's happening out there. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's measurable. I don't know if anyone's actually giving up their phone. But people are very much like, I'm sick of these rectangles. What about dumb or worse rectangles?

• 1:01:17David Pierce?

  There is a moment of phone disintermediation that is happening that I think is very exciting.

• 1:01:26David Pierce?

  Let's see. Oh, gosh, there's so many. Let's do the Dyson On Track headphones.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  This is nothing.

• 1:01:32David Pierce?

  That's the first time I've said that name out loud. I don't like it.

• 1:01:34Alex Cranz?

  The On Track?

• 1:01:35David Pierce?

  Bad, bad.

• 1:01:37Nilay Patel?

  They're very, Dyson made very customizable headphones. That's cool. I'm, I'm super down.

• 1:01:41David Pierce?

  And they don't look like a Bane mask, which I would argue is a tremendous improvement.

• 1:01:44Alex Cranz?

  And they cost $500.

• 1:01:46David Pierce?

  Less improvement. Yeah, that is good.

• 1:01:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I, well, really curious to see how they, they work out. I know Chris Welch is gonna probably review them, call them in, but, uh, yeah.

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  They do look cool. They're just expensive.

• 1:01:58David Pierce?

  Did the Bane ones sound good? I don't remember.

• 1:02:01Alex Cranz?

  They sounded okay, but this is giving real skull candy. And I don't know if that's a derogatory skull candy or a pos, it's just skull candy.

• 1:02:09David Pierce?

  It's a little derogatory. For $500, it's derogatory.

• 1:02:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Nilay Patel?

  I think my issue with these, and I, you know, I know people love Dyson products. I just wanna sit on an airplane with headphones and say Dyson on them in this way.

• 1:02:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Also, there's no fan. Where is the fan?

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you've got, you've got one core technology, Dyson.

• 1:02:28Alex Cranz?

  Gosh.

• 1:02:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, okay. I wanna, maybe there's something, but I don't think there are anything.

• 1:02:34David Pierce?

  So the way you just said, Neil, I, Dyson in this way, it makes me think you like bring your vacuum on the plane. And you're like happy to show that off, but you don't wanna rep Dyson in this way.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm saying. That's like, it's a very confusing.

• 1:02:47David Pierce?

  With his air wrap style, it's just like killing it on the plane.

• 1:02:49Nilay Patel?

  Down on an airplane, I don't know, and you like opened a box of food and had a Chevy logo. I'd be like, what is happening here? This makes no sense.

• 1:02:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, I can give you that.

• 1:03:00Alex Cranz?

  That makes sense.

• 1:03:01David Pierce?

  Yeah. I think Dyson just had a bunch of headphone parts left and just shipped them. That's my theory. The, let's do the last one and then, I have, I have more. I have, we could do this forever, but let's just do one last one. And then we should go. And I think it is the most, is this anything of all the major phone companies right now? And it's that Google just leaked its own Pixel 9.

• 1:03:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21David Pierce?

  Google was just like, here's the Pixel 9 Pro. Is this anything?

• 1:03:26Alex Cranz?

  I like they asked.

• 1:03:27David Pierce?

  I don't know. That should be the title of the YouTube video. They're like, do you like this?

• 1:03:32Alex Cranz?

  They did this, was it last year? Was it last year that they leaked the Pixel?

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  Is this a leak? Can we stop calling this a leak? They just posted it.

• 1:03:41David Pierce?

  They just posted the phone.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like a high-res photo. They're like, here it is.

• 1:03:46David Pierce?

  They did a video that just says, introducing the Google Pixel 9 Pro. You're right. They just launched the damn phone.

• 1:03:51Nilay Patel?

  That's not a leak.

• 1:03:52David Pierce?

  You're absolutely right.

• 1:03:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. They just were like, here it is. For now.

• 1:03:56Nilay Patel?

  The camera bump is outrageous.

• 1:03:58David Pierce?

  It's huge.

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  What are we doing, guys?

• 1:04:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  The camera bump is like, starting to be the size of a phone. Like that, the little, I, I, Apple, what's the Apple Watch phone called?

• 1:04:11David Pierce?

  Tiny Pod?

• 1:04:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The Tiny Pod. I'm, I'm curious if the Tiny Pod with the Apple Watch in it is as big as the bump on the Pixel 9 Pro.

• 1:04:18David Pierce?

  Okay, so Pixel 10, you make the bump removable.

• 1:04:22Alex Cranz?

  That's what I was gonna say!

• 1:04:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. Now we're talking, Chris.

• 1:04:25Alex Cranz?

  Now we're talking. That's the good stuff.

• 1:04:27David Pierce?

  We just did it. It's really, like, the whole story of this thing is going to be, it runs Gemini fast. It's like, it's very clear that is the whole sales pitch here.

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Which, what else does Google have?

• 1:04:38David Pierce?

  I do not find that compelling.

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  But I'm not convinced Gemini is doing all the things Google wants to do. We'll, we'll get to that later. But if that's the whole pitch here, it has to be good. And what have we learned about AI hardware? It's probably broken, and I don't believe you.

• 1:04:56David Pierce?

  So, yeah, we're gonna say, uh, that launch is August 13th, right?

• 1:05:01Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:02David Pierce?

  Uh, so TBD, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna say tentatively, it is not anything. Uh, we should take a break, but the last one is the, the OnePlus Pad 2 has a vibrating stylus. Um, for reasons.

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  This is not anything.

• 1:05:20Alex Cranz?

  You know what? You're writing utensil to vibrate?

• 1:05:23David Pierce?

  A linear motor inside that makes the tip vibrate to give you that feeling of a pen writing on paper. Cause you know how your pen vibrates.

• 1:05:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Alex Cranz?

  That's what I expect.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  I think what we should do is, is anything every week.

• 1:05:37Nilay Patel?

  This isn't anything.

• 1:05:38David Pierce?

  This is great. Yeah. Okay. Great. This is, that's it. We're done.

• 1:05:41Alex Cranz?

  And seen.

• 1:05:42David Pierce?

  The Tiny Pod, I think, is the big winner.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  The already successful Apple Watch, now in a weirder case. That's something.

• 1:05:52Alex Cranz?

  That's something.

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll be right back.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. This is a complicated lightning round.

• 1:06:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, we got a lot to do.

• 1:06:33Alex Cranz?

  We do.

• 1:06:34Nilay Patel?

  We have to deliver on the $27 million house that sucks. But I think we should close with that. So David, you're going last.

• 1:06:39David Pierce?

  I'm so excited. Okay.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  I'll just start with my favorite extremely silly story of the week. Comcast, investor, inbox me your parent company. They don't like me. And they don't like me because of the way I'm gonna tell the following story. Comcast owns NBC, which has the Olympics, right?

• 1:06:57Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  Comcast loves this because every year the Olympics is like a big deal for Comcast and NBC. They get all the programming. People are jumping, they're flipping, they're swimming. You know, the Olympics.

• 1:07:10David Pierce?

  Those are the three things typically.

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  This year they have breakdancing.

• 1:07:16David Pierce?

  Which is, to be fair, kind of jumping and running.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  Every Olympic sport is one of those three. Jumping, flipping, and swimming.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  As you know, sports in America are basically in 720p and have been forever. Because there's no competition with broadcast. Comcast is going to do the Olympics in 4K. But they're only gonna do it. Comcast is gonna do the Olympics in 4K, probably on Peacock, but probably like the horrible upscaled 4K that they do.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  If you have a Comcast cable box, you will get a high bitrate, low latency 4K feed of the Olympics.

• 1:07:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Nilay Patel?

  So if you have an Xi6, a She6, I don't know what kind of cable box that is, because I live here in the future.

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  But if you have one of their cable boxes, you can get hi-fi audio and a 30 megabits per second low latency 4K stream of the Olympics, which sounds awesome. Frankly, that sounds awesome. It is just ridiculous that they're limiting it to their cable box, which they say they have to do because of their custom network, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's absolutely no reason they have to do it this way.

• 1:08:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, why didn't they put those resources into Peacock and letting Peacock do it?

• 1:08:30David Pierce?

  I will say, this is going to work for Comcast. Like, the obvious move here is to get people who don't have this box but have a Comcast account to upgrade to this box. And it's gonna work. Like, the sporting events that make people go out and buy new, higher-res televisions, like, it's the same push. It's gonna work.

• 1:08:51Alex Cranz?

  Are the Olympics that?

• 1:08:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, dude, it's the Olympics. The Olympics are huge.

• 1:08:57Alex Cranz?

  Sometimes.

• 1:08:58Nilay Patel?

  So you get W-Vision HDR and Atmos immersive sound, and then, yep, channel 1350, which is USA 4K, will get the-

• 1:09:07David Pierce?

  Wait, it's just the one channel? It's not all of the Olympics, it's just USA?

• 1:09:12Nilay Patel?

  And, yep, and then enhanced 4K.

• 1:09:14David Pierce?

  So you get the Olympics and Monk reruns.

• 1:09:15Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:09:16David Pierce?

  Congrats.

• 1:09:18Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:09:18Nilay Patel?

  It's 24/7 access to the national screen, the national stream.

• 1:09:23David Pierce?

  Oh, that's worse. I take it back.

• 1:09:25Alex Cranz?

  Nevermind, yeah.

• 1:09:27David Pierce?

  Peacock.

• 1:09:27Alex Cranz?

  Just, Peacock's gonna, like, Peacock, they seem to have been doing a really smart design for it.

• 1:09:32David Pierce?

  I got an email this morning telling me that my Peacock price is about to go up, and guess when my price changes? Oh, it's in the middle of the Olympics. Surprise.

• 1:09:43Alex Cranz?

  You can test and see if it, like, which is better, with or without paid Peacock.

• 1:09:49David Pierce?

  I am required to keep paid Peacock because it somehow has all my shows. We've talked about this.

• 1:09:54Alex Cranz?

  This is true. This, I don't know why I suggested that to you.

• 1:09:57David Pierce?

  Peacock is weirdly, like, central to my day-to-day existence. But I try not to, I try not to think too much about that because it just makes me sad.

• 1:10:04Alex Cranz?

  You get all the Girls 5 Ever, though, so.

• 1:10:07David Pierce?

  I do like that.

• 1:10:09Nilay Patel?

  If you have a compatible streaming device, you will get W Vision HDR and Atmos, but you don't, you don't get the enhanced 4K. This is very complicated.

• 1:10:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying is Sony Patriot Core, the rebranded Sony Avriacore that I have on my Sony TV, still showing Madame Web at 80 megabits per second. The finest streaming experience you can have in America today. All right, Cranz, what's yours?

• 1:10:32Alex Cranz?

  Also 4K related, because Sling TV is adding 4K streaming for free. Unlike everybody else who is charging for it.

• 1:10:41Nilay Patel?

  Where's Sling on the Go 90 sale, would you say?

• 1:10:43Alex Cranz?

  With this?

• 1:10:45David Pierce?

  At least in the 70s.

• 1:10:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is like a Hail Mary.

• 1:10:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is, help. They've already done it once. They, they did it, they did a couple of days ago with the Fox Sports All-Star Game, and we all immediately went to social media to talk about watching 4K.

• 1:11:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, that was huge news. Everybody, everybody knew that.

• 1:11:04Alex Cranz?

  On Sling TV and on their Roku or Amazon Fire device. But they didn't, partially because it's, it's pretty much limited to Sling Blue subscribers, because there's two versions of Sling, only in a couple of major, a few major cities.

• 1:11:17Nilay Patel?

  Fully at an 80. They're fully at an 80. This is so complicated. I care about this so much, and it's so hard to understand what you're saying.

• 1:11:24Alex Cranz?

  But if you're in Gainesville, Florida, you, you can get it, and you don't have to pay extra.

• 1:11:30Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:11:31Alex Cranz?

  So it's, yeah.

• 1:11:32David Pierce?

  Big ups to Gainesville. I will say, if you run a streaming service and you're out there, 4K streaming as a, as a like free up service to keep people engaged is going to work. Someone needs to go out and just be the one that's like, yes, you can have 4K for no more money, because we love you.

• 1:11:50Alex Cranz?

  Besides Sling?

• 1:11:51David Pierce?

  It will work. Sling did it for what sounds like 11 people, so great. I'm thrilled for those 11 people. Gainesville, I'm sure is, is, you know, happy rioting in the streets. Like, that's great. But this, this is a feature that could work. Like, this is the kind of thing that people want, and someone who wants their customers to be happy should give this to them.

• 1:12:13Nilay Patel?

  Again, I have said many times, YouTube should just pay to produce all the games in 4K, and then just have 4K games on YouTube TV.

• 1:12:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  And it's too, like, they have the money, and I'm pretty sure they will. It's Google. They're like, whatever. I think it's too complicated.

• 1:12:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  All right, David, bring us home.

• 1:12:31David Pierce?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:12:31Nilay Patel?

  Twenty seven million dollar mansion that sucks.

• 1:12:33David Pierce?

  This is the best news. So Sam Altman bought a house in 2020 for $27 million. That was, I don't know if it was when he bought it, but it was at least at one time the most expensive San Francisco real estate listing ever. And it sucked. He sued, or he, his, his people through a series of weird corporate things that is fighting another series of weird corporate things on the side of the developers sued because basically they built him what, what his lawyers are alleging was a lemon of a $27 million house. This whole story is bananas. So the Architectural Digest made an 11 minute long video. I'll link it in the show notes.

• 1:13:18David Pierce?

  Going through the house before it was sold. And the house is, it's not beautiful, but it's like incredible. If that makes sense. It has, it has a gym. It has a massage room. It has a closet that is larger than most houses. It has.

• 1:13:32Alex Cranz?

  A wellness cottage, right?

• 1:13:34David Pierce?

  It has a wellness cottage. Thank you. That's the phrase I was looking for. It has three ovens in the kitchen, which seems like one more than even like the very extravagant amount of ovens to have.

• 1:13:45David Pierce?

  But it's real like showstopping piece was this cantilevered infinity pool that kind of looked out over San Francisco. It's gorgeous.

• 1:13:55David Pierce?

  According to the lawsuit, the people who were building the house were involved in a bunch of like corporate and financial shenanigans that led to them doing a crappy job and not paying contractors who then as a sabotage move, did things like shove bags and debris into drains, which then clogged those drains, which did things like cause a ceiling to collapse in the gym in the house. It caused, there were, there were like inches of standing water under some of the walkways. There was apparently mold everywhere. Let's see, what else do I have? Numerous leaking irrigation lines that were incorrectly installed on the rooftop garden.

• 1:14:39David Pierce?

  Failure of the tread lights in the exterior staircase, which were repaired, but then failed again. Defects in the design and waterproofing of exterior planters, just over and over and over again. Big giant pool basically leaking into and rapidly destroying the rest of the house. And the estimates were that the price to fix all of this is going to be more than $4 million, which is a number for repairs that I cannot fathom. And so basically, the lawsuit now is saying that Sam Altman was essentially duped into buying a $27 million piece of crap.

• 1:15:11Alex Cranz?

  Who made it?

• 1:15:12David Pierce?

  And it was so funny.

• 1:15:13Alex Cranz?

  Was like D.R. Horton behind it? Because it's just...

• 1:15:18Alex Cranz?

  One of the other big builders?

• 1:15:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, sometimes you get duped into spending a lot of money on an engineering marvel that can't actually do all the things people say it could do.

• 1:15:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Nilay Patel?

  It's just one of those things. What if the capabilities of this cantilevered pool do not match with the staggering amount of hype that has come with said pool?

• 1:15:42David Pierce?

  Do you think the pool helps you send like slightly better business emails?

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  The pool has already tried to have sex with Kevin.

• 1:15:58David Pierce?

  But yeah, I should say, on the one hand...

• 1:15:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. I love you, Kevin.

• 1:16:00David Pierce?

  On the one hand, like, this sucks. I don't mean to like particularly make fun of Sam Altman. Like, as somebody who just went through a much less expensive and problematic house renovation, this sucks. And like, the idea of spending all of this money on a house and then basically discovering it is literally collapsing inside of itself, that sucks. I don't wish that on anybody. In another way, it's very funny.

• 1:16:23Nilay Patel?

  The metaphor here is very good. Also, he was just driving around like a $5 million clinic sign, right?

• 1:16:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, he's fine.

• 1:16:29Alex Cranz?

  And the house is so ugly. Like, it's just, I like incredibly, incredibly unattractive house. So, good for him. He can go get it redone, like, take his earnings from the lawsuit, make it look like a real house. It'll be great.

• 1:16:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's just, I would encourage everyone to go read the lawsuit. I'll link it. It's 38 pages and the first like 10 pages are just explaining the structure of the company that built this house and how insane it was. And there was like, they lost a $50 million judgment against them for other shoddy work that they did. And they were like, the company was like, running out of money. So they stopped funding their projects while also at the same time, doing marketing about how like their whole thing was detail and 25% of their work went into things that the owner would never see because they just cared that much. And that's how it's 27 million. I love it. It's so, so funny. The whole thing is just like, there will be a documentary about this and I will watch every single second of it.

• 1:17:29Nilay Patel?

  And the documentary will be made by Sora.

• 1:17:31David Pierce?

  And most of it will be lies.

• 1:17:35Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:17:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited. All right, we are way over. Like, it's already next week. It was next week at the end of the first segment.

• 1:17:43David Pierce?

  Now it's September. Yeah. The iPhones are here now. Let's talk about that.

• 1:17:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no. All right, we gotta go. But before we do, I just want to call it one story on the side that's incredible. If you're an old head gadget blogger like me, Sean Hollister and John Porter wrote about the Stream Deck, the Elgato Stream Deck and where it came from, which is this legendary gadget blogger obsession, the Art Levitiv Optimus Keyboard. Turns out, by the way, Art Levitiv turned into a very weird, hard right Russian nationalist, which we had to add to the story.

• 1:18:13David Pierce?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:18:13Nilay Patel?

  Which is not what I wanted out of this very innocent story about the Stream Deck. But that is such as 2024. But if you were like me, you're like, reading and writing gadget blogs like 20 years ago, this keyboard just kept coming up as the thing everybody wanted. And it turns out the company that made the actual display has kept going and that turned into the Stream Deck. And it's just like a winding tale of some people really believing the key should light up. And I love it. And the design is incredible. So go read that. And then we have just tons and tons of stories. It was a great week on the side, actually. And then I promise you, we'll moderate the politics, but they're here. So just get ready. It's election year.

• 1:18:52David Pierce?

  And I will say, and everybody should hold us to this. I want to spend a lot of time talking about like, policy and less talking about like, horse race shenanigans.

• 1:19:01Nilay Patel?

  What did the polls say today?

• 1:19:03David Pierce?

  Yeah. So like, hold us to that. And that is, that is the thing we're going to try to do. Because this stuff, this stuff matters a lot. It matters right now. But we also don't need to spend a lot of time like ranting and raving about who said what on the campaign trail. And we will not.

• 1:19:16Nilay Patel?

  That's for our other show, 24/7 Politics Verge. You can watch on Roku devices tomorrow. All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:19:28David Pierce?

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:19:46Speaker 04

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