Pod Insights The Vergecast Fake news, Touchbar, and the Surface Studio About this episode The tech review season continues this week with reviews of the Macbook Pro with Touch Bar, Microsoft’s Surface Studio, and even an actual book that Apple released. This week on Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter give an overview of these products along with the topic of the week (or the month, or maybe the year): the problem of social media dealing with fake news articles that go viral. Paul sits down with Casey Newton, Silicon Valley editor at The Verge to discuss it all.
00:48 - Fake news on social networks
05:44 - Interview with Casey Newton
33:57 - Macbook Pro with Touchbar review
39:56 - Apple’s book Designed by Apple in California
44:25 - Apple TV
50:20 - Microsoft’s Surface Studio review
57:54 - PS4 Pro
1:02:52 - NES Classic
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Transcript 13,037 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? Let's start this party.
0:08 Nilay Patel? Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge.com. The show is doing great lately, I want you to know this. You, the listeners, have multiplied a number quite significantly. Take a minute before we begin the show. And ask yourself why. Why do you keep us?
0:22 Speaker 01 A whole minute, though.
0:23 Nilay Patel? Take a whole minute. We're just gonna count one, two. No, anyway, whatever. It's The Vergecast. I'm Neil Appel. Paul Miller's here. Hello. Dieter Bohn is here. Howdy. Uh, we're gonna talk about technology. We're gonna talk about culture. I gotta say, last week, we very explicitly avoided politics and policy. But it's been a whole week of President-elect Donald J. Trump, and it's gonna be a little bit unavoidable. Jumping in the deep end. Just going for it. Uh, there's a lot to talk about, though. But I think we should start at the start. I think it's been the biggest news of the week since the election. We're gonna come at it a couple of different ways, but we should start with it. It's Facebook and fake news is one of the dominant tech stories to come out of the election. And if you haven't been looking for it, because it's, it's not a story that has, like, great appeal to a wide number of readers,
1:08 Nilay Patel? but I think it's a story that's tremendously important. So, obviously, as you know, Facebook is the biggest media distribution system on the internet. You might not think of it that way, but it's true. Most media companies rely on Facebook to distribute their content, to get page views. There are entire brands that their entire strategy is based on Facebook.
1:27 Speaker 01 Facebook actually pays money to some media brands?
1:31 Nilay Patel? Facebook?
1:31 Speaker 01 They pay for Facebook Live videos?
1:33 Nilay Patel? So if you watch Facebook Live, our parent company Vox Media has a deal by which Facebook pays Vox Media to produce some amount of Facebook Lives every month. Uh, we obviously run Circuit Breaker. Paul runs Circuit Breaker with Ashley and Micah. When we developed it, it has a Facebook distribution-first strategy. We obviously get traffic from all kinds of other places. So Facebook-
1:51 Speaker 01 A lot of Facebook.
1:52 Nilay Patel? A lot of Facebook. Facebook is a enormously important tech and media company. Facebook thinks of itself as a tech company without the obligations and responsibilities of a media company. So Mark Zuckerberg is out there in the world saying, "We're not a media company, we're a tech company." And one thing that's true, it's happening right now- Is that a lot of fake news that was related to the election that is directly referential to the election? And we have no way of knowing, but it feels like may have influenced many voters is being distributed on Facebook. So what the most famous example is there's a fake story about the Pope endorsing Donald Trump, which has like a million shares on it and that got spread on Facebook and Facebook has no great tools to take it down or block it. It is complicated.
2:36 Speaker 01 Or do they have the tools?
2:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, Facebook has the tools to literally create virtual realities, right? They have, they have the tools to, to wrap your brain in a simulation of another world.
2:50 Speaker 01 And here we are, disclosure, I disclosed the, the Vox Media thing. I also got to disclose that my wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook.
2:58 Nilay Patel? Sure.
2:59 Speaker 01 There it is.
3:00 Nilay Patel? So it's a big story and it is one of, I think, the most important stories in tech right now. Uh, and it's not just related to Facebook. It's related to Twitter, it's related to basically all of the platforms that now really truly control how media is distributed. And there was a time when fake news got distributed in email forwards. In fact, I got one from my parents last night.
3:21 Speaker 01 Nice.
3:22 Nilay Patel? About the 28th amendment. It's like a famous email hoax. It's been around like since 1992. The 28th amendment, uh, it's about passing, uh, it's, it's so close to passing, guys. And if you just forward this to 10 people.
3:36 Speaker 01 Oh, then Bill Gates will give you a dollar.
3:38 Nilay Patel? And Bill Gates will give you a dollar and Congress will pass a law, uh, stating that, uh, all, no, Congress can make no law that doesn't apply to themselves as congresspeople, which will keep them from doing all kinds of.
3:48 Speaker 01 Snopes, Snopes is a mixture of truths from 2009.
3:52 Nilay Patel? Oh, yeah, but no, but the, the earliest version. Yeah, I read the Snopes, it's great. By the way, Snopes, time of their lives. This is what they were made for, like basically she just buys Snopes.
4:05 Speaker 02 I need a Gmail plugin that anytime I get an email from somebody, namely my parents, it automatically does a Snopes search and then gives me
4:15 Nilay Patel? Yes.
4:16 Speaker 02 A button to click to reply to just send back the Snopes article. Just like, you got this, you got this story. Click this button to send the Snopes article back. That would be great.
4:24 Nilay Patel? Actually built into every email client. The Snopes button. It's a big theme. And if you look at how money in the media has shifted, newspapers are, unless you're the Wall Street Journal, or actually not the Wall Street Journal, the Wall Street Journal just laid a bunch of people off. If you're the New York Times, your subscriptions are going up. If you're the Washington Post, you just got bought by Jeff Bezos. Doesn't matter.
4:44 Speaker 02 So you're fine.
4:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Jeff is going to keep you in business. Every other print newspaper and bunch of print magazines and print companies are losing money because the audiences are online and the audiences online are coming at you through Google and Facebook. And all the profit from the media industry has, the print media industry has moved from the print companies to Google and Facebook. Like, it's a huge shift in money.
5:06 Speaker 02 So it's the incoming traffic from Google and Facebook.
5:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And they, Google runs the world's biggest ad network and DFP. Facebook obviously has its own big ad server. They have better ad targeting, right? They obviously have better ad technology than Conde Nast, whatever, or your local paper. So if they've taken all the money, do they, do they have to take some of their responsibility to police the news? Paul, you, you actually sat down, Casey Newton, who's one of our great senior reporters, has been on the Facebook feed forever, and you sat down with him to talk about fake news a little bit.
5:36 Speaker 02 Yes, we had an excellent conversation. I would like to play it for you right now.
5:40 Nilay Patel? Snopes.
5:44 Nilay Patel? Paul.
5:44 Speaker 02 Casey.
5:45 Speaker 03 How are you?
5:46 Speaker 02 Hey, I just came across a story on my Facebook feed that says, "You're not a technology reporter, you're actually a bear living in the woods."
5:54 Speaker 03 And it has over 80,000 shares.
5:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I just shared it with all my friends. But I thought, after sharing it with everybody, that I'd try to get to the bottom of it and see if it's really true.
6:04 Speaker 03 You are not unlike many Americans, Paul.
6:07 Speaker 02 Okay, so yeah, it's all over, well, it's all over my Facebook feed is all these stories about fake news and what Facebook is doing about it or not doing about it, what Google is doing about it. So yeah, can you, how did this even become an issue?
6:24 Speaker 03 Sure. So in the aftermath of our recent presidential election here in the United States, an election that had a result that left a lot of people stunned, people started to ask the question, well, you know, why did the population seem to react so much differently than the polls suggested that they were going to? And one explanation that at least some have turned to is that in the run-up to the election, a huge number of totally made-up stories about the candidates started to flourish on two platforms in particular, one being Facebook, the other being Google. Facebook is a place where, at least according to the Pew Center, 44% of Americans get at least some of their news. And according to an analysis
7:09 Speaker 03 that BuzzFeed did, the most shared stories from the 20 biggest sort of fake news and so-called satire websites got way more engagement, or significantly more engagement, I should say, than stories shared by reputable outlets that were reporting the facts. So for example, a story that falsely said that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump went crazy viral while stories, you know, suggesting that Trump is a racist nightmare maybe performed less well. And so now there's a lot of soul-searching going on in the media about kind of how this
7:49 Speaker 03 happened and whether and what Facebook and also Google, which of course has a news platform of its own, should do about it.
7:57 Speaker 02 So yeah, so there's this rumor that Facebook maybe had a tool that would like identify fake news, but they didn't want to deploy it. Now, and there's also a rumor that there's like internal rogue team that is working on something. Like, do you think, what do you think about this stuff? I have no idea.
8:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:15 Speaker 02 Because it's all speculative. Again, what is truth?
8:20 Speaker 03 Well, it's a great question, hard to answer, it turns out. You know, the outlets who have reported those pieces of information are pretty reputable, and I do not disbelieve them. I should also say, I have not been able to independently confirm the things that they reported. I've spent the past week talking to current and former employees at Facebook, and the people I have talked to there say that the company sort of does take this seriously, but it's more complicated than a lot of people seem to believe that it is, but that in any case, they have not made changes to the algorithm or rejected changes to the algorithm based on how those might affect one political party.
9:05 Speaker 03 Now, at the same time, it is the case that, again, according to a different BuzzFeed analysis, conservative-leaning sites published more totally false news than left-leaning, made-up news sites. And so, were Facebook to take some kind of significant action to eliminate fake news from Facebook altogether, or prevent it from spreading in some way, that likely would have an outsized effect on those conservative-leaning sites. And then there would be the second-order effect, where if you are a conservative and you use Facebook, and you started to feel like Facebook was not showing you the kind
9:46 Speaker 03 of news and information and entertainment that you wanted to see, it could break Facebook, because you would just abandon the platform, and maybe you would go start a kind of fair and balanced social network of your own. So, if you're Facebook, your number-one goal in all of this is to just maintain the perception of absolute neutrality on your platform. And so I think whatever Facebook does, that is going to be kind of the prime directive.
10:12 Speaker 02 It's interesting. Facebook recently had this big announcement, I want to say like six months ago or so.
10:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:18 Speaker 02 About changing their algorithm to disfavor clickbait headlines.
10:22 Speaker 03 Right.
10:23 Speaker 02 Does that kind of intersect with this?
10:25 Speaker 03 Yes, and it gets pretty technical, but basically they tried two approaches to reducing clickbait earlier this summer. One of those was to rely on reports from users of Facebook. So if you saw a story that was clickbait, you could report it as clickbait, and then Facebook would reduce the spread of that information over time, the more reports like that it got. And then the other approach they took was just a purely software-driven machine learning approach where they looked for common keywords and phrases, like "you'll never believe what happened next," and they would sort of automatically prevent those from spreading. Facebook wound up going with the machine learning route, and they wound
11:07 Speaker 03 up jettisoning the kind of self-reporting mechanism. And what Facebook says is, that Gizmodo's report that they built this tool and rejected it, they're actually talking about that that kind of one method that Facebook had attempted to reduce clickbait. So again, it gets really kind of complicated and technical and nitty-gritty, but Gizmodo says, "Look, like the fact that they didn't wind up implementing that particular approach to reducing clickbait, like, has nothing to do with what we reported, which is they didn't use it because it hurt conservative-leaning sites."
11:41 Speaker 02 I guess my big thing, it's interesting, this is so interesting to me because it's like, it's instantly philosophical.
11:48 Speaker 03 Right.
11:48 Speaker 02 And, and what is the difference between promoting and spreading misinformation, which is obviously the wrong thing to do.
11:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:58 Speaker 02 And being an arbiter of truth and a censor.
12:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:04 Speaker 02 And where is that line? What is the difference?
12:08 Speaker 03 Well, it is, on one hand, just an incredibly frustrating subject. Look, I think about this a lot as a journalist, right? If you are a reporter, you're constantly confronted by these questions of ontology, right? How do you know what you think you know? And for me, it often comes down to, well, somebody told me, and I trust them. And I try to only talk to people who I trust. And when they lead me astray, I post a correction. But hopefully, over time, my track record speaks to the fact that I work as hard as I can to ensure the accuracy of everything I report. There are other sites out there, though, that just don't take that as their mission. And so the question then becomes, well, should they be allowed to post on Facebook at all?
12:48 Speaker 03 And as you note, if Facebook says no, then that does become maybe a question of censorship. It gets them into some pretty ugly terrain philosophically. Now, there's a flip side of that, though, which is, what if rampantly spreading misinformation winds up undermining our democracy, right? Like, then will Facebook still turn around and say, well, look, we're just a neutral platform, you need to blame these bad actors, not us? I suspect a great number of people are going to be turned off by that and may, in fact, abandon Facebook, right? So as much as there's a risk to Facebook kind of on the right of this perception that it is no longer a neutral platform, I think there's also kind of a risk on the left if
13:31 Speaker 03 people come to feel like Facebook is not trustworthy and Facebook does not take seriously its power as a major distributor of news.
13:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, I don't know what to do. Normally, I feel like I have, like, oh, I know what they should do. It'll be fine if they just did my thing. I have no idea.
13:51 Speaker 03 Well, look, I mean...
13:53 Speaker 02 What's Google doing? How are they doing fake news?
13:57 Speaker 03 So, Google was sort of first out of the gate to announce something really important, which is that it was going to classify some of these fake news sites. And if it did classify them as a site that was sort of trying to pass off lies as the truth, then that site was not going to be... Be able to use their ad network, which is, you know, one of the main reasons that these sites exist. They're profitable, right?
14:20 Speaker 02 Google has like a, like a database of, of true things, right?
14:25 Speaker 03 Well, in order to be featured on Google News, right, like news.google.com, there's a sort of rigorous application process, right? And so a site like the Denver Guardian, which if you were to visit its website, looks every bit like a real news site.
14:39 Speaker 02 And it's That's a big, big problem with all of these fake. I used to totally be able to spot one instantly. And now like, I basically have to assume if I haven't seen this site before, reporting something that was reputable. I have to assume it's fake.
14:55 Speaker 03 Yes.
14:55 Speaker 02 Until I, I know otherwise.
14:57 Speaker 03 Yes.
14:58 Speaker 02 Okay, what is it? What's it called? The Denver?
14:59 Speaker 03 The Denver Guardian. I mean, you can go there.
15:01 Speaker 02 Hate to give them.
15:02 Speaker 03 And, um, you know, it's very savvy of them to use kind of a city name because it makes you think, oh, well, this is just some local news site. I haven't heard of before. Uh, they published this viral claim that an FBI agent who had been linked to the leaking of Hillary Clinton's emails had been found dead in a murder suicide. This was one of the most shared stories in the run up to the election. And some people say again, that it, it wound up increasing turnout for Donald Trump or a diminished turnout for Hillary Clinton. Right? And it looks like a, a real news website. And so what Google has said is sites like that, we're not going to allow them to use our ad network to profit. And Facebook came in pretty quickly thereafter and said, you know what? We're, we're going to do the same thing. So, I mean, one thing that these, uh, you know, giant platforms can do is to just kind of make it harder for these sites to make money,
15:47 Speaker 03 which then gives them fewer incentives to do this kind of, um, uh, lying that they've been doing for the, you know, past many years.
15:56 Speaker 02 I'm, I'm still amazed that those ad networks pop up that story about, look at this child actor who died. You'll never believe it. Like, yeah, there's some of this stuff that's been persistent for a long time. But yeah, maybe, maybe that'll help. Maybe economics.
16:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, but you raise a good point, Paul, which is that this problem is not new, nor is it limited to Google and Facebook. There are these ad networks, Tabula and Outbrain, which post the, you know, get rid of belly fat with this one weird trick style headlines. And many websites, including perhaps some that we work for, use them because they generate a lot of money. And these sites will tell you all day long that they do their best to only put the very best content in their network. And yet you visit any single site on the web, and what is in that box, and it's absolute garbage. Right? So this issue does go beyond Google and Facebook. And unfortunately, the monetary incentives will
16:55 Speaker 03 always be to just post the most salacious misleading headline.
16:59 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, I'm gonna keep monitoring the situation. And I feel like I feel like I'm not like a big sharer, except for stories about you being a bear in the woods. Like, I typically don't feel like I share and retweet, or I guess I retweet like funny things.
17:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:18 Speaker 02 Words that people say.
17:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:20 Speaker 02 But yeah, I do think being a reporter a little bit, I'm not much of a journalist, but like, it's definitely made me just so skeptical about the truth. Especially because like, even if you did a profile, and it's not even hearsay, it's just literally reporting on someone's life directly.
17:37 Speaker 03 Right.
17:38 Speaker 02 Well, you leave out 95% of the facts that you gathered during that time. So like, are you sharing the whole truth?
17:45 Speaker 03 Right.
17:45 Speaker 02 I'm not trying to say that all of these things are equivalent, and that Pope supports Donald Trump is the same thing as a slightly slanted story, but it's tough.
17:55 Speaker 03 But I think you're raising a really great issue, though, which is that one thing that every American can do, whatever every citizen of the world can do in the aftermath of this election, no matter who you supported, is try to become a more literate consumer of news. If there is an issue out there that is important to you, you need to read more than one story about it. And you need to read more than one story from more than one outlet, right? Not even talking about making sure you're reading articles from every side of the political spectrum. You can read the same article from three sites that align with your political worldview, but at least expose yourself to the chance that somebody got it wrong. If you want to gain a fuller understanding of what is going on in this world, you need to read more, you
18:40 Speaker 03 need to watch more, you need to ask more questions, and you need to think like a journalist and be skeptical of what you're seeing. And before you go to share it, ask yourself that question. Is it possible that I am being scammed here? And if I am, I'm not going to put this thing onto the internet.
18:55 Speaker 02 You may have to click on the headline before you share it. Just put it out there.
18:59 Speaker 03 It's a best practice.
19:00 Speaker 02 On that awesome, rising note, I'd like to thank Casey Newton, Bear in the Woods, for joining me.
19:08 Speaker 03 Paul, it's always a pleasure. I'm gonna go hibernate now for the next four years.
19:12 Speaker 02 Well, have a great, great nap.
19:14 Speaker 03 Okay, bye.
19:16 Nilay Patel? Paul told me earlier that the interview ended on a rousing note to be an informed consumer.
19:20 Speaker 02 That's the word I was looking for, rousing.
19:22 Nilay Patel? Rousing.
19:23 Speaker 03 Not an a rousing note.
19:24 Speaker 02 No, I said rising.
19:27 Nilay Patel? I think it's true. Actually, that fundamental issue, just be smarter, could have stopped a lot of things in this election cycle.
19:37 Speaker 01 One of the things I've been talking to some people on our staff about is like, I graduated high school in 96. The internet, the web in particular, was a thing, was beginning to be a thing. And like, we would like have English classes where we would go online and research, and they would tell us, don't trust what you read on the internet, and give us like, basic tools for like, can you trust the thing that you're reading? And what's so surreal to me about the fake news on Facebook thing is, literally, 5th graders are taught how to avoid this problem, and yet, we have this giant institution that is used by billions
20:20 Speaker 01 of people around the world, and we're not applying 5th grade level analysis and like, awareness about like, whether or not a thing is true to these stories before we click the share button.
20:33 Speaker 02 I was thinking about that, that like, maybe it's Wikipedia's fault. It got too good.
20:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:38 Speaker 02 It used to be a joke, can't cite Wikipedia, and then they're like, well...
20:41 Nilay Patel? You still shouldn't cite Wikipedia.
20:42 Speaker 02 Turns out...
20:43 Speaker 01 Bring back Incarta. That's what I say.
20:45 Nilay Patel? Well, so, actually, that's hilarious, first of all.
20:50 Speaker 01 Bring back Encarta.
20:51 Nilay Patel? I'm getting a CD-ROM.
20:52 Speaker 01 The whole thing. We should definitely do that with great, big, clickable interfaces and like slidey transitions.
20:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:58 Speaker 01 Bring back Encarta.
20:59 Nilay Patel? Bring back Encarta.
21:00 Speaker 01 But Dieter, you always talk about like the deals, like the gatekeepers and deals, right? Like, we're gonna talk about Apple TV in a little bit.
21:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:08 Speaker 01 The whole TV industry is made up of gatekeepers and deals. You always talk about virtual assistants. So to integrate with Alexa or Siri or Cortana or whatever, you gotta make a deal with Apple or Microsoft to get access to the thing. It feels like this is the point at which Facebook being just like a wide open playground for every media organization, scrupulous or not scrupulous, is actually a net negative. And if Facebook made some deals and aggressively whitelisted things, it might be good. That is not what I usually think at all.
21:44 Nilay Patel? Wow.
21:44 Speaker 01 Ever. I never think that.
21:46 Nilay Patel? Switching to T-Mobile, I hear.
21:47 Speaker 01 But do you trust the deal or do you trust the algorithm? Right? Like, if you, if you trust the algorithm, you know, there was a thing this week where the first result on Google search for who won the popular vote was a fake news article. It was a lie. And theoretically, if you had asked Google Home that question, it would have gone out to the web, run its little algorithm, and given you the one answer that you get out of a voice assistant, because it can't give you a bunch of links. And that one answer would have been a lie.
22:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
22:21 Speaker 01 And, and so like, yeah, I don't know. Do you, do you trust the deals? Do you, do you trust the algorithm? Or do you just have to like, go to the website that you trust and like, form that kind of bubble? Like, are, we have somehow regressed in our ability to like, think critically about the media that we consume, because like, we are flummoxed by the opacity of these algorithms and the opacity of these deals. And it's like, Addy wrote a great piece about like, the inner mixture of news with your friends seems like one of the fundamentally problematic things here. Like, you wanna go to Facebook? You're supposed to see stuff from your friends. It's also showing you stuff from news.
23:03 Speaker 01 And then mashing those things together has you applying like the part of your brain that thinks about your social circle circle to the part of your brain that thinks about news. And you just get short circuited and you end up using the internet like a third grader instead of a fifth grader, which is like, we should be reading the internet at least at a fifth grade level, I like to think.
23:22 Nilay Patel? I mean, I can, I can also make the death of the web argument here. I mean, this, this is maybe one of the darkest first segments of the Vergecast in history. There was a time we all browsed in desktop PCs or laptops. And we started either at RSS readers that we had picked ourselves from sources that we trusted. Or at portals of some kind. And Gadget, when we ran in Gadget was very much a first destination for people that sent them out to all kinds of other blogs that we had aggregated news from. And you could trust us. At least we hoped that you trusted us. Now, your first stop, or AOL.com was a huge portal. Yahoo.com was a huge portal.
24:00 Speaker 01 It was mine go to. Remember the directory?
24:03 Nilay Patel? The directory. But that was a different time. But those portals were, Drudge Report still exists, a huge portal. And those, you knew there was an editorial organization behind them. Right? Both, I mean that in both senses of the word. There was a, like a group of people as an organization. And then there was like a thematic organization to the, to your experience on the web as you traveled through the portal. Now, people start at Facebook. People start at Twitter. There is no editorial organization behind either of those things. There are only these opaque algorithms. And there, and I mean, there's no, again, I mean it in both senses of the word. There's no group of people operating as a unit with one mission to like, show you good things or like, present true things.
24:48 Nilay Patel? And there's no operating principle by which the things, like Facebook's incentive is to get you to stay inside of Facebook. That's why they built instant articles. That's why they built a video player. And they just want you to share more and more things, be more and more engaged. And it turns out, fake news, which is designed to provoke outrage or like confirmation bias, isn't really good at keeping you engaged.
25:09 Speaker 01 You know, one thing I really like in the current media landscape is Reddit.
25:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
25:13 Speaker 01 Because Reddit, wrong and misleading headlines get upvoted all the time. You don't click on the headline to go to the source. You click through to the comments and look at the most upvoted comment.
25:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
25:26 Speaker 01 And it's typically saying, this is actually false.
25:30 Speaker 02 And it's really helpful for like for science stories for like future, you know, like, oh, new battery technology, it's gonna fix everything. And then it's like a well, actually, kind of a person shows up.
25:41 Nilay Patel? Reddit is an automatic well actually.
25:42 Speaker 02 And even even unlike the more conservative parts of Reddit, you know, like the Donald has a lot of people, you know, show up and say, ah, this is misleading. Like, I feel like that works better on Reddit for whatever reason. I don't know if it's the crowd, if it's the mood, or it's the interface. But, but yeah, Facebook doesn't, doesn't promote that.
26:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, this is going to be, I think, the biggest story of the year for these companies. Right? What is their true responsibility? And it's, it is an incredibly difficult situation.
26:14 Speaker 02 I will say, oh, go ahead.
26:16 Speaker 01 No, I was just gonna say, the thing to unpack to, like, if you want to get Casey Newton, who gave that interview with Paul, real mad, tell him you want to argue about whether or not Facebook is a media company. Because that's what everybody, everybody just wants Facebook to admit it's a media company. And that's true and fair. It has repercussions if they do that. But it's like, it's almost too simple and binary of a question. Are they a media company or not? You actually have to unpack it and look at like editorial choices. And are they responsible for the stuff that people post on Facebook? And is an algorithm in effect, an editorial choice? And like, claiming that it's not is actually like shirking your responsibility. Right? There's like,
26:59 Nilay Patel? I can make that argument in a way that probably would drive Casey even crazier. Because media companies come in all shapes and sizes, right? So I think the question of, are you a media company, is not one to one. Are you the New York Times? Or are you ABC News? Or whatever? Comcast is a media company. Comcast, another disclosure here on the Vergecast today. Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, right? Comcast, what do we know of Comcast? They are, they started as a cable company. They distribute media. They are in the media distribution business. If Comcast is your interface to television for most people, or it was for most people, you sign up for a Comcast account, they gave you a piece of technology, a piece of hardware that mediated Your relationship to television, right? It could record shows, it showed you a guide, it did all these things.
27:44 Nilay Patel? That's how you got television. There's no way that if, you know, it was the election in 1992 or whatever, and it came out that 1% of the television on Comcast was just blatant lies about political parties. We wouldn't be having this Comcast wouldn't be out there saying, oh, we're just a technology company. They bear some responsibility for the things on their distribution network. Facebook is a media distribution company. They distribute media, whether that media is made by their users and it's pictures of your family, whether that media is made by news organizations, whether that media is made by whatever. Zuckerberg's comment, 99% of things on Facebook are true. Well, 1% of them are false.
28:19 Speaker 02 But this, I mean, this is
28:20 Nilay Patel? That's a crazy for any company.
28:21 Speaker 02 This is a classic internet thing where platforms do not want to be responsible for the content posted by their users.
28:28 Nilay Patel? And if they take some responsibility, they get into really legally murky territory.
28:33 Speaker 02 And it's a lot of work.
28:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
28:34 Speaker 02 I mean, it's a classic internet stance and, and way of being that it's not our fault for what people put on
28:43 Nilay Patel? Right.
28:43 Speaker 02 The internet.
28:44 Nilay Patel? But then they take it, they take credit when, you know, Twitter leads to a revolution or Twitter leads an activist movement. They're surprised, they're proud, they're proud of the good outcomes and they say the bad outcomes don't matter.
28:56 Speaker 02 Well, um, yeah, I don't know. I just, I really, I really, I really.
29:02 Nilay Patel? You're not, I don't think you're supposed to know.
29:05 Speaker 02 Two, two small things. One, this might be the story of the year for, I don't know if people have seen, but there's, I think it's a Forbes feature. I forget who did this. Two side by side streams.
29:16 Nilay Patel? Wall Street Journal.
29:17 Speaker 02 Is that Wall Street Journal?
29:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
29:18 Speaker 02 Two side by side streams. One is left leaning, one is right leaning or whatever, and they're so polar opposite. It's incredible. I would say the left leaning stream is getting that stream of stories about how this election is Facebook and Google's fault. I would say the right leaning stream is getting stories about how CNN colluded with the Hillary campaign and fed her the questions from the debates. Like the, the, the right leaning stream is not up in arms about Facebook's algorithm. Maybe they should be, or lack of filter for fake news. They're up in arms about media elites, as they're called, or the gatekeepers, this, you know, this great.
30:00 Nilay Patel? Us. They're mad about us.
30:01 Speaker 02 They're mad about us, and they're mad about the Times, being selective with what they cover. Even if they're not outright lying, hiding negative stories and promoting other stories. It's, I think that's what the right is focused on right now. The conservatives are focused on that part of this media story. I don't think this fake news story is making a dent in that right feed. Everybody needs to look at this left or right feed.
30:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it is amazing.
30:30 Speaker 02 Really crystallizes this whole thing for you.
30:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, I get what you're saying, like, a bunch of the population doesn't know, or doesn't care, or they're focused on another part of the media equation that they don't think is right. But overall, I think it's a net negative if the biggest distributor of media that exists on the internet is openly admitting that 1% of the things that it distributes are fake. Because that 1% is gonna make you think someone is lying to you, or the establishment liberal elite media is hiding stories because you don't see them, you don't see the lie. Like, if you're unable to differentiate between lies and the truth, and you see a bunch of weird crazy lies, like Hillary murdered an FBI agent, you're like, why isn't the New York Times covering this? Why isn't this everywhere?
31:14 Speaker 02 I just think there's a larger danger.
31:16 Nilay Patel? You just end up in this zone.
31:17 Speaker 02 There's a larger danger of having a company like Facebook being in charge of what's true and what's false, than there is a danger of people lying to each other on an open platform.
31:26 Nilay Patel? I think it's just all about mediating that danger. Like, I don't necessarily want Facebook to read every post I write. You know, the thing that we do is cover Facebook. What if Facebook decides that every post we write about Facebook is a lie? It's maniacal.
31:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:41 Nilay Patel? It's gonna be tough. That's why I think it's the biggest story for these companies, right? Not the biggest story for their relationship with consumers, or their products, or their rise and fall in the industry. It's existential. It's what is their responsibility? They got it. They did it. They're not hackers who dropped out of Harvard anymore. They are the most powerful media executives in the world. Even if they don't want to admit they're a media company. What do they owe their society?
32:08 Speaker 02 Yes, it's a good summary.
32:09 Nilay Patel? All right. Do you want to talk about Lenovo Cloud's storage solutions?
32:12 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
32:13 Nilay Patel? Let's read this ad.
32:15 Nilay Patel? Look, let me tell you something, Paul. Yeah. The cloud sounds magical. It does. But it's still just data stored on servers. Yeah. It's estimated the cloud, which is just servers, mind you, holds 4X bytes of data equal to the storage capacity of 6 million average laptops. By 2020, if we last that long, experts expect the cloud to hold 40 zettabytes of data, or the storage equivalent of 80 billion average laptops. Most of that data is stored on nearly 5.5 million servers operated by just 16 companies. But the cloud, again, not magic, just servers, isn't just a place to store stuff. In fact, business increasingly relies on cloud for expandable computing power. Imagine, if you will, that you have guests coming over, but you only have one bedroom. Not actually that difficult to imagine. What if you could order an extra bedroom for your guests that you could just remove after they leave?
32:59 Nilay Patel? This metaphor is very difficult, but just go with it. I got, no, absolutely have it. That idea is behind Lenovo's next-generation data centers built for cloud computing. They just bring you a bedroom and then take it away. See, the cloud is all about giving your company the ability to expand and contract server capacity on demand without actually adding more hardware. Lenovo understands that on-demand access can give your company a tremendous competitive advantage. The faster you can scale up, the faster your development team can test your applications. And that means you can get new product features under the market faster. But that kind of flexibility is worthless if your servers are down. Lenovo servers number one in reliability and performance, because you don't have time for downtime. I added that little click that's not in the script. Right? You don't have time for downtime. Oh, but the line. It's a good line. Anyway, are you feeling handcuffed by proprietary hardware software relationships? Lenovo Systems allows you to partner with leading software providers to ensure your cloud solution is best in class.
33:43 Nilay Patel? Lenovo Systems can even integrate with legacy software platforms to help you get your cloud solution up and running quickly. So, learn more about how Lenovo is transforming the data center at www.lenovo.com/datacenter.
33:55 Nilay Patel? Let's talk about some stuff. A bunch of Apple stuff happened this week. You want to talk about the Touch Bar review, Dieter? We did the MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar. And we did, there's a crazy coffee table book they did.
34:04 Speaker 01 Oh my god, that coffee table book. So Jake and Walt both reviewed the Touch Bar version of the MacBook Pro. And the takeaway seems to be not change in the future of computing.
34:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
34:16 Speaker 01 Just, it's basically like if you closed your eyes and imagined a Touch Bar review where the Touch Bar was like, "Meh, fine." That's what these reviews were. Like dongle life is a hassle. The touch bar is sometimes confusing when it tries to do too much. When it tries to act like a just a simple function, you know, button bar. It does fine. There are a few moments of like, oh, hey, this is really cool. But you know, the hardware is beautiful. The screen is gorgeous. The speakers are really loud. Yeah. So like the touch bar is useful when it acts like a regular set of function buttons. But when it tries to do too much or get too cute, it gets really confusing really quickly. The thing that you might not expect is Apple didn't do the thing that Apple usually does with laptops.
35:00 Speaker 01 So the things that Apple usually does laptops is make beautiful screen, decent keyboards, incredibly good build quality. It's light. It's thin. They did all that. But battery life is a little hit and miss. Yeah, it's like, which not great.
35:14 Speaker 02 I thought we were making all these sacrifices so that they could give us another winner on battery.
35:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. So it's, it's, it's all over the map. So like Jake tested it across two different lap, two different 13 inch laptops and a 15 inch.
35:26 Nilay Patel? They, Apple was so concerned about his first test. They sent him a second one.
35:31 Speaker 01 Right. Uh, now the battery life on the non-touch bar version, the boring one is like, fine. It's exactly what you'd expect. And it turns out the internals are like radically different between those two devices, uh, which is interesting. Also speaking of the internals, the speaker grill on the touch bar is like mostly for show. Most of the sound comes out the air vents on the sides.
35:50 Nilay Patel? What are we doing, kids?
35:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's like, it's just, it's super inconsistent. You are not going to know, uh, what your battery life is going to be. And you can't trust it, uh, in our testing at least to hit Apple's claimed 10 hours. Even if you're not doing crazy stuff. And that's not even getting into all the fetching about the, uh, you know, sixth generation processor and the, the hard cap of 16 gigs of RAM, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Which you could get into. I'm like, I'm of two minds on that debate. But mostly I sort of land on, it would have made it five to 10% faster if they had managed to get in there at the cost of like further delays or it's like untested processors and the processors aren't even available yet.
36:35 Speaker 01 So I kind of am willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt that they made the right choices on. The processors, although I do think it's aggravating that it caps out at 16 gigs of RAM. But overall, the general sentiment, I've just been, I'm just owning this whole conversation. Overall, the general sentiment out there is like, eh.
36:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
36:54 Speaker 01 It's like, it's fine, it's fine.
36:56 Nilay Patel? I haven't ordered one yet, but desperately need a new computer. I mostly need a computer because I got new Verge stickers and new Rack stickers and you put on something.
37:04 Speaker 02 Oh, man.
37:05 Nilay Patel? Yep. What am I gonna do?
37:06 Speaker 02 What a hard, hard life.
37:08 Speaker 01 Did you talk about the, did you talk about the last sentence in Walt's review?
37:11 Nilay Patel? No.
37:11 Speaker 01 The last sentence in Walt's review is, if you need a new laptop and you love Macs, this is what Apple is offering. Take it or leave it.
37:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
37:18 Speaker 01 That's true. Not, not, not, not thumbs up, not thumbs down, not review score. Walt's take on this thing is, take it or leave it. And like, that's, that's exactly right.
37:27 Speaker 02 It's like sitting down for dinner when your mom cooks.
37:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
37:30 Speaker 02 You're like, you don't get to make decisions.
37:35 Nilay Patel? Here's the big question, here's the only question I have. How, Paul, do you know when Kaby Lake quad cores are coming? Is there any?
37:41 Speaker 02 No idea.
37:42 Nilay Patel? No idea.
37:42 Speaker 02 I think they should be.
37:44 Nilay Patel? If they rev them instantly, this is the thing.
37:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, people will be so mad.
37:48 Nilay Patel? How fast are they gonna rev them to that next gen of processors?
37:50 Speaker 02 It's gotta be a six month minimum wait.
37:53 Nilay Patel? So can I, can I hold out another six months? Will I, can I get more stickers in six months?
37:58 Speaker 01 It's gonna be a year. There's no way they're gonna rev them right away. Like, I, unless they're, unless Apple is like legitimately freaking out over people's reaction to this thing, they're not gonna rev them instantly.
38:09 Nilay Patel? Well, they are insistent that they're selling tons of them.
38:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, they do say that. Well, that's the thing, like, they are, I believe them, like, I believe they're selling tons of them because it's a really, really, really good MacBook Air.
38:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
38:22 Speaker 01 The MacBook Pro is a incredibly good MacBook Air. It doesn't seem like it's clear that it's a good MacBook Pro.
38:29 Nilay Patel? Alright, I'm gonna get one.
38:32 Speaker 01 I mean, but are you gonna get the touch bar?
38:34 Speaker 02 It looks like these processors are out.
38:37 Nilay Patel? The quad core Kaby Lake?
38:38 Speaker 02 They're just not being used.
38:39 Nilay Patel? No, if they were out, they would put them in the machine, right?
38:41 Speaker 02 Uh, the Spectre, the Spectre uses them.
38:44 Nilay Patel? Hmm.
38:44 Speaker 02 It says there'll be over 100 different slim computers with Kaby Lake chips by the end of the year.
38:49 Nilay Patel? I don't know, man.
38:50 Speaker 02 Spectre, XPS 13, the Swift, Acer Swift 7.
38:53 Nilay Patel? Quad core or dual core? Their reasoning was they couldn't do it. Quad-core? Those are all quad-core? I don't know. You're saying that they- They said they couldn't do it. Apple couldn't put Kaby Lake in the MacBook Pro because there was no quad-core chip for the top configuration. So I bet there's a bunch of dual-core Kaby Lakes out there. It's unclear why they didn't just... I mean, I get it, right? You don't want to have two different architectures floating around. It's unclear why they didn't put dual-core Kaby Lakes in all the mid-spec ones and then wait on the quad-core one. I mean, that's a thing they could have done. They could have released a bunch of dual-core mid-level ones and said, "The Pro one, the top-of-the-line Kaby Lake quad-core coming in X months." Shipping, right? They could have just done that. That would've been nice. Right? It's the chip isn't ready yet, but we're gonna sell this computer.
39:38 Nilay Patel? That would be a kindness.
39:39 Speaker 01 But that would, that would mean trusting Intel not to screw up its latest and greatest processor.
39:45 Nilay Patel? And they've had some problems. Yeah, but then at least Apple, but all these people are freaking out are gonna be pointing at Intel, not at Apple, right?
39:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:52 Nilay Patel? They just, their messaging around all this stuff is confused. So actually, that weirdly enough transitions me into this coffee table book.
40:01 Speaker 01 What's it called?
40:02 Nilay Patel? It's called Designed by Apple and Cupertino. So Apple put out a $300-
40:06 Speaker 01 Or in California.
40:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah, in California. Designed by Apple and Cupertino. We have it. We have the little one. It's two sizes, of course.
40:14 Speaker 01 Of course.
40:14 Nilay Patel? There's hubris and hubris Excel.
40:21 Nilay Patel? So it's, it's a beautiful book. We have it. We have the $300, we have the small one, which is enormous. I promise you, you do not need to buy the bigger one. It's still huge. It's very heavy. It's printed on the nicest paper I've ever seen. Apple, of course, made their own paper. There's an interview with Johnny Ive in Wallpaper Magazine. He's like, "You know that we made our own paper. We developed our own printing thing. It's an eight-
40:44 Speaker 01 Actually, Tyler Pina on our video team made a joke about, of cour- I bet you Apple uses their own paper and I had to like walk over to him and like tell him that his joke was correct, that they had in fact made their own paper.
40:56 Nilay Patel? It uses, you know, most printing is like four color. This uses eight color CMYK. I mean, it is beautiful. Like the pictures of the neon colored Apple products in here, like the super bright iPods. There's a picture of the iPod socks. It's all just, it's so vibrant. The blacks are the blackest blacks I've ever seen. There are virtually no words in this book, except for an intro by Johnny Ive. I forgot about the iPod socks.
41:21 Speaker 01 Is there a picture of the Magic Mouse charging?
41:23 Nilay Patel? Uh, there's not a picture of the Magic Mouse charging. There's all these cool photos. With the pencil? It ain't, the last page is the pencil, which is just a picture of a stylus. Is it plugged in? It's not plugged in. Uh, there's all these cool pictures of like the tools they use to like carve the chamfer on the iPhone and like carve out the ins. It's neat, but I just, Apple, the fact that Apple themselves made it and like not, it's just the most. Oh my, 30 years, whatever. That's fine. They could do it. It's not 30 years. It starts with the iMac. There's nothing before the, the first thing in it is the, the five color iMacs. Not even the Bondi blue iMac.
41:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, which is nuts. Like, how do you not talk about Apple design? How do you talk about Apple design and not talk about the original Mac?
42:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't know. It's very confusing. Maybe that's just been covered some, it just starts with the iMac. It's all Johnny Ive stuff, right? The original iMac. It starts after the original iMac. It starts with the five colors. Oh, not the Bondi? Not the Bondi. I, so I, here's my theory. It is completely unverified. I have no idea if it's true. I think Johnny Ive was like, you know what? Done all I can do. Here's a pencil. I'm, I'm fading out and I want to put out a book of my stuff. I have no idea if that's true. Zero idea if that's true. Well, this is like when you put out a greatest hits, it means you're. Yeah. So James Barham, our great creative director, wrote a post about it and he, his note was, A, he's a photography nerd. And he's like, these are beautiful photos. He loves the printing. You should read it. It's great.
42:48 Nilay Patel? And he pointed out that the excitement he felt looking through those, like the first three quarters of the book. The lamp iMac? The lamp iMac. There's a great picture of the lamp iMac with the wires, like how the hinge works. Like it's neat. He's like, "The excitement I felt in that section of the book started to fade as I came into new Apple products."
43:07 Speaker 02 Because everything's designed now.
43:09 Nilay Patel? Everything's super designed now.
43:10 Speaker 02 Back in the day, I loved his post after you pointed it out. Yeah, when Apple started out, they were raging against the beige box. And there's no beige box to rage against.
43:22 Nilay Patel? Yeah, even gaming PCs are crazy designed. I mean, they look like dragons that will kill you.
43:27 Speaker 02 They're crazy. Let's not say designed.
43:32 Nilay Patel? This is the most user-friendly dragon ever created.
43:35 Speaker 02 I literally, I bought a case for my own PC that I built. And among a shelf that probably had 50 to maybe 100 different desktop cases, I found one minimal one. I bought the minimal one.
43:51 Nilay Patel? Nice.
43:51 Speaker 02 Everything else was crazy.
43:52 Nilay Patel? It's just a weird moment for Apple. I just, I really, this book on top of the MacBook Pro, on top of just a bunch of things they've put out in the world that haven't come to fruition. It just makes it, it's a great book. I get why you put it out now. It's the holidays, if you have an Apple nerd in your life, you feel like spending $300 on the finest custom paper, they'll be happy with you. I get it. But it's just weird that the $300 you should spend at the Apple Store for the biggest Apple nerd in your life is not a technology product. It's a book of old technology products. It's not the, like, so Apple TV.
44:27 Speaker 01 Apple TV.
44:27 Nilay Patel? They put out, here's another transition. They put out the Apple TV. They can't get any of the cable companies to sign on to their guide service.
44:34 Speaker 01 They can't even make their guide service the Apple TV app, the home of the Apple TV.
44:40 Nilay Patel? Right, because no one's signing up for it.
44:41 Speaker 01 Right.
44:42 Nilay Patel? They can't get Netflix to be in it yet. It sounds like they're going to figure out Netflix sooner or later. It's just a product that they released that it hasn't yet come to fruition. And I wouldn't say it's the best-designed or best-working television product, because almost every television product is flawed in some ways. But Apple's product is flawed in the fundamental way of not having that much television. Like, they can't get through it.
45:04 Speaker 01 Well, they've got PlayStation View now.
45:07 Nilay Patel? So that's, they have Sling. So you can watch TV on the Apple TV, but not from one of Apple's TV services.
45:13 Speaker 01 Right.
45:13 Nilay Patel? Right? You can go to someone else's TV service, which is crazy town.
45:17 Speaker 02 Can I make a confession here?
45:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
45:19 Speaker 02 And maybe the police will just come knocking on my door.
45:22 Nilay Patel? I hope they do.
45:23 Speaker 02 I stole live television the other day.
45:26 Nilay Patel? How?
45:26 Speaker 02 Cause I wanted to watch a football game.
45:28 Nilay Patel? Oh, yeah.
45:29 Speaker 02 Seahawks Patriots. I'm a Seahawks fan. I am a Game Pass subscriber. So after the games, I get to watch them, but I don't have an antenna. I don't have cable or anything like that. And I found this thing that it's like, it's great technology. It uses like some torrent style peer to peer technology to live stream something from like Sky Sports rebroadcasting NBC or whatever. Perfect 1080p, great frame rate, like very few glitches. It just worked and it was beautiful. And it's like, oh, that's right. I forgot that the best media experience is always stealing.
46:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's really.
46:05 Speaker 02 Cause then I like, watched all the other games that I cared about this week on Game Pass. And Game Pass is like some weird low resolution. It's like better if you Chromecast it from your phone. Sometimes it doesn't work, but they're like, their browser player is like garbage and blocky and.
46:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
46:21 Speaker 02 It was just, oh, it was just so sad. I was like, man, that time when I was stealing.
46:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah, stealing's great.
46:27 Speaker 02 So nice.
46:28 Nilay Patel? This is a Virgass motto. Stealing's great. No, Dieter and I, Dieter, we're at the end of this, we're gonna have a PS4 Pro because I think Dieter just wants to admonish everyone to buy one, but Dieter and I both have Sunday Ticket subscriptions. The Sunday Ticket is, their app is wildly inconsistent on every platform. I use it. Yeah. I use it over Chromecast because I find that that works best. The Apple TV one, it literally makes it impossible to figure out how to get into full screen. Yeah. Do you know how you get in full screen on the Apple TV Sunday Ticket app?
46:58 Speaker 02 Whisper.
46:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah, you just yell at it. Siri, please. You just beg it. Come on.
47:03 Speaker 02 Come on, Siri.
47:04 Nilay Patel? No, you press the pause button on the remote.
47:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:07 Nilay Patel? Why? Why, why, why? Don't do that. Uh, but then I get a text from Dieter this week. He's like, another reason to buy a PS4 Pro. Sunday Ticket app is the best on the PS4. It's crazy town. Stealing. Let's all go back to stealing.
47:21 Speaker 02 Let's go back to stealing.
47:22 Nilay Patel? Is it? I mean, I'm the lawyer, but I'm just asking, is it legal if I pay for Sunday Ticket and just steal it?
47:27 Speaker 02 I know that's, that's always the vibe. That's the vibe I have. I pay for Game Pass. I deserve it.
47:34 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna read this ad and then we're gonna talk about the Surface Studio, which Tom reviewed, and we should talk about that PS4 Pro stuff.
47:40 Speaker 02 And I've got a weekly segment.
47:41 Nilay Patel? Oh, you got a weekly segment. So I'll do this, that, and then the other thing.
47:46 Nilay Patel? This advertisement, right here. Mm-hmm. A little company called Eero. The single router model just doesn't work for our increasingly high bandwidth world. It's simple physics, like light waves, Wi-Fi waves don't just go through walls well. Imagine asking a light bulb in your living room to light your master bedroom. Just imagine it, Paul. A lot of crazy metaphors in the ads this week. What you need is a distributed system. That's what offices have had for years at considerable work and expense. But with Eero, you can install enterprise-grade Wi-Fi system in your home in just a few minutes. Just download the Eero app on your iOS or Android device. It'll walk you through each step of the process. It's quick, easy, and painless. Current Wi-Fi routers are really tough to manage and optimize. The Eero app lets you manage your network from the palm of your hand, so you know how many devices are connected at any given point, as well as the internet speed that you're getting from your service router. You can also easily create and share a guest network. Eero comes with more memory and power than currently needed to zap Wi-Fi to every corner
48:30 Nilay Patel? of your home, which makes it possible for the company to add features and improve performance over time just by pushing an update from the cloud. These updates come overnight when you're not using your system. Actually, Eero in news, put out Eero 2.0, which is now has true mesh, that's what they're calling it. They've updated their Wi-Fi. Claimed it's twice as fast. Twice as fast, their topology of the thing. There's a new app that lets you manage devices better. It's all, it's all happening. Eero is protected with standard WPA2 encryption, and because it controls hardware and software for your entire network, ensures you're always secure. Traditional routers don't push software updates to their customers, so they're left vulnerable to cyber attacks. Eero updates automatically, so you not only have the latest features, but the latest security at all times. And they've got really great customer support. They've really invested in it. You can get a hold of Wi-Fi experts within 30 seconds. If you have any worries about your other connected devices during setups, one of those
49:15 Nilay Patel? experts can walk you through everything. They can also help you if you're not sure how many Eeros are right for your home. Just call. The answer, I'm sure, is one additional Eero. Sounds right. So I'll just be super transparent. I have Eero at my house. I think it's great. That sounds like you're saying Euro. Euro. I, we, also, my house is in Europe, and we pay for everything in Euros. No, I have three Eros. They're great. I love them. I'd like, it's neat to like, look at the network on my phone. This has been me talking about the Eros that I have. It's weird, we don't usually do this or that, but I own this product and I like it. There you go. You can get free overnight shipping if you visit ero.com and checkout. You select overnight shipping and then enter the code VERGCAST to make that shipping free. That's pretty great. Go to ero.com, buy some Eros, select overnight shipping, enter the code VERGCAST.
49:57 Speaker 02 Tried to update the firmware of my router the other day and you like download a zip file. And then you upload it to your router and then you just pray it doesn't break it.
50:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
50:10 Speaker 01 I mean, that's some like Android ROM shit right there.
50:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was like, it felt like hacking. I didn't, I didn't go through with it.
50:19 Nilay Patel? All right. So let's wrap up on a couple of things.
50:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:20 Nilay Patel? Tom reviewed the Surface Studio and he made an all your base belong to us joke in the headline.
50:25 Speaker 02 Really?
50:26 Nilay Patel? Which really slipped by us there, Tom.
50:28 Speaker 02 Sneaky, sneaky Tom.
50:31 Speaker 01 I don't know if he made it. Okay, fine.
50:34 Nilay Patel? A beautiful invader of Apple's base? Come on.
50:37 Speaker 01 That's not an all your base belong to us.
50:39 Nilay Patel? Hmm.
50:40 Speaker 02 Hmm.
50:41 Nilay Patel? Hmm.
50:42 Speaker 01 He likes it. It's really good. It's wildly expensive, but it, it seems like it's bar none, the best monitor you can get. Uh, it just happens to be attached to a computer that like the MacBook Pro is kind of so so.
50:54 Nilay Patel? Is this just the state of the, the world right now?
50:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
50:58 Nilay Patel? Like all the innovation is in mobile processors that we never use for their full potential. And then everyone is stuck with like middling desktop processors.
51:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, well.
51:06 Nilay Patel? What are you gonna do with that?
51:07 Speaker 02 I've been telling everybody the frigging Moore's law is dead. And people are in denial and they pretend like it's not dead and this thing and this thing and this thing. But yeah, you can make a ton more cores. But software doesn't necessarily use, not all things are parallel or paralle- parallelizable.
51:27 Nilay Patel? That's the Paul Miller story. Not all things are parallel.
51:30 Speaker 01 Parallelable.
51:31 Nilay Patel? Parallelable. It's a great book.
51:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:33 Nilay Patel? That's Paul's progrog.
51:34 Speaker 02 It's a real, it's a real problem. They just can't, I don't know. It's frustrating. I just feel like everybody's in denial.
51:41 Nilay Patel? But he likes it.
51:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:43 Nilay Patel? The dial is a cool thing.
51:44 Speaker 02 Would you?
51:45 Speaker 01 He brought in, he brought in a graphic artist to like try it out with him. And there's like beautiful pictures of Tom that he drew. We've got a great video, an amazing video that you should definitely look at.
51:54 Nilay Patel? Like video team's been on point with these review videos lately.
51:57 Speaker 01 It seems like it's legit fun to use.
51:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. Like phones became rectangles, right? The, remember this show used to be about phone design.
52:05 Speaker 01 Hmm.
52:06 Nilay Patel? Every week we'd be like. Look at this, this phone has flames on the hood, like, it was crazy. And now they're all kind of the same black rectangle.
52:12 Speaker 02 The keyboards were.
52:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but PC innovation's like having a little.
52:16 Speaker 02 Would you, this dial, I can't tell if it would really bother me, like, I feel like, like, I don't even like touchscreens. I feel like it bothers me to put anything on my screen. Obviously, if you're drawing on your screen, you're already kind of interacting with your screen. But would you want to put a dial on your screen?
52:32 Nilay Patel? I don't think it's about putting it on the screen so much as when you put it down, it's your entire work surface.
52:38 Speaker 02 So it's.
52:39 Nilay Patel? So it's just another control on your work surface. And but because it's your work surface is the computer.
52:44 Speaker 02 Like, like.
52:45 Nilay Patel? Can show you contextual information.
52:46 Speaker 02 Think about like that little iTunes modal that'll float over all other things. I guess that's not really a problem anymore. There used to be like.
52:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:54 Speaker 02 Music player apps that would float over everything.
52:57 Nilay Patel? And you would just have like crazy visualizers in the corner of your screen and all that.
53:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
53:00 Nilay Patel? I, I think the idea is that when you put it down, your whole world becomes that surface.
53:05 Speaker 02 Alright.
53:06 Nilay Patel? So it's not like there's a screen and then you've got all these controls. It's, you're down. And so now you've got like a knob to like really turn up the saturation. But like, at Paul, Tom points out, like, there's not a lot of apps that support it yet.
53:19 Speaker 02 Right.
53:19 Nilay Patel? And to get that support, it's the same thing as the touchbar or 3D touch or whatever. It's like they've got a little chicken and egg problem. Not everybody has this thing. So why would you make your app support it? And if you are supporting it.
53:31 Speaker 02 Would you rather have touchbar or surface dial?
53:36 Nilay Patel? Dial, hands down the dial.
53:37 Speaker 02 Dieter?
53:38 Speaker 01 Well, hmm, I mean, I think probably the touchbar because I would just use it more.
53:44 Speaker 02 This is a tough one.
53:45 Nilay Patel? We just broke Dieter. He just went into like Westworld mode.
53:48 Speaker 02 I don't know.
53:49 Speaker 01 No, I got, I've gotten literally six phone calls during this podcast. I'm really popular. I'm gonna have to put my phone on airplane mode in a minute. I would, I want to say the dial is cooler and I'd want the dial, but I also use laptops. And so I like, like, build a dial into a laptop? I don't know. That would be weird.
54:04 Nilay Patel? Can I tell a story about Dieter and I attending a briefing together?
54:08 Speaker 02 Please.
54:09 Nilay Patel? So we go to the MacBook event. We're sitting down with, you know, the Apple executives are showing us the thing after the event. And they're, Dieter's like trying to have a very serious conversation. And I just kept DJing like a maniac with a touchbar.
54:23 Speaker 01 It was infuriating.
54:25 Nilay Patel? I was like, I'm beat matching.
54:28 Nilay Patel? Like, this is great. And the Apple executives, they're like, trying to not be annoyed. Dieter is just openly annoyed. And they keep seeing things like, see how useful it is? And how great it is? And I was like, I'm playing four Justin Bieber songs at the same time.
54:44 Nilay Patel? Like, that's enough. And they're like, the touch bar is super useful.
54:49 Nilay Patel? It's a real moment for us. But so far, that's the only thing I've enjoyed doing on a touch bar. Style, it's style for sure. Who doesn't want a big old knob to like turn?
55:00 Speaker 02 Always wanted a jog wheel on my desk.
55:02 Speaker 01 What are you gonna do with it?
55:03 Nilay Patel? Remember when every Sony product had a jog wheel? That was, that was their only idea.
55:08 Speaker 02 I've got a scrub, Dieter. I've got a scrub.
55:11 Nilay Patel? They're like, a cellphone? What if we put a wheel on that cellphone? I just, I would love to be at the meeting, the Sony meeting, where they're like, every product will have a jog wheel from now on. Fine, it doesn't matter. Whatever it does is fine.
55:23 Speaker 01 I was at a meeting that I, with a tech company that shall not be named, and the executive was making a point. He's like, remember, remember, you know, the, the history of smartphones? You kind of start with the razor. And I literally like stood up. I was like, no, you don't.
55:39 Speaker 01 We need to talk about the Scion. Really matters.
55:45 Speaker 02 A razor's not even a smartphone.
55:46 Speaker 01 I know.
55:52 Speaker 02 Wow.
55:53 Nilay Patel? Paul, you want to do your segment? Every, Paul does a segment.
55:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's called Rally Around the Family.
56:00 Nilay Patel? Tell me that you're about to talk about a pocket full of shelves.
56:03 Speaker 02 No, this is, uh, this bread basket will charge your phone while you overload on carbs.
56:09 Nilay Patel? That's good.
56:09 Speaker 02 It's a, it's a bread basket.
56:11 Nilay Patel? Oh, yeah.
56:12 Speaker 02 It's literally a basket designed for holding bread.
56:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
56:16 Speaker 02 And then below, at the base of the bread basket is a charger. It's like, like USB plugs for charging, charging USB devices. And then my favorite thing about this is that the PR kind of implies that when you plug your phone into the bread basket, it's charging.
56:37 Speaker 02 By the way, this is like a prototype made by
56:39 Nilay Patel? Of course.
56:40 Speaker 02 Sister Schubert.
56:41 Nilay Patel? Why not?
56:41 Speaker 02 Probably not for mass distribution. It kind of implies that when you plug your phone into the breadbasket, that your phone's energy is what's keeping the bread warm. Because the basket also warms the bread.
56:57 Nilay Patel? That's not right. That's not how the energy should flow. Wait, do you put your phone in the basket?
57:02 Speaker 02 It's called the Basket of Warmth. Uses the very electronic devices that create distractions at dinnertime to keep freshly baked
57:10 Nilay Patel? So there's the USB.
57:11 Speaker 02 Sister Schubert's dinner rolls warm.
57:12 Nilay Patel? So there's like a USB shelf and then there's a shelf for the phones to go on?
57:16 Speaker 02 No, the phones just stay on the table.
57:20 Speaker 01 Maybe plugging the phone in turns on the heater. Or maybe it's got, uh, maybe, maybe, maybe the breadbasket is built with discarded Galaxy Note 7 batteries.
57:30 Nilay Patel? See, that's right.
57:31 Speaker 02 There you go.
57:31 Nilay Patel? That's, that was going there.
57:32 Speaker 02 There you go.
57:33 Nilay Patel? By the way, on a plane, uh, this week coming back from, uh, wedding, flight people came on. All Galaxy Note devices are banned from flight. Straight up, all of them, old ones, new ones, future ones, we're done. Yeah, it's over. They're never putting out another Note.
57:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:49 Nilay Patel? All, all Galaxy Note devices.
57:51 Speaker 02 What about the S Note?
57:54 Nilay Patel? Do you want to talk about PS4 Pro and then?
57:56 Speaker 01 We were running so far over. I will just say, I can't believe I didn't buy a PlayStation before now. Uh, but it turns out that 4K and HDR is buggy and it doesn't work with a bunch of TVs and we need to wait for, for more update. But, oh my God, why did I stick around with the Xbox for as long as I did? I was a complete idiot. Remote play is amazing. It even works on my dinky 12 inch MacBook. Keep an eye for those for more issues. If you have a 4K HDR TV for it to get cleaned up and as soon as it does, spend all of your money on a PlayStation 4, because I love it.
58:29 Speaker 02 I'm in.
58:31 Nilay Patel? I'm ready for a full upgrade.
58:33 Speaker 02 That was a weird one, when a score in that review. I don't do a lot of reviews, I'm really insecure about reviewing things. Scoring that review is like, I think it's really great.
58:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
58:42 Speaker 02 But it's weird to give things like big numbers.
58:46 Nilay Patel? Seven.
58:47 Speaker 02 It's like a Sony PlayStation product, it's a regular thing, you could buy it at GameStop, you can't give it like.
58:52 Nilay Patel? Why not?
58:53 Speaker 01 So my Xbox One S can sit in my cabinet with the cabinet door closed and not overheat. PlayStation four, absolutely not. I had to set it behind my TV because it just got way, like, it was going to burn my apartment down. So there's that.
59:07 Nilay Patel? I'm ready. Yeah, there's a story today, Best Buy stock is rallying because all kinds of people are buying home theater stuff again.
59:13 Speaker 02 Oh, really?
59:14 Nilay Patel? I'm ready. I'm ready to throw it all out and start again.
59:16 Speaker 01 Didn't you just buy a TV?
59:18 Speaker 02 Like a big?
59:18 Nilay Patel? Like two years ago. I mean, that for me, that's like.
59:21 Speaker 02 You tweeted like last month that you bought a TV. It was like.
59:25 Nilay Patel? No, no, I bought a garbage TV for like our weekend place.
59:29 Speaker 01 He bought us outside TV.
59:31 Nilay Patel? I bought a TV for outside.
59:33 Speaker 02 You didn't buy a TV, you bought another TV for another home.
59:38 Nilay Patel? Yes. I bought it, I bought.
59:40 Speaker 02 I'm sorry.
59:41 Nilay Patel? No, no, no. That's like, that's like on the side. That's like, I didn't eat dinner, I had a snack. I had a little TV snack.
59:49 Speaker 02 But did you eat yet?
59:51 Nilay Patel? No, I haven't eaten yet. Alright, I had some nuts and some cheese. But I'm about to have, go eat the steakhouse.
59:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know you think you want a TV, but I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna remind you that there's no more plasma TVs and the world is better off for it. And you're gonna be so angry and depressed that I just said that phrase that you're gonna, it'll put you off the whole idea of buying a TV.
1:00:11 Nilay Patel? No, I want an OLED, man. I'm all in. I got a friend with an OLED, I keep on looking at it. I keep on trying to walk out of his house with it, but it's really big.
1:00:19 Speaker 02 OLED is the first like TV demo at Best Buy in years that's been like, whoa.
1:00:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:00:26 Speaker 02 It's like, oh, there's those TVs? And there's those TVs.
1:00:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but what about my garbage curved Samsung, huh? That thing's great. See, that's a little snack TV. What if I like, what if, do I want to try? It's like an amuse-bouche.
1:00:38 Speaker 02 How much is, I don't know.
1:00:39 Nilay Patel? I spent $475.
1:00:41 Speaker 02 I don't care. It doesn't matter.
1:00:42 Nilay Patel? It's, I, it's literally for watching football.
1:00:44 Speaker 02 I agree. I agree. You did a good job.
1:00:46 Nilay Patel? You should come visit.
1:00:47 Speaker 02 I would love to.
1:00:47 Nilay Patel? It has an operating system for some reason, because that's what you want. Every now and again, just prompts you to update it. Unclear what features I'm receiving or why.
1:00:57 Speaker 02 You know, I, I looked.
1:00:58 Nilay Patel? It has a built-in virus scanner. I'm not shitting you.
1:01:01 Speaker 02 Most of these TVs run Linux of some, some form. Some of them run WebOS. There are hardly any TVs that are jailbroken or, you know, like.
1:01:11 Nilay Patel? Right. Cause they all have different, slightly different builds. There's no one TV to target.
1:01:15 Speaker 02 Right. You can't just put an operating system on them.
1:01:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But why? Why? It'd just be a screen, man.
1:01:20 Speaker 02 They're all computers, especially the 4K ones. They've got enough power to upscale 1080P to 4K. Like they're, they're computers.
1:01:26 Nilay Patel? Actually slightly more powerful than MacBook Pro. It's a better GPU than MacBook. Anyway, that's a hard MacBook Pro burn. Anyway, I'm gonna read one more ad. We're gonna get out of here.
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1:02:46 Nilay Patel? That's our show. Does there anything else to talk about? There's so much more, but we're gonna, we're gonna go away. We're gonna go away. Yeah. Oh, we didn't talk about the NES Classic. Paul, do, give me two thoughts about the NES Classic. You can't have one.
1:02:58 Nilay Patel? They did a great job.
1:02:59 Speaker 02 Thought number two that I feel like everybody's forgetting is that NES games are hard and you'll be sad if you try to play them.
1:03:08 Nilay Patel? When I was a kid, I had one of those like 50 in one pirate NES cartridges. Did you ever know about these?
1:03:14 Speaker 02 No.
1:03:14 Nilay Patel? These are great. There's a, there's a street in Chicago. Called Devon. It's where all the Indian shops are, were, and there was a pirate electronics store on Devon Street. So my parents would make me go there to buy like Indian groceries and textiles, whatever parents do. I don't know. I was like eight. And I would go to the pirate electronics store where you could buy the PAL to NTSC converter, VCR and all this crazy stuff. And it was like this thing that I always wanted. It cost like $80. It was like way out of my league. And it was 50 NES games pirated onto a single cartridge.
1:03:47 Speaker 02 I knew there was a lot of like unauthorized cartridges back in the day, but.
1:03:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And so I, after sufficient years of begging, my parents like got me this cartridge.
1:03:56 Speaker 02 You got it?
1:03:57 Nilay Patel? Got it.
1:03:58 Speaker 02 How was it?
1:03:58 Nilay Patel? And I had all the NES games and they were all so hard. I was like, this is garbage. Yeah.
1:04:06 Speaker 02 That's all I could think about when I think of this thing.
1:04:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:04:08 Speaker 01 Man.
1:04:09 Nilay Patel? But it was, it was like the prize.
1:04:10 Speaker 01 I got so mad at Ninja Gaiden, uh, Ninja Gaiden 2, actually. I like broke our entertainment center. I like chucked a Nintendo controller and literally like dented shit all the time. I was a controller chucker. The other Nintendo thing I just have to point out is, um, there's a company making Legend of Zelda Escape the Room, which is basically you and six other people go in a place and then you solve Zelda puzzles in real life.
1:04:35 Nilay Patel? Do you actually like push boulders around?
1:04:36 Speaker 01 Participants work in teams of six to solve a mystery in a huge area all within a time set limit, set time limit.
1:04:41 Speaker 02 Huge area means definitely boulders.
1:04:43 Speaker 01 There's gonna be Gorons, Zoras and Kokiris. This is going to be amazing.
1:04:49 Nilay Patel? Does anyone get to fire a bow and arrow?
1:04:51 Speaker 01 I hope so.
1:04:51 Nilay Patel? Do you have to be good at the flute?
1:04:53 Speaker 01 Dude, I'm getting a hookshot. I'm getting a hookshot and I'm gonna just go flying around that room. Cannot wait.
1:04:59 Nilay Patel? Well, that sounds like a video that we should make.
1:05:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:05:01 Nilay Patel? Noted. Brush up on your flute skills.
1:05:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:05:06 Nilay Patel? Anyhow, that's our show. Thank you for sticking with us. I know it's a crazy one. Follow us. Paul is at FuturePaul on Twitter. I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backlon. You can follow The Verge on Twitter, on Snapchat, Instagram. Instagram, blown up for The Verge. Biggest tech brand on Instagram. Do you know that?
1:05:18 Speaker 02 We are?
1:05:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah, biggest one.
1:05:20 Speaker 02 Good for us.
1:05:21 Nilay Patel? So keep doing that.
1:05:22 Speaker 02 Casey Newton's at Casey Newton.
1:05:24 Nilay Patel? Casey Newton's at Casey Newton. We're gonna have, I'm just buckle up. We're gonna have a lot more about Facebook and policy and all this stuff as this administration comes in. That's where we live. That's who we are. We are, in fact, The Verge. Anyway, also go to iTunes, check out our other podcasts. Ashley Carmen actually hosted What's Tech this week, talking about Snapchat spectacles. It's a fun episode. Brian Bishop was on it. He actually has them. He tried them on. That's also a great video. Brian's really good in that video. I host Control Alt Delete with Walt. We also talked about the MacBook. If you want to get into that this week, it was a pretty fun episode. Lauren Good, who many of you know, hosts Too Embarrassed to Ask on the Recode side. Kara Swisher hosts Recode Decode. And Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media, which is a really fun one this week. It's this music blogger, old-school music blogger named Bob Leftsetz. And our minute 23.
1:06:05 Nilay Patel? Just burns Farhad Manji to the ground, which is a choice. Anyway, that's it. That's our show. Rock and roll. Paul.
1:06:28 Speaker 02 Parallelable.
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