The PS5 Pro made us sit closer to the screen

Nilay and David talk about the election, and how The Vergecast plans to cover and talk about the next four years of the Trump administration. But only for a minute. Then it's onto our reviews of the new Mac Mini and MacBook Pro, which reset Apple's desktop and laptop lineup in an excellent way. After that, Sean Hollister joins the show to discuss his review of the PlayStation 5 Pro, the news about backwards compatibility for the Nintendo Switch successor, and the state of Nintendo's fight against emulators. In the lightning round, we talk about really expensive domain names, oddly named smart home standards, and cloud gaming whales. Which apparently exist. Further reading: Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election What does Trump’s election mean for EVs, Tesla, and Elon Musk? All the Big Tech leaders congratulating Donald Trump Google CEO says company should be ‘trusted source’ in US election Another Trump presidency is literally toxic — his opponents are gearing up for battle Here’s FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr sucking up to Donald Trump by threatening to take NBC off the air Apple Mac Mini M4 review: a tiny wonder Apple MacBook Pro 14 (2024) review: the Pro for everyone Amazon says it’s fixing the Kindle Colorsoft’s yellow screen Kindle Colorsoft owners complain of a yellow bar on the e-reader’s screen PS5 Pro review: how close is your TV? Nintendo’s next generation is off to a great start Nintendo says the Switch successor will be compatible with Switch games Why is Nintendo targeting this YouTuber? Did OpenAI just spend more than $10 million on a URL? The Matter smart home standard gains support for more devices, including heat pumps and solar panels Nvidia to cap game streaming hours on GeForce Now instead of raising fees 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

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• 0:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Rich Cast, the flagship podcast of spending millions of dollars on domain names. It's, we're going to talk about, it's a real thing that happened. It happens every day. You just don't know about it. And that's why this podcast is hard pivoting away from politics towards the buying and selling of domain names. I'm your friend, Neelai. David Pierce is here.

• 1:19David Pierce?

  Hello. You know what I love about that is I genuinely think we have some real, serious competition to be the flagship podcast of the domain buying industry. And this is why I love technology.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  Like, you know, they've got real estate podcasts out there.

• 1:31David Pierce?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  We could, cyber state. Is that a word?

• 1:36David Pierce?

  I wrote a big story a few years ago about like the ongoing primacy of the dot com and got to interview some truly fascinating characters, people who just like bought a bunch of TLDs and just like screwed off to the Caribbean and now make millions of dollars selling domain names. It's the greatest.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  There's, we, Juan, we should do this. We should just pivot to this.

• 1:59David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  So if you want to front our domain arbitrage business.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  You know, that's a lightning round sponsorship opportunity. Two, we are going to talk about a specific domain name later, which is very interesting. And three, the entire dot I O T L D is like vanishing.

• 2:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  Which is like a big story because a bunch of crypto and AI startups have dot I O names. We'll come back to that as well.

• 2:23David Pierce?

  Do you own any silly domains?

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  Um, you know, I went through that period where I had a hover account and that was my form of sports betting.

• 2:32David Pierce?

  Uh huh.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  And now all those, oh, the, the credit cards expired and the domain names went away. And so it goes.

• 2:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, there was a period, I would say of maybe three or four years where every couple of months I would get an email from hover. Being like, your domain name is about to renew. Do you want to renew it? And it would be straight up for a domain I had completely forgotten that I owned. So that's all I had. I had a phase, I would say it was like, it was like a shopping phase. I bought a bunch of domains and now they are slowly winnowing away, but I still own a bunch of them. I bought a domain for Anna to write her, like a thing for her birthday one year. It was one of the coolest thing I ever did. So she just has her own website that is just like a love letter I wrote to my wife one time.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's very sweet.

• 3:14David Pierce?

  Coolest thing I ever did. And now I pay ten bucks a year and I guarantee you she hasn't looked at it in five years. Just wasting money now.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  You had to bring it up like every anniversary. Do you know how, as you get older, you realize like the deep lore of your friends is just that you were jerks. Like if you like, look at it with fresh eyes, like we were just pretty mean to each other. Uh, we, I had a friend.

• 3:33David Pierce?

  That's what men interact, that's what we do.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  Pretty much had a friend, they dated a person, uh, this person, not very bright and thought the word debacle was tobacco. And I owned tobacco.com for a long time. And I couldn't make it a thing because ultimately the core of it was just being mean to someone. You can't be like, I got this great story about tobaccos and you're like, no, you're just a jerk.

• 3:58David Pierce?

  I think we're past the statute of limitations on it though. It's time to, it's time to really turn that into something.

• 4:03Nilay Patel?

  Everyone, everyone is like a long since married.

• 4:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  But I'm just saying, I'm just prefer, I'm, I'm putting around that story, the self-awareness. Yeah, that was just the heart of your friend's lore sometimes is like, oh, you were super rude when you were 25 years old. Uh huh. Yeah, that's how it goes. All right. We got a lot to talk about. There's new Mac Minis. There's PS5 Pros. Uh, there's upgrades to the Matter standards. I got a lightning round unsponsored. We should start with the obvious news in America today. Which is that I think I know when the Jeep Wagon Air S is coming.

• 4:40David Pierce?

  That's exactly where I thought you were going. This is good. I'm glad we're on the same page here today.

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  I've gotten wind that it's December. So if you're in the market for Jeep's first EV, it may or may not be December. No, it's obviously the election. It happened on Tuesday. It's a big deal. Donald Trump won again, if you haven't heard.

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  We're not going to dwell on it too much. We didn't dwell on the fact that I wrote an endorsement of Harris last week. We try to keep politics off of this show. I have a whole other show to rant about politics, so we can do that over there. I will say, you know, we have a big audience. I'm sure some people are very happy. I know a lot of our audience is very upset. We're gonna cover Trump the same way we covered him the first time, which is he's gonna make a bunch of decisions. A lot of them will be tech policy decisions. And this time around, we have a bunch of familiarity with how he approaches tech policy. And so do the big companies, right? The big companies, their CEOs are all writing him congratulatory notes. Jeff Bezos is like, throw me a Blue Origin contract. Um, Tim Cook probably doesn't want 20% tariffs on the iPhone.

• 5:42David Pierce?

  Right.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  Elon Musk wants sideloading to happen on the iPhone. This is a thing that he has said that the App Store review process is censorship. This is a lot of competing tech billionaire stuff in a very transactional way with a character they're familiar with. And it's going to lead us to covering a lot of stories. Just the tariffs alone. Most of our products are not made in the United States. The idea that we can instantly impose tariffs and have that manufacturing move here seems farfetched.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  If you will recall, the last time this man tried to move technology manufacturing to the United States of America, we spent a lot of time pointing out buildings in Wisconsin were empty. Some familiarity.

• 6:21David Pierce?

  How many weeks do you think it's been at this point?

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  Since Google announced a website. One of the first things that happened in Trump one was Congress immediately repealed a rule that imposed privacy regulations on ISPs. And then we made a character, if you will recall, out of a Jeep Pi. I know who the new character it's going to be. It's going to be Brendan Carr. He wants to be the head of the FCC. It's every like, in all likelihood, he will be. We wrote a profile of him in the 2020 election because he very much was advocating for the FCC to be in charge of section 230, which kind of makes no sense. It's all going to happen again.

• 6:53David Pierce?

  Right.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  So we're going to just cover the world as it stands and the people and the characters are doing stuff in that world. Sometimes that will, I think, cross over to the show.

• 7:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  Many times. I care a lot about broadband deployment. I know our audience does too. We talk about the FCC a lot on this show. It's all just going to happen again. And we'll bring it up on the show as it's relevant, but I don't think we're going to make this a show about Donald Trump's tweets. Does that make any sense?

• 7:20David Pierce?

  No. Yeah, I think, I mean, you mentioned kind of what we've learned versus the last time we did this. And I think one big change is we're just clearer on what's real and what isn't. And I think this is true of any political situation that like the question of what someone says and what is real are very rarely the same thing. And I would say it's just that the volume with Trump is so much higher. And so we've, we've learned in ways how to sort of suss out what matters and what doesn't. But I think, like it or not, like I chose not to become a political reporter on purpose. And yet we are at a, at a moment in time where like, I think you could argue that tech

• 8:00David Pierce?

  companies, and in particular, a handful of big tech companies are going to be more central, both to the running of the government itself, but also like what that government is interested in than ever. And I mean, you look at what Elon Musk has been in the Trump campaign already, like these things are intermingled in ways they've never been before. And I think part of what we're going to have to do is both figure out what all of that means and try to cover the ramifications for regular people, right? Because it all, there's so much of it is. Yelling and political nonsense. And like, I think we don't, this show in particular, we try really hard not to care about that. But like, this stuff is going to matter in

• 8:44David Pierce?

  every other thing that we cover in new ways. And I think we have to figure that out.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  I'll just keep giving examples because I think that's a useful way to talk about it. The Google antitrust case where they're paying Apple to be the default, that case started in the first Trump administration, got finished in the Biden administration. I'm sure Apple wants the new Trump DOJ to drop the antitrust case against them. But I'm equally sure that Andreessen Horowitz, which promotes what it calls the little tech agenda, and which spent a bunch of money on Donald Trump, wants that case to be pursued to the finish line because they would love to sideload crypto apps onto the iPhone. There's just a lot there. I have no idea how it's going to shake out. But just to bring it all back around, the fact that there is this week a PalmOS emulator on the iPhone is

• 9:32Nilay Patel?

  the result of government action. Like, there's just a lot of stuff that is true about the products we use and how they work and how they work together that is related to what happens over there. And we just have to keep an eye on it because all of these people are going to start kind of nakedly lobbying the Trump administration. And their interests aren't actually aligned. So there's just a lot of sort of inherent conflict, which will result in stories and then I think ultimately result in changes to the products we all use that we like to talk about on the show.

• 9:59David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 10:00Nilay Patel?

  There's a whole bunch of other stuff and we will bring it up when it's necessary. I'm eager to hear from everyone. We have all gone through this together before. Like, if you want me to just start roasting Foxconn every day, like, I can deliver. I just don't want to scream into the void for four years. So let us know. We got email addresses. We got voicemail lines. We want to yell at me personally. I'll take it. We are here to serve the audience. But we're gonna, we're gonna try to figure this one out and make sure we are constructive as opposed to just being noisy, if that makes any sense.

• 10:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  All right. Hard pivot away from presidential politics.

• 10:34David Pierce?

  Tiny computers.

• 10:35Nilay Patel?

  Tiny computers. Speaking of 20% tariffs, the Mac Mini now costs $5,000.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  But it's made by hand in your bedroom.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  That joke has layers. I'm just putting it out there. That joke has layers.

• 10:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:53David Pierce?

  There's somewhere in North Carolina, I think there either is or is not a factory.

• 10:57Nilay Patel?

  Mark Robinson has been sentenced to manufacturing the Mac Mini in your bed.

• 11:04Nilay Patel?

  All right. All the Macs came out last week. They were announced last week. We have reviews, the M4 Mac Mini, the MacBook Pro 14. We have the base one review. Antonio is reviewing the high-end model. Let's start with the Mac Mini. Chris Walter reviewed it. He's in love. I, as I was reading his review, I had to stop myself from buying a computer I don't need.

• 11:24David Pierce?

  Same. I, I haven't fully stopped myself yet. I still have it in my cart, but I'm not looking at the tab anymore. So I'm considering that a victory. But I would say by the time you're listening to this, there is like an over 90% chance that I have bought this Mac Mini. I mean, they did, it is the thing, right? It is, it is what we hoped it would be. And I think the, the one thing I've been surprised by actually is how much smaller it actually is and, and it seems to like be meaningfully different in terms of like where you can put it and how it fits on your desk and like the little places you can stash it. And for something like this, which is a design to be a computer you mostly never like touch or look at or interact with,

• 12:10David Pierce?

  that does matter, right? I think I still don't know that that is like the most important thing in the universe. I don't think you should upgrade just to get a slightly smaller Mac Mini.

• 12:20David Pierce?

  But also, everything else about it is good. The performance is right. It has a lot of I/O. I've heard a couple of people say they wish the front ports were Thunderbolt instead of just regular USB-C. The back ones are Thunderbolt. But fine, like this thing is $600. And I think in a time when Apple products are, are getting, I would say,

• 12:42David Pierce?

  More expensive at dubious additional value. This one is like a, just an unabashed victory.

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  I think Chris's line is this is easily the best value in the entire Mac lineup now.

• 12:53David Pierce?

  I think that's probably true.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  And the thing that really cements it for me is the base model, the $600 one has 16 gigs of RAM, which has kept me from buying a Mac for quite some time, right? You go, I go into the configurator, I look at eight gigs of RAM in the default. I go add the RAM to get to 16 gigs and then I'm always like, this is so expensive. This is the most expensive RAM in history. I'm not buying this dumb computer and I just have it.

• 13:15David Pierce?

  Which is still true, by the way. Every, every one of the upgrades on all of these new MacBooks and Macs is like lunacy. It's like, I know what these things cost and you're trying to charge me 200 bucks for a little more storage. Like, let's calm down.

• 13:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, we have it. Chris has it in the review. You can buy two base model Mac Minis for a dollar less.

• 13:35David Pierce?

  Than the upgraded one?

• 13:36Nilay Patel?

  Than the upgraded.

• 13:37David Pierce?

  That's so stupid.

• 13:40Nilay Patel?

  Yes, you can buy two base model Mac Minis with 16 gigs of RAM and 256 gig SSDs for the price it costs to upgrade a single Mac Mini to 32 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage. It's actually a dollar less.

• 13:54David Pierce?

  That's just, that's stupid. But again, to your point, the good news is, and I think this is true of both the Mac Mini and the new MacBook Pro, which we should also talk about, is that the base model is excellent. And I think Apple, Apple for years has given you base models that are like almost there, but the, you always kind of want one step up from the base model. Of almost every Apple product, the thing they try to sell you is the one level up. Either it was like the iPad that only had 64 gigs of storage or this one that had eight gigs of RAM, which is a perfectly fine amount of RAM.

• 14:26Nilay Patel?

  No, super wrong.

• 14:26David Pierce?

  But it's not what some people like.

• 14:28Nilay Patel?

  How will you unleash the power of Apple intelligence with only eight gigs of RAM?

• 14:35Nilay Patel?

  My friend.

• 14:36David Pierce?

  Very few things have made me feel more vindicated than everybody getting access to Apple Intelligence. But, but this time, these are the right models for most people. The base model is the one that most people should buy. And I think that's very much to Apple's credit that like it, it just built the computer people should have. And if you just click buy and don't check any other boxes, you're going to get an excellent computer.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And what's also great is a bunch of the outgoing computers like the M2 Airs and M3 Airs are being sold now in 16 gig base configurations for the same price. Which again, I think is because Apple just wants to use Apple Intelligence, but is also proof that that extra eight gigs of RAM did never cost them anything.

• 15:16David Pierce?

  Right. But it is, I actually think, I mean, we for a couple of years, I think, had a long debate about when the M1 came out, right? The M1 MacBook Air, and it was like an obvious giant upgrade from the previous ones. And then the M2 came out and we were kind of like, well, maybe the better buy is actually the M1 Air, which is getting cheaper because the M2 is out. And, and the performance increase isn't necessarily there. And I think that question might be complicated, right? Like, is the, is the increase from the M2 or the M3 to the M4 super meaningful? I think the increase from eight gigs to 16 is meaningful. Again, eight gigs is fine for most people.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Super isn't. The argument, by the way, I know, just to lay it out, I'm aware of the argument that David is too embarrassed to make, that some of you will put in YouTube comments. But the disk is so fast that going to swap doesn't really matter if you have eight gigs of RAM. I know, I'm aware of the argument. Apple executives have looked me in the eye and made the argument, and I'm just telling you that it's still not good.

• 16:19David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, I'm sitting here on an M1 Mac Mini with eight gigs of RAM, and I can tell you that that argument is not true. And yet eight gigs of RAM is basically fine. Just close some tabs, you'll be fine. But anyway, going to 16 as the base. Is is really important. And I actually am like eager to now go get my hands on one of the M2s with 16 gigs a couple of years in and see, because we're going to end up with like, you know, there's the Walmart version of it that is deliberately substantially cheaper and kind of the like entry level MacBook Air. When that thing has like an M2 and 16 gigs of RAM, that is going to be a very, very compelling computer for a lot of people. And I just think like, again, if you want one of these beastly machines

• 17:01David Pierce?

  that's going to last you forever, like, I feel very good about both the air or about both the new Pro and the new Mini. But especially as we get to this 16 gig of RAM baseline, even a couple of generations old is going to start to last a really, really long time.

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I am. Well, first of all, the M1 Air, the Walmart special M1 Air is now down to 649. And it still says built for Apple Intelligence. And I just have to, for as little as Apple Intelligence does, it's not going to go great on that computer.

• 17:31David Pierce?

  No, I would not buy that if you want an AI machine. But given a minute and that thing will be $649 and it will be an M2 and it will have 16 gigs of RAM, right? Like, when we get to there, that gets really exciting.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  Becky has an Intel MacBook Air, like a rose gold one, and it is dying. And I told her today to buy an M3 Air 16 gigs of RAM for just about $1,000. I think it's a little over $1,000. I think this is the best buy in computing right now.

• 17:57David Pierce?

  I think that's right.

• 17:58Nilay Patel?

  You don't need an M4 for the stuff we're doing. And this computer is going to last forever with 16 gigs of RAM. So it's true that of in the sort of MacBook Air zone, picking the chip is sort of not as important as the RAM. And the fact that 16 gigs is becoming more prevalent in all of their spots is really good.

• 18:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Nilay Patel?

  For the Mac Mini, this is like, you just push the button. You don't need like, and this is why I've been so close to buying one all day, because they've reduced the pain of like going into the configurator and adding more money to the base price.

• 18:27David Pierce?

  Genius.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  It also is proof that that x-ray gigs of RAM cost them nothing.

• 18:31David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah, that was always just pure naked money grubbing from Apple. The the one financial question I am dealing with as I go through this is do I spend the extra $200 to get the Touch ID keyboard? Because I'm sitting here, I have a Logitech keyboard that I really like. I have a Logitech mouse that I really like that I will never give up because the Magic Mouse is an awful piece of hardware that no one should use.

• 18:57David Pierce?

  Touch ID is awesome and goes a very long way. And especially if you're never going to turn the thing off because the power button is on the bottom, which did not bother Chris Welch at all.

• 19:07David Pierce?

  It's like the Touch ID thing with the Mac Mini goes a really long way.

• 19:10Nilay Patel?

  Do you have an Apple Watch?

• 19:12David Pierce?

  I do.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  So I unlock my Mac with my Apple Watch. I've never even thought about needing to unlock it with.

• 19:17David Pierce?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 19:19David Pierce?

  I have that set up with my phone, but I actually don't think I have it set up with my Mac.

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I sit down on my iMac at home and I just like hit the button and it unlocks. It's great. And I've never, unless you want to buy stuff on your Mac, but I don't, I don't use Safari in that way.

• 19:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, it's really, it's purely a login thing. All right, this is good. You've solved this for me. I can keep my, I can keep my computer. Thank you.

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we should talk about the MacBook Pro. And it seems, and Tony reviewed this one for us. It does seem like Apple has finally created some differentiation for the base model MacBook Pro. They've added the correct ports. It has more performance than the Air. It's no longer this weird tweener where it was like the base model Pro is just for people who don't want a MacBook Air. Now it's like, oh, this is a meaningfully good computer. And then if you want to go up from there, you can continue to go up from there.

• 20:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, again, it's back, it's back to the thing of like, Apple always wanted you to buy one above the base. And I actually think that was even more true on the Pro than others, which like weirdly they were caught in between. The, the base Pro had a touch bar for like way too long. And finally, it seems like they just sort of scrapped the whole thing and were like, the, the Pro line now makes sense in order all the way up. And again, the, the base now starts at, I think, $15.99.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:34David Pierce?

  Clear upgrade from the Air in terms of price, but also in terms of like what you get performance wise and all that stuff for battery life right now. You've been a Pro guy forever, right? Like I'm, I'm an Air guy and to me, this does not make me want a Pro anymore. And I suspect for you, this is like, this is exactly the Pro that I'm looking for. And I feel like good for Apple for mostly getting that right.

• 20:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's correct. I mean, I'm, I'm a 15 inch, I guess now it's 16 inch laptop person and always have been so.

• 21:03Nilay Patel?

  Again, you know, Becky needed a new computer and I was like, you should just get a new MacBook Air. And it never crossed my mind to say, oh, you should spend a little bit more money on the Pro. Whereas before, that was always kind of like, yeah, it's like, it's a little bit more money. It was like, it started at $13.99 or something right before $12.99.

• 21:17David Pierce?

  I think that's right.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  You get them on sale. And it was like, slightly better. And the screen was a little better. And the performance is basically the same. Like, they really did, I think for one minute, the M1 Pro and the M1 Air, the difference was the Pro had a fan, so it didn't throttle as hard.

• 21:31David Pierce?

  That's right.

• 21:32Nilay Patel?

  And that was the entire performance difference in these computers.

• 21:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  And so they were just like smushed together. And now I think Apple has enough M-series chips in enough configurations and enough display configurations to meaningfully differentiate the products. And so, you know, eventually they'll be, is there an M4 Air? There's not an M4 Air.

• 21:51David Pierce?

  No, I got.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  Right. So, you know, eventually there'll be an M4 Air, but then they'll put an M5 in the Pro. And like, now they just have enough products, like at every level of the computer, to actually pull them apart and create differentiation. And I think that M4 Pro, if you're, you know, a college student who's interested in editing video or like doing photos, like this thing is a meaningful improvement over the air without breaking the bank.

• 22:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  Do you need a nano texture screen? Like, I don't know. But like, but I think it's actually interesting to see Apple, right, I mean, this company is defined by its like mastery of the supply chain. They're using their supply chain mastery to actually create reasonable gaps between their products in a way that I don't think they could quite get to before.

• 22:32David Pierce?

  I agree. And also, it makes the whole lineup easier to explain, right? Like, I feel like on the one hand, you now have the Air and the Mini, which exist kind of on the like, regular person computer side. And then you have the Studio and the Pro as the sort of obvious upgrades. Although, the Mini and the Studio are closer to each other than they should be, but the Studio will get an upgrade and like, You get what they're going for. And then the the Studio and the Pro are like for people who mostly need these for professional reasons, and they have some upgrades that go with it, you know, more ports, more power, like all that stuff. And then the Mac Pro just like exists off on the side. But that, there is now a sort of consumer desktop and a consumer

• 23:16David Pierce?

  laptop and a professional desktop and a professional laptop, has not been the case with Apple's Macs in a very long time. And this, this is like the cleanest this lineup has felt to me in a very long time.

• 23:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then there's the iMac, the desktop for receptionists.

• 23:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, we, we basically don't talk about the iMac anymore. It's like, the iMac is, if you want an iMac, buy an iMac. It's the iPad Mini of Macs.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  Pilots are walking on the planes, the iMacs strapped to their thighs.

• 23:43David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 23:43Nilay Patel?

  I really am gonna take apart my old iMac, make it a display, and then buy a Mac Mini for it. I just need to create the time for, like, no one in my family is like, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna give you a full afternoon to disassemble a 10-year-old computer and turn it into a display.

• 23:58David Pierce?

  I will say, we got, we got a lot of people after, we talked about this, what, last week, uh, saying they have the same problem. There are a lot of people out there sitting with like, functionally useless iMacs that are still big, beautiful displays, that you just kind of stare at it and you're like, why can't I use you? And, uh, so I think if we can solve this for people, uh, this is yet another side business that we're gonna start, where we're just gonna fix computers.

• 24:24Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna call the iFixit folks. We're, we're good friends with them. And we're gonna, we're gonna figure out a way to, to do this as a community. And that means David's gonna drive a van around the country, fixing your iMac, and turning it into a display. It's gonna be great.

• 24:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm into it.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  It's a new sponsorship opportunity. If you thought the lightning round was exclusive, David's iMac Repair Van.

• 24:46David Pierce?

  Sponsor the iMac van.

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be incredible. Last little bit of gadget news. We should talk about the Kindle Color Soft. Yeah, that's it. I mean, that's, that's kind of the whole story.

• 24:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, tough, tough, tough beat for Amazon, which came out with this whole lineup of new Kindles, including the Color Soft, the first Color Kindle. And a bunch of people were like, hey, Amazon, why'd you take so long to do Color? Kobo and Books and others have been doing Color for a while. And Amazon, Poonos Pene came on this show and said, basically, in as many words, because it took us this long to get it right. This is, we, we did it. Everybody else did bad Color and we did good Color. Uh, and then a bunch of people started getting Color Softs. And it turns out they have this weird, like faded yellow band at the bottom. And there are, there are a bunch of reasons I've seen for why this might happen.

• 25:40David Pierce?

  There's, there's some speculation that it's, it's a UI thing that just doesn't fade properly. When you switch out of like the library view into a book, it just doesn't pull that color off the screen. Amazon seems to have, uh, kind of freaked out at this. Like if you look at the Kindle Color Soft page right now, the reviews are really bad. There's a ton of them. People hate this thing. And there have also been a couple of other issues, like it was supposed to ship with a dark mode. And then Amazon just didn't ship it with the dark mode. Uh, that was like a, a feature that was advertised that just doesn't exist on this thing. And they had to delay shipping. Like this thing has actually turned into kind of a mess in a way that for Amazon,

• 26:20David Pierce?

  which has basically like ruthlessly executed on slight improvements to the Kindle for 15 years, is very strange. And it's super weird because I'm sitting here with like the new Paperwhite, which I loved to bits. Like that, that thing is, it's excellent. It is everything you would want like a super simple Kindle to be. And the Color Soft kind of just looks like a swing and a miss.

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I mean, the Paperwhite is an incremental improvement, right? They made the page turn speed a lot faster.

• 26:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  But it's the same product. And this point you're making about Amazon sort of relentlessly improving the same tiny iterations. I think people buy them and they just expect them to work. Like you expect 99.9% similar functionality out of any Kindle.

• 27:06David Pierce?

  A hundred percent.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like I asked Becky, I was like, do you want a new one? And she literally, she looked me dead in the eye. She reads her Kindle every night. She looked me dead in the eye and said, stop buying me Kindles. Because it's the only gadget I can buy. Anything else. And she was like, stop it. Like, I'm good. I will let you know when this one catches fire. And that was the end of that conversation.

• 27:25David Pierce?

  And I think like the that's the the new paperweight is that, but slightly better in a bunch of ways, which is to some extent like it's what Becky and what a lot of people want from a paperweight. Right? Like, go faster when I press the thing to change the pitch.

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  The color soft is the big change.

• 27:40David Pierce?

  It's supposed to be the new thing.

• 27:41Nilay Patel?

  And you have to get that right.

• 27:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, especially if you're going to come out and be like, oh, we we took a long time to do this, but we think we've gotten it right. There have been all these.

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  So you're in our DRM jail, so you will only eat when we feed you.

• 27:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, it's it's a tough look. And I think it's going to be really interesting. There's this new scribe coming out in a few weeks with a bunch of like flashy AI stuff. Like, they they pitched this as the biggest rev to the Kindle line ever.

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Pano's was here. He was like, I set him free.

• 28:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, and if if you're if your big first swing goes like this,

• 28:18David Pierce?

  that is tough.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  Have they said why? Is this like a manufacturing error? Did somebody step on him like?

• 28:24David Pierce?

  They haven't said they've they've essentially just acknowledged that it is a real problem. Our review unit has one Andrew Lashinsky has been using it and has seen the yellow bar. His stance so far seems to be that it is worse in photos than in real life, but it is still very much real and there. And Amazon has acknowledged to lots of people and according to people on Reddit, which take with a grain of salt, Amazon has actually been calling people who have had who have left bad reviews and bought the thing to see what's going on. Like, you get the sense the company is scrambling that this has been such a big problem. But Amazon has acknowledged that this is a real thing and is an issue and that they are trying to fix it.

• 29:04Nilay Patel?

  Is it a hardware issue or a software issue?

• 29:06David Pierce?

  Unclear.

• 29:07Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 29:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a bad look. I mean, right now, I'm just gonna I'm gonna open I'm gonna open the Kindle Color Soft page.

• 29:16David Pierce?

  And I'm just gonna like, so the reviews are truly, truly, truly brutal.

• 29:21David Pierce?

  In a way that like the Kindle is every, everybody is like, it's a Kindle. I like my Kindle. The Color Soft, which I would remind you is $280. Way more expensive, currently at 2.6 stars on Amazon.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it is a hardware problem.

• 29:37David Pierce?

  It is.

• 29:38Nilay Patel?

  We have a quote, "The company is making adjustments so that new devices will not have a yellow band. People who already own a unit can contact Amazon for a refund or replacement." And the statement from an Amazon spokesperson to us, "We take the quality of our products seriously. Customers who notice yellow band can reach out to customer service team for replacement or refund."

• 29:56David Pierce?

  Could be either way. Maybe hardware, maybe, yeah, who knows? But yeah, Amazon claims there's a fix. So we'll see. Right now, you also can only get delivery. I'm seeing delivery for two weeks from now, which is a thing that has started showing up. Amazon seems to have like frozen shipping on this while they try to fix it.

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  I feel so bad for them. They're such a struggling company with so little money.

• 30:16David Pierce?

  I know, it's awful. Hopefully, hopefully they get it together. Real upstart ebook company. Hope they can get it together.

• 30:22Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because this was, this really was the first like revitalized Amazon hardware. Here we go.

• 30:29David Pierce?

  And there was so much enthusiasm for it. Like I, I was actually really surprised at how excited people were about the Color Soft. Because on the one hand, it's not the giant sort of leap in functionality for most people. It's just like now your book covers are in color. But A, for people who like carry these things around and have them sitting on their night table, like that alone is meaningful. But also I heard from a lot of like comic book fans and people who love graphic novels and people who are like, "This actually changes the kind of thing I can do on this device." And again, it's, it's $80 or $90 more than the paperweight. Like it's not a small choice to buy this thing instead of a different Kindle. And it just, I feel for all the people who have just like thought this was the thing they'd been waiting for and it turned out it wasn't.

• 31:12Nilay Patel?

  This is why you gotta stick with the Boogs Palma, man.

• 31:16David Pierce?

  Do you want one? I have a, I have a Palma 2 right here.

• 31:19Nilay Patel?

  What do you think?

• 31:19David Pierce?

  Uh, can I just quickly preview my Palma 2 review for you?

• 31:22Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 31:23David Pierce?

  I picked it up to do some testing and play with it and do some reviews. And an hour later realized I had picked up the original one instead of the second one.

• 31:32Nilay Patel?

  That's perfect.

• 31:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's where we are.

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. Uh, well, I picked up my Boogs Palma 1 and then put it down and then have never picked it up again. So I'm doing great. Uh, all right, we gotta take a break. We'll be back with Sean Hollister talking about the PS5 Pro. We'll be right back.

• 31:49Speaker 01

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• 32:19Speaker 04

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• 33:17Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Sean Hollister is here. Welcome, Sean.

• 33:20Speaker 07

  Hi.

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  It's the voice. The voice of a new generation has returned once again to the Vergecast.

• 33:26Speaker 07

  I'm almost 40.

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  Sean, you're not supposed to admit this. I don't know. This goes on YouTube. You have to say you're 18 years old and you can't read.

• 33:33Speaker 07

  It's good because look at my complexion. It's just fine.

• 33:38Nilay Patel?

  I have a lot of additional YouTube jokes to tell and I'm just not going to tell them. If you sponsor a landing round, I will call you personally and tell you the jokes I was about to tell. They weren't about Sean, they were about YouTube.

• 33:45David Pierce?

  That's the worst argument you've ever made for sponsoring the landing round. No one is going to sponsor it now.

• 33:50Nilay Patel?

  We're going to have more incoming now than we've ever gotten. And we still will not know how to accept the money. We're going to figure it out one day. But it's not today.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  All right, Sean, you're here because you reviewed the PS5 Pro, which the review, the embargo of which was the day after Election Day. So while everyone else is glued to the screens, watching counts go up, Sean, I believe you were just moving back from your television one inch at a time to see when you could stop telling that the PS5 Pro had increased resolution in Bloodborne.

• 34:23Speaker 07

  I want to tell you that you're incorrect, but that was literally exactly what I was doing. I was walking up really close to my TV to see all the glorious pixels and then continually walking backwards until I couldn't see the difference anymore between a four-year-old PlayStation and a brand-new PlayStation.

• 34:40Nilay Patel?

  I love this. This is what we do here. First, tell people what the PS5 Pro is and then explain why you were doing exactly that.

• 34:47Speaker 07

  Okay, the PS5 Pro is Sony's new game console, which is basically a PS5 with more storage, a little more memory, and a substantially faster GPU. The GPU itself, 62% faster by teraflops. You get rendering performance increases of like 45%. So it's not quite enough to take your games from like, "They weren't 4K before," to suddenly they are 4K, except there's also AI upscaling on board, because of course, everything has AI in it now. And so with that, you can theoretically get a best-of-both-worlds experience, where if previously your PS5 game was running at 4K, but only 30 frames per second,

• 35:32Speaker 07

  now you can run it at a smooth 60. Or if your game was previously lower resolution at 60 frames per second, you can now get higher resolution and more detail at the 60 frames per second. And so you put your existing games in this, and if they've been patched to PS5 Pro Enhanced, then all of a sudden, they look better or they run smoother. And that's great, right? It's PS5, but better. It's also $700.

• 35:59Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot of dollars. It does have the little rib on the side.

• 36:03David Pierce?

  It does look nice.

• 36:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 36:04David Pierce?

  It's got like a little racing stripey thing. I'm into that. But wait, Sean, this is the thing I've been trying to figure out about the PS5 Pro. It feels like there could be three different kinds of games for this. One is like game that is not aware of the existence of the PS5 Pro. It's just a game. It's a PS4 game. It's a PS5 game. The other one is like a game that already existed that has been like upgraded in some way to be ready for this. And then there are like theoretically games made with the PS5 Pro in mind. Do all three of those things exist in the PS5 Pro world? Like if I put in a game that just does not care about the PS5 Pro at all, is it going to look better?

• 36:46Speaker 07

  In many cases, it won't look better if it doesn't know that you've got a PS5 Pro in there. But there are so many edge cases here. This is a very difficult review to write. Okay, so we have, let's start off with the with the obvious. Like, are there new games that are only for the PS5 Pro? Will there be exclusive games that only run on this? Probably not. Sony has not said anything to suggest that that will happen. They will probably save those for the PS6 whenever that comes out. And even though theoretically, maybe they'll let those run on a PS5 and a PS5 Pro as well. You could theoretically now have a be in a place where games are like PCs. You get your new PlayStation, they

• 37:29Speaker 07

  look a little better. You play the old PlayStation, they look worse. It's all x86 under the hood now. It's possible. It's all AMD chips under the hood now. It's possible. Has Sony actually done that? Not quite. They would, of course, like you to buy games again and again and buy the updates for those games. So to some degree, it's not happening.

• 37:46David Pierce?

  I mean, there are barely even PS5 only games, right? I mean, I'm looking at the list of PS5 only games, and it is just not that many.

• 37:54Speaker 07

  There aren't PS5 only games, but there are a lot of PS5 only versions of games. So you put the PS5 disc in, like you were getting a different and better experience than the PS4 version. Absolutely. 100%. Like, that is a much bigger difference also than the difference between PS5 and PS5 Pro. Okay, so the second question is, you've got your no exclusives, no exclusives for this. But then you do have games that do not necessarily need the patches. They don't necessarily need to develop or put in the extra legwork to make a game run better because Some PS5 games have an unlocked framerate. Now, most of the time, you're like, a console experience is going to be a smooth 60, or it's going to be a smooth 30 FPS.

• 38:37Speaker 07

  The developers decided we're going to lock it there, so you don't have up and down in terms of the performance. You get a reliable framerate. But because there's so much difference in power between PS4 and PS4 Pro and PS5, and now PS5 Pro, some developers are like, well, no. If we leave our games in this PC-like state, where if you just throw more performance at them, they'll be better. There are a handful of games like that. Digital Foundry tested, you know, Cyberpunk 2077. And it's like, oh, okay, that works. But there's this other wrinkle in here, which is that if you have a TV with a variable refresh rate on it, especially one that can go all the way up to 120 Hz, you put a game

• 39:20Speaker 07

  on this with that unlocked framerate, and now your game that was only running 30 frames per second could run 40 or 47 or something like that. If you play this exact same game on a TV with a locked number of Hz, a locked refresh rate, you're only getting the 30 or the 60. If you can't hit the 60, you're at 30, you know? So we're in that place where if you have the best TV and you have an unlocked framerate game, then you don't need a PS5 Pro enhanced patch to get some excellent enhancements out of it. Most of the time, though, you're going to want these patches.

• 39:56David Pierce?

  Is the market for what you just described 11 people? I don't know. I'm not, I'm not a guy with a variable refresh TV, but like... But that's your fault. That's a personal failing of David Pearson. I don't disagree.

• 40:12Speaker 07

  Nobody should buy this unless they have a 65-inch, variable refresh rate, HDR, probably OLED TV that they sit at least, no more than eight feet away from. You know, they are sitting close to this screen, preferably like five feet. Maybe three, three would be good. I'm sitting in front of a 32-inch 4K monitor. That OLED monitor, it's a beautiful Alienware monitor. And I like the PS5 Pro a lot on this screen.

• 40:46David Pierce?

  So, but that's, that's actually, I think, a good point because you, and you, you make the same point in the review, which is that you basically find yourself using it like a gaming PC. This is not like a plop it in the TV entertainment center, sit back on the couch and game kind of thing. This is like, sit three inches from the screen until your eyes bleed, kind of quality.

• 41:09Speaker 07

  This is the same argument we had about the Steam Deck. I mean, people love the idea of a gaming PC, but they don't want all of that hassle. And the Steam Deck is like, here is so much less hassle, take it with you. It just works for the most part, even though it's running Linux under the hood, these Windows games just work, just start them up. We guarantee that these ones will work. And Valve doesn't always guarantee them properly. PS5 Pro, plug that into your desktop monitor, pick up your DualSense controller, it's amazing controller, and these games just work. And they look beautiful.

• 41:42David Pierce?

  Right. This is why I bring this up, because I think if you look at it that way, you're no longer competing against a much cheaper, almost as good PS5. You're competing against a way more expensive, way more fiddly, way more complicated gaming PC.

• 41:57Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so Sean, you mentioned this in the review. You said this is like, the power of a mid-range gaming PC, right? It's somewhere in there. Is that so much more complicated and expensive?

• 42:06Speaker 07

  A mid-range gaming PC?

• 42:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, you have to run Windows.

• 42:10Speaker 07

  Exactly. That's really it. That's really, that and, and, and ports. I mean, Sony has ported a lot of good games to gaming PCs now. Its various port studios, like Nixies, have done this. And some of them are great, and some of them are really, really not great. I booted up The Last of Us Part 1 on both my PS5 Pro and my gaming PC. And trust me, the gaming PC has more oomph under the hood. The graphics card in there, you're gonna get more framerate, more textures. I proved that out by playing Alan Wake 2. But with Last of Us Part 1, it is not a good port on PC. The little girl's hair in the beginning of the game, it looks like Medusa-like tentacles

• 42:54Speaker 07

  on my PC, because there is some kind of bug. She is also a vampire, apparently, because there is, she has no reflection in any of the mirrors on PC. On the PS5 Pro, the mirrors show the entire world, including her. Also, it took like a minute to load the game fully on, less than that, maybe 30 seconds to load the game on PS5 Pro. I spent 15 minutes compiling the shaders for the game on PC, after which point it still didn't work properly.

• 43:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So is it worth it? I mean, I, look, I have a PS5. I play one game on it. I, I throw interceptions in Madden. I do that for about an hour every night.

• 43:30Speaker 07

  On your Frame TV, which it feels important to say out loud at this moment.

• 43:33Nilay Patel?

  On my, my 77-inch Sony Master Series OLED, which does have VRR.

• 43:37Speaker 07

  Okay, there you go.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no one in my house enjoys when I do this. Uh, there's a lot of swing in TV. But this isn't a game, I doubt they're gonna update Madden. The, the only thing they're gonna update Madden is with like, is more interstitial advertising to buy their weird cards. That's, that's the only updates this game. Is this worth it for me? This, it feels like not at all worth it to me.

• 43:57Speaker 07

  No. No, wait for a PS6.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh, uh, Max plays Astro Bot. My six-year-old plays the hell out of Astro Bot, which is the best game in the world. And the Astro Bot Dual Suns controller is actually delightful because the light around the touchpad glows in different colors when you play the game. The whole thing's a delight.

• 44:14Speaker 07

  We played the hell out of Astro Bot. I did not notice a difference.

• 44:17David Pierce?

  All right. Are there games that you feel like it's worth it? Like, is, is there a game that it's like, if I play this game for hours a day, this upgrade is, is that meaningful all on its own?

• 44:28Speaker 07

  You would have to be an uber fan, and it might need to be something competitive. And this is one place I did, I didn't get to try like Call of Duty on this with like, in, in like intensive multiplayer. I don't even know if there is like a fast refresh mode. But let's imagine for a moment, you have like, imagine Call of Duty, or, or, or really competitive fighting game. Comes out within 120 hertz mode. And all of a sudden, this is like the best way to play outside of a PC because you actually have like lowered latency from the, from your inputs into the thing. Or if they also like, let you use a mouse and keyboard, maybe that's what they need to do. If they take this thing and they're like, it is your gaming PC. Every game you throw it will be better because we are issuing a mandate that every developer

• 45:13Speaker 07

  has to have unlocked framerate and resolution and graphics setting options on all of their games. And we're going to let you plug a mouse and keyboard into it. And it basically is a PC, except it's a really cool and quiet and compact.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  This is like Microsoft's dream of the PC for years. You were describing the world's wildest Surface RT.

• 45:35Speaker 07

  If you're a Final Fantasy VII uber fan and like, all you wanted for your entire existence since 1997, or whenever it was, was to see Final Fantasy VII turn into a, you come to life around you. This still isn't that because it's not VR, but um, but it's, it looks better than PS5 for that. It's pretty muddy on PS5 and in the 60 hertz mode.

• 45:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I do like the idea that this is a weird incursion into gaming PC world. It makes it make more sense to me. Whereas when there was a PS4 and the PS4 Pro came out a little bit later, there was just some like obvious reasons that I would want my, I would want to upgrade my console at that time. Cause that's what got you 4K back then.

• 46:18Speaker 07

  Did you upgrade, David?

• 46:20David Pierce?

  I only got a PS4 Pro. Uh, I still have a PS4 Pro. I bought that just because it was like, there was like a Black Friday sale, so I ended up with it. Uh, but again, I, I played that on a 1080p computer monitor for a very long time.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  Do you have eyes?

• 46:35David Pierce?

  I say these things primarily just to piss off Eli. This is, it's great.

• 46:39Speaker 07

  So I asked because all, this means all of us are PS4 Pro owners. All of us bought into this last gen, when, when the pitch was like, now you get HDR and now you get like 4K, which is like.

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  But it was like fake 4K.

• 46:53Speaker 07

  Contrived checkerboard rendering, but like.

• 46:56Speaker 07

  But the thing about, the thing about that, you have to be a certain feet, amount of, number of feet away from your PS5 to like not see the difference. You have to be within eight feet to see, like really see the difference with PS5 Pro. That worked in the favor of the PS4 Pro. Because at the distance you were away from the screen, you could tell that it was 4K, but you could not tell that it was contrived checkerboard rendering. At least I couldn't. Maybe you could, Neil.

• 47:21Nilay Patel?

  I could not. But I, but I, you, this is not my, as everyone knows, evaluating video games is not the thing that I do because I play two of them. And I'm horrible at one of them. So, like, it's, don't take my word for it. But yeah, I agree with you broadly that the PS4 Pro made sense to me because it got me the two features I wanted to use on my TV.

• 47:43Speaker 07

  Right.

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? I want all the lights on my TV to be lit up, as everyone knows. And so it got me the 4K and it got me the HDR and that was great. This one is like, I don't know, whatever, it's more pixels. Like, I always play in higher resolution mode versus higher performance mode. Because I, that's the trade-off I'm willing to make, and I'm not willing to make this trade-off. The idea that the PS5 Pro is actually meant to go up against a mid-range gaming PC and be simpler and faster and have a better library of more optimized games, kind of like, kind of recontextualizes the whole product.

• 48:14David Pierce?

  I agree. And makes it way more, like, $700 seems a lot less wildly expensive.

• 48:21Nilay Patel?

  Is that how Sony is talking about it?

• 48:24Speaker 07

  No, absolutely not.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe they should start. All right, so that's PS5 Pro. Anything we missed, Sean? Anything that like stood out to you apart from that? How's the weird detachable disk drive thing?

• 48:36Speaker 07

  The detachable, okay, so it doesn't, it does not come with a disk drive, which is like, how do you call it the Pro when it doesn't have this feature? How do you, how do you release this console to an audience of nitpickers who are going to care about those graphics and that frame rate? But you think they magically don't care about, about physical media? Like, people care about physical media if they're nitpickers. And so I did have to special order the disk drive and put it on this thing. It was so easy.

• 49:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're hard to find, right? The disk drives are not easy to get your hands on.

• 49:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, I went, I looked at GameStop, I looked Best Buy, I looked at Sony's site, I looked a bunch of places. Eventually found one at Walmart. Not a close Walmart, but I did, I did order it. It got to me next day. So, good, good for you, Walmart. And I guess I'll scalp it now. No, I'm not going to scalp it.

• 49:23David Pierce?

  You probably could.

• 49:25Speaker 07

  I really could. They are hotly in demand. Sony did not make enough of these things. But, but yeah, it clips on really easily. Once it's on there, it looks like an original PS5. And it's, and it's smaller, you know, it's, it's, and it's, and it's fairly quiet and not that warm. Like I'm using, it's under the desk right now. I'm using it as a foot warmer while we do this. It's, it's currently ray tracing, having wake two. And it's, it's enough to warm up my feet a little bit, but it's not, they're not super toasty. And I would say it's.

• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  This is how we're measuring heat and thermals on every product from now on. Like, did it make my feet super toasty? Under the desk. It's very good.

• 50:11Speaker 07

  It's quieter than the original Steve Deck was. The original Steve Deck had a really noisy fan. This is quieter than that.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  Have they added Dolby Vision to the PS5 yet? If you want to play Blu-rays on it? I don't think they have. All this extra processing power, and I just want Dolby Vision support. And then I would buy a new PS5 Pro with this disk drive and I would use it as Blu-ray player.

• 50:30Speaker 07

  I bought the Samsung OLED TV this time, so I don't have Dolby Vision either way.

• 50:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 50:35Speaker 07

  Sorry.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  Can everyone just check in with me? Just send me a note and I will help you out. I'm doing my best out here.

• 50:42David Pierce?

  Neil, I have a 42 inch P series TCL I'm looking at. Can you give me a once over?

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  I walked into a new neighbor's house the other day and he showed me the TV above the mantle and he goes, it's, it's not, it's like a different kind of frame TV. And I was like, I have to get out of this house. Cause he hadn't bought it. Cause there's a bunch of competitors of frame TV now. And I was like, I gotta go. I gotta get out of here. I don't know you well enough to react to what you just said to me. The way that I want to. And I don't have control over my emotions, so I have to just leave.

• 51:17David Pierce?

  That's good.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  Uh, other gaming news, it seems like everyone keeps expecting Nintendo to actually announce what should be called the Super Nintendo Switch hint, but instead they've announced an alarm clock. And then I believe it was on election night, announced that the forthcoming Switch successor would be backwards compatible.

• 51:36David Pierce?

  Well, no, you, you forgot one.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  I forgot.

• 51:38David Pierce?

  There was also the music app, which was, there was like 24 hours of excitement of people being like, oh my God, I keep hearing there's a Nintendo thing happening. This is going to be it. This is it. This is it. I am in Slack with Andrew Webster being like, we have to have a plan. This is the biggest thing. And then they announced the music app.

• 51:54Speaker 07

  Some guy was like, I had this leak that it was going to be the Switch the next morning. And Andrew Webster, he was like, my heart can't take it. He, our game's entered. He was so ready to write about the Switch 2. And then the next morning, the leak guy was like, I just got used by Nintendo so hard.

• 52:10David Pierce?

  It is my favorite. I have come all the way around. I hope Nintendo does this for five more years. Just don't, don't ever launch the new Switch. Just keep doing silly stuff. There was also a museum launch in there somewhere. Andrew got an invite to go to Japan and it was about a museum and not the Switch 2. Like, it's so funny. This is the best.

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they know that everyone's expecting the Switch 2? So every other team at Nintendo is like, let's do our announcement first.

• 52:32David Pierce?

  They have to, they have to know. And this is now the funniest bit from a tech company in a very long time. And I love it so much. But this week we got actual Switch news. Not the Switch news we were expecting, but actual real Switch news.

• 52:46Nilay Patel?

  But it was, and this wasn't an announcement, right? This is like, this was like in a briefing, like buried information.

• 52:52Speaker 07

  I think it was like a financial briefing and then, and then Nintendo was like, I guess nobody noticed. So we'll, we'll tweet it now. And they did.

• 53:01David Pierce?

  On election night, in the middle, literally I'm sitting on my couch, talking to people during election night. We're, we're tracking the returns as they come in and somebody just drops this tweet in Slack and is like, did they just announce backwards compatibility for Switch games?

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  Right. Can I read you this tweet? As Rich Cast listeners know, I like explaining how the journalism sausage is made. And this one is particularly good because at 8:26 PM, it's November 5th. The Nintendo account just tweeted, "This is Furukawa", which is the president of Nintendo, Shantoro Furukawa. But it just says, "This is Furukawa", no other names.

• 53:39David Pierce?

  I'm gonna start all my tweets like that from now on.

• 53:41Nilay Patel?

  Does it not say, "I am the president of Nintendo"? It just says, "This is Furukawa."

• 53:45David Pierce?

  Very good. You know who it is.

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  What time is it?

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  At today's corporate management policy briefing, we announced that Nintendo Switch software will be playable on the successor Nintendo Switch. What is the corporate management policy briefing? They had it offsite. That's, that's what I'm taking away from this. They had it offsite and they distributed some pamphlets and they're like, "Shit, this is gonna leak. Furukawa, get on the horn."

• 54:09David Pierce?

  It's either that or like an internal company newsletter that like only goes to the accounting department. And they were like, "Ah, I hit all staff instead of accounting. Like, I guess we'll just share this with everybody now."

• 54:20Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. I, from now on, am signing every tweet from the Verge accounts as "This is Patel."

• 54:29Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 54:30David Pierce?

  It is good. But wait, Sean, if I, if I understand the news correctly, basically what they announced is that whatever is coming after the Switch will be able to play Switch games, which is a big and somewhat unusual deal for Nintendo. Does that, do I basically have that right?

• 54:46Speaker 07

  Let's talk about the impact of this remote. So this could be one of two things. Let's go, let's go optimistic first. The Nintendo Switch, the original 2017 Nintendo Switch, launched with like 12 games, all of which were basically like Zelda and everything else. We had a headline on The Verge, "The Nintendo Switch launch games lineup is disappointing and needlessly confusing." That is where the Switch began before it became the juggernaut that it is today, which has one of the biggest libraries of any console ever released. It is amazing. And so the Switch 2, having that lineup on day one, would be phenomenal. The thing is, we don't know if this means it will have a cartridge slot or not.

• 55:31Speaker 07

  So if it doesn't take the Switch cartridges, then you're gonna have to own these games digitally or buy them again, or whatever you have to do there. And now we're back in the PS5 Pro, why don't they think we like physical media space? I don't know which it is. They didn't say.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I'm at, I buy the games digitally because I'm lazy. Right? Like, Astro Bot is available. I'm just gonna download it.

• 55:59Speaker 07

  I've started doing that.

• 56:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, see?

• 56:02Speaker 07

  At Luigi's Mansion, I got Echoes of Wisdom digitally, but I have so many cartridges.

• 56:07Nilay Patel?

  The Bluey game is on the Switch at our house because no one was letting me drive to the store. It was like, here and now, we're doing this, right? So I, I, I think more regular consumers have these like hybrid libraries. And I think it's important for them to say, like, you just keep using this library. Because once it's digital, it's just there, right? I mean, there's a million, and don't get me wrong, there's a million other problems with this, including preservation and emulation, which we will talk about in a second. But I think from just a pure convenience, or your library will be here with your new Switch. I think it's starting to become an expectation, just like apps on an iPhone are expectation. Like, I bought all this stuff, I'm gonna get the new device, it's just gonna be here.

• 56:46Speaker 07

  I want that so much, and I want it to be portable and preservable and... It's nice, you know, it's nice when you fire up your PS5 Pro and you're like, all these PS5 games are there. And all your PS4 games that you bought in your digital library. But it's what's extra nice, when you can take all those discs that are on your shelf and also stick them in there. Why not both? Hopefully both.

• 57:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's Nintendo, they're gonna do some weird stuff. That's, you know it's true, no matter what here, the Switch.

• 57:12David Pierce?

  Historically speaking, Nintendo has kind of gone on both sides of this, right? Like, if I remember right, the Wii U played most, or at least some Wii games. But then, like, you're talking about complete break to the Switch. Like, yeah, just, and like, you know, you go all the way back and like, the N64 was very much its own thing. It's not like those giant ass cartridges went on to the next thing. So I guess it would be hard to, uh, put odds against what it seems like Nintendo might actually do here.

• 57:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, like, the, the portables, it's been pretty good in the portable space. Like, if you bought a Nintendo DS Lite, you could play DS games on that. You could also play Game Boy Advance games on that, which was basically an entirely different system. You couldn't put original Game Boy cartridges in there, or Game Boy Color cartridges. But you go back a generation before that, the Game Boy Advance, you could put Game Boy Advance games, Game Boy Color games, original Game Boy games into that, they would all work. You go up to the DSI, all of a sudden you've got just DSI and DS, you don't get Game Boy anymore. So they kind of like, they try to do like one to two generations usually of backwards combat. And then occasionally, like you said with this N64, they're just, we're done. But even like the GameCube, you could stick a Game Boy player onto the bottom of that and stick your cartridges in.

• 58:26Speaker 07

  So maybe there'll be some offbeat solution.

• 58:28David Pierce?

  That's the most Nintendo possible outcome here, where they're like, well, here's the thing, but we'll also sell you this weird arm attachment that lets you play all of your other games. It's made of cardboard.

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  Did you ever have the Nintendo robot for the Nest? This just made me think about the original Nintendo robot.

• 58:42Speaker 07

  No.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  They made a robot and it pushed the buttons on the, it was, you should go look it up. It was, yeah, it was ridiculous. And I wanted ones, I wanted one so bad and I finally got one and it was so disappointing. Like so deeply disappointing.

• 58:56Speaker 07

  Shocked.

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we are talking about emulation, we're talking about all this stuff, Sean, we should end by talking about your story. You wrote about Nintendo going after YouTubers who are streaming games, talking about game preservation. There's a lot of action in this front lately and that's all right next to, I don't know, companies like Ambernic, which are just selling hardware emulators free and clear on Amazon with apparently no repercussions. Talk about this story and then let's talk about that bigger picture. What is going on with Nintendo on YouTube right now?

• 59:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, so Nintendo and I've written one story, but there's, there's more in the works, I think. Nintendo seems to have decided it wants to make an example out of one particular YouTuber. And it may be targeting others as well, though we think there may be a copyright troll on the loose. And that's what a future story is going to get into. But this, this one guy is named Russ Crandall. He runs a YouTube channel called Retro Game Core. And the weird thing about Nintendo targeting him is that he is known for advocating against piracy. He shows up all kinds of like genuine Switch cartridges in his videos to show you that he's not just like.

• 1:00:09Speaker 07

  Ripping games off the internet, although maybe he does some of that on the side. But he wants you to know that you can do this somewhat legally, or so he says, by making your own backups of your games, putting them on to flashcards if you want to, and then taking around your entire library of Switch games with you that you have on genuine cartridges. This is possible now through a particular device that Nintendo really does not want the world to know about. And so in a, in a new example of the Streisand effect, they decided to target this guy. He is not somebody you would necessarily want to target if you're Nintendo, though,

• 1:00:49Speaker 07

  because he's a very interesting and likeable person, I would say, who has, who has an audience that understands him as an educator, who like teaches them how to use things rather than boasting about how he pirates stuff. He also happens to be a New York Times bestselling cookbook author, a 22 veteran of the US Navy, and all kinds of other things that you can read about in my whole story.

• 1:01:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a good story, but I, it does seem like if you're Nintendo and you want to go like full scorched earth on this kind of thing on the internet, like you can, you can use copyright to pick that fight. But that doesn't seem like what Nintendo is doing here. It has instead picked a small series of very specific fights with a couple of emulators and now with this one YouTuber. It's not like the stories we've heard over the years about, you know, companies that just go and issue mass copyright strikes for everyone using footage of any of their stuff, which is a thing that has happened a few times on YouTube over the years. That's not what Nintendo is doing here.

• 1:01:58David Pierce?

  And it, and I, it's hard for me to figure out what it is doing.

• 1:02:01Speaker 07

  I want to say that the common theme here is Nintendo is just ridiculously less tolerant of people cutting into its current gen console profits. You want to talk about old games, you want to talk about, you know, you want, you want to play, show off emulators with Game Boy games, or SNES games, or N64 games. You want to build emulators for those things. Nintendo's generally going to leave you alone. But once it started, once we started seeing not only Nintendo Switch emulators and Nintendo Switch games all over YouTube playing on Nintendo Switch emulators, but the very latest games, the Zelda that's going to come out this week, or just has come out this week.

• 1:02:44Speaker 07

  Here it is, running in, you know, at a high resolution on a PC. Look how much better it looks than it looks on the actual Switch hardware. Hmm, maybe you should be playing it here on a PC instead, or maybe you should take your whole library of Switch games and play them on a Steam Deck, which is not only looks better than it does on the Switch, but is portable, like a Nintendo Switch. Is the Steam Deck better than a Nintendo Switch? Wouldn't want people to walk away with that idea in their heads. This is where Nintendo started stepping in. And so we saw a while back, before, before, before it fought against Yuzu and Rio Jinx, the two big Switch emulators, before it did that, there was a while, I want to say maybe

• 1:03:26Speaker 07

  about a year ago, where a bunch of folks showing off Switch games on Steam Deck started getting little notices from Nintendo that maybe they might not want to do that. And some of the, some of the folks who were, you know, the, the YouTubers who were more, wanted to stay on Nintendo's good grace, it just went ahead and voluntarily started making some of those disappear. But they told other creators in their sphere, hmm, Nintendo did this thing to me. And word got around that this was happening. I think Linus Tech Tips did a video at one point where they were like, we're going to call out this trend, and here we're gonna, we're gonna blur out all of our footage of Switch games. We're gonna be like, hey, look, you know, look what we can do Nintendo, you're not gonna go after us, right? And I don't think they did.

• 1:04:09Speaker 07

  But after that kept on apace on YouTube, and we kept seeing more and more, here's how you emulate your Switch games on Steam Deck, Nintendo went after the emulators, the software that's making all of that possible. And Yuzu was the biggest emulator. And there were whispers in the community that they were testing their emulator on games that had leaked out early, games that were not even out yet. A new Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. Allegedly, they had it and were making sure the game was ready for it before it launched at retail. And so that, regardless of whether Nintendo could pin that on them or not,

• 1:04:54Speaker 07

  seems to have inflamed Nintendo's fury to go after them legally. And so Yuzu went down, Reujinx went down. There are lots of forks of these emulators floating about the internet, but they are more in the dark regions of the space now. They've slunk back into the shadows for the most part. They're trying to keep a way lower profile.

• 1:05:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's funny, one of, you know, a Verge trope, a thing the Verge believes is that copyright law is the only law on the internet, especially when you have a platform, because it's the one law everyone agrees can restrict speech. And so you've got a process on YouTube where a big company can just say, like, "Remove this speech." And you can fight it. It sounds like from your story, Crandall Retro Games is gonna go fight it, but it's expensive and hard.

• 1:05:47Speaker 07

  Actually, I think he's not. I don't think he's gonna fight it.

• 1:05:51Nilay Patel?

  He's not going to?

• 1:05:52Speaker 07

  Yeah. We started out, in my story, I say that he's waffling. And as of my last communication with him, he was waffling. But I rewrote this draft a few different times. Originally, when I spoke to him, he said he was 75% likely to fight this. He talked to lawyers, like, "Yeah, I've got a fair use case." I don't think he wanted to go to court over it, but he can at least submit the counter notice to the DMCA takedown, which lets YouTube off the hook and then puts the spotlight on him. And then wait and see if Nintendo sends him a cease and desist or goes ahead with a lawsuit. He was in that place where he was like, "Maybe I'll try my luck, 75% likely."

• 1:06:36Speaker 07

  I was talking to him later and he was like, "Well, maybe it's 50/50."

• 1:06:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's expensive and complicated.

• 1:06:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? And you gotta be buttoned up. I mean, this is a thing we talk about with independent creators all the time. Go be successful, but then there's a whole universe of infrastructure that you don't have because you don't have like a media company. Like, we have lawyers, like, we get letters like this all day long. And I'm just like, cool, our lawyers will see you now. And then our lawyer's like, Howard, do you want to fight? I'm like, fight all the way. Because, you know, you get to say that sometimes. And that's fine, right? Like, that's the infrastructure of having a big company around and like having a reputation and like, a lot of the lawyers on the other side are repeat players. So now everybody has relationships. Solo creators on platforms are just sort of at the mercy of whoever wants to go after them, including Nintendo.

• 1:07:26Nilay Patel?

  And then they have to make big, meaningful decisions about whether they want to like, fight for emulation software being displayed on screen as fair use. Like, this is very confusing.

• 1:07:36David Pierce?

  Well, and this is what the emulators themselves have gone through too. The question of like,

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40David Pierce?

  even if we think we're right and we would win at the end, can we literally afford the fight? And I think the bet a lot of companies make, not just Nintendo, but one of the bets it seems like Nintendo is making, and has been right so far, is that the emulators are going to decide they can't afford the fight.

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:07:58Speaker 07

  I talked to a lot of emulator developers for a previous story about what happened to Yuzu and what was happening to View Chinks. And every one of them told me, no, I would have to roll over if Nintendo came after me because there's no way in hell I'd have the resources to fight anything.

• 1:08:15Nilay Patel?

  Or, and honestly, litigation is exhausting. Right? Like Nintendo's gonna, you, you're fine, I'm gonna fight, I'm gonna spend the money, I'm gonna hire the lawyers. Nintendo's gonna come after you and say, give me every piece of email that has ever mentioned anyone involved in the development of this emulator. Show me your, all of your history, your DMs on GitHub, like, whatever it is, like, I don't know if GitHub has DMs, but you understand, like, show me, like, involve all of these other people. Because these are almost all volunteer projects in one way or another with lots of different contributors. And it's like, oh, this is gonna be exhausting and not everyone's gonna play ball and it's all like, Yeah, I feel for these communities when they come up against this stuff, but it's also just very true that the only mechanism we have in the United States to

• 1:09:00Nilay Patel?

  to handle anything is copyright law and copyright law is like the bluntest instrument. And YouTube's approach to copyright strikes, like you get three and you're dead. That's it.

• 1:09:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think a lot of people need to know, like a lot of people don't know, Nintendo does not serve you with a copyright strike. The copyright strike is a YouTube platform feature where YouTube can make it easier on themselves so that they don't have to face down any lawsuits from Nintendo. They can say, hey, creators, we're going to make this three strikes and you're out rule so that you police yourselves. That way, we don't need to get involved very often. We'll automate it as much as we can. Come to us if there's a problem and maybe we'll reach out to Nintendo on your behalf, like they did in this case. YouTube did reach out to Nintendo, according to, according to Russ Grandle, and to see

• 1:09:56Speaker 07

  if they would pull their strike willingly, once they knew who Russ was and what kind, what Russ stood for. And Nintendo was like, no, we're not gonna, we're not gonna pull.

• 1:10:05Nilay Patel?

  That sounds right. By the way, that entire system is called Notice and Takedown. It's in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and every platform has it. YouTube just has one expression of it and YouTubers running into that stuff, when they make the video about it is like when they, when they get their wings. Right? More people are familiar with copyright law because if YouTubers complaining about copyright law, then like know the speed limits in their own towns. And this is all just a thing. Anyhow, it's fascinating. Sean, you're gonna be writing about this more because it feels like emulation is a real crossroads.

• 1:10:35Speaker 07

  It really is. While I cannot personally write about the Apple aspect of it, it is fascinating, utterly fascinating, that this was the year that, that Apple said, hey, you can go ahead and put retro game emulators on our iPhone platform. We're going to explicitly carve out something in our App Store rules for that. Despite the fact that as far as most of the lawyers are telling me are concerned,

• 1:11:04Speaker 07

  putting games, your own retro games onto an iPhone is probably not technically legal.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, that sounds like a long story that we should publish and we should come back and talk about. Let's take a break. We'll come back with Lightning Round. We'll be right back.

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• 1:12:49Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. The lightning round, unsponsored, although there might be some news on this front.

• 1:12:56Nilay Patel?

  You can sponsor David's mobile repair van. David will come to your house and take any iMac you have and turn it into a monitor.

• 1:13:03David Pierce?

  David's iMac mobile is still very much up for sponsorship.

• 1:13:08Nilay Patel?

  Have you seen the little board? I think Wes Davis wrote about it. There's a little board that lets you turn the Sunflower iMac G4 into a monitor. And he has, he did it to his like 20 year old iMac G4. And I immediately went on eBay and looked at 20 inch iMac G4s, which are 20 years old. And they are so expensive.

• 1:13:25David Pierce?

  Really?

• 1:13:26Nilay Patel?

  They're crazy expensive.

• 1:13:27David Pierce?

  I mean, they're just like beautiful furniture. They're, they're, they're one of the only gadgets that old that I would happily just like put up on that mantle behind me.

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I think you gotta, we'll link Wes's right up. And he was like, why did I do this? Cause it looks awesome.

• 1:13:43David Pierce?

  It's good enough.

• 1:13:43Nilay Patel?

  It's just an honor. It's great. All right. Lightning round. We promised some hot domain name chat. David, what you got?

• 1:13:51David Pierce?

  I'm so excited about this. So, uh, the other day, this week, Sam Altman just tweets chat.com. You click on it and it goes to chat GPT. Uh, it turns out there is a whole fascinating story behind the fact that if you go to chat.com, it leads you to chat GPT. And the, the story in a nutshell is, uh, Dharmesh Shah, who is the CTO of HubSpot, bought chat.com for $15 million, 15 and a half million dollars, like last year. And then two months later, sold it for, we don't know exactly how much, but he said a profit and enough of a profit that he was able to give $250,000 of profit away.

• 1:14:34David Pierce?

  Do with that what you will. My guess is it was substantially higher than 15 and a half million dollars. I cannot prove that, but based on what I know about domains and the fact that chat.com would be, uh, very highly in demand to a large number of people. I suspect that was very expensive and that he made a tidy sum of money in two months on his 15 and a half million dollar domain name purchase. Anyway, it is now the domain name, uh, that leads you to chat GPT. Just to clear up a thing that has gotten very confusing on the internet, chat GPT, not rebranded, still called chat GPT. Still a thing a lot of people know. I still hate the fact that GPT is like a term that has entered the

• 1:15:17David Pierce?

  public lexicon that we all just say now. Hate that, but it's still called chat GPT. But chat.com now goes there. And I think that is going to be the kind of product domain for that thing going forward. Which is fascinating in a bunch of different directions. It says something about how important websites still are in the world. It says something about how important dot com domains still are in the world. It says something about why OpenAI raised six and a half billion dollars because domain names are expensive. Like, it's just, there's just a lot going on in this one purchase. But, uh, this all happened about a year ago and it just rolled out this week. And, uh, I think is, is now going to be one of the bigger domain names for a pretty long time.

• 1:16:02Nilay Patel?

  It does seem like Dharmesh also got shares of OpenAI, which is fascinating because this is not a public company, but it's about to become a for-profit public company. There's a lot here. You should read that. He put up a tweet being like, it's everything. Here's the whole thing. And then there's a long prompt for ChatGPT that helps you. He's like, it's a prompt that GPT-01 does a really good job of reasoning through. And that ends with, how much do you think he sold the chat.com domain for? What percent of that was in shares of OpenAI, providing an approximate range and show reasoning? But he doesn't show the answer. So it can just hallucinate whatever you want.

• 1:16:38Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  So, I mean, that's wild all the way around. It's not like ChatGPT, the most successful consumer product in a long time, was struggling for brand recognition. It is also now baked into iPhones or will soon be baked into iPhones. So the idea that they need a domain name is just like pure vanity, it feels like. Like, they have the distribution that they want. But it does seem like as they go towards being this new kind of for-profit company, that they're gonna, they're just gonna become more consumer-friendly in a variety of different ways.

• 1:17:12David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, I've been saying this on the show for a while now, but I think the thing that is happening right now is that OpenAI is being lapped as a product organization by a lot of other folks. Like, Apple is building better products around ChatGPT right now than OpenAI.

• 1:17:28Nilay Patel?

  Let's not. You sound drunk.

• 1:17:30David Pierce?

  That's what I'm, that is the lowest bar in history, and it's still the case. Like, this is, this is where we are.

• 1:17:37Nilay Patel?

  Give me one example of Apple building a better product around ChatGPT.

• 1:17:41David Pierce?

  It's easier to get to ChatGPT on iPhone.

• 1:17:44Nilay Patel?

  But that's just a pure distribution advantage.

• 1:17:46David Pierce?

  But that's my point, right? Like, the better example is, uh, Google is doing much more interesting stuff on top of Gemini.

• 1:17:53Nilay Patel?

  If you had said that first, I wouldn't have accused you of drinking on the job, David.

• 1:17:56David Pierce?

  This is why, you gotta lead with the hot take and then pull it back. This is, this is what we do here. Uh, no, but I think the actual real example is Anthropic and Claude. Anthropic is just building vastly better consumer products on top of Claude more quickly than OpenAI, even though OpenAI typically has been first to a lot of the underlying technology. But you're starting to see this shift where, like you said, chat.com becomes Just a more understandable way to get to this thing than anything else. Like, one thing somebody said to me a long time ago was that just being able to put a simple domain name on a billboard goes a really long way. Like, just, just to be able to, just, like, you can imagine the billboard, right? That it's just like a pure white billboard and it just has chat.com on it.

• 1:18:40David Pierce?

  Like, that's powerful in a way that, like, openai.com/chatgpt is not powerful. And there's just a bunch of little things like that. They've, they've launched this new set of models that are starting with O1 instead of GPT-4O Turbo. Like, they're getting slowly better at putting this in front of people in a way that is slightly understandable. That only goes as far as your products go.

• 1:19:03Nilay Patel?

  I will say chat.com 100% sounds like a 1990s dating site.

• 1:19:09Nilay Patel?

  That's me, and that's just what that's like.

• 1:19:10David Pierce?

  I mean, it does.

• 1:19:11Nilay Patel?

  Great. And I met my wife there, to be honest.

• 1:19:15David Pierce?

  Rename ChatGPT to Plenty of Fish and we'll be good to go.

• 1:19:21Nilay Patel?

  Shout out to Casey for the wife joke.

• 1:19:22David Pierce?

  Wait, do you want to know, by the way, I plugged all of this into ChatGPT, all the stuff Darmesh said to do, I just did.

• 1:19:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:28David Pierce?

  And the, it gives a lot of thoughts. And then the conclusion it draws is Darmesh likely sold chat.com for around 20 to 30 million dollars, with 25 to 50% of that amount in OpenAI shares. Ordinarily, that's based on nothing, and I wouldn't believe it, but that's what he told us to do. So I think, yeah, you can take that as something like the truth. And if that's the case, and he did it a while ago, which it sounds like he did, that man has made a ton of money on this domain name. Because like, what, what happened to the valuation of OpenAI with this new fundraising? What is, what, like, this was, this is a damn good domain name purchase. If indeed it is what ChatGPT says it is.

• 1:20:08Nilay Patel?

  It's so much better than tobacco.com, which I simply let expire.

• 1:20:13David Pierce?

  You're missing out.

• 1:20:14Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they're going to rename ChatGPT to just chat?

• 1:20:16David Pierce?

  No. I don't. I think ChatGPT is actually against all odds a very good brand. People know what it is. I think it actually explains itself better than like Claude. Uh, and so there, there is a, it is sort of Kleenex-y in the AI world right now where like people know it better than any other AI product. And like, if you can make Google work for 25 years, you can probably make ChatGPT work for 25 years. And

• 1:20:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:20:43David Pierce?

  I think they will.

• 1:20:44Speaker 07

  Is that a problem for them? I thought the famous thing about Kleenex was that Kleenex did not like that Kleenex was the generic word.

• 1:20:51Nilay Patel?

  Kleenex. I thought you were saying clean.exe and I was like, I don't know what David's talking about.

• 1:20:57Nilay Patel?

  Kleenex, that's what you've been saying.

• 1:21:00David Pierce?

  Oh, boy. We all need to go outside.

• 1:21:05Nilay Patel?

  Has it been a weird few days? Is my brain mush?

• 1:21:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Nilay Patel?

  If I had to unearth stories from 2016 to 2020, be like, oh, I used to know a lot about this. Yes. Clean.exe.

• 1:21:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's a classic.

• 1:21:17Nilay Patel?

  It was a defrag program that everyone loved.

• 1:21:19David Pierce?

  Yeah. No, but Sean, to your point, I think, I think there is something to that. I think it is, that's like real sort of champagne problems stuff. When you become so big that other people start associating knockoff products with your product, like everybody wants to have that problem, even though that problem is kind of annoying. And I think

• 1:21:35Nilay Patel?

  And even though, but just to be clear, that problem is also fake. Kleenex owns its trademark. They have not lost the rights to the word Kleenex.

• 1:21:41David Pierce?

  But the idea that you go see any tissue in the store by any brand and you're like, oh, it's Kleenex is like, you can see how that's a problem for Kleenex, but I don't think Kleenex is upset about it. I think they're doing fine.

• 1:21:52Nilay Patel?

  There's a, well, I'll find, there's a, they made like a musical about it. Or one of these companies with one of these names like this made an entire musical about how you're not supposed to say, you're supposed to say something else, which is why they all say facial tissue. That, there's a, this is a horrible tangent and now it's time to talk about the matter of smart home standard, which is my lightning round.

• 1:22:12Nilay Patel?

  Matter 1.4 is out. We're two years into this. I will tell you that I needed a smart plug for our Halloween decorations and I bought just the regular Miro's HomeKit ones and the Miro's Matter ones. The Matter ones were so finicky that I just sent them back. And I was like, well, this still isn't ready. And that's kind of where I'm at with Matter. But Matter 1.4 is out. Jen Toohey wrote about it. She's been tracking every ounce of changes to the standard. As always with Matter updates, there's more devices. So there's heat pumps and solar panels. They did robot vacuums. All this stuff is all happening. They still don't have security cameras. The reason I want to talk about it is, one, the vocabulary is amazing. And I need to explain

• 1:22:52Nilay Patel?

  the vocabulary to explain the thing that is good about Matter 1.4. So in the Matter standard, every smart home ecosystem is called a fabric. You follow me on this? So Apple HomeKit is a fabric. Amazon Alexa is a fabric. I don't know why they picked fabric. I'm guessing it's because the radio standard is called Thread. Yes. But they don't all run on Thread. It's very confusing. They're all called fabrics. And the big thing, the big, big thing in Matter 1.4 is multi-admin across fabrics, which is yet more vocabulary. But all it really means is that when you set up all of your devices

• 1:23:35Nilay Patel?

  in Apple Home and then connect to Alexa, they all just go over there. So you don't have to set them up in two places at once, which is a thing you would have thought they would have figured out from the beginning of Matter. Yeah, I just assumed that was how it already worked. None of this, none of this worked at the beginning of Matter. Like, the border routers between Wi-Fi and Thread weren't incompatible, that the auth was incompatible. Like, none of this stuff worked. So they've got, they've had the standard on the market, which is, you know, Apple kind of like really pushed this. They've worked with Amazon, they've worked with Google to get the standard out. It's built on HomeKit in a lot of ways. And the idea is, all of these smart home devices should be compatible with everyone's ecosystems. And for about two years, what that has meant is, there's more devices.

• 1:24:21Nilay Patel?

  But they're really only compatible with the one you choose to make them compatible with. Right? If you have Google Home stuff and Alexa stuff in your house and HomeKit, you kind of like pair your smart plug to one. So you have more choice because the Matter accessory makers can just make one thing, but you don't actually get more compatibility.

• 1:24:39David Pierce?

  What you just described is directly against the whole point of Matter.

• 1:24:43Nilay Patel?

  Right. So they have finally done the thing.

• 1:24:45David Pierce?

  They did Matter now.

• 1:24:46Nilay Patel?

  They did the thing. They're calling it enhanced multi admin.

• 1:24:53Nilay Patel?

  It lets the Thread border routers, Thread is the low-power wireless signal that all this stuff's supposed to run on. So the border routers that bridge from Thread to Wi-Fi are now compatible. So you get them at Eero and a HomePod Mini and all this other stuff. And they will bridge to Thread, make one big Thread network instead of multiple Thread networks, which is what they've been doing up until now.

• 1:25:13Nilay Patel?

  They are doing a better job of managing Wi-Fi routers that have Thread routers in them. All the stuff needed to exist. But the main thing is bridging multi admin across Fabrics, which is just platforms. And that means you can set it all up in HomeKit. And then you can buy an Amazon Alexa and be like, I already have a Matter. I already have all the stuff and it will just figure it out. Now, is any of that gonna work?

• 1:25:37Nilay Patel?

  Will it import your rooms and your device names and all the stuff that you need to like really make that work? Unclear. Jen is a very good reporter. She asked the Matter people this and they did not say.

• 1:25:49Speaker 07

  I really, really like Jen's whole quote in this story. I'm hearing it in her British accent right now. Matter will make everyone play together nicely this time. Promise.

• 1:26:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Bluetooth is gonna work great next year. That's where Matter is. It's in the zone. And I forgot to mention, by the way, the reason I've been pointing out it's called Fabric this entire time is this is called Fabric Sync.

• 1:26:12David Pierce?

  Which is nothing. This thing should be called like Needle or Sewing Machine. Like, there's a bunch of, there's so many things we could do here. But if you're gonna commit to this stupid bit, you have to commit to it correctly.

• 1:26:23Nilay Patel?

  And the quote from the...

• 1:26:25David Pierce?

  Call it like color match. Like, listen, I have ideas.

• 1:26:29Nilay Patel?

  And the quote from the Connectivity Standards Alliance spokesperson here is, "If a new device shows up on Fabric A, it can automatically be added to Fabric B."

• 1:26:39Nilay Patel?

  However, it is unclear whether the correct name and location of the new device will automatically go to the other platforms if you have to enter those manually. That will be up to the platforms to implement. So another year, Matter 1.5, everybody. Bluetooth is going to be great next year. But this is the thing, we're so close. It's all coming into focus now, right? You buy a smart home device, you just add it to one system. Suddenly you can just talk to your Google Home and access that device. This is the thing everybody wants. So close.

• 1:27:06David Pierce?

  We are in that funny moment now where it's like, if we could just pretend that every smart home gadget that had ever been made didn't exist and start from scratch, we could build the good things so quickly. But because we did the good things so late, everybody is having to back their way into making this make any sense in a way that is just going to make it worse for everybody for a long time. Like every, every story about Matter getting better makes me want to buy smart home products less. Because I'm like, this all sounds great and I have absolutely no belief that any of it is coming to anything that I own, ever.

• 1:27:41Nilay Patel?

  Look, David, you just keep looking at your garbage TV and I'll let you know when it's time, alright? By the way, I want to say thank you to the dozens, if not two dozens of people who wrote to me and Joanna about smart garage door openers and the people in particular who mentioned the RAT GO product, which stands for Rage Against the Garage Door Opener.

• 1:28:00David Pierce?

  Amazing.

• 1:28:01Nilay Patel?

  Incredible hobbyist project name. It is a hack that gets past the Chamberlain Security Plus Protocol, which it is true that Joanna stood on a ladder and installed one of the Miro's things and she has a Chamberlain thing which DRM's the button. The button on a Chamberlain, this is the power of monopoly. The button is DRM'd with the security protocol.

• 1:28:21David Pierce?

  So. It's awful.

• 1:28:23Nilay Patel?

  It's all ridiculous, but there's a hack called the RAT GO Rage Against the Garage Door Opener and now she's ordering one of those, I believe.

• 1:28:27David Pierce?

  Love that.

• 1:28:29Nilay Patel?

  This is our community, you're a family, alright? No matter what happens out there, we've got your back. And Joanna is literally texting me photos of herself on the ladder. It's very good. All right, Sean, what do you got?

• 1:28:40Speaker 07

  I also have a Meros in my garage that I need to install and hopefully get around the Chamberlain TRM button. But I've also got a story about Nvidia, a company that made $16.6 billion in pure profit last quarter, has decided to cap the game streaming hours on GeForce Now, its cloud gaming service, for its whales. I don't know why they're doing this. They are doing it in the best way possible, believe me. I will tell you all about it. So first off, it's a 100-hour cap per month. So you have to play more than like three hours every single day of cloud gaming, which is a lot of cloud gaming to get to this cap.

• 1:29:21Speaker 07

  And they're not going to instill that monthly cap until January 1st, 2025, for new users. And I think it'll be, yeah, 2026 for existing users before they lose their playtime. So if you get in now, or if you've already been a user, you don't have this monthly cap until an entire year from January. In addition to that, while some people were worried that they would lose their founders' memberships, that they would suddenly have a cap on their founders' memberships that were promised to have a certain quality of streaming for the rest of their lives, as long as they maintain their monthly dues. Nvidia's come out very recently in an FAQ and they says, "Founders, as long as you keep paying, you won't have a cap either." So founders are taken care of, existing customers are taken care of for a year.

• 1:30:06Speaker 07

  New customers can get taken care of for a year if they start early. Lots of, they've gotten out ahead of this. They're telling everybody it's clear. Their messaging is clear. They're doing a good job compared to most of the companies that we needle for this. But I don't understand why they're doing it at all, because the only people they're going to hit with this are the whales, who I would assume are their most vocal and passionate supporters of this service?

• 1:30:36Nilay Patel?

  Once you got a whale, man, you just keep going after him.

• 1:30:40David Pierce?

  Just keep raising prices.

• 1:30:41Nilay Patel?

  That's what it goes. You've never owned a casino?

• 1:30:44Speaker 07

  But they're not, they're not charging more. Why don't they, why don't they want to say, hey, you know, well, you can pay more for the unlimited, but they don't have that as an option. They're just like, no, we're capping it for everybody.

• 1:30:52David Pierce?

  So I actually, in a funny way, I think doing what you just described ends up being a worse PR move to basically say, oh, you want the unlimited thing? Now you have to pay more for it. You're going to piss people off more that way than doing what Nvidia did. I still, I have two thoughts on this. One, uh, maybe Nvidia should make better chips that do all this stuff more efficiently. This sounds like an Nvidia problem, not an anybody else problem. Uh, you got a bunch of money, maybe you should make better chips, Nvidia. That's just thought. Thing number two, uh, and this was everywhere in the comments on this story, uh, and it was my reaction too, is just like, oh God, another really great reason to not bet on cloud gaming is, is like everywhere you turn,

• 1:31:34David Pierce?

  it feels like something about this deal is not living up to its potential. And it's, I mean, it goes back to the same stuff we're talking about with even just downloading digital games. Like there, there is this sense that all of this could be ripped away from me at any time, and none of these companies are doing anything to make that not feel like the case. And even this, I, I agree with you that this is a relatively small thing and it will not hit that many people, but it's just another one of those things that's like, maybe don't bet too much on this being a good thing for you forever.

• 1:32:06Speaker 07

  I wrote a piece three years ago that the only way cloud gaming is going to succeed is if it removes all of this friction. And it theoretically could, like, once upon a time, you could just press a button on a web browser and you'd be playing a game instantly in your web browser, no problem. It's still a thing you can do.

• 1:32:22David Pierce?

  Assassin's Creed.

• 1:32:23Speaker 07

  Yeah. But, but, but I wrote, I just put laid out a list of bullet points. These are all the things that go through people's minds before they sign up for cloud gaming. What if my connection isn't good enough? What if my home networking gear isn't good enough? What if I live too far away from the servers? Will it actually have the games I want to play? Will there be enough of them to justify the fee? Will developers bother to port new games over? Will they run as well as if I just bought a console or PC? Will I need a special controller or dongle? Will I go over my data cap? Will I be able to play with my friends who are on different platforms? Will I lose access to my games if they lose a distribution deal or shut down the servers? Will I have to wait in line to play the games? Can I get my save games? What about the outages? Are they hiding how well these games will run? What if the company decides it no longer wants to be a game company, which has happened to several of these platforms now?

• 1:33:08Speaker 07

  There's just so much uncertainty going in. And just one more piece here from Nvidia.

• 1:33:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Nilay Patel?

  You've sold me, I'm buying a $700 PS5 Pro. I'm sitting two feet away from it.

• 1:33:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, every time, every time we talk about this stuff, I'm like, I'm all in on Blu-rays again. I'm all in on game cartridges and I'm buying a console. Like, it's, it's the only way. Turn off all the internet and just let me play games offline. It's gonna be fine.

• 1:33:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, homesteading, but for video games. I'm gonna grow them myself outside.

• 1:33:37Speaker 07

  It's too bad, though, because, because it works so well. And those people that Nvidia are capping know it.

• 1:33:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Is GeForce Now a success? I mean, you mentioned how much money they're making, but they're making money selling H100s to Meta. Is GeForce Now a success for them?

• 1:33:51Speaker 07

  We don't know. I'm guessing it's, it's got, it's gotta be a cost for them, you know? Because they have, they have massive hardware investment and, and infrastructure investment to stand this thing up. Theoretically, they could say, oh yeah, we've got a data center that can do this AI thing, or it could also do that GeForce Now thing. Maybe they're starting to build it that way. But last time I looked, there were special cloud gaming specific data centers for this thing. Laid out in a particular way with particular chips, so.

• 1:34:23David Pierce?

  It also kind of makes you wonder if they're capping it at 100 hours a month. What are the whales playing? Like, the, the, the top 1% of GeForce Now users, like, how many hours a month must they be playing for Nvidia to decide that it has to have this hard cap? It's gotta be a lot. Like, if you, if you have a bunch of people who are at like 102 hours, you're not introducing this cap. They're like, they found somebody who is just like, has the thing on 19 hours a day, 31 days a month. And they're like, we have to make this stop.

• 1:34:53Speaker 07

  I wonder if people are just like leaving it on to, I don't know. Maybe they've figured out some workaround to mine Bitcoin through this. I'm not sure.

• 1:35:03Nilay Patel?

  That sounds right. I mean, that's the sort of thing I would use G-Force now to do.

• 1:35:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:06Nilay Patel?

  If I knew how to do any of that.

• 1:35:08David Pierce?

  And I think we're all worried about Nvidia's ongoing survival as a company. So I hope this works out for them.

• 1:35:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Data caps are back, baby. Uh, you wait. They're, they're, they're coming. This FCC, they're, they're, they're gonna do it. Uh, all right. We gotta wrap up. We're way, way over. Sean, thank you so much for coming on. There's just a lot on the site this week that isn't politics. Go read it. We had a good week on verge.com. Uh, and we're back next week with even more. That's it. That's the show. Nothing wrong.

• 1:35:41Speaker 08

  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 Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:36:02Speaker 09

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• 1:36:33Speaker 10

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.