Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked August 2022 biggest announcements

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler to discuss all the announcement from Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event this past week. Further reading: HBO Max will be replaced next year by a new service combined with Discovery Plus Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked August 2022: the five biggest announcements The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 gets a little extra polish, but it’s still $999 The new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 is a little better and still too expensive Here’s how the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 compares to last year’s Z Fold 3 Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked is a foldable party of one Samsung still hasn’t given us a good reason to buy a foldable phone Samsung goes big on battery with the Galaxy Watch 5 series Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 2 Pro: more comfortable design and hi-fi audio Google tries publicly shaming Apple into adopting RCS Disney Plus’ Premium streaming price is rising to $10.99 per month Disney Plus’ ad-supported plan will launch in December Disney Plus and Hulu are getting steep price hikes Gmail is now officially allowed to spam-proof politicians’ emails Ethereum’s big proof-of-stake blockchain switch could happen on September 15th Apple’s next iPhone might be more expensive AirPods cases with USB-C could be in the cards for 2023 Battery percentage finally returns to iOS 16 and it’s hideous Sonos has delayed the release of its next product — likely the Sub Mini LG Display’s 97-inch OLED panel vibrates to create ‘cinematic’ 5.1 sound Call 866-VERGE11 (866-837-4311) to ask The Verge about this week's Samsung announcements. We may answer them on Wednesday! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today on The Vergecast, the team breaks down the Galaxy Unpacked event, and we're sorry to inform you, Disney Plus not winning the streaming wars. Of course, we'll get into all the gadget news from this week. That's coming up right after this.

• 0:13Speaker 01

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

• 0:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast with folding phones. You wanted it, you got it. One hour. Phones that flip in half. Phones that open up back up again. Phones that turn into tablets. That's all we're... No, we're going to talk about a lot of things. I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here.

• 2:10David Pierce?

  Hi, I'm just here to tell you that phones are cool that don't fold. My whole phone doesn't fold. I'm good.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  Alex Cranz is here.

• 2:20Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend that loves to open the phone with just like one thumb.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Just like do a.

• 2:25Alex Cranz?

  Just boom, pop.

• 2:28Alex Cranz?

  I'm trying to think of what the noise is.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 2:30Alex Cranz?

  Cause I haven't used a flip phone in so long.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  In 1999.

• 2:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  I purchased a cellphone called the Sony Zuma CMZ 200. It's the best phone ever made.

• 2:40Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  It was. Sounds like. It was amazing. I bought a used one. I have one at my house, like a perfect condition one. Do you know how you talk about this all the time? It had a stock to open. Like the mic flipped down from the body of the phone.

• 2:53Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Never mind. This is a good phone.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  And so when it had the Sony jog dial, so it had like a, you know, had a multi-element LED display to like.

• 3:02Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  The text. So you'd like scroll to a name and then if you could get it exactly right, you could make the call by flipping the stock open.

• 3:08Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  And then when you were done, you'd be like.

• 3:11Alex Cranz?

  Oh my gosh.

• 3:12Nilay Patel?

  And I practiced that move so many times.

• 3:15Alex Cranz?

  Like in the mirror? I gotta look cool.

• 3:17Nilay Patel?

  I was like scroll and flip, baby. And my friends in high school were like, one, why are you the weirdo with the cellphone? And two, stop saying scroll and flip.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  But I have it again. It was the best. No, look, scroll and flip. Let's do this. And my all-time top five cellphones.

• 3:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  Sony Zuma CMZ 200. Just putting it out there. Scroll and flip. I feel you. Richard Lawler is here, by the way. I do exist and I have bad news about streaming.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  It's true. So we have been remote for a million years. We're all together in the studio today, which is crazy. It's literally never happened. It's gonna be the one we were.

• 3:55Alex Cranz?

  The first, the first time.

• 3:56Nilay Patel?

  We were just sternly told that we can't talk over each other because Andrew can't fix it in post like he can when we're all apart. So this one's gonna be nuts. But Richard is actually in town. I don't think he's been with us in person since you started at The Verge. Over a year now. That's crazy. But if you want to go all the way back to like Engadget Podcast days, Richard and I worked together at Engadget. I used to see you in person all the time, but it was at like CES at like three in the morning. I'm like, there's Richard. My feet, I need to lean over and touch the ground. Richard is here. But it's good to see you in person. We're all here. There's a lot going on. I want to start with a little update.

• 4:33Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 4:34Nilay Patel?

  There's a Samsung event we got to talk about. There's folding phones. There's Disney is happening. There's a little gadget lightning round, but we got to start with an update. Last week, we talked about HBO Max, maybe dying, maybe living. Who knows what's going to happen? We said, when there's news, we'll have an emergency podcast. You had may have noticed, we had no such emergency podcast. Because the news was like just a devastating nothing.

• 4:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  It was devastating and they announced that they will eventually kill HBO Max.

• 4:59Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  Sometime next year, but for now, everything is cool.

• 5:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's all going to go on Discovery Plus's stack. So if you hate the HBO Max app, good news.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  So does the CEO of Discovery.

• 5:13Alex Cranz?

  He also hates it. If you hate the HBO content, bad news. He also hates it.

• 5:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:18David Pierce?

  No. It's so expensive.

• 5:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:19David Pierce?

  It's so much cheaper to just like rebuild houses in Texas than to do other things.

• 5:25David Pierce?

  Game of Thrones is way more expensive than that.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  They did have this slide where they talked about their franchises and they were like Game of Thrones and Harry Potter and then the 90 Day Fiance Universe. This is a real thing they put on the slide. It was incredible.

• 5:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, those were not good slides. There was like the male skewed males, apparently. You guys, you guys love plots.

• 5:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Alex Cranz?

  You love scripts. Female skewed. We, we just love reality. That's not true, though.

• 5:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:54Alex Cranz?

  I got to send a note, but it was great.

• 5:56David Pierce?

  If nobody's getting married this episode, Alex is not.

• 5:59Alex Cranz?

  I'm out. I, I, I turn the TV off, fling the remote.

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  So what they've decided to do is they are going to merge HBO Max and Discovery Plus. They haven't decided what it's called.

• 6:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  They're going to have a new app. It's like all the content from HBO Max on the technology of the Discovery Plus app.

• 6:16Speaker 05

  Is the Discovery Plus app good? Does anyone know?

• 6:18Nilay Patel?

  No, see, the thing is, it might only be perceived as good because it never crashes, but that's because no one uses it.

• 6:24Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  That's like, I, I think that might be the mistake they're making. But they seem to like it.

• 6:28David Pierce?

  It's fine. Yeah, like it is definitely possible that there are just 12 people using it and so it's not a problem. But like the app is fine. It's not the like trash heap that HBO Max is. So that's good.

• 6:38Alex Cranz?

  Well, we think that, right? Because HBO Max, people actually use it.

• 6:42David Pierce?

  No, but the thing when you go to load HBO Max and it's like, oh, would you like to see some thumbnails for the shows you're watching? Come back in 30 to 40 minutes. Like at least Discovery Plus doesn't do that.

• 6:51Alex Cranz?

  Right. No, I'm saying that's because no one uses it. Like if you

• 6:55David Pierce?

  Maybe.

• 6:55Alex Cranz?

  If it has 50 more million users, everybody, get everyone you know and everyone else you know to subscribe.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  Pull over your car and subscribe to Discovery Plus right now.

• 7:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, log in.

• 7:05Nilay Patel?

  Promo code is decoder.

• 7:08Alex Cranz?

  See if it works. Let us know. Report back.

• 7:10Speaker 05

  Could it, could it actually hold up to a Game of Thrones premiere night? Ever?

• 7:14Nilay Patel?

  We don't know. They think it will. So like I said, it was, this news, as you can hear, was not worth an emergency podcast.

• 7:21Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 7:22Nilay Patel?

  But it is true that they're going to kill HBO Max, the app, and then relaunch it, maybe still called HBO Max on a new technology platform. And then that will also have the content of Discovery Plus.

• 7:30Alex Cranz?

  I think it's going to be HBO dough.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they do love the stupid names. Again, this is a company and they decided that their new corporate tagline is the stuff dreams are made of. Which is the Discovery Plus app.

• 7:42David Pierce?

  Just call it 90 Day Fiance, the streaming service.

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  We'll come back to streaming because we got to talk about Disney, Disney, all kinds of stuff happening with Disney and Disney Plus. But let's start with the gadget news of the week. Big Samsung event, Unpacked 95 or whatever it was called.

• 7:57David Pierce?

  A lost track.

• 7:58Nilay Patel?

  Unpacked August 2022 is the actual name of it.

• 8:00Alex Cranz?

  That's 95 is better.

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:02Alex Cranz?

  Send a note. Samsung.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  Unpacked 1000. They announced a bunch of stuff. David?

• 8:08David Pierce?

  Yeah. So it was, this is like, they do two unpacks every year. And the one is like, here are all the phones that regular people want to buy. So they're like, here's the Galaxy S and here is when like the Note is no longer a thing because that used to be their off time. But anyway, so the February event, I think it's February, is usually the one where they're like, here's the phones for regular people. And then this is like, here's the weird stuff we're building in Korea. And that's essentially what this was. So they announced the Z Fold 4, which is the phone that folds open. There's the Z Flip 4, which is the flip phone. Go on, I'm ready.

• 8:42Alex Cranz?

  It folds open?

• 8:44David Pierce?

  It folds open.

• 8:44Alex Cranz?

  They both fold open?

• 8:45David Pierce?

  They do both fold open. One folds and one flips, technically.

• 8:48Alex Cranz?

  Okay, sorry, sorry.

• 8:49David Pierce?

  There's the Z Flip 4, which is just a flip phone, because the clamshell flip phones are coming back, as Nilay said, you can scroll and flip.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  Scroll and flip, baby! It's back!

• 8:59David Pierce?

  And then there's the Z Fold 4, which is the one that's like a big, long candy bar that opens up sideways into a tablet. And that's like when people talk about foldable phones, the Z Fold is basically the one that everybody talks about. It just like is the foldable phone that exists in the world.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  I don't know about that. I see more flips.

• 9:15David Pierce?

  Really?

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  Because they're so much cheaper.

• 9:16David Pierce?

  They are a lot cheaper. So yeah, the Z Fold 4, I think, is 1,700 bucks, and the Z Flip 4 is $1,000, which is like not a lot in the fancy smartphone world, but for the Z Flip is, for like a foldable phone, is kind of cheap, but it's like the same price as an iPhone. But I don't think I've ever seen a Z Flip in the wild. Do you see these?

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, uh, for Samsung. I was at the doctor's office, the reception had a Z Flip 2 or 3, unclear which one. And I was like, "Oh my god, you got a Z Flip." And she was like, "I hate it."

• 9:46David Pierce?

  Oh no.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  Instantly, no thought.

• 9:48David Pierce?

  Why?

• 9:49Nilay Patel?

  "Why?" And she's like, "Well, I have TMO, well, there's not good service here." And I was like, "Well, that's not the phone." "Do you hate the phone? Do you like the phone?" And she's like, "Oh, also it loses all my text messages, and my daughter has an iPhone, she can't text me." And like, we never really talked about the phone. We talked about the

• 10:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  the universe of feelings that networks and messaging platforms have, which really is like what we always talk about. I was like, "Oh, you should come on the Vergecast." Uh, but it was like an immediate, like, "I hate this phone." Like, "I wish I had an iPhone on my Verizon."

• 10:16David Pierce?

  Fair. Yeah, I mean, somewhere someone at Samsung is like, "None of this is our fault, we're so sorry."

• 10:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that

• 10:20David Pierce?

  Take it up with Google.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  1,000%, right. Like, I was like, "But do you like the flippy?" She was like, "Yeah, it's fine, but I don't have any service, and I can't text my daughter." Like, at some point, that stuff is way more important than whether you have like a sky-blue metallic folding phone, which is like, I would be like, "That's all I want."

• 10:36Alex Cranz?

  Isn't that why, like, the iPhone does so much better?

• 10:39Nilay Patel?

  Right, because it has a proprietary messaging service.

• 10:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like everybody's like, oh, it just works.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  We'll get to that.

• 10:44Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 10:44David Pierce?

  Literally will get to that.

• 10:45Nilay Patel?

  The Dieter Bone Memorial RCS segment is coming on the Vergecast. So those are two phones. I will say that the Z Fold 4 is like still ridiculously expensive.

• 10:55David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  It's like $1,800.

• 10:56David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 10:57Nilay Patel?

  And it's a very iterative improvement.

• 10:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like, it's in sort of a weird spot where it's like now the Z Fold 4 like basically is as good as Samsung's other phones, which sounds like a small thing to say, but it's actually kind of a big deal. Like it has, it has good specs. It has like a slightly less good camera than like the S22 Ultra, which is it's, you know, the note replacement's super high-end, 6.8 inch, it's a monster of a phone. But it's like roughly as good as the rest of Samsung's phones, which has not been true of the Fold before. You used to have to make like weird sacrifices for, you know, durability and the camera was a lot less good and they've like slowly but surely brought that stuff up. And now it's like, it's funny that we're to the point where foldable phones are just like iterating every year, but this seems to be where we are. It's like, they're like, yep, we did it. It folds now. It doesn't break

• 11:44David Pierce?

  the first time you try to open it like it used to, so that's good. But then, yeah, it's just weird. It's like before anybody even started really using these things in a mainstream way, we're already at like a mature foldable market. It's very strange.

• 11:56Alex Cranz?

  It's just Samsung though, right?

• 11:58David Pierce?

  Of one, yeah. It is, yeah.

• 12:00Alex Cranz?

  And that's because it's, there's still like a little crease when you open it, right?

• 12:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, the crease doesn't really bother me.

• 12:07Alex Cranz?

  Is the film still there? Like if you remove the film, does it still explode?

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  No, you are not meant to remove the film.

• 12:13Alex Cranz?

  I know.

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  I think they've, they've landed on a treatment of the film that does not suggest it is removable.

• 12:19David Pierce?

  Right.

• 12:20Alex Cranz?

  Excellent.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  And that is the solve.

• 12:21David Pierce?

  It no longer looks like a screen protector in the way that it used to.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:24Alex Cranz?

  Shrimp.

• 12:25Nilay Patel?

  But the screen replacements are much cheaper now. It's like $29 if you have the Samsung plan. It used to really, whatever the Samsung extended warranty is. So like they've entered into a territory where they're, to David's point, they're just normal phones.

• 12:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  And I think especially the Flip 4, which is $1,000, it's got flagship specs. It's got an S22 camera in it, the right processor, a bigger battery. It's like, oh, that is kind of like Samsung's flagship phone.

• 12:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Alex Cranz?

  That's the one I'd get because you can put it in your pocket.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  You can put it in your pocket, but the fold, the fold four still exists is like the monster that will usher in a new paradigm of computing. And I think actually all the attention belongs in the flip four.

• 13:08Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 13:08David Pierce?

  I totally agree. I think the flip four is like what phones should be. Like I'm, I'm, I want my current phone to stay the way that it is, but also be smaller and not be annoying when it's sitting on a desk. I want to be able to close it. That makes me very happy.

• 13:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:21David Pierce?

  Whereas the like, I got in a bunch of trouble because I wrote this story yesterday about, uh, I just don't really think there is a point to the fold as a thing. It's like, you can have a big phone or you can have a slightly bigger phone that's also much thicker and way more expensive. Like, can I interest you in that? No, I just, I, but then a bunch of people got really mad at me because they were like, no, it's, it's a big screen. You don't understand. Big screens are magic.

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's an Android tablet.

• 13:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. If it was an iPad mini that you folded it in half, I would buy it in a heartbeat for less than $2,000. I would probably not buy it actually for $1,800.

• 13:57David Pierce?

  So it's kind of like, do you want, do you want an iPad mini that folds to be the size of an iPhone? Or do you want an iPhone that folds to be the size of an Apple Watch?

• 14:03Alex Cranz?

  I want both because they're different things.

• 14:06David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 14:07Nilay Patel?

  Wait, okay. Walk me through the, I want an iPhone that folds into an iPad use case.

• 14:12Alex Cranz?

  That's what Dan does with his. So Dan Seifer.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he's got a fold three.

• 14:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And he just like sits there and he opens it up and then he watches like all of Halo on it. Because his wife is like, we are not watching that on the TV. You can watch it as you go to bed at night. And that's, that would be my use case. Like, I just want to be able to be like, have it in my purse.

• 14:31David Pierce?

  You can do that on is every other phone that exists.

• 14:34Alex Cranz?

  But big.

• 14:36David Pierce?

  Not really. It's the, so when you fold out the fold four, it is a, it's a 7.6 inch screen.

• 14:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:43David Pierce?

  Which is like bigger than your phone for sure.

• 14:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:46David Pierce?

  But is it like life changingly differently big from your phone?

• 14:50Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna, so I've got a bunch of purses.

• 14:53David Pierce?

  Liam, our producer is nodding vigorously at you right now. Liam, who I would remind you bought a Z fold and then instantly returned it.

• 15:04Alex Cranz?

  Twice.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  It's like not life changingly enough.

• 15:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  Like life changing has many stages.

• 15:10Alex Cranz?

  But but you can put it like if you have the fold, you can fold it in half and then you can put it in a smaller purse.

• 15:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Alex Cranz?

  Then you could a regular tablet.

• 15:19Nilay Patel?

  But the reason you'd want it to be an iPad.

• 15:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  Is because then you would get the world of iPad software.

• 15:24Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  And instead, what you get is the world of Android tablet software.

• 15:28Alex Cranz?

  That's why I don't have one.

• 15:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay, just like, okay, so then walk me through the I have a regular sized phone that folds into half that size.

• 15:37Alex Cranz?

  Pockets.

• 15:38Nilay Patel?

  Pockets.

• 15:38Alex Cranz?

  A lot of us do not have pockets that like work. I'm wearing some pants today and they work and it's great. You guys didn't have to hear me talk about it because I bought these pants not yesterday. But anytime you get a pair of pants and you can put your phone in it, it's like a huge event. Like you text your friends and stuff.

• 15:54David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:55Alex Cranz?

  And so like having a phone that you don't have to text your friends because you got new pants. Game changer.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I mean, I buy all of it. It's just to me, the I have effectively stopped using my iPad because my phone is so big.

• 16:07David Pierce?

  Same.

• 16:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, there's not a lot that I want to jump up to iPad size on. And the last time I did it, I was like, all right, I'm gonna there. You know, there's a TikTok iPad app. So I was like, all right, like I scroll through this a lot. I'm gonna put this on this iPad. And I was like, oh, TikTok compresses the video for phones. So this is an objectively worse experience.

• 16:25Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:26Nilay Patel?

  The video looks horrible.

• 16:27Alex Cranz?

  And I will still spend I had to delete TikTok because I just like opened my iPad mini and just like whoop.

• 16:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, so I didn't try it on a mini. I tried it on like a nine point seven inch iPad.

• 16:35Alex Cranz?

  Even worse, even worse.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  It's like a garbage iPad we had lying around.

• 16:39Alex Cranz?

  And you have to like flip it to the right side. It's terrible. I hate it.

• 16:42David Pierce?

  Richard, you have spent today talking about the two laptops that you use and the 49 inch monitor that you sit in front of all day. So I feel like you are a person who appreciates screen real estate.

• 16:53Speaker 05

  I love I love screen real estate, not necessarily on my mobile device.

• 16:56David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 16:56Speaker 05

  And I'm fine with it being small. What I would like in a foldable phone is number one, what if it gave me iPad like battery life if I didn't have to charge it every day?

• 17:04David Pierce?

  Okay, into that.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  You hit that mark.

• 17:06David Pierce?

  Fold doesn't do it, but I'm into the idea.

• 17:08Speaker 05

  Or better yet, if it folded two different ways and it had a keyboard and it was called the Motorola MPX.

• 17:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 05

  And you would sell me one right now, I would give you all of the money I have for it.

• 17:19Nilay Patel?

  Or the Nokia communicator.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  Yes. That I'm into, but what they're doing, the flip is interesting. I like being able to close my phone and hang up a call. That sounds good.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Also, the flip, when you close it, you open the camera, the selfie camera, because it's got that screen on the front back. There's a screen next to the cameras. It has a name that I'm blanking on, but there's a screen on the back. That becomes their selfie camera, and you can preview on that screen. And I love the idea of a high-quality selfie camera.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  And the way it kind of carries it around its own stand, that you can have it mounted, you know, you can have it just sitting on the desk, like an L shape, sort of. Like, I like that idea. I don't know how good that is in practice, but the idea of it sounds good.

• 17:59Alex Cranz?

  Wasn't that the entire thrust of the presentation from Samsung? They were just like, you know what's cool? L shape.

• 18:06Nilay Patel?

  No, this is like every company that makes anything that can fold is like tent mode.

• 18:12Alex Cranz?

  Where was the tent mode?

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, all those, like, Intel two-in-ones for the longest time. Like, what you want is a tent.

• 18:20Alex Cranz?

  Because you're cooking?

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  The future of computing is a tent shape. We need you to believe this and buy an Intel base two-in-one.

• 18:29Speaker 05

  I bought the XPS two-in-one. It folded. I used it in tent mode once. It was bad. It overheated. The battery life wasn't as good. It was a bad idea.

• 18:39Alex Cranz?

  Why did you use it in tent mode?

• 18:41Speaker 05

  I was in the kitchen. You're supposed to be able to use it that way. You should be able to have a recipe up, and you can scroll through it with the touchscreen. It's going to be great. It wasn't great.

• 18:49Nilay Patel?

  And what if you had a smaller phone in tent mode, huh?

• 18:53Alex Cranz?

  No, it's L mode. They don't do tent mode. So it's a little L mode. So you have to, like, get down there, squint at it.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  So it is true that Samsung is like the only mainstream provider of mobile phones in this country. They've got the two. Like, carriers discount the flip all the time. Like, that's the, you can get discounts on the fold, like, but they are mainstream products. Like, this is what they're launching. It's funny, because Moto was really, remember they did that whole Razer stuff with all the influencers and the thing? It didn't flop. And so this week, at the same time, Moto has, like, launched a new Razer only in China.

• 19:28David Pierce?

  And we missed it. This is how, like, it launched and we didn't notice.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  They didn't tell us. They were like, ah, like, a few hours later, like, by the way, we launched a new Razer in China.

• 19:39Alex Cranz?

  Does that, like, how many phones did they have to sell in the United States? You'd just be like, no, we're not even going to tell anybody.

• 19:45David Pierce?

  Six.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  By the way, the new Razr has a flex view mode, so you can open the screen halfway.

• 19:51David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  This thing kind of feels like it's a flip. So it has a bigger screen in the front, 2.7 inch cover screen. The flip is, that's the name of it, by the way, the cover screen. Well, the flip is a 1.9 inch. Because it's bigger, it has like a full notification interface. It's got a widget on here that looks exactly like an iOS widget. But same sort of like 50 megapixel camera with optical stabilization, 13 megapixel ultra wide. It's like, this is another flagship phone. It just seems like, it seems like only Samsung is like willing to make this bet and maybe not get market share because they've got market share all the way at the low end. And all the competition here is at the low end of the market now.

• 20:33David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 20:34Nilay Patel?

  This is kind of depressing.

• 20:35David Pierce?

  There's just no upside to trying to pick the fight anywhere else. Like, it's, it's just, everybody is set in what they have. And it's like, part of the reason I think flip phones are interesting is it feels like most people who are not that interested in like reinventing their phone experience are not gonna go for the phone that folds into a tablet thing. But if it's like a phone that looks and feels like my phone, but I can close it and put it on my desk, like, that's a thing I think people will like intuitively understand and it doesn't blow up my life to use it. So I feel like if I was gonna bet on either one of these to like actually make noise in the like world of phones kind of across all of the different price points, that's the one I would bet on.

• 21:14Alex Cranz?

  Is a flip phone less breakable? Like, when you throw it? Like, if I threw my phone at something, like, ah, I'm scared, and threw my phone at something, it would shatter. But if I had a flip phone and it was closed and I threw it?

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  I think in general, anything with more moving parts is like more delicate.

• 21:29Alex Cranz?

  But the screen is now protected.

• 21:31Nilay Patel?

  It's true, the screen is, but the hinge is now exposed.

• 21:34David Pierce?

  Why are they having to use all that, all those crazy new materials to get the screen that folds? Like, I wouldn't try it, is what I'm saying.

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Alex Cranz?

  Like, the, that's, I guess I can't get a flip phone because the urge to do that.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  To try out throwing it.

• 21:48David Pierce?

  You need to buy one of those, but also a Nokia 3310 that you can just huck across the room anytime you need to.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. It's a test.

• 21:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  This would be a great video. These are basically only renders that Moto released about this thing, but yeah, this one looks great. It's not like a real...

• 22:01David Pierce?

  This is the thing. Like, I get flip phones. I want one. I can't explain why.

• 22:07Nilay Patel?

  You shouldn't have one. You certainly can't have this one.

• 22:08David Pierce?

  But I want one.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  But this is the thing. Like, we should talk about, this is the Dieter Bohn Memorial RCS segment. So, uh, Google this week, full-on shaming blitz against Apple. Like, by-name campaign. It's time for Apple to fix texting. Ford Dieter did his first, like, Google executive tweet. People were like, "You work for Google now." Um, we love you, man. Uh, but like, Google's like, it's Apple's fault. Like, full-on, this isn't like a carrier thing. We ain't gotta push it. It's like, Apple needs to support RCS to improve texting. Here's all the things they're broken. It's not just green bubbles. But then there was another part where like, also the green bubbles are hard to read. Ooh. It's true. It's true. But, ooh. Fundamentally...

• 22:51David Pierce?

  That's not the problem.

• 22:52Nilay Patel?

  My theory has always been that foldables are, because they're a different hardware form factor, they can command interest. Like, I've probably said this on this show 100 times. Things that look different always get more interest than

• 23:02David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 23:02Nilay Patel?

  things that look the same with slightly different software.

• 23:04David Pierce?

  Right.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  Just true. So like, it looks really different, so it commands your attention. And then people get to the point where they're like, "Wait, I can't text my daughter. Wait, it doesn't work like my iPhone that I'm really comfortable with."

• 23:15David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  "Wait, I don't, it doesn't have AirPlay." Like, whatever bits and bobs the Apple ecosystem that you're aware of suddenly don't appear for you. And you're like, "Ah, it's too hard to use. I'm gonna stick with this iPhone."

• 23:25David Pierce?

  This is why people don't switch, because it's just not worth the effort anymore. Like, the things are, they're close enough, but not exactly the same, and it's just not worth the effort to switch.

• 23:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. 100%. Do you think that if Apple went to RCS, like, this is what, I think the limit of my theory is being tested, right? That, we've talked about iMessage lock-in on the show a million times, and we've talked about people like, looking at new kinds of hardware form factors a million times. If you give them a new hardware form factor and Apple goes to RCS... Do people switch to Android in any meaningful way? Or is all the other stuff just pure lock-in?

• 23:56Alex Cranz?

  No, because you still need iMessage. Like RCS isn't gonna fix all the problems. It'll fix some of the problems.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  It'll fix group texts, it'll fix picture messaging. It'll fix a lot of things.

• 24:06Alex Cranz?

  When somebody says congratulations and you suddenly get fireworks on your phone, it won't fix that. People will be so upset.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Google can add a... I mean, that's just like recognizing one word. Like, I feel like there's enough AI inside of Google to be like, can you detect the word "congratulations"?

• 24:21David Pierce?

  The tap-back thing is the perfect example of that. Because it used to be if you were on a group chat with anybody on Android and you would do the like tap-back thing and hit "love", it would be like, you know, so-and-so loved, and then just quote your message, and that was a horrible nightmare. And Google just fixed that. Right, so there's like, that's the same kind of thing. They could solve some of that stuff. But no, I cannot imagine the answer is yes to your question. Like RCS does not change enough to really matter. Like, I think what RCS does is make Android better. It makes like being an Android owner in an iPhone world better. It doesn't make... It doesn't change anything about being an iPhone owner, which is, I think, why Apple doesn't really care.

• 25:02David Pierce?

  And it doesn't change enough to make a meaningful difference to people, I don't think.

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  Right, because of all the other stuff.

• 25:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like, people stay on iPhones because they've paid for apps, they use like platform-specific things, they like AirPlay, they like know where the browser is, like how the notification shade works. It's like the thing, the muscle memory of using a phone is so intense.

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they love the feeling of getting an Android feature two years later and then saying "Apple invented it". People love that.

• 25:30David Pierce?

  Oh, it's so good.

• 25:31Nilay Patel?

  It's like 100 and 120-inch screens, amazing. Tim Cook invented that.

• 25:36David Pierce?

  Games that actually work, those are fun. Love those.

• 25:39Nilay Patel?

  You know what my current lock-in feature is? It's not true lock-in. People are gonna quibble with me that I'm like saying lock-in. It's a thing that I'm like, oh, I can't keep this up. When you copy something on an iPhone and paste it on your Mac.

• 25:51David Pierce?

  Oh, amazing.

• 25:52Nilay Patel?

  It's like, oh. Oh, you should just hold me tight. I'm gonna just open the garden walls and then bring the gate down and padlock them. I'm staying right here.

• 26:00David Pierce?

  You know what's weird about that, though, is that, at least in my experience, works perfectly and it's amazing. And every other thing that Apple does where they're like, try to move stuff between your device, is garbage.

• 26:09Nilay Patel?

  Right, because that's just moving like text.

• 26:12David Pierce?

  But the thing where it's like, I have a browser tab open and the little thing pops up on the Mac and it's like, would you like to open this? And I say, sure. And it's like, how about a different webpage? Or it's like, I turn my headphones on and it's like, do you want to connect to all of your devices except the one that's currently ringing?

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:26David Pierce?

  And it's like, hmm. But then the copy and paste thing is magical.

• 26:29Nilay Patel?

  The copy and paste thing works. I will say the what do you want to answer your phone on intelligence? It's like rival Siri in terms of great idea, completely useless execution.

• 26:40David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 26:40Nilay Patel?

  It's like, what if everything in your house was ringing?

• 26:44Nilay Patel?

  It's like, what if just my phone was ringing? But then you can't turn off because you had to turn off the little phone. I could talk about this all day.

• 26:50David Pierce?

  We should finish Samsung, though, because there were a couple of other things announced. Speaking of headphones, there was the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro. People love the Galaxy Buds. They're like a deeply underrated set of headphones, I think. And these are 230 bucks, which is, I think, $30 more expensive than they used to be. But by all accounts, seem to be very good.

• 27:12Nilay Patel?

  What's the Bixby integration like?

• 27:15Alex Cranz?

  That one, that one person.

• 27:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, John Bixby. Bixby made one for me.

• 27:20David Pierce?

  Bixby appears zero times in our story about the Galaxy Buds.

• 27:24Nilay Patel?

  I think Bixby appears zero times in Samsung's presentation.

• 27:28Alex Cranz?

  You're worse at sneakers.

• 27:29David Pierce?

  Samsung studiously avoids the word Android every time, which I find very funny. And I think this is true in all of these. Like, Apple says Siri less and less every time, and Samsung says Bixby less and less every time.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:41David Pierce?

  And Amazon just says Alexa more times every, every time you turn around.

• 27:46Alex Cranz?

  Are we moving away from where they all were like, we have to compete and show our stupid AI digital assistant is the best one?

• 27:53David Pierce?

  I think so.

• 27:54Alex Cranz?

  We finally passed that point.

• 27:55David Pierce?

  Well, they all now, they all now treat them as like, like if you ask Apple, Siri is not like a voice assistant, it's just like a generalized intelligence. And they're like, oh, this is what they say. They're like, the thing when you pull down the notification shade and it recommends which apps you should open, they're like, that's Siri. And it's like, no, it's not, that's my phone. Like, I don't, I don't care. We can cool about what it's named, but like Siri is the thing that searches the web when I ask for a timer. Like, that's what Siri is.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  Remembering which app I open the most is not artificial intelligence, that's just a counter.

• 28:28David Pierce?

  But yeah, so, okay, so there were the buds, which I believe Chris Welch is reviewing, and I suspect will turn out to be very good, because the Galaxy buds have been very good for a while. And then there was the Galaxy Watch 5 and Watch 5 Pro, which are, I think, 280 bucks and 450 bucks respectively. And the big thing here was more battery life.

• 28:47David Pierce?

  I actually think the Galaxy Watch is super fascinating, because like, especially now that they've gone back to like, working with Google and doing Wear OS stuff, like the Watch 4, by all accounts, was like, really good.

• 28:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:56David Pierce?

  And people really liked it, and it was like, the first thing that was like, okay, if you are an Android person and want something kind of like the Apple Watch, here is something kind of like the Apple Watch. And the 5 Pro just seemed, or the 5 and the 5 Pro seemed to just like, push that slightly forward, like, more sensors, more health stuff, because everybody's in on health stuff. The Watch Pro, I think, is enormous.

• 29:16Nilay Patel?

  It's enormous. And it has like a touch bezel, right?

• 29:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, they both do.

• 29:20Alex Cranz?

  Forty-five millimeters. That's like, that's a big, chunky, chunky watch.

• 29:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Alex Cranz?

  I used to have, I used to have like a 42 millimeter my dad gave me, and I would wear it to soccer practice in like, 6th grade, and it just took my entire wrist up. It just looked like I was wearing a large bracelet, like a cuff bracelet, it was great.

• 29:39David Pierce?

  You used a phone on your wrist, basically.

• 29:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I could stop bullets with that wrist. Watch.

• 29:44David Pierce?

  But yeah, and I think especially, like, this is coming, and there's presumably going to be a new Apple Watch soon, and the Pixel Watch is coming, and it's like, this, this is like a cool moment, where it kind of felt like everybody was giving up on smartwatches, except for Apple. And now it sort of feels like there's, there's real stuff out here happening again, which is cool.

• 30:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I will say that the 45 millimeter size, I'm just looking at our photos of this on our wrist, it's just like.

• 30:06Alex Cranz?

  The one on Allison's wrist?

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  Monstrously huge.

• 30:09Alex Cranz?

  You can put like, multiple fingers. I think you could probably put her whole other hand. Between, that's just huge.

• 30:15David Pierce?

  Oh, Neel, I have great news for you. Uh, Vsong, who wrote about the, the watches, um, writes, and I quote, "After months of waiting, Samsung Galaxy Watch owners can finally use Google Assistant on their devices. Don't panic, Bixby lovers. Samsung promises all five of you that Bixby is still available on the Watch 5 and Pro."

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 30:31David Pierce?

  So.

• 30:33Nilay Patel?

  If you love.

• 30:33David Pierce?

  Neel and four others.

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  It's a dog with shoes. It's just here to help you out. Remember when their pitch was like, Bixby will just do settings for you?

• 30:41David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:42Nilay Patel?

  And that was the, the idea that like, our settings are so complicated that an AI dog will help you go through the settings.

• 30:49David Pierce?

  Bluetooth.

• 30:51Alex Cranz?

  Richard's just shaking his head over here.

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  Don't you have an Android phone? Do you have Bixby?

• 30:56Speaker 05

  Uh, I do not have Bixby. I have unfortunately never had a modern Samsung phone. The last Samsung phone, I think, was the Galaxy S2 Epic 4G.

• 31:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  If I'm not getting it wrong.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  The Epic 4G Touch 2.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  Yes. It was, it was a wonderful phone, but no, it did not have any AI or any dogs wearing shoes.

• 31:14David Pierce?

  Missing out.

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  I think Samsung should have just taken our lead and branded Bixby as like helpful dog butler in shoes. And like, straight gone Clippy with it. And like, every time you push the button, like, here's Bixby.

• 31:27Alex Cranz?

  That would be branding. People would talk about that.

• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  They did. I did. I made it up and then we all talked about it.

• 31:34Alex Cranz?

  No, but I'm thinking like Clippy, like, like.

• 31:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:36Alex Cranz?

  The, the wider realm would, the realm?

• 31:39Nilay Patel?

  The realm.

• 31:40Alex Cranz?

  The realm.

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  The realm of Samsung.

• 31:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, people would talk about it. They'd be on TikTok all the time. Bixby dog.

• 31:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Alex Cranz?

  Be like a character. It'd be a meme. Get on the Samsung.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  I've been telling them for years. They won't.

• 31:52Alex Cranz?

  Paying Eli.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  I know that they are aware.

• 31:54David Pierce?

  It's your IP.

• 31:54Nilay Patel?

  Inside of Samsung, they are aware that I think it's a dog with shoes. And like, it's just like, turn like, what do you have to lose?

• 32:01Alex Cranz?

  Stop.

• 32:01Nilay Patel?

  Three people are using this thing and you're giving up to Google Assistant.

• 32:04Alex Cranz?

  Come on, man.

• 32:04Nilay Patel?

  Just go full cartoon dog.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  People should not put me in charge of any tech companies. I think that should be very obvious.

• 32:12Alex Cranz?

  I disagree. I want the dog.

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  Everyone wants the dog. It's very obvious.

• 32:17David Pierce?

  When you own the Green Bay Packers, you can make it.

• 32:19Nilay Patel?

  You should ruin Pinterest.

• 32:20Speaker 05

  I own two shares of the Green Bay Packers, sir. And then we'll know what to do with our Pinterest page.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  We'll figure out our Pinterest page. All right, we should take a break.

• 32:29David Pierce?

  Before we do, one thing. So we, we're going to talk more about Samsung and foldables and gadgets and why the internet is mad at me about big screens on next Wednesday's show. And if you have questions, call the Verge hotline, which is 866-VERGE11, which is 866-837-4311, but it's just Verge11. Don't worry about it. And call us and ask us all your Samsung and foldable and phone questions and we'll get to a bunch of them next week.

• 32:55Nilay Patel?

  Tell us your Bixby stories.

• 32:57David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 32:58Nilay Patel?

  Call us and be like, "One time, I couldn't figure out how to turn on a feature on my Samsung phone, and I asked Bixby to do it, and Bixby helped." I just want to hear one story like this.

• 33:09David Pierce?

  And if you have a drawing of a dog with shoes named Bixby.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, please.

• 33:13David Pierce?

  Please send it.

• 33:14Alex Cranz?

  Email that.

• 33:15David Pierce?

  Meow is reckless on Twitter. We all need to see it.

• 33:17Nilay Patel?

  Hit me up. We'll just do a whole run of them on our TikTok. It'll be great. All right, we're going to take a break. When we come back, Richard's going to tell us what's going on with Disney and the streaming wars. We'll be right back.

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• 34:01Speaker 07

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• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Richard. Rich. RJ.

• 34:40Speaker 05

  I have many names.

• 34:41Nilay Patel?

  Rick Dog.

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  Disney earnings this week. Good news, bad news. I was on CNBC today and they were like, "Stock is up," which means like, good news.

• 34:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:50Nilay Patel?

  I don't know why they let me talk about stocks. It's great. But, uh, stock is up. Trey Pac, you know, he's one of the Bobs.

• 34:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Old Bob.

• 34:59Nilay Patel?

  He looked as happy as he could, which is like, a medium amount of happy.

• 35:03Alex Cranz?

  He's got that theme park money now, man.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so, they're doing great. Subscribers are up, they have more subscribers now than Netflix. Disney 221 around the world, Netflix 220. Disclosure, The Verge made a Netflix show, of which I'm the EP. Fox Media makes shows with all of these companies. Comcast is a minority investor in Fox Media, whatever.

• 35:23Alex Cranz?

  Media.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  If you've listened to the show, you know that it doesn't work. The money has not dissuaded us. Disney's in a weird place. Like, they're raising prices with the subscribers are doing great. I gotta call out, Bluey, season three just hit Disney Plus, which means if you have a child, you're never unsubscribing. But it's a weird moment for them.

• 35:42Speaker 05

  The question of who, of whether or not this is good news, I think, uh, depends on whether or not you're a Disney investor or a Disney Plus, uh, customer. If you're a Disney investor, great news. They have more customers, they have a plan to make more money, they have a plan to be profitable on streaming by 2024, maybe. These are all the things you love to hear. If you are a Disney customer, I have bad news. You are the reason that they will be profitable by 2024, because they're raising prices on everything. They've discovered that people will pay for, I don't know, Marvel movies for all of the Disney Kids stuff. People love to watch the properties that they have. They will pay for it. Maybe they won't pay for Netflix if they keep raising the price, but they will keep paying for Disney every single time. It's great news for Disney and that they're taking advantage of it.

• 36:24Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's still cheaper than Netflix, too. And like, I think a big part of this is they care about these bundles. These bundles are really actually good deals. Like, I looked at the bundles and I was like, oh, that's what I'm gonna do. Because you can get the Disney bundle with Disney Plus, Hulu.

• 36:40Speaker 05

  Is that with ads or without?

• 36:41Alex Cranz?

  Both of them without ads.

• 36:42Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 36:42Alex Cranz?

  ESPN Plus with ads.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 36:44Alex Cranz?

  Sure, for 20 bucks. And that basically, who cares about ESPN Plus? I'm sorry to you and my brother.

• 36:51Speaker 05

  PTI and me.

• 36:53Alex Cranz?

  And I guess, oh my god.

• 36:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, you're actually podcasting with three ESPN Plus subscribers, so...

• 36:58Alex Cranz?

  Well, then this is a great deal for you guys, because I'm over here being like, wow, I don't care about that. That means I'm getting both of these services I do use for $10.

• 37:06Speaker 05

  But that's the pitch, is that they can tie together all of these things. They cover everybody. Whoever you are, they have some stuff for you. And that bundle's going to be a pretty good deal. They've really recreated the parts of the cable bundle that people wanted at a cheaper price.

• 37:18Alex Cranz?

  At the same price that Netflix premiere bundle, or premiere just service.

• 37:23Speaker 05

  And if you're looking at that versus Netflix, and you're looking at what you get, and you're thinking, I'm going to pick one, you're probably going to pick the Disney one.

• 37:31Alex Cranz?

  If you are one of the people who's spending $20 a month on Netflix, I am one of them.

• 37:35David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, same.

• 37:36Alex Cranz?

  Same. But if you're one of those people who's like, ooh, do I want this bundle, or do I want Netflix? And you chose Netflix, please, I mean, don't call me, but like...

• 37:45Speaker 05

  Well, there's a number they can call.

• 37:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, call that number.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  866-VERGE-11. Just hit the number.

• 37:49David Pierce?

  There it is.

• 37:49Alex Cranz?

  Tell us why. I wanna know why you're doing that. Yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 05

  So here's what I'll say. The ESPN Plus thing is like, it is valuable in very short windows. Right? Because it's not really ESPN. However, the World Excel Championships were recently broadcast. This is a true story. You watch them on ESPN Plus. In football season, weird right stuff. NFL primetime, which is like the best NFL clip show that happens at the end of every day before the Sunday night game, or end of every Sunday before the Sunday night game.

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  ESPN doesn't have the rights to broadcast it because NBC has the rights to all highlights on broadcast on Sundays, but they got the rights to stream highlights. So it's on ESPN+ So that alone is worth it for that one chunk of time.

• 38:32Alex Cranz?

  Do you, like, what about the actual games?

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  Right. What you're doing during the games on a Sunday is napping. You're in the dull roar of a football game.

• 38:42Speaker 05

  Or if you're a Lions fan, crying.

• 38:43Nilay Patel?

  And then you wake up and you, while you eat dinner.

• 38:48Alex Cranz?

  That's not how we do it in Texas. Like, that's like a three hour event. If I call my dad at any point during a Cowboys game, he gets so mad. So I do it multiple times and then like, oh, I'm sorry. I forgot the game was still on.

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Alex Cranz?

  I know it's at least three hours.

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  But ESPN has just figured out how to, it's definitely three hours. If you call me at any point during a Packers game or Richard during Lions game, there's a lot, there's a lot of screaming.

• 39:09David Pierce?

  Giants are awful. You can call me.

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  But like, they have like very cleverly found their way through this like highlights rights problem and added value to the streaming product.

• 39:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  Even though it's only for like however many months of the year. And they're kind of doing that around the line with sports.

• 39:27Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 39:27Nilay Patel?

  Or they're kind of doing that down the line with sports where it's like they're adding value to the cable subscription.

• 39:33Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 39:34Nilay Patel?

  But it's still like, it's only valuable. I would never pay for that on its own.

• 39:38Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 39:38Nilay Patel?

  It's something that comes in a bundle with Hulu and Disney Plus. This is the greatest value out of all time.

• 39:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like, this is, I think it's just a really good value. So everybody's complaining rightfully that they've raised prices, but also they said when they launched the service, they were going to be raising prices. They're like, no, these prices won't last. And they didn't. They raised it like, what, two years later?

• 39:57Speaker 05

  They said almost explicitly that they were planning to lose money for the first few years. And then when they have the plans to become profitable, that they would raise prices. And that's, that's what they're doing. They raised the price on ESPN last month. They announced the ESPN plus the price raised there on the standalone plan. And now the bundles are getting a little bit, a bit more expensive. They've also been talking about bringing about how you can get full ESPN on streaming.

• 40:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:18Speaker 05

  More openly than ever.

• 40:19Alex Cranz?

  That'll be.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  Clearly that comes someday. Now, that's probably going to come with charging more money. But we're looking at it.

• 40:27David Pierce?

  I would say the only thing that surprised me about this was that Disney just kind of did it all at once. I feel like the thing we've seen with the streaming companies over the years is they all just like raise their prices a dollar at a time and like, hope you don't notice. Like Netflix basically raises its prices every three months and they just like, hope you're not gonna notice.

• 40:43Speaker 05

  Disney knows something about trying to do this that I think maybe Netflix is learning. Like Disney has sold bundles. They have changed pricing so many times. They've got, they have an advertising business that actually works. Netflix, not yet. So they're not learning on the fly with these things and they kind of know which buttons they can press and how hard.

• 41:00David Pierce?

  That's fair. And it does seem like, like we talk about the, like, who's the zero on the go 90 scale?

• 41:06Alex Cranz?

  I think it's Disney. Yeah.

• 41:09David Pierce?

  Like Marvel alone is like...

• 41:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Marvel's real shaky lately. There's no guarantee that if, they don't make better movies than they've been making. Like, there's no guarantee that the next phases will be sticky.

• 41:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, right. Marvel is like in a weird place because it is this big behemoth. It does still make a ton of money even though the films are getting worse and worse. Like, Shang-Chi accepted. That was a really good movie. Go watch it if you haven't. But it's still a huge franchise for them and they've got Star Wars and they have everything Disney's ever made and they have everything Fox has ever made. So they've got, what, The Simpsons? They've got all of the princess movies. I'm so sorry, the Disney princess movies? Whatever you want to call them? Like, they've got...

• 41:55David Pierce?

  All the Pixar stuff.

• 41:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:56David Pierce?

  I mean, the library is unbeaten.

• 41:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they have like, they have all, most of the IP, right? Like Warner Brothers is, is recognized that they have IP and they think it's 90 Day Fiance. That's weird.

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  But, so the difference...

• 42:07Alex Cranz?

  Like...

• 42:07Nilay Patel?

  That's really weird.

• 42:08David Pierce?

  The 90 Day Fiance universe.

• 42:10Nilay Patel?

  I love it.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  It's real.

• 42:12Alex Cranz?

  Right up there with it.

• 42:13Nilay Patel?

  If you're not in it. So actually, I think the difference is that HBO still programs itself like a TV network, right?

• 42:19Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  There's a new season of something really high-end that comes out on a regular cadence.

• 42:23Alex Cranz?

  No, Disney's doing that too. Like Disney Plus.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  Disney's like, we farted out another Star Wars thing. Do you want to live in it?

• 42:28Speaker 05

  We started the show and you were talking about, what is that, The Beast?

• 42:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 05

  On FX, on Hulu?

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  The Bear.

• 42:34Alex Cranz?

  The Bear. The Beast.

• 42:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, but that's like FX on Hulu. Like, that's a TV network that went to Hulu. Like, Disney Plus, the app, is not quite programmed this way yet.

• 42:44Alex Cranz?

  Disney Plus is very much programming. Like, they're doing it. They specifically are moving shows around, so they have like a night that you're watching Disney Plus. So you're watching your Star Wars and your Marvel overlapped, and you're just tucking in for the night. They're like, that is very much part of their plan. And I think it's pulled from the Hulu, ABC, like, realm. And I think they're doing it better than HBO Max.

• 43:06David Pierce?

  I think I agree with that. But the other thing Disney has done really well is integrate that stuff with an app that shows you old things. Like,

• 43:15Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 43:15David Pierce?

  And this has always been the problem that like Amazon has had, where Amazon has this massive library of stuff that they just absolutely refuse to show you. And instead, they're like, would you like to watch Jack Ryan? And you're like, no. And they're like, ah, well, we don't have anything else for you.

• 43:28Alex Cranz?

  The other day, I finished watching something. I don't even remember what. It wasn't Miss Marvel, but I finished watching something on Disney Plus. And it was like, do you want to watch Captain Marvel? And I was like, yeah, I haven't seen it in a bit.

• 43:36David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 43:37Alex Cranz?

  Play.

• 43:37David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 43:38Alex Cranz?

  Let's go. And like,

• 43:39David Pierce?

  And then every once in a while, they'll just throw in, be like, remember all those animated movies you made 40 years ago that you love? Like,

• 43:44Alex Cranz?

  You want to watch it?

• 43:45David Pierce?

  You want to watch that? And I'm like, yeah, I do.

• 43:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And whereas Netflix, I'm like, you finished watching Stranger Things. Do you want to watch anything remotely related to that? And I'm like, sure. And they're like, okay, instead, we're going to show you another like Cake Wars episode. I'm like, no, that's, you've misunderstood. You've missed something here. And Disney's like, I don't know, they've got a really strong app. They've got all of the IP, which is like, is that ethically, morally right? Probably not. But they got it. They got the money. They got the, what, $50 billion or whatever they made from, from theme parks this year. They're doing great.

• 44:17Speaker 05

  The Fastpass, the Lightning Lane, the Genie Pass, I'm sorry, bringing in tons of money in the theme parks. Turns out that charging people for convenience is a good businessman.

• 44:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Speaker 05

  And their ad-supported plan is launching in December.

• 44:29David Pierce?

  So, again, I was on CNBC today, Bob Chag was being interviewed by Julie Borst. She asked him, can you raise prices in the theme parks? And he was like, yeah, we'll see.

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  He was basically like, here's what we do. We like, we see how much the consumer can tolerate and then like, you know, we push it. I'm not, he's like, we have no plans to at this moment, but like, we're always looking. And it's like, yeah, you're.

• 44:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they, they figured out they can nickel and dime you and we'll all be like, yeah, okay.

• 44:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Alex Cranz?

  I want to do the, the Guardians of the Galaxy, right?

• 44:54Nilay Patel?

  I disagree with you about the, the, which the, the $5,000, like, no, that's the Star Wars one.

• 45:00Alex Cranz?

  Oh, the, the big place?

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Alex Cranz?

  And you get the, the lightsaber. I'm gonna buy one. Very excited.

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  Two MacBooks. That's how you measure these experiences. Do I want two MacBooks or do I want to go to a spaceship?

• 45:12Alex Cranz?

  MacBooks.

• 45:13David Pierce?

  Then, then Richard would have four laptops.

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna, I, it's true. I think they have the, the best app, right? They built on BAMTech. They had the best stack all the way along. Hulu is, now it's theirs. They're programming it with more compelling stuff. I'm just pushing back. I think Disney is so big and they're so addicted to their franchises that they are, they're losing sight of like, making good stuff.

• 45:35David Pierce?

  I would, oh, Star Wars is dying for that exact, like, Star Wars is, is bad now.

• 45:38Nilay Patel?

  They're just like milking that thing. And then I think they're milking the MCU in like a.

• 45:42Alex Cranz?

  But they're doing good stuff on Hulu. Like Hulu is where they still actually have people who know TV, programming it. So that's why you got the, the bear. That's why you're getting, what is it? Little fires? The, the.

• 45:53David Pierce?

  Little fires everywhere?

• 45:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, little fires everywhere. Like, you're getting really good stuff on Hulu. I watch it, I think, probably, it and HBO Max are my two most watched services. And it's because it's got stuff like FX where they've done really, really good programming and they're putting it almost exclusively oftentimes on Hulu and it's just like, super watchable.

• 46:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm sure, like, to Richard's point, like, you're an investor, this is great. It's all just money in Disney. From a Disney, like, brand perspective, Hulu app, not as good as the, even the HBO Max app in some ways, right? It's like, a very confusing situation.

• 46:27Alex Cranz?

  Remember their linear TV, built in part of the Hulu app?

• 46:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:31Alex Cranz?

  And how they, they decided that they didn't want to do a menu like everybody else does, where it looks like cable TV. And instead they're like, no, we're gonna like, decide what you should watch. On on live TV and you're like, no, that's

• 46:41Nilay Patel?

  No, they all do this. This is like catnip for product designers. So like, we're doing a live TV app and I'm like, let's reimagine.

• 46:47Alex Cranz?

  But they got yelled at so much that Hulu was like, sorry, we're working on it. We're gonna do a really good app now.

• 46:51Nilay Patel?

  This is the hill they all want to climb. Like, can you, this is Steve Jobs just gaslighting this entire industry. By saying on his bed, he cracked the user experience for TV without any further explanation. And now everyone thinks they have to crack the user experience for TV and the entire consumer base is like, we just want a grid. It's the spreadsheet. We want a spreadsheet of TV shows.

• 47:12Alex Cranz?

  What if he cracked it by just being like, I changed the font?

• 47:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what he meant. He was like, I made it look nice. Have you heard of retina screens? Add more pixels. Yeah, I think the danger for Disney is that it's real sticky right now because of the catalog. But if the shows and movies are bad over time.

• 47:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna run into the same problem.

• 47:32Alex Cranz?

  I mean, yeah, but they have so much runway.

• 47:36Nilay Patel?

  Hulu shows is Disney shows. That's what I meant by the brand thing.

• 47:38Alex Cranz?

  Totally. And Disney, at least in America, wants you to keep that separation, right? Like, they very much said, we're not gonna put Deadpool, we're not gonna put all this like racist stuff on Disney Plus. We're gonna keep that for Hulu because that's for adults. And Disney Plus is like general Sunday night Magic Kingdom, whatever that that thing we all had to watch on Channel 8. Sorry, none of you are from Texas. Remember Sunday nights, there was always like the Disney hour of content? Come on, y'all are old. You know this. There was like a Disney, there was like, there was always like special movies and stuff.

• 48:16Alex Cranz?

  There you go. But but like, they're, that's, Disney Plus is their family friendly stuff. And they know as well as we all do, little kids have trash taste for the most part. So like, they can pump that stuff out for a while. I think they are gonna see diminishing returns. I think they are already like poisoning their own franchises over and over again because they're not, they're thinking about the money and not about the quality of the content. But everybody else is also kind of thinking the same thing.

• 48:45Nilay Patel?

  That's true. I buy that.

• 48:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Warner Brothers last week was even like, yeah, we don't care about the money. Like, we want the money. We're gonna put out stuff that'll make the money.

• 48:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We'll see. Okay, let's do the good 90s film.

• 48:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:57Nilay Patel?

  So we think HBO Max, after, after we complimented HBO Max.

• 49:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Nilay Patel?

  It is like.

• 49:03Alex Cranz?

  It's 90.

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's not yet.

• 49:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  It's like a preemptive 90 on the tech side.

• 49:08Alex Cranz?

  It's a 60.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  So it's like, okay, halfway between 45 and 90.

• 49:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:13David Pierce?

  It seems right.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's so depressing.

• 49:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It's a bummer.

• 49:15David Pierce?

  It's not HBO Max's fault.

• 49:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:18David Pierce?

  It's just, it's, it's being, this is happening to HBO Max.

• 49:22Nilay Patel?

  This is why mergers should be legal.

• 49:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  Disney Plus is zero.

• 49:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Nilay Patel?

  By the way, the Go90 scale of Zoom streaming services, zero is alive, 90's dead.

• 49:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Hulu, I don't know, Hulu's higher because I think at some point, like Hulu doesn't exist in a lot of other markets, right? It is pretty much an American market thing. Other markets, everything just is on Disney Plus. And in the United States, they're like, no, no, we must keep these two things separate. But I could definitely see them at some point be like, nah, smoosh them together.

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Hulu has like a long history of people trying to kill Hulu.

• 49:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:56Nilay Patel?

  Like at any moment.

• 49:57Alex Cranz?

  It's immortal at this.

• 49:57Speaker 05

  It might be the last streaming service to go.

• 49:59Alex Cranz?

  Cause it was one of the first, right?

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  It's unkillable.

• 50:01Speaker 05

  It is.

• 50:02Nilay Patel?

  Like so many people have tried to kill Hulu.

• 50:04David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 50:05Alex Cranz?

  I know.

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  Like at any moment, some Disney executive gets a promotion and they're like, finally.

• 50:09Alex Cranz?

  Disney tried to kill Hulu. They're like, we're gonna buy you and destroy you. I guess we're gonna use you because otherwise everybody's gonna pirate our stuff.

• 50:17David Pierce?

  And then somebody at Hulu was just like, we've signed deals to have next day shows until 2068. Like, what are you gonna do about it?

• 50:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, so, so Richard, you're making the call that Hulu is like a permanent zero, unkillable.

• 50:30Speaker 05

  Can, it, it can, it can never die.

• 50:32Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 50:33David Pierce?

  Hulu's not even on this.

• 50:34Speaker 05

  It's, uh, what, the, the drowned house, or what, what, what does not live can't, can never die? There, there you go, that's Hulu.

• 50:39Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 50:39Alex Cranz?

  All right.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Netflix?

• 50:42Alex Cranz?

  15.

• 50:42Speaker 05

  They still have 220 million subscribers.

• 50:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're still huge.

• 50:45David Pierce?

  I think we, the last time we did this, I think we landed like high single digits, which feels about right.

• 50:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  All right. Any other streaming services on the, on the scale this week?

• 50:53Alex Cranz?

  Paramount Plus, zero. You knew I was gonna say it.

• 50:57David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  Greatest streaming service.

• 51:00Nilay Patel?

  Paramount Plus is a zero, uh, all the way through the release of Top Gun Maverick.

• 51:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, and then it will be the most popular streaming service for a couple of weeks, and then it'll be like 90.

• 51:12Alex Cranz?

  I think as long as Star Trek exists, like, or as long as people who watch Star Trek exist, we're dying out, apparently. A friend of mine, she teaches college, and she's like, "All right, who watches Star Trek?" And it used to be, all the hands would raise. And she teaches like, video game history. So it's like, these are nerds, right? And she's like, "Okay, everybody raise your hand if you watch Star Trek." All the hands raised. Nowadays, she's like, "Raise it." And there's like, one person in the back of the room, who's wearing like, a Star Trek shirt.

• 51:37David Pierce?

  She's like, "You get an instant A+."

• 51:39Alex Cranz?

  You pass. Everybody else fails. So like, it's slowly dying, but like, as long as there are all those fans, and it's kind of, it's not as big as Star Wars, but it's got a very, um, active community, it's, it's a zero.

• 51:51David Pierce?

  It's gonna be interesting to watch Paramount Plus bleed that to death.

• 51:55Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 51:55David Pierce?

  Because in the same way that Disney Plus bought Star Wars, and was like, "We're gonna make eight Star Wars things a year until all of you."

• 52:01Alex Cranz?

  And I'm gonna let them do it.

• 52:02Nilay Patel?

  Somewhere in the Paramount Plus office, there's an accountant with a spreadsheet, and they're looking at it right now. She's freaking out, because the spreadsheet has like, a row in it labeled "Data Center Costs." And there's another column labeled "Churn," and they're modeling out how many people are gonna sign up for a seven-day free trial to stream Top Gun Maverick and then leave.

• 52:26David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  And spike the data center costs and never pay the $1.00. And they're just hoping they can, enough of those people forget to cancel. And I'm telling you, she's like, freaking out. Like, she's like, "Someone, someone needs to look at my screen right now."

• 52:39David Pierce?

  She's like, "Our payment processing systems are gonna go down."

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  She's just zooming random people, being like, "Can I share my screen? I need to share this screen with you."

• 52:46Alex Cranz?

  Are they doing, how, is it gonna be 4K? Is it gonna be Dolby Vision?

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  If they do not stream Top Gun Maverick in 4K HDR, like, I will drive over there and be like, "I'm taking the tapes, I'm starting my own streaming service. It's 90 all the way, but it's gonna be glorious for a day."

• 53:03Alex Cranz?

  Top Gun.

• 53:04Nilay Patel?

  There's no way that-

• 53:05David Pierce?

  It's called Tom Cruise, the streaming service.

• 53:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Tom Cruise is all about like, he wants you to turn off.

• 53:11David Pierce?

  Tom would never let this happen.

• 53:12Alex Cranz?

  He's probably good. It's like in his contract, if you stream it, it can only be streamed at 4K with Dolby Atmos. And if you detect somebody has is using headphones or watching on a mobile device, their device will explode.

• 53:24David Pierce?

  And he's figured out how to automatically change your TV to turn off motion smoothing. He's like, Tom gets it.

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, there's gonna be a long prelude before Top Gun Maverick runs on the stream.

• 53:33David Pierce?

  Oh, there probably is.

• 53:34Nilay Patel?

  He's like, I'm moving my hand right now. Does it look too smooth? I'm gonna keep doing this for one hour.

• 53:40David Pierce?

  I'm gonna read you the manual of every TV that exists.

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  He's like, skip to five minutes for Samsung, seven minutes for LG. I'm here with you.

• 53:47Speaker 05

  There will be a series of blinks in this video. Just your TV, just sit back and let it happen.

• 53:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he's very serious about this. In the depths of the pandemic, by the way, I looked, I looked at how much it would cost to buy one of those like only in Hollywood dedicated high end streaming boxes.

• 54:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:05Nilay Patel?

  Cause I was like, whatever, I'm never leaving this house again. It was like $15,000. I was like, I don't, I care a lot. I don't care this much.

• 54:15Alex Cranz?

  You could get such a nice like projector for that.

• 54:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but you need content.

• 54:21Alex Cranz?

  Just plug that, that Roku in.

• 54:23Nilay Patel?

  And then I almost fell down the Chris Well troll of being like, I'm gonna start buying Blu-rays.

• 54:28Alex Cranz?

  I did that. I do that.

• 54:29Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. You like, you're in your Plex box and your Blu-rays.

• 54:33Alex Cranz?

  I get the Blu-rays, I rip them.

• 54:36Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 54:36Alex Cranz?

  Because that's, that's legal, right? Like, I'm using it for my personal use only.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  I quit being a lawyer. I ain't your lawyer.

• 54:41Alex Cranz?

  Quick, quick.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 54:44Alex Cranz?

  It's probably, um, someone I know provides me with copies and I put them on my Plex server.

• 54:50Nilay Patel?

  That's more illegal.

• 54:52David Pierce?

  I meet a guy in an alley.

• 54:54Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I do. I buy pirated movies. You want to stick with, I buy the media, I own the movies and I rip it.

• 55:03Alex Cranz?

  There we go.

• 55:04Nilay Patel?

  For archival purposes.

• 55:07David Pierce?

  That's my lawyer talking if anybody asks.

• 55:10Nilay Patel?

  As everyone does.

• 55:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, as one does, yeah.

• 55:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:13David Pierce?

  I think if you were like, David, can you rip this DVD? I have literally no idea what I would do.

• 55:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, what's your process for ripping a Blu-ray?

• 55:21Alex Cranz?

  You know, you stick it in.

• 55:23Nilay Patel?

  To what?

• 55:24Speaker 05

  Okay, wait, Microsoft is bringing CD ripping back to Windows 11.

• 55:30Nilay Patel?

  Wait, really?

• 55:30Speaker 05

  This ripping is coming back. Yeah, they're testing it in the betas now, it's a whole thing.

• 55:34Nilay Patel?

  Wait, tell me about this whole thing.

• 55:35Speaker 05

  It wasn't in Windows Media Player, but they are beta testing it again. In the beta versions in Windows 11, CD ripping.

• 55:41David Pierce?

  Are you supposed to just like wave the CD over your computer?

• 55:44Speaker 05

  I don't know where you will put the disc, but if you have somewhere to put it.

• 55:47David Pierce?

  You just slap it on your keyboard and then something happens.

• 55:49Nilay Patel?

  Like automatically?

• 55:50Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 55:51Alex Cranz?

  Oh my god.

• 55:52Speaker 05

  But I don't think the feature is in the media player that exists in Windows 11, like the retail version right now.

• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  But in the beta.

• 55:58Speaker 05

  But in the beta version, if you have it installed, you have a version that will rip a CD for you. I just don't know where you're going to get a CD drive.

• 56:04Alex Cranz?

  Sick.

• 56:04David Pierce?

  Or a CD.

• 56:05Nilay Patel?

  Do you think this is like, Nadella himself is like, I have a number of CDs.

• 56:10David Pierce?

  My Blu-ray collection is out of hand.

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  Add this back for me. Okay, first of all, that's incredible. Love that. The Plex community freaking out. Walk me through your Blu-ray ripping process.

• 56:22Alex Cranz?

  Okay, you can buy for like $50 now, it's so cheap. You can just get a little player and yet you plug it into.

• 56:29Nilay Patel?

  A USB-C Blu-ray player.

• 56:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  Is it USB-C?

• 56:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, well, no, mine's USB. Mine's USB, but they got USB-C ones now too, because I had to walk my sister through buying one.

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, okay, okay, okay.

• 56:39Alex Cranz?

  Because she still.

• 56:40Nilay Patel?

  Because she's also a player.

• 56:42Alex Cranz?

  She still listens to CDs.

• 56:44Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 56:45Alex Cranz?

  And I was like, I was like, you don't need a disc player. Like, she held on to her iBook for years, because she was like, I need a CD player. And I was like.

• 56:52Nilay Patel?

  Your sister's my favorite person.

• 56:53Alex Cranz?

  No, she's the worst, but.

• 56:57Alex Cranz?

  But, no, so you plug in your little cheap Blu-ray player.

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 57:01Alex Cranz?

  You put the disc in, you have to have, I can't remember the name of the app, but you have to have this one, because it's been like at least a year since I did this. You have this one app that like removes any, um.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  DRM?

• 57:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, any barriers.

• 57:13David Pierce?

  What year would you say this app was most recently updated?

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  It enables media freedom.

• 57:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, exactly. And then you just use handbrake. Like, you rip it and then you put it into handbrake.

• 57:28Nilay Patel?

  So you're further compressing it with handbrake?

• 57:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:31Nilay Patel?

  So you're accomplishing very little for all this effort.

• 57:33Alex Cranz?

  Because when I did uncompressed, it was great. And then I put it on my Plex server. And my Plex server is like, what are you doing to me?

• 57:40Nilay Patel?

  Video Shield started smoking.

• 57:41Alex Cranz?

  It's like on fire. It was like, I'm coming to kill you right now.

• 57:45Nilay Patel?

  Why not just play the Blu-rays?

• 57:47Alex Cranz?

  Because I have to like stand up.

• 57:50Nilay Patel?

  This is why I have dozens of Blu-ray discs that I have never watched. And I only see them when I move and I have to pick them up and carry them. And I'm like, why do I have these? Yeah, but you keep buying them. I need the best quality. For media freedom. For archival reasons.

• 58:03Alex Cranz?

  What happens if you lose internet? You go somewhere without internet?

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  I just want to point out that you described your process for this. And you are recompressing the Blu-rays.

• 58:16Alex Cranz?

  It's not as good, but it's still better than if I watched it on Netflix or any of the other places.

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  If you've ever tried to watch Justified on Amazon Prime, then you know why you would do this. The video quality on the stream is just terrible.

• 58:27David Pierce?

  I feel like you're doing a lot of work that you could just buy it like on iTunes and download it to your computer and you've done the same thing.

• 58:34Alex Cranz?

  It's not quite as good a lot of times.

• 58:36Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, Tom Cruise, if you're listening and you want to come on the show unless you're Alex about piracy and why that's hurting Hollywood, doors open.

• 58:44Alex Cranz?

  He would be on my side because I'm still getting the Blu-rays. Sometimes I watch them.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  You think Tom Cruise would be on the side of you should buy a $50 USB-C Blu-ray drive?

• 58:54Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  Remove the DRM and then recompress Top Gun Maverick.

• 59:00Alex Cranz?

  I got this. Like, Tom and I would vibe. It'd be fine.

• 59:04Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited for Tom to be on the show. If anyone out there knows Tom, I'm sure he's listening. If anyone out there knows Tom, tell us what DRM removal tool you use and then we'll let you come on the podcast.

• 59:13David Pierce?

  And if you'd like to come do a 30-minute PSA about how to turn off motion smoothing on your TV ahead of watching Top Gun Maverick, we're here for that.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  One of my favorite parts just about like modern life at this moment is like everyone is constantly using computers. And every now and again, I like to imagine Tom Cruise like confronting stage manager on his iPad.

• 59:33Nilay Patel?

  Like it's just like you can't, none of that works together, you know? Like, he's like, uh, I gotta send an email. And like, oh, he's looking at the same weird Gmail interface as the rest of us.

• 59:44Alex Cranz?

  Wait, you think Tom Cruise sends emails?

• 59:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:48Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  Unhinged, all caps.

• 59:50Alex Cranz?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 59:51Nilay Patel?

  Three sentence emails.

• 59:51Alex Cranz?

  Absolutely not. He has somebody he tells.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 59:56Alex Cranz?

  Like, no, he shouts at someone.

• 59:57David Pierce?

  No, I'm with Eli. He shouts at Siri is what he does. Tom Cruise is a voice dictation monster.

• 1:00:02Nilay Patel?

  So he uses Mail App. Just play this game. It's incredibly fun. Imagine any Hollywood celebrity you can think of.

• 1:00:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  And be like, Kim Kardashian sometimes is like, these Google search results are full of ads because everyone is having the same experiences all the time. Like, it's all the same. Kanye West is like, huh, I gotta get on Instagram. It's all videos now.

• 1:00:26Alex Cranz?

  They have assistants who do that. They have a Google assistant.

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  No, Kanye is like out there being like, I don't have OnlyFans, I have Reddit. Like, I've heard him say those words. And it's all the same. I just, it's, we should just do an entire episode of the Verchess where you imagine celebrities using one. All right, Liam wants me to wrap this up because I said OnlyFans. We gotta take a break. We're gonna come back. We have a little lightning round. We'll be right back.

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• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Lightning round. A lot of little news this week. I just mentioned Gmail, so I gotta mention this one. So politicians want to send you emails. You may have gotten these emails and you might have thought to yourself, wow, these emails are all written like scams. Turns out, Google's filters have agreed with you for many years and politicians' emails have been filtered into your spam.

• 1:02:41David Pierce?

  And some politicians think Google is perpetrating a giant scheme to send some people to your inbox and some to spam. Shadow ban. Exactly.

• 1:02:51Nilay Patel?

  This is like a real thing that happens. So they yelled at Google enough, and so Google concocted a plan by which politicians could request to be exempted from Google's spam filters. And today, the Federal Election Commission said, yep, that's fine, you can do your plan. This is like one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Like, what emails do I want the least? Any politician asking me for money.

• 1:03:14Alex Cranz?

  I still get asked by Wendy Davis for money and to vote in Texas. Still, I don't want those emails. I marked them as spam on purpose.

• 1:03:24Nilay Patel?

  Now they're gonna get through. And it's like the worst political pressure campaign you can think of.

• 1:03:28David Pierce?

  I think if politicians should be able to request not to be spam, we as users should be able to request not to be emailed by them. Like, if Gmail can control this that cleanly on one side, it should be able to give us a toggle that says, no, thank you politicians, goodbye.

• 1:03:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, filter all politicians.

• 1:03:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:45Alex Cranz?

  All politicians.

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  I would push that button in a heartbeat.

• 1:03:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, 100%. The texts, like if I could do that on my phone, like, oh, we know that this is somebody texting you to donate money to your local senator.

• 1:03:57David Pierce?

  Somehow I got on Nancy Pelosi's list as a person named Freddie. And I get a text message probably five times a week being like, Freddie, this is urgent. Give me $6.

• 1:04:07Nilay Patel?

  A real clever online harassment gambit is people try to sign me up for like all the things. And now they're all filtered. And so they still try to do it. I'm like, no, no, you don't understand. This was five years ago.

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  No, you don't understand. I was already signed up as Freddie for Nancy Pelosi's email list. Like, you can't hurt me anymore.

• 1:04:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, Richard, you wrote about proof of stake this week. This is like a true line, and we're just bouncing around. Ethereum for years has promised a switch from proof of work, which uses a lot of energy, to proof of stake, which is a different method of mining and validating transactions in the network, so it's more energy efficient. I forced Richard to listen to a hardcore Ethereum engineering conference call today. What did you learn?

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  I listened to an hour and a half of people talking about the blockchain and blocks and everything they... I don't even know what words they were using. None of them were in the Bible.

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  I think the... I think what they ended up saying was that they've completed their last test merge of a network, and it mostly worked. There were a few glitches that they're still working out, but they think they're ready to do it for real, to move the full network over to this proof of stake system that's going to use so much less energy. And they have basically a date.

• 1:05:17David Pierce?

  Haven't they been saying almost exactly that for like three years?

• 1:05:20Nilay Patel?

  Five.

• 1:05:20David Pierce?

  Five years, okay.

• 1:05:21Speaker 05

  For years and years and years. But now they have a date for the final, final, final, final, final merge.

• 1:05:29Alex Cranz?

  When? When is it?

• 1:05:30Speaker 05

  The terminal date, the TTD, is September 15th or 16th, depending on when the block gets mined.

• 1:05:38David Pierce?

  Perfect.

• 1:05:39Nilay Patel?

  So maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't. I think everyone knows I'm on record saying this will never happen. Too complicated, never gonna do it. If it does happen, here's the wild part. That is horrible news for AMD and Nvidia.

• 1:05:51Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:05:51Nilay Patel?

  The requirements for mining validating will go down. A bunch of Ethereum miners will flood the market with used GPUs. The demand for GPUs will go down, but then that's also like when AMD and Nvidia will have their new GPUs coming out. And then everyone often make a big decision about whether you want to use a GPU that's been used for mining for years, which maybe you don't because things have been rotten, red hot for so long. But like already like the analysts, like Morgan Stanley is like, bad news coming for GPU vendors, for chipmakers, because Ethereum is going to proof of stake.

• 1:06:21Alex Cranz?

  Didn't like Nvidia?

• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  If they ever do.

• 1:06:23Alex Cranz?

  Didn't Nvidia go out of its way to be like, stop using us? Did I make that up?

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  They put in the flag, but.

• 1:06:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but people just ignore it.

• 1:06:30David Pierce?

  That accomplished nothing.

• 1:06:31Nilay Patel?

  I think it accomplished nothing.

• 1:06:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Alex Cranz?

  Okay. Sorry Nvidia, sucks for you.

• 1:06:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think they got around that in like a day. Yeah.

• 1:06:37Alex Cranz?

  They tried.

• 1:06:38Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. But I would just say like that's, to me, it's, there's the Ethereum story, which would be cool. And then like, I'm happy if anything uses less energy, but then like the main complaints about NFTs, of which Richard has many.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  Right. The big one is like, this is a lot of power to use for Pokemon. We should cool it. And that, that thing goes away, which I think is interesting.

• 1:07:03David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, the, the switch to proof of stake is, has like, everyone in the crypto community is like, any problem you have, anything you don't like about crypto or Web 3, proof of stake fixes it.

• 1:07:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13David Pierce?

  It's like, this is like the magic bullet that will make all of this work and be viable.

• 1:07:18Speaker 05

  Well, if it weren't an environmental nightmare, the thing that would be left is that all of their applications are useless and do things that no one wants. But they would get rid of this one problem.

• 1:07:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. That's, now it's environmentally friendly to have an app that no one uses or wants.

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:07:33David Pierce?

  It's perfect.

• 1:07:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful.

• 1:07:34Nilay Patel?

  It's, we'll see. We're gonna keep tracking it. I think I'm with Richard, even money on they push it over six months.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  It, it, it has always been delayed. There's no way that it doesn't get delayed at least once.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  We will eat crow if it, we'll have Richard back on and he can announce that Ethereum has switched to proof of stake. You're, you're here with me. Look in my eyes. You have to come back on and announce that it's switched.

• 1:07:52David Pierce?

  We will force him to buy an NFT on air.

• 1:07:55Nilay Patel?

  I don't think we could do that. I think what we will do is we're starting my NFT era.

• 1:08:00Speaker 05

  I'm going to become a web three booster.

• 1:08:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Speaker 05

  I'm going to all the conferences.

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  There we go.

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  I'm one of those guys.

• 1:08:05Nilay Patel?

  A bunch of Apple stuff. Rumors, rumors, rumors. Sounds like the next iPhone might be more expensive.

• 1:08:11Alex Cranz?

  Like 15%. But, but that number, the 15% is like all the iPhones together. So some iPhones could be way more expensive. Some could be like $5.

• 1:08:21Nilay Patel?

  I bet they do a super expensive iPhone Pro.

• 1:08:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24Nilay Patel?

  Like if you're looking at Samsung being like $1,800, you're like, yeah, we could, we can charge.

• 1:08:29Alex Cranz?

  What's an $1,800 iPhone?

• 1:08:31Nilay Patel?

  It's Pro, dude. It's huge. Nine inch screen, but they call it an iPhone.

• 1:08:37Alex Cranz?

  It's just the iPad mini with more cameras on the back.

• 1:08:40Nilay Patel?

  They'll do like a riff on the A series processor that like makes it more like an M1. They're like, add another camera lens, like.

• 1:08:45Alex Cranz?

  Ugh.

• 1:08:46Nilay Patel?

  You can see how they could just get you to $1,800 phone.

• 1:08:49Alex Cranz?

  I just, I'm upset because I always try to justify why I need a Pro and I always do. And if they do that, I'll be like, that's stupid. That's too stupid. I can't do that.

• 1:08:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Alex Cranz?

  And that's a bummer for me personally, because I like to be like, yeah, it's my Pro.

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the rumor this year, right, is that they're gonna do a max size regular iPhone? Because everyone loves a big, cheap screen. Mm-hmm. And so for the longest time, you ended up buying the Pro because you just wanted the bigger screen. So you gotta really scoot something over there to make it worth it.

• 1:09:13Alex Cranz?

  I would buy the Pro because it had the smallest screen, too. That just the regular Pro is always smaller than the others.

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna put out there that revealed preferences say, people say shit like that all the time.

• 1:09:24Alex Cranz?

  Where's Allison? We gotta get Allison.

• 1:09:25Speaker 05

  No, my wife owns the Pro specifically for that reason. Because it's a slightly smaller phone for her hands.

• 1:09:32Nilay Patel?

  Say that over again.

• 1:09:33Speaker 05

  My wife, my wife owns the iPhone Pro specifically for that reason. She, she needs a phone that is slightly smaller to fit her hands and bought it.

• 1:09:39Alex Cranz?

  Thank you.

• 1:09:40Speaker 05

  I was, I was surprised, but it, it works better for her.

• 1:09:43Alex Cranz?

  If we're not getting Allison on the line, we can get your wife on the line to support me here.

• 1:09:47Nilay Patel?

  Everyone says they want a small phone. Some people buy small phones. Most people are like.

• 1:09:51Alex Cranz?

  Three.

• 1:09:52Nilay Patel?

  They get into the store and like, what's the biggest, cheapest screen you have? Liam is holding up his phone like.

• 1:09:57Alex Cranz?

  It's small. It's a small phone.

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  He will presumably return it in two weeks. I'm just.

• 1:10:03Alex Cranz?

  Don't do it.

• 1:10:03Nilay Patel?

  He's doing the full John Cusack in the window right now with his phone above his head.

• 1:10:07Alex Cranz?

  It was very romantic.

• 1:10:10Nilay Patel?

  AirPods cases with USB C, not this year, but next, it sounds like.

• 1:10:15David Pierce?

  Seems perfectly logical.

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  If they move the iPhone to USB C, then they have to move the AirPods.

• 1:10:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  That seems obvious.

• 1:10:20David Pierce?

  Even if they don't, I mean, it's like, Apple has rapidly moved everything else to USB C. And there's no like giant accessories ecosystem for the AirPods. So that seems like a really easy switch for them to make. Like, the case they're gonna make, the case they've made for not switching from Lightning is like, we have a big ecosystem, people have chargers, people have stuff that they like to use. It's a total nonsense argument, but that's the argument that you cannot make that argument about AirPods. Like, I have cool stuff, I plug my AirPods case into, is like, not a thing that people say.

• 1:10:48David Pierce?

  So like, it does seem like we are headed towards a world where the iPhone is also on USB C, but I don't necessarily see this as like a harbinger of that. This is just like a thing they're gonna do.

• 1:10:57Alex Cranz?

  Is this related at all to the EU saying everybody's gotta go USB C?

• 1:11:01David Pierce?

  I assume so. I mean, that's like, that's gonna be part of where this all has to end up, right?

• 1:11:06Speaker 05

  Even if they go portless on the iPhone, which I don't think they would do, you would still wanna move the AirPods to USB C because you would have no reason to ship Lightning cables anymore.

• 1:11:15David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:15Alex Cranz?

  Well, you would if you kept the AirPods on it.

• 1:11:19David Pierce?

  No, they'd rather sell you really, really expensive USB C cables.

• 1:11:23Alex Cranz?

  That's true. Hundred dollars.

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of Apple, one last thing. iOS 16 has added a battery percentage meter.

• 1:11:31Alex Cranz?

  It's a go.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's really weird. So you can, you can always get it. You can get it right now in Control Center.

• 1:11:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Nilay Patel?

  But they took it away because of Notch on the main screen, so now they've added it back. But the thing stays full all the time, it just has a number in it.

• 1:11:42David Pierce?

  Yeah. So it'll say, like, in the, in the photo we have in our story, it says 49, but the thing is all filled up. It literally makes it look like you have 49 batteries.

• 1:11:54Nilay Patel?

  Something's going on with Apple design right now that is deeply unsettled. Like, hardware design on a real high note.

• 1:12:01David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, laptops are better than ever, M1 chips, M2 chips, they're like, Apple hardware engineering can do no wrong. And the software engineer's like, we're drunk.

• 1:12:10Alex Cranz?

  Piles.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  Piles of windows. Have you ever thought about 49 batteries on your phone? I don't know what's going on there. But it's back, which is good. Talking about Sonos ever so slightly. Bad quarter for them. Here's the fascinating part. They delayed their next product, which Chris Welch believes would be the sub mini. That kind of makes sense.

• 1:12:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, which Chris Welch has been leaking relentlessly for months.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  But this is really interesting. So Sonos' sales are all TV accessory sales.

• 1:12:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  TV sales are down, which means Sonos' soundbar sales are down. So like, there's just a lot of thinking like, maybe all the upgrades happened already? Like, all the work-from-home pandemic upgrades happened? And these companies are all going to be hurting for the next couple of years because there's no more upgrade cycle for any of this stuff.

• 1:12:56David Pierce?

  I've been thinking a lot about what Adam Mosseri said, I think, last week, that like, the assumption that all these companies made during the pandemic was, it accelerated these trends, but we're never going back to the way that we were before. And actually, what might be happening is we are currently in the midst of going back to the way that we were before.

• 1:13:12Nilay Patel?

  Even farther.

• 1:13:13David Pierce?

  A hundred percent. Which is super interesting to me. And I feel like, is like, this is the kind of thing I think we're going to see a lot of places. Where it's like, people either bought stuff that they're not going to upgrade for a long time. Or they're just going to go back to the way that they were when they were allowed to go outside again. And that like, the amount of time we spend using these things is going to go down. That we're not, people don't use Zoom as like a normal life behavior. Now we use Zoom because we have to. And now that we don't have to, people are going to stop.

• 1:13:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Alex Cranz?

  We saw that with like Netflix. That was part of their earnings narrative. Is that like, yeah, everybody subscribed. And now they don't subscribe because they can go outside and see people.

• 1:13:48David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like, I think you're right, that like, the Sonos thing is just like, everybody who was going to buy one of these, just did.

• 1:13:56Nilay Patel?

  And now that you have one, like, you don't have anywhere to put anymore. It's like the Amazon problem, where you buy one thing, and suddenly it shows you advertisements for only that product. Every single time you go to Amazon. But I bought new speakers. I bought a racing wheel. I bought a keyboard, gaming headsets, progressively better headphones. I have them all now.

• 1:14:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Nilay Patel?

  I, for like, the next four years, I don't need to purchase any other things. But I know you, and you will.

• 1:14:21David Pierce?

  You will.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah. I've known you for a long time.

• 1:14:23David Pierce?

  I have one racing wheel, and you can have two racing wheels.

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  When am I expected to carry it from upstairs to downstairs?

• 1:14:31Nilay Patel?

  I think that's like actually a real hard part for Sonos, right? Like they're in this big patent lawsuit with Google. Google just filed another version of the patent lawsuit for really dumb stuff. For how, when you have multiple speakers in a room that you detect which, which one's closer to you. And that's when you light up the voice, that's Google's patent they're filing in Sonos. They should all just sell these lawsuits. But Sonos suing Google, say Google tried to crush them, they're on, so all this stuff. That's like one big distraction. And then on the flip side of it, you've got maybe all the TV upgrades happened and our, the biggest part of our business is selling upgrades on their TVs, which are soundbars. So now you gotta like get more speakers in more rooms or figure out more service revenue on the speakers. You have, Sonos owners famously persnickety about being asked for additional money. It's, I think it's just a hard place.

• 1:15:15Alex Cranz?

  Or make better stuff.

• 1:15:17David Pierce?

  I think it's not even that. I think it's, they, they need to make new stuff. Like, like Sonos' thing has been to basically, they're like, we're gonna make a soundbar and then our next product is gonna be a cheaper soundbar. And then our product after that is gonna be a more expensive soundbar. But if everybody who's gonna have a soundbar already has a soundbar, like you have to go, you have to go invent a new market of things that people are going to do.

• 1:15:34Speaker 05

  They're also in a situation where the TV manufacturers-

• 1:15:37Alex Cranz?

  That's all I wanna buy.

• 1:15:38Speaker 05

  Suddenly don't wanna sell TVs anymore. They wanna make money on the services and the commissions of streaming, streaming services and advertisements. And selling TVs is suddenly not the biggest part of their business.

• 1:15:48Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they've been, TVs have been dealing with this problem for a while, right? Like they had this big, everybody went out and got, moved to high def and then nobody wanted to move to 4K because it was stupid. And so they kept being like, what are reasons to get people to move to 4K?

• 1:16:00Nilay Patel?

  It was HDR.

• 1:16:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And then that was kind of successful, but not totally successful. And so they're, they're always, they've always been looking that we need a revenue stream besides just selling TVs because selling TVs is not enough to keep the TV lights on.

• 1:16:15Nilay Patel?

  You missed a turn there, which is they all tried to convince us for a long time that 3D TV would drive an upgrade.

• 1:16:19Alex Cranz?

  We don't talk about that time.

• 1:16:21Nilay Patel?

  Richard and I lived through that time together.

• 1:16:22Speaker 05

  3D TV was underappreciated. It's a great way to watch NBA games.

• 1:16:25Alex Cranz?

  That is incorrect.

• 1:16:25Nilay Patel?

  What are you talking about?

• 1:16:27Speaker 05

  You can see the angle, like the, the three quarter angle of the courts. So that when people pass and when people shoot, it's very difficult to see in 3D.

• 1:16:33Nilay Patel?

  How many NBA games are ever broadcast in 3D?

• 1:16:34David Pierce?

  I watched all of them. Are you the person now-

• 1:16:36Nilay Patel?

  Was it six?

• 1:16:37Speaker 05

  It was a few.

• 1:16:39David Pierce?

  So now all these leagues who are like, put on your Oculus Quest and you can watch it like you're on the site. It's you, you're the one watching.

• 1:16:46Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:16:48Alex Cranz?

  The confidence, like, just the sureness of that.

• 1:16:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, we'll hang out a virtual All-Star game next year. It'll be great.

• 1:16:55Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be sick. Yeah, I will never, this is my favorite CS story, and then we'll wrap this up because we're way over. Do you remember the CS where Sony had Taylor Swift perform? It was years ago, and this was before Taylor Swift was like Taylor Swift.

• 1:17:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:08Nilay Patel?

  It was early on, so I go in Vegas in the convention center, I sit down, and they're like, Sony recording artist, Taylor Swift. And they gave us all glasses, and we were not meant to watch actual Taylor Swift. We were meant to watch 3D TVs broadcasting Taylor, who was right there. And they're like, look at this incredible demonstration of Sony's end-to-end 3D broadcast capabilities. And I was like, I'm gonna watch Taylor Swift, like, she's right there.

• 1:17:40Alex Cranz?

  How was it?

• 1:17:41Nilay Patel?

  It was incredible, but like, they were like blowing glitter everywhere, like, the whole thing. And like, literally, they were like, please watch the TVs. I was like, no, absolutely not.

• 1:17:54Alex Cranz?

  They should have had her behind like a curtain, and then slowly raise the curtain. You're like, oh, she's been here all along.

• 1:18:00Nilay Patel?

  It was like one of the strangest periods in all consumer technology, and they were like, people are gonna buy the shit out of 3D TVs.

• 1:18:07David Pierce?

  Do you think they told Taylor? I'm just trying to imagine the pitch where they're like, Taylor Swift, so you're Taylor Swift, right? You're Taylor Swift, do you want to come perform? But we're going to actively tell everyone to not watch while you perform.

• 1:18:20Nilay Patel?

  It was utterly, this was like the

• 1:18:21David Pierce?

  She's like, deal.

• 1:18:22Nilay Patel?

  This was the high point of Sony CS, like, they never, after that, they're like, yeah, we've got a handful of new action cameras.

• 1:18:31Nilay Patel?

  If you like PlayStations, there's one over there.

• 1:18:34Alex Cranz?

  That short throw projector they show every year.

• 1:18:37Nilay Patel?

  They love the short throw projector.

• 1:18:37Alex Cranz?

  It's the same one every time, they're like, is this a new one? No. But look, it's cool, isn't it? No. It's been there for five years.

• 1:18:45Nilay Patel?

  They have that, they have that special room.

• 1:18:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Nilay Patel?

  It's like dolled up like an ultra minimalist living room, and they're like, this projector is only eight inches from the wall, and it's like, I don't know who has rooms like this. And it costs a hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  I will never forget that. It was just like one of the strangest moments.

• 1:19:03Alex Cranz?

  How much do you think she got paid for that?

• 1:19:05Nilay Patel?

  Enough so that they had no budget for anything for years to come.

• 1:19:08David Pierce?

  What do you think, what do you think it's like when Taylor Swift sends emails?

• 1:19:12Nilay Patel?

  This is what I mean. She's on Tumblr. Like, she occasionally is like, why haven't they ever updated the Tumblr interface? Like, she has to be.

• 1:19:20Alex Cranz?

  She definitely has like a custom signature. Like, she thought about that. She put effort into it.

• 1:19:24David Pierce?

  With like a picture at the bottom?

• 1:19:25Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:25David Pierce?

  And like a, like a really nice inspirational quote.

• 1:19:29Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no, I guess probably the inspirational quote.

• 1:19:31Nilay Patel?

  Taylor Swift buying a new MacBook to check out Tumblr and being like, why is there so much garbage in the dock? I'm never gonna use numbers. Like, everyone has to have these experiences now.

• 1:19:41David Pierce?

  She's probably mad at Catalyst. She's like, my apps, they don't work like they're supposed to.

• 1:19:45Nilay Patel?

  My god. She's like, these electronic apps use so much power. Everyone has these experiences.

• 1:19:51Alex Cranz?

  Just sitting there when her Chrome tab hangs.

• 1:19:54Nilay Patel?

  Liam really wants us to stop doing celebrities using computers. I've never seen him want us to talk about something else.

• 1:20:00Alex Cranz?

  Well, we're, we're stealing from the episode we're gonna do all about that. Sorry.

• 1:20:03Nilay Patel?

  One full, Liam, one full hour of just us imagining celebrities doing mundane shit with their computers. People, he's, he's the rapid up.

• 1:20:13Alex Cranz?

  Do you think she put it in tent mode at any point?

• 1:20:17Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. He's just like Barack Obama, being like, hey, Google. And Google's like, I've set a timer for you. Like, these things happen to everyone now. All right. That's enough.

• 1:20:27Alex Cranz?

  The common denominator.

• 1:20:29Nilay Patel?

  One, yeah.

• 1:20:29Alex Cranz?

  It's universal.

• 1:20:30Nilay Patel?

  The common denominator is like shitty user experience. Like, you can't escape it. It doesn't matter how famous you are. All right. I think we're way over. I mean, there's other stuff. I mean, I want to talk about this 97-inch OLED from LG that they claim can produce 5.1 audio.

• 1:20:47Alex Cranz?

  Sure.

• 1:20:48Nilay Patel?

  By vibrating the screen. But I think we have to go see it in person to believe it's true.

• 1:20:53Alex Cranz?

  I think we have to do a lot more than that to believe it's true.

• 1:20:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Sure. It's like soundbars.

• 1:21:00Nilay Patel?

  I have a Sony screen TV that does that thing.

• 1:21:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, soundbars are always like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, the Sono Soundbar is great. It'll do 5.1. No, it's three speakers in front of you. It'll do three speakers in front of you. That's what it'll do. It's three. 3.0. Don't lie.

• 1:21:19Alex Cranz?

  I mean, yeah.

• 1:21:20Nilay Patel?

  I want to believe it. I want to believe it's real. All right, we're way over. Liam is incredibly mad at me and I've run out of celebrities that I whose names I can't remember. If you can think of a celebrity that uses technology, please email Liam directly. He wants to hear about it more than anyone in the entire world.

• 1:21:35Alex Cranz?

  Maggie Smith accidentally hitting the touch bar.

• 1:21:39Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:21:39Alex Cranz?

  And activating.

• 1:21:40Nilay Patel?

  This is what I'm saying.

• 1:21:41Alex Cranz?

  Sorry. Sorry, Liam.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  If you do a good impression of a celebrity using technology, please call the Verge hotline and do that impression for us. We will play it on the show.

• 1:21:49Nilay Patel?

  Dame Judi Dench accidentally engaging control center. Like, this has definitely happened.

• 1:21:55Nilay Patel?

  1,000%. She's like.

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  She just walks around with her flashlight on 24/7.

• 1:22:01Nilay Patel?

  She's like, oh my God, what are our focus notes? Like, it's real.

• 1:22:06Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're wrapping this up. It's all over. We've gone way over. Richard, thanks for being here, man. He's real.

• 1:22:11Alex Cranz?

  He's real.

• 1:22:12Nilay Patel?

  He's a real person.

• 1:22:13Speaker 05

  I exist. You can find me on the internet at RJCC. I have mediocre Apex Legends highlights clips to show you.

• 1:22:19Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 1:22:19Speaker 00

  There it is.

• 1:22:20Nilay Patel?

  You can tweet Alex. She's Alex H. Krantz. David is at Pierce. I'm at Reckless. That's it. That's the Vergecast tracking.

• 1:22:34Speaker 00

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Moreno. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:23:02Speaker 08

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• 1:23:49Speaker 09

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