HomePod (2023) review, the Steam Deck one year later, and faking your death online

Today on the flagship podcast of removable power cords: 02:14 - The Verge’s Alex Cranz, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Chris Welch, and Nilay Patel discuss the updated version of the Apple HomePod. Apple’s new HomePod plays it safe How to use the Apple HomePod’s temperature and humidity sensors 43:23 - Katharine Trendacosta joins the show to discuss why and how faking your death has been a common practice in online communities. A Fake Death in Romancelandia She created a fake Twitter persona — then she killed it with COVID-19 1:05:19 - Verge senior editor Sean Hollister gives an updated review of Valve’s Steam Deck, which had a buggy start in 2022. The Steam Deck wasn’t born ready, but it’s ready now 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.

• 0:02Alex Cranz?

  Hello, you're listening to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of removable power cords. I'm your friend Alex Cranz, and you know, it's kind of nice here in New York City today because it's snowing, technically. Big fat flakes, but it's super warm, so they're not actually sticking. But it's a nice change of pace because if you didn't know, until yesterday, North Texas had actually gotten more snow than New York City this year. Absolutely wild stuff. More Wild is the show we've got coming up today. It's going to be a lot of fun. I'm talking with Chris Welch and Jen Tuohy and also Neelai. And we're going to be talking all about the HomePod's place in the smart home ecosystem, what it means for Matter, what it means for home theaters. It's a lot of fun.

• 0:46Alex Cranz?

  I'm also going to be talking to Catherine Trendacosta from the EFF, all about faking your death online. And finally, hanging out with my good friend Sean Hollister. We're going to be talking about your favorite gadget, my favorite gadget, everybody's favorite gadget, the Steam Deck. It's going to be a super fun, super nerdy time. All of that's happening right after this. I wonder if I could do a snow angel in this. I probably should not.

• 1:14Speaker 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.

• 1:59Speaker 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.

• 2:45Alex Cranz?

  Okay, welcome back. Apple's big HomePod has returned. The second gen HomePod is not that much different from the original, but it has added a couple of updates, including for like audio, for the smart home, even some of the home theater stuff. So I had to get together with Jennifer Pattinson Tuohy, who has been reviewing it from like the smart home perspective, and Chris Welch, who's been reviewing it from like that audio nerd perspective, and then Neelai Patel, who reviewed the original one way back in 2018. Let's get to the convo.

• 3:21Alex Cranz?

  I've got three incredible people with me, well, two incredible people and Neelai with me to talk about the new HomePod. Neelai Patel is here. Hi, Neelai.

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna just interpret this the other way, which is that y'all are incredible, but I'm fabulous.

• 3:38Alex Cranz?

  I love that. That is exactly what I meant.

• 3:40Nilay Patel?

  You gotta look inward to your own heart and find your own validation in life. That's a real lesson when you hit 40.

• 3:45Alex Cranz?

  Jen Tuohy is here.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Hello. I'm very pleased to be here. Also feeling fabulous.

• 3:50Nilay Patel?

  There you go. See? Welcome to my team, Jen. We're the fun ones.

• 3:54Alex Cranz?

  And Chris Welch is here.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Hello, I'm surrounded by three HomePods right now.

• 3:59Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  They're taking over.

• 4:01Alex Cranz?

  Okay, well, this will surprise no one. We're talking about the HomePod today. Jen and Chris have a review. They're up on the site right now. You can go read it and see their their feelings, or you can listen to this.

• 4:11Nilay Patel?

  Or both. This is like a like a spatial audio DVD commentary. What you need to do as you're reading a review, play this podcast from three or four HomePods placed strategically throughout your home.

• 4:23Alex Cranz?

  And we're slowly all creeping up on you. It's gonna be great. All right. So so this is kind of a big deal for them because we thought the HomePod was dead, or at least pretty done. And now there's a whole new one. How different is it, Jen, from like a smart home perspective?

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Well, from the smart home side, it's actually very different from the original HomePod. It's identical to the HomePod Mini. There's like, no difference, other than $200. Well, the one thing that's different, I take that back, is one, one small but large difference is speed. So the new HomePod has the fast, has a fastest processor. It has the S7, whereas the HomePod Mini has the S5. And that is the one thing I definitely noticed that the new HomePod, the HomePod 2, responded very snappily to my Siri requests.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Very few on it, or hmms, compared to the Mini, which, you know, has, it's getting a little long in the tooth, you know, it's turning three this year. So there's, you know, what you would expect to see a bit more speed, but feature parity is identical between the two. There are a lot of new features, though. There's a lot of sound focus outside of audio sound, which Chris, I'm sure is gonna regale us with. But there's a new feature coming in the spring. That's actually not here yet, which is gonna turn the Mini and the HomePod 2 into a smoke alarm and CO- Monoxide alarm detector, not sound detector. So it's not actually turning into a smoke alarm, but it will listen for your smoke alarms and your carbon monoxide alarms because they have unique signatures.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  And that will come in the spring and mean you'll get sent an alert to your phone if one of your HomePods in your home hears an alarm going off, which is a very useful feature that all the other smart home speakers already do, which is kind of a theme in my review is that this is really Siri and the HomePod kind of playing catch up in the smart home space and adding a lot of features that are great and super handy and that everyone else already did.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  So, but that's good for Apple Home users who are, you know, a dedicated bunch and who don't necessarily want to switch ecosystems to get some of these features. You know, we finally have multiple timers, which has, those have been around for a little while now. And those have been actually around for a year or so, but they, they work great and you can name your timers now. Oh, wow. Which is, yeah, very handy. You can even dismiss a timer from one room if the HomePod is in the another room, which is nice. You don't have to yell. There's a lot of little things like that, but just a kind of little quality of life features, smart home features that have come to the new HomePod and to the HomePod Mini. And, you know, you can, one thing I really like, which is unique to the HomePod is the Find My capability.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  So you can now track your family just with your voice. You know, where's my child? Where's my husband? You know, you don't have to get your phone out and like put effort in.

• 7:27Nilay Patel?

  That's the next great Apple commercial is just someone screaming, where's my husband? And a speaker lighting up and saying the answer.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  He's outside.

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  Do you ever think about the people who spend their lives like laying underground, under ocean, fiber optic cables on ships or the engineers who spend their entire lives developing the next process technology for like a microchip like the S7?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  And like one day they wake up and like, it's all in service of people being able to set two timers at once. And that's what we're going to be excited about tomorrow.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  It's exciting.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  Siri in particular, every time it comes up, I'm like, this is all we get? Like all this work?

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Two timers.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, you can name one timer and you can scream, where's my husband? And that is the pinnacle of assistant technology.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  You can do lots of timers. Actually I did up to five at once, which was quite exciting.

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  See, take that cruise ship people. So much reanilism.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Well, we do also have the temperature and humidity sensing, which we've actually written about quite a lot on the site this week. But that's, that's going to be in the home pod too. And I've been finding that really kind of fun. Cause it's cold right now in South Carolina, which is very unusual. So I've been using it to keep my rooms temperate. And it's worked really well, although I was talking with our deputy editor, Dan, who is also a big home pod, Apple home user. And he's been trying to set up the humidity sensor to do things, which I don't really need to do in South Carolina. Cause South Carolina is humidity personified. And he's not been having any luck with that. So there's still a bit of testing we need to do to sort of, you know, put that through its paces.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  We've only, only had these diddy little devices for a few days now. I'm holding mine up. It's actually quite hefty. You could do good arm workouts.

• 9:14Alex Cranz?

  Is that what you've been doing, Chris? You've got two of them. So you can do both arms at the same time?

• 9:18Speaker 04

  Yes, just benching those every night.

• 9:20Nilay Patel?

  It's like the rock, you know, the rock curls as children. I've never seen that. It's very funny.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Home pod curls.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  Jane, can I ask you this question? It seems like there's the updates to Apple home and sort of matter coming along for the ride. So the Apple home and home kit ecosystem is getting a big upgrade. And there was a software update to existing home pods and home pod many that sort of exposed the sensors, added more capabilities. What is required in that suite of new features to get a new home pod for? Cause I think the line for me is really blurry. It doesn't seem like the hardware of the new home pod is required for a lot of the new features of Apple home that are coming out now.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  So in terms of matter, you don't need a new home pod for matter. In fact, the original home pod will be a matter controller. It will not be a thread border router though. It doesn't have a thread radio in. And that is something you might want with matter, because a lot of, or some new devices are coming out that use thread. And Apple home is kind of leaning more on thread as opposed to Bluetooth.

• 10:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  For a lot of its connectivity, which is a good move because Bluetooth in the smart home has never been a, a great experience.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  We know Bluetooth is just a hot mess.

• 10:33Nilay Patel?

  Next year. All right. Next year.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  So I, you know, I definitely see Apple Home moving away from reliance on Bluetooth. And Thread is really where they're putting the, the eggs in the basket. And Thread is still kind of a nascent technology. It's, it's been around for almost a decade, but this, the infrastructure is still not quite there to support a strong Thread network. I've been talking to a different, number of different companies who are all producing Thread border routers, which is part of Matter. They're two distinct technologies that work hand in hand, Matter and Thread. And the problem is right now, if you have like a Google Home Thread border router, which it's the Nest Hub Max is one, and you also have, say, an Echo 4 Gen, which is going to be a border router in the next few months. They'll all create their own separate Oh no. Thread networks, which kind of defeats the purpose of Thread.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  So we're waiting, everyone promises me that this is all going to be fixed soon. And that eventually all of these devices will work together in sort of harmony in your home, which is, you know, the promise of Matter. So I would recommend if you're on fence and you don't have a HomePod or an Apple TV that supports Thread and you're looking at buying one, it's worth having a device with a Thread border router if you want to work in the smart home. Because it, it will, it's future proof in your smart home. But you don't need one necessarily today. So it's interesting because Apple came out with two new Apple TVs and didn't put Thread in one of them, but did in the other. So, I mean, maybe, I don't know, they're hedging their bets there a little too. But it does, it is an important step for Matter,

• 12:06Speaker 03

  which Apple has been fully kind of on board with since the beginning. Because it actually sort of started Matter, one of, it was one of the founding companies. And it has, you know, contributed HomeKit to the infrastructure of Matter. There's a lot of similarities between Apple Home, using Apple Home and using Matter devices. The problem right now is there are just not very many Matter devices to use. And they sent us, Apple sent us a Matter, an Eve Matter device to use with the HomePod, which is great.

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  It's had a light switch, a plug.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Uh, the plug, yes, the Eve energy plug. And I'd already use, I'd already been using a Matter Eve energy plug that I'd upgraded myself. But there's just not enough devices out there yet to really get a feel of how this is all going to work. The momentum is there, though, and I would, you know, definitely going to sort of check in in a few months' time and see if the thread solution, the spread situation has resolved itself and, you know, whether these devices are actually creating a stronger, more robust network in your home, or if they're all still competing with each other and causing issues, which unfortunately is one of the problems at the moment.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  So the dumb question here is if you have an existing HomePod and you're happy with it, your reasons to upgrade from a smart home perspective are kind of zero, right? It's like, you want thread, but there's not enough reason to have thread yet. And if you have a new Apple TV or you have a HomePod Mini, or they actually get together and work together, you have Hero routers or Echo, like, that stuff will serve the purpose.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Correct. There's no major benefit to having multiple thread border routers. You can do it, and it will help extend your network, your mesh network, but only if you live in a reasonable sized home, you're not going to need multiple border routers. So yes, if you have an original HomePod and you're happy with it, it's fast enough for you, and it responds well enough for you, then, you know, you can get thread for less than $300 quite easily by adding HomePod Mini or an Apple TV, or, as you said, a border router from a, from a different company, because The new one's faster. The new one is faster, yes. That's been my experience from the smart home side. Like, I put a HomePod 2 and a Mini together and asked my questions, and the HomePod 2 always got, got

• 14:16Speaker 03

  there first, grabbed the glory and ran with it, and responded quickly. That, like I said, much less sort of, I mean, an R-ing and kind of waiting, spinning its wheels. And there was a much faster response. I am actually on the new Apple Home architecture, which I think is not actually to do with Matter, but it's sort of like in preparation for Matter. And that is something that they pulled. Apple had a lot of issues when it first rolled out. But if you did get it when it first rolled out and it worked for you, it's still working. And I found that it has been a lot more stable and a lot more reliable. So the improvement in the HomePod 2 could also be down to the improvement in the home architecture.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  I don't have an original HomePod here to kind of compare, but my Mini is not as fast.

• 15:04Alex Cranz?

  So it's probably, probably going to generally be faster. Chris, does it sound better?

• 15:10Speaker 04

  It sounds very similar to the first HomePod, very similar and not the same. Like if you put them side by side, you can tell some differences.

• 15:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  But sometimes the new one sounds clearer and better. And sometimes the old one sounds a bit more detailed, like all comes down to what song you're playing. But on the whole, it's very, very similar.

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  They cut down the number of tweeters, right?

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, there are five now. It was supposed to seven last time and there are four mics instead of six. There's also a new system sensor is what it's called, which is the most vague thing I've ever heard in my life that's supposed to like help with all like the computational tuning even better than it was last time. So on the whole, those things should hopefully balance out for like a very similar overall sound, which it is. So if you liked the first one, you like this one. If you didn't like the first one, you're probably not going to love this one either.

• 15:51Alex Cranz?

  So you're not going to sit there, you never like were listening to stuff on the new one and being like, man, I just missed those seven tweeters.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, not myself, but I'm sure there will be like a small group of people who swear that they ruined it and that the first HomePod was like a really special product.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah. The stereophone people are about to, I mean, this is, this is the greatest gift they've ever been given is arguing about the number of tweeters in the HomePod. So the, the first one, when I reviewed it a long time ago, there was a lot of, Apple like made a lot of noise about computational audio, using the tweeters, they, you know, they have a sensor in the body of the HomePod to measure the distance the woofer is going, right? They were bouncing some sound off the walls and measuring that in real time. If you moved it, they would re-measure it. All very cool. I was never like, oh, this is the greatest sounding speaker in history, which is kind of where Apple like led people to believe, like their version of computational audio would dramatically blow away speakers costing tens of thousands of dollars.

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  And at the end of the day, it's like it's limited by its size, right? It's like it's this big and it can do this much. And like, it sounds very good. And the Sonos one sounds pretty good, too. And the Sonos five sounds a little bit better. And it has bigger low end drivers, so it can make more bass, right? Like, it's just very much, they overhyped it, because I think Siri was bad. So their solution to marketing, it was like, it's the best sounding speaker in the world. Are they doing that again this time? Or are they just kind of like, here's, you love the HomePod Mini, now it's bigger?

• 17:20Speaker 04

  There was less talk of all that stuff, but it is still the same as far as like the room stuff goes and all that background process goes. But yeah, I mean, the review that like, the sound is very clear, super detailed, rich, whatever. But there's no warmth to the HomePod sound, whereas like Sonos does have some of that and some other speakers do. This is very like, this is what the lab told us a speaker should sound like.

• 17:42Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's interesting, though, because I remember the one HomePod having a much warmer sound than the Sonos one.

• 17:49Speaker 04

  Sometimes I guess certain tracks, again, it comes down to again, but in the whole, it's just very clear to me. Like, that's the one thing that I always like vocals are right there in the center. It sounds good. I think two is where it really starts to like, sound really, really good. But that's $600. So at that point, you are looking at a Sonos five or whatever else, too.

• 18:06Nilay Patel?

  You will get more serious separation from two, obviously.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. So two together, and that's where the spatial audio thing, a case can be made, that when you have two very nice speakers beaming sound all over the room, that spatial audio does start to make a bit more sense and sounds pretty good for like, the very good mastered tracks.

• 18:23Alex Cranz?

  Okay, it started to make sense. Did it actually, like, were you like, okay, I get spatial audio now?

• 18:28Speaker 04

  For a few songs, yeah. But there are still so many that are bad, that still don't sound, don't sound as good as their stereo versions. But yeah, there are certainly some tracks where there's just like, more atmosphere and you can hear instruments throughout the room and it's a bit more than stereo itself. So it's there. Certainly more than headphones and earbuds, where it's still just very silly.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  My new go to rule is it only sounds good if the music was meant to be listened to on drugs. And so like music for being on drugs, that's like great. And then everything else, and we've got notes about this, people like it, but everything else just kind of like loses impact. And I think where Apple could succeed here is by getting away from spatial audio for music, which they are just relentlessly promoting to no discernible effect and focusing on the TV features they've added to the HomePod, right? And saying, okay, you can get two HomePods together. They've added this new feature where you can do EARC off a TV. So you can send all the audio from your TV to your HomePods.

• 19:23Alex Cranz?

  Can we talk about that?

• 19:24Nilay Patel?

  Well, have Chris explain that. But then you get, you get Atmos when you do that, like proper movie Atmos?

• 19:29Speaker 04

  I think it mixes down Atmos. Like there are no like up firing speakers, obviously, in the HomePod, but it sounds pretty good. Yeah. So that feature has been around, I guess. They've called it beta to like last week when they actually put out TVOS 16.3, or whatever it was. And so now it's like a full on feature. And so you can plug the Apple TV 4K. You need the new one. That goes into your TV's EARC port. And then the HomePods will play all of your TV's audio. So like I was playing a PS5 game and there was like no latency, no audio sync issues. I was like, this is not supposed to work this well. This is EARC. It's supposed to be a hellscape.

• 19:58Nilay Patel?

  It's HDMI. Yeah. Like none of this is supposed to work, right? This public service, what TV do you have that you're using this with?

• 20:04Speaker 04

  I've got the Hi-Sense U8H myself, and I have very good wifi. So I'm sure that that plays into it too. There, there are many factors that could make this worse for you, but it does work. And so that by itself has me convinced that Apple has more home theater stuff coming down the pipeline. Cause like, why would you go through all that work just for the HomePod?

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, I remember the number one thing when I did the review of the first one, the number one question people asked was, can I use it with my Apple TV all the time? And so I think just from a, you know, Apple doesn't do like proper focus groups. So just like a market research perspective, they're like, what would make the HomePod better? And they're like, I want to use it for my TV. It's like, you would build it. They built it. You know, I think I would put this in the same category of like, it doesn't detect a fire, but it can listen for a smoke alarm. It's like a Rube Goldberg machine to get what you want out of the HomePod. It's like, you need an Apple TV and you EARC into the Apple TV and that wireless is sent to the HomePod. And we don't actually detect a fire, but we'll listen for a smoke alarm. It gets to the right outcome, which is your phone beeps if there's a fire and the TV

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  audio is coming out of the speaker. It's just a winding path to get there that is kind of like distinctly on Apple.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it seems strange to leave your Apple TV on at all times for that feature too. But it sounds better than like a Sonos Ray soundbar, like the two of them together.

• 21:15Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 21:15Speaker 04

  The bass. Those woofers are

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  Those are legit woofers. So like, if you don't have like a subwoofer for your Sonos or any kind of like budget level soundbar, this is going to sound much better than that. But again, you've got to leave your Apple TV on all the time, which I'm sure some people do. If that's their mainstreaming device and that's fine.

• 21:30Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of in a weird place financially though, because a Beam is like $300 and this is

• 21:36Speaker 04

  $600.

• 21:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, $600. And then an ARC is what, $200 more than that? And that'll give you true Atmos and everything. So it's like, I don't really know if the people who are buying a Sonos are like, do I want to go into this weird middle ground necessarily with two HomePods?

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah, that's some people who just like live like all in Apple's world, thoroughly in the ecosystem, don't want to go anywhere else and they're happy there.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you're like an exceedingly well groomed person who wears all black and you live alone and you don't allow strangers into your house and all the magazines are perfectly arranged, this is going to be great for you.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  And all of your furniture is made out of concrete. You know, like I'm describing like my idealized lifestyle. Like, it's because I'm not trying to talk down to be like, if I was very single, like I'd be like, yes, all my furniture is made out of concrete and you're not allowed in my home. And all I have is HomePods. The wire perfectly routed, so you didn't see it. In reality, that's like not how it works for most people.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Well, you can remove the wire now.

• 22:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Now that you can remove the wire, I know we're going to see third-party battery mounts for this thing.

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  There's, there's still a lot of question like, why bring it back? Okay. And I'm biased because I'm coming from the smart home side. But I think honestly, it all ties in with Matter and Thread, because the original HomePod was discontinued just after they started Matter. And I think Apple realized that this was not going to be capable of supporting this new smart home platform. And the biggest change really in, in this device is from the original is the support for Thread and It has Matter, which you can have in both. But this is now their flagship smart home controller for Matter. And that people were sad it was gone. They wanted it back. It wasn't as successful as perhaps people expected, but there's a passionate user base behind

• 23:27Speaker 03

  this this device, the original version, and I'm sure there will be with the new version. And it it fits perfectly into the lineup. But it's not what they really needed to do. What they really need to do is bring us a smart home controller that we can actually use to control our smart home that has a touch interface and that works with multiple people. Because right now, Apple just sucks at that. Yeah. I really struggled. I could not get personal requests to work for all of my family with the new HomePod or the old HomePod.

• 24:00Alex Cranz?

  Just your your husband and you were the only ones it worked for?

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Only my husband I would work. As soon as I had my kids, it just went crazy.

• 24:06Alex Cranz?

  Did it was it just like they do not like pay the mortgage? So they do not get a say?

• 24:15Speaker 03

  I don't know what it was. I've been talking to Apple. They've been troubleshooting, but we haven't found a solution. But every time I added either of my children, one of whom is over 14 and one of whom is under, because that's a cutoff point with family sharing, it would just stop recognizing anyone's voice. And the personal request side is a real challenge in the smart home. None of the other platforms have actually nailed it very well either. I I struggle with both Google Home and Amazon's Alexis ecosystem for them to recognize personal requests. It's it's a hard, it's a hard problem, but it's one that really needs to be solved because the smart home is not about the single guy in the concrete house. It's about multi-user homes and and places where, you know, you've

• 24:59Speaker 03

  got roommates. There's very few people that live alone and that are going to have a vast or a comprehensive smart home ecosystem because and that's something that all these solutions need to work on. And hopefully, I mean, Apple's has been the most useful to date because of the tight integration with the phone. But obviously, if not everyone in your home uses iPhones or iOS devices, then it's it's just not useful. And as much as Matter is helping bring down those walled gardens for the smart home, Apple is still very much a curated garden party.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the Matter piece for Apple is really interesting. They're very much behind it. They did give up a bunch of HomeKit or share it with the Matter consortium to build off of it. And that's because the other smart home ecosystems were ahead, right? Alexa notably is much more ahead. Many more devices work with Alexa. You get everybody to support Matter. All those devices work with HomeKit as well. You can control them from your phone. That's great for Apple, but isn't the flip side of it that the Alexa and Echo show can also control your smart plugs just as well as HomeKit on your phone?

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Well, that's the key phrase, "just as well." Will it? I mean, because Matter is giving that common infrastructure so that everyone can control the same devices, but you still have to have the good user experience on top. And as I've talked about before in articles, the HomePod and the Apple Home ecosystem is one of the better user experiences. The Alexa experience, the Amazon experience is still... It's so big and it can do so many things that it's also really hard to kind of keep track of and remember exactly what you want it to do. And you might ask it to turn on a light and it will go and buy you some toilet paper. You know, there's too much going on.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Whereas the Siri ecosystem and Apple Home is a lot more tightly controlled. So if you're using Matter devices in either platform, you're going to have different experiences because of the experience that each platform adds. And that's where they're going to differentiate is by, you know, with Apple Home, you can use adaptive lighting. And that's not part of a Matter yet, but hopefully it will come so that, you know, you don't just have to buy the expensive light bulbs to get that expensive feeling feature where the lights change naturally during the day with sunlight. You'll be able to use any Matter-enabled light bulb and, you know, have that feature that you can use through Apple Home. Amazon Alexa doesn't offer that feature yet. So, you know, there's going to be things like that that make the difference, that make

• 27:36Speaker 03

  you choose one platform over the other.

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  I think this product was just like so easy for them. It's like such an easy lift. So they call this the all-new HomePod and that's just the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life because it's like the same design. And it's like...

• 27:48Speaker 04

  Here's your new speaker. It's very similar. And so they just like bought themselves probably two years to build something new that's actually gonna like be that new thing for the home.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, so you were talking about what they should build, right? Which is like a tablet with a touchscreen that you can actually click the buttons on. Like, put, put an iPad on a stand. That's what Google is doing with the next version of Nest. We don't know when it's gonna come, but they showed one. I'm wondering, on a more conceptual level, HomeKit in particular doesn't live anywhere that a user understands, right? You buy an Echo, and it's like, now I'm in control of your smart home. And you're like, okay, this computer is the one that's in charge of my smart home. And that's not exactly right. There's a lot of cloud services and all this other stuff going on. But like, you're like, this is the thing that controls my house. HomeKit lives on an Apple TV. It lives on an iPad

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  until recently. It could live on this thing. Like, you can solve a lot of HomeKit problems by just like rebooting your Apple TV, which-

• 28:43Speaker 03

  Or your iPhone.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or your iPhone. And it's like, the lights aren't working. I need to turn off my phone. Like, I say this stuff out loud to people, and I know I just sound like a maniac.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  That's so true.

• 28:55Nilay Patel?

  Does this solve that problem? It's like, all right, I'm just gonna reboot the HomePod, and that'll fix it?

• 28:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that has been the go-to solution for any issue with HomeKit, your phone and your, whichever home hub you have. And with Alexa in particular, and a lot of Google Home, there's much more reliance on the cloud. But the intricacies of how the Apple TV and the HomePod and the phone all work together have very much been kind of a black box. We just know that rebooting the phone works. Who knows why? Apple has said, I think, that the new home architecture is gonna kind of make some of that a little clearer. But that hasn't officially arrived yet, so we still don't really understand the difference. I did notice in my testing, since I've been on the new home

• 29:39Speaker 03

  architecture, that it does stick with one home hub rather than bouncing around. Like, I used to love going to my HomePod minis, which I would constantly unplug for various reasons, and would mess everything up. Now it just sticks with my Apple TV that's hardwired. And it's like, hallelujah, this makes sense. This is what we should have done since the beginning.

• 29:59Alex Cranz?

  Do you get to choose that?

• 30:00Speaker 03

  No, no, you still can't choose it. But it just seems to be more rational than it used to be before. And it did try and use the HomePod, the new HomePod, a couple of times, but then it was like, eh, went back to the TV. So, and that's something about the smart home in general that I think confuses people. And what is going to help with Matter, because we're going to bring almost most devices and most interactions that you need to be quick and happen on a regular basis into your home and local without having to use the cloud. Because that's where, you know, when people get frustrated with Siri, I think we talked about this on our last episode together, Alex, you know, because she's, it is waiting, or it's, it can't connect to the internet, or it can't get some device to work.

• 30:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  It's normally something is broken in a cloud connection or some kind of Wi-Fi connection, whereas once we have this more robust infrastructure for the smart home, those kind of issues won't, won't happen so much, hopefully. And it'll be a much smoother experience, you know, just as easy as actually turning a light switch on.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  The ever elusive goal. It's so funny because I still have my little Homebridge Tamagotchi in the garage that I have to go and like reboot and open up to take the SD card out and like reformat it every few months. And I'm like, this is better. This is like concentrated effort into chaos. Like every three months, I start it all over and then it's fine for three months. As opposed to, you know, like Matter, which is one day, I'm sure, just like Bluetooth, it'll be better. But right now, it's like a lot of like diffuse effort to even know what the hell is going on.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  I think the good thing though, the thing that I'm most excited about with Matter and Thread is that you won't need a Tamagotchi. You won't need a single device that runs everything, because when you have a single device that runs everything, you have a single point of failure. And that's when things. Go belly up. And you know, with Thread in particular, and with Apple and most of the ecosystems putting Matter and Thread into every device, most people these days with smart homes have more than one smart speaker. So you're going to have these multiple points that can keep your smart home running if, you know, because someone unplugged your Echo speaker to use their hairdryer and you didn't realize and now nothing's working in your home anymore, you know, that that won't happen anymore. And that's one of the reasons, I think, that Thread got chosen over Zigbee,

• 32:19Speaker 03

  because in previously, and when you use Zigbee, if you're familiar with, you know, like Philips Hue runs on a Zigbee bridge, and you know, one morning I might wake up and I'm like, why are none of my lights turning on? And I realize it's because someone unplugged my Hue Bridge for some reason. But nothing, you know, it's, you're going to lose that single point of failure. And the smart home is going to become much more kind of diffuse and more integrated into your home, rather than just relying on little white boxes or Tamagotchis in the garage.

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  No, but Jen, here's my solution, though. Everything is routed through my Homebridge Tamagotchi. But then, independently of that, that is plugged into a smart plug that is on HomeKit natively. So when the Homebridge crashes, I can just reboot the people living there.

• 33:03Nilay Patel?

  It's like a genius.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  That works unless your Wi-Fi has gone down.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  And then you're just out of luck.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  This is also a great solution for troubleshooting anything at your parents' house remotely, is you get a smart plug on their network. And then you just turn it off from your house.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  I spent like three hours on the phone with my dad the other night because he couldn't figure out why when he reconnected his router, it wasn't working. And he just put two cables the wrong way around. And it's like, oh, this smart home is doomed.

• 33:37Alex Cranz?

  Well, we are going to face like, a challenge for the next couple of years, though, right? As everybody has, because people still have to upgrade everything that's never going to support Matter. They're still going to have to like, wait for some company's Dyson's like, yeah, we're doing Matter. And then crickets.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  There's a lot of crickets. Yeah, so knows crickets. Yeah, although the good thing is that Matter works with your existing ecosystems, right? So if you're all in on Apple Home, or all in on Amazon, or Google, or SmartThings, you can start adding Matter devices now, and they will work just like they do, like your system works today. So it's not like we're asking, you know, it's not, Matter's not going to make everything have to start from scratch. It is going to be a slow process. It's, you know, like when they try and redo roads, or redo the plumbing, they're not going to do it all at once because everything would explode. You need, it's a slow process. So yes, I think ultimately, I'm going to be doing this for a long time. It's going to keep me in a job.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  Speaking of Sonos, I do kind of wonder, we did mention Sonos, and I do kind of wonder if like six months down the line, we're going to wonder, like, did Apple play it too safe with the HomePod 2? Because like, Sonos is going to come out with a brand new, like, wholly redesigned speaker, like spatial audio, you say? Okay, here's like a 10-driver, like, speaker that's going to have USB-C in and all sorts of crazy stuff.

• 34:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm just really hesitant to think of how many people who can afford a HomePod are also thinking like, it's either that or the Sonos. I would assume most of those people are usually like, it's that and the Sonos.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  I make this mistake too. I think, I always think of the HomePod as like, you should get two of them. And so like, I think it costs $600. It costs $300.

• 35:13Alex Cranz?

  It costs $300, yeah.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's in a, a pretty reasonable range for a lot of people who are willing to spend money on smart light switches and whatever. Like, I think what Chris is getting at is Sonos is going to offer you more advanced technology than what Apple has. It might have even more unnecessary audio processing, and it will work with more things. For example, a thing that the Sonos speaker will do is work with Spotify.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  Which is still not there as a default service, but I guess that's Spotify's fault at this, at this point.

• 35:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but I, I think like, they're different products, right? Like, one is probably more intended for The HomePod I see is more like, oh, I've got Sonos in my, my living room. That's my home theater. I'm not going to necessarily want to use HomePods for that. The HomePod is more like, I need to have music while I'm cooking dinner. And I need to be able to talk to it. Cause one is talking and like Sonos is bad at the assistance. Sonos is real, real bad at assistance.

• 36:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Alex Cranz?

  So I just don't like, if you're getting it for the assistant, you don't need, like, those are two different things.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  It falls in a slightly odd spot because if you just need the, the music while you're cooking dinner, then you've got the Mini.

• 36:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  If you want more interaction, you want to follow a recipe in the kitchen, then you're going to go with like a show, an Echo Show or a Nest Hub. You know, an iPad sitting next to a Mini is just, just feels kind of wrong.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  I just feel like it's, it is, as Chris said, it was an easy upgrade now, but I don't think it's the grand plan for Apple Home going forward.

• 36:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  I might, but I think I'm in a very small minority because we use Google Assistant on our Sonos one. And we use Google Homes and their default audio device is set to Sonos speakers in the various rooms they're in. And these companies are suing each other and they hate each other. And everyone says it's not supposed to work.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, how did you get that to work?

• 37:06Nilay Patel?

  I think it's because I cover the lawsuit that they're both like, we can't screw this up and there's a one house. There's like one engineer from each company on call to be like, all right, they asked to play classic rock at 7:00 PM. Like make it happen. And like someone pushes the play on Spotify on the Sonos side. Like, I don't know. I'm assuming there's some sort of complicated legal PR, Rube Goldberg machine to make sure it works in my house. But I like, that's the dream, right? Is that you assemble all these components from all these different vendors. You kind of get the, the best of everything, or at least a solution that's more tailored to you. Right? Because what I want is The, the only reason we have Google Homes is because of the photo feature on the, the

• 37:50Nilay Patel?

  Nest Hubs. It's really good. And like, I don't know why Amazon hasn't built a good photo system for the Echoes. I don't know why Apple, they've tried.

• 37:58Alex Cranz?

  Hasn't built one at all.

• 38:00Nilay Patel?

  And yeah, Apple, this, the default, like, just make the thing with the screen. Like, people will buy it without a second's hesitation. But like, that's what we want. So that's what we have. And then we want Sonos speakers, because that works with all the other stuff we have. And it's like, I would get a HomePod, but again, it's like the concrete table problem, where it's like, it's designed for this one. It's designed for Tim Cook. Tim Cook's house has a lot of concrete furniture in it, you know? And like, it's just like, you don't make enough products here. Like, it's not versatile enough, or there's not, the product line is not versatile enough to, to fit into all these spots in your house. So I guess I'm coming out from kind of the same place as you, Alex, which is like, there's maybe one room in my house where this would be great. But there's like, I want, a smart home is like, the home.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, this HomePod is like, slightly better, slightly cheaper, but it's not going to change the calculus on like, who's buying it in the first place. And so I think, like, the first one wasn't a hit. I can't see this one being like a smash hit either at $299. Maybe once it goes down like $249 at some stores, that'll pick up some. But I think, like, on the whole, it's, it's the same HomePod, bit smarter.

• 39:05Alex Cranz?

  What is the price you would like, instant buy it at?

• 39:08Speaker 04

  I think $199 for sure. I'd be like, sure, buy it.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  And that's the studio, the Echo Studio is $199. Sonos One is $199 too, right?

• 39:17Speaker 04

  Thereabouts, yeah.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna say this out loud. A really good pair of regular old stereo speakers sounds better than any of this stuff.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Blasphemy.

• 39:26Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's just true.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  It's true.

• 39:29Alex Cranz?

  Do you ever go into the, the Home Theater Reddit? And it's like, half the people are there, like, I've just replaced my, my Sonos, or my Vizio Soundbar or whatever, and I just got two speakers and got rid of my sub, and it's like, I'm hearing everything for the first time.

• 39:45Nilay Patel?

  It's just way better. There's an entire other episode of the show on the specs to get marketed and in whatever. I'm just saying like all these speakers are like inherently noisy and they try to cover it up with extra processing because they're full of radios. And like, if you just like make speakers that are not full of radios and are connected with wires to clean sources, you're in a much better spot. Whoa.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  But that's the problem. Everyone, you know, we want these multi-use devices now in our home. We expect more out of our speakers than to just play music or just to play the audio from our TV. And it's, it's a problem and it's actually another problem. I mean, Chris and I have talked about this in the past, like Matter actually has a casting spec built in. So in theory, if all these players keep playing nice together, you know, we could be playing all our music on all of our smart speakers and our AirPlay speakers. Everything could all work harmoniously, but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen. Mainly because Sonos and Bose and a couple of the other big speaker companies who are part of the CSA,

• 40:49Speaker 03

  which is behind Matter, don't seem to be actually making any movement or any headway on doing this multi-room audio between companies and the individual companies that have multi-room audio like Amazon and Google and Apple, you know, they want to keep their, but these are little fiefdoms that look like they're going to stay. We're not, the whole kumbaya part of Matter doesn't necessarily look like it's going to go through the entire smart home space, unfortunately. And audio is such a big ticket item for most of these companies, right? Cause they want you to stick with their streaming service, their subscription service.

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think at the end of the day, like Amazon and Apple and Google like have no interest in making smart plugs or window shade controllers, because there's no recurring revenue against them. Like, if Apple's like, it's our new smart plug, it's part of iCloud, it will cost $10 a month. People go away. And so like you see where they're like willing to commodify the ecosystem. But streaming services are recurring revenue. They are lock-in to a certain extent. They are excellent places to upsell you to other parts of their services bundle. There's no way to let it go, that stuff.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  No. So yeah, it's always going, the fragmentation is going to remain on those levels for sure. We're not going to get the simple smart home for many years.

• 42:03Nilay Patel?

  Just make me in charge of everything. Who's the president of CSA and how do I take him out?

• 42:08Alex Cranz?

  They gotta get you your Apple TV, your TV made by Apple.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna go to that guy's house, reboot his Apple TV and he'll be out of a job.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  Sorry.

• 42:20Alex Cranz?

  All right, guys. So the, the review is up now. Kevin and Chris worked on it together. Thank you, guys. We're gonna take a break and then when we get back, I'm gonna be talking with Catherine Trindacosta about faking your death online. It makes sense in context, I swear.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  It's a hard segue. How do we fake the CSA guy's death online?

• 42:37Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

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• 43:12Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 43:33Speaker 06

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you, if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 44:16Alex Cranz?

  All right, welcome back. I'm very excited because I'm talking with my friend Catherine Trindacosta. We've worked together. We've been colleagues for many, many years. And one of our favorite things to talk about is faking your death online. I know that's like a weird thing to have a favorite to talk about, but Catherine and I love to talk about it. And there was a super weird one that actually appeared in the New York Times last month called "A Fake Death in Romance-Landia." And it's all about this romance novelist who, you know, faked her death. So like, naturally, I had to get together with Catherine. We had to talk about it. She's like categorized fake deaths into different buckets for reasons. It's a whole thing. We're just gonna go ahead and get to that chat

• 44:56Alex Cranz?

  right now with Catherine Trindacosta. Hello, Catherine. Thank you for joining me today.

• 45:06Speaker 07

  Thank you for having me to talk about one of my favorite topics in the world.

• 45:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you and I have talked many times about fandom and online communities and the absolutely wild things that come out of it. And what we're talking about today is this woman was a member of the romance novelist community, specifically self-published romance novels. She was a member of this community. She was super, super active. She was so active that she was getting a lot of hate. And then one day, someone appeared on her account and said she had, it was her daughter, and she had passed away. Everybody mourned. Two years passed. She reappeared on January 2nd of this year to say, "Surprise, I am alive. I'm excited to get back into the community. Let's have some fun." And the

• 45:55Alex Cranz?

  community did not react with the same enthusiasm that this author had.

• 46:01Speaker 07

  It's weird. It's almost as if if you fake your own death and people mourn you, if you show back up, people are not happy to see you. They are, in fact, very upset by the emotional manipulation.

• 46:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And it was very interesting. The New York Times did a piece on this, and it was very focused on the mental health element. This woman had been battling depression. She'd been battling other mental health issues. And she really laid a lot of it, of the situation, at the feet of that. And we've just seen this particular circumstance appear over and over and over again.

• 46:38Speaker 07

  Well, here's the thing. If you're burnt out, or if you're being attacked, it is perfectly valid To want to take a break, to want to leave that community, to want to not interact with the people who are causing you harm. You see that actually a fair bit when people are like, I'm just leaving social media. It's bad for me. People are yelling and I can't handle it. That is all perfectly valid.

• 47:01Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 47:02Speaker 07

  What you can't do is affect other people's health by putting them through the trauma of thinking someone they know has died. Right?

• 47:12Alex Cranz?

  And that's, that's what happened here.

• 47:14Speaker 07

  Yes. If it's just about you, if it's just about your health, and this is a thing you actually see on the internet all the time, you can just disappear. You don't have to make an announcement even, right? If you're not using your real name and they don't know who you are, you can just leave.

• 47:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 07

  You can always just leave. So when you do something like this, it becomes pretty clear that it's not just about your own health. It's about something else. It's either about like, you want to bury this and never come back, which is why this person coming back was unusual. Usually it's about trying to escape because something's about to catch up to you. And you want to cause trauma so that people don't poke into it harder. Or it's just about attention on its own, right? So faking a death is like a very extreme thing to do because it's not about you. It's about the effect that fake death has on many other people.

• 48:13Speaker 07

  And I talked to you about this, like, it's like a spectrum.

• 48:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:16Speaker 07

  When you fake your own death, there's like a, an X axis and a Y axis. And on the X axis is like-

• 48:22Alex Cranz?

  You showed me a chart. You made a whole chart.

• 48:24Speaker 07

  Yes, I drew a chart. So on the X axis, there's like, are you killing your fake killing yourself? Or are you fake killing like members of your fake family or other things to like get attention? Or to just like give an excuse as to why something? And then the Y axis is like, you're doing this because people are catching up to your con and you need to go. Or you're doing it for attention, just purely for attention. And like, these things is all a spectrum and you can be, because it's the internet, it can both be yourself and someone else at the same time. And it can be a little bit of like-

• 49:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 07

  I want to leave this situation before my lies catch up to me, but I also want attention.

• 49:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and I think it's interesting that it really happens in these fandom communities, right? Like, you and I are both members of fandom communities. We've both been, we've seen this happen a lot in the last 20 years. What are some examples of this happening before? Because this wasn't the first time we've seen somebody in a very small, very active community suddenly nope out of that community by faking a death.

• 49:38Speaker 07

  So, my little chart that I made for myself actually doesn't have a ton of fandom examples because I wanted to be more accessible to normal people.

• 49:46Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 49:47Speaker 07

  So like, on one hand, you have the Manti Te'o thing, which has a documentary came out recently about it. And that was very clearly a getting away fake death, right? So the Manti Te'o story was this football player on this Notre Dame team that was doing really well. The major news cycle of that story was that Manti Te'o's grandmother and girlfriend both died, that he continued during that year, that he was playing for them, all of those things. And it turned out that the girlfriend did not exist. And that Te'o had been catfished, which is, you know, the term for someone pretending to be someone

• 50:31Speaker 07

  else online to lure people into various kinds of relationships. And in that case, the person pretending to be the girlfriend was very clearly had killed this person off in an attempt to end the lies, to sort of get away from this sort of fake thing.

• 50:51Alex Cranz?

  The catfishing.

• 50:52Speaker 07

  Killed the catfish, right? So that's sort of in the self getaway category. In the dead center, this was a big story, like, I think, a couple of years ago, like, at 00 on the graph is Bethan McLaughlin.

• 51:06Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 51:07Speaker 07

  Now, Bethan McLaughlin was a professor at a university who announced the death of another academic from COVID. This academic having been a person who had been very vocal and active in the Move for greater equality within the sciences. So this person had been Native American and disabled and queer, I believe, as well. And then in a truly horrifying manipulation, this other academic came up and said, oh, she's, she's died of COVID. And it turned out that she had less died of COVID and more never existed and had in fact been Beth Ann McLaughlin the whole time.

• 51:53Alex Cranz?

  So she had to get rid of her because she couldn't have anybody.

• 51:56Speaker 07

  So this was both killing someone, a fake someone else and your fake self. And it was to get rid of both the con and clearly for attention. Otherwise you wouldn't announce it using your own real name. Like, there's a lot going on in that one. It's one of my favorites because it's, if this person had paid attention to online fandoms, she would have known like, anytime you make an announcement about someone else's death, they're gonna look at you. So don't attach your real name to it. Like, it was wild. And then in the form of like, clearly just doing it for attention and like, killing random family members or like, other people and then giving themselves cancer is the infamous

• 52:41Speaker 07

  Miss Scribe, the fandom person who had so many massive moments of fandom drama that it involved a giant, like, eight-part series of posts where this person did more work than journalists do in dissecting what had gone on. There's like a term for when you're killing other people where it's, it's called munchausen by internet.

• 53:07Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:07Speaker 07

  Right? Because the, the famous thing is munchausen by proxy. That's when usually parents pretend or make their child sick so that they can get attention as the caregiver of a sick child. At least in munchausen by internet, there usually isn't a real child, but people will, for attention or sympathy, beef up their trauma. And I think the reason we're sort of seeing this acceleration of it is that it's come with the acceleration of like, attention as a commodity online.

• 53:39Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 53:39Speaker 07

  And so you can't just step away. You have to get attention when you step away too. What's bigger attention getting than dying?

• 53:50Speaker 07

  There's also like a vindictiveness about it that is very internety. That's very like, you people did not appreciate me enough. And you did not like me enough, or you did not pay me enough attention. So in addition to doing this thing that'll get attention, I'm gonna make it painful for you. I'm gonna make you feel bad about it.

• 54:11Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 54:12Speaker 07

  So I both get attention and I've gotten back at you.

• 54:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and going back to the the Ms. Scribe example, because that's, I think, one of the most interesting ones. It was one of the earliest ones. This was like, what, early 2000s? It was in the Harry Potter fandom community, which at the time was one of the biggest online communities out there. There was a lot of people involved.

• 54:36Speaker 07

  And this whole saga like took down fan websites? Like, it it did a lot.

• 54:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was, it created this this huge kind of catastrophe through the entire fandom community. And a lot of people were involved. I believe Cassandra Clare, the now very famous New York Times author, was a part of that community and and was having to deal with the with its having to deal with it while also being accused of, I think, plagiarism within the community. There was just a whole, whole lot of mess. And at the center of it was Ms. Scribe, who had had gotten involved with a whole lot of people. And then when things started to get really intense, started killing off family members that we assumed did not really exist. And a lot of the reporting done since then bears out that.

• 55:25Alex Cranz?

  And I think it's really interesting because we really only see this when the internet came around. This wasn't a phenomenon as common pre-internet. And it was like, OK, we can all communicate, we can all gather in these smaller groups now. And we can also get so intense that we don't necessarily know how to regulate ourselves and escape these. And I think like, we've all had those moments where you're like, oh, I'm really into this community, and you need to figure out a way out. And these people are like, OK. My great grandmother is gonna die for a third time today.

• 55:58Speaker 07

  Well, I didn't think of it actually as like going full circle. Before like pictures and documents, you could fake your own death by just walking to another town and claiming to be someone else, right?

• 56:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 07

  Like this used to be an easier thing, but it didn't used to be for attention. It was escape. It was always an escape thing. It was a con man trying to escape or, you know, various other things. People just trying to leave scandal behind. There is the infamous like theories about various lords who fake their own deaths to just sort of get away. So it used to be very easy to fake your own death, but that was killing your real, the identity you were born in.

• 56:38Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 56:39Speaker 07

  It wasn't constructing and then killing off a fake identity quite as much. I mean, for con man, yeah. But like, again, it was sort of, it was solely to get away. The attention was not really part of it because you didn't actually want that much attention. You wanted to be able to get away. And so now we've reached this era where you can create and kill non-real people sort of easily, but you aren't doing it to get away from your real life obligations or from the police, because that's not going to happen. You're really doing it just to see how people react, to get attention. It's like the, it's like a TV trope, right? Where people like attend their own funerals to see how people feel and on all of those things.

• 57:23Speaker 07

  And like in television, that's not real. It's a rhetorical device to allow you to find out how people feel about characters. And then people are now just like, I would like to know what people would say about me if I died, so I shall die.

• 57:41Alex Cranz?

  I'll do a quick announcement. I'll post it on Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter or wherever. And then I'm just gonna sit back and rake in the true feelings that everybody has about me.

• 57:54Speaker 07

  Some personal news, I died, right?

• 57:59Alex Cranz?

  That's basically what it is. They're just saying, okay, you know what? I'm just, I'm just looking for it. We don't know if that was necessarily the case in this instance.

• 58:07Speaker 07

  We don't know if this is the case with Me Chen, but revealing it and coming back to me very much screams, I would like attention.

• 58:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 07

  And very much screams too of that, like of that internet vindictiveness of like, you all drove me to this and so I'm revealing it to you now. So you'll feel extra bad. I believe her husband is now taking the blame as being the one who told her to do it.

• 58:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And when she spoke with the New York Times, she said that things just got out of control. Her husband insisted on faking her death on the internet. And when she started to feel better and feel like she wanted to return to the community, she did. The community has naturally not been really enthusiastic about her return. They are not excited to see her and it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate that she, she felt this was her best avenue forward. It's unfortunate that this community had to deal with a lot of trauma and grief over the last two years. And a lot of people probably felt really bad. Good reminder, always be kind on the internet. You never know what's going on with someone else. Just be kind.

• 59:16Alex Cranz?

  But this one was, I just thought it was so interesting because reading it, every single part of it I heard, I was like, oh, this sounds like Miss Scribe. This sounds like half a dozen other situations I've seen over the years in these smaller, insular communities where someone just says, F it. I want to see what happens. And it was just truly kind of wild to me.

• 59:37Speaker 07

  This person seemed a lot less destructive about it in the, in a way. Because you can tell because she underestimated the negative response to coming back. Because in the sort of fandom examples, it's either like desperation, like. Oh, no. People are real mad about real things that I have done to them because there are also many instances of like fake outs to get money for for the fake conventions and things like I need to get away in a way that they won't they will feel bad asking questions about.

• 1:00:08Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:00:09Speaker 07

  Or it's F all y'all like you are the worst people like you've ruined me and I want to make you feel as bad as I did. So time to fake a death. And sometimes too, like time to fake a death in the like most attention-y zeitgeist-y way, like the Beth Ann McLaughlin one, to kill a fake native person with COVID. There's just like a lot of appropriation packed into like that one sentence.

• 1:00:39Alex Cranz?

  As far as we know, she's she's white. She's not part of the disabled community. She is not queer. Like she was just doing a lot of appropriation and then killing that person off. Just to feel happy? Just to feel good about herself to like hurt other people?

• 1:00:56Speaker 07

  I think the thing that too about that one is like to look at COVID early on too, like early on in the pandemic when it was so horrifying. I mean, it's still horrifying, but when when it was both horrifying and really uncertain what was going on, to see that as an opportunity to get rid of this thing you built is callous in a real specific way.

• 1:01:19Alex Cranz?

  Super, super callous.

• 1:01:21Speaker 07

  I think too, it speaks to like a very sort of immature internet sense, like people being sort of because they don't have to to act like an adult in a room with other adults. They sort of regress because it is the like childish, like, oh, I need to get out of a test. Grandma's been dead for five years. She won't mind if I kill her again. Like. It it has sort of that kind of a logic to it.

• 1:01:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Speaker 07

  The kind of logic a child has who does not really understand the real effects. Like, you want attention. But the the difference between like, I want attention and like, this causes other people real pain to feel my pain.

• 1:02:00Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:01Speaker 07

  Is like a very sort of immature child conception of how like people process those kinds of announcements about people about people. Because like, to them, it's gonna make them feel bad, but it's not traumatic because it's not a real person that they know.

• 1:02:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 07

  Except to those people who have empathy and are real humans, it does.

• 1:02:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think it's it's this common thing we see in communities. It's often people who are kind of new to these communities. They they forget that you can forge real relationships online without seeing people all the time. Catherine, you and I live on other sides of the country and we talk constantly. We talk all the time and we have a real relationship. We're friends. We're gonna go to Disney World together. And I think people forget that, yeah, you can forge those relationships online. You can forge really impactful relationships online. And so when they when they kill someone off, when they start to disrupt those for their own personal gain, there's something really kind of egregious about it. It feels just a little, feels wild and you kind of laugh because we've seen enough of these at this point that I almost always laugh.

• 1:03:08Alex Cranz?

  But it still feels kind of like you've taken advantage of people, other people's kindness and forgotten kind of the social codes that we are all usually very cognizant of in real life and we oftentimes forget in a virtual space.

• 1:03:22Speaker 07

  I think one of the reasons that you and I are so fascinated by the fandom stuff is, this is gonna sound weird, it's like porn. Whatever technology porn goes to first is going to be the big technology. Similarly, fandom finds the drama center points years before the mainstream. So like, when the internet first sort of started, everyone did this drama and now we're seeing it leak more into like, other places, right? Like, the Manti Teo thing was. Like a major college sports scandal.

• 1:03:57Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:03:57Speaker 07

  Which is far away from like two Harry Potter fanfic archives having a fight. Right? So you can, you can do that archiving. Like every time one of these things happen, I text like various people who are journalist friends of ours. And I'm like, you're writing about this story. I need you to understand how many times this has happened and how easy it is to investigate and check and how it happens. And I think too, for the fandoms where it still happens, they tend to be young fandoms because they tend to be younger people because they tend to have not lived through it already.

• 1:04:30Alex Cranz?

  Or in the case of this fandom, this was a fandom where you had a lot of people who weren't maybe as online as someone like you or I, or people generally involved in fandom was. These are people who are kind of new to using the internet to connect this way.

• 1:04:44Speaker 07

  Or were, because they were self-publishing as authors, were using real names or names that had associations to them that gives them a sense of security because it's like, no one's going to do anything weird with their own name or the name that is what they publish under, not really realizing that that's what happens in fanfic all the time.

• 1:05:06Alex Cranz?

  I think you're right. I think this is something that we see again and again in fandom. This is why you and I immediately both went, oh yeah, that woman faked her own death and then came back in the romance community. That's normal. And like, we didn't even blink. And so the people were going, oh my God, you and I are like, seen it.

• 1:05:22Speaker 07

  She didn't start a cult, so she's like.

• 1:05:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there's no Snape wives, there's no cult going on. This is still beginner fuckery in fandom.

• 1:05:30Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:05:30Alex Cranz?

  But, but thank you Catherine so much. I'm sure I'll probably, we'll probably have to bring you back the next time somebody does something truly wild that you and I have seen a billion times before in fandom to talk about. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Thanks Catherine.

• 1:05:49Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna take a real quick break and when we're back, we're gonna talk about the Valve Steam Deck and what's actually changed in the last year since it came out.

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• 1:07:15Alex Cranz?

  Okay, we're back. And you know what else is back? The Steam Deck. You know, it honestly didn't leave. It's been over a year since the Steam Deck came out, and it's still going strong. And there's been over like 100 updates on it. There's been a ton of weird little software quirks and changes over the last year. It really, it feels like a different device from the thing that shipped back in February 2022. And so that also means I got to bring back Sean Hollister, because he has spent over 435 hours with the Steam Deck. He and I are going to talk about what's changed, what the drawbacks are that still exist, and what Sean would probably score the thing if he had to score it right now. Hey Sean, thank you for joining me talking about the Steam Deck.

• 1:07:57Speaker 09

  Hey, it's great to be back. I love this thing.

• 1:08:00Alex Cranz?

  I really, really like my Steam Deck and I think you are one of the few people that likes their Steam Deck more than me. You loved it when it first came out, but you also were very clear-eyed about its many, many flaws when it first came out.

• 1:08:12Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Alex Cranz?

  And you've changed since then, but kind of walk me through when it first came out, how much you were disappointed.

• 1:08:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, let me, let me go back even a little bit further. I got to go to Valve's headquarters before the Steam Deck came out. Months before, I got to try it and I had this vision in my head of like, this is going to be where I buy my games now. Because I changed where I buy my PC games. I used to, I used to buy them, of course, on a PC. And then I was like, well, now all these great indie games and small games are coming out and I'm going to play them on the Nintendo Switch instead. This is where I'm going to buy them because this is where I could actually play them. I can take them with me. I can play them in the bedroom, you know, when my, when my kids are trying to sleep and things like that. I can, I can take them on the go. I just wasn't getting enough time with kids to play my games on my actual PC.

• 1:09:00Speaker 09

  So I was giving Nintendo my money and I tried this Steam Deck. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is going to be the Nintendo Switch of PCs. Not in that it's going to be like this thing I buy at retail that just plays my games well. But it's going to be where I buy my games because I can, I can just have the time to play them finally. And I was like, this is going to be great. And then the Steam Deck arrived on my doorstep in February 2022. And the thing was just felt so messy and broken and buggy. I'm like, how the heck could you put this thing on sale, Valve? And it wasn't just that it was, it was broken because I've used a lot of broken gadgets before.

• 1:09:40Speaker 09

  It was that Valve was pulling the rug out from under me every single day with new updates. And some of these updates made things better and some of these updates made things worse. During the period that I was supposed to review this and let the entire world know whether this device is any good or not. And so I wrote, this thing was a mess. I said, if Valve sold the console and playing at Best Buy or GameStop, people would return it in droves. The UI was sluggish and crappy. The games, you'd launch a lot of games and they would just not launch. They would just go to a black screen. Some would crash in the middle. My Wi-Fi connection would disappear. My Bluetooth headset would pair and unpair. So many issues with this thing at launch.

• 1:10:25Alex Cranz?

  There was other like, big stuff, like, wasn't there an SD card issue where it would like, just delete your games?

• 1:10:32Speaker 09

  Oh my gosh. Okay, so, SD cards are this thing. I bricked, I kid you not, I bricked three SD cards.

• 1:10:40Alex Cranz?

  Like, just had to throw them out?

• 1:10:41Speaker 09

  Yes. Like, I have one right here. I have a 256GB, very nice SanDisk Extreme 256GB card here, that I used to help review the Skydio 2 drone, because you know, you need a very fast SD card for drone footage. You're getting 100 megabits per second down from that camera. I stuck that thing in there. It's a brick now, because it didn't format the card properly. Valve had this issue where it was, it was trying to do like, a full and complete format, like, overwriting every bit on an SD card when you're doing it. And they switched to a quick format, and that's better. It doesn't break SD cards as far as I'm aware. But this thing where, I lost three cards because of this. I plugged a solid

• 1:11:22Speaker 09

  state drive into the deck's USB port, and the deck didn't know, I guess, not to run devices too fast when it doesn't provide enough power. Because, you know, it's a small device with like, a 40 watt hour battery, this Steam Deck. It doesn't have a lot of power for its USB port. Well, my SSD, in my enclosure, a nice SSD I've been using for a while to transfer things between computers, the deck decided that it was going to just blow through that thing. Download giant game to it very quickly, without providing it enough power. And so, that got bricked too.

• 1:11:57Speaker 09

  It's like this thing was a shit show at launch. And yet, you could already see the potential. There was so much potential there. They were fixing things very quickly. And so by the end of the review period, I was like, you probably shouldn't buy this thing today. It's not ready. But wow, you can play all of these old PC games and all these new PC games with all this horsepower. These amazing controls you can customize to do any kind of game. Phenomenal. And so I was like, okay, maybe this thing will be great.

• 1:12:29Alex Cranz?

  So was it like, the flexibility of the device was so good that you could overlook the fact that you had now spent hundreds of dollars of your own money in the process of reviewing it, just washed that money down the drain?

• 1:12:45Speaker 09

  There were, yes, yes. I want to throw some caveats in there. First off, we gave this thing a score that today would have probably fleshed, would probably be at like a 4.5. At the time, we gave it a 6.5. But like, if you read our descriptions of how we review devices today, we would have, we would have to give it like, less than a 5.0 back then. Because we do not like telling people to buy gadgets that are not ready, that have a lot of issues with them, that may not pan out. At the time, though, yes, I could see that this thing was already fun to use. And that's super important. Like, people want to buy things that are fun, right?

• 1:13:27Speaker 09

  Even if, even if part of the fun is like figuring out how to make games run on a console. I've read so many, I don't, I think you're also in the Steam Deck subreddit.

• 1:13:36Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:13:36Speaker 09

  And there are so many people in there who post how much fun they're having just figuring out how to make various games work, figuring out all kinds of cool things to do with it as a full Linux PC. Lots of people say they're doing more of that, that they are actually playing games, which is funny to me.

• 1:13:54Alex Cranz?

  There's guys who are saying, oh, I, I plug it into my TV and I use like a PS4 controller and I just use it as like a console, like a traditional console now. And then there's people who are like, oh yeah, I use it as my primary computer. It just seems like this great, it's for the tinkerers. It's for all the people who just like to, to mess with stuff.

• 1:14:14Speaker 09

  I've seen people do video editing on this, on this computer. I, I've seen people like piece together, you know, stuff for their work. Uh, I saw there's a, one of the developers of VLC, the amazing, um, open source, uh, video player that, you know, you can play, it plays anything you throw at it. It's working on a way to turn the deck into like a miniature TV. Internet streaming TVs, it'll, it'll just stream down like channels over the web or something. I don't know. Yeah, I want a portable TV. I want a handheld device that can double as my work PC in a pinch. I want a, a game system that flawlessly runs all my GameCube and Wii games because there's an emulator that somebody put on Linux, like.

• 1:14:55Alex Cranz?

  Just flawlessly.

• 1:14:56Speaker 09

  Yes, it does all these things. And the controls, which are, many of them carryovers from the, the cult classic Steam Controller that Valve released a number of years ago and then had to put on a $5 fire sale. Anyhow, if you missed out on the Steam Controller, the controls in here just let you do so much. I have, I'm, I'm playing through, um, Trails in the Sky now. It's a, it's an RPG game with a lot of dialogue. Uh, I have three of the buttons on my Steam Deck set to be turbo buttons so that I can speed through the dialogue and, you know, the sword swinging when, when I'm, you know, trying to build up my CP to do the big flashy magic and special attacks.

• 1:15:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 09

  When I am playing Genshin Impact, which you're not really supposed to be able to play on a Steam Deck, but you can because somebody built a client for it in Linux. And also because I can stream Genshin Impact for my PlayStation 5, because there's a PlayStation 5 streaming client on the deck, which is amazing.

• 1:15:52Alex Cranz?

  And it works really well.

• 1:15:54Speaker 09

  It works really well. When I'm playing that game on a PS5 by itself, or, or, or, you know, any of the other consoles, it's really difficult to aim a bow with like some of the bow characters in that game, which is annoying because the game rewards you for, you know, hitting enemy creatures in the head with a bow for some reason. I don't know why. Anyhow, the deck has gyroscopic aiming that you can add to literally anything you play on it, including streaming a game from my PlayStation 5 to the handheld.

• 1:16:24Speaker 09

  So my deck is transmitting its gyroscopic motions over my home Wi-Fi to my PlayStation 5 to tell my PlayStation 5 how far to move virtual analog stick so that the bow of my anime character can line up with the head of some legendary monster in this game and it feels like it's running locally.

• 1:16:45Alex Cranz?

  And that's just cool.

• 1:16:46Speaker 09

  There's just so much cool shit you can do with the deck. But that's not what the focus of my recent piece was. Like, the main thing I want to tell you today, the main thing I wrote in my, like, long-term review is that, yes, there's this whole ecosystem of cool things, but also you can just use the Steam Deck now as a game system and it works. And it did not at launch. That was not the case nearly a year ago when it launched.

• 1:17:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and it works with, like, a wide variety of games. I know we've seen some complaints on the subreddits because somebody goes and they played, like, this really nobody's ever heard of it game from 20 years ago and they're like, "Oh, the Steam Deck doesn't work out of the box with it." But most modern games, most new games, it works pretty, pretty well out of the box. I played, like, just three days of Vampire Survivors. My sister was like, "Don't you want to say hi to me? I haven't seen you in a year. I'm here for Christmas." And I was like, "I, sure, but after I get through this level."

• 1:17:44Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45Alex Cranz?

  Like, just totally glued to it because it played so, so well. It worked so well. And also I could, like, huff the fumes off of the fan on the Steam Deck.

• 1:17:55Speaker 09

  This is, this is a beautiful in-joke also from the Steam Deck subreddit and Discords. Everybody comments on how good it smells, the chip fumes that are coming out through the fan. I don't know what that is. I'm guessing it's just warm air.

• 1:18:08Alex Cranz?

  Probably should not be huffing it. Probably, this is a disclaimer, do not huff those smells. We cannot be held liable for it. Please don't do it. We don't know what's in it, but man, it smells great.

• 1:18:22Speaker 09

  It does, it does. At the risk of reduction, there are three reasons why games might not work on the Steam Deck. One is, they are big, modern games, but they use anti-cheat software. That's the biggest one. Some of the biggest games in the world will not work on the Steam Deck, like PUBG, Lost Ark, Call of Duty: Warzone, Rust, Destiny 2. A lot of these games don't work, not because the Steam Deck doesn't support anti-cheat. In fact, Valve went out of their way to go ahead and say, "Hey, big providers of anti-cheat, easy anti-cheat, and Battle Eye, we're gonna make you work. Hey, developers, all you have to do is enable them." That's not the reason they don't work.

• 1:19:06Speaker 09

  They don't work because the developers, the publishers, decided they weren't willing to take the risk of enabling these, and then maybe somebody on Linux figures out some kind of cool hack. Because these anti-cheat software can't necessarily run as effectively in the kernel-level manner that it wants to, because there is no way for them to control what happens on Linux the way they can on Windows. Now, somebody's gonna listen to the podcast and be like, "Oh, it's totally possible. You could totally build a system where this works." What Tim Sweeney at Epic Games, who says Fortnite will not come to this, what Tim Sweeney will tell you is that they don't want to spend the money to build such a system.

• 1:19:51Speaker 09

  They don't think it's worthwhile for the amount of players they'll get in return.

• 1:19:55Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:19:56Speaker 09

  I mean, he didn't say that explicitly, but reading between the lines of what he told us, that's what he's saying.

• 1:20:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's an investment to build support for the Steam Deck. And one of the reasons I think it's so popular thus far is that the investment for most game developers is fairly minimal, right? When they don't have the anti-cheat software.

• 1:20:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, I would say even if they do have the anti-cheat software, it's minimal to enable it to work, but it's not necessarily minimal to satisfy your company and your shareholders that you will have not inadvertently created some kind of loophole that will come to bite you in the ass down the road. That might be the expensive part. Yeah, most games just work. Anti-cheat is one reason they don't work. Another reason why they don't work is because they are old enough that whatever game company built it had to do something very customer proprietary with the software that they use to run, say, the video cutscenes at the beginning of the game.

• 1:20:56Speaker 09

  Some games will not launch simply because they cannot launch the video that plays at the very beginning of the game, and the rest of the game would run. And the reason we know this is because most of the games on the Steam Deck that are designed for Windows run on a compatibility layer called Proton that is developed primarily by Valve, open-source developers that Valve is paying to improve Proton's compatibility. But there is also a fork of Proton called Proton GE, which stands for Glorious Egg Roll.

• 1:21:26Alex Cranz?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:21:27Speaker 09

  Which I love, which is maintained by people who do not care so much about proprietary things that they may not have the legal rights to use. And there are some games that will just run because they said they built in whatever the proprietary video codec was. And so you can see a game that wouldn't work on the main fork of Proton just does on the Glorious Egg Roll version.

• 1:21:47Alex Cranz?

  Are there examples of games off the top of your head that don't work? Because I definitely have, I think I've run into this situation, and I'm just completely blanking on any games.

• 1:21:55Speaker 09

  Persona 4 Golden was not working on the Steam Deck at launch. It had issues, I think, with cutscenes and also with audio. There was some kind of audio glitch as well. In Glorious Egg Roll, it worked perfectly, and then Valve went back and worked with Proton to, I think, get around some of those issues. I don't know if it uses some kind of compatibility layer for the codecs now or what, but they did make it work, and they made it a full Deck-verified game. I know that currently, The Longest Journey, the last time I tried to play The Longest Journey, which is a famous point-and-click adventure, that does not run on Steam Deck. I can't remember if it works in Glorious Egg Roll or not, but I would, I would bet you 10 bucks that it is one of those issues where just some codec or some thing that

• 1:22:40Speaker 09

  they tried to launch at the beginning of the game doesn't work properly, and that's the reason it doesn't play. Because there's no reason why the Deck shouldn't be able to play that game.

• 1:22:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think one of the ones I run into is Crusader Kings III. It's got some like weird pop-ups at the beginning of the game. And sometimes I can get right through them and get to play. And sometimes I want to fling my beloved Steam Deck across the room.

• 1:23:01Speaker 09

  Yeah, so it's anti-cheat, one reason. Video codex or other proprietary techniques that they use that, you know, the Steam Deck doesn't know how to interpret yet. Or, and this is also a relatively large category at this point. It actually does work and Valve just is marking it as unsupported because they haven't fully tested it yet, which is wild. It is wild to me, not that they haven't tested the whole library, but it's wild to me how many games Valve says, hey, this doesn't work, but they haven't gone back to retest and it actually does.

• 1:23:33Alex Cranz?

  Mass Effect is a good example of that. The Legendary Edition, the majority of people who play it have no issues with it, but it continues to say, does not work, don't try it.

• 1:23:43Speaker 09

  Mass Effect is one where there was a period of time where it wouldn't launch unless you like jumped through some hoops because EA broke that and it broke a lot of other EA games by introducing a new version of their EA Launcher, which used to be called Origin, that's a whole long story. They introduced a new version of the EA app and it just, they never tested it on the deck and it didn't work and it broke everything. And you couldn't see the prompts that you needed to click through in order to get into your game. It would ask you like several things and those things wouldn't graphically show up on the deck. They do now, particularly if you enable proton experimental. But those are still all marked unsupported because EA hasn't quite finished it yet. So they run properly. Like EA keeps breaking it with new versions.

• 1:24:28Speaker 09

  And so Valve, I think Valve is waiting until that all settles down. But like The Witcher 2, Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, XCOM, Enemy Within, the original Half-Life. Those games are all marked as unsupported and they all just... Run.

• 1:24:43Alex Cranz?

  And now everything seems to be ready. Well, not everything, but a lot of it. Like, it seems like something where I could recommend it to a family member and not have to worry about doing tech support all the time.

• 1:24:56Speaker 09

  Yeah, I largely agree with you. Like, I recommend this now to people who want a PC gaming system that they could take with you. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to people who do not like the PC of experience of like tweaking settings, because you can still absolutely play a game on Steam Deck and be like, this runs, but it doesn't run very well. And if you come from the PC background where you're like, okay, I will turn down the shadows and, you know, and set the game spec to low, but then I will increase the anti-aliasing, because this is a 720p, you know, 800p screen where you really need anti-aliasing or else games look pixely. If I'm coming from that background, or if I know the person I'm recommending, it comes from that background, absolutely, no question.

• 1:25:40Speaker 09

  If you have $400 to spend, you want this portable gaming PC, do it. If you're the kind of person who like, you want everything to just work like sticking a cartridge into a Nintendo Switch works, and you don't want to think about settings ever, it's not there yet, it could be there someday, but if you're that kind of person, I would wait until future handhelds.

• 1:26:03Alex Cranz?

  That's fair. I think that's, well, they can go just get a Switch and tell that it plays a lot of these games.

• 1:26:08Speaker 09

  But you probably shouldn't, because there'd probably be a Switch Pro next year. But anyhow, moving on, or this year, it's 2023. I expect this holiday, well, maybe we'll have something, I don't know.

• 1:26:17Alex Cranz?

  Well, thank you, Sean, for coming on and talking about the Steam Deck. We're gonna let you go, because we'll have to bring you back again to talk about the Steam Deck, and we want to do it over lots of different episodes. Appreciate you taking the time.

• 1:26:28Speaker 09

  I'm so happy. I will come back to tell you about the latest hacks later on.

• 1:26:32Alex Cranz?

  Awesome. Okay, that's it for The Vergecast today. Thank you for listening. As always, there's a ton more coverage on the site and you can see all the stories that we've talked about this week on theverge.com. If you have thoughts, feedbacks, feelings, Steam Deck game recommendations, you can always email thevergecast@[email protected]. And if you have questions, call the hotline. It's 866-VERGE11. That's 866-VERGE11. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Nori Donovan is our executive producer and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I will not be here on Friday.

• 1:27:14Alex Cranz?

  I'm going to be in Disney World, but Neelai will be back this Friday with a whole bunch of The Verge crew and they're going to be talking about the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event and all the other news that popped up this week. So stay tuned. Till then, rock on.

• 1:27:36Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:27:58Speaker 06

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:28:22Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  This series is presented by EY. If your best finance people are doing expense reports, chasing receipts, or spending time on month end close, it's time to get Brex AF, agentic finance that eliminates that work before it starts. Learn more at brex.com/AF.