Confusing new Apple products, Netflix password sharing, and NFT cults

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler discuss the announcements from Apple this week, HDR video standards, and all the news out of Netflix and Tesla. Apple launches redesigned iPad with a bigger screen and USB-C Logitech updates Crayon stylus with the USB-C port missing from the Apple The new Apple TV 4K has a remote with USB-C and a lower starting price Apple’s new iPad only supports the old Apple Pencil–and need an adapter to do so Apple’s Magic Keyboard Folio for the new iPad has a 14-key function row The new iPad makes no sense Apple announces new iPad Pro with M2 chip and Wi-Fi 6E Netflix password-sharing crackdown will roll out globally in ‘early 2023’ – and here’s how it could work Netflix announces Profile Transfers – for when it forces you to finally pay up Netflix is all-in on binge-watching Netflix is ‘seriously exploring’ a cloud gaming service Can Netflix reclaim the ‘Netflix for games’ crown from Xbox Game Pass? Elon Musk is “excited about the Twitter situation” Tesla is “smoothing is vehicle process to avoid bottlenecks” Elon Musk’s frisky earnings call touched on the Cybertruck, Twitter, and teh future of Tesla Elon Musk says Starlink will keep funding Ukraine’s government ‘for free’ despite losing money Help, Foxconn has gone from AI 8K+5G to ‘3+3=∞’ Google adds replies and stars to Messages — and is taking the RCS fight to iPhones Lightroom is (finally) all I need for photo editing I went all in on eSIM and I have regrets The next generation of Thunderbolt seems nice but less necessary than ever Adobe’s latest AI prototype gives even the worst dancers some impressive moves GMC Sierra EV Denali revealed: plug-in-powered pickup goes premium Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Today on The Vergecast, the crew tries to explain the weird products out of Apple this week. We'll break down the news from Netflix and Tesla and a lightning round that gets a little spicy. That's coming up right after this.

• 0:16Speaker 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.

• 1:01Speaker 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.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, flagship podcast, Dongle Town. It's a lonely place, but we're all in it together. That's really the experience of using modern technology. You're alone in your house. The things aren't going to plug into one another, unless you engineer a solution, but you know that you're connected to millions of people worldwide who are going through the exact same frustrating problem.

• 2:21Alex Cranz?

  Who all know what a dongle is.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  It's a real, how did we end up here, man?

• 2:29Alex Cranz?

  I don't know, man. I love a dongle, though. I'm excited to talk about dongles.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  Mistakes were made, standards were organized, and standards organizations are the problem.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh my gosh. All right. Well, that voice you hear is Richard Lawler. What's up, Richard?

• 2:43Speaker 04

  What's going on? Good to be back.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  Immediately joining the show with a spicy take.

• 2:47Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  About standards organizations. That's how you know it's a Vergecast, everybody.

• 2:50Alex Cranz?

  Hell, yes.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  Richard is here in place of David Pierce, who I believe is in Texas.

• 2:56Alex Cranz?

  What? He went without me?

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I just got a Slack from him today. It said, I'm getting on a flight in Texas. There was no.

• 3:02Alex Cranz?

  Shocking.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  Preview of this Slack. There was no follow-up from this Slack.

• 3:07Alex Cranz?

  He's just in Texas now.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  He's just in Texas now.

• 3:10Alex Cranz?

  It's a big state. Could be anywhere.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Everybody's getting into Formula One. That's, that's what it is.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  So hopefully David comes back at some point. I wish him well in Texas. I don't even know what part of Texas he's in. He just said he was in Texas. But anyway, Richard's here. Alex Krantz is here.

• 3:25Alex Cranz?

  Hello. I am very curious to know where in Texas David is.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, if anyone in Texas sees David, let Alex know.

• 3:32Alex Cranz?

  Let me know. Don't say hi to David. Just like, be like, hold on, I have to DM.

• 3:36Nilay Patel?

  Just take his picture on the street and send it to Alex. It's suvalence.

• 3:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's fine. I've consented, so it's okay.

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  It's not from above. It's from with it. It's suvalence.

• 3:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  All right. I'm your friend, Neil. Welcome to Vergecast. There's a lot going on this week. I was looking at the rundown before we started. Boy, this is going to be a Vergecast. That's all I can say about this episode of the show. It's going to be one of the most Vergecast, Vergecasts of all time. That's what I got for you. We got new Apple stuff. Apple more committed to dongles than ever.

• 4:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  I think Apple has decided to react to governments around the world attempting to standardize ports by saying, fine, now our shit will be more frustrating than you could possibly imagine.

• 4:17Alex Cranz?

  You want us to do it? We're gonna do it and there'll be dongles, hundreds of dongles.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  What combinations of magnets and dongles do you want, Europe?

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  Cause you've never seen one like this. So there's a lot going on. New iPads, new iPad Pro, new Apple TV 4K, new remote, new keyboard cases for these iPads, the whole thing. Then Kanye West decided to buy Parler. Who knows why? Netflix is running on password sharing. Tesla had an earnings call. Foxconn did some Foxconn stuff. And Richard confidently told us before the show began that he's been crypto pilled.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  They get everybody eventually.

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  Who knows what that means?

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I don't know if that's true. I think, I think that's a complicated reverse troll.

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  Just a ton going on. Let's start, obviously with Apple. I want to say it's a weird move, but Apple has done this before. They did not have an event. They just issued a bunch of press releases and we were, off we go.

• 5:14Alex Cranz?

  They, I mean, they did do a video. You, you can go out and you can watch like a 20 minute video. And I guess if you like hunch forward and watch it really closely, you'll feel like you're watching the normal like stream.

• 5:26Nilay Patel?

  I didn't watch this video. Did you watch this video?

• 5:28Alex Cranz?

  I watched part of it and then I was like, I don't have to watch this video.

• 5:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Cause I just go on the website and look at the stuff.

• 5:33Alex Cranz?

  The press release. Yeah. I'm good. I'm ready to go. But they did do a video this year.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  We're practically in range of having the things in our hands. I think I can skip the video this time. If I have the spec sheet, I'm good. I've seen an iPad.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Right. So this is the, this is the, the weird zone all these companies are in. You can have the big event, maintain all the surprise, show the stuff to us in person. We love that. I'll sit through a video in your theater just to see the stuff in person right away. That's a fine trade. And obviously like, talk to executives and the people and take picture, all the stuff.

• 6:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  Good trade. Then there's what Apple has been doing, which is virtual events where we all watch the video together. Sure, from the comfort of our homes and then we all look at the spec sheets.

• 6:14Alex Cranz?

  Hold hands in the metaverse.

• 6:16Nilay Patel?

  Then there's this, which is what if you would just put out all the spec sheets right away? And then also make this video in case what you wanted was to watch a video at home. And I would say this is the least effective of the approaches to the modern product announcement.

• 6:28Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent.

• 6:29Nilay Patel?

  But please don't go back to making us all stream the video first. I think just put out the press releases. So they put out all the press releases, like lots of stuff.

• 6:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, a lot of stuff, like a shocking, I was, I was expecting like an iPad.

• 6:42Nilay Patel?

  There was real surprises.

• 6:43Alex Cranz?

  We got two iPads, we got the Apple TV.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  A lot of their events recently, I feel like we haven't had the surprise come in.

• 6:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  But this time I was, I was actually shocked by some of the things. It was good to have that back.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  What were you shocked by? What shocked you the most?

• 6:56Speaker 04

  I didn't see a new Apple TV coming this week or two new Apple TVs. That's, that's double. Okay. It's, it's not, okay.

• 7:03Alex Cranz?

  It's a new processor.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  It has a new chip inside from a newer iPhone. It is still the same.

• 7:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So the, yeah, the Apple TV is basically still the same as A15 now. They've removed the fan, which most people did not even know the Apple TV had a fan. But more recent Apple TVs have gigantic slow fans and then now they don't have a fan. Here's the weird part about the app, well, two weird things about these Apple TVs. This is what shocked me. One, it's still expensive. They lowered the price to 129 for the base model. But it's still incredibly expensive, like Roku's are more or less free.

• 7:36Alex Cranz?

  They, they frisbee them to you when you walk into Walmart. Amazon is just like automatically shipping them. You just sneeze in Amazon's direction.

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  If you have Amazon Prime, you can get a fired TV stick for nothing. Apple's at 129, so they lower the price at 129. But that 129 model is really weird, right? It has, it, it's 64 gigs of storage, no ethernet. So it's like, it's just a weird, it's like a more expensive, cheap thing.

• 8:02Alex Cranz?

  No fan.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  No fan. They put an A15 chip in it. People don't even know that the old Apple TV 4K's had fans and they had big slow fans, bottom and some vents. Now they don't, whatever. So that's 129, 64GB of storage, Wi-Fi only. Who is that for? Because for $20 more, you get double the storage. You get an Ethernet port, which if you are actually serious about streaming 4K, you probably want this thing near some sort of hardwired connection. And then you get a Thread radio, so you can support Matter and have it be your home. This is like the easiest $20 you should spend.

• 8:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Nilay Patel?

  The most future-proof $20 that you can have in your home.

• 8:39Alex Cranz?

  I keep wondering why they didn't drop the price of the base model one more. Like, if that had been $100, $50 difference, I would, I would still be, I would be here saying, this is an outrageous price difference. How dare they? But also, it would make like more business sense for Apple, because they'd be pushing it.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  It feels like they Motorola'd it.

• 8:57Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  Where it exists to go on sale for $99.

• 9:02Alex Cranz?

  But how do they do sales?

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  They don't expect you to buy it for 129. They're just, they're gonna put it on sale, and they're gonna say, hey, man, we give you a discount.

• 9:09Alex Cranz?

  This is the Ted Lasso discount. You gotta watch season three, $100.

• 9:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you sign up for Apple TV, you get one of these for, for free, right? Like, or for an inbox. Okay, maybe. I'm still saying that 149 model, you're gonna spend this much money in a streaming box, and you're not getting an Nvidia Shield, for my Shield people out there, of which Alex has one.

• 9:26Alex Cranz?

  It's still the best one.

• 9:29Nilay Patel?

  It's super not the best.

• 9:31Alex Cranz?

  Because it, because you can do pass-through, you can do audio pass-through to your receiver, which the Apple converts, the Apple TV converts the audio. And so if you're really serious about your home theater audio.

• 9:44Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 9:44Alex Cranz?

  That's the only reason to get the Shield. I, like, I love them both. I still get the, I still use the Apple TV, because I also use a Soto Spar. I don't care about pass-through.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  It's truly the only way to duplex.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 9:56Alex Cranz?

  That's not true.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  The right way.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  And, and did you know, it can gently warm your weed for you while you run flex?

• 10:02Alex Cranz?

  It can do everything. It's a magical device.

• 10:05Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  See, I believe it's good. It's really expensive. I like it, but you should just spend the money for the really good one because it's $20.

• 10:16Alex Cranz?

  So like

• 10:17Speaker 04

  It's just a bizarre situation.

• 10:19Alex Cranz?

  It's super weird. And also the storage, I keep coming back to like, why do I need so much storage on my Apple TV? I can understand like RAM, you know, and I could understand like wanting to load up more of the movie or whatever that you're streaming. So it can serve directly. So it's not like, I get that, but

• 10:35Speaker 04

  It's games. People, some people put games on Apple TV. That's what I got for you.

• 10:39Alex Cranz?

  There's how many?

• 10:40Speaker 04

  If, if you did gaming on Apple TV, then I guess it would matter. I just think it's so strange that now it supports both Dolby Vision and HDR 10 plus. I can't, I can't think of exactly how many devices have that.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is Samsung.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  The Samsung HDR.

• 10:53Alex Cranz?

  Samsung HH

• 10:55Speaker 04

  And Dolby Vision. Usually you have to choose. Yeah, there, there are a few, but

• 10:59Alex Cranz?

  Hi-Sense has HDR 10?

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, so if you just, you just look at it. So, oh boy, talk about standards bodies, Richard. This is why standards body should be abolished and I should be in charge. Just the feudal lord of all tech standards, Neil Patel. Vote Patel, but really in sort of a dictator way.

• 11:16Alex Cranz?

  It's a great glow up.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  So Dolby Vision is a standard. Apple supported it. Huge fanfare. Apple's one of the biggest supporters of Dolby Vision. They put in the Apple TV. The iPhone supports it. Macs support it. Apple loves Dolby Vision. You can record in Dolby Vision on an iPhone. Samsung has never supported Dolby Vision.

• 11:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Nilay Patel?

  It's always supported HDR 10 and then HDR 10 plus. The difference between HDR 10 and HDR 10 plus is effectively the difference between Dolby Vision HDR 10. So HDR 10 has the same wider dynamic range, bright, bright things get brighter, darker is Dolby Vision, same wider color, gamut to a certain extent. Dolby Vision has dynamic metadata, so it moves the dynamic range along with the scene. That's how the compression works. HDR 10 is fixed. HDR 10 plus dynamic metadata. Now, you can argue. About the fine distinctions between all of these things. I think Dolby Vision looks better than HDR 10+

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  Plus. Other people can't see it, whatever. But now the technology is the same. Samsung just refused to support Dolby Vision and even its TVs. They were totally committed HDR 10+ Plus, as was Amazon.

• 12:21Alex Cranz?

  Because they didn't want to pay, because Dolby Vision, you have to pay to like, use their product. You have to pay to like, master all of your stuff. Like, you have to go through a process with Dolby Vision. And HDR 10 Plus, they can just be like, bam, that's HDR 10 Plus, baby. Enjoy.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  And there's like, just weird mafia level licensing shenanigans in the background of all this, whatever. But Samsung sells a lot of TVs. So at some point, it was just who was gonna blink first? Was the industry gonna just support HDR 10 Plus because it's on all the Samsung TVs? Or Samsung gonna be like, screw it, we're paying the money, and we're gonna support Dolby Vision because all the services are on Dolby Vision? And it looks like Samsung won. Like, they just flatly won. And now, Apple, the biggest booster of Dolby Vision, is shipping HDR 10 Plus on the Apple TV.

• 13:06Alex Cranz?

  I don't know if they won, because they still have to get like, all of the different people making content have to start mastering in HDR 10 Plus. And most, a lot of them are still mastering in Dolby Vision in HDR 10. They're not doing that, that matadam.

• 13:21Nilay Patel?

  They do have, like Netflix and Amazon had at least some HDR 10 Plus stuff, I believe. Or at least, no, Amazon did. I can't remember.

• 13:27Alex Cranz?

  I think Apple TV is now gonna be doing some, like, everybody's slowly kind of doing it, but they're all irritated because they still have to like, go, okay, now they have to do an HDR 10 Master. Now they have to do an HDR 10 Plus Master and a Dolby Vision Master.

• 13:40Nilay Patel?

  But I think if you get the HDR 10 Plus Master, it's easier to go, it's easier to go fall back to HDR 10, for sure. It might be easier to go back and forth between Dolby Vision. I just, this is what I said. I told you to be the Vergecast-iest Vergecast of all time.

• 13:53Alex Cranz?

  But it'll be ugly. It won't be as pretty as Dolby.

• 13:56Nilay Patel?

  How many profiles of Dolby Vision does your TV support? Let's get into it. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I'm, I'm dying to see, Apple never really figured out this big plan they had to run everything in Dolby Vision, including the user interface. And then dynamically remap into SDR, and now potentially an HDR 10 Plus, because that's what Amazon's app supports. That was what the Apple TV shipped with this.

• 14:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Nilay Patel?

  Where the whole thing permanently ran in Dolby Vision. And they would dynamically remap content. It just like didn't work. So that's where you get match content and framerate and that's how you should run your Apple TV. Now you can, now that now there's another thing to switch to. So we'll see if they can get to a place, which is where everybody wants to be, where you're doing this seamlessly without blinking the TV to black.

• 14:42Alex Cranz?

  I do wonder though, Apple's always had kind of an issue with the handshaking on Dolby Vision and like, it's this thing called Edid and it's basically when your, your set top box handshakes with your TV and says, this is the kind of signal I'm going to send. Apple can sometimes be really wonky about that and you have to very specifically set up your Apple TV to get the handshake right, to get it in Dolby Vision. And I wonder if like, we're going to see some weird handshaking issues with these new ones where it's like HDR 10, HDR, Dolby Vision, who knows?

• 15:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:14Alex Cranz?

  Because that's been like a big frustration for new Apple TV users.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  When they roll out new TVs and new versions of HDMI standard every year, they have plug parties.

• 15:23Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  You should go listen to the HDMI spectacular episode of the Verge. Has to talk about this. All the manufacturers show up, all their engineers show up with all their stuff and they just plug things into one another.

• 15:33Alex Cranz?

  It's great.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  To make sure it all works. I've always wanted to go to one.

• 15:36Alex Cranz?

  But it almost never does.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's why.

• 15:38Alex Cranz?

  The Edid is like really, like, Apple's kind of notorious for having one of the best Edid, like that handshake, but it's also still kind of like wonky. Everybody's kind of crummy at it. It's great. I love it.

• 15:50Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, if you are attending an HDMI plug party, let me know. May I just come with you? I'll just pretend I work at your company.

• 15:56Alex Cranz?

  It'll be your plus one.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  Undercover at the HDMI plug party.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  So we're going to talk about this thing for 10 minutes and not talk about the most important development.

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, go ahead.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  The remote has USB C now.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm just worried. I'm like, I'm like, you can't feel it. There's an anxiety building.

• 16:07Alex Cranz?

  It doesn't do crypto, Richard.

• 16:09Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 16:09Alex Cranz?

  What's exciting?

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Remote has USB C now.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  Talk about your plug parties. So this is the year where.

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  Apple's bullshit about USB C is catching up to it.

• 16:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  It is fully the year. Like, all of these devices are all over the place because Apple didn't just go with the standard and they shipped lightning all over the place. So the Apple TV remote for years has been a lightning. And so you have to charge it very often. It's like every six months.

• 16:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I haven't charged mine in like a year.

• 16:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So then, and this year with the update, now it's USB C. This is fine. People probably have USB C connectors in their homes now. Europe has mandated USB C for new devices.

• 16:51Alex Cranz?

  Apparently they don't include a USB C cable.

• 16:53Nilay Patel?

  But there's no cable in the box. And this is what I mean.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Unless, unless you live in Brazil, then you can get a USB C cable in the box.

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  Because the Brazilian government is like, what are you doing? You have to put cables in the box? This is what I mean. Like, Apple's just like, God, it's middle finger in there. It's like, you want USB C? It'll be the most annoying, most difficult implementation of this possible. So no cables in the box. It's different than all your other stuff. We didn't do the phones this year. Whatever.

• 17:17Alex Cranz?

  Wait, Richard, does the box have like a different layout? Like, how do they fit the cable in there?

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 17:24Alex Cranz?

  Does it just come taped on the side with a big middle finger?

• 17:28Speaker 04

  I think people figured this out by looking at the website spec sheets. So I don't know if anyone's actually seen the packaging yet.

• 17:34Alex Cranz?

  Somebody send, Richard, not me, a photo.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  But I bet there's just an empty slot in every other global release. And you're like, huh, what's that?

• 17:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, for the Brazilians.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  All right. So that, but the Apple TV going to USB C is kind of like neither here nor there, right? Like, yeah, it's a remote. You plug it in once a year. You probably have one of these cables in your house. So be it. Unless you're like deeply in the Apple ecosystem and all you have is lightning.

• 17:59Alex Cranz?

  And like one micro USB cable? You're just like, no. Have fun going to Micro Center.

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  There's no way to charge this thing unless you have USB C already in your house. Like, you just get it and your remote doesn't work and you're screwed. So it goes. That one's fine. It's the iPad. So wait, that's, so that's the Apple TV.

• 18:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's surprising how the prices work. It's surprising that Apple caved on HDR 10 plus. It's a little surprising on USB C, but like, whatever.

• 18:24Alex Cranz?

  It's surprising they announced it.

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  It's surprising they announced it.

• 18:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  If anyone thought we weren't going to start with the Apple TV, I don't know what show you thought you were listening to. Of course, we're like deep in the Dolby Vision profiles. It's the Vergecast. All right. Then there was the stuff we were expecting, which was new iPads. And I think we were all expecting the new iPad Pro, which we can get through very quickly, I think, but we should come back to because it's also caught up in this USB C noise. So the new iPad Pro has an M2 chip. It has Wi-Fi 6E, which is Apple's first Wi-Fi 6E device. It's a great, it lets you

• 18:55Alex Cranz?

  It's wonderful.

• 18:56Nilay Patel?

  Use more Wi-Fi channels in your home if you have Wi-Fi 6E router, which I just bought Eero's Pro 6Es. They're great. Super stupid expensive, and I only bought them because I'd podcast from home twice a week.

• 19:09Alex Cranz?

  You look wonderful today. I was, I was thinking there was something a little different about you today. And it's that

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  It's an extra 50 megahertz of bandwidth.

• 19:17Alex Cranz?

  Hell, yeah.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  That's, I don't know what that is. It's the sun's low in the sky.

• 19:20Alex Cranz?

  It's a 50 megahertz difference.

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  It's a 50 megahertz, not bandwidth, of spectrum. That's what I'm doing. It's a

• 19:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  I'm not even doing that. This is IMAX from 2015. This thing is probably on 2.4 gigahertz. I just have routers that don't crash in two minutes. That's, I bought new ones. That's all that happened. Anyway, so the iPad Pro has M2 Wi-Fi 6E. Otherwise, same design, same features.

• 19:40Alex Cranz?

  Same displays.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Same boulder rolling down the hill of Stage Manager when iPad OS 16 comes out. Same, same displays, right?

• 19:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Nilay Patel?

  LC displays, no changes, just a

• 19:52Alex Cranz?

  The micro LED display in the, the iPad, the 12 inch.

• 19:56Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 19:57Alex Cranz?

  That I remember Chris Welch wasn't a great fan of last year. He thought there was like some weird roll off in the light.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  There's some blooming with those in weird ways.

• 20:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  But I, I've always liked them. It's weird, but the 11 does not get micro.

• 20:10Alex Cranz?

  That's what I was holding out for. I was so excited for an 11 inch with micro. And I was like, oh,

• 20:15Nilay Patel?

  Nope.

• 20:15Alex Cranz?

  Well, I won't spend way too much money on an iPad Pro I don't need now. It's the whole reason.

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Take that, Tim Apple.

• 20:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I really showed him.

• 20:24Nilay Patel?

  Instead, I'll be buying dongles from you at $29 a pop.

• 20:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that's why I've had Pro. But then there's the new iPad.

• 20:32Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  Which is totally redesigned, bigger screen, USB C, the camera has been moved, so it's at the top in landscape, new keyboard cover, old pencil.

• 20:41Alex Cranz?

  It was redesigned, the weirdest pencil. Like, everything about this kind of shocked me. One, I didn't expect a total new redesign, because normally, that's like, like, Apple for these press releases is usually like, here's a little, the M2 and the iPad Pro, go. And I'm like, okay, I get that. I don't need to see that in person. This is a whole new device. So I was expecting, like, I would have expected a lot of big things. But then I think about that pencil, and I think about, like, all of the pictures in the Apple, in the Jobs Theater, of people playing with that dongle and that pencil.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  The old pencil.

• 21:15Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God. Of cour- yeah, yeah. Okay, I get it. I get why you couldn't do an event for this guy.

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  You just want to hide the pencil from people.

• 21:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Nilay Patel?

  So this device is full of compromises. So a 10.9 inch display, the new flatter edges, so the same kind of, the same kind of design language as the iPad Air and the Pro. They updated the cameras. Like I said, they moved the front camera to landscape, Wi-Fi 6, so Apple's finally, like, adopting Wi-Fi 6 across its line, Touch ID and a power button. I complained about this on Twitter, and people were like, you know, pretty mad at me. Apple keeps saying this is an all-screen design.

• 21:51Alex Cranz?

  It's got a bezel.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  Dude, the bezels on this thing are ridic- like, go watch the video. This is the reason you should watch the video. Like, because they show the thing a lot, and you're like, oh, those bezels are huge. Like, you could-

• 22:02Alex Cranz?

  Like, you could live in that.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  And I understand that they're not calling it edge-to-edge, now they're saying it's all-screen. What is the difference between all-screen and edge-to-edge display? Those things mean the same thing.

• 22:11Speaker 04

  This has HP touchpad bezels.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, okay, just close your eyes. Pull over in your car, close your eyes. Imagine this. Let's just go through this exercise.

• 22:18Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  Imagine the bezels were 10 times thicker. So it was like a little tiny display and lots of bezels. Right? But otherwise, the same. Would you call that an all-screen display, or an all-screen design?

• 22:35Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I would if I worked at Apple.

• 22:37Nilay Patel?

  Right, I'm saying, but people are like, I'm like, this is not all-screen. And people are like, yeah, it is. There's nothing else but screen. Okay, just like, push it out. Imagine the screen was four inches, but it was the same size case, and there was just that much bezel on it. And I was like, this is an all-screen design. Would you agree with me?

• 22:53Alex Cranz?

  I mean-

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  No, you wouldn't, because you're not bonkers.

• 22:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no.

• 22:57Nilay Patel?

  Because words have meanings. Now imagine the screen, there's no bezel. And I was like, this is an all-screen design. Would you agree? Yes, of course you would.

• 23:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Nilay Patel?

  So there's at some point between filling into the edges in a little postage stamp with five inch bezels, where you can no longer get to say it's all-screen.

• 23:16Alex Cranz?

  And this is where you, you, you're at the point right now where you're like, this is not all-screen. Richard, do you feel it's all-screen?

• 23:23Speaker 04

  You gotta hear both sides. You gotta hear both sides. You gotta hear both sides. The screen is all-screen, right?

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I agree that the screen is all-screen.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  The screen is nothing but screen. There's nothing but screen. Where the screen is, there's no notch. There's no, uh, a porthole little for the front-facing camera, nothing like that. It's just screen. That's all, it's all-screen.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So you're saying it's what you mean by it's an all-screen screen design?

• 23:49Speaker 04

  Yes. Yes.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  By the way, even the thing isn't all-screen because there's a camera there. Like definitionally, it's an all-screen and camera design.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  All right. So that's the new iPad. They've added USB-C to it, but because they want the old pencil, the old pencil charges with lightning. In a famous Johnny Ive design decision, you charge the old pencil by plugging it into the lightning port of the old iPad.

• 24:15Alex Cranz?

  It's beautiful.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  But now it's a USB-C. So now what you do is you plug a USB-C cable into your new iPad and then you plug a $9 dongle, which is female USB-C. So you plug your cable into that and then female lightning. So you plug your lightning pencil into the other end. And my God, man.

• 24:34Alex Cranz?

  I, so I actually like the dongle.

• 24:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 24:38Alex Cranz?

  I'm, I'm sorry. Like, I don't like the dongle in that I want to own one.

• 24:44Alex Cranz?

  But I like that they were like, okay, we only want to use the old pencil.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 24:48Alex Cranz?

  Well, so now we've got to plug it in and we want to go USB-C.

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  They make a new, they've made it for years.

• 24:53Alex Cranz?

  But it can only be charged by magnets. And they're like, we can't do the magnets because, because it's going to mess with like the camera or something. And so we can't, no magnets. So we got to use the old pencil that has the goofiest way of charge and we got to plug it in. But we can't just sell somebody a cord because they would have sold you a cable. They wouldn't have included a cable. They would sell you a cable that's female lightning on one side and USB-C on the other. And like, that's a terrible cord. You can never use that again. And now you just like, you got your little dongle and you plug it into your USB-C cable and you're good to go.

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  My theory is when Apple rolled out this Apple pencil years ago, they were like, people are gonna love this thing. And they made like 10 million of them.

• 25:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Nilay Patel?

  They were riding high. Maybe Tim Cook pressed the zero on his number pad one too many times. He's made too many of them and they're all in a warehouse. So like, you know what? We're just gonna get rid of them over time.

• 25:45Alex Cranz?

  But they could just give you one.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  I'm going to absolutely purloined a take from news reporter Ammar Shakir, who pointed out that one explanation, and I think it holds some weight, is that a lot of schools have iPads, the base model iPad that we're talking about. And they have a lot of those pencils already. So making it work with the old pencil, they don't have to replace the pencils.

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  Why can't you support both things?

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Hey, man, technology's hot.

• 26:09Alex Cranz?

  Well, they're already gonna be all of those, they're gonna want all of those schools to go and update to the new iPad, which is now what? $150 more? $100 more?

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So we gotta talk about the pricing because this thing is really expensive.

• 26:22Alex Cranz?

  Really expensive.

• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  For what it is. So it's $449 for the 64 gig model. The old version started $329. The 320 iPad was like this close. I don't think it was an impulse buy. It was still too expensive for that, but it was like teetering on the edge.

• 26:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  A $250, $299 is like, I'm gonna buy this one, kid. I can break it.

• 26:42Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  $329, right on the other side, frequently discounted, right? You could buy a refurbished one, you could buy a used one, whatever. $449 is no longer in that territory.

• 26:49Alex Cranz?

  That's just $100 less than an iPad Air.

• 26:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's weird. It's weird. And then the keyboard is another $250. We should talk about this keyboard. It's, what's it called? The Magic Smart Folio?

• 27:01Alex Cranz?

  For the 10.9 inch iPad.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  It's the Magic Keyboard Folio for the 10.9 inch iPad. It's got a trackpad, it's got buttons, it's got function keys.

• 27:12Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I love that.

• 27:13Nilay Patel?

  Which is another really interesting addition from Apple to the iPad line. This thing, and it's got a kickstand. So it effectively turns the new iPad into a Surface. You know, and there's an arm surface this year.

• 27:25Alex Cranz?

  Only this cheapest iPad has the function keys.

• 27:29Nilay Patel?

  Right. So the iPad Pro still has the same keyboard case with no function keys and no kickstand.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  I can't defend that one.

• 27:36Alex Cranz?

  I believe you mean the Magic Keyboard Folio for 12.9 inch iPad Pro. We have to use the right names.

• 27:45Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. There's something here where Apple is just caught in the middle.

• 27:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  Right? They didn't update the new iPad. If they just moved the camera to the side and added function keys to the keyboard, would have made a little sense. They didn't do any of that to that iPad. They just bumped the processor. This iPad is like a substantial redesign. It is clearly designed to be used in laptop mode. Right? Landscape, front-facing camera, keyboard case with function keys, a surface-like kick-out design, slightly more expensive. This is the iPad is the low-end laptop replacement. This is the iPad that goes up against the $500, $600, $700 cheap Windows PC, high-end Chromebook, I guess. It's weird. It's a weird product.

• 28:28Alex Cranz?

  But it's $700.

• 28:30Nilay Patel?

  And they're keeping the 329 model in the lineup. It's not going away like it usually does.

• 28:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. No, I thought Monica did a wonderful story this week, just like trying to wrap her head around why this thing exists and pointed out that, okay, if you get it, you have to get the key, like, and you want to use it as a laptop, you have to go get the keyboard. So now you're spending $700. So now you're spending $700 on this thing. And for that, you can get a really nice Windows machine that does all the things and isn't like the iPad OS, which we all enjoy, but also it is not a laptop OS.

• 29:04Nilay Patel?

  I will say Monica put a line in this piece, which is very good. It's called "The New iPad Makes Some Sense." You'll read it. But in the middle, she's like, "It's not a computer. I don't care what you say." And I was like, "Wow." Strong words for Verge.com. The website founded on the notion that we should just argue about what words mean for the rest of our lives. But I get what she's saying.

• 29:24Alex Cranz?

  Monica was like, "No, line in the sand."

• 29:27Nilay Patel?

  She was like, "It's not a computer." Our laptop reviewer was like, "This garbage isn't a computer." But they're obviously trying to get it to compete. She's earned the take. She's earned the take. She's, she has earned the take. But it's weird, right? Because the Surface, the ARM Surface is this form factor. Exactly. This is Microsoft's form factor. And the ARM Surface is also limited in what apps it can run, right? Because it's Windows on ARM. We'll see what its battery life is like. But this new iPad is more of a head-up competitor to the Surface than ever before. Four, it's just it's cheaper, but then I can't do as much as it's iPad OS. It can't run. This one can't run Stage Manager because it's not iPad Pro. Just a weird product all the way around. Like, I'm not sure what Apple is doing. I'm not sure why they went USB C on this one and then didn't do the

• 30:09Alex Cranz?

  I forgot about the piles. I'm sorry. I forgot that it doesn't do the piles.

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't do piles.

• 30:14Alex Cranz?

  No piles.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  One thing I'll say, Logitech updated its Crayon, which is also what's what's schools buy. USB C port, you just plug a USB C cable right into this thing.

• 30:24Alex Cranz?

  That's the way to do it.

• 30:25Nilay Patel?

  Outdone.

• 30:26Alex Cranz?

  But maybe they can just break off that lightning part of it. Snap it off.

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't get it, man. And here's there's somebody who has given a ninth gen iPad to a child. Actually, not having a home button is gonna be is weird. It's gonna be weird for a lot of people.

• 30:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. We got a whole episode. Whenever David comes back from wherever he is in Texas, he's gonna do a whole Wednesday episode on the iPad, how to even pick one. David has more feelings about Stage Manager than anybody.

• 30:54Alex Cranz?

  The most feelings.

• 30:56Nilay Patel?

  And today, before he DM'd me about being in Texas, he had dug up a story that I'd written for Engadget in like 2008, where Steve Jobs was talking about task managers and what they represent to people.

• 31:09Nilay Patel?

  I was like, I don't remember writing this, David. It's like, I found it. I'm like, God. So that's coming Wednesday.

• 31:13Alex Cranz?

  Very good.

• 31:14Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, just a weird set of products from Apple. And this USB C moment for Apple is coming and it just feels that the company hasn't grabbed on to it yet. You know what I mean? Like, it didn't go all the way. It seems like it's fighting it is like what I would say.

• 31:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I don't think Apple wants to do USB C. I think this is shocking, but

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  They're being dragged through the door, kicking and screaming and clawing into the floor.

• 31:40Alex Cranz?

  I don't think they want to do it.

• 31:41Nilay Patel?

  I want to be clear about this. Apple invented USB C. The standard exists because Apple wanted it to exist for that 12 inch MacBook. They were so proud of it when that MacBook came out and now they're like, how dare you force us to use this standard that we invented?

• 31:56Alex Cranz?

  Sometimes your children betray you, and this is one of those moments. I'm sorry, Tim Apple.

• 32:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. Told you this was gonna be a Virg Cassie, Virg Cass. We'll be right back.

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• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Lots of other news this week. So Netflix had a bunch of news. They had earnings. Tesla had earnings. Elon Musk said he was never going to be on an earnings hall again. Guess what? He was on this earnings hall. Talked a bunch. But let's start with Netflix. Richard walks through it.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  Netflix has had an interesting pandemic. They, when everyone came home, suddenly everyone subscribed to Netflix and their subscriber numbers exploded way beyond their projections. Just really, they kind of gobbled up what they expected the next few years to take within the next few months. And the downside of that has been that as the pandemic has kind of progressed and we're now years removed, they aren't growing anymore. They already added all the customers. They can't find more people to sign up for Netflix. People are leaving Netflix because there are other streaming services. Other, the Hollywood studios and the big companies have gotten into streaming and they're spending a lot of money to do it. And earlier this year, Netflix lost customers for the first time in 10 years. So they came out with their earnings

• 34:12Speaker 04

  report this week and we finally got news that the password sharing crackdown that they have talked about to try and turn around and reverse this trend will roll out globally in 2023. They've been using it in a few Latin American countries. Whether or not people like it depends on who you ask. If you ask Netflix, everyone loves it and it's great. If you ask people in those countries. They say it's confusing and they don't like it.

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  So it's weird because Netflix has to frame this is like a feature addition. They can't frame it as, hey, we've noticed you've been stealing for a number of years. They can't come at it that way. They've got to be like, hey, you're sharing your account. We love it. Would you like to pay some more money to keep doing it? And I, I just don't think that makes sense to anybody. Like, I think most people like intuitively understand that they're being shaken down.

• 34:57Alex Cranz?

  And it's like, not a little amount. It's not like, hey, do you want to spend 99 cents a month to share this password? No, you will have to spend 7.99, which used to be what Netflix costs. And also you're going to have to watch ads and they may or may not suck.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  That's brutal. And if you want to watch Netflix on a TV that's not at your house, it could get complicated now. Especially if you're there for more than a month or stuff like that, like suddenly the rules have changed. It's not just, oh, hey, you know what? I'm here. I'm going to sign in with my Netflix account and watch stuff. It's not going to be like that anymore.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  Have they talked about how they're going to figure that out for people who are traveling?

• 35:29Speaker 04

  They have, they detailed that a bit on their support page. They.

• 35:34Alex Cranz?

  It's partially like if you're signed into the app and stuff, I think is part of it. Like if you sign into the app on your home network, right?

• 35:41Speaker 04

  It really only applies if you're signing in on a TV, I think is what they said.

• 35:45Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  So like, you know, if you're watching on your, your phone or something and you're traveling, you've got, you've got a whole different, different kind of thing. But essentially what you are dealing with is you're going to, you're going, you may run into this if you are trying to sign in on a TV that's somewhere not where you live.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  All right. So you gotta tell all your exes to watch Netflix on their phones and use AirPlay.

• 36:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I have to tell my mom. She's just not going to have Netflix ever again.

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But for your mom, you just like pay the money.

• 36:13Alex Cranz?

  She can pay the money. I'm not paying.

• 36:15Nilay Patel?

  The password sharing thing is complicated with like the number of people, like roommates and old friends and ex-girlfriends, like.

• 36:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  Here's what's going to happen. I'm like, not talk to you anymore. This is over. We're, you're on the account. By the way, and you start Venmo, $70 a month, or your Netflix is going to have ads. Those are your choices.

• 36:35Alex Cranz?

  Don't you ever just do like the hard cutoff where one day, like one day I signed on and I was like, why am I getting all these recommended, recommendations for shows about babies? I do not have a baby.

• 36:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:47Alex Cranz?

  And I remember my old roommate had a baby and was just using my account. And I was like, I don't talk to this person anymore and just annihilated it.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  And they're gonna make that easier, so.

• 36:56Alex Cranz?

  Just like took, changed the password, demanded sign out, no more baby content.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  Wow. So if, if what you want to do is to be petty with your ex roommate.

• 37:05Alex Cranz?

  Yes, or your, your ex, your ex boyfriend, ex girlfriend. Like, I think everybody should be just a little more petty.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  That is a feature. That's a feature. Yes. But yeah, I think essentially if you are, what it comes down to is verified, the idea of verified devices. It's sort of like your home Xbox, if you have like an Xbox or a PlayStation, which one is your home one? So if you're watching on a device that you've already verified for, they, they don't, they don't exactly have all the details. But like, if for a month or so, if you are away from home, you won't get prompted for a code or to like a text message or something to verify who you are. But if you stay away from home for a while, suddenly it's going to ask you to verify the device again. Or maybe it'll ask the people who are, who are back at your, your home location to verify their devices. It's gonna get real complicated for you. That's what I'm saying.

• 37:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm very excited for the cat and mouse game of people trying to break Netflix password sharing rules. It's, it's going to happen. It's gonna be incredible.

• 37:56Alex Cranz?

  I was gonna say, it sounds kind of like screeners. And with screeners, you have to verify a lot of times. And then your friend will be like, can I have the screeners? And you're like, no, I don't want to be like getting a verification code at 3 a.m. and having to just text it to you. So I'm not doing that. So a lot of people are just gonna.

• 38:10Nilay Patel?

  You mean, screeners for review movies and stuff?

• 38:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, when you're reviewing movies, when you, when, when you're reviewing TV shows, they'll send you like, you'll have to like login and you'll have to get a two factor authentication. And it's a whole thing and it's fine, but you can't do it with your, your friends ask for the password. And you're like, no, it's too complicated. It's two factor. So if they're doing like a two factor kind of deal here, that prob, that like, that complication will probably push more people be like, man, get your own account. I'm not texting you codes at 2 a.m.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  Some friendships are gonna fall apart over this.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we're gonna see friendships fall apart. It's gonna be great.

• 38:43Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited. I can't wait to write 500 stories about Netflix password crack time. But it's all this back to what Richard is saying, right? Netflix is sort of like out of human beings to sell Netflix to. So it needs to get more of them by kicking more people off password sharing. So it is like created more Netflix customers against then sell to. And then needs to basically raise prices and cut costs. Like they're at mature company saturated market moments and like, here we are.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  And it is really interesting to see them in this mature company era of theirs, because they have suddenly turned into the cable company.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  On their earnings call, the only thing they want to talk about is how they are profitable and none of their competitors are. They just want to remind everyone that they make money and HBO Max, Peacock, you name it, Paramount, they're all just plowing millions or billions of dollars into into a hole and setting it on fire and it's going away.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  Okay, well, two things. One, to be fair, if I was competing against Peacock and the AT&T implosion of HBO Max, I would point out that I was profitable all the time, too. I'd be like, you know what's true? They're just lighting your money on fire. Two, I am now compelled to disclose Comcast Universal's NBC unit, which is the proprietor of Peacock, is a minority investor in Vox Media. I assure you, they did not like what I just said about Peacock or anything that I've ever said about them ever.

• 40:04Alex Cranz?

  Didn't we also make a Netflix show?

• 40:06Nilay Patel?

  Two, we've made a Netflix show. It's a great, you should go watch it. It's called The Future of It Will Single Handedly Save The Company In This Time Of Turmoil And Strife. Our company also makes TV shows all over the place. There's a Chad Mum, our, the creative director of Vox Media Studios, are very excited about partnering with the people who make F1 Drive To Survive, to make a show about the PGA Tour. He's just been tweeting about golf for for months now. I don't know what goes on over there. I just see the golf tweets. There's a conflict of interest, everybody. Golf tweets from my buddy. The end. That's the disclosure this week.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  The other things that Netflix talked about, they announced the profile transfer so that, you know, when you get kicked off someone's account, you can take your your account and walk and create a new account that you will hopefully pay Netflix for, they hope. But you can't merge accounts. Like, don't they know that people get married sometimes and you have multiple Netflix accounts?

• 40:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, it's all over, man. You gotta decide, who are you now? It's like changing your last name, but it's your Netflix saga.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  I gave up, I gave up my Netflix.

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  Other interesting things Netflix, they're in earnings calls, so they're all in on binge watching. I think there's been a lot of this conversation, especially because House of the Dragon is out, HBO Max, really all in on sort of these week by week drops. Other, Hulu does week by week for its big shows. Like all, most of the streamers are at week by week. Netflix still just drops them all at once, does not get the water cooler conversation, does not get the sort of weekly ringer podcast about what's going to happen next. It just all happens at once. And they're committed to it. They say this is what creates the value for Netflix subscribers. I don't know about this. Here's a quote, "We think our bingeable release model helps to drive substantial engagement, especially for newer titles." I feel like it's the opposite. I feel like they lose out on that sort of week by week anticipation.

• 41:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think this is one of those situations where they're going to have regret in a couple of years, because these other companies have all figured out the water cooler situation. Like, these are mature entertainment companies that have been doing this in many cases for decades and decades. And while like viewership habits have changed, some stuff haven't. People still only have a limited amount of time to watch shows every day. And that like getting ahead and everything is really frustrating for people. It's like, I don't want to binge watch. I don't want to watch a show, group watch a show with my friends on Netflix. Cause then I'm gonna have to be like, okay, I can't watch it.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  This is a conversation that they're having internally, where they have some debate. And they just released, or they're going to release this new Ryan Johnson movie in theaters. And there was a Wall Street Journal article about kind of the debate that executives had over whether or not they should do theatrical releases and how that would affect the kind of movies that they can get and put on their service. And also, the release, the release strategy. My guess on this, my personal guess based on basically nothing, is that Reed Hastings was forced to give up his position on the ad thing. He had to. He kicking and screaming, they were losing customers, the investors were scared, they had to do something. They added ads.

• 42:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna take-

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Binge releases from him and from Ted from their cold dead hands. So until they have the new CEOs, they're going to still do binge releases because that's what they want. And that's, and that's when you'll see it change.

• 43:06Nilay Patel?

  I agree with you with the ad thing. This is like, right, Netflix is out of people. So you got two choices to make more money. You got to create more people, which you can do by kicking people off of their password sharing. And then you got to make more money from the people you got, which is showing some of those people ads. Those are, that's it. That's what you got. The binge thing to me is just, right, they're already starting to break, right? Stranger Things was in two drops. The new Guillermo del Toro thing is a couple of drops, right? Like they're getting there where they realize they got it. Like here, here's another disclosure. The new show, the new series, The Watcher on Netflix, based on New York Mag story. New York Mag is part of Vox Media. Yeah, the whole thing. It's good, you should watch it. Anything about the kind of all, I'll watch it. It's great. He was in Mr. Robot, you know how I feel with Mr. Robot. Great. That show would be better if it was week by week, right?

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  It's a cliffhanger show. It's a thriller. They should stop it every week and make people try to figure out the mystery. Instead, you just, everybody watched it all at once and everyone's like mad about the ending, which I won't spoil. But it's a New York Mag story, which you could have read. So like, how much can you possibly spoil it? But that's weird, right? To get everybody focused on the end and like, whether or not the thing completed itself successfully versus over a long period of time, making everybody focus on the twists and turns of the mystery inside of the story.

• 44:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  At some point, they're just going to have to deal with it.

• 44:20Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think they also have to deal with the fact that at some point, right now they're profitable. Competition is increasing. I mean, I don't think most of these streaming channels are going to survive, but the competition is there. They're, they're having to fight other people for, for some of these dollars and some of these subscriptions. And you can't just keep churning out content. At some point, the, the kind of like infinite content has to become finite. And so if they're the only ones in that binge mode, being like, we just shoveling stuff in your faces while Disney's over here doing, we do two shows a week. That's it. And it's Thursday night and have fun. Like they're just going to run into a problem of money. That's why Disney is doing so well is it's being very cautious about its, its rollout.

• 45:03Alex Cranz?

  That's one of the reasons that HBO Max and some of these other ones have struggled is because they weren't cautious. And they were shoveling money at people and just being like, yeah, make as much content as possible. And like Netflix is the worst offender there. And You're seeing that burnout in Hollywood. You're seeing those ramifications in the entertainment industry. And at some point, I think that's going to catch up with Netflix itself.

• 45:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 45:26Alex Cranz?

  We'll see.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  The other thing Netflix is doing, right? They gotta get rid of people. They gotta create more customers. You fire the people from password sharing, make them pay you ad ads. Those are your choices. You also make new products. So they are now quote, seriously exploring a cloud gaming service, which makes sense. Netflix is very good at streaming video over the internet. In its simplest form, cloud gaming is just streaming some video to you over the internet, accepting some input back from you, adjusting that video.

• 45:53Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  In a, you know, performant and low latency way. They gotta do it though, right? I mean, it's harder than it sounds. Actually getting the games.

• 46:02Alex Cranz?

  Maybe you think of the games. Jay Peters did this great story this week called, Can Netflix reclaim the Netflix for games crown from Xbox Game Pass? And he spoke with a bunch of different people about like, what are the actual challenges there? And Richard, you're right. Like, that was one of the biggest challenges is they don't have all those relationships that Nvidia and Microsoft have with game developers to make games. Like, they've got a lot of games on their platform, but they're primarily indie games from indie developers that's for mobile.

• 46:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yo, but Ubisoft is like, you want Assassin's Creed? We'll stream it anywhere.

• 46:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Ubisoft will do that for anyone. We could probably have, we could probably have Assassin's Creed on the Verge website at any point if we wanted to do a deal.

• 46:40Nilay Patel?

  Look, we've got big updates, the redesign coming. And soon, the biggest update of all, which is the entire Verge will just be a level of Assassin's Creed. We're gonna bring backstage. And you'll have to do the eagle dive to find a new story.

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  That's our bird noise for today. I can't make the bird.

• 46:57Alex Cranz?

  That's the noise they make in the game. I've never played these games. I don't know what they do.

• 47:00Nilay Patel?

  You gotta play at least one Assassin's Creed. What are you doing?

• 47:02Alex Cranz?

  I've played, I played the Viking one, but I didn't finish.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  That's not the best one by far. I mean, it's like the most like beautiful one.

• 47:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:10Nilay Patel?

  But like.

• 47:10Alex Cranz?

  What's, what's the good one?

• 47:12Nilay Patel?

  They all blur together. The, the, the one in Italy, the Itzio.

• 47:16Alex Cranz?

  Okay. That's like an early one. I was, I was always told never to finish one.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  They made, I think, no, I made, they made three with him, I think.

• 47:23Alex Cranz?

  I'm really up to date on my Assassin's Creed lore. Sorry.

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  I had Assassin. Yeah, there's people listening to us right now who are hardcore Assassin's Creed fans.

• 47:32Alex Cranz?

  I'm so sorry.

• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  They're writing the slash fix and like, please don't email us. Like, I just, I'm sorry. But Itzio was the one.

• 47:38Alex Cranz?

  I know they don't have the middle finger. That's like, there's my lore knowledge. They don't have their middle finger.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because they've got knives.

• 47:44Alex Cranz?

  Which is way cooler.

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  It's true. My wife used to be like, are you playing the game where you stab people in the face? And I'd be like, I am playing that game.

• 47:51Alex Cranz?

  I am.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  That is a totally accurate description of this game. But Ubisoft will be anywhere, right?

• 47:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Nilay Patel?

  The problem is Ubisoft is one of the last large independent game studios with, you know, a triple A title like Assassin's Creed to drop on everyone. All of the other studios are getting bought by Microsoft. Whoops.

• 48:14Alex Cranz?

  And just Microsoft.

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  Pretty much just Microsoft.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  You get into this weird, you get into this weird space because you, you build a service that only people who are hardcore gamers would want. And then you don't have the games for those hardcore gamers. Like you don't have a reason for those people to turn off the PS5 and Xbox Series S or X or S or gaming PC that they already have.

• 48:32Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that cloud gaming is only for hardcore gamers?

• 48:35Speaker 04

  No, but it's hard to sell to someone who isn't a hardcore gamer. Like if someone who plays mobile games on their phone, maybe they should try cloud gaming, but how would you convince them to do it?

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Alex Cranz?

  I think it's a, like hardcore gamers want triple A games, generally speaking, right? And you're, you're just regular person who doesn't own any consoles, but would probably want to play a game is going to want to play those same triple A games. Those are the ones that are in the marketplace, the Call of Duties of the world, the Destiny twos. And so like they're gonna, you're gonna have to have support for those if you want to get those people who are like, yeah, I don't want one, but I want to like mess around with my friend who, who plays this game a lot and like, see what they're doing and, and experience it. So you have to like, you still have to have those triple A games because that's where the audience is, whether they're hardcore or casual, I think.

• 49:22Nilay Patel?

  Every time I talk about gaming on this show, people yell at me. So I'm just going to lean directly into it. This is my personal.

• 49:27Alex Cranz?

  They can all yell at me.

• 49:28Nilay Patel?

  This is my personal cultural war trolling.

• 49:30Speaker 04

  Either you have Madden or you don't.

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I play a lot of Madden and now Chris Grant, the publisher of the verge, the group publisher of the Virgin Polygon is trying to get me to play Control. That's where I'm at with gaming lately. I buy all the games. I just bought Cyberpunk, haven't played a minute of it.

• 49:43Alex Cranz?

  No FIFA?

• 49:43Nilay Patel?

  That's, I buy them all and I don't play them. But here's my, here's my thing.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  If you didn't play it when it was broken, you didn't really play it.

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  I watched all of the videos of the weird map clipping and I was like, this looks amazing. And then I just never played it. If you are a Netflix binge watching subscriber, right? You sit down in front of Netflix, you want 16 hours of content to fill the empty hours of your day. Sure. What you could sell to that audience is like a great, single player, story driven narrative game.

• 50:15Alex Cranz?

  Those don't exist.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  Right? Start playing this game, experience this long story, you'll come to the end of it, it'll be whatever. The entire modern games industry is like veering away from that, especially with the AAA titles into, you know, GTA V is like an extremely long running, massively multiplayer world that asks you for money in one way or the other every five minutes.

• 50:37Alex Cranz?

  Right. They're all MMOs because they just want to like get as much of your money as possible. They're trying to create their own subscription services effectively. So yeah, I think Netflix is gonna have to figure that out. How do they, are they gonna make a Stranger's Thing game? Do you want to play a Stranger's Thing game? Like a AAA?

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  Why do you keep calling it Stranger's Thing? I think that's a fanfic that is not officially licensed.

• 51:02Alex Cranz?

  It's the evening.

• 51:03Nilay Patel?

  Stranger's Thing is, I don't know if you've heard about this.

• 51:05Alex Cranz?

  Stranger's Thing.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  It's a 60 hour, extremely dark, gritty reboot of Perfect Strangers.

• 51:15Alex Cranz?

  You went in a butt.

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  Balki Bartoklis wandering the streets of Chicago with a knife.

• 51:20Alex Cranz?

  I was gonna go.

• 51:22Nilay Patel?

  It's Stranger's Thing.

• 51:23Alex Cranz?

  Balki's just like, hey guys, what's up? I can't even try the accent.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  Cousin Larry's a drug dealer. It's Stranger's Thing, everybody. There's like 90% of the office has no idea what I'm talking about. Perfect Strangers was a show in the eighties that I am guessing, based on having watched a lot in the eighties and not any time recently, I'm just gonna guess it didn't hold up, just based on what I remember of Stranger.

• 51:46Alex Cranz?

  You mean Cousin Balki who like held a lamb and was like, I'm from another country and other countries, we don't have things. We just have our little goat.

• 51:55Nilay Patel?

  But can you be racist against a fake country? The Vergecast, everybody. I think I know the answer.

• 52:05Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so that's Netflix. Rebooting Perfect Strangers is a dark, gritty, 60 hour, single player video game.

• 52:12Alex Cranz?

  Gonna be incredible.

• 52:16Alex Cranz?

  They're all gonna have like the little five o'clock shadow.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's great.

• 52:19Alex Cranz?

  And some large gun. It's gonna be great.

• 52:21Speaker 04

  Oh, it'll be right, right? It's gonna, it's gonna look fantastic.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  It's, yeah, it's just cousin Larry walking. Yeah, it's gonna be great. And then cousin Larry's gonna do the eagle dive from top of the Sears Tower.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  Stab people on the streets of 1980 Chicago. I don't know why this game hasn't been made. I would play the, tell a lot of it.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, Liam. All right, let's talk about Tesla. Is that a good segue, everybody? Speaking of diving off of skyscrapers and stabbing people in the face, Tesla had earnings. They're doing okay. Walk us through it, Alex.

• 52:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, they're, they're doing all right. I think the big thing that kind of jumped out at me was Elon talking about Twitter again and saying he's excited to buy it and he's sure definitely gonna buy it in a couple of weeks.

• 53:01Nilay Patel?

  No, they've got to close on 28th. They're eight days away.

• 53:04Alex Cranz?

  They got next week.

• 53:05Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 53:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So this time next Friday, he has to have purchased Twitter and he's currently saying he's very excited to buy it.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:13Alex Cranz?

  But he also like, they're, they're shipping cars, they're shipping almost too many cars, right?

• 53:18Nilay Patel?

  They're not shipping too many. They're shipping everyone they can make and they're just running too hot. So they're trying to create efficiency in how they make cars. And in particular, for whatever the next car is, Elon is saying, for all the effort we put into making one Model 3, we should be able to produce two of whatever the new car is.

• 53:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but I would like, kind of want them to first go back and figure out how to make the cars not fall apart when somebody sneezes in one.

• 53:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that stuff has gotten a little better, but it's still the thing that plagues Tesla. Like I was looking into buying a used Model 3 for this commute to New York that I'm doing once a week. And all of the forums are like, you should buy a used Model 3, the best car I've ever had. Tesla's changed my life. Also, make sure you buy an extended warranty and reserve at least two weeks of time a year for inevitable repairs. And it was just like, it just stated as, like, it's just part of that community now in a way that is a little too normal, but it's.

• 54:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, the door might fall off.

• 54:15Nilay Patel?

  They're still the.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  But they'll, they'll fix it eventually.

• 54:17Alex Cranz?

  It'll be fine, it'll be fine.

• 54:18Nilay Patel?

  Latches on the Model 3 in particular.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  You can live with that.

• 54:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think Elon's still got some quality control to do. I think he said they're putting out a cheaper car. He promised the Cybertruck will hit next year.

• 54:29Alex Cranz?

  Okay, okay.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  He did not reveal the design for the windshield wipers.

• 54:33Alex Cranz?

  They're still working on it. It's gonna actually be 12 different wipers all around the.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  In a triangle, I'm telling you.

• 54:41Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be incredible. But you know, they also did like in the earnings, they they said that they're making money. I think that was kind of one of the little concerns everybody had is that Elon had to sell a bunch of stock to buy Twitter. And that hurt Tesla's stock. And it's like, okay, but are they still making money? Like, was this always just a stock rich company? Or can they still keep going and still produce these cars when he's off? Spending everybody's money on Twitter. And they're doing.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  And frankly, being distracted by Twitter.

• 55:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, super distracted by Twitter. So they're doing it. And I'm really curious to see if he's like, I don't know. I keep thinking, is Elon gonna stay the CEO of all these different companies? Because ever since I learned that he has 20 direct reports at Tesla, like, my brain just screams at that knowledge every day.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but he's not like doing like best practice one on ones with them. He just shows up and it's like, did you do, did you make the car drive itself? Not yet. Okay, we'll say it's next week.

• 55:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 55:36Nilay Patel?

  So you know, analysts did not like Tesla's quarter. And the thing that you are saying about their deliveries have made too many. They can't deliver, they can make the cars, but they don't have the transportation capacity to deliver all of them.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  Turns out their layoffs actually let go some of those people.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  That's true. So we'll just see. I mean, I think Tesla's in a strong position, but this Twitter thing like looms over Tesla in a real way. And it will be, like I said, they actually closed the deal, but my headline is like, welcome to hell Elon Musk. Because owning Twitter is gonna suck for him. Like, he is too easily trolled into doing and saying dumb things. And when it's like state actors and weirdo politicians on both sides trolling you into moderation decisions that they favor. It's, it's just, it's, uh, welcome to hell. That's like, literally, he should run away screaming. But now he's saying he's excited about it.

• 56:26Alex Cranz?

  I hope he just bans all governments and politicians from having Twitter.

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I don't think he's gonna do that. I think he's.

• 56:34Alex Cranz?

  He's gonna do the opposite.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  He's gonna, he's, yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  He's gonna sell it to the government for $50 billion.

• 56:40Nilay Patel?

  Twitter employees, Bloomberg reported Twitter locked its equity grant, so it's not handing out equity in anticipation the deal will close. So we'll see next week.

• 56:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:49Nilay Patel?

  Then speaking and then more Elon news, just an absolutely bizarre back and forth about Starlink in Ukraine. Obviously Elon started shipping Starlink units to the Ukrainian military and to Ukrainian citizens. The government was paying for some of it, the United States government, other governments around the world were paying for some of it. Turns out Ukrainians are doing crowdfunding to pay for some of their own service. Other people were setting up crowdfunding accounts to pay for some of their own service. Elon claims that he'd been paying for it all out of pocket. Starlink is like not a profitable thing. And he's like, actually the biggest challenge for Starlink, he said this many times before all this happened.

• 57:21Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 57:21Nilay Patel?

  The biggest challenge for Starlink is just not going out of business because usually everything goes out of business, like satellite based internet companies go out of business. So then he said, we can't keep funding this forever. The government should pay for it. That got leaked. That turned into a political football, especially because Elon keeps tweeting about Russia and peace plans. And he's just making a bunch of bad decisions there. And then there was a lot of pressure, hey, you're threatening the access the Ukrainian military is relying on. You're obviously a puppet of Putin, which Elon of course took exception to. And now he says he will keep funding Starlink for the Ukrainian government for free despite losing money, which I would just note, the United States government, other governments around the world, were already paying for some of this. So it's just deeply unclear what is going on here.

• 58:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  Also, just one of those, if you take free stuff from a billionaire, boy, do you end up beholden to the billionaire.

• 58:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah. I think like, this is one of those situations where I have a rule of thumb where I try not to tweet about international politics. And I think Elon should also try not to tweet about international politics.

• 58:24Nilay Patel?

  But soon he will own Twitter.

• 58:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Nilay Patel?

  This is what I'm saying. This is going to be, he is too easily trolled into responding.

• 58:30Alex Cranz?

  Like he got in like a Twitter war briefly with the president of Ukraine, who is at war. It's just, he should not tweet in this space.

• 58:39Nilay Patel?

  It's bad.

• 58:39Alex Cranz?

  Like, I think he got a lot of goodwill with Starlink, did really well for him. And now he needs to just like, be quiet. Like, yeah.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  Or he could do nothing, right? He could, he could, it's, I think it's legitimate for money losing business that's providing a critical infrastructure service to an American ally.

• 58:58Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent.

• 58:59Nilay Patel?

  To ask the American government to fund that service. I think that is a totally reasonable request. That it gets reported should, you should, you could just not react to it. Be like, yes, in fact, we did ask the United States government to pay for this service. The same way the United States government is like paying for missiles and ammunition to go to Ukraine. Like, great. Like, that's Boeing does not get trolled into responding to its, to criticisms of its defense contracts.

• 59:25Speaker 04

  But that's the Elon story is that no one else, no, no other CEO ever operates this way. And there are reasons and we just keep finding out the reasons why they don't.

• 59:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, when he owns Twitter, it's all gonna get stupider. Especially because, right? He's up against Kanye West buying Parler, which is gross and weird. Kanye tweeted a bunch of anti Semitic things. He got kicked off the platforms and then he basically got conned into buying Parler, which is bleeding money. Mechanically, has a great story about how Parler was basically dying and they conned Kanye into buying it. There's no other way to describe it. And then obviously Trump and Truth Social, which is falling apart in a series of extremely chaotic recriminations, including its own former executives going to the Washington Post and providing all of the evidence that he had given to the SEC about how badly Truth Social is run.

• 1:00:16Nilay Patel?

  So at the end of it, just like in this flaming pile of alternative social service wreckage, there's an Elon owning Twitter with nothing, nothing to stop him. It's gonna be weird.

• 1:00:26Alex Cranz?

  I mean, we can all stop using Twitter.

• 1:00:28Nilay Patel?

  Why do you think we redesign the whole website? Why do you think I made it a Twitter?

• 1:00:31Alex Cranz?

  Keed up.

• 1:00:32Nilay Patel?

  Cause I'm ready. Anytime you want.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  Ready, ready to pull the escape hatch.

• 1:00:36Nilay Patel?

  You gotta start tweeting on a website more. All right, we gotta take a break. Dude, it's gonna, we'll see. I mean, I'm, I'm as addicted to it as anybody, but at least we have an escape hatch. You know what I'm saying? All right, we gotta take a break. When we come back, Richard's gonna tell us about his crypto obsession. I can't believe how excited I am about this. We'll be right back.

• 1:00:58Nilay 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.

• 1:01:20Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:01:44Nilay 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.

• 1:01:57Speaker 05

  This series is presented by EY. If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed sponsored jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Richard Lawler. This week, you fell deep down an NFT rabbit hole. Because as everyone remembers, CNN decided it would start selling NFTs, and then they decided they would stop. Tell us what happened here, my friend.

• 1:03:05Speaker 04

  I will have you know that their NFT marketplace lasted 16 times as long as CNN plus. For first of all, that just first of all, yeah. Okay. Like, let's, let's, let's take the win. Let's take the W there. Uh, the CNN vault, which tried to sell moments because who doesn't want to buy digital tokens attached to news articles about famous events and trade them or sell them with your friends? That's a thing people do. It's, it's something that everyone wants. I, I was sitting at home, hoping someone would launch a service like that. And then CNN did.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  I actually spoke to someone who had spent more than $10,000 on, uh,

• 1:03:42Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  That, that was what they thought. Um, you're kind of looking at what they own on, on these moments. Like there, there are, when you take a look at these things that these, these brands launch, these web three, these NFT things, you think, okay, nobody's buying that. There is someone who is buying it. There are, there are, are no, there is a certain number of people who have the money and have decided, yes, I am going to go ahead and invest because CNN sounds, sounds like a reasonable company. They're not going to rug pull and just disappear overnight like some of these shady NFT operators. And that's exactly what they did. Uh, 16 months later, they were like, yeah, no, we're not doing this anymore. And the community is, uh,

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  Wait, there's a community?

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  I'm surprisingly not really pleased about it. They, they CNN said that they're going to give some refunds.

• 1:04:25Alex Cranz?

  I was like, how many people besides this one person?

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  Every NFT project has a community. Every NFT project has a discord and there are at least five people who come on there every morning and say good morning to each other and they talk about their day. It's, it's beaut, it's actually beautiful.

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  Stop trying to crypto pill me.

• 1:04:37Speaker 04

  You should join a few, you should, you should get into NFTs.

• 1:04:39Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm not coming in. This is like the end of the fun. First of all, you're trying to get me in at the end of the party when all the streamers are falling down, people are sweeping, like, no.

• 1:04:48Alex Cranz?

  Come over and help clean up.

• 1:04:50Speaker 04

  I, I've got some really nice NFTs that I can sell you at a good price. I'm just saying.

• 1:04:54Nilay Patel?

  I have stayed out too late with you in my life before, sir, and I am not doing that again, especially when there's crypto involved.

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  Everyone survived.

• 1:05:04Nilay Patel?

  Ever, it's true. Everyone survived. Where, where's your, you, you are notably, we're joking. Richard is notably skeptical of NFTs and crypto. Now that you've talked to these folks, where, where's your feeling at?

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  It's it's really unfortunate and I feel like these people have been taken advantage of. Like you had these brands just kind of grab at these these projects and they they launched and they had these promises. They said, we're going to give you utility. We're going to give you special experiences. We're going to give you access. We're going to allow you to do this and to do that. And then none of those things happened. They they sold you magic beans and then they said, okay, stay tuned with our social channel in our Discord. And then they waited a year until everybody forgot about it. And then they said, yeah, we're we got your money and we're just gonna leave now.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they rugged everybody super hard.

• 1:05:48Speaker 04

  We we don't have any bigger plans here. We it it never got big. It never scaled to a level where we're going to continue doing it. I think there was a report earlier this year that CNN had made $300,000 from it, which, you know, is a small number amount of money for a person, but for Warner Brothers Discovery isn't enough to stay in the business.

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was not even enough to fund one extra day of CNN Plus. They're like, we can't even, not even an extra hour. That's not gonna do it for us.

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  And CNN is far from the only brand like this. Um, like I'm, as I said, I really am in a lot of NFT discords. Every company that you can name has tried to do web three things. I'm I'm in one for the gap. And many of them have either completely abandoned their communities, or they just keep dropping things to sell to these same people who already bought in. And the people are are hoping that the company will do something that will bring in new people so they can bring it so they can sell the tokens that they bought early at a profit. But they just keep pumping money out of the same people over and over again. And that that's really where the cycle is.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  That's brutal. Well, I'm gonna continue avoiding it. I'll just keep getting my updates from you from the CNN.

• 1:06:51Alex Cranz?

  You talk to this person who spent $10,000. Did they have a reason besides like just speculation?

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  They just they're into NFTs and you know, they they get into the community. When you when you are in one of these things, and I compare it very much to a cult, um, because that's really what it is. You you have this like magical belief that things are going to go up. And everyone shares it and you can get in and you can kind of log in and every day you'll have maybe five or maybe 500 people telling you how great things are and how you're in the right place and you're doing the right thing and you're going to win eventually. And and that that sense of that community is really what people are there for. But to be in the community, you have to buy things. And some some people buy a little bit more.

• 1:07:35Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, I can't wait to start our NFT collection.

• 1:07:38Speaker 04

  Oh, next next year. The heel turn is coming. I'm doing it.

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  It's coming right out when we redesign the entire site as an Assassin's Creed level. It's the future of all media. Speaking of nonsensical future ideas, I'm going to try to get through this as quickly as I can. I told you it was going to be Virgasty Virgast.

• 1:07:54Alex Cranz?

  Are you gonna, are you gonna talk about Wisconsin?

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna talk about Wisconsin. So the Packers are bad this year, like very bad.

• 1:08:01Alex Cranz?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:08:01Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm not gonna tell you. They're very bad. I predict that Aaron Rodgers will destroy at least two more Surface tablets by the end of the year. That's my personal prediction about the state of Wisconsin. No, the state of Wisconsin, there's a company called Foxconn, which you may have heard about on the show before. They were supposed to build an LCD factory in Wisconsin. They have not built that. It's mostly serious, it's like into buildings. They did build a dome, which they continue to claim is a data center. It is not a data center. The data center is located outside the dome in a shipping container at the porta potty next to it. This is true information.

• 1:08:31Alex Cranz?

  I mean, is that technically?

• 1:08:32Nilay Patel?

  And even that isn't data center. It's just a shipping container with some Dell servers in it.

• 1:08:36Alex Cranz?

  It's like the Apple version of, it's like the Foxconn version of the all screen.

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:40Alex Cranz?

  Right? Like it's close enough that it counts.

• 1:08:42Nilay Patel?

  There's some screen that, there's some screen.

• 1:08:45Alex Cranz?

  There's some data center.

• 1:08:46Nilay Patel?

  There's some data center around the dome.

• 1:08:49Alex Cranz?

  They plugged it in to the data, into the dome.

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  All right. So Foxconn, when it goes into Wisconsin, like 2016, 17, they, they're just doing whatever they're doing. And one of the enduring mysteries of what Foxconn was doing in Wisconsin was they kept talking about something called the AI 8K plus 5G ecosystem. This is a real phrase they said, in my belief, to just bamboozle dumb local politicians in Wisconsin into thinking they were doing something cool. Like they just fired buzzwords at these hapless dummies and they got a huge tax break, right? Scott Walker was like, I love AI 8K and 5G. I sound great now.

• 1:09:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Nilay Patel?

  What, welcome to the Wiscon Valley.

• 1:09:32Alex Cranz?

  They just went to CES.

• 1:09:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:34Alex Cranz?

  They saw what was like on the little banners around and they're like, that's it.

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  At one point, they set up what was essentially a CES in Wisconsin, like a fake trade show.

• 1:09:44Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:09:45Nilay Patel?

  With like big TVs and drones, like all the CES stuff that we go to and ignore to like find the real products. They set up one of those. So AI AK, so Josh Jezza, who did most of our Foxconn reporting, won awards for that Foxconn reporting. We've spent years alternately trying to figure out what Foxconn means by AI AK plus 5G and laughing at it. And in one very notable instance, receiving just anonymous threats from Foxconn executives to tell, telling us to leave them alone. And then in the same breath, trying to explain what AI AK plus 5G is. It was very confusing. None of this matters anymore because Foxconn just announced a new plan to make electric vehicles. They were like, we are

• 1:10:26Nilay Patel?

  ambition is to make EVs for Tesla. I don't know if you just heard us. Tesla's making every car at Tesla's very good at making EVs. It does not need a contract manufacturer. It makes the cars. I don't know what, anyway. Foxconn announces two reference designs of its new EVs. And then the, the president of Foxconn says, we have a new strategic vision. Are you ready for it?

• 1:10:49Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:10:50Nilay Patel?

  It's a three plus three equals infinity.

• 1:10:53Alex Cranz?

  Well, you said, is it three plus three equals infinity or an infinity symbol?

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  It's a symbol. It's a symbol. So then the, the Foxconn in Wisconsin website has been scrubbed of all references of AI AK plus 5G.

• 1:11:08Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 1:11:08Nilay Patel?

  And it has all been replaced with three plus three equals infinity. So I don't know, man. Three plus three, by the way, it's three industries, electric vehicle, digital health, and fee robotics. Who knows what that is? It's not the same as.

• 1:11:21Alex Cranz?

  They're gonna make the robot. They're not gonna make the, the cars. They're gonna make the robot.

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  It's, I can't even begin to explain what fee is. Fee is a subsidiary of Foxconn. They set up to take over the, whatever.

• 1:11:32Alex Cranz?

  They're gonna make the Tesla robot.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  Three things. The three is electric vehicle, digital health, and fee robotics. And then the plus three is technology. It's 5G solutions, semiconductors. By the way, the logo for semiconductors is just the USB logo. So I don't know what's going on there. And then industrial AI, which Foxconn has branded IAI. This is a real thing with a link to something called the IAI Institute, and that link just doesn't work. So I tried. I clicked all the links on this website.

• 1:12:02Alex Cranz?

  Can we, can we all list ourselves as just employees of the IAI Institute? Like, Richard, you're now chairperson.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  I always was.

• 1:12:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Alex Cranz?

  The IAI.

• 1:12:10Nilay Patel?

  You should sell some IAI NFTs, Richard.

• 1:12:12Speaker 04

  Why didn't they go with you plus me equals us? It was right there.

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  It's a deep cut. It's gonna miss some people, but for those who appreciate it.

• 1:12:22Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I got is first of all, three plus three is six. I don't know. I just want to put that out there as a thing that I know.

• 1:12:29Alex Cranz?

  Infinity.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  Is the, as the father of a four year old, I'm really confident that three plus three equals six. This is, this is something we're working on actively in our house.

• 1:12:38Alex Cranz?

  Just not looking at it in the Foxconn way.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Second of all, you can't just list industries and technologies and be like, here's what you do. You take these three industries and you just throw some 5G solutions at it and arrive at infinity. Don't know what that means. Third of all, none of this is going to create jobs in Wisconsin. Right? Like at the end of the day, they have an empty building. They've got a dome. The website has been updated to brag about the dome.

• 1:13:05Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  In the, in the, but the brags are like, the dome is nearly 100 feet tall, which I would note is not 100 feet tall. So you've built like an eight story dome. It's just not impressive. And they're like, you can see it from the highway.

• 1:13:24Nilay Patel?

  Which I don't know if you've ever driven through Wisconsin. Wisconsin's mostly cornfields. So like, being able to see an eight story building from the highway is really not that big of a deal.

• 1:13:34Alex Cranz?

  But you know, people go out of their ways to like, find the largest ball of twine.

• 1:13:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Alex Cranz?

  Like, is there, is there just a vendor sitting out there next to the data center with like, a bunch of little ball, little globes, selling them to people who pass by, who drove off the highway to be like, what's that globe over there?

• 1:13:54Nilay Patel?

  No, you don't understand. If you drive by there, and your parents' house is like right by there.

• 1:13:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Nilay Patel?

  They built just huge roadways.

• 1:14:02Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:14:03Nilay Patel?

  To support what they thought would be 13,000 jobs.

• 1:14:07Alex Cranz?

  Oof.

• 1:14:07Nilay Patel?

  Building like 100 inch TVs. So they built roadways and water and power to support manufacturing on this massive scale and to move these like giant TVs.

• 1:14:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  And none of it exists. Like if I was still a teenager in Wisconsin, like I would do, I would only be drag racing by the dome all day long, because it's just like six lane roads that are dead empty.

• 1:14:35Alex Cranz?

  Are there, are there people in any of the buildings?

• 1:14:38Nilay Patel?

  Sometimes.

• 1:14:40Nilay Patel?

  That's why sometimes the dome is apparently like an event space. There are no pictures, by the way, of the inside of the dome.

• 1:14:48Nilay Patel?

  And Foxconn continues to claim the dome is a data center.

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  They say there's going to be a network operations center there, and I believe-

• 1:14:52Nilay Patel?

  What network? There's one data center. Shipping container. That shuts down the shipping container.

• 1:15:03Nilay Patel?

  It's just truly bizarre. But anyway, so AI, look, AI AK plus 5G is out. Three plus three equals infinity is in. You let me know if you know what that means, because I I'm working on it.

• 1:15:14Alex Cranz?

  I'm really excited about it.

• 1:15:15Nilay Patel?

  It's it's real bad, but the you got it. It's just everybody can read the website. Because the part about the dome where they just insist-

• 1:15:22Alex Cranz?

  You can see it from the highway, Eli. It's incredible.

• 1:15:26Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever looked at an eight-story circle from the highway? Because now you can, Foxconn. Some other things to talk about. David wrote a big piece about Google and RCS. They're adding replies and stars to messages. And they're doing it a way that's super annoying. So if you're in a group chat with an iPhone user and they fall back to SMS and you do a tap back in Android messages, they're going to start getting the annoying SMS. It's like so and so did a so and so like your thing.

• 1:15:55Alex Cranz?

  It's so petty.

• 1:15:56Nilay Patel?

  It's good. It's so petty.

• 1:15:57Alex Cranz?

  It's so petty. It's so good.

• 1:15:59Nilay Patel?

  That's a good piece. Interview with some Google PMs who worked on the thing. Chris Welch wrote about the new feature in Lightroom, content aware fill is coming to Lightroom. So now you kind of don't need Photoshop to your photo edits, which is kind of amazing.

• 1:16:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we had Adobe Max this week. They announced-

• 1:16:13Nilay Patel?

  It was Adobe Max this week, yep.

• 1:16:15Alex Cranz?

  They did this big update and Chris is like super, super excited because we're finally like, Lightroom is super annoying. I was really shocked. Like, I was honestly shocked when I see that saw this pop up on the website. Because when I first got in this business, I was told if you use Lightroom, you're a punk and you don't know anything. Only pros use Photoshop. And I'm not a pro, but I wanted to pretend I was one. And so like to see actually that Lightroom is good now and see somebody who's a really good photographer like Chris Welch say it, I was like, oh dang, that's that's big news.

• 1:16:45Nilay Patel?

  It's good. It's expensive, which is its problem, but it's good. It's been getting better. It's really good on the iPad.

• 1:16:50Alex Cranz?

  Is it subscription based?

• 1:16:52Nilay Patel?

  It is.

• 1:16:52Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:16:53Nilay Patel?

  And what you get for the subscription is a bunch of storage, right?

• 1:16:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Nilay Patel?

  So it works out, but it's really good on the iPad. All the jokes about USVC aside, Lightroom and an iPad Pro with the second generation pencil, like the whole thing. Choice. And, you know, especially with the newer chips, super fast. Before the MacBooks went to M1 chips, I preferred Lightroom on my iPad because it was so much faster than my Intel MacBook Pros.

• 1:17:18Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 1:17:19Nilay Patel?

  It's a thing.

• 1:17:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, it just looks really, really cool. The, the other big news that came out of Adobe Max was that like, you know, every year they do something wacky and they're like, this is the future. And this year they were like, if you give us a picture of someone, we can make that, we can turn them into a puppet and make them dance.

• 1:17:36Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's pretty cool.

• 1:17:37Alex Cranz?

  And yeah, there's like Jess Weatherbed, who's a new reporter, she's on our international team, she's lovely. She watched all of the Adobe Max stuff, paid attention to it. And she put a GIF into this thing and it's just these two cutouts of people doing the OPA Gungam style.

• 1:17:55Nilay Patel?

  The Gungam style.

• 1:17:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you haven't seen this, you should. It's worth it.

• 1:17:58Alex Cranz?

  It's a really, it's like they're deeply unsettling images. Adobe has not figured this out yet. I've rarely been more terrified.

• 1:18:08Nilay Patel?

  This is my TikTok strategy is I'm just going to do an AI version of myself doing TikTok dances.

• 1:18:13Speaker 04

  Watch this and then watch the trailer for Meghan.

• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  That movie looks bonkers. Alison Johnson has a big piece on eSIM and what that's like. Alison obviously is a phone reviewer, so she switches from iPhone to Android all the time with a physical SIM card to just do it.

• 1:18:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:32Nilay Patel?

  With an eSIM card, you gotta get corporations involved in your situation. And that sucks. Turns out that sucks.

• 1:18:38Alex Cranz?

  She was actually at the office when, when she did the switch and we just, everybody just heard an, oh no.

• 1:18:46Alex Cranz?

  Because she's like, I gotta call Verizon, because she was like on the phone with Verizon doing the switch, but they did the switch. And because they did the switch, the phone she was on no longer worked. So it just disconnected her. But then the new phone didn't work.

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  This is the promise and the peril of eSIM, right? The promise is you can provision your phone onto anyone's network at any time without a piece of plastic.

• 1:19:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09Nilay Patel?

  He's like, push the buttons and see. That promise is, I would say, halfway realized. Like, the real incentive promise is you open the cellular settings on your phone, you see all the available networks in your area, their speeds, their prices, their plans, you pick and choose and switch.

• 1:19:23Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's a way better promise than what I heard about eSIMs. I want that one.

• 1:19:27Nilay Patel?

  But we're nowhere close to that. That's just me saying, here's some cool shit that could happen. What's the promise?

• 1:19:31Alex Cranz?

  That'd be really cool. I want that.

• 1:19:33Nilay Patel?

  You can kind of do that on iPad. What's the promise you heard?

• 1:19:35Alex Cranz?

  I just heard that, oh, are you traveling internationally now? You don't need to find one of those stupid little SIM card removers to switch your SIM out. You can just be like, bam, internet.

• 1:19:45Nilay Patel?

  So your promise of eSIM was, uh, we'll reduce paperclip usage.

• 1:19:48Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:19:50Nilay Patel?

  All right. So it's a spectrum. On the high end of the spectrum is free and open competition, a more informed consumer making better and more rational choices. A little couple ticks below that, you won't need a paperclip. And then there's where we are, which is, oh, shit, the carriers have locked you in. And actually, switching your account from one phone to another got substantially harder because it's not just moving a piece of plastic, it's moving someone else's software authorization for a piece of hardware, which is exactly what it sounds like.

• 1:20:22Alex Cranz?

  Bad.

• 1:20:23Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. Maybe it'll be easier. We'll see. But that piece is really good. You should read it. It is really the promise and the peril. Like, the promise is apparent. We all know what the end state should be. The reality is very different. And then there's a new generation of Thunderbolt that Mitchell Clarke wrote about. This is really interesting. So Intel gave up the basis of Thunderbolt, or the basics of Thunderbolt for USB 4. So now Thunderbolt and USB are kind of the same thing. I don't know. I kind of don't understand why Thunderbolt exists anymore.

• 1:20:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think it really struggles to exist now because USB 4 is like, gonna be really fast when we start seeing it in actual products.

• 1:20:55Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait till it comes to the Apple TV remote.

• 1:20:57Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be amazing in 2035.

• 1:21:00Speaker 04

  It brings us right back around to where we started. The problem is standards groups. We need a standards groups focused on getting rid of standards groups. Are you guys with me? Are you in? Let's create it.

• 1:21:09Alex Cranz?

  Neil is starting it. He's the chair.

• 1:21:11Nilay Patel?

  Having interviewed the heads of Benny standards groups over the past many years, they're the, they're the most politician politicians I interview because their job is to make sure no one's mad.

• 1:21:21Alex Cranz?

  But everybody ends up mad.

• 1:21:22Nilay Patel?

  But everyone's always mad.

• 1:21:25Alex Cranz?

  They suck at their jobs.

• 1:21:27Nilay Patel?

  They can't, but they're, it's like an impossible job.

• 1:21:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Speaker 04

  But this, so it seems like the difference is the, if you have a USB four V two device or cable, then certain features are optional. But if you are, if you have Thunderbolt, then those optional features are definitely in there is what it sounds like on some of them.

• 1:21:44Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's kind of what we've seen so far with Thunderbolt in USB, right? Like I can, I can run my, my monitors off of a USB port on my computer, but they're going to run a lot nicer off the Thunderbolt one because it's got a higher bandwidth guaranteed. And USB has always struggled with being like, yeah, you can pick and choose everything. Oh no, your, your laptop exploded because you used the wrong charger. Sucks for you. So.

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  10 minutes to transfer that video file because you are using the wrong cable.

• 1:22:10Alex Cranz?

  But it's very, it's very Dolby Vision HDR 10 plus where it's like, yeah, one of these is good, but the other is actually way better.

• 1:22:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Alex Cranz?

  If more expensive in every way.

• 1:22:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And one involves paying until licensing fee.

• 1:22:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:23Nilay Patel?

  Fair enough. Some other things to call out. Our homeland series continues. It's a big series about TSA and security in America. It's the 20 year anniversary of TSA, which is frightening to think about. But Sarah Jong and Sergio almost have a piece about the Portland van adductions in 2020, which is just a thrilling caper. So I encourage you to go read that. Nicole Letman has been paying a lot of attention to the fertility features that are being added to all kinds of tech products, including the Apple Watch. All these things are getting added. They're filling a void that exists in the context of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. So like this incredible collision of tech companies seeing a market, the culture war and the politics of abortion changing dramatically for the worse.

• 1:23:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Nilay Patel?

  And people kind of not knowing what to do or what to believe or how to use these products or what data is collected. She's doing an amazing job reporting all that.

• 1:23:13Alex Cranz?

  There's also this weirdness, she and I have talked about it a bunch about is that like the research isn't there. All the research now isn't being done by, by scientists with no financial, no real financial incentive. It's being done by these companies who do have a financial incentive and they're like, these fertility products are pushing really weird things. Like we have, we have ways, methods of birth control that we know work. That don't require you to own an Apple Watch and be like, oh, not this week, honey. So like, that's, yeah, she's doing just a tremendous job on this stuff.

• 1:23:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, this is, I think, one of the biggest Verge stories you can think of, like, what it, all the, the colliding themes inside of it, right? The law, the culture of the United States, the politics, bodily autonomy, the tech industry, data privacy, it's all colliding in a really extraordinarily messy and somewhat depressing way. And Nicole's just doing a great job covering it.

• 1:24:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Nilay Patel?

  Last few things, right as we have been talking, Andy Hawkins covered the launch of the new GMC Sierra, E V Denali, horrible name. It literally just happened. So I basically have no idea about anything, except it gets 400 miles of range, can power a whole house for up to 21 days, and it looks ridiculous.

• 1:24:31Alex Cranz?

  I was thinking it looks kind of cool. Is it the headlights? The headlights look real bad.

• 1:24:36Nilay Patel?

  The headlights look real bad. I mean, it looks like the Silverado, they just GMC'd it up a little bit.

• 1:24:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:42Nilay Patel?

  And the inside has a vertical touchscreen with touch controls for climate.

• 1:24:46Alex Cranz?

  I have never wanted to control the seat in my car while I'm driving more than on a giant vertical touchscreen.

• 1:24:54Nilay Patel?

  It's ridiculous. It's going to cost $107,000. So, cool.

• 1:24:57Alex Cranz?

  Oh, but they, they changed the name of the trunk in it.

• 1:25:00Nilay Patel?

  What's the name of the trunk?

• 1:25:01Alex Cranz?

  They're calling it the E-Trunk.

• 1:25:03Nilay Patel?

  The E-Trunk.

• 1:25:04Alex Cranz?

  Just watching your face as you, you realized that was, I'm sorry.

• 1:25:09Nilay Patel?

  It all, it all just happens. And then lastly, Charles Plaimmore reviewed Black Adam, which I haven't read yet, just went up, but I think it's bad.

• 1:25:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he told me, he told me earlier today, it was not very good and is kind of mean, but not in a fun way.

• 1:25:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good. Well, I'm trying to get The Rock in Decoder. So if you know The Rock, Send it to me.

• 1:25:31Alex Cranz?

  He can answer for his crimes.

• 1:25:33Nilay Patel?

  He should answer for his crimes. All right, that's it. That's the first cast we have, as always, gone over. If you have eyes on David Pierce, just take a picture, send it to Alex. You can tweet at her.

• 1:25:42Alex Cranz?

  She's all I want, please.

• 1:25:44Nilay Patel?

  Alex H. Krantz. Richard is at RJCC. I am at Reckless. We love hearing from you. What's Wednesday is iPad.

• 1:25:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, all about the iPad and the piles.

• 1:25:56Nilay Patel?

  And the David's so mad about stage manager. Look for that on Wednesday. Decoder this week was Meredith Whitaker, the president of Signal. She talks some shit about RCS 2.

• 1:26:03Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 1:26:04Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, it was a good one. All right, that's it. That's our chest.

• 1:26:12Speaker 00

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected]. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:26:49Nilay 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.

• 1:27:10Speaker 07

  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 extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:27:35Nilay 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.

• 1:27:47Speaker 00

  This series is presented by EY.

• 1:27:51Speaker 08

  Support for this show comes from CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is CoreWeave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose-built tech, building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI. Ready for anything, ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to CoreWeave.com/ReadyForAnything.