Microsoft’s Edge Chromium launches, NBC reveals Peacock details, and our CES takeaways

Stories this week: The Verge Awards at CES 2020: welcome to the land of the concept Eight big takeaways from CES 2020 These gaming PCs want to compete in the console wars Laptops were boring at CES, but there’s hope for the future The most important TVs of CES 2020 were finally for the masses Microsoft’s new Edge Chromium browser launches on Windows and macOS How to install extensions on Microsoft’s new Edge browser The browser wars are back, but it’s different this time Google is finally killing off Chrome apps, which nobody really used anyhow Google to 'phase out' third-party cookies in Chrome, but not for ... Roomba’s robot vacuum could grow arms in the near future OnePlus confirms its next phone will jump to a 120Hz screen Latest Galaxy S20 Plus leak shows off 120Hz display and no … Samsung’s Galaxy S20 and its many cameras revealed in leaked photos 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, a little bit of CES wrap up, future of TVs, folding screens, all of it. We get into the browser wars. Microsoft has a new version of Edge out, and we talk about the future of streaming. NBC's Peacock launched, literally, while we are talking on the show. That's coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 0:39Speaker 02

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• 1:13Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the ever-growing Vox Media empire. It does, it's a...

• 1:20Speaker 03

  The sun never sets on it. Because the sun doesn't shine on the internet. Because the internet is a series of tubes that are underground.

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  It went, it went a different place than I thought it was going. But I went there with you. I'm glad that we went there together. That's Dieter. Hi, Dieter. Hello. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Paul, it's been so long. It's good, you know what? It's good to be back. I missed you guys. I missed you too. And I'm Neela. I'm your friend. So we're back. It's been a million years. We went to Las Vegas, Dieter and I, for, it was my 11th year. What year, how many CSs have you been to, Dieter? 13. I'm too old for Vegas now, is the thing that I learned. My body just rejected it by the fourth day. It just wanted me to go home. And I did. And then it said, I'm still mad at you. And I was basically sick until yesterday. But it was at CS is always fun. It's always good to be with our team. It's always good to see all the people that we see at CS.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  The whole industry shows up. You just see people floating around that you haven't seen in a long time. It's great.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Yep. I know a person who knows a person who came back from CES with Dengue fever.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot. I don't know where in Vegas they went. But I it's like at once I believe it and it too it's like fantastic, but that's like the Las Vegas spirit. Anyway.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  We haven't really talked, Paul, before we started the show, Paul was like, we haven't really talked about CBS CS overall. Uh, we did one episode there. We did some interviews there. You're going to hear some interviews that I did with various executives come out over the next couple of weeks. I'm very stoked for AMD. Can you tease the AMD interview? I can tease the AMD interview. That one's coming out soon. So I interviewed CEO of AMD, Dr. Lisa Su. I will tell you that she's just one of the smartest, funnest, coolest people I've ever talked to. Super sharp. Uh, very clear on what AMD's opportunity is and how she's managing the company to hit that opportunity and compete with Intel. And very clear that like, you know, AMD chips in laptops is a multi-year step-by-step process and they're at year three.

• 3:14Nilay Patel?

  And they think that, you know, year four and year five, they're going to blow out. At year four and year five, they're going to like blow it out and make a big splash. Uh, we talked about AL and ML. We talked, you know, like, we just got into it and she, she just knows it all cold and she is also the CEO. So she's thinking more strategically than, you know, every time I interview somebody like this, I like, like, I'm not a total chip nerd. So I go on Twitter and I'd say, hey, I'm going to interview this person. Send me some questions. And some people are, are great. They're like, when is, um, AMD gonna compete in this product category with Nvidia? Which is like a high level strategy question.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:51Nilay Patel?

  And then other people are like, I've got a 2010 gateway PC with missing driver support for this specific video card. Can you ask about it? Like, I don't think she knows. Like, she's the CEO. Like, so it's always, that mix is always really interesting to me because it's a good mix of, you know, the people who are like interested in AMD as a company and strategy and people who are using the products. And I think finding that connection is just for me personally, an interviewer, like that's my goal is to connect. The CEO strategy to the experience of using the products. But a great conversation. I don't mean to hype it too much. It's gonna come out really soon. I gotta say, I'm more hyped now, so. Yeah. Just put it out, be like. Sometimes I talk to a CEO and I can't get there. Right? I can't get to that connection between how does your strategy affect what people use?

• 4:34Nilay Patel?

  And with her, it was like, right away, it was instant. It was really good. Uh, anyway, so wait, the CES stuff is coming out, but we haven't like, kinda taken the step back. The show we did there with Ashley and Sean was like deeply in the weeds of stuff. I just wanted to like, take a step back. Dieter, do you feel ready to take a step back from this experience?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  I do, yeah. Uh, I mean, I have to step back in. I've taken so many steps back that I have already tried to wash it from my memory. But, you know, I, I think relatively famously at this point, I'm not a CES hater. I try to take a more nuanced view of what goes on at this thing. That it's about showing off technologies, not necessarily showing off like the next hit product in a lot of cases. I think that the dial was turned too far this year in terms of like, let's show off concepts. Like, I love a concept if there's a reason for it, or if there's a specific technology or a specific future that you are like touting. That's like what a concept car usually is. The concepts at CES, a lot of them are just like, innovation will happen.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  It's like, I need like something more than just like, we made a, we made a crazy car. I need something.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  And there's, there's just too much, too much of that.

• 5:44Nilay Patel?

  So it's, it's just a kinda go category by category. I always say CES is a TV show. The concept car TVs that we saw at CES this year took two forms, I think. One was 8K, uh, and the other one was like, what if a TV looked like this? Uh, and whether that was like a piece of furniture or a regular TV with a motor behind it. It was like, what if we like make your rectangles different? And then what if the rectangles had more pixels in them? Like I would say those are the two categories.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Can you give me like what a CEO's pitch for why 8K matters at all? Cause I I haven't really been paying much attention. Cause like I, you know, we're so far from actual 4K high quality content in the living room that 8K matters.

• 6:27Nilay Patel?

  So I I can give you the pitch. I that you actually hit on something that I think is very much happening right at this second. But the pitch for why AK matters is 4K hardware, displays, cameras, broadcast, all that stuff is very close to, in the case of the broadcast distribution stuff, like very close to commodity ready for wide scale deployment. The sets are already commodities, right? Like you spend $300, you agree to have some company you've never heard of track you for life, you can get a 4K TV. Um, fine. So like they're done there. So their forward investment is an 8K, right? Like they're, this is like now they're, they're as close to commodity as you can kind

• 7:10Nilay Patel?

  of get, you know, it'll, it'll keep going for a while, but by that point it'll be completely uninteresting. So now they're trying to boot up sort of the 8K cycle. And that's, that is where their next set of investments going. That's where their next set of R and D is going. That's where, you know, when Fox Sports upgrades all of its cameras from 1080p to 4K, that's a lot of money to come in and they're getting ready for like 4K to 8K. Like that's, that's that cycle that they're, they're just way out in front of.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  For a consumer perspective, I think that part of the argument which some have made explicitly and some have not is that the processing power and their ability to do really good and interesting things with the picture means that you will actually want to turn on their magical upscaling algorithms because it will look better, whatever you're watching will look better upscaled to 8K using their algorithms than it would just at a normal 4K, a normal 4K TV is like a thing that they aren't like out and out saying, but like here and there you kind of get the hint that they want to, but you know, we actually have to see it to judge that.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I walked by a lot of AK TVs on the show floor and I am very picky and I think I, you know, I believe I can see it. I'm in audio file. I can hear it. Those cables sound real warm. And I could not see it. Like, I just didn't buy it.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Right. In the wild, I have yet to see a 4K experience in any home that is any, anywhere as close to as good as the 4K that I saw in like, what trade show was that? It was probably IFA 2010 or 2011, you know? That 4K is better than the 4K that is in the home.

• 8:53Nilay Patel?

  My dude, we got a Mac Pro with a Pro Display XDR in the office. We've been, in addition to sometimes doing work on it, we've run a lot of 4K HDR video loops from YouTube on it. That looks really good. So come by and visit. You can look at that. But to get back to the thing that I said I disagreed with you on, where 4K isn't ready. I actually think the TV industry is constantly hunting for an upgrade cycle. That's just the, the way they're organized, even though now the TVs are computers and they do data collection and they have revenue bundles and all the other stuff that they've done to make your TV generate revenue over time. The industry is still organized around, you're gonna buy a new TV. That's the thing it wants you to do. It's the Super Bowl. You're gonna buy a new TV.

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  It's President's Day. That's when everyone bought a new TV. Abe Lincoln bought a new TV every day on his birthday. Like, that's just how they are. It's Black Friday. You need a new TV. Like, how many TVs can you get?

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Which I think this cycle should be variable refresh rate. And that's probably my, you know, my bias.

• 9:51Nilay Patel?

  Agree. That's not ready yet. It's not ready yet. It's here. It's in like, it's in some of them. But what is really happening is a convergence of the hardware being close to commodity. So the actual sets are close to commodity, especially sort of the mid-range. The high-end sets, the OLED sets are getting smaller. The panels are getting easier to get. So you see more companies doing them and their prices are still dropping. And then a shift to streaming where you can actually deliver the stuff like the broadcast networks are not ready to deliver in 4K. The Super Bowl will be in 4K, but like only if you subscribe to one Dish Network plan that requires you to like stand outside your house with a whistle at 8am that will like directly attune the saddle. It's like they're

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  not ready. They can do it, but they're not quite ready. But if you have Netflix, you just get 4K HDR, right? Like Disney Plus, how do they drive a lot of people to Disney Plus? They said Star Wars is remastered in 4K HDR. So there's this drive on the streaming side to remaster the content because they know people will appreciate it. They will sign up for the services and there's consumer behavior that's shifting to the services. And then there's hardware that can display it to you. That's kind of a series of coincidences, but I think it's actually driving an upgrade cycle. I do not know what part of the upgrade cycle 8K is gonna get. Like if you just like spin it out into the future, the first or I'm sorry, if you look at the the history and then spin it out into the future, the

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  HD upgrade cycle was driven kind of by accident, by form factor. People wanted to get flat panel TVs and they ended up with a 720p HD display because that's what they were. And then that just kept happening. But that was, they just wanted smaller, thinner TVs to put in the world so they could get them. The 3D cycle didn't happen because no one gave a shit. The curved TV cycle didn't happen. Like they, they keep trying, but now they're at a place where there's an abundance of content from streaming services, consumer behavior is changing. You maybe don't want a bunch of boxes under your TV. It's easier to just go buy a Roku TV or whatever and you can just get it and it's like a big beautiful 4K TV and Mandalorians in 4K HDR. Right? Like it's all just like waiting for you to,

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  to, to, to watch. 8K is like, what's gonna drive it? What, what associated massive shift in consumer behavior is gonna drive it? The way that I want a smaller, thinner TV or I have cut the cord and now I have access to a library of content at higher resolution that seems really cool. 8K is gonna need that? I don't know where it is. I can't predict the future. Maybe something will happen, but that's, I would say that's the problem.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  I want it to be like, like the wallpaper style TV that LG does just becomes commodified and like, people will want to get a TV that's so thin, it just like, they can just like tack it to their wall with double stick tape. You know?

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  I think that's, that's a ways off, especially with 8K, which, you know, like if you walk up to some of these TVs, you're like, oh, this thing is beautiful. And then you like, just kind of sneak up to it and put your hand over on the side. And it's like, also it could heat my room for through the winter.

• 12:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, I walked, Samsung had the wall TV again, the modular one. I was walking by it with somebody and I was like, oh, they updated it. And they actually looked at me and said, it's generating a lot less heat than last year. Which one implies like last year, you noticed the amount of heat and then this year you noticed it was less. It was so much last year. So yeah, there, I think there's a way to go. I just, 8K is the stuff they show off because they need to drive that, that cycle. I think they're getting lucky with 4K HDR. And I honestly think the HDR side is more important than the 4K side. I would rather watch 1080p HDR than 4K HDR or 4K SDR.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  Right. That's, I'm not mad at anybody trying to drive an upgrade cycle. I'm just like, 4K, for me is visually better than 1080p. And I agree HDR is really nice. And a good 1080p HDR is probably better than bad 4K. But a 4K is already like diminishing, like you're not going to get a lot more like 4K, you already see a ton of the film grain. Like 8K, you can see, you can see compression artifacts better.

• 13:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like 5G is going to solve it all, Paul. That's the.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  That's where, I don't know if you've noticed it, but 8K, 5G and AI are going to come together.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  Well, it is, it's, there's a lot of synergy there. If you think about it. So wait, can I, can I take you guys on a little tangent about 5G?

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  I've been thinking about it.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  What is the show about?

• 14:13Speaker 04

  Well, because it kind of sparked the, you know, you, you have your standing question of, you know, is 5G a race? And obviously for carriers, especially, you know, like country versus country 5G race, I don't know, that's probably a little silly. But the way I've been thinking about just recently is, actually, I listened to this podcast called Software Engineering Radio about this infrastructure as a service, like trying to, like, instead of the cloud where you spin up a virtual machine, like, this is like the cloud, but you can spin up real hardware. And it sounds like their big client, or something that they're working with a lot, are mobile carriers who are deploying 5G. And something this guy said is that 10

• 14:51Speaker 04

  years ago, when LTE was deployed, the cloud didn't really exist. But now, the cloud is a very well-known idea. So they, they, they deployed LTE in a way people did old timey computer things before the cloud. But now that the cloud is such a thing, and now that the edge is so hot, and they're doing this deployment. Basically, the long and the short of it is, I think carriers view the 5G deployment, like specifically, the physical hardware that they have to put out into the world to support 5G, not just the towers, but the, the backend of it, is a chance to build the next AWS.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I have sat at dinners with

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  every major carrier where they have given me that speech. And then I say things like, are you as good at AWS as Amazon? And they're like, well, of course we are. And I'm like, will you run Yahoo.com? Which does not suggest your software engineering ability is very good. It's like that. Yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Well, and one of the reasons why it's, it's a bit of a race is you have to be able to show that, like, hey, you want to have your servers in our, in our building, because there's so much traffic coming through. So they kind of need the traffic to incentivize the people building on their infrastructure, in a sense.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I think that's correct. It's, it's a much bigger piece of the promised zero latency 5G experience than is ever really mentioned. Like,

• 16:20Nilay Patel?

  5G is gonna have zero latency, so doctors can do surgery with, you know, like, whatever. The cars don't have any latency. It is not, that is not so much a function of physics or speed of the network. That's a function of data being processed closer to you because data is being processed at the network level. That is very much the, I mean, I've heard it from every major carrier in some way or another. We're gonna bring processing to the network level, we're gonna do it locally, it's gonna happen faster, we're not gonna round trip to wherever AWS is. I just think that carriers are less sincere than they often let on.

• 16:58Nilay Patel?

  Such a good way to put it. This is gently as I can say it. And I think they are also interested in doing crazy carrier stuff, like tagging all your packets so they can track you more effectively and build competitive ad solutions for Google and Facebook. Like, they wanna do all that other stuff. Oh, but, but Neel, Verizon just launched a new search engine that promises not to track you. I'm 100% certain that they have found another way to track you and they want you to use that search engine so Google cannot. Yeah. I, I just know how they think.

• 17:34Nilay Patel?

  So I actually, I was with a, I would say, an infrastructure executive at CES. And I asked him if it was a race. And he was like, "No." I was like, "Well, you're the person who should say it's a race." And he's like, "It's a, it's a national security race. It's a race against Huawei. Everyone needs American companies to win, everyone needs companies like Verizon and Qualcomm to win. And then their preferred suppliers in Europe like Ericsson, Siemens to win. So that the prices of their equipment drops and becomes cost competitive with Huawei. So Huawei does not build all of the, all of the 5G networks in the rest of the world." This is like a big topic. There was just a bill proposed this week.

• 18:19Nilay Patel?

  We, you know, it was bipartisan. It was like Ed Markey and Marco Rubio came together to start a 5G, like a billion dollar 5G fund. There's a rip and replace bill for the midsize carriers who have already deployed Huawei gear to rip it out and replace it with other stuff. That stuff, we don't know if it has traction, we didn't like cover it. It's just like, there's that noise. And the more I ask people why, what it's a race, it's a race kind of fundamentally for Qualcomm to win, right? For Qualcomm and Ericsson Siemens to beat Huawei so that their, their, you know, their corporate technicals can define the 5G standards as opposed to Huawei's.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  Am I being tinfoil hat for every time I hear this? I was like, we want the NSA to spy on them, not the Chinese government.

• 19:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you want to, you want the home team to be looking at you.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that's tinfoil hat at all. I think it, the more you talk to people, the more they would prefer that friendly interests are spying on Americans rather than hostile foreign interests. Which is like, you know, I don't love it, but I get it. Like, it's hard to argue with that one. But Paul, you look, you're gonna, you're gonna get some Pringles cans, you're gonna do like your own private libertarian mesh network. I'll come visit you.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  And incentivize through lightning.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  I think that for consumers, what all of this actually, what 5G means for consumers is you bought a phone in 2020. Like, the Qualcomm's, you know, the new, the new high-end chips from Qualcomm, they're just are gonna have 5G in it. Whether or not the network is there to actually give you much benefit from it, whether or not it's really any faster, whether or not you like manage to eke out a millimeter wave signal somewhere, or if you're just on like T-Mobile's mid-band or whatever, it just means you bought a phone that maybe has slightly faster data from time to time. And all this other stuff is like not gonna get resolved in 2020, is my prediction.

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, one of the things I, I do at CS a lot is I, I take a lot of meetings, sort of in my role as like a Vox media person with a lot of Vox media partners and, you know, they always want me to talk about, what am I seeing? What are the trends, blah, blah? And I, this year, for the first year that I can ever remember, I was like, does anybody want me to talk about 5G? And like, the size of exhaustion that I heard. We're just like out of control. They're like, no, we get it, it's gonna change our business, like, who cares? And I think the industry has done so much to focus on, it's a revolution to try to get people hyped into this massive capital expenditure that is gonna be required. They haven't delivered a killer app. They haven't delivered a promise.

• 20:57Nilay Patel?

  That's even slightly less esoteric than we're going to do faster computing at the edge with lower latency, which is like not the most scintillating dinner conversation. Like, "Thank you, Vergecast listeners for paying attention to us." I just, it's not on par with like YouTube works on your phone, which was like the LTE promise. So I think there's a ways to go, but I've come closer to realizing that what some people think the stakes of the race are. And I've come much closer to realizing that it's like Dieter said, what's going to happen is you're going to buy a new phone and the network is going to get better around you. And you're like, "Oh, that phone's a little bit faster." And that's all, truly, that's all that's going to happen.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  So we've talked about 8K, we've talked about 5G, we obviously have to talk about AI so we can hit the Foxconn trifecta.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you. I didn't see any AI. The buzzword was dead at CES this year.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Well, the only place that tried to make hay out of it was Neon, that weird Samsung division that was creating like digital avatars that would talk to you. And it just flopped. Like, everyone just like saw it immediately through it. It was like, "This is awkward and bad and unfinished." And everybody else that talked about AI, they no longer expected you to like swoon when they said that their product uses AI. It's just like, "Our product has a microchip in it."

• 22:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the default answer now from like every reasonable tech journalist when you're like, "My product has AI in it." Like, everyone's like, "How is it biased? What bad data set did you feed your robot so it will do something horrible in the future?" Which I think is a totally fair response, but I think it kind of, it dulled the sharpness of the buzzword. We got to talk about folding screens, we got to talk about PCs. Which one of those do you want to do first, Dieter?

• 22:41Speaker 03

  I think we can knock PCs up pretty quick. I think that we are waiting to see what Intel's new chips really do in the real world. I don't think that we're going to ever see from Intel another like Haswell level, like, "Oh my god, the battery life is twice as good now." But I think that we're going to see better improvements in their newest chips that we have in the past couple of years. And it'd be very interesting to see what happens with AMD on laptops. And Paul probably has more to say about this, but like, I think that we're going to get just like a sort of fun, good old fashioned like chip fight, specifically on performance and battery life on laptops. And like, that'll be fun.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was the story of the show for me. Again, while I'm stoked about this AMD interview because AMD, I mean, to be fair, they haven't shipped it yet. So it's hard to say like, you know, AMD has been promising, well, AMD basically promised to compete with Intel again on performance and desktop. And they really, really, really have done that as of like right now. Like they have price per price performance ratio, they're winning in most cases on on like desktops, especially for enthusiasts, especially if you like lots of cores. Now they're promising to be

• 23:55Speaker 04

  maybe competitive on laptops, which would be huge. And the weird place my mind went because AMD is so tied up in the next gen consoles. And I'm sure you got that there's this really cool Alienware concept of a PC Nintendo Switch. I think it was one of your guys' best in show. Yeah, it's great. It looks really cool. The concept UFO. And it got me thinking because I was like, when, you know, AMD keeps on, you know, innovating, just, you know, just working and getting better. AMD powers the PS4 and the Xbox One. When do I get like a like the PS2 Slim is one of my favorite hardware objects in the history of the world. It's just so beautiful. It's so small and it's exactly as

• 24:39Speaker 04

  powerful as a PS2. It's just way smaller. So when you get one of those of a PS4 Xbox One, then I put myself in like the if you're if you're like a an executive at Microsoft or Sony and you're thinking, what should we do next? Well, we'll definitely do a more powerful thing. But let's let's call up AMD like, hey, AMD, could we make a Nintendo Switch that is a PS4? Or a Nintendo Switch that is an Xbox One? And then I got to think about the Xbox Series weird naming like it's like multiple things. And Microsoft's like, we're not going to have exclusives for the next gen because we, you know, we want stuff that scales across. Basically, who is going

• 25:22Speaker 04

  to be the first to make the ultimate a non-switch Fortnite machine? Could have 5G if you think about it. 5G Fortnite Xbox handle handheld. AI AK display.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  With AMD, obviously, you know, that's the thing, I don't quite know, like, you know, the requirements would be a little less than an actual Xbox One because it'd be like a lower res display. I don't know if AMD is actually there yet. It might be like until next year. And honestly, I don't know all the strategy. Maybe you wouldn't want to cannibalize your holiday sales, having a portable up against your new next gen. But I think, I would imagine both Microsoft and Sony are taking something like that pretty seriously right now.

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it makes sense for them to do it. I think, you know, they both also have a foot in game streaming, which is where 5G, for all of its problems and promises, actually could make a difference, right? Like, okay, we're gonna do X-Cloud, but we're gonna run it on Verizon's network. That's gonna lower the latency. It's gonna stream at a high bandwidth to mobile devices. Why do we need to put a scaled-down Xbox One chip in a handheld? Like, right, I think there's some dependencies along the way there, or inflection points. But it's an interesting idea. And like, certainly the fact that they've picked PC parts to sort of build off of, means that they, they get the value back of whatever's happening on

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  the PC side, right? The chips get smaller and more powerful, process nodes get smaller, like, they get, they just get it for free, in a way that when they were building custom chips, they didn't. And I think that's, that's a cool outcome if they get there. I just think, the whole 5G streaming stuff, like, they're investing in it because it's a hedge, and that hedge might work out.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Or it's Stadia.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Well, Stadia just announced that they're gonna have 120 games next year. So, and 10 of the, 10 of which I think are gonna be exclusive. I still can't get over the fact that I have Google Fiber in, like, Oakland, California, like, across the way from, like, Google's data centers presumably. And I still have got, like, you know, weird glitches and down-resing and...

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  You have an ethernet cable from Sundar's house, directly to your house. Let's talk about folding screens for a minute.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  I don't think they're ready. I think that they're too, like, they're too easily damaged. Nope. But the main thing that I make the folding screens, made you think is, man, there's a lot of pressure on Microsoft to figure this out.

• 27:54Nilay Patel?

  We're all waiting for Windows 10x and specifically I'm also waiting for like Microsoft's iteration of Android for the Duo. Duo is a small one, right? And the Neo is a big one? Yes, Duo is a small one, Neo is the big one. Yep. It made me a little bit more hype for the Duo because even though it's not a proper folding screen, it will be a device where you don't have to worry about damaging the thing. The last thing I'll say, because I know you have a lot of thoughts about this, Neelai, is I saw a Galaxy Fold in the wild in the hands of a person that was not a Samsung executive and so did Sean O'Kane. Yeah, I mean, we were at CES. There was a lot of... I mean, I also saw a guy driving a Lamborghini with a wrap on it that said Mud Life. So, I don't know what that means. Like, I just, I don't think we should take Las Vegas seriously.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  I think it was like, he was like a dirt bike company CEO. It was very confusing. So, we're going to talk about Microsoft in the next section, but I just saw Sachin Adella and he was using the Surface Duo as his phone and I was so jealous. Like, you know that thing, like, you know, we're in a big room, people are talking and, you know, like, some people are looking at their phone. Every time he did that, he like pulled out this super hot glossy white ultra thin, he unfolded it and he was like doing it and then it was time for him to pay attention, he would close it and I was like, ah, oh, I want that real bad. Yeah. My, my read on it is that the technology to fold the screens is so close that people cannot help themselves. They cannot help but imagine the new form factor,

• 29:26Nilay Patel?

  even if the technology isn't quite there. Like, they know what they want to build, they're taking practice shots at it, they've, they're, they're sort of collecting the market data around what works, what doesn't work, which way it should fold. We talked about this the last time we talked about folding screens. But at this CES, the, the shots were a little bit bolder. Everything was a little bit closer and like, it's just very obvious that the screen technology is not quite there. Everyone understands the problems, everyone understands what it can and can't do. They're kind of doing it anyway and they're doing it more aggressively in the hope that, you know, Corning makes the glass. Yeah, but has anybody hinted that someone's gonna... Everyone's hinting about the glass. Really? It's just like the thing that everyone's like, it's gonna be great when the glass

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  is here. Dieter, I think you heard it a bunch of times, too. Yeah, it's just, but they never say, oh, the glass is coming. They're always like...

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, we just, all we need is glass. It's like, you know, don't you?

• 30:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they definitely know. That company Royale that made the horrible Android phone that folds. It's like, this is like deep inside baseball of CES. To get floor space at CES, you have to like buy it, right? And then there are some spots that are more expensive than others. It's real estate like anything else. So this company, which makes nothing, as far as I can tell, has put out one Android phone to get its brand out there. They spent all of their money to buy a spot directly in front of the doors to the LG booth. And then in that area, they just put every kind of folding display idea that anyone has ever had. Yeah, right?

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  They made a tree out of folding displays that would like wave in the wind. This is not even exaggerating. There was a folding display in a purse. There was a folding display on a top hat.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  A top hat? The top hat's my favorite.

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, they're like, have you ever thought about a dehumidifier with a curved display over the front? We have produced one of those for some reason. And all of it is like, definitely in the hope that some LG executive walks out of the door of their booth and they're like, oh, these guys figured out folding screens. We should definitely buy this company. It was just the most obvious thing I've ever seen. But I think the industry is there. Like, they've figured out the hardware side at a level of confidence where they're ready to sell it to the executives of other companies at CES. Whether or not the glass works. I really want that top hat. I'm sad we didn't do a post about the top hat. It's a miss on my part.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Are you like, are you angling to turn into like the Monopoly man?

• 32:05Nilay Patel?

  What if I was the Monopoly man, but like I had the price of Bitcoin on my top hat all the time?

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  Top hats are the new Fedora. You're right here first.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  What, one thing that did cross my mind, looking at like these pictures of the, of the X1, the ThinkPad X1 Fold, is these are, devices are thicker than non-folding display devices. And if folding displays teach us to love thickness, because thickness gives us more functionality, then I'm totally into it.

• 32:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, like I said, I watched Nadella use the Duo, which is just two LCDs that fold with a hinge.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  But you could just, and obviously it was like an event for reporters and he was definitely doing it on purpose, but just in that you could see like, oh, this is a different way of using a phone. He has a different relationship to this device. And when he unfolds, it's actually thinner in some respects and like, it feels different. I didn't actually see what he was doing on it. For all I know, it was a dummy unit. And he was just like dramatically swiping for effect. But I think he, I was told it's actually his phone. So I suspect he was using it, but it just made me, it made me want that future. And to your point, Dieter, even though it's not an actual folding screen, they're, they're ready to take the shots at it and they're ready to like invent that moment. And it's pretty good. Okay. We gotta take a break. Let me, actually speaking of Microsoft, there's a lot of Microsoft to talk about.

• 33:28Speaker 04

  Lot.

• 33:29Nilay Patel?

  We'll be right back.

• 33:34Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 34:03Speaker 06

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• 34:12Speaker 07

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• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter, can I tell the audience a story about your post today?

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Yes. This is my post yesterday, and the day you're listening to this is Friday. The post on Thursday.

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  The post on Thursday about the browser wars are back. So, most days, the editors of The Verge get together at the end of the day and talk about, like, what happened, what we got to write tomorrow. Like, we just have our editors' meeting. And we sit down, and we, like, look at what the audience is interested in. We're like, "Man, people are really interested in Microsoft Edge," which is surprising.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:03Nilay Patel?

  Just like on its face. Like, Microsoft made a web browser. That's a story from 1995. Like, I'm just going to be honest with you. But people are really, really interested in it. Because it's complicated. People are not necessarily happy with the current, like, for a million reasons.

• 35:18Nilay Patel?

  And then Dieter and I have been talking about the ad-tracking side, the cookie side. We've talked about Electron apps and why Microsoft, like, on the show. We've done this forever. And I was like, "Dieter, you gotta just write the browser war piece." And he's like, "I...gahhh." And he made the Dieter noise.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  I made the Dieter noise. And then I said, "I can't write it in under 8,000 words, because it's too much."

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  And I said, "Well, somebody else can write it shorter." And I was like, "I can't let anybody else write it."

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  And then he did it anyway. I definitely tried to make Tom Warren write a shorter version of this. And Dieter got mad and did it anyway.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  And if you read it, the specific thing I did is I'm like, "I want to write about all this other stuff, but I can't. So, I'm not gonna. I'm just going to say some other things instead."

• 35:59Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, that is the backstory. The browser wars are here.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:03Nilay Patel?

  Start with Edge and go from there.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  So, Microsoft has officially released the Chromium version of Edge, which is built off Google's Chromium, but has all of Microsoft's stuff. So, their bookmark syncing, Bing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, their extension store. But you can still use Google's extension, whatever. And, you know, it works just as well as Chrome. And so, we're going to be testing it for battery, testing it for all this other stuff. But if you use Windows, your default browser now can actually, like, render webpages, again, in a way that the old Edge couldn't, because, you know, web standards are broken. Everyone codes to the browser now. And so, it's out. We need to see if it's, like, better for battery life than Chrome is, because that's one of the big questions. But it also leads to just a million questions for Microsoft

• 36:49Speaker 03

  in terms of how are they going to set the rules for tracking differently than Chrome does? How deeply are they going to embed the Chromium engine into Windows 10 itself? Because there was a hot minute where, like, Edge was, like, going to be, like... The core rendering bits for a lot of parts of the OS in the same way it is for Chrome OS and lots of other operating systems, half of Android is basically just Chrome rendering stuff. And so you like, you can spin out a bunch of new futures for Windows and for Microsoft based on the fact that they no longer have to spend cycles on making a browsing rendering engine. They have one in-house with their own stuff plugged in that is very extensible and like has a big ecosystem around it.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  So they could, they could switch, try to get people to switch away from electron apps to progressive web apps. They could say, no, we still believe in the universal Windows platform, whatever it's called, so that there's more uncertainty and more opportunity for Windows, just more action than I've seen on the Mac in years.

• 37:54Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 37:55Speaker 03

  Well, just there's not necessarily, I mean, opportunity in terms of like moving the platform forward, like what's next for the Mac? iPad apps are a huge bust. There's Swift UI, but that's not doing super hot. Maybe they'll move it over to ARM at some point. But in terms of, let's take this desktop platform and move it into the future of the way computers are supposed to work. I think Microsoft has a few more, they've got more incentive because they don't have a mobile platform except for Android. And they have just, you know, like they've got more angles they could take. Now, that's a problem because then they're going to take them all and not do great at any of them probably, but it's more fun to watch at least.

• 38:39Nilay Patel?

  So we, we were joking on Twitter earlier today, like you said, we always ask for competition. And then I think your, your basic tone was, but not like this.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  Because a competition is like sort of orthogonal to what consumers actually need or want. It's, a lot of it is based on ad tracking. A lot of it is based on like default service lock-in. Kind of unpack that a little bit. So.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Man, when we think of the browser war, what we think is going to happen is like, all right, we're going to have Chrome, and we're going to have Edge, and we're going to have Mozilla, and we're going to have Brave, and we're going to have Vivaldi, and we're going to have, you know, insert other browser here, and we're just going to find out which one is the best. What has the nicest features, what renders webpages fastest, what doesn't kill your computer with, you know, tons of tabs. We'll just do that. But there's a little bit of parity there. And so, the actual competition now is convincing consumers that you want the data services that are associated with your browser, syncing it all up with Google, or syncing it all up with Microsoft, or whomever, or you want the privacy options that are offered. So, Apple Safari has a bunch of anti-figure printing,

• 39:46Speaker 03

  and it's using AI to block trackers in certain cases. Mozilla is working off of a blacklist. Mozilla, by the way, just had to lay off 70 people, which is a huge bummer. There's a hashtag for it, I think it's Mozilla Lifeboat. If you have a job in the web, please go look for these people. And so, we are now looking at this competition, but it's not a competition that a thing that a consumer can like, do much with, other than like, do a bunch of research on trackers? Yeah. Which doesn't sound like super fun. Or like, pick an ecosystem, which is... Or pick an ecosystem, which is like, the actual thing that's happening. And the pick an ecosystem question, again, you'd be like, okay, well, we're talking about desktops, and so you can just download the one that you like. But desktops are secondary,

• 40:30Speaker 03

  they're not the most important computing platform anymore. They're phones, and phones are locked down. iPhone is literally locked down. You can't pick a different rendering engine. Apple won't let you. You can download another browser, but it's basically just a wrapper around Safari. And on Android, it's a little bit more open, but I don't think, I mean, I would be happy to be convinced otherwise through some sort of data, but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people are just using the default. And even with the browser ballot coming in the EU, that most people are just going to stick with Chrome, because it's like, oh, it's Android, I want to use the one that's native. And so this whole discussion about the browser battle and which ecosystem we gotta pick and who protects your privacy and da-da-da-da-da-da-da ends up not leading to your ability

• 41:15Speaker 03

  to make a like conscious purchasing decision or browser choice. You can't go and like choose what browser you want because you're probably locked into whatever ecosystem you've got on your phone.

• 41:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, only to a certain extent. I mean, I have an iPhone and I run Chrome everywhere else.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Do you use Chrome on your iPhone?

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  I don't.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:33Nilay Patel?

  Because, I mean, like, what if I click a link somewhere else?

• 41:38Nilay Patel?

  Who knows what will happen? Oh, I definitely know what will happen. Apple will take over. I think a lot of people live at least with, have the experience of at least two rendering engines in their life, right? Like, you've got sort of WebKit Safari on your mobile device and you've got Chrome and Chromium on your laptop. And like,

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  That's as much competition as most people experience in terms of like fundamental computing infrastructure, but at least it's there. Like, I appreciate that. The thing that kills me, there was a, I don't know that we wrote it up, but there was a good piece in Boing Boing on Friday, I think, last week, that the DRM extensions that let things like Netflix work in the browser have now all but made it impossible for an indie browser company to exist.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 42:23Nilay Patel?

  Because the license for those extensions are so expensive and so hard to actually contractually get a hold of, that it's even cementing more power into the big players. And that is like, do you want to live in a world with 10,000 indie browsers? I do. Does that prevent an immediate, obvious security problem in our age of like widespread data breaches and leaks? Like, there's a, there's a half and half there, but what is definitely happening is that the bigger players are getting more share. Nobody wants to let go of the browser because it's like a fundamental gateway to their services. And I'm at least happy to see Microsoft join the fight again in this way, even if, you know, I'm sure

• 43:06Nilay Patel?

  there's a lot of web people out there who are not pleased that the number of rendering engines is diminishing over time.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's like so much, he's so deeply ready to say so much more.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Do you think we peaked, people are most tracked ever in their browser? And we are actually going to be getting better? Like, I feel like it's really pretty easy nowadays to get your browser to stop tracking you. As far as I like, as far as I know, you know, like, I use Safari and with the default settings, plus like an extension, I feel like pretty untracked. I broke most of Google fonts and I'm fine with that, you know? Like websites that use Google fonts, they don't load because I didn't want that. I didn't want that to happen to me. Other than that, the web mostly works.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  That's the other big news is Google finally announced that they also, following Mozilla and then Apple, who followed Mozilla, want to end support for third-party cookies. So that's like, those are like the tracking cookies, right? And that is the source of a lot of the nightmare. And Apple, last year, last summer, basically followed Mozilla and put a stake in the ground and said like, we think of tracking as a security risk and we are going to do everything we can to stop it and like, bring it on, bring on the arms race. And so they have this intelligent tracking protection, they're trying to stop fingerprinting. Google says that this is bad because they're, you know, if you block all cookies and people

• 44:40Speaker 03

  will just use even more terrible things. So it's this fight where nobody is really giving each other the benefit of the doubt in some ways. So if you are on Google's side, you're like, Apple hates the web, they just want everything in the App Store. If you're on Apple's side, you're like, Google hates people, they just want everybody to be tracked because they make all their money on ads. If you're on Mozilla's side, you're like, can we just have like an open web ecosystem where like lots of people can survive? That would be cool if we didn't just have two major companies run everything. How about that? If you're Microsoft, you're like, you guys like Azure? Azure's cool, right?

• 45:16Speaker 03

  So this whole thing is like rolling out and Google finally had to capitulate. They're like, yeah, no, we want to kill third-party cookies too. And so when that happens, like the ad ecosystem still needs some way to do some tracking. And so now the fight has gotten to the point of, well, what new technologies, what new APIs are we going to create to allow some form of limited tracking with informed consent from the user and some way to ensure that, you know, like affiliate links work and, you know, web stuff with a little bit less creep? How do you build that technology in such a way that it's just like an open web standard

• 45:58Speaker 03

  and not just, you know, one or two big companies like become the gatekeepers for all of that? That's a very hard problem. And the fight has gotten down to, I think there's one thing where Apple has a proposal where if you click up an ad for to buy, you know, a washing machine and then you go buy the washing machine, how does the washing machine website that know to give the affiliate credit back to this website that had the ad? Well, like, oh, well, we made this API. And so instead of a tracking cookie where they can track you forever, when you click the thing, your browser just hangs on to this like little bit of information of where it came from and it will tell the washing machine website that, okay, that's great. And Google's like, yeah, that's cool. What if instead of like six bits of identifying information, there's 64?

• 46:40Speaker 03

  With 64 bits, you could basically identify a single person on the planet instead of just like a category of people. And so they're fighting about that.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  Do they actually need the six bits? Like, like, I know they want the six bits, but do they even need those?

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Well, if you can come up with a proposal that makes sure that theverge.com gets some piece of money and the washing machine website knows to pay it to theverge.com, please propose it.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  Please put it out on Dieter, please stop leaking our plans to cover washing machines. What are you doing? I'm not saying it's great, but there was a, there were ads before tracking, you know? Well, actually, let me address that head on, Paul, because I think that's like a very common misconception. Right? Like how ads work and how people get paid. Like, traffic is not money. It just isn't anymore in that way. Like, the number of computing transactions and then literal auction transactions that happen when you load a webpage is out of control, right? So you load a webpage and then within like one or two seconds, like 45 auctions happen on various ad servers in interlocked ways to display you an ad.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  And those auctions are basically based on tracking, right? Like, I know that you, Paul Miller, you live in a house, you've got some books. You've got a yellow microphone. You're very likely to buy a book about a yellow microphone. Like, someone is after that demo. They've got an ad for yellow microphones. They're gonna pay a lot of money to put ads on a page that you see that someone else doesn't see. That is like so complicated and so based on tracking that right now, what we have to do is unwind it. And when you say ads existed before tracking, the market for a small company to like actually spend their marketing dollars and get return from it didn't exist before.

• 48:34Nilay Patel?

  So like, I keep joking about the fact that I buy like every wireless charger I see on Instagram. Like, those companies are getting more value out of their marketing spend. And they, they're allowed to exist as companies that are selling products because they're targeting the ads. Like, that's actually a value. I don't think that we can ignore it. I think what's happening here is we're over-tracking, we're not disclosing where the data is going. The data is leaking all over the place. We're tracking with 64 bits of information. You've got all of my location date. Like, there's some-

• 49:03Speaker 03

  There's some level of boundary here where the the tracking has enabled new markets. And it's certainly enabled new businesses to spend their marketing dollars more effectively. But it has caused way more problems than I think that set of benefits.

• 49:17Speaker 04

  I mean, something we learned with the whole metadata thing is that if you have six pieces of data on me and someone else has six pieces of data and then someone else has six pieces, then you do some sort of multiplication, like the cross referencing. And now you know just as much as if you were Google and we're tracking all 64 at once.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  So Paul, like the the thing that you're expressing is the core of the argument right now. Apple and Mozilla are like, this is a crisis. And so we have to stop this right now and let the chips fall where they may. And if that hurts some businesses, so be it. Protecting user privacy, given the crisis of tracking, is too important. So we're just, we're locking it down and all of those people will figure something out. Life will find a way. And Google's like, yeah, what if we just took it a little bit slower? It's a crisis. We'll do some stuff here and there. But let's like, let's try and not like completely kneecap this ecosystem in this moment. And, you know, the truth on both sides is like not as extreme as I just stated.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  But that's, that's basically the outlines of the like the browser battle on from like the the cookie and advertising side. So it's, it's like, it's super tough as a consumer to like make that choice. You end up making your browser choice based on not thinking about just doing what the platform gives you or based on the reputation of the company. I trust Apple more than I trust Google or I trust Mozilla more than I trust any of them. And I'm just going to use Firefox. And that's just, that's a perfectly valid reason to make a technology choice. You know, you, everyone has to take shortcuts. But it's, it's interesting because historically, for the life of computers,

• 51:05Speaker 03

  when we have talked about making a technology choice, we would just get to talk about like the quality of the product as like a user experience. Like, is it fast, right? Instead of, you know, if we're going to compare AMD versus Intel, imagine if the entire discussion was about, you know, which one of these companies has more tracking, you know, transistors, right? And like, where do the transistors go? That's, that's basically what's happened here to the browser wars.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think what's the corollary to this.

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  The good part is that with the browser, we get to kind of have it in the open. Right? It's like very easy for smart people to figure out what browsers are doing, what websites are doing, the interplay between them. It's not easy, but it's not hard. On your phone, there's no way to know. Facebook has built this entire business inside of its apps, and it is almost impossible to know what the hell is going on.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  And this also applies to like Apple's ad ecosystem, which is not big, don't get me wrong, but like, how many of these rules and tracking rules apply to that? I don't know. And I don't know if that's because I'm dumb or what, but I trust Apple to like do the right thing. But with Facebook especially, there's just, there's a lot of that stuff that is web adjacent or using web technologies that's completely opaque.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, and I say this again, like, I think the sort of like Instagram story advertising marketplace has like pretty good qualities, right? I think people aren't super annoyed by Instagram story ads. They're not always great, but they're not like, they're not as bad as the other advertising that you see on, on computers all over the place. They are effective, like people know they're effective. You can target them really well. Like, again, if you're looking for a dude to buy a wireless charger in New York City, you can like push all the buttons on the Instagram ad manager and I guarantee you I will see that ad, right? Like, that is a, that is a useful loop for businesses to have. On the flip side, Facebook is like, knows everything about me.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  And they can, they can target so well that people believe that they're listening to them. And that, that's like a huge problem.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  We should ban all trackers, ban all targeting, except for once a day, every computing device has a red light that turns on and that means a microphone is listening. And then you just talk about the shit you want to buy. And that's how you get targeted.

• 53:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Instead of, instead of your, your five minutes hate, it's your five minutes commerce. You just say the keywords that you're interested in for five minutes.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  I was thinking about this recently, you know, you can have an ad blocker on your computer, right? And you just reject traffic from known advertiser URLs. But what if you had a bot that accepted all that?

• 53:42Speaker 04

  Traffic and put it into a sinkhole and generated a profile of like, I'm a billionaire yacht owner who buys wireless chargers and I live in New York City, you know?

• 53:52Nilay Patel?

  Why do I have to get a bot to do that when I could do it myself?

• 53:55Speaker 04

  Right. Create the most expensive possible ad profile for yourself so that when you do go to websites, not only do you not see the website.

• 54:05Nilay Patel?

  You're costing ad massive amounts of money.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  The advertiser, it's like an offensive approach to ad blocking.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  I like it. You should build, that's like, you know, there's that helm server where you get to run your own email server? Well, you should reach out to that company. I've got an idea to stop tracking even farther. It's a, it's a honeypot that costs everyone money. Just like put that on your network. It's like a toggle switch and like, you know, I block ads at the network level with my Eero. I do, I block ads and malware. I especially do it for my parents. Cause it is just like, please, please internet, leave my parents alone. But if you had a third switch that was like, lie, lie, lie expensively. It's a free idea for the Eero people. I hope they take me up on it. All right. We gotta take a break. We'll be back. Talk about some streaming stuff. Check this out.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 55:26Speaker 06

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 55:35Speaker 08

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.

• 55:43Speaker 06

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• 55:57Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Paul Miller. It's been weeks.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:00Nilay Patel?

  I was, I'm just gonna say this, based on the day that we're recording this, we haven't done this segment in like four weeks, and the president's being impeached. We didn't hold the country together, Paul.

• 56:10Speaker 04

  I did, I did the, uh, what you, I'm sorry.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  Correlation is causation, man. That's how it works.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  I, I did the segment, uh, as like a pre-recorded for, for CES.

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 56:21Speaker 04

  I forget which day it was. Um, I talked about, uh, Intel's GPU.

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  But we didn't do it together.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  But now we're together. Now we can bring, really solve all of the world's problems. It's called, "If a Roomba had arms, who would it hug?"

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh. Is it everyone? I hope it's everyone.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  Well.

• 56:39Nilay Patel?

  It's not everyone, is it?

• 56:42Speaker 04

  I just got, okay, so there's this story from CES, the, the, apparently Roomba, um, uh, is, or iRobot, the company that makes Roombas, which also makes like military robots, like it's a whole robotics company. They don't just make vacuum robots. And apparently they're testing out arms on a Roomba. And, and they want Roomba to eventually help out with more complex tasks around, like, like any robotics company ever wants the same thing, but they want the robot to help with like laundry, dishwashing, food serving. So that makes sense. Then they kind of walked it back, like, we don't really want to talk about future products. And so who knows how many arms or what is really going on with Roomba and arms. But

• 57:24Speaker 04

  I started thinking about it, and who would Roomba hug? Does Roomba love you and your family and therefore destroys dirt? Or is Roomba just hungry for dirt? Does Roomba love dirt, or does Roomba love you?

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  I feel like the addition of arms does not answer that question in any way. Like, you can't be like, the, I'm gonna add arms to this Roomba and that will land us at the answer to whether it loves you or loves dirt. Like, I guess you just have to find out, like, is it right now hugging dirt with its, with its vacuum functionality?

• 58:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Right now, what it's mostly doing is getting stuck in like the same stupid place every day, no matter how I set up the beacons.

• 58:08Nilay Patel?

  You are so committed to your Roomba. I buy Roombas and send them back all the time.

• 58:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, once a year, I'm like, we should do a Roomba. And Becky's like, we're just gonna send it back. And I'm like, no, I won't. This one has more beacons. It has a laser. It's got AI.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  My suburbs across the street neighbors have a Roomba mower. It's pretty cool.

• 58:30Nilay Patel?

  That seems extraordinarily dangerous to me, just based on what I know of the vacuums. All right, it's streaming time. There's a lot in the streaming wars going on. My new favorite trend in the streaming wars is executives who are launching streaming services insisting that streaming wars is the wrong phrase.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  They're like, people are gonna subscribe to multiple streaming services, which I believe is true. I think the answer is also that they will not subscribe to some streaming services and those services will lose and die. That's why it's a war, because casualties will...

• 59:01Speaker 03

  You could call somebody who subscribes to both Netflix and Qeeby a double agent.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's... And when we sat down with Katzenberg, he was like, they're double agents. So today, like, as we speak, right now, at this moment, NBC is holding the launch of Peacock in the SNL studios. We invited a bunch of media to sit in the fancy SNL studios and hear about their new streaming services. I will disclose to you, for the 1 billionth time, NBC Universal is an investor in Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge.

• 59:33Nilay Patel?

  You know, that's some information you have now. I will follow up that information by saying, their business model is to show you a lot of ads, and I think that's a bad idea.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Okay, there's three tiers. There's 10 bucks a month for no ads.

• 59:46Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  There's 5 bucks a month for ads. And then if you are, I think, a Comcast or a Cox Cable subscriber, you can get free access to the ads or 5 bucks off the ad-free version.

• 59:58Nilay Patel?

  That's not complicated at all. Okay, so if you have Comcast, it's 0 or 5. And if you don't have Comcast, it's 5 or 10?

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  So, one of the things I've heard a lot is you need to get people into the app, right? Like, all these streaming services are now solving the same general challenges that...

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, photo management apps had a while ago, or whatever other category of apps has been hot. First of all, you need people to know what the hell it is. Yep. That's hard. It's a lot of marketing money. You need people to pick up their phone, open the App Store, search for your app, and hit get, which is a surprisingly like hard road to go up. You know, the average number of apps downloaded by the average person in an average month is zero. So that's like, that's like one of my favorite stats. Like, they gotta cross that bridge. Uh, then they, you gotta download that app, then you gotta sign up for an account.

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  Wait, average is zero?

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  The average is zero.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  That's, is that rounding down or rounding?

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  It's right, it's obviously rounding down. How would you round up? If you uninstall a bunch of apps. Every, it would be actually great if most people in America uninstalled like half an app a day or something.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  That's a form of self-care. Question, there is a free tier with limited programming. Okay, so, so in a, so there's like, one tier that's just Olympics promos and ads for the Olympics. You can do that for free.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  Okay, this, this is the first thing that you, so you're talking about, you gotta tell people about it, right?

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  Well, the Olympics happened in July 24th.

• 1:01:29Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. And that, we're gonna be inundated with Peacock ads around the Olympics.

• 1:01:33Speaker 04

  Peacock launches on, that's, that's a pretty great rollout, don't you think?

• 1:01:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, and I think, um, The Mandalorian and Star Wars did a lot for Disney Plus. I mean, Disney had, like, literally ESPN reporters were on air being like, "Today is the day that everything changes." Disney Plus, like, like Disney and ABC, like, they use their muscle to get Disney Plus out in the world. But it's also full of, like, Disney movies and Star Wars and Marvel. Like, there's an element to the Disney Plus interface that is just its own marketing, right? The top-level nav of Disney Plus is Disney, Pixar, Marvel, National Geographic. Like, I feel bad for that last box. It's like, it's the one that doesn't have a cinematic universe, it's just the actual universe.

• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  But like at the top level, they've got all those franchises, they've got all those studios are just like doing it. NBC Universal like doesn't like Peacock isn't going to have like that stuff. It's gonna have a lot of shows, it's gonna have its own interface. Again, this is happening as we speak, so I haven't even seen it yet, but it's launching, it's coming. And there again, the pitch is we have a slightly different consumer proposition, which is you can pay less money to see some ads, right? And then obviously we'll have like the world of NBC content in it. I think that's like, that is to me, the most interesting part about that is it is not the same as Netflix. Like Disney Plus is really offering you the same deal as Netflix. Pay us a bunch of money, don't look at any ads, watch the stuff you love, right? And that's like very much the Netflix model.

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  Hulu has had that ad tier and I think it's a very popular tier. And I think NBC is going after that zone because I don't know if you know that like they divested out of Hulu with the Disney Fox agreement.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, although NBC show is still going to be available on Hulu till the licensing deals run out.

• 1:03:20Nilay Patel?

  Of course.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  It's gonna be a fiasco.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  So that's Peacock, it's happening now, Julia's doing all the work. She's obviously, we'll have her on again soon to talk about that, probably next week to talk about these streaming launches. And then next to it is HBO Max and I just want to read, this is like the point we're at. We're like, all they can really sell is the content, like they can't sell like the interface. They can't sell like, you know, TikTok is like, here is all these cool features. Here's like a cool filter. Instagram is like, here's all these like, uh, like roulette wheel filters that tell you what Marvel character you are like. These apps can't do that, they're just trying to get you to the content. So that the way they're talking about how cool and wonderful it'll be. This is an article in the Hollywood Reporter where HBO Max executives are, are talking about how great HBO Max is. Over the holiday, I'm just gonna read the quote, "Over the holidays, the exec told the room,

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  he tested out an early version of forthcoming streamer HBO Max." On his watch list was a combination of HBO's Watchmen, classic episodes of Friends, the Warner Brothers movie Full Metal Jacket, a Wonder Woman cartoon, and the documentary Andre the Giant. Quote, "That was an amazing four hours of viewing that I did, and such a wide array of things at my fingertips." That is the most insane four hours of content I can think of. Where you're like, "Oh, I just gotta settle down from watching Watchmen by watching Full Metal Jacket, gonna bracket that with some Friends, and then hard shift into Andre the Giant." Like, what? Like, I couldn't be in that headspace at all.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  You, everybody needs to have a show that they save that is their unicorn chaser. So if you, if you're watching a show and it's dark and depressing and dour, you always need to be able to like, "All right, I need, I gotta watch one more thing that'll make me feel okay about life and the universe, and I'm gonna watch just a real half hour of that and then I'll be done."

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  So a chaser in like the drinking sense?

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, I strongly recommend She-Ra on Netflix as this, uh, uh, thing. It's great.

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I got this order wrong. It was Watchmen and then Friends and then Full Metal Jacket. Which in terms of just jarring shifts between...

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  Watchmen needs, needs a unicorn chaser, Friends, Full Metal Jacket needs unicorn chaser, uh, Wonder Woman, and then you end on Andre the Giant.

• 1:05:34Nilay Patel?

  That is just such an intense four hours. How is that supposed to be compelling to anyone? I want you to be in a state of complete emotional confusion at the end of your four hours of HBO Max. Anyway, that, it's just, the thing that, to me, is like, it's funny, I'm sure, you know, he's trying to demonstrate the breadth of the, the service, but that's how they have to talk about it. That's, that's the only move they have to get you over the hump of knowing about the service, going to download it on your phone, opening up a user account, giving it your credit card information, hopefully forgetting that you gave it your credit card information, and then incurring billing for the rest of your life. Like, that's the business model they're in. I think we're gonna see a lot of attempts

• 1:06:15Nilay Patel?

  to mitigate it by saying it's free or cheap with ads, or to market moments like Baby Yoda, where you feel like you're left out if you're not in the mix.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  Here's what I want. I want, this won't work because some of these shows are staying exclusive, like especially like Mandalorian, but I want a service that actually tracks what shows I'm watching and tells me if it would be cheaper for me to bail on all of my subscriptions and just buy seasons from like iTunes. That's what I want. But it's not possible anymore because a bunch of these shows are just gonna be exclusive to the streaming platform.

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, I keep on hoping that only bad shows will be exclusive. Cause I do like that idea of that buying media. I don't know. It's, it is, it's like, so I was super planning on, I, like I said, I wasn't gonna get Disney Plus, but then I got it for free because I'm on Verizon. So I got Disney Plus. I was not planning on paying any attention to Peacock, but they've got the Adventure Zone, which is like one of my favorite things ever that exists ever. So of course I'm gonna pay for it and watch it. And of course I'm not gonna watch ads, so I'm gonna pay $10 a month. It's gonna be great. But, uh, yeah, it, I do think that calculate, if that calculator could exist,

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  I think it would be, like, even if it was virtual, like, let's pretend that you could buy these things on iTunes, you know, like you just pay $15 and you download a whole season of television that you like, uh, and then you don't have to watch like seven hours of television every night for the rest of your life. I think, I do think you'd be saving money.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  Okay. Yeah.

• 1:07:55Nilay Patel?

  I really got it.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  Here's the thing that I, here's how I feel about all of these shows using like their nostalgia bait shows to get you to subscribe. The personal story, I need a hobby. And like, I live in an apartment, so I can't make the hobby like, you know, fixing stuff around my house. So I'm like, what am I gonna do? Uh, I could take woodworking class, or I don't know, maybe I'll be that guy that like builds like cool like giant Lego kits. A lot of people do that. They get a lot of satisfaction out of that. Uh, but every time you go to like amazon.com and look at the Lego kit for the Millennium Falcon, which costs $800 and you scroll down, same thing with like the Aston Martin Corvette or any of those like super complex kits.

• 1:08:34Nilay Patel?

  The photo of the person building the Lego kit is like a 45 year old guy by himself. I'm like, oh no, nope, not doing that. Nope, too cliche. And that's how I feel about like, oh, I have to subscribe to this thing because it's got my, you know, favorite show from, you know, 2008 or whatever. Like, it's just, you're better. Go watch something new. It's okay.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. What's the line? Kill the past. Let the past go. Kill it if you have to. Just forget that show ever existed. I forgot most shows in the past existed. It's fun.

• 1:09:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that nostalgia stuff is like interesting. I also think that there's so much new content that needs to be made for these services to persist, that that inflection point will be super interesting to me. When HBO Max is not trying to sell you on the strength of the familiar names in its library, but it's actually trying to sell you on like the new teen comedies that HBO Max is gonna, like, that is gonna be an entire, that's why the streaming war phrase is actually more apt. They're gonna have to spend a lot of marketing money to cut through the noise and that you spend money and time over here. And that is, it is necessarily a fight, even if it ends up that half of America subscribes to one collection and the other half subscribes to another collection and everyone makes money in the end. The fight for attention is gonna be,

• 1:09:49Nilay Patel?

  I think, pretty, pretty blood thirsty.

• 1:09:51Speaker 03

  Because the kids are gonna be out there with their 5G PS4 switches.

• 1:09:55Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be amazing. Dieter, you want to talk about some cell phones real quick before we go?

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, real quick. So Samsung announced Unpacked, their phone event for February 11th. We've got a few weeks before that happens, so we can get into the rumors, but XDA Developers has basically gotten the goods on what to expect. The S20, there'll be an S20 Plus, an S20 Ultra, which will be a spec machine. We're expecting 120 Hz refreshed displays, which is the thing OnePlus is also promising to do. So expect every major Android phone to have that. And they're adding a fourth camera, a macro camera, Samsung is, which we'd also seen on like their light phone. So that's coming. There's gonna be the Galaxy Z Flip. We'll get into more of the rumors later when we got more time, but be aware that the Galaxy machine is spinning up.

• 1:10:44Nilay Patel?

  Spinning up. I gotta say, macro camera to me is like the... Well, now we're just adding like niche functions. Like the next year, they're gonna be like, this camera is made for birders.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:55Nilay Patel?

  Bird watchers only.

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  That's how I felt about wide angle at first, and now I love it.

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  But wide angle, there's like a utility with other people in the room with wide angle.

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Nilay Patel?

  Like it's, it has like some, when I say social, like it has value if other people are around you. A macro lens has very little value if you're in a room with other people. You're like, stand very still, I'm gonna get extremely close to your skin. No, you take, you take both of pictures of, of your food.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  And your cat.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can do that with a regular lens. All right, look, I love macro lenses. I'm excited to buy this phone just so I can take close up pics, pictures of subpixel layouts on the go. That's what I do with a macro. You really are in a glass house when you criticize macro lenses.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  They're, they're gonna follow the trend that they started with the Note 10 and they're gonna, they'll be the first Galaxy S phone without a headphone jack.

• 1:11:44Nilay Patel?

  Woof. Well, it was a good run, and now our headphones are computers and they have software updates that ruin the noise cancelling.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Nilay Patel?

  That's a thing that really just happened with the AirPods Pro, actually.

• 1:11:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  It's great, I'm happy that everything is a computer now.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  Actually, the worst part of the software updates with the AirPods Pro is there's no way to like actively install it because it just sort of ambiently happens when they, Apple thinks the time is right. And that means there's no way to uninstall it.

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  It's just like, you just gotta wait.

• 1:12:10Nilay Patel?

  True conspiracy theory, no proof, just a true conspiracy theory. I'm gonna, I'm gonna say it, it's irresponsible. If you're in your car, just like pull over and be like, say to yourself quietly, I'm about to hear an irresponsible thing that I should immediately forget. Okay, ready? What if Apple launched it with extremely hardcore noise cancelling? So people, because they knew people would compare that, but they knew it sounded kinda bad. And then after launch, they're like, we're gonna flip it back to sounding good with the noise cancelling that we believe in.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  Hmm. Why couldn't they just do both?

• 1:12:45Nilay Patel?

  I said it was irresponsible.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:12:47Nilay Patel?

  That's my, there it is. I said it, I said it was irresponsible and wrong. Uh, but you know, you think about that. What about ad tracking at the headphone level? Do you think that's not gonna happen? That's like already in Sony's Terms of Service Agreement. Like 100%, it's like, we will send listening data back to our servers. It's gross. Everything's gross. At this point, find a way to buy vinyl records in a bunker. Paul and I are gonna be working on our Pringle Can Mesh Network. We'll talk to you again next week.

• 1:13:21Nilay Patel?

  But like a DVD box set of MacGyver. Computers aren't terrifying if you just think it's all really funny. That's The Vergecast. That's the show that we make here. All right, that is, in fact, The Vergecast. I'm happy to be back. We do have a bunch of interviews coming out. I'm excited for you to hear them. Please, give us feedback on that stuff. You can tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backalun, Paul's at FuturePaul. Dieter, tell them about your newsletter.

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  It's a newsletter. You can find it at theverge.com/newsletter. It's called Processor. It's about computers. Defined broadly.

• 1:13:52Nilay Patel?

  Defined broadly. That's the most Dieter, like, asterisk on like the inherent joke about computers. Uh, that's it. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  Promo code.

• 1:14:21Speaker 09

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• 1:14:46Speaker 10

  Every sample has a story. Learn more at 10xgenomics.com.

• 1:14:51Speaker 11

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