How to keep your data safe when you travel

If you’re heading on vacation this summer, you’re going to want to listen to this. The Verge’s Gaby del Valle joins the show to explain how worried you need to be about your digital data when you cross borders, and what you can do to protect yourself. Even if you don’t think you have anything to hide, a little precaution goes a long way. After that, Puck’s Matt Belloni joins the show to explain why Apple, Amazon, Google, and other tech companies continue to pour money into the streaming business, when it seems so far removed from what those companies do well. (Spoiler alert: it’s fun to be friends with Ben Stiller.) Finally, we answer a hotline question about the Google Pixel’s ascent to “best Android phone for people who just want a phone.” Oh, also: thanks to everyone who voted for us in the Webby Awards! We’ll know soon whether we won, but however it shakes out, we’re so grateful to everyone who voted for us. Further reading: Is it safe to travel to the United States with your phone right now? DHS’s airport panopticon is getting people deported and detained Trump says he wants to deport US citizens to El Salvador Matt Belloni at Puck The Town podcast From Puck: How Long Can the Apple TV+ Experiment Sputter On? - Puck Google Pixel 9A review: a midrange phone done right Google Pixel 9 review: the phone that Android needs Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of having really famous friends. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am in my backyard, on my patio, putting together this little tyke's house that we got for my toddler. It was a gift from my parents. My two-year-old, I think, is very much gonna like it. But also, if I'm being honest, it was very fun and cathartic to put this thing together in the way that it's fun to do IKEA furniture. It's a little bit of work, it's just enough to make you feel like you've really accomplished something. And I'm like, "Yeah, I built a house today. Is it made of plastic and will it blow away next time there's wind? Yes, but that's not important. I built a house today." Anyway, this house is not what we are here to talk about today. Today on the show, we're gonna do two things.

• 0:45David Pierce?

  First, I'm gonna talk to Gaby Del Valle about a thing we've actually heard from you a lot about recently, which is how to travel with your phone, especially across borders right now. It's very complicated in the United States politically, and so Gabby and I are gonna try to give you some tips on what to do to secure your data before you travel. Then I'm gonna talk to Matt Belloni from Puck about what he is seeing in the big tech streaming wars and why companies like Apple and Amazon and Google want in on this in the first place. We also have a really fun hotline question about Google. Lots to get to today, but first, I have to figure out how to get out of this house. I barely crammed myself in here, and it's gonna be very ugly getting out. So, this is The Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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• 3:01David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right. The house is finished. I get to get rid of this giant box behind me. I made it out alive. Life is good. Let's get into it. We've heard from a bunch of you over the last few months with kind of a similar question, which is basically some version of, I'm about to travel and I don't know what to do with my devices. I think for a lot of political reasons, especially here in the United States, there are new questions about how you should be securing your phone and what data you should be traveling with across borders. It just feels different now. And I actually think this is the kind of thing that has been interesting and important for a long time, but is really just coming to the forefront now in a new way. So I grabbed Gaby Del Valle, who wrote a really great story for us about this, and

• 3:46David Pierce?

  we dug into it. Let's do it. Gaby Del Valle is here. Hi, Gabby.

• 3:50Speaker 05

  Hi, how's it going?

• 3:51David Pierce?

  You're here out of the trenches of the insanity of our world right now. I feel like every time you turn in a story, it's just like, the world is weirder than you even think or realize, by Gabby.

• 4:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's kind of my beat. It sucks. I mean, I like it. I like doing it, but I'm like, what if things weren't that way? That would be awesome.

• 4:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, indeed. So I've asked you to do this because you wrote a story about basically traveling to the United States with your phone in 2025. And we also got a hotline question very specifically asking about the same thing. Your story did super well. This is clearly a thing people are curious about, and I just wanted to dig into some of it. But let me, let me just play you the question that we got on the Vergecast hotline as a way to just kind of set up the conversation we're about to have. Does that sound good?

• 4:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:38David Pierce?

  All right, let me just play this.

• 4:41Speaker 06

  Hey, David. I'm European and I'm about to travel to the US. I read about Customs and Border Patrol searching phones. What might happen if I refuse? And if I have to let them search my phone, how do I prepare? Do I delete chat apps and password managers? Do I log out of my Google account and delete my Google Drive? Do I change my phone password? And what about my laptop?

• 5:00David Pierce?

  Okay, so there are a bunch of good, practical questions in here. But before we get to all the good, practical questions, I just want to sort of lay the land a little bit on this. And one thing I've been wondering a lot is how widespread is this kind of border search right now? The idea that like, somebody will detain you and search through your phone and look for anti-Trump text messages is like a thing we're hearing about. How big and widespread is this right now, really?

• 5:28Speaker 05

  I would say it's not super widespread, at least according to the most recent data we have, which is from the 2024 fiscal year. So it's not current, but that year, less than 0.01% of arriving international travelers had their devices searched by Customs and Border Protection. But at the same time, we are seeing, you know, a lot of anecdotal reports of people having their phones searched, of people having their laptops searched, of being turned away because of what comes up in a search. So I would say, even though it's not necessarily something that happens really frequently, like, people's anxieties are not entirely misplaced either, because you don't know if it's going to happen to you ultimately.

• 6:04David Pierce?

  Right. And it does seem like it'll probably be a minute before we get real quantitative data about this stuff. But it certainly seems like anecdotally... The stories we're hearing about this seem to have increased pretty dramatically.

• 6:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would say anecdotally, they've increased. And I mean, you know, part of that could be like, whenever Trump is in office, like, people care more about what Customs and Border Protection is doing, what ICE is doing. It's just kind of a, like, an attention effect. But at the same time, like, the reasons why people are being turned away are, in some cases, unusual. Like, a French scientist who sent, like, text messages saying that Trump's research cuts were bad.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  Like, that's not a usual reason to turn someone away or deny them entry.

• 6:48David Pierce?

  So how did it come to pass that these are legal searches that Customs and Border Protection is actually doing? What is the legality of these searches right now?

• 6:56Speaker 05

  So in 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement cannot conduct warrantless searches of people's cell phones without their consent. But there is what is called the border zone or border search exemption, which is exactly what allows CBP to search your phone at an airport or other port of entry. So in this instance, border doesn't mean, like, the physical, like, land borders of the US. Like, if you're flying into Chicago on an international flight, like, that's a border zone. If you're flying into, like, I don't know, Omaha, I'm just picking places in the middle of the country. Like, you don't have to be physically at the border for you to be in, like, a border zone. So the border zone exemption basically means that there are just, like, areas where the Fourth Amendment,

• 7:38Speaker 05

  not that it doesn't exist, but it's a little bit more flexible, a little bit less robust, because you're being inspected for entry into the country. So even though you are physically present in the United States, you have not yet been legally admitted. So it's just like a kind of different, um, different situation.

• 7:57David Pierce?

  So and is the idea that just by virtue of the fact that you are coming from not in the United States to in the United States, that somehow there is? I don't know, like probable cause or a reason to check or like, I guess, what is the reason behind that exemption?

• 8:12Speaker 05

  So I spoke to a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who explained it to me basically is like, you know, there's always kind of been a border exemption and it's before there were phones, it was they would check your luggage, they would check the things on your person, things that similarly, like you would need like reasonable, um, reasonable suspicion or whatever for search and seizure, but because you are entering, these things are considered like related to your travel, related to your reason for being in the country. But your luggage, you know, they might be looking for you smuggling something, trafficking something, uh, drugs, people, contraband, um, eggs recently, CBP, uh, has had an increase in people smuggling eggs from Mexico, which is really funny.

• 8:56David Pierce?

  Oh, boy.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, but your phone is not really like just a thing that you're carrying with you or your laptop. It like contains your entire life on it, um, which is why like domestically, um, the Supreme Court has held that, you know, law enforcement can't just go through your phone without a warrant, but it's because of this border search exemption, they can do it at ports of entry.

• 9:22David Pierce?

  Right, it's exactly the thing you just said about your phone is both the reason it should be more protected and the reason Customs or Border Protection would really, really, really like to look at.

• 9:31Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 9:31David Pierce?

  Those two things are exactly in like diametric opposition at all times.

• 9:36Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 9:37David Pierce?

  Okay, so what do we know about how these searches actually work? Like I'm imagining just like a dude standing in the corner, just like flipping through the apps on your phone. What actually happens in one of these searches?

• 9:49Speaker 05

  So it depends, I would say. You know, when you get to the airport and you go through customs and they're like, where were you? What's the reason for your travel? That's just like your standard run of the mill inspection. You can get pulled into what's known as a secondary inspection, which is when they take you into a back room. And this is like, they ask you more questions. You're sitting in the room and so they can ask to look at your phone. If you say yes, there's two types of searches they can do. There's what's known as a basic search. They have to put your phone on airplane mode and they can look at whatever is on your phone on airplane mode. They can use the search function on your phone. They can go through your pictures. They can go through your texts, like any apps that you have open that like maybe are still cached. Like they can look through all of that with your phone on airplane mode. Then there's what's known as an advanced or forensic search,

• 10:33Speaker 05

  which is when they hook your phone up to an external device and they like grab everything that's on it. And they keep it.

• 10:39David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  They keep it for as long as they want. And in some jurisdictions, like they can only do warrantless forensic searches that are pursuant to like border crimes. In some jurisdictions, they can only do searches that are pursuant to other types of crimes. It depends, but mostly they can just look at your phone and take what's on it. And they just store that information forever. Or maybe not forever, but for a very long time. I need to check the laws on that.

• 11:07David Pierce?

  Yeah. But even in the basic search, to your point, like I think it strikes me as, I think one of the questions a lot of people are going to have, like our caller here is like, okay, what, what information are they looking for? And I think to the question of like, okay, you're going to dump everything on my device and take it. I think that's one question, but like, okay, I'm sitting in the room and there's somebody flipping through my phone. Are they just like doing a spotlight search for the word Trump and seeing what happened? Like, is that, is that a reasonable guess as to what's going on here?

• 11:37Speaker 05

  I don't know if I could speak to that just because I don't know. They could be looking for anything like, it's kind of like the inverse of, well, if you have nothing to hide, like what are you afraid of? It's like, you don't know what's on there. You don't know what could be used against you. Like, like somebody texting his friend, like it's so crazy that Trump cut science funding. Being a reason to deny them entry from the country is like wild.

• 11:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 11:59Speaker 05

  There is, um, there was a story of a Brown University doctor who had her visa rescinded and got turned away. The CBP agents who were interrogating her say that she had admitted to going to Lebanon, where she is from, to attend the former leader of Hezbollah's funeral, which like, in most instances, that would, that would get you turned away. But they apparently searched her phone and found photos, they called sympathetic photos and images of the former leader of Hezbollah in her phone's recently deleted folder, so not even like in her camera roll, but in the recently deleted folder. And when they asked her, like, why do you have these pictures on your phone? And why did you delete them?

• 12:43Speaker 05

  She was like, oh, my family sends them on WhatsApp. And I deleted them because like, I, I don't know, like, they're not me, but like, yeah, I support some of his like religious, like whatever. She, she said a lot of stuff. But the point being, like, if you read between the lines there, like WhatsApp defaults to downloading whatever images people send you. So yeah, like, yeah, like, my family sends like a zillion, like, good morning, everyone, things, and I have to delete those on WhatsApp like every single day.

• 13:09David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  All of which is to say, you don't know what they're going to find in your phone. And even like trying to delete stuff might not necessarily help you if you don't fully delete it and then they find it in your recently deleted folder.

• 13:22David Pierce?

  Right. Interesting. Yeah, I was just thinking, like, we're, we're in the middle of, you know, litigating like the, the Signal group chat for attack planning and all this stuff. And it's like, there's actually a lot of ways that things can happen on your phone without you even necessarily being actively engaged in it. Like, I was actually thinking about the WhatsApp one, where like, mine is all, all my friends are like degenerate sports gamblers. So there's now, my camera roll looks like I'm a degenerate sports gambler, even though it's just all of my degenerate friends sending the bets that they're losing that just dump into my camera roll now. And so like, if you just opened up my phone, you would actually make a bunch of assumptions about me that are wrong. And that is just one specific tiny way that that stuff can actually start to happen.

• 14:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, your friends are the ones whose parlays are hitting. It's not you, it is your friends.

• 14:07David Pierce?

  All my parlays hit, Gabby.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. But yeah, like, I don't know, like, I have texts on my phone from like 12 years ago. I don't know what I was saying 12 years ago.

• 14:18David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  I just, I don't think about it. And, you know, maybe, maybe we should be thinking about it, which is, which is concerning. And it applies both to like, people traveling to the US from outside the country on visas and to US citizens. The difference is just like what your rights are, what you're, whether you have the ability to say no, and what happens if you say no.

• 14:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's talk about that, actually, because I was gonna ask you about this, because you said, if you say yes, these are the two kinds of searches that they can do. Can you say no? Who can say no? What happens if you say no?

• 14:49Speaker 05

  Technically, anyone can say no. But different things will happen. If you're a US citizen and you say no, they can't deny you entry into the country because you are a US citizen. They might hold you in there for a while. They might try to be like, "Why are you saying no?" But they can't not let you in. They can take your phone. And they can use forensics tools to get into your phone if they really want to. This has happened before. There's case law about it.

• 15:17Speaker 05

  If you're a permanent resident, so you have a green card, it's tricky. Like, you can say no. And in some cases, you can't be denied entry into the country. But like, if you've been out of the country for more than six months, then you are basically like, once again, being inspected for entry. And so saying no could like, affect your inspection for entry. If you have like, certain charges on your record, like, that could lead to you also kind of being inspected again. So it's just a little bit trickier than it is for US citizens. If you have a visa and you say no, they can just fully not let you in. They can send you back to wherever you came from, and they can deny you entry. So, the safer thing to do than saying no

• 16:00Speaker 05

  is to, you know, travel with your devices really locked down and really clean.

• 16:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay, so this is a good segue to like, let's get, let's get super practical about this here. The sort of nuclear option here is just like factory reset your phone before you get on the plane. Is that, is that just the idea here? Is that what you should do?

• 16:19Speaker 05

  I mean, it's not a bad idea. I would say it's not, it's not a bad idea. Like, upload whatever, back it all up, factory reset. If you don't want to factory reset, there are like other things that you can do. And I would say this advice applies most to US citizens and permanent residents. If you have a visa, I'm, I'm not really sure like whether, you know, just like targeted deleting of stuff is gonna, is gonna help you much. But um, if you uh, don't want to factory reset your phone, you should, I mean, actually, everyone. Everyone should turn off biometric fingerprint, face ID, turn it off, turn it off.

• 16:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, but can you explain that to me, actually? Because that was one thing in your reporting that, uh, that I found sort of confusing and surprising. That there is a difference between what they can do with your face ID or touch ID and what they can do with your like six-digit passcode to get into your phone. What is going on there?

• 17:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this is like a very interesting legal thing. It's the difference between what's known as testimonial and non testimonial. Testimonial and non testimonial evidence, I believe. And this has mostly been litigated in like local police departments, unlocking people's phones with their fingerprint or their face. But like, some courts have ruled that a cop cannot compel you to give them your phone password. Like, one, two, three, four. They cannot ask you or whatever it is. But they can use your finger or your face. Because basically testimonial evidence is evidence that compels you to disclose the, the contents of your mind or your thoughts.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  So you were, by telling them your password, you were disclosing something that you think you were being compelled to tell them what you think.

• 18:00David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 18:01Speaker 05

  But- That doesn't happen when they're just like putting your finger on the thing. This is also like when people go to protest, they're advised to, you know, turn off like biometrics. Because they can take your phone and just like.

• 18:12David Pierce?

  So just like the only analogy I can draw there is like, that's, that's the law you make so that they can fingerprint you at the police station. And but you still don't have to talk like, is that? Is there some similarity there?

• 18:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if like, that's like the legal like reason, but that is like, like an analogy that like makes sense to me. There is, um, so one federal appeals court ruled that non testimonial evidence, so like a biometric login for your phone. Requires no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking. Yeah. So you're totally right.

• 18:47David Pierce?

  There you go. Okay.

• 18:48Speaker 05

  Um, yeah. So because it doesn't require you to think or express your thoughts against your will, then they're allowed to do it.

• 18:55David Pierce?

  Okay. I'm not sure I buy that distinction, but it is, it is an interesting distinction nonetheless. Uh, okay. So the, the practical advice there is turn off everything but the passcode.

• 19:05Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah.

• 19:05David Pierce?

  For sure. Turn off all biometric authentication.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  And turn off your phone before you cross.

• 19:11David Pierce?

  Why?

• 19:12Speaker 05

  Because the first time you turn your phone back on, you can't log in with biometrics. So even if you forgot to turn off biometrics. Like the first time you need to put in your passcode, um, there are depending on like on your device. Um, you can maybe disable biometrics by like pressing the button on the side a couple of times. Um, so like, yeah, the main thing is no biometrics. Passcode login only. Turn your phone off. So, you know, back up your device, wipe whatever you want to wipe. And again, like people are going to say like, why do I have to wipe my device if I'm not doing anything wrong? It's like. Because the scope of what is wrong is expanding and expanding and expanding, even if the law hasn't changed.

• 19:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. And, and truthfully, like the, the way I would answer that question is like, maybe you don't, but i- is it worth the risk? Right? Like even if you don't think there is something in there, like I think about this, like you were saying, your text messages from 12 years ago, like. This is the reason I, I like deleted all my tweets at one point. I was just like, I, I don't know what I was tweeting in 2010. But I absolutely do not want to be held responsible for it. Right? Like, no one should be held responsible for what they were saying on the internet or in text messages. 15 years ago. And in this particular case, you are potentially signing yourself up for, if nothing else, that. And that, that should scare everyone.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  And if they do a forensic search of your phone, they keep. They keep the data, like they keep it, it's theirs. So DHS is building out this massive surveillance database called HART, which stands for the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology. And it's going to basically replace their current massive database, which is called the Automated Biometric Identification System, or IDENT. And HART is like, their plan is to be able to map people's like, non-obvious relationships, like all of these different things about a person's life that again, like go beyond like, who, like, why are you traveling to the US? Where are you coming from? Like, what do you have on you? Like, if you let them, you know, take your phone and take all the contents on your phone

• 21:08Speaker 05

  and back it up for god knows how long, like, that is data that is being fed into this like, massive machine. And you don't know how it's going to be weaponized against you or other people. It's kind of like the 23andMe thing, you know, like you get a Christmas present, you spit into a vial and like suddenly like your 12th cousin is getting arrested for like murder. Maybe, yeah, it's weird analogy, I guess, but yeah.

• 21:31David Pierce?

  But it is true, and I think that, that question of, not only like, how does this affect me, but how does this affect? You, you don't know the sort of second, third and fourth order effects that this data being out there has. And this is the thing we've learned over and over, right? That like, the, the location data in your phone and the, the usage data on social networks, like this stuff actually affects a much broader circle of people than just you as it gets out there. And I think it's like, that's a, that's a useful thing to hold on to, especially in this particular case, I think.

• 22:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, there was actually just a, an instance of a lawyer who was coming back to the US with his family from spring break. US citizen lawyer. The agents at CBP at the airport like, tried to look through his phone. He got away with like, just a basic search, basically. Not a forensic search, they didn't back up his information, but it's like, His client's information is on that phone. There was another instance where CBP took an immigration lawyer's phone. And, you know, they did like use the forensic search to like comb through what was on it. And a lot of that, of what was on it was like client information.

• 22:41Speaker 05

  And so, you know, a lot of us, myself included, use our phones for work, for personal things. And there's not just information about me on my phone. There's information about my friends, there's information about my family, there's information about like my sources. And so I would say like, it's really important for everyone. And it's like especially important for like journalists or lawyers or people who have like sensitive information on their phones.

• 23:08David Pierce?

  So given all of that, do you think the selective deletion strategy even makes sense? Like, is there a sort of half measure people can take that will help them? Or is, are the possibilities here just so huge and broad that you kind of might as well just do the nuclear option because it's the safer way to go?

• 23:28Speaker 05

  I mean, I would say like, you know, it's still a small, a very small percentage of people who are getting their devices searched. But at the same time, like realistically, how long does it take to back up your data and wipe your phone? And then put everything back on your phone? It doesn't take that long. It might be annoying, but it's also annoying to sit in a weird interrogation room for hours and have law enforcement looking through your phone. So I would say, I'm not going to tell anybody what they should do, but I think that the wisest course of action is to minimize your risk as much as possible. And maybe that means wiping down your phone entirely.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  Maybe that means like typing in keywords that you don't want people to see. And then deleting whatever fits into those keywords. I think just like, the main thing to do is assess your risk as much as possible and try to protect yourself as much as possible. And then also, Especially if you are a US citizen, like assert your rights as much as possible as well.

• 24:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. And if you delete things, you have to then go to trash and delete them again. Delete permanently is the phrase you want to look for in almost every case, because that's when they're actually deleting. All right, last thing, and then we'll let you go. How do you think about this stuff as it pertains to other devices? I think phones are unique in that they have that sort of massive information that you're talking about. But also, like, I travel with my laptop. Should people think about their laptops the same way they think about their phones? Are all devices kind of looped into this?

• 25:00Speaker 05

  I would say all devices are looped into this. I kind of want to do a separate piece on laptops, because I also travel with my laptop. I have so much stuff on my laptop. I do not want to put everything, like, I don't know, like, on an external hard drive in the cloud and then back on my laptop. Like, that frankly, sounds like really annoying and time consuming.

• 25:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, resetting your laptop is way more annoying than resetting your phone.

• 25:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm not sure about that, to be honest. I will say that my old MacBook does not have biometric login, which is great for me in this particular instance. And yeah, I don't know. That's a good question, and I think one I should probably call up some lawyers about, because I'm not 100% sure.

• 25:43David Pierce?

  Okay, but in principle, if you're traveling now, you should be applying kind of the same thinking and rigor to all of your devices, not just your smartphone?

• 25:50Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, definitely. And like smartphones, you know, are maybe easier to lock down, also easier to search, but there's a lot of stuff on my laptop.

• 26:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Speaker 05

  A lot of J-Store articles.

• 26:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, think of the PDFs I have, we both have, just like randomly kicking around in our downloads folder. I'm confident some of those would get me in trouble. I don't even know what they are, but I am confident they would get me in trouble.

• 26:15Speaker 05

  Oh, for sure. Same. I know what mine are, and they're weird. They're weird even like when I'm showing something. Like, when I'm sharing my screen, I'm always like, no, no, no, guys, you don't understand. It's research. It's research. I swear.

• 26:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. There is a part of the challenge here that there is so much kind of mystery in it. And like you, you mentioned in the piece that you wrote that even what airport you land in could change the way that you go through some of this process because of the different ways that different districts of federal courts have ruled about how these searches can work. So it's like, I think my sense is it is in part designed to be complex and hard to understand, uh, which makes it all the more important that like you, as the person going through it, understand what is in your rights to do.

• 26:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, totally. It's like, it's, I mean, I just like having to read about circuit splits to write this piece. I was like, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. What's going on? Um, and I was talking to lawyers and lawyers are like, yeah, this is really complicated. It's really complicated. It doesn't make any sense. Um, we have begged the Supreme Court to rule so that there's like a single national binding policy and there isn't one. But at the same time, like, I don't want people to think too much about like the circuit splits and the different jurisdictions because ultimately like the, the rulings and the differences are mostly about forensic searches. Um, the, the legal question hasn't really been raised for basic searches. Um, which means like

• 27:36Speaker 05

  they can do basic searches basically anywhere. Um, and you know, once again, if you volunteer your phone, if you say no, then there's like a whole situation with like legality and everything. But if you're like, yeah, sure, here's my phone. Like, maybe don't do that if you don't have to.

• 27:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's, that's a good place to start. All right, Gabby, thank you. This was great. Super helpful. And to our caller, thank you for, for calling in. I hope this helped. Thanks, Gabby.

• 28:02Speaker 05

  Thanks so much.

• 28:04David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a quick break and then we're gonna come back and talk about streaming. We'll be right back.

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• 29:45David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So I think I've mentioned this before, but one of my favorite podcasts is called The Town. And it's hosted by this guy named Matt Belloni, who is also a writer at Puck. He was the editor of The Hollywood Reporter for a long time. He is like a guy who knows everybody in the entertainment business. And that's mostly what he podcasts about. And he has talked a lot recently about Apple TV in particular, but also kind of all of the big tech streamers. And I've been listening to him talk about this for a while, wondering, why on earth would a big tech company want to get into streaming in the first place? Hollywood is a messy business. Everybody's up, everybody's down. It's, it's super complicated. It's all about relationships. It's like the exact opposite of what these ruthlessly efficient tech companies want to do.

• 30:28David Pierce?

  So I called up Matt and just basically said, this is what I want to know. Can you come on the show and answer it for me? Why on earth is big tech doing streaming? And he agreed, and here it is. Matt Belloni, welcome to The Vergecast.

• 30:41Speaker 08

  Thanks for having me.

• 30:42David Pierce?

  Thanks for being here. This is, this is very exciting for me. You see a lot of the same like streaming wars stuff that I see and that we talk about on this show all the time. But you see it from a very different perspective. Like I'm, I'm a guy who grew up like reviewing smartphones and you're, you're a guy who grew up in Hollywood. And I think it's like, we're, we're sort of running at each other in the tech industry right now. And that's, that's what I want to talk about.

• 31:03Speaker 08

  I was the last guy with a BlackBerry.

• 31:05David Pierce?

  I feel like everyone in LA was the last guy with the BlackBerry.

• 31:08Speaker 08

  They were very popular here. I don't know why. Maybe that we were just kind of afraid of losing the keyboard.

• 31:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, there was something to though, like, everybody in LA wrote really long emails way after it was cool to write long emails is a theory I've developed. So I think I think I want to start with Apple because I have I have like a big picture question I want to talk about. But I think the easiest way to talk about it is probably by talking about Apple TV. Which is on a run of like, pretty good hits. Severance was huge. Everybody's excited about Severance. The studio seems to be very good. You're in it. So you're hopelessly compromised.

• 31:42Speaker 08

  I am, yes. I'm not going to trash my own show. The the three scenes I'm in.

• 31:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, the good news is it seems to be very good. So I think you're you're safe on that front.

• 31:53David Pierce?

  And yet, there's been some reporting that Apple is losing up to a billion dollars a year on this whole project. So I guess maybe the easiest place to start is why is this not working for Apple as a business?

• 32:05Speaker 08

  Well, do we know that it's not working? Just because they're losing money doesn't mean that the entire endeavor is not working. It's just not working on traditional metrics where you have a P and L and you get into a business to make money in that business. Apple seems from the very beginning to approach Hollywood from two perspectives. One, this would be a brand halo. This would be something nice that they could do that would give them something cool to talk about. And they would work with the kinds of stars that they, as Apple, consider themselves worthy of working with.

• 32:42Speaker 08

  And they would put out some shows and have a service that would be additive to their services business, which they seem to care very much about these days. And would give them something cool to put in commercials and to talk about in tweets and on earnings calls. That was one reason. The second was to essentially.

• 33:03Speaker 08

  Provide a bundling opportunity with their other services. If they could keep you longer in the Apple ecosystem because they had Apple One and they had news and games and, you know, television shows that you've heard of, that that would be additive to their other businesses. So I think when we talk about the failure in Hollywood, there's legitimate things they're not doing that they should be doing, in my opinion, but I don't know that we can say that they're not getting out of this what they wanted to get out of it.

• 33:39David Pierce?

  That's fair. I mean, and I think the, the question of, does it matter if Apple TV plus makes any money? It seems like it has been sitting there for Apple since it started this project. And I feel like, I'm curious how you see the brand halo piece of all of this because to me, it's like, I remember back when they first launched this thing and do you remember they had that event that they just like paraded a bunch of A-list celebrities out on stage?

• 34:03Speaker 08

  Oh yeah, it was the cattle call.

• 34:04David Pierce?

  Right. And so it's like, is, is this entire endeavor worth it just for that? Like, is that what Apple needs to get out of it? And it can just sell a bunch of iPhones and who cares about the money? Like, is the brand halo real enough that it's actually worth it for this company?

• 34:18Speaker 08

  Uh, well, you'd have to ask them, but I think from my perspective, it was meaningful for them to get all of these celebrities up to Cupertino. Remember the famous Oprah line, like, they're in a billion pockets, y'all. Like, that was her reason for getting into business with Apple. And if you look at the choices they are making on the content side, one after another, it is huge stars. If you, I mean, it's a joke around town. Like, if you've got a big star-filled package and you're selling it around town, Apple will bite. Like, they just want to be in business with big movie stars and big TV stars. And the criticism of them is that they don't ultimately often enough follow through on

• 35:02Speaker 08

  the promise of those stars. There's lots of projects that are kind of littering Apple TV plus that have big names in them, but don't ultimately turn into great shows. There are examples, of course, of shows. That do turn into great shows with big stars. But the the the evidence we have for whether they're getting out of this what they want is that they continue to sign up big stars. And when it works there, you know, Eddie Q can go to South by Southwest and have an hour long conversation with Ben Stiller and he doesn't have to talk about all the other problems that are circling Apple.

• 35:37David Pierce?

  Is that something we see across Hollywood, this idea that like it's it's worth the cost to be able to sit next to Ben Stiller for an hour? Like, is this is this sort of a long playbook run by companies in Hollywood?

• 35:47Speaker 08

  People in Hollywood don't care. They just want them to keep doing it. The biggest nightmare would be if Apple suddenly decided one day to get out and this is not worth it to them. So they have people in town are like terrified that Eddie Q is going to wake up one morning and be like, wait, why do I have that meeting in LA on my schedule? Like, why? Let's just not do that anymore. Like, that is the fear, because then it would suck a few billion dollars out of the professionally produced content industry. And Apple's a big buyer of that kind of content. And does the average Apple customer think more highly about Apple because they have a Jon Hamm show or they produce the studio? Like, I don't know the answer to that. I mean, that's

• 36:32Speaker 08

  a Harvard Business School study waiting to happen. It probably doesn't hurt. And it's a rounding error for them to be in this business. And it does let Tim Cook go to the Oscars and talk about it on the earnings call and tweet about how much he loves Ted Lasso. So is that worth it for them? Maybe.

• 36:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, the the people will pay a lot of money to have famous friends is a lesson I have learned over and over in in covering this business.

• 37:01Speaker 08

  Especially when you already have a lot of money.

• 37:04David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, you already have the money. Get the famous friends.

• 37:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly. Like when you got everything in the world, what don't you have? Exclusivity and famous friends are exclusive and to be able to say that we are producing a Martin Scorsese movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, not everyone can say that.

• 37:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. So you've kind of run at the big picture question I wanted to ask you, which is basically, why do these big tech companies want into Hollywood in the first place? And I think the, the way I think about it, like it is, it's a, it's a risky business at best and a terrible business at worst. These companies don't necessarily seem to have any particular aptitude for it. And yet it seems like every tech company that hits a certain kind of status is like, okay, our next big project is we're going to go just headlong into the streaming wars in some way.

• 37:54Speaker 08

  Well, I think it's, it's specific to the companies. If you look at what Amazon is doing, for instance, I actually do think that it makes sense for Amazon to get into this business because look at what Amazon is. It is a massive retailer and television is a massive retail product. If they can be the next generation gatekeeper of all television, that is a good business for them to be in. And by the way, it would also help keep people in the prime ecosystem and sell them more toilet paper. So Amazon, I think, is the poster child for what a tech company can get out of Hollywood if they do it right.

• 38:34Speaker 08

  And I think the jury's still out on whether they are doing it right or whether they can turn this into a massive business. They think at Amazon, they think that Prime Video is going to be profitable in the next year or two. And if that's the case, then good for them. They spend a lot of money and they are making headway there. And, and in some ways they have a leg up on Apple because what did Apple do this past year? They put Apple TV plus in the Amazon Prime Channels business. They essentially bowed down to Amazon and said, okay, we need you to sell our product. We, Apple, the biggest company in the world, need Amazon to get people to subscribe to Apple TV plus. And it's working. They are getting a lot of subscribers through the Amazon Channels program,

• 39:19Speaker 08

  as are all the other services. And that is the end game. Just like Amazon wants to sell you four different varieties of recliner, they also want to sell you four different varieties of programming.

• 39:32David Pierce?

  But is it definite, are we sure that you then need your own massive slate of content? And you need to spend eight and a half billion dollars on MGM in order to do that? Like, I actually get the retail side of that for Amazon in particular. That makes a lot of sense. But do you need your own Hollywood universe in order to be that company?

• 39:54Speaker 08

  Uh, it's a differentiator for sure. I mean, there's a lot of these companies out there like Roku and DirecTV that don't produce their own shows on that scale. And Amazon believes that if it owns enough of this stuff and can use it as a lure to bring people into the ecosystem, then that is a differentiator. And I think I agree there. I think that the, the, the fact that they have original programming that people do watch, I mean, these shows like Reacher and Cross and, you know, the kind of guy with a gun shows, people are watching that stuff on Amazon. Obviously now they have Thursday Night Football, which has been a big deal for them. And it costs nothing but money, which is what they have. And they are in business with the NFL, which is the most premium video product there is.

• 40:39Speaker 08

  So I, I do think it's a differentiator and it, and it sets them apart from some of these just platforms. It's, it's, it's a, the programming does matter. Maybe not on that scale and maybe they won't do it forever, but I think it does matter.

• 40:53David Pierce?

  I'm particularly curious, when companies like that come into Hollywood and they're like, we, we are going to invest in streaming in some meaningful way. We're going to start making content. They all have essentially unlimited amounts of money. What's, what's, what happens in Hollywood when one of those companies shows up? Is it just like, oh, thank God, another money fountain that they're just going to have to come buy our stuff and everybody's psyched about it?

• 41:15Speaker 08

  Well, yes, I think that's certainly part of it. But then it becomes, what do they actually want? And what are they actually going to do for my creators? And that's the representative community when they're looking at this. And I remember when YouTube started doing professionally produced shows. It wasn't just whether Google had the money to make them. Obviously everybody knows they do. It was, okay. How is this going to be produced? Are you, are you doing this via the unions? You know, that's a big thing. Netflix, the first thing they did when they got into original programming was we are going to play by the rules and we're going to do union contracts with all of the different unions. We're going to pay people differently.

• 41:58Speaker 08

  They're going to give you more money than your quote upfront, but they're not going to pay backends. And that was a big shift for the industry and everybody went along with it because they were making more money upfront. And when YouTube started doing this, it was how is this going to be displayed? Is my show going to be a pop up video next to a cat falling downstairs? Or is this going to be presented in a premium elevated app format? Where you go to a separate area and then the premium shows play. And I think those are all the questions that people get asked. Still to this day, people complain about the Amazon interface and it's hard to find stuff. And it looks like a retail store and that's a factor. The, the Apple interface is super elegant and looks like an Apple product.

• 42:43Speaker 08

  And people like that and their shows look like they're expensive and they are. How are you going to market this? That's the other thing is that Netflix doesn't do very much marketing. They have an algorithm that does most of the marketing for them. So outside of the awards context, you're not going to get much marketing for Netflix. And Apple and Amazon have said, okay, we will actually market your shows. And I think it depends on who you are as to whether you actually get that. But those are all the things that you look at when, when the tech companies come to town.

• 43:15David Pierce?

  And is that kind of the list that any new entrant in this space would have to come up with? Like if, if you're a, any studio or distributor, are you having to answer those same questions? Like, is there anything different when it's these tech companies that are trying to do this?

• 43:31Speaker 08

  The, the thing that's different, I think, is the, uh, the question of presentation. Because in the old format, you kind of knew what a movie was. You knew what a show was. You knew if you sold it to NBC, it was going to get a certain kind of treatment. You could argue over the marketing and you could argue over the time slot and all that stuff. And in movies, you, you argue over the release commitment, whether you're getting a wide release, whether you're getting a, a platform release, the marketing spend associated with it. On these platforms, there's a fear of just being.

• 44:04Speaker 08

  Churned up by the algorithm and not being presented in a way that your art is, should be presented. And when I talk to representatives, they really try to think about that. In some places like Netflix, say, you gotta, you know, you gotta trust us. This is what we do. We will find the right audience for your show. Others, you could have a little bit more of a conversation. What's the marketing going to be on this? Where, where, what am I going to get for a theatrical release for my movie? And, you know, the, the F1 movie that Apple is releasing this summer, they guaranteed at least a 45 day window in theaters. We'll see how long it ultimately ends up getting

• 44:45Speaker 08

  beyond that. But that was the, a big reason why that F1 movie went to Apple and not to Netflix or one of the others, because they got a guaranteed theatrical release. So those are, so there's some of the considerations.

• 44:58David Pierce?

  There's an interesting disconnect, sort of inherent in all that, that you've written about a bunch over the years. And like, you always use the word content as sort of a shorthand for the difference in how these people talk about it, which I really like.

• 45:09Speaker 08

  The C word.

• 45:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, we talk about it all the time, too. It's right. It's like, what is, what is art and what is content?

• 45:14Speaker 08

  Yeah. And that was the big problem at Amazon is the head of the studio referred to a James Bond movie as content. And the producer of the James Bond movie did not like that.

• 45:24David Pierce?

  Yeah. So that's actually the exact example I was about to ask you about. Like, I think the, the whole saga with Bond and the Broccolis and the, that the great quote where, you know, she hates everybody at Amazon. Still not perfect relations everywhere, but I remember years ago, there, there was this feeling that like the tech people don't get us Hollywood people. And the tech people were like, shut up, we have all the money. And has that gotten better over time? Like, have these, have these groups of people figured each other out a little more?

• 45:52Speaker 08

  Well, the interesting thing is that slowly but surely, these tech companies have been populated by traditional studio people. If you look at the people that are running the content operations at Apple, Amazon and Netflix, they're all traditional Hollywood people. Bella Bajaria ran the content group at NBC and now she's the chief content officer. Netflix, Jen Psalke, who just ended up leaving, but she was also an NBC executive before she went to Amazon. And over at Apple, the top content executives ran Sony Pictures Television and they were big producers. So, you know, and on the movie side, they probably, so slowly, but surely, at least in the Hollywood groups.

• 46:33Speaker 08

  I'm not talking about the people who work in Los Gatos for Netflix, but the Hollywood people are Hollywood people. So there's a level of comfort that the, the representation and talent community has with those people because they're one of their own. Now, often that will butt up against the instincts of the tech companies. And that's when you see conflicts and it comes to a head all the time at Netflix where they absolutely do not want to put movies in theaters. And obviously the artists all want their movies in theaters and they lose projects right and left over that. And they want traditional marketing. Netflix doesn't do that because they have the algorithm.

• 47:13Speaker 08

  And there's a, an interface where, you know, the creatives would love for the credits of their shows and movies to play after they air. But the Netflix model is to push, push, push to the next piece of content. So it starts autoplaying before you even see any credits. Like that's what you have to live with if you're working with those services. But I guess in the words of Don Draper, that's what the money's for.

• 47:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, I always get a kick out of, uh, whenever you're watching something with a post-credit scene, you have to like work really hard to go find it. Because Netflix is desperate to just get you off the credits and onto something else. And I'm like, no, no, I'd actually, I'd actually like to watch this Netflix.

• 47:48Speaker 08

  It's annoying. I know. And, and like, makes me feel a hundred years old, but it's like, why? Why are we already on the next show? And I get it. Like, you know, it used to be that those would count as views. When the autoplay started a new episode of a show, all it would take is like 30 seconds or a minute and Netflix would count it as a view. They don't do that anymore. But yeah, it was kind of a fraud.

• 48:09David Pierce?

  Agreed. So I feel like there's that, that kind of. Hollywood people inside of these companies who then have to go like sit in conference rooms with the business people and the tech people and the product people. That tension, at least from where I sit, still seems sort of alive and well. And I feel like this is a thing that that we hear about and cover all the time. It's like if you're, you know, you're Andy Jassy, you're the CEO of Amazon and you look around and you're like, okay, times are tough, tariffs are coming, things are complicated. Where where can we pull back? And you look over at this thing where you're like, well, we just spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Citadel, this show that no one watched and was awful. That's a lot easier to cut than a bunch of like AWS engineers.

• 48:50David Pierce?

  And and so I wonder like, it does seem like there's been a little bit of a cultural shift towards sort of understanding how that world works and what the investments look like and caring about, you know, the art. And those people seem to be more powerful inside of those companies than they once were. But I do still feel like if you're if you're an executive at Amazon or Google or Apple or any of these companies, I don't feel like the Hollywood people are winning yet.

• 49:15Speaker 08

  That's probably true. The the ultimate deciders still are in the headquarters and they're not in the LA operations. And I think that that is, you know, they are, they operate on the whim of these these overlords that determine budgets. And there have been a couple come to Jesus moments, especially at Apple, where they have said, listen, you know, we we put these movies in theaters and they flop and they give us bad headlines. People write about, people write the words apple and the word flop in the same headline sentence. Like, that's not what we want. We're Apple. We don't have flops. So although I guess lately they do.

• 49:54David Pierce?

  But yeah, more so recently.

• 49:56Speaker 08

  They, you know, so they're like, why are we doing this? So when they had this movie, Wolf's, last summer, Clooney and Pitt, and they didn't think it was great, they just said, we're not doing that. Well, you know, we're gonna put it just on the service. And there's a real question as to whether Apple's gonna put more movies in theaters. I think F1 this summer is a big test because they don't like the bad headlines. If they're not doing this for money, essentially, they're doing this for brand halo and for services, then why endure bad headlines if you don't have to?

• 50:25David Pierce?

  I feel like streaming hits are like the new cult classics where you say that movie was a huge failure and everybody's like, well, no, everybody saw it later. They really liked it. It's like.

• 50:33Speaker 08

  Well, that's been true forever. I remember being in, in meetings with the HBO people in the 2000s where they would talk about how all the press attention is on their original series. But when you look at the bread and butter of who was watching HBO, it was people watching those movies that they didn't see in theaters, but had their first run on premium cable on HBO. And one of the biggest movies for HBO of all time was the flop Battleship. Remember that movie?

• 51:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, I do.

• 51:05Speaker 08

  Huge flop in theaters, but it had a lot of stars. They had Rihanna. Remember that?

• 51:09David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:10Speaker 08

  It had all these like hot stars in it. And like, there is a train wreck element when you're watching on television that works. The thinking in streaming is that the originals bring people in and the licensed content keeps them. Because you come in for the sexy title. If it's Max, you're coming in for the HBO original series and then you stay for the Warner Brothers library of movies and all the other stuff that's on Max. The knock on Apple is that for reasons beyond me, they have not invested in a library. They could license a ton of movies. They could license kid stuff. They could license shows from

• 51:51Speaker 08

  other networks. They don't do that. It's really just a repository for their originals with some, some other stuff that they put in there. And as a result, the engagement numbers, the time spent on the platform are tiny. Nielsen releases a gauge metric once a month where it tells you the percentage of time for each service on connected TVs. And obviously YouTube and Netflix are the top draws, but Apple doesn't even rate. Apple's not even on the top 10 list because the engagement numbers are so low because people are coming in for those five shows that they've heard of and that's it. They're not staying for anything else.

• 52:36David Pierce?

  So as we look ahead, where obviously it's, it's a weird moment in the world and economy right now. But I feel like we've been for years.

• 52:46David Pierce?

  Everybody has been asking like, okay, at what point are some of these companies going to decide to just go all in on this? Apple's gonna buy Disney or Netflix, somebody's gonna go, Amazon's gonna go spend all the money in the known universe and just eat the NFL entirely. Like, someone is going to fully like 100% this strategy. And yet, it hasn't happened yet. Why, why do you think not? Why haven't we seen the like, full push into the middle of the table from one of these companies?

• 53:13Speaker 08

  I, I think there's a couple of reasons. First, the antitrust concerns, and the Biden administration was so openly hostile to M&A activity, that I think there's, there was a real sense that any effort on the tech companies' part to buy a studio, or pull off another MGM or Fox Disney, would be met with pretty swift resistance. And now, under Trump, we're seeing a different kind of chaos, where the market is so volatile, that you're afraid to do anything in this kind of environment. So that's one reason. Secondly, like, other than the Beats acquisition, we have not seen Apple do anything in the M&A space in this arena. And all these people out there saying, well, oh, it's only a matter of time before they

• 53:58Speaker 08

  buy Disney. Really? Like, are we sure about that? Do you think Apple wants to be in the churro business, and the turkey leg business, in, you know, countries around the world, and have to deal with a kid getting eaten by an alligator at Disney World, and things like that? Like, that's, that's what they want to be in? I, I just don't, I just don't see that. I could see them picking off something like Warner Brothers, which would give them HBO, which is what they wanted to buy a decade ago, and Time Warner wouldn't sell it to them.

• 54:28David Pierce?

  That's right. I forgot about that.

• 54:30Speaker 08

  And I think that that makes a little bit more sense. But again, that would come along with all of these dying television networks. And does Apple want to be in the business of managing the decline of television? I mean, they could try to sell that stuff off, but that's a, that's a real challenge there. So there's all of these different M&A scenarios from the tech companies. They, they raise- Both regulatory and logistical problems. And I think that's why we haven't seen them so far. Doesn't mean they won't happen. I'm just saying that's why.

• 55:00David Pierce?

  Last thing, and then I'm gonna let you go. Uh, F1, you mentioned this earlier. Strikes me as kind of a big moment for Apple TV Plus specifically, but also this whole sort of big tech streaming thing. This is certainly the biggest, most expensive swing I can think of from one of these sort of big tech companies trying to make this happen. It's doing the theatrical thing. We've been seeing ads about it for like forever. Brad Pitt was like at F1 race. This is like, this feels like a moment to me. Does it feel like a moment to you? Like, are you, are you watching this carefully?

• 55:33Speaker 08

  Certainly for Apple. It's definitely the biggest thing they've done. And they partnered with Warner Brothers for the release. Apple doesn't release their own movies in theaters. They partner with the traditional studios for that. And I, I think it, it's a big moment for them because it's kind of a make or break. I think if this is a total flop and they put all this effort and money into a movie for theaters that didn't really make a dent. I, I think they really question what they are doing in the theatrical space. And that has repercussions all the way down the line. Having said that, Eddie Q was at the CinemaCon movie theater convention last week, and he was doing meetings with the traditional theaters. And he was at least saying, we care about theaters and we're gonna do some movies in theaters.

• 56:18Speaker 08

  So maybe they're committed to this, but I think if, if F1 flops, they're gonna really question it. I don't think it will. I think the movie looks good enough and I think that there will be an audience globally for this movie. So it, it may not be a billion dollar grocer, but I think it will do enough to, for them to feel like it was a success and that that was worth, it's worth doing for the right movie in the future.

• 56:40David Pierce?

  All right, Matt, thank you so much. This was really fun. Appreciate you doing this.

• 56:43Speaker 08

  Yeah, no problem.

• 56:45David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna come back, take a question from the first guest hotline. We'll be right back.

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• 58:28David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11. The email is [email protected]. Call us, email us, text us. I don't know if you can text us, but try and text us, actually. And if it doesn't work, let me know, because I think that's a thing I can do. I might just have to go and turn it on. Anyway, we try to answer at least one question on the show every week. And I think, by the way, we're going to do like a full hotline episode here in the pretty near future. So if you have questions you want us to answer, get them in. We got a lot of fun stuff coming up. This week, we have a question about Google.

• 59:02Speaker 09

  Hello, my name is Nick. I'm a longtime listener of the Vergecast. I have a couple of thoughts after your last episode. I wanted to ask about the Google Pixel. It seems like the Pixel has gone from being a "what is this phone going to even do in the future?" to a "this is what I recommend to my friends and family." Can you walk us through how that happened? Thanks.

• 59:24David Pierce?

  I really like this question because one of the reviews that I am frankly most proud of in retrospect, but was very skeptical of my own thoughts at the time, where when I was at Wired and the very first Pixel came out, I said it was the best phone on the planet, period. Like, not just best Android phone, best phone. Because what we had been wanting was a phone that ran Android, that didn't come with all the limitations of iOS and the iPhone and all of the closed-wall-garden-ness of it, but was simple and easy to use and just worked. And you didn't have to spend all your time tweaking settings and installing launchers and thinking about it. Something that just did all the things your phone was supposed to do. And the very first Pixel was very close to that. It wasn't perfect,

• 1:00:09David Pierce?

  but it was very close to that. And I think, to me, the most fascinating thing about the Pixel line ever since then has been this weird roller coaster of progress that it has made, right? I think Google has, over the years, gotten better at design. I think you can quibble with that a little bit, but the cyclopsy thing that happens on the Pixels now, I think, looks nice. The cameras have consistently been very good. And yet, every time you turn around, there is some weird thing going on with the Pixels. This is what I mean by the roller coaster. It's like, it's sort of two steps forward and one step back with every one of these hardware iterations. There have been these mysterious hardware issues with a lot of them. My wife actually had one of these with a Pixel 7, I believe

• 1:00:51David Pierce?

  it was, where her screen just went green, like matrixy-green, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. And I looked it up online, and tons of people were like, "Yeah, this happens. Google says it happens. They'll replace it." This is the kind of thing that is hard to engender real confidence. And Google has had pretty rough customer support over the years. Its interest in the Pixel lineup has kind of waxed and waned. It has had some issues with the tensor processors. There was one of the Pixels where the fingerprint reader didn't work very well. Some of the phones have been really sort of big and clunky. Google has just never quite put all the pieces together. But the thing it had going for it all this time is that it was the simple one.

• 1:01:31David Pierce?

  Right. I think Samsung for most of its life in the Android world has been the default Android choice and with good reason, right? Samsung makes really good phones. It has really good, interesting hardware. It has great cameras. It caught up a long time ago in a lot of those things and consistently does a very good job. But a Samsung phone is sort of by definition, a power user thing. And Samsung has still not done enough to pull back the operating system to make it so that you can just get a phone and have it and use it and it can just be your phone. I don't think most people want to do work on their phones. Right. And so I think for me and for Allison Johnson on our team and for a lot of our reviewers, the thing that we keep landing on is that simplicity is really important.

• 1:02:15David Pierce?

  Right. And when I say like a Pixel 9A is a perfect phone for my parents. I mean that literally, right? Like, I think there are lots of people who want to do stuff on their phone and they like mucking around in settings. And I actually think Samsung deserves enormous credit for how much it lets you do on the phone. Samsung is just like a tinkerer's paradise of an Android device and should get real credit for that. But not everybody wants that. I think most people don't want that. And I think frankly, the reason Google started making pixels in the first place is that it understood that most people don't want that. Most people want a phone that they turn on that works. And that is not a thing you get from most Android manufacturers. And so Google set out to say, okay, we think Android is really great.

• 1:02:59David Pierce?

  We think everybody is kind of bastardizing Android in the name of being interesting and customizable and trying new things and adding their own apps on top of our existing apps. And it was just too much. And so Google came in and said, okay, we're going to pair all of that all the way back. And we are going to give you the basic, simple, straightforward, pure version of Android.

• 1:03:20David Pierce?

  And I think that was the right idea. And Android, you know, has also had its ups and downs. Android has had some weird ideas about like where apps go and how widgets work and all different kinds of settings ideas. But I think at this point, Android has landed in a really stable, really mature, really solid place, and so has the Pixel. I say this with real trepidation because frankly, at any moment, Google could just decide it doesn't care about this stuff anymore. And it has made grand promises about supporting these things for a long time that it has walked back in the past. Right now, it promises seven years of security updates for its devices. That's a big deal and a big win. Am I confident that Google is gonna wanna make smartphones in seven years? No.

• 1:04:03David Pierce?

  But if Google does wanna make smartphones in seven years, I think that's great. And so, at the least, I think we've landed on a place where you have two really great Android options, and that's a victory. You have Samsung, which is like the power user lineup. It lets you do the most, it is the most capable, it is the most phone, like in every imaginable way. And on the other hand, you have the Pixel, which is simple and straightforward. It is like the set it and forget it smartphone. And I think that's also very powerful. And I think different phones will work for different people. I think, frankly, I'm an iPhone user. I have been for a while. I'm terrified of leaving iMessage, just to be completely honest. But that dichotomy, I think, is great.

• 1:04:45David Pierce?

  And I think the fact that the Apple lineup doesn't have that, where you get to choose between the one that just sort of works and you don't really have to think about, and it's, it's simple and clean and nice, versus the one that will just let me go in and muck around and have some fun. I love that about Android. I hate that about iOS. But anyway, so that, that's where I've landed with the Pixel. I think the Pixel, and really sort of solidifying with the nine lineup last year and the nine A this year, has landed at a point where like, I trust these phones, right? They're good, they don't have obviously huge glaring flaws. I don't have to tell you about the thing to watch out for. It's just a good phone, and it is a good phone that I'm not going to have to spend hours teaching you how to use, and that you're not gonna have to spend hours figuring out how to use.

• 1:05:29David Pierce?

  And that's a victory, and we need more of that in the tech industry. I say all this, and you know, give it three days, and Google will cancel the next Pixel, and everything will be set. But until then, I'm gonna keep recommending the Pixel to a lot of people because I continue to think it might just be the best phone out there.

• 1:05:48David Pierce?

  All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. Thank you, by the way, to everybody who voted for us in the Webby Awards. We're going to know on, oh, today, Tuesday, the 22nd. Whether we won or not, we will tell you on Friday. We're either going to, you know, happy celebrate or sadly yell at Brendan Carr one way or another. That's going to be the Vergecast. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other Android phones you want to sell me, you can always email [email protected] or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Like I said, we're going to do a full hotline episode here in the very near future, so get your questions in as soon as you can. We love hearing from you and they have set us up on some truly wild reporting adventures. So, thank you for that.

• 1:06:33David Pierce?

  This podcast is produced by Eric Gomez, Will Poor, Brandon Kiefer. Vergecast is Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neel and I will be back on Friday with Brendan Carr, OpenAI, more Signal shenanigans in the government, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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