Tesla's robotaxi reality check

Tesla is famous for throwing caution to the wind in the name of rolling out cool technology, so it was somewhat surprising to see its robotaxi service launch over the weekend in somewhat muted fashion. The Verge's Andy Hawkins joins the show to explain what, exactly, Elon Musk and co. launched, and what it says about the state of the self-driving revolution. After that, The Verge's Allison Johnson takes us through the history of MVNOs, and why they might just be the best deal in wireless carriers. We talk about Trump Mobile, Ryan Reynolds, e-SIMs, and what it would mean to make it easier to switch service. Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline about how to free up storage on your iPhone. It's harder than it should be, but hopefully easier than you think. Further reading: Tesla’s robotaxi is live: here are some of the first reactions The Tesla Cybercab is a cool-looking prototype that needed to be much more than that Waymo says it will add 2,000 more robotaxis into 2026 How Donald Trump and Ryan Reynolds can easily sell you phone plans Trump Mobile is a bad deal How to clear up space on your iPhone when you’re running out of storage 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 being unsupervised. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am doing, I think I've talked about this on the show before, my annual-ish full-on backup of everything. So over the years, I've basically developed a rule about how I think about files and folders and stuff. I want to have them in three places. And anything that doesn't allow this, I try not to use. I want to have all my stuff like in whatever app I'm using, whether it's notes or photos or to-dos or bookmarks or whatever, I want to have it all somewhere. And then I want to have it all in some other sort of cloud storage thing, Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft, pick your poison. And then I want to have it all somewhere on a physical drive.

• 0:46David Pierce?

  And that usually means things like text backups and a lot of like HTML and PDF downloads. And this is the time of year when I try to make sure that all of that is intact. In theory, I should do this a lot more often. I should do this like once a month or once a week. There was a time where I did it once a week and was like very diligent and proud of myself.

• 1:06David Pierce?

  Not so much recently. So now what I'm doing is I'm downloading all of my photos. I'm downloading all of my notes as text and markdown files. I'm downloading all of the bookmarks and stuff I have. I'm downloading like browser history, which I'm confident is not a thing I'm ever going to need. But basically, anything I can turn into some kind of searchable, archival file gets downloaded, gets put on a drive like this one. I have a couple of them lying around and I try to just make sure it all lives there. This is a way of like backing everything up without making my life more complicated, which I like, right? This is just like a permanent archive that in theory, I never have to touch. I think very rarely have I ever actually had to go on to this drive and find something. It's just a failsafe. It works for me.

• 1:49David Pierce?

  I got inspired to do this, by the way, by today's hotline question, which we will come to at the end of the show. It's a fun one. And an annoying, and we'll get to that. But anyway, before we get to all that, today is not just about storage and file backup, though I could talk about that for hours. We're going to do two things on the show today. First, we're going to talk to Andy Hawkins about the slightly complicated Tesla robotaxi announcement over the weekend. And we're also going to just catch up on the state of robotaxis in general, because this market continues to be very confusing and is moving both slower and faster somehow than you might think. I'm also going to talk to Allison Johnson about MVNOs, this new type of wireless carrier that suddenly seems to be everywhere. And I think might be more important than we realize.

• 2:34David Pierce?

  There's Trump Mobile, there's Mint Mobile, there's like Boost, but there's something bigger happening here. And Allison and I are going to try to figure out what it is. All that is coming up in just a second, plus more stuff on storage. But first, we have to take a break and I have to go and download, let's see, 11,000 photos for my cloud drive. Pray for me. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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• 4:34David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Andy Hawkins is here. Hi, Andy.

• 4:36Speaker 05

  Hi, how's it going?

• 4:38David Pierce?

  You know, I once again have to talk about robotaxis that both do and don't exist. So this is, that question fills me with a lot of confusing feelings. There was a launch this weekend, we would say. Is that, is that a fair assessment of what happened?

• 4:54Speaker 05

  Something happened. A thing happened. It was, I don't know if you could call it a launch. It still feels very beta to me in many ways, but we can get into that. But yes, I guess one could argue a thing was launched.

• 5:08David Pierce?

  Okay, so what, what did happen this weekend? Like what, there was a, there was a small, I was very confused by this because Tesla is a company that like does big splashy things at the, at headquarters all the time and is like constantly making noise about these huge announcements. And then this, what you would think would be a big moment in Tesla's history just kind of sneakily came and went on a Sunday. What, what happened here?

• 5:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, it, it was very muted. You're absolutely right in that assessment, which is, which is not normal for Tesla. But then again, we're, this is Tesla and so few things are normal for this company. But yes, what happened was on Sunday, June 22nd, for several hours, a handful of Tesla vehicles were operating in the city of Boston, Texas with no one in the driver's seat. And they Picked up and dropped off a bunch of passengers. Many of those people were Tesla fans, extremely so.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  The most vocal of Tesla fans, one could say. And that is why they were allowed to ride in the cars. They were, it was an invite only situation. So these invites went out to all of Elon Musk's best friends. And they got to ride in these driverless Tesla vehicles. And I'm saying driverless because there was no one behind the steering wheel, but they were not the unsupervised robotaxis that Musk promised at the beginning of this year. Because there were Tesla employees sitting as safety monitors in the passenger seat. They didn't have steering wheels or pedals on their side, but they could effectively hit a kill switch and stop the vehicle from operating if they wanted to.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  As far as I can tell, I watched a lot of live streams. That is one thing that Tesla fans online love to do is livestream their cars using full self-driving. And so when the robotaxis came up, they were all ready to livestream. So I watched many, many several hours long videos of these live streams.

• 7:08David Pierce?

  So what is the rider experience as best you can tell? You didn't get to ride in one, you weren't in Austin, but like you said, you've seen these. So like, walk me through a ride in a Tesla robotaxi as far as we know.

• 7:19Speaker 05

  So from what I could tell, there is a separate app that is not the Tesla app. It is a standalone robotaxi app. You download that app, it ports over your profile from the Tesla app, including all of your preferences and all those things. And then you can hail a vehicle using this app, much in the same way that Uber works. Yeah, it's basically Uber. And that was something that a lot of these folks were saying, that this is a very similar experience to Uber. The vehicles only operated in a very small part of South Austin. It's not clear to me how large a size of a geofence this is, but it is very small, much smaller than Waymo's geofence in Austin. Waymo right now has over 100 vehicles operating across Austin. I think their geofence is around 65 square miles.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  Tesla's was much smaller. So you had to initiate a ride in the geofence. Fence and also the the destination needed to be also within the same geo fence. So you were seeing a lot of people calling rides to their hotels or they would drive into the geo fence to use to use the the robot taxi service, hail a vehicle and then take a ride to like a fried chicken place or something like that.

• 8:25David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 8:26Speaker 05

  And a lot of these people folks were would take a ride. They would get out at their destination and then they would immediately hail another ride. They were sort of just like in a revolving cycle.

• 8:37David Pierce?

  Right. So you use the app, you get this car, it comes, you you get in it and there's no one, there's not like a person to drive away, but there is a person in the front seat.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 8:49David Pierce?

  This is like the the dynamics of the like, how do I get in and start the ride? Strike me as potentially deeply hilarious in this in this moment, like you have a driver, but they're not driving.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I I think it is. We should also just be really clear here, like the idea of a safety driver or a safety monitor extremely common in the autonomous vehicle space. Waymo, Cruise, everyone basically has used a safety driver at some point, either behind the steering wheel, in the passenger, sometimes both. I've been in self-driving cars where there was two people in the front seat. Their hands were, you know, sort of off off all the controls, but they were there to to take control if something happened. Those were during test phases. I think is is the real important thing to to make clear here. And what Tesla is doing is is pretty unique in the in the field in so far as they're using these safety monitors as part of a commercial service. Again, not open to the public yet.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  It'll be interesting to see if they do open it to the public, whether they keep the safety monitors in or whether they pull those folks out. But at this stage of the game, these are paid rides. Elon Musk has said he's charging a flat rate of $4.20 entirely coincidental, I'm sure, that price, $4.20.

• 10:00David Pierce?

  I'm sure the accountants went over that one rigorously to figure out.

• 10:04Speaker 05

  Has has no other meaning, I'm sure, that I could tell. But, you know, these are paid rides, got that safety monitor in the in the passenger seat. I saw a few videos where the writers were would try to interact and ask questions of the safety. Monitor, that person was not having it. They were, I think, it's pretty clear that their instructions were, don't talk to the passengers.

• 10:24David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  Don't touch the controls unless you absolutely have to. And we can get to this, but there was one incident that I saw. Where one of the vehicles drove briefly in the opposite lane of traffic on the wrong side of the road.

• 10:37David Pierce?

  Oh dear.

• 10:38Speaker 05

  And I thought it was super interesting, first of all, that it did that. Second of all, that the safety monitor made no attempt to grab the steering wheel or do anything. Even though the vehicle was briefly on the wrong side of the road, operating dangerously. So that's kind of an interesting thing about this whole Tesla experience that is unique, I would say, across the industry.

• 10:58David Pierce?

  Unique in what sense? Like, I think part of the reason this, this moment is so interesting to me is it is both. The launch of a commercial product that real people can use, for sure. But it is also very much a testing phase, right? Like, they're not making money on $4.20 a ride. They're not. Doing this in any kind of sort of meaningful volume for people that's going to make this make sense as an app to open when I just want to get somewhere. And like, this is very clearly a beta test, right? And I think part of the reason it's so interesting to me is that this is a moment that Tesla, which has been talking a big game about its autonomous abilities for a very long time. Has to actually show what it can do, right?

• 11:42David Pierce?

  Like, a thing you and I have talked about before is like, don't listen to what Elon Musk tweets, like, listen to what he says to investors. Because that's where you have to, you have to tell the truth. And like, when you put the car on the road is when you at some point have to tell the truth. And this, especially compared to what we've seen from Waymo recently, which is just on this relentless, massive expansion plan. Like, Waymo feels like it's close. And this, to me, did not look like Tesla feels like it's close. This felt very small from Tesla to me. And I think that's not a bad thing. It's just a recognition of where Tesla is at this moment. And I just found that, that disparity and dichotomy is sort of fascinating.

• 12:15Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, it's super fascinating. And I think it's a reflection of a few things. I think you're spot on in your analysis so far. I think it's, it's, it's absolutely a reflection of where Tesla is at this moment, right? Like, they were on a tear for a few years, especially during those post pandemic years. Where they were just, their stock price was, you know, on the upward trajectory. They were selling a ton of vehicles, super profitable. And then you saw 2024 happen.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  The Trump endorsement, Elon Musk going full tilt on MAGA, dark MAGA, sorry. And then things started to change pretty drastically for the company. Sales started to drop. They ended 2024 having sold fewer vehicles than they did in 2023. That was the first time in many years that that had happened. And then, as we've seen, in the first months of 2025, that's gotten worse and worse as Musk has gotten more and more political with Doge and his involvement in the Trump administration. So I think that there was a sense that the company that needed to do something to recapture the narrative, to justify this enormous valuation that the company has been enjoying for such a long time, where they are valued exponentially more than your average car company. And that was all about robotics.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  Musk has been talking about AI and robotics for such a long time without having delivered a product to anybody. And it was just coasting on vibes, right? Tesla was your prototypical meme stock. It was just chugging along on the vibe train. And so I think as soon as sales started to go down and you started to see sort of chips in the facade, I think that that's when the company decided, okay, we need to actually start delivering on what we've been promising, on what Musk has been promising for such a long time. I mean, it's been almost a decade since he said millions of robotaxis on the road within the next two years. And every year was successively another two years. We just need two more years to make this happen. And now they finally have to deliver in order to reverse this trend as it's been going on in their financials.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  And I think that's why this seems so small, so contained, so rushed in many ways. I mean, it was just sort of like they needed to meet this June deadline that he put in place at the beginning of this year. And it's just drastically different than what he's been selling to people for such a long time. I mean, the vision of Tesla for forever was you buy a Tesla vehicle, that vehicle is going to be the one that is fully driverless. We're going to sell you this, this technology. You're going to be able to add your car to the Tesla network and make money off of it, right? Cars typically lose value as soon as they leave the dealership. That's just the, the state of the game. Tesla was, was saying, it doesn't have to be that way. You could actually earn money off your vehicle. It will become more valuable over time.

• 14:56Speaker 05

  That is not what is being rolled out this week in Austin. This is a fleet service. It is more akin to Uber and Waymo than it is to anything that Musk has been selling. And I think that is, is sort of why what we're seeing today is, is so different than what has been promised for such a long time.

• 15:12David Pierce?

  Do you think anything that we've seen in this launch either makes you feel more or less confident about some of those bigger visions? I mean, obviously, we should talk about the Cybercab, which is notably not these cars, but that's fine. And there is this big, grand, kind of galaxy brand Tesla vision around robotaxis like you're talking about, right? And I think none of this points to that, but also none of this makes me feel like it's out of the question. Does that make sense? Like, do you feel like we're closer or further away after seeing all this launch?

• 15:46Speaker 05

  I mean, it's only been one day.

• 15:49Speaker 05

  And I think that that's like the thing that kind of makes me concerned. We can't really evaluate any service after just a day. We haven't tested it ourselves. And the fact that it's being filtered through these extremely biased pro-Tesla accounts, I think should give everyone a lot of pause about what we're seeing on the ground in Austin. That said, you know, I think it's a good idea that they have safety monitors in the front seat. You know, I think a lot of folks are trying to drag Tesla for doing that, but at the same time, I would prefer there to be more safety, safety nets, backups, fallbacks, all these kinds of things that you need to have in place. Because I think when you look at Tesla's technology versus Waymo or someone else, you can see why there is this concern about how this company has been rolling these things out over the years.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  The fact that it's a computer vision only system without relying on things like radar and LiDAR as secondary sensor inputs. And the fact that, you know, full self-driving as a product has been shown many times. A lot of people like it, a lot of people use it, but there have been numerous cases of crashes that have taken places, injuries with Tesla's driver assist products, even deaths. And the government has been investigating Tesla for a number of years now, based on how they market their products, but also the technology itself and whether or not it is actually safe as they market it to be. And we don't know, because Tesla as a company is a black box. We have no visibility into the safety of their products. They give us safety statistics that are extremely selective and are designed to make the company

• 17:18Speaker 05

  look good and are not actually verifiable in any Way or peer reviewed in the ways that Waymo has done with their safety data. They have published numerous articles in scientific journals, peer reviewed scientific journals that they say show that their vehicles cause fewer crashes, cause fewer injuries, cause fewer deaths. Tesla has not done that, and yet they are now on the road in a city without drivers behind the wheel. It's been one day. I think we need to take a deep breath and cross our fingers and hope that nothing goes wrong.

• 17:50David Pierce?

  That's fair. Yeah, I think I think that's right. And I think it seems to me that we're in a position of

• 17:57David Pierce?

  sort of uncharted territory with Tesla, which is that actually reading about a lot of this, this is much more careful than I've come to expect from Tesla. Actually, this is this is the sort of thing that I think 12 months ago Tesla even would have just been like, it's out there. Fools, go see what happens. And this is like, this is the kind of like very thought through, very small, very cautious thing that we actually don't expect from Tesla. And A, I think that's terrific, right? Like that is clearly the correct outcome, given where we are. But it's so unlike Tesla that it almost feels scarier as a result.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  And yet it's still risky. I mean, you're right. You're also like, it's because it looked because like, yes, we, I think we could very well have assumed that Tesla was just going to go full tilt and, you know, a thousand driverless vehicles on the road. They did not do that. It's a small group. It's like,

• 18:46David Pierce?

  I honestly thought at some point they would just turn it on for every Tesla that exists. And then the government would be like, what? And Elon Musk would be like, what are you going to do about it? That's honestly what I know is gonna happen.

• 18:57Speaker 05

  But no, it does. It does outwardly. It looks cautious and they, I don't want to detract from that. And I, I do want to give the company some credit for, for exhibiting some a modicum amount of caution. That said, it is still lacking in some serious safety safeguards that I think we've seen a lot of other companies do. Waymo, for example, will drive six months with safety drivers behind the wheel, wheel, no passengers. Then they'll allow passengers in, then they'll take safety drivers out and it'll be for invite only for employees only and they'll test it. That way for another six months. There's a, there's a, there's a process here that they go through. They don't drive on highways. They don't go to airports. Tesla also no highways, no airports at the moment.

• 19:41Speaker 05

  But they decided to go out there and start inviting customers with safety monitors in the passenger seat. They didn't go through this sort of process of testing for over a year, which is what they do because they, their argument is we have three billion miles of customer driven data on full self-driving. We have end to end neural nets that are powering these vehicles. We have everything that we need and yet they haven't sort of been transparent about how they're testing the vehicles. They're not releasing the statistics that we're seeing. They don't have these additional sensors that other companies use because Musk has long argued that they're too expensive and it just doesn't make sense, even though the costs on those sensors have been, has been dropping pretty steeply over the years.

• 20:23Speaker 05

  So again, you have to give them some credit, but not entirely too much credit because there are still a lot of risks that the company is taking here. And as we've seen in the past with full self-driving, when things go wrong, Tesla's defenders will come out and say, oh, this, this and this, and this is why this happened. You know, they'll make any excuse that they can as to why mistakes have happened. We saw it yesterday when this car drove on the wrong side of the road. You saw a lot of people rush into the comments and say, oh, my own car on full self-driving will do that sometimes. It's so annoying. That's a big problem. It shouldn't do that. Your car should not just decide to drive on the wrong side of the road, you know? And so, I know, I, I want to give them some credit, but I don't want to give them too much credit.

• 21:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, to be, to be very clear, I think for a long time, there are going to be better ways to get to the fried chicken restaurant than getting in a Tesla robotaxi. You know what I mean? But so I think it just, let's sort of zoom out a little bit because I think the way I have been thinking about the robotaxi world for a while is that there is, there is Waymo kind of in a, in a tier of its own. And then there's sort of everybody else, but Tesla was this wild card that was like, who knows what it's going to do? Who knows how well it's going to work? Like, we just don't know. And we're still, like you said, very early in this, but it does seem like we can at least slot Tesla in somewhere in terms of where the company thinks it is in self-driving. Is it still Waymo and then everybody else?

• 21:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, and I think you also have to talk about Uber in some respects too, because Uber has sort of made this move now to partner with dozens of self-driving car companies in North America, but also in Europe and in Asia. And they're sort of trying to become kind of like the platform for any company to come and deploy vehicles on.

• 22:11David Pierce?

  Which seems smart, right? Like, the doing the Uber thing strikes me as a much safer bet than trying to do the Tesla thing where it's like, we're going to try to own everything, but that requires doing everything at giant impossible scale. Uber is just like, whoever wins, we win, which actually, at this moment, strikes me as a pretty good call.

• 22:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it is. It is pretty smart. They're working with Waymo. They're working with a number of other pretty legit operators. So I do think that there is, and they're also doing it on the on the delivery side, on the Uber Eats side as well with the sidewalk robots. So that's a really interesting approach to it. But yes, I do think that like you do have to say that Tesla is part of the conversation. They are operating driverless vehicles on the road in a commercial capacity. And they have said, Musk has said, 10, 20 vehicles at launch, perhaps 1,000 vehicles within a few months, and then we're going to be in California. He wants to start operating in Los Angeles. He wants to do it in San Francisco. These are Waymo markets as well. And I think that that's a fascinating thing. And then obviously, they've said that in 2026, they're going to start production on

• 23:11Speaker 05

  the Cybercab, and then we're will eventually start, you know, then the ball will really be rolling and there'll be no turning back at that point. But I do think that, you know, it will entirely depend on which markets that Tesla is operating in and what sort of obstacles they may come across. Texas, zero obstacles, right? There is just no, all you have to do is basically show proof of insurance, and you can do whatever you want. And obviously, you're dealing with an extremely Musk and Tesla friendly government that exists in that state. That said, they had just passed some regulation that says that you need to apply for a permit. Perhaps Tesla, you'd like to wait until September 1st, when these regulations kick in and then apply for a permit. That's what a lot of lawmakers in Austin were trying to pressure the company into doing. Didn't happen. Tesla

• 23:53Speaker 05

  just went ahead and did the thing anyways. California, entirely different situation. There's a very rigid permitting process. You need to do have several months of testing. You need to submit, you know, documents to the government to show that your technology is up to snuff. You know, you have to apply for a driverless permit. You have to apply for a commercial robotaxi permit. There's all these sort of a successive number of permits, but that's the market, right? California is the big market that Tesla wants to get. If they want to compete with the Ubers and the Waymos and everyone else, they're going to need to be in those markets competing with them as well. And they may run into some problems as the sort of regulatory requirements get more and more difficult as they look to spread out.

• 24:34David Pierce?

  Right. Is the sense in the industry that this stuff is going to be kind of a let a thousand flowers bloom market where it'll be sort of like the car market where there's lots of different companies and you can choose your your own provider and everybody can kind of peacefully coexist on the roads? Or are we running towards some kind of like winner take all or at least winner take most version of the the robotaxi future here? Because if that's where we're going, I kind of have a hard time figuring out how anybody catches Waymo at this point, at least quickly. But maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe maybe Waymo can continue to be Waymo and Tesla or some other company can figure out how to be just as successful in just as many places and everybody can coexist together. What is the sense of how it shakes out there?

• 25:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's going to be entirely dependent on safety. Okay, I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but really it's the kind of situation where as soon as something bad happens, someone gets hit, a crash occurs, the whole industry almost needs to reset at that point. And that's when you start to see who's a winner and who's a loser in that situation. Because as we've seen in the past, when there's some sort of injury or death, that that can ruin companies. It happened to Uber. It happened to Cruise under under GM's ownership. And it could very well happen to Tesla, right? As soon as there have been already. Injuries and crashes, right? But there have been people behind the wheels of those vehicles. And so Tesla can say, we're not liable. We told you to pay attention and you didn't.

• 26:03Speaker 05

  This is a different situation and Tesla is taking on a lot more risk now than they ever have in the past and a lot more liability. That said, I do think Uber's model is really interesting and could be the one that we see as the most successful. You get you sort of like smaller AV operators, maybe more locally based, you know, who are able to deploy their vehicles to a small number of customers on Uber's platform. And then you have sort of like your big operators, like your Waymos and others who have more runway, more capital, more financial support and therefore are able to grow, acquire more vehicles and then sort of spread across the country. But, you know, it will

• 26:45Speaker 05

  be a very safety guided, I think, development and it should be, right? If you can't prove that you can operate these vehicles, and I think the liability thing is the one that is the biggest hurdle for most of these companies. If you cannot put a driverless vehicle on the road and be confident in the fact that that's not going to come back and bite you in the ass and cost you hundreds of millions of dollars in liability costs, then you should feel confident in doing that. But otherwise, that's going to be the thing that I think that weeds out sort of the the major players with the confidence and those that maybe are a little bit operating with a little bit more risk.

• 27:18David Pierce?

  Okay. But you think, I mean, it's an interesting way of thinking about it because there's so much potential for like problem and change there that maybe I'm wrong to think that Waymo is in any way sort of insurmountable at this point. Like there are still so much big, huge, massive stuff left to do.

• 27:34Speaker 05

  I mean, Waymo has been able to circumnavigate the problems in the past with when when someone has deployed a vehicle that was not ready and someone got hurt or injured. There's been sort of the under, there's an understanding that like that hurts the whole industry, right? People don't tend to separate Waymo from Tesla or what have you.

• 27:53David Pierce?

  They're just self-driving cars.

• 27:54Speaker 05

  They're just self-driving cars. It's a technology that is not ready for prime time because of this this incident that happened. I feel like Waymo has been able to skirt around that a few times in ways that other companies have not. But that said, you know, I do think that if something happens in the future and if it's a Tesla vehicle that is responsible for something that happens, some sort of incident, it will be tough because it is also a perception game. And if you can't convince people at scale to trust this technology, they're just not going to use it. They're going to rely on human-driven, you know, Uber vehicles, which is why Uber hedging its bets now, saying, oh, we got, we got human drivers and we got robot cars. You know, that's a way to sort of say, both can coexist and that's a company that could potentially be well positioned

• 28:38Speaker 05

  for more success in the future. But yeah, I do think that like if it once, and something will, something will go wrong. I don't want to be doom and gloom, but there will be eventually an incident that happens. Someone will get injured, especially as more of these vehicles hit the road and you just reach a certain level of scale where it's unavoidable, these types of incidents. It'll be really interesting to see who's responsible and how the rest of the industry responds to that incident. And then if the public decides to reject it and say, okay, that's enough, we've had enough of this, which we saw in LA recently with these Waymos getting completely incinerated during these, these anti-ice protests. You know, that's a bad look for Waymo. It's a bad look for the, for the whole industry too. And I think it's, it goes to show that there's still a bit of a hill to climb in

• 29:23Speaker 05

  terms of public acceptance and trust.

• 29:26David Pierce?

  Totally. Well, speaking of things that have fully climbed that hill, at least in my brain, can we talk about the Nissan Leaf just for one second before we go?

• 29:32Speaker 05

  Oh, well, happy to.

• 29:34David Pierce?

  The last time you were on, I told you I was irrationally excited about this car. And then Nissan sort of fully unveiled the, the 2026 Leaf and I feel so incredibly vindicated because this car seems awesome and I'm very into it. Tell me, tell me why I should or should not be excited about the, the new Leaf.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  Okay. So you should be excited for it because the specs look great. It's like over 300 miles on certain trims. They haven't said what the price is, but I'm sure it's going to be like in the $40,000 range, which is where most EVs are these days. If it's under 40, I will be impressed. But I'm sure if that's going to be reliant on some incentives that probably won't exist by the time this, this Car comes out.

• 30:16David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 30:16Speaker 05

  It's got dual ports on it for both CCS charging, fast charging and Tesla NAX fast charging. I have not seen that before in a, in a production vehicle. Typically you'll, you'll, they'll come out with one or the other and they'll give you an adapter for the rest. This one, Nissan's just saying, why not just put two ports on this, on this bad boy?

• 30:36David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 30:36Speaker 05

  So that, that's pretty sick. And just the look of it, it just looks so much better, right? It's like, it's kind of reminded me in some ways of like when the new Prius came out a couple of years ago and how much of a glow up that was. It just like looked sleeker and sexier than the, than the old Prius. The same is, is with the Leaf. It just, it's sort of like cast off its frumpiness and it's now a fully grown up crossover SUV. It, it just looked great. The downside, it's Nissan, right? Nissan not in a, not in a great place right now.

• 31:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  Struggling a lot. They had a huge round of layoffs a few months ago. Tried to merge with Honda, didn't work out. Had to, had to break that up, but clear that the company is still going through a lot of financial difficulties. I, I don't think that's going to affect the Leaf at all. I think that they're really gung ho about the Leaf and, and are, I, I don't doubt that Nissan, it's not going to be like a Fisker situation. Nissan's not going to cease to exist or what have you. But I do think that that, that might give some folks pause. But yeah, otherwise I, I do think that the Leaf looks awesome and I can't wait to test it out.

• 31:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, it just seems like we're, we're still so desperate for like compelling mainstream EVs. And I think the, the Leaf tried and failed to be that so many times that it was like, it just, it just kept whiffing on like really basic stuff. It was like, what if we made a car that was ugly and didn't go very far? And I was like, well, I don't think that's it, Nissan.

• 32:00Speaker 05

  But it was like, but it was the first, it was the thing, right? Like everyone gives Tesla the credit for, you know, inventing the EV market, but it was really Nissan that took the risk, right? They are the ones who put the, the Leaf came out first. That was the first, it wasn't long range by any stretch of the imagination, but it was way more than a lot of like the very early compliance vehicles that we saw. And it was cheap. It was so cheap. It was, you know, 112 miles of range, like 30 grand, maybe even like 25 grand. That was what this was all supposed to be before like the EV market got kind of hooked on luxury goods and, you know, fine leather goods and all that kind of stuff that you see with like the Rivian's and the Polestars and whatnot. Things just got too fancy and we kind of like lost sight of like, what was the point of all of this is to,

• 32:45Speaker 05

  if you really want to drive adoption, you gotta meet people where they are and you especially got to meet them where their finances are. And so many EVs today, I think you could say that Tesla was really responsible for that with the Model S. And then that sort of like, kind of was the model that everyone wanted to follow because they were so successful. So had the Leaf been the one that was the success and not the Model S, it could have been a different story. You could have seen Ford and GM and BMW and everyone else like rushing to put $20,000 EVs on the road. But instead it was Tesla that was the breakout star. And thus, that's why we got 70, 80, 90,000 EVs before we got any hint of a $20,000 one.

• 33:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, I am rooting for this car for exactly that reason. It feels like the thing the Leaf has always wanted to be is a thing we need in the car market right now. And at least from the look of the thing, it feels like it might have actually gotten there. But I agree with you. I think price will end up being everything. And I would not say I'm terribly optimistic, given, you know, gestures broadly, everything.

• 33:49Speaker 05

  But that's it. We're supposed to be getting cheap EVs from Ford, from Volkswagen, supposed to be coming out some really cheap ones. Next year, we're going to get the R2 from Rivian. That's supposed to be their $40,000 EV. I do feel despite all of these headwinds and political machinations that are going on, it does seem that the industry is still committed to putting out affordable EV that people can actually buy. And hopefully the Leaf will be sort of like that precursor to a lot of great things to come.

• 34:17David Pierce?

  You and me both. All right, we gotta take a break. Andy, thank you as always.

• 34:22Speaker 05

  My pleasure. Thanks, David.

• 34:24David Pierce?

  We'll be right back.

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• 36:00David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison.

• 36:03Speaker 07

  Hello.

• 36:04David Pierce?

  Allison, I've dragged you in on your day off.

• 36:08David Pierce?

  Because we have to talk about MVNOs.

• 36:10Speaker 07

  I wouldn't miss it. I love a good MVNO chat.

• 36:14David Pierce?

  So this is very fun for me because this is the sort of thing that I feel like in the course of my day-to-day life, I have spent almost no time thinking about. This sort of like weird world of network usage and carriers and who you buy your service from. I've just like, I signed up for a Verizon account in 2004 and basically have not thought about it since then. And then with all this Trump Mobile stuff, we got to like... Actually sort of have a bunch of conversations about how self-service works that I have just not really had before. And I have found myself deeper down this rabbit hole than I ever expected. And it is sort of fascinating. And I feel like you've had kind of the same journey over the last like seven days.

• 36:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I I go into the rabbit hole sometimes when I'm writing about, you know, wireless services and Boost Mobile and all that. And it goes deep. Like, there are some people out there who are like so plugged into their network and like what spectrum they're using and what, you know, like all of the kind of things that go on under the hood. There's a lot, but I've I have skimmed the surface and it is fascinating stuff, I think.

• 37:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree. So let's just start at sort of the very base floor here and then build up. What is an MVNO?

• 37:30Speaker 07

  So an MVNO is a mobile virtual network operator. And it is basically like a storefront for wireless service. They don't own the network. In the US, we have three wireless networks. So they buy the service from one of those three providers and they resell it. And that it's like basically as simple as that. So the MVNO is a little bit more of like a a marketing exercise. And they feel like they can tap into a different market that the big providers are not like addressing directly. It's kind of fascinating.

• 38:11Speaker 07

  I talked to a friend, analyst Avi Greenberg, and he was like, they've been around for decades, actually. Like, I feel like I've heard about them so much in the last, you know, two or three years. But as as long as there's been like an audience to address, there's been like an MVNO for that group of people.

• 38:34David Pierce?

  So why would the big three carriers in the US, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, allow this to happen? Like, you're basically saying they're they're taking their network, which these companies spend an enormous amount of money on, like, building and maintaining the infrastructure to have wireless coverage all over the United States. And sell it to ostensibly your competitor. Why would these companies do that?

• 39:00Speaker 07

  So they get like a guaranteed return on that bit of, you know, their capacity. And they might have more capacity than they're always using. So it's a little bit of like a guaranteed payday for them when they sell it to the MBNO. You know, they make their money, the MBNO then has to go like make their money back by reselling it. So it helps them in that way. And there are just market segments that like a Verizon or an AT&T is maybe too big to go after or wants to uphold a perception of like it's the best fanciest wireless network in the world.

• 39:43Speaker 07

  So there are, there are audiences of like people with poor credit or people who don't speak English that like Verizon is not going to like hire a whole team to translate all their marketing materials into like a particular language. So it's, it's beneficial to them in like a number of ways.

• 40:05David Pierce?

  Okay. And my understanding of the, the capacity thing is that that has gotten more and more possible over time. And I think this is where I start to make very clear how little I understand how wireless networks actually work. But my, my sense of it is that as these networks have gotten faster, as we've, you know, gone up the Gs, they've also gotten more efficient. So like however, whatever a hundred million people on Verizon actually use less of this sort of overall capacity than before. So maybe even as it's getting better, Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile have actually more empty space to offer. Do I have that basically right?

• 40:42Speaker 07

  Yeah. And someone else I spoke to was pointing out that 5G really like.

• 40:50Speaker 07

  The genuine 5G, like we're in the era of all the networks have actual 5G networks now. They're not trying to rebrand 4G as 5G. And that technology does allow for more capacity. So that might be partially why we're hearing a little bit more over the last like year or two in particular, especially T-Mobile, which has had kind of the head start with all the sprint spectrum. So they had just like extra capacity lying around. You want to sell it and definitely get some money back for it.

• 41:26David Pierce?

  Okay. So when I think of MVNOs, I think the first one I think of is Boost Mobile. Uh, and I feel like Boost Mobile has been around forever since like the, the early aughts. And has basically been on every imaginable network over time. It's been bought and sold like a half dozen times. It, the company has a crazy story, but is like pretty successful and has been for a long time. Mostly without ever operating its own network. I think that's like a little murkier now in a 5G world, but it doesn't matter. Mostly it has been an MVNO for most people for a very long time. The thing I think of when I think of Boost and by extension, most other MVNOs is just that it's cheaper. Right? Like it is, it is, there are fewer, you know, perks that come with the account.

• 42:09David Pierce?

  There aren't as many resale stores that you go to, to get your phone serviced. You're not going to get maybe as good a deal on a phone, but the price per month is cheaper. And that I feel like is pretty consistently the story with MVNOs. Is it usually just kind of that simple? Like you, you trade a few things, but you get a cheaper price every month?

• 42:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, basically. I think that's, and there's a few other things it could be playing in there. Like they may not require a credit check and Verizon will, you know, needs a credit check for you to get on one of their plans. So they make that a little bit easier. Yeah, they may be okay with, you know, lower credit scores too. Or in a lot of MVNOs, I don't know if it's exclusively. All of them, but they tend to be prepaid. So you pay for your service and then you have your month of service and

• 43:00David Pierce?

  Right.

• 43:01Speaker 07

  The big unlimited plans from all the bigger carriers are postpaid and you kind of sign a contract. You know, quote unquote, they can cut your service off if you stop paying them kind of deal.

• 43:14David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah. So what, what's your sense of the downsides of these? Like if you, you get a cheaper price, is it, should you like roughly the same service that these things promise? Like this has always been my open question is like, yes, you are, you, you are, I understand taking T-Mobile network capacity and giving it to me for less money than T-Mobile. And I'm like, would I trade retail store access for that? Absolutely unequivocally. Yes. Like maybe not everybody would, but I happily would. I will fix my own damn phone. Thank you. But then there, there's always, I feel like you, you look at the fine print and it's always like weird bandwidth priority stuff going on that I've never been able to, I don't know. And it's just always like, that's the stuff that makes me squirrely is like in ways I don't understand.

• 43:58David Pierce?

  Is this actually sneakily less good than T-Mobile, even though it's technically T-Mobile?

• 44:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, I think it, yes and no. There's deprioritization, which is something that, you know, you can buy a plan from Verizon and still experience deprioritization. That's where you have an allotment of a certain amount of premium data. And once you hit that threshold, it's usually pretty high. And the other thing that comes into play with the MVNOs is that the networks have these kind of quality of service tiers for their, the way they split up traffic. So they put things that are really like sensitive to latency on the highest priority, like

• 44:45Speaker 07

  voice calls, first responders, that kind of thing. And then like down the ranks is, you know, your mobile gaming, your internet of things, all that stuff. And I think MVNOs tend to sit like just one tier or so below, like the main wireless brand's own traffic. Does that mean you will experience that difference in, in a meaningful way? Like?

• 45:15Speaker 07

  It's really hard to say. I I know a bunch of people on MVNOs now who are like thrilled with their service. And I don't think it's ever bothered them if that's a factor.

• 45:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, I will say the the one that I have heard about, this is purely anecdotal, but I I know a surprising number of people who switched to Mint Mobile over the years and had really good experiences. And Mint Mobile's thing was like, it's it's T-Mobile, but it's 15 bucks a month. And also like Ryan Reynolds is here. And I think like, that was very meaningful for people, but also the idea that you are getting, I think even even 90% as good T-Mobile's coverage for $15 a month, I think is a trade most people are perfectly happy to make. And I remember a lot of this happening, especially during COVID, when people were at home a lot and you're on Wi-Fi a lot. And I was thinking about this, researching all this stuff, like, the amount of time that I spend off of a Wi-Fi network at this point is pretty small.

• 46:14Speaker 07

  Can I tell this story real quick? I had my um, my Verizon account completely shut down while I was traveling home from WWDC.

• 46:24David Pierce?

  Oh, no.

• 46:24Speaker 07

  It was a whole technical weird thing with how I I kind of did it to myself, like switching around from eSIM to physical SIM. We got it sorted out, but I got off the plane. I was like, oh, no, I'm dead. Like, I have died. I don't have cell service. Like, I just live here at the airport now. And it was actually like, I was like, no, there's Wi-Fi. And there was like Wi-Fi in the parking garage. And I could text on Wi-Fi. I could call on Wi-Fi. I'm like, oh, actually, like, this is fine.

• 46:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 07

  I like got my Uber on Wi-Fi and I survived. But it's it's an interesting thing that some of the, so like the cable companies also run MVNOs, which is such a weird thing of like, you know, you can have Xfinity Mobile Service and then Verizon wants to sell you home internet. And I don't know what to make of that. But um, I think one thing that cable companies are doing is like tapping into that, that like, hey, you're on Wi-Fi a lot. Like, we'll just kind of facilitate that when you're out and about. If there's an Xfinity Wi-Fi network, like, you can use that and and it saves us on the data that we're paying for. It's a whole. Weird world out there.

• 47:39David Pierce?

  It is a strange thing. And I think, I mean, that goes back to your point about this kind of rise in MVNOs over the last few years that I think is real. Like, I went back and was like, OK, is this just a thing that we've been hearing about recently? And there have been tons of these before. The answer is no. Like, there has been a boom the last several years in MVNOs. And I've been trying to figure out why. And I have a couple of theories, but I'm curious if you have a sort of leading theory about the boom in MVNOs recently.

• 48:08Speaker 07

  So I talked to my friend Avi, and he made the good point that, like, Ryan Reynolds really did, like, start a lot of this.

• 48:16David Pierce?

  Wait, really? I've been making that joke all week. I thought I was just kidding.

• 48:18Speaker 07

  No, I thought it was funny, too. But he was like, no, Ryan Reynolds is actually to blame here. But having like a friendly face to an MVNO and like the branding of Mint Mobile is so cute. And there's a little fox, and it's just kind of like friendly and kind of appealing. I think attracted a lot of people and sort of helped like shake off the stigma of, you know, a prepaid service or an MVNO as like, oh, that's just cheap. And, you know, you got to buy from the main carriers if you want actual good service. It's kind of like a Costco effect where you're like, oh, yeah, actually, it's kind of cool to shop at Costco.

• 49:03Speaker 07

  And like, save a bunch of money on like, nice stuff I would have bought somewhere else.

• 49:08David Pierce?

  But so I think that makes sense. And then, I mean, you consider the fact that Ryan Reynolds like, didn't start, but like bought into an MVNO, made a bunch of fun ads, and then sold that MVNO, Mint, to T-Mobile, which provided the service for Mint already. So it essentially sold T-Mobile back to T-Mobile for $1.35 billion. Bananas. Like, genuine congratulations to everybody involved. And I think to me, what that says is like, OK, there was a real understanding at the end of that, that the brand matters a lot, right? That like, you can have, and this is what you're talking about, you can have network capacity, you can have whatever. But like, people want to deal with a company that they like, and that that's a really meaningful thing.

• 49:49David Pierce?

  And so I get that from the perspective of like, I get why you would start up an MVNO. Like, this is why Trump Mobile makes sense to me, right? You're like, OK, any sort of affinity-based thing, it's pretty easy to start a wireless carrier. It's a thing people pay money for. It's a relationship they have. It's like, I get it. I get why the smartest guys did it. It's good. There's gonna be more and more of this over time. The part of it that I struggle with is like, I don't know a lot of people with a ton of like Comcast brand affinity. I guess this is where we should disclose that Comcast through NBC Universal is invested in Vox Media. I don't know a lot of people who are like psyched about their relationship with Comcast. And so the idea of like, oh, sure, I'll sign up for wireless services just seems tricky. But then I guess the other thing this has made me think a lot about is, and I'm sure you and I have

• 50:32David Pierce?

  heard this speech from many different people many times, that like, people want to have fewer accounts and fewer bills. And just the idea of like, okay, I can take your wireless service away from being another account and another bill and another customer service line, and just wrap it into this thing you already have. And I think, if I'm getting like galaxy branded about it, I think that's the theory for like, the bank, right? Which is a very sticky account that you're probably gonna keep for a very long time. It's like, you're used to dealing with your bank.

• 50:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think so. And there's, there's a little bit of like, we are more used to like, dealing with things online. And I think like, five or so years ago, if I thought about switching wireless service, I'm like, well, I gotta walk into a store and I gotta talk to a T-Mobile person and get a SIM card and do the thing.

• 51:19David Pierce?

  And they're gonna spend an hour trying to convince me not to quit. And that's the thing I hate the most about it, is when you call and you're like, I would like to cancel. And they're like, would you like a deal? And you're like, I would like to cancel. And they're like, would you like a better deal? And you're like, I would like to cancel. And they're like, okay, I can offer you a year of service for 99 cents. And I'm like, just let me go. I quit. Please let me leave.

• 51:39Speaker 07

  Where were you six months ago with this deal? Yeah, no. So I, I know I'm not in a hurry to add any more accounts to my life, but I think, yeah, having eSIM as an option makes it easier. And I think, a little bit of the, of the momentum is there with your, I talked to my hairstylist and she's switched to Mint Mobile. And she's not a tech person and was a little bit terrified about doing all of this. But she's like, yeah, it's, you know, they talk you through it. There's cute little graphical interfaces to help you like, switch your plan. And you do it. I, I think, having those things there for people kind of.

• 52:24Speaker 07

  Helps spread the word of like, oh, this isn't as terrifying as it sounds like. And you don't actually have to go spend half a day at a wireless carrier retail store.

• 52:34David Pierce?

  My sort of galaxy brain theory about why this could be a very exciting trend. And I'm curious if you agree with this theory. I talked a little bit about this with Jake on Friday, but I've been thinking about it ever since. That what we get now is we get like AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon have spent tons of money building very impressive infrastructure all over the United States. This stuff is going to get bigger. They're going to keep working on this and they are going to be increasingly happy to like recoup that investment by selling it to MVNOs, right? So we're going to get this giant proliferation of ways to get more or less identical wireless service, like sort of within a, within a small range of quality, pretty good wireless service. What that means now is there are going to be a million ways to compete on everything else, right?

• 53:18David Pierce?

  Like the, the, they're going to compete on billing. They're going to compete on like how good the app is for managing your account. They're going to compete on different kinds of features and different stuff you can do and different perks that you get, or they're just going to compete on price. And all of a sudden that like, we've been on this constant rise in the cost of wireless service. Like a thing we talk about on the show all the time is that we get pretty bad service for a lot more money than almost anywhere else. And it's largely because there are three companies that matter and nothing else. And it's not the same as having like truly competitive networks everywhere, but it's, it's, it's the closest to that that we're going to get, I think. And, and so maybe what we're going to get is this gigantic boom in like, if not the network competition, then like interface competition on top of that network.

• 54:03David Pierce?

  And that might be very exciting. So like, I've, I've been reading about Disney Mobile a bunch. Do you know about Disney Mobile at all?

• 54:08Speaker 07

  No.

• 54:09David Pierce?

  Disney has an MVNO.

• 54:11Speaker 07

  No, really?

• 54:13David Pierce?

  To be honest with you, I could not confirm whether it still exists.

• 54:17Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 54:17David Pierce?

  I don't think it's popular, I'll tell you that. But it launched in 2006. Like to your point, this stuff has been around for a long time. It was originally on the Sprint network. And this was the thing that really was, I was like, oh, this is why MVNOs could be awesome. So it was basically, it was a like Disney. Based experience. They were like, we, we want to do for, for families and kids and parents, what we think they would want in a phone service. So, uh, here's just a list. I'm reading their press release from 2006 and they have a bunch of new features, uh, that they were launching. Uh, one was set spending allowances and track usage for, for voice minutes and all this stuff back when minutes were a thing and you would get alerts when the allowances have been reached. So parents could be like, you know, you get this many text messages and this many minutes,

• 55:03David Pierce?

  uh, and then it'll, it'll let us know when you get to the end of it. That was a big deal back then, back when everyone was paying a ton for minutes over it. Uh, determine the hours of the day and days of the week when kids can use their phone. Good idea. Uh, program restricted and always on phone numbers to manage with whom kids may communicate. Super smart. Uh, prioritize important family messages and locate kids' phones with GPS capabilities. So they took this thing, right? And they're like, okay, this is Sprint service, but we can actually like change the features you get with your plan and how you use it and how you access it and how we bill it in a way that makes more sense for this group of people. And that to me is like, I'm like, oh, you could, there are an infinite number of versions of that thing that you could do. And I think that is like

• 55:46David Pierce?

  way more so than just like one fewer bill. That idea I find super, super, super compelling. Am I just totally pipe dreaming here? Like, is this not where we're headed? Could, could I have this world or am I just insane?

• 55:57Speaker 07

  I hope you're right. And I think like some of that will happen, but the thing that makes me a little pessimistic is that it all starts with their relationship with the main three carriers and they, I don't know what level they're dictating, like what you can and can't do, you know, with the service. It certainly in their interest to make sure that like their offering is the shiniest, best, you know, coolest. I think it has already happened a little bit with like, with Mint Mobile and T-Mobile buying Mint Mobile kind of speaks a lot, I think about.

• 56:37Speaker 07

  How that is an important piece of business that they want to bring back in-house. So I don't know, I'm just a little pessimistic from the like capitalism, doing capitalism kind of side of it, but I hope it would be cool if there were like actual better ways to interact with a wireless company. I definitely, we're gonna see like, I think some of the MVNOs are sort of bundling services in that way to kind of like differentiate and the Liberty Mobile, which is the network that the MVNO that Trump Mobile is just kind of glomming

• 57:18Speaker 07

  onto. They had a whole bunch of thing that was like, it's like telehealth and device protection. It would be cool to see a company do that and do it in a good way that doesn't feel like up-selling, you know? I don't know why this just pops into my head, but I was like Headspace should do an MVNO. What if Headspace?

• 57:42David Pierce?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 57:43Speaker 07

  I don't know, like built-in soothing activities that you could do when you're dealing with your wireless carrier.

• 57:52David Pierce?

  No, see, okay, here's, here's my idea for Headspace. It, Headspace dynamically replaces all hold music with meditation.

• 58:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:00David Pierce?

  So when you're waiting, it just, it just replaces it and it gives you just like a five-minute meditation while you're waiting on hold to talk to, you know, your bank or whoever.

• 58:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's like, we noticed you're on hold with Walgreens for 30 minutes. Would you like?

• 58:13David Pierce?

  Would you like to meditate?

• 58:14Speaker 07

  Do you want to hear the sound of whales?

• 58:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, I do. Thank you, Headspace. I would love to hear whale sounds.

• 58:20Speaker 07

  Free idea. I will sign up for Headspace Mobile.

• 58:23David Pierce?

  Headspace, get at us. You can, you can have this, but we demand free service. That's how this works. One other question on this, and, and then I'm gonna let you go. The, the other piece of this to me seems like, uh, phone unlocking becomes an important part of the equation here, right? Like, eSIMs make it easy to switch your phone, but we're still in this kind of nebulous, is my phone locked to my carrier world here in the United States? Again, I should point out that so much of this is going to seem like esoteric and ridiculous to people anywhere else who have long had better, more competitive mobile phone universes that don't require all of the shenanigans that we're talking about here.

• 58:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 59:00David Pierce?

  But here in America, it does feel like if we can get eSIMs and we can get unlocked phones and we can get big, vast carrier choice, we are like somewhere cool and exciting. Are we on a good path to unlocked phones?

• 59:14Speaker 07

  I think we're on a like very slow, good path. There's some legislation. I think they were trying to tell the carriers like, you cannot lock someone's phone to a network. Like, you have to unlock it after a certain amount. It was like six months.

• 59:29David Pierce?

  I think it was 60 days was the thing they were going for.

• 59:31Speaker 07

  60 days, okay. Yeah, that's even better. Whether or not, like, I've paid off my device to Verizon, that's between me and Verizon. But like, they can't just be like, you may only use this phone on a network. That's good. That's progress, I think. But I think there is a little bit of just a habit with, especially in the US, of like, it's time for a new phone. Go to Verizon or go to their website. And undoing that a little bit, I don't know exactly how that starts, but like, you can just go to Apple's website and you can get a device like payment plan.

• 1:00:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Speaker 07

  It doesn't have to come from the wireless carrier, but somehow the good deal always seems to be tied into like, well, you know, if you connect to your Verizon account, we'll just help pay for this phone for you.

• 1:00:23David Pierce?

  All right, for now, go back to your day off. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. We are going to take a break and then we're going to come back and do a question from the hotline. Thank you, Allison.

• 1:00:31Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:00:32David Pierce?

  Be right back.

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• 1:02:11David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is [email protected]. You can hit me up directly. Like, we're not hard to find. If you have questions, get at us. We love hearing all of your questions. Today's question is something we've talked about on the show before, but we get a lot. And so I want to just tackle it again in as aggressive and straightforward a way as we possibly can. It's about storage. Here it is.

• 1:02:37Speaker 08

  Hey, Vergecast. This is Anthony from Denver. I have a question about the best way to free up space on iPhones. Um, last week, uh, while my mom was visiting with me, um, she had shared that she had just bought a new iPhone 16, but it was already kind of running out of space and was very slow. So she wanted to know what she could do to free up space on her phone and, and hopefully speed it up. And specifically, she wanted to know if there's anything that she could do uh, to remove photos from her phone and, and back them up and, and store them elsewhere. Now, my, my wife and I were both Pixel users, so we were both kind of, uh, flabbergasted uh, to learn that Apple doesn't have a photo backup solution.

• 1:03:20Speaker 08

  Um, it has iCloud, which as far as, you know, we could tell is like a syncing service. But Apple doesn't really have any solution for both backing up photos while also removing them from, uh, the device. And so after researching for a few hours, uh, the, the solution that we ended up like coming to is you could use a service like Google Photos or Amazon Photos. Or you could try downloading them to a computer and moving them to an external hard drive. My wife and I, we ended up deciding to solve this problem with Google Photos. And after about two hours or so of backing up most of the photos and deleting some of them, uh, we ended up saving her about 50 gigabytes of space on her iPhone.

• 1:04:03Speaker 08

  Um, but we were both kind of left wondering like, how has Apple not made a well-designed like photo backup solution? Like, why would anyone want to use 50 gigabytes of space on their device for photos? When they don't have to, when they probably don't even want those photos to be on their device at all? And is there really like, is there anything else that iPhone users can do?

• 1:04:30David Pierce?

  You, you can see why this sent me down a rabbit hole of thinking about where all of my stuff is, right? And I have a few thoughts for our, our friend here. And for everyone who is thinking about this, which as far as I can tell is everyone, I think like I'm running out of storage on my phone is as universal a problem as anybody has on technology, right? Like it's, it's everywhere. So here's what I would say. If you use an iPhone, this is all going to be Apple specific because frankly, Apple does this in the worst possible way and Google is at least a lot more straightforward. You just dump stuff into Google Photos and there it is. The thing that I would say is that A, even if you're on iOS, Google Photos is great and you should use it. If you, there's a good chance you have lots of storage over there.

• 1:05:12David Pierce?

  That's a thing I pay for separately anyway, just because I wanted the drive storage and the more Gmail. And so like, there's a solid chance you're already paying for more Google storage. So use that, use Google Photos, turn on the auto backup, it'll send everything up there. I think Google Photos is a vastly better photo experience than anything Apple is doing. So that's what I tend to use anyway. I also will say, and I hate so much that I'm saying this. Apple's $2.99 a month, 200GB iCloud deal is a pretty good deal. It is absurd that you don't get that for free, that that's not the base tier, that Apple, the richest company in the world, is going to nickel and dime you $3 a month just to have like an appropriate amount of storage for your photos. But it's, it's three bucks a month to largely not have to think about this most of the time.

• 1:05:57David Pierce?

  And frankly, that's worth it. A couple of other things. The, the first thing most people should do is go to Settings on their phone and turn on the optimized storage thing in Photos. Let me just do this right now. So I have it right. You go, you go to Settings and then you tap on your name at the very top. And then you go to iCloud and then you tap on Photos. So this is telling me I have 10,745 photos and 687 videos, taking up 102.29GB of space. That's a lot. I suspect there are a lot of you who have much more than that. Uh, and you want to turn on the thing that says optimize iPhone storage. So basically what that does is instead of leaving the whole kind of increasingly large file

• 1:06:41David Pierce?

  with every new rev of Apple's camera system on your device, it keeps all of it in iCloud and downloads a smaller one to your device. What I have found is this is just rubbish at actually working. Sometimes it loads things way too slowly. Some, it seems to leave things on your device for too long. It is not actually optimizing space nearly as successfully as it ought to. Again, this is where Google Photos does it much better. It just leaves all this stuff in the cloud and then you tap it. It pulls it down when you need it, like much better system. But that should at least save you a little bit of space. There is also a bunch of tools in here for just deleting things, which I think is what I would tell most people to do.

• 1:07:21David Pierce?

  So again, you go, you go into settings and you go to your face and you go to iCloud and you go to photos. And then you hit manage storage and it loads this thing for you. That basically then gives you actual information about all of the stuff on your phone. Right? It, it takes a long time in my case, because it has to look through 10,000 things. But it pops up a thing that says, review your photos and videos. Mine is telling me I can get 50 gigabytes of space back by deleting duplicates, screenshots and videos. In my case, uh, almost all of that is videos. And the thing I like about this is there's this one screen all the way deep down here in settings. That will actually show you in order your largest videos.

• 1:08:02David Pierce?

  And I would bet, and I have confirmed this both on my phone and on some others, just as sort of basic, you know, research purposes. That almost everybody has a few like sneakily humongous videos on your device. You accidentally took a seven minute long video in your pocket without noticing it. You have one that's like six minutes of pro res that is taking up half the storage on your phone. Like there's just a bunch of little things here. So for me, like if I delete the nine biggest videos on my phone, I'm looking at eight gigabytes worth of space, just to free up like that. So that's one thing to do. You can delete all your screenshots, you can delete all of your, um, complicated, overly done edited photos. You can delete your duplicates, you can delete all the stuff that you don't need.

• 1:08:47David Pierce?

  And it's much easier to do here in settings than it is almost anywhere else on your phone. So delete the stuff, put it in iCloud. And then the thing that I would do, if you like, really want to invest in this is go to the iCloud Photos website. Which is a better way to like mass move stuff around. Open it up, make the, use the little slider at the top to make the photos as small as possible. Scroll all the way to the top to the very first photos you took, which overwhelmingly I suspect. Or ones you might want to keep but don't need like ready access to. Download all those photos and put them somewhere else. Like delete some of them, download some of them. It is easy and quick to do from a web browser in a way that on your phone or an iPad,

• 1:09:31David Pierce?

  or even in the Photos app on a Mac is just kind of messy. This is like a good mass tool for just getting everything out. And what I'm trying to do in this go around is basically only keep the last couple of years of photos actually in my iCloud. Everything else goes into this like permanent storage of some kind. And so the idea is that I have a place to get those. And someday when I want to go look at them, I will know where they are. But they're not sitting in the cloud storage accessible to me all the time and taking up space because they don't need to be and I don't need them all the time. So those are all my recommendations. You probably have lots of storage space also, by the way, in places like Amazon and Microsoft. And everybody I think has like a Dropbox account lingering that they're not using. There are places you can put things other than iCloud.

• 1:10:15David Pierce?

  And I would encourage you for almost everything that isn't something you think you're gonna like actively need and use, put it somewhere else because Apple does not do a good job of managing your storage and desperately wants you to overpay for it. So just don't play Apple's games. Delete all your biggest stuff, put it all somewhere else. And I think life will be okay. And in theory, this is a thing you should do, I don't know, once a year. That'll take you 20 minutes. It's like not a hard project, but it is a thing you shouldn't have to do. It's not to excuse Apple. It's annoying that this is the case, but that's what I do. So I hope any of that helps. And if you have a better tip for how to manage all of this stuff so that you don't have to go in at the last minute every once in a while and just mass delete a bunch of stuff, I would love to hear it. Tell me all of your tips.

• 1:11:01David Pierce?

  All right, that is it for the show today. Thank you to everybody who's on the show with me and thank you as always for listening. As ever, if you have questions, thoughts, feelings, storage ideas, weird things that you're as obsessive as I am about with markdown files, get at us. The hotline is 866 VERGE11. The email is [email protected]. We absolutely love hearing from you. This podcast is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez and Brandon Kiefer. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neel and I will be back on Friday to talk potentially more about Tesla. He's gonna have some FCC thoughts. We got a lot of stuff to catch up on before we all head out on parental leave. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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