Google gets fined, Macbook Pro benchmarks, and Roku CEO Anthony Wood

We’ve got a super stuffed episode of The Vergecast this week. First, the biggest news in tech right now is the European Commission’s ruling that Google has been unfairly using Android to push Google search on users, giving it an unfair advantage. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul sit down and discuss the implications. In the second half of the show, Dieter discusses some of the new MacBook Pro benchmarks that claim the processors may throttle performance due to cooling issues. Nilay got an exclusive interview with Roku CEO Anthony Wood, so we’ve included that in this episode as well. Also, our culture coverage continues this week with another roundup by Megan Farokhmanesh and Bijan Stephen. There’s even a whole lot more in between that — like Paul’s newly sponsored segment “Fold the phone” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 01:46 - Verizon is shutting down its original video app Go90 06:26 - Six questions you were afraid to ask about Google’s EU antitrust case 25:09 - Google may put its Fuchsia OS on smart home devices within three years 34:25 - This week in culture with Megan and Bijan 39:42 - Test suggests 2018 MacBook Pro can’t keep up with Intel Core i9 chip’s thermal demands 53:15 - Roku CEO Anthony Wood interview 1:17:33 - Paul’s weekly segment “Fold the phone” 1:20:39 - Galaxy Note 9 leak suggests it looks a lot like the Note 8 1:22:12 - Walmart reportedly plans to launch Netflix competitor under its Vudu brand later this year 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.

• 0:03Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge Network, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, a subsidiary network of the Vox Media. That's the beginning of the show. I'm Neelai. I am your friend. I wanted to be clear about that. Paul, hi Paul.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:21Nilay Patel?

  Dieter.

• 0:22Speaker 02

  I could be your friend, but there's no guarantee.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Okay, when you have good cop, bad cop, what's the tertiary cop?

• 0:28Nilay Patel?

  The third cop.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Third cop?

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Moo cop.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Which went wild.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Not like moo cow, moo like Japanese, not just, nevermind.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Moo cop?

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Yeah moo.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  All right. It is a week. Here's what's gonna happen on this Vergecast. We have a ton of news. Dieter has an emotional roller coaster to go on with the Mac Pro. We've got This Week in Culture with Megan Farokhmanesh and Bijan Steven, bringing that one back. Super excited. I interviewed Anthony Wood, the CEO of Roku. That interview was wild. That interview literally began in a way that I just was not, was not expecting.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  He claimed that he runs the flagship podcast?

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  He was like, hello, welcome to Vergecast.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Does he keep undercutting you on price?

• 1:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because like $17.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  No way!

• 1:16Nilay Patel?

  No, he, you'll hear it later on the show, but he laid out exactly how Roku makes money in like a very calm way. He's obviously a very good CEO. He's like, here's what Roku does. And it was just very clear that Roku does not, is not a hardware business. They are an advertising business. But we'll get to that in the show. So that's, and I asked him about Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, of course.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Of course you did.

• 1:39Nilay Patel?

  Paul's segment is sponsored once again. We're gonna, we're gonna try that.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Still socks.

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  For a second time. So let's just get into it. Biggest news, we missed this on the 4th of July. Go90 is dead. I just, people have been asking me to talk about it, but Verizon's Go90, the streaming service that asked you to go sideways.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Is now permanently horizontal.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  Has fallen sideways into the grave.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Some of my favorite shows are going off the air. Relationship Status, Confess.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, we have to be nice because there's an SB Nation show.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Snatchers.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  The SB Nation show is very good.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  I'm sure it is.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  Foul Play, which you should go Go90 while you can and watch SB Nation's Foul Play. It is very good.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Well, Verizon said that they're giving the IP back for all the shows back to the creators. Yeah, they're not just shutting it down. Like, all the stuff that was made for it, they're like, yeah, do whatever you want with it. We don't care anymore. Just like a total capitulation.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  I just don't. Here's what I want. The so it's dead. I think Verizon's future is like a media tech business. The way AT&T bought Time Warner, Verizon bought AOL.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  And Yahoo.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  So like, they made different purchases. There was a great story in the information about whether that's going to keep going. Whether Tim Armstrong, who is Paul and I's old boss, whether he's going to try to spin AOL, Yahoo, Oath, back out of Verizon, which would be incredible. So yeah, it's just, I just want to, here's my real problem. I don't have a go to bad streaming service anymore.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Bring back dial up, like a new hip internet service that's dial up for people who feel over, over connected, over stimulated.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  You know, it's like hipster internet, the new AOL.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  I feel like that's a good name for like a New York restaurant, flip phones and dial up.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  We do have a good go to bad streaming service to, to make fun of. But the problem is with Go 90, you're punching up, right? You're, you were, you were attacking Verizon when you attacked Go 90, and that felt good. But nobody feels good making fun of Crackle.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  No, but Crackle's Sony. You can make fun of Crackle. Also, I think Crackle's dead.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Screw you, Crackle.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm pretty sure Crackle's Sony.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Crackle's still around, man.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Is Crackle still around? Crackle's official name, by the way, is Sony Crackle.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  As long as Sony is manufacturing the most adorable robot dog in the universe, I do not approve.

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  Subsidized by Crackle.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I really hope Crackle shuts down because my headline will be, oh, snap, Crackle popped.

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  It's giving away the gold eater. So this was supposed to be like a two minute joke. It's turned into a five minute disaster with a pun.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  I'm ready to move on.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  I want to, we have, there's actually a lot to talk about in the show this week. And I personally find Facebook policy news exhausting and depressing. But I want to tell you, so we're just not going to do it, but I want to tell you, go listen to Kara Swisher interview Mark Zuckerberg on Recode Decode. It's 90 minutes long. Zuckerberg puts his foot in his mouth several times, including suggesting that Holocaust deniers are maybe just innocently mistaken.

• 4:47Nilay Patel?

  Which is very strange and wrong, but it's Kara at her best, Zuckerberg at a medium. A medium.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Medium Zuck.

• 4:56Nilay Patel?

  Medium Zuck.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Just, I know we can't, we don't have time to really get into it, but I'm going to say one thing. After I disclose my wife works for Oculus, which is invented at Facebook. As you listen to this interview and listen to Zuck try and like justify his decisions. In the back of your mind, just if you studied philosophy, just think, oh, he's a, he's a rule. He has, he follows a rule based ethic. He's, he's, he's a Kantian. He's trying to find the categorical imperative. Just think about Kant's ethics as you're listening to Mark Zuckerberg. And think about how he's doing it right and how he's doing it wrong.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  I've, I, what I thought about was this would be a lot better. Zuckerberg would just accept the fact that he's a dictator as opposed to trying to be like a friend.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  But do you want him to be the dictator?

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, at least I would know how it worked. You know, like he's going to make decisions and it'll be arbitrary and capricious because he's a dictator. But if we all supplicate ourselves to him enough, and we're like, I also smoked brisket, Lord Zuck.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Sing, sing songs about our glorious Zuckerberg.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And be like, he'll, he'll be nice to us as opposed to this thing he's doing where he's like, I'm just your buddy, Zuck.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Neil, I heard he's always been nice to us.

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  All right. Listen to that. I can't, I honestly, and if you're interested in what's going on on Facebook.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  Casey's newsletter, the interface is excellent. You can read that every day. There's just so much for this episode of the Verge Cast. We're, we're just going to set it aside. So go listen to Rico Decode, Kara and Zuck. Read the interface from Casey. Tweet, tweet at Casey. He likes your tweets. You can get all that stuff there. Okay. Let's start with the biggest news of the week in our zone, uh, which is Google and Android in the European Union. So the European Union fined Google $5 billion. It's the largest fine in EU history for illegally bundling.

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  Chrome and search into Android for a period of years for, it's three points. Bundling of Chrome and search, it is preventing other manufacturers from forking Android. So you can, obviously Android is open source. If you want to make an open source fork of Android, you are prevented. Google will contrashly not let you use Android. So if you want to be an Android manufacturer. You mean use the name Android? No, no, if you want to get the. Use Play Store. If you want to use the Play Store, you cannot ship even a single forked Android device. So they, they pull you into their ecosystem. And then the third thing, which honestly to me is like, in this world that we live in is like,

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  sure, Google made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators to bundle Google search apps on handsets in favor of our search engines. Which is like, yeah, of course they did.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  Why would they need to pay if they're forcing everybody? Uh, cause if you sell a tie's in the handset, right? Yeah. And you, you set Google as the default, you get paid. Like, there's a million little wackadoo things. Oh, so this like includes like, Apple? Well, no, Apple sets it as their fault. And I think Apple makes payments to Google for setting it as the default. So it's unclear, just a certain large manufacturers. And it's like, there's like four of them. Right. So probably those four. All right, so let's pull this apart. So I, I read a bunch of the, the EU issued a bunch of documents, I read a bunch of documents. Basically their argument is that Android's business model is fundamentally unfair.

• 8:21Nilay Patel?

  And that Google, by pulling lots and lots of core features and updated APIs out of Android and into Play Services, obviously brought the app developers along there. And then they uncompetitively tied and like the use of Android to the use of the Play Store. So if you want to ship an Android phone and get the Play Store, which is where the apps are, which is where the thing you want, you are now bound to this other contract, which makes you use search in Chrome by default. I think it's the specific contractual language that EU called out was within one swipe of the home screen.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  You've got to see Google stuff.

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  We have actually known this for a long time, right? This is not a surprise. The way that Google uses the Play Store and Play Services to drive Android, I think we have actually talked about on the show as a good idea, like a lot.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Well, it's a good idea insofar as it's the easiest avenue that Google has to get updates, security updates and other like little updates out to phones without waiting for, you know, carriers and OEMs to push out full on operating system updates. And it's also a really good system insofar as it lets them update apps without waiting for like a yearly cycle, the way that Apple does with iOS in a lot of ways for its core apps. And so there's that. So that is good. I would say that I am not necessarily pro, like put everything into the Google Play Services thing, because the more of the core of what you expect your phone to do coming

• 9:52Speaker 02

  from a Google thing instead of from an Android thing, like it does mean that AOSP phones and forks of Android don't get the benefit of that stuff. So I'm, I don't know, there was, there was a whole kerfuffle when they got rid of the, like AOSP browser and went to like Chrome as the default renderer. That basically was the right thing to do because it meant they didn't have to ship two web browsers. But it's still like, it's, it's a good thing that they, that they do it from a bunch of technical reasons. It just so happens that it also get, you know, makes Android more of a Google product than it is just a product from HTC or Samsung or Amazon or whatever.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  But I would take you back to, I don't know, 2009, when wave after wave of Android phone with a garbage skin would come out and we would laugh at how bad all of that work was. And I, you know, part of it is Google pushing manufacturers to stop doing that stuff. Part of it is honestly the market. Like every time we review a phone, we're like, it's as close to stock Android as you can get without buying a Pixel. Like it's the thing that the market has wanted. So, Google saying we're just gonna foreclose some of this crazy, wide-open development on Android has actually been the positive consumer outcome. Yeah, what is the consumer harm that they're alleging? So, the consumer harm they're alleging is exactly what you'd expect.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  It's the market for search engines and default browsers on Android is extremely limited. So, consumers don't have a choice to buy a phone that has Bing preloaded, because Google restricts that from happening. I'm not sure that anybody wants to buy a phone with Bing preloaded, but... I have argued specifically that that's consumer hostile, yeah. But that market is foreclosed. So, Google just won't let that exist. You can't buy a phone with a different browser preloaded, right? Those are the two. And the mechanism is, if you want to use Android and you want to get the Play Store, which is the only reason you want to use Android to ship a phone, because you want the apps, you have to do these other two things.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  So, the market for the other two things has closed down. Now, underneath all of that is, Google doesn't charge any money for Android. They don't charge any money for the Play Store. They make all their money from search. So, if they don't have those apps on the phone as default, they are not gonna make money giving away Android and Play Store for free. So, like, that led Sunar Pichai, you know, the EU ruling came out, within 90 days, Google has to pay the fine. They have to stop bundling these things. Sunar Pichai says, "Well, this might change the business model of Android. We might have to start charging for Android to recoup that investment." That, to me, seems like a totally idle threat, for this specific reason.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I don't know. Microsoft charged licensees for Windows Mobile a bunch, like...

• 12:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying. So, they might do it.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  They might do it. And they might charge 5, 10, 20. I don't know what Windows Mobile license costs, but all that cost went to the manufacturer, then they pass it on to the consumer. And if they decided they needed to do that for whatever reason... I do, like, connecting manufacturers have to pay for Android to this ruling is a little bit fuzzy to me, but whatever. Like, who are people that, "Well, I want the free one. I don't want to pay for Android." What are they gonna go to, Tyson? Like, they could, they could, there is a world in which they could charge manufacturers to license Android and put it on phones, and it wouldn't necessarily hurt them, because there's no other choice anymore.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  That seems like a lot. I mean, it's a good, I don't know if it's a valid threat, but it's a real good threat from Google's perspective. Because if you, if Google's like, oh, oh, we're not allowed to do this stuff. Okay. It's $100 to license Android.

• 13:36Nilay Patel?

  So here's why I think it's particularly not a valid threat.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  What is anybody, that's way more damaging, but like Google's within its right to do that, right?

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Google's within its right to do things that are way more damaging to consumers than this stuff.

• 13:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe, because it's like the EU went away. They're not like, well, our, our work here is done.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  I mean, you have a whole industry of manufacturers who are billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in to, to Android.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  And if Google vastly changed how it supported Android, or it's like, hey, we decided we're gonna stop developing it. We're just done. Like, that would ruin a lot of companies.

• 14:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it would also ruin Google, right? I mean, that, search revenue for mobile is no joke.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 14:24Nilay Patel?

  Right? That's their business. So they, they need Android out there. They need Chrome out there. They need search out there. I'm sure they're gonna start making other kinds of deals where they'll just pay the manufacturers to put.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Well, I thought they got in trouble for making payments to certain large manufacturers.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  Because I think those payments were conditioned on other terms. But like, if it's just a free market and they just pay more than Microsoft. It's not like Microsoft is like, yeah, we'll spend some of that hot Bing revenue. Like, they'll, they'll cut their revenue. I think the real, the real opportunity here is inside of the forks. So now you've got Samsung in a position where it can just fork Android and make another thing, even though it has size in. You've got LG in a position where it can fork Android and make another thing.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  It sounds like Amazon's gonna, could get Play Store on the Fire tablets, right?

• 15:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, that, to me is a big question, is are those forks gonna get access to the Play Store? Like, that, it's not clear to me that the EU is demanding that they do that.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  It's like they're specific.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead, Dieter.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  They're they're leaving like the remedy up to Google. They're like, here's the stuff you shouldn't be doing. Do something else and let us know in 90 days what your plan is, but they're not saying you're you like with Microsoft. They're like, all right, Microsoft, you must have a ballot when and people you must randomly show different browsers at the, you know, first time someone logs into Windows and let them choose. And, you know, they like specifically told Microsoft what to do. The EU here is saying, hey, yeah, you can't demand that people include Chrome and search if they want the Play Store and you can't do these other things. So stop doing that. Tell us what you're going to do instead. And so that doesn't necessarily mean they're going like one of the remedies is going to be you have to let the Play Store show up on,

• 16:06Speaker 02

  you know, Fire TVs.

• 16:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't think that's what's going to happen, but I do think because Amazon, Amazon's like putters along with Fire OS. Yeah, it's like not a they they make basically kids tablets with it, right? Now they have this opportunity to say, hey, HTC, not a lot going on over there. Would you like to make a Fire OS device? HTC can make their phones and they can make a range of devices running Fire OS that runs Amazon Store. And that could turn into something else.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Because just just to clarify, because I was confused on this, the specific restriction that Google was saying, if you do any forked device, you can't do any.

• 16:45Nilay Patel?

  Any play device.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Any play device.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  So you can't you can't ship even a single product running a forked version of Android if you want the Play Store. And that was to ostensibly to minimize fragmentation and Google brought up fragmentation to the EU, which is just another one of those moments where like just the nerdiest tech blog shit is now being talked about at the highest levels of government. But they're like Android fragmentation is a problem and the EU said, we don't believe Android fragmentation is credible, which is true.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  What is what is the law? I I I kind of feel like I need to read this, but like, what kind of laws do they have in the EU? Is it just it feels unfair to us?

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I'm not a European lawyer and very arbitrary American lawyer.

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  But I mean, like, they're anti-competition laws are the same. They went and measured consumer harm, and they went and measured harm in the marketplace. And Google said, "We're preventing this other thing, and this outweighs that harm you see over there." And then they made a determination of credibility. You can read it, it's just, it's gonna make a reference to, like, a lot of laws you've never heard of, because you don't live in Europe. Right? But it tracks with what you would expect. And I think a big piece of this, like, Trump tweeted about it today, like, "The European Union is attacking us today." But a big piece of it is, like, this is America's home team. Like, in the United States, like, Google and Facebook and Apple, like, they're the home team.

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  So regulating them feels like, like, their argument is, if you take away this regulation, you won't get this. Like, you like this, right? Google and Europe, like, Europe has always looked at these big tech companies as like, you're, what are you doing? Like, this isn't competitive. We don't want this to happen. We want French search engines and German search engines. And so I think they're much, they're looking at that kind of market dynamic, where Google has come into their country through the mechanism of the internet, and they've dominated the field, and there's not space for their own countries to develop that, that economy. And I think that's super interesting.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  So they just get to take $5 billion from an American company?

• 18:50Nilay Patel?

  Google's gonna make $5 billion in six days.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  It's, that's...

• 18:55Nilay Patel?

  It's true, though. That's six days of their revenue.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's a lot of money to just be able to take for...

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it's the fine, right? Like, the idea is that you punish them, and then they won't do it again, and other actors won't do it.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Why can't they pass a law that says Google can't, or, or, sorry, arbitrary companies, I'm not thinking of anybody in particular, can't force other companies...

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  But they did. That then they Google broke the law.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  They had specific laws that would have applied to the.

• 19:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it's not like they just like swept it. The European Union is not like a swift decisive body. Right? Like it is a very ponderous, slow. We've issued a joint resolution that will now be taken up by the Council of Elders. The Council of Elders has issued a secondary resolution that will be passed down to the Council of Lowers. The lowers have decided to play cricket for five days. Like the it's like a very ponderous body. This is four or five years in the making. So like the idea that this is like a capricious decision is like out of that context like.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Like this went on long enough that at the beginning of it, Microsoft was like pushing for it and lobbying for it. And now now they've gotten to the point where like they've made nice with Google about some patents, some other patent disputes. And so they're like, they're staying out of it now. It went from like a thing that Microsoft was pushing hard for to like it went on long enough to like, yeah, you know what? We've figured it on our own. You guys, you guys do your thing.

• 20:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you're slower than a patent dispute.

• 20:29Nilay Patel?

  You're not, you're just not moving fast. The best outcome is like Google pays them money, whatever, they'll make it back in six days. And then you're going to see the sort of ecosystem of Android vendors start to do more interesting things. Because they're no longer locked into doing what Google wants them to do. It's a good outcome. The bad outcome, I think, is then they will stop doing what Google wants them to do. And their history of decision making is not excellent. And so you're going to get a lot more blooping sounds.

• 21:06Nilay Patel?

  A wide variety of smart devices that aren't necessarily as secure as is like a play device. So it's gonna break.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Being everywhere.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  If you're Microsoft, this is your opportunity. If you're Amazon, this is your opportunity. But I think creating the fine aside, creating the opportunity for these companies to compete again is not a bad thing. Right? It's the mechanism of how you create that opportunity. Like the market wasn't creating that mechanism because Google had the market. So this is the remedy to.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Google built the market.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, not I mean, sort of.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  They made an operating system and they gave it away for free. And people are just being a big whiners about it.

• 21:44Nilay Patel?

  They sort of gave it.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  They could always use Tyson.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  What is it? Migo? What was that other one?

• 21:50Nilay Patel?

  Man, Migo. Right. This is revenge for Migo. Look, Finland's not in the EU, but this is revenge for Migo. That's what it is. That's all this is.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Okay, two questions.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Can you name one person who works at the EU who is not actually in charge?

• 22:07Nilay Patel?

  I could say any name I wanted to right now.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  I know.

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  Sven Sborglund.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, this is an unaccountable body.

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  No, it's not. If you were in Europe, you would know these things.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  We have Europeans on our team. You could slack them right now.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I'll do that after the podcast. We'll see. We'll see whom they know. Who's your local EU representative? Second question. If I wrote a surprisingly popular new operating system, and I wrote a relatively liberal license for it that allows you to do anything for it, but with some certain conditions that I made up arbitrarily, like if you do weird things with this, you can't use the vanilla version.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  So here's the thing. If you start there, I think you're fine. The thing Google did was they changed it. So they began moving.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Entrapment.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  They began, right. So they had this huge network effect of Android users. They were dominant. You have to ship Android to get market share. Again, if you're in the EU, you're looking at Finland. You're like, there's a burning platform over there, right? Like, ah shit.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  What's all that smoke in the sky?

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's all of Finland.

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  But so you have to use Android to get the thing. And then Google makes the switch in large part in response to people like us complaining about fragmentation and security updates. They make the switch to say, if you want Android, you have to use Play. You have to use play services. You know, Ars Technica calls foul because, you know, it's against the the spirit of open source and like, there's been lots of great Ars Technica articles about it, but that's really the outcome for them. But they switched the license term and they started moving all of their API development, all of their innovation into play services. And so that means they they took the market and they turned it to their advantage as opposed to entering the market and saying, this is the deal.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  But the other thing to really remember here is this isn't really about Android. This is about Android insofar as they feel like Google used Android to prop up its search monopoly. So they did this thing, they did this stuff to Android and they're not happy about it. But they they see that it was, they did it to prop up search. The reason that Chrome is like the thing here is Chrome is a avenue to search. And so this is as much about Bing and DuckDuckGo and whatever as it is about, you know, Mego or Tyson or whatever else.

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  All of Finland. They're trying to get Finland into EU. This is how they're doing it. Like, we avenged you. Join our customs protocol.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  There's other things in Finland. Because I'm a DuckDuckGo user.

• 25:01Nilay Patel?

  Are you?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. I just feel like it's very rebellious of me and apparently EU approves.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  My God. All right. One more Google thing and then we can take a break. A big Bloomberg report today about Fuchsia, its OS under development. We've kind of known about this, right? I mean, it's been out. Dieter came on Circuit Breaker Live when we were doing Circuit Breaker Live and literally did like a conspiracy theory yarn board about Fuchsia. But Dieter, can you walk me through this?

• 25:27Speaker 02

  So, very good report over at Bloomberg and it seems like it mostly came from the engineers that are working on it and like actual Google executives who would like green light stuff and decide what they're going to do with this are very noncommittal about it. And whether they're noncommittal because they're lying or whether they're noncommittal because they're actually noncommittal is an open question. But it seems like the engineers are like, look, we're making this thing. It's great. It could be used for anything. It could be used for everything. It could power phones. And TVs and gadgets and smart home things and like this should this should replace Android and Chrome OS and everything else. And then the executives were like, yeah, I don't know. We got some ideas. We got some, we'll see. And then the, the, the killer line at the, at the end of it is,

• 26:11Speaker 02

  I mean, it's going to take three to five years for this to happen, if it does happen. But then the killer line at the end of it is, um, one person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff described the effort as simply, quote, "It's a senior engineer retention project."

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  So there's a bunch of really cool, smart people who wanted to do something cool and smart. Android, I don't know, I, maybe this is not fair anymore, but it has a reputation for being kind of rickety, being kind of like, deep down in its bones, not really modern and cool. And this is built on an entirely different kernel. So like theoretically could be a very interesting new operating system. Paul, you wrote this in the newsletter. And so everybody in the community like wants to pin all their hopes and dreams on what this thing will be. And so they, you know, the, it's just very hard to suss out what it's going to be because I don't, it doesn't seem to me like there's like a secret, high level Illuminati plan for Fuchsia. I think it's, some people wanted to make a thing. They got, they got nothing else to do. They might bail if they can't do it. It seems like a good idea to try

• 27:10Speaker 02

  and make a new cool operating system on a good, modern kernel and, you know, good architecture, et cetera, et cetera. So you know what? Go ahead, go ahead, folks. Go do that. And a bunch of people are working on it. And, you know, if they're working on it just to make something cool, if they're working on it as like the goal to completely replace Android someday, I think it's very difficult to separate out people's like hopes and dreams that they can just like project onto this thing from what any actual long-term plans are. And since this is Google, there may not be any actual long-term plans because Google does weird, random crap all the time.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  I think there's, the two interesting things for me with Fuchsia, they are, do seem to be, and they have like a lot of like former WebOS type people. Trying to like reinvent what a computer interface would be like and like make it story based and it's really hard to tell if any of that will pan out at all. That's but that's really fun experimentation. I think the most really applicable thing that I think Fuchsia could offer that is very hard for Linux is because it's kind of a micro kernel, a lot of the like drivers, hardware support is out of the kernel. And for supporting new hardware,

• 28:22Speaker 01

  it's a lot cheaper and safer with this kind of design theoretically if it works out and they can build it to be as, as you know, powerful as Linux in other ways. Being able to like a big problem with like getting your, getting a new device to run Android or Chrome OS, it's whatever hardware you've put in that box, you need good Linux drivers and writing good Linux drivers involves basically working with the Linux kernel and it's, it's messy and it's, it's difficult and it's expensive and time consuming. And that's where like security vulnerabilities show up. So you have a potential for a lot more, I feel like

• 29:04Speaker 01

  more rapid iteration and more rapid adoption of new hardware if, if an operating system like this was on the market. That, that's to me, I feel like the biggest upside of Fuchsia.

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  I just, how many times in my life can I be asked to be excited about a new operating system?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Every day.

• 29:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, potentially.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  But, but, but hang on, that's not fair at all. When's the last time you've been asked to be excited about a new operating system? Like at most, things are coming along in a clip of like three years.

• 29:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm not saying it's happened recently. I'm saying five years ago, it was like every day. And we had to like, we had to like manage all of our hopes and dreams and expectations about Windows Phone, MIMO, which turned into MIGO.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, the new BlackBerry OS is here. And like, we know all of the problems with these things. And that, this Fuchsia piece didn't answer like, the most important question, which is, will Android apps run on this operating system? Right? Like, will it have a Gmail app is like not yet known. And like, that's the stuff that actually makes this stuff successful or not. If it turns into Google's smart devicesy like operating system. Great, that's cool, but I think the idea that Google's gonna re- re-architect or replace Android with Fuchsia is like staring at the same problems that stare at, you know, Apple's

• 30:25Nilay Patel?

  gonna replace OS 7 with Copland in like 1998. Like, it's the same set of problems. And we know what those transitions look like. Maybe I'm just being crusty. If you're a teenager listening to this, please, by all means, be extremely excited about a new operating system. You got about 10 years of that in your life, and then you can like be a crank like me.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the greatest moments in my life of following technology is when, I mean, I was sad. I thought Apple was gonna buy BOS, and that was gonna be the next thing. And then they bought Steve Jobs's Next.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  And then they, they're like, yo, we're gonna redo our operating system. And it's gonna be bonkers. It was bonkers. It was constantly bonkers.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  What, you're gonna put stoplights?

• 31:10Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Well, you can make that like whoosh animation.

• 31:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Like, those icons, they're so large. They're like photographs.

• 31:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  I don't know. I have such a fond memory of that like moment of like seeing everything that was very familiar to me like change.

• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  And I always wanna see it again.

• 31:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, so that's Windows Phone, right? Like, what I'm getting at is Windows Phone like had this new idea about how you should use a phone, like a deeply new idea. And many of those ideas were great. And many of those ideas are in every other phone now. They were just subsumed in other operating systems in a way that I think is very healthy. But the thing of Windows Phone was not successful, right? And like, that's, I think that's the thing about Fuchsia.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  They weren't replacing-

• 32:02Nilay Patel?

  My caution is up.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see what you're saying.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  I was gonna say they weren't replacing a successful phone.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  With Windows Phone, but they did screw up their desktop by trying to do that to their desktop. So, yeah, it's dangerous.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  I will say this, um, Nest was like fully rolled into Google this week.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  They, the CEO of Nest was ushered out the door, Rishi Chandra, who runs Google Home now oversees the whole Nest team. It's all part of the same group. This is the sort of thing where if you want to see a bunch of new Nest devices, you've got a new kind of operating system that's like ready to go that isn't as heavy as Android.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Uh, they, one, it's not ready to go, I don't think.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  It's just a few years.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  And two, they've already got an operating system to do that. It's called Android Things.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  Is it really?

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Yes. The new, uh, smart displays that are due out this summer run it, that we saw at CES.

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh, right, those. That's really cool. Where are those?

• 32:59Speaker 02

  They're due this summer.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  All right. All right. It's time for an ad. Then we're gonna run This Week in Culture with Megan and Bijan. It's gonna blow your mind. Then we're gonna come back and we gotta talk about these MacBooks. It's a real serious issue.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Do we, do, okay, we do.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  So, Dieter, get ready. During the course of this ad, I want you to steel yourself emotionally.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  I'm gonna get some whiskey.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  But while you're steeling yourself, consider shaving your face, Dieter.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

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• 34:02Speaker 02

  For the butt.

• 34:03Nilay Patel?

  That's for the butt. The world famous shave butter and the best razor, the Six Blade Executive. Yeah. Keep the blades coming for a few bucks more a month and add in shampoo, toothpaste, anything else you need for the bathroom. Check it all out at dollarshavclub.com/verge. That is dollarshavclub.com/verge.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  All right, check it out. Here's Megan and Bijan this week in culture.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Megan Prokmanash, a reporter with The Verge.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  And I'm Bijan Stephen, a culture writer at The Verge.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  Welcome to the top headlines in culture. We have a very strange theme this week.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not about bullying, but it's not not about bullying. I'm kidding. That's not really what I mean. It's really about groups of people getting together and demanding collective action.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  For good and bad ways.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  So first up, we have a piece by Megan. The headline is "ArenaNet Firing Casts A Chilling Shadow Across The Game Industry." And the deck is "You're Just Waiting For The Wrong Tweet To End Your Life Now." So tell me about it.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this has been kind of an ongoing story. ArenaNet, who makes Guild Wars, they fired two of their employees after a spat, let's say, with a streamer on Twitter. So in this case, we're talking more about the general impact it's had on the industry, as well as the people who currently work at ArenaNet. So there's been a lot of discussion since about social media policies. In this case, ArenaNet didn't have a very clear or strong social media policy, according to multiple people I've spoken with. And so there were no clear guidelines on how people should be acting online. It was kind of just be nice to people. And that's not really a good measure or guideline in 2018 on Twitter.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  Post Gamergate in a way.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Exactly. So not only is this having an impact on people who work at ArenaNet, I mean, we've seen reactions from developers across the industry. A lot of developers are now rehauling their social media policies. And this is great, because they're talking about their devs about how to deal with harassment or what the expectations are. And that's something that needs to be clarified.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  You know, they could be better.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  They could be better.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  You know who is being better, though, is Hollywood. So Sandra Oh is the first Asian woman nominated for a Lead Actress Emmy, which is progress in a way, although I can't believe it's taken this long to get there.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  Hollywood has been around for how long? But Sandra Oh was nominated for her role in Killing Eve. It's beautiful. You should go watch Killing Eve if you haven't already. But yeah, it's kind of fucked up that it's taken this long for a person of Asian descent to make it to Hollywood, one of Hollywood's biggest stages.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  I mean, when you think about it, it's not like there are that many Asian actors who are given the chance to be in these roles. Like, you think about, like, the Iron Fist controversy, for example, them casting a white dude in this story that's traditionally been very exploitative. Or you think about Scarlett Johansson, Ghost in the Shell, who's playing the role of a Japanese woman.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and she, there was a little controversy about her recently, right?

• 36:30Speaker 04

  She has not learned her

• 36:31Speaker 03

  She has not learned her lesson. She, a couple of weeks ago, was announced that she was going to play a trans man, but she stepped back from the role. Scarlett Johansson decided, after the sustained backlash, to drop out and give the part to someone else, which I think is a really great sign. It's a good sign of progress.

• 36:46Speaker 04

  I mean, credit where credit is due, even if it was not as great as her initial response, I appreciate that she is kind of righted, of course. So, let's do a speed round.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. First up, a piece from our boss, TC, a big gamer. The headline is, "Seeing Ubisoft ban jerks in Rainbow Six is now my favorite part of the game."

• 37:05Speaker 04

  That's an A+. A+ response there. Very proud of Ubisoft for that one.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  The background is Ubisoft decided to start banning people for saying racist things in chat, and the bans are global, so everyone can see you get banned for saying something really shitty.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  Bravo. That sounds like a great plan to me. So, headline, "Another hastily-planned YouTube event ends in failure."

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Oh, man. You just wrote this one. This is about, what's that guy's name?

• 37:30Speaker 04

  Fuzi Tube.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Fuzi Tube. What hap- is that like a disaster? Is this another YouTube disaster like Tanacon?

• 37:34Speaker 04

  Yes. So, this guy has 10 million followers on YouTube subscribers. He's a pretty big deal. He's known for doing prank videos and quote-unquote "social experiments." So, he tried to play at a concert in seven days. It ended with a bomb threat. He was promising Drake to be there. There's actually-

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Did Drake say anything?

• 37:48Speaker 04

  That's the thing. There's no evidence that Drake was ever gonna be there. Drake has never responded to this man and may not even know who he is.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Who can relate?

• 37:54Speaker 04

  [laughs]

• 37:55Speaker 03

  All right, what's next? Oh, this is good. "The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one."

• 38:01Speaker 04

  That is the saddest thing I think I've heard all day.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  It's pretty sad.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Please tell me more that will cheer me up.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's by our very good colleague, Patricia Hernandez. She found a bunch of Twitch streamers who had been just streaming to literally no people. It ends on a happy note. I mean, you should read the whole piece. It's a great feature. But the happy note is, the one person or one person got one viewer who stuck with them, and now they're engaged.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a rom-com.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  It's a rom-com.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  It was a rom-com the whole time.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  So, congrats to Twitch and everybody involved.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  Up next, we have, Nathan Fillion stars as Nathan Drake in what might be film's only good video game adaptation.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  This is the role Nathan Fillion was born to play. I know, okay, I mean, Firefly, great. Serenity, great. Whatever, man. He's a sci-fi guy, but he looks like Nathan Drake.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  And that's all that matters when it comes to acting.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  And they have the same first name.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  See? It's perfect.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Oh, man. I watched the short film. It's so ba- it's not bad. It's good, but it's also bad because they needed more money to make it. And I think Hollywood should get on that right now.

• 38:59Speaker 04

  I'm sure they're taking notes right now. So that is it from us. For more culture news, you can of course, check out The Verge, come visit the culture section. And you can find us on Twitter. I'm Megan underscore Nicolet.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  And I'm Bijan Steven, at B I J A N Steven.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  Make sure to tweet nice things at us. We're very kind online.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  And we're very soft. So please, very nice things.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  I love those two. Real firecrackers.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  But soft.

• 39:22Nilay Patel?

  Soft firecrackers. Our culture team sits right in front of me in the office. And they're just, all day, it's laughs.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  It's true. Why didn't have so many more jokes?

• 39:34Nilay Patel?

  We're like, my dongles don't work. And they're like, we're watching movies. It's a whole different, it's a whole different game. All right, Dieter. My man, you steered emotionally?

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, okay, we have the 15-inch Core i9 maxed-out review unit of the new MacBook Pro from Apple. Just like, the top of the line. It's $6,700. So I've been playing with it. Veron Pavek, our director out here, has been putting stress tests on it. And we're getting ready to, you know, write and publish a processor episode, womp womp, and a review. And so, we were gonna, today is Thursday, we shot yesterday, Wednesday. On Tuesday, a guy named Dave Lee, Dave2D on YouTube, published a video that basically said, yeah, this thing gets stupid hot. And so, there's thermal throttling, and they slow the processors down to slower

• 40:29Speaker 02

  than what their, you know, low-rated frequency is supposed to be, 2.9, because they can't handle the heat. And that's ridiculous and bad. There's another YouTube video before that, and then since then, it's turned into a pretty big kerfuffle, technical term, about whether or not these Macs have the right thermal signature inside, and if they can actually handle the new Intel chips that are inside them. We are still working on our review. I will tell you that I'm having a hard time replicating these thermal results. But that doesn't mean that they're wrong. In fact, you know, Dave2D is very well-respected, knows his shit. So I have no reason to, you know, think he screwed that benchmark up. I just haven't been able to get it on my end.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  There's also like other benchmarking stuff going on because unless you're in a lab, benchmarking is going to be, you know, variable and weird and you're going to get strange outlier results all the time and you never really know. And so it's complicated. And so a bunch of people are running benchmarks. We're watching what everybody else is doing. We're trying to run our own. We reached out to Cinebench to be like, hey, is this thing accurate? And they're like, you know, we don't, I think I forget the exact quote, but it was, it was basically like, we're not really optimized for these, these new MacBooks on this benchmarking test. So that's the relatively short version.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Big question.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  I can give you some of our results, but.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Have you put your laptop in a freezer?

• 41:54Speaker 02

  That's the other thing that he did is he, you know, it was too hot. So he put it in a freezer and it ran way faster and way better in a freezer, which to be clear, like, again, I am not saying that there's not a problem here. And I'm not trying to like solely defend Apple here, but you want your processor to throttle itself if it gets too hot. You just, that is what you want it to do because otherwise it will degrade the processor or break it. And so it makes sense that if you put it in a freezer, the thing will be able to run hotter because it's in a freezer. And so like, you would expect it to be able to run better and faster in a freezer than not. So there's that. But that doesn't mean that it's not running too hot on the other side.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  The horrible takeaway would be if this laptop, thanks to throttling in the same temperature room, is running slower than the last gen top of the line.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  That seems to be what some people are finding in their tests, that it is running slower than last year's MacBook because of this, this heat issue. I'm having a really tough time coming to like a solid conclusion here that I can feel comfortable calling a review. So that's why I'm, if I seem like I'm being a little skittish here, it's because the worst, the worst result you can get in any science experiment, isn't it succeeded or it failed. The worst result is inconclusive. This data doesn't tell me anything. And I feel like in our testing, that's kind of where we are. Because number one, you know, we're finding. On Premiere Pro, which isn't really optimized for the Mac and is always slower than the Mac than it is in Windows. We're only seeing like a, we were only seeing like a 10% bump over a two-year-old MacBook Pro,

• 43:30Speaker 02

  which seems terrible, but then we ran a way more intensive test that was like much harder on it. And then it got up to like a 50% bump. Final Cut Pro X, like 50% speed improvement over older laptops, like time after time after time. But then, you know, you sit there and you watch the Intel Power Gadget and like, watch the processor temperature go up and watch the frequency kind of start getting spiky and weird. And you're just staring at it and you're like, is this out of bounds? Is this completely normal? Is this not normal at all? And it's just, it's super hard to really know without doing a bunch of, bunch of stuff over and over again.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  As far as I understand, the newest generation of Intel processors, like in the high end, have like a, kind of like a burst mode. Like they have a high peak clock speed, but they can't, none of them can sustain it.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Right. Are you talking about turbo boost or beyond that?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  I think it's like extra turbo.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Nitro.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  More turbo.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Give me that NAS. Well, so here is, here's the big question for me. And Dieter, I said this to you the other day when we, like Dieter, we're like on the phone at midnight. Dieter was like, this whole, this whole thing is upside down because all this stuff was breaking. It is shocking. The one thing Apple is better at than almost anybody is managing thermals. Like they are very, very good at it. And they're, I mean, they are.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Because they don't put anything inside of the computer.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  But like. They, they literally put themselves in a quote unquote thermal corner with a Mac Pro. And the, the most recent generations of the MacBook Pro have had a sort of a reputation of not being super great for thermals relative to big, thick Windows machines. They have been historically very good at thermals, but there has been a troubling trend. And the problem is like getting clear judgment on that is super hard because people are like, well, Apple only cares about making thin stuff. And then you, you end up in forums and you just watch people sniping at each other. And, and so, I don't know, I, I am not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt of being awesome at thermals with Pro devices in the past year or two. Here's what I believe in my heart. Wait, give me my, give me my. You are filibustering.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Like, yeah, yeah. Well, I will retake the floor, sir.

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  The Mac Pro, I cannot believe I'm defending this thing, was a genius thermal device if they had predicted the rise of GPUs.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Who could have known?

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  So I'm just, I'll put it out there. It was a very well-designed device for an alternate reality that didn't come to pass.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Well, actually, that's, that's what I believe in my heart. What I believe, deep in my heart, is that this MacBook Pro, and the one, since this generation with the touchbar and everything, was designed with the belief that Intel would deliver 10-nanometer chips that would have a lower heat signature, and then these things would be amazing. But then Intel didn't, and then Apple was stuck in a weird box where they have to decide, are they going to go with the hot chips or not? And if we go with the hot chips, will this laptop be able to handle them? And so then the question becomes, if that's true, the question becomes, is, you know, it's Intel's fault for not delivering the chips and making, you know, two hot chips, sure. But should Apple have redesigned this laptop to accommodate

• 46:48Speaker 02

  the thermals before shipping it? The answer clearly is probably yes, but, you know, I don't know. Like, in my heart, I think that what they shipped this year is not what they believed they were going to ship two years ago. Two years ago, I think they believed that they were going to be shipping this thing with a brand-new generation of Intel chips.

• 47:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  That's what I think.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  I'm beating a dead horse with this, but this is, again, just Apple's, like, yes, it is really nice that MacBook Pros are thin, but some people need a very powerful computer that is also portable.

• 47:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  And so, it sucks, if you're Apple, that you have to make a computer that's a little thicker, and now you're sad, and all the design team is just crying.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  But what, pros, some pros need to do things.

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm trying, I'm giving Apple the benefit, like, you have to imagine they tested these things. They have a bunch of benchmarks on their webpage, which presumably are based in some real testing that occurred, not just Johnny Ive being like, I don't like how long that bar is. Please make it shorter, right? Like,

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  Like presumably that was real testing, presumably they did thermal testing. This isn't, these are not the things that Apple cheats out on, right? So the, the benefit of that I'm willing to give them is there are some edge cases that you just simply can't predict that the second you release it to people that will immediately come out and something will happen. But at the same time, you've gotta give yourself more headroom in these Pro products. Who's gonna find those edge cases faster than anybody? It's a bunch of pros with wacky workflows. So it's like, why don't you just give yourself the space for that to happen? And I, I don't understand. And then on top of it, a bunch of stuff with a keyboard happened this week.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 48:34Nilay Patel?

  Where like an Apple support document came out that confirmed that the membrane is to protect it from dust. I fixed it as like spraying it with paint. And they're like, yep, it's to protect it from dust. And it's like, why don't you just tell us or even just whisper it like to, you know, a trusted person who's gonna say it's, it's right? Like, why are you playing all these games with this laptop where you, you literally like don't know what's true and not about the laptop based on what Apple's telling you? That's like a huge mistake if you're selling a Pro, a $60, $500 computer that they have to depend on.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  And I do wanna, I've been thinking about this a little bit because I feel like I've complained a lot about Apple's products lately, but it is scary to buy a non-Apple laptop because you go on the forums, you go in comments, you look around and tons of people have random things break on their laptop. And you're even, with a typical PC laptop, you're even in a worse scenario than you are with Apple because there's no genius bar. But yeah, if Apple loses that edge of being thought of as like the obvious choice if you want something that you can assume will be reliable for a few years. That's, uh, that's not good.

• 49:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, especially at this level of expense. So we'll see, Dieter, you're gonna keep testing it. Hopefully Apple says something soon.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  If you're listening to this, like, we're, we're, we're still planning on publishing next week. We'll see if it gets pushed back. And I'm not promising to provide like the definitive benchmark answer because I don't, I don't own a lab. We're gonna, we're gonna do, we're gonna do real serious testing. We've have been, we're gonna continue to do it. But we base our review off of like the entire experience, not just like the length of a bar on a benchmark graph. So I don't want to raise expectations too much, but I do want to like start to get a sense of how real this thermal problem is. And I, yeah, it's, it's inconclusive from my personal tests. There's a bunch of people that are pretty unhappy about it. I tweeted this, I'm just gonna repeat it because I'm so proud of myself. Because there's logic gates inside of chips. I really want this to be called Gate Gate.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  Dieter.

• 50:38Nilay Patel?

  And we're gonna move on. Here's what I'm hoping for from your review. I'm hoping that you're like, yes, the processor throttles itself to almost unusable levels constantly. But that is more than made up for by the addition of True Tone to the touch bar.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  We actually have only, we've only turned True Tone on to like prove, show that it works. You can, you can, you can't see it on the, the touch bar. Like it's impossible. Like maybe you can see it. You can see it on the screen, but then we turn it off immediately because Veron's a video editor and needs accurate color.

• 51:07Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's real. So what if you just want a word process on the 67? There are people out there.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna do it. They're never gonna hit the throttle. They're gonna be great. All right. Uh, Roku this week announced new wireless speakers. They're a little bit strange. They only work with Roku TVs. So you like bring them in your house, you push the button, it finds a TV, automatically syncs through TV. That's cool.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Hmm. They don't even work with like Roku boxes?

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  No, just the TVs. Because the TVs are on the software and then Roku's very proud that they've solved some like latency issue because they've got the software on the TV. They've got the software with speakers. But if you plug something into the back of the TV, like a game console where they can't manage latency, they'll just turn off and you'll play your games through the TV speakers.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Why is this an unsolved problem?

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  That's what they said. So I tweeted, this seemed insane. Roku got ahold of me and said, "We want to talk to you about the speakers and the future of Roku." Honestly, they also told me the product team was looking into the input situation. So I didn't bring it up with the CEO because I doubt the CEO is like, "Yes, I did make a horrible..." We talked about a whole bunch of other stuff. Check it out. Anthony Wood, he was great. So I'm just going to read this ZipRecruiter ad real quick and then we're going to do our interview with Anthony Wood. Here we go.

• 52:21Nilay Patel?

  Subs of the Vergecast brought to you by ZipRecruiter. It's hard to find qualified candidates. It takes a long time. It takes too many applicants when you have a job open. But ZipRecruiter makes it easy. You can check it out right now. ZipRecruiter.com/verge. ZipRecruiter sends your job to over 100 of the web's leading job boards, but they don't stop there. With their powerful matching technology, ZipRecruiter scans thousands of resumes, finds people with the right experience, and invites them to apply to your job. As applications come in, ZipRecruiter analyzes each one and spotlights the top candidates so you never miss a great match. ZipRecruiter is so effective that 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the first day. With results like that, it's no wonder that ZipRecruiter is one of the highest rated hiring sites in America. And right now, Vergecast listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web

• 53:06Nilay Patel?

  address, ziprecruiter.com/verge. That is ziprecruiter.com/verge. V-E-R-G-E. ZipRecruiter, it is the smartest way to hire. So we're here with Anthony Wood, the CEO of Roku. Thank you for joining us, Anthony.

• 53:20Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me on.

• 53:21Nilay Patel?

  So you guys announced some new speakers. I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the future of Roku. But real quick, you, I think most people think of Roku as still kind of like a startup, like an insurgent, but you've been there for a while. Roku's been there for a while. You're a public company now. Tell us a little bit about the journey, like where the company is now.

• 53:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, we're the leading streaming platform in the US, you know, with almost 21 million active users. You know, quickly a little bit about Roku. We build a purpose-built operating system or distribution platform for television, you know, via the internet. We distribute that platform by licensing to TV companies. And actually, you know, at this point in Q1, 1 in 4 smart TVs sold in the US ran the Roku operating system. So that's been very successful for us and it's still growing. You know, we sell a leading streaming player lineup, and that's how we distribute our operating system. But you know, what people, many people don't really realize is we make almost all of our gross profit are... You know, our money from advertising and content distribution. So we're really a service

• 54:19Speaker 05

  and advertising business at heart. And, uh, you know, if you just look at the history, we, we, we start, we shipped the first Netflix player in 2008. And since then, we just had steady continual growth as we've added more content, you know, we've lowered prices and as, you know, more and more people cut the cord and switched to streaming to watch TV. We went, we went public almost a year ago. Things are going great.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  So that's actually really surprising that you make most of your money on content distribution advertising. I, you know, I ask people for questions on Twitter. That was actually one of the most popular questions is can I just pay a fee to turn off the ads? But it sounds like that's a big piece of your business puzzle.

• 54:56Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, we have, we have the most content, most streaming content of any streaming platform. And there's every conceivable business model is available. All right. So, you know, if you want to watch Netflix, there's no ads on Netflix. Hulu, you know, you can pay a little bit extra and have no ads. So Amazon Prime, there's no ads. But other content, there are ads, you know, YouTube, news, the Roku channel. Uh, and then there's transactional, like Tivon, where you pay to watch a movie, you rent a movie. So just depends on the customer, you know, if they want to watch ads and, or if they don't want to watch ads, how much they want to pay, you know, all those options are available.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  But for your revenue, when you say content distribution and ads, who pays you for content distribution? What does that deal look like?

• 55:32Speaker 05

  Well, when you're a content distribution platform in a television business, you make money distributing content. You know, you provide, we provide a lot of services or content partners, things to help them build subscriber bases, promote their content, you know, let customers know about what's available to watch. And all those activities, we do get paid for. So, you know, it's kind of an exchange of value. We help content distributors find customers and sign up customers and promote their content. And we get, we get paid for that. In terms of advertising, one of the ways, you know, we get paid from content partners is we get a share of their ad inventory.

• 56:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 05

  We take all that ad inventory, that video ad inventory, and we aggregate it. And then we run a, we sell targeted ads. You know, there's a, there's a large number of Americans now that you can only reach on Roku. So if you're a TV advertiser and, you know, you want to reach consumers while they're in the living room watching TV, those consumers are shifting to streaming. And as they shift to streaming, advertisers are following them. So building out a big next generation TV ad platform is an important part of Roku's business.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  That's really interesting. Honestly, I don't think most people listening to the Vergecast or buying a Roku product really understand that that's where your revenue comes from. Is that why you're able to keep your hardware costs so low? I mean, you have devices at like $19. Is that part of the puzzle? You just want to get them out there?

• 56:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. That's right. I mean, we don't really make money. We certainly don't make enough money to support our engineering organization and our operations by the cost of money to run the Roku service. That's not paid for by the hardware. That's paid for by our ad and content business.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  Super interesting. So you're expanding, speaking of hardware business, you're expanding that. This is actually how we ended up on the show today. You put out a line of speakers, and I'm very interested in what Roku is doing with this new line of speakers. So you've got speakers that connect only to the Roku TVs over Roku Connect. Just tell me about them. What's the play there? What's the idea there?

• 57:17Speaker 05

  Right. Instead of saying we got speakers that only connects to Roku TVs, I prefer to think of it as we have Roku TVs, that every Roku TV owner now has access to an awesome audio option that they wanted. So every piece of hardware we sell is in the service of building our installed base, so that we can execute on our business model, which is to make money through advertising and content distribution. So speakers are no different. For us, one of our big goals as a company is to be the best TV platform. And we went from, over the last handful of years, we went from 0% market share to, like I said, Q1 of this year, 1 in 4 smart TVs sold and US ran our platform, our software, our operating system. And we think that there's a lot of room for innovation in TVs. So we

• 58:01Speaker 05

  spent a lot of time thinking about how can we make the TV experience better for our customers. And when we started thinking about that problem, one of the big issues consumers have is audio. Like, you know, movies have, you know, big screen movies and TV shows are mixed with great audio, but all TVs probably can't actually reproduce that audio. I mean, as TVs get thinner and thinner, the physics are just hard for speakers. The speakers in the TVs get smaller and it's hard for them to reproduce good audio. You know, it's one of the reasons so TV audio doesn't sound that great compared to, say, a movie theater. And it's often hard to even understand what people are saying because part of the dialogue range for males is cut off by most TV speakers. But adding a soundbar or something... Home theater system certainly to a TV is complicated and hard for most people.

• 58:46Speaker 05

  And so most people don't do it. And so one of the things, one of the problems we're trying to solve is make it super simple to connect better audio to your TV. It should be, you know, should be as simple as just plugging in a couple of speakers and they auto connect to your TV and you don't do anything differently with your remote control, except now that you have better sound on your TV. And so that's the reason we're releasing the Roku TV wireless speakers is we're trying to make the Roku TV the best TV it can be. Uh, we're trying to drive innovation there and that will cause more people to want to use Roku TVs and that will cause, you know, us to be able to sell more ads frankly in the long run. So that's why we're doing it. We're trying to make TVs better and we're not trying to make money selling speakers.

• 59:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, one of the main questions I got, you people see speakers, they first question, and this is a bunch of people ask me on Twitter, are you going to add Spotify support? You know, you guys are a TV platform. I'm sure you haven't thought about a Spotify app, but once you add speakers to the mix, people want to just play music through them. Is that something you're thinking about?

• 59:37Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, Spotify specifically is not currently on our platform, but it used to be and you know, I can't talk about the future, but we would love to have Spotify back on Roku and you can assume that we're actively working on that. But in general, the way we think about speakers for TV are that the primary function is to work, just I'm watching TV, I want it to sound great. I want it to be easier to understand what people say. I want the better dynamic range. I want, you know, better bass, I want it to sound good. So that's the first thing, but people do listen to a lot of music using their TV. It's, you know, music apps on Roku, which we do have a lot, everything from Pandora to iHeartRadio to, you know, Sirius XM, YouTube Music, YouTube. I mean, there's lots of music apps on Roku and people do use them to watch, to listen to music. And so, and especially with speakers, you know, better speakers connected to your TV,

• 1:00:21Speaker 05

  that'll probably even be more common. So we have, we have built features into the products to make it easier to listen to music. So for example, it has Bluetooth, I mean, it's a simple feature, but it has Bluetooth. So you can listen to, you know, any, any music that's on your phone using Bluetooth. We also bundle a new kind of voice remote we call the Roku Touch, which is a battery powered remote, kind of a puck sized, small remote that you can put on, say, your kitchen counter. And if you want to listen to music, you can, you can press the button and say, you know, play, play country music.

• 1:00:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, this is the first step. Are you envisioning a larger line of home products? I mean, are you envisioning a full wireless speaker ecosystem, you know, an Atmos system? Are you thinking that big?

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  Well, the way we think about it is we want to be sort of the underlying fabric that connects everything, all the audio stuff, especially to your TV. So, we announced the CES, a protocol called Roku Connect, which is a wireless protocol for connecting audio devices in your home, including to your TV. And that's the protocol that our new Roku TV wireless speakers use. They use this Roku Connect protocol to, you know, to connect automatically to the TV. But we also showed other features, CES, like connecting multi-room audio, being able to start listening to audio on my TV and then walk into the kitchen or a different room and continue listening to the TV show, you know, in that other room through wireless audio streaming. So, we definitely envision that TVs will evolve to have what we call home media networks. And that, you know, we want to, through protocols like Roku Connect, we want to tie everything together.

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  So, I mean, that's great. I'll be honest with you, that is, it's an ecosystem, and everyone is racing to put that ecosystem in your home, right? I mean, you have, I would call them frenemies, right? Like, Amazon Prime Video is on the Roku box, but they want to sell Fire TVs, they've always got Alexa devices, they do a full home audio integration, Google Play Movies, Google obviously makes Google Play Home, they make the Chromecast. How do you compete with those ecosystem vendors who are obviously important providers of video on your platform, but are also making competitive devices and ecosystems?

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  Well, in terms of audio, audio and voice, I mean, we're looking for ways to work with those, those companies' products. And our strength really is that there's a lot of Roku TVs being sold every day and a lot of households have Roku TVs. And so, starting with the TV and making it easy to expand from there. And then, once you've done that, you know, connecting with other devices in your home makes perfect sense. But we're not, we're not necessarily looking to do that, you know, a exclusion of, of other devices you might have in your home. Our goal is to be an open platform, work with as many companies as possible. But there's a lot we can do, you know, within our ecosystem and to make it. And again, our goal is to make the Roku TV the best TV there is. In terms of Google and Amazon, I mean, just generally, we've been competing with them for a long time. Like you said, they're frenemies. You know, actually, if you just look at smart TVs, for

• 1:03:00Speaker 05

  example, Google started shipping Android TVs before we started shipping Roku TV, but they have very small market share. We've got almost the entire market for licensed OSs. You know, Amazon has TVs, but Roku TVs sell extremely well versus those TVs. And I think it's because, you know, those companies have taken Android and ported it to the TV, which is fundamentally a phone operating system. And we built a TV operating system from the ground up. And it just gives a better experience on TVs. It's lower cost, better value, we have more content. So we've been competing with them for a long time and we've been competing very effectively.

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  So I want to ask you, you keep talking about the Roku TV, which is an interesting conceptual model because there isn't a Roku TV. You have a bunch of partners that make TVs, some very well reviewed TVs. I think everyone who thinks about TVs will just tell you to go buy one of the TCL Roku TVs. They're great, but they're not your TVs. Are you thinking that you're going to make your own TV? Or are you happy with the partner relationship? Or it seems like your business is giving the software to other vendors. But when you say the Roku TV, it's actually a long line of products from a variety of people.

• 1:04:04Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, that's absolutely right. And we're not going to make TVs. We're going to continue with our licensing program. You know, when I say Roku TV, that's what we call it. And that's what we call our reference design. Maybe that's confusing. I mean, when I use it the way you might say Android, you know, the way Google.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  So do they ship your reference design? Do you do all the work and they get all the glory? Or are they doing customizations on top of it?

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

  You know, we work with, I think, over 10 different TV brands at this point with hundreds of TV models. And they do a lot of work. But yes, we, I mean, we are a TV company. We design TVs. So we design, we design the hardware, we design the software. The hardware is a reference design. So we turn it over to the TV OEM or the factory or the brand. And then they actually productize it, but we'll help them with that. You know, we help them bring up the TV factories. We help them, you know, with whatever they need help with. So we're sort of their support organization. So we provide the reference design, the software and support. They build the TVs, they sell them. Once they're sold, and then in retail, we often provide retail support. So we help with retail marketing. And then once the customer buys a TV, then we take over all the software updates.

• 1:05:07Speaker 05

  So we provide, you know, regular reoccurring software updates, adding new features to all the Roku TVs. And so all the Roku TVs in the field do run the same software version. There's no real customization other than hardware customization.

• 1:05:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that is a model that, you know, we've seen many platform vendors try to enact. And it has proven harder in most cases than it seems like it's working for you. What's made it successful for you that you can actually hold everybody to the same software version on the same cadence?

• 1:05:35Speaker 05

  We do it for, that's the trick.

• 1:05:39Nilay Patel?

  It's not a bad answer.

• 1:05:41Speaker 05

  Well, it's the same. It's the Microsoft strategy, right? Like, all Windows PCs run basically the same operating system version because Microsoft does the updates.

• 1:05:48Nilay Patel?

  That's true. I guess I'm thinking in mobile where you see a fragmentation.

• 1:05:51Speaker 05

  Right. So in the mobile world, you know, Android generally doesn't do the software updates, which is why there's a lot of fragmentation.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  So TVs, to me, it seems like buying the smart TV is the future. Like, most people are gonna buy a smart TV. They're gonna get whatever OS. Like you said, a lot of them are getting Roku OSs. But they're gonna get that OS. It's gonna have most of the apps they need. The desire to buy a standalone box is dropping. Do you see the market turning in favor of smart TVs versus boxes? Or do you think the boxes are gonna continue to be a strong market?

• 1:06:21Speaker 05

  We think both are gonna continue to be a strong market for a long time. I mean, you know, if I had to choose, which I don't, I don't choose. But if I could say, okay, if I could choose for a customer where they're gonna buy a Roku TV or Roku streaming player, you know, a box or stuff, we would pick TVs. Because, you know, TVs is a more complete solution for the customer. We have, you know, more touchpoints with the customer. And the TVs are growing faster than players. But players is still growing well, nicely. And it's, we sell, you know, a lot of players every year. And especially as we start expanding into more international countries, players will continue to be important. And, you know, we sell a lot of streaming players to people that wanna upgrade their smart TV. You know, maybe they've got a Samsung smart TV, which might have a great picture, but doesn't have the channel that they wanna watch.

• 1:07:05Speaker 05

  And so they get a Roku streaming player to go with it.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I got a lot of questions about international expansion. So the first one was, there's something going on in Mexico, where the court said these boxes are being used for piracy. You appealed recently. They said, nope, can't sell them there. What's the status in Mexico?

• 1:07:22Speaker 05

  In Mexico, there was a lower court ruling that was brought by Cablevision, a Mexican cable company, that said that Roku players cannot be sold in Mexico. They can still be used, and we have lots of users in Mexico. But this court ruling said we can't sell players in Mexico, which we believe is a complete violation of Mexican law. And so we're obviously fighting that and expect to have that ruling overturned at some point. You know, Cablevision sort of made the... The case, which I would say is a pretext that Roku players should be banned because they're they're used a lot for piracy. But it turns out actually that Roku players, I mean, all open platforms have pirate content on them. But pirate content on Roku players is actually very low. I mean, worldwide, if you look at sort of the usage on a Roku player worldwide, ninety five, ninety nine point five percent

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  of the streaming hours are can be attributed to channels that are probably not pirate channels. And there's about half a percent that might be pirate channels. And then if you look in Mexico, it's higher, it's eight percent of the content could possibly be pirated. And ninety two percent is probably not pirated. But that's actually very low for Mexico. Piracy is very popular in Mexico and it's lower than other competing platforms like Android, for example. So we think that actually we're one of the best citizens when it comes to piracy. And it's just a pretext, it's a cable company in Mexico doesn't like streaming as a competition. And it's using any any method they can. We we think we'll prevail eventually in that.

• 1:08:43Nilay Patel?

  Other countries, a lot of people ask me about India. Are you thinking about pushing into India? Do you have a timeline there?

• 1:08:48Speaker 05

  Uh, we don't have any timeline. We know we haven't announced India as a country we're going into yet. But I mean, I mean, what I will say is that streaming is a is a global activity. And it's something that we think is is worldwide. And that's our, we aspire to be a worldwide platform company.

• 1:09:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so you guys are also moving into some original content. It's a thing you're starting to do. You've got you got your own channel. You're obviously competing with huge players with massive investments in content, you know. Netflix spends billions of dollars, Amazon spends billions of dollars. Apple, I think, has allocated a billion dollars towards content. How how do you think about that? Just that investment and where you want it to go over time?

• 1:09:25Speaker 05

  Right, so we're we actually are not producing original content. So that's that's I'll explain what the Roku channel is. But but we we don't have any current plans to produce original content for the reasons you just said. It's it's a multi-billion dollar business, you know, game. And and also, we're an open platform for distributing other people's content. So we, you know, we are a content distribution platform. We have lots of originals on Roku by Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and others. Now, the Roku channel is a channel that's our own and operated channel. But its goal is to provide another outlet to distribute distribute content on Roku. So content on the Roku channel comes from two primary sources. One is the biggest source is actually companies that already have channels on Roku,

• 1:10:05Speaker 05

  but syndicate that content into the Roku channel. So it gets to provide, you know, it's just another way to attract viewers to watch their content. And then we also have studios that own content that distribute directly onto the Roku channel. Viewing on the Roku channel is generally incremental. So if a company has their own channel, plus they have something in the Roku channel, the Roku channel is generally incremental. So for us, it's all about how can we make it easier for consumers to find content, especially free ad-supported content. So that's what we're doing with the Roku channel. It's not competitive with our channel partners. It's just another outlet for them to distribute their content.

• 1:10:39Nilay Patel?

  So do you have a team of curators, editors, programming professionals who are picking and choosing? Or it's, hey, do you want some incremental views on the show? Put it over here.

• 1:10:48Speaker 05

  There is an editorial team, but there's, but it's moving increasingly to algorithms, to, you know, a lot of recommendations.

• 1:10:54Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So you're not like aggressively programming it and promoting things. You're, you're saying put stuff here in the Roku channel. We'll promote it inside of the channel and potentially on the main interface?

• 1:11:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, inside the channel. So, I mean, we promote the Roku channel to drive users to it. And then once they're in the Roku channel, you know, it's, it's increasingly moving to recommendations based on your personal preferences and what's popular. And so it's just another outlet for content owners to merchandise and promote their content.

• 1:11:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. I have one last big question, and then I want to do a little lightning round of some of these Twitter questions. The last big question is just about the design of the interface, quite honestly. You've, you did mention that, you know, your competitors are repurposing mobile operating systems. Some of them are real flashy because they have, you know, they're putting a lot of horsepower on their boxes. And then they're running these full OSs with these graphics layers. Yours is still very simple and it's pretty, it's pretty direct. I think a lot of people appreciate it, but do you think about the big redesign that you need a flashier, more interactive TV experience with, you know, that enables different kinds of viewing experiences? Or are you, are you kind of dead ahead? We're going to get you to watching what you watch and get out of the way.

• 1:11:56Speaker 05

  Uh, well, there's two, I got two answers to that question. The first is that we put a lot of effort into making a super simple UI and we're continually working on the UI and testing different concepts. And you're right, sometimes we'll get like, we'll get dinged for like, oh, our UI is not flashy, or we haven't updated it. We do update it, people just don't notice because we try hard to not, you know, to not make it jarring. And the result of that is we have an incredibly simple UI that gets awesome MPS scores. I think we have the best, you know, the best ratings of any of our competitors. People confuse like flashy with great, simple, easy to use. And it's hard, you know, it's a challenge actually to stay focused on continuing to build a simple UI that customers like to use.

• 1:12:39Speaker 05

  And so that's what we do. So it's purposeful. It's not like we're, you know, didn't notice that competitors sometimes have flashier UIs. We just think that they're flashier and not in a good way. And then the second answer to the question is, and also, well, just, and then to add to that last one, and it's an app-based interface. So it's, you know, it's primarily about exposing apps like Netflix and the Roku Channel and Hulu. Now, there are 5,000 apps on Roku and growing, and that's too many for consumers to go digging around looking for shows to watch. And so we do think the future is a different UI, which is more content focused, more recommendation focused. And we have that UI. It's called the Roku Channel. So the Roku Channel is our, is our

• 1:13:19Speaker 05

  sort of sandbox for building a next generation, you know, content-first user interface. And someday, you know, when we think it's ready and good enough and has enough content in it, it'll probably, you know, become the home screen. But that's, that's not going to happen right away.

• 1:13:34Nilay Patel?

  I mean, and do all your channel partners, are they ready for that future where you're sort of disaggregating their interface and putting their content, remixing it into a new UI?

• 1:13:42Speaker 05

  We'll always have apps. And even if we, even, you know, if the Roku Channel became more the home screen, I don't mean literally it would become as is the home screen. I mean that the recommendation engine would become part of the home screen. But there would still be, there would still be apps where, you know, we're never gonna, at least we don't have any plans to not allow partners to have apps, if that's what they want to do.

• 1:14:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, I'm just looking at, again, some of your competitors, you know, Apple has the TV app, but Netflix isn't in it because they want you to be in their interface. Like, do you foresee that same kind of challenge coming up?

• 1:14:11Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, sure, absolutely. So the big guys like Netflix are gonna wanna have their own apps and their own user interface. But, once you get past, you know, Netflix and a few others, you can actually get more viewing for your content if you, you know, let someone like Roku do the merchandising of your content for you. I mean, that is what we do for a living, so, and we're better at it than most of our app partners. So, there is this dynamic where, I think, some apps, that sort of the mid-tier and long-tail, will have to choose between sort of riding their own app or actually getting more viewing by being part of, you know, someone else's content-first UI.

• 1:14:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Speaker 05

  But we'll, we'll always allow both options.

• 1:14:46Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I wanna do the slide here, but I have one more, kinda bigger question here. What you don't have right now is integration with one of the bigger voice assistants. So, you know, obviously Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple's got Siri. Are you gonna have to do that, or can you build an entertainment, you know, TV-focused voice assistant that lives away from those things?

• 1:15:04Speaker 05

  Well, our belief is that, you know, voice assistants are great for the products they're in. We don't think voice is the primary navigation for television. You know, what voice is great for is when you know what you want. Like, you know you wanna listen to the Beatles, then voice is great. You know, you say, "Play the Beatles." But, if you wanna browse around, look for a movie to watch, or a TV show, and you don't know what you wanna watch, then voice is not, is not helpful. So, for TV, we think voice is, you know, for things like search, it's useful. Um, so that's why we have voice remotes with voice input. And, you know, we announced the CES, we're coming out with our own voice assistant focused on media playback. So, you know, "Hey Roku," "Search for movies starring Tom Cruise," you know, those kinds of features will come to our platform. And then for music, voice is important, so, you know, like I said,

• 1:15:48Speaker 05

  we just announced the Roku Touch Voice Remote, and you can say, you know, "Play country music," and it'll play country music.

• 1:15:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay, here's three of the most popular questions. You support Dolby Vision on the TVs, but you don't support Dolby Vision on the boxes. Our viewers refer to it as "all of the lights," and they want all the lights lit up. Are you gonna add Dolby Vision to the boxes?

• 1:16:06Speaker 05

  Uh, Dolby Vision, we don't, that's, we don't announce feature products.

• 1:16:10Nilay Patel?

  Okay. The absolute most popular question, are you ever gonna let people order a remote with custom shortcut buttons? I'm not kidding. By far the most popular question.

• 1:16:19Speaker 05

  No, I'm sure you're not kidding. I was just laughing because we spent a lot of time thinking about how we could do that. Like, we were thinking, like, could we put, like, E Ink, little E Ink displays on the buttons. But anyway, we don't talk about future products. We do have the Roku Touch I was telling you about before has three preset buttons that you can program to do whatever you want. So that's, so that's pretty close.

• 1:16:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay. And then last one, this is my favorite one. What is your, Anthony Wood, what is your personal home theater setup?

• 1:16:42Speaker 05

  You know, I had a pretty complicated home theater setup like 15 years ago, and I just threw it out because it was too complicated. I got tired of trying to use it. So, right now, I don't have one, but I'm gonna get some Roku TV wireless speakers. I'm really looking forward to it because they sound awesome.

• 1:16:57Nilay Patel?

  That was a layup. That was, I think, that was a pure layup. All right. You don't, you don't have like a, like a seven, you don't have like a crazy TV guy, 7.4, 0.12?

• 1:17:05Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:17:06Nilay Patel?

  So you're, right now, you're listening to TV speakers and you're, and you're gonna get your, uh...

• 1:17:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I, I decided it was just too hard. I got tired of the remotes. It was just, it was just too much work.

• 1:17:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No wonder you put out speakers. You're solving your own problems. The true story of innovation exists.

• 1:17:19Speaker 05

  Finally, I've got a good home theater system.

• 1:17:20Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on The Vergecast. Really appreciate it. I'm excited to get these speakers and try them out. I'm excited. I mean, I'm a Roku customer. I'm excited to watch the ecosystem expand. And it's been really great talking to you.

• 1:17:32Speaker 05

  All right.

• 1:17:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Yo.

• 1:17:35Nilay Patel?

  Every week, my man.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:36Nilay Patel?

  What's it called?

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  It's always called Fold the Phone.

• 1:17:39Nilay Patel?

  Who is Fold the Phone sponsored by?

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Well, I'm glad you asked. Fold the Phone is a professional segment of The Vergecast, and it's brought to you by Darn Tough Vermont socks. They're back. If iPod socks were made by Darn Tough, they'd probably still be a thing.

• 1:18:02Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Is the ad copy that I have been given by Darn Tough. That shows you the deep cuts that these people are aware of. Made in the USA and unconditionally guaranteed for life. Use promo code VERGE at checkout for 20% off your first order at darnough.com.

• 1:18:22Nilay Patel?

  Very good. All right. Fold the phone.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Fold the phone. It just occurred to me that Darn Tough is actually a pun. Like, darn? Just now I realized it. Darning wool? Yeah. That's pretty good.

• 1:18:32Nilay Patel?

  Continue.

• 1:18:34Nilay Patel?

  My God.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Samsung will reportedly launch a foldable phone next year. So this is a Wall Street Journal report, seven inch display can bend in half to transform it into a wallet shape. We have been seeing folding phone rumors and patents for like my whole life.

• 1:18:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  And I just want, I'm just ready. I'm just, I think it's a really, really good time for a weird form factor. Um, just to do something, do something bonkers.

• 1:19:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  There, who, what's that? ZTE has that kind of folding phone and it's cool.

• 1:19:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  I think Samsung could do something fun. I feel like it'd be like a hot, what, what we need is like a razor moment. We haven't had a phone that's like so bonkers to look at.

• 1:19:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, I feel like Samsung, they've been curving the display. And where they haven't gotten is just curving it all the way over that edge.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  It's like a double sided?

• 1:19:29Nilay Patel?

  So the ZTE phone is like two screens and you fold them and they got a border.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:33Nilay Patel?

  Samsung is like, it's got, they just fold it and it unfolds into a flat sheet. That's a single screen. I'm like, I'm here for that.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  So the screen goes all the way around to the back and then you look, because that's the big thing is, is actual flexible display technology. None of them can do like a crease, like a piece of paper.

• 1:19:51Nilay Patel?

  So it would go around. It would be, it would be a radius. But like they're already kind of doing a radius. So you could see it.

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  As near as I can tell from like the, some of the renders and guesses at what Andromeda was going to be is that there would be two screens that would, but they would both.

• 1:20:04Nilay Patel?

  This is the Microsoft courier thing?

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Microsoft one. And so the hinge would be, there'd be no black border between them because the, they technically be two screens, but they'd be so close to each other when you unfold it. Cause the screens would bend in on the inside, if that makes sense. Uh, but this sounds like it's a, it's a single screen, which is better if they could do it. And it's been, like you said, just years that we've been waiting for one of these things to actually appear.

• 1:20:30Nilay Patel?

  And it's going to run FireOS.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  With YouTube.

• 1:20:35Nilay Patel?

  The whole, the dream is alive. That's super exciting. Um, there's also S9, there's a little bit of extra fun news. There's S9 leaks, or Galaxy Note 9 leaks. Um, S9 exists. The Note 9 is leaking out. So there's, we're, we're coming up, you know, it's mid summer, it's kind of the doldrums, but we're, we're coming up on that period.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  We're getting some new phones.

• 1:20:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we reviewed the Vivo Nex with the fingerprint set, I mean.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  The pop out camera?

• 1:21:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm so here for the weird hardware moment to be back.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  The dream phone. But yeah, I just, I just think you need something that you, you can't tell, you, you, you can tell that it's not just like every device. Something, something bonkers, which I guess Vivo Nex.

• 1:21:19Nilay Patel?

  All right. And then two last things. Uh, one, I want to remind people that Go90 is dead.

• 1:21:27Nilay Patel?

  It's important to me.

• 1:21:31Nilay Patel?

  Comcast got out of the way. Uh, they, they withdrew their bid for, for Fox. So Disney is going to buy Fox, bring those X-Men right into the MCU. I, I just.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  For the low price of.

• 1:21:45Nilay Patel?

  Billions of dollars, 60 some billion dollars.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Google can earn that in 12 days.

• 1:21:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. He nailed it.

• 1:21:55Nilay Patel?

  That's going to be a, a thing. Like, these companies are getting bigger and they're going to war with streaming services. So you're going to see Disney build that streaming service with those assets. At the same time.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Hulu, or they get controlling interest in Hulu.

• 1:22:08Nilay Patel?

  It seems like it, yeah. Uh, at the same time, Walmart, this is my favorite little, Walmart is going to try to turn Vudu into a Netflix competitor for eight bucks a month. I use Vudu because it, uh, its HD streams are higher quality than almost any other HD streams. And they have Marvel movies and Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, which no one else does. So I, I'm like a Vudu fan. They're cheap, they're good, high quality. I think I'm, I'd be the only one. But I, it's like, I'm in that moment where like, I have a secret and I would prefer if they didn't try to turn it into like a bigger company, like just leave this thing I like alone, but we'll see. But you can see all these companies, the, the race to like, build the content service is, is here.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Who'd you guys bet on? I think one of the interesting things was with the, what they were talking, AT&T, somebody from AT&T was talking with that whole controversy of like, they're going to ruin HBO.

• 1:23:02Nilay Patel?

  The idea that there's, in the long run, there's gonna be maybe six, maybe four. It feels like Netflix is a shoe in.

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  It'll be Netflix, whatever AT&T's Warner time HBO thing ends up being called DirecTV something. Hulu, I think, is either in or they're gonna like completely implode. I don't know why I think that, but there's enough stuff happening with mergers and acquisitions and mecha nations at the top level. And they have, all of them have such a stake in Hulu. I just worry that like someone, someone is gonna get a hold of Hulu and just screw it up. But that's on the list. And then, you know, crackle.

• 1:23:43Nilay Patel?

  YouTube.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's in that conversation, right? Like, I think that's sort of a, I don't know how that will break. But I think what we're seeing now is there's, you know, Anthony Wood was saying, the Roku channel on Roku is the sandbox for them to develop a content recommendation UI for the home screen. So eventually, on some timeline, the Roku home screen will recommend content to you, as opposed to just showing you a list of apps. I think everyone is headed in that direction, where you turn on your TV and it's, it's showing you stuff it wants you to watch. And that, it's like, who owns that interface is really the ultimate question. And then that becomes another kind of bundle, where now you're just paying Roku 12 bucks a month to get a channel guide. And like, you see, everyone's kind of weaving in and out of that. We're just reassembling

• 1:24:30Nilay Patel?

  a cable bundle. Like, who's gonna own that in the end? And the answer is the combination of Disney, AT&T, and Time Warner.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  Tim Armstrong will somehow be involved.

• 1:24:40Nilay Patel?

  Timmy. All right. Take the oath. I'd be so proud of him. He spends oath back out of, back out of Verizon. And he like sells it to like Sprint. Like, he just, he just keeps doing it. All right, that's it for this week. We ran a little long. Thank you for sticking with us. Thank you to Megan and Bijan for this week in Internet Culture. We'll have them back. We're continuing to experiment with these segments, so let us know what you think. Go listen to Converged with Casey Newton, another great episode this week. Doing great in the charts. Tell Casey you love him. If you're interested. We didn't talk about Facebook this week, but again, Casey has a great newsletter called The Interface if you want to get into that. And Mark Zuckerberg was on Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. Go listen to that. Recode Media with Peter Kafka is also excellent in the Vox Media Podcast

• 1:25:22Nilay Patel?

  Network. You can tweet at us. I'm Reckless Paul, Future Paul, Dieter's @Backlon. Please tweet Dieter your MacBook benchmarks. Just whatever MacBook you got. Whatever year, whatever generation, he would like to see your benchmarks. He's @Backlon. That is it for us. Thank you so much. Rock and roll. Paul. Promo code.