Surface Go, Apple earnings, and HipChat memories

In the thrilling conclusion to our three part epic miniseries, "Apple doesn't make the laptops we want," Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss how nothing really even matters because Apple is a phone company worth $1 trillion. Samsung, Amazon, and Tesla earnings are also discussed, along with Farhad Manjoo's "Frightful Five" thesis. Then, in "The Bezel Wars," our hosts discuss the Surface Go, iPad rumors, and the Windows 10 S life Dieter has been living. Paul's weekly segment about "Wireless Vapes" is as poignant as ever. Ultimately, the final question is something like, "How many notches can you fit on the blockchain?" 02:19 - The race to $1 trillion 05:25 - Phones, not Macs 14:18 - Amazon's cloud power 24:53 - Dieter's Surface Go impressions 26:41 - Can you name ten Windows 10 S apps? 34:20 - #donglelife 38:44 - Paul's weekly segment, "Wireless Vapes" 44:35 - Two notches, max 46:31 - Pixel 3 leak 47:54 - Mergers and acquisitions 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.

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to our cast, the flagship podcast of the Smarter Truck Rally.

• 0:12Nilay Patel?

  We're in the middle of this whole project to like professionalize the show and do segments. Says who? Well, me.

• 0:20Nilay Patel?

  And, and then I keep thinking the intro should be more professional. No, I just want to go to a monster truck. And literally every time I start trying to do the professional intro, I, I just like embarrass myself. Vergecast, Vergecast. Anyway, I'm, I'm Neelai, your old friend, the guy you know. Here's Paul.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:38Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, how are you feeling?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  I love the audience this week.

• 0:44Nilay Patel?

  I need to start preparing you for this is going to be a running joke. Well, we're feeling out whether it's going to be a running joke. With your level of hostility.

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm your frenemy this week. Ooh, that's a good. Okay, this is a true thing. I spent the last two days in like Vox Media Leadership Offsites. And so like yesterday, our head of revenue, Lindsay Nelson, who's like a brilliant person came and explained out, you know, how she sees our business going advertising. And there's a book that just came out called Frenemies by this brilliant New Yorker reporter named Ken Oletta, like another legend of the field. And it was basically like, frenemies is real, like all of the companies hate each other and they're all afraid of Google.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  And the ad agencies in the middle are getting squeezed and they're terrified. And she, uh, this is. It's a real confidence booster. This is total inside baseball, but she's like, so we go out and ask for ad money and we're asking for it from CMOs, Chief Marketing Officers of big companies who allocate the dollars. Uh, and she's like, the, the average tenure of a CMO in this industry is only two years. So just think about that. You show up. After four months, you still kind of don't know where the bathrooms are. At six months, you have a plan and then you know you're about to get fired for that last six months. So you really just have like the middle eight months to like make decisions. And she's like, that's who I talk to every day. It was a lot. Anyway, speaking of money,

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  it was a week of earnings. All the big companies, well, most of them reported their earnings. Apple, Amazon, Apple and Amazon are currently in a race to have a market cap of $1 trillion and become the first company that is a trillion dollar company in history, which is a real inkblot test for how you feel about capitalism.

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  Apple, at this moment, I think its stock price is 203 and change. And if it hits 207, it will be a trillion dollar company.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Wait, I have a trillion right now.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  You have the market cap? Did it happen?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  It's 1.007 trillion, trading at 204.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  So ding ding ding.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh, because they just sold a bunch. Yeah.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, our tech team is like, I'm a hunt. Apple's trillion dollar company.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  I mean, this is according to Yahoo Finance. I don't know.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  According to Apple's own stock app.

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  That's what's happening. The stocks app is rounding up for Apple.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  You know, they made such a big deal about the stocks app.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  They were getting ready to be worth a trillion dollars.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  The multiplication team was gutted so they could hire a couple more interface designers.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  You know, the other problem with that new Intel processor on the i9 is it can't do math. Back in the day.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Floating point.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  When you spin up Core 6, it starts rounding up to manage the thermals. Anyhow, by the time you are listening to this, it is all but certain Apple will hit a trillion dollars market cap. That's a lot. That is.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  It's the most in fact.

• 4:11Nilay Patel?

  And I, Amazon is sure not to be far behind. So that's like.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  Paul was just before he came on air, Paul was pointing out the Farhad Manjoo at the Times just wrote a great column about how there's so much tech backlash against these big companies. There's so much more recognition that they in many cases have monopolies or they act like

• 4:34Speaker 01

  How come Paul gets credit for this?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I clicked on a link that Dieter put in the show notes.

• 4:39Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, I just opened his doc.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe if Dieter had shown up on time.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Oh. 4am for this Virg cast. We're recording earlier than usual.

• 4:54Nilay Patel?

  It's true, we are recording. Anyway, the point of this piece is basically

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  the companies are facing more scrutiny and more pressure than ever. And yet they are succeeding beyond anyone's, beyond literally any measure that we had previously recorded. Unless you're the stocks app, which I think has been at a trillion for like a year now, like an aspirational market cap situation.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  It's the Sony product of stock apps.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So let's just start with Apple and Apple's results are pretty interesting. They're, you know, they sell a lot of iPhones and Tim Cook on the call said this is the story of this quarter is the iPhone and services.

• 5:38Nilay Patel?

  What's interesting is the narrative around Apple, I don't think, you know, we're about to see new iPhones in September. That is actually not far away, right? It's August. So we're a month away from new phones. I, the iPhone 10 to me, like it's a phone I have.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  Obviously it has a great new design and it does all the stuff, but I, it doesn't feel like it, they've extracted everything from the iPhone 10 that they could, you know, and they're gonna put more.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  You mean they have more to do? They're not done with phones?

• 6:11Nilay Patel?

  Is that what you're saying? They're not done with phones. It just seems like the narrative is not, the iPhone 10 was the next revolution of phones, right? Like it was a really big stepping stone to like where they might be going, but.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  That business seems, as I think we talk about this all the time, much more iterative than before.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the, the way I see it is the, the interesting thing about this is their ASP, the average selling price for phones is like ticked up again for the first time in a while since basically the iPhone 6. And that has meant that, uh, like the iPhone 10 hung on and kept, people kept on buying it after that first initial wave of early adopters, which is very, very good news for Apple.

• 6:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And so the, the next question, it wasn't like a wholly like changed, change everything massive seller, but it was a, it was a very good seller and it, it has hung on longer than I think some people were thinking it might. So that's the good news. The, the question is, to your point about them extracting more out of the iPhone 10, what are they going to do for, in September? And to me, like the big thing, the number one thing that Apple has to do with the iPhone is they gotta make a big, cheap one for India.

• 7:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  And China.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  So let's talk, well, well, there's two things I want to talk about with Apple within earnings specifically. One is more phones and the other is Macs. So with phones, we just ran a great piece, uh, from Kunal Dua, who's the editor of Gadget 360, which is India's largest tech site. Also just like a huge tech site. It is bigger than The Verge, uh, because literally three phones come out in India a day. And they just, they cover them all and they help people, like it's crazy and they do an amazing job over there. But so Kunal, I, there was a report, I think two weeks ago, like Apple has sold less, fewer, fewer than a million iPhones in any of this quarter. All right. So I said, Kunal, can you write a piece for us?

• 8:10Nilay Patel?

  He said, yes, which is great. Uh, and his piece like really lays bare the challenges Apple faces in that market. One, people do want things like dual Sims because they have actual carrier competition. So they switch between the cheaper data plan and the cheaper voice plan all the time. Um, they. This is like primary computers for people, so they treat them like computers. So they want things like more RAM and expandable storage.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  And big screens.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  Big screens. So they they talk about the specs and they can obviously get insane specs in the Android market if they want them. Um, they're the camera thing. This is like the most interesting part of his argument was Apple typically competes on it on its camera. But every camera is basically fine, especially if your primary screen is actually a phone screen. Right. So he's like, if you're always just looking at a phone screen, most of these cameras are fine. Which is not how like we have ever talked about cameras on the show or on the verge, right? Like.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Well, not since like the early days of Instagram, right?

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  Right. Um, so I think Apple has to get into that cheaper space. So there are rumors they're gonna put a bigger LCD iPhone 10 ish design. There are rumors that there's a 10 plus coming with the bigger OLED. So they're expanding the range of iPhones again.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  There's also a reference of a dual SIM in the latest iOS 12 beta.

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So it seems like they're they're gonna make the moves around the phone.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Apple would ever make an iPhone Note?

• 9:44Nilay Patel?

  With it like a stylus, an Apple pencil, you just plug that into the bottom of your phone.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  I mean, it's clearly something that a lot of people want. I don't get it. I can't write with.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so that's a phone. I mean, it's clear the phone is just rolling along. Hmm. It's the iPhone. It's their business. I think that is great. And there people are buying them and they're loving them and they're doing portrait. Someone I know last night showed me a photo and excitedly told me the photo was in portrait mode. And I was like, that's great. Like, I don't, you did good, you know, like people love the thons. That's great. And it's sort of like incrementally going up. I think the problem that we've all identified with Apple is it seems like the company keeps getting bigger. It keeps getting more money and their attention on everything else seems to be wavering and the quality of the everything else is

• 10:33Nilay Patel?

  seems to be falling or seemingly ignored or not even there, right? So like Macs, lowest Mac revenue in a long time.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yep.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  Because they didn't update the Macs.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel like we've covered this pretty thoroughly, but.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I get it. Apple is an iPhone company. I mean, I feel like for all of these, all these companies, like their, their, their challenge is like developing markets and Apple, if Apple wants to keep growing, isn't that where they have to go? Like where else?

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  So here's a headline from Mac rumors, which I don't think you can accuse of being biased against Apple. It's right. It's right in the name. Apple sold fewest Macs in any quarter since 2010 as nearly entire lineup was outdated.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, exactly. I mean, I just feel like they gave up on, on, on Macs. So I can give up on caring about Apple's computers. Because that's what I'm at right now.

• 11:34Nilay Patel?

  So I mean, I think that's like just the story of Apple, like their, their core business, the phone is doing incredible. And I think in the broader market, that masks the thing that we constantly talk about in the show, which is like all of the other stuff that we depend on. By the way, there were also rumors of new iPads and some mocks floating around. And new iPads will have an edge to edge display and no headphone jack. Because they don't have enough room.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  We don't know for sure about the no headphone jack. There was rumor that would only, that Face ID on it would only work in portrait mode, but Rambo over at nine to five found that it does. In fact, there is a reference to Face ID recognizing orientation, which is a sign that it will in fact work in landscape.

• 12:17Nilay Patel?

  That's good. Yeah, I mean, there's no, but you don't just feel it in your heart that they're going to take the headphone jack away in the iPad.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just like, hey, parents of the world, you know how you hand an iPad to your kids with some cheap headphones? And that's how the car works?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Wait, but just back to the developing market.

• 12:35Nilay Patel?

  Now your child will learn about Bluetooth pairing.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Oh, God. That's, that's, wait, Apple's really into getting people to learn to code. They figure Bluetooth is like a really good first step to getting educated in how computers work.

• 12:51Nilay Patel?

  Does your toddler have an interest in computers? Well, Bluetooth will stop that.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Best Buy has a whole section of like child safe headphones.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  It's a real thing. Now all of those manufacturers get to make Bluetooth.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Wait, but Huawei shipped more phones than Apple in the second quarter.

• 13:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I did not like not at the high end.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  But does that matter? Is that a threat?

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  That's not an existential threat.

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Android has always had, it's an existential threat to Samsung. Right? Like Huawei is a growing influence. The Android market is fracturing. Whatever's happening in Europe with the unbundling, they Google can address China because they don't have the Play Store there. What like the Android market is getting bigger. It's always been bigger than the market, at least in my.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Well, and and Samsung's earnings are like S nine sales kind of soft. Sony is done finally, and they finally admitted that they could, they should stop making the same design they've been doing for five years. Phone business.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Sorry, man, I really, everybody wants to love Sony phones. It's like you pick them up and you're like, oh, wow, like.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  How they make it so heavy?

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  Weights in the phones.

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  Old Beats headphones. Um, yeah. So, okay, so that's phones. That's Apple. I think it's worth, it's worth talking about Amazon for a couple of minutes here because quarterly profit of 2.5 billion, it's highest ever. That's like, it's a big number. Amazon also typically managed itself to like nothing. They ran at breakeven, but now they're just getting bigger and they're, I don't know if everybody thinks that Amazon is an infrastructure company. Right? Like their money comes from AWS and they still manage a store very tightly. And I.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Their margins come from it.

• 14:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Nilay Patel?

  And I just don't think like anybody quite thinks of it that way, even though everybody knows it. Do you know what I mean? Like out in the world, people still think Amazon is just a retail store. It's like disrupting retail stores at a high level. And fundamentally, what it did was disrupt the idea of cloud computing.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  But don't you still think that's relatively small part of it?

• 15:11Nilay Patel?

  It's the lion's share of their profits. So one of the analysts in Farhad's piece in New York Times is like, if you're a retailer, you are terrified because now Amazon has, you know, by genius or by luck, I kind of think it's a mix of the two and maybe more luck, ended up at a place where they can subsidize the store with their cloud business and continue to drive prices down because they they're able to just run that thing as cheap as they want, with as little margins as they want because they have got this cloud business raking in the cash for them.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:43Nilay Patel?

  But like not a great place to be.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  But what really impacts me as a person day to day feels like Amazon selling products, everything.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  And shipping it really fast.

• 15:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  And like the fact that they do pump those margins from the cloud computing business into making retail unassailable.

• 16:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what you and Dieter are saying the same thing.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Think so.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  With different valence. Yeah, just you're emphasizing the middle words and Dieter's emphasizing the final words.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  I've heard this thing about cloud computing being like such a huge, important part of Amazon's business, and that's obviously true, especially from a profit perspective. But there is also the fact that Amazon as a retail business is just really, really, really, really big.

• 16:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, there's not that, but if you're Walmart. Like Walmart, I think Dieter tweeted a screenshot, like Walmart is super thirsty.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:40Nilay Patel?

  They are partner, like we have like 15 headlines on the site that's like Walmart partners with another company, Walmart partners with Toshiba, like just like all day long, because they're trying to build this hedge against Amazon with alliances, which is basically how like post-World War I Europe worked.

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  Amazon is, Amazon is like.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  Who's the Archduke in this metaphor? I'm just saying, like, there, there's a hegemon and they're forming alliances. Right? This is literally my freshman year international relations class. But what they don't have is an economic engine like Amazon's business. And that economic, the, the real question, honestly, is like, is that fair? Like, can you, like, in a, in a normal retail environment, like a store opens up in your neighborhood and they undercut the other store on price and like lose money on prices, that's illegal. Right, that's predatory pricing. So like the big box store comes to your town and they, I mean, Walmart just did this so for an African, so it's a little bit common, but like Walmart

• 17:50Nilay Patel?

  takes the loss on everyday staple items. So you stop going to the general store and then they make it up on some other margin because they also sell tires, right?

• 18:01Nilay Patel?

  That usually is illegal, right? That usually is classified as predatory pricing. The question for Amazon is like, can you put that into that rubric because they run this cloud business that is still profitable, even though it's subsidizing so much of the investment into the store? And the answer like is like, uh, Jeff Bezos looks great in a leather jacket. Like, um, so I think that's super interesting. I think that, I think Farad's piece is basically right. Like the, the scrutiny of these things is going to keep going up because the way these businesses work is unlike literally any business that ever existed.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Like the scrutiny is going up, but it has not affected any of them yet. They're for Facebook, had to minute. Facebook lost like a million users in Europe. Boo hoo there. Their stock tanked, but they're still the fifth biggest company by, you know, like they're, they're, they're ahead of Berkshire Hathaway. Like the, the, the point is that all of the like, everything is dour and we're all not comfortable with these companies. And like there, there's going to be consequences. The consequences are not hitting them in their stock price or their profits.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I, I do have a general optimism that, that like right now, the technology groundwork is being laid for decentralized alternatives to

• 19:18Speaker 01

  I thought you were going to say revolution.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  For revolution.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  The Linux on the desktop revolution.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  I think it's going to take a while to get it right and, and, and to make it, uh, good. But I think there's, there

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Aren't necessarily fundamental things, especially in a pure software sense. When you're talking about especially like something like a social network that is just a web, you know, a website, basically, and apps. I don't think there's anything intrinsic that that is going to stop ultimately people wanting like more control of their data and of the the access and the controls and the privacy and the censorship and all that sort of stuff. It can, I think, definitely is driving the demand for an alternative while simultaneously

• 20:12Speaker 02

  a lot of the technology technologies being built, I feel like that will make an alternative viable.

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  I don't think it's all blockchain. I think I think blockchain is become like this sort of like red herring for people who love decentralized stuff. And so they kind of emphasize it maybe, maybe a lot too much.

• 20:32Nilay Patel?

  Blockchain is just, it's a word that if you even whisper it, people are going to start tweeting it up.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Okay, okay.

• 20:36Nilay Patel?

  Look at what you did.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  We write about technology, it's a technology, people spending millions of dollars on crazy blockchain ideas.

• 20:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  But I think that because there is something there that that is still being teased out, but I think will eventually show up to be very competitive against these companies, especially in the software space. I think hardware is obviously a lot, a lot harder.

• 21:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but my skepticism of all these blockchain ideas is that ultimately what they all are is supposed to be like replacements for currency. Right, like that's what Bitcoin is.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  That's what Bitcoin is.

• 21:15Nilay Patel?

  But even Ethereum, right, which is, those are the two major players. Although Ethereum has all the smart contract stuff and the sort of compute piece, great. But no one's, no one is using them that way. Like, once you get the tokens, it's the sort of transact piece of it is the next part of it where you are, you've moved value, like money into the system to be decentralized, like hasn't happened. And then I think once it does happen, the economies of scale that we're talking about with Amazon.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:50Nilay Patel?

  The, literally because it's decentralized, no one will consolidate them in a way that creates that economy of scale.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Well, because.

• 22:00Nilay Patel?

  Especially if no one's transacting the tokens. Which at least right now, just like does not like literally everyone's like Hoddle like the opposite of that.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Well, but, but, but the core idea, right?

• 22:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Is that you have grown mistrusting of a centralized authority? And you want to be able to distribute that trust? And I think that, that concept, I think, could eventually be competitive with Amazon and Facebook and Google.

• 22:30Nilay Patel?

  I hope so.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  I mean, if we're waiting for the blockchain to save us from like big tech monopolies.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  I'm not saying, I'm not saying blockchain, I'm saying, I'm saying the exact same impetus that leads people to trying to solve everything with blockchain.

• 22:43Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Is the similar motivation that will lead to people finding something that actually really works as an alternative.

• 22:50Nilay Patel?

  I agree with you completely, except Facebook is starting a cryptocurrency division.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  They're just gonna do, you know what I mean? Like they're, they, they see it too.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  I, I think the central.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  The whole question, Paul, is, is that impetus is there, but is the, is that social force anywhere near as powerful as the social forces of these big five, five companies combined right now? And I don't think that the answer is very clearly yes. I think the answer might be that those big five companies have more social power, more force in the world in terms of capital and just social influence than any, you know, anti-establishment desire that we're currently seeing funneled into stuff like blockchain.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think ultimately, my hope is that like large bigness and centralization of, of, of companies like Facebook and Google, who like try to make decisions for everybody is going to be their undoing. That's my thinking is that the, a kind of a one size fits all is not going to work for people.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, I hope when the new version of stocks comes out in iOS 12.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  You set up all the alerts for when you're proven correct.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  This has been Tech Earnings Seasons with future crypto socialist Neil Ippolititer.

• 24:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm in it. Let's, let's get it.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Comrades.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm putting the verge on the blockchain today. I don't, I don't know what that means.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  It's all about blockchain.

• 24:24Nilay Patel?

  What's it, what's the thing? The Civil? I know it's not all. Civil, the journalism startup that's like journalism on the blockchain.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  Maybe we'll do that. I've read all of their white papers. Couldn't tell you how that works. But we're, we're, I'm gonna figure it out and we're, we're gonna talk about it.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Microtransactions.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  Uh, just wrap up some other earnings here. Tesla is finally making money in a Model 3.

• 24:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, we talked about Samsung. Samsung's like, great chips, sweet phones. I think that's where they live. And then obviously Facebook. But Dieter, let's talk about something fun.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Good.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Good and fun.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  Something wholesome.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 25:01Nilay Patel?

  Pure.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  And that is Windows tablets.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Just like my mother used to bake.

• 25:10Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't love a Windows? No, the server's go is like here.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:13Nilay Patel?

  You've got one. Tell us about it.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. If, if you're wondering why we don't have a review up yet, uh, all these units today is, uh, Thursday, the embargo day for reviews. Uh, we got it, I think Monday or Tuesday, pretty like it was Monday, pretty late, like just wanted more time to actually do, do well on it. So, uh, by the time you listen to this, I might, uh, have shot the review, but we're, we're planning on building the review based on your questions. So tweet me your questions. I'm at Backlon and I will build the review off of them. Um, it is, um, it is wonderful. It is a wonderful little computer. I like it a lot. But as I, I said in the video, I have a, a very big soft spot for tiny little computers and that's precisely what this is.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  It's just a great little dude. I don't know what to say.

• 26:00Nilay Patel?

  How is its Pentium processor? I think is the only question that anyone has had so far.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, the answer is better than I expected. As long as you don't expect too much, you will be pleasantly surprised. I was expecting utter garbage.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And I got like pretty good. No, but so here's the thing. If you live in S mode, which you shouldn't do, cause S mode is awful. Um, you can, I had like eight, 10 apps open and one of those apps was Edge and that Edge, uh, app had probably 10 tabs in it and it was fine. Like they were all, you know, like Edge and Outlook and Spotify and, you know, news, the news reader that I use, I forget, you know, a bunch of like Windows.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  No, Dieter, I'm sorry.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Store apps.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  I'm sorry. You said 10 apps, Windows S. I need you to name 10 apps.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Let's got them off.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Okay, we've got, we've got Edge, Outlook. I forgot what else.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Uh, hang on, I'm.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  I know there's a Netflix app, there's an.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  What you're not seeing in your car is Dieter furiously using the service go. I'm just opening, okay, so, uh, calendar, Outlook, Edge, Todoist, Twitter, which we're gonna count even though it's PWA, Slack, Simple Notes, Next Gen Reader.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Is that like an RSS?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Word.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Word. There you go.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  I'm not a web browser.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Fire in the big gun.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  That's nine.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  We, we, oh, you want one more?

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Candy Crush.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  No, it does ship with Bubble Witch 3 Saga, though, if you like that.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Is that a free to play? I bet that's a free to play.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  I'm sure it doesn't count.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Alto's Adventure, I don't know. I tried, I've tried running Cuphead, but it crashes on launch, even though it's like an Xbox game.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Uh, I ran Ori and the Blind Forest and connected an Xbox controller over Bluetooth and

• 28:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  it ran, but it was a little bit laggy. Uh, once we turned off S mode, like, you can edit photos in Lightroom CC, classic. Like, you can do it. You don't want to do a huge batch and you're gonna eventually get slow, but the bigger problem with it isn't like, as long as you're not trying to do too much, the biggest problem is actually the screen is pretty small. It's a tenant screen and the bezels are approximately 30 inches around it.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  It's just got huge. What about the? It makes the screen feel so tiny.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  What about the ergonomics overall? Is it basically like using an iPad Pro and an Apple keyboard?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  It feels more cramped than an iPad Pro, honestly, than the 10.5. The keyboard's a little bit smaller, but I still got used to it pretty quickly. They've designed it really well. The caps are like concave a little bit and it's got better key travel.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  The only problem with the ergonomic honestly is that it's, it's just, it feels a little bit cramped. But you eventually get used to that and. How is it as a tablet?

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  Not as a little Windows PC in a funky form.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Have you used Windows tablets?

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  So that's the, yeah, okay.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  I actually, I've been using, because the screen is so small, I've been using it in tablet mode instead of windowed mode, even though I've got the keyboard attached a lot more. And, you know, you get by, it's like, it's okay. Like split screen is pretty good. I, it, it shows you which, where the focus is better than, you know, an iPad does, which is nice. The cursor focus, I mean.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  You know, and like switching between, it's pretty good. You know, it's, it, it, as it, if you're thinking of it as a tablet, like the problem is that you won't have the same number and quality of apps that you get on an iPad. But, you know, you get full window stuff. The, the hilarious thing is, did you know that Amazon pulled the Kindle app from the Windows Store? What?

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  I don't know. You have to, you have to, you have to exit S mode to download the Kindle app. And the Kindle app for Windows is not good.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  It just seems, it seems extremely petty. So that's fun.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  But is, do Amazon and Microsoft have a beef now?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  No, they love each other. They're doing Siri and Cortana, they're both in Seattle. Everyone's at the fish market, they're just throwing the fish at each other.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  I've seen it.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Didn't Satya say like, I love, I love being in the same city as Amazon and I love competing with them. And I also love like, they're frenemies. Yeah, they're, they're very, they're very happy with each other. Like in general, like half of the Alexa team is just like old Windows engineers. Like, you know, there's like an affinity.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's weird. I mean, maybe it's just, maybe the, well, let me ask you this. Aside from Kindle, would you recommend buying this thing and leaving it in S mode?

• 30:40Speaker 01

  No, I tried, I tried it. No, I tried. I tried living in S mode, but here's the thing.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  I use one password, not available in S mode in the, in the store. Fine. But you know what is available in the Windows Store? The one password extension for Edge, the Edge browser, which means that you launch it and then the one password extension tab pops up and says, hey, in order for this to work, you have to install one password. And then you go to install one password and you can't unless you turn off S mode.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  So you have to uninstall the one password manager.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  It feels like they walked themselves right into that.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. There isn't a lot of Windows S in the world, right?

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  So the store is like, usually I think people assume that this, whatever you're doing on a store is happening on regular Windows.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Yes, but if Microsoft wants to make Windows as a thing, which is a viable goal to have, to make a version of Windows that's hard to bloat. They have to work really hard at it. That's, that's not a downhill ski.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, they've tried everything. They've tried paying developers. They've tried making a whole mode of Windows that like, tries to incentivize and force developers to make, put stores in the Windows Store. Like, I don't know, like they, first of all, they should just, I don't know what the cut is in the Windows Store, but it should be, it should be negative. Like, they should, they should pay you a tiny little bonus every time someone downloads your app in the Windows Store. Like, that's where they're at. That's what they need to do.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  So would you, would you, would you buy one of these for personal enrichment?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  It should not be your main computer. It's not powerful enough for that. As like a side hustle.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  As a thing, as a light computer when you travel, it's, it's pretty great. But again, like, I'm okay. I like the original. I like the little MacBook, even though it's underpowered, right?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  I, I can get by on an iPad. This, I can do a bit more here than I think than I can on an iPad.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Well, you can run Next Gen Reader.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can. It's good. It's a good RSS reader, man. Come on.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  There's a high probability-

• 32:50Nilay Patel?

  I feel bad for the next gen reader people now.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  They're great. They're the next generation.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  I'm sorry. There's a high probability I'm trading in my Surface Pro 4 for the LTE version of this that comes out later this year.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  The big question for me is the price. So the good one is with a keyboard is 650 or 680.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  And with the SSD instead of-

• 33:12Speaker 01

  EMMC, which is the low end. Yeah, the low end one has not enough RAM and it's got EMMC storage, which is like an MMC card soldered to a chip or something. It's apparently not good. They said, Microsoft, of course, sent me the good one, so I can't comment on the quality of the bad one yet.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  I mean, I will say that I reacted to the iPad refresh news by just like immediately buying a refurbished iPad Pro 10.5, which you can get for like 550 bucks. And it's like a great computer. Like, that's what I play with Lightroom on. I'd still go back to this. When I saw this, I was so excited about it and I was certain it would sell with a keyboard for like $400. The Surface Go.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  The Surface Go seems like an amazing idea. Cut the iPad Pro off to the knees. Like, we're more pro and we're cheaper. No way. It's not cheaper. Oh, damn.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Also, have you heard of the Pentium?

• 34:09Nilay Patel?

  What's it like build wise? Is like premium, good feeling?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's magnesium. Some people have said that the magnesium feels a little bit more plasticky than the Pro, and I guess that's true, but I don't know. I don't care. It's good.

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  I could, I could talk for another 45 minutes about USB-C, but I don't want to.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh, someone, a few weeks ago, we were talking on the Vergecast and I was like, there's no USB-C power ports in Home Depot. Added last week, people have been tweeting me pictures of wall sockets, which is amazing place to be in your life. When, when, when people, when my people are in the Home Depot and they're like in the power socket aisle and they're like, I gotta tell Eli about this. That's like-

• 34:50Speaker 02

  That's beautiful.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  That's a community.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  You know what?

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  That's shared vision.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  I've been, let me know if anybody finds this. Whenever I go to a bodega, they've got the cheap headphones behind them. I'm always looking if any of them have lightning connectors. I've never seen a lightning connector headphone in a bodega.

• 35:08Nilay Patel?

  I don't think, I don't think any of those companies can make the DAC cheap enough. I am still just like on it with USBcs, like everything's a mess.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 35:17Nilay Patel?

  To be clear, USBcs is a mess because no one will pick an audio standard. So we just published a chart. What was it? It was, Peter, what was it, Dan review, right? About USB, it was Sony put out a USB C charge and listen.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 35:33Nilay Patel?

  Which looks insane. And then there was a chart of what phones it work with. And it's like easily 50% of phones don't work because they use a different audio standard. So that's just like a industry, that's a decentralized problem. You gotta put the audio DAC on the blockchain.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  And that'll solve it.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  And then on the Apple side, Apple is clearly restricting what people can do with lightning connector. Like they, it's not like a secret, like they are because they're trying to move people to wireless. And so both ecosystems are not developing. And so what we're left with is like, you know, you should do, you should buy some AirPods. And then never listen to the low end of your music again in your life.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  You know what I did? I bought Beats X and you know what? They were great for a while and then you know what happened? The right ear doesn't work anymore.

• 36:17Nilay Patel?

  Peter, didn't you tweet that you liked the Beats X last week? You start some controversy.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's been a debate. Um, Mike and I are, um, we, we like the Beats X. Uh, the rest of the Verge staff thinks they sound awful.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Oh, they do.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  But neck, yeah, but neck buds are cool, man.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  The Beats X are too long, but neck buds are super convenient. They're, they're in some ways more convenient than truly wireless headphones. I've switched to the Jabra Elite 65 Ts myself, and I do like them, even though my first pair crapped the hell out with a bad firmware update and Jabra customer support was very unhelpful. Um, but nevertheless, I persisted. Um, anyway, yeah, I like the Beats X. They're fine.

• 36:55Nilay Patel?

  Um, speaking of headphones, uh, This headline's great. Does this little green dot mean that new AirPods case is imminent? There's a picture of a new AirPods case, it's got a little green dot on it.

• 37:08Nilay Patel?

  Apple has said they're gonna put out a wireless AirPods, like, you're gonna be able to charge everything on AirPower. So if they're, they're showing you the photos of the wireless AirPods case, there's a chance it means the AirPower charging mat is coming.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, Apple's claimed a lot of things.

• 37:24Nilay Patel?

  Half-Life 3 confirmed.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  For instance.

• 37:29Nilay Patel?

  It's kind of.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  I kind of want Apple to never.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Halo was gonna be an AirPower exclusive.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  I want, I want AirPower to live in that same limbo world that open, you know, open standard FaceTime lives in. You know?

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  That just, they announced it on stage and like the team that was responsible for building it was like, sitting in the audience going, wait, what? We're, I guess we're making that now. And then it never happens.

• 37:51Nilay Patel?

  That's not a product, that's just an oval.

• 37:55Nilay Patel?

  It's not, that was just an idea we had.

• 37:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, it's, I, there, we seem due for a really big Apple moment in September, right? New phones, new iPads.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  New Macs.

• 38:09Nilay Patel?

  Maybe some new Macs.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  They have to.

• 38:12Nilay Patel?

  AirPower.

• 38:15Nilay Patel?

  Siri will get not one, but two timers.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Small, small iPhone. Just give me a small iPhone.

• 38:22Nilay Patel?

  So we're cruising up on it.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Give me a small iPhone and a Mac Mini with a 1070 in it, and I'll be good.

• 38:29Nilay Patel?

  You're not.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  I'll just, I'll just put one under each arm and walk into the sunset. My small iPhone and my GPU accelerated Mac Mini.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  You got dreams, man, and I appreciate them.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Nvidia, please.

• 38:43Nilay Patel?

  I've always liked that about you. Speaking of your dreams, Paul.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  Every week. My dude, he do a segment.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  It's called Wireless Vapes.

• 38:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  It's very exciting for, for everybody, but I lost the tab. If only I was using Edge.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Juul plans to release new Bluetooth-enabled vapes internationally.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  I didn't actually read this.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I could tell you what's going on with this.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, please explain Bluetooth vapes to me.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  They have to release it internationally because the like approving new vapes in the US has slowed down because of the FDA. The Bluetooth would allow them to like, you know, have fancy Bluetooth features. It's not the first Bluetooth vape. So they could track your usage and blah, blah, blah.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Like, so you could have an app?

• 39:37Speaker 01

  You can have an app. It would all that app would also allow them to authenticate, which would mean that they could at least try to make the case that they are not allowing the youths to use it because you could, they could say the thing won't turn on unless you authenticate with your phone and you have to prove that you're 18 on your phone in some way. And therefore, they're restricting kids from using it. Rachel Becker, who's been on the jewel beat lately, also did a story about like flavors and they're restricting flavors. And it looks like, yeah, that's coming to lower nicotine, lower flavors. Anyway, that is the idea is they they'll be able to offer some Bluetooth features and they'll be able to tell the world, look, we're not letting kids use these. We've made our app so that

• 40:18Speaker 01

  they can't. That all seems fine. But here's my question. I tweeted this. Do you think a company that is in the business of selling you a product that you're addicted to should be able to track your usage of said addiction via their app? Like, that gives them a ton more information about how you're vaping and how much nicotine you're taking in. And I don't know, like, that's, that's, that's just seems scary to me.

• 40:44Nilay Patel?

  So I just love the idea that what what our industry is moving towards to is creating problems and then selling you Bluetooth solutions. Like, that is the new business model. Like, we have, we have made an enormous problem for you. And now Bluetooth pairing will fix it in some way.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Internet of vapes.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  So Jewel, just to be clear, they're not releasing these in North America. You will like this. Hmm. Because of regulatory problems. So new vape development was frozen in the States. And so they're releasing this in like, like Israel and China or something. And they could release them here. Dieter, I'm with you that like the tracking is scary. But what they are not doing is explicitly saying, we want you to quit the jewel. Right? That should be the goal is like, you're no longer addicted to nicotine in this product, whether it's Bluetooth or not is going to help you get there. They're very much in the mode of like.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  I mean, that's pretty hard. That's a hard, that's a hard one for a company. It's hard to like, here's a, here's a feature that helps you quit.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So like, why would you let this company do all this self regulatory behavior? When it's not in their own instincts or incentives. Right. And like, I think that's the problem Jewel has run into is like, they were the cool kids for a long time. And now everyone's like, wait, what if your shit's really addictive?

• 42:14Speaker 02

  What if Jewel could communicate over an open standard vaping protocol? And then someone, Jewel could write an app that's like, smoking AC cigarettes is fun. And then it's like a little dancing like shapes or something. But someone else could, could use the same API and write a quitting jewel. That's very somber.

• 42:37Nilay Patel?

  Are you saying that we, we have to, we're going to have to deal with like, uh, JavaScript standards for Jewel?

• 42:42Speaker 02

  I, I'm thinking more like a IEEE standard.

• 42:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You're going to like the straight market solution, which is like a range of vaping apps are available.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  And you're like.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  We have a, a, an API.

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But like from like a public health policy perspective, you don't really want the like, you don't want the market to self-select for like, I'm in a nicotine coma all day long.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  I mean, if it were an open standard, it could connect to, um, digital assistants. So you could, you could walk home and you could say out loud in your room, hey, Google, is my kid hitting that vape? And then it would be able to tell you.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's coming. Alexa supported.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Have I told the story of how I got addicted to cigarettes on this podcast?

• 43:25Nilay Patel?

  Did you start smoking cigarettes?

• 43:26Speaker 02

  No, I started vaping. I was not a cigarette smoker and then Enjoy, remember Enjoy, those like, the vapes that look like cigarettes, but they're like kind of single use.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  So one Enjoy is like two packs, but I didn't know how much I was smoking it. And so I got super, super hooked on nicotine.

• 43:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  And then I had some friends who were smoking real cigarettes and then I just started smoking real cigarettes. But if there had been an app.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Maybe I could have moderated my use. I'm just saying, I don't know.

• 44:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't think the answer is.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  It's easier to tell how much you smoke a real cigarette because you run out of them.

• 44:07Nilay Patel?

  If Jewel wants to solve this problem for itself, it needs to sell the quitters pack, which is like one full strength pod, one 3% pod.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  And one taste pod.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  One that just hurts you.

• 44:21Nilay Patel?

  And they're just not, they're not doing that. I couldn't tell you why.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  All right. That has been Wireless Vapes. Tune in next week.

• 44:28Nilay Patel?

  All three of us have such strong opinions on this.

• 44:32Nilay Patel?

  Three boys with nicotine problems. Discuss the jewel.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, last little bits here. This is, I think, my favorite story of the week. Google bans Android phones from having three or more notches. I am outraged.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  That is a preemptive regulation.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, seriously. That's what I'm talking about. These centralized companies think they know better than everybody else. Also, no side notches. You can only put notches on the top and the bottom.

• 44:56Nilay Patel?

  So how can you get to three? It doesn't make sense.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Two on the top.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  Yes, you could.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Exactly. So you could only have two notches.

• 45:05Nilay Patel?

  But you don't need both regulations.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  What I want to know is what?

• 45:10Nilay Patel?

  If you've already regulated none on the sides.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  What future Android phone? What future Android phone made it into Google's lab and they're like, what the hell? We gotta write a blog post. This has to stop.

• 45:24Nilay Patel?

  Get Hiroshi down here. We need to talk about this right away. Matias is in the corner just like, ah!

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Material design. We thought of everything. We have a drop shadow for literally everything.

• 45:39Nilay Patel?

  There's like a manufacturer in there, holding up piece of paper with notches cut out on all four sides. It reflects the real world. It's just sliding one piece of paper behind another.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Wasn't Amazon's Fire Phone basically a phone with four notches?

• 46:00Speaker 02

  It's a lot. I just, it's such a good.

• 46:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I want a four notch phone more than anything.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  That's the first thing I thought. I'd pay a thousand dollars for the most notches, but it's small.

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's mostly notch, actually. What do we used to measure screen to bezel ratio? Now it's a screen to notch ratio. Deeply important to us. So that's amazing. Dieter, you have thoughts about these Pixel 3 leaks, right?

• 46:35Nilay Patel?

  Um. So the notch on the Pixel 3 looks insane, by the way.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  It looks really big and dumb. And the notch itself, even though it looks really big and dumb, it's not like deeply offensive to me, but it's like kind of offensive to me. The, the bigger problem that I have is if they're keeping the same size as the current Pixel 2 XL, and they're just increasing the screens by like moving it and adding a notch, but it's great. You get a bigger screen, but it means it's even farther to reach to like reach the top of the screen than before. And so weirdly, the notch makes it harder to use. The bigger screen is weirdly worse. The reason notches are cool is they let you release a smaller phone with a bigger screen.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Instead, they release, they might be releasing the same size phone with a bigger screen. And no, thank you. No, no, thank you. I want, I think that I'm ready for something closer to the size of an iPhone 10 in the Android world with a big screen. This is why Dan loves the, the LG phone, right?

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  It's exactly that thing.

• 47:37Nilay Patel?

  With LG software on it.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Um.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  And then lastly, just a couple of little ones. I mean, but Dieter, your point was like every pixel has leaked and it looked terrible. And then they're fine.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yes, that's also true. We'll see what it looks like in real life.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  You need to see some colorways.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  And then lastly, two acquisitions. Logitech is acquiring Blue Microphones for 117 million.

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  I have a bunch of Blue Mic. I think everybody who makes podcasts just like starts to acquire blue snowballs.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:06Nilay Patel?

  Like I have like three of them. Why? Where did they all come from?

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Two, two snowballs and a Yeti.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have a Yeti too.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  No, it's because you're traveling around my house.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  You're traveling, you're desperate and you need a microphone to do a podcast while you're on the road and you just go to Best Buy and buy a blue microphone. We've all done it.

• 48:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then you're like, why do I have every color of blue snowball ever released? And so it's, there's a little bit of danger, right? Like Logitech acquired a bunch of other companies. They're growing, but here's my big hope. The engineers at Logitech go to the blue offices, they open the door and they're like, we would like to show you some connectors that are not from 2005. And then I buy the next blue snowball and it does not have literally the old USB printer connector on the back. That would be great. The Yeti has like one of the most unreliable mini USB ports ever made.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  The thing, the thing is held on with like three microns of solder and nothing else.

• 49:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So like maybe the lot, like the Logitech mouse people are like, we make USB ports for competitive gamers. We're going to show you a thing or two about using screws to hold down your connectors. And then this one is super funny. We actually, when we started The Verge, we were on IRC and then we started to use a more modern chat platform called HipChat, which at the time, I don't remember this, was a Flash app.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 49:32Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  HipChat wasn't Flash.

• 49:34Nilay Patel?

  It was, it was, it was the version, it was Adobe Air, which is fundamentally Flash. So it was an Air app. And it was like, I remember it would like slide on my computer. And then we all moved to Slack, like everybody moved to Slack. HipChat got bought by a company called Atlassian. Atlassian literally just said, sorry to Slack and then shut down HipChat and, and sold, gave the IP to Slack, but then they also took an investment in Slack. So they basically said, we're sorry, we're shutting this down. We're giving you all the IP and some money for your trouble. And that is the best end of a competitive product I have ever heard in my entire life.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  It's good, but I remember our hip chat days like very fondly. I literally can't remember anything about hip chat. It was a lot.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  It was, there was an era of software, I should write this article, there was like, I call it the blue era. Cause like a bunch of the really cool hip apps had like this blue color aesthetic to it. So hip chat was blue, audio was of this era.

• 50:39Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. I loved audio.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  I need like three, two or three more, and then I've like got a story here. I feel like turntable wasn't blue, but it was in that same zone. There was like that, I don't know, mid 2010s zone of apps were like super well designed, felt really new, felt really modern. And for the most part, were completely doomed.

• 51:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Everything, it was like a very inoffensive blue. All right, that's it. It was kind of a small week in news, but I enjoyed this time together. One trillion dollars. One trillion dollars. Good job, Apple. Way to make. Stocks app is actually rounded up to 1.1.

• 51:23Nilay Patel?

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• 52:06Nilay Patel?

  Get started with a free account and 12 months of intelligence services at azure.com/trial. That's A Z U R E dot com slash trial.

• 52:17Nilay Patel?

  There's also other stuff you can listen to. The ad just continues, but now it's just now for our stuff. You can listen to Converged with Casey Newton. That's great. Excellent show. You can listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. All excellent podcasts, all available at Apple Podcasts, everywhere else. Rate us, review us, give us the five stars. You can follow us on Twitter. I'm Reckless, Paul is Future Paul, Peter is Backlon. We'll be back next week. That is The Vergecast. Rock and roll.