The Steam Deck is Valve's new handheld / iPhone 13 rumors grow / Virgin Galactic sends Richard Branson to the edge of space

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Cranz discuss this week in tech news — the new Valve Steam Deck, Netflix potentially getting into gaming, a lot of Apple news, and some billionaires going into space. Further reading: The COVID-19 vaccines weren’t hacked — this task force is one reason why Foxconn and TSMC strike deal to buy 10 million COVID vaccines for Taiwan Valve’s gaming handheld is called the Steam Deck and it’s shipping in December Netflix snags former EA, Oculus exec to lead its video game efforts Apple’s latest iOS and macOS betas undo some of Safari’s controversial new design iPhone 13 rumors grow more certain ahead of September launch Redesigned iPad mini reportedly on track to launch this fall Apple just launched an official $99 MagSafe battery pack for the iPhone 12 lineup iPhone 12 reverse wireless charging can power up Apple’s new MagSafe battery pack Apple is working on Apple Pay Later to help you buy things without paying for them yet Apple reportedly wants in on NFL Sunday Ticket Apple’s weather app won’t say it’s 69 degrees Facebook says FTC chair shouldn’t help decide the future of its antitrust case Biden’s executive order puts net neutrality back in the spotlight President Joe Biden’s latest executive order is a huge win for right to repair Space tourism rivalry gets extremely petty ahead of Branson’s spaceflight Virgin Galactic has opened a sweepstakes offering a trip to space Virgin Galactic successfully sends Richard Branson to the edge of space Samsung’s next Galaxy Unpacked device lineup may have been entirely spoiled in huge new leak The Galaxy Z Fold 3 will support the S Pen Pro, according to FCC filings Ikea and Sonos picture frame speaker review: wall of sound TVA TemPad review: who needs TikTok when you can control time and space? We want to see your internet bill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Alex Krantz joins the show to talk about the new Valve Steam Deck, Netflix potentially getting into gaming, a lot of little bits of Apple news, and some billionaires going into space. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Freedom Phone.

• 1:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  We're not going to talk about it yet. It's coming up later. I just want all 10 people who have tweeted us about The Freedom Phone to know. It's on my mind. I've been thinking about it. I've been thinking about you. I'm Neela. I'm your friend. Dita Brown is here. I am tabs located in the correct place. A win for all of us. Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:09Alex Cranz?

  Hello, I'm neither of those things.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, I was like, I'm movable UI.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  I'm undiscoverable buttons and weird gestures. Welcome back, Alex. It's been a couple of weeks.

• 2:20Alex Cranz?

  I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  It's like a quiet summer week. Dieter and I were trying to figure out what the through line of today's episode was, and we settled on chaos.

• 2:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  A lot of little things going on, but we've got a bunch of actually really interesting COVID stories this week. Nicole Wetzman, who is leading the charge on all of our COVID coverage for over a year now. Do you know she started like two weeks before the pandemic?

• 2:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  Here's a little like a little backstory. Nicole started and she was gonna be our health reporter. And we had all this like, we had all these ideas about how we were gonna cover health and tech and Apple and all the like, we have a, we have another idea for you. Anyhow, she has a great story this week about the vaccine supply chain and all these tiny companies along the way of the supply chain that had no cybersecurity protections, had no information security staff at all, and how all of that had to be secured really fast. It's a really fascinating story. Go check it out. Like, we live in this world of like, big companies and ransomware and executive orders, and then this is just about a bunch of little companies that had to get their

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  act together really fast to get the vaccines out. And it's, it's good news. Like, they did it. So I encourage you to read a story about people actually doing the right thing and delivering.

• 3:39Alex Cranz?

  It's a nice change of pace. I love it.

• 3:40Nilay Patel?

  It's a good change of pace. Speaking of delivering, and actually, here's like a happy thing that Foxconn did. I'm starting on it on like a good note here. So the political status of Taiwan, as I'm sure most listeners know, is like, very fragile. China wants to be in charge of it. Taiwan thinks of itself as a country. Back and forth we go. To get vaccines into Taiwan, Foxconn and TSMC, the chip company, were like deputized by the Taiwanese and Chinese governments to go make the deals so that like countries weren't dealing directly with Taiwan. It's very strange. But anyway, Foxconn and TSMC have now made a deal. To buy 10 million doses of COVID vaccines and distribute them in Taiwan. Oh, that's great.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  You just like, watch the vaccine distribution story hit all of the other pieces of the puzzle that we're always talking about, including international trade issues. So that's really interesting that if you read that story, you can see the mechanics were really interesting. And then we are now like, learning more about the vaccines, we're learning more about COVID. So we have a gigantic data set that can now, using machine learning, predict the severity of COVID if you get it, which is super fascinating. So all these kind of downstream effects of what's going on with COVID. All that is to say, in this country at least, there are like, two populations, vaccinated, unvaccinated. And the unvaccinated population is, the case counts are rising and the severity is rising. So if you are not vaccinated, please, I beg you, go get the shot. I, I, I got it.

• 5:08Nilay Patel?

  Dieter got it. Yep. I got it. There you go. Yeah. Here we are. So like, I just beg you, I know, I know it's hard. And today, the White House, actually somewhat alarmingly, started talking about COVID misinformation, how it spreads on social platforms and walked, I think Addie will have a story by the time this podcast is out, but walked right up to the line of like, uncomfortable, like, content moderation suggestions for Facebook. Because they have this big push to get people vaccinated and over the line and actually bring the pandemic to an end. So, yeah, it may be, maybe over the line. I think Addie is writing that right now. But you, you see that push and it's because America is, by one sort of aggregate metric, doing well.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  And then if you dive into locations and counties and regions and different groups, just a wide split.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  If you live in Arkansas in particular, please go get vaccinated and tell your friends to go get vaccinated. It's messing with my travel plans.

• 6:03Nilay Patel?

  It's weird, even, I don't know where I'm from in Wisconsin, it's like county by county, the rates are like swinging 20%. It's absolutely wild. So if you haven't, please do. If you know people are hesitant, please be that person who helps ring along so we can finally bring this to an end. Okay, that's COVID. By the way, our science team is still just relentlessly covering it, even though they want, they're like, can we? And I'm like, not yet. So just like, do it for them. Okay. I would say this is the biggest news.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:33Nilay Patel?

  Biggest gadget news of the week.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  The news happened right before we started recording, which was great, because we have a big gadget news to talk about now.

• 6:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we had nothing. Thank you Valve for announcing this favor. The Stream Deck. Dieter, what is the Stream Deck?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  The Stream Deck is a, it's the Switch Pro.

• 6:50Nilay Patel?

  Steam Deck. Andrew just corrected me, the audience didn't hear it. I said Stream Deck.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, you did.

• 6:55Nilay Patel?

  But it's the Steam Deck. The reason I said Stream Deck is Elgato is also having an event right now.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  Where they're announcing a bunch of creator stuff.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  Including an updated Stream Deck. This is gonna be super great.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  The Steam Deck. Imagine what you were hoping the Switch Pro would be, and that's what the Steam Deck is.

• 7:12Alex Cranz?

  Is it?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  No, it's not quite. It's a, it's a portable thing that looks like a, just a really big honkin', chonkey Switch. It's got AMD chips in it, so a quad-core Zen2 CPU and eight compute units with AMD, R, DNA, two graphics, whatever. It is a base price of $399, but don't buy that one because it has super slow EAMC storage and it can go up to $649. And it runs Linux, which you could install Windows on it if you want, and it's designed to play games that you can buy on Steam, which is great.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  There's no way this thing is real.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  What are you talking about?

• 7:49Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it's totally real.

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  Jay Kastrak has had a, had a tweet that sums up this whole thing, which is big Kickstarter 2017 energy.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  It looks great. These are obviously renders. I don't know.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know. We, we had, we had the Steam controller there for a hot minute and these, these actually have the little thumb touchpad things like that, that big, that was the big idea of the Steam controller is you don't need a mouse and a keyboard because you've got touchpads on your, on your controller.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  So they brought those back.

• 8:17Alex Cranz?

  I think they did it also in the most cowardly way possible though, because they did it like right under the, the joysticks. So you're like, your thumb, the, the meat of your thumb is always going to be just sitting on those touchpads constantly. Maybe. I don't know how to play a video game. I'm trying to think of how you hold one in your hand, but like, I just wish they'd kind of committed one way or the other to, to the joysticks or the touchpad, if it exists.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  I mean, I think they learned from the, the Steam controller that, that the idea is not as good as their hopes were.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  For it. And it's gone. You can't buy it. You can, for a while there in 2019, you could buy one for five bucks. They had a fire sale, but now those are gone.

• 8:57Alex Cranz?

  I still have mine. I'll sell it to you.

• 8:59Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 8:59Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:00Nilay Patel?

  I would not like it at all.

• 9:02Alex Cranz?

  I don't have actually the, the little remote to plug into your computer. So I don't think it's actually useful at all. I don't know how I could use it. But I have it. I'm actually, actually very excited about this device.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 9:15Alex Cranz?

  It just like, you know how you see a really kind of crummy gadget, but it just hits that like gadget lust. You're just like, this looks dumb, but I also looks like I would spend like four hours playing with it. And there would be a great four hours. That's like, that's what it hits me with. I'm just like, oh, man, this looks like I would want to go to sharper image and play with this thing.

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  This hits me like it has a 720p display. I mean, imagine the Switch Pro and what was the big thing about the Switch Pro was it was 4K output?

• 9:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Nilay Patel?

  And maybe a slightly higher resolution display and like the Switch Pro didn't get any of that. And this thing is a seven inch, 720p display. Like, yeah, I don't know.

• 9:58Alex Cranz?

  And it's thick and it's got like buttons on the back that you're supposed to use your pinky?

• 10:04Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what this reminds me of? I just, it just hit me. This is the modern day Atari Lynx. Oh, do you know what I'm talking about? Like four people, you, you two nerds I'm talking about, but like, I had an Atari Lynx. I spent so much time like saving money when I was like 13 to buy an Atari Lynx. It was the talk of the middle school. I had, I had the big one. They actually made a second model of the Atari Lynx that was smaller, but I had like the chunk.

• 10:30Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  And what it was not was a Sega Game Gear. This is, this and the Switch have like the same exact, like this is more powerful, like the Lynx was more powerful.

• 10:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like this isn't even like a Neo Geo. Like the Neo Geo, you could be like, you know what? That was a really good console. It was just like, nobody bought it. This is very much like, some people are going to buy it, but it's not going to be a great experience. It's, it's the Lynx. Like, yeah.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  Look, I'm excited for this thing. I don't care what all you say. I've been trying to stream X cloud games to my phone and my Comcast disclosure Comcast is an investor in Vox Media parent company. However, connection is terrible.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  And I, you know, I just, I want to play some control without a TV. And this will let me do that. And I'm sure it'll be great. You know, I'm sure that'll be like high, high frame rate for every, high everything.

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So the battery life numbers here are super interesting because of what they called out.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 11:30Nilay Patel?

  Right? So you can play, this is a quote they gave to IGN. You can play Portal 2 for four hours. If you limit it to 30 frames per second, you can play for five or six hours. That's pretty good. But the other side of the quote is for lighter use cases like game streaming, smaller 2D games or web browsers, you can expect a maximum battery life of seven to eight hours.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  So they are explicitly saying, oh, game streaming is a thing you should do with this device, which is really interesting because if you're Steam and you see that future coming, you've, you've got the same App Store problems as everybody else. You're not going to stream Steam games to a Switch. Nintendo's not going to let you do that. You've got to, you gotta get on the road somehow. This in that context makes a lot of sense. Right? You're not, it's not a console where you're like actually bringing down Steam games. It's a device that allows you to do game streaming in a focused way as part of the Steam ecosystem. Totally buy that.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Right. So it's running SteamOS, which is, you know, Steam's version of Linux. And they've got a system for getting Windows games going on that, et cetera, et cetera. But if you want, apparently you just install Windows on this thing. And Windows is, you know, already streaming Xbox. So Tom Martin already put the piece up like, yep, install Windows and stream Xbox. And there you go. You're good to go.

• 12:44Nilay Patel?

  That is like, there's all kinds of like early 2000s drivers questions around there. Like you can install Windows on it, like, will anything work? Like, do you have to do BIOS hacks to like make it happen? Like,

• 12:55Alex Cranz?

  Does it have like Windows precision touchpad on it?

• 13:00Speaker 02

  It would be amazing if like one of the two touchpads was a precision one and the other one wasn't.

• 13:06Alex Cranz?

  I just, I don't understand why you would get this when you can get like an Android device from like G P D or something that's a lot thinner and will do all the streaming.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it'll do the streaming, but you can't play, you can play Hades on this, right? You can play Control on this. There's a bunch of PC games that are never coming to the Switch that you might want to play portable and you might have a Comcast internet provider at home and you wouldn't be able to stream ever because they're terrible. And so you want to have, you know, games that aren't otherwise available, available. That's why this thing is compelling to me. And so I refuse to believe that it's going to be bad. It's going to be bad. I refuse to believe it, though.

• 13:45Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be so chunky.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  It's very big. I love this idea that, how much have we talked about whether people actually game on their Android phones? Like, I still don't believe it. But like, one of the things that's true is, is chips get smaller and other parts of the cell phone supply chain get more commoditized. Yeah, you can just build stuff like this. And if you can connect it to an ecosystem like Steam, I mean, there are other like little gaming PCs around this size that we have covered. They're all like no name manufacturers, whatever, but they exist. Like, this is a category that is sort of developing quietly.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've seen these things at CES like two a year for the past three years.

• 14:27Alex Cranz?

  Well, I do find, though, that like, this is really nerdy. The, the chips in this is cool. Like, because it's using like a laptop mobile-based chip. It's not, it's like doing like an X86 chip. It's not, it's not a ARM-based thing. And that's not as common in something this small. And AMD in particular, doesn't usually go this small because it's always had like, it's a power-hungry processor. So like, getting it this tiny and getting AMD in there and like, that's just neat. That's cool. I don't necessarily believe the battery life claims, but I'm excited to try them out.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if it arrives.

• 15:08Alex Cranz?

  If it actually like shows up.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, they're supposed to ship it in December. That's what they're saying.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  And pre-orders start this like today, the day you're listening, Friday, they start on Friday. And the pre-orders are actually really interesting. They are trying to stop scalpers. And so it's a, you have to put down like a $5 deposit for number one. For number two, in the first round, the only people they will allow to preorder this thing is people who have made a Steam purchase before June of this year. So if you haven't bought anything on Steam, you can't rush over there right now and make an account and preorder this thing in the first wave, which is very clever.

• 15:46Alex Cranz?

  I love that.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  Now I gotta find a scalper to spot something on Steam.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Hey, man, I successfully ordered a Switch OLED model today, so I'm feeling pretty, pretty good about myself.

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  Did those sell out?

• 15:59Speaker 02

  The, the first round of pre-orders went up and it did the thing that all console pre-orders do when they go up is you never know which store is going to work and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. And then they like start flashing the buttons different colors over time. And then eventually you give up or you eventually you get one. So did they sell out? It's Schrodinger's OLED Switch.

• 16:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, so this is, I mean, I'm joking about it being vapor. Like they've showed off a real one to IG. Like they're obviously going to make a go. It's, it's a big company, like Valve can do things. But the chip shortage here, especially with new look AMD chips is a real thing. Like they've, they've got to contend with it. TSMC, we mentioned earlier, actually is booking record revenue and saying the chip shortage is going to extend into next year. Right? So like there's massive demand for every chip that everybody can make, but there's just not enough. Car makers, we, I keep talking to car CEOs in Dakota, they're all like, yep, into next year. Like it's not what we, it's not transient. It's like. This is another year of this shortage that we're kind of all looking at. So we'll see.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  Again, I'm excited. This is the exact sort of thing that if not for a convoluted preorder scheme, I would just impulse buy on the show. And once you get me there, I'm ready to click the button. Speaking of games, the other kind of biggest news of the week, and then like I said, just a litany of other things. But the other kind of headline making news this week, Netflix has hired a former EA and Oculus executive to lead game efforts. Alex, walk me through this one. I don't, I'm just like, can everybody focus?

• 17:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm kind of the same way. You know, I'm hearing like, we heard two kind of different theories for what games at Netflix could look like. And there's the one like, oh, they've got, the one I went to that I've been since told is stupid, which is that like, they, they've got this big streaming infrastructure in place. They know how to get content onto your devices. So how hard is it to do like what Google and Microsoft have been doing and just do cloud gaming, but Netflix style, right? And like, they, they, they know how to make deals with big partners and stuff. So they could do that. But I've been told that's probably very stupid and not what's going to happen. And more likely, it's like, they're going

• 18:10Alex Cranz?

  to start partnering to do like mobile games and more beginner gamer friendly stuff using Netflix IP. So like Stranger Things, Bridgerton, there's talk of a Bridgerton game.

• 18:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 18:25Alex Cranz?

  I don't know what that would mean. Only good things. Like, is like a dating sim? I don't, yeah.

• 18:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, lots of outfits.

• 18:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like a little, little doll that I dress up in Bridgerton. I mean, honestly, I would play that in a heartbeat. But yeah, so I guess there's like this idea that they're gonna just start, because Netflix has really been pushing to try to find other revenue streams. And so the big one is like, well, let's do games, let's do events. So besides just Witcher Con, there's gonna be like a Bridgerton ball.

• 18:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 18:57Alex Cranz?

  I would honestly love to go and witness that. I hope everybody dresses in the outfits.

• 19:02Nilay Patel?

  So you mentioned different revenue streams. Like what is fascinating about that is Netflix historically, right? They only have the one revenue stream, which is you pay for Netflix.

• 19:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 19:12Nilay Patel?

  And then you can, you can like, there's some different pricing tiers, but they have like two strategies. One is they go find more customers. And that's kind of like, who's left? And the other one is they just like slowly raise the prices on you. But there isn't some other thing that you can buy from Netflix. Like you just buy Netflix access. So to me, a huge question here is, is this just more Netflix that you get for the same price? Or is this another thing that you would pay extra for and actually becomes a second revenue stream?

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Or they just start like making mobile games based on their IP and trying to just cash out on that. Here's, here's my idea for Netflix. Disney got into video streaming. I think Netflix should get into amusement parks. I want Bridgerton World really bad.

• 19:57Nilay Patel?

  I buy it. Witcher World would be good. Oh, I feel like, um, Julia's not here. We need to like officially hand over the Julia disclaimer block to Katie.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  We'll, we'll do it in some way. We'll have our own event and like Julia can like anoint Katie with all the disclosures.

• 20:12Alex Cranz?

  It'll be beautiful.

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  I have to disclose Vox Media has a Netflix show that has explained The Verge has a Netflix show in production. There's a disclaimer. And once upon a time, someone thought about making a Quibi show. Quibi's up for like, like eight Emmys. I don't even know.

• 20:28Alex Cranz?

  It's up for so many.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Oh, further disclosure, the executive in question here was at Oculus. My wife works at Oculus, which is a division of Facebook.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  Did we already do the Comcast disclosures? Is there anything else?

• 20:41Speaker 02

  That should do it for now.

• 20:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have an LG TV. Is that important to know? I have one LG and one Sony. I only buy off-brand HDMI cables, if that's important to anyone.

• 20:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, I think the, the big question for all these streaming services now, right? Like Netflix has all the people finding growth, like watching that churn, like Netflix subscribers go up and sometimes they turn off, but it's kind of just like a permanent, they're in the enviable position. It's a default that you subscribe to. You're watching HBO Max try to collect subscribers. It's doing okay. Disney's doing great. Peacock is not.

• 21:18Alex Cranz?

  I just subscribed to it, though. I'm the one, the one person that subscribed.

• 21:22Nilay Patel?

  But why? They put out a press release about you.

• 21:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they did. They were like, we got one. No, it was some British show about women in a rock band and I watched, they got me. There was like the one free episode and they're like, do you want to watch it? I was like, sure. And they're like, well, to watch the rest, you have to subscribe or pirate. And I was like, I'm gonna be good and subscribe.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  There was a button that was like pirate that like clicked you into Plex.

• 21:45Alex Cranz?

  That just automatically appears in my head. That's part of my movable UI. It just appears just for me.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  That's like your AR glasses are like, another choice exists.

• 21:56Alex Cranz?

  And I was like, I'll be good. I will pay for this content. And it was a cute show. And now I'm like, well, now I have Peacock and I don't know. I'm trying to like, watch things on it just so I can, I should just cancel it, but.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  Did you watch your, oh, did you watch the whole rock band show?

• 22:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was only six episodes.

• 22:13Nilay Patel?

  Did you pay for without ads? It's very hard to pay for Peacock.

• 22:16Alex Cranz?

  It was, it was hard to like, buy it. It was hard to like, and I was also on my Apple TV and trying to like, do it through there. And they're like, well, you have to log in on your phone. I was like, ah. So I had to like, go get my phone out because it was charging. It was six.

• 22:28Nilay Patel?

  Here's my, my favorite part of the paying for Peacock experience. This is a true, this is true.

• 22:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Nilay Patel?

  If you, if you just buy it directly, it charges your credit card twice. So it charges you once for Peacock, $4.99, and then you get a separate charge that's Peacock without ads, which is like another $3.99. And it's like, you couldn't figure this out, could you? That I just bought the one without ads. Like, Peacock is betting big on the Olympics. It's, Peacock is NBC. He has the Olympics. They're expecting this all to happen. But you're just kind of looking at these, these companies in this battle of streaming giants. And they're all just like out of people, right? Like if you want to get another customer, you have to take it away from Netflix. You have to convince them that you should pay in addition to Netflix or whatever other five streaming services you have, or you have to convince them

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  that they should stop playing Fortnite or whatever. And this is like Netflix explicitly is like our competition is Fortnite because you're paying for us anyway. And so we have to convince you that the Netflix icon is a better use of your limited amount of time than your Xbox or whatever. And so you can see why they would chase into games because if you if your CEO has just like wandered the earth being like, actually, our competition is Fortnite. Like someone's going to think that you should just make a Fortnite. I just, I don't-

• 23:46Alex Cranz?

  Bridgerton characters.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  With Bridgerton characters. But I think that like the idea that streaming games are, you know, the core idea is very simple, that you'll run the game in a data center and you'll stream the video of the video game to you and you'll pass back controls in some low latency way. And like, of course, this makes sense. And Netflix is really good at streaming video. So of course they would just like be, but like, it's really low latency video. You have to be able to pass the controls back. You have to run video games at a data center. Like, I doubt Netflix is buying gaming hardware for its data centers. They're just sending out like video streams.

• 24:22Alex Cranz?

  And like, Google and Amazon both tried this and with mixed results.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  I mean, Google's still trying this technically, and so is Amazon.

• 24:31Alex Cranz?

  Yes, technically, they both still exist. I will one day finish my playthrough of Baldur's Gate on Stadia, but then I have to subscribe to Stadia again.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  So you got to reallocate your peacock dollars. You see the problem.

• 24:45Alex Cranz?

  I think it's a long shot, but the the cloud gaming idea is a very big long shot because there's just so much engineering they have to do. And if Google couldn't get together the people to make the games exclusively for their-

• 25:00Alex Cranz?

  Cloud console, Netflix is gonna probably have a problem too. Or it'll all be like European and Korean pop song like video games, much like their, their content is now all like international content, right? You don't see as much English language first content so far lately.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, they just had, they just had Witcher Con, so Witcher, yeah, second season of Witcher's coming out. Sexy Beasts, the Netflix dating show where people dress up in just full animal makeup.

• 25:29Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 25:30Nilay Patel?

  That's, I get an email about that from Netflix every day. They're very excited about it. So many things are happening on Netflix. Two things at once, Sexy Beasts, the dating sim would actually be kind of intense. But that problem, I, I think we're gonna see it over the next year. The problem of the market being saturated and watching TV being so complicated is only getting worse. And like, it has waxed and waned. I think we covered a lot of this action last year, but as Amazon has its MGM transaction, which is not a guarantee, right? The FTC is, is looking at it and all this stuff, but Amazon beefs up Prime Video, Apple continues to invest. They, Apple got a bunch of Emmy nominations for Ted Lasso, like, they're feeling good about Apple TV Plus regardless of whether it makes any sense for them to do.

• 26:16Alex Cranz?

  It's low key great. It's, it's way better use of your $5 than Peacock. I subscribe to both.

• 26:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Alex Cranz?

  I'm a monster.

• 26:23Nilay Patel?

  I have not paid for Apple TV Plus yet. I just, they keep sending me the emails saying, guess what? We're refunding you your five bucks. That's it. Cool. They will ruthlessly find a way to end your whatever free trial around before Ted Lasso comes out. I think that's the plan, actually.

• 26:37Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so I just haven't, like, I really wanna watch For All Mankind, season two. And people say it's like amazing.

• 26:44Alex Cranz?

  It's incredible.

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  I really wanna watch, uh, season two of Mythic Quest. Oh, yeah. I, we finally started watching Mythic Quest. It's so good. It's really good. The first season was great. It's ruthlessly going after like, you know, micropayments in games, going after Apple. It's ruthlessly going after a bunch of like Ubisoft memes and Ubisoft is like part of the production of this thing. Like, it's amazing. Yeah, so I'm just waiting until Ted Lasso, the next season comes out. I'm gonna pay for it and we'll watch all those shows at once and then cancel it and just like wait for the seasons to come out again. But like Netflix doing games like Apple wants to push Apple Arcade like Netflix is a really important partner to Apple on the Apple TV. They're just gonna crash into each other in weird and strange ways. And I there's a part of me that says, yep, Netflix is sort

• 27:30Nilay Patel?

  of the default winner. They've got to come up with more stuff. But if they don't keep their eye on the ball, it is true that HBO Max has a better and more interesting catalog, a much worse app. Just a disaster of an app everywhere you look, but the library is better. Hulu and Peacock and Apple are not sitting still with that library. Like, you gotta, you gotta stay on the ball before you get distracted by this other stuff.

• 27:55Alex Cranz?

  I'm kind of curious, though, because Netflix is, it's so big that it's kind of used that, like, its size to to knock people around, including Apple, right? Like, if you go into the TV app on the Apple TV, you don't get Netflix shows because Netflix said, yeah, we don't, we don't need to work with that. We don't need to be a part of this, this experience. And if they're gonna go into games, they're gonna kind of need to work with people. They're gonna need the something from, from Apple or Google or whoever. And I'm really curious to see what happens then.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna launch exclusively on the Steam Deck. I hope like, I hope like Valve executives are like checking the site, see what our coverage of the Steam Deck was like, and they see the Netflix news. And Netflix executives are reading the site, see what their coverage is like, and they see the Steam Deck news, and they're like, yeah, it's two great tastes. I mean, those are the two biggest headlines. We're gonna take a break. There's just a whole list of other stuff we should talk about, including 5,000 bits and bobs of Apple news. But let's take a break. We'll be right back.

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• 29:26Speaker 05

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• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Which of these bits and bobs of Apple news do you want to start with, Peter?

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Oh, let's start with the betas.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's like one thing about the betas. It's like, Apple listened to everyone.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Apple listened to everyone and they almost fixed the tab layout in Safari. They didn't actually fix it, they almost fixed it. So now the URL bar is separate on desktop, which is great. They like brought back some more stuff on the mobile bar. So you've got, you know, more than like one button that's not hidden. And then that all seems fine, except that the tabs are just like floating buttons above your browser window. Just like, there's, they're just some buttons and those are the tabs. And one of them is 3% darker than the rest of them, and that's your active tab.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  What are you doing?

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  I get the feeling that inside of like Apple's user experience design labs, they are thoroughly convinced that this is a better way and that people just need to get used to it and they will come around. But like, they have only talked to themselves and they've convinced themselves that this is true. And then they put out the betas and they got all the feedback. And these are very grudging changes in the direction of maybe the discoverability of the interface and your most important app shouldn't be hidden.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  Cause like, they still haven't put the refresh button at the top level of the nav, right? Like, that button should just always be in front of you. I'm happy they're changing it. I hope they continue to change. Like, honestly, they should change it all the way back. The only thing I support is moving, moving the address part of the bottom so you can reach it.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Moving the address part of the bottom, good. All the rest, bad. And I think that they, they want us to be thankful for what we had before. And so they just gave us something worse. And then when they go back to what we had before, we're like, oh, Apple, you're so good at design. You finally figured it out.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like I said, I see a bunch of ideas here that are like, we're Apple, let's be bold, especially in the mobile browser. But I just like the idea that you have the home bar at the bottom that you can swipe between apps and then like 20 pixels above it, you have that address bar that you can swipe between web tabs. That's a mistake. Yeah. Like, a lot of people are gonna screw that up just on accident all the time. Well, hopefully they keep changing it. I'd like to congratulate them for trying. Keep going. You can do it. You can get all the way there. You can get all the way there to a user interface that people understand. The danger is that they're gonna release iOS 15 and the story will be that the web browser is bad. Yeah.

• 32:31Nilay Patel?

  And like, we've seen this now, like, as important as we think we are. Like, we'll put out stories on how it works, but like, the chatter on Twitter is just gonna be, this thing is stupid. And there's no way to control that. There's no way to, you can't pay influencers to influence that conversation. Like, it's just gonna get away from them. Like, you can just see it coming like a train, so I hope they figure it out.

• 32:53Alex Cranz?

  That's actually gonna be in an episode of Ted Lasso.

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  Social media is once again out of control. Ted is actually the two, Ted Lasso and MythQuest are hilarious in this respect. So Ted Lasso is like full of product placement, right? Like, yeah. They all have Macs, they all have iPhones. MythQuest is a show about game development, but they just all have PCs and like, Razer PCs.

• 33:15Alex Cranz?

  Like, really clearly labeled Razer PCs. Like, no mistake what it is.

• 33:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, do you know a company that's making a show? It's deeply hilarious. There's a bunch of iPhone 13 rumors and an iPad mini rumor.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  So, the iPhone 13 rumor is basically that Apple is going to make Galaxy S21 Ultra, and that will be the next version of the iPhone Pro Max. That's it. Like, they're gonna switch to an LTPO screen, is the rumor, and they're gonna have a improved optical zoom, supposedly for video recording. I don't know what that's about, but it just sounds to me like they're gonna maybe put a periscope on it, and they're definitely gonna put an LTPO screen that'll have variable refresh rate, finally. And that'll be the thing that gets you to use a Pro iPhone instead of the regular one.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  So the optical zoom in video, you said periscope. That's because in video, you want to smooth zoom. You don't want to switch between lenses. Is that your inference here?

• 34:13Speaker 02

  No, you can, you can, if you have a periscope inside the phone, you can get a longer zoom optically than you can otherwise. That's all.

• 34:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Now Sony is doing a thing where you can have like a, it can actually switch the focal lengths between zooms. It's like physically moving the lenses, which is nuts. That's on the Xperia 1.3. But I would be very, very surprised if Apple did that. I think we are definitely the place where like, Apple is putting stuff out on the iPhone a couple, one to two years after Samsung does it. And they often will implement it better than Samsung. But, you know, we're super late in variable refresh rate screens on iPhones. It's nice that they're going to go LTPO. That's like what is going to enable it. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm going to say it. Apple, I am begging you to leave the lightning port on this phone. Because it seems like the other alternative is no port. And like, come on.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, so there's this rumor, it's Quo who says, the MagSafe ecosystem is not ready. The Apple wants to do it, but the MagSafe ecosystem isn't ready.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:15Nilay Patel?

  I would remind you that Apple is fully in control of the MagSafe ecosystem. There are no MagSafe products. There just aren't. There's the battery. Apple just made its own $100 MagSafe battery.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  I just bought a $50 anchor battery that has a little MagSafe magnet on it.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  But that, that one is a fake. As far as I can tell, that one, it like uses the magnets and he uses Qi, but it doesn't support the higher MagSafe charging rate.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Oh, that's correct. Yep.

• 35:42Nilay Patel?

  Right. So it's like, it's sort of, in the sense that Apple cannot restrict magnetism from operating in the world. It is a MagSafe product.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Not for lack of trying.

• 35:53Nilay Patel?

  They can't make the magnets not be magnets. Like, yes, it clicks onto the back, but then it's just a Qi charging battery.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  That aligns itself. And this is kind of what Apple said, like when they announced the iPhone 12. Like, yep, it's got magnets on the back. We can't stop you. But what they can do is say it can only charge at certain rates.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  So their new $100 MagSafe battery can charge at the full rate. It can.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  When it's plugged in.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  When it's plugged in.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  I think it's five watts when it's not plugged in.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  It can go to like 15 when it's actually plugged in.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  And it also displays its battery life in Apple's little battery widget, which no other non-Apple device can do. So you can see it next to your watch battery and your AirPod battery and whatever.

• 36:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  And it does reverse charging. You can reverse charge the puck from your phone if your phone is plugged in, which I don't think they're gonna let anybody else do.

• 36:42Nilay Patel?

  They're definitely not gonna let anybody else do. But it's just funny to be like, we're moving towards a portless iPhone. And the reason we are not all the way there yet is this ecosystem hasn't developed. And it's like, well, you haven't let anybody make anything.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:55Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is, I mean, I complain about the Apple accessory ecosystems. The same is somewhat true of Lightning. But like, all anybody wants to make is cables to charge your phone over Lightning. So like, people just make them and they knock them off. But the MagSafe thing to me is, we're cruising towards a year of the iPhone 12, right? It's just a couple of months before the 13 is gonna come out. And there are no accessories for this innovative new system.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  There is a wider diversity of types of add-ons under the MotoMod modular brand than there are for MagSafe.

• 37:26Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  That's it. I mean, we should just put that on the site.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  Of all of the things you have proposed writing for the website, burning the MagSafe ecosystem with MotoMods is the way to go.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:40Nilay Patel?

  I do like the idea that if you have the iPhone 12 mini, which does not have great battery life, this thing clicks on the back, you can still reach the phone. Like, that's cool. I'm into that.

• 37:50Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it ruins like, the whole reason to get the mini, though, which is that women can put it in their pockets.

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is like Z-axis instead of, you know, X and Y-axis. So.

• 38:01Alex Cranz?

  Those pockets are tiny.

• 38:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We've got to get one. We got to play with one. This is just like, funny to me. It's like, this whole, like, I have the Moment car mount. It's great. It's just a little black circle. Definitely does not charge my phone.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:15Nilay Patel?

  It's a great, it's like, the coolest car mount I've ever had. And I think Bridge Cast listeners know, that's high praise. Like.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Because you can get them all.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  It's very easy. But it doesn't charge the phone. And it's like, why? The number of people who have tweeted me that like, they've bought a series of hacks to turn the regular MagSafe puck into a car mount.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I get it. But it's because no one else can get that puck into their actual product.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:43Nilay Patel?

  It's just killing me. It's like, they have these, all these cool accessory ideas, and they just come to nothing. All right, they're gonna buy Sunday Ticket.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  That's the solution.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, so this more again, bits and bobs new this week.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:58Nilay Patel?

  Sun NFL Sunday ticket is like the grand prize of NFL licensing rights.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 39:04Nilay Patel?

  DirecTV has had it for years. It's just a horrible experience. Bad app, doesn't work. Everything about that experience is designed to make you buy DirecTV hardware.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  Right. So the thing about DirecTV having NFL Sunday ticket is if you are in a place where you can get DirecTV, they might not let you sign up for it because they want you to get DirecTV with Sunday ticket. You can't sign up for just the online version of it. So I have consistently, up until last year, when I stopped doing it, just made up addresses on DirecTV's website until I found one that they would let me buy direct Sunday ticket. So if for nothing else, that I won't have to lie about where I live to a company so that I can pay for their service. I hope Apple does this.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Amazon has been ordered to buy it a bunch. Amazon just bought some other NFL rights. It just comes up a lot, right? Like here's this prize that will make everybody buy your service. Apple apparently wants it. That would be like, you know, Eddie Q is a huge sports fan. You can just see him being like, this will, this is what I want.

• 40:08Alex Cranz?

  This is the win.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  But like, Amazon wants it, like, I would bet that the various vice presidents that run AT&T.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  Like just realized that they're like, oh shit, we own DirecTV. Maybe we should put it in our other streaming service that actually works. There's going to be a bidding war, but it's fascinating to me that Apple, like I said, I still don't really understand the strategic reason for Apple to make content. Especially because they've distributed that app over everything, right? It's not selling hardware for them. They can just get it on your smart TV. I've yet to see the reason. They're making good stuff. Totally understand that. Why are they doing it? And then why would they spend all this money for streaming rights? To stream it on other people's smart TVs? Like, still very confusing to me.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  How long until Apple TV plus costs 10 bucks a month?

• 41:00Alex Cranz?

  Ted Lasso, season four.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  No, I mean, that's the whole question. That's the answer to your question is what's the plan here? The plan here is they have to charge more than five bucks a month. And so they're gonna. And so the question is when?

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, I get that, but like, they put the app on every smart TV platform under the sun. Roku on Android, like, it is shocking to me that my Chromecast with Google TV has an Apple TV app. They have all the ones they wouldn't do. I would expect they wouldn't do that one, but they went ahead and did it. And actually, a little crashy, but overall great. Yeah. Just like the Chromecast with Google TV is, as a whole. But there's no app for Android phones, right? And if you're gonna make a service like this, eventually you have to be like, well, here's a huge marketplace of people who might want to also watch our shows. And so like, that to me is, yeah, they could charge more money, but then they're just squeezing more money out of a small market instead of setting the same price out of a big market.

• 41:54Alex Cranz?

  Is it supposed to be like iMessage where they're keeping it off Android so that you'd be like, well, I really want to watch Ted Lasso on my phone. So I guess I better get an iPhone.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  Isn't that weird?

• 42:05Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I would think so. I do. But, but I also watch everything on my TV.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, I mean, there's a theory there, right? That they know that most, like, more and more viewing time is going to tablets and phones. So they want to have that be the draw to iOS devices. And just as a nice service, they will make it available on every smart TV under the sun so that that doesn't become a blocker for you if you're thinking about subscribing. Getting it on TVs is not about getting it on TVs. It's about making sure that people who will subscribe on their iPhone, don't say no because they can't get it on their TV. It's the anti-quibi strategy is basically what I'm saying.

• 42:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I buy all of this, but the cynical flip side of that is that, yep, it's a lock-in strategy.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:49Nilay Patel?

  You're not gonna buy an Android phone because you love Ted Lasso so much. And I, what?

• 42:55Nilay Patel?

  They're all smarter than that. Like, just like, imagine that meeting. But I do think if they get Sunday ticket, then it becomes a real lock-in strategy. You want to watch any football game, any Sunday, you have to have an iPhone. That reminds me to your point, Dieter, like, these companies are just turning into cell carriers again. This is exactly what Verizon did with the NFL. It never inspired me to get Verizon. It only inspired me to hate Verizon and ruthlessly pirate football games. This keeps coming up on this show.

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. Like I said, bits and bobs. Here's the last one. And this story was just a real wild ride for Heim. Dieter, you want to explain the weather app? No, I wanted to be the one to make the joke. All right, fine. So Heim Gartenberg, who is a mathematical person, I would say, noticed that the weather app on his phone would not say that it was 69 degrees. Nice. Thank you, Dieter. I appreciate you. Anyway, so he looks into this. It's only on some versions of iOS. It doesn't appear to be happening on iOS 15. We write it up because it's funny. It's slow week, as you can tell by the news we're talking about. Everyone just assumes Apple is doing this on purpose. We assumed that they're doing it up. It's like very Apple thing to do. Yeah.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  Right? And then people start tweeting, "Heim, he starts figuring out." It turns out, Apple's getting the core data underneath in Celsius and converting to Fahrenheit. And just the rounding error just like prevents 69 from happening. Like, it just always rounds up to 70, it rounds down to 68. So we update the post. It's really funny. Here's the second funny thing that happened. Our dear friend, Marques Brownlee, also noticed this. He's like a video creator. That's his brain, right? So we put up the story, we're tweeting about it, we're doing all this stuff. He just made a video about it. He made a video about it on TikTok. Great. Awesome, whatever. We followed up. We were text-first. We made our TikTok video because we have this like small TikTok renegade channel that I can't stop from happening. Right.

• 44:54Nilay Patel?

  And everyone in TikTok's like, "They don't know we have a website."

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  So you copied my cousin, like, we gotta leave this alone. But the other day, our social media manager, Caitlin Hatt, made a TikTok being like, "We have a website.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  We have a YouTube channel and an Instagram, like, we exist."

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  It's like really funny. It was like the second, it was like the, the second order, like deeply hilarious part of that story was like, our TikTok audience doesn't know that The Verge is a website.

• 45:29Alex Cranz?

  It thinks it's just her.

• 45:30Nilay Patel?

  It's great. Yeah, they think it's Caitlin. Yeah, because people are like, "Why are you verified? You have so few followers." And she's like, "Because of the, because of, because we exist." And the comments are like, "See, she has a successful business." And it's great. Caitlin does have a successful business.

• 45:43Alex Cranz?

  Good job.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  Caitlin's in charge now. Please direct all complaints to her.

• 45:49Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's take another break. We'll come back and run through a bunch of policy stuff and then billionaires, just keep going to space.

• 45:54Speaker 06

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• 47:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Joe Biden keeps doing stuff.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  Olivia Rodrigo's in the White House.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  All kinds of things are happening, but he had a big executive order came out last Friday. Lots of bits and bobs in this order. They're all, it's all about competition, increasing competitiveness across the economy, a bunch of Virg cast stuff. I was laughing because it's down into the weeds of like standards, patent licensing, which if you were a long time listener of the show, you know that we used to spend hours talking about like LTE standards, patents and friend all the way down in there. But two pieces that we should spotlight here. This is strange, right? Like this is stuff that when Trump did similar things were like, yeah, a little dictatory.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:03Nilay Patel?

  But he had Lena Khan, who's the new head of the FTC and Jessica Rosenwarsall, who's the acting head of the FCC at the event with him. And he signed the order and he's like, I strongly recommend the FCC bring back net neutrality. And he said, he has a bunch of suggestions for the FTC to do. And the reason I make the Trump comparison is Trump would often command his agencies to do things in a way presidents are not really supposed to do. And then everyone get all up in arms. And here's like, they had a party and Joe Biden's like, I think you should do this stuff. And they're like, great idea, Joe. And like, the optics are different, but the concerns are the same.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:37Nilay Patel?

  I think the difference here is he appointed the heads of the agencies to do these things. So he's just like repeating their ideas back to them as opposed to commanding them to sell TikTok to Microsoft or whatever the hell Trump's doing. So there's, I would, I take the criticism. I hear it. At the same time, Lena Khan of the FTC, like Facebook is like filing motions, saying that Lena Khan shouldn't judge cases about Facebook, or she shouldn't be in charge of the FTC's lawsuit against Facebook that Mike had refiled. Amazon is filing the same motion. You shouldn't judge the Amazon MGM merger because you as a law student wrote articles about Amazon.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  I don't know who I'm stealing this from, but very important headline we need to, we're going to write about this is that these companies are afraid of the wrath of Khan.

• 49:29Nilay Patel?

  All right. If we ran a print magazine in the 90s, we'd like,

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:34Nilay Patel?

  Put our face on it with like a big.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  If anybody, if anybody's listening, works for Wired, I just, that's your next cover. Just like do it.

• 49:40Alex Cranz?

  Done.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  Big order says net neutrality should come back. There is not enough votes in the FCC because not enough commissioners at the FCC yet. They just haven't appointed enough commissioners to like, take this vote on party lines to bring back net neutrality. We've been talking a lot about AT&T and streaming and all this stuff. I just want to remind everybody that Trump got elected, he installed the Geppie, net neutrality went away, and AT&T was like, "We should buy Time Warner." Like, that was their idea. And they were like, "We're gonna do clips of Game of Thrones on AT&T phones, and revolutionize the business with the power of 5G." And they just like said a bunch of nonsense about how they could combine Time Warner's content with their excellent delivery.

• 50:23Nilay Patel?

  It all came down to like weird preloaded Android apps. Like, any carrier idea comes down to like-

• 50:31Alex Cranz?

  Like three livestream TV services?

• 50:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we've, we've written a mediocre Android app, and now it's on everyone's home screen by default. But this cost, what, billions of dollars in value? It led to a total exodus of talent from HBO, like all their executives left. Like, thousands of people got laid off in all this mess, and then it failed, and now they're selling it. And like, what if we just had a law that was like, "AT&T can't have this idea anymore?"

• 50:59Speaker 02

  You're not, you're not pro net neutrality, you're anti AT&T.

• 51:03Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, it's like, maybe you're gonna make the argument that the carriers haven't done the worst things that net neutrality proponents said they would do.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  Which is even to my mind, kinda shaky. Cause AT&T definitely excluded HBO Max from data caps. Like, they did the things.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 51:22Nilay Patel?

  But even if you don't buy that argument, because you haven't seen it or felt it, the idea just destroys businesses. Notable, like AOL bought Time Warner to mix content and access and destroyed itself.

• 51:34Alex Cranz?

  Just don't buy Time Warner is the real note here.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like AT&T shouldn't be allowed to do anything and don't buy Time Warner are the two core ideas in that neutrality itself. I just want like, there's, there's a real argument to be made here now with enough evidence that actually you should prevent this because what you want these companies to do is spend their money making the networks better. And if you don't just stop them from chasing content integration, they will get distracted. Yep. Because they always get distracted and it always fails. So like, I still think they're doing shady things to the network. I still think they're coming to shady agreements. I still think that given half an ounce of regulatory leeway, they will start, I mean,

• 52:17Nilay Patel?

  they are, they're like raising prices and putting data caps on after the pandemic. Like, they will act badly because they have no real competition for most people. Dieter, you can't switch from Comcast, right? They're going to act like monopolies because they are. But it is also true that even if you just want to look at it in the coldest business sense, they will chase the worst idea that any ISP has ever had every single time. They will buy Time Warner. They will just do it every time. Actually, we keep mentioning NBC and Comcast. Really interesting thing that is playing out with Comcast right now. When NBC bought Comcast, they were under a consent agreement with the FCC and the FTC that they could not mix content and access. Right.

• 53:01Nilay Patel?

  That agreement has expired. Comcast hasn't really done anything else because there's still lawsuits and regulatory instability. Joe Biden's just like talking about bringing it back. So they haven't tried to mix it. That means both businesses have done well and analysts are like, you should spin off NBC.

• 53:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, even when you do it as well as you can do it, people are like, why'd you do this? Yeah. Like, this doesn't make any sense for your business. So we'll see what happens with the neutrality thing. The other piece, and Alex, I know you're in on this, right to repair.

• 53:35Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  Lot of right to repair in this order.

• 53:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So, so I guess like farmers are going to be able to repair their deer tractors now. Um, I think the, the, the big thing was that it was kind of broad, but he, he basically told the FCC that they really need to be thinking about like how to stop unfair competitive, competitive restrictions on third-party repair or self-re pairs and specifically cited, it didn't cite John Deere, but specifically cited tractors and, and farm equipment as, as the big thing. But obviously like that's, I think gotten the most press, but it also counts for like phones and laptops and everything else that you want to repair that is virtually impossible to repair yourself right now.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the idea is that you should be able to get manuals. There shouldn't be software locks and you should be able to get OEM parts, which is really important. We, I just had the CTO John Deere, Jamie Henman on Decoder. You know, he, his, it's fascinating, right? Smart guy makes products people like, his arguments against repairing a tractor are exactly the same arguments that Apple makes against repairing your phone, right? He's like, you'll do dangerous things. It's regulated. It's a computer. We've got to keep the criminals out. And it's like, or you could just let us repair it. Like it's, like the farmers, like these are our tractors. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like you let us repair them. I'm like, it's my phone. It costs $1,500.

• 54:56Nilay Patel?

  I think this is a surprisingly big deal. This is like rights repaired, uh, Motherboard and Vice have done it. Just a tremendous job of covering it. Over the years, we've been interested in it. They've really led the way in coverage. It's been kind of amazing to see just like how focused they've been on it, but it's right there.

• 55:13Alex Cranz?

  I think the reason we focus so much on John Deere is because everybody else, we kind of had it slowly taken away from us, right? Like it was bit by bit by bit, losing the ability to repair your, your laptop. Like I remember replacing the entire display on my G3 Pismo, um, that I spray painted in a bathtub in college.

• 55:33Nilay Patel?

  What color did you spray paint it?

• 55:35Alex Cranz?

  Purple.

• 55:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay. That's a great choice.

• 55:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. But then my friends would come over and be like, why is there purple spray paint all over your bathtub?

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  And then you say that's none of your business.

• 55:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:47Nilay Patel?

  Get out of my bathroom.

• 55:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Um, I did not get my deposit back, but.

• 55:55Alex Cranz?

  Don't do that. But we all like, it's been chipped away. Like the things you could repair, like these companies like OWC and iFixit, which I still think of, I still type in PB Fixit when I'm trying to go to iFixit. It's just muscle memory. Like the stuff that you could buy from those places to do your repairs a decade ago, even like five years ago, there was so much more stuff. And now it's like, you can buy some special screws and some special like bits to remove the screws. That's, that's about it. Maybe a battery if you're lucky. You better get your heat, like a heat gun out to remove the current battery. So like, I think it's, it's good. It's, you know, I was a big nerd, even though I have friends

• 56:37Alex Cranz?

  who have these tractors and are very excited, it's going to be easier for them to repair their $100,000 tractor that uses GPS to like, paint hay lines or whatever. I don't know. Like, they're very excited. But with the rest of us, like, I, I'm pumped. And I think this is a huge, huge deal. And like, I think it's, it's really great that it's finally happening. Maybe, we'll see. Because it's still, just the SDC was told to crack down.

• 57:06Nilay Patel?

  He's like, I would encourage you to do this.

• 57:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm sure they'll all be immediately told, asked to recuse when they start the crackdown.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  I've been collecting a bunch of old PDAs to like, show off on a shelf. And I forgot that on the handspring visor, the stylus, you could unscrew the cap of it, and it had a little tiny Phillips screwdriver that was exactly designed for the Phillips screws on the visor itself.

• 57:30Alex Cranz?

  That's awesome.

• 57:30Nilay Patel?

  So that you could...

• 57:32Speaker 02

  You could take it apart and fix stuff and re-solder the wires, because that's how old that thing was. The other thing that's really interesting about this executive order. Yeah, you know, you're right. He's instructing all the heads of all the departments to go do stuff. But it's explicitly under the rubric of promoting competition. It's not, Apple is bad, or a right to repair is morally right. It's, no, no, competition, y'all, is actually good. And in order for us to have competition, we should do this stuff. And so instead of leading with the thing that everyone can argue about, he's leading with, "Hey, isn't competition good?" And then everyone will be like, "Yeah."

• 58:13Speaker 02

  And then, and then he's like, "Okay, well, how about this stuff?" And it will pull more people along, theoretically, if our politics aren't completely broken, which maybe they are.

• 58:22Nilay Patel?

  I agree with you. One of the more interesting things about this whole situation is the bipartisan shuffle that is occurring.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  So like, right to repair bipartisan support, like farmers live in red states, their representatives hear from them, like, they're into it. They're like happy about it. Consolidation and meatpacking, Republican representatives and senators like care about it a lot.

• 58:47Alex Cranz?

  Republican senators actually don't like it. The consolidation and meatpacking is like this whole weird thing that's happening where a lot of people are for, like, a lot of the independent producers are for it, but the larger producers, who are the bulk of producers in the US, are against like stopping the consolidation. They like the consolidation because they get the good deals and stuff.

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  There's always a group of people who really like the consolidation.

• 59:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  They tend to have a lot of money and they speak loudly.

• 59:15Alex Cranz?

  So you have like these, these different groups, but they're all Republican, which is great. So it's like this, this, this fighting between these different like producer groups.

• 59:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what I mean. It's like, there is a shuffle here that is happening under the, the usual red and blue shuffle that we're used to as it relates to competition. Here's my favorite part of the order, because I think this is very funny. So he encourages the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, who by the way is the acting chair, not the chair, he's got to nominate somebody. But he encourages Jessica Rosenworth, who is currently the acting chair, to adopt net neutrality rules, blah, blah, to conduct future spectrum auctions, and then provide support for the continued development and adoption of 5G open radio access network protocols and software.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:00:02Nilay Patel?

  ORAN. ORAN is the network software stack that Dish Network is supposed to use to make its 5G network to compete with T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 1:00:12Nilay Patel?

  So in here, he's like, "Can you just goose that along a little bit?"

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  Nothing's happening here.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Somebody help Charlie.

• 1:00:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I mean, that it's this is like this underlying, we don't think about 5G networks as having suppliers and vendors, right? We're like, we usually live at this high consumer level. Like, we think about AT&T and Verizon as providers of 5G to us, the consumer. They've got to go out and get Nokia and Siemens and whoever else to like, put stuff on their towers.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:43Nilay Patel?

  And right now, all that stuff is effectively proprietary. Like, you buy into one system. ORAN is the open one, where any supplier can be a vendor. A lot of this is aimed at increasing competition, so we're not reliant on Chinese companies like Huawei.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  So even in here, all the way down to the nerdiest thing I can think of on the Vergecast, Joe Biden's like, I got an idea about ORAN. Put that in there.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Just for you. Does Joe Biden have that idea, or does Tim Wu have that idea?

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  That's definitely Tim Wu's idea.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  It's absolutely Tim Wu's idea. This entire section, by the way, is under a previous section that instructs to protect the vibrancy of American markets for beer, wine, and spirits. The Secretary of Treasury shall not, after 120 days of this order, submit a report to the Chair of the White House assessing the current market structure and conditions of competition on beer, wine, and spirits. But he's all over the place.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  He's like, too many, too much consolidation in the spirits market. Diageo, get in here. I like the idea that there's like, there's an alliance between like, Diageo, Verizon, meat packers. You're killing us, Joe. Diageo, give me a call if you ever want to do a vodka brand. I've got ideas for it. So I feel like we have to talk about Branson, Virgin Galactic. First flight he was on it, made a big deal. It was real weird.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was weird. They made a fake video of him riding his bike to the spaceport, which it turned out he like, just, he had ridden his bike the day before. They faked it. I'm all for bike riding, but I mean, I don't know how, I don't know how that connects to anything. The thing that's interesting to me is like, Amazon and like, Blue Origin, they had to like, be snipy about this too? Like, it's not technically space, you know?

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay, great. Well, something really interesting about this, like the bicycle, the video, we're very used to SpaceX, right? Probably everybody listening to the show has watched a SpaceX livestream. SpaceX basically apes NASA, right? And NASA is like...

• 1:02:45Nilay Patel?

  NASA TV is not like action packed. Right. Right. NASA like their streams are, you know, they're a government agency trying to educate the public and inspire the youth to do math or whatever. And they're very dry and direct. SpaceX, Elon's an engineer, like that's an engineering company. Famously, you know, Tesla doesn't do any marketing. Like, so SpaceX looks a lot like NASA. I think as a company, they're engineering focused. Most SpaceX launches are like, after the launch, there's a long period of just like watching a rocket float into the sky while a dot on a bar graph at the bottom moves along. And then like excited people tell you about space engineering.

• 1:03:24Nilay Patel?

  And people are captivated by this. This all makes sense. Our science team has very conflicted feelings about those SpaceX live streams, right? Because they're not real. Like, they ape a thing that looks official. They ape the government regulated thing, but they're a private company that looks like it. But they're still pretty good and people watch them and people like them. Branson is literally like a music video executive. Right. That's who he is. He's an entertainment executive. The Virgin Galactic stream was like an infomercial, like no aping NASA whatsoever. There was another stream that was up from just like a YouTube channel and they were just like, yeah, watch us if you

• 1:04:07Nilay Patel?

  don't want the fluff. Because interspersed with the regular Virgin Galactic stuff was like, you know, like at the Olympics that you like human interest pieces on like athletes? Yeah. It was that but for Branson. And then like one about, one about his mom. Like, just like all this stuff hyping it up. And I was like watching, I was like, this is this like a sci fi movie where the rocket explodes. Like, it made me anxious as I was watching. I was like, if you say something is great this much, like, I've seen movies, man. I know what happens. It all went off. It was fine. But as space gets more privatized and commercial, I think we've all been kind of lulled into complacency by SpaceX being this engineering

• 1:04:50Nilay Patel?

  company that kind of looks like NASA. It's gonna get commercial. Like, that plane landed and they're like, here's a song Richard Branson commissioned from Khalid. And then we just like, listened to a song for a while. Like, why is this happening? And I think we should all just get ready. It's like, Blue Origin does it, and Virgin Galactic does it, and other companies start to do commercial space. They're gonna do commercial space. And it's gonna look like branded content. Not, like, if something went wrong in that flight, would you, I would not have trusted that video to be an accurate representation of the flight.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:05:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Alex Cranz?

  Would have just been cycling on the same two seconds over and over again, until they figured out what to say.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, the thing about this stuff is, it's these huge celebrations. And if you actually step back and think about, what are we celebrating? We are celebrating the fact that private companies have done something that we did as a, like, society and a government 70 years ago, 60 years ago, whatever. Like, that's, that's what we're celebrating. And I know that's reductive and it's more than that, but I don't know. It is a little weird. Like, the joke that billionaires are going to space, they should stay there. I don't want anybody to die, obviously. But I do, I do want to know, like, other than a PR opportunity, like, tell a better story of what the purpose of your, you know, space rockets are.

• 1:06:15Alex Cranz?

  Well, Branson's is just a PR opportunity, right? Like, he's just-

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  Branson said he was evaluating the product. Like, he came off his rocket, right? And they're like, what was it? And he was like, that was amazing. I dreamed of it since I was a little boy. What a great opportunity to evaluate the customer experience. And it's like, uh, like, you're not Neil, like, that's Neil Armstrong, like, say, like, one small step for, like, they evaluate the customer, that's what your brain went to?

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Nilay Patel?

  And like, that's what I mean, like-

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  I see, man, QA is important, right?

• 1:06:50Nilay Patel?

  I just like you sound like the line manager at a jelly bean factory like what are you doing, man? It just really struck me that we're really used to SpaceX and SpaceX conducts itself one way that looks a lot like NASA. And like I said, our science team has conflicted feelings about that, right? But even still, like, it'd be hard for me to make the case to most listeners to show that that's like problematic. Your conflicted feelings there are like, can you really trust this? It looks like a thing you can trust, but whatever. But it's still, it had a sincerity to it. It continues to have a sincerity to it. This Virgin Galactic thing was, I don't think we're actually ready for the commercialization of space and what it will look like. And this one, to me, was like, oh, boy.

• 1:07:33Alex Cranz?

  We just saw it.

• 1:07:35Nilay Patel?

  That said, I would love to have that customer experience. That'd be so rad. Okay, some gadgets. There was like a bunch of little gadget leaks along the way. Dieter, walk us through them.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  We've probably got Samsung's entire unpacked device lineup that leaked. So we're looking at everything we expected. Z Fold 3, Z Flip, whatever the number is, some watches. So that's happening. I think the date is also rumored. I want to say it's August 11th. Yeah, I'm excited to see what what happens with the the Fold, the Flip 2 is going to have a bigger screen. That'll be good. The Z Fold 3 will have stylus support. I hope there's something else to this story because the Fold 3 needs more than just stylus support. It needs a little bit more elegant software. It needs to get thinner. They need to change the form factor. I don't know that this is the year for that. Maybe it's a year that they bring the price down even further.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Like, if they, if they have this thing and it's like 1,500 bucks, like, that's exciting. Otherwise, it's not.

• 1:08:37Alex Cranz?

  Well, the watch is exciting, right? This is gonna be-

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  The watch is exciting, yes.

• 1:08:43Alex Cranz?

  This is gonna be a big deal for the watch.

• 1:08:44Nilay Patel?

  No, I think this is the right year for the Fold 3. Everyone's like, they, poor Samsung, like, the pandemic hit, everyone stayed at home.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:53Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited about a phone-sized thing that maybe is a little thinner that like opens up into a bigger useful thing.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  Mobile computing's back, baby.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the Fold 3 was the perfect pandemic phone if you could afford it because you could, you wouldn't feel weird carrying around this big remote control in your pocket all the time. Didn't matter if it was awkward because you weren't going anywhere and then you would have a big screen, you know, with you all the time instead of your phone. It was great.

• 1:09:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm just like, again, my dream is to edit verge articles with a pen. So if Google could get to supporting that in Google Docs, that'd be great. And then just imagine the havoc I would wreak on planes and subways with like a giant fold out tablet and a pen. I've had this dream for like 10 years. It's never going to come true, but just stay with me.

• 1:09:40Alex Cranz?

  Okay. I'm gonna put my energy towards believing in that for you.

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  I'll tell you what, I'm gonna submit my next draft to you in Word and then you'll be able to do it. Okay?

• 1:09:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I'll happily circle things in Word.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could do it on your, you know, your bargain basement Surface Duo and, you know, get a, get a Surface stylus for that and you're good to go.

• 1:09:57Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't quite, it's still not quite what I want. I've, I've, I've thought about it. I've tried a little bit.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Nilay Patel?

  There's, I don't know, it's, because it doesn't show up in all the places you want it to show up.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  I think you don't want the marking up. You just want the, the experience of the power. So if you want me to come out to New York and you could just be like, get me pictures of Spider-Man and then, you know.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's all I want. When, um, here's a, like, one, if you're an editor, like, you know, you watch the movies, like, the dream is that you will have the glass paneled conference room and like all the pages of the magazine will be there and you'll like point at them and be like, that one needs a Spicer headline. Better photo here. Let's move this to the front of the, like, you'll, I, I've never gotten to do this.

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  When Vox Media and New York Magazine merged, I went to visit the editor in chief of New York Magazine through office and like hang out. And he was like, oh, here's where we put the print magazine together. And my immediate instinctive response was like, fuck you.

• 1:10:52Nilay Patel?

  I looked so mad at him. He was like a little confused.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  I was like, no, no, you don't understand. This is just jealousy. It's just a dream. You're great, David. Yeah, just a dream I have. Let's end with what we promised we would talk about, the Freedom Phone.

• 1:11:07Speaker 06

  Everyone is complaining about big tech censorship, but no one is doing anything about it. They say, build your own phone. So I did.

• 1:11:15Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, you've, a lot of people have tweeted at you, a bunch of people have tweeted at me. This is the second or third time the Freedom Phone has been announced. What is the Freedom Phone?

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  It is a Android phone, running probably, I guess, some version of Lineage OS. That's basically just an Umidigi phone. And it's a spitting image of the Umidigi A9 Pro, according to Animation is Key. I think that looks about right. And it is, it has an app store that cannot be censored, apparently. And it has some preloaded apps on it. And it runs Freedom OS, whatever that is.

• 1:11:50Speaker 06

  Freedom Phone truly is the best phone in the world. It does everything your current phone does, except censor you and spy on you. With the Freedom Phone, your freedom of speech is our number one priority.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  All of which is to say, it's a grift. It is a way for Eric Finman, who is selling this thing, to squeeze a bunch of money out of people who are mad and think that buying an Android phone that claims that it is free is a way to solve that anger. It's a grift. Don't, don't buy it.

• 1:12:23Nilay Patel?

  So, again, this is like the third time this thing has been announced. We have passed on every time. We're gonna try to get one. I think that's important. But Eric Finman, there's a video, you can go watch it. There's this guy, he's like, hi, I'm the world's youngest Bitcoin millionaire, which to me is a signal that I should stop watching a video. You keep watching the video and he's like, we gotta stop big tech. I've built this phone to fight back against the oppressive sensorial power of app stores and privacy, like, whatever. Then he's like, I have an uncensorable app store on my phone, the Freedom Phone, which as Dieter pointed out, is a rebranded Chinese Android phone. I would also point out, we've talked about app stores a lot on this show and in this world. You want a little censoring in your app store.

• 1:13:08Nilay Patel?

  Just a little. Just a little. Like, you want malware to not be in your app store. Overt identity theft scams, maybe not in your app store. Blatant rip offs of other apps. Fake Instagram clones. If you want that not in your app store. So it's weird that he's like uncensorable app store.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Nilay Patel?

  Then it does kind of like, it's unclear what riff on Android this thing is running, but it's obviously a riff on Android. That also means it won't have the Play Store.

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:13:38Nilay Patel?

  Which means like, you're gonna buy this phone because you want freedom, but what you will have achieved is like, freedom from YouTube.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. He's selling it for a huge markup over this Umi Digi phone. I don't think it'll ever ship. I think it is all just a grift.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Every single thing on the website that says, like, you want to find out more? Like, it says uncensorable app store. And like, oh, I want to, what does that mean? What's the button that lets me click on it to learn more? It's buy it now. Preloaded apps. Oh, what are the preloaded apps? I'll click the button underneath it to find out what the preloaded apps are. It's buy it now. Oh, the free speech first operating system, Freedom OS. I wonder what the features of this operating system are. I'm going to click the button underneath that to find out what all this is about. That button is buy it now also.

• 1:14:22Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say my favorite thing about the buy it now situation is that?

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Buy it now.

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  You can enable, they've enabled Apple Pay. So you can, you can buy your uncensorable phone with Apple Pay. It's very good. Like I said, we, we had this like internal argument about whether you want to give this obvious scam a lot of attention. And we think the best way to do that is to joke about it for five minutes on the Vergecast and then try to get one and see if we can pull apart what it actually is. But just, I mean, if you're a listener of the show, the basics here are obviously scammy. Right? Like, an uncensorable app store is inherently a bad idea.

• 1:15:01Alex Cranz?

  Who is, who is putting apps on that app store?

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. Like, if, in like, so that, you know, their big one is Parler and Gab. They want them all on there, blah, blah, blah. Like, sure, I get it.

• 1:15:12Alex Cranz?

  All right.

• 1:15:13Nilay Patel?

  But Parler, like, Parler's Android app probably relies on Google Play Services.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  It sure might.

• 1:15:19Nilay Patel?

  Because that's what they targeted it to. And they won't have Google Play. Like it is like just a very, the basics of how a phone works here are like, yes, I wish that we were more Android variants. Yes, there are lawsuits that might split apart place. Or we talked about that last week. This is just a dead ahead grift. It's also just very funny that it is. I mean, this is like, how many small companies that have repackaged Chinese Android phones have we seen come and go? Like, it just like, doesn't work. Anyway, that's the Freedom Phone. I hope we get one. If you have a line on one, please send it, let us know. I'm not giving them my Apple Pay information. It's not gonna happen for me. But I would love to know more about this thing. Okay,

• 1:16:01Nilay Patel?

  a few things to call out when we get out of here. Chris Welch reviewed the Sonos Picture Frame Seekers, which definitely look cool. They're basically like a play one on your wall, which is neat. The fact that you can't change the picture is like a huge miss to me.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a huge miss, but also everyone's very first thought is, I bet I could figure out a way to fix that. I bet I could. Yeah, I could. I'll just take an X-acto knife, just go to town.

• 1:16:25Nilay Patel?

  Purple spray paint in the bathtub. Let's get this done.

• 1:16:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's all you need.

• 1:16:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I've been reading a lot. I don't know why, why I keep chasing this stuff. Like, I just keep reading these articles that how you can take in IKEA Symphonist speaker and use it to drive other speakers.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  It's apparently very easy.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:16:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is me saying, I have a, I have an idea for a bad Saturday project that will fail. But that's the reviews on the site. Heim reviewed the TEDPad from Loki. So this is one of the funniest things Heim has ever written. It's very good. That's on the site right now. And then we've been talking a lot about net neutrality, internet bills. We have a partnership with Consumer Reports where we want to collect a lot of internet bills from people and just evaluate prices, speeds, fees, weird taxes, all that stuff. We're hoping to get tens of thousands of bills. So go to the site, go to Consumer Reports, send us your internet bill. Like,

• 1:17:19Alex Cranz?

  But through the link.

• 1:17:21Nilay Patel?

  But through the link. Don't just like mail us your bill. There's a link. There's a partnership. It's great. It's called Let's Broadband Together. Yep, we're going to keep everything private. Consumer Reports is running that whole side of it. We're going to do the analysis. I think there's a lot to learn here. So check that out. Send us your internet bill. Okay, that's it. I'm not going to tell you who's on Decoder next week, but this is just me chasing a big fun summary idea. You'll like it, but I'm actually not on the Verge House next week. I'm on vacation. Dieter is going to do a full hour on RCS.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually.

• 1:17:49Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be so exciting.

• 1:17:52Nilay Patel?

  If I'm in control, that might happen. You never know. Uh, you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless Dieters, at Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Krans. We love hearing from you. We'll see you in a little bit. That's it. That's Verchast. Rock and roll. Five stars.

• 1:18:24Speaker 07

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• 1:19:10Speaker 08

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