Pixel 6 preview / Apple reveals new efforts to fight child abuse imagery

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Cranz discuss Google's preview of the Pixel 6 and its Tensor chip. Verge policy editor Russell Brandom explains how Apple will reportedly scan photos on iPhones and iCloud for child abuse imagery. Vaccine carrots only got us so far — now, it’s time for sticks New York Auto Show canceled as delta variant spreads NYC’s Key vaccination requirement for indoor dining can be met with an app Yelp will let businesses list their vaccination policies Moderna says a third shot of its COVID-19 vaccine may be needed to protect against variants This is the Pixel 6, Google’s take on an ‘ultra high end’ phone Google’s Tensor chip is only the first step toward truly great Pixel phones Apple will reportedly scan photos stored on iPhones and iCloud for child abuse imagery Apple reveals new efforts to fight child abuse imagery Google’s new Nest cameras and doorbell have lower prices and more smarts Oppo announces ‘next-generation’ under-display selfie camera Here’s a closer look at Apple’s canceled AirPower wireless charger Apple updates Mac Pro GPUs with new AMD Radeon options You can get a Touch ID-equipped Magic Keyboard without buying a whole iMac now Elon Musk and Apple deny wild story that he tried to replace Tim Cook Facebook can project your eyes onto a VR headset, and it’s exactly as uncanny as it sounds NYT crossword puzzle no longer works in third-party apps, crosses puzzle solvers HBO Max is getting its own exclusive podcasts, starting with Batman AT&T has officially spun off DirecTV, which is now its own business T-Mobile confirms it will shut down Sprint’s LTE network next year Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, Alex Krantz joins the show to talk about the new Google Pixel 6, a bunch of other gadgets that came out this week. And Russell Brandon joins the show to talk about Apple's new system for detecting illegal imagery on your phone. And it's coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:15Speaker 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.

• 1:01Speaker 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.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of double vaccine.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  That's what I want to call it, right? Where you mix and match vaccines. But the problem is that Pfizer and Moderna are already two shots. So it's kind of like a double. You understand what I'm saying?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  We're going to need a term for it because it's going to come up.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, if you think of one, let us know. Anyway, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  I'm the person who came up with the term hybrid vax.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  Hybrid. Oh, that's good.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Although it does sound like one of the vaccines runs on gasoline.

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  Which, you know, I don't want to spread any more misinformation than is absolutely necessary this time. One gives you 5G and the other one is gasoline. And who knows which one is which?

• 2:41Speaker 02

  I got another one.

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Before, before you introduce Alex, you ready?

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Chimera Vax.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's.

• 2:46Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 2:47Nilay Patel?

  That makes it sound like the Island of Dr. Moreau. Like, what you, all these names, you gotta imagine, like, what is the crazy right wing ecosystem gonna do?

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  And they're gonna start screenshotting the Island of Dr. Moreau.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Patriot Vax.

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 3:04Nilay Patel?

  That's actually, that's good. Hi, Alex. Alex Cranz is here.

• 3:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I am, I'm the Patriot Vax. I got my, I got my hat. I got my, my flag.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  A lesser known DC superhero.

• 3:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Nilay Patel?

  Killed in the first act of Suicide Squad. Um, actually, speaking of, there's a lot to talk about. Dieter held a Pixel 6.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  And what it looks like is in his brain, nowhere else.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  There's some big Apple privacy photo scanning news. Russell's gonna join us to talk about that. And there's all kinds of other gadgets. But let's start to start, we're already talking about COVID. We're in a strange period of COVID. It is back with a moderate vengeance because of Delta. So the good news is that hospitalizations and deaths are, are not spiking, but cases are spiking. The reasons hospitalizations and deaths are not spiking as badly because the vaccines work. Problem is not everybody in this country is taking the vaccines. So we're in a wave of things like office reopenings are getting postponed. Big companies are all postponing the office reopenings. It's Google, it's Apple, so on. The New York Auto Show

• 4:12Nilay Patel?

  was supposed to be this month. I was very excited about it because it was gonna be a very EV focused auto show. There's a lot of rumors about cars. And now it's canceled because the Delta variant is causing enough problems, even in New York State where the vaccination rates are high. And then in many places around the country, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, vaccine rates are low and people are dying. So we're kind of in an odd stage of it. We're hearing a lot about vaccine mandates from various companies to go into their businesses to work in their businesses. You have to be vaccinated. That is obviously politically dicey. We're hearing a lot of back and forth about that. There's a lot of.

• 4:54Nilay Patel?

  Prove that you're vaccinated. So there's all kinds of apps and services. New York City has something called the key to the city.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 5:03Nilay Patel?

  It's an app and to dine inside, you gotta show your vaccine proof with the key to the city.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Has Mayor Bill de Blasio ever done anything that didn't make you cringe just a little?

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  One time he wore like a Hawaiian shirt to a pool party and I was like, all right.

• 5:17Alex Cranz?

  That's nice.

• 5:18Nilay Patel?

  You got the right, that was it. That's the only thing that's on my list. Yelp is gonna let businesses start listing vaccination policies. So there's just a lot of that. You know, the, the sort of verge element of this is there's a lot of privacy implications with having databases that people need to check all the time and serious ones. And I think the concerns about who can access those databases, when and why are real, especially with things on your phone and things on the cloud. But at the same time, there is but one way out of this nonsense. I would really like to hold on the verge, our birthday party in October, in late October. I would like to have it. I'd like to see all of you there. There's only one way that happens.

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  And that is if vaccination rates go up and we overcome the Delta wave and we don't end up in the Lambda wave, which is already happening in South America. So please, I beg you, get vaccinated. The other thing to know is that Moderna is already saying that a third shot might be necessary. So Moderna and Pfizer, the two-shot mRNA protocols, Pfizer, I think we talked about this last week. Pfizer is still effective after six months, even against the variants. Moderna is starting to say, hey, to protect against these variants, you might need a third shot. Good news is vaccines are effective against the variants. But we're just, we're coming up on that, that like timeline of, oh, boy, we're gonna have to do this all over again.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:37Nilay Patel?

  I would prefer not to do that. I'm assuming most listeners of the show don't need me to implore them to get vaccinated, but if you're on the margin, just, I did it. Just go, go do, you'll be fine. You'll get great 5G.

• 6:49Alex Cranz?

  Or you're driving in the car with a friend who you know isn't, just like turn the podcast up a little.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Alex Cranz?

  Look knowingly at them at the stoplight.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  A person tweeted at me, why, why do you keep telling people to get vaccinated at the end of the show? Your listeners must all be vaccinated. And in the US at least, as of a couple of weeks ago, people under 40, less than half had had their second shot. So if you're listening to this, there might actually be a decent chance that you haven't been fully vaccinated and just come on.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's time. And I need to just tell this to Dieter, to say this out loud. The quarterback for the Vikings got COVID, couldn't go to training camp.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:27Nilay Patel?

  Still refuses to get vaccinated and the coach was like, fuckin' Facebook.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, pretty directly, he's like, the problem here is bad information to the players.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  And he's like, it is what it is. And he's very frustrated and unhappy. And like, I don't know, you're the coach.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  The bench is right there. You can surround it with the Plexiglas that the Cousins asked for. Just do it.

• 7:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's real bad, but hopefully, hopefully people get a sense of their responsibility and they do this thing and we can have our birthday party in October, which is, I've been thinking about that party and what it would be like to actually see everybody. We have, we have really cool ideas.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:07Nilay Patel?

  Bring the verge to life in person and I'll just be honest, I'm a little nervous right now. So if you're hesitant, if you are worried, there's a lot of great material on our site. Other sites. Google's gonna build a website that helps you get tested.

• 8:24Nilay Patel?

  How long have we been doing this? Anyhow, speaking of Google, there's my segue.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 8:28Nilay Patel?

  I love it. Dieter, you went to Google's campus.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  I did. I went to Camp Charleston.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  It's called Camp Charleston.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  They have an outdoor tented area with like outdoor, like open air meeting rooms. And they call it Camp Charleston because that's the name of one of the roads next to the Google campus.

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. And then you, you were allowed to hold the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6 Pro.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 8:51Nilay Patel?

  Ask questions about it.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 8:54Nilay Patel?

  But not take any photos or videos of it.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Also correct.

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  And also not receive a whole lot of information.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Tell us about the Pixel 6. A limited amount of information. So the leaks that you have probably seen are accurate. It is a big, squareish phone and the back is got, you know, a glass. And then there's a big, long camera bar that runs the length of it. And then there's a different color glass above the camera bar. It feels nice. It feels, you know, like premium. I hate that word a little bit, but it's also like the word. And my takeaway is that Google is trying this time really hard to make a phone that feels like it could compete with. The next high-end iPhone or the next high-end Samsung phone. Well, the one after that's 21, maybe not the next high-end Samsung phone, which will be folding.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  It feels nice. There's two sizes. I believe it's 6.4, 6.7. And this is exciting. There's a new camera sensor in it. Not the same one that they've been using since like the Pixel 2. The rumor is that it might be 50 megapixels. They wouldn't say. There's also a folding telephoto lens on the Pro. They look very, very similar, like unless you like physically set them next to each other and see that one is a little bit taller than the other. They're very difficult to tell apart. So I'm a little bit tempted to just go with the six because it's a little bit smaller, but you lose 120 Hz refresh rate screen and you lose the folding optical lens. But the whole point of all of this was not to show off the hardware. They kind of just had to because they know and everybody knows.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  The point of this was to talk about Tensor. Tensor is. It's when you're a little bit nervous and then you get a little bit more nervous that Apple's eating your lunch. And so as because you're more nervous, you're Tensor. Yeah. You know, you can't make a good phone. Tensor is T E N S O R. I'm Tensor now. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry.

• 10:49Alex Cranz?

  After that joke, yeah.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  It's a system on a chip, like every phone. It's got a CPU and a GPU and image processor and blah, blah, blah, blah. Google is putting on what I thought was going to be the first, but it turns out that it's the second. Mobile TPU. Now, TPU is a tensor processing unit. That is the custom silicon that Google's been making for a while now in its data centers for doing machine learning stuff. So think of it as like a GPU that doesn't have as much of like actual graphic stuff, but does similar kinds of operations. It's just custom designed to do machine learning and AI. And so they are trying to build the TPU into the pipeline of a lot of the stuff that the phone does. And so the two big examples right now are like voice stuff and camera stuff. And so.

• 11:36Alex Cranz?

  That that tracks.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like those are Google's demos, right? Like.

• 11:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Like, here's a great photo and here's a great voice recognition, speech to text.

• 11:45Nilay Patel?

  That's what they wanted to show you. They showed you some demos. We should talk about those demos.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:49Nilay Patel?

  But like, I don't know. Apple makes chips.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:53Nilay Patel?

  They've got a neural engine on them.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  Is this the same as that? Just I put this into.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Sure. They're not giving any details on like the core CPU GPU stuff here. They're saying they're licensing some parts of their system on the chip. Rumor is they're working with Samsung and so that might be sort of like X and O's with Google stuff. But the big question is, is this like a genuinely new thing that Google makes that is new and interesting and like, you can think of it as like they're getting out of the Qualcomm box and actually able to, you know, make their own faster chips. Or is this just they've got a co-processor that does machine learning stuff on the side? And they're doing an excellent job branding it by putting it on to like a custom system chip that also has like the section that Samsung made and the section that, you know, Qualcomm made or whatever the hell.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  I mean,

• 12:39Speaker 02

  unclear.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  That's unclear. If it is excellent, and there's a lot of rumors out there that this is an X and O's chip. One, no other phone in the United States has an X and O's chip on it that I'm aware of. So that's like a big deal that Google would be allowing Samsung into the US market in this way. Very big questions about what modem would it use, right? Like, even every phone in the United States basically has a Qualcomm modem in it. The only people who don't use it are Apple. They're still using it because they had to buy Intel's modem division.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:10Nilay Patel?

  And like fix it, right? Like, there's a lot of big questions there.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Well, there's also a middle ground option, which is Samsung is manufacturing it instead of TSMC. But it's not really an X and O's design. It just happens to share a bunch of stuff because ARM just makes like default designs, right? Like this is what a big chip, this is what a little. And so it's possible that it is like fully Google designed like top to bottom. But it's designed in such a way that's sort of off the shelf from like ARM's standard designs. And so therefore it won't sort of outperform Qualcomm in certain ways. During our talk, Ricardo, hardware chief at Google, likes to talk a lot about how like benchmarks are bad. They don't measure what you want, you know, you should be measuring. And their benchmarks just don't exist for the kind of AI and machine learning stuff

• 13:55Speaker 02

  that the Pixel 6 is good at. And like, Google needs to like, figure out a way to like, put specs on that that people can understand.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's fair.

• 14:05Alex Cranz?

  What are the good benchmarks nowadays for a phone? Like, if I want to know a phone is fast, what am I looking at? Am I looking at just like how it browses the verge?

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Well, first step is, do you try and see if the company that made it has done anything hinky to mess with your idea of what the benchmarks are? Because that's pretty common. The web is actually a pretty good way to check because sometimes web pages are heavy and they can bog a phone down. But often companies will do specific things to Chrome to like extend or reduce battery life. So that isn't necessarily a good benchmark. So Osterloh is not wrong that benchmarking is complicated and computers are getting more heterogeneous is the word. It's not just one thing. However, just because that's true, doesn't mean that they're not getting just completely spanked by the A series chip that Apple makes, right?

• 15:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. Apple's benchmarks, like they're just like, don't label the Y axis, right?

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like unclear. We just know they're fast.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  The, the reason I bring up all this stuff about Samsung and Xbox is the Google Samsung relationship.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:16Nilay Patel?

  Is in a really weird place. They partnered together on watches. Samsung decided to drop Tizen. They're partnered together potentially on this chip. That's really interesting. And then Google's making a phone that if they actually do it, if they succeed, the natural place that they will take market share away from is Samsung.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Yep. Also, not, not for nothing, Samsung was somehow convinced to stop pushing Samsung messages and let Android messages be the default on Android phones around the world.

• 15:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't, there's something happened like, was there, is there a new Samsung executive who like listens to the Vergecast? Reveal yourself.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  TM, we know you're listening.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  I would say weirder things have happened than like a Vergecast listener gets a job and then something changes.

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  We've been doing this for 10 years. Strange, strange things have happened, but that whole relationship to me seems really odd, especially when you say Google's going for it. They're making a flagship, which is something we've been imploring them to for years. And like, they're not going to take market share away from Apple. They're only going to take it from the zombie brands that still exist in the United States and Samsung.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  When you say it's a flagship, what does that mean?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  What is it? What is a computer? Eli, what is? It's a top tier phone that's going to cost more. It's easily going to cost more than a thousand dollars. At least the Pro will, I'm sure of it. It has flagship specs across the board. So, you know, with the Pixel 5, you know, it had a slower processor. It had the old camera. It didn't have all the camera sensors. If you just like do a spec chart and you're like, what will Android super fans be mad that this thing lacks? They're trying to get rid of all of those things so that it has all the camera systems. It has the high megapixel count. It has enough RAM. It has a big screen. It has a high refresh rate. It just, it has all the stuff. And then in addition to that, it feels like a premium, nice phone because every Pixel

• 17:22Speaker 02

  up to now, like literally everyone, maybe with the exception of, I guess, the Pixel 4.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  You're like, oh, you, you, you made a phone that could have been like premium and nice and feel like it, you know, is worth the money. And then you, you just like dipped it in plastic.

• 17:38Nilay Patel?

  Unapologetically plastic.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Like all of their phones have been like metal, anodized, you know, beautiful metal. And then they painted over with plastic to like, give it a different feel and a different grip. And I like that there's like a humility to that, but it also is like, it's time to stop. It's time to just make a flagship phone with all the specs that feels like it belongs on the shelf next to an S21.

• 18:01Nilay Patel?

  You mentioned that in Google's earnings call, their CFO was like, get ready for us to spend a lot of money in advertising.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:11Nilay Patel?

  That like they gotta have a phone that's worth the advertising. Right? Like before they like, we are marketing the phone. I'd be like, there's one billboard in Brooklyn. I have seen it.

• 18:20Alex Cranz?

  It's great.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I already have the phone. So you're not getting a lot of value out of that. But like, they're gonna go wide. They're gonna expend a lot of money.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Well, that's the promise and they're, they're, they're interested in picking up market share. Rick Osterloh said that this finally really is the Google phone. So, uh, you know, Google promises to actually go big and try and like sell phones is a thing that they've been kind of saying, or at least not denying. I don't know. Uh, but this year they're actually saying it. But who knows? It's, it's possible that they won't actually try, or it's possible that they will try and it won't matter. But the goal here is to have this not just be the phone in the back of the Verizon store. The goal is to have it be the phone in the front of the Verizon store that, that when you walk into the Verizon store, the Verizon salesperson knows that they're gonna get a little bonus if they happen to sell you a Pixel phone. Right?

• 19:10Nilay Patel?

  Alex looks very concerned.

• 19:12Alex Cranz?

  I just, I keep looking at it and, and I'm sorry, I just keep getting confused by the camera because it's so like big and I keep thinking about wireless charging and like putting it on a big wireless charging mat. Is it gonna have wireless charging?

• 19:26Speaker 02

  I'm sure it will have wireless charging. I'm not concerned about wireless charging. That's, it's like big enough that you'll be able to set it on something. More concerning is potentially a case because that bar goes all the way across the back of it. So getting a case that can fit around that camera bar or having to deal with like a two-part case, which is always terrible. Unclear. The good news about that camera bar is it does have like the tiniest little like lip over the glass. The metal that is on the top and the bottom of it goes over just a little bit. So it should protect the glass on the back there a little bit. Yeah.

• 19:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that, that just feels like I will break it immediately. I one time got a phone repaired and broke it two hours later.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 20:03Alex Cranz?

  Just, it was like my iPhone five.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Alex Cranz?

  Like threw it on the ground in an Ikea parking lot while people were like, why? And I was like, I don't know. Just sobbing, looking at my busted phone. So this one looks like I'm not gonna take it to Ikea anytime soon.

• 20:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I feel like we need to be honest about these camera bombs. Like everyone is like, well, they're there. Why hide them? And it's like, but why are they there?

• 20:26Alex Cranz?

  Why are they so big?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  They're there so that you can have a good camera?

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  Right, but why do they have to be bumps?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Oh, why isn't the phone just that thick? If the phone were that thick, you'd be like, this phone is too thick.

• 20:37Alex Cranz?

  But what if the phone were that thick and also didn't break? Like,

• 20:43Nilay Patel?

  now you're like, make it out of plastic. We're just like going back to where we came from.

• 20:46Alex Cranz?

  Was, was part of it, right? And then you just have like a nice phone. It's a little thicker than than my current phone, but I don't have to go spend $50 extra for a case and I can throw it on the ground at Ikea.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, a bunch of, a bunch of companies have tried that and no one, no one likes it.

• 21:04Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Like, that's kind of the answer.

• 21:06Alex Cranz?

  So we just like the bump.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, here's the other question about the bump. The bump, I don't know, I'm used to it now, so I think it's like, it's prominent and fine. It's like, you know, it's like a Jordi La Forge visor. So it's cool, but I don't know, does the bump on an iPhone, you know, 12 look okay? Or does it looks, you know, it's like, if you're gonna have a bump, there's only so many ways to do it. And there's like, all of them look silly, like if you step back and think about it for a minute.

• 21:31Alex Cranz?

  I mean, as bumps go, I love this bump. I, I, I think it's, it's bold and it's, it's really like going for it. It's not trying to hide that it's a bump. Like, I feel a lot of phones are like, well, we're bump, but shh. Don't look.

• 21:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:45Alex Cranz?

  And this one's like, no, we're bump.

• 21:46Nilay Patel?

  But the case question is gonna be really interesting here, right? Like, they can't do two-part cases, so it's gonna have to be like a flip, like a, there's gonna be a big hole in the case. It's gonna be like all floppy, right?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  But I do think everyone puts their phone in cases. Cases are a big business for all the cell carriers. Ashley wrote a story ages ago where she interviewed the, the people in charge of cases at Verizon and AT&T. Those people think they are the biggest trendsetters in the entire world. Like, they think they are fashion designers. They're like, we, here's what we do. We set the trends for America. It's, it's like an amazing piece. It's worth reading. But Google, like, Apple shows up with a new phone. There are already iPhone 13 case mockups floating around.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  All the casemakers are on it. They know it's a market, they gotta get in there. Apple is like suing people in China about leaks. And one of their stated, which is really weird, by the way. But one of their stated reasons for doing it is that leaks make casemakers waste money, which is like the most, like, you don't give a shit.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  That is, that is, by the way, the most attention Apple has paid to third-party iPhone accessory makers in the history of Apple. If you put that much effort into the smart connector on the iPad, please.

• 23:05Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't, I don't believe you, but okay, I'm glad that you're pretending to care. If Google wants to be at the front of the store and get the SPFs and like, they need that whole ecosystem of stuff around these phones. And so when I hear like, they're gonna go for it, they've got to think through the whole experience and put a, maybe waste a lot of money. Right? In order to like, get the market share that, like, the chargers in the phone stores right now are labeled Apple and Samsung.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:33Nilay Patel?

  We're done pretending that there are underlying standards here that are worth caring about. There's the Apple charger and there's a Samsung charger and like, Google needs to get in on that conversation in some way.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, they've been making cases. It's impossible to sell a phone without selling a proprietary pair of Bluetooth headphones. The buds have done eh, maybe they'll take another shot at that, like, and you know, there was no mention of the watch, but there's rumors that they're working on a watch at some point. So I don't think this fall, they're going to come out with the whole, that whole entire ecosystem story, but they should have enough to like, convince your local AT&T store employee to push this thing on you.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  That's what, nothing.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  That's what you want.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  My dad's gonna end up with one of these phones because AT&T is just gonna sneak it into his, like, we actually have not talked about the TPU at all, the tensor part of it.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  What were the demos they showed you?

• 24:27Speaker 02

  There were two from the camera and two with voice. The first one was not magically getting rid of a chain link fence in front of a Little League player, which I've been waiting for them to do forever. It was a blurry picture of a kid and then the, the promises, because the photo pipeline runs through the TPU. The TPU is able to do a couple of things that weren't possible before. One is it's also it's able to handle the standard HDR stack of photos the main sensor takes and a super fast photo the ultra wide camera takes at the same time. The TPU is able to recognize that there is a face in the photo and that we like faces to look a certain way. The TPU is able to recognize that the face is blurry and then it's able to combine the

• 25:10Speaker 02

  sharp image with all of the other not so sharp images from the main sensor and create a sharper image of that kid's face and do all of that without making you wait for Google Photos to process it for 30 seconds, which often happens on the Pixel 5.

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's, that's very impressive if they can pull all that off.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:28Alex Cranz?

  And it doesn't require internet and it's all, it's all on phone.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  This is all local. Like, if you remember when they announced Android 12, they had the, um, the Android Compute Core, which was like the special, this is where we do local machine learning stuff and it doesn't have access to the internet. We promise it's safe. I think the TPU is designed to like handle the stuff that happens inside that core. So all of these demos basically work in airplane mode. It all is happening locally.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  Two things. One, the what is a photo question just got vastly more complicated.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Why?

• 26:01Nilay Patel?

  Because the whole reason that you want to sharpen a kid is because they're usually moving faster than the shutter speed of the camera, right?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:08Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So now you, you haven't even captured any detail, right? Like you've got a, you've got a smear of pixels.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Well, no, you, you, you captured the detail from the ultra wide. The ultra wide is fast. It takes the super fast shutter speed photo, but a super fast shutter speed photo, you end up with a whole lot of crap you don't want. Grain, it's low light, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They get the good stuff from the main sensor and then they put them together.

• 26:35Nilay Patel?

  Right. So they're, it's like they're photoshopping two photos together.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:39Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like HDR, there's a lot of what is a photo chicanery to discuss, but at least like you kind of get it. You're like, we're gonna take five images or 50 or whatever Apple says they're doing now or like.

• 26:54Nilay Patel?

  And we're gonna, we're gonna take the sky from one and they all happen at the same time from the same perspective.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 27:01Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's the same camera.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Oh, so you're mad that this is coming out of the other camera?

• 27:05Nilay Patel?

  Different camera is now doing something.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  And that's being used to add detail to this, like.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Well, so Neelai, Rick Ossoff has an answer for you.

• 27:15Nilay Patel?

  You're, you're not thinking, you're not thinking about it properly. Of course not.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  So this problem with the kid, he says it's quote, "A very difficult smartphone camera physics problem." And his goal is quote, "We're trying to turn those kinds of problems into data problems."

• 27:31Nilay Patel?

  That's just like, it's not illegal if we change the law. Like, I don't,

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. Like weed used to be legal, but it's not anymore. Like, still weed? Like, there's no.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Hey, man, it's all, it's all just particles and waves, man.

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  I get, I'm just saying that I kinda bought it with HDR.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  When this phone comes out, I just feel like we're gonna do an hour on what is a photo because it's adding detail from a totally different camera.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  That took a picture from a different spot, like a physically different spot on your phone.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:11Alex Cranz?

  Are you gonna be able to like, do your own composites in camera? Like, choose different photos?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Oh, I have no idea. But Neelai, we've already been here. The telephoto on the pixel, it uses your handshake to put together a sharper image by getting pixels from multiple different perspectives. And if you set, if you set it on a tripod, it literally moves the OIS sensor when you do telephoto so that it can get pixels from different perspectives. Now, we're talking like, you know, nanometers here instead of, you know, three centimeters over. But what's the difference?

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  I just think once, once you've got a different sensor and a different lens.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, you've definitely moved into the realm of like, now the robot is just saying things you wish Anthony Bourdain had said, right? Like, it's just like, something else is happening and it's worth considering.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  We've already got the Trifobia phone, right? The, with like the 50 lenses on the back of it. I mean, you know.

• 29:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited to play with it. I think it's very cool sounding. It's just somebody who takes a lot of photos of a fast-moving, often blurry child.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I see why you'd want to solve that problem with specificity.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  That data problem. So here's the more important one. They're claiming that they fixed video and they showed me a demo of the iPhone 12 Pro Max, the Pixel 5, and the Pixel 6. And the Pixel 5 looked like hot garbage, just like over-sharpened to the max, terrible. The iPhone 12 Pro Max, it was, you know, shooting into the sun and there was like an umbrella and behind the umbrella it was too light, it should have been darker. And so the Pixel 6 got all that more accurately. And the claim is that they're running their HDRNet, this is their AI ML for doing, combining pictures, on basically every frame. They're basically running the same processes they use to improve their photos on video. And the TPU is what allows it because, you know, 4K video at 30 frames a second is pretty fast. So you need a fast,

• 29:58Speaker 02

  custom-made processor to be able to apply machine learning to all that incoming data.

• 30:04Nilay Patel?

  So that, this is another one that I really kind of don't understand, want to unpack more. So when you say you're running the HDR pipeline on a photo, what you mean is you've actually captured multiple photos at multiple exposures. We've merged them, we've done things like detect faces and skies, that's all ML, and then we've like produced this complicated collection of pixels that we insist on calling a photo.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:30Nilay Patel?

  Are they, they're doing that now for every frame of video? So are they collecting multiple exposures for every frame of video?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  That is an excellent question. Is, is, when you shoot 4K 30, is it actually like 4K 120 and they're like, you know, taking four and making a single frame and like doing that literally, you know, 30 frames, 30 times a second?

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  And also just ramping the exposure over.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can't believe that they're doing that, but I don't know. But they are, they are using, he said, he said, we're using the same HDRNet that we use on photos on video. So like, what does that mean? I don't know. What I do know is it means that Google, instead of saying, and it does video, they're saying, no, it does good video. This is, this is like, the bottom line across all of this stuff is like, is the tensor processor, the, the system on a chip faster than an A series, or at least a Qualcomm, does, you know, this, all these questions, AI, blah, blah, blah, blah. If it makes the video actually good, and it makes Google actually make claims that they're making the best thing now, and we get to, like, say, Google says they're making the best thing and judge that, instead of, Google made a phone, but, you know, they're

• 31:33Speaker 02

  kind of, it's kind of mid-range, they're kind of half-assing it, so, you know, the video's not great, but they're not saying it is, you know? If they're actually making the claim now, that's exciting. Like, if the video is good, then hooray. Does it max out at 30? Don't know.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  The number of things they just wouldn't tell you. It's so funny. This is one of the strangest phone launches I've ever seen. Like, Alex, have you ever encountered a phone launch like this?

• 31:58Alex Cranz?

  No, it's, it's super, super bizarre. And like, I'm just kind of baffled by it, but, okay, great, give me a preview, preview, preview, pre, pre, preview.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Google announced the Pixel 5A by denying rumors it was canceled. I mean, that, that did happen.

• 32:17Alex Cranz?

  Like, is this just a symptom of the fact that Google is terrible at leaks? And so they're like, yeah, we're just gonna do it all before we announce it, for real.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like, look, like, Samsung will let you preorder stuff it hasn't announced. You can go and like, put yourself in a queue to buy the Galaxy Z Fold 3. The president of mobile, T M Rowe, is like, yeah, we're making some folding phones, it's exciting. And then we're gonna announce them in, you know, a couple of weeks. He like, wrote a public letter. They're just like, what is a phone announcement anymore? Like, it's just like, we all know that there's gonna be a new iPhone. It's like- No, but Apple will be like, please, we can't possibly talk about rumors and speculation.

• 32:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  But like the Osborne effect, because everybody knows that these companies are just making a phone every year, it's like less and less and less. So, and if you're Samsung, you make 8,000 kinds of phones, you kind of don't care. If you're Google, you definitely don't care about hurting pixel sales right now, right? So they're all just like, yep, there's a phone coming at the same time as always.

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  I think we were talking about this last week with Apple earnings, right? Like the traditional phone buying cycle appears to have just blown up. Like it's kind of over. Like there's just all these promotions going on. People are, everybody in the world has a phone, right? Like the market is utterly saturated. Whatever. You're just, people are just buying phones whenever they need them now. Like there's that two-year, one-year cycle is kind of over, you know? And so I think there's an element of this where they're just like, it doesn't matter. We just need people in the forums to claim that the Pixel camera will blow away Samsung's camera and Apple's camera for the next five months or however long it's going to be. And that is

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  more important than keeping all the secrets. The problem is if they don't live up to the hype, I mean, and how many times have all of us experienced this? Like the hype builds you like, this is how I felt about Starlink. Like, I was like, I got it. It's here. Screw you, cable. Oh, no.

• 34:22Alex Cranz?

  And then you saw a tree.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like that's, I think that's the risk for Google, but in the grand scheme of pixel sales, a tiny risk. Like it can't go worse for them. So I

• 34:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they've kind of hit rock bottom. They are the HTC of

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  They literally are the HTC.

• 34:48Alex Cranz?

  RIP.

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  So when are we, when are we expecting to see this thing, Dieter?

• 34:52Speaker 02

  They usually announce their flights of pixels in October.

• 34:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they just need to survive. They, they just need to hype. Not like, yeah, Apple's gonna put out their phones in September if they're on schedule. They, Google just bought themselves one month of every comment under every review. A half of tech YouTube is going to be, the pixel camera is going to outdo this thing.

• 35:14Alex Cranz?

  Do you think they're going to try to undercut whatever we're going to see from Samsung?

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  Samsung is like not doing well.

• 35:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, cause like this is normally like note time and we haven't heard about a note.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  No, we're not getting a note. We know that for sure. We're getting, we're getting folding phones. They didn't talk about folding pixels. I don't think it's going to happen this year. In Android world, this is competing with OnePlus and Huawei? Question mark. Will these phones, will pixels be sold in China? Doubtful, right? So it's like OnePlus and Samsung, like, but mostly Samsung. Yeah.

• 35:49Alex Cranz?

  So it's like, do you want a folding phone or do you want a Jordi La Forge phone? Yeah, that will be your choice for Android users or a OnePlus that you have to like go buy online.

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you have to like enter a T-Mobile store, say a password.

• 36:03Alex Cranz?

  It gets escorted to the back.

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  Say another password. The local mob boss is there being like, who let this person in here? I just came for the OnePlus. That's actually how they should do it. They probably sell more OnePlus phones if they like every T-Mobile store.

• 36:19Alex Cranz?

  Do that process.

• 36:20Nilay Patel?

  Like an elaborate speakeasy setup.

• 36:24Alex Cranz?

  Just get all dolled up to go.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Someone call Mike Sievert, the CEO of T-Mobile. Yeah, Mike, I got an idea for you. He's going to do it. They, cause they're like the renegade brand.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Are they?

• 36:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to add this.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  They're, they're, they're doing, they're doing the CES keynote now. They're, they are, there's nothing more established and mainstream than running the CES keynote.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  That's fair. Assuming there's, well, I don't know, you could, you could, they could go like full Qualcomm and like, yeah, try to blow people's minds. All right. Pixel in October. We'll see. We're assuming Apple in September. When is this? The Samsung is like next week. Samsung is August 11th. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's hardware season, y'all. It's back. Here we go. Phone season's here. Very excited for all this. Very excited to just fold phones. I'm like, I'm excited to see the Samsung stuff next week. Okay. We're gonna take a break. Russell Brandom is going to join the show. We're gonna talk about this Apple photo scanning system, which seems very complicated. We'll be right back.

• 37:29Speaker 04

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• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. What's that sound?

• 38:52Speaker 05

  It's me. It's my music.

• 38:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, is that Russell Brandim's music? He just arrived.

• 38:58Speaker 05

  It is, and I'm here to

• 39:00Nilay Patel?

  Just out of nowhere. You're here to fight.

• 39:02Speaker 05

  Talk about tech news.

• 39:03Nilay Patel?

  So, Russell, this is a very deep subject we have to talk about.

• 39:07Speaker 05

  Well, yeah.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  Apple today announced a very serious system for detecting child abuse imagery on their phones. They had a briefing call. You were on it.

• 39:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:20Nilay Patel?

  It's the system itself seems very complicated. And there's a variety of features across their devices that we should talk about. And then the reaction also seems very complicated.

• 39:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, so what happened is, Apple, before they did this, because they wanted to be very diligent, and we appreciate that, they got academic math papers from a bunch of computer scientists, basically saying that this is cryptographically robust, which it seems like it is. While I do have some concerns, my concerns are not that like the math will break down and not work the way it's supposed to work, right? But cryptographers talk to each other, and this separate cryptographer, Matt Green at Johns Hopkins, who's a little, I think, more privacy minded, sort of raised the alarm, being like, this is a new threshold.

• 40:11Speaker 05

  And I think he had incomplete information. He actually said even before it came out, like, he was kind of backing off as he found a little, a few more of the safeguards. But we should say what it actually is. I think the other confusing thing about it is that it's not as if prior to this, Apple was not doing anything to fight this stuff. So it's a little bit of like an incremental advance in particular. So It's a little tricky to find. Okay, so there's some stuff that's just-

• 40:45Alex Cranz?

  But what is it?

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  Figure it out.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  There's, there's three things.

• 40:50Alex Cranz?

  Yes, give it to me.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  The simplest possible thing is now if you ask like Siri for child abuse imagery, Siri will like actively be like, hey, that's messed up. You should call this hotline because you don't want to hurt someone. Is there something on like wrong happening in your brain? So like it'll Siri will tell you that now, which I understand why this is not like the first thing that they put in Siri. But I don't really have, I don't think anyone really has problems with that.

• 41:21Alex Cranz?

  I mean, but, but they've had stuff in Siri before, right? Like when you try to look up abortion clinics and stuff, it would be like, there was some weirdness there at the beginning of Siri.

• 41:31Speaker 05

  This is, but yeah, but this is on purpose. And they're like, okay, we talked to the, we talked to the clinics and they're like, this is what you tell them. And so they're, they're telling them that.

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  You know, I just want to clarify that, but the beginning of Siri, yes, it was true. If you asked for an abortion provider, you got weird results. But that was like, Apple thought that was bad. And then they fixed it over time.

• 41:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:52Nilay Patel?

  This is Apple saying in Siri and on the device search on the iPhone.

• 41:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:57Nilay Patel?

  If you ask for this material, or I think if you indicate somehow to Siri or search that you're in trouble, a set of proactive results are delivered to you. They're like, call these numbers, here are the resources you need.

• 42:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, so that's like just good. It's a little bit like, it's like good PR stuff. I think the other thing is they had previously as part of the iCloud family plan, put in systems, if it seemed like

• 42:28Speaker 05

  kids were taking or receiving messages that were like a little dicey, it would like blur it out and say like, hey, are you sure you want to see this? This is going up in our sensors as this. Now there's an additional thing that will bring up more resources. And also at some, in some circumstances, like alert the parents, which again, like this is very much in the context of you've gotten an iCloud plan that, that, you know, has chosen to do this. So, so that I think is the uncontroversial stuff and I think is, is quite good. The thing that people are freaked out about, and I think- It's like when it first hit, the alarm level was at an eight and now it's been dialed back to like a three. But three is still like more than zero.

• 43:15Speaker 05

  So essentially, the way a lot of the searches for these images work is that they'll have a hash. This is the same way, like if you're just checking a password, you check that it hashes to the thing that the hash, the hashes match, rather than just storing an actual copy of the password right there. And so it's a similar thing where they don't have to have these huge databases of horrific imagery. They'll just say, okay, does it hash to the same hash that something is, is, uh, is, you know, that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has said is like something we should watch out for. And this is like, if you, if you attach something in Gmail, right? If you attach an image, they'll check that you're not using it to do this messed up thing.

• 43:54Speaker 05

  But if the hash doesn't match, crucially, it doesn't tell them anything about what the image is. It's just like, it's not this specific bad one. And then they check for a bunch of bad ones and if it doesn't match, then that's it. And that's 99.99% of, you know, the stuff. So this is extending that to iCloud photos, which is remarkable because it's potentially a photo that someone who has iCloud enabled on their phone, but has not ever sent to anyone, right? They just have it and it's in their iCloud. And so there is also a threshold. So if there's just one alert, it won't necessarily trigger it.

• 44:36Speaker 05

  But if there's like some greater number, but that also makes, because they want to keep the number of false positives as low as they possibly can. So, I mean, I think broadly, this is like what the industry standard is. So our friend, friend of the blog, Casey Newton, was on the call. And his, his question was, who's looking at these? Are these Apple moderators? Are they some freelance company? Because of course, that's always an issue for these things, something Casey's written a lot about. My thing was, can we commit that it's just going to be this particular organization that we trust? That's generating hashes? Because one of the concerns is, Apple does a lot of business in China.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  That, you know, if someone says, okay, actually, I'm going to put a hash of this picture of Tiananmen Square or something. And so then I'm going to know that's now a forbidden image. It's very difficult to check the hash because the whole point of the hash is you don't have to look at the picture. But suddenly it's generating alerts whenever anyone is sharing the Tiananmen Square image.

• 45:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, let's, let's step back and just kind of abstract that out.

• 45:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:38Nilay Patel?

  So what Apple is announcing is we've got a system where if you're assigned into iCloud, all the photos on your phone back up to iCloud photos. That's just how that works.

• 45:47Speaker 05

  That's, yeah, that's baseline. That's just how iCloud works. Yeah.

• 45:50Nilay Patel?

  That's how your phone works. We've now built a system in partnership with Nick Mick, which is the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They've got a database of known horrific photos.

• 46:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  They're generating hashes of those photos and saying, as things go back and forth between iCloud photos, we're going to match the hashes. And if you cross some threshold of horrible photos, Nick Mick will get alerted.

• 46:17Speaker 05

  And Apple, crucially, yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Isn't there also a piece where that database of hashes itself gets sort of obfuscated? So you can't go look at it and see what's in it. And it's actually getting distributed to phones so that if you are an iCloud customer, but it doesn't get uploaded right away, they still can like get the alert?

• 46:35Speaker 05

  My sense is that it is when your phone talks to iCloud.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 46:40Speaker 05

  Is when that's happening. But again, like this is stuff that is, if it is on your phone and it's in iCloud photos, it's gonna pass through that gate at some point. Like, it's not plausible to, to do it without that. I mean, you have to turn off iCloud, basically, right?

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  I mean, I think the thing that Apple is very spooked by is, and I sort of used this language on the call and sort of got yelled at, they really, really do not want us to talk about it in terms of, this is Apple scanning the files on your phone. That, that is true. Like, it's not really happening that way. They're checking these hashes. If it does- Not trigger one of these alerts. They have no idea what any of the pictures are like. That is certainly true. And it's sort of as they're passing through this threshold to a cloud service, right? So if the point is, I just don't trust the cloud and I'm going to go live in the woods with my local iPhone, I still have the capability to do that. It's just that like,

• 47:47Speaker 05

  that's not really how photos work on iPhones.

• 47:49Nilay Patel?

  So that system, they've got a phone that takes photos. They've got iCloud photos, which is pretty tightly integrated with the phone.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:58Nilay Patel?

  It's very hard to have an iPhone with that iCloud at this point.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  And they're saying we've here's this integrated system that detects child abuse injury. If you abstract it out one level, what you have is a system that detects pictures.

• 48:12Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  Right? The danger here is that the Chinese government or some other repressive regime will generate a different set of forbidden pictures and use that to to chase down iPhone customers.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  I would also say like, there are parts of the world, if you're in Russia, or you're in Egypt, or somewhere like that, where there are groups that say they're interested in protecting children. And what they're really interested in is like beating up random gay people. And obviously, Apple does a lot of business in China, right? So the question is, this is what we're trying to like isolate this from. And I think the way that you do that is look very, very carefully at who has the ability to put something in this database, right? Nick Mc is fine. Nick Mc does great work. They're very, very focused on sopping this stuff. They don't really care about anything else. And I think they're also very like focused on retaining

• 49:09Speaker 05

  their credibility as an organization that can do this. And they've they've done a good job at that. Everyone trusts them. We've never really had a reason not to trust them.

• 49:19Speaker 05

  Nick Mc, it's national because it mostly does stuff in the US. This is rolling out first in the US. I said on the call, you know, Apple, will you, will you commit to only doing this with Nick Mc? And they said, you know, we're, we're expanding to other countries, other countries. You have different organizations. And like, I mean, what, what's the European equivalent of Nick Mc? There is one. I'm sure they don't want to commit to it if they don't have a partnership in place. But it really, really does matter who the organizations are. And so as this expands, my hobby horse is that I will continue to push them to just have a public list of what these organizations are.

• 49:59Speaker 05

  But having said that, I do think fundamentally it's a robust system and it's not what we were worried it would be, which is a sort of backdoor to searches of local content on iPhones. It's definitely not that.

• 50:16Alex Cranz?

  But it is a door though, right? Like, like essentially they've said, here is a door. And if you've got the right code, you can come in.

• 50:25Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, so only for images is the first thing, which is important.

• 50:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:30Speaker 05

  And I also think only for specifically iCloud photos, right?

• 50:36Alex Cranz?

  Right, but like they now have said, we have a door. So if they go in, they're doing business in say Russia or China. And those countries say, hey, I know about your door. I want, here's my list of things. Here's my, here's what I want you to be checking for. They can say no. And then China can say, okay, then you can't sell phones here anymore.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, and China in particular, China owns the data center like.

• 51:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's like giving a lot of places leverage now against Apple. It feels like.

• 51:10Speaker 05

  There is definitely, I, I think there is a real question. There's always like this sense that China, like someone from the Chinese government is having weird scary back channel conversations with Apple. And like, I wonder what scary back channel conversation they have in the wake of this being announced.

• 51:29Alex Cranz?

  Well, also the US government, like the US government for years was like, give us a backdoor.

• 51:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:34Alex Cranz?

  To your phones and Apple said, no. And now they can say, okay, they can come back again. They can say, all right, here's our list of stuff. Tag it.

• 51:43Speaker 05

  I think the big, big difference is, and this is like across the technology industry and everyone who works with the internet, there's this understanding that child abuse imagery is different. It's like

• 51:56Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  extra, extra bad.

• 51:58Alex Cranz?

  Because it is. Yeah.

• 51:59Speaker 05

  It's extra bad, right? I feel like everyone is like comfortable saying that. And this is sort of the political proposition of Nick Nick is they are not interested in like catching drug dealers. If they get back one of these hashes and it's just going to them and Apple and it shows like a table with a bunch of cocaine on it, they're going to say this thing is broken, send it back, right? At least that's, that's sort of the promise. And that's why we should trust them to have this extraordinary access to like iCloud.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Your private photos.

• 52:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, certainly.

• 52:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:36Speaker 05

  It's extraordinary, but it's because what they're, the whole purpose of their organization is that this stuff is extraordinarily bad.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the, the concern is that up to now, Apple's had this line that, you know, what's on your iPhone says your iPhone, the iPhones are, is private. And we all know that like, it's not black and white, complete absolutes, but they could hold to saying it's an absolute week. There's no way that we could ever access this data. There's like, we don't have access to it. Nobody else could do it. You know, it's impossible. And if we built a backdoor, all hell would break loose. We can't, we can't control the genie. Once we make, once we make the genie, it'll be out of the bottle. And so the concern is that this is like a, but actually you figured it out for this one thing. So the next time the government wants to do something, they get to say, but wait a minute, you figured it out there. That's the concern, right? I don't know if I buy it, but that's the concern.

• 53:26Nilay Patel?

  The government will say that because they're stupid and are fail to understand nuance. Facts. They're going to say it. I know they're going to say it.

• 53:34Speaker 05

  Neil, I complain about me if you want, but I'll ask that you not be rude to our government.

• 53:44Nilay Patel?

  The role reversal on the Verge has to be, it's great. Uh, no, but that's what they're gonna do. The FBI is gonna show up and say, you did this for Nick Mick, unlock this phone. And these are two wildly different problems with two wildly different sets of expectations. So if you are already an iCloud user, or a Google Photos user, or a Gmail user, or a Microsoft OneDrive user, the government has access to your stuff. It's just a fact. If you, if you back up your iMessages to iCloud, it is possible for the government to show up to Apple with a warrant and get that stuff. If you live in China, the Chinese government operates the iCloud data centers. They've got, they're in, there's, they're not talking

• 54:28Nilay Patel?

  about the door. They built the door. They designed the lock. Like, they're in there.

• 54:34Nilay Patel?

  What Apple is relentlessly focused on is the phone itself, encrypting the stuff on the phone locally. And they have, as of yet, not allowed the FBI to do that. They claim they don't allow the Chinese government to do it. I think the big question mark here is as the local stuff on the phone, and Apple's growing enormous services business merge into one thing, using the tremendous power of America's first in the world 5G network.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  That's my, that's my government for it. The second anything hits the cloud or a data center, all bets are off. And they always have been. And that, like, that nuance here, that's why, that's why I think this program is ultimately good. But it means that if you don't store your iMessages in the cloud, and the person on the other end doesn't either, you're sort of free to send horrific imagery back and forth. And Apple knows it has a problem with that in iMessage. And they're unwilling to, to let anyone in there. And they're like, well, here's this other thing. In our cloud services that we can do. And the governments around the world are going to say, no, we want a backdoor to the phones.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  The difference here, Neelai, is it's that the link to iCloud photos for the first time is a difference in policy, not in technology. The hash is stored on the phone. They only apply it the moment it gets uploaded to iCloud photos. Instead of scanning images in the cloud, the system performs on-device matching using the database of known CSM image hashes provided by NIKMCC and other child safety organizations. Apple further transforms its database into an unreadable set of hashes that is securely stored on users' devices. Before an image is stored in iCloud photos, an on-device matching process is performed, et cetera, et cetera. So, again, I think I'm pro this system. I'm pro this system. But the line that has been crossed just with a baby step is if Apple wanted to, it could

• 56:32Speaker 02

  do that scanning just on the device.

• 56:34Nilay Patel?

  On the phone.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  On the phone.

• 56:36Speaker 05

  I would also say, just to be the Fourth Amendment nerd, like, we're talking about San Bernardino. In the San Bernardino case, they got all of this information. They had everything that was in his iCloud because they had particularized suspicion. They were like, this guy is specifically back, right?

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:55Speaker 05

  He committed this horrible murder, and we know that there is this crime here, and he's directly involved, and we would like to see his iCloud, thank you. And so what is different about this is it's a dragnet. It's sort of the Snowden scale, like, it's everything. And I do think Apple understands the gravity of that, and that's part of why they're tiptoeing around it. But yeah, with any of these, it's like, there's nothing wrong with this specific thing, but also, we're really close to a lot of really dangerous stuff.

• 57:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a good thing they're doing it. It's just, it's a slippery slope, right? Like, yes, this is a good reason to do this. Please do this. Like, let's stop this. This is bad stuff happening. But you have now opened yourself up, and all of your users, and you're a company that prides itself on privacy. Like, this is the thing, like, security experts and stuff, we're using iPhones. After all of those dumb private phone, like, security phones died in the early 2010s, they started using it because this was the, this was the secure phone. And now it's like, no, it's not actually as secure as we've allowed you to think it is.

• 58:14Alex Cranz?

  And here is this new thing. And sure, we're focusing on this really bad thing to stop. But the door's there. The door is open. It can now be like, it is no longer a wall. It is a door and it can now be opened, like, right?

• 58:31Speaker 05

  I mean, it was never really a wall. It was just like,

• 58:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It was like, it was a door that looked like a wall. It was like one of those like bookcases.

• 58:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:40Alex Cranz?

  And you're like, and now they've taken the bookcase off and you're like, now it's clearly a door.

• 58:44Speaker 05

  Do you know in Last Crusade, when they're in the, the fireplace and then they pull the poker and it rotates around?

• 58:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 05

  It was like that. It was a wall feature that then spun to, to get you in and out.

• 58:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And now it is very clearly, we don't have to worry about it. We could see the door from a mile away. And so can everybody else.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, again, I think that this is like Russell's point, like child abuse imagery and Nick Mc, like their entire, like that zone, everyone agrees the problem is so severe and so bad that we should build tools to stop it.

• 59:21Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 59:23Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So we, we built some and Apple built them in their way and they say they're more private. And there's all these layers of cryptographic security. Abstractly, you have now built a tool to detect images on people's phones. And you could repurpose that technology stack if you are a authoritarian government. And like, really the only thing stopping that from happening is like Tim Cook.

• 59:46Alex Cranz?

  Well, Tim Cook is all that stands between your phone.

• 59:49Speaker 05

  So I, I do think the optimistic version of this is that there is a political consensus that is built around Nick Mc. And if it isn't that specific organization, like if it's just, like Nick Mc starts to sprawl out and they're also really mad at Trump now. And they're also like trying to find tax returns or something, people would very quickly be like, I don't actually trust you to be the arbiter of what is bad and what is good. And I think like we look at these situations all the time where we're like,

• 1:00:24Alex Cranz?

  But they're not the arbiter in this case. It's, it's Apple giving them the access.

• 1:00:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, Apple's giving them the access, but I'm saying,

• 1:00:30Alex Cranz?

  Like, Apple is the arbiter of this.

• 1:00:33Speaker 05

  Right? And that's the reason people are okay with it is they're okay with Nickmick. Whereas like Facebook is shopping around saying, is there some group of organizations we can get where people will trust them to say what is hate speech? And the answer is you just can't. There is no such organization because hate speech is like conceptually problematic and everyone disagrees about what it is. And like, there's just no political coalition around that. And so the thing that they're trying to do can't be done. Right? Whereas like Nickmick, to their credit, everyone trusts them to have one ring. And so they get it. But I think if they were not trusted, and also if you give it to an organization elsewhere

• 1:01:15Speaker 05

  that is not trusted, you do potentially start to see that political sort of consensus start to fray.

• 1:01:26Nilay Patel?

  And, but I think this is like, you described the worry is going from an eight to a three.

• 1:01:31Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  And like somewhere along, the eight was they've built this abstract system that can detect photos on your local storage. And it went to a three because they explained what it was. They did do the work where they had a bunch of cryptographers in the mix. And they said, it's Nickmick at the end. Right? And you can, I think that was like the path from very like lots of worry to it's pretty like, we should talk about it, but we're not freaking out anymore.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I think so. I would also say it's particularly the threshold thing where, you know, what we're talking about here are essentially errors. And it would now, they can't really say what the threshold is, but it's like five or six things. And so it's a very plausible mechanism for keeping the false positive rate very, very low, which is what they say they want. And so I think that in particular made a lot of people feel, like I said, not entirely amazingly, absolutely comfortable with it, but like significantly more comfortable with it.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  But at the end of this chain, there is some sort of human review, right? Like, one of the, one of the early concerns was that someone could send a bunch of these images to you in some way, and then your phone would, would, you know, get flagged, and then the police would show up at your door because someone was trolling you or whatever. But Apple's saying that, that the, the last step before they alert the authorities is there's a human at Apple who somehow reviews something?

• 1:02:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, well, this is, this was Casey's concern, is that like, so then you have a moderator looking at this, these horrific, this horrific imagery, saying like, yep, that's horrific. We should go get that guy, right? And it's both really important and also kind of an extension of this sort of awful, like, just workplace story that, that, that he's written about. So, I, I mean, I do think that, and this was one of the other things they said, is that they were like, look, we've built this system to identify child abuse imagery. If we start to get sort of results from it that are not that, because it's someone tagged a text post making fun of Chairman Xi, then we're gonna know about it and we're

• 1:03:44Speaker 05

  gonna take action. Now, again, this depends how much you trust Nick Mick, it depends how much you trust Apple, it depends how much you trust sort of the other groups that are eventually let into this room. But I do think that's a robust part of the chain.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like, when is the cell rolling out the next versions of the operating systems?

• 1:04:05Speaker 05

  So it's in iOS 15, and they say by the end of the year, it's like an update within the thing.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Okay. So my sense is that it rolled out today to a chaotic amount of controversy that does seem to have been slightly quelled. My sense is we're gonna hear about this a lot again when it actually ships.

• 1:04:29Nilay Patel?

  Right, because they're gonna, now that, now that they've announced it, they're gonna receive a lot of questions and a lot of concern. They're gonna have to address them in some way.

• 1:04:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I do think a lot of it, they're hoping will just be invisible in the background. Because, you know, again, if, if there's one false report in a trillion, then hopefully no one is encountering bad things about it. And also, I mean, the other concern is if we do start seeing bad reports, I don't think people are gonna be screaming from the rooftops that they were falsely accused of child abuse imagery. Like, that's potentially just something that they're gonna wanna publicize. So I mean, you worry about that, too. But I, I don't know. I do think one of the scary things about it is like, this may be all we hear about it for a while, whether it goes well or it goes badly. That's why it's sort of like, now is the time to get commitments out of them.

• 1:05:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, well, we'll see. I do think it is notable that Apple, the company that has stakes its entire reputation on privacy, is starting to realize like, oh, we need to, we need to build some systems around that when the problem is this bad, right? Like, there's another way for them to approach this, and it is to be ideologically rigid. And I don't think they can do that at their scale. So that's interesting. But we'll, we'll see. Well, I just suspect, Russell, you're gonna be writing about this one or two more times the next few weeks.

• 1:05:53Speaker 05

  That could be, well, you, you're in a good position to make that prediction.

• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  I just, I just, I just see the chatter, and I don't think it's gonna resolve. And I do think they need to answer a few more questions. But I'm, I agree with everybody else. Like, the problem is bad, and if we have the tools to stop it, we should try to stop it. The compromises to stop it, to the overall functionality of the phone, are worth discussing. Right? Like, that's like, that is the privacy debate at every level. And I think this is the first time we've seen Apple.

• 1:06:28Nilay Patel?

  Literally give anyone any sort of view, as abstracted as it is, into what is directly locally on your phone. I wonder if they're gonna run that what happens on your phone says on your phone ad anymore, because now everybody can point to this thing.

• 1:06:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they can't run it anymore.

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  It's becoming a real don't be evil style thing where it mostly exists for people to throw it back at Apple.

• 1:06:50Nilay Patel?

  Pretty much. This is why you should never say anything about yourself or do any marketing whatsoever.

• 1:06:56Alex Cranz?

  Just shut up and do it. Self phones.

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  Russ, do we play you off too? Do you have entrance music and exit music?

• 1:07:01Speaker 05

  Look, I love the sound of the music. So the more we use it, the better for me. I get royalties, so it's money in my pockets. Oh my god.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna get a content ID strike. It's gonna be great. All right, Russell, thank you very much.

• 1:07:14Speaker 05

  Yep.

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• 1:08:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Thanks again to our man Russell Brandon. Do you know, there's just a grab bag of gadget news here at the end here. Also, you've given me a new segment, which I appreciate.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:08:41Nilay Patel?

  Tell me, tell me what's up going on here.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  So, Google just finally, finally announced a whole slew of new Nest cameras. And to me, the important thing is they finally have a battery powered Nest doorbell. So you don't have to wire it, which is very exciting. The interesting thing about this lineup of cameras is that they have tensor processing units inside them. They have TPUs, which they're using to, you know, identify humans. Google's big claim is that these things are better and faster at identifying the movement you actually want, instead of just, you know, random movement. And so that's potentially exciting. They've got smart camera specs. They're not 4K, which is fine.

• 1:09:22Nilay Patel?

  That's weird.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  Well, they say that what matters more is HDR and what matters more is, you know, low light. And so they're not doing 4K on it. I think.

• 1:09:32Alex Cranz?

  So we're not quite to the enhanced zoom.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  We're not quite to the enhanced zoom. Yeah, I mean, 4K does let you like crop in a little bit, I suppose. But, you know, there's a flood camera. What are the outdoor cameras? You can mount with a magnet in case you're not worried about anybody just reaching up and grabbing it, which is amusing.

• 1:09:47Alex Cranz?

  But I would do that in my house.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you want, you might want to do that just because, you know, you can recharge these things if you choose to get the battery powered ones instead of the ones that get wired directly into your house. Plus that, I don't know, we'll see. I'm excited to see if they're better than my shitbox Ring doorbell camera.

• 1:10:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, as a renter, these all sound very renter friendly.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have a bunch of Ring cameras. There's nothing scarier than when we get the alert. It's like, there's a person in the backyard.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Nilay Patel?

  But it's like, the reflection of the moon.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Nilay Patel?

  But you have that one moment, just like.

• 1:10:20Alex Cranz?

  The terror.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Is it a ghost?

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, I'm gonna, what do I got a kitchen knife? I got, there's a bow and arrow downstairs, like a kid's bow and arrow was, will that help me?

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  No, it does not.

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's not going to look very menacing at all.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  No, you need, you need to, you need to scare them with absurdity. You just gotta come up with the strangest thing you can. They're like, I don't want any part of this.

• 1:10:44Nilay Patel?

  It's crazy in here. So if Google's smarter than that, more power to them.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Apple says they have a next generation under display selfie camera. We've seen selfie camera photos before and they've been, what's the word, awful? But Apple says the next one that they've got is better. And there is a rumor that a leaker has said that the under display camera on the Galaxy Z Fold 3, by the way, there might be an under display camera on the Galaxy Z Fold 3, is quote, quote, is not bad, unquote.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  That could be good. That's exciting.

• 1:11:21Alex Cranz?

  It's fine.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Alex Cranz?

  Maybe not fine. Okay.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, okay, so Apple announced some stuff. They have new Mac Pro configurations with GPUs and Radeon options so that they have not completely stopped making Intel computers, I guess.

• 1:11:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, and also they are apparently capable of getting AMD GPUs.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're the only ones.

• 1:11:44Alex Cranz?

  They're the ones.

• 1:11:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, they're only going to ship like six of them, right? Like.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:11:50Alex Cranz?

  And it's like their custom, they're custom built too. It's the MPX module, not, not just like a regular card.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:57Alex Cranz?

  So don't buy one of these. Take the card out and try to return it or something. It'll be useless. I mean, it was gonna be useless anyway, but it'll be really useless.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Right, right. They also finally released the ability to buy the new Touch ID Magic Keyboard and associated touchpad on their own instead of just getting with an iMac. I almost bought one of these. I love it, but I can't justify it, but hardly wants to. Well, I, I use my Mac in like headless mode. I've got a, I've got a MacBook that like is sitting behind my desk and I'm in, looking at one monitor here. So I, I'm typing my password in all the time, or I'm waiting like three seconds for my watch to like make weird vibrations so I can do it. But it's good that they're available. And then we did see a leak of someone actually got ahold of an AirPower wireless charger.

• 1:12:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Tom.

• 1:12:45Alex Cranz?

  It did exist.

• 1:12:46Nilay Patel?

  It did, it did exist. Tom got some photos. When he talked to the person who has it, it's hilarious because it's, it still doesn't work.

• 1:12:56Nilay Patel?

  Like, why didn't this thing ship? It's because the prototypes themselves did not work. So it has 22 coils, but apparently only three of them work. Yeah. Because it's a prototype and it needed software support in the devices. It doesn't, doesn't do anything.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:10Alex Cranz?

  But it looks cool.

• 1:13:10Nilay Patel?

  It does, it does look, it looks like an oval.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, hang on, but if you look at the, the chip stuff on the inside, if you have a dead, dead, dead, dead wireless charger, I invite you to take it apart before you electronically recycle it, put it into e-waste and just look at how complicated your Qi charger is and compare it to this. Because, oh my God.

• 1:13:35Nilay Patel?

  It's hard to believe they ever planned to sell this. It was gonna make a hundred bucks, right? Like they were.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:40Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  It's just like the definition of overcomplicated.

• 1:13:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Well, it's ridiculous.

• 1:13:46Nilay Patel?

  It's, I'm glad, I thoroughly enjoyed looking at these photos. You should go.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you know, what might have happened is they could have released this thing if Elon Musk had been the, the CEO of Apple.

• 1:13:56Nilay Patel?

  This was, I think, my favorite story of the week.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  Well, please tell us what happened.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  So there's a new book out called Power Play Tesla, Elon Musk and the Rest. It's by this guy, Tim Higgins. As books do, as in the runups of publication, there are excerpts everywhere. So the excerpt that got all of the attention was Tim Cook and Elon Musk apparently had a conversation about Apple buying Tesla. And Elon said, great, I want to be the CEO. Tim Cook was like, sure, you can continue to be the CEO of Tesla. Elon was like, no, the CEO of Apple. And Tim Cook, according to this excerpt, said, fuck you and hung up, which is a great story.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's great on so many levels.

• 1:14:35Nilay Patel?

  Everybody has just vigorously denied this story to the point of absurdity. Elon was like, I've never seen Tim Cook. I don't even recognize the name. And the people are like, here's a photo of you and Tim Cook at the White House, like two years ago. Like they've obviously encountered each other, but they all claim that this never happened.

• 1:14:55Alex Cranz?

  I'm pretty sure if the phone carriers could like, if we knew who the phone carriers were, they would also say that this call never happened.

• 1:15:02Alex Cranz?

  Just everybody's like, no, no, it didn't exist.

• 1:15:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Alex Cranz?

  Don't know what you're talking about.

• 1:15:05Nilay Patel?

  But now I'm very excited to read this book. By the way, Elon also announced in the wake of this book that Walter Isaacson, who wrote the Steve Jobs book, is writing about him.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:15:16Nilay Patel?

  Which is absolutely.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  Elon Musk is going to crack TV now.

• 1:15:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, two things. One, Walter Isaacson has not said anything. Like Elon, right? The, the, he has the exact personality that would announce that he personally would announce he is commissioned a biography of himself.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Nilay Patel?

  Not the author, which is just like backwards. Uh, and second.

• 1:15:40Alex Cranz?

  He's gonna self-publish it.

• 1:15:43Nilay Patel?

  Every Tesla, when you, it will just like audiobook as you drive.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:15:48Nilay Patel?

  Also, the Walter Isaacson job is very bad. Like, it's very bad. It contains, for example, without any scrutiny, Bill Gates saying that Apple bought NeXT and all they got was Steve Jobs and they never used the next operating system.

• 1:16:04Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  And like the iPhone runs on that. Like, they obviously got to next. Anyway, we'll, we'll see how badly Musk can roll Walter Isaacson.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16Nilay Patel?

  But I, I just enjoyed Tim tweeting. Like, I'm having a biography. Like, because of this other book that's out, he's like throwing the curveballs.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  What else happened? Oh, okay. Disclosure, my wife works for Facebook Reality Labs, a division of Facebook, which makes the Oculus. But they're, they were in the news this week and I'm not going to talk about it because somebody else has to.

• 1:16:39Alex Cranz?

  It's so terrifying. It is terrifying. Everybody, I want you to like, pull over wherever you are. Just go look up this story and look at these images.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  Well, can you just say what it is?

• 1:16:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This researcher, it was just like one researcher went to his boss and was like, hey, I have an idea. When people are wearing their, their VR headsets, we can't see their eyes. That's a problem. So what if we create digital eyes to beam out from the front of the headset? And his boss was like, that's really stupid. I mean, okay, go do it, but that's so dumb. And so he did it and it's just a nightmare. It's just absolutely, it looks like, like Terry, you remember in 12 monkeys?

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:17:19Alex Cranz?

  The guys in the future with like the, that's what it looks like. It's just these really almost grotesque, super exaggerated eyes slapped on the front of a VR headset. And I adore it. I love everything about it, but I would never, like, I don't think any pity who actually is a human being is like. Interacted with this.

• 1:17:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they made it. They spent like.

• 1:17:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that that guy, he's interacting like in the mirror. I like, I don't see how anybody else is like looking at that and be like, you did a good job.

• 1:17:49Nilay Patel?

  It's like, this is what he did in quarantine. He's like, this is great. Everyone's like, dude, you just haven't been outside in here. But the idea of this is that you will never take the headset off.

• 1:18:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:00Nilay Patel?

  Right? That.

• 1:18:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02Nilay Patel?

  You're always wearing the headset and then sometimes you need to like interact in the real world. So you turn on pass through mode and your eyes will be here on the front of the headset as you like walk around your house. And it's like, there's a much simpler solution to this.

• 1:18:18Alex Cranz?

  Just like push. Just like a finger can help you here.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  I love it. I've never taken my headset off. All right, Dieter, you gotta, you gotta, we got, we got what? Another hour? You go in on dot P U Z?

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  So listen, I have never seen an open standard die that I didn't want to talk about.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  So dot P U Z dot P U Z is a crossword puzzle file format that is used by crossword puzzles around the world. And the New York Times has just announced that they are no longer going to support it. So you can't do the New York Times crossword puzzle in third party apps. This is a problem for at least three groups of people. First group is people who just like using other apps other than New York Times crossword puzzle app. The second group is people who use those apps because they're more accessible because the New York Times crossword puzzle app is not the most, does not have the most accessibility options of all the crossword puzzle apps. And the third group are all of the S E O scammers who automatically parse dot P U Z files and make webpages for every single New York Times crossword puzzle clue

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  that are perfectly designed to scam the hell out of Google. And they just always appear if you're certain, if you search for a New York Times crossword puzzle clue, these things, these, these scammy websites that are created automatically are always at the top because it's one of those information deserts. Right? Who else is searching for this exact, you know, random phrase that Will Shortz came up with? Nobody, so like scam websites appear. My hunch is that the Times got rid of it because they want to do more weird, wacky stuff with their crossword puzzles have like. Animations and features and, you know, clever puns that are visual and whatever. And they can do that on their own app, but it doesn't appear in .puzz because .puzz is basically, you know, like a text file.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  So once again, the ecosystem of, you know, third-party apps interacting with each other and using feeds has died because a website wants to make something more proprietary so that they can add new features because having an open standard slows down innovation, apparently.

• 1:20:19Nilay Patel?

  But they're the only ones making the standard.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Well, no, there's all sorts of, there's, there's .puzz from everybody. Everybody makes .puzz files. It's, it's been around forever. The LA Times, like.

• 1:20:30Nilay Patel?

  But the New York Times is the dominant provider of .puzz. I just want to say.

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

  The New York Times is the dominant provider of everything. I mean, like they, they just, they had like their, their earnings or quarterly whatevers and they, they just, we're all gonna, we're all either gonna go work for one of the big five tech companies or we're all gonna work for the New York Times. They just, they dominate everything. What do you want?

• 1:20:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm, no, I'm gonna stay here in the woods. I'm gonna be fine. You can't have me.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, there's lots, there's, if, if you are interested in crossword puzzles, there are lots of really cool puzzle providers out there that, beyond the New York Times. Check out American Family Values Crossword Puzzles. They're great. They're super fun.

• 1:21:07Nilay Patel?

  I saw a really good thread from Randy Pickers, an antitrust professor at the UFC. And he was like, you know, these antitrust bills might prevent the Times from closing .puzz. Like.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:21:21Nilay Patel?

  They're a dominant provider in an ecosystem. They have this like repeated pattern of dealing and interoperability.

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Nilay Patel?

  This would be a problem. Like the interop bills, that you might force the Times to make their apps interoperable.

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  See, what we need is like.

• 1:21:38Nilay Patel?

  Which was just very good. Like, what is the best unintended consequence of this is like.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Nilay Patel?

  Tightly regulating the crossword puzzle market.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  There's gonna be a formation of a international standards group to cover the file format for distributed crossword puzzles. It's gonna get subsumed into the W3C.

• 1:21:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Speaker 02

  And it'll just become a web standard next to XML and RSS. It's gonna be great.

• 1:22:01Nilay Patel?

  Does somebody own the .puzz format? If you're the maintainer of .puzz, please talk to me. I have some questions.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  Let's get. Questions.

• 1:22:09Nilay Patel?

  And now for our new weekly segment. Oh, AT&T, you. They just won't stop doing stuff.

• 1:22:18Nilay Patel?

  All right, here are my, here, well, actually, I'm going to start with not AT&T. Okay. I'm gonna start with T-Mobile. Yeah. T-Mobile bought Sprint, you will recall. Yep. The, the promise of them buying Sprint was that they would then support Dish Network. Yep. And building a new 5G network called Project Genesis with a five. In place of one of the, in place of one of the S's. Still with you. Okay, so they did all that. None of that has come to pass. This is where AT&T comes in. Dish Network is now partnered with AT&T to support its network efforts as it builds out Project Genifiesys.

• 1:22:59Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so then T-Mobile over here is gonna shut down Sprint's LTE network and repurpose all that spectrum for its own 5G efforts, which is. The, the very network that, that Dish had to switch to because T-Mobile wouldn't provide them? The network, yeah, it's like, the network that T-Mobile, that Dish was supposed to be using, and now they use, and like, T-Mobile ran them out of town, so they went to AT&T. So now T-Mobile was like, great, we got rid of those jerks. We're shutting the Sprint LTE network down. Okay. All that's horrible. I just want to call out this headline from Heim Gartenberg that I totally forgot that we had ever published. Heim, in September 28th, 2018, Sprint points out that its LTE network is, in fact, trash.

• 1:23:53Nilay Patel?

  So it's no great loss that's, that T-Mobile is gonna re-farm the spectrum and make its own network better. But it is very hilarious that they just ran Dish away from them. Yeah. Waiting arms of AT&T, so it can run with this plan that was obvious to everyone except our nation's regulators. Okay, so that's one merger that went horribly awry, unless you are in fact a T-Mobile executive. AT&T, my favorite, my baby.

• 1:24:21Nilay Patel?

  You're horrible, messy, messy baby. Uh, I pay this company so much money every month. I wrote for vox.com this week. I wrote, they're like, what's, they did a thing like the worst money you've ever spent. Yeah. Asked all these people for little entries and mine was, my family spends over $500 a month on AT&T because they've just merged into every corner of our lives. Like just a rolling wave of mergers just took over my family. Now we, it's very complicated. Anyhow, AT&T bought DirecTV for billions of dollars. They bought Time Warner for billions of dollars. Then they realized they owned DirecTV and Time Warner and they had no fucking idea what they were doing.

• 1:25:07Nilay Patel?

  Was this before or after everybody from these companies are like, well, we're out of here? No, first they fired everybody. It's like thousands of layoffs, thousands upon thousands of layoffs. Like this merger destroyed lives, bled all the talent from Warner Media. They launched HBO Max. Yep. Then they realized, okay, we got to get out of this. They sell Warner Media to Discovery, a deal that has not closed, but it appears to be on track for, they bought it for 80 something billion. They're selling it for 40 something billion. Great. What a deal. They're like, crap, we still own DirecTV. Why did anybody notice this? Does anybody read the ledgers?

• 1:25:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So they have now officially closed the deal to spin DirecTV off into a partnership with a private equity firm called TPG. The company throughout this entire process, they only refer to the new company as New DirecTV. They're like, DirecTV will be spun off into a new corporate entity currently known as New DirecTV. The deal has closed. New DirecTV announced its new name, which is DirecTV. Yeah.

• 1:26:14Nilay Patel?

  Great. Many, many lawyers made a lot of money along these roads. Along for the ride, AT&T also sold its other TV business, AT&T TV, which you may remember was once called AT&T TV Now. Yeah. Right. They have like 45 rebrandings. They were like AT&T TV. Yeah. That is now part of new DirecTV, which is DirecTV, and that has been renamed DirecTV Stream. No.

• 1:26:47Nilay Patel?

  And then all of this is like, there's an asterisk, which is like, none of this includes HBO Max.

• 1:26:54Nilay Patel?

  So, oh, and they also spun off U-verse. They're, they're like broadband cable service. That's all part of DirecTV, but DirecTV is gonna shut that down. They're not taking new customers.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:27:06Nilay Patel?

  So DirecTV now consists of a zombie satellite business where the CEO was like, I still think people, there's another 10 years in this. And he goes, 10 years after that, maybe not so much, but there's another 10 years. It's like, it's just an incredible quote. Then they've got their streaming service, DirecTV Stream, which is, if anyone has ever used AT&T TV, it's a very bad.

• 1:27:28Alex Cranz?

  So bad.

• 1:27:30Nilay Patel?

  And then they've got this like dying U-verse brand, and that's a company now that is owned by private equity. And if you just like, Katie wrote about it, you look at our comments, our comments are like, oh, the vultures have come for me. Like, also like a lot of DirecTV customers being like, I was really hoping this service would be better, and now I know it won't.

• 1:27:52Nilay Patel?

  And then over here is Warner Media, which is going to Discovery. And Warner, yeah, they're like, Katie also wrote a great piece about the Black Widow lawsuits. Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney over lost royalties, because it was supposed to be a big theatrical release and then ended up on Disney Plus. Jason Clark at Warner Media, he just like did that at the beginning of pandemic, pissed everybody off, lost Tenet, right? Like, lost Christopher Nolan. He did it with Tenet, he lost Christopher Nolan, but they're doing better. Like, the movies are coming out, Suicide Squad is out today. Like, they're on the cadence. They've like, made everybody angry. Okay, it's a big, there's a big podcast conference this week called Podcast Movement. Ashley Carman's there. AT&T has news. They're gonna start doing podcasts in HBO, HBO Max.

• 1:28:35Nilay Patel?

  They've got a new Batman series. It's like a radio play, and like, it's gonna be in the app. And Ashley's like, great, is your app a podcast app? Like, for example, can it play when the phone is locked? And they're like, not at this time.

• 1:28:55Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing?

• 1:28:58Nilay Patel?

  It is just like the most tremendous cluster. Like they take two steps forward and they're like 5,000 steps back. I love this company. I'm addicted to it.

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  And this has been another edition of, oh, AT&T.

• 1:29:11Nilay Patel?

  They won't ever stop.

• 1:29:15Nilay Patel?

  If someone, I can't, I'm never going to leave them. I'm just never going to leave them.

• 1:29:19Alex Cranz?

  So wait, how many TV services did they go from? They went from like 25 different streaming services a year ago to one, two?

• 1:29:28Nilay Patel?

  At some point, the CEO of AT&T was like, even I can't keep them straight. Yeah. The real thing that's going to happen to DirecTV is that the rights to Sunday Ticket, the NFL service are going to come up and Apple or Amazon is going to buy them. Yeah. Because they have unlimited money. And now DirecTV doesn't even have AT&T's much more limited money. They're just their own company owned by private equity. And they're like, I don't know, 10 more years?

• 1:29:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Nilay Patel?

  They're just going to lose that fight and then there's, there'll be nothing left.

• 1:30:02Alex Cranz?

  They're just going to be sending explainer videos to people on how to set up like just regular over the air antennas.

• 1:30:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:08Alex Cranz?

  So they can continue to get service.

• 1:30:10Nilay Patel?

  Their marketing pitch lines are very much like, we're totally focused on video. It's like, where have you been?

• 1:30:18Nilay Patel?

  So is everybody else.

• 1:30:21Alex Cranz?

  They're pivoting.

• 1:30:23Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, if any AT&T executives want to talk to me, please feel free. I've been asking for years, mostly been turned down.

• 1:30:34Nilay Patel?

  I want to call it a story, actually Russell, it's Russell's story. The sacking of a crypto mecca, he went to a, a small town that had basically set itself up to like run on Bitcoin. And then the feds noticed.

• 1:30:49Alex Cranz?

  We're like, no.

• 1:30:49Nilay Patel?

  Showed up and arrested everybody. It's great. You should read this story. I am hoping something like Hollywood producer makes a heist movie out of it. Putting that out there. Rihanna, if you know anybody.

• 1:31:02Alex Cranz?

  Riri, we got a pitch for you.

• 1:31:05Nilay Patel?

  And then I want to call it Zoe Schiffer, who has been doing just incredible reporting on the internal culture of Apple and the employee unrest at Apple that usually never comes out into view. Apple employees pushing back about return to work, pushing back to make sure that they're paid equitably across different demographic lines. Senior engineering manager was put on leave this week for tweeting about sexism in the office and reporting it. There's a lot there and Zoe has been chasing it. So I want to call her out. Her stories, I think, provide a really unique view into that company that we just have not seen for a long time. On Decoder this week, I talked to Neil Mahon, the chief product

• 1:31:46Nilay Patel?

  officer at YouTube. I encourage you to listen to that conversation. I don't think the transcript really, you can just hear me running into a brick wall, is what I would say. So I would listen to that one. He answered some of the questions. I like Neil. I think he's, he's very smart, but I think YouTube's response to questions is to become more opaque.

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Nilay Patel?

  And I think that, that I love publishing the transcripts. I think they make Decoder much more valuable over time. We're always going to do that. This is one we're at. I think listening to the opacity increase is like fairy telling about YouTube. So I encourage you to listen to that. Next week on Decoder, Argo AI, self-driving company, their CEO, Brian Seleski. I will tease by asking this. Self-driving CEO. I was like, hey, we did all this 5G stuff. Did it, did it help? Not going to tell you what his answer was. I think you're going to like it.

• 1:32:41Nilay Patel?

  Okay, you can tweet at us. Dieter's at Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. Russell is Russell Brandem. I'm at Reckless. Love hearing from you. That's it. That's a Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Get a vax.

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

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