Microsoft enters the metaverse race / Beats Fit Pro review / Apple’s software chief speaks out against sideloading

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Tom Warren discuss Microsoft's take on the metaverse at their Ignite event this past week. Verge editor Chris Welch joins to chat about his review of the Beats Fit Pro and Apple's third-gen AirPods. Stories from this week: Microsoft Teams enters the metaverse race with 3D avatars and immersive meetings Microsoft is planning 3D metaverse apps for Xbox and gaming Microsoft Loop is a new Office app for the hybrid work era Microsoft’s GitHub CEO steps down Beats Fit Pro review: sporty AirPod Pros with better sound Beats announces Fit Pro earbuds with wing tip design and $200 price Apple AirPods (third-gen) review: new design, same appeal The best wireless earbuds to buy right now ‘Sideloading is a cyber criminal’s best friend,’ according to Apple’s software chief Verizon and AT&T delay crucial 5G expansion over aircraft interference concerns Facebook is shutting down its Face Recognition tagging program Instagram and Twitter finally make link previews work again Zillow reportedly needs to sell 7,000 houses after it bought too many Ford’s selling electric crate motors based on the one in the Mach-E The 2022 Volkswagen ID 5 is a sporty electric SUV with over 300 miles of range Gobble, gobble: GE Appliances wants you to trust its smart oven to cook the perfect turkey 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, Chris Welch, and Tom Warren join the show. We talk about Microsoft's metaverse announcements. Yes, Microsoft go through Apple's new Beats Fit Pro headphones. Might be better than the AirPods Pro and a little lightning round of gadget news. That's coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:16Speaker 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 recording problems and the metaverse. It's a two-for-one deal on the nation's favorite podcast today. Huh? I'm your friend, Neil I, Dieter Bohn is here.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  I'm a spreadsheet and a PowerPoint and a document and a note in the metaverse.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy. The enterprise metaverse is here, my friends. Tom Warren is here to talk about it with us.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Hello. I'm in a metaverse somewhere, but I'm not a spreadsheet.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, I can't see your legs, so you could be in the metaverse.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Oh, that's true.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:20Alex Cranz?

  If Zoom ever does avatars for the metaverse, I'll be one of those.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  You can do it in Teams. This is the news. So there's, there's like a bunch of stuff happening this week that is all, it's all the metaverse, all the time now. We're going to talk about Microsoft had an event. They did their own metaverse stuff. There's some new headphones. Chris Welch is going to join us. Facebook news, there's always Facebook news. There's electric car news, all kinds of things going on. But first, I just want to say this out loud. This, this is it. This is the week that the verge turned 10.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  It's not, Dieter and I have had been on a roller coaster of emotions this whole week.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  It's been a lot, but, but we're done now. We're done having emotions for, for a while.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  For 10 more years.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  We've had enough.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  A little inside baseball of our team is every time we do anything, first of all, we, our biggest strength and our greatest weakness is that we just move on to the next thing.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  Like, we're just all, it's like, great, we did it. What's the next thing? Which, again, is a strength and a weakness. But we're also like, we're very good at what's, what could we do better for the next time? So that's everyone's instinct, right? We did the 10 year package. We should take it down and move on to the next thing. We can know that's 10 years of work. Like, leave it. Just like, let it ride for a minute. That's good. And then everyone's like, you know, next time we gotta do X, Y, and Z better. I'm like, next time is 10 years away. We, we, we're going to learn a lot of things.

• 3:38Alex Cranz?

  We'll be in the metaverse then.

• 3:40Nilay Patel?

  We'll be. Yeah, we'll, we'll have no legs in 10 years. That's the goal. But I do want to say, once again, thank you for everyone for reading. We put up the package, a very funny sort of inside joke that our design team didn't know. They, they were, they're previewing the package to me and I started laughing. So the navigation of our big verge 10 is a riff on something called the Zoom quilt. So it's a huge image. And as you click around it, you like move around the image and see different parts of it.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  In our, like, earliest verge design meetings, our friend Josh DePaulski, our co-founder, was like, the whole site should be a Zoom quilt. And we like, talked about it a lot.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:17Nilay Patel?

  So our old designers from that, from back then were all like, you, you did a Zoom quilt. And it was just a confluence of events, which I think is very funny. And Josh thought it was funny, too. He had a very nice thread. All those emotions, 10 years, we made it. But like I said, our biggest strength, one of our weaknesses. We're on to the next thing. And the next thing.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Is an HTML table. We're gonna, we're gonna slice up a JPEG and we're gonna display it in TRs and TDs. And each one's gonna be a full link. It's gonna be great.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, our tables are not great. We actually make better tables on the site. That'd be, that'd be a huge improvement. But thank you, everybody. You reached out, read the packages, read all the pieces. If you haven't done it, you're listening to this on a Friday. Pull over in your car and just spend the next couple of days in your car on the side of the road. There's just a lot of stuff to look at, both stuff looking at the past. We have a great list. Heim did a great list of the worst gadgets we've ever reviewed with like amazing animations. We have some of our favorite stuff and we have a bunch of stuff looking at the future. So if you haven't taken time, this weekend's a great time. Read all that stuff. Thank you for reading. We've got, it's not over. There's another decade of The Verge to come. And I promise we'll apply some learnings from this one to the next, to The Verge 20. Okay, news. Tom, there's a big Microsoft event this week.

• 5:31Nilay Patel?

  What was going on?

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was Ignite, which is the second Ignite they've had this year, actually. So they just keep igniting the ignites. The big news is Microsoft's now officially using the buzz term Metaverse. So they, they have their enterprise Metaverse now with 3D avatars, immersive meetings, all this sort of stuff. So the, the dream is that you will jump into a Teams meeting, don your headset or your HoloLens or whatever, jump into some virtual space and then start playing with PowerPoint in that virtual space with all your coworkers without legs. For some reason, all the 3D avatars don't have legs. I don't know why.

• 6:08Alex Cranz?

  How mad are they at Facebook right now? Because they were talking about this kind of Metaverse thing like four or five years ago. I remember I went to an event in like San Francisco where we all sat around and they're like, soon you'll wear a headset and you'll have all your meetings inside. And we all laughed at them. And then Facebook did it. We laughed at them and now they're like, but we still want to do it. But everybody's talking about Facebook, but we did it first. We did the dumb thing first. Like, are they mad?

• 6:35Speaker 03

  I feel like they've been nervous stroke mad of Facebook's efforts to do stuff in the workplace for a while. So it was kind of interesting that they announced basically everything that Microsoft's kind of doing the other week. Or like, you know, they showed, you know, future concepts essentially. And Microsoft's really kind of only shown that as well. So it's like, they're both, they're both obviously really competing hard to deliver the same thing that, does everyone want that right now? I don't know. Probably not. But yeah, they must be, the competition is on now between them two. So, because Facebook is very aggressively trying to get into the enterprise and into, into businesses. Which is basically where all this stuff's being used right now anyway. So, because Microsoft pivoted hard with HoloLens to, to the commercial space.

• 7:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, so one, one question I have is Microsoft's only headset is the HoloLens.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:24Nilay Patel?

  Which is cool in its way. It is not anything close to a consumer headset. It's certainly not a VR headset.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  No.

• 7:31Nilay Patel?

  So they're doing the metaverse. You cannot, I don't know, I'm like, they're very sarcastic air quotes. That's what I want everyone to know. They're doing the metaverse, but they're doing it in like, I don't know. It feels like you're going to be in the metaverse with an Xbox controller on your couch, not in VR.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  They're doing it in a, in a way that basically most people that be participating in it will be, won't be wearing a headset, right? So, so Teams is going to be updated. So you can, you could basically say I was having this meeting with you guys now. We're all on video in a Zoom call right now, talking to each other. But I could perhaps turn my webcam off and use an avatar instead, which would then take all the words that I'm saying, all my audio cues. And then basically animate itself as if it was me, which is kind of weird.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  I just like the transition point of that is like, I'm in a meeting with a bunch of people and a cartoon of Tom.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Imagine being fired by a cartoon boss.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  But that's what's gonna happen, right? Somewhere, some, someplace.

• 8:32Nilay Patel?

  You know, if I can predict what company will do that, it, what media company? That's actually a fun game. What media company will have cartoon layouts first?

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm thinking of two. There's two front runners.

• 8:43Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I got some ideas.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  That's a total media company. I'm, I apologize to the audience that is not deep on media Twitter, but six people are gonna think that's hilarious. But that's like, that is the weird transition point, right? Like, if you look at the stack of things Facebook has, Facebook has the VR platform. It has an operating system. It has apps. It has, it's built all this stuff to put your computer in VR with you, which is like the ultimate dongle, right? Like, an app that runs on your computer that shows your computer in VR is like a very funny concept, but it works. It, again, there's a lot of air quotes here. It works, but they have no software. Like, they don't have an email client or docs. Like, they don't, you can't actually work in Facebook's version of the metaverse.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  But like, they've built the hardware to enable. And Microsoft has none of the hardware, none of the application ecosystem. And they've got all the software that you actually need to use.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, Microsoft does have their mixed reality headsets. But like, when I say they have them, it's like, there's like one or two left.

• 9:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but, but mixed reality is still, you're in, you're not in the metaverse, dog.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Like, yeah.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  Whatever that is. I don't know what it is yet, but I know you're not in it.

• 9:56Alex Cranz?

  I think we've seen them, like, they did a metaverse. Because remember when they launched all these, these headsets? And it was gonna be the whole thing. And Satya got up and was like, this is, the VR is the future of the workplace. And then we all get a little house. And I immediately filled mine with like giant dinosaurs. And that was like, that was the metaverse, right? I just couldn't invite anyone in. It was like my weird little fort.

• 10:20Nilay Patel?

  So is Animal Crossing the metaverse?

• 10:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  They also have alt space VR as well. They acquired that, which is its own metaverse, right? So.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm putting a line in the sand.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  You got, you gotta be in VR to be in the metaverse.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 10:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 10:33Nilay Patel?

  Yep, that's my, that's my line. Other, everything else is just, it's just a rebrand. It's just, they renamed Verizon Media to Yahoo Ad Tech, which is a real thing that happened. TechCrunch and Engadget are now owned by a company called Yahoo Ad Tech. That's just we're like, screw it, we're going for it. It's just a rebrand. You're just rebranding video games as the metaverse. Unless you're wearing a headset and doing stuff.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  So I think that the rebrand is right. You know how every so often like, well, we need a new gen so that we can argue about stuff and we can complain about the kids. You know, we're Gen X, this is Gen Z and Gen Y and blah, blah, blah, blah. That's all the metaphors is honestly, that's like all that web three is at this point. Our crypto is like, oh, we've got some new stuff and we need to have a metaphor to like lump it together so we can feel like it's new. And that's, that's, that's what the metaverse is turning into. It's turning into a meaningless term very, very quickly. Disclosure, my spouse works for Meta.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  That's true. You gotta say it now. I would say that that places it fully in our strike zone on the show.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  What's a, what's a computer? What's a metaverse? There we go.

• 11:35Nilay Patel?

  We don't know yet. So I'm just, here's my little line in the sand.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  It's a singularity.

• 11:39Nilay Patel?

  Nadella said this during his Ignite presentation. The whole point is the digital world will come into the physical world and the physical world will go into the digital world. Right? And you'll interact with them on some level of equivalence. Sure. You can't really do that with Hololens right now. You're not going to sit around at work wearing a Hololens with like a cartoon of your boss in the court, like in a tiny field vision all day. Like you can't have a Teams meeting in Hololens to any realistic degree that you would want to actually get work done in. Maybe you will someday.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Do you think that the Hololens team actually has to do that? Like, like I'm imagining when he invented the Palm Pilot in the nineties, Jeff Hawkins carried around a block of wood and pretended that he had like a little hand computer.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  Like the worst dog fooding.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, they all have to wear the headsets all the time and pretend like the battery hasn't run out and just imagine that everything is out there in front of them.

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  This explains the very slow pace of Hololens development.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  I absolutely think that Alex Kipman just probably does all of his meetings with Hololens. I like to think that he does.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying is that it's Facebook's making this big push to work, which, you know, maybe their rebrand to Meta. Will make it easier to sell Facebook enterprise software to people. Because if I was running a business, I would not be like, I want to use Facebook's work tools, given the baggage of Facebook. But now it's Meta, it's a different company that has nothing to do with those problems.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  On the other hand, Microsoft already has the tools that everyone's buying. So if they are racing the same direction, they're, they're starting from, they each have the thing the other one doesn't, and they're racing into the same place. I think the big question is, can Microsoft get serious about VR headsets? Which at least in the short term, are the thing that actually enable a bunch of the experiences they're trying to show you. Like, why don't they just buy the Vive?

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, you'd like to think they could just work together and sort of share the platform, but obviously that doesn't benefit either of them, does it? But it's a similar sort of concept to the beginning of the iPhone, right? Like, Apple obviously built the hardware and didn't, didn't quite have the software, and the apps and that sort of stuff. And then it slowly, like, well, I'm gonna say slowly, like quickly, became a massive platform. And beyond anything that I thought, that, that we thought it would be when it, when they first announced the iPhone. And I think that's kind of the same with, potentially with whatever Meta could be doing here. Some of the concepts they have are pretty interesting. And I'd, I'd argue that getting the hardware right is more important than, than the software straight away. Cause you can build the software on top of it, right?

• 14:09Speaker 03

  You can, you can improve that software. But getting the hardware wrong and rolling that stuff out is, is, is a harder thing to come back from. So Microsoft has obviously done the whole lens. That hardware was not great to begin with. It's, it's improved and they've got some really interesting patents and really interesting work going on there. But that stuff's so early, I think, whereas I just feel like Meta's gonna come in here and shake things up a little bit more than, than we might think they would.

• 14:38Alex Cranz?

  I have a, a deeply, maybe hostile question. Is, is like, this just Windows Phone 2.0?

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wow. That's Verchess, everybody. You can send your notes to Alex, she's Alex H. Krantz on Twitter.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, obviously with Windows Phone, they didn't have the apps. It's a bit of a different thing, isn't it? Because the way that they're positioned is they're leveraging off of Teams, right? Which they have, I mean, if you're Slack, you will say that they just forced it down people's throats. If you're Microsoft, you'll say that 150 million people use it all the time and they love it, you know? Like, it really depends on your point of view of how well they've actually done with Teams, or if they're just forcing it on people with Office. But they do have that Office base, they have that enterprise base. So they have some leeway there to like experiment around with, whereas they obviously didn't have that Windows Phone. Like, they had to, all the decisions they made, they had to make right.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  And they made, you know, some pretty wrong decisions in my eyes. But like, I feel like they've definitely had a head start with the HoloLens and some of that mixed reality work. But it hasn't really gone anywhere. Like, it's not as if they're known for that right now. Obviously, they're known for the HoloLens, but not, definitely not on the VR side. And the stuff that they're trying to really push out with Mesh and this integration into Teams. Like you're saying, Eli, like, it does feel like a rebranding of VR in a way. And you kind of, to really fully participate in it, in the vision that they're trying to sort of like lay out here. Like, surely you're gonna have to use a VR headset, right?

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Do you really want an avatar just running around as you without you really being there?

• 16:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm looking at some of these screenshots. I'm like, this seems like it would be horrible. Like, you've got a browser window open on your laptop and you're like, your little dude is like running around a room with a light. But it's like, why would I, I would just, I'm just gonna call you on the phone, man. Like, I don't need to, I don't need to do that.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  The only slight argument against that is like, there's a company called Spatial, which does a lot of this work already. And I don't know if you guys have used it, but it's super interesting when you're doing like meetings with people you haven't met, or like coworkers and stuff, and you like do little huddles in a virtual room. And then you can do like the side chats and stuff. That sort of stuff is really interesting. So if, I think if they do basically what Spatial's doing, then it could be kind of interesting for Teams, for sure.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what the coolest Spatial feature is? They started this, this was like their thing, and they moved to huddles and all this other stuff.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  Their whole idea is that everyone in a, if you have an office and you have remote people, their whole idea is that everybody in the office in the meeting room will have their laptop open and Spatial open. And they'll use all of the laptop microphones to finally make that sound good.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, we, it's what everybody complains about. When, like, six people are in a conference room and one person is remote, like, the one person who has a bad experience. So I think that stuff's cool, but it's still just, like, laptop stuff. To Microsoft's credit, every VR headset that isn't the Quest basically runs on Windows, right? So like, there's a little bit of a connection there. Like, I mentioned, like, the high-end Oculus headset runs on Windows. Like, so they've got the literal connection there if they want to take advantage of it. I think it's just weird they haven't done what Sony has done. Like, the Xbox is a very powerful console. They could make a headset for it and kind of jump into it.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  And Nadella kind of hinted at, like, the fact that obviously Minecraft is considered a metaverse and-

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  Here's a quote. The quote is very good. It's very good. Dieter, to your point about rebrands. "You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming," he said. "If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse."

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  Minecraft is a metaverse. So is Flight Sim. In some sense, they're 2D today. And the question is, can you take that to a full 3D world? And we plan to do so. Absolutely plan to do so. Everything's a metaverse, guys.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  I'd love to know how Halo is a metaverse, but-

• 18:32Alex Cranz?

  Red versus blue.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  But Flight Sim is, like, super interesting in that. And obviously Minecraft as well. But Flight Sim has the fact that you can just basically be flying in the sky alongside other, you know, players in a real-world, essential environment. So that's like, I don't know, if they can make that into more sort of metaversy, that could be interesting.

• 18:57Alex Cranz?

  The thing we're also not talking about is HP, who's like the largest, I think, right? Largest provider of PCs to the enterprise space. And they're also still very much in the VR headset game. Like, they just released one earlier this year. And so it definitely seems like Microsoft has low-key got a plan. They're just not sharing all of it with us. They're tying all the dots together.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  So here's the biggest criticism of all these metaverse plans that I've encountered online.

• 19:27Alex Cranz?

  That require being in the metaverse?

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  That we have to keep saying "metaverse." It's a real problem. And I'm just sort of curious for everyone's take on this. All of these visions are just tremendously boring.

• 19:39Nilay Patel?

  Like what here, we're going to build all of this technology and we're going to all this stuff and we're going to change your relationship to the digital world and we're going to do NFTs. So your clothes can follow you from one, from the Halo metaverse to the Minecraft, but whatever. That'd be amazing if you're wearing the same clothes in Halo and Minecraft, by the way. But at the end of it, the killer app that they're putting forward to you is like you without legs at a conference table, do doing something like doing some work, like Excel in the metaverse is the end goal of all of this. And like, great, I understand that we've all spent a lot of time in the pandemic and like, there's been a lot of remote work for, for a lot of people. We're like rethinking our relationship

• 20:21Nilay Patel?

  to screens and meeting. Like, I get that there's all that pent up energy, but I'm also just like, yeah, at the end of all of these visions, it's like people doing office work.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  In a different way.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  In a different way.

• 20:34Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of horrifying because I worked at a job one time where the great vision of, of the, the person in charge of CEO, we'd, we'd like, we'd moved to being a fully remote company. This isn't Vox Media. We'd moved to being a fully remote company. And the great vision of the CEO was to have giant TVs in every like space where, where all the workers were, so that remote people could always appear on the giant TV and participate. And I'm like, Galaxy Brain, that's a little like Microsoft. Yeah, it's Microsoft's metaverse. So this, this, this unnamed CEO, who's no longer

• 21:16Alex Cranz?

  CEO, like that was their vision. And, and Microsoft is like, yeah. And part of me is like, that almost makes sense. But then all, the other part of me remembers when that was like discussed and everybody said, no, I don't want a giant vision of my distant coworkers hovering above my head.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  Do you remember when we, um, we had James with that tele-present robot thing? And he was going around the, the office?

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the iPad on, the iPad on the Segway.

• 21:42Alex Cranz?

  That was the metaverse.

• 21:43Nilay Patel?

  That was my vision, by the way, was iPads on a Segway, just floating around with like British people being like, oi.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  How do you do, governor? That's your impression of a British person? That's all you got?

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  I had this pure moment of like, am I gonna get cancelled for my British person? And so I cut it down. I was like, oh, this is it. This is what cancels me.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  You just get cancelled for the worst British impression ever.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  No, but we did. There's a great video. You can look at it on our site. We were like, James Vincent, we've got an iPad on a Segway, a telepresence robot. That's fundamentally what it was. Just like spend a week trying to work with us. And the week was like, I don't know, the thing just kept bumping into things.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  And him having to shout to people to unlock doors and stuff.

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  It was a very strange, but.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Well, so this is why the metaverse is in advance is instead of being on a Segway. Now there's just, you're just legless. You could just float.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Just float through the door.

• 22:51Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's just very clear. We're in this like early hype period with all of this stuff. Everyone's, everything's just getting rebranded as a metaverse. But the core of the idea, I think, is between Facebook and Microsoft, it does have a set of boundaries. Right? You're gonna do things in a virtual space instead of a physical space. And actually spend like meaningful time in those virtual spaces.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think like this is definitely going off of the deep end. Like this is the extreme of like us trying to figure out exactly how we're all gonna work remotely and stuff. Right? Like for years, I've obviously worked at the verge for nearly 10 years now. And jumping into meetings remotely is always a pain. There's a time zone. Like you don't always feel part of the team sometimes because of that. I don't feel like this will necessarily improve that. But I feel like if we got to the point where these companies started using some of the like Discord features, where you can just sort of chill out in a, in a call like Slack has. Those things actually do have an effect. Like you, you feel like you're connecting with your team more on a daily basis, talking to them more.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  So like gradual things like that, I prefer to, you know, legless in some 3D avatar talking to me. Sort of future landscape. So yeah, I, I, I feel like we've got a long way to go until this vision's fully, you know, actually here and fleshed out. But it's, they're all trying to basically. Get you to the point where you could, like, remember when you're sitting at a desk, you could just tap someone on the shoulder. Like, they're trying to, basically trying to bring that back to life, right? These interactions and keep people focused and everyone doesn't really want to be jumping in and out of Zoom calls with a webcam on every five seconds. You might get up late, you might not take a shower, you don't want your webcam on, like, all that sort of stuff, like.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  This is how you end up getting fired by a cartoon.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  This is why my webcam's never on.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the, the big thing is, we didn't know what smartphones would do, but we knew that there were one or two things that they were great at, that we definitely could tell we wanted right away. And so the question for all of these companies is, what is the one or two things that is going to be, that are going to be sticky, that are going to be your quote unquote killer apps, that people are going to want to do? And then, will you luck out when all of the emergent behaviors from the relentless iteration of technology arise? So, like, Apple had, like, an incredibly good browser and an iPod, and it got those things, and then everything else emerged out of that, you know, cameras,

• 25:24Speaker 02

  et cetera, et cetera. So, all these companies want to, like, have that moment, that smartphone moment. That's fundamentally what this is. It's like, oh, we, we want another giant trillion dollar business like the iPhone was for Apple.

• 25:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, and Zuckerberg was explicit about it. He's like, I can't live in a world where Apple and Google are in charge of me.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  And so, like, the, the, the thing that I think a bunch of these companies are missing is they're describing the vision of what it will be in five to 10 years, right? And in, in the way that you would have maybe wanted to describe the vision of what a smartphone will be in five to 10 years when it first happened. But they're not telling you what you could do with it tomorrow. That's actually compelling enough to make you be like, yep, I need that thing tomorrow. And so, that, that's the problem.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're not telling you, like, the problem that it's fixing, straight away, right? Like, it's, it's the, you know, in five years, we might be doing this, and that is definitely the problem. Like, you need to have a solid foundation and something that clicks with people. You go, oh, yeah, that's, that's a great idea, you know, like, like, the Slack stuff that they basically copy from Discord, like, that is a great idea. Like, it genuinely does improve things on a day to day. It's such a small little thing, but it does actually make a, a big difference. And just having, like, I don't think Microsoft has a solid sort of VR headset foundation for this work yet. Obviously, the HoloLens is, you know, an exception, but like, that thing is like, what is it, three and a half thousand dollars or something? And do you want to sit there all day with that on? No?

• 26:46Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, this is like the main thing that the solution to Zoom meeting fatigue is not putting a headset on your head.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:54Nilay Patel?

  It's fewer meetings.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's all that is. It's just like have fewer, shorter meetings that are better, not make the meetings more like meetings in a corporate office building. Like, that's what, that's what everybody's rebelling against right now. It's like, oh, I didn't, we didn't need to go to the office and I don't want to go back and you can't make me. And it's like, okay, Microsoft is like, all right, you don't have to go to the office. What if you wore this headset all day?

• 27:23Nilay Patel?

  I will say, Alex, we, I think we recorded this last week before this news came out, but I know this will be of interest to you. I think the killer app for VR is fitness and in particular Supernatural and Meta bought Supernatural last week.

• 27:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right after Supernatural announced that you can do boxing in it and it's really good and I love it. And I converted to Addie.

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you did?

• 27:43Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:43Nilay Patel?

  My wife loves Supernatural boxing and every time she is done with it, she comes down and announces to me that she is so good at boxing. And like, are you, do you want to fight me? Also, it's dance boxing, but okay, it is very fun. But on the flip side of this, Zuckerberg is buying every popular VR app that he can get his hands on. Anything that blips above the mean on the Oculus store, Zuck will buy. And so, you know, I had Chris Milk, the CEO within the company, makes VR and Decoder. You know, I pushed him pretty hard. I was like, there's only one platform right now. Do you feel tied to this platform? And he was kind of hinting, you can go back and listen to it, like, everyone knows Apple's going to make one of these headsets.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:23Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, we're going to be ready for that. And you could see that the plan was like, be an indie VR thing with two platforms. There's another big market that's going to open when Apple has a headset. And I am pretty confident Zuckerberg just.

• 28:38Nilay Patel?

  Wrote a big check like he was just like, what if I just stopped that idea? I will say that I've been told that the meta deal of supernatural was in the works way before the boxing. I thought it was weird that they happened at the same time, like it was a surprise like Chuck, like Zuck jumped out of a helicopter with bags of money and like crap. We have to do this. No, it was in the works for a long time and I think they timed it to this, but that's where I think meta versus Microsoft is interesting. Just in the context of this conversation. Yeah, we don't know what the killer app is going to be, but anytime anything looks like it, Facebook meta is, we'll just buy it. Like they don't know what it's worth. They don't know. I guarantee you they don't know how much money to spend like their answer is like oodles. If we'll pay oodles of dollars for this app.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  But Facebook or Meta does know, like they, they will, they will know because they're in the platform and we know that they, they use that sort of telemetry to, to acquire companies. It's just been their playbook. So they will keep doing M and A and I'm sure of that. Like I think Microsoft will plug the gap where they can, which is always just the enterprise. And Facebook is going to try and do that and fail probably.

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  So what's funny to me about all that M and A, like yeah, they're doing it and they did Beat Saber and they bought it. What was the other big one they bought? They bought another really popular game, the Population One, which is like Fortnite and VR.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:56Nilay Patel?

  Those things are like, if you believe that Halo is a metaverse, those things are metaverses, right? You have a character, you can see other players, you're wearing clothes. Supernatural to me is hilarious because it is all about you. It has like, if you think about Facebook and the Facebook files and they're like, you know, they need, Facebook needs the kids, right? Chris Mill told me Supernatural's user base 50 50 men and women, 60% of users are over the age of 40. So it's activating this entire user base that is not what you would think of as like tech early adopters because it's fitness. But it's just you in there thinking about your body, like no NFT clothes, no avatars, no other people. Like you're just working out and so it's like the opposite of the metaverse in like a very real way.

• 30:41Nilay Patel?

  But it's the thing that is selling the most headsets and I, there's some, some collision there is bound to happen.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  It's definitely interesting because like, I feel like whenever I've used stuff like VR chat or space and got into any of this, it's, it's just always full of kids. Like I very rarely come across anyone my own age. So it's like,

• 30:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Alex Cranz?

  Cause they're in supernatural.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Boxing away.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  They're like, I gotta, I gotta fix this old body. Young people are like, my body is great. What if I make a new digital one? Old people are like, hold on, there's a real time limit I'm working against here. And try to push that out as much as I could. There's a little bit of other Microsoft news. They made a Notion competitor called Loop.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:22Nilay Patel?

  I was talking to one of our designers. Here's a little insight base. Well, we're redesigning the whole website. It's coming out next year. So I was talking to one of the designers and he was like, everything is Google Wave.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Actually, that was TechCrunch's headline is Microsoft releases Google Wave. Very good headline.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  That's pretty good.

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  We use a product called Slab with our product team. It's Google Wave. This Microsoft thing is Google Wave. Like, if you're new to us, Google Wave predates The Verge. It was this very, you should just go look at screenshots of Google Wave. It is the most bonkers idea for software ever. They're like, what if we reconceptualize email and every email is a living document that you can embed QuickTime files in? There's like not a better way to explain that.

• 32:04Alex Cranz?

  That was honestly better than any, I used it for years and had no idea what it did. I was just like, I'm here. I'm on the wave.

• 32:11Nilay Patel?

  So all these things like Notion and Slab and like even Google Docs now to a certain extent, the whole concept is you have living documents that multiple people can work on. And you can like, it's like basically imagine if email was collaborative. This is like the only way I can really think about it. It's interesting that Microsoft finally got there.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  It's funny because when they first announced this stuff, it was fluid framework. And it was like, okay, yeah, this sounds kind of like Notion, but they didn't have like a hub app app and all that sort of stuff. And now it's like, oh yeah, no, this, this is like Notion now. Yeah. Okay. And now it's called Loop. So it's like, yeah, okay.

• 32:43Nilay Patel?

  And then Tom, can you give us the five minute version of this GitHub drama?

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not less drama and just more, I don't know. So basically Nat Freeman, who was there for, I think, three years as the GitHub CEO, he's stepping down later this month. He basically joined Microsoft when they acquired Zamarin. And then they obviously acquired GitHub a few years ago. So he's stepping down. So the more interesting part is that the guy who's taken over, Thomas, he's reporting up to Julia Lucien, who has just been promoted to the president of Microsoft Developer Division. Which is an interesting promotion because she's basically at the centre of a really controversial decision, basically on .NET that happened about two weeks ago.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  And it basically triggered a bunch of open source community backlash. And then Microsoft was like basically forced to do a U-turn on this decision after like 24 hours. So it's kind of interesting that she's getting even more like control of like Microsoft's developer sort of focused products, especially like GitHub is like a massive platform for Microsoft. And it's grown quite a lot since they've acquired it. And there's a bunch of sort of questions going around about like their whole .NET and the foundation that's supposed to oversee that work and how committed Microsoft is to open source and actually keeping it open source. Because the decision that was made was basically to restrict a feature from being open source, essentially, and being a paid part of Visual Studio, which like obviously didn't go down

• 34:15Speaker 03

  well with people because people have been testing it and it was in something called a release candidate, which is like essentially, we're finished, this product's done, it's in bugs, you know, test the bugs and we're shipping it. And then they were like at the last second, we're not shipping this really key feature that you want, which is hot reload, which I'm going to go too deep into it. But basically when you're coding, it allows you to make changes and it's sort of like live. So it's like a really big feature for developers, like is is a huge feature that Microsoft's been really slow to to adopt, to adopt. So a lot of controversy around it. We'll see what happens, but like, I think fundamentally, Microsoft has obviously been pretty good with the open source community, but at the end of the day, they're there to also make money, you know, is a revenue driven company, so everyone has to remember that.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  So as much as they want to be seen as stewards of open source and participating in it, it's decisions that that like that they did a few weeks ago that I think we're going to see more of, you know, like this isn't going to be a one off. So wait and see, I guess.

• 35:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I only brought it up because, you know, we had a down on decoder and he was championing how Microsoft is open and that the open platform and the other platforms. And then like the next day, Windows did a bunch of weird stuff with Edge. And a couple of months later, this happened with the open source community and like, that is a real dynamic between how Microsoft wants to perceive itself and then the things that make sense for its business or aggressive moves for its business.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the problem with this very particular one is that it makes a tool Visual Studio Code, which is actually free. It makes that like more powerful or like on a level with Visual Studio in a sense, which is obviously mainly a paid commercial product. So like basically if they keep giving away stuff for free and improving it and open source, then like where, you know, where are they making their money there? So it's, it's very complicated, very complex thing. But I feel like this is, this is one of the straws the bloke that like camel's back between like the dot net community and the open source community. And I feel like this is going to be an ongoing thing. Like we're definitely see a lot more of this with, with Microsoft's open source efforts for sure.

• 36:21Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's like fundamentally opposed philosophies on everything, like they can't coexist for, it's, it's impressive. They've coexisted as long as they have.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  I would give them that. They, Microsoft pivoted to supporting a lot of this stuff.

• 36:36Alex Cranz?

  They have coexisted, but like, it's not tenable.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it, it, it could be tenable if Microsoft can figure out different business models. But I mean, the reason it's worked for Google is because Google has a, a literal fire hose of ad money that they're very good at making bigger. And we're not going to get into it, but there's a whole bunch of Google ad stuff that happened. And there was like the Chrome stuff, but like, Google can like afford to seem like really good open source stewards in a lot of ways, because like, they just have a giant funnel of money that is tangentially related to all of it. And Microsoft doesn't have quite that big a funnel. They need to make money in other ways. And at some point, it feels like that could get in conflict unless they can like start changing some business models.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  It's definitely, the business models is definitely the key thing. But like Google does questionable stuff as well, doesn't it?

• 37:28Nilay Patel?

  Of course. Yes.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  When it's pretending to be open.

• 37:31Nilay Patel?

  We have to take a break. We cannot get into Google's questionable stuff. I promise. Dieter and I are very focused on some of that story. We'll, we'll come back around to it when we actually publish the story. But, uh, yeah, I, the reason I brought it up is we're seeing all this metaverse stuff. We're seeing all these companies talk about interoperability. We're seeing the gap between how Microsoft wants to be perceived and some of their actions. It's only going to get weirder as like the quote unquote metaverse. Like the idea is that you will move freely between all these digital spaces and your stuff will come with you, which is very complicated. So it's interesting that like, yeah, high, highfalutin metaverse stuff on the ground.

• 38:12Nilay Patel?

  It's like, we made a feature to Visual Studio and .NET and everyone got mad and we had to change our minds. Like the, the things are still happening.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  I think it's, it's just so funny because it's like they, because it's such an open way, they wouldn't have, if they'd made that decision before they open source .NET and I wouldn't have even noticed.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  You know, it's just, it's going to be, it's going to be an interesting few years ahead.

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, Tom, thank you so much. We got to take a break. We'll be back with Chris Welch. We'll be right back.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  All right.

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• 39:56Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Chris Welch is with us. Hey, Chris.

• 39:58Speaker 06

  Hey, everybody. Good to be back.

• 39:59Nilay Patel?

  All right. There's like headphone news. Do you want to walk us through this? I mean, Chris reviewed a bunch of stuff.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  I mean, it's all Chris's bag. He reviewed the Beats Fit Pro, which I find very fascinating. Also reviewed the new AirPods, which we talked a little bit about last week. And concurrent with all that, updated our wireless earbuds guide. But let's start with the Beats Fit Pro because they were announced and reviewed. And I find these things incredibly fascinating. And I find myself incredibly unhappy that I bought a pair of AirPods Pro a couple of weeks ago. So what's the deal with these Beats Fit Pro?

• 40:33Speaker 06

  They're so good that I don't know why people would buy their AirPods Pro anymore, honestly. Yeah.

• 40:38Alex Cranz?

  Same, Dieter.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  What's the basic idea behind them?

• 40:41Speaker 06

  So they're 200 bucks. They got a sporty design with these fins that kind of sit in your ears to keep them in place. And like a lot of these have been kind of like uncomfortable before and like they get annoying. But these ones actually, you can feel them there, but they don't press into your ear in any way. So they can kind of just sit there for hours and they're still comfortable. They've got the same noise cancellation as the AirPods Pro, so that's just as good. The transparency mode is just as good as the AirPods Pro, maybe like a hair not quite as good, but it's still better than most earbuds you'll find. The sound quality is a lot more punchy and better. They don't have wireless charging, so that's one advantage of the Pros. And the case is a bit large still, a bit chunky. But it's also the earbuds sit like in that case more certain. Whereas you have those times where you like go to use your AirPods and like one of them is dead because they didn't charge perfectly.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:26Speaker 06

  So you don't have to worry about that. But yeah, I guess as a whole, like there've been like all these questions about Beats and like, does Apple really care about Beats anymore? Why do they buy Beats? And now they've just kind of come roaring back with the Fitz for its Pro, which.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  So here's my question. If this is metaphor, it's going to make everybody very mad. But if AirPods Pro are like Camaros, are these like Firebirds? Are they basically just like, like another, like a rebadging, rebranding of the same thing with a slightly different feature set?

• 41:56Speaker 06

  I guess so. I mean, if you read some of the reviews, it seems like a lot of people are saying like, these are the sporty AirPod Pros that I always wanted.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 06

  So it seems like Apple's not going to make these themselves, but they're happy to let Beats kind of fill that zone.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  But do you think they're like fundamentally like the same internals? Or just like in a different body with a different set of things? Or are they like completely different headphones that just happen to like share the, you know, W1 chip and some other tech?

• 42:17Nilay Patel?

  H1 now.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  H1, excuse me.

• 42:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, they share the H1 chip, but the drivers are custom. So those are different from the AirPod Pros. They sound a bit better, like I said, fuller, more bass. But otherwise, like they do share a lot of features. They have all the usual like Apple tricks, like automatic pairing and all that stuff. But yeah, I mean, as a whole, like if you want Apple earbuds, like if you read a lot of the headlines on these, like people are saying these are the best ones they make, period. It's like the AirPods Pro.

• 42:43Nilay Patel?

  Why is the case so big? Here's the like, the thing about AirPods that like is their best feature is that the case is small.

• 42:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like they're great, but like, you know, these have all the same features. So like you've got the actual buds in your ears, these might win. I'd be like, yeah, but the, the case is still gigantic compared to AirPods.

• 43:01Speaker 06

  The form factor is part of it.

• 43:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 06

  Cause the hooks, the fins are there, so they've got to have room for those. The Power of Beats Pro case was like enormous because they had those hooks on there.

• 43:10Nilay Patel?

  They were so big.

• 43:10Speaker 06

  It was like, like what else could they really do? Cause like the earbuds needed that space. So these ones are kind of the same story. You've got to have room for the fins in there. But otherwise, you know, it's still like, you know, fit in the pockets, not the small pocket of your jeans, but the larger one, it fits fine.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  I have to say this purple is very striking, the photos of.

• 43:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yes, yes. Please go see our photos in the review. They're very pretty.

• 43:30Alex Cranz?

  The photos are fantastic. What's like, if you had to compare the fit to any earbuds out there right now, are they like, do they fit like the AirPods? Like for those of us with tiny, tiny ear cadals that it's surprising we can hear things? I'm one of those people.

• 43:45Speaker 06

  Yeah. So my friend has really tiny ears in those photos, actually, and they fit her pretty comfortably. She was kind of surprised, honestly.

• 43:50Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's.

• 43:51Speaker 06

  But yeah, they feel kind of like the Pros. I mean, you can feel the, the wingtips, like I said, they're kind of there. But otherwise they're super lightweight, super comfortable and they're pretty like. Discreet in your ears, you can't really see them sticking out that far. So they've got that going for them, too.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they don't have the stupid stems that hit my bike helmet strap. It's very annoying. You mentioned that they aren't quite as good at supporting Android as Beats used to be. What's the story there?

• 44:14Speaker 06

  So the Studio Buds that came out a few months ago that some people on our staff actually loved quite a bit. Those actually didn't have the W1 chip or the H1 chip in there. It's like they, so they supported like features like fast pair in Android and things that these don't. So like these are back to being like an Apple tech inside. But the Studio Buds were fine. They were comfortable, their sound was okay. The noise cancellation was pretty mediocre, I think. So they've done a lot better there with these. And the other 200 bucks, which is a pretty good deal when you put them next to the AirPods Pro that cost more money.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, you know, the, the, the loop of wire that enables wireless charging. We know that that costs $400 to make. So it is ridiculous that there's not wireless charging on these.

• 44:50Nilay Patel?

  So here's what I'll say. You, you reviewed the, the new third gen AirPods, which are very close to the AirPods Pro now in terms of design minus

• 44:59Speaker 06

  Right.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  the in-ear and minus noise cancellation. So now you've got the third gen AirPods at 180. You've got the Beats Fit Pro. You've got those at $200. And then you've got AirPods Pro at, what, 249, but they're always on sale for 229.

• 45:13Speaker 06

  Right.

• 45:13Nilay Patel?

  So like literally in $20 increments, you have all of Apple's headphones. How on earth do you make that decision?

• 45:19Speaker 06

  Well, there are people who like love the open style of the AirPods. I'm not one of those people. Like they let in way too much outside noise for me. I mean, I live in New York City, you know, like I hear plenty of noise as it is. So I don't want to have that always like just engulfing my ears. But there are people who swear by it and just like they're aware when they're like running outside or like on a bike ride or things like that. They just want that awareness of what's going on. So I think that's an easy decision for those people.

• 45:39Nilay Patel?

  Having just been back in New York, the number of people I saw who were just wearing AirPods, I could tell they weren't listening to a goddamn thing. They were just like wearing them.

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  Or just like wearing one. I kind of, if that's like your vibe, right? You're just gonna leave these things in your ears all the time. You can't see everything out. Okay, bye. But it's still just like crazy to me.

• 45:57Speaker 06

  Right, so the open style is like an easy thing for those that set those apart. But as far as like the AirPods Pro and the Beats go, it's kind of hard to pick between them, honestly. It depends if you want like the sporty vibe. These are great for fitness. They stay in your ears through runs and the gym and things like that. They're IPX4 water resistant, same for the AirPod Pros actually. So there's no difference there. But the sound's better on these, battery lasts a bit longer. So there are like several reasons to, to consider these over the AirPods Pro.

• 46:24Alex Cranz?

  How's the, how are the Zoom calls on it versus?

• 46:28Speaker 06

  Not quite as good as the Pros because there is no STEM.

• 46:31Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Which which ones are better for for the metaverse?

• 46:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 46:38Speaker 06

  Good Lord.

• 46:39Alex Cranz?

  Sounds like the AirPod Pros.

• 46:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, the Pros. So I guess if you're on Zoom all day, that's another reason to go for the Pros and the third gens as well. So the voice calls on here are good, but they're not gonna be quite up to that level.

• 46:49Nilay Patel?

  Do they support the you and I think share the same opinion of spatial audio, which is like,

• 46:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  Why? It's just like a question mark. Do you are these these are doing spatial audio? Is it the same basic confusing experience?

• 47:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's the same head tracking as the AirPods Pro 2. So they have that. You know, I see more and more people saying that like, oh, I love spatial audio. And so I think

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  Those people are all plants. I'm sorry. That is just a coordinated astroturf campaign.

• 47:11Alex Cranz?

  Who are they?

• 47:12Speaker 06

  People in our YouTube comments?

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, those are that's that's pure. That's just like the head of Universal Music is like telling his interns like, Get on Chris's reviews on YouTube. Say you like it.

• 47:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  Show yourself spatial audio.

• 47:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, spatial audio. Like I say in the review, it's good for video. So so for music, I think like more and more artists are starting to use it a bit better. But on the whole, it's still a super hit or miss as far as it's gonna be good or way worse than the stereo version is.

• 47:41Nilay Patel?

  For if you're doing a lot of movie watching in headphones, yep, you want some headphones that support this stuff. Apple's far in the lead. If you're not, I would just like cross it off your list of things to consider. Like,

• 47:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  It is just not there yet. So we're, you know, we're cruising on into the holidays. It seems like we know all the headphones are out. Where are your picks right now for for iOS and Android?

• 48:02Speaker 06

  So the best overall are still the Sonys, the 1000X M4s.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Chris, I I trust you. I believe you. I know that you're right that they sound the best and they have the best set of features. But the fact that moving them from one device to another requires 20 minutes of repairing just kills me.

• 48:19Speaker 06

  That has not been my experience, but to each their own.

• 48:23Speaker 06

  So yeah, those are at the top of the heap still, just because they're sound quality. And they got the awesome ANC. Then we have Bose is also like another good option for noise cancellation. Then if you want to spend less, the best earbuds under a hundred dollars are the new Jabbers, the Elite 3. Those are 80 bucks.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, those seem great.

• 48:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, those are terrific. They lack pretty much all the frills you'd expect from other butts, like wireless charging. And there's no auto pause when you take one out. So they cut like a lot of corners, but.

• 48:47Alex Cranz?

  No spatial audio.

• 48:48Speaker 06

  No spatial audio.

• 48:49Alex Cranz?

  Tragic.

• 48:50Speaker 06

  Of course. And then for the sports and gym stuff, the Beats Fit Pro have now finally beaten the Power Beats Pro. That were our pick for a long, long time. And yeah, I mean, there's still a place for the AirPods Pro if you love Apple stuff. Samsung's Galaxy Butts 2 are like a nice overall pick on Android. So.

• 49:07Alex Cranz?

  Are they?

• 49:07Nilay Patel?

  Dieter is just shaking his head.

• 49:08Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I was watching Dieter shake his head.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  It's the nightmare here is like, what's the best one to get for the holidays? And it's like, well, it like depends 1,000% on like 15 different factors.

• 49:19Speaker 06

  What phone does the person you're buying for have?

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Exactly. And part of me feels, especially with Apple stuff, that they, they actually don't, they're not worried about cross shopping anymore. They're just like, you know what? We're just going to flood the zone and people are going to roll in, they're going to have an amount of money they want to spend and we're going to make sure that we've got something at that price point.

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  God, it's a good thing there isn't an open hardware interconnect that enabled competition between platforms anymore on these phones.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  Just a thing I think about all the time. It's a good thing our headphone ecosystem has not been restricted by arbitrary software features. Okay. Well, I'm glad our headphones are locked in. Can I, I'm just going to do one more dunk on spatial audio, the head turning thing, right? So my initial was like, spatial audio is like answering the question no one asked of what if Jimmy Page was sneaking up behind you?

• 50:04Nilay Patel?

  The head tracking thing is like asking a question no one answered of what if you were at a concert with Taylor Swift and you turned around?

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't.

• 50:15Alex Cranz?

  It's the metaverse.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  That's an awful lot of technology to answer that question. It's just so confusing. Anyhow.

• 50:21Speaker 06

  This doesn't always have to be a concert in my ears.

• 50:23Alex Cranz?

  What if it's all prepped for their AR headset? So you have that really good audio when you turn around.

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but why are we forcing these poor artists to creep around?

• 50:35Alex Cranz?

  So when I put on my little glasses, I'll be able to watch them physically creep around and it'll all be worth it.

• 50:42Nilay Patel?

  That's all right. I'm pretty sure the wave of artists talking NFTs is coming for a decoder and I'm very excited about it. And I'm going to ask every single one of them, that spatial audio, just you wait and be like, did you have any part of this? Or is this all just like a weird music industry accounting scheme? Because that's what I believe it is.

• 51:01Speaker 06

  Have you even heard your spatial audio mix at all? Probably not.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  All right, Chris, thank you so much. We'll be right back.

• 51:07Speaker 06

  Thank you.

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• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  We're back. This is kind of like just a grab bag of weird stuff, but I'm excited for it.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a bunch of weird stuff.

• 52:27Alex Cranz?

  We're all cyber criminals, I think, right? We're cyber criminals, excited to talk about it.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  There is a conference called Web Summit. I believe, Alex, you've been to this. I have not in quite a while. And they had a surprise guest, Apple's Senior Vice President Craig Federighi, rolled up to talk to the folks at Web Summit. Oh, what's Craig want to talk about? Turns out Craig is real mad about the European Commission's proposed Digital Markets Act, which would require Apple to let users sideload. So he got up in front of this crowd after like a very, very excited host was like, yo, we got Craig, hold your iPhones up, turn your flashlights on, it's gonna be amazing.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Pull it out. Yeah, that's right. Let's light it up. And he said, as our next guest loves to say, let's dim the lights, let's set the mood.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Craig Federighi, come on out.

• 53:18Nilay Patel?

  This is what Web Summit is like.

• 53:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, this is it.

• 53:21Nilay Patel?

  The most amped European tech people you can think of.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Craig rolls out at the stage and is like, hey, everybody, sideloading is evil.

• 53:30Speaker 08

  One security firm found more than 5 million attacks per month on its clients using another mobile platform. But there's never been this kind of widespread consumer malware attack on iOS. So what's the difference? Well, the single biggest reason is that other platforms allow sideloading.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  He gave a whole presentation, speech, running through all of Apple's arguments about how it is very, very dangerous and bad and the end of the world if sideloading happens on the iPhone, that everything needs to go through the App Store.

• 54:01Alex Cranz?

  Crucial to do that at a conference full of like, young developers.

• 54:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Alex Cranz?

  Learning to develop. That's the place to do it.

• 54:08Speaker 08

  Sideloading is a cyber criminal's best friend. And requiring that on iPhone would be a gold rush for the malware industry.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Now, I would just remind you that Google by default does not allow sideloading. And they don't want you to do it, right? You hit that switch, Google's like, are you sure? You'll die. And then you like try to do it and they're like, huh.

• 54:30Alex Cranz?

  You sure?

• 54:31Nilay Patel?

  Yep, we got a knife to your throat and you're, we're gonna stab you. And then like, they don't want you to do it. So it's like, it's a weird comparison from the jump. Because it's not like it's happening a lot on Google. And in fact, when Epic tried to get people to sideload Fortnite, it failed and they had to go crawling back to the Google Store. So just putting that out there. Second, Apple makes the Macintosh. Like, you remember those?

• 54:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:55Nilay Patel?

  And like, are they saying that everybody just like install software on the Mac is just a honeypot for cyber criminals? Cause that's weird. That's a weird position for them to be in. I don't know. It's like, it's the, he was at the, he was at the epic trial. He was asked this question by the judge. The judge didn't buy it. In the opinion, she kinda didn't buy it. He was like, Craig had to walk that fine line of like saying the Mac was less safe than the iPhone. But the iPhone is in your pocket all the time, but we should do better on the Mac, but we're not going to lock down the Mac. It's, Apple's just in a weird place. Side loading undermines security and put people's data at risk. That's, that's his position now.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, no, it's always been their position. And like lots of supporting arguments too. If side loading is allowed, then a certain social network might require you to side load if you want to talk to your friends. That's dangerous, which is, it's a lot. Maybe it's true. I don't know.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  You know, you might be smart enough not to side load, but that doesn't mean grandma isn't. And that's the end of the world. You know, a bunch of stuff like that.

• 55:58Alex Cranz?

  Grandma's not side loading. That's a lot of steps.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  So I made a bad tweet about this. I was like, look, there's, there's other, like, it's possible to protect your phone. You know, without the app store, that they could like scan apps in the way that Google does. And like, lots of people were real mad at like, and like, it's a bad tweet. There are ways to scan for malware with that, you know, without the app store. The, the real point I'm trying to make here is it's a false choice. It's not all computer security has to happen for the app store or Armageddon, right? There's that, that, that's not the only way to set up a model to protect a computer. And to say that the app store is like the best way. And the only way is, well, I would say it's disingenuous.

• 56:43Alex Cranz?

  It's like they spent over 20 years talking about how good Mac security was to the point that you didn't need like antivirus stuff, right? Like they, they spent years doing that. And now they're like, but you do if it's a phone. If you hold it in your hand and not on your lap. Like, that seems to be the distinction.

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  And I just want to say, like, there's one argument to be made.

• 57:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  Which is you carry your phone around on you all the time. It's the camera you take to the bathroom with you.

• 57:10Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, I think we'd all have a different relationship with our phones if we just started referring to them as the cameras that go to the bathroom with you.

• 57:17Alex Cranz?

  I'm never, never bringing it with me again.

• 57:19Nilay Patel?

  It's just a weird thing that you do with a camera. You're like, I'm going to this bathroom. Bring in four cameras with me. Right? Okay. So fine. Like, yep, there's a higher threshold. And, you know, the, the United States government just blacklisted the NSO group, which is the most famous purveyor of zero day hacks against the iPhone. Like, there's a lot of reasons you want to be more protective of a phone. But then there's a lot of reasons. The phone is also most people's primary computer. Only computer in, in many, many cases. There's a lot of reasons that you want to give people an out from corporate control. So I will say another person who spoke at Web Summit was Spotify's Chief Legal Officer, Horacio Gutierrez, who's been on Decoder. And he gave a speech about protecting the digital economy from gatekeeper platforms.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  What do you think the, the, the green room is like, those two hanging out?

• 58:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. He like Craig Federer, he's just like running up to the Spotify guy being like, you're creating a Wonderland for cyber criminals. And the Spotify guy's like, we're just trying to stream music. And he's like, have you tried our spatial audio? That's my impression.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  I'm over here. No, no, just kidding. I'm over here.

• 58:24Nilay Patel?

  I can't hear you.

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't think they saw each other. But Horacio's got a long tweet thread. I'll just read the highlight. "The apocalyptic wasteland that Apple says would ensue if they're forced to comply with competition laws is a fiction. There's nothing in the Digital Markets Act or any other proposal that will prevent Apple from setting privacy and security standards for the platform." So that's just like, that's the other side of the argument. The one thing I'll point out, and we should move on, is Apple doesn't, like, Facebook's in a lobbying place right now. Right? There's all the regulators and there's Mark on Capitol Hill and just a lot. Nick Clegg works at Facebook. Just a lot of lobbying and politicking and whatever from Facebook there. And that's why they're rebranding and trying to do all this other stuff. Like, they live in a world of regulatory pain.

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  We do not perceive Apple as being a political operator in that way. But the amount of lobbying coming out of Apple right now is at an all time high. It's speeches like this, it is lobbyists on the ground in various states pushing back against competition laws. It is my personal vindication about buttons and links. They filed for a stay on that order and they said, these buttons and links are a real problem for us, told you so, all over the world in all kinds of ways. They're whatever you think of the Build Back Better bill, whatever that looks like now, whatever chaos you think that is, they're against it, right? They're pumping millions of dollars into, I think, the Business Roundtable. That's their lobbying organizations actively lobbying against that bill.

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, Apple's fully in the political game in a way that we do not perceive them as being in the same way that Facebook is. Facebook is just more public because it's, it's Facebook.

• 1:00:01Alex Cranz?

  Because there was a whistleblower talking about the files.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. So it's just like, I would just remind everyone that you think Apple's like above it all, but they are, that's the speech. They're in the mix, they're lobbying against these proposals. We'll see how it goes. Yeah. Should we go to Facebook or do you want to talk about this 5G situation?

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  We should start with the 5G. I mean, the, okay, well, I've already disclosed, but the, the, the two Facebook things are Facebook jettisoned some of its like facial recognition data, but I think it's still hanging on to the models. So, you know, it's not, not, they don't, they don't get quite as much credit as maybe they've, they've gotten in the initial wave, but they get some. And then speaking of lobbying and policy, Facebook is pulling a little bit of an epic, just a little bit. They are letting creators put links into some Facebook stuff to get paid directly by users to get around Apple's tax. And so it's sort of a, well, you'll, you'll, you'll ban us if we have a, if we try and

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  get around the 30% tax, but are you going to ban the individual creators to whom we are giving the tool to make a button to get around your 30% tax? Which is a very interesting stratagem.

• 1:01:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And they, Mark Zuckerberg announced this in a Facebook post where he was like, "Apple sucks, but we don't."

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  Like, straight up, like, the first sentence is like, Apple's tax is a problem, but we're getting around it with this thing, which is interesting. I think it's the face, shutting on face recognition is really interesting in the context of the metaverse, because one of the things, metaverse adjacent technology is AR glasses that show you people's names. You talk about killer apps, that's the killer app.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Nilay Patel?

  Facebook had all that data, and they're throwing it away. So, we'll see what happens, but.

• 1:01:46Alex Cranz?

  Why, why are they throwing it away? Is it just because everybody's said, oh, that's terrible and horrifying?

• 1:01:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they say they don't want it, which, like, I wish more companies said that. But, I mean, again, they're, they are hanging on to, I believe they're hanging on to some of the models that they used some of the stuff to build. So, like, a very, very cynical take would be like, yeah, they, they, they can't make the model better with what they've got. So, they might as well dump it and get the PR win from it.

• 1:02:10Nilay Patel?

  Yep. And they write this quote, "Looking ahead, we still see facial recognition technology as powerful tool, but the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against the growing concerns about the use of technology as a whole." So, if you've done all the modeling you can do with the data you have, you can just exit quietly from one gigantic regulatory fight about facial recognition and just, like, focus on your other gigantic regulatory fights. Like, sure, I'll take it.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  Also, it's still, they still own Facebook.

• 1:02:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  Do you know where all the pictures of people's faces are?

• 1:02:38Alex Cranz?

  They can still just go do it again.

• 1:02:40Nilay Patel?

  They're just like, they just like hit start on the program. I don't know how that works.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  They just, they reboot, and they forgot that it was in, like, the startup files. So, if they reboot a server, also, they're just doing it again.

• 1:02:52Nilay Patel?

  They do a configuration change.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Wait, one more, one more configuration change.

• 1:02:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Instagram will now, if you tweet an Instagram thing, show a little preview card inside Twitter.

• 1:03:05Alex Cranz?

  Yay.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  That nine-year fight is over. The dumbest, stupidest fight.

• 1:03:11Alex Cranz?

  Got to protect the images.

• 1:03:13Nilay Patel?

  So, they initially fought because Instagram didn't want Twitter building off of its user graph.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:03:19Nilay Patel?

  Which is, like, fascinating. Casey Newton, by the way, by the time you're listening, this story on how this deal to put the previews back will be up on the website. Happened over some wine and sausages at the back of a Twitter at execs house.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  As a real boy.

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  Um, yeah, it's very good. That story will be up by the time I just love a little deal Tik Tok. Like they were just hanging out and they're like, man, we should fix this decade old problem that everyone hates. And they fixed that. Um, but I think it's also just very telling. They don't think those user graphs are growing against each other anymore.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, yeah, at the heart of it.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  It's not a completely different story from the facial recognition story.

• 1:03:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's like, we're out of Twitter people. Also, we only care about teens now. This one is very interesting to me. Verizon, AT&T, they both bought a bunch of mid-band spectrum. The phones now support it and they are delaying rolling out that network because of aircraft interference concerns. Which seems like one of those cliffs you should have seen coming.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. In fact, I, I believe they, I think it's more like it was a game of chicken. And, and they blinked like the F like at the end of the day, like the FCC had a trump card or not the FCC, the FAA had a trump card and they, they played it. And so everybody else had to blink.

• 1:04:31Nilay Patel?

  So this is the second kind of like 5G radio frequency controversy that has erupted. The first one was, uh, scientists, weather scientists were like, you're going to interfere with our weather collection systems. And I think the industry just sort of ran over them.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, they saw, they saw Elon Musk do it with the space internet and like, well, let's just see if we do the same thing.

• 1:04:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So we have a story about that. It's from Justine. It's from November 2019, but that, that was a real thing. And like people cared about a lot. Wireless industry just sort of ran over meteorologists.

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  FAA and the nation's airlines, a little bit harder to run over.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  And I think because they're above you, they're literally, you can't run over them because they're.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  You know, spatial audio, they fly right over to your head. So the aviation industry has been talking to us for a while. They brought it up in August. Uh, major disruptions to the use of the national airspace system can be expected to roll out of C-band 5G. FAA released a thing. AT&T said this week, it's working to better understand their concerns.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, the concern is you're going to interfere with their equipment.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  And they're only, they're only delaying it by a month, which is interesting because like, we didn't know when they were rolling it out in the first place. So it's sort of funny like, yeah, we're going to delay it a month. But by the way, we were planning on launching it. It's like, oh, okay, great.

• 1:05:45Nilay Patel?

  However, there are other countries where the stuff is rolled out. We'll just see what happens. It's very funny that AT&T and Verizon, for all of this hype. By the way, their argument is if you don't let us do this, we'll lose the race to 5G.

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  And it's like,

• 1:05:56Alex Cranz?

  We did. We lost it.

• 1:05:58Nilay Patel?

  Super lost.

• 1:06:01Nilay Patel?

  Also, no one is leaving America because there's better 5G. Just a reminder, there's never been a race.

• 1:06:07Alex Cranz?

  There's, there's at least one Verge reader who will leave America because the 5G is better.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  And that boy was me.

• 1:06:13Alex Cranz?

  It was you.

• 1:06:13Nilay Patel?

  To Canada.

• 1:06:16Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's a little lightning round. The Zillow story is nuts. So Zillow, Zillow, which by the way,

• 1:06:24Alex Cranz?

  It's upsetting.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  Had a great business model, right? Which is like, access the public real estate database, show you the listings and then take cuts on both sides of the, they're like, what if we buy the houses? And then use AI to price them. Just a cautionary tale. They bought too many houses. The AI didn't work. They need to sell 7,000 houses that they bought at too high prices. They're, they're laying off 25% of their staff, which is 2,000 people.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  Don't, don't build AI business. Like, it's a boom market for real estate. They're like every, my entire TikTok feed, like every fourth video is like, I've been like, here's how I make a million dollars a day flipping houses.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:04Nilay Patel?

  There's an entire television channel. It's just like people flipping houses. And Zillow is like, the robot's going to do it.

• 1:07:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Nilay Patel?

  It didn't work for them.

• 1:07:11Alex Cranz?

  Who, who's going to buy all the houses?

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  Also fundamentally, like, if people think that your app is there to help them buy a house and you're actively making it worse by like buying houses and flipping them, maybe, maybe, maybe you're, you're bad.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  It's just a weird, like, the story of the digital economy is not having any inventory, right? Like Uber's a taxi company without taxi companies. Is Airbnb is a hotel company without hotels? Like, an old meme. Because it was like, what if we're a real estate company that owns houses? It's like, you missed, did you not see the tweet? That's the whole, okay. Ford, the car news. Dieter, are you into this Volkswagen ID.5?

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  I am. It's not that much smaller than the ID.4, but it's like a sportier, slightly, you know, cooler looking version of the ID.4. I'm just incredibly angry because they're not, they're only releasing it in Europe. They're not going to release it in the US. Same thing with the ID.3, by the way, their, you know, replacement for the Golf. I would just like to buy a small car that, where I can, you know, see over the hood and, you know, fit it into my garage. Those are, those are things that I would like, like to have. And, and in America, I can't because we're, we're, we're racing to 5G instead, I guess. I don't know.

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  All, all cars in America look like angry robots.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Nilay Patel?

  That's your only choice.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  There is a, there is a pilot program, I believe in the Netherlands right now for Tesla to start sharing its supercharger network. And it works there because there's like regulations that make sure that the charging plugs work and are compatible. But maybe someday, we could have decent charging networks for cars that don't have Tesla badges on them in the US. That's another thing that I would like. Anyway, I have emotions about electric cars, not the least of which is this, this new Ford crate thing, which seems amazing.

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  This is, we've done a lot of stories about old cars, like classic cars, but who've turned into electric cars. It's a, there's a big scene. We did one on like a ultra fast Mustang, like years ago. I think it's very cool. Like Ford is the, Ford has always sold crate motors. And now they're just going to sell you the Mustang Mach-E's drivetrain, and you can just like put in anything. And they announced it with a classic truck restoration. It's neat. Like, That's cool. If you're gonna actually get to full electric cars, you need to let people tinker and like build weird stuff. And I think Ford, Ford has a long history with that. So I think it's very cool. That said, I would not, I'd be like, this truck probably doesn't like have a great crash rating.

• 1:09:46Nilay Patel?

  So there's, there's limits to it, but I, I think they recognize that you have to get the hobbyists and the car enthusiasts on board. And they've been, they've been doing it in weird ways, which is fun. There's a lot of Tesla drivetrain swaps that happen. It's, it's cool at Ford's.

• 1:10:01Alex Cranz?

  Like, that was the kind of the primary one until now, right?

• 1:10:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's the one you could get.

• 1:10:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that was, that was it. Nobody's doing a Volt.

• 1:10:09Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I made a slow car.

• 1:10:12Alex Cranz?

  Put a Chevy Volt in my Shelby. Looks great.

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. It's not particularly fast. The Mach-E GT is out and, and that is like a rocket, but this one is a, it's a little d powered, but I'm sure the whole point is you gotta give the stuff to people and let them build a community around it. Okay. I really want to talk about this oven.

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  So GE has a line of smart ovens and it has a new thing that will, uh, it'll handle cooking the turkey for you and like make you worry less about the million variables that go into cooking a turkey. I only put it on the rundown because I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, sure. Whatever smart oven, but no, people are really excited and into it.

• 1:10:48Alex Cranz?

  It's a software update is the, is honestly the neat part for me.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  I, I think that like smart ovens are, are going to be cool in next year. I think that the, like they added like an air frying feature via a software update to some of their smart ovens. Like it's time, it's time for ovens to get even smarter and cooler. We need to move beyond pod based food technology into ovens, creating insane new ways. I want my oven to turn into an instant pot via a software update. I'm just going to say it, just the whole thing, just seal it up, pressure cook it.

• 1:11:19Alex Cranz?

  I'm sending this whole audio clip to my landlord so I can move away from the gas.

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  I am extraordinarily skeptical of this entire oven situation.

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  Come on. Just gonna be honest with you. Like, I don't know, man. Like the whole, there's like a lot of smart grills, right? Where you like put the probe in that, that every Traeger can do this, right? It should monitor the temperature of your feed and you can walk away. This is doing that for a turkey. So it's like, first of all, the model is proven out by all the outdoor cooking companies.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:11:51Nilay Patel?

  But the whole reason that cooking turkey is hard is because. The white meat and the dark meat cook at different rates.

• 1:11:57Alex Cranz?

  Well, you spatchcock it. You'll be fine.

• 1:11:59Nilay Patel?

  It's just like this quote. It's like, you don't need to do any other work. You just like, throw a raw turkey in the oven and let this commute. It's like, no, you probably still need to.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Try the skin out. You should have a brine. You should do the stuff.

• 1:12:13Nilay Patel?

  But you don't even need to unwrap it. The robot arms that appear via software upgrade.

• 1:12:19Nilay Patel?

  I will say this, when it's done, the oven timer app says gobble gobble.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Which is perfect.

• 1:12:25Alex Cranz?

  It's great.

• 1:12:26Nilay Patel?

  Somewhere at GE, there's someone who had to go source the gobble gobble audio file and then like, package it into the software update. If you are that person or you know that person, I will give you a full hour on this show to talk about how you selected the gobble gobble sound. And the meetings you had to go to, like, did you present it to the board?

• 1:12:45Alex Cranz?

  How many gobble gobbles were there?

• 1:12:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Was there, was there like a fun one that you really liked, but it was deemed too edgy? Like, I just want to know. Find me.

• 1:12:54Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's it. It was a weird week, though. A lot of things happened. But it's like, we're entering the kind of pre-holiday lull after all of October. Yep. But we'll be back next week. We're, we're going to be here. We're here for you. We got another 10 years to go. It's a long, it's a big promise, but we're going to do it. Another 10. Starting now. On Decoder this week, we had a very special guest, Dieter Bohn.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Hey, I know that guy.

• 1:13:17Nilay Patel?

  We talked about Springboard, your documentary. On Monday, on Decoder, Alex Heath talked to Meta's CTO, Andrew Bosworth, about the name change to Meta and the Metaverse. Go listen to that. Alex did a great job.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  There's a Tuesday episode of the Vergecast coming next week, which you're going to want to listen to, because Andrew Marino has gotten together with Liam and I to make a special episode about everybody's favorite port.

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Not the wine.

• 1:13:45Alex Cranz?

  I was like, the tawny?

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 1:13:50Nilay Patel?

  Lots of podcasts to come. Very exciting. Thanks to Tom Warren. You can tweet at him. He's at Tom Warren. Thanks to Chris Welch. He's at Chris Welch. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. Dieter is Backlon. I am at Reckless. Dieter, by the way, if you listen to that Vergecast Live, explain to what Backlon means.

• 1:14:06Speaker 02

  Only a little. It's a, it's a bridge version.

• 1:14:08Nilay Patel?

  It's very long. That's it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  Get a shot. Unlike Aaron Rodgers.

• 1:14:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:14:35Speaker 09

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• 1:15:21Speaker 01

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