Wordle and the App Store clones / FTC’s Meta antitrust lawsuit moves forward / PCs big year

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Russell Brandom discuss the FTC proceeding with an antitrust lawsuit against Meta, the success of Wordle and its app clones, and more RCS drama. Verge deputy editor Dan Seifert stops by to chat about this week's gadget news and the state of the PC market. Stories discussed: White House to launch COVID test-ordering site ‘by this weekend,’ reports say White House hosts tech summit to discuss open-source security after Log4j Google calls for new government action to protect open-source software projects Judge says the FTC’s Meta monopoly lawsuit can go forward Meta’s real antitrust problems are only beginning Want the ‘TLDR’ on a site’s terms of service? There’s a bill for that Apple says App Store developers have earned more than $260 billion The App Store clones are here to profit off Wordle’s success The Wordle clones have disappeared from the App Store Wordle copycat creator apologizes for ripping off the popular free word game The real beauty of Wordle is how its emoji results tell a story Alleged Apple App Store scammer AmpMe lowers prices and says it’ll investigate its ‘consultants’ Google exec says Apple is ‘holding back’ customers who text Google says Apple ‘should not benefit from bullying’ created by iMessage lock-in It fills me with glee that Canon printers now think Canon’s own toner is fake Apple’s $19 polishing cloth is back in stock online Ford doesn’t want the F-150 Lightning’s launch to be plagued by scalpers Tesla removes 2022 production date from Cybertruck website The PC market just had another big year thanks to pandemic demand TSMC earmarks record $44 billion for chip manufacturing expansion in 2022 The pandemic has blurred the lines between laptop categories Sony Xperia 5 III now shipping in the US, almost nine months after initial announcement The Nvidia Shield is getting Android 11 and other upgrades Sony says it’s still making new PS4s, but most stores aren’t selling them Google’s Android 12 update has been the rockiest one in years Ford doesn’t want the F-150 Lightning’s launch to be plagued by scalpers Wear OS will work better for lefties... eventually Tesla removes 2022 production date from Cybertruck website GM is creating an online used car marketplace Buy Nothing exploded on Facebook — now it wants a platform on its own 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, Dieter Bohn is on vacation, but Alex Krantz, Russell Brandim, and Dan Seifert join the show to talk about the world of drama, a little bit of Facebook antitrust, and we go through some gadget news. It's a good one. That's the Vergecast coming up now.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:57Speaker 01

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

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Dieter Bohn's vacation.

• 1:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Congratulations, Dieter.

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  He did it. He's on vacation.

• 1:56Alex Cranz?

  He's on it. He's not here.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  He's posting pictures of power tools to his Instagram stories. I think he's spending his entire vacation in a Home Depot.

• 2:05Alex Cranz?

  Except for crying about RCS, but...

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's true. Like, the news cycle has dragged Dieter back into Twitter several times. Anyway, I'm your friend Eli. Dieter is off this week on a very well-deserved vacation. Alex Cranz is here. Hello. Russell Brandom is joining us.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  Why hello?

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  And a little bit later, Dan Seifert is going to join us. We'll talk about some gadgets. So, you know, it's a slower week. There's still some things to talk about. I'm going to start bringing back the hits. Dieter's out. I'm just, I'm just playing the hits. I'm like, it's like Journey without Steve Perry. I don't have any new ideas. It's been 23 days since the president of this country promised a website where you could order a COVID test. President Biden said there'd be a website where everybody could get a free test. He said on December 21st, the day that we're recording, it's been 23 days. The day you're listening, it'll be 24 days. I will say, and Russell, I'm curious, I've been watching you and McKenna talk about this. There was a report on like PBS that

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  the website would be here this weekend. And then today, President Biden remarks today said next week. So potentially, this thing is coming. There is a difference between this weekend and next week. Unless you believe the week starts on Sunday.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:14Alex Cranz?

  Russell, my question for you real fast is, is it just like a holdup in their Squaresk base account? Like, is that why we're not getting it yet?

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I do think there is legitimately like a non-technological issue in that they want, that they are ordering all of these tests, right? Like, they ordered 100 million, and that sounds like a lot, but it's not actually that many when you think about like how many people are in America and how often one needs to test. And so it is like, I think they want to have some of that supply lined up.

• 3:48Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  But also, I do worry, like, this is the way people talk about something when they have not actually done it, right? Like, like, oh, I'll do it this, it'll be in this weekend. Oh, it's next week. And so there is a real, particularly after the Trump situation and with the withering ongoing scrutiny of The Vergecast, I think there's a lot of pressure to actually deliver on this.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, also the surging COVID cases in America. Like, not to say that the withering scrutiny of the show is not the animating factor in all American political life, but the pandemic is still happening. And like, I just, I can't say the Biden administration is in like a great position right now in terms of pandemic response. They've not done well. And this website is like the dumbest symbol of the whole deal, right? They're like, we're gonna give tests to everyone. A website is coming. And like, I don't know.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Well.

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  Squarespace, wix.com. Like, I read website service ads every week on this show.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  That's not the problem. The problem is the supply and the problem is the logistics of delivering the things. And if they were just open about that, I feel like they could have stood up the website and started taking signups from people the day after they announced there would be a website. And that's the part that I just don't understand.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it is true that as policy editor at The Verge, like, the day that they launched the website, I am going to take a hard, pitiless look at it. And the extent to which it's screwed up, I'm gonna be on the website within the hour saying, this is screwed up. Why did they launch this garbage? You know, why not fix it if you're gonna launch it? And so, like, I do think there's, they're under a lot of scrutiny. There's no, there's no way around it. I think the bigger picture story for me is, and maybe this is like the hopeful spin on it, but um, I do think there is like a question throughout the pandemic of whether the government is like actually capable of doing things, specifically the

• 5:50Speaker 03

  US government. But like, I mean, this in some ways was spurred by like Jen Psaki saying, what are we gonna do? Mail tests to everyone? And everyone said, yeah. It's like, no, actually, this is, in fact, people do expect the government to do this. That would be a good thing for the government to do. And there is kind of a shift in stance. And you hope that at some point, we turn some kind of corner. And we're like, actually, this is a trillion dollar enterprise. We should be able to like, identify and meet needs for the citizens of the country.

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, no. Re-conquest for oil. That's what we do here in this country. Um, can you tell where my formative political moments were? Whenever it comes out, I'm like, oh, I was in college during the Iraq war.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's my only frame of reference. But I, look, hopefully, they stand up this website. I just, we're gonna dunk on vaporware cars a little bit later in the show. Like, I would just encourage anybody making a tech product, you announce it right before it ships. You don't, you don't just let people wait for your vaporware. Like, you're buying this problem. Hopefully, it stands up. Hopefully it doesn't crash on the first day government websites.

• 6:55Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I you have a lot of optimism and hope in your heart.

• 6:58Nilay Patel?

  Does that sound like optimism?

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  Where are you?

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  All right. Hopefully they launch it. It's supposedly coming this weekend. If not, we'll just keep counting. Hopefully you have access to testing, which is fundamentally the most important thing. All right. Speaking of the White House, Russell, you are the policy editor.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 7:15Nilay Patel?

  There's some policy action in the world. The White House held the security summit, a bunch of open source vendors, big companies. What's going on there?

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Again, it's generous to call it action. So log 4G was this bug that, you know, it was in fact pretty nasty. It was basically every network system, you want to log the stuff that's happening on your network. In case someone's doing some nefarious stuff, you can go back and find it, or even just like things are breaking. We want to see what's going on. But logging functions aren't very exciting to code. And so everyone basically uses the same one. Like we made a single open source logging system that is perfectly fine. And it's the one that most people use. And so it was a bug in that, which was very, very scary for people. Because there's no sort of central repository of how many people are using this.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  And and thus, basically, it was assumed everyone was vulnerable and it was this catastrophic thing. So now the White House has sort of invited people from all of these big companies, along with the heads of various sort of tech adjacent government agencies, to talk about how important open source security is and how we're going to sort of fix it. So it's Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta slash Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, it's sort of all the all the heavy hitters.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  And so the joke with open source software is, right, these incredibly important libraries are made maintained by volunteers that no one really knows.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:45Nilay Patel?

  And they're really important and people fix them out of their hearts. And that's it's a very reductive joke. I understand it's not always the circumstance. But that's always been like the danger with open source. And the pushback is, we should control this more tightly, which then cuts against the whole principle and ideals of open source. Where do you think that tension is right now?

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's wild for me because when I was a baby cybersecurity reporter, we had Heartbleed, the open SSL bug, which taught some very similar lessons. And it gave rise to, you know, all of these same companies were like, look, we'll throw in 100 grand a year to hire some actual people to look at this stuff. And we have the Open Source Security Foundation now that is going through looking at these. I mean, I think it's less about control and more about kind of the infrastructure problem, right? Of let's identify the stuff that really needs a security audit and we want to be very, very careful on.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  And, you know, when, when some new version of the logging software comes out, because they say, hey, we found some security issues, install this one, like, people will update it and install it. It's not that hard. It's more just keeping an eye on the worst things that could break and sort of breaking them in a controlled setting before they break in the wild.

• 10:05Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, when Heartbleed happened, I don't recall that any sort of policymakers being like, we must convene a summit, initiate a policy and talk about the supply chain of software in the United States as a critical cyber vulnerable. And now, what's the difference? Why is it happening now?

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Uh, I think there's a sense, particularly after ransomware, that like, the government should be on top of this. I would say objectively, more expertise in the federal government than there was when Heartbleed happened. There are smarter people to get in that room. And I think there's a sense that like, actually, we're not fixing all of these problems on their own, like ransomware being a classic example. And there is a role for like, the government in at least coordinating. And I'll say, I mean, this is the other thing we hit about this is that Google said, yeah, we want this to be a private-public partnership, which previously it was just a bunch of private companies giving money to the Open Source Security Foundation.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  And like, that was kind of fine because we didn't assume that like, the US federal government was necessarily going to play a productive role in any of it. I don't know that we've, that's necessarily paying dividends yet, but anyway, they're trying.

• 11:20Nilay Patel?

  Uh, how long until you think this pays off? Like, I mean, that's like the real question here, right? You've got, I don't know. It seems like we hear about bugs at this level fairly often. They do get patched. Log4j got patched fairly quickly, but they keep happening. Like, how long until this doesn't seem like a forever problem? Or it's a forever problem with a known management?

• 11:38Speaker 03

  It's really that second one. Like, I guess, if the question is, when will things constantly stop breaking on the internet? The answer is for as long as there's an internet.

• 11:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's been 23 days since Russell promised things would stop constantly breaking.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. But, but I do think, and we already sort of saw this with Log4j, where like the FTC was very aggressive in saying like, "Hey, we now have a patch. If you don't patch and you get hacked, we will come after you." Like, we are using our force as a consumer protection agency to make sure that this thing gets secured. And, and sort of everyone does what is understood to be the correct cybersecurity response. So, I mean, that's, that's something I think we're starting to standardize the response to these things. It's a very big boulder and a very sort of large hill, so it's gonna take a minute.

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  There's other policy news in the world. The, well, we'll do a whole section on Wordle discourse, just you wait.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:35Nilay Patel?

  Just like reality television, we're gonna talk about the one moment of action

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Stay tuned.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  in and out of every commercial break, but you have to wait until the last five minutes.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:44Nilay Patel?

  That's a horrible way to like hype ourselves up.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  I'm not here to make friends.

• 12:51Nilay Patel?

  It is what it is. The worst line given to us by any reality programming is Top Chef making everyone just be like, whatever. F it, it is what it is. Here's my horrible flan. Okay, speaking of horrible flan, the FTC.

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  So, the Trump FTC tried to sue Facebook. They wanted to break Facebook up, Instagram, WhatsApp. They were not successful. The judge said, "You haven't alleged sufficient facts to prove." Facebook has a monopoly for personal social networking, which is a very odd market if you really think about it. Biden FTC, led by Lena Kahn, picked up the case, said, "No, we're gonna replead it." They added some data to show that Facebook is big and the judge is letting that case move forward. That seems like all they had to do.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:35Alex Cranz?

  It was such a low bar.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  There was this question when it first broke of like, you know, these, these cases are really hard, right? And like, it's very conceptually challenging to be like, this is the personal social network market. And this is, this is like, what that looks like and what the clear edges of it are. And it sort of wasn't clear if like, it was a conceptual problem, or if they just literally had not done their homework. This is what, this is the language the judge used, by the way, as he was like, now they have done their homework.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  And it really seems like he just wanted some com score numbers where they're like, yeah, it's dominant. Like, well, we're going to argue about it in court, but like, this is our basis for saying that. And like, that was pretty much, like, I was surprised by how little was different that, that was able to sort of tip the scales for the judge.

• 14:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it really is just some data asserting that Facebook, it really is just like com score numbers that says Facebook is big.

• 14:34Alex Cranz?

  Was there really no data before where they just like, it's big?

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, earlier Russell was like, this government has competent people in it.

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  Like, I think it comes down to that. I mean, the Trump administration kind of did things for political purposes.

• 14:50Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't feel uncomfortable saying that they were often motivated by politics instead of policy.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Although this was the FTC, I mean, it like, a lot of those people had been in from before Trump. I think part of it is, like, it has been a, a long time since the FTC sued to break up a major American corporation. Like, that's.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, they just like, didn't know how, is what you're saying?

• 15:13Speaker 03

  I think they didn't know how, and if it's the Republicans leading it, their hearts kind of not in it.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like they assembled the IKEA and they were like, oh, this one piece is backwards. They're going to take this whole thing apart.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 15:24Alex Cranz?

  And they just walked away.

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  I sort of buy it. I, I guess I'm a little more skeptical and cynical because I watched how the Trump administration pursued AT&T, Time Warner.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 15:35Nilay Patel?

  To your point about their heart, I'm being in it. Their, their best argument against that combination was effectively a net neutrality argument.

• 15:43Nilay Patel?

  And they couldn't make it because they were anti net neutrality. So they had to make all these other arguments and they just got their asses kicked. But the whole point of it was to scare CNN, like the dude was just mad at CNN. And I think a lot of this Facebook animus from that administration was pointed at Facebook moderation policies, right?

• 16:03Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 16:04Nilay Patel?

  It's just kind of the way that that administration works. So it didn't surprise me that they didn't make the case well. It surprised me at how little more, how little additional work the Lena Kahn version of FTC had to do to get to the next bar. The end result, though, is that they still have won virtually nothing, right? They're just allowed to go forward. The judge is like, this is a high bar to clear. Like, you might not win.

• 16:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I was kind of surprised by like, the tact they took. The thing they want to break up is, is specifically, they want to carve out Instagram and WhatsApp, right? Like, they don't want to get rid of anything else. They don't want to like, deal with the whole ad duopoly or anything like that. They're just focused on Instagram and WhatsApp. And that just kind of surprised me because I would have not seen that as like, the real harm of the Facebook monopoly.

• 16:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it's interesting, Casey has made this point in Platformer, and especially in the one issue Platformer we syndicated, that there's a lot of ways to think about Facebook, but Facebook right now is facing so much competition.

• 17:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  That by the time this court case happens, whether or not Facebook owns Instagram might be totally irrelevant. Like, TikTok might have succeeded in destroying Instagram by the time this case reaches a resolution. The judge threw out another claim about Facebook API interoperability and data sharing, because he's like, they stopped doing it in 2013 anyway. Like, why are you mad about this thing they haven't done for years? So I do think there's just a lot of that. And I, I also think, like, you mentioned advertising duopoly, like, at the same time, Apple just sort of unilaterally was like, cookies are dumb. And like Facebook's ad business is taking ahead. So there's a lot of actual market competition coming for Facebook. So I think the FTC saying this acquisition was illegal and we're going

• 17:53Nilay Patel?

  to try to create competition by breaking these companies up. It might be too little too late, but it certainly sets a tone for how they're going to think about everything else, including it's all of its VR acquisitions.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I do. So like Casey made the point that like the fact that they're scrutinizing the VR acquisition is potentially a bigger deal because it's sort of forward looking, which I think is true. But I also think like we're living in the tech space and we're very sensitive to like sort of small variations where like TikTok gets a little bigger and like it seems like it's on the rise and this is understood to be a threat to like projecting out like five years in the future, Facebook. But like, like it still is just the giant in the room and it still does own the top three social networks in the world. I mean, if we're calling WhatsApp a social network, but like it still is just this massive thing.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  And I think the nature of the FTC process and antitrust processes generally is that they move really slow because you're trying to do this big, complex thing that has rightfully, for the, for the same like time Warner reasons you were describing, like, we don't want it to be a good way to just punish your political opponents. But like slowly setting those guardrails is really important. And I do think it's still like a world in which Facebook has to divest from Instagram and WhatsApp is still a way bleaker future for them than a world in which they kind of squeak by and, and, you know, maybe have to pay a fine, but don't get the worst consequences from this case.

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I feel like we don't talk about like, you know, the main Facebook blue app on the show ever, right? We talk about the, well, the company is not called Meta, the Meta company, but the main Facebook blue app, like.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  You know, them adding a feature to that does not merit our attention. Like, we ignore it, but it's still, for many people, the internet.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, even for people in this country, certainly for people around the world, especially in other countries with kind of different internet access regimes, Facebook is the internet.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:59Nilay Patel?

  And so, like, what they do is important. I just think their positioning of themselves now is meta. Their acquisitions in VR are much more, stopping that stuff early, the way that the government may or may not have stopped Instagram early, like, has a better chance of being successful policy-wise than trying to break up Instagram at this moment in time. Like,

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  Earlier, I said this government was competent. I just meant that, like, they're not nakedly motivated by politics and something. They're good at being lawyers in that way, you know? Like, that's what I mean by competence in this, in this regard. I don't mean that they're going to be successful at this because they're, they've got home runs on their hand.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this, this was the big thing that, like, the big other ruling is that Facebook had tried to sneak in, in this dismissal motion, like, by the way, Lena Khan can't even argue this because she was mean to us earlier.

• 20:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, she wrote some articles that were mean to us.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  And, and we got, like, this thorough, thorough sort of reasoning from the judge, being like, no, this is a ridiculous argument. Like, obviously, anyway, yeah.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  Google is making the same argument, too. Like, they wanted to be like, so you've tweeted about us before. You may not be in charge of lawsuits against us. And it's like, no, actually, that's what you, that's what you want, like.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  You want people who are knowledgeable about a subject.

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  Here's my idea for the American justice system. It's the movie Minority Report.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  People swimming in pools, and you call them and be like, should we break up Instagram? And then who knows what's going to happen? That's just not how the thing works. But at the same time that this is happening, and we're talking about Facebook's past, Meta, the company that exists in the present, is on a buying spree of VR companies.

• 21:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Nilay Patel?

  Most notably within, I think Alex and I are both Supernatural fans, within makes Supernatural.

• 21:48Alex Cranz?

  It's $400 million.

• 21:50Nilay Patel?

  Which is enough to like, trigger FTC review. And so they're like, nope, we're gonna look at this. I like within, I like Supernatural. I've had the CEO Chris Milk on Decoder. I think he's very smart. And I asked him on Decoder, like, isn't your opportunity to wait until Apple has a headset and then you make an app for two platforms instead of being controlled by Facebook? And he's like, yeah, I don't know. And then like, money talks, you know?

• 22:16Alex Cranz?

  $400 million, yeah.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  But that's, to me, that's the danger, right? Right now, there's but one VR application store. It's on the Oculus Quest. Obviously, there's some stuff on the PC side, but the mainstream consumer VR application store is on the Oculus Quest 2. It's great that Dieter isn't here, because he wouldn't even have to just recu- he'd have to throw his computer out the window for this conversation. But I miss you, Dieter. Every minute of every day that you're not here. But it's, this one's good. But Facebook has perfect usage data.

• 22:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  Right? They know what apps are leaving the store. They know what apps are being used on their headset. They have perfect telemetry. And they're just buying the winners. So that when Apple shows up with another platform, they've got all the winners. They've got all the killer apps already, and Apple will have to start from zero. Now, Apple is very capable of overcoming that burden, I think. Right? They've got a huge user base. They're not Facebook. They don't have the baggage of the Facebook brand and the Meta brand or whatever. They've got developers who love them. But it's still like Facebook. You can see them just spending the money on the moat.

• 23:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Nilay Patel?

  And I think the FTC is saying, no, wait, you can't do that. It seems fairly smart. It seems early. And it seems like, regardless of what happens in this Instagram case, When they go to the within case, one argument the FTC will be able to make is we didn't stop Instagram early enough or provide enough scrutiny and we ended up in this situation and we don't have to do that again.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I will say the most interesting part of all of this to me is like, it is nice if you are funding VR companies, that you have this clear exit strategy of we're gonna get big enough that we'll get bought by Facebook, right? And in a world where you have aggressive FTC action, not just on this, but on all like emerging emerging technology spaces and you can't just say like, well, Facebook is spending a ton of money to try to get a lead on this entire category of product. And so they're gonna, we're gonna try to get some of that money by developing one of these products. I wonder what happens to

• 24:20Speaker 03

  that investment, like if we just see kind of a crunch in the, I mean, I don't know, it's it, this is very second order effects, which are like really difficult to predict, but I do wonder how that changes the VC math.

• 24:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I've definitely heard this argument before and the flip side of the argument is actually Patrick Spence from Sonos has described this argument to me many times. He's like, that creates, but if all anyone has ever doing is getting acquired, you've got a kill zone of innovation around the companies.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  Cause only one, one idea will get acquired or one company will get acquired. So there's a whole range of stuff that the companies might do that's not worth investing in. And like, yeah, I mean, I think it's a big back and forth. I just, don't you think like being a software developer should be a business that you should run, not just a thing you make so that a bigger company eats you? Like, I think that's like the ultimate question is like, most of these companies get founded not to be run as good businesses, but to get eaten by Google or whatever.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Or Facebook, Meta.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  And I think it would be better if we just had some more companies.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  Well-run, large, like, that's just like, it's a very simplistic way of thinking about it, but that's just some ad. But speaking of Sonos, they won big patent ruling against Google.

• 25:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Nilay Patel?

  In their case, at the International Trade Commission, Google had to like turn off features on Chromecast because they were ruled to have violated these patents.

• 25:39Alex Cranz?

  Well, it was really weird how they, how they violated them too, right? Like, I believe this was a story where Google hit up Sonos and they talked about maybe working together. And then Google was just like, thanks for all this cool info. We'll talk to you later.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:54Alex Cranz?

  This was a great meeting.

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It was like, how do we get assistant on the Sonos? And then like Google's product roadmap was like a bunch of Sonos tech.

• 26:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Nilay Patel?

  And Sonos was like, great. Are you going to do the assistant thing? Google's like, what? And, you know, the story is much more complicated than that. But eventually, you know, Patrick's position is Sonos is an old company, has a huge patent portfolio. And the reason you have a huge patent portfolio is to create leverage.

• 26:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Nilay Patel?

  And people either steal your stuff or don't give you the deal you want. So I'm eager to see if Google, like, they either re-engineer everything to get around Sonos' patents, or they can just pay the money and license the patents and so give Sonos the deal terms it wants to maybe like run two assistants at once, which is the thing Sonos wants most of all, is to run Alexa and Google Assistant at the same time on its speakers.

• 26:42Alex Cranz?

  If, if they could run Siri on it, I would not be in my current quest to get rid of my entire Sonos setup to buy like very expensive bookshelf speakers. I've run all in on HomePod minis. It's upsetting. They're just...

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  How many? Wait, when you say how many HomePod minis, yeah?

• 26:58Alex Cranz?

  I mean, caveat, I have a three-room apartment.

• 27:02Nilay Patel?

  So is it four?

• 27:03Alex Cranz?

  I have two. I'm thinking about getting a third one, but I feel like it's just going to get activated, never get activated, because it'll be too, it'll be right next to one of them. But it's, it's great. And Sonos is like, I'm no longer as invested in Sonos as I once was, emotionally speaking.

• 27:21Nilay Patel?

  Wow. I mean, I understand.

• 27:23Alex Cranz?

  Way off topic here.

• 27:25Nilay Patel?

  That's why I'm just saying like, here's this like swirling policy debate about what big companies get to do. And like, one of the things they got to do was just like run over a small company.

• 27:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Nilay Patel?

  And like, part of, one way to run them is just buy them. Another way is to just like, throw money. I think Mark Zuckerberg called it, we'll go into like, kill mode.

• 27:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  When they're discussing whether or not they would buy Instagram.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  This came up in the documents. This is like in the FTC case. They're like, Mark's gonna go into kill mode.

• 27:53Alex Cranz?

  Is that what he's doing in the VR space, going into kill mode?

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Imagine the legal trainings after this where they're like, just talk about being competitive or wanting to provide the best. Try to avoid phrases like kill mode.

• 28:07Alex Cranz?

  I feel like they're probably like, Mark, just don't email. Just.

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  Right. So let's say you're, you're Mark and you're on Meta. You've got perfect data in the store. You see everyone's using Supernatural. You also have inside of it, Facebook move.

• 28:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  And you can go and you can buy Supernatural for $400 million, nothing to Facebook. Or, and if they say no, you can be like, all right, we're just gonna give something that looks like Supernatural away for free and build it into Oculus move. And that's like, well, that sucks. Like, at that point, you have no choice but to sell. And that's kind of what Google did to Sonos, right? They said, we're just gonna take your tech and there's nothing you can do. And Sonos at least has some recourse. I think one of the pieces of the puzzle for all of this is like, what are the responsibilities of the platform owner? So what do they get to buy?

• 28:54Alex Cranz?

  They shouldn't buy anything. If you're the platform owner, you own the platform. That's it. Like, Microsoft taught us this 30 years ago or whatever. Like, you can't just be sneaking.

• 29:04Nilay Patel?

  Another lifetime ago.

• 29:05Alex Cranz?

  Another lifetime ago.

• 29:07Nilay Patel?

  Who was president? Like, George Washington president? Microsoft lost that case. Who cares? All right, we gotta take a break. And we're gonna come back with some, uh, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back with some hardcore Wordle discourse. It's gonna be amazing. We'll be right back.

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• 30:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Who wants to try to describe what Wordle is?

• 30:33Alex Cranz?

  I've never played it, so let me try.

• 30:35Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 30:35Alex Cranz?

  I'm very excited. I've, okay, so you get like slots, right? There's a word and you have to guess it.

• 30:45Nilay Patel?

  When we used to have Paul Miller try to describe a picture to us. It's like a segment. All right, go ahead. There's slots.

• 30:50Alex Cranz?

  Okay, okay. So, so as I understand it, everybody gets the same puzzle every day and it's a bunch of empty squares and they have to put the right letters in, in the, to get to spell the word. And it's the same word for everybody, right?

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, you've got it so far.

• 31:05Alex Cranz?

  I've got it so far. And you have like a certain number of guesses on each letter?

• 31:10Nilay Patel?

  No, you have six guesses at words total.

• 31:13Alex Cranz?

  A total? That's terrible.

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  It says one word a day, you get six guesses at what word it is.

• 31:18Alex Cranz?

  Okay, and you, but then the green, I thought the green, the green and the squares was like how many times you guess on each slot?

• 31:25Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  So I would give you, I would give you a yellow square for this part of the answer?

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's correct. It's all in the wrong direction. So the, you guess a word.

• 31:34Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  And the, the letters turn green if you have the right letter in the right position.

• 31:39Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 31:39Nilay Patel?

  Yellow if you have the right letter or the wrong position. And gray if it's the wrong letter entirely.

• 31:44Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 31:45Nilay Patel?

  So those grids that you're seeing all over Twitter are like. The little, actually James Vincent wrote about this today. They tell a little story of frustration.

• 31:52Alex Cranz?

  Yes, it's like a box score.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  How you're guessing and like when you got it right or wrong.

• 31:56Alex Cranz?

  So you want like, just a single row of green is perfection.

• 32:00Nilay Patel?

  Yep, that's all the right letters and all the right spots.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  And then the game is over. So that's always at the bottom.

• 32:04Nilay Patel?

  And then you've won and then everyone shares it. So this guy is a developer. He's in New York. He's from Wales. He made the game as like a love letter to his wife and just like put it on his website. The game goes viral. So it's all over Twitter, but it's just like a free game every can play on a website. It's like, I was talking to our deputy features editor, Sarah Jong. It's like a perfect little encapsulation of how we want the internet to be or how we thought it was. Like a guy made a game on his website.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  I enjoy the game and I don't have insight into their relationship. But I will say it potentially sounds like a bad gift.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  I made you this word game on the internet. Like, alright dude. Like take her out to dinner, come on.

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  You're in the panty, baby. We gotta, we gotta, we gotta change it up.

• 32:51Alex Cranz?

  Like, like this is the equivalent of when somebody shows you a YouTube video and says, hey, I want you to watch it. And then they loom over you while you watch it and you have to like respond to it. Like she, this poor woman had to do the exact same thing. But it sounds like, it sounds like it was more successful.

• 33:05Nilay Patel?

  I tried to get Becky to play Wordle and she took one shot at it and she was like, no. And just like set it aside. However, if you are a certain kind of like SAT nerd, this thing speaks to you. And it has, it has gone viral. As with many things, we, we live in a bubble. It has particularly on viral within the media industry, but like whatever. The New York Times has written about it. It's everywhere. But it's just this like little freeware game. On a domain, powerlanguage.co.uk. Like it's not a commercial product at all. And it's gone everywhere. So then immediately, the ruthless economics of the app store came into play.

• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  All these clones have appeared. A bunch of clones went into the iOS App Store. That's one that we've spent most of our time, but I'm sure there's ones in the Play Store. Including one just called Wordle that looks exactly like Wordle.

• 33:56Alex Cranz?

  My favorite one.

• 33:57Nilay Patel?

  And the guy is like tweeting. Like, look at how many people are downloading my game. And like, he's like, to the moon, because he's added like IAP and like a subscription program and like Wordle Premium. And it's like, what are you talking about? Like, this thing was pure. So everyone's getting mad at him. Like, all of the lions of like Mac software are like, screw this guy. And then you've got the whole narrative around Apple and its App Store that's like, from the Epic Trial, from everything, where Apple's like, we have to be in total control of the store to protect people from scams. And it's like, well, there's, here's this huge scam.

• 34:35Alex Cranz?

  Were you guys not like, did you not like, go and match his URL on his website with the Web, the Wordle website? Like, it feels like it was very low, very easy due diligence to do here.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  So I think this is like part of the, this is where I think it gets really tangled.

• 34:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  You know, like, the guy's immediate defense was, well, this wasn't trademarked. Which like, definitely makes like, as a IP person, like, that makes you sound like such a goon. Like, if your immediate response is like, I was not legally prevented from doing this thing that is, everyone is outraged by, is like, you might have missed it.

• 35:09Alex Cranz?

  He's just one of those guys that spends all of his time on the Reddit, am I the asshole? Like, he was just like, fun, like legally, I'm not the asshole.

• 35:18Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I've done. I've started using your name and I've logged into your bank account, but nothing, there's no trademark on your name, good sir.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  Well, and one of his defenses was, well, look, I offered to give the guy a share of the profits and he never got back to me.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  So there's like a lot of these clones. There's like the one that like, particularly because the guy's tweeting was so higher. This gets pressed, we write about it, everyone writes, everyone's mad. Apple takes all the clones down.

• 35:45Alex Cranz?

  Including Wordle?

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  So now we know that Apple, at like a policy level, agrees that it made a mistake, right? Like, the outcome is they took all the games down. So now it's not like, oh, you snuck through a loophole in the store. It's a, they just missed it. And I, there's like a lot of angles here, right? Can you copyright or trademark or otherwise provide intellectual property, protection to a game mechanic?

• 36:08Nilay Patel?

  And it turns out there was like a game show in the seventies. It's basically Wordle. It's called Lingo, I think.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  Chuck Woolery was the host.

• 36:15Nilay Patel?

  Chuck Woolery.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  So we got that Woolery tie in.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, it's actually in the App Store rules. If you recreate a game that Chuck Woolery hosted, anyone can copy it.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  So people are talking about this with like 2048, which is kind of a rip off of threes, but for like it, you have to expend less mental energy. Um, I have two 2048 apps on my iPhone right now.

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  How?

• 36:38Speaker 03

  And I have no idea which one is the real one. They're indistinguishable.

• 36:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, so here's, here's how I knew the difference between threes and 2048. Threes was like a beautifully crafted game and it was its own. Yeah. Sensation. This was years ago and we wrote about 2048 and threes many times over the years. But threes was like well engineered. The first time I downloaded 2048, my phone got hot and my battery died. And I was like, well, this is what you get.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  The end. I think here, right? There's all of the, there's all of discourse around what legal protections games have, game mechanics have, names have, whatever. That's all like outside the realm of the fact that Apple insists on total control of its store. And one of its rules is don't copy other apps. Like you can go look it up. It's one of the rules. Right. It literally is like be original. That's, there's no law in America. It's like, you must be original. Like, that's not.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Not yet. That's the Kanye platform.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  Vote Patel. Patel, Patel yay. 2024, be original. Um, but I, I just don't think like the, those legal arguments make any sense in the context of Apple's insistence on total control. And then the fact that Apple, it's so easy to, this was almost the expected result. That someone would scam this guy's idea or his virality and turn it into an App Store success.

• 38:05Alex Cranz?

  I keep thinking of Flappy Bird. When the guy took down Flappy Bird and immediately there were like 12 Flappy Bird clones, most of them looking the exact same. It is just, I'm always kind of baffled by the idea that Apple maintains, insists it has total control.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I could kind of, I can distinguish the Flappy Bird case.

• 38:21Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 38:22Nilay Patel?

  This is good. This is some real law school.

• 38:24Alex Cranz?

  I'm ready.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  Mr. Patel, can you distinguish the Flappy Bird versus App Store case? The Flappy Bird guy was like, my game is poison. I'm ruining the lives of people around the world. I will not be, I will not be complicit.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  And that was true.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  And that's how he felt. And so he was out. And so other people just like rushed to fulfill the demand. Like, what is Apple gonna do in that case? Be like, we shouldn't have built it.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Who is this guy to deny us the experience of Flappy Bird? Who made him god?

• 38:56Alex Cranz?

  Just Oppenheimer making the bomb.

• 38:57Nilay Patel?

  So that's a little different. Like here, I think the biggest open question, and it's like fascinating, is like, the Wordle guy hasn't said anything about how he went wish to capitalize on the viral success of his game.

• 39:08Alex Cranz?

  Maybe he just has his phone off this week. Maybe he is, he and his wife have like, gone out for a week, having a nice time, and he's gonna get back.

• 39:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's gotta be costing him money to like run the server, right?

• 39:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but if he's like, got his computer off, he's gonna come back and be like, what is my server bill?

• 39:25Speaker 03

  I like to think that, that this is his, his wife is like furious at him because of this, because it was a bad gift. And she's like, look, just don't, just let's not ever mention the game ever again. And he's like, okay, I'm sorry, I'll make it up to you. And then all this happened. And he's just trying to keep a low profile, happy home. And so that's probably why we haven't heard from him.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. He's like, I can't, I can't get into this Wordle thing again. I don't even wanna know.

• 39:53Alex Cranz?

  Honey, my, my bad gift went viral.

• 39:55Nilay Patel?

  I think, I would suspect he, that the end result of this is that thing becomes a real product and like, is monetized in some way. And I think that actually cuts against. Again, I think one of the reasons people like this, one of the reasons I like it is it's a freeware game on a website. It's not an app, there's no mechanics, there's no, it's not begging you to buy extra moves.

• 40:17Alex Cranz?

  Is there a little like banner at the bottom that you always accidentally click on?

• 40:22Nilay Patel?

  Nothing.

• 40:22Alex Cranz?

  Nothing.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Someday, the real move is to monetize the word so that we'll all log into Wordle and the word will be like Honda.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  That's actually, that's actually pretty brilliant. Um, okay, so that's the Wordle discourse, it is ongoing. I will tell you if, if you're in your head, what you're thinking is, but can you monetize it, or can you protect a game mechanic? The answer is, no one knows the answer to that question. Right, like, that's a challenging legal argument to make.

• 40:52Alex Cranz?

  Cause he didn't copyright it.

• 40:54Nilay Patel?

  No, cause it's not like written down. Like, it's very challenging. Like, there's not a, none of our existing IP regimes, like, fit it perfectly.

• 41:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  Like a game mechanic. So, you have, you have to like, invent one, or like, shoehorn it into another one. It's, it's, yeah, it's, we, we can't do it here, I'll just die.

• 41:16Alex Cranz?

  We're not doing it, we're not doing it.

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  Other weird discourse of the week, the Wall Street Journal thundered onto the scene years late and was like, teens don't like green bubbles.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  Which if you've been paying attention to this show or The Verge, we, we know that green bubbles cause social dynamics in groups of people, particularly young people. Uh, we did a whole episode of Why'd You Push That Button with Ashley and Caitlin years ago, uh, and like, the lead was like a guy on Tinder who's like, I keep getting rejected when we move to text because my bubbles are green, which is ice cold. It's amazing. So, we, we've known for a long time that green bubbles, blue bubbles, cause social dynamics, especially with younger people. The Wall Street Journal's headline was like, teens are bullying each other because of blue bubbles.

• 42:01Alex Cranz?

  Good.

• 42:02Nilay Patel?

  And once you bring teen bullying in, like, all bets are off. So then, Google Hiroshi Lachimer is like, Apple should stop enabling bullying, which is... I mean, take, you know, take the shot.

• 42:12Alex Cranz?

  I just realized where you're going and I'm so excited to get there.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just like, I get it. Eventually, some politician is going to be like, iMessage enables bullying. What we should do is make encryption illegal. Like, you can just see how, once you add bullying to the mix, like, no one can make any arguments. And what you have, like, the FBI will, like, live in your bathroom.

• 42:36Alex Cranz?

  Like, the argument, poor Dieter has been screaming for RCS for years. And all he had to do was be like, actually, teens bully each other without RCS.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  That's the only bad argument you ever had to make.

• 42:50Alex Cranz?

  Only one.

• 42:50Nilay Patel?

  So Hiroshi, who I don't think is trying to make this argument entirely, he is saying we shouldn't bully people. The clarifies what he meant is we shouldn't hold people back. What he really wants is RCS.

• 43:02Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we're just here at this point of the discourse now, right? Like, we've gone all the way to teen bullying is a problem because RCS doesn't exist. At some point, and I, now I really do miss Dieter, I'm just curious why the carriers, which can force Apple to run lies about the status of their 5G network on display on your screen at all times. AT&T is like, yeah, just call it 5GE. That's the rule. You want, like, you want on this network, it's 5G, put the logo on there, Apple. And Apple will do it. Why none of the carriers have been like, yeah, it's time to support RCS. Like, just turn it on.

• 43:41Alex Cranz?

  I think it's one of those things, like, there's this kind of knowledge. When you're interviewing certain celebrities, some of them have questions you're not allowed to ask. Like, for years, you were not allowed to ask Jodie Foster if she was gay, because we all knew it. But you weren't allowed to ask it. And I think it's like the same thing.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  This first cast has taken a deep turn.

• 43:59Alex Cranz?

  But I think it's the same thing of, like, they're not allowed to ask Apple about RCS. It's just like, you walk into the room, and there, and like, there's a handler, and they're like, so, um, RCS, don't, don't even use those three letters together. Like, real, what was it? Like, that's, that's what I'm thinking there.

• 44:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, don't ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

• 44:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. There's just, like, certain things you're not allowed to ask them.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  I will say, I am not sure that RCS is going to solve the teen bullying problem.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  And more broadly, like, I even think people will still make fun of Android users in unfair and hurtful ways. I once witnessed, I live actually next to a high school, and I witnessed a group of teens making fun of one of the teens because she listened to SoundCloud.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  That this was like, oh, like Spotify is like actual music, but SoundCloud. And she was like, guys, it's for the mixes. But that didn't do anything.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  But I'm just saying, these platforms, like the cleavage points between the platforms, it's always gonna be a cause of social division.

• 45:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you can give the teens a reason to bully each other, they're gonna do it. I just think that messaging interoperability is like one of those things where all you need is a handful of teens to be like, I had green bubbles and I was excluded from school activities. And then, I swear to God.

• 45:24Alex Cranz?

  I'm excited for this congressional hearing.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm not saying Apple needs to build iMessage for Android, right? We have the documents where Federighi and Schiller are like, no. Like, no, that will, like, the lock-in is important to us. Like, we have the emails.

• 45:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying that in the current encryption debate, you just like, you give them the teen bullying, and then, like, any politician is like, what we need to do is turn off encryption so parents can read all of your text messages. It's like, what just happened?

• 45:57Speaker 03

  I mean, the thing is, they're rebooting Degrassi. Like, this could be a plot line that could bring all of this to a head.

• 46:04Nilay Patel?

  That's what you need.

• 46:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, little proto Drake being like, I got yelled at because I got green bubbles.

• 46:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, all the shows in my youth did like a very special episode about drug usage. Blue Bubbles.

• 46:14Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  Just like sweeps the teen show landscape. All right, we'll see. Next week, we'll have Dieter back on. I'm sure that RCS, I'm curious what his thoughts on RCS and teen bullying are. We'll hold it for next week when he's back. We gotta take a break. Russell, thank you so much for joining us.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  My pleasure.

• 46:30Nilay Patel?

  Dan Sevort will be on right after this. We'll be right back.

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• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Dan Seifert is here. Hey, Dan. Hey. We got like a real grab bag of post CES gadget news. Got some car stuff to talk about, but I want to start with my favorite gadget story of the year so far. And I recognize it's only the beginning of the year, but I think this one's going to stay in the lead for a long time. So as you know, there's a chip shortage. One or two. The chip shortage has expressed itself in many ways, maybe most notably like the the blood sport of acquiring a PS5. However, Canon can no longer find the appropriate chips to enable the DRM for its printer cartridges, like its ink cartridges. So now they're shipping the cartridges without the DRM chips and just instructing their own

• 48:43Nilay Patel?

  customers on how to defeat DRM and Canon printers. And it turns out all you have to do is click OK.

• 48:52Nilay Patel?

  It's just very good. But the printers are, when you put the cartridge in, the printer's like, no, that's a fake toner. But because they don't have the DR. It's great. I hope they never find supply for these chips.

• 49:01Alex Cranz?

  Like destroy that supply. Everybody who's doing that pivot to something else pivot to PS5 chips. You're fine.

• 49:07Nilay Patel?

  So it's a button isn't okay. It's close.

• 49:09Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 49:10Speaker 06

  You just close the pop up window that comes up.

• 49:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, it turns out you don't actually have to worry about this warning at all. We've been lying to you to sell the cartridges in a markup the whole time. I hope they never ever solve this problem. The other thing I'll note, as you know, the chip shortage led to a dramatic reduction in supply of Apple's $19 polishing cloth.

• 49:30Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  Shout out to Alex Heath. The polish, the cloth is back in stock. I believe Heath is purchasing one. We're gonna make him do like a two hour video review of the cloth, the most important product Apple's ever sold.

• 49:45Alex Cranz?

  I'm just upset he didn't report this out.

• 49:48Nilay Patel?

  We should have made him write this first. Mr. Fancy Facebook reporter. No, you're writing about cloth, man. Okay, let's start with gadgets. We just came out of CES. We're starting to write some of our CS trend stories. Dan, it seems like the the story of PCs is just on a radically different trajectory now than we thought it would be a couple of years ago.

• 50:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, laptops are so hot. I mean, which is like an obvious thing that like any of us that have just like come out of the past two years and are still in it. But, you know, the it's real. You know, sometimes you wonder if I remember, I don't know, a year ago or whatever, and like, you wonder if those stories that like, there's so much demand for laptops, people are buying up Chromebooks and buying up laptops and buying up PCs and stuff like that. You wonder how much of that is real. And now we like, after two years of, you know, successive massive growth in the PC industry, it seems like it absolutely is real. And it doesn't look like it's going to slow down, which is kind of interesting. Depending on who you talk to, they they wonder if like, you know, was

• 50:48Speaker 06

  it peak laptop in 2021? Or are we still going to be seeing lots of like, huge growth in this industry over the next year as people maybe? Maybe one, some theories have been floated that like, maybe in 2020, you bought the laptop you could find because you needed something immediately, but you don't love it. Like you had to get the Chromebook because it's not great. And now it's like, okay, well, you're two years later, you've lived with it. Now it's like, maybe you're ready to actually get the laptop you want. That MacBook Pro that you wanted is now available. And so like, you're out buying it, um, which is seems to be a thing. So, uh, yeah, it's, it's kind of wild to think about that. Like we were spent, what, five to 10 years asking, what's a computer?

• 51:32Speaker 06

  And it turns out a computer is just a laptop.

• 51:36Speaker 06

  Sorry, Dieter, you're on vacation. You cannot rebuttal that.

• 51:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, Dieter's gonna listen to this and like, drive to your house. No, Monica has a great piece coming out of CES that like, you know, the design cycles for hardware, 18 months ish. We, we had Bracken Darrell, CEO of Logitech on, and he was like, yep, about 18 months. Now the products that we designed for work from home are coming out. I think that's true across the industry. So Monica has a great piece. And she's like, all these laptops at CES are meant for work from home or for creator stuff or for a permanent home office, which is the thing people are talking about. And the, at the beginning of the pandemic, all, they were just selling enterprise laptops or whatever they had on hand, because there's no supply. Now they're not just selling what they can make, they're selling stuff designed for it. And it means kind of our traditional laptop categories are all out the window.

• 52:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely right. The, one of the points, uh, from Monica's piece is that people want more powerful computers for a variety of tasks, even if they're like, not necessarily gaming. Like it used to be that like, if you were buying the most powerful computers, because it was specifically for gaming, it had a crappy keyboard, terrible trackpad. Uh, maybe it didn't have a webcam. Like for a couple of years, our favorite gaming laptop just didn't have a webcam. Guess what? CES 2022, that very laptop now has a webcam. And you know, like, it's, and, and, and people are demanding more powerful devices because they are sitting at a desk and they're plugging it into a big monitor and they are doing multitasking a lot more than maybe they used to be because they are relying on it for eight to 10 hours a day to do their jobs.

• 53:06Speaker 06

  And, uh, we're, we're seeing that paired with a great keyboard and a great, um, trackpad. And, you know, hopefully fingers crossed better webcams. We'll see when we get them. They're probably still terrible. Webcams will forever be terrible, but like, at least they're there now, uh, which is an interesting divide. So like now, now you've got computers that are. Maybe just as powerful as a gaming laptop would have been a year and a half ago, but it's designed for doing work or maybe doing both because you work on it and then you also play games later on it. So.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  Can I say Monica's piece has this great quote from Alex Cho, the president of Personal Systems at HP. Gamers game because they want to connect. It's like gamers game, baby. Like bring it on.

• 53:49Speaker 06

  Gamers be gaming.

• 53:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's good. I think it's I think it's utterly fascinating to see that the emphasis on portability in laptops is like slightly waning. That MacBook Cray, I bought one. It's definitely heavier than my old one, but it lives on a desk almost all day long. It doesn't matter and it like can do what I want it to do.

• 54:07Speaker 06

  I'm staring at one that's like sitting in a vertical dock on a shelf behind my desk. Like I don't even I sit this desk eight to 10 hours a day and I don't even touch the thing. Like it might as well be a desktop computer.

• 54:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, why don't you want? Because there's no M1 Pro Mac Mini.

• 54:20Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what you're writing for. That's great. You're missing out. That's a beautiful display on that little computer. I thought about it and I was like, why would I buy a display that's worse than the display on the computer?

• 54:33Speaker 06

  That struggle is real.

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  So the flip side of that is we of all this is there's lots of demand. There's going to be supply. TSMC set aside $44 billion for chip expansion in 2022. We just had Cristiano Aman, the CEO of Qualcomm. He said he thinks ship shortage stuff for them anyway will be over by the summer because they've already pre allocated supply. So it just seems like the tech industry has kind of figured itself out. And now we've got a bunch of products that were designed for the new normal, which is pretty fascinating. Did you see that elsewhere at CES?

• 55:07Speaker 06

  Uh, you know, this was a weird CES. We what we saw was uh, this CES was very falling back on like what the traditional CES type of thing was in that it was like a lot of laptops announced and a lot of TVs announced. And then we saw a lot of things that were like, maybe we were expecting to be announced and kind of like got pushed out. And so maybe they didn't announce it as CES because their product wasn't ready or, you know, they didn't attend CES because, you know, very valid reasons, just like. We didn't intend in person. So it was kind of an interesting CES in that respect. TVs were huge, were very popular. Some of the most popular articles over the CES week were about the new TVs,

• 55:48Speaker 06

  about the fact that LG finally is coming out with a 42 inch OLED and that, you know, the QD OLED and stuff like that are addressing a lot of the complaints that we've had with OLED technology, which has been really great so far, but isn't as bright. So QD OLED makes it brighter. So that's, I don't know if that's like really tied to like the pandemic though. Other than maybe people are just sitting at home watching TV all the time because that is your theater, your home theater. Like, you know, maybe there's like a three line you can pull to that, but I also feel like new TVs are always going to get better and people are going to be interested in newer, better TVs forever.

• 56:21Alex Cranz?

  Did we see anything like about, so we know that laptops are changing and we're even seeing, you know, she talked to Logitech and we're seeing like peripherals and stuff are changing. What about the furniture? The home office furniture is that like, did we see anything at CES like better standing desks because they all look the exact same right now and they all look like they belong in our office in Manhattan?

• 56:46Speaker 06

  I mean, there's some nice ones looking out there. There, you know, you can get wood, wood table ones. I've got a wood one. I mean, I don't know. I didn't, I didn't, I don't know if we saw money at CES. And it's, it's like one of those things. That feels like one of those things where like, that is the experience that we missed by not being on the show floor and not being in those weird halls is that there might be some companies with some weird new standing desk design that like fits in your home, but like they're off the radar. And the only way you're really going to know about them is if you walk by it'd be like, what is that weird thing? And unfortunately we didn't have that experience this year. It was very much, you know, remote. So that possibly, but we didn't see anything standing out. Obviously the, the gaming companies, I think, I think Razor recently announced a desk.

• 57:31Speaker 06

  I'm not sure if it was CES or before.

• 57:32Alex Cranz?

  They did announce one with a computer built in.

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, like, that's like, that's razor.

• 57:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, it's razor. No, I just, I'm really curious to see, like, I love that we're kind of, there's was this immediate transition in the laptop space. And I keep thinking about, like, you know, in the 90s, everybody either had a computer in their kitchen, or they had it in that weird hutch.

• 57:53Nilay Patel?

  Bring back computer rooms. Computer dead, bring it back.

• 57:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the weird little hutch in the, in the room.

• 57:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:58Alex Cranz?

  And like, where are the hutches? Where, like, I don't want to have to look at, I mean, I have to look at, I don't, I can't, don't have a place for my office. I have to look, and I miss a hutch.

• 58:07Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you, one of the longest running feature pitches I've had at the Verge, literally no one has ever taken me up on. And if you're listening to this and you're a writer and you want to do this story, just like, let me know. Okay, there is a flat pack furniture association in this world, right? Where all the flat pack furniture makers get together, they have conventions. It's real, it's a real thing.

• 58:27Alex Cranz?

  Does IKEA all show up in like, full black, like?

• 58:30Nilay Patel?

  I want to know.

• 58:31Alex Cranz?

  Where the big dudes on campus?

• 58:33Nilay Patel?

  Like, I want, I've been like, we should do a story about like, whether like, the people at Souda Woodworking are like, sit around me and like, those fucking IKEA guys again. Like, like, is, how competitive is this industry? Give me the personalities. Is there like, a number one flat pack furniture designer guy dresses all, like, the Johnny Ive, the flat pack furniture, and he's just like a dick to everyone, but he's got the best idea. Like, get me in there. And I've pitched this story so many times, and everyone's like, what is wrong with you?

• 58:59Alex Cranz?

  I want to know the answer.

• 59:00Nilay Patel?

  It's like a billion dollar growing industry. Let me in there, man. Like, you know, like, some stuff is easier to put together than other stuff. If you've ever moved house, you like, had this experience. You're like, oh, this, like, these instructions make sense, like, got through it. And then other stuff is like, so it's 900 screws. That's what you got here, right? Do those people feel bad? That they're like, I'm just horrible at designing flat pack furniture? If you, if you, if you're a writer and you're listening to this, and you want to do the like, 15,000 word dive into the drama and agony of flat pack furniture, like, let me know. Because I've been, I've been looking.

• 59:39Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I want to read that. I want to read that. I don't want to write that story or report that story, but I want to read that story.

• 59:45Nilay Patel?

  I just like, I just love thinking of the idea of like, a rock star flat pack furniture designer, just like, walking through the convention and everyone's like, oh my god. He's like, yeah, he's obviously right. He's like, obviously Swedish.

• 59:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. He's got like a little entourage.

• 59:58Speaker 06

  He doesn't have to wear the name badge. They just let this person in.

• 1:00:02Nilay Patel?

  I don't know why it's a him. It's a her. Who knows who it is. But she shows up and like, everyone's like hushed tones. And like, one person tries to talk to her and like, an assistant's like, no, no, no.

• 1:00:11Alex Cranz?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:00:14Alex Cranz?

  Do you know how few screws and dowels she put in her last piece? You don't talk to her.

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  I'm talking about it. It's there. It's gotta be there.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  No, I'll do the story. Okay. There's a bunch of like, wacky Android news and none of it's good, but we're gonna like, talk through it. Well, I'll say this. Android 12 is out. The rollout is super rocky.

• 1:00:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's been a rough few months.

• 1:00:40Nilay Patel?

  What's going on?

• 1:00:41Speaker 06

  Uh, so Alison Johnson did this great report, actually just sent up today. One of the things that we observed over the last few months was that Android 12 updates had been really rough. Samsung released it and then pulled it. OnePlus released it and then pulled it. Google itself released it and put it on the Pixel 6s and those release. And then they're really buggy and they released an update in December that had to get pulled. And it's just been like a mess all around. And there's this weird tension between Android enthusiasts who really want updates really quickly, like as soon as that update is announced, they want it on their phone. And the manufacturers who actually delivered their updates earlier this year than typical,

• 1:01:26Speaker 06

  except they were a hot buggy mess. And so it's like, which, which one do you want? Do you want, uh, you know, this, uh, this, uh, update to be, you know, six weeks later than you desire? Or do you want it to work? And so like, you know, it was this weird tension. And so Alison did a lot of research. She compared the timelines to prior years. It turns out like Android 12 was actually released by Google a month later than prior history. But Samsung released its version of Android 12 earlier than it had in the past. And, and so there was a weird timing dynamic, but the, the gist of it was, and she spoke- To Michel, who listeners might remember from XDA developers, he used to be the editor in chief there,

• 1:02:08Speaker 06

  a real kind of like an Android expert. And the point that he kind of made was that this is one of the biggest updates in Android's history. I think the biggest update since Android five or six, he said. And there's a lot of things going on. We see a lot of visual changes, but there's also a lot of under the hood changes. And the potential for problems is just exacerbated when it's such a big update. And then you combine that with the timeline changes and things like that. And in certain circumstances, like with OnePlus, they were trying to merge a code base of their Color OS and their Oxygen OS together and with Android 12 on top. And it just like kind of collided and they had to pull their update before. I'm not sure if they've re-released it at this point. But it's just been like a really rough few months. And so that

• 1:02:50Speaker 06

  Allison's report does a really great job of like kind of explaining why it's been that case and laying out the timelines of like what the last few months have been. And for the Pixel 6, Google said they were going to release this fixed update in late January. We're still waiting for it. And this update that was supposed to come out in December added features for Google's new wireless charger that goes with the Pixel 6. So like unless you got that update in December before it got pulled, which very few people got it, you can't like utilize the charger fully and stuff like that. And there's other weird bugs and and hiccups that need to be addressed. So it's just been, you know, not a great update season. It's very exciting to get a new Android update, especially one with Android 12 that like brings as much change to the table because

• 1:03:35Speaker 06

  OS updates for smartphones can be kind of stale at this point. Like there isn't a whole lot of difference year over year. Android 12 is different. Like it is visually a very different thing right away, but it's bringing bringing some pain too.

• 1:03:48Alex Cranz?

  My sense reading Allison's piece, which is excellent, everybody should go read it, is it was almost like Google kind of said, fine, you you want fast updates like Samsung was like, fine, you want this? I'm gonna give it. I'm gonna give it to you. Here we go. We're gonna go fast. See? That sucked, didn't it?

• 1:04:05Nilay Patel?

  They're just like tempering expectations.

• 1:04:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, like Samsung specifically in prior years has had a pretty long beta cycle of a couple of months, maybe three months or whatever before releasing the final one. And this time it was like four weeks of beta and boom, we're delivering it. And oh, whoops, we broke a bunch of folding phones in Korea.

• 1:04:22Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's why we do those six months of beta. That's actually good.

• 1:04:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I said there was more Android news. So Android 12 rushed out maybe too fast. 2021 came and went. Microsoft did not deliver Android 11 to the Surface Duo at all. We have no idea what's going on there.

• 1:04:40Speaker 06

  I think we know that the Surface Duo is just not a high priority for Microsoft is what the answer there is.

• 1:04:45Nilay Patel?

  They said they were gonna do it. It's an expensive phone. At the same time, Nvidia put Android 11 on the Nvidia Shield, including the one they shipped in 2015.

• 1:04:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. Now that you love to see.

• 1:04:57Alex Cranz?

  This is my favorite thing about the Nvidia Shield. Almost all of them use the exact same guts, the same processor. Like, they haven't really upgraded the processor since that 2015 one. All they've done is shrunk it. So it was like, they apparently made a processor so, I mean, it was too powerful for, for the TVs at the time. Like, it was totally unnecessary power. And it's just like, oh, wow. When you think about power in your smart home product, especially your smart TV product, and you give it power, it has a much longer life. Something for all TV manufacturers the world over to take note.

• 1:05:31Nilay Patel?

  Our Samsung TV runs on a hamster and a wheel. He can, he can complete one task per minute. No software updates will ever be provided unless it's to deliver advertising to you. Smart TVs.

• 1:05:44Alex Cranz?

  But this is like, a big update for the Shield. I'm, it's weird because the Shield is, is very popular in like, super nerdy home theater circles. So this is like, kind of a big deal.

• 1:05:54Nilay Patel?

  Sometimes I forget you're, you're newer to the show.

• 1:05:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the, the Shield owners listen to the show.

• 1:06:00Alex Cranz?

  I love you guys.

• 1:06:01Nilay Patel?

  They're aware of us.

• 1:06:02Alex Cranz?

  You're my favorite. Nobody ever wants to talk with me about Shield and slacks.

• 1:06:06Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. See, we, I knew this was perfect. You should have just said this in your interview. Like, I'll talk about the Shield.

• 1:06:11Alex Cranz?

  I'll talk about the Shield. You guys hit me up. We'll talk about how excited we all are. I, like, I, honestly, one of the highlights of, I've, I've been out of town for the last few weeks, and one of the highlights of returning home is I'm gonna be able to put Android 11 on my Nvidia Shield.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's good.

• 1:06:28Alex Cranz?

  It's great.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  Is Shield your go-to? Is that your main box?

• 1:06:31Alex Cranz?

  I switch between it and the Apple TV. Just kind of to feel alive. Just to experience.

• 1:06:38Nilay Patel?

  I will say that I've almost entirely given up on our Chromecast with Google TV.

• 1:06:42Alex Cranz?

  It's rough.

• 1:06:43Speaker 06

  I gave up on mine. I replaced, I had three of them. I've replaced all of them with Apple TVs because I'm done with it.

• 1:06:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will say that the Apple TV, the user interface is not as good as the Chromecast. There's a reason I was like very into the Chromecast. It was great.

• 1:06:58Alex Cranz?

  Well, and it's got live TV built in, like.

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that was good. Want one click to get to Peppa Pig. I mean, that's a game changer for a parent, man. But it not working is not a game changer for your three year olds.

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  Peppa's all in purple and she's making terror, like monster sounds bad. So we went back to the Apple TV. But maybe I'll break out the Shield.

• 1:07:23Alex Cranz?

  Get that, bust that Shield out.

• 1:07:25Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:07:25Alex Cranz?

  Do some GeForce Now, it'll be great.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  Big news on the, on the Shield front. It's going to support 4K HDR streaming for GeForce Now, which is pretty cool. But then on the other, on the flip side, right, it's Fortnite's back on the iPhone through GeForce Now, which is amazing on the web. So the, the slow advance of cloud gaming continues. All right. One last Android thing and then we should talk about cars. The Sony Xperia 5.3, nine months after it was announced, it's now shipping in the United States.

• 1:07:53Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:07:54Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it's like the ultimate vaporware success story.

• 1:07:56Speaker 06

  You, you can buy last year's phone today.

• 1:07:58Alex Cranz?

  Yay.

• 1:07:59Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of vaporware in cars, Tesla removed all mentions 2022 from the Cybertruck website. We, we went on about this last week, like the number of EV announcements that have no dates next to them is out of control. I will say that someone tweeted me that apparently that when Elon won Person of the Year, Martha Stewart asked him about Cybertruck ship dates at the event.

• 1:08:27Alex Cranz?

  Look, she's got to clear the brush on her property. She needs.

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  And so at that event on December 13th, 2021, he said to Martha Stewart, the Cybertruck will be in production roughly a year from now, which implies 2020, 23. They just had an update of the website and I don't think anyone was paying attention to this interaction between Martha Stewart and Elon at a Time Magazine cover party. So like, sure, maybe the decision was made earlier, but in any case, it shifted back.

• 1:08:53Alex Cranz?

  How limited is Martha going to be if they don't deliver in 2023?

• 1:08:57Speaker 06

  She should have broken that news on her blog.

• 1:08:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know. Right? Martha.

• 1:09:01Speaker 06

  Put it on the site.

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  I love that she asked about it.

• 1:09:04Alex Cranz?

  Tweet it.

• 1:09:06Nilay Patel?

  Martha is very online. We, Caitlin and Tiffany wrote a feature about Martha Stewart for us ages ago. And it turned out Martha is like very online. Anyway, vaporware car. The other kind of like piece of this puzzle, which I think is interesting. And I, this is one of those like impossible questions. Ford is allowing dealers to tell people who buy the F-150 Lightning that they cannot resell it for a year because they do not want people to buy it and immediately scalpel it, which is something like, sure, we've seen all over the place with PS5s and Xboxes. To do it with a pickup truck is like amazing. It's just like fascinating. I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think scalpers are great. So this is not a Ford policy.

• 1:09:47Nilay Patel?

  This is like your dealer could do it and Ford will be like, cool. You don't have to agree. It's just one of those like.

• 1:09:55Alex Cranz?

  I kinda hate it.

• 1:09:56Nilay Patel?

  Ford's like putting it out in the ether, like maybe this is a good idea.

• 1:09:59Speaker 06

  Well, we've seen it before with exotics. They did this with the Ford GT, the 2017 edition, I believe, the one that they redesigned that makes it look modern as opposed to retro. You could, if you bought it, you couldn't sell it for two years. You were like, signed an agreement saying you would not sell it for two years. And Ferrari does things like you can't buy the new Ferrari unless you own an existing Ferrari. So it's, it's, it's kind of interesting to see those strategies make their way to the most mainstream vehicle ever made. Which, you know, maybe there would be scalps, but the funny part is like, I don't expect like scalpers to be the ones putting markups. I expect dealers to stick markups on these things. Like, like when you have a dealer market, excuse me. They can charge whatever they want to sell the vehicle. And if

• 1:10:43Speaker 06

  there's a lot of demand for a vehicle, they will add markup to it to make a higher profit. So like, that's where the, the scalping is gonna happen.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, so right. So I think the idea is Ford doesn't want its dealers to do that, but it wants to protect dealers from scalpers who will then like, nothing makes a car dealer matter than being forced to sell it MSRP and then having the car flipped. Which is like a thing I've heard about with like Mach-E's and stuff. Like, that's a real thing. The Bronco, like Ford, in particular, Ford is in like the lucky position of having like a number of hot cars right now.

• 1:11:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  And so like the Bronco, you can still get a first edition Bronco, which is not making ages ago. Just because there's like some guy who bought one the first day and it's now like $300,000. And you're just waiting to see if it happens, right? Like.

• 1:11:28Speaker 06

  Or, or the people selling RAV4 hybrids for a hundred grand.

• 1:11:33Alex Cranz?

  I respect those guys.

• 1:11:35Nilay Patel?

  But those are dealers like that's a dealer being like, maybe we can pull this off.

• 1:11:42Nilay Patel?

  I think like that dealer model, I was treating this like a couple of days ago, people were like, well, this is why Tesla has a direct sales model. But the difference is right now, it's like impossible to buy virtually every Tesla and Tesla could just like unilaterally raise the prices like whatever.

• 1:11:57Nilay Patel?

  So I don't, I like I said, I think it's one of the hardest problems to think about like. My instinct is like, you bought it, you do whatever you want with it. I drove off the slot. I could sell it. Five feet down the street if I want to, it's my car. But at the same time, I think it's really like in PS five world, we think it's really unfair to all those kids who just want a PS five. The best way to buy one is to spend $700 on eBay.

• 1:12:20Speaker 06

  It is really unfair to all those kids that will want an electric F one 50.

• 1:12:25Alex Cranz?

  Those poor babies.

• 1:12:25Speaker 06

  It's really unfair to all those kids like me, a mid to late 30s guy. Who wants an electric one F one 50 and doesn't want to spend $200,000 on it.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, as long as basically the market for electric cars is like a bunch of vapor, I think these, these things are just going to keep happening. Right? Like there's just not enough supply. You can't just like spin up a car factory and make more cars. Like that's a years out process. So as long as we're in this weird moment. Where there's no actual EV transition happening, we just keep pretending there is one with like renders of electric cars. Like this problem is going to keep happening and actually acquiring the cars is going to be almost impossible.

• 1:13:04Alex Cranz?

  I'm happy to destroy the universe or excuse me, I am happy to destroy the environment. To not spend a hundred thousand dollars on a RAV4 hybrid.

• 1:13:14Nilay Patel?

  See like that's the problem.

• 1:13:16Alex Cranz?

  I am the problem.

• 1:13:17Nilay Patel?

  That is a rational, personal, economic decision.

• 1:13:20Alex Cranz?

  Very content to say, oh, 70,000 or what is it $50,000 more? Or I consider you to contribute to the destruction of our planet. Goodbye planet.

• 1:13:31Nilay Patel?

  Is it, is it the $10,000 like Prius superiority premium? Like it's not a hundred thousand dollars. Like. That's the big question.

• 1:13:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. What's the number where I'm like, oh, maybe the, the environment matters slightly more than my wallet?

• 1:13:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The person driving the hundred thousand dollar RAV4 prime is like, they've got like the, the huge sign on the back. That's like, I paid a hundred thousand dollars. For this gas mileage.

• 1:13:55Alex Cranz?

  But they probably got it from like Bitcoin. So this is just them like trying to make it up.

• 1:13:58Speaker 06

  Just imagine the vanity license plate.

• 1:14:03Speaker 06

  100K RAV4. You could do it. It's eight characters. You could do it.

• 1:14:08Nilay Patel?

  All right. We're gonna end the show right there because it's like fully ridiculous. I want to call it a great story from one of our newest reporters, Mia Sato. She wrote about buy nothing groups on Facebook and now they are making an app and a platform of their own with all of the attendant community dynamics and app dynamics that you might expect. It's a great story. Encourage you to read it. Like I said, decoder this week, Cristiano Aman. Next week, actually, speaking of cars, we have VW Global CEO Herbert Dyce runs all VW. That was a wild conversation. He wanted to talk about Tesla, but I don't think he's not supposed to. So he kept on referring it to as our American competitor. It was great. Highly encourage you to listen to that. We'll be back next week with the rich ass. Tito will be back. You can tweet at

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  us. I'm at reckless. Alex is Alex H. Cranz. Dan is DC Seifert. Russell is at Russell Brandom. We love your tweets. Please talk to us. That's it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:15:02Alex Cranz?

  So excited for these Shield fans.

• 1:15:24Speaker 07

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• 1:15:55Speaker 08

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