Big screens, bigger screens, suitcase screens

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Dan Seifert discuss the iMac's 25th anniversary, the state of streaming, a TV in a suitcase, and a whole lot more. Further reading: Linus Tech Tips pauses production as controversy swirls They Review Movies on TikTok, but Don’t Call Them Critics YouTube is adding chat, highlights, and Shorts to NFL Sunday Ticket It’s official, people aren’t watching TV as much as they used to iMac at 25: a visual history of Apple's iconic all-in-one computer How the iMac saved Apple For a generation of students, the iMac was a gateway to the future In a world full of laptops, is there a place for the iMac? Apple moved the end call button again in iOS 17 These iOS 17 Features Won't Be Available at Launch - MacRumors Everything New in iOS 17 Beta 6 - MacRumors DisplayPort: A Better Video Interface | Hackaday LG now sells this bizarre TV in a suitcase, and I must have it Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 family review: easier choices Google Chrome will summarize entire articles for you with built-in generative AI OpenAI wants GPT-4 to solve the content moderation dilemma An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban The Biden administration urges the Supreme Court to take up content moderation cases Special counsel obtained ‘some volume’ of DMs from Donald Trump’s Twitter account Microsoft to hold ‘special event’ in New York City on September 21st Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition, even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  Wait, you're locked out of your air conditioner?

• 1:04Alex Cranz?

  I turned it off. I turned it off.

• 1:16Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to our cast, the flagship podcast of gadgets and suitcases. We're bringing it back. So much of what's happening in our culture now is things that have happened previously in our culture. And gadgets and suitcases is one of that. Some old, like 1960s James Bond stuff. And LG is bringing it back. We're going to talk about that a lot. But I'm your friend, Neelai. David Pierce is here.

• 1:38David Pierce?

  Hi, I really like the fact that we've talked a lot about how like on the internet, it's 2006 again. And with gadgets, it's 1958. Like, I love it. I'm all in.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  We need a whole suitcase for this camera. Alex Trans is here.

• 1:53Alex Cranz?

  I always liked the typewriter in a suitcase.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 1:57Alex Cranz?

  Like, that really had a nice appeal to me.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  Again, more things need their own bespoke cases that you bring around.

• 2:04Alex Cranz?

  100%.

• 2:05David Pierce?

  I mean, isn't this is the exact same energy as the resurgence to the flip phones, right? Like, the experience of I want to use the gadget to I'm using the gadget. Right now, it's just like you just like tap your screen. That's not enough. Make me do more mechanical stuff to use my gadgets. I want to have to like, take a cover off of my television. I want to have to plug some things in. I want to like, do incantations, like, make me work.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  One of those big pole switches.

• 2:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, I want to have to turn a key while someone else on the other side of the room also turns a key. Like, that's, that's how I want to use computers.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  This is going to be our new published process. It's like, multiple key turns, and then a blog post goes out.

• 2:45Alex Cranz?

  It's how you stay fast.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  It's how you stay fast. That's really how you know, like, did I get it right? Like, I'm asking someone else to turn a key. I better have done this correctly. Okay, so, it's been one of those weeks where there's like, lots of little news going on. So there's lots to talk about. There is a TV in a suitcase, which I suspect we're going to talk about at length. There's other bits of gadget news, there's a bunch of streaming news. Trump's DMs have been subpoenaed from Twitter, which is amazing. And we should talk about just encryption in general as a concept. Lots of that stuff. Dan Seifert's going to join us for the second segment. This week was the 25th anniversary of the iMac. We had a big package about that. Lots to talk about there. And then, of course, we are pretty certain that there will be a new iPhone in September. So I'll talk about that with Dan a little bit, and what's coming.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  It seems like the camera bump, shocker, getting bigger on the iPhone this year. It hasn't gone the other way in quite some time. But let's start, there is one big thing happening in the world of tech and media that several of you have asked us to talk about. I've gotten some tweets, I've gotten some emails, I've gotten some Instagram threads. And it's what, what's happening at Linus Tech Tips. Big YouTube channel, run by Linus Sebastian. We are reporting on it. We have a story on it. Alex wrote that story.

• 3:58Alex Cranz?

  I sure did.

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  People are talking to us. The basics are like, fairly simple. And then, what has happened is ever more complex. So, Gamers Nexus did a video calling out some inaccuracies in Linus Tech Tips' testing policies. Controversy with a GPU cooling block that ended up at an auction and probably shouldn't have. This spiraled into a lot of craziness around that channel. They released a video saying they were going to pause production for a week, that they'd gotten too sloppy, that they're running too hard. And now there are some allegations of sexual harassment in their workplace. That's a lot. From my perspective as editor in chief of The Verge, our contribution to this, insofar as we're going to contribute to it, is to do reporting,

• 4:40Nilay Patel?

  is to make journalism. That's what we do here. So we're not going to overly comment or do analysis on that situation or have opinions about it. At this moment, we're going to do some reporting and figure out some real facts. That's what we're good at here. In particular, we're good at reporting on creators and we're pretty good at understanding the dynamics of tech creators, right? They're, they sit right next to us. We, we watch them very carefully. We have lots of relationships with them. But we are not that thing. Like, we are not in platform dynamics in that way. Like, that's, we are journalists over here. So we're just going to maintain some of that distance, so we can put some reporting into the situation. I think that's important. That's where we're going to be for a minute. The one thing I will say,

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  and it has nothing to this situation specifically, or that channel, or that company specifically, is that this pattern in media repeats pretty often. So when we were all baby bloggers, we were like, screw the big newspapers. Like, this is the beginning of my career in the mid 2000s, was a bunch of bloggers being like, the institutional newspapers and magazines are garbage. We're going to undo them. We don't need all their process and all their dumb ethic. Like, I did it. I was there. And now we have The Verge. And it's like, hard fought, over a decade later. And we have a huge ethics policy and like, our disclosures on this podcast, we do them so often that they're like a joke. And we're like, transparent about our reporting

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  standards. And we have a background policy. And if you look at it, you're like, oh shit, like, we just recapitulated all of the things of traditional media. Because the pressure on us, as we got bigger and bigger, was that we needed that stuff. And yes, we got to reinvent it. And yes, we got yelled at a bunch along the way about not having some of it. But it's largely the same as like, what happened before. We did it our way. And I think we did it better than some of the ways that it had been done before. Because I think that's important to try to improve. But we, we had to do it again. And that was like, early blogging. I think, in general, like, the YouTube ecosystem is arriving at that place.

• 6:48Nilay Patel?

  So other big YouTubers, they have ethics policies, they have review standards, they talk about that stuff and they need that stuff because that ultimately protects you when you are at this scale for a lot of reasons and you need it to build trust with your audience. I think that will happen to TikTok again in a really short order. There's a story we quick posted this week in the Times about movie reviewers on TikTok, on Movie Talk, who insist that they are not critics and they take money from the studios and they don't want to do negative reviews and all that's, and that's just the beginning of the cycle, right? They're like, we're not these old fuddy duddy movie critics, we're something new. And eventually they're gonna, they're gonna not be new.

• 7:28Alex Cranz?

  I was like, that's what Harry Knowles said.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 7:31Alex Cranz?

  Like 1999, when he launched his movie site, right? Like, we see this over and over and over again, there's a new medium and everybody goes into like, you have new access, like, right? There's different gatekeepers and so you're like, okay, I'm gonna go become a, go do the cool things in this medium and not do it like all the other people who've done it in other mediums before me. And then you kind of discover that actually some of that stuff makes sense and there's a reason they do it.

• 7:57Nilay Patel?

  Yep, your desire for access can corrupt you in like very specific ways that are repeatable and understandable and predictable. Your need to have the audience like you, especially on an algorithmic platform, very predictable at this point. Like, the pressures are the same and they lead to the same outcomes and in particular, the algorithmic platforms, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, they kind of destabilize groups from working together. They are very individualistic. So like, there is not, if you look at YouTube, Dave and I were talking about this, if you look at YouTube, big media brands are not successful on YouTube that can band together and say, these are our standards and we will enforce them. Like, generally, that is not the case on YouTube. Generally, that is not the case on Instagram.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  It is all individuals. So individuals run into these problems like over and over again at scale and then disaster strikes.

• 8:51David Pierce?

  Well, and that confluence you just described, I think, is the thing that is new, right? Like, I think what we were all going through, you know, in the early, mid aughts, in the sort of blogging revolution was like, it was about sort of... Teams and websites or whatever. And then the next thing that happened was very much the like individual creator. And there's this thing that happens that happens to people over and over and over on these platforms. You get big enough that you literally just hit the ceiling of what you can do alone. So these folks are building out and they're building big staffs. And what you do is you end up sort of exporting your own self onto other people as you try to build a business. Because your audience is connected to you, like as a person and scaling that is really challenging.

• 9:34David Pierce?

  And I think we've seen a lot of folks in a lot of different ways run into trouble with like, how do I make this thing bigger than me when in fact it is all about me? And that that just becomes messy in so, so many ways that I think no one or very few have like really neatly figured out over time.

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think it's also just unreasonable to say to an individual creator, like uphold the standards and practices of the AP.

• 10:00David Pierce?

  Right. While running at the speed of every single platform that exists on the internet, which is required for you to do in order to continue to be successful in your business. Like it's just, it's just not possible.

• 10:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, and I think that's just very challenging. And that, that sort of this thing I said at the very beginning, like what we can contribute here is some journalism. I mean that. And we have the opportunity to do it. Because we are under no pressure from the algorithm to get views about this today. Like, we just aren't, you know? And that's something that we fought hard for. That's why I care about our website so much, right? We want to be apart from these platforms so we can report on them in a meaningful way. But I just see this, this bigger story is the thing that has caught my interest here. Yes, this, these allegations are serious. And yes, I think we need to report on them and talk to all the principals. And we are among the few sites that have statements from some of the principals and Alex's story. I think that's important.

• 10:51Nilay Patel?

  But it's because we spend our time insisting on having statements from named principals in our stories. And we get to do that because we run our own little platform. And that cycle of, okay, if I'm totally dependent on YouTube, I have to do whatever YouTube wants me to do. As a platform to get views, like you can just see how it just spirals out of control and no one, over and over again, like YouTubers talk about this all the time. And very few people have the opportunity to step out of that and say, look, I need to impose my own principles here, or I need to borrow some principles from other kinds of media that have done this before, instead of just, it's a raw competition for attention and views on these platforms. So I just see that very clearly, mostly because I lived through it as a baby in a different medium.

• 11:36Nilay Patel?

  Like, this has been my experience in media, and we have been lucky to say, we're gonna build our thing as a group under the brand of The Verge. And if I'm not here, The Verge will persist, because it is a brand that stands for something. And like, we own it. Like, we own our platform. Yes, we are very dependent on other algorithmic traffics. Like, yes, I've talked about that at length. But at the end of the day, like, our website is our website, and we get to choose what goes on it and not really overthink it. And like, that's the distance that I think is important, that enables us to journalism. But that is really hard fought. Like, at no point is that not on my mind. Like, Alex and David, like, no, like, this is what I think about all day long. That's what

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  we're gonna bring to the story. Like, I don't want to overdo this conversation. I just see that pattern repeating. And it's at one stage for YouTube, and it's another stage for TikTok. And it's just gonna keep happening as new media emerges.

• 12:32David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 12:33Nilay Patel?

  All right. So on that note, there are some YouTube news this week, which is kind of fascinating. YouTube is a platform in a really interesting space, right? There's YouTube Shorts, and they're kind of adding some TikTok-y features. And then there's YouTube TV. And I guarantee you, this coming football season, YouTube TV is going to be the thing that they talk about and promote and think about more than anything, which is wild, because it's a cable bundle.

• 12:57David Pierce?

  It is and it isn't, right? So I've been talking to YouTube about this for forever. And the thing that is true about YouTube is it has all of the pieces of everything on its platform, right? Like, every single entertainment thing you can imagine exists somewhere inside of YouTube. And the thing YouTube has never successfully done Is put all those pieces together, right? Like you look at YouTube Music and it's like, okay, you have a library of music. You also have every live performance ever. You have this incredible library of covers that people do. You have all this fan made stuff. Like, how are you not figuring out how to give me every imaginable Taylor Swift thing? All in one place? I'm serious. Like, no platform has more of that than YouTube.

• 13:42David Pierce?

  And it has never successfully stitched all of it together. And I think what it's trying to do with football is very much the same thing, right? So they paid what we've heard and reported was $2 billion a year for NFL Sunday Ticket. Huge amount of money. There's, I would say, very little chance that that is going to be like a strictly very profitable thing for YouTube, especially in the early days. But what they're trying to do is figure out, okay, how do we use that to essentially sell you a cable bundle? Which, like you said, is deeply hilarious. And we should talk more about the fact that everything is just a cable bundle again. But they're also trying to figure out how to make it YouTube, right? Like, one of the things YouTube announced this week is that they're adding a bunch of features to Sunday Ticket. They're gonna have live chat and polls inside a game, which to me sounds like just like

• 14:27David Pierce?

  a waking nightmare. Like, watching football while a million internet strangers like yell about football? Sounds awful. That's what Twitter used to be for, but I don't know, whatever. And they added a thing where there's now gonna be a live set of shorts showing real time highlights from every game on Sunday, which is like technically really weird and complicated and I have lots of questions. But is a really interesting idea. And they're doing all this stuff with creators that they're not really talking about yet. But basically, what it seems like is YouTube creators are gonna have kind of unlimited access to a huge amount of football content. Yeah. Which is gonna be really interesting and is the kind of thing that creators have not had easy access to before. So there's this thing where YouTube is like, okay, we have football. Like boil it all the way down, right?

• 15:12David Pierce?

  Like, we have football plays that happen on a field. What are like all of the YouTube-y things we can do with them? Which I just think is like the most interesting question in the universe. And I think YouTube like has barely any idea of all of the answers that there are to that. But it's gonna be super interesting to like see how all of that shakes out.

• 15:31Nilay Patel?

  The creator side is the most interesting thing because there's no lack of football plays on YouTube right now.

• 15:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, but if you if you like steal it, you run the risk of like a copyright strike. And it's like, things can get kind of awkward. Like, one thing I watch a lot of is people talking about soccer, right? And there's like, this weird game you have to play if you are not the rights holder, where they'll show like awkward animated stick figure pictures of people moving around to like demonstrate tactics. Or there's one guy who does a great thing where it's like an overhead shot of what looks like a the old Microsoft Surface where he'll like move little things around on the screen. And people do these sort of clever hacks to get around the fact that they can't actually just use the game. And and what the NFL is now doing is saying, all of these people who want to make things about football, like here, have the game. And you've been able to watch highlights before, but you've never been able to like

• 16:22David Pierce?

  use them in the way that like you can use music. And I think that is big.

• 16:27Nilay Patel?

  That's a good comparison to music, right? Like, all the social platforms, apart from Twitter, we should, we can talk about that briefly, but all the social platforms basically blanket licenses to the music catalogs. And then creators can use them and there's content ID and blah, blah, blah. And the rights holders get paid when you use music on YouTube. I'm skipping over an awful lot of complexity there, but that's that's how that's supposed to work. It's fine, it's fine. Whereas sports leagues have not issued these sort of blanket licenses. So this is like the first time with a major league in a huge setting that this has been enabled. I'm sort of curious how it works.

• 17:06David Pierce?

  I am too.

• 17:07Nilay Patel?

  Like, is there, are they going to do content ID for football plays? Like, I just don't know the answer to that question.

• 17:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, YouTube has not super explained all of that. There's a lot left to do, and I get the sense there's a lot they haven't quite figured out yet and are think are probably going to spend this first season figuring out. But like, that's very much the road they're heading down, and I think it's really interesting.

• 17:24Alex Cranz?

  Why can't you just use the clips and comment on them? Because like with movies and film, like movies and TV shows, you can just be like, here it is, I'm talking about these two people talking.

• 17:34David Pierce?

  Because Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, will come to your house and beat you to death. Is basically like, truly like sports leagues are at the bleeding edge of being incredibly litigious about people using their stuff that they're not allowed to use. And the leagues have gotten more permissive over time, I would say, because they've realized that having things on, you know, House of Highlights on Instagram and on the various accounts on different social media platforms is actually a good marketing thing. The NBA has been way out in front of this. They were like, oh, you want to like show cool highlights and make more people watch basketball? Terrific, knock yourself out. The NFL has been kind of all the way on the other end of that spectrum where the NFL has been super, super, super protective of all of that stuff over the years.

• 18:19David Pierce?

  And even it has loosened up a little, but like it's, it's the most valuable video that exists in the world in like a very real way. And they've always been super protective of it.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  And it, you know, it's funny because they were going to sign this deal with Apple and Apple was like, we want to do cool broadcast ideas for VR headset. And they said no, because they don't know how that's going to work. They don't know where the money will come from. And they ended up with YouTube. It's like, we're going to use your clips across YouTube and presumably when creators use these clips, the NFL will get money, right? The same way that the labels get money when you use music on YouTube or TikTok. And I think the NFL just like deeply understands that. Right? Like, oh, automated licensing revenue? We understand that. Weird VR headset idea. Give us 35 years, like 100% the split that is happening there.

• 19:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're still stuck on, would you like to watch this game on your phone? Like, we're not nearly at VR yet.

• 19:21Alex Cranz?

  I guess I was just like confused why it's not considered fair use to just do sports.

• 19:25Nilay Patel?

  So, so it is, right? Your, your problem is, fair use is complicated. You need to do, you need to add some value, right? That's basically it. The, the, the standard is transformative fair use. You need to make something new out of a clip. So, yes, if you're sitting there doing like deep analysis, Dan Orlovsky and like high analysis of a play that he does on ESPN and you're like using like several short seconds to like show a difference and you're like in it, you can do that. And, uh, for example, our sister site, SP Nation, go to secret base on YouTube. They are doing this all over the place and it is great. And that is fair use. It's classic fair use, like inside fair use. If you're just a creator being like, look at this cool play, you, you kind of have to fight your way through it, right? And like most individual creators,

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  like we've been talking about, the infrastructure to have that fight does not exist for them, especially if you're like a new creator. So YouTube content ID and like the platform, like they don't want to have this fight at scale at the sports leagues who might all become lucrative partners in the future. So they just clamp down on it. And you just, you just kind of like see that, that back and forth dynamic happen all over the place. Whereas, you know, a bigger company, an ESPN or a Fox or whatever, like has an infrastructure to like push forward the fair use argument. And so like, it should be, it should be like, I, if you, if you are like a wealth, like independently wealthy YouTube sports creator can probably solve this problem.

• 20:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:53Nilay Patel?

  But like most YouTube creators are afraid to like try because they'd rather just make the next video and make money instead of spending money fighting the NFL.

• 21:02Alex Cranz?

  Well, and a takedown notice is always terrifying. Even if you're like, I'm in the right. It's like, no, this is terrifying. I have to burn my entire account and walk away. Not that I have any experience with that.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  And, and you know, the YouTube notice and takedown is all in DMCA. So it's all compliant to that. And it basically kicks you out into like, go have a lawsuit and come back and tell us how it went. Like it, like YouTube itself is not there to mediate the problem with you. They are there to comply with the DMCA, which is to say there was a notice. Of a takedown and you can appeal the takedown and like we'll do a thing and like sort of at the end of that rainbow is did you call your lawyer and once you get there you're like I'm just gonna make the next video like screw it right because if you get you know a number of strikes your channel gets it's a whole thing and like I said like big companies can solve this problem individual creators stuff like that so it is like kind of great that YouTube realized like oh we don't just want this in our cable bundle we want this on YouTube and

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  they created some financial relationships so that you can use the stuff like you can use music I'm just very curious to see how the NFL reacts to lots and lots of YouTube creators using NFL clips the way that they use music because that is an uncontrolled environment and we have no idea if the YouTube is going to put guardrails on it.

• 22:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's yeah, we there's there's a lot we still don't know and the season starts I think like September 7th so I think what's available on that first day versus what's available at the end of the season I suspect it's gonna end up pretty different yeah but I'm very curious to see.

• 22:29Nilay Patel?

  So that's one part of YouTube and then on the other side of YouTube on the short side they're adding more samples so they're adding more music a big part of the TikTok like win has been its relationship to the music industry and breaking new records breaking new sounds Planet of the Bass is like a thing that is happening because of TikTok so YouTube music is chasing after that and then sort of next to all of that more governments are banning TikTok so NYC has banned TikTok and city-owned devices it tracks lots of other cities and states and then Cranz you had an incredible reaction to this headline Nielsen released some data saying okay TV viewing is officially down like people watching linear TV is now half the people.

• 23:12Alex Cranz?

  My fury.

• 23:13Nilay Patel?

  And you were like fuck this headline what is going on there?

• 23:18Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so so the headline is it's like it's accurate.

• 23:23David Pierce?

  I'm not even sure I agree with that, to be honest.

• 23:25Alex Cranz?

  But there's a big asterisk. There's a huge, huge asterisk in that this is all coming from data that they only started gathering two years ago. So like, all time asterisk, we only started doing this two years ago.

• 23:41David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 23:42Alex Cranz?

  Technically, I feel like Nielsen would, PR would come to me and be like, this is technically accurate. And I'd be like, it is, but also it's not.

• 23:48David Pierce?

  It's accurate, but it's meaningless. Like, and honestly, and we've talked about this a bunch, but there was also this like, big Financial Times story the other day that was like, streaming is officially more expensive than cable. And it's like, well, okay, sure, if you have this gigantic list of streaming services, and if you have this made up promotional price for cable that no one actually has, sure, streaming is more expensive than cable, congratulations. But we're at this point where like, to me, all of this has proven, and this like, goes along with a lot of people in the strike have been talking about with data transparency and stuff. Nobody knows anything. We don't know that Nielsen is the best thing we have and was reasonably good when most people watched all of their television, sitting on

• 24:30David Pierce?

  their couch in front of their television. Even then, it was a mess, but it was, it was good enough. Now, it's like, it gets this one tiny sliver of how people experience entertainment. It doesn't capture mobile very well. It doesn't capture a huge portion of how people spend their lives. And to me, I don't take anything away from any of this data, except that like, people watch lots of TV, lots of places, and nobody knows anything.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  This is my, my theory, my underlying theory of the television industry, is that no one knows how to measure anything.

• 25:01David Pierce?

  I, I think that's right.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  All, all the metrics are fake, and agreeing to measure everything in the same way is a nuclear bomb waiting to go off for this industry.

• 25:10David Pierce?

  Well, and ironically, now, where we are is the streamers know, like Netflix knows, and is increasingly disincentivized to tell anybody. Because like, if nobody knows anything...

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  No, Netflix is gonna do, because of the ads that Netflix is doing, they're gonna do something with Nielsen, right? Or Nielsen wants that contract, which is one of the reasons I think that this headline came out.

• 25:30David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 25:31Nilay Patel?

  The headline basically is like, the streamers won, and then they're gonna walk into Netflix offices and be like, hey, we just said you won. Like, do you want us to measure, by the way, disclosure, speaking of disclosures and transparency.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  We made a Netflix show. I'm a Netflix CP. You should go watch that show. Someone wrote us a very nice email asking if we're allowed to talk about our Netflix show during the strikes. The answer is that our Netflix show wasn't a union production and it's also over. So I don't think I'm going to be arrested, but let me know if you're in one of the unions and want me to stop talking about the Netflix show we made two years ago. Let me know. Anyway, that's one disclosure. Comcast through its NBC Universal arm is an investor in Vox Media, our parent company. Alex is in the WGA. Our newsroom is organized with the WGA East. I have HBO. I've been watching Hard Knocks like a maniac. It's a crime that Hard Knocks is on at Tuesdays at 10:00 PM instead of Sundays at 9:00 PM like it should be. I feel very strongly

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  about that. That's my personal bias there. I have really weird feelings about Aaron Rodgers right now. Is there anything else, David? I think that's it. I think those are all disclosures.

• 26:34Alex Cranz?

  That seems right.

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's like the solid.

• 26:36Alex Cranz?

  I have a TV back there. That's disclosure.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, Netflix is under a lot of pressure to release these ratings because they need to sell ads. You need to tell the advertisers how many people watch your ads. That's going to happen to HBO Max. That's going to happen to Disney Plus. They're all running these ad tiers. And that is the thing that is going to provide one set of pressures to release standardized metrics. So the ad market can decide where to spend their dollars. And the other thing that's going to happen is in the strikes, one of the demands from all these unions is tell us what shows are successful. So we can calculate our residuals more accurately and get more money. And I think that's going to place another amount of pressure that might finally break this fever. But I have no idea how it's going to play out.

• 27:16Alex Cranz?

  Well, it sounds like that was some of the big news this week was that the producers said, oh, yeah, we're now going to give you more access to data. We don't know all the details yet, but they finally agreed to like, yeah, it makes sense that you guys should probably have more data, which everyone knew before this, but it's nice that they agree finally.

• 27:34Nilay Patel?

  Not to get into the mechanics of that negotiation, but the streamers were going to have to give up this data to advertisers. Like it was going to happen just because of the nature of that market. So I think this is like the concession they were most willing to give because they needed to standardize and synthesize all that data. The question is whether it's Nielsen or Parrot Analytics or whatever, who knows. But the idea that the data needs to be standardized and everyone can, so everyone can understand it, that's coming from the ad market. That's not coming from that negotiation. I think it is a good concession and a useful one to all of us. But it's eventually an advertiser is going to say, how many people saw my ad? You just have to have a real answer. Okay, we should take a break. It's been a wild

• 28:16Nilay Patel?

  ride in the first segment, I have to say. We're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back. We're gonna dip 25 years into the past and talk about the iMac with Dan Seifert. Get your brains ready. We'll be right back.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called in me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 29:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Dan Seifert is here. Hey, Dan. Hello. Welcome back to the show. You had a big package this week. Our friend Jason Snell contributed, a staffer from Around the Verge contributed. This week was the 25th anniversary of the iMac. There's a lot to unpack. Like, that means a lot of things. Yeah, it means we're old. It means we're old. It is incredible to think that the Mac was a younger platform when the iMac came out than the iPhone is now. John Guber pointed out when he linked to Umar's visual history of the Mac. So the Mac was 14 when the iMac came out. The iPhone today is 16, which is just bonkers to think about where these respective products are

• 30:17Nilay Patel?

  and their impact on the world. But the iMac really changed a lot of things. Tell us about this package, Dan.

• 30:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, so you know, 25 years since the I'm first iMac went on sale, it was like August 15th, 1998, the iMac, as Jason really pointed out really well in his piece, it was the product that really turned around the company's fortunes. It allowed them, it was successful and popular enough to basically develop the iPod, which then became successful, popular enough to develop the iPhone. And then, you know, Apple becomes $3 trillion company. So without the iMac, like you don't have any of that. And Apple at the time was like very on the brink of not existing anymore. And, and all of the products that had been developed in the 90s were like these kind of beige boxes, very typical looking, not a whole lot of creativity

• 31:07Speaker 05

  or design were put into them. But then when Jobs came back and teamed up with Ive and they brought out the iMac and just kind of like changed everything in terms of like the perspective of what like a home or a consumer electronic in your home could look like. It had this like radical design. It was a thing that was like, people looked at it and they wanted it. Whereas if you looked at a PC at the time, you looked at it to maybe want to use it and like do things on it, but you didn't want the object itself. It was just a box. Whereas the iMac was an object. And then that design was so influential, it not only permeated throughout Apple's lineup, influencing the design of what the software looked like on Macs and then further on down the line, but it also made translucent

• 31:52Speaker 05

  plastic products really popular at the turn of the century, all the way down to the infamous George Foreman grill that looks like an iMac.

• 31:59David Pierce?

  I had never seen that before until this package became a thing. And I'm now obsessed with this translucent George Foreman grill. It is, it is the thing I want most in the world. If, if anyone listening wants to buy me one.

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  Do not buy a used George Foreman grill.

• 32:15Speaker 05

  What if it's in, what if it's in mint condition and then it's got the, the bun warmer?

• 32:19Nilay Patel?

  A product that can never be cleaned.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  No one has ever perfectly cleaned a George Foreman grill.

• 32:25David Pierce?

  No.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  Cannot be done.

• 32:26David Pierce?

  I clean ours constantly and it's just fully disgusting.

• 32:29Nilay Patel?

  Wait, you have today in 2023 a George Foreman grill?

• 32:32David Pierce?

  I am reasonably confident that the George Foreman grill I have is older than both me and my wife. It was like my wife's grandma's and it just somehow was in our house. I don't know how it got here.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  Maybe we should just switch this segment to George Foreman grills.

• 32:50David Pierce?

  It just, I use it all the time. It's great.

• 32:53Nilay Patel?

  What do you use it for? Are you making like stuffed burgers like George Foreman?

• 32:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, constantly. No, it's like, I'm just saying, if you have, if you have leftover chicken breast and some cold bread and you want to throw it in the Foreman grill for 90 seconds to eat lunch? Bob's your uncle. It's your panini press. Yeah. No, but the, back to the iMac.

• 33:13David Pierce?

  Listen, David's recipe blog is another story for another day.

• 33:17Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, that's gonna be a success. Talk about getting the views. Put some cold chicken on a 30-year-old George Foreman grill.

• 33:23Speaker 05

  I want to hear the story about how your wife's grandmother grew up building with the, with the George Foreman grill.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  Will we live or die today at lunchtime with David Pierce?

• 33:35David Pierce?

  Do you know those things that just end up in your house? You're like, I didn't buy this. I never asked for this. I just have this now. That's, that's the Foreman grill in my house. Like it's, George Foreman himself might have brought it to our house for all I know. Like I sincerely don't know. But the thing about the iMac that most blew my mind, Dan, was like reading Jason's piece, the, the full like YOLO energy of this thing from Apple in 1998 where they're just like, oh, you want a floppy disk? Screw you, USB. Uh, you want a thing that looks like a computer? No, here's this weird Pixar looking piece of nonsense. There's just like, you just get this vibe from Apple that I kind of love where they're like, look, we know if this doesn't work, we're screwed and realistically, we're probably screwed anyway.

• 34:20David Pierce?

  So like, here's the weirdest thing we can think of. Do you like it?

• 34:22Speaker 05

  It's got a handle.

• 34:23David Pierce?

  And people did.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I was talking about this on Instagram threads with a few people. You know, people are keep saying they want a desktop version of Instagram threads. This is like the thing everyone says, we say it. Mark Zuckerberg is replying to Jay Peters saying it's coming soon because we say it a lot. That's a real thing that happened this week. What they mean is a web version, right? The desktop application default that most people think about is a web app. Especially for a platform like Instagram threads. No one is out here asking for like a native win 32 Instagram threads application.

• 34:57Speaker 05

  I would like a native app, but.

• 34:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that's like a very small. It's just like not the thing people are asking. If if Instagram's response was you can run the iPhone app on your Mac using Apple silicon. Some nerds would be very happy and most people like, what the hell is this? I just want to run it in my browser. And Apple in particular with the iMac. That was the moment that that began. Right until that computer. Desktop applications on computers were one generally not connected. Right? The web was just starting. That was the Intel monopoly, the height of the Intel monopoly, even like AMD in that moment. Was like a serious competitor to Intel. So you had win 32 and you had Intel and that was the application environment for 99% of everything.

• 35:43Nilay Patel?

  And the Mac was this like runt platform that Microsoft sort of openly talked about supporting. So they wouldn't be a monopoly. Like they're like, as long as we have this competitor, we won't get sued by the Justice Department. Little did they know. This is like, this is a lot like in in that moment, Apple basically said, there's this idea of a network computer. And you know, the original vision was like a $500 terminal with just a web browser, which we finally got into with like Chrome boxes. But that was like sort of the genesis and it got bigger because they couldn't really build it then. But no floppy drive was so you could send files radical idea at the time. There were like entire issues of Mac world that were like. How will we survive?

• 36:21Alex Cranz?

  I think that was like Walt Mossberg's one criticism of it in his review was like, no floppy disk, this is bullshit.

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  And then importantly, the reason that it was a viable product to sell to people was that they were like, you can just plug it into the internet and use the web, which is the thing you want. You don't want Microsoft Word running on an Intel processor on Windows. You want a web browser that can bring you all this cool web stuff. And if not for the web and web standards, this computer is a gargantuan flop. Right? It looked cool as hell. It dropped all the bullshit. You only really had to plug in what two wires? Like, that was a very famous commercial. Like, you plug it in and there's no step three Jeff Goldblum, like that whole thing. It signed you up for internet access through an ISP and then you could just like run a web browser.

• 37:10Nilay Patel?

  And now we're just 25 years later, people are like, I want a desktop version of Instagram threads. And they mean a web app. And there's just a straight line from that idea to this idea that I think we often underestimate. Like, that's the revolution. The phone is very important. It just came at the, it's just the last piece of that puzzle. The first one was, oh, we can sell a computer that basically runs a web browser. And like, if we do a good job of that, we can become the Apple that we are today.

• 37:40David Pierce?

  Which is why like the Johnny Ive thing became so important, right? Like, they timed giving a new crap about design perfectly. Because I think Jason has this line in his piece that's like, on the internet, nobody knew you were using a Mac. And I love that because it's, it's true. And it's like, oh, you could just buy the computer that looked cool and was blue and had a handle. And all the stuff you wanted to do on the internet, you could still do. And it was like, Apple, being a hardware company, worked for it in a sort of unique way in that moment because it had no ecosystem play. It was like, we, all we can do is build a cool thing and hope that people want to use it because we don't have any other moves.

• 38:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Power PC G3. Have you heard of it? It's uh, we're gonna, we're gonna walk away from this as fast as we can. And like, you know, all that stuff is really hard for them. Like, I, I, I think we underestimate how, you know, Apple's very good at processor transitions. Now we take it for granted, like, we're gonna run the Macs on Apple silicon. And we're like, oh, you're good at this. In that moment, right, they were stuck on the G3 architecture. They were stuck with the, iMac launched with OS nine, which if you, I am old. That was not a good operating system.

• 38:49Alex Cranz?

  It was sweet. What are you talking about? You could customize your text.

• 38:53Nilay Patel?

  You could. This is an operating system that famously until the very end, you could bring the entire OS to a dead halt by holding down the mouse button.

• 39:05Nilay Patel?

  And that was like by design, like it was not a native multitasking, multi-threaded OS. I think until the very, very end of OS nine, you could be like, you know what, I just need to, everyone stop for a second. You're just like, hold down the mouse button and be like, we're waiting, we're waiting. Everyone chill the fuck out, like, we're waiting.

• 39:25Nilay Patel?

  And they had to do OS 10, like all this stuff they had to do, but they needed to sell enough iMacs to, to get there. That kind of brings us to where the iMac is today, right? That's, that's a history. I will say that we, you should look at the visual history that we did. Uh, and we should all stop and take a moment and recognize the iMac G4 as the pinnacle of computer design.

• 39:43Alex Cranz?

  Are you crazy?

• 39:45David Pierce?

  Wait, can I, can I tell you a story about the iMac G4?

• 39:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:48David Pierce?

  So I bought, let's see, this is probably 2011. I bought an iMac G4 because it was the only Mac I could afford, which you will, you will realize if you do math that it's a nine-year-old computer that is long since out of date and no one is caring about it. It was, this is the only Mac I could afford. I bought it from a stranger on Craigslist. We met in, uh, I believe it was Union Square. And he literally like went through an existential crisis, giving me this computer that I think I paid like a hundred and fifty dollars for.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:20David Pierce?

  Because he wanted it so bad and regretted so immediately selling this thing to me. That literally like as he was handing it to me was like, ah, but it's so, I just, I don't need it, but like, ah, I love it. And it's just, and I was like, yeah, like that's, that's why I want it too. Like I want this old ass computer because it's so cool looking. The, the G4 was my first ever Mac, period. And it was so old and so useless at that point. And I loved it to pieces because it was so cool looking. It was just, I genuinely think it, I agree with you. I think it's the best looking computer ever made. I loved that thing.

• 40:56Speaker 05

  It's a shame they only did it for one generation. Like it was, it lasted for like a year and a half or so, and then boom, right on to what ultimately looked like a big iPod.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah. I have a story to tell about that, but Cranz, I, I want to hear your bad opinion about the MXG4.

• 41:11Alex Cranz?

  Like, did you guys have to use that G4 iMac?

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. David used it. I mean, he's still, it's right next to his George Foreman grill.

• 41:21David Pierce?

  It's a family heirloom.

• 41:23Alex Cranz?

  At the time, because it was not great. Like, I don't know. The G3 was just, there was something much more charming about the G3 iMacs, like the big CRTs and everything.

• 41:32Speaker 05

  Well, I think the, the, the G3 was almost like cartoon like, and then the G4 was a much more serious, this is the future looking thing.

• 41:42Nilay Patel?

  Hold on, we, we gotta get this timeline right. There's the original iMac was bonded blue. Then there was the, the, the rainbow ones, right? The, the five colors. Those are the ones you might be talking about, Alex.

• 41:52David Pierce?

  That's the G3.

• 41:53Alex Cranz?

  That's what I had. Yeah.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  That's the MXG3. Then there is a bizarre interregnum where Steve Jobs got on a stage and said, we have some exciting new iMacs to offer you today. And everyone thought he was going to do a flat panel iMac. And he was like, these motherfuckers are called Dalmatian and Flower Power.

• 42:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:08David Pierce?

  What?

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  Literally people were like, what are you talking about? And that was like the last gasp of that shape. Go look at a blue Dalmatian iMac.

• 42:19Alex Cranz?

  It's beautiful.

• 42:20Nilay Patel?

  They cannot be found.

• 42:21David Pierce?

  Oh my, this is the ugliest thing I've ever seen.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  Like, Apple went across the world and country, collected them all, and was like, "You memory hole this." Steve Jobs famously walked off of stage when he announced those things, after sensing the vibe in the room, and said, "It should have been fucking ready." And what he meant was the flat panel iMac should have been ready.

• 42:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Nilay Patel?

  This is a real thing. You can go look this up.

• 42:44David Pierce?

  I just Googled this, and I'm looking at these for the first time in my life. And first of all, everyone should do this, and look at these, because these are incredible. And what these look like to me is if somebody took a normal iMac, and then like, you know those really awful, like, $1.99 skins you can buy on your phone? That like, from Amazon, that you just like, apply to the back of your phone? And they don't quite stick right, and it's very clear that somebody just like, took a picture of a picture of a picture of a wallpaper, and then put it on this. That's what this looks like to me.

• 43:12Nilay Patel?

  They are nuts. We had them in my computer lab in college, and they are nuts. Like, they're just nuts.

• 43:18Alex Cranz?

  So I was gonna say, I was in college around the same time, and I had to do IT, so I had to like, work on everybody's computers. That's what my piece on the iMac is about.

• 43:27Nilay Patel?

  Is this why we vibe? Because we're both like, college IT people?

• 43:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we were both like-

• 43:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't think we've ever really talked about this, but I've known it in my heart for quite some time.

• 43:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's why, that's why. That's why we always judge David.

• 43:39Alex Cranz?

  He was in high school being like, "Oh, boy."

• 43:41David Pierce?

  Jesus, where did that just come from?

• 43:43Nilay Patel?

  Damn, that's just like, David took a shot.

• 43:46David Pierce?

  I was out just like, partying and getting laid. Sorry, Cass.

• 43:50Alex Cranz?

  We had computers to talk about.

• 43:54Alex Cranz?

  We were having a great time over there.

• 43:57David Pierce?

  Dan suspiciously quiet on what he was doing at this period.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  I was an IT person in high school.

• 44:03Nilay Patel?

  There we go.

• 44:05Alex Cranz?

  We were the cool kids.

• 44:07Speaker 05

  I had a job, a high school job, as a PC tech for a local hospital.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  I think it's very obvious that this group of people was nerds in high school. Alex, continue your story.

• 44:16Alex Cranz?

  And David.

• 44:19Alex Cranz?

  But but no, you could tell like basically how much people's parents spent on them for school based on which generation of IBAC they had. So somebody comes in with a Bondi blue, you're like, oh, you got the hand me down, huh? They had like the blueberry or something. You're like, okay, okay. And then they had that Dalmatian one. You were like, wow, you're loaded.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  This is a straight class system based on iMac colors that you have posed on on your customers in the College IT shop. There was like a middle period that we haven't talked about, like the iMac DV where the shelves got clear. It was all cool. But I'm saying that was the last version. And then this is the thing I wanted to say about the G4. It was a Steve Jobs moment unlike any other, where they released the iMac G4. And he was like, everyone else solves this flat panel computer problem by putting the computer behind the display. And he did the thing. He like, put up a bad version of that drawing. And he was like, this isn't the right idea. We made it a sunflower. And the thing was on the cover of Time Magazine. I think it was a Steven Levy piece on cover of Time Magazine. And Jobs and Johnny, I've told an entire story in Time Magazine about how they were trying to solve this problem of where the computer should go with the flat

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  panel. And they were walking and they saw a sunflower and the birds sang and Johnny looked at Steve and Steve looked at Johnny. And they were like, we did it. And then 18 months later, like, we put the computer behind the display.

• 45:38David Pierce?

  They kissed passionately in front of the sunflower.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  But it's like, they sold that thing so completely, until they were ready to do it the right way. And then they dropped it like a stone. They're like, we actually solved the problem. And here, here's the thing you've always wanted. And it has been that thing ever since. And just that thing, where they so completely bought into the solution they had at the minute, until they were ready to do it the way they wanted. And then they never talked about it again. They were dead, dead to the world. Like, no company can do that now. Like, even Apple basically cannot do that anymore, right? There are too many installed devices, there are too many old things to support,

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  like all this stuff. To be like, for 18 months, we talked about sunflowers. Never remember that again. Erase the sunflowers from your brain. Now it's a white piece of a white rectangle, and that's the future of the iMac. To me, it's like, in the history of the iMac, that moment is more about Apple's culture than anything else. And it's sort of like unremarked upon, because they successfully memory hold the iMac G4. But it was that shift, that I was like, oh, they are ruthless. Like, they are ruthless about getting to the right answer as fast as they can, and not talking about everything they did in the past. To this day, well, you think about a car company, Ford's like, we made another Bronco. But it

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  looks like the old Bronco. Like, here's yet another Mustang. Like, most companies are very excited to trade on their past, in a way that Apple, like, maybe a little bit more recently. But you will note, Apple said nothing about 25 years of the iMac.

• 47:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:18Nilay Patel?

  It just came and went.

• 47:19Speaker 05

  They had, they had two opportunities to say it this year. The announcement in May, and then the in-store in August, which is when we turned our package. But yeah, not a peep.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think it's, all of that Apple culture is pinpointed in that moment, where literally this computer was on the cover of Time Magazine. And then 18 months later, they're like, here's the, here's the white one you wanted. And like, that was it. Like, the end. We have this other piece here. It's really about the future of the iMac, right? Like, where does it go now? It's, it's in a weird spot.

• 47:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So Monica wrote a really great piece on, you know, nowadays, Apple's Mac business is 75 or 80% laptops. And then the rest is like, really niche computers, the Mac Studio, the Mac Mini, and then there's the iMac, which was updated in spring 2021, with the M1 chip. It's got that new design, and it's basically just been parked for like, two and a half years now. We've got M2 chips in other laptops, or other Mac computers. It's not in the iMac for whatever reason. But like, the iMac- Mac has been this kind of thing that just kind of ebbs and flows for the past decade or so like Apple will release an update and then ignore it for like four years and then we get an iMac Pro

• 48:30Speaker 05

  and then it gets ignored for four years and then it then we get a new M1 iMac and then it gets ignored for however many years. So Monica's takeaway was ultimately that like Apple isn't dishing the iMac or getting rid of the iMac. That's just kind of the way the place that the iMac sits in today's Apple is just much less prominent and less influential than it was two decades ago or certainly two and a half decades ago. So it's just like a different product. What's interesting to me is that the original iMac that we talked about and all the generations after that were basically saved for the iMac Pro pitched as consumer products and consumer computers. And the current iMac is still kind of pitched as that consumer computer, whereas the

• 49:14Speaker 05

  other Mac desktops are really pitched towards professional, creative, niche use cases. But Apple doesn't really talk about the iMac all that often outside of its like initial launch when they showed yellow iMacs in kitchens, which is a very odd place to put an iMac.

• 49:30Nilay Patel?

  Especially that it doesn't have a touchscreen.

• 49:32Speaker 05

  Doesn't have a touchscreen. Yeah. No, you need your your touchpad, your trackpad and keyboard in addition to your iMac in your kitchen.

• 49:38Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 49:39David Pierce?

  Can I run a theory by you guys that I think is right but have no actual data for just lots of anecdotal evidence? I would bet that people keep iMacs longer than any other single Apple product. Like I would bet the average use lifespan of an iMac is the longest of any other Mac because the the screen is very good, the thing works relatively well, you're not going to notice when the battery starts to give out, which is often the first thing that goes in a lot of laptops. And the like inertia of upgrading is so big because it's just the whole thing. If I have a desktop, if I like want to upgrade the Mac Mini I'm sitting here with, I can keep everything else I have and just slot in a new Mac Mini.

• 50:22David Pierce?

  Upgrading your iMac is like upgrading your whole office all at once. And also, like you said, Dan, these are consumer things that people are like, this is like the family-est computer that Apple has, right? And I think if you, if you have like a 2011 iMac that's just like sitting in your den, the like leap to upgrade that is huge. And the reasons to upgrade that when it's like a pretty good screen and the only thing that's really wrong with it 12 years later is that it's like pretty slow. My guess would be that like the average lifespan of one of those things is just absolutely off the charts. And if I'm Apple, I'm looking at that and saying, well, I'm going to sell people a computer. They're going to upgrade once every 11 years. I'd rather sell them a MacBook that they're going to want a new one in three.

• 51:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, people do with their MacBook Airs, they drop them.

• 51:09David Pierce?

  They spill things on them.

• 51:10Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think the battery, the battery part of this is, is the big, like, that's a big part of this is because those batteries go and, and you can't replace them on, on newer laptops and stuff. So it's just like, you're food barred. Whereas your iMac can go forever. I think somebody on this call might be recording with like an ancient iMac.

• 51:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm looking at it right now. It's a, it's a 2015 27 inch iMac. I will say that I-

• 51:34David Pierce?

  And you're you. Name another gadget you own that is eight years old.

• 51:40Nilay Patel?

  The cameras are coming up on that, the Z7500 coming up on that. But that's like a, that's like an emotional, like I should upgrade that camera. Like I take a lot of shit from this team for selling that camera. But I, you know, it's never done me wrong. Old man still got it. This computer I basically use for this. I run one web app on it. I run Riverside to do this show and it's this setup and everything plugs into it and it's fine. It is radically over spec. So I, our, our studio, Vox Media Studios, was upgrading their computers many years ago. And they were just going to recycle this and I was like, I'm taking it. Cause we're just like sitting on the curb and I was like, can I, can I? And they're like, don't tell anyone. Now I've told everyone.

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  So it goes, but it has, it has, well, the key is it has 32 gigs of RAM. And this is like the key to longevity of every computer, in my opinion, is like, it is just, it has massively more RAM than it needed in its time. And that means it stays forever, which is why I tell everybody who buys a Mac now that eight gigs of RAM is not enough. Like that, to me, is more of the evidence of Apple's planned obsolescence than anything else, is eight gigs of soldered RAM. Like, mm, mm, mm, no, no, no.

• 52:51Alex Cranz?

  No, don't do that.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  And it's just weird. And I, I think David, you're right. The iMac sits in a lot of places. My parents have an ancient one. They refer to it as the mainframe. It's, it's very good. And they go to it when they want to do anything serious, like logging into the bank.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  Because they, they want a big screen and a browser that feels safe.

• 53:13Alex Cranz?

  Cause I can't use your phone. Why don't parents like bank apps?

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  Cause they're, they feel like their phone is not serious enough for logging into the bank.

• 53:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 53:22Speaker 05

  I, I think that what, you know, what you're describing, Eli, and what David, you described as like, it's sitting in a den. That is like the concept, the original concept of the iMac. It was a shared family computer. And it's just that at this point, at this time, that doesn't exist as a product for a lot of people in functional ways in their lives. If you've got kids in school, they're not coming home and sitting at a desktop to do their homework. They're doing it on a Chromebook that links up to their school's network or, and goes with them to school. Or they have their own personal devices, an iPad or an iPhone or whatever smartphone. The shared concept of a family computer is like not something that really fits into the modern day life.

• 54:01Speaker 05

  Whereas the other desktops in Apple's lineup, the Mac Mini, the Mac Studio, et cetera, are, they have like purposes that fit into people's lives as like devices that they work on all day. But the iMac as the family thing doesn't really exist anymore.

• 54:15Alex Cranz?

  That was like, I mean, the iMac itself was a response to, everybody had family computers, like in the eighties and nineties. If you had a computer, it probably wasn't in your room unless you were like, just Richie Rich, right? Like you had a lot of money.

• 54:28Nilay Patel?

  Alex is like, get that Blue Delta Nation computer out of my face.

• 54:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right? Like, you didn't have that, like, everybody, that, that, so, so the iMac, when the iMac came out, it was like, oh, this is a computer where it's not just the parents using a beige box, like the kids can interact with this, which is why my brother watched A Bug's Life on repeat every day, over and over and over again on the damn thing. And nowadays, computers are cheaper, they're more affordable, so, and, and laptops have become much, much more affordable than they were at the time. Like a laptop was still insanely expensive at the time. I, I think all of my laptops until I got out of college were. Hand me downs because my parents were like, absolutely not. You do not get a brand new laptop. You're going to drop on its face and break. And then we have to pay for it. Get out.

• 55:12Alex Cranz?

  And, and, but the prices have come down. So it's like, it's much more affordable. It's much easier to go and buy a Chromebook for a kid than be like, okay, everybody's going to use this communal computer in the living room. And also like, we have to have a space in our living room carved out just for the computer. And then you got one kid on the computer, another kid watching TV and they're all yelling at each other. And now they can just all have phones and be quiet in another room.

• 55:32Speaker 05

  Or the school dictates that they have a Chromebook, which like takes the decision out of your hands entirely. And then like that iMac that you have sitting there is like not used by them because it's not the tool that fits into the rest of their curriculum.

• 55:45Nilay Patel?

  Alex just made a, a striking case to bring back the computer room.

• 55:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm in on this. Yeah.

• 55:51Alex Cranz?

  I want a computer room. That was the best. Like you were always sitting in like a dining room chair that you should not be sitting in, hunched over it.

• 55:59Nilay Patel?

  Everybody had that horrible Office Max furniture.

• 56:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Nilay Patel?

  You know what I'm talking about? The, the desk and the hutch and that, the whole thing. Here's what I want. Verchass listeners, send me photos of your computer rooms.

• 56:10Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 56:11Nilay Patel?

  Not your modern gamer rooms. I mean, your childhood computer rooms. If you have such a photo, I just want to look at them and maybe we'll run like a thing about computer rooms. Who knows if they're good enough. Again, I do not want your weird gamer den with your LED lightings and your Wi Fi's. I want your 486 tower with a turbo button with Encarta open on a CRT.

• 56:34Alex Cranz?

  Hell, yeah. That's the room I'm looking for.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Show me where you came from.

• 56:42David Pierce?

  I had a gateway with the cow logo. That was, those are the days.

• 56:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Give me your origin story in a photo of your computer room. All right. We should, we, we've talked about the iMac quite a bit. There is an Apple event coming up. We're assuming in, in September for iPhones. That's a pretty solid guess, given the decade plus of iPhones coming out in September. iOS 17 betas are out. Dan, any thoughts here?

• 57:06Speaker 05

  They keep moving the end call button, which seems to be driving people wild. I think, you know, other than that, I think iOS 17 is going to be for a lot of people. And we've kind of said this in our preview coverage already that it's going to be a pretty small update across a lot of things. And some people are really going to appreciate little things like interactive widgets.

• 57:25David Pierce?

  I was going to say, my one quibble with the characterization of small update is that every app developer that exists on the internet will not shut up about how excited they are about interactive widgets. It's going to get full crazy with the interactive widgets, and I'm very excited about that.

• 57:40Speaker 05

  Maybe it'll just be more exciting when it launches and those app developers can actually put out their work.

• 57:44David Pierce?

  Whatever, Dan. You're going to check off a to do on the home screen of your iPhone, and you're going to freak out. It's going to be great, Dan.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  It's going to be so great. At the grocery store, checking off to do's on my widget, like I could have been doing on Android since 2010.

• 57:58Alex Cranz?

  Coming.

• 58:00Speaker 05

  But yeah, I mean, other than that, it's going to be the 17th version of iOS. What are we expecting to change here?

• 58:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited because the autocorrect situation is bad. It has, now that people have pointed out so consistently to us, it has gotten worse in a way that is impossible to measure, but it's definitely worse. And I just, I'm just looking forward to this update.

• 58:22Speaker 05

  The vibes are off.

• 58:23Nilay Patel?

  Give me your LLM powered autocorrect. Like, I'll take it. Anything has to be better than this. It's weird, right? Have you guys noticed? It's gotten worse.

• 58:31Alex Cranz?

  Everybody judges me. They always know when I'm on my phone because there's always at least one horrible, confusing typo that like, Apple was just like, no, I got you. I'm going to change this word. It totally makes sense. And I'm like, no, it doesn't. It's a terrible context.

• 58:44Nilay Patel?

  My theory is that Apple is just trying to push us towards that humane AI pin. They're like, what if you don't use this computer? What if you just talk to your hand instead?

• 58:55Alex Cranz?

  Just, hey, guys, what's up? I have thoughts about the show we're watching.

• 58:59Nilay Patel?

  By the way, the humane AI, this is totally random. They announced this week that they're, they're gonna launch or do something in October on the day of a, of an eclipse. That's what I got for you. They put out a video, watch the video. They call out our friend Sam Schaefer in the video. That always makes me smile. It's like the only time they all light up is when they talk to Sam. Sam's not even in the video. He's behind the camera and they're like, Sam. And they all smile and that just made me happy, but they're like, a momentous day is coming. When the sun will be blacked out forever and then you will talk to your hand. And I was like, okay. So sometime in October, uh, they're gonna release this pin and we can all see what's up.

• 59:35Alex Cranz?

  The talk to the hand puns, we just gotta get those out of our systems. Or I guess probably just me. I just gotta get that out of my system until that's announced.

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  I did the post about Pornhub MindGeek suing a restaurant in New York City called Donor House. It's a kebab restaurant. And I was like, don't make the joke, please. And everyone in the comments made the joke.

• 59:55Alex Cranz?

  You just let other people do it. Like it's right there. It's like, okay, I'm not, I'm gonna resist. Do it for me.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  I was like, I'm just begging you. And everyone's like, here it is. We said it. Fine. Okay, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back and do a lightning round with Dan. We'll be right back.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton calling me, the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Wanna make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it. When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  We're back. It's lightning round time. There's a lot going on in this lightning round.

• 1:01:23Alex Cranz?

  So much good stuff and some like sad stuff, mainly good stuff.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  There's also an email where the subject line is HDMI disgusts me.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  Which is just

• 1:01:33David Pierce?

  We have found our people.

• 1:01:35Alex Cranz?

  I was like, they get us. They get us.

• 1:01:37Nilay Patel?

  I keep, I use this line that I ruthlessly stole from Casey Newton all the time, which is anybody can get traffic, but it's impossible to get an audience. And it's like, oh, we have an audience. Like that, those are, you have to trust us to send us that subject line. That's a relationship and I appreciate you. Sal, it was from Sal. Anyway, his point is that DisplayPort is superior to HDMI because of a piece in Hackaday. Hackaday, by the way, I personally have a long history with. There was, there's a long intertwining of Hackaday and Engadget back in the day. We'll link the Hackaday piece about DisplayPort being better, but HDMI disgusts me.

• 1:02:14David Pierce?

  Sal ends his email by saying, I feel like I've been red pilled by DisplayPort, which is unbelievable.

• 1:02:20Nilay Patel?

  It's a very good, look, DisplayPort is packet based and I understand, I understand the point. Fine. Okay. Lightning round. Cranz, you've got the best one. Take us away.

• 1:02:30Alex Cranz?

  Are you ever like having a dinner party with your friends outside and you're like, I really want to watch some TV. So you go, you get your little suitcase out of the closet and you put it out and you watch your TV because it's in the suitcase. And then later you're like, oh man, I'm going camping with the buddies. I need to watch TV on my camping trip. So you bring your little suitcase with you. LG was like, everybody needs to be able to do that. Not just people who built a suitcase TV. The rest of us need to be able to do it. So there's the 27 inch standby Migo.

• 1:03:03David Pierce?

  To be clear, not stand by me, which would make sense.

• 1:03:06Alex Cranz?

  Stand by me.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  And not, not Migo, the Intel based mobile platform.

• 1:03:12Alex Cranz?

  I'm just, I'm going to say standby Migo. Like I refuse to, to break it out into one, in multiple words. It's beautiful. It can last three hours on a charge. You can get through one of the Lord of the Rings movies.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I just, how, like, there's so much room for, it's a suitcase. Wait.

• 1:03:32David Pierce?

  No, no, no.

• 1:03:33Nilay Patel?

  It's a 27 inch screen.

• 1:03:36David Pierce?

  You guys, I have, I have a revolutionary idea. Make the suitcase bigger. Give me more screen and more battery in a bigger suitcase.

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  My 16 inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip has a bigger battery life than this television.

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  11 inch smaller screen.

• 1:03:57Nilay Patel?

  You're telling me that it's just the pixels, but it can run an M1 chip.

• 1:04:02David Pierce?

  Well, it runs WebOS, which is probably the reason it only gets three hours.

• 1:04:06Speaker 05

  My favorite part of LG's promotional images of this is this is two young, very fashionable hit people sitting by a pool.

• 1:04:16Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:04:16Speaker 05

  And the guy is using the TV.

• 1:04:18Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:04:19Speaker 05

  To skip a track on the world's largest music widget. Cause it's 27 inches in size to just go to the next track and then, and they didn't pay for any licensing. So the song is song titled by artist's name.

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  If you, by the way, this is what I was going to call out to, perfect call out from Dan. If you're in your car, pull over now, the link is in the show notes. Go look at this picture. When, when, when marketing agencies come up with briefs for products, they're like, we, here's what we want people to feel. Here's how we're going to execute it. I want to know what they wanted you to feel. When they executed this photo, right? They had to do it. They had it, they had to get some tables, they had to get a lady with a book. They had to buy white linen clothes for this gentleman. He has a drink here, they put a lemon in it. They opened the suitcase. They were like, they instructed him to be pointing at the next track button in what looks like a clone of Apple Music,

• 1:05:20Nilay Patel?

  but is not Apple Music. All of that happened, like a series of decisions happened with intent. And I'm just dying to know. Like, I don't believe this TV is a touchscreen.

• 1:05:33Speaker 05

  I think it is.

• 1:05:34Nilay Patel?

  It is a touchscreen.

• 1:05:36Speaker 05

  In other points about this TV, one, it can rotate 90 degrees. So you can watch TikToks on it.

• 1:05:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it is a touchscreen. It has table mode.

• 1:05:44Speaker 05

  And yes, and then you could play chess on it with the touchscreen as they show in other photos.

• 1:05:49Alex Cranz?

  It's got Dolby Vision. It's got Dolby Atmos with four speakers.

• 1:05:54Nilay Patel?

  It's 1080p Dolby Vision.

• 1:05:57Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it's gonna be, yeah, like you're gonna watch your one half hour of a show because you probably forgot to charge it. So you've only got 30 minutes of time and you're gonna watch your 30 minutes of the nanny in Dolby Vision.

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  And it also has to get bright enough so you can actually see it outside. So it's got to run at like 1200 nits.

• 1:06:14David Pierce?

  It has an outdoor picture mode, which acknowledges the fact that you are out in the world. Like, Neel, if we're just gonna go down the road of like, how are we marketing this thing? The, the idea that they are giving is you're gonna bring this thing. You're gonna put it in the trunk of your car. You're gonna go camping. You're gonna open up the trunk of your car. You're gonna open up the suitcase. You're gonna, you're gonna swivel up the screen, turn it on, and you're gonna put on a, a video of a quote cozy, crackling fireplace. While you're out camping.

• 1:06:44Alex Cranz?

  Is that not what you do when you camp? You don't put the iPad out?

• 1:06:47David Pierce?

  Like, oh, we could make a fire. And you say, what do you mean? I've already made a fire. And you just pull the screen up. Not saying.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  I just want to point out, if you watch their video, they are all sitting around an outdoor dining table. And she opens the suitcase and opens the screen showing the fire.

• 1:07:02Alex Cranz?

  And then makes you watch a YouTube video.

• 1:07:04Nilay Patel?

  It's all very good.

• 1:07:05David Pierce?

  Do you, you say, I have made fire every time. It's amazing.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  Every single person on our staff wants to buy this TV. I don't know why.

• 1:07:12Alex Cranz?

  It's only a thousand dollars.

• 1:07:13Nilay Patel?

  It, that's the wrong way to think about money.

• 1:07:16Alex Cranz?

  It's only a thousand dollars.

• 1:07:17Nilay Patel?

  Many, like, an iPhone is a thousand dollars.

• 1:07:20Alex Cranz?

  Every outdoor dinner party is just transformed with this thousand dollar device.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  But if you preorder it, you get a free X Boom 360 speaker, which is $250. So really. It's like the TV is free.

• 1:07:34Nilay Patel?

  Wait, basically, yeah. Again, if you know what the intent of the man changes track on music player picture is, please, just like, please let me know.

• 1:07:45Alex Cranz?

  Touch.

• 1:07:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm, I'm just dying to know. I'm also dying for the first person to take this as a carry on on a plane and just. Bust it out of the tray table. But yeah, it's just like.

• 1:07:56Speaker 05

  The TSA will never let you get on a plane with this thing. They are gonna look at this thing and detain you for the longest time ever.

• 1:08:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're gonna be like, what is this music widget? But then you show them the fire and it's gonna be fine. All right, Dan, what's your, what's your lightning round?

• 1:08:11Speaker 05

  Uh, I'm gonna plug myself. I reviewed the, uh, three Galaxy Tab S9 tablets today on the site. And I'm just gonna say it. Android tablets are interesting this year.

• 1:08:21Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:08:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're back, baby.

• 1:08:23Alex Cranz?

  Finally.

• 1:08:24Speaker 05

  Android tablets. It's a year of Android tablets.

• 1:08:27Nilay Patel?

  When you say they're back.

• 1:08:28Alex Cranz?

  They never left.

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  Do you mean that they are back in a way that is competitive with the iPad? Or back in the sense that someone is releasing them?

• 1:08:38Speaker 05

  I would say that they are, uh, actually pretty interesting and good this, like.

• 1:08:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 05

  The, the interesting part about it is, uh, Samsung's been releasing high-end Android tablets that have been pretty decent for a few years now, but it's been only Samsung. And now there's like actual competition within the Android space. You could buy a Pixel tablet, or you could buy a OnePlus tablet, or you could buy, uh, a Lenovo tablet or something like that. Uh, Samsung still makes the best ones, but it also makes like the most expensive ones. So there's like actual variety. It's, there's different ideas happening. There's different experimentation. The software's gotten a lot better. Uh, there are actual ecosystems that have been built out. If you're a Samsung phone owner, it makes a lot of sense to use a Samsung tablet because it works together in the way that an iPhone works with an iPad. So.

• 1:09:24Alex Cranz?

  Wait.

• 1:09:24Speaker 05

  It's.

• 1:09:25Alex Cranz?

  Dan, aren't you a Samsung phone owner?

• 1:09:28Speaker 05

  I, I am.

• 1:09:29Alex Cranz?

  Use a Samsung tablet or do you use an iPad?

• 1:09:31Speaker 05

  I would say that, uh, nobody should buy their purchase decisions based on my own personal device choices.

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  Tracks.

• 1:09:40Speaker 05

  Because you will be entering regret.

• 1:09:43Nilay Patel?

  I've seen Dan use Dex.

• 1:09:45Speaker 05

  I use Dex. Like Dex is fascinating and like surprisingly capable at this point. It used to be a hot mess, but I think I wrote this entire piece on Dex. And I spent quite a few days actually working on Dex to like test the tablets and stuff. And it's, you know, pretty, pretty good.

• 1:10:03David Pierce?

  Dex is good now. I spent a decade going to meetings with Samsung, being like, you know Dex exists, right? What if you did anything to it? And they were like, meh, it's Dex. It's like a thing we put in slides, but no one actually uses. And now they've like made it into a thing. You can actually like have multiple windows in a way that isn't bad on your tablet. Like what a concept.

• 1:10:25Speaker 05

  It feels like Stage Manager, if you took all the binders off of Stage Manager and all the restrictions off of Stage Manager, and you did the thing that you want to do with Windows on a screen, that's what Dex is.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm just gonna, Dan, I'm just looking at your scores. I'm just, I'm just evaluating Android tablets or back.

• 1:10:42Speaker 05

  So you are a commenter on the website?

• 1:10:44Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I am the people. So you gave the Tab S9 an eight, which is fair, although 16 by 10 is.

• 1:10:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's my main complaint with the S9 is 16 by 10 is still a little blah.

• 1:10:56Nilay Patel?

  And then the S9 Ultra, which is the one that like, you know, the YouTubers just waved around in TikToks. It'd be like, look at this. And I got it. I was like, yep, look at that. But you gave that one a six because it's gigantic and ridiculous.

• 1:11:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  And $1,200.

• 1:11:13Alex Cranz?

  It's more expensive than the suitcase TV too.

• 1:11:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:11:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, it has a processor.

• 1:11:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, it does anything.

• 1:11:23Alex Cranz?

  Outrageously priced.

• 1:11:26Nilay Patel?

  And then the S9 Plus, you gave a six and this one just bleh. Like I don't even like looking at it.

• 1:11:32David Pierce?

  I feel like there's, there's required to be one tablet in every lineup that just makes no sense and no one should buy it.

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. You know, in a vacuum, the S9 Plus is great. You know, it's got a great screen, great performance. It's got all the benefits that the others have. It's just, it's too big to like comfortably use for tablet stuff. And then it's like, if you are going to buy it for productivity, just buy the Ultra, because that gives you the space to really be productive in a way that the Plus doesn't.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  For, for $200 more, you can have the one that people go, whoa.

• 1:12:06Nilay Patel?

  That's this product. Like you look at an S9 Ultra, you're like, holy shit. That that's a thing that exists. You look at the S9 Plus and you're like, well, I'm gonna buy an iPad. Like, that's that product. It's like, this is the one that is the most head on with an iPad. The bezels are big.

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  I would say that the bezels are not that big.

• 1:12:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh, in this photo, it looks like.

• 1:12:28Speaker 05

  Maybe they look that way in the photo. You know what it is? It's uh, because that photo is a photo of a video in 16 by 9, so it's making it look bigger. But if you look at the side, you can see the bezels on the side. They're not that big.

• 1:12:39Alex Cranz?

  So if you watch anything, if you watch the vast majority of TV today, it'll look like it has huge bezels.

• 1:12:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, cuz it's great on an iPad. 4:3 movies. That's my favorite.

• 1:12:50Nilay Patel?

  Okay, um, this is my defense of 4:3. 4:3 is the God's chosen aspect ratio. For portable computers.

• 1:12:56David Pierce?

  Our Lord and Savior 4:3.

• 1:12:58Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying 69 and 1610 screens are horrible. 1610 is the worst of all worlds. Right? Cuz you watch a movie, you still get the weird letterboxing. And then you try to do any work and or hold it, God forbid, in portrait. And you're like, well, I'm just a guy with a rectangle. Everyone look at me.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  An iPad, like 4:3 is like you make one compromise on watching video. You make one compromise and everything else is great. 69, you make one compromise, which is useful for it, which is that it's useless for anything but watching video.

• 1:13:31David Pierce?

  Oh my god, the thing is enormous, Dan.

• 1:13:33Nilay Patel?

  See, that good sport.

• 1:13:35Alex Cranz?

  That's a thing.

• 1:13:36Speaker 05

  It's a platter. This is, this is the Ultra.

• 1:13:38Nilay Patel?

  We have not, we have not spent enough time on the show. Just, we, look, the audience has grown. We've added a second episode. We gotta do an entire episode that's just like, there's one correct aspect ratio.

• 1:13:49David Pierce?

  No, you're wrong. The correct aspect ratio is 3:2 on laptops. That's it. There's no other good answer. 4:3, you just said the only compromise with 4:3 is watching video, which is the main thing most people do all the time.

• 1:14:05David Pierce?

  It's like, remember when Macs were good, except the keyboards sucked? Like, it turns out keyboards are pretty important.

• 1:14:11Speaker 05

  To Samsung's credit, these devices are phenomenal for watching video. Like, the screens are tremendous, the sound is tremendous. Like, these are entertainment machines. It's just personally, if I'm going to spend $1,200 on a device, I'm going to want to do more than just watch a movie once a week or whatever on it. And so like, I do want to get more out of it.

• 1:14:29Alex Cranz?

  When do we get like a 2.39 aspect ratio on a tablet?

• 1:14:35Speaker 05

  Like that Toshiba laptop that had the 21 by 9 screen?

• 1:14:38Alex Cranz?

  I want to feel like I'm watching a movie in the 60s on CineRama. Like, I just want it, wow.

• 1:14:44Nilay Patel?

  Christopher Nolan is like, I made a laptop.

• 1:14:48Nilay Patel?

  You're not going to believe how wide it is.

• 1:14:52Alex Cranz?

  That's all I want.

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, David, what's your, what's your pick?

• 1:14:54David Pierce?

  Mine's quick. It's, I've been following all this Google SGE AI search stuff for a while. And Google this week, in the, in the guise of like relatively, you know, minor feature update, rolled out a thing where you can now use SGE as you look at webpages and it will summarize them for you. And you can like interact with webpages through Google's AI. And it's like, that's not a small thing. That's like an enormous leap in Google making Chrome like the AI hub of the internet, which is messy and weird and complicated and fascinating. Uh, and they're also putting more AI stuff in the sidebar of Chrome.

• 1:15:34David Pierce?

  So it's like very quietly, AI is coming like front and center to the entire web browsing experience through Google. And like you talk about kind of AI all the way down. Like, we're going to get to the point where Google's AI is summarizing AI-generated webpages that you found through Google's AI-powered search. And it's just all going to get real, real, real weird. But Google, like Bing has been so loud about like, we are putting Bing everywhere. Like, Google is being very quiet about it, but it's basically doing the same thing.

• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the, especially the sidebar stuff. The interesting thing about SGE right now is Google featured snippets are still often superior to SGE. Like, the AI will like overwrite, you know, like a precocious 7th grader. And it's like, no, I just needed the answer to the question.

• 1:16:23David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:16:23Nilay Patel?

  I don't need all this preamble.

• 1:16:24David Pierce?

  It can't answer a question. Like if, if a question has a simple answer, it's, it can help you like, explore the universe of, of your question, but it can't just be like seven.

• 1:16:38Nilay Patel?

  This thing though, this these SGE features where it's summarizing pages, there's something going on in the background. I don't know what it is. If you work with New York Times, please tell me what it is. There's something going on with the New York Times and Google and OpenAI that I have not been able to, to piece out. But if you look at New York Times's robots.txt, it, it allows everything. It allows Google, allows OpenAI. It's, it literally is star dot whatever. All out. There's no, very few things are blocked, which is fascinating. Uh, we got actually a question from a reporter when OpenAI rolled out its crawler that, once you have a crawler, you can block it. Uh, so they just rolled it out and someone asked us, hey, why do you block it? And the reason is actually contained in a piece David wrote about Nilay, which is,

• 1:17:19Nilay Patel?

  the internet has been so fixed for so long that most places only allowed Google and Bing, because Bing powered all the other search engines for so long. So you only needed to allow Google and Bing and everything else was just cost, right? Like a, an infinite amount of crawlers coming over your pages is just server costs you don't need to pay because there's Google and there's Bing. So most publishers, most pages only allow that. So OpenAI, now that they have a new crawler, they gotta go get permission from everyone. The Times allows everything, but then there was a report this week that they might sue OpenAI because they're really mad at them and they want a deal and they have a deal with Google that no one knows the terms of. I'm telling you, there's this thing that is happening with AI on the web and all these features that are quietly rolling out in the background of it

• 1:18:04Nilay Patel?

  is like a nuclear explosion of lawsuits. It is just coming and it's, it's going to be wild. And we're going to talk about it at the Code Conference, September 26th and 27th in California.

• 1:18:15Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 1:18:16Nilay Patel?

  It was good. I got there in the end. Actually, my lightning round ones are all AI too.

• 1:18:20Alex Cranz?

  Ones.

• 1:18:21David Pierce?

  You'll notice, yeah, Neelai said ones because unlike the rest of us, Neelai is incapable of following the rules.

• 1:18:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's two that are the same one. It's two that are the same thing. So OpenAI rolled out GPT-4 to do content moderation, which is terrifying.

• 1:18:37David Pierce?

  But everybody treated this like it was a new thing. They were like, oh, they're gonna have humans looking at the production of the algorithm, and then they're gonna feed it back into the algorithm.

• 1:18:46Alex Cranz?

  You just did a story.

• 1:18:47David Pierce?

  What a novel concept. And it's like, that's how it has worked forever.

• 1:18:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like Facebook and YouTube in particular have been like, this is a problem and maybe AI can solve. Like, do you think Google has not been trying to do AI in content moderation on YouTube for ages? They've been doing it. That said, Casey asked a bunch of experts about it in Platformer. You go read it. The experts seem to really like this idea. They think it is faster. They think they can build some tools. Importantly, they think a bunch of startup social networks can use tools like this. You don't need the resources of a Microsoft. You don't need the resources of a Meta or a Google or whatever. There's something there. Importantly, if you go to Europe and all these other places, they have laws in the books now that say you have to be able to explain your content moderation decisions, and it's not clear if GPT-4 can do that. So.

• 1:19:35Alex Cranz?

  It can't.

• 1:19:37Nilay Patel?

  Or they gotta build it. I mean.

• 1:19:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was like, it can't yet.

• 1:19:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, part of what they said they're doing is part of the process is asking the model to explain itself. And as we've seen, like, the more recursive you get with these LLMs, the weirder and worse they all get. But, uh, but it's an interesting road to go down. And I think you're right. Like, even if all this does is get everybody to, like, you can plug and play C-plus content moderation, like, that's already a huge win for the internet.

• 1:20:03Alex Cranz?

  Are we gonna have a point where the content moderation, like, where they ask the chat GPT to explain itself? And, and we're gonna have to talk about how it just claimed that it was like a unicorn that longs for death? Like.

• 1:20:16Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Like, I, I, I think we'll see. I mean, the, the flip side of this, which, right? We're, we're talking about putting a robot in a position to censor content is in Iowa school district, there are book bans across this country right now. This is a real problem. They decided they weren't going to read the books. They were just going to ask ChatGPT to summarize all the books in the library and tell them which ones to ban, which is like a pure abdication of 2D. Like, that is the laziest shit I have ever heard in my entire life. If you are going to ban books, don't, right? Like, first. Second, like, do, do the work. Be like, we, we asked a robot to tell us what books to ban.

• 1:20:58Nilay Patel?

  Like, this is the, the beginning of the use of the tool beyond just the cool demos you see on TikTok. It's, oh, lazy people are going to make stupid decisions with it that impact like lots of things.

• 1:21:10Alex Cranz?

  This was, I mean, this was also kind of a protest because they're being required. They have to go do it all themselves. Like, they didn't, they weren't given a list of books. They were basically said you'll be like subject to big fines and stuff if you don't put together your list of books and have it done by a certain time. So that's why, like, they were like, okay, well, we'll just do it fast and have ChatGPT do it because you don't care about the kids. So why should we? It was kind of like my read of, of why they were doing it.

• 1:21:36Nilay Patel?

  A protest chat, ChatGPT banning.

• 1:21:38Alex Cranz?

  Still not great. It's still like, still books getting banned and kids don't have access to important media, but like.

• 1:21:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, it got attention from us. So there's that. But I would say this is the flip side of we, we want it to be able to explain itself. When you start making decisions like, we'll let the robot summarize the book so we can ban it from our library. You really need that robot to be able to explain itself. And so that's why I said it's two things that are kind of the same thing. Like, we're going to put it in charge of speech on the internet. It should really be able to explain itself because people, once you start saying this is an acceptable thing to do with it, people are going to use it in truly bizarre ways. Last two things, we mentioned this briefly at the top of the show, the special counsel, Jack Smith, has obtained Trump's DMs from Twitter. We won't go into it, except to say, this is why we are constantly banging on about encryption. And if this brings our two

• 1:22:28Nilay Patel?

  parties into alignment on the need for end-to-end encryption on our platforms, I'll take it. Because that's why you have it. Also, your Twitter DMs have never been deleted. They just get hidden when you hit delete. Use encrypted platforms, people. Use them. Don't DM people on Twitter. All right. Last one, Krans is a Microsoft event in New York coming up.

• 1:22:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, September 21st, we're going to get a Microsoft event. Sounds like we'll probably get some surfaces because they frequently do one in like September, October. There's usually a big Surface event. So it sounds like we'll get some of that. Who knows what else? Microsoft's been very busy this year, so I wouldn't be surprised if we see other stuff, but who can say?

• 1:23:09David Pierce?

  I believe they're going to talk about AI would be my guess.

• 1:23:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12David Pierce?

  If I had to just kind of wildly stab in the dark, I think it's possible that the word co-pilot will be mentioned.

• 1:23:20Nilay Patel?

  When you turn on the new Surface, it's like, have you broken up with your wife yet?

• 1:23:25Alex Cranz?

  I'm here for you.

• 1:23:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of Microsoft AI, Code Conference, September 26, 27, Microsoft CTF Kevin Scott. Definitely going to talk about AI.

• 1:23:34David Pierce?

  September, by the way, is going to be nuts. We assume there's going to be an Apple event the second week of September. There's going to be an Amazon event on the 20th. This is going to be on the 21st. Code is then, Meta Connect, I believe, is at the end of September. Like, it's going to be full crazy coming back. Like, for all the Vergecast listeners who are like, oh, talk about more gadgets. Oh, it's coming, y'all. It is coming.

• 1:23:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. These August Vergecasts were just like, here's a grab bag of cool stuff to talk. No, no, no. Dead focus.

• 1:24:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:04Nilay Patel?

  It's coming.

• 1:24:05David Pierce?

  It is coming.

• 1:24:06Alex Cranz?

  Four hours.

• 1:24:07Nilay Patel?

  All right. Speaking of which, everyone go get some rest. Pull over in your car, take a nap by the side of the road, and get ready for September.

• 1:24:12David Pierce?

  Put the, put the fire on your suitcase TV and take a nap.

• 1:24:17Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta wrap up. David, you've got a new newsletter called Installer. Tell people about that.

• 1:24:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's basically just designed to point people towards all the cool things that exist on the internet. We've put out one issue so far. The second one's coming out this weekend. It's been really fun. A lot of people got really mad, which I assume is a sign that it's fun and interesting and things are going well. We're changing up a bunch of stuff, learning new things all the time. Theverge.com/installer and also send me all the cool things. The best thing about this newsletter has been that everybody now tags me in funny things on the internet. It is awesome. I love it very much.

• 1:24:47Nilay Patel?

  Go subscribe and saw it is very fun. I will say I will not apologize for not deleting two-factor notifications.

• 1:24:56Nilay Patel?

  The number of people are like, why do you have all these unread? I'm like, they're like five-year-old two-factor. I typed in the code already and they're like, go delete. I'm like, I'm not using my time that way. You can come over to my house and blow an hour deleting old notifications.

• 1:25:09Speaker 05

  Iowa 17 is here to save you, Neil. It will delete them automatically.

• 1:25:13Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be beautiful. I cannot wait. The number of emails I get where I'm like, yep, I saw that subject line and I refuse to take. If the phone could just read my mind, that it's like, your order is ready is not a thing that I need to take any further action on.

• 1:25:27Speaker 05

  You need like Superman's laser eyes and just like blast them.

• 1:25:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just be able to squint at the phone.

• 1:25:32Alex Cranz?

  That's what humane's gonna do. Don't worry.

• 1:25:36David Pierce?

  You just tell your hand, like, I got it.

• 1:25:39Alex Cranz?

  Delete all the bad emails.

• 1:25:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. That's a Vergecast. Send us photos of your computer and some dying to see the good ones, not your modern garbage ones. They're probably great. In a couple of weeks, we'll ask for those too. Yeah, but I'm looking for, you know, that that that tone of wood that was sold in the Office Mac? That I want that. All right. We love you. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:26:05Speaker 06

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Moreno. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:26:36Speaker 07

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess Collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.

• 1:27:06Speaker 08

  Looking for a simple way to thank your clients or recognize employees for a job well done? A Starbucks Card is more than a gift. It's a pick-me-up, a break in their day, and a reminder that you appreciate them. Whether you're shopping for digital or physical cards in bulk, Starbucks Cards are the perfect gift to brighten anyone's day. Share the joy of coffee and connection when you give the gift of Starbucks. Shop Starbucks Cards in Bulk now at starbuckscardbtob.com.