Amazon and Microsoft's AI parades

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss all the announcements from Amazon's fall product launch event and Microsoft's Surface and AI event. Further reading: Amazon’s fall 2023 product launch event: live news, announcements, and more Amazon is set to supercharge Alexa with generative AI The Fire TV should be at the heart of Amazon's smart home The new $269.99 Echo Frames look a whole lot more like glasses. Alexa Eye Gaze offers a new way to control Alexa on a Fire tablet In the new Echo Show 8, Alexa will be 40 percent faster. Finally some hardware...for kids. YouTube is going all in on AI with background and video topic suggestions YouTube made a video editing app — just like TikTok Microsoft Surface event: the 6 biggest announcements Microsoft’s new Xbox controller borrows great ideas from Stadia, Steam, and Sony This is Microsoft’s new disc-less Xbox Series X design with a lift-to-wake controller Microsoft’s next Xbox, coming 2028, envisions hybrid computing Microsoft addresses the huge Xbox leaks: here’s Phil Spencer’s full memo Microsoft’s Phil Spencer says acquiring Nintendo would be ‘a career moment’ Microsoft announces the Surface Laptop Studio 2 with upgraded chips and ports A first look at Microsoft’s upgraded Surface Laptop Studio 2 Microsoft announces the new Surface Laptop Go 3 Hands-on with the Surface Laptop Go 3 The Surface Go 4 comes with a much-needed performance boost Microsoft 365 Copilot launches in November Windows 11’s next big update arrives on September 26th with Copilot, RAR support, and more Microsoft announces Surface Hub 3 with portrait mode The cable bundle of the future is officially here Google’s Bard chatbot can now find answers in your Gmail, Docs, Drive The Home Assistant Green is here to make the most powerful smart home platform more accessible 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.

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of a scandal that's taking over the pole dancing, not the pole dancing community. The flagship podcast of Ed Sheeran tearing the line dancing community apart.

• 1:24Alex Cranz?

  What?

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  This is, this is just random TikTok knowledge I have now.

• 1:27David Pierce?

  Oh, have you entered shiver TikTok?

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29David Pierce?

  Welcome.

• 1:30Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  It just follows me around the internet now as people line dancing to shivers by Ed Sheeran. And then the comments are like, this isn't real line dancing.

• 1:40Alex Cranz?

  Like doing the electric slide and the little dosey do.

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  The line dancing situation, it's the next big trend.

• 1:45Alex Cranz?

  It's coming to a honky tonk near you.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  But shivers by Ed Sheeran is, David appears to know.

• 1:50David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. I've been, I've been deep in, in shiver dancing TikTok for a long time, as we call it.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  And it's deeply controversial.

• 1:57Alex Cranz?

  Because it's Ed Sheeran.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  Because it's Ed Sheeran.

• 2:00Alex Cranz?

  That's not what I want to listen to.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  There are entire people who have built careers off of line dancing to shivers by Ed Sheeran.

• 2:07Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  And the commenters are like, this isn't country music. And their response to the commenters are, I post other songs, only shivers gets views.

• 2:15Alex Cranz?

  I hate it.

• 2:18Alex Cranz?

  I don't like it.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. It's it is easily my favorite low stakes internet drama. Is why like, you know how there's a theory that like, the Chinese government is manipulating TikTok to destabilize America?

• 2:32Alex Cranz?

  That's how they're doing it.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  The algorithm is like, you will dance to shivers.

• 2:36Alex Cranz?

  That's where we get our civil war.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  It's a very good. Hello, I'm your friend, Eli. Alex Trans is here in the studio with me.

• 2:41Alex Cranz?

  I'm just really upset today. It's all good.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna play shivers later. David Pierce is here.

• 2:45David Pierce?

  Hi, my theory about the shiver thing is that this is this generation's Cotton Eye Joe in that it's a song and a dance that don't make any sense in context and no one should ever do that involves like leg kicking.

• 2:57Alex Cranz?

  You gotta slap the leg.

• 2:58David Pierce?

  But it has taken over the universe. This is it's Cotton Eye Joe 2.0.

• 3:03Alex Cranz?

  I never mind, I love this trench now with like that read.

• 3:07David Pierce?

  It's all good.

• 3:07Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful.

• 3:08David Pierce?

  There's no downside.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm expecting a 10,000 word shivers feature. How shivers is tearing country music apart.

• 3:14Alex Cranz?

  David and I are on it.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  The country music has gone through quite a lot right now. I'm saying shivers is the C plot.

• 3:19Alex Cranz?

  It is, because there's like, there's the guy who's like, the alternative music version of country and he's taking on bro country.

• 3:27Nilay Patel?

  We have so much to get through on the show.

• 3:29Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  We're here at shivers. Okay, there's a lot on the show today, a lot. Amazon had a big event, they announced not as much stuff as they usually announce their events, but a bunch of stuff, big push in generative AI, Microsoft had an event, YouTube had an event, Microsoft had massive product leaks, which were vastly more interesting than their event.

• 3:49Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 3:49David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 3:49Nilay Patel?

  There's other stuff going on. There's the Google antitrust case, just in the background of all of this, which has its own controversy embedded in it. And then next week is the code conference. So just quite a lot going on in Virg, like September is here.

• 4:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Nilay Patel?

  We're no longer getting ready for September. There's enough going on in Virg world this week that the Wednesday show is all about the iPhone reviews, because we need to just clear the decks for today's show.

• 4:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Nilay Patel?

  All right, so let me give you the quick update on the Google trial. And it will be quick because it is deeply frustrating. No one knows what's going on in the Google trial.

• 4:24Alex Cranz?

  Including both sides?

• 4:25Nilay Patel?

  No, I think they might have an idea. So, most federal court cases are locked down. This is true. If you look back over the past year or so, more and more of them are starting to open up, right? They're allowing documents to be posted. There's some cases, audio is being streamed. Certainly reporters are in the courtroom. Just look at the Microsoft case, which has resulted in this giant leak, which we'll get to. But you know what happened in FTC versus Microsoft, we were able to cover for you. You know what happened in Epic versus Apple, we were able to just cover for you. Do you know what's happening in Google versus the DOJ? Or the DOJ versus Google? You don't. Because reporters in the courtroom are not allowed to have devices, which means they have to take notes by hand. And Google,

• 5:07Nilay Patel?

  the judge, the DOJ are in some extremely annoying fight about public access to documents. So, Google published a bunch of documents on its website about its opening arguments, et cetera, et cetera. The DOJ tried to do that. Google got mad at them. All those documents have now come down off the DOJ's website, and there is some sort of argument happening amongst the two parties and the judge about whether the documents will come back. In particular, one document, which we don't know what it is, which is, quote, "embarrassing" to Google.

• 5:40Alex Cranz?

  I want that one.

• 5:41Nilay Patel?

  That's the one I want. One of Google's financial executives was testifying. That was closed to reporters. So reporters, taking notes by longhand, weren't even allowed in the room. We believe that, as you're hearing this on Friday, that Apple executives will be in the courtroom. But no one has posted a schedule, so we don't know. It's just bonkers.

• 6:00David Pierce?

  Yeah. And even the, like, semi-haphazard ways that information was being shared have all sort of disappeared. In part, I think, because of these behind-the-scenes machinations going on, but also because Judge Meta seemed to get so angry at these documents going up that now everything is going to get even more locked down. For the foreseeable future, like we're what? We're what? Two weeks into a 10 week trial? And other than those first couple of days, we basically don't know anything. Somebody sent me a picture of a like old school typewriter and was like, take this to the courtroom. They can't stop you. It's not an electronic. And I think that's the coolest flex of all time. But it is very weird.

• 6:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:41David Pierce?

  I get why Google in particular would very much like for it to be this way because it's not interested in losing this fight in the court of public opinion. I don't know for sure that they're the ones driving this, but I can certainly see why they would. But it's very strange that this is where we've landed in this process.

• 6:58Nilay Patel?

  Addie Robertson is covering the case very closely, as closely as we can, who's been in the courtroom for us. I'm like, we should write this story that's like, Google's trying to hide. And she's like, that's not what's happening. It's the judge.

• 7:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 7:10Nilay Patel?

  Right. Her opinion of this is it's the judge is like, I'm going to be in control of this. And I get it. And you could make a case from sort of an outcome basis that not making the trial into the circus will allow the court to reach a good and fair outcome. And then we can like check their work in the end because all of it's public. But there's also the fact that like, one of the biggest companies in America is facing antitrust charges that may or may not result in it being broken up or the structure of its deals with Apple's change. And we just don't know. Like, we do not know what's going on in that trial right now. I think that's absurd, but that is the state of the Google trial. That's the update, which is it's Schrodinger's trial. Is there an antitrust trial in that? Who knows? Probably. Is Google liable? Who knows?

• 7:55Nilay Patel?

  So that's that. The other update I want to give everybody is the Code Conference is next week. I'm hosting it with Casey Newton and Julia Boorstein from CNBC. It's going to be great. I've been speaking to some of the people to prepare. We're going to appear on stage, so I'm very excited about Getty's going to show off. I'm very excited about Microsoft's going to show off. Adobe has some stuff they've told us they're going to show off. I think it's all going to be really fun. Here's the news, though. The UAW is on strike against three major American automakers and Mary Barra, CEO GM, dropped out today. Oh. She doesn't, she doesn't want to give any fodder to the negotiations, which I sort of understand. She took with her, like, it's sort of, I just want to be clear. I can intellectually understand why she I do not understand why she doesn't want to just say what she needs to say, but whatever.

• 8:39Nilay Patel?

  She took with her Mike Abbott, their new executive vice president of software, who is gonna, because why does GM want to be at the Code Conference?

• 8:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  Talk about EVs, talk about the fact that they dropped CarPlay. And so I have said to our team, the only moment that matters at Code is me asking Mary Bear why she took CarPlay out of the Escalade. Yep. We were like, prepared for it. And now I cannot deliver that moment to you.

• 9:02Alex Cranz?

  Did you have like four versions of the question for her?

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. You can't evade, you can't dodge it. I think it sucks, but the people love it, right? What are you gonna do? It shivers. I brought an Escalade out on stage. Here it is. Explain. That's true. We have the CEO of Monarch Tractor, by the way, an EV tractor. And I was like, will you drive the tractor on stage? And he goes, it's very heavy. That was the end of that conversation. It's gonna be cool. The Polestar 3 is gonna be a code, which I think is gonna be really cool. You'll see some of that. That is basically just released. I'm just excited about a bunch of stuff that's happening at Code, but Mary Bear is leaving. That said, and we'll not reveal it at this moment, we are 99% sure that another CEO of an EV company will be there.

• 9:44Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:45Nilay Patel?

  Like a good one.

• 9:46Alex Cranz?

  Okay. I was like Elon? No.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  No. It's funny how you can interpret like a good one in many ways.

• 9:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  But a good one.

• 9:52Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, one that you want to hear from.

• 9:54Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  And then I got another idea that I'm working on, which I think will be cool. So, that's the code update. It's September 26th and 27th. We will have like wall-to-wall coverage on The Verge. I'll be there with Casey and Julia. You can buy, you go to voxmedia.com code, you can buy virtual tickets now, they're $5 if you want to like follow along. Otherwise, tons of coverage on the site. We, you know, pay attention to Code. It's the thing I'm doing. Okay, let's talk about the news. Should we start with Amazon?

• 10:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there was an Amazon event. David and I went. We hung out. Yeah. I took the train down. That was the worst decision of my life. That was horrible. I took two trains.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  So there's like a lot of drama with these Amazon and Microsoft events.

• 10:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Nilay Patel?

  Like meta-drama.

• 10:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's so fun.

• 10:34Alex Cranz?

  It's my favorite part of this. Like, I think that was the big conversation of the week. Because the gadgets, and there was a lot of cool gadgets, and the gadgets are deep, and we're gonna talk about the gadgets. But the big thing was Panos Panay. Is he runs all the devices and windows at Microsoft, or he did because this week sudden announcement he's leaving, which is wild because there's a Microsoft event this week.

• 10:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Alex Cranz?

  David Limp left Amazon a couple of months ago and Bloomberg reports Panos Panay is going to be taking over his job, David Limp's job at Amazon. So then the Amazon event happened on Wednesday. Microsoft event happens on Thursday. And meanwhile, we've got these two guys who've been running these departments, running these events, deciding what's going to be on stage, figuring out how these things work and operate are both like huge mix up, huge change up. And it's just like.

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  I wish there was, I wish it was a true swap.

• 11:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:28Nilay Patel?

  That's really what, it's like, it would be perfect if, if Limp was going to Microsoft and Panos is going to this. But Limp is just out.

• 11:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Limp's done. He's, he seems very happy. He seems chilled to be, to be moving on with his life.

• 11:41Nilay Patel?

  I like Dave Limp a lot.

• 11:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  We, we've talked to him a bunch. He's been on Decoder. He's a very smart guy. He, he's always said the right things to us. I would say, looking at his tenure over Amazon devices, not a lot of heat there.

• 11:53Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's not fair. His strategy was interesting.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  What do you mean?

• 11:56Alex Cranz?

  Because the strategy was about, we're going to see what sticks. We want to like, we're new in this department.

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  I want to hear why David says it's not fair.

• 12:02David Pierce?

  The Echo has been a gigantic success. The Kindle has been a gigantic success.

• 12:06Nilay Patel?

  Wait, the Kindle has been a gigantic success. The Echo is not a gigantic success. And Alexa is not a gigantic. It does not make any money.

• 12:13David Pierce?

  Fair. Sure. That's it. Those are two different questions.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  And you would not even say that people are passionate about these products.

• 12:20David Pierce?

  Oh, Dave Limp would say that. Dave Limp said that to me, to my face after the Amazon event, that people love their Echoes. I mean, one of the questions I asked him, they had this whole run about generative AI and wanting their AIs to seem like human, right? Like, that's their big thing. They wanted to say ums and ahs and feel like a member of your family. And I feel like if we've learned one thing about AI over the last 12 months, it's that that's a bad, dangerous, problematic idea. So I asked him that. I was like, why shouldn't this thing just be a tool that I use when I need it? Why should it be my friend? That seems scary. And he was like, that's how people do it. They say they love you to their Echo and, and we're going to keep leaning into that. Like. There is real affinity for that stuff. Most people just like play timers and ask silly

• 13:05David Pierce?

  questions, but like, that's, that thing is real. Amazon's problem is that it's not a hardware company, right? Like, their whole thing has always been, we don't make money when you buy our products, we make money when you use our products, right? So like, they don't make money on the Kindle, they make money when you buy books on the Kindle. The problem is they never found a way for you to buy anything through the Echo.

• 13:24Nilay Patel?

  But this is just what I mean. We're agreeing more than disagreeing. When I say there's not a lot of heat on these products, the Kindle is its own thing. It's its own weird, closed ecosystem. They put out new Kindles every couple of years.

• 13:35Alex Cranz?

  Monstrously successful.

• 13:36Nilay Patel?

  And people just buy new ones. And, fine. And it is a cultural product in its way. Although I think the, the sort of cultural impact of print books continues and grows in its own way, which I think is fascinating. The Echo, people set timers with, and it's really useful. And little kids ask it to tell jokes, and you can dress an Echo Dot up like a Mickey Man, like all that stuff. But it has just been that for the longest time. And maybe some of this generative AI stuff will change that, but they haven't grown it into a business. They haven't figured out how to get people to do anything other than set timers and play music. Like, at all. The smart home stuff has kind of petered out, and we're all waiting for Matter to do whatever, and they've made some of those announcements. And then the hardware itself is like somewhat stagnated.

• 14:21David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. Not even somewhat. It is fully stagnated. Even the new stuff they're launching is just like big plushy screens, just like the other big plushy screens, like-

• 14:29Alex Cranz?

  With Thread routers.

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sure.

• 14:31Alex Cranz?

  Zigbee.

• 14:32Nilay Patel?

  They've updated the stuff. And again, I like Dave, and I think he has the right ideas. When you talk to him about smart home stuff in particular, he's like all in on the good standards and making sure the stuff works. Like, he says all the right things, and he's honest, which is like the highest compliment I can give. But I think that the Fire, that's a good pun for Amazon devices, it just seems like they hit a dead end, and they didn't know what to do next. And I think you bring in Panos Panay,

• 15:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Nilay Patel?

  who's all fire, all the time. And he's gonna go and like, try some stuff and be bold about it, which I think is great. I think his tenure at Surface, in particular, has been underappreciated.

• 15:14David Pierce?

  Oh, I agree.

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, he completely rebooted the idea of Windows laptops from his position at Microsoft.

• 15:19David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 15:19Nilay Patel?

  And we've talked about it a bunch on the show, but basically, he walked into Best Buy and said, "Why are every Windows laptop here, why is it under a thousand dollars? And we have just seeded the high end to Apple."

• 15:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  And then they invented a bunch of stuff. And importantly, I think this is totally undercover, they gave that technology away to the Windows OEMs.

• 15:39David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 15:39Nilay Patel?

  So I've walked around CES with Panos, and he's like, "Those are my hinges." And pointing at laptops, like, "Those are my hinges, those are my... Like, here's all the stuff we made that we just gave away."

• 15:48David Pierce?

  He pulled off the thing Google has been trying to do with Pixel for years, which is like, teach the ecosystem how to make better stuff. Yeah. Like, he did that to the Windows ecosystem.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:57David Pierce?

  Like, if you have a Windows laptop, it is better because of Panos Panay. Like, it just, it just is.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:03David Pierce?

  And I think that's really cool. Can I tell you my most galaxy-brained take about all of this? I've been talking to people and asking around, and I have no actual evidence for this, but I'm increasingly convinced that I'm right. Do you want to hear my theory? Yes. My theory is that Panos Panay wants nothing more than to make a next-generation smartphone. He has been toying with this with the Surface Duo. He's been goofing around with this idea with a bunch of different Windows things over the years. He has like, tried desperately to figure out what is the smartphone-y thing that comes right after candy bar smartphones. Microsoft, I don't think, has any interest in making smartphones anymore.

• 16:40Nilay Patel?

  Or even supporting the one that it made.

• 16:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's over that. You know who desperately, desperately would love a reason to get back into the smartphone game? Is Amazon. Because the reason Alexa can't win...

• 16:52David Pierce?

  Is because it's not on your phone in a meaningful, device-integrated, super-useful way. It is the single most important device you have, and it is the worst Alexa device. And if you gave Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy like all the money in the world, they would go back and make the Fire Phone better, because it would have changed Amazon forever. And I think somebody came up to Panos and said, "We are going to let you build the foldable phone of your dreams, and it's, we're gonna kick ass with it." And that's why he's going to Amazon.

• 17:17Nilay Patel?

  This is your theory?

• 17:18David Pierce?

  This is my theory.

• 17:19Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's a good theory. I like it.

• 17:21David Pierce?

  I know for sure the phone thing at Amazon is right. I am 100% sure that Amazon believes very strongly that if it wants to win, it should figure out how to make phones, and that that is a way to do this.

• 17:33Alex Cranz?

  We saw them set the table for that at the Amazon event. Because the Amazon event was about the Show 8, which seems really nice. I wasn't enthusiastic about it until I spent an hour with Jen, and now I'm like, "Yeah, that's cool as hell."

• 17:46David Pierce?

  Jen's good like that.

• 17:48Alex Cranz?

  She's very good at like that. And, you know, there was that, and there was the Hub, and all of that. But most of that event was on Alexa, and on how Alexa is different than Siri and Google Assistant, and better. And I don't know if that's true, because we didn't get to actually play around with it a lot, because all of the demos had massive guardrails.

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 18:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like, I was like, "I wanna go break the..."

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  That's how you know the generative AI is like about to say some crazy stuff.

• 18:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:17Nilay Patel?

  It's like, "We want to ask you," because it'll be like, "You wanna bang?"

• 18:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I wanna define some... I was like, "How can I make..."

• 18:23Nilay Patel?

  What if we set a timer for five minutes to get it on, you know?

• 18:26Alex Cranz?

  Just play the music?

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  What about, "You'd need seven minutes for that?" I have to stop.

• 18:35Alex Cranz?

  I just hear the guitar.

• 18:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, look, if you're listening, and you're at Amazon, you're on the Alexa team.

• 18:39Alex Cranz?

  Make it horny.

• 18:40Nilay Patel?

  Horny Bing rebooted Microsoft on the front page of the New York Times. Just send one Alexa to Kevin Roos. It could happen to you.

• 18:50Alex Cranz?

  But not one of the kid Alexas?

• 18:51Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 18:54Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so why did Jen get you so excited?

• 18:58Alex Cranz?

  I think her enthusiasm for it as a hub, because that poor woman is on a quest to find something that will actually work as a hub, where you don't have to say, yeah, this will work, but, because that's with all smart home hubs, every single smart home hub, you're like, perfect, you will not need anything else, except, actually, you're gonna need this.

• 19:16Nilay Patel?

  Can I, can I give you my tiny little example of this right now?

• 19:19Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  So we have a new house. So Jen and I, there are lots of backchanneling.

• 19:22Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:23Nilay Patel?

  And it's not, it's not great. Matter is not ready. Do not buy. Look, it's a bad time to buy a house for a lot of reasons, but if you're listening to the show, it's a bad time to buy a house, because you're gonna want to put smart stuff in it, and the standard is not ready.

• 19:36Alex Cranz?

  Nope.

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  It is just not ready. So you are trapped into buying obsolete technology. It is the worst feeling in the world.

• 19:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  You're like, I'm gonna go all in on HomeKit, like, whatever. Except, here's what HomeKit can't do, you can't tell HomeKit where you live.

• 19:52Alex Cranz?

  What? Nope.

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  So, you just can't. There's no direct interface for being like, my house is here. It just detects it off your phone, and if you've set up new routers with new MAC addresses, Apple TV doesn't have GPS in it, so it just decides where your house is gonna be. When you set it up as a hub, it's like, I've never seen that MAC address before on this router. You probably live in your old house, right? Just bonkers. And every, every smart home thing, like, it's just missing one thing. For example, HomeKit, missing an address field.

• 20:28David Pierce?

  Minor detail.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  Minor detail.

• 20:31Alex Cranz?

  Little one.

• 20:32Nilay Patel?

  You look at the Reddit threads of people who are like, HomeKit doesn't know where I live. It's like, five years deep. And the workarounds are ridiculous. But it's true. Most things are Matter or Thread, or they're missing one piece of the puzzle.

• 20:45Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  Matter itself, just, you know, like, when you're, like, building a new city in SimCity, and you're like, I'll just finish that road at some other time. Matter.

• 20:53David Pierce?

  Yep. It's a good road. It's like a beautiful four blocks of a road.

• 20:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And you're like, something good's gonna happen.

• 21:01Alex Cranz?

  And you just stop.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  And that's like Matter and doorbells. It's like, you just, an area of your town labeled that, and you'll come back around to it later.

• 21:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And it sounds like the show eight is gonna be a little bit more inclusive, it's gonna have, it's gonna have the stuff. It'll work. And theoretically, if this generative AI works.

• 21:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Alex Cranz?

  Then, then yeah, we're that one step closer to the Star Trek computer dream, which is kind of how I understand Amazon's dream.

• 21:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that that saves Limp's dream. Like, he has talked to us about ambient computing quite a lot.

• 21:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:38Nilay Patel?

  But you weren't able actually to try out these generative AI features.

• 21:41Alex Cranz?

  Not really. I tried to I tried with a Fire TV and I wasn't allowed to ask questions, which, oh, and it was just super, super guardrails. He clearly had like, OK, these are the ones I'm going to show you to showcase the stuff, which is fine. I think that's very normal for these kind of situations. The the Internet's really crappy, as we saw when, like, Limp had struggles on stage because it seemed like the Alexa, like, lost connection at one point. And he was just like, I'm just gonna stand here awkwardly.

• 22:08Nilay Patel?

  See, this is why I prefer live demos to whatever Apple's doing.

• 22:12Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:12Nilay Patel?

  That's it's that's like, even that just hearing that is like, makes this whole thing.

• 22:15Alex Cranz?

  It was nice. And but you have to remember, OK, well, you know, this is one of the most challenging networking environments you can have because you have 100 journalists all with like cameras and laptops uploading a ton of stuff all at once in one small room. You destroy the Internet.

• 22:31David Pierce?

  Whatever. If Taylor Swift can do it for the Eras Tour, I don't care.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  5G, baby.

• 22:34David Pierce?

  Uh, no, I will say the the thing Dave Limp told me is that most of this stuff is not live yet and finished. Like, the even the folks who buy some of these products early on may not get the full generative AI piece of it. It's all backend stuff, right? Like, all the stuff is happening on Amazon's side of things. That's why a lot of this tech is coming to, like, the original Echo, which

• 22:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:59David Pierce?

  obviously doesn't have the hardware to, like, run LLMs locally. But it doesn't have to because all this stuff is happening in the cloud and just being ported back to you through Alexa. Uh, but it's it's going to be a pretty slow process for Amazon. Like, Alexa is basically this compilation of like thousands of different little things. We think of it as like one character, but it's actually just a million different pipes all kind of coming into the voice. Uh, and they're going to do it, as far as I understand, kind of bit by bit as it goes. Before this all becomes sort of fully generative AI. And my understanding is that's going to take a little while.

• 23:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's going to come with the phone.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  It's going to come with the phone. There is this new eye gaze thing where you can just like look at the displays and control them with your eyes, which is a little terrifying.

• 23:42David Pierce?

  A little?

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  Amazon seems much more comfortable with the idea of putting cameras and smart.

• 23:46Alex Cranz?

  They had a drone that you could fly around your house for security. Like their their their concept of security and and and stuff is way different.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're like, what if Robocop was in your home?

• 23:57Alex Cranz?

  There's like three people in the world who are like, yes.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Alex Cranz?

  And the rest of us like, mm, no.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  And they're listening right now. Welcome. We appreciate you.

• 24:03Alex Cranz?

  We love you.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but no, Amazon is just very comfortable with the idea that these things should have cameras as well as microphones. I am hard stop at cameras.

• 24:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  Just no, thank you.

• 24:12Alex Cranz?

  You don't want a camera owned by someone else in your bedroom at all times?

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you.

• 24:17Alex Cranz?

  Shocking.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm good. But you know when you ask people, would you ever put a camera in your bathroom? They're like, no. And like, you know, you carry like seven of them in your bathroom.

• 24:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, every time.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  And there's like, yeah.

• 24:27Alex Cranz?

  And then they lie. And they're like, it's in my pocket the whole time. It's not.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I you I hide it. I wrap it in a little towel like a baby and put it away.

• 24:36David Pierce?

  But wait, Neil, I think the camera thing is really interesting because like I I'm with you on the would not put a camera in like my bedroom. That that's been a nonstarter for us for forever. Uh, I we don't even have any cameras in the house.

• 24:49David Pierce?

  But like.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  You have seven of them in your pocket right now.

• 24:51David Pierce?

  A I mean, I have seven that I have one right here. Like, you know what I mean? Uh, we don't have any like smart home camera things.

• 24:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:57David Pierce?

  But then there are questions like, okay, not a camera, but what about like a radar detector? That knows when you're getting close and can change the interface so that you can use it. That's not the same, but it's not totally different either. It's like my device being aware of me all the way down to like my device can see precisely what facial expression I'm making.

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:21David Pierce?

  Somewhere on that spectrum is where I get uncomfortable and I don't know exactly where it is. But I think and like Amazon is doing this too. They have the these really interesting ideas with things like the the Hub Max, the big new smart home controller about when you're far away, it should show you one thing, right? Like probably status information. It'll look like a thermostat show you temperature or whatever. As you get closer, it can start to show you more information. And when you get right up to it, it should show you buttons because that's what you're going to do when you're standing right next to it. And to do that, they have to be able to do presence detection. It has to know where who you are and where you are. And full color camera for that?

• 25:55David Pierce?

  Little much for my taste, but like I still have not figured out where I go from like, this is a useful way to do a useful thing to like, eh, it's a little much.

• 26:04Alex Cranz?

  I like that they're they're trying to figure it out because the Echo itself, like the original one, was already kind of invasive and people had to reconcile that, right? Like, I'm gonna have an always on microphone in my house. That's way more than anybody had had before.

• 26:17David Pierce?

  Well, and the lesson learned was that people got used to that really fast, right? Like, Amazon was like, oh, we can just do this because it's fine.

• 26:23Alex Cranz?

  And so Amazon is clearly like trying to find, okay, what's, we have to do this presence detection. We have to do something because you cannot have a super successful smart home without some sort of like surveillance. That's just, you need it. And if you want the convenience, you're gonna have to give that up. And so they're clearly trying to figure out, okay, where's, where's most people's line? Drone that flies around your house, robot that drives around your house and gives you beer too much?

• 26:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, those are different. I would say those are different. The robot was useful.

• 26:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:53Nilay Patel?

  The drone is terrifying.

• 26:54Alex Cranz?

  Was the robot useful?

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm saying, well, I mean, it could have been useful, but it wasn't.

• 26:58David Pierce?

  Brings me beer.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think if you, I think if you can actually solve the it brings me beer problem, like a lot of people will sign up for that at under a thousand dollars.

• 27:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  The like, there's a drone that looks at stuff. A lot of people are like, yeah, I don't know, man, just rob the place. Like, I can't be doing this.

• 27:15Alex Cranz?

  You're welcome to everything.

• 27:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But I'm with, I'm with you, David, that there's like some.

• 27:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there's that, there's that point.

• 27:23Nilay Patel?

  It's fuzzy.

• 27:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:24Alex Cranz?

  And it seems like Amazon is trying to find that point by throwing things, by doing like the limp strategy, which is like, okay, well, we're just gonna release, we can afford to release things, so we're gonna release things and see where that line is.

• 27:36Nilay Patel?

  I think this is the thing that will change under Panis Panay the most.

• 27:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think he's gonna have more focus.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like, Amazon is like, we'll put a mic and speakers in it, Alexa, light switches, whatever. And the idea that the market would settle on an idea, I think has just not come to fruition.

• 27:53Nilay Patel?

  Especially because Alexa hasn't been worth it.

• 27:55Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  Like, man, again, I'm out here trying to buy a thermostat, man. Like, the Eco B I want is like, it has Alexa in it. I'm like, but I don't want that.

• 28:03Alex Cranz?

  You can turn it off. I never used it.

• 28:06Nilay Patel?

  But why, why does it, why is it even there?

• 28:08Alex Cranz?

  I don't want it. I don't know.

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't need a microphone in my thermostat, man. I'm trying to tell this to you. But then it has, whatever, it's just like, but that was the idea. We'll just like, put it everywhere. I suspect Panos will bring much more focus to that program.

• 28:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  There's a little bit of reporting in Reuters that like morale is low in that team. I think that's to be expected with any gigantic leadership change. But I also think the sort of leadership style is about to go a dramatic change. And if you've been allowed to be like, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna spend tens of million dollars on a drone that flies around your house. And then just put it out there and see what hap- like, I suspect those days are gonna come to an end.

• 28:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:49Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna be sad about that.

• 28:50David Pierce?

  I think, Neel, the truest thing I think about your feeling about Dave Lim's tenure is that the last, like, big capital N new thing Amazon's hardware division launched was that first Echo in 2014.

• 29:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, the Echo shows, I think, were an important turn.

• 29:08David Pierce?

  That's fair. Okay, sure, I'll give you that. But, but even that, that's, that's one and a half things in what amounts to a decade. And, and everything else has been sort of iterative splinters of the same idea. And I think one thing Panos Panay is very good at is being a fountain of big, new, wacky ideas.

• 29:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Fire TVs in there. Actually, in general about this, and Amazon has weirdly sort of discounted the Fire TV as the centerpiece of its smart home strategy. When it is probably by, like, by most measures, the most used Amazon device in most people's lives. Like, if you have a Fire TV in your house, it is probably the Amazon thing you interact with the most.

• 29:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  But it's a TV, so like... You get it to play whatever you want and he's like move on with your life.

• 29:52Speaker 06

  Right.

• 29:52Nilay Patel?

  And I think there's a gap there that I think is fascinating. And they announced a new one, right?

• 29:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they announced two. So they announced the, it's the new Fire TV 4K stick and it's, it's going to be more powerful. It's going to be faster. It should have better wifi in it. And then there's going to be a new Fire TV Max. And that's going to have a whole, like, that's going to be more in competition with the Apple TV. Which is great because Fire TVs have notoriously stayed far, far, far away from the premium end of things. Which is really annoying if you want to experience it, but you don't want to look at garbage on your TV. And like, I paid for Dolby Vision. I want Dolby Vision.

• 30:31David Pierce?

  Wait, but Alex, can I tell you the wildest thing about what you just described?

• 30:34Alex Cranz?

  What?

• 30:34David Pierce?

  The, your, your description is exactly right. And the difference between bottom and top is $10. It's $10. Buy the fancy one, people. Like, wait for our reviews. We'll probably review them.

• 30:47Alex Cranz?

  Please buy the Max.

• 30:48David Pierce?

  There are many smarter people that verge on, on this stuff than I am. But I'm here to tell you, if you are going to buy one of the new Fire TV sticks, spend the $10. Get the Dolby. Get the better features. Get the faster speeds. It will last you longer. It will make you happier. It's $10.

• 31:07David Pierce?

  It's, I don't understand why this other one exists. Like, Amazon likes to do the thing where they're like, this one costs $5 and this one costs $50. And then I'm like, okay, these, this is, these are real things. And then they discount the one really heavily on Prime Day and they'll just like, give it to you anytime you put anything in your cart. Like, whatever. That's all fine and good. This one is, if you're going to have a $50 one, that's fine. And a $60 one, that's very good. Like, what are we doing? I don't understand.

• 31:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  All right. Lastly, we have to talk about the Echo Frames and we're going to take a break.

• 31:34Alex Cranz?

  We do.

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  Why did they make glasses again?

• 31:36David Pierce?

  So, okay. I can answer this question because I asked Dave Limb this question. Uh, I literally pointed at them on the table in front of him in this conference room we were sitting in talking. And I was like, smart glasses? Are these, are these a thing? And he goes, I don't know. So what I can tell you is true is that like the last time Amazon had this run of like weird stuff they were gonna launch, they did a ring, they did a whole bunch of other stuff, all with the idea of like, things you have on you all the time that might connect to Alexa, right? Most of those things didn't find an audience. They're not here. It's not an accident that like the Echo Ring 2 does not exist. The frames, he said, caught on. They're not huge. They're not earth-shatteringly popular.

• 32:20David Pierce?

  But he said, he was like, we have found a bunch of kinds of people who really love this. Outdoorzy people who have always been the target market for this, right? Like you want, you want to be able to listen to music and talk to your device without having headphones blocking you from the world. That's useful. And like Bose is working on this kind of stuff. Meta's working on this kind of stuff. There's like this teeny tiny little but kind of growing smart glasses world that I think is sort of fascinating. But he basically was like, what we thought happened the last time was that they were severely limited by the fact that they didn't look very good. That we thought there might be more people who were interested in relatively lightweight, relatively simple glasses that let you talk to Alexa and play music, period.

• 33:06David Pierce?

  So with this generation, we made them nicer looking. And they are in fact much nicer looking. They have a bunch of different styles. They have some different lenses. They did a thing with Carrera that looked so bad when I put them on, but I'm sure will look cool on other people's faces. But they're like, I get the sense that they're like, okay, this is the good version of this product that some people seem to have caught on to already. Like, let's see if there really is a there there on this one. So I'm fascinated to see how well this thing actually does.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait to make you review these.

• 33:35David Pierce?

  I'm down. I went back and looked at our old review and all of the pictures are Dieter looking very serious, holding one of the stems of the glasses. It's so good.

• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  It's good. This is why I'm excited for it.

• 33:46David Pierce?

  I can't wait.

• 33:46Nilay Patel?

  Very serious.

• 33:48Alex Cranz?

  Gonna get the same outfit, too.

• 33:49Nilay Patel?

  That's Amazon. There's lots of coverage on the site. If you're into the, there's an Eero Pro Max with Wi-Fi 7, two 10 gig ports and two 2.5 gig ports.

• 33:59David Pierce?

  It's huge.

• 34:00Alex Cranz?

  Do you need that?

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  It's $1,700 for a three pack. It's great. I love it.

• 34:04David Pierce?

  You're gonna buy it for sure.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  Like, you know, there's like, oh, no. We have one gig internet service. Although we could get eight gig Optimum service. I just couldn't figure out what for. And now I'm like, oh, it's so I can buy this router. Yeah. It's a horrible way. It's a horrible way to spend $1,700 is switching to Optimum. No, thank you. No, thank you. But it's great. The Echo Hub Max. Go look on the site. It's all fun stuff to look at. But the real news here is that this is like the end of one line of thinking. Yes. Which is just utterly fascinating to me.

• 34:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  Then it all happened on the same day. It's great. OK, so we're gonna take a break. When I come back, we're gonna talk about Microsoft's event, which is on the other end of all this trouble. We'll be right back.

• 34:53Speaker 00

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• 35:54Nilay Patel?

  OK, we're back. Should we do the leaks first with Microsoft? Or should we do the event first? Event.

• 35:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's do the event and then we'll do the leaks, because that's way more interesting. And the event will seem like a super bummer if we talk about the leaks first.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  So Microsoft had a Surface event today. Is that fair to call it a Surface event? Well, not anymore, because Panos is gone. So Panos was tweeting about this a couple of weeks ago. I get excited to be in New York, do the thing, da, da, da. Show off the new server. We've all seen these events. Yeah. One of them, he was like, I made the new Surface. I made it for you, Joanna Stern, and like, pointed at her. It was great. It's like an all time great tech event moment. And she was like, me? And he's like, yes, you. It was great. He bailed on Monday. Just tweet, I'm out.

• 36:35Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 36:35Nilay Patel?

  And then there was a scramble. And as you said, Bloomberg reported, he's going, Amazon, no one's confirming anything. There's a lot of speculation, whatever. So now Microsoft has to like, do this event. And they scrambled up some people. Nadella showed up.

• 36:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  And what'd they do? They said, it's all about AI now. So what happened at this event?

• 36:54Alex Cranz?

  They didn't announce the Surface Pro, but we weren't expecting that. They announced a new Surface Studio Laptop.

• 37:01Nilay Patel?

  It looks cool.

• 37:02Alex Cranz?

  But they didn't talk about the plinth. Remember the plinth?

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Alex Cranz?

  That was a big part of the last one.

• 37:06Nilay Patel?

  The flat part.

• 37:07Alex Cranz?

  The flat part.

• 37:09Nilay Patel?

  Plinth. It's a good word.

• 37:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's a good word.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  More thing, you should, you should pull over your car right now, make a list of five things you wish to describe as a plinth. And then go to wherever you're going and just say it.

• 37:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:19Nilay Patel?

  All the time.

• 37:20Alex Cranz?

  If Panos had been there, he would have said plinth.

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Alex Cranz?

  It would, it would have been great. But they announced a new Surface Laptop Go 3. So that's a nice little upgrade there. And they announced a new Surface Go 4. And I love a Surface Go. That's one of my favorite devices in the world. But it's also one of the most disappointing devices in the world because it's so cute. And it's so small. And then it's so expensive for what it is.

• 37:43David Pierce?

  It's also not meant for regular humans. Like, this is like a business device for business people, right? Didn't they, they explicitly pitched it to frontline workers this year?

• 37:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So this year, it is not going to be sold to us, us normal folks. You're going to have to like, go through your ID, IT department or something like that. It is still going to be outrageously expensive at $550. It is still going to be outrageous.

• 38:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but if you're provisioning UPS.

• 38:05Alex Cranz?

  No, but it's overpriced because it's got an Intel N200.

• 38:10Nilay Patel?

  Brutal.

• 38:11Alex Cranz?

  It's just like, y'all, did you try? Monica got to chest it out. She was not enthusiastic. It was, it was still, she could see the slow, slowness of it. She, she and Tom.

• 38:21David Pierce?

  I love that this is the device you've chose it to focus on so far, Krantz. The one device that people can't buy and the worst one by far. And you're like, let's talk about that for a while.

• 38:30Alex Cranz?

  That one's my favorite because it's so cute. And you're just like.

• 38:33Nilay Patel?

  It is cute. Everyone loves a cute little tablet that sucks. All right. We've all done it. Who hasn't bought a cute little tablet that sucks?

• 38:40Alex Cranz?

  We've got four fire tea, like fire pads.

• 38:44Nilay Patel?

  I've had a Nexus 7 for God's sake.

• 38:46David Pierce?

  Okay, that didn't suck. How dare you?

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  I remember they're like, "We wrapped it in leather like a motorcycle." And I was like, "I love you." And I was like, "Hmm."

• 38:57Alex Cranz?

  Leather's nice.

• 38:58Nilay Patel?

  All right, tell me about the actual laptop Studio 2. Does it have a good chip in it? This is always the crime with Surface devices.

• 39:04Alex Cranz?

  So this was interesting because it sounds like the laptop 2, they actually put the real chip in it. They put 13th gen instead of 12th gen, which is like Microsoft's hallmark. They love to put last gen stuff in. And they're like, "Don't you want to pay the exact same price? No, no one wants to do that." So it was really, really nice that they did that this time. I think the GPU is still an older generation.

• 39:27Nilay Patel?

  Of course. I mean, it's always, there's always something.

• 39:29Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no, it's an RTX 4050 or an RTX 4060 GPU. So that's not too bad. And it's real pretty. The last one was really cool, like...

• 39:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If I was going to get a Windows laptop, I would get this one.

• 39:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's the coolest one. Is it really expensive? Do most people need it? Probably not. But is it really, really, really cool?

• 39:48David Pierce?

  It's a MacBook Pro, right? Like, this is...

• 39:51Alex Cranz?

  With a plinth.

• 39:52David Pierce?

  This is actually a thing that the Windows ecosystem doesn't have enough of. When you get to really powerful computers, way too many of them tend to either get really big and really heavy or super gamery. And both of those things are for valid reasons and there are real markets there. But I think one thing Microsoft correctly sussed out with this line was, "We need a thing that is very attractive, the size is about right for what it is, and it's powerful, and it does like nifty, surfacy things, like the pull-forward screen that it has, where it sort of comes off its hinge and you can like drape it over the keyboard." It's very cool. And if you're a person who uses a Surface Pen a lot, it's really useful. And it's like, that to me is, I'm like,

• 40:36David Pierce?

  "This is how you make the MacBook a touch device, Apple." Like, there it is. That's the answer. But I feel like, I agree that this is not the one for most people, but like, this is a good thing that should exist. And it's good that Microsoft finally got it right. I have the first laptop Studio here. It's my like go-to Windows machine. And I love it to bits. But anytime you try to do anything like intense on it, it just kind of falls apart. And I'm caught, it seems like Microsoft went after this one. It has more ports, it has better power. Like, it could be a win. If they can get the battery life right, that's going to be the question.

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  Do you think if Panos is walking out the door, he's scratched out the previous generation processor? And I was like, "Put a good one in it."

• 41:16David Pierce?

  He just turned the 12 into a 13 and said goodbye.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  With a pit of surface fans.

• 41:21Alex Cranz?

  Peace.

• 41:22Nilay Patel?

  He was like, I got one more thing by the good one.

• 41:25David Pierce?

  The most interesting thing about this event by far to me was that it took them 40 out of 60 minutes to even talk about hardware. Like, this was not a devices event in the way that we're used to. And the same was true of the Amazon event. Like, both of these were events about AI, right? Like, Microsoft spent the vast majority of this event talking about Copilot. And the idea that you're going to have this AI assistant that works in all of your apps and on your computer and on your phone and understands everything about you and can just sort of stitch your life together in this helpful AI way. And part of it was like relaunching products we've heard a bunch about already, which was odd. They like announced a new version of Windows, but only in sort of passing as they were talking about Copilot.

• 42:07David Pierce?

  Like, this was a Copilot event in which they launched hardware on which you might do Copilot things, which I think is fascinating because there was also this Business Insider story, I believe today, Thursday, as we're recording this, about why Parnas left Microsoft. And one of the answers was because he was frustrated that in this huge switch to AI, Microsoft was devaluing its hardware because it's building these things that work everywhere and who cares about having like a flagship device? It's very funny that he would then go to Amazon, which just spent a whole event doing the exact same thing. But like, clearly, that's what Microsoft is doing, right? Like, it's every big bet it's making is about AI.

• 42:46Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's kind of interesting because this also all came on the same week that there was a whole bunch of leaks about Microsoft. And in those leaks, they were, it was, some of those leaks were about the strategy for Microsoft. And last year, as soon as last year, they were all sitting there, Satya was saying, we have to have a unified strategy that pushes our hardware, that pushes our software, that does it all together. And for us, it's going to be hybrid cloud computing. And so it was this whole thing about game computing and how you were going to be able to like do some of the processing on the computer and some of it in the cloud. And that was the whole thing. And it seems like AI kind of like. Has pushed that to the side and they're like, oh, we now have a new unified vision and it's AI. And then Pano leaves and now it's like, okay, but the hardware, what's happening with the hardware?

• 43:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's no, like I said, it'd be better if they switched places.

• 43:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  But no one is in charge of hardware. I mean, we have a memo and it's like some people, but they're shuffling new people into it.

• 43:40David Pierce?

  Dave Lim coming in to be the co-pilot guy actually makes a certain amount of sense, given what he's been up to at Amazon all these years.

• 43:46Nilay Patel?

  Just drive your cars in different directions, guys.

• 43:48Alex Cranz?

  Just wave.

• 43:49Nilay Patel?

  Just like high five on the highway.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  Uh, let's talk about this co-pilot stuff because there's quite a bit of it. But like David said, a lot of it's been announced already.

• 43:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  So Windows co-pilot seems like a big idea, like the computer will use your computer for you, but it also seems fairly limited.

• 44:05Alex Cranz?

  I think it's a terrifying idea. I was talking with Tom about it before we came to record the Vergecast. And we were both like, yeah, co-pilot seems really cool, but how are you going to trust this AI? That we don't know is finished with your spreadsheets for your Fortune 500 company.

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you shouldn't do that.

• 44:23Alex Cranz?

  Don't do that. And, and so I really am kind of worried that their, their ambition to show that they are the kings of AI and they're hip and cool now. And they beat Google is going to shoot them in the foot if they piss off all of.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think it's important, again, Google and I have a trial is going on.

• 44:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  The punching bag in this trial is Bing, at least in secret.

• 44:42David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 44:43Nilay Patel?

  Somewhere in secret, the United States government is just punching Bing in the face. And we don't know about it, but we know it's happening. We can detect that Bing is being punched in the face, but we can't actually.

• 44:53Alex Cranz?

  Wait.

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  See it.

• 44:54Alex Cranz?

  Did you hear it? Just got punched.

• 44:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but what is true is that Microsoft launched all this stuff with Bing, they made all this noise. Front page article in the New York Times and Bing has gained zero market share.

• 45:06Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 45:07Nilay Patel?

  At least as far as anyone can tell.

• 45:08David Pierce?

  It hasn't gained zero, but it's gone from no one cares to no one cares.

• 45:13Alex Cranz?

  But now horny.

• 45:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty weird in that room. No one goes into. It's like that car in the subway, you know, just don't, don't go on that one.

• 45:24Alex Cranz?

  Don't go on that one.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  But like, that's the answer, right? It's like, this stuff isn't working. So Microsoft's putting it in more and more places in the hopes that it will work. But the turn that is really interesting for me is in Windows, where you're like, change my display resolution and it will just do it.

• 45:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Nilay Patel?

  That's like a meaningful, the last digital assistant that attempted to do this was Bixby. But on Windows, where it is pretty Byzantine, I think that might actually make a big difference in how people use Windows.

• 45:51Alex Cranz?

  I mean, Windows menus are garbage. And remember how for the longest time, they all still had like Windows 7 UI? Even though they're like, we have this new thing and it's great. Except for all of these really important menus you have to use if you're testing laptops every day. Alex Cranz, that was just for me. But yeah, I, I just get so nervous about how fast they're moving on AI at Microsoft. Like, I just spend a lot of time thinking about, this seems like a bad idea. It seems like you're going way too fast and this is gonna bite you in the ass. Because you, they haven't had the ability to test this as extensively as they'd like. And that's why we're seeing like, that's why Amazon is going kind of slow here. Even though Amazon did this big announcement and showed all this stuff, they're still going slow.

• 46:35Alex Cranz?

  And Microsoft is like, full steam ahead on releasing this and bringing this stuff to market and putting this in everybody's hands. And it does need to be in hands, right? Like, it needs to be tested. But is the best place to test it? The, the install base for all of the companies that currently pay you lots of money to use your software? I don't think that's the best.

• 46:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, you have to pay $30 a seat to use it in an office.

• 46:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:59Nilay Patel?

  So I, I think that pricing is a bit of a test. I also think it's a bit of a barrier.

• 47:02Alex Cranz?

  It will keep a lot of people out.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  The only person who should be using AI in Excel at your company is the person who is best at Excel. Right, right at this moment, to just let you know what it can and can't do.

• 47:10David Pierce?

  Well, and, and that's actually, that's a pretty good example, right? And, cause I think what Microsoft would say, and I think did say at a, at a panel they did after their event today, was basically like, don't trust this thing to do something you can't do yourself.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 47:26David Pierce?

  Just trust it to help you, right? And I think that is the right, like, having the Excel expert say, okay, here's this menial thing I do 100 times a day, can the AI do it for me? Is actually a pretty useful and like instructive test. But for me to just go in and be like, hey, Copilot, we making money or what? It's like, that's a bad idea. We shouldn't do that.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  You should do that all the time. I'll pay $30 a seat for you to do that.

• 47:54David Pierce?

  How's the money, co-pilot?

• 47:57David Pierce?

  And, and I think we're in this place now where with so much AI, it's like, if you want to do dumb stuff, it's gonna go poorly for you. And people will do dumb stuff, and it's gonna go poorly for them. And I think there are really interesting questions to be asked about whether we should be protected from that as people. It's like, it's the, the self-driving stuff, right? Like, if you have a thing that's called a self-driving car, people are gonna do, they're gonna fall asleep and have sex in the backseat. And that is not what they should be doing, but they're gonna do it. And so what's your responsibility as the one making that is a really interesting question. But I think at some point, if I'm Microsoft, you just have to like, throw it out there and do your best. And I think the way they're pitching it is really interesting, because it's like, it's

• 48:42David Pierce?

  not a tool for doing spectacular business calculations. It's like a way to play a Spotify playlist, right? It's like, doing the things that are easy and, and tractable, and you know how to do, but take 12 clicks, you can just do it with a command now. And that's the kind of stuff that this stuff is generally pretty good at. But then, like, I think Microsoft's been trying to do this at Bing all year, too, is figure out how to put a ceiling on that, where it's like, okay, we want you to be able to do this stuff without doing all the dumb shit we know people are gonna do as soon as they're allowed to. And I don't think anybody has figured out that answer yet.

• 49:19Alex Cranz?

  I don't think there, there is an answer to that. Like, people don't like it when you say, oh, you have all of this access to technology, you only get this little bit.

• 49:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Alex Cranz?

  No one likes that.

• 49:28David Pierce?

  And it sucks.

• 49:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. You hate it. So.

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  Someone told me that LLMs are uniquely good at teaching you how to make chemical weapons, because there's so much information about building chemical weapons on the web, that they've just learned it all. And like, now, we're at the point where like, you shouldn't let them do that.

• 49:44Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 49:45Nilay Patel?

  But like, now it's just built into the sidebar of Windows.

• 49:48Alex Cranz?

  Now you just do it. Well, not yet, not yet. It's coming September 26th.

• 49:53Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so that's, that was this Microsoft event. Copilot everywhere, basically, a little bit of new hardware. Then there's the other Microsoft event.

• 50:01Alex Cranz?

  The big event.

• 50:02Nilay Patel?

  The one that you weren't supposed to see, which is, and I want to be very clear about this, because there is some narrative out there. The FTC leaked Microsoft's documents. That is absolutely not what happened. So FTC versus Microsoft happens, lots and lots of documents are getting uploaded. We can see them all in the docket. The court clarifies, Microsoft was asked to do some stuff, failed to redact these documents. Just publish them for everyone to see. So Microsoft was like screwed up in a massive way here.

• 50:29Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I'm not complaining.

• 50:31Nilay Patel?

  No one's complaining, but the leaks are out of control. There's a new Xbox Series X, another new Xbox, a new controller. Phil Spencer idly wanting to buy Nintendo. Where to begin?

• 50:42Alex Cranz?

  The controller?

• 50:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:43David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 50:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:45David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 50:45Alex Cranz?

  The controller is cool.

• 50:46David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 50:46Alex Cranz?

  Right? It's got the haptics like the PS5 controller, so it'll feel like more real when you do stuff. I don't know if, if all of our listeners have a PS5, could buy one, it's a lot easier now. Spend that $500, but the haptics feel really cool in it. And this is supposed to have that. It's supposed to be kind of like Stadia where it's got like those haptics also double as like volume. It's like if you're getting shot at or something, you'll still feel it and hear it. That's just cool. Like, I don't know, it's just a neat controller. It's gonna have replaceable joysticks. Out of the box, right now you have to spend like, what, $250 for a Microsoft Elite controller? Or one of, something from Scuf or something? You won't have to do that, it'll just be there.

• 51:29Alex Cranz?

  And if you wanna replace the joysticks because you like dig in and kind of distort them because you play too hard. I don't know anybody who does that, but if you do, you'll be able to replace it. That's neat.

• 51:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's a cool controller, and also, I think the, the vision behind it is super rad, which is basically like Microsoft's in this place now where they want you to be able to play. All of your games, all of the places, right? Like it's cloud gaming is is a huge part of this. There was a leak in here that Microsoft is planning to stream PC games through cloud gaming. And there's this line in the roadmap document that came out that says, "Controller becomes the hero. The new Xbox controller is the only thing you need to play on every device." And the idea is that the controller connects to Wi-Fi itself, or to your console, or over Bluetooth. And so it becomes the console in a super real way. And all you need is a screen and a controller, and suddenly you're up and running.

• 52:25David Pierce?

  It's a very like Stadia vision of the world. And I think that was the single smartest thing about Stadia that ever existed. And I think this idea of like the controller being the thing, and you can play anywhere as long as you have the controller, is so cool. And I really hope it becomes real.

• 52:39Alex Cranz?

  I really, like, that's the thing that I really hope this AI stuff that Microsoft is focused on doesn't distract that much from the cloud gaming things that they're doing, because it's so cool.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  So in these leaks, over and over again, Microsoft is like, "The Xbox is our play for the consumer."

• 52:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  They're not shy about it.

• 52:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  Phil Spencer is like, "This is the thing that we do for the consumer." And like, Nadella is like, "This is the thing we do for a consumer." And also, it all runs on Azure, so just like, keep that in mind.

• 53:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  That's where the money is, Phil.

• 53:12Alex Cranz?

  Don't get too ahead of yourself.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  So that's a controller. Tell me about these consoles.

• 53:16Alex Cranz?

  Disc-free. Like, that's a big deal, I guess, for the Xbox Series X, because the original one had the disc player, separates it from a lot of the other stuff, including PlayStation. Most people don't actually need or want the disc player. Like, it's great if you want to watch movies.

• 53:30Nilay Patel?

  I have a digital PS5 and it just never comes up.

• 53:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Most people just go, and it's more storage, which is crucial. I think it's going from one terabyte to two terabytes. Theoretically, obviously, this is leaked. It could totally change before it comes to market, if it comes to market. But, yeah, and it sounds like there's another Microsoft Elite controller in the works, which I'm really curious to see how it's going to build on on this this leaked. Cloud gaming controller like just seems cool as hell.

• 54:01David Pierce?

  It does. There's also apparently an Xbox that has been planned for 2028. And we should say, by the way, that these are all older documents that may or may not exist in the current reality. Like, a lot of stuff people were planning a couple of years ago when like Bitcoin was a billion dollars and money was free and everything was fantastic. Like, the vibes are very different now and people have made very different plans.

• 54:25Alex Cranz?

  And we've seen some of this stuff already canceled.

• 54:27Nilay Patel?

  By the way, in the grand scheme of leaks, the best leak to get is the email about the leaks that leaks.

• 54:32David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  So Phil Spencer emailed Xbox team, Tom got it, you know?

• 54:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  And Phil says the Xbox team, I know this is disappointing, even if many of the documents are over a year old and our plans have evolved.

• 54:45David Pierce?

  Right. But let me just say, so the one other Xbox that was...

• 54:49Nilay Patel?

  Now back to the real stuff.

• 54:50David Pierce?

  Who cares? Whatever. Let's assume all of this is real because I want most of it to be because it seems very cool. There's this plan for a whole new, it seems, generation of consoles in 2028 that is basically, I think they call it a hybrid gaming platform.

• 55:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this was what we were talking about earlier in the show. They want to basically have it so the really big processing, the really hard stuff happens in the cloud. And then we do some of the other stuff smaller locally. And we've heard this talked about before. Sean's written about it. I definitely have said on this show, it's stupid and will never happen. I guess I'm wrong. That's totally fine. And it's a really compelling idea if they can make it work, but it's going to require like a bunch... Like, they talk about this in their roadmap and in the story that Sean wrote about this, that it is really complex issue. There's a lot of like silicon stuff that they have to do, a lot of processor stuff they have to figure out that will make it really, really tricky. But if it works, then you can have like...

• 55:50Alex Cranz?

  The really expensive quality of a PC, like, you know, those $3,000 PC rigs that people do, 4K gorgeous, everything turned to ultra, you could have that on an Xbox, which is currently totally incapable of that. And you could have it at that Xbox price. And that's, that would be very compelling for a lot of people.

• 56:10David Pierce?

  Or even further down, I mean, there's a, there's a line in one of those documents that says, they want to sell something for under $99 as like a handheld device. And if anyone ever gets this right, it basically means, anything with a screen becomes a powerful gaming system. And if you have more local power, it'll do more locally. And so you'll get a slightly better experience. If you have less power, it'll do more in the cloud. So you'll have a slightly worse experience, but still get functionally the same thing. And if we get to that, like, holy God, is that a hard technical thing to do for so, so, so many reasons. But if we get there, that kicks ass. Like, that is the future of how we use computers that I would very much like to live in.

• 56:50Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's, it's essentially the, like, Kindle-ling of, of Xbox where-

• 56:55David Pierce?

  You can play games on your Kindle.

• 56:57Alex Cranz?

  Where it's like, we got it-

• 56:58Nilay Patel?

  Anything with a screen, bro.

• 56:59Alex Cranz?

  We're just trying to get you some hardware so that you can actually go do what we want you to do, which is buy a lot of games, spend money in our marketplaces. That's like, that's always been the big get for Sony and for Microsoft. And moving into that cloud gaming would really, like, making cloud gaming actually succeed in this fashion would do that. Because, okay, I spend a hundred bucks and I get the exact same, like, a very similar experience to my friend who spent 500 bucks or my friend who spent 3,000 and built it all himself. Like, just makes things a lot more equitable.

• 57:30Nilay Patel?

  So what's funny about all of this, there's all this happening. We're, we're, Microsoft's running ahead with these plans. Contextually, right now, Apple's like, the phone is the best game console ever made. iPhone 15 Pro is best, right? And they're all local all the time. And Microsoft can never put a cloud gaming service on the iPhone for like a billion different reasons.

• 57:50Alex Cranz?

  Through the web browser.

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  Through, through the web browser, fine.

• 57:54Alex Cranz?

  Go through Safari.

• 57:55Nilay Patel?

  That's like one pressure on this.

• 57:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:57Nilay Patel?

  Then the other pressure is that Nintendo exists. And Nintendo's relationship with the internet- Is shaky. Nintendo knows the internet.

• 58:06Alex Cranz?

  It acknowledges.

• 58:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was about to say, it knows it exists. Does it want to use it? No, it took so long to get to cloud gaming. Because I think it was like last year or the year before that. Before it was finally like, you can save things on the cloud and use it on your.

• 58:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm just like, look at the structure of the game industry right now. The structure of the games and the iPhone.

• 58:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:25Nilay Patel?

  All Candy Crush, Free to Plays, DLCs, the whole thing. Nintendo, biggest game of the century in Tears of the Kingdom, announces it will not have a DLC because it is complete. And just an incredible, like.

• 58:40Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful.

• 58:40Nilay Patel?

  The flex that that is, is so, so powerful. Like, what more do you want? We don't need to make more money off this game. The last line was like, keep exploring high rules. It's like, hell yeah, Nintendo.

• 58:52Nilay Patel?

  It's like, you haven't got to have it. It's like, just incredible weird competitive pressures, right?

• 58:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  That are nothing to do with this like hybrid future of computing idea. One, Apple's like, it's all local and you, no, no thank you, sir. And Nintendo's like, what?

• 59:05Alex Cranz?

  Put his internet.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  Please continue exploring.

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  On our console that has like the processing power of like a mid-range HTC phone from 2011. Like, whatever, you know? So then, in just, I'm putting that context to tell you about this email from Phil Spencer, where he's like, buying Nintendo would be a career moment. He says, I totally agree that Nintendo is the, capital V, prime asset for us in gaming. And today gaming is our most likely path to consumer relevance. I've had numerous conversations with what we think is LT. I've had numerous conversations with the leadership team of Nintendo about tighter collaboration and feel like if any US company would have a chance with Nintendo, we are probably in the best position. The unfortunate situation, or fortunate for Nintendo, he says in parentheses, is that

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  they're sitting on a big pile of cash and they have a board of directors that until recently has not pushed for further increases in market growth or stock appreciation. The problem with Nintendo is that Nintendo's good. Yeah, they're like, Nintendo has a bunch of money and the people who run it are like pretty happy with it.

• 1:00:11David Pierce?

  It's like, okay.

• 1:00:13Nilay Patel?

  Good luck.

• 1:00:14David Pierce?

  It's the most ruthless capitalist VC funded thing I've ever heard in my life. They're like, how you you don't want my money? What do I do?

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like your board of directors. So then he's like, this guy's been buying up shares and hopefully he'll do it. And he's like, we've shown the full write up on Nintendo and Valve, interestingly, to the Microsoft board of directors. And they're fully supportive as in like, but that's just like all this stuff, all this technology stuff just sort of falls down in the face of, well, the biggest platform on earth and mobile. They can't do the thing with. And then the best game platform is just like, whatever.

• 1:00:53Alex Cranz?

  I mean.

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  Like focus on the games.

• 1:00:55Alex Cranz?

  That's why they've been pretty actively on Epic's side for every single one of these Google and Apple.

• 1:01:02Nilay Patel?

  By the way, when I say the best game, don't come for me. I'm quoting Phil Spencer saying Nintendo is the prime asset for us in gaming today. That's what the head of Xbox thinks about Nintendo, not me. I play Madden and I quit playing Zelda right when I got to Ganon.

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  Cause I didn't want to grind for shit so I could beat him.

• 1:01:22Alex Cranz?

  You're like.

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  Which apparently is like extraordinarily common in this game.

• 1:01:25Alex Cranz?

  I think that's most people.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Alex Cranz?

  I only did it in like, it was like late at night one day and I went, okay, I'm just gonna do it. Why not? Let's just go.

• 1:01:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I was like, look, I have a job, all right? I don't, I'm not gonna go look for fruit to kill this guy. Whatever. You just know that I could Ganon and I shut down my switch and I walked away.

• 1:01:44Alex Cranz?

  Never touched it again.

• 1:01:46Nilay Patel?

  But I just think that's a weird position for this, especially because of a third place console.

• 1:01:50Alex Cranz?

  I don't necessarily think it's a weird position because I think they they are really like, they have a strategy to deal with Apple. And their strategy is to say epic, fix it. And and they've they've put a lot of effort into that, right? Like, like they've they've been on Epic's side for the majority of both of these trials saying, no, no, they're right. Because they need cloud gaming to appear on these platforms and they have their workaround now with with streaming and stuff like that. And Apple's doing its whole gaming thing, but Apple's gaming thing, as much as it says it's where gaming happens.

• 1:02:22Alex Cranz?

  Game developers have different feelings.

• 1:02:24Nilay Patel?

  We're starting to get the emails from the iPhone gamers.

• 1:02:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're there.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  They're starting to come in.

• 1:02:27Alex Cranz?

  They're there and you guys exist and I love you, but like, you're not like.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:02:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  Watch it.

• 1:02:35Alex Cranz?

  You're you're you're different.

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  We gotta take a break.

• 1:02:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we gotta take a break.

• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  Come back and talk about YouTube and do a little.

• 1:02:43Alex Cranz?

  Send all of, all of your feelings about that to Neelai.

• 1:02:45Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you.

• 1:02:46Alex Cranz?

  Neelai Patel at the.

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  Look, here's what I know. You can talk about Android gamers like they don't exist. You mentioned that it's silly that Apple thinks the word pro means mobile gaming and the emails come.

• 1:02:57Alex Cranz?

  And I know you guys, you can use the controller and you can play it. And I, I think that's great. I want to use my phone for phone stuff. I don't want to use it for game stuff. That's why I've got a switch and 40,000 other consoles. Get with the program.

• 1:03:11David Pierce?

  I just would like it on the record that everything Alex just said is wrong and I do not agree with it. And I would not like to be associated with the emails that you're going to send.

• 1:03:19Alex Cranz?

  Come at me. You're all incorrect.

• 1:03:21Nilay Patel?

  I have a family. We're taking a break.

• 1:03:27David Pierce?

  All right.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

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• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Should we do this YouTube thing very quickly and then do a lightning round?

• 1:04:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, we can do it fast.

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So YouTube had an event today made on YouTube, a bunch of influencers. I told Charlie Puth was there. Mia, who went, told me that photos and videos were not allowed. And then Charlie Puth came out and all decorum went to the woods. And people were like, I'm doing it. Nah. And he was like, what about a song that went like this? Like, he did the thing. Uh, Charlie Puth, it's great. Nature's original creator.

• 1:05:05David Pierce?

  I've been trying to profile Charlie Puth for like four years. Charlie, if you're listening, get at me. Let's do this.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're in for it. Our people will obey the no photos and videos rule, or will they? See, every pitch needs a little danger in it. All right. Uh, so they announced a bunch of AI stuff, big theme of all these events, AI stuff. So this is Google's turn, right, with YouTube. So Dream Screen, which lets you create a background for shorts, generative AI. They showed a bunch of silly stuff. Mia asked a bunch of questions about what the guardrails on that would be. For example, what if you ask it to generate a background for YouTube shorts that violates YouTube's policies? I just thought of four. It's not hard. For example, what if you would like, say, a Dukes of Hazzard themed background for YouTube shorts? I went in a different direction, but yeah.

• 1:05:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just like, that's a, even that's just a challenging question for a million horrible reasons. So many. But so goes. Uh, so YouTube has to figure that out. They said it won't do any of that stuff, but we'll see. So that's really interesting. David, you were quite taken with Dream Screen.

• 1:06:11David Pierce?

  I think it's really interesting. I think this question of how do you give creators tools to use generative AI without giving them tools to make so much awful generated crap that it ruins your platform? Is like the question of the internet right now. And it's one we've talked about a lot. And I think. YouTube is way behind on giving its creators native tools to make things. And this as a way to get into that, I just think is really interesting. And like, starting with backgrounds is clever, but there's also a thing where the AI tools in the YouTube studio will start to generate topic ideas for creators that it says are personalized to the things that those creators are doing that already work.

• 1:06:56David Pierce?

  So like, I have a thousand things I hate about that, but I think it's fascinating. And we're in this place now, we're like, everybody is trying to like relentlessly game the algorithm to be successful on YouTube. And now the algorithm is just gonna tell you what to do.

• 1:07:09Nilay Patel?

  Yes, this is the thing, this is the most incredible announcement of the entire thing. It was buried, right? They did Dream Screen, they did the new editor on mobile, which is basically CapCut. It's called YouTube Create.

• 1:07:22David Pierce?

  The only thing to say about that is it's bonkers that that didn't exist a decade ago.

• 1:07:25Nilay Patel?

  They did, they had a thing, YouTube Capture, whatever it was called. It was just really bad and doesn't count, right?

• 1:07:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it is nuts, by the way, YouTube is the platform it is. And basically Final Cut Pro and iMovie and Adobe Premiere are the native creation tools for YouTube. Like, that's crazy.

• 1:07:42Alex Cranz?

  This pre, it predates phones being like the primary computing device for people.

• 1:07:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, but we've been doing this a while now, but sorry, Neel, I derailed you. What were you about to say?

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  So this thing, this automated AI insights thing.

• 1:07:54Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:55Nilay Patel?

  I am obsessed with it. It's, they buried it, right? It's not like the big flashy consumer feature, but basically, if I'm getting it right, YouTube is gonna look at a creator's analytics, they're gonna say, here's what's working well for you. Then they're gonna look at everyone else's analytics and say, hey, inside of your library of stuff, you should make more stuff like this, because it performs better for all the other people. Which is, right, there's a universe in which creators could hire analytics people. You can get there. Right, and like, big media companies have analytics people that do this stuff. But then there's just the robot telling people, make this stuff to get views.

• 1:08:34David Pierce?

  Well, and, I mean, we've been through this in so many sort of specific instances, right? Like, the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial was one where all kinds of people just started doing that because it was obvious that's how you get views. This robot is just gonna tell everybody to make Mr. Beast videos. Like, that's just what it's gonna be.

• 1:08:49Nilay Patel?

  We don't know. What we think, we don't know.

• 1:08:51Alex Cranz?

  Will it be mouth open or closed on the thumbnail?

• 1:08:53David Pierce?

  Unbelievable question. If Mr. Beast isn't getting a cut of this for being the one, like, training at the best with the best stuff, it's a real shame. But no, I think you're right, and I think this question of whether YouTube can build a system that is, like, creative and personalized and helpful, or if it's just going to tell people to do more of what's already working everywhere on YouTube until everybody is doing the same thing with the same generative AI tools and the same music library that looks the same, like, unclear.

• 1:09:22Alex Cranz?

  Kind of feels like it's gonna be that, given our extensive history with every other push in social media, based on algorithms.

• 1:09:31Nilay Patel?

  Time remains undefeated.

• 1:09:33Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:09:34Nilay Patel?

  And people get older.

• 1:09:35Alex Cranz?

  It's true.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  These kids.

• 1:09:37Alex Cranz?

  I hate it, but true, yeah.

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  And people get bored. And so, you know, I am a firm believer that data can only tell you about the past. This is like, what I believe in my heart. If we followed our own analytics, we would only cover the iPhone.

• 1:09:52David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:09:52Nilay Patel?

  That's all we would do. It is that, it is-

• 1:09:54Alex Cranz?

  We're not doing that.

• 1:09:55Nilay Patel?

  I know, I know you're mad at me for saying it. The end of this virgus has gotten real spiky. But I promise you, if I just did what people clicked on, we would write about the iPhone Find Wolf case 500 times a day, and Elon Musk for the rest of our lives. And we don't do it because we're bored. We don't want to do it. We think, you know, like, there's a thing here that we do where we, like, decide what we're gonna do. But if you're fully analytics driven, you just, that's a narrowing, right? It's just the aperture of your interest just falls down and eventually you just make one thing.

• 1:10:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Nilay Patel?

  And I think most YouTubers are people and they have that like instinct where they like push against it. But then there's a lot of people who are there to just make money.

• 1:10:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was about to like, my, my, my big concern here is the people who want to make money tend to be really good at it. And they tend to dominate the algorithm. And then what we saw with Facebook, what we saw with even Google SEO is over and over and over again. The thing that rises to the top isn't the quality stuff.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Alex Cranz?

  It's the algorithmic garbage.

• 1:10:53Nilay Patel?

  Like David said at the very beginning, this is the thing that kills your platform. Like the dream screen generative AI background is not the thing that kills YouTube. The AI powered analytics that flattens all of YouTube and that people just fighting for the same kinds of attention. Well, on the other end is like people, it's an audience. And if you only get one kind of thing from the platform, eventually the audience gets bored too.

• 1:11:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Nilay Patel?

  And I don't, I don't know that YouTube is contented with that cycle or which I think is a fair approach for YouTube. They're just like, it'll be fine because there's enough people who want to be YouTubers.

• 1:11:27David Pierce?

  Well, and the, the optimistic take on this for YouTube would be that YouTube is not just one thing, right? Like you, you can be a guy who stands in front of your furnace and tells people how to use it and like make a career out of being a YouTuber. And to that person, if this tool is any good, it's going to suggest new ways to make videos about furnaces, right? But it's like, if, if we get to the point where every creator on YouTube is just being told to like, go live stream Taylor Swift's era's tour because that's how you make money on YouTube at this moment in time. We're hosed and it's a perfectly plausible reality that that's where we land.

• 1:12:01Alex Cranz?

  Do you think they start to change the surfacing though for, for like what you actually see? Like, will it be harder to find the guy who does the furnace videos?

• 1:12:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, because that's search, you know, and like. I don't know. I just think that this thing, like these recommendation algorithms, these, these metrics drive the dynamics of the platform more than anyone ever really wants to admit. And so here, the platform is going to start interpreting the metrics for you. And that's like, some crazy shit's about to happen. Like, it's exciting in one way. It's also just like, I hope you're ready for it, you know?

• 1:12:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's do a really fast lightning round, and then we gotta, we gotta get out of this.

• 1:12:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's like 40 more tech events to go to.

• 1:12:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we're busy. My lightning round is, I'm gonna selfishly say, go read my blog I wrote about how the future of cable bundling is here, which is a David headline, by the way.

• 1:12:52Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:12:53Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful David headline.

• 1:12:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, and it's so here. By the way, we are hearing rumors that the strikes might be over soon.

• 1:12:58Alex Cranz?

  We are. Yeah, they were saying as soon as today, but it is now, we're recording, it's about 4:00 PM. We haven't heard anything. We'll see.

• 1:13:05Nilay Patel?

  All right, David, what's yours?

• 1:13:06David Pierce?

  Mine is, the Google Bard chatbot can now integrate with your Gmail and Docs and Google Drive and actually like, go find information for you in your other apps. And you look at that and it's like, oh, scary privacy stuff. It's like, my guys, it's all Google. They all have it anyway. Don't worry about it. And genuinely, I have found it's totally useless in some ways, but in, in the thing where you're like, I have an email about a thing, I don't really remember, but can you find that email for me? It is like surprisingly good as a resource to just dig through all my crap and find that one thing I was looking for. So this is the time where I'm like, okay, this is like a, a digital assistant that we're actually making into something. It's still Bard, so it's still not very good,

• 1:13:51David Pierce?

  but it's, this was like the first step forward I've seen for Bard where I'm like, all right, there's, there's something here.

• 1:13:56Nilay Patel?

  All right. I've done enough big thinky thinks on this episode. My lightning round is that I'm sitting here holding a iPhone 15 Pro in a fine woven case. And my initials are fully scratched into the back of this case.

• 1:14:08Alex Cranz?

  I can see them.

• 1:14:09Nilay Patel?

  And it's not great.

• 1:14:09David Pierce?

  It's as bad as advertised, really?

• 1:14:11Nilay Patel?

  It's as bad as advertised. I mean, it's, it's fine, but it's not great.

• 1:14:15Alex Cranz?

  I want to see you eat fried chicken and then pick it up.

• 1:14:18Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you.

• 1:14:19Alex Cranz?

  It's all I want.

• 1:14:20Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. We, it's, it's, September continues. Next week, we're at the Code Conference. We'll have links, lots of coverage, lots of stuff continues to go down here in the craziest September of my career as a tech journalist. That's it. We gotta go. Break them off.

• 1:14:39Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:15:12Speaker 06

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:15:42Speaker 08

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