Pod Insights The Vergecast Into the iPad Confusion Zone About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss a whole bunch of tech news from this week — a new Apple Pencil, the latest Cybertruck confusion, streaming updates, and more.
Further reading:
Apple Pencil joins the iPad confusion zone
Apple announces entry-level Apple Pencil with USB-C charging
Elgato’s new $279.99 Prompter is an all-in-one teleprompter and extra monitor
Analogue is making a 4K Nintendo 64
OnePlus Open review: right size, wrong price
Elon Musk says ‘we dug our own grave with Cybertruck,’ offers new delivery date
Elon Musk answers Tesla pricing question with anti work-from-home rant
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/18/23923256/musk-dodges-question-about-accepting-legal-liability-for-tesla-full-self-driving-cars
Tesla profits dip as it invests in factory upgrades and AI development
https://www.threads.net/@keubikooriginal/post/CyjavWouN0w
X will start charging new users in two countries $1 per year
ChargePoint is bringing Tesla’s NACS plug to its vast network of EV chargers
These space-saving public EV chargers are ridiculously fast and rolling out now
FCC kicks off fight to restore net neutrality
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/19/23923617/nokia-announces-14000-job-cuts-amid-5g-downturn
Here comes another Netflix price hike
Netflix’s first live sports broadcast pairs up F1 drivers with pro golfers
Spotify launches hub for artists’ merch
YouTube might make an official way to create AI Drake fakes
Get ready to see a lot more product ads in YouTube videos
YouTube wants to get you watching more news from ‘authoritative sources’
There’s no way you’ll miss YouTube’s like and subscribe buttons now
There's no way you'll miss YouTube's like and subscribe buttons now
How Ecobee is becoming the smart home company Nest should have been
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
Transcript 16,303 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 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 like 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.
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1:11 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the confusion zone. We'll explain what we mean soon. Hi, I'm your friend, Neil. Alex Krantz is here. I'm your friend who is always confused. So not in the zone. I'm, I'm, no, I live in the zone. I see. Yeah. David Pierce is here. I'm never confused about anything. David's out the zone. He's like, I'm not going in there. Not in the zone. We have quite a lot to talk about. We're restructuring the show this week is a series of lightning rounds, which I assure you that I am working on finding a sponsor for. There's one I have in particular in my brain. Starts with an eh and ends in a tell. If you're listening and you're from one of America's most important chipmakers.
1:55 Nilay Patel? Caller people, I don't do any of that side of the, that's, that's the other side of the house, but they're waiting to catch your money and rebrand this, the Vergecast Thunderbolt four round sponsored by, you know what I'm saying?
2:07 David Pierce? Yeah.
2:08 Nilay Patel? Anyway, it's a show of lightning, there's a lot of news, we gotta get through it all.
2:10 David Pierce? Yeah.
2:11 Nilay Patel? Uh, but before we begin, I want to, I want to shout out to two listeners who I would like to give t-shirts to. One, I literally just ran into me on a train today, looked surprised, said they were a big fan, and I forgot to say, give me your email address. So just send me an email, tell me what your name was on the train platform, and I'll make sure you get a t-shirt. I'm not saying their name because I want, that's my verification scheme.
2:32 David Pierce? Hmm.
2:34 Nilay Patel? So the second one is more, a little more of a story, and is truly one of the funniest moments that I've ever had hosting this show.
2:41 David Pierce? Okay.
2:42 Nilay Patel? Which is 10 years now. So we're in New York, like, lots of people just expect to see people in New York. It's like a normal thing that happens if someone's like, hey, the Verge.
2:55 David Pierce? Yeah.
2:55 Nilay Patel? You're a guy. I'm super mad at you about headphone jacks, and like, we're off to the races.
2:59 David Pierce? We should say, by the way, that, that is what 95% of people say when they meet one of us, they just go, ah, the Verge.
3:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's like a real thing. Look, there are creators who are vastly more popular than we are, so we're, we're, we're down here, but one of the best aspects of this is because it's a podcast, and people have been listening to us for so long, people just come up to us and start talking to us like they, they know us.
3:22 David Pierce? Yeah.
3:22 Nilay Patel? And often, whoever's partner is like, do you know each other? And I'm like, no. It's always very funny. So I, I appreciate this, happy to talk to whoever at any time. But I'm saying, in New York, that's normal, because people know that we're in New York, like.
3:36 David Pierce? Right.
3:37 Nilay Patel? You have some baseline expectation that we're at least supposed to be in this city, or at an Apple event, or whatever it is. I was in Boston this week.
3:45 David Pierce? Mm-hmm.
3:46 Nilay Patel? Where Harvard is launching something called the Applied Social Media Lab, and it's a big fancy event, and big fancy people, and... It's like a launch. There's panel interviews and da, da, da, da, da. And how can we help social media reinforce democracy like Eli stuff? You know, the stuff. Uh, and so I was there.
4:06 Alex Cranz? The stuff.
4:08 Nilay Patel? And, you know, at, at the event, watched the thing. We did a decoder episode with Larry Lustig. It was all great. But like eight 15 in the morning, I'm at Walgreens in Cambridge. And a Vergecast fan just looked like utterly perplexed. As I'm walking into the Walgreens, they walked up to me. And that very politely and all they had headphones in and they were listening to the last episode, the Sonos episode. And all this person could do was just like point at their phone. They were just like, that's you.
4:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's me. And then they said their name. So thank you for listening. I'm sorry. But I was like not supposed to be in Boston. Like I could see that.
4:47 Alex Cranz? Like, yeah.
4:48 Nilay Patel? It was just like unwired. Like, why is this person here? And I get it. Cause why was I there at eight 15 in the morning at Walgreens? This poor person was going to work. Send me an email, say your name. I remember your name. We'll get you a T-shirt. It was just like one of the purely funniest moments. Like it's like honestly, like, why was I there? There's no explanation. I had not tweeted. I'm in Boston, like nothing. Just context free. See a person that you're listening to. Must have been truly strange. So send me an email with your name and I'll send you a T-shirt.
5:17 David Pierce? Is it because of your tremendous brand loyalty to Dwayne Reed that no one could believe?
5:23 Alex Cranz? CBS.
5:24 Nilay Patel? So yeah, there's two, there's two T-shirts I want to send out. If you saw me on the train today. Uh, or if you saw me randomly in Boston. Which again, truly random situation.
5:34 Alex Cranz? I like that they didn't point at you because that's what I do when I see someone. I just point.
5:39 Nilay Patel? It was, it was showing me the, the activity widget on their iPhone. It just really got me. Like I would have done the same thing.
5:45 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
5:46 Nilay Patel? Like if I, if I was like, I don't know, watching Red Zone on my phone and Scott Hanson was there, like all I would have done is just like point at my phone. It's you. That's you.
5:57 Nilay Patel? You're there and here at the same time.
6:00 David Pierce? Uh, wait, before we move on, I have a really important question.
6:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
6:03 David Pierce? How many gadgets did you bring on the train today? I cannot tell you the response that we have gotten to your thesis that you would like to be the guy who just walks onto the train like a murderer with nothing.
6:13 Nilay Patel? Nothing.
6:14 David Pierce? The number of emails and posts, you got so much response to this being like, this is the way.
6:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah, this is all anybody wants to do.
6:20 David Pierce? Have you made progress? How are we doing?
6:21 Nilay Patel? So I, since that episode, I had not been back in the office. So my plan was to sneak into the office reviews closet today and see if we have a galaxy fold with Dex.
6:32 David Pierce? Hmm.
6:33 Nilay Patel? And I was gonna give it a shot in the, the coming week.
6:37 David Pierce? Okay.
6:38 Nilay Patel? Cause I, I'm commuting in the office like two or three times a week, so I'm gonna give it a shot one of these days.
6:43 David Pierce? Okay.
6:44 Nilay Patel? This requires like an enormous amount of upfront work as all assassinations require. Just a lot of planning and preparation. I had to set up a Dex workstation in the office, which is like perhaps not the best use of my time in the office.
7:01 David Pierce? I'm sure IT can help you.
7:03 Nilay Patel? No, no, no, no, that's not a ticket you wanna file. Hello? I would like to put an unvetted third-party operating system on this network.
7:12 David Pierce? It's fine.
7:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, just, uh, can I, can I have full access to the LAN, please? You've never heard of this operating system. It runs on a phone we don't even own. You know, I gotta do some prep work, which I will attempt to do today.
7:27 David Pierce? Yeah.
7:27 Nilay Patel? Um, I don't know why in my head this has to be a folding phone.
7:33 David Pierce? No, it makes sense.
7:34 Nilay Patel? Right.
7:34 David Pierce? Like a regular phone's not enough.
7:36 Nilay Patel? But like many Samsung phones run Dex.
7:39 David Pierce? But not as well. It's for the reading on the train, right? Like it's, it's like you want, you want the something to like sit down on the seat and, you know, cross your legs into your crossword puzzle. Like that's the, that's the interim stage. That's where you open the phone.
7:51 Nilay Patel? Right, but there's no part of, I'm not bringing out my laptop on the train, I'm just using my phone.
7:55 David Pierce? Yeah, shut up. Doesn't matter.
7:56 Nilay Patel? I don't, I don't have the middle ground between phone usage and laptop usage.
8:00 David Pierce? It's cause you don't have a foldable phone. I don't understand. This is it.
8:04 Nilay Patel? The other side of it is at my house, I have to set up an always on desktop computer to run beeper so I can get my iMessages.
8:11 David Pierce? Yeah.
8:12 Nilay Patel? So if you just think about the amount of prep work I have to do, so I can just roll up onto the train.
8:18 David Pierce? Okay, no, but here's the real thing.
8:20 Nilay Patel? I have to set up two different, extremely weird computing environments and make them both work.
8:25 David Pierce? Perfect.
8:26 Nilay Patel? So I can execute this plan.
8:28 David Pierce? If the Verge believes in anything, it's in doing so much work so you don't have to carry anything anywhere. Like, that is what we stand for.
8:34 Nilay Patel? I saw those notes and I was like, people get it.
8:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
8:37 David Pierce? Yeah.
8:37 Nilay Patel? You just want to roll up.
8:38 Alex Cranz? It's the dream.
8:39 David Pierce? But Neelai, the middle ground is you open it up and you accomplish your other dream, which is to write on stories with a red pen as an editor. So you get on the train, you unfold your phone.
8:51 Nilay Patel? If Google wants me to switch full-time to Android, just make it in the Android Google Docs app. You can circle things and that shows up as an edit everywhere in Google Docs. Make that exclusive to the Android version of Google Docs. I'll switch tomorrow. All I want to do is circle things with a red pen and send it to David where it says, "clunky."
9:15 Nilay Patel? That's it. As an editor-in-chief, I've had but one goal and I've stayed laser-focused on it this entire time.
9:22 Alex Cranz? David's less excited about that goal.
9:25 Nilay Patel? At the very beginning of The Verge, Joanna Stern had a Post-it note on the side of her monitor that just said, "clunky." So she would, she'd be like, "I know what you're gonna say." So she would just remember. I'm very predictable, man. All right, that's all the preamble. I'm working on my desk situation, David.
9:41 David Pierce? Okay, we're gonna check in next week. This is not, this is not a task you are allowed, if you have things on the train next week, we, the Verge cast public, will be very disappointed in you.
9:51 Nilay Patel? I hate it. I carried my backpack on the train today. I was like, "Why do I have all this stuff?" This bag exists solely to have my laptop in it.
9:58 Alex Cranz? No bag.
9:58 Nilay Patel? And I don't need all the stuff that's in it, but once you have a bag, you start filling it with stuff.
10:02 David Pierce? Some people would say the answer is buy another laptop. I say that's not the answer.
10:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah, a good answer is that I could actually ask our office people for a desk. And you know, because we're in return to work and nobody has us, it's all the stuff. I don't want, no, I'm not, I don't use software at work. I'm not filling out IT tickets and none of this is happening. You know, my dream, it's to never use enterprise software.
10:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
10:24 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna get, I, I would bet that I get closer to consistently having emails printed out and handed to me using Dex at work.
10:32 Alex Cranz? I, yeah.
10:33 Nilay Patel? Like a long term, what is more likely to be a real thing that happens? It's I get to the point where people hand me printed out emails than I consistently every day use Dex.
10:43 Alex Cranz? I think if you don't, if you have a bag next week, then yeah, we're, we're just gonna start only communicating with you with like printed emails. Be like, can you check this in Slack? No. Email.
10:54 Nilay Patel? All right. We, there's news.
10:56 Alex Cranz? Yeah, there is news.
10:57 Nilay Patel? There's a lot of news, but I'll, I'll, I'll work, I'm gonna go check out the Dex situation in the closet after this.
11:03 Nilay Patel? Okay. Lightning rounds, let's start with gadget lightning round.
11:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
11:06 Nilay Patel? David, you got the first one, what's up?
11:08 David Pierce? I want to talk about the Apple pencil.
11:09 Nilay Patel? The confusion zone.
11:10 David Pierce? The confusion zone. We are entering the confusion zone. Uh, who knows how long we'll be here, but we are here now.
11:16 Alex Cranz? Thank you, Rod Sterling.
11:18 David Pierce? So, Apple launched a new pencil. It's a, it's a pencil, but it charges with USB-C. That is the only thing about it that I understand. There is now an Apple pencil that charges with USB-C. What Apple also did was make the entire situation of buying an iPad and an Apple pencil vastly more confusing on top of already being more confusing. And the funniest thing that has happened this week is that there are, I would say, a set of people on the internet who spend a lot of time explaining weird decisions Apple makes as if they are not weird decisions. Apple lost everybody on this one. This was one of those, everybody was like, why on earth are there three pencils? There's now the Apple pencil first generation, which works for a subset of iPads.
12:03 David Pierce? There's the Apple pencil second generation, which works for a subset of iPads. And there's an Apple pencil USB-C, which works for a different subset of iPads. And there, there is just no world in which any of this makes any sense anymore. And it has led a lot of people to reconsider whether the iPad makes any sense anymore.
12:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
12:19 David Pierce? And I just, I just need you guys to feel as annoyed about this.
12:22 Nilay Patel? That's the domino meme, right? Where it's like, they released the Apple pencil with USB-C, it's the first little domino. And like, the last one is someone is like, I'm switching to Windows.
12:34 Nilay Patel? I saw, I saw this happen this week. They're gonna go full surface. Yeah, they're like, at least the Surface Pen makes sense and I can, I can just buy the one and it works everywhere. So the, I get why they needed to make an Apple pencil with USB C and I like the little design. It's a slidey cap, so it just opens. Maybe the first affordance to charging accessory that makes sense that Apple has released. Ever. At least in the context of, of comput- like, obviously AirPods. Yeah, you don't have to plug it in. It's not in the bottom, you don't have to take the cap off. It's not only magnetic to some iPad.
13:10 David Pierce? You plug a thing into it instead of plugging it into a thing, which is the obviously correct and better way to do everything.
13:16 Nilay Patel? Yes. It's important people recognize and might have charging cables for. All, all very good.
13:20 David Pierce? Yes.
13:21 Nilay Patel? Great. Uh, so that part's cool. It's missing a bunch of features. So there's like a, there's a, Apple released a chart with checkmarks of what all the things do and it looks like one of those charts of like when you go to buy health insurance or something and you're like, I don't know what any of these words mean or whether I want this and this is definitely gonna put me in debt. Like, it's like that level of confusing in the chart. Yeah. And there's a bunch of features that if you don't know you need them, you, you're like, do I need hover? Do I need double tap to switch? Like, it's, it's hard to convey the value of the features in a chart like this.
13:56 David Pierce? Well, and there's also the fact that the USB C Apple pencil, which is ostensibly the newest Apple pencil, is missing a bunch of features, including features that exist on the first generation Apple pencil. Like, pressure sensitivity, which I would argue is a very important feature in like a high-end Silas. This thing is $80. It does not have pressure sensitivity. The very first pencil Apple ever made has pressure sensitivity. Like, what are we doing here?
14:22 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Well, it's not us. It's not circling things.
14:26 David Pierce? Definitely not.
14:27 Nilay Patel? Um, also the image they released to promote this new pencil. Just go look at it. We had a full Slack conversation about it. It is ridiculous. It is, it's a picture of like a boba tea custard. And it, mm, I don't wanna, it's like an illustration of it. Parts of it look like a recipe. Arrows go nowhere. The recipe would not help you, like, if you just like look at an illustration of a custard and there's just like some words on it that are like bake until 3:50, you're like, I don't know what I'm baking. And then, yes, there are arrows that go to nowhere.
15:00 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
15:00 Nilay Patel? And then it says how many there might be as though this is like a catering order. But then it's beautifully illustrated.
15:05 Alex Cranz? I like that the highlights were all the exact same width because there's no pressure sensitive.
15:10 Nilay Patel? I didn't notice that.
15:11 Alex Cranz? So it's gonna be the same width.
15:12 Nilay Patel? Anyway, just go look at it. I don't mean, whatever. It's, it's marketing material. It's an ad. We did that post a long time ago. It's like the only thing people can think of to do with the service pen is circling things. And this is like the ultimate exercise in nonsensical circling of things. Like this image, no one would ever make it unless they had been assigned to making an image to market a stylus. That is the only reason it exists. And I think that's kind of indicative of this whole exercise of the iPad. They sell a lot of them. They have a lot of different kinds of uses. It is 500 different kinds of appliance to people, but that means it has no narrative. It's just a thing. And it's like, you can sell the ninth gen one with a lightning port.
15:58 Alex Cranz? You shouldn't.
15:58 Nilay Patel? Kids can watch Disney Plus, but it's cheap. It's like, that thing needs to compete with Fire tablets that are essentially free. Or you can sell one at the top end that has all the features in the world and is meant to compete with Windows laptops.
16:14 David Pierce? Yeah, there were a bunch of rumors before this announcement that we were gonna get a big iPad refresh this week, that there was gonna be some much bigger news about tablets. And I think, A, the fact that that didn't happen is sort of telling. I mean, the iPad is way overdue. That whole lineup is overdue for like a real, serious refresh. It's been, I mean, the, the ninth generation one has a home button and a lightning port. Like, it's way behind. Uh, and you can still buy it and it's still, I think, $329 is the starting price for an iPad is really important to Apple. And I think the new low end iPad is, is like 450 bucks. And I'm just, I'm betting Apple just cannot figure out how to sell that thing at its margins for $329.
16:56 David Pierce? But we're getting to the point now where it just doesn't make any sense, that lineup anymore. It's like, if you're an iPad mini person, it's easy. You just buy an iPad mini, that thing kicks ass. I'm an iPad mini person, buy an iPad mini.
17:09 Alex Cranz? Same.
17:09 David Pierce? Beyond that, there's an entry level iPad and another entry level iPad. There's an iPad Air. There are the iPad Pros. Like, we, they've just lost the plot here. And I think you're right. It's because... Apple is increasingly unclear what this thing is for. Like, I think the MacBook was gonna die and the iPad was gonna be the computer of the future. And then, actually, the MacBook got awesome and has had a real resurgence. And now, the question is like, we're back to, is there a space between your increasingly large, increasingly powerful phone and your increasingly long-lasting, increasingly portable laptop? And, you know, what, 13 years ago, when the iPad came out, there actually was a lot of gap that your phone didn't cover and your laptop didn't cover. And those two things have both come closer together.
17:54 David Pierce? And it feels like the space for the iPad is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
17:57 Nilay Patel? Yes. I would remind you that we opened the show with a ludicrous, but entirely realistic conversation about whether I can just walk onto a train with a folding phone that turns into a desktop PC at this office.
18:11 David Pierce? Yeah.
18:11 Nilay Patel? And, again, ludicrous, but not a thing I can't do. Like, it's just a thing I can do right now. As I can buy a phone that opens into a tablet, arrive at work, and turn it into a reasonable facsimile of a desktop computer.
18:30 David Pierce? Yeah.
18:30 Nilay Patel? Because it will be running Dex, which RIT will have to let me put on some.
18:36 Nilay Patel? The iPad does not, like, it's not cognizant of that reality.
18:41 David Pierce? Right.
18:42 Nilay Patel? In the application ecosystem, in the user interface with stage management, like, all that stuff, it still thinks that people don't want laptops. I think that's just getting increasingly untenable.
18:52 Alex Cranz? No, I think they know about the laptops, because half of those iPads become laptops. You know, you have to spend like $150, $200 for the case, but you can turn most of those iPads into-
19:04 Nilay Patel? The Magic Keyboard is $300.
19:06 David Pierce? I was gonna say, I wish it was $150.
19:08 Alex Cranz? Look, it's been like four years since I bought one, but that's brutal. But, like, they're very aware, and they try to go after that kind of surface pricing. They try to position it as a surface, but then they have the cheap ones and the mini, and they're like, "Well, no, no, these are iPad iPads." And these are iPad laptops, but-
19:26 Nilay Patel? What's really interesting, what has changed my mind about the iPad is watching two people in my family use them.
19:30 Alex Cranz? Okay.
19:31 Nilay Patel? Max, who is five, who watches YouTube Kids and plays Minecraft. And- There's actually a really tight nexus there. She watches people play Minecraft on YouTube Kids.
19:41 Alex Cranz? Mm-hmm.
19:42 Nilay Patel? And then she plays Minecraft.
19:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
19:44 Nilay Patel? And that means she is now great at Minecraft. Because she's five, she doesn't have to make any money.
19:49 Alex Cranz? She's terrifying.
19:49 Nilay Patel? We feed her, we take her everywhere, we can just pick her up and move her if she's not in the right place, you know, like. She can, all of her mental energy is focused on Minecraft.
19:58 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
19:58 Nilay Patel? In a way that is wonderful and I miss it. But like, the thing is perfectly adequate for that task. She is not like, I want a newer, better iPad. It doesn't even matter to her.
20:10 Alex Cranz? Right.
20:10 Nilay Patel? The thing is a window to Minecraft. I don't even know how she does it because she's using touchscreen controls to move around Minecraft. It makes me dizzy watching her play this game. I'm like, do you want to control her? She's like, get out of here, old man. It's weird. She's five, she's mean. No, she's not.
20:24 David Pierce? And it, by the way, in a, in a certain way, that is like.
20:27 Nilay Patel? Perfect.
20:28 David Pierce? The dream state of the iPad. Like, what an unbelievable success story of a device you just described, right?
20:34 Nilay Patel? It's an appliance for Minecraft.
20:35 David Pierce? Yeah.
20:36 Nilay Patel? And it's doing that job perfectly, and it charges using the same cable as her mother's iPhone. Which makes life very convenient for those two, right? Very inconvenient for me at this juncture. It used to charge the same cable as my phone. Now I'm just like a weird old guy in the corner being like, it's a USB. Like, I'm just like left out of my family. That's her, right? Appliance for consuming video on like handful of video apps and playing one, one game. Then there's my sister, who is a full, like iPad as a laptop person.
21:08 Alex Cranz? Love this.
21:08 Nilay Patel? So my sister's a doctor, she goes to work, Windows is foisted upon her. She comes back and she has no desire to further use traditional desktop operating systems. She just is on her iPad. And she's ultra effective, she's like an iPad person. And I watch her use this thing and it's like literally just a relief from desktop operating metaphors.
21:31 Alex Cranz? Yes. I mean, I do that.
21:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:33 Alex Cranz? I've got one where like if I, if I have to do work on the weekends or something, sometimes I'll go and use my, my computer. But a lot of times I'll be like, I'm gonna pull out my 2018 iPad Pro and use that just to escape.
21:44 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:44 Alex Cranz? Just to not feel like I'm at work. Because Slack will probably still be open because I probably left it open and like some drafts that I owe edits on are there. And I'm like, I don't want to look at that. I just want to. Go and do things.
21:55 Nilay Patel? Mm hmm.
21:55 Alex Cranz? And so it's really nice. And then I got my, my other iPad, which is just for in bed, reading and, and looking at YouTube and not going to sleep.
22:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
22:04 Alex Cranz? It's great.
22:05 Nilay Patel? You're hitting a point that I've, I'm starting to hit now, which is like, I should have computers per room.
22:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I, that's, that's basically what's happened.
22:12 Nilay Patel? I used to like have a laptop that I would carry around. I'm like, what if I get a Chromebook for the living room? It's like, it's right over there.
22:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I don't have anybody to be like, no.
22:22 Nilay Patel? Um, so I tried to do this with my iPad. I was like, the iPad will just like live in the living room.
22:26 Alex Cranz? It's hard.
22:27 Nilay Patel? It'll be my TV computer. And an iPad on a Magic Keyboard is like not a good laptop. So if anything at work happens, it's like, I can't do it. I have to go get my laptop. And then the Magic Keyboard is like not great for lap.
22:38 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
22:38 Nilay Patel? Like if you're on a couch with it, it's like, oh, this is somewhat uncomfortable.
22:41 Alex Cranz? I put a pillow.
22:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
22:43 Alex Cranz? And then I put it on top. That's, that's my little habit.
22:45 Nilay Patel? When I say this is the domino, by the way, Apple released the USB C, Apple pencil, and here we are. I'm like, I gotta get a Chromebook for my living room.
22:52 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
22:53 Nilay Patel? I'm telling you, people are like evaluating all the places they would otherwise put an iPad. And they're like, oh, there's a slightly better product to put in that place. Unless you're using it as an appliance, unless it has a single purpose and you've, you've jammed an iPad into that purpose, like playing, again, playing Minecraft, watching videos. For the longest time, we, my oldest iPad lived on our old treadmill. And Becky just used it to do Peloton treadmill workouts. Like it was just a Peloton TV. And then we moved and she's like, I'm buying a real Peloton. And we threw that iPad away.
23:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
23:27 Nilay Patel? But like, that's all, it's, the thing is an appliance. And I think Apple has not, it has not marketed the thing well. It's like, it is an appliance. It's like, here's all the iPads you can buy. And it's assuming the market will just figure it out. But then you get to the pencil and you're like, I don't even know what to buy.
23:41 David Pierce? Right. I mean, I think the, the thing that Apple has held on to all this time is that it is possible to be all things to all people because it's just a screen, because it has the accessories, because it has a gigantic app ecosystem. It can solve everybody's problems because everybody has different problems, but everybody has problems, right? And the iPad can be the solution to all those problems. And if you have a subset of problems, I think that's true. Like, if you want to play a certain kind of game, the iPad is the best thing that exists on earth to play that kind of game. Alex and I talk about reading on the show all the time. And it's like, the iPad is the best reading device. Like, it's not close.
24:16 Alex Cranz? Yep.
24:16 David Pierce? It just is. It's the best Minecraft device if you want to watch videos about Minecraft and then play Minecraft, right? Like, if you have this one need, it's a really expensive device, but it works. The problem is, Apple has made it so vastly complicated to figure out which one is the right one for your needs that you're going to start to, like, literally push people away because I just... I'm looking at these pencils and the answer for me is I'm not going to buy one. Because, like, what is happening? I'm going to buy the $10 knockoff on Amazon that just works with all of them. It's going to be fine.
24:44 Alex Cranz? Like, Apple used to be really, really good at this, too, right? Like, Apple would go and kill something just to keep their lineup as clean as possible. And over the years, it's gotten messier and messier. And that's fine in a lot of ways. It's good. Like, there's a lot of phones you can choose from. They're very affordable.
25:01 David Pierce? Yeah.
25:02 Alex Cranz? All of that. But with the iPads in particular, it's like, no, you've got... made it too messy. It's just too messy.
25:07 Nilay Patel? Because I don't know, for most... Well, Apple's so big now, they still sell new products. They need something at every price point.
25:12 Alex Cranz? Right.
25:13 Nilay Patel? And so they just bring things down in price. So that makes a little bit of sense to me.
25:16 Alex Cranz? A little.
25:16 Nilay Patel? The old one's still here if you want it. They particularly do that with the iPhones. With the iPad, I think they don't... They have to articulate a reason that you're not going to buy the cheapest thing, which I think in this case is a Fire tablet.
25:28 David Pierce? Well, and not only that, I mean, I think we could sit here and I could pretty quickly explain to you the difference between the four models of the iPhone, right? Like, there are features that you get on one that you don't get on the other. Other than screen bigger, thing more expensive, can you tell me the difference between the entry-level iPad and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro?
25:49 Nilay Patel? It has a LiDAR sensor, David. I don't know what you're talking about. Everyone is constantly out here doing LiDAR stuff.
25:56 Alex Cranz? It's the future.
25:57 Nilay Patel? I will say that in our... My new office in the new house, Liam, our producer legitimately has, like, carpet samples for me to, like, de-echo this room and treat this room that I have to go look at. And he was like, "Send me some dimensions." And I did the LiDAR room scanning thing with the iPhone, and it was super cool. And then I ended up with, like, a file that I had no idea how to use it or send it to anyone.
26:20 Alex Cranz? It's here.
26:22 Nilay Patel? This lightning round has gone on. It's a confusion zone.
26:24 David Pierce? Yeah.
26:25 Nilay Patel? That's all I'm saying.
26:26 David Pierce? But it also, my prediction is, at some point in the next 12 months, either this is gonna get much worse, or Apple is just going to clean it up drastically. And I would bet on that. I think we're gonna get a bunch of new iPads that make a lot more sense very soon.
26:37 Alex Cranz? I hope the latter.
26:38 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna bet on more confusing. Just to be contrary, I have no insight.
26:43 David Pierce? One of the iPads is gonna be a soundbar.
26:45 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
26:47 Nilay Patel? We got a lot of emails of people who are like, you don't know what you're talking about. They're definitely making a soundbar. No way. I'm gonna get printed out emails delivered to me at work before Apple releases.
26:56 Alex Cranz? And they're all gonna be the soundbar.
26:58 Nilay Patel? All right, here's my lightning round one. I'm actually really excited about this. I would've done the whole show on this product. Ogato has a new thing called the Prompter, which is just a $280 teleprompter.
27:08 Alex Cranz? I want it so bad.
27:09 Nilay Patel? With a bunch of lens adapters. You can like screw it right onto the end of various DSLR lenses. It has other mounts for whatever. It's a display with a mirror. And a little bit of software. Like, the tiniest bit of software to be able to let them claim that they've done something here. But it's a USB-C display with a mirror and some clever mounting hardware. So you can like put it right on a DSLR. I think this is one of the funnest products ever.
27:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah. It's just a teleprompter, but for people.
27:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And it's like itty bitty.
27:41 Alex Cranz? Because right now, if you wanted to do a teleprompter, and you didn't want to go spend money on an actual one, you'd have to get an iPad. And like, there was a whole setup you could do.
27:48 Nilay Patel? So in the pandemic, I was given a giant teleprompter to do review videos. Like, we did a bunch of review videos. I remember we did one, I think it was the first M1 MacBook airs. Dieter and I like reviewed them when we were home. I think I did a MacBook Pro. We did a bunch of reviews at home, basically. So the studio sent me a prompter, so I could like read the reviews.
28:12 David Pierce? This is a good time to tell everybody, by the way, that every single thing Nilay says on the Vergecast is scripted, and he's reading off a prompter right now.
28:18 Alex Cranz? He's just that good.
28:19 Nilay Patel? Obama's in the era right now.
28:22 Nilay Patel? Listen, everybody. So we have one. To mount an iPad on a meaningfully good prompter required like the world's biggest, heaviest tripod. It's just like a huge, heavy thing that you need to have to get an iPad going. And then you need special software on the iPad. It's all just a mess. This is just a little USB C display that you like plug into your computer. It does have a little bit of software, a little bit of teleprompter. I want it so bad. But the most important thing is because it's just a monitor, you can just slide windows to it. Yeah. So you can just slide the Google Doc right to it and read that. As opposed to like having to send it to some other weird software that I needed to have in an iPad. It's small, so it can be mounted on a variety of things.
29:06 Nilay Patel? That mean the heavy iPad. And importantly, you can just put Zoom windows because you just put windows in. So you can just like make eye contact with people while you're video conferencing, which is the secret of my success.
29:19 David Pierce? Okay, quick, can we talk about this, though? Because this has come up a bunch and I both want to talk about this now. And I also want people to email us, [email protected] . Is it good or horrifying when the person you're talking to in a meeting is staring dead into the camera and attempting to make eye contact with you? I believe it is horrifying and bad. And it should be illegal to look at your camera during a Zoom meeting. But I genuinely like you, Neel, I like went way out of your way and rigged up a whole system where it actually appears like you're looking at the camera as you're talking to somebody who is on your screen.
29:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
29:52 David Pierce? I hate it.
29:53 Nilay Patel? I think it's weird to exist in a world where no one's ever looking at each other. And particularly in the pandemic, it just really impacted me that like no one was ever looking at anything.
30:06 David Pierce? Yeah.
30:06 Nilay Patel? And one way that I could signal that I was paying attention was by looking at the camera. Because necessarily, if I'm looking at the camera, I'm not just like looking at some webpage. Now with the Elgato prompter, which is $280, I can definitely look at a webpage.
30:25 David Pierce? It is an interesting thing, though, because I feel like the thing that so many people learned during the webcam is like, everyone is always just kind of looking six inches below you.
30:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
30:35 David Pierce? It's like, I always just think about it as like, everyone you're talking to is always staring at your belly button. Right? Like, that's, that's the angle we've all gotten used to in these video chats. And in the abstract, I agree, that's weird, and it would be better if we all just like barreled the camera and stared at each other. But also, the funny thing is, if I'm looking at the camera right now, I'm actually not looking at you.
30:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah, you're looking up.
30:54 David Pierce? I'm looking at the camera. And all of the norms of this are weird, where like, there have been all these studies that show when we do Zoom calls, actually, we spend most of the time looking at ourselves and not the people that we talk to. And that's like exhausting and emotionally problematic and really bad, because we're not supposed to be looking at ourselves this much in life. But just this prompter is like, if you're somebody who like makes videos and streams or whatever, and like you're the creator and they're the audience, I can see why you look into the camera, and that makes sense. But these new norms of like virtual conversations.
31:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
31:24 David Pierce? Are so odd to me, and I just don't know the right answer. But I do think something like this, where I can feasibly be looking at you and the camera at the same time, is very cool. So like, I'm, I'm into this for that reason, but I, I still think it's weird.
31:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, I love it. Well, especially because I can put a fancy camera behind it. Like, they have, have you seen the TikTok ad for the CenterCam? I'm bringing Sony Imaging Webcam back. Oh, nice. With the Elgato. I'm gonna buy you an HDMI card. And you're not leaving the office before I have a folding phone and you have an HDMI card. You've seen the thing, like, it's like a CenterCam, I think that's what it's called? Yeah. And it's just like a little itty bitty camera sensor on a stick. And the idea is that it is not in the way. Mm-hmm. And it's just a bad camera. Like, this, this is my problem with it, is like, I want it to look good, because I'm a precious camera man. You want to look nice, yeah. So this is like, what gets me at this, is like, oh, you can put a good camera back there.
32:16 David Pierce? Yeah.
32:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And that, that, I think, changes my relationship with, I know, I'm definitely getting one. The other thing that I think is super important about this. Uh-huh. Is we, we just keep seeing this over and over again. All these companies, the little companies are making gadgets for creators. Like, there's a real market there. Those people have needs. The needs are not perfectly met by pro hardware or pro cameras. There's a sweet spot there for Twitch streamers and YouTubers and all that. And I think it is fascinating. I thought we would see a bunch of that stuff for work from home in the pandemic. And we've definitely seen some of it, some like cooler little ducks. That market petered out because people were not, like, you buy it once and it goes away.
33:00 Nilay Patel? And it's not growing. Hey, I want to grow up to be a streamer. Or, hey, I run a small company and making content is the best market I can do. And these things, I need some help doing it well. That is a large and growing market. And just the amount of gadgets that are coming out to solve that problem is actually pretty fascinating.
33:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
33:18 Nilay Patel? And I'm a gadget nerd, so I'm excited about it. But I think there's something durable there about the creator platforms that we haven't quite seen yet. Like, YouTuber's been around for a long time. The stuff to make YouTube videos well, there's not actually a lot of it. You still kind of get funneled into buying a Sony camera and Premiere if you want to make a YouTube video.
33:39 Alex Cranz? Podcasting where the first time you do it, you have to go and you Google. And there's like three websites. They look like absolute garbage and they give you the actual list of stuff you want to buy. And it's all like pro stuff, if you want it to be good.
33:51 Nilay Patel? Even that market, there's like a new Shore mic that's a good idea.
33:55 Alex Cranz? And we've started to see in the last couple of years, we started to see like, oh, used to, I'd have to go buy a whole rig in order for my podcasting setup to sound nice. And now it's like pretty inexpensive for most people to just sound nice out of the box. And I think we're getting rapidly to that place with cameras and that whole setup. And soon, and the lights and everything else, like, everybody's going to look the same.
34:16 Nilay Patel? I can't wait to put up the camera lights in the office. Liam, they're coming. They're coming. This lighting around just keeps going on. Alex, what's yours?
34:22 Alex Cranz? All right, so mine is Analog, who makes really, really good emulation emulator slash consoles. Is doing an N64. And I'm personally am very, very excited because the N64 is the hardest, maybe not the hardest, but probably one of the hardest consoles to emulate. It's super hard to emulate in software because the processor was all custom. And so. You have to have a really, really powerful computer to play a lot of N64 games if you're emulating them. This, you'll be able to play cards. It's got an FPGA that mimics the original hardware, so it should be a lot faster. It should play cards natively, and then if you do somehow get software on it, it would play the software natively, the emulated games natively, and I'm just like, super, super excited for this thing.
35:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
35:08 Alex Cranz? Like, a little too excited. I'm gonna have one.
35:10 Nilay Patel? The lack of emulation for the N64 has made it like, almost a forgotten console.
35:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because everybody's like, "Okay, what was on it?" GoldenEye, which like-
35:19 Nilay Patel? Important.
35:19 David Pierce? The greatest game of all time.
35:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
35:21 Nilay Patel? Mario 64, perhaps the most important game of all time.
35:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I mean Mario 64, there was, um, obviously the two Legends of Zelda's, and those are about it when people talk about it, but if you grew up in that age, it was like, nah. You played a lot of games. Like, Chris Welch is always like, WCW.
35:37 David Pierce? There was also the first Mario Tennis, which was the video game in my life I have been best at.
35:43 Alex Cranz? It wasn't the first Mario Tennis. That was for the Virtual Boy.
35:47 Nilay Patel? Wow, David, how dare you forget the Virtual Boy?
35:49 Alex Cranz? How dare you?
35:52 Alex Cranz? How dare-
35:53 David Pierce? Yeah, it was the first one.
35:57 Alex Cranz? The first one people played, do you mean?
35:59 David Pierce? Technically, the first one was like, the one someone made in their lab in Japan, but I don't consider that one real either. The first one was for the N64.
36:09 Nilay Patel? All right, I'm excited about this. There's no pictures of it yet. There's like, shadowy, render-y things.
36:13 Alex Cranz? It's gonna come later. I know we'll probably be talking to that team and hearing more from Analog soon, so I'm really, really excited. And it just looks cool, and also closer to a GameCube from Analog, and that's what I really want, because they are so expensive on eBay, and I really regret selling mine.
36:31 Nilay Patel? Can I tell you my story of GameCube regret?
36:33 Alex Cranz? Yes.
36:35 Nilay Patel? This is-
36:35 Alex Cranz? The face alone says it's gonna be a great story.
36:38 Nilay Patel? All right. I'll tell you after the break. Liam says I have to tell you after the break. We'll be right back, everybody, with the story of GameCube regret.
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37:53 Nilay Patel? Alright, we're back. What is it? Here's a story from my youth about the GameCube. Okay. So there is a bar by my apartment in college called The Cove. Alright. And on Thursday nights, The Cove would have $4 pitchers. So we all went to The Cove quite a bit. Is this a story from like the 1930s? Yeah. This is like a real thing. In Hyde Park in Chicago, The Cove had $4 pitchers on Thursday. So we're just there. We were there a lot. This is Milwaukee's best, though, right? No, it was Miller Lite. It was like any garbage domestic beer. Okay. But you can tell that I grew up, again, in the 50s. And this is the time that the GameCube was the state of the art console. Yeah. The war had just ended. Everybody was... And yeah, so we're there a lot. We know all the, you know, the people who come through.
38:37 Nilay Patel? And one day, Heineken is at The Cove. And they're having a Madden tournament. And I'm like, I'm in the Madden tournament. I don't know if you've ever tried to play Madden on the GameCube controller? It makes no sense. Like, everyone was horrible at Madden on the GameCube. Like, I want you to go, pull over in your car, and look at a picture of a GameCube controller, and imagine trying to play Madden on this thing. Best controller ever made. For playing three games. Soul caliber. Like in classic Nintendo style, they're like, we made this controller to play one specific Mario game.
39:13 David Pierce? Yeah.
39:14 Nilay Patel? It's a game where Luigi fights ghosts with water.
39:17 David Pierce? And there's only one, there's essentially one button on the GameCube controller and all the rest of them are tiny and thousands of miles away from each other.
39:24 Nilay Patel? I love it. And Madden is about quickly deciding what button to press. And everyone's like, I don't know, yellow. And like, it's a disaster. So this is the longest Madden tournament of all time fueled by $4 pitchers of beer. So on top of it, everyone's destroyed. The long story is, I won the Madden tournament and I came home with a GameCube with the Heineken logo silk screened all over the top, which my friends and I all called the Heine Cube.
39:53 Nilay Patel? And if I only had held on to this thing, Max would be going to college tomorrow. Yeah. I'd be like, take her now, Harvard. Yeah. Heine Cube, baby. That's my story.
40:03 David Pierce? I thought that was a sad story. That's an awesome story.
40:06 Nilay Patel? Well, I don't have it anymore.
40:07 David Pierce? Oh, okay.
40:08 Nilay Patel? It's a loss of money. I think I gave it to my friend, Robert, when he, when he graduated. Robert, if you're listening, I'll send you a T-shirt in exchange for the Heine Cube.
40:14 David Pierce? Neelai, I have really good news for you.
40:16 Nilay Patel? Huh?
40:17 David Pierce? You can buy right now, six Nintendo Heineken Game Cubes for the low, low price of $20,000.
40:25 Nilay Patel? No, are you kidding me?
40:26 David Pierce? No, that's real. I just found this on eBay.
40:31 Nilay Patel? But. Like a lot of six Heine Cubes?
40:34 David Pierce? Six Heine Cubes, three purple, three black. There were only 100 of them made, according to the eBay listing. $20,000.
40:43 Nilay Patel? I had one. That could have been you.
40:45 David Pierce? 33 people have this on their watch list. I'm just saying.
40:48 Nilay Patel? I had one of these things for three years.
40:53 Nilay Patel? Not anymore. I'm so annoyed with myself. The Verchass is over, everybody. We're done for the day. I've got to go back in time to play Madden on GameCube. So my daughter can go to college. I have to invent a time machine and tell my, tell my drunk 22-year-old self, "You hold on to that GameCube."
41:13 Alex Cranz? Don't you give it away.
41:14 Nilay Patel? I'm much worse. I've been playing the new Madden. I have no idea how this game works anymore. When I describe Madden as knowing what button to push quickly, that is no longer true.
41:23 Alex Cranz? It's like team management now, right?
41:25 Nilay Patel? No, that's a whole other part of it. There's like a whole Pokemon version of Madden that you can play.
41:29 David Pierce? But now you have to know, you have to know where to look and you have to like, it's, it's, it's, you have to know like six buttons to press at the same time.
41:35 Nilay Patel? The game is so hard that they've added bullet time to it?
41:38 Alex Cranz? Nope, nope, nope. Your football's gotten too hard.
41:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's like, this isn't how this works for anyone. Alright, let's carry on with our all lightning round show. Although this is kind of like the Tesla round. Cause Tesla had earnings, there's a lot of news buried in Tesla earnings. I will quickly start by saying, as long as we're talking about Elon X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, rolled out a plan where in two countries, they're gonna start charging people a dollar to sign up on the web to keep away the bots. I don't know about you, if I, for example, had access to a bot farm, I would quickly realize that I could just bankrupt Elon Musk with credit card fees. I don't know if this plan's gonna work. I don't have access to a bot farm. I wish no ill will to anyone. I'm just saying.
42:22 Nilay Patel? It seems like you opened the door to a particular kind of problem with this plan. We'll, we'll set that aside.
42:28 David Pierce? Yeah.
42:29 Nilay Patel? Uh, Tesla earnings though are kind of like all over the place. Do you wanna start with the Cybertruck or do you wanna start with the money?
42:35 David Pierce? Let's start with the Cybertruck.
42:36 Nilay Patel? Alright, here's the quote. Elon Musk says, "We dug our own grave with the Cybertruck." Uh, cause it's so complicated and so hard to make.
42:44 Alex Cranz? And ugly.
42:46 Nilay Patel? There's that aspect of it, I would say.
42:50 Alex Cranz? Throwing it out there, just a little feeling I have.
42:52 Nilay Patel? Uh, they're gonna deliver the first few on November 30th at the factory in Texas, the Gigafactory in Texas. They have not said how much these will cost.
43:02 Alex Cranz? I-
43:02 Nilay Patel? Or to whom they will be delivered.
43:04 Alex Cranz? Concerning.
43:06 Nilay Patel? You get the feeling these first, these are like show deliveries.
43:09 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
43:10 Nilay Patel? Like Kimball Musk will take delivery of a Cybertruck. Yeah, it's, it's like one of those things. It's like, who is buying them for what price? There's no price release. The only people buying them are obviously in a pre-existing relationship with Tesla and they will take delivery. Upon delivery, the price will be revealed. Again, not how most people buy a car.
43:31 Nilay Patel? Just put that out there.
43:32 David Pierce? Although I will say, if any company can make that a thing, it's Tesla.
43:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I think that's-
43:39 David Pierce? The specific hold this company has over a subset of people where they can just like-
43:43 Nilay Patel? Oh, and like Ferrari.
43:45 Alex Cranz? I guess Ferrari does kind of do that now.
43:47 Nilay Patel? The ultra-high-end hypercar manufacturers.
43:51 Alex Cranz? It's like invitation only, and then you find out afterwards.
43:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
43:55 Alex Cranz? But look at a Ferrari and look at a Cybertruck. Which one of those do you want to have enough money and spend it on it? Like, if you're that rich.
44:03 Nilay Patel? I can't wait for that moment to be a TikTok. With a picture of Ferrari and a picture of a Cybertruck.
44:09 David Pierce? Also, because-
44:09 Alex Cranz? Which one do you want?
44:10 David Pierce? The Cybertrucks that we've seen, and we've now seen a lot of pictures of these things in the wild, they look like crap. Like, I think reasonable people can disagree on whether the Cybertruck is a cool-looking vehicle or not. It's personally not my thing, but I know it is lots of people's thing. Fine. The ones they're making look like shit. Like, they are poorly made. Elon Musk has talked a lot about the, like, the machine tolerances and how close everything has to be. They're out there with, like, essentially like duct tape holding the pieces together. Like, they're not making this thing well right now. And I think it's very funny that the people who are going to get the first ones are like the diehards. Either the Tesla diehards, or the Elon Musk diehards, or the Cybertruck diehards. And they're essentially going to get cars that look like I built them. And like, that's not good.
44:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
44:55 Nilay Patel? So let me read you this quote, the rest of the "we dug our own grave" quote. And I want to see if people can make the connection to the other person who spoke like this. "We dug our own grave with the Cybertrucks," said Musk. "The Cybertruck is one of those special products that only comes along once in a long while. And special products that come along once in a long while are just incredibly difficult to bring to market, to reach volume, and to be prosperous." So the first part of that is Steve Jobs.
45:22 David Pierce? Yep.
45:24 Nilay Patel? I'm very excited to be standing here today. Every now and again, you're lucky to make one special product like the Mac or the iPod or the iPhone. That's how we began the iPhone event is almost this line exactly. What he did not say at the end of the iPhone event was the iPhone is going to be incredibly difficult to bring to market in a way that is prosperous.
45:46 David Pierce? We barely know how to make this thing.
45:49 Nilay Patel? And the thing is like, Apple didn't make phones at the time. Tesla is an existing high-volume car company.
45:55 David Pierce? The iPhone at the time was barely existent.
45:59 Nilay Patel? Right.
45:59 David Pierce? Like, all the stories we've heard is like, it barely worked. It's a miracle the demos came off as well as it did. There were like two of them on Earth. Nobody knew how to do anything and still Steve Jobs got up there and was like, it's fine, we got this.
46:10 Nilay Patel? Today, Apple revolutionizes the phone. Like, that's what he's saying. So I get, and you know, you look at the cover of the book, there's a real Steve Jobs thing happening with Musk.
46:19 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
46:21 Nilay Patel? He's, now he's saying the lines, right? He's doing covers. I'm just saying the Cybertruck, the competition is real and exists at volume and scale. And the market for electric pickup trucks right now is not great.
46:37 David Pierce? Yeah.
46:38 Nilay Patel? Like, you can just go get an F-150 Lightning, even in the middle of the UAW strike, because the people who wanted them bought them. I think GM just cut back production of its electric pickup trucks because they're trying to figure out where the demand is.
46:53 Alex Cranz? I asked a friend who only owns trucks.
46:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
46:57 Alex Cranz? Everybody in her family, they're ranchers, so they all own trucks. Everybody around them only drives trucks. You will, like, don't have small children in their parking lots, because all the trucks are so tall.
47:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
47:07 Alex Cranz? And I said, are you excited about the Cybertruck? It's coming. And she's like, what is that? And I was like, ooh, that's, that's like the core, that should be the core audience. Like, oh, you, you drive it all over the ranch and then you come back and you plug it in at night? And they're like, who?
47:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah. A lot of people are gonna, a lot of people buy Tesla cars. We should get into the rest of the earnings and we can dive into what that exactly means. I'm just saying this product is entering an incredibly saturated market full of very strong opinions and its competition did not sit still. I think what Musk is talking about here is like stainless steel manufacturing techniques and like unibody casting and that stuff makes the product special, but then it still has to go be a product. And in particular, Alex knows pickup truck owners, I know pickup truck owners, if you read pickup truck forums, these are some of the most customized, most highly personalized vehicles that exist. And they spend a ton of money on them.
48:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah, the amount of money you can throw at a pickup truck. They're like platforms unto themselves. And if this one isn't durable and it doesn't work. Yeah. Hey, do you think people in America have opinions about pickup trucks? Like, if you're driving your $100,000 triangle down the road and there's panel gaps, do you think the people who've been doing screaming matches about Ford versus GM for 100 years are gonna have opinions about this? It's gonna be amazing. Anyway, November 30th, the first deliveries, but I don't think a regular person, let alone a car reviewer, is gonna get their hands on this thing until next year. Yeah, I think that's right. Maybe late next year. So that's the Cybertruck. There was no discussion of the wiper. I know everyone wants to know. Just nothing. There's only one thing I care about.
48:49 Nilay Patel? People have seen them, they've taken pictures of the truck. I'm saying if you encounter one of these trucks, don't take pictures of the side. We know what shape that is. Take pictures of the wiper, man. Get up in it. I want macro shots of the wiper. Take the wiper off the Cybertruck and bring it to Neil. I've heard a theory about how that wiper is constructed, and none of the images I've seen so far confirm or deny this. Is it gonna like whip? I can't, I don't wanna, it's an unsourced, I don't even wanna put the energy into the world. Okay. I need some photographs of this thing up, up close and personal to confirm or deny the theory that I've heard. I'm not telling you what it is. Okay.
49:31 Nilay Patel? Other little Tesla earnings news, the actual money at Tesla is looking pretty weird.
49:42 David Pierce? Yeah, it's good and bad all at the same time. I think the the numbers they reported, I just wrote it down. It was $23.4 billion in revenue, which was up from the same time last year. Like they're they're making money, they're selling cars, earnings way down. They made about two little less than $2 billion in profit, down from 3.3 billion on about the same amount of revenue last year. So Tesla has a bunch of reasons for this, right? They're like, they are making big upgrades in the factories, so production goes down a little bit, which means you're gonna make less money.
50:15 David Pierce? Also, something, something AI and supercomputers that I don't like, I don't know. Elon Musk just like says robots a lot and people are like, oh, that makes sense for your earnings and I don't care about that. The biggest thing is they keep cutting the price, like these used to be expensive cars and they're really not expensive cars anymore in a lot of places. And I think what is happening is that Tesla is selling more cars because it's making them much, much cheaper to get in a time when that is not a lot of company's strategy at the moment, which has been sort of fascinating. And Tesla for a long time had like crazy profit margins, like cars. Neil, you you probably understand this much better than I do, but my impression is cars are not a high margin industry. And for Tesla, they have been, and that is starting to go away in a big way.
51:00 Alex Cranz? It was like 20% margin in in some of the earlier years and now it's like not that.
51:06 Nilay Patel? Most car, big car companies make all of their money on financing. And so they they have just sort of brought the margin of the cars themselves down because they assume that you're gonna lease the car and they'll make all the money on the lease. And then you'll give the car back to them and they'll sell it again at a much higher margin. So like a company like BMW basically assumes they're gonna sell every three series twice. And that's just like baked into the model. And that's why BMW in particular is like CarPlay is here when you lease it. And when you buy a pre-owned one, it costs $40, like
51:37 Alex Cranz? Right.
51:38 Nilay Patel? They're they're able to monkey with it because they know the dynamics of how they sell that vehicle are are just not what people expect. Tesla also had the benefit early on of having consolidated basically all of the car into a single compute stack.
51:53 Alex Cranz? Right.
51:54 Nilay Patel? So like your average GM or Ford vehicle has like 5,000 suppliers in it and 5,000 different microcontrollers. And Tesla was like, there's one. Right, and they consolidate, and it was more expensive and it was a harder way to architect a car. And now it's, you know, every car company CEO will tell you that's what they're gonna do too. But they just had less stuff in the car.
52:14 David Pierce? Yeah.
52:14 Nilay Patel? Less engine stuff, less transmission components, less exhaust stuff. But also, more importantly, less, fewer microcontrollers and computers. And they owned all the code. So they just had this ability to create all that margin. But now if you look at Tesla's financing rates, sky high. While the big automakers are like back to 0.9% because they just desperately want you to buy a car. You know, and it's like, they're, they're fighting a war there where they're just lowering prices. Elon went on a rant about interest rates. Cause he hasn't, I don't think they have that business, that like the financing business the big carmakers do. So like in the middle of this earnings, they asked him something really silly, right?
52:53 David Pierce? Let's see, he answered a question about the Tesla. And he compared it to the RAV4 for some reason, which I thought was interesting. So he says, if our car costs the same as a RAV4, no one would buy a RAV4. Or at least they would be very unlikely to, which is a bold proclamation. But then, then he said, I think since so many people who buy cars, especially in the US, can't afford to wait for tax credits or something. Our car is still much more expensive than a RAV4 when you look at it that way. Which is like, not 100% sure what he's talking about. But he's, he's got a lot of thoughts about how people who make a lot of money, don't understand what life is like for people who don't make as much money. And I think the case he's trying to make is that it's good that prices are going down, which like,
53:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:39 David Pierce? Sure, I am, I am pro this. I'm not sure how he ties that back to interest rates. Maybe you can make sense of it.
53:45 Nilay Patel? So he's basically like, interest rates are too high, people can't finance these cars, right? And then he's saying, our car is more expensive. And so it's even harder to finance them. And that's what I'm saying, Tesla has not built up that. Like low zero interest rate financing, like that's just not where they've made their money. And you can have like their valid opinions, say that's a better way to do it. Like BMW is selling every car twice because they assume the first purchaser will finance or lease it. You can have a lot of opinions, right? I, I think you should, but it's just true that in the market today Tesla just like sells cars.
54:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah, and it doesn't sell them very well. Like this is a company that is actually pretty bad at the whole finance and just like.
54:25 Nilay Patel? Right on Tesla's website, they're like, here are the three ways you can buy this car. You can finance it, you can lease it, or you can buy it in cash. And like they kind of want you to just buy it in cash.
54:33 Alex Cranz? Right.
54:34 Nilay Patel? And I think they probably sold a lot of monolises in cash, actually.
54:38 Nilay Patel? And, you know, they want to take Bitcoin for their cars. Like they pioneered a new way and they don't move the prices and there's no negotiation and all that stuff. But what is happening is he's bringing the prices of the cars down, reducing the margin. And his investors on the call are asking him, are you also reducing the cost of the car to preserve your margin? He's got a quote here that says, it's like Game of Thrones for pennies. That's how he describes reducing costs at Tesla, which is actually a great quote. And I think what is happening is he's feeling all of this pressure from high interest rates, weird economic environments. He calls credit card interest rates, who's serious?
55:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
55:16 Nilay Patel? Right, he, he's got this real populist streak in him.
55:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
55:20 Nilay Patel? And I, I think what he's basically saying is the market isn't fair to me at Tesla. Everyone should want to buy my car, like, why are you pushing a RAV4? You know, like you should, you should want a Model 3.
55:34 Alex Cranz? Which is goofy because nobody wants, I mean, a lot of people obviously do want a Model 3. But it's not a well-made car. Like a, a RAV4 is pretty well-made. It's not going to have enormous panel gaps I can fit my whole hand in.
55:47 Nilay Patel? It's true.
55:48 Alex Cranz? I can't guarantee the same on a Tesla.
55:50 Nilay Patel? Right, and then this all transitioned, by the way, into a rant against work from home. Where David, I believe he compared people who work from home to Marie Antoinette, which is pretty good.
56:02 David Pierce? Yeah, it is very good. Yeah, and he, I think the, the question was something relatively benign, like. Do you think that more people working from home and thus not commuting and caring a lot about gas mileage in their cars might have an effect on Tesla? Which I would argue is like a perfectly fair question to ask any car company right now.
56:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
56:19 David Pierce? And I think that the quote was, um, yeah, he said, these are some real Marie Antoinette vibes from people who say, why doesn't everyone work from home? What about all the people that have to come to the factory and build the cars? Which is a funny thing to say from Elon Musk, who has been like very demanding about people coming back to work. And all the people who have to go to the restaurant and make your food and deliver your food. It's like, what are you talking about? How detached from reality does the work from home crowd have to be while they take advantage of those who cannot work from home? Interesting, again, sort of populist streak. Funny thing to say from the guy who has been selling very expensive electric cars for a really long time and is also the richest man on earth.
56:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And also, by the way, the CEO of four companies. Thus, by definition, working remotely at three jobs at all times.
57:02 David Pierce? And has been very demanding about bringing people back to work.
57:05 Nilay Patel? Just, just saying. Always working remote. If you can, there's one person who was definitionally always remote from at least one of his jobs. It's, he seems like he's getting it done.
57:17 David Pierce? Hmm.
57:19 Nilay Patel? We'll see. So there's just a lot going on with Tesla. I think that company particularly as some of the Twitter debt comes due and there's lots of questions about how that will be secured and whether those bankers, that's all Tesla money. It's, it's propping that up. So just a lot of pressure on Tesla right now.
57:35 David Pierce? Yeah. Yeah. And it does seem like the, the push that they've been making is to make like a thoroughly mainstream, everybody can afford it kind of car. And you can see, I think he said something, it was like digging a tunnel with a spoon, I think was the way he phrased it. And like, I believe him, right? Like it's, I think it's going every dollar to get out of that car from now on in order to make it the price of a like Honda Civic is gonna be a fight. And especially in a time when money is hard to come by and lots of things are really expensive for lots of people. It's gonna be interesting to see.
58:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
58:11 David Pierce? Which is like, why you would think the Cybertruck, which is presumably going to be very expensive, would be like a salve for a lot of that stuff, except they can't figure out how to make it, which seems like a problem.
58:20 Alex Cranz? It's gonna be like a hundred thousand dollars, right?
58:23 Nilay Patel? If it ever comes out, man. Look, all I'm saying is, I've heard a rumor about the Cybertruck windshield wiper.
58:29 David Pierce? Yeah.
58:30 Nilay Patel? If you can just send me some really close photos of it. I'm not gonna tell you what it is. Two other lightning round pieces of the puzzle also important in the context of Tesla and its future. Yes, you can argue about if the cars are well made or not. You know, it's really just, can you justify? Can you, can you make an emotional argument about why it doesn't matter? Sure you can. Lots of people can. The moat for Teslas for so long is if you are in the market for an EV, they have the single best charging network.
59:00 Nilay Patel? And then they opened up the standard NACS. The Biden administration said, do you want this money? You got to open your network. Tesla chose the money. They could have not chosen the money. I've seen a lot of people say the Biden administration forced Tesla into opening its network. If dangling huge sums of money and saying, I will give you this money if you make this decision is, is force, that's fine. You can believe that that's true. But that is the dynamic here. The Biden administration said, we're going to invest in charging infrastructure. Here's a bunch of money for it. And Tesla said, we'd like some of that money. So they opened up their network. ChargePoint is going to do NACS plugs into its network of medium experiences. It's fair to say about all of the non-Tesla charging network.
59:44 Alex Cranz? This is the one like behind the gas station that you have to.
59:48 Nilay Patel? ChargePoint and Electrify America are like the two big networks.
59:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
59:51 Nilay Patel? ChargePoint is the one where if you were in a small town and you're like, is there a charger here? There's like one in front of the library. You know, like it's running, it's running on 120. It's like, that's ChargePoint. Electrify America is like, we've built a thing to launder VW's reputation for diesel. And they're slightly better. This is, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is broadly true of these two networks.
1:00:15 David Pierce? Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's basically right. And no one is very good at making chargers that like work over time and aren't broken or wildly complicated whenever you pull into them.
1:00:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So but ChargePoint is going to do it. So and they have a picture. The funniest thing about this is EV SE charging plugs are the least exciting thing to take a picture of. But they have to put photos in their press releases. So it's just like a guy holding
1:00:42 Nilay Patel? Like, I don't know how to describe this. They're like, here's the photo of us with a Tesla charger. And it's like, here's a guy.
1:00:50 Alex Cranz? The photo is just hand out. It's just a disembodied hand.
1:00:53 Nilay Patel? He's almost charging the car, but he isn't. You know, it's like, great. They're gonna do it. There are other new chargers. A company called Gravity has new, much smaller chargers designed for urban environments. They're really fast, actually. Faster than any car in America to take right now. So you see, there's a lot of action on the charging front because of NCS.
1:01:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:01:13 Nilay Patel? BMW just said they're gonna do, like, a bunch of other car companies are gonna start doing this by 2025. So you see, okay, this thing will be the standard, and we're gonna eventually stop talking about the supercharger network as a moat. We're gonna start talking about charging cars. And that, I think that's gonna change the dynamic of Tesla's yet again.
1:01:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I, I don't think Tesla's long for this world. Like, 15, 15 years.
1:01:37 Nilay Patel? You're crazy. I'm sorry. I love you, but you're just crazy. And I want to end this by saying this. Because I know what you think. You think that Tesla's a bad build quality, and people are gonna, over time, it'll...
1:01:47 Alex Cranz? The batteries are all gonna die or explode, and people are gonna be pissed.
1:01:51 Nilay Patel? That's true of all cars. People love Range Rovers.
1:01:55 Alex Cranz? Hmm, they shouldn't.
1:01:57 Nilay Patel? Like, a modern Range Rover mostly does not work.
1:02:02 Alex Cranz? It looks pretty.
1:02:02 Nilay Patel? They look amazing. But I, like, went to buy one, or just, like, look at one, because it's like Becky's dream car. And then, like, people are jumping out of bushes, being like, "Don't. Stay away."
1:02:12 Alex Cranz? My dad was not one of them. He would have said...
1:02:14 Nilay Patel? He has one.
1:02:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah, he'd be like, "Not anymore."
1:02:16 Nilay Patel? We did not buy a Range Rover. I'm just saying it right now. But I'm just saying, I, people love cars. Like, they keep selling Range Rovers. They love them.
1:02:26 Alex Cranz? That's Tesla's future.
1:02:27 Nilay Patel? They keep selling Ford and Chevy pickup trucks. Tesla has fans like that way longer than 15 years.
1:02:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:02:33 Nilay Patel? All right, we gotta take a break. More lightning round to come, but this time, they're actually gonna be bolts of lightning, not extended deliberations. We'll grab it.
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1:03:50 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. It has been a very philosophical sort of lightning round trail.
1:03:53 Alex Cranz? Elliot, like, let's go back to my feelings on Tesla's longevity.
1:03:57 Nilay Patel? What is a car? All right, I've got a few telecom lightning round ones.
1:04:03 Alex Cranz? A few?
1:04:03 Nilay Patel? Just a couple. I'm gonna try to bundle them together. So today, McKenna Kelly is in Washington DC as we speak, watching the FCC vote to restore net neutrality, which is not done, but Biden finally fully staffed his FCC by the pure failure on Joe Biden's part to just not have a functioning FCC for most of his administration thus far. But he finally pulled it off. He's got all the people. They're gonna go do it. A lot of people are gonna tell you it didn't matter. We haven't had it this long. The telecom companies didn't do bad things. No one's throttled your data. They're lying to you. They're lying to you. They're lying to you for two reasons. One, there's a bunch of state net neutrality laws in the books in New York and California, all these other big populist places.
1:04:48 Nilay Patel? And two, the telecom companies have done a bunch of dumb, dumb things and blown a lot of money and attempted to do bad things. They were just such horrible ideas, they blew up in their faces and resulted in massive layoffs across the industries that they covered. For example, a company called AT&T, I don't know if you-
1:05:09 Alex Cranz? Never heard of them.
1:05:10 Nilay Patel? They're just a little, little thing. You can, you know, a funny thing about AT&T, I don't know if people know this, you can actually split it up into hundreds of little companies and it will slowly reform over time. You know, just blob back together. There it is again.
1:05:25 David Pierce? And one of those companies will be HBO for 10 minutes.
1:05:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's amazing. Anyhow.
1:05:30 Alex Cranz? It's like Mercury.
1:05:31 Nilay Patel? Lightning round. Anyhow, AT&T bought Time Warner in order to zero rate data on its network and make you watch a grayscale Justice League.
1:05:42 David Pierce? Because my data cap was the reason I was worried about streaming services. That tracks.
1:05:50 Nilay Patel? It's a real thing.
1:05:52 Nilay Patel? Anyhow, so net neutrality going back in the books. If you are the sort of person who's generally worried about censorship on the internet, I would say that free speech online, a set of keywords that usually implies people with slightly different politics than mine. But if you are worried about censorship on the internet, you should be worried about it at the pipe layer most of all, because it is the least transparent, the, the least accountable, the least competitive part of the internet stack. You should say, okay, we should definitely not have any control over data here. Now, I firmly believe this, that that is an inappropriate place for any kind of censorship or throttling or business model interference with information. So that's what we're doing again. McKenna's there, we're gonna have a weird fight about it.
1:06:37 Nilay Patel? Brendan Carr, classic bad faith FCC hucksters, like giving PowerPoint presentations about why everything's great within our access in America. That's what we're gonna cover again.
1:06:47 Alex Cranz? Does it have like a little sponsored by AT&T at the bottom of the deck?
1:06:51 Nilay Patel? It's just, it's a Death Star.
1:06:54 Nilay Patel? Similarly, you might have noticed that I've paid a lot of attention to the end of the 5G era, as I've taken to calling it.
1:07:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I was like, Neil is looking towards 7G. What are you talking about?
1:07:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah, whenever I get one of the PR emails about talking about 6G innovations, I'm like, you dummies. I've been on 9G this whole time. Turn that frown upside down. Nokia is cutting 14,000 jobs. By the way, do you know Nokia sells 86,000 employees? They became an infrastructure provider, and there was a thought that Huawei would take over the world of infrastructure, and then we like basically banned Huawei. The Europeans basically banned Huawei from providing cellular infrastructure. So companies like Siemens and Nokia all invested heavily into 5G equipment. That's the stuff that's running right now. Nokia has now cut 14,000 jobs. The reason the operators have found it challenging to monetize their 5G investments.
1:07:51 David Pierce? That's a quote. That's a quote.
1:07:53 Nilay Patel? That's a quote. That's a quote from the CEO of Nokia. This is why we're cutting 14,000 jobs. The operators invested so heavily into 5G with no plan
1:08:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:08:05 Nilay Patel? to make money, and now they're cutting back on their further investment because there's no money here. So we, Nokia, are cutting 14,000 jobs. Here's where you could put a bunch of 5G towers: rural America.
1:08:18 Alex Cranz? But the backhaul.
1:08:19 Nilay Patel? Sure. But I'm just saying, like, what are the promises of these networks is that you will bring broadband to more people more effectively? That is not done. We have lots of listeners, readers in rural America. Alex and I both care about this quite a bit.
1:08:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:08:34 Nilay Patel? McKenna cares about it quite a bit. We pay a lot of attention to it. The broadband deployments.
1:08:38 David Pierce? I don't care, just apparently. I don't care at all about rural broadband. I'm not interested.
1:08:42 Nilay Patel? You're a city slicker, Pierce.
1:08:43 Alex Cranz? City slicker.
1:08:44 Nilay Patel? Urban cowboy, David Pierce.
1:08:45 Alex Cranz? All right. Little John Travolta.
1:08:48 David Pierce? Uh huh. What floor of a New York skyscraper are you guys on right now?
1:08:57 Nilay Patel? Anyhow, all I'm saying is, it didn't happen. They did the thing that they always do.
1:09:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:09:02 Nilay Patel? They blew a bunch of money, they made a bunch of promises, they served urban areas and covered the highways of America.
1:09:08 Alex Cranz? And nowhere else. I would argue internet's actually gotten worse in rural America.
1:09:14 Nilay Patel? Interesting.
1:09:15 Alex Cranz? Like, especially phones. Used to, I could drive from one town to another, my moms, to visit my mom, have phone the whole way. And now, every time I go down this little hill, I say, "I'll call you back at the end of this hill." Every time, it's very consistent.
1:09:31 Nilay Patel? That's true. If you stand on a street corner here in New York City, under a streetlight.
1:09:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:09:35 Nilay Patel? You can get like 10 gigs down.
1:09:36 Alex Cranz? I just tell my mom, and they're like, "Go, go to New York, stand under it."
1:09:41 Nilay Patel? Get to that street corner. Look, all I'm saying is, the amount of nationalist rhetoric that we heard about 5G.
1:09:47 Alex Cranz? Yep.
1:09:47 Nilay Patel? We have to win the race. Otherwise China will win the race. And then they'll be doing the robot surgery, and you'll be, I don't know, working with a shovel for the rest of your life. Do you remember this? I remember it very clearly.
1:10:00 Alex Cranz? It was last week.
1:10:00 Nilay Patel? And I'm still on the hunt for 5G applications that require 5G. AT&T released a helmet, they did, uh, Gallaudet University, I think that's how you pronounced it, they made a helmet for football players who are deaf, and has displays in the visors so they can like call plays, and, very cool.
1:10:18 Alex Cranz? Where, where, where's the football played? Like, in rural America?
1:10:23 Nilay Patel? That's true. I just, I'm just like looking at this thing, I'm like, this is not, you don't need 5G for this helmet.
1:10:28 Alex Cranz? You just need wifi.
1:10:30 Nilay Patel? Good wifi would have gotten you there, right? This is kind of the level that we're at with this technology. To this day, we're pretending that 5G is enabling applications.
1:10:41 David Pierce? Well, and it's part of the reason stuff like the Nokia news is so disappointing, is that we were promised that the reason 5G was gonna win was because it was so deployable. You don't have to dig trenches, in the same way, you can, you can actually get this thing to people more easily, and they can use it using like devices and infrastructure they already have. Sounded good, and now to see everyone pulling back because they can't figure out how to like immediately monetize this small speed increase that people like the three of us got from 5G means the people we're talking about who actually could have benefited from 5G being rolled out in their towns where digging trenches is hard work, not gonna happen. That sucks.
1:11:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I just, the pivot to 6G is coming so hard. Just wait.
1:11:25 Alex Cranz? What will the surgery be?
1:11:29 Nilay Patel? Like they peel the carrot. It's gonna be amazing. All right, Cranz, what's yours?
1:11:32 Alex Cranz? Okay, so Netflix raised prices again.
1:11:36 David Pierce? Which we knew was coming.
1:11:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we knew, we knew. It's happening. It's only for two of the plans this time. One is the basic plan. It's gonna be $11.99. The other is the premium plan, which gets you 4K and everything. That's gonna be $22.99.
1:11:52 Nilay Patel? Ooh, that's right on the...
1:11:54 Alex Cranz? That's, I, see, I'm upset, but at the same time, I thought I was paying that already for that. So I'm like, this sucks, but...
1:12:03 Nilay Patel? All right, disclosures. I have an AT&T account. I have for some time. I'm a Netflix producer. We made an Netflix show. It's called The Future I Can Watch on Netflix for any number of prices apparently, including with ads.
1:12:15 Alex Cranz? There is a little, a little silver lining.
1:12:17 Nilay Patel? We've done a little telecom dunking, and I've talked about net neutrality. Comcast through its subsidiary NBC Universal, and that's our box media. I think that's it for now. We'll see what else we have to go into.
1:12:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:12:28 David Pierce? Comcast provides my internet, and it's very slow most of the time.
1:12:31 Nilay Patel? There you go. We've gotten some notes that are like you're not taking them seriously. Those are serious disclosures. Those are all real conflicts that you can evaluate. We want you to know.
1:12:39 Alex Cranz? The only kind of like bright side of this is the basic plan, or the, no, the ad-supported plan, the $6.99 plan, used to, you couldn't get offline downloads. So if you were gonna be on a plane, sucks to be you.
1:12:52 Nilay Patel? Now you. Do you get the ads for the offline downloads? I don't know. The idea of paying money to download someone else's ads is a lot. That said, we run.
1:12:59 David Pierce? That seems fine to me. That's like, that doesn't bother me at all. And they'll, they'll get good at like dynamic ads, the way that like podcasts work. There's a good chance if you're listening to the show, you've heard dynamically placed ads based on what you downloaded.
1:13:09 Nilay Patel? If there's one thing that I've listened, I've heard from our listeners is that our dynamic ads work great.
1:13:13 David Pierce? Yeah, it's perfect. Nothing ever goes wrong with dynamic ad placement. But no, what's truly wild to me about this is so the, the thing you get for the premium price, which is $23 now, is you get 4K streaming, uh, and I believe you get four at a time. So like you can, you, up to four people can be watching, which isn't really true because of the way that the password sharing stuff works. So like, I used to have the four screens account because it was feasible that four different people might be using our account at the same time. That's probably not realistic for most people anymore. So I think you're already probably overpaying, but that's also the only way to get 4K. So if that's the thing you care about, Netflix just knows it can charge you whatever you want.
1:13:54 David Pierce? But you can now get the ad-supported version on six screens for less than the cost of the premium account. Like it, it's just so transparent that Netflix will charge you whatever it has to in order to get you to switch to ads. Like, that's just what it is going to be. They are going to price gouge you until you switch to ads.
1:14:14 Nilay Patel? Yep.
1:14:15 David Pierce? And the upper limit of that, God only knows, like premium might cost $50 in a year. Because if there will be, it's like the people who still pay for AOL on discs. There will be some of those people and Netflix will gouge them for every penny they're worth.
1:14:28 Nilay Patel? So we, I understand the dynamics of this pretty easily, right? We have a lot of people ask us why you can't just pay us to turn off ads. And the answer is if you just look at the revenue drop that would cause, the price I would have to make you pay.
1:14:44 David Pierce? More than you think.
1:14:45 Nilay Patel? Too high, especially in a market where like the basic thing that we provide, which is tech news, is readily available for free all the time. Like kids on TikTok just reading verge articles are a thing that I I can't price out of the market, right? I think Netflix is discovering the same thing.
1:15:02 Alex Cranz? But the bigger issue is for me, as a big media nerd, is 4K. The only way I can get 4K is to be price gouged. And like
1:15:11 Nilay Patel? Right, because they know that that there's like perfect price elasticity there. If you want 4K.
1:15:15 David Pierce? Yep.
1:15:16 Nilay Patel? If you're us.
1:15:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:15:17 Nilay Patel? There's a 0% chance I'm paying anyone anything for less than 4K.
1:15:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah, the the only reason I do it is for 4K. I don't have four TVs running Netflix in my house all the time. I should.
1:15:29 Nilay Patel? Get those data caps.
1:15:31 Alex Cranz? Just hit them. Use that FiOS.
1:15:33 David Pierce? And I I guarantee you Netflix is going to spend the next three years testing that theory of you. Like, the question is, will you cancel before you switch to HD?
1:15:44 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:15:44 David Pierce? That's the thing Netflix is trying to figure out.
1:15:46 Alex Cranz? Yes, I will cancel before I switch to HD.
1:15:49 David Pierce? I don't believe you, and I don't think Netflix does either. But we're we're gonna test that theory.
1:15:53 Alex Cranz? They don't know what I know about websites on the internet. Sucks to be
1:15:59 Nilay Patel? We're just gonna start writing headlines that are like, the 4K on HBO Max is free.
1:16:05 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:16:06 Nilay Patel? Like, just shaming them into competing. That's that's our function in journalism.
1:16:10 Alex Cranz? It's true. It's true.
1:16:12 Nilay Patel? David, take your Spotify victory lap.
1:16:14 David Pierce? Mine's very quick, and it's just because I'm very proud of myself. I said on this show not terribly long ago that Spotify should stop mucking around with trying to be the TikTok for audio, or whatever that means, and just try to win at music. Because for all of the stuff going on in the world and all of the audio things out there, we actually don't have a really great music app at this moment in time. There are a lot of like, Apple Music nerds who are gonna email me and tell me why I'm wrong, but you're wrong. Apple Music is not a good product either. They're all bad. And Spotify appears to be slowly taking my advice. It has sold merch through Spotify for a long time. If that's a thing you want to do, there are tools for that.
1:16:54 David Pierce? But it is now rolling out a dedicated hub for artist merch on Spotify. This is a thing you're gonna start to see a lot of. You're gonna see Merch, you're gonna see ticket sales, you're gonna see all kinds of ancillary. So you like this music, here's how we can make money from you, stuff coming to Spotify. But I just, Andrew Moreno, our producer, went back and found the TikTok that we published of me saying this. And I was exactly right, and I'm very proud of myself. And also, good job, Spotify. Stop trying to pretend that all of the other stuff you're doing is gonna work. Exclusive podcasts were a stupid business. You wasted a lot of money. Merch is actually gonna work.
1:17:32 Nilay Patel? Tech companies are really bad at being media companies. The only tech company that's ever been good at being a media company, Netflix. You don't think they're a good media?
1:17:40 David Pierce? I think there are a lot of people who argue Netflix was never really a tech company. That Netflix was always a media company masquerading as a tech company.
1:17:46 Alex Cranz? It was never a tech company.
1:17:47 David Pierce? And got valued like a tech company.
1:17:49 Alex Cranz? I would agree, but it's also, it's a bad media company. It is not a very well-run media company because it can't put out bangers. It puts out like maybe one a year.
1:17:58 David Pierce? You're paying $23 a month for that, Alex.
1:18:01 Alex Cranz? I know. It's because I'm watching Ugly Betty right now, and I don't have it on DVD.
1:18:06 Nilay Patel? All right. Well, email us, tell us, tell us if you will quit Netflix before you drop 4K. I'm actually really curious where the audience is on this.
1:18:17 Nilay Patel? This is a self-selecting group. I think I already know the answer. But I would like a little data from the Vergecast audience. Will you quit Netflix before you downgrade from the 4K plan? And tell me why. Because I'm sort of desperate to know. I think I'm gone before I lose 4K.
1:18:33 David Pierce? I don't believe that for one second.
1:18:35 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:18:35 Nilay Patel? I have a, I'm married to someone who watches a lot of comedy on Netflix, who probably doesn't care.
1:18:40 Alex Cranz? Peacock.
1:18:41 Nilay Patel? This is gonna be a, this is gonna be a whole conversation we have.
1:18:44 Alex Cranz? Frasier's on Paramount.
1:18:45 Nilay Patel? We're watching like ad-supported SD comedy specials in our house before I drop this thing. All right, that's it. We're way over. Liam's spitting mad. He's not, actually. He's smiling. He loves it. Everyone write Liam a nice note. A nice note. We'll see you later. Lots of great stuff on the site this week. There's a bunch of YouTube news, actually, like incremental YouTube changes are really interesting, including an AI feature where when people say like and subscribe, the bell starts shaking. This is hilarious, like a perfect creator economy moment. Jen Tuohy has a great piece on EcoBee, and it's like ever-expanding ambitions in the home. She compares it to Nest. The headline is it's becoming the company Nest wanted to be. If you know anything about me and The
1:19:26 Nilay Patel? Verge, you know that we started our first big feature was on Nest. Like, I wrote it with Tony Fadell, and I remember him telling me his ambitions for the company, and obviously it failed in spectacular fashion because of Google. So I loved this piece by EcoBee and how they're building up their ecosystem. Very cool. All kinds of other great stuff on the site. And then, we would be remiss to not note that there's a war happening in Israel and Gaza. We have a lot of coverage about the information space of that war on our site. There's a lot going on with misinformation, disinformation. I just need to take a break from it during the Vergecast. Many of our listeners have told us the same, but there's a lot of coverage on the site. We're taking that stuff seriously. Go look at that. Particularly
1:20:08 Nilay Patel? what is going on in Europe with the Digital Services Act, and the European governments being able to issue take-down requests of social networks is new. And it's gonna have a lot of implications for a lot of things in the future. Okay, that's all on the site. That's it. That's Vergecast.
1:20:28 David Pierce? And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.
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