2023's biggest tech stories

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Richard Lawler discuss Apple pulling the Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 from its website, the potential Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount merger, and what the biggest stories were on The Verge Dot Com. Further reading: Apple to pull Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 this week due to ITC ban Apple loses attempt to halt Apple Watch sales ban Why the Apple Watch is being banned — and how Apple can avoid it Masimo CEO thinks Apple can’t code its way out of the Watch ban. Apple Watch ban: everything you need to know Beeper is giving up on its iMessage dream Apple reportedly plans Vision Pro launch by February Apple’s immersive next-gen CarPlay will start with Porsche and Aston Martin Bird’s goose is cooked. Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount in discussions for a max merger Adobe explains why it abandoned the Figma deal Adobe won’t compromise on UK’s attempt to block Figma merger Peloton’s oldest bike tablet will be cut off from classes in a few months Peloton’s app now pairs with third-party treadmills for some subscribers Inside Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” Twitter Elon Musk predicts X will replace banks in 2024 Mark Zuckerberg agrees to Elon Musk cage match challenge Apple Vision Pro is Apple’s new $3,499 AR headset I wore the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the best headset demo ever. Sam Bankman-Fried gambled on a trial and his parents lost Amazon has just opened up its Sidewalk network to give any gadget free low speed data Sony’s portable PlayStation Portal launches on November 15th for $199.99 Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO FTC v. Microsoft: all the news from the big Xbox courtroom battle Buckle up because El Niño is almost here, and it’s going to get hot iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in titanium: price, features, and release date This is Microsoft’s new disc-less Xbox Series X design with a lift-to-wake controller Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon The Steam Deck wasn’t born ready, but it’s ready now Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human SodaStream is a bad deal, and modding your own is better Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of 2023, the whole year. When you think of 2023, you should think of the Vergecast and you should tell your friends to think of it that way. I know the people have been doing year in review packages. We've done them as well. All of them are wrong because the only thing that happened in 2023 was the Vergecast. Is that right, Dave?

• 1:32David Pierce?

  That's true. That is absolutely correct. The Vergecast wrapped is a thing that doesn't exist, but will in 2024. I promise.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't want to know. I'm your friend, Neelai. That's David. Alex Krantz is on vacation. Well deserved vacation already. Our holiday wishes to her, but Richard Lawler is here to fill in. Hey, Richard. Hey, good to be back. All right. So this is our year in review show. Unfortunately, the tech industry has decided to chaotically fire out news at the end of the year. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to do what David has titled a year end Apple chaos lightning round. Then we're going to have an actual news focus lightning round. And then we're going to go through our biggest stories of the year, which when we get to it, we'll explain how we decided what they were. It's surprising, but that's how we're structuring the show. I think it'll be good.

• 2:21David Pierce?

  The news is a lot. Like, I just want to say before we like, could everybody just stop, please? Like, the last time we had a holiday, Sam Altman got fired. Like, it's about to be Christmas. Can we just not? Like, from now on, can we just not for like, two weeks? Please, everything.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just shut it down. This is the problem with working from home. All right, let me just put it out there like a cranky old man. You're at home now. All right, stop working. Stop doing things. No more calls, shut the laptop.

• 2:49David Pierce?

  Go to the fun screen, not the work screen. It's time.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, on that note.

• 2:54Speaker 05

  Twitter goes down in the middle of the night.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Richard, I've never seen Richard actually like, turn it all the way off. I've known Richard for a very long time. All the way off is not a setting that I think exists with Richard Lawler. All right, let's start with the year end Apple chaos. There's a lot of year end Apple chaos. I think the biggest, most material bit of year end Apple chaos news is whatever is going on with the Apple Watch at the ITC.

• 3:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  David, can you quickly run us through this?

• 3:24David Pierce?

  Sure. So the basic thing that is happening is Apple lost a long running fight against a company called Massimo, which makes medical devices, about a sensor for blood oxidization in the Apple Watch. There's a lot of history there that we can talk about, much of which I think is very interesting, but what it amounts to is that Apple lost and the ITC, the International Trade Commission, put in an import ban, which would mean that Apple could not import and then sell Apple Watches. All recent Apple Watches since the Apple Watch Series 6, except for the SE, would be covered. So basically, no new Apple Watches for Apple into the United States.

• 4:05David Pierce?

  Apple had 60 days since that ruling in October to either like, come to a deal with Massimo to get this done and sign a licensing agreement, or convince President Biden to veto the order. That expires December 25th, which is Christmas. And then on December 26th, the import ban takes effect. At this point, anything could still happen, but pretty much everybody seems to think that by a mile, the most likely outcome is that come December 26th, Apple is no longer going to be allowed to sell most of its Apple Watch models in the United States.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  So there's a few things to unpack here, which I think are interesting. One is the long history between Apple and Masimo, which we can talk about. The second, which people have directly asked me about is patent nerdery. So I'll just-

• 4:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's why we had to do this here. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of-

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  This is what I'm here for. So let me just, I'll just do this part very quickly. Because it's not actually that complicated this time. You can feel however you want about the patent system. But in this case, you have a small US company that developed some technology, got some patents on it. Then there's the wonky backstory with Apple, which we can get into. But you have a small US company, made some products, got some patents. The thing that has become the trend in patent lawsuits, especially between tech companies over the last decade, is you file two patent lawsuits when you're mad. One is a regular old patent infringement case in federal court. The other is a patent infringement case at the International Trade Commission, which is an executive agency that regulates what comes into the country.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  And the reason you do that, the reason it's popular, is because we don't make a lot of things in America. That's just the truth.

• 5:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  So if you are Apple suing Samsung, or Samsung suing Apple back in the day, you are running this fast track, parallel patent infringement litigation at the ITC to ban your competitors' phones from entering the United States. Because that's going to create a lot of leverage for you in a settlement or a negotiation or whatever. So that is the trend. Every time you see a patent infringement lawsuit, especially when one of the companies involved, or both the companies involved, have a big offshore manufacturing presence, they need to import goods in the United States, the ITC gets involved. Sonos and Google, ITC involved. Famously, Apple and Samsung. ITC was involved. And Samsung actually won at the ITC against Apple, was going to prevent iPhones from being imported. And-

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  The Obama administration stepped in and said, no, we're going to veto this one. And in that case, you see there's like a nationalistic impulse at play. You have an American company, you have a Korean company. The White House is like, we're going to let the American company win. In this case, something that's very different is you have a small American company and you have a giant American multinational. It does not seem like the Biden administration wants to pick sides here. It's like not an easy win. Like, no one's waving a flag when you let Apple crush the small company. It just doesn't, doesn't seem like it's going to happen. So that's the, just the shape of it, right? The ITC is this place where a lot of parallel patent litigation happens because it's faster.

• 7:09Nilay Patel?

  And because you can quickly get to a very damaging result, which is banning imports, which creates a lot of leverage. And now Massimo has that leverage.

• 7:17David Pierce?

  The ITC is not a legal system, right? It's not like writing laws and judges at the end of it. It's just like a, it's just like a bunch of people who make a decision that has this gigantic effect you're talking about, but it's not like-

• 7:28Nilay Patel?

  It's a court, it's an administrative court. It's a, it's a different kind of court. You can get all the way down to some real law school stuff. It's not a court in the judicial branch. It's an administrative court and they work a little bit differently, but it's a court. Like it has, it does that thing. So that, that's the, that's what's happened here, right? There's been this patent litigation. I'm sure the sort of federal court patent litigation will continue to wind its way through the court system, but Massimo won at the ITC, said, basically the policy of the United States is we don't allow people to import goods that are infringing the patents of companies that operate in the United States. Okay, like you understand, like broadly, patent system aside, you understand why that's the policy. You want to punish people for violating patents, especially people who might be manufacturing their goods offshore or not paying all that.

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  Like you see where that's coming from. Okay, Apple has to contend with that. And it's what's amazing to me about this. And David, I think this is where the backstory is really interesting. They haven't just paid the money to Massimo. They haven't just bought the company or paid the licensing fee. They've been waging war against a small company for like a decade.

• 8:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, this goes back to 2013. And the very short version of the backstory is when Apple decided it wanted to start doing the blood oxygen stuff in the Apple Watch, it contacted Massimo as a possible partner. And both sides agreed that that is a thing that happened, that the two companies talked to each other. And then from there, Massimo's argument is essentially, Apple hired, I think it was their chief medical officer and a bunch of our employees and a bunch of our engineers, and essentially just ripped off our technology whole hog and put it into the Apple Watch. Apple's version is, we met with Massimo, decided that it wasn't going to be what we wanted it to be. They weren't close enough to a

• 9:13David Pierce?

  consumer device, so we went a different direction, and then hired Massimo's chief medical officer and a lot of his engineers and staff, and built very similar versions of his technology. So the sides are like, far apart in a certain way, but not that far apart in a certain way. And it seems like what has happened at this point, I was watching a bunch of interviews with Joe Chianni, who's Masimo's CEO, and he is like, bought in on this idea that Apple is not an innovative company and needs to be shown to the world to be the non-in innovative company that it really is. And Apple's also having this fight with Alive Core about some of the EKG stuff that was going on. And he is out here being like, I have spent $60 million over a decade on this litigation, and I am going

• 9:55David Pierce?

  to win to prove to the world that Apple is not the company that it claims to be. Apple, meanwhile, is the largest and most resourced company on planet Earth. And the general consensus of the reason that no one at Apple's side has come to the table here, is that Apple doesn't want to give people incentive to sue them.

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:15David Pierce?

  And if you can sue your way into getting bought by Apple, or getting paid off by Apple, people will do it. And I think those, if you take those two things, there's just no space in between them, just none.

• 10:27Nilay Patel?

  There's a little bit of space.

• 10:29David Pierce?

  Is there?

• 10:29Nilay Patel?

  There's a little bit of space.

• 10:31David Pierce?

  What is that?

• 10:32Nilay Patel?

  It's not a ton of space. And I, I've covered Apple patent litigation for a long time. In many ways, Apple v Samsung is the new story that helped The Verge become The Verge. Like, it was, it was a thing that drove a lot of our early traffic and interest. So I've spent a lot of time covering Apple patent stuff and talking to Apple folks. They are religious that they don't steal anything, that everyone else is a bad actor and that everyone wants money. And that Apple's gonna, and I get it. I really get it. And you can see how this gets expressed in all kinds of ways. Apple hates Qualcomm. They hate this company. And it's because Qualcomm runs a bunch of patent licensing schemes. They own all the patents to 5G. Apple doesn't want to pay them, right? They sued each other.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  The lawsuits were really snippy. Apple went out and bought Intel's modem division so they could get away from Qualcomm. That is an incredible bet.

• 11:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, Apple's, Apple has like whole billion dollar divisions of its company that are just set up as petty counters to other companies.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  Failing divisions. Like, if you'll remember, Intel failed to build a 5G modem. And Apple bought the failed modem division from Intel on the theory that they would just manage those people better.

• 11:48Nilay Patel?

  That's crazy. You only do that if you're like blinded by petty rage at someone else believing that they had invented something that you needed. And so that's Qualcomm. And I think people look at their attitude towards Samsung or Qualcomm and they're like, these are giants fighting. What are they doing? You get down to the smaller companies who feel aggrieved and Apple runs the same playbook. And I think it comes out looking very differently. Right? We met with this small company. We saw their technology. We went and instead of having to pay the premium to buy the company, we just paid a premium for all the people. Right? I think in one of the stories, Joe Chianni says the chief medical officer, like they tripled his payday or something. So they just spent a bunch of money on people. They, they took the company away from him and they took his technology and he's been fighting his patent lawsuit.

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  And Apple's belief is that it can just win in court over and over and over again.

• 12:35David Pierce?

  And this is a story that startups tell about big companies all the time.

• 12:38Nilay Patel?

  Every day, every company.

• 12:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I look at this and I look at Apple getting all the way to this moment where they have preemptively announced they're not going to sell the Apple Watch. The ban isn't in effect. It's just the week before Christmas. They should be selling every Apple Watch they can. The way Apple announced it, super weird. Super weird. If you're Apple and you're, it's Christmas and the Apple Watch is one of your, is like the ultimate Apple Christmas gift, right? You need to sell as many watches as you can. This is extremely material information that your Q4 results will be impacted by not having the ability to sell the Apple Watch. That is, that should be a press release. That should be

• 13:22Nilay Patel?

  an 8K filed with the SEC. Like, you should be informing investors in the biggest, most official way you can. And Apple didn't do that. They gave a background quote to 95 Mac, which is great. I love 95 Mac. My, all of my criticism here is for Apple. Yeah. That is an insane way to announce this news. And my belief is they announced it that way because they didn't want to seem important. They wanted to raise the pressure on the administration. They wanted this veto. And I don't think they're going to get it. And they're going to have to contend with the Apple Watch not being on sale unless they buy this company, pay a settlement whose premium is rising every single day. Every day the Apple Watch isn't on sale is the day that Massimo is like winning,

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  right? Like the price increases for, from Massimo's side. Every day the Apple Watch is on sale. And what's even crazier about this, Joe from Massimo keeps saying this in every interview. He keeps saying it takes two to Tengo, which is just an amazing thing to say. He's like, I'm willing, like, I will accept the money. They have to show up and offer it to me. And they, they won't. And I, I think Apple's just backed itself into a weird kind of corner here where they should have just bought this company 10 years ago. And we would have, no one would have ever heard about any of this.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  And I think your explanation of it being religion is the only one that makes sense here because when you think about it, How could Apple have possibly have let it get this far? It just, it just, it boggles my mind to think that they didn't take care of this before. That they didn't deal with this. Whether you're worried about being sued by other companies, or who else might follow precedent, anything like that. They're getting sued all the time. That is already happening. There's just, there's no reason to do this logically.

• 14:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. It, it, it does seem like there is a certain version of this set of events that it never gets to this, right? Like, the, part of the reason this is so shocking is that we went through all these steps. And, and Richard, one of the things I'm curious about is how much you've been sort of aware of this story over the last 12 months? Because it's been lingering for a long time. Like, they've been fighting about this for a decade, and yet I personally was fully out of the blue shocked by the news that this was happening. Because every time you turn around and it's like, oh, a company's suing Apple, Apple will eventually write them a check and we'll never hear about it again. This is what happens over and over. The fact that anybody talked about it at all is surprising, and then every step gets a little more surprising. But eventually, it's like, they're either gonna write the check, or settle in some

• 15:41David Pierce?

  other way and we'll all move on with our lives. So to me, it's like, it, it's the fact that, uh, the fact that it came out of nowhere, even though it absolutely did not come out of nowhere, is what's so telling to me. That it's like, this is so, such an unusual outcome of an incredibly common thing, that I think if I'm Apple, I bet nobody at Apple thought it would get this far. Up, up to and then potentially including the day of the ban. I bet most people at Apple are like, it, it will, we'll win, it'll be fine.

• 16:08Speaker 05

  And I think you're exactly right. That's pretty much how I was thinking about it. I was aware of it, just like I was aware of a number of other lawsuits that are winding their way through the system involving Apple. You have all the class action lawsuits, you have all the patent lawsuits, you have everyone ever saying that they invented the action button before you got it on your iPhone 15 Pro. But it never, it never turns into anything, or very rarely turns into anything. And then this one just dropped one day. It was like, oh, by the way, uh, if you want an Apple Watch, you should get it soon.

• 16:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, my favorite conspiracy theory about all of this, by the way, is that, is everybody saying like, oh, this is actually gonna be awesome for Apple's Q4, because everybody's gonna rush out to buy an Apple Watch before it leaves shelves.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  What a vote of no confidence in Apple's business development or legal teams. If you're like, this will improve sales because everyone will rush out, you're like, because Apple's lawyers will continue to lose this fight. Tim Cook won't just write the check. I don't know, man. It's a weird story. Every part of it is weird. It was weird 10 years ago. It's weird because Apple's religion is weird. People sue Apple every day, right? You're not by settling the one case where there's merit or we'll get this far, regardless of your opinion on merit. It's not like you're going to encourage other people to show up. They're already there. You're already the richest company in the world. Like you're the fattest target there is.

• 17:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  So it's a weird dynamic to think more people will want to sue you. Like, there's no one left. They're already suing you. If you wake up one day and you're like, you know what? I'm gonna be a patent troll today. The first thing on your mind is how do you sue Apple? And that is fine. It's like, whatever. It's part of the system. But there comes a point where you had 60 days to negotiate the settlement before the thing wouldn't go on sale? And you banked it on Biden showing up and having an opinion on whether the Apple Watch should be on sale? I don't like, have you, you didn't pay attention to this dude? Like, doesn't seem likely.

• 18:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's weird.

• 18:06Nilay Patel?

  Like Biden's out there giving interviews on whether President Trump did an insurrection. They're like two, like even if you think he's checked in, whether the Apple Watch on sale is on his list of things we pay attention to? Far down any list that anyone would make, the things that President United States should be paying attention to at this moment in time. So the whole thing is weird.

• 18:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  Last minute Apple chaos. Anyway, it's Christmas. Go buy an Apple Watch before.

• 18:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Nilay Patel?

  Becky's doesn't listen to the show. I bought, she got a new one for Christmas. And I will tell you this, one of the funniest things, she only got her because she has a six. She has series five or series six. It's dying, like the battery's dying. It's several years old. I bought her the new one. I bought her a nine and I was like, oh, this is just not different.

• 18:52David Pierce?

  No, they are remarkably the same, to the point where I had to take mine off and look at it today to remember which one that I had. Like, this is just where we are.

• 19:01Nilay Patel?

  And what's actually funny, Victoria Song has pointed this out over and over again in our coverage. The blood oxygen sensor on the Apple Watch is not that useful.

• 19:08David Pierce?

  No.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  It just doesn't do a lot, so.

• 19:12Speaker 05

  But if you have an old one, you should keep it around just in case it's useful for iMessage later.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's get to that. Let's talk about Beeper. Eventually, you're gonna have to jailbreak iPhone. No, eventually, you're gonna have to jailbreak an Apple Watch and wear it around your neck to use Beeper. That's where we're going, David. What's going on here?

• 19:28David Pierce?

  This makes me so sad. So, we've been covering the Beeper versus iMessage thing for the last few weeks. And I think at this point, I feel pretty good about pronouncing it over. So Beeper said at the beginning of this week that they had yet another fix for the iMessage blue bubble on Android thing that they've been working on. And announced the fix, and it is so ridiculous as to be more or less sort of unusable for most people. Basically, the way that it's working is by connecting to a device. It can register, it can register your phone number as an iMessage number if and only if you have an iPhone or a Mac, which I would point out is exactly how it already worked.

• 20:13David Pierce?

  And so, we've just kind of come all the way back around to where we were. And their solution is literally like, it's gotten to the point where they're saying, "Ask a friend who has an iPhone to give you the registration code so that we can get into their system, because that's the unique number that we need. They won't have access to your iMessages, but every once in a while, they're gonna get a new code to keep the registration going, and they're gonna have to give you that too. Or, you can have an old iPhone, which I'm sure tons of Android users have around. Or, and this is the best one, you can rent an iPhone from Beeper, which is a thing that they're considering doing. Like, this just, it just doesn't work, right? Like Beeper lost. And you can feel about that, however you'd like to feel about that, Beeper lost.

• 20:53David Pierce?

  And I think it's very clear now that what Beeper is pushing towards is being like a martyr for a greater cause of fighting against Apple. And Eric Michakovsky, the CEO, was on, I forget, one of the morning shows talking about this. I think it was CBS This Morning, talking about this. A bunch of congresspeople wrote a letter about, you know, the antitrust implications of iMessage. And so, there's this like, political fight starting that I don't think is actually gonna go anywhere, because I don't think the merits of this particular case are particularly strong. But, one of the first times I talked to Eric about this, I asked him, like, "Is there a version of this story where you become a martyr for a greater cause? And are you okay with that being the end?" And he was like, "That's not what's gonna happen." And I was right, that is what happened. I'm sorry.

• 21:38Nilay Patel?

  I read that letter, you know.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  I want to have a high opinion of our government, you know, like as a citizen of America. I truly want to believe that we can get back to having an effective government. I read that letter and I was like, have any of you ever used a computer? Do you have them? Are you, you ever turn one on? You ever see how like they're using Apple's computers without permission.

• 22:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 22:07Nilay Patel?

  That's what's going on here. It's not, this is pretty straightforward. And you can believe that Apple should make iMessage more interoperable. I believe that. You can believe that green bubbles and blue bubbles are causing an epidemic of weird bullying in America's schools. I believe that. You can believe that Apple has a moral obligation to allow for encrypted messaging between iPhone users and Android users without, you know, saying something like, go use WhatsApp and stuff like you. You can believe all these things. Ages ago, before Dieter went to work for Google, while he still worked here, he wrote a story for us called the moral case for bringing iMessage to Android.

• 22:43David Pierce?

  Right.

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  You can believe all of those things. That's a great piece. You should read it again.

• 22:48David Pierce?

  It holds up really well. I read it while writing about Beeper and it is, everything he says is still true.

• 22:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can believe all these things. You do not have to believe that requires Apple to let people hack their systems. Like it, or find these workarounds like there, there's just something in there that I, the moral argument for letting Beeper work in the way that Beeper works is just weird, right? It's like, it's a little too uncomfortable beyond, we should put some pressure on Apple to make the system more interoperable. But if that's what you're pegging it on is they found a 16 year old kid found a hack. Like you're just, you're just in dicey territory from the jump. And by the way, I really do believe Apple should make iMessage interoperable. I think everything should be interoperable, but it's just, this one is like.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  It's Apple resolved it without a lawsuit. That's, that's actually probably the most notable thing here. They just cat and moused Beeper out of the game without ever sending the mean letter, which based on what we were just talking about is like very admirable for Apple.

• 23:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  They, they did not use, I assumed that we would get a computer fraud and abuse act letter, but they just shut it down.

• 23:58David Pierce?

  Yeah. Richard, what do you make of this? I feel like I, I've talked to myself in circles now for like three weeks about, I think Beeper is right about everything, except whether it is and should be allowed to do what it's doing. And ultimately that's the only thing that matters to me. But I, I'm super curious what you think, having followed all of this.

• 24:16Speaker 05

  That is the stickiest part about this is that what Beeper is actually doing, they're pretending to be iPhones or Macs. They've figured out a way to do that and Apple figured out a way to undo that. And I don't think either party is wrong. It's, it's great that they tried to do it. And Apple is certainly within their right to say, hey, this device that is on our messaging system is not actually an iPhone or Mac that has been activated. It shouldn't be allowed to do that. And the kind of the solution that they've come to where you are actually using an iPhone or Mac is probably one that I guess Apple doesn't really have a way around and that they, they could use, but it's so ridiculous. This is not what anyone wants. This is not a service that people want to pay for as, as they were suggesting it.

• 25:00Speaker 05

  And ultimately I think everyone's unsatisfied. Being an Android user, never having had an iPhone, the most surprising part of this whole news is when I opened up my iPad and found out that I have nine iMessage messages in storage somehow. And I don't know how that happened. So that, that is a mystery that still has not been solved. And if anyone at Beeper or Apple would like to-

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how to say this to you, but I've been using your iPad to spoof iMessage for some time now.

• 25:28Speaker 05

  I should have known. I should have known. That that explains a lot of weird messages.

• 25:35Nilay Patel?

  You know, the funniest thing about this is Apple, you know, they caved to Europe. They're gonna do RCS. They've talked about doing encrypted RCS. They've talked about other extensions for RCS to make rich messages with video and photos better. We're very close to getting what you want out of Apple here, right? Like, to what end is actually making iMessage itself?

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  Like forcibly interoperate with just one app accomplish very much?

• 26:07David Pierce?

  Again, I think it would be great. I like Beeper as a user experience a lot. I was able, I piped in like 10 different inboxes into Beeper and it is like a saner way to message. It's great. No one is obligated to support that, right? And I, that's fine. And, and I think you're right. Like if you boil Eric and Beeper's like moral argument all the way down, what they say is SMS is bad technology and Apple is doing its users a disservice by relying on it. I think that is absolutely true. And I think RCS is the correct solution to that problem, not Beeper, which is the problem, right? Like even the case Beeper wants to make doesn't end in, and the right solution is Beeper.

• 26:48David Pierce?

  It ends in, and the right solution is this better technology that we've invented that works for everyone.

• 26:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 05

  No, the right solution is to take it back to when we had that one app that had MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger and IRC. What we have, ICQ. Yes, Trillium. That's, that is the solution. That is where we need to go.

• 27:06David Pierce?

  Trillium, Adium, Pidgin. What a world.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  None of them could spell any words correctly. That's the thing.

• 27:13David Pierce?

  They all had eyes where there shouldn't have been eyes.

• 27:17Nilay Patel?

  All right. So our condolences to Beeper. Hopefully one day there's blue bubbles for everyone. Till that time, you can buy iPhone and use Beeper on your Android phone. We got there. You won again, Tim Cook, you crafty devil. Other little bit of Apple news, lots of smoke but no fire yet on a Vision Pro launch in February. Potentially in late January. This makes sense. Just if you think about the next few weeks here, it's going to be CES very soon. A terrifying reality. Apple loves to disrupt CES. So saying we're gonna have an event in late January, early February, during the second week of January when CES is going. Pretty good timing for Apple.

• 27:59Nilay Patel?

  And then they have said early 24 for the Vision Pro since the very beginning. So we'll see. I, you know, I think, does this thing have a killer? Has Apple figured out what the Vision Pro is for yet?

• 28:11David Pierce?

  I don't know. The answer seems to be spatial video, right? Like, I feel like this has been the most interesting thing about the last month or so is we've seen this trickle of stories come out from people who have tried shooting spatial video on the iPhone and then seeing it

• 28:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:26David Pierce?

  on the Vision Pro. And that just, at least from Apple's perspective, seems to be overwhelmingly the first thing Apple would like to tell you about the Vision Pro. I am very skeptical. I mean, some of the headlines you see are absurd. People are like, I was moved to tears by seeing my photos in the Vision. It's like, I bet, probably not. That's probably just like the screen resolution being off and it hurt your eyes. Like,

• 28:51Nilay Patel?

  You're like, you haven't had emotional experiences with technology before? That's impossible.

• 28:57David Pierce?

  I, I don't know. I, I'm not convinced that that is the killer app.

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  You're just, you've just never had a feeling in your life, man. I cried when I watched the movie Best of the Best with Julia Roberts' brother. Like, I'm confident this thing is gonna bring me to tears, like, the first time I try it on. I've started shooting, I will say, because, you know, there has been these very controlled. Apple's been weird with the press. I'm just gonna say this, right? They, they did the, the Apple Watch thing and this weird background statement to one, like, that's weird. It's just weird on its face. We're gonna talk about the CarPlay announcement. CarPlay also wasn't a press release. They gave that to GQ and cool. Like, what are, what are we doing? And then this weird thing where like, some people get to do the spatial video demo and some people, whatever.

• 29:44David Pierce?

  Even the beeper stuff to like, call a win for us weird, which it also was. The beeper stuff, which Apple never in a million years would have talked about. We spent weeks trying to get them to talk. They gave me one quote and have never answered another question about it. What?

• 29:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sure. We're in the ecosystem.

• 29:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Nilay Patel?

  Sometimes, you know, the light of the sun shines upon us.

• 30:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm just pointing out, in general, it's been, it's been a weird.

• 30:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  A weird sequence of statements and not statements and whatever.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  But the, the Vision Pro one is, to me, is like, classic Apple.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  Where they just want people to be talking about other people's experiences, which are good. Which is fine. You know, it's like, again, people, companies are gonna, Apple's run the most successful playbook in this, in world's history. Keep doing it. But the idea that you're gonna put on this headset and have an immediate set of emotional experiences is what Apple definitely wants you to think about right now.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 30:41Nilay Patel?

  Not.

• 30:42Speaker 05

  It's what you should think about it. Having an emotional experience through a screen is the best thing possible.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 30:48Speaker 05

  I mean, what, think about it. What would you rather do? Use your real eyes to look at your children in three dimensions? Or look at them inside an Apple headset on a screen in three dimensions?

• 30:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, if they're not around.

• 30:58Speaker 05

  I think there's an obvious answer here.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  I think, like, as a, as a parent.

• 31:02Speaker 05

  Actually, they are around. They're, they're tapping you on the shoulder right now as you're wearing the headset, looking at them.

• 31:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, as a parent of the five year old, there are definitely moments where I'm like, I wish I could just rewind the clock on whatever you're doing right now and experience you a couple of weeks ago.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  And you can't with an Apple Vision Pro. It is only $3,500. How, how have you not bought one already?

• 31:23Nilay Patel?

  Look, I've started shooting, like, I've started shooting some social videos, just so I have them, right? I'm like, I'm very curious about this. My, my broader point is not positive or, or negative. It's just, you can see, when I say, what is the killer app for this? It is not something that is useful. It is something that is emotional.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:42Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's what we're being steered towards. You're gonna have a series of emotional experiences with this technology, which is probably the right thing. Richard sarcasm aside, probably the right thing. Right? Here's the thing that's gonna help you relive some memories. Here's the thing that's gonna blow your mind. Here's the thing that's gonna be memorable that you're gonna wanna talk about, that you're gonna be excited for buying the more affordable version when it comes out. Not, here's a thing that helps you get better at work, so you tell your boss to expense a $3,500 headset, which is where Meta was going with the Quest Pro. Right, and it just, no one could get there. Like, no one was like, this has made me more productive.

• 32:17David Pierce?

  It's kind of what Apple learned from the watch, right? Like, Apple framed the watch as very much a successor to the phone. And that didn't work. But then Apple found out a thing the watch was good at that the phone was not, which was all the health and wellness and fitness stuff, and just leaned really hard into that. And so all of a sudden, it's like, okay, you need this device because it does things your other devices can't do. And I think the problem, all the headsets have had so far, is they don't really have any of that, right? They yell about like, it's more immersive, and they talk about like, the games you can play. But fundamentally, it's like stuff you can do on other screens, just different and potentially cooler. And that pitch doesn't actually work all that well, at least not at the scale you need to work if you're Apple.

• 33:02David Pierce?

  But with something like you're talking about, like, 360 videos feel like you're living inside of your memories? Like, there it is. That's a thing. Real or not, like, that is, that is a thing I can't do on my phone. Whereas like, I have more screens is not.

• 33:16Speaker 05

  And in a world where most of people don't have actual access to these devices, it's a story that you can tell over and over and over again, and they'll be interested in, until you can get the price down and the manufacturing up, and actually sell them an affordable headset.

• 33:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  Two and a half years from now.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna remind everyone that many, many years ago, before disinformation and fake news was a threat to democracy, we ran a fake Super Bowl ad. We put out a press release saying we were gonna run a Super Bowl ad. This got picked up far and wide. We did it to punk the haters. I want to be very clear, there was like, three reporters that specifically I wanted to tweak, and we got them all. We also unfortunately got the New York Times, which, to this day, has a story on their site that says, like, "The Verge planned Super Bowl ad."

• 34:01David Pierce?

  Which was technically true.

• 34:02Nilay Patel?

  It was true. We bought a Super Bowl ad, we bought Airtime in Helena, Montana, for like, $700.

• 34:10Nilay Patel?

  And we ran a very local Super Bowl ad. We sent a reporter to the Buffalo Wild Wings in Helena, Montana, to watch our Super Bowl ad and see what people reacted, and... I don't need to tell you that the patrons of the Buffalo Wild Wings in Helena, Montana, during the Super Bowl were not moved by our Super Bowl ad. Our traffic did not go up on that day. But in that ad, there is a shot of former Verge editor Ross Miller shedding a tear inside a VR headset. Oh, yeah. And that is the thing that most people seized upon is being utterly ludicrous. Inside, like, the joke inside of our joke was that the Verge thought people would cry

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  in VR. And like, now, here we are. It's 2024, and Apple's like, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna weep like a little baby in our headset. And it's like, all right, we weren't so wrong. I'm excited. Like I said, I've already started shooting some videos of Max in his facial video, just because I don't want to look at someone else's kids. That's not gonna make me cry. I'm gonna look at David's kid. Yeah, whatever. He sucks. We should actually, that's, that's, okay, this is gonna be part of the review. We're gonna send each other videos of our children. Ooh. And see if one of our children can make us cry. Okay. That's cool. I'm gonna cry like a baby, no matter what happens. I love kids. All right, last one. Richard, I feel like you gotta, you gotta take us through the CarPlay situation because it is ridiculous.

• 35:36Speaker 05

  Last year, in 2022, if you can remember, at its developer conference, Apple said that we were gonna get a new next-gen CarPlay, would take over every screen in your car, and they were going to announce vehicle news by the end of 2023. It is, we've got a few days left in 2023, and they finally said it's coming in some Porsche and Aston Martin next year, maybe. And we've got two mock-up displays

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 05

  of the kind of CarPlay-equipped supercars. And what you see is the CarPlay screen across, even, even in the dashboard, right in front of the driver, with the speedometer, the tachometer, whatever you want. It's in the center, or maybe it's on the left. It's styled with their logos, with their colors, and with the, I think Porsche's Hound 2's, Hound's 2's pattern that they usually have on their seats is now in the screen. I'm not sure if it's any better than what you already have in your car or something you actually aspire to. But the idea is that if you are a Porsche owner and you're using CarPlay, you'll get a special CarPlay experience that someone doesn't get in, you know, their mirror Honda or Toyota or something like that. So you don't have to deal with that anymore.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  I'm not sure really where we're going with this. I just buttons are still better. We had dials and needles and that was fine to show out your speed in your tachometer.

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  So a couple of things. One, a totally reasonable headline on this story could have been Apple announces Photoshops.

• 36:59Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 36:59Nilay Patel?

  Uh, because these things are not real.

• 37:01Speaker 05

  I believe they're real.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  They are, what, these pictures are not real. So the Aston Martin one in particular is the interior of an Aston Martin DB12. Uh, and it is just a bad Photoshop job. Like the, the CarPlay display has not been skewed correctly onto the screen of the Aston Martin DB12. And I know this because it broke my brain and I put it on threads and people started noticing that the lines aren't parallel.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  Oh geez.

• 37:30Nilay Patel?

  Like it's just, it's just weird. So that's one thing. The Porsche is a little more confusing. I'm not a hundred percent, I assumed it was a Cayenne, it doesn't look like a Cayenne. If, even if you just look at that. So what you have in the Aston Martin is they took over the infotainment with just regular old CarPlay.

• 37:50Nilay Patel?

  Unclear why they had to Photoshop this badly. That's just CarPlay on that center screen.

• 37:56Speaker 05

  It's not what they showed last, it's not what they showed in 2022.

• 37:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm just saying like that's just, it's just CarPlay on the center screen. And the CarPlay has a handful of climate controls baked into it. What's particularly funny about that is there are hard buttons in the DB12 right below them. So we've accomplished a lot, but you've got a little bit of climate control on CarPlay. That's a big, and then you've obviously got the speedometer and then. But CarPlay today can access the center screens of certain cars like Polestars. So we, just very little has been accomplished in the Aston Martin screenshot. The Porsche screenshot.

• 38:33Nilay Patel?

  Again, it appears to just be Photoshop. You look at it, you're like, why would you want this? Like, why? First of all, the Porsche is going 205 kilometers an hour,

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  which is 127 miles per hour.

• 38:49David Pierce?

  Sick.

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  While on a phone call

• 38:54Nilay Patel?

  with a calendar open on the passenger display. So it's like, this is the most dangerous office environment in world history. Don't do this.

• 39:05Speaker 05

  I think that you misunderstand Porsche customers.

• 39:09Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's it. And then all of this screen real estate is, again, to my eye, just like, not being used for anything. Right? So you've got a gauge cluster, you've got a speedometer, you've got a row of icons, you've got a launcher, you have a giant map instruction that says, stay on this road, you have call controls. And then over on the right, the massive passenger display, you've got two calendar entries, a media controller, which, why is that all the way over there? And then more map information, and then the weather.

• 39:50David Pierce?

  Perfect. That's the problem here.

• 39:53Nilay Patel?

  It's like, what is all this? Like, is this, are people crying out for the lowest information density possible in the driving while you're going 130 miles an hour?

• 40:05David Pierce?

  I'm so torn on this because on the one hand, I think it continues to be true that CarPlay is better than everybody else's software in cars.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 40:17David Pierce?

  So, so to some extent.

• 40:18Nilay Patel?

  By the way, and you know, I don't think it's good, but I will agree with you.

• 40:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, I didn't say it was good.

• 40:23Nilay Patel?

  Say for Tesla and potentially Rivian.

• 40:26David Pierce?

  Sure. Fine. Maybe. It's, it's better than Porsche would build on its own, is a thing I believe very strongly. That said,

• 40:38David Pierce?

  Why do we want any of this? Like, my favorite thing that happened here was this came out like right at the same time that VW did an interview where it was like, we're bringing buttons back to our cars because everybody wants buttons. And we tried to do other things and we moved everything around and people said, stop it, give us buttons. So they're bringing back buttons. That's like a thing that happened. And so I'm like, okay, if this is where cars are headed, I kind of don't think it's the worst idea to give all of it to companies that actually know how to build software. I'm not sure the right answer is Apple, but it's like, if all of my car is going to be is a bunch of screens, I would rather have Apple programmed those screens than whoever makes my car. Just as I would rather have a car company make my car than

• 41:23David Pierce?

  Apple. But what if we just didn't do any of this? Like, what if we just rewound this idea back like six generations ago and just made cars the better way?

• 41:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and we did our best to put software in them that made sense.

• 41:42David Pierce?

  Or just less software. Like, I'm almost on the Neely team of like, the amount of software I need in my car is a mount for my phone. Maybe that's it.

• 41:54Speaker 05

  Like, when we were at the part where it was just Bluetooth controlling the app on your phone that's playing the podcast and you could just press the same play button and pause button to pause it or whatever. We were pretty good there. Like, that's what you want mostly.

• 42:05Nilay Patel?

  I am utterly-

• 42:06Speaker 05

  And your phone on a mount with Google.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  Befuddled. So again, I think the Aston Martin screenshot is a DB12. Almost 100% sure of that.

• 42:14Speaker 05

  It has to be. It was the only car announced.

• 42:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, they didn't announce any cars. This is an important part of this announcement. They didn't announce any actual cars. They didn't announce any actual features. They announced two screenshots, which are Photoshop's and two quotes from people who work at Aston Martin and Porsche. So I couldn't tell you-

• 42:33Speaker 05

  They told Car and Driver that it should be in the system that's coming next year in the DB12 and the Volante.

• 42:39Nilay Patel?

  Oh, okay. So Aston Martin, Car and Driver has-

• 42:40Speaker 05

  And Porsche said something, they'll like have more information when they reveal the Macan, or however you say that, the all-electric car that they have-

• 42:48Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so this is the interior of the Macan.

• 42:49Speaker 05

  That's what you can assume, I think.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  Because it is not the current interior of the current Macan.

• 42:54Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  So a new electric Macan will have this. Okay, fine. That makes sense to me. I'm just saying- Why, like, Apple could have just been late, right? They promised that by the end of this year, they would have some announcements. We had heard, I've heard over and over and over again from all kinds of car companies, except for Porsche and Aston Martin, which foolishly I did not think to consider, that no one's going to do this because everyone thinks the future of their cars is recurring revenue in the cars. You can go listen to the CEO Volvo on Decoder just recently, talk about how he's doing it differently, but he still wants to do recurring revenue just for like car insurance. Like, everyone thinks that controlling this interface is a big deal and letting Apple undifferentiate their cars is a big deal.

• 43:37Nilay Patel?

  So you can see this middle step is Apple is still going to run all the software, but Porsche gets to skin it, or Aston Martin gets to skin it a little bit. Okay, but they're not actually cars. Like, why not wait until you have an actual car? What was the rush?

• 43:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  To get it out before the end of the year? Like, no one thought it was coming.

• 43:56Speaker 05

  They could have done like a line on the page where they talk about the next gen CarPlay that says, oh, and it's coming in a Porsche and Aston Martin next year.

• 44:04Nilay Patel?

  Right, but we, instead, we have to announce some screenshots.

• 44:07David Pierce?

  Do you think Apple, like, some lawyer at Apple came like running into Tim Cook's office and was like, the watch is getting banned? And Tim was just like, release the photo shops.

• 44:18David Pierce?

  Just has them ready. Whenever we need to drown out bad news, we'll just show people weird CarPlay stuff.

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited. I'm excited for us to have giant screens full of redundant information surrounding us in cars. You know what's great about driving at night is having bright LED lit screens at you just in the middle of nowhere.

• 44:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's the end of the Apple chaos. We got it, we got to wrap this up. We're going to come back, we're doing a very fast lighting round, then we're going to do a year in review. It's going to be great. We'll be right back.

• 44:51Speaker 00

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

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• 45:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. We have to do a very fast lightning round. Fast. The note is for me. I'm the one who makes the struggle. All right, David, kick us off.

• 46:02David Pierce?

  For this lightning round, I have six things. No, mine's very short. It's that Bird, the once flying scooter company, is cooked. To steal from Jess Weatherbed on our team. Bird filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company has been like all but dead for a pretty long time. And just seems to have completely given up. This company was worth, I want to say like $2 or $3 billion just a few years ago. I confess, I was all in on this like micro mobility future. I still kind of think it could work that like what we need is better public transit. But what we also need is cool ways to get around cities that aren't cars.

• 46:46David Pierce?

  And like I'm, I think the e-bike revolution is really interesting. I think scooter is really interesting, all this stuff. Bird like really started this trend in a really big way. It just sort of dropped scooters in every city in the world, made a ton of money, raised a ton of money, really did the Uber playbook. It was run by Travis Vander Zander, who was a former Uber executive, took over in a huge way, flew too close to the sun and R I P Bird.

• 47:11Nilay Patel?

  That's that. I was just in downtown LA. By the way, I went to the Emmy Awards because our Netflix show was nominated for an Emmy.

• 47:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  It was a real thing.

• 47:17David Pierce?

  Disclosure, we make a Netflix show.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, we're going to talk about Warner Brothers. It's coming anyway. Disclosure, our Netflix show was nominated for an Emmy and I went to Emmy Awards, which was crazy. And I sat behind the production team for the Kelly Clarkson Show. And they loved to party. They were just whooping it up and statuettes for days over at the Kelly Clarkson Show. Sadly, we did not win. We lost to a show about Italy on PBS, which. You know, when you're in the educational informational program category, the daytime Emmys, you kind of think you're going to lose to the show about Italian food. So it was still fun to go. It's still fun hanging with the team. But anyway, so I was at the Emmys, downtown LA, the streets are full of scooters. And what struck me was everyone, if you will remember, Bird and Lime, they started with just like

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  consumer scooters. They were like ordering from like AliExpress.

• 48:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  At massive costs and they were breaking and people were throwing in the river. And they're like, we're going to engineer the scooters to be better once they've taken off. And they've done that. And the Bird scooters in particular now look like some Mad Max shit.

• 48:20David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:20Nilay Patel?

  Like raw, raw aluminum, like totally armored, like they're, they're like an imposing thing. And it's like, oh, these are the least cute scooters now.

• 48:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, they weigh like a thousand pounds too.

• 48:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:33David Pierce?

  And this is the problem. All those things became totally commoditized and everybody was like, either, you know, we're going to win and then we're going to be able to raise prices like Uber did. Or we're going to figure out how to make the unit economics work so that they stick around all this stuff. And then some combination of everybody grew too fast and there was a global pandemic and nobody went outside for a year.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:51David Pierce?

  Just crushed everybody. And like kudos to Lime and a couple of others that have kind of managed to stick it out and continue to, to keep on keeping on. But uh, this was, this was always coming for Bird. It was either going to, it really was. It was either going to just completely decimate everybody and take over the world, or it was going to run through all of its money really fast and die. And that seems to be what happened.

• 49:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it was less Uber and more WeWork.

• 49:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 49:20Nilay Patel?

  All SoftBank Vision Fund investments.

• 49:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:23Nilay Patel?

  All right. Speaking of things that are doomed, Richard, I believe you have a lightning round item for us?

• 49:28Speaker 05

  Yes. Uh, the news broke through multiple outlets in the, in the last day or so that Warner Brothers, Discovery and Paramount executives are in discussions for a Max merger. That was in Alex Karan's headline, of course.

• 49:40David Pierce?

  Oh, my God.

• 49:41Speaker 05

  Because we might get Paramount plus Max, Max plus, or something like that.

• 49:46David Pierce?

  I hate it so much.

• 49:47Speaker 05

  If these companies are allowed to combine. Because we have two failing giant entertainment companies that can't really support themselves under their own weight. The only solution that their executives can think of is to combine them.

• 50:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 05

  Which I don't know what else you could do. But they're probably going to try and find out if this if this is the solution.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  You could try to make good movies. Uh, one option that uh is does not seem to be in vogue. Uh, but it's just a it's just a thing you could do. Uh, you could make a compelling television show for your service that you've rebranded as Max.

• 50:22David Pierce?

  You could stop trying to be Netflix.

• 50:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:24David Pierce?

  That could be fun. Uh, like, I mean, this is the thing, right? And and we've been talking about this for years now that it was always going to be so expensive and so complicated to compete that there were always only going to be a few winners. And I think at this point Netflix is one of those winners. Like, I think I don't I don't see how Netflix falls apart at any point in the near future. Disney is one of those winners, but is in kind of a weird place. And there's probably not room for many more like Apple TV and Prime Video get to live on because their companies have so much money that those things are like not material.

• 51:00Nilay Patel?

  So this is the real problem, though, but all these executives will tell you is that they're competing against cost centers for tech companies that have massive profits. So Apple TV plus is just a cost center.

• 51:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like lunch for employees and Apple TV plus.

• 51:14Nilay Patel?

  And again, you know, my theory with Apple TV plus in particular is they make it so that when they talk about services revenue, they don't have to talk about Candy Crush whales, because all their service rates revenue is the 30% cut of net purchases on games. That is Apple services revenue. Amazon does Prime and they spend a ton of money. And you know, what you might describe as a produced Thursday night football game. It's not the best produced, but it's produced Thursday night football game. Uh, because that stuff keeps Prime subscribers around. It it is their retention. They know it, but it's still a cost center, right? Like, the lifetime that they in it's Amazon, they like run the math, like the lifetime value of Prime subscriber stays on year after year is very high.

• 51:55Nilay Patel?

  And we can take some of that margin out and produce this TV show because that will inspire more people to stay for long.

• 52:00David Pierce?

  I mean, they did a Black Friday football game. Like, I don't know if you need a clearer indication of where the money here is for Amazon.

• 52:06Nilay Patel?

  Right. If you're Warner Brothers, you you don't have some other thing that's making all the money. You just have to like, go make the thing. And I would just remind the audience that Warner Brothers is the most cursed company in world history when it comes to mergers like.

• 52:24David Pierce?

  That might be true.

• 52:26Nilay Patel?

  The Times, I, you know, I don't, I'm not this sort of person like runs around yelling at you at times, but the Times had a very funny piece on this, or at least I thought it was funny because they had the, you know, the very sort of normal Times business writing of like, there's ample business logic for the deal. And then they like listed all the reasons you might want to merge. And it's like, you know, every time any company merges with Warner Brothers, it ends in disaster. Like, like the AOL Time Warner merger is the most failed merger in history. The AT&T Time Warner merger is a close second. Like the only thing that merger accomplished was a massive layoffs, a shitload of debt and a grayscale four, three Snyder cut. That's it. That's what you got out of that merger.

• 53:08David Pierce?

  Big three.

• 53:08Nilay Patel?

  Nothing else. What are we doing, y'all?

• 53:11Speaker 05

  Well, the Warner Brothers Discovery merger hasn't failed yet.

• 53:15David Pierce?

  I don't know. I think, uh, how, how's your, how's your Batgirl going? No, I think, I mean, the, the problem is the Warner Brothers Discovery thing was never going to work. It has so much debt.

• 53:26Nilay Patel?

  So much debt.

• 53:27David Pierce?

  So many holes to dig out of that. It's like, since the minute this company existed, people have been asking, who are they going to merge with? Uh, which was just, it was just never going to work. And the answer, I think, I mean, people have seen this coming for a long time, right? Like, these are two companies that were never going to compete with the handful of giants that are out there, but combined, maybe.

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  Combined, but combined to do what?

• 53:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:54Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like honestly, combined to what? To have more content? It's not more content that people, no one's running around being like, I don't have enough content.

• 54:02David Pierce?

  Right.

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  And I don't even like that word. Like it just implies like being shoveled, glurged into your mouth. Just like, take the content, like just do it. It's another Tom Cruise movie. You will have it. Um, there's more reality television. I think what people are, what, what you are looking to Hollywood to do is make really good stuff that is a little bit more scarce. If you want stuff with YouTube production values, boy, is there a YouTube for you. You know, if you want stuff at Hollywood production values, there's actually not, not a lot. And it just seems like there's a race to the bottom here because of all of the debt that in particular Warner has had to take on through its sequence of disastrous mergers.

• 54:45Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't know, like these companies are not going to make a great app with a great user experience that makes you feel good about using it. That's full of really great stuff that inspires you to pick it over Tik Tok. And like, that's what they're really competing against is Tik Tok on your phone.

• 54:59Speaker 05

  And I think that's the biggest problem for them is that when you look at the supposed winners in this space, Netflix, are they, are they winning? Because they're probably going to have to raise their prices again. They do every six months or so anyway. They're throwing on games. They're trying to find some other way to get you to pay more for a slightly bigger bundle until they actually do recreate cable. Disney, what is Disney anymore? Is it going to have ESPN? Is it going to be something else? We don't even know. So I'm not even sure what the model for victory is for them. They just, they're chasing kind of nothing.

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  It's mergers and golden parachutes. Let's be very honest. By the way, having not done the full disclosure, Comcast is a minority investor. No, Comcast, by the way, I haven't done the full disclosure. Comcast NBC Universal Division is a minority investor in Fox Media, the largest parent company. I promise you not a lot of love from Comcast flowing in our direction.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  By the way, one of the, the other line was like this would in the time series, one of the other lines in the time series was this will give them leverage in the negotiate cable rates with Comcast and Charterhouse. Like the dying stars. Yeah. The thing that people are quitting in droves. Good luck.

• 56:06David Pierce?

  And the companies who are now negotiating by saying, we don't need TV anymore because the only place we make money is through internet service. Yeah, perfect.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  It's, by the way, they just leaked the last four social security digits of everyone who has internet service, maybe so.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. Anyway, so Comcast is an investor in our company.

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  We, we made a Netflix show. It's not made in front of Emmy. It's called The Future of Us. You go watch it. We, our company makes other TV shows. You know, the usual, I have a Disney account. I just went to Disney World. Does that count? I think the magic band is like neoliberal fantasy. Okay.

• 56:42David Pierce?

  That's good.

• 56:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, last one. This is mine. I think this is actually fascinating on two fronts. So Peloton, you know, they got a new CEO. They went through, they also went through a big pandemic over hire. They bought Precor, they bought factories, and then they went through a pandemic crash when people realized they could go back to the gym. So they're like reorganizing their business. So I have two Peloton ones, or kind of the same one, I think, in interesting ways. The first, if you have Peloton hardware in your house and you have the subscription, which is the plus tier of the subscription, you now don't need the hardware. So you can now walk up to any treadmill that supports a Bluetooth protocol called FTMS and use the Peloton app with that treadmill, which is like pretty interesting.

• 57:25David Pierce?

  And it'll like keep track of the same data about how you're running and all that stuff?

• 57:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you get your incline speed, pace and distance in the app, which will track it with the rest of Peloton stuff. This is fascinating to me. Like just, they're just debundling their thing. You obviously need the more expensive subscription, which very much implies that you have the hardware, but they are debundling it. And then, you know, there's a weird little Bluetooth standard for people to argue about and figure out what supports what. Cause it hasn't really been important yet. And now Peloton is going to make this weird little Bluetooth standard important. Next to that, their oldest bikes are 2015, 2016. They're getting very old. And so they are gonna, they are no longer supporting the Android versions that run on those bikes tablets.

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  So they will give you a $500 credit to buy a new bike, which is very expensive. Also, those bikes are always on sale, so it's nothing. Or, this is really interesting, they will just sell you a new tablet for those bikes. The tablet is ridiculously expensive.

• 58:24David Pierce?

  So it's like, it's like a dumb bike with a smart TV and you just replace the smart TV?

• 58:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like there's, there's just a thing happening in Peloton world where they're realizing that the sort of computer part of it.

• 58:36Nilay Patel?

  Like can be fully disaggregated from the bike part of it or the treadmill part of it. And so in the one sense, their actual hardware, they're just upgrading the hardware. And there are some arguments in our comments and elsewhere about whether the price that upgrade is too high. It's it's normally $375, but if your bike is expiring, they'll give you a $50 credit. So it's $325.

• 58:56David Pierce?

  That's a lot.

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  To buy a new tablet. That's a lot for like a what is not the world's greatest Android tablet, you know?

• 59:01David Pierce?

  On top of the very expensive thing that you already bought and have been paying for for a long time. Yeah, that's a lot.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  This is a lot, but it is interesting, right? You can just put a new computer on it. And then on the on the other side of it, you can just get a treadmill that supports this Bluetooth protocol, buy the more expensive subscription and use your own tablet. So you kind of just see like the the nature of this company's relationship to hardware, software subscriptions is changing a little bit in a way that you can you can get to a place where you're paying too much money for a Peloton subscription and you have neither their treadmill nor their tablet. And their app is just talking to your treadmill on your iPad. And that's like, oh, now it's a totally different company.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  It it just feels like what Peloton always should have been.

• 59:44David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 59:45Speaker 05

  Kind of an add on that they didn't need to be the new exercise bike company. But I assume that they registered probably correctly that if they tried to launch with something like this, either the technology wasn't ready at the time, which I can believe to an extent, or if they did deliver it and did work, that one of the big bike companies would just make their own version and they would get frozen out. But we had to go through this whole 10 years of waste.

• 1:00:07Nilay Patel?

  It's interesting to put it in the context of the streaming conversation. Like Peloton's real differentiation is it's instructors, right? They've like, they put on a show that the shows have communities around them. The instructors have people, the hardware is good. We Becky has a Peloton treadmill. I have a Peloton bike. They're really good. We use them a lot. And I can see how having them integrated is a superior experience to if I was like cobbling together an iPad with something else and like needing a Bluetooth protocol to work.

• 1:00:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, anyone who's ever like tried to pair their phone to the treadmill at the gym, like that that experience can suck real bad.

• 1:00:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but what's fascinating about this is, Richard, your point is they could have just made it all about the content. And maybe that would have been better, but I think you need something to sell. Like Apple Fitness Plus is all about the content. I don't think it's nearly as successful as Peloton. And I, you know, like Apple's like, you just bring your own bike and no one does it. No one cares. So there's something in there that I think is just next to the streaming conversation. Peloton sort of de-bungling itself in this way is like fascinating. And then there's a wonky Bluetooth standard, which is suddenly going to become more important.

• 1:01:11David Pierce?

  Score.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  You know, I can't stay away from the tree.

• 1:01:13David Pierce?

  Holiday spectacular 2024 Peloton Bluetooth. No, the thing I think is interesting about this is like, Richard, I think that arc you describe is like exactly what Peloton should have done and potentially was always going to do like, no one at Peloton, I'm sure was like, we can sell $1,800 bikes to every single person on earth. They're like, we're going to sell these bikes to as like the luxury item and that's where we start. And then we become a content business to the rest of people. Uh, and that all would have worked just fine, except they absolutely lost their mind in the middle of the pandemic.

• 1:01:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46David Pierce?

  When everybody bought a Peloton. And so suddenly they were like, oh, maybe the market is bigger than we thought. And what it actually was, was just that they did the 10 years of business they were ever going to do in like three months. And suddenly they were, instead of there being 10 times as many people who might buy a Peloton, which is what they decided was the case, it was actually just that everyone who was ever going to buy a Peloton had already bought a Peloton. So if they had shifted right then and been like, okay, we've hit the group. Now we're going to be a content business. Peloton might be in a really different place. But instead, like you said, Neil, it bought factories and bought companies and was like, we're going all in on weird hardware.

• 1:02:21Nilay Patel?

  And what's particularly interesting about that is along the way, uh, the CEO of Peloton got pushed out for making those decisions. And they brought in the new guy, Barry McCarthy, ex Netflix, who is now running a Netflix.

• 1:02:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  By disaggregating the service and the content from the hardware. So like I said, it was just, we were talking about streaming. I was like, oh, this Peloton, there's something right there. That's the same thing.

• 1:02:43Speaker 05

  The difference between them and streaming is that Peloton also released a treadmill that killed a child.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  Which is probably.

• 1:02:50Nilay Patel?

  Hey, that one, they're, uh, they're about to release it. It's true. That was oddly dangerous.

• 1:02:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  Like too dangerous and it went away. Uh, and now on their website, you can preorder the new one, which is the same. I don't know. It's very confusing. All right. On that, uh, very dark night. Thank you, Richard. We're going to take a break. We're coming back. We're going to do, uh, what I think will be very fun. We'll be right back.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

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• 1:04:21Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. So David had an idea to just go through all of our top stories for the year. But then, this idea got complicated by the idea of how you would make such a list. David, what have you done?

• 1:04:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, so when I raised that I wanted to do some kind of end of the year thing, I was like, how do we sort of pick out the biggest stories of the year? Do we all come with our ideas for the biggest stories? Do we come up with a list and try to rank them? And you were just like, "What if we just like took the top posts on theverge.com and went through them all and decided, like, were those actually the top stories of the year?" I was like, "Cool, sounds fun." Horrible idea. We're gonna do it, but it was a horrible idea. So we went through and basically, two ways that we measure traffic on theverge.com are through Google Analytics and through a tool called Parsley. They, it turns out, have very different ideas about how much traffic a page is getting.

• 1:05:16David Pierce?

  So what I ultimately did was look at both of them and then I sort of triangulated a list of the most popular Verge stories of 2023. But in order to do that, you have to get rid of all the stories that are just like obviously successful because people search for those things all the time, right? Like, a piece of fun inside baseball is that the single most popular Verge URL after our homepage in 2023 was our roundup of the best wireless earbuds. Sure. And there's tons of those, right? We do buying guides, they're really good, they're really helpful, lots of people find them, lots of people buy stuff. It's great. Then we have things like explainers. We have an NFT explainer from like two years ago, I think.

• 1:05:57Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:05:58David Pierce?

  That is still lingering as one of our most popular stories.

• 1:06:02Nilay Patel?

  The best part about that explainer, by the way, is it's Mitchell Clark, I believe, wrote it, and it is basically a reason why no one should buy an NFT.

• 1:06:08David Pierce?

  It's also the reason Mitchell Clark left the Verge and like moved to the woods.

• 1:06:12Nilay Patel?

  He's like, I need to walk around the West Coast for a long time. And he's been doing it ever since.

• 1:06:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. And then, yeah, and then there were like some random things that we just left off because they're popular for reasons that are not newsworthiness, like a sort of one-off story that James Vincent on our team wrote about deep fake nudes that for reasons I don't need to explain but are very obvious was very popular on the internet all year. So, point is, I whittled all this down into, I think, an imperfect but like directionally useful list of the most popular stories on theverge.com in 2023.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  Minus the list of best laptops.

• 1:06:49David Pierce?

  Minus the list of best laptops, yeah. And-

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  Which is a great list.

• 1:06:53David Pierce?

  Oh, tons of good stuff. I highly recommend Googling all those things and clicking on the Verge links many times so that they keep being popular in 2024. And so what I want to do with each of these is just go through and basically I want to decide for each of these, does this belong on like biggest stories of 2023 list? Because a lot of these, they have their moments, people get very excited, like there's a huge sort of spike in interest in traffic and then they die out. Others live much longer, so I want to go through and see like, does this merit a list of the best biggest stories of 2023? And the first one- And again, I'm going in a pure list of popularity. This has no, no judgment.

• 1:07:34David Pierce?

  The first one is a big feature we wrote about inside Elon Musk's extremely hardcore Twitter. And there were a few others on this list, including the one where Elon Musk predicted that X will replace banks. He gave employees a year to replace banks. And then there was the whole Zuckerberg Elon Musk cage match challenge. So I've just boiled all of this down to Musk Twitter X shenanigans.

• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  The one thing I'll point out, just having looked at the list. You know, I don't often think about our URL slugs and the Zuckerberg versus Musk slug had the word world star in it, which is just the funniest.

• 1:08:10David Pierce?

  Fantastic.

• 1:08:13Nilay Patel?

  It was like Musk Zuckerberg cage match world star. And it just did numbers. And now I've learned an important lesson about putting word world star in all of our headlines. I see why this is the, this is the biggest story of the year.

• 1:08:28David Pierce?

  It deserves to be here, right?

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, it, we've talked about this now at length. We've done a huge package on it. Like this thing catalyzed a reordering of the internet. And maybe you think I'm going too far. I really think that that's true. And the only thing that I'm missing when I say that is also the whole AI Google search dilemma is like right next to that. But this thing just catalyzed a rethinking of the social internet in big ways. Threads is the number one app on the App Store. Mastodon is growing. Interest in Activity Pub is growing. Threads is going to do activity. Like all of that massively catalyzed by Elon's purchase of Twitter. Then next that, you know, that story, extremely hardcore, you know, on just like a verge level.

• 1:09:13Nilay Patel?

  We co-produced that story with New York Magazine. It was on the cover of New York Magazine. We made that story with Casey and Zoe at Platformer and Alex Heath on our team. So it was just like. Just from me personally, like, a lot of people had to work together in a way that people in media don't often work together to make something really great. That story is really great. And it is the story of a culture change inside of a company and what it was like in those early days, tons and tons and tons of great reporting. And that immediately led to not like just reflection, obviously, interest, but a bunch of other companies being like, what if we were a little bit more hardcore? And you just immediately saw

• 1:09:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:09:52Nilay Patel?

  ping pong around sort of tech culture.

• 1:09:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, there was that brief moment where everybody was taking a page out of Musk's book and being like, that was like how a lot of people excused bringing people back to the office. They were like, it's time to, it's time to get serious. Like, stop being so nice to your employees.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're gonna lay off a bunch of you. It was like a real thing that happened, sort of in the wake of Elon.

• 1:10:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, what if we had 50% less people? And then a bunch of companies realized, like, oh, that wouldn't work. And Elon was like, what if we did it again?

• 1:10:17David Pierce?

  Well, we're gonna get to the layoffs in a minute here.

• 1:10:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20David Pierce?

  But Richard, you sit in the news all day. This is, this is the biggest story of the year, right?

• 1:10:24Speaker 05

  I was at a holiday party for my wife's job the other day, and I was telling them kind of what it's like to work in this job. And this year, really for the last few years, a lot of it has been, oh, Elon just did a thing. Over and over and over again. If you are tired of reading the news, I am tired of thinking about writing it and talking about it. The number of stories that we did not write is much longer than the number of stories that we published or that we considered. And it's one of those things where, Neil, I think you're extremely right about all the things that it covered, but it was even more than that. It was security. It was policy. It was international, even the layoffs, how they happened in different countries across different continents and were affected by different laws.

• 1:11:07Speaker 05

  We had the lawsuit. We had the whistleblower who came back and said that Twitter was wildly insecure before and talked about the things that the previous administration was doing. We we had the woman who was sleeping in our cubicle.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Who then got fired.

• 1:11:21Speaker 05

  And later got fired. It was a it was a momentary star. We we had, there were just so many things that happened. I I can't remember all of them, or even one tenth, I think.

• 1:11:29David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I think, which is impressive, actually, because that means Elon Musk is the story of the year two years in a row. Because all of the chaos of the acquisition was very much that thing in 2022. So here's hoping we don't make it a three-peat. On that note, let's move on. Next on the list, I I would not have put this second, but I'm not surprised it's actually here, is the Vision Pro. Our our just in initial announcement post was number two. And Neelai, your hands-on getting to try it.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  Face on.

• 1:12:02David Pierce?

  Your your face on was also on this list, too. Not surprising to me that this is the gadget of the year, right?

• 1:12:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's the newest, most impressive thing.

• 1:12:13Nilay Patel?

  It has the biggest ideas. It had the flashiest launch. It's it's Apple, you know, Apple's always going to be on that list. I'll I'll just do a spoiler way down on this list, but still in the top, whatever, 50, the iPhone 15 Pro, like, it's it's just there.

• 1:12:27David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:12:27Nilay Patel?

  I get it. And also, people are just really curious, you know, it's like a new hardware category from Apple. What are they going to do better than everyone else? I think that some of that interest will carry through the actual launch. But it would surprise me is the hands-on did as well, because it was, as I was writing it, I was like, there's no way to convey what's actually happening.

• 1:12:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, you just, you're, I'm dancing with architecture, like, I'm I'm doing the thing here where, like, I can't take a picture of it, I can't show it to you. I can just write about it around it, you know?

• 1:12:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, I was sitting one table over from you at Apple Park in their visitor center while you were writing this story. And you came out and you were just like, I think I just have to write about all the things that happened in a row. And I think that's all I can do. And I was like, yeah, I think that's all you can do.

• 1:13:13Nilay Patel?

  That's what he did. Turned out people liked it. Worked out great.

• 1:13:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Nilay Patel?

  All right. Number three on the list was, I believe this was Liz Lopato on the last day of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial. Her headline was Sam Bankman-Fried gambled on a trial and his parents lost. But I think to some extent, A, this is a terrific piece. But B was the summary of the SBF FTX trial, which Richard like definitely belongs on this list, right? Biggest stories of the year.

• 1:13:41Speaker 05

  Surely. Over the last year, we saw this kind of coming at the end of 2022 as FTX collapsed. Sam Bankman-Fried went on a massive media tour and then he was arrested.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like you do.

• 1:13:53Speaker 05

  A very strange sequence of events. Arrested and extradited from the Bahamas and then we had the trial. And it all kind of wrapped up within a year. And I think the verdict came in a year to the day after CoinDesk had published this kind of expose of what turned out to be just one of their balance sheets showing some really serious problems within FTX. But Liz, I thought that in particular, this piece dug into the personal side of it, of who Sam Bankman-Fried was and what it meant for him to view the world in the way that he did and how that resulted in both the growth of FTX, the way that the investors and the people who backed it were kind of drawn into it and they saw an opportunity in this person and in this company.

• 1:14:37Speaker 05

  And then what happened after it all fell apart and after he was on trial? And why, why someone would go to trial on this? Why they would risk all of this when we all saw it, when we all read it and we were like, yeah, he's going to be found guilty, right? And he was.

• 1:14:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Speaker 05

  But how we got there?

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  I always think that the tagline for the verge is how technology makes us feel. You know, which is like, it doesn't work in ad beatings. Like that's where you need to. What we're sorry about the future, whatever. But this one to me is like a perfect encapsulation of that. Like, we're not a financial publication. We're not really a business publication. Sometimes I think we're like a secret business publication. Where we cover tech really closely, but we cover like this very human part of it. We spend a lot of time on that thing. And to me, Liz just found that line in this trial. Her coverage of this trial through and through is amazing. But this one, it just made it sad. Like.

• 1:15:32Nilay Patel?

  Yes, he scammed a lot of people out of a lot of money. Yes, all this stuff. And there's just a sadness to it. And if you even read the comments or like to people posting on threads about it or whatever, people caught that sadness and it really resonated with them. Like, if you're just a parent and your kid has this big belief and he's on a rocket ride, like, you're, you're just not motivated to be like, well, my kid's a shit. Yeah. And there's just something in there. It's, it's worth reading and just like really sitting with, because Liz caught it like exactly. And she was in the courtroom every day. And she was just watching this happen to these people. And there's something in there that I think is just really powerful. It's like, it's very literary. It's like, what I want the verge to be at its, its best, even though it was a trial about cryptocurrency scams.

• 1:16:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, I will say, this is a totally unfair thing to say, whatever, six and a half weeks after the trial. But there has been less, uh, ongoing fallout from the FTX trial than I expected. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff brewing, but when the trial ended, it felt like a lot of people kind of, you know, wiped, wiped their hands of it and moved on with their lives. It was like, oh,

• 1:16:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, I hear, here's one thing I know. Richard remembers. The people who-

• 1:16:38Speaker 05

  I remember everyone who ever tried to sell an NFT and I will follow them forever. It will never drop.

• 1:16:44Nilay Patel?

  Receipt Swaller over here has not forgotten a goddamn thing.

• 1:16:48Speaker 05

  What I was gonna say is there, there actually has been some fallout. We've seen several other executives go down. We've seen Binance started the entire run against FTX. They have had a guilty plea to criminal charges. Their CEO is in America and cannot leave because he is a flight risk. There, there are still things going on. I think we're gonna, we're gonna see these echoes just kind of continue throughout crypto and throughout the financial industry.

• 1:17:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. All right. Next one. This is, uh, just to, you know, take you further inside the Parsley Google Analytics thing. On Google Analytics, this was, I think in like the top three most popular stories of the year, and it was nowhere on Parsley. So I don't know what to make of that. So I just put it in here. Uh, this is Jen Tooey's story about Amazon opening up its sidewalk network to give any gadget-free low-speed data. I remember being very surprised at how well this story was doing at the time. It's a good story, but like, I was shocked that that many people care about sidewalk as a thing.

• 1:17:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm convinced that the words free data.

• 1:17:44Nilay Patel?

  Or the thing.

• 1:17:44David Pierce?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:17:46Nilay Patel?

  Right. Any gadget free data, you get it.

• 1:17:49David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 1:17:50Nilay Patel?

  I immediately understood. People are out there in the streets with their chumbies going like, how do I connect to these sidewalk networks?

• 1:17:55Speaker 05

  There was also a sort of weird discussion that popped up around this where people were like, oh, your Echo is suddenly going to give away your internet capacity to whoever wants to use it. So you need to change the thing.

• 1:18:06Nilay Patel?

  That's true. And your Ring cameras, a bunch of stuff has sidewalk enabled. And the idea is that you can build stuff like Amazon has trackers, like Tile and AirTag, competitive tracker and stuff. They have pet tags. And so you need to build this like big mesh network and you would participate in it. I don't think any of this has really come to pass, right?

• 1:18:26David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:18:26Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's not a lot of sidewalk stuff out there.

• 1:18:28David Pierce?

  This is the first story on the list that I'm like, this doesn't really belong on the biggest stories of 2023 list, which is no slate to Jen. It's a great story. But yeah, I think sidewalk is a longer term, super interesting thing. This idea of like these local mesh networks is really fascinating, but is not like in people's lives and brains.

• 1:18:47Nilay Patel?

  Amazon has a page that's like Amazon sidewalk gadgets on amazon.com. And it's a long list of like FAQ questions and what you can use. And the only products you can buy are bridges. You can buy Echo devices and Ring cameras and there's not one thing that you can do with.

• 1:19:08David Pierce?

  Connect all your stuff, do nothing.

• 1:19:11Speaker 05

  I will say this, the coverage map is looking a lot more filled in. If you click to their page compared to the version that we have in here. So it's still going, but they've also had an executive change for Amazon. So I don't know what the priority will be for this going forward.

• 1:19:23Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Panos Panay now runs devices and services at Amazon.

• 1:19:27David Pierce?

  Panos, free data for everybody. Let's do this. Okay. Next up, Sony's portable PlayStation Portal launches on November 15th for $199.99. This is the single most surprising thing to me on the list, mostly because the Portal is stupid.

• 1:19:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, they, nobody knows that.

• 1:19:43David Pierce?

  I guess that's true.

• 1:19:43Nilay Patel?

  One, you've done that. See, you do this for long enough. You get jaded, you get, you know, you gotta, you gotta sand that off. You gotta look at this with beginner's eyes, David.

• 1:19:53David Pierce?

  You're right.

• 1:19:53Nilay Patel?

  People are like, there's a new PlayStation. I'm super hype about it.

• 1:19:56David Pierce?

  And the story's from August. Life was so simple in August.

• 1:19:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? They're like, it looks crazy. It's got these weird handle controllers. Like, it could also be a batarang. It's only $199. I haven't been told about the ridiculous limitations of this device yet. I understand why people clicked on this story. $200 PlayStation on the go.

• 1:20:15David Pierce?

  I can tell you confidently.

• 1:20:17Nilay Patel?

  It also only works in your house.

• 1:20:19David Pierce?

  Yeah. How to buy the portal, not on the popular list. I'll tell you that.

• 1:20:25David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, I know. You're right. This was exciting at the moment and it felt interesting. Cloud gaming was a thing people talked about all year. It was like, there was a lot going on. I can see it, but boy, did that.

• 1:20:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, look, I'm, I'm not going to be like the entire media's editor in chief. The, the difference between the verge and everything else is we're excited about technology often. Because I've watched this cycle a million times where people are going to be excited about the PlayStation Portal. And like, I, I know, I know.

• 1:20:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? But I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna like harsh your vibe right at the beginning. Everyone else is like, this is stupid. Technology's stupid. We're not gonna do that. We're here for you. We're gonna talk about USB C for a full hour.

• 1:21:07Speaker 05

  And if you want to carry around an LCD screen to play PS5 games on, we're here for you.

• 1:21:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Speaker 05

  I support, I personally support your choices.

• 1:21:15David Pierce?

  But technically, we're not here for you because you have to be in your house and, and we have to be in our house. We can't actually be here for you. Really sorry.

• 1:21:24Speaker 05

  For you.

• 1:21:25Nilay Patel?

  I would say the next one on your list is exactly the same story.

• 1:21:29David Pierce?

  I was just about to say, speaking of cool promises that vastly under-delivered. Google announces the Pixel Fold.

• 1:21:36David Pierce?

  Womp womp.

• 1:21:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I didn't go great.

• 1:21:39David Pierce?

  I wanted to love the Pixel Fold. I have a Pixel Fold sitting right here and I still look at it and I'm like, why aren't you better?

• 1:21:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I would say all of the hardware we saw, the Pixel tablet was also a kind of a disaster that year.

• 1:21:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:21:53Nilay Patel?

  All right. Last year, I should say, um, this past year, the, the Pixel Fold, I think what people were hoping, and I'm, this is just, this is vibes based analysis, but I think what people were hoping was that Google would have gotten it right in a way that Samsung has not gotten it right, or it would be cleaner in a way that a Samsung device is just a cacophony of capitalism. Uh, and maybe, you know, Google, that's not right, but it also is just like not more useful than a regular Pixel phone.

• 1:22:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:23Nilay Patel?

  It's.

• 1:22:24David Pierce?

  Yeah. Where we landed was like, this thing is $1,800 and doesn't make a particularly good case for itself.

• 1:22:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:30David Pierce?

  Uh, the thing that always amazes me is like, it's just heavy. It's just a big chunky brick of a thing. And I still have high hopes for the Fold 2. I'm not gonna lie to you.

• 1:22:41Nilay Patel?

  And it doesn't even run Dex, am I right? Look, if you could take a goo, if you could take a Pixel Fold and turn it into a proper Chromebook, let's talk.

• 1:22:52Nilay Patel?

  You know who I'm talking to. Let's talk.

• 1:22:53David Pierce?

  Which brings me to my next story. I Love Dex by Dan Seifert. No, I'm just kidding.

• 1:22:59Speaker 05

  The other problem with the Pixel Fold is that it's both massively expensive and several months, just a few months later, they brought out a better phone.

• 1:23:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:07Speaker 05

  That wasn't foldable and was cheaper. So you don't have the new hardware and the new AI capabilities and the new Pixel. It just folds. And so, so you've, you've paid all this money and you don't have the best phone. It's, it's just the wrong, the wrong mix of things.

• 1:23:20David Pierce?

  I really, I think the, the Verge audience wants to love the Pixel maybe more than it wants to love any other individual device.

• 1:23:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29David Pierce?

  And like, there's a lot to like about the Pixel, but the Pixel continues to be, uh, more loved than it deserves among our audience, I think, and by among our staff in a lot of ways. I love the Pixel, uh, despite the fact that like Samsung objectively makes better.

• 1:23:45Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait to get to the one Samsung.

• 1:23:50Nilay Patel?

  I won't give it away now, but there's only one. Yeah.

• 1:23:52David Pierce?

  All right. Yeah, we can keep moving. So the next one is VW beats Tesla to the punch and unveils an affordable electric vehicle. This was from March when VW announced the ID2All. One of the worst names of all time.

• 1:24:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's not great.

• 1:24:09David Pierce?

  Like, when you look at a name and you think, oh, that has to be a typo. I should fix that. You did it bad. ID, capital I, capital D, dot, space, number two, lowercase a, l, l, dot. What? That's nothing.

• 1:24:22Nilay Patel?

  Yes, not great. Nothing about this is crazy.

• 1:24:25David Pierce?

  This does not belong on the list. Great headline. Exciting times.

• 1:24:28Nilay Patel?

  Great headline.

• 1:24:29David Pierce?

  Does not belong.

• 1:24:30Nilay Patel?

  Great headline. Also vaporware car.

• 1:24:32David Pierce?

  Yeah. VW, make buttons. That's good, but make cars.

• 1:24:37Nilay Patel?

  I just realized there's no Cybertruck wiper coverage on this list, and I don't know what we're doing here, guys. I gotta, we gotta go.

• 1:24:43David Pierce?

  I should have mentioned I took all Cybertruck, Cybertruck wiper coverage off because it just would have dominated the whole list, and who has the time? Next one, a pretty recent piece of news. Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI. This one I like very much because this is both extremely deserving as one of the biggest stories of 2023 and extremely not deserving at the same time.

• 1:25:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, a story in which almost nothing happened at the end.

• 1:25:07David Pierce?

  Right, but it was captivating in a way that I think no other single news event in our world of 2023 was. I can't think of another moment like that this year.

• 1:25:18Nilay Patel?

  I maintain a list of TikToks that should be PhD theses in media studies.

• 1:25:22David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:25:23Nilay Patel?

  One day I'm gonna publish the entire list. And a lot of them were TikTokers just like reading our stories about OpenAI drama and then imposing like their own TikTok drama narratives on them. Which was, it was just like, the thing that interested me about that is like, it was a story that could be everything to everyone. Like, no matter what you thought or how you felt, you could take this, like, guy got fired. Employees like guy, guy comes back. And you could just, it's like the hero's journey, man. It's like, you just put any, any story you want onto that foundation, and they did. What happened, you know, what happened in there is actually really meaningful, right? Like, Microsoft is involved, they were taken aback, there's a lot of reporting now that comes out that's like, maybe Sam was lying to the board, but the board can point to any specific

• 1:26:08Nilay Patel?

  instances, there's gonna be an investigation, but you're right, in the moment, it was captivating. It was also Thanksgiving, like, literally, nothing else was going on. Uh, I think it's on this, I think this is one of those moments when, like, governance of AI, like, jumped all the way to the top of people's minds for a minute, that at least means the next time we have to talk about it, everyone is initiated into the vocabulary, which is good.

• 1:26:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, we like have a shared reality of AI chaos now, which is useful.

• 1:26:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:39Speaker 05

  The thing that struck me about this one is it's the, it's the lens sanity story of the list. It is the one that came completely out of nowhere. Um, I think one of the things that hits me when we have big stories is when I think, oh, man, we should have seen that coming, we should have been more prepared or had something ready. Did not see this one coming at all, could not have seen it coming. It just dropped in the middle of the day and suddenly we're reading it all together and we're like, wait, he's fired?

• 1:27:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Speaker 05

  Did that just happen? It also, as you mentioned, happened when nothing else was happening, so.

• 1:27:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Also, for me personally, uh, working on this story with Alex Heath while at Disney World, uh, truly one of the most surreal, surreal moments of the year and potentially.

• 1:27:17David Pierce?

  If they were ever gonna make a sports documentary about you and Eli, it would be that, that weekend.

• 1:27:22Nilay Patel?

  Can, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, the two things happened to me at the Outer Rim Bar at, uh, the Disney Contemporary Resort. One, uh, I talked to Alex about this story a whole bunch, which is just weird, right? And my family's there, it's Disney World, like, Mickey singing or whatever Mickey's doing in the restaurant, and I'm like, talking about it, opening it. The second is I went to the bar after that conversation, I sat down, and I was informed that there are regulars of the Outer Rim Bar at Disney's Contemporary Resort, and a bunch of regulars were there to watch football, and many of the regulars travel for hours to come to this bar. And I'm like, looking around, I mean, it's not, it's just like, you know, it's like,

• 1:28:03Nilay Patel?

  it's one of those hotels where the, oh, the middle is like wide open, and you can, you could see into the brunch spot where like Mickey was singing, and I was like, y'all come here, and like, we love it here, and I was like, I need to get out of Florida, like, I need to go away.

• 1:28:17David Pierce?

  If you stay longer than six days, you never leave.

• 1:28:21Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I don't, and there are other cities.

• 1:28:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, there are other televisions.

• 1:28:27Nilay Patel?

  But like, keep in mind, this is what was happening to me while we were doing the OpenAI reporting. I'm like a dead certain some of that bled into the OpenAI.

• 1:28:37David Pierce?

  The whole thing got more chaotic over time, which feels right for your situation.

• 1:28:41Nilay Patel?

  I was like, we all have to get out of Florida, metaphorically and literally.

• 1:28:45David Pierce?

  Next up on the list is FDC versus Microsoft. This is the story stream that Tom Warren mostly did during the FTC versus Microsoft trial. And a fun fact.

• 1:28:55Nilay Patel?

  The Activision trial.

• 1:28:56David Pierce?

  What's that?

• 1:28:57Nilay Patel?

  This is the Activision deal.

• 1:28:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, the Activision trial. The fun fact about this one is that this is the only story on this list for which Google was not the top referrer. Basically, any story that's going to like, have a long life on the internet, ends up getting a lot of traffic from Google, because that's just how people find things. Google Discover, Google News, like, Google is sort of the long tail of internet traffic. This is the only one on our most popular list where the number one traffic referrer was the verge.com, which meant that people typed in the verge.com to go find Tom's news about an Activision trial, and I think that kicks ass.

• 1:29:33Nilay Patel?

  Also, I think if the year wasn't ending now, Sean's coverage of Google versus Epic.

• 1:29:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 1:29:40Nilay Patel?

  Have a similar traffic curve. It just happened towards the end of the year. The Microsoft case was earlier in the year. Also, you know, Activision is a little, this was a little sexier deal, I think. And the court case was, more was revealed.

• 1:29:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:53Nilay Patel?

  I think what, one thing that I have taken away from all the trial coverage this year, and it's like, a lot of it, it's a little overwhelming even for me, and I love it, is, boy, there's just a lot of backroom shenanigans at all these companies. We think these companies are sort of like, operating in the marketplace, and they are not. Like, they are constantly thinking of like, every possible way they can turn every single deal into an advantage. And that's. Yeah, Microsoft won this one. They obviously took over Activision. The FTC has appealed. We'll see how that goes. But, you know, I think Microsoft's, people's perception of Microsoft changed after you like read a bunch of their internal emails about how this will happen.

• 1:30:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, this was a really interesting one. I feel like this was the kind of thing that just kept being interesting day after day after day after day. Like so many of these trials have sort of ebbs and flows, but FTC versus Microsoft is very compressed. It happened very quickly and a ton of stuff happened. And we also learned that like Microsoft thinks it would be cool to buy an Intendo and it became a whole fight about Call of Duty. It was just like all of the like biggest, sexiest names in gaming and entertainment just yelling at each other. It was great.

• 1:30:58David Pierce?

  Next up on the list, buckle up because El Nino is almost here and it's going to get hot. And maybe the best headline we published this year. Neelai has a theory about buckle up headlines. Oh, it's not your theory?

• 1:31:07Nilay Patel?

  No, it's not my theory. It's Andy Hawkins, our transportation editor. Every time we run a buckle up headline and it does numbers, he just says, people love buckling up, which is totally true. Like if you put buckle up in a headline, people are like, I love to buckle up. I need to know what's gonna happen. Our climate coverage does surprisingly well. I think we have a young audience. People love it. People like being able to share the stories. Like they're skeptical friends and family. Generally, there's a sense that like this is, this coverage is talking to an audience of itself, but Justine, our climate reporter, and Andy, who is her editor, they do a really good job of making the stakes real. And I was, I'm happy the stories like.

• 1:31:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. Justine does a really good job of covering climate stuff like for regular people just living their lives day to day, which is cool.

• 1:31:51David Pierce?

  Okay, next up, we have the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max launch. I'm actually surprised this was this low.

• 1:31:57Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 1:31:58David Pierce?

  Just, it's the iPhone. Like, I don't know, The Verge is like founded on the iPhone being a big deal.

• 1:32:04Nilay Patel?

  It's an iPhone.

• 1:32:07Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Not the iPhone, smartphones. Our early days were like, well, this Motorola phone.

• 1:32:16Speaker 05

  They put USB C on it. And and that's uh, that's most of what we have to say.

• 1:32:22Nilay Patel?

  I wonder if we made this list over a long, if here time for every year, we could track the sort of dominance of the iPhone by how high or low it is in the list. Cause my sense is that it's trending down.

• 1:32:33David Pierce?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:32:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. That like the new, the newest iPhone is no longer the most important tech news of the year has not, and that has been the case for a while now. There was a case, there was a time when it was the most important tech news of the year.

• 1:32:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. It's still big. Like, I think to some extent, it's interesting that it's the only sequel device on the list. Everything else is like sort of brand new in some meaningful way. This is the 15th iPhone. Like the Galaxy S23 did not make the list. You know what I mean? The Pixel eight didn't make the list. So it's, it's definitely in a league of its own in that way. But I do think it's true that I bet it has sort of fallen down the scale on Google Analytics over the last, whatever 12 years of the verge of existence.

• 1:33:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The flip side of that is that people are still really interested in the iPhone, which

• 1:33:19David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:33:19Nilay Patel?

  Again, if you kind of look in the broader press or the conventional wisdom or in the culture, there's a sense that people are over it. And then we look at our list and it's like, oh, this is still very high in this list. Like, yeah, being up on the Verge's traffic list represents a lot of.

• 1:33:32David Pierce?

  The numbers on all of these are enormous, I should just say.

• 1:33:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:36David Pierce?

  Um, okay, next one, we have a couple more to do and then we'll get out of here. This is Microsoft's new disc list Xbox Series X design with a lift to weight controller. Richard, this was another FTC versus Microsoft thing. Wasn't there, there was like that run where we got accidentally a bunch of cool leaks, right?

• 1:33:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, a document was posted, I think from Microsoft that accidentally didn't redact a bunch of things in it. And that revealed some of their future plans. Uh, and this is what we saw, the, the cylindrical Xbox Series X successor that maybe we'll see someday, maybe we won't. Their plans for a future controller, what they want for the Series S, what they want for Game Pass, all of these things. And this is, this is the second time that we've seen these kinds of plans from Microsoft. There was a Ford Elisa leak years ago.

• 1:34:18David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:19Speaker 05

  And people, you know, people just love these. I, I don't think there was anything that. Absurd about the, you know, kind of revealed in these, these documents, but just seeing a console that they haven't launched yet and who knows, maybe they never will. Um, what was, was ridiculous.

• 1:34:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And Phil Spencer had to put out a statement. He was like, no, this is a thing. We try everything. He was just like, he was very sad about it. The thing looks cool. I will say it looks great.

• 1:34:45David Pierce?

  It does. And the thing, I, I continue to be very excited about the idea of a console that is actually just inside of a controller and you just connect the controller to a screen and you can play that way. Like that's the future. Give me that. Sadia was right about everything.

• 1:34:59Speaker 05

  And one of the things that we learned here is that Microsoft is looking at it that way too. They found they, I think their phrase was that the controller is the hero. And they, they're like, oh, you know, you can plug your Xbox controller into whatever and play Xbox game.

• 1:35:10David Pierce?

  Make it happen, Microsoft. All right. Last one.

• 1:35:13Nilay Patel?

  And Sony was like, the PS5 is weirder than ever.

• 1:35:18David Pierce?

  Do you like Spider-Man? Here's some.

• 1:35:24Nilay Patel?

  This can only be, you can never put this on its side. Don't even try.

• 1:35:28Speaker 05

  Weirdly, no one had issues with us reporting on this one.

• 1:35:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Cause it was in the trial. I mean, that's just like, whatever. It's like.

• 1:35:34David Pierce?

  Um, all right. We're gonna, we have one more on the list, but first I'd like to read you a handful of honorable mentions. We had stories about layoffs that were huge this year. We had a story about the Steam Deck that Sean wrote that was very good. Ironically, he wrote it before the new Steam Deck came out. Um, but it was a big year for the Steam Deck.

• 1:35:52Nilay Patel?

  Sean, the Steam Deck and the Verge.com.

• 1:35:55David Pierce?

  It's just beautiful.

• 1:35:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, it just all comes together. It's just, it belongs together. Just don't leave, don't touch it. Leave it alone.

• 1:36:01David Pierce?

  I agree. Um, Josh Jezzo's piece inside the AI factory about like the real human labor behind AI was hugely popular. Really, really good story. Uh, it's been in a bunch of like best things of 2023 lists I've seen recently. Go read that if you haven't. Uh, Chris Person's thing about modding his Soda Stream was really high on the list, which kind of made my heart happy. Uh, and then, uh, Man of Chicago Lewis's very recent story about SEO experts, which pissed off the whole SEO community. Thank you all for reading our story. Loved that. But the last one on the list of the biggest stories of 2023 and one that I think absolutely deserves to be here. Samsung caught faking Zoom photos of the moon.

• 1:36:41Nilay Patel?

  What is a photo?

• 1:36:44Nilay Patel?

  I'm doing it. It's happening.

• 1:36:45David Pierce?

  This is it. This is the, this is proof forever that we get to talk about this as much as we want.

• 1:36:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Here's what I'm going to say. And I, uh, look, this is only half a joke. All right. I love Liam, our producer, but any good podcast needs tension. You need to be fighting against someone who won't let you do what you want to do. And Liam is the one who says, I can't talk about what is a photo for an hour and a half every week.

• 1:37:10Nilay Patel?

  That's it. We're sticking it to the man. Every click on a what is a photo article.

• 1:37:15David Pierce?

  It's a vote against Liam.

• 1:37:17Nilay Patel?

  No, don't. Liam is wonderful. No, I'm just, I'm just joking around, but you need, you need the tension. Big content's trying to hold me down.

• 1:37:24David Pierce?

  I actually love this story because it is a what is a photo story, which was genuinely like an ongoing news story all year. It's, it's an AI story. It's a like transparency and what we understand on the internet story. It's a like, what are your gadgets supposed to do for you story? It's like, it kind of has everything all in one fake photo of the moon.

• 1:37:41Nilay Patel?

  And also the best thing about it is it requires you to understand that every photo of the moon is the same photo.

• 1:37:48David Pierce?

  Which is genuinely kind of mind bending.

• 1:37:49Nilay Patel?

  Like the thing about it that is the most interesting to me is like, the stakes are zero. Because you can never take a different photo of the moon.

• 1:37:59Nilay Patel?

  So like it, you, I could fake a photo of the moon today by just copying in a picture of the moon. And it's, I haven't lied to you because the moon definitely looked like that at that time.

• 1:38:11Nilay Patel?

  I love it. Ah, let's just talk about it for another hour.

• 1:38:14David Pierce?

  No, we have to go. That's my list.

• 1:38:16Speaker 05

  This had been dug into in 2021. Uh, it was, it was a story that came back around and.

• 1:38:21David Pierce?

  Wait, this happened before? What?

• 1:38:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. There was a feature from 2021 where, uh, input magazine, uh, talked about the fake detailed moon photos. And they, they kind of explained it then, but they didn't explain it enough. And that was why we, we had to do this all over again.

• 1:38:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That, but I will say like.

• 1:38:39Nilay Patel?

  A lot of people try to give Samsung an out. You know, it's not really faking it's like, no, you don't understand. Samsung is taking the longest possible route to putting a clip art moon in your photos. You don't need all this AI. Just, just be like, it's the moon, right? Here's a selection of photos of the moon that you can have because they're all the same photo. Your stupid eyes and dumb camera aren't required for this. Just print out this photo.

• 1:39:04David Pierce?

  I really love that as a product that it's like every time you take a crappy picture of something, your phone is just like, it's just like looks on the internet and it's like, here's a better photo that of what you just, would you like this one instead?

• 1:39:14Nilay Patel?

  We're so close to it.

• 1:39:16David Pierce?

  Fireworks, concerts, just do it, just.

• 1:39:18Nilay Patel?

  The Eiffel Tower?

• 1:39:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, like somebody already did this. You're good.

• 1:39:22Nilay Patel?

  But the thing is, the different, the difference with the moon is that no one in the world can take a different photo of the moon. Like the Eiffel Tower, like the Eiffel Tower is always changing. There's like dust in the air, there's people around, there's French people whizzing by with the berets and cigarettes. The moon's just there, man. It's been the same. Just give people a photo. I love it.

• 1:39:46David Pierce?

  Every time you take a picture of the moon, your printer starts and a picture of the moon comes out.

• 1:39:54David Pierce?

  It's amazing. All right, that's it. That's my list. Biggest stories of 2023. It's a good year.

• 1:40:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was a pretty good year on the Verge Con. Yeah, very good one. Thanks to everybody for listening to our show, which has been going on now since 2011. And then before that, even longer. We've had a lot of notes recently about how many people have been listening to us a whole time. Tell your children, initiate a new audience. It's gonna be great. No, we had a great year. SAP was great. The Verge persists. We've got a huge year coming, both in terms of what we want to cover, what we want to do, the features on the site we want to release. I really do think that there's like a new internet coming and I want the Verge to be right at the forefront of it. So I'm really excited about next year. I'm happy to work with these guys. I miss Alex. Say hi to Cranz if you see her gallivanting around the skies of America on Santa's sleigh. And that's it.

• 1:40:46Nilay Patel?

  Happy holiday. That's Vergecast.

• 1:40:53David Pierce?

  And that's a wrap for 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. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:41:26Speaker 06

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• 1:41:55Speaker 07

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