Samsung Unpacked 2021 / Zack Snyder's Justice League is in 4:3 aspect ratio / EVs, e-bikes, and batteries

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn talk to Verge reporter Julia Alexander about the long-awaited release of "the Snyder cut" of the Justice League film on HBO Max and more updates in the world of streaming services. Verge senior reporter Andrew Hawkins joins the show to discuss the new electric vehicles that were announced this week, talking to Sen. Chuck Schumer about infrastructure, and the state of e-bikes in America. Further reading: People aren’t missing their second COVID-19 vaccine dose, CDC data says Some research has gotten a huge boost during the pandemic Biden promises May 1st vaccine eligibility for all adults and a federal vaccine website Disneyland will reopen on April 30th, for California residents only Tinder is giving away free mail-in COVID-19 tests Apple Maps now shows COVID-19 vaccination locations Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine website builds on a swine flu tool You will watch the Snyder Cut in 4:3 aspect ratio because HBO Max respects cinema Zack Snyder’s Justice League remains overshadowed by its social media campaign Netflix is trying to crack down on password sharing with new test HBO Max will debut its cheaper, ad-supported tier in June YouTube Shorts arrives in the US to take on TikTok, but the beta is still half-baked Chuck Schumer wants to replace every gas car in America with an electric vehicle E-bikes are expensive, but this congressman wants to make ... Canoo reveals a bubbly electric pickup truck Kia shows off first full images of new EV6 electric car Here are the biggest announcements from Volkswagen’s battery event Elon Musk crowns himself ‘Technoking’ of Tesla Foxconn says it might build EVs at empty Wisconsin site, or in Mexico Samsung’s midrange phones now feature fast refresh rate screens, stabilized cameras Samsung says it might skip the Galaxy Note this year Apple discontinues the HomePod, but the HomePod mini will live on New iPad Pros reportedly launching as soon as April, and the … Intel puts Apple’s ‘I’m a Mac’ guy into new ads praising PCs Biden to tap former Senator Bill Nelson as NASA chief Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Coming up on The Vergecast, Julia Alexander joins us to talk about the Snyder Cut and what's up with streaming. Andy Hawkins joins to talk about all things cars. And then Dieter and I go through some gadgets, including what's going on with the HomePod. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:14Speaker 01

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

• 0:59Speaker 01

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

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Snyder Cut. This will be a four-hour podcast where we reintroduce some old characters, introduce some new characters, and really, we're broadcasting in 4/3 today. It's gonna be great. I'm very excited about this episode of Vergecast. I'm your friend, Neelai. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  I am your 16 by 9 friend. I want to put out that Neelai literally is broadcasting in 4 by 3 because he can't figure out his webcam settings.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  No, I can. I know the, so I have an RX 100. It's plugged into my computer. And if I run it in video mode, which outputs 16 by 9, it draws too much power. It'll draw, it draws more power than it can get over USB. So the battery will die. So I have to run it in photo mode, which outputs four, three. That's incredible. Let me tell you, trying to explain that, because I go on CNBC all the time and they're like, can you switch it to 16 by nine? I'm like, I have this problem with USB power draw. And there's like, whatever dude will crop it. And it's like the end of that conversation every week. Julie Alexander is here.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Hello, I'm here and I'm also in four, three, I think. I don't know.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, you've got like a shelf next to you. So you've, you've physically cropped off part of your frame. This is great. Lots to talk about. As always, I want to give COVID update. Still the biggest story in the world, but lots of light at the end of this tunnel and hopefully maybe not the only thing we talk about very soon. So on the vaccine front, the two vaccines that came out first in the United States, Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna vaccine, both required two doses. There's a lot of worry about whether people would follow through and get that second dose. CDC says not happening. People are actually getting their second dose, which is great. Also the single shot Johnson and Johnson vaccine is out. Lots of states are opening up. If you can get the vaccine, go get it. Just go do it, please. It'll make everything better.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  Nicole has a story about how research into things like mRNA vaccines into long COVID. All that stuff has dramatically accelerated because of the pandemic. It's very, it's a very bittersweet second order effect. Like it's good that that stuff is happening. Also, I wish it had never happened. Yeah. But it is happening. There's a lot. It's a, it's a good story. A good list of things that have really accelerated. I'm gonna say this, last week on Friday, President Joe Biden promised a website where Yep. By May 1, he wants all adults. He sure did. Eligible for the vaccine in every state. He said there'd be a website where you can find that vaccine. It has been one week since he said it. The deadline is May 1. So we're kind of like in a negative count situation.

• 4:18Nilay Patel?

  Here's the big difference. The website kind of already exists. So there is vaccine finder.org that you can go to. Yeah. Nicole interviewed the people who are building it. It, it has existed. It was built for the swine flu. She has a great story. They're, they're building it. They're expanding it for this May 1 date. So I'm obviously going to count. We will obviously hold people accountable to me. One, when you're starting from a website that already exists, like you can use it. I went and found an appointment near me using this website, but it already exists, which is a real head start over 17,000 Google engineers being very surprised one Friday a year ago. Anyway, that you can just go look at it, read that story. Nicole is tracking

• 5:01Nilay Patel?

  that very closely. We're obviously always very interested in websites. Other second order effects. Julie, you're gonna love this. You're on a Disney. It's a Disney story. Disneyland's gonna open on April 30th for California residents only. What's up? Big Bob Chapek coming through, head of parks. He's like, that's his history. That's a big deal for them. Yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  It's a huge deal. They haven't been, they've never been closed for this long. They've taken like two days to close the park and they're like 100 years or whatever they've been open.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So that's very exciting. These next, it's really funny to me. Apple Maps using data from Vaccine Finder is now showing vaccination locations, but then Tinder, who I'm assuming is just desperate for people to get out there again. Tinder is now just gonna give away COVID tests. And like, I will encourage the audience to draw the line from why Tinder is giving out COVID tests to the end result of testing COVID negative in your Tinder profile. I think that is very funny. Like I said, lots of light at the end of the, please remain safe. Go get the vaccine if you can. Wear a mask. It's not over yet, but after a year, I'm completely going insane in the woods. After a year, I can see the end. I think all of us can see the end. We just have to be vigilant and careful until

• 6:11Nilay Patel?

  the end, the actual end. Okay. Speaking of the end, Julie, we have some news to announce, which is that you'll be on the Vergecast again, but this is your last official Vergecast with us as a member of the Verge staff.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm very sad about it, but yeah, I'm very grateful. You guys kept me coming around and so I could ask questions about iPhone cameras.

• 6:33Nilay Patel?

  That's really why we're here. We gotta really connect with our audience of Canadians with broke ass cell phones.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:41Nilay Patel?

  You'll make your news when you make your news, but it's a great having you on our team. Someone is gonna have to tell me what's going on with Disney. I just think it's amazing that you waited until the Snyder Cut came out before telling us you were moving on. Like, you're like, that's the moment. Streaming is over now.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  There's nothing left to do.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  The minute that we see a movie come out in 4.3, I was like, that's it. This is the last straw for me. I need to get out of the game.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, we're very proud of you, but tell me about this, because you've seen it now. We had this hilarious, the entire Verge staff, like, just hit pause, like 8:30 in the morning. The newsroom ground to a halt, and we all talked about this movie coming out in 4.3, which apparently a lot of people knew, but it is still just very surprising. So you've seen it. Explain what is going on with Snyder Cut.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. Yeah, I woke up to mass chaos about Snyder Cut, and I was very excited because I thought we were like excited about talking about superheroes. And then in traditional Verge fashion, it was a conversation about aspect ratios. Yeah, so the movie, to preserve the like artistic integrity of the film which was supposed to come out, well, which was never supposed to come out, but has now come out in like an IMAX format, is being streamed in 4.3 as opposed to like traditional widescreen that we're used to.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Oh, so it's 4.3 to be, because IMAX is 4.3?

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  No, IMAX is not 4.3.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  This was like, this was the thing that was going around. It's his artistic vision. That is what I remember.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  Let me just say what is happening. In traditional Verge fashion, we have moved way on to the weeds. A lot of people woke up today, and the first thing they decided to do on this March 18th was immediately settle in for four hours of the Snyder Cut.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  Right, that's, I mean, obviously, what else would you do on a Thursday? And like, the first thing that happens, you get a bright blue gradient, HBO Max purply blue gradient screen.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Worst splash screen color for a smart TV platform ever, by the way.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  So bright. If you had a Samsung LCD, this thing just like burned your retinas off. It's like so bright. Neon blue, and it says, "To preserve Zack Snyder's original vision, this movie is presented in 4.3."

• 8:53Nilay Patel?

  No further explanation, right? Like just that. And then you sit in that bed and then like Justice League happens in a square on your rectangular TV. Okay. So like that screenshot is like deeply funny. And he had hinted that this was happening and reviewers like Julie had seen it. So people knew, but I think that all happened on like film Twitter.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's like superhero, like Stan Twitter was aware of it.

• 9:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But once you break out the neon blue splash screen to the world on your gigantic splashy streaming service, like people are like, wait, it's a square. And then that the worlds collided of like, the Snyder fans being like, it's because of IMAX.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  Right. I would just point out IMAX is not 43. IMAX is just another square, square-ish shape.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  I think it's really great that there's a, a, a group of people who think I would like to watch this movie so that it takes up my entire screen because that is how I like to watch things. And then his fans who have argued for this movie for four years are like, no, it's fine. I'll watch it this way because it's his vision. And this is what we fought for. And it's like this beautiful moment of like, see, this is what happens when you ask for something. There are issues with it.

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  Very funny. So, um, I'm going to go all the way down the rabbit hole. IMAX, the big classic IMAX.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:15Nilay Patel?

  You're in sixth grade and you go to the planetarium IMAX where the screen's all above you and you're in the like the stadium seats is 1.43 to one. It's a square, but importantly, it's a square that extends above your head. Right? It's like this, it's, it's square-ish. 43 is 1.3 to one. So even if you wanted to say it was shot for IMAX, I'm assuming between Zack Snyder, HBO and AT&T, they could have gone with the correct aspect ratio. It's not just another square.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  A better solution, honestly, nine by 16 portrait mode Snyder Cut. That's what I want.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  See, that's it. Super tall Batman.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  That would actually work without giving anything away. That would work well.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  A lot of it is like very powerful, powerful like shots of like looking up at Batman or like down at Superman. So it would, it would work.

• 11:15Nilay Patel?

  You get that, that zero TV that Samsung make that's rotates? Yes. And so constantly throughout the, the movie.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Uh, it would have been, it would have been great for Quibi. This would have been the perfect Quibi.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember when we were at CS, this is like a, this is, it seems like the history of Julia and Eli doing things. We're at CS, we meet Jeffrey Katz and we're talking about Quibi and we're like, have you seen the rotating TV? And he just looked at us with hate in his eyes and tried to convince us that Samsung had stolen the idea for Quibi. And it's like, I don't think that's what happened. I think they might have been looking at Instagram or TikTok. Anyhow, so the movie's out. It's a square. The thing I will say about IMAX, it's great that he wanted to release it for IMAX, but he knew he was distributing it on HBO Max. Right? Yeah. Which is a generally 16 by nine service. It will never be screened in IMAX as, as near as I can

• 12:04Nilay Patel?

  tell. It's just like the boldest creative decision I've come across in a long, 4K Dolby Vision 4.3 is incredible. I'm so proud of him.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Hey, you know what? Let's never say never. I, I just literally before I hopped on this call, I just finished the movie. Uh, I like watched it throughout.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Took all day, but I got, I, I watched it and I will say I, I liked it cause it's extremely over the top. Uh, and I enjoyed it, but I was like, I finished it and I was like, there's no way this ever comes out to IMAX. Like this is his final hurrah. And the first thing on Twitter is like, all these people who are very respected journalists being like, so obviously they're going to give him another movie. Like they're going to release this in IMAX. And I was like, we can't even, I want to focus on getting to like Fast and Furious nine, which is the movie that if we all wear our masks, we'll be able to go see Zedars in two months before I even think of this movie being in IMAX.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  I just need to say one more thing about the 43. A lot of people are going to discover with this movie specifically that they thought it was cool for them to buy the cheap 4K TV. And didn't realize that like local dimming actually matters. And they're just, they're, the, the, the letterboxing on the left and the right is just gonna, they're just gonna have like gray.

• 13:23Nilay Patel?

  And just two gray bars.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, hopefully local dimming, we'll see.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  It, yeah.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  Send us pictures of your TV showing the 43 center cut. Cause you know, Dolby Vision cranks up that backlight.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:34Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's a lot going on here that TV manufacturers did not anticipate.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Can I just say I've never felt more rewarded for my viewing choices than with this movie? Cause I watch everything, I've said this on this podcast, I watch everything on my MacBook Pro. I, I'm gonna sell my TV because I never use it for anything. So everyone's complaining about 43 and I was like, this is, this looks like how I watch everything.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  Did you get letterboxes? Did you have, did you have vertical boxes and then pillar boxes? Cause Dan was saying that's so bad.

• 14:07Nilay Patel?

  It's so bad. I'm so excited to watch this movie tonight. I'm like gonna leave, I'm like gonna abandon my family and be like, sorry, I got hour four of this thing going.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  By the third hour, it kind of fades into the background. You're just kind of like, I don't even know what I'm watching anymore, but I need to finish it.

• 14:25Nilay Patel?

  Julia, you wrote, speaking of, they're gonna give him another movie and Fast and Furious nine. You said this to me today, like, it's great, this movie's coming out. HBO really wants to, to sell a lot of subs against it, but it's not like their future. But this fan campaign feels like the future of something.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, my argument is that I think, I think a lot of people assume this movie is gonna drive a ton of subscribers to HBO Max. And my argument is that while it will drive definitely a number of subscribers, the people who are, want this movie already signed up for HBO Max. Like they're already DC fans who signed up to watch everything else. And so I think they'll add an incremental number and then I think what we'll see more importantly is a number of people cancel their HBO. Streaming services within a month, which is what happened with Hamilton. Like, if you look at people who signed up for Disney Plus for Hamilton and then the drop off two months later, it was huge. It was massive because there's nothing for them to watch that they're interested in. And so I think the question for Warner Media is like, oh,

• 15:24Speaker 03

  like, do we do this to show people that we're listening to them and that we, you know, we want them, we want their loyalty, we want to be able to feel like we connect with our fans. And if that is the case, then like, that is a scary world where a corporation like AT&T is listening to people with Batman profile pictures on Twitter being like, please give us this movie for four years. Like, that's a weird place for companies to be in. And everyone that I spoke to for a piece I wrote about kind of the fandom and the fan service that's going on with this, we're like, it's a slippery slope. And I hope that companies and studios don't do that. That would be very bad for cinema and for the world.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, let me make the opposite argument. AT&T historically has listened to no one. Why shouldn't they listen to Batman? Just hear me out. If this is the thing that can get AT&T to do, like, we just have to get Snyder Cut fans deep into net neutrality.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  You know, famously, former CEO of T-Mobile, John Ledger, liked to say that he was Batman and was a big Batman fan. So we could be in a world in which the John Ledger is dictating the movie strategy for AT&T.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  We could live in a world where John Ledger becomes Batman. There's like nine of them at this point. He could just be Batman.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of the net neutrality thing, AT&T did some weird stuff this week. There's actually really, like, this is a story that you and I broke. So when HBO Max launched, they gave us an exec, he doesn't, he's not on it anymore. They reorged like immediately after launching. So, you know, it's like, whatever, he was just doing his job as an executive and now he runs something else at AT&T. But we had an interview with Tony Gonzalez, who was part of the launch of HBO Max, and we asked him very directly, hey, will the data be free in AT&T's network? And he hemmed and he had and... Then they confirmed it like basically on the side. California passed its net neutrality rule after the Biden administration and went through all the courts like this and that. It's in effect.

• 17:20Nilay Patel?

  And so AT&T says, oh, we can't break up the internet for California only. And it like after this like long process of us pushing and hemming and hawing and then finally confirming it like under the table. They put out a blog post and told everyone we're taking your HBO Max free data away that we didn't. We didn't even say that you had because it's like obviously shady and uncompetitive. But now we're taking away, this is what net neutrality does to you. And there's been a little bit of an uproar around it. But it's also just like, that's where Netflix lives. Like, if you want to watch Netflix on your AT&T phone, you're using your data. I find it hard to get worked up about this, but it is a real thing that happened this week.

• 17:57Nilay Patel?

  And the only reason anyone even knew HBO Max was free data was because Julie and I asked this poor dude on the podcast and he looked terrified.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I'm in, I'm on the same page as you. I don't get why people would be super worked up. I mean, I guess if you're watching a ton of like friends, I guess, and you're like, oh, man.

• 18:17Nilay Patel?

  On your phone on the go.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  On your phone on the go. Yeah, I guess it's like, that sucks for you, person. Also, I have other concerns about you.

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  Maybe, I mean, okay. Is there like a mid maxers like I'm only going to pay for, I'm just, I live the entire AT&T lifestyle, AT&T phone service. I'm going to get, have this streaming service and I'm going to save a whole bunch of money by not subscribing to any other streaming services. I'm just going to watch HBO Max. And since I don't have to pay for the data, I save that a little bit more money. Is that the, is that the argument here? So that is the argument. There's, there are studies out in the world that say in countries where that kind of thing is allowed. The overall price of internet access is more expensive. Yeah. The real thing you want to do is get rid of data caps.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:02Nilay Patel?

  And I would, the, the whole AT&T free data thing is particularly funny because AT&T was just paying itself through the sponsored data program.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:10Nilay Patel?

  So the HBO Max division paid AT&T Mobility, or whatever it's called now, for data. So the consumers wouldn't have to pay for the data. But that is just like, I could send you a Slack, Dieter, that's like, I officially have paid you $5 and all that money just stayed inside of Fox Media. Like, it doesn't matter. Like, it was just a net zero cost. If Netflix wanted to deal, they would have to pay real money out of Netflix into AT&T. And no one, uh, the only customers of AT&T sponsored data programs are other AT&T divisions, historically. And the reason for that is it's an accounting scheme that raises the price for everything. Anyway, I have taken the Snyder Cut into net neutrality. This is what I'm saying. You gotta get Snyder Cut fans just amped about net neutrality.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  No, we gotta get, we gotta get Snyder Cut fans to, to start defending other random AT&T things now, like 5G E. 5G E is the four by three of us.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  That's horrible.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  This is why Julia's leaving.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  I'm trying to get Snyder Cut fans, I am launching a campaign to declare John Stanky, who's the CEO of AT&T, as Business World Chris Maloney. And I want to get that trending.

• 20:19Nilay Patel?

  That's real good. All right, a handful of other streaming things. I, I know you gotta run, Julia. A handful of other streaming things. Talk about Netflix for the longest time, really wide open with password sharing. Just anybody can log into any Netflix account. They're doing like a two factor test, essentially for security. It kind of feels like they're, they're just trying to cut down on that a little bit as the competition heats up.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  The strange thing about this story, so yeah, basically the story is that Netflix is curbing password sharing. If you try to log into an account and it's like, oh, you're, are you in this household? Yes, you can like, they'll send you an email or a text and you can put that in, then watch it. So their whole thing is like, if you're not authorized to use it, then you won't be able to. Um, and I guess if you have broken up with someone and you don't want to text them, you will not be able to use the account. But when I learned about this and I was talking to people at Netflix. Like I kept saying like, is this two factor? Cause this just sounds like two factor and Netflix doesn't have it yet. And but they were like curbing password like that. I used that language. I was like, so it's curbing password stuff. And they're like, yep,

• 21:23Speaker 03

  that's part of it. Uh, and so it's, I mean, I think they're hitting a point where they're at more than 203 million subscribers and they kind of realize a lot. They could have a lot more if people are forced to sign up. And, uh, but it's funny because you could collect quotes from Reed Hastings, who's their co-CEO over the years where he's like, listen, like with my wife and I are in different like parts of the country. We want to be able to use a Netflix. So password sharing is just part of the deal. Uh, and now it's kind of like the company is realizing there are not an infinite amount of humans. Uh, who will sign up for Netflix. And so they have to figure out how to continue to growing at this point.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  I do like that they they put the barrier at like text your ex. Yeah. Like we have done, Andrew, we've did an entire episode of why'd you push that button about people using their ex-boyfriends Netflix account? For years and then having to be like, oh crap, he noticed.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  I, yeah, I went through a breakup and didn't really care. And then I realized that he kicked me off the Hulu and I was like devastated. I was like, that was like the thing for me.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, take a moment. You're like stared out the window. So Zack Snyder music played.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  I was like, that's another $12 a month.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Martha, um, speaking of HBO Max, uh, you have long pointed out that their real strategy is putting ads into things. That feels like, have they solved their problem with the Roku's and the Amazons of the world to, to make those deals work?

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, they're mostly everywhere. Now they're launching their ad-supported platform or version, sorry, in June. We don't have a price yet. And the best part about that is that Warner Media CEO Jason Kylar announced a price would come in the coming months. And I was like, well, June isn't coming. I assume we'll have it before then. But yeah, the idea is that it will be cheaper. There will be ads, but ads will not run on HBO original programming. So no one will have to watch The Sopranos with ads in between it or at the end of it and beginning of it. Everything else will be the same with the exception of same day theatrical release. So if you're on the premiere plan, which is the current one, you'll be able to watch Dune the minutes on HBO Max and the minutes in theaters. If you're on the ad supported plan, you will not have access to that.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  But otherwise, like their whole thing, as Jason Kylar said at a recent Goldman Sachs conference, not everyone in the world is wealthy and $15 is steep when you compare it to a lot of other streaming services. And especially when you consider that Disney has a bundle that's like not too much more expensive. You're getting a lot more and Netflix is kind of like muscle memory where everyone has it. It's the first thing you open. And so I think they are hoping that this is what really kickstarts their subscriber growth because they've had a slow start. And now with the movie rollout, they're seeing better performance, but they really need to like kick it into high gear.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so HBO originals, you don't even see ads before and after?

• 24:07Speaker 03

  No, so there's no ads, no ads on HBO originals.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm gonna say, but it seems fair to be like, you're not paying for this. You're gonna watch, for some reason, you've chosen to watch Westworld again. You have to sit through an ad like it's, I mean, that's good. I'm like praising them. It never, it's hard for me. You can tell it's hard for me to praise AT&T.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  I know.

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  But that's a good decision.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  I feel like it's that comes from the HBO camp. I like, I think that was their, I think they've made, I think the HBO camp has made a lot of, well, not sacrifices. They were bought by a company. They had to just go along with it. But they've, they've seen a lot of their, I think their culture really disappear. And I think their whole thing about we're, we don't have ads and we're prestigious entertainment and that's our whole thing. If there were ads, if no one is out there listening, has never seen a HBO show with ads, I highly recommend it. It is a wild experience. I watched Sex and the City with ads once and it was crazy. And I think that was probably the HBO demand where it's like, put ads on the platform, like put ads on Sesame Street or wherever you want to do it on. But like, don't have Game of Thrones or yeah, whatever they have coming up, like we don't want ads on this.

• 25:13Nilay Patel?

  I would love to see the pitch from the HBO Max sales team to put ads on the Game of Thrones. Be like, the least, you thought YouTube was fucked up for your brand. Have you seen this show? Chris Welch wrote about this last week. I saw you tweet about it. The sort of like ad product side of TV is getting wilder and wilder, like autoplay ads on pause screens. I think you had like a QR code show up. Is that the next transition that we're into? Like, we're just gonna festoon these interfaces with even more actual ads?

• 25:44Speaker 03

  I think there's two parts to the story, and one is that as Roku and others, but really Roku become more dominant, and as Roku really buys more advertising tech and becomes a place where it is gonna control a lot of advertising, and it's gonna be a place that streamers want to be on, and so they'll work with their advertising product. I think what you will see is more advertisers take advantage of like targeted, specifically targeted streaming ads that will play on pause screens, that will find ways that do not feel as disruptive as playing in the middle of an episode every eight minutes. Instead, it's like you pause, and there's a thing that shows up with a QR code, or you, like Hulu has done this, where you pause and an ad kind of shows up on the ad-supported stuff in the past. I don't hate it. Like, I know like Welch and I are on totally

• 26:29Speaker 03

  different sides of this. I'm someone who's like, advertising is just an evil that like we live with. I'm someone who like spends too much money on Instagram ads. Like, I don't mind targeted advertising. I don't mind seeing it on a TV. I don't mind if it's paused. And I'd much rather that than like every 10 minutes, there's a new, there's like four ads that are the same ad playing over and over again. Yeah. Because it feels much less disruptive.

• 26:53Nilay Patel?

  I just feel from the advertiser side, you're like, oh man, I hope some people press pause today. See these ads.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  I mean, I pressed pause on the Snyder Cut like 30 times.

• 27:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I was gonna say. That's true. Totally fair. All right. Julie, you joined us to cover YouTube, and that grew into all the other stuff you cover. So we got to end with YouTube. Yeah. What about YouTube?

• 27:14Speaker 03

  We, yeah, I mean, I'm gonna go out with a bunch of really big YouTube stories, which is nice. Well, not big, but they're fun. They're fun reports. What is going on? I mean, YouTube's, I mean, YouTube right now in this moment is experiencing what feels like two distinct trends. I think the biggest story this week right now is with one of their most prolific vloggers, this guy named David Dobrik, who's Vlog crew has been accused of a lot of different sexual harassment and sexual misconduct allegations from people over the years. I mean, and so I think there's a creator reckoning coming from that perspective, that end that we'll keep an eye on. And I also think at the same time, because of the pandemic, the other trend that YouTube is seeing is people figuring out how to do more

• 27:58Speaker 03

  new, interesting narrative storytelling. And so I think we're seeing stories play out in Minecraft and Fortnite and the way that YouTube creators and Twitch streamers have figured out how to turn this into not just let's plays and streaming, but like actual ongoing stories that have captivated millions of people. That is something that I know YouTube is looking into trying to figure out more of and how they can highlight that more and how they can kind of, if that's the next evolution for trending videos and a very big part of their creator ecosystem, which is gaming. So I think there's two things. I think one, creators are about to have a new reckoning where they're going to realize that there's problems happening within the space that they need to learn how to self-police and YouTube is going to have to figure out how they deal with prolific

• 28:42Speaker 03

  vloggers getting into these kind of really bad situations. And on the other end, they're going to have to, they're looking at a new wave of content coming up from very interesting creators who were not prolific two years ago and suddenly are the most prolific. And I think those are the two YouTube stories that are like happening right now.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  Are they feeling pressure from like the TikToks of the, like they're launching YouTube Shorts? But I feel like it's the same as Instagram reels, like they felt like they needed to have it so they have it, but it's not TikTok. Like, are they feeling that pressure? Are they still the big dominant monopoly provider?

• 29:15Speaker 03

  I think they're feeling pressure from competitive ad stuff. I think they want to tell people and advertisers that people spend this much amount of time on the platform and engage with it and they can buy stuff on. And I think TikTok is a, especially as TikTok gets into more e-commerce and figures that side out and does figure out more targeted ads situation, like that is going to be something that YouTube worries about. And at the same time, I think the problem is that every single app wants to be every single app. And I think YouTube wants to be shorts and YouTube wants to have stories and YouTube wants to have like a little community update section. And it's You do one thing very well and you should just continue doing that one thing because when I open your app, I'm opening it for one specific reason. Same with TikTok. Like I wouldn't want TikTok

• 29:58Speaker 03

  to do five-minute videos because it's like, that's not what I'm coming to your app for. I don't want Instagram to do reels because I'm only coming to your app for the grid and for stories. And I think as more apps try to be everything for everyone, it's just going to drive more people away. So I hope YouTube launches shorts and maybe it's a bit of a success for them, but I hope that they still focus primarily on longer form, you know, short form, but longer form videos compared to TikTok because that's where it shines. And as long as creators are still making the most ad money and monetization from their videos on YouTube, like they'll continue creating there, which means people will continue going there and they'll be fine.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. I'm going to send you off with one last Julia Block disclosure. We talked about them all. Wait, we didn't talk about Peacock. So something on Peacock.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Oh, the office is free for one week.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  There you go. Here it is. The ceremonial goodbye Julia disclosure block. NBC Universal, which owns Peacock, is a minority investor in Vox Media, which is the parent company of The Verge. We are producing a Netflix show. Quibi existed for a time and all of us have, we have a YouTube channel. There it is. I did it. We should have music. Andrew, put in some music here. Julia, it was amazing working with you. I'm so proud of you. We'll have you back on the show. I love having your experts back, but please, it was great working with you. Good luck with everything in the future.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thanks, guys.

• 31:33Speaker 04

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• 32:05Speaker 05

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• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Andy Hawkins, welcome to the Vergecast.

• 32:38Speaker 06

  Hello.

• 32:39Nilay Patel?

  Andy, you're a senior transportation reporter there. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of moving stuff news.

• 32:44Speaker 06

  People are moving.

• 32:45Nilay Patel?

  People are moving. Let's start with the, there's cars, there's batteries. Dieter just announced that he's a Fred. What's a Fred?

• 32:51Speaker 02

  So it's a, it's a derogatory term in the cycling community for a poser, for, you know, someone that thinks they're a cool hot shit bicyclist or racer or whatever, but actually just has like bought the stuff, but doesn't know actually how to ride the bike. You know, and it's like, it's not, it's not a very inclusive term. It's a gatekeeping type of term, but like, I am proudly a Fred. I am proudly a person that doesn't know what the hell they're doing on their bike, but I like getting on my bike and it's okay.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  But there's like, yeah, there's a trend. Everyone is a Fred.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  You have to go through a Fred phase.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  You should write a book called Fred Face.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Fred Face.

• 33:26Speaker 06

  I take personal offense to this because my grandfather is literally a Fred. His name was Fred. He was an avid cyclist, loved to bike. I say, take the turn back. Let's reclaim Fred.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  There's no way that we're getting through this segment with Andy without these two talking about e-bikes because it is.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 33:45Nilay Patel?

  It's just a little peek into the Verge. It's all they talk about at work is e-bikes. There's an e-bike cabal, a renegade e-bike faction. It's, it's, something's going to happen. I feel the e-bike community is upon us.

• 33:58Speaker 06

  I have a 20-year plan to push Verge into a strictly e-bike only publication.

• 34:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, let's start with the, there's news, there's e-bike news coming. There's some subsidies. Andy, the big news of the week in Transpo, you interviewed Chuck Schumer.

• 34:11Speaker 06

  I did. Talked to Chuck. Talked to Chuck about charging. We chatted. Chuck and I. No, Senate Majority Leader made a proposal a couple of years back and it kind of like made news for one day and then went away and no one talked about it because there was Republicans in control of Congress and I think there was an assumption that it wasn't going to go anywhere. But his proposal was basically, let's do a Cash for Clunkers style program for electric cars. We want people to trade in their gas polluting cars and get a huge discount on an electric car. So this was his proposal. It was going to cost $454 billion and then

• 34:53Speaker 06

  it kind of just went nowhere. So now that Dems are in control of Washington and they just passed this COVID relief bill and they're turning to infrastructure now, Chuck wants, he wants his electric vehicle proposal to be part of Biden's infrastructure package. So that is going, so he decided to call us up because we have the ear of the president. Obviously, the president is avid reader of The Verge.

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  The president's on the YouTube channel all the time, comments on every video. He's like, I verge. Verge has very little malarkey, turns out, so.

• 35:27Speaker 06

  We are a malarkey free zone. We are pro Fred and anti malarkey. So yeah, he wants it, he wants to put it back out there. So we decided, they decided to call me up and do a short interview to sort of get the, get the proposal back in the discourse. We talked a little bit about that. We talked about a couple of other things. But yeah, it's sort of the, the news aspect of it is they haven't quite settled on like how much money they want to give people back for trading in their gas cars for an electric one. But they do want it to be more generous than the current federal EV tax credit, which is $7,500. So I think that's pretty significant that they're looking at something that's even more generous than what's considered to be a pretty generous tax credit for EV purchases.

• 36:08Nilay Patel?

  And that credit phases out, right? Like you buy Tesla and I don't get that credit because they've sold too many cars.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  There's a cap that after a car company sells 200,000 vehicles, then they're, it phases out and then they eventually are not eligible for the tax credit anymore. So yeah, Tesla's ineligible. GM also hit the cap there ineligible, but pretty much every other car company, since they're still in the early phases of rolling out their electric vehicles are still eligible for it.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  So, okay, net, net, making a car, even especially an EV car, takes up a lot of carbon and does stuff to the environment. And like, so in theory, hanging on to a clunker, hanging on to a gas car for a while, might not be worse for the environment than training it in and having it, I don't know, turn into scrap and then spending the carbon on a whole new car. But on the other hand, if more and more people end up getting electric cars, it like starts up a virtuous cycle, creates pressure to create more charging network, blah, blah, blah. So my sense is that there's like lots of nuance and debate to have here. But on the whole, it seems like it would be a really good way to like, push everybody

• 37:21Speaker 02

  towards electric. Cause every time we talk about, you know, when's everything going to be electric? There's all these dates that are thrown out there. And it's like, you know, five years in the future, a lot of self-driving cars. And it's been that way for the past 30 years. I started, I'm starting to feel like EVs were going to turn into that until literally this year, when like every single company on the planet like is actually showing off real electric cars.

• 37:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's funny too, because Chuck thinks that that's because of him. He was, he made like some comments.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Of course he does.

• 37:47Speaker 06

  Something like, I put up my proposal in 2019 and now they're all going all electric. I'm sure I had something to do with that.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  That's a good, good Schumer impression.

• 37:54Speaker 06

  Thank you. I need to work on it. But it's, yeah, no, it's true. I think it's like, this can't exist in a vacuum. This can't just be the one thing that the government does in order to incentivize people to make the switch. Because, yeah, you're right. It's, it's a carbon intensive process to make cars. The mining of the materials that go into batteries is very intensely carbon heavy. And then you've got the electrical grid. An electric car is only as clean as the thing that it's plugged into. And if, you know, 30% or 40% of our power comes from coal, it's not a very good alternative to just driving your, your, you know, your Ford F-150.

• 38:34Speaker 06

  Around. So I think that the, you know, what he sees this is it's not just a discount for people who come in and trade in their cars, but there's also a component to it to incentivize the manufacturers to switch over to less carbon intensive manufacturing. And then there's also an EV charging component to it that would increase the number of chargers that are have been installed. And the electrical grid stuff is like a whole other thing that they're going to have to deal with this part of the infrastructure package, I think.

• 39:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I had the, um, had the Mustang for a week. I was tweeting pictures of it and like lots of smart people were telling me like the, the real problem right now is the Venn diagram of EV car owners and single family homeowners is like a circle. So I have this car. There's nowhere around here to charge it. And I was like, oh, this is fine. I'll just put in another dryer outlet in the garage and it'll charge overnight. And that's a great, and like, it seemed very simple and all the like very smart transportation analysts were like, yeah, most people don't like live in houses where they're like, I'll just throw in a dryer. Like that excludes anybody who lives in an apartment building. It excludes anybody that commutes beyond the range.

• 39:40Nilay Patel?

  It like, there's just tons and tons of people that excludes. And so you can incentivize a mass turnover, right? You're going to give people a huge discount on a Tesla if they trade in their old car. A lot of people are going to go buy a Tesla and then they're going to run face first into the infrastructure problem. But I, I think it's better to have like even more electric car owners demanding the infrastructure, like that chicken and egg problem doesn't get solved without the cars on the road. No one's going to, no one's going to invest in the infrastructure to, to run an empty charging station.

• 40:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think the government just needs to be extremely generous with, with the money that they give out on this because yeah, it needs to, you know, Schumer was talking about giving homeowners subsidies to install chargers in their home, but also to like large property owners, to commercial property owners, uh, to gas station owners. So if we're talking about like, you know, every time you go to a Shell station or a BP station and there's a level two fast charger, that's there in addition to the gas. Gas pumps, then that's, you know, that's a big game changer for a lot of people because as it is today, the charging infrastructure, you encountered this, you live somewhere that's a little bit more remote.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  I live somewhere that's very dense in New Jersey. There's no, there's barely anything around here regardless, you know, and it's ridiculous for that, you know, all the chargers right now are pretty much all in the state of California. And the rest is just like, you know, kind of shit out of luck.

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, Dieter's not, Dieter's, you should, uh, yeah, I mean, I can go to Disney World, I can.

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  The other piece of the puzzle aside with e-bikes, there's another proposal to make e-bikes way more affordable with tax credits. Walk us through that.

• 41:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, I love this idea. So this is, um, uh, this guy Earl Blumauer is a congressman from Portland, Oregon.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  Total Fred.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  I know, total Fred. Uh, and he put out a proposal to give people like a 30% tax credit on their e-bike purchases up to like $8,000 basically. So that's like a pretty huge range in terms of when you think about what e-bikes cost these days. They're anywhere between like a thousand bucks and like 10,000 bucks. Um, so he's talking about giving people a pretty hefty tax credit, sort of similar to what we've got today with the federal EV tax credit. That, you know, you make a purchase, you buy an e-bike and the idea here is that e-bikes, they're not just like for recreation and for mountain biking and for fun. They're like a legitimate car replacement.

• 42:11Speaker 06

  And if the, if you can get people to sort of bake into their heads that, you know, I don't need to buy that second car. I can buy an e-bike instead and make a lot of sort of these short trips in my neighborhood, in my community using that. And then, you know, I have a car to make road trips and whatnot, then that's something that can be really transformative when it comes to carbon emissions, traffic congestion, uh, road fatalities that we have, you know, tens of thousands of every year. So this is a great idea. I asked, you know, I interviewed Blumauer about it. He's, he put it out there. It's starting to get some traction, uh, but you know, it's, it's Congress, it's Washington. Who the heck knows how, you know, what the endpoint of all of this is, but I still, I still think it's a pretty great idea.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  So I was tweeting about this and just like the the instant response is, well, this is a stupid idea because winter. And there's like four responses to that. One is like, well, then don't ride it in the winter. It's still good for the other months out of the year. Two, we don't have to have a single way of transporting people around. Three, not to be actually guy, but like, lots of people ride bikes in Finland. Like, if the infrastructure is there, it's actually completely possible. And so I, yeah, I guess for me, like, there's, there's enough upsides to e-bikes as like a mode of transportation that to just say no because of like some of the downsides doesn't make sense. There are definite downsides. It sucks to ride in the rain. It sucks

• 43:37Speaker 02

  to ride in the snow. It sucks when there's not enough good infrastructure. It is harder to haul a lot of stuff with a bike. Like, all that stuff is true. But there are just as many problems with cars and with trains and whatever else. We should have more options for people that like are better for getting around. So You forgot for I live in California. This is what I'm saying.

• 44:00Speaker 06

  I will say this, it's raining today. I'm testing an e-bike from this company called Turn, T E R N. That's it's got, it's a great cargo bike. It has room for both my kids on the back. I put both of them on there. They gave me this really cool like rain canopy thing that fits over the rear rack of the bike to like, they're dry. I'm getting pelted with with rain. And my cars are at the whole thing, but they're completely dry. There are like, there are like companies that are thinking of this thing like really creatively, like super like interesting accessories to go along with this. And yes, I agree. Like in Europe, they bike in all weathers and all conditions. And we are the ones that are like, you know, turning our nose up with this. Like, that makes us look like really like a bunch of friends, honestly.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Once you slap a motor on a bike, you can do so, so many weird things with the shape of the bike. It doesn't have to look like the traditional bike that you're envisioning in your head. It can have a giant ass trailer on it, right? Like, you could do all sorts of wacky stuff. Once you put an electric motor on it.

• 44:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, the form factor is very fungible, I would say. And there's, you got like a ton of delivery companies that are creating like tiny little like miniature delivery trucks that are actually e-bikes in disguise. Like UPS has got it, DHL. It's like, there's, there's a lot of potential.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Okay, we got it. We gotta stop telling each other how smart we are about e-bikes and talk about some cars. This is what it's like every day.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the Verge Newsroom.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Can we please talk about this canoe truck?

• 45:27Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  I can't decide, I mean, I love it, but I can't decide if like, America is gonna love it, because it is very cute.

• 45:34Nilay Patel?

  It looks insane. Here's what, you were talking about bike design, car design right now is going through one of the weirdest and best periods in a long time. Because the same thing you're talking, once you put a battery in it, you can do whatever you want. Every EV is basically a giant skateboard, right? And you don't have to route the exhaust, you don't have to manage heat in the same, like, there are challenges, it's a giant moving thing, and you have to solve a bunch of known problems. But you don't have an engine, you don't have a gas tank, like all the stuff. You just have a skateboard. And then on top of that skateboard, you can do any wild ass idea that you have ever had in your life about a car. This canoe pickup truck is like, they let a six-year-old drive it.

• 46:15Speaker 06

  It's a pickup truck. It is a pickup truck.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:18Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely what it is. It's the round block and the square block.

• 46:23Speaker 06

  I think I stepped on it the other day.

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  It's great. I think that's great. I think the Cybertruck is great. Like, pickup truck design is about to go through a really weird moment, right? There's gonna be the electric F-150, which will look like an F-150 with different headlights. Then there's the Cybertruck, which is a, just a rolling triangle. That's what's happening there. And there's this canoe thing, which is a bubble. The Rivian truck is like, kinda, we, like,

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  These are the most popular kinds of cars in America, and they're about to go through a design revolution. It's super cool.

• 46:58Speaker 06

  The Hummer EV.

• 46:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's the Hummer. There's, you and Sean made a video about how many

• 47:02Speaker 06

  We did.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  new cars are coming out. That video is really fun. I will say on the other end of the spectrum, traditional car designs, they don't, like, they don't know what to do. So like, there's a Kia EV6. This car has, I would just say, one of the weirdest butts in automotive history. It just looks weird.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  It's fine.

• 47:22Speaker 06

  It's a bit like, yeah, it's kind of like raised up a little bit, like it's wearing like platform heels almost.

• 47:27Nilay Patel?

  Like BMW got into like a lot of controversy many years ago. What were they called? They had a designer named Chris Bangle. They called it the Bangle Butt. And then all the car manufacturers copied it and BMW dropped it. Like you can see what Kia is trying to do here. You know, they squint, you're like, oh, they're trying to, and it's like, no, this didn't, this didn't work. It looks like a hatchback got confused.

• 47:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a bit, it's got a bit of a fastback kind of proportions to it, but I, I, I don't know. I mean, like Kia is like one of those companies that they make cars that people buy. They're affordable, they are mass market. And I think when you get a company like that going into electric, you know, full steam, that that's, that's a net good, you know?

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Speaker 06

  In the end, but yeah, the thing still looks.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  It looks really weird.

• 48:09Speaker 06

  A little.

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  And then on the other end, you have BMW, which already makes extremely weird looking cars right now with gigantic, like the size of the BMW grill has gotten outlandishly insane, but they do that because their air intakes for their internal combustion engines. So they just revealed the I four, which looks exactly like the four series and they still have the gigantic BMW nostrils. So they just, they just put some stuff behind them.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  They're fans of classic Looney Tunes cartoons. I just love Bugs.

• 48:40Speaker 06

  It would have been incredibly outside of like BMW's, like what they're willing to do if they had gone full Tesla Model three with just like the flat, you know, grillless nose to the car. So I think like they're clearly not there yet. They have

• 48:59Speaker 06

  another concept that they, they released earlier this year, the IX. That's going to be the one. I think that that's going to be probably most appealing to people because it's in a, it's in a crossover SUV and that's like a very popular form factor. But yeah, it, it, it's not, you know, it's also got a very aggressive grill on the front as well. So it's like, they can't go full, you know?

• 49:20Nilay Patel?

  I just imagine like.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  They made the I three. Are they just like that? That was a mistake. We're never, we're never going to try and do that again.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

  No, they're, they're going with big nostrils. Like I just imagine, you know, they're like sketching out the I four and like, you know, the person who's in charge of like brand identities in the room and he's like, well, we gotta do the nostrils. And then like there's probably one other designer being like, we could stop it. Like this is the moment like you can break from the nostril thing like we could stop and like he just lot like lost it like they lost the fight like no inflection point we'll see I am very curious in general because of all these new designs that are coming out to see if people even test like the model S the model three very standard familiar designs in the grand scheme of things maybe a little more aggressive than average but they look like cars

• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  the model X looks like car has cool doors lots of pluses and minuses on the doors the Cybertruck is just out way out in left field and I'm very curious to see as as the electric car movement comes these new carmakers show up are people going to gravitate towards the familiar designs which is always kind of the argument we heard from carmakers like they got to look like cars or are they going to go super wild like we I just couldn't tell you

• 50:35Speaker 06

  Well Tesla's already had some success with like this teardrop shape in its of its cars and is not I wouldn't say is a common thing most you know like if you lined up all of the sedans and all the SUVs and all the crossovers you know they're all gonna look somewhat similar to each other but Tesla still stands out a little bit in insofar as it's got this kind of like weird bubbly kind of shape to it not as much as the canoe but yeah but the Cybertruck is completely in the opposite direction of that it is a parallelogram on wheels so yeah and we're supposed to get another look at like of some redesigns of the Cybertruck later this year because they are anticipating going into production

• 51:17Speaker 06

  by the end of this year potentially although Elon Musk has said that is

• 51:22Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, we that's not that's not how we refer to him anymore

• 51:25Speaker 06

  You're right, His Majesty Elon the First Techno King of Tesla, I forgot

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  Thank you

• 51:32Speaker 06

  Bend in the

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  That car I mean everything Tesla is delayed

• 51:36Speaker 06

  Yes

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  I feel like the Cybertruck is going to be delayed Can we, we should explain the techno king situation.

• 51:42Speaker 06

  So it was a, I think this broke on Monday morning. It was a great thing to wake up to Monday because I was already up really early because I was because Volkswagen was going to do this big like battery day presentation that was supposed to be very similar to Tesla's battery day that they had last year. And Volkswagen did announce some really, really interesting things, but that of course got completely buried by Elon Musk filing or Tesla actually filing in with the SEC, a name, a title change, which is that he was going to be techno king, one word techno king, no space. And Tesla's chief financial officer Zachary Kirkhorn was going to be have the new title of master of coin.

• 52:24Nilay Patel?

  But they're retaining their existing titles.

• 52:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is, it's a, it's a joke.

• 52:29Nilay Patel?

  The SEC loves it when Elon Musk jokes is my understanding. Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 06

  The best about, the best thing I love about this is, is watching legacy financial publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and all like Barron's and like all these places having to cover this like very serious, very seriously. I just get like an endless kick out of like watching like that kind of stuff.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  I've decided that techno king refers to the music, not to technology.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  I'm sure that's what Elon thinks too.

• 53:02Speaker 06

  He produced a song this week and he was going to sell as an NFT. So clearly he's, you know, he wants to be, he has this whole other side of him that is, wants to be a music producer, clearly.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  We went almost an entire hour without saying NFT.

• 53:16Speaker 06

  Oh shit.

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  You did say fungible earlier and I was like, ah, but we've made it this far. You actually mentioned, let's go through Volkswagen's battery. Like the batteries are the big deal here, right? Tesla is really investing in battery tech. They're. Building more battery factories. There's a big report they're going to, they're going to like help the Texas grid with a giant battery farm. What's going on with Volkswagen?

• 53:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Volkswagen just came out with its first mass market long range electric vehicle, the ID. Four. We reviewed that a couple of weeks ago. I think it's a pretty great car. There's, you know, it's not, it's not as technologically impressive as, as a lot of EVs, but it's still highly functional. And they've got a whole other slate of EVs on the horizon. But they want to be, they want to be like this company that is a, you know, not just an electric, making just electric cars, but also they want to really get a hold of their supply chain. And to do that, they really need to get more heavily involved in battery manufacturing, because it's all about batteries. It's, you know, with, with, when it comes to EVs, the battery is the, the first and last thing that you need to be, you need to be talking about.

• 54:19Speaker 06

  So they talked about how they will be reducing the cost of producing their batteries by up to 50% over the next few years. They're building multiple battery factories, gigafactories around the world. They're expanding their network of charging stations. And they're also talked about eventually transitioning to solid state technology, which has been sort of the, the holy grail of battery technology for a really long time.

• 54:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I think Volkswagen is always trying to buy goodwill back after Dieselgate. Like it, it feels like that's still the frame that company is operating in, even if like maybe the world has forgotten, because we just, everyone moves on so quickly now, but Volkswagen is still like, here's what we're doing that's good. And that's like always their, their foot forward. I really wonder who is going to like win the battery war, because car companies don't make a lot of their own things generally, like they have giant supplier networks, they have huge supply chains, that stuff consolidates over time. Do you think Volkswagen is like positioned to actually do it?

• 55:18Speaker 06

  I think so. I mean, they're the number two auto manufacturer in the world based on sales. You know, they, if anyone has like the heft and the capital that you would need to actually do something like this. I think it's definitely them. I mean, we've seen what Tesla can accomplish with far less than what, you know, far less resources than what Volkswagen has. And they have supercharger stations around the world in Europe and China. It's growing. I think if Tesla, Volkswagen really put its like pen to paper and just really kind of like committed itself fully to this. And it sounds like they are and like their stock kind of their stock price kind of went crazy this week because of this announcement. And it's kind of gone down a little bit. But I think that they, you know, that they'll

• 56:01Speaker 06

  get both the recognition that they're looking for from their customers, but also that bump that they're clearly looking for from the markets, which have obviously sort of heaped up most of their rewards on Tesla over the last year. So I think that there's definitely an opportunity for them to come in and kind of steal some of that thunder.

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, this feels like the classic disruption story. Like Tesla was a small company. They didn't make gas engines. They they were all focused on this and it was existential for them. Volkswagen's a big company. They make all the things. And they're like, oh, we're gonna do it too. And you just assume that they have the money and the resources and the people. But like, there's a reason Apple invented the iPhone and Microsoft didn't, you know, like, it has that feel to it. We'll see how it plays out. Like, I actually, the the number of electric cars that have come out that have been good recently is like, there's enormous cause for optimism. And then you like, push the buttons on their infotainment screens and you're like, hmm, maybe there's less cause for optimism.

• 57:04Speaker 06

  I'm really excited because I'm getting, as a loan, I'm getting a Polestar 2 this weekend.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh, awesome.

• 57:09Speaker 06

  The first car on the road that's got like a full, fully baked in native Android operating system. And I think it's really kind of like a bellwether, I think, of what we're going to see to come where I think more and more car companies, I could be totally wrong about this, but I think more and more car companies are going to be turning over their operating systems to the to Google and Apple because they just do it. It's just clear that that's what people want. They want their phone in their car. They don't want to deal with sync four and like all that BS. They just want, you know, a familiar experience. And I think like Volvo and their sub brand Polestar, they recognize that. And they were really quick to adopt that. And I think, you know, whether the rest of the industry follows is going to be, you know, we'll see.

• 57:54Nilay Patel?

  I think Google's in a good position. The one thing that we are talking about a 10 year road to self-driving, right? Like, that's a long way away. But once the car can even like, even closer, level three self-driving, right? Like, still a wheel, but it can kind of drive itself. That built-in navigation system has got to be a lot better than they are right now.

• 58:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:16Nilay Patel?

  Because you won't be able to just CarPlay, Google Maps, or whatever. You have to tell the car where to go. And I think that that is just another inflection point for these companies to get way better at the in-car stuff, as opposed to just like the Mustang Mach-E is like, here's an interface, but like, really, it's a gigantic CarPlay screen that looks nuts. And it's like, they're just assuming that that's what you're gonna do. And that's the end of it. And the second you want that car to drive itself, you have to unplug your phone and actually use the screen. We'll see. I'm, I think like Volvo switching to Android, Ford is switching to Android. I think they're realizing like, oh, we need a really good map. And we know some people who make a really good map. Would you like to build the rest of the operating system?

• 59:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's, that's definitely. And, you know, like, Google obviously has Waymo, which is the like, the leading autonomous vehicle company in the world. And, you know, I think it's just like, it's clear that that's going to be sort of like, they're going to be sort of in the catbird seat in terms of like, fielding these requests from these, from these companies. Like, they're going to be able to pick and choose who they want to do business with and who they don't.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  All right, last one. And I just want to tell this story in the context of two of our reporters. So Foxconn announced this week, it will, it will decide what to do with the factory in Wisconsin by July. That's, that's the whole announcement, really. But then they're like, it's either going to be EVs, or something else. Which is like, a pretty enormous rage. And so, like, we see the store, we got to write this story. Sean, like, sees EVs. Sean O'Kane, our other senior transportation reporter, sees he's like, oh, it's the EV story. Josh Jezza, who's like, always on the Foxconn reporting, he's like, I'll help you out. They like, come together. Story goes off. And then Simon put a headline on it. And the fight between Foxconn's full of shit, and the word EV in the headline.

• 1:00:07Nilay Patel?

  These two just like they're totally different views of what the story was. It's very good. The idea is that Foxon signed a deal with Fisker to build EVs. They want to be an EV platform company. Again, it's just their skateboards, right? Like you can like be the best skateboard manufacturer. You're going to be in a good position to help a lot of people build cars. So Foxon wants to do that. They have a plant in Mexico. I'm just going to put the money on Foxon decides to build the EVs in Mexico. But they keep, I think they're stringing along the Foxon thing, the Wisconsin thing. Because they got to do something, but it's either EVs or something else.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  Or something else. Something else is like a pretty, you know, it's like a relatively specific category of things, right? Something else.

• 1:00:48Nilay Patel?

  It's real good. But you know, the only thing they've ever produced at factory is a handful of test things. They made some masks, which was good during the pandemic. They did some mask manufacturing. They announced a deal to make ventilators. Fell through. Before that, they announced a deal to make coffee robots for airports. So if you go to like, if you're, I think Austin has them, a bunch of airports have them. They're these coffee kiosks where you like push a button and you see the cup go through a conveyor belt and then like makes coffee and comes out.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Nilay Patel?

  These, by the way, automated coffee machines have existed for a long time. So robots is very funny to me. That deal fell through. The market for airport coffee robots kind of went away. So they have literally manufactured nothing but masks in this facility.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  They've also manufactured hopes and dreams.

• 1:01:34Nilay Patel?

  That's true. And a lot of good journalism. And a lot of, a lot of great journalism and maybe one day, either EVs or something else. Yeah, we'll see. All right, Andy. Hope springs eternal. It does. We'll have to have you back soon, man. This is great. We'll talk to you. Thanks, guys.

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• 1:03:15Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Dieter, there's some gadget stuff going on. Samsung stuff, Apple stuff. What's up?

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Samsung held another Unpacked event and I get why. I understand why they wanted to do it because they were, they announced the Galaxy A52, the A52 5G and the A72. And as you may know, since I've been banging on about this since last year, the A series phones are the ones that Samsung actually sells. They sell way more of them than they sell the S series or the Note series or the Z folding phones, obviously. So Alison wrote it up and the news is basically that a bunch of stuff that used to be reserved for like high end or mid-high end is now in like solidly in the mid-range. So 90 Hz refresh rate screens, IP67 and you know, of course, there's like 5G. You can get 120 Hz on some of these phones.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  The thing that I don't get honestly is if the cameras are like decent, why would you buy a regular S21, which already like is pushing down into like the mid-range, right? With the materials and the cameras basically the same as last year. The daylight between, you know, A52 5G or an A72 and a Galaxy S21, it's like very, very narrow.

• 1:04:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, same with this. They said they might skip the Galaxy Note this year.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  That's the other thing, yeah. But they're, they're, they're pinning down on a chip shortage, which is interesting because it's probably true. Chip shortage is very real, but they've been telegraphing about not wanting to make the Note for a while now.

• 1:04:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm like two comparisons because the Note was like supposed to be the highest of the high end, right?

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Nilay Patel?

  But here are my two comparisons.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:04:50Nilay Patel?

  And I don't think they're running out of chips. I think they're running out of strategy. But here are my two comparisons. Apple ran into this problem with the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. It like, didn't, it couldn't really differentiate them.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:05:03Nilay Patel?

  Not the little MacBook, like years and years ago.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Oh, years ago. Okay.

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  Years ago. Like, there was like the MacBook, and then there was like a MacBook Pro.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  And like, it was just weird. Like, what is the real difference between these things?

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:05:16Nilay Patel?

  And they kind of just got rid of it. They just got rid of the MacBook, and there was an Air, and there was a Pro, and they brought back the little MacBook, and everything all went to hell, basically. And now they're kind of back, right? Where they have an Air and a Pro, and there's no thing called the MacBook, because there's just no space there for a thing.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  In between those things. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  So that's one way you can look at it. The other way I was thinking about it is Virtu.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  The, the, the luxury phone company?

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  The ultra-luxury phone manufacturer.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  That takes a, a phone and then super glues some Swarovski crystals on it and calls it luxury? That, that company?

• 1:05:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it wasn't like great luxury, but it was like, we'll take a phone and make it more luxurious.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  And we'll like, create a price differential with exclusivity and materials and, I don't know, a butler comes to your house to unbox it.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  And that's what you're suggesting flagship phones are, is Swarovski crystals?

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just, they haven't gone, neither one of those ways is correct, right? Like, you can't buy a much nicer phone anymore. Right? Like, it's really hard. You're kind of running out of that space. You, you get more, you get more camera lenses on the back. You might get some more RAM. But like, most people don't need that stuff. So you got the MacBook problem. And on the other hand, like, even the materials, like, it's, you can't buy a phone made of more premium materials. Like, maybe, like, Apple's on the high end. It's one kind of stainless steel versus another, but like...

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, you get like, whatever they're calling Gorilla Glass now, instead of like, polycarbonate, but polycarbonate's not bad.

• 1:06:49Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  It's actually funny that you, you like, talk about, like, what makes the flagship phone a flagship. In the context of the S21, it's interesting, because like, well, they brought the S21 down, but like, I, I kind of know what you get out of a Plus or an Ultra compared... Compared to these phones, but the rumors coming up for these new OnePlus phones, I mean, you know, they're going to be announcing them, I think, next week. There's the OnePlus 9 and the 9 Plus, and there's also like a OnePlus 9R floating around. And OnePlus traditionally does like the last year, like the one regular old OnePlus 8 was great. And so like, what's a differentiation between the OnePlus 9 and the 9 Pro going to be? And is it going to be worth that money? This is why Samsung wants folding phones to happen, right? Because that's like a very clear, obvious, oh, you should pay more for this, right? The what you should pay

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  more for. We've been talking about this for years, but like, it's, I don't know, it's really real. And like, it's really clear. I, man, I feel like I've said this like, a dozen times in phone reviews over the past couple of years. Like, when you buy the most expensive premium Pro, Max, whatever one, what you're primarily paying for is like, niceness.

• 1:07:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, there's a part where it's like, in every other part of the economy, when you pay more money, it's nicer in a way that you can see.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  But this is the thing, you pay more money, it's nicer in a way that you can see or feel or experience. In tech, historically, you pay more money, it does more stuff. That's the implicit assumption in consumer tech. And that no longer applies. And so like, making the shift from it does more stuff, or it's like, does stuff better, to it's nicer. And the only way that you can express that is either through fancy materials, or, you know, some sort of spec that feels ephemerally better. I don't think companies have figured that out quite yet.

• 1:08:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, the other comparison I would make is the iPad Pro. Like, I have a Yeah. two generations old iPad Pro, we're expecting you want to come out. But last year, they added the LiDAR sensor. And at no point, for the first time in a long time, was I like, oh, I need a new gadget. I was like, this is the same, only with a sensor that I will never use. I bought the new Nest Hub. So, uh, Google put out a new Nest Hub with the display. It looks exactly the same. They're doing some more stuff with Soli.

• 1:09:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like sleep tracking with Soli, basically.

• 1:09:02Nilay Patel?

  That's very creepy.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:04Nilay Patel?

  Here, here's a thing that can use radar to detect you breathing while you sleep.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I just, I'm probably not going to turn that on. But what is it really? They added a faster processor, and they've added so much stuff to that platform. That the ones I have in my house are like, starting to get slow.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:09:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like you say, you say, I'm on Google.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Nilay Patel?

  So I'm trying not to trigger everybody's thing. But you say the, you say the wake word.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Nilay Patel?

  And like, you can see it like chug.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 1:09:30Nilay Patel?

  Like it does, it doesn't drop, the little screen doesn't drop down instantly. It doesn't go into responsive mode.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I stopped using my Nest Hub because I like, I don't know, we've got the echoes in the kitchen and then my bathroom, I've got the cheap little Lenovo clock. And I have to reboot it. Like I have to unplug it like once a week because it's just like, you ask it to do something, it's like, okay, I'll do it. And then just nothing happens. It just stops. And like it thinks it's doing it because like it'll, I'll tell it to play the news. So like, all right, here's NPR. And then silence for two minutes. And then like two minutes later, it's like, and now here's your next news show. It's like, but you didn't play the thing.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I remember when we reached in the show and we're like, why did, why do these run? Like whatever Chromecast thing and these ones are on Android. And I think that's like, we finally found the answer. It's like, Google cares about one platform and not the other.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, it's just funny. It's like, they look exactly the same. The screens are the same. I'm willing to pay another hundred bucks for adequate performance. After however many years of having it. Like, that's fine. That's worth spending money on. But that's not what we're spending money on with phones anymore.

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  But which, which phone do you own? Do you use?

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, I have a gigantic 12 Pro.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like, would you have bought, uh, the, the, if they had sold that same one, but with like last year's processor and, and one less camera, but it's the same size screen, would you have bought the, the cheaper one?

• 1:10:49Nilay Patel?

  If they, well, the camera, this is hard because with Apple, it's the camera and the processor like right.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  Together.

• 1:10:55Nilay Patel?

  On top of each other. But assuming they could do it, which I don't think they can, but I would have bought last year's processor with this year's cameras.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  Cause that, that's the thing that I prioritize with the phone. Right?

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:05Nilay Patel?

  Is that, I still think it's too big after all this time. Like it's still just like a little too big, but

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  Did the screen size bump really do it for me? No, it's the cameras.

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Nilay Patel?

  So, well, see, I, I just think it's like, they've, they've reached this point where like, you're, it's either you go down the MacBook strategy path. Where you just sort of get rid of the middle and you have the, the really high end one and you have the, the consumer one. And that's, that's where the S21 gets squeezed, right?

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's super squeezed right now.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  Or you go down the, the Virtu path.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Nilay Patel?

  Where it's like, now it's made of leather. And you're like, sure.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, they started with the Note 20 last year. The regular Note 20 was like, kinda bad. Like, it was like, a standard phone, but they like, they really cut down a bunch of stuff, and it's like, you should just get the Ultra. And so I was really curious if they're gonna do this year, because, especially now that you can get a stylus on the S21. Anyway, we haven't talked about the HomePod being discontinued. I just figured we'd lead the show with that and just have emotions about computational audio for an hour and a half.

• 1:12:09Nilay Patel?

  It's funny, the HomePod got discontinued, because we haven't talked about the HomePod on the show since the HomePod came out.

• 1:12:17Nilay Patel?

  I mean, look, I was very impressed, like, Apple, like, I went to the same event that all the other journalists went to, and they showed me their rooms with all the padding and the anechoic chamber, and I got to talk to them about moving the sound around. Like, all very impressive. At the end of the day, Google is selling a $99 smart device that is smarter and is also a kick-ass photo frame.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:41Nilay Patel?

  Right? Amazon will just, like, throw an Echo Dot at you. Like, you just, like, walk by an Amazon warehouse or Whole Foods, there's an Echo Dot in your back pocket. The HomePod was just so expensive, Siri is underpowered, and like, I don't think people care about sound quality. Everyone knows, like, people are about to spend four hours watching a 43 movie.

• 1:13:04Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. So I think the HomePod Mini is doing a lot better, it's cheaper, people seem to really like it. It is the future of HomeKit.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Nilay Patel?

  Is kind of like, embedded in the HomePod Mini.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, stop, stop, stop. I'm not gonna let you talk about Thread. Not yet. I need to, I need to have my own emotions. I never bought the HomePod. I've listened to it in rooms. The thing about the HomePod is, Apple did this thing that it does every now and then, where it rolls up, and it says, "We are gonna do the thing that we did with the iPhone with so many other categories, where everybody else did it badly, we waited for our shot, and now we're doing it well." So, okay, sure. They said they did it with the Apple Watch, it didn't, it took a while. They definitely did it with the iPad. If you consider tablets to have existed before the iPad, technically they did with Windows, whatever. Obviously, they did it with the phone. What market were they disrupting with the HomePod? Or were they saying they were disrupting? Was it the smart speaker market? Was it like Echoes and Google Homes?

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Was it Sonos and high-end audio? Was it like, were they trying to do something with ambient computing? Like, we've been talking, we were talking, we've been talking about ambient computing since like Walt wrote his big column about it. And it seems like the only company that's like actually still trying it is Amazon. Everybody else is like, sort of not putting their whole like effort into it. And Apple clearly wasn't going for that. So I think the problem with the HomePod is like, they didn't know who they were disrupting. They didn't know, they just like, oh yeah, people like nice things, we made a nice thing.

• 1:14:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think they saw the voice assistant in the home as a real threat to their ecosystem, particularly from Amazon, right? Like, I, we, we know, we have heard, we have been told, Alexa is to Amazon as Windows is to Microsoft.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:14:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? That is their operating system, they're gonna build around it, they want that in your house, they want it in your car, they want it everywhere. Apple's like, we can't just let Amazon step over us and then figure it out, and then 20 years from now, put out the Alexa phone and we're dead. Like, you gotta cut that off a little bit, and you have Siri, and you've done nothing with it, and your customers are saying, we'll buy this from you.

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Nilay Patel?

  And next to it, and this was the rumor that I'd always heard, you have a bunch of like audio engineers who are insistent they've made the next great version of audio, and have been pushing you to release this thing forever.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Nilay Patel?

  So I think they just like mashed up the ideas, to your point. They didn't have like a clear vision, but they thought, well, Apple will charge a premium, we'll get in people's houses. And I just, of all companies, Apple not realizing that people will pick convenience over sound quality is the funniest. Because Apple was like, here's the iPod, 128k AAC, that's what we're doing, 1,000 songs in your pocket, also check out these headphones, they're, they're bad. And like, revolutionized the music industry.

• 1:15:48Nilay Patel?

  I think that's a miss, but I think the mini is like they're back on track. They're selling it. That's even their own press release saying they're discontinuing their HomePod, focused on the HomePod Mini. I think that smart home, homekit market for them is a lot stronger. And if, you know, you want to listen to music, you're either you're wearing your expensive AirPods Max or you're, you've got actual speakers and a soundbar and all this other stuff.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, it took them forever to realize that there's more than one person in a house, that it's not just a simple humans device. So, okay, HomePod Mini supports Thread. I'm still waiting for Choype. Actually, it's chip connected home over IP, which is like actually basically homekit, but everybody else is going to turn it into a standard and adopt it. There's like more smart home stuff coming that I think is going to be a big deal. Like, we're still waiting for Sidewalk from Amazon to hit in a, in a major way. Like, there's a bunch of smart home stuff that I feel is like just sitting under the surface waiting to happen. And I don't know, it'll all be powered by Thread on the HomePod Mini.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  So Thread is like a wireless network that sits next to Wi-Fi, isn't Wi-Fi.

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:16:55Nilay Patel?

  Right now, like basically the only Thread stuff that exists are like some NanoLeaf lights in the HomePod Mini.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, in Eero.

• 1:17:01Nilay Patel?

  But you could put like, if you usually look at the Eero Reddit where people are trying to connect the NanoLeaf lights, like they haven't, you can turn on the Thread radios in the Eero, but

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:10Nilay Patel?

  It's not there yet.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:17:11Nilay Patel?

  Hopefully they'll get there soon.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  Everybody who has a HomePod Mini and these NanoLeaf lights are like, this is amazing. It's so fast.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:17:21Nilay Patel?

  Right? Because Thread is just like alternative mesh network. It's not competing with Wi-Fi packets on your Wi-Fi network.

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:17:29Nilay Patel?

  And so like you push the button on your phone and like, apparently it's just like, the main benefit is it's really fast. The other benefit is that it's like every Thread device is a mesh node.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:17:39Nilay Patel?

  So the lights themselves become another Thread node that is lightning fast. So you like, don't have to put 50 Wi-Fi routers everywhere.

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  So it's really like, I never, I guess I am sometimes annoyed that it, things take a while to turn on when I ask for the lights to turn on, but I'm always, I always just attribute it to like, some random crap happened on my phone or like, I guess it wanted to talk to the cloud this time. I don't know. But yeah, like it's, it actually is way slower and now I'm going to be super annoyed every time I talk to. By digital assistant and ask for the lights.

• 1:18:10Nilay Patel?

  The second you notice it, it took a long time.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot.

• 1:18:13Nilay Patel?

  Or you have hubs, or the other thing that, like, I have Lutron smart lights.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  I have a Lutron hub, and that's fast. So you push a button, and like, that is fast, because you talk to the hub, and the hub controls the switches. But it turns out, putting actual Wi-Fi chips in things, like, they're small. They're small, they don't have big process, like, all that stuff, and so Thread makes it all faster. The big question is, the other company that's like, all in on Thread, it's this other smart home company called Eve. They make a bunch of stuff, people really like Eve. You go to the Eve website, and they're like, "The future of the smart home is the HomePod Mini." Because it's the only Thread border device you can buy that'll bridge Wi-Fi to Thread right now.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:18:55Nilay Patel?

  Because Eera hasn't, like, gotten all the way there.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:18:57Nilay Patel?

  Even though they're the first people to ship Thread. I just, it's gonna be like a crazy year of smart home stuff, is Thread, chip, all the other Thread devices we even promised for five years finally come out.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited. I'm gonna buy the Eve weather station. That's my big thing.

• 1:19:12Speaker 02

  Okay. I'm excited to not install any of the stuff in my apartment. That's what I'm excited about.

• 1:19:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just a little box, you just, like, put it outside your house.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  Couple of things, iPad Pros, Mark Urban says they're coming in April. There's been, like, swirling stuff that Apple's gonna do an event, and then, like, the invite never lands, and who knows? I'm also, like, desperate for either the new iMac or the new MacBook Pro. There's just a bunch of stuff that we're expecting from Apple ahead of WWDC, and we're just sort of, like, waiting.

• 1:19:41Nilay Patel?

  I have, I have a theory, a small, bad theory.

• 1:19:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:19:45Nilay Patel?

  I think they might be waiting to have an event.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:19:49Nilay Patel?

  It's just, it's a bad theory, it's not a great theory. I think if Apple wants to do something, they're gonna do it. I think they have thoroughly enjoyed putting out infomercials for people. But I, those events are events for a reason.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Nilay Patel?

  And, like, if you're gonna do the new MacBook Pro... Yeah, like, I don't know, we'll see, but it has been sliding, that ship shortage stuff is there.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:08Nilay Patel?

  My theory is like, as it gets close, as it slides, and you get closer to actually having an event, potentially. They built that theater for a reason.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they also like, they want to control the situations which people take their first pictures of their devices, right? They like that hands-on area. They built that for a reason, too, right? So just like my living room, which is objectively awful. I think that they're putting it off because they saw these new Intel commercials with Justin Long and they're terrified.

• 1:20:35Speaker 07

  Hello, I'm a Justin, just a real person doing a real comparison between Mac and PC. Come on.

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  If you haven't seen them, Intel put out a series of commercials with Justin Long, the "I'm a Mac" guy, and he says, "I'm a, I'm just a Justin, just, I'm a human being." And then he goes and he goes into a living room and he like talks to a person, he looks at a PC, and is like, "Oh, wow, this has two screens. Oh, wow, this guy's playing video games. This is stuff you could never do on a Mac." The end. There's one, the keyboard in the front computer with the second screen. They screwed up the After Effects on it, and the second screen is hovering over his hands in like a split second, anyway. So these are the commercials.

• 1:21:16Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I think these ads are mostly just Intel got itself dunked on. So like, just objectively, the ads didn't work the way they wanted to.

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Nilay Patel?

  Let me make the case for the ads.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:21:25Nilay Patel?

  Intel is about to enter, they have a new CEO.

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:21:28Nilay Patel?

  They're about to enter this extremely weird middle period, where either they're gonna figure it out or not.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:21:34Nilay Patel?

  Inside of that middle period, every time Apple puts out an M1 or an M-series computer.

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  Yup.

• 1:21:41Nilay Patel?

  The story about Intel being dead is everywhere.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:21:44Nilay Patel?

  Intel also has hundreds of OEM customers with their chips inside their computers. These are ads about real problems with Macs. So like, it is true that you cannot touch the screen on a Mac.

• 1:21:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:58Nilay Patel?

  Many people have noticed this. It is true that you can't fold it over and make it a tablet. It is true that you can't use the stylus on it. It is true that if Apple really wants you to have, we did, we talked about Fitness Plus with Ashley, like, Apple wants you to have an iPad and a phone and a Mac and it like,

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:22:15Nilay Patel?

  That is true. It is true that there are no games on a Mac. Like,

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  None of Intel's points were wrong.

• 1:22:19Nilay Patel?

  It is true that the design of a Mac has been static for years. And even with the new chips, they still look the same.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:22:26Nilay Patel?

  And maybe that will all change now, but all that stuff is true. So the things that Intel is saying. Are just true criticisms of the Mac.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  Yep, 100%.

• 1:22:37Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's all I got. I don't, it obviously did not work out.

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, the, the thing of like every time Apple releases a new M based Mac, it's going to be Intel's dead stories is real. Like every single time I talk to a company about a new laptop or like new Chromebooks or whatever. It's like, yeah, but are you worried about the M1? Like your, your battery life is like actually half of what the competition is. And it's going to be a long time before there's an answer. And like Intel's got to figure out what it's going to do with itself in that, that period.

• 1:23:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And again, new CEO, he just started. Like, I think in a couple of weeks, he's going to do his first big thing.

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  Is the first big thing that, that screw it, we're, we're, we're giving up on trying to fab this stuff ourselves. We're just going to have TSMC make our stuff.

• 1:23:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  That was a big shrug for those.

• 1:23:26Nilay Patel?

  He's got to do something. That's what I mean. They're about to enter this weird fallow period. The whole point of the new guy is to change the strategy. And he just started. So like, what's the first thing to do is like, just remind everybody that from a design and capability perspective, the Mac is like, actually quite static.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, maybe that like Microsoft tries this every couple of years too. Like maybe it had very predictable results, but like, I get it. I under, I just don't, I think maybe they should have seen the predictable results. On the other hand, hiring Justin Long.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  Nah.

• 1:23:58Nilay Patel?

  Made everybody talk about Intel.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 1:24:00Nilay Patel?

  They bought themselves a whole, if you believe all press is good press, which I do not as a member of the press. They bought themselves a cycle. We'll see. I'm trying to get Pat Gelsinger on Decoder. We'll see how that goes. If you're listening, Pat, you know, show up.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:14Nilay Patel?

  It's my challenge to you. No, we, we're working on it. It's, it's a healthier conversation than that. Okay. Last thing, I just want to call out Lauren Grush, our excellent space reporter, is actually on book leave right now. So good luck to Lauren. She's working on it. Um, she'll be back soon. In the meantime, uh, we have an interim space reporter named Joey Roullette, who is great. He got a big scoop today, this morning scooped, uh, scooped a Biden appointee. He's Senator Bill Nelson, former astronaut Bill Nelson, will be the Biden's pick. To head NASA, which is a big deal. Anyway, congrats to Joey and the scoop. It's great. We have great space coverage and I'll be back eventually. All right, we're way over time. We're going to wrap it up. Thanks to Julia. It was great having Julia on the Verge team for a while. I will let Julia tell you where she's going. But thanks, Julia. You can tweet at her.

• 1:24:58Nilay Patel?

  She's @LadMouthJulia. Thanks to Andy. He's @AndyJ Hawk on Twitter. You can tweet at us. I'm @RecklessDeeters, @BackLawn. Decoder on Tuesday is Kevin Ruse, the columnist from the New York Times. He just wrote a book about something called robotic process automation. Literally the only person who's ever wanted to talk to me about that. I've been trying to get someone to talk to me about it for like three years. It's a good book. That's coming up on Tuesday. We'll be back next Friday with more Vergecast. That's it. Rock and roll. Continue wearing a mask.

• 1:25:44Speaker 05

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• 1:26:14Speaker 08

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