OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro review / Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Pichai testify before Congress once again

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn talk with Verge reporter Allison Johnson about her review of the One Plus 9 and how it compares with their 9 Pro and other Android flagship phones. Politics reporter Makena Kelly joins the show the discuss Congress’ first hearing of 2021 with the chief executives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Further reading: AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine 79 percent effective in US study US officials publicly question AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine data Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine website builds on a swine flu tool OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro announced with Hasselblad-branded cameras OnePlus 9 review: cheaper than the Pro and almost as good The lower-cost OnePlus 9R is official, and it sounds surprisingly strong OnePlus 9 Pro review: the elegant Android alternative Here’s how the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro compare to Samsung and Apple’s flagships The $159 OnePlus Watch is OnePlus’ first smartwatch Angry MacBook owners get class action status for butterfly keyboard suit Intel invests $20 billion into new factories, will produce chips for other companies Intel Unleashed, Gelsinger on Intel, IDM 2.0 - Stratechery The startup trying to augment audio reality in public spaces Yes or no: Are these tech hearings doing anything? Mark Zuckerberg proposes limited 230 reforms ahead of congressional hearing Jack Dorsey is just trolling Congress with Twitter polls now Lina Khan is just the first step toward tougher US tech regulation Congress tries to get the FTC in fighting shape Microsoft rebrands Xbox Live to Xbox network The street prices of Nvidia and AMD GPUs are utterly out of control 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?

  This week on the Vergecast, Allison Johnson joins us to talk about the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro. Dieter and I talk about Intel and a MacBook class action lawsuit. And then McKenna Kelly joins to talk about the latest disaster congressional hearing for big tech CEOs. That's coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:16Speaker 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.

• 1:01Speaker 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.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of congressional hearings. This will be one hour of talking about Congress. No, that's not true, although there will be some talking about Congress. I'm your friend, Eli. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  I'm your daily misinterpretation of how the First Amendment works.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, very good. Allison Johnson's here.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Hello. I don't have anything to follow that.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm just here. It's tough. Welcome to the first guest. It's a second shot. Like, this is the one where you start, like, really getting into the chaos of the show. A little bit later, Makena Kelly is going to join us, and we are going to talk about, when we are going to talk about the congressional hearing on 2:30 that is, as we record, continues to take place chaotically. So I'm excited to talk to her about that a little bit later. Allison and Dieter are going to talk about the OnePlus 9 reviews they did. There's some other gadget news in the mix. But as always, I want to start with COVID, the biggest story in the world, and right now, very much in the vaccines, who can get them? Where are they? How can you get them? Phase of our one-year-long COVID experience. A bunch of news that we have on the site, you can go read it. Our science team is always covering the hell out of this.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  The big kind of debate happening right now is around the AstraZeneca vaccine, which, as of this morning, is now being reported as 76% effective here and around the world. Officials are questioning it. We have a lot of coverage of that on the site. You can go read it. It is some combination of a science and public relations disaster for AstraZeneca.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, mostly the public relations, I think, but like, it doesn't help when you want people to trust the science when you're screwing up your messaging left and right.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. In the meantime, many, many, many doses of this vaccine are being held in the United States. They are approved in other countries, so there's some debate over the way should we ship them before they go bad. We have a story called "Welcome to the Age of Vaccine Diplomacy," which I promise you I will not fall down the hole of patent policy, but there's a raging debate about vaccines, the patents, letting other companies manufacture those vaccines outside of the patent rules. It is not a great look for the United States right now. We're being very protective of the vaccine patents, and maybe we shouldn't be. But that is all happening. You can read about that on the site. I have to note, it has been two weeks since President Joe Biden announced that he would

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  Have a website by May 1st.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  That will let anybody find a vaccine. Here's the thing, it that it already exists. You just like go to it. It builds on an existing tool. I used it. There are vaccine sites around me that just show up. Some of the data is out of date, like the part they're they're building it out. So unlike the last time, they're just expanding an existing tool. But we are going to hold them accountable to this May 1st deadline, but it has been two weeks since he announced it. I continue to count. I will say that I went and got my first shot.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Congratulations.

• 4:40Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you this? I had to drive an hour and a half away because I live in the woods. So I drove an hour and a half away. I will just, this is the thing that struck me about it. So I drove to like a local college, like gymnasium, like it was basketball court. I got my vaccine in effectively a basketball court. And when you think about the army, because it was staffed by, by people in the army in their fatigues. When you think about an army taking over like a community college basketball court. That's dystopia, right? That's the end of the world. But this was like a party. Because everyone was so happy that they're getting their shots. It was just the, it was just the weirdest mashup of like how it looked and how you thought it was going to feel. And what was actually happening?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  I was just about to make a Red Dawn joke, but literally nobody would get it because nobody is as old as I am.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  But no, they remade that movie recently, like maybe like 10 years.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, but does that remake count? Let's be honest.

• 5:35Nilay Patel?

  No, it's fair. It's very bad. Anyway, if you are eligible, please go to one of the many, many websites. We actually have a story about how the websites are slow. They're they're being crushed under demand. You know, the website that Biden is promising hopefully will alleviate that burden, consolidate some data. But if you can go, please go. And then lastly, we have a great story about people are leaving Google reviews for the vaccination sites. And they're just very sweet and very earnest. And so go read that because it's the beginning of the end is here. Basically is how I feel. And after one full year of this, the shot took 10 seconds and I was on my way. So please, if you can go get vaccinated, hopefully it opens up as wide as the president is promising. And that that website continues to work. We are tracking it very closely.

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  We will continue to hold the administration accountable for their promises, but the website exists. You just go to it. So just like go to it and see. Okay.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Big reviews this week, Dieter. Yeah, Alison reviewed the OnePlus 9. I reviewed the OnePlus 9 Pro. There's a wireless charger in the mix. There's a watch coming. OnePlus held an event where they once again did the thing where there's a person standing on a virtual stage and they're like, "Look at the phone!" And then a giant floating phone appears next to them, just like 50-foot-tall phone just floating in space on the video. It was a lot. Just look at how stunning the OnePlus 9 Pro is.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so OnePlus, you've heard us talk about OnePlus a bunch. Last year with the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro, the story was like, they're finally ready to take Samsung on head-on. They're like, they're gonna go beat Samsung. And this year, like, it's a little bit harder to tell the story because it's like, yep, they did it. They like, they're legitimately a contender to Samsung now. So now this is their next shot. So it's a bit of an iteration story. But, you know, they did a bunch of really interesting things. And the big debate for me, honestly, is like, between the 9 and the 9 Pro. We've got a million things to say about the Hasselblad partnership, but I think to me, the most interesting discussion is if you want this OnePlus phone, do you go for the 9 or the 9 Pro? You reviewed them both, but what is the big difference between the two?

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Basically, for the 9, you're losing out on a few things, but it's not too much. You don't get the very fast wireless charging. You do still get like 15-watt wireless. You don't get the brand-new image sensor in the main camera. And weirdly, you don't get optical image stabilization in that camera, which is kind of the biggest bummer. You don't get a telephoto lens, and you are not gonna get millimeter wave. But outside of that, you get a whole lot. You get the fast 120 Hz refresh rate screen. You get the Snapdragon 888 processor. You get the, you do get the ultra-wide lens, which I love. I could go on about that.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really, I mean, what struck me is you do keep all the really important things, and you save like 240 bucks if you choose the 9. So for me, it's kind of a no-brainer, but maybe I'm biased because I spent so much time with it.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Well, on that list, like you, I think like the rail is plastic too, apparently.

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, sort of aluminum. You look at that list and it's like, yep, that's the thing you would hold back if you're trying to save 240 bucks. The only thing on that list that makes me go, ah, really, is the optical image stabilization. That's the only one I'm like, yeah, that one, it feels like you were just trying to push people to upgrade to the Pro. But everything else, it's like, yeah, you made a great, you made a great phone at a great price. Here's the thing we should get into. There's no millimeter wave on the nine. I don't think that's a huge loss. Both the nine and the nine Pro are, support 5G on T-Mobile, or rather, T-Mobile supports 5G on the nine Pro. T-Mobile's selling these phones. Verizon has not certified it for 5G, which is a completely different process from getting, you know, certified for 4G or just working unlocked on 4G. And AT&T is just never gonna, or

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, just never gonna get 5G on AT&T.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  Is that bans? Is that a certification process? Is that? Okay, let me put on my like Monopoly bad guy hat.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  Let me be the voice, the voice of corporate America.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Somebody at OnePlus gave Justice League a bad review and AT&T is mad.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  No, okay, so if you are, if you're running the wireless side of AT&T, which I have to specifically call out because AT&T owns Batman.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  So you're not the Batman executive at AT&T.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:57Nilay Patel?

  You're the wireless executive at AT&T. You are terrified of churning off your customers.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:03Nilay Patel?

  Same with Verizon and T-Mobile. You're terrified that your customers are gonna churn off to another provider. You have this huge new network that you are desperately hoping is the thing that causes an upgrade cycle and a new wave of multi-year contracts and family plans.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:20Nilay Patel?

  You're like, the network is the reason you're gonna sign up for AT&T, not the iPhone, because you can get the iPhone everywhere. Why would you let somebody attach a phone to your network without locking them into a contract?

• 10:31Speaker 02

  So.

• 10:32Nilay Patel?

  I mean, apart from the fact that you're evil. Like anti- but like that's the rationale here, right? They've got the new network. The old network, you can just like plug and play, mix and match. Use an eSIM and just like push the button on your phone and connect to

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  The new network, you're like, that's my, my baby. You can't have that unless you make a deal with me.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  I guess that makes sense. So are you saying that we're, we're barreling towards a world where only Apple and Samsung are like, definitely going to be supported by all three networks and everybody else is just like, gonna have to hustle? And we're gonna go back to a world of like carrier exclusives?

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's what this feels like, right?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  But like, even Apple and Samsung, like, it's not necessarily true that any iPhone out of the box can connect to all three networks and work well.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  And it's certainly not true globally. So like, there's just that first, there's the first, like, I think, practical excuse of like, you've got a lot of bands, you've got a lot of frequencies, antenna designs haven't been locked, like, all that early part of the network stuff. And then there's, I think, just the dead ahead business consideration of if you want 5G, we want to sign you up for a 5G plan and put you on a device contract and maybe sign up your whole family and maybe get you addicted to HBO Max and then maybe just move into your house and then maybe we like tentacle our way into every other part of your home. That's, that's just my impression of AT&T in general.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess. I mean, there, there was some weirdness with, I think Verizon and like, just being supported by Verizon full stop last year. So some of this might just be OnePlus execution. But yeah, there's like, there's weirdness with provisioning on 5G. Like, you can't just like use any old SIM card, then especially on Verizon, I've had problems where like, I take a SIM card out of one phone, put it in another phone, like, oh, you're gonna screw up the 5G. I was like, why? How? I don't get it. Yeah, it's not, not great. Let me actually make the case for the OnePlus 9 Pro. You do get the faster wireless charging. The charger's 70 bucks, which is a lot for a charger. But it works, it's really clever. So they do the thing where instead of, it's 4,500 milliamps of battery, but they split it between two cells.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  And so what they can do is they can charge both of those cells independently, which basically doubles your charging rate. And so that's how they get from zero to 145 minutes. The longevity of those cells getting charged up that fast when they're like half the size is maybe something you could be worried about, but it's kind of cool. You get OIS, you just get, it's just like nicer, I guess, is how I would characterize it. It's just like you get the little telephoto, you kind of just have a, you know, the nice high resolution and it's just, it's just a little bit nicer. But I think that I would never recommend that anybody go do it unless I like can have a 20 minute conversation with them about what they like and care about and understand about a phone. Like if you go seek this phone out and you want the Pro, like good for you.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  I'm not like, it's a, it's a fine decision, but if, you know, just, hey, I want to buy a OnePlus one, what should I get? Like nine, every time.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  I'd agree with that. And I, that's kind of in my head. The difference between like the nine and the Samsung S21 is that if you're knowledgeable and you understand what you're getting into with the nine and you're really into those features like the fast wired charging, et cetera, it's going to be an awesome phone for you. But if you're sort of like clueless and you don't care too much, like the may, the Samsung S21 is just going to be like the easier, like everything just works. You get all of the 5G, you get the telephoto, you get stabilization, it's all there.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all there, including the ads and the apps. It's great.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Every time you check the weather.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  OnePlus doesn't even really have a, a big price advantage anymore, and that was their thing. They have a small price advantage. The Pro is 970 and then it's a hundred bucks more to get to 256 and then the nine is 729 is what I'm looking at here. Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's still quite a bit cheaper than the S21. So it's, you're paying less, you're getting a little bit less. It just kind of depends on you, if you're getting a good deal out of that. If those are the things you really want, then you'll get a good phone.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  My perception of Samsung prices is they launch with a price. Yeah. And then if you just wait four months, like every carrier will be like, would you like three free? Four days. Just like bam.

• 14:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like you can get like you can get a two for one Samsung deal if you just like wait patiently enough.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  So like that, the price advantage, it's like you, it just depends on the moment in time. The list price, they definitely have the advantage, but you know, I don't, I don't think OnePlus is going to discount as heavily as Samsung traditionally discounts.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  So often when we have these debates about, you know, this, this phone versus the other phone, it comes out of which one has the better camera. I think in this case, that's not quite the necessarily the right way to think about this decision because, I mean, I'll just tell you the S21, definitely the S20 Ultra, but like probably the S21 like has a better camera, at least a better camera holistic experience. But I prefer using, as long as you're not turning on and like pixel peeping the photos, I prefer using the OnePlus phones over Samsung phones, like pretty much every time.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I get that.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it just feels less Samsungy.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  And they were going in the right direction with one UI and then they're just like, they're just backsliding. But we should talk about the camera. So the Hasselblad partnership, it's a $150 million, three year deal. And the first part of that deal is tuning the colors to get that Hasselblad look. Also, I've never shot with a Hasselblad. I don't know that I could tell you, oh, I know, I know exactly what to expect out of a Hasselblad. I like, you know, I've watched, you know, other people on Verge staff use them. Like, do you get any, any of that Hasselblad essence out of this thing?

• 16:17Speaker 03

  I have no idea.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  No, I've taken like two photos with the Hasselblad and it was terrifying both times pushing the shutter. I mean, that's not really, it's funny when they start talking about the color tuning because it's not something I'm aware of as being like a big Hasselblad advantage. It's nice and I think like, I don't, I find it a kind of problematic, like natural color? Like, what does that mean? Do we really want natural color out of our phones? But regardless, I mean, they've done a nice job. I think it does a really good job with landscapes, but I wouldn't go, you know, I'm not over the moon about it. It's, it's fine.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's fine. And it's, it's right on the line of like complete bullshit that there's nothing there, right? There's, there's something there. They did, they did do some stuff, like they get a little bit of credit. It's not just a logo. But it's not like way more. We had this thing in the line of the video where I like had to like scale. I think Mark has actually put it in his video of the scale of like complete just a just a logo deal to like Hasselblad made the camera. And it's like a three, two and a half.

• 17:31Nilay Patel?

  So zero, wait, zero is a logo deal.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, zero is a logo deal.

• 17:35Nilay Patel?

  10 is Hasselblad made the camera.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:38Nilay Patel?

  And so you're saying this is like a three?

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a 2.5. I don't know. Where would you put it?

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's right about there, like a like a healthy three.

• 17:46Nilay Patel?

  That's like someone at Hasselblad saw the camera.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that's that's literally what it is. They had like their Hasselblad, you know, evangelists or whatever they are ambassadors, like check, check out the photos and give their thumbs up or thumbs down on the color science.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's promising that they're saying eventually there will be elements of Hasselblad design in the optics and the sensor. So they're they're threatening to go into like a five, six territory, but not quite.

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  The scale is just extremely real now.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. While we're on the color thing, I want to talk about the ultraviolet, but we're on the color thing. I do think it's fair to say that OnePlus is trying to develop its own look. It's like, if you took Samsung's vibrancy, turned it down a notch, and then you took the pixels tendency to make things blue, and just a little bit of the iPhone's tendency to like flatten out highlights and shadows, that's where OnePlus lives right now. And I would say that it gets into trouble more often than it should. Like, it's great for landscapes, but it will just sometimes make the blue sky just like so azure, so crazy that it like, like veers into purple. So sometimes it just, it just, it's aiming to do something, and it just like overshoots

• 19:02Speaker 02

  the mark. It does the same thing with sharpening a bunch. But like, if you're not opening it up on a desktop and like, you know, going to 100% on the pixels, a lot of the times you won't notice it. But like that, some of that, those color misses, like you're gonna see it, because you know, color you can see on any screen.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, Alison, I'm curious because you, your background is camera reviewing. Like you came to us from DP review. You were at a different camera review site before that. Now we have you doing phone reviews. I think that makes a lot of sense because almost all we talk about in our phone reviews is cameras. Like Dieter and I have had this debate for years. We've had it with our audience for years. Where do you measure the quality of the photo? Is it on the screen of the device itself? Or is it off in the world? Because my instinct is off in the world. That is not everyone else's instinct by far. But I think like you, you need to take all the photos off the cameras and then look at them on a, on a neutral screen because then you can actually compare them. And then the, the very good counter argument, which I completely buy, I just, just not me,

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  is well, you're only going to ever look at them on the, on the phones themselves. So the only place to really measure the quality is like on a phone screen. Because 99% of people will never take that photo to another screen.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's so easy to lose track of that, especially when you're looking for the differences. Like the, the differences between a camera on, you know, any modern flagship is kind of in those details. Aside from like big color differences, like you mentioned, Dieter. So as reviewers, you go, we go in and we're looking for those things and we're trying to see what they're doing and who has an edge where. But you do have to kind of step back and be like, hold on, I'm looking at this at a hundred percent. I've been poring over this image for five minutes. Someone's going to look at it for two seconds on their phone and like scroll by.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, you do always have to keep in mind that like the bar for the consumer and that it's probably different from what we're looking at.

• 21:08Nilay Patel?

  I just feel like for the longest time, our criticism of OnePlus phones was the camera isn't any good.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  And then they, you know, they signed a deal, they got, they got a 2.5 brand deal out of it with Hasselblad. And now we're like, I said this around the iPhone review time too. It's like all the flagships basically look the same. Like the idea that they have looks has all but faded away. Like three years ago, they all had looks and like what OnePlus is selling here is Hasselblad has a look and we're going to get you that look. And like, maybe they're inching towards it. But I, I just like, is more and more parts of the phone have like collapsed than we've ended up with. We're going to really look at the cameras. Cause that was the place where in particular, Apple and Google were so far ahead. Even that is flattening out, right?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and one thing that kind of struck us in our conversation with OnePlus was just asking them about the computational photography aspects of what the camera's doing and, you know, Google and Apple spend so much time every year on what they're doing differently with, you know, multi-frame capture and tiling and all this. And it wasn't really a big focus for OnePlus, which is not to say that they aren't doing it or they aren't innovating on it. It was just kind of a striking difference between, you know, they've really gone in on this Hasselblad brand and kind of getting people to think about that with their cameras

• 22:31Speaker 03

  as opposed to doing all the computational stuff. And I don't know, it's interesting.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  Are they doing the computational stuff?

• 22:40Speaker 03

  I believe so. I mean, we didn't get into it this round. Dieter, you've had many more briefings with OnePlus than I have.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they are, but they, like Alison said, they can't just talk your ear off about it. It's sort of like, other companies will happily give you like literally the camera engineer or like one step away from the camera engineer. OnePlus doesn't do that quite as much. So you're left to guess a little bit more about what the, you know, the actual behavior of the camera is behind the scenes. On the whole, I prefer these two, the Samsung phones, but I think Alison's right that like for most people, the Samsung phones are probably like an easier bet because you're just like, you're more guaranteed to get the whole package. But the thing that shocked me going into this review and this like completely informed my angle for writing it, is I was like, you know, I should check on OnePlus's market

• 23:30Speaker 02

  share. And it's just like nothing. They got nothing. Zippo in the US. They're worse than the Pixel. If you're not beating the Pixel, you got problems. So this is definitely still like, OnePlus is trying to not be a phone for enthusiasts and like their brand has definitely moved in that direction. And like, any normal person could go get a OnePlus and feel good about that phone. It's not just for enthusiasts anymore, but it's just for enthusiasts. Like, that's who's buying it.

• 23:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, I mean, the phone market right now is, you know, there's all these rumors that LG is going to sell its phone division.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Yep. They're also doing better than OnePlus in terms of US sales.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's just not great. Yeah, that's just the US. Like OnePlus has a huge market outside the US. LG is like at the point where they're like... Well, we're not Samsung. We might as well focus on washing machines. Like, we've got a better washing machine business. Let's just turn our attention to refrigerators. This one costs $5,000 and makes ice in a circle.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's their engineering attention, and they're just never gonna win in phones. That's really, to me, the big question is Sony has all but dropped out. We're kind of like waiting for the other shoe to drop with Google. It just feels like every year that, you know, we'll get a Google executive to tell us that they're really committed to the Pixel, and then it turns out they're not. It's like, I don't know. I don't know how else to describe that repeated interaction. OnePlus is trying, but they have nothing. Samsung sales, I'm just looking, strategy analytics, S21 tripled sales the S20.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:57Nilay Patel?

  Because of the immediate price cuts. And so we're just kind of back in this like Apple and Samsung race.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  And it kind of feels like that the race is between iOS and Android. And then the Android market has just flattened itself into Samsung.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much, in the US, anyway. There's, other markets are completely different. India is a completely different market, of course, there's China. Even like South America. Kim Lyons actually had a really good story today that Motorola has localized the languages in the phone for a couple of indigenous languages that are at risk of going away, which is really cool, and Motorola is actually really strong in Latin America. There's differences in other markets, but yeah, in the US, like, it's Samsung and Apple. And it's like, but that's what it is. Actually, we should talk about the 9R, Alison, because that, speaking of India, is like gonna be potentially an interesting deal.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, wasn't part of the big unveil of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Plus, but the 9R is going on sale in India only for now. The price equates to like 550 bucks US dollars. And it's another case of like, you still get a whole lot. There's 6.5 inch display with 120 Hz refresh rate, like the OnePlus 9. There's a step-down processor, but you're still getting an 870 Snapdragon chipset. And then you don't get, you don't get the Hasselblad branding on the camera.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  But you get the main camera from the 8T last year, which was pretty good.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  And you do get optical image stabilization on that one. So there you go.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  What the hell? That makes no sense. Is that just a different? It's like the hassle a lot of people were like, we're not paying attention and they just like snuck it in the door. Super weird, right?

• 26:51Speaker 03

  It's so confusing. I don't know. So yeah, there's a couple of things like you don't get quite the fastest wired charging. There's no wireless charging. You know, you don't get the fancy new ultra wide camera. But yeah, it's potentially, it, it looks like a pretty smart set of trade offs to get like a meaningfully lower price. So it'll be interesting to see if it makes it over this way. We didn't get the Nord last year. You know, there's a big, big gap between the N10 5G, which is in the, the $300 kind of category. And the, you know, the nine and the nine pro. So this could fit in there pretty easily.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Then there's the watch, the OnePlus watch. It's 159 bucks. I will just tell you, the Vergecast listener, between us friends, I asked what the operating system was. And all we know is that it's an RTOS. It's a real time operating system. Oh, my God. That's what we know, which means it's not WearOS, which is generally thought of as a positive.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  It looks like the spitting image of one of the round Oppo watches. Yeah. And I'm sure it's basically running the same operating system. So it's kind of like a Fitbit operating system. It should last about two weeks. It's got a bunch of like, it's got a blood oxygen sensor and a step counter and GPS and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of which are going to be like in OnePlus's health app. I don't know if it'll connect to Google Fit yet or not. I'm think, I think it'll be fine, but you should not expect third party app support. You should not expect an ecosystem around it. I'm glad it only costs 160 bucks because that is, right now, like unless you really, really, really want it. Spending more than 200 bucks on a smart watch for Android is rough, right? It looks nice. Yeah, it looks fine. I'll give it that.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  I mean, it's fully an appliance, like it's, it, think of it as an appliance. Like you don't care, hopefully, what operating system your washing machine runs. If it has an operating system, right? It might, some of them do. You don't really care what operating system you're like. You know, Echo has, not really.

• 29:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  So think of it like that. It's gonna do some stuff, but it's gonna do the stuff that it does when you open the box and set it up for the first time and never anything more than that stuff.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I just, you know, the entire watch market is like, because no watchmaker can adequately address the iOS consumer base. They can't, I mean, like overwhelmingly, like, rich people have iPhones. Like, that's just, like, you can feel about that however you want. There are many ways to feel about that, but it is just true that that is how the market is split. So if you can't spend the money to make the most expensive thing, because that market for you, like, people with a lot of money to spend who don't have iPhones is just a smaller number of people.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  So like, making that product for them, like, it's just like, not a good idea. You, what you want is to make a product that people with iPhones can buy, because then you can make the most expensive one and like, get that virtuous cycle of innovation. And it, as long as Apple just sort of like, doesn't admit or doesn't deny that they're keeping other people from making watches that work well with iPhones, like, they don't say anything about it, but like, you can't get rich notifications and respond to texts from a watch if you have an iPhone, when they're, like, they, they have limited the connectivity. I think it's always gonna be stuff like this OnePlus watch. Like, there just isn't a market for the high-end watch that connects to an Android phone.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  Because so much of the phone ownership, like, so many phone owners who would otherwise buy it are just funneled towards an Apple Watch.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, I'll buy that, but like, this watch, even like the, you know, the Fitbit, the Versus of the world, running a lighter weight operating system, like, can be very good. They survive the three-second rule, or the two-second rule, I think it is, or, no, I call it the three-second rule, like, no operation on your watch should take more than three seconds.

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Right? Because if it does, you're done. But since Google put all its money in slow-ass Wear OS, and all its effort there, and we don't know what they're doing right now, you know, with Fitbit, like, there's no, there's no sense of anybody being able to build that ecosystem, other than Samsung with Tizen, but like, try and get a, get a good map app on the Tizen smartwatches. I have, and you can't.

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  And even just like, what are the two things that we know people buy watches for? It's notifications and health stuff.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 31:25Nilay Patel?

  And like, you know, Tim Cook is out there saying Apple's biggest contribution to the world will be health stuff. Like, that is his thesis for his tenure at Apple and even generationally what Apple will do for the world. I don't know how the Apple TV fits into that, but I'm confident they're working on it.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  You can use Apple Fitness on the Apple TV. Like, it asks you, you know, which person ties to the Apple Watch?

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  You need a lot of mental and physical dexterity to use the remote?

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 31:48Nilay Patel?

  That's, it's like a puzzle every time. But anyway, but he's saying, like, that's his thing. He's building the sensors into the watch. I know it doesn't work with, what was the thing you were complaining about? Ant Plus with your bicycle?

• 31:59Speaker 02

  That's true. That's true.

• 32:00Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Like, they're building a second proprietary wireless protocol called, you know, Gymkit next to the, like, they're doing stuff around the watch that makes it a little computer. And everyone else is kind of like stuck in limbo.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  I think this watch is just a really good example of how far the two paths have diverged.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  Like, Apple is like multiple, multiple steps ahead. And OnePlus is like, it's 159 bucks. It's, it's very pretty. We won't tell you what operating system it runs. And on our chart of features, we're going to list that, we're going to list the pixel density. Because that's what we got. Like, we got to fill in the square. Like, what else do we got? But, you know, good try for them. All right, we got to take a break. Alison, thank you so much for joining us.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  The video's up. Real collab effort coast to coast, Dieter and Alison. Go watch the video, read the reviews. We got some gadgets to talk about. The McKenna is going to join us. We'll be right back.

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• 33:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Kind of big gadget news, like big tech news.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  Of the kind we didn't really get before. I feel like in the, in the four years of Trump, like stuff like this just like fell by the wayside.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  But it was nice to see, like, Intel had a big analyst event, new CEO, big new plan, and like, there was just enough slack in the tech news ecosystem that everyone could pay attention to it.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, and be like, oh, wow, I should actually think about this for a minute.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  So Intel's doing a lot of the right things. They are gonna build more factories, they're going to set up a business to sell their chips to other companies, which is important because they're also gonna allow other companies to like make system on packages of, with their x86 chips. So they'll be, they're gonna have more customers that are able to do more interesting things with their core chips. And they're also going to, in addition to all of that, start outsourcing the manufacturer of some of the stuff they want to make so that they can just leverage how far ahead of them TSMC is, basically. So Intel's big problems were they couldn't get down to five nanometers or even seven.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  And, you know, that, that meant that they were behind ARM and behind, you know, Apple stuff for the desktop. And like, just like, everything kind of rolls out from there. And so they have this multi-pronged effort to like, set themselves up to actually participate in the modern

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Economy of devices and computers in a way that they kind of haven't been, right? They had the modem business and then they're making chips and then the chips refer desktops and PCs. And then, you know, servers and slowly but surely. The way that computers are just made, you know, the way that things are customized on the on the chip. The way that things are packaged, the, you know, ARM versus x86 slowly but surely. Things modernized in a way that they just could not produce for. And it's not just about the nanometers, it's about all of it. And so they're trying to say they've got it, they know what to do now.

• 36:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would, I mean, I would take, yeah, who knows, right?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was a long pause there, which Andrew may or may not cut out, but it was me shrugging, saying, can they execute on all of this stuff?

• 36:12Nilay Patel?

  I think the more important thing is like, this isn't Intel pivoting. It's Intel got rid of a CEO, hired a CEO that had been at Intel for many years, had left. He's come back, I'm going to say this, this is, you should watch the presentation. This is not what he, Pat Gelsinger's new CEO, his whole vibe is like the returning warrior. Right? Like, that's what he's saying. He's like, I'm back to fix it.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 36:40Nilay Patel?

  But if you watch the video, like, he's very nerdy and earnest. So it's not like a super aggressive vibe, it's just a very confident, I know what to do. And to your point, Dieter, he said over and over and over again, what we have to do is execute. And we have to go back to the like Intel standards. He had this one line that has just really stuck with me, mostly because I, on the other podcast, I just talked to a lot of executives. And so like, I'm always on the, I'm always attuned to like the catchphrases of companies because you just hear them, they come out. And he's like, we got to go back to when we say we're going to do X, we deliver 1.1X.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, out to the world, that means nothing. Right? Like, what does that mean? I am confident inside of Intel, like, they're always saying that.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:25Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 37:25Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 37:25Nilay Patel?

  That's like the corporate culture reboot of the new CEO. And the like, lack of, you know, not invented here pride, like, they are spinning out a chip manufacturing business where they're going to make ARM chips. And they're going to let other companies do stuff. They're going to make x86 chips at TSMC on their seven nanometer process. Like, he's like, all this preciousness is gone and we're just going to compete.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Can they do it?

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. You know, we didn't really talk about the ads that the Intel ads that they just made where they went up against Apple. We didn't talk about them enough.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:01Nilay Patel?

  They made them, they're silly. Justin Long is silly. Like, that part of it is silly. And as I watched this presentation, I realized, oh, they made those ads for the people who worked at Intel.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 38:12Nilay Patel?

  They didn't make them for regular consumers. They made it to just like rah rah the team.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  And I wonder how effective that is, but it's always interesting to think about who the audience for that stuff is. Because if you're Intel, all you've heard about is how Apple kicked your ass for like a year.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Well, that's all they've heard. There's also like the context of who is buying Intel chips. And it's, you know, it's from a consumer front, it's like down to like laptops and some desktops, right? Really, if you think about it. But they sell a bunch to cloud service providers, right? But can they get back on Android? They tried that for a hot minute. Can they get into other smaller devices? Can they get into any number of other things that they just haven't been doing? So they, they need to like, make everybody feel good about what they're good at on PCs. And they need to like, maintain that as long as they can, while they start diversifying into all this other stuff.

• 39:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think the real question is, all that other stuff, it's probably still not mobile, which is the big market. But we just talked about, in the United States, there's only two companies in mobile, really.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  So to run a phone, you just need a constellation of data centers. That is the reality of your phone. Like, yep, there's a chip in your phone, that chip's really important. Apple's very good at making those chips. Qualcomm's very good at making those chips. Intel is not so good at making those chips.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:33Nilay Patel?

  At all. They literally are just, they don't even do it because they're bad at it. But everything your phone connects to you is run off a data center, which is full at this point. There's a little bit of a transition going on. But right now, it's the most part, it's full. The data centers are full of Intel chips.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like, that, that transition is actually the scary thing. Because as like, there's experiments with doing some ARM stuff on those big servers. A lot of companies like, oh shit, this is great. There's like, stuff that we can do and stuff that we can customize. Ben Thompson made this point in Stratechery. It's one of his free newsletters. You should go look at it. Where When you buy an Intel chip, you're buying like a bunch of stuff that like your server doesn't need, right? And so you could like not, if you could customize the thing to not include that stuff and make the stuff you do care about better, you're gonna do that. And it's easier to do that on ARM right now than it is with Intel. And that's the thing that they need to fix really fast.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, again, the question comes down to how fast can they execute? How fast can they spin up their foundry business? How much, you know, demand can they pick up? Can they, can they pull it off? And the things that work in their favor, which, you know, we're about to have McKenna on to like get into the weeds of like social media moderation policy. There's another gigantic policy problem in this country, which is like most of the chips are manufactured elsewhere.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:52Nilay Patel?

  There's a microchip shortage in the world right now. I think we mentioned this last week or the week before, but like GM is just manufacturing pickup trucks without a fuel economy chip in them. So they're getting one mile per gallon less than the pickups with the chip. And they're just like, screw it. Like, we're not gonna not make pickup trucks. We're shitty. It's like, it's all we're here to do. We're just gonna make it without the chip. Game consoles, massive shortages, because there's just not enough chip production capability. So Intel's saying, look, we have chip production capability. We can pick up some of this demand that's not way on the bleeding edge. We could, we'll make other people's designs, we'll ship our designs to other foundries. And by the way, United States and EU governments, we're not in China or a Chinese company.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're gonna make, we're gonna put our factories in your countries.

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, I think that element of it, again, over the 10 years The Verge existed, like, we haven't really talked about the geopolitics of chip manufacturing that much. And I feel like over the next, over the run of Pat Gelsinger's tenure as Intel CEO, we're gonna end up talking about geopolitics of chip manufacturing a lot.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Yep. But we're still gonna talk about monopoly, because can, but honestly, because can Intel, because things are moving on, like Qualcomm phone chips are made differently now than they were when Intel was trying, right? Can Intel build up the capabilities to make those kinds of chips? You know, can they catch up faster than everybody else is running ahead? You know what I mean? Because I would love for that to happen because I would love to see some real genuine competition for Qualcomm on the high end. I really would. It would be nice to have some good ARM Windows laptops. That would be great. We have seen what happens with the Mac when it moved to ARM and it just hasn't happened yet for Windows. And I would love that. I would love for Intel to like, drive that. I don't know if they're gonna be able to get there in time.

• 42:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, in time is like a really, what's the deadline?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Nah, deadline is Qualcomm figuring it out. They got all the time in the world.

• 42:49Nilay Patel?

  It's like, that's your deadline? Like, your deadline is the Surface Pro or whatever? Pro X? Like that, if you're Intel and you're like, oh, we gotta, we gotta figure this out before the Surface Pro X is great. Like, whoo, pressure's off. I think their real deadline is ARM in data centers. But that is an entirely different topic. Anyway, we are trying very hard to get Pat Gelsinger on Decoder. If you're at Intel, slack him. Just let him know. Don't do that. Please don't do that. Please do it on our S R C A to get, we are going through official channels. But yeah, if you see him in the hallway, just ask him when he's coming on Decoder. But I'm excited to talk to him soon. All right, couple other pieces of tech news. I really just want to read this quote to you, Dieter. So there's a long running lawsuit against Apple and for

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  the butterfly keyboard, class action, product liability suit.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so for listeners, if you don't know, we see class action lawsuits basically every day and we don't write about them because they happen every day. It's just a thing that happens. It's part of like, the substrate of the economy. But once they get official class action status from a judge, and then the company actually has to deal with it, and there starts being things like discovery, whatever, that's when it's worth starting to pay attention. And so that's what happened here.

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  Yes, so there's the lawsuit filed against Apple saying the butterfly keyboard, which Apple has since replaced this past year, across the entire line, back to the old kind, the switches. But the four-year experiment in butterfly keyboards resulted in this class action lawsuit saying the keyboards are defective. They argued about who should be in the class. The class got certified. Part of the arguing was some discovery that happened at Apple, and I just want to read you this quote. It's redacted, but it's from an Apple executive talking about their attempts to fix the butterfly keyboard.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:33Nilay Patel?

  No matter how much lipstick you try to put on this pig, it's still ugly. And that, to me, is like,

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Man.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  We spent years saying, hey, these keyboards are bad. And they're like, we think they're good. We fixed it. It's all better now. And they knew, right? And like, that, that is, it's just that little peel back of Apple sometimes that is so revealing.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  I feel like when we would ask Apple about this, they'd be like, customers love this keyboard.

• 44:58Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  And it's like, but, but we, I guess we never asked if you love this keyboard because customers love, if they say customers love them, they're not saying we love them, if you think about it.

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, we were very clear that we, Walt Moss was very clear that he didn't love these keyboards. Joanna Casey Johnston, like, many people, it's funny, Addie wrote this story and she was like, the irony of me, right? Because she still has a butterfly keyboard. And she's like, the irony of me writing this story with double vowels is like very high. I think it comes through. So just go read that story. You can like feel Addie is like, I hate this keyboard. Last little bit of gadget news, Dieter, you read about this startup called Spatial?

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:36Nilay Patel?

  Which I am utterly fascinated by.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Okay, so this was my very first in-person demo since my last tech event, which was the Samsung Galaxy S20 in March of 2020, or February, maybe, of 2020. And I wasn't gonna go, because like, an in-person demo, ah, but I was intrigued because I didn't understand what they were doing. I needed them to explain it to me. And I kind of thought I need to experience, experience it because it's an audio thing. But I was also intrigued because this company's actually kind of got a murderer's row of people on it. It's got a former Disney Imagineer, it's got a former Nest engineer, who also was at Mozilla, it's got a former engineer from Apple who worked on a bunch of Apple audio products. It has,

• 46:20Speaker 02

  and this is near and dear to my heart, a former product manager for Handspring Trio. Put that out there. So like, a bunch of people that have made a bunch of really good stuff, right? So. The product is called, the company's called Spatial. And the idea is they, they want to make ambient audio. And so it's some combination of, they can position sounds in space around you, which is not a big deal. But they can do it with this abstraction layer that runs in real time, that can just interpret the sounds to any arbitrary number of speakers. So you don't need custom speakers for this thing, or even custom placement. They just try and figure out the best way to position the audio based on where you tell the speakers are. And then the actual audio that you're hearing

• 47:04Speaker 02

  isn't like the corny track you hear at a zoo. They have you set up basically a game engine for audio. So you have birds and rain and, you know, the wind rustling through the trees and a creek over there and the input from a Sonos stream and a microphone by the ocean over there and a dragon and all this stuff. And then all of those audio objects, there's literally a display where you look at them like, like in 3D space. And you like click on each object and like, this is a bird. And the bird likes to fly at like this time of day. But it's, there's a little bit of entropy there. There's a little bit of chaos there, so it does different things. When this bird is near a similar bird, it's going to chirp. But if it's all alone, it'll just fly around.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  When the dragon comes, all birds are afraid of dragons. So they're going to shut the hell up until the dragon goes away. When there's rain, the birds quiet down and the frogs get louder. So like you just program in the behavior to all of these little individual audio objects. And the end result of all of this technology is kick ass muzak?

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Or it's like a cool theme park area, you know? Like you go to, you go to Disney World and like the Pirates of the Caribbean line is full of really interesting audio that's not on a track, that's not on a loop, that interacts with itself and interacts with you as you like, you know, trudge through the line.

• 48:28Nilay Patel?

  You've got the, I'm reading your piece and you've got this line, it's like, whoever the customers end up being, it won't be an easy sell. And it's like, yeah, I get it. I would connect this to, like, we have talked about Atmos so much. Like Atmos is object oriented sound. And like you can have generative, object oriented sound. Like if you play it, if you play a video game and it has an Atmos soundtrack, that's what's happening. Like it's just dynamically generating an Atmos soundtrack and things are flying around you. What it doesn't do is close the loop with the speakers. So with Atmos, like, it doesn't quite know what's happening in your room. It tells you where to put the speakers and you can do some like reference EQ tuning, like every receiver can do that.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Oh, so actually, neither does Spatial. They don't know what's going on in real time in the room. If you put a sensor in and it can like see you, it can do stuff. But they're not bothering to tune the sound actively to the room minute to minute. In fact, when I asked if they were doing this, they said, that's a science experiment. You tune it to the room once and then you're done.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, you have to tell, you have to tell it where your speakers are.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to tell, I have these speakers in these rooms and my walls are made of glass and blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 49:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's more information than like your average Atmos receiver has. It's even more information than like this, the Sonos arc, the big one has. Where you saw, where you stuff like wave your phone around while it chirps at you.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 49:44Nilay Patel?

  This is like, it knows what your room is because you told it, right? It's not going to do some auto sensing science experiment, sure, but you've told it where your speakers generally are, what your room is made out of. And then it's like generating a sound, like that's closing the loop in a real way. That to me is like fascinating, right? Because it can mean like, maybe you can accomplish this with fewer speakers. Maybe you could.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Cheaper speakers.

• 50:06Nilay Patel?

  Cheaper speakers.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  The speakers that you've already got installed in your museum lobby or whatever.

• 50:12Nilay Patel?

  That's a great market.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Honestly, like, who is the market for this? And like, deep down, I kind of like, the market for this is Disney is going to acquire us so that they can make, it'll be easier for them to design their theme parks.

• 50:21Nilay Patel?

  Or the market for it is like Dolby will acquire them or.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  Right, or one of the video game companies. Like, you can, I can just see like that, we've spent a lot of time talking about Atmos. I think Atmos is great. Most people don't even have it yet, so I'm way ahead of the curve here. But, once you have it, you're like, oh, I can see how this could get better for all these other kinds of audio situations that I'm in. Right, so right now, it's like, I'm going to watch Justice League. I'm going to spend the next four hours of my life, four hours and two minutes. In grayscale, because I watched grayscale one this weekend. In this like, generated audio environment because I've had Atmos set up. Then I'm going to turn it off and I'm going to go upstairs and listen to music. And my one Sono speaker in the kitchen is going to do it. And it's not going to know about any other, other speakers in my house. And like, I'm actually not creating an audio environment.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm just like, there's some music coming out of the corner. You can like link that all together. So there's one system that knows about all the speakers in your house and it's like, doing something cool. Yeah, I could be, I could get down with that. I don't know about the birds and the dragons.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Well, you know, whatever. I mean, the, they, they took us to the engineer's house. So like, we walked through his backyard. Uh, and there was this one moment where I like walked under his deck and they like had cave sounds and like bat sounds in there. Um, and they were really good at like tuning the audio such that you couldn't hear it out like just a foot away, but you could hear it in the, under, when you're under the deck. And we just pointed at the speakers and they were like standard shitty outdoor speakers. They just like were careful about where they pointed them and they were careful, you know, about how they programmed it in. So that when you walked in there, you heard the cave and then when you walked out, you just heard the creek that was down the way.

• 51:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think one of the big questions, AR and VR are coming, they're coming around us, like a lot of our generated experiences are very personal. Like you have to be wearing the glasses. Two people need to be alone together in VR.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:11Nilay Patel?

  These kinds of things are like, these are shared experiences.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So imagine launching a company that demands a shared experience in a pandemic. That, that seems like not great.

• 52:21Nilay Patel?

  It's beginning of the end, Eater.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  All right. I love weird new startups. I'm glad, we haven't talked about a weird new startup with a crazy idea on our chest in a year, so I was just excited to talk about it. We're gonna take a break. McKenna is gonna join us. This hearing is still going and Jack Dorsey is openly trolling Congress on Twitter while testifying. A lot going on. We'll be right back.

• 52:43Speaker 04

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• 53:28Speaker 05

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• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  We're back. McKenna Kelly is here. Hey, McKenna.

• 54:01Speaker 06

  Hey.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  So we have pulled you away from a hearing. I'm just going to read the name of the hearing. The hearing is Disinformation Nation: Social Media's Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation. That's the, that's the name of a bad Netflix documentary, not a congressional hearing.

• 54:19Speaker 06

  A bad Netflix documentary has been brought up in like every hearing so far. So I think that's an okay, you know, reference to me.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're, they're spicing up the titles here, but it's Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai in front of the House of Representatives. Which, which committee is it, McKenna?

• 54:35Speaker 06

  Energy and Commerce.

• 54:37Nilay Patel?

  I watched part of this hearing. It's still going on. It's like four hours of this hearing. I watched part of it earlier. You were watching it. You're going to go back to watching it and write it up with whole report. Addie's watching it. It's pretty embarrassing so far.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's one of those where everyone's airing their own personal grievances with Facebook and Twitter and Google again.

• 54:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're just yelling yes or no questions at the CEOs of these three massive companies. The CEOs, I would say, are having three distinct kinds of reactions. So Sundar, as always, Sundar, very patient, very kind, very much not answering the questions. That's his entire vibe with these. Zuckerberg is trying to conduct some sort of like college freshman intro to moderation class. That's like usually his thing. And then Jack Dorsey is just trolling them by checking his phone during, is that your phone? Sorry, I apologize. And Jack Dorsey is just trolling them by tweeting during the hearing.

• 55:37Speaker 06

  Right. He had a Twitter poll go up. So it basically had gone around. Everyone's like, wow, so many yes or no questions. It's kind of become a hearing meme in our niche little tech policy circle on twitter.com. So now Dorsey went on, just tweeted a question mark with a poll, yes or no. And just a couple of minutes ago, one representative finally brought it up and told him he's really good at multitasking.

• 56:02Nilay Patel?

  Wow. That man. Is he unhappy about it? It's like, how do you even?

• 56:08Speaker 06

  I wish I could show you the face he made. I screenshotted it. But it was kind, it was like a little bit of a smirk. Like, he didn't seem, you know, he didn't seem too troubled by the fact that she caught him, that the principal was telling him to turn off his phone in class.

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  So the underlying policy issue of this hearing, which, again, we've had a couple of pretty good hearings recently. And then this one is just, for some reason, a mess again. But the underlying policy issue is 230. They, all three CEOs have been asked if they would support 230 reforms. Zuckerberg actually proposed, in his, you know, opening statement, a reform. What was that reform?

• 56:47Speaker 06

  He is like, yeah, totally. Do a little bit of like tweaking to section 230. Give somebody the ability to make sure that we're moderating the way you guys want us to. And we'll have like some third party enforcer who maybe would be the FTC, maybe would be like a self regulatory body. Like, he wasn't very clear in that at all. But he's open to some changes. Of course, those changes are very minor. And really, which is Facebook, it's stuff Facebook is already doing. So they're happy to have that encoded in law.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I thought that the lawmakers are playing this game now where they keep asking the CEOs to respond to one another. And then just like, at one point, they just asked Zuckerberg what he thought of YouTube.

• 57:27Speaker 06

  Why?

• 57:28Nilay Patel?

  Which is just a great question. He was like, what do I think of YouTube?

• 57:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's very silly. The thing that I've really noticed the most in this hearing is just how unorganized it is. I mean, every lawmaker has their five minutes to ask the questions that they want. But like we talked about earlier, like, there is no narrative here. Like, what are we getting at? You know, what is it that they want? And it's hard to pull any kind of like, straight narrative together at all about this. And at some point, you know, we think about the hearings in the past, and kind of what I'm writing about right now is that hearings do have some kind of self regulatory effect. If you get a lawmaker in front of Jack Dorsey, or in front of someone, and they say something that's, you know, really important, and it can instruct what they do, what the companies do on their own.

• 58:13Speaker 06

  But the fact that Dorsey is doing these like, silly polls, and Mark Zuckerberg has gotten so good at this hearing format of dodging questions and doing things like that, at what point do we get to that the hearings do nothing?

• 58:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 06

  But introducing bills that likely will go nowhere. You know, we used to have things where the Honest Ads Act by Senator Amy Klobuchar, that got Facebook and Google to have their own transparency, ads transparency database. We're not seeing that anymore. We're getting to the point where you need to legislate, or they're not going to do any self regulation at all.

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  The different, I'll compare it to, last year, we covered a lot of the competition hearings, right?

• 58:51Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  In the House, N H R S Subcommittee. And like, we saw immediate effects from that, in the way that you're describing, right? Like, Apple started opening up, it's like, going to allow different default apps. Like, we've just seen the push and pull of, oh, man, they're looking at us, we've got to change our behavior and maybe escape some of this scrutiny. Facebook notably responded by pulling all of its companies closer together, and like, firing some CEOs. Everybody responds. Here, but like, in that committee, even the Democrats and Republicans, they absolutely do not agree on the solutions. They definitely agree on the problems. Even if the problem is as simple as, we think these companies are bad, and they don't have enough competition. So then, like, they were asking questions about the problem, without grandstanding about the solutions, because they might not disagree.

• 59:37Nilay Patel?

  Here, I'm not sure that Republicans and Democrats agree on the problem of misinformation on social networks. And I don't mean that in the like, one of the parties is evil way. I mean, literally, the question of should they moderate more or less is up for debate.

• 59:52Speaker 06

  When we talked about the anti-just hearing last year, what we kind of talked about was that, well, everyone agrees that these companies have so much power. Here we go. How can we get enforcers in better fighting shape to take on these companies, right? That was agreed upon between Republicans and Democrats at House Judiciary. Now, we're in a free speech issue, right? We're in a First Amendment issue, and that is extremely divisive, and that is extremely difficult to legislate around. When you look at Democrats, the whole hearing today is about misinformation. They want things to be taken down. They want things that are algorithmically, you know, promoted when it comes to like, extreme emotions, extremism, things like that. They want that stuff tampered down. But then you look at the Republicans, and they're like, well, I'm being censored online. Don't, don't, no, don't moderate anything. And it's hard

• 1:00:37Speaker 06

  to come, when it's a free speech issue like this, when it's a Section 230 issue like this, where is the common ground? And I think that's the bridge that needs to be crossed, that may not be able to cross at all between these two, in order to get some kind of narrative and some kind of forward momentum moving towards reform.

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm looking at Zuckerberg's 230, his proposal, right, which is, it boils down to, if you're a big platform, you should be more transparent, and you should only get the protection of 230 if you show that you have some moderation capability. And what I was saying earlier, they asked Jack Dorsey to respond to that, and he was like, that sounds good. I don't know how you define what a big or small company is. And that might have been the most substantive exchange that happened during this whole thing. Because that's a really good question, how you define what is a big platform, what is a small one. But I look at that, and it's like, well, when this third-party enforcer you're talking about, like, who is it? Who is on it? Who staffs it? How often do they come by and check? Right? Because

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  right now, the process, the way 230 works, is you're mad at Twitter for a tweet, you go and sue Twitter, you're in the lawsuit, Twitter files a motion to dismiss, saying, "We cannot be held liable for this," citing 230 in the body of case law, and you're done, you walk away. You sue Twitter for a tweet, does Twitter have to like, Go to someone's office and be like, look at our moderation system and here's our scale. Like, we'd like our get out of jail free card now. All of that is, that's the stuff that big companies are good at doing. It's not the stuff that small companies are good at doing, and that's just compliance cost. And also, it's like, when do you do it? And I look at him like, I'm pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg is actually proposing getting rid of 230 here.

• 1:02:18Nilay Patel?

  Like, at the end of, at the end of that complicated road, he's saying, for every lawsuit, I'm gonna like, get a punch card and show it to you. And so the default is that it's gone.

• 1:02:29Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  And then Zuckerberg's in a great position because Facebook can pay whatever it costs.

• 1:02:33Speaker 06

  It's renewing your 230 license.

• 1:02:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Speaker 06

  Maybe like every quarter or something.

• 1:02:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and it's like, that's not what you want, right? Like, what you want is better moderation that is more fair. And I just, I haven't heard that from any of these, from any members of Congress in this hearing. It's mostly like, do you agree that hate speech is bad? Yes or no? And they're like, yes, also, we moderate 1 billion pieces of content a day and something's gonna get through.

• 1:03:01Nilay Patel?

  How do you think that, um, one of the big questions coming into this hearing in particular, was the insurrection at the Capitol and how these platforms might have contributed to it? It might have been planned on it. How has that conversation gone?

• 1:03:13Speaker 06

  Right, so I think one of the better moments in the hearing having to do with the insurrection, I forget who asked the question, but Mark Zuckerberg was asked to take responsibility for at least some of what happened at the Capitol. And he, of course, dodged, and he placed more of that blame on Trump. Uh, it was Trump who did this. It was the Republicans who did this. You know, of, of course, like, not taking responsibility and being, we're the platform, right? Of where these people posted to do this violence. So I, I think it really is just kind of positioning right now. And it's so sad, but the thing that caused this hearing to happen, in a front to democracy months ago, is not being really addressed at all. It's all these personal things, like, um, something that Marjorie Taylor Greene posted, or something that somebody else posted.

• 1:03:58Speaker 06

  Why did you take this down? I wish that the organizers of this hearing took some time to maybe like counsel some more, to counsel more with other lawmakers and build a narrative on what happened at the Capitol. We saw such good storytelling at Trump's impeachment trial about, all that work has been done.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Speaker 06

  Um, such good stuff being done in his impeachment trial to tell that story. Why couldn't we do that here? Of course, that's just not happening.

• 1:04:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and maybe that's just not particularly the House of Representatives. I noted earlier, you mentioned, like, as we were talking about the hearing, like, members of Congress are just up for reelection more often than senators. And so they're just motivated to grandstand to get the Twitter clip to run in the ads for the next election, which is coming up very soon. And that part of it, where the members of Congress are themselves like very online posters, like, it waxes and wanes, but this feels like a maximum moment of like, oh, we're just pure posters.

• 1:04:57Speaker 06

  Right. No, I think you're 100% right. It does come down to having, what are your constituents telling you? And then advocating for that, which oftentimes the issues vary, state by state, issue community by community, you're not going to get any consensus, and that makes it very, very difficult to legislate.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  Have you seen any difference in how these companies are generally reacting to the government since the change in the administration?

• 1:05:22Speaker 06

  So, of course, like, Amazon isn't testifying today, right? But Amazon, at the beginning of the Biden administration, was like, hey, we'll help, you know, pass out vaccines, we'll help do all this stuff. Of course, that's not a moderation issue, but they're definitely trying to cozy up a little bit more because Biden has appointed a number of people to serve in administration, you know, positions now that are really, really tough on tech. I think Lina Khan this week, who wrote that basically viral legal paper about Amazon, is now going to be at the FTC if she's confirmed. We have Tim Wu, the man who coined net neutrality, he's over at the National Economic Council.

• 1:06:04Speaker 06

  So I think the companies are seeing that there is more of a threat under Biden. Now, of course, there's a lot of issues that need to be addressed first. We have the COVID relief, we have economic relief, we have gun issues now, too. But there is this little, you know, there is definitely a lot more momentum to get something done under Biden, for sure.

• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that's where Zuckerberg's saying, here's the 230 reforms? I would take and like

• 1:06:27Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:06:28Nilay Patel?

  Right. They're proposing their own regulation in their, in their own interest. Right?

• 1:06:32Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah. And I think they've done that before. So after the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg came out with a proposal for privacy regulation because privacy was really, really hot. Now, of course, nothing happened with privacy at all. Now, will this be the same case with the 230 reform? Who knows? It really depends on how this kind of Congress ramps up and what the priorities are this year and over the next four years.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just like, I, I, I'm thinking about this hearing and one of the things that just really strikes me, to, to your point, McKenna, is we're at the point where the hearings don't matter and Dorsey is kind of like not taking them seriously. And he's solved his biggest problem, which is that Trump isn't on his platform anymore. Right? Like that, at the, every one of these previous hearings, like that was the elephant in the room. Right? And he solved that problem and he's probably not coming back. Like, we just had Kayvon on Decoder and I was like, is Trump coming back? And he's like, he's banned. End of, do you want to talk about fleets? Like, very much the vibe at Twitter was like, he's gone. We're not opening that door. YouTube's position is he's gone. We'll bring him back once the threat of violence subsides, which is as squishy as anything. So he's gone. Right?

• 1:07:44Nilay Patel?

  Once you take that out of the equation, you are left with, why is Marjorie Taylor Greene getting moderated on Twitter? And their set of policies is like clear and she's a cartoon character and she's like wildly over the line. I think she wants to get banned. Right? Like, that's a great for her in some way. And so I, I just like, the dynamic here is you've got one side that is the Democrats walking right up to what the First Amendment would allow them to do. And in some cases, Representative Matsui asked, what are you going to do about hate speech on your platforms? And like, what caught me is like, well, Congress can't do anything about hate speech. The First Amendment and a litany of court cases has said hate speech laws in America are illegal because of the First Amendment prevents them.

• 1:08:26Nilay Patel?

  But Facebook can do something about hate speech. So you've got the Democrats asking the platforms to do stuff that like Congress and the government can't do. And you've got the Republicans, I don't know, basically trolling their way into. Social media stardom. There's like, there's no path forward there as far as I can tell.

• 1:08:42Speaker 06

  No, it's all bad faith for the most part. And I think Democrats at least realize that if they ask specific questions, if they're targeted enough, uh, maybe it'll pressure them to do something self-regulatory. Now, how many times has Facebook done anything really self-regulatory? Well, they'll ban like Trump and they'll, um, well, maybe we'll do some more privacy stuff in an ads database and things like that. But they're also minor and it's, I mean, it is kind of meaningful in some ways, but it doesn't get to the, um, the length of reform and changes that a lot of people want.

• 1:09:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. One of the things that we talked about during the campaign was that Biden and Trump actually had the same position on 230 reform. Like Joe Biden's like, we should just get rid of it. And Trump was like, get rid of it. And that, it came from very different motivations. Is that still the administration's basic position? Is that still the basic democratic position?

• 1:09:35Speaker 06

  So I wouldn't say it's the basic democratic position. I think if you, anytime I talk to anybody, ask the White House about it, it's like, he said what he said. And it's like, it's like, when I say Biden said what he said, right? Um, and that's about as far as we get. Uh, but I, the, the basic democratic goal, I, no, I think, I think it's shaped over time. I think people saw 230 and they were like, wow, 230 sucks. Um, but over the past couple of months, what I've noticed a lot is that it's, they realize that you can't do that. Uh, and things are getting a bit more serious. You can't just revoke 230. So when you think about Susta Fasta and like sex trafficking stuff, that was a little poke in 230 that had a lot of ramifications that were not, you know, people didn't expect them to happen.

• 1:10:18Speaker 06

  Now, I think you're getting to the same place. After, a month after the insurrection, Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner introduced the Safe Tech Act. Now, if you look at that bill, it's a targeted 230 change that has to deal with being able to sue Facebook if somebody is harassing you or causing you personal threat or harm. There are these little poke holes that people are trying to poke out. And we just saw another bill reintroduced this week by, um, Anna Ishu, and that would poke a hole in 230 if a platform's algorithm

• 1:10:51Speaker 06

  Has been found to amplify terrorist content.

• 1:10:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:10:55Speaker 06

  Right. So it's all of these little, little, little poke holes. And I think we're going to see more and more of that. I think that's going to expand past 230 reform. And it's going to be like in privacy. I think we saw Amy Klobuchar send a letter to the FTC or something about women's violence against women and domestic violence and something about privacy there. We're going to see a lot more of that over the next like six to eight months for sure.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm very curious to see how the process of incrementally poking holes in 230 goes.

• 1:11:25Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:26Nilay Patel?

  It's also interesting, you know, we had Klobuchar on for a Virge Live event with Addie. You know, they like went in a fairly straightforward way. Like, we asked her the questions, she answered the questions. Mark Warner just did an event with Protocol and he got like super mad. Like, they asked him the questions, like, I don't believe a word you're saying.

• 1:11:45Speaker 06

  Can we get, can we go do something else? Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's a testy topic, right? And it's going, anything with free speech is going to be a very testy thing. And it'll be interesting to see if any kind of consensus is formed up this year at all.

• 1:12:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it just struck me because they're the co-sponsors of the bill. And they're like, they're, even their vibes about what the companies are doing was totally different. All right, McKenna, I cannot let you go without asking you about broadband because I know you and I both are like deep in the broadband weeds all the time. It seems like net neutrality is like on its way back in some way. And it also seems like Biden's big infrastructure push is like gonna include some broadband stuff. Just give me a quick update on that.

• 1:12:28Speaker 06

  Right, so there's an infrastructure package. Infrastructure Week is allegedly actually happening soon, right? And so I know it's ridiculous, but so they're toying around with how much broadband money is going to be in there. Now, Jim Clyburn in the House and Amy Klobuchar in the Senate have a package out that's like over $80 billion for broadband investment. And they're pushing to have that included in the infrastructure package. Of course, that can be, you know, Taken down a notch, maybe some less money, maybe it goes somewhere else, but it does seem to be that broadband is a huge priority. There was an infrastructure hearing earlier this week and Tom Wheeler, net neutrality man from the FCC was there. And then Mike O'Reilly, a former FCC person. So out of the four people they had to talk about infrastructure,

• 1:13:11Speaker 06

  two of them were people to talk about broadband. So I think broadband is going to be really, really big when it comes to infrastructure. On net neutrality, Ed Markey said a couple weeks ago that he was going to reintroduce or introduce some kind of net neutrality bill in the coming weeks. I'm doing air quotes there because it's been the coming weeks and we have not seen it. But there will definitely be a push. Now, what that means for the FCC, it's 2-2 right now. We don't have a Democratic majority in the FCC. So if they even wanted to do net neutrality, they couldn't. So Biden has to nominate one more person to sit at the FCC before the FCC can do anything.

• 1:13:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, technically he has to nominate two, right? Because Rosemarcelle's the chair, but she's only the acting chair. So doesn't she have to go through?

• 1:13:56Speaker 06

  Right. So I don't know when her nomination is technically up. It wouldn't be because she was just nominated like two years ago. Remember her nomination was like held up for a bit. So she's just appointed as the chair right now. So he will likely, we don't know if she's going to continue to be the chair, but we still need one other Democrat on there. That person could end up being the chair as well, but that decision, of course, hasn't been made yet.

• 1:14:22Nilay Patel?

  I see what you're saying. Yeah, I'm being, it's funny. Here's something like verge inside baseball. So we're like, we just did a big issue, like a DIY issue. We heard a bunch of stories about DIY stuff. And like, what should the next one be? And like, oh, we should do infrastructure. And like, literally, our desk editors meeting was like, we can't say that, we can't call it that, we can't, because then it will never happen. It's like a self-defeating prophecy. Like, we are just, we cannot say the verge is going to do it. We cannot do it. And we're going to try to do it. I'm excited about it. It's coming up later on. But it's just funny how the phrase "Infrastructure Week" is cursed in American life now.

• 1:15:00Speaker 06

  Banned phrase.

• 1:15:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, for real. I'm McKenna. I sadly am going to release you to go finish watching this hearing. Good luck.

• 1:15:07Speaker 06

  Okay. No, thank you for having me. Always like hopping on here to talk about the wonkiness of the Capitol.

• 1:15:14Nilay Patel?

  As always, Dieter, we've gone over.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  I'm sorry.

• 1:15:17Nilay Patel?

  I know, I know.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  It's not my fault.

• 1:15:18Nilay Patel?

  What are you talking about?

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  It's not your fault.

• 1:15:20Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I really want to talk to you. Well, two things, two little gaming lines I want to point out. One, uh, Tom Warren is just totally chasing the story of Microsoft quietly rounding Xbox Live to Xbox Network.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  It's, it's so nuts. Like they just, they make a decision. Microsoft is running out of things to put the word Xbox in front of.

• 1:15:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  Just.

• 1:15:41Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's funny when we had Phil Spencer on Decoder, he was like, we know, we know the names are out of control. But anyway, they're doing it very quietly and like Tom just keeps blowing up their spots. Like Major Nelson changes his Twitter bio and Tom's like, I'm on it. So that story is really funny. And then Sean Hall Street, a great story about the street prices of Nvidia and AMD GPUs, which are like chip shortage wildly out of control right now. So just want to call those out. Great stories on the site. You can tweet at us. Dieter is at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. McKenna is at Kelly McKenna. Allison is Allison Joe one. Tweet us, we'd love to hear from you. I really encourage you to listen to this week's Decoder with Kevin Roos. It's about something very boring, uh, called robotic process automation.

• 1:16:24Nilay Patel?

  But it's really just about computers using Excel on other computers, like at the heart of it, which I think the Vergecast audience will appreciate. Check that out. Next week on Decoder, we have Tracy Sun, who's a co-founder of Poshmark. That was a really great conversation. Read the Verge, it's gonna be great. Rock and roll.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Wear a mask.

• 1:17:32Speaker 07

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