App Store chaos, ray tracing, and new Macbook Air rumors

This week on The Vergecast, Paul, Nilay, and Dieter start off the show with the news that Netflix is testing a payment feature to bypass Apple’s App Store fees, which leads into a larger discussion of (as Nilay calls it) “App Store chaos.” Paul seems pretty excited about “ray tracing” — a term that Nvidia is using for its upcoming graphics cards — so the crew explains what that means and how far ahead Nvidia is compared to its competition. Competition is a general theme in this week’s episode. We’ve also got our two recurring segments in the show: deputy editor Liz Lopatto’s “This Week in Elon Musk” (which is now a newsletter) and Paul’s segment “Cold ears, warm heart.” And we must not forget the latest Apple rumors that have hit the news in preparation for the likely Apple event in September. But there’s a whole lot more in between that, so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 03:35 - Netflix is testing a payment feature to bypass Apple’s App Store fees 20:39 - ‘Ray tracing’ could bring the biggest graphics jump in a decade 30:59 - DJI’s new Mavic 2 drones have upgraded cameras and zoom lenses 34:34 - Nikon strikes back at Sony with first full-frame mirrorless cameras 40:09 - This week in Elon Musk with Liz Lopatto 44:15 - Apple’s MacBook Air successor will reportedly have slim bezels and high-res Retina display 51:14 - Microsoft to bundle Xbox One consoles, Xbox Live, and Game Pass into a monthly subscription service 52:56 - Paul’s weekly segment “Cold ears, warm heart” 53:52 - A day in the life of a Waymo self-driving taxi 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?

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• 0:45Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is also brought to you by the Audi e-tron. The electric car has always raised questions. Can we contend with the elements? What's the range? With high-speed charging, long-range capabilities, and quattro all-wheel drive, the fully-electric Audi e-tron could be the answer. Visit audiusa.com/e-tron to learn more and stay informed.

• 1:05Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Paul Miller. I'm sorry I'm late, Neil. Paul was late to our recording today. I deserve the flagship. You're not getting a 90-minute Vergecast today. No, we're gonna be fine. Hi, Paul. Hey. I'm your friend, Eli. This is Paul. Hello. The delinquent. Dieter, tell the audience about your relationship with them.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  I'm your constant companion. I'm always there, lurking.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  He's your PDA. Your Palm Pilot, if you will. There's kind of like a lot of weird and wacky stuff to talk about this week. A quiet week, generally. I want to start by just plugging a couple things. One, our new show, The Future of Music with Danny Deal, who is legitimately the coolest person who works at The Verge, went up today. She's got imaging heap in VR, like volumetric VR. It's the first time like an artist has done that. So go watch that on YouTube. It's a cool show. We've got more episodes coming of that. Home of the Future with Grant Amhara, continuing to go. Somebody tweeted at me and Dieter that like they were watching the episode and they started screaming "vendor law". Lock in at the screen. Grant was Warmed my heart. I was like, yes, we've trained you all well. So go watch those two shows on YouTube. They are great.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  And then you might have noticed that we've been doing some interviews and segments and experimentation on the Vergecast. We're going to start. We've gotten a lot of feedback. People love the interviews, but they just, they just want an hour of us goofing. So we're going to start working on like splitting out the interviews. So next week, I recently interviewed the president and general counsel of Microsoft, Brad Smith, about what's going on online. How they're moderating their different services, election interference, the whole thing. So next week, we're going to publish that as a standalone. And we're going to start publishing some standalone interviews as kind of a trial balloon. So just keep an eye out for that. I, I know people like podcast listeners hate it when weird things happen in their feeds. Nothing should change.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  And I get it, but the feedback we've gotten suggests that we need to split, split the interviews out from the main show. So we're going to try it out. If it goes well in like September, we'll just like go for it and start doing it all the time. So that's happening next week. I just, I don't want listeners to be surprised when suddenly other stuff happens in the Vergecast feed. But I think it's going to work out. That interview we recorded, it is great. He's great. He's very illuminating. There's a little bit of news in there. I don't want to give it away. Some like wild stuff happened as they think about moderating all their services. That'll happen next week. So just keep an eye out for it. Let me know what you think. I feel very confident that's the move, but if you feel differently, I want to know. All right, let's start with the news. I just have this written down here as App Store chaos.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  That's like basically how I feel about it. The basics are we all understand how app stores work. Apple runs one, Google runs one. Google got slapped by the EU, so you have to disintermediate play services from Android. That's a big deal. Right after that, we talked about in the show, Epic Games pulled Fortnite off of the Google Play Store, said, side load it. This week, Netflix is testing a payment feature to bypass Apple's App Store. This is not quite the same thing. You don't still download the Netflix app from the App Store, but it's a subscription service. And previously, if you wanted to subscribe, you could just hit the button and it would go through Apple's in-app billing and you would just like subscribe to Netflix. Now that button is gone.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  You would pay more if you did that, right?

• 4:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, yeah. I'll get to that in a sec. Now that button's gone. Netflix says, "Go to the web, sign up on the web, give us your credit card details there, come back, log in, you're good, watch Netflix." What Dieter's saying is correct. This is true for Netflix, for Spotify, for a number of other services.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I did it for YouTube. I was just the world's laziest man. It's like, I know it's $10 on the web. I could pay $13 a month. I have YouTube Red. I feel bad.

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  So Apple has a 70/30 split for every transaction that happens through its store. And so companies are smart. They just pass that cost on to you. So it's $10 a month for YouTube Red on the web. It's $12.99 if you buy it in the YouTube app because it has to pass through Apple's payment service. Companies are starting to like resent this. I think there's a lot of big questions about these app stores, whether or not they're like monopolies on these platforms, basically. Ben Thompson today, very smart analyst who writes Strategery, wrote, "Apple has an absolute..."

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Wait, what was that?

• 5:22Nilay Patel?

  He writes Strategery.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Strategery.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Strategery.

• 5:25Nilay Patel?

  Strategery.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Okay, sure.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  And it's got a line of E.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  I got it.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, it's really good. If you don't subscribe to it, you should subscribe to it.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Clearly missing out.

• 5:32Nilay Patel?

  Pay him directly so you don't have to pay the extra fee. It's really good. He's really smart. But he, in his newsletter this morning, he wrote, "Apple has an absolutely monopoly over app distribution on the iPhone and they are nakedly, baldly charging rent." Right? Like, they can just do it. And I think a lot of developers are saying, "What am I even getting for this money?" Like, I don't have a human contact at the App Store. I don't, the rules seem capricious. And that's, I mean, that's why I just wrote down App Store chaos. Like, this moment is here.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Well, I just think of it from the user perspective. Like, what makes life easier as user? And I know, for instance, every time that I flirt with buying a digital product... It's typically I land on Amazon and I'm gonna maybe buy Kindle book or maybe buy an audible book and Amazon, I'm just go through this crazy redirect carousel because an Amazon link in Safari wants to open the Amazon app. So Amazon app launches and then Amazon app's like, oh no, he wants a digital product. So then it bumps me back to the web so I can buy it on the way. It's just, it's just bad user experience and it's confusing. My question is, how can Netflix, can they put a link?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Because I feel like part of Amazon's thing is they can't even link directly to their store where

• 6:52Nilay Patel?

  Neither can Netflix.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  So they just have to say, hey, we've heard about this thing called a web browser.

• 6:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Why don't you see what happens if you type

• 7:00Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I can just write, if you need to sign up for Netflix, visit Netflix.com. I mean, it's not, they're Netflix. How many people left have to sign up for Netflix?

• 7:08Speaker 02

  No, but it's, it's gross in the sense of that, that possibly, you know, work, this side loading thing works for Epic.

• 7:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  This, this web browser thing might work out for Netflix.

• 7:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I saw Walt and Stephen Sinofsky tweeting today and Stephen Sinofsky, who used to run Windows, knows who's talking about in this industry, was like, look, every distributor and every supplier, they're always at war. Walmart versus Procter and Gamble was a war and that's like a thing you have to manage. And Walt pointed out, when Apple introduced the App Store, he said, I'm only taking 30%. People like applauded because previous to App Stores, developers had to pay Verizon to get weird, bad apps preloaded on feature phones.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  I think, I think that's a good point.

• 7:52Nilay Patel?

  But we're 10 years away from that now.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Previously to the App Store, if you wanted to get an app on a phone, you went to the web. And no, I'd, there is a genuine question of what does the App Store provide to developers? It provides some level of promotion. It provides like payment stuff. It provides users the ability to have like a single place where all their subscriptions might be. But I think most of all, the number one thing it provides is trust. If I install an app, From this store, I know it's coming from the store. It's not coming from some weird malware redirect. Back in the day, if you went to go download an app on your computer, you'd end up at, I don't know, downloads.com or Mac something, something, or this other thing.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  And then you're like, okay, well, where's the download button? I can't find it amongst all these ads. I gotta make sure I click the real one and not the fake one. That's gonna take me someplace else. And you'd go for developer and it was like, it was a mess. And so if your brand is big enough that you can solve some of those problems without needing Apple, why wouldn't you? Or Google, in this case. The thing that's different with the iPhone is they do, in fact, hold a monopoly. You cannot install an app on the iPhone without going through the App Store, full stop.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wait, just for all the people who just screamed actually in their cars. Cause they did. You can. If you run a big business or you're a developer, there are ways to, right. But the normal person who buys iPhone has no recourse to install an app on their own.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  So the reason it has, one, we know that Apple makes money on it. It's not net zero for them. And two, 30% just seems high. It is the case that if you do a subscription, it goes down to 15% after the second year. And that's a very interesting incentive. It sort of seems like Apple saw this coming a couple of years ago, right? But I don't know, like absent an App Store, the web created App Stores for other platforms. There was a really great site that you could trust called Palm Gear that provided almost all of the same services that you get out of an App Store. The Mac had Corelia, which was a sort of a clearinghouse for stuff. Like, these things are possible to create. But having it be official from the company and knowing that they have

• 10:08Speaker 01

  an infrastructure of, you know, robots and people that are checking for malware and quality and whatnot is a genuine service. The question is, is it worth 30%? And then the second question is, if you don't need those services, do you have recourse to something? And so Netflix is in the enviable position of not needing that stuff. And they also are in the enviable position of having another way to like, get money from people.

• 10:32Nilay Patel?

  But wait, no, Netflix, it's important, I think, to distinguish Netflix from Fortnite.

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  Netflix is still putting its app in the store. Right? I think that's a key element here. They're not shipping a binary to you. They're just opting out of- So, if we're talking iPhone, so is Fortnite. Right, because they don't have a choice. But, just to be clear, like Netflix, all the trust, all the malware checking, whatever, they're just bypassing the payment service because they get, they get literally nothing for that 30% cut. Yeah. They just pass it directly to the consumer and, you know, Apple takes some money and Netflix gets nothing. So like, why not just lower your price and say, "Sign up over, give us your credit card number over here, and then your experience in this app is going to be almost exactly the same."

• 11:22Nilay Patel?

  But Fortnite on Android is shipping you a binary, which I think is really, really different. Because that's what gets to what you're talking about, Dieter, which is, are there alternative ways to get code onto your phone? And that opens just a vast number of questions.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Can I make a bit of a tangent? This is a story we haven't really covered.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  But, you know, Discord is launching a Steam competitor. So, Windows, one beautiful thing about the Windows ecosystem is there's lots of stores. Steam is the most popular one. Steam is trying to get all Discord-y and added voice chat. Discord, I don't know if they had this in their pocket, I'm sure they had to be playing this for a while.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Paul, you missed your shot. You could have said Discord's getting real steamy.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Ooh. Discord's getting real steamy. They have, they're launching a game store. And there are a lot of value ads that, especially on a PC, that you sort of like, you're managing updates for people. You're managing sort of like the reputation system for the different publishers and like, ratings. And, and there's also the online presence aspect. Like, Game Center is basically a lag to launching a game on iPhone. That's about all it is. I would, I, you know, I know Apple doesn't want this at all, but I would love alternative stores on, on the iPhone.

• 12:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think that's where, it's funny, if Apple Store was better or offered more flexible pricing or more options for developers to sell upgrades or all the things developers have been talking about, I don't think you would see- This sort of agita from that community about how Apple treats them. And it's it's just there and it's real. And of course, Apple isn't offering that stuff because they don't have to. They're just they're the only choice. So if they had some competition, maybe they would like change their policy. In all, I think the App Store has been a huge boon to everyone, right? Like developers have distribution they never had before. Consumers are getting more apps. There's just more activity. But what has it done? It's inexorably lowered prices to almost zero.

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  Consumers are overwhelmed.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  And we all forgot how to use the web.

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everyone, no one knows how to use a computer anymore. That seems like, you know, the the comparison between Walmart and Procter and Gamble is like, what could Procter and Gamble do? They could like go to Target, right? They could go to Amazon. They have these other distribution options. And particularly on the iPhone, they don't. And I think what we're seeing with Google is this huge amount of interest in other distribution options. So Fortnite, you know, Samsung's exclusive was you could get it on the Samsung App Store, which is not particularly exciting. But the idea that Samsung has this App Store and they're going to buy exclusives and sort of claw their way into relevance is somewhat interesting. Dieter, what were you gonna say?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Oh, I was just gonna point out, as long as we're talking about pure monopoly on the iPhone, there is this idea out there. I don't really know if I'd buy into it, but that one of the reasons Apple chose not to ban the Infowars app was because it would make very clear to everybody what a pure monopoly they have on the App Store. Whereas with, you know, podcasts, you can you can still get a podcast, you know, other in via other means, via other apps, via, you know, knowing how RSS works or whatever.

• 14:44Nilay Patel?

  I've heard this conspiracy theory.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  Who didn't know that? Who who is? Is there anyone like, is there one senator who's like, oh, I can't get Infowars? I better look into whether there's an alternative source of apps on the iPhone.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Are you suggesting that senators might not be like tech savvy?

• 15:00Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what I'm suggesting.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Another part of this, this whole free speech debate is is like, oh, you don't like Twitter? Leave Twitter. Apple has kept gab.ai off of the App Store for offensive content, quote unquote, which is.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  It's kind of weird because you have a web browser on your platform.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  And we talked about this from the very beginning. Apple used to ban porn apps and we'd be like, yo, Safari is, you can go to Tumblr.com anytime you want.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think they, but that's, they want that. I think they're actually okay with that. I think they know this is Apple's space for our values, our curated, quote unquote curated selection because it's massive. And then the web is the open space. And I think they're very comfortable with that distinction inside of Apple. The question is whether anybody else understands that distinction, whether that distinction is important, whether in the face of regulatory scrutiny, that distinction even means anything. Those are wide open questions. I have no idea. But I think that's the distinction they've certainly made.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  But, okay, so step back from, I shouldn't have opened this Pandora's box, but step back from like giant like regulation questions and just look at who else has the opportunity or the the wherewithal to do an end around of either Apple's App Store pricing or Google's store entirely. Because the going assumption right now is if you're Epic or if you're Netflix, yeah, go for it. You're big enough. You've got your own brand. You've got your own direct customer relationships. Like you could totally pull that off. But like, who else?

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  Spotify immediately leaves Spotify.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Leaves a mind. Uh, Google. New York Times, like has got a mixed model, actually. You can subscribe on the web and then it works in the app.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  They all had mixed models, right? Every, all of these companies had, Spotify for years has been like sign up on the web, like, don't do this. But we have to do it. So, yeah, I think the Times, the Post could do it. Amazon bizarrely could do it, right?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Well, Amazon's doing some crazy shit on Android, right? I think they finally are getting rid of that Netflix or that Amazon Underground app that they had. The Underground App Store for Google. Remember that?

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God. I mean, I think there's an endless list of these services now. The point I was making earlier about it being 10 years later is this ecosystem is fully developed, it's mature, the companies that have come up as companies who built software for the phone are now as big or bigger than the platforms themselves. They have options, and there's no reason they wouldn't use them. I think the question is just how will Apple and Google react? And I think they're in vastly different positions because Google is required by the European Union to unbundle Play Services in the store from Android. So,

• 17:51Nilay Patel?

  like, whatever is going to happen on Android is going to be drastic, and I think Apple, being Apple, will probably be more conservative. But the pressure is definitely there from these businesses that after a decade of shipping mobile software are now deeply aware that they have their own customers, their own customer relationships. Like, if Spotify tomorrow was like, "Hey, sorry, we're canceling your iOS in-app payment membership. Go sign up on the web. By the way, it'll be $3 cheaper." Is anyone going to get mad at them?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  No, but I think that Spotify actually has different incentives. I think that Spotify is in a customer acquisition race with Apple, and Apple's doing really well with Apple Music on the iPhone relative to Spotify, especially in the US. And so I think it's a lot riskier for Spotify to try and take a hard line on this than people realize. They're popular, but they're not dominant.

• 18:38Nilay Patel?

  All right. We've got to take a break. This is going to be a weird ad. I want you to know what's going to happen. There's going to be MythBuster on the show. But it's like sponsored. So Carrie Byron, famous MythBuster, is now going to do an Audi ad. Go on this adventure with Carrie Byron.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Hi, my name is Carrie Byron. I'm a former MythBuster, so I'm always very curious about new technology. Today, we're going to take a peek into the future, the future of the American highway. It could be filled with electric vehicles supported by an ecosystem of technology like super-fast charging stations. Right now, the future is being built by people like Jonathan Levy at EV Go, the nation's largest network of fast-charging EV stations. All right, Jonathan, let's start at the beginning, the charge. Now, EV charging stations, are they going to be available everywhere?

• 19:25Speaker 04

  Yes, because we want to integrate charging into people's everyday lives. And that means putting the chargers where people need them, whether it's in metro grocery stores and other things, or just off the highway, or sometimes a combination of that.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  How quickly will we be able to charge an EV from zero to 100?

• 19:41Speaker 04

  Today, the typical EV can get to 80% using a fast charger in about 20 or 30 minutes. And a lot of people are starting to think about 350 kilowatt charges to be able to do things in about five to 10 minutes.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  And tell me about these charging corridors. What does it look like when it all comes together?

• 19:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean, ideally, you have a mix, right? Where you have some things that are just off the highway, just like a regular old rest stop. Some of them are a mile or half a mile off so that you can still pull into a strip mall, grab a sandwich, and let the car charge while you're doing that. We want to have both. And so there's a big concerted effort to make sure that we're pushing the envelope and putting fast chargers out there that can work for all sorts of people, whether it's their road trip or just their day to day life, or if it's a rideshare driver that's taking people to and from the airport.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  To learn more about going electric with Audi, check out AudiUSA.com/ETRON. That's AudiUSA.com/ETRON.

• 20:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, thank you again to Audi ETRON. Thank you to Kerry. Okay, there's big Nvidia news, RTX 2000.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Here's a great segue. Did you know you can ray trace a car?

• 20:47Nilay Patel?

  That's true. All right, Paul. Tell me about these GPUs.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Remember when the next gen came out? Like the PS4, Xbox One?

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  And everybody, you know, more power, graphics are going to get better. But there was no like thing that you could just point to, like, that makes it next gen. And then they kind of like mid-gen went like 4K. I feel like we have now seen next gen. And it is real time ray tracing. And so was it a week or so ago Nvidia released like the workstation version, their Quadro, um, is it Quadro or Quattro?

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  Quattro.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Their workstation cards. And like going up to like

• 21:28Nilay Patel?

  Quadro.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Quadro, okay.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  I was thinking about the Audi.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  You win Audi.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Like the cards go up to like $10,000, like the the die size is like enormous. It's like the second biggest chip ever made. And I remember there like even just a couple of weeks ago, there was speculation. Oh, like Nvidia is like holding back on consumer cards. Consumer cards are kind of like no win for them right now because they're still leading with their their 10 series. And AMD is not catching up and people just buy all the like all the new cards for for cryptocurrency. And then sell resell them later. And it's just like a busted market right now. No reason for them to release a consumer card. And then they released the the 20 series, which is amazing. So it does real time ray tracing.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  So the basics of real time ray tracing, I just didn't see this coming. So this is really exciting. So this is something I believe it's Pixar that was doing it first. But basically, if you ever seen like a ray trace image in progress.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  It looks like a really low ISO, a high ISO image, like really, really grainy. And it slowly fills in over time and it gets clearer and clearer and smoother and smoother. So now there is a neural network based de-noising algorithm that can take a noisy ray traced image and fill it in so that it looks just like fully rendered. So you're saving a ton of time because you're take instead of taking like the hundredth pass of a ray trace, you can take like the first or second or something like that. So that's big boost number one. The other big boost and the way that Nvidia is applying this to like games that we will actually play is that you'll still have rasterization. So the the way games are typically rendered, that will happen.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  And then ray tracing is basically being added on top to do the lighting in real time. And everything I've seen that they've demoed so far looks beautiful. It's just an obvious leap forward. So you're going to get better, like typically like depth of field effects, bloom effects, stuff like that. A lot of that stuff typically is done with the CPU right now. So that can be done in in engine with actual like light rays. Well simulated, you can have refraction, you can have reflection. It's just, it's good, and you can have cooler shadows where you tilt the light.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  This is one of those things for like-

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Wobbly things.

• 23:52Nilay Patel?

  I love it when new hardware comes out and gamers are like, we can get cooler shadows. And then like, it settles in and they care about games again and that pendulum just always swings back and forth. Like, I will buy any game just to be like, check out, check out that 4K.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Real-time global illumination.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Imagine it.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  That sounds, that sounds like your conspiracy theory YouTube channel.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I'm telling you, globally illuminating, in real time.

• 24:23Nilay Patel?

  So here's what I don't quite understand about Nvidia's, like, pricing model. They don't actually make consumer products, right? They farm them out to Asus and EVGA, but they set the prices. So the RTX 2070 starts at $499, uh, the 2080 is at $699, 2080 titanium is $1,000. Then there's Founder's Editions. Mm-hmm. Yeah, what's with the Founder's Editions? I think you get a sticker. You get $599, $799, and $1,200, right? But they're setting the prices for their third-party vendors. How does this work?

• 24:57Speaker 02

  No, they typically set basically like a base price, like a stock price. Here's what the stock model is, and then vendors can, can try to like, basically lose money.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  And undercut that price, but more typically like, they'll have a stock version and then like, this one's liquid cooled and this one is overclocked and, so vendors can like, make, but they've been setting prices like this for a while.

• 25:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, I'm not in this market and I'm like, just looking at, like, you can buy it from Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, PNY, or Zotac. How, how would anybody make a decision about which one to buy?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  It's just your favorite.

• 25:32Nilay Patel?

  It's not just the answer? Everyone hasn't sold out their entire inventory to cryptocurrency miners, I think is the answer.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Also that, I don't know, I, I bought an Asus motherboard and so I was like, buying my video card and it's like, oh, this Asus 1070 is the same color.

• 25:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna vertically integrate my desktop PC.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  You want a brand that you can relatively trust, that you trust that they're gonna do a good job cooling it and...

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  Are these good for cryptocurrency mining? Can you ray trace some Bitcoin?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  I don't know that, I don't-

• 26:01Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if that's a phrase.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  So Nvidia is doing some, this is something I've been like thinking or talking a lot about. I'm not trying to say that I predicted real time ray tracing, but most of the gains that we're seeing in computer performance, full stop, across our phones, desktops, servers is through like very application specific. I mean, that's what is mining most of the Bitcoin now is ASICs, like chips that are specifically designed for a purpose. These are chips that are very specifically designed for Nvidia algorithms. You know, they've worked with Microsoft, they've worked with the Unreal Engine to allow developers to use this pretty easily. But you're basically, Nvidia

• 26:44Speaker 02

  is more and more, it's like, it's like being an app, like an iOS developer. Like I'm going to use Apple's SDK APIs and make an Apple like thing. And so you have like, there's, there's this, I forget what the acronym is, but there's this specific algorithm for basically chopping space into little chunks so that when you're doing ray tracing, you don't have to go everywhere. You can kind of just focus on one little spot. And that's specifically accelerated by Nvidia. So like they, and obviously this, this neural network that does fills in the noise, that's

• 27:22Speaker 02

  specifically accelerated. So they do have like a TPU tensor processing or

• 27:31Nilay Patel?

  It's a tensor unit.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  It's just called tensor.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  But because Google's chips are called TPUs.

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  Either tensor or flow processing units.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  So anyways.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Google has a flow.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Nvidia does rate these on, especially their workstation cards on, on like AI workloads or neural network, network, TensorFlow workloads, basically.

• 27:53Nilay Patel?

  This sounds like the sort of thing you usually hate. I just want to put this out there. You're so excited about ray tracing that your general hatred of proprietary like API calls and SDKs is like out the window.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, because. Very excited about, no, so this is, this is part of my, this is my whole, my whole vision of how I believe the world works. You start with a walled garden. You tend the garden, then you tear down the walls.

• 28:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  And this is definitely the walled garden section. That, that, that Nvidia's out in the garden with a little watering can, hoping, hoping ray tracing will grow.

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  Subscribe to global point source illumination.

• 28:38Nilay Patel?

  What, what was the phrase? Global?

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Real time global illumination.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, Paul's available on YouTube now. Uh, you can pay $3 extra.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  But I mean, have you guys seen these videos? It's beautiful.

• 28:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I watched all the videos today. They're incredible. I think it's just one of those things where it's what you're saying. It's like, it's very limited to like Nvidia's view of the world and they're just seem to be really far ahead. And that's fascinating to me because they, it's, you know, like the Xbox is on AMD chips, Apple's on AMD chips. It's like, they're just like off pushing these incredibly high horsepower desktop PC experiences. And it's, it's fascinating to me that the sort of rest of the industry can't find a way to work with Nvidia better.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Maybe they're, um, I don't know, like, what is this thing? What was the power draw? I tweeted this.

• 29:28Nilay Patel?

  It's like 215 watts. It's like insane.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  It's insane. It's just completely insane.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  What do you want? Slow time ray tracing?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  All right.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Well, the, the other thing, my hope is that because they're accelerating more workloads and yes, they're, some of these are very specific to specific algorithms. Hopefully that horsepower will be available and developers will figure out how to use it for tasks that are beyond just ray tracing. So hopefully we'll find other things in our lives that will be accelerated by this. But, you know, obviously launching a gaming card, you're going to emphasize the gaming application.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think Nvidia is just so far ahead. It's, it's like what you said. They, they didn't have to.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  And they just like did it. And now everyone else is kind of way behind. And I think it's deeply fascinating that all of that effort is localized into one corner of computing. When all the other things we talk about tend to run these wacky AMD processors.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Well, and there isn't, it's something kind of thrilling about that. It's, it's, it's like if Nvidia came out and like, we have solved messaging.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  And they launched a proprietary hardware accelerated messaging platform, that would be hell.

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  No, it's coming.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  If they're.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  Now that you said it, it's real.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  If they're hunkered down, developing the future of graphics, I'm, I'm gonna love it every time.

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Speaking of which, I just want to do some camera news real fast and then go into the next thing. Mavic 2, DJI had an event today, Thursday. Uh, Mavic 2 came out, Mavic 2 Pro, Mavic 2 Zoom, both have Hasselblad cameras. They look great and they're also apparently very quiet.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:12Nilay Patel?

  Which makes me happy.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  I was all set to be like salty about that there's two versions and why don't they just find a way to put, you know, something modular in there so you don't have to pick between the two different things and why, you know, it's like you're, you're buying the camera and then you're stuck buying this stupid drone that's attached to it. Right? Um, which is a weird way to put it, but you know what I mean? Um, but I don't know, I like actually looking at what they've done and looking at the decisions they made and looking, you know, there's the bigger sensor on the two. I don't know, I'm actually weirdly hyped for these things.

• 31:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I really actually want to buy. I, I'm trying to sell my Phantom 4. It's not going great because newer, better drones are available. So I'm trying, I'm like trying to get rid of it because I want one of these very badly. But then I'm like, what do I need this for? And I realized I should just get a Spark. But you look at these specs.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Also look at the footage that Veron shot in Iceland.

• 32:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Uh, at the bottom of that post, it's just like, oh, I want that.

• 32:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I want this a lot. I mean, they're expensive. It's like, what, $1,200 and $1,400?

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, the Mavic 2 Pro is 1449 and the Zoom is 1249.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  This Hasselblad camera.

• 32:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think it's real. I don't think it's a sticker.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  How do you think Hasselblad helped improve? Cause just to be clear, these drones are not carrying a five.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  They're not carrying a medium format. Also DJI owns a huge chunk of Hasselblad.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:33Nilay Patel?

  So I'm assuming.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  They have the rights to use the logo.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  I don't know, I think that's like a really interesting question, but I think they probably did more than just put a sticker on it. I think there's probably some sensor integration there. Right? I mean, they bought a big fancy camera company.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  You assume that their camera engineers at DJI were like, hey, can we talk to them? And they're like, stickers only.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  That's exactly how I figured it out.

• 32:59Nilay Patel?

  Hasselblad folks like, "No, only stickers. Welcome to our waiting room." They're t-shirts for everyone. No, I think they, I think they actually did some stuff. I think they're never gonna really tell us, but DJI's been so far ahead anyway.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  But I think getting that, I think the Hasselblad stuff was more about their pro line, right? Like the Inspire. They wanna put that logo on the big film drones. They can put them on the Mac too, why not?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  But I mean, the, the, the thing that I love about what we're talking about, like going from Nvidia to this is like, here are two companies that are so far ahead of everybody else in what they do. And there's like ancillary or related, you know, product categories or whatever. There's AMD for Nvidia. There's, I don't know, unique for DJI. But either one of these companies could just coast for a while, and it seems like they're not.

• 33:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, absolutely not. The Mavic also, the Mavic 2 has insane obstacle avoidance. So you just like set it to fly and it can go around things and above and below things. The video they put out to demonstrate this was like, definitely seems like it was flying through the Death Star, which I don't know, it's like a regular occurrence for most people. But as somebody who has crashed a drone, I certainly appreciate it.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  So you're saying Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are obsolete?

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Their skillset is-

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  They're replaced by a robot with a zooming camera that says Hasselblad on it.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  Also, I don't know, really know why you need to zoom with a drone, because you can just fly the drone.

• 34:17Nilay Patel?

  I've been thinking about this a lot.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Well, you do that, that, um, what, what's that, that cool zoom that you do where you're moving the camera one way, but you're zooming the other way? It's really disorienting. You can do that.

• 34:28Nilay Patel?

  I think of that as the Rondo zoom.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  Rondo was one of our old video directors. Okay. Other camera news. New LX100 from Panasonic with touchscreen new sensor. And then Nikon just released its full frame mirrorless stuff. The Nikon stuff, they, it really feels like they missed a trick. Right? Like, what do people think of when they think of like mirrorless cameras, things smaller, easier to handle? So Nikon put out like a full-size DSLR body, D7. Z7 and Z6, I keep getting it wrong. They're huge, the lenses look nice. You can get an adapter for the typical Nikon F mount lens. I just don't know where they're going with this one.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Here's what I think happened. Nikon, a decade ago, was like, hey, uh, these smaller cameras are coming. Eventually, we're gonna need to get rid of the, the lens, or not the lens, the mirror. We should get ready, we should, we should like have, be ready to make cool, small cameras. Well, it was a decade ago. Like, well, well, how do we, how do we do that? And somebody said, I know. Let's bring Ashton Kutcher in and we'll make something called CoolPix. And then it was such a traumatic experience having to work with him that Nikon has decided they're out of that game and they're only gonna make big ass cameras for the rest of their company, because that's just where they live.

• 35:44Nilay Patel?

  Can I just point out that the, um, the adapter to use the regular lenses is called FTZ. F2Z.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  No.

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  Whatever Nikon product manager came out with that.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Maybe Ashton Kutcher's still lurking. Okay, okay, but here's the thing. One advantage of mirrorless cameras is the small size.

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  But there are other reasons that people gravitate towards them.

• 36:08Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  And what annoying thing about Sony's cameras is they have these tiny little batteries that run out in like 15 minutes. And so you have to like, to have a, an effective professional Sony kit, you basically have to have like eight batteries with you. Um, and then like a dual charger, so you got two batteries charging, you know? So I, I don't know how these cameras will actually operate, but

• 36:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  especially, you know, if you're, if you're actually professional, the, the lens size is gonna dominate unless you've got like a pancake lens or something. So, I don't know, I feel like there's definitely room for a bulkier, uh, full frame mirrorless camera if it's actually good, but, and I hope it's good. And also, they're doing this crazy lens. The Noct lens, 58 millimeter, f-stop 0.95.

• 37:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Fastest glass in Nikon's history.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  So that's pretty cool.

• 37:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited, I'm a Nikon person.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:08Nilay Patel?

  I can't believe I just bought an Nikon DSLR. That seems dumb in retrospect. But, you know, I'm excited. I just think as I come, these are going up against a Sony A7 III and A7 R3, and people love those cameras in a way that I'm not sure Nikon can roll in with kind of late to the party. I'm excited for them to do it. I think Sony needs the competition.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  Again, the only theme of our show is please competitors emerge. Anyway, I'm excited about it. It's cool. And then I mentioned the LX100. Speaking of Sony, I think the RX106 is, we just reviewed it. Becca, our video director, did an amazing video review on our YouTube channel. You should go check that out. And Stefan wrote a review on the site. The 6 is one of those camera, the Mark 6. Everyone who wants to buy it talks to me about buying an older one instead. They talk about buying the 5, they talk about buying the 4, because they're cheaper, they're virtually the same. People love the LX100. I think that class of cameras, honestly, the upgrade from your phone camera to that is just staggering. And I said it on our show like 1,000 times now. We take so many awesome photos of the baby,

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  and I love them all. She's really cute. And the second I like go to look at one closely, I'm like, oh, this photo actually sucks. Like, I don't feel that way about the RX100. So I'm, I'm gonna end up buying a camera. I'm gonna buy a drone and a camera. This segment was stuff Neil is gonna buy.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Microphone, Jack.

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  That's true. That's true. Does the LX100 have a microphone, Jack? No, you wouldn't want to shoot video on that thing, anyway. The LX100 does have a cool thing that Nikon started doing. It has continuous Bluetooth low-energy transfers to your smartphone. So as you shoot, it transfers automatically, which Sony's Play Memories does not do yet. That makes me happy. All right, I'm gonna read this ad.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  If you have an Android phone, you can NFC tap it to send it one right away, which is really convenient.

• 39:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's just Dieter out there. Do you have like a move where you like take a photo and like click your phone real fast and like take another photo?

• 39:06Speaker 01

  No, I just, I take photos, I review the stuff I took, and then I take, find the one I want, and I tap it to my phone, and then I post it to Instagram.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  I was hoping that you had some sort of elaborate dance that you did as you took photos.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  No, I'm sorry.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  But Dieter, do you ever need to send money internationally?

• 39:23Nilay Patel?

  I want to warn you against using your bank or PayPal. By the way, this episode of The Verge Cast is brought to you by Transferize. Sure, they get your money from A to B, but that transfer costs you more than it should, a lot more, it's the old way. Let me tell you about the new, smarter and cheaper way to spend money internationally, Transferize. Transferize, founded by two friends, Tibet and Cristo, were frustrated by their bank's bad exchange rate and high fees, and they wondered, what if we could bypass the banks entirely? So they built Transferize. That was seven years ago. Today, more than 2 million people use Transferize. People sending money home, businesses paying suppliers, freelancers getting paid, the list goes on. Transferize's clever new technology gives you a great exchange rate and a low fee, so it'll put some extra money in your pocket for the more important things. Because no one has ever said, it's important that my bank gets some extra money. Test it out for free at transferize.com/podcast or download the app. Once again, that's transferize.com/podcast. It's the wise way to send money.

• 40:06Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's Liz with This Week in Elon.

• 40:09Speaker 05

  Hello and welcome to This Week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lopato, the deputy editor at The Verge. We're doing something a little different this week. We're going to be creating a newsletter, This Week in Elon. You'll find subscription links at theverge.com. You should definitely sign up. And I'm just gonna just go through it, okay? So about 12 hours after I recorded last week's This Week in Elon, The New York Times published an interview with Elon. So, you know, last week was immediately out of date. Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff in there that's interesting, but one of the things that interests me the most is that the board is looking for a second command for Elon, which makes total sense because you read the interview and he's like, well, you know, I've been working 120 hours a week.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  Sometimes I sleep at the factory, sometimes I don't really sleep at all. I mean, that does not seem sustainable to me. And Elon has a great track record of picking successful number twos. I'm thinking specifically of SpaceX's Gwen Shotwell, who has been incredible for that company and who also has taken a lot of pressure off of him and made him free him up to spend more time with Tesla. So if you could find a Gwen Shotwell for Tesla, that might potentially make things a lot better. Because I know when I'm working like that, I don't work 120 hours a week. But there are definitely weeks where I'm working more than I should. I get short-tempered, I get snappy, I'm not my best self, I make sloppy mistakes. And Elon being human, I suspect the same is true of him.

• 41:36Speaker 05

  So having somebody to take the pressure off and run the organization so that he can take a vacation that's longer than a week seems like it's probably a good thing. Speaking of SpaceX, NASA has finally approved SpaceX's plan to load propellants onto its rockets while there are astronauts on board, which some aerospace experts thinks is risky. But the reason why it's been approved is that SpaceX has to demonstrate the fueling method at least five times on the Block 5 Falcon 9 rocket before the process is certified for people. So that's exciting for SpaceX. And now we're going to go back to Tesla drama because there's been a lot of it. So you may remember Elon Musk tweeted about taking Tesla private. He was thinking about taking Tesla private at 420 share. Blaze it. And pretty much all hell broke loose.

• 42:20Speaker 05

  Well, anyway, Goldman Sachs has confirmed they're involved. Morgan Stanley has dropped coverage of Tesla, so that's, quote, spurred speculation they could be playing a role in taking the privatization forward, according to Bloomberg News. And while we're talking banks, it's perhaps worth mentioning that JP Morgan is feeling pretty spicy and is predicting a Tesla stock plunge because funding was, quote, "not secured." So their price target for Tesla shares is $195, which is a lot less than 420 and also not a very fun number.

• 42:54Speaker 05

  Couple of other things going on. Ark Invest, one of Tesla's biggest investors, has published an open letter saying they don't want Tesla to go private, that they think that it's actually better for Tesla to be in the public markets, they think it's going to be better for the company, they firmly believe in the company. So there's that. Those are your bulls and bears, my friends. And then meanwhile, there are a couple of other smaller things going on. Wall Street Journal is reporting that some Tesla parts suppliers are nervous they won't get paid. Business Insider is reporting that Tesla is still having some manufacturing problems, and they surveyed 12 customers who say they got flawed cars. And some of those folks say that getting fixes wasn't easy. I will just note that 12 is not a huge number. One other thing, the Azealia Banks thing is still happening, and I still don't know

• 43:39Speaker 05

  what to make of it. I'm just going to say the whole thing gives me a really severe case of secondhand embarrassment. And I don't think I'm the only one who's embarrassed because Grimes and Elon Musk have unfollowed each other on Instagram and Twitter. And then later Elon Musk deleted his Instagram account. I don't know what to make of that. I don't know if they're unfollowing each other because they just want to keep a low profile, or if they have in fact broken up. But, uh, social media, none of us should be using it. That's this week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lopato. Thank you so much for listening and you should subscribe to our newsletter.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I feel like we need to talk about these app rumors.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  So, Apple's coming up, September is looming. September often does. That's a real Counting Crows song. September's looming, we're expecting a new iPhone event, because that's what always happens. And so now this little baby flood of leaks is coming. So Mark German at Bloomberg says MacBook Air replacement with a retina display and a new Mac Mini targeted at pros.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  I don't know if we're gonna get that in September. That might be an October thing.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it really feels like they're gonna have two events.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Like, we're expecting three iPhones and they're probably gonna, and we're also expecting the Apple Watch with a bigger screen. I don't know how they fit that in. There's also like the new iPad Pro in the wings and Mac. Like, they're gonna, there, there's no way they try and do all that stuff in a single event.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm with you.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Right?

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I can see them doing three products in one event, but not five. That seems like an awful lot. Although, sometimes they just like, do it, you know? Like, every now and again, they're just like, here's all of the things.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  I'd have to physically see a Mac Mini in an Apple store to believe Apple is launching a Mac Mini.

• 45:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the report says they understand what people use Mac Minis for, which is like, server colocation. Uh, there's one, this is my favorite one, home theater usage. Uh, because the HTPC market's still beating along. So you can see, that's like a processor bump situation. They don't need to do a lot. And they are bad at bumping processors. So they bump the processor every eight years.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, careful.

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  It's a long time. Uh, then MacBook Air seems a lot more complicated. So, and John Gruber, you can just read his brain breaking in real time on Daring Fireball right now as he tries to piece it together.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  My brain is also broken.

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't know why this seems so complicated to everyone. So that, here's the basic problem.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:08Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, correct me if I'm wrong.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  I'm standing by to correct you.

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  The, the, the report is, it'll be the same.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Dieter, just go ahead.

• 46:16Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, go ahead.

• 46:19Nilay Patel?

  Wait, let's see this one. I'll just help you.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  The report is that there's gonna be a new MacBook Air replacement that will have, uh, it'll be about the same size. It'll have a 13 inch screen, slightly smaller bezels. And great, that's what everyone's been waiting for. Hooray. But here's the question. We all assumed that when they released the MacBook and then the MacBook Pro, that that was how it was gonna go. There was gonna be the MacBook, small and thin and whatever, and then there'd be the MacBook Pro, big, tanky, not tanky, but bigger, whatever. And then the MacBook Air would eventually just kind of...

• 46:57Speaker 01

  The way it's turned out, the MacBook is underpowered and the MacBook Pro is touchbarred. So everyone's real unhappy. And so everyone's waiting for them to come out with something else. Because the thing I've been, you know, beating the drum about is they don't have a good $1,000 laptop. They don't have a good like mid-range. They'll never do low-end whatever. So if they release this thing, it's, you know, assume it's about the size of the MacBook Air, maybe a little bit thinner, has a better real processor unlike the MacBook. Why does the MacBook exist?

• 47:27Nilay Patel?

  To have an armship in it next year. That's why it's there.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  You think so?

• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, the problem with the MacBook is it's underpowered, but Intel is underpowered.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  But why is the Air the one that's bigger and heavier than the MacBook?

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  Because the Air is the one that's gonna get a realistic processor in it this year. Like, I think, I think everyone's brain's shrinking because you're overthinking it. The MacBook Air is one of the most popular computers ever named, ever made.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:51Nilay Patel?

  It had an absolutely golden brand. Joanna Stern, for $500 more, you can get a MacBook Air. I mean, that's just like all she wrote on our website for two years, because it was true. And they've tarnished that brand, but they could instantly bring it back with this very simple set of updates. They can move the MacBook to ARM and have that be the tip of that spear. And the MacBook Pro can continue to be whatever it's gonna be.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Here's what Apple should do.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  They should introduce this thing and just call it the MacBook. And they should be like, and the old MacBook is, you know, the MacBook little. We're rebranding it.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  The MacBook little.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  MacBook Air, call it the MacBook Air, like, whatever.

• 48:29Nilay Patel?

  No, look, if you just think, go with me on this. The MacBook is a computer with an ARM processor makes sense, right?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:39Nilay Patel?

  Like, just in terms of what it is, the size it is, what it could be, in terms of how Apple wants its consumers to think about the future of computing, right? You buy this thing, it's the jewel, it's a little bit more expensive, but it's the whole future, and it only runs some subset of our Mac operating system applications, but...

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Stocks.

• 49:00Nilay Patel?

  And the stocks. And it can run some iPad apps over on the side. The MacBook Pro is for pros. It's got last year's chips in it, but it's still fine.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  A vibrant partnership with AMD.

• 49:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's for pros, it's gonna be big. The MacBook Air, the thin and light that everybody wants, which is an Intel chip, the full range of stuff, in a reasonable size of the retina display. That makes sense to me in that you've got your pure consumer offering, this MacBook, which does not have the range of apps, because it runs ARM. You've got the Pro, which does everything, has a discrete GPU. By the way, I can't get mine to turn off, and my battery dies in 10 minutes right now. Just letting everybody know how that DGPU life is working for me. You've got the Pro, which does everything, and then you've got the Air, which is the thin and light, down the middle, golden brand name. I don't know why that seems complicated, but knowing Apple, they will complicate it in some way.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  I mean, the MacBook, the MacBook Air launched when you had a plastic, chunky MacBook and a heavy, powerful MacBook Pro, probably with a disk drive. Yeah, actually with a disk drive.

• 50:12Nilay Patel?

  So the plastic ones had a disk drive, too?

• 50:13Speaker 02

  That's also true. So what they need to do to differentiate is they take the existing MacBook, they wrap it in plastic, they add a disk drive, and they charge $600 for it, and everything is solved.

• 50:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't know who I saw on Twitter today, but there was some Mac developer who loaded up, like, the first iBook, like, the tangerine orange one that looked like a toilet seat, and he had Xcode open on it in, like, 10.3, and it just looks, everything about it looked like a cartoon, and I literally thought, like, instinctively thought, that was a brighter time in America. I was young, the operating systems were bright, there are colors everywhere, the buttons were pulsing, the computers were neon orange. It was pretty wild. I miss that moment. Yeah. It's gone now. Now we just want dark modes and everything. Yeah. That's where we're at.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Bring back, bring back Zubas is what you're saying.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God. No, it was post Zub. I don't wanna, I don't wanna talk about this anymore. All right, uh, one more thing real fast. Uh, Tom Warren has been doggedly pursuing these leaks. Microsoft creating a new subscription service for Xbox that bundles a console, Xbox Live, Xbox Game Pass. It looks like 25 bucks a month for the Xbox One S, uh, and like 35 for the One X. This is on its face a bad deal. If you just bought all that stuff on its own, it'd be cheaper. And yet, I'm like, this is gonna make me buy a One X. I don't know why. I don't know why. I cannot explain it. But I've been, I've had a One X in a shopping cart on Microsoft's site, on Amazon. I haven't been able to pull the trigger.

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  Now you wanna owe Microsoft money for two years. I don't get it.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Can't you just like return it when you, if you want, if you're done with it after a year? I don't know.

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, like a lease? I have no idea how this works. I just know that like, the idea that I'm gonna pay 30 bucks a month, or 35 bucks a month. It's weird, right? That's appealing to you. Yeah. Cause I would never buy Game Pass otherwise, ever.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Microsoft has wanted to, they've been talking in vague terms about trying to get like the console cycle, a little bit more like the phone cycle. You know, so your apps will be compatible from generation to generation of console. They can release them more often. And so also copying the phone model of like, get a, just get a subscription to your phone, put it on some weird payment plan. Makes perfect sense for the way that they're thinking about the console market.

• 52:38Nilay Patel?

  Also, if you're like a kid, it's a lot easier to get 30 bucks a month, like weasel your way into 35 bucks a month than. You can just like go out.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  It's good like, it's good practice for being in debt to large companies later.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Take a summer job.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  Xbox capitalism is practice. It's great. All right, Paul, every week, we have like two minutes.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Every week, it's called Cold Ears, Warm Heart.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Can't lose.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Can't lose. HP has made a new patented method for cooling your ears with headphones. It's a thermoelectric magnets.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  So the new.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  Omen Mindframe Headset. They're also cloth, which is nice, USB powered. I just hate having hot ears.

• 53:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  But I also like.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  How do magnets cool your ears?

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Thermoelectrically.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  I want to wear these all the time. I, I get this thing where like one of my ears will just like suddenly like get really hot and turn super red and I don't know why. And just the idea of just having cold ears is like, that makes that, you don't want cold feet, but you do want cold ears.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Dieter gets it.

• 53:43Nilay Patel?

  How much does that cost?

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Two hundred bucks. Also, not portable because it's USB powered.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  You get a battery. Come on. It's the future. Okay, that's it. I want you to look at a story on the site. I just want to plug one more thing. Andrew Hawkins went to Waymo's self-driving big large-scale test, exclusive, checked out how they're managing a fleet of self-driving taxis, which are, to be fair, Chrysler Pacifica mini fans.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  But they're cool. So like read that. It's a great story about a problem that I don't think we think about with self-driving, which is like, literally who will change the oil in these cars? So check that out on the site. It's great. How the future's going, future of music's going. We didn't talk about politics this week, but I promise you they are still happening. And Casey Newton is covering them all on the interface. Check that out, theverge.com-interface. That's the newsletter you can get every day. You can also follow us on all the social media platforms of your choice. We're usually at Verge. Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow us. I'm at Reckless on Twitter, Paul's future Paul, Dieter Spaklon. You can also listen to more from the Box Media Podcast Network. Check out Recode Decode with Kara Swisher and Recode Media with Peter Kafka. This episode of Road Chaff is brought to you by Audi e-tron. Despite all of its technology, there's a lot that all the Audi e-tron doesn't offer. For example, it has no tailpipe emissions

• 54:54Nilay Patel?

  and no need to fill up at the gas station. You just plug it in at home. The Quattro all-wheel drive system offers no reason not to tackle roads in almost any weather. And with long-range capabilities and high-speed charging, e-tron is a new way to think about electric mobility, which makes sense. It's the first fully electric vehicle from Audi. e-tron was built to defy the elements and upend the conventional wisdom. So in truth, it isn't really lacking anything. After all, it isn't just an electric car, it's electric Audi. e-tron is here in the future of electric. Visit audiousa.com/e-tron to learn more and stay informed. That's it. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Promo code.