Is this peak TikTok?

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the Apple Vision Pro review rating, changes to the TikTok app, streaming news, and more. Further reading: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not The Vision Pro is a computer for the age of walled gardens Apple’s Vision Pro battery pack is hiding the final boss of Lightning cables Even without Netflix and YouTube, Apple’s Vision Pro has over 600 apps at launch TikTok loses Taylor Swift, Drake, and other major Universal Music artists UMG set to remove music from TikTok amid AI and payment concerns TikTok test automatically identifies products in videos and offers purchase links TikTok goes full YouTube Hulu is cracking down on password sharing, just like Disney Plus and Netflix The death of the Amazon deal could mean goodbye iRobot Lawmakers propose anti-nonconsensual AI porn bill after Taylor Swift controversy All the news from Congress’ Big Tech child safety hearing Snap is recalling and refunding every drone it ever sold TikTok’s CEO can’t catch a break from xenophobia in Congress Your home’s internet connection could soon be called .internal Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The First Cast, the flagship podcast of putting Windows all around you and then walking around them, then looking at them, and being in the future. The future. Yeah.

• 1:12David Pierce?

  That's iTunes' most specific genre.

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  It's The First Cast. I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here. Hi. Alex Trans is here.

• 1:22Alex Cranz?

  Hi, I'm your friend that really misses Microsoft's Windows.

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  The HoloLens people are so mad at me. They're like, "How did you do this whole review? And you never mentioned HoloLens, the thing that invented spatial compute." And it's true. Microsoft invented a number of these words with no regard for what they meant. They're like, "HoloLens is mixed reality. That means augmented reality. This VR headset in Windows, that's Windows mixed reality." Like, just anything. And all the words meant the same thing. And I have done some very cool HoloLens demos in my life. I put on a HoloLens, and I changed a spark plug on an ATV in the basement of a Microsoft building, and it guided me.

• 2:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  It put arrows, like, "Go to this drawer, open this drawer." I don't know if any of that was real or if it was totally state... Whatever, it was awesome. I was like, "This is definitely the future of changing spark plugs in an ATV, as long as the room is set out exactly right and the computer knows where all the parts are." Like, this is how we should change spark plugs. Which, by the way, if you set up the room exactly right, you know all our parts are, you no longer need the computer to change the spark.

• 2:30David Pierce?

  Because you put the spark plugs where they go.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  But whatever.

• 2:34Alex Cranz?

  You outsource that.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but they were like, imagine a mechanic on an airline. And now, I'm like, man, I wish Boeing had bought more hololenses. They're also in Seattle. Just putting that out there, Microsoft. The problem with the, the hololens, oh, and I did a very cool demo, Microsoft, one of the few companies in VR that has ever solved colocation. So I wore a hololens and someone else was wearing a hololens. And we were looking at the same thing at the same time. And like, I would interact with, it was like a model or something. And I would interact with it and they would spin it the other way. And no one else, as far as I can go, very, no other company is on a commercial scale. I don't think the Quest headsets can do that. The Vision Pro can't do it.

• 3:14Alex Cranz?

  Okay, that's cool then.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  Right, so I, just all credit to hololens. The hololens is a gigantic failure, which is why I didn't mention it. It failed as a product. The person who was leading the project got forced out of Microsoft for sexual misconduct allegations. They did a bunch of layoffs on the team. They've reorganized their hardware portfolio and they say, quote, and this is a real quote, "We'll make a next version of the hololens when the time is right."

• 3:43Alex Cranz?

  Oh, there you, is it, is it right?

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  No. You know what they're gonna do? They're gonna make a bunch of AI stuff and print money instead of being like, you can change a spark plug with our glasses on.

• 3:56Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I'll never be able to change a spark plug, though.

• 3:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, anyway, so shout out to the hololens people.

• 4:01David Pierce?

  Hololens also objectively the coolest product name in this entire category.

• 4:06Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:06David Pierce?

  No question. Hololens kicks ass.

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  It's good, it's a good name. And the first one was cool and the second one was even better from what I'm told. I never tried the second one. And, you know, if, if you have the perfect spark plug setup.

• 4:20Alex Cranz?

  Are you-

• 4:21Nilay Patel?

  That thing kicked ass.

• 4:22Alex Cranz?

  Are you saying you don't fondly remember the Acer AH101DBEY Windows Mixed Reality Headset? That had a good name. That's a good ring.

• 4:32David Pierce?

  Say it slower, slower.

• 4:34Nilay Patel?

  But Addy and I just decided what the words would mean in our review. We made a sidebar. We're like, "This is what Mixed Reality means and this is what Augmented Reality means." And then Addy was like, "You know, this is a flip of how Microsoft wanted it." And it's like, "I don't care." Like, "I'm putting my foot in the ground and this is what we're saying." Uh, anyhow, so shout out to the HoloLens people. I feel you. It was a cool demo.

• 4:55David Pierce?

  Did any magically people get at you?

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  The magically people were just happy to be mentioned.

• 5:01Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, "Your product is a true AR product, optical AR that has fatal compromises in it and no one should buy it." They're like, "Oh my God, finally. The validation we deserve." Some people, I will say two things. Uh, some people basically called the top on two technologies in this review. I said, "Camera-based pass-through has, is, might be a dead end." And I feel that it might be a dead end. And I said, "Hand and eye-tracking." It, there's a part of it that's valuable for some things, but it's also a dead end. It cannot be the primary input. And I heard from people who've been working on this who have shipped-

• 5:35David Pierce?

  Wait, sorry. Real quick, we should just say, by the way, this is your review of the Vision Pro, which went up this week. We talked a bunch about it on Tuesday.

• 5:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:41David Pierce?

  If, if you, if you haven't been living inside of Nilay's brain for the last week or so, he's talking about the Apple Vision Pro, which we just got to so fast.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna say, let's, no, this is right. I woke up, I use this app called Sleep Cycle on my, uh, it's my alarm clock. And yesterday I woke up and it basically congratulated me on finally getting some sleep.

• 6:04David Pierce?

  Oh boy.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  It was like, "Good job. You've got 400% more sleep last night than you've been getting." And I was like, this is a disaster. So yeah, I'm wired. Now I've like got too much sleep, but the amount of caffeine, I've basically only eaten cinnamon toast crunch this week. It's bad.

• 6:21Alex Cranz?

  The inside of your mouth after that much cinnamon toast crunch.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, I didn't eat it all in one go.

• 6:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but it's cumulative.

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's cumulative in that each bowl is 25 grams of sugar.

• 6:35Alex Cranz?

  We'll miss you.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm just like, why, the crash is gonna be bad. We're not buying this anymore. But that's, I would like get home and be like, what can I eat? You know, like fast.

• 6:44Alex Cranz?

  Cereal.

• 6:44Nilay Patel?

  Cereal. And I was like, this cereal. Anyhow, yes, a Vision Pro review. I heard the, the, the two things I read that I, they were like, the big ideas that I didn't overly highlight is Vision Pro is the best version of a device with camera-based pass-through and hand and eye tracking they've ever seen. And I was like, it might have inadvertently proved that these are dead ends. And I have heard from people who have shipped millions of devices with camera passer and who have invested millions upon billions of dollars in the hand and eye tracking. And they were like, you have a point about camera pass-through. It's good for what it's good for. And like, it's not a dead end if you use it right, but Apple's trying to make it do too much, which I thought was really interesting feedback.

• 7:27David Pierce?

  That's fair. Cause it is like on the, on the Quest 3, it's useful in spots, right? It's like the, I'm playing a VR game and I like double tap on the headset and it opens up so I can like see what's around me or whether I just kicked my dog or whatever. But it's not like you don't, you don't live in the pass-through. And so for that, I think pass-through works fine. Apple is like, default state is pass-through. And I think, I think that might be where it's pushing too hard.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  There's a really cool app, uh, that Gen 2 we posted on the site where it's shortcuts.

• 7:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Nilay Patel?

  And you can put the shortcuts all around your house. So you get all these shortcuts by your TV and all this stuff. And that's really cool. It's like, oh, but to use that, you have to wear this all the time.

• 8:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  So not, no longer useful. So it, this is the argument, this is a simulator of what Apple really wants. But they're like, look, camera passer has its uses. But if you try to pretend it's AR, you're gonna run into the problem. We agree with you there. And then the note about eye tracking, and this person has spent a lot of money on eye tracking in their life, was you are overloading an input channel by trying to use it for output. Which is fascinating.

• 8:28David Pierce?

  Wait, explain.

• 8:29Nilay Patel?

  So your eyes are an input channel.

• 8:30Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 8:31Nilay Patel?

  So you're used to taking in a lot of information with your eyes, or an input channel. And then you overload it by trying to use it as an output channel to control the device.

• 8:39Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's smart.

• 8:40Nilay Patel?

  And so the, the, the feedback was you, you hit on something that this industry has been talking about for a long time.

• 8:45David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  Which is you can't overload your input channels as output channels. And you'll run into this problem with eye tracking because you have to look at what you want to look at. And you have to look at what you want to control instead of what you're looking at.

• 8:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because historically eye tracking was just to like enhance it. So like if you kind of glanced to one side, the camera would move. So you'd see what was ever, whatever was over there.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's like.

• 9:04Alex Cranz?

  Render.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  That's foveated rendering.

• 9:05Alex Cranz?

  Right, yeah, and it didn't really, what like.

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  That's to save processor cycles.

• 9:09Alex Cranz?

  Right, but no, it also made it a smoother experience. It made it like less, oh, I'm just staring at some screen.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, so it's a blurry.

• 9:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like it made it a nice experience. And even when you do it just on a regular laptop screen, I did a, I reviewed way too many Tobii laptops once upon a time. It was really useful because you could just kind of look at things and, and it would pop up and make it a little brighter. It'd make it a little easier. But like anytime I would try to like control the computer with it, I was like, oh, I hate this.

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Alex Cranz?

  Because I'd like glance at my watch and my character just start running around in circles.

• 9:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and this is overloading an input channel as output. So you, when you use it the way you're describing for foveated rendering for highlights, right?

• 9:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  Make it a little brighter, you're enhancing the input channel.

• 9:50Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 9:51Nilay Patel?

  When you use an output channel, you might overload yourself. So this person was like, yeah, in the history of eye tracking, this is a thing that we understand. And then they said, I had it wrong on hand tracking.

• 10:01Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  That there's, the industry believes in hand tracking. They're gonna get it right because it is the most natural way of doing things. And there's a lot of work being done. I keep pointing out, so computers are always watching. And the vision, regardless of that joke, the Vision Pro does mis-register a lot of hand input. Also cannot differentiate between your hands and someone else's hands.

• 10:20Alex Cranz?

  Also, you personally look really goofy doing it in the office.

• 10:24Nilay Patel?

  It's true.

• 10:25Alex Cranz?

  It was so good.

• 10:26David Pierce?

  Wait, hold on. So if you're just sitting at your desk on the Vision Pro, I can just stick my hands in front of your face and start literally typing on your keyboard?

• 10:34Nilay Patel?

  Sure can. Or, or you can just put your hand in front and click your fingers together and it'll register a click.

• 10:39David Pierce?

  I'm gonna do this to you so much when I see you.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait to do this. Assuming that I'm wearing the headset. What a good prank. It's a good prank. So you're screwed with people. Like, when I say the thing is lonely, it does not contemplate anyone else being around you who is not on their best behavior, which is all the time. All other people are not on their best behavior.

• 10:56Alex Cranz?

  Is it just assuming that, like, the pass-through will suddenly pop on and you'll see David being like, "yoink"? I assume that's the noise David's gonna make.

• 11:05David Pierce?

  That's what I do when I type, yeah.

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  The only AR feature is in it. Specifically, it recognizes David Pearson and makes that sound. So, anyway, I thought this was all really interesting feedback, because people who have been working on this stuff for a long time were like, "We liked your review. Here are the things we think you got right and wrong." And the camera-based pass-through as a replacement for true AR feels directionally correct to me, right? This, it might be the ceiling for that. Eye-tracking, they're like, "Yeah, people are gonna react to it differently." We will see. This is the first big eye-tracking at scale that will happen. And then they're like, "You're just wrong in eye-tracking." So we'll see. The fact that, like, it just misregisters input to me is, again, people are gonna... By the time you're listening to this, people will have them.

• 11:50Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I just seen has already worn a Vision Pro and a Cybertruck.

• 11:54Alex Cranz?

  Just immediately?

• 11:55Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 11:56Alex Cranz?

  Like, as soon as the embargo lifted, she was walking out.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  I mean, she's funny as hell, so like, I appreciate that she did that. But like, some other kind of YouTuber, not I just seen, who is wonderful, some other kind of YouTuber is gonna do the actual thing with the Cybertruck and the Vision Pro, and the clock is just ticking.

• 12:12Alex Cranz?

  Unsafe. Don't do that.

• 12:13David Pierce?

  Don't, don't do it.

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  They're not gonna listen to us. They're doing it for the views, man.

• 12:16Alex Cranz?

  Don't do it for the clicks. Do something else cool.

• 12:18Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. I'm excited for people to actually get their hands on this outside of just experiencing other people's experiences. And I'm very curious to see how people react to hand and eye-tracking in particular.

• 12:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. Also, if you got one, as you're hearing this on Friday, the 2nd, it's the day this stuff is coming out. If you got one, call us and tell us about it. Well, this'll be a super fun thing to do on the hotline for the next two weeks. I just wanna hear people's experiences with the Vision Pro. Tell us what you're doing. Tell us what's cool. Tell us what sucks. Give us, give us your, like, 60-second review of the Vision Pro, literally whenever you want. Call the hotline. Send us emails.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:54David Pierce?

  [email protected].

• 12:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying to know. You can tell me, tell me I'm wrong, whatever you want. I'm dying to know how you feel about this product, because it is new, and that's what's exciting about it. Which leads me into the score. So a lot of people have asked me about the score, and I will tell you... And David in particular will tell you that I drove myself crazy trying to give this thing a score after I'd written the review. Yes. Just bonkers, like, because I'm the one who says world of no sevens. Then I gave it a seven. It's like. So if you don't know, world of no sevens, a thing I say all the time, which is you, the seven is just the default score. It is milquetoast. And so if you say world of no sevens, it forces you to make a very hard choice between six and eight.

• 13:36Nilay Patel?

  And I am the person who says this, and I definitely gave this thing a seven. And I tortured myself over that seven. And you got it wrong. And David thinks I should have given it a seven. You got it wrong.

• 13:47Alex Cranz?

  I tend to agree with, I was genuinely shocked because I didn't participate in the review, but, but we, you know, we did the Vergecast. And so I went as soon as it posted and I click and I scroll down and I saw that seven and I was like, but we, it felt like a six in the Vergecast that we recorded. This is interesting.

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I said on the Vergecast, and I have to own this.

• 14:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Nilay Patel?

  Inconsistent input system is a full point deduction. And at that moment in time, and I, this is 100% true. The score that was entered into our little score database was a six.

• 14:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 14:18Nilay Patel?

  And I said that knowing that I'd already typed the six into that database.

• 14:21Alex Cranz?

  What pushed you back up to a seven?

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  I had a conversation with Verge and Becca, in particular Becca, our wonderful video directors, who made this whole review with me and used it a lot in the course of that review. And they reminded me that it was really fun.

• 14:38Alex Cranz?

  So that, so it lost a point for inconsistency, gained a point because it's fun as hell.

• 14:44Nilay Patel?

  It lost a point for, Verge was, we were, we were like, we were in it. We were like, we opened up our own how we rate page and like read our own definitions of the numbers. Like, you're in an office with people for hours upon hours arguing with the dumbest, like you just like fall down the rabbit hole completely. And we discussed bringing back decimals, which we got rid of a couple of years, like the whole thing. And.

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  Verin's line was, "We need a, we need a number that means fantastic but useless." Because that, he's like, "This is fantastic. I have no idea why I want to use this."

• 15:17David Pierce?

  What about the number that says it's $3,500? Do you know how many, you want fun, buy a Nintendo Switch and you'll have $3,200 left. Isn't that cool?

• 15:29Nilay Patel?

  So, look, like I say, I was at six for a long time.

• 15:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  It was a six. I swear to you, it was a six. And Becky was like, "But you have had, like, the thing you are doing, that you are constantly talking about, this thing that you keep coming back to, like, 'I'm lonely in here,' is because you're having fun and you want other people to have fun with you." Which is not how I feel about the meta quest. Which is like, "This is fun. Like, I'm swinging a bat around." Like, there's not a point where I'm like, "Look at this thing that you, is wild, that I want you to see." Like, the art gallery of webpages that I made in our cafe. It's like, this is crazy. Like, nothing else can do that right now. The meta quests can sort of do it, but they're kind of shaped, like, this is like perfectly locked-in-place windows and you can just leave the room and come back. That's your point, is it was fun. It was a full point deduction for the stuff I complained about,

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  and it, it earned its way back into the seven zone. Because it's not an eight.

• 16:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, oh yeah, I was gonna say, it was never an eight.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  It was, there was no point with this thing getting an eight.

• 16:25Alex Cranz?

  Did it ever go to five?

• 16:27Nilay Patel?

  So I was texting with Dan Seifert.

• 16:28Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 16:28Nilay Patel?

  Wonderful reviews that are, uh, number one Dex fan in the world, Dan Seifert.

• 16:32Alex Cranz?

  Traitor.

• 16:32Nilay Patel?

  Dan just left the verge, so he was not part of this review. We wish him well on his new journey in life. It's gonna be really fun for him. Um, but Dan texts me after the review and was like, "Seven, huh?" And I was like, "Dude." And, like, literally, people are jumping out of the woodwork to quote Dan at me throughout this process. Because Dan's quote is, "You never regret giving something a lower score." Ever. Like, if you just instinctively pick the lower score and you, well, it's five years from now, you won't have regret in it. You might be like, "Ah, I gave that stupid thing an eight. Why'd I do that?" But you'll never be like, "I judged it too harshly." Uh, like, literally, I'm like, walking down the street and people are like, "You know what Dan would say?" It's like haunting me.

• 17:10David Pierce?

  And I will say, that's not, that's not a, like, judgment decision. That's not saying, like, we reflexively hate products. That is like a decade of hard-worn experience.

• 17:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:20David Pierce?

  And this is the mistake that you made, Neelai, is you got sucked in by the thing being fun. Like, that's a stupid reason. It's just a stupid reason. Like, this is a $3,500 computer. You don't judge your MacBook on whether it's fun. You judge it on whether it does the things it is supposed to do. And this fundamentally doesn't. There are a lot of things that it is supposed to do that it either doesn't do or doesn't do very well. And it is $3,500.

• 17:49Nilay Patel?

  I take the criticism and I, look, I knew what I was buying. I was buying a bunch of people telling me that I did give it a high score, including David on this very podcast. I knew how this Verchass would start today when I gave it that seven.

• 18:02David Pierce?

  You did. But wait, I just, I just want to point at the tension of this, which I think is both the tension you felt in reviewing this and the reason we all think the Vision Pro is so interesting, is that it is objectively cool and new and interesting, right? Like, Joanna Stern, a friend of the Wall Street Journal, made a video and there's a moment in it where she sets two timers and puts them over two different things on her stove. Like, that kicks ass. It's so small and so silly, but it's so cool and people really responded to it. That is not a reason to buy a $3,500 product or to wear a headset on your face all day. But she said. Right. But it is cool. It is undeniably cool. The shortcuts thing you were talking about is like, undeniably cool.

• 18:42David Pierce?

  And I want to live in a world where that is part of my life. I will not wear the headset and I will not buy the headset in order to get that thing. But like, that's that tension, right? Where you have these moments where you're like, oh, this is it. Like, they, they did it. This is it. And then you have to weigh that against, what is this thing I have on my face? What does that mean for like, my life? Is this worth the cost? And you even said in the review, right? We, we review things not just based on like, what they might be someday, but what the thing is in the box. But that is so.

• 19:10Nilay Patel?

  But that's not, that's not what got it the seven. That's my rule.

• 19:14David Pierce?

  It's a good rule. It's the right rule, but it's, it's so hard to do, especially in this case. Because A, Apple has a longer history of being right about these things than most. So like, most of the time, you genuinely should not assume this thing will ever get better for any reason, because most of the time it doesn't. With Apple, it usually does. And so you have to believe that more than with most companies. But then also. It's $3,500.

• 19:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so here's how I've been, that price thing, also weighed on my mind. Another good argument for sex. If it's a phone review, and even in phone reviews now, it's like, you're just reviewing iPhones for people who buy iPhones. You're very rarely writing a review for somebody with an Android phone, except for like blunt curiosity if the camera's good or bad. Um, my assumption going into this was that I was not writing buying advice. The people who are buying the Vision Pro are buying the Vision Pro, whether or not I think it's good or bad.

• 20:07Alex Cranz?

  So what was that score speaking to?

• 20:08Nilay Patel?

  So the score was like, okay, like however many they sold, 80,000, 120,000. The vast majority of people are gonna try this thing on, and my guess is after a while, they're like, yeah, it's seven. And like, that is where that came from, right? Is, eh, it kind of works a lot of time, but oh, man, I sometimes have a really good time. Like, that, that exact thing, the reason it's World of No Sevens, is the, that is why I got there. Cause sometimes you're like, oh, this is great. And then sometimes you're like, I'm looking at the, look at the, right? And like, that is like a real challenge in there. It's not broken. The last Apple product I gave a six to was the Apple Studio Display, whose webcam basically shipped in unusable state.

• 20:49Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, this is six, cause this display technology, the panel is fine, but the backlight technology is steam powered, and this camera is effectively broken, six. And that was what, $1,200, $1,300?

• 21:01David Pierce?

  $1,600.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  $1,600, I should have given that a five.

• 21:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, you should have, that's what I was about to say, you scored that thing too high.

• 21:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, alright, maybe I'm just wrong.

• 21:09David Pierce?

  But I will say, a bunch of people pointed out the similarities between what this thing is and what the original Apple Watch was, which I think is really interesting, because you give both a seven, and I think you were right about the Apple Watch and wrong about this. And I've been trying to figure out what it is.

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 21:24Alex Cranz?

  I know what it is.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  Wait, wait, I wanna hear what David's theories.

• 21:26David Pierce?

  I have two theories. One is $3,500. And the other is, I think the first Apple Watch got the form factor almost right.

• 21:38David Pierce?

  And hadn't quite figured out the use case, but it was like still a nice thing to wear. I got furious at the first Apple Watch because it didn't tell the time. The screen wasn't on all the time. Like, how are you a watch if you don't tell me the time when I look at you? But it like, the thing was there, right? It was close enough to being what the thing should be. And it already did some of the things you would want it to. So it was like, that felt closer to me than this, in which the thing itself is nowhere near what it's supposed to be.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  Nope.

• 22:06David Pierce?

  Not even close. And so that's where it loses me. Like, I deduct a full point for absolutely no one thinks this is what this is supposed to look like.

• 22:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I will say I feel very vindicated by the modern rereading of the Apple Watch reviews. Guy got raked over the coals for giving that thing a bad score.

• 22:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, it holds up. It really does.

• 22:22Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, this thing is a, I believe I used the word bauble. I was like, this thing is a bauble, and you will buy it. And if you buy it, you will like it, because people like baubles. But it is not fashion. It is technology that looks like fashion, and they need to figure out what it's for. And it took them three generations to get there.

• 22:39David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  And they totally rebooted the software. And I was like, no one will ever, and like, for a long time, people were like, you were just unnecessarily harsh. And this time, like, literally, there are screenshots comparing my two reviews.

• 22:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Nilay Patel?

  Being like, oh, this is the same exact thing. And the only thing I will remind everyone of is, one, I was right. I'll always remind you of it. No, but two, the path wasn't set when the thing was launched. Right? So being like, this thing happens to the Apple Watch means it will happen to the other thing. They had to adjust.

• 23:12David Pierce?

  Right.

• 23:12Nilay Patel?

  And actually, the review is like, it adjusts them. Like, they take the feedback from the market, from the customers, from the reviewers, and they like, make decisions based on it. And one of the big decisions they had to make along the way was, we are totally rebooting WatchOS.

• 23:27David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  To make the interface different, to completely decrease our reliance on third-party apps in an app store.

• 23:34Alex Cranz?

  You're just telling me your watch review should have been a six.

• 23:37David Pierce?

  But also, Apple, with the Apple Watch, and this is true of a lot of Apple things, right? Apple starts by getting the hardware pretty close to right.

• 23:44Alex Cranz?

  I gotta leave.

• 23:45David Pierce?

  And the software is further away.

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  Alex will be joining Dan Seifert in the world beyond.

• 23:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, can we just re-review every Apple product we've ever done right now? Let's just rescore them all.

• 23:57Nilay Patel?

  I get a lot, yeah.

• 23:58David Pierce?

  The watch hardware was very close. And then the question is, how do we make this thing into what it ought to be inside of this box? And Apple usually gets the box right. In this case, neither one of them is right.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:10Alex Cranz?

  Well, like, the watch shipped to people and they could use it and they could set it up and they didn't have issues with it. And lots of people bought one.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  Wait, famously Karl Lagerfeld could not set his up and were

• 24:21Alex Cranz?

  It does not

• 24:22Nilay Patel?

  Do you not know about this? This is like an old Verchess joke. Karl Lagerfeld was photographed, you know, they gave it to all the fashion people.

• 24:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  They photographed Karl Lagerfeld wearing, proudly wearing it with the setup screen on the face.

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  And that's like, we call, we started calling it Lagerfelding, where you're just like wearing a dead Apple Watch, just as a, as a fashion accessory.

• 24:41Alex Cranz?

  That's awesome. But again, that was another reason to give it a seven, because it was like a fashion thing, not necessarily a good one, but it was fashion. And this is just like such a developer kit that I keep him like, I keep thinking about that a lot. Like, it feels like such a developer kit.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  They just won't say it, man. There was a story in Vanity Fair.

• 24:59Alex Cranz?

  A beautifully photographed story in Vanity Fair.

• 25:01David Pierce?

  It was.

• 25:02Alex Cranz?

  Stunning.

• 25:03Nilay Patel?

  A photographed story in Vanity Fair. Tim Cook is wearing a headset.

• 25:07David Pierce?

  He's blinking. Did you notice this?

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  His eyes are closed.

• 25:10David Pierce?

  His googly eyes on the front of the headset are closed. He's blinking in the photo.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  That's very funny.

• 25:15David Pierce?

  It's fantastic.

• 25:16Nilay Patel?

  They should put that on the website. Anyhow, there's a story in Vanity Fair and it is, I mean, honestly, a story could be from 10 years ago. I know Nick Bilton, who wrote it, Nick is a very nice guy. I've had a taco at a party at his house before, like, he's a very nice guy. But it could have been written 10 years ago about VR.

• 25:34Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, the line is like, Tim Cook saw himself on the moon and he knew it was the future. Like, that line has been written about Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer.

• 25:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you could have just like done find and replace Magic Leap for every time they say Vision Pro in that review.

• 25:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, do you remember Magic Leap? Was it Wired that ran the story where

• 25:53Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  Ronny Bravitz was like, I'm hacking the GPU of your brain.

• 25:56David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 25:57Nilay Patel?

  Like, we've just been here, man.

• 26:01Nilay Patel?

  And so I think Apple can't say it's a developer kit. They can't. Place themselves in the long line of companies that have been doing this for a long. They have to say it's finished, which is why they have to, they have to have entertainment. And they have to do this. James Cameron is in that Man of Fair piece quoted as saying, this will change everything. And it's like, dude, you have done more scuba diving VR than anybody.

• 26:24Alex Cranz?

  I have been thinking about that quote specifically more than anything else that's come out of this whole situation, because James Cameron is like, not generally a guy. I was gonna say, he's not generally a guy prone to hyperbole, but he did once declare himself king of the world.

• 26:39David Pierce?

  I don't know if that was hyperbole at some point.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  At that moment in time.

• 26:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but when it comes to like, technology, he's not usually a guy prone to hyperbole. And so when he's like, no, this changes everything. And he's specifically talking about the display technology, like, which sounds really, really incredible. I was like, is there something there? Like, have we missed something that James Cameron is seeing that we're not, besides like, the inside of the headset?

• 27:02Nilay Patel?

  It is legitimately amazing display technology. I have nothing but admiration for how hard it was to build those displays. They are genuinely amazing.

• 27:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  They are available, apparently, on the market. The same person who told me about hand tracking being something he believed in was like, you know, Meta could have bought those. Like, they, that was a thing that Meta had the opportunity to buy, but Meta's version of headset would have been even more expensive, because Meta doesn't have M1 chips or M2 chips. They would have had to go and buy chips with more power and more battery. And they're like, this is, we can't go this way.

• 27:32Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  So Apple uniquely was able to make use of these displays, which are, again, an engineering marvel. But like, James, they're just better than what you have now, right? They're just like, linearly better than the thing you have now.

• 27:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:48Nilay Patel?

  And that, if you're James Cameron, like, you should be able to see, like, this is the step, like, this is the step change that changes it all is like, not the thing.

• 27:55Alex Cranz?

  I really wanna like, sit him down and be like, did they just like cherry pick your quotes here?

• 27:59Nilay Patel?

  They run Apple TV Plus, man, I know.

• 28:01Alex Cranz?

  Like, I need, I just need to know more from Jim. Jim, call me. I know you listen to Vergecast.

• 28:06Nilay Patel?

  He does.

• 28:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. We'll talk about the, the sub too.

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  Jim was the guy who told me about Meta. He's the source.

• 28:12Nilay Patel?

  If you're listening, Tim Cook, that's not true at all. Not even like the slightest bit true.

• 28:17Nilay Patel?

  A little bit, it's, it's by the time you're listening to this, it is, will be out. I'm sure some of you are driving your cars, wearing it right now. Stop it. Pull over to the side of the road.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  Apple today, a little bit more, Apple announced along with the launch of Vision Pro, 600 apps will be at launch, which seems like a good number.

• 28:36Alex Cranz?

  It's a lot.

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  For, for a new platform, it's a good number.

• 28:39David Pierce?

  Is it?

• 28:40Nilay Patel?

  I think so.

• 28:41David Pierce?

  I mean, it's fine. It's some apps, but like this is the company that spends a lot of time talking about hundreds of thousands of apps and millions of apps. 600 is, is good.

• 28:51Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna point out, I once got really roasted for be, for complaining about how few games launched with the Nintendo Switch.

• 28:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Alex Cranz?

  Granted, I did say it when Zelda came out and it was one of the best games ever made.

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  But like, here's the 600.

• 29:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. 600 is impressive.

• 29:06Nilay Patel?

  600 is great.

• 29:07David Pierce?

  600 is Vision Pro, like built for spatial computing. It's also gonna have all the iPad stuff.

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. 1 million apps, 600 Vision Pro apps.

• 29:15David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  Which I will just point out is 999,000, 900, uh, 600, 999,000.

• 29:23David Pierce?

  400.

• 29:24Alex Cranz?

  400.

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  400.

• 29:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:25Nilay Patel?

  No, that's 100, that's a million. Yep. Okay. I'm gonna do this math right.

• 29:29David Pierce?

  Math. Please leave this in.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  No, do not leave this in.

• 29:32Alex Cranz?

  Leave it in.

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  Everyone's gonna find Dan if we leave this in.

• 29:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, all right. Um, which I'll just point out is 999,000, 400 iPad apps.

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot of iPad apps.

• 29:46Alex Cranz?

  That's a lot of iPad apps.

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, among this, it's, 600 is not bad if it's the right 600, but I will just point out, among the 600 they announced, compatible apps from top cable services, including Charter, Spectrum, Comcast, Xfinity, Cox, Contour, Sling TV, and Verizon FiOS.

• 30:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. That's what I want.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  If you're rocking the Verizon FiOS app in space, like, what are you doing, man?

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  Paying your bills. If you buy the space computer and take it out of its little marshmallow and put it on your head, you're like, "Let's open the Charter Spectrum app." What are you doing, man? Well, you gotta pay your bills so you can keep downloading stuff.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  That is the funniest, and that, obviously, you're trying to point out, like...

• 30:32Nilay Patel?

  Entertainment. It's entertainment. It's not Netflix, it's fine. Do you know what those apps stream in? 480p that they lie is 720p. That is the lowest bitrate video you can get, which is hilarious to me. Because I, this is all buried in a review. I should quick post on the site just to break it out. It will not support VR video on YouTube. It's like, "Won't do it." Right. And they're like, "Because the VR video on YouTube is too low quality." Apple. So it doesn't have a YouTube app, and if you go try to watch them 360 video on YouTube, it just won't work. The end. Can I say one more weedsy thing, and then we can break out of this? Go. Yeah. It's very weedsy, but, uh, people asked us this question a lot, and I didn't know the answer when we did the old episode. How does it smell? How does it smell? Okay.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  It smells like the future, obviously. The faintest whiff of roasted marshmallows.

• 31:23Nilay Patel?

  People asked about the Mac display sharing, and I finally know how it works. Which is very complicated. It is basically a 27-inch, like, Studio Display or iMac display. So you tell your Mac you're sharing to it, your Mac imagines a 27-inch 5K display.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  It runs the interface at 2560 by 1440, which is a perfect 2:1 scale. That's how a 27-inch iMac works by default. You cannot change it. So a 27-inch iMac display, you can run it at other resolutions, and it'll be fine. This one, it says, it gives you a low-resolution warning. So it wants to run at this 2:1 scale. Then it takes that 5K display

• 31:58Nilay Patel?

  and sends it as a 4K video stream to the Vision Pro, which you can then resize at will. No. So it is not pixel-perfect at all. It looks great. I have no complaints about how it looks. But the thing that is happening is that it is imagining a 5K display that a Mac knows how to run at, because that is the 27-inch iMac, the 27-inch Studio Display.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  It runs the interface at 2560 by 1440, but if you're running something 4K, it has enough pixels to just do it because it's a 5K display. But then the thing that is happening is streaming at 4K to the Vision Pro. So it compresses that and it makes us smaller.

• 32:32Alex Cranz?

  It sounds both technologically cool and also like, I just hate it from, in the same way I hate when people say, yeah, this is 720p streaming.

• 32:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:44Alex Cranz?

  When it's secretly 480.

• 32:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Or if they're like, this is HD and it's 720.

• 32:48Alex Cranz?

  Lies.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  Fox. Just putting that out there. Anyway, everyone asked me that question and I, that is the answer. And so it is correct that they keep calling it a 4K Mac display. It's actually a 5K Mac display, but it's actually running at 2560 by 1440 and whatever, it looks fine and you'll use it unless you need pixel perfect accuracy, in which case, take your face computer off and just look at your screen.

• 33:08David Pierce?

  There we go. Six out of 10.

• 33:10Nilay Patel?

  That's it. We gotta take a break. We'll be back. We're gonna talk to Vision Pro for the rest of the year. Come on. We have to take a break. We got a lot of stuff to talk about. We'll be right back.

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• 34:25Speaker 06

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• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's enough talking with our eyes. Let's talk about our ears. Huh?

• 35:02David Pierce?

  All right, land this plane, Patel. Let's go.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  I tried. It's been such a long week. The cinnamon toast crunch crash is real, man.

• 35:12Alex Cranz?

  It's happening in real time in front of us.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  Just melting over here. No, it's big news. This may be bigger news than Vision Bro. It's bigger news. It will impact more people more directly.

• 35:22Alex Cranz?

  Okay, yeah, that's true.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  Cause more damage to the economy than you can imagine. Josh Hawley is gonna write a bill about it soon. The Universal Music Group, in a fight with TikTok, has pulled its catalog from TikTok. Its catalog includes Taylor Swift, Drake, Olivia Rodrigo, Bad Bunny. Basically, I think U2 is in the mix.

• 35:44David Pierce?

  Billie Eilish is on here, Harry Styles, Justin Bieber, Adele.

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:48David Pierce?

  All of them.

• 35:49Nilay Patel?

  Universal CEO Lucian Green, who, by the way, was profiled in The New Yorker this week, talking about his worries about the music industry and generative AI, obviously ahead of them pulling their music from TikTok. They said TikTok has offered them horrible terms and is trying to bully them. This is bad news for Tik... And it's gone. If you go look at Taylor Swift on TikTok right now, her catalog is gone. All those videos, all of those TikTok videos that have Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo and all those other arson, copyright notices.

• 36:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. And there's just a huge portion of TikTok that is now silent. It's nuts. And I assume this is ultimately just a negotiating tactic on both sides. And this feels to me sort of like a carriage dispute with cable companies where it's like, it's actually in everybody's interest to resolve this and they will. But Universal is clearly trying to prove that it is willing to pick this fight. Because I think TikTok has reached a point that like, I've been thinking a lot about Roku, reading about this, because there was this long period of time where Roku was like, every streaming company's favorite streaming platform, because it didn't have competitive content, it wasn't an advertising business, it was just the place people bought hardware to go to apps, and that was perfect for all the apps, right?

• 37:00David Pierce?

  And so everybody worked with Roku, even when they wouldn't work with each other. When Apple and Amazon were beefing, they still both worked with Roku. And then Roku got big enough that it said, we are going to start selling advertising on our own, and we're actually going to start making our own content, and we're going to start competing with you. But we're so powerful now that there's nothing you can do about it. And Roku started sort of just eating chunks of that market away. And it had gotten so big that there was nothing any of these players could do about it. And I think TikTok believes it is now that powerful. That TikTok grew so much on the back of essentially like goodwill and free marketing for all of these record labels and all the music being out there and became this like center of culture.

• 37:43David Pierce?

  And now is turning around and saying like, look how powerful we are, you're going to play by our rules now. And I think Universal is one of the few companies probably in a position to actually hold fast against that.

• 37:55Nilay Patel?

  Especially because of its stable of artists. And Universal, to be clear, is a big, old school bully record label. Like Lucy and Grange is a very good operator. He has led the music industry through Universal through many shifts and he gets what he wants. He's the one who, when Fake Drake showed up on YouTube, it's Lucy and Grange who pushed YouTube and Google into being like, here are responsible AI things. And here's a new monetization system for AI-generated music on YouTube. I know that's great for the world. It's great for universal music.

• 38:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:27Nilay Patel?

  Right? And that's it's his job and he's gonna, but he has shown the ability to bully platforms using his gigantic catalog of artists and the artists all like him.

• 38:39David Pierce?

  And there's hardly anybody with that specific kind of leverage against these platforms.

• 38:43Alex Cranz?

  And he's, he's going after AI in this.

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  Yes, specifically that he wants protection against generative AI on this platform, just as he has it on YouTube. I think the difference between TikTok and YouTube in this context is that YouTube is a music listening platform. And this is long confused like YouTube itself, like YouTube, Google, very data-driven organizations. Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, used to say things like, we're a music service. Because if you look at the data, the thing people do the most on YouTube is they listen to music.

• 39:15Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 39:15David Pierce?

  There's literally a stat on YouTube that is most watched non-music video, video on YouTube. Like, that's how big music is, is like Mr. Beast keeps breaking the non-music video record.

• 39:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 39:27David Pierce?

  Because that's YouTube is music videos slash everything else.

• 39:31Nilay Patel?

  Right. Oh, right. And like the lo-fi beats girl, like people turn on YouTube and they just like get access to music.

• 39:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Nilay Patel?

  And so YouTube is a streaming and they, you know, YouTube music exists and they've grown this thing. And YouTube knows that, you know, the Google executives now will tell you YouTube is a licensing product. Google search is a fair use product. YouTube is a licensing product. They know they need these relationships with the labels to preserve the existence of YouTube, especially because what people do the most is they just listen to music. TikTok is a discovery platform, right? So, and that is where their power comes from.

• 40:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but I think, I think music is still like intrinsic to its success to.

• 40:10Nilay Patel?

  It is, but.

• 40:11Alex Cranz?

  Like it has to.

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  But TikTok to Spotify is the pathway there.

• 40:14Alex Cranz?

  Right, for, for music, but I'm saying for TikTok, the reason people go watch this stuff is because it's music, like.

• 40:21Nilay Patel?

  Right, but if you're TikTok, what you, but what the data is showing you is people discover new songs on TikTok and then they go to Spotify and listen to them, right? And you're saying to the music industry, you will not be able to break new artists to a younger generation without us. So you believe that you have all this, whereas YouTube is looking at its data and saying, if the music goes away. All of this is gone.

• 40:43Alex Cranz?

  Right, but I think UMG is saying you need us because otherwise the kids won't have any content to do their dances to.

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  But they will have other, this is the TikTok bet.

• 40:54David Pierce?

  Right.

• 40:54Nilay Patel?

  If you're TikTok, this is how you end up here, you're saying there will be other music.

• 40:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're hoping that somebody else is as big as Taylor Swift, which is like

• 41:03Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 41:03Alex Cranz?

  bold. Travis Kelsey is gonna start his own record.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  Right, the Super Bowl is in two weeks. This is a bad time to not have Taylor Swift on your, on your, on your platform.

• 41:10David Pierce?

  It's an interesting one, though, because like, the, the, the three names we put in our story, which I think is sort of fascinating, are Taylor Swift, Drake, and Olivia Rodrigo, right? I think Taylor Swift obviously does not need TikTok. TikTok is more in need of Taylor Swift than Taylor Swift is TikTok. I don't think that's arguable. Drake, same. Olivia Rodrigo, interesting case. Olivia Rodrigo, very famous artist, came up on Disney Channel, had lots of things, but also her music broke in a big way on TikTok. Would Olivia Rodrigo be as big as she is now without TikTok? Who knows? Right? And, and she's huge. And I think every, I think you're right that the bet TikTok is making is that everyone who is not an A++ list artist needs TikTok more than TikTok needs them, because there

• 41:55David Pierce?

  is just an infinite supply of up and coming musicians all over TikTok everywhere.

• 42:01Nilay Patel?

  Are you gonna break the Lil Boofing guy without Universal Music? Like, maybe you are, right? What's the other, uh, is TikTok just gonna do sea shanties?

• 42:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  Maybe, like, you know, like, uh, do you remember Ricky Desktop? We did a profile that said Ricky Desktop.

• 42:17David Pierce?

  The DJ guy.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  He did the dice beat, the boat beat, the chicken wing beat. And then he, he was like, oh, now I'm a real producer and he won't talk to us anymore. Ricky Desktop, if you're out there, man, I hope you made it, dude. Chicken wing beat was fire.

• 42:30David Pierce?

  It was.

• 42:32Nilay Patel?

  But like, that's TikTok's bet, is there's an infinite supply of new things to discover. And Universal's bet is you need our art, like, we have the stars.

• 42:40Alex Cranz?

  That's why I think this is fascinating, like, historically, I just thought it was really interesting, both because what David said earlier about how this is like the fights with the carriage.

• 42:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Alex Cranz?

  It's the same thing, like, oh, we are in a new entertainment age, where now these fights are no longer happening between TV companies and, and big studios, they're happening between music companies and big social media platforms. And that's just like, that's a, we're in a whole new space. And, and it's still rapidly developing. And now you have this whole generation of kids and it's like, okay, are they going to stay on this platform that is doing their girl Taylor dirty? Which is certainly a messaging that UMG can and has pushed.

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Alex Cranz?

  Or are they going to?

• 43:19Nilay Patel?

  Are you going to protect Taylor Swift against AI? That's what all Universal has to say. And the TikTok's right answer right now is like, no.

• 43:26David Pierce?

  Well, and given, I mean, A, Taylor Swift is Taylor Swift, but also what's been happening with this, like, the, the images, the non-consensual generative AI stuff of Taylor Swift on Twitter, like, this is, I, I would not purport to say that Universal timed this intentionally and perfectly, but boy, if they did, did they time it perfectly.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  Their contract was up on January 31st. They, they, the contract was written ages ago.

• 43:51David Pierce?

  The timing just worked very well for them. But, uh, but it did. And I think it is, all of these things are very much coming together. And also one other wrench to throw in here is TikTok is relentlessly trying to close the TikTok to Spotify pipeline with TikTok Music, which it is continuing to work on and continuing to test and continuing to roll out all over the world. And so TikTok is becoming this thing where if it works, and if TikTok Music works, it's going to just like, take the whole music industry inside of it. And so if you're Universal, you're like, okay, if we sign a bad deal now and TikTok Music hits, it suddenly becomes a really bad deal. Because now there's no, there's no out, there's nowhere to go

• 44:31David Pierce?

  because we've lost a whole generation of music listeners to this one app and service.

• 44:37Nilay Patel?

  Can I just, can I offer you some very, I just realized this, a very funny? Media inside baseball drama tidbit. Sure. The New Yorker this week has a profile of Lucy and Grange, Conde Nast. Wired's cover this month is Zee Show, the CEO of TikTok. And they're just like battling it out across the covers of Conde Nast. It's pretty good. It's very good. But that's like where we're at, right? Like, these people are out in public trying to advocate for themselves. I think TikTok is in danger. Look, I've called the top on this episode on camera pastor and eye tracking. I feel like we're close to calling the top on TikTok. Wow. Really? Yeah, if you TikTok, you know, it's a pandemic phenomenon. They didn't just grow through like good vibes.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  They bought billions of dollars of Facebook advertising to get app installs, right? And that really popped, was it Musically? It was Musically, they bought Musically. And, you know, they've got AI and they recommend it. But like, this is a pandemic phenomenon that felt really good in that time. Everyone's together, we're all doing these dances, like, we create cultural moments. We need to escape life and all we have to do is flick. Yeah, right. And here's all these people talking, we're all bacon bread. The kids are doing call and responses in department stores. You remember, you know, like, they would all yell the thing and they'd yell the other, like, what was it? It was, it was dirty, uh, which is great. That's what I love. Yeah. Um, uh, it was just fun. Like, kids are terrifying their parents with this app is like, that's what we're here for. That's why The Verge exists.

• 46:07Nilay Patel?

  And now it's in the middle of what Cory Doctorow would call the insidification cycle. Right. Right? So TikTok is no longer full of organic, wonderful content from people who are bored in the pandemic. It's full of people trying to sell you stuff, right? And like more, more so than YouTube, right? YouTube, you can have AdSense and you can just make videos and YouTube runs the pre-rolls and you get some money and that's the end of that. The TikTok Creator Fund does not work that way and it like, doesn't even pay that much money. So if you get success on TikTok, you immediately start looking for a brand deal. Right. And you just see this, this thing happen so fast. And so it has just become like,

• 46:49Nilay Patel?

  Less good feeling in the same way that I would, I would say Instagram has had the exact same problem. Like Instagram is influencers.

• 46:56Alex Cranz?

  It's a catalog.

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. And TikTok is just headed that way. And they've added the TikTok shop. Now they're doing this thing where they're incentivizing horizontal videos that are over a minute long to compete with YouTube and they're going to add this music service. And you're like, you're getting farther and farther away from the thing that made it worth spending billions of dollars to get app installed.

• 47:16Alex Cranz?

  They're doing the Elon Musk, they're trying to do an everything app.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, maybe. I just think like, when you open it, it's no longer like, here's a bunch of delightful things that are like, it, and maybe I just need to reset my algorithm or something.

• 47:29David Pierce?

  No, it's, it is what it is. I mean, and now like, I think the TikTok shop is the thing, right? Like, if you want to point at one thing, if you want to call the top, it's the TikTok shop.

• 47:38Nilay Patel?

  By the way, to be clear, I'm not, I'm saying, I feel comfortable saying we might be close to calling it top.

• 47:43David Pierce?

  No, Neel I called the top. You heard it here first, everybody.

• 47:46Alex Cranz?

  Done.

• 47:47David Pierce?

  Four out of 10 on TikTok from Neel I.

• 47:50David Pierce?

  But no, the, the shop, not only did the TikTok shop come in and all of a sudden, two out of three videos you saw was somebody trying to sell you something from the shop. John Herman at New York Mag wrote a really good piece about, he did a live stream after putting a used pencil in the TikTok shop and got thousands of viewers because TikTok just absolutely boosts engagement through the roof as long as you're selling something. And now TikTok is running a test, we had a story this week, where it's actually identifying products in videos with AI and offering purchase links to them. So not only is it incentivizing everybody to deliberately sell you stuff, it is going to sell you stuff even when you don't mean to sell stuff. And all of the incentives on this platform now are going

• 48:35David Pierce?

  to be to sell you stuff from the TikTok shop, which by all accounts is being wildly subsidized and everything's very cheap and it's all sort of sketchy and weird. But like, that is going to break this platform faster than anything else.

• 48:46Alex Cranz?

  I have a question about the shop. Do you guys, like, when you see the little orange button, do you just scroll past it as quickly as possible?

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  When I see the live indicator or when I see the TikTok shop, I'm like, gone. Except, there's one that gets me every time and it's wrecking my whole algorithmic situation. It is constantly trying to sell me off brand Dewalt batteries.

• 49:06Alex Cranz?

  And you're like, ooh.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  I get so many TikTok shop livestreams for like, you can buy five DeWalt six amp hour batteries for just 20 bucks. Look at how well they're. And it's like, those are gonna light my house on fire. And I just keep watching and be like, are they gonna light on fire in this video?

• 49:19Alex Cranz?

  And it's also just QVC feel like anytime I see the live ones, I'm like, I, I don't watch QVC when I had like television. Why am I gonna do it on a TikTok?

• 49:27Nilay Patel?

  I gotta go buy some batteries. I, it's in my brain.

• 49:29Alex Cranz?

  Thinking about it. Yeah, they got you.

• 49:30Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's not even QVC. It's just a guy being like, look at these, look at how cheap these batteries are.

• 49:34David Pierce?

  Seriously. It's, yeah, it's not even as good as QVC. Like, QVC tries a lot harder than this. But I also think like this, this is the same thing. This is TikTok feeling itself, right? I think Instagram, somebody wrote this, I think it was Sean Herman, but if it wasn't, I'm, I'm stealing this thesis from somebody else. So to whoever it was, I'm sorry. I forgot who you are. Uh, but Instagram has sort of identified this same thing where it's like, what if we made everything for sale, but has done it very slowly and carefully because there is a sense of like, we don't want to ruin the experience, or at least not ruin it very quickly. TikTok doesn't give a shit about that. TikTok is just like, oh, you like our app? Shopping now. And there is this sense of like TikTok, I think feels like

• 50:16David Pierce?

  it is inevitable now. Like it has won in a way that it can now turn on anything. It can change the algorithm. It can say, oh, we're doing horizontal videos now. It's literally going 90, Neelai. TikTok is going, literally going 90.

• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. I'm not ready to do that at all.

• 50:30David Pierce?

  No, I'm not even saying in reality, the app is going 90. They want you to make horizontal videos.

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  So one of my favorite things to do, this is gonna make me sound very pretentious when I'm saying it. Um, whenever I leave America, I like to read books about America.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  It's just like a thing.

• 50:48Alex Cranz?

  I also just huck into some Tokville as soon as I leave.

• 50:51Nilay Patel?

  Not like that.

• 50:54David Pierce?

  Imagine Neelai just like unfurling the pledge of allegiance on the plane.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  Not like that. So one of my very favorite books is called The Conquest of Cool. It is about the American advertising in the 60s after all the GIs came home and they got money. And that's when the counterculture started. And it is, if you like Mad Men, you should read this book because it is the thesis of Mad Men, right? Is we're going to take the counterculture, we're going to take rebellion, we're going to repackage it and sell it to people. And that means Americans, just our culture is like kind of sarcastic and ironic all the time.

• 51:27Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 51:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, we sell rebellion here in America and like selling out it. This is the most sellout our culture has ever been, but it's still like, ah, you sold that. Like, we're just not a sincere people here in the United States of America. Other countries are very sincere, which is why I always read about our culture when I go, because the contrast is real. And so you can see a little bit of that over-commercialization because Instagram is an American company that feels very American. Like, it understands the thing that it is, and it knows it can't just slam shopping into your face culturally. The designers, the product managers, Adam, like, there's a lot of people who live here. Like, if it's an American product in that way, that's American. They try to be very global.

• 52:07Nilay Patel?

  Like, Instagram is huge all over the world. I'm not denying that. I'm just saying there's a cultural aspect to the product's design that is reflective of the fact that you cannot just walk up to an American and be like, buy the shit. Like, it just kind of, it sometimes just doesn't work.

• 52:23Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 52:24Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's, there's a little bit of ironic detachment that we accept here, that we expect here. TikTok is just, it is a Chinese company, and I think there's a little bit of that. Like, the reason, there's everything apps in China, if you go to those places, are ultra-commercialized in a very different kind of way. And I think, I'm not even saying it's good or bad, I'm just saying that it's a different culture.

• 52:45Alex Cranz?

  No, you, you can feel it, because I think, I also see it with how we're very reviews-driven in this, this culture. Like, in, in America, you go on Amazon, you go to places, you still are checking like, okay, does this have a good score? Am I going to get this? And, and that, that shop app is like.

• 53:01Nilay Patel?

  So there's none of it?

• 53:02Alex Cranz?

  None of that. It's just like, you want to buy it, right?

• 53:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's just a different vibe. And again, I don't, I don't, I really am being careful. I don't mean to say like in a xenophobic way, I'm like literally just identifying a cultural difference in how the commercial content is presented to you in this app that I think is reflective of something else.

• 53:21David Pierce?

  When you look at apps like Shein and Timu and like Wish back in the day and like that vibe is, a lot of that comes from China and is very much percolating all over the US now, right? Like there were all these years where all these different kinds of companies tried to make this influencer-driven shopping work, which has been huge in China for years, right? Like a person will get on camera and just talk about products they like and they sell millions of dollars. And that has never been a thing in the US and it is like rapidly becoming one because that portion of culture and commercial life is very much been exported to the US. And I think it's happening really fast.

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:00Alex Cranz?

  But it's just QVC.

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  Sort of. So it's just like, sort of.

• 54:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:06David Pierce?

  But it's a really different generation, right? Like.

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  QVC is different, actually. I think I was watching QVC in the lobby of a hotel recently. It's a rock in life. Highs and lows.

• 54:20Alex Cranz?

  So much excitement.

• 54:22Nilay Patel?

  Signing the Apple Security NDA for the Vision Pro, watching QVC in the hotel lobby, right? Highs and lows. And they were selling electric snow blower with a cord. And the poor woman had to be like, this cord is so convenient. And it was like, just amazing. It was like some of the most amazing performance I've ever seen. I was like, screw the, screw the Oscars. Like, find this woman. This is the best actress in America. And like, yeah, TikTok has some of that element to it, but a lot of it is just like showing you stuff. Like, there's, there isn't that.

• 54:55Alex Cranz?

  That performative, like, isn't it?

• 54:56Nilay Patel?

  Amazon has more QVC in it. And I'm telling you that I think that is like reflective of the sort of just like detachment you need.

• 55:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:05Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's, it's authentic, right? It's like very American, authentic in its way.

• 55:08Alex Cranz?

  Oh, but it's not.

• 55:09Nilay Patel?

  It obviously isn't. But that's what I mean. Like, there's, you have to build a little bit of artifice in our culture to go dead into selling.

• 55:17Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  Right? In other cultures, you don't. And that's just a cultural difference. And it's interesting, to David's point, to see that come through in the apps. What's really interesting is Meta doesn't operate in China. So we have not sent that back the other way. Which is just like also fascinating and concerning. And it's good, I think for good reason, they don't operate in China, right? Like, they don't want to give data to the Chinese government.

• 55:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  And Google doesn't operate in China for the same reason. Apple does. Interesting. So this moment for TikTok where I'm saying a close call on the top, I wonder if that will be part of it too. Where their arrogance about what they are, what they represent to this culture is going to run into their ideas about what will work.

• 55:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I think that's right.

• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  Right, and to run into sort of the essential nature of like how Americans wish to consume advertising is going to be really interesting because it's not like the TikTok users aren't already complaining about TikTok shop.

• 56:10Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 56:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, they already don't like it. And now you're going to take Taylor Swift away and her label boss is going to say they won't protect her from AI clones of her voice. Like, that's a, it's a dangerous position.

• 56:21Alex Cranz?

  And there are so many.

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. That's enough TikToking.

• 56:28Nilay Patel?

  Killing it.

• 56:29Alex Cranz?

  I hate it. I hate it so much.

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  I have been on such a like good, healthy, clean eating diet and exercise. And then this last week, just reviewing this thing, I'm just like, give me the sugar.

• 56:40David Pierce?

  It's a real, I think, like, everybody, there's a version of this that is very much like when you had like finals week in college.

• 56:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:48David Pierce?

  And like, the whole rest of your life just sort of collapses around you. That's what Neelai has been through for the last seven days, except in a headset.

• 56:57Alex Cranz?

  That was like, you would see him and the rest of the team that worked on it. And you, yeah, it was like, oh, you guys are in finals.

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and now I have scenitis. Right, let's drink some Miller Lite and go to six.

• 57:08David Pierce?

  I'm never doing any work again.

• 57:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break, we'll be right back.

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• 58:18Speaker 06

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• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Lightning round.

• 58:50Alex Cranz?

  Sponsored by Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

• 58:53Nilay Patel?

  Do we have any individual sponsors of Lightning Round this week? I got some emails last week. Individual listeners who wanted to sponsor Lightning Round. Liam?

• 59:00David Pierce?

  I've asked our sales team to reach out.

• 59:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. If you're an individual listener of the show and our sales team reaches out to you, set the highest price you can think of.

• 59:11Nilay Patel?

  $50 million.

• 59:12David Pierce?

  But also, if you just Venmo Neely $10, we'll do it. It's fine.

• 59:16Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I guess it's the other way around. Our sales team should set a high price. I don't know how advertising works. That's why I haven't been able to sell the Lightning Round to anyone.

• 59:25Alex Cranz?

  Give us money.

• 59:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm handing her, I'm giving it away to Smeg, left and right.

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  You want a weird old fridge? Smeg.

• 59:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's weird that Smeg has not reached out yet. So strange.

• 59:36Alex Cranz?

  That's a weird name to choose.

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  Actually, one of my favorite TikTok videos I've seen recently is a guy refurbishing fridge.

• 59:41Alex Cranz?

  Really?

• 59:42Nilay Patel?

  And I think they know, it's, they're listening to me. So show them some fridge videos.

• 59:46Alex Cranz?

  They're listening.

• 59:47Nilay Patel?

  All right, Cranz, what you got?

• 59:48Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna be mean and do two.

• 59:50David Pierce?

  Ooh.

• 59:50Alex Cranz?

  I haven't reviewed a giant headset this week, so I'm gonna be selfish.

• 59:54David Pierce?

  We'll allow it.

• 59:55Alex Cranz?

  And do two. So my first one is streaming stuff, which is Hulu is cracking down on password sharing. It's been a while, but they, they said, yeah, we're in on this too. We also want more of your money, which means more of you need to use your passwords, sign in. David, how are you feeling about that?

• 1:00:13David Pierce?

  This sucks. So I, I forget where I first heard this. I think it was on, somebody on the, the Town podcast, which is a very good podcast that everybody should listen to, who was saying that we as society screwed up by not being angrier when Netflix did this, because we all just kind of rolled with it. We were like, oh yeah, Netflix isn't gonna let you share your Netflix password. That sort of makes sense. And then it worked and everybody else is like, oh dope, we can do that too. We should have been so much angrier at this. Because this sucks and is bad and is just shaking users down for every penny they can get from them. And we've just all kind of allowed it to happen. And I can't get mad now that Hulu's doing it because I didn't get mad when anybody else did it, but I wish I had. I should have been angrier. We all should have.

• 1:00:58Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you a text I got literally as we've been podcasting? It's from my sister. It's a screenshot of Netflix and it says, looks like our Netflix jig is up.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  This is real. Alex is looking at it.

• 1:01:13Alex Cranz?

  I can see it.

• 1:01:13David Pierce?

  My version of this specifically is Hulu. I have an incredibly insecure password on my Hulu, because I haven't changed it in probably a decade, because there, I mean, there honestly must be 30 people out there in the world using my Hulu account, including at least one ex-girlfriend. Uh, I've been married for a long time now. Like, it's, it's, it's bad times coming for a lot of people.

• 1:01:35Alex Cranz?

  Sharing Hulu passwords is how I found out a friend had a baby. It's because I was like, where's all this baby content coming from? This is too much. And I was like, oh, she's still got my password. That's rude. Stop watching baby stuff. Make a new account.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  So I, Amazon also launched ads this week, right?

• 1:01:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Amazon, that, like, it really feels like-

• 1:01:53David Pierce?

  We should get loudly mad about.

• 1:01:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it, it feels like between last week and this week, we're really like fully swung into the dark ages of streaming. We're fully in that moment where like, it sucks? Because it sucks.

• 1:02:05Nilay Patel?

  This is when the cable bundle just like comes roaring back.

• 1:02:08Alex Cranz?

  It's here, right?

• 1:02:09Nilay Patel?

  No, it's not here. You can't just be like, I'll, I mean, this is why Apple's announcing the Charter Spectrum app and the Vision Pro.

• 1:02:14Alex Cranz?

  I was like, you can't, if you like, I, I, I like Verizon. Verizon's like, would you like Disney Plus? And Hulu?

• 1:02:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Alex Cranz?

  For like a little less money and maybe we'll throw in Apple TV.

• 1:02:23Nilay Patel?

  No, I want like an old school cable locks app now. Give me a grid guide, start playing stuff as soon as I open it.

• 1:02:27Alex Cranz?

  Saying that's.

• 1:02:28Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is just Tubi. We're about to have the CEO of Tubi on the code. So I'll just ask her if this is what's happening.

• 1:02:33Alex Cranz?

  It is.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  But man, I wish one of these services would be like, all right, we're just doing it. All the content's in 4K and it's everything.

• 1:02:42Alex Cranz?

  The Apple TV kinda does that.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  But it's not everything.

• 1:02:46Alex Cranz?

  They don't have a lot.

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  Even baseball on Apple TV plus isn't in 4K and they own it.

• 1:02:51Alex Cranz?

  That's because they're doing sports. If they weren't doing sports, it'd be everything.

• 1:02:53Nilay Patel?

  4K on Apple TV plus and they, they literally own it. They're going to get to doing 180 degree 3D video of soccer before they stream it in 4K to a TV. God, that's real.

• 1:03:03Alex Cranz?

  I a hundred percent believe that.

• 1:03:04Nilay Patel?

  By the way, Addie called this out yesterday and I didn't mention it in this review. It started to talk with the Vision Pro again. Apple keeps allowing them 360 videos and they are 100% 180 degree videos.

• 1:03:12Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  You turn around, it's just black. And they're like, but it's a 360, it's like.

• 1:03:17Alex Cranz?

  No, you have to go all the way around. Did you show them the, the Michelle Obama video?

• 1:03:21Nilay Patel?

  I just like, I can't, why do you think I was trying to watch YouTube VR, dude?

• 1:03:26Alex Cranz?

  Relive the moment.

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  I was like, again, a million years ago, a little baby, Neelai Patel interviewed Michelle Obama at the White House with VR cameras.

• 1:03:35Alex Cranz?

  I was so jealous of that.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  And we're just reliving it again. We're just reliving it. They're like, well, a new frontier immersive entertainment. I was like, no, I was with the first lady in a circle. You look all around. You could watch Trey Shalhoub, our executive producer being like, wrap it up, just like our current producer is doing right now. Six out of 10.

• 1:03:55Alex Cranz?

  It's great.

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  Alex, what was your other one?

• 1:03:57Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, my other, my other lightning round is, uh, so, Amazon was gonna buy iRobot, the, the, the robovac company, and the EU said, no, can't do that.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Alex Cranz?

  So, so they pulled out, the CEO of iRobot, Colin Engel, is, is gone, 350 people are getting laid off.

• 1:04:16Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 1:04:17Alex Cranz?

  The company is like, and it sucks, and, and Jin Tu, our incredible reviewer of everything smart home, wrote a really lovely piece this week, just being like, they were doing it, they were doing all the cool stuff, and they're having to compete with companies like Ufi, who is owned by a bigger company, like, all of the other big robovacs are owned by companies in China with lots and lots of money behind them, and iRobot's out there being like, we're gonna figure out robotics in the home, all by ourselves, with no money. But yeah, so, so it's kind of a bummer, it's, it's unclear what's gonna happen with iRobot, because it seems like they really needed that acquisition for the influx of cash, because in order to compete with their competitors, they either have to, like, make their already very expensive robovacs more expensive, or they have to not, or like, they need money.

• 1:05:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so I'll say two things about this. One, the reasoning that iRobot and Amazon gave was, we see no pathway to approval in the EU.

• 1:05:11Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:05:11Nilay Patel?

  Which is now what everyone says.

• 1:05:13Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, the EU's argument was, Amazon sells these vacuums, they're gonna buy this vacuum company and prioritize their own vacuums against other vacuums, you can feel how about, about that however you want. Amazon, just like every other company, is doing layoffs and cost cutting. And Dave Limp, the old head of hardware, is gone, and Panas Panay for Microsoft is in, and they're cutting that whole division down. There is a part of me that says blaming the Europeans is a very convenient excuse to not randomly buy a robotic vacuum company.

• 1:05:40Alex Cranz?

  It's certainly possible.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  For a smart home strategy that has not panned out for Amazon.

• 1:05:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, it doesn't, their, their strategy just doesn't make sense.

• 1:05:48Nilay Patel?

  So, I'm just saying, like,

• 1:05:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Nilay Patel?

  It's great to blame the EU, and I encourage you to blame the Europeans at any given time. The EU culture is so broken, they have no apps. Just putting that out there.

• 1:05:57Alex Cranz?

  Well, there's also, there, there's a weird thing happening where, like,

• 1:06:00David Pierce?

  The Roomba was a genuinely like groundbreaking thing. iRobot has made a lot of really good products for a really long time. That thing, to your point, Alex, is becoming completely commoditized, right? Like, you can get a pretty good, it's not as good as the best Roomba, but a pretty good robot vacuum for like less than $200 now. These things are getting cheap really fast. And then the other thing was iRobot's whole idea was like, we are, based on the knowledge that we're getting and the understanding that we have of your home, literally because we have a thing that's in there mapping where your chairs are, we're going to be able to understand your home in a uniquely powerful way. And we're going to be able to do things with it. Like, remember when this got announced and all of a sudden everybody was panicked about

• 1:06:44David Pierce?

  Amazon having the literal floor map of my house? Like, that's a real thing. But there's also a ton that a company like Amazon with its resources can do with that. If, like Neela is saying, you believe that Alexa and robots and Ring and all this stuff, like, you can see how it all comes together. But it seems increasingly clear that Amazon has just decided that's not a winning strategy for Amazon.

• 1:07:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, we have not heard a word from Panas Panayat.

• 1:07:08Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  He's not a retiring man, you know? He's a very aggressive personality. He wants to win. I'm dying to hear what his vision for all this is. We know what Dave Lim's vision was. He has been on Decoder, we've talked to him lots and lots. But he never actually brought Ring and Alexa and all this other stuff together in a cohesive way.

• 1:07:30David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:07:30Nilay Patel?

  They're very separate ecosystems. One of my favorite things with Amazon is they run Ring and Blink, two different home security camera systems that don't talk to each other.

• 1:07:38Alex Cranz?

  It's such a mess.

• 1:07:39Nilay Patel?

  It's just utterly bizarre to me. Talk about QVC, the Blink-QVC commercials are incredible.

• 1:07:45Alex Cranz?

  So good.

• 1:07:45Nilay Patel?

  If you ever watch one, it's just like, these cameras just run on batteries. What is happening here?

• 1:07:51Alex Cranz?

  I think you have a beautiful future, it's a QVC.

• 1:07:54Nilay Patel?

  I would do so well, I can speak directly to the American psyche. By the way, the Europeans have one app, it's called Spotify. Apple hates it. That's what I got for you.

• 1:08:04Nilay Patel?

  By the way, the other thing I want to say, I feel very badly for the people who are going to lose their jobs.

• 1:08:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  And I hear an argument out in the world that's like, if you don't allow these exits, all these people lose their jobs. I will just remind everyone that what happens when big companies buy smaller companies is that they lay everyone off and the companies fail and they go away anyway.

• 1:08:20David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:08:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's one of those things where I don't know, like, it seems like iRobot was always kind of like not doing great. This was probably always going to happen regardless of who bought them. And now it's just like, well, we don't have to hide, we can't hide behind that anymore. We're laying these people off. The CEO is leaving.

• 1:08:36Nilay Patel?

  Amazon, if they bought this company six months ago, they would have laid off 300 people.

• 1:08:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers, Discovery bought Warner Brothers. They just, just keep getting rid of them.

• 1:08:44Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:08:45Nilay Patel?

  Mergers are bad, is my general argument that I will keep making. The Europeans have it right there. They're good at that. But I do think there's a little bit of, little bit of opportunistic undoing of this deal.

• 1:08:55Alex Cranz?

  Like, that's a, that's a good theory. I like that theory.

• 1:08:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, David, what's yours?

• 1:08:59David Pierce?

  There's so many I want to talk about, but I will avoid talking about top-level domains for one day.

• 1:09:04Nilay Patel?

  That was gonna be mine.

• 1:09:05David Pierce?

  Okay, you can have that one. I'll talk about Snap, which I think today, Thursday, announced that it is recalling and refunding every single Pixie drone that it sold because of a problem with the batteries.

• 1:09:20David Pierce?

  And I just want to sort of briefly mourn Snap, interesting hardware company, which I believe is dead.

• 1:09:28Alex Cranz?

  There was just one drone, right?

• 1:09:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, it was called the Pixie. It was like, we had a, we had a great video about it. Alex Heath made a really cool thing in like a weird carnival-looking building.

• 1:09:36Alex Cranz?

  His joy as it like flew out of his hand.

• 1:09:38David Pierce?

  It's delightful and it's such a cool idea. It's like, it was essentially like autonomous little yellow drone that could land on your hand and fly around and take pictures of you. And like, makes perfect sense for what Snap is trying to do. Snap also sort of relentlessly trying to make spectacles a thing, but has been very quiet about that for a while now.

• 1:09:57David Pierce?

  I just, there was a, there was a minute, that's not true, there were a lot of minutes where I believed Snap was like a sneaky company that was going to win in a lot of really big ways. And I am mourning the end of that thesis a little more every single day. But RIP the Pixie, which flew apparently too high and too hot and too fast.

• 1:10:20Nilay Patel?

  And its batteries exploded. It's amazing that Instagram and Meta got there faster with the Ray-Bans than Snap did with the spectacles. Well, I think money had something to do with that. I'm sure money had something to do with it, but that people are lining up for those spectacles. Like Snap was a big platform and it never made the turn out of teens messaging.

• 1:10:42David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:10:43Nilay Patel?

  To whatever the next thing is. Like they invented the filters. Yeah.

• 1:10:46David Pierce?

  I mean, do you remember how long the joke went that Evan Spiegel was the chief product officer at Facebook? In addition to being the CEO at Snap? Like it was true for a long time.

• 1:10:56Nilay Patel?

  And it turns out the product he needed to invent was advertising revenue.

• 1:11:03Nilay Patel?

  Matt is still much better at that than Evan Spiegel. Yep. All right. Mine is top level domain.

• 1:11:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, buddy. Yeah.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm so excited about this story, especially because it's such a bad top level domain. It's, it's not great if you know anything about the internet. So if you are a huge nerd like me or Cranz. Yeah. You have a lot of local. Not David. David's not nerdy enough. Absolutely. You know, there's one thing I know is that Cranz and I are navigating to more local devices on our network than David can even contemplate. David's out there being like, this Pixie drone's amazing.

• 1:11:39David Pierce?

  Right. I'm outside, you know, driving cool cars and picking up chicks and you guys are just like 192.168. Let's go.

• 1:11:48Nilay Patel?

  So if you have configured a router, if you like me, have a little Raspberry Pi, Tomagachi doing a home bridge situation. If you're like Cranz and you operate a questionably legal Plex server. It's legal. For the local community. Uh, I still don't have the password. I'm just saying. Uh, if you're like Cranz and you've been ripping Blu-rays to your Plex server. Over a decade, very legally. You know, you gotta type 192.168 dot whatever to get to your, right? And sometimes you can fudge it with a dot local domain. There's all this stuff you can do. And sometimes it doesn't work. So ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Incredible name for this organization that we do not talk about enough.

• 1:12:33David Pierce?

  Did not know that's what that stood for.

• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  That this company, it's, it's a, it's a long story, but it's just amazing. They like got themselves to ICANN, you know? They just reverse engineered the acronym. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has proposed a new top level domain. For devices on your network. So instead of typing 192.168, you will type whatever. Dot internal.

• 1:12:57David Pierce?

  Meili dot internal.

• 1:12:59Nilay Patel?

  Nope. Hard pass. Not doing it. The other choice, my friends, was dot private. They should have put a pearl on there. They ultimately chose dot internal. As it found, quote, "dot private may carry the unintended imputation of privacy." I don't know, man.

• 1:13:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, dot local was sitting right there.

• 1:13:34David Pierce?

  Dot my stuff.

• 1:13:37Nilay Patel?

  Get out. Like, my home bridge is homebridge.locals. You can't, I'm happy to tell it to you because if you try to go to it, you'll go to your home bridge. This works. So excited to hack you guys. That's like a, that's like a bonjour hack or whatever. Yeah. This is like a different, like an actual top level domain that will mean this thing on the internet. And they went with dot internal. Because dot private. Yeah, it's too much. The implication would, is privacy, not the other thing. I think we found, actually, we're not the nerdiest people. It's ICANN. Anyway, there, it's not done yet. It's not happening. You can go to the ICANN website and leave comments. Please behave yourselves. Wink, wink. It's ridiculous.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  I love it. I like, I like that people have so much stuff on their own networks. That this is a thing that we, people used to insist that no one would ever have anything on their own network.

• 1:14:32David Pierce?

  You know what else you could have done as the TLD? Is dot network. What a crazy idea that would have been.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. My stuff.

• 1:14:38David Pierce?

  My stuff, I think, is the one.

• 1:14:40Nilay Patel?

  My dot stuff.

• 1:14:41David Pierce?

  My dot stuff, yeah.

• 1:14:44Nilay Patel?

  Behind firewall.

• 1:14:46David Pierce?

  David's stuff, no girls allowed. That's my, that's my local network.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Someone's gonna write in and correct me on how .local actually works, but I know it's not official TLD. That's why I'm saying it.

• 1:14:59David Pierce?

  I will say, in the abstract, I love the idea of having a name for your local stuff.

• 1:15:05Alex Cranz?

  I don't.

• 1:15:05David Pierce?

  Instead of all of the IP address nonsense.

• 1:15:08Alex Cranz?

  I memorized all of those IP addresses so long ago.

• 1:15:11David Pierce?

  It feels like a you problem.

• 1:15:12Alex Cranz?

  I don't, what, I have to go back and redo that? I need to know where my, my doorbell is at all times.

• 1:15:18Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. Here's how .local works. .local is a special use domain name reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the IETF, the rivals to ICANN. I don't know if they're rivals.

• 1:15:27David Pierce?

  Sharks and jets, baby.

• 1:15:28Nilay Patel?

  I think they should fight, and it is not allowed to be a top-level domain.

• 1:15:32Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:15:33Nilay Patel?

  It has been reserved by the IETF. If ICANN comes and takes it, that's a task force, baby. All right, that's, that's, I'm sorry. It has been a very long wait for it.

• 1:15:44Alex Cranz?

  This cinnamon toast crunch, Neelies, it's in the house.

• 1:15:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm, look, I love you all. Thank you for listening to The Vergecast or watching it. I'm sure you have some complaints to leave in the comments. Just do it. Just engage. Come back and engage again tomorrow.

• 1:15:57David Pierce?

  And next time you're in a meeting, if there's just two of you there and then a third person joins, just say, "That's a task force, baby."

• 1:16:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, but you knew what you were getting. That's it. That's The Vergecast.

• 1:16:20David Pierce?

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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• 1:17:10Speaker 08

  A single click, a ransomware attack, a business lockdown, a demand for Bitcoin. These are real threats financial advisors are facing today. Hear how AI is transforming cybercrime, why these attacks are accelerating, and what advisors can do to protect their business, their clients, and their future. Tune in to If You Could for what's next.