Pod Insights The Vergecast Disney’s big bets on sports, streaming, and Fortnite About this episode The Verge's David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Adi Robertson discuss sports streaming, Apple Vision Pro updates, Bluesky removing its invite system, and more.
Further reading:
ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. are putting together a juggernaut sports streaming app
Disney Plus will start its password-sharing crackdown this summer
Disney invests $1.5 billion in Epic to create ‘persistent universe’ tied to Fortnite
Apple TV+ Became HBO Before HBO Could Become Netflix
@lucas_shaw • All these articles should be required to note that nobody watches Apple TV+. • Threads
A new Vision Pro teardown shows Apple’s incredible pixel density
Apple’s first Vision Pro beta lets you bring virtual items closer
Apple’s Vision Pro launch day photo drop captures eager customers.
The Vision Pro’s killer app: Cybertruck clout-chasing accessory
YouTube says a Vision Pro app is ‘on the roadmap’
Vision Pro’s Personas look a little crisper after latest beta update.
It’s been 10 hours.
Bluesky social network drops invite-only sign ups
The fediverse, explained: Mastodon, Threads, and the open future of social networking
X hits number one on the Apple App Store amid second celebrity image scandal
The FCC bans robocalls with AI-generated voices
Ford quietly created its own ‘skunkworks’ team to develop low-cost electric vehicles
Apple is still working on foldable iPhones and iPads
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 16,234 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:59 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of multi-stakeholder media companies. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neelai Patel is not here, but we all are, which is very exciting. Alex Cranz is here. Hi, Alex.
1:11 Alex Cranz? Hey, I'm your friend who's ready to do a victory lap.
1:13 David Pierce? Let's go.
1:14 Alex Cranz? In a second.
1:15 David Pierce? It's coming. Addie Robertson's here. Hi, Addie. We have a lot to talk about this week. There's a bunch of streaming news. Disney did just all the things. We're gonna talk about that. A bunch of Vision Pro stuff. This is like the first week that regular humans got Vision Pros, and it got real weird. So we're gonna talk about that. Blue sky stuff, bunch of other stuff. We'll do a big lightning round. But let's start with Disney, right? I feel like we have to start with Disney. I hate, hate, hate talking about earnings on The Vergecast. It is my least favorite thing. But every once in a while, Bob Iger shows up and is like, what's up, losers? It's earnings time.
1:44 Alex Cranz? Well, I think technically, it's not just Disney, right? It's Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery.
1:50 David Pierce? True. Okay, you're right. So within the Disney story, there are like somewhere between two and three individual stories.
1:58 Alex Cranz? Yes.
1:59 David Pierce? We should probably start with the sports thing, right? That was kind of the big streaming wars news of the week. And Alex, this is where your victory lap begins. So tell us what's going on.
2:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah, so what's happening is ESPN and Fox, which are both currently owned by Disney, are...
2:14 Alex Cranz? Are teaming up with Warner Brothers, which is not owned by Disney currently.
2:18 David Pierce? Give it time.
2:19 Alex Cranz? Give it time. Are all coming together to make a giant streaming app, which is effectively what Hulu was back in like 2009, which is when ABC and Fox and NBC all eventually came together to make Hulu and like fund Hulu and put all their content on it. It didn't start that way, but that's, that's where it went after like a year or two. And that's what's happening now. It's like Hulu for sports. And I said that right as the news broke and then as more came out, it was like, yes, I'm right. It is Hulu for sports.
2:48 David Pierce? Yeah, you were increasingly vindicated.
2:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
2:50 David Pierce? So, okay, let me see, let me see if I understand this because we've gotten sort of bits and pieces of information about what this thing is, but it's, it's a streaming service that is launching later this year sometime.
3:00 Alex Cranz? Yep.
3:00 David Pierce? It will have a name.
3:01 Alex Cranz? Yep.
3:02 David Pierce? We don't know what the name is. Warner Brothers is involved, so it will probably be stupid, but it will have a name. It's going to be a mix of all of the linear networks owned by those companies, right? So like all the ESPNs, all the Fox Sportses, ABC, all the TNTs of the world.
3:22 Alex Cranz? TDS.
3:23 David Pierce? And just like those full channels.
3:24 Alex Cranz? Yes.
3:25 David Pierce? Right? It's just like, it is, it is live television of those channels, sports or not sports, right?
3:29 Alex Cranz? Right.
3:29 David Pierce? Okay. Cause that was one of the big questions is like, is this just sports? Is this not, it's just, it's just channels.
3:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's just channels, but it basically is sports.
3:37 David Pierce? Okay.
3:37 Alex Cranz? Right? And, and, and so it's going to be like, it's going to be all of these different sports things. And then Disney is still saying they're going to do something with ESPN as its own standalone, which has me wondering what the hell's going on with ESPN plus, which I think you are one of the few people I've ever met that was like, yes, this is a rad service.
3:56 David Pierce? No, this is good. Okay. You're explaining that this makes no sense.
3:59 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
3:59 David Pierce? Which is the thing that I have been trying to figure out is does this actually make any sense? Because all of that is there, right? And then there's going to be what I think amounts to like individual sports, right? So the stuff on ESPN plus, the stuff that Warner Brothers gets through the Bleacher Report, the stuff that Fox has streaming, like all that will also exist inside of this Hulu for sports.
4:23 Alex Cranz? Theoretically, yeah.
4:25 David Pierce? Thing.
4:27 David Pierce? And that's, that's it, right? It will have its own price. You can pay for it. But also, if you want to watch all of that stuff on the other services that are also part of this, you can. And a lot of that stuff will also be on cable because it's just the cable channels that you're getting in the streaming bundle. So what is this thing?
4:42 Alex Cranz? I think, I think it's like, a question, a thing I hear a lot from my brother and sometimes from you and Eli, but you guys are much more technically savvy, is streaming is really hard if you want to watch sports. Like, my brother is constantly complaining because he thinks, okay, I have this sports service. That means I can watch the Cowboys anytime I want. Well, the Mavericks now. Now I can watch the Mavericks anytime I want. And, and then he'll be like, no, it's a blackout. And, and it's really annoying. And he has to then go buy another streaming service, or he has to find someone who like, can like, stream just that one channel to him. And it's all stupid and confusing. And this, I think, is going to potentially reduce that confusion. But not a lot, because sports streaming is still a huge mess. Because
5:26 Alex Cranz? every single sports, like, owner, like NFL and everybody is selling their rights all over the place in all these different ways. And like, trying to put all of their eggs in every single basket. And it feels like this is kind of solving for that, but kind of not.
5:44 David Pierce? Yeah. It feels like, I don't know, Addie, does any of this make any sense to you? Can you explain this to us?
5:49 Alex Cranz? Sports.
5:50 David Pierce? As the resident sports lover.
5:52 Speaker 04 Who clearly knows anything about sports. I mean, this seems mostly, it, that is absolutely the impression I get, is that sports is the great thing that streaming hasn't managed to do anything with yet.
6:03 David Pierce? Yes.
6:04 Speaker 04 Which also, I think, means that there's more of a piracy ecosystem around it in a lot of ways. And I do wonder what impact that's going to have on this at a time when my sense is piracy and all the other areas that streaming once decimated has grown a lot?
6:17 Alex Cranz? Yes.
6:18 David Pierce? That's interesting.
6:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
6:20 David Pierce? I don't really pirate anything, except off of Alex's Plex server.
6:24 Alex Cranz? Totally legal.
6:24 David Pierce? But I have watched more sports than I'm proud of on like a TikTok livestream, because I literally couldn't find anywhere else to watch it. I generally feel like if I try my hardest to find a legal way to watch something and there isn't one, it's no longer my fault, which is not a good legal argument, but it's how I feel about streaming. And often with sports, I'm like, okay, I pay for every single streaming service I can find that will show me sports. And still, there's like a one in three chance I just can't watch whatever is on.
6:53 Alex Cranz? And you pay for live TV too, right?
6:55 David Pierce? Not anymore. So I got rid of cable. But the, this is part of the whole thing is like, the only reason now to have cable is if you like sports, because it is the one place that generally has all the sports. Unless you want, like, if you're big into like college volleyball, you're on ESPN plus, right? But for the most part, live TV is like the last bastion of it's just where all the things are. Which is very funny, because now that's the biggest problem in streaming is there is no place where all the things are. So we all just want cable again.
7:24 Alex Cranz? Well, and there are also these, these smaller services that do live streaming, that sports is kind of what they do. Like, I think Fubo is one and Sling TV is another one where like, they still have all of these channels and so they've been making forty, fifty dollars a month on people for just this. And they're about to get bodied.
7:44 David Pierce? Do you think so? Like, is this the end of online live TV?
7:48 Alex Cranz? No, I don't think it's the end of online, live online TV. I think it's probably going to be devastating for a few specific companies, like Sling and Fubo.
7:59 David Pierce? Yeah.
8:00 Alex Cranz? Right?
8:00 David Pierce? I pay for Sling exclusively to watch sports.
8:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
8:03 David Pierce? And I will stop now.
8:04 Alex Cranz? Hulu is gonna be fine, right? Who else does live streaming at this point?
8:09 David Pierce? YouTube TV is the big one now. And YouTube TV has even made a big deal out of sports as the reason to have YouTube TV. Like, they got the NFL Sunday Ticket deal, they paid a whole bunch of money for. It's, it's the core thing that YouTube TV is, is a sports package. And increasingly,
8:26 David Pierce? If this thing works, and there are a million reasons to think it might not, like, did you guys see the news today that the leagues were blindsided by this? Yeah. And had no idea this was coming, which is bananas. And
8:37 Alex Cranz? I feel like the FTC is going to be very busy with this soon.
8:41 Speaker 04 I'm actually curious why this hasn't happened earlier.
8:43 Alex Cranz? With everybody bundling together?
8:45 Speaker 04 The sports, like someone making a really big play for live, a large live sports.
8:51 Alex Cranz? It's because partially the leagues. The leagues don't, like, the leagues want to control their rights. Their rights are super, super lucrative, which is why Google spent a ton of money to get YouTube TV and the NFL sports.
9:03 David Pierce? Sunday Ticket.
9:04 Alex Cranz? Sunday Ticket. There we go. Sports Ticket.
9:06 David Pierce? Sports Tickets. It's the same thing. It's, no, it's, I think it honestly begins and ends there. It is so expensive to have sports and it is like the last thing that is that expensive. And I think, but I think it spins both ways, right? I think for a while it was like, oh, okay, we can use sports to grow our own thing. And I think it was when Max launched that they made a big deal out of Bleacher Report being part of it. Right. They were like, we have HBO and we have Bleacher Report, as if those things were like equals. And that didn't really work. And now I think all these companies are at a point where it's like, okay, if you're trying to buy sports rights, which again are the best way to win in TV.
9:47 Alex Cranz? Right.
9:47 David Pierce? Is to like, if you have the NFL, you're going to have a successful television business. It's just how it works. If you want to do that, you either have to have tech company money, because now Amazon and Apple and Google are all in this fight. And they just have infinity money to throw at this. Or they have to band together and find a way to fight this. Because what the leagues want is they want their stuff to be everywhere, which is why they're also on broadcast TV. Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, just gave a long speech basically about how they're not going to ditch broadcast TV, because that's how most people experience the games. It's like, that's true, and it's going to be true for a while. So you either have to replace that unbelievable scale with some other kind of unbelievable scale,
10:30 David Pierce? which I think each of these companies wanted to do. I know for sure Disney has been trying to do this. They're like, oh, ESPN is going to be the thing. And they're like, well, it's going to cost you like a hundred billion dollars. And they're like, well, never mind. And so. It does seem like kind of a sign of desperation out of these companies that they're like, "Our only chance is to all do this together, or else we're host."
10:50 Alex Cranz? Well, we saw that last year because ESPN has been looking for a partner for a while now.
10:54 David Pierce? Yeah.
10:55 Alex Cranz? And apparently it had one over at Fox, which is part of Disney. They could have just like walked down the street and knocked on the door and been like, "Let's work together, come on." And I guess they finally did. And then Warner Brothers, who has very, very vocally like David Zysloff, has been like, "Anybody want to do business with me? I'm ready to do business."
11:12 David Pierce? Yeah, he's like, "I'll buy you, you buy me, I don't care."
11:14 Alex Cranz? Whatever you want.
11:15 David Pierce? Let's sign some checks.
11:16 Alex Cranz? And this like is a great deal for them because most of these, most of these big channels are owned by Disney. Only a few of these channels are owned by Warner Brothers. And now they've got like an actual leg into sports. No disrespect to Bleacher Report. They've got an actual leg into like live broadcast sports.
11:32 David Pierce? Yeah.
11:33 Alex Cranz? And that's huge for them. And then these other two have some moneybags over in the corner, who are going to pay them more money and hopefully fund whatever massive lawsuits I guess they're going to deal with from the leagues and probably the FTC.
11:47 Speaker 04 It does absolutely feel like the kind of consolidation that the FTC right now is, it's gonna be like, yeah.
11:54 David Pierce? Do you think, I've been, I've been going back and forth on this because on the one hand, it's just a thing they're all doing together, right? And I think the case that they seem to be making to each other and to the sports leagues and to the world is like, "This isn't a new product. We're just taking a bunch of existing things." Like, one of the things I was reading made an interesting case that the fact that they are linear streaming channels and not some new way of disseminating the content is how they've managed to do this without signing new deals with the league. And I don't know if that's true or not, but I assume the case that they're going to make is, "This is okay because it's all, you know, stuff we were doing anyway, we're just packaging it differently." But I have a hard time imagining that's how it reads to
12:35 Speaker 04 I feel like
12:35 David Pierce? Lena Kahn or anyone else.
12:36 Speaker 04 We've just spent a bunch of time talking about these small streaming players that are going to get bodied by this. And that is just the biggest argument that
12:44 David Pierce? Yeah.
12:44 Speaker 04 that people could make.
12:45 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
12:46 David Pierce? I think that's probably right.
12:47 Alex Cranz? It's all down to Fubo. Fubo and Sling TV are about to change the history of sports broadcasting in America.
12:53 David Pierce? But wait, let's talk about Hulu because
12:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
12:55 David Pierce? the, you made the case when this is first coming out that this is Hulu for sports, which congratulations, you were precisely correct on that. We should also probably do a disclosure here. Let's see, Neela's not here, so we'll do it. Comcast is a minority investor in Vox Media through its subsidiary NBC Universal, which owns Peacock, notably not a part of this, notably also owns lots of sports rights, as does CBS and Paramount Plus. So lots of sports still not in this. We made a Netflix show. It's good. I had nothing to do with it. Y'all might have. It's a show.
13:26 Speaker 04 You did an interview.
13:28 David Pierce? There you go. So Addie is wildly conflicted.
13:30 Speaker 04 Oh, my God. Addie, where are you?
13:33 David Pierce? I don't know, other things. Alex has a black server of dubious legality. But we should just like, let's, let's do a little bit of a retrospective on whether Hulu was a good idea. Because if you rewind a million years ago, it was sort of a similar thing, right? They were like, okay, Netflix exists. What we need is a way to take all the things that we like about broadcast TV
13:57 David Pierce? on the internet.
13:58 Alex Cranz? Well, they weren't even fighting Netflix. At the time, they were explicitly fighting pirates.
14:02 David Pierce? Like they were There. Yeah, that's right.
14:03 Alex Cranz? It was torrents. They were, they were fed up with torrents. I don't know who does those. And, and they were too, super upset with it. And so they said, so I think it was like, NBC Universal was one of the first ones was like, hey, let's, it got with some private equity companies and, and made this deal. And then ABC and Fox, who at that point, only one of them was owned by Disney, all said, oh, we, we want to be in on this too. We want like a nice control way to get our stuff out there without having to manage like abc.go.com. Remember that website?
14:33 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
14:34 Alex Cranz? And, and so they said, okay, let's all bundle together. Let's, let's do it this way. And then CBS was like, F you guys, we're gonna go do our own thing and eventually that became Paramount Plus, which is
14:45 David Pierce? We choose not to reference CBS All Access.
14:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's like, it just went off and did its own thing, but everybody else came together to fight piracy. And at the time Hulu was huge, like it was like the second most followed website after like YouTube or something at the time because people were really into it because they got all the stuff. And then everybody immediately started to like bicker and fight because apparently when you have all of these huge egos and big companies in the room all trying to work together, they don't. So
15:13 David Pierce? Right. Well, and I feel like that the other reason this is just Hulu again is it's that dynamic exactly, right? It's, I don't think pirates are so much the fight here. Like, I really increasingly believe this is about like rights consolidation and making sure they can, they can like continue to stay in the game together and build a sports thing, both because it's what people want and because it's the only way any of them can afford it. But this sense of like, okay, if we don't give people one place to come to do it, they will find other ways that are worse for us.
15:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
15:45 David Pierce? Which is what Hulu was and Hulu really worked because it was like, oh, I want to watch Parks and Rec, which was just on TV. I can either go torrent it tomorrow or I can just go to Hulu tomorrow. And everybody went to Hulu because it was easier. It was like it was Spotify and the music industry, like same thing. But then it turns out that having three large companies own a company together goes badly.
16:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
16:05 David Pierce? And like, you know, who's been through this now is Disney. Disney knows this better than anybody and is now willingly signing up for this again. Disney just screwed itself into paying like 20 billion more dollars to acquire the rest of Hulu from Comcast after all of this. And now is just happily jumping back into bed in this exact same agreement again. It doesn't make any sense to me.
16:26 Alex Cranz? I think it kind of makes sense. I think Disney has been facing a lot of existential crises with its various businesses, particularly broadcast TV, particularly ESPN. And this gives them like a lot of opportunity to make some money back and make those businesses viable again, provided they don't get fully bodied by the FTC, Fubo.
16:49 Alex Cranz? Everyone else involved.
16:50 Speaker 04 I'm honestly, let's just be clear that no matter what the FTC does, the FTC also tends to have to go through the courts and the FTC has not a great track record with the courts right now.
17:00 David Pierce? Yeah, no, they mostly lose.
17:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah, so that's fair, that's fair. They'll get like bodied on Twitter, or excuse me, they'll get like bodied on threads, maybe X, possibly TikTok.
17:11 David Pierce? I think Bob Iger will get over it.
17:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I think he'll survive it.
17:14 David Pierce? And speaking of Bob Iger, so let's, let's switch to the other story here, because I think the other thing happening at Disney right now is, like, Disney is both, I think, to your point, kind of in an existential crisis. It's been a weird couple of years for Disney. It's not growing as fast as it wanted to. It's not making as much money as it wanted to. ESPN is still this like giant fountain of cash.
17:35 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
17:35 David Pierce? That now seems threatened, so they're trying to figure out all this other stuff. And yet, our man Bob Iger shows up to the earnings this week and is really like kind of feeling himself, rolls out these big giant initiatives and is just like, what's up everybody? Like, we're still the Walt Disney Company.
17:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it was, it had like big Bob Chapek energy, particularly because it was so like tech focused, a lot of the stuff he was saying, because one of the things is that they're going to have their own like persistent universe tied to Fortnite, which we don't entirely know what that means or what that's going to look like. We have a vague idea. But it's got Fortnite, persistent universe and Disney involved, so that sounds like money and cool.
18:14 David Pierce? It feels like that's gonna work.
18:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it feels like, that's like a Bob Chapek, like, that's the sort of thing he wanted to do, right? Like, he wanted to turn this company into a tech company. And so this is like, okay, this is giving them some inroads and taking their, their like terrific IP and putting it out there in the Fortnite space and making those deals. And then you also have like, okay, they're going to start cracking down on Disney plus password sharing. Which is another like tech thing where it's like, okay, no more free rides. Get out of here, which Bob did when he was like, no more free rides at Disney World or whatever.
18:47 David Pierce? And Bob Iger was like, how dare you do that? That's so hostile to our customers. We love everybody who comes to Disney World. How dare you raise prices?
18:54 Alex Cranz? But he doesn't love people who share passwords. Don't do it. Bob will hate you.
18:59 David Pierce? Let's, let's talk about this Fortnite thing, because I think this was a surprise in a lot of ways. Disney said they're investing 1.5 billion dollars, I think, in Epic to create a, a persistent universe, as you said, tied to Fortnite. Again, we have no details on this, but Disney and Epic have partnered a ton on stuff over the years. There's been all kinds of Marvel stuff inside of Fortnite. And my sense is this stuff is done very well and feels like in a lot of ways, kind of a natural place for Disney as a company to go, right?
19:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, the absolute first thing I thought is, oh, I kind of thought this had already somehow happened.
19:40 David Pierce? Yeah, so I mean, I think what we've seen from Fortnite over the last year, or from Epic really, is this idea that they can take the thing that is Fortnite and the Unreal Engine underneath it and build it out into more stuff, right? They did, they did Lego Fortnite. They have the racing game that I can't remember the name of right now, but it's very fun and everybody should play. And there's just like, there is a universe around Fortnite now.
20:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
20:01 David Pierce? That seems very powerful.
20:02 Speaker 04 Which also ties into, it seems like what they kind of want to be is corporate Roblox.
20:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
20:08 Speaker 04 Roblox is incredibly popular. Roblox is also just the jankiest thing in the world. You go to a website and click on a thing and you find like a prison simulator made by a 13 year old.
20:18 Alex Cranz? But my godson loves it.
20:19 Speaker 04 This is more, it is, they want to be a game full of games and, but it's these very well-recognized IPs.
20:28 David Pierce? And it seems like if that's the goal, you literally could not imagine a better partner than Disney, right?
20:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah. So is, is Roblox?
20:34 Speaker 04 Well, Lego was a pretty good partner.
20:36 David Pierce? Lego's, that's true.
20:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because they did Lego first, right?
20:38 David Pierce? Yeah. Lego for, and Lego Fortnite by all accounts is doing super well and makes sense. It's like, the thing I keep coming back to is like, I'm, I'm very old.
20:47 Speaker 04 Yeah.
20:47 David Pierce? And so I play Fortnite like it's like a game for shooting. Uh, most people, especially younger than me, because again, I'm very old. Fortnite is just like a place to hang out.
20:56 Alex Cranz? It's just a place to like, do fun stuff.
20:58 David Pierce? Yeah, and there's like, there, there are purely creative worlds in Fortnite where you just go to build stuff. And it's, the Roblox is kind of the same thing, right? Like the, the being there is the point and like. Disney World. It just, it just is digital Disney World in so many ways. And I feel like Disney, I'm almost surprised Disney didn't try to do this itself. But it seems like a big, big bet on who is going to win this race that it would pick Epic to go with.
21:25 Speaker 04 I also think the scaffolding of a game, even if you're mostly hanging out, is really important just because we have seen at this point, two or three decades of things like MMOs tend to be really successful, even if people are using them to get married or hang out with friends. Whereas things like Horizon, where the entire goal is, why don't you do the things you do in real life? But you can't actually get any of the sensory experience. It seems like people just don't, like, obviously, some people use them. Things like VRChat definitely have a base.
21:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
21:56 Speaker 04 But I think it's a little less intuitive why you should get into them.
22:00 Alex Cranz? I mean, my godson, I was back in Texas recently. And that night, he's like, I'm gonna play Roblox with my friends. And we were like, alright, cool. And we off, we went off to the rodeo. We came back that night and he was asleep. We get up the next morning and he's like, my favorite game in the world is Lego Fortnite. The babysitter showed it to me and now I'm obsessed. And that's all he plays now. Like, it was just like an instant drug for him. And he was not a big Fortnite player. He was like a Roblox fan. But that like, it was just very clear. Built that world, it give him that thing. And then he's gonna be like, there's my babysitter's house over there at Fortnite. And I was like, well, that's a little creepy, but also I love this for you. And I love that she has the patience to play this with you, because you're eight.
22:39 David Pierce? Yeah.
22:39 Alex Cranz? But it's like, it's a very weird, like, it's not weird, but it's just kind of how quick it is for, for people to just jump into it. And, and it feels like with Disney, that's just gonna be like huge.
22:52 David Pierce? Yeah, I mean, yeah, having the pull of like, characters you recognize and the storytelling that Disney is so good at goes a really long way. But it, it breaks my brain to think about all of this, because on the one hand, I think the two things that this says to me are, uh, Epic is winning in some vague but real way. And also that we're all still betting on this idea of the metaverse being a thing. And I really thought we had just given up on that idea. Like, I've made so much fun of the whole concept of the metaverse for the last two years, and now I'm sitting here being like, this is an unbelievably good idea. Of course, Disney is doing it.
23:25 Speaker 04 I feel vindicated because I feel like that it was not me who wrote this, but several people just said, look, the metaverse is just video games. It's just that we went through a weird period where a bunch of men in suits decided that we, what if it was video games, but minus the things that people actually like about video games?
23:43 Alex Cranz? I feel like you used to make the point a lot that Roblox was the metaverse, and like, Roblox was one of the biggest metaverses, right?
23:51 Speaker 04 I think, and Roblox itself decided it wanted to make that point, too. It ended up changing its name away from games, and that's also, I think, kind of silly, because clearly what, people are doing games there.
24:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah, that's what they play.
24:05 Speaker 04 Even if they're highly social.
24:06 Alex Cranz? Right.
24:07 Speaker 04 But I just, I think we've gotten away from the idea that you're going to work in Fortnite, which is kind of what I associate the metaverse boom of the pandemic era with.
24:16 David Pierce? So there's no, like, B to B Fortnite software?
24:18 Speaker 04 No, Roblox told all its employees to come into the office, because you can't work in Roblox.
24:25 Alex Cranz? We try to work in Lego Fortnite.
24:26 David Pierce? I'm down.
24:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, we try that.
24:28 David Pierce? I could podcast in Lego Fortnite.
24:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
24:30 David Pierce? Come on.
24:31 Alex Cranz? Let's do a whole, whole show in Lego Fortnite. We can do it.
24:32 David Pierce? I'll wear my Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.
24:35 Alex Cranz? Same.
24:36 David Pierce? And we'll, we'll hang out in Lego Fortnite. It'll be sick. So you, you're like, this thing works for you. You're, you're in on this concept?
24:43 Speaker 04 I mean, not me personally, but it makes sense to me.
24:45 David Pierce? Okay. Why not you personally?
24:47 Speaker 04 Because I don't like being around other people.
24:50 David Pierce? That's honest. Okay. I respect that. Yeah, I, I think this part of Disney feels like, in many ways, the biggest bet, where like, it's, they're still very much calling Disney, like, the Disney Plus company, like, that is the thing Disney needs to work. But Disney spent, I think, $2 billion to do a gambling thing that will work, because it's sports gambling, and it can't help but work.
25:18 Speaker 04 It's doing great, yeah.
25:18 David Pierce? But this feels like, in terms of sort of big swings with a lot of room for error and a lot of, like, monstrous room for success, the, the epic thing seems like it could be a big part of that.
25:30 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because I feel like Disney, when it comes to games, has had like, a very mixed... Run of Things, right? Like, they've had some good stuff, they've had some bad stuff.
25:39 David Pierce? That's true. Disney's not, I'm trying to think of the good
25:41 Alex Cranz? They've licensed stuff.
25:43 David Pierce? Based on Disney IP and they're
25:43 Alex Cranz? Right, like, they've licensed stuff, so you have, like, Kingdom Hearts and
25:47 Speaker 04 Many Star Wars games.
25:48 Alex Cranz? All of the Star Wars.
25:49 David Pierce? They do exist.
25:50 Alex Cranz? Right, but then they
25:51 David Pierce? Are they good and fun and exciting and worth playing?
25:54 Alex Cranz? Disney's also had, like, its own
25:56 David Pierce? They're out there.
25:56 Alex Cranz? Internal studios, and then it's, like, moved away from those internal studios. I think under Bob Chapek, it did a lot of, like, heavy reorg
26:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
26:04 Alex Cranz? With the studios. And, and so this is, like, an interesting, almost like, return to form for Disney to be like, oh, yeah, games.
26:12 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, the thing I associate weirdly most with it is, is Warren Spector's Epic Mickey.
26:16 Alex Cranz? Yes.
26:16 Speaker 04 Which I don't think anyone would really call a an absolutely massive financial success.
26:21 Alex Cranz? No, but it was like, that was the most Disney of Disney games, right? Like, that was, like, anytime I think of a video game at Disney, I go back to him being like, "Yeah, you're gonna paint your way, like, into the future with, like, Mickey Mouse."
26:34 Speaker 04 It was also just symbolic of that period, though. That was, like, the height of prestige AAA single-player games.
26:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
26:41 David Pierce? I just Googled "best Disney video games ever" just to make sure there wasn't, like, an obvious one I was missing. And we're looking at things like Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse from 1990, and Quack Shot from 1991. Like, the track record's not amazing.
26:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah. And so, they, they've got all these terrific IP that they've been very good at selling out to other companies. And now, doing this with Epic in what seems like is gonna be a much tighter relationship. I'll be really curious to see what happens there. And also, if it explodes, it's gonna be, like, really interesting to watch.
27:16 David Pierce? It's also very fun that this is one of Apple's best friends partnering with one of Apple's mortal enemies.
27:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
27:23 David Pierce? Which I just enjoy very much. Uh, like, Bob Iger and Tim Cook are going to have a lot of very polite, very testy phone calls over the next couple of years, and I'm very excited about it. It's gonna be great times.
27:33 Alex Cranz? Oh, my god.
27:34 Speaker 04 I mean, Disney was a big launch partner, it was supposed to be for the Vision Pro.
27:36 David Pierce? Yeah.
27:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah, you can, you can go hang out, you can watch a movie, like, I think in, in Darth Vader's palace.
27:44 Alex Cranz? Or something.
27:45 Speaker 04 It's, I don't remember if it is that exactly, but yes, it was Disney, definitely Star Wars themed.
27:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah, there's, I think there's one that's like on, on the volcano planet where he lived for a while. I know far too much about Star Wars, apparently, judging by both of your faces.
27:59 Speaker 04 Oh, no, I remember, I remember all those things. I'm trying to remember because I went into the theater and I do not remember where it was. I wanted to say Tatooine.
28:07 Alex Cranz? Was there?
28:08 David Pierce? There was a Tatooine, that I know. I don't know if there were others, but there was definitely a Tatooine.
28:11 Alex Cranz? Maybe I just made up Darth Vader. I want to watch a movie on Darth Vader's like throne.
28:15 David Pierce? It's a good idea. Listen, I know for sure Bob Iger is listening to this podcast, so Bob, get it done. Make it happen.
28:20 Alex Cranz? Come on.
28:21 David Pierce? All right, one more thing before we switch gears and take a break here. I don't know if you guys saw, but the, the feistiest argument of the week on threads, everyone's favorite feisty social media platform, was about Apple TV Plus and HBO. And I just, I just wanna, I just wanna feel everybody out on, on how we feel about this. So Wired wrote a story, basically positing that Apple TV is the new HBO and that it's, it is where you go to get basically nothing but very good things. They don't do that much, but the things that they do are very good. And then Lucas Shaw, who's a reporter at Bloomberg and very good and knows this stuff better than most, quote tweeted somebody saying something to the effect of, anyone writing something like this should be required to say that nobody watches Apple TV Plus.
29:06 David Pierce? And the feelings that that brought out in people on the internet, people blogged about it, people posted about it, people got very angry at Lucas. Somebody called him a funny name that he then quote tweeted and it just became this whole thing. But I, I think the, the question underneath it is like, is Apple TV the, the one now? Like, is it, is it, is it the best one? Is, but interesting.
29:30 Alex Cranz? I mean, here, here's a question. If, do you like science fiction?
29:35 David Pierce? Sometimes.
29:36 Alex Cranz? Okay. Do you like weird, modernist takes on historical women's stories?
29:47 David Pierce? Yes, universally.
29:49 Alex Cranz? And do you like Ted Lasso?
29:51 David Pierce? This is scarily accurate.
29:53 Alex Cranz? If you like those three things, then like, Apple TV is great. I think Apple TV Plus is very much like HBO in that it has really high standards. It maintains those really high standards. And like HBO, for a very long time, nobody watched it. Everybody's just like, like, we, we love to be like, oh, yeah, HBO, Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones is huge. It's, it's massive and a ton of people watched Game of Thrones. That was not normal for HBO. That was a surprise and a shock and a delight for HBO.
30:22 David Pierce? And also, I'm pretty sure that like, the Game of Thrones ratings would have been like, a pretty bad episode of The Big Bang Theory.
30:28 Alex Cranz? No, no, they were still doing-
30:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, isn't, I just don't see a conflict between the two things you just mentioned.
30:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
30:32 David Pierce? That's totally fair.
30:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I think they were doing like, 10, 11 million average viewers for, which was massive for HBO. And at the time, for broadcast TV, it was like, pretty okay. But, you know, you think about the MASH finale, or was it Grey's? My, my big one is Grey's Anatomy, season two, was over 20 million people watching it. So you're like, no.
30:54 David Pierce? Yeah.
30:54 Alex Cranz? I, I, 20 million people did not watch the, the latest season of For All Mankind. They should have.
31:00 Speaker 04 I guess the thing that interests me about this comparison is that a lot of the way that I experienced early, like, prestige TV and HBO shows was through a critics ecosystem that doesn't exist anymore. That a lot of the, I think you've written about this, that there was the idea that nobody's, like, not that many people are watching this show, but every critic you know is watching this show. Everything on the internet is writing about it. There are these whole little ecosystems. I'm really curious what that looks like for Apple.
31:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah. And I think, Apple's been doing kind of okay with it. That's one of the reasons it's gone so far into science fiction, is because like, you have Monarch, which is a big show that's based in, in the Godzilla world. And it does ask you to care about the Godzilla movies. You shouldn't.
31:40 David Pierce? But it wants you to so bad.
31:41 Alex Cranz? It wants you to. And the show is, the show is legitimately good. I think it's got a great, like, time ahead of it. And same with For All Mankind. But it doesn't really like-
31:51 Alex Cranz? They're not really hitting at the same kind of like pace that traditionally those critically acclaimed like shows like we don't have a television without pity anymore. AV Club is very, very different than it was 10, 15 years ago, five years ago. And, and so you don't have those like conversations happening. Instead you have like people on TikTok going through and judging Emma Stone's favorite movies and saying why they suck, which is like not particularly useful criticism. Uh, or you have, uh, what is it? You have threads and, and people making fun of Lucas for something he was right about like, nobody watches Apple TV. Except for B and David, I think.
32:26 David Pierce? Yeah. Well, there were, there were a lot of people who responded being like, well, Apple TV plus has 25 million subscribers.
32:31 Alex Cranz? That's different than how many viewers.
32:33 David Pierce? Yeah. Yeah. They all watched Ted Lasso. I'll give you that. They did all watch Ted Lasso.
32:37 Alex Cranz? And then they, they, they maybe watched, did they watch Foundation? Probably not. Severance?
32:42 David Pierce? They all said they watched Foundation. They watched like an episode and a half and they're like, yeah.
32:45 Alex Cranz? The only person in the world who watched all of Foundation is Dan Seifert.
32:51 David Pierce? And then he had to leave The Verge because of it.
32:52 Alex Cranz? Yeah. That's why he's not at The Verge anymore. It's because we found out he watched all of Foundation and we were like, wow.
32:57 David Pierce? No, but Addie, I think you're, the point you're making about critics made me think of something, which is that like even still, like I think about a, a website like The Ringer, which has a lot of really good pop culture coverage. They sort of instinctively cover every new like 9pm on Sunday HBO show. Because there's just an assumption that this show sort of matters, right? Whether it's The White Lotus or Succession or any of those kind of handful of times a year shows that.
33:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I'm getting that with True Detective right now.
33:27 David Pierce? Yeah, totally. Uh, and there's just a like cultural assumption that this show is relevant because it is like the Sunday night show on HBO. Apple TV definitely doesn't have that. Uh, like I could not tell you what day any Apple TV show comes out, which I think is like a meaningful thing.
33:43 Alex Cranz? Was Ted Lasso Tuesdays?
33:45 David Pierce? I honestly couldn't tell you. Like the, the only streaming one in general I remember was the first season of The Mandalorian on Disney Plus. Came out Friday mornings and I had friends who would. Literally like wake up early in the morning on Friday morning to watch the show in order to like be able to talk about it at work. And so like, that's the level that you get to. And I think HBO just sort of has granted that level of of cultural relevance, even if it's not real. Like, we were just looking this up before we started, and four million people watched the series finale of Succession, like one of the great TV shows that every critic on the internet was writing about, which is like, half the number of people who watch an episode of Chicago Fire, like everybody's 95th favorite TV show. But nothing
34:29 David Pierce? has hit that sort of cultural relevance that HBO just gets to have because it's HBO.
34:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:37 David Pierce? And even though Apple TV has a lot of good shows, I actually think like, if you just took 50 random shows from any streaming service, I would bet that Apple TVs are better than any random 50 on any other streaming service.
34:50 Alex Cranz? And that's what they were, I mean, that was like, the kind of the core argument, I think, of that HBO piece, the Apple TV Plus piece, was that, hey, like, pound for pound, it's hitting above its weight. Like, it's doing really well.
35:01 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's probably right.
35:02 Alex Cranz? But it's also, it's not doing true detective numbers. It's not doing Chicago Fire numbers. And historically, prestige TV doesn't do Chicago Fire numbers. That's why, part of why it's prestige TV is because a lot of people say, I don't want to watch that. It's too smart.
35:18 David Pierce? It's too prestigious.
35:19 Alex Cranz? It's too prestigious.
35:20 David Pierce? I will say, though, and we need to take a break, but Criminal Record on Apple TV Plus kicks ass. I'm pretty sure it's not going to land the plane, and it's not going to make any sense at the end. But it's like, five episodes in, and they've all been great.
35:30 Alex Cranz? I love this.
35:31 David Pierce? So, highly recommend. But I might take that back. Anyway, we need to take a break. We'll be right back.
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37:11 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Let's talk Vision Pro. So as you're listening to this on Friday, it's now been a week since the Vision Pro came out into the world. We've got a bunch of news, but Addy, I just want you to like, describe the vibes of what you've seen from a week of Vision Pro being in the world.
37:28 Speaker 04 It feels like I've seen sort of three things. One is everyone noticing all of the little annoying things about the Vision Pro that Neelai and the rest of us noticed. Two is people going, oh wow, I'm like a developer or I'm a person who is interested in technology and this thing is a technologically interesting system. Both of which were, I feel like, kind of prefigured by our review.
37:50 David Pierce? Yes.
37:51 Speaker 04 The third is, this thing's really expensive. This is a cloud symbol.
37:56 David Pierce? Agreed. And that is the one I should have seen coming more than I did, I think. I sort of took it as, this thing is really expensive, maybe it'll be kind of ridiculous and gauche to wear outside. Holy God, was I wrong.
38:11 Speaker 04 No.
38:12 David Pierce? Oh man, was I wrong.
38:13 Speaker 04 You're right. You're still right. Don't, don't, it's still gauche.
38:16 David Pierce? I'm right in the abstract. I'm wrong in actual reality.
38:19 Speaker 04 Don't give these people power.
38:20 David Pierce? I mean, what was it? I think Jake posted something on the site. The headline of the quick post he did was just, "It's been 10 hours." And this is a video of a man in his car, driving while wearing a Vision Pro. Which, like, we knew was gonna happen, and we got a bunch of
38:35 Speaker 04 Cybertruck, wasn't it?
38:36 David Pierce? impressed posts from people saying, "Boy, you guys called this." And I kept being like, "This was not a tough call, guys." Like, this was what it was gonna be. But now, we've seen people walking around the mall. You see people on the subway. Like, you're totally right that being the person with this out in the world makes you interesting. And I don't think that'll last, but it's very much what it is right now.
38:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, I feel like there are two ways this could go. One is the iPhone, which, having an iPhone in the early days, like, if somebody else had one, you were like, "Oh, my God, iPhone." The other way is, I remember Google Glass. I remember the period, like, the week or two where Google Glass, it was like, "Oh, this is so exotic." All of these models where it's like, this incredibly exciting sci-fi thing. And it looked a lot cooler than the Vision Pro, frankly. And then, within a month or two, you were getting banned from bars.
39:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah. No, 100% it's gonna be that side. Because right now, all the people doing it aren't using the Vision Pro correctly, which was pointed out to me by someone in our office who has the Vision Pro.
39:34 David Pierce? If you're walking down the street with a Vision Pro on, just like pinch-pinching the air, you're not doing anything.
39:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah, apparently, you can only have one... Sorry. Apparently, you can only have one window open, and you have to hold it like this all the time. So theoretically, the only way to actually make it like...
39:48 David Pierce? You're just carrying your window down the street.
39:50 Alex Cranz? Walking around like that. And I'm like, "Yeah, you got..." And he got so mad, he was like, "They're not doing it right." "You can only have one window at a time." And he was like, walking through the office, showing us how it works.
40:00 David Pierce? I was kinda hoping it would be like, you wake up in the morning, and you like walk to the subway, just sort of leaving browser tabs behind you.
40:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
40:07 David Pierce? And then you just pick them all up on the way home. You come back out, you put it on, and it's like, "Oh, cool. There's all this stuff I had to do today." Like, that sounds awesome. That is super not how it works.
40:16 Alex Cranz? No.
40:16 Speaker 04 I would just like to note also, this is a thing that I have had many people mention about pass-through, is... I am waiting, someday this thing is going to crash while you are wearing it. It is going to be incredibly annoying to suddenly be blind.
40:30 David Pierce? Yeah.
40:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, while you are driving.
40:32 Alex Cranz? Right.
40:33 Speaker 04 Don't drive with it.
40:35 David Pierce? Yeah.
40:35 Speaker 04 Don't be dumb.
40:36 David Pierce? Yeah, that's a good, just quick PSA, don't do that. Just don't, don't do that.
40:40 Alex Cranz? Well, I think like when, when, uh, when the Wall Street Journal did theirs, uh, when Joanna did her, her review and she did like a ski slope thing, they just shut down the ski slope. Cause they're like, oh, we can't have other people like on this slope with her. And what if she goes blind, right into somebody, can't have that happen. So it's like, don't, don't drive with it.
40:59 David Pierce? I like that Joanna shows up and she's like, guys, I have an NDA, I have to do this separately. And they're like, don't worry, we don't, I won't anywhere run around you anyway. Like, you're cool. Uh, but it does seem like the people have landed on the thing that we've all been talking about for the better part of a year now, which is like, this thing is a, is a television. That seems to be overwhelmingly the takeaway is like, like you're saying, there's some cool technological stuff going on here. In, in certain like engineering ways, this thing is masterful and amazing. Kind of useless for a lot of things, but holy crap, is it a great TV watching experience? That's like, the thing I've seen overwhelmingly seems to be that.
41:38 Speaker 04 Which is driving me insane because it is a TV that I cannot use in the way that I would use a TV because it is single user. The single user-ness of this thing has been driving me just up a wall for a week.
41:50 David Pierce? Yeah. Oh, no, I completely agree.
41:51 Alex Cranz? You're sitting mad, like watching you.
41:53 Speaker 04 I'm, I'm angry, like I'm genuinely angry because I have so many electronics and I, look, I share them with a person.
42:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
42:02 Speaker 04 And the point is we are both able to use this thing. And I can't, it's not just like, oh, it's fitted for your face or whatever. It's, you literally can't use the interface.
42:11 Alex Cranz? Right.
42:11 Speaker 04 It won't recognize your eyes.
42:13 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we, we haven't all been using Neely's review unit because. We can't.
42:18 David Pierce? Right.
42:19 Speaker 04 I mean, you can start a guest, like, to be clear, the thing that happens is there's one person who can own this thing. It recognizes them. You can start a guest session by pressing the button and then you have to do this like minute-long calibration process of picking colored dots out.
42:31 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
42:32 Speaker 04 And then it can recognize you and it can recognize you basically until it swaps back. And then you have to start a new guest session. So there is, gets to be one designated TV user in the house.
42:43 Alex Cranz? That's it. No one else watches TV.
42:44 Speaker 04 Everyone else has to spend a minute getting their TV ready.
42:47 David Pierce? And I do think, I, I was less worried about this before it launched than I have become now. I'm with you. I think it's, it's actually the single biggest thing missing from the Vision Pro right now is decent multi-user support. Because if it is a television and/or a game console, it's going to be a thing you pick up, put on, use for a bit, and then put down. Right? It is, it is like very much a, an episodic device, like all headsets are right now. Like Chris Gray made this point on this show a while ago and I haven't stopped thinking about it ever since. I was like, oh, why aren't there VR games that are fun to play for eight hours? And he was, because like, who the hell wants to play a VR game for eight hours? Like, I think that's right. And so the idea that I take off my headset and put it down on my couch and the headset is the television and my wife can't then put it on is stupid.
43:33 David Pierce? Like, there are people who are saying, you know, it's, it's lonely and you can't watch TV alone, or you have to watch TV alone in it. And I both think that's true and also kind of overstated. Like, a lot of people spend a lot of time watching TV alone. I think that's basically okay.
43:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
43:48 David Pierce? Somewhere, Richard Lawler is listening to this feeling very vindicated. But this idea that it, it would be like no one else in my house is allowed to watch my TV ever. It's just bad.
44:00 Alex Cranz? It's the 50s.
44:01 Speaker 04 Well, or like no one's allowed to use my Playstation.
44:05 David Pierce? Right. Yeah, exactly.
44:06 Alex Cranz? So like, rich, multi-kid families. You, you remember, did you ever have friends like that when you were a kid? And they'd be like, oh, this is my Playstation. My brother has his own Playstation.
44:16 David Pierce? What? No.
44:17 Speaker 04 They'd be like, I did not have this, no.
44:19 Alex Cranz? Why do I have that? Why do I have my own Playstation? Then your parents would be like, because they cost money, get out.
44:25 David Pierce? Yeah.
44:25 Alex Cranz? Go, go mow the yard.
44:26 David Pierce? Yeah, they'd be like, go outside, that's your Playstation.
44:28 Alex Cranz? Extremely easy to switch because every other entertainment-focused computing device on the market, except maybe the iPad, recognizes you're supposed to have multiple profiles. I just like watching Addie get so mad about both profiles.
44:39 David Pierce? I was talking to Jake on our team earlier. The fun of being in the office is I get to just randomly get in arguments with people. And he got very heated and was saying that we should start giving every iPad a zero out of 10 until they give proper multi-user support. And I'm just like, hell yeah, dude, like, that's, it's a stance, let's go for it.
44:56 Alex Cranz? No more sevens, only zeros.
44:57 David Pierce? Yeah, I support this, I'm into this. Any other Vision Pro stuff we should talk about? I don't want to linger on this, we've talked a lot about Vision Pro on the show.
45:04 Alex Cranz? We, uh, IFixit did a big breakdown of the displays. And, boy, howdy, is the pixels per inch awesome.
45:13 David Pierce? Is it nuts?
45:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
45:14 David Pierce? Run us through the numbers.
45:15 Alex Cranz? 3,386 pixels per inch.
45:19 David Pierce? That seems high.
45:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's only, it's only a few, a few pixels less than what you would expect for like, like, what 4K requires, which is why it's not technically a 4K display. But it's like-
45:31 David Pierce? But it's this big.
45:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
45:33 David Pierce? Yeah.
45:33 Alex Cranz? The fact that it's an inch and it has that many pixels on it is, is kind of insane.
45:37 Speaker 04 Do you want to give the Quest 3 and the other numbers that were in our post?
45:41 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess.
45:42 Speaker 04 A useful comparison?
45:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah, and by comparison, the Meta Quest 3 has 1,218 PPI. And then the HTC Vive, the HTC Vive Pro has 950. And if you want something that you actually look at more than like, once a day, uh, the iPhone 15 Pro Max has 460 PPI. So this thing is-
46:07 Speaker 04 And they point out that pixels per degree is a lot of, is, in some ways, more accurate. That's like, the degree of field of view that-
46:15 Alex Cranz? Right.
46:15 Speaker 04 Pixels because a headset is like this thing where it just blows up a gigantic, a small screen to a gigantic field.
46:22 David Pierce? Right.
46:23 Speaker 04 But even those numbers are also pretty good?
46:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah, and it's like, the numbers here are just outrageously high. And you're like, okay, so this thing is like- Damn good. Yeah, because the pixels per degree, the Vision Pro is at 34 PPD, which is lower than the 94 and the 95 ratings for the iPhone 15 from 15 feet away, or no, the iPhone 15 from a foot away, or the standard 65-inch 4K TV from 6.5 feet away. So I guess is lower number better here for the PPD? For the pixels per degree?
46:57 Speaker 04 Higher is typically better. I think that the point is that it is still not going to get you the kind of clarity that you get from like looking at a very small field of view for a small screen. But it is still, I don't know that I have the numbers here, but it is still pretty good for comparing it against other headsets.
47:16 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
47:16 David Pierce? But it also makes pretty clear how hard a technical problem this is because, I mean, Neil, I was talking about this when we talked about his review. It's like the comparison to like blood cells, which means nothing, but it is technologically insane that Apple got this many pixels onto a screen this small, and it's still not enough to do the thing that we need to do in order for the stuff to be really realistic. Right? Like, that is the scale of this problem, is you can have that many pixels on that small space, but because it's so close to your eyes, and because it is literally trying to simulate reality, the bar is just so, so, so high that even though Apple has done like an order of magnitude more than anyone else has been able to do, we're still not there.
47:59 David Pierce? Like, the road for really making this stuff amazing is so long.
48:03 Speaker 04 It's also, yeah, a reason why pixels are just not the be all and end all of headsets.
48:08 David Pierce? Totally.
48:08 Speaker 04 Like, things like field of view turn out to be a really big deal with the Vision Pro.
48:11 David Pierce? Yeah.
48:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
48:12 David Pierce? Yeah, it's been really interesting watching everybody go through, I would say, the kind of normal honeymoon phase of a Vision Pro where you get it on, you do the first couple of things, you get the setup, you learn how to do the pinch, the eye tracking, and it's like, oh, my God, it works, and it feels amazing. And then very slowly, you start to notice, like, oh, I can see the edges of my vision here as I'm going, and then, oh. The pinching doesn't really work and you just like slowly but surely the things that don't quite work start to creep in. But everybody seems to have that very first 20 minutes in the headset where it's like, "Oh, my God, I'm never taking this off. This is the greatest thing that's ever happened."
48:49 Speaker 04 That is also the impression that I feel like everyone who put on a VR headset in 2013 got.
48:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
48:54 David Pierce? That's probably true.
48:55 Alex Cranz? No, that's true. I was talking to a friend who he did when I worked with him, we worked on the original Oculus Quest review. Was it the Oculus Quest? The Rift.
49:04 Speaker 04 The Rift was the first.
49:05 David Pierce? The original Rift, yeah.
49:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah. And we worked on the original Rift review and he's like, "Wow, I kind of called it like then." I said, "Basically, my review is a lot like all of the Vision Pro reviews right now." And it's like, "Look back." Yeah, no, he's right. Like when you finally try really cool VR, you're like, "Oh, wow, this is awesome." And then it kind of goes away, which is why nobody talks about VR cardboard anymore. Because that was really cool when you first put on like the cardboard. And then five minutes later, you're like, "Okay, what do I do now?"
49:32 David Pierce? Yeah, I think a lot of this stuff is just a question of how long it takes to reveal its problems to you.
49:37 Alex Cranz? Yes.
49:38 David Pierce? And the Vision Pro, to its credit, seems to take a pretty long time to reveal its problems to you. But right about the time it starts getting heavy and the battery starts dying and the gestures don't work quite so well.
49:49 Alex Cranz? And you remember, you spent $300,000 or $3,500 on it.
49:53 David Pierce? Every once in a while, somebody has just been posting in all caps, $3,500. And I feel like this is now my legacy on the Vergecast. I'm very happy about it.
50:02 Speaker 04 I do feel bad. You mentioned Google Cardboard. I feel really bad for all of the people who spent a bunch of time making 180 and 360 degree videos, I guess including us, many years ago. And Apple is just like, "No, they're not good enough. You're not looking at them."
50:15 David Pierce? Yeah.
50:16 Alex Cranz? They look like potatoes.
50:17 David Pierce? Which is wild because it's not like Apple is going way out of its way to ensure every experience you have in the Vision Pro is like perfect and sane. And a lot of people are having issues with, you know, motion sickness and some of the like problems with the ways that apps work. And there are not that many guardrails, except on videos that Apple doesn't think look good enough. And I think that's kind of a silly set of guardrails.
50:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's frustrating. Especially that it's even just on the web. Like, the web is the place I think of is you should be able to just go and experience a thing, even if the quality is not great.
50:51 David Pierce? Yeah, if I'm willing to go onto that stupid keyboard and type www.youtube.com/360videos that are going to make me throw up, like, that is my right. This is the internet. I should be allowed to toot that. All right, anyway, we should move on. Before we get to the landing ground, one more, one and a half more things I want to talk about. I'm only giving Alex a half, and we'll get to that in a second. Blue Sky opened up this week, which I think is interesting. This is the new Twitter-y social network that all the shit posters went to and have been kind of hanging out in secret for the last year. And now, Blue Sky is open to everybody. Jay, their CEO, did an interview with Alex Heath, talking about how they plan to make money.
51:34 David Pierce? And what do you, what do you guys make of this? Is like, is Blue Sky, is Blue Sky coming?
51:40 Alex Cranz? Do you know how I fully understood? I hadn't looked at the website yet. I was scrolling through threads and I saw a bunch of posts saying, "I'm on Blue Sky, but I'll still be posting here on threads." And that's how I knew that Blue Sky had opened. And I was like, hmm, is it good if that's how I find out? Is just a bunch of people on threads saying, "I'll still be here, I'll still be on both, posting on both."
52:00 David Pierce? Yeah, it's interesting. You're on Blue Sky, right?
52:02 Speaker 04 I'm on Blue Sky. I went to Mastodon first. I still use Mastodon. I have slipped to Blue Sky just because Blue Sky's felt much more low stakes.
52:11 David Pierce? Interesting.
52:12 Speaker 04 Part of it was that it was private, that it was just much smaller. But it does feel like where a bunch of, A, Twitter people that I liked went. And B, it feels like I don't have to be contributing to a greater social good, which was the feeling I ended up getting from Mastodon.
52:28 David Pierce? Yes. Mastodon is very much like an NGO designed to make the world a better place through lots of developmental documentation.
52:38 Speaker 04 Which I'm sure is not true for absolutely every instance, like all of the usual caveats. I just got the sense, I was like, is this really a good enough, constructive enough thing? There were just so many people talking about, you just, you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be cluttering up our timelines with all of this frivolous stuff.
52:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:54 Speaker 04 And then I went to Blue Sky and Drill was there.
52:56 David Pierce? It's just all frivolous.
52:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. And also a decent amount of law Twitter ended up there.
53:01 David Pierce? Yeah, fair. Yeah, I, part of me thinks it's a success story if they all end up being their own things and different. And I think the weirdest part is going to be the people who... Kind of commit to posting everywhere and try to be the same thing everywhere. I just don't think it's gonna work. And I think these things have all developed such different norms that like the vibe on Blue Sky is unrecognizable to the vibe on Threads or on Mastodon. Largely in good ways, but mostly in just extremely chaotic ways. There's just a lot of people making inside jokes that you don't understand if you've been off of Blue Sky for more than 10 minutes. But that's a good thing, right? And I think that part of the big bet that the social web is making right now is that
53:46 David Pierce? there can be lots of winners and lots of things to come out. But in some ways, I think Blue Sky taking this long to open up was both the best and worst thing that happened to Blue Sky. Like, Blue Sky has this very, like, mature vibe now, right? Like, Blue Sky knows what it is. But the downside of that is it knows what it is for this small group of people who have been there together alone, like, on a desert island for a year. While Threads became sort of the clear mainstream choice, Mastodon continues to be Mastodon. Threads and Mastodon are eventually gonna be integrated. And so it just kind of feels like Blue Sky is just relegated to forever being an also ran.
54:25 Alex Cranz? Yes. I mean, that's why I didn't... I have an account, but I don't really participate in Blue Sky as much is because my brain can only handle so much social media. And so I don't want to, like... I'm not gonna be one of those people on a bunch of different platforms and always talking. And that one, I was like, I just feel like this one is not gonna be the big one. I think a lot of really cool people are there. But a lot of the really cool people there, I'll just text.
54:48 David Pierce? Yeah.
54:48 Alex Cranz? And talk to them because they're my friends.
54:50 Speaker 04 On the other hand, I kind of... Well, A, I do wish that it were much easier to have a single interface where I could at least check all these things.
54:57 Alex Cranz? Yes.
54:58 Speaker 04 At the same time, that's very annoying to me. But I'm also, I don't know, I hope we get more sites that are small and niche and that I can just go to for a small subset of things. Blue Sky in some ways reminds me of Tumblr in its post-hegemonic era.
55:13 Alex Cranz? Yeah, in its current era where it's just like a couple of folks you know, and they're being really weird, and that's great.
55:19 David Pierce? Yeah. Tumblr's in the phase where every time somebody mentions Tumblr, you go, "Oh, Tumblr."
55:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
55:24 David Pierce? And that is kind of what Blue Sky feels like already.
55:26 Speaker 04 Except that, I guess, one of them allows porn.
55:28 David Pierce? Well, you know.
55:29 Speaker 04 Tumblr. I'm really curious how long it's going to last, because I am just... Apple and Google exerted so much pressure a few years ago in getting not-safe-for-work stuff either paywalled or ta... not paywalled, but like either walled away or taken down.
55:44 David Pierce? Yeah.
55:45 Speaker 04 The Blue Sky getting on it feels... odd?
55:49 David Pierce? Yeah, I mean, to some extent. I think you could make a pretty good argument that Blue Sky never should have opened up. That main... that that sort of managing and slowing down that growth was a good thing for Blue Sky. Like, it grew too fast in the beginning. Like, remember when people were hacking the invite codes and a ton of people came on all at once? It became a mess. Like, the the norms changed, people started doing weird stuff, the platform started breaking in weird ways, the health thread ruined everyone's life. And
56:14 Speaker 04 God, what the hell.
56:15 David Pierce? there was, I think, a moment where they said, "Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna slow this down on purpose." And I think that was the right thing to do then, and I think you could make the case it's the right thing to do now. The problem is, that runs against all of Blue Sky's stated goals, right? Which are to build a social protocol for the web that is bigger than Blue Sky and to kind of reinvent the way that we do everything. Which I think at this point, it it lost, right? Like, we're in a VHS Betamax war with with AT protocol, which runs Blue Sky, and Activity Pub, which is underneath Mastodon, and which Threads is gonna adopt. And it almost doesn't matter anymore, I don't think, which one is better. Activity Pub is gonna win.
56:53 Speaker 04 Yeah.
56:53 David Pierce? It's just gonna win. And I think if I'm Blue Sky, you either have to look at it and say, "Okay, do we want to keep fighting this fight that we are now so far behind? Or do we go, like you're talking about, and try to be something different and not try to build the next great social media company, but like lean into this thing that we already are?" Which I think could be very cool.
57:13 Alex Cranz? But doesn't... at some point, they have to make money.
57:16 David Pierce? Yeah, presumably.
57:19 Alex Cranz? I think that's gonna be a real challenge if they don't grow. And I totally agree with you. I think-
57:25 David Pierce? Mastodon runs on like a Patreon.
57:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
57:28 David Pierce? You can get by for a pretty long time.
57:29 Alex Cranz? That's true.
57:30 Speaker 04 Open source projects, yeah, used to be taken for granted as just things that could exist.
57:34 David Pierce? Yeah. And there's a way to run this stuff as like an okay business that doesn't involve like, if Blue Sky wants to be a trillion dollar company, there are certain things you have to do in pursuit of that, right?
57:47 Alex Cranz? Right.
57:47 David Pierce? But I think my hope is for the next phase of the social web that not everybody tries to be a trillion dollar company, that there are going to be lots and lots of much smaller ways to do this stuff.
57:56 Alex Cranz? Fingers crossed.
57:56 David Pierce? And I think Blue Sky, I could be totally wrong because there are a lot of things Blue Sky does really well. And it's a, it's a nice looking app. Everybody on there, it's where Drill is. It's like, it is the most fun social platform on the internet. Like, I really believe that. But it is such an unusual place now that I feel like if I had never been there before, it would show up and it would, it would feel very strange.
58:19 Speaker 04 It also feels like a place that you kind of can only really grasp if you were on Twitter.
58:24 David Pierce? Yes. But like, but like on Twitter, like capital O on Twitter. And, and God help you if you were one of those people. It really is, it's full of like decade old Twitter jokes that if you don't get, you, you sort of need a glossary to help you understand what the hell is going on on Blue Sky.
58:41 Speaker 04 Yeah.
58:43 Alex Cranz? Funny.
58:43 David Pierce? We'll see. I, I support all of this. I hope Blue Sky works. I just don't think it's going to. All right, Alex. I'm so afraid to do this right now.
58:53 Alex Cranz? I have, I have a piece of news here.
58:55 David Pierce? About what's gonna happen. Before we take a break, we have one more story we should talk about for such a short amount of time.
59:04 Alex Cranz? Shortest amount of time. And in fact, it says, "Alex, be careful," in all caps. As some of you know, I did make a bet with some people that at some point we would probably see a picture of Elon Musk.
59:18 Alex Cranz? And little Elon. I don't want to say any other way.
59:22 David Pierce? I already hate this.
59:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah, and we're one step closer because they are currently dealing with a problem on the platform, on X, the platform, where there is a non-consensual photo of a celebrity in the nude.
59:37 David Pierce? I mean, it's Drake's nudes. Like, we can just say this.
59:39 Alex Cranz? It's Drake's nudes.
59:40 David Pierce? Everyone on the internet knows this. This is why this became a story, right?
59:43 Alex Cranz? It led to, it led to X being the number one app on the Apple App Store. I want to just be very clear, non-consensual nudes are not okay, don't do that. But also, I hate how close we are getting to the big nude where I win a bet. I don't want to win this bet. It's a terrible bet.
1:00:02 David Pierce? Everyone loses that bet.
1:00:04 Alex Cranz? Everyone loses when I win this bet. Clean up your act, X, like, stop, stop letting non-consensual stuff just be all over your platform. That's not cool.
1:00:13 David Pierce? Yeah, well, and that, and then all this stuff, we were kind of bookended with stories about the Taylor Swift deepfakes being all over X. First, there were, there were problematic, non-consensual deepfakes. And now there's a deepfake of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump that's all over the platform. X is just an odd, odd place.
1:00:34 Alex Cranz? It's, yeah, it's, it's an old kind of internet, but not in a good way, particularly if you, like, have any vested interest in X and don't want to be sued.
1:00:43 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:00:44 Speaker 04 I was saying, it reminds me of Reddit back in the mid-teens, during the period where they were extremely laissez-faire.
1:00:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:00:51 David Pierce? But at least Reddit would, like, say out loud that they didn't want these things. They wouldn't do anything about it for a long time, but at least they would say, "We don't want this awful stuff to be all over our platform."
1:01:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:01:03 David Pierce? You do not get that sense from the leadership at X right now.
1:01:06 Speaker 04 They are, yeah, well, I think that Elon is definitely operating in a landscape that comes after Reddit's cleanup, in which you're, yeah, you can't even just say, "I don't endorse this, but it's here." It's like, you have to have full-throated endorsement of, "Yes, the Nazis." Even though, like, look, yes, he has condemned the Nazis. He also just talks to a bunch of far-right people and spreads his own conspiracy theories. And there's just a bunch of stuff that...
1:01:31 Alex Cranz? Even though Reddit people like hung out with and invited the guy from Creep Shots into their events, like, they didn't end up doing that.
1:01:41 David Pierce? Right. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And it's just bad times all around.
1:01:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's just bad times. I don't want to win this bet. Don't, please. I like, I went from kind of wanting to win the bet because I like to be smug and win things to like, I don't actually want to win this bet with Liz. Don't.
1:01:58 David Pierce? It's a terrible bet. And also, to everyone who is asking for trending topics to be on threads, you don't want that. Don't click on trending topics because something bad will probably happen when you do it. All right, we need to take a break, then we're getting back to a landing round.
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1:03:48 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Let's not talk about Drake's nudes anymore. Let's do a laying around. Addy, you go first. What do you have?
1:03:56 Speaker 04 So, the FCC has a law against robocalls. And this is said you cannot have artificial voices. Do artificial voices include AI voices?
1:04:07 Alex Cranz? Artificials in the world?
1:04:09 David Pierce? My instinct says yes.
1:04:11 Speaker 04 And they agreed. Good. Good for them.
1:04:13 David Pierce? Nice.
1:04:13 Speaker 04 They declared today that the, that AI-generated voice clones in robocalls definitely do violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. That means they can crack down on them. This is partly relevant because the election season is heating up and New Hampshire has just released the results of an investigation about who was making phone calls pretending to be Joe Biden. It's companies in Texas.
1:04:35 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it was companies in my hometown.
1:04:37 David Pierce? Okay, you need to be less excited about this.
1:04:39 Alex Cranz? I mean, look, anytime I see my hometown's name...
1:04:41 David Pierce? This is not a cool, like, "Ah, those are my people" moment.
1:04:44 Alex Cranz? If you're not from, like, New York or like a big town and you see, like, I'm from Fort Worth, I see Fort Worth in a name, I'm like, "Oh, cool!" And then I look a little closer.
1:04:52 David Pierce? You just described Fort Worth, Texas, like it's like a tiny town in Iowa.
1:04:56 Alex Cranz? I mean...
1:04:57 David Pierce? It's like a large city right next to Dallas.
1:04:59 Alex Cranz? This is so flattering. Thank you.
1:05:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think of it as being a pretty, a pretty big place.
1:05:03 Alex Cranz? Look, when you're next to Dallas, like, they're always over there talking about how cool they are and how you suck. So, we have some inferiority complexes over in Fort Worth. And apparently, we also have spammers calling, pretending to be Joe Biden. And they were saying, like, "Don't vote," right?
1:05:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, you gotta save your vote. A thing that doesn't make any sense.
1:05:22 David Pierce? Oh, wow. Wait, didn't, wasn't that a whole story in the last election cycle that there were, there was a guy who was convicted of, for posting on Twitter about, like, telling people not to vote, making fake ads, saying... You can vote by text message and telling people not to vote?
1:05:40 Speaker 04 I think you are thinking of Jacob Wohl, the troll who, yes, was doing robocalls. And robocalls were, yeah, they were an issue in the last election. They're obviously also just an issue as part of the overwhelming spam that means I don't answer my phone anymore.
1:05:55 David Pierce? Yep, same. I told somebody in an email the other day, "Oh, give me a call when you get a sec." And they called me four minutes later and I didn't answer. It's like, I don't know this number, I'm not answering the phone.
1:06:04 Speaker 04 Anyway, so now AI has, like, it has a lot of things, supercharged this. It's starting to become an issue and the FCC is at the very least recognizing it's an issue. And we probably will end up seeing more of that this.
1:06:16 David Pierce? This also seems like we're already kind of deep in the deep fake election in a very real way.
1:06:22 Alex Cranz? I just, if you get a call and it's like, "Hello, this is President Biden." Why would you ever believe that call?
1:06:29 David Pierce? I'd be like, "Oh, Joe, what's up, dude?"
1:06:30 Alex Cranz? Like, that's just like whenever you get the emails that is like, "This is President Biden. I need your help right now, Alex Cranz."
1:06:37 David Pierce? But you would at least think that is a message he recorded, right?
1:06:42 Alex Cranz? No.
1:06:42 David Pierce? You wouldn't?
1:06:43 Alex Cranz? When you see those move on emails, are you like, "Oh, my God, Nancy Pelosi is actually emailing me David Pierce." No, you're always like, "This is stupid and not real."
1:06:52 Speaker 04 Okay, you want the weirdest version of this, though, is that Eric Adams, who you will hear definitely in conjunction with the weirdest of anything.
1:06:59 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:06:59 Speaker 04 He does his own deep fakes, like, he had a bunch of calls where he auto-translated his voice.
1:07:05 Alex Cranz? Yes, I remember that.
1:07:06 Speaker 04 To make it sound like he spoke languages that he didn't. I'm curious how that stuff is going to end up being affected by this.
1:07:13 Alex Cranz? I mean, hopefully, I would assume it'd be the same way, where they're like, "No, that's not true."
1:07:18 David Pierce? I don't, oh, man, what a legal mess that's gonna be. Can you deep fake yourself? I don't, I don't know.
1:07:27 Alex Cranz? I feel like maybe just don't do that kind of call. Like, like, it's so, it's so like dumb because it's just like Nancy Pelosi is not writing me this email. Joe Biden is not out here calling me like at the phone, at the phone banks, calling me because do we do phone banks anymore? Is that really a thing anymore? No. Maybe. Maybe in New Hampshire. But it's just dumb. I'm just like, who, who is answering these calls being like, oh, wow, Joe told me not to vote. Well, better not vote.
1:07:58 David Pierce? I mean, I
1:07:59 Alex Cranz? I mean, still send those people to jail. Don't do that.
1:08:01 David Pierce? More people than you think.
1:08:02 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:08:02 David Pierce? Right? Like, what? This stuff is, this stuff is a mess. And yeah, we are only at the very beginning of what's to come. Alex, what do you got?
1:08:09 Alex Cranz? Uh, my, my thing is not about Joe Biden or my, my home state.
1:08:13 David Pierce? Okay, well, then I don't care.
1:08:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah, never mind. It's all dumb. No, it is cool because Ford, Ford, hold on, I almost said Fort Worth again.
1:08:20 David Pierce? Fordworth.
1:08:22 Alex Cranz? Fordworth. Okay, so Ford has been quietly creating a Skunk Works team for low-cost EVs. And that's exciting because cheaper EVs are good, more competitors with Tesla will be good, just competition in general. We love that. It is also, did you all watch that show, like All American, I think it was called? Like the auto show?
1:08:43 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
1:08:43 Alex Cranz? It's on NBC.
1:08:44 David Pierce? American Auto.
1:08:44 Alex Cranz? American Auto. Yeah, yeah. It just feels like it was out of a storyline from that.
1:08:49 David Pierce? So, okay, let me explain to you what I don't understand about this. Ford, notoriously a company that makes cars.
1:08:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:08:56 David Pierce? Um, you don't need to make a car company inside of your car company to make cars. You can just make cars.
1:09:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:09:03 David Pierce? That's your, that's your thing. It's like, Apple's like, well, we created a Skunk Works team inside of Apple to build smartphones. It's like, nope, you do that already. Just tell them to make a different one.
1:09:13 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:09:13 David Pierce? What is, I, this, what?
1:09:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I, I think my, my understanding of it is
1:09:17 David Pierce? Ford is like, it's illegal for Ford to make anything other than F-150s. So they have to create a whole new thing to make something else.
1:09:23 Alex Cranz? I suspect it was probably because a lot of the people working on the Skunk Works project, the, the head of it is, is a guy who was at Tesla for years, Alan Clark. But a lot of the people working on it are from this place called Automotive Auto. Space, motive, space, power. I had to AMP.
1:09:42 David Pierce? Sure.
1:09:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I had to, I had to spell it out. And, and they acquired this startup last year. And so I think it's probably just easier to pull them into a little company than a big company. But still, I, I agree with you. It's like, you can just go tell your people to make cheap EVs.
1:09:57 David Pierce? That just makes me think they call it a skunk works because somebody at Ford thinks that makes them sound like a tech company. And what that actually is, is just a team at your company. That's just some people who work for you.
1:10:07 Alex Cranz? They're, they're gonna go make a really cool stealth bomber.
1:10:10 David Pierce? Bliss, look, I think it's awesome. I am extremely in favor of Ford and everybody else trying to figure out how to make cheap EVs because that dream seems increasingly dead all over the place now. And like, more power to anybody trying to pull this off.
1:10:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's, it's funny, like Farley, the, the CEO of Ford had an earnings call after all of this came out, TechCrunch reported the story, and said that Clark and the, and the team at AMP slash Ford skunk works, cheap EVs.com, whatever you want to call the place, said, this is a flexible platform that will not only deploy to several types of vehicles, but will be, but will be a large installed base for software and services that we're now seeing at Ford Pro. I don't know what any of that means. And I, I don't understand how this company is running. And does it know that it's a car company?
1:11:01 David Pierce? Somebody went to ChatGPT and said, listen, dear ChatGPT, I run a car company.
1:11:07 Alex Cranz? Like Jim Farley.
1:11:08 David Pierce? What would I say if I ran a tech company instead? And they wrote that press release.
1:11:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah, Jim Farley, don't, don't let ChatGPT write your press releases anymore.
1:11:16 David Pierce? Just build cars, man.
1:11:17 Alex Cranz? Just, just make cool cars.
1:11:18 David Pierce? Make cheaper cars.
1:11:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:11:19 David Pierce? Take the things that you make and make them cheaper.
1:11:22 Alex Cranz? Maybe, maybe shorter.
1:11:23 David Pierce? Right inside your company.
1:11:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah, maybe I don't need cameras to be able to see out of the front of my car.
1:11:28 David Pierce? Listen, it's a week and all dream.
1:11:30 Alex Cranz? It's the little things.
1:11:31 David Pierce? I'm gonna go last because we started on a Cranz victory lap and now we're gonna take a David victory lap.
1:11:36 Alex Cranz? What, what is it?
1:11:37 David Pierce? So the, the information reported this week that Apple is developing, quote, at least two iPhone prototypes that are flip phones.
1:11:46 Alex Cranz? In their skunk works project that's probably not actually owned by Apple.
1:11:50 David Pierce? Correct, which is just, uh, they, they take all the people who work at Apple Park and they just tell them to make phones. And they say, "You're a skunkworks now." And somebody raises their hand and says, "What does that mean? Does it change anything?" And they say, "Shut up. We're a tech company.
1:12:08 David Pierce? This is the future."
1:12:08 Alex Cranz? Just go do it.
1:12:09 David Pierce? But there have been rumors about this for a while, that Apple was making these things. And also, a thing to know about a company like Apple is that they prototype everything. Like, if you can imagine a phone of some shape or function or feature, I would bet you $10 there is one on a table somewhere in Apple Park. It's just how it works. It's just what you do if you are a company this big that makes this many products. But Apple, like me, thinks flip phones kick ass and is gonna make some, and I think it's awesome.
1:12:42 Alex Cranz? I love that.
1:12:42 David Pierce? And apparently also, Apple is working on a foldable iPad, which is the other dream.
1:12:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:12:47 David Pierce? Like, what a... That's just like, "Give me an iPad Mini that folds up and I can put it in my pocket." Like, hell yeah. That is also apparently being worked on. This stuff is complicated. We've seen flip phones. They're hard and bad and have big creases and have their issues. I still firmly believe this is like the next thing.
1:13:05 Alex Cranz? Yes.
1:13:05 David Pierce? And I think it's clear to everyone, including Apple, that smartphones need a next thing or they're just gonna be laptops. They're just gonna be fine. You're gonna have it. You're never gonna think about it. You're gonna upgrade it when it dies and that's gonna be it. And Apple has a lot of money riding on being able to get you to upgrade more quickly than that. And I think foldables are gonna be that thing.
1:13:26 Alex Cranz? I think the only part of this that surprises me is that we aren't closer to the Apple foldable, given historically their timeline of kind of like following everybody else. They're usually only a couple of years... With the exception of the Vision Pro, they're usually only a couple of years behind everybody else. And this one, they'll be like five or six years.
1:13:45 David Pierce? Do you wanna know my theory about this?
1:13:46 Alex Cranz? What?
1:13:46 David Pierce? They can't call it anything other than the iPhone.
1:13:49 Alex Cranz? Uh huh.
1:13:49 David Pierce? And you can't make an iPhone... That is like a 1.0 anymore.
1:13:54 Alex Cranz? Hmm.
1:13:54 David Pierce? Like, they can't come out and be like, "It's a new thing. It's called the iFlip." Everybody like, "No, it's just a flip. It's an iPhone." Like, what are we doing here? And so I think if I'm Apple, I feel like I have to make an iPhone that is like on par with all the iPhones we already sell, which is now a 17-year-old line of phones.
1:14:14 Alex Cranz? Same.
1:14:14 David Pierce? And so I think catching up to that is really hard because the footphones require new components. They require rethinking how batteries work. There's some new software stuff you're gonna have to do. Like, it's hard work to do this well. And I think in the way that Apple was clearly very comfortable releasing a Vision Pro that is not the thing they wanted it to be, I don't think you get away with that.
1:14:35 Alex Cranz? Okay.
1:14:35 David Pierce? With an iPhone. I think you can maybe get away with that with an iPad. I think if they came out with a foldable iPad and were like, "This is a whole new thing." And people were like, "It's not perfect, but oh, my God, it folds. Isn't that cool?" That I could see. But I think the iPhone is too big and too important to everything that Apple is doing for them to be like, "Here's a thing that's not quite finished."
1:14:55 Alex Cranz? Okay.
1:14:55 David Pierce? That's my theory.
1:14:56 Speaker 04 I guess I can see that. The iPhone is also just, your phone is a thing that you absolutely need to work in a way that you don't a bunch of other devices.
1:15:03 David Pierce? Right, yeah. Like, if my iPad sucks, I just put it down. But like, I, if, yeah. No, you're exactly right. If I leave my phone at home, life has fallen apart. I had, when I was at, uh, when I was in Vegas for CES, I, my phone just like broke one day. And it was the most stressful, like six hours trying to get all of that to work again because I couldn't log in to anything because I didn't have the two-factor working. Uh, I couldn't talk to my wife because we talk over SMS because she's on the Pixel and I'm on an iPhone. Like, it was awful. And I had this moment of being like, "Oh, I'm way too reliant on my phone." But that's just life now. You're exactly right.
1:15:38 Alex Cranz? You can actually feel your stress. Like, I only sort of tangentially knew about what was happening with your phone, but I could still feel the stress through Vegas.
1:15:45 David Pierce? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I about burned our hotel down with my anxiety.
1:15:49 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like, the moment, and you could also, at one, at one point, you're like, "Oh, I'm feeling pretty good." David must have gotten his phone fixed. Okay.
1:15:57 David Pierce? Yeah, I had this moment of like, okay, I have meetings to go to. I have things I'm supposed to do today. I'm not doing any of it because my phone doesn't work.
1:16:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:16:03 David Pierce? It's like, what is this world that I live in now? But that like, I can't, I cannot leave my hotel room until my phone works again.
1:16:09 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:16:10 David Pierce? It's not good.
1:16:11 Alex Cranz? It's not good.
1:16:11 David Pierce? But, but you're totally right. Like that, that is, that is where Apple is. And so if they're like, here's the iPhone flip, it might break.
1:16:19 Alex Cranz? But give me the iPad. Give me the, I like, I got my little iPad mini. I want to get rid of that thing. I want, I want it to fold. I want it to have it in my back pocket.
1:16:26 David Pierce? I'm ready. I've been waiting so long to upgrade my iPad mini, which still has Touch ID and is like busted and is now old enough that some of the apps won't update anymore. And I'm just holding out. I'm like, give me, give me the thing, Apple. Give it to me.
1:16:39 Alex Cranz? You're gonna have to wait till it's, it sounds like 2026 is the earliest people are theorizing this is gonna come out, but we'll see.
1:16:46 David Pierce? I can't wait that long.
1:16:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I mean, we've got new iPads coming probably pretty soon.
1:16:51 David Pierce? Listen, Tim Cook, I know you're listening. You're, you're in a room with Bob here right now, listening to this podcast. Just ship me one. I won't even tell anybody. Just get me one. It'll be fine. Everything will be okay. All right. We gotta get out of here. We've, we've gone long, as always.
1:17:06 Alex Cranz? Yep.
1:17:08 David Pierce? In Neelai's honor. It sounds like Neelai's dead. Neelai's just gone for the day. He'll be back. Everybody always gets very worried about Neelai when he's not here. I promise everyone, he's okay. He's just, I think, on a plane, being too ashamed of himself to use his Vision Pro, which I plan to give him a lot of crap for next week. But we need to get out of here. But before we do, one quick thing. We, The Vergecast, are moving to The Verge's YouTube channel, starting next week. So, starting with the show on Tuesday, all of The Vergecast episodes are gonna be on The Verge's YouTube channel, not The Vergecast's YouTube channel. We're still gonna use The Vergecast's channel for clips and all kinds of other fun, extra stuff we're gonna do. But if you wanna find the full episodes, go subscribe to The Verge channel. If you're already subscribed, hang out there. I think you can subscribe to a playlist on YouTube, which we'll have for the podcast. You can
1:17:53 David Pierce? do that, too. It's gonna be awesome. So, do that. Smash them buttons, whatever YouTubers say. I don't know. And until then, go listen to Decoder. Casey Newton was on it. For once, it was a good Decoder episode. And Decoder is also, Decoder is also now twice a week. The Vergecast is now on Tuesdays and Fridays, instead of Wednesdays and Fridays. There's a lot of change going on.
1:18:13 Alex Cranz? I love it.
1:18:14 David Pierce? But it's The Vergecast. We'll see you next time. Rock and roll.
1:18:20 David 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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