Hello and goodbye to the MacBook Air

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Apple's upgraded MacBook Air, the EU's Digital Markets Act deadline for tech’s biggest “gatekeepers”, and a bunch of tech news from this week. Further reading: Apple announces upgraded MacBook Air laptops with M3 chips The MacBook Air’s wedge is truly gone — and I miss it already Apple may not do a spring event this year How the EU’s DMA is changing Big Tech: all of the news and updates How every tech ‘gatekeeper’ is responding to the DMA iOS 17.4 is here and ready for a whole new Europe Apple hit with a nearly $2 billion fine following Spotify complaint Spotify and Epic criticize Apple’s iOS changes as ‘a mockery of the DMA’ Spotify will show pricing options outside its iOS app in the EU — if Apple lets it Apple kills Epic’s iOS game store plans over App Store criticism Apple is bringing sideloading and alternate app stores to the iPhone Apple unbanned Epic so it can make an iOS games store in the EU Alternative iOS app stores won’t work (for long) outside of the EU. Here’s the new iOS default browser nag for iPhone users in Europe. Apple is officially dropping iPhone support for web apps in the EU Apple’s decision to drop iPhone web apps comes under scrutiny in the EU Now Apple says it won’t disable iPhone web apps in the EU Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to Verge Chat, the flagship podcast of European Regulations.

• 1:03David Pierce?

  Oof, not the most exciting one we've ever done.

• 1:06Nilay Patel?

  It's not great. Look, if you go talk to like entrepreneur, founder, guys, professors, business school professors, that's the word I was looking for, and you're like, what's a good time to start a business? They're like, regulatory change provides opportunities for new business to form. And they say this in an officious academic way, and they push their glasses up in their nose and they walk away smoking a pipe. This is that moment, only everyone is also having the most emotional reactions to change that are possible. It's a lot. Anyway, I'm your friend, Neil, David Pierce is here.

• 1:44David Pierce?

  Hi.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  Alex Cranz is here from Texas.

• 1:47Alex Cranz?

  Yes, I am currently in the 1970s in Texas, judging from my background right now.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot.

• 1:54Alex Cranz?

  It's a lot.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  You got the room divider? There's a lot going on back there.

• 1:58Alex Cranz?

  It's a good time.

• 1:59David Pierce?

  The one decorative plate behind you is every house I've ever been in in my life. There's one decorative plate and I always appreciate it.

• 2:06Alex Cranz?

  Well, you can't see him, but there is more than one decorative plate in this space.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Everyone pull over in your cars and mail a picture of your decorative plate to [email protected].

• 2:17David Pierce?

  Yes, please. Thank you.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  If that, we do an entire installer that is just photos of decorative plates. It's pretty good.

• 2:24David Pierce?

  That's fair. I should say, speaking of emails that you have requested, to everyone who emailed asking for Neelai's 10,000-word feature on the Samsung Frame TV, it has been greenlit. I hear you. And now what I would like you to do is yell at Neelai for not filing 10,000 words about the Samsung Frame TV.

• 2:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just got it done. I have a, I've already begun to do some reporting, I will tell you. And it is the silliest reporting of all time.

• 2:52David Pierce?

  Does it mean just yelling at your TV?

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  No, I just ran into the person who runs the art store on the train. That's my reporting. He was like, what's up?

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  There you go. So I'm working, I'm working on it.

• 3:05David Pierce?

  That's your version of all the people who say, like, there are all these politics reporters who are like, the best way to get scoops is just get on like an Acela car on Amtrak between New York and DC and just listen to people's phone calls.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:17David Pierce?

  Yours is just like, get on one going into New York City and ask what startup they found.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  Pretty much. Pretty much.

• 3:24David Pierce?

  I love it.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  What Samsung acquisition were you in the, in the mid 2010s? I'm, I'm, I'm working on it. I will say, if you're watching this on YouTube, you, I'm in the new studio that our producer Liam has built for me, mostly by mailing me Amazon packages, which is great. But he put up the wall right behind me. Very good. Great with a circular saw, that Liam. And there is a Frame TV that is yet to be hung on the wall behind me, just looming over the show with a Vergecast logo on it.

• 3:51David Pierce?

  It's good.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great. I can't get away from them if I tried, but I will, I'm gonna do it. I have a lot to say about the Frame TV. That is not this show, though. This episode of the show, there's actual news. There's not just me having feelings about a mid-range television that we've tarted up a bit. There's a new MacBook Air. We got some Microsoft news coming. There's iPad rumors. Then there is the Digital Markets Act in Europe, which went into effect today as we are speaking. All the big platforms from Google, Facebook, Apple, they're all changing. All of those people, I would say, are coping in whatever way you wish to interpret the word cope.

• 4:30David Pierce?

  There are a lot of people who need hugs, it seems like.

• 4:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Alex Cranz?

  Cope is a generous term.

• 4:38Nilay Patel?

  In whichever way you wish to interpret the word cope.

• 4:43Nilay Patel?

  However, you want to interpret the word cope, I would say that our major platforms are coping.

• 4:48Alex Cranz?

  That's fair. Yeah.

• 4:49Nilay Patel?

  Let's start with products.

• 4:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  Let's start with hardware. There's new MacBook Air in this world, which Apple just sort of snuck out into the world. David, what's going on?

• 4:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, so we've been kind of expecting Apple to announce it was going to have a spring event. Normally in March, not every year, but many years, it'll do a thing where it launches usually new iPads and then a smorgasbord of other stuff, depending on what they're doing, but usually iPads at the center. It seems like this year we're not going to get that and instead we're going to get a parade of press releases. And the first one that came out is two new MacBook Airs. There's the new 13 inch and the new 15 inch. They have M3 chips. They're basically just spec bumps, right? A little faster. There was a mention of 6G in the press release, which I find personally infuriating.

• 5:38David Pierce?

  There was lots of noise about them being good for AI, which I think is essentially just a way to say like these have pretty fast processors and no one else knows what that means.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  No, I want to spend maybe an hour on the one paragraph where Apple said these are the best consumer laptops for AI.

• 5:52Alex Cranz?

  The best.

• 5:53David Pierce?

  Utterly meaningless sentence.

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  It will not be this hour in this second, not starting now, but later in this episode, we're going to take that apart word by word.

• 6:02David Pierce?

  Okay, I'm excited about that. So yeah, these new ones, they support dual displays for the first time, which people are excited about.

• 6:09Nilay Patel?

  If the lid is closed.

• 6:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's really, it's really something.

• 6:13Nilay Patel?

  I feel like my job on this section of the podcast is to comment on everything David is saying.

• 6:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry.

• 6:19David Pierce?

  No, it's okay. We got a real like you finish is we finish each other's sentences vibe going on right now.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  At the end of the sentence is real mad.

• 6:27David Pierce?

  Right.

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  Like here's a fact, here's an angrier fact.

• 6:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, I love this for us. They also killed the wedge, the M1 MacBook Air is no longer being sold, which is the end of that design. All that's left is the M2 and the M3. I have a lot of feelings about that. But basically, it's like new MacBook Airs, they're a little better, they're a little less expensive. Here you go. I can see why, if you're Apple, you don't have an event for this. They're just like, remember the MacBook Air? This is the MacBook Air now. You're like, alright.

• 6:55Alex Cranz?

  Well, they've been kind of doing that a little bit, right? Like, sometimes they're just like, we guys, it's a spec bump. You don't, you don't need me, you don't need like Tim Cook to dance for this. Just enjoy your spec bump.

• 7:04David Pierce?

  No, I'm not mad at it. These look like great laptops. Like, it is, the MacBook Air is just so thoroughly the best $1,000 PC on the planet right now, that I feel like Apple is just like, you get it. Here it is.

• 7:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. When they announced these MacBook Airs, there was an event, and they kind of didn't have a lot to say. Like, the last event with MacBooks at it, they were like, it's 15 inches, you know?

• 7:34Alex Cranz?

  Tim Cook just held the camera, just stared it down. It was like, yeah, that's it.

• 7:39David Pierce?

  We had a whole conversation about the feet on the MacBook Air, Nea. Do you remember that? Because that was the only thing to talk about. It's like, look, there's little feet.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they did like a demo of pages. Like, for real, they did a demo, like, you know, and they're like, it's because the screen is larger, you can make the windows bigger. This was a real thing that happened. I'm not making this up, even a little bit.

• 8:00David Pierce?

  That's real.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  So I get what you're saying when you say that they've run out of things to say. But when they spec bumped Intel MacBooks, they just spec bumped them. Which is fascinating, right? They're like, well, here's some new Intel processors. We didn't want to use them, but we have to, until we figure out how to shove an iPhone processor into here. But here they are. It's a Core, or whatever Intel says this is called this year, right?

• 8:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:23Nilay Patel?

  And they would sometimes do a press release, they sometimes wouldn't, I feel like they've hit that point with the M3, but because they make the M3, and they're very proud of it. They have to act like it's bigger than it is.

• 8:35Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's the best processor for AI, so they have to promote it.

• 8:39Nilay Patel?

  Wait, right. Yes, that's like exactly what I mean. It's like they have to make up some stuff.

• 8:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  And the world's best consumer laptop for AI is a wild thing to say. I agree. They are probably very good at some AI related tasks. They have a list. M3 includes a faster and more efficient 16 core neural engine, along with accelerators and CPU and GPU to boost on-device machine learning. Leveraging this incredible AI performance, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's some stuff you can do. You can check your homework with AI math assistance in GoodNote 6.

• 9:14Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  If you're doing your math homework in GoodNote 6, I'm guessing you don't need AI. Like, computers historically great at math.

• 9:26Nilay Patel?

  Real problem.

• 9:29Nilay Patel?

  Like, I'm just wondering about that. Okay, you can automatically enhance photos in Pixelator Pro. That's great. I've talked about how much I like using the enhanced features in Lightroom. If those are faster than the M3, that's great. Removing background noise from a video using CapCut. Who on earth is using CapCut on a MacBook?

• 9:44David Pierce?

  I literally didn't know that was a thing you could do, if I'm being completely honest.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  Do you see what I'm saying? I'm pretty sure that's the iOS CapCut app.

• 9:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, that you just use on your Mac. I don't, it's, it's kind of a good idea. I can sort of see it.

• 9:56Alex Cranz?

  It's a good app.

• 9:57David Pierce?

  I just, how do you not read all of this as Apple just being like, our things are very fast. Do you like to do fast things? Come do fast things.

• 10:05Nilay Patel?

  But that's what you do every time. Try, okay, so I'm looking at CapCut. Try out the CapCut Desktop version. It's the iPad version of CapCut.

• 10:14David Pierce?

  Perfect. Great.

• 10:15Nilay Patel?

  Great, but I'm just like, that's not a lot.

• 10:22Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's very cool that Apple has these trips and that ByteDance ships a video editor that makes use of the tools. But that is downstream of the fact that they make TikTok on the iPhone. Because if you, people will know, CapCut is the TikTok video editor broken out and made into an app. And by the way, if you can figure it out, you're a genius. You don't need AI. Uh, cause the TikTok video editor and are very confusing. Um, uh, not to say people don't figure them out. Teens, the teens are brilliant. Uh, it's just fast. Things are fast is wild. Then you get down to what people actually think of AI.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  Which is MacBook Air can run optimized AI models, including large language models and diffusion models for image generation locally with great performance. And it's like, I'm also sure that is true.

• 11:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  I am also a hundred percent sure that Mark Zuckerberg is out here being like, I've bought more Nvidia H100s than anyone else in history. Developers should come here because I have them all.

• 11:20David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 11:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  And that there's a huge split in where AI is being deployed and built. And you can run it on an M3 MacBook Air. And I, I think Apple's just trying to.

• 11:33Alex Cranz?

  Apple's not the only one that did this though, right? Cause like both Lenovo, HP, everybody at CES was like, look at our new laptops. They're the best at running AI stuff. And you're like, what AI stuff? And they're like, AI stuff, the best.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  Can I just offer you one more sentence? From this press.

• 11:50David Pierce?

  This is the best one. I can't believe it took you this long to get to this.

• 11:53Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's been a slow build and I, Alex, thank you for the alley-oop here.

• 11:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:58Nilay Patel?

  Because this was.

• 11:59Alex Cranz?

  Here.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  This was the thing that ended all of the Windows laptops. When they're like, you know, like Microsoft Copilot, because what Apple has written in its press release is in addition to on-device performance. MacBook Air supports cloud-based solutions. Enabling users to run powerful productivity and creative apps that tap into the power of Microsoft AI. Such as Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Canva and Adobe Firefly.

• 12:25David Pierce?

  Can I translate that sentence for you just very quickly?

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, please.

• 12:28David Pierce?

  The MacBook Air has Wi-Fi.

• 12:34David Pierce?

  We did it, everybody.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  I, you know, it's a press release. Like, whatever, you need to put some words in a press release. I'm not, you know, don't overindex on this. It's hilarious, but it's kind of like, we're just out of things to say. We're like, we made the best laptop. I don't know, ChatGPT says some shit about AI.

• 12:53David Pierce?

  It's really the funniest set of problems to have because ordinarily, right, they'd be like, okay, here are the list of things that it does that are substantially faster. And this press release has a little bit of that. It's like Excel spreadsheets are up to 35% faster, which is a completely meaningless statistic about anything.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 13:10David Pierce?

  Video editing is a little faster, but it's like, this whole thing is just a lot of words to say, this laptop rules. It already does everything you wanted it to. It's done everything you wanted it to for two generations now.

• 13:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:23David Pierce?

  It's gonna be fine. Just buy this laptop.

• 13:26Nilay Patel?

  What do you want, a 16-inch screen?

• 13:27David Pierce?

  Right.

• 13:28Nilay Patel?

  Wait, one decade.

• 13:29David Pierce?

  Remember when we fixed the battery and now that's not a thing you worry about in your laptop? You're welcome for that again. That's still here.

• 13:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I will call out the two things. One, they call out the headphone track, which is a personal victory for any laptop. You can't, you can't take it off this computer. It's a disaster and you know it. You know it in your heart. You shouldn't have taken it off the phone, especially now that phones are huge and you got to deal with it. Uh, second, the two external displays with the lid closed is what are we doing? That, by the way, that implies that all the old one,

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  all the old ones can support two displays with, right? Cause you got the lid up and another display.

• 14:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's still just two displays.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  It's just two displays. You should let all those people have two displays with the lid closed. Are you gonna force an upgrade to an M3 so they can run Canva and a web browser?

• 14:21David Pierce?

  Yeah. We've made a gigantic performance breakthrough. The display can be over there now.

• 14:28David Pierce?

  We've done it, everybody.

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot. What's interesting about this is, you know, it comes on sort of the heels of a report, I believe from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, saying they're going to roll out a bunch of stuff over the next few weeks. So we were expecting the MacBook Air, iOS 17.4 is out. That's the DMA compliance release. We'll get to that in a minute. But that is support, supposed to support new iPads as well. If in days past, a new MacBook, some new iPads, some other new products, whatever, that is an Apple event. And I think now the pressure is on them to be like, it's a Vision Pro. It's the next iPhone. And I, I wonder if they've just sort of gotten themselves miscalibrated on what people actually care about,

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  which is like new products they will use and buy, buy and use.

• 15:18David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, this is like the most mainstream product Apple makes in this, in this like category, right? So if ever you were going to be like, here's a thing that many, many, many, many people want and are going to buy, this is the one. But it does make for a deeply uninteresting event. Like, I feel for whoever would have to stand there and make a long speech about how the M3 chip is going to change your life.

• 15:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but it could have been the thing after an iPad with Pro with an OLED display. And you're like, look at the iPad Pro with the OLED display. And here's some iPad Airs. Those are cool. And then one last thing. MacBook Air's got an M3 in them now. Great. And we're done. Like, that would have been a nice, nice event. I would have enjoyed watching that while you guys fly out to it. It would have been good times.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh, this is the other problem. They have to, they have to make infomercials now for all their events.

• 16:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, yep.

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  And I bet the infomercial team is like, we don't, we don't know what to do here.

• 16:10Alex Cranz?

  It's five minutes.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  It was old MacBook Air. It's too hard to hold. Like,

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  what are you gonna do? Like someone using a Windows laptop, it explodes into flames. You're like, whereas when you actually had in-person events, you could talk about the computer.

• 16:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  Uh, by the way, David, I just looked at the, uh, it's 35% faster at Excel.

• 16:32Nilay Patel?

  And there's a foot, there's a footnote. And the footnote is, testing was conducted by Apple in January 2024. See apple.com/macbook-air for more information. Uh, which means Apple just did some tests.

• 16:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:44David Pierce?

  Literally opened one spreadsheet and said, we did it.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  Very unclear what those tests are. And then you go to that webpage and, uh, it does not, it does not tell you what the tests were.

• 16:54David Pierce?

  That's very strange.

• 16:56Nilay Patel?

  If anyone knows how to measure the performance of Excel, let us, I'm sure you can. I'm sure the

• 17:03Alex Cranz?

  No, I used to do that.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  But is there a standard Excel speed test for computers?

• 17:08Alex Cranz?

  No, we would, we made one, that place I worked, we had one and it had like 50,000 names on it. And then you'd have to press a button and it would process all the names and you time it.

• 17:19David Pierce?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 17:20Alex Cranz?

  And it was, it was a fun test. I mean, it was really obnoxious to do, but it was, it was kind of cool. And then all of them got to be about the same speed, which was real fast. And it was no longer a useful test. So I guess we'll go make a fun Excel spreadsheet again.

• 17:36David Pierce?

  You bring up an interesting point with that, actually, which is that like with the AI stuff, the idea of this benchmarking kind of tool might actually be interesting again. Like one thing I think about a lot is the only AI thing I do on my specific computer locally is transcriptions. I have this app called Mac Whisper that I use. I just feed in an audio file that from an interview or a YouTube video I need quotes from or whatever. And it just transcribes it using Whisper from OpenAI. And it runs locally on the device. It's pretty fast, but it has this really fascinating. You can either download the small crappy version of it that's really fast, or the huge, really good version of it that's super slow.

• 18:20David Pierce?

  And, and for me, the idea of being able to like cut in half the time it would take me to do the very good one is like a meaningful thing in a way that a faster processor has not been meaningful to me in a very long time. So I think with the image stuff and with that kind of stuff, like local AI is going to mean something and speed of that is going to mean something. I just think for most people, we're like a generation or two of devices away from that. And at least for now, basically everything is going to keep happening in the cloud. So like the most AI forward thing Apple did in this moment is Wi-Fi.

• 18:55David Pierce?

  But like someday, I think this will be real. So like the idea that we can be an AI focused laptop, I think is a thing, just not yet for most people.

• 19:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the question is like, what do you want to benchmark in that case? Is it image generation? Is it AI transcription? Is it text generation?

• 19:12David Pierce?

  Is it?

• 19:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Make an image of Hitler that's so not racist that becomes racist again?

• 19:19David Pierce?

  It's probably not that one.

• 19:20Alex Cranz?

  Probably not.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  I'm guessing that will not be a released benchmark. But if someone wants to do it.

• 19:26David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  So that's that. I want to talk about the iPads, but before we do that, I feel like we should give Alex a moment to just mourn the passing of the wedge MacBook Air.

• 19:36Alex Cranz?

  I'm bummed.

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  Alex, I know you had quite a lot of feelings about this.

• 19:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I had feelings and then I made Victoria write the feelings because I'm in Texas.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  The power of being the editor.

• 19:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the power of being the editor. We both had the same feelings, which was like, the wedge was cool. And it packed a bigger battery, too. Remember, like, the battery life was really, really good on that M1 MacBook Air. And I missed that. And it was just like, it had an identity. And now the MacBook Air kind of doesn't. Like, there's not a big difference between it and the MacBook Pro physically at all.

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  Or any laptop.

• 20:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's just like, okay, now it's just a really good laptop. And that's cool. But before it was like, it's a really good laptop that's a little like wedge shaped. And four of us noticed that, but us four really cared about it. We were really passionate about it.

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  Remember the first MacBook Air, Steve Jobs pulled it out of the Manila envelope, which was a big deal to be like, look at how small our computer is.

• 20:32David Pierce?

  One of the great reveals, still.

• 20:33Alex Cranz?

  So good.

• 20:34Nilay Patel?

  One of the great reveals. I encourage you to all go back and look at photos and reviews of that first MacBook Air.

• 20:41Alex Cranz?

  It was garbage.

• 20:42Nilay Patel?

  Which was such a deeply compromised device. They built it around a custom Intel processor that Intel didn't know what to do with because it was so underpowered. And they're like, and Apple and Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive are like, what if tiny computer? The ports were on a flat down door on the side.

• 20:59David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:00Nilay Patel?

  This thing was weird. It was like a different design language entirely. It was very, it was like bulbous. The second generation MacBook Air, the iconic wedge shape, came later when they had done the iPhone and some other things. And they, they were like, what do we bring back to the Mac? And the thing they wanted to bring back the most was instant on when you open the lid, because Macs didn't used to wake up right away. They were computers. They would like emit steam and like make whirring sounds. So the main thing they wanted was when you opened the lid, it would be ready to go like an iPhone would be ready to go when you hit the wake button and they had to build all this stuff. And that was like the moment the MacBook Air became the MacBook Air. You had the wedge shape. It was still really small. Alex, the battery thing was a real big deal back then. They built these, I think they called them terrorist batteries.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  It's a whole deal. It was a whole thing. Like there's a Johnny I video. He's like, the batteries are in steps like a terrace. Like a thing. You can go watch it. All that is amazing. Walt Mossberg famously bought like five MacBook Airs. To like have in his house because he didn't want to use any other laptop. He was afraid they were going to discontinue them in that weird period where Apple stopped caring about the Mac.

• 22:09David Pierce?

  It was the butterfly keyboard era is what it was. Like that was the moment that it was like, oh, maybe these are just going to get worse again. And then they stopped and they got better again.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  Because people realized that Macs were infinitely more capable than iPads.

• 22:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. What if we just like made computers that were good and people wanted to use? What a meeting that must have been.

• 22:30David Pierce?

  But I think, I mean, to me, like, I've been trying to think about how I feel about the wedge because the comments on V's piece are very funny because it's a bunch of people being like, oh, the verge, you yell at people for not redesigning their stuff every two years and then you yell at them when they redesign their stuff every two years for getting rid of their iconic designs. And I think there's maybe something to that, but I also feel like the wedge was legitimately like an iconic piece of laptop design.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 22:58David Pierce?

  And also it was better. Like I cannot prove it, but I sincerely believe that typing on that like very slight incline with your hands felt better than the flat thing that I'm kind of perching on top of on other MacBooks. It's why I liked the Air over the Pro. That like it's thinner, it's lighter, but also it felt a little better to just have my hands on. And maybe I just like need to get used to that. I still mostly use an M1 Air all the time and I love it to pieces. And I will say one of the truly wild things for me as a Tech lover is now I am two full revs of this device out of date and still have no compulsion to upgrade. Like I just don't need this computer. My M1 Air is still good and is

• 23:41David Pierce?

  going to be for a long time, which is a crazy place for Apple to be, but is also like as a laptop user, kind of amazing.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  We got a bunch of notes last week after we talked about Apple making a TV and like why they didn't make a TV because the upgrade cycles are too long and now the upgrade cycles are too long. And people were like, this is the weirdest I've ever felt. I don't need a new anything.

• 23:59Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  And that is a wild place for any of these companies to be in. Like you just don't need a new one. They all kind of do the things and everyone's chasing whatever shiny object that you think will be the future. But at the point where you're like, well, it runs Chrome and using Chrome, I can access cutting edge AI systems better than ever before. You're kind of at a, you're kind of at a place where you got to figure out what the next thing a laptop is going to do. The thing that gets me about the wedge shape in particular, and Alex, I'm very curious for your read on this. Apple tried to kill the MacBook Air a lot.

• 24:33Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 24:33Nilay Patel?

  Like, they tried really hard. They didn't update it to retina for years. They just left this thing alone and they tried to push everyone towards that, that weird middle 13 inch MacBook Pro that they made that

• 24:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  like obviously wasn't a MacBook Pro. Like the real MacBook Pro had four ports and this one only had two. And it was like, you just made a MacBook Air and put it in a case of the retina display and called it a MacBook Pro. Phil Schiller stood on a stage one year and did like volumetric analysis of the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro and was like, this one is actually smaller. Why won't you buy this one? And everyone's like, I don't know, like the wedge shape. And they kept selling them until they, they, they were effectively forced to unkill it. Like their answer to us, to other people asked was like, people just keep buying this computer. Like, we have to just keep making it. Like, what do you want us to do? So they updated it, they revved it, they put the retina screen in it. They eventually put the M1 in it. And now, I think,

• 25:32Nilay Patel?

  Alex, what they did was they just made that 13 inch MacBook Pro.

• 25:37Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 25:37Nilay Patel?

  And they just called it a MacBook Air.

• 25:39Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  And that's what, that's the thing you're reacting to.

• 25:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Nilay Patel?

  The MacBook Air was a design.

• 25:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. They, they, they had something that was like really thoughtfully designed and stood out. And people have said, yes, this is a thing I want to own in my house. And if I'm Walt Mossberg, I want to own five of them. And and then they said, okay, what if we just took the MacBook Pro, which is very, very good. I'm I'm currently podcasting from one. Love it. And we just made it a little lighter and cheaper.

• 26:09Alex Cranz?

  And we called it an Air. That's not the same thing. I mean, technically, it is. It is the new MacBook Air, but it's it's not quite the same. Like, this was a thing that was so well designed. You just wanted to have one, even if even the underpowered versions of it, you still wanted to have it. Even when it had a garbage display, you still wanted it because it was just, it worked. It like the design, everything came together just right. And then they said, nah.

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's all over.

• 26:35Alex Cranz?

  And it feels like they're they're focused more on on the guts than they are on the outside design, which is fine. Like, they've spent a long time only focused on the outside design and not the guts. So it's it's good that they're thinking about the guts. But I would like a balance of design and thinking about really smart guts for your cool laptop. That'd be nice.

• 26:55Nilay Patel?

  You want you want them to be beautiful on the inside and the outside?

• 26:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  The dream.

• 26:59Alex Cranz?

  The dream.

• 27:01David Pierce?

  Part of it also is that, like, I think the thing that Apple may have underestimated for a while is how good the MacBook Air brand is.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 27:11David Pierce?

  Like, I just think about Joanna Stern spending a decade reviewing laptops and being like, for $200 more, you can buy a MacBook Air. Like, it became a meme that for $200 more, you can just buy a MacBook Air, and that's the right thing to do. Like, I think that has a sort of immediate reception in people's minds as like, that's the best laptop. That is just if you don't know which laptop to buy, just buy a MacBook Air. It has been true for so long, even when it wasn't true. And it wasn't true for a minute there because it did get weird and old, but it was still like the default laptop. And to some extent, I think it's wild that Apple kind of tried to throw that away. And I think also thought that that was just a story about MacBooks. But I think it's not. I think it is a thing

• 27:54David Pierce?

  about the MacBook Air. And so and so now, even when it is essentially just like a a Pro minus in a very real way, like, the distinction between those two is just dead.

• 28:03Nilay Patel?

  Incredible branding, David.

• 28:05David Pierce?

  I thought you'd like that. The MacBook Pro Mini. I don't know. Call it whatever you want. But it's like, the Air name, I think, is actually really important. And I think Apple understands that in a way that it didn't for a while.

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let me make the counter argument just for sake of it.

• 28:20David Pierce?

  Please.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Apple's branding is hopelessly confused.

• 28:25David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  And they are addicted to some words that have lost all meaning, but they don't know what other words to use. I don't know what AirPods Pro are. I just don't. What is professional on AirPods? Like, unless you're using the Vision Pro, they are necessarily compressed audio and you shouldn't do anything professional with them, except appear on cable news from time to time.

• 28:51Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, an iPad Pro is just an iPad with a nicer screen and more RAM?

• 28:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  Mm hmm. I know what a MacBook Pro is. That's designed to run like pro applications. I know what a Mac Pro is. It's like, we're all over the place. What is, why, what is the Vision Pro? What is the Vision minus? Like, these, these words, they just have these words that like signify something to their audience. I think you could get to a place where you have a MacBook. Remember they used to just have a regular old MacBook? And then you could have a MacBook Air, which would be an ultra portable, like a 12 inch computer that was really powerful. But I think the problem is consumers have said very loudly what they would like is 13 to 15 inch laptops. And so you have to take your best brand and put it in that box and MacBook Air is by far the best brand for that box.

• 29:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think what Apple wants is to have a MacBook and a MacBook Pro. And Apple tried to do that for a while. It's just that it made the MacBook bad and made a bunch of bad decisions about the MacBook and also spent several years sort of steadfastly ruining its entire computer lineup before fixing it. And, but I think like 10 years ago, Apple wanted to have a MacBook and a MacBook Pro and so badly botched the MacBook that I think it just had to go back to the MacBook Air. Like, there was a minute, they wanted that to be the one.

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  They should just release that black plastic MacBook again.

• 30:16David Pierce?

  They should.

• 30:17Nilay Patel?

  That black plastic MacBook was a triumph.

• 30:19David Pierce?

  It was.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

  All right, we should move on from just navel gazing with MacBook Air. Uh, look, release a wedge shaped computer and Alex will buy it.

• 30:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, I will say the fact that I cannot wait for our reviews because if they actually got rid of the fingerprintiness on the midnight one, that might be the thing that makes me actually kind of lust after an M3 MacBook Air. Because the M21 looked great, but then you touch it and it's gross forever. And hopefully they fix that.

• 30:45Nilay Patel?

  So we are in different places because the other rumor is that they're gonna refresh the iPad lineup and actually make it make sense. They will have an iPad Pro and iPad Air. And then the iPad Air and the iPad Pro are pretty fuzzy.

• 30:55David Pierce?

  Have you seen the rumor that there's not gonna be a 12.9 inch iPad Air? Because that makes sense.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:00David Pierce?

  What if we had more models, Neelai? Can I interest you in more iPads?

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  Every now and again, I'm reminded that Tim Cook is a supply chain expert. You know, and like, he's like, what if I just flex on my ability to manage the complexity of the supply chain? That's what I got. You want 4,000 SKUs? I got you 8,000. Come at me. I'm Tim Cook.

• 31:23David Pierce?

  I mean, that's right.

• 31:24Nilay Patel?

  Fuck, you can just do it. He's like, how many manufacturers and how many countries? Double it. Why are you still in the room? By the way, that's the most famous Tim Cook story I want to think about all the time. When he had the meeting about some problem in China and then he looked at his executive and he's like, why are you still here? And the guy got up and flew to China.

• 31:39David Pierce?

  Didn't go home. Didn't pack a bag.

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  Just went straight to China.

• 31:42David Pierce?

  Rules.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  Very good. And that's how you get a 12.9 inch iPad Air. He's like, what are you doing? This isn't enough SKUs. Get out of here.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't know what his meetings are like at all. Is that, you should come on Decoder, Tim. Please tell me what actually goes on in your life.

• 32:01Nilay Patel?

  What I think is really interesting about the iPads is they're gonna put an OLED screen in an iPad Pro and I do not need to upgrade my iPad Pro and I will buy that product so fast. Yes, 100%. Because OLED. Why am I gonna do that?

• 32:15David Pierce?

  It's the same reason you have a stupid Sony TV. It's the same reason, like, there is just a subset of people in the world headlined by one Neelai Patel, who if you just say the word OLED, they will start just hocking money in your general direction. And when you run out of ideas, you just say OLED now? And Neelai buys it.

• 32:37Nilay Patel?

  By the way, can I just say, Beck and I watched Anyone But You on Bravia Core on the new Sony OLED. And boy, if there's one movie that does not need to be streamed at 80 megabits per second, it is Anything But You.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  Nothing in this movie is moving fast.

• 32:53David Pierce?

  But that like doubles the amount of stuff that's on Bravia Core, so that's pretty exciting.

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  It's like, they got one, they did it.

• 33:01Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, I, I hope they can reconcile the iPad line a little bit with all of these changes. And actually be like, okay, the Pro has the nicest display.

• 33:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Nilay Patel?

  Not, uh, yeah, but the same display with a nicer backlight. We'll see. None of this stuff is going to get an event, so that we will have very little opportunity to ask questions about it, you know, like, we're going to get them, we'll review them, and that will be that. But I think it's funny that Apple doesn't think adding up its biggest products and announcing them all at once merits a moment anymore.

• 33:31David Pierce?

  Cause they're not phones.

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  They're in a place where they have to do really, really flashy things. I, I, I think they only do the phone because people expect them to do the phone. I honestly think with the way they're going right now, unless they change the phone in some giant way, that, you know, if the next iPhone is a camera bump and a processor bump, the argument to not do an event based on what they're doing here is right there. But there's no way they can't do an iPhone event, right? That's their moment every year.

• 33:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, I do think we're, we're ramping up towards a pretty huge WWDC in June for a variety of reasons. All the AI stuff is rumored to be coming then. I think, like, if you want to see a sort of software-led hardware cycle coming, I think it probably starts at WWDC.

• 34:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I agree with that. And I'm very curious to see the best consumer laptop for AI is a clear potential hint towards the next version of macOS and iOS will have some actual AI features in it.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  Besides whatever LLM they claim is powering the world's worst autocorrect on the iPhone keyboard. Uh, we should talk about the Microsoft news because right next to all of this is the Surface Pro 10, Surface Laptop 6. Alex, what's going on there?

• 34:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they, there's some confusion there. Tom, Tom was doing some investigating and because we had one, we had Zach Boden, I believe, say that we were going to get a whole new line of surfaces with OLEDs in them announced this month. It sounds like we're gonna get something announced this month, but it's going to be more for like, commercial stuff. And then we'll get some consumer stuff later, including some surfaces with OLEDs and ARM processors. But we're not really sure if the ARM processors are going to be exclusive to the consumer ones, or if we'll also get Intel in them. So there's still, things are up in the air. But we're going to be getting some new surfaces this year. It sounds like we're going to get a pretty

• 35:23Alex Cranz?

  big redesign on, on the Surface Pro and the Surface Laptop for consumers, but not necessarily the commercial version.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the fascinating thing here is that Panos Penae is no longer at Microsoft to run this stuff. So whether or not there is a mission change for Surface or a philosophy change for Surface, I think is kind of up.

• 35:44David Pierce?

  But we won't see it this time, I think. Like, just the, the product rev cycles are so long that like, Panos would have led whatever these are. So I think if there is an event at which they talk about it, I think that will be interesting. But also, we're probably a generation or maybe even two away from new leaders showing big changes. Uh, but I also kind of feel like, like I loved the Surface Laptop at the beginning, loved it. It was so nicely designed. It was like soft and comfortable. It came in those good colors. The battery life was like, I loved that thing. And I feel like both the Pro and the Laptop are kind of long in the tooth at this point. It feels like both are in need of kind of a new idea about what they're supposed to do for you.

• 36:28David Pierce?

  And I'm sure Microsoft will tell you a whole AI story and there will be a copilot button and everything will be everything. But for me, like the, there, there are bits and pieces of the design stuff that Tom has been talking about, but I'm really curious to see if there is a bigger shift in the works here.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that thing about the cycles being long, when Panos Penae was out there posting that, how excited he was about the Alexa hub, I was like, you didn't know that was coming.

• 36:51David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah. That literally was finished before you started working.

• 36:57Nilay Patel?

  Like, I wish I could show up and be like, I'm excited about other people's ideas, too. I'm in charge now. Uh, I, I agree with you, but I do think just how they position these products after the leader is gone. And there is some new leadership that has to, you know, be accountable for even launching them. Like, one thing you do is not make them.

• 37:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Nilay Patel?

  That's a choice, but I think they're gonna do it. I think they're gonna launch them. I think Microsoft has to be in the game. Uh, and yet maybe they have a co-pilot button on them. Maybe they put chat GPT right in the camera just to look at you. You're some weird ideas I had. Uh, you should leave your wife. Um, that's famously what chat GPT said to you. You remember?

• 37:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Nilay Patel?

  It's very memorable for Kevin Roos.

• 37:36David Pierce?

  Yeah. So does Kevin.

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  So do many readers of the New York Times. Um, but I, all of that, right? Is like, you, you have to make these products for a reason. And one thing we definitely just saw with Microsoft is some big rethinks of why they do things. Like Xbox just went through a huge rethink of what is Xbox? What are we doing? Why do we make this stuff? And the answer was, uh, we're gonna put the games on other people's platforms now. Like, there's more money to be made on the games than, than making the games put hardware in your living room. And I, I wonder if Surface is in that place, too.

• 38:13David Pierce?

  I, I, I think that's very possible. It's gonna be really interesting to see if Microsoft tries to tell a consumer story about these things. Or is just like, buy these for your point of sale people at work? Which I think it might. Like, I think one of the reasons Panos left was reportedly that Microsoft was pulling back on some of the ambitions for this stuff. And that, I think you, you might be right, that we might start to see pretty fast.

• 38:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, we should take a break and we should come back. It's time to get into the Eurozone, which is a real thing. Uh, it's a really cool name for a very boring idea, but we're gonna leave and come back. And then we're, the Verchass goes to the Eurozone.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  We'll be right back.

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• 40:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. To clarify for our European listeners, the Eurozone is where they take the Euro. It is a very cool name for a very boring thing. Places where you can spend the Euro, which is only 20 of the 27 countries in the EU.

• 40:43David Pierce?

  The Eurozone is also an amusement park. That's just kind of like, it's just Europe everywhere. It's like Epcot, but it's all Europe.

• 40:50Nilay Patel?

  You're just like, here's some cheese.

• 40:53Nilay Patel?

  Chocolates. Everyone's very trim. Everyone's walking so much, and even though they eat the carbs and the dairy. Eurozone. You know, there's a proposal in the EU to relabel the fat-burning zone on treadmills as the Eurozone.

• 41:12David Pierce?

  Had me the first half. I'm not gonna lie. Boy.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  So, look, we're not going to the Eurozone, all right? We're going to the bigger Venn diagram of the Eurozone, the EU itself. Welcome. The EU won't stop. They're doing things they love, regulating companies. It's what they do. And maybe they're gonna do a good job this time. Maybe some real changes will happen. We can talk about some changes in the past, which I think informed changes here. But the Digital Markets Act has arrived today, Wednesday, March 6th. The day we are speaking is the day it has gone into effect. A bunch of big platforms have been designated as gatekeepers and they have to change how they work. They have to become more interoperable. They have to provide more choices to consumers. All kinds of things are happening. David, can you run us down? There's quite a few.

• 42:01David Pierce?

  Sure. So this basically hits six companies. You have Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft. There is a very real one of these things is not like the others thing with ByteDance there, which I actually think is very interesting and we should talk about. But essentially, all of these companies have been designated as, like you said, gatekeepers, which means they are the ones who are so powerful and so important that they should not be allowed to just do whatever they want. And the way that the EU regulates that and has decided has been complicated and everybody is appealing everything and it's all kind of a mess. But essentially, we can go through each company if you'd like to. But essentially, the way it has boiled down is that these companies now have to offer

• 42:44David Pierce?

  more transparency and data protections for users. And that shows up in a bunch of different ways. Amazon has had to give advertisers more transparency over like what they're doing and how their ads are doing, which is a strange and sort of obvious seeming thing. TikTok is now letting you pull a lot of your data out of TikTok and put it into other apps that support it. Meta is giving you more ways to protect your data and not have it shared across Meta services. So the idea is like... Your data should be your data. This is one of the things the EU has been harping on for a long time, right? That I should be in control of my data about me on the internet. And all of these six companies are having to do a lot more. Then there are big debates about app stores. I think this one's largely about Apple, at least from what we've seen so far,

• 43:29David Pierce?

  but we'll hit Google and the Play Store in pretty real ways, too. There's the question of like, are you allowed to build in your own apps and preference them over others? So Microsoft in the EU is now allowing you to disable Bing and uninstall Edge and a bunch of other Microsoft apps. So the idea is just these big companies relentlessly self-preference themselves. And the EU is essentially saying, you have to stop doing that. And there's a fallout in a million directions from that, but that is, I think, kind of the top line as I've come to think about it.

• 44:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And what's really interesting about that is the amount of big businesses that exist in the world that are organized or at least adapted to that self-preferencing.

• 44:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  Google search is, I think, maybe the clearest example of this in the world. Many, many huge industries are just adapted to the notion that Google is where people search for things.

• 44:23David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  So today, I think a bunch of travel services, like flight airlines and hotels and other kinds of things, put out a letter that's like, we know Google's going to change, but it should still send us as much traffic as it used to before. Right? And there's like a fear that like change will lead to a different result as opposed to somehow being better, but the same, which is a fascinating way to think about regulatory change. The other thing that's happening is that the changes are hitting things that have never been different. In particular, a bunch of Apple services.

• 44:56David Pierce?

  Right. I think those two things are actually really aligned. And I'd never really thought about it like that until you just said that. But there is this fascinating thing where it has been like this for so long that actually, even if in theory, some of these things are going to get better and more pro-competition and more fair, which there are a lot of smart people who argue it's actually going to be none of those things. But even if it is those things, it's still going to screw up all of the businesses that are going to be. affected by it just because it has been this way for so long and and just the sheer amount of change that is going to come for all of these companies even if it ends up being good in the end is going to be such a like crazy whirlwind of new stuff over the next 12 months

• 45:39David Pierce?

  that it's gonna like it's gonna change a lot of things and we should say almost all of this is happening just in the EU and the EEA the European Economic Area and if I'm being honest I don't totally understand the distinction but I know our international team gets really mad when we say one and it's not the other so just know that it is whichever one of those is correct is what I'm saying but we expected a lot of this to be like big global change I think that the idea was whatever what happened in the EU would sort of roll out everywhere in the world and that is in almost every case not happening at all and in fact what's happening is like the the European internet is going to be one thing and the rest of the world is going to be another

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  so I think one of the reasons we all thought this would happen is I always think about the model of car regulation in the United States California is a huge market for cars in the United States it passes some rules the easiest way to make cars is to make them comply to California's rules and so California's rules sort of affect everybody else across the country because the cars are built for California like emission standards and things like that all happen for California you can see okay Europe's a big market they're gonna pass some rules we're gonna have to design the products for the most constricted market that will hit the United States as well and what all of these companies are saying is no our monopolies are pretty good actually so we're gonna go ahead and spend more money making weird special European versions of

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  our products and then unless you force us to we're gonna keep taking the profits the monopoly profits everywhere else and I I that is a rational response like many many many things are different in the United States versus Europe like Europe has a bunch of different regulations than we do but it's weird because I think People assume an idealism of some of these companies that what they want is to compete or what they want is a more level playing field for consumers. And here it's pretty naked that what they want is to preserve their monopoly profits. So they will do a bunch of extra work over there to make a different European internet.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  And unless they are forced, that whatever those goals are will never come here or anywhere else.

• 47:46David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah. And I think at this moment, there's pretty strong indications that they're right to make that bet that whatever is happening there is not going to percolate elsewhere because so far it really hasn't. But at least so far, I mean, am I right to say that the thing that's going to hit the most people most quickly is this stuff with iOS, right? It feels like Apple is the one that is like changing in the biggest ways the most quickly. And I guess on the side also pissing off the most people the most quickly. Yeah.

• 48:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I think that's 100% what's going to happen because that's what everybody actually uses right now. And it's actually being changed right now in some cool ways, but mainly ways with, what is it? Lot of feelings is what Neil I was saying earlier.

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot of feelings.

• 48:35Alex Cranz?

  So many feelings are happening. Apple is like screaming as it goes to do all of this and everybody like in a way that everyone is having to learn more about App Store policies than I think most of the European Union ever wanted to.

• 48:48David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:49Alex Cranz?

  And a really like, I'm just kind of surprised by how mad Apple is being about all of this, how loudly angry Apple is being.

• 48:59David Pierce?

  It is true. And you always feel like Apple wants you to not think about all the machinations that make Apple, Apple. And now the fact that like, I can tell you developer deals off the top of my head feels like a problem for me, a problem for Apple, a problem for the world. Like, this is a strange place we've entered into.

• 49:19Alex Cranz?

  And I think it was always going to kind of happen too, right? If they, like you guys were talking about this, if they open it up, if, if we start paying attention to this stuff that we didn't really pay attention to for a very long time, then yeah, people are going to want to have these conversations about how much money Spotify is getting on the backend and that sort of thing. But at the same time, that is really bad for both Spotify and Apple's business.

• 49:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Alex Cranz?

  Or not their business, but their reputation with the public more than anything else. Like, the business is all gonna keep going. Apple's gonna make a lot of money with this new thing where they have to pay 50 euro cents. She says. European Union.

• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  I believe it's pronounced doubloons.

• 50:03Alex Cranz?

  But for every download over that first million, including every update, like app update, like, that's insane. That's a lot of money. And they're being so petulant about it in a way where I'm like, you just got hit with a $2 billion fine. Like.

• 50:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Alex Cranz?

  But you want to get more? This was usually like, so it's weird. I'm just, I keep being surprised by it.

• 50:29David Pierce?

  Neil, I'm curious how you feel about this because I, I feel like we've reached a point where this fight has been going on so long, specifically between Apple on one side and Spotify and Epic on behalf of lots of others, but especially those two companies on the other side. And it really seems like no one looks good in any of this fight. Like, I, I feel like everyone has lost this fight now. And it's just bad times all around. Nobody's happy. Everything's worse. This just seems like it sucks.

• 50:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm always thinking about the beginning of the App Store, when the thing that Apple would compare it to was app distribution on pre-iPhone smartphones, which was largely handled by carriers. And carriers were capricious and they would get in developers' ways and they would charge exorbitant fees.

• 51:20Nilay Patel?

  And it was, it was bad.

• 51:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:21Nilay Patel?

  And I would just caution Apple that having a reputation for being capricious and charging huge fees and getting in developers' ways and then issuing press releases saying things like Spotify has never paid us a cent to be on the iPhone is like. But everyone who has an iPhone paid you the money.

• 51:40David Pierce?

  Right.

• 51:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:41David Pierce?

  They bought an iPhone.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  This is the problem that Apple is running into. Almost insistently by in by saying that when you have an application on someone's computer, Apple deserves a cut of what happens in that app. And I that is as simple as it gets, right? Like, you either agree with that proposition or you don't. When you have a computer, should the person who sold you the computer be in between you and the things you can do on that computer? There are some really good arguments for Apple being in between the iPhone customer and what they can do on the iPhone. iPhones go everywhere with people. They contain an enormous amount of their personal data. They can track you. They can be used for horrible things.

• 52:26Nilay Patel?

  They have a shitload of cameras on them, just more every year. They're like, we're up to five. It's like, there's a lot of reasons where you want a bunch of extremely motivated, very smart computer scientists and policy people sitting between a computer user and the things that can happen on their computer, and in particular, what software other people can run on a computer. But you have to have an exit ramp. And the reason you want to protect the computer user should be for safety, not because of money. And what's happening right now is Apple is using the moral argument for we need to keep our users safe. We need to protect them from themselves when they use these computers that go around in their pockets everywhere they go. They have pictures of their kids on them. And they're using that to justify their economic argument.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  And that I think that's where it's falling it down. And and I think that is candidly where some of the people at Apple are at risk of damaging their repu- like their personal reputations inside this community. Because they keep saying it out loud.

• 53:24Alex Cranz?

  It's not even Spotify, though. For me, it's it's what's happening with Epic and how they were just like, OK, we don't trust you anymore, so we're going to take your developer account away again.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  So this is what I mean. This is the one, right?

• 53:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:36Nilay Patel?

  This is the one. And it happens.

• 53:38Alex Cranz?

  It's so precious.

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  The DMA was announced and Apple's compliance plan with the DMA was announced. And Epic immediately reacted by saying, we will have an app store with Fortnite on it in the EU, and the Epic game store is going to happen. And we're going to do it. And we're going to prove that even under these rules, which we Epic think are too restrictive, because there's a lot of rules. Apple's going to make all these alternative app stores. Under a lot of rules, which are basically designed to make them not good. Yep. Right? Like, Apple's design of how alternative app stores should work on iOS under the DMA

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  is basically meant to have it not be a viable thing. And Epic's point has been, we're gonna do it, we'll have Fortnite, we'll bring the other game developers on. And even under these restrictions, which we think are bad and are malicious compliance, we think it'll be good and prove the point. And Epic today, just literally today, before we started podcasting, had a press conference, Tim Sweeney spoke, he took questions from reporters, including our own John Porter. And they released a bunch of emails between Epic and Apple, including emails between Tim Sweeney and Phil Schiller, where Epic applied to be a developer to make this app store in the EU, under, I believe it's Epic's Games Sweden. Apple wrote back to Epic and said, how can we trust you? You've done all this stuff in the past.

• 54:54Nilay Patel?

  Tim Sweeney wrote to Phil Schiller and said, you can trust us, tell me what assurances you need. And they got, and Apple replied, at least according to the emails we have seen from Epic, Apple's free to send us some other emails. But Tim Sweeney said, what other assurances do you need? And Apple replied by sending a letter from a lawyer saying, you have criticized the App Store and our plan for compliance in the EU, you've proven yourself to be untrustworthy and we are revoking your App Store privileges. And it's like, what are you doing? Like, why would you do that? Like, the only thing that's gonna happen is Tim Sweeney, who loves a press conference about how shitty Apple is, is gonna hold a press conference about how shitty you are.

• 55:33Nilay Patel?

  And a bunch of European regulators, who you have already accused of being anti-Apple, are gonna look at your behavior and find you again. Yep. Like, this is not, like, I know, I know a lot of kindergartners, I have a kindergartner. I know kindergartners who are more politically adept than this. I just don't understand it. And that's why when I'm saying like people's personal reputations, like this feels like they are personally mad as opposed to playing the long game with a bunch of regulators. And just because we're speaking the day after Super Tuesday and we all have to think about the prospect of Donald Trump once again being our president, I will remind everyone

• 56:13Nilay Patel?

  that Tim Cook did the best job of managing Donald Trump than anyone, right? Donald Trump went to have put a trade war up on China and Tim Cook managed Apple through a trade war.

• 56:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  Because he was able to distance himself personally from what Apple needed and what he probably felt and advocate for Apple's interests. And I think here, there's just a collapse. Like there's just some angry people. And I think that's super weird.

• 56:42David Pierce?

  I really, I'm with you. I cannot make heads or tails of how this went down like this because there was also after Apple made its announcements about what iOS 17.4 was going to be, one of the things it did that Tim Sweeney hilariously gave Apple credit for was reinstate Epic's developer account, which it had banned what feels like a million years ago now, when the whole Fortnite debacle first happened and started all of the fights between Epic and Apple about this stuff. So there was this sense in which it was like, okay, Apple is at least outwardly going to attempt to look like it's turning over a new leaf and play nice in in these spaces. And then to just so

• 57:22David Pierce?

  swiftly say, just kidding, and just yank the rug out from under them again, knowing full well what Epic is going to do, is it's just weird. I just truly cannot figure it out because it is so obvious that it was going to go like this if this is how you played it. Epic is the single loudest voice building a third-party app store. And like, Apple either wanted to light this on fire, or should have known it was going to be lighting this on fire.

• 57:50Nilay Patel?

  So we do have a statement from Apple now that kind of directly gets at what you're saying. And it just feels like maybe they didn't do it as cleanly as they wanted to. So we reached out to Apple, we asked, what's going on here?

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  Apple mad. That's the whole statement.

• 58:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:07Nilay Patel?

  Here's the quote. Epic's egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right to terminate any or all of Epic Games wholly on subsidiaries, affiliates, or other entities under Epic Games' control at any time and at Apple's sole discretion. In light of Epic's past and ongoing behavior, Apple chose to exercise that right. So this is just nakedly revenge.

• 58:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and the ongoing behavior is Tim Sweeney continuing to be loudly mad on Twitter about what's going on with the DMA.

• 58:39Nilay Patel?

  Great. But I'm just like, you could have just said, in light of the Epic's past behavior. You don't have to say ongoing behavior.

• 58:47David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  Right. And that's the part where it's like, oh, this company is just vengeful. You can say, look, we had a lawsuit. They broke the rules. We sued them. They sued us. We had an antitrust trial. The result of the antitrust trial is we don't have to do business with them. We're just gonna not, we're gonna keep not doing business with them. That relationship was broken. Saying, we sort of maybe thought we'd do business with you and we approved a thing and we did some weird letters. Ah, [BLEEP] it. You know, like, I don't know, there's just something that like, if you want to build a business on these platforms, I don't know that that feels like a stable foundation. And I think a lot of these companies, Spotify, Netflix, Epic, whoever, we've heard now, as David

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  pointed out earlier, we've just heard too much about the reality of doing business on the store. And at the end, I think consumers don't know, they don't feel it, right? Like, it's hard to be sad about a thing that doesn't exist. But the point of this regulation is like, what if it was different? What if the stores are more vibrant? What if there were more kinds of apps, including apps Apple would never allow? I, I'm shocked we have not seen a store spring up just for gambling in, in Europe, right? Like, European laws of gambling are actually much more permissive than laws of the United States about gambling. I'm shocked that there is not already a storefront for gambling apps in Europe, because Apple would never allow it. And it's like, you can, I, I'm not a gambler.

• 1:00:13Nilay Patel?

  I go to Vegas and I, I ask people how much money they're gonna spend on gambling and I spend that money on winisines, because that is a better investment, my friend. Every single time. It has been for decades. Everyone remembers the Linux. No one remembers the

• 1:00:26David Pierce?

  I remember the Linux.

• 1:00:28Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:00:29David Pierce?

  It was good.

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm not a gamble. It's like, whatever. I'm just saying, like, that is a world that could exist. That is an industry that could exist that Apple right now just prevents from existing. There are lots and lots and lots of things like this, and it's hard to prove the negative. And I think Apple not even allowing Epic to prove the negative is like, all they're proving is that they're capricious.

• 1:00:48David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:00:48Nilay Patel?

  And they're, they're pretty mad. And I, I just, I don't know that is the smart political play. And you might feel it's a smart moral play, but it just feels like a bunch of European regulators are not going to look at that and be like, yes, we, we also have to abide by what an American court said.

• 1:01:03David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah. Well, I think in this case, like, so much of the question of what's happening on iOS particularly is, is somewhere in this gray area between technically doing what is required, right? The sort of malicious compliance that a lot of folks have, can have talked to Apple about. And doing things that are just nakedly not solving the problem that you claim they're solving, right? Like, I think the, the Apple's browser choice screen on iOS in the EU is, to me, perfect malicious compliance. Apple is on the record over and over in the Google antitrust case and elsewhere for saying that it hates choice screens. And it is now required to have a choice screen asking, what browser do you want to use as your default browser on your iPhone? And when you upgrade to iOS 17.4

• 1:01:48David Pierce?

  in the EU, that you will get that. This screen is ugly. It's unhelpful. It takes you to the App Store in a really confusing way. It includes a bunch of browsers no one's ever heard of. It's just not good. And, and like, it's very clear that Apple has no investment in making it good. And they're like, well, you're making us do this dumb thing. We're going to do it in the dumbest way we can think of. That is very hard to fight. That, like, that argument is hard to prove that that's what's happening. It's very obvious that that's what's happening. But this thing where it's like, oh, you, you claimed to be opening up the App Store because that is what, by law, we are requiring you to do. And now you are just vengefully shutting down the biggest, loudest player that wants to do this, just feels like a bad call.

• 1:02:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think Apple making it really, really hard and arduous to open a third-party app store is in a certain way, very clever. I think it's it's it's conniving and it's cynical, but it's very clever for a company that has a lot to protect in that space. To just pick this fight with Epic again, over and over, and just kick it out and threaten to have all of this come back at you just seems dumb. I just don't get it.

• 1:02:59Alex Cranz?

  I feel like it's it's a company who is seeing their their power wane in this marketplace, right? They're they're seeing it happen really quickly and they have to assert their dominance. Like, they have to show everybody, no, we're the boss. We still control it, right? Like Spotify, you start mouthing off like this. That what that's what happens to you. And that's certainly like a take, that's a thing you can do. Plenty of businesses have played that kind of hardball, but very few that are so consumer-facing and and really dependent on consumer goodwill in a way that Apple is very much dependent on. Like, you know, we have to deal with our our ISPs, even though we hate them.

• 1:03:42Alex Cranz?

  They are some of the most hated companies in the United States, but we have to deal with them because they're monopolies. And this is a very common reaction of a monopoly is to be like, okay, if you're gonna fight our monopoly, if you're gonna try to counter our monopoly, we're gonna like grind you into dust repeatedly. And you shouldn't probably do that if you're someone like Apple, who is a monopoly on the App Store, but isn't necessarily like a monopoly in a lot of other places. Like, you can go buy a Samsung phone, you can go buy a Google Pixel, you can just not use Apple products eventually.

• 1:04:18Nilay Patel?

  The best thing you can do when you're a monopoly is not act like one. And I feel Apple learned that lesson. Like, a very, like, you know, Microsoft, when they were the Death Star, they acted like, you know?

• 1:04:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Nilay Patel?

  And they got in a lot of trouble. And like, you know why Chrome has way more market share than IE? It's Because Microsoft got itself in a lot of trouble and was forced to stop bundling, i.e. with Windows. Like, that's a real thing. Like, that was the antitrust case. And it's because Microsoft went and killed Netscape with a bunch of moves just like this. And I worry all the time with the modern Apple that the people who are coming into the company, the people who work there, like, you know, this company's been around for a long time. They have only worked at the Apple that is this Apple. And the people who built it from the underdog Apple are, you know, they're just getting older. It's just like time where time, there's been a wave of departures from Apple recently,

• 1:05:18Nilay Patel?

  reported all over the place. And you're just like, oh, if you walk around like you're that thing and you're not, you don't have that little, like, chip on your shoulder that you gotta earn it from consumers. All right, like, you've gotta take one piece of market share away from Windows every single day, which is what the version of Apple that became this thing came from. Like, you are just gonna act like a bully. Yep. Because you have no conception of when you weren't. And I think the flip side of that is consumers, a lot of newer, younger consumers, do not have any recollection at all of Apple on the come up. Right? Of that incredible run of Apple just sort of like creating product after product that revolutionized industry after industry. They're like, yep, we grow up, we get a phone.

• 1:06:03Nilay Patel?

  My parents put a watch on me so I can leave the house without them. Right? So they can track me everywhere. Like, my friends are all on iMessage and they bully people with Greenbalk. And it's like, yo, there's no, like, long history of goodwill here. There's just this. Mm-hmm. Right? And it's like, I can't get Fortnite on my phone because these two billionaires are fighting. And I, like I said, I will just, I'll end it here. We talked about EU regulation for a long time. People are gonna email us, they're gonna talk to me about Apple's business model and how much money they make and stock price. I get all the, whenever we criticize Google, people are like, I dare you to short Google. I can't, we cannot buy the stock. We cannot do that. And I will just remind you of a quote that I think about maybe once a week. It's in a Wired profile of Walt Mossberg walking through the CES show floor.

• 1:06:48Nilay Patel?

  And he had just written a bad review. This is a true story. He had just written a bad review of like the Sirius radio when it had first come out. And the CEO of Sirius started yelling at Walt Mossberg on the show floor of CES. And he said, you brought our stock price down. And Walt Mossberg looked at him dead in the eye and said, I don't give a fuck about your stock price. And that's it. I don't care about the richest company in the world making more or less money where their stock price goes. I care like, are we getting more interesting innovative products? Are we building cooler experiences for people? Do I feel like when I spend my money as a consumer, I've done it in a way that feels good and healthy? I don't know if these EU regulations are going to achieve that. I don't know if Apple's compliance or malicious compliance will achieve that. I have no idea.

• 1:07:31Nilay Patel?

  I do know that right now, the way it has been going, our choices are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And more and more of the dollars are flowing to Apple instead of app developers. And that feels weird. So like, I'm all for flipping the table and everyone can have their feelings, but I would just caution. Apple in particular, acting like this right now does not get you the goodwill so that the next time you're like, I think all of you should rewrite your apps in a different language that we invented. People aren't going to do it. And that's where the power comes from.

• 1:07:59David Pierce?

  You know what I've been thinking about a lot recently is Apple Pay, which I think Apple Pay on the iPhone is like essentially a perfect product. And the way they've integrated it into websites so that like, like for me, it's, it's takeout food over and over, right? Where I'm like, I'm on a website, I'm, I'm ordering and my options are either spend eight minutes entering my contact information, which I can do. But it's 12 fields and I have to go get my credit card and remember what it is. Or I tap the button that says Apple Pay, I double click on the side, it scans my face and I've paid for dinner. That is, that is winning with product in an open ecosystem and it kicks ass. And it is like, that is Apple at its best.

• 1:08:36David Pierce?

  The opposite of that is this fight that Apple is in about all the anti-steering stuff and the $2 billion fine that just came from the EU about all this. Spotify stuff, which is Apple saying you are not allowed to tell people the other places they can go pay for your stuff. And for years with Apple Music was preferring Apple Music. Apple Music was allowed to have ads and notifications that Spotify and others are not allowed to have. And that is the opposite of winning with product. That is saying, we are going to prevent you from doing anything, including save your customers money. Because we can't. And, and to me, it's like, I, I want to see the Apple pay Apple and not the Apple Music Apple.

• 1:09:17Nilay Patel?

  Can I, wait, can I?

• 1:09:19David Pierce?

  That was.

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  Go. Can I tell you a story about Apple Pay?

• 1:09:22Alex Cranz?

  Yes, please.

• 1:09:25Nilay Patel?

  Over the weekend, this is like what happens when you're the end of the chief of tech website. I went to pay with Apple Pay and it didn't work. Right? My credit card got declined. And I was like, this is weird. And I called the bank and the bank was like, Apple Pay is having an unexpected upgrade, which is incredible euphemism. Like an absolutely incredible euphemism.

• 1:09:44David Pierce?

  It broke in a cool way.

• 1:09:47Nilay Patel?

  So I was like, that's weird. And I posted on threads about it, like, is anybody else having problems with Chase? Uh, and a lot of people got back to me like, this is broken for me all day. It's like, email Apple. It's the weekend. You know, Apple's, hey, is Apple Pay broken? I'm just wondering, I started this down. And it took a minute because it's a weekend, fine. And they got back to me and they, uh, Apple, you can read the story. Apple basically was like, this is Chase's fault. It's not Apple Pay's fault. And I was like, great. You know, Apple Pay doesn't work. Right? Like, it doesn't matter to anyone whose fault it is. It, what matters is that Apple, like, people are trying to pay with their phones. It's not working. And they're like, yeah, but it's Chase's fault. And I was like, cool, like, cool. Like, I, I will, I will happily write that down. You know, but here's the information I can give you. Have you thought about updating your status page to say it's Chase's fault?

• 1:10:31Nilay Patel?

  Like it's, this is what people are reacting to. This is the information you can give them. And the idea that Apple had a dependency on one of the largest financial institutions in the world. And they were like, but blame them. When it's like, but the, but, but people are holding is a phone that has your logo on it. You know, and it's like, when AT&T goes down, people don't blame Apple. They blame AT&T. You're very happy for that. Like, that's fine. Like, people understand these relationships, but at the end of the day, like, you are responsible for the products. And like that thing where Apple Pay is an almost perfect product. Because Apple has managed all these relationships for you. That's what I mean about the hubris, like.

• 1:11:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  Apple's like, it's not our fault. It's like, no, it's your product.

• 1:11:13David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:11:14Nilay Patel?

  Let's, it's your magic, right? Like, you are the ones who made this almost perfect product and you're pissed that you have a dependency on someone else. And you prefer, Apple in particular is famous for preferring to have no dependencies on anyone at any time.

• 1:11:25David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:11:26Nilay Patel?

  And I get it because I would love to have no dependencies on anyone. But then you look at some of the moves, like this web app stuff, right? Where they, the DMA, they said, we're gonna disallow web apps because we think we have to allow other browser engines. And people said, no, no, no, like, the EU got a little weird and Apple said, okay, we'll have web apps again and we'll just do it this way. I will just remind everyone that the reason Apple exists today at all is because Steve Jobs could do the iMac and tell people they could get on the internet. And the only reason that was a viable thing to say was because what people wanted was web browsers.

• 1:11:56David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:11:57Nilay Patel?

  And so the web browser on the iMac was approximately the same as the web browser on Windows. And so he could sell you an iMac instead. If he had been like, well, you can use here is Microsoft Excel, Microsoft could have just turned off Apple. They could have turned off the business. But because of the internet, like the open application architecture of the internet, he was able to sell Macs again. And it's weird now for Apple to be at the point where they're like, what if we don't have an open application architecture? Right? And like, that's weird, like, that's where you came from. The company would have not made it out of the 1990s if not for that. And I just, I don't know how to like underline for people like, a lot of our audience is young, but these things are not new. Like, these moves are old moves.

• 1:12:42Nilay Patel?

  And it's just weird for Apple, which is a company built out of some of these changes a long time ago, to be making the same mistakes.

• 1:12:50David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. We'll see. There's a chance that this just results in a bunch of like weird Europeans talking about how much better their like 15 browsers are.

• 1:12:58David Pierce?

  I also think it's possible this results in nothing. Like, I think, I think what Apple clearly wants to change is nothing. And I think you're gonna get a bunch of people who like accidentally set Ecosia as their default browser for 10 minutes. And then they go back to Spotify and nothing at all changes.

• 1:13:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, here's my real question. The, the one thing that could change that, uh, cause choice screens have not worked in Europe, right?

• 1:13:18David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:13:19Nilay Patel?

  Famously, uh, in one of our pieces about it, we link to a long analysis of where choice screens came from and whether they work or not. But what has never happened is you've never been able to pick Chrome. Right? The choice screen has always been designed to make you not pick Chrome.

• 1:13:35David Pierce?

  Well, it's been designed to make you pick a browser you've never heard of, or the only one you've heard of. In this case, there are at least two you've heard of.

• 1:13:41Nilay Patel?

  There's Safari and Chrome. So the idea that people will pick Chrome is actually fascinating. I'm dying to see what happens there. I don't know what's gonna happen with anything else, but the Chrome versus Safari in a choice screen, that seems very interesting.

• 1:13:53David Pierce?

  It could happen.

• 1:13:54Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. We've been going on way too long about here. All right, the wine is great.

• 1:13:58David Pierce?

  We're leaving the Eurozone.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  Goodbye, Eurozone. The Eurozone. All right. All right. We gotta take a break. We'll be back in a little bit.

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• 1:15:37Nilay Patel?

  We're back. We're out the Eurozone.

• 1:15:40David Pierce?

  We made it. We landed in America.

• 1:15:43Nilay Patel?

  We landed in America, where we're gonna talk about Elon Musk and pickup trucks in short order. That's really gonna happen here. Alright, we gotta make this lightning round quick. We went on too long. This show's too long. Oh wait, do we have a sponsor for this lightning round?

• 1:15:55David Pierce?

  I don't think so.

• 1:15:55Nilay Patel?

  Sony Bravia Corp. Sony, that's not, that's all. Sony has to pay the money to sponsor the lightning round. Other people don't have to, but if you're a big company, if the European Union has designated you a gatekeeper, you have to pay money to sponsor the lightning round. Alright, Dave, what you got?

• 1:16:12David Pierce?

  Okay, I have two, which is a good start. One is very fast, which is just that there are now transcriptions in Apple Podcasts for all of its shows, including The Vergecast. Sometimes they are very wrong in very funny ways, but it's actually a great feature. You can like tap on a paragraph and it'll take you to that part of the show. You can, it's a great way to go back and be like, what was that thing I missed? Without actually having to like scan back 15 seconds into the show. It's just an awesome feature. I am not an Apple Podcast fan in general, but it is like, I'm tempted back to it because of it. It's just a cool thing. So if you make a podcast app, do transcripts. It's great. And also, don't yell at us for things they get wrong in the transcripts, because they're not our transcripts. But my real one is, sorry, Sean Hollister's been covering a bunch this week.

• 1:16:58David Pierce?

  That is something we talked about a bunch on The Vergecast last year, which is game emulators. So there's this emulator called Yuzu that was for emulating Nintendo Switch games. And basically Nintendo picked a fight and Yuzu just caved.

• 1:17:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14David Pierce?

  And this has been the thing that a lot of the folks in the emulator community have worried about for a long time, which is that emulators are very popular and kind of just unproblematic enough that it has not been worth it for the game companies to pick this fight. But Yuzu kind of crossed that threshold for a couple of interesting reasons. People were using it to play unreleased games, so it got the kind of press and attention from these companies that you don't typically get. And basically what it sounds like happened is Nintendo just Showed up and was like, we will crush you to death. And they said, okay, we're shut down and took all their stuff offline. They they shut down the Discord. They've been doing stuff and it has had this real like immediate chilling effect

• 1:17:56David Pierce?

  on emulators all over the place. There are folks shutting down discords. There are folks saying you can't talk about emulation here because of the legal repercussions that we're worried about. And it it just literally took Nintendo picking one loud fight with one company. And all of a sudden, it feels like this whole emulator world is kind of in peril.

• 1:18:16Alex Cranz?

  Which is kind of weird because Yuzu, like I had it on my Steam Deck. I maybe I own a I own a Nintendo Switch. I feel totally morally.

• 1:18:27Nilay Patel?

  Notable Plex user.

• 1:18:29Alex Cranz?

  Fine, but my choices.

• 1:18:30Nilay Patel?

  Has the emulator on her Steam Deck.

• 1:18:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, who who knew? But it was always kind of a weird one because generally emulators only emulate older systems. So like it doesn't emulate the PS5. It emulates the PS4 or whatever. And Nintendo, because of the Switch architecture, was really, really easy to emulate. And it has been since the Wii. It's just been like super, super easy to emulate. And people just started getting more aggressive with that. And it's like, yeah, if if I can go download the unreleased Metroid game and play it on my Steam Deck, that probably is actually a pro like I I was kind of when that happened. I was like, isn't Nintendo going to come down like a bag of bricks on them? Because that's not how emulators have worked for the last 30 years.

• 1:19:15Alex Cranz?

  And yeah, they they did, in fact, come down like a bag of bricks on Yuzu.

• 1:19:19David Pierce?

  But also, if you wanted to make that same case about a 20 year old Mario game, it's just as true. It's just that it's such a smaller, less interesting business for Nintendo that it's better off just leaving well enough alone and let the people who want to play these old games, who are then probably likely to come by the new games, do so, right? Like it's it's this very sketchy, but sort of workable balance. And I do agree. I think Yuzu did something slightly different to trip over.

• 1:19:45Alex Cranz?

  Because it was a current thing. It was current games. Because even like the 3DS emulator they had was it was just, you know, not as many people are paying it playing a 3DS nowadays.

• 1:19:55David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 1:19:55Alex Cranz?

  Or like, there's a really good one called Dolphin for for Wii games and GameCube games. And that's a 20 year old system. That's that's that's different than like. I can just go buy a bunch, get a bunch of unreleased games on a torrent site and play them on my Steam Deck and never play Nintendo at dime right now. Like, that's just piracy.

• 1:20:15Nilay Patel?

  Why do you know that information?

• 1:20:17Alex Cranz?

  I have no idea. I gotta go. I have no idea what's happening here.

• 1:20:23David Pierce?

  Alex, you're in Texas. There are no laws there.

• 1:20:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there are no laws here in Texas. We don't do regulations here.

• 1:20:29Nilay Patel?

  Here's what we do. We roll a call and we play unreleased Nintendo games.

• 1:20:34Alex Cranz?

  But it was, it was all, the useless thing was always wild. I wish it didn't have such a chilling effect on the emulator community, because like, emulators are sick and I still want somebody to make a good N64 emulator, which is still a weird challenge, but...

• 1:20:50David Pierce?

  We think analog is up to something. I'm hoping.

• 1:20:53Alex Cranz?

  Oh my god.

• 1:20:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, right. They did, they did tease that thing. I will say, you know, the trope at the verge is that copyright law is the only law on the internet, because it's the only thing that can stop anyone from doing anything for some reason. Well, the reason is first of all. But copyright law is the only law on the internet. And here, I think there's, we still don't know the answer, right? It's like, actually kind of fascinating that they settled. Because what you get is, people don't know if emulators are legal or not, some of them are going to get taken to court, but usually, the way the cases are structured is you have a big, rich corporation and then an emulator.

• 1:21:28David Pierce?

  Which is just like a handful of people and a GitHub. That's the fight.

• 1:21:32Nilay Patel?

  So the big, huge corporation shows up and says, ah, we're gonna sue you. That's gonna cost a lot of money. And that usually crushes the thing. It's the same in the fanfiction community, actually. Like, fanfiction is something that is sort of just tolerated by large publishing houses. There have been a handful of cases, but like, it's bad, it's probably bad to piss off the people who love your work so much that they're writing their own versions of your work. Like, that's just like a bad move. So it's like tolerated, but you could just stop it if you wanted to. Or you could at least file a bunch of lawsuits and get everyone to spend a lot of money and chill it out of existence. And I think here, what you have is...

• 1:22:10Nilay Patel?

  Nintendo probably said, look, we can make your lives horrible. We can cost you a lot of money and we will probably win because we can afford even more lawyers and like, who knows what this outcome will be, this could take years. Or you could just shut it down, pay us the money and this will be over. And I, I, I don't, I, I feel conflicted about that, right? Like, that didn't get anyone to an answer. The next emulator can start, right? There's no law against it. There's no precedent saying it's illegal. Like, you could probably take the source code of Yuzu today and start it all again. But these people can't because they signed the settlement to break and go away. And I, I just wonder like, at some point,

• 1:22:49Nilay Patel?

  the amount of DRM and protection and lockdowns and stuff that is around all digital content is going to run against the reality that people are going to build emulators, right? And like, we just haven't, we just haven't run the process to its end because the money has never been aligned to let us have the fight all the way to the end.

• 1:23:09Alex Cranz?

  Nintendo, though, has always been pretty consistent with like emulators versus, I guess, piracy. Like, I think they think of those as two very different things. And for a long time, there was a, there's a lot of different ways you can pirate games on, on older Nintendo systems. They, they did a lot of like these cartridges that you can go and you can put in a system. And they were really aggressive about stopping those. When, when the 3DS system had a pirate, like a little, people were out there selling a little SD card you could put in a 3DS and just pirate everything. Nintendo was super aggressive about that. So like, the user thing, I know everybody's being like, what does this mean for the emulator community? But it really was more, what does this mean for the game piracy community? And that will probably piss off a bunch of emulator people.

• 1:23:54Nilay Patel?

  I do feel like there's a difference between selling atoms, like selling physical Tandens and like, it's a little bit hard, but you can figure it on software. All right, Alex, what's your lightning round?

• 1:24:05Alex Cranz?

  My lightning round is I want to be really fiscally irresponsible and get the new Lenovo Legion go. It's $700. I don't need it. Sean reviewed it. I want it so bad. It's, it's Windows, which means it's not as good as the Steam Deck because the Steam Deck, the Steam OS is just superior. But you can turn it into a tablet. You can take both of the, the handles off and one of them, you can then turn into a mouse. Like a vertical mouse and that is just, that just rules. I just, I want this thing so bad.

• 1:24:39David Pierce?

  It's the gadgetiest gadget.

• 1:24:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41David Pierce?

  We've covered in a while, I think, where it was like Lenovo was basically like, we are prevented for a variety of reasons for making a really great handheld gaming thing because you just kind of can't do that with Windows, the way that it works now. Everybody agrees with that, including Microsoft. So we're just going to do a bunch of weird, fun stuff where you can flip everything around and cool things happen. Is any of it any good?

• 1:25:07David Pierce?

  Sometimes, but is it cool and rad and you're going to want one anyway? Like, yeah.

• 1:25:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:12David Pierce?

  You do.

• 1:25:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13David Pierce?

  And I do. Like, this, this might not be a good device, but I want it anyways.

• 1:25:19Alex Cranz?

  Sean did give it six.

• 1:25:21Nilay Patel?

  The everything old is new again vibes of this thing are like, man, I've seen Microsoft try to shove Windows on a handheld in so many different ways. And now it's like, yeah, it rules now. You know, it's like, fine, fine. You want this little crap laptop, you can have it.

• 1:25:41Alex Cranz?

  I want it.

• 1:25:42Nilay Patel?

  I kind of love it. I love it. I love it. I can't say no. Also, I love, Sean has a long history. Sean is one of our co-founders. He has a long history here at The Verge of extremely like, just Sean photo choices. There's no adjective describing it except Sean. And here it's like, it's a Windows handheld is obviously being photographed in a chair outside. They're beautiful photos. They're very good. But like, only the mind of Sean Hollister can produce these images.

• 1:26:12Alex Cranz?

  They're beautiful.

• 1:26:12David Pierce?

  I love it.

• 1:26:13Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. It's a very, you should go read it. It's, it's a fun read. All right. Here's my lightning round. It's our boy Elon Musk. We haven't talked about Elon on the show for a long time. I feel like we've done a good job, but we can't not talk about this. Elon sued OpenAI this week. For a breach of contract, which I will come to, saying that when, you know, he was a founder of OpenAI, he gave this company a lot of money, it was supposed to be open source, and now OpenAI is a proprietary extension of Microsoft. He wants the court to declare the GPT-4 is actually artificial general intelligence and must be open source. It's crazy. The whole thing's crazy. OpenAI released a reply.

• 1:26:54Nilay Patel?

  We thought it would be a legal filing, but it's just a blog post that says Elon's dumb. Yeah. It's like more or less, that's what it says, with a bunch of emails where Elon is like, we should make OpenAI part of Tesla. We obviously can't compete with Google. Like, there's just a bunch of emails in here, which are, which is just a weird way to respond to this. Like, here's the receipts. Also, notably, Ilya Sutskever, who has not been heard from since the Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, signed the OpenAI response blog post. So they're united on this. Here's what I will say about this. OpenAI has responded, and they say they're gonna move to dismiss the lawsuit, all claims. This is just very basic stuff. And I will say, I got one thing wrong in the blog

• 1:27:36Nilay Patel?

  post, but I did it on purpose as a test, if you believe me. Sure. So I wrote about this. Okay. I'm not wrong. You're wrong. I'm not wrong. I was testing you.

• 1:27:48Nilay Patel?

  Sure. As you may know, I was once a lawyer. I was not good at being a lawyer. I'm not claiming that I was a good lawyer. I very quickly moved to blogging about cell phones. That's how my legal career is going. I was like, what if? I memorized the name of every HTC cellphone, right? That was a better choice for me as a person. But I, I did, I did the thing. I know a bunch of lawyers. I'm married to a lawyer. We got lawyers on our staff. We got lawyers at the company. They're everywhere. You can't get away from them. And I was like, hey, can you sue someone for breach of contract if there isn't a contract? And the answer is basically no. That fundamentally is the answer. But you have to have a contract, particularly if

• 1:28:32Nilay Patel?

  the performance of said illusory contract takes place over a year, like longer than a year. So for example, I'll give you a law school hypothetical. Alex and I are friends, right? I said, Alex, this is like some real law school shit. I said, Alex, like, I'm going to deliver you 50 pieces of lumber a week for $50. And Alex says, cool. And then we shake hands, right? And then I show up and I say, here's my 50 pieces of lumber. And Alex says, here's 50 bucks. And we just do that over and over again for 11 months, right? And the 12th month, I show up, I deliver lumber, Alex doesn't pay me the money. I can probably sue her for breach of contract.

• 1:29:09Alex Cranz?

  Rude.

• 1:29:10Nilay Patel?

  You got all this performance. I took the lumber. And by the way, in law school, it's like always lumber. It's always something like this. Things of like, what are you talking about?

• 1:29:19David Pierce?

  It's nails of hay.

• 1:29:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're like, like most law students are like, one, I was like 23 years old and the ancient law professor is like, and then what would happen if you didn't deliver the lumber? And they're like, what are you talking about?

• 1:29:32Nilay Patel?

  What is, I didn't do the reading.

• 1:29:34David Pierce?

  So I promised to Venmo you every week.

• 1:29:37Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's always like this. Then you could sue, right? You have this like, I did this thing called reliance where because Alex had paid me before I went, I dropped out the lumber, I left. I assumed the money would come, she didn't pay me. I say, you gotta pay me. I go to the court and say, look at all this history and then look at the negative thing that happened to me. Because I assumed that she would do the thing, which is pay me the money for the lumber that for some reason I had been delivering for 11 months without a written contract.

• 1:30:04Alex Cranz?

  Sick fork.

• 1:30:05Nilay Patel?

  And that's like the, the classic law school, can you enforce a contract that's not written down example? Elon is saying, not that. Like so much not that.

• 1:30:17Nilay Patel?

  Like the most not that. He is saying there is a contract, but the contract called the founders agreement only exists in other pieces of paper. He's like, it's in these emails I have between me and the other founders. It's in the articles of incorporation that they filed the state of California. Like court, just read some stuff. I'd like you to read. Write me a contract and then say they breached that contract.

• 1:30:43David Pierce?

  Right. He's saying, if you read all these things, like you'll, you'll get the idea.

• 1:30:47Nilay Patel?

  Right. That when I was donating money to a nonprofit, I assumed that they would do. And it's like, she's like, you are a first year lawsuit, you're listening to this, or you attended law school, or even if you're thinking about attending law school, just ask yourself, you're a judge, you're, you're looking at the richest man in the world. And he's like, I don't know, I'm kind of an idiot. Like I just gave him all this money without contract. And the judge is like, get out of here. Like my own one L contracts professor, his name is Stuart McCauley, used to say to us all the time, what happens? You pays your money and he takes your chances. And like, if you buy the stuff and it's bad, like that's on you. And like here, Elon's like, donate the money. And he had, he has all these emails, like these other emails are like, that

• 1:31:30Nilay Patel?

  OpenAI is publishing where he's like, this isn't enough money. We're never going to succeed. I want total control of this, or I'm not going to give you more money. And it's like, dude, you, you just didn't have the first thing. Yep. Like the first thing. Right. Which is, what are the terms of me giving you this money? You didn't write them down. It is the silliest one L law school problem I can think of to file a claim for breach of contract. And then within the breach of contract claim that the contract does not exist, but is actually located in some emails. Like I cannot tell you what every, like I showed it to Becky and she just gave me the face. Like, I don't want to think about this. I like, she's like, I graduated from law school. I'm a practicing attorney. We don't do this anymore.

• 1:32:11Nilay Patel?

  And then the second one, the claim is for promissory estoppel, which is long term, but that's the thing where it's like I delivered the lumber and Alex to pay me the money. And so I have what's called detrimental reliance. So I like assumed she would do the thing. Sorry, Alex. I assumed Alex would pay me the money. She was paying me for for months and months and months. And then I did the thing. She didn't pay me the money. I've now relied on her promises to me and performance of those promises in the past. There's none of that here because the detrimental reliance is that OpenAI was supposed to deliver AGI, which you cannot possibly claim. Just what are you talking about?

• 1:32:49Alex Cranz?

  They didn't make Skynet.

• 1:32:51Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, it's all very dumb. The thing I got wrong is that I put a joke at the end, another one L law school joke where I was like, the thing that will happen is OpenAI will, uh, will file a motion to dismiss. And I use the federal name of the motion this place and on California court, it's called a demur. I'm very sorry. I'm not going to correct it because it's a honeypot for nerds.

• 1:33:10David Pierce?

  First of all, that's a really good joke. That's a really good funny joke that lots of people got and enjoyed. So great job.

• 1:33:16Nilay Patel?

  Sarah John thought it was hilarious.

• 1:33:18David Pierce?

  I'm glad. There you go. It's the audience is small, but it's there. I think to me, the wildest thing about this is this now marks two episodes in two weeks in which we have talked about Elon Musk demanding to take over another company. Last week it was Elon saying, I'll sell Tesla to you, Tim Cook, but I want to be the CEO of Apple. And now it's OpenAI. And true, true, like you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take. You know what I mean?

• 1:33:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Shoot your shot, Elon.

• 1:33:44David Pierce?

  Next, next he's going to be like, listen, Larry Page, just give me Google. Just shut up. Just give me Google.

• 1:33:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, he's actually two Tesla shareholders saying, give me more of Tesla, which is very funny.

• 1:33:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:56Nilay Patel?

  Elon also has a very expansive view of what a contract is. In another case, X is suing the Centers for Combating Digital Hate for a report they put out saying hate speech had risen on Twitter. Now X, after Elon took over, they're claiming this interfered with advertisers, blah, blah, blah. And their legal theory is that it's a breach of the contract that when they sign up for their Twitter account, they knew they weren't supposed to do X, Y, and Z, and they could foresee that they would be interfering in X's business relationships by doing whatever they did. And the judge, I want to, I want to say this as clear as I can. The judge evaluating this case said to X's lawyers, quote, "This is the most vapid extension of contract law I have ever seen."

• 1:34:42Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing?

• 1:34:47Alex Cranz?

  I like you would be, I would be embarrassed if, if I, if I went into court and that I've never been in court.

• 1:34:52Nilay Patel?

  You would be embarrassed until you went to bed on your bed of dollar bills.

• 1:34:57David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:34:58Alex Cranz?

  Just dollars, though. It's a dollar bill.

• 1:35:00Nilay Patel?

  Just single dollar.

• 1:35:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, those aren't hunnies.

• 1:35:05Nilay Patel?

  That same law professor, Stuart McCall, contracts professor, Stu Mac, we call him. He was, he was very good.

• 1:35:11Nilay Patel?

  He would often ask us, as we went through the facts of some esoteric lumber case, why do you think this case was filed? And we would all answer, you know, some high minded question and start, he would start cackling and he'd be like, no, no, no, the lawyer wanted a BMW.

• 1:35:29David Pierce?

  Uh huh.

• 1:35:30Nilay Patel?

  It's like very good.

• 1:35:31David Pierce?

  Elon's buying a lot of BMWs.

• 1:35:33Nilay Patel?

  Elon's buying a lot of BMWs. I'm just saying, like, if you want to stand in front of a judge, have the judge call you vapid, like, I don't think a BMW is enough. You got to at least hit Aston, you know?

• 1:35:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Nilay Patel?

  If not, full G-Wagon situation.

• 1:35:46David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 1:35:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, a lot of electric G-Wagon preorders are being placed around the I should run OpenAI lawsuit. All right, that's it. I'm sorry that we talked about him again. It's gonna, it's an election year, we're gonna end up talking about him.

• 1:36:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:01Nilay Patel?

  I can feel it coming. But don't worry, we'll also talk about the law of emulation. Dodge released the electric charger this week, the EV charger. It's got some big speakers in the back to make vroom, vroom noises. That's coming up next week on the Vergecast, everybody.

• 1:36:16Nilay Patel?

  We should do it a whole thing where we just compare the vroom, vroom noises that various muscle car EVs make.

• 1:36:21Alex Cranz?

  We a hundred percent should.

• 1:36:22David Pierce?

  That's, that's been in the works for a while, actually. It's, it's gonna happen, it's gonna be great. Next week, we're also gonna talk about lying down mode in the Quest headsets. Lot of stuff to get to.

• 1:36:31Nilay Patel?

  Very good. I should tell everyone that we recorded this a day early, because the three of us will be at South by Southwest on March 8th, doing a live Vergecast. David has set up quite the game for us to play on that stage. If you are in Texas, come see us March 8th on the Vox Media Podcast stage at South by Southwest. We would love to see you. The very next day, on March 9th, I'm doing a live Decoder and interviewing the CEO of Figma, Dylan Field, which will be very fun. Obviously, quite a lot to talk about there, life post Adobe, but Dylan really wants to talk about the web and like the future of the web. Like, Figma is a web app. I don't know if you caught it. I'm very interested in the web. It's a thing I care about a bit. So I'm very excited about that. Alex is like, I didn't know what I was signing up for.

• 1:37:14Nilay Patel?

  March 8th, The Vergecast at South by Southwest, March 9th Decoder. We have loved to see you. That's it. That's Vergecast.

• 1:37:26David Pierce?

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866VERGE11. 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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