More Galaxy S10 leaks and Sonos headphones

The Samsung Galaxy S10 continues to leak, indicating that it may have a headphone jack, a hole-punch display, and a cryptocurrency wallet. But that’s not all. We also saw some new concepts for foldable phones, a rumor about Sonos headphones, and theories on Google’s secret Fuchsia operating system. So this week on The Vergecast, Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller run through all of that and then some, which you can listen to right now. Thanks to Microsoft Azure for sponsoring this episode. Get started with a free account and 12 months of popular free services at Azure.com/trial today. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:24Speaker 01

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• 0:58Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. There's only one of us right now because watch push that button is their season's over. They're gonna start another one though. That's gonna be fun. But for now, it's just us solo flagship of technology news. Still counts, though. It definitely still counts. I'm your friend, Neelai. How are you? Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bohn is here. Hi. Wow, Dieter. Don't know what's going on with Dieter. We're gonna figure that out. That's what this hour is gonna be. Anyway, this is a show, as you might know, about technology news, some jokes, just three buds having a good time. We got some phones to talk about. There's some S10 leaks. Mobile Congress is coming up. There's some Sonos rumors, some Netflix stuff going on. I got a whole Fortnite copyright thing I

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  want to talk about. But first, Better Worlds is the Verge's science fiction project. It's huge, massive. 11 stories, five podcasts, five videos. It's going on the site right now. We put one of the podcasts in the Verge Cast feed this week in place of the interview episode. I really hope you liked it. I know it's something different, but please check it out. Go to the Verge Extras feed if you want to hear more short stories. We've rebranded it Better Worlds. You can look at our YouTube channel. There's amazing animation and the stories are on the site. The great John Scorsese story this week. Called a model dog. Please check it out. I implore you. That's just my plug. I'm so excited about this. The news is so dark and this is such like a positive uplifting thing that's about science and technology, which we're not getting enough of lately. So check it out. I hope you like it. Paul, have you been reading it?

• 2:23Speaker 03

  I've read the first one with the spaceship, but I, I want to catch up.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  We do it. I'm excited about it. I just, I just want to remember and think about it. Okay, that's it. That's enough plugs. I'm going to be honest. It's been a quiet week.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Kind of quiet. Yeah.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  But like a lot of stuff going on.

• 2:37Speaker 04

  We're in the like CES happened and now, you know, most of that stuff isn't real, but some of it is potentially very exciting. And then everyone is taking a breath and then global congress is going to be starting up in a basically a month from today. And so like that's starting to ramp up. The leaks are starting to ramp up. But in this zone, it's just a little bit quiet. It's at least as far as like direct gadget news goes. And yeah, so it's, you know, it's fine. There's, there's plenty of stuff happening for us to talk about, but not so much that it feels overwhelming. We can just sort of spread out and relax and talk about notches for as long as we want.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  Good. Can I tell you my favorite little bit of news?

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  It's not on a rundown. It's not even news. It's just my favorite thing that happened this week. The government, as you know, shut down.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  That's my favorite bit of news as well.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  No, that's not my favorite. It's generally horrible news. But 800,000 federal employees aren't working. The FCC is shut down. But our friends at motherboard who are great, that, you know, they wrote a story about location tracking. We talked about this last week, that the cell carriers selling your location data and they wrote this follow-up piece about this company called Zoom ago, which had this presentation for why the rules should be even more relaxed. And so they email the FCC, motherboard's reporters email the FCC's press line for comment, but nobody works at the FCC. So the person who just started emailing them back was a GPI. He's the only person left in the building.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  It's like you email customer support at Apple and you're just like, ah, my iPhone screen is broken. What do I do? And Tim Cook replies, he's like, hey, what's up?

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's incredible.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Tim Cook here.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  I laughed very much about it when I saw the tweet from other boards that are in chief. Okay, Dieter. Yeah. There's exciting notch developments or anti notch developments in the world today. The S10 and S10 plus are leaking all over the place.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:23Nilay Patel?

  And we should talk about this hole punch. We should talk about the, the double wide hole punch display that the S10 plus has. But first, can we just, can we all just celebrate the fact that Samsung is making flagship phones in 2019 with headphone jacks? People like I literally, I tweeted out just the word headphone jacks that linked to our, our story about the leaks and people are like excited. They're like, I'm gonna buy an S10. It's amazing.

• 4:44Speaker 04

  This might be the last one. There's a rumor that this is the last time Samsung is gonna leave the headphone jack in the phone.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Wasn't that the rumor the last time?

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but then I think Samsung sees the market demand. They're aware. They know it's up. But look, phone sales are slowing down. The upgrade cycle is slowing down. This phone will probably be on sale for three years. That's three more years of, of, of high end headphone jack. It makes me, it makes me happy. Now, am I gonna get a Samsung phone? Is the question.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  You really oughta.

• 5:11Nilay Patel?

  You know.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Vote with your wallet.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  I need to have an iOS phone and an Android phone. That's a thing, you know, in my life.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  It's also really nice to have a vanilla Android phone.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's not the Samsung. A Samsung phone is like a

• 5:23Speaker 03

  It's not.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  More like a rocky road situation.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  All right. Let me make the case for why you should buy one of these Samsung phones.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  We don't, it's not a good case. We don't, we've never seen it. It's not even real.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  We haven't seen them, but like, okay, make the case for why you should be hype about the Samsung phones.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Imagine Dieter's wearing a red polo and he approaches you in a Verizon store.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  All right.

• 5:44Nilay Patel?

  God.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  All right.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  All right. Thing the first, headphone jack.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  That's it.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  I, I think that we're gonna look back at 2018. If you survey all of the notches on all of the phones in two years when we're beyond the era of the notch, the notch era, and you have to pick, what was the doofiest, stupidest notch that was made on a phone? You could make the case that it was the Pixel 3 XL.

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, without question, right?

• 6:14Speaker 04

  You don't, you don't even make the case. That's just a fact. Well, there's some, they're like, there are some phones with like the double notch and like the double notch is like pretty out there. Anyway, this thing has an elegant looking front of the phone. It has, you know, a little bit of a bezel at the top and the bottom because they didn't make you, they're not spending the extra, however many. Tens of millions of dollars to do the engineering to fold the screen underneath. They already spent all that money to fold the screen on the left and the right. So it is relatively proportional. It has these little hole punch notches, which again, I think that just a full cutout proper notch would be just as fine. Like you don't actually gain anything by having that extra screen there, but aesthetically, I think it looks good. You no longer have to deal with a fingerprint sensor on the back that's super hard to reach. Instead, it's the right there under the screen.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  And if you, you know, maybe they'll do the iris sensor, but I don't think there's room in those notches for that. So that's gone. So it's just a very simple unlock process. And you get to try out One UI, which is Samsung's latest attempt to make a clean version of its software. You get to.

• 7:17Nilay Patel?

  That's in your plot.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I think I'm interested in seeing what One UI is like. I really am. I missed out on the beta, but shifting everything down. And you know what? I'm not even mad about the cryptocurrency wallet. I was prepared to go on a full rant about how dare they. And you know, I don't care. Fine. Like it's a thing that people want around the world. And Neelai, for you in particular.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  You are the man who, we use Slack every day for our internal chat and we have to use it all day. And most of us do the same thing and customize the way Slack looks and feels to match our preferences. So we don't have garish, ugly colors. But you have said that you like to leave Slack at the defaults because you want to experience what most people experience.

• 7:57Nilay Patel?

  I leave almost everything at the default.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  So if you leave everything at the default and you want to experience what most people experience, you have to, for your job, buy a Samsung phone.

• 8:06Nilay Patel?

  I understand what you're saying. Now, to be fair, there are defaults that I change all the time.

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  For example, I think you all know how I feel about motion smoothing, which is the default of most things. Change that one. I do change the color tuning on phones because the super crazy. Right, but I'm talking about like your general muckety muck settings and people are like, you can just change that. I'm like, most people don't. I think that's important, how things behave. You gotta leave it to default. But I hear what you're saying. And look, I gotta, I always have to have an Android phone. I haven't had a Samsung phone in a very long time. Maybe this is the one. Maybe, maybe this One UI is going to convince me.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  I mean, you don't have a Pixel 3, right?

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  I do. I have, I mean. I have the little guy.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  What?

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  I mean, yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Just imagine a world where one UI is so good that people start switching in droves. They're like, Samsung, whatever, but then they try the one UI and they're like, oh, this is what I always wanted a phone to be like. And Samsung cracked it.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  People are finally like, yes, I want this dog with shoe. I want Clippy to be on my phone. No, you know, I was talking to Dan Seifert ages ago. And I think we're at the point with phone UIs where the value of experimenting actively cuts against their ability to capture customers, right? So Dan, his wife's phone had broken and he gave her some Android phone and it was like too different and she didn't like it, right? But you give the phone that has like just aggressively cloned the iPhone UI and people will like make the transition. And I've, I've noticed this several times too, because I have some friends who switched

• 9:44Nilay Patel?

  to Android phones and Samsung aggressively cloning how the iPhone looked and felt like captured customers for Samsung. So we sit and we're like, we want to see all this competition. We want to see all these crazy ideas, all these new paradigms.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  And then real people.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then real, I'm like, give me a windows, windowing system and a stylus. And then real, real people out there in the world are just kind of like, I know how to use a phone. I'd prefer this other phone to be similar to that. And I think that cognitive switching cost is real high. So everything is converging. Like I would, I would be, I would be very surprised if Apple's swipe gesture ideas don't just become the default everywhere in like the next two or three years.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  But at the same time, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take.

• 10:33Nilay Patel?

  You know, the one UI, every time you swipe up, it just screams one at you.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  Instead of the bleep bloop noises that Samsung used to make. Look, I'm surprisingly hype about hole punch displays. I'm super, we saw some more foldable display concepts.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. Xiaomi's got a really good one.

• 10:53Nilay Patel?

  Xiaomi's is really good. There was the, the, there was a Motorola patent drawing of the new razor that might have a foldable display that leaked this week.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Which, oh man, that patent drawing is like, it will never be that good, but anyway.

• 11:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That patent drawing is, is, I don't, I don't know if you can file for like an aspirational patent.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  It's very aspirational, but we're like entering an era of extreme hardware innovation again because the display technologies have like taken another leap. That's usually when you see it. So the displays are getting thinner. You can bend them and curve them. You can punch holes in them. I am super down for all of that. And I think we're gonna, I'm with Dieter, I think we're gonna look back on the notch era as being just like an aberration before we did more interesting things with screens. Like, the notch moment is very much, this is the most you can do with this category of screen. And then we're gonna like move on and see all the foldy stuff, all the stuff where the sensors are integrated directly into the screen or under it. I mean, that Xiaomi, I, like, I'm a sucker, you know,

• 11:57Nilay Patel?

  like, I love extremely futuristic prototype demo things. But I looked at that and I was like, this is the closest to CGI in real life that I've seen on a phone in forever. Right? It literally looks like they're folding just like a floating image.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, the first time I saw that video, I thought it was a CGI Maca.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  If you haven't seen it, two sides of it fold in, like TechCrunch nailed it. They said it's a triptych. So like, two of the sides fold under and behind the thing. So that, that's what gives you the phone shape instead of it just folding in half. Which, for some reason, just adding an extra fold makes it more impressive for, I don't know. But, you know, they actually managed to make Android responsive and work with that little thing. So, good, good on them. I'm actually a little bit surprised. Like, I want to know more about what Google is doing to support folding displays by default, because they said they're gonna do it, but it's like, what exactly does all of that entail? Because I highly doubt that the prototypes we've seen so far are using, aren't all just, you

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  know, some custom thing that these different companies made. Yeah, but if you're Xiaomi, you don't give a shit, right? Like, you forked Android, you're in China, you're like, screw you, Google. Have you heard of Memex? That's our operating system. It has nothing to do with you.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  My guess is that folding phones are just as well supported by Android as tablets are.

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  In the, in the sense, it's conceptually the same. You have, have, you need apps that can adapt to different screen sizes and ratios.

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But do you?

• 13:34Speaker 03

  And so people who build apps with using the modern toolkits of that that Google provides and don't do anything customer interesting with their app can support tablets and probably support folding phones just fine.

• 13:48Nilay Patel?

  My sense.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  That's my guess.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  My sense of the folding screen, obviously it's happening Android, you know, that platform has its own dynamics. My sense of what it's good for is consuming content. Right? I don't, I don't know that I, I've never sat down in a coffee shop with my phone and like, looked at Twitter and been like, man, I wish this was bigger. Right? Like, that's not it. But I think I'm gonna unfold this and like, look at a bigger picture or watch a video fullscreen. It's that stuff and I don't, that doesn't really, as long as the video players, right, and like content views scale. I don't know that this is the thing that makes people want to use Microsoft Word on an Android phone.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Oh, right. Right.

• 14:27Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  It's mostly for view. I mean, I can imagine, especially with this Xiaomi phone, like, you're scrolling through YouTube, you find a good, a good video, and so you unfold it, watch it in full, it like automatically goes to fullscreen, you watch the whole video, and then when you're done watching the video, you've tucked tucked the sides back in, and now you start scrolling through YouTube looking for your, your next fix, you know?

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Like, that's a pretty seamless experience.

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  I, I, just, history suggests that the word seamless should not be applied to this experience yet.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm pretty sure it'll be, it'll be weird, but in the best way. And I, in a way that just like, you know, processor improvements will fix it in two generations, like, it'll be like that.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Think about how much handwork is involved when you've got a phone in portrait and you now you want to go fullscreen, and so you tap the fullscreen and then it like, it turns and it, and now the, the operating system starts turning like 90 degrees at a time trying to find which way is down with gravity, and so you shake the phone so it gets the, the landscape just right, because you're on Android and it's not as perfect as it is on iOS.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  I will say iOS is real janky with rotation lately.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Almost.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Maybe gravity's messed up.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  It's probably true. Look, the government shut down, no one's getting the gravitational signals they need from the government network of gravitrons. Is that how that works? Uh, can I just say that the rumor about LG, by the way, is not a folding screen? It's that they'll just have a second screen that you can plug in.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, you just like carry it around and plug it in. I love this idea. Just like you just have another like thing sitting in your bag and just click it in. Or like you can maybe unclick it and like stick it in a little pocket behind the phone.

• 16:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  Um, that's great. You like get all the benefits and then if you just want the skinny little phone with the weird bend on it, you throw, you leave the second screen behind.

• 16:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, one, I don't think they've yet articulated the benefits. This is only for like, like real estate people. We're like, let me show you some specs. You plug in the other screen, you're like scrolling on your phone and you're like, shoot a picture. I literally, I've been trying to figure out what you would use this for. And it's definitely for the, the kind of people who give PowerPoint presentations in Starbucks.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  I mean, you use it like all this, in theory, all the stuff that you do on an iPad, you could do on, you know, your phone. There are lots of people that still, you know, want the iPad mini and like a dual screen or folding screen device like is essentially an iPad mini, but it folds up.

• 16:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  That's cool.

• 16:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm into it. Like I said, I'm, I'm, this is what it's, people listening to the show know, like, I'm usually very much like, well, what is it good for? And this is the one place where I'm like, I don't care. I just, I just want a folding phone, like.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  With a headphone jack.

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  With a headphone. Can't have it all, Teeter.

• 17:13Nilay Patel?

  And then the Honor View 20 is out. It's got a 48 mix, 48 megapixel camera, which makes me happy.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  I mean, well, and that camera is like, Sam Byford wrote a really good piece. Like that camera is actually not bullshit. Like it's actually there, there are, they managed to have real benefits. And there have been very, very, very few smartphones with super high megapixel counts that haven't actually just been objectively worse than like a standard eight or 12 megapixel camera. Um, and this one, you know, manages to be as good and in some cases better. And that's rare. So that, that's why, that's why I'm excited about that phone.

• 17:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I just, we're just in this period where a bunch of threads that have been brewing for some time are starting to land and shipping devices. Like the, there's a Vivo Apex that'll be at MWC where the entire display is a fingerprint sensor. Like, come on. Like, that's super cool. It's a prototype and who knows? And, and then we've seen enough Vivo weirdness to know that they just like having ideas just for us to look at them. Like the thing, the camera pops up, like that's fine. But I, I just, where it, I think this MWC, which is coming up sort of mid February, is going to be full of. Extremely weird phone designs that sort of make last year seem like an aberration.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Can I throw a curveball that's not on our topic list?

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what we're here for.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  Paul, have you been keeping up with Fuchsia, Google's Skunk Works OS project? More from like the programming language side. Why, what's that? Well, okay, so two things have happened since we last checked in. One, the UI that everybody has seen for Fuchsia has basically been yanked and put into private repositories. It was called Armadillo. So you no longer can like track and watch how they're thinking about what the user interface looks like publicly anymore, or at least not easily. So that's one. And then this week, Google hired this Apple veteran named Bill Stevenson, who worked on a lot of macOS releases. And what's interesting there is two things. Well, I'll say there's three things that are interesting there,

• 19:14Speaker 04

  but I'm only going to say one of them on the Vergecast because I'm saving the other two. But when Bill Stevenson posted about it, he said, "I'm excited to share that this February I'll be joining Google, here's the important part, to help bring a new operating system called Fuchsia to market." Whoa. To market? To market. Like the real? Which is the first time, to my knowledge, like Google finally just up and admitted, yes, we're doing, this is a thing. And there have been lots of other little developments. So we've seen some pretty clear indications that they have been developing versions of Fuchsia that can run on things like smart clocks and smart displays. So even like that Lenovo smart clock, we think that that could run Fuchsia.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  And that's, yeah, I've got a couple other like conjectures and thoughts and ideas, but they're like too sketchy for me to like put my name behind, even on the Vergecast where I'll say anything. So I think that Fuchsia is going to be an exciting thing to watch in 2018. I don't think anything's going to actually get released this year, but I do think that we're going to start to see more stuff become like secretive. So if you haven't like poked around, if you're able to look at GitHub and understand even a little bit of code, now's the time to do it, because I think they're going to start pulling more stuff back as they get ready to like turn it into something real.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  What is it going to turn into though?

• 20:32Speaker 04

  See, this is where I think I know, but I don't want to say it.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  I think it's Google's everything operating system. If it can run Android applications, it can. And it's bait and it can run on really lightweight devices. It's like it's Google's like Darwin at the kernel, right? It's instead of having like its own special variant of Unix as its main kernel for all its operating systems. Google will have Fuchsia and whatever the actual kernel of Fuchsia is. And then it can toy around with making like more user facing operating system stuff. Like they could ship an Android phone that would have Fuchsia stuff as the innards of it.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  But it still works and operates just like your current Android phone. Or they could go crazy and, you know, replace all the UI with Flutter and stuff. Like they have a lot of flexibility, but I do think they want to get away from Linux. Or at least have my, my original think was that they wanted to have a very viable replacement for Linux if something goes bad with Linux. But now it seems like they're investing enough in it that they are fairly confident that they can pull it off.

• 21:51Nilay Patel?

  If you're listening to this and you're in your car, I'm just going to tell you, Dieter is completely stone faced right now.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Getting nothing, nothing from this man.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  Like Paul was just saying every word he can think of and Dieter's like, uh huh. Like go ahead, Dieter, you were going to say something.

• 22:07Speaker 04

  Uh, I was going to say, I remember once when I was trying to understand Docker and I couldn't figure it out. And then Paul finally was like, explained it to me. And then I went, oh, oh yeah, that makes sense. That's really obvious. And that's like really smart. And that's the way that, um, you know, software in the cloud should work. And, uh, I feel like there's a not precisely analogous move that they're doing with like a consumer or like a device operating system to Docker. But, uh, it's like sort of analogous in the like, oh yeah, everything, everything should be, uh, should, uh, the, the internal parts of software in a computer should communicate that way. Paul says it's like the everything operating system. I like, I feel like they're

• 22:52Speaker 04

  building a kernel and they're building a system that instead of like having a bunch of virtual machines or having to like report stuff that it's flexible enough that it can run like apps flutter apps with the Android SDK. And there's even like code that's like Swift, like, let's see if we can figure out how to get Swift to run on this thing, right?

• 23:09Speaker 03

  They've got, they've got Swift in there. They've got like a lot of Rust code. One way to think of it, like the, the invention, it's not the, not like they came up with this concept, but the, what makes Fuchsia different than a typical operating system is that it has what's called a micro kernel. And so the idea is that all the, most of the drivers, most of the functionality of the operating system is not in the kernel. Whereas Linux is, is more of what's called like a monolith. It's, it's big. And when you write a driver for hardware, right? You want your hardware to be able to work with Linux. You have to write code that interfaces directly with the kernel, which, so you

• 23:51Speaker 03

  basically have to contribute to Linux to make your hardware work with Linux. Whereas with a micro kernel, the kernel is much more self-contained. And so therefore it's much more portable and stuff that like, a lot of the drivers can be much more sandbox, much more like basically like apps and therefore a lot more portable. And so you end up with a lot more modular of an operating system and a lot more portable of an operating system. That people were thinking about this even back in the nineties, the thought was that maybe it's not as fast, but, but they're pretty sure that they can make it fast.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's funny that we've come this far with Google and its OS that they're, they're like gonna make their next OS, right? Like Android isn't that old, but the idea that they're gonna completely re-architect a new kind of OS from, from the ground up is actually kind of remarkable. And especially remarkable, they're hiring people to bring it to market. Well, and it's also remarkable because they just spent quite a while mucking around with like some of the, the core primitives of like what Chrome OS is, right? Like Chrome OS is now basically like half Chrome, half Android bits, right? And like, there's a, there's some, there's some stuff that like, they're debating whether or not they should be in virtual machines or blah, blah, blah. But like, there's like, The way they're messing with Chrome and at the same time, they're developing this

• 25:09Speaker 04

  thing on the side. And so then the big question is, like, we used to be like, what are you gonna do? You gonna bet on Android or on Chrome OS? And why do you have both? And it's so confusing. In two years, we're gonna be having the same argument about like Chrome OS slash Android hybrid and Fuchsia. And then people are gonna be like, no, no, you don't understand. Fuchsia's for this, this, and this. And Chrome OS is for that, that, and that. And then Android is, you know, that other thing. And so I don't think they're gonna kill off any of this stuff right away. And it's not gonna be a one for one replacement, which means we're gonna have a whole lot of like confusion about what is for what thing. In the same way that, you know, like, why is there both a cast platform for smart

• 25:50Speaker 04

  speakers and an Android things platform, right? Like, Google, just as a company, is not worried about having like, a single unified, you know, thing that runs everything in the way that Apple basically has. Everything is iOS. And like, Google sort of doesn't care. And in some ways, that's a little bit more honest. Because to say that, you know, everything is running iOS is like, rough, right? It's like, is the touch bar on, you know, my MacBook Pro, it's like, some variant of watchOS, apparently, sort of, kinda like, it almost like, becomes like meaningless terms when you talk about like, what are the operating systems that run these little gadgets?

• 26:30Nilay Patel?

  My dude, wait until they launch the App Store for the touch bar with subscription pricing. And that is their next great services play on the Mac. I mean, come on. That's what's coming. You can feel it in your heart.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  If you want to tell me that everything I just blubiated about Fuchsia was wrong, I actually want you to tell me. And my email address is [email protected]. And just talk to me. I really do want someone that like, gets it a little bit more than I do. And 9 to 5 Mac has been doing the series called Fuchsia Fridays. And they've been doing really good work. But in general, I feel like we're getting to a point where it's no longer like, random skunk work projects. It's a thing they're bringing to market, and we can actually start defining what it is.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  You know, here's the two things I will, just very broadly, listening to you talk. One, it feels like Chrome OS is gonna end up the odd one out. Right? Because it's the most broken. Right now, even though it's just it's it's just not the thing they're trying to make it like become is not good. Like, I don't know what to say about that. Like, I love the Chrome OS laptops I have, but only when they're doing the very narrow task of like browsing the web. Everything else Google wants Chrome OS to do is like a mess. So like it if they if their their intention is to extend onto the desktop, it seems like Chrome OS is the one that they should more immediately replace. The second thing I'll say is that that the attitude you're describing at Google,

• 27:53Nilay Patel?

  where they just kind of don't care, is the thing that scares me the most about buying Google hardware.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? Where it's like, they don't really care. They're not invested in it. They're not gonna. They're not gonna keep it up. They're not gonna maintain it. Like, I've, you know, I have this home hub, and I'm just like, is this product gonna last? Like, are they gonna care? Are they gonna release a home hub 2? Or is it just gonna sort of like disappear into the ether like so many other Google things disappear into the ether? And that that to me is they gotta solve that problem. I think I think more people perceive that with Google than that company wants to admit.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is my biggest problem with Google, other than the fact that they um spy on everybody all the time. But I I say another way to put it is that I I feel like way Google thinks about products, like, instead of aggressively dog fooding things, like, instead of telling us employees, like, look, we built this one thing, you better use it. Google has more of like a vibe of like, hey, we built this thing, you're not using it? Oh, should we make a different thing? So then you will use it, you know, like, that's kind of like more their attitude about it. Like, they want their employees to be using their their things, their components to build the new things. And when their employees choose not to, Google thinks, well, maybe we need to make a different thing, so their employees will want to use that.

• 29:10Nilay Patel?

  Everything seems, I mean, Google is like the whole vibe of the company is a college campus, and it just often it often feels like they're like, they they come together on project teams, and then in the quarter ends, and they like move on. So like, everyone took the class where they built the Google Wi-Fi, and then like built one, and then like passed the science fair, and like, does anyone work on the Google Wi-Fi anymore? Like, it's like deeply unclear to me.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Maybe they made some lasting memories.

• 29:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. Best vacation ever. It's like, they're all at the robotics fair.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  Remember that time when we worked on a wifi product?

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  It's like, that product exists, like lots of people have that. They made all these promises about AI doing band steering, like, is there an AI researcher at Google who's still thinking about channel allocation on the Google wifi? Or they just like hand it over to the cloud monster? Like, that's the cloud monster?

• 30:05Speaker 04

  I don't know how Google works.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, that's all I'm saying is I'm sure there's lots of people at Google who work on all of these products. But the company's outward communication about that process gets lost in this like flood of new things that are half built.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  Or it gets lost in the flood of not having anything built, AKA the Google messaging story and the death of Hangouts.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, what's going on there? Dieter, you're the only one who understands.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  So Hangouts is turning into Hangouts Chat. So enterprise users that use Hangouts are getting converted to Hangouts Chat, which is like a Slack alike. And also Hangouts Meet, which is, I don't know, a Skype alike, I guess, relatively soon. And then concurrently, Google once again is like, well, we're not, we're, we're consumers and regular people. We're gonna, we're gonna transition you to, and like something will happen in October, probably. We'll see, I don't know. You know, it's like, it's probably going to like, I don't know, we, we value you, you're great. Uh, but we're gonna switch you over to chat once we sort of figure it out. Um, in the meanwhile, a recommendation for what you should do if you want to talk to somebody is, um, well,

• 31:12Speaker 04

  eventually we'll roll out RCS, but it's not really on computers that well. So, um, I, I, I don't know, man. You, you're, you, you can figure it out. There's lots of other companies, I guess. They, it's cool, we're cool, everything's cool. Uh, by the way, Hangouts Chat is coming, I guess. Uh, but it's not really for consumers, but if you want to use it, sure, I guess.

• 31:33Nilay Patel?

  They maintain Hangouts just so they don't have to like use Slack, right? I mean, that's what's happening here. Like they use it internally.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  So, and like other big company like Twitter uses Hangouts for all of its, all of its video calls. So there, I bet, it just seems like, okay, like we, we need this product, we have it. We can keep sort of developing it, right? Like the interns will fix it up every couple of months.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  They gotta do something and that then we don't have to like pay Slack or we don't have to use Microsoft Teams like it feels like it exists as a consumer product just because it because Google needs it to exist or I'm sorry as an enterprise product just because Google needs it to exist for its own enterprise.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:11Nilay Patel?

  It's like just very much my sense of it. So when does RCS come out, Dieter?

• 32:14Speaker 04

  My, my best answer to what is going on is that rambling insufficient like non-committal thing I just gave you and I could, I could give you that again if you want or you know, we can move on to things that aren't awful and terrible like that's, that's it like RCS is going to come out when it comes out carrier by carrier, phone by phone. The rollout there has been not quite bungled, but it's certainly not like being handled well. There's still a lot of confusion out there and like what they should do is like AT&T now supports RCS universal profile, done. And but instead it's like this one carrier has this one phone that will let you talk to other one carriers that have that other one phone sort of so there. It's like.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  It's like, like MMS back in the day.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's like MMS. It's exactly, it's exactly like that.

• 33:03Nilay Patel?

  I sort of get it like to not to defend our nation's wireless carriers. It's not something I usually do, but I get, they can't break message. They can't just like roll it out without some small scale deployment to make sure it works, right?

• 33:16Speaker 04

  That's what I'm assuming is, is going on, but I don't know. In the meantime, it's just like, well, whatever. And like also I kind of am happy that the RCS rollout is happening slowly and haphazardly. It's, it's a much better story outside the US to be clear. Like it's actually quietly just like happening in a bunch of countries, but it being messy is just means that Android users are forced to like make a decision now to switch to Signal or Wire or WhatsApp or whatever. So I don't know, I can't.

• 33:46Nilay Patel?

  I get the feeling the, the true RCS rollout comes when the 5G phones hit, right?

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Oh, it could be.

• 33:53Nilay Patel?

  That, you know, that's like a good time to like break everybody's habits and be like your 5G phone now has better multimedia texting. That's part of 5G. You can, you can feel how there's like this consumer benefit that you can tie into this intangible network change.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 34:09Nilay Patel?

  Maybe.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  I was, that seems obvious.

• 34:12Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let's take a break. Let's read some ads. I kinda wanna talk about the Google and Oracle lawsuit going into Supreme Court and then.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 34:18Nilay Patel?

  I, I'm ba- I'm just basically gonna ramble about the Fortnite lawsuit situation until someone makes me stop.

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• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  Google and Oracle. If you don't remember.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Oracle.

• 35:32Nilay Patel?

  Of course. Paul, I think you might find this interesting. So Android, once upon a time, was built with the same API calls as Java, and there was a deep relationship between Android and Java.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Still build Android apps with Java.

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  Still do. They were built with API calls that worked the exact same way as the Java API calls, but they were not the same API calls, if you believe Google.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  They just worked and smelled exactly the same and happened to share similar names or identical names in some cases.

• 36:02Nilay Patel?

  Java was developed by a company called Sun Microsystems. You might remember Sun Microsystems for its famous CEO Eric Schmidt, who was once the CEO of Google, became the chairman of Google to Google. He's like, hey, this thing I made Java, maybe? And they're like, yes. And so they used a lot of Java or a lot of Java-ish things to build Android. Sun Microsystems, purchased by Oracle, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, notably famous for being Steve Jobs' best friend, it's a fact. Oracle now owns Java. They sue Google, this is years ago now, sue Google for infringing the various copyrights in Java and the various patents in Java. We covered this lawsuit ages ago.

• 36:45Nilay Patel?

  We went to the trials, crazy town.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  We went to the first trial.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  We went to the first, and this is the case that won it. So the specific copyright infringement is the API called names, the words that were used, the structure of the APIs in Java were replicated in Android even though the underlying code was not the same. This is the infringement at risk. The judge, who we've actually profiled.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 37:11Nilay Patel?

  Sarah Jeong profiled Judge Alcep for us. He is the judge who codes. Basically said this is nonsense in the Ninth Circuit. That got overturned. Then they went to a jury. The jury said this is an infringement. That got overturned. Today, Google announced they are asking the Supreme Court of the United States to rule whether the the structure of API calls can be copyrighted and protected. Because they say this threatens the future of all software development. If a company like Google cannot build a compatible operating system by using the structure of of API, the structure of names of APIs.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  So can a small thing that's a piece of a larger thing, can that smaller thing be copyrighted? Yeah. The larger thing could probably be copyrighted. Well, let's, we'll get to it. Can the small thing? Yeah, I mean, this is the theme of this section of the Vergecast. But Paul, I'm Right. Just having laid out what I've laid out, and knowing what you know, what do you think?

• 38:06Speaker 03

  I never understood this at all. I never understood, I never understood. Okay, okay, if you want to use an operating, like, like a, a, a programming language to build an operating system, then you use all the functionality of that programming language. And if it happens to be that, so like, if, if I took, I don't know, some imaginary program, oh, if you take the programming language Swift, right? Which has been explicitly open sourced, right? But it's not, doesn't work on all platforms, right? Or it might be partially ported to another platform, right? So Swift has a lot of functionality, but not all of its functionality works on all platforms.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  So let's say I'm going to do it, I'm going to bring Swift to Fuchsia, right? And it's going to run on Fuchsia on ARM, and it's going to make your fridge talk. I could write some ARM code to support the Swift functions, right? You know, I could write that backing code so that now I could use more of Swift so that I can make my talking fridge really responsive and great. Like, that's just like how you port software to different platforms. If, if Java was not available for making software, I feel like Oracle should have said, "This is not for making software. This is just a thing that you look at.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  This is just code that you can, you could read a book that we published about Java, but you, you're not supposed to make software with Java." It doesn't make any sense.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  Paul, I can, I can simplify this for you. Have you ever heard of Bikram yoga? Which is the hot yoga, the yoga you do in a hot room.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, okay. I've heard of hot yoga.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  In, in 2015, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Bikram yoga isn't copyrightable because it is an idea rather than an expression. Hmm. Okay, so, wow, you are really, really poking at me. It relates. It sort of relates.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  This whole section is just me trolling Neelai.

• 40:12Nilay Patel?

  You're killing me.

• 40:17Nilay Patel?

  The thing is like, I'm gonna get it wrong and the copyright lawyers are gonna yell at me, but I'm gonna try.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 40:22Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna try to remember what I learned ages ago.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  So the idea of expression dichotomy is foundational to the notion of copyright law. So for something to be copyrighted, the right that you're getting is the right to copy it. In order to copy it, it needs to be fixed in a tangible. If you have an idea for a song, you're singing it out loud, you don't get a copyright. You record it, now you get a copyright, right?

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  It's you get this tangible fixed expression. So the idea doesn't count. So the bickering yoga people, if they wrote a manual for how to do bickering, that manual can be copyrighted. But just doing it is not. So that's like a whole thing. With Google and Oracle, the the main thing is that Oracle did write down the structure, sequence and organization of the Java API. Right? So how it's structured, the sequence of those elements, the organization of it. And Google is saying, yes, in order to use Java for our operating system, we had to reuse that structure. But none of the technical implementation of the API is the same as yours. So you write an app in Java and you call some API.

• 41:31Nilay Patel?

  Android is doing something totally different. It's like, right? You call the API, you say, return, return this data. And the way that Java is, Sun implements it, does something to return the data. The way Android does it does something different, but all that's really happening is you're pushing the API. Right? You're saying, give me this thing that I want.

• 41:50Nilay Patel?

  Literally Oracle is saying to use the structure, sequence, organization of the Java APIs. Is it not? It's like, that's copyright infringement. And Google is saying, well, no, this is how people know how to code. So if we don't, then everybody who knows how to use Java won't be able to write, write an app for the Android phone and Java is open source. So this is like, this is the debate. It's not so much idea and expression. That's the other thing.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Why is this copyright instead of patent?

• 42:17Nilay Patel?

  There was a whole set of patent claims and they were, they were tossed out. The, the heart of this is structure, sequence and organization of the API in copyright. It's actually been to the Supreme Court once and it was denied and now it's going again. Well, the Supreme Court denied to review the case, denied cert.

• 42:32Speaker 03

  There, there's a long history of, you have to copy the structure, sequence, layout, whatever of, of a machine if you want to be compatible with it, right? So, so when you made IBM compatible operating system, you know, you had to make it like, I mean, this is actually a, one reason why a lot of people can't forgive Microsoft is that Microsoft has been extorting companies that have used Linux for decades over the, the fact that Linux implements the FAT file system, right? FAT, the dumbest, simplest file system of all time that's been around for 30 or 40 years.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Microsoft has a patent on it and so Microsoft extorts money out of companies for using Linux because they have a patent on FAT. I mean, it, this is why we should abolish patents and copyright. The end. Thank you.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Problem solved.

• 43:33Nilay Patel?

  The FAT patents one expired, so that's fine.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's still hard to forgive Microsoft for being such an asshole about it.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, fair. I mean, I disagree with you on that, but we can move on to the next thing.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:46Nilay Patel?

  Because the, the next thing is about the expansion of copyrights in digital spaces.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  Which troubles me every time. So I've been thinking about this a lot. I've been tweeting about it a lot. I should probably just write it down, but I'm talking about the podcast and stuff. So there's all these people suing Epic. There's now four cases, I think, about the dancing emotes in Fortnite, right? And we've done some good coverage on it. I think Nick wrote a great piece. He talked to a lawyer who had been a professional dancer, like the, the single best analyst that you can find for such a thing, right? Like the copyright lawyer who's been, who actually is a dancer. Um, and there's great coverage out there. I don't think anybody has really thought through the public policy implications. So here are the facts. So you've got 2 Milli, the rapper. You've got the guy did the Carlton dance. You've got the floss kid. They're all represented by the same law firm.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  They're all suing Epic because Epic lifted their dances into these emotes. It's actually kind of complicated how you buy them. You have to buy the battle pass, they come in pack, you can maybe buy them individually. But basically, they say, "You're selling our dance and we deserve a cut of that." Right? That is a lot. So then you have a lot of people saying, "Well, that's true." They made this thing, they put this culture out in the world, Fortnite is selling it, like a version of it, they're making tons of money on Fortnite, just printing money with Fortnite. It only makes sense that they should have to pay these people who made these dances. You can't just boost stuff out of internet culture and resell it somewhere else. It's only fair. And I think that fairness argument is very powerful for people, given the scale of Fortnite's

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  success. Yeah. What I think is extremely dangerous, and so Paul, I don't think we should abolish copyright, basically because I was a copyright lawyer and it's very dear to me. Every time we... Well, in that case, we could keep it. But every time you expand the realm of copyrightable subject matter, you run into insane side effects that we see over and over again. So this issue has never really been litigated before because, quite frankly, there's not a lot of money in dancing, which is just a real thing. But Fortnite has a lot of money, so this law firm is out there. So you can copyright a work of choreography. So the single ladies dance that Beyonce does in that video.

• 46:04Nilay Patel?

  If you just do that whole thing again and sell it for lots of money, Beyonce and choreographers can sue you for lifting her choreography. If you want to put on a Broadway show at your high school theater, you can buy the choreography to the Broadway version in a book where choreography is written down. And you can like redo it, right? Like you can buy these rights to choreography. So like a long piece of choreography is a copyrightable thing. If you especially if you write it down, if you like notate it or you like make a video of it. Expression. It is not clear whether a sequence of dance moves is copyrightable. The copyright office, not the law, but the copyright office says no. Right?

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 46:42Nilay Patel?

  The law says, but that when you look at like just sort of the guidance of the copyright office, they're like, no, like their example is the hustle is not copyrightable. Cause that's just like a common dance move. But that's not the law. That's just the copyright office has got. And so these cases are going to create precedent for like the quantum of dancing that is protectable under copyright law. And that that like quantum of that unit of dancing is not yet. We don't know where the threshold is between what is not protected because it's just the hustle. Everybody can do the hustle. Or it's this like larger piece of choreography.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Well, and what about, what about like simultaneous dance invention? Like, do you have people rushing to like, like, like they put an SD card of a video of them like doing a new dance move and then mail to themselves like the, like the trick with copyright?

• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  So that you have like a timestamp of when you invented a dance. So now you can sue everybody, whoever does that dance move.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. So that's like, there's, there's your, I mean, you can like fairly say like the Carlton dance guy. He's first, like he invented it on the Fresh Prince. You probably, you know, like the Millie Rock, like the dude's name is too Millie. It's called the Millie Rock like, right? Like, but that unit of ownership doesn't exist. Like it's not clear where the boundaries of the unit of ownership are, which is a very hard concept to get your head around.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  You can own a song, but you write a song. You can register copyright in a song. You can own the sample of a song.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  Right, so.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  And you can own a riff as well.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  But you can't own the song title, right?

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  See?

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  That's a whole different thing. But you can own some notes, right? So like the difference between these are just some notes and this is a riff and this is me quoting your riff in a transformative work. Those are all things that get litigated case by case. And we do it for songs, so songs make lots of money. You can't really reuse a riff. Like you can't just like take the satisfaction riff from the Rolling Stones and like make satisfaction again. Like you will get sued for that.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  I know, but I've said that's pretty close to a dance. It's timing, right? It's what you're doing and how long you do it.

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so very famously, uh, Robin Thicke and Pharrell got sued for Blurred Lines.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:48Nilay Patel?

  Right, and like court ruled this is too close to the, to another song, even though they're not the same. So there's a lot of that precedent out there in the law. But here, and I think there's that expectation, right? Like if Blurred Lines had flopped, I don't think they would have gotten sued. So you make this hit, you know, making lots of money. Authors who think they contributed to your work are gonna come for you.

• 49:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  None of that expectation is there culturally with dancing, right? Like you see Michael Jackson moonwalking, you can moonwalk. No one thinks like, oh, if I moonwalk in a bar, I hope this bar has a jukebox license, which is how that would usually work. So here's my, my worst case scenario, right? There are dance music trolls in firms, startup,

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  that buy up the rights to dance moves on the internet for cash payments. Right, you just like need a million dollars, you're gonna go buy 100 dance moves for $10,000 each, right? Like you're just like, didn't do it. You're just buy a lot of money and then you use the rest of your million dollars to file lawsuits against other people who do that dance move. Cause who's not gonna take the upfront cash payment for their dance move?

• 49:53Speaker 04

  This hasn't been a problem or a thing until Fortnite, right?

• 49:56Nilay Patel?

  Until Fortnite.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  The only reason that people go after it if, in any copyright situation is if there's money in it. Okay.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying this unit of ownership has never existed before.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  Never existed before. There's no cultural heritage.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  Right, but there's, there's, there are a million places where the law around owning a thing is complicated as hell. We did the super long podcast with Sarah about Mechanica rights way back in the, whatever it was with music. You know what? What's one more super complicated vague area of law for people to sue each other over? Like, it's not gonna burn everything down and, you know, Epic is still gonna make money. Like, are you worried about stifling dance move innovation in the world? Is that, is that what you're afraid of?

• 50:42Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I'm absolutely worried about stifling dance move innovation. Wouldn't you be worried about stifling dance move innovation?

• 50:47Speaker 04

  No, dude, I can't dance.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think you should be worried about stifling dance move innovation. My point is, this set, this thing, which is very strange, which is digital representations of dancing for your avatar, has created the opportunity for there to be a new quanta of ownership and copyright, which is crazy, right? Like, to create a new thing that you can own does like not happen very often. That you can go sue somebody else just for doing in a YouTube video, right? So, I don't know, like, some YouTuber flosses for eight seconds in a video. The floss kid can, has, will now have the right to go sue them for whatever portion of YouTube ad revenues they get if they're not demonetized.

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  YouTube has to develop a content ID system to make sure dances are not infringing in their videos, because they don't want the secondary liability. If, this is one I pointed out yesterday, all kinds of NFL players do dances on the sidelines when they score touchdowns. A lot of money in the NFL. Do all these people get to go sue the players, the NFL, the broadcasters? If you accidentally do a dance that you didn't know was copyrighted? This is like the Pandora's box of crazy that these lawsuits. So I think everybody's very focused on the unfairness of wealth transfer here. But I, I think the nightmare scenario of like Nathan Mervil being like, well, this worked in patents. I'm just going to run around buying up dance moves. So I can, I can just go sue, I mean, they do this music samples happens.

• 52:19Nilay Patel?

  There are companies that will scan for samples.

• 52:21Speaker 04

  I am worried about, uh, dance move patent troll organizations, dance move troll organizations.

• 52:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  Buying them all up.

• 52:28Nilay Patel?

  The next great villain.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  That's bad.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  From Marvel to the.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  However, if we can, if we could stop that from happening and we just allow these like quanta of movements to be copyrightable. Then we have a, um, a massive source of non-governmental funding for the arts. Choreographers don't get paid jack. And now here's a way for them to make some money. It's great.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a poorly monetized profession.

• 52:55Nilay Patel?

  Look, I just in my, like, I've been thinking about it because there's a fourth lawsuit filed this week. So you can go listen to a function with Neil Dash, also on the Box Me Podcast Network. He did a whole thing about sort of the inequity of, of the wealth transfer. He actually had 2 Milli on his show. Go listen to that. It's, it's, it's fine. It's all fine. But I just, I want listeners to also think like, you're creating a new thing. You're creating a new thing that people can sue over. In like the history of platforms being overzealous with knocking down copyright infringement. The history of DMCA complaints, the histories of unscrupulous law firms trolling because of intellectual property rights. I, I actually think there's some value to like, to Paul's point, some things not being copyrighted.

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  This copyright not existing in some places. Because it lets people just do stuff. It lets culture spread faster. And so if you start adding money and rights to something that has historically not had it, you will necessarily crush it. And I, I don't, I think everyone's so focused on the unfairness aspect that the knock on effect of kids on YouTube getting sued is like not there. Like there's a whole fight in Europe right now over articles 11 and 13 where Google and Facebook would have to pay a link tax, where they'd have to, every online service provider has to have aggressive content filtering IDs. Imagine if you added dance moves to that mix because you can own them. But that's, it's nuts. Okay, that's it. My rant is over.

• 54:25Speaker 07

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• 55:26Nilay Patel?

  Sonos, rumored to be making headphones.

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is a report from German over at Bloomberg, and it seems like he's got sources, but in addition to that, Sonos has recently told shareholders, quote, "We plan to push our boundaries by investing resources to make the experience of Sonos outside the home a reality." Which is the worst quote ever. But, got me thinking, like, why would you want Sonos headphones? Number one, maybe they'll sound good, right? Like, that seems like a good reason, right? But is there any other reason you would want, in particular, Sonos headphones as opposed to just good sounding Sony or Bang & Olson or whatever headphones?

• 56:07Speaker 03

  The ideal with the Sonos headphones, this would pay off if you're walking home, you know, you just got off the train, you walk home, and you listen to a song, and the song's about to get real good, and so you take off your headphones, you put them on a Sonos dock, and then you're, bam, your Sonos system comes alive, you know, and like the song's climax, it's really exciting. That would be the Sonos experience for headphones. Otherwise, I don't really get it.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. The only other reason I could think of to want to have Sonos headphones is if you somehow think that Sonos's software of like queuing up all like integrating all the different music services that you listen to into a single app and letting you like queue up things from like here's the thing for my podcast app and then I'll play some music next and then I'll play this thing from this, you know, radio app that does the news and then blah, blah, blah, blah. And you just want to have like a central repository of everything that auditory that you've got and then you'll be able to use that with your headphones in addition to using it at home.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  You can just have like a queue.

• 57:11Nilay Patel?

  But then you've got to like route all audio in your life through the Sonos app, which is just deeply depressing.

• 57:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, from Sonos's perspective, that is exactly what they need to be doing because otherwise other apps are theoretically going to get better at at routing your app audio and they'll also work with home speakers that aren't Sonos.

• 57:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I think I think they just need more products. What Sonos is effectively saying is like, our product line is limited to these experiences inside your house. People are only going to buy so many speakers. We need to sell them one more thing or we need to bring them into our ecosystem in a way that is additive. Like, it would be cool if you put on your Sonos headphones at home and the audio switched from your Sonos beam to your headphones.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, that would be neat, but that doesn't mean your Sonos experience is out out of the home yet.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I, to me, I feel like they, we reported a TS on a survey they were doing across a bunch of platforms where they're like, what products should we make next? Headphones were not on that list. It was a bunch of other stuff like a cheaper Sonos sub, Atmos rear firing speakers, like.

• 58:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:16Nilay Patel?

  I think that stuff will take them farther. Rolling out Google Assistant, which Dieter and I saw, will like accelerate them. I just, I don't, I'm very curious what they can offer for headphones. In that same report, by the way, it was very interesting. I think you already mentioned that Apple was making headphones with their own high-end cans.

• 58:34Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 58:35Nilay Patel?

  And AirPods.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, that rumor's been around for a while. Yeah, yeah.

• 58:37Nilay Patel?

  Apple owns Beats. Remember the original, super premium, expensive headphone brand?

• 58:43Speaker 04

  Nobody at Apple remembers that.

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  Has, has ever an acquisition been so like bungled?

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Most acquisitions.

• 58:50Nilay Patel?

  No, it's just like, they bought Beats. I get that Apple Music exists. There's no reason to spend a billion dollars to buy the core of Apple Music. They definitely could have gotten those deals and built that service themselves. It's all, it's been re-architected along the way. It's not like Jimmy and Dre and Trent Reznor are doing anything, right?

• 59:08Speaker 04

  You don't know that?

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  Trent Reznor is not doing anything in it. I just, I promise you, he's not going to work every day and being like, I think we should fire 200 car engineers, like.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  You don't, you don't think, I mean, I feel like they've probably already gotten their money's worth from Beats just in hardware sales.

• 59:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that was part of the deal, right? It was like, this is like, this is an acquisition that'll pay for itself. But they didn't do anything with the products, except put W1 in them and then inconsistently add lightning ports. Yeah. It's just amazing that, like, there can be rumors in the world of Apple making headphones when they bought a dominant headphone company.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. I just feel like a lot of acquisitions go that way.

• 59:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  The cultures don't, don't mesh.

• 59:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, how long has Google owned Nest?

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Nest.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  Right?

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  So there's that, there's that story this week of, of people's passwords getting reused. Like, people had bad passwords, so their Nest, people were logging into their Nest cameras. Where they reused passwords and then people logged into their Nest accounts. And then were issuing like fake warnings of impending war with North Korea. Did you see this?

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  And support Nest, it's like not really their fault, right? Like, everyone's like, Nest cameras get hacked. And you're like, looking to what it really is and it's, we reused their password.

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  Well, Nest could have like kept a closer eye on, I don't know, you, you could make the case that at some point, Nest should like look at its customers that don't have two factor. Uh, and I don't know, is the onus on Nest to like let their customers know like, hey, you're on Have I Been Owned? And, uh, we noticed you should change your password. You know what I mean?

• 1:00:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't know, like, but you could make the case that they might have had some responsibility to like,

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  try and keep an eye out for some of their customers that might have had passwords compromised on other sites. Maybe. I don't want, might want to say that, but sure.

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  Anyway.

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  Maybe. Especially because they, they make cameras and thermostats. Like, they have a higher duty of care, right?

• 1:01:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:01:00Nilay Patel?

  But Nest is owned by Google? And you can't log into your Nest account with your Google account. And Google does all that stuff like it's that is just a crazy situation to me that I mean, I literally when Matt Rogers was a CTO, he's gone now. I emailed him and I was like, hey, I just bought a Nest thermostat. Why can't I log in with my Google account? And he just replied with good idea, smiley face. And it was like two and a half years ago.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  What do you, I don't know. So you're right, Paul. Maybe, maybe the solution to like antitrust in the world, this should actually just let everyone buy each other because it will inevitably fall apart.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  Does what? Thank you. I thank you for joining my team.

• 1:01:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm not on your team, Paul. I'm just, I'm just interested in your, in your literature.

• 1:01:47Nilay Patel?

  My team has sensible antitrust regulations.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  And some modicum of copyright laws. All right. Can we, can we end real quick on what's going on with Netflix and Hulu and then wrap this thing up?

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  Only if we let Paul do his weekly segment that we never forget about and that he does every week with the same name all the time.

• 1:02:05Nilay Patel?

  Paul, I'm sorry, buddy.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  You are gonna love this week so much. Like always, the segment is called, my heart is a low frequency oscillator.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  And Teenage Engineering is the, is the greatest company on earth. They just came out with this like, uh, it's called the OPZ, as the Europeans say, or OPZ, which is the follow-up to the OP1. So it's like a little synthesizer thing. It's really cool, has no screen, very hard to use, very exciting. But just now, I guess because it's NAM, they announced another product, which is this line of, uh, pocket operator modular synths. So I don't know. It, I didn't hear about modular synthesis till like six months ago, but imagine this, Neelai. Imagine a gadget that is only headphone jacks.

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Right? And, and sometimes volume knobs.

• 1:03:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  So, so then you plug one aux cable. Sometimes, often, actually.

• 1:03:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  So, so basically, it, it, it, it's just a money sink. So you get into like the Euro Rack system is 3.5 millimeter. There's also modular synthesis with quarter inch jacks. This is teenage engineering is trying to make a very affordable modular synthesis setup. And it's, it just looks awesome. And it'll, and it's, I mean, it's not cheap. It's $500, but that's cheap for modular synthesis. And it's got a lot of stuff to it. Anyways, if you haven't ever heard of modular synthesis and you like spending thousands of dollars on gear, it's, it, there's so much YouTube waiting for you out there.

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm ready for it. I love teenage engineering. It's my favorite. By the way, I should, I should note that it's NAMM this week. It's a big music trade show and Danny Deal and Vlad are at NAMM and they're reporting on a bunch of wild stuff. This is a big focus for us this year. Like I want us to do more tools coverage for creators because there's an explosion of neat podcasting stuff, neat video streamer stuff, neat cameras for YouTubers. Instagram is like Renaissance of photography equipment. So I want to, I want us to do a lot more of that this year and connect the tools creators are using to the platforms are using and the work they're doing. And it's like, that's the verge. That's like the thing that we do. So look out for, if you're into this music stuff, look out for Danny and Vlad this week because they're at NAMM.

• 1:04:31Nilay Patel?

  Danny's got some wild interviews lined up, actually. I'm excited for it. Okay. I was going to do Netflix and Hulu, but here's the news. Netflix is going to cost $2 more and Hulu is going to cost $2 left. So it's a wash.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:44Nilay Patel?

  That's kind of it.

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  That's kind of the news. Like Netflix makes a ton of, of news with its shows all the time. It gets, you know, Oscar nominations and it, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. Join the NPA.

• 1:04:54Nilay Patel?

  Hulu has The Handmaid's Tale? Yeah, Netflix joining the NPA, which just makes me so sad.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, Hulu and like Hulu has The Handmaid's Tale and like they're just like still around. Like that's, I hate to say it, but like Hulu is not making the splashes that they need to. And so it makes sense that they're, you know, dropping their prices. Let some kind of needle Netflix a little bit and good on that, but.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  There's good stuff.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  I don't know where they're going.

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  There's like some wild. Yeah, like they have some good originals and they have obviously the first run stuff from the major networks. What I will say is that I like assigned out like we need to do a Netflix versus Hulu piece. Blah blah. I was like looking at it today with Chris Welch. It'll be up by the time you listen to this. So pull over in your car and read our Netflix versus Hulu piece. But so, you know, one of the things, so they have different content, obviously, but they're also like technically very different, like worlds apart. Netflix technically is way ahead of Hulu, right? Netflix supports 4K. They support Dolby Vision. They some stuff in Atmos. They have lots of stuff in surround sound. Hulu is like 1080p stereo in most cases, at most.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  So I was like, I'm reading this and I was like, Chris, you didn't mention surround sound. He's like, actually Hulu supports surround sound, but only on certain devices. And it's the in here's, here's the truth. Hulu, you can get surround sound from Hulu on a Nintendo Switch, but you cannot get it, this is true, but you cannot get it on the Apple TV or Roku.

• 1:06:20Nilay Patel?

  It's like the Xbox One, the PS4, the Switch. You can make, some stuff on Hulu will have surround sound, but not Roku or the Apple TV. It's absolutely bonkers. I don't understand what they're doing. And thus I will pay them $2 less a month.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  My question is what, why is there a service for people who like movies that are already made? You know what I mean? Like, I want to watch Doctor Strangelove.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  It's called Vudu or iTunes Movies.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have to buy them. You have to like rent and buy.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  It used to be called Netflix, but they lost all the rights to stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of movies. They lost all the rights to the stuff and the junk. What you're describing, Paul, is HBO.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  You just get HBO now and you get HBO's library of movies and you're fine.

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  They have a just very small curated selection of films.

• 1:07:10Nilay Patel?

  You're looking for every movie.

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  Well, right now I'm looking for Doctor Strangelove, which by the way, there's not a very good, I mean, I know there are a couple of websites that help you find which service a film is on. But there's not a very good one.

• 1:07:23Nilay Patel?

  I think, Paul, you should go full on into owning physical media. This is the next step for you into like Criterion Collection Blu-rays into like walls of books. Like, I would like to come visit you and enter like a plush mahogany media space.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Yes. Okay. Here's my thing. I would buy, well, one, physical media is not great like archivally and like a, like a last for a hundred years.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  Neither is digital media.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  No, but at least you didn't buy.

• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so your, your, your criteria is it should la, it should outlast you?

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  Yes. If I could buy like a holographic cube, right? That stores a film for over a hundred years. That's my criteria. Paul's criteria collection, over a hundred years.

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. The show is going on too long and you've got like 30 seconds left.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  It needs to, it needs to be 8K minimum. Cause 4K is not equal to the resolution of 35mm film. And if I'm gonna get an archival set, anyways, that's what, that's when I'll move to physical media.

• 1:08:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, get on it. Sony, I don't know. Who's gonna make a weird format that lasts for a hundred years in 8K? It's Sony. Yeah. So if anyone at Sony is listening.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  Memory stick 8K.

• 1:08:47Nilay Patel?

  Memory stick cube.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Memory stick cube.

• 1:08:50Nilay Patel?

  Alpha. That's been the Vergecast, everyone. Worst of the year. It's the year, you know, it's only January, so that's fine. Uh, we'll be back next week. We'll have another interview episode. You know, another Vergecast on Thursday. Listen to all of season three of Why'd You Push That Button? It is, um, you know, a good podcast that you can listen to. It's well-produced, tells a narrative story. It ends on time. So listen to that show. Ashlyn and Caitlin are great. You can listen to Pivot with Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher. I mentioned Function earlier. You can listen to Function with Neil Dash. All great shows on the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can also follow us on all the social platforms, but honestly, just like shut it down, read a book, but while listening to us. Okay. Rock and roll.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  Paul. Email me about fuchsia.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  Dr. Strangelove is available on archive.org. But is that legal? I don't know.

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