Galaxy S10E review and Spotify takes on Apple

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Natt Garun, and Paul Miller discuss the changes in the new Android Q beta as well as a review of the Samsung Galaxy S10, S10+. and S10E. Which phone is best? Also, Spotify files antitrust complaint over 'Apple tax' All that and much more on this week's Vergecast. Stories discussed in this episode: Android Q developer beta is available now on all Pixel devices The best early features of Android Q Every new Android Q feature we have found so farSamsung Galaxy S10E review: short, not shortchangedSamsung Galaxy S10 review: the awkward middle childSamsung Galaxy Buds review: imperfectly acceptableFacebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are still down for some users …Facebook returns after its worst outage everFacebook and Instagram's outage cost advertisers thousands of …Spotify files antitrust complaint over 'Apple tax' Why Vivo thinks port-less phones are the futureApple confirms March 25th event, expected to announce new TV …Apple's WWDC 2019 will kick off on June 3rd 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Hey, real quick, before we start, Vox Media is doing a survey about podcasts. So just go to this web address, take the survey, make us look good. It's voxmedia.com/podsurvey. If an answer can favor us, I'd appreciate it. This week on The Vergecast, we're joined by Nat Garen. We're going to talk about the Galaxy S10e. Dieter's going to fall in love with the Galaxy S10. We're going to talk about Apple versus Spotify, talk about Android Q. We're going to do a little bit of a preview of Apple's event on the 25th.

• 0:23Speaker 01

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• 1:07Speaker 02

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• 1:39Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge Podcast Network, of which there are two. So we're doing great. Why'd you push that button? Doing a great job, but we are the flagship. I'm your friend Neelai. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bohn is here. Hello. And Matt Garen is here.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  Nat reviewed the S10e this week.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  I sure did.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  But we're back. I just want to start by saying thank you to everyone who came and saw us live at South by Southwest. I was just describing it to Paul as an out of body experience. To have that many people, A, just come see us at all, and then B, be completely enthusiastic in a conversation about antitrust policy is just beyond my wildest imagination. It's probably because we had an open bar. I'm going to be honest with you, but-

• 2:22Speaker 04

  No, but hang on. At the end of the, end of the podcast, we always ask for questions and typically at these live podcasts, you know, well, we spent an hour talking about, you know, antitrust policy and then the first question is iPhone or Android. But instead, all the questions were about antitrust policy. It was really fun.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was great. And I just, to everyone who came, thank you so much. If you listened to it, just know I, about halfway through, I just literally could not believe it was happening because it was so much fun and so cool. So, thank you, everybody. We want to do more of those in the future. We'll do more of those in the future. If you want to sponsor the open bar or live podcast, get in touch. That'd be great. Because it really, really helped everyone along. Okay, let's get into it. First things first, we are recording this before this happens, but the Tesla Model Y will be announced this evening. Elon and crew putting it out. We have, we're going to have full coverage of that. You'll see it on the site. Just one thing I want to point out, Sean O'Kane wrote a great piece for us today. Tesla is, as I'm sure you're aware, is on a bit of a bumpy ride, is Liz Lopato says Elon is Elon-ing

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  again. But they famously don't advertise at all, right? So even in their, their like SEC quarterly reports, they say one of our biggest advantages and one of our biggest weaknesses all at the same time is we sell all of our cars through word of mouth and like reputation and people loving the brand. So, a really interesting thing that has been happening is Model 3 demand is like a bit of a question mark. So for a while, the Model 3 had what appeared to be like infinite demand. It's like the best selling car ever. People, they literally can't make them fast enough. That demand appears to be tapering. The Model Y is what comes in. It's this, it'll be sort of the compact SUV. It's the most popular style of car. That's going to be the one. It's either going to prove it out or not. So that's, that's the thing to watch for tonight.

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  See how people react to it. See how pre-orders go, all that stuff. It's the open question. You should read Sean's report. It's a lot more detailed. It has actual research in it. But it's the one thing I think people should be watching for now that the model, by the time you listen to this, the Model 3, the Model Y will be announced. It's the thing to watch for. So like I said, we're taping this before it happens, but it's happening. Okay. Now, on to the extremely nerdy stuff. I'm very happy we're starting the show on nerd business instead of law business.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  It's where we've been lately. It's where the whole industry's been lately, but there's nerd stuff going on. Dieter, Android Q, tell me what's going on.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  So last few years, Google has been like, surprise, we're releasing a beta of the next version of Android right now in March. And it's no longer a surprise because they've done it again. Android Q is out in beta for Pixel phones and nicely enough, all the Pixel phones. They went back an extra year, which is great by popular demand, they said. But the, the thing about this early beta is it's an early beta. It seems stabler than I expected, but you still should never install it on your primary phone. And typically there's like the stuff in the early beta that's there because developers need to be ready for it because it might break their app or change stuff. But the like actual user facing features and final stuff doesn't come until just, you know, a little bit later at Google I/O.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  So, I mean, we could break it down. Nat did a great video with this thing. I could talk about like the nerdy developer stuff and like there's, but there's also other hints of what user facing stuff is going to be in here. So I don't know, I don't know. Where do you want to start, Nat? Do you want to start like deep nerd or you want to do user facing?

• 5:43Nilay Patel?

  Let's do user. I mean, the people-

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the more fun stuff is user facing, which I think people are going to be excited to find out that dark mode is now extending to the rest of the phone, or at least it seems like it's going to be the system wide. It's actually disappeared from the display under settings, but if you do just put it on like battery saver, then the whole thing turns into- Dark mode, which is pretty awesome, like the settings and like the

• 6:06Speaker 04

  That's cool.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Apps like in the main drawer now is all dark mode, which I think people really excited about. That's one thing. If you dig into developer settings, there's also now some customization tools that changes like icon shapes. So for some reason you don't like circles, you can now get teardrop and squirk, squirk.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  Oh man, squircle.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Squircle.

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Squircle. Yeah, official, official name for the setting. Yeah. Yeah, zoom mode is available now on your Oh my god. Pixel phone.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So if you don't like circles, which are, you know, to me, very appealing to the eye, you can now get teardrop because why not?

• 6:41Speaker 04

  That's great.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then you can also change like the top bar to a different color. Now there's purple. Sure. Yeah. Fun stuff like that.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Is it all just thematic tweaks like that?

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Trying to think what else was available.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  So the, the way I see, like, if you look at the stuff that just mentioned, you can change a few colors. There's a dark mode toggle, which actually isn't there. But if you install the beta while you have dark mode on in P, then it like sticks with dark mode. It's this whole thing. And, you know, some font stuff and some icon shape stuff, you put that all together and you're like, oh, this is the very early version of theming. And they're just going to actually offer proper theming built into it in the way that Samsung phones have had for years. Or if you install a third party launcher, you've been able to get, but they'll do it a little bit more system wide, a little bit more native to the platform. So even though they're only offering like green, purple and some other color right now, blue. I anticipate that they're, they're going to be officially showing like a full on dark mode and then hard and parcel that full on theming.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  And what we've been able to look at so far, like the building blocks of that thing. That's cool. That's my hunch. Is that going to extend to like third parties or is that? That's complicated, right? I know. It could, it could extend to all third parties. It could be just a base part of Android. Or that's probably what it's going to be because, you know, it's in this early beta. So they want developers to play with it and everyone to sort of see how it's going. But like theming exists now for current Android phones. So one of the reasons, one of the things you can do on a S10 is like, they've got a whole theming system. Right. And there's like a handful of Samsung apps that could apply to it and you apply templates and blah, blah, blah, blah. So like. Making it system wide is actually like not that difficult. It's kind of a solved problem. Like Samsung, for example, is one of the companies that has basically solved it.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  But Samsung is also an interesting example because it's also like a closed ecosystem of, you know, themes. And so if Google wanted, there could be like the Google ecosystem of themes and then everyone else is on their own to figure out how they're going to theme. I suspect it's just going to be a bait like part of the system for everybody. And maybe if we're lucky, like two years from now, everybody all adopt it instead of using their own custom rolled themes.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  That's what I think is probably going to happen, but it's possible. Google could just keep it for their own.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's also possible they'll roll out Fuchsia right when that is finally done and then we'll start all over again.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  How do you guys feel like dark dark mode seems like it's like one of those like easy features that like Apple and Google have left until last. Just as like a nice PR win when they've run out of ideas like I love it. I prefer it for most of my applications, except for like reading prose. I don't really like dark mode for reading prose. Like, is it so important to you guys?

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  No, I don't think it's I don't think it's that important. I think it's very appealing and nicety eyes. But I also think that like, I don't know, most people who use phones aren't just like early adopters. Like my mom probably won't like this.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  What she wants to run dark mode.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  I I I think it's cool that it saves battery on OLED screens. That's neat.

• 9:34Speaker 05

  That's true.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  Does it save that much battery?

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  I have no idea. I guess you just you just roped yourself into a long term test. Two identical phones.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  I feel like there was like a like a like a hack or some extension you can install on Firefox back in the day. And turn all the websites black to save to save battery on your laptop. But that that doesn't make any sense.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  That never actually.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  It theoretically makes sense on OLED.

• 10:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just think it's trendy, right?

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  Like we we went from like, you know, the early web, we just did the web 30th anniversary A to Z thing. Jacob put together was super fun. There were like lots of like black web pages and like green text on black to be super retro and blah, blah, blah. And then I was then we're like, oh, wait, no, we can. We can make stuff white and like white space exists. And let's make things big and blocky and do cards everywhere. And then everything was cards and dark mode is just the latest UI trend. That's that's kind of how I see it.

• 10:27Nilay Patel?

  I do think it is kind of it's what's fun about it is how fast everyone realized what Paul is saying, which is if you just add it. Like some X percentage of your user base will be irrationally happy. Right, like dark mode is here and I'm like, okay, like Slack added dark mode. Like, how moody do you need your Slack to be? Like, what kind of Batman chatroom are you in? But like, it's fun. Like, just that moment is fun. You understand what the incentives are. Like, you flip your UI around and something everyone's happy with you? Like, that, there are not many UI changes that offer you that, that reaction.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter, what's some of the nerd stuff in Q?

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Well, Matt didn't mention my favorite thing. So she can guess what my favorite thing is.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  My favorite user-facing feature.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Is it the share sheet?

• 11:14Speaker 04

  Yes!

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, um, yeah.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  Mind meld.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, mm, I got you, bro.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  My tweet about this was at the top of Android's Reddit subreddit.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  I don't know, it's insane, anyway.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Okay, well, the share sheet now has a much slower lag. Um, yeah, and then it gives you the little URL and then like the copy to clipboard, like, right up top, which is normally the way people want to be sharing stuff. So that's a lot better. Um, I found that in some of my use case, like, it doesn't always bring up my frequent contacts, but like, if you use it often enough, it'll start to come up and it'll load a lot faster. So that's always really nice.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  It's based on, I believe, the Actions framework that was introduced in P. And it's also something they've been promising for a year. Right now, the share sheet kind of has to like, when you pull up the share sheet, it has to go, "Hey, Android apps, all of you, what, how do we share to you?" And the Android apps go, "Uh, hang on a second, let me..."

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it all starts running up.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  And then they like, it pops up and then things start moving around and there's a pause and delay. But now, apps have to publish ahead of time, quote-unquote, publish ahead of time, how they're, how they share to the system through actions. I think it's actions, yeah, it's action, or slices, no, it's actions. And then that allows the share sheet to come up more quickly. Google says instantly, but Nat, I think you, you said it was like less lag.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  No, I don't, yeah, no, I think that, like, once, the first time you hit share, it definitely takes, you know, like, a half second, but then after that, it comes up pretty quick.

• 12:37Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 12:38Nilay Patel?

  Is that how iOS works? So the apps publish into a registry and that's why they're always there?

• 12:42Speaker 04

  There's a lot of, isn't that how iOS works in Android Q?

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  I see.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  For example, location sharing.

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  There's one thing on this list, I'm looking at the list from Android Police of continuously updating features, that is definitely not an iOS, which is a desktop mode. Have either of you tried the desktop mode?

• 12:59Speaker 04

  Not yet.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's what I want more than any, screw your dark mode, whatever, you can have all the colors and themes you want. What I want is you plug the phone into a thing and it turns into a fully windowed operating system for no reason.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  I mean Dex does that, Samsung does that.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Samsung, I mean, that's, isn't that the history? Samsung does the Samsung way, and then Google putters along and two years later they do it correctly for everybody else.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that desktop mode is also half there because they like, they already like three quarters built it to get Android apps working in Chrome OS. And so like, oh, you know, I've, I've basically almost finished a double major instead of getting a minor, I might as well just take this one extra class and do it. And then they created desktop mode.

• 13:41Nilay Patel?

  I love it, that's great. Anything else from Q that we need to know about?

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's some other nerdy stuff, like permissions are gonna be a little different in Q, just like iOS, now you can have, you can set app permissions to only access your location when the app is in use, instead of a blanket yes or no. So that's helpful, I think that'll help with battery, that'll help with people who want to limit their data sharing with third parties. It's also gonna limit how apps can access your other phone identifiers, like your serial number and IMEI, and it's going to by default randomize your MAC address, so like this all matters and like means anything to you if you hate ad targeting and just want more, a tighter control around that, so if you care about this stuff, like, that's coming in Q. Screenshots now have a frickin' notch in it.

• 14:28Nilay Patel?

  Is that true, that wasn't just part of the early beta that we saw?

• 14:30Speaker 03

  I mean, it is technically still an early beta, so it is still true. I don't know what this is for, I, I don't know, like, this is the definition of weird flex, cause like, I have a Pixel 3, look at my notch on my screenshot. I don't know what else. I have no idea what else this is supposed to be for, but that's the only thing I can think of.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  It's funny, cause Apple 100% does it the other way and they remove the notch. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what Android does now is it removes the notch. So it's whatever. The the permission stuff is really interesting because that's that's the other example of like what the iPhone does. And I it can cut both ways. The way Google's characterizing it is anything that's a permanent, unchangeable identifier on your phone, they want to limit an app's ability to access. So not just listed off the things. It's your MAC address. It's your IMEI. It's your serial. And that should make it harder for apps to track you and put, you know, whatever. And then, you know, you can reset your stuff and they'll reset your MAC address by default and blah, blah, blah, blah. On the other hand, it doesn't stop Google

• 15:33Speaker 04

  from knowing that stuff. And so it makes it so that if an app wants to track you down to like your person, who you are, that it gets harder for them to do it just on their own, which is great. But it also means that like, oh, you know, who can do that is Google. So maybe we'll just buy more Google ads.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's 100% what they're gonna do.

• 15:55Nilay Patel?

  It's like, privacy win. Also, Google win.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Well, I mean.

• 15:59Speaker 05

  I changed my mind. Break them up.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Break them up.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  That was insane. Literally, tapping people chanting, break them up was the most fun.

• 16:09Nilay Patel?

  But we need a soundboard so we can just hit a button anytime we want to get the sound of the crowd.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  No, Dieter, to your point, like, if Google makes it harder for other people to track you and they make it easier for them to track you, that's a pretty unassailable moat for them to say, we have better targeting. Do you think that's what they're doing here? Or are they actually trying? I think it's both. It's really good for them. But this is part of this thing that Google calls Project Strobe, which is like a sort of Google-wide initiative to like, look at all this data that they're collecting on users and decide whether or not they want want it, basically. And so that's one of the that's like, part of Project Strobe was shutting down Google Plus. Project Strobe, they also announced when they shut down Google Plus that they were doing a thing that is now turning on in both Android Q and like, a couple earlier versions of Android, where they're limiting app access to some of your

• 16:59Speaker 04

  like, contact information. So for example, if you want a List of like contacts, you know, from the address book. Android is not going to tell you who your most contacted people are if you're a third party app. Like that's data they don't want to give out. They're also limiting access to other call log information. It used to be if you wanted to like make a text message app or make a, actually not even a text message. Make any app that needed SMS for one reason or another. The only way for Android to give you those permissions was to give you permission to like all call logs and text messages. Which seems bad, so they've actually like figured out how to lock some of that stuff down a little bit more. So they're, they're, they're creating more like discreet, limited APIs for apps to be able to get at information that they might want from you.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  So that they can make sure that the siphon is, you know, pretty narrow. And that is also very much like what the iPhone is doing. But again, like, is the iPhone going to be better at limiting what apps can find out about you, Paul Miller? Or you, Nat, or you, Neelai? Probably, but Android is moving in that direction and that's part of this Project Strobe thing at Google.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  To everything you just said, there is a well-known rational self-interest for a company to collect less data. Which is that there's a liability there. If they own a bunch of personal information about people and then it gets leaked. And there's a lot of privacy advocates talk about, it's not like I want to, to, you know, everything I do to be so secret because I'm a secret agent. You know, it's, it's that, it's that these companies literally can't, even with the best intentions, keep data safe. You know, Home Depot can't with the best intentions not leak credit cards. So, so how could you trust really anybody to own sensitive data about you?

• 18:48Speaker 05

  And therefore, you know, so I, I hope more companies come around to this and I hope this is literally Google actually doing that. And not just doing this as like a PR move.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wish the liability was higher, right? I mean, like, how much trouble did Home Depot get in really? Well, I will tell you that I happily went to Home Depot and bought more stuff from Home Depot last week. Like, like it's, I mean, I don't know. Like if you just look at the data, but like the lists of ongoing data breaches, like there's not enough, right? Like.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  And I think you're right, Paul. Like, at some point, stuff leaks. But the sort of like, we have to keep it secure because otherwise we'll face billions in fines, or someone will sue us, or our market position will be eroded. That link is a lot weaker than I think anyone wants.

• 19:35Speaker 05

  You could argue that it's hurting Facebook's market position a little bit.

• 19:39Nilay Patel?

  But Facebook has had that.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  It's definitely been a black eye.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  But only because of like, an unrelenting series of insane scandals. Like, like, like, an all-time historical string of, like, blunders has gotten faceless at the point where maybe some people are quitting Facebook.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  But I do agree with you. There should be a very high liability to, to misusing people's personal information.

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, it's good that they're trying to protect it more.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Hey, Nat, is there anything else in queue? Like, you've used it more than I have. How's this, this product sans font everywhere? Does it look okay? Does it look fine to you?

• 20:13Speaker 03

  It looks fine. I mean, I like it. I mean, like, it's starting to show up everywhere. I think you're seeing it in a lot of the web-based Google services. So for it to show up in queue now doesn't surprise me. It's, you can change it to a different font, but the one that you can alternatively change it to is like, really just not very nice. So stick with the new font, it's fine.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Okay, Nat.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Yo.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  You reviewed the S10e?

• 20:37Speaker 03

  I did.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Which is, like, the one?

• 20:40Speaker 03

  It is, if you had to pick from the three, I think that the S10e is definitely the one that most people will like. It's cheaper. The fingerprint sensor placement, in my opinion, just makes a lot more sense on this. I know that there are some opinions about the in-screen reader, but I just prefer the placement on this one better. If it's better in a small hand, especially mine, I actually think it could go smaller, but so far, so good.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  The past Samsung phones, I think S9 and S8 have a 5.8-inch screen, so they stuck with that size and just made the body smaller and the screen fit around it more with thinner bezels.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. How's the camera?

• 21:16Speaker 03

  The camera? You know, doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother me. It's just, it's hard for me to have strong feelings about the camera because I do think that it takes really nice pictures. And like their wide angle actually looks way better than like, or their ultra wide, I should say, looks better than their wide, which is weird. Like, I always, always keep it on ultra wide.

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's weird. Like, I keep it on that because it's, I don't know, like, you get more, you can, it's, it's easier to just crop than to get too close and then you're like, eh, whatever. But I'm so spoiled.

• 21:48Nilay Patel?

  It's like, let me take a photo, she runs away from you.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  I really don't want to be that close, y'all. No, but, I don't know, I feel like I'm so spoiled because I come from the Pixel camera and I know you can just download the Pixel camera on this, but like.

• 22:02Nilay Patel?

  But does it improve it?

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Um, I just, mm, I haven't really used it on that too much in the, like, week that I had to review it, but I just feel like the niche features, like night sight or Samsung's version is called night, bright night.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  Samsung.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can't get it to come on, like, manually. It just has to be really dark out, which is kind of annoying. Um, you know, sometimes I, I know that Vlad likes to apply the night sight effect even when it's daylight out and it's like just fun and more versatile, you get to play around with it a little more and you can't do that on the Samsung phone because that's kind of a bummer, like, just low light pictures just don't look that great. Um, and, but yeah, otherwise, like, the camera's fine, um, the screen is fine, I don't notice the difference at all. Like, I know that people, maybe if you're coming from a quad HD screen, you're like, oh, this doesn't look as nice, but I don't, I don't know that you'll notice that much. Um, most people, anyway, I don't think that they'll notice that much unless they put phones literally side by side and try to, like, pick out the differences.

• 23:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The one thing I want to talk about, well, so first off, with the camera, you published your shots in the review.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:09Nilay Patel?

  And I, I just don't think it looks good. Like I think Samsung, they used to be kind of in the lead. And then the iPhone and the Pixel are both going in opposite directions.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  Totally fine. I think most people will be happy with it, but if you're coming from something like a Pixel phone, then it's like, yeah, it's just not the same. Um, yeah, and the wide angle selfie has a smaller field of view than the Pixel. So, and it tends to make people look really pale.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Like, I think in the sample shot that I put in my review, you can see that like Dami's like, looks like a ghost.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  She's a ghost.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Maria is like five shades lighter than she is. It's not great.

• 23:46Nilay Patel?

  Samsung has a combo platter of overexposing and blurring of skin tones.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, they love to try to like skin smooth, which, you know, I used it, it's fine, but like, the idea of just knowing that you had to turn on skin smoothing is just so offensive to me. It's just like, I thought I had nice skin, but like, wow, this does look better. And wow, like now I feel really weird about myself.

• 24:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm all in. I'm like getting older. I'm like, smooth it out.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  No, man. I'm trying to love me for me, okay? Self-love.

• 24:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then the other thing I want to talk about, the SNE, you know what I'm going to talk about, is the screen protector.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Oh my god. It's terrible dude. I've had it in my pocket and like, okay, I know people are gonna like yell at me for keeping my phone in my pocket, my keys, but I literally can't put it in my jeans. I'm sorry. So I keep it in my purse or in my jacket pocket with my keys. And the scratches are insane. So like, if you use a screen protector, just peel this thing off that comes with the box out of the box. It's terrible. It, yeah, the corner radius and the hole punch, as you can see in our review, does not line up. Looks crazy.

• 24:52Nilay Patel?

  Was that on when you pulled it out of the box?

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, I pulled it out of the box like this. I was looking at the phone and then I saw like the little line around the hole punch and I was just like, what the hell is this? I thought it was just the plastic that comes with new phones. So I tried to get it off. I'm just like, this is really not coming off. So then I like talked to Samsung. I was like, is it supposed to be like that? Or like, did you send us a device that somebody already used and maybe suck this thing on? And they're like, oh no, that's shipped out of the box. I'm like, what?

• 25:17Nilay Patel?

  So just to be clear, so other Samsung phones, the corners of the screen. Don't match the radius of the phone, right? It's like, the iPhone, this is like one of my favorite little Apple things. Like, it, all the radii are perfectly matched, right? So Samsung phones, LG phones, all these other phones, the corners of screens are curved, and the radii don't match. The S10E, they match! They got there, we did it. Mission accomplished. And then there's a screen protector on it that doesn't match. And then on top of it, the hole for the camera on the front is misaligned. So, like, I, I can't look at it. I don't know what to tell you. It's very sad. I don't know what Samsung, they can do better than that.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's, I, I think it's thoughtful that they tried, but like,

• 26:03Nilay Patel?

  It's nice that they tried.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  It's, it's very thoughtful to try, but I think that's like, it's almost borderline offensive to be like, to give you a shitty product and to not give it to you at all.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Especially at like 750 bucks.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, you know, like, if you're gonna get one, just get a new one, but like, if you are just keeping this on, just until you get a better one, sure, it'll do. Um, yeah, that's all I can say about it.

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  But it also scratches.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean...

• 26:29Nilay Patel?

  Alright, 750 bucks.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  750 bucks.

• 26:31Nilay Patel?

  S10E.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  I actually don't think, I, I know I called it a cheaper phone, but it's not a cheap phone, so I don't, actually don't think that people should go out and buy it right now unless, you know, your phone is on the road, you're breaking. Um, if you wait a couple more months, more than likely this thing's gonna get cheaper. Um, it's gonna get discounted, it's gonna come in BOGO deals, like, galaxies go on sale really quickly. Um, so if you want one, or if you're getting multiple devices for your family, you should definitely wait it out for a couple months.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, but at 750?

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  S10E or iPhone XR?

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Well, here's the thing, iPhone people are gonna use iPhones, right? Cause they're locked in the ecosystem, so, I, it's hard for me to convince an iPhone to use or to switch an Android. But if you're gonna use an Android phone, like, really the question is, S10E or Pixel 3? And, I think that if you care a lot about the camera, Pixel 3. Um, for all other things, I think S10 will make a lot of people happy.

• 27:24Nilay Patel?

  And I have that phone, Jack.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:26Nilay Patel?

  Just putting that out there. Super important to me. Uh, Dieter, you spent, I, I watched this happen.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  Dieter landed in Austin for South by Southwest. On his way to the hotel, he stopped and purchased an S10.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  Actually, just to be clear, I blew past my hotel a half an hour north to the nearest Best Buy. And then made my Lyft driver wait for me. And he didn't want to get in trouble, so he clocked out, so I had to pay him cash to drive me back down to my hotel. And the traffic was horrendous, so this whole like S10 trip took two hours, which doesn't sound that painful. Cause you know, whatever, but it's, it was two hours in traffic. Um, and, uh, in Austin, when all I really wanted to do was go get tacos and a beer. So it was, it was painful.

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so I watched this happen. He, Dieter went on his adventure in Texas to buy a phone. Then he showed up and he had the phone.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Boring adventure ever.

• 28:18Nilay Patel?

  Dieter shows up in Texas and goes to Best Buy. And he's like, I think I like this phone. And then over the course, the next four days, I literally watched this man fall in love. So you love this phone, but you think the camera is, is fine.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  The camera is fine at best. You need it. It requires more skill than the Pixel 3 camera. And it is not like, it is not a step change better compared to the S9, which was not a step change better compared to the S8. It was like, you know, they're incremental improvements. Um, and meanwhile, we did see something closer to a step change from like the Pixel to the Pixel 3. Like you could see that improvement curve. And I think the same thing happened. Like, I'm actually, um, more impressed with the XS compared to the XS on the iPhone side than I thought I would be. Uh, even though it doesn't seem like that big of a difference, but the change on the, the S10 is just not that great. Um, and their scene stuff is like also pretty bad. The telephoto is like shruggy.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  Um, I think the wide angle takes worse pictures than the standard, the ultra wide angle takes worse pictures than the standard wide angle, but it's just way more fun. It is. It's way more fun.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. I just like that you can see more.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, when you look at it and you're like, holding it, and you're like, switch to it, you're like, this is impossible.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  No, but like, also, once you have it on ultra wide, and then you switch back to wide, you're just kinda like, this looks like zoom. Like, it just doesn't look, it's like, too close. Too close.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  But the thing I love, the thing that has sold me on it, is this like, cuts both ways thing of the software. I was not expecting to like, be deeply into Samsung software, because there's, you know, too many options. But, like, there are just a few things that are great. The, like, edge panel thing, I could put my calendar over there, love it. There's a few more options in the quick settings. You can theme it, you know, you can screw out the wallpapers on the, you know, hole punch, whatever. And I love having the full-size screen with like, minimal bezels. And you kinda get that with the S10 E2, so it's not that big a change, but...

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I actually prefer the S10 E. It's like, it has a little bit of a bezel, I prefer that. I like, I'm not super into edge screens, to be honest. So like, I just like it better that there is no accidental way for me to pull out the edge panel.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  Right. So I think most people should get the E if you're looking at a Samsung phone, like, for sure. But I'm happy that I got the regular S10, and I'm having medium-good luck with the fingerprint sensor. It is definitely slower than a standard capacitive sensor. It's about the same speed as Face ID, but it feels slower, because with Face ID, as you're unlocking it, you're like, already tapping the thing, or already swiping up, so it feels faster. But it's about the same speed in my experience. But I'm also not using any kind of screen protector, and it seems like screen protectors really hurt the, you know, reliability of the thing actually reading your thumbprint.

• 31:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this fingerprint sensor is hit or miss. It's either it works and people like it.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  I guess I never miss.

• 31:19Nilay Patel?

  Finally happened.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  There it is.

• 31:20Nilay Patel?

  We finally have a TikTok meme on the first chest.

• 31:23Speaker 04

  You started it.

• 31:25Nilay Patel?

  I just said a phrase. I just said some words.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  As important as this topic is, I really do want to hear more about about one UI.

• 31:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 05

  Like, could you convince somebody like, oh, you have a phone that does have one UI? You're really missing out. Like, what, what, what's the selling point?

• 31:42Speaker 04

  You're not really missing out, but you're, you're missing out on like the, you know, some of the apps having the little jib jabs at the bottom, so it's easier to reach.

• 31:51Speaker 05

  What's a jib jab?

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Like the UI.

• 31:53Nilay Patel?

  It's like shifts everything down. What's a jib jab?

• 31:56Speaker 04

  You're missing the edge panels. There's like a million little extra cute little settings that are fun. Like, you can, you can mess around with what the lock screen looks like. They work incredibly well with the Galaxy Buds, which don't quite have the Bluetooth capability of AirPods, but it works. Galaxy Buds work are like good with a Samsung phone and just kind of average with a non Samsung phone. Cause you can like customize the sound and you can like set the taps to like change the volume and all this stuff. There's like, there is a moment where you're using the Samsung phone with the Samsung stuff where you're like, oh, I, I'm like in a Samsung ecosystem. And I'm not all the way and I'm not using Samsung Health because I'm not a maniac.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  But you like, you have this moment where you like, look back and you're like, oh God, I, I crossed the border and I'm like living that Samsung life and I don't know how that happened. I never thought I would be that person.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's lost. He's sitting in a highway in Texas, just being like, what happened to me?

• 32:55Speaker 05

  Standing behind you is the ghost of Bixby nodding approving.

• 33:00Speaker 04

  Okay, so Bixby is still objectively terrible.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  But you can download, it's called Bix Assist, and then that lets you remap the button to Google Assistant. So.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. Yeah. I'll take that. I like, poor Bixby. Yep, just a little dog with shoes wants to be loved. So of the three, you think the, you think the middle one, so Nat has voted S10E.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  But I mean, I, I kinda can't choose the other two because they don't fit in my hands. So like.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, sometimes you vote for some reason. Sometimes you vote for other reasons.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  You, you should get the S10E. You don't need the telephoto lens. You don't like the, the fingerprint sensor on the side is fine. The screen is a little bit smaller, but it's, it's just as fast. You know, the, the, for me, I, I got the S10, so the S10E for similar reasons to Neelai preferring the iPhone XS to the iPhone XR. Like the screen is better in a way that like people that like care about screens deeply will notice. But the screen on the S10E is really good. It's just not like the holy shit best screen on a phone good.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just think it's, I mean, we have, there's three reviewers I talked to. Dan is like, get the S10 plus. Like that's the one. It's either the E or the plus. I love the plus. Nat's like, physically, I'm only allowed to have this one. Yeah. And Dieter's like, I like this one because it's the middle. And like, is, is that just three different people? Like great Samsung made choices?

• 34:24Speaker 03

  So Dieter's mama bear and Dan's papa bear and I'm a little bear.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  I hate, I hate this metaphor too. I hate this the most.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  And Neelai's Goldilocks.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  If you go to a store and hold all three, like you'll pick up the plus and the 10 and you're like, these are basically the like same size. I might as well get the bigger one. And then you'll set down the, the plus and you'll pick up the E and you're like, these are basically the same size, but the smaller one feels better. And then like you, you, when you put them all three side by side, you're like, it is insane that you made three phones. You should have just made two. But then when you like, try and like pick each one up in turn, you kind of don't know where to go. And I think for a lot of people, the regular 10 is just going to fall out. They're either going to want to get the big one or the small one, especially since so many of us are recommending the small one is like, why not get the small? I think Marquez's video about it was literally titled, why not? Right? And Nat says, go get this one. And she's right. And it's not just if you like small phones.

• 35:16Speaker 04

  It's like, it's objectively a great phone. Yeah. I don't know. I guess I'm just the weird one that likes the, the one in the middle.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  It's just like the, it's basically basic economics. Like you go to a movie theater, you get the medium, small, like large popcorns and like, no one gets the medium except if you're a theater.

• 35:30Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  I do.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, you are truly the medium popcorn of the Vergecast.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  I am, I am a middle child and so it, it falls naturally to me to be forgotten and choose the forgotten phone, so.

• 35:42Nilay Patel?

  I, I will say this, the, the S10, uh, having played with Dieter's and played with Nat's a little bit, the S10 is an objectively nicer thing. So it's, it's worth the upgrade just for like, it's a little bit more premium feeling and that screen is a little bit nicer. But other than that, whatever. All right, we have to take a break. We're gonna come back. I'm sure Paul and I are gonna yell at each other about interest law. It's gonna be great. We'll be right back.

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• 37:14Nilay Patel?

  We're back. So last week, we did a live Vergecast. I met with Elizabeth Warren, a senator from the great state of Massachusetts, running for president. Uh, she told me she wants to break up all of the big tech companies. She's got a whole bunch of rules. You can listen to that episode. We went through it. It was really fun. Break them all up. We all chanted. Great time. This week, Spotify, uh, is suing Apple in the EU for very similar reasons to what Elizabeth Warren was laying out. So Warren's plan is if you run a store, you shouldn't be able to participate in that store. If you're, if you have a company that's over $25 billion in revenue and you run a store, you shouldn't put your own products in the store because you will have incentives to do, to do bad things. Right? So we want to break them all up, have the store companies, have the product companies. Is that workable?

• 37:59Nilay Patel?

  It does not seem so. Like, that's the conventional wisdom. But her argument to me was it's easier to just break them all up because then I don't need to regulate every little thing. Everyone will just figure it out on their own. That's her argument. Spotify says, well, hey, we're an Apple Store. Apple bought Beats. They launched a music service. And after that, they began screwing with us constantly. So they started rejecting the spot, like when Spotify would update the app, those apps were getting rejected by Apple for mysterious reasons. Spotify famously, and this has been going on for five years now, hates the fact that if you want to sign up for Spotify on an iPhone, you have to pay the Apple 30% tax, famously.

• 38:41Nilay Patel?

  Spotify cannot even email, Apple won't let them even email their users on iOS to say you can sign up in other places. They reject the app constantly for having it point to where else you can buy it. Apple withheld, like, Apple Watch features forever, it's forever to get a Spotify app on the Apple Watch, even though other partners are there. There's some other stuff in there, like, we want to be on the HomePod. It's like, do you?

• 39:07Nilay Patel?

  Does anybody care about this? But they've got this laundry list. And the thing that I think is powerful about their argument, whether or not you think it's right, is Apple is motivated to make Apple Music more successful. So they use the power of iOS and the App Store to restrict Spotify, to hold Spotify's updates back, to prevent Spotify from going outside of the payment ecosystem, and to boost Apple Music. So Walt was tweeting at me and Dieter yesterday. This is how Apple keeps their platform secure. How do you make the connection between running the App Store, the Apple tax, and the app updates? And so here's, here's just my read on it. I tweeted this, well, love Walt. It's good to talk to him about it.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  Apple, when you think about monopolies and antitrust, you think about leveraging a dominant position in one market to gain a dominant position in another market. Right? So Apple in America has something like 45 to 50% of the market, 43 to 50%, depending when you measure what quarter. In the UK, it's right up there, too. So country by country, you look at it, they've got some huge chunk of the market. They have an absolute monopoly for iOS users. That's like, you can just define the market that way. So if you're an iOS user, Apple is your gatekeeper. And a company can't reach you, except through the open web, which is there, but you can't do a Spotify in the web. So a company can't reach you with an app or service unless they come through Apple's gates. They're literally the gatekeeper.

• 40:31Nilay Patel?

  So they're using that position to price Spotify higher, which is price discrimination, and to restrict Spotify's competitiveness by limiting its access to features of the platform that they then give themselves. They also break the rules on their own behalf. So I think we've written three or four stories about this now where other companies are not allowed to do push notifications that are promotions and Apple Music is like, "Do you have a family? You should get them an Apple Music." And so that's the, that's the argument.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  One of the things you guys talked about in the South by episode is that a lot of antitrust for, for a lot of these major tech companies are difficult because all these products are free. But this is a really interesting case where there's a very obvious Spotify for a time costs $13 on iPhones because, because Apple.

• 41:22Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  So does that count as like, this is raising prices in the, in, or is it, I mean, because there's also, you know, a lot of people make the argument, "Well, this is just what a retailer does. They mark up goods, you know, like this is what Walmart does." And they, Walmart obviously has a lot of control over the various people who want to sell things through Walmart. I mean, and this is tough for me because I hate Apple's position on this from a technical standpoint.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Speaker 05

  I think it's so dumb. It was so frustrating. It always bugged me. I'm a huge customer of Audible, you know? And I'm sorry, Apple, but I have given Amazon very many dollars because I love audiobooks and they're better at it than you are. And but Apple has made my life hell having to shop Audible on the Audible website all the time. And in the fact that the app lit, Apple literally, and this, this is in Spotify's litany of complaints. It seems like almost every time Spotify's app got rejected is because they tried to in some way inside of their app suggest that a paid experience exists for people were they to use the web browser. Yeah.

• 42:38Nilay Patel?

  Right. And like they're, and Apple makes the rules and Apple interprets the rules. There's no recourse to some independent authority, like, so Apple gets to say, well, that's not in the rule. And Spotify says, well, last week you said it was. And they go back and forth and they don't get through.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, part of the problem there is like a bunch of those like app rejection complaints and even like Apple Watch and HomePod stuff is the sort of thing that if you are Apple or you are more sympathetic to Apple than to Spotify, you could just nitpick to death, right? Like your app got rejected. You don't really know why. And you know that this is the rule anyway. And so that's separate and you can't connect one thing to the other thing. Um, you know, just because some, you know, random, you know, low wage, uh, you know, app review or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, and so it's like making like, if they actually want to make that case that those two things are connected, um, like that would, that would take like an explosive, like court case lawsuit, like, you know, discovery. What they're doing right now is this big giant PR push, right?

• 43:35Speaker 04

  Um, and they're not the only ones, like, uh, they're the only ones doing it in like that this like direct and explicit a way, but like Netflix is waiting in the wings to see what this looks like. Uh, Tim Sweeney is just agitating.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  A man, a man Tim. Tim Sweeney's the CEO of Epic, which makes Fortnite, which famously pulled its app out of the Google Play Store and said, you need to sideload Fortnite because we don't want to pay Google's app tax. They obviously cannot do that on the iPhone. I think they're very upset about it. Netflix, uh, won't let you sign up through iOS anymore. Uh, they want you to, you know, they want you to go sign up on the web. There's this argument, look, these are the biggest things. What are the biggest things going? Netflix, Spotify and Fortnite. Like, what do you want on your phone? Those are the things. And so, of course, they can, they can force users to go another way. If you're a medium-sized company, you're not one of the biggest cultural institutions in the world. You don't, you don't get to play these games, right?

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's, there's the Spotify stuff and, you know, they're big and they're competitive with Apple in one way. I don't think the Spotify app gets reviewed by low-wage App Store reviewers. Fair. I think that shit gets reviewed by Eddie Q, right? So, they have this argument that Apple's screwing with us, right? And they're screwing with us to promote Apple Music. And to Paul's point, some prices are higher, right, because of it. But in Europe, as we have, I think hilariously discussed on this podcast many times, the standard is actually competitive behavior, right? It's not this extremely tightly tied to price thing, which is the standard in the United States. So, I think you can see, kind of like both sides of it. It's Apple's platform, this is how they keep it secure by tightly controlling the store.

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  You can actually even argue at that, there's definitely scam apps in the store. They're like, the incentives they built in the store around like free-to-play games, where they take 30% of everybody spending too much money on Candy Crush. Those are bad incentives for Apple. Like, there are some bad outcomes in the store, but on the whole, it's like a well-curated store that keeps people from getting viruses. So, like, that's their argument. They did build the iPhone, right? Like, they should get some credit. It didn't exist, now it does, so they should be able to say how it works. I think those are pretty valid arguments. But on the other side of it is, well, this is the only marketplace that people with iPhones can experience.

• 45:57Nilay Patel?

  And maybe they chose it, and maybe they didn't, but they're not gonna switch. They're, how many different ways are you locked into an iPhone, right? Like, you're not gonna, unless you're Paul Miller personally, you're not gonna say, "I want a phone with multiple app stores," and switch your phone. And I, I just, I don't think the market can speak that loudly about this issue. I think the companies involved need to say, "Hey, the market for our, our little slice of the market, the market for music streaming services is tightly constrained because of Apple's behavior," right? And that, that is a problem, that's like a problem for everybody.

• 46:31Speaker 05

  But I think they're a little bit, that's a little bit paternalistic. And I feel like there's, there's too much paternalism on all signs. Apple thinks that you are too dumb to be safe. You are too dumb to decide what is an appropriate thing to be listed in the podcast app? And what is appropriate app for you to download? And what is an appropriate in-app purchase? That you are too stupid to figure it out. And therefore they will protect you. But at the same time, I think that's exactly what this antitrust law ends up being is that, well, consumers are too dumb to leave companies that harm them. And so we have to help the, the, these consumers by destroying these companies.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, I don't think, I don't think destroying is like a hard word. A specific example that Senator Warren gave to me was, look, we broke up Standard Oil. And actually, because there were four different companies, shareholders got more value returned to them. Right? So there's like a positive net economic benefit. There wasn't one monopolist collecting monopoly profits. And that was, that was the net loss. But overall shareholders, you know, however many Standard Oils were created, return more value. Sure. Like you want to fall all the way down those weeds? There's a podcast that Vox Media makes called The Weeds. They are happy to do that for you. I think my point is if you are on a platform, if you're a customer on a platform,

• 47:57Nilay Patel?

  and the platform vendor is doing all kinds of petty shit to make your free market choice objectively worse than their own product, that's probably an issue for you. You can feel it, right? And I think all of us feel, this show is about feelings about technology. It's like, it's core. And like, we are constantly feeling platform vendors doing weird stuff to us. Right? We're constantly feeling that, that sensation of choice getting constricted. And so there has to be some recourse beyond, you know, throwing out how I share it. I want to switch to Spotify and I want a better Spotify experience. So I have to degrade my photo experience with my family because I prefer Apple Photos.

• 48:36Nilay Patel?

  Like that is an insane market choice to just like, how are, how is any rational person going to make that decision?

• 48:43Speaker 05

  Well, and this is why I, I, I don't, I'm gonna be, I feel like I'm becoming a total one note on this podcast because I'm starting to doubt that there is any such thing as a good, large company that provides services.

• 48:57Nilay Patel?

  Break them up.

• 48:59Speaker 05

  Because

• 48:59Nilay Patel?

  You want 50 small companies.

• 49:01Speaker 05

  It just feels like, it feels like no matter who you trust to run your life for you, they will fail you. And, and, and the problem was upfront when you decided that you were going to offload responsibility to somebody else.

• 49:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, and I think another way, so the, the alternate approach is you should have more companies competing in the market for, on different levels. And I, I, again, I think the Elizabeth Warren approach, it was fun to talk to her about it. I think the lack of nuance to that approach is actually really refreshing where she's just like, the answer is breaking them up. And then like, you know, the, the sort of VC class of Silicon Valley is on CNBC today being like, everything's so complicated. How can you just break? And she's like, yeah, that's exactly the point. Like, I don't want to, I don't want to sit around and go into Twitter with 10,000 lawyers and figure out how to like carve it apart. I just want to break you up. Like, here it is. It's done.

• 49:50Speaker 05

  I want to, I want to steal the easy way.

• 49:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 05

  The direct way.

• 49:54Nilay Patel?

  The easy way.

• 49:55Speaker 05

  Without any legal cover.

• 49:57Nilay Patel?

  One of the things she said to me that I thought was really interesting is this way you also know it happened. Right? Like you, you don't have to, you don't have to sit there and like, and measure like, you know, we, we turned down the lock in screw on Tim Cook's panel, like his iOS control panel. And like five years from now, we're going to measure some effect and be like, it sort of didn't. It's like, no, we just broke you up. Like it definitely happened. We definitely took some action and then we can definitely measure the effects. Again, do I actually think it's totally workable? No. But has it sort of, for me personally, like made me realize like, I am actually fundamentally a capitalist who believes in competition? Like that's, that's where I'm at. I don't think these markets are competitive enough.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that consumers have the ability to make real choices in these markets because on both platforms.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  You are constantly shoveled towards locked in services. You are constantly like either by price discrimination or by user experience or by, you know, like marginal ecosystem benefit. You're constantly being told, wouldn't it be great if you used Google Photos? Wouldn't it be great if you use the built in mail app instead of whatever app you want to use on the iPhone? Like, that's constantly happening. Do I think there are much narrower solutions than just like blowing every company up? Probably.

• 51:19Speaker 05

  My experience is I go to my room and I secretly write essays I never publish about how maybe everything should be more difficult and ease of use is a bad thing every time. And then I go and help my parents set up Google Photos.

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so Spotify thing is super interesting, like.

• 51:38Speaker 05

  My life.

• 51:39Nilay Patel?

  So here's another example. It's going to play out and it's amazing that one, like 2020 election coverage season is here for every news outlet and B, I think it's really important for us to go talk to 2020 candidates because they all have positions on it. McKenna Kelly talked to a bunch of them. They're all going to come out with some tech regulation platform. Who better than The Verge and its audience of drunk people at South by Southwest screaming, break them up to like go after these candidates. So we're going to try to pull as many of them in. But here's another example. Facebook went down yesterday for like a day. It was down for like 25 hours, right? And a bunch of people are tweeting this morning. I think Taylor Lorenz, who's a friend of The Verge, is a great reporter. You should read her stuff. But she's tweeting this morning, like, here's some story about MySpace from like the early

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  90s or whatever. And the headline was, is MySpace a natural monopoly? And she's like, this is just something I'm keeping in mind. And I get that. But what MySpace was not, and MySpace like fell apart. And then there's like Nokia's on the cover of Forbes or whatever. It's like, can anyone beat Nokia? And it's like, yep, sure can. And Paul, I think that's kind of your argument is like companies get too big, they get clumsy, they stumble, they fall down, they miss the next thing. I just think, like my point of view is that betting on other people's failures is a mistake.

• 52:55Nilay Patel?

  Right, like that shouldn't be your animating principle, like something will just happen and everything will write itself. Like you have to be active. So betting that Mark Zuckerberg is gonna blow it is like, for me, it's a tough call. Betting that Jeff Bezos is gonna blow it is a tough call. And those companies are situated wildly differently than MySpace was. So Facebook goes down for a day, and Ashley Carmen wrote a story that's like, influencers lost a bunch of money, brands that advertise on Facebook lost a bunch of money, like, random people who do motivational speaking are like scrambling to fill their seminars because they'd had this Facebook promotional plan. So like, this entire second-order effect of businesses built on Facebook, like, falls apart because they're wholly reliant

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  on Facebook. Now, that is like, a huge amount of responsibility for Facebook. It's a huge thing for all of us to contend with. Yesterday was also, there was like a momentous vote in the British Parliament about whether to delay Brexit. A third of British news consumers get their news from Facebook. So like, it just went away, like, on this big momentous vote, which is the 9,000th momentous vote of Brexit that will happen in our lives. That's like a huge amount of responsibility for one company to carry. And I think, antitrust aside, the amount of scrutiny that you have to apply to a company that has that much responsibility should be higher. Because there's not, when it went down, it was like all those influencers

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  just shifted their dollars to another platform. All those little mom and pops Kickstarter projects didn't shift their dollars to another platform. They just took the hit. And so if there's no market competition there to incentivize Facebook to act right, well then I think you get the past year of Facebook, where they are just stumbling from thing to thing to thing to thing. And they can't get, they can't get it together.

• 54:44Speaker 05

  Don't you think Facebook lost a lot of money in those 24 hours?

• 54:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm sure they did, but...

• 54:49Speaker 05

  I mean, they have an incentive, it's just...

• 54:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, look, online services have an incentive to keep their services up. I get it, but...

• 54:57Speaker 05

  I mean, the regulation did not build this. Regulation didn't design and build this up to be as big and stupidly central as it is. I mean, I hate Facebook. I was very proud of the fact that I did not know Facebook was down until somebody told me on Discord.

• 55:16Speaker 05

  But it's dumb and I hate it and it's useless. But I didn't build it like the government didn't build it, you know? They didn't do all that work and investment and risk. I mean, that's the thing is that we look at winners and then we want winners to be better. But what we don't see is people who try risky things and then they fail. And we don't, you know, I don't know.

• 55:41Nilay Patel?

  So that's that comes back to like my point about competition. Like we're in a place, I think, where no one is going to try to build a competitor to Facebook. Right? It's just like, it seems unlikely. The competitor, there might be, Discord is a great example. There might be a place where other people go and they build different kinds of businesses. But there's literally no market competition for Facebook. And when there was, they bought it and they bought it again. Right? And like that sort of that, like that consolidation is, I think, the harm. Right? You, I would have preferred a world in which Facebook was competing with Instagram and WhatsApp was a paid messaging service that was encrypted by default and they weren't going to do ads. Like, I think that is sort of the heart of the, well, screw it, we'll just break them up. Right? Like, why not?

• 56:26Nilay Patel?

  Like, what if we just had three companies again? And then we, and then we'll like, see what happens, right? Instead of this, we're going to go in there and sign a consent decree and a lawyer will sit on Jeff Bezos' shoulder and be like, you can't make that laptop stand, but these sheets are fine. Like, that seems horrible to me. But yeah, Paul, I think your point, like, there's an element here where there was nothing and there's something. And if you get too successful, like, the punishment shouldn't be like, we get destroyed. But I also think if you're a platform, if you've been listening to the show for, we've been doing it for, what, eight years now? Paul and I before that for two. So like, Paul and I have been yelling at each other about this for a decade.

• 57:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  What is the thing that we hear talking about? The thing we're talking about is that platform vendors have some responsibility, right? They needed an elevated sense of fairness on their platforms. And some platforms that, you know, they're differently situated right now. So like, Windows and iOS and Android and OS 10 are all kind of different and Linux is out there being as different as it can be. But there should be some level set of, if you want to make an app and get it to somebody on a platform, the platform vendor won't screw with you. If you're a customer and you have a Windows laptop and you want to put Chrome on it, Microsoft isn't going to stop you. Right? And I, that's, I think we need to get to that mindset. Because we all feel, I just think we all feel it.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:47Nilay Patel?

  Right? And that's, that's like, you can get to the rule in 50 different ways. But I think if you're a tech person and you listen to the show, like, all we ever talk about is platform locking. And like, how it makes us feel bad. So like, there's some way to get there. Okay, Dieter, what were you saying?

• 58:00Speaker 04

  So I was gonna say, there, like, one way to think about this is, we're thinking about this on like, a spectrum of like, on one end is, I don't know, big companies and one of the small companies. But I actually think it's, there's actually like, two axes. So there's let companies be big and make companies be small on like, the Y axis. And on the X axis, there's, uh, don't regulate at all, all the way up to like, full-on Bernie Sanders controls everything. Right?

• 58:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. By the way, the Bernie, the Bernie, the Bernie bros, uh, they tweeted at me that Bernie is not trying to nationalize things. If you're, just know, it's a symbol. We're describing a symbol.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, full-on regulation controlled by, by Bernie.

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God. He's at back lawn.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  Him, not me this time.

• 58:44Speaker 04

  If you look at, if you look at it as like, this sort of like, there's a Y and an X axis. If you look at, allow big companies and have zero regulation, you get to like, where we are right now, right? Facebook just buys whoever they want. Um, you know, Google gets to do like, weird stuff with ads, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So Elizabeth Warren's proposal is like, low regulation, but small companies, right? And like, figure it out. We're just gonna break them up and we're gonna regulate that way. And then, but, so when people are calling for regulation, there's like, are you regulating them into smaller companies? Or are you just gonna like, let them still be big monopolies, but you regulate them as monopolies? And it's like, we need some sort of like, Z axis to like, get out of this, or we just need to pick which quadrant we want to live in.

• 59:25Speaker 04

  Um, because right now, we're living way off in the corner on big companies, big unregulated companies. And we either need to pick another quadrant to move to, or we need to figure out some way out of like, this rubric of thinking about these things.

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it's the moment right now, it's weird. You know, this is a tech show. We've spent however long talking about the S10 E and how it feels in the hand, right? Like, but these companies are under an enormous amount of scrutiny because they went from being gadget makers and photo sharing service providers to being basically the center of modern life. And what Facebook decides you can see is like what you're gonna see on Facebook. And like, there's a lot of action on the right wing of this country to break up Facebook because they don't like it. They don't like that. Is that the same as what Warren is saying? I don't know if it is, but the feeling towards the company is exactly the same, which is you are too powerful.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  And I think if you get the feeling on both the right and the left of you are too powerful, then the government is probably gonna find some way to check that power.

• 1:00:26Speaker 05

  My Z-axis, and I really like this analogy, but my Z-axis is can I find a way that I don't have to care what happens to these companies? Outside of a theoretical, like, I'm gonna defend property rights and I'm basically an anarchist. But like, outside of that, outside of a theoretical sense, I don't have to care. Like, I don't have to care about, you know, sides. My brain just turned off.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  Cause you don't care.

• 1:00:53Speaker 05

  I guess I don't care. I just lost my train of thought because there was no care there. The hope is that I don't have, that I don't have to care and that I have my own software, my own products and Libram's a new phone that runs actual Linux. It works and it's wonderful. And then it's all in like a peer-to-peer mesh network. And so I don't need the big, the big telecoms anymore. And it's just wonderful. And we store everything on IPFS. We use the Ethereum name service for DNS.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  Paul, I mean, I love you, man, but if you're betting on the Linux phone, like, I just, I worry that you're gonna be disappointed. All right. Like I said, this is gonna keep happening. We're gonna keep trying to rope politicians in to talk to us on the Vergecast. We're, we're having some, some good bites already. So yeah, more I trust talk is coming your way. You can't stop me.

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  Try your best.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Because Neil, I have monopoly on the Vergecast.

• 1:01:48Speaker 05

  No! Break him up!

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:02:17Speaker 07

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:02:42Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  This series is presented by EY. If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed sponsored jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:03:44Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Paul?

• 1:03:45Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  Every week.

• 1:03:47Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:48Nilay Patel?

  Hit me.

• 1:03:49Speaker 05

  My segment has always been called... Phones aren't jokes.

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:03:54Speaker 05

  This is about a very negative trend in our industry where where companies make phones that are jokes. And I can't handle the pranks. So this started with Mizu, which made a portless phone as a publicity stunt.

• 1:04:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  And now Vivo has the Apex 2019 concept phone, which is also portless.

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  I have, I have very strong feelings about whether or not that phone counts as portless.

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  Why? Because it's got that little thing on the back?

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, it just has a USB port that isn't a USB plug. It's just, it's a Pogo Plug version of a USB port. It's not, it's not portless.

• 1:04:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 1:04:30Speaker 04

  Pogo Puns are back. That's a port.

• 1:04:34Speaker 05

  So it's like a double prank.

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Speaker 05

  Again, like I always say, phones aren't jokes. Stop lying to me with your joke weird phones that aren't real.

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  No, it's just a flat port. Anyway.

• 1:04:47Nilay Patel?

  No, it's not a port. Wait, a port cannot be flat. Is there a hole in the phone?

• 1:04:51Speaker 04

  Yes. It's a metaphorical hole.

• 1:04:53Nilay Patel?

  No, it's Pogo Pins. Pogo Pins are back.

• 1:04:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's Pogo Pins, but the Pogo Pins, I guarantee you it's just like remapped USB leads.

• 1:05:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, sure. Yeah. But is there a hole in the phone?

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  I mean, okay, I just Googled port. It says a socket in, you know, in which a device can be plugged.

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  I think, I think that qualifies.

• 1:05:12Nilay Patel?

  Can you locate the socket, Mr. Bone?

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's magnetic. It's, it's around the port on the inside.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's like a little dip, like that's a socket.

• 1:05:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Nilay Patel?

  This is like the worst court case in history.

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  Is, is MagSafe, is MagSafe a port?

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  Is MagSafe a port?

• 1:05:26Speaker 05

  R I P MagSafe, by the way.

• 1:05:28Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  It's a socket. If a port is a socket, then yes.

• 1:05:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Nilay Patel?

  But what if a socket is a port?

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  I think, hmm, yeah.

• 1:05:38Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:05:38Speaker 05

  You're laughing, but phones aren't jokes.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  I don't know, man. We're all, we're all having a grand old time.

• 1:05:45Nilay Patel?

  Can we talk about my favorite pogo pin joke phone? Which is the Red Hydrogen One.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 1:05:50Nilay Patel?

  Just summarily, sort of like, so we reviewed the Red Hydrogen One, which was supposed to be this modular phone. It was gonna get a red camera module on the back. And it was a horrible phone. I think Jake gave it our lowest score ever for a phone of three. That's three points out of 10. I think two of them were simply for existing.

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  And this red, just removed all mention of this camera module from their website, and they put out a statement that was like, "Yeah, it turns out making a phone is really hard, so we're gonna not do this, and we're gonna come back. We're back again, round two. Don't worry, Hydrogen One owners, all five of you, well, we'll take care of you." So that, this, that, my favorite pogo pin idea, which I was super hyped about, actually, because how cool would it be if you could just like stick a red camera on the back of your red phone? Much like your Linux phone, Paul, I think.

• 1:06:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  Really-

• 1:06:46Speaker 05

  This is your dream?

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  Really ran on hope. Less so Android. Android did not run well on it.

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  There's a new version coming, they're gonna fix it, and the CEO, who has historically been very salty when people have reviewed this phone badly, says there's gonna be some sort of upgrade program, and, and as a side note, all Hydrogen customers will be, his quote, quote, "obsolescence obsolete" when buying into the new professional image capture program.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, all his customers are obsolete?

• 1:07:17Speaker 04

  You'll be obsolescence obsolete.

• 1:07:18Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna, they're gonna make obsolescence obsolete.

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. That's upsetting.

• 1:07:25Speaker 05

  It's words.

• 1:07:26Speaker 04

  We're gonna obsolete obsolescence? Like, that's a cool phrase, but to say that customers will be obsolescence obsolete?

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  Is like a whole other-

• 1:07:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're in the right ecosystem, you just run around being, "You can't obsolescence me."

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  I'm obsolescence obsolete.

• 1:07:42Nilay Patel?

  It's great. These pogo pins are gonna save me. Alright.

• 1:07:45Speaker 05

  Mr. Red said.

• 1:07:47Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, before we started, I was gonna take this out, but Dieter made me put it in, and it does sound cool. You have, you have some conspiracy theory about the Chromecast turning into a game console? What's happening?

• 1:07:56Speaker 04

  Uh, so, um, Google has a big, uh, gaming announcement at the Game Developers Conference, GDC. They posted like a teaser. Uh, someone took that teaser, I think Extreme Tech took that teaser. It was like, you know, zooming in towards a glowing door, and at the end of the glowing door was giant ghost cowboy, which was amazing. Um, but we're expecting to do streaming games. They had Project Stream a while ago. And I don't remember where I can cite this, but someone had the conspiracy theory of like, imagine, you remember last year when they added Bluetooth to the Chromecast Ultra and nobody knew why? Imagine, you just, any Bluetooth controller and a Chromecast, you now have a game console. Um, there's been a patent for a, uh, Google-made controller.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Uh, the patent was, uh, not for the controller itself, but for like, you know, an indicator light, basically, so don't over-read it, but like, they had a drawing that looked pretty complete. Anyway, look for that announcement from Google, but there's also other like, streaming game things happening at GDC, so, um, Microsoft has got, uh, streaming games, there's something just happened with PS4. Valve is turning, uh, Steam Link into a streaming game system. Um, everyone's making streaming game stuff now. It's just like, that is what's happening at GDC this year.

• 1:09:11Speaker 05

  I thought everybody already was making streaming game things, and then it didn't work.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:09:16Speaker 05

  And then, and then, again, they were like, hey, let's do streaming games this time, and then it didn't work again. I can't keep track of this industry at all.

• 1:09:26Speaker 04

  I mean, it's, it's, it's happening again. I think it's all about like, codecs and how fast is your wireless and how fast is your internet?

• 1:09:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, I remember when Steam Link came out, I was like, oh, this is exciting. Like, I can, um, you know, I can use my laptop in one place in my apartment, and have my PC somewhere else, and I could play Factorio, and then it would crash constantly, so I completely gave up on it. And now, they think they're ready for my, my desktop computer to stream video games over the internet. Like, I don't know. Like, i- if somebody does this, and it really is actually fun to play those video games, good for them. That will be a great time. Until then, I just so unconvinced.

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  I mean, it's, uh, I mean, I have a sling box. I can't, I can barely stream like 720p television over the internet from my house.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  But like, we, we tested Project Streams. Stefan wrote an article back in October, and, uh, he's like, way better than he expected. Granted, he wasn't expecting much, but like, it worked way better than we expected. Like, it is like, as a minimum viable gaming product, like, you're gonna go from like, spend a hundred bucks on a controller in a box, and like, good enough, little bit of lag, but whatever. If you're gonna just go play, I don't know, Assassin's Creed, or some other, you know, first-person game, you know, by yourself, eh, you can get by. And then there'll be this Delta, and then, well, you buy an Xbox S, and like, there'll be like, like, these step functions all the way up to buying an insane gaming rig. And

• 1:10:54Speaker 04

  the, I, it does seem like streaming games is gonna get, like, viable and cheap, even though it won't necessarily get good. And that'll be different than what we had before. Everyone's gonna announce their plans for that. It may all disappear in a puff of smoke, like, the last three times. But that's what's coming.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  Is anyone here contractually obligated to say something about 5G at this time?

• 1:11:13Speaker 04

  Oh, my god.

• 1:11:14Nilay Patel?

  It's like, is John Ledger gonna pop, like, burst through a window and be like, 5G, bro? Like, that's a, that's a thing, right? Zero latency, wireless connections?

• 1:11:22Speaker 05

  Only if you pair it with 8K and AI.

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  No, you're killing me.

• 1:11:26Speaker 04

  No, you use AI to figure out how to, how to encode the game, and then, so that it doesn't take too much bandwidth, and then you stream it over, uh, 5G to your 8K screen. It, it all makes sense.

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then you just put a crater in the middle of Wisconsin and take the money and run. It's great.

• 1:11:42Speaker 05

  People just need to, the, the physics of this are just stupid. Because like, what do people wanna do? They wanna play Fortnite. What happens in Fortnite? You are in multiplayer death matches.

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Speaker 05

  You're shooting at people. The latency is so...

• 1:11:59Speaker 05

  Fundamental to the experience.

• 1:12:01Speaker 04

  Paul, let me ask you a question.

• 1:12:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 04

  Do you stream 4K movies onto your TV via some box? If you have a 4K TV, is that a pretty common thing people do in America now, even though bandwidth isn't that great?

• 1:12:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, every time I push play, it starts out really blurry and then later on it's 4K.

• 1:12:18Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:12:18Speaker 05

  Okay, go ahead.

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  If, if the conversation we would have had around whether or not 4K streaming was viable without some massive infrastructure upgrade five years ago would have been like, no, this is crazy. It'll never happen.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  And then we just sort of muddled our way there and it sort of happened. I think the same thing will happen to gaming.

• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  Streaming.

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  I'm with you.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  But yeah, how do you, how do you fix the speed of light, Dieter? You can't improve latency.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  Truly, the Vergecast has landed in its natural state.

• 1:12:45Nilay Patel?

  How do you fix the speed of light, Dieter? Uh, I will say I have a PS4 Remote Play. It's now on iOS. So like, I have it on my iPad. It's like pretty neat. I bought.

• 1:12:56Speaker 05

  What do you play?

• 1:12:57Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I played Madden on it. I tried to play a racing game on it, which was super dumb. That was not, that was not a good idea at all. Uh, but you can play, you can like get through a Madden. Like, that game stops and starts enough, you know? But I bought a Steel Series Nimbus controller so that I can like play PS4 in another room in my house. I haven't set it up yet, but maybe it'll be awesome. And then I'll let you guys know. It'll be great. I think the idea, like, the, the idea that I'll travel with an iPad and then I can actually play PS4 wherever I go is like very powerful. Is that, is any of that gonna work?

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  No, but the idea is powerful. That's really been the theme of this episode.

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  The ideas are so good. The executions are so bad.

• 1:13:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if only you can dream it. All right. One last thing we gotta talk about. Uh, Apple this week announced an event for the 25th. The last Vergecast show we had, we had Julia Alexander on. We talked about streaming wars. 25th, looks like Apple's gonna be in the streaming wars. They're gonna announce their new streaming service. I bet there's gonna be a bunch of celebrities on stage. Uh, it doesn't sound like there's gonna be any hardware at that one. Uh, they're probably also gonna announce their like, uh, Apple News Premium thing. Where you like pay money to Apple and you get a bunch of subscription news things like the Times or whatever. They're having problems signing up newspapers like the Times actually, so we'll see who's in the bundle. So basically, if you just like take a step back. Apple's gonna have an event on the 25th.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  We'll talk about it more next week in the lead up to the event, but they announced it this week. And that event probably looks like just Apple announcing partners. Right? Like an hour of being like, here's a show. Here's a network. Here's the CEO of another network. Here's the publisher of Time Magazine. Like-

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  Here are some trailers.

• 1:14:38Nilay Patel?

  Here are some trailers. Like, I don't think they're gonna announce a bunch of new software. Like, we kinda know what the TV app looks like.

• 1:14:43Speaker 04

  They gotta do some kinda tweaks to the TV app. I mean, they'll announce partners, but like, some of those announcements will be like, and the TV app- in my dream, and it's actually my nightmare, in my nightmare, they announce, and now when you hit the- you know, now this is the new home screen and it takes four convoluted button clicks when you're holding the Apple remote upside down in order to get to the old home screen. Right?

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what they're- they'll switch it so the TV home screen, the TV app screen is the home- which has always been their explicit plan. They've said it to me directly.

• 1:15:12Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:15:12Nilay Patel?

  Um, the TV app screen will be the new home screen and the app screen will be an app screen.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:18Nilay Patel?

  And then, not for nothing, the people who have chosen to partner with Apple will get preferential treatment on the first screen of Apple's interface. And the people who haven't, like Netflix, will be hidden away.

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:15:29Nilay Patel?

  Just keeps- that theme is right there. And then, Apple News, the same deal. They'll announce some software tweaks. And the publishers who have chosen to take money from Apple and pay a cut will be promoted in Apple News. And everyone else will not. And Apple will literally be a news distributor and we're all gonna have to deal with that together as a family. It's gonna be great. But that's coming on the 25th. I'm sure more reporting is gonna emerge next week, so I won't belabor it here. On next week's show, we'll do a whole preview of what we expect on the 25th, but I want to mention it because invites did go out this week. And that's it. Nat, you got any last hits? What's your dream?

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  What- what's my dream?

• 1:16:02Nilay Patel?

  Paul's dream is a Linux phone. My dream is playing PS4 games streaming, uh, on a tablet when I'm traveling. Dieter's dream is obviously, uh, WebOS returns triumphantly with slices.

• 1:16:15Nilay Patel?

  What's yours?

• 1:16:15Speaker 03

  Small phones that fold.

• 1:16:17Nilay Patel?

  Small phones that fold. By the time this comes out, I think we're gonna have our chart of folding phones and the things that they're called, and I don't want to give it away, but it's one of the funniest things we've made in a long time, so look for that. All right, that's it, that's The Vergecast. We'll be back. I'll just gonna let you know what's happening. Next week on Monday, we're gonna drop an episode of Switched on Pop, which is a great new show in the Vox family. Dieter and I actually met one of the hosts, Charlie at Southby, he's great, ex-Google engineer and now makes music podcasts. That's coming on Monday. On Tuesday, it's not gonna be me doing interview. Casey Newton actually interviewed Alex Stamos from ex-security at Facebook at Southby.

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  If you listen to podcasts at 1.5 speed and you try and listen to Casey's interview at 1.5 speed, you will die. Play it at normal speed. Just trust me, they talk that fast.

• 1:17:02Nilay Patel?

  Stamos said that Facebook's pivot to privacy was Mark Zuckerberg with his back to the wall, burning the boats and pivoting the entire company, so that's a, it's a take. So that's coming on Tuesday. Next Thursday, we have another chat show, so lots coming up next week on The Vergecast. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week, rock and roll.

• 1:17:20Speaker 04

  Paul.

• 1:17:21Nilay Patel?

  Promo code. Linux phone.

• 1:17:44Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neel Apatel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:18:05Speaker 07

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy, and if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 1:18:30Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:18:46Speaker 08

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