Apple diversifying business, face unlock for Pixel 4, and a bill banning endless scrolling

Stories this week:The iPhone now makes up less than half of Apple’s businessApple confirms the Apple Card is coming in AugustGoogle is asking people on the street to scan their faces for $5The Google Pixel 4 will unlock using a face scanThe less expensive Pixel 3A helped Google sell twice as many smartphones last quarterNew bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrollingThe major broadcasters are suing to shut down this app that streams ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC for freeT-Mobile CEO on 5G: Verizon is ‘clueless,’ AT&T is ‘lying, confusing’Dish confirms that it will become a major US mobile carrierVerizon says it has a secret 5G plan after T-Mobile CEO calls company ‘clueless’Verizon expands its 5G network to four more citiesVerizon’s CEO thinks half of the US will have access to 5G next yearLook upon Samsung’s new 3.5mm to USB-C dongle, ye mighty, and despairYou can already reserve the Galaxy Note 10 and it will arrive on August 23rdNew Nvidia Shield TV box shows up at FCCMophie’s iPhone XS and XR battery cases are now available for allIt’s a keyboard! It’s a trackpad! It’s almost a great iPad mouseYou can now run Android on a Nintendo Switch 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?

  This week on the Vergecast, we talk about Apple's earnings, the future of the iPhone business, talk about Pixel 4 and its forthcoming face unlock. We get into the new Josh Hawley bill that would put a timer on your social media, so this is true. We talk a little bit about T-Mobile, Verizon 5G, and the Galaxy Note 10 is coming. That's the Vergecast coming up now.

• 0:14Speaker 01

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• 0:46Speaker 02

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• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media empire, a growing empire which will one day come to your city. But like benevolently, like in a fun way. Does that make you Palpatine? Uh, but in a fun way.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  I thought it was like a race to 5G reference.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  No, that's, that's happening whether we wanted to or not.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  Which is also a Palpatine thing.

• 1:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's sort of. I don't want to get into it. I'm Neelai. Hi. Dieter's here. Hello. Paul Miller's here.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  It's a big week. Addie Robertson is going to join us around the halfway mark to talk about another Josh Hawley bill in the Senate. This one, this is true. This is a true thing we're going to talk about. It's a bill that would require all social media platforms to limit your usage to 30 minutes a day by default, and then even if you change it, reset it every month to protect you from, from YouTube and Twitter, which, you know, saying it out loud. Any good idea. Anyway, Andy's gonna come by. We're gonna talk about that. There's a big trend going on with that stuff. But before I do that, there's tech company news in this world. It has been two weeks of nonstop earnings. I think last week on the show, Google earnings broke while we were taping. This week, we've waited it out. Apple earnings

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  have happened, third quarter. Dieter, walk us through.

• 2:35Speaker 04

  So, the big news is that the iPhone no longer accounts for more than half of Apple's revenue. For the first time since, I think it was 2012, they're making more money off everything else than they are on just the iPhone. And there's two ways to look at this. Oh my God, the iPhone is failing, blah. The other way to look at it is, hey, they finally have a diversified business and not just an iPhone company. Here's the thing, though. They are still just an iPhone company. I love your iPad. I love your Mac. Apple TV, you're fine, except for your remote. But, you know, like, during the analyst calls that came later, you know, in the back half of the financial results call, one of the

• 3:20Speaker 04

  analysts sort of like tiptoed up to like, asking a question about, hey, so, all these services that you're doing, what about, you know, offering services not for the iPhone? And Tim was like, well, you know, Apple Music is on Android and the Apple TV does exist, but look. And then he went on like a three-minute tear on how much headroom there is to sell services to iPhone customers. They've got, you know, a billion something monthly users. He talked actually quite a bit about the fact that there's a secondary market for iPhones, which means that like, don't just look at our sales quarter to quarter, but also look at what like used iPhone sales look like, because we can also sell to those people. And just the sense that I got at the end of it was, don't expect the Apple Watch to

• 4:05Speaker 04

  work with Android anytime in the near future. Don't expect iMessage on Android ever. And yeah, like they believe, I think, pretty strongly that they don't need to expand out beyond iPhone with their services in a really meaningful way. They've got Apple TV on, you know, a bunch of smart TVs, but beyond that, they're just sort of like, it seems ridiculous. It doesn't even enter their worldview that they would offer their services on Android.

• 4:33Nilay Patel?

  So the top line here is iPhone growth continues to slow. They still sell a lot of phones. I feel like we always, it's easy to miss this with Apple. They sell an enormous number of phones at very high prices.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  The issue is they, like, year over year, they're down some like 10, 12%, right?

• 4:54Speaker 04

  And that's just for phones. Like, year over year, I think that their overall revenue's still increased year over year.

• 4:59Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Which means they get to say best quarter ever, like they usually do. But yes, the phone revenue is decreasing.

• 5:04Nilay Patel?

  The phone revenue is decreasing, the sales are decreasing, and there's some, they don't break out how many they sell anymore. So it's hard, phone revenue decreasing could be a function of, well, they put out the 10R, they're selling cheaper phones than last time around, right? Like, there's a whole mix of things in that equation. But the very top line is phone revenue is down, which implies sales are down, and services and wearables revenue is up. So they're, they're getting more money out of every iPhone customer.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Right. But the, the thing is, like, you look at that graph, like, the iPhone's trending down, revenue is trending up, at some point, you know, they may meet, and revenue on services is trending up, at some point they meet, but like, there's a cap to how much they can make on services in theory, and that cap is how many iPhones are there, and how many people that own iPhones are willing to pay for Apple services. And so that's why, you know, you, you look at the global market, and Android has 85 something percent market share. So it's like, well, obviously, that's like where the real money is. But I think from Apple's perspective, you know, when they brought the iPod to Windows, it was like, y'all, you gotta do something. The Mac is like, fine, but it's not doing that great. And like, you, you gotta do something to sell more stuff. And so it felt sort of...

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Inevitable or necessary for the company to bring the iPod to Windows because it, you know, it brought in a huge customer base that they didn't have before. And I just don't think Apple feels any kind of real pressure to do that with their services business. I think they're, they're just fine telling their shareholders to chillax. We're making plenty of money selling services to iPhone users.

• 6:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So just to pull it apart, service by service. Tim Cook is saying, we haven't maximized the amount of money we can make on services just with our installed base. So you're saying there's, there's a, there's a revenue line and there's an installed baseline. At some point they intersect. Great. Tim Cook is saying, we're really far away from that intersection.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, that's fair, right? They don't feel pressure to go beyond what they need to do. But then in some places they obviously feel that pressure. In particular, their, their, their content businesses. So Apple Music is on Android, Apple TV plus whatever it is. iTunes movies and TV shows just launched on Vizio TVs. Airplay two is on a whole bunch of TVs, Samsung TVs, LG TVs, what have you. So there clearly is some pressure, right? To like, get the content business wide. Because I don't think you can get Oprah to just be on iPhones. Right. She wants to be on all the TVs. And I don't think you can get Taylor Swift, although Taylor Swift has a Spotify deal now. So clearly they couldn't get her anymore.

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  But I don't think you can get, I don't know, Chance the Rapper is like a big Apple, Apple deal maker. You can't, he doesn't want to just be on iPhones. He wants to be on all this stuff.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:54Nilay Patel?

  So that's the split, right? iMessage and other Apple, Apple, what's it called? Game Arcade, Arcade Studio.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Apple Arcade, yeah.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  Max Arcade Plus 5G.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Just, we need, I, I, this is a side tangent, but we need more words besides plus, max, XL, what's the other one that we get? Go.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Now.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Like, well, I'm naming the next kid, go.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Now.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Those are the only five words you're allowed to append to the end of your product that mean that it's bigger or you have to pay a subscription for it. And we just, we just need more words.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Remember when it was extreme and it's just started with an X, there's no E?

• 8:35Speaker 04

  I'm just glad that we're done with Ultra. Like Ultra's gone. That's great.

• 8:39Nilay Patel?

  No, that means it's, it's just in hiding. It'll come back.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  It's like Bell Bottoms.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  Ultra is like a groundhog. It pops up and it sees the shadow. It goes away.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  So Apple, Apple has services that are designed to monetize its install base. And then they have services that seem designed to trap its install base.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Would you agree?

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Sure. Absolutely.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  So iMessage is designed to trap you.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  But they don't charge for iMessage.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Right. Well, I mean, I don't know how many iMessage sticker packs you've bought, Paul, but I've, I've been thoroughly monetized.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Oh, I, I totally forgot about sticker packs. Oh, wow. I was gonna say, does anybody feel trapped by Apple News?

• 9:23Speaker 04

  No.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  When I use it, I do. I want to get out.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  When I get an Apple News link and it opens up Apple News instead of a web browser, I feel very trapped, but otherwise, no.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  I mean, I have to make that better.

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  Neil, I might because he's, he pays for it and like, you know, reads a Vogue article once a week or something, right?

• 9:39Speaker 04

  Vanity Fair. It's always Vanity Fair.

• 9:41Nilay Patel?

  And the, the multi-step click process to go from Twitter to Apple News.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  Is a nightmare.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:48Nilay Patel?

  And certainly not worth my $10 a month, which I should immediately cancel and put into Max's college fund. What am I doing with my money?

• 9:55Speaker 04

  So, look, I've said this before. I will say it again right now. You should not care how much money Apple makes. Unless you are a stockholder, a major stockholder, you shouldn't care. You should only care about this discussion insofar as it affects what kind of products Apple makes and if they make your life better or worse. And so the, the looming question has always been, when Apple becomes a services-first company and makes more money off services than it does off of selling iPhones, will that change the way that it makes products? Will they be scammer? Will they like take their eye off the ball on design? Will they do stuff that is user-hostile in some way?

• 10:35Speaker 04

  Will, you know, I don't know. They, they make random deals that are stupid and annoying, but you have to live with them because that's what they offer you.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Well, they set the default search to Bing.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. Right. So, so far the answer is, yeah, it's like, it's annoying around the edges, but it doesn't seem fundamentally like. They have, Neil and Paul, you might have a different answer. Uh, but I think one thing that's worth watching, keeping a really close eye on is the launch of the Apple Card, uh, which by the way, they announced is happening next month, this, this, or this month now in August. Because the more I think about it, the more annoyed I am with the Apple Card.

• 11:10Nilay Patel?

  Why? People seem so stoked about it.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  It's fine. It's, what is it? You get 3% on Apple purchases, 2% if you use the Apple Pay on the phone, and 1% if you use the card. Is that the breakdown?

• 11:22Nilay Patel?

  It's not my fault. The, the Apple purchases one to me is so funny. It's like, how much money do you spend at the Apple Store on a regular basis?

• 11:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:30Nilay Patel?

  To make that extra, like, how many AirPods can you buy, man?

• 11:35Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing there?

• 11:36Speaker 04

  It's just, it's, it's like a fine card. Uh, the app that like shows you your spending breakdown is really cool. I've been like, trying to like pay more attention to the logging of my finances and so, I'm learning things and so it'd be cool if some of that was more automated for me. But if they start like really pushing their kind of like fine credit card, that's actually not that much better than everything else that's out there. Um, and in many ways it's worse because you can't use one if you don't have an iPhone.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Then, I don't know, that, that starts to feel like you're taking things that are fundamentally the same as what everybody else sells and claiming that it's better. And that worries me a tiny bit.

• 12:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that the way I frame it is, well, Apple compromised the user experience of the phone to upsell services. And I'm happy to go on literally any, uh, cable news television program and say that out loud, which is like a thing I do. Uh, so if you're a producer, just give me a call. I'll come on your show and say that. Um, and I, you know, I published that headline. The way I think the pressure works, and I, Dieter, I think your point about the, the two curves intersecting is, is a good one. Right now they have a lot of room to grow that services revenue. They have a billion installed devices, running iOS, they have lots of phones. They have that secondary market of refurbished devices that they and the carrier sell. They're very interested in trade-ins, all that stuff. So a lot of phones, a lot of iOS devices.

• 12:55Nilay Patel?

  A lot of Macs, what have you. That's a lot of people to just ask for some more money a month. And so that that first wave of revenue, and you're already seeing it, is pretty easy to get. Right. And that's where their services business is growing. Apple News Plus is not good, but some percentage of a billion people are paying for it and services revenue are going up. Some percentage of people buy Apple Care. That number is going up.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  They talked a lot about making more money off Apple Care or like more people are attaching to Apple Care on the earnings call.

• 13:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you make it easier to get a new phone every, every, every so often. That number goes up like, great, they're doing it. The App Store, some percentage of a billion people do App Store stuff. The number goes up.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  They are so excited about App Store revenue. They're talking about it a bunch. And man, it was actually infuriating because when the App Store launched and like, Steve Jobs got, I believe it was the all things D stage or maybe it was, no, maybe, no, it was definitely all things D. Like, you're gonna make money off this? He's like, nah, it's like, it's just enough to like, run the thing. We're not trying to make this a profit center. Don't be crazy. And now they're like, it's a profit center. And they specifically talked about how they were really excited about how the App Store was making more money because the Chinese government changed some rules to allow more apps that have in-app purchases in their games.

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  Specifically games. Like, we talk a lot about the government on this show, unfortunately. And we're like, you know, the classic line of the government is like, the government shouldn't pick winners and losers. Like, you want to see the government picking winners and losers. It's the Chinese government getting some games past the censors with in-app purchases and Apple's revenue going up.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, we're not, that's like, there it is. That's the end of the spectrum. I feel very comfortable about everything that's happening.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  But so, right, and they're gonna launch more services. So some percentage of a billion people will sign up for their TV service. Some percentage of a billion people will sign up for the game service and on and on and on it goes. That's the easy part, right? Like, that number just goes up. Apple's happy. They're monetizing more. Their folks, great. As those lines get closer together, getting the next sort of tranche of users to pay for stuff gets harder. And that's where like, the marketing pressure has to go up. And then the next level gets even harder. And then by the end, it's like, you haven't signed up for any services. Have you heard about iCloud storage? Because we have just decided that the iPhone will now take slightly bigger photos than before.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Your contacts are two terabytes.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. Every contact now automatically includes a 4K video for some reason to make the user experience better.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  This is literally an emoji. Like now the emoji gets stored in the contact file.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  I mean, that's a nightmare conspiracy theory, but you can, you can see it, right?

• 15:43Speaker 03

  This is how I'm starting to view these, these companies, not like totally as like they're, they're attacking me, but what if they decided to attack me? What if Apple were all out and tried to make my life worse through its various vectors? How much effective power do they have over me right now? And I've limited that a little bit because I have a Mac, but my Mac has an iCloud account. Like Apple could probably right now remotely delete my Mac because I have iCloud.

• 16:13Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  You know?

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  So obviously, but that's like the far worst case. So that's really far down the tail of possibility. But you know, there's some other, other ones like a credit card. Like I told you guys earlier, like the credit card is so appealing to me and I can't even figure out why. But like Dieter said, you know, it's got your budget in there, you know?

• 16:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  So what if you plan your whole life around this credit card and then they make it vastly worse for some reason? Well, you know, now what? I'm going to spend three days switching credit cards and budgeting apps and you know, so like, how, how vulnerable am I to this company making a bad decision and messing up my life?

• 16:50Speaker 04

  We got, we got, we got a lot of stuff to talk about. So we had to move on. I'm just going to say this. Apple services are like a cat.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Oh God.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  When you get a cat, it jumps on your lap and you start petting it and it starts purring. You feel comforted and happy. The cat is making a ton of money. And this metaphor is the services, it's purring and happy. Everything is great. And then, you know, after a while, a cat rolls over and shows you its belly because it thinks, you know, you might want to give it a belly rub. And you're like, oh, this sounds great. And then you do, and then it wrecks you. It's claws come out and it destroys your arm. Those are Apple services. Pet the cat, feel really good about it, but just beware of the belly.

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  I feel like an, an underlying thing the listener needs to know in this situation is that Dieter has long had, I would say, a rocky relationship with his cat.

• 17:35Nilay Patel?

  And for at least a year, I would ask him how it was going and he'd say, "The cat hates me." It would be like the first words out of his mouth, but it's gotten better over time.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  The cat likes me now, yeah, since we found a routine.

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  And that's the Apple card.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  But it's important to know about cats is that they can exhibit the symptoms of love without actually loving.

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  So one more thing about Apple earnings, I want to just mention, because it jumped out to both Dieter and I, is Catalyst, which is the sort of technology that lets iPad apps run on the Mac. It's obviously coming with Catalina. Tim Cook mentioned Catalyst three times, if not four, on this call. He mentioned it in his prepared remarks to the analysts on the call. He mentioned it again when he was like going through like the different lines of business, like, "We're so excited about Catalyst coming to the Mac." And then someone asked him a question about Mac apps, and he was like, "We're so excited about Catalyst." Here's the disconnect. Coming out of WWDC, everything was Swift UI, right? Like, Swift UI is the future, whatever. Catalyst apps that we have are bad.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the cadence was, leading up to WWDC, I and Mini were like, "You gotta fix Catalyst apps." And I explicitly said, "Apple, you should go all in, prove that they can be good." And then WWDC happened, and they were still bad, like really bad, like troublingly bad. And so everyone's like, "Oh, this is a problem." But Apple also announced this thing called Swift UI, which is a new way to make apps that work across all of its platforms and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, really easy to code a UI, and actually pretty good, better than most cross-platform stuff. So everybody in the Mac world were like, "Well, I guess Catalyst is like a sideshow. What really matters is Swift UI. And let's just, let's just all agree together to kind of ignore Catalyst for now, or at least treat

• 19:22Speaker 04

  it like a stepping stone." And then Tim Cook just comes out super hard for it on the earnings call.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And he also said iPadOS is a strategic step for the iPad, when at WWDC they're like, "No, it's just a different name."

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:35Nilay Patel?

  So a lot of sort of like disconnect between what I would say is the inside baseball of Apple world, where everyone is like, you know, doing Kremlinology to figure out what they really mean, what the real future is, and these public messages, which is like, "Catalyst is going to be great for the Mac. Please ignore the apps that have already shipped." Catalyst is gonna be great, we promise. And iPadOS is a strategic new direction for the iPad. When inside Apple world, everyone's like, nah, it's just iOS with some stuff. And I, we'll just have to see, but that is a clear disconnect in their messaging.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  One last thing, just, I'm just, this is a side note, but it's, we're recording this on August 1st. And I don't know if any of you are using any of the betas, but I gotta tell you, really nervous about them launching this stuff on time.

• 20:17Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 20:18Speaker 04

  There's, everything is really rocky.

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Compared to last year especially, so we'll see. Could be like, maybe they'll, they'll just push it off, the stuff will launch in October. That would be fine. Don't, please don't launch, launch these operating systems before they're ready, Apple. Do not feel bad if you have to launch the iPhone 11 with iOS 12. Like honestly, don't. It will be fine. It won't hurt any sales at all. Just don't launch these operating systems until they're ready. I beg you.

• 20:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, but they're on a deadline. They can't launch the operating, they can't launch the phone without the new operating system to support it.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  Sure they can.

• 20:52Nilay Patel?

  They've never done that before.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they can. What's to stop them?

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, putting features on the phone and then marketing the phone with its new features? What do you mean? Like it has a third camera? Cool. Like, who cares?

• 21:04Speaker 04

  The camera will get turned on later. It's fine.

• 21:06Nilay Patel?

  This camera doesn't work.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  It's like the microphone hidden inside the, you know, the Nest Protect, whatever.

• 21:11Nilay Patel?

  I guess they'll launch portrait mode later.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're on a deadline. They gotta, they get, that event, that phone event is like, you know, hardware, software services all coming together.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:21Nilay Patel?

  We'll see.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  And maybe they'll announce the price for Apple TV Plus at that event. Who knows?

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  I mean, by the way, the, the, the way this should work, Paul, and I think this goes to your point of like, how can they, how do you make sure they're not cheating you or like flexing on you? Is if you have less exposure to their prices. So instead of paying nine bucks a month for Apple News and, you know, however many dollars a month for the games and however many months, how many dollars a month for the TV service? They just charge you a flat fee a year like Amazon Prime. So it's like a hundred bucks a month. You get a phone, you get service, you get all these software services. That's I think what people want. I think that might be why we don't know the price of the TV service and all this other stuff yet.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Doesn't that, I don't know, it's weird. Amazon feels like they have in some sense, no incentive to improve the offerings of Amazon Prime.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Because it's diffuse across a bunch of things. And then at the same time, Amazon Prime seems like the only streaming service that cares about having like random old stuff to watch.

• 22:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, we can do an entire hour on streaming wars, but Amazon does relentlessly improve Prime to make that not just a streaming service, like the whole Prime experience. Because it is so worth it to them to have everybody just pay them some money a month. And that makes you more likely to shop at Amazon. It's a whole thing. So I'm very curious to see if Apple does that kind of like recurring revenue bundle around the new iPhone. And just they're like, everybody gets a new iPhone every year. It costs a hundred dollars a month.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  The problem is, what would you call it?

• 22:57Nilay Patel?

  Apple Phone Care Plus Prime.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Apple, Apple good now.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Mega Ultra.

• 23:02Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they're friendly with Amazon. They can just call it Apple Prime. All right.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 23:06Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of stuff that's coming out, there's also Google earnings and then Dieter, you basically like, Google was like forced to respond to you. I don't know how else to put this in there. I mean, is there any other proof that the Pixel 3 didn't sell well and is not selling well than their willingness to just tell us about the Pixel 4?

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, there's not. They're just like, yep, here you go. More stuff of the Pixel 4. If you didn't see the news, they just fully announced and put up a blog post that the Pixel 4 is going to use face unlock. Presumably that means no fingerprint under the screen, which is fine by me. It's going to use the same sort of face unlock technology that the iPhone uses. So it's got an infrared camera. It shoots like dots at your face and then it reads the dots. All that's fine. That's why the bezel is like all the way across the top because they got to fit a bunch of stuff in there. The other thing they have to fit in there is a tiny little radar sensor because it has Project Soli. And the radar can basically detect when like your face approaches it, like the blip on a radar screen. And then it will turn on the face unlock when it detects your face is coming to check your face and then the phone will just unlock. So like

• 24:08Speaker 04

  in the act of picking it up, it'll unlock, which is. Fine, but really not that much better than what the iPhone does like it does. I don't know. We'll see. And you'll also be able to use Project Solely to wave your hand to do stuff.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  You can solely can detect like the tiny violin gesture, right?

• 24:26Speaker 04

  It can detect the tiny violin gesture, but I don't know if they're using the tiny violin gesture. So far as I know, they've only announced like waving to like go next track, last track. They've already done some like stuff with the Nest Max where you can like hold your hand up like to pause it. I think that they're in a tough spot because if they get too cute with all these gestures, they're doomed because like one, you won't remember them. Two, think about how user interface works. You do a thing and then something happens and then you do that thing again. And then the same thing happens. This has been the problem with gesture interfaces since Samsung started showing commercials of people in the kitchen with their hands covered in dough, swaying their hands at a phone.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  It doesn't work consistently. So whatever they choose has to be easy to remember and it has to be rock solid and work. Otherwise it will go down in history as just another gimmick phone. And Google needs the Pixel to not be a gimmick phone. It needs it to be like the canonical Android phone. And if it just is another phone with a bunch more gimmicks, they might as well be LG. And hell, LG probably sells more phones than Google does. And like, that's a really bad spot to be in. We're going to do weird gimmicks every year and bleh.

• 25:39Nilay Patel?

  Google, Google said that in their earnings, the Pixel 3 helped them sell twice as many Pixel phones though.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Twice as many? That's a number? They sold Bezos pixels.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  I mean, just to put some, some meat on the bones of, of, of Dieter whining. The Pixel 3, when I squeeze the Pixel 3, I think this is a good gimmick. I don't like yelling, okay, Google, you know, I like to squeeze, squeeze the phone. And all I do is set a timer for cooking meat. That's all I ever do to, when I squeeze the phone. I don't ask it questions. I just set a timer. Its response time is completely random.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  It can't, even though I squeeze, this is a physical gesture, I felt the chik chik. I know it got the squeeze and it launches the voice thing. The time where it begins listening to me is random. And the time when it stops listening to me is completely random, even though I'm doing it in the for in the exact same scenario, on the exact same spot in my house, you know, every time. So I, and I think part of this is the symptom, like it's kind of that conversation you guys had with, with the Google, uh, with the Android executives. Like there's this firewall between the Pixel team and the Android team, which is laudable in some sense, and clearly detrimental in another sense, because the Pixel team is not necessarily

• 27:09Speaker 03

  the best Android phone manufacturers on the planet.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Yep, they know. They have to have that firewall because they need to not piss off Samsung too much.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Sure, sure.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  But apparently they're less worried about that because they super announced, uh, face unlocking Pixel for, uh, less than three weeks or two weeks ahead of Samsung launching the Note 10, which is probably going to use an in-screen fingerprint sensor. So womp womp.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's a, we, we haven't said why they announced it. Which is that Google employees are wandering the streets of America, offering people $5 to scan their faces.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  That's not why they announced it. They announced it because they've got this wacky plan to like pre-announce features like their LG. But it does in fact turn out that they do have people wandering the streets, handing legal forms to people sitting in the park and say, hey, can, can I scan your face for Google? Uh, ZDNet, uh, had the story and then Android Police confirmed it with a couple of other people. And, uh, you know, I'd like ask Google, like, what, what? Really? And they're like, yeah, we're doing it.

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  So I appreciate it, first of all.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, they're, they're saying what they're doing.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:16Nilay Patel?

  They're asking permission and they're paying people. Those are all good things.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:21Nilay Patel?

  They're good things in a context of the dystopia that we live in.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  A time traveler from Equifax follows the Google employee and says,

• 28:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Here's $125. Sorry, in the future, we will use this face information and then leak it.

• 28:37Speaker 04

  So, one of the things I appreciated is, I was like, what are you doing with the data? And they're like, you know, some lawyer wrote the form and it said, we keep it for five years. And that's dumb. We don't need it for that long. So we're only going to keep it for 18 months. And something that we were recording location, but that's dumb. So we're going to stop doing that. And, you know, this question about like, is it, it's never associated with a Google account, but there was one specific thing that Google said, which was like, faces are inherently not anonymous. I was like, thank you. You actually are like getting better at talking about this stuff.

• 29:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think it's, they need a diverse set of faces so it works.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah. So this is, this is the thing is they want to, they want to test it on a wide array of faces, ethnicities, diversities, genders, to make sure that it is rock solid across all of, all of those things.

• 29:21Nilay Patel?

  And that's also a lot of, well, it's just in the context of this moment in time, Google paying you $5 to scan your faces. It has so many different like emotions that it causes.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:32Nilay Patel?

  But it's fine. I'm sure Apple did the same thing in secret, you know, like.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. They probably just brought people into a room and threatened them with death if they talked instead of handing them a form.

• 29:40Nilay Patel?

  Welcome. This anechoic chamber is used for testing the home pod and also murdering you if you ever tell anyone about this.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  So it goes. All right. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. Addie is going to join us. We're going to talk about what is going on in the government. We'll be right back.

• 30:01Speaker 05

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• 31:02Nilay Patel?

  Addie, welcome.

• 31:03Speaker 07

  Hi.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  How are things?

• 31:04Speaker 07

  I'm not great in the specific capacity that I'm here.

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  Let's just get into it. So our friend Senator Josh Hawley, he keeps doing stuff, I think is the best way to phrase it.

• 31:19Speaker 07

  Doing online stuff.

• 31:20Nilay Patel?

  He won't stop. He's very angry at tech companies. He thinks they're bad. And he put out a bill this week, the SMART Act?

• 31:27Speaker 07

  The Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh. Oh, my God. Okay.

• 31:32Speaker 07

  He's mostly issued backronyms, so it's maybe a little bit notable that he's started doing them now.

• 31:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. What does the SMART Act do?

• 31:39Speaker 07

  Well, it reduces social media addiction. Okay, actually, what it does is it's really confusing. The intent of it is to take what are called dark patterns, which are things that are designed to make you engage with a website more in ways that are sort of manipulative, like a thing that scrolls infinitely, so you'll read it forever, or those pop-ups that say, like, do you want to sign up for our newsletter? Or in tiny print, no, you're a horrible person.

• 32:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 07

  So the idea is, among other things, to ban those. And to ban things like autoplaying videos and a bunch of stuff that people hate. But it's also just kind of an insane bill. So for one thing, it's supposed to apply to social media companies. But based on everything I've read, it sounds like social media companies are anything of any size that is primarily user-generated content. So like, hey, you have like a stamp collector forum? Great, now this has the exact same rules as Twitter.

• 32:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that doesn't seem right.

• 32:36Speaker 07

  So then there's that, then there's the rules that people have actually been talking about online, like the fact that these sites will have to prominently tell you every 30 minutes that you've been on them 30 minutes, also to by default block you every 30 minutes. And you can opt out of this, but the block will reset at the beginning of every month.

• 32:54Nilay Patel?

  That one is the most, it's across every platform. So it's to track your usage across every platform that you're on Twitter somehow.

• 33:01Speaker 07

  Like phone, yeah.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then every 30 minutes are like, you're done. Or even using it this 30 minutes unless you go and change it.

• 33:08Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 33:09Nilay Patel?

  But then it, in the statute, it says, we reset.

• 33:12Speaker 07

  Yes, the first of every month.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  I have a better name for this bill. It's the no, no, addiction, no yuck bill.

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, so one thing that is true.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  The nanny state bill.

• 33:25Nilay Patel?

  I got you. So one thing that's true, we've now said addiction like three times. It is not actually proven that these sites are addictive.

• 33:32Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  Right, the science on that is pretty like sketchy. It's like brand new.

• 33:38Speaker 07

  And I mean, the science on a lot of addiction things, like there is a fundamental disagreement about whether you should medicalize it. And this obviously doesn't engage with any of that. Other people have pointed out that there's also just a blanket rule that's like Health and Human Services can make rules, whatever it wants, about things that interfere with consumers' freedom of choice. Which I was talking to Luke Stark, who's a researcher at Harvard, and he was like, yeah, no, this is also a thing that Josh Hawley introduced in a bill like two days ago, that's basically, we will make rules so that you're not allowed to have political bias or things like that. It's just a weird, open-ended rule.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  So it bans infinite scroll, it bans autoplay. I'm not necessarily opposed to these things.

• 34:18Speaker 07

  Except that it does not ban autoplay for advertisements. So the autoplay you hate, actually it's still there.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good.

• 34:23Speaker 07

  Mostly.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  Let's kind of make sure the advertisers are okay. So it bans infinite scroll, it bans autoplay in some circumstances, not if you're an advertiser. It puts limits on how long you can use the platforms, it resets every month. It bans, this is my favorite one, badges and other awards linked to engagement with the platform. So if you get an award for using Twitter for too long and you don't get some extra features, that's just again, that's just illegal. What does he think this will actually accomplish for people that will just use social media less?

• 34:51Speaker 07

  It's really hard to say because again, a lot of the standard wisdom is that none of this stuff passes, but it works the ref and moves the Overton window. So people start thinking, well, okay, this bill is not going to pass, but maybe we should have a bill that like makes you stay off Twitter.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 07

  And people sort of grab the bits of this that they like, and then it becomes a normalized thing that people will think about.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  So there's a part here, it's labeled neutral presentation. And last week, we talked a lot about the FTC settlement with Facebook. A lot of what the FTC found was that Facebook did dark patterns in its UI over and over and over again to get you to consent to things or not know that your permission was needed to steal data from you, right? Like facial recognition in particular, you know, the FTC complaint is like screenshot after screenshot of Facebook playing interface games to get you to consent to facial recognition without you necessarily knowing it. Okay, I'm all for a law that says you can't do that stuff. But this seems to me like way too far in like directly regulating what the interfaces look like in a way that I don't even know if that's going to be effective.

• 35:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's super specific. It's worth noting that there was also an earlier bill that was supposed to essentially ban dark patterns. It was Mark Warner and Deb Fischer in the Senate, and it's called the Detour Act. I'm not going to look up the acronym for that. But its thing was, we should just go to the FTC, tell the FTC, look into this, you have the authority to ban dark patterns. Like you should make rules about this roughly similar to the way that you have rules about how you have to disclose ads. And that seems like a thing that made much more sense.

• 36:21Nilay Patel?

  So a parallel I would draw, and this is true. So like you go to law school, you like study contracts law, there's a uniform commercial code, there's a bunch of consumer protection stuff, like in every state. So if you go to rent a car, like a car rental contract is like a fairly regulated thing. And like the fonts have to be a certain size, and you have to prove that certain things were disclosed. It's a lot, right? And this is like you spend a lot of time, like law school contracts exam questions often have the phrase like, "The following clause was printed in 18-point type," which is code for, they did everything they could to make you see it. So you presumably knew it when you signed the contract. I don't think anybody reads a car rental contract.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, I don't, I don't think that is like an effective tool of disclosure. And so, to me, saying we're gonna directly regulate these interfaces so you make better choices when you click "accept," still doesn't get to the fundamental problem of no one's reading these contracts, no one's making choices based on privacy, no one's like picking Bose headphones over Sony headphones because Bose has a better privacy policy, which is the nightmare scenario that we're currently in. Like, it doesn't get to the, the main problem, it just gets to, it seems like Josh Hawley wants to punish Google and Twitter and Facebook.

• 37:36Speaker 07

  Yes, and take down every site on the internet alongside it. I mean, the thing this is supposed to do isn't necessarily private, like, make people aware of what's happening, it is the, based on the premise that if you erase these dark patterns, people will presumably spend less time on Facebook, or less time on Twitter, because they literally can't get to it, or because they have to hit a button to look at the net rest of their feed and they're aware of it. I am unclear on what the science is on whether that's likely to happen.

• 38:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I just, where would you, where would Twitter even put that button in its timeline?

• 38:09Speaker 07

  No, you could load a hundred tweets, load just a finite number of tweets, I don't know, I could see this stuff actually being done, it's just weird to imagine it being legislated.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  Here's another favorite part I have. "Not less frequently than once every three years, the Commission shall submit to Congress a report on the issue of internet addiction and the processes through which social media companies and other internet companies, by exploiting human psychology and brain physiology, interfere with the free choices of individuals on the internet." That is, like, wild! Like, it's, that's truly wild, that he's saying, "We've lost your free will because you can infinite scroll."

• 38:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, we're in some sort of full-on, hidden persuaders, subliminal messaging stuff here. Like, this feels so much like the ad debates from long before I was born about whether, like, Coca-Cola is secretly forcing you to buy it.

• 39:00Nilay Patel?

  And, and there's, I just want to be clear, there's not a lot of science under this, right?

• 39:05Speaker 07

  I would not be able to say that for sure, but it definitely doesn't seem like the kind of thing where we can tell this is going to happen.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  There's a reason it resonates is because it is sort of obvious that these services are designed to be sticky. Like, that's a, that's an old timey internet word, like that people have been trying to make services that make you come back and that make you spend more time on them. So they've been working very hard and diligently to do that. But, you know, the solution, I mean, this is like a ban on sugar. Like, I think sugar has something that you could call addictive properties, or it's hard to quit sugar, you know. But a ban on sugar is, is, is probably not the solution.

• 39:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is, so I, this is like the bigger point, which I have just been seeing now for months. I think we've been talking about it for months. It feels very odd that Josh Hawley, who is a Republican, is taking the position of, I'm going to directly regulate the behavior of companies. I'm going to say what companies can and cannot do, and we're going to say this behavior is banned. And Elizabeth Warren, who's a Democratic frontrunner, is saying, actually, the thing to do is, is break them up so there's more competition in the market, and people have more choices. And that, to me, feels like a total inversion of what you would expect these policies to be. And I, it's, I'm watching sort of the

• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  tech policy people in DC, like, literally, last week, they were just all in a Twitter fight with each other. It was very entertaining. Like, there's a realignment in, like, who is backing what policy that is fascinating to me. Because Republicans basically are like, we don't like Google, we're going to directly regulate what Google can do. And I think Warren is, I think, the face of this on the other side, and she's saying, the solution is antitrust. The solution is the market. And you just wouldn't expect that alignment to exist in the way that it does.

• 41:02Speaker 07

  At least in the first half. Although, it's, it's been really frustrating that I feel like a lot of people who think this bill is awful and ridiculous still buy the framing of it that I think is flawed, which is basically that, A, the internet is these few sites. So when you say social media, obviously, you mean these. And B, just... That the internet is a thing for wasting time on, which is, maybe that's true for a lot of people. That's very sad. I work on the internet. I post fanfiction on the internet. I do all kinds of things that are not on these few sites. I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. I enjoy it a lot. That's a user-generated content platform. It's really frustrating to sound, A, like a shill for the internet, but B, that I don't know that all of these

• 41:46Speaker 07

  things that have really meant a lot to me in my life have more or less been erased under this blanket proposition that tech is bad.

• 41:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, that's the other thing that gets me is, to pass a bill like this, you have to assume that Twitter and Facebook and Google and YouTube are forever, and that they're the only things worth carrying. Like, they're named. They're in here by name. That's very rare for a bill like this to just specifically name companies. And Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are just named in the bill, and then it's like, and other companies like them.

• 42:17Speaker 07

  As such services existed in 2019.

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So it's like, very targeted towards the existence of YouTube now, and then like, everything else like that. That's fairly rare. Like, you don't see a lot of bills that are like, Altria Tobacco shall stop addicting children. Like, that's not allowed. Like, Steve will stop mowing my lawn. Like, get off, like, you don't see a lot of that. It's also not necessarily legal to do stuff like that. So that's the other question. So Mark Cuban, who was on the interview episode on Tuesday, he, I tweeted this selection of the bill about the time limits, and he responded to me, "This is just a marketing platform for Josh Hawley." Right? We're all get outraged about it. We all know his name. Some people will fund him. Some people will fund the other side. We'll move the Overton window,

• 43:02Nilay Patel?

  and we'll start talking about regulating tech. Is that kind of your estimate of the politics of this?

• 43:07Speaker 07

  It seems like an entirely reasonable estimate, and also that whenever anybody dumps, dunks on this eminently dunkable bill, Ted Cruz gets to retweet them and say, "You work for Google."

• 43:15Nilay Patel?

  He did that to us. It's a real thing.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Wait, what?

• 43:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I, Ted Cruz retweeted me last week. This week, last week. I was like, "Thank you."

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Is this the lawmaker version of trolling, right?

• 43:27Nilay Patel?

  That's, so that's like a question. Is Josh Hawley just trolling tech companies to like, get everybody to talk about, like, this bill has no cosponsors, right? He just like, did it. Great. Is it gonna go anywhere? Who knows? Is his bill to make the FTC an ultra-powerful speech regulator for Twitter gonna go anywhere? Like, I don't know.

• 43:48Nilay Patel?

  Is everyone talking about Josh Hawley and the fact that he keeps putting out bills that would regulate tech companies and in particular, social media platforms in increasingly direct ways? Yeah, we're talking about it right now. That's actually a question we had. Like, you know, Russell and McKenna and I were like, sitting around, talking about how to cover this bill. And it's, do we give it this much attention?

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Are you letting Josh win?

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but he's a senator. There's not much more he can, there's like, one more place he can go. And like, maybe he wants to go there, but we're not gonna slow him down or speed him up. We're just gonna talk about what a senator is suggesting we regulate the internet. Like, this is, this is now, in fact, the Overton window has moved. Like, this is the outer bound of the conversation.

• 44:29Speaker 07

  And I'm not sure how many people understand that when someone says, "You propose a bill", that does not mean the bill has any likelihood to pass whatsoever. So, it seems like a lot of people may have the impression that, "Oh no, this is like a seriously considered thing, the US is maybe gonna do this thing, this is wild, like, this is policy."

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Speaker 07

  It's weird.

• 44:49Nilay Patel?

  It's, I, I just think it's, the, the thing I wanted to get out is, in particular, is this, what I see as an inversion or realignment of how Democrats and Republicans have talked about regulating tech companies. Like, it is wild that Republicans are, for example, the president actively talks about how off, how much he has deregulated the government. Like, how many regulations he's crossed off every day, like, you know, his first week in office, he's like, "I brought in the shredder, uh, we found all the regulations and I got rid of them." And this is nothing but a set of extremely specific regulations on how a software interface should work. That's a disconnect.

• 45:27Speaker 07

  To be fair, Tulsi Gabbard did sue Google for sending her emails into spam.

• 45:31Nilay Patel?

  Can you unpack that for two seconds?

• 45:32Speaker 07

  All right, so, during the debates, not the last debates, but the one, ones before, Tulsi Gabbard buys ads on Google, so when people search her name... Her selected link will come up on top of the organic results. And after the debate, when she was very popular in searches, they suspended her account for about six hours for what appears to have been a payment processing issue. And she was upset about this, which is entirely reasonable. She then sued Google over it for violating her free speech, which is less reasonable, eminently, and cited a lot of the same arguments that people like Holly and folks on Lane Cruz cite, like just sort of took for granted that Google regularly has an extremely specific

• 46:17Speaker 07

  political bias that it deals with in incredibly micromanaged ways. So she sued them. Also, she claimed that her fundraising emails get disproportionately sent to spam, which would be a really difficult thing to prove.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So just on the subject of the ads, I love the idea that not being able to buy ads from Google implicates your free speech rights. Also, Google serving up results for Gabbard's website for free. Like, they didn't stop delivering search results, which is the main thing that they do. Like, they weren't like, you search for Tulsi Gabbard, and they, because they deactivated her AdWords account, then send those searches to Joe Biden, right? They were still just like serving up searches. She just wasn't allowed to buy ads next to those searches because her credit card got declined or whatever it was.

• 47:02Speaker 07

  I mean, I think the problem is partly that Google doesn't do itself any favors by being so gigantic that it cannot really or will not explain what's wrong when something goes wrong. So it just gives these vague error messages or complaint responses that leave a lot of room for conspiratorial constructions.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you fill in the gaps yourself.

• 47:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, because it's genuinely bad. It's ridiculous sometimes.

• 47:24Nilay Patel?

  So I think that's like a main point. I think the Holly's like Section 230 bill kind of gets at this. You hear this from all sides. These companies are not nearly transparent enough, like at all, at any level. Like, no one knows how much money YouTube makes. Like, that's like the first thing. It's like the first thing to know about any company is like, are you profitable? Do you make money? How do you make your money? Who, like, who's paying you? You can't find that out about YouTube. It's buried inside of Google's earnings, which are buried inside of Alphabet's earnings. So even at that level, you don't know that about YouTube. Then on Twitter, it's like, how did you make this enforcement decision? And no one knows the answer. Right? It's like this very opaque process. Facebook is another realm of opacity.

• 48:09Speaker 07

  Right. Twitch, which is Amazon, also notoriously weird about enforcing rules.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So like, I think everybody agrees on that. Like, these companies are so opaque that it's very easy to come up with conspiracy theories. I just don't know that it's weird. You know, like, people always say Silicon Valley is very libertarian. Like, I tweeted out this bill. Like, we were, I saw the shares of our URL. This hit the button, where everyone's like, you can't tell us what to do. Right? And it's like, this will kill innovation, which is my favorite line. It's like, well, maybe innovating towards gamification was always the wrong move. But I just don't know what Holly's goal is with stopping this one in particular. Like, is it just making everybody hate the tech companies more? Because this is a style of regulation that if you applied it to any other business, you would not have Republicans proposing this kind of legislation.

• 48:57Speaker 07

  Yes, probably. I don't, I can conspiratorialize a lot about, maybe the 30 Minutes thing is actually just this giant, like, thing that's supposed to be so crazy that everyone forgets about all the other ridiculous parts. Like, I don't know. I don't know how much of anything means anything.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  It feels like an op-ed, and he just, he realized that his greatest distribution platform was publishing it as a proposed bill.

• 49:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that is absolutely true.

• 49:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, he's, again, a United States senator. Like, his greatest distribution platform is proposing laws for the country.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  That's his job. The question is, like, are those laws reasonable? Are they constitutional? Are they effective? I think with this bill, it's mostly what this is effective at is, hey, there's somebody in the Senate who hates you. Right? Like, if you work at Twitter, or Google, or Facebook, like, there's at least one person who hates you, and you should be aware of that. And maybe that's enough. But it's just a really weird moment where that, that sort of vendetta against the platform companies is emerging in this, in this stuff. Whereas I think if I, who's the person who proposes that we should directly regulate the companies on this show the most? It's me. Right? I'm like, net neutrality should exist. AT&T should not be allowed to do things.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Some people call Eli the Josh Hawley of the Birds.

• 50:20Nilay Patel?

  Me saying gamification is a little bit dangerous, like five years ago, if I was like, gamification's super dangerous, these companies are making these things sticky, these algorithm, like, you wouldn't have been surprised if I said it. If I had said, "There should be a law that says you have to quit Twitter after 30 minutes", you, Paul, would have laughed in my face. This is a bizarre moment. I would have cried first, but then I would have laughed.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  But, like, it's weird to see conduct on these like this proposed. Anyway, what happens next with this bill?

• 50:52Speaker 07

  Maybe nothing, maybe nothing ever.

• 50:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:54Speaker 07

  He proposes a ton of bills, he had the internet censorship bill like three days ago.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Speaker 07

  If anything did happen, it is very hard for me to imagine how this law would be constitutional in any way if it somehow managed to get through everything.

• 51:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, this is, it's very much like, um, I think Paul had a good point, it's like banning sugar, or like forcing companies to print a bunch of like nutrition facts and things, like, those laws routinely get challenged because you can't just like step in like that, right?

• 51:21Speaker 07

  And it's like sugar was made of speech.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  If sugar was the first amendment. Well, I mean, that's another open question, right? Is the software interface of a platform speech?

• 51:34Speaker 07

  It's also just weird to suggest that, taken to its logical extreme, you should ban software being user-friendly? Like, yes, the ultimate non-dark-pattern system would be if there were 50 buttons that were identical all over everything and I couldn't use anything. I would not want to spend a lot of time on that website.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  I was sort of into it, like, what if everything was required to have a series of hardware knobs that were identical and everything looked cool as shit? Like, everything was like a giant mixing desk?

• 52:00Speaker 07

  Regulate cyberpunk.

• 52:02Nilay Patel?

  See? That's where I'm getting at. All right, well, I wanted to bring it up, again, I have a sense of conflict about how much attention to pay to these things, but I think for our audience, we have to dive into it a little bit, because this is, I would say, the most extreme proposal for how to deal with Facebook and Twitter and YouTube that I've ever seen, and the dude is a senator. I'm gonna try to get Holly on the show, we gotta, that's, that's the move.

• 52:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, I would really like to hear what he thinks this bill would do.

• 52:31Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, like, does he believe in like net neutrality? Like, it's, you're like, there's, there's so little competition for YouTube that I gotta cut it off every 30 minutes. Like, I'm interested if he, he wants to apply that to other places where there's not as much competition. Okay, speaking of not as much competition, there's another sort of legal policy fight brewing, which I think is really interesting. Have you heard of Locast?

• 52:54Speaker 07

  I read about Locast on our site and have never used it.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  I think a lot of people have never used it. Paul, have you heard of Locast? I have. So Locast is a weird company. It's a nonprofit. That's right. But don't you forget it.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  It's a nonprofit company that was set up to capture over the air broadcasts from NBC, CBS, Fox, the big networks, and then restream them to people. It is what you would call a loophole startup in that there is a clause in the copyright code that says nonprofits can do this. They can retransmit broadcast signals. So they're like, alright, we're a nonprofit. You can just like donate to us however much you want. We set it up. They exist. You can go use Locast. We've reviewed it. People seem to like it. Great. They were unsurprisingly sued by the big broadcast networks this week. The broadcast networks claim that Locast is basically a conspiracy shell company set up by Dish Network and AT&T

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  so that they lower the prices for their services. So Dish Network, AT&T, Comcast, whoever, cable companies have to pay retransmission fees to rebroadcast ABC, CBS, and Fox. It's like a whole thing. And so they're saying, well, if you if you set up your weird nonprofit Locast Dish Network, then when you come to us to negotiate the rates for retransmission, you can just say, we won't pay you anything because our customers can use Locast for free. That's a wild argument. I like, my question is like, how well-run do you think Dish Network is?

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  Like AT&T announced not one, but like three TV services with the same name this week. Yeah. That's a very sophisticated conspiracy theory.

• 54:41Speaker 07

  Also, it makes it sound like, or write-up of it makes it sound like it's basically unusable unless you actually pay them.

• 54:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it's right there in nonprofits, so I have to skate around things. There is a big case you got, do you remember, like Aereo? Oh, boy.

• 54:53Speaker 04

  I mean, Aereo consumed the world for about six months, and then as soon as it was over, it just like got completely memory holed and no one knows what you're talking about when you bring it up.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  So I had forgotten that the Aereo case went all the way to the Supreme Court with a dissent written by Scalia, like, like the whole thing happened with Aereo. So Aereo was a startup. We did a video with them. They had a warehouse in Brooklyn full of tiny little, like, quarter-sized antennas. I still have an Aereo antenna somewhere. I should put it in, like, Lucite and, like, save it forever. So Aereo was this company. Their, their main innovation was tiny little antennas that could pick up TV signals. You would sign into your Aereo account. They would assign an antenna to you. So now it was your antenna, and then you would tune into some broadcast network and, and stream it to yourself, right? So like, an aggregation of antennas and they dynamically assign one to you. Got it.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  They did the work.

• 55:45Nilay Patel?

  They did the work.

• 55:45Speaker 04

  You know?

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  But they did the work of, like, identifying the loophole and engineering their way into a loophole.

• 55:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, what's the point of loopholes if they don't work?

• 55:53Nilay Patel?

  Right. So this case, the broadcasters sue Aereo, they go, and this is like the funniest thing about the low caste problem. The broadcasters sue Aereo, they go all the way to Supreme Court and they lose. The Supreme Court says, yeah, we get it. You did all this work, but this looks and acts like a cable TV system. So if you're gonna look and act like, if it quacks like a duck, like, it's a duck, you gotta pay the money, right? Like, this is illegal, you're copyright infringing. Aereo went back and said, okay, we're, the Supreme Court said we're basically a cable system. That means you are legally required to license the content to us. So, let's go, let's do it. The K, the broadcasters, ABC, they went back again and said, no, we're gonna fight that too.

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  And they fought it and they won in the Southern District of New York and said, and the, the line they drove was like, this is the definition of a cable system. This is how it works. Even though Aereo looks like it, it is not one. We're gonna exclude it from the definition of a cable system. We don't have to license them anything. Uh, they're dead. So Aereo died. So they, they won sort of twice, the broadcasters won. They, they won the first time and said, this is copyright infringement. The Supreme Court said, this looks like a cable system. They're obviously infringing. And then they won again. They said, they're, they're still not a cable system. They don't get the mandatory licensing. So now you're low caste and you show up and you're not a cable system and you're a nonprofit. By the plain language of the copyright law, that's it's not even a loophole, Paul. It's like, that's what it says.

• 57:22Nilay Patel?

  Like, anything that is not a cable system, that is a nonprofit, that does not have direct or indirect commercial advantage, gets to retransmit these signals. So the broadcasters like screwed themselves because they went after Ario too hard.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  Oh, this is delicious.

• 57:38Nilay Patel?

  But then, so their argument comes down to because it is a conspiracy theory of Dish and AT&T to have a free option so that they have to pay lower retransmission fees. It's indirect commercial advantage. That's their whole game.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 57:53Nilay Patel?

  That's why it sounds like conspiracy theory.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  This is a good time to point out that there is a, um, a project called Puffer. And I think it's still around, puffer.stanford.edu. And it's, it's, so Stanford is nonprofit. Apparently, schools are nonprofits, who knew? And, uh, and, uh, this is a project by students at Stanford and they're working on machine learning algorithms for optimizing, um, uh, like streaming bit rates. Uh, but what they happen to be streaming is a bunch of local television stations. So there are other ways to get free, uh, uh, local TV. I just, why can't they just give, or you know what? Why can't they just work it out with their local?

• 58:38Speaker 03

  Like, I want to watch like local TV commercials for my local furniture store. Like, why can't ABC give that to me? Why can't I go to ABC.com, watch ABC and also see commercials for my local furniture store? Why is that so hard?

• 58:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, uh, cause, uh, cause you're not paying them. I mean, that's the, that's the thing. Like, they're required, if they want the airwaves, they're required to do a bunch of stuff. Cause airwaves, as we know, are a scarce resource. The government should allocate fairly to it, whatever.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Says the man.

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  This is good old Neelai. This is Josh Hawley. Right, so if you want access to airwaves, you have to do a bunch of stuff. One of the things they are required to do is like, broadcasters are free. They can't like, charge you whatever. They're not required to do that on the internet. So if you're ABC and you're like, making stuff, you would actually much rather have people pay a cable system and then some fraction of that cable system money get paid to you. You're not super excited about like, your broadcast operation. You're way more excited about this direct payment you're getting from all these other folks.

• 59:40Speaker 03

  Well, then give back the spectrum, you jerks.

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  So, during the Aereo, during the Aereo fight, like, some of the networks are like, if Aereo wins and this is allowed, we will go dark. We would prefer to be on cable and cable alone than have to operate these broadcast networks that Aereo can like, retransmit for free in this way. So like, this is like, a cold business decision for them. So they get to be these national networks and they get to use airwaves, they get to like, claim that role in society. But, when that got threatened by Aereo, they're like, we'll just go dark. Like, screw it, we're out. Like, you want Dancing with the Stars? Like, you gotta pay a cable company for it. That's a big deal and I, the nonprofit exceptions, like, there's another exception for like,

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  hotels, right? Like, if you run a hotel and you put an antenna on the roof and you retransmit to all the TVs, like, yeah, Congress is like, yeah, that's probably fine. You don't have to like, sign up as a cable system for your like, days in, like, you can do that.

• 1:00:37Speaker 07

  Wait, can Aereo rent me a two-square-inch hotel room with an antenna?

• 1:00:41Nilay Patel?

  See, that's what you should do.

• 1:00:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, a tiny little hotel room with a sling box.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  This is the loophole I'm looking for. Hold on, guys, I gotta sign up for an Airbnb account.

• 1:00:57Nilay Patel?

  But it's weird, because fundamentally, these signals are being transmitted for free. Think about this, you're in your car right now, Addy, you're sitting right there, I'm sitting here, we're in New York. My body is full of ABC programming right now, just beaming through me.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:01:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm being energized by the radio waves of CBS right at this second. The only problem is, my dumb brain can't decode those signals.

• 1:01:21Nilay Patel?

  I need, I need some like, hardware to do it.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  And, as everyone knows, Comcast is an investor in Fox News.

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  If not for your dumb brain, being unable to decode digital television signals, you would not have this problem. All right. Speaking of being energized by radio waves, Teeter.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  My body is filled with the power of Verizon 5G, although it's not because it doesn't exist anywhere yet.

• 1:01:53Nilay Patel?

  Can you take us through this T-Mobile Verizon beef?

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  So the earnings happened, T-Mobile's earnings, their earnings call got delayed because they were waiting for the dish, you know, announcement and the Sprint merger announcement and all of that stuff to happen. So of course, all they had to talk about in their earnings call wasn't how they did last quarter. It was like, what's going on? And it's all about 5G. And John Ledger, CEO of T-Mobile, soon, I guess to be the CEO of the new T-Mobile, which is T-Mobile plus Sprint.

• 1:02:22Nilay Patel?

  Minus boost.

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  It's a real algebra. There it is. Someone asked him a question about like 5G something, something. And he gave, now to be clear, this is not a fair assessment. This is a pro T-Mobile assessment. But it is also the clearest assessment of how 5G works and what carriers need to do to make a successful 5G network that any carrier executive has ever given.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  It was remarkable. It was also just like hilarious.

• 1:02:51Nilay Patel?

  Super mean.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  He's hilarious. Yeah, super mean. He said Verizon's strategy will not work. It was a first move of play. It'll cost 1.5 trillion to do. They're dead in the water without a strategy. AT&T at least gets the template, but they don't have the, you know, mid-band that they need. So AT&T gets a vision. They don't have the mid-band. So there's a hole in their strategy, but they at least get the template. So to sum up, Verizon, clueless, no strategy, nowhere to go. AT&T, not clueless, but lying, confusing people about 5GE, which is really just 4G advanced. And there's a big hole in their template, which is in the middle, which was like, actually.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:03:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. Because if you want to do 5G, you can't just do millimeter wave. You got to do millimeter wave. And then you got to have some stuff in the mid-band where a bunch of, this could be used by a bunch of 4G stuff. And then you also ideally want some low-band stuff. So you can like, you know, get distance and punch your walls and whatever else. So you want. All the stuff. I'm playing a little bit fast and loose with talking about the spectrum because it is super complicated. And if I, you know, it's just hard to understand. So anyway, Verizon responds, uh, To Jake on the record. To Jake on the record. Uh, he asks them and they say, yeah, we have a plan. We're not, this is silly. Of course, of course, we've always had a plan. Uh, we're not just depending on millimeter wave. And so Jake's like, oh, yeah, cool. What's the plan? And they're like, not, not gonna tell you.

• 1:04:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a secret plan. It's great. Which is just amazing. And so I made fun of them for having a secret plan. And then people like immediately accused me of like being in the bag for T-Mobile, which have you heard the things I've said about T-Mobile over the years? Super have, it's just amazing, uh, that we're getting these like these catfights between these executives that T-Mobile has started because they decided to like be wacky, uh, or only going to get stranger and more hilarious as they get mixed up with how complicated 5G actually is. And so we're going to get these like super weird esoteric burns that you won't understand

• 1:04:57Speaker 04

  unless you know what mid-band spectrum is. And it's just, that is where we live now. And also John Ledger runs a big company now. Or he, he will, right? Like, he's no longer nipping at the heels. He's like, I run a, I run a company as big as yours. Yeah.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  I just want, I wanted to offer a helpful heuristic for people who are confused about spectrum numbers. So your wifi is 2.4 gigahertz slash 5 gigahertz, right? So think of your wifi range and imagine it's the same spectrum, right? If, if that was on a cell phone tower, you know, it would be high up. It might have a good line of sight. So you could probably, let's say maximum get about 10x what typical wifi range you would expect. So you have a wifi router in your house. Imagine it worked like 10x better, like best case, right? So that's the 2.4 gigahertz, the 5 gigahertz, right? Higher than 5 gigahertz is like the millimeter wave world, right? So much shorter than wifi.

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  And then lower than 2.4 gigahertz is the low band. So much further range, but a lot slower than wifi. That's just like, if you're ever confused and you see some numbers like 800 megahertz, one is, is 200 megahertz less than 1 gigahertz, you get it.

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, this has always been, I mean, do you remember, actually, Paul, do you remember, we were at Engadget when this happened, there was a 700 megahertz auction?

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  And we were like, Paul has to write an explainer about the 700 megahertz auction. You're like, no, I have no idea what it's on. We've gotten better, it was like 10 years ago. 700 megahertz, it's because they shut down analog TV. And they moved everybody to digital TV and they, they took that spectrum back.

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:35Nilay Patel?

  Good old government. And they auctioned it off and Verizon won a huge chunk of it. And that's like, that was the LTE spectrum that everybody wanted because it, you know, Verizon was like, this is oceanfront real estate, which makes no sense in the context of radio spectrum, uh, but that's what they said. And that, that was, we're going to take this very good chunk of spectrum that has like the right characteristics of, um, like being able to go through walls and like range and all this stuff. We're going to reallocate it for wireless instead of analog TV. We've, we, there are some other spectrum auctions going on right now, but there's nothing that looks quite as good as that unless you're T-Mobile and you just bought Sprint and you got a bunch of like 6 to 800 megahertz spectrum.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, fundamentally, the switch to 5G is starting to just look like Jenga. Like, there's millimeter wave. And so like, that's the cool new technology that's like, actually not that great for like, just using a cellphone in the world, but it's cool for short range stuff. And then everything else is a game of spectrum Jenga. Uh, what do you have free? What do you have now that you could someday reallocate? And what can you get? And so T-Mobile's whole thing is like, we're buying Sprint because they've got the good spectrum and we can put together our puzzle pieces to get all the, you know, bands we want to provide 5G service and it'll be great. So that's what T-Mobile is going to do, but what is Verizon and AT&T going to do? What, how are they going to play their spectrum Jenga game to make sure that they can either transition stuff from one use to a 5G use?

• 1:07:55Speaker 04

  Or that they can get new spectrum to apply to 5G?

• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  And let's not forget, canny conspiracy theorist Dish Network.

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  Which, uh, is now going to run our nation's fourth wireless carrier because they're proven to be so good at it. Very exciting. Now, I'm going to switch to Dish, it's going to be great. All right, we're going to take a break, we'll be back, we got to talk about Samsung. Addie, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you.

• 1:08:19Speaker 06

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• 1:08:51Speaker 08

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• 1:09:20Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul Miller.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:22Nilay Patel?

  Week after week, you do something so consistent. I mean, it literally is the only thing stable in the lives of most Americans now. What's it called?

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  It's called "And the Trackpoint Guys Laugh and Laugh."

• 1:09:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Sure. What on earth does that mean?

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  So there's this new keyboard out, the MoKebo.

• 1:09:47Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I saw the word on the site and never pronounced it. MoKebo. I get it. All right, keep going.

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  How would you pronounce it?

• 1:09:54Nilay Patel?

  No, I just thought it... I didn't realize it was more keyboard.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  Oh, you're...

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  Okay, well, sure. Okay, so imagine a chiclet keyboard with all the chiclets crammed together, right? Creating almost an uninterrupted surface. Guess what that surface could become? It could become a touchpad. Now, your whole keyboard is a mouse, right?

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  And you're saying, "Well, sometimes I like to type on my keyboard. Won't I get false mouse movements?" So with the MoKebo, you put your thumb on this bar below the keyboard, and that puts you into this mouse mode. And apparently, works okay as a pointer, not great for scrolling. But I just wanted it to... I wish I could use a track point. Have you ever tried to use a track point on on a thinkpad?

• 1:10:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I've never been good at it. People love it. I've never been good at it.

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  Exactly, right? But wouldn't it be great to be one of those people? That could love the track point because you'd hardly ever have to move your hands. It probably it's probably so much better for your wrists instead of like like twisting your I'm trying to describe the the movement that is non ergonomic that I make going from the home row to my touchpad and it's bad for me. If only I had a touch point that I knew how to use, or if the Mokeybo was was better. Anyways, just made me wistful.

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  Do you think it is actually more keyboard?

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  It looks like, I mean, if Mo keyboard means a mouse.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  All right. I mean, look, you know how I feel about wacky hardware. I'm with you. Speaking of wacky hardware, we got to go through Samsung. There's Samsung event, right?

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  Note 10 already, you can already preorder it. We already know there's gonna be a headphone dongle.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  So the event is next week on August 7th. The Note 10, you can preorder and it ships August 23rd. But most importantly, we have our first images of the dongle.

• 1:12:00Nilay Patel?

  This is my nightmare.

• 1:12:01Speaker 04

  Is that the most important thing?

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's it's it's of my tweets about the Note 10 is the one that got the most engagement.

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, my I my tweet was better than your tweet.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:12:13Speaker 04

  Cause I asked, is there a is there a headphone jack in this? And then I wrote, Note 10 this phone.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Nilay Patel?

  Really what I want, I think, you know, we always think about how do we improve the Vergecast? How do we make it better? How do we change it? I think if we get to a place where you and I are just arguing about who had a better tweet.

• 1:12:33Nilay Patel?

  That's how you really get to the next level of audience.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  Look, I I love that Samsung was the last holdout of the major phone makers to keep a headphone jack. That makes makes me happy in my heart. I own a Samsung Galaxy S10. I love it. I think it's a great little phone. I am disappointed that they decided to let that go, but I'm not like religious about it. It's a bummer, but okay, fine. If you're gonna get rid of the headphone jack, you gotta make a dongle. You know, at least it's USB-C.

• 1:13:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, so here's one question. Is this a USB-C dongle that will work in every USB-C device? Or is it right? Cause USB-C to headphone is not, it's not a standardized connection.

• 1:13:15Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 1:13:16Nilay Patel?

  Also, there are already Galaxy buds in this world, but I guarantee you that Bixby buds are on their way. Right? Like that's, if you're getting rid of the headphone jack, what does everyone learn from Apple? You gotta make the true wireless headphones that are the upsell right next to the phone.

• 1:13:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Nilay Patel?

  It's coming.

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  I just wanted to let everybody know as far as the dongle life update is that I, I have been using my Pixel 3 with USB-C, the pack-in USB-C headphones this whole time. And as of like a week or so ago, one side of the USB-C is more finicky than the other.

• 1:13:53Nilay Patel?

  Of course. Of course.

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  Which is like, it's not just that you can't use regular headphones. That's not the only problem with this. It's not just that you can't charge your phone and listen to music with headphones at the same time. That is not the only problem. There's also the fact that you created a single point of failure and I'm still sad.

• 1:14:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, the Note 10 is the one, you would think they would take it off the S11 first.

• 1:14:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:14:20Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:14:20Speaker 04

  Leave it on the Note 10.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  The Note 10 is like the muscle car of Samsung's line. It's like, it has a stylus, it has a micro SD card slot in it. It can like, it can connect to everything. Would you like a keyboard? It can turn into a Windows PC. Like, it's that phone.

• 1:14:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Nilay Patel?

  You would think they would, and it's also gigantic. Like they cannot make the, we ran out of space argument.

• 1:14:40Speaker 04

  Plus version of it, which is even more gigantic.

• 1:14:42Nilay Patel?

  It's so big, it has a spot for the stylus inside of it.

• 1:14:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's just a cylinder of empty space inside of the Note 10.

• 1:14:56Nilay Patel?

  Like this, I just assumed this would be the last phone to see it go. Cause it's like the do everything phone. It makes me sad that it's, it's the first of Samsung's phones. Although it's not, Samsung has some other devices without iPhone Jack, right? The new tablet that looks exactly like an iPad Pro.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it is also sort of wild that like they're there, you know?

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  So the Tab S6, so it has a weird like notch that you place the stylus into like a divot, which I think is interesting.

• 1:15:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  On the back.

• 1:15:25Nilay Patel?

  That's not gonna work.

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  Well, maybe it won't work, but it still seems better than Apple's solution. Like if you have the keyboard case on this, the keyboard case holds the stylus there. So it's like you can keep the stylus with the thing that uses the stylus. I like that. But also the keyboard cover, it has a touchpad now. And you can like with one button go into Dex mode and Dex mode has a Linux, an app that is Linux that runs in Dex.

• 1:15:56Nilay Patel?

  Linux.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So it's basically the year of the Linux desktop.

• 1:15:59Nilay Patel?

  I just wanna, I just, hold on. The Android tablet that has a secondary weird windowing system called Dex.

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:09Nilay Patel?

  And then that has an app that is Linux.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's all great.

• 1:16:14Nilay Patel?

  It's all wonderful. Does the app actually show you Linux? Or is it Linux like in another abstraction layer?

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  I don't know. I haven't really used it, but some people like it. People apparently like, and I think you can get like different distros on it like it. So that it's different than what Google has done with the Chromebook is tried to completely integrate Linux with the Chrome OS desktop. And that's, it's been a long uphill slog and it still isn't great as far as I know. But you know, it's nice because it's all, it all seems interoperable in theory. Whereas Samsung has more gone, Linux is an app. And if it, you know, it runs pretty well and that's could be enough for a lot of people. And it would, you know, you could probably get more done with fewer bugs probably right now.

• 1:17:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  I, that's my understanding.

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  I am curious to see how well Dex works. I do like the idea of a tablet that has a tablet interface when you're using it as a tablet. And then you know what? Screw it. I need some windows right now. I could just hit a button and get some windows. That is something that I would use on an iPad. I'm just saying.

• 1:17:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, I am very happy that there's still tablet competition in the world, even if it's, even if it's come to the point where Samsung is just like blindly aping the iPad Pro, which is just look at a photo. I'm not wrong. And like the Note 10 is exciting. I think we've been underplaying it because, you know, it's like the dead season. It's also the Note. And like, the Note in my mind is like, the question is still like, will it explode? Like, that's that happened. Like, we didn't, we didn't forget Samsung. You made a phone that exploded. And then you just moved on. But it's exciting. I mean, I love a new phone. Yeah. All right. I'm going to say this because if I don't, the the Shield people will come for me. There's a new Nvidia Shield at the FCC.

• 1:18:05Nilay Patel?

  I said it. You can't say I'm ignoring the Nvidia Shield now.

• 1:18:10Nilay Patel?

  Stop that, Josh Hawley.

• 1:18:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm psychologically torturing you with my knowledge of the Nvidia Shield. Okay, that's it. That's literally all I'm gonna say. There's a new one at the FCC. Maybe the same chip as uh, as the new Switch. Yeah, that's what we think. By the way, you can put Android on a Switch now, uh, which is hilarious.

• 1:18:30Speaker 03

  Which is all kind of the same thing as the, because this is basically the version of Android that Nvidia makes for the Shield is the version of Android that runs on the Switch. So it's really all one big story.

• 1:18:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. See? Nvidia Shield. We were like, got into it. All right. We're way over time. Thank you so much for listening. That one was all over the place. I didn't even talk about the Mophie battery cases for the iPhone XR, which are prevented from allowing you to use the headphone dongle.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58Nilay Patel?

  Get on that, Hawley. Look into the MFI program. Why won't anyone look into this?

• 1:19:06Nilay Patel?

  That's the show. Next week on the interview show, Paul Ford, who is a somewhat legendary writer about code. I mean, literally, he wrote an entire issue of Bloomberg Business Week entitled, What Is Code? Really great conversation. He's coming up next week. We'll be back on Friday with this podcast. Remember, as you drive, you're being energized by millions of radio waves. It's happening. You can't stop it. Big Bang Theory is literally in your body right now. If you're listening to this over Wi-Fi, it's not just coming out of your speakers. It's in your body. Facts. There are other podcasts you can listen to. Maybe you'll have the same body horror reaction. Maybe you won't. Why'd You Push That Button is great. That's out. Ashley

• 1:19:51Nilay Patel?

  Kellner did a great job with that show. Land of the Giants, Jason Del Rey's deep dive into Amazon. That show, it's just, it's a deep dive into Amazon. This one was all about Prime. Go listen to that. You can listen to Kara on Recode Decode and Pivot with Scott Galloway and you can listen to Peter Kafka and Recode Media. One of my favorite shows because I'm a huge mediaer. Go listen to all those things. Just think about radio waves in your body this week. That's what I want you to do. And when you have those thoughts, just tweet them at someone. Maybe me, maybe somebody else. But just share that idea with people because it's funny. That's it. That's what I got for you.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Do you know which frequency microwaves use? It's 2.4 gigahertz. Do you know why 2.4 gigahertz was available for Wi-Fi? It's because it's a junk spectrum because it's absorbed by water. Guess what your wa- what your body is made out of?

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Just stand right next to your router and see if this podcast can get through your body. That's what I'm saying. All right. That's enough. Goodbye. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  Paul.

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