Adobe Max 2019 announcements, AirPods Pro, and missed texts from Valentines Day

This week on The Vergecast, everything that happened at Adobe Max 2019, reviews for the Microsoft Surface Pro X and AirPods Pro, and missed text messages from Valentines Day. Stories this week: Adobe Max 2019: all the top announcements Adobe’s Photoshop for the iPad is finally here, with more features to come Adobe is developing Illustrator for the iPad, to be released 2020 Adobe Aero turns Photoshop layers into interactive AR experiences Adobe’s Fresco drawing app arrives on Windows Photoshop adds an extremely helpful AI subject selection tool Adobe previews an AI feature that can tell when an image has been manipulated- Adobe’s AI-powered video framing tool is available now in Premiere Pro Adobe is launching a free AI-powered Photoshop Camera app Adobe is building live-streaming into Creative Cloud apps Adobe’s Premiere Rush can now publish directly to TikTok Microsoft Surface Pro X review: heartbreaker Microsoft's Edge Chromium browser will launch on January … Microsoft unveils new Edge browser logo that no longer looks ... Microsoft’s new Office app for iOS and Android combines Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Microsoft previews the future of Office documents with Fluid Framework for the we A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day Somehow, Android's messaging mess is about to get even … AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile have finally agreed to ... Apple AirPods Pro review: perfect fit Google buys Fitbit for $2.1 billion Google is buying Fitbit: now what? 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're talking about everything that happened at Adobe Max. The new Microsoft Surface Pro X came out. Microsoft Ignite happened. And we talk about what is going on with mistext messages showing up from Valentine's Day. That's all coming up on The Vergecast now.

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• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the ever-growing Vox Media empire. Someone's going to eventually talk to us about that. I can just feel it. The company's getting bigger.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  Someone's going to be like, Eli, you have to stop that. But not today.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  Today, we are still the flagship podcast of the situation.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  Today, yeah, the situation. There are basically two weeks of news here, a lot going on. First of all, I'm your friend Eli.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Hi, Eli.

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  That other voice is Dieter Bohn. I'm here. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Domi Lee is here.

• 1:48Speaker 04

  Yo.

• 1:48Nilay Patel?

  How's it going, Domi?

• 1:49Speaker 04

  Good.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  You're back from LA?

• 1:51Speaker 04

  Just flew in. Boy, my arm's tired.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  It's already off the rails. There's a lot going on. We basically have two weeks of news.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  We're not gonna get it all. Like, there's stuff that's just hitting the floor.

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We actually just made a bunch of cuts. But I want to start with something new, I think, for The Verge in general. So, Domi, you just came back from Adobe Max.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  Basically, we created a team of people who cover, like, the creator sphere about a year ago, somewhere around there. And so, like, we have Julie on to talk about, like, YouTubers. And sometimes we have Ashley on to talk about Instagrammers. But a thing that we noticed is that all of these creators have their own monopoly problem, basically, which is that everyone in this industry is reliant on Adobe. It's a huge company. I think it's a little bit under-covered.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, basically, every YouTuber uses, like, Premiere to edit their videos. Every Instagrammer is using Photoshop or Lightroom to make their photos look great. Every artist author is using Photoshop or, you know, Illustrator. So Adobe Max is this huge creativity conference that they have every year. And it's basically the only place in the world where you can get a room of 15,000 people all cheering for a selection tool or a content-aware fill. I mean, the air was...

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Why have we not got...

• 3:07Speaker 04

  It was... The air was electric. Like, people were... People were going nuts. Like, they would announce something on stage and they'd be like, "Yeah, like, we love Sensei", which is like their AI platform, which basically is in, like, every single thing they announced this week. So they announced, like, the big one, which is Photoshop for iPad. And they announced that they're bringing Illustrator to iPad. Like, they announced, like, 15 different things. So there's a lot to talk about.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Is it, like, a bunch of, like, engineers? Is it a bunch of creative people? Is it a bunch of nerds? Is it all the above? Like, what's the crowd like?

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Pretty much. So a lot of designers. And the conference is open to anybody, but, you know, it's, like, really expensive. Tickets, I think, are, like, 300 or more. So it's basically companies that are sending teams of designers to go and, like, learn stuff. They have workshops. And it's, like, really global, too. Like, I saw a lot of, like, foreign press and, like, people being fed, like, like, the Japanese translations of, like, what was going on on the stage. So, um, yeah, just, like, a ton of people all... Packed into like the LA conference, like the convention center.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Why was John Mulaney there?

• 4:16Speaker 04

  So.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  That was very confusing.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  That is a part of an annual event they do called Sneaks, where they preview a bunch of like experimental new features that are coming. So I think they previewed Adobe Fresco there last year. And they always have a celebrity host. So last year, I think it was like Tiffany Haddish. And this year they had John Mulaney. And it's kind of like, like, I think it's like 6:00 PM or so. And so they're like handing out drinks and like getting people like excited about these new features that could probably like take over their jobs later at some point. So it's kind of like buttering them up. It's like, hey, we got this cool celebrity host. Like, this is a fun event. Like, no, no worries here.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You wrote a whole post based on the one that can, I think, do, can detect like image manipulation.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's a lot of AI features like that. So there's one that's really cool or scary, depending on how you look at it, where you can, it can track your body movements. So it sees like the subject in a video and it automatically generates like 18 different body joints. So you can make a character animate like really fast and, you know, mirror your body movements. There's another one that might take Andrew's job. It just cleans up a lot of like background noise or it can take out like all the ums and ahs like of your speech. So a lot of scary stuff out there.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  Let's start with like the news news. Because the sneaks are really interesting and they kind of show where Adobe is going. Like, once I think a company like Adobe hits that point of massive saturation in the industry, they can roll out a feature and then everyone, like it changes the nature of what we make. But the big one here is actually not new features. It's actually a much smaller set of features on the iPad, which is Photoshop on the iPad.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  So when the iPad Pro was coming out, I think you had Photoshop for iPad. Adobe was like pre-releasing it. They gave you an exclusive. We had Scott Belsky on the podcast. We talked about it. It's been a long time.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  It's out now. It's getting bad reviews in the app store.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, currently it's at a 2.3. And people are mad that it doesn't have a lot of basic features like the Magic Wand tool, which I got a lot of flack for when I did the, the review because, the video, because I tried to Photoshop a sword into Carly Rae Jepsen's hand.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  Look at you.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  And yeah, and usually you would just do like a click of the Magic Wand button to like erase the background. But it didn't have that feature at the time. That's what we thought, like, oh, they're gonna add it later. So like, I just had to use the Eraser Tool. And people were like, yeah, why aren't you using the Magic Wand Tool? You're so dumb. And then it's like, it doesn't even, it's not here on the final version. So they, they said that, I talked to the Photoshop product manager and she said, they are gonna be much more aggressive with bringing updates to Photoshop on the iPad because it's mobile. So they're gonna try to do it like maybe once a month. Yeah. So hopefully we'll see that feature coming soon, but a lot of people aren't happy that it's not like the exact desktop experience on the iPad.

• 7:04Speaker 05

  There's the exact recreating all the features of Photoshop. And then there's the Magic Wand Tool, like, you know, like, I understand that you can't bring all of Photoshop in one go. That's all, it's a lot of work. But doesn't that seem like it's one of those bare minimum features? Like, what, what is Photoshop-y? I know you said, in your write-up, you talk about how the code is coming from the real Photoshop. What are there features that make it feel like you're, you have the real Photoshop?

• 7:29Speaker 04

  They said they definitely focused on like the compositing workflows first. So onstage, they're like, we're gonna bring in this mushroom from Adobe Stock and we're gonna make it glow and we're gonna put it in this forest. So it is good at like, you know, putting these pieces together, but it's not so good at other workflows, like maybe illustrations. So for that, they were like, why don't you try Fresco? That's our other app for illustration.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Wait, isn't the Magic Wand Tool like really important in compositing work?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Right, so.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Okay, so there's this whole debate about is this real Photoshop or not? It's based on the real code, but like, with the USB port on the iPad, it's like, is it a real USB port until you can plug a USB drive into it and do something useful? The answer is no. It is not real. Well, Dieter went straight to USB-C. I was not expecting that turn coming, but I definitely should have been. Is it Photoshop if it doesn't have a Magic Wand Tool? Is that, is that the thing? Or is there some other thing?

• 8:19Speaker 04

  Well, so the thing they are focusing on are the cloud PSDs, which is you can basically start a file on the desktop and then you can continue working on that same file in the iPad and vice versa. So that's the thing that they're focusing on first.

• 8:32Nilay Patel?

  This is what I have been trying to like muddle towards is the cloud PSD is like the heart of this whole enterprise. And they, when they first announced Photoshop for iPad, they like half mentioned it to us. Now they're like, here it is, like, here's the real deal. Like, you're gonna run this real Photoshop on the iPad, but really the thing is it's gonna use the same files that sync across Creative Cloud to your desktop and, I don't know, to your other devices in the future.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna, that is ecosystem lock-in. You have to pay them forever to use this cloud file.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  And you have to, you have no choice but to pay them however much they decide to charge for cloud storage. And last time I checked, Photoshop files not small.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the cloud PSDs are also really important because they are making, they're introducing new apps that kind of rely on these Photoshop files. So they also announced Adobe Aero, which is this like AR authoring app, and it basically uses layered PSD files. So it's like, it's, it lets people make AR experiences like without knowing how to code, without knowing Unity. It's like, all you need is Photoshop. And it's like, well, great, so now I have this Photoshop, I gotta like rely on this to make this AR experience. And there's also a new app called Photoshop Camera, and that also uses Photoshop layers so you can make filters for, you know, like Instagram or TikTok, so, yeah.

• 9:54Nilay Patel?

  So it seems like there's two kind of big ideas here. One is related to the thing that we're always talking about, which is when are, when are tablets gonna just supersede laptops? And Dieter, you reviewed the Surface Pro X this week, so there's just a lot of lines converging here, right? So when are, when are like mobile processor-based tablets gonna supersede sort of Intel laptops? Or Intel? It's there, it's there. And so one of the key apps in this world, in this conversation is Photoshop. Right? Like, there's no way for a ton of creative people that you can switch to an iPad if Photoshop isn't there. So now you've got a thing that is called Photoshop, and Adobe insists it's real Photoshop.

• 10:37Nilay Patel?

  But it's, it's like one quarter of Photoshop with a wacky new file format.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Hmm, yeah.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  And eventually, they're gonna build it out to be the whole thing.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  It's at least one quarter of Photoshop that it's the same file when you're at your real Photoshop desk. So if you like get stuck, you don't have to do anything except turn on your computer and open Photoshop.

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  Yes, the essence of the iPad experience is getting stuck and then opening your laptop and then having the fan turn on and the battery die.

• 11:02Speaker 05

  I, I brought this up a little bit ago, but I, I've been doing a lot of music stuff on the iPad. And music on the iPad is all about, with the exception of a couple apps that do everything all in one, most of the ecosystem, it is all about bopping from app to app. So like, it makes sense, like, I would work in Photoshop and then like, ah, I need kind of a drawing feature. I'll use the same, I'll work on the same file and fresco, or like, ah, now I need to, to make it AR.

• 11:29Speaker 05

  You know, but, and then like, ah, well, but now it's not really ready for print and I wanna you, uh, work on it on my desktop. So then I, you know, jump over to, like, for music on the iPad, a lot of people bounce something, you know, they just use the iPad as sort of the, the place to be creative and free. And then you finish it on your desktop. I think that's a pretty common workflow. So I could, it kind of makes sense with, with, with Adobe approaching it this way, but it is scary to have it be one Adobe file format instead of something that could be, you know, interoperable.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, to be fair, the, like, the PSD file itself is not like a paradigm of interoperability.

• 12:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, well.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  Well, you can also, yeah, you can open PSD files on, um, I think, is it Affinity?

• 12:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. Like, I don't really dislike Adobe as a company, but I hate their stupid Creative Cloud app that takes over your computer and you can't uninstall.

• 12:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, but now it's an experience. I mean, I heard about this too.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  Creative Cloud is no longer, it's like, it's like a social network now.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  It's a whole thing now.

• 12:32Speaker 05

  I have like Pixelmator on my Mac, but I don't really do a lot of photo stuff. I use Figma for vector and like, like design kind of stuff. And I use DaVinci Resolve for video editing. I've like tried to extricate myself from Adobe.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  I wonder if that's like a, I don't know if Adobe is afraid of that, or if they're just like, "Ah, we're so fine."

• 12:50Speaker 04

  I mean, they are kind of already going after Figma now, because Figma's whole thing of like, of like multiplier editing, which lets, which lets people like work together on the same file. It's like, they announced that same feature at Adobe XD. So, Figma, you in danger, girl.

• 13:08Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so there's Photoshop, and they, they know it's getting kind of trounced in reviews. They seem to be okay with it.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Scott Belsky tweeted today, you know, it was like, "The hardest journeys," or-

• 13:21Nilay Patel?

  Dear God.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. They know the first version is gonna be, you know, not the best. It's not gonna get the best reviews. And I think for them, it's gonna be a process. And I do believe them that when they say they're gonna bring the Magic wand tool, like, in a couple of months, or whenever that might be.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Personally, like, I am, I do a lot of work where I like translate comics. So that's something that I can do on the iPad, where I couldn't do before. It's like, all I need to do is just like import fonts into the iPad, and I can use like the text tool on Photoshop. So it's like, a lot of little things like that, that I can like do on a plane, like on the go, that I would use this for. I don't think I would use Photoshop on the iPad for like drawing, because I don't do that on the iPad to begin with. I use my computer.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  So I was actually gonna ask you about that. So how much of your creative workflow with your comics, like, could you move to the iPad, or would you want to do on the iPad? It sounds like a little bit here or there, but like fundamentally, Adobe hasn't convinced you to like throw your computer away.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  Right. See, like, I wouldn't use Photoshop on iPad at all for drawing comics, because I've never used the iPad for drawing comics. Like, I've tried Procreate, and it's really hard for me to just like switch up my workflow. But, yeah, like, the thing with translating text, like, that I can see myself using Photoshop for.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  So they also announced Illustrator. So they got, they announced Photoshop ages ago, it's out now. Scott Belsky, I like Scott, he was like on our show, I hope we have him again, he's fun to talk to. He does, he is a thought leader, and sometimes he tweets like a thought leader, and he's like, "The journey just beginning. Mobile is a new dawn." Like-

• 14:58Speaker 05

  Okay, so they're on the journey, but then they also announced Illustrator.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  Which is obviously the other big app in the duo of Adobe apps. Is it gonna be the same cut down thing? Are they gonna, is it gonna have a magic wand tool?

• 15:10Speaker 04

  It's going to have, it's the same concept where you can take the same Illustrator file and open up on the desktop and continue working on it. I do think, so I got like a preview of it and I do think that people are gonna be a lot happier with Illustrator when it launches on day one than they were with Photoshop because I don't think there's, like the only, the only important thing in Illustrator is the pen tool and that, like the demonstration we saw was like very impressive. It looked complete. It's got all these features where it uses AI where to take a photo, you can import a photo of like a sketch that you did and then it automatically like creates these paths and you don't have to like add anything to it or you can like tweak it if you want, but it, for someone like me who doesn't use Illustrator on the, on the desktop,

• 15:55Speaker 04

  the iPad version just looked a lot easier to use for beginners and they've just like simplified the UI. So it's just like anyone with an Apple pencil could like probably learn to use it really quickly.

• 16:05Speaker 05

  Is Illustrator, does it get its own like dot A I C files?

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's what's gonna happen. Yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the stuff about using the Apple pencil to draw paths and adjust paths and making that easier than doing with a mouse was completely fascinating because every time I try and deal with any kind of path, like I've used Illustrator a handful of times and every time I get anywhere near those little anchor points and like twitch my hand, the whole drawing just like explodes in front of me.

• 16:31Speaker 05

  I, I used to do a lot of Adobe Illustrator and it is all about having your hands on the keyboard and there's like two or three or four different modifier keys that you're always pressing to switch between modes. But on the iPad, it's, it's like, it's a row of buttons that you tap with your second hand?

• 16:46Speaker 04

  There's like a touch modifier, which they also have on their other apps and it's, it's like the equivalent of holding down the shift key. And so they acknowledged that Illustrator has a huge learning curve and it's just like mystifying to like learn how to use it and. It's easier on the iPad because when you press, when you tap like the pen tool, it opens up like a contextual like sub-tool menu and it just knows like what the next move you're gonna do is. It's like, so you drew a path and it's like you wanna like remove these points and it's like all you gotta do is like click on it and it just automatically knows.

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Illustrator to me, every time I try to use it, I'm like, I don't know enough math to draw at this point in time.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  Like, it is the most frustrating app for me. Like, I don't understand it at all, but the iPad, it looked easy.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so this is the opportunity, right? They're gonna rethink all these interfaces on this place. They're gonna cut down the feature sets and build them back up around new interface paradigms. I think the hard part is, again, in the context of can you move your work to this other place, to this other kind of computing, they have to get, I mean, Photoshop, it has like the Microsoft Word problem, where every feature is important to 25 people and it's mission critical to 25 people. And those 25 people are very important. And like, I don't know, like, it's a, it's a long road to catch up to that.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  We actually don't have time for it in the Vergecast, but one note just ran into this problem. They like, they're, they've reverted and they're gonna continue developing the old version instead of working on the new, new good one that they made. It's a whole mess and it's because of this 25 people problem. Anyway.

• 18:16Nilay Patel?

  So I wanna talk about one other announcement and then I wanna talk about SNEAKS, because SNEAKS are really fun. But they're building two features into sort of the, the video world. One, Premiere Rush can now publish directly to TikTok.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  Which, it's adorable. Like, Premiere Rush is like adorable, like, just as a concept. Like, what if we made an iMovie that was different? Fine. But it can, it can publish directly to a social platform.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  I love Premiere Rush. Don't be mean.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  I think it's important.

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  You love clips! I'm sorry.

• 18:46Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's like, a bad video editing tool, I'm in. Anyway, so they're, they're publishing directly to TikTok and then they're building... Like the ability for you to livestream directly into their apps, which seems wild.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that is still in beta. Right now, they're exploring it with Fresco. So you can just like press a button to go live and then it generates a link for people to like click on and they can like write comments on it.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so it's not live on like Twitch or YouTube? It's live inside of like the Adobe ecosystem?

• 19:13Speaker 04

  Something like that. It's still very new, but they're thinking about bringing a built-in livestream feature into Creative Cloud Apps. So maybe one day in the future, it's like you could press a button to go live from Photoshop and then people will be able to like follow along and see what you're doing. But they're doing this with like a learning component. So they do this thing right now called Adobe Live and it's on Behance. And it's like you can just watch an artist work for like three hours at a time. And some streams have it, so you can actually see which tools they're using at that time. And it's like a tool timeline. So it's like, oh, they cropped this, they made this selection here. And it's just done with the purpose of like learning step by step how this piece was created.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  So it is gonna be really helpful for designers, because that's how you learn, basically. It's like more helpful than art school, you know? It's like whenever you want to learn a new skill, you just go on YouTube. But this is the like Adobe equivalent of that.

• 20:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's like the really interesting part of this is they're aware. I think Adobe is super aware that there's a generation of creators who are coming up on their products and it teaching them to use their products and specifically their products. And like building a full ecosystem around them from like literally learning how to use it to publishing directly to TikTok. I mean, it's just brilliant. I can't tell if it's evil.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Scott Belsky said that it's like what Twitch did for gamers, he wants this to do for artists. So they know that their products are like really hard to use. And you could, it would take literally like hundreds of thousands of hours to like learn how to use it. And that's why like, that's why Adobe Live exists, so people can learn to use their products.

• 20:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, and they are hard to use, but like, they should be because they're very powerful.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't think this is an argument to like, cut down how hard they are.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  Right, it's just like, you can do a lot with it.

• 21:01Nilay Patel?

  But there are competitors, and I, like, Affinity exists, uh, Luma Fusion, what's, is that the video one? Procreate is really good.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  Procreate is super powerful, yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 05

  Procreate, I would, I would imagine is way, way more popular than anything Adobe does for artists on the iPad, right?

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Right, people love Procreate, it's only like, a $10, like, one-time purchase, and it's super powerful, and they're gonna bring the ability to import Photoshop brushes into it, um, and they're bringing animation, like, they have animation already, but they're gonna bring it to Procreate 5, which is like, the next version that's coming out, so... Yeah, like, I don't know, like, maybe Adobe should be afraid of Procreate.

• 21:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, I, I guess, I saw Affinity, like, is doing a 50% off sale, like, this week. Right, like, there's competition now for these apps that have kind of been the only things you can use on the iPad. You were saying, like, Figma's in danger. Like, is, like, is Adobe so big that it's gonna run over this, like, little indie creator scene on these, on the iPad in particular?

• 22:00Speaker 04

  I don't know, well, Figma is, um, it's interesting, it's, um, like, a fairly new company, but a lot of, like, huge companies, I think, like Slack and Dropbox have, like, moved their entire teams over to it, and, um, like, I think it also has, like, a free plan, so, like, anyone can basically, like, use Illustrator, like, for Illustrator tools, like, on the web. So, it's got its advantages, I don't know if, like, Adobe XD adding, um, like, a co-editing feature is going to, like, ruin Figma, um, but, yeah, I mean, it's kind of scary that they have modeled that feature after Figma.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Does Figma say anything about it? Because usually, small companies, like, do a bunch of, like, very subtle sub-tweets.

• 22:38Speaker 05

  You get that nice, snarky tweet.

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Welcome, Adobe, really.

• 22:42Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  The surest sign that Microsoft is about to like destroy you. Slack just said it about Microsoft Teams. The first one was Apple ran it about IBM when IBM put out a personal computer. It was Steve Jobs ran, "Welcome IBM." You will note that IBM went on to dominate the Macintosh.

• 23:06Nilay Patel?

  Then there was one that was, "Welcome Apple," and I think that was about streaming services. And then Slack just ran the, "Welcome Microsoft" about Teams. I'm not saying Figma has done this, I'm saying there's a long tradition of greeting your giant competitor by welcoming them, only to have them like come into your house and destroy you.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Has, has any executive in the history of tech ever said, "A rising tide lifts all boats," and been in business five years later?

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  No, definitely not.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 23:31Nilay Patel?

  I'm, right, this big company has validated the market and people see that we have the superior product. Like, that's like, you should just start, you should get on LinkedIn that day, if you work at that company. I don't think that's gonna happen. This ecosystem of smaller competitors on the iPad, one, people have already bought the thing.

• 23:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  So they've got the apps on their computer. Two, Photoshop just isn't there yet.

• 23:51Speaker 04

  Like, uh, feature-wise?

• 23:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, it's not a full competitor, yet.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so the thing is, it's only included as part of a Creative Cloud subscription. So, I don't think this is gonna be the thing that gets people to sign up for a Creative Cloud account. It's just for people who already have Photoshop, and it's just like an added benefit.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that's like, Paul, to your point about Creative Cloud, like, it does take over your computer, it's a big app now, but it's also like a lifestyle?

• 24:16Speaker 04

  It's a personality.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, I've got a Creative Cloud membership, and you've got all the apps, and like, one day I'm gonna use Adobe XD, I'm gonna make that website.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  That's me, like, I, uh, I just download stuff in the hopes that maybe I'll learn to use it someday, and it's just like sitting in my computer.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you got, you can get all the icons there that all in a row.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Looks nice.

• 24:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, did you see the one person who tweeted us that was like, the Photoshop icon is round?

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Yes, so that, actually, there's a reason for that, it's like...

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I just tell people, all the app icons on the Mac are squares, and the Photoshop icon is rounded off, and it looks... If you notice it, you will never unnotice it.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  It got, it graduated to a rounded, um, edge. I mean, that's, yeah, because they, the explanation is that, once the app becomes, um, "cloud-aware," was the word they used, they become rounded.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  That is the most subtle.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  I love it.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  It's incredible. That's ridiculous. All right, let's talk about these sneaks, because the sneaks are based on something else Adobe is doing, or most of them, which is they have their own AI platform called Sensei. I'm unclear whether Sensei is like one AI platform, like a singular AI that is smart, or whether it's like branding for all their efforts, the way that like Watson is at IBM.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm not really sure either. They just call it their AI platform and it's part of like features like content aware fill in Photoshop where you do like a circle around something that you want to remove and it just like takes it away. And it just showed up a lot in most of the sneaks. And I think, let's see, what's one that was pretty good?

• 25:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the key?

• 25:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, go ahead.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  There's one called All In, where it's for those moments when you're trying to take a group photo, but the person who's taking the photo like wants to be in the group photo. So it's like you take two photos, like one without you and one where you're in it. And then the AI kind of like pieces the two photos together. So you're kind of like, everyone's like in the photo together.

• 26:11Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Oh, it's like it's a Vanity Fair mode. Yeah. No, it's like AI compositing.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:17Nilay Patel?

  You don't need a magic wand, the AI is gonna do it for you. So I mean, that to me is like, these products aren't real yet, right? Like, that's the John Mulaney, everyone's having a drink, check it out, we're like compositing you in a photo. But they're saying Sensei, I mean, it's already in, like, content aware fill is already in Photoshop. Sensei is all over Lightroom, like you can like search for faces and things already. But it seems like the next turn for them is we're gonna start doing a lot of stuff for you? Is that, was that a sense that you got from them? Or is that just we're seeing it kind of on the outside?

• 26:49Speaker 04

  They've already kind of acknowledged that this work is really powerful, but they don't want to Like scare creatives into thinking like we're gonna take your jobs. Instead, they're trying to make it so that, oh, we're gonna get rid of like the tedious tasks for you and like make it really easy so you can be, you can have more time to be creative. But I also think they're kind of starting to realize that the stuff they're unleashing into the world could have like very negative consequences. So they also previewed this feature that tells when a photo has been manipulated. So it gives you the probability that like these pixels have been moved and shifted around. So that also is kind of related to this new initiative that they brought up. It's Content Authenticity Initiative. And they're doing it with Twitter and the New York Times.

• 27:33Speaker 04

  And there's not really a lot of details about it yet, but it's just like a thing that they're acknowledging. It's like, hey, we kind of have this role and like responsibility now to acknowledge that this stuff is really powerful.

• 27:47Nilay Patel?

  I like the, I like the manipulation detection, which is like effectively like people on forums being like, I've looked at a lot of shops in my day and I can tell by the pixels that this is me. It's like, yeah, we can actually, we can do that.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  I mean, it's great that Adobe is making the tools to alter photos so you can't tell. Then it's making the tools to tell if the photos have been altered.

• 28:06Nilay Patel?

  They're arms with themselves.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  It's great. There's a real duality inside of Adobe.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  I just realized that this, this like image verification thing that they're doing with the New York Times and Twitter is like the end of the story is someone is going to do watermarks, but it's blockchain.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Like that's just coming from all of us.

• 28:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we do not know what is happening with this. I can rant and rave about this all day and all night, but we don't know any details. So I, I will, I will cut myself short because we're gonna find out what is actually happening. I just don't think, there's two ways to authenticate anything. One is to like have a server and a certificate and then like ping the server and say, I've got this hash. Is this the right, right? That's like the, the number one way that you do it. That's how everybody does everything. Once you do that, you can say, don't display the image and you've got DRM. Like that's how DRM works. Like, hey, I've got this content. Can you authenticate it? Okay. The other way is to do some like crazy ass blockchain shit. This is, those are your two choices.

• 29:09Nilay Patel?

  And I just don't think Adobe and Twitter are gonna do some crazy ass blockchain shit with images.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  I don't think the New York Times has put all of its images on the blockchain. So it's gonna pull you towards the server. And once you've got an authentication server, it's like, okay, I'm done now. We'll find out. I just, once you have an authentication server, you have the beginnings of a digital rights management platform. The thing, the two things that the sneaks that I was most interested in were the video framing tool and the Photoshop camera. But especially the Photoshop camera. Like, that thing looks amazing.

• 29:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's basically Lightroom for people who don't know how to use Lightroom, and that's like me. So if I have a photo, it just tells you based on what's in the subject. So it's like, oh, I took a photo of some Peppin Pop. It's like, that's a food, by the way.

• 30:02Speaker 04

  It's like, okay, the AI knows that it's a picture of food, so it'll do like the right filters for the food. Or it's like, you can add like a bouquet effect, so the AI will identify the subject, then it'll just like blur out the background like on its own. So you can also create filters for it. So you can make a filter in Photoshop, and somehow that gets onto the Photoshop camera app. I'm not really sure. I haven't tried it out yet.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  That to me is, you know what they haven't done yet, I don't think, is like formally created the sort of like preset store. Like, there is sort of a secondary economy of like Lightroom presets for mobile. It sounds like you could do a bunch of Photoshop camera presets.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good point, because like people are already selling Photoshop brushes on Gumroad.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  So maybe in the future, people will be able to buy like filters for Photoshop camera.

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They're probably just trying to figure out ways to avoid the Apple tax.

• 30:54Speaker 05

  I want the LiveJournal aesthetic Photoshop filters. You know, do you remember the LiveJournal look?

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  You're on your own, buddy.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  No, I've been on LiveJournal. I had a LiveJournal.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  Okay, so you're making a strip of photos of like all your favorite Twilight characters. And, but you have to, it was before, Instagram filters are the, are just, you know, the apified version of what the LiveJournal aesthetic. And, you know what, they're...

• 31:24Nilay Patel?

  I feel like we just learned an awful lot about how you spend your time. So you know what's really interesting? I, I, we, we obviously just had the podcast last week with Instagram and the Pixel Camera team, and we were talking about how their looks affect each other. The Lightroom auto button, since the iPhone XS came out, has radically changed how it works. It now pushes highlights way down and shadows way up. So it makes raw photos look more like iPhone photos in a way that it didn't do before. And so like this Photoshop camera, like Lightroom, people use Lightroom, they're now going to be in control of like a look, like a very obvious look that happens. And it's funny because I've noticed the auto button in Lightroom has like subtly changed. It's like, what if this photo is a lot flatter, like your phone?

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  Which I, I just think Adobe is a creative company, is probably less interested in having a defined look of its images.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  They were saying how they think that like the camera improvements and all these new phones, it's just like, it's just happening so fast that they think that they could do software better than these platforms, better than like, you know, Google Pixel phones or like iPhones. So I think stuff like the bouquet effect, it's like, that could be really useful for people who don't have the latest iPhone.

• 32:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The one feature of Lightroom that I've never understood on a phone is that it's also a camera. Like, I don't, I don't love that the image editing app and the camera app are the same. It's like, it's just a whole thing inside of Lightroom that I've never understood. I could talk about Lightroom all day long. I have a difficult relationship with Lightroom. It's, it's, it's a monopoly.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm, I'm going to pay for Lightroom for the rest of my life. So last question about Adobe, because we are talking about this company. I'm really happy you went, I'm really happy you're on the beat. I, I think it is an under-covered company. It's so important to this entire ecosystem, and it actually doesn't get covered as, I don't know, critically as we cover Apple or Facebook or whatever. You come out of Macs, you've been talking to a bunch of people there, you're talking to the creators. What is the vibe around Adobe? Is it, it, it just seems... More mysterious than other companies we talk about.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  The vibe of like the people who are there or?

• 33:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, do people love it? Like, the vibe is electric. They're cheering for content aware Phil. But like, it seems like people have a very up and down relationship with this company and its products.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like the people who are there are only there because their company's paid for them to be there. So these are people who don't have to think about paying $10 a month to the company because it's already provided to them by their companies, which is sort of like the situation I'm in, you know, with Vox Media. And it's only online that you see like all these criticisms that, you know, you shouldn't be charging $10 a month. Like, that's way too much for a service that is, you know, only $10 like for a lifetime of pro creator affinity. I'm starting to see a lot more tweets from people being like, this is it for me. Like, I'm soaring off Adobe now, now that I have all these other alternatives. So I do think maybe we'll start to see more of that happening.

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. To me, it feels like to switch to an iPad, they needed Photoshop on the iPad. Like, Apple needed Adobe to make this product. And they finally relented, and that's going to open up a wave of conversations about this set of tools that is otherwise sort of under remarked upon. Is that a phrase?

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  Under remarked upon?

• 34:40Speaker 03

  It is now.

• 34:41Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 34:42Speaker 05

  You're playing a dangerous game when you decide your business model is some sort of lock-in. Because if people find the key, and that key is a free app called DaVinci Resolve that works on Linux, you know, like, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, wow, like, goodbye, goodbye handcuffs made by Adobe.

• 35:03Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't think that a free app that works on Linux is the thing.

• 35:07Nilay Patel?

  Historically, not the thing.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Adobe.

• 35:09Nilay Patel?

  Just pretty sure.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  You lost me.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  Go on YouTube.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  No idea.

• 35:14Speaker 05

  I, I, I left Adobe Premiere for DaVinci Resolve. Just search that on, on YouTube. There's a million people.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  A million?

• 35:22Speaker 05

  A million.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  It's like 25 people.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, look, that's what fundamentally what I'm excited about is we this was a moment to be like, okay, that we're covering the hell out of Adobe. Here's 95,000 stories that they're going to produce and new products and new features. I think the goal is I want to track them as carefully as we track these other companies because you're not going to get a bunch of people shifting their primary computing platforms if Adobe doesn't take them there. And that's to me is remarkable.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  I mean, I have a whole story about this, which we could talk about after the ad break.

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• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:03Nilay Patel?

  Surface Pro X.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  X, not 10. X.

• 37:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  By the way, I tweeted this. What does X mean in Microsoft world? There's the Xbox, there's the Xbox One X, there's Windows 10 X, there's the Surface Pro X, and near as I can tell, all those X's mean different things.

• 37:22Speaker 05

  In my opinion, unless you're Apple and you explicitly tell me it's pronounced 10, I think X stands for extreme.

• 37:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, expanded.

• 37:31Nilay Patel?

  Exhanced.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  I don't know, can you spell the word disappointing with an X? Because that's how I feel about the Surface Pro X.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  Oh, boy.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Ex-appointing.

• 37:38Nilay Patel?

  Ex-appointing?

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're gonna do an entire, long, extra podcast on this. I've got Tom, who has the Surface Pro X, and also Dan, who has been testing the other services. We're like, gonna talk about this for god knows how long, pretty soon. And so, I don't want to go super deep on this. I just want to say two things. Surface Pro X runs ARM, and I love it. It is the prettiest computer. I think it is way, way better looking than an iPad. And if you can find only ARM apps for it, you can get incredible battery life, and it's fast and it's great. But those apps don't exist, and so you end up having to use emulated apps, and then it's slow and gets bad battery life. And you can't run Lightroom at all. And that is why I bought it and then returned it.

• 38:23Nilay Patel?

  Twice. Twice?

• 38:25Speaker 03

  I bought it ahead of time, and I was like, no, this is a bad idea. I'm gonna cancel it. And then, I was like, but what if I, what if I got it anyway? And then I did it again, and then I canceled it. And then the review unit came, and then I discovered that you just, you just can't install Lightroom, and I was like, thank god. And then I bought a Surface Pro 7, and I'm happy.

• 38:43Nilay Patel?

  Have you tried using Lightroom on the web on it? That's the ultimate hack, is to get that computer-

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Lightroom on the web is fine.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  For web stuff, yeah. Like, I do that on Chrome OS all the time.

• 38:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I'm saying, the ultimate move to kill the battery life on a Surface Pro X is to install Chrome, and then use Lightroom on the web in Chrome. And then that's like 25 minutes, and you're done.

• 39:04Speaker 05

  There's clearly a pain knob here, controlled by app incompatibility.

• 39:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:09Speaker 05

  How far would the pain knob have to be turned down for you to buy a Pro X a third time?

• 39:16Speaker 03

  If they made Lightroom available, even emulated, I would probably do it.

• 39:20Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so, explain the, so we had Panos on the show, and he said to me and Tom, "Our team has done an amazing job with emulation. Anything you want, iTunes and Chrome, those are the bellwethers, we got 'em."

• 39:32Speaker 03

  They do.

• 39:33Nilay Patel?

  But what, where are the breakdowns? Like, why do the breakdowns exist?

• 39:38Speaker 03

  So there's, there's two kinds of ways to make an x86 app. There's make a 32 bit app. And if you use Mac, you know that a bunch of 32 bit apps stopped working in Mojave, right? So the new architecture is 64 bit, which is better in ways because there's more bits, whatever. It's better. They can emulate 32 bit using what I forget what it's called. And those run better than you expect. I didn't expect Mac, but they like, they run okay. But ARM 64 cannot emulate 64 bit x86 apps. So if an app doesn't have a legacy 32 bit version hanging around or hasn't updated to 64 bit, then you're fine. But a bunch of apps are like, oh, well, we're just going to make the best one. We're going to make

• 40:22Speaker 03

  the good one that runs the best. And that's a 64 bit one. And we're not going to bother maintaining the 32 bit one. And so the best, most forward looking Windows apps don't work.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  That seems a little upside down. Isn't the whole point of the best, most forward Windows apps that they're processor agnostic, right? That they're modern. Is it easy to port from Intel 64 to ARM 64?

• 40:45Speaker 03

  I don't, I'm not a developer. I don't know. I think that for some apps, especially like the UWP apps or like whatever, it is relatively easy to port. In fact, UWP should just work in 64 bit ARM natively across most of these in the first place. So for relatively simple apps, I think it's pretty straightforward. But for apps that like directly like need to talk to the GPU or directly do processor stuff, I do not think it's a simple transition to go from x86 to ARM. You can't just like check a box to compile to ARM and you're done.

• 41:13Nilay Patel?

  So is this just a bunch of weird Microsoft decisions coming home? Right? Because UWP as a platform is a mess.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  It is one more, yet one more decision in a chain of decisions that Microsoft has made since, uh, let's just go, how far back do you want to go? Let's, let's go back to Windows RT, uh, where Microsoft says, you know what? Uh, we've really got to get off of this classic, you know, Windows NT code base. We gotta, we gotta move the world forward. Here's the new kind of Windows. Please make apps. Uh, they did that with RT.

• 41:47Nilay Patel?

  Did that with, I mean, Windows 8 doesn't really count, but they started to mess around like what Metro turned into. Then there was S mode. I'm probably forgetting something somewhere. And now there is Windows on ARM. And I just think there's just a lot of developers that were, are like, why would I take a flyer on Microsoft's latest attempt to get us to try a new version of Windows that's wacky? Like, I'll wait and see what, what happens. And I don't, it's a totally rational decision.

• 42:13Speaker 05

  Apple's version of this is like, we're gonna be harsh but fair. Like, we are absolutely doing this new thing. Which, you know, now, now that we're seeing this ARM laptop from Microsoft, it makes more sense like why Apple wouldn't do this yet. Because they can't say for certain that this can be the future. I, I could imagine Apple saying, we aren't going to release ARM laptops until we know we can do all ARM laptops and give sort of developers like a, an end of life on, on Intel stuff.

• 42:43Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 42:43Speaker 05

  Whereas Microsoft is clearly not certain what the future will be.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, I, so I, one question I have, I'm also not a developer, is like whether ARM 64 emulating Intel 64 is just a hard, like a hard limit, like you just can't do it no matter what architect, like what operating system you're on, or that's a Windows problem?

• 43:00Speaker 05

  Everything's possible. It's, if it's Turing, no, if a Turing machine can simulate another Turing machine, you can do, turtle all the way down and you could, you could, you could do anything if you wanted to. It's just how much of a performance hit. Like, there are certain, like, x86, emulating x86 is really efficient. You can, you can do that. Like, so there are things that are gonna be faster and slower, but that's definitely not impossible.

• 43:28Nilay Patel?

  Right, so, I mean, Apple has the, I mean, we'll use Photoshop as an example. They can't put out an ARM laptop and then be like, here's this weird version of Photoshop that doesn't have a magic wand. People are just gonna wanna run Photoshop on their fun new ARM machine? And that's just the end of that question. Like, either that works or it doesn't. Yeah. Right? And I think Microsoft has decided, well, what if some stuff doesn't work? Dieter, you described it as a CEO's computer? And I just want you to, I just want you to unpack that a little bit.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  If you, if you only use Office and you never need to edit a photo and like, you can afford to have the little people do the hard work, then you're gonna love this thing. It's also a CEO's computer because only a CEO can afford it.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Like, you have to spend, like, there's a $1,200 version with the keyboard which you shouldn't get. Like, the good one with 256 gigs of storage is like 1,800 bucks. And if, if they had just re-released the Surface Go with an ARM chip in it, I might actually be interested in it, because like, 600 bucks, it's a little bit slow, and it doesn't run all the apps, but it's 600 bucks, like, yep, sign me up. I will experiment in this wacky future with you, but 1,800 bucks? Like, that is just way too much money to take a flyer.

• 44:33Nilay Patel?

  So, what, what, the other interesting thing, and I know you're gonna do a whole thing with Tom and Dan on it, so we don't have to keep drilling at it, is, this is the same but nicer form factor than the Pro 7.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  Which can just do everything. But, a year from now, they're gonna put out the Neo, which is the big dual-screen, like, Windows 10x, uh, computer, that runs Intel. And it seems like the big form factor shift would have been a great time to do a processor shift, and say, "You need to rewrite your apps for this new dual-screen paradigm."

• 45:08Speaker 03

  You know what would happen, though? The dual-screen one would fail. I think the stakes are too high for the, the Neo, from Microsoft, to risk not having the apps for it. So they have to go with Intel, because they know that if they don't, it will absolutely bomb.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  Wow. I mean, it's tough. It, it just seems, all of that seems very hard.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Super hard. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm happy I'm not in charge of solving this problem. Um, and we've seen Microsoft try to solve this problem over and over again. Remember when they threw money at the Windows Phone problem? And they just, like, paid developers, just make apps? Like, I could, I could, like, sit here and, like, make the list of things I wish Microsoft had done to make more ARM apps available on this computer. And, literally, everything I could think of, like, Microsoft has already tried it, and it hasn't worked. So, I don't know.

• 45:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, the main thing they tried was just paying people. And they can't, like, pay Adobe. Like, what's, Adobe's, like, whatever, we got 10 bucks a month from everyone, forever.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Ah, they could pay Adobe.

• 46:00Nilay Patel?

  Put them, I don't know.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  They could pay Adobe.

• 46:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The next time we get Scott, we're gonna be like, how much does it cost to make a Windows app? Okay, so can we talk for, by the way, you brought that up, so now I'm thinking about it. Can we talk for two seconds about Bill Gates saying we'd all be using Windows Mobile if not for antitrust in the 90s?

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  I don't even know how to unpack. So Bill Gates is onstage with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times Dealbook Conference, and he says, "I took my eye off the ball because of antitrust. It was my mistake, but if I hadn't done that, we would all be using Windows Mobile instead of Android." Which he has said to me on this show in a slightly different way before. This is the most directly that he said it.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 46:41Nilay Patel?

  But this is what I wanted to ask you about, dear. He said, "We were three months away from a Motorola deal that would have changed everything, and we were just too late." That, if I, if I have my timeline correct, and I think his timeline's really wrong, that would have been the deal, the Droid deal on Verizon. So the deal that killed WebOS.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  I really wish that you hadn't brought this up on the Vergecast, because like, this is my big reporting project, is somebody inside Verizon was playing Microsoft, Palm, and Google off of each other for like, six months, keeping like, them all on the hook, thinking that they were gonna be able to be the big iPhone competitor killer, because the storm had clearly failed. Like, Verizon, yeah. Verizon had anointed the BlackBerry Storm, and it was a disaster of a phone.

• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  The only person who liked the BlackBerry Storm was Paul Miller, who thought, I believe in her review, said, "This screen is great."

• 47:37Speaker 05

  A brief hands-on demo, I was misled into liking the BlackBerry Storm, and I have repented for that many times on this Vergecast, as you are well aware.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, but now both Microsoft and Palm CEOs have said, "Well, if, if we had gotten the deal that Verizon said they were gonna give us, then we would be Android today." So I want to know who in Verizon was, is like, that, just that stone-cold Machiavellian manipulator that had all three of these companies in like, competing, you know, meeting rooms.

• 48:07Nilay Patel?

  Lowell McAdam, the genius who also launched Go90. It's a real hit or miss situation.

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 48:13Speaker 05

  But, okay, okay, but doesn't the BlackBerry store kind of disprove that a little bit? If Verizon's such a kingmaker and they put their Verizon cash behind a prospective king from a vaunted smartphone manufacturer, the smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry, and that failed, it kind of does matter how good the thing is, right?

• 48:35Speaker 03

  It does matter how good the thing is. If they had put all their money behind Windows Mobile, I don't know that it would have succeeded. I do think that if they put all their money behind Palm, behind WebOS, of course, it would succeed.

• 48:43Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  WebOS was the best thing ever.

• 48:45Nilay Patel?

  Of course, you think that. No, here's what I'll say. Bold proclamation. Windows Phone, WebOS, and Android at that time were all as good as each other.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Yes. Although, at that time, Windows Phone didn't exist. It was still Windows Mobile.

• 49:00Nilay Patel?

  It was bad.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Which was bad, but was more capable. And if they had just had, I don't know, they could have fixed it, in theory. They didn't, and I don't know that they absolutely could have. But I will say that it turns out that Microsoft employed a lot of people, not just Bill Gates, and they were trying to and couldn't. So I don't think Bill Gates's attention would have solved that problem immediately.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

  Also, Bill Gates wasn't the CEO at the time.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  And also, Bill Gates was making bad UIs at the time. He wasn't the CEO either. Yeah, like, there was a whole lot of things that weren't going, going, doing well.

• 49:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It seems, I would say that quote is very interesting. He was probably half joking, because he was half joking when he said something to me. But that timeline's real messy. And also, David Pierce beat me to this tweet. If your argument is that antitrust regulation is the reason we're all using Android instead of Windows Mobile, like, that is the best argument for antitrust regulation I've ever heard in my entire life. Like, yes, you created the opportunity for a new competitor to come in with a much better product than Windows Mobile. Like, yeah, break them all up. Let's just go nuts. Let's see what happens. This reminds me of another quote, by the way, of this time, which is when, along the lines of Welcome, Apple, Vic Gendotra, when Microsoft, he was at Google, when Microsoft bought Nokia, he just tweeted, "Two turkeys do not make an eagle," which remains one

• 50:19Nilay Patel?

  of the most esoteric burns I've ever heard in my entire life. And I just, I think we should all talk about it more often.

• 50:25Speaker 05

  And accurate.

• 50:26Speaker 04

  He invented that saying?

• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  No, I think it's like, one of these like, weird sayings that like, European wireless carriers used to say to each other all the time. Like European executives wander around dissing each other's mergers by saying two turkeys don't make an eagle. And he pulled it back out to say it again. But I had never heard it before because I was a baby reporter. And I was like, what is this? And literally people would pull me aside at conferences and be like, this is a famous saying from a 1947 merger between Siemens and tire manufacturing. What are you talking about? Okay, do you want to talk about Ignite for a couple of minutes and then we can move on?

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Just a couple. I mean, it's Microsoft's big enterprise conference. And you think, oh, Microsoft IT enterprise conference snore. But no, they announced a ton of shit. Like, here's the date for Edge going, you know, here's a release candidate and here's when it's going to be official, Edge Chromium. Here's a whole thing about Office. Now, all the Android apps are just one Office app. Here's blah, blah, blah, blah. They had a whole ton of stuff. And then they basically are pushing this idea of the fluid framework, which is like the cloud PSD. It's the new way that they want files to work, which is a proprietary thing in the cloud.

• 51:40Speaker 05

  There's a very good quote on this. What if there was no more document? Instead, this is a canvas and the canvas is smart.

• 51:52Nilay Patel?

  I feel like that's just a great way of saying now you have to subscribe to your file system.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  Probably, probably. You need to unlock the full paid Office 365 to, for the canvas to be smart.

• 52:05Speaker 03

  The problem is that they don't have good language for it yet. So they're trying to do to basically like Google Docs sharing, what Google Docs sharing did to emailing Word attachments or floppy disk Word files, right? When, if you had a Word file, you'd somehow have to get that to somebody else and they'd mess with it. They'd have to give it back to you. And then you have to make sure you've all got the right versions or whatever. And the reason that Google Docs when it first came out was so innovative and so interesting wasn't the quality of the word processor or even the fact that it was on the web. It was that entire problem of dealing with files. And which version of the file you have and blah, blah, blah, blah. It just made it go away because like, here's the doc. We all work on the doc.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  When you open it up, it's always the right version, the most recent version of the doc. If it's not, you can go back and look. So Microsoft is trying to go one step beyond that, but I don't know what the hell they mean by it.

• 52:58Speaker 05

  So yeah, so like the canonical document is like a URL. I think that's the what if there was no, no more document aspect, right?

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:06Speaker 05

  Instead, this is a canvas, right? The canvas, you find the canvas because you know the URL. So you could drop this URL into a Slack and this canvas pops into the Slack and you're probably Microsoft Teams and other people can see that, right?

• 53:20Nilay Patel?

  This canvas drops into Slack and reminds you that Microsoft Teams is a superior product that's included your 365.

• 53:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. But the canvas is smart aspect, I think, is kind of to do with like embeds. And I think it kind of, it kind of makes sense why all the office apps are merging. I, I think what Microsoft is doing with this is like, what if you, an Excel spreadsheet, you know, no more document, this is a canonical URL for an Excel spreadsheet was embedded in a Word document.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  Are you gonna say O L A, Dieter?

• 53:50Speaker 05

  And Apple, they have invented Apple's open doc.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no. You think that, but you're wrong because it's, it's a canvas. You can, you don't have to pick what kind of file you're using. Everybody can collaborate on it. You can chat next to it. Microsoft is trying to reinvent Google Wave.

• 54:06Nilay Patel?

  We all went three different doomed technologies. Dieter picked Google Wave. I picked Microsoft's doomed O L E and you picked up.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Oh, I forgot O L E.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. It was pronounced O L A.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:18Nilay Patel?

  Look, the 90s are back. This is all a bunch of bad early 2000s, late 90s technology.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  The last thing to say about Ignite is whatever hope you have, like the, the idea that Office is, I don't know, that they're pushing that onto the web. They're, they're working way harder to make web apps happen than universal Windows platform apps happen. Like if, if the, the answer to this whole ARM problem is Microsoft just has everybody install PWAs or just like make, you know, Edge browser windows into apps or like. You know, whatever Microsoft's version of Electron might be someday. And it's not. We actually have apps in the Windows App Store. I think Microsoft would be fine with that. In fact, I think they're pursuing both of those tracks and we'll see which one wins is kind of, I think, what the strategy is.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  You think this is why they moved to Chromium inside of Edge?

• 55:10Speaker 03

  I think that Chromium is a much better app platform than whatever Edge was using. And they knew it and they they need to have some sort of hedged bet to be able to make web apps just in case. I do think that there's a little piece of this where Microsoft is trying to claw back a little bit of control of the web and control of how people use the web from Google. And Google's happy to let them because then they seem less like monopolists. And by the way, they're also using Chromium anyway, so hooray.

• 55:40Nilay Patel?

  I love that we've now come to the point where Google's like, yeah, take some web market share. That would be good for us to Microsoft.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  Yep. That's exactly where we live.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  That's just a bizarre, bizarre time in history. Dieter, do you know what's going on with Electron apps in the Mac App Store?

• 55:56Speaker 03

  No, it's very strange. So if you haven't heard, there are some Electron apps that were rejected because they were using private APIs. And so Electron just works by using these private APIs, undocumented APIs, however you want to refer to them. And you're not supposed to do that in App Store apps, so they got rejected. And this is very odd because there are a ton of very, very, very popular apps that happen to be Electron apps, like Slack, that continue to be accepted. And so the big question is, is Apple making a grand new policy that it's trying to kill Electron apps to move everything over to Catalyst apps? Because those are great? Or, and then if so, are they applying those rules like capriciously and like letting the big guys in?

• 56:37Speaker 03

  So that's bad. Or is it like the bog standard, like an app reviewer like followed the letter of the law and they shouldn't have and like they they forgot the unwritten rule that you're supposed to let a bunch of apps through just because? I lean towards the latter, but there's been actually surprising little chatter about it. So I kind of think the latter is the case. But it's, from where I'm sitting, it's still like a developing story as of today.

• 57:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, I feel like if Apple was to ban Electron from the App Store, that's like a nuclear.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  And they would have to be way better at Catalyst.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  And they are not.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  But you can see where it's going. Right, which is-

• 57:15Speaker 03

  You could, if the catalyst was any good, or if Swift UI was any good. Like, there's a whole lot that's not good on the Mac. Uh, like, I, I, again, I hate to just quote my own tweets, but like, the thing that's wild about the world we live here, live in right now is, when you use Windows and you run into like, the old version of Windows, like the Windows 95 UI, like the, like, three, you know, nested menus and deepened settings, you get annoyed. Like, this doesn't look like Windows 10, what the hell? Uh, when you use a Mac, you get annoyed whenever you run into anything that's new. Anything that might, that Apple has tried in the past three years. You're like, what the hell is this shit?

• 57:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, we'll see. All right, but you're gonna do a long, deep dive on Surface stuff?

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're gonna talk all, all the Surface stuff. Uh, Surface laptops, uh, Surface Pro 7, Surface Pro X. Uh, we'll probably talk a lot more about some of this Ignite stuff. Uh, teaser, Tom Warren has been using the leaked ARM 64 version of Edge, and, um, changes things, changes things a lot.

• 58:13Nilay Patel?

  All right. So if we haven't sated you with this deep dive into Chromium trivia, that's coming up. All right, we're gonna take a break, we'll be right back.

• 58:26Speaker 06

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• 59:26Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller.

• 59:26Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 59:27Nilay Patel?

  The consistency that holds our nation together. In a segment that is always called.

• 59:32Speaker 05

  Uh oh, we have a time hole.

• 59:35Nilay Patel?

  It's not great.

• 59:37Speaker 05

  So, a ton of people have received text messages that were originally sent on Valentine's Day. And I have, it's happening across a bunch of major US carriers, right? So it's not just one, one-off technical glitch. So I have applied Occam's razor and have, I've also read Harry Potter. And in Harry Potter, the most magical, powerful magical force is love. The day of love is Valentine's Day. So a time hole was created on Valentine's Day. And now the carriers are trying to cover it up, right? And so how are they going to cover it up? Well, guess what was announced one week or two weeks before? CCMI.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 1:00:21Speaker 05

  Now, if, if anything has been made clear over the past couple of years about RCS, the carriers care nothing for our texting ergonomics or for RCS. So I think only the discovery of this time hole and an attempt to cover it up has brought the carriers together to create a new, integrated conglomerate. I don't know what CCMI is, but they're going to work together very hard and they're going to provide us RCS in order to hopefully fix the time hole. But probably around February of 2020, we will, you know, a great, a great price will be asked of all of us to really heal the world.

• 1:01:01Nilay Patel?

  I feel very strongly that I should apologize to the listener for saying, this is a segment that holds America together. And then you immediately drove into Harry Potter. Like, no hesitation, like you were like, yes, I hold America together. I've read Harry Potter. So for just an apology from all of us to you, the listener, but I think you're right.

• 1:01:21Speaker 05

  That divisive book series, Harry Potter.

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  I feel that you are, well, it's more divisive over time. If you want to make a hard left turn on Harry Potter, I'll go there with you. But I don't think that we should do that. I think you're right.

• 1:01:31Speaker 05

  Okay, good.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  But I think, I think, I think something else is happening. I think this is a breaking point for SMS. So Jake, like, we noticed that all these text messages are coming. People are like weirded out. Jake talked to somebody who got a message from like. A dead friend, that's horrible.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  We saw a bunch of people getting texts from their exes and then me like, I started chatting again. That seems different. My theory is that lots of people are faking it and just sending you ups and me like, oh, that was from Valentine's Day. Uh, I mean, that's, I'm like, over a decade out the game, but that's what I would do.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I was a bad person. Um, all the carriers have like blamed each other now and blamed an unnamed third-party texting provider.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, not only that, but their statements, like both T-Mobile, T-Mobile was sort of the only ones that have said anything. And they both have said, this is resolved. Like, we know, we know this happened and it's fixed now. It's like, or, or you could keep talking.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Tell us what the hell.

• 1:02:30Nilay Patel?

  Tell us who this third-party provider, so I think there's like some third-party service that you've never heard of, that your texts go through, which is already a problem. Did you know that Sprint and T-Mobile and 18 and Verizon all just send, route your texts through another company that you've never heard of?

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Your, your completely unencrypted texts, by the way?

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  It's at Mark's, it's at Mark's, like I work at his house. It's zucktext.com. He's just doing it for you. They need to break that contract. So they, they created a problem and now they can tell this company that they're out of their like SLA agreement. So they can launch their bad texting platform. That's my theory, Paul.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:03:04Nilay Patel?

  It's more of a conspiracy theory than the world is, there's a love time hole, but it's, that's my, that's my conspiracy theory.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  It's like, it's about the same. I mean, you may recall that I, uh, emergency ran out of the Vergecast two weeks ago to go report this story about the, uh, carrier consortium. I forget what CCM, CCMI even stands for, but the, the, all carriers are, all four US carriers are making a joint venture, a brand-new company, to make RCS a reality and they're gonna give you an app, which is just the worst timeline. Um, and, uh, Google's whole reaction has been like, hey, we're, we're glad they're paying attention, which seems like positive, but also scary. I don't worry any of this is going. My conspiracy theory is they, um, they, that SMS and RCS are like in a box and you don't want to touch the box.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Because the box is very fragile and like, nobody really knows how anything works. And so somebody walked up to the box like, oh, we gotta get RCS going. And they like opened up the lid and that shook the box and that's where all these texts came from. They like, just, you just, they shook the box that runs our SMS.

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, so do the carriers not notice that a bunch of messages didn't go through on Valentine's Day?

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  It's odd, right?

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  It can't be a problem that happened today if the texts are from February. The problem had to have occurred in February. And then today, like, the problem was fixed. Because they're not resends, as far as we understand. These are, these are texts that were delayed for a period of months. And so for them to be like, this is a problem, but we fixed it. It's like, the problem is from February.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  But like, do you think anybody, anywhere in any of the carriers, has any idea what is actually going on with SMS? Which is a technology that was built to like, work on like, the transport, like, meta-communication layer?

• 1:04:52Nilay Patel?

  Here's my que- how many people broke up on Valentine's Day because their texts didn't go through?

• 1:04:56Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, this sounds like a viral marketing stunt for a movie.

• 1:05:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 04

  So they paid a bunch of random Twitter people to randomly tweet, like, hey, this text, I didn't get it.

• 1:05:09Nilay Patel?

  And we're gonna find out tomorrow, it's not hijinks. Jake said, uh, most of his reporting on the story was making sure it wasn't a viral marketing stunt.

• 1:05:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Nilay Patel?

  That was his first instinct. But he's now talked to many, many, many people. And if it is a viral marketing stunt, more power to you, you've now convinced every news organization in the world. That's written T-Mobile suck. We should let them merge, that'd be great.

• 1:05:29Speaker 05

  And if it is a marketing stunt and you haven't written the movie yet,

• 1:05:34Speaker 05

  please call it Time Hole.

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  How wild is it that it's like Valentine's Day? Like, what, why, how? Valentine's Day, that one, it's not like we're exactly six months away from Valentine's Day. Hey, why not the day before? Why not three days after? Why not exactly six months ago?

• 1:05:50Speaker 05

  What if somebody used like, like a rare heart emoji and it gummed up the system? It's horrible.

• 1:05:55Nilay Patel?

  All right. Two more things to talk about. Google's buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion?

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's going into the hardware division.

• 1:06:05Nilay Patel?

  Under Rick?

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Who knows what's gonna, yeah, under Rick Ostrillo. Who knows what's gonna happen to Fitbit software? They're adamant that you're gonna be able to go delete your data if you're not comfortable with Google having it. They're adamant it won't be used for ads. The Wear OS people are like, we look forward to working with Fitbit people, which is like the saddest.

• 1:06:21Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, man, I, I, I don't even, we need to do like three more verge casts for me to work through my emotions on this one. The bottom line is like, I would not expect anything to happen with this acquisition for like two years. Like, it's gonna take them two years to like navigate this thing. Rick has done a good job buying other companies. He did a good job buying HTC, but this is gonna take a minute.

• 1:06:44Speaker 05

  Two years from now, is Fitbit, are Fitbit devices better, worse, or nonexistent? And then are Wearless devices better, worse, or nonexistent?

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  I don't know, Paul.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  I think, so I have a slightly different theory. Google has to make a watch to complete its ecosystem that can compete with the Apple Watch. They have to. Like, the Apple Watch is extraordinarily popular. It sells a lot of units. People are wearing them. They now have like the 199 model, which is the like, I'm related to you and I need to buy you a present, but I don't actually know you, so here's this thing that looks like I love you. Like, that's a very important price point for Apple.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  What is more important for that, that category, the AirPods Pro or the Apple Watch?

• 1:07:22Nilay Patel?

  No, regular AirPods are in that zone. You only buy AirPods Pro if you really love someone.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  Gotcha. Okay. Great.

• 1:07:28Nilay Patel?

  That's where I live. It's the holiday season and you can tell I'm thinking about this. Like, you can, if you get noise cancelling, I know you. If you get the regular, it's like, you're great. You got my last name. Let's not overthink this. I'm gonna be a great dad. But the watch is like critically important in that zone. Where it's a great product, it works really well, it's integrated with the operating system. There's no denying that it is like a tremendous boon to Apple. It locks you in, the whole thing. Yeah. Google has nothing. They got a bunch of like weird fossil designs that like run a bad processor and that they don't have flat tires. Like, that's like the main thing. Like, if you're interested in Android, where what you're really interested is like a circle. That's your main design consideration in this product.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  And you should just buy a Samsung's watch instead.

• 1:08:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So, Google has to like finish their ecosystem because now people wanna buy a watch that connects to their phone. Like, if you buy a Pixel, you don't have like some great analog to Apple Watch to go buy. I think this is their move to do it. And Fitbit, because they don't run on hopeless Qualcomm processors, because they're good at health tracking, because they have like the social network of competition, all the stuff. Google can just like make it less ugly, make it so that it's easier to like action a notification on the Fitbit operating system connected to Android and just move the hell on.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  Well, so that's the question. The number one question is, when Google makes its watch hardware under Rick Osterloh, are they making a Fitbit? Or are they making an Android wear that uses Fitbit's hardware chops?

• 1:08:56Nilay Patel?

  I know. Why wouldn't you keep the Fitbit name? They kept the Nest name in a different way.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  It's gonna use Fitbit OS. You know, there's 15 versions of Fitbit OS. But it's basically an RTOS. It's like, pretty, pretty low, whatever. It's like, based on what Pebble did. And it's not that powerful, right? It's not that extensible. WearOS is very powerful, very extensible, maybe qualcommable, have a chip that comes. So, did they buy Fitbit? Because Fitbit has a bunch of people that know how to make good wearables? And then they're gonna have them make a good WearOS device? Or did they buy Fitbit? And they're just gonna like, run out the clock on Fitbit's platform? And, but they're, you know what I mean? Like, what, what is, what are they gonna make? Are they gonna make a Fitbit watch? Or are they gonna make a WearOS watch?

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  Fitbit watch.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  I could go either way.

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  Like, why would you buy Fitbit if you didn't want their actual stuff?

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Because they've got people that know how to make a watch. That's like it.

• 1:09:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, I think they'd be, they'd be foolish to walk away from like, the more successful product, in favor of their own not successful product.

• 1:09:52Speaker 05

  Do you think they'll, they'll open source Fitbit stuff?

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  Who knows?

• 1:09:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  It's all very confusing. Like, I, I landed on, don't overthink it. Like, Rick just wants people that know how to make a watch.

• 1:10:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just like you want people that know how to make a watch.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  That was what the HTC acquisition was. Like, I was like, oh, what do they do with HTC? Do they want the blockchain phone? What's happening? Blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, he just, he just wants people that don't suck at making phones. That's all.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  The end.

• 1:10:14Nilay Patel?

  And they can just like, just do it themselves.

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, we heard about the Pixel 3. Like, they just like, did it.

• 1:10:19Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:10:20Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:10:21Speaker 05

  The Nest Pixel Phone. Watch, sorry. So, the next, let me try the joke again. The Nest Pixel Watch.

• 1:10:28Nilay Patel?

  You're done.

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's the first guest, everybody. No, the last thing to talk about is, in fact, AirPods Pro. Uh, we didn't talk about them last week when they came out. I have them, I'm wearing them, Chris Welch reviewed them. Here's what I'll say about them. They are the thing that AirPods should have been from the start. They sound fine.

• 1:10:45Speaker 04

  I tried it out in the office and having never worn noise cancelling headphones before, it was incredible. Like, our open office plan, where you can hear like, everybody talking about four different things all at the same time, like, I put in the AirPods and it was just like, they all started whispering. That's what it sounded like. I was like, this is crazy. So, I can never have them, because if I wear them in public, I will die. I will get hit by a bus. And I will drop them onto the subway tracks.

• 1:11:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, you can put them into the weird mode. Um, transparency mode. People are freaking out about transparency mode.

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19Nilay Patel?

  So, I, I spend a lot of time on planes. Dieter, you spend a lot of time on planes.

• 1:11:23Speaker 05

  I do.

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  Noise cancelling headphones are how you survive life, if you spend this much time on planes. And like, my Sony ones have the bad transparency mode, where you like, cup your hand over your ear, which just makes you look like an asshole. Like, someone's talking to you, and you're like, I'm not gonna take off my headphones. I'm just gonna go like this. Uh, every time I've tried it, I'm like, I, I apologize. Like, I tried this for the fourth time. Transparency mode does not feel that way to me.

• 1:11:48Speaker 04

  Why don't you just take off the headphones?

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's some saying.

• 1:11:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Nilay Patel?

  But like, Sony, once you be like, you know, the flight attendant comes by and says, what do you want to drink? You're just gonna go like this, and you're like, a Diet Coke. And you're just like, I'm a horrible person. Like, there's no way to do that without feeling waves of guilt.

• 1:12:04Speaker 05

  Transparency mode is for spying on people while looking like you're listening to music.

• 1:12:08Nilay Patel?

  Yes. There's a whole social construct around transparency. But, normal AirPods, you can just hear everything. So like, whatever.

• 1:12:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 1:12:15Nilay Patel?

  I will say that the difference in transparency mode of like, my Sony cans and these AirPods is very minimal. The AirPods Pro are a classic example of Apple taking a technology that has long existed, and then being like, we invented it.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, when they're like, in their description on the website, when they're like, we add anti-noise to the noise, I'm like, guys. Like, literally Bose was doing this like, 20 years ago. Like, what are you doing? Uh, but they're very, they're very good. Um, they sound fine. I just wanna put this out there. Deeply fine. They do not sound great. They're deeply fine.

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  Well, I haven't tried them yet. What's this thing with like, they're not as, because it sometimes bothers me in your headphones will have that seal, right?

• 1:13:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 05

  Like, and there's, these have slightly less of a seal.

• 1:13:03Nilay Patel?

  No, the seal is still there, but there's a vent, so you don't have that weird popping feeling, like when you put them in your ear.

• 1:13:09Speaker 05

  If you have a vent, don't you have a, you don't have a seal anymore, right? I, I'm just, I'm really confused.

• 1:13:15Nilay Patel?

  So you need the seal for bass response. So you, you do have a seal, right? It's sealed, but there's a vent, so it equalizes the pressure inside your ear versus outside.

• 1:13:24Speaker 05

  Uh, so while it wubs, it lets in air as appropriate so that it doesn't push on your.

• 1:13:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like the, the most amazing moment of AirPods Pro, like when you get them, you put in one. And when you put in just one, it doesn't go into noise cancelling, it goes into transparency. So the mics are lit up and it vents. So you put in one and it instantly feels like you haven't done anything.

• 1:13:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  Which is like a remarkable feeling. And then you're like, wow, now I'm just a guy with a Bluetooth headset. Let me put in this other one. And then it goes into noise cancelling and then you're like sealed out. And that, that's like very cool. But the vent just is there to equalize the pressure and it works really well.

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  I think they're great. I don't know if it's the vent, but I will say that compared, I haven't tried the Sonys yet, um, but compared to like over ear Sony, uh, noise cancelling headphones, uh, the AirPods are not effective at, uh, drowning out incredibly loud noise.

• 1:14:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  Uh, they make it, they make it slightly less noisy, um, and slightly less annoying, but like it's still there. Uh, like I'm, I'm talking about like on the train, right?

• 1:14:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  On the subway where there's like just horrific screeching at 95 decibels.

• 1:14:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or a plane. So last week I flew to California and then I flew to Chicago and I was on a lot of planes last week.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Nilay Patel?

  And I gave up on the AirPods and I put on my Sonys.

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  They were way quieter. Yeah, they just can't roll with a plane. Like there's, planes are real loud.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Nilay Patel?

  Um, and the, you know, putting something over your ears to block out even more, actually more effective.

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  I, I have purchased the most scary, it is going to find a way to transmit a virus, 3.5 millimeter Bluetooth transmitter I could find at Amazon. Uh, it's not like the one with the extra cable. It's literally just like, uh, a headphone jack with a, a thing next, stuck onto it.

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Um, I'm really excited to try it.

• 1:15:06Nilay Patel?

  That thing's going to hack your car.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:08Nilay Patel?

  Just like straight up. It's going to like detect like this is a Honda Civic. I know how to hack it. You're kind of, you're going to get pwned by that, like the government. It's gonna be fun.

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, I think they are very good. Like I said, they're actually great in terms of how they work. I think they are like, proof positive that Apple's tight control of its ecosystem lets them do stuff that no one else can do. Which is either great, and that's great, or it's horrible. Right? Like, I think the noise cancelling technology in the Sony wireless buds is probably better because it's the Sony stuff, which is very good. They probably sound better, depending on how you feel about how things sound. But there's no way Sony can match the pairing, there's no way Sony can match the battery life, there's no way Sony can integrate their controls right into the control center like Apple can do. Like, that stuff, it's starting to border on, huh, it's a little unfair.

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58Nilay Patel?

  I asked Apple, by the way, if they were gonna roll any of their improvements to Bluetooth into the standard, and their answer was, hmm. So, I'm just gonna accept that as a no.

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Nilay Patel?

  Alright, that's it, it's the Vergecast. We did the whole thing. Tommy, thank you for being here. Cool. I am very excited that we're covering Adobe this much. Hope so. It's a, I think they're just, I just honestly, I think they're undercover. Anyway, we have a bunch of stuff to tell you about. The week before Thanksgiving and the week of Thanksgiving, the Vergecast is gonna go a little sideways. We're doing a big feature on pirate radio, which still exists, it's still vibrant. There'll be stuff on the site, we're actually gonna print it as a zine in the spirit of, like, pirate radio. But Andrew, our producer, has been working on some special feature podcasts that we're gonna run that week. There'll be three of them. The first one is about DJs in Afghanistan who work for the United States military, spreading military messages. We're profiling one of those DJs. We've got among people who have a phone conference line that they just like play their own pirate

• 1:16:54Nilay Patel?

  radio on, so people just dial into a party line, which is hilarious. And the last one, we can't not yell at Congress on the Vergecast. So, a bill called the Pirate Act in Congress that actually cracks down on pirate radio. And that actually is gonna have a ripple effect. So, three special episodes, the week before Thanksgiving, Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. And we're off for Thanksgiving, although we might have a little surprise in mind, but we'll think about it. We'll let you know. But I want you to know that's coming, I want you to look forward to, it's gonna be really fun. And I want you to buy our zine when we put it out. I'm very excited. We're gonna, it's our first print product.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:25Nilay Patel?

  It's a zine about pirate radio. The first episode of the Pyro Radio Series is Tuesday the 19th, so stay tuned for that. I also want you to go listen to Reset with Ariel DeHaem Ross, former Verge reporter and now Recode, doing a three times weekly tech show called Reset. It's about a broad definition of tech. It looks at science, medicine, and politics. It's out now. It comes out on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Go subscribe to that wherever you get your podcasts. Dieter, you want to talk about Command Line?

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  It's a newsletter about computers. It comes out pretty much every weekday. Sometimes I write something longer in it, sometimes I don't. But if you miss me tweeting opinions about tech, it's because it's all in the newsletter. So you should go subscribe to it, diverge.com/newsletters.

• 1:18:02Nilay Patel?

  Also, I want you to check something out on our sister show, Today Explained. Sean Ramesharam and Vox critic at large Emily Vanderworth are discussing the streaming war as one of our favorite topics. Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, and Peacock, which is NBC's entry, what it all means for the future of TV. They're calling the episode Streaming Explained. That's in the Today Explained feed wherever you get your podcasts. And then you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at FuturePaul. Dieter's at Backline. Domi, what's your Twitter?

• 1:18:28Speaker 04

  Domi underscore Lee.

• 1:18:29Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. All right, that's the Vergecast. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  Promo code.

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