How much MacBook is enough MacBook?

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz discuss the Apple Macbook Air M3 review, Jon Stewart's take on AI, and a whole lot more of this week's tech news. Further reading: Apple MacBook Air M3 review: small upgrades It’s time for a hard reset on notifications Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers Microsoft is working on an Xbox AI chatbot Samsung says Bixby’s still not dead The world needs more gadgets like LG’s briefcase TV Jon Stewart on AI, Lina Khan, and the other things Apple didn’t want him to say A first look at Europe’s alternative iPhone app stores Will the Apple antitrust case lawsuit affect your phone’s security? How Meta’s global head of safety approaches online age verification Is TikTok still TikTok without the algorithm?’ The US House banned staffers from using Microsoft Copilot FCC will vote on restoring net neutrality rules X’s ‘complimentary’ Premium push gives people blue checks they didn’t ask for Spotify’s price is reportedly going up again AI George Carlin case settled as performers demand better protection OpenAI’s voice cloning AI model only needs a 15-second sample to work Google Podcasts is gone — and so is my faith in Google Vote for us in the Webbys!! People’s Voice Technology Podcast Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchast, flagship podcast of Best Printers 2024.

• 0:39David Pierce?

  Best printer, small business, office, home use, black and white color.

• 0:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, label printing. That's my part. That's my favorite sort of evolution of the SEO spam is the Amazon product name that is just all of the things.

• 0:58David Pierce?

  It's everywhere now.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:59David Pierce?

  The everything on Amazon is like 60 words long now.

• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03Alex Cranz?

  Which is better, though, like the way they name phones at Samsung or the way they name products on Amazon's website?

• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  It's Samsung. It's 1,000%. I want to be clear. Samsung, the Samsung naming conventions, and in fact, most tech product naming conventions are now like performance art.

• 1:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22Nilay Patel?

  They're just like some words, a galaxy, a number, some other letters. Fine.

• 1:27Alex Cranz?

  They're just riffing. It's like jazz.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're just like, here's some ideas we had, you know? And then what the SEO spam is just all this technology and all of this AI and all these algorithms. And we're like, what's the best way to win at them? Just shove all the words in the title field.

• 1:43David Pierce?

  And then off to the side, there's like Sony, who's just like, would you like 16 numbers and letters together that don't mean anything?

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. It's very good. Anyway, we're all together in the studios.

• 1:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here.

• 1:54David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  Alex Cranz is here. Hello. It's been a minute since we were all on this show at the same time. Let alone all in the same room at the same time.

• 2:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, wait, how were y'all's vacations?

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  They were good. Very good. I drank a lot of Miami vices, which is when you put a daiquiri in the pina colada. So it's pink and white.

• 2:14David Pierce?

  Incredible.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot of sugar at 8 a.m. And a lot of rum.

• 2:18David Pierce?

  And then at 9, 9 a.m.

• 2:19Alex Cranz?

  But you're getting the fruit, so you're getting your vitamin C.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what you really, that's what you really want. Uh, it was good, but we were, you know, when you travel with a small child, you end up on her schedule, like a five-year-old schedule.

• 2:29Alex Cranz?

  So you were in bed by 7?

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we were in bed by 9 and we were up at 6 and hammered by 11, like a five-year-old. Uh, and I was like, wait, this might be the ideal way to live my life.

• 2:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  Like on this, and then I immediately was like, no, I-

• 2:42David Pierce?

  Especially when you're on vacation, though, like being the first one up has real ramifications. You're like, the world is your oyster for like three hours at the resort before anybody else wakes up.

• 2:51Alex Cranz?

  You get the best cereal, like the best breakfast, it's the best.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was good. Uh, how was yours?

• 2:56Alex Cranz?

  It was good. I, I mopped.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  You mopped?

• 2:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  Did you go on vacation as a small Victorian chambermaid?

• 3:03Alex Cranz?

  Pretty much, pretty much.

• 3:04Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna do like a LARP?

• 3:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I really, I really needed to do some mopping, so I did a lot of mopping. I really, my goal was to like, see if I could become one with my couch.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good.

• 3:15Alex Cranz?

  For like a whole week.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's an important kind of vacation.

• 3:18Alex Cranz?

  It, like, I thought it was great. My dog did not agree. He, he was very frustrated with my vacation, but I had a great time.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Did you watch anything? I mean, couch time is watch time, right?

• 3:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I, I saw Girls 5 Ever, 5 Ever?

• 3:31David Pierce?

  Very good.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  Netflix wants me to watch this show, I'm just not gonna do it.

• 3:34Alex Cranz?

  You should do it.

• 3:34David Pierce?

  It's very good.

• 3:35Alex Cranz?

  It's good.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  It's good?

• 3:36David Pierce?

  It is legitimately very good.

• 3:37Alex Cranz?

  It's very funny.

• 3:38David Pierce?

  It's, it's straight out of the brain of Tina Fey. So like, if you think 30 Rock is funny, you don't think Girls 5 Ever is funny, and I think 30 Rock is very funny.

• 3:45Alex Cranz?

  And it spends a lot of time making fun of like, a very specific neighborhood in Brooklyn that I used to live in, so I'm like, yes!

• 3:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's good.

• 3:53Alex Cranz?

  Yes!

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  I'll give it a shot.

• 3:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's good, it's good.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  I went through the whole three-body problem with Netflix. You know, I was like, I opened Netflix, I was like, I'm gonna watch this show, I watched the whole thing, and it wasn't good? And I was like, this is, I had the Netflix problem again. And easy to disclose that I made a Netflix show. Our Netflix show is great.

• 4:12Alex Cranz?

  Unlike some other ones.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  It's called The Future of.

• 4:14David Pierce?

  Less so.

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but, I don't know. It was like, that was the thing I did, because we went on vacation, we came back, I mean, like, several days left, like, post-vacation.

• 4:23Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 4:23Nilay Patel?

  Which is a clutch move.

• 4:24David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:25Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and I was like, how am I gonna spend this time? And I was like, watching, watching television.

• 4:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, of course.

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  It was amazing.

• 4:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and I was like, the show is, it's fine.

• 4:35Alex Cranz?

  That's why I switched it off and turned on the new Walking Dead show.

• 4:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:39Alex Cranz?

  And like, that's just adorable. It's two people being like, what if we kill a bunch of zombies and make out? And I was like, alright.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  The spoiler alert people are gonna come.

• 4:47Alex Cranz?

  I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

• 4:47Nilay Patel?

  I tweeted one thing about Three Body Problem.

• 4:50Alex Cranz?

  They came for you.

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  And they came, and I was like, this book has been out for a million years.

• 4:54Alex Cranz?

  What's the problem?

• 4:56Nilay Patel?

  It's fine. Anyhow, it's a weird springtime week.

• 5:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  I feel like there was a lot of news the past couple of weeks, the government and the tech companies are just doing a thing. And then this week, everyone went on spring break.

• 5:11David Pierce?

  I think that's literally true.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, everyone was like, we just gotta stop the fighting. Everyone go drink a Miami Vice. We'll come back. We'll get back, right back to it after spring.

• 5:19David Pierce?

  Well, and now, on the flip side, we're now, what, four weeks away from the beginning of, like, developer conference season?

• 5:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:26David Pierce?

  So everybody is out of filing legal briefs and into planning for, like, weird AI product announcements. And this is sort of the small doldrums in the middle.

• 5:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is the quiet week where we saw them outside getting a beautiful tour of Wall Street with all of the other high schoolers.

• 5:43David Pierce?

  Lovely.

• 5:44Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. No, this is the New York visit week.

• 5:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Nilay Patel?

  When's DC visit week? When do the eighth graders go to DC? That was last week.

• 5:50David Pierce?

  The cherry blossoms came out and just every 13-year-old in America went to the Lincoln Memorial on the same day. It was unbelievable.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  So that's this week where they, we, so the Verge's offices are in the financial district of New York, which is very old. There's a bunch of old stuff you can look at, and this is the week where they're all here looking.

• 6:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're all like, yep, there's some old stuff. I'm looking at my phone.

• 6:09Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook is like, George Washington got hammered in this bar. That's a real thing he thinks about all the time. But there's, there's a lot of stuff to talk about. David has structured the show into three lightning rounds.

• 6:20Alex Cranz?

  All sponsorable.

• 6:21Nilay Patel?

  Three sponsorable lightning rounds, which no one has yet to sponsor. We get a lot of emails from people. They're like, I'll pay some money.

• 6:29David Pierce?

  Yeah. Promises don't pay the bills, friends.

• 6:33David Pierce?

  Hit the Venmo or leave me alone.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna figure this out. I promise you we'll figure this out. But if you run a large company, we're good at taking a lot of money.

• 6:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's a whole floor of people at this company who's like, a huge amount of money, we know what to do. When I'm like, someone wants to pay us 20 bucks, they're like, I don't know.

• 6:52Alex Cranz?

  Just DoorDash.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  We should be on DoorDash.

• 6:57David Pierce?

  But all we deliver is like, hot podcasts.

• 7:00Nilay Patel?

  It's like, nothing happens. And yeah, three lightning rounds, we should start with, we did have a big review this week. A few weeks after it came out, we hired a new laptop reviewer, Joanne and Elias. Her, she, we got her up to speed, crans, we like, let her do a ThinkPad, and then we're like, MacBook Air, get it done.

• 7:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and she did. She had a lot of feelings about the MacBook Air M3 15 and 13 inch, because they both came out, and they're pretty similar, and she was like, they're good MacBooks. They got a little faster. And then she was very upset because they had 8GB of RAM, standard. And I tend to agree with her, but I know some people on this podcast don't.

• 7:39David Pierce?

  Well, yes. I mean, we're gonna fight about that for many hours.

• 7:42Alex Cranz?

  Some people have bad takes. It's okay.

• 7:45David Pierce?

  It brought me such great joy to watch someone else come and go through the same thing that all of us have been through with the MacBooks over the years, which is, this is very good. It's probably the best laptop you can buy. It is a teeny tiny bit better than the last one, and slightly more expensive, and Apple really wants you to buy something much more expensive. Do I give that an eight or a nine? It's like, the eternal question of the MacBook Air is like, it's probably the best laptop. It could probably, it's kind of annoying. What do I do with that?

• 8:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:16David Pierce?

  And it's just like, it's nice to see someone else go through this very intense process. Because the story of the MacBook Air is like, it- It rules, like it is, it is pretty hands down the best all around laptop on the planet. And yet, it's a pretty small upgrade over the last one. It has a bunch of the same deficiencies as the last one, and they desperately, desperately, desperately want you to spend $2,500 on a laptop, and not $1,000 on a laptop.

• 8:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:40David Pierce?

  They are very good at getting you from one to the other.

• 8:42Alex Cranz?

  That's what I did.

• 8:43David Pierce?

  Is it?

• 8:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Well, I went with a MacBook Pro, yeah.

• 8:46David Pierce?

  You got, you just, you let yourself get specked up?

• 8:48Alex Cranz?

  I got specked up. I like, like, that feeling from, from the early days of the MacBook Air, where you, you couldn't get the Air, you had to get a Pro if you wanted power. I was like, "I know I don't, I don't, I know I could be fine with an Air, but I have an Air for work." This is really like, it's important for me to know the whole lineup.

• 9:04David Pierce?

  So I can either have a Pro to run all my Chrome tabs, or I can have an Air to run all of my Chrome tabs?

• 9:09Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, well, and Crusader Kings 3. Like, it plays it beautifully.

• 9:16Nilay Patel?

  So what you're talking about is directly related to the 8 gigs of RAM situation.

• 9:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Nilay Patel?

  Which is you settle down to buy this laptop, the base configuration should be amazing. The base configuration compared to any other base configuration, potentially the best all around laptop. Like, that's a, it's a real thing you can make an argument for.

• 9:33David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 9:33Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  And then you're like, "But if I put 8 gigs of RAM in this, it will last for 2 years, and then it will die, and I'll do this again, so I should put 16 or 32 gigs of RAM into it." And then you're like, "I should add some storage to it, because of now it's gonna last a long time." And then you are quickly at, "Oh, I should just buy a MacBook Pro."

• 9:48Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 9:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, "I should spend slightly even more money, and I can just have a 14" MacBook Pro."

• 9:54Alex Cranz?

  Like, off, off the shelf, you don't have to worry about somebody like customizing it, and them adding a little shipping time to it. Just get happy.

• 10:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, 'cause what is it? You go from 8 to 16 gigs of RAM, that's 200 bucks. You go from the base storage, which is 256, to 512, that's another 200 bucks. So already, you've just turned your $1,000, or your $1,100 laptop in this case, into a $1,500 laptop. At which point, you're like, "Well, maybe I'll just get the 15" because it's not that much more expensive."

• 10:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:23David Pierce?

  And then you get, then you're up to there. And then, it is, I mean, it is so perfectly calculated how to get you to buy like the mid-spec MacBook Pro. It's just unbelievable.

• 10:33Alex Cranz?

  It's beautiful.

• 10:34David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it is not the computer anyone needs. Like, I truly do not believe the premise that if you buy 8 gigs of RAM, it's only gonna last you 2 years, and it won't work. I think like, if you're a person who like... Really heavily uses your computer, sure. I think if you're gonna spend money on one additional spec, RAM is always the thing.

• 10:52Alex Cranz?

  This is what I'm-

• 10:53David Pierce?

  Totally believe that. I believe firmly that for most people, for most uses, the base configuration of the MacBook Air, storage, RAM, everything is fine.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  Crazy. You're a crazy person.

• 11:03David Pierce?

  That's so much computer.

• 11:05Alex Cranz?

  This is what I'm trying to-

• 11:05Nilay Patel?

  But not enough RAM. Go ahead.

• 11:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is what I'm trying to understand. It's because like, you said this, and it was like, just lobbing a bomb into chat in the office. Like, you were like, "Yeah, yeah."

• 11:15David Pierce?

  So mad at me.

• 11:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I resisted like, telling anybody that you said that, and then you like, you were like, "Yeah, I believe 8 gigs." And everybody's like, "David, what are you doing?" And is it because we're all people who use our laptops a lot and always have a bajillion tabs open that we feel that need for the RAM?

• 11:35David Pierce?

  I mean, that's part of it.

• 11:36Alex Cranz?

  Like, is it like a verge?

• 11:38David Pierce?

  It's, I think it's two things. I think half of it is what you just described. I think the other half is we are all literally professionally trained to be sensitive to our computers being slow. And then I look at like, my mom, who is on a nine-year-old iPad, and like, doesn't notice that it's a problem. Like, it just works fine. And she taps a thing, she waits a couple of seconds and it opens. And I'm like, "Do you know how long Safari just took to open, Mom?" And she's like, "What are you talking about?" And it just opened. Like, it's whatever. I think most people don't spend as much time thinking about how long their tabs take to open as we do. And maybe they should. And I think they arguably should.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  For $1,100. I'm just gonna throw back your Vision Pro criticism. For $1,100, being like, "This computer is a little slow," when it's the fastest-

• 12:25David Pierce?

  But it's not slow. It's not slow.

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  That swap is immediately noticeable. So the argument, the pro 8 gig argument is that the SSD is so fast that swapping to and from virtual memory using the state-of-the-art blah blah blah that Apple is state-of-the-art about you is imperceptible. This is the argument.

• 12:43David Pierce?

  This is the argument. And on the new one, apparently the storage is much faster, so that argument might be closer to true.

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The argument is wrong.

• 12:51Nilay Patel?

  Like, the storage is still slower than the RAM. It might be very fast, but it's still slower than the RAM. And so when you hit the swap, which you can do really easily on a Mac with care, they gave RAM.

• 13:00David Pierce?

  I'm gonna bet I'm swapped right now. Let's see.

• 13:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh, what do you, what do you, what do you do to?

• 13:04Alex Cranz?

  He's going into the activity monitor?

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't know if you had something like weird utility. David is the proprietor of installer, often, often has weird utilities.

• 13:13David Pierce?

  I do have weird utilities, but I have hit the swap.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it just like happens immediately.

• 13:17David Pierce?

  If you go to memory, it'll tell you down at the bottom. Swap used. Sorry, keep going.

• 13:22Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 13:22Nilay Patel?

  Riveting radio program. Open activity monitor and click on memory.

• 13:29Alex Cranz?

  It's a how to.

• 13:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, all I'm saying is, that's the argument. And I, at this point, in 2024, not a good argument. They should just bump you up to 16 gigs of RAM at standard. And then I think this computer would be amazing.

• 13:43David Pierce?

  I, I do agree with that. I, I think it would be better if everybody had 16 gigs of RAM. I think it's absurd that Apple charges $200 to go from eight to 16 when that RAM doesn't cost anywhere near $200.

• 13:56Alex Cranz?

  The most enduring scam.

• 13:58David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, the margins-

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  And it's soldered in, so you can't even upgrade it later.

• 14:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 14:02Alex Cranz?

  Because used to, the, the hack was you'd buy it with the garbage RAM and then you'd just upgrade it as soon as you got it.

• 14:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you'd do the thing where you lift it up the keyboard.

• 14:09Alex Cranz?

  And just, and you're done. And now they're like, no, you will pay us $200 or swap and suffer.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, all I'm saying is, great computer. It, it's like the base storage of the iPhone or the base storage of iCloud. And I was like, how much is just enough to annoy you into paying us more?

• 14:26David Pierce?

  Oh, no, that's real. Uh, but how much? When was it that you switched your family to Chromebooks?

• 14:32Nilay Patel?

  Uh, ages ago.

• 14:33David Pierce?

  How is that going?

• 14:34Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's fine, because I bought, uh, well-

• 14:37David Pierce?

  You got a lot of 16 gig of RAM Chromebooks running out there?

• 14:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I bought, well, so it's only one Chromebook.

• 14:42David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 14:42Nilay Patel?

  It was the Google, what was the fanciest one?

• 14:45Alex Cranz?

  The Pixel book?

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  No, it was before, the-

• 14:48David Pierce?

  Well, there was the Chromebook Pixel. That was the, the sick one.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm literally Googling, bought my mom a Chromebook because I might be the only- Hold on, hold on, let me just get that right. Um, no, I bought a Chromebook Pixel in 2016.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  It was, it was a thousand dollars. It has a core i7 and like 16 gigs of RAM and it is just

• 15:09David Pierce?

  Really?

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  Rockin'.

• 15:10David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 15:11Nilay Patel?

  Because it was so overpowered

• 15:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  For its time. Now it's a little underpowered to run Chrome. Uh, my 2015 iMac.

• 15:17David Pierce?

  Such a damning critique of Chrome.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  It's not great.

• 15:21David Pierce?

  That an i7 and 16 gigs of RAM like barely keep up anymore.

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  Uh, my 2015 iMac, which is done now.

• 15:27David Pierce?

  Oh.

• 15:28Nilay Patel?

  It's over.

• 15:29David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 15:29Nilay Patel?

  It's like the fans are just like on all the time, but it lasted as long as it did, almost 10 years, 32 gigs of RAM. That's, if I have one piece of advice for buying a Mac, which is loaded up, especially because it's soldered in, load it up with RAM at the beginning. Because you can't fix it, you can't upgrade it. Everything else, you'll be fine. Like over time.

• 15:49David Pierce?

  I do agree with that. I also think 256 gigs of storage, unless you do a lot of media, like if you're, if you just take photos on your phone and upload them to Google Photos and that's your photo strategy, 256 gigs is plenty.

• 16:02Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I, I disagree there.

• 16:03David Pierce?

  I know you do.

• 16:04Alex Cranz?

  Well, and then I'm saying this as someone who has a server at home to offload all my big files.

• 16:10David Pierce?

  Like a super normal workflow for regular people that everybody does.

• 16:13Alex Cranz?

  But even with that, I'm hitting that 256. Like the, the laptop I bought now has 512 because I was tired of hitting the 256 and being like, oh, I have to go delete this game that I play two times a year, but I really want to have access.

• 16:25David Pierce?

  What's using up all your storage?

• 16:26Alex Cranz?

  It, it's games.

• 16:27David Pierce?

  Okay. I mean, fair. Then I'll add that to media. That's totally fair. Games are enormous.

• 16:31Alex Cranz?

  They're so.

• 16:32David Pierce?

  You download two games now and you've eaten 256, but absent those two things, there's very little you're going to do that's going to take up that much storage.

• 16:40Alex Cranz?

  That's true. My mom has like a hundred.

• 16:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Alex Cranz?

  Billion gigabytes.

• 16:45David Pierce?

  Fine. Yeah. And at 256, literally unless you do media, which is huge, and especially now, like good God, every photo off the iPhone is enormous now. So like, get as much as you can, if that's a thing that you care about and you're going to like be in Lightroom doing stuff, which is another case to get more RAM. But if you're just, I firmly believe that most people buy laptops, download a web browser and that, the end. Uh, that is, that is 98% of most people's laptop experience now and like maybe Office. And for that, the base config is fine. I so firmly believe that.

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  I think you should spend at least $14.99 on one of 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage.

• 17:21David Pierce?

  And then at that point, why not get the 15 inch?

• 17:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:24David Pierce?

  And then there's a, there's a pro I'll sell you.

• 17:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And then you're just at a 14 pro and you're like, you have the 14 pro.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  Actually, I thought the biggest takeaway from Jonah's review is that the M2 is still for sale. And that's a pretty good deal if you can spec it up.

• 17:36David Pierce?

  Which is funny because this was also in a lot of ways, the story of the M2 review was that the M1 is still for sale.

• 17:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:42David Pierce?

  Uh, and now, I mean, you can buy the M1 at Walmart for, what is it, like 699 bucks?

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  Did we ever, so this hit while I was on vacation and there was like a furious amount of like conversation about whether Walmart was blowing out old stock or whether Apple was gonna make more M1s and if they, they're gonna make more M1s.

• 18:00David Pierce?

  Yes. That seems to be, I don't know that we've ever actually had that officially confirmed, but that, that is.

• 18:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's.

• 18:05David Pierce?

  Every bit of evidence we have suggests that that is the case.

• 18:07Alex Cranz?

  Unclear. It seems like it's gonna be going for a while. And it's not necessarily like they're making more M1s. They just have a ton of stock.

• 18:17David Pierce?

  No, they don't. That's not how Apple works. Literally, Apple pioneered the idea of not having warehouses.

• 18:22Alex Cranz?

  No, no, no. I mean, they have, they have like, they have tons of extra stuff around. That's how we got the iPhone SE. The iPhone SE came because they had a ton of the, the, uh, the cases, right?

• 18:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, sure. Having, having parts that they're very good at making very cheaply. Yes.

• 18:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, like they, they had a ton of those MacBook Air, original MacBook Air casings, right?

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook is like, what are you doing, guys? I'm the supply chain guy.

• 18:49Alex Cranz?

  Shove some M1s in them, send them to Walmart.

• 18:53Nilay Patel?

  Walmart. I think they are still making them. I think they, they've, they've projected out their demand and they're still making them. We have that quote from Walmart in one of our stories where the Walmart guy is like, we're gonna have these for as long as people want them.

• 19:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  Which has to be.

• 19:06Alex Cranz?

  I think it's a huge warehouse, like Steven Spielberg style warehouse. And Tim, Tim doesn't like to think about it. You don't bring it up around Tim. But Walmart, Walmart's like, we'll, we'll take care of this for you, Tim.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Reminder that Apple made the 13 inch MacBook Pro with optical drive for five or six years after they stopped selling it.

• 19:25David Pierce?

  Liam gets it.

• 19:26Alex Cranz?

  Oh, thank you, Liam.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 19:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. No, this is, I, what I think is true is I think it's less that Apple has a warehouse full of them somewhere and more that Apple, with that wedge design in particular, is now at like unbelievable economies of scale.

• 19:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:40David Pierce?

  And to just throw that away, like to get rid of all the tooling that's really expensive and the processes that you spin up to do this stuff like. There is a group of people who want those and will pay that price. And what I think is most surprising is not that these still exist and that Apple would keep making them, but that Apple is interested in selling a $700 laptop at Walmart. Like, to me, that's a much bigger change than anything else going on here. It's just, this is not a thing Apple has ever done before. And it's like, there's a world in which you would argue it feels like a company running scared, trying to make money wherever they can. I don't really think it's that, but it is a definite, like, strategy change in a way that I think has not been.

• 20:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because Walmart is very focused on luxury. Like, their, their whole thing is luxury and not Walmart. Let me take that back.

• 20:28Nilay Patel?

  Very confused.

• 20:29Alex Cranz?

  Let me, let me read that one.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  When I think about Walmart.

• 20:31Alex Cranz?

  That's what I think of, too. Yeah, that, that's all switched up. But yeah, like, Apple is very well-known for being all about luxury.

• 20:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Alex Cranz?

  Walmart, less so.

• 20:42David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, they just do different jobs. And like, if, if Apple wanted to just figure out how to sell the best $500 computer, it probably could have, it probably could have done that 35 years ago.

• 20:53Nilay Patel?

  They put that computer in Walmart. It was called the iPad. It has been in Walmart the entire time.

• 20:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  My two-year, you know, in-the-woods experience. Walmart was the only store. I spent a lot of time contemplating what electronic products are in Walmart in Catskill, New York.

• 21:11Nilay Patel?

  It's iPhones, all the iPhones, including the Pros. And it was iPads. And then they just didn't put the Macs in there. And now they have one Mac. And I think the iPad, Mac, a $700 M1 MacBook Air, the wedge design, and whatever iPads you can get at Walmart. Apple's just like, you want the laptops. Like, let's be honest about what people want to buy here.

• 21:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Nilay Patel?

  They want laptops.

• 21:34David Pierce?

  People are gonna go in looking for an M1 MacBook Air, and there's gonna be a, a salesperson who's like, wouldn't you rather have a 12.9-inch iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard and an Apple Pencil that's $1,400 all-in? And somebody's gonna leave with just like a bag full of nonsense, and they're like, I just wanted a laptop. But not at Walmart. There wouldn't be a salesperson at Walmart.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  That's true. It was, it was, look, I did a lot of shopping at Walmart in my two years of pandemic woods living. There was not a lot of salespeople around. It was not a thing. But all I'm saying is to, to connect the dots between the two of you.

• 22:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  The Apple running scared, maybe less scared. Apple finding every dollar it can find right now and just squeezing is weird. This is the company that gets rid of its old products.

• 22:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  Like, this is the company that's like, we're gonna cannibalize ourselves. And now they're selling three generations of the same laptop. We, it's weird.

• 22:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's very different. And it changed kind of quietly without.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:36David Pierce?

  Like, they, they, they did, nobody made any noise about it, but now you look and it's like, it, it operates like a very different company than it did, even just a few years ago.

• 22:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I could probably put, uh, killing the extraordinarily wasteful and stupid car project.

• 22:48David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 22:49Nilay Patel?

  Uh, this, like, the pressure on the App Store, the anger around the App Store antitrust stuff, and the, we're gonna sell more products at more price points than ever, like, all in a line.

• 22:59David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, they, they, they saw that, like, money is not infinite.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, which it, it is for them.

• 23:07David Pierce?

  Historically, it has been, yes.

• 23:08Nilay Patel?

  But it's just weird. It's just like a weird moment for that company.

• 23:11David Pierce?

  Yeah. And then there was that, I think it was a Reuters story this week, that Apple is now working on personal robots. Oh, yeah. I was like, okay, guys. Sure. That'll go good. We'll see him when we see him.

• 23:21Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we should mention, by the way, as long as you're talking about Apple, they rolled out, uh, personas that just like float around with you this week.

• 23:26David Pierce?

  Haunting.

• 23:26Nilay Patel?

  In the Vision Pro. You should watch the video, the video's on our various video platforms. Uh, it's like Wes and Vee, and they just don't seem happy with each other. I gotta be honest with it. I have not wanted to put the Vision Pro back on since I handed our review into Vee.

• 23:42David Pierce?

  I was talking to Wes earlier, and he was like, I gotta go FaceTime some friends and troll them really good. I'll talk to you later. And I was like, good. That feels like the right use of the Vision Pro. That, that is the best use. Strong use of $3,500. Seven out of 10.

• 23:56Nilay Patel?

  All right, speaking of amazing gadgets, Cranz, you've got one here.

• 23:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:59Nilay Patel?

  Opening lightning round.

• 24:00Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God. So Chris Welch, if, if, most of you are not in, in the verge office, so you don't get to see Chris as often as I, as, as often as I do. But, uh, he's had this suitcase at his desk for a while now. And, and this suitcase, I'd always be like, what is that? He'd be like, it's, it's, it's a TV.

• 24:17David Pierce?

  He'd be like, don't ask about the suitcase.

• 24:19Alex Cranz?

  Don't ask about the suitcase. And he finally reviewed the suitcase. And what I quickly learned was that everyone has been seeing this LG suitcase TV on TikTok. And so a lot of people are like, oh, Chris finally said it's pretty okay. It's time to get it. But

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 24:35Alex Cranz?

  But I want to, I want to be clear. You probably don't need the $1,200, 1080p.

• 24:41Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 24:42Alex Cranz?

  27 inch TV in a, in a suitcase. It's cool as hell, though.

• 24:46Nilay Patel?

  It is very cool.

• 24:47Alex Cranz?

  It just like, it hits like, like he, he talked about in, in his review, it just hits that gadget spot where you're just like, yeah, I want this.

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's foldy and clicky and it's a little outlandish. It's a touchscreen for no reason. I sat on the floor and played Solitaire for like 25 minutes.

• 25:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It, you just can do that because it's, it's fun.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Alex Cranz?

  And I just really, really enjoy the thing. And I think it needs no, doesn't need to exist in the world, but also I'm like, well, maybe I do need one for my bedroom. Because I can't figure out where to put a TV. Maybe I just have a

• 25:16Nilay Patel?

  In a suitcase?

• 25:17Alex Cranz?

  In a little suitcase.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  The answer is a suitcase.

• 25:19Alex Cranz?

  On my bed? Hmm, that would go well.

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  You need a ceiling projector.

• 25:23Alex Cranz?

  There's a fan up there.

• 25:24Nilay Patel?

  Get rid of the fan. I saw it, uh, uh, at CES, of course, in some like random booth, like a combo platter light fan projector.

• 25:32Alex Cranz?

  Oh, well, there we go. Then I'm done. That's what I'm gonna get.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  It's good. Obviously, we didn't turn the fan on the whole thing by, slightly. Very good. Very good.

• 25:40David Pierce?

  What I can't decide about this TV is whether I want it to be much better or much cheaper.

• 25:45Alex Cranz?

  That, that was

• 25:46David Pierce?

  Because part of me is like, give me the 1080p screen, give me 27 inches, make it 500 bucks. And like, will I buy this thing and take it on vacation with me three times a year? Like, yeah, I probably would. Uh, or am I like, I, this becomes, you know, the, the like basement TV for all intents and purposes. And I want it to be better than this. And I'm so torn between those two things. Because $1,200 for what this thing actually is. Is too much.

• 26:11Alex Cranz?

  It's ludicrous.

• 26:11Nilay Patel?

  Both of you have now described wanting this TV to keep it stationary in a room. You're like, the basement TV. Just like, buy a TV, dude.

• 26:19Alex Cranz?

  No, because it doesn't turn into a suitcase.

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  Just like, buy a TV. Yeah, but why? The purpose of a suitcase is that you take it with you.

• 26:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's my vacation TV. I will say, the thing where they're like, put it in the bed of your truck and watch TV is like...

• 26:35Nilay Patel?

  The dream.

• 26:35David Pierce?

  It is the dream. It is also just the most specific use case. It's like, I'm gonna tailgate with this thing six times a week. And it's gonna be worth it. If you are a season ticket holder to something.

• 26:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:48David Pierce?

  Buy this television. Like, that's where I'm at.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  It is true. Chris's basic point was like, we need more gadgets again, which is

• 26:54David Pierce?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 26:55Nilay Patel?

  A direct pull on my heartstrings. It is, I think it should be cheaper. I don't think it should be better. I think it should be cheaper.

• 27:00Alex Cranz?

  He made a good point that he understood why it was so expensive, because it is such a niche product. And he's like, if they made it better, then it would just be more expensive. Twelve hundred dollars is also expensive, but like, I don't, I don't know if I fully buy it, but...

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  I actually don't buy that at all. Like, LG can make a good TV for virtually no money, right? All they've really done here is buy a suitcase.

• 27:21Alex Cranz?

  They put it in a sick suitcase.

• 27:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, it really is just a TV and a hinge.

• 27:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:26David Pierce?

  Like, it's not...

• 27:27Alex Cranz?

  But you can, you can plug stuff into it?

• 27:30David Pierce?

  You can plug...

• 27:31Alex Cranz?

  You can play your Switch on it? It's, it's got a touchscreen, so you can like, play solitaire?

• 27:36Nilay Patel?

  You should buy one.

• 27:36David Pierce?

  There's just something, there's just something about this one picture in the review, where the, the TV is on a couch, and it's, it's folded up, the suitcase is open, it's flat, and there's two people on either side of it, playing chess. And this picture is both like, truly absurd, because I cannot imagine regular people ever actually doing this, and also makes me want it so bad.

• 27:58Alex Cranz?

  And you can see that, that, that, that whole conflict in their faces, too, in the photo.

• 28:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're kinda like, what is this bad chess app that I'm playing on this enormous television?

• 28:08Alex Cranz?

  But I'm also having a good time.

• 28:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't have a good time playing WebOS chess on a suitcase TV?

• 28:16Nilay Patel?

  All right, speaking of gadgets, my lightning round is the yearly printer review was published.

• 28:22David Pierce?

  It's a big day for you.

• 28:23Nilay Patel?

  Big day for me.

• 28:24David Pierce?

  This is what I assume you did on vacation the whole time, was just plan your epic comeback with the printer.

• 28:29Nilay Patel?

  So if you don't know, something is happening to Google Search right now. Where various websites, their traffic is declining because Google changed the algorithm. And some of them, we did a decoder with Mia about one of them, House Fresh, their purifier blog. There's a retro gaming site who's editor in chief or owner, or someone who's complaining on Twitter that their traffic is... And then a bunch of like, content farms.

• 28:53David Pierce?

  Right.

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  Also.

• 28:54David Pierce?

  And the idea is to kill the content farms.

• 28:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:57David Pierce?

  But they are catching some of the good, caring sites.

• 29:02Alex Cranz?

  A lot of people catching strays on this one.

• 29:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's something that the internet as we know it, I believe this to be true, the internet as we know it is about to fall apart.

• 29:12David Pierce?

  Oh, I really agree with that.

• 29:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Nilay Patel?

  Something weird is happening on the internet out there. So my contribution to that is to make stories that pointed out.

• 29:26Nilay Patel?

  By using the form of the stories, the content farms.

• 29:31David Pierce?

  It's a very meta art project.

• 29:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  I think the verb should be an art project. So the answer to the question, what is the best printer, has been unchanging for a decade. Which is the cheapest Brother laser printer you can find.

• 29:42David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  But that is, like, Google cannot accept that as an answer. Because it's not new enough, because there's not enough shopping links, because the data isn't semantic enough.

• 29:53Alex Cranz?

  How many H2s you got in that, that piece?

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  I've one.

• 29:56Alex Cranz?

  Gotta have it.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  And it's just me pointing out that LLMs don't know the answer to the question yet. Anyways, I wrote the piece. Once again, we have sold like 2,000 printers.

• 30:06David Pierce?

  It's amazing.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  Which is just the funniest part of this whole thing.

• 30:11Alex Cranz?

  It's my favorite part.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  It's easily the funniest part of this whole thing. It's like, what should this actually look like? It should just feel like, just buy this one and shut up. Like, that's all anyone wants on the internet when they're looking for product advice.

• 30:21Alex Cranz?

  And Google's like, no.

• 30:22Nilay Patel?

  And Google wants to. You have to update the page. So you look at the internet. And you're like, you type in best printer and all the top results are like, updated last week to point out that a bad product is the new winner. Or like, they be like, we changed our methodology. And you look at the number of sites that one, claim to have reviewed every printer,

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  and then claim to have updated those printer reviews yesterday. And then also get the answer.

• 30:49Alex Cranz?

  Like, updating it on January 1st, 2024, so that you, to say they've updated it in January 24.

• 30:55David Pierce?

  2024, yeah.

• 30:57Alex Cranz?

  It's cool.

• 30:57David Pierce?

  It is. So my, my big edit to you in this story was to add a bunch of links to the kinds of things they're talking about. And some of it is, is just truly wild. And it's like, I feel like everybody has seen these at some point, right? You Google one of these and you go on to some site you've never heard of. And it's basically just like a product name. People on Amazon like it. Here's what they say. Copy and paste a bunch of Amazon results and, and call it a day. But the, like, one of them is on people.com, the eight best home printers of 2024, tested and reviewed. Like, nothing against, I have not even read this piece. I don't know. But what in the world is People Magazine doing caring about printers?

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:30David Pierce?

  Like, how is this what the internet has become?

• 31:32Alex Cranz?

  That's how they print the magazine out.

• 31:36Nilay Patel?

  CBS News, I think was my favorite one. Then I realized, like,

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  the demographic of CBS News might be looking for printers. I don't know the answer to that question. It's, it's just very odd that if you like, look at the architecture of our internet, a lot of people are like affiliate, weird affiliate clicks will pay for everything. And then you just look at what that means in practice, which is trying to game Google search to get those affiliate clicks. And that, we're in the death spiral.

• 32:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:03David Pierce?

  Well, and one of the things Google has been trying to take away recently is sites that not only do that, but try to hide it, that all have a sort of sneaky. navigational part of their site that's not in the nav, they never put it on the homepage, you can never find it. It's like, parts of these websites exist exclusively for Google. It's not just stuff that is like, made because you see it on Google Trends, which a lot of people do, and that's like, that's a thing we think about, it's a thing everybody thinks about, like, knowing what people want to know is fine. But like, when you go to this deep, deep hole of like, we are going to actively wall this off from the rest of our site, so that the people who come here on purpose never even find it. It's like, that's tough. And that is, that is now a game, a lot of people feel like they have to play.

• 32:44Alex Cranz?

  People doesn't. You can find it on the People page.

• 32:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Alex Cranz?

  I just had to go check.

• 32:48David Pierce?

  People's like, "What's up, guys? We love printers."

• 32:50Alex Cranz?

  No, they also love-

• 32:52David Pierce?

  "What's Ryan Reynolds up to? Printers."

• 32:53Alex Cranz?

  Pool cleaners.

• 32:54David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 32:55Nilay Patel?

  That's-

• 32:56Alex Cranz?

  And dandruff shampoo.

• 32:58David Pierce?

  That's, this is the stuff.

• 32:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's just very odd. It's a very odd moment on the internet. I like, fully believe, that this is not sustainable, like, in any way, shape, or form. I give it a year, before like, the Google Fried Internet turns into whatever the next thing's gonna be.

• 33:16David Pierce?

  I think that's probably right. There was a really interesting, uh, the folks at 404 Media the other day wrote about a search engine called Kagi, which is one I've used and been talking about for a while. And I just like, posted about it and was like, "Oh yeah, this is good, I've been using it for a while, this is a good story." They were talking about how much better it is than Google. And shocked at the number of people I got who were like, "I'm done with Google, I'm out, I'm over it, I've moved on, I finally switched." And I feel like, Google has had this sort of like, inevitability for so long, that I just feel starting to crack in a lot of ways. Like, I think, there is this sense that Google is not the only option anymore. And I think AI has kind of undone that in people's brains, even though AI is not actually that good at a lot of search things.

• 33:56David Pierce?

  But it does, it feels like, Google being sort of too Google to fail, feels like it's slipping.

• 34:03Alex Cranz?

  What was the most recent, like, search you went to do, and Google just totally failed you?

• 34:12David Pierce?

  I haven't used Google in a while, if I'm being honest.

• 34:14Alex Cranz?

  Okay. I still use it and I still am like, wow, it sucks every day that I don't change my behavior.

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  So it's not a straight Google search, but I actually have an answer to this question because I've been thinking about it ever since this happened.

• 34:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  I have a Google, I don't even know what they call them anymore, you know, a circle that runs Google Assistant in my bathroom. A Nest tub, whatever they call them now. Have they killed Nest yet? A Google Home?

• 34:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's one of those.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  You know, a circle.

• 34:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Nilay Patel?

  Like a fabric circle with a microphone in it.

• 34:42Alex Cranz?

  Google circle.

• 34:42Nilay Patel?

  A Google thing.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  I should know the name of this product.

• 34:47David Pierce?

  Is it the little guy? Is it the home mini?

• 34:48Nilay Patel?

  It's a Nest tub. Yeah, it's a home mini.

• 34:49David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 34:50Nilay Patel?

  Is that what it is?

• 34:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  A circle.

• 34:52David Pierce?

  The little, the little guy, like the big hockey puck.

• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  I highly recommend putting one of those in your bathroom. They're very useful in there. And I, you know, sometimes I have to play a podcast in the morning. Sometimes I just have it set a time, like all this stuff. And I asked it how long it would take to drive to the airport. And first it answered with a number of miles. And then it said, I can't. And I said, well, how many minutes will that take? And it just couldn't. And then it sent me some, some stuff on the web. And I was like, all of this AI, like all of this AI and Google Maps.

• 35:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, like you have that.

• 35:26Alex Cranz?

  You have all of the skills.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  If I just asked Google Maps this question, it would immediately deliver me that answer. And you can't. And it's like, well, we just didn't close the loop.

• 35:35Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  And that, to me, I was like, oh, I should have just tried something. Anything else would have been fine. And I, I think that that's like the Google loop closing. Hopefully they get better at it. They've had a long time. You wrote about this this week.

• 35:49David Pierce?

  We're, we're gonna get to that.

• 35:53Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, that, that's the last one that really failed for me. And I was just like, how is it possible? Like, even if, at this point, if Gemini had just lied to me.

• 36:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  And in like 45 minutes, I don't know, that's prior.

• 36:05David Pierce?

  Seems right.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sure. Right? That feels right. About 45 minutes. Yeah. Like, it would have been better than just like, I don't know.

• 36:11David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 36:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's nothing less useful than asking about how far away something is. And it's like 25 miles. It's like,

• 36:18Alex Cranz?

  Cool.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay. What does that mean to me at this point in time?

• 36:21David Pierce?

  Should I run? What's the plan here?

• 36:25Alex Cranz?

  Just hustling.

• 36:26Nilay Patel?

  What's your last one on Google, Fanny?

• 36:28Alex Cranz?

  Uh, yesterday, I was trying to decide, I asked it, should I get an impact driver if I already have a regular like power?

• 36:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's impossible. That's like too hard.

• 36:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was too hard for it. It was like, no. And I was like, what power tools should I get? And it was like, here's all the power tools for carpentry. And I was like, I didn't, I just wanted to know what power tools should like a nerd who wants more power tools get. You failed me. I got really upset.

• 36:51Nilay Patel?

  That's a really hard.

• 36:52Alex Cranz?

  Maybe, maybe I went too hard.

• 36:53Nilay Patel?

  You've opened like, that's like Pandora's box question.

• 36:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  Like, I've seen videos of people arguing that, uh, that the housing crisis caused people to switch from the standard drills to impacts. Cause all the people with experience building houses got forced out of the market and the kids didn't know what they were doing. Like, you're touching on a third rail of power tools to that question.

• 37:12Alex Cranz?

  It's.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  Like somewhere a data center exploded because you asked Google that question.

• 37:15Alex Cranz?

  I went like, I had to go like a couple of links in. Just, I was like, I need something that's not people trying to sell me power tools.

• 37:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Alex Cranz?

  And, and eventually I got like some people debating impact drivers. And they're like, yeah, if you, you got a lot of sheet rock, you got, or not sheet rock, you got a lot of drywall you gotta get up, you get that impact driver. Change your life. And I was like, well, I don't have that.

• 37:33Nilay Patel?

  Our publisher, Chris Grant, is about to run in here. If he's just generally talking about power tools, he's gonna, he's gonna go crazy.

• 37:38Alex Cranz?

  Kick the door open.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  Uh, well, I'm just saying, this is my, my prediction. A year from now, market, what day is it? April 4th? Market, a year from now, whatever Google is today will look radically different.

• 37:51Alex Cranz?

  Hey Siri.

• 37:53David Pierce?

  I, no, I agree. And I think, I think Google knows that too.

• 37:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:56David Pierce?

  Uh, I'm not sure they know what to do about it. Do you see the, I don't know if it was a rumor or a report, but there was, I just saw something go by, basically saying that Google is now considering charging for its AI stuff, which I find totally fascinating. Uh, like the, the actual AI search stuff would be a paid thing instead of a free thing. Messy and complicated, but like you get the sense, Google knows it can't be like this for much longer. And it's flailing in a bunch of directions trying to fix it. But I think, it seems like the internet is getting crazy faster than Google is getting good at doing

• 38:29Alex Cranz?

  The solution. They just need to sell some shit in Walmart. Not $200, I'll sell it in Walmart, you'll be fine.

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Some other AI stuff for letting around. Microsoft is working at Xbox AI Chatbots with a scoop from Tom Warren.

• 38:45Alex Cranz?

  It's just Clippy for Xbox.

• 38:47David Pierce?

  And he's right that it needs to be called Xbox. I just.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  It does need to be called Xbox.

• 38:50David Pierce?

  That is correct.

• 38:52Nilay Patel?

  The, we, Microsoft confirmed it. We are testing at Xbox Support Virtual Agent, an internal prototype of an animated character that can query Xbox support topics with voice or text. This is the general manager of gaming AI at Xbox. The prototype makes it easier and quicker for players to get help with support topics using national language, taking, it's like, this is great. This is cool, but like, how many people are on the daily, just like, asking Xbox support for help?

• 39:19David Pierce?

  Why did I lose it?

• 39:22David Pierce?

  No, I, I mean, customer support AI is like.

• 39:25Nilay Patel?

  It's coming.

• 39:26David Pierce?

  Done. Like, that's, that is, good or bad, that is the future of everything, right? Like, all the, the robot phone trees are gonna be replaced by chatbots, and that's just where we're headed. And that's kinda what this sounds like. I think there is possibly more Xbox could do here, but.

• 39:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it starts somewhere.

• 39:41David Pierce?

  This just sounds like it's gonna be an adorable little customer service guy.

• 39:43Alex Cranz?

  No way. I, I love this idea of it killing phone trees, though. Like, if AI kills the phone tree, oh my god.

• 39:50David Pierce?

  Oh, that's coming. I really, I really think it is.

• 39:52Alex Cranz?

  Game changed.

• 39:53David Pierce?

  It just, frankly, like, just online chat customer service over having to call and wait for a human was delightful. Now, all of that is just being replaced by AI bots who are like, yeah, helpful. And my favorite thing is the people who go on to those things, like, the people who went to the car rental company and asked it to, like, do all kinds of weird stuff. Like, this stuff is gonna get bad and crazy and weird, but that is, I think at this moment, probably the most slam dunk.

• 40:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:20David Pierce?

  Business use case for all of this. It is just going to eat the customer service industry.

• 40:24Nilay Patel?

  Right, cuz all of, I mean, working customer support is not fun. You are mostly reading scripts of people.

• 40:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:31Nilay Patel?

  Just have a robot read the script.

• 40:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  I just wanna know how they will all respond to me just mashing the zero button over and over again, which is all I do.

• 40:38David Pierce?

  Representative, human, representative.

• 40:41Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you. I feel like I never call a phone tree with a problem the phone tree is designed to solve.

• 40:47Alex Cranz?

  Never.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I don't need to check my balance. Like, I can definitely do that on my phone.

• 40:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's like, I need to do something hard.

• 40:53Alex Cranz?

  Who calls to check their balance still? Like, why are they offering that still? Because I noticed that too. I called the bank and they're like, "Do you want to check your balance?" I'm like, "No, I'm looking at the app right now that told me to call you."

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm gonna start calling to check my balance.

• 41:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Nilay Patel?

  How am I doing? Looks like I gotta talk to somebody.

• 41:12Nilay Patel?

  Samsung says Bixby is not dead, which is an incredible thing to say.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Like, because it implies that everyone thinks Bixby is dead. My t-shirt that says, "No, Bixby is not dead," is causing a lot of questions. A Samsung executive tells CNBC that the company is, quote, "Working so hard"

• 41:35Nilay Patel?

  "to put AI features in Bixby." Even though they just did a big deal with Google and Gemini is now all over the phone and the phones are running Gemini Mini, Gemini Nano. I'm not great at Google product names today. Neither is Google, don't worry about it. You know, there was a big awards banquet this week. The ASME Awards, I drank a lot at them. Just like Google stuff. Google Circle, Gemini Tiny. Yeah, you're doing great. It's fine. You're as good as anybody, including most of Google's product managers. Like, don't worry about it. So, if you will recall, when Bixby was announced, dog with shoes. If you are not caught up on Vergecast's lore, Bixby, the name, sounds like a dog wearing shoes. That's the entire joke. That's it, yeah.

• 42:19Alex Cranz?

  It's a good joke.

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you were to imagine, if you were to draw a picture of something called Bixby, you would imagine a dog wearing shoes. Was a butler, too. Yeah, like a butler, who would go, but like a, you know. Yeah, fancy dog, yeah. People have sent us pictures, cartoons. I encourage you to go ask an image generator to make a Bixby dog wearing shoes and send it to us.

• 42:38Alex Cranz?

  Long ears, short ears?

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  Long, long.

• 42:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's what I thought.

• 42:41Nilay Patel?

  This is a real floppy dog.

• 42:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's what I thought. That's what I thought.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  Bix, Bixby.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  But if you recall, the original Bixby, the idea was that it would not compete with like Google Assistant to do, go like web queries. It would change the settings on your phone.

• 42:56David Pierce?

  Right. It was designed to do stuff.

• 42:58Alex Cranz?

  Never did it.

• 42:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, never. It was not a good butler. I mean, it was a dog.

• 43:04Alex Cranz?

  Dogs aren't good butlers. Inherently suck at it.

• 43:07Nilay Patel?

  What do we think we're doing here? But now they're saying we're working so hard to make it that, which is fascinating, because they still think that is a thing that people want.

• 43:16David Pierce?

  I think it is. I think like, the idea that I can just yell at my phone to do something, like, "Go download the Ticketmaster app." Way better user experience than what it actually currently takes to go download the Ticketmaster app, but it just has never really worked. But I think we're actually at a point with a lot of this AI stuff where like, in that sort of limited scope of like, things your phone is capable of doing, have the system connect the dots for you, that can work. Like, is it easier to say, "Turn on Bluetooth and look for this weird name of headphones that I have"? Is that easier than going into the menu and hitting the thing? Like, probably not. But I think Samsung's idea that this

• 43:57David Pierce?

  is less about like, getting esoteric philosophical answers about the world and more about just like, getting the stuff done that you do on your phone, I think is right.

• 44:05Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's kind of what we talked about earlier, where it's customer support.

• 44:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it basically is.

• 44:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It's for people being like, "I don't know how to turn Bluetooth on on my phone. How do I do it?" And Bixby will appear.

• 44:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, "Bixby, my phone's in Portuguese. Fix that." Perfect.

• 44:21Alex Cranz?

  "Obrigado."

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  I was just gonna read you the quote from Wanjun Choi, Executive Vice President of Mobile at Samsung. "I believe we have to redefine the role of Bixby, so that Bixby can be equipped with generative AI to be smarter." You have to redefine Bixby's role. Not a butler anymore.

• 44:36Alex Cranz?

  Bixby has to roll. It has to have a role.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. So Bixby exists on all the Samsung's other products. You could see how they build the neural ecosystem. I don't know, man. I feel like we're all racing to shove AI into these moments. And I think the phone companies are particularly afraid of the rabbits and the Humains and the blah blah blahs. You wrote a piece about this this week. Like, the AI gadgets are coming.

• 45:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  And I think you mentioned developer conferences. I'm confident we're going to see a bunch of AI stuff in iOS at WWDC. Google, obviously, at I/O is going to talk about it a lot. I can't imagine they will, Microsoft will talk about anything else at Build.

• 45:15David Pierce?

  No. I mean, and the problem is, all of these companies, there's basically like two sides of the world at this point, right? There's the companies that have done well in smartphones, which is three companies. It's Apple, it's Google, and it's Samsung. Those companies are desperate to figure out an AI reason for your smartphone, so that you will keep using your smartphone. Because what they're afraid of is that this new generation of other companies is going to come in, and they're not going to have solved the whole problem immediately, but they're going to have fixed some part of the user experience that people are like, oh, this is the thing that gets me past my phone. And I think that's what I'm particularly looking for with what Humain is doing and what Rabbit is doing and companies like Brilliant and even Meta with the smart glasses that are getting the

• 45:56David Pierce?

  AI. Like, can they start to pull pieces of what I do on my phone out of my phone? And if the answer is yes, that starts to kind of get in the way of this, like, essentially three-company ownership of the smartphone universe, at least in the US. And so it's not at all an accident that you have Apple with Siri, Google with Gemini, and Samsung with Bixby, like, desperately trying to figure out how to make your phone AI inside of the existing structure of phones, which is very hard to do, because an AI that can do all the things I want it to do is literally not allowed in the way that phones exist right now. So it's going to be fascinating. And so Apple is either going to have to say, like, oh, Siri can now go download apps for you and do stuff inside of those apps, and it

• 46:38David Pierce?

  has weird permission that nothing has ever had before. Or it's going to, like, protect this crazy revenue stream that is the App Store at the risk of losing it all to gadgets that come up with a new way to do it. It's going to be a really fun, like, three months. Pure chaos.

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I'm telling you, a year from now.

• 46:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:55Nilay Patel?

  It's my prediction. In the, in the spring doldrums, I'm just like, a year from now. Whole new internet.

• 47:00David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 47:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, we should take a break. We should come back. We have Lightning Round Part Two. Still available to be sponsored. Call now.

• 47:07Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll be right back.

• 47:11Speaker 05

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

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Lightning round, part two.

• 47:48David Pierce?

  This one's gonna be fast.

• 47:49Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna, David pointed out, the first lightning round was almost an hour long. And we talked about four things.

• 47:55David Pierce?

  Classic lightning round.

• 47:56Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're just gonna go, we're gonna, this is my plan for this one. I'm just gonna read the headlines.

• 47:59Alex Cranz?

  Oh, okay.

• 48:00Nilay Patel?

  And then we're just gonna.

• 48:01David Pierce?

  Alex and Alex just leave.

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  Jon Stewart's back on The Daily Show. Yep, just on Mondays, I think. He had a good segment on AI, mostly being fake outs. And then he interviewed Lena Kahn and basically accused Apple of censoring his previous show on Apple.

• 48:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and this isn't the first time he's done that. That's the thing I like, that's what I wanted to talk about on the show. It was like, what's going on with Apple and Jon Stewart? Because he keeps being like, hey, Apple censored me more than once. It wouldn't let me talk about China. It wouldn't let me talk to Lena Kahn. Like, it wouldn't let me do stupid pokes at technology, what's going on over at Apple. And that's a bad sign.

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, although what did Apple think they were buying?

• 48:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like everyone around that.

• 48:46David Pierce?

  I wondered that too. Like, just don't make a deal with Jon Stewart. It's like, it's fine. If that's, if that's how you feel, just don't have Jon Stewart. Like, I don't know.

• 48:56Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's what they eventually decided.

• 48:57David Pierce?

  Well, right.

• 48:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:58David Pierce?

  But I think about like, there, there was a thing Ryan Johnson said a few years ago about how one of the sneaky things about Apple is they'll never let the bad guy have an iPhone in a movie. You guys heard, you've heard this.

• 49:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:08David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I, I think about that all the time as just sort of like a silly quirk of Apple, right? And there's a lot of things going on with how distribution works. And there's like now Tom Cruise can never be fighting an enemy with a name because it gets associated with a country and the movie doesn't play in that country. So like, you can move around inside of this landscape in all kinds of weird ways. This one is just like. It just seems like it was a bad fit from the beginning. And I also, I don't know Jon Stewart personally, but I get the distinct sense that if you make Jon Stewart a list of things he can't do, he's gonna then attempt to go do every single one of them.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:41David Pierce?

  And so I feel like it's almost a miracle that lasted this long with Apple. But it was very funny to hear him say to Lina Khan, "I wanted to have you on my show," and Apple said.

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  By the way, Lina Khan is the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

• 49:55David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  She leads a lot of antitrust efforts. Federal Trade Commission not the entity suing Apple for antitrust violations. That's the DOJ. But she's the face of a lot of it.

• 50:05David Pierce?

  She has a lot of feelings about antitrust in general.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:08David Pierce?

  Lot of, lot of things.

• 50:08Nilay Patel?

  And the tech companies all hate her. It's like a real thing.

• 50:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:11Nilay Patel?

  But it's like weird. Like, I, I come back to this all the time, same as you, Alex, which is like, these tech companies, they want, they want to do media, and then they get one slice of what it's actually like to do media, which is just having to be okay with things, and they're like, "No, thank you."

• 50:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. But I mean, they're, they're, we're seeing they're, they're increasing their control in Hollywood. Like, like, Apple is doing pretty well. Apple TV was the second most searched thing during the outage yesterday. Like, like, they, they have this power, and, and is always, I think, very uncomfortable for me to see any media organization, which Apple now is, saying, "No, you can't cover something." And, and that's been the way it's been always, right? There's always been censors at, at these companies saying, "No, you can't talk about this. No, you can't talk about that." And it felt like in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years, those censors, their power had really started to wane because we had these different ways of getting this content to people. It wasn't just broadcast television. It was also, it was the films, but it was also streaming. It was also cable, all these other ways.

• 51:12Alex Cranz?

  And Apple came in and was like, "Yeah, network censorship, huh? That's it. It's cool." And, and just brought it immediately back. And it makes sense, sure, but the last time they were doing it so that they didn't get sued by the FCC, that's why we had network censors for so long. This time, they're doing it because Apple doesn't want to upset people in China because it wants to sell phones in China. And like, the motivation is very, very different. And I think that's what makes me the most uncomfortable here.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:42Alex Cranz?

  Is that like, we're seeing a very large company exert its influence directly on the things it owns, and then saying like, "We're doing it for very greedy capitalism reasons." Which is like, fine, that's your job. Your job is to make money. But also... If your job is to make money and your job is to create media.

• 52:03David Pierce?

  But also, if you don't want someone talking about AI in China. Don't hire Jon Stewart. Right, that's kind of where I'm at. Like, this is the part about this I find so confusing is like, there was the thing with Disney forever, right, where Disney was reluctant to do something like add Hulu to Disney Plus, because this sort of family-friendly nature of a platform they called Disney was very important to that company. And that has, I think, changed internally over time, but like, that's a stance you can hold.

• 52:31Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 52:31David Pierce?

  If that's how you want to feel, terrific. Don't hire Jon Stewart. And so, and so to me, it's like, the, the thing that I find strange is not that Apple has these feelings, but that it really loudly wants to pretend it doesn't have these feelings. And then goes around just sort of quietly trying to steer everyone in the direction that Apple would like. Which is honestly Apple's whole MO with everything, all the time. It's like, Apple, Apple prefers to be sort of the wizard behind the curtain, exerting influence without saying or doing anything publicly.

• 53:02Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  This is the closest Apple has gotten to like news programming, though. Like, I'm fine. If Apple wants to make, if Apple wants to be a movie studio and it only makes heartwarming movies about uplifting.

• 53:11Alex Cranz?

  That's fine, yeah.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  Great, you're a great movie studio.

• 53:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, nobody's mad at the Hallmark Channel for not doing like hard-hitting news.

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  I'm furious at the Hallmark Channel every single day, sir. But like, hiring Jon Stewart is like, we're gonna do news, we're gonna be topical, we're gonna be relevant. And you just see most other big tech companies, they tried it, and they're all running away from it as fast as like Instagram threads. We don't want to do news. They're like, this is messy, it's hard, it gets us in lots of trouble. It's not even what people want. Instagram threads, the algorithm is only gonna show you content about how to be a trad wife, so people can do engagement bait. And it's like, what's happening here all day long? Right? And like, I think Apple hasn't quite had that realization yet.

• 53:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think that's true. But I think there's also just the, the concern that if these are also the companies that... Are the primary owners of how we view media and they all don't want to do news and they don't want to like talk about serious issues all the time. Well, that's bad, too.

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, take a look around the media industry. Let's see how well this is going for everybody. Okay, that's that one. Speaking of Apple antitrust, two things. One, the first European alternative app stores have hit because of the DMA. Not the good one yet, which is Alt Store, which is going to have the emulators in it. But like an enterprise one has hit, which is perfect.

• 54:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  Of course, enterprise software is the first to go.

• 54:26David Pierce?

  Yeah. Would you like to jump through a bunch of hoops to download B2B apps? If we got a store for you.

• 54:31Nilay Patel?

  But Kalen Booth, who's in Europe, we hired them to like look at this stuff. We have a good, deep look at it. There are a lot of hoops.

• 54:43David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:43Nilay Patel?

  A lot of hoops.

• 54:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, let me, let me just read this sentence to you. It made me laugh very funny. It goes like this. You begin by clicking a browser-based link to load the alternative store. From there, you receive a pop-up informing you that your installation settings don't allow marketplaces from that developer. Then you head into Settings, enable the marketplace, return to your browser, click the download link again, and receive another prompt asking you to confirm the install. Finally, you can open the store and browse the available apps.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  Perfect.

• 55:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:09David Pierce?

  I feel like I'd screw that up by accident.

• 55:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So the argument is Apple doesn't know if its things are in compliance with the DMA until they release them and the European regulators tell them, which is weird, right? Like, if you're gonna be a regulator and you're gonna insist that things are designed that way, you should just say how you want them designed instead of this weird back-and-forth. But I suspect all of this will change. Because the way it's designed is they released it and then the European regulators are gonna be like, "Maha."

• 55:39David Pierce?

  As they do, yeah.

• 55:40Nilay Patel?

  And they're gonna say this isn't good enough.

• 55:41David Pierce?

  I think that's probably right. I also, I'm not terribly bothered by making people jump through several hoops to do this, honestly. Like, I think the, the thing on the Mac where if you try to download an app from a sort of non-trusted source, being like the App Store, it makes you open Settings, find a thing, check that box, and then go do it again. I think that is like the correct number of hoops to jump through. Like, this is the sort of thing you should not be able to do by accident. But if you want to do it, you should be able to do it.

• 56:11Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I disagree.

• 56:12David Pierce?

  You should just know, you should have to know that you're doing it.

• 56:13Alex Cranz?

  I want to be able to absolutely destroy my phone on accident. I like, that's how I learned how to compute and I wanna, I wanna maintain that. And I think like, kids today, it's, you know?

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  Kids today!

• 56:25Alex Cranz?

  The kids today, they gotta learn too. Everybody's gotta learn how to like, just destroy all of their technology. Cause they clicked one wrong box somewhere. And it, it makes you, it makes you sharper, it makes you think more. And we, we gotta, we gotta make people sharper and think more.

• 56:39Nilay Patel?

  This is how we bring down a number of Iranian centrifuges.

• 56:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:43Nilay Patel?

  Just let the worms proliferate.

• 56:45Alex Cranz?

  Yup.

• 56:45David Pierce?

  Malware, build character.

• 56:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it does.

• 56:49Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever brought down an entire computer lab trying to download one MP3? Alright, now you're a real man. Um, I, I think there's a balance in there. Cause Android has had this model for a long time. Where you can like, jump through some hoops. And the argument is like, I mean, we've seen it in the Epic anti-trust case against Google. Like, Google knew the people weren't doing it because the hoops were there.

• 57:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  But then you kinda don't want a bunch of people accidentally screwing things up. The thing that's really interesting though, is Alt Store has Delta in it, which is a Nintendo emulator. By all accounts, a great emulator. Apple won't allow that on its stores. But now you're like, oh, there's an entire use case for the iPhone that's available to me now. Cause there's an alternative application distribution model. That's worth it.

• 57:31David Pierce?

  Oh, agreed.

• 57:32Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent.

• 57:33David Pierce?

  Agreed. And I think it, it is, it's kinda great that that is the first thing. Because like, leaving aside all the legality questions about emulation in general, like whatever. Playing those kinds of games on your phone is so fun. It's so fun! And, and you're right that it has not been allowed and it's never going to be allowed. And there was a minute where Riley tested the developer, thought he was gonna get into the App Store proper. And then got that sort of ripped out from under him. This is a couple of years ago now.

• 58:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:02David Pierce?

  But now we're at a point where like, if you wanna go through the hoops, you are going to be able to get your phone to do almost anything. And I think that is the right approach. I think it should be hard work to do. The dumb stuff you want to do on your phone like I think it should be more than one click of one link to download malware on your phone. But damn it, if you want to download malware on your phone. You should be allowed. You should be allowed. And I think that's fine. And I think it is going to be interesting to see from a regulatory perspective, how they view the hoops. Because I think if if the goal of the EU and the regulators in general is to make it so sort of like opaque in the process that it feels like you're downloading an app from the App Store even when you're not, I actually think that's a bad outcome.

• 58:47David Pierce?

  But I also feel like the thing where you have to go essentially check the one box that declares the like, I know what I'm doing and I'm willing to put up the consequences. And then you can move on with your life feels right to me. And this feels like a little overshoot of that.

• 59:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see how it goes. I'm very excited. I mean, this is the experiment. We've never run it before. Like, we'll see how it goes. I think there's something really exciting to happen here.

• 59:09David Pierce?

  I agree.

• 59:10Nilay Patel?

  David, you've added this extremely fake story about Steven Mnuchin buying TikTok without the algorithm. Defend yourself. Defend the addition of this. This is a totally fake story.

• 59:19David Pierce?

  It's a totally fake story. Well, this is why I added it because so we got a ton of feedback over the last couple of weeks about both the Apple antitrust stuff and the TikTok ban. And we're going to talk about all that stuff on Tuesday's episode. But for this one, my real question is more theoretical than this. Like, Steven Mnuchin is not going to buy TikTok. Buying TikTok with the other without the algorithm is not a thing.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  He's a former Treasury Secretary under Trump.

• 59:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, who is not going to buy TikTok. Doesn't matter who he is, he's not going to buy TikTok. And I think I'm just fascinated by this question. So there are two pieces of news here that I think are related. So one is that Facebook this week rolled out a unified video player for all of its video across platforms. And it's basically all in on precisely TikTok style vertical video. And that plus this thing where it's like, OK, what do you buy if you buy TikTok without the algorithm? Just led me to believe like, maybe maybe the answer is nothing like. Buying TikTok without the algorithm, is that anything? But then we're at a point where TikTok has actually gotten more and more transparent about what the algorithm is.

• 1:00:25David Pierce?

  And so in theory, you could start to do better and companies like Meta have been more explicit about like, "We're not going to, you know, show you stuff from your friends. We're not going to buy us anything except engagement and entertainment, essentially." So it's like you can actually start to kind of reverse engineer TikTok. And without this magical algorithm that is so much of what TikTok has become, you're just buying a brand name, right? Like you're buying, you're buying a license to the word TikTok and that's well and good. But TikTok without the algorithm feels like it, to me, it's worth like $5.

• 1:00:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57David Pierce?

  I don't know. I just don't see it. And I think that if that's going to become the question, and I think so far, our theory, which is that this is going to lead to nothing, has pretty much borne out. We've basically heard nothing about this since there was all that stuff a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:01:12Alex Cranz?

  I hope he doesn't. I hope like right now, as we're recording.

• 1:01:15David Pierce?

  Oh my God.

• 1:01:16Nilay Patel?

  When I think about the voice of the youth, I think of former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Well, you get all the content. He'd buy all the content. And then you just put any algorithm on top of it and you're fine.

• 1:01:26David Pierce?

  Sure?

• 1:01:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, that's what you'd, that's what you'd be buying. You'd be buying all the user-generated content that is TikTok.

• 1:01:34David Pierce?

  I guess that's true.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's.

• 1:01:36David Pierce?

  But also all of that content now exists on all the other platforms.

• 1:01:38Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 1:01:39David Pierce?

  So that's kind of where I'm at, right? Like if I'm, if I'm the Instagram team, I'm, I'm having meetings where it's like, what does TikTok have and offer at this moment that we can't? And like the YouTube Shorts team I know is asking that same kind of question. Like, it's all just sitting there and especially if you don't have the algorithm. And the algorithm has been made out to be this like magical thing that is irreplicable and perfect and understands people better than they do themselves. I don't know that it's that. I think part of it is just that like TikTok is so shameless about the way that it works. And like Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram is like wringing his hands, trying to be a good person. And TikTok is just like, TikTok shop, let's go.

• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  TikTok is doing things. It's just happened for you. I think they're testing this. It's definitely happening to me where they just start playing an ad at the end of every video now.

• 1:02:26David Pierce?

  Oh no, I have not gotten that.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  So you're like, instead of looping, it's just like, here's an ad. And all of those ads for me are for the Land Rover Defender, which is utterly confusing. Like, that algorithm believes that it can get me to buy a Land Rover Defender. And all the ads start with the same sweeping shot of the word Defender. So it's like, I never know if it's just like some weird IT security company. No, it's Land Rover Defender.

• 1:02:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there it is.

• 1:02:52Nilay Patel?

  There it is again. Definitely not buying a Land Rover Defender. It's pretty good, though. Yeah, it's just like, but they've started doing it like they're, the platform is getting, they're squeezing more pennies out of it, right? Because it might go away or something might happen.

• 1:03:03Alex Cranz?

  I feel like the, the algorithm's also just getting worse. Like, it keeps showing me this guy going, "What's up, brother?"

• 1:03:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's got.

• 1:03:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I, I'm not a sports person. I don't play Madden. You guys immediately were like, "Yeah, yeah, we of course, maybe that's why." Yeah, I know that now because TikTok's shown me that repeatedly.

• 1:03:25Nilay Patel?

  The fact that TikTok just made a weird Twitch streamer a star is like very interesting.

• 1:03:29Alex Cranz?

  Super weird.

• 1:03:29Nilay Patel?

  All right, mark this down where that's a story. We'll come back to this in a week or so. But the story's totally fake. This dude is not buying TikTok.

• 1:03:35Alex Cranz?

  No, no.

• 1:03:36Nilay Patel?

  Uh, last two little regulatory ones. Uh, I think it's very funny that the House of Representatives has now banned staffers from using Microsoft Copilot because they're putting too much data into an insecure LLM system. Very funny. Yep. Just deeply funny. Um, and then we'll come back to this in more detail. But the FCC has scheduled a vote to restore net neutrality, which is very interesting. It feels like we've already ruined enough things. You know, it's like, it's like hard for anyone to get excited about this. It's like, we did it. Like, because they took net neutrality away, I, I just wanna, there are people out there who are like, nothing bad happened when net neutrality went away.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  And one very specific bad thing happened, which is that AT&T bought Time Warner.

• 1:04:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, very specific bad thing happened. And they thought they could prioritize Time Warner services on AT&T's network. And then they paid Zack Snyder to make a 4-3 grayscale version of the Justice League.

• 1:04:39David Pierce?

  Alex, did Batgirl die because net neutrality died?

• 1:04:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42David Pierce?

  Could you draw, I feel like you could draw that line.

• 1:04:44Alex Cranz?

  I think, I think you can.

• 1:04:45David Pierce?

  Cause without that acquisition, they don't have all the debt when they get offloaded, which means Zaslov doesn't have to kill Batgirl.

• 1:04:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52David Pierce?

  Thanks to Jeep Pie, you ruined Batgirl.

• 1:04:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, this man and his stupid mug, his stupid oversized Reese's Pieces mug. And everyone's like, no bad things happened. And it's like, actually, one very tangible bad thing happened. It was AT&T had a theory of the case. It was like, we will buy a content service, prioritize it, and preload tiny little clips of Game of Thrones on mid-range Android phones. And accept all of that from our data caps. This was, this was it. And then we're gonna get Zack Snyder for some godforsaken rea- I know he thought it was the IMAX aspect ratio, okay? I know that's what he was thinking.

• 1:05:29Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:30Nilay Patel?

  But the reality is, he made a 4-3 version of Justice League. That's how I watched it on my TV. It was a square. Why?

• 1:05:39Alex Cranz?

  The more you say it, the more I feel like, what if net neutra- like, like, actually, that was a good thing, that, that AT&T was allowed to-

• 1:05:46Nilay Patel?

  We got a 4-3 Justice League.

• 1:05:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because it proved that, like, no one wants that.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  It does prove, I will, I agree with you. I actually agree. The market firmly rejected AT&T's ideas. It was like, no, this is stupid. But we didn't need to go through all that pain. We didn't need to fire all those people. We, like, the layoffs that occurred, the, the, the, the general pain-

• 1:06:10Alex Cranz?

  Thousands of people affected.

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  Lobbed upon the American populace.

• 1:06:14Alex Cranz?

  With black and white Zack Snyder-

• 1:06:16Nilay Patel?

  The 4-3 Justice League was created. Like, we didn't have to, again, I'm saying, like, I think the layoffs were worse. Like, the millions of, the millions of dollars of, like, debt and weirdness and-

• 1:06:27Alex Cranz?

  But we all experienced Zack Snyder movie.

• 1:06:30Nilay Patel?

  Rounds of rolling layoffs are bad. I don't think we need to do them. We should have healthy companies in a functional marketplace. But then also, there was a 4-3 Justice League.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  Also, very tangible.

• 1:06:42Alex Cranz?

  We had to watch it.

• 1:06:43Nilay Patel?

  Results. I watched all like 15 hours of it.

• 1:06:46Alex Cranz?

  You had to do it as a journalist.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  And the only thing that saved me is because I invest in OLED technology. Oh, my God. The pillar boxes weren't shining great. It was so bad. How was your bitrate? Horrible. HDMX is a garbage bitrate. Get that shit on Bravia Court ASAP. And excuse that from your data caps, AT&T.

• 1:07:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, whenever anyone tells you, whenever you see the weirdos on the X being like, net neutrality led to nothing. Immediately reply with a screenshot of 4.3 Justice League in Greyskull.

• 1:07:22Alex Cranz?

  I feel like the Venn diagram of weirdos on X saying net neutrality led to nothing. And the people who really wanted that 4.3 movie is a circle.

• 1:07:37Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, they couldn't even, they weren't even like, just fill, make it 16, like, just do it. IMAX Enhanced, right? Huh?

• 1:07:45Alex Cranz?

  Because we all have those in our house. You don't have an IMAX screen in your house? All that OLED?

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  I do like that IMAX Enhanced is basically meant, we took a 21.9 cinema frame and made it 16 by 9. It's just regular now. It's just regular. Like Disney Plus is like, IMAX Enhanced, like, what does that mean? It's 16 by 9.

• 1:08:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  That's like, that's what that has worked out to. It's great. All right. That vote is coming up. We'll probably have Lauren back to cover in more detail what it actually means. There's some meaningful differences between this version and previous versions. I just want to point out that, again, you live in an America, right now, 2024, where Baccarat was killed, David Zaslove.

• 1:08:26Alex Cranz?

  Can't believe it.

• 1:08:27Nilay Patel?

  Reign of terror continues. We're down to three wireless carriers and Project Gen 5 sis.

• 1:08:34Nilay Patel?

  All because of the stupid mug. It's a real thing. And there's no, um, by the way, at the same time, the same Ajit Pai FCC got rid of the privacy protections for broadband carriers and any ability to regulate them all. These are our favorite companies, the ISPs. I should note at this time that NBC Universal is a minority investor in Vox Media, which owns The Verge, and NBC Universal is on like Comcast, which does not love net neutrality, or me, as it happens.

• 1:09:03Alex Cranz?

  I subscribe to Verizon. It's okay.

• 1:09:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have iFiOS. It's nice.

• 1:09:09Alex Cranz?

  It's okay.

• 1:09:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm an AT&T subscriber. I stream Justice League for free.

• 1:09:12Alex Cranz?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:09:13Nilay Patel?

  That was, that didn't hit my data cap at all. Congratulations.

• 1:09:16David Pierce?

  That's big for you.

• 1:09:17Nilay Patel?

  Uh, my AT&T subscription still locked into Max, and so now I only have Max and 1080P. It's very good. All right, we gotta take a break. We'll be back.

• 1:10:02Nilay Patel?

  We're back with what David has titled the Everything Else Lightning Round.

• 1:10:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a kind of grab baggie.

• 1:10:07Nilay Patel?

  Sponsored by Everything Else.

• 1:10:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, sponsored by Walmart.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  Did you get a free blue check from X this week?

• 1:10:15David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:10:15Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:10:16David Pierce?

  Sad.

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  I hesitate to talk about Elon on the show.

• 1:10:19Alex Cranz?

  Did you get a?

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. The, me, the guy who wrote, "Welcome to hell, Elon," has now been gifted a blue check.

• 1:10:27David Pierce?

  Congratulations, you're an influencer.

• 1:10:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what that means.

• 1:10:30Alex Cranz?

  It's all working because now you're talking about it. See, he got you.

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33David Pierce?

  And you're gonna use Grok now.

• 1:10:34Nilay Patel?

  Can't wait to buy a Tesla. He's had a bad couple of weeks here.

• 1:10:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Nilay Patel?

  Right? So Tesla's deliveries are way down under forecast. I've, I've never seen it before, but various investors and executives are talking about replacing Elon as CEO. That will probably never happen, but even the fact that it is a conversation that has occurred. Like in the CNBC orbits.

• 1:10:59Alex Cranz?

  The shine is off.

• 1:11:00Nilay Patel?

  Seems very bad. Tesla's stock is generally tanking.

• 1:11:03David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:11:03Nilay Patel?

  Elon is tweeting about the woke mind virus instead of shipping more cars or making X good. It's not great over there.

• 1:11:10Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:11:12David Pierce?

  No, I think there was a thing about Tesla that made him kind of invincible for a really long time because it was like the, the conversation around Elon for so long was like, say whatever you want, people are voting with their dollars, right? Like Tesla was on fire. Investors loved it. People were buying it. We talked on this show about how there was essentially unlimited demand for Teslas and at some point in the last year or so, that turned. And I think you can probably blame that on a confluence of things. Not all of it is, a lot of people decided they don't like Elon Musk anymore, but I think I, some of it is that. But like

• 1:11:49David Pierce?

  this sort of era of power that Tesla had for a long time seems pretty clearly to be, if not over, then under like really serious threat. And as we've been saying, and I think as you in particular, Neil, I have said a few times on this show, Tesla is both like a great strength and a great weakness for Elon because of the way it ties him to China, because of the way it like has all of his fortunes inside of it. That like what happens to this company is so materially important to what happens to everything else that Elon Musk wants to do, including the way that SpaceX works with the government. Like it's all so tied up. And so you get the sense that as it is starting to turn the other

• 1:12:32David Pierce?

  way, it like the spiral happens in the reverse direction too.

• 1:12:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37David Pierce?

  And it feels like it's getting really ugly, really fast.

• 1:12:39Nilay Patel?

  So we have a story this week. Uh, there's a reputation tracking firm called Caliber. Went and surveyed a bunch of people. Uh, the consideration score for Tesla, which is basically consumer interest in brands. The question they went and surveyed people, I would buy or continue buying products and services from Tesla if given the chance. Uh, in November 2021, 70% of people said yes. That's down to 31%. Whoa.

• 1:13:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that, everything about that, because we've, we've seen the quality has dropped. We've seen people talking more about that quality. We've seen people struggling with getting their cars repaired, getting, getting this like customer service is really, really bad there. So.

• 1:13:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Alex Cranz?

  All those things that actually do matter to a consumer experience and, and Elon kind of was like, don't worry about it. We're, we're building the future. Eventually people are like, yes, but I want my car to work now.

• 1:13:28David Pierce?

  Right. I also think this ongoing full self-driving fiasco that this company just cannot get out of, where it refuses to stop calling.

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:36David Pierce?

  Full self-driving when it is not full self-driving and actually what it's doing is really dangerous. Like, the, the public perception on that, I think is like decidedly negative at this point.

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46David Pierce?

  Uh, which is really ugly, like even outside of how you feel about Elon Musk, the idea that Tesla is like the future of cars in a lot of ways like hinges on that.

• 1:13:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, their entire valuation hinges on that.

• 1:13:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:13:57Nilay Patel?

  Like I've watched, uh, I mean, I go on CNBC all the time. I talk to the analysts there. You, you look at how the market values Tesla and it's still built into the idea that you will go to work and your car will like leave your house and like drive itself and be a taxi service.

• 1:14:13David Pierce?

  That Tesla is going to be like infrastructure.

• 1:14:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Nilay Patel?

  Right. And like, no, it's a car company.

• 1:14:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's the, but all of the multiple of Tesla is built on the idea that the cars will generate more value than just being a depreciating asset that most people should lease.

• 1:14:29Alex Cranz?

  So did they all think it was Uber?

• 1:14:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's like, that's the idea here. Like the multiple, and that's why Elon is constantly talking about AI now.

• 1:14:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:38Nilay Patel?

  All this stuff and he's like, AI, like Tesla's really an AI company. Cause he's trying to get this other thing to happen and get this other multiple. And it's like, the market is starting to just see a car company, a car company that shipped a triangle instead of a pickup truck. Um, a car company that can't deliver like well-made cars on regular, like all this stuff. And who CEO is becoming more and more unpopular by the day because he won't shut up.

• 1:15:05Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:15:06Nilay Patel?

  We, like I talked to a lot of CEOs. They're not all pleasant people. Like, by and large, like, very aggressive type A personalities in the C suites of American companies. But they know to not...

• 1:15:20Alex Cranz?

  They have people around them. They hire publicity firms and stuff, which Elon famously refuses to do.

• 1:15:27David Pierce?

  And, like, "Don't tweet" turns out to be pretty good advice.

• 1:15:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30David Pierce?

  Most of the time.

• 1:15:30Nilay Patel?

  Especially about the woke mind virus and the great replacement theory.

• 1:15:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, if you're a publicly traded company, don't tweet.

• 1:15:37Nilay Patel?

  If you're a publicly traded company that sells electric cars to extremely liberal people, by and large, just doing some white supremacy on the side, it's not a great idea for you.

• 1:15:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, not great for your value.

• 1:15:48Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, it's just a weird time, like, to bring this all back around, X now giving the checkmarks away to journalists for free, very funny.

• 1:15:57David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:15:57Nilay Patel?

  Like, all the way back around, they're like, "What if we verified some..." It's because they need people to use the platform, and I suspect it won't work, but...

• 1:16:08David Pierce?

  No, if anything, it seems to be, like, do you remember that moment right after they said, "You're gonna have to start paying for the blue check," but they hadn't taken it away from people who had it before? And all these people were coming out saying, "No, no, no, just so you know, I didn't pay for it."

• 1:16:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's happening.

• 1:16:24David Pierce?

  "We're doing that again," where people are, like, embarrassed to have a blue check.

• 1:16:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but...

• 1:16:28David Pierce?

  In a way that it is like, it's a badge of, like, "You are pathetically still using this platform," rather than something you're actually part of.

• 1:16:36Alex Cranz?

  I was gonna say, it kinda works, because then you have to go log in and tweet, or excuse me, post, "I didn't pay for this checkmark."

• 1:16:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Alex Cranz?

  Like, "They gotcha."

• 1:16:47David Pierce?

  And your unregretted user minutes go through the roof.

• 1:16:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's enough Elon talk for one day.

• 1:16:53Nilay Patel?

  Spotify reportedly having a price increase. They've realized, they increased, look, they increased prices last year, had their best year ever. They also laid off punch people, had cuts, so the increased revenue reduced costs heartlessly, but do it.

• 1:17:07Alex Cranz?

  That does, in fact, work.

• 1:17:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, usually maths out. There's not a lot of places to go from Spotify. Like, I don't think people are like, "Oh, Spotify's going up, I'm switching to YouTube Music."

• 1:17:19David Pierce?

  No, people should not and are not doing that. I mean, I think, to me, the thing that seems to be true is that 9.99 was the wrong price for streaming music. We just kind of decided this, like, years ago. It was just like, in the same way that Steve Jobs was just like, "What if songs cost 99 cents?" And everybody was like, "All right." Like, a long time ago, it was just like, 10 bucks a month, and this is where we are. And it turns out that is good money for record labels. And bad both for most artists and most streaming companies.

• 1:17:53Alex Cranz?

  Well, I mean, Spotify did it because that was when they were, they were coming into the United States, where you had this really entrenched market run by Apple. And they were like, "Okay, we gotta compete with 99 cent songs. How do we do that? 10 dollars a month and you get all of the songs." And we are all like, "Yes, that's sick."

• 1:18:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think if it had been 20 bucks a month, it probably wouldn't have worked. But if it had been 20 bucks a month, it might have been a hell of a lot more sustainable.

• 1:18:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, I would say the last 10-plus years of like, 10 dollars a month, that's, that's a pretty good run, for, that's a better run than like Netflix.

• 1:18:27David Pierce?

  Oh, for sure, yeah. No, I actually think we as users probably saved a lot of money over the last decade on Spotify's dime. But I think, this feels super inevitable to me, and this will not be the last one, I don't think. That, like, it went from 9.99 to 10.99, and now, the report is it's gonna go up, I think, to either one or two more dollars, right? I would not be surprised if, a couple of years from now, we're at like, 15 bucks for Spotify.

• 1:18:54Alex Cranz?

  What?

• 1:18:55David Pierce?

  I'll still pay it. Like, music services are awesome. I have, I have zero qualms with the fact that I have all the music on Earth available to me at all times. But, it is, it is a bummer to see this. I'm more sensitive to this for Spotify, because like, it's a bad business for Spotify. It's not Spotify being like, "We make lots of money, but we want more, give us more." This is Spotify being like, "We literally cannot do this anymore. Please give us more money."

• 1:19:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:23Speaker 04

  How do y'all feel like Apple will respond to this?

• 1:19:28Nilay Patel?

  I don't think Apple will raise their prices at all, actually. I think that any price increases get rolled into Apple One. And that's just what they're gonna keep doing. I think Apple Music, they run as a loss leader to get you into that bigger bundle.

• 1:19:39Alex Cranz?

  I don't even pay for it. I get it through my Verizon account, and I'm like, alright.

• 1:19:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think Apple is very happy to let that be somewhere between an okay business and a slightly less than okay business in service of everything else.

• 1:19:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they want you in that Apple One bundle, as hard as they can be. When all their services went down, it was like people searched for the App Store being down, and a little bit of Apple TV, and nothing else.

• 1:20:06Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it was so sad. We were looking at the thing we put in, like, we're like, what about Arcade?

• 1:20:10Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:20:11Alex Cranz?

  We couldn't even, like, find the line on the graph. We're like, oh, that's a bummer.

• 1:20:16David Pierce?

  Which is funny, because Apple Music is hugely popular. Like, it is, it is, Apple Music and Spotify are the two winners in this market by a gigantic margin.

• 1:20:23Alex Cranz?

  It's not the one people go Googling when they can't get it on their rush hour.

• 1:20:27David Pierce?

  Definitely not.

• 1:20:28Nilay Patel?

  Alright, two stories that are in conflict in really interesting ways. OpenAI has a new voice cloning model. It only needs 15 seconds of audio to clone your voice. Fascinating. And there was a fake George Carlin special. They settled with the estate of George Carlin. They promised not to do it anymore. Actually, a weird drama inside of that story is whether there was actually AI used to make the fake George Carlin special, or whether they were faking it, which is interesting.

• 1:20:56David Pierce?

  Well, they admitted to writing it themselves.

• 1:20:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00David Pierce?

  How the rest of it was produced, I think, as far as I know at least, has not been really nailed down. But the idea that this was, like, written, produced, and created by AI, just flatly not true. And it's been a really fun thing going around. Like, there was this whole story this week about how Amazon's Just Walk Out technology was actually powered by, like, a thousand contractors in India manually reviewing your trip through to make sure that you paid for everything. And I think it was Molly White who runs the website, like, I think it's, what is it, Web3 is going great?

• 1:21:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:33David Pierce?

  Who was basically like, I wish I had been tracking all the times that AI turned out should just be a guy. It's really true, and this feels like that, too. It's just, it's just a guy.

• 1:21:43Alex Cranz?

  It doesn't help that one of them is like from Mad TV. Like one of the hosts.

• 1:21:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but these two ideas are intention. We've talked about this so many times, like AI being able to clone a voice or clone a picture, da, da, da, da, da. And then you have, and doing it faster than ever, 15 seconds of our voices to clone us.

• 1:21:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Nilay Patel?

  Which we have generated more of that on this very, very podcast.

• 1:22:02Alex Cranz?

  You're welcome.

• 1:22:04Nilay Patel?

  And then it's like, oh, but we have no controls over how those licenses are used, or any of that is actually being done. Except for these handful of lawsuits that might bring the whole thing crashing down.

• 1:22:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, and OpenAI's strategy has been so far to roll it out really slowly and only with a few partners. And it's like, okay, that's fine at the beginning, but then what's going to happen is you're going to have a better version of this technology that you give to everybody. So like, what's the plan then?

• 1:22:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29David Pierce?

  It's like, if they were saying, you know, it takes 900 hours, so we're only letting a few people use it because it's hugely intensive. I'd be like, okay, well, whatever. But this is like, we found a very good technology, but only a few people can have it. And then everybody can have a very good technology. What are we accomplishing here?

• 1:22:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46David Pierce?

  But I think, I mean, this is, this has been coming, right? Like the, the New York Times, I think it was this week, had a big announcement about how most of its articles are now going to be available in audio form read by automated narrators. Like 11 Labs, which is a company we've talked about on this show before, is doing like incredible slash terrifying work synthesizing people's voices. Like this stuff is moving as fast as any other tech in AI right now. And it's getting really crazy, really fast. And I feel like probably should be talked about more than it is.

• 1:23:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:21David Pierce?

  In the way that we talk about like generated images and how they're being used in political campaigns and all this stuff. Like you're going to start, you're going to get phone calls from Joe Biden telling you not to vote. Like, that's a thing that's going to start to happen.

• 1:23:32Nilay Patel?

  It's already happened.

• 1:23:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like, it happened.

• 1:23:34David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I think like this, OpenAI is typically very good at this. And I think is not usually wrong when it says it built something good, but is not great at. Playing it slow.

• 1:23:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. By the way, one story that hit, just as we were, as we've been talking on this podcast, Neil Mohan, who runs YouTube, at a conference, said OpenAI should not train its systems on YouTube, which is not how OpenAI has thought about the internet.

• 1:24:02David Pierce?

  No. And who was it? It was, was it Mira Murati?

• 1:24:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06David Pierce?

  At OpenAI, who said to Joanna Stern, our friend, Joanna was, when they were talking about the video thing, Sora, that OpenAI came out with, Joanna was like, are you training this on stuff from the internet? And she was like, ah, some training stuff, internet, public, private. And Joanna was like, are you getting it from YouTube? And she was just like, I don't know. So I was like, oh, okay. So you're obviously getting it from YouTube.

• 1:24:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:27David Pierce?

  Cool.

• 1:24:28Nilay Patel?

  Not great.

• 1:24:28David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:24:29Nilay Patel?

  If Google sues OpenAI on behalf of YouTube creators for training, it's weird. There's a copyright apocalypse. We did an entire decoder with Sarah John. You can go listen to it. But there's a potential copyright apocalypse.

• 1:24:40David Pierce?

  Mr. Beast is gonna make a video in which he sues OpenAI for a hundred million dollars.

• 1:24:45Nilay Patel?

  And then gives the money away.

• 1:24:48Nilay Patel?

  That would be incredible. All right. We gotta end this thing. We're way, way over. But David, you should end by talking about Google Podcasts.

• 1:24:55David Pierce?

  Well, this is, this is a good, we're circling back around to, we're closing the loop on Google not closing the loop. Google could stand to learn from us. So Google Podcasts is dead, although it's actually not dead. It's like ironically, Google has so forgotten about Google Podcasts that it seems to have forgotten to turn it off.

• 1:25:12Alex Cranz?

  Was that, it was that, that was its like podcast app?

• 1:25:15David Pierce?

  Yeah. So it had a dedicated podcast app. It came out in 2016. Been around for a while. It did what Google does to many of its apps, which is like it launched, it had big ideas. It seemed kind of cool. It got a couple of updates. Google forgot about it. Google launched a competitor and then Google killed it.

• 1:25:33David Pierce?

  This is the story of Google Apps. And so the, the plan here is to replace Google Podcasts with YouTube Music. And they've been making some moves into YouTube Music. There is a, I would say, strong chance you are watching or listening to this podcast right now on YouTube. Part of the reason Google is investing in YouTube is because that is a vast and massively growing place for podcasts. But it had this really cool opportunity in podcasts, right? Like Google, I went back and read their initial thing. And in 2016, when they launched this app, and they had these big ideas about discovery and helping people find insights inside of podcasts and doing audio transcription and search and all this stuff. And it's like, oh, that seems good. Like, why didn't you do any of that?

• 1:26:18David Pierce?

  That would have been cool, and instead you just forgot about this app for eight years and then killed it. And YouTube is not gonna do that stuff.

• 1:26:23Alex Cranz?

  Are they gonna release Google Podcasts with Gemini at Google I/O?

• 1:26:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god, if they relaunched Google Podcasts at I/O, that would be incredible.

• 1:26:32David Pierce?

  With Gemini.

• 1:26:34Nilay Patel?

  They could have also solved huge amounts of podcast analytics and advertising problems that everyone has all over the place.

• 1:26:41David Pierce?

  Yep. I heard from a lot of people after I wrote this story. I had a paragraph in here basically being like, hey, Google, if you had just done for audio creators what you did for video creators on YouTube, you could have won this industry the same way that you did. And I heard from a surprising number of podcasters who were like, I have been begging slash hoping YouTube would do that for years. Like, build the ad tools, do the rev share, let me post my stuff on YouTube and make money from it as an audio creator the same way you can as a video creator. And there are lots of, I was about to say good reasons, but they're bad reasons, but there are lots of reasons Google didn't do that. But it didn't do that. And it could have. And that sucks.

• 1:27:21Nilay Patel?

  I remember being in meetings at our company. It's like, Google's coming, we better be ready. And I'm like, gee.

• 1:27:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they'll get distracted. Don't worry about it.

• 1:27:28Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I don't know, man.

• 1:27:30David Pierce?

  But also to everyone who wants to know, the answer is Pocket Casts.

• 1:27:32Nilay Patel?

  Pocket Casts.

• 1:27:33David Pierce?

  If you want a good cross-platform podcast app that is not going to go away, the answer is Pocket Casts. There are other good ones out there. AntennaPod's really good on Android, Overcast, Apple Podcasts. But if you want to know the answer, it's Pocket Casts.

• 1:27:44Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll end there with that completely uncontroversial opinion that no one will blame you.

• 1:27:50David Pierce?

  The lightning round brought to you by Pocket Casts.

• 1:27:52Nilay Patel?

  No, you gotta pay the money. We can't give this stuff away for free, man. Perceived value.

• 1:27:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, you're right. I apologize.

• 1:28:01Nilay Patel?

  Brought to you by anything other than Pocket Casts. All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. I'm gonna call it a few stories. Becca did a comparison video of the Fujifilm X106 versus the Ricoh GR3X. I'm saying it slowly because that's just a lot of letters and a lot of Roman numerals in that.

• 1:28:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's not good.

• 1:28:20Nilay Patel?

  But it's really fun. I'm desperate to buy these cameras for no reason other than I just want them. Allison wrote about notifications being bad, which is worth reading.

• 1:28:29Alex Cranz?

  She's right.

• 1:28:30Nilay Patel?

  No takeaways. Just like, start over. Just like, throw all this away. It's bad. And then Liz wrote about Vice, one of the weirdest, wildest stories I think we've done in a long time. We did an integrity decoder with Liz about this story. She can listen to that next week. But the gist of it is, we thought we were writing a story about how advertising on the web was like went sideways and couldn't support Vice because they shut down their newsroom and website. So we thought we were writing about like advertising cookies and programming. And no, no, we were, we were just writing about crazy people. That's the story. She talked to 20 people. She described reporting that story as a hall of mirrors. Because they all hate each other. They're all lying to each other, about each other. It's very good. Beautiful. Including one part where it was revealed that Vice had a NetJets account.

• 1:29:13Nilay Patel?

  That was on, on the budget of their digital division. And then two different people took credit for shutting down. And Vice's response to us was, "We have not had a NetJets account since 2021."

• 1:29:25Nilay Patel?

  There you go. So you did have a NetJets account.

• 1:29:27David Pierce?

  We're really proud of you.

• 1:29:28Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Uh, great story. Go read that. That's it. Oh, uh, by the way, uh, we got nominated for a bunch of Webby Awards.

• 1:29:34David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The People's, for Best Technology Podcast, the Big Webby and the People's Choice. Go vote for us. We'll have a link. Go vote for us in the Webby Awards.

• 1:29:43David Pierce?

  Also, listen, people, it's, it's so important that you vote for The Vergecast as Technology Podcast. Decoder is also nominated in Business Podcast. Neelai can have his. That's all fine. I need you to vote for The Vergecast. It's so important that Neelai does not win as Decoder. It's so important. Please vote for The Vergecast.

• 1:30:03Nilay Patel?

  The Webby's really did a stirk there. I'll take the business win. Give, give this show the tech win.

• 1:30:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, you get to have it either way.

• 1:30:09Nilay Patel?

  Decoder is nominated in both categories.

• 1:30:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Just look for my face and click on it. That's all I'm saying. It's gonna be great. All right, that's it. We're way over. On a slow week, we still went way over. That's it. That's The Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:30:26Speaker 04

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:30:46Speaker 06

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