iOS14 public beta is released, Google’s Pixel 3A is discontinued, and Samsung's event is coming soon

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Dan Seifert discuss Apple's iOS14 public beta, the future of Google's phones, and what to expect at Samsung's next hardware event. Stories discussed this week: This isn’t a COVID-19 wave — it’s a tsunami Tracing the link between your phone and the next pandemic Doctors are better at treating COVID-19 patients now than they were in March After the pandemic, doctors want their new robot helpers to stay Facebook and Instagram will remind people to wear face masks White YouTube creators struggle to address past use of racist characters Everything that the big social networks banned this week, ranked Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Starbucks, Target, Unilever, Verizon: all the companies pulling ads from Facebook Facebook auditors call out Mark Zuckerberg for ‘vexing and heartbreaking decisions’ iOS 14’s public beta is rolling out today iOS and iPadOS 14 public beta preview: something for everybody Reddit says it’s fixing code in its iOS app that copied clipboard contents LinkedIn says it will stop repeatedly copying iOS clipboard Apple promises to support Thunderbolt on its new ARM Macs Intel’s Thunderbolt 4 standard looks to raise the bar for USB-C devices Google’s Pixel 3A is discontinued, but these retailers are still selling it Samsung reportedly won’t include chargers with some phones starting next year Samsung needs a splashy product for its splashy product launch Mysterious new Samsung wearable revealed in FCC filings Logitech is already giving up on its Alexa-powered Harmony remote control Google’s upcoming Nest speaker revealed in regulatory filing BMW is going all-in on in-car microtransactions A weakened version of the EARN IT Act advances out of committee Fading Light: the story of Magic Leap’s lost mixed reality magnum opus I built my own camera with a Raspberry Pi 4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, Dan Seifert joins us. We talk about iOS 14. It's in public beta now. What's going on with Thunderbolt and new Armax. Talk about the Pixel 3A. It's a good time coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Empire. That feels good. Yeah, that one felt good. I'm Eli. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  I'm your mate.

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  Dan Seifert just walked out.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  I had to close the door. I had to make sure the office door is closed so we can avoid a BBC situation here.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  I see. With the children.

• 1:37Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  Truly, America's workplace culture has been reshaped by children running in and out of frames on Zoom. It's good. I think it's a very healthy pandemic outcome.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  I got put on blast today by famous sci-fi author John Sculsey for having cat hair on my shirt during a video. There was like three hairs, but apparently that was enough to merit a tweet from John Sculsey about me.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  I like the notion that, you know, we're all revealing our true selves at home.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  And some of the artifice over the workplace is gone. That said, the next time I go on CNBC, I'm pretty sure I'm going to put my hair in a ponytail. It's almost that long.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  And I'm about to turn the corner on letting the beer just go fully insane. Oh, yeah, that's great. Do it. Well, I'm in the, you know, I might as well just go for it. Anyhow, as always, there's a bunch of tech news to talk about this week. iOS 14, the public beta is rolling out. Dieter's been using it. There's lots to talk about with that. iPadOS, all of Apple's 95 OSs, got some news on the Apple Silicon Max are coming. There's a bunch of sort of Android news to talk about. There's a Samsung event happening. And then I still gotta grab a bag of gadget news. But before we get into all of that, as usual, I want to start. But first off, we took last week off for the 4th. Happy 4th of July. I hope you didn't miss us too much. But so there's been a lot of sort of virus news, racial justice news. Again, I've been saying this every week.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  Those are the two biggest stories of our time. You're gonna, it's gonna be 10 years from now, what you're gonna remember from the summer of 2020, I promise you, is not that the Reddit app was copying from the clipboard every couple of minutes. You're gonna remember, it was the pandemic and the, and Black Lives Matter, which appears to be the largest protest movement in American history. So I want to update on those stories real quick and we can get to the gadget stuff. Again, as I say every week, I know people come to us for a little bit of distance from those big stories, but we have a huge team that's working on that stuff. Those stories are, I'm telling you that this is the most formative moment of most of our lives. So I want to point out that we're covering that stuff. I want to shout out our team for that coverage. So, on the virus, it is 17 weeks? I think it's 17. Sure.

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  17 weeks since Trump held up the, or well, since Dr. Birx held up the flowchart next to Trump. They were on days together, saying that there would be a nationwide testing apparatus where you'd go to a web, you know, you know what I'm talking about. 5,000 Google engineers were gonna make it pixel perfect. It got smaller? Four Google engineers.

• 4:06Nilay Patel?

  I think if four of them had been assigned to it, it might actually have been made by now. Yeah, right. But obviously, even listening, you know that Dr. Birx held up the flowchart, Trump stood next to it. They promised this testing apparatus that does not exist. Some states have reasonable testing systems. Verily, which is the part of Alphabet next to Google, has rolled that out in a much smaller scale than you think. But tests in this country are not happening. In a coordinated nationwide way, and there's actually a delay in test results right now. The testing system is backed up overall. That is sitting right next to enormous surge in cases, particularly in the Sun Belt. All this is bad. This problem is not getting solved until there is a coordinated testing and tracing apparatus. It's just not here. That leads into some of our coverage.

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  Meredith Griggs, our science editor, wrote about how this isn't just a wave, it's a tsunami.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Actually, on that story in particular, like, go read it because you might just think, oh, that's a, that's a cute headline. It's a, it must be a take. But the metaphor for how you think about what the rate of cases are actually matters in how we react to it as a society. Like, if you don't think of it as a wave, but you think of it as a tsunami, that like, that metaphor leads to different reactions. And like, it's actually really important.

• 5:19Nilay Patel?

  No, I, I, I think everybody should read it. I think that the discrepancy in just how bad it's getting and the ways to fix it and the way that we're talking about it, which is incredibly politicized, is very dangerous. So read that story. On sort of the other side of it, Nicole Wetman wrote about how doctors are getting better at treating COVID-19 patients. And they were at the beginning of the outbreak in March. There's a lot of, I think, conversation about how the overall spike in cases has not been followed by corresponding increase in deaths. Deaths are lagging. They, they, they happen weeks after the spike in cases. So there's just a lot of wait and see there. But then there's also this other factor, which is as the virus takes over the country and the world, we're learning more about it, we're getting better at treating it. So that's a really interesting story.

• 6:03Nilay Patel?

  James Vincent wrote about how doctors are using more robotics in hospitals and in their practices. After the pandemic, the doctors think that the robotics are going to basically change medicine. That's a really interesting story. And then lastly, on sort of the platform side of the fence, Facebook and Instagram are going to start reminding people to wear masks. I, now on this podcast, I'm going to remind you to wear a mask. There are many cool masks out there. Just buy one. Wear a bandana. Just please do it for me, because I would like to travel again soon. It's just an idea that I have about going places.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Or ever.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it'd be great. So all that coverage is there. Like I said, it's, it's the biggest story of our time. The other biggest story of our time is the racial justice movement that's happening in this country. We're actually going to talk to Rashad Robinson, who's the head of Color of Change, which is one of the groups organizing the Facebook boycott. As we're recording this, I'm going to talk to him tomorrow. By the time you're listening to him, I will likely have talked to him. The social media platforms are just under intense pressure. So Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Starbucks, Target, Unilever, Verizon, they've all pulled out ads from Facebook, they've paused ads on other social media platforms. Casey and Zoe are keeping track of all the policy changes and all the bans that are happening on platforms like Reddit and Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat. And then on the creator side of the fence, Julia Alexander

• 7:18Nilay Patel?

  wrote a great piece about how white YouTube creators are struggling to address their past use of very racist characters in their videos. That is just a reckoning that is playing out across every social media platform. And that is all the background context for a civil rights audit that was issued by Facebook this week. Did you read about it in the interface? Casey's going to go into depth on it. But Facebook basically set up its own team to support a civil rights audit. It took two years. It came out, you can read it, it's out in public. They referred to some of Mark Zuckerberg's moderation decisions as vexing and heartbreaking. And then what Casey pointed out to me as we were talking about it today was, it was an audit, it took two years, it was supported internally by a dedicated

• 8:01Nilay Patel?

  team at Facebook, had the support of Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, and they were only able to look at Facebook, the blue app. They did not have time or resources to also look at Instagram and WhatsApp, which is just one more little checkmark in the argument of, is this thing too big? Right? If you have two years and all this dedicated support and you can only look at one corner of the empire, is that thing too big? So Casey's going to make that argument in the interface, you should go read it. But those are the two biggest stories. I really just want to keep reminding people, our team is laser-focused on them. We are constantly covering them, we're constantly talking about it. But I know you came to us for a break and to talk about some tech news. So let's talk about some tech news. Dieter?

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Now, we will proceed with the section of the Vergecast, which is 45 minutes of me complaining about the Clock app on iOS.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm very ready for this. So iOS 14 is out.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  The public beta.

• 8:55Nilay Patel?

  The iOS 14 public beta is rolling out now. Dieter, you've had sort of the private beta.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, the developer beta, uh, there it's on, but that's on beta two at this moment. So the, the public beta one is probably about the equivalent of the developer beta two. If you're paying attention to that stuff.

• 9:11Nilay Patel?

  And the only thing to note is that they have once again failed to take Dieter's feature suggestion into account.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  The inside baseball, okay, so the thing here is in order to change the time on alarm in the clock app on iOS, you need to tap the edit button and then tap the time. You can swipe to delete them, but you can't just tap them to open up the time to change the thing. They also got rid of the little, uh, uh, dialy dial to, uh, change times and dates. That's interesting. You don't type them in on a pad like normal.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Anyway, the inside story here is like two, three years ago, Neelai and I were in a room with a bunch of like Apple engineers for like, ask us anything on background, like, what do you want to know? We've, if you had a long day of like, learning about the new version of Mac and iOS and whatever, and what's left, what didn't we cover? What do you want to know? And I like popped off about this issue for a good 45 seconds, followed by utter silence from everybody in the room. It's like, why is he so mad?

• 10:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It was truly one of those, like, it was the end of a very long day.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  And I think we had just been like, we hadn't eaten, but it's now that you did it, you're committed to it.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. It's, it's part of my, it's part of my being.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  Just so I, I understand this entirely. So unlike everyone else, Dieter, everyone else that uses the clock app for alarms just has like endless alarms that they've set, probably using Siri. And it's just like, it's just like endless, like list of alarms and they just make a new one every single time. You want to be able to use one of them and just change it by 10 minutes.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Just tap on, tap on the time and change it. That's how it works on the Apple Watch, by the way. So, uh, it turns out though, that you can just say Siri with the wake word before Siri and ask her to delete all of your alarms and then that like will do it. So like the, the solution for this is to know the secret password that you say to the digital assistant.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  I have never opened the clock. Uh, well, when the iPhone first came out, I think I opened the clock app once, but since Siri has come out, I have never opened that app. The only thing I use Siri for is setting alarms and timers.

• 11:12Speaker 04

  When I was editing Dieter's, uh, script for the video for this iOS 14 piece, I actually had to go open the clock app to figure out what he was talking about.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  I was so mad about it. I feel, anyway, so like, we should actually talk about the operating systems and not the clock app.

• 11:28Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I think this is riveting radio.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  All the people trapped in their homes like, yes, this is the break from the nonstop swell of depressing news I've been waiting for.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Uh, okay. So iOS and iPadOS. The way that I tried to break it down is each one of these platforms has like a big headline flagship feature. And then there's a few app features and then there's like a million other features. And the story I made up in my head, and I put this in the, in the piece today is like, I just imagined that after WWDC last year, Craig Federighi got in a room and was like, wow, that was, that was exciting, everybody. What do you, what do you want us to do next year? And like this one guy in the back, it's like, uh, can, can, can I finally finish this, to ship this default apps thing that's been sitting on the shelf for three years? And Craig was like, you know what? Sure. And then there was just chaos as everybody demanded to be able to ship their app that's

• 12:23Speaker 03

  been sitting on the shelf for the past three years. And that is iOS 14.

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the default apps thing, it's big news that they buried in a slide in a corner of a slide, but no app supported yet, right? So you can't try it.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  You need, the third party apps have to like be updated to support it. And so I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  But what is the other stuff that feels grab baggy to you?

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Uh, there's other stuff like, uh, you can add captions to photos, which seems silly, but it's a big deal because it means you can like search for stuff. Like you can search for that haircut picture that you need when you get to go to the barber again. They added picture and picture to the iPhone, finally. They cleaned up the, uh, search stuff on both iOS and iPadOS so that it is more universal and searches across everything. And also remembers that the web exists and you can like hit enter and search something on the web. I mean, there's mentions, there's new emoji, there's bike directions, there's new ways for like favorites to show up in home controls in the control center out of the home app. And then the home app is making other suggestions. There's web page translation Safari. There's

• 13:28Speaker 03

  a bunch of privacy stuff, which maybe is like a bigger thing, but it's still like feels a little grab baggy. Spatial audio for iPod, AirPods? Okay.

• 13:38Nilay Patel?

  Does it work?

• 13:39Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know. I haven't tried it. That in particular, I didn't get to. Game Center got updated. Game Center still exists.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  I mean, it just goes on and on like that. Like, they improved the shot to shot performance inside the camera app, so that you have to wait less time for the photos to get saved.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty cool. Yeah, the big change, like the big visual change is the new home screen and widgets.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  I feel like you have a lot of thoughts about widgets.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  So, the, like, it all bleeds into each other because it's not just that you can put widgets anywhere you want on the home screen, it's that it's an entirely brand new widgeting system that uses Swift UI and developers are gonna have to remake their widgets to work with this new system. And this new system, by the way, also works on the iPad and macOS. So they've remade their entire widgeting system to be cross-platform across all of their major platforms, except, I guess, Apple Watch, although, for all we know, this is like based off Apple Watch tech, because like that's sometimes that's randomly the story with with Apple stuff. So, it's fine, it's interesting, you can like, they like, they don't take up a ton of battery. The question for me is like, you've done this thing that feels a little bit

• 14:47Speaker 03

  cross-platform, but there are like, other things that feel like are going to be cross-platform real soon, like iOS apps running natively on the Mac. At some point, people are gonna start demanding, like, clear connections and syncing between those things, and I don't know how long that's gonna be.

• 15:04Nilay Patel?

  The thing about the widgets that gets me, because, right, they're written in Swift UI, which is like Apple's big carrot to get developers to to use Swift UI. Like, most apps are not written in Swift or Swift UI. You have an iPhone app, you want to make a widget, okay, you gotta go get your feet wet with this language. That makes sense, it's a good carrot. I'm just saying, I love Dashboard on macOS. They took it out of Catalina. Dashboard widgets were written in JavaScript and HTML. So they took them out and they added widgets back into the operating system in Apple's own, like, like, you see the move they did there. It's a real Apple move.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  If we're talking about web hostile moves.

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy. What do we do? You know exactly what you just did, Eli. You like were setting up that angle so obviously. I mean, it's instinctive at this point, but go ahead, Dieter.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Oh, man. So there's a there's a new thing in Safari across all these platforms that gives you a privacy report, which is great. And Apple has this thing called intelligent tracking prevention. It tells you how many trackers were prevented, not blocked, but prevented. And I think we talked about this on the first cast before, like, there's a number and you can't do anything with the number other than be unhappy about the number. There's also, I don't know if this is a web thing, but the apps now have to ask for permission to enable certain types of tracking, right? Certain types of ad tracking when you like run the app or when, you know, the first time it tries to track you or whatever. And so everyone is just going to straight up say no to that. Why would anybody say, yeah, sure, go ahead and track me? That sounds great. And that pushes

• 16:39Speaker 03

  apps and pushes the app economy more towards paying, getting Apple its cut, its 30% cut to get paid in a way that is interesting, I think. That's a bit of a stretch, but like, you can kind of see it. Apple definitely knows what the incentives are on the platform and tries to nudge developers in a direction. You know, the direction that Apple's trying to nudge the ecosystem, if you look at it from like an ethical moral, like they're taking an ethical moral stand as a company, it's like, yep, cool, more privacy. But their ethical moral stand also dovetails really nicely with the way that Apple makes services money. In the same way that Google's quote unquote ethical morals stand about like, let's slow down and not change the

• 17:21Speaker 03

  web too fast. And like, we got to not block cookies on Chrome right now because it'll break too many things, just happens to dovetail with their business model. So there's a whole lot of like, I believe you that you're taking an ethical stand, but I also recognize that your ethical stand makes your company more money.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, the web is Google's revenue model. I don't think we say it enough. Google is the only company that has monetized the web at scale.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  At scale, sure.

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  There's a little bit of Facebook and a little bit of Amazon, but like, the web existing and operating just makes money for Google. The way most people bounce around the web is through Google search. And that sends them to a bunch of websites and Google has ads all over Google search and then sends it to a bunch of websites and then Google owns the ad serving platform. They own the ad auction platform. They like there's money, money on webpages is made by Google. And to be clear, the way that Google monetizes Android is the web, right? Like they have the services stuff in the App Store stuff that Apple does. But Android exists as a free product and they give it away to everybody because then they dump Google Play services on it and they know people

• 18:25Nilay Patel?

  don't use Chrome and like that was always, so every swipe that Apple can take at the web, I think can fairly also be interpreted as a swipe at Google.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  So here's another example. This is app clips. So Android actually has something like this is called instant apps. I suspect it'll be slightly more popular on the iPhone, although who knows? The idea is the apps are temporary. They're, they're, they're less than 10 mags are easy to install and then they go away after 30 days. And it's for stuff like riding a scooter that you want to rent or it's, you know, some other like temporary paying a parking meter, you know, buying a thing at a chicken restaurant because they don't want to use like Apple Pay and they make you use the app. Some, some small thing.

• 19:04Nilay Patel?

  What kind of chicken restaurants are you going to?

• 19:06Speaker 03

  I don't know, man. Imagine it's got like an incredible menu.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  What chicken restaurant in America right now has an app?

• 19:12Speaker 03

  What?

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  What non-chain?

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Well, it's possible.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  I'm guessing Chick-fil-A has an app. Fine.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:20Nilay Patel?

  What non-chain? If you have a local family chicken restaurant and it's got a high-end app and they've got enough dedicated development resources to make an app clip. I want to talk to that restaurant.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  You send them my way. Continue.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Okay. So, but there is a world in which everything that an app clip does could just be handled by a web app. If you think about it, app clips are like basically the equivalent of a browser tab, but in app form, right? But Apple explicitly says, no, we don't believe that the web and webpages and web apps should be allowed to do things with the hardware of the phone. They should not be allowed to know that Bluetooth exists. They should, like, locations should be very, very carefully protected. They should not have access to, you know, the camera or to, you know. Blah, blah, blah. And so there's just a bunch of stuff that can only be done by an app on Apple's platforms that

• 20:14Speaker 03

  in theory, if they wanted to put that effort into adding it, adding support for that, those sort of APIs into Safari in a secure way, they could. They just fundamentally believe that that is going to break the web and it's impossible and it'll lead to chaos. Which again is another like, I see the principled stand you're taking, but I can't help but notice that principled stand leads to more apps on the App Store that may or may not give Apple a 30% cut.

• 20:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, I'm really high on app clips. I, I would like it to be a widespread thing, but you know, in the before time, I would like walk around New York City and I would see city bikes and I'd be like, man, one day I'm going to try those out. And then I would think to myself, I have to download City Bike's garbage app. I have to give it my credit card. Like, I'm never going to ride this bike.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  I'm just thinking of all the parking apps I have on my phone for that exact reason. I go to one place and I need to pay for parking. And I had to download this random app and give them a credit card and all that stuff. And I used it like once a year.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you can't take it off your phone because it like, you know, it's like hoarding cables. Like, why do I still have like giant USB A printer cables in my house? Because what if I get a new printer and it doesn't come with the cable? It's on my mind, but like, I don't know, taxis in New York are another thing, like every.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  I've got so many taxi apps from, from my trips to New York, Curb, Arrow, something else. There's like five of them. And then they all, and this is just like, again, nostalgia for the before time. Taxi drivers would always tell me like, Apple Pay doesn't work when there'd be an Apple Pay logo on the thing. Cause they were trying to get me to use the app. All that stuff should be app clips. All that stuff should be wave your phone and some exchange of code happens. And it's like, here's the, here's the API to pay us and we're going to put up a custom interface. I totally buy that that's better than go to a website.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  But I mean, you could wave the phone and it could do the same thing through web technology. And that would mean that the taxi company or the chicken restaurant would just need to make a web app that would work on Android and iOS. With app clips and instant apps, they now need to develop two completely different apps for two completely different platforms in order to support their customers.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  Google hat, what's Google's version of this?

• 22:26Speaker 03

  Instant apps. It's mostly used to like, like scam people into installing some, you know, pay to play game.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Not to be mean, but I'm not seeing a ton of uptake on instant apps.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  Right. Instant apps is one of those like you can download half an app without installing it over the web and monkey around with it and then you're done.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  And move on. App Clips is like you wave your phone and like one third of the UI appears as a one-time use app, right?

• 22:53Speaker 03

  No, well, I mean, but it still shows up in your app library with a little dotted line around it. It's a little mini version of the app. They're actually the identical same thing. Apple just presented their version of it in a more compelling way because they're like, they like, they got to put it next to the idea of a rentable electric scooter, which didn't, wasn't a thing when Google introduced instant apps.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  I was gonna say it's like the instant apps, if I remember correctly, was pitched as a very similar thing. Like you'd be at a restaurant and you want to like place an order. So like the instant app for the restaurant is instantly available. You use it, you do your thing, you move on. In the real world, I don't think I've ever actually encountered an instant app since they've come out.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  We gotta find this chicken restaurant.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  It's the only way to solve this problem. Well, it's interesting that almost all of these use cases are I need to pay for something, which is theoretically also solved by the payment technologies built in all of these phones. But all these sites want, all these companies would like to collect a little bit of user data from you, right?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  And that like, that tension, I think Apple has not resolved. But I, the thing that really gets me about it is like, I don't know, 10 years ago, making fun of QR codes was like the thing to do. And now we're just like fully in a world where like, oh, QR codes are everywhere and we use them all the time and they're extremely handy. And Apple has now invented its own QR code.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Its own custom QR code.

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  Come on. Of course they have. I get mad when I have to log into a TV app and they have, and they make me type the URL instead of presenting the QR code on a screen of my TV. I was like, why don't you use a QR code? I'm like, how far have I fallen? This is, I have, I have emotions about the lack of a QR code in the Paramount Networks app. Like what happened to me in this life?

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Man, next up, you're gonna be asking for IR blasters.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  I hate you. All right. What else is happening? And I'm just moving on. I'm not even engaging that with you.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  All the cool home screen shit doesn't go on to the iPad. Can someone explain that to me?

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  Womp womp. I think you have this in your write up that they didn't mess with the iPad windowing stuff.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  Right? They sort of like left it alone. It's still not good, right? And I think on the, I mean, it's just, it's the same as it was before, which is not good. So I feel very confident in saying it's still not good because it's the same. I think there's a larger rethink of iPad windowing home screen coming.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Oh, so that'll come when they, when they add a touchscreen to the Mac, they'll also revamp the iPad. Is that what you're thinking?

• 25:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So for example, what if you put out an iPad that was effectively a laptop running macOS and it had widgets on it and ran iPad apps? That seems like a train that is just starting to leave that station, right? Like, I, I think all of that is just, it's coming in a way that it's hard to discern right now, but why would you add widgets and new interactions to this home screen?

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:45Nilay Patel?

  When you might be changing in a bigger way. Like, that is the outstanding question for the iPad. Right? Is what does this thing look like when our Macs that can run iPad apps are going to sit right next to it?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:57Nilay Patel?

  And I, I think they just sort of left it alone because that, that question is going to lead to another universe of questions and it's better solved holistically than in pieces.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that makes sense. But, you know, like, it's, it's interesting. Like, the Mac has a cut at this thing. They've got the app launcher, which nobody ever uses, but I sometimes do. And then the iPhone's got the app library and then the iPad just doesn't get any sort of like catch all place for all your apps go. It still just has like the classic home screen. And there are the new widgets, but they still live in that like permanent sidebar. You can't intersperse them. So I think you're right. They just like wanted to leave it alone because they're doing something else bigger later, I hope.

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, the iPhone is also, I mean, if you just think about the size of the market, see iPhone is this massive market. More people have used it. More people are used to it. You can roll out this kind of change and say, okay, this is a big change in how you use your phone. The iPad to be used in this way, the iPad Pro is only two cycles in, right? Of this particular windowing style, this particular, it's a, it's not a computer, it's a computer, whatever. Does, just watch one of Dieter's many processor videos. It's something. It's a type of computer, but it's only like two generations into this use case.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:08Nilay Patel?

  So I think it's harder to roll out change and then change it again. When you don't have this mass of people who are like, this is how an iPad works and a whole bunch of people probably. Like anybody with a child mostly uses an iPad as like a YouTube kids consumption device and adding more complexity that home screen is like even more sideways.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  Sure, but we're talking about putting a widget somewhere else on the screen. It's not like a completely overhauled home screen here. And I don't understand why that isn't possible on the iPad. And as it is, like you were saying with like, if you got kids using the iPad or whatever, the changes on the iPhone can be completely ignored in iOS 14. You don't have to use widgets. You don't have to use the app library. You can install iOS 14 and still have your seven home screens full of apps and completely ignore those features. I mean, I think for the people that are using the iPad as a laptop and as a computer and things like that, they would be happy to move a widget to a different spot and clean up their home screen into some semi terribly organized folders and what have you. But I don't know.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, I think Apple is stuck with the, the iPad is comparatively feature poor, right? As a laptop replacement. And I don't mean that as like, it just like literally comparatively like, if you get a Windows laptop, you can customize it in any way that you want. Right? Most, if you get a Mac laptop, basically any way that you want. And iPad is like, not that thing. So if you add customization features to it and you know, maybe in a year, we're going to blow all of this up. You're taking people that you're already asking, adapt your workflow to this other kind of computer. And that all of that work and all that sort of like cognitive reorienting that Dieter talks about, that it's required to use an iPad is not worth it.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:57Nilay Patel?

  And I think Apple is better at saying this adaptation, this effort will be worth it for a long time. And I think that's why they're like, we're not going to give you a little bit more to this comparatively limited device. We're going to change a lot. And that that just that just seems like why you would limit it. It seems like the if you know an ARM Mac that's running iPad apps is coming. Something else has to happen to the iPad.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  And that's something else might be way more worth it in terms of a change. And like now you can move a widget here. And then when we change it for real, someone's going to get mad at us that their widget was moved yet again. Like, just whatever, screw it.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  It's like it's Android notifications, right? They just they don't want to deal with that.

• 29:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it's better to make people. I mean, Apple's strategy of this has always been very clever. It's better to make people demand something for a year and then like triumphantly present it to them.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  Right? And be like, you asked for it. It's widgets on the home screen.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Introducing the iPad desktop. It'll be even an even bigger deal if you make people wait for 10 years like they are with multi-user on the iPad. Because I think that must be the plan. There's a full 10 years of us demanding it and then they'll give it to us.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  You got another 10 to wait, my friend.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  Tell me about this compact UI. So you've been using it. And the thing that has struck me the most is like this Siri Compact UI, the phone notification stuff like they're they're making an effort to make this a more multitasking operating system. Picture in picture, like the idea that your phone can do two things at once is like it is finally arrived as an idea on the iPhone. Speaking of things they made you wait for.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Ha, Dan, do you want to do that? Do you want to take this one? Because I I I might explode. I think you I think you got it.

• 30:39Nilay Patel?

  It has arrived as an idea. You are you are correct. It has not arrived as a as a reality because it's like it's just a it. It might as well be fullscreen, but you can like see behind it. It's basically just a transparency level. They just they took it from like 90 to zero. Right? You you can't have it persist there on the screen and do other stuff. The picture in picture is the only one. The picture in picture does persist and you can like have two different active elements at once.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  But like, for example, it's really interesting that Apple, even on their Macs models of the iPhone, have resisted the temptation to offer split-screen apps. I'm sure that nobody actually uses it on Android, except for the four people that are going to tweet at me about it. How dare you? Which is fair, but that's, it's interesting they have it, but I don't know what exactly I would want to have multiple things going on on the screen beyond picture-in-picture. Like even the Google Assistant doesn't really let you do this, but they can do a split-screen if you want. But there is a sort of sense that Siri should know what's happening on the screen and do stuff with it and vice versa. And like, there's no interaction happening there, and I would love to see that.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  But I think for this first iteration, the main thing that they did was create a pretty blue bubble for Siri.

• 31:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's a part of me that loves this. First of all, you have to imagine a lot of things for this to be great. Siri has to be good. It has to be capable across multiple domains and apps, but imagine all the things.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  It's got 20 times more facts, Deli.

• 32:08Nilay Patel?

  It's so many more facts. But like, I love the idea that you're using your phone, you ask a quick question, and in parallel, simultaneously with whatever you're doing, Siri like does a thing, right? Like, that's a cool idea, and that's what this looks like in the screenshots. I think it's going to be very weird for people to find out that it's not, and then it goes away. And, you know, like, we have the answer from Apple, which was, I think they said it to John Gruber on his podcast, Craig Federer, you said, like, "We didn't want you to ask Siri something and then have to press a button to make it go away."

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:43Nilay Patel?

  Which is defensible, but I think it's one of those things that is absolutely defensible for a group of product managers. But like, in the real world, people are going to be like, "Why doesn't this stay here?" Like, "I accidentally tapped it and I accidentally made it go away."

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  Like, I think that, we'll see, we'll see how it goes. What is your experience with it like?

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Uh, it's just Siri, but nicer looking. I mean, that's fine, it's whatever. This may be the same story as like the iPad, but in reverse. They like, they want to get there, but they just didn't want to do it the first year. They wanted to like, see how it goes, see how people react to it, and then they'll start. They didn't have time to like, finish the thing that they actually want to make, so they just made the first step of it.

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then just a few more things to talk about. There is this thing that is happening that is very entertaining to me, which is, it turns out a lot of apps hit your clipboard a lot. So with every version of iOS, Apple's adding on more and more warnings, security features. Actually, I appreciate it. I think the camera and microphone indicators are going to be super interesting. They're great. It will absolutely not stop anyone from believing that Instagram is listening to you. It won't. But they're there. So I think that's really cool. I actually do think the Safari tracking stuff is interesting. Awareness is the first step, all that sort of thing. But there's a new one where it tells you that an app hits your clipboard. The warning is like LinkedIn copied from YouTube, right? So like YouTube dropped something on your clipboard

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  and LinkedIn picked it up. So you can see that the flow of data. And it turns out, and many apps have a good reason to do it, but it turns out a lot of apps hit your clipboard all the time. And so LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, like so many apps have popped up warnings for iOS 14 users, because like every keystroke, they check the clipboard. Yeah. And they've all had to walk back like security concerns. They've all said it's a bug. But it turns out they just got caught, which is. You think so? You think you think they just got caught? Really? I think it's got caught. I think like, they got caught in the sense that there are legitimate reasons. So one of the reasons is you've got a link in your clipboard, and they're checking to see if there's a link there. So they can generate a preview. Yeah. So when you hit paste, there's a preview. That's a totally legitimate reason. There's

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  a new way to do that that won't trigger the warning that sandbox that Apple has built. They just got to switch to that. I think a lot of app developers are just kind of curious that like, they want to know how many times you're pasting links, like they're collecting that telemetry data in a way that wasn't necessarily clean before. When I say got caught, what I really mean is, I think Apple builds these warnings for a reason. They knew something bad. They knew something bad was happening. So they built the warning to show it. Because Apple collects a lot of telemetry data, too. Right. Better or worse, they'll do it. And it might be anonymous, whatever, but they absolutely collected telemetry data. And I think if you see like, man, a lot of apps hit that clipboard all the time. Like, we're doing so many system calls for clipboard contents. You're kind of like, well, users should know.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  Right? And I think if, if I'm just a person opening the LinkedIn app, I have no expectation it will ever look at my clipboard until I hit paste.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:44Nilay Patel?

  And I, that's why I mean by they got caught. Like they were doing a thing. They might have great and reasonable intentions to do it, but you should really ask before you go into a store of data where I've pasted something. For all you know, that's a password. For all you know, it's my social security number, like whatever. You should ask me first. And I think this, as Apple builds more and more of these warnings, you can read it as them being more and more paranoid, or like we were saying before.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Why didn't they just go all the way and, and like every time something asks for your clipboard, it pops up a, a okay, cancel? Just put a wall up in front of it.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  Cause I, cause I think there is this other way to do it.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  And certainly like, um, there's, there are apps where it's Mac OS where you just hit paste and it has already read the clipboard and like, if you just hit paste in preview and you've got an image in your clipboard, it'll just like make a thing for you.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:29Nilay Patel?

  Right? And so I, there's like, there are good reasons for, to give apps like prefetch access to your clipboard, but you have to know why. But they all got caught. They're all changing it.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  And then the other, the other two kind of mysteries resolved, I would say. Um, Apple announced, and I think this is, came next to Thunderbolt 4. So Intel sort of formally announced Thunderbolt 4, um, which was sort of as usual, laced in a bunch of USB standards. And then on top of that, Apple said, we're going to support Thunderbolt on our new Apple silicon ARM MAX, which was a bit of a question mark at WWDC, right?

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, Apple, Apple just straight up like, they saw this, this, this Thunderbolt news hit and they, they saw that everyone's like, what the hell is up with Thunderbolt and ARM? Cause like, people just assume Thunderbolt is an Intel thing, therefore it won't work on non-Intel things, which is not necessarily true. Um, so Apple's like, no, we're, we're going to do it, which is really interesting because it also means that, um, Dan, you, you, you said this, that they're going to be the, the first ARM device to support Thunderbolt?

• 37:29Speaker 04

  It's likely they will. Like you said just now that like, it's not necessarily an Intel thing, but in practice, it has been an Intel thing. So if you have a computer with an AMD processor, You're not seeing Thunderbolt support on it. If you have a computer with an ARM processor, we've yet to see Thunderbolt support on any of those. So it's very likely that Apple will be the first maker to ship an ARM computer with Thunderbolt support on it. I think it's great. I think it is very acknowledging of the fact that Apple has supported Thunderbolt 3 since 2015 or 16 or whatever it is. And there's all these accessories and docs and stuff that it's like basically forced its users to buy and invest in too.

• 38:09Nilay Patel?

  And Thunderbolt docs cost a thousand dollars. They're so expensive.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  They're expensive.

• 38:13Nilay Patel?

  You live by the dongle sword, you die by the dongle sword.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  So I can use my very expensive Thunderbolt dock that I'm using with my Mac Mini right now because it has four Thunderbolt ports on it. I can use it with an ARM Mac whenever I get one of those. So that's like, nice. That's great.

• 38:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, I would, I mean, there was a joke, but like, Apple has pushed everybody to buy Thunderbolt accessories. That has been their strategy for I/O.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  I would love to know how much Thunderbolt adoption has been pushed by Apple. Like, like it's because Apple basically forced it. Like, other manufacturers all support Thunderbolt now, but they didn't in 2016 or 2015 when Apple really pushed the shift to it. So I would love to, I'm very curious to know. If anyone knows that info, let me know.

• 38:56Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because Apple takes all the credit for pushing USB in the very beginning with the iMac. And I think they would like to take credit for pushing USBs, but it just isn't, it didn't happen the way they thought it would. Well, and it's probably also just like a reasonable thing for Intel to sort of let go of, right? They still get to get some money from Apple for a license to the SPAC or controller chips or whatever they're going to use.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  Well, it's very interesting. Actually, Intel says that they do not license Thunderbolt anymore. They ceased it for Thunderbolt 3 and they will not for Thunderbolt 4. They certify Thunderbolt, which apparently doesn't cost money, but it does cost more to have a product that actually passes certification. But they don't charge a license fee anymore. They were very particular about it. They actually let us know. In an email saying we don't charge for certification anymore, so.

• 39:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the dynamics between Apple and Intel here, I think, are just utterly fascinating. Right? I mean, just think about the the number of stories where the Apple Intel relationship has gone sideways or upside down in the past three years.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Modems.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  Modems, that's the big one, right? They wanted Intel to be the modem supplier to compete with Qualcomm and break the Qualcomm monopoly. Intel was unable to do it to the point where Apple was throttling Qualcomm modems. I will never forget this because Qualcomm was just so unhappy about it, they filed a lawsuit against Apple. Intel failed. They sold their modem division to Apple and they just like exited the business. Like they they could have been it. It could have been the thing for them. They Intel's obviously like PC chip roadmap, their processor roadmap, just like hit the breaking point with Apple. Apple's walked away and made its own chips. Thunderbolt is this Intel thing that Apple's depended

• 40:43Nilay Patel?

  on. It seems like Intel is more or less being compelled to let Apple use it in a way that they usually tied to their processor. Like, just the dynamic between Apple and Intel is Apple saying over and over again, we're gonna do it ourselves. To the point where we're we'll buy, we'll acquihire entire divisions from you. And just managing those people better will result in modems that can compete with Qualcomm. Like, that is crazy. But it just keeps happening. So that's one mystery resolved. The other mystery, which I'm actually really surprised on, I happily admit I got it wrong. We were talking about how the Apple TV can support 4K YouTube now. And Apple had this weird mysterious line, it's like

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  the latest YouTube videos. It turns out, not only can the Apple TV do it, iOS devices can support 4K HDR on YouTube now. And it's VP9.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 41:33Nilay Patel?

  It's not, it's not the new codec. So I think, I think the reason that Apple did not answer that question when we asked them over and over again is because they didn't want to admit that they rolled.

• 41:43Nilay Patel?

  Like they roll. They just they they support Google's codec now like straight up. And so if you have iOS 14, you've got the YouTube app, you can make it. You can make it play 4K HDR. Uh, and I think that is not yet true on Safari, uh, on Macs, but I suspect with the next generation it will be. So mystery solved. I was utterly curious about this. I just assumed that AV1 had like succeeded because Netflix is using it. Uh, Google's actually using it on Android. Yeah. For some videos, but it appears from everything that we can see that Apple actually just caved in supporting VP9 because selling $170 TV streamer box to can't play 4K YouTube is stupid.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  Just, that's a fact. Okay. We gotta take a break. We come back. We got some Android news to talk about.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  College football is back. So Hilton calling me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay.

• 43:36Nilay Patel?

  All right. There's like happy Android news and sad Android news. And I say that it's happy and sad. And then I will also say there's Google Android news and there's Samsung Android news.

• 43:50Nilay Patel?

  Let's start with sad. What is going on at the Pixel leader?

• 43:53Speaker 03

  The 3A is, um, that end of life, 3A is like discontinued. Google's no longer selling it. Once it's out of stock, it's out of stock. And the Pixel 4A is, um,

• 44:05Speaker 04

  MIA?

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Wow. It's, it's gone out. It's on, it's on a foray into the world. Yeah. Uh, don't it, we expected it a long time ago, like a long time ago. And it just, nobody knows. There's just leak after leak about it. There's like nonstop stuff. We see it hits the FCC.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  It was reviewed on YouTube like three months ago.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Like, as, uh, so who knows? I like straight up, who knows?

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that they, like the, you know, the three and the 3A, they had such criticism. We made a lot of fun of them because, you know, the story was Rick Osterloh was like, why is this battery life so bad? Like, do you think Sundar and Rick were like, hey, can we, um, can we see the phone that we're about to release?

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  Cause they didn't do it the last time.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  I mean, I think this just kind of speaks to, I mean, there's, there's obviously been unique challenges this year for many supply chains. But I think the fact that Google had to, had at some point stopped making a 3A and they ran out of them. They sold out of them because they never released its successor. That was obviously, you know, very well into development and stuff like that. And they still haven't released it. It just kind of speaks to that. Google is not good at selling things. Like, could you imagine, like, when, when I think back of like when Apple products have been delayed, the, the white iPhone four was delayed for like six months because they had production issues with the, the color coding and things like that. Imagine if you couldn't buy an iPhone because the prior one had run out

• 45:41Speaker 04

  and Apple hadn't figured out how to make the new one yet. Like, that's what happened here.

• 45:47Nilay Patel?

  You think they haven't figured out how to make a 4A? Maybe, maybe.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  Is it hard to make? I don't know. Like, Google hasn't made anything with the Qualcomm 730 before, which is a chip we're expecting on it. There was rumors that they were thinking about making two sizes and then they like balked and now there's like just gonna be the one size. So maybe they had to like roll everything back. Maybe that was like the the move that Rick came in is like, what are you doing? Actually paying attention to what a submission was doing? I don't know. There's there's any number of things, but like something happened. And I I refuse to believe that the plan was to release this thing whenever they're gonna release it, which we still don't know.

• 46:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think honestly, the we talked about this with Suneer in our interview with him, which is almost two months ago now. But like the notion that they're gonna keep trying and keep plugging away like I if I was Google, I would take this moment in time when there are launches and like the phone cycle is pretty predictable and we kind of know what's gonna happen and say, we actually have to reset. We have to solve our huge problem, which is we don't make a flagship that competes and we have to do that. And I we we should spend our resources and time doing that.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying this as somebody who just hopes that that's what they're doing because I really do think that Google could come in and make a flagship phone and not charge $1100 for it. Right? And it would still have the build quality and the features and the camera and all the stuff that we always talk about. And that is such a compelling lane for them to be in versus we're gonna live at $400 or wherever they think that the A series is gonna be in like a 4A coming out is it just kind of cements the narrative that they're also Rans? And I why live in that zone now when you can't do any in-person marketing, you can't hold an event, people aren't going to stores, they can't hold the thing like you can only sell online like you know exactly how that's gonna turn out because that's exactly what's happened every other.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  I don't know. The three A's was the best selling Pixel phone.

• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  They sold 10 of them.

• 47:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they sold four of the three. So they sold more than twice as many as a three A like. It's still the best selling Pixel phone.

• 47:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like I I'm saying they got to move the bar. They got to move the bar to we compete with Apple and Samsung. And I think they they know it. And I think this.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  The other option, Eli, is they they nope out of that fight altogether and they compete with like OnePlus at the $800 price range.

• 48:11Speaker 04

  That's who they competed with at the 800 price. Yes, definitely is OnePlus.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  If they they could they could nope out with the Pixel five, they could nope out of like the like pristine, beautiful glossy flagship 5G stuff. They could nope out of the $1,000 plus phone thing.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  How are you going to make a phone called the Pixel five and not have it have a 5G modem?

• 48:32Speaker 03

  No, that has to happen. But like, there's two 5G modems, right? There's the 865 and there's the new version of the 865 or whatever. Uh, that's like, it's fine, but it's not great. And then there's like the lower 765 stuff. That is like a little bit less expensive, uh, but has the modem integrated in, which theoretically has like maybe some like battery advantages, which I don't know if you've ever used a Pixel, but thing needs some battery help.

• 48:59Nilay Patel?

  Um, every time, um, our Chris Grant, who you see the editor shape polygon is now sort of the SVP of the division that houses us. Every time I call him on the phone, he's got a, he's got a Pixel three. And every time I call him, he's like, this phone is so hot, the battery is about to explode. I'm on 1%. I'm like, dude, it's 2pm and you're at home.

• 49:22Nilay Patel?

  What is going on? He's like, this phone's a disaster.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I get it. But I think that's like the, that's what I mean. The opportunity is to redefine what a flagship means and to take the hit. And to be at the price point of the OnePlus stuff.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  But make a phone that's flashy and premium and that people want as a status symbol.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  Google has never been able to do that.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Not for a long time.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  And that's a tough, tough battle. I mean, like, if you look at a OnePlus phone, it is flashy. It has the highest end components they can stuff in there. It doesn't have. A recognizable name outside of like enthusiasts, but like if you're looking for like a flashy, pretty gorgeous, well-made hardware like OnePlus doing that at 800 bucks or 900 bucks or whatever it is now.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I think Google should take that McLaren's like deal away. They should just partner with every firm that will like give them the brand name for free like Polaroid, McLaren, RCA, just Porsche design, like just layer them on there.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  If we're gonna do the car analogy thing, I think what Google thinks is Samsung stopped making the Camry and the S20 has turned into like a Lexus and OnePlus only makes fricking like, you know, Subaru WRXs or whatever, right? And they want to, Google wants to make the Camry.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  The Camry is the A series, though.

• 50:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Samsung absolutely makes the Camry.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 04

  But nobody is proud to drive a Camry like, like nobody is like.

• 50:51Nilay Patel?

  Lots of people are proud to drive Camry.

• 50:53Speaker 04

  And like, it's a great car, it's very reliable. Are you excited to drive a Camry?

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  Camrys look like mean spaceships now.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's true.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  They look like angry transformers coming to take your family home from school.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm here to defend the honor of the Tour de la Camry. I mean, it is like the most popular car in the world for a reason. But I hear what you're saying, like trying to like stratify it. I just think the narrative around Google's phone ambitions is that they have failed.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:21Nilay Patel?

  Putting out the 4A does not change that narrative. It doesn't sell them any more phones. It doesn't give them any more leverage against Samsung. It doesn't create the sense that Android is ascendant. Like, all the things they have to do have to happen with a phone launch. And that phone launch has to be exclusive.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  If that Blockbuster Information story about Rick Osterl saying, you guys screwed up the battery on this thing, I disagree with your decision is true, then there was some sort of come to Jesus moment where they canceled the tablets and blah, blah, blah, blah. And was that long enough to go that they could actually pivot in time to whenever they're gonna launch the Pixel 5? Or are we like having a next year conversation right now?

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I mean, like this, the whole conversation is pure speculation. Like, they could have just decided they didn't, they wanted to have an event and they're gonna hold it off. They could have decided like, we're not ready to have people back in the office to complete the certification trials. Like, a million things are true. The pandemic disrupted everything. But I think it's also just a good time for them to say, is this strategy working? Right? And I just don't think you can honestly look at their current strategy and say, this is a success. Right? Even though the camera's great, even though we like the phones, like, it's hard to look at it and be like, yep.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 52:24Nilay Patel?

  I definitely think you should buy a Pixel phone instead of a Samsung phone, which is a weird place for them to be.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. Their whole goal is to be a competitor to Samsung and provide some leverage in the ecosystem.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  Well, their advantage right now is, uh, there's no like weird power things that Henry Place has a really good story about that up, uh, today, yesterday, when you're listening to this. And also like, I don't know, Samsung's $1,200 phones have ads on them now, like.

• 52:48Nilay Patel?

  So, speaking of Samsung, their event is coming, it's August 5th.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  The invite is a splash of copper. It looks like. We're just guessing it's the note.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  That's what it is.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there's a wearable that showed up at the FCC and then this rumor that they're also gonna drop the chargers and the rumor was Apple is gonna drop the chargers, uh, last week.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, which everyone's real mad at me for saying that's good. I stand by that opinion.

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely good. I do not need another Apple tiny crap charger in my life.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, but like Samsung had just finally started to ship good chargers with its phones. It took a long time, but like, and same with Apple, like even the, the Pro came with an 18 watt, the 11 Pro came with an 18 watt charger. Like they're finally putting good chargers in there now. And, and you know, maybe they won't anymore.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. What else is rumored for this Samsung event?

• 53:37Speaker 04

  The beans, ear beans.

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  Ear beans.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  The Galaxy beans.

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  Ear beans, ear beans, ear beans.

• 53:45Nilay Patel?

  Cannot wait.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  Dieter, I believe you've said this before, but I fully agree. So I'm echoing it. Uh, there needs to be more fun in products and ear beans. Sounds like a very fun product, especially if they actually ship them called ear beans.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Do it.

• 53:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm super down for Samsung Galaxy beans in my ears.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  So the, the other things I've rumored, uh, like maybe a fold two already. Well, I guess it was a year since the last fold, right? That whole debacle was a year ago.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  Wow. Well, the whole debacle was a year and a half ago. The re-release was a year ago.

• 54:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:15Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 54:16Speaker 04

  And, uh, then maybe a Z Flip with 5G. That's been rumored a ton as well. That's a lot of stuff for like one event in the middle of August.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that'll be exciting.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  Then it's Samsung, so there might be other stuff too.

• 54:28Nilay Patel?

  Wash machines.

• 54:30Speaker 04

  There was, I think I just saw some rumors today. There's a, a tablet, an S7 has started been rumoring around with, with the new 855 or, excuse me, 865 plus chip that was, uh, just announced by Qualcomm.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  So God bless Samsung making Android tablets like they're a thing.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  I love it. It's great. It's a lot of stuff, but also like. Samsung events, we just came through this like event season where we watched all the big companies like try to adapt to this world. Samsung events are like known for being over the top spectacles in person with like gigantic stages and.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  And they love to pack the audience with Samsung fans.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, how are they gonna do this?

• 55:12Speaker 03

  They're gonna have, they're gonna have a fake audience that's just gonna be chanting ear beans, ear beans, ear beans.

• 55:19Nilay Patel?

  They're sampling that right now. You should be careful.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  It'd be fascinating if like, you know how some of the sports leagues have been like selling the ability to put a cardboard cutout of your face in the stands? So you can watch your, your sports team. What if Samsung did that for like people who are like super Samsung fans and they get their face in the audience of their, of their live stream?

• 55:42Nilay Patel?

  That would totally be worth it.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  It could be, what is, what is the Samsung emoji thing called? The Memoji knockoff? I've already forgotten what it's called. I use Samsung phone every single day and I forgot. It could be those on a cardboard cutout.

• 55:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, or they could like host the entire thing virtually, like the sports leagues are also doing, like this entire event happens in NBA 2K21.

• 56:03Nilay Patel?

  It's like an idea.

• 56:06Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is the one that to me is the most fascinating, like Apple pulled it off to a certain extent. I, we, there are aspects of it that as journalists, we did not enjoy, but I think for most people just sort of consuming it, it was just fine.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  Right, they made a, they made an hour and a half long TV show about their 45 operating systems and people watched it and they had a great time doing it and that's great. Microsoft's made a four hour TV show of how developing software, which is very Microsoft and it worked and people liked it, like they, they figured it out on their timeframes. Samsung like makes bombastic spectacles out of product features.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:46Nilay Patel?

  And they, I don't know, I like, I'm very curious for this one. This is the only one where you can't quite predict how it might go. Especially because like that moment of like revealing the fold two, they can't get that hush over the audience and like create that somewhat fake sense of drama.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, they can't have the drop, you know, the doo that you get, you know? Like they can't do that.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, you can, you can feel it in your Galaxy Beams. You've got the right headphones. You really, your whole, it's a whole body sensation. So we'll see. Uh, I mean.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's funny, we just had this whole conversation on Google needing to like, do flagship stuff, needing to create a moment, needing to create spectacle. Like Samsung is just about to do it. Like, they're gonna keep being the default Android provider at this scale with this amount of effort intensity.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:32Nilay Patel?

  Spectacle.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Samsung, I think, is in a more dangerous place than people, than most people think, I think, because they're so dominant. Like, they've got the A51, A71, like, they've got the most pop, best-selling Android phone. The S20 is the default. The Note is often thought of as a flagship, but it's actually not anymore. It's the S20. Like, Samsung doesn't have the halo device that makes everyone think that Samsung as a brand is a hot shit technology company.

• 57:59Speaker 04

  Well, that was supposed to be the fold, right?

• 58:01Speaker 03

  It was supposed to have been the fold, and now it's not. And so, like, the S20 is great, but the S20 Ultra kind of fell flat. It was the camera didn't do so hot. So, the thing that Samsung does to, like, act as a foil to Apple is race ahead on certain kinds of technologies, do them first, and also it tries to race ahead of the rest of the Android world. Well, it's no longer racing that far ahead of the rest of the Android world, except in a couple of areas. And like, they're like neck and neck with Apple in a lot of stuff. And so, what, what will Samsung do to create that sense of, like, we are the innovators here, you should like, you should have affinity for Samsung? This is why I'm sort of hoping it's, that the Fold 2 is gonna be here, and that it's actually good.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  We'll see. Because as much as, you know, I love the Note, and I love people that love Styleye, I don't think that, because it has the same specs as the Galaxy S20 fundamentally, because it's on, you know, they're on this weird off-cycle or whatever. It's hard to generate, like, Samsung is a super innovative, tech-forward company that is ahead of everybody else with the Note. It just is.

• 59:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then, next to it, Apple's like, our phone has picture-in-picture now.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:17Nilay Patel?

  You've asked for them. Widgets are here, right? And it's like, man.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  Samsung gets no credit. Like, Google can't figure out scrolling screenshots in Android 11. They like just announced that like, yeah, we can't get it done.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  And it also took until Android 11 to get native screen recording.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Samsung's been doing that for years. Samsung, like, one of the things that iPad OS is they can, you can like highlight text and then copy as plain text and then paste it, like highlight your handwriting or whatever, and then copy as plain text. Samsung introduced that last year in the note, in Samsung Notes. Like, it's been around. And like, does, does, does anybody remember? I do, but I'm weird.

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  There's like a hardcore, like, note forum right now that is, they're pasting in this audio.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Nilay Patel?

  And they're coming for you, buddy.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Great.

• 1:00:03Nilay Patel?

  Like noteusersforum.net. Rise up.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  It's at Backlon. Let them know. You're around. Don't let them disrespect you.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  I will only accept criticism in the form of puns on Twitter.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  All right. We gotta take another break, and then we got a little grab bag of news. We'll be right back.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:01:28Nilay Patel?

  This is a little grab bag. Do you want to start? Let's start with the Google stuff. We've been in that zone and we can do the rest of these things.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  Their upcoming speaker codenamed Prince has hit the FCC and it looks like a little fabric-covered ciabatta roll.

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  What does it do? Is it just a little guy?

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  I saw it described as like half a Home Max or the smart speaker equivalent of like a Sonos one, but it's very, it's very front-facing. You know, it's not like a big square or a circle like the HomePod. So that's a fascinating choice. But yeah, it's like better sound out of a Google Home speaker is like, I think the TLDR of it.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  It seems to replace the recently discontinued original Google Home speaker, which was the air freshener thing from 2016 or whatever that was out forever. That finally got discontinued, apparently like in the past month.

• 1:02:20Nilay Patel?

  I didn't know that. Is that really?

• 1:02:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Apparently it's gone. And this thing, I'm looking at our coverage on it. It's on the verge.com. Definitely looks like a ciabatta roll. I think it is like, I think it is like deceptively small in the pictures and I think in real life it's actually going to be bigger. And we actually, the pictures that have leaked are next to a ruler. So you can see exactly how big it is. And it's like 200 plus millimeters tall. I don't know what that is in inches, but it's bigger. It's not like a Nest Mini replacement. It is something bigger than that.

• 1:02:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so, okay, I see. It, you know, it's funny. Like we have HomeHubs here and now I never want to buy a smart speaker without a display again.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, just because what do we use it for? We use it for timers. You know, it's really useful. Seeing the timer.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  The Echo show still doesn't show multiple timers at once, is my understanding. Is that true, Dan?

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  I believe so. I haven't attempted to use a multiple timer in a long time.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Google speaker does, but my wife does not like saying the Google hot word. So she prefers to say Alexa. Sorry, I said that out loud. I have become so annoyed at like the way that the Sonos ones are bad at Alexa hot wording that I just like turned it off and bought an Echo Dot. So now we have an Echo Dot and a Google Home Hub sitting next to each other in my kitchen. And I'll use the Google one because I like seeing the timers displayed on it. And she uses the Echo Dot.

• 1:03:46Speaker 04

  You can link the Echo Dot to the Sonos. So then you, when you speak to the Echo Dot, it plays out the Sonos.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  Yes, that is the, the next step.

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  And then on the Sonos, you can turn on the Google wake word and then you can use both of them at the same time on the Sonos.

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  I actually don't know that you can do that.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  You can, actually. You can set the Sonos to be a Google wake word and then you can tell Alexa that the Sonos exists and you're fine. The problem here is I have my Sonos Ones that surrounds for my living room and for some reason that or just Sonos Ones suck. Like they're so bad at recognizing wake words and they're so slow at reacting if anything goes wrong that it's just not worth it.

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  Well, you know, the reason is when you issue the wake word to a Sonos device, lawyers from all three companies have to negotiate a cloud services agreement. It's actually, it's, it's, it's keeping a lot of first year associates employed.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  I, I can't believe we have waited this long to troll Neelai with the end of lifing of the Logitech Harmony Alexa powered remote control. Like this is, this is a dark day for IR repeaters, Neelai. I need to know what your feelings are.

• 1:04:58Nilay Patel?

  My, it's, this is like a really weird moment in television history.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  What started the game?

• 1:05:05Nilay Patel?

  Wow. The TV was invented.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  The way I cathode ray tube works.

• 1:05:12Nilay Patel?

  You know, there's two ways. There's an aperture grill and there's a, there's a dot mask.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  Trinitron was an aperture grill. No, okay. Just think about where we are with TVs at this moment in time.

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  There is, there are more streaming services. There are bizarrely more streaming devices. There's more consoles. There's more stuff to watch, consume and plug into your TV than ever before, which is true. There are fewer control solutions for TVs than ever before. Logitech is basically the market leader. They keep trying this stuff and you know, we should actually should get that Logitech CEO of Ragan Daryl back on the show one of these days. But the last time he was on our show, he was like, yeah, Harmony is fine. I bought. We bought OBS. Have you heard of Streamlabs? That's the future. Like Twitch is where we're going. So like, it's just like Logitech, which is the market leader in remote controls is like,

• 1:06:06Nilay Patel?

  yep, we're gonna let that peter out. And I was really high on Kavo, like, they haven't issued an update in forever. They're still around. You know, like you see them sort of like responding to people on Twitter like, they're around, they just haven't done anything. Yeah. There is not another, no one is trying to solve the problem of I have a PS4, soon to be a PS5, an Xbox, a Roku, an Apple TV, and whatever apps on my TV. I just need one remote control on my, on my desk. Like, Well, that's because HDMI CEC has solved that problem for everybody. It just works. It's just bizarre. It's like an obvious market opportunity. And instead, it's like, every couple of days Joanna Stern tweets about how her Apple TV remote is lost.

• 1:06:49Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there's a Wall Street Journal article about how millennials coming home to stay and they're like boomer parents' houses are confounded. Because all of the boomer parents have like 45 remotes and they've all like muscle memory their way into knowing how to change the channel. And they can't explain it to anyone else. But that's an article in the Wall Street Journal, like every executive in Silicon Valley should be like, this is my startup. Like, this problem is so bad that the Wall Street Journal is writing about it. Uh, there's a market opportunity and it doesn't exist. It is confounded. And I think part of the answer is like, many people just buy the TCL Roku TV and they get their remote and they're done. Yeah. Many people just buy whatever, but just one click next to that,

• 1:07:31Nilay Patel?

  you've got people with the five-year-old smart TV who have bought a streaming device and have a PlayStation and might have a soundbar. And those people are just in a world of absolute pain. My parents bought this thing called a MAG. I don't know what this is. It's like this weird box. It's an IPTV box and then like, something that appears to be illegal happens and then Indian TV streams to their house. I was, I was about, I was about to ask. I like, I'm really not sure what, all I know is my dad paid $200 to his friend and this thing showed up. Like you have to know somebody to buy one who will go, go get it for you.

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  Very confusing. Uh, but like, you know, IPTV services exist in many other countries. You can just like buy one of these boxes and like sign up for it. Okay, great. They're trying to figure out like how to make it all work. So now they have another remote that needs to, and that needs to interact with their like receiver and their like, and like, it's just nuts. And I like, I can't go to their house and just do it for them.

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Nilay Patel?

  And so I'm like, okay, plug it into the receiver. And they're like, what remote do we use to turn everything on? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. And that is an insane, at this point in TV history, when more people are watching more TV than ever with across more devices.

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Nilay Patel?

  Like for Logitech to be like, you know what? This reasonably good idea of having a Alexa powered remote control, we're just screw it like we're.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Well, so here's my question. Why isn't, you're gonna hate me so much for what I'm about to say. Hey, guys, you guys ready to just be pissed? Just if you're, if you are lucky enough to be in your car, pull over and just prepare to grip your steering wheel in anger. If you have a mouthguard, put it in so you don't grit your teeth, grind your teeth. Why isn't there an alliance? Why isn't there an industry consortium to standardize this shit? Why doesn't the Bluetooth Alliance or like the Z-Wave Alliance just roll in and be like, all TVs and all set-top boxes work this way?

• 1:09:31Speaker 04

  It's called IR blasters.

• 1:09:34Speaker 04

  Like, like we're talking about all of these remotes, like, yes, some of them use Bluetooth to communicate, but they also all have IR blasters on. Amazon has put IR blasters into its remotes that weren't there before.

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  Have you ever looked at a manual of like IR codes? That's one of the reasons Logitech failed because it just, the database of how many IR codes they have to keep track of got so big that it took down the entire server farm.

• 1:09:59Nilay Patel?

  They're like, we can't afford these 32 gig micro SD cards for our IR database anymore. It's too much. Yeah, I don't know. Like, it's just, it's wild to me. And I, you know, we keep asking people about it, like,

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  It is just crazy to me that the solution the industry has landed on is this is too hard. You will have six remotes.

• 1:10:19Speaker 04

  Yep, you can, you can pay to fix it like control four will come into your house and you can write them like a four figure check for a universal remote in your, in your living room and, and it'll, it'll do all the stuff.

• 1:10:32Speaker 03

  That'll work for six months until you buy some new thing that you want to have next to or plugged into your TV.

• 1:10:37Speaker 04

  And then you call your control four guy and he comes to your house and he hooks it up. Like I'm serious. That is the whole business model. That they can fix it, but like for like normal people who don't want to spend multiple thousands of dollars to fix the multiple report problem or multiple remote problem. Yeah. Like it's the harmony, which they maybe aren't making any more of they're discontinuing. To, to be fair, this, this Alexa powered harmony thing was terrible. Like it was a bad product. It shouldn't have shipped, but like.

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  Just to catch you up, your harmony remote is almost surely safe unless you bought this fancy Alexa harmony express. And if you did, you can get a full refund or you can just get a free harmony elite, which is a very, very nice remote control.

• 1:11:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  So like Logitech is doing well by its customers here.

• 1:11:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, but the, the harmony elite is like four years old.

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  Are they ever going to update that is the question like.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Speaker 04

  And at some point they're probably going to stop making them.

• 1:11:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, they got a lock on the market.

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, but we said this and then, and then you ask the CEO, what's up with it? And he's like, yeah.

• 1:11:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, to be fair, that was, that was a long time ago. We, that conversation we, I was in the office for, which is officially a long time ago, like a different lifetime ago. We'll try to get him back. We'll, we'll see what we can get up to. He won't. If I send the email, it's like, Hey, do you want to come on and talk about harmony remote? So he'd be like, no. So let me see if I can lure him in to talk about Twitch streaming or something. Last two things. This is really interesting to me. BMW announced that, uh, they're basically going to do in car microtransactions. So they're going to ship all the features in the car and then you can pay to turn them on and off as services. Which is like, it's the nightmare, right? I mean, that's the nightmare.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  Well, you're paying, well, the question is, are you paying for the hardware in your car that isn't turned on when you buy the car or lease the car?

• 1:12:24Speaker 04

  It's a BMW. You absolutely are.

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  Most BMWs are leased, so I think this makes sense for them to say, okay, we can, we're not going to like make different models of the car with different wiring harnesses and stuff. We're just going to lease you a three series and you can decide and we'll just like light them up. And then when you come back and lease your new one, we'll take that three series back. We can configure it for the customer.

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Nilay Patel?

  Ah, sure. No one wants their car to work that way.

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so this is like the inverse of the charger thing. I'm like, yes, get rid of the charger. Take the price of the thing down 20 bucks and let us get a gift card to buy our own charger, buy Apple services or whatever. Great. But this is like, it's there and I have to pay more to use it. Something about it, I like, I want, I want to believe that I could like, work myself up into a like a mental model where like this thing is acceptable and okay, but just at a gut level, in the same way that people are like, how dare you not put a charger in the box? I am, how dare you put heated seats in my car and I've got to pay you a fee to use them.

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  It's like the next step beyond what Tesla's doing, right? So like Tesla will ship a car with, with X capacity battery and only unlock X percent of that, right? And then you pay them five grand and you can get the full capacity of the battery. Like Tesla's done that for a number of years now.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  And that bothers me too.

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I think what's worse about the BMW situation is that you have to pay a monthly subscription. You can't pay 300 bucks and turn on those heated seats and they'll just be on and work for the rest of it. No, you have to pay in perpetuity a monthly fee and then like you stop paying that monthly fee and your heated seats stop working.

• 1:13:55Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Uh, so here's the list so far that is in Sean's story. Heated seats, uh, automatic high beams, adaptive cruise control. Once upon a time, Android Auto and CarPlay were on this list and everyone was so mad at them. It was $80 a year for CarPlay, which is just horrible. Uh, and then people were so mad and then they turned it off like. That list of features, I kind of get it. Okay. I don't, it's 90 degrees right now. I don't need, I don't need to pay for these seated seats.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  You're basically buying a Camry.

• 1:14:25Nilay Patel?

  So you gotta stop bragging on the Camry. I'm not having.

• 1:14:27Speaker 04

  And then you check the boxes until you get into a BMW.

• 1:14:31Nilay Patel?

  Why do you hate the Camry?

• 1:14:32Speaker 04

  Features that you expect with a luxury BMW.

• 1:14:35Nilay Patel?

  The Camry is the worker's car. It's the car of. Oh my God. I own a Civic. I think a Civic is a little bit more. Podcast is fully off the rails. I think we're going to see this across more car companies. I think Ford is interested in the F-150. It's cars as a service is, that's the story here. Right? We're going to start to ship more features and I, I'm with you, Dieter. Like I, I don't know. I'm, I'm going to buy like a. You're going to buy a Camry. That's, that's obviously what's happening here. Look, I'm getting older. I've got a kid. It's.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  2007 Escalade. Don't have to worry about it. The heated seats are already broken.

• 1:15:15Nilay Patel?

  That's horrible. I gotta go Google for Escalade now. And then the last one, this is just an update. We've talked a lot about 230 and encryption, just for months, years now. The Earn It Act, which basically forces companies to provide a backdoor to encryption if they want 230. Two completely directly related concepts that obviously should be put together. Makes no sense. That is out of committee. So it went through the full committee process. It got weakened in committee. Like it's not quite of a direct correlation, but it's up, it's up for, like it's three votes away, right? Senate, House, Pres- well, President doesn't. Was it a vote?

• 1:15:56Nilay Patel?

  The House is a vote. Okay. Let's call it a vote. I mean, he's, he's got to sign it or not sign it. I guess in many ways it's a vote. I'm a student of American history and politics. It's three steps away, right? House vote, Senate vote, President signing it away from being the law. There's, you are going to hear a lot about it. We have a lot of coverage on it. Our policy desk, Eddie McKenna Russell has done a great job with it. There's nothing to say at this moment, except that through the committee process, it is getting weaker. That tie of breaking encryption to 230 is getting weaker, but it's still there. It's still not quite as clear. And I think Mozilla has already come out against it very strongly. I think you're going to see as it moves forward, the debate about whether we're going to break encryption

• 1:16:38Nilay Patel?

  and do backdoors, it's, it's just fully here. So I don't want to, I don't want to burn too much more time on it. We've, as usual, already gone long, but uh, go check out that story and just keep an eye on it because it's, it's, there's a lot of bills. I would, I would call them the sort of like Josh Hawley zone of bills. Josh Hawley wakes up, takes a shower, has an idea, another bill has been produced about how Facebook must, must shut itself down. Like, that's fine. This one is through committee. It's like, it's, it's hit the stage where it's, it's close in a way that the other ones aren't. So keep an eye on it because I, I suspect we're going to be hearing a lot about encryption in the, in the weeks and months to come. All right. That's it. Um, I want to call it two stories, just real quick.

• 1:17:21Nilay Patel?

  Happy stories. Well, one's bittersweet. Addie Robertson, you might know that Magic Leap, the mixed reality company, CEO left, they got a new CEO, they're pivoting to enterprise, they're shutting a lot of stuff down. What a surprise. Um, they were going to make, they had one last game to make, uh, called fading light. Addie Robertson has the inside story of that game, what it meant. It's a great story. It's all about like how you might use AR and mixed reality to tell a different kind of story. So check that out. And then I got to call out, uh, Becca Farsace's new YouTube series, Full Frame. First episode came out on YouTube. She built a camera with a Raspberry Pi 4. It's a delight. You just watch it. It'll just make you happy. It's so much fun. Okay. That's it. You can tweet at us.

• 1:18:04Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's at Backlon, Dan's DCC for, I'm at Reckless. We've got newsletters. Dieter's got Processor. That's theverge.com/newsletter. Casey's got the interface, theverge.com-interface. A little treat next week. We're going to put out a special episode of Why'd You Push That Button? Ooh. Dating in the pandemic, Ashley and Caitlin and Andrew kind of made a renegade episode. Caitlin doesn't work at Vox Media anymore. Hmm. She works at The Atlantic. We'll see. We'll see how that goes. An episode with us. It's great. Super excited that that's coming next week. Like I said, interview episode is Rashad Robinson from Color Change. We're talking about the Facebook boycott and we're back on Friday with Cheshire. Lots going on. That's it. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.