Surface Duo hands on / Amazon's Halo fitness tracker / Epic vs Apple: the latest

Wired's Lauren Goode returns to the show to discuss Microsoft's soon-to-be released Surface Duo, Amazon's new fitness tracker, and an update on Apple's battle with Epic over the App Store. Stories this week: FDA authorizes Abbott’s fast $5 COVID-19 test FDA authorizes convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19 Tracking COVID-19 through symptom monitoring will be harder when flu season starts Facebook chose not to act on militia complaints before Kenosha shooting Facebook takes down ‘call to arms’ event after two shot dead in Kenosha Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman interview Amazon announced Halo, a fitness band and app that scans your body and voice Amazon Look review (2017) Fitbit’s new Sense smartwatch can take your skin’s temperature to help you manage stress Microsoft Flight Simulator players are flying into Hurricane Laura Fall Guys is the feel-good game of the summer Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 2 doesn’t have a release date, but you can already watch this review This could be the first real picture of the Pixel 5 Sony Xperia 5 II leak reveals a new 120Hz display and a headphone jack The Asus Zenfone 7 adds a third lens to its neat flipping camera LG’s swiveling ‘Wing’ phone allegedly revealed in video leak TikTok sues Trump administration over US ban Kevin Mayer quits as TikTok CEO due to ongoing political turmoil Walmart says it’s partnering with Microsoft on a TikTok deal Epic judge will protect Unreal Engine — but not Fortnite Why Epic can’t afford to lose the Unreal Engine in its legal fight with Apple Read the emails between Epic and Apple that led to Fortnite’s App Store ban Apple is holding the Unreal Engine hostage, Epic says in new motion Epic confirms Fortnite’s new season won’t be on iPhone, iPad, or Mac Fortnite is splitting into two different games because of Epic and Apple’s fight Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases after all Fortnite on iOS already feels empty and dated Apple’s move to make advertising harder on iOS 14 is part of a trend Announcing the Get Wired podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, our friend Lauren Good returns from Wired. We talk about the Surface Duo. We talk about new Amazon Halo Fitness Tracker. We talk about TikTok, Apple versus Epic, the whole thing. It's coming up now on the Vergecast.

• 1:17Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media flagship podcast empire. See if I just say it's the flagship of they can't get in trouble. You see, you see what I'm doing here? It's very clever. No. Hi, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm your antagonist, I guess. That's great. That's what you want on a show, some spice. We had a special guest today. Lauren Good is here. Welcome, Lauren.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  Hi, I guess that makes me your neutral party, your meeting.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Yes, that's what we want. Notable Verge trader Lauren Good is here. Welcome. Lauren, is it Wired now? You got a new show. We got to talk about that. There's all kinds of tech news to talk about. But I always start with two things. Dieter, you did this last week. I did, yeah. I think I kept the count correct, actually. Who knows? Forever ago, 24 weeks, according to the rundown here, Donald Trump held up a, well, Dr. Deborah Brooks held up a flow chart with Donald Trump looking on. A flowchart of when a website from Google, I think 45,000 Google engineers are going to work on this website. You would log into it, you would do a symptom checker, you would drive through a test. Test results would come back on a, it doesn't exist.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Verily is trying, you know, the division of alphabet that isn't, you know what I'm saying? It's just still very small, no national testing strategy in place. That is a big piece of the COVID puzzle. Still waiting for that, but there are some other COVID news on the site. We always start with just a quick rundown. The FDA has authorized a fast $5 COVID-19 test from Abbott Labs. We've got a great piece on that that actually details how it works. Check that on the site. FDA has also, this is a little bit more controversial, authorized convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19. Lots of questions about pressure being put on the FDA right now, but all that's on the site. Flu season about to start, we got a big story on the site about flu season overlapping with COVID-19 and symptom monitoring and testing.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  All of that is going to be more challenging when the flu is also in season. That's coming up. And then the other big story in the world that we constantly talk about and check in on is obviously the movement for racial justice in this country. I will just admit, I am very biased. I was just saying to Lauren before we began, I can barely look at the current set of news about this in Kenosha, Wisconsin, because I am from Racine, Wisconsin, and I grew up just miles away from where this is happening in Kenosha. That's where my mom works, but there's obviously big protests in Kenosha. Police shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times. Then there was another shooting, two protesters died. Our piece of the puzzle here is that Facebook had complaints about groups, events on Facebook,

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  possibly inciting some of this violence, they chose not to take them down. And then it took them down, which is about a classic of a Facebook pattern. As exists, we're just going to keep living in that pattern for a long time. But I always want to start the show by pointing out, those are the two big stories in the world. Those are the stories that will change the world after 2020. It's all over the site, we're covering it very deeply. We care about it a lot. There's a lot of tech news to talk about and we hear from the audience constantly that people need a break. And quite frankly, with this one, I kind of do too. So I'm excited to talk to it. Dieter and Lauren about tech news. One more plug before I begin. Casey and I talked to Jeremy Stoffman, the CEO of Yelp on the interview podcast about antitrust, about competing. Check that out. It was a really good one. Jeremy hasn't talked to a lot of people since all

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  of this began. So go, go listen to that one. We pushed him pretty hard. One thing I'll call out, I'm actually interested to see what you think of this. Like Yelp is to small businesses as Google is to Yelp.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:49Nilay Patel?

  And that's just a tough place for Jeremy to be.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Well, I worry that he's spicy, too spicy, that biases his reviews towards the restaurants because he was very spicy on that podcast.

• 4:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, if you're a small business owner, like Yelp is some giant of search that you have no influence over. And if you're Yelp, Google is some giant of search you have no influence over. It's, it's the same problem all the way down. So we got into that. It was very interesting. I think kind of understanding this antitrust moment requires talking to kind of everyone at every level of the stack and Yelp is like right in the middle of it. So check it out. That was the interview episode this past week. All right, let's talk about some tech news. I want to talk about the, I want to start with this Amazon halo.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's a lot to talk about. I want to talk about flight simulator. Dieter has a Surface Duo that he's only able to talk about the hardware with right now, I think. There's all kinds of stuff, but the Amazon halo seems very, Dieter's just right, go ahead.

• 5:42Speaker 04

  I'm so excited. Okay, we're going to play a game. I'm going to describe a fitness gadget and Lauren and Neelai, you're going to either like, you're going to react and most of your reactions are going to start in one place and they're going to end in another place. Okay, so step one, it is a fitness band that does not have a screen and has the usual array of sensors, accelerometer, barometer, heart rate monitor, and also a temperature sensor.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Fitbit. That's what came to mind. I know you said to react, so I'm thinking like the early, the earliest versions of Fitbit.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  But without a screen. So it's like a super boring Fitbit, right?

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Right, right. Like an old Fitbit.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  It's like a charge. What was it called?

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, like a force or something like that.

• 6:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  Uh, they work with the American Heart Association so that they don't just count your steps. They give you an abstracted activity score that pays attention to how intense your workout is. But actually, you have to manually enter your workouts because it can only automatically track running and walking. And if you sit for more than eight hours, it starts deducting your score. And they only give you your activity ring for the entire week. So if you take a rest day, you don't feel like you're being punished by your Apple Watch.

• 6:48Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Okay. So like a, oh yeah, like a less intense version of Apple Watch.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. Uh, it tracks your sleep. And, uh, if, uh, if it detects that your sleep is bad, it will give you cute little recommendations in the form of these things called labs, where it, uh, suggests that you change your habits in order to sleep better. Like quit drinking at night or kick your cat out of the room.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Like I need a fitness band to tell me that.

• 7:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Nilay Patel?

  I feel like you could just tell anyone in America to be like, stop drinking so much at night. It would work right now.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  You should sleep better during this pandemic.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  If that were the end, we would just, uh, the story would be, Amazon made a fitness band. They just made the thing that Amazon does, which they just made a cheap version of the thing that everybody else has, but Amazon has one. The end, hooray. Next up, there's a feature called Body. You take your smartphone and you prop it up on your dresser. And then you get down into your underwear and then you stand in front of your smartphone whilst it takes pictures of you in your underwear, all four sides. And then those pictures of you are uploaded to, uh, AWS, Amazon's cloud. And Amazon does some calculations on them to take those pictures and turn them into a direct 3D model of your body. And then it uses machine learning on that 3D model based on extensive knowledge of people

• 8:05Speaker 04

  with a similar, you know, height and build as you to calculate your body fat percentage in such a way that they say it's more accurate than your standard, like smart scale that uses the, you know, electricity between your heels or whatever. And it approaches the accuracy of like stuff you can get in a full-on hospital or full-on like, you know, gym or something that where you like go weigh yourself underwater or whatever.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  So this is creepy, and I probably should have a better reaction than this is creepy. But there is a timeline for this, right? If you go back just a few years, there was a company called Naked Labs that was doing, you know, consumer-facing 3D body scans that I wrote about for Wired. And I think the year prior to that, in 2017, Amazon actually had acquired a company called Body Labs that TechCrunch wrote about that was doing this kind of 3D body scanning. And then you guys also very clearly remember, because I think I wrote about this for The Verge, that Amazon did the Echo Look.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Yes, that's the thing that I thought of.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Yes, which took a photo of you in your clothing, not naked, although I suppose you could have stood in front of it naked if you wanted to.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  It would have been like, "Wear some clothes."

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Right. Neelai, do you remember this? I actually brought it to the New York office and had you stand in front of it. And, and yeah, and like, take a photo of your different outfits.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Did it recommend, Neelai, wear something other than black? Wasn't that its recommendation?

• 9:25Nilay Patel?

  Add some color. It was just my mom, which is made a phone call to my mom. And my mom was like, "Will you wear some colors?"

• 9:31Speaker 03

  I think that you were wearing a tie that day. Is that even possible?

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you do wear ties a lot.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. So we'll have to go back and read this review on theverge.com. Maybe we'll put it in the show notes for the podcast. But it seems inevitable. I guess it's a long way of saying it seems inevitable that at some point, Amazon was going to do something increasingly creepy with this technology.

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the look failed, right? It didn't go off, like, nobody bought one. Like, the return on the investment of, "Put a camera in your bedroom and let Amazon take photos of you and tell you what clothes..." Like, no one thought that was a good deal. I feel like it's a substantially worse deal to be like, "Take semi-naked photos of yourself and then Amazon will tell you you're fat." Like, I'm not... Why would you pay money for that experience?

• 10:14Speaker 04

  So, the, the good news is, the images don't stay on Amazon servers. They get deleted within 12 hours.

• 10:20Nilay Patel?

  Is that good news? That, that's just some news.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  It's some news. It's better news than if they kept them, right? But I haven't gotten to the part that is a complete freak-out for me, which is, once you have your 3D scan of your body, and you can like, look all around and see the whole thing, there is a slider, a little, you know, slider thing on the screen, and you can slide your finger up and down on the slider, and it will add to or reduce the amount of body fat on the 3D representation of your body to show you what you would look like if you gained more body fat or lost body fat.

• 10:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, but then can I use that in a series of online avatars and profiles?

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  That would be valuable.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  Like, what are you supposed to infer from that?

• 11:04Nilay Patel?

  Supposed to incentivize you to like work out. You can see what you would look like if you lost some weight or you'd see if you look like if you bulked like.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  And maybe you like save a series of them over time. So you can see your, you know, your before and your after or something is the idea.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  I think there's an argument to be made that maybe in 2019, this would be received very differently. But in the context of this massive pandemic that we're living through right now, people's idea of like health and particularly this, this idea that like you should just take control of your health and the consumer, consumerization of healthcare and it's, it's all, it's all your fault. Uh, if something goes wrong is, is like increasingly sort of out of step with, with what we actually need to address in health right now.

• 11:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, again, my, maybe I'm just like an old guy. My sense of when or why anyone should send unclothed pictures of themselves to a corporation is just maybe a little bit more puritanical than the world. I, I'm still going with never. Like that's just never the value of that. Right? Like, I mean, I can see why you would build tools like this to give people more control. But what, what do we know about all these fitness trackers? They all need to provide some massive amount of value over the Apple Watch in order to break in.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  And like, so if this is the set of value that, if this is a set of things that Amazon thinks is more valuable than the watch, it's like, it's cheap, it's a little bit more gentle and has this other feature. I would still tell most people with an iPhone to buy an Apple Watch.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  The place where my mind immediately went and where a bunch of people in my mentions are, have gone is people with a body dysmorphic disorder, or people might have anorexia or some other self-image issue. Uh, the idea that you could like obsessively look at a 3D scan of your body and like reduce the amount of body fat on it digitally and just like have that be part of your exercise app or your fitness app is, uh, pretty troubling to me. I asked Amazon about this and they said that there's some safeguards in. It won't show dangerously low levels of body fat on the scans. It's not available to anybody that's under 18 years of age. And if you do like have low levels of body fat in your scan or whatever,

• 13:19Speaker 04

  they do start popping up warnings about the health implications of not having enough body fat. Nevertheless, it seems like that's like, that's the sort of thing that I just, I don't know. It's troubling. There are lots of examples of these like fitness tracking apps and fitness trackers getting misused by people who like have body issues.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think those are really, those are very, very valid concerns. But I think the thing I'm trying to get my head around is that those are not necessarily new concerns either. Because as I mentioned, there have been body scanning technologies available to consumers prior to this. And Liz Lopato from The Verge has actually done some really excellent reporting too on how these consumer wearables could contribute to body dysmorphia problems. I think my question is still around like the timing of it, like why now? And if Amazon was going to be, offer some real value, like I would love to see them include an SPO2 sensor. That's something that we really haven't seen done very well in a consumer wearable yet. And like, that's something that would actually be really valuable at this moment in time.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Or is it, I mean, look, we know based on our reporting experience that products are in the pipeline for like at least 18 to 24 months before something hits the market. So this has obviously been in the works for a while. But it might just, it just might have been more valuable if it had a different feature set at this point.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  It does have a temperature sensor, but I don't think it like works like in the moment. And there's a bunch of heart rate monitors, early heart rate monitors that worked like this where you couldn't, like you could just say, what's my heart rate right now, but it would like track it over time. So this thing tracks your temperature mostly when you sleep. And so when you wake up in the morning after it's gotten three days to see what your baseline is, you'll be able to see if your temperature was higher or lower than, you know, your normal. And so that might tell you that you might have a fever coming before you realized it or something.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Final feature, well, we're gonna skip labs, which is like their go experiment stuff. Actually, maybe we'll get to that, but final feature is called tone. When I saw this in the first screenshot of the app, like, oh, muscle tone. That's great. Now, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's a microphone and it listens to you all the time. And none of this ever gets uploaded anywhere, but periodically it will listen to your voice and it will send that voice over Bluetooth to your phone and then your phone will do a little processing on it. And it will tell you if you are positive or less positive, or you're high energy or you're low energy, or you sound frustrated or annoyed or happy or apologetic or whatever. And it will show you moments throughout the day when it thinks it knows what your emotional

• 15:52Speaker 04

  state was and like lets you know if you were like being a jerk to your family or not.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Why? Like, this sounds like someone at Amazon read like a PhD thesis, you know, and they like bought the research and they hired the researcher and they built this feature and they're like, that's what people want.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:12Nilay Patel?

  But like, what, like, what is the, one of the things about all these devices that I've long been confused about is at the end of the day, going back and like reviewing what happened that day from like a data perspective offers you almost no insight. Right? If you're like, if the thing is like, you were angry at noon, it's like, yeah, I, I definitely know.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  But what if you didn't? What if like, it turns out you that you didn't realize that your, your tone of voice was like accusatory or whatever at noon? And then you go back and like, what the hell happened at noon? And you're like, oh, I was, I was talking to so and so.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I would say, I would actually say that I have found it helpful to have historical data. Um, and coming from the perspective of a woman, one thing that you get asked a lot when you go to the doctors is when was your last period? And I'm like, oh, let me look that up. And then there's often like a lot of corresponding data that accompanies that. And if no one has talked about their period on the Vergecast before, I'm very happy to be the first person to do that right now. But, but yeah, like, I mean, there are things that, or you, you think about the last time you weren't feeling well, and maybe you had a doctor's appointment and then you look up your health app and you're like, oh yeah, and actually like my blood pressure was high that day or whatever it might be. Um, I do find that to be useful from a historical perspective. That said.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  But that time series is longer, right? That's what I mean. Right? Like the minute to minute of a day tracking, I just like, don't. Like I um, I u- I used to use a sleep tracker app. Now I just wake up in a panic at 7 a.m. on the dot. Like, I'm just like, what's gonna happen now?

• 17:46Nilay Patel?

  Just like, pure panic, awake. Uh, but I used to use, uh, Sleep Cycle on the iPhone and, you know, like the minute, the overnight data of like, you snored for 20 minutes is like useless. You get to six months of data and like, the weird correlations just show up, right? And I, so I do think that's valuable. I just think like this, like it telling you that your tone of voice is you, you were angry at 3 p.m. and to get that data, you have to have an open microphone all of the time.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  That seems completely backwards to me.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and also like, if anyone truly is wondering how I sound most days, I'm just gonna say stressed. Like, I don't need a wearable to tell me that. I'm like, we are living through stressful times.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Amazon is like, you had Zoom voice again. It's like, yeah, I know. I get it.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. I haven't, um, I haven't actually, I can't verify this. I had, I had one person DM me and say, I, I, that this person was a beta tester. This person said that, um, during the beta test, that you had to push the microphone to have a test and the thing only ever said that this person was angry. Just not.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  Maybe I was angry that I like, was beta testing this? I don't know, but like, nonstop angry. The thing that's, that people are talking to me about, about this tone thing is, it's one thing for, um, I don't know, me to have my gadget tell me, uh, you know, your tone is bad. Uh, it's quite another thing for somebody else to be told their tone is bad. Like, the, one of the things that happened, I was writing this story is people like, oh, it's tone policing. And it's like, ooh, it is, but the, the phrase tone policing and what it actually means is so like fraught for me to just like, throw that phrase into this gadget. It would have been like, That's what it is, but not really, but I can't do, and actually asked Amazon,

• 19:33Speaker 04

  what about people with different accents or different genders? And the response is it's a high priority for us. And I want to quote this, if you have an accent, you can use tone, but your results will likely be less accurate. Tone was modeled on American English, but it's only day one and will continue to improve.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Oh, they threw out the day one line.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, they, Amazon also always capitalizes the D in day one, which

• 19:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  Heavy sigh.

• 19:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's early days for Google and it's always day one for Amazon.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  Amazon, yeah.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  What is the purpose? Like, what's the, what's the thing you're supposed to learn?

• 20:06Speaker 04

  So here is my thesis. Imagine you're like a dad, right? And you know, you need to go to the gym, but you know what? Honestly, you're not gonna, and like you could get a fitness band, but it's just going to make you feel bad because you like, aren't like actually going out and hardcore exercising. You just want to be a little bit more active and you know, you should sleep better, but whatever. And, you know, you're, you're starting to get a little bit of a gut and maybe it'd be a little bit helpful to like, you know, get a little motivation to get rid of it.

• 20:36Nilay Patel?

  I feel attacked. This is bad.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Maybe you're yelling at your kids and like, you don't know it. Cause like, you're like, kind of, maybe you're just stressed out and like, it would be helpful for something to tell you if you're like, being kind of mean to your kids. Like, I feel like this thing was just like, it's like the ideal device for like a dad and a nightmare for like, a teenage woman, right? Like that's, that's what, that's how I see this.

• 21:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like all the overstressed Amazon executives are like, that's what I need.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Sounds like, from the way Dieter wrote about it too, that it's also designed to be a little bit more of a passive device because it doesn't have, doesn't have GPS, it doesn't have wifi. It didn't have something, well, as you said, it's, has the microphones that are listening.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  You can mute the microphone. The microphone doesn't record anything other than snippets of your voice. It tries to only listen for you and it deletes those things right away. So like, you don't interact with the thing. There's no display. It's just like.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  There's no screen. You don't set it into like exercise mode. Like, you're not like, I'm cycling now.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  No, you've got to do that in the app. And like, you can't even like, like, I don't know, triple tap the button to be like, it's time to go use a rower or whatever.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's a totally passive tracker. And I think that the, yeah, the, the target audience you're describing is probably, probably somewhat accurate.

• 21:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, you know, there's like a, in the early days of Fitbits, I had a bunch of friends who would wear a regular watch and a Fitbit on like different wrists. And all of that has faded away as people got smartwatches. I always think about it in the same framework as the first Apple Watch, which was a mess. And like, Apple knew it and they've rebooted the product like significantly. But it didn't do very much or anything very well for the amount of care that you had to give it. Like, just beyond like charging it and wearing it on your wrist all the time, like, it was messy and hard to use. And like, do you remember that the, just like the home screen interface was like 15 different swipes to lead to 15 different navigation paths?

• 22:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  And so the, like, there was not value there, but it had notifications from iMessage, and it had some rudimentary health tracking stuff. And that value was like, very high. And then Apple refined the product down to be just those things in one generation. And now they've been slowly layering in, there's an App Store that nobody uses. There's some other stuff it can do.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Right. There's GPS, there's waterproofing, there's EKG.

• 22:56Nilay Patel?

  Right. But that core exchange of why are you going to strap this battery to your wrist and then worry about the life of that battery?

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  And like, know about how to use this computer too.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  The core exchange has always been notifications and health stuff. And so if you come in and all you have is health stuff, you have to find a target market of people who want your specific version of it without the other massive value of having a computer on your wrist.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  So the battery lasts a week. So that's helpful. It's not demanding of you, other than like, you gotta wear it. And if you want, you can share your health records with, you know, your Cerner or whatever compatible electronic record system. Or you could like take part in like the John Hancock Life Insurance Wellness Program or something and get, you know, weird discounts on stuff. So it's possible that like, the motivation here is, you get like ambient information on how you can improve your lifestyle. You like start changing your habits because you take part in these lab challenges. And you get, I don't know, a discount on your life insurance.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  So Amazon is positioning it in a way that it's not, it positions its other products effectively, which is, we're going to promise you a certain level of convenience. And at the same time, we're going to have a tremendous amount of data on you. And it might be kind of rudimentary to start, but it's going to improve. And you have to figure out, and I'm going to use this word, my coworker Sydney from Wired used this word in our Gadget Lab podcast taping. You have to figure out the calculus that works for you. And that calculus is how much convenience you are willing to trade for potentially your, the erosion of your own privacy. And that's like, that's kind of what, that's kind of, it's like what a lot of things are, right? Like when you go to the Amazon website now, it is actually not a great consumer experience.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  And we've seen Amazon's, you know, model of convenience sort of threatened in the time of the pandemic, right? With like delivery times changing and everything else. But like you still have to make that calculus, whether it's worth it to you to like use Amazon as a service. And we've seen that with some other products that have come out. We certainly see it with like Alexa and the Echo. And so this like wearable is like, is also somewhat emblematic of that.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  All of which, by the way, this thing is 100 bucks. It's like 65 bucks for an intro program and it's four bucks a month. Like it's a subscription.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  There's a subscription fee?

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Yay, subscription.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  That's it. And let's move on. There's another, I can't, I don't even want to talk about this anymore. Don't buy this.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  I want to talk about this the whole show.

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's another, there's a Fitbit.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, what, they, they added a temperature sensor on it and then it can like, tell you to meditate, tell you to like, stop being so stressed and breathe. That's, otherwise it's a Fitbit.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Oh my goodness, for the umpteenth time, I do not need these wearables to tell me I'm stressed. I know.

• 25:43Nilay Patel?

  I do think that, I mean, Lauren, to your point, obviously the product ramps here are very long, right? But the opportunity to somehow engage with the COVID testing, tracing, it's all sitting here for these companies. You want to get people to drop their Apple watches or their Samsung watches for your thing? Just like, right, that, uh, that pulse SPO2, right? Pulseox, is that what that is? Just add that sensor and then people will be like, yes, this is valuable in this time for me. And like, we just haven't seen it. There's like some glimmers of it out there, but all these products seem like they're just from a different, and they are, but they just seem like they're from a different time with different priorities.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, the way that researchers are sort of triangulating this data right now, and Fitbit is part of a large research program through scripts, and I know that other trackers like Aura, the Aura Ring are also a part of these, these research projects right now, is that they're taking, researchers are taking all of the other data that they gather, right, like skin temperature, heart rate and things like that, and sort of triangulating it to say like, to grab those biomarkers and say there was some kind of variation right now in this data, which could point to X, which could point to X, which could mean that you have COVID. But it's still these steps away from actually identifying, I think, some of the key metrics that would indicate that you're, you're very, very sick. But they're working on it, and I actually do think the hardware is, it's going to get there.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. My, my big question with the, like, Google's still like waiting around to, to get permission to finish the deal to buy Fitbit. And so like, where, are they just gonna like keep making Fitbits? Are they gonna like keep the software? Like, you know, a Fitbit, I don't know how long people realistically expect one of these things to last. And I'm sure it'll be supported even if Google gets the acquisition or whatever. But it's just like, what's the plan here? Is this the last Fitbit before the Google acquisition? I don't know. It's weird.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  I think, I think Google's just generally happy that Amazon introduced a thing to make it seem like, look at all this competition. Of course you can buy it.

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  Do they have a plan beyond that? Like, who knows? All right, we've talked a lot about wearables. There is lots of other hardware to talk about, but we gotta take a break. We'll come back and then Dieter's gonna tell us all about his new gaming laptop.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm very excited about this. We'll be right back.

• 28:08Speaker 05

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

• 28:37Speaker 06

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• 28:43Speaker 05

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• 28:46Speaker 06

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• 29:02Speaker 06

  Hi, I, uh... Let's get you a basket.

• 29:08Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, you've got a very special phone that you're only allowed to talk about half of.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we have, uh, they have sent out, Microsoft's sent out the review units for the Microsoft Duo Android phone. Uh, I got one. I got mine late because it took the courier a long time to show up.

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  They did that on purpose for you.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  That was so great. It's just the best. And, uh, the rules of, uh, Microsoft's embargo is that I can tell you whatever you want to hear from the experience of looking at and, I don't know, using this thing with the screen off and all of the screen on information has to come at the embargo time, you know, when, when reviews are allowed to be published, which will be, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say what the embargo time is, but I can tell you that like the thing, we all know that the thing is getting released on September 10th, so.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  And why do they want, why do they want this to be screen off so far?

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Well, that's a really interesting question. It's, it's possible that there's something that they would, they would rather have people talking about how nice the hardware is for two weeks than anything else. That's a possibility. It could be they just, they, they know that the fold two is, uh, out in the world and there's going to be a big announcement from Samsung, so they want some kind of information out there. Um, there's lots of, lots of possibilities and I, you would, you know, you'd have to ask Microsoft.

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  So I've seen it a lot of these. That's the other thing that is important, which I think is telling in a variety of ways.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  My very fancy box said it was like one of the first 50, and I guarantee you there's more than 50 of these in the world.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  My colleague Julian has one too.

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  There you go. Do you think some people got a box that's like one of the first 100?

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Oh, that's so dark.

• 30:42Nilay Patel?

  They just segmented it. Like, some people got one of the first 10.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  And like, you're just in ways. Well, what is it? What's it like?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Uh, when it's closed, it is very thin. It's really not that much thicker than like a smartphone with a camera bump. If you like count the camera bump and put it across the whole thing. It is very wide. Like, you can hold it in one hand, pretty much, especially if like you open it up and there's bezels and you can like grab it by the bezel. But if you have the thing folded in half,

• 31:11Speaker 04

  it's super wide. And so like imagining, usually, you know, phones are relatively narrow and so you scroll, but like having it be wider is weird. The hinge feels great. You know, it feels like the same friction, I don't know, resistance all the way through the turn. It came with plastic bumpers. Why? I don't know. I mean, I imagine there's gonna be hard to find cases, so Microsoft felt like they had to include something. Google did the same thing with the fold. Part of me is a little tiny bit worried they included plastic bumpers because they know that like people are gonna be clacking them shut and maybe that'll be a problem. I don't know. It's glass in the front and the back. I know that like some people were a little bit surprised with that because it looks so like gray and metal. In photos, you don't realize it's glass, but it's glass.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  You know, it's, um, it's very thin. It's very elegant. It's very unclear to me if, um, this is the shape of thing that I want or not.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Does it fit in your back pocket?

• 32:07Speaker 04

  It fits better in my back pocket than it does in my front pocket because it is so wide. It feels sort of weird in my front pocket, but it's like, it's like back pocket sized. Is this thing safe to sit on?

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  I know you can't talk about the screen on experience, but notably, there's no screen on the front.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  Or the outside, or whatever.

• 32:27Nilay Patel?

  The outside.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  So that feels safe to talk about because there's no screen at all. See what I'm getting at? How, what's the vibe of being done with it? The thing I'm most excited about this phone is that you can be done with it. You can close it and it goes away and it's a little notebook.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I guess I have to like use it to tell you what it feels like to stop using it. But it is, it's nice to like just close.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  I really tried to lawyer my way into that one.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Set it on the table.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  One thing I am curious about is like, I'll tell you what, trying to like open it up one handed is a scary nightmare. You cannot do it one handed. You really can't. And like, you think you'd like maybe wedge a finger in there and like flip it out or whatever? Nope, it's two hands, which makes me wonder if that's like annoying enough where if you just want to check something quick and you want to be able to use it one handed, if I'm going to start like having it open all the way 360 so that the screen's on both sides and start using the phone that way? You know what I mean? And then like having my pocket with both screens exposed, like.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  So you can see the time.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  That seems more dangerous, but it also seems like it'd be a hell of a lot more convenient if I just want to pull the thing out and check a text message.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  But your regular phone is in your pocket with the screen exposed all the time.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  Right, but now there's two screens exposed, so.

• 33:43Nilay Patel?

  But that's why you have plastic bumpers.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  Have you been using the pen at all?

• 33:49Speaker 04

  I, I can't say if I have or not, given the on-screen experience, but it is compatible with.

• 33:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Surface pen. I think that's one of the reasons it's so expensive is they like needed to like have a screen that works with like the traditional surface pens. I really think this thing costs too much.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, already?

• 34:07Speaker 04

  We talked about that before, but it's like 1,400 bucks. Like, man, that's a lot.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, the move here, if people have questions about the Duo, they should tweet at you, at Backlon. And then we can address those questions in the review for the screen on experience. You're just, you're taunting me with this thing.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  I don't know what to tell you.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  The problem that I have is that if we weren't on the podcast, I could just ask you about what the software's like, but we're on the, this is horrible. So we're just going to wrap this up.

• 34:37Nilay Patel?

  That's it for the Vergecast, everybody.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Oh, I really missed you guys. You're such a great duo.

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  That was a burn. I just want to be honest with everybody. Okay, this is in context. You mentioned the fold. The Galaxy Z Fold 2 is coming. You are both excellent product reviewers. I sometimes pretend to be a product reviewer. I watched this video, this Chinese YouTube video that's a review of the Z Fold 2. And I kind of realized like, maybe we shouldn't make videos with the words in them. Just like, obviously I don't speak or understand Chinese. But like, I got so much out of this reviewer's like tone and inflection. And just like seeing him use the thing. I was like, why do I talk in reviews at all?

• 35:24Speaker 04

  You just have to make noises. Oh, you know what? Our review should just be music. And then it will be the chart showing the Halos reading of our emotional state.

• 35:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  And it'll just be a graph of our emotional state overlaid over B-roll of the gadget.

• 35:40Nilay Patel?

  That's what everybody wants. Everybody wants to watch a graph of our emotions during a review. The point here is the Z Fold 2 isn't out, but there is a review in, from a Chinese YouTuber that you can go watch right now. There's a link on the site. Watching this, here's the two things I noticed. The design seems just far superior.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Superior to the prior Fold. Okay.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 36:02Nilay Patel?

  The big screen on the front seems like a massive improvement. The hardware design itself is refined. It's a little less squared off. It's a little smoother. The not having the camera indentation on the screen, having the hole punch camera, like, just big improvements to sort of the user experience, the human feeling of the device. Just from watching a regular person flip it around and use it. Everything else seems like the same deal to me. Same set of software problems, same set of Samsung stuff happening. At one point, this reviewer puts it in tent mode and then like has Google Maps running. While it's like on the dashboard of his car. And it's like, I'm not going to use my $2,000 delicate phone propped up on the dash of my car to navigate.

• 36:46Nilay Patel?

  But does that seem like a good idea? It just doesn't seem like where I'd want to put my phone. Yeah. So that, that to me is like, the context of all these flippy phones is you have to develop a killer use case for them, which is even harder when you're at home. Lauren, I think you, you've written about this several times, like, we're just at home. The sale of so many of these gadgets is like harder than ever.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Right. And it's opened the window for a lot of other technologies. I mean, there's a shortage of Chromebooks right now and people are asking all the time what monitor they should get for working from home. And they're investing in speakers for home. And there's a lot of opportunity there for the consumer electronics market. But yeah, the entire pitch we've heard over the past two years of these foldable devices is like for people on the go. When you're on the go, when you need something that you can, you can like use in your pocket to send a text. And then when you get on the plane, you unfold it in the, you know, in the tray and you watch a movie on it, or you're going to bed at night and you don't want to talk on the phone anymore, but you want to watch something on it like it's a tablet or to use it as a reading device, or you get to your office and you dock it.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  And it's like a second screen. All of these use cases, like they've totally changed and they've changed for the foreseeable future. And so these companies, particularly Microsoft, had to like change its messaging around like, like Panos, you know, was saying like, and you guys were in the briefing too, like, yeah, I love it. Like when I, you know, I take it from my desk to the couch to the patio. It was such a different message from even just like six months ago. Like, wow, we're no longer road warriors.

• 38:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The thing that kept, that grabs me is for, I used to, ages ago, in the Engadget era, like I used to work from home, but I only ever worked from home. Then I moved to New York and I started going to the office. Now we're all at home again. And the thing that I remember that like just an instant realization memory was, oh, I used to like have a room that I worked in and then I would leave that room and not work anymore. And now I just like have a phone and the work can chase me all over the house. So I have to like leave the thing. So I'm done with work.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:53Nilay Patel?

  And like, I'm going to take my flippy Microsoft computer from the deck to the patio delivery. It's like, no, that's the opposite of the thing I wanted. It's like very much the opposite of how I want this experience to be. I want to leave my gigantic computer in this room, close the lid, walk away and be like, I'm done with work now. And I think a lot of people experiencing work from home, they've arrived over the course of these last few months at that realization.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  All of the digital wellbeing, time well spent, screen time features are actually really bad for most people at just turning off the work stuff. Like unless you are like working a massive corporation that has big metal managing all of its devices and they've got all the work stuff in its own little protected silo on your phone, you know, in Knox or the BlackBerry Zone or whatever.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  BlackBerry Zone?

• 39:44Speaker 04

  It's a thing. I forget what it's called.

• 39:46Nilay Patel?

  It's called Zone?

• 39:47Speaker 04

  It's like a thing. It's like the apps are in the workspace and they're like encrypted.

• 39:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just don't think it's called the BlackBerry Zone.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Well, maybe it should be because there is a new BlackBerry coming. Emotions about that. Where was I going? Oh, it's hard to turn the stuff off, right? It's hard. You gotta like, remember like, turn off these notifications and like, turn off that notification. There should just be a toggle. It's like, turn work off and it like, runs through a script of like, turning off a bunch of the stuff that would normally be incoming from work. And because everybody uses different apps and different work apps, it's really hard to enable that sort of thing. To the effect of like, do people really want a big, like the big foldable screen at home? Like, I have two thoughts about that. One, nobody cared about the Note 20 Ultra relative to previous big Notes. And I think that's part of it's just really expensive. And then my like, my counter thought is, like, the use case

• 40:37Speaker 04

  of having a big foldable screen is having a big screen. And I'm, I, ever since like, everybody in the world kind of got head faked by making fun of the very, very, very early versions of the Note, and then it turns out, oh wait, no, everybody just wants a big screen. I'm a little bit hesitant to just dismiss things like the Galaxy Fold out of hand because if they can find a way to make the thing a reasonable price someday, then it may be that people want a big screen so badly, they're willing to deal with all of the compromises that go with it.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  That's a great point, but I will also say too that there is the camera and the devices that we're talking about, particularly the Galaxy Fold, the Galaxy Z Fold and the Duo, don't really have great camera experiences. So at some point, going back to the calculus, you're gonna have to make the calculus of whether or not you want a screen that unfurls into a much larger screen, or if you want something you can just whip out of your pocket super quickly, press a side button and take a really good photo.

• 41:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, my perspective on the big screen thing is, I think you want a big screen, but you want the screen to get smaller. And so I've always thought that the Razr, the Z Flip, that's like, that seems much more likely to work itself out. Like, that's the thing that you want. You want a regular sized phone, but it actually gets smaller, versus you have a pretty big phone and it gets even bigger, and then the software of it being even bigger is just kind of confusing and weird.

• 42:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, man. Will Android ever be good on big screens, on tablet sized screens? That's like the question. Will they ever figure it out?

• 42:15Nilay Patel?

  And I think part of the reason that Google and Microsoft are kind of like doing the Surface Duo together in a way that seems much happier than you would expect, is Google's like, well, we didn't figure it out. Maybe they can.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  Android has historically always been bad on tablets, but what if it's Android on two very little tablets that are attached to each other on a hinge?

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, what if, like, what if Microsoft Word on the Surface Duo turns out to be the thing, right? What if the only way to use Excel, the way that power users want to use Excel, is on a folding Android phone? Does that sound like a killer app? To me, it does not. Are there like, an army of wealthy accountants out there who are like, yes?

• 43:06Nilay Patel?

  Maybe. And I like, but the idea that Microsoft can actually build complete software experiences that take advantage of a new form factor UI paradigm. Well, they can in a way that Google has not been able to get its kind of other army of software developers to try. And that's like an opportunity. I think that's largely why Microsoft's first Android phone is not a phone, right? It's, or well, Panus will tell you it's not a phone, but it's a new form factor. Because I think the race is to get to that new form factor.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  And then what is the, what comes after that? Like, is the after that, then Microsoft and Google work together to make a Microsoft Pixel C, which is like effectively a Surface tablet with Android? Like, I wonder where it goes after that?

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that that middle zone is real tough, right? They've got the little Surface. I mean, if this thing goes off and it works, then the real question is between the laptop and the phone, what operating systems are going to live there? I think that's where that fight gets a lot dicier. But first, they have to make it clear that productivity on Android and the way that Microsoft wants it to be productive is even possible or a good idea. Right. We're very far from that. I mean, we'll use the Duo and C, but Android is very far from that. And like the Chrome OS Android mashup didn't work out like at all. At all. And you've got like a little Surface Go, right?

• 44:34Speaker 03

  I have a Surface Go here. I have a Surface Go 2, but I really haven't used it much, to be honest.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because you're a house with your real laptop.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Right. That's exactly right. And then, and then I like to say now that our lives are like, are structured by the different sized screens we use. Like, you wake up to a 5.5 to 6 inch screen, and then you, and then you graduate to a 13 inch screen or 15 inch screen for the day, or maybe a monitor. And then, and then like your, your leisure time is like the 50 inch screen, which is your TV. And then you have like one more at night that you're like, what am I going to use? And for me, that's the 10 inch, or I guess it's the 11 inch iPad. So like, the Surface Go would probably fit somewhere into that, that structure of the day for me. And I'm like, well, I don't want to use a pen and use Microsoft software at that time of night. I want to watch Netflix, you know?

• 45:26Speaker 03

  I'm not doing spreadsheets at that point.

• 45:28Nilay Patel?

  Man, can you imagine? Like if Microsoft, we're going to talk about TikTok eventually, but if Microsoft buys TikTok and that's the cell of like all of their hardware is like the best TikTok device. Some more phones talk about before we get to that. There's a picture of the Pixel 5 out there.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  I haven't seen it. What does it look like?

• 45:43Speaker 04

  It looks like a Pixel 4A. It, it, it looks like a plastic Pixel, like with a fingerprint sensor on the back and the whole deal. The specs have like gotten better over time in terms of the rumors. So it looks like it's going to have a good enough battery, good enough RAM. Getting rid of their face unlock is like, man, I don't even know how to feel about that. It's very strange. I will say that in the pandemic, the phone that I use more than anything else is actually a Samsung Galaxy S20 because it has a fingerprint sensor and it's not a hassle to unlock. If I had an iPhone SE around, it would probably be that. So maybe they decided to do that, but I kind of doubt it. They, they had to have made this decision a while ago. So to me, it's like when you start adding on the stuff you expect from a high-end Pixel.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  So higher refresh rate screen, we're expecting it to be the exact same camera with, by the way, the same camera sensor that they've used since, I think the Pixel 2?

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  Like, yeah.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  That's the rumor, which is ridiculous. No face unlock. The processor will be like medium faster, maybe not technically fast, as fast in the benchmarks as the Pixel 4. Like, well, how much should that cost? Cause you can get a OnePlus 8 for like 700, 800 bucks. You can get a Galaxy S10 on sale or refurbished for probably 600 bucks. You can get a Pixel 4A, which is excellent for 350 bucks. So how much Google thinks that they can get for this Pixel 5, which for all intents and purposes is like a mid-range phone with a good camera that doesn't have quite as nice specs as other mid-range phones with not quite as good cameras is, um, I don't know.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  That's, that's going to be exciting to see.

• 47:23Nilay Patel?

  What if they just cancel the Pixel as a phone and just sell it as a camera?

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  I mean.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  Really? Like, I mean, are you asking that like, like, should we actually map that out?

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, I was just looking at the, um, the newer Canon cameras that can share directly to Google Photos, which is very interesting to me. It's like, I'm a Nikon person, but would I switch for that? Maybe I would. But like, what if they just said, this is actually just a camera with a cell connection? And like, carry this instead of whatever mid-range smartphone you have, and you'll take really excellent photos, and it'll be integrated with Google Photos. Like, wouldn't that be like, just a more interesting product for them to release at this time versus another sort of weird Pixel phone?

• 48:04Speaker 03

  That's pretty cool.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  They tried that. They, it was the, the, the clip, the clips.

• 48:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that thing was so weird.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  It was like automated and the photos weren't that great.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Samsung tried it. There was the Galaxy camera, which was literally just like a, a mid-range point and shoot with an Android phone slap on the back of it.

• 48:20Nilay Patel?

  That was like the ultimate in Samsung, like, two engineers from like different parts of the company like ran into each other in the kitchen and they were like...

• 48:28Speaker 04

  And they're, they were both carrying their, their, their projects and like, they ran each other, they flew up into the air, and they landed on the ground in a pile. They're like, oh my God, what if we did this?

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  There was a, uh, there was a story ages, ages, ages ago, um, when the Motorola Rocker came out, the like Motorola iPod phone, that like Steve Jobs screwed Motorola because they announced that phone and like, minutes later, he announced the iPod Nano. This is ancient history, but like, there was definitely a story at the time that was like, a much better version of the Rocker is to buy an iPod Nano and just tape it to the back of a Motorola Razr. And like, you would just like, get a better product. And like, that was the Samsung phone. I'm saying, what if Google engineers it? To like, they're like, this is the coolest camera you can get.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Just think of all of like the Franken gadgets we're missing out on right now because engineers are not running into each other in kitchens at Google's campus.

• 49:21Nilay Patel?

  I gotta start doing some just like, uh, roundtable zooms with various engineers from companies to seed horrible ideas.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  We could have a TikTok alarm clock.

• 49:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God, I'm dying.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  Wake up to a different, like viral TikTok every morning?

• 49:35Nilay Patel?

  That would be, uh, great, actually. Cause you would just hear the sound over and over again. You'd be like, I need this to stop.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  I think the question for Google is how can they put out a phone that's differentiated? The last three of them have been mid-range forgettable phones. And as, if the rumors are true, as you're saying, like, the camera is not getting better. It's getting different, but the camera hardware is the same. The technique is the same. They're... Making different looks out of the algorithm, which is interesting. Yeah, but they're like, they're, they're perish, they're, they're tiny differences. I don't think that, that it's evolving as much as we'd like to give them credit for. And, and then the video, I mean, we, speaking of TikTok, like we live in a video world now and that video is not getting any better. Yep.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  How much would you pay for a device like that, Neilie?

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  Like a sick Google camera with great 4K video that.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Well, like a, like a Google camera that has, yeah, great 4K video, takes great still photos, uploads immediately to Google, um, Google Photos. And let's say it has like the Titan M security chip. So it keeps all of your, your multimedia data secure or whatever it might be. And any biometrics you use to log on. I'm like, that's pretty much it. You're not like playing games on it. You're not answering emails on it.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like I would happily pay like $500 for that thing. And that's like high, but I have a kid, right? Like we, we take so many photos of our kid that we have maxed out our first 20,000 image. Google Smart Photo Library, like. What? Yeah. We had to like start a new one. It was like very funny. Oh my God. Dave Lee from Google Photos was tweeting me. He's like, we gotta get rid of that element. And I was like, you do. And I was like, this is great.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, like we take, once you're in that zone where you're just like taking a ton of photos, like having a device that's more dedicated is great. Especially if it has slightly better image quality than your phone. And so Google can get there. The only reason I propose it, and maybe that's a total dud of a product, but at least it's not another mid-range pixel that no one's going to buy. You know what I mean? Like, at least it's a different attempt to get Google into your pocket in a way that is smart.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  What if they just took it like one step further and made it the creator's phone? So you had like a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack so that you could plug in accept audio accessories. It did run Instagram, so you could upload things directly. It ran Instagram, TikTok, like all the major platforms. Of course there would be like an easy YouTube integration because Google YouTube. And what if it, yeah, what if that's how they marketed it?

• 52:00Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we've just walked ourselves all the way back to just having a Android phone.

• 52:05Nilay Patel?

  Basically described a Galaxy S20, like we're just, we're there. And all the creators are using iPhones anyway, because that's right. Like, I just think that how are you going to break into this market and differentiate yourself? And if all you really have is your camera. Because it's still all they really have. And a software experience that some people think is better, but like on them. Like for most people, not having a Samsung browser and a Google browser is not a reason to buy a phone. That's what we talk about because we're annoyed all the time, but like, whatever. They're clearly choosing Samsung phones in the market. Maybe you just stop, stop saying it is the thing that it is and start saying it's something else and just see what happens.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  So here's what I want Google to do. Just start, just, just call them nexus's again. Don't front like they are like meant to sell in big numbers. Don't front like you're going to compete with Samsung. The next time we talk to one of their executives and be like, hey, you said in five years it would be a market success. They'll be like, yeah, nope, it's never going to be a market success, but we're going to keep making them because like it's good to have like an exemplary phone. Like if they just admitted, we just want to make a nice Android phone that we want to use. That's exemplary to the market and that we can use to develop Android on. And because we're nice, we'll sell it to you if you want one. They just did that, lowered expectations radically. Then there would be like a group of people who like bought it because they like having that phone and that experience and it feels cool.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  And nobody would feel bad about it ever again.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  Yes, they, they create a scarcity around it, basically.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  And say like, it's for these like special use cases.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. The problem is they spent a billion dollars or $3 billion, however much they spent on HTC. Which is for Google's like, you know, pocket money.

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, whatever.

• 53:48Speaker 04

  They did do that.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  In an effort to make this better. All right. Once again, the Veritas is devolved and just us complaining about the Pixel. There are two more phones I want to talk about. There's a Sony Xperia 5 2, which is a horrible name. 120 hertz display and a headphone jack. That's honestly the only reason I'm going to bring it up. God bless them. And then the Asus Zenfone 7 with the flippy camera. I'm just proud of them for competing in the camera lens wars. Now the flippy camera has three, three cameras.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  Should we talk about this LG Wing? Oh my god.

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  It's on the list, but it's like the best phone of the week.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  What is it? Tell me, tell me.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  So it's a phone, like just imagine a phone. And then imagine the front of the phone, you rotate it, but the back of the phone stays. So I'm holding it horizontally and then the front of the phone, you rotate vertically, but the back stays horizontal so that there's a vertical phone in front of you. And then there's a little bit of a screen sticking out to the side, like a wing, not two wings, just like a wing and you just get like a little bit of an extra display there. Like you've seen like, it's like vertical sliders, right? Where like you slide the phone up and there's a keyboard underneath. There's even been vertical sliders, like you slide the phone up and there's like more display underneath. This is like, you just rotate it and a screen like sticks out the side.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Oh my god, I'm looking, Neil, I just slacked it to me. This is incredible. And it's actually being used in this video as a GPS device, like an in-dash GPS device, which is pretty much like what it looks like. It looks, it looks that clunky.

• 55:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:15Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it does look that clunky. It's great. I'm here for hardware innovation and phones. We got flippy phones, we got foldy phones, we got swiveling phones. We got phones with flippy camera lenses. Let's have it, people.

• 55:28Speaker 04

  We, we spent 20 minutes talking about the Duo. LG makes a phone right now that you can go buy with a case that has a second screen on it with a big, you know, gap in the middle. It's the LG Velvet, pretty fine. And then you put the second screen on it and the experience of like trying to deal with second screen is pretty not fine, but you can do it. It's there for you.

• 55:48Nilay Patel?

  All right. Go look at the LG Wing and just imagine a world in which we are constantly switching for phone form factors and the software worked. There's a big asterisk and the software worked and we could live in that world.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  And there's something to be said too about that explicit delineation between screens. Right? Which is like what the Duo has to a point, but like this LG phone, I'm looking at it right now and there is just no, there's, there's no fluidity to this. There's no expectation of fluidity. It's just like you have two screens smacked against each other in perpendicular format.

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  We made a phone a T shape. Is that what you want? I love it. Lauren, the next time you come back to the show, I expect you to be using an LG Wing. Okay, I wanna, we gotta take a break and come back, but before I do that, we have to talk about Flight Simulator. And Dieter, you, I promised them that we talk about this gaming laptop you bought, so just walk me through your situation.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  I bought, I bought, I'm sold, I've sold my, I'm in the process of selling my Surface Pro X, because I don't need an LTE-enabled, long battery life, ARM-based Windows computer. Maybe nobody does.

• 56:53Speaker 04

  I bought the laptop that Monica Chin, our excellent laptop reviewer, recommended, which is the Asus ROG Zephyrus 14. Got a 1080p screen with a pretty good refresh rate on it. It does not have a webcam, which is delightful. And I am gonna start playing PC games again. It's been a super long time for me. So if you have recommendations of what games to play, I will put them on my list. I will tell you that the very top of my list is all of the Half-Life games, because True Story never played them.

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  Huh.

• 57:25Speaker 04

  So yeah, I'm really excited about it. I'm also excited because I want to start participating in some of these viral moments that are happening with games now. So there's Microsoft Flight Simulator, where everyone's playing it, they're going around, they're taking screenshots, they're taking little videos. It's really easy to take videos and screenshots off of games now. They're on Twitch, they're finding all sorts of weird things, like towers that reach into space because somebody had a typo in some database somewhere. People flew into the hurricane because they're compatible with real-time weather data, which is amazing. And I'm also just gonna play the hell out of Fall Guys. Have you guys been watching any of the Fall Guys stuff?

• 58:01Nilay Patel?

  Yes. I mean, I have a PS4, so I'm ready to do it. I just haven't done it yet, but I've been watching video after video of this game. It seems amazing.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  It is incredible. I'm so, like, the fact that we can just have, I don't know, like, it's like, these games are, it's so much easier to share and spread little clips of them and to get a little snippet of joy out of a video game that doesn't require you to watch a four-hour Twitch stream or be super into gaming. Like, I could never play Fall Guys for the rest of my life, but still love that game and get a ton of joy out of it just from watching little clips of other people having their little goon get knocked off of a thing in the, you know, weird... Version of the world that is Fall Guys.

• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  This is how I feel about Fortnite. I'm never gonna be good at Fortnite, but I thoroughly enjoy watching other people play Fortnite.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  I'm really not gaming at all these days, guys, or ever for that matter, but I do appreciate games as an art form and I appreciate your enthusiasm for them.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  Well, you don't need to be a gamer. That's the whole point. Like you can go look at like the weird stuff that's happening in Microsoft Flight Simulator and like it makes your life better. It makes you happy. I don't know. I love it.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  I mean, the clips I've seen shared on social are pretty cool.

• 59:11Nilay Patel?

  The, the flight simulator thing, does your new laptop play Flight Simulator?

• 59:14Speaker 04

  Uh, it better or I'll be very unhappy.

• 59:17Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the Flight Simulator one to me is super interesting, right? Because the, the, the, it'll eventually come out on Xbox, but right now the barrier to entry to Flight Simulator is like pretty high, right? You need a power hole PC, you need a fast connection. I mean, how is anybody playing it without flight controls? Like we, we had a story last week that like flight control accessories, the rattle, the rudders, the joysticks, whatever are selling out because so many people are playing fights. Like, that's crazy. If you're a company and you make like rudder pedals for a PC, you're never like, oh man, they're flying off the shelves, but like this is your time. And like, that's like, that, that barrier to entry is very high. Like, most people cannot play a flight simulator until it comes to Xbox and then everyone will.

• 1:00:02Nilay Patel?

  But right now there's all this stuff happening in this virtual environment and you're sharing out of it. It's like a window into it. There was a thread of like errors saying like, there's, the game's amazing and all this stuff, but the errors are hilarious. Like they're air conditioning units on the top of the leaning tower of pizza. Which is like, just the funniest thing to look at and to see and like that little, that interface between what some people are able to do and share out to the internet. What everyone's able to experience to me is super interesting. All right. Now maybe I'm gonna buy a gaming laptop.

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  You should. I recommend it.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, let me know if it plays Flight Simulator. Well, I'll update everybody next week. The amount of dumb things I'm willing to buy right now is way higher than you think. Uh, it's just retail therapy. So we're gonna get through it. All right. We're gonna take a break. We, we have a little bit of TikTok drama, a little bit of epic drama to talk about. We'll be right back.

• 1:00:56Speaker 05

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• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  Lauren, before we talk about this other stuff, tell us about your new podcast.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for bringing it up. So I have a new podcast for Wired. It's our new flagship show and it's called Get Wired. We launched it late July, so we're about six episodes in and it's been really, really fun so far. It's weekly. It runs on Monday mornings and topics so far have really run the gamut. Our very first episode was about the neighborhood watch app, Citizen, and in particular, we kind of went into the deep into the mind of a 12-year-old crime chaser on the app, which was, which was pretty fun and fascinating. We've talked about the ways in which animal rights activists are using different kinds of technology, including VR, to expose some of the abuses going on inside of factory farms. We had an interview with Bill Gates. We're going to be talking about the back to school fiasco in the United States.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  So yeah, we're just trying to highlight, I guess, the best of Wired stories in audio form.

• 1:02:51Nilay Patel?

  And so you're talking like, I mean, obviously you talked to Gates, but you're obviously talking to like Wired reporters and building out what they're doing.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I would say that occasionally we do plan to do high-profile interviews, such as the Bill Gates interview, which was conducted by Wired editor-at-large Stephen Levy. But it's not, I mean, the goal of it was not to launch an interview podcast. The goal was to find really compelling stories that have rich audio elements and then find ways to tell those stories. But as you guys know from producing lots of things, podcasts, videos in particular at The Verge, like, production takes a lot, right? And sometimes as you're reporting a story, you're not necessarily getting like that audio or that video right off the cuff. Like, you have to go back and figure out ways to tell stories through those mediums.

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  So, most of the show is us like talking to fellow Wired reporters and saying like, "Tell us about this story you reported out," and then using that audio to illustrate the story.

• 1:03:50Speaker 04

  So like, a really good example is the, you had to run a shoot of the people, the activists that go and like invade like factory farms. And you're talking to the reporter and you like just played a short clip of the, this horrific thing that was happening to the animals at the farm. But if it were just on the website, I probably wouldn't have clicked play. If it were, you know, I don't know, on a video or something, I would have skipped over it or something. But like, hearing it in the course of the conversation felt like way more visceral than it otherwise would have. So that worked really well.

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  Thank you. Yeah, that's the goal. And like with the Citizen episode, for example, it's one thing, I think, to read a story about a 12-year-old crime chaser, but it's another thing to actually be in the car with him and his mom, since he's not even old enough to drive, as they drive around his neighborhood, south of San Francisco, and, you know, look for things that are happening according to the Citizen app. And here's sort of like why he does this and what excites him about it, and also what does it mean for a future in which, you know, there's sort of all these like little surveillance nodes around, right, in the form of smartphones. So, um, yeah, so there, the, we're trying to take a dive into our very strange present and potentially even stranger future in ways that feel compelling through audio.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  That was like my best pitch for it, I guess. I hope I hope you'll listen. I'm really excited about it. It's been a lot of work and a lot of fun.

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Do you have a twin on the show?

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  I wish. I have to say, first of all, I actually wish I had a clone, but I have to say, guys, the number one request I get through my Instagram DMs, on Twitter, through emails, to this day, I have now, it's been how many years since I left The Verge? Like, two and a half years. People say, can you please do your twin videos again?

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  I swear to God. And so I think one of these days, you know, I have a camera here. It's not a great camera, but I have a camera here. I have some lights. I think one of these days I'm gonna have to figure out how to like self-produce this, just for fun.

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  I think what we have to do is organize like a fake beef. Like, you make a twin video for Wired, and then we pretend to be really mad that you you stole your format. I mean, like, create this. I don't know why I'm saying that out loud in the podcast. If you are someone out there who's engineered a beef for publicity, like, please get ahold of me. All right. Well, we do have to talk about some policy stuff. You gotta eat our vegetables here. Today, the day we're recording, the TikTok saga is even more out of control than before. So if you'll remember, Trump initially issued a 45-day order. So September 20th, TikTok had to sell. There has been a lot of reporting about sort of the inside of that deal.

• 1:06:35Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft initially wanted a small steak, then TikTok said, do you want a bigger steak? Then Trump said, you gotta pay me a little bit on the side, which is real sketchy, and no one has ever really figured out what that meant. And Microsoft put out a statement saying, we will compensate the United States Treasury, which is just weird. I'm just gonna tell you, I have not talked to a single businessperson who understands that, except it made Trump happy. Fine. Then he issued a new order, extending the deadline by another 45 days. So a 90-day clock. November, mid-November now is the deadline. All of that is hanging over the head of this company. Oracle has been reported to be very interested. The Trump administration is very cozy with Oracle.

• 1:07:18Nilay Patel?

  This is a real thing. Larry Ellison's a donor. They host fundraisers. He does all the things. Oracle has emerged as a frontrunner. Last night, today, TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer's gonna quit.

• 1:07:30Nilay Patel?

  You just F this, basically, was his, uh, his note.

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  Uh, if you don't recall, TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer was the guy who like launched Disney Plus and then didn't get tapped to be the next CEO of Disney and so rage quit and ended up going to TikTok. It's more complicated than that, but.

• 1:07:46Nilay Patel?

  Based on the reporting now, the parallel here is very clear. He did not know that he wasn't getting the Disney CEO job. He found out the morning that Chapek was getting the job that he didn't get the job.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:54Nilay Patel?

  So then he quit. And then it turns out, uh, Julia Borstein at CNBC reported today, he was not involved in the talks with Oracle at TikTok. So you're like, just a guy who's been cut out twice. You're like, out. And like, these deals do come with, um, uh, like what's called key man provisions. So you acquire a company, Lauren was a key man when we acquired Rico. That's a real thing that happened. You acquire the company and you have to like, make sure that certain key people come in. If you're Kevin Mayer, you're probably one of those people and that probably means you're, you have to stay there and work for a while. And you're like, I don't want to be one of Nadella's guys. I don't want to be one of Larry Ellison's guys. Like, I'm supposed to be a CEO.

• 1:08:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:08:36Nilay Patel?

  And like, he quit. So then that happened and then on top of that happening, Walmart announced, uh, that it was partnering with Microsoft on a deal by TikTok because of e-commerce, which seems horri- I'm just gonna say, that is the worst idea I've ever heard. Turning TikTok into like a shopping experience for Walmart stuff? Don't do that.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  Hmm, agree. I would say that if the three of us were to go into our, um, uh, credit card history and tally up all of the amount of money we spent on crap we saw on Instagram ads, uh, I think I know who would have spent the most.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  Which would be who, me?

• 1:09:15Speaker 04

  I think Neelai is what I think.

• 1:09:18Nilay Patel?

  No, I buy, or actually that has been curtailed.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:09:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, I started using TikTok worth Instagram.

• 1:09:28Speaker 03

  Well, I think also like Walmart has really been trying to push a lot more into video, right? And so I guess it makes sense from that perspective, but I would worry that it would effectively be the quibbification of TikTok, which would be like, take this idea, take this idea or this concept that's already like working on a different platform, and then, and then try to sort of add your twist to it in a way that's just not really going to work, because the kids are already in one place, right? They're already like doing the thing on the platform. So then like if Walmart bought it, it would suddenly become, what is it? Walmart owns like Vudu or something?

• 1:10:03Speaker 04

  No, so Walmart sold Vudu to Fandango in April. And so I bet that it's like whoever was in charge of Vudu at Walmart was just, has just been like hanging out and is bored. It's like, hey, I know what I could do to keep my job.

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  So the quote from Walmart to CNBC, "The way TikTok has integrated e-commerce and advertising capabilities in other markets is a clear benefit to creators and users." That's what they want. They want advertising e-comm. And like, ooh, seems gross. TikTok, the last bit of news, TikTok actually sued the Trump administration over the ban order saying that Trump had not shown a color of real harm. I mean, this is all the stuff we talked about when the ban was issued. No one really knows what the theory of the case is against TikTok, except that it's from China. And if you're going to have that theory of the case, well, then you definitely need to have it against WeChat, which Trump administration did. You probably need to have it against Tencent, which importantly owns half of everything in Hollywood, just a real thing, including, this is my segue,

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  including 40% of Epic, makers of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine. So many streams cross that fight between Epic, Fortnite, Unreal and Apple, which has continued to just like operate in high gear. Right? I mean, there at the moment. So we, we, there's a lot always to talk about with Apple and the App Store. Let me just ask you both this, though. Is it strange that Apple seems so content to be the villain? Because they're definitely acting more like the villain than they should be. Yeah.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  How so?

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  Their statements are all pretty aggressive, right? Their actions are all pretty aggressive. Like this, so that, you know, the Epic did the thing, they enabled the payments and then Apple said, we're going to cancel your developer account, including the developer account for Unreal Engine, which is a different, technically different company than the, there's Epic Sarl and then Epic, which makes Fortnite, um, the retaliating against both, Epic filed this TRO, there's all these emails came out, temporary restraining order, sorry, full lawyer speak. The point of a temporary restraining order is to maintain the status quo so that neither party can do something that can't be undone. And so the judge granted the restraining order with respect to Unreal Engine, because if Apple kills the developer account for Unreal Engine, that is a bell you can't unring, that's harm that

• 1:12:17Nilay Patel?

  you can't undo. Whereas with, if Epic wins the Fortnite lawsuit, they can calculate some damages, they can reinstate, like they can get back to it. So that all made sense, but the move to go after Unreal is like, pretty aggro. Their statements about this stuff are pretty aggressive. You know, they, they pushed on WordPress to add in-app purchases. They've been pushing on other developers to add in-app purchases. It just seems like Apple's in a, in a place where they don't seem, I don't know, sad. They don't, like, they don't seem like they're trying to do the right thing, but it's so complicated and we're all going to work through it together. They're making it seem very much like, this is our phone and we want to cut of everything that happens on the phone,

• 1:12:58Nilay Patel?

  and that's the price of the phone. And that is just like a, I don't know, they just seem more aggressive and more happy to be the bad guy in some of these narratives than otherwise.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it is incredibly complicated. I can't help but wonder if Apple is just thinking about winning the war and not this particular battle. So like, ultimately, Apple has one of the largest app stores in the world. It's the only way that you can currently get applications on Apple products. It means to maintain ultimate control of that app store, maintain the Wald Garden, right? And so I wonder if going after specific elements of that App Store, such as Unreal Engine, or any kind of gaming, you know, Google Stadium, we've talked about, or I'm sure you guys have talked about too. Or something like payments is part of that strategy,

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  but also ultimately some kind of head fake.

• 1:13:58Speaker 04

  It's weird, like, there's, there's a way in which these statements could be like, "Look, guys, we, we set these rules, we got to apply them evenly. It leads to these unfortunate situations. We're going to try and figure it out, but for now, the rules are what they are. And if we make an exception here, it's going to be chaos. So like, we're doing this thing, but we are working to work on it, to figure it out and make everybody happy. Just bear with us, but these are the rules." Instead, it's, "These are the rules. You made all kinds of money on our store because you were on there for free, and we're going to apply everything equally. And if you are just follow the rules and do what we say, then we're happy to have you back." Like, the, the tenor of those statements is remarkably aggressive.

• 1:14:43Speaker 04

  To me, what's fascinating, I did a, like, a pretty basic newsletter on this. It's like, that remarkably aggressive tone, like, it plays maybe in the court, but, and maybe it plays with like, a general audience that's like, loves their iPhone and understands that like, you got to follow a contract when you like, click a checkbox, or like, you agree to the iTunes, I don't know, whatever. But it is very off-putting, I think, to a developer audience. And Steve Ballmer clapping his hands, yelling, "Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers." Apple shouldn't take developers making stuff for their platforms for granted. They have been able to do that with the iPhone for a very, very long time. But it's no guarantee.

• 1:15:28Speaker 04

  And the thing that you don't know is like, it's like a missed opportunity cost. Apple will never know if there is a developer who would have made something awesome for the iPhone, but saw this stuff and was just like, "Ugh, that seems like a mess." And maybe not even- Even consciously, just like subconscious like uh and went and did something else for some other platform. And like that stuff can accrete over time. And when it does, you eventually like, you eventually go over a hill. And then people start thinking of you the way they thought of Microsoft in the bad old days of Microsoft. Where like, people would like spell Microsoft with a dollar sign for the S, ha, ha, ha.

• 1:16:10Speaker 04

  Uh, but you just saw it everywhere and Apple could like, it could like lose that PR fight for that very important constituency. And it can be very damaging for them down the road.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  I completely agree with you on everything you just said, and I in particular tend to think that anyone who has expertise in software who joins the argument and says, well, look, for as long as software has been distributed, the distributor has ultimately taken some kind of tax, right? Like back in the days of shrink rock, shrink wrap, software boxes sold on retail shelves that we used to go to and buy in stores. Like, there was also a tax on that too, right? And so, and Apple's cut is actually relatively fair compared to that. I think that's a bad analogy. I think that the way that software has changed, in particular, the distribution of software has changed over the past few decades. Like warrants a different look at the way that these kinds of, you know, relationships, these revenue sharing relationships are structured.

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  And I do think that all of this is pretty bad for developers. But I think like the question that Eli was asking was like, why do we think Apple's being so aggressive? Not necessarily like, and I think like they're being aggressive because at the end of the day, what better way to get their messaging out than to have a giant fight with Epic, who makes one of the most popular games in the world, um, versus like having this fight with Hay from Basecamp, which like, you know, 50 people are aware of, I shouldn't say that, like, a lot of people are familiar with Basecamp and they use Basecamp. But it's like not the same level of argument. And so the Epic argument actually serves as a vehicle for them to like make a stronger argument for their, their cases outside of congressional subcommittee hearings.

• 1:17:48Speaker 04

  But I don't understand why Apple wants this fight so badly. Like Laura, the last time things started getting a little bit like hairy with developers and the

• 1:17:56Nilay Patel?

  30% tax, blah, blah, blah, blah. You interviewed Phil Schiller about this switch to like the subscription thing and like the change from, "Well, it's 30% the first year and then you can be 15% after that."

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:18:06Nilay Patel?

  And they tried to like completely solve this, this problem with the 30% tax and you can't have trial modes and like, it was all messy and they're like, "Well, look, subscriptions are going to solve it." In some ways, they were actually ahead of the curve there because like subscriptions are everywhere now. But they were accommodating in a certain way. They still did it in a real Apple way, but like they saw that there was some sort of discontent and they tried to address it. This time, they see that there's discontent and their answer is, "No, these are the rules. We made this platform. It's ours and we get our cut."

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  Yes, ultimately in 2016, when the App Store rolled out these changes led by Phil Schiller, they were, I think on some level, trying to appease and help out developers. But ultimately, the changes that year were about serving Apple. I mean, it was also the year that they rolled out search ads, right, in the App Store? And what they were doing was laying the groundwork for fundamentally what would be their own growing subscriptions business, which we've seen pretty much quarter over quarter, year over year, since then has just completely grown. So yeah, sure, subscriptions maybe are great for the developers who want some kind of recurring revenue and they want the confidence in that recurring revenue and they get a better cut if they are able to maintain that for a long period of time. But ultimately, it's, it's also all going back to Apple. Not all, but it's, there's money going back to Apple there.

• 1:19:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and on a consistent basis, like it's like, I mean, I hate subscription apps. I hate them. I've got, I use Mailplane on my Mac still to handle my Gmail, my calendar. And, you know, I got a new Mac and I installed Mailplane and I typed in my serial code and I didn't pay anyone any more money. And like, that was such a normal thing to have happen, but now in 2020, I was like, "This is great. Like, I already paid for this. I paid for it. It's done. I'm done paying for it now. It's over." And that push to subscription from Apple, instead of doing things developers wanted, like upgrade pricing, trials, all that stuff, they said, "Just make everybody subscribe." All that meant was they get a recurring cut of recurring revenue.

• 1:20:07Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't, "We made it easier to operate on our store or to build your business." It was just a way for them to get, charge your credit card more often. And that fundamentally is just where the iPhone has gone. Where every interaction that you have on your phone, everything you do on your phone accrues some money to Apple in some way. And I think that's why they're being this aggressive because it's existential for them.

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  Because they can't sell any more iPhones.

• 1:20:32Nilay Patel?

  Because everybody who has an iPhone has an iPhone.

• 1:20:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:20:34Nilay Patel?

  Until the 5G upgrade cycle hits or until their AR glasses hit, like they're not going to get a big wave of new purchases. They're just sort of like every two years, most of the people who have the two-year-old iPhone get a new iPhone. Or now in the time of COVID, they don't because they're at home.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:20:53Nilay Patel?

  And so like there's the amount of money they're trying to squeeze out of the platform at every corner. It just seems like they're not being quite as honest about it as they could in a way that would justify the aggressive actions they're taking against Fortnite. Now, Fortnite did pick the fight, right? They absolutely picked the fight, but I continue to think they picked the fight kind of thinking they were going to win.

• 1:21:15Speaker 04

  And they might not, the way this like it's going. By the way, this is going to be weird because I have to change the way I say this. Uh, disclosures, since we're talking about App Store stuff. Uh, my wife works for an App Store. She works for the App Store for Facebook Labs, which is the division of Facebook, uh, which makes the Oculus headsets. No longer called Oculus, apparently.

• 1:21:36Nilay Patel?

  You got through it?

• 1:21:37Speaker 04

  I did.

• 1:21:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Like, there's not much to say. Not much else has happened after the restraining orders. Again, the point of restraining orders is to maintain the status quo. Status quo is maintained.

• 1:21:47Speaker 04

  Well, yes and no. Status quo is maintained, but Fortnite is like already getting worse on the iPhone. Like, it already like feels like there's fewer people on it and it doesn't have the new content.

• 1:21:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the new content is Marvel. I also think Tim Sweeney kind of knew everyone's at home and the number of people playing Fortnite on their phones versus playing on a PC or a console is low.

• 1:22:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:22:06Nilay Patel?

  Uh, you know, the flip side of this is so well played to them, right? They've reduced the risk. Flip side of this is Google, and it just doesn't seem like the Google fight is as, again, if I was Sundar or anyone at Google, I'd be like, we're gonna just see what happens with Apple. But why would they want to be in this fight as aggressively as Apple is? But there hasn't been any news on the Google front, as near as I can tell.

• 1:22:27Speaker 04

  Not really, no. I mean, they're, they also kicked them off the Android Store, but other than that, it's been relatively quiet. But there is a, there's a trial there too. So at some point.

• 1:22:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, at the restraining order hearing, I think they asked how long they needed to get ready for trial and Apple's answer was like 10 months. So we got a ways to go. Yeah. There's going to be so many blog posts, you guys. So many podcasts and blog posts before this thing even begins. All right, we've gone way too long. Lauren, thank you for being here. You have another podcast. We're talking at Gadget Lab.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we have two podcasts at Wired. We have the brand new one, Get Wired, that I'm hosting every Monday. It drops. And then we have another podcast that's been, I think it's been going on for at least four or five years now, called Gadget Lab. And I co-host that every Friday with Michael Calori, a senior editor at Wired. And that's our more consumer-focused, gadget-focused podcast. So check that out as well.

• 1:23:17Nilay Patel?

  Great.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  And thank you so much for having me on. This has been really fun.

• 1:23:20Nilay Patel?

  Good. Our Verge expats are always welcome back on the show. Whenever you want. It's great to see you again. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backlon. Lauren is at Lauren Good. Dieter's got a newsletter called Processor, verge.com/newsletter. All this TikTok epic Facebook stuff, Casey writes about in the interface, you can check that out, verge.cominterface. We'll be back on Tuesday with the interview show, next Friday with the chat show. Just a lot going on. We'll see you soon. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.

• 1:24:11Speaker 10

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• 1:24:40Speaker 11

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.