Congress releases tech antitrust report / Apple’s next iPhone will be announced on October 13th

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn bring in Russell Brandom and Adi Robertson to discuss congressional report about whether Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google are violating antitrust law. Dan Seifert stops by to discuss Apple's upcoming iPhone event on October 13th. Links: Global TV shipments hit record high last quarter, report says America’s internet wasn’t prepared for online school I regularly forget that I have New York’s COVID-19 exposure notification app Congress releases blockbuster tech antitrust report What Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook have at stake in the antitrust fight Apple made ProtonMail add in-app purchases, even though it had been free for years Oracle and Google’s Supreme Court showdown was a battle of metaphors Apple quietly stops selling Bose, Sonos and some Logitech gear — only Apple audio remains The Supreme Court is taking on Google and Oracle one last time Apple’s next iPhone will be announced on October 13th Apple Watch SE review: pay a lot less to give up only a little Why Apple needed the FDA to sign off on its EKG but not its blood oxygen monitor The Apple Watch heart monitor sends too many people to the doctor YouTube 4K has come to Apple TV, but we’re waiting on HDR, 60fps, and iPhone/iPad playback Disney movies are now available in 4K on Apple’s iTunes store Apple sues recycling partner for reselling more than 100,000 iPhones, iPads, and Watches it was hired to dismantle Samsung Galaxy S20 FE review: the right price for the right stuff Samsung Galaxy Note 20 review: stylus tax Google Nest Audio review: the sweet spot Google Fi now directly sells Samsung phones and adds a new 5G map G Suite is now Google Workspace in a bid to merge Gmail, Chat, and Docs Gmail has a new logo that’s a lot more Google More early Prime Day 2020 deals have kicked off on Amazon Meet Ricky Desktop, the most viral beatmaker on TikTok SPACs, explained Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, we talk about the big congressional antitrust report with Addie Robertson and Russell Brandon. We get into a little bit of Google versus Oracle at the Supreme Court, and then Dan Seifert joins us to talk about Apple's iPhone event next week, Prime Day, and a bunch of reviews across the site. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:17Speaker 01

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• 1:01Speaker 02

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• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of congressional justice.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  I got Russell. I think Russell faked it, but I'm gonna accept it. I'm your friend Eli. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm your worst nightmare. Ooh, good. Addie Robertson is here. Hey. Russell Brandom is here. Why, hello. Addie and Russell are going to join us for the first half to talk about the big congressional antitrust report, a little bit about the It's a decade in the making, Google and Oracle hearing at the Supreme Court. Then later on the show, Dan Seifert is going to join us, talk about the Big Apple event next week. We had a bunch of reviews this week, lots, lots going on. I want to start where I always start. Should be unsurprising to everyone, it has been 30 weeks since the President of these United States intimated strongly that Google would be building a website for coronavirus testing.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  There's no website, just 45 million engineers have been working on it diligently. They've managed to completely rebrand Google, like G Suite in the workplace. They've changed all the icons. They've launched two new phones and they have not yet made a coronavirus testing website. So take that for what you will. President also, by the way, has just announced that he personally discovered a cure for the virus. I don't know if you've been following that, that's great. So chaos reigns, more COVID updates. I just got to get through it. It's too much to bear that these past two weeks have been particularly crazy. But just some second order COVID stuff I want to point out that we covered. Monica Chen wrote a great piece about broadband infrastructure and online schooling and just how bad it is.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  I encourage you to read this. A state legislator from Kansas, like a hardcore Republican state legislator from Kansas, shared the piece and said, this is what my constituents face. It's a bipartisan issue. It's really interesting. Please read that piece, it really brings it home. Nicole Wetman wrote a review, I guess you call it, of New York State's COVID-19 exposure notification app that plugs into the Apple, Google APIs. The headline is great. I regularly forget that I have New York's COVID-19 exposure notification app, but that is exactly how it's designed to work. Like you're not supposed to know you have it. If you haven't downloaded one of these apps and your state has one, please get it, download it, put it on your phone. It will, in some small way, even if some small percentage of people have it and use it, it will have an impact is, is what we have been told.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  What I'm choosing to believe because I'm an eternal optimist. And lastly, just, I think, a really interesting second order effect of all this. Global TV shipments hit a record high last quarter because more people are home and upgrading their TVs, which will obviously lead us in the second part of the show. Prime Day is coming. It's TV buying season. It's all happening at once, but you see that second order effect of the virus hitting in all kinds of ways.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  I bought a TV for the first time.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, what'd you get?

• 4:23Speaker 03

  I bought like a TCL 50 inch.

• 4:25Nilay Patel?

  TCL is a safe brand to go get. You can just kind of trust it'll work. Yeah, we really like them here.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. It has the Google TV like Android integration, but I haven't turned any of that on. I just put it straight into the PlayStation. That's it.

• 4:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Russell, would you like us to spend the next 45 minutes talking about the difference between Google TV and Android TV, which is what you actually probably have? Because we could do that.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  No, but I do want the listeners to know that I'm gold ranked in Overwatch now. So get some cred there.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  I will say, as we go into the conversation on antitrust, the Google TV, Android TV, Chromecast, YouTube TV is like the best argument for actually not regulating these companies because they will just slowly collapse on themselves. Anyway, just to end it, COVID is the biggest story in the world. The fight for racial justice is in the world. It is top of mind for us. But a lot of this news, and in fact, I think this tech antitrust report is going to have lasting, just Titanic repercussions into the next years.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  Welcome back to Squawk Box. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust releasing its long awaited report on big tech. And that report is now officially concluding that Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook have monopoly power and Congress must take action, they say, to change antitrust laws.

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  I'll begin by saying that the chaos of this report being released was very interesting. There are three competing reports, I think, in total. There's one from the Congressional Democrats and there are two from the Republicans. None of them disagree on sort of the facts, the conclusions of the investigation, that the companies are acting anti-competitively. And the kind of fundamental conclusion that some regulation needs to happen, where there is a massive disagreement as to what should be done. But I just want to highlight that and underline that. There's very few bipartisan facts in America at this moment in time. Just very precious few facts that both parties agree on.

• 6:19Nilay Patel?

  And both parties agree that Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are acting anti-competitively, and they have evidence of it. And that's a remarkable thing. So I just want to start there and underline it. But Russell, take us through a little bit of the, you know, we thought this thing was coming on Monday. It got held up. Now there's three reports. What happened there?

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I don't, how often do we talk about embargoes? How much do Vergecast listeners know about embargoes? Basically, you know, a big part of the news gathering process is people will say, we're releasing this and we want to tell you about it in advance. So you have time to like, put together an article or a review. And it's not just something that you slapped together in 10 minutes because you want it to be first to tell everyone. And so they'll say, okay, like here's this, you know, it'll be, it'll lift at this time and we'll give you this briefing in advance. So that happened Sunday night. We got that, like we were ready to be working on Sunday. And then they were said, oh, no, no, no, never mind. Like, we're not doing that. And that happened sort of a couple of times. And we were really puzzled by it.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  You know, it was no secret that this report was coming at some point. But it seems like the reason that happened was, so the, the House is controlled by the Democrats, which means the Judiciary Committee, which is what was issuing this report, was also controlled by the Democrats. The Democrats sort of knew what they wanted to say and were putting together this 500-page report, but they kind of were figuring the Republicans would go along with it. And I think at the last minute, the Republicans were like, we're not signing on to any of this. And in fact, are going to have two other reports, even though that's kind of confusing. And we don't fundamentally disagree with what you're saying. Although we disagree with what, about what should be done.

• 8:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so one of the reports is from Congressman Ken Buck, a Republican. And his quote, I think he said to Axios, and he said it to... Reuters, I agree with 330 pages of the Democrats' report, which are the facts. And then his report is called "The Third Way" and has some other... I don't know what the second way is. I've been very confused about the title of this report.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Well, I think the second way is Jim Jordan's way, and he's trying to do some Clinton-esque middle path, because that worked so well for Bill Clinton, I guess.

• 8:33Nilay Patel?

  Right. So then the other one is Jim Jordan, who's like, "You didn't talk about Section 230 and conservative bias at all," which is explicitly not what this whole proceeding was about.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  Is there actually a report for Jordan? I've gone through this. I have looked, and I've found like a statement. I'm not sure he's actually put out a comprehensive report.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  I think his office mostly issues tweets.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 8:53Nilay Patel?

  I think that constitutes his report.

• 8:54Speaker 05

  Okay, so that's his report.

• 8:55Speaker 06

  You know, it would help with the conservative bias problem in Google rankings is actually putting out the report, because then the web crawler would have something to index. And then you would show up higher in the rankings. Really, like, very, very good at Facebook, not so good at SEO, is what I'm taking away from this.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's totally fair.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  I do think it's worth, like, underlining what this doesn't talk about. Like, it's really about competition. And this is, you know, I think for Facebook in particular, when, you know, all the conversation about Facebook up until now has been mostly about data privacy, which this was not about at all. It's not about, like, "We own your data, or you own your data, and how are we sharing your data?" It's also not really about moderation and saying, you know, "These platforms have bad things on them. We should be working harder to take down bad things," or "Not take down things that are only kind of bad." It's really about these companies' businesses, which in particular, like, the business of

• 9:58Speaker 03

  how Google makes money is actually really complicated and mostly opaque to sort of the average Google user. And so a lot of it really gets behind the scenes and talks about the sort of behind the scenes deals of who shows up in what search bar and why.

• 10:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think that that split, we have talked about this so much and other smart people have talked about it so much. Everyone is mad at the tech companies and they're all mad for different reasons. And this is the first big congressional report with recommendations. And it it doesn't hit all of the reasons, right? Like, the reason that Basecamp is mad about their email app at Apple is radically different than the reasons that conservatives are mad at Twitter. And so to, I think, push them all together has always been an error. It's easy to do and you can kind of see why you would do it, right? Like, not letting your app on the store kind of feels like not letting a tweet on your service. But

• 10:59Nilay Patel?

  they're actually radically different problems. And this one is, it has always been focused on competition. So, Addie, give me a sense of, I mean, it's 450 pages. So, do your best. But give me a sense of, you know, what the report says. I mean, we've obviously talked to Congressman Cicilline, he was the chair of the subcommittee. I would not say there was a ton of surprises here based on those conversations that we've had on the show. But there's a lot of information. So, give me a sense of what it says.

• 11:30Speaker 05

  So, and this is a really great report that Russell did that we can, you can look up. But as we've talked about, there are four kind of different cases against each of the companies. And Amazon, a lot of it is based on the idea that it's competing with its own sellers on this huge retail platform, that they make this case is just way more powerful than any brick and mortar store. And so it's using a lot of data that it gets in shopping to just clone and sort of compete very unfairly against the people on its platform. Facebook, a lot of the attention is given to its past acquisitions. So Instagram, there were these hearings about Facebook going into destroy mode if it didn't get Instagram.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  It's focused a lot on that to sort of, nobody's surprise. Then Google, it's just this huge search giant. It's also runs Android. It bundles a lot of these things together in a way that is potentially anti-competitive. And then Apple has the App Store. Like it has iOS, which is this huge platform and it has the App Store and it makes apps that often compete with apps on the App Store while charging a commission to be on that store. So that's the kind of general case against them. And then there is a series of remedies that, like we've talked about, are from the Democratic majority. So part of them, the parts that the Republicans, the sort of third way report agree with are we should give more resources to antitrust watchdogs. So like the Justice Department.

• 12:58Speaker 05

  And again, these places are already investigating tech companies. So we're waiting for those reports too. And then there are some sort of individual remedies, like they talk about interoperability, increasing that for social services and making these sort of bans on self-preferencing. So companies have to offer their own services with roughly the same terms as sort of other apps that are on their platforms and competing with them. Where it gets really interesting is, first of all, they're suggesting that the consumer harm standard is too narrow. That's been a really huge deal with the entire antitrust debate. And so they're trying to make the case

• 13:41Speaker 05

  that we need to take into account the effect on, not just on consumers, but on people who are selling things on platforms and on democracy as a whole, they say. Yeah, here it is. Clarifying that they're designed to protect not just consumers, but also workers, entrepreneurs, independent businesses, open markets, a fair economy and democratic ideals. So this is just a sort of sea change in how antitrust rules have worked for a while. And then the other thing that's just a really tangible, potentially huge change for the platforms is trying to limit how much sort of vertical integration they can have. Trying to make them separate the core businesses and the platforms they're running

• 14:23Speaker 05

  from adjacent businesses that are often competing with the companies on that are using those platforms. So, Amazon, for instance, it runs its own site. It sells Amazon Basics, which are the products it sells on that site that often clone other competitors. It has a huge streaming service. On its streaming service, it runs Studios, which is a company that produces and distributes movies. It has its own game studio. It's just this massive behemoth and this creates potentially gigantic problems for that. And then it just on the sort of Facebook side of things, it recommends a stricter standard for later mergers. So, anything that a company tries to acquire from now on, it's recommending that they take a much closer look at it.

• 15:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I thought that one to me jumped out as, I mean, how often have we talked about like shifting the presumption from you should be allowed to merge and you have to find reasons not to, to you shouldn't be allowed to merge and you have to convince us that it's okay. Just that alone would like really alter the way that these big companies do business and the way they think about doing business, which is to just be relentlessly acquisitive and shut down any competition in their zone. There's this great quote in there from a VC where he says like, "Amazon is the sun. Like it feeds us and nourishes us, but if you get too close to it, it will incinerate you." And it's like, oh, wow. Like, everyone is very existential about the existence of these companies to the point where they're making

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  metaphors about the sun and our relationship to the sun.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  Just a side note, it's a well-written report.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  It is a well, you know, there's a lot of, if you just look on Twitter, it's the reactions are what you would expect. The sort of lawyers and academics and activists that we track are all very happy about the report. The tech industry, that set of pundits is like, "This report doesn't understand anything about the tech industry." And I think the answer is very much that this report gets it so on the nose that you have to, you have to, you have to struggle to find inconsistencies inside of it that you then kind of like make the whole criticism. So one of the inconsistencies is a lot of this report, and obviously this is self-serving to us, so take it for what we will, but a lot of this report is about how the tech giants

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  have crushed the press. That's actually where this whole process started. Cicilline was investigating the effects of big platforms on local media. That's literally the core of all this. And so there's a part in here where they're just going on about how the media needs an antitrust exemption to bargain against the platforms. So all the, all the local news stations in America can band together. And, and so I just read this criticism. It's like, how is it, how is antitrust enforcement good for tech platforms, bad for them? And it's like, because they're huge. Like if you, if you're expecting rigid ideological consistency from the government of the United States, like I have something to tell you. It's like, there's a, it's not going to happen. Like we make different policies for different industries. And it's that, I

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  think that criticism that it's badly written is I've just been comparing it to what is actually written. It gets it right. The investigation is there. The facts are there. The amount of complaints are there. There's reporting in here that we haven't honestly quite seen before. And then there's just the notion that this is a different kind of industry and these platforms are different. And so you gave the example of Amazon Basics. They actually directly address the comparison to store brands in stores. And they say the reason Amazon Basics is different is because Amazon has perfect market information. They know what everyone is searching for. They know the prices they will pay and they can make products to fit into that and put it right at the top of your results in a way that Walmart or Target cannot do in their own stores. And so I think it's responsive

• 18:00Nilay Patel?

  to the actual state of the big tech companies in a way that I generally think when we read government documents of this type, or when we read court cases, we're going to talk about Google Oracle, like they're just lost in a world of metaphors that make no sense. This report is very much about the thing it's about and it accepts it on its own terms and talks about it in those terms in a way that I think is really powerful. So that leads me to, I think we should just kind of take it maybe a little bit company by company.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Well, actually, I want to, I want to jump in with one other thing that I thought was, so, so we mentioned sort of the, the acquisition aspect. And it's sort of near and dear to my heart because I think of, when I think of like the good times for the tech industry, when people liked it. And it was sort of like, there's this idea of the startup marketplace. If you just can't get acquired by Google, or like it's way harder for Google to acquire companies. And so there, there's a lot of less, there's a lot less big ticket acquisitions happening at all. The classic argument has been, well, this is going to be terrible for venture capital. It's going to be terrible for startups because there'll be, it'll be so much harder to exit, right?

• 19:08Speaker 03

  And one of the things that has, that they show in the report is they say, as soon as the big players enter a market, the, the VC investment completely dries up. Like, we've had this round of VR startups, they got acquired, like, no one is looking for another, like, Facebook bought its VR startup. It doesn't need another one, you know, it's, you know, Apple has, has acquired the ones it's going to acquire. If you're, if you're making a sort of ephemeral social network, like, no one wants to fund that. And it, and they sort of directly tie it. And so the argument is that by tamping down on those acquisitions, you'll actually get more activity from venture capital and sort of more startups.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Which I think, you know, we've seen that drying up as companies have gotten bigger and sort of like, you know, where did all the cool startups go?

• 19:59Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's there. Just take 4% of Google's market share, you've got, and revenue, and you've got a spectacular business. And no one will do, like, I keep coming back, why doesn't Apple have a search engine? Maybe because they don't want to make ads, they don't want to do tracking, they don't want to do stuff. But like, the idea that no other company is interested in a A from scratch search engine and you can't fund it even if you wanted to is is nuts to me. And I think that speaks to that. We've heard it. We've heard it called the kill zone. Anything just like it's it's related to that sun metaphor about Amazon like anything that's a little too close. They'll like the big platforms will just kill and they'll tamp down innovation there.

• 20:40Nilay Patel?

  And I, you know, maybe building a search engine is too hard, but I don't. Silicon Valley does not usually accept too hard as a blocker for anything like Elon Musk is trying to put a chip in your brain right now. And like maybe some other people can build a search engine. I do think that we should talk about the companies in turn and we might as well start with Google on that note. So Russell, you did write that piece sort of examining the report through that lens. It's very much how it's organized. It's interesting how hard they came at each of the companies. And on top of that, Google is facing what will eventually be released a lawsuit from the state attorney generals of this country for antitrust behavior. So what what's the state of play with Google?

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this, this is the thing. We're also waiting at any moment and it's sort of being delayed in similar ways. That that's sort of this big Department of Justice report. But yeah, so I mean, Google is in some ways the weirdest one because it's doing so much at once. And so much of the actual business is kind of behind the scenes like. So search is a dominant browser. There's this whole section of the report that goes into Google's kind of dissembling around market share of like, well, we define market share differently. Or we don't think about market share at all. But like, I think anyone listening to the show, like, Google is the search engine. Chrome is kind of the main browser. And, you know, I mean, there's just not, not a lot you can say about it.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  And I think part of what they look at is the ties between these things that, you know, Google maintained dominance in search through the shift to mobile because of Android. It sort of. Was so hard to break into search because Chrome was the dominant browser. You couldn't get those licensing deals from, you know, there weren't that many other places to go. And so I think the implicit threat here is, okay, if we get the big bill and the Democrats sort of get all the legislative asks they want, they're gonna start saying, okay, you can't demand this.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  And we saw this in Europe that, you know, you can't force manufacturers to bundle Google services with Android. In fact, everyone just wants to, they want Google services anyway, so it hasn't been like a huge thing. But when you, when you say, okay, all of those deals are no longer in effect, does the sort of conglomerate Google still hold together? Or is it, do other competitors start to find kind of cracks in the armor? But that, that to me is the one where it's hardest to know how it's gonna play out. Because it may be that like, I mean, Chrome is a good browser, like Google is a good search engine. So it may be that they retain their dominance even without that. I don't know.

• 23:32Nilay Patel?

  I think we've seen a little bit of the early returns on sort of these, the browser ballot type, pick your search engine, and the smaller search engines in Europe are actually complaining they're losing market share because of it. Like people are affirmatively picking Google search when they can, because like, I know that one. And it's that, I think we saw that with the original browser ballots with Internet Explorer way back in the day too. Like, it sounds like such a good idea, we'll just present more choices. But maybe in practice, it just, it further entrenches the incumbent.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  I mean, the part where that seems maybe most not true is one of the slightly weird marginal cases, which is Google info boxes. Like, that's a thing that Yelp, which has been one of the biggest critics of Google search, has been complaining about, is when you search for something on Google, it's gonna return results from other Google services. And stuff like Google's business reviews are like, they're not particularly great necessarily. Like, it's much less clear in that case that they're the thing that people would affirmatively pick. But that's also like a much smaller business than say being the company that makes browsers.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I, you know, the, um, throughout the report, there's all these like little damning moments of documents and emails the committee got of, you know, Sundar Pichai, when he ran Chrome, being like, we need to push Chrome on more people. And like now, when we talk to him, you know, he's the CEO, he's like, we're just doing our best, we're living our values. But then you see what he's like as the executive in charge of something. And you see the conversation inside of Google about promoting Chrome on the search page. And they're like, this feels icky. And like, we're doing it anyway. And I think just that internal debate is reflective of the real stakes of this in a way that gets erased over time. Like, I think now it's, of course, Google is promoting its own properties on its own pages. But the first time they did it, they actually had a debate.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's funny, because when I think of, when you think of antitrust, you're like, breakups. But Google, like, the Google breakup idea here is much less Google search from YouTube or whatever, and much more this page of search results in this ad network, they all need to be a little bit more independent of each other. So they act more fairly. And that, that has always seemed a little bit more nascent. It's like a little less tangible. But then it's coming in the context of this gigantic DOJ report that we're expecting, where one assumes their answer's gonna be just break up Google.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like, I also think it does get into weird, like, so the report does a good job of just sort of presenting the evidence. But I think it does get into a little bit weird ideological territory. Because so one of the things that Google has done, and this is specifically what Yelp is mad about, and a bunch of other places are mad about, is sort of Hoover up information. So one of the case studies is like celebrity net worth dot com was-

• 26:22Nilay Patel?

  It's great. I love that celebrity net worth dot com made it into a congressional report.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Imagine that this is the one that takes down Google and Sundar is like rolling in bed and I can be like, celebrity net worth dot com. That was the one. But, but like, so, so this guy did a lot of work sort of collecting the net worths of all these celebrities and delivering authoritative data. And Google sort of eventually kind of Sherlocked it into an info box that was just you would Google, you know, Russell Brand of net worth, and it would just sort of come up in the info box and you wouldn't need to click through.

• 26:55Speaker 05

  Except it's not Sherlocking. It's more like they just literally took the app and put it into the business.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  But so this is what's weird is at a certain point, you're like, who owns the information about a person's net worth? Like, is it not fair? Like, if if they had just looked and had a person type it in and they were just like reblogging things from like, it's just odd. At a certain point, you do get into this weird copyright territory where it's like, they're just trying to communicate the truth in a way that's like profoundly economically advantageous to them and disadvantageous to like, the vertical search providers that would be their direct competitors. But like, they are providing this service. And like, if you start to bring antitrust law into that, that's regulating the extent to which

• 27:45Speaker 03

  they can convey, like, accurate information. I don't know, I feel like it gets into very dicey territory. That's like harder than just, you know, the three biggest social networks shouldn't be owned by the same company. You know, like, it's the question of what a post antitrust Google looks like, is really the hardest of the four companies to me. And it's not like any of them are easy.

• 28:10Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't know, that makes sense. Like, that's, that is sort of why it's an antitrust case and not say a copyright case, though, because the question isn't whether this is a thing that's legal, which, yeah, it seems like it is. It's whether or not Google doing that ends up in the long run, creating a system where nobody makes something like celebrity net worth and ends up just harming the market in general in the long term. But yeah, it's weird. There and Genius tried to sue Google over basically the same thing and it failed.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Right. So the Genius case is right there. You know, Genius is a little craftier as a company, right? So they had the lyrics on the Genius.com website, and they encoded all kinds of stuff into the lyrics to prove that Google was copying. Like, they had Morse code in some of these lyrics. They had like weird, weird typos and things in the lyrics. And then Google lifted it and they're like, look at.

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  Like you didn't put that Morse code in there. We did, like we caught you and Google's entire response is, well, we license our lyrics from the same provider. So obviously and but ingenious is like, but we give the lyrics to the, okay, you're just lifting from a website. You're not paying anyone. The song lyrics ultimately, the copyright to them is owned by the artists, by the labels. So like, they're not even involved in like, that to me is, it's at the heart of this whole thing, which is if you, if you are starting genius.com and you know, your end result is eventually Google will take our entire, the value of our entire website, and then put us into some weird litigation where we're pretending to own the copyright to song lyrics. We didn't write, which we're gonna, like, you would never start it. You would

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  never start Celebrity Network. Like, this is what Addy is saying. And that is like what the report is getting at, that if these companies have unchecked power, will kill competition. Like, you wouldn't even start a company because Google will just take it away from you. I just think that's, it's very hard to write a law to make Google stop it. Other than saying, Google, stop it.

• 30:06Speaker 06

  Well, but when there is pressure on Google, it like has the technical capability to change. One of the big dramas was they were putting misinformation into the infobox because people would deface Wikipedia. And then the infobox pulled it from Wikipedia really fast and then it would show up. And so they partnered with Wikipedia to like, make it so that if something, somebody went after a Wikipedia page, it wouldn't immediately show up in the infobox inside Google. So a little bit of pressure on them might make them change in theory. But the, the whole thing with this infobox is it's actually part of a larger discussion of regular, organic search results getting pushed down by other Google properties besides just them sucking up the information. Yelp isn't just mad because they might have been

• 30:51Speaker 06

  scraping Yelp. They're mad because Yelp shows up 50% down the page, even if it's the first result, because there's a big Google Maps box and there's like four ads and there's another thing over on the side. You just got a constellation of Google stuff before you get to anything else.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  Google would argue that that is making the product better. That you, you type in local restaurants near me and Google just tells you the answer instead of delivering you links to other search providers that will give you some further answer. In the context of this report, I don't know if that argument has carried any water. Like, I don't know if the committee believed that the product is getting better. But that's like very much Google's argument. It's like, we just made our product better.

• 31:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, and maybe that they don't care that they they're more worried about the ecosystem of startups and, you know, diversity of sources of information, et cetera, et cetera, than they do about whether or not Google gets to make its best possible self on the search result page.

• 31:46Nilay Patel?

  Fair. Let's go through the other companies a little more swiftly, because I want to talk about I want to talk about what is already happening in response to this report existing. The companies are changing a little bit, and I do want to make sure we talk about Google and Oracle for just a minute. Amazon, it's, you know, we've talked about, we've had Lena Kahn on the show. She wrote Amazon's antitrust paradox. She's on the committee. There's a great report in Protocol about how the committee sort of divvied up the tasks. Lena Kahn actually worked on the Google side of it. Somebody else worked on the Amazon one, but Amazon is like where this kind of this sort of antitrust inquiry, we should change the standards, energy came from. Eddie, what's your read on how the committee is approaching Amazon beyond just shutdown Amazon basics?

• 32:30Speaker 05

  That's really hard to read is the problem. Like, Amazon is so many pieces.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, is it just stop preferring your own products? Is it stop competing against your own sellers?

• 32:41Speaker 05

  I mean, that's what the the nondiscrimination stuff seems like it could potentially be going for is that you have to be able to offer. I mean, potentially, you could say they should not be able to use data that, say, sellers can't access or something like that. But I'm not totally sure what this means for Amazon.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  I mean, I do think you're gonna see, Amazon does often very quietly the kind of thing that we see Apple and Google do kind of loudly where they're like, we're launching a TV show network now, like, and it's sort of is good, but also it's sort of that it's successful and prominent because it's coming from this dominant technology company. So, Apple, or I mean, Amazon will do that with like vacuum cleaners and TVs. And I mean, that is in a large part what Amazon Basics is. And I think that's definitely In danger, I think also there is a lot of they because they have so much leverage,

• 33:44Speaker 03

  the different levels of selling a third-party product on Amazon, like there's there's the sort of Amazon marketplace where you're just like a dude with some products in his house, and it's like a website that you can sell them on. And then it's like now you're storing them in the Amazon warehouse and Amazon's doing fulfillment for you. And now you're a preferred Amazon seller, and now you're a featured Amazon seller, and you're sort of moving up the prestige pyramid in Amazon-ness. And all of those moves are deeply embedded to you sort of using more of Amazon's infrastructure services and giving them more data on just

• 34:24Speaker 03

  your customers and your broader operations, and also just more favorable terms for them as a seller, because they have an immense amount of leverage. And I think one of the things we would see in the non-discrimination rules is they would lose a lot of that leverage for just legal reasons. Like you, they would no longer be able to write contracts in a certain way. And I think a lot of that would be very subtle and behind the scenes, but I do think like they're exceptionally profitable for a retailer. And and I think that leverage is a big part of why.

• 34:58Nilay Patel?

  And you bring up a really interesting point there, which is that the report does not issue specific things that it should happen to Amazon. It says, these are the things we discovered happening. Here are the remedies in general, non-discrimination rules. There's one line in there that's like, the company should not be allowed to use their superior bargaining positions, which is like adorable. Like that's like a prohibition on doing business in general. Like, that's all bargaining, someone has a superior bargaining position.

• 35:26Nilay Patel?

  So it's, I think it's important to connect the sort of abstract remedies that are proposed. Here's how we should change the law to the fact that they have all this evidence. Russell, you pointed out in your piece that Facebook is surprisingly the shortest section. So let's go through that quickly because I want to end with Apple just because Apple seems like the most responsive at this moment, like it is doing the most things to make people happy. But go through Facebook quickly first.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so I think then this was, you know, at the time of the hearing, we got this, this sort of look at the documents around the acquisition of Instagram. I think a big part of it is making the case that Facebook's acquisition of Instagram was not right and like in retrospect, that was a miss by the government. Like the government should have at the very least, applied more scrutiny to that. But then, I mean, the question is, okay, what, what would you like to do now about this? Congress can't really pass a law to split them up. It can strengthen antitrust laws and this is where we get into the consumer welfare

• 36:31Speaker 03

  standard stuff, but a lot of it is them kicking the ball to DOJ. I mean, I don't think there's a world in which the FTC successfully separates these companies, but like, I mean, I think that-

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  The FTC is like, we're mad at you. Give us the change from your pocket.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  That's all, that's all they got.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  A lot of it is them just sort of building out the case and saying, all right, some actual regulator, take it from here because, you know, and the stuff that does need to be legislated around, it tends with Facebook specifically, tends to be privacy, election stuff and kind of speech regulation rather than antitrust. So I mean, I do think if there wasn't a classic antitrust case to be made against Facebook, they would have found it and made it. And so this suggests to me that there kind of isn't.

• 37:22Speaker 05

  As a VR person, I find it really funny that Facebook owns like this entire platform and entire market for entire genre of hardware, but that genre of hardware is so small.

• 37:34Speaker 05

  Because yeah, this is a thing that Oculus developers are complaining about is that like Facebook makes this really great hardware that's tied to this platform that's tied to Facebook and they constantly are getting Sherlocked. But that's like way down the road. If VR somehow becomes a huge thing, then Facebook has a problem.

• 37:51Nilay Patel?

  You know, what's interesting about that is there were, I mean, obviously, when Facebook bought Oculus, Oculus was in a different position than Instagram. So a lot of this report goes into the fact that Instagram was on its way to being a viable business, which is opposed to how Facebook talks about Instagram, which is we found some hobos on the side of the road. We liked their app and we gave them everything. Right? And that's like Facebook's version of the story. And the story in the report is Instagram was scaling. They were not having your classic like run out of server capacity problems at a scale but like they were on a path to sustainable growth and they could have just grown and been fine. Oculus was not there. Like Facebook bought Oculus when it was still like a bunch

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  of duct tape and some like stolen Samsung OLED panels out of a phone. And they were stumbling towards a product. And so I think Facebook has just a much stronger case that they invested in one company that was ahead of the curve before it was anything close to viable. The question is really, why aren't there other VR companies for these Sherlock developers to go to and say, screw you, Facebook, I'm leaving you behind. And that circles all the way back to what is the, what is the VR investment like space look like? And it looks like no money because everyone assumes Facebook will just win, which doesn't seem healthy.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Well, like Daydream, I mean, Addy, you were writing about this, like, Google can could continue to bankroll a VR platform.

• 39:16Speaker 05

  And it so much does not care.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, Apple's gonna put one out soon, right? That's what we think. Or maybe AR. Something is gonna happen there. Actually, let's talk about Apple. This is the one where I think a lot about Microsoft's sort of retconning of its antitrust case. Right? Bill Gates is like, yeah, I didn't invent Android because of the antitrust case. That's his preferred way of thinking about it. But in many ways, the sort of 90s antitrust, Addy, you've written about this, like the 90s antitrust battles with Microsoft opened the door for new players like Google to emerge, opened the door for things like Chrome to happen. It did open the door for maybe Microsoft. I mean, this is what Gates is saying, that he was distracted. He missed the trick in mobile. I don't know if I believe that entirely, but right, just the they didn't break up Microsoft.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  It did not happen, but the the presence of the regulation threat, the presence of the scrutiny enable other players to come in and change Microsoft's behavior. Do you think we're seeing that with Apple? Right? Like, there is the epic lawsuit, which is ongoing. It seems like the judge hates them both, to be perfectly honest. Like, she does not like the arguments either side in that case is making. Obviously, the scrutiny is there. And then we're just seeing Apple kind of back down. They're letting the game streaming services in there. They are backing off on in-app purchases for apps like Proton Mail and Hey. They're getting, they're taking hits from Microsoft, which has changed its Windows Store app policies.

• 40:43Nilay Patel?

  Like, they're kind of giving up a little bit, or they're they're backing off some of their positions a little bit.

• 40:49Speaker 05

  I mean, their game streaming backing off is it's pretty, still pretty onerous and limited. Like, the last we heard, there's still, you have to basically approve everything as a separate app, which is pretty wild. But yeah, they do seem responsive whenever there is an individual instance of they're just doing something that's clearly really potentially anti-competitive. The cases you mentioned, there was the sort of parental control apps that they ended up letting back in the store. So that does seem like they're willing to sort of back down on individual cases, and this could maybe lead to something more macro.

• 41:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just want, if you pass the law that says you can't self-deal on your own platform, like, that has huge consequences for the App Store. The question is whether Apple can show up and lobby their way into some carve-out for that law, because they can say, "Look, we already did all the things. We're doing it on our own. You don't need to regulate us. The market is taking care of it." And I I am trying to I'm trying to decide whether I think Apple is pursuing these changes. Well, it's obviously for both reasons, but on what balance like are they pursuing the changes for? Because I think it's good for the ecosystem because they they know that they're just going to keep getting hit over the head from Microsoft and and Facebook and Sony and all the other companies that are mad at them. Or because they see the regulation coming and they want to make the argument.

• 42:07Nilay Patel?

  It's it's both, obviously, but in which direction is it does it lean?

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I so the thing that really struck me on this was. So if you're just if the rule is just you cannot treat your product differently on the platform than you treat competitors products like. Apple is almost the most egregious case, although it's rarely sort of seem it doesn't seem as evil when they do it for whatever reason. The one that struck me was, you know, NFC on in payment apps. NFC is sort of a great way to do payment apps like it's because it's short range and so the security is better and anyway, it's what you would like your payment app to run on. Apple's payment app on the iPhone runs on NFC.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  I think they just opened it up in iOS 14 that so now sort of Square can get in the game. After like a fairly pivotal few years for mobile payments. So like just the fact that they said, all right, well, we get we we get a few years where people have to use our thing is actually incredibly valuable as something like that is opening up. If are they just not going to do that anymore? I mean, that's like the most Apple possible thing in the world is like we solve the problem and we want you to use our solution. And we think that'll make everything like it's just that's the classic Apple thing. I think you that's a fairly low stakes version. I don't think Apple's betting the company on Apple Card and and that whole payment infrastructure. They're sort of hoping it happens, but I think they would be willing to

• 43:38Speaker 03

  see that float down the river if it meant that they could avoid an intense regulatory fight. I do think the question of App Store fees, like the one that is being pushed by Epic right now, they are, they're dug in on it. They cannot compromise on letting people run an independent software distribution network on Apple devices. Like, that is too core to the proposition. And I don't know, like, I think, I think if you, it would be very hard for, for tech antitrust people to see that as anything other than just a violation.

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think this is the one where I think the criticisms of the report, specifically related to Apple and the iPhone, hit home the hardest, right? You are asking Apple to change its DNA.

• 44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and, and you, and you even see, I mean, this is when, when, when the, I think this came out with the hearing, but they had all of these quotes from Steve Jobs saying, you know, look, it's very simple. If people want to buy books on an Apple device, they're going to use iBooks. It's the bookstore for Apple devices. Like, that's how it is. And you could almost like hear his voice saying this. And he's like, no, of course that's how, like, don't be an idiot. And, and I mean, that is, that's the DNA we're talking about. He's like, well, no, we'll just make the best bookstore and then we'll force people to use it. And that's, that's the Apple way. And I think, and that's how they've been doing things for 20 years. And it's made them like the largest company in the world. So like, yeah, I mean, they're, they're like pretty used to it.

• 45:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think that, where do you, where do you tell them to stop? Right? Like, okay, Fortnite shouldn't have to pay, they should have their own in-app purchases, seems reasonable. But you developed your LiDAR sensor, you put all the money into developing in it on the back of a phone, and on day one, it has to be open to everyone before you even figure out how you want it to work? Like, there's just no way to, like, You might as well say hardware companies can't make software and software companies can't make hardware. Like, once you're down into that part of the stack.

• 45:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, so that, the NFC and this alternate App Store thing, all three, Apple will fall back on, well, we need to keep our platform private and secure, and this is the best way for us to do it. And so, it's actually a very similar problem to the Google search results pages. At a certain point, solving this problem requires dictating product decisions to these companies, right? Apple, if Apple were to open up in the way that we are, like, you know, the antitrust thing might want them to, then they would have to, when they're making their next, you know, NFC thing, or they've got this ultra-wideband thing coming, right? They would be forced from day one to create an open API, they would be forced to, like, read people in on how it works, we would all know exactly

• 46:33Speaker 06

  what's coming, because, like, everybody else would leak, they wouldn't have their big product reveal, and when it came out, there'd be Apple's solution and, like, four other solutions, and it would be a little bit messy and androidy in terms of what works and what doesn't. It completely changes how they think about making their stuff. And either you just say, yep, the government now gets to be in the room with your product managers, or you come up with some other way to slice it, like you said, like, the hardware people can't make software, that is equally problematic.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, so like, the extremely Microsoft approach. And this is how Microsoft has done everything for a long time. It's only recently that they've been more integrated. Microsoft would make the new feature of Windows and loudly announce it, and then, like, quietly say, actually, we're not shipping the consumer version of that. These four licensed software products can make use of this Windows feature, and all of you are on your own. And then we, being the extremely gentle and understanding tech critics that we are, would say, why don't you just integrate it and make it on your own? The Apple way is so much better. Every time. That is like, Microsoft plays for sure DRM, destroyed itself in the face of the iPod being an integrated solution, and Microsoft was like, fine, here's the

• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  fucking Zune. And we were still like, you're too late. The Zune is a great product, and I think it died an untimely death. But- That was the cycle that Microsoft was in, was they would build a platform capability and let other people build on it. And they just, quite frankly, lost every turn to Apple building the integrated product.

• 48:04Speaker 06

  It's one of the reasons Intel's losing right now. They show off a new product, a new thing that they can do in a laptop, or like, cool, when is it shipping? Well, you know, in like six months to 18 months, when one of our OEMs finally puts in a product. It's like, okay.

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and this is like, this is why I started the Apple conversation in this way is, is the pressure enough to move Apple to a happier place? Do they feel responsive to move to that more comfortable position before the regulators show up and say, now you're Microsoft? Like, now you're just building platform capabilities.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I also don't think any of the antitrust people, like, there are a lot of people who have, they're sort of dedicated their career to making tech antitrust happen. I don't think any of them got into it thinking of Apple. Like, I think they've become a test case for this. It's sort of in the way that Facebook is, where like, they're very big, they definitely, like, throw some elbows from time to time. So like, would you, you know, if you can get Tim Cook in the room with Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos, like, do it.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  But I just don't actually see, like, if they are the first ones to get hit by this, it will basically be collateral damage. Like, I think people are mad at Amazon and Facebook and Google. And Apple is kind of along for the ride on this.

• 49:33Speaker 06

  Except they have, like, the big, high-profile lawsuit where all the teenagers are making memes about how they're brothers.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that happens after, that happened like, that happened after the hearing. That's what was so crazy. Like, the hearing, when the hearing happened, they asked Tim Cook straight up, they're like, have you ever retaliated against a company for violating the, for sort of disagreeing over the app store terms? And he said, absolutely not. And then they just moved on. And two weeks later, all hell broke loose.

• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  All right, no one will tell us if Tim Sweeney has talked to the antitrust committee, but I feel confident that they have.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  It would be weird, right?

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  It would be weird if they hadn't. All right, we have, we have spent a long time on this. I do want to spend the last just couple of minutes of this segment talking about the other gigantic tech policy thing that's happening, which operates at a far different layer of the stack, way away from consumers, but... Depending on how this goes could have just gigantic consequences for the way that people build software. So Addy, I think we first read about Google and Oracle suing each other nine years ago.

• 50:34Speaker 05

  Oh, it is older than this site.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it's forever. The first time they went to court was like nine years ago. It was like one of the first big

• 50:41Speaker 05

  Yes, that makes sense.

• 50:42Nilay Patel?

  ongoing coverage. Brian Bishop, we sent him to the trial. I remember thinking of it as the test run for Apple and Samsung. Like, it was the beginning of the verge. I was like, how will we cover trials? Like, Brian, go to this seemingly inconsequential Google and Oracle lawsuit and we'll like do a dry run for Apple and Samsung. And he was there for six months, like just forever. It was pure torture. Thank you, Brian. He called the goricle. Goricle. It has gone up and back from the Supreme Court twice and now it's there. Arguments were yesterday morning. Addy, walk us through, honestly, what was at stake and what happened?

• 51:18Speaker 05

  So what's at stake is, yeah, basically, we have explained this on our site a few times, but back in when Google was developing Android, it decided that it wanted to make it relatively interoperable with Java. It developed, it used Java application programming interface libraries. So that basically there's like certain structures that it uses that give you access to Java functions, roughly. I'm terrible at explaining this because I'm not really a programmer. But basically, Oracle says, this is the, which had bought Java in 2010, says, this is the equivalent of you just stealing our code. Our code is copyrightable, and it also threw in some patent claims. And this has been to court several times now.

• 52:02Speaker 05

  It finally made it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court, after a COVID-related delay, finally heard oral arguments. It was just a giant string of metaphors. That was like, it was like an hour and a half of metaphors.

• 52:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, my favorite was the QWERTY keyboard metaphor. Yeah, can someone explain, I saw this flying by on Twitter and I was like, I can't, I don't even know how QWERTY relates to Java. I'm just gonna let it wash over me.

• 52:26Speaker 05

  Okay, so the thing with the case is that it's kind of very loosely, there are a couple of big arguments that Google is making. The first one is that the code that Oracle is using is, that aspect of it is not copyrightable, that they couldn't declare that they just own the structures that let Android call certain functions. The second one is that it's fair use, in part because it's the only way to get to a certain functionality or a place, like it's the merger doctrine. And Google's claim, that's where the QWERTY keyboard analogy comes in, is that after a while, like if you invented a QWERTY keyboard, at first, there's no reason someone else shouldn't come up with a different keyboard.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  You could, it's a bad analogy because you can't copyright the QWERTY keyboard, but bear with me, if you could, then at first, it's not a problem. But after a while, if you want to make a product and you want someone to be able to use the product, you need to be able to use a layout that people understand. That's the QWERTY analogy.

• 53:27Nilay Patel?

  So imagine that every key on the keyboard was like a Java API call. And that, that sounds like my dream. That's all I want in life. He doesn't love it. Well, Addy's right. It's a bad analogy because you can't copyright the layout. But basically Oracle is saying the structure, sequence and organization, right? Those are the SSO, structure, sequence and organization of the Java API calls is the QWERTY keyboard. And Google's saying, well, you can't, you can't copyright that. It's an index and we wrote all the code underneath it. And even if you could copyright it, just reusing it so people can use Java to write on Android is fair use. This has gone up and down. I think, Addy, like any number of computer scientists have said Oracle

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  is a bad actor here and they will completely redo how people write code. Any number of other tech companies. So Microsoft's general counsel and president Brad Smith wrote an article with Kent Walker, Google's general counsel in the Wall Street Journal, like an op-ed, being like Oracle's being a dick. I mean, it's like literally everybody but Oracle thinks that this is a bad idea for Oracle to win this lawsuit. But Oracle, I think, is just winning this like convoluted metaphor battle. Like, it just does not seem like the Supreme Court understood the real... To come back to what I was saying about the antitrust report. The antitrust report lives

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  in the world of the tech industry. It's using its language. It understands that you can disagree with it, but it's not a bunch of metaphors about, I don't know, like retail stores and books and indexes and cordy keyboards. It's just describing the things as they are. The oral arguments were just endless series of metaphors about other things, some of which had nothing to do with the reality of the situation.

• 55:11Speaker 05

  I mean, some people pointed out on Twitter that like Google's lawyer didn't necessarily do them a ton of favors in that aspect, in that regard. Like, a lot of the reason there were so many metaphors, there was like, it's like a J.K. Rowling novel, it's like somebody's football team, it's like a hit song, was that they didn't really manage to distinguish between, say, what an API is, like just this basic functionality that lets something interface with something else, and, say, writing the code of TikTok. Like, if you write a video game code or something that does some very clear expressive thing, that's copyrightable. Like, you can copyright code under certain instances. And they didn't really distinguish between something that is really clearly creative and, say, the idea that you could

• 55:55Speaker 05

  have a basic code structure that enables like this basic functionality. So we ended up getting left in the land of like, it's like art, and you can copyright art.

• 56:05Nilay Patel?

  And then next to this is the procedural history of the case, which is that Google has won in front of a jury on these exact claims, but then a court of appeals throughout the jury verdict. So then another whole thing that they're arguing about is whether it was appropriate for the court to throw out the jury verdict.

• 56:21Speaker 05

  Which you should explain more than I can, because I cannot. I have no background for that.

• 56:26Nilay Patel?

  So like, the really basic way of thinking about it is, in any lawsuit, you have questions of fact and questions of law, right? So like, the first thing that you are... Trying to establish like, what are the facts? And so you go to a jury for that. Like, did, did you do the thing? Did these things happen? Did Google copy the code? And you present all the evidence and the fact finder says yes or no. That's the jury. Then when you appeal, you assume the facts are correct. And you appeal the questions of law. Was the law correctly applied here? Should the law? Should this set of facts reach this outcome in the law? And that's usually why appeals decisions are very narrow. That's why there's no juries. That's why you don't really get new evidence presented and all that stuff.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  It's a big deal for a judge to throw out facts, to throw out what the jury said was a fact. This was fair use. This wasn't copyright infringement. And say, I'm interpreting the facts my, my own way, which is what happened here. So that's another, it's just like an issue for the Supreme Court to say whether it was appropriate for the appeals court to substitute its judgment for a jury, which is a fact finder, when an appeals court is supposed to, to litigate questions of law. So like, that's very wonky. That I'm trying to, those are the precise terms. Usually when you say people, questions of law, you get all mixed up between law and fact. And honestly, there are like probably some legal scholars who would tell you, there's no difference between like, right? Very philosophical, but the real question is, the jury says what the facts are. Was this copyright infringement?

• 57:53Nilay Patel?

  Was it fair use? Those are factual questions. And then the appeals courts are supposed to answer questions of law. Now, whether the Supreme Court decides to kick the metaphor can down the road and just say, you can't throw out a jury verdict is like a real possibility here. I think that the Supreme Court, especially in an eight, eight moment, like, no risk grid, Bader Ginsburg is like, who knows what they will do? But if Oracle wins, like, and we'll see what happens. But if Oracle walks away with a win here, like literally the nature of how we code software will change, unless there's some legislation that makes this okay. So we're tracking it. I don't want to, it is taken over a decade to get to this point. I don't want to let it slide by on our show, but just go read some of the coverage.

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  And I think your piece is going to come out by the time this podcast is out. It is chaos. It is like the ultimate example of. Is our legal system prepared for tech industry chaos? And like, what is really happening with computers? And the answer is no.

• 58:54Speaker 05

  I want to point out my favorite metaphor, not because it's the weirdest, but because it's the most convoluted, which is someone makes a special collection of herbs and spices that they then package and they can copyright that. But then they also publish the instructions for going to a specific aisle in the grocery store and finding the collection of herbs and spices. And the code is like the herbs and spices and the directions to get to it in the grocery store, it's like the API.

• 59:20Nilay Patel?

  I love that. That's great.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  This is the classic fried chicken law.

• 59:26Nilay Patel?

  Class, it's, they call it the KFC rule.

• 59:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:29Nilay Patel?

  When you take a computer science class. It's great. Read Addy's piece. Tell me what your favorite metaphor for an API is. You can tweet it to at Backlon.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Great.

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  My Twitter address. We got a, we've been going on about legal stuff for too long. We got a break and talk about some phones. Thank you very much, Addy and Russell. It's great to have you. I'm sure we will talk to you again as both of these issues continue winding on. Thanks a lot.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll be right back.

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• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  Dan Sevort, welcome.

• 1:01:24Speaker 07

  Hello.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna be a busy man next week.

• 1:01:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, like, all of us are, but yeah, we're pretty busy in the coming week.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  So it's time to hard shift from hardcore policy talk to gadgets. Apple, as sort of as expected, announced that on October 13th, there will be an event. They seem much more comfortable with everyone saying it's the iPhone event this time around compared to earlier where they had to walk back and then they didn't announce an iPhone. So new iPhones on October 13th. I think we're expecting four, two phones, two sizes each.

• 1:02:00Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  Seem about right?

• 1:02:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's, that's what all the rumors have been pointing to.

• 1:02:04Nilay Patel?

  The invite said, hi, comma, speed, high speed.

• 1:02:07Speaker 07

  Gee, wonder what that could be.

• 1:02:08Nilay Patel?

  So when I first saw it, I was like, oh, it's, this is, they're gonna do the ARM Mac. Hello, fast Mac. Right. And then everyone was like, oh, it's gonna have 5G, it's gonna be faster. And I was like, but 5G is slower than 4G. And that's where my brain is. So it took me a while to get on everyone's level. But yeah, it's obviously a reference to the 5G iPhones coming.

• 1:02:31Speaker 07

  I mean, you could be right as well.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  Now, I'm like, I'm actually like very confident that there will not be a Mac.

• 1:02:36Speaker 07

  Well, no, but we are expecting new A series chips in the new iPhones because there always is. And they haven't released the iPad Air yet, which we know has the new A 14 because they don't want anybody to speed test it before it's in an iPhone. So you could, you could salvage this theory of yours. It just won't be related to the Mac.

• 1:02:55Nilay Patel?

  It just won't be the thing I thought it was. I could just pretend I was always thinking about something else. So yeah, so high speed, we're expecting iPhone, what are they at 13, 45?

• 1:03:06Speaker 06

  12.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  What number is it? 12?

• 1:03:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 07

  Doesn't even matter anymore. Why do they still have numbers? It's like the only thing in the product lineup that still has a number, except for the watch, I guess.

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  There is a possibility that they call it iPhone 11 5G. They pull a Samsung. There's also the possibility they could call it an S line.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  They have to redesign it.

• 1:03:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, the rumors is going to be redesigned to look more like an iPad Pro.

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And they, they just like necessarily have to redo the antennas for 5G.

• 1:03:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  Especially if they do millimeter wave.

• 1:03:34Speaker 06

  If they redesign it, they're going to rename it.

• 1:03:35Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. So iPhone 12, maybe they'll call it the iPhone 12 5G. I would almost bet money that they will definitely not call it the iPhone 12 5G. Which is very not Apple. So iPhone 12s, we're expecting probably a 12 Pro. Fair bet that there'll be a LiDAR sensor on the back of that one. And then sort of the mainstream iPhone 12 with 5G.

• 1:03:57Speaker 06

  And then, and then a iPhone 12 mini is like the thing I've seen out there. That they'll, they'll make a small one. They'll call it a, they might call it a mini, but there'll be a small one. So it'll be, normally it's like iPhone 11 was iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone 11 Pro Max Mega. And now it'll be iPhone 12, iPhone, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone 12, and then there'll be some fourth one that'll be like a smaller version of the iPhone 12.

• 1:04:21Nilay Patel?

  You don't think they'll do iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Max, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max?

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  I don't think so.

• 1:04:29Speaker 07

  Not based on the, like, the rumors mill for the past year has said that it's been like, the small one will be something like a 5.4 inch screen. And then the next size up is 5.8 and then 6.1. And then, what's the latest rumor on the big one? Like 6.7, I think. So it wouldn't make a ton of sense to call something a Max if it only has a 5.8 inch or 6.1 inch screen.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  Okay. And then we're just assuming the Pro will have Pro, Pro stuff? LiDAR sensor?

• 1:04:59Speaker 07

  But not 120 hertz.

• 1:05:01Nilay Patel?

  But not 120 hertz. Still, we don't know. Okay. I mean, like, I'm trying to, I don't live in a 5G coverage area. I barely live in LTE coverage area now. So I'm trying to like, how, why am I gonna buy this phone? And I'm like, struggling.

• 1:05:15Speaker 07

  Neil, you're lucky you live in a, we have an electricity coverage area.

• 1:05:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yes, my power just went out for like an hour and a half. Like, okay, like, what's the battery like, like Apple?

• 1:05:26Nilay Patel?

  So I'm just thinking, besides 5G, what are they, what are they gonna layer into this phone? It's a new processor and a 5G modem?

• 1:05:31Speaker 07

  Maybe there's a visually different design. I mean, that's a great question because the one thing that really hasn't come out in the rumor mill is anything about the camera systems. Other than like, you can guess that there will be a LiDAR sensor because the iPad has it. The only thing we know or, or assume because of the rumor mill is that it won't have 120 hertz on the screen. We don't know what the resolution will be that we can guess on the sizes from the rumor mill. We can assume that it won't have USB C, but there would be a nice surprise if it did.

• 1:06:03Speaker 06

  It won't. Why would, why would 2020 make something nice happen?

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  You just did that. You just said that's a troll, Dieter. You just wanna make Dieter mad.

• 1:06:11Speaker 06

  I gotta go.

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  And then do we think there's anything else at this event?

• 1:06:16Speaker 06

  You know, like, how long have we been waiting for AirTags to show up? How long have we been waiting for them to do something to the Apple TV? If only just cut the price in half, which is what they should have done two years ago.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so there's like two little bits of Apple TV news this week that made me realize, like, just how, how weird the Apple TV is as a product, and just like how bizarrely limited it is. So like, this one is just a deal, but whatever, it's the deal they should have made ages ago. So Disney movies are finally available in 4K on the iTunes Store.

• 1:06:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, the, the idea that Apple sold the most expensive streaming box on the market, and you couldn't watch Marvel movies in 4K on it, like, what, what have we been doing this whole time?

• 1:06:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  That should have been the whole review.

• 1:07:00Speaker 07

  You could, but you just had to do it through Disney Plus.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, come on, man.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  Right, like some of someone else's service could do it, or you could buy one like just like out of the box, the thing couldn't do it. Okay. And then the YouTube 4K situation is it's just so upside down. I don't know who to blame. I don't know who to be mad at, but you can now watch. I watched a YouTube video in 4K.

• 1:07:26Speaker 06

  How are the blacks?

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  Not great, but I did it. I watched a YouTube video in 4K the other day, but it doesn't support HDR on YouTube on the Apple TV, doesn't support 60 frames per second. So like it's still just like, doesn't do all the things. And then there's like this crazy, like you can't do it on the iPhone or the iPad. And it's just like, someone is to blame. Is it? Is it Google? Do they just want you to buy a new Chromecast? Is it Apple? Have they been secretly lying to us how fast the A10 chip? It's an A10 in there, right?

• 1:07:56Speaker 06

  Who knows?

• 1:07:59Nilay Patel?

  It's some extremely powerful A series chip in the Apple TV 4K. Have they just, do they, can they just not do it? I don't think that's the case.

• 1:08:07Speaker 06

  I think they could do it. I think it's, it's like a, it's, it's, it's, it's gotta just be still wackadoo codex stuff, right? Same as it ever was.

• 1:08:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or just like fighting between these two companies. Like, yeah, the way Google wants to do it is they want to send all of your data to the web first and then, right? And like, Apple doesn't want. So the Apple TV is just in dire need of a refresh.

• 1:08:28Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:08:28Nilay Patel?

  To just bring it to where it should be, let alone become like the primary winner in the marketplace.

• 1:08:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't, it needs a refresh insofar as like, they should make it a dongle, or they should make it smaller or cheaper or something. But just as like, have a remote that does things on the TV. What the Apple TV really needs is they need to make whatever deals they have to make to get what Google got on the Google TV, right? The new Chromecast. They just need to be able to have the Apple TV be the home screen, the Apple TV app on the Apple TV.

• 1:08:58Speaker 07

  Here's a, here's a real question for you. What if they do nothing to the box and they redesign the remote? Would you buy a new Apple TV?

• 1:09:07Nilay Patel?

  You have to buy the box to get the remote? No, because I've already like thrown away that remote and gotten a different one.

• 1:09:14Speaker 07

  You did throw it out. It's at the bottom of your couch cushion. You're just not able to actually find it.

• 1:09:20Speaker 06

  So anyway, so iPhones for sure. Maybe Apple TV. I just, I think that they're gonna not. AirTags, the four circles and like some are like, oh, the circle looks like an air tag. So maybe at some point they gotta release these damn things. They put, you know, the EWB things in the old iPhones for a reason.

• 1:09:39Speaker 06

  There's also the rumor that there's a bunch of audio stuff. So Apple just pulled a bunch of third-party audio products out of the Apple Store. And there's been Beats stuff sort of ambiently floating or Apple will make AirPod branded over your headphones. There's rumors of that. And so.

• 1:09:54Speaker 07

  There's rumors of the HomePod rumors just keep like bubbling back up. Like maybe there will be, it won't be a new HomePod 2, but there will be a mini HomePod.

• 1:10:03Speaker 06

  What if the refresh of the Apple TV is it's a HomePod with an HDMI port on the back?

• 1:10:08Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it would honestly be the smartest move they could make.

• 1:10:11Speaker 06

  I mean, that's what the Fire TV is.

• 1:10:12Speaker 07

  Brilliant.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's just funny. We came off this like hour-long conversation on competition. I'm just like, why are you trying?

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I would, what have we learned about this both categories of products? We talked about TV and now we're talking about HomePod.

• 1:10:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Nilay Patel?

  The winners are cheap ubiquity. Right? Like a Roku has the processing power of a like a hamster on a wheel.

• 1:10:36Speaker 06

  It's like a really beefy. A hamster's fit though, right?

• 1:10:39Nilay Patel?

  It's a muscular 4K hamster.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  High-res hamster. Yeah. Well, is it, is it torque or speed that you need on the, anyway, it doesn't matter.

• 1:10:50Nilay Patel?

  It's a sprinter or the lifter. Um, do please tell me what kind of hamster you think is on the.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  But like cheap ubiquity, right? So like they're cheap. They're everywhere. That's the Echo story. It's the Nest story to some extent. Apple just like wants to be at the high end of the market. Are they going to allow themselves to make the $15 dongle?

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  That's supported by advertising, which is what everyone else makes.

• 1:11:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Speaker 07

  Well, the original or one of the original justifications for the Apple TV 4K being at the high end of the market was this idea that someone was going to game on an Apple 4K or Apple TV, which never really panned out. So like, do they dive deeper into that? Or do they just leave it alone?

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  They've got Apple Arcade. We've heard a lot that Apple Arcade has big ambitions. There is a report that they want AAA games that can compete with things like Breath of the Wild out there. There's rumors of a controller, right? I mean, that would be the reason to have an A14 processor in Apple TV that plays the same games as your iPhone or whatever. It would be the reason to have Arcade. The same question you could ask about the HomePod. Are they going to make the HomePod puck that costs $30 where the business isn't selling the expensive hardware? It's your Apple One subscription gets you a Siri that works. That would actually be very compelling. If there's a regular Siri and there's functional Siri and that costs $9 a month. I don't know if any Q's thought about this yet. But like, those are, I think, big questions. Like, we're expecting something

• 1:12:14Nilay Patel?

  else here. Right? Two phones and some other set of things that are too small for their own event that don't distract from the phone. So that means you can't have the ARM Mac that definitely needs its own event.

• 1:12:25Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:12:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? That's a big moment for them. You can't, they already did their iPads. You need phone ecosystem stuff.

• 1:12:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:32Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, stuff you wouldn't have your, you would not have your own event for a cheap Apple TV.

• 1:12:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Nilay Patel?

  And that would definitely won't distract from our phone. You would not have your own event for a cheap HomePod. It won't distract from our phone. So it's that category of stuff I think we're looking for here. We'll just see what it is.

• 1:12:44Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:12:45Nilay Patel?

  But I think the question for Apple is whether they're going to go down market to compete with where the winners are, or whether they're going to like states. Are they going to put an Apple TV 4K Plus with games next to the PS5? Right? Like, that just, what are you walking into? Next to Xbox in the cloud? Like, all the stuff that's happening, they've got some big questions.

• 1:13:05Speaker 06

  So, back to the phones real quick. One of the questions for me is the, the thing that's happened this year is we've seen phone companies, like Samsung in particular, go, all right, you know what? We're going to sell you $1,400 phones, $1,500 phones, and then we're going to have the main phone. Or a phone that comes clocks in at like 700, 800 bucks. Google just like said, ah, we give up making flagship phones. We're going to make the Pixel 5 at like that, you know, 600, 700, $800 range. The iPhone has been there. The iPhone 11 is there. So will Apple give themselves permission to like further increase the cost of the Pros? So that and then how are they going to break down their prices? Because one of the things they've done with the Apple Watch is they like, they made a new one that was inexpensive with the Apple Watch SE.

• 1:13:49Speaker 06

  Are they going to try and do that with the iPhone again? And, you know, there's still the iPhone SE floating around, right? The new one, that's cheap. So where Apple decides it wants its product mixes to land in terms of price for its phones is actually kind of up in the air for me. I don't think it's necessarily as predictable as it has been in years past because like the market isn't predictable anymore.

• 1:14:12Speaker 07

  To your point, Dieter, if these four phones pan out, we are staring down an Apple iPhone page that has five current models on it for you to choose from.

• 1:14:24Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:14:24Speaker 07

  And then if they decide to keep prior generation models at a lower price, as they historically have done, you could, you could, in theory, be choosing between eight different iPhones. You go buy an iPhone, which is just like, what a concept to think about. But like, you know, you had your, your piece go up today, just laying out how Samsung's doing that exact thing because they are hitting every single price point.

• 1:14:49Speaker 06

  But we kind of know the answer, right? There's the iPhone, right now, there's the iPhone 11, which is the one we just confidently recommend to people.

• 1:14:57Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:14:57Speaker 06

  Just buy that one. That's it. That's the one they want you to buy. And then if you're a gigantic nerd, you buy it 11 Pro.

• 1:15:07Speaker 06

  What we buy. And then if you are budget conscious, you buy the SE. And it's like, that's the, you're still going to land in that spot, right?

• 1:15:15Speaker 07

  Well, they're going to have the-

• 1:15:16Speaker 06

  It's still what it's going to look like. You're just going to have a little bit of screen size.

• 1:15:20Speaker 07

  Yeah. But there's going to be the SE, there's going to be this rumored Mini, there's going to be the, whatever the successor to the iPhone 11 is.

• 1:15:27Speaker 06

  I guarantee the split between the SE and the Mini is bigger than the split between the Mini and the regular one in price.

• 1:15:34Speaker 07

  Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. The Mini will be pretty, pretty high up there and it'll probably-

• 1:15:39Speaker 06

  It'll be like a $50 difference.

• 1:15:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, the pitch will be it's, it's everything you like about the iPhone on a slightly smaller package because we heard people like small phones.

• 1:15:45Speaker 06

  Sure they have.

• 1:15:47Nilay Patel?

  Um, right. And this, and I do, like, Dieter, the Pro Max, the LiDAR sensor and probably all of the 5G bands, that's another very easy distinction for them to make is we're gonna let millimeter wave happen on this big phone.

• 1:16:02Speaker 06

  But not on the smaller one. That's interesting. Yeah.

• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:16:06Speaker 06

  Well, but what a bunch of companies are doing is they'll, they'll sell you a 5G phone, but if you want the Verizon version that you get to use if you happen to live next to the right street corner, you have to pay 50 bucks more.

• 1:16:16Speaker 07

  Or 100 bucks more.

• 1:16:17Speaker 06

  Or 100 bucks more. Yeah. Which is ridiculous.

• 1:16:19Nilay Patel?

  And I mean, these networks, like, they're just like not there yet, like physically there yet. So, all right. So like, you can just see them say, okay, that the top end phone has all of this stuff. It's a very expensive, we are not anticipating a lot of people are gonna buy it. All of our marketing effort is in the middle zone. I'm, I'm curious to see how Apple positions the iPhone in this moment. Like, every company is having, is like, their challenge to tell you that what you need right now is a new phone. Because you don't. Just like, in a very deep level, you do not need a new phone. If you have a reasonably new phone, you're doing fine. And you are not, this set, like, the sell

• 1:17:01Nilay Patel?

  for the Galaxy Note, or whatever, Dieter, we're gonna talk about in a minute, but like, taking notes on the go is like, maybe not as compelling of a $1,400 proposition as it used to be. And so like, I'm deeply curious. I think, you know, Apple's good at reading a moment. I'm just deeply curious how they're gonna position all of these phones right now, and try to get people excited about having a new mobile device, when we just talked about it early in the show, TV sales are through the roof for the first time in forever.

• 1:17:30Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:17:31Nilay Patel?

  Because everyone's just at home all the time. A little more Apple stuff. There's actually a bunch of watch news here. Dan, you reviewed the Apple Watch SE? Strapped one to your child? How'd it go?

• 1:17:40Speaker 07

  Well, I reviewed the SE independently. I'm also working on a piece on family setup, which is the strapping my, one to my child part. That's to come. So hopefully it'll be up soon. Giving myself a little bit of a deadline push here. But yeah, there's this, if you look at site now, there's a review of the Watch SE. It's, it's fine. It's a Series 4 that you can buy now at a lower price. And the Series 4 was great in 2018. Series four is still pretty great in 2020. WatchOS 7 makes it really fast and the SE is really fast with WatchOS 7. I didn't have a Series 6 to side by side compare it to, but I really don't think that the faster processor in the Series 6 is really going to materially make a difference in your day to day on an Apple Watch.

• 1:18:22Nilay Patel?

  No, the tough thing about the SE is that it's the one everybody should buy, except you don't get it always on screen. But like, it's the one that you should buy.

• 1:18:28Speaker 07

  That's the thing I missed.

• 1:18:29Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:18:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, that's in my review, that's the thing that I miss the most. I don't really care about the blood oxygen sensor. Don't really care about the extra heart reading stuff for my uses. Not having it always on display is like the bummer, but really, a lot of people might not care about that. They hadn't cared about it for years until the Series 5 came out. So I think that one will be really popular as a gift this holiday season as well. Like, it's just like at that price point where you're not like shelling out an embarrassing amount of money to be that person to give a really expensive gift to somebody if you're buying them an Apple Watch.

• 1:19:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I want to call out, we, Nicole wrote two great pieces about the, well, the health sensors on the watch this week. So she wrote an explanation of why the EKG had to be FDA approved, because Apple's specifically making claims about what it can do for health and not the blood oxygen monitor, which Apple hasn't made any specific claims, which is an interesting place for Apple to be. Like, look at this great sensor. It's like in our ads. It's the climax of the Apple Watch ad is like the person in space saying it does it. But why?

• 1:19:31Speaker 06

  Because it's only, it's good for high elevation stuff. If you're, if you're in space, you need to know, otherwise.

• 1:19:38Nilay Patel?

  So that's really just a really interesting piece on just the, the sort of dueling regulatory paths. Like, she explains it really well. And then there was a study, which I think is really interesting to think about, which is having the heart rate monitor on the Apple Watch has resulted in people overgoing to the doctor.

• 1:19:57Nilay Patel?

  And like too many false positives. And that's just one of those things to unpack. Like, yes, it has saved some lives. Apple is very proud of it. That's a good outcome. We're happy about it. But there's a flip side to it. And there's actually rigorous health studies happening about the nature of these false positives. So you should cover that. Really good work. Um, we should talk about Prime Day. It's happening on the same day as the Apple event.

• 1:20:20Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Nilay Patel?

  This is why I said you were gonna be busy. Next week, you're gonna be busy.

• 1:20:23Speaker 07

  It's gonna be busy. Prime Day is, uh, two days. Cause it's Prime Days. Get it? But yeah, it's Tuesday and Wednesday. Best Buy thinks Black Friday starts on Tuesday. So they're launching their Black Friday sales on a Tuesday in October.

• 1:20:37Nilay Patel?

  So come up with another dumb name.

• 1:20:39Speaker 07

  Look, look, look forward to that. But, you know, I don't know. If you want to buy some stuff, get it on sale next week.

• 1:20:47Nilay Patel?

  Anything good yet?

• 1:20:48Speaker 07

  I mean, like, oh, we'll see. Like, Amazon's got some stuff on sale now. They've got, like, talking about TVs. They got some Fire TV models that are like half price or something right now. They've got an Echo Show 5 at half price. But like, you can never trust Amazon device sales. Like, when I say devices, like, there are Echos and Kindles and stuff like that, because they are literally always on sale. Like, if you pay full price for an Echo, you somehow stumbled on the one day a year where it's being charged full price. So like, you know, it's hard to say. We'll see. Amazon's, of course, you know, hyping it up as like a super big deal for them, because they want you to go on and buy stuff. But like, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll find out. And if there are good deals, we'll be covering it. And, you know, we'll, you know.

• 1:21:30Nilay Patel?

  I told Cameron I was gonna write the piece about how you should buy the $300 Prime Day TV to run Zoom on it. It's like half a threat. I might just keep saying it on the podcast. I think you should buy a cheap TV to run Zoom on it.

• 1:21:40Speaker 07

  And now you can stick the Facebook Portal TV on top of it. And it has Zoom.

• 1:21:45Nilay Patel?

  It's too much. All of those things collect too much data. It's what I think. The $300 TV is definitely collecting too much data.

• 1:21:52Speaker 07

  Data collection Hydra thing that you also can do Zoom on.

• 1:21:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. Put that thing on a separate network in your house, is what I'm saying. All right. We're gonna take a break. There's a few more reviews to talk about. We'll be right back.

• 1:22:10Speaker 08

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• 1:22:40Speaker 09

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• 1:23:22Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter.

• 1:23:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:23:23Nilay Patel?

  You reviewed the Galaxy S20 Fan Edition.

• 1:23:27Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:23:28Nilay Patel?

  Pantheon of great names. Surprised they didn't throw a 5G in there.

• 1:23:31Speaker 06

  There might be one technically.

• 1:23:33Nilay Patel?

  And the Note 20.

• 1:23:34Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:23:35Nilay Patel?

  Tell me about these phones.

• 1:23:36Speaker 06

  They should be the same class of phone, which is there's the good one and then there's the inexpensive one. For this S20 FE, they did it right. They like, they took out the most expensive parts, they left in the parts that you care about, like maybe 5G, but definitely the 120 Hz screen, decent enough cameras, and they charge, they're charging $699 for it. It is a great product at a great price, especially if you can find a discount, because Samsung phones are discounted all the time. This is the phone, I think I mentioned this on the show before, but Samsung did not plan on making this phone. You know, when they had the S10, they had like the S10e, and then later on there was the S10 Lite or whatever. When they had their S20 event, they did not have this phone in their room.

• 1:24:18Speaker 06

  The S20 event happened. We all went on lockdown. And they're like, yeah, we need, we need something cheaper. And so they made this phone.

• 1:24:25Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:24:25Speaker 06

  That fast. Yeah.

• 1:24:27Nilay Patel?

  That's incredible.

• 1:24:27Speaker 06

  Cause they're Samsung and they can just make whatever they want, whenever they feel like it.

• 1:24:32Speaker 07

  Remember when we used to make the joke that when Samsung saw a problem, they would just scoop up a thousand engineers and throw it at it?

• 1:24:39Speaker 07

  Like, that's exactly what they did here. Except it was probably like 10,000 engineers that were like, make a phone.

• 1:24:43Speaker 06

  The Note 20 makes no sense to me. It's a thousand bucks. And it doesn't have a high refresh rate screen. Everything else is fine. Like, that's it. But why is it, it should be like 200 bucks cheaper. How can they make the S20 FE? At 699 and this thing costs 999? The answer is the S20 is actually probably an A series, but we don't need to go into that. But they, it's not a good deal. It's a weird phone. You're just paying a tax to get a stylus if you really want one. And you should not buy it at full price. The original headline for my review was don't buy it at full price. If you can find it for 200, 300 bucks less, go for it if you want a stylus.

• 1:25:21Nilay Patel?

  Also, AT&T, if you're on AT&T, AT&T will just fire one of these phones at you for no reason.

• 1:25:26Speaker 06

  Well, they'll fire an Ultra at you, right? Which is, yeah.

• 1:25:29Nilay Patel?

  But I think even more reason to never pay for this phone. What you should do is walk into an AT&T store. Just like loiter a little bit, you know, cough, like draw some attention to yourself. You will walk out of that store with a Note 20 Ultra. It will just happen to you.

• 1:25:43Speaker 07

  Don't go into a store and start coughing. Like, that's probably not a good idea.

• 1:25:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. You'll definitely walk out of the store at that point.

• 1:25:49Nilay Patel?

  Just be like, me, over here. And they'll be like, here's a phone.

• 1:25:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's good. It's a good speaker. If you're, if you're looking for like a Google Assistant speaker. And you don't want to spend Sonos prices, then Nest Audio is great. You compare two of them together. That's stereo. Pretty loud. It's a much bigger upgrade over the Google Home. So if you got a Google Home from like 2016 or whatever. The Nest Audio is definitely an upgrade over that. And if you listen to music a lot. It's a much better experience than the Nest Mini. So if you're in that Google Assistant ecosystem, it's a, it's a good pick. It's hard to compare these smart speakers across ecosystems though, because like, it's hard to like, imagine someone being like, I've got four assistant speakers. Oh, the new Echo came out and it sounds really good. I'm gonna throw all those in the garbage and then

• 1:26:36Speaker 07

  switch over. It just doesn't seem like a realistic thing. But when the new Echo does come out, or when I have a review unit, I will certainly be comparing them head to head and telling you which one sounds better. But for most people, it's like, I'm kind of in this ecosystem, even more so than like a phone. It's a very sticky ecosystem.

• 1:26:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, my new thing is I have Nest Minis next to big Sonos speakers, because the Sonos speakers of microphones are so slow to assistant.

• 1:27:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're so bad.

• 1:27:04Speaker 06

  But the Nest Mini isn't.

• 1:27:05Speaker 07

  I, I put this in the review that the, uh, the Sonos one is a better speaker speaker. It sounds better, it gets louder, it's more powerful than the Nest Audio. But if you want a smart speaker, the Nest Audio is a better smart speaker. Like it hears your voice better. It's compatible with more things that the assistant can do. It'll get new features for the assistant much quicker than the Sonos will. So, I mean, priorities. I guess you could just stick a Nest Mini next to your Sonos speakers like you do.

• 1:27:34Speaker 06

  The, the weird thing about this Nest Audio, you're right. No one, no one is gonna switch for this. And so this really does establish that people are gonna be in the ecosystem. But it's a question about new buyers. Is this thing designed to appeal to new buyers first time? I, I've never had a smart speaker before. Which one should I get? Or is it much more likely that those people, I've never had a smart speaker before. Oh, someone threw a Nest Mini or Echo Spot into my, you know, Christmas stocking. Or, you know, I tripped and bought one at Target or whatever. Is that the more likely entry point? So this speaker in particular is like, if you're in the ecosystem, good. If you're not in the ecosystem, you're going to buy one. It's a pretty good chance that like, you're probably gonna end up buying one of those like,

• 1:28:15Speaker 06

  cheaper ones first before you buy this one, is my guess. I don't know.

• 1:28:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think the intent with this is different. Like, if you're buying this, you are buying it specifically because you want something. Bigger, louder, more powerful than what you can get with a Nest Mini. And Nest Mini is great for like accessing the Google Assistant. But if you want to use a speaker day in and day out to listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks or anything for like a long period of time, you're going to have a better experience with a Nest Audio. And I think it's at that price point where it's not, it's not a huge expense. Like a hundred dollars isn't, you can definitely spend a heck of a lot more for speakers, but it's enough that you're like, I'm intentionally buying this. I'm not getting it accidentally for free when I bought a Nest Hub. Or, you know, I'm not walking out of the store and oh, these are on the thing for $20. Let me just throw it in my cart.

• 1:29:05Speaker 07

  Like it's a much more intense purchase.

• 1:29:07Nilay Patel?

  So here's my question. Does the Nest Audio exist to keep me from buying a Sonos One? Like I've got a, I've got a, I've got a Google Home. It sounds like crap. I want a better speaker. You know, I'll just get a Sonos. That's good. I know that's a good speaker. Is that, does this exist? Because I've got a Nest, I've got a Nest Mini. I want to get a nicer audio speaker. What should I get? Oh, well, I could just get the Google one because I've already got this little mini thing here. Does it exist to keep me from buying a Sonos?

• 1:29:31Speaker 07

  Yes, they're competitors. Like they are competitors in this space. They're not buddies. Like they're, like Google would rather you buy their speaker than Sonos's speaker.

• 1:29:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I think Google has a real, a real positioning problem there. Right? Like we have seen Apple, and obviously the HomePod was way more expensive, but Apple made the entire case about sound quality and no one cared. Like just no one cared. Like how many like stereo forum influencers did Apple like convince to write gushing posts about how they could throw away all like, no, those guys are back on the forums saying like, I spent $8,000 on speakers again today. Like, you know, like they didn't throw away all their speakers for their HomePod, I guarantee you. And like, it just didn't work. Like it just fundamentally didn't work. Like, I think the sell of I want to buy a fancier speaker.

• 1:30:24Nilay Patel?

  I want it to sound better is. But you just you're buying into like an entire lifestyle. You're buying brands. You're buying famous brands and Google doesn't have any of that. And so like they're, I think they're in a weird place where they have to build up that cred. Amazon has been slowly doing it, you know?

• 1:30:40Speaker 07

  But we're looking at $100 speaker and those brands, those legacy brands, your, your, your Denons and your Onkyo and, and all these other ones that I'll probably mispronounce as well. Are not for a hundred dollars. Like you were just way beyond that, right? These are like, the Nest Audio will be on Walmart shelves, Target shelves, you know? Best Buy, what have you. It is an accessible thing. It's not big. It, it doesn't require, like you literally just plug it into the wall. There's no speaker wire to hook up. There's no receiver to plug in. There's none of that. No configuration.

• 1:31:12Nilay Patel?

  No, I was talking about Sonos specifically where Sonos has the brand equity of being like the fancy one.

• 1:31:17Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, like Sonos, what Sonos did really well was they have that great sound quality that a lot of people like and they, they kind of have that, but they bring that simplicity that I was just talking about of like, you just plug it in. And you're done. And like, you're not hooking up speaker wire. You're not configuring things. You're not, you know, whatever you do with speakers.

• 1:31:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Taking all the fun out of it.

• 1:31:38Speaker 07

  They take all the fun out of it, but you can listen to music. And so like, I think, I think honestly, that conflict that you pointed out is tougher for Sonos than it is for Google because Google is really like, like they have the Google Home Max, but like, most people are not buying the Home Max. It's, it's, it's. Probably not something that most people are investing in because it's more expensive and it's bigger. The Nest Audio is in this like sweet spot of like, which I, oh, that was my headline, wasn't it? Yeah.

• 1:32:03Speaker 07

  It's like the sweet spot of price and performance and it's good enough. And like, that's really where Amazon's echoes have like, kind of sat for the last couple of years as well. Like they're really accessible prices. They're always on sale. Google's probably going to put this thing on sale all the time as well. So like, they, they sound good enough that for the average person, for even for me, like. I'm it's certainly enough of an experience that like I'm not like compelled to go to the next step and then the next step beyond that.

• 1:32:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just think that of all of these, which is the one that's most interesting. It's the new Echo show with the screen that moves around. Right. It's like you're just kind of like up against like everybody has dots and minis and all this crap in their house like, you know, it's like not hard to to find everyone with a first gen Echo like they have been flooding the zone with the microphones and the speakers, making the case to upgrade. I think you have to add something else like a moving screen is like, oh, shit.

• 1:32:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, like, we've seen that over the years with Amazons, like, Google took four years to replace the Google Home. That was like an eon. But in Amazon's case, they've been updating every single year and they've already done like the sound quality upgrades. Like your the Echo you buy today sounds a lot better than the Echo that came out in 2015. The Echo Dot that you can buy today sounds way better than the first Echo Dot. Like, they're surprisingly good audio quality out of them. So now this year has been really interesting that they completely flipped the design to give you a reason to upgrade. So now the Echoes are balls instead of cone or cylinders and the Echo show moves like it's they they they knew that increasing the audio quality on the Echo show is not going

• 1:33:39Speaker 07

  to get someone to upgrade Echo show. Just it's it there's like real diminishing returns there. But if the screen follows you around, it like moves around like that is a very compelling reason, assuming it works.

• 1:33:51Nilay Patel?

  It's amazing how simple I am at the end of the day. I'm like, oh, Moose, I gotta get that one. We are way long. Dieter, I just wanted to quickly talk about what's going on with G Suite. Not G Suite anymore, Neelai. Well, so they they took the only reason I'm bringing this up is like, this is like one of those moments where the verge just drove a very dumb story. So they were obviously like preparing to roll this out and they rolled out a new Gmail interface a little too fast. And so it broke Gmail's search for a lot of people. In like a really particular way. In a very particular way. So if you search for something, you could no longer select every message in your entire inbox on the desktop that matched. You could never do

• 1:34:34Nilay Patel?

  it on a phone and then like delete them or mark them red. And so every power user of email just like fell into this like chaos mode and like a flood of tips came and we wrote about it and then Google was like, crap, we're gonna fix it. And the next day they're like, we're rebranding all of G Suite.

• 1:34:49Speaker 06

  So it's called Google Workspace now. They added like a new tier for small businesses. They changed all their icons. And so I wrote this thing. I was like, here's the rename. Here's why. They want to make you to not have to open up new tabs anymore. So everything works inside everything else. And they're changing the icons. And I bet that's going to annoy people. Here's all the new stuff. The end. Tom Orin says, hmm, that's all that's really interesting. And he just writes a post saying, they're changing the Gmail icon. That's all anybody cares about. Because it's like, not a pretty icon, really. It's just kind of like, a lot.

• 1:35:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, none of the icons are good. They're all just kind of a mess.

• 1:35:26Speaker 06

  The Google Docs icon is like, why is that a doc? I don't understand. It's rolling out to G Suite business users first. There'll be some, you know, consumer stuff. The confusion of what exactly Google Chat does for consumers versus businesses will continue. Google's really proud that like, they sort of beat Microsoft to the punch on these little fragments of apps inside other apps thing. Oh, good. They made OpenDoc again. Yeah, the fluid stuff is still like, sort of in beta, blah, blah, blah, like, available, not, I don't know. It's called Google Workspace now. I guess it's nicer to say that than G Suite. But yeah, you know, they're just like, everything eventually turns into OpenDoc or Wave.

• 1:36:08Speaker 07

  Remember when it was called Google Apps?

• 1:36:09Speaker 06

  I will say that they've done more to G Suite apps in the past year than they had like, the three years prior. But there's a new guy in charge, right? Javier started to improve the iPad app a little bit. Yeah, there's a new guy, Javier Soltero. Yeah. So he's done a bunch. They're moving forward. And yeah, so there you go. That's, that's what's happening. You're going to have a new Gmail logo. It's connected to a massive rearchitecting of the entire product. It's not my fault. But you knew this was coming when they put meat on the Gmail app, right? We begin where we end with an obvious antitrust violation from Google. Exactly.

• 1:36:44Nilay Patel?

  Okay, that's it. We are, this time, we are actually way long. So we gotta wrap this up. I want to call out two more stories. You might have heard about SPACs, Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicle, the hottest tech boondoggle going. It's how companies are going public without having a public is wild. Liz Lopato wrote a great explainer of it. It's very fun. I encourage you to read it. Either you're only lightly interested in business, it's just lizard or best. So just go read it. And I have to call out this interview Jake Katsnakas did. If you're on TikTok, you have probably just heard one of these beats. The guy behind all the most viral beats on TikTok, literally, he's named himself Ricky Desktop, which is an amazing name. He's 22 and the way he talks about being famous on TikTok

• 1:37:28Nilay Patel?

  is the most calculated shit I have ever heard. It is incredible. It like restored my faith in humanity. The kids are like, I'm get famous. I know what to do. I'm put water drop sounds before the beats. So famous TikTok dancers can do a whoa. Like, that's how he's thinking about it. It is wild. I encourage you to read it. It just decided aside of TikTok that hasn't been explored and just a a great interview with a hilarious character, Ricky Desktop, my new hero. Check that out on the site. You can tweet at us. Dieter's at Backlon. Dan is at DCCFert. I'm at Reckless. Dieter, you got another one coming on Tuesday?

• 1:38:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, we are going to be talking to a guy you might have heard of. His name is Marquez Brownlee. He does a YouTube channel.

• 1:38:09Nilay Patel?

  He's like a young upstart.

• 1:38:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm looking forward to that. That'll be on Tuesday.

• 1:38:14Nilay Patel?

  That's great. And then obviously, Apple event, Prime Day, review season continues. Big week next week. Eventually, there's gonna be election too. It's like some little minor news in the background. Just a lot going on through October. We're trying to get through it every day. But we'll see you. We'll see you next week. It's gonna be a big one. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:38:34Speaker 06

  Go vote.

• 1:38:54Speaker 10

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• 1:39:25Speaker 11

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