Emulators are taking over the App Store

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss third-party iPhone app stores, game emulators, Google Android and hardware team restructuring, the latest TikTok news, and more. Further reading: Third-party iPhone app store AltStore PAL is now live in Europe The free Delta game emulator for iPhones is live on Apple’s App Store A new NES emulator was briefly available on the Apple App Store The first Apple-approved emulator for the iPhone has arrived... and been pulled Apple opens the App Store to retro game emulators Google is combining its Android and hardware teams — and it’s all about AI Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now AI isn't useless. But is it worth it? Facebook’s AI Told Parents Group It Has a Gifted, Disabled Child Big Papa Joe, world's biggest TouchWiz Fan - The Vergecast (clip) Facebook’s AI Told Parents Group It Has a Gifted, Disabled Child Sony might have perfected Mini LED TVs with its new 2024 lineup Broadcast TV still exists, and now it’s sort of getting a built-in DVR TikTok Notes starts rolling out as a new rival to Instagram TikTok gives users more in-app ways to buy event tickets. TikTok divest-or-ban legislation could suddenly be fast-tracked in the Senate Report: ByteDance still has access to US users’ TikTok data despite Project Texas The president could delay a TikTok ban an extra six months under a reported House proposal. TikTok to restrict users who repeatedly post problematic topics from ‘For You’ feed Twitch’s new TikTok-style Discovery feed is rolling out to everyone soon Spotify is developing a remix feature to rival sped-up TikTok tunes Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to ‘inject a sense of crisis’ Boston Dynamics’ new electric Atlas robot is swiveling nightmare fuel Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to Rich Cast, the flagship podcast. Mini LED technology.

• 1:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07Nilay Patel?

  If there's one thing this show is actually about.

• 1:10Alex Cranz?

  It's displays.

• 1:10Nilay Patel?

  It's displays.

• 1:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12David Pierce?

  Classic audio subject.

• 1:15Alex Cranz?

  It's David's favorite subject.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  If you're gonna talk displays.

• 1:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  You want to do it in a radio show.

• 1:24David Pierce?

  That sounds right, yeah. Cause I'm gonna make a TV show that's just sound next. It's gonna be sick.

• 1:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  I feel like that that's been done quite a lot.

• 1:34David Pierce?

  I also feel like Netflix just greenlit that for me. Just now. Congratulations to me.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  Just Sound with David Pierce.

• 1:41David Pierce?

  It's pretty good.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  It's just you listing sounds you like?

• 1:44Alex Cranz?

  I was seeing him like in a little robe, sitting at like a fireplace behind him and be like, and now here's another sound.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right.

• 1:51Alex Cranz?

  With like an NPR voice, yeah.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  He's like babies laughing. I feel like I have to disclose it on the EP of a Netflix show.

• 1:58David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah, we got to this right away. You even said your name and you've already disclosed. This is great.

• 2:03Alex Cranz?

  That was Nilay.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  The Netflix show is called The Future. It's great. You should go watch it. This is Alex Cranz.

• 2:10Alex Cranz?

  Hey, what's up? That's all I got.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  David, David Pierce, host of Just Sounds, David Pierce.

• 2:16David Pierce?

  It's an honor to be here.

• 2:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God. I love your work.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  It's good.

• 2:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  You know that when you plug a USB device in to Windows and it's like

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  it's a good one. That's episode three.

• 2:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm just offering my, you know.

• 2:35Alex Cranz?

  It's a spin off for the Vergecast.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, there's actually quite a lot of news this week.

• 2:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  We've got to talk about what's happening. The iPhone emulators have hit various app stores around the world, which is actually really interesting. Google has reshuffled its Android team, which we should talk about. Meta launched its big AI push to compete with ChatGPT. It is true that Sony announced the next generation of its mini LED TVs. That will be a full hour in the middle of the show today. Then we got a couple of lightning rounds and David's going to do something he calls Headline Blitz with David Pierce.

• 3:06Alex Cranz?

  Speed run.

• 3:07David Pierce?

  I'm gonna, it's the Just Sounds, but it's me screaming headlines about TikTok. It's gonna be incredible.

• 3:14Nilay Patel?

  I also, I just want to, I'm gonna try to summon some energy in the world. It appears, not today,

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  but there might be a lightning round sponsor in the future. So if you could, everyone listening could just.

• 3:28Alex Cranz?

  Send us the good vibes.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna make it happen.

• 3:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  It's a, it's a guy named Steve. He gave me 20 bucks.

• 3:35Alex Cranz?

  I love Steve. Thanks for the 20.

• 3:36Nilay Patel?

  It's not Steve. Sorry, Steve. Okay, let's talk about emulators on the App Store. This is a big deal. So if you've been listening to Vergecast, you know, the Europeans did some regulating, as they want to do. They basically said you have to allow other app stores in Europe on iOS devices. Those other app stores started appearing. One launched this week. Alt store pal. What's the first thing these alternative app stores want to allow? Game emulators. It's the thing people want. There's been a little bit of back and forth about which emulators are going up first, which ones aren't. Apple responds to this by saying, you know what? We are going to allow emulators in our app store now. Because we don't want people installing these other app stores.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  That means emulators have come to the Apple run iOS app store. The first good one called Delta is out. It's been 10 years in the making, basically. Riley test out the developers and cranking away on it in various ways. Gray area ways for 10 years. It's here. People are playing it and they're loving it. It's good. David, you've been tracking this all very closely. What's the vibe?

• 4:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm just looking to see if this app is still the number one app in the app store. It is, in fact, still the number one app in the app store. So it was like two weeks ago, as you're hearing this on Friday, I think two weeks to the day since Apple did what it likes to do in these cases, which is just sort of update a support page without really telling anybody. But there are people watching these things. And basically, over the last five days, really, we got the first Apple emulator, which showed up in the app store and then fairly quickly was revealed to be a clone of the old version of Delta, which was an app called GBA4iOS. Spelled just like it sounds, really pulls off the tongue.

• 5:23David Pierce?

  And it eventually, it quickly got pulled from the app store. And then another one came out, I think it was called BIMI. It was out for a minute and then the developer pulled it out of what the developer said was fear, which we should come back to, which I think is fascinating. And then, like you said, Delta came out. We've talked to Riley on this show before. He was on the show last fall talking about emulators. He's been working on this forever. And at one point, a few years ago, thought he was going to be in the app store. And then that got ripped away and has come up with, I would say, increasingly creative ways if you want to do some work to get this thing out. As soon as the announcement came out that third party app stores were going to be allowed, he announced he's been working on one, like this was always the plan. And then I think it seems like basically just out of nowhere, Apple was like, yeah,

• 6:08David Pierce?

  you're cool. You can do this. And he was like, sick, I've been building this for 10 years. Here it is. And it is like, I mean, it is a remarkably good app for what it does. We can talk about the legality of ROMs and emulation. We should talk about all of that. I did a decoder episode with Sean Hollister on all of this like two weeks ago. It was very good. But it's it's just so funny. This is like a version 10 app that just showed up on the App Store all at once. Like, I think I can say this without getting me or Riley in trouble. This thing has been in Test Flight for a very long time because there's a lot less review on Test Flight. You can just test apps in beta. Some people can have them. I have had it. It's like it's out there. And now, all of a sudden, he was able to just flip the switch,

• 6:51David Pierce?

  and it is the number one app in the App Store. So much pent up demand for something like this. It's fascinating.

• 6:58Nilay Patel?

  So, we should talk about the legality of it. Alex, I know you've been tracking a lot of that stuff over time. There's a war on emulators generally occurring?

• 7:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. Nintendo is Nintendo for the longest time was like, you know what? You do you. Because the emulator audience, I think, was fairly small. And I think they have been kind of probably dreading and looking at this moment and knowing it was going to happen at some point. Because you can get them on Android and go to town. But iOS-

• 7:25David Pierce?

  But it takes some work.

• 7:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it takes some work. And iOS is like, there's some impact there. And if you can just automatically download this and then get your ROMs, that means you're not going to pay Nintendo for a kind of a similar version of it on your Switch, right? Like, why would you do that when you can just have it on your iPhone?

• 7:43Nilay Patel?

  I mean, so the the answer for the longest time is, and why doesn't Nintendo make a Game Boy Advance emulator and sell ROMs? And the answer to that has been they don't want to pay 30% to Apple and-

• 7:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's kind of like, I think the the more accurate, like, like emotionally, their response is, you know that meme of of your beloved?

• 8:09Nilay Patel?

  The meme of my beloved?

• 8:10Alex Cranz?

  Singer.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  This singer. Mariah Carey.

• 8:13Alex Cranz?

  Mariah Carey. You know that one of Mariah? That's what I think of.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  The meme of my beloved sounds like a very, very inexpensive Netflix show.

• 8:24Nilay Patel?

  That's just a couple of guys and an iPhone.

• 8:26Alex Cranz?

  That's like a freebie show. Yeah, right? That's on freebie. But you know that the Mariah Carey meme where she's like, I don't know her and puts the glasses down? That's kind of been Nintendo looking at the iPhone for the last, like, last 15 years.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  Fair enough.

• 8:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I don't know her, go away.

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  But if you put Nintendo games on the iPhone, you you just reduce the value of Nintendo's hardware.

• 8:48Alex Cranz?

  Right, right.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  That's the thing that has been the problem.

• 8:50Alex Cranz?

  That is the thing. That's that's what Nintendo is most focused on is they they've got a really good business of focusing on the hardware. And they've opened up, right? They've done some more development. Super Mario, is it Super Mario Run, I believe? They've got some some good games on there. And and they've even recently, it's like, I believe, late last year, we're kind of like, yeah, we're gonna start exploring more stuff on iOS. But they, for the longest time, they've not been a fan of it. And they've recently started going after these companies again.

• 9:21Nilay Patel?

  The companies in, like, little groups.

• 9:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  So Jason Citron, the CEO of Discord, is on Decoder next week. Looking out for that. Discord just got what amounts to a cease and desist, like, legal orders saying, delete these channels, these servers, that are hosting emulator groups. And they just wiped them out.

• 9:40Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 9:40Nilay Patel?

  And it's actually, we talked about it, you know, he's like, the lawyers won't let me say. But basically, he's like, we don't have a choice. And no one really knows how they ended up not a choice. So you're just in this weird moment where this stuff has been tolerated because the distribution is zero or a handful of people in test flight who know Riley.

• 10:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  Or illegal in a way that's like, fine. There's a lot of arguments that it should be legal, but it's been tolerated.

• 10:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Nilay Patel?

  Now it's in the store. Like, Apple's like, screw it. The last thing we can allow is the rise of successful alternative app stores because there's demand for these emulators. We have to allow it in our store to keep people away from the alternative app stores. And it feels like this whole conversation is going to come to some kind of head.

• 10:26David Pierce?

  I totally agree. And I think this is sort of a truism of gaming in general that has held true over time, that people who want to play games will jump through a surprising number of hoops in order to play games, right? It's why all of the cutting edge PC hardware is given to gamers first, because they're the ones who will pay for it and do the work to adopt it. It's why Apple allowed game streaming for the same reason. People will go out of their way to do whatever they have to do in order to play games. And so, Apple has started to pull this stuff back. But I just keep thinking about when we did an episode on emulators on this show last year. Chris Plant, the energy chief of Polygon, basically said when I asked, "When are we just going to get Spotify for old video games? Why can't I pay 20 bucks a month to play all of these ROMs perfectly legally?" And he just looks

• 11:09David Pierce?

  me dead in the face and goes, "No one actually wants that." And, and his point was just that this group of people is so small and so irrelevant to the rest of the gaming industry that it's actually not worth the effort to care about them, for an Nintendo, for anybody else, that it's like, you leave them alone because odds are they're also buying your new games, and so that's great. You don't want to piss them off. But it's just kind of a live and let live thing because it doesn't mean anything to anybody else. I think the fact that Delta is so successful and the fact that this has become such a big thing is going to be a really interesting moment in that story. Because this is the first time ever it looks like there is actual honest to God mainstream demand for something like this. Because if

• 11:51David Pierce?

  you just download Delta, there's nothing there. It's just an app with nothing to do. You have to fill it with stuff. And that stuff has to come from somewhere. And that stuff mostly comes from places that are not you dumping ROMs that are yours from your Game Boy cartridges, which no one knows how to do and no one is going to know how to do. And you can just go on Google and search for ROMs and they're all right there. So like, this stuff is just out of the shadows in a way it never has been.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  I feel like notable Plex owner Alex Cranz has a response for you, David.

• 12:19Alex Cranz?

  I do. It is a lot easier if you want to back up your carts now versus 20 years ago.

• 12:24David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 12:25Alex Cranz?

  There's a lot of different ways to do it. I think you can technically do it with some of the analog consoles and, and there's a whole bunch of little tools and stuff. And to be clear, Nintendo doesn't care as much about the NES games and the Super Nintendo games. Like, when they went after Yuzu, that was because Yuzu was doing much more, like, it was doing the Switch.

• 12:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Alex Cranz?

  The thing actually out right now that you can buy.

• 12:44David Pierce?

  Including Tears of the Kingdom. Like, before other people were playing Tears of the Kingdom, people on Yuzu were able to play Tears of the Kingdom.

• 12:50Alex Cranz?

  This next part, I say, as someone who owns the Super Nintendo version of the analog, loves a retro game, have you played a retro game lately?

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  I, so I'm watching Fallout, and I was like, I should play Fallout 1. And then I looked at it, and I was like, I'm not gonna play Fallout 1.

• 13:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's like watching old movies. You, it takes a very particular kind of person to be like, yes.

• 13:11David Pierce?

  You know where they really work, though, is on the iPhone.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 13:15David Pierce?

  Like, all the games that look like crap on your 60-inch 4K TV look great in a little square on your iPhone. It is the perfect place for this kind of thing.

• 13:25Alex Cranz?

  But it's, it's, in some ways, right?

• 13:28David Pierce?

  I don't know this. I just know this hypothetically based on,

• 13:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, hypothetically.

• 13:31David Pierce?

  You know, the internet and all of the carts that I have legally downloaded.

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  This is great. I feel like the fact that I'm, one, in, in charge of this operation, two, a fucking copyright lawyer, three, deeply aware of the situation is all that. Like, I'm going to jail when I leave here.

• 13:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're actually sitting out there. But just for Neela, David and I get off.

• 13:53Nilay Patel?

  Nintendo police are here. They're like, Nintendo?

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  I, I couldn't apologize more deeply if I wanted to.

• 14:07Nilay Patel?

  So, let's set aside the legality, right? Because it is actually a weird gray area. There's a lot of parallels to Napster and ripping MP3s, and it's a lot.

• 14:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the law has changed. Maybe we'll come back and do a whole thing on the legality of that. Let's set that aside. One huge problem Apple has here is it traditionally has not allowed emulation of any kind. And now, it is allowing it, which means an entire library of software that people like better than Apple's software is available, and proving a very important point. Right? Like, Nintendo games are better than the games that Apple has half-heartedly supported for 10 years.

• 14:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Nilay Patel?

  And they are running in emulation. They're not, they're not coded in Swift. The controls are better. They're more portable. It's better. Like, the whole thing is showing a vision of what the iPhone could have been the whole time if Apple would just let go.

• 15:06Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  And I, I feel like that's actually the bigger problem for Apple in all this. Like, the next emulator that comes out is gonna just be Windows 95. Right?

• 15:16David Pierce?

  But it can't. That breaks the rules. This is like, the parsing Apple's review guidelines is so funny here because you can just tell the number of meetings they had to make sure what you just said is impossible. Let me just read you two sentences. It says, additionally, retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games. So much going on in that sentence. The following sentence, you are responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these guidelines and all applicable laws. Which applicable laws? Who's to say? But the phrase retro game console emulator apps is so specific and so lawyered to absolute death.

• 16:00David Pierce?

  What is, what counts as retro? Who's to say? Apple can do whatever it wants. What counts as a console? A PC probably doesn't. Like, it is so narrowly tailored to just let Apple do whatever it wants and nothing else in the funniest way.

• 16:15Alex Cranz?

  I just think this is gonna somehow end up with all the Nintendo emulators getting kicked off because Nintendo raises a stink and we're just left with like Atari Lynx.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  But there can't be a universe, by the way, Atari Lynx emulators rule. I had California games on my Atari Lynx. That shit was awesome.

• 16:32Alex Cranz?

  You had an Atari Lynx?

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. I did not notably have a Game Gear.

• 16:36Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  I had the other thing. That's a bummer. I had the ostracized.

• 16:42Alex Cranz?

  You had the one that I could only find at like the off-brand toy store.

• 16:45Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't great. I really wanted the TV tuner attachment. We were gonna come to TV tuners later in the show. We'll come back. It's all thematically linked.

• 16:55Nilay Patel?

  Thinking about my Atari Lynx. It had the little cartridges that were like very thin. The Xbox 360 is a retro game console at this point in time.

• 17:02David Pierce?

  Is it?

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  Yes, of course it is.

• 17:04David Pierce?

  Maybe.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  It's two generations ago. It's 20 years old.

• 17:08Alex Cranz?

  I think part of this is going to be these companies who are actively selling it, right? Like, like, Microsoft is pretty active in supporting old games, right? They're very backwards compatible. Nintendo is actually pretty backwards compatible. Sony, way less so. So, so I think there's a real potential of seeing like a PS1 game.

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  If you are Microsoft,

• 17:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  You have a 20-year-old console, why aren't you putting that emulator on the store tomorrow? With the ability to download games for three bucks and you're giving 30, a buck to Apple? Who cares? That is free money.

• 17:38Alex Cranz?

  Some consoles are harder to emulate than others, right? Like, like, the Nintendo consoles, most of them are really easy. N64, super hard. Even on an iPhone today, it is really hard to get N64 games playing properly. And I think Xbox might be the same. I need to double-check this. But I'm pretty sure that the Xbox 360, you don't see as big a robust emulator community around it as you do, like, Sony games. And part of that is, again, you could just go buy those games. Like, if you have an Xbox, any kind of Xbox, you can just go and play Saints Row 2 or whatever.

• 18:10David Pierce?

  Yes, Sony is an interesting example because Sony has done a really good job over the years of making its current consoles, and I confess, I don't have a PS5, so I don't know how true this still is now, but for a long time, there were a lot of PS1 and PS2 games that you could play on a PS3 and a PS4. Like, they've done a good job of keeping that stuff available and making it part of its cloud services and all this stuff. So I think if I'm Sony, I can sort of see it in both directions. Where, one, it's like, okay, this is helping me sell PlayStations, so I want to do that. But on the other hand, I kind of agree that if Sony was just like, hey, for whatever, 10 bucks a month, you can play every PS1 game on your iPhone? Like, I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat. And it's just sitting there for them.

• 18:53Nilay Patel?

  It is true that some of this stuff is hard, but have you heard of the staggering power of the A-Series chip?

• 18:58Alex Cranz?

  So as you guys were talking, I was looking this up and apparently there's only really like one emulator for right now for Xbox 360. It's only for PC. It's called Xenia, which love the name. And on Reddit, there is discussions. People are really weird about it. They're, they're like, yeah, it sucks. Or it's fine. But it's apparently like, one of the only ones.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  No, there's one called Zimu.

• 19:20Alex Cranz?

  Oh, there's also Zimo?

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  Zimu is for the Mac.

• 19:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, how could you forget about Zimu?

• 19:23Alex Cranz?

  I'm so sorry.

• 19:24Nilay Patel?

  We're all just Googling.

• 19:25Alex Cranz?

  We're just Googling this furiously right now.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  The point is, Microsoft is very capable of making the product. Sony is very capable of making the product. It is free to them because they already own the library. The demand is obvious. And the thing it's just going to prove out is Apple's way of doing things has unnecessarily restricted user experiences on the iPhone.

• 19:46Alex Cranz?

  That's a good point, yeah.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  And I, that is the danger. Because once that falls away, and people are like, wait, this is better than when Apple is in tight control of this ecosystem. Which is what we hear, by the way. When we talk about antitrust and control, we get an awful lot of notes from people who are like, this is what I'm paying for. It's for Tim Cook to push all the buttons on my phone for me.

• 20:09David Pierce?

  Well, and I would point out that one of the really hard things about regulating that is proving the other way. Because a big part of what like, the DOJ in this case is saying, is that it would be better if it wasn't like this. And that's so, so, so hard to prove. And this, to your point, is going to be a very real way in which it is going to get a lot better very quickly, because it changed.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  And I believe, I don't know, but I believe that's why the emulator rule is global, and not just in Europe, where Apple is required, like legally required to allow other app stores, which would just go ahead and do this. They know, they can see the outsized demand for emulators. If you allow other app stores with more permissive rules, people will flock to those app stores, they'll get the demand, they'll be like, in Europe, we get game emulators. Why don't we get them here? Well, I guess we need rules to allow other app stores in the United States, and they're not.

• 21:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 21:01Nilay Patel?

  I think they'd rather soon be in a lawsuit with Nintendo.

• 21:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  Than have any political capital to open up the app model in the United States.

• 21:08Alex Cranz?

  And that'd be a wild lawsuit, right? Because a lot of these games were... Copyright was super weird in the 80s around video games, if I remember.

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  It remains super weird.

• 21:20Alex Cranz?

  It's not, it's not easily sorted. So this would be a fight for Nintendo regardless.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, it depends on who you're suing, what you're suing them for. Like, again, the, the, the things that you would map it to are still Napster and Groxter.

• 21:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Nilay Patel?

  And the Supreme Court, and the appeals courts in those cases, like, invented theories of liability. Like, with Groxter, it was like, you are enabling copyright infringement. You know it's happening. You're marketing the thing for copyright infr- now you are liable for copyright infringement, even though you've done none yourself.

• 21:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  That's a, it's a bunch of steps down there. You gotta get all the way there. I'm not sure that you're gonna do that against a single developer. I'm not sure you can prove that case against Apple. By allowing these emulators on your store, you know, this, you're marketing the iPhone to do this copyright infringement. There's a lot of road. That's a lot of steps.

• 22:10Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 22:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's also, Apple is, like, the, the second sentence of that thing in the guidelines that I read is Apple, pretty clearly foisting that responsibility on whoever is shipping the emulator. They're like, oh, if people use software in here that isn't yours to own, that's your problem. We, we told you not to. You've broken our terms of service.

• 22:26Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's why they pulled the, the one app too, right? Like, the, the, was it GBA for iOS?

• 22:31Nilay Patel?

  No, that is very confusing.

• 22:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 22:35Nilay Patel?

  So IGBA comes out, it's the first emulator hit any of these stores.

• 22:39Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so not GBA for iOS.

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  Right, but then Riley tweets, hey, this is a fork of GBA for iOS, the thing that I made long ago.

• 22:47Alex Cranz?

  That I definitely never had on my phone.

• 22:49Nilay Patel?

  Right, and, and what his point was, Apple makes all this noise about how the App Store is controlled and safe, and here's just a bootleg of my decade-old project that they let slide through while my real project is waiting, is sitting in review.

• 23:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:02Nilay Patel?

  So he's like, very irritated about this. Apple pulls the app and then in a classic sort of Apple way, there's no public explanation given of what they're doing. There's nothing we can link to. There's Mac rumors saying, Apple has told us on background that they've pulled it for these two reasons, one of which is copyright.

• 23:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:21David Pierce?

  It's so important in this context to remember that Apple's review process is insane. Like, in all seriousness, like, anyone who claims that Apple's app review process is consistent and has rules and makes sense is just out of their mind, right? And like, we see this all the time. It's so easy for bad apps to get through while people get their apps hung up on absolute tiny technicalities that don't actually have anything to do with anything. It's lunacy. And so I think what happened in this case is, once it became obvious that this app was just a rip of Riley's app, it's very popular. This is a new thing. It makes sense from Apple's perspective to say, you've violated the rules by borrowing

• 24:06David Pierce?

  someone else's app. I think there's even the rule is borrowed in scare quotes in Apple's guidelines, that they can't borrow your work, which is a very funny way to say. And so I think in this case, it was, it's pretty easy and protected for Apple to say, you just boosted somebody else's app. You can't have this.

• 24:22Alex Cranz?

  Well, yeah, and it was like, it basically had wiped some of the licenses that the original was developed with.

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  Classic.

• 24:29Alex Cranz?

  Off of it and.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  Classic bad faith move.

• 24:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:31David Pierce?

  And like filled it with ads, right?

• 24:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So it was just all around like, no, this is garbage.

• 24:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Alex Cranz?

  And the guys apologized.

• 24:38David Pierce?

  We see in the App Store all the time. Do you remember the, when Flappy Bird came out and all of a sudden there were 40,000 Flappy Birds that all had a million ads? Or ChatGPT, when it came out and was first really popular, you could search for ChatGPT and there were a billion things that kind of looked like ChatGPT and were called ChatGPT, but just had ads and would like steal your family from you. Like, Apple is bad at this. And just continues to pretend that it is like in a firm hold of everything that happens on the App Store and it just is not.

• 25:07Nilay Patel?

  Nope. So that's emulators here in the United States, around the world. Because Apple knows if it allows emulators in alternative app stores in Europe, people will want them here, it's bad. So it's allowed them here.

• 25:19David Pierce?

  Wait, can I ask a legal question, though? This is the thing I've been wondering about the last couple of days, this has been going on. The, this idea that we now see what better looks like and that could be bad for Apple. I've been trying to figure out in my head, if I'm Apple, am I more worried about, okay, this sort of proved the point that the iPhone gets better if we allow this one thing, now it becomes more legally dicey, they're going to say, well, now we have to allow all these other things because we've proven the point that it gets better when we do. Or does Apple say, we've thrown you a bone or two, let's all shake hands and move on? Does that make sense? I'm trying to figure out like, which is the winning strategy there?

• 25:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to ask some AI generation program to generate Tim Cook and Jonathan Cantor and Tim Cook saying, we've thrown you a bone or two, now let's shake hands. Like, it'll blow up, like, we're going to blow up a data center with that prompt. It is an unimaginable situation.

• 26:09David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 26:10Nilay Patel?

  I, I think the danger for Apple is they will get forced into allowing more and more things. This has long been the danger, this is why they have fought it for so long. We don't know what kinds of things will happen in the European market, because other kinds of app stores are going to let other kinds of things happen. So there's only one app store in Europe right now, it's by Riley Testout, it is called Alt Store Pal, it's going to launch with Delta, obviously. And this clipboard manager app, Clip, which is a type of app that is forbidden by Apple on the regular App Store, because a clipboard manager can see all the things that you are copying and pasting and da, da, da, da, da. Totally normal to have clipboard managers on desktop computers, Apple is not allowed it on the phone. So here you go, here's this one other kind of thing you can do in the iPhone that you couldn't do before.

• 26:55Nilay Patel?

  Is that going to be enough to, to turn the tide of regulation around? I don't know. Emulators obviously were.

• 27:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Nilay Patel?

  Right? So there, there's only one store right now.

• 27:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there's only one store and there's no porn or gambling and I feel like we made a bet. I think I may have lost a bet somewhere.

• 27:13Nilay Patel?

  How quickly porn, well, I think Riley's been working on this store for a long time.

• 27:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and he didn't want to put porn on it.

• 27:18David Pierce?

  Give it a minute, Krantz. I absolutely do not believe you have lost this bet yet.

• 27:22Alex Cranz?

  Okay, it's coming.

• 27:24Nilay Patel?

  The second the Vision OS App Store opens, the floodgates, wrong phrase.

• 27:36Alex Cranz?

  Don't cut any of that.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  There's only one. The point is, there's only one store. We don't know. But the second there's another compelling thing that you can accomplish with an app from another store that is compelling enough for anyone, any significant set of people to go download that store and get that app, Apple will allow that thing. It seems inevitable that that is the, just how the flow of innovation is going to go now. You know, we always joke that like just the hint of competition makes these companies behave, just like a whisper of competition. Here you have both like mandated competition because of the regulators. There's now other app stores. And there's going to be way more than a whisper of competition. There's going to be just people trying stuff

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  because it's a land grab in Europe for iPhone customers again, which is cool.

• 28:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, and that pipeline of cool apps come out that Apple doesn't allow to, Apple allows it so that people don't go through the hoops of downloading an app. Like what it seems is now obvious, and I'm so curious how far this will go, is that it is more important to Apple to keep you in the App Store than to keep its rules about the App Store.

• 28:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:47David Pierce?

  Like, Apple will bend massively as long as you stay in the App Store. And it's going to be so interesting to see how far that extends. Like, I am on record with like the Apple Sports stuff to say that betting and gambling is coming to Apple platforms in a way that people do not yet see. And I think this, like porn, I think is probably a pretty bright line for Apple that it won't cross for a variety of reasons, but like, there will be popular betting apps that do things that Apple's apps won't let you do. And like, how far will it go to keep as much in the App Store as it possibly can is going to be a big question over the next year or so.

• 29:27Alex Cranz?

  I think the port is gonna happen as well. I think they're gonna be like, yeah, I think they're gonna be like, oh, you can age gate it and then use Face ID to access your Pornhub account.

• 29:38David Pierce?

  And they'll tell a security story about it.

• 29:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, they're gonna do a whole security story about it.

• 29:42Nilay Patel?

  This is, no, I disagree.

• 29:44Alex Cranz?

  Okay, yeah, because you'll just see too much porn on the subway?

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  No, although here, two things. One, as I was riding the subway into work this morning, a woman was watching a horror movie with full speakers, no headphones.

• 29:57Alex Cranz?

  Oh, cool.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  And there was just a lot of deep breathing and then screaming. Just horror movie. And for a while, it was just deep breathing. So everyone was looking around the subway car. Incredible breach of subway etiquette all the way around. And I was like, should I just give her my AirPods? Like, this might be worth the 200 bucks right now.

• 30:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:14David Pierce?

  I honestly believe that if you are listening to something on full speaker, everyone else within earshot is now firmly within their right to come over and press pause or rewind. Or, we're all watching this together now.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  Sit down next to the person?

• 30:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're all watching this together. And I can be like, Cole, can we just go back 10 minutes? I missed the part that was happening. You should be able to sit down next to them and be like, we're watching this together.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just do the double tap to go back 10 seconds.

• 30:39David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  Uh, don't do that, but if you do, let us know how it goes.

• 30:44Alex Cranz?

  Probably not well.

• 30:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm guessing, uh, not well. Okay, that was a side note. Here is why I think Apple won't just like, let porn happen.

• 30:51Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 30:54Nilay Patel?

  There was nothing to watch the other night, and I did it. I watched Argyle.

• 30:57Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 30:59David Pierce?

  Welcome.

• 30:59Nilay Patel?

  It was bad. It was real bad.

• 31:01Alex Cranz?

  Did his hair ever move? Did he ever fix his hair?

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  It's not. I don't want to say anything about this movie. What I want to say is, throughout the entire period that I was watching Argyle, I was trying to imagine Tim Cook watching Argyle.

• 31:18Alex Cranz?

  Is that just like, if Tim Cook wouldn't do this, it won't appear on the App Store?

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  I think that is as good of a content understanding for Apple as anything. And you're like, this is about as far as, is, he's gonna go.

• 31:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, he, he had to sit there. And then he had to tell Matthew Vaughn that that was a good movie. Right? Like, there was, there was obviously a screening. This is a big Apple movie from the twisted mind of Matthew Vaughn.

• 31:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  Dua Lipa's in the thing. And then they all got up and the lights came on and, you know, Apple Park. And Tim was like...

• 31:54Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 31:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:55Nilay Patel?

  I just, there's like a part of me that says like that there's a boundary on Apple's behavior. And I don't know exactly what it is about the image of Tim Cook watching Argyle that makes me confident the boundary will never get to porn.

• 32:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  But if you just sit there, I don't watch Argyle, I don't, I can't stress this enough. This is not a good use of your time.

• 32:15David Pierce?

  No, it's awful.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  It is just not a good use of your time. But if you watch it and you imagine Tim Cook watching it, I mean, like, this is what I paid for.

• 32:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:25Nilay Patel?

  Then there's a part of your brain that's like, when the, the whatever Apple product marketing manager comes to him and says, all right, here's how we're going to solve for the porn revenue.

• 32:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:34Nilay Patel?

  Like, that person will just, like, get yeeted on.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, he's like, my brain can't process this.

• 32:41Alex Cranz?

  He's just got a little spring in his office and he.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  It's a beautiful Johnny Ive, liquid metal, like.

• 32:49Alex Cranz?

  It's gorgeous. It looks kind of like the Webby Award.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  The design is obvious and it's minimalism. But it's just a box on a spring. All right. That's enough to talk about Tim Cook and pornography in the same sort of mental space.

• 33:02Alex Cranz?

  We're sorry.

• 33:04Nilay Patel?

  David, you're, I know you're covering it. Are there more app stores in the mix here?

• 33:09David Pierce?

  I think so. So the, the first phase of this, there's been a handful of folks saying it's coming, right? And a lot of it is gaming. Epic has been loudly talking about doing this. The folks behind the, the SetApp thing, which is like a subscription to a bunch of Mac apps, they've said they're working on some stuff. So I think we're going to get more of these and there's going to be a set of them that are like very professional and very legit and are sort of big businesses unto themselves. And then there's just going to be this crazy minefield of new ideas. And I think those are going to take a while, from what I can tell. It's like, it's hard work to build one of these things. And I think in Riley's case, he's been running Alt Store for a while.

• 33:52David Pierce?

  And so there were, there was a bunch of paperwork and stuff to do to get this working. There was the, you have to get like a million dollar line of credit or something to open one of these app stores. But he was able to, from what I understand, jump through these hoops relatively quickly. If this is just a.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because Tim Sweeney was like, here's a million dollar line of credit. I need this to start happening.

• 34:10David Pierce?

  Basically, right. And then if you're, if you're the, the MacPaw folks who have been running SetApp for a while, or you're Epic, like, you have the resources to do this. But if you want to just spin up an App Store from nothing, it's actually pretty hard work.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:23David Pierce?

  And so I think that my guess is like this fall and maybe even into next year is when the like truly weird stuff is going to start to happen, but it is going to happen.

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  My question is, what is the next set of emulators? Like just to stay focused on emulators? Maybe Apple's not going to allow Windows.

• 34:39Alex Cranz?

  It's Atari Lynx.

• 34:40Nilay Patel?

  It's definitely Atari Lynx, but like maybe Apple isn't going to allow Windows emulation in this App Store at the gate, but you can see maybe Alt Store is going to allow Windows 95 emulation. And we're all going to be playing Leisure Suit Larry on our iPads, right? Like you can see Commodore 64, is the Commodore 64 a retro game console? I don't know.

• 35:01Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 35:01David Pierce?

  I guess.

• 35:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I believe there was one briefly on the store.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  There you go. I mean, what is the definition of a retro game console?

• 35:09Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 35:09Nilay Patel?

  We could do another half hour on the bird chest, I'm confident. But as that starts to open and the library of acceptable software starts to expand, which Apple has never allowed, they've wanted everyone to stay inside of their user interface. And for good reason, I don't think these are bad things that Apple wanted, right? They didn't want a bunch of weird flash ports in the iPhone in the beginning. They made very serious rules about how apps should look and feel so that the user experience would be great. I think that the time limit on needing to do that has long since expired. So now it's like, what else is going to be allowed here? And you can see that emulation of various kinds of other computers are going to very quickly open the door to floods of other cool software, which all, most of which, by the way,

• 35:53Nilay Patel?

  won't be monetized by like weird micropayments and hats.

• 35:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Nilay Patel?

  Because it's just old software.

• 35:58Alex Cranz?

  I'm curious, one that I think will be kind of interesting is Scum VM. So Scum VM is a lot of.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  What was that game? Monkey Island?

• 36:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Monkey Island, point and click games, all made by LucasArts.

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Alex Cranz?

  Which is now owned by Disney. And Scum VM is kind of like independently maintained by other people. And I'm like, oh, that's a really, that's one you always see anytime a system starts allowing emulators, the PSP, the Vita, like even the Steam Deck. That's one of the first ones you see and it's like. Is it gonna, is it gonna pop up soon? Are we gonna get Scum VM? Are we gonna be able to play the dig in Monkey Island on this thing? Or is Disney gonna come around and say, hey?

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. I'm like, I, there's a part of me that, the thing I'm looking forward to most is some sort of retro Windows or Mac emulator that just lets me run a non-creative cloud version of Photoshop on an iPad. Like, that's coming, right? It's, it's coming. Wes Davis, our weekend editor, posted on threads a video of him playing.

• 37:00Alex Cranz?

  It was the Kirby, the Canvas Kirby game.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, on an iPad.

• 37:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Nilay Patel?

  For the Nintendo DS, but he was playing it with a stylus on iPad. And it's like, ah, that's better than any idea Apple's had for an iPad game.

• 37:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was like, that's, that's cool as hell. I love that.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  That's not great. I'm excited for it all. A little chaos is good for this market.

• 37:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Nilay Patel?

  All right, I want you all to go, we're gonna take a break. You all go, just watch the Argyle trailer.

• 37:23David Pierce?

  Don't, don't do that. Why would you tell people to do that? Go do anything with your life other than watch the Argyle trailer.

• 37:31Nilay Patel?

  I've never watched a movie where I've like openly wished the Apple TV had a 2X button. I was like, cause I can't stop in the middle.

• 37:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. You don't just like walk out of the room? Like, I'm just gonna go do laundry now.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  I gotta know what hap- it's just like a curse. That's why I watch so little stuff.

• 37:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:47Nilay Patel?

  Cause I gotta know. And then I'm like committed and like now like this is my personality now, like I'm a different-

• 37:52Alex Cranz?

  Now I really, David, I think we need to just find the worst content possible and be like, Eli, you're in it now. You gotta keep going.

• 37:59David Pierce?

  Eli, have you heard of suits?

• 38:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna take a break. I'm gonna yell at David a little bit. We'll be right back.

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• 39:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. For me, it was the scene where she started ice skating. Wait, who? I haven't seen it yet. This is spoilers.

• 39:45David Pierce?

  No, no, no. We cannot do this. Listen, sometimes I would say the Verge cast is known for long diversions down strange rabbit holes. This is just like objective cruelty to our audience.

• 39:58Nilay Patel?

  I'm just, you know that famous story where Tim Cook looks at his lieutenant and he's like, "Why are you still here?" Yeah. I literally imagined him standing up in the Steve Jobs Theater when that happened in the movie and being like, "Why are you all still here?" Matthew Vaughn just crying, running, weeping from the room. It's not good.

• 40:17Nilay Patel?

  I have so much to say about how bad this movie is. All right. That's a Tuesday episode.

• 40:22David Pierce?

  No, do that on Decoder. Get that out here.

• 40:24Nilay Patel?

  It's a full, we're gonna get Matthew Vaughn on Decoder and be like, "All right." So the big reveal of this movie.

• 40:28David Pierce?

  How do you make decisions and let's change that?

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, speaking of decoder.

• 40:38Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 40:38Nilay Patel?

  There's an org chart change at Google.

• 40:40Alex Cranz?

  Okay, that's a good, that's a good segue. I love that.

• 40:43Nilay Patel?

  I pulled that one off. I was rehearsing that one.

• 40:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I love that.

• 40:46Nilay Patel?

  And I looked in the mirror this morning. I'm like, we're gonna get this right today.

• 40:48Alex Cranz?

  Just nail it.

• 40:50Nilay Patel?

  Uh, um, yeah.

• 40:54Alex Cranz?

  So Google, Google's getting a whole reorg. Like, or it's not just Google, it's Android, right? Because David, you, you actually spoke with Rick. You, you got the whole, the whole thing.

• 41:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, so the place to start is that Google is a famously well-run company with an org structure that makes sense to everyone and is, is structured in order to make everyone produce good work, right? We all agree on that as sort of the premise of all of this.

• 41:21David Pierce?

  No, Google is just abject chaos all the time. And this is like, in large part deliberate, like, from the beginning, Google's whole thing has been like, hire really good people and just sort of like turn them loose. And it's just like a loose construction of smart people who make things. And that's fine as far as it goes. That's how you get Gmail, which was somebody's 20% project 20-plus years ago now. It's also how you get 400,000 messaging apps and all of the weird things that Google has built and killed over the years. But basically, the, the thing that I have come to understand over the last couple of days of talking to people, including this new team at Google, which is basically a combination of Google's hardware team, which was run by Rick Osterloh, and its Android

• 42:04David Pierce?

  team, which was run by Hiroshi Lockheimer. Hiroshi also ran Chrome, Chrome OS, Google Photos, Google One, and a smattering of other stuff. But it basically oversaw like a lot of the most popular platforms where people actually interact with Google stuff. All of that is now being smushed into one team under Rick Osterloh. It's called the Platforms and Devices team. And the idea very much is to make all of that into one team so that they can run faster with AI. Like, the whole story over and over is just AI. We have to do things faster. We have to make our moves more quickly. We have to be able to pivot faster. We have to be able to build new stuff faster. We need to have hardware, software,

• 42:47David Pierce?

  and AI all together. We need to have full stack everything, like. Google, I think, as we've seen over the last, what, 18 months now, got caught sort of off guard by the speed with which AI took over the world. Like, Google built so much of this foundational technology and yet didn't beat ChatGPT to market. Like, that is a failing of that company. And they are now racing to keep up. And I think sort of smushing the hardware and software together, particularly on phones, is a pretty huge shift in trying to make that go faster.

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  So I have a number of questions here.

• 43:26Nilay Patel?

  One, I think Google was initially, Alex is just laughing.

• 43:30Alex Cranz?

  I'm just laughing. I was like, the speed with your, I've got some questions.

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm reading this, I mean, it's an org chart.

• 43:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:37Nilay Patel?

  I have a number of ideas about this org chart change. But the core one is what you just said, which is Google was caught off guard by ChatGPT. It's failing the company. We're, it's, it's been a year now. LLMs are not as good as people said they were going to be. Like, the humane, like, even if you imagine a version of the humane pin, where the hardware was perfect and it was fast, it's still like, that's the wrong bridge.

• 44:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  They, they just, there's no way for them to fix that problem. Right? And we have not seen any meaningful improvements on hallucination for any of these models, really. So you're like, yeah, they were caught off guard. And then they were really worried that Google search would go away. Satya Nadella is out there being like, I'm gonna make them dance. I would, it is true that Google started dancing.

• 44:24Alex Cranz?

  They, they did a little tippy tap dance.

• 44:26David Pierce?

  But Satya Nadella didn't do it.

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's like, that wasn't, Bing has not been the beneficiary of the dancing in any way, shape or form. Google, I would say, dancing without rhyme or reason. Not a lot of rhythm in the, the dancing happening in Mountain View.

• 44:43David Pierce?

  Agreed.

• 44:44Nilay Patel?

  And so it's like, if, if you believe that that is the thing that set them into action, that's the thing they're talking about, like, to what end?

• 44:50David Pierce?

  I don't know if I'm being completely honest, and I feel like this is the strange moment we've come to in AI. Like you had Drew Houston on Decoder this week, I think, and he repeated the line that Sundar Pichai and others have said that AI is as important as fire. Like, people just say that unironically, that this is the most important thing that has ever happened to society. Like, literally, that's the thing people say out loud. And is it? Like, is there any actual evidence of that so far?

• 45:21Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I would say, yeah, Liz and I-

• 45:26David Pierce?

  Fire, Alex. Fire.

• 45:28Nilay Patel?

  Also electricity.

• 45:29David Pierce?

  There's ample evidence it's not crypto. Like, I think we're there.

• 45:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think Liz and I have talked about this a lot. She gets, like, weird 2:00 AM texts from me, just being like, "Do you think, like, AI is the biggest thing since the internet?"

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  If Liz is not responding to these texts with AI-generated responses, I don't know what we're doing here.

• 45:48Alex Cranz?

  No, she's always fully in the conversation with me. It's really nice that she returns my calls. Thank you, Liz. But I do think that, like, AI is, artificial intelligence as a whole, not necessarily just generative AI, is a pretty big moment, right? Like, it is a form of automation that is enormous, and it covers a whole lot of different industries. And that kind of big sea change is very rare, and it is as big as the internet. It is as big as when we started automating, you know, machinery and stuff like that. Like, it's a big moment, but it happens in fits and spurts and stuff. And right now, we're kind of in a "huh" moment. It's a technical term.

• 46:29David Pierce?

  Right. It's only obvious which things qualify in retrospect, right? Like, if you're running one of these companies, you look at what the internet did 25 years ago, and you look at what mobile did 15 years ago, and you say, "Okay, a whole generation of companies died at the hands of these changes, and the world changed because of these changes." Like, if you believe that AI is the next one, you kind of have to bet everything right now, even before it's ready. Because if you don't, you'll get left behind by the companies that do. That's one side of the bet. The other side of the bet is that, at this moment-

• 47:07David Pierce?

  There is nothing about AI and chatbots and this thing that is that important yet. And, and so we're in this place where it's, it's still, I think the like, we got that incredible pop of like, oh my God, I cannot believe this thing is as good as it is when ChatGPT launched. And there has not been a moment that has surpassed that since then. Maybe I'm wrong. I, I would be curious to know if there are folks who feel like we've hit higher highs than that in terms of like remarkable achievements in AI. But to me, it feels like we're still riding that one single high. But if you believe that it is going to be as big and fast and powerful as so many of these people do,

• 47:50David Pierce?

  you don't have a choice but to bet everything on it because otherwise you're just dooming yourself and your company and your employees to death.

• 47:57Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Yeah. And fine. I, I think all of the big high point moments in AI since then, or at least the ones that have like made the news broadly, like broken into mainstream news, not just this show. Um, have been bad.

• 48:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, they've been failures.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:14David Pierce?

  They've been failures. Swaggy popes.

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, you know, weird, weird woke mind virus controversies, like fake ones, like just like all over the place, like Bard, just getting dates wrong all over the place. Like the thing that is notable at these systems right now is that they don't know anything.

• 48:32David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we're going to talk about Meta's AI launch this week. I generated a bunch of images of stuff and it just like, doesn't know how clothes move. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, oh, this isn't that useful. And that's like, so I just want to stay there for one second. Like you're making this bet because you're like, we have to accelerate our, our AI moment. Still unclear, like what that moment looks like in the end. And maybe that the whole point is like move faster, figure out what's right and what's wrong. Uh, Astra Lowe gave you the example of the Pixel camera. Okay. I get it.

• 49:08Alex Cranz?

  But they've been doing AI stuff with the Pixel camera.

• 49:10Nilay Patel?

  For a lot, but this is his example.

• 49:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:12Nilay Patel?

  And he's like, we're gonna do that, but faster.

• 49:13Alex Cranz?

  It felt a little to me, and David, maybe correct me if I'm wrong. It felt a little like Silicon Valley in particular is very hyped on AI, right? Like, like there, the conversation is, what are you doing with AI? If you're not doing something, you're stupid. And a lot of this felt like almost a response to those people being like, yes, we also care about AI. We're at the big, we're, we're big. This is our performative moment to tell you that we genuinely believe in this. But it was really for that audience, not necessarily for the.

• 49:43David Pierce?

  I think that's half right. Like, I think that's exactly right. I think the other audience is investors, right? To, right now, if you want to continue to run the company that you run, you have to tell an AI story. You just do, like, that's, that is where we are. It's, it's what everybody was doing with mobile 10 years ago. It's like, if you didn't have a mobile strategy, what are you doing? Now, that, that thing is AI, right? Like, it's Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect example of this. Like, Mark doesn't talk about the metaverse anymore. Because nobody wants to hear about the metaverse and they sell shares in Meta when they do. And so now they're telling an AI story. And in a lot of ways, the AI story and the metaverse story actually run together. But they talk about it differently because that is how you win and you get people excited and you convince them that you are marching towards something huge.

• 50:28David Pierce?

  So I think you're right, they're, they're telling that sort of same story to two audiences because without them, they don't have the runway and talent they need to get there at all.

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so this was but the first question.

• 50:39Alex Cranz?

  Okay, sorry.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  Is this the right goal?

• 50:41Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 50:42Nilay Patel?

  That's just the first one. And I think the answer is probably yes, like you have, it has to be the right answer.

• 50:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  We have to show movement towards this goal. We have to unify Google's famously messy teams, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Google now has Google DeepMind, which itself is a merger of Google Brain and DeepMind. The CEO of that, Demis Hassabis, who's been on Decoder, and I asked him, how will this merger work? And he was like, it'll be fine. Recently, some leaked comments suggesting he's not so happy with it. So, right, so now you've got Google Research and DeepMind.

• 51:14Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  We'll see how that's going. And then you've got this new group, which, you know, from a thousand yards, if you squint and you're hammered, is like, oh, this is, they're doing an apple.

• 51:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  They're doing hardware and software and services all under one roof to make better complete products.

• 51:32Alex Cranz?

  They're going to vertically integrate everything right when the FTC is like, hey, stop that.

• 51:36David Pierce?

  That's perfect tactic.

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you do have to be hammered.

• 51:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:38Nilay Patel?

  To, to make that claim. Like, I don't, but you see it, right?

• 51:42Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  You squint, you're like, okay, then they'll do all the products over here. They still have a Samsung to deal with. Like, if Google's like, now the pixel rules, because we made the software custom for the pixel, do you want some of the Samsung? Also, you just announced a bunch of our AI stuff in your phones. How are they going to manage that?

• 52:01David Pierce?

  Google is very sensitive to this question. I raised this question to Rick and Hiroshi, and their response was essentially, no, you're wrong, everything is fine, the partners love us, don't even worry about it. I'm paraphrasing, but only, only just. But I think.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they gave you a quote from the CEO of Qualcomm for this story, just to be like, see? It's like, dude, he sells chips to every, he doesn't care.

• 52:25David Pierce?

  That's right.

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  Christiane Aman does not care if Google and Samsung are beefing, as long as everyone's on phones.

• 52:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's all about the power of Snapdragon.

• 52:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:32David Pierce?

  I think there are two things going on here. One, I think there's an interesting thing here to compare what Google is doing to actually what Parnos Panay did at Microsoft, which is he was running Surface, and then he was running Surface and Windows. And the way that they came to see it was actually what we need to do is we need to make the best Windows PCs and then give what we make back to the ecosystem. So, like, the Surface team actually pioneered a lot of things that really worked well on Windows. They did a lot of work on the handwriting stuff, they did a lot of work on detachables, and then essentially gave that back to partners, who were then able to make better Windows PCs as a result.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you a story about that?

• 53:13David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I can tell the story because it doesn't work there anymore. So, one of my favorite CS moments, I'm walking around a Microsoft booth with Parnos, and we're talking about that exact concept. What, why do you make these things? Because the Surface machines were there, and the partner machines were there, and I was like, this has got to be weird for you. And he was like, no, no, let me show you something. Parnos was like, no, no, let me show you something.

• 53:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:32Nilay Patel?

  And he's like, that's my hinge.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  And he was pointing at one of the partner machines, he's like, we, that's our hinge. And that's my display, blah, blah, blah. Like, he was like, this is all our stuff. And like, what we're doing, like, we're just spending the money to innovate because the none of these OEMs can outspend Apple. So this is worth it to us. And I asked him for years to give me that story, like, in a printable way. But obviously, none of the partners are gonna be like, that's Ponos's engine.

• 53:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 54:00Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 54:00David Pierce?

  But I think there's something to that, right? And if you are the company with the resources to feed the ecosystem, you can kind of, rising tide lifts all boats, that situation. And if you're Google, and what you need is for AI to win broadly, and for Gemini to win specifically, doing that work on the Pixel and then giving it to Samsung, theoretically works for everybody. I say theoretically because I think Samsung has a long history of not being psyched about Google's situation internally, anyway. Tyson, I guess, still exists. I would not bet Samsung is thrilled with this change at Google. But I do buy the theory that if Google manages this correctly,

• 54:43David Pierce?

  it could, it could pull Android AI as a whole along with it.

• 54:48Alex Cranz?

  Well, and you're talking about phones. We've been talking about phones mainly, but it's not just gonna be the phones, right? Like, it's gonna be in the TVs and the watches and all the other places, too, where Samsung doesn't have as big a shareholder, right? Like, Samsung TVs, they sell a lot of TVs mainly to Neely, but...

• 55:06David Pierce?

  Tyson, maybe.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  I love it. Oh, that's a good sound, the, actually, the Tyson startup sound on the TV. Do, do, do. It's like...

• 55:15Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 55:16David Pierce?

  Just sounds.

• 55:16Nilay Patel?

  Episode four.

• 55:20Alex Cranz?

  But, but there is all this other stuff. And in those cases, like, yes, this makes a lot of sense, right? Like, Android TV.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let me give you the counter example.

• 55:29Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 55:30Nilay Patel?

  Let me, just before you go off into Android TV, because there's nothing I want to talk about more about the raging success of Android TV.

• 55:36Alex Cranz?

  It's all you think about, I know.

• 55:37Nilay Patel?

  Google bought Motorola, famously.

• 55:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:42Nilay Patel?

  And Andy Rubin, the founder of Android, who worked at Google at that time, was, again, is another CS story, is walking around CS, and he saw how hard Samsung was skinning Android, got furious, locked into a battle with Samsung to bring them back into the fold and ruin Android less.

• 56:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. TouchWiz.

• 56:03Nilay Patel?

  And the deal was, Google had to sell Motorola to Lenovo. That's what, that was the concession that Samsung extracted to stop it. Like, it wasn't because I yelled at them about making bloop bloop sounds and having, making everyone go to the bathroom because of TouchWiz. It was because Andy Rubin was like, "What are you doing? I will sell Motorola and stop competing with you directly if you reel TouchWiz back in." That's a lot, right? And many things have happened since then. We've, now it's called One UI. Like, it's all different now. Google since then bought the failing HTC, turned that into whatever pixels we have now. Like, the relationships are different. It seems like the tensions are different.

• 56:45Nilay Patel?

  But there is actually history of Samsung being so irritated that Google would compete with it head up by buying Motorola, that it started peeling people off and Google had to make the big concession.

• 56:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Alex Cranz?

  But at the same time, TouchWiz sucked. Like, it was hurting Samsung, wasn't it?

• 57:07Nilay Patel?

  You know, many people...

• 57:09Alex Cranz?

  It was hurting me to look at it, so I just assumed.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  Famously, someone has called this show and insisted that ladies love the Wiz. This is a real thing that has happened on this show. I forgot about that. Big Papa Joe, baby. Well, we'll run the clip. Well, we'll put the clip in the, in the show notes. That's a real thing that has happened. We've been doing this show for a very long time.

• 57:27Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 57:29Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if people liked TouchWiz or not. I don't know if that was a good idea. I'm just saying that tension was there. And part of the reason Tizen exists is because Samsung wanted its own operating system. It does not want to, it wants to be in control of its future.

• 57:44Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 57:45Nilay Patel?

  And it has this massive dependency on Google and phones. And it did not want that in TVs, anywhere else. It doesn't want these dependencies. Where, I, I'm just saying, you look at this and you're like, oh, they're, you're, you know, you do your drunk thousand-yard squint.

• 57:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Nilay Patel?

  At this org chart change, like, oh, they're, they're gonna, they're walking right back into it.

• 58:02Alex Cranz?

  I call that the 2:00 AM Liz text.

• 58:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. I guess I think the thing that is different from 10 years ago is like, where are you gonna go? Like Samsung knows Tyson is not a move at this point. There's just no, there's no option outside of Android if you are a smartphone manufacturer. Samsung, if it made Android worse or tried to go to the AOSP route and build their own apps, like it didn't work last time and it super wouldn't work this time.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:35David Pierce?

  And the other side is if you believe that AI is the thing, you need Google more than ever because like Samsung has been way out in front of promoting Gemini. It's getting a lot of these Gemini features ahead of pixels in some cases. Like I think if you believe in the AI revolution, Samsung is actually sort of forced to increase its dependency on Google, not try to get away from it.

• 58:59Alex Cranz?

  I mean, what if they end up going with like Harmony OS or whatever Huawei's

• 59:05Alex Cranz?

  operating system is on, right?

• 59:06David Pierce?

  Like, how's that, how's that going for them in the US?

• 59:09Alex Cranz?

  Not great, but like, I don't know. I think, I don't want to just immediately say they're, they're totally locked into Android, although they very much are. I think there is like options available to them, especially as we have this.

• 59:22David Pierce?

  I say this in all sincerity, make me a list of those options.

• 59:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's Harmony OS. They're just gonna go all in on the Chinese market.

• 59:29Nilay Patel?

  This is why you need middleware and super apps.

• 59:34Alex Cranz?

  You got us there.

• 59:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was coming inevitably. All right, I'm, I'm hopeful for a more focused, faster Google. That's what Rick is saying. He wants to, he wants to move everything faster. He wants to ship more things. I think the best thing Google would do would to kill even more products actually right now, just reduce the number of Google products by half and then loudly announce that it will just keep iterating those products for five years.

• 59:59Alex Cranz?

  That'd be cool.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  That would be a huge change.

• 1:00:01David Pierce?

  Do you remember in like 2011 when Larry Page came back as CEO and he did, I think it was on an investor call, uh, said the, he gave the whole like more wood behind fewer arrows speech and then Google promptly killed a whole bunch of stuff that it had been working on. Uh, like this is just the Google cycle, right? They're like, they realize, oh, we're not making enough money and/or the world is changing. The first time it was about Google Plus was like, we're going to reorient everything around social, which went super great. And that's why we all use Google Plus now. Uh, it's just the same thing again, right? Like Google sort of lets its company sprawl, lets everything get weird, hires lots of people, builds a million messaging apps. And then at some point you go, oh, this is actually making

• 1:00:42David Pierce?

  us interesting, but it's making us slow. And we have to all point in one direction now. And that's what you do when you have to point in one direction. And for Google, that one direction is very much AI. Like they made a couple of other little org changes, uh, today as part of this announcement at DeepMind and Google Research and elsewhere. And like Sundar Pichai in particular is very clear that the message is like move faster and move towards AI. Like that is Google's job for the foreseeable future. Will it work? Yes, because Google is a famously well-run company with a culture and structure that makes total sense.

• 1:01:14Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, Google I/O is coming up next month.

• 1:01:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:01:18Nilay Patel?

  And I anticipate we will, I, we end up talking to all of these folks at I/O every year. So, uh, we'll just see how it's going. We're like, one month in, did it work?

• 1:01:27Alex Cranz?

  Just stare really hard.

• 1:01:28David Pierce?

  And then AI Sundar Pichai will say, yes, it did. And then that'll be it.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  All right. You know, I, we have Meta is competing with ChatGPT on our list here. They are, they announced AI products. It's, they're everywhere. You can chat with a Meta AI on literally any Meta surface you can think of. Instagram, WhatsApp, for some reason.

• 1:01:45Alex Cranz?

  Have you done that?

• 1:01:47Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, I, I have gone directly to meta.ai and only asked to produce images of Jesus made of spaghetti.

• 1:01:57David Pierce?

  The true correct use.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, which it won't do. It will not produce any religious iconography. If you ask it to produce images of a Middle Eastern man from ancient times made of spaghetti, it will happily do that.

• 1:02:10David Pierce?

  But it's not Jesus per se.

• 1:02:13Nilay Patel?

  I, you know, you can.

• 1:02:14Alex Cranz?

  It's open to interpretation.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  You can get to a, a state. You can prompt engineer your way into something that I believe.

• 1:02:23David Pierce?

  Make it look more Jesus-y.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  So the reason I mention this, just to point out, this has been going on for months now. Crazy AI-generated images are constantly going viral on Facebook. The last one, I think our friends at Hard Fork covered it. Jesus is a crab, just like hundreds of thousands of likes.

• 1:02:44David Pierce?

  Was there a shrimp?

• 1:02:46Nilay Patel?

  There's crab and shrimp.

• 1:02:48David Pierce?

  Oh, there's crab, it has shrimp. Oh, I got deep into shrimp Jesus. I totally missed crab.

• 1:02:52Nilay Patel?

  I think Hard Fork was shrimp Jesus. There's also, you know, carsonization is like a real phenomenon in evolution, where everything turns into a crab, and that's been true of AI-generated Jesus as well on these platforms. And then the one that just killed me, it's a quick post on this, I wrote it, you can go into it. The images of Jesus made of spaghetti on a Lambo also made of spaghetti. Oh my God, it was so good. The last one I saw had 36,000 likes.

• 1:03:18David Pierce?

  Oh my God.

• 1:03:19Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. And I, you know, if Meta is going to release AI tools, we got to see if we can just close the loop. Yeah. And the answer is no, actually, the spaghetti Jesus on a Lambo is not nearly as good as the ones that are currently on Meta's other platforms. So whatever tool the spammers are using, a little bit ahead of Meta's tools currently. I like that.

• 1:03:41David Pierce?

  That's good for them.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  Meta's got some work to do.

• 1:03:43David Pierce?

  Meta should always be a little bit behind its own users. That feels right. I do think it's interesting, though, that part of this also Meta released Llama 3, which is the new version of its own LLM. And it seems, in a very real way, like we have a pretty strong sort of four-party race right now between Claude from Anthropic, GPT-whatever, Gemini, and now Llama, to be like the model. We're in this space where it's like, it feels like computer chips from a million years ago, when like every subsequent one that comes out every two weeks is like a little bit faster. And just the sort of speed and success is going up really fast. But these four companies are all like deep in it, they have a ton of money,

• 1:04:25David Pierce?

  they're very invested, and it is, it is kind of happening really fast.

• 1:04:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, although I don't know that it's quite like computer chips and that they are all bad in different ways.

• 1:04:38David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  Right, like as chatbots, Molly White, who writes Web3 is going to scrape. She's had a newsletter, she's like, I'm kind of interested in this, like. I'm more positive than the people think, given how she feels like we'll link to the newsletter as well. But she's like, I asked it to write this newsletter and she has all the results of all the four. And she's like, the thing about them is I told it to write like me and it just is scolding you. Like they write like angry school teachers, I think was her phrase. And it's like, that's the thing, like it, they can generate copy. Is there a reliable way for anyone to say whether the copy is generated is getting better or worse? Even within a single model or between them?

• 1:05:20Alex Cranz?

  As a critic and an editor, yes, but I don't want to read it all.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  But you look at like four columns of like middling work and you're like, I have to kind of rank these.

• 1:05:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're all garbage.

• 1:05:30Nilay Patel?

  All of you get D minuses, like get out of here.

• 1:05:32David Pierce?

  Well, in that way, it's actually kind of an interesting parallel to the computer chips thing because we're in the, we're in the phase where they're all passing benchmark tests with increasingly impressive scores that don't mean much to real people yet. And the question is like, is anyone actually going to make real use of the sort of raw capability of this stuff? That means anything to anybody. Uh, and so far the answer is largely not really.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I do think one interesting piece of the meta puzzle at least is it has massive distribution and is 0% afraid of using it.

• 1:06:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Nilay Patel?

  Like if you use a meta product, boy, is there AI next to you now. It's just happening. It's just here it is, just talking to you. Meta's AI showed up in a Facebook group for people with gifted and disabled children, made up a child it had and said it was very happy in the New York City public schools.

• 1:06:21David Pierce?

  Oh, no.

• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's just a thing. And someone said, is this Black Mirror? And the AI responded, no, it's not.

• 1:06:28David Pierce?

  It's just me, Meta AI.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a, it was like a story in 404, which we will also link many links, links to everyone. I'm just saying the most notable stuff about this here. And I was like, when it's going a little sideways.

• 1:06:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, they've gotten really, really good at making machines that are impressive at confidently lying.

• 1:06:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Alex Cranz?

  And that's

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  The goal, I mean, it's always been the goal.

• 1:06:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like just go put a little suit on it and have it run for office. Like it's got it down.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  Finally, finally a president I can get behind.

• 1:06:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Lama three.

• 1:06:56Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I'm shrimp Jesus. I'm proud to be an American. That's enough AI talk. Let's talk about the real thing.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  Mini LED televisions.

• 1:07:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we got the TVs.

• 1:07:10Nilay Patel?

  It's been heavy, man.

• 1:07:12Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, David.

• 1:07:13Nilay Patel?

  Policy updates, there's been Europeans.

• 1:07:15David Pierce?

  AI stands for awesome interpolation.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, so Sony, this is the most important story of the year.

• 1:07:23Alex Cranz?

  I'm with you, for now, until next week.

• 1:07:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, there's a revolution in TVs happening.

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  Just lock in.

• 1:07:35Alex Cranz?

  All the TV makers are like, "Neil, I get it."

• 1:07:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because I do. So at CES this last year, we saw a bunch of mini LED televisions. I confidently predicted that mini LEDs would bring prices down and people would start buying bigger TVs. There's a little bit of data, there's a little bit of data about some other thing that I'll talk about in a second. Sony has started skipping CES, they've done it for years. They announced their TVs this year. Sony, slowly pulling back from OLEDs.

• 1:08:04Nilay Patel?

  Which is really interesting. So the OLED I have, the A95L, QD OLED, Quantum OLED, very bright, very colorful. They're just sticking around. No updates to the flagship OLED in the summer.

• 1:08:16Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  All of the flagship TVs are mini LED TVs. They're the Bravia 9s.

• 1:08:24Nilay Patel?

  Sony won't tell you how many backlight zones they have, they will just tell you increasing percentages. Incredible chart. They're just like 325% more dimming zones.

• 1:08:34Alex Cranz?

  Just more?

• 1:08:36Nilay Patel?

  Just more.

• 1:08:37Alex Cranz?

  Don't worry about it, it's just a lot.

• 1:08:41Nilay Patel?

  So I've, and that's 325% more than last year's X95L, which I've seen. Which is a beautiful TV that only if you're paying attention to, do you see any blooming. Now, it's brighter, there's 325% more zones. I'm anticipating that there will be no blooming, or it'll be even harder to see. Which means, you can now get gigantic, super bright, LED bright TV with the black levels of OLED, without the burn-in problems.

• 1:09:09Alex Cranz?

  How much does that cost?

• 1:09:10Nilay Patel?

  And it's better for gaming, because it's faster refresh of LEDs.

• 1:09:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no, I totally am all for that. And with someone with a 2017 OLED, really, you cannot understand how much I'm all for that.

• 1:09:22Nilay Patel?

  It's also 50% brighter than the X95. I'm just telling you.

• 1:09:25Alex Cranz?

  But how much is it?

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  They're not, they're not like a number that's good.

• 1:09:30David Pierce?

  Ne- Ne- Ne- Ne, I tell the people, tell the people, what is the cheapest one of these costs?

• 1:09:35Nilay Patel?

  The, the 65 inch is 32.99, which is not out of whack with top end OLEDs.

• 1:09:41David Pierce?

  Let's, let's, can I just say that, can I just say that price number slightly differently?

• 1:09:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:46David Pierce?

  It costs $3,299.99.

• 1:09:49Nilay Patel?

  If you're like sitting there-

• 1:09:50David Pierce?

  32.99 is like, oh, 32 bucks. That's what a normal TV costs now. No, no.

• 1:09:55Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna have to stay on the wall for 10 years. If you're out there cross shopping LGG3, you're like, oh, that's interesting. That's all I'm saying.

• 1:10:03David Pierce?

  Yeah. You're gonna have it on your wall for two years and then Neelai Patel is gonna come on the Vergecast in 2025 and say, listen, everybody, there's another 325% increase.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  So here's the problem. So the A95 only goes up to 77 inches and the top end Bravia 9s are 85 inches.

• 1:10:20Alex Cranz?

  That's so much TV.

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  Which is $5,499. I just bought this TV last September. Like, what am I doing? It's a, this is bad. Like, I have to send her to college, right? You know, like, that's gonna be a couple of days of college by the time she's ready to go to college.

• 1:10:36David Pierce?

  That's like some textbooks.

• 1:10:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. A single textbook.

• 1:10:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you get 24 hours in the storm, kid. I bought a new TV.

• 1:10:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, th- these TVs represent a huge shift from OLED in this market.

• 1:10:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Nilay Patel?

  This is when it's starting to happen and I think that means the rest of the TVs are gonna get cheaper. Like, these are the crazy top ends that are supposed to compete with the high-end OLEDs. They have insane features. They, um, we've, we're so far from the motion smoothing debate generally, like, regular, you know, regular people TVs, you just have to turn off motion smoothing. At the high end of the market now, the TVs have built-in calibrated modes for the services, where the services can calibrate your TV for whatever they're streaming. So Prime Video calibrated on the new Sony Bravia 9s will know if you're watching a movie or you're watching Monday Night Football and recalibrate the TV for you automatically.

• 1:11:32Alex Cranz?

  But that'll only work-

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  If you-

• 1:11:34Alex Cranz?

  Use this, the smart TV function they have.

• 1:11:37Nilay Patel?

  Gonna be not talking about the details. If you wanna run Bravia Core and stream at 80 megabits per second, you gotta use-

• 1:11:45David Pierce?

  So tight.

• 1:11:46Alex Cranz?

  You gotta, you gotta make some sacrifices.

• 1:11:48Nilay Patel?

  By the way, there's some debate in the comments of Chris Welch's story about this, about whether it's called Bravia Core or Sony Pictures Core. Just clear it up. It's only Bravia TVs, or the only place the platform supports 80 megabits per second pure stream. Everywhere else it's Sony Pictures Core and it doesn't have the one feature that's good.

• 1:12:08David Pierce?

  So Sony Pictures Core is the bad one?

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  Sony Pictures Core is like, what if we made it not good streaming service with a small cat? Like, what if we made a streaming service where you opened it and it was like, Madame Web is the thing we got?

• 1:12:23Alex Cranz?

  You just, you turn it off.

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just didn't, I didn't redeem my credits for Madame Web.

• 1:12:29David Pierce?

  No, I will say Sony does a thing that I appreciate, which is they just, they make the TV that is just the dope TV. And they're like, whatever it costs, no problem. But like, this $5,500 one is enormous. It has, what was it called? Like X wide angle for the viewing angle stuff. It has amazing speakers. It's like, I just, Sony does the thing that I like, where they're like, here is the luxury version and we are just going to slowly make that one cheaper over time. And someday in 2061, I will own this exact TV in my house. And I can't look, I can't.

• 1:13:04Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna take a long time. So the, that's the Bravia 9, the top end. So the flagship Sony TVs this year are mini LEDs and my A95, which we'll just soldier on.

• 1:13:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, that's good though, because you don't have, do you have regret buying it? Do you have the FOMO?

• 1:13:20Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to say it this time. Then the one step down, the Bravia 8s are regular LEDs, not the QD LEDs that I have in the A95. They've got all the same stuff, but you can just see Sony is, but their biggest, best, their push is mini LEDs. I think the rest of the industry will follow them. Then there's actually cheaper mini LED TVs that don't have all the stuff.

• 1:13:43Alex Cranz?

  I think you use cheaper generously here.

• 1:13:46David Pierce?

  It's a very relative term.

• 1:13:48Nilay Patel?

  $2,300 for a 65-inch Manila D is like, that is as good as the X95 is dead-on competitive with an OLED. With a high-end OLED.

• 1:13:57Alex Cranz?

  I think I needed just one in my house next to my 2017 OLED to see which is better. I gotta like, get them next to each other and see if it's truly better.

• 1:14:06Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so I will end my gushing over Sony's television, which I haven't seen. I don't know if these are as good as I want them to be. I don't know what 325% more dimming zones mean. I don't know if these auto-calibrated modes that require to use their weird software that basically tries to like ransom you into enabling Samba Interactive TV, which watches your every move like a hawk to sell it to some snarling data. I don't know. Alright, that's all just there. I'm just saying picture quality-wise, you can see what's happening in this market.

• 1:14:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:35Nilay Patel?

  Next to that is the fucking Frame TV, which is dominating the charts. And I just want to tell this story about the rudest text you can send me. The rudest text I've ever received. And I feel comfortable saying this because I posted about it and Casey revealed himself.

• 1:14:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Nilay Patel?

  So Casey and I are friends, as you can tell by the tone of my voice. And so, you know, he just got in your house. He's like, everyone's excited, everyone's buying stuff. I just got in your house. And he's like, should I buy a Frame TV? He sent me this text at 12:30 in the morning. And he's on the west coast, I'm on the east coast. And I believe this conversation took another full hour. Like, I was like, I can't let this go. Something's wrong in the internet.

• 1:15:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you're like, you couldn't sleep that night until you get that done.

• 1:15:17Nilay Patel?

  I tried so hard to make this man buy an LGG. I was like, you play video games?

• 1:15:23Nilay Patel?

  Do you like quality?

• 1:15:25Alex Cranz?

  Why did he want the Frame?

• 1:15:28Nilay Patel?

  Because in the end, it was revealed that all of the people he was asking own Frame TVs, including me. I own two. One's just in the studio, in the podcast studio in my house. It just shows the decoder logo. That's all it does.

• 1:15:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and it does have a beautiful bezel.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  It was, yeah, sure.

• 1:15:48Alex Cranz?

  Sure. I'm trying to help you here, Neil. I'm trying, I'm trying.

• 1:15:51Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying the Frame TV is like a 10-year-old LCD panel with a single backlight, no dimming zones. It's just a bad TV.

• 1:15:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Nilay Patel?

  But people like it because the display is matte.

• 1:16:04Nilay Patel?

  And most people don't actually watch their TVs anymore. They watch TikTok.

• 1:16:08David Pierce?

  Eli, can I, can I float a theory at you? That maybe people don't care about 325% more dimming zones anymore. Is it, is it possible?

• 1:16:18Nilay Patel?

  They don't care about TVs anymore. I think the Frame TV is the, the harbinger of doom. What's the problem? What, what is the thing all streaming services are facing? People are saying, okay, there's gonna be a big black rectangle in my house. I want it to look best when it's off, because it's mostly off.

• 1:16:33Alex Cranz?

  Wait, I just realized the Sony TV is basically like a cool gaming PC to the, the Frame's iMac.

• 1:16:43Nilay Patel?

  I've never, I don't think I've ever wanted to melt as much as I currently wish to melt.

• 1:16:47Alex Cranz?

  You have so many iMacs in your house, Eli.

• 1:16:50David Pierce?

  Eli, this is why Just Sounds is gonna be a huge hit on Netflix, because nobody watches their TV anyway. It's just sound while you look at TikTok.

• 1:16:57Nilay Patel?

  Yes, incredible. I, but I'm saying like, I think, I keep making this joke that I could write 10,000 words with the Frame TV. I definitely could. Maybe I just need to like rant into a camera for an hour. We can edit it together. But all I'm saying is you look at the market, you look at the, the quality of TVs that are coming, right? There's a technology shift in the TV industry underway right now with these minorities. I think they're gonna be really cool. And then you look at what people are spending the money on, like what people think the best TV on the market is. What's still priced, you aren't worried about these prices. Go look at the Frame when it's not on sale.

• 1:17:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's insane.

• 1:17:32Nilay Patel?

  You're buying a 2016, 2017 vintage, you know, edge lit LCD, like it's bad. And they're charging the prices of an OLED, because the display is matte and you can pay 50 bucks for your art store. And people are like, that's the best TV you can buy.

• 1:17:49Alex Cranz?

  That's why Samsung will stick with Android on the phone.

• 1:17:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 1:17:54Alex Cranz?

  On the phone. It's all comes back to the phone and Android.

• 1:17:57Nilay Patel?

  Why is that?

• 1:17:58Alex Cranz?

  I just forgot.

• 1:17:59Nilay Patel?

  Because the ties in App Store is killing it on the frame.

• 1:18:02Alex Cranz?

  That is a bad joke, keep going.

• 1:18:04Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we'll just cut that part. Anyway, I was saying, uh, it's like, just keep ranting about this forever. Forever and ever and ever.

• 1:18:10Alex Cranz?

  I like it though.

• 1:18:11Nilay Patel?

  I, I'm telling you, the Frame TV is the harbinger of doom for the streaming services.

• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  Because people are like, we don't watch this thing. We're gonna pay a premium.

• 1:18:23Alex Cranz?

  Oh, you're saying because the TV is so crappy that when they do watch it, they'll be like, what's the point?

• 1:18:28David Pierce?

  People are buying a TV intentionally to not watch it. Is what you're saying. The point of a TV is no longer to be watched.

• 1:18:35Nilay Patel?

  Right, it's to just be there. It's like a binky.

• 1:18:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Nilay Patel?

  Like, if I need a TV, I'll turn on this thing and I don't really care what it looks like. The rest of the time, it's gonna show me a picture.

• 1:18:44Alex Cranz?

  Isn't that many people, though?

• 1:18:46Nilay Patel?

  It is, I would argue, the Frame TV is Samsung's most important product. It is a product that has the most impact on the culture today.

• 1:18:54Nilay Patel?

  A thousand words, 10,000 words.

• 1:18:56Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I want to read, I want to read all of these words.

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  I mean, when am I gonna, I host two podcasts a week.

• 1:19:02Nilay Patel?

  I can't even justify to this group of people that we should talk about the Frame TV that much. Everyone, I need to take a week off.

• 1:19:10David Pierce?

  I got a lot of emails asking for your 10,000 words on the Frame TV. So I think we're gonna have to just do this at some point.

• 1:19:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we'll carve the timeout, we'll carve the timeout.

• 1:19:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's do one more TV related. Just to end this segment in place of hope and optimism.

• 1:19:26David Pierce?

  Oh, no, are we about to go from Neely's crazy to Krantz's crazy?

• 1:19:29Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:19:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Well, because one of the things I noticed in the Sony story was that these TVs all have ATSC 2.0 tuners in them. Yeah. And this week was the big broadcasting conference in Las Vegas, NAB. And everybody was making lots of announcements. And the big announcement, some of the big announcements I was excited about was from Roxy, who we covered back at CES. And NBC Universal, Peacock, some sort of distantly related cousin of ours.

• 1:20:01Nilay Patel?

  There's no way. I'm sorry.

• 1:20:06Alex Cranz?

  Comcast?

• 1:20:09Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:20:09Alex Cranz?

  Is a part investor in us.

• 1:20:11Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:20:12Alex Cranz?

  And Peacock. We're distant cousins.

• 1:20:16Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I don't, hmm, we don't know each other.

• 1:20:19David Pierce?

  That means I'm basically friends with Zooey Deschanel, so I'm good with that.

• 1:20:22Alex Cranz?

  Basically, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fine.

• 1:20:24Nilay Patel?

  That's the worst disclosure we've ever had.

• 1:20:27David Pierce?

  I'm basically friends with Zooey Deschanel.

• 1:20:29Alex Cranz?

  That's the new disclosure.

• 1:20:33Alex Cranz?

  But they both announced that they were bringing new technology to ATSC 3.0. Right now, there's a couple of channels in the country that broadcast on the spectrum that use ATSC 3.0, not a lot. And right now, if you go and you watch shows on those channels, it's just normal TV. There's no reason to be excited. But, coming soon, because of Roxy, you're going to be able to pause and skip in your local news. And then, on the Today Show, which I know everyone listening is a huge fan of, you'll be able to do the same through the NBC Universal stuff. And so, it's a little bit, little, little, little bit, little, little something happening there.

• 1:21:18Alex Cranz?

  And eventually, it could be something really cool. I still keep being like, one of these days, Peacock is just going to be on NBC, and that'll just be the new NBC.

• 1:21:25Nilay Patel?

  And they'll distribute it over there. I got you.

• 1:21:28Alex Cranz?

  One day.

• 1:21:29Nilay Patel?

  The thing I want to reveal about the story is that when Alex was writing it, she realized that her TV does not have ATSC 3.0.

• 1:21:35Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no. It does now.

• 1:21:37Nilay Patel?

  Get out there. Mini LEDs for everyone.

• 1:21:40Alex Cranz?

  I bought that tuner immediately.

• 1:21:42Nilay Patel?

  You bought a tuner. Bravia nines. All right, we got to take a break. I'm killing, I've worn David down. This is what you get. This is your fault.

• 1:21:51David Pierce?

  My TCL Roku TV is quaking over here.

• 1:21:54Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God. No, that's just upsetting. Don't say you have a TCL Roku on this podcast.

• 1:21:58Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of TVs that are ruthlessly mining your data.

• 1:22:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:01David Pierce?

  It's awful.

• 1:22:02Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to take a break. We'll be right back with David Pierce's TikTok Headline Blitz.

• 1:22:08Alex Cranz?

  Oh, God.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

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• 1:23:12Speaker 07

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• 1:23:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I would say that it's when there's not quite enough news is when our show goes the longest. I don't know why that is, but that has been true for 10 years.

• 1:23:50David Pierce?

  I think it's when I give you too much time to mess with the rundown before we start. I'm going to start revealing the Vergecast to you. Four minutes before we get.

• 1:23:58Nilay Patel?

  Just live reacts. We could just do a box of me reacting to you doing the Vergecast the whole time. It's rare that we get a show that's so out of control that we bring up Big Papa Joe.

• 1:24:09David Pierce?

  Here we are.

• 1:24:09Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot. All right. We gotta, we gotta wrap this thing up. We're just way, way over the line. I promised it and now it's here. David Pierce's headline blitz. David, take it away.

• 1:24:21David Pierce?

  I would like to just briefly catch you up on all of the things that are happening with TikTok because TikTok is not banned. It is still here and it is wild. It's just how I would say it. So here's what has gone on in TikTok land just since the last time we did this show together in the studio. TikTok notes is an app that is coming out. It's only available in a couple of countries, but it's just straight up Instagram. TikTok just did Instagram and they're like, here, would you like Instagram? TikTok made it. So that's a thing that exists. There are also now ways to buy event tickets, like concert tickets and stuff inside of TikTok because TikTok hasn't found enough ways to sell you stuff. They want to sell you more stuff. I think that is going to work. I think like. All of this concert stuff is going to move inside of music apps in really interesting

• 1:25:04David Pierce?

  ways. And I think TikTok is going to do it first, and it's going to be really fascinating. There's been a bunch of like, non-news news about the TikTok divestment stuff. There's a new bill in the House that is being attached to aid to foreign countries that is partly now also a TikTok ban. So it's possible that that is going to move to the Senate much more quickly where they're going to have to talk about divestment and banning. The president has said that he's going to potentially delay a ban another six months to make this all happen again. TikTok has said it's going to restrict people who keep posting problematic stuff on the for you feed. It also was reported this week that all of this Project Texas

• 1:25:46David Pierce?

  stuff, which I would say we have relentlessly made fun of on this show for a long time, is basically just a bunch of nonsense and that ByteDance has access to lots of US users' TikTok data. Twitch and Spotify continue to do their best TikTok impressions. Spotify is rolling out a remix thing so you can start to play with music in the same way that you can play with sounds and speed them up on TikTok. Twitch is doing a for you feed, basically. I don't know how to say it more than that. They just did a for you feed for Twitch, which I think is actually very smart. The world is TikTok now. Like, everybody is trying to become TikTok and TikTok is trying to become everybody else. And maybe it'll be banned and maybe it won't. And that's all I got.

• 1:26:25Nilay Patel?

  I will say that TikTok trying to sell stuff relentlessly is just reaching new levels of weirdness for me personally.

• 1:26:32Alex Cranz?

  I found a solution.

• 1:26:33Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:26:33Alex Cranz?

  Okay, here's what you guys are gonna do. You're gonna go on TikTok and you're gonna search deep talk. One word, deep talk. And then you're gonna watch a bunch of those videos. They're gonna be really weird. They're gonna be nonsensical. You're gonna be really confused. You're gonna be like, this is just looks like what Cranz's brain looks like on the inside.

• 1:26:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:51Alex Cranz?

  And you like a few of those, and then you're on deep talk and you're no longer on shop talk.

• 1:26:56Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:26:57Alex Cranz?

  It's great.

• 1:26:57Nilay Patel?

  I would, when I say all AI right now, it's my experience with it is like weird and bad.

• 1:27:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:04Nilay Patel?

  TikTok believes I want to coil things that look like ropes so much. It's like, you're gonna buy a garden hose reel, you're gonna buy an extension cord reel, you're gonna buy a USB cord reel, which I don't think you should be doing at all. It's just like, have you thought about reels? Buy them. Just buy them now. And the pitches are increasingly abstract and a little threatening.

• 1:27:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, they're like, you will feel guilt if you don't get in on this hose reel deal now.

• 1:27:34Alex Cranz?

  Mine is a puppet.

• 1:27:36Nilay Patel?

  It's already bad. It's already bad.

• 1:27:38Alex Cranz?

  Skateboarding on a leaf over water. That's all my TikTok is right now. And it's great. I'm like, I don't know what the hell's happening.

• 1:27:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, there's, there are people out there right now who have bought like upwards of a dozen hose reels. Because this algorithm is just ruthlessly manipulated them.

• 1:27:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, I did buy something not directly from TikTok.

• 1:27:58Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:27:58Alex Cranz?

  But they showed me a strainer. I went and got it on Amazon. It's great.

• 1:28:01Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. Do we have a sense of the Senate bill might be moving? Do we have a sense if it's gonna happen or not?

• 1:28:07David Pierce?

  At the moment, not exactly, but Lauren Finer just wrote a really good story that the, the general assumption is that because it's tied to foreign aid, the Senate is basically gonna have no choice but to talk about it. Like where we landed with the last bill is the Senate is just sort of studiously pretending it doesn't exist. That is going to be less possible now. And it's, it's, I think, it's gonna get raised one way or another. Where it goes seems to be anyone's guess.

• 1:28:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, we have time for, I think, two more. That was David's Headline Blitz, everyone. Congratulate David. Please sign a note. You'd like more Headline Blitz in the future.

• 1:28:42David Pierce?

  You can sponsor the Headline Blitz inside of the lightning round if you'd like to.

• 1:28:46Nilay Patel?

  It's available for sponsorships at this time. We're still, we're very close. Just everyone, close your eyes and send good vibes to our first lightning round sponsor. And then we'll move on to the Headline Blitz. All right, Alex, what you got?

• 1:28:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, so Boston Dynamics, they make the robots.

• 1:28:59Nilay Patel?

  That's a good one.

• 1:29:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they, they make the robots. Earlier this week, they said goodbye to Atlas. And then the very next day, they said hello to new Atlas. In the most terrifying video of all time.

• 1:29:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:10Alex Cranz?

  Where like the legs did like some weird 360 degree hinge stuff. The head looks like some sort of lamp. It basically looks like a video game monster. And, and then we wrote about how it needs to have hair.

• 1:29:26Nilay Patel?

  We did do that. It was a good pitch from Alex.

• 1:29:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Nilay Patel?

  And I said, just make sure it's over reported. And boy, did Eve Peiser over report the story of why robots need hair.

• 1:29:33Alex Cranz?

  Just asking directly some poor scientist, do you think the robot would be less creepy with fur? And the robot's like, no.

• 1:29:41Nilay Patel?

  The scientist was like, not the robot. You don't ask the robot what would make it less creepy.

• 1:29:50Alex Cranz?

  Don't worry about it.

• 1:29:52Nilay Patel?

  Was this written by a robot?

• 1:29:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Nilay Patel?

  Give the robots hair, written by a robot.

• 1:30:00Nilay Patel?

  You should watch the video. Our former Verge reporter, James Vincent, I believe his post on the video was, "It's funny that Boston Dynamics just leaned directly into terrifying."

• 1:30:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just horrifying, horrifying.

• 1:30:13Nilay Patel?

  It's very good, because it looks like a person, but it moves like a horror movie. This is probably what the person on the train was watching. Alright, here's mine. I just want to end with this, because, I'm just gonna say it. So this, wait, so this is mine. I just want to end with this. I don't know why I think this is so funny. Samsung is requiring its executives to come to work for six days a week now to, quote, "inject a sense of crisis."

• 1:30:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they gotta get around that Google reorg.

• 1:30:41David Pierce?

  Yeah. Wait, so Samsung is like, "We want to make this worse for everyone."

• 1:30:47Nilay Patel?

  So, right, they've had disappointing financial results, sales are down, they fell short of expectations in 2023. It's a crisis, we need to make you feel the crisis. The executives are now doing a six-day work week until something. And I, you know, theoretically, I'm an executive at this organization. I feel like if I was like, "I'm gonna come to work one extra day a week," but it's just executives having ideas about how to not come to work anymore. I feel like our staff would be like, "You're gonna have the worst ideas in the world."

• 1:31:22Alex Cranz?

  Have fun by yourself.

• 1:31:24Nilay Patel?

  It's like, here's what we need. Everyone have more meetings on Saturday about how it's a crisis. That will solve the crisis. I cannot wait for the weird shit Samsung is about to start doing. Like, just fully, they just did a buy one, get one free TV deal. That's a six-day work week idea, like, fully a six-day work week idea. They're gonna start giving away toasters when you open a bank. It's gonna be incredible. They're gonna have the wobbly guy on the lot outside the Best Buy.

• 1:31:55Alex Cranz?

  Is Bixby coming back?

• 1:31:57Nilay Patel?

  Bixby, full Bixby, but like, goth Bixby, like, get some attention. I finally saw the video of what's-her-name.

• 1:32:05Alex Cranz?

  Just crawling out of the water. Go, go, JoJo.

• 1:32:08Nilay Patel?

  Bixby's doing a country album. Let's see if that works. Like, can you imagine what a bunch of executives unconstrained by the reality of making or doing anything?

• 1:32:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Nilay Patel?

  Trapped in the office together on Saturday. Told it's a crisis and they can't go home on Saturdays until the crisis. Just imagine. It's gonna be incredible. I can't wait for what happens this year with Samsung.

• 1:32:33Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna get some cool stuff.

• 1:32:34Nilay Patel?

  Every TV is a 3D TV. Like, just anything.

• 1:32:37Alex Cranz?

  Curved and filled with AI inside.

• 1:32:41Nilay Patel?

  It's good. The whole rest of the world. Drew Houston on Deco is like, we're going fully remote. You don't push your employees. You get better innovation. Samsung's like, Saturdays.

• 1:32:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. We're just gonna stand over you and breathe loudly.

• 1:32:55David Pierce?

  Someone there is currently pitching bringing back the Galaxy Note, but now it has two styluses and everybody is like freaking out about how exciting it is.

• 1:33:03Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like, just in the lead times on new products are long.

• 1:33:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So like four years from now, we're gonna be like, what on earth?

• 1:33:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, instead of a stylus, it's nunchucks.

• 1:33:16Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna look back on today.

• 1:33:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Nilay Patel?

  You can directly trace.

• 1:33:20Alex Cranz?

  Just boop all the way back to that. It's gonna be a good time.

• 1:33:24David Pierce?

  It's a laptop, but it's 54 inches.

• 1:33:26Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying is I'm gonna start calling whatever happens next, we just have to start calling it Saturday Samsung.

• 1:33:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:32Nilay Patel?

  Just as a family. Can we agree on that?

• 1:33:34Alex Cranz?

  Yes, totally.

• 1:33:35Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm hope, as a person who is an aficionado of weird Sony, I am very hopeful for the opportunity Saturday Samsung might bring.

• 1:33:44Alex Cranz?

  Party speakers.

• 1:33:45Nilay Patel?

  Right? Where are they?

• 1:33:47Alex Cranz?

  It's coming.

• 1:33:47Nilay Patel?

  Where's Samsung's answer to ULT Pro?

• 1:33:52Alex Cranz?

  Somewhere. It's coming.

• 1:33:54Nilay Patel?

  What was that little robot we saw that could, Bali?

• 1:33:56David Pierce?

  I was just about to say Bali is about to get a lot of shine at Saturday Samsung. Bali is a main character.

• 1:34:03Alex Cranz?

  Let's go Bali, go.

• 1:34:04Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. We're way over time. We're just completely over. I apologize, but I don't apologize because the feedback we get is you'd like this to be six hours long. So we'll do that next week. All right, that's it. That's the Red Cast.

• 1:34:22Speaker 00

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

• 1:34:42Speaker 08

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