Two new antitrust lawsuits against Google / AirPods Max review / iOS 14.3 has arrived with ProRAW for iPhone 12 Pro

The Verge's Dieter Bohn, Nilay Patel, and Adi Robertson discuss the two antitrust lawsuits against Google announced this week. Chris Welch joins to discuss his review of Apple's AirPods Max. Further reading: FDA authorizes first COVID-19 vaccine in US Health care workers in US start receiving COVID-19 vaccines Texas attorney general announces ad tech antitrust probe against Google Google accused of search manipulation in third major antitrust lawsuit Prosecutors say Google accessed private WhatsApp messages — but the evidence is thin Apple launches new App Store privacy labels so you can see how iOS apps use your data Facebook criticizes Apple’s iOS privacy changes with full-page newspaper ads Facebook hits back at Apple with second critical newspaper ad Apple defends upcoming privacy changes as ‘standing up for our users’ Epic Games Store now offers Spotify, signaling app store ambitions beyond just games Judge orders Tim Cook and Craig Federighi to testify in Epic’s Fortnite case Apple AirPods Max review: superb headphones, awful case Apple Fitness Plus is now available iOS 14.3 has arrived with ProRAW for iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max Halide: Understanding ProRAW Samsung confirms stylus support is coming to Galaxy phones like the S21 Samsung’s Galaxy Note series will reportedly still continue next year Here’s the best look yet at Samsung’s Galaxy Buds Pro wireless earbuds OnePlus 9 leak shows off the upcoming 2021 flagship in photos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Addie Robertson joins us to talk about the two new antitrust lawsuits against Google. That's a total of three now. Also, Facebook versus Apple, ad tracking controversy. Then Chris Walsh joins us to talk about the new AirPods Max and what's going on with Pro Ra on the iPhone 12 Pro. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast for the consumer welfare standard. It's going to get real dry today. I don't know. Technically, I'm on vacation, so I'm just going to admit to everyone that I'm a little less prepared than normal. But it's fine. I'm Neelai. It's fine, because Dieter Bohn is here.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  I am your full front page ad, expressing appreciation for you and your family, instead of condemning you.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  That'd be nice. That's how we're gonna save print. Personalized Dieter Bone appreciation posts. Addie Robertson is here. Hey. And a little later, we're gonna have Chris Welch. We're gonna talk about Apple AirPods Max and some other gadget news. Addie is here to talk about all of the action between Google and the government, Facebook and Apple. There's just a lot of stuff happening in the world from a policy perspective. I want to start where we always start first, though, with a COVID update. As I'm sure all of you are aware, vaccines have started to roll out. The FDA has authorized the first COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer. People are taking them. They're posting videos and selfies of themselves getting the vaccine, which is amazing. So

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  that is happening. We are covering it. Mary Beth Craig's obviously has her newsletter antivirus. The vaccine is not the entire story. Rolling it out is difficult. Making sure people comply with the two-shot regime of how you get vaccines, at least this first set of vaccines, is difficult. So there's a lot to be maintained in terms of data compliance, all that stuff. The second dose of the vaccine is gonna knock people out for a day. So like, it's gonna have effects, which is gonna bleed into misinformation and that entire ecosystem around vaccines and the internet, which isn't healthy. So we're tracking that very closely. The platforms are starting to remove vaccine misinformation. So Twitter is being more aggressive. There's just a lot of news about the vaccines now that they're out. They're

• 3:44Nilay Patel?

  being distributed. They're being taken. People are experiencing them. So we're tracking all that stuff in our science desk and in Mary Beth's newsletter antivirus. It's exciting. It's happening. It's gonna be a long, slow rollout to getting back to sort of a normal place. So that's the COVID update. Still the biggest story in the world. Our science desk is incredible. Very proud of how they've covered it through this. Hopefully, these vaccines get distributed well. Okay, on the policy front, Addie, there's just a lot. I think we all hoped that we'd be kind of cruising towards the end of the year. And it feels like every state attorney general was like, you know what? We have a couple more ideas for 2020. So the Texas attorney general has announced a new case against Google. We've heard there's another one coming. There's obviously the existing federal case

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  against Google. Tell us what's going on.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I believe it was last week was we're all gonna yell at Facebook week and this week is we're all gonna yell at Google week. The background is that in October, there was a very long awaited Justice Department case against Google alleging that it mostly that its search business was anti-competitive and an unfair monopoly. So then, as you said, on Wednesday, Texas and a total of 10 states ended up filing a different suit that took aim specifically at ad tech, which was not really a focus of the original Justice Department case. They announced this with a really intense sizzle reel on Twitter.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  Texas AG Ken Paxton taking the lead to investigate Google.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Investigate Google. Google.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Tech giant. Google. Google. The focus is Google's

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Anti-competitive.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  Antitrust. Antitrust. Anti-competitive. Trust.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  They made a hype video for their lawsuit. It was so much.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  And they did it before anybody actually had seen the lawsuit. So people were just like watching the hype video.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  It's like all we had was just like newscasters saying, "Google, antitrust." And then the Attorney General for Texas is walking over here like, "Google is bad."

• 5:37Speaker 05

  Google repeatedly used its monopolistic power to control pricing, engage in market collusions to rig auctions in a tremendous violation of justice.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  I feel like this explains why there are two state lawsuits.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Yes, so that was Wednesday.

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's Wednesday. That's like the bombastic one.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  And then today, there was a Colorado suit. Colorado and a total of 38 states and territories, including some that had signed on to the Texas suit, filed what's sort of like a Justice Department plus suit. It explicitly is like, "We're gonna take a bunch of the complaints from the Justice Department. We agree with them, and we're going to add on some more specific things, mostly involving ad tech and what are called vertical search engines, which is like the sort of topic-specific places that you would go to look for like plane tickets or restaurant reviews.

• 6:27Nilay Patel?

  So the federal government case from October was Google, you're paying Apple too much money to be the default. You're protecting your default position. You're locking out competitors, that whole realm of Google behavior. The Texas lawsuit that came with its own hype reel is very much about the advertising market and how Google pushes people out of the advertising market. And then today's case led by Colorado is also about ad tech, but also about Google manipulating search results to favor its own properties and pushing out the Yelp's and the TripAdvisor's of the world.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  It's complicated because the Justice Department case is kind of an omnibus. But yeah, the Justice Department focuses on, Google's really big. It has all this power. It works with other companies like Apple, but also with Android device manufacturers to make sure that everybody uses Google for everything, like if you're on your phone or whatever. Then the Texas suit is very narrowly, Google has these ad markets. They're incredibly powerful and it manipulates them in such a way that it and Facebook are just going to absolutely dominate ad sales and take choice away from the companies and like the webpages who are buying ads and placing them. And then the case today from Colorado says, okay, all the stuff the Justice Department

• 7:43Speaker 03

  said is correct, but we would like to add specifically that it's not just Google making deals with these big companies. There's also, there are these specific actions they're taking that are really taking advantage of and suppressing all of these smaller topical search sites. And also, we're going to add some ad tech stuff that's weirdly distinct from the Texas case.

• 8:06Nilay Patel?

  So at a high level, this Colorado case feels like what I expected the Justice Department case to be. I remember when the Justice Department case came out, we're all like, you're going after the Safari deal? That's the center of your case? And it seemed weird because the way that we usually think of a Google monopoly is them screwing with Yelp, them screwing with like flight results and all the stuff they do on the search results page. And what's interesting to me is these cases really are complementary to each other, broadly speaking, it seems like.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Did they, they all knew what the other folks were doing. They were talking to each other and did they consciously split out, you do this, I'm gonna do this, we're gonna do this, or was it divide and conquer that it just worked out this way? I'm trying to figure out how we got to a place where we've got these three different suits instead of one big ass one, and none of them are like identical to each other.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  So there was a lot of speculation that the Trump administration was trying to really rush out a Justice Department case before the election, and that there were cutting corners and just trying to get the thing that was like a big, broad slam dunk, here's why Google is bad. And I sort of buy that now because the case that Colorado brought is so, I mean, not only because, yes, that that makes sense, but also because the Colorado case is so much, we're gonna talk about these things, but we're also going to tie in a bunch of more specific, sort of wonkier, issues that require a little bit more time to explain. I'm not really sure what's going on with the Texas suit, honestly. Like, I'm kind of confused on that one. The other weird thing is that the Justice Department case

• 9:38Speaker 03

  was just a document, and both of these state cases are very heavily redacted, sometimes to a kind of hilarious extent. Like, you'll read, there are, someone's making an analogy, and they've blacked out what the analogy would be.

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  Yes, because the analogy is like, for, for Google, the analogy is, it can really only be very obvious mafia references. Like, at the end, like, Google is so big in the ad market that they're like, it would be like if you didn't pay the mafia don, and then the mafia don came to your website and broke its knees. And it's like, well, that's not so much of an analogy.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  There was also a Star Wars reference that got redacted?

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Yes, so the Texas case has, apparently, they cut this deal with Facebook that was to their benefit, and they had called it something that's named after a Star Wars character. The redaction shows it seems to be pretty, a pretty short name, which doesn't narrow it down very much. But it's redacted, we were all trying to figure it out.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was inspired by a Star Wars character, but not necessarily. So people were coming up with all sorts of droid names that, like, G2F2, because like, Google and Facebook together.

• 10:39Nilay Patel?

  I feel like they redacted that on purpose just to make tech journalists pay attention to their filing. It's just like a little psychological warfare in the heart of the Texas lawsuit. I have like two, one is like an actual legal strategy. Why are there three cases? Why do they're split in this way? And the other one, maybe I'll, maybe I'll do the simpler way first. So if you think about Google, what a problem that Dieter and I have as we think about like organizing our team is often someone will say to us, you should have a Google reporter. And I'm like, great. So you want an ad tech reporter? And they're like, no. What we mean is an Android reporter. And I'm like, great. So we're going to do a cert, we're going to have a Google search reporter. And Google is so big that it is actually impossible for anyone to say

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  they cover Google. And if you just kind of look around at the industry of reporters, the people who cover Google, actually only the best ones only ever really cover a narrow slice of Google. So I think we're very good at Android. We do not spend a lot of time in the weeds of Google search. Mark Bergen at Bloomberg is really good at like Google search and Google's business deals. There are reporters, Julie Alexander is really good at YouTube, but the influencer side of YouTube, not the technical licensing side of YouTube. It's just a gigantic company. It's just true of all of them. It's true of Amazon. It's true of Apple. Like you name it. They're so big that you can't just like take one shot at them. Even if you just think about it in the most simplest way, which is how should we write about Google? Who should do the work? It turns out you need

• 12:05Nilay Patel?

  45 people just to think about the whole scale of Google. You combine that, I think, with just the standard life cycle of a lawsuit, which is that over time, they get smaller and narrower, right? The first thing Google is going to say is you should throw out some of these claims against us. And the judge is, the judge is instinct is, well, I don't want to do, I don't want to do so much work. So I'm going to throw out the bad ones. The prosecution is going to agree to throw out the ones that seem the weakest. You know, they're, they're going to feel out the judge, they're going to feel out the process, and they're going to stick to the best ones. And so if you just have the one huge case, your ability to say any one of those things is the strongest, just naturally over time drops out. So then you end up with three cases that are pointed at different chunks

• 12:48Nilay Patel?

  of Google. And they're, they can be focused on those is each of those chunks is their own strongest case as opposed to the Justice Department having to staff a case that's about Android and about search and about ads. And I like the ad case, we can talk about ad tech at a pretty broad level. It is very confusing. Our, the Chief Revenue Officer of Vox Media, Ryan Polly, his line about ad tech is it's complicated because everybody who works in ad tech needs to stay employed. Like it's a, it's an employment program for the ad tech vendors to keep it complicated and keep the jargon high. He thinks it's very funny, but I don't know that a judge or jury is going to be like, I'm excited to dive into the vagaries of programmatic

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  advertising and header bidding and Google owns, you know, at every part of that stack, Google's in the one or two position in the market. Then every one of those things is a place where Google can act anti-competitively, or in the case of this lawsuit, be accused of colluding with, with Facebook. So that's just one whole complicated weedsy argument that might fail, like it might just hit the rocks of complexity. And if you, if you're just like failing there, are you making any headway on the Google killed Yelp argument? If you fail there, are you making any headway on the default search on the iPhone argument? So there's like, I think there's just a good strategic reason to keep them as three separate cases and also keeps Google having to fight on three fronts. But at the same time, Addy, I think we talked about this a couple of months ago, we've just seen Google's responses

• 14:15Nilay Patel?

  to these cases and it's, they're very much the same. It's like, well, everybody likes Google. Don't you like the search results being better? Why would you want to ruin this? And it's such a great argument in response. And I'm not sure that any of these lawsuits really, they don't really address the fact that people do want Google to be better. And sometimes that looks anti-competitive.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  I mean, I keep going back and forth on, so yeah, Google had put out this blog post and it's like, we've gotten so much better. Here, look at what happened if you searched for bread in 2000 versus 2020. And in 2000, it's 10 links and in 2020, there's, it zooms in on all the different parts of the screen. You've got the box that tells you whether bread is good for you and where you can buy bread and bread recipes. And then the weird thing is that if you read the lawsuit from today, they kind of make the same argument in reverse, which is Google, it used to be 10 big, 10 blue links. If you searched for bread, you'd just find bread stuff. Now, if you search for it, we're going to map out this diagram on the page where you're going to see, oh, there's this box where Google's put its own, like reviewed restaurants for bread and you have a bunch of ads for bread

• 15:15Speaker 03

  stuff. And then you have all of this other stuff and then way below the fold, you're finally going to get those 10 blue links. So they're, both sides are basically making the argument that Google's search has either become way better or way worse because of all the stuff Google is doing.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  I think one of the more complicated things to pull apart there is there are some things Google may or may not have done that are just flatly illegal, right? If they actually are colluding with Facebook to monopolize the ad market, that's just illegal. Like, we don't have to get into the weedsy conversation about antitrust law standards, or whether we should change them, or whether prices went up. Like, that kind of collusion between two of the dominant players is just flatly illegal. And so they'll just dilute. I mean, they have to... There's some question marks about what they actually did because of the redactions. But if the government can prove that case, it's just legal. On the other hand, there are some parts where making the product better feels very anti-competitive.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  And the question is whether feelings are illegal. They should be.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  The lawsuit from today, it makes some... One of the things that is nice about it is that it makes a lot of very specific claims about why specific things are bad. Like, its argument, broadly speaking, is in areas where Google isn't really competing with anybody, like restaurant sites, if you're a vertical search engine, you get to put your name to your results and like, make clear that people know this is where their results are coming from. But if you're in an area where you're... where they actually have a vested interest in maintaining dominance, like local, like, business results, then they're gonna make it very difficult for people who are reading links to tell that they're coming from somewhere like Yelp or TripAdvisor. And because of that, they are preventing these sites in areas where they're specifically

• 17:02Speaker 03

  trying to compete from basically building brand recognition. And you can argue that, yeah, there are like, reasons why Google would want... should do this, and that it's not... that it does boil down to feelings, but it's at least more specific than the general, like, Google. They put its own... it puts its own stuff in boxes because that's the best stuff.

• 17:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think that, I mean, we have another fiery statement from Yelp in our inboxes, we always do. I can read it to you. Eight weeks ago, the United States Department of Justice brought a historic antitrust suit against Google. This morning, a bipartisan group of 38 state attorneys general has filed with their own suit, zeroing in.

• 17:39Nilay Patel?

  On how Google manipulated its search results to illegally maintain its general search monopoly, it goes on to say, "This is arguably more significant than previous lawsuits in that it strikes at the foundation of Google's dominance, its search results. For nearly a decade, Yelp's small public policy team has openly advocated for heightened antitrust scrutiny of Google's behavior. It is gratifying to see Google finally brought to justice for this specific conduct." And I think that really cuts at what we've been talking about, which is there are a lot of places you can focus your scrutiny of Google. And I honestly think search results and ads are, that's Google's business. And a lot of stuff around like whether they pay Apple too much money to be the default, it just feels, and we talked about this when the first case came out, it feels like a

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  sidelight to, Google controls all the advertising on the web. And importantly, the search engine results page delivers a lot of traffic around the web. It is a fire hose of traffic. And when Google changes its mind about where that traffic should go, companies literally succeed and fail. And when they change their mind about how that information should be displayed and where it should come from, companies like Yelp can just get knocked out of the game. I think the question is really, you know, the specific harms listed in the suit, they do get to the question of, has anyone been harmed? Like, the companies might have been harmed, but have consumers been harmed? Which remains the standard. And that's, I think, all these cases are fighting against that standard. Because I think a lot of consumers are going to say, "Well, we just use Google and it

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  keeps getting better." Addy, one question I did have, there's this lengthy digression into WhatsApp, and it's connected to the Google and Facebook colluding. And we usually think of Google and Facebook as, you know, hardcore competitors, especially in advertising. What is going on with this WhatsApp story?

• 19:23Speaker 03

  That's an excellent question that is confusing lots of people, actually. Our colleague Russell Brandham wrote a good piece about it. Basically, the gist is that the lawsuit contends Google, as part of its, like, illegal collusion with Facebook, cut this deal that lets it advertise against WhatsApp messages, WhatsApp being an encrypted service. So, the argument, it seemed like, was that Google cut- This deal that lets it look through WhatsApp messages the way that it can quote unquote, "look through Gmail messages," like scan them to target advertising. As Russell explained, this doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. It's not clear how they would be able to access WhatsApp messages.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  And it's not clear if there are sort of a speculation that maybe the idea is that if people are backing up their WhatsApp messages to somewhere like Google Drive, that actually the deal is that they can access that. But if that's the case, then it's already on a Google service. It's sort of strange and confusing. But the problem is that they've redacted this pretty heavily. And so it's possible that there is a reasonable explanation for this that we just don't know. And that's going to be one of the interesting things to watch.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Can I ask a really stupid question? We're not dealing with matters of national security directly. Why does this stuff get to be redacted? Why, like, what's this, is it, is it like, it's straight up competitive reasons? And they don't want to be punished for having a lawsuit filed against them because it would tell their competitor something? Or is there some other reason that, like, all this stuff gets redacted?

• 20:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it all depends on where the evidence comes from and how it was, what the agreement is between Google and the prosecutors to get it. So if the evidence was filed under seal or there was a discovery process under seal, the prosecutors can't break the seal. If, like, you don't negotiate with the person you're filing a lawsuit against.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  You're not like, hey, I'm about to file a lawsuit against you. What would you like me to redact? It really depends on how you've located the evidence. So some of the evidence, for example, in the House antitrust investigation was filed under seal, right? They asked for the stuff. They didn't want to subpoena the companies. Remember, this was like a big, dramatic piece of the puzzle, like, how aggressive is this going to be? That we're going to ask Tim Cook to appear, we're not going to subpoena him. And then they all like, all the CEOs like jockey for position of who got to go first. Because they didn't want to be that aggressive. So I think here, what you're looking at is, there's a lot of evidence that's filed. Some of it was likely filed under seal or under an agreement that they would, it would be redacted. Over time, I suspect it will come out because the prosecutors don't want this shit redacted, right?

• 22:01Nilay Patel?

  They would like, they would just like to tell you what Star Wars name metaphor Google is using for evil. Because that's a great headline for them. So I suspect over time, there will be a lot of arguing about this. But yeah, I think it just comes down to how the evidence was gathered and. I, again, I showed up unprepared. So I don't know the answer to that question, but that's the mechanism underneath it. Addy, walk me through the general argument of Facebook and Google colluding.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  The general argument is that Google was a very dominant advertising player and that it then saw Facebook's dominance and was threatened by it. And so it ended up setting up, again, because of redactions, it's kind of unclear, some kind of secret agreement that would let these companies sort of set the, like, set the terms for people who are trying to advertise on them. And they're also making a big deal out of what is called header bidding, that is trying, when they're trying to, if you're buying an ad or you're placing one, that you're trying to think that you're running things through a bunch of different ad exchanges, but actually, Google and Facebook are trying to monopolize

• 23:08Speaker 03

  this market and route everything through a system that basically lets them dictate the terms of how ads get placed.

• 23:15Nilay Patel?

  We're so close to having you explain programmatic advertising.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  And I'm not going to do it.

• 23:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'll see if I can do it really fast. So, programmatic advertising, this is like the heart of our business, so I should be able to explain it. When people show up and buy ads on a website, they don't just buy ads on the Verge, they target an audience. So, we actually just had Melissa Grady on Decoder, and she did a better job explaining this to me. But you're Melissa Grady, you're the CMO of Catalog, you want to target, I don't know, 35 to 50-year-old people who identify as CEOs. So you like, put in all that data into your ad exchange, you say, "Go find those people, show them this ad." When you load a Verge webpage, all those trackers that people complain about are trying to figure out who you are. And then they go off to another ad exchange, intermediary server, and they say, "Hey, this person who's a 35 to 50-year-old CEO showed up on this

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  website, who wants to buy the ad slots on that website?" Then there's a process called header bidding where all the all the ad servers can say, I've got this much money. I want to buy this ad. There's an auction. The ad gets passed through the whole system and gets displayed. It's very complicated. It happens very fast. It's the thing that makes the web slow. It's also the thing that makes all the money in the web. Google and Facebook run the dominant exchanges. And when I say Google is in the one or two position at every part in that stack, all of the services that run that set of interchanges, Google has a division or a company or a system that has a one or two market share position at that stack. If you have the one or two position of in market share in that stack, it is very likely that you want to preserve it. It's very likely that you make a deal with the other one. And the other one is almost always Facebook. This will actually lead us

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  in the second segment, which is about Facebook and Apple complaining at each other this week. But it's comments they're doing. It's all it's all blending together. But the idea that that Facebook and Google would collude to prevent competitors from appearing. I mean, that there are lots and lots and lots of ad tech companies. They have lots and lots of opinions on this. And this seems like the one where it's hardest to explain to a judge, hardest to explain to a jury. But inside of the industry where it's just where all the money is, people feel it. They definitely feel it, that it is hard to beat Google and Facebook in delivering and servicing the ad market. Now, whether it been like, we all have feelings about tracking. We Dieter and I get the tweets about the trackers on the verge like every day. We get it. But that is the engine

• 25:32Nilay Patel?

  of advertising the internet right now. That engine is changing. That's we're going to talk about with Facebook and Apple. But Google has, I think, been very aggressive at maintaining its dominance in that system, which is where all the money is right now. I think I pulled that up.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

• 25:46Nilay Patel?

  They definitely got something wrong and some ad tech person is going to tell me about it.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  But so but the lawsuit might have gotten something wrong. Like, just as when we were looking at all Google's potential monopoly problems overall, and the first cut was making deals for Safari placement, and then the second cut is ads, and then the third cut is like the thing we expected with what the Search results page does. There are probably a million different ways to go at Google for what it does within the ad tech industry. You know, they bought However, however, long ago they bought DoubleClick. And it was like an up and comer. And then they like took over that section of it. And if you make this case to Google, like you're in charge. Like, no, we actually only comprised such and such percent of this, the online ad market.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  And it's only like a third of a percent of the worldwide ad market. Or, you know, whatever the thing is when you're trying to define the market. But especially online, they control the important parts. They run the, they run the exchanges, they run the intersections. And there's probably three or four, eight other ways to go at them for what their ad tech does. This is the way the Texas case goes. There might be other ways, but I don't know that there's a single one of those ways that is easily explainable. I don't know that the way that ads work on the internet is so complex. There's no way that you can in, you know, 30 seconds even, explain exactly what Google is doing in a way that I think would be accurate and convince people that they're doing because

• 27:17Speaker 02

  it's confusing.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  I mean, the thing that Neelai said is super strong, which is that if they have a bunch of material that's like, they cut this shady backroom deal to do something that they're saying that they're not doing, then you don't actually have to explain ad tech, really. You just have to explain a bunch of damning communications. But because there are so many redactions, we don't really know what they've got.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I think as the cases progress, they are going to narrow. And that means all of the emphasis will be on one or two things. And I think that will make it easier for everyone to understand. Dieter, to your point about how complicated the advertising market is, this is a totally different story. But today, I think it was Oracle, put out a report saying there's massive amounts of ad fraud in streaming video because scammers set up server farms to just pretend to be clients, like streaming service clients. And they request ads from the ad vendors. And then they tell the ad vendors that the ads were displayed. And it's like $25 million in fraud from people just pretending to be the Hulu client and Apple TV.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  And the only reason Oracle caught them is because there was a mismatch between the hardware and the OS that was reporting to run, like they were reporting older Apple TVs are running newer versions of TV OS that aren't unsupported. That's the thing that got them caught. Wow. And that kind of stuff throughout the industry is just prevalent, right? Like, it's so complicated, it happens so fast, it happens at such a vast scale that you can, you can just set up a rack of servers and pretend to be Apple TVs asking for Hulu ads and get paid out. At the same time, that allows for Google to do things that might not be on the up and up. But because they're Google and they're dominant, they look like the cleanest vendor of them all. And that, but that comes back to like, are feelings illegal?

• 29:02Nilay Patel?

  Like, right, like, wouldn't you rat, like, Google at least will tell you what it's doing in some cases, or maybe they have a bunch of emails to Facebook being like, Mark, I think we should dominate this market, which would just be flatly illegal. But some of the stuff they're doing is actually to combat fraud. Some of the stuff they're doing is actually to lock out the shady vendors. And they will say that to us. That actually, I think we should take a break and come back and talk about Facebook, because one of the ways you can talk about Facebook and Apple yelling at each other is in the context of Chrome. Part of this connects to the fight between Facebook and Apple. So let's take a break, we'll come back and talk about that.

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• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. So there's the Google antitrust fight that's happening. Part of the Google antitrust fight is connected to Apple. One of the things that Apple and Google are both doing is they're restricting cookies in their browsers. So again, I talked to Melissa Grady and Decoder, like, within three minutes of us having that conversation, she started talking about the world going cookie-less. Like, this is what CMOs of big companies are thinking about, is cookies on your web browser. So Apple is restricting all the cookies in Safari, they're switching their identifiers, they're faking out websites, like, they're trying to keep you anonymous. And then they're gonna do these labels about data, which Facebook is very mad at. Google has said it will do this thing with cookies in Chrome in 2022.

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  Why is it taking them longer? Because every time Google tweaks Chrome to make it harder for third-party advertisers to operate with cookies, they benefit themselves because you are signed into Chrome. So they know who you are all the time. So Google's ad exchanges already know who you are because you're just signed into Google, whereas all the other advertising vendors need to drop a cookie in your browser. So they, years ago, when Dieter and I took a briefing with Google about this cookie thing, they're like, "We want to do it today. We know we're getting hammered on privacy, but if we make the move, we'll get sued for antitrust."

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple things. One, disclosure, my wife works for Facebook Reality Labs, which obviously is a division of Facebook, so there's that. Two, talking specifically about what's going on with cookies and browsers, the other reason Google will publicly tell you... That they are taking their time here is they do actually want to not just break all of advertising, right? There's this system that's happening where the incentives for Google are to like, keep the web around. And in order to keep the web around, people need to get paid. In order to get paid, there needs to be advertising. So they want to like, slowly build a new system to replace cookies that is more anonymous. And so they end up in this thing where there's like a privacy budget, or like, how many things is a web browser able to figure out about you before they're capped, and blah, blah,

• 32:38Speaker 02

  blah, blah, blah, blah. But it just so happens that them slow rolling it aligns with their monetary incentive to not get dinged for antitrust and to continue, right? But the same thing applies to Safari and its moves with cookies and also with these new things they're putting on apps, which we got to talk about. It just so happens that Apple making it harder to identify and do advertising aligns with its monetary interest to have people like, pay for stuff directly, and they prefer pay for stuff directly to Apple, rather than have stuff be supported by advertising, because that they know that that system like, helps other companies that aren't Apple, because Apple doesn't want to make money

• 33:22Speaker 02

  through advertising. Now, I'm not saying that either one of these companies is necessarily acting in bad faith, although I suspect that it's like, it's not a pure yes or no answer for either one. But often with these discussions, there's like, there's a default assumption out there that, oh, Google's trying to screw you, or, oh, Apple's trying to screw Google, or whatever. And from my sense of it is, it's like, yeah, maybe, but that might not be the primary reason, but it sure doesn't make them sad that it's happening, is kind of how I see it.

• 33:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, they're competitors. I think they're like, competing, you know? I don't think that Facebook and Apple like being in a fight that they're in. So Addy, can you? Can you just give us the overview of what's going on with Facebook and Apple?

• 34:07Speaker 03

  So yeah, so Apple, one of the things it's updating with iOS 14 is that if a site, if an app wants to use your sort of phone advertising identifier to track you or personalize ads, it has to ask permission. And naturally, the expectation is that a lot of people are going to say no, which is going to make apps that use advertising take a hit because their ads are no longer seen as as valuable. And so Facebook, which obviously, as we've just discussed, is a major advertiser, has started taking out full-page, giant, very tasteful ads in major newspapers, saying this is going to hurt small businesses. Why are you killing

• 34:50Speaker 03

  small businesses, Apple? You're terrible.

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  They were two days in a row.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:55Nilay Patel?

  I read those ads. And it just, it's like, the idea that Facebook really cares about the the local butcher is like, maybe they do. But it was like, I don't, you don't think about Facebook's interests and like, small business interests as being aligned in that way. Casey had a great line in Platformer. He was like, local shoe stores and bowling alleys existed before Facebook. One presumes they will continue existing without Facebook advertising in this way. Like, Facebook didn't create the market for this business. It made advertising more effective for those businesses in some way. Here's what I don't understand. Maybe you can help me out. What is Facebook's goal?

• 35:35Speaker 03

  I mean, it seems like the goal that we had speculated on was that this is a thing that's designed to appeal to the kind of people who read like, the Wall Street Journal, that this is like, a regulator and lobbyist thing?

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  Right. So first, so the Facebook, we just spent all this time, Facebook and Google operate the most effective, dominant advertising platforms in the history of the world. And they were like, we're going to run these ads in print. Right? Like, just that alone, to me, is like, shocking. Like, if Facebook wants to target, they're, and it's true, they're running some of these ads digitally. There was a very funny one at the top of vox.com, and the headline, like, gigantic letters. It was like, Facebook supports internet regulation. And then like, the vox.com headline was like, we should regulate Facebook. Right? Like, they're, they are targeting in that way. They're running those ads on Axios, all the places, Politico, all the places that the regulators and lawmakers and their staff are reading.

• 36:33Nilay Patel?

  Putting it in print, and the goal is to like, make it feel permanent, right? The goal is to make it feel big. It's to get the earned media of people taking the picture and tweeting the ad like, to cover it. Like, if Facebook rolled out a digital ad campaign, would we write a story about it? Facebook rolls out a print ad, we're like, "Facebook took out a very strange print ad today. Here's what it says, because it is likely that none of you are buying a print newspaper." So I think there's just an element of trying to make it feel bigger. But then the actual ad is, "Apple is rolling out a change that will make it harder for us to run an advertising service for small business. Step through those gates of logic with us. Apple is gonna hurt small business." And I still don't know what, do they want Apple to roll back the change? Do they want the government to write a law preventing the change? What on earth would that law look like?

• 37:18Nilay Patel?

  "Apple, you can't put up a pop-up saying, 'This app collects your information.'" That seems unlikely at best in the current environment. Like, I don't know what the end goal is, except to try to rally up some anger at Apple. I know, we know Zuckerberg is kinda mad at Apple all the time. They control a big platform too, they're dominant, they don't get the scrutiny. We heard that Facebook is gonna support Epic in its lawsuit against Apple. It just, but what is the, what is the goal? Like, it's just, there's an empty question mark at the end of it. Like, you're gonna rile up all this anger at Apple? It's not gonna take the heat off of Facebook. And it's certainly not gonna make European privacy regulators prevent Apple from putting up a privacy notice. What is the goal?

• 38:00Speaker 03

  Privacy has been kind of at the core of Apple's anti-trust fight, though, in the US. That, this dovetails very neatly with the claim that when Apple wants to destroy a competitor, it does so by saying that they pose a security risk. Like, it rolls out a thing that lets you watch your kid's screen time, and suddenly, all the independent apps that have been doing this are a security risk. Or if you are going to run something like Tile, or if you're gonna do something that duplicates a feature Apple has decided is going to roll out, then you're going to have to make, your users are gonna have to jump through these hoops where they accept these, "Oh, this could be dangerous, are you gonna accept it?"

• 38:40Speaker 03

  So, from that perspective, Facebook is calling attention to a thing that has definitely been on regulators' minds.

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, I feel like the attack on Apple for being protective of its users, it just doesn't have any political weight to it. And that's what you really need, right? You want the law that says you have to be, "Apple's abusing its anti-trust position." Okay, a bunch of small businesses showing up and saying, "Apple takes 30% of our revenue, even when we had to shut down our yoga studio and hold virtual classes." Very sympathetic, right? Like, every lawmaker is falling over themselves to say, "Apple's the bad guy there." Apple is telling people that WhatsApp collects a shitload of data, and they're already coming after Facebook. Like, who? Like, just our cast of characters

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  from all these hearings and investigations in Congress. I can't even imagine, like, even the cartoons, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz, like, they're not gonna be like, "Yeah, we think Facebook is wrong here." They're gonna be like, "We should break up Facebook." That's just like always their reaction to these things.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  I mean, Facebook can be somewhat optimistic about how its public image is perceived by other people. Like, they had a call where they were, like, showing off a mind-reading like, armband, and they were like, "Clearly, people will not think this is creepy," earlier this week.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  There is just the fact, the bare fact that, and maybe this is just too 40 chess, but the labels getting rolled out on apps, the nutrition labels saying, "This is all the data that's being collected by apps," naturally would lead to a huge round of stories that are just going to look at the labels and being like, "Wow, let's compare the things that are being collected by all the apps, and Facebook collects a lot. Holy crap." But now the story is, Facebook is angry about this. Here's their ad saying something about small business, like, "They've successfully muddied the waters and prevented just a pure round of stories saying Facebook collects too much information."

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Except that now we're also talking about that because they put up these ads.

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  No!

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  All right. I appreciate the fight. I appreciate the competition. I think Apple's doing the right thing with the labels, just flatly. I would rather, like, what makes a good market? Lots of information. So you're a consumer, you want a lot of information about what you're signing up for, especially when it's free, and what you're trading in exchange for the service is data. You should know exactly the terms of that exchange. So putting more information into the market so people can make better decisions. Kind of unequivocally a good thing. So I'm happy to come down on the side of that one. There's a lot more to come. Hopefully it doesn't come in the next two weeks because I think everybody would like a break from 2020. But Addy, thank you so much for running

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  us through it. It feels like policy coverage into next year is going to be fast and furious. I expect we'll be talking to you a lot. Thanks. All right, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back. Speaking of Apple, we're gonna talk about these headphones with Chris Welch.

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• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  We are back. Chris Welch is here. Hello, Mr. Welch. How are you?

• 43:12Speaker 08

  Hey, it's good to be here.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  So let's talk about you. You reviewed the AirPods Max and then iOS 14.3 with ProRAW for the pro phones, cameras, come out, you wrote that up too. I am very, I mean, who's ready for an hour on raw formats?

• 43:30Nilay Patel?

  Let's start with the AirPods Max. I had them. I played with them. I was like, huh, these are weird. And then I put them in a box and I sent them to you. What do you think?

• 43:37Speaker 08

  Well, the smell was gone that you, that you got from the cushions when you first unboxed them.

• 43:43Nilay Patel?

  Someone told me that that, that specific phenomenon is called off-gassing, which is a wonderful phrase. It is specific to soft materials, particularly memory foams, and that's the smell. And it does fade after a few days. That first day, let me tell you, I don't, it's the first time I ever heard the phrase off-gassing, but now I know exactly what off-gassing is. And my God, the off-gassing. But it was gone by the time it got to you.

• 44:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I spent a few days with them and I think I kind of came to the conclusion that, I mean, first of all, they are a ton of money. $550 is a lot, but it's not unheard of by any means. And they are just really good noise cancelling headphones. They sound fantastic. The battery life is decent, 20 hours. And yeah, they've got all the usual Apple tricks like automatic switching and spatial audio, which I love a lot, especially on these when you're watching movies. But you can also just save your money and get something from Sony or Bose and you'll be very happy.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  So you're, you're wearing them right now. I can see that you're wearing them with a wire plugged into the side.

• 44:44Speaker 08

  The $35 wire, yes.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  Amazing. And one of the big questions was, obviously Bluetooth introduces a certain amount of latency. Does the wire remove that latency?

• 44:55Speaker 08

  Yes, it does. As far as I can tell, anyway, like I've done this a few times with them. I've made some GarageBand tracks and those have been fine. So I think as far as like monitoring goes, you can use these and. And you shouldn't have any latency at all. So in that regard, the cable is nice to have, but it would have been nicer if it were in the box.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  Another thing I noted in your review, which was a big question I had just in playing with them for five minutes, they're, they're white. A lot of them, a lot of the parts of the thing are white, particularly the ear cups and the headbands. You were like, it's already starting to get a little dirty. Is it, is it just like the normal amount of dirty and then it's flat? Or is it just getting dirtier over time?

• 45:30Speaker 08

  That's definitely getting dirtier over time. Like these last few days, again, the ear cushions are getting a little bad. You can take them off. Like Apple doesn't really tell you to like wash them with any kind of like soap or anything. They just like say like use water and like a soft cloth and it's about the best you can do. So I would go for like space gray or like the dark blue color seems to, seems like it would be a good choice if you want to hide some of that stuff. But yeah, white is going to be rough and the green too, I think is pretty light. So.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  Former Verge Creative Director James Barham bought them and he was like, I will never wear these outside of my house because they're so heavy. Yeah. He was like, they sound beautiful, he said. I want to get to the sound, but are they heavy?

• 46:06Speaker 08

  They are pretty heavy. I mean, much heavier than like the Sony or the Bose headphones, but I mean, they're all metal. And so you gotta like take that into account. And so that's going to be some weight. Like the top of your head doesn't really feel it. You just kind of feel it like on your ears, but it's very soft and comfortable. I think if you like neck problems and something to kind of be aware of, but like as far as just like sitting around the house, they feel fine. I wouldn't want to like walk like three miles in them. You would probably feel it then.

• 46:30Nilay Patel?

  So it's like, it doesn't hurt on the headband after a while. Like they, they spread it out. Well, it's just like, it adds a feeling of weird inertia. Like when you turn your head,

• 46:40Nilay Patel?

  my head's a lot heavier than before.

• 46:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, but I've got like a huge head and they're pretty comfortable. I mean, they don't clamp too down. I've seen some people don't really like the clapping force of them, but for me, that's been fine. I haven't really felt any tightness or anything like that.

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  One of my friends, I'm just asking you questions. My friend asked me and I was like, I don't have them anymore. I'll just ask Chris on the podcast. They're made of metal. It is cold outside. Do they get cold in the winter? There's just a part of me that says these were not designed to leave the house. Right? They're, they're getting dirty. They're, they're like heavy. Yeah. They might not be like, if you have a wet finger and you touch a very cold piece of metal, like bad things happen. How cold do they get? And is it, it's cold in New York? Like,

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Are you asking for a warning label? Like do not lick?

• 47:23Speaker 08

  Don't stick your tongue on them.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  AirPods Max when outside?

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  There's a reason most things are made of plastic.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Like, uh, how in the winter, they feel usable in the winter outside, even though they're made of metal?

• 47:35Speaker 08

  I think so. I mean, we're outside shooting the video on Sunday and they were getting pretty cold. But I mean, if it's that cold, you're going to have gloves on. And so I think it's not going to be that much of an issue. Like, I don't really see a case where you would be holding your hand against them for a long period of time. And plus, that's where the dial comes in, which I love about these headphones versus like your tab controls that can kind of go crazy in the cold and stop working, right? We've seen that from Sony on a few models.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, my, I've got the Sony XM, MX, XM threes.

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we get it wrong every time.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  When it gets super cold out, these touch controls, they're just like, goodbye, whatever. But you like the dial? Does it feel natural to use? And like, you remember what all the little button presses do and all that?

• 48:14Speaker 08

  Feels great. I mean, I hit the stem pretty often. The headband, that is just because it's so close, but I think over time that would go away. But yeah, it's easy to find and works.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I think physical controls, especially for something you can't see, much better than touch. Like you just like locate the button and go.

• 48:31Speaker 08

  Sure wish there was a power button, though, speaking of physical controls. There's been a lot of confusion over like the battery situation when they're outside the case. And Apple hasn't been super talkative about it.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, real briefly, can you like talk about what that controversy is with the, the battery situation? Cause like, put them in the case, they go low power, but if you don't put them in the case, people are experiencing different rates of battery drain if it's just like sitting on your desk.

• 48:54Speaker 08

  Yeah. So when they go in the case, they go into a super low power state, which is pretty much off as far as I know. But when they're out of the case, if you put them down like on a table, they'll turn off within, I think a few minutes or not fully turn off. Sorry, go to sleep or like a light form of sleep where they're still connected to your iPhone, but they're not really doing anything. And as far as I can tell, they can sit there for a few hours and only lose like two or three or four or five max like points of battery. And so it's not like some massive drain overnight. But I think a power button would have solved a lot of this confusion.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  How do they sound?

• 49:26Speaker 08

  They sound fantastic. I mean, I think they sound better than your Sony and Bose, of course, not by like a huge massive margin. But if you're someone who cares about audio, I think you're going to notice.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Do they sound better than the Sony and Bose when you are moving around?

• 49:38Speaker 08

  Um, depends how much, how closely it's into your sound when you're walking around.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Well, this is what I'm asking, right? Like, the jump from crappy headphones to good headphones in every situation is noticeable to me, right? So your standard pack in.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  Apple earbuds, ear pods, I think, sound horrible. If you buy any reasonably good set of headphones, no matter what situation you're in, you're like, that was an improvement.

• 50:04Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, they all sound good. I would say the Sony and the Bose and these all sound fine. And they sound good. I mean, they're not like the best headphones I've ever heard in my life, but they're only $500 and not like a $1,200 pair of like open back headphones. So, but they sound great. I wish that Apple had come up with something more than Apple Music and like wireless AAC audio. We've been stuck on that since 2007. So I think it's time to move up there at some point.

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  And this is a, particularly with the Sonys, I think you and I both got a lot of tweets and incoming, like, you have to make sure you use Android and they have a higher quality Bluetooth codec if you use certain services. The iPhone doesn't support any of those codecs. So if you, if you do get to the higher bitrate audio with the Sonys on Android, are they competitive or is it just more resolution? Like, how would you describe the differences?

• 50:54Speaker 08

  I'd say competitive. I think the Sonys always have more bass, which is too much to some people. I think it is kind of bloated, but some people just love that really bass forward sound. And so I think that's where the Sonys went out in terms of like that really, you know, popular sound. And these are a bit, bit more neutral. I mean, not at all neutral. They're tuned in a way that's like that, you know, U-shaped EQ curve where the bass and high is a little bit enhanced, but they sound really, really good. And so I've been pleased with that. The case is obviously the worst thing about them. I, I would love to see Apple like change to like a different case and just send that to people for free. It is that bad, in my opinion. They won't, but I think they're going to start to sell like third-party options pretty soon because it's pretty universal, the turn on these. So.

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  Mac rumors found an interview that the design team gave, I think it was in Japan, ran it through Google Translate. And the justification is they think other cases, other headphone cases are too heavy and too thick. And so making this thing out of a single piece of whatever it's made out of meant that it would be easier to fit your headphones in a bag. And then having the headbands stick out meant that it's easier to pull them out of a bag because there's a handle that you can grab. That was, that was the gist of that interview.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  That sounds like a very carefully construed response to a poor reception of this case, but.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  I, Apple's very intentional. I bet those reasons are real and I bet they thought their idea was good. And, and every now and again, Apple makes a product for itself that does not reflect any real people in the world. So Apple's design team wakes up every day and they get in their Ferraris and they drive to the spaceship. And they walk through like a handful of gates and they go into their pristine design lab. And then normal people are on the subway where it's dirty and they're perfectly white headphones. Just pick up grime from the air and like, sometimes Apple just misses the trick, right? Like, my favorite example, this was when CarPlay was first introduced. Eddie Q is literally on the board of Ferrari.

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  And so CarPlay was in Ferraris before it was in Honda Civics. Like that, he just solved his own problem.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  And I, I respect it. I don't, I can't complain about it, but sometimes you can just see it happen. Like the worldview of Apple is just like a little too narrow. I think this case is like exactly indicative of that. Like they made a product that they wanted and like to hell with everybody else. And like, you know what? Like, you can't be mad, like they're very niche headphones. But you can't be too mad at the fact that Apple made exactly the product it wanted in this one ultra luxury category. But I do think it, like the question of whether it's worth the money. Like it really starts to knock up against, well, other $500 headphones come with extremely nice cases. They come with the litany of cables you need to use them in every situation.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  They still come with the, the two-pronged airplane adapters. I have, I have not been on a plane with a two-pronged thing in the past decade, but they still come with these headphones.

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's amazing, right? I love it. Um, well, if you have an older private jet.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 54:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Yeah, it's, but it still works. Um, that's your, you're like the, the low tier Bose customer. You're like, well, my jet's like 15 years old, but, um, that's, I don't know how these people think. One big question I have about sort of the case, the ecosystem, the headphones in general. You use them now for a while. It feels like if, once again, like just like the HomePod, right? The HomePod, the first HomePod sounded great. And the second you left Apple's ecosystem, it just fell apart.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. And it just wasn't worth it as a smart speaker assistant and they changed it and they made them mini and they've done all the stuff. I feel like this is the same exact set of issues. It sounds really good. I still don't buy that computational audio is a phrase. We can get into that specifically. It's just processing, but if you have a bunch of Apple devices, you mostly are at home, you're using Apple services, you use Siri a lot. These things are going to be great.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Actually, can I ask a question about that? Does it support? Hey, sir?

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  It does. Okay, good. Cause if it didn't, that would be a huge problem. I'd be like, what? They definitely don't believe in Siri anymore. Okay.

• 55:09Speaker 08

  Yes, there are two H1 chips in there. Siri would hope it would support a Siri.

• 55:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wait. Do we know why it needs two H1 chips?

• 55:16Speaker 08

  I didn't really get a straight answer on that.

• 55:17Nilay Patel?

  Okay, great.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Because you can.

• 55:21Speaker 08

  It's a flex.

• 55:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because they, no one else even has one. So like, well, do you, all right. But like the HomePod sounded great. Lots of weird audio processing going on. Great with Apple Music. Didn't really support Spotify at launch. Like, these are headphones, they're obviously a little bit different, but that, these are going to sound great. They're going to be the most expensive. If you're in the Apple ecosystem, they'll do all this like fast switching, ambient audio with your iOS devices that have motion sensors.

• 55:49Speaker 08

  Hip Hop's on planes again. If you got your iPad, if you watch a lot of movies on there, it's going to be a great experience to like, watch these and have spatial audio. I wish it worked on Apple TV. I get why it doesn't, but I wish there was like some kind of like software solution to just like, tell them like, where is your TV located in front of you here? And so they can kind of replicate that.

• 56:05Nilay Patel?

  Can't you just guess that the TV is in front of you?

• 56:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's like front and center. Yeah, that's what I would.

• 56:10Nilay Patel?

  Can you just like lock it in place?

• 56:13Speaker 02

  If you're, if you are driving home in your Ferrari from the Apple Design Center and you walk in your door, your Apple TV is ensconced in your closet, Cruston system with all the other stuff. Right. And then it's running through a magical system to get to your TVs and different parts of the house. So they can't assume that it's there.

• 56:30Nilay Patel?

  One of the great, I don't know, it's like a. I seem to recall this, one of the great things you can do when you control the entire interface is put things on it, like a, like software, that's what it's called. Couldn't you just say, "Look at your TV," and then just like locate the TV in space and have the headphones have that as their own relational reference? There's like a million ways to solve this problem that do not involve putting a gyroscope in your TV. If Apple were to release a TV of its own, I would say they should put a gyroscope in it, because then at least they would have finally released a TV. But

• 57:02Speaker 08

  I guess the next Apple TV 4K is gonna have some weird sensors in there.

• 57:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just on a U1 chip to tell you its position, right? Like, Apple has a stack of technologies to solve this problem.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  I think we should bring back everybody wanting Apple to make a real television again. Let's like, let's start that up again.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  Again? I've been there.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  No, but like, let's just, let's, let's get Munster on board. Let's like, push. They're a trillion dollar company. Why not? Right? They could do whatever. They're making self-driving cars. Like, all the reasons for Apple to not make a TV that we would always cite or hear cited, and the reason, like, it doesn't make sense, and they don't want to get in that business, and they like their margins, and the upgrade cycle, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of that matters when you're a trillion dollar company. You can just do whatever you want.

• 57:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like make $550 headphones with a garbage case that only works near Ferrari.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 57:50Nilay Patel?

  Let me come back to this HomePod comparison. The HomePod was not successful because nobody cared about sound quality. They cared about convenience, they cared about the wide ecosystem. Do you think this has the same problem?

• 57:59Speaker 08

  I'm not sure it's gonna be the same problem. I think with the HomePod, people also cared about price. I mean, it was priced pretty high above the Echo and the Google speakers. So, this is also more expensive, obviously, but I think people are kind of drawn to it. I mean, they've sold through a lot of these. Who knows, like, what it means that they're not shipping until March. It's really hard to say what that actually means, but I think people are buying them. I think there's gonna be some disappointment over the case. People are gonna be bummed about the cable not being there, but they sound great. Like, as a headphone, they are excellent. The noise cancellation sounds just as good, if not better, than what Son and Bose are doing, which is pretty impressive. So.

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that's the AirPods. Two other things came out from Apple this week. Fitness Plus hit. Dieter, you, I don't know, it's, it's, it's in the review ecosystem.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're, we're gonna, we're gonna do some long-term testing on it. We, we weren't in the group that had it ahead of time, so we're gonna, we're gonna take our time and have, like, actually multiple different people try it out, because, you know, we want, like, I never exercise. I'm gonna try. And what's that like? Somebody else who does exercise more often is gonna try it. So we're gonna take our time with it. But I will tell you that right now, I'm less angry about the fact that it requires an Apple Watch. I kind of get what they're going for with that, because they do really wanna like introduce the stats on the screen and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it has made me angry all over again over multi-user on the iPad. So when you use it with an Apple TV, the Apple TV pops up a thing saying, who's exercising?

• 59:27Speaker 02

  And then your watch says, I'm exercising. And you tap the watch and it pairs and you're off to the races. And you could do that with literally any Apple TV, right? You'd walk up to one in a hotel room, hotel lobby, boardroom, somewhere, whatever. You can use Fitness Plus with your Apple Watch, login, multiple users, no problem. But not on an iPad. On an iPad, it's tied to the person whose Apple iCloud account is signed into it. Because, you know, iPads are only for a single person in Apple world.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  That makes no sense. Like, just have multi-user inside of the app.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  But I mean, that's how it works in the Apple TV. And it's probably like, shouldn't it be the same app on the Apple TV and the iPad? You'd think, from what I can tell from people's reactions to it, it's like, if you're a serious, like, serious fitness person, and you're deep into biking and you're using Zwift, or, you know, you're already a Peloton person or whatever, and like, you're really specialized and you know how you wanna do your stuff. This stuff might be a little bit basic for you, but it does seem like it has a really good range underneath that sort of pro level. And so I'm really excited to see how people feel like how accessible it is, and if they're gonna ramp up on it. And I am also really curious to see how many people just start using it because it's like, it's just part of the bundle.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  In the same way that like, Microsoft's whole argument for Teams is like, you're already paying for Office 365. You might as well.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  But it's not really part of the bundle, right? The Apple One, like, the most expensive one.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  The most expensive one.

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  I think the ones people are gonna get. I think it's like, it's funny how diminished Apple One is conceptually from Apple. Yeah, right. Like, they announced it, and here's this bundle, and then we like, did all the work of trying to figure out what it was. And they just haven't talked about it ever since. Even though they've put out like a flood of products over the past. I'm telling you, you gotta put the iPhone in a bundle. Speaking of the iPhone, iOS 14 three hit, supports Fitness Plus, supports AirPods Max, also supports ProRAW, which Apple's new camera format. Chris, you been, you been playing with it a little bit?

• 1:01:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's cool. So it basically combines flexibility of RAW, you get all that editing power. And now you get, on top of all that, you get all the smart HDR and the other tricks that the iPhone does for its usual shots. So before you'd like choose just RAW through apps like Hailight, some other apps can do it as well. But now you can actually combine those two for some shots that look great. And you can still fix things like shadows and white balance and all of that really, really well. So it's pretty fun. There's still some reasons to use plain RAW. Like if you want sharpness, I think it still takes a beat to capture all that data when you're doing ProRAW versus like a RAW photo is just like an instant capture. So the reasons to like, stick with RAW versus ProRAW. But yeah, it's neat. And it's just part of the software now. And it's right there in the

• 1:02:09Speaker 08

  camera. And you just hit a little toggle. The files are huge. So you don't want to use it all the time. It's like 25 megabytes, megabytes per file. So that'll fill up your five gigs of iCloud relatively quickly.

• 1:02:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God, if you're buying iPhone 12 Pro and shooting ProRAW, you're like, I'm just gonna stick with the basic iCloud plan. I appreciate that. That's like, I bought a sports car and I put 87 in it. Yeah. Some people do it. The Hailight folks actually wrote a really long blog post about ProRAW, which you should go read it. They will do a better job. They will do a better job explaining the weeds of it than we will, even if we spend an hour on it. And what I found really interesting in that thing that you said about sharpness, ProRAW is still like smart HDR requires multiple frame captures. So you will get a bunch of cool HDR tricks, and then you'll get the editing ability inside of a smart HDR photo. But a single frame will always sort of inherently have more sharpness in

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  many situations. Right. We'll just see. The other thing that we got to use it, I think figuring out when to flip all the toggles is going to be, I mean, it's gonna be fun. It's, it's a year of using new camera formats. The other thing they noted, which I think is super interesting, Apple is using the DNG format, it's Adobe's format. They're using, I think they referred to them as like little known tags in the format to make some of this work. And they added to the spec with Adobe. So they've sort of expanded. So it's a standard file format, which is great. You know, if you're like a Lightroom person, you know that every time a new camera comes out.

• 1:03:41Speaker 08

  Takes a while for the raws to actually work.

• 1:03:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like Lightroom has to come up with its own set of interpreters for the, because a raw literally is the raw data off a camera sensor. Apple is actually doing that step here. And that's what's enabling them to use, uh, to do prior on all three of the cameras, the wide, the ultra wide and the telly, um, and the front camera, which they were not able to do before. Because no one, like, no one's gonna write the iPhone selfie camera de-mosaic or, like, it's not gonna happen. So it's cool. And then the, the thing that the, the Halide blog post suggested, which I think is super interesting, is because Apple has now developed a raw format, a thing they could do, even to deliver raw formats in all these other places, is make their own camera sensors,

• 1:04:28Nilay Patel?

  which is sort of the last piece of the chip puzzle for Apple. And I think that is, you know, we had this conversation on Samsung a while ago when they went to bigger gigantic camera sensors and they were, they were doing their own pixel binning and all this processing, like, Apple can get to the place where it can deliver its own kind of camera sensor and then still deliver a usable raw format off of it because it, it doesn't need to deliver the actual raw sensor data to people. So like, you just see like, it's bit by bit, like, they just put out this file format. But the thing I thought that was most interesting about the blog post is like, he pulled the thread out all the way, like Sony's imaging sensor division falls off a cliff.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, like, see, uh, Sony, the way they said, see, Intel, I thought that was really fascinating. Go read that blog post. Uh, it goes into way more detail about it. That said, I, I've been playing with prior to you. It's fun to edit. Lightroom doesn't support it yet, so there's a couple of steps before we can, I think, really push it, because I want to use the usual workflow tools that I use. That's the only way I can, like, using, editing in Apple Photos is like, yes, it's neat. I have no idea what's, yeah, like, I can't tell you if it's doing the same thing my other raw photos do, because I don't edit my raws in Apple Photos. Dieter, you got some Samsung stuff you want to talk about?

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  Oh, there's a bunch of stuff. So Samsung President of Mobile, TM Rowe, published a very gauzy, hazy blog post about innovation in the future. But there's a bunch of news that was embedded in it. So officially said that there'll be more to talk about in January, which is a lock that the S21 is going to be announced in January. Said that the best parts of the Note experience are coming to other Galaxy phones, which is code for styluses are going to work on the S21 and probably the next Galaxy Z Fold. And also that Samsung intends to make folding phones more accessible in 2021, which means that they'll hopefully come down in price. And the other rumor that's been floating around with Samsung, especially around the stylus news,

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  is that, well, they'll just kill the Note because the Note has no reason to exist. It's literally a Galaxy S phone with a stylus silo. And then they like take the opportunity to like rev the camera a little bit or rev the screen a little bit, you know, in an iterative way. But it has been years since the Note has been the flagship premiere of brand new technologies that you've never seen before. That now belongs to the Ultra line, if a phone is called Ultra, like the S21 Ultra or S20 Ultra, or it belongs to the Fold or the Z Flip or the Z Fold or whatever. So the Note's reason for being is to be a big square phone and to have a stylus silo, right? That's it.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  So if they just like make the S21 Ultra just a little bit more squarish, then you're like, what do you need? Like, you don't need it.

• 1:07:20Speaker 08

  It seems kind of risky because I feel like sometimes they take bets like in the S20. I'm sure like last year, the camera had some focus issues that they didn't really fully fix until the Note. So if you don't have the Note as that mid-year product, then you kind of just run the risk of having some bugs.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Anyway, there's been reporting that the Note might not be killed off this year. So maybe that they saw the reaction, maybe they just, they do realize that people are very, very dedicated to this brand. And it may also be like there are now like, like the regular Note 20 this year was like,

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  they whiffed on like finding the right mid-range balance. It's really hard to make a good mid-range phone and they really whiffed on it on the regular Note 20. Maybe what they'll do is they'll try and make the regular Note next year just. The note and it'll be a little bit cheaper. Who knows? We will see. We also got another leak of the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro. So the way that Samsung's headphone parlance works now is buds are the things that go in your ear. Beans are the thing that sit on the outside of your ear, but still sort of in your ear. So the buds Pro are going to be the buds, but they're going to have active noise cancelling. Is that right, Chris?

• 1:08:26Speaker 08

  Well, I call them the buds live. So they're still buds like the beans. So your description does not work.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  They should have called them beans. It would be so much easier.

• 1:08:35Speaker 08

  Greatest miss of all time.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  We saw a leak of the OnePlus 9 that's coming. It seems like everyone's moving their stuff up earlier this year. And then we did an interview with Pete Lau. He talked to a bunch of journalists. They confirmed they are in fact working on a smart watch. It seems like they might actually use Wear OS and they're going to like do something weird to like make Wear OS work better with Android TVs. It's very hazy. Anyway, I don't know. If you look at the leak for the OnePlus 9, it's like, oh, they, they, they made an iPhone. OnePlus is really, OnePlus is losing its like luster. There was this whole drama where they like preloaded Facebook on some stuff. Their design is like, I don't know. I thought the OnePlus 8 was, and 8 Pro was fine, but it didn't feel like truly deeply different in like a OnePlus

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  way. I don't know. I think that they no longer get the benefit of the doubt that they used to. And so I'm really going to be curious to see what they deliver with the OnePlus 9. And if they can continue to make a good camera, because that was the thing about the OnePlus 8 Pro, is the camera was very good. So if they want to stay in that tier, they really need to deliver on that camera in 21.

• 1:09:39Speaker 08

  Yeah, it seems like they get sidetracked by really strange cameras like the macro camera. And I think the AT had some other kind of weird sensor in there too, right?

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  There was like a color, color camera that like did weird color modes for some reason.

• 1:09:50Nilay Patel?

  You gotta differentiate.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Nilay Patel?

  How do you make an ad and be like, when you zoom in, we have more pixels than Apple? You gotta be like, no, everything's purple.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  OnePlus.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  I mean, that, that is what they did.

• 1:10:04Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever wanted to take a picture of a bug very close to the bug?

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Macro camera, that's what we can do.

• 1:10:09Nilay Patel?

  You can't, I'm telling you.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  But like a million cameras got, million phones got macro cameras in 2020. Uh, I feel like, like there was some factory that made macro camera sensors. And then they forgot about them and they were in a bin. And then they were wandering around in January 2020 and they opened the door like, oh God, look at this. Let's sell these for cheap. And that is why every mid-range and low-range phone, Android phone had a macro camera this year.

• 1:10:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I buy it. You can just see that supply chain come to fruition all the time. All right, we have gone, I was like, this will be a fast one. I'm unprepared, but we went over as always. I don't know how long it's supposed to be. You let me know. That's my Christmas present from you to me. Uh, you can tweet at us, I'm at reckless, Dieter's at backlon, Chris is at Chris Welch. Thank you to Addie for joining us to talk about Antrastoff. She's at the dextrarchy on Twitter. We love your feedback. Hit us up on Tuesday, uh, on Decoder, Ethan Brown, the founder and CEO of Beyond Meat. It's gonna be a fun one. Uh, very curious how that company fared through the pandemic and beyond. And then on Thursday, Christmas Eve, we usually take Christmas Eve off, but this year, my friends, do we have a present for you?

• 1:11:15Nilay Patel?

  The Vergecast HDMI Holiday Spectacular is coming out on Christmas Eve. It, I can't believe we actually did it. It will feature numerous sleigh bell sound effects, also interviews with David Glenn, the president of the HDMI Forum, uh, Bill Baxter, the CTO of Vizio. Uh, we talked to Sumit Sarkar from Polygon about the new game consoles and all the HDMI. I mean, it's gonna be wild.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's jam-packed.

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's a, it's a holiday spectacular.

• 1:11:45Speaker 08

  It's jam-packed, just like the HDMI 2.1 standard.

• 1:11:49Nilay Patel?

  It's coming. Uh, and then after that, we're taking a break and, uh, the Vergecast is off until January 8th, 2021, which feels like so far away, but is, is coming right up. So Tuesday and Thursday next week, we got Decoder and the Vergecast HDMI Holiday Spectacular. And then we'll see you next year. All right, that's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Stay home, be safe, wear a mask.

• 1:12:29Speaker 09

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