Rabbit, Humane, and the iPad

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss this week's tech and gadget news. Further reading: Rabbit R1 review: an unfinished, unhelpful AI gadget The Rabbit R1’s first software update addresses its dismal battery life - The Verge Turns out the Rabbit R1 was just an Android app all along TikTok and Universal Music Group end feud with new agreement Microsoft’s OpenAI investment was triggered by Google fears, emails reveal Peloton announces new round of layoffs as CEO quits Elon Musk goes ‘absolutely hard core’ in another round of Tesla layoffs Tesla layoffs hit Supercharger team just as it’s poised to take over EV charging LinkedIn is the latest company to get in on gaming Pixel 8A leak reveals $499 starting price Beats announces Solo 4 headphones and $79.99 Solo Buds Beats Solo 4 review: playing both sides Walmart is about to launch a 4K Chromecast that’s also a smart speaker SwitchBot S10 review: with plumbing hookups, this robovac and mop is actually hands-free iOS 17.5 beta lets you keep Find My on during iPhone repairs Razer made a million dollars selling a mask with RGB, and the FTC is not pleased Instagram’s updated algorithm prioritizes original content instead of rip-offs Meta is “exploring” algorithm changes on Threads. 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

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

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

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to our chat, the flagship podcast of David finally admitting it's just a three. That's what we're known for here, just being broken down and saying, you know what? Three. I'm your friend, Eli. This is Alex Krantz.

• 1:17Alex Cranz?

  I'm thinking what a two is.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  It's on fire. David Pierce is here.

• 1:23David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 1:24Nilay Patel?

  The Verge's very own three, David Pierce.

• 1:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's listen. I've heard worse. I'll take it.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  No, David, you're a ten in all of our hearts, especially now that you've admitted the truth. Lots to talk about on the show. David reviewed the Rabbit R1, which that's the whole show. That's two hours right there. We have what we're calling a money round. There's a bunch of money news to be talked about, including LinkedIn adding games. When you think about money, a bunch of gadget stuff, there's some Pixel 8A leaks, there's an iPad event next week, or what we assume is an iPad event next week. We got to talk about that and do some preview of that. And then, of course, the lightning round. The Verge's very own lightning round.

• 2:06David Pierce?

  Still woefully unsponsored. Very upsetting.

• 2:10Alex Cranz?

  Pixar should sponsor it.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, see, any, any number of companies.

• 2:14Alex Cranz?

  Lightning McQueen round, come on, it's right there.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  As a man who, for obvious financial reasons, needs to sell his Raptor, the Ford Lightning is right there.

• 2:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:27Nilay Patel?

  It's true.

• 2:27Alex Cranz?

  Just right there.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  Alex, I haven't talked to you about this yet. We have to get rid of the pickup truck. It was my mountain adventure pandemic binky pickup truck.

• 2:35Alex Cranz?

  And you're like, you live far too close to New York now to own a pickup truck.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it is incompatible with my neighborhood.

• 2:41Alex Cranz?

  Can you, can you like, how many points is a turn in, in the street?

• 2:45Nilay Patel?

  No, that's, I'm just knocking over houses. I'm just like, whatever, I'll pay the fine.

• 2:51Alex Cranz?

  No one has a post off, post box anymore.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's all, it's all over. But I'm, I'm just saying, we, we didn't call it the Raptor round.

• 3:00Alex Cranz?

  We could.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  Jim Farley, CEO Ford, who's clearly in charge of the podcast marketing budget.

• 3:08David Pierce?

  We will name the lightning round after any car. I'm not, I'm not above that. For a price, I would call this the Kia Forte round. No problem.

• 3:18Alex Cranz?

  Okay, nevermind. Yeah, that's fine.

• 3:20Nilay Patel?

  Again, the conceit of the lightning round is it goes fast. It actually never goes fast. Anyway, we're gonna get to it.

• 3:25David Pierce?

  Kia Forte round, I'm telling you. It's right there.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  That's a music term, I think that.

• 3:29Alex Cranz?

  It goes okay, and then.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  We have to stop this.

• 3:32Alex Cranz?

  You can steal it.

• 3:33Nilay Patel?

  You can steal the lightning round.

• 3:37Nilay Patel?

  But, but we're gonna be there in like 45 minutes. If, if between now and then, you can convince your CMO to sponsor it, give us a call.

• 3:44David Pierce?

  There we go.

• 3:44Nilay Patel?

  Liam is waiting for you. All right, let's start with the news. The news. The Rabbit R1 was released. David, you went to the party. You talked about it last week on the show, how you felt about the thing. This week, you've written a review. I don't think if people in the Verge chat audience are paying attention to the gadget ecosystem, I don't think your review is surprising because there was no embargo. People just got them. It was only people who bought them that had them. They were just talking about it. The, the problems have been obvious the whole time. But, and I think Mark has, was like, this product is almost unreviewable. It is so broken. But you did it. You actually reviewed it. You gave it the score, the whole, the full Verge organized review treatment.

• 4:25Nilay Patel?

  It didn't seem to go well.

• 4:26David Pierce?

  It didn't go well. It's been a very funny experience because I think coming at this after the humane experience, which was sort of a normal, like, high-end gadget review experience where they give it to a group of people. It's under embargo. It's a very sort of secretive thing. People are not talking about it on social. There's like not. Tons of sort of real time feedback coming from people. And then this comes out and Rabbit just hands it out to hundreds. And then the day after what seemed to be thousands of people. Like I picked mine up at that event last Tuesday night. And people started getting theirs in the mail like on Wednesday. Uh, and these are just users like I bought one. I bought one in order to get it to review. Everybody who has one bought one.

• 5:07David Pierce?

  And, uh, it turns out a bunch of people who have spent months being really excited about this thing that has been super hyped as like a cool way to use AI to get stuff done. And feels like the future in a Star Trek communicator. And then you take it out and you say, order me a ride. And it says, this app is going to take a long time to load and then fails. Turns out that sucks. And so it's been a really interesting experience over the last, what? Nine days since it came out, watching people go through basically the same process I have, which is you start with, oh, this thing is fun. It's cute. It's whimsical. It's adorable. And then you use it for a couple of very straightforward things and it does those things. Okay. For days, it didn't know what time it was.

• 5:49David Pierce?

  Uh, mine would tell me the time if I asked, but it was three hours off. And because Rabbit's AI is like trying to be very clever, it wouldn't let you set the time zone manually. Uh, it also, you would ask it the weather and it would just invent a place for it to be. Uh, there were a couple of people in the office at The Verge who have seen this and were asking it. And I at one point asked three times in a row, sitting in my basement in Washington DC. And it gave me the weather for New York, Philadelphia and Budapest.

• 6:16Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 6:17David Pierce?

  Three times in a row.

• 6:18Nilay Patel?

  The third one's a wild card.

• 6:20David Pierce?

  All right.

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  At least the other ones are former capitals of the United States.

• 6:24Alex Cranz?

  Maybe it just really.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  Never, I think George Washington never went to Budapest. As far as I'm aware.

• 6:30David Pierce?

  As I can tell, yeah.

• 6:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I can't even think of what the, the similarity between those three cities is.

• 6:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm saying three of them are former capitals, seats of the United States government.

• 6:39Alex Cranz?

  Two of them.

• 6:40David Pierce?

  No, no, that, that thing you just did ascribes way too much thought and intelligence to what is actually happening on this.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  They're just places where Ben Franklin was hammered. That's fine.

• 6:52Alex Cranz?

  It was Ben Franklin hammered in Budapest.

• 6:57David Pierce?

  But yeah, so I go through this whole process and and by the by the time I'm actually sitting down to be like, what is the story of this device? It's both that it is so woefully underbaked. Like, they've been promising really interesting stuff since the beginning, right? And we made a lot of fun of humane for a year for just the weirdness of that device. But Rabbit just kind of came out and they were just like, here's the thing. Here's what it does. It's a fun toy. It's $200. And it's like, OK, that actually, that might be something. And they just didn't do it. They just didn't build the thing they told us they were gonna build.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  So I'm gonna ask the same question I asked about the humane pen, which a lot of listeners have just been asking us, as though we know. Why did they ship this this way?

• 7:40David Pierce?

  I have a lot of theories about this. I don't. The answer is, I don't know. And I will say, the most specific answer is, I don't know why they shipped it now and not in three months. Like, I can tell you why they shipped it now and not in 12 months, because inventory is expensive. You have to make decisions on what you buy and when way in advance. And actually, to like, make a bunch of stuff and then stick it in a warehouse and then update it, repackage it, and ship it is like wildly expensive. And so the like, once you've started the logistics train, it's really, really, really hard to stop it. So I think that's the simplest reason.

• 8:20David Pierce?

  It's like, everybody made this date call a long time ago and didn't finish building the thing before it had to ship. And rather than eat the like, very real cost of delaying it a few months, they just shipped the unfinished thing and said, big stuff coming this summer. But both humane and Rabbit have been out there being like, oh, yeah, tons of stuff coming. Jesse Liu, the CEO of Rabbit, stood in front of the screen showing the roadmap, and it has this big, long list of stuff that absolutely needed to be there on day one, that is coming, quote unquote, "this summer." While I was using the device on Tuesday, they shipped a big software update that fixed the time zone thing, so my Rabbit now reliably knows what time it is, which is very exciting. And like, kind of fixed the weather. It doesn't give

• 9:05David Pierce?

  Me Budapest anymore, but it also gives me like 20 miles from my house. So we're like, we're getting there. And that, but that's the kind of stuff. Oh, it also fixed the unbelievably disastrous battery life that this thing had like. If I sat here and just used it for 60 minutes, it died. And if I just turned it on, put it on my desk and didn't touch it, it would die in six hours. It, I mean, it was unbelievably bad. And it's much better now. The, the, it still is like a one day device, even if you don't touch it at all, which is still pretty bad. But it's better. But this is the stuff that is just like literally inexcusable to ship to people who paid for your device. And I'm, I'm sensitive to all of the business reasons that that is hard to guess.

• 9:49David Pierce?

  AI is changing really fast. These companies don't have infinite amounts of money and supply chain victories. But you just can't, you just can't do it.

• 9:58Alex Cranz?

  I mean, people have lobbed a lot of like really negative assessments at Jesse Lou. Since this thing came out and has been kind of a boondoggle for him, right? Like a lot of people are bringing resurfacing the fact that he was formerly CEO of a company that promised NFTs in the metaverse.

• 10:15Alex Cranz?

  Didn't deliver on that and then kind of moved over, which is not a, not a really great look for him. And, and it's just like, and I've heard, I've heard the accusations on Reddit just flying fast, right? Saying that, that this was a grift, that everybody was just kind of like misled into this thing. That was clearly like a beta product, that they had no intention of thinking was real. And I don't like, there's no reporting behind any of this. This is just rumors, but the rumors are furious.

• 10:41David Pierce?

  Yeah. The like Jesse is a grifter thing is a very real thing that is floating out there. I think, I, I forget what the name of the law is, but it's never ascribed to malice, what can be described by incompetence, right? Like, that's what this is to me. Like, this is just a startup that made a bunch of really big promises and didn't pull it off. That explains everything that is happening here, right? And I think frankly, like that was the NFT thing. Everybody got really excited about this huge thing that was happening, thought it was gonna be really cool.

• 11:08Nilay Patel?

  That was grifting, that I just.

• 11:09David Pierce?

  Some of it was grifting.

• 11:11Nilay Patel?

  Almost all of it. I just came from an event where they had an NFT wall and everyone was like, ew.

• 11:17David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  Now, a lot of people were not saying ew back then.

• 11:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because they were at the top of the pyramid.

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  I would, I would, yes, I would point out that the Verge staff almost universally was saying. Yes, oh, I agree. Ew. And then there was Richard Lawler, who was saying ew, but also in a way that suggested I told you so. Like, he was like, pre-I tell, I told you so.

• 11:37Alex Cranz?

  Before they even announced what NFT meant, Richard was like, mm-mm.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  I told you so.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  Those were the two reactions on our staff. Look, I, I, I'm, I'm much more inclined to believe this is some.

• 11:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Nilay Patel?

  Like hardware startup disaster. At 199, it's like hard to grift anyone.

• 11:55Alex Cranz?

  I mean, if you're, if you're broke ass and you were like, this is going to be my cool gadget.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:00Alex Cranz?

  At 199, like, like a lot, some people.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, if you, if you're like in the grifter game, you're, you're trying to make more money than that at a pop, you know? The thing that gets me is a lot of that conversation is related to just the reality of these products. There were teardowns of the Humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1 from I Fix It This Week. They're Android phones. That's what they are. And people took that to be a sign of the grift?

• 12:25Alex Cranz?

  That's not a sign.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  This thing is just running Android on a chipset that you can get, the Rabbit.

• 12:30Alex Cranz?

  But so is your TV, anyway.

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  Right, but the, in the Rabbit interface is really just an Android app. And you like smash those ideas together, like this thing is broken, doesn't quite work. And it's really just an Android phone. This is a grift. And I, I think it's actually quite important to pull those ideas apart. I agree. Because like you just said, Alex, almost everything is an Android phone.

• 12:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like your fridge probably is also an Android phone.

• 12:51Nilay Patel?

  Everything is a time bomb. Everything is just waiting to unleash Bixby upon you.

• 12:57Alex Cranz?

  Everything can run an APK if you try hard enough.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  That's actually, whatever that, that's a law. Alex's law.

• 13:03Alex Cranz?

  That's Alex's law.

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  You can horsepower an APK in almost anything these days. It would be shocking to me if this thing wasn't running Android. Or some commodity smartphone hardware, like, that's what's cheap. At a, at a buck 99, again, like, maybe an easier thing for them to have done would have been to buy a bunch of like used Galaxy A-series phones and put their app on it. Because then at least they would have told the time reliably.

• 13:30Alex Cranz?

  Well.

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's, it's weird, like, the thing that I can't quite wrap my head around is like, if you're gonna build on top of the existing thing, which almost everybody does, why didn't you get the easy parts for free?

• 13:43Nilay Patel?

  Like, why didn't you get, I know what time it is, or I can do a GPS lookup to pull the weather. That stuff is all in the operating system. Like, not being able to tell the time is actually like, I can't quite wrap my head around, even if you install like, the most open source version of AOSP, Android Open Source Project, on the most open dev hardware that exists. It's not like clock doesn't come for the ride.

• 14:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  And that's the part I don't get. It's like, all the energy got focused on the hard part, and they didn't take the free stuff for free.

• 14:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was like, they're doing too much. Like, nobody was there just going, no, y'all were doing too much. Let's, let's just, let's scale it back. We got this really kick ass hardware. Because, like, in your, in your piece, you talked about it, that the hardware is, is, is nice. It's, it's cool. I tried one this week. It was really cool to handle. I expected the buttons to be more, I expected everything to be softer.

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Alex Cranz?

  Like, the soft touch plastic, but it wasn't. That was a bummer. I forgot where I was going.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  My new startup is 100% buying used Galaxy A series phones, installing ChatGPT on them, and being like, this is the future.

• 14:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Nilay Patel?

  Which is more or less the piece Alison wrote this week.

• 14:50Alex Cranz?

  Right, right.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  Um, but that's the part, David, did they talk to you about this? Has Jesse said anything about it? I know they put out one statement in response to people leaking their APK, saying like, this isn't going to work on your Android phone, calls our cloud services, our open sourced version of Android is heavily customized, all the stuff you would say. But there's just a part where like, not getting the basics for free is just really weird to me.

• 15:14David Pierce?

  There's a real fake it till you make it thing happening with this, that I think is what a lot of people on the internet are responding to, right? Like, would that, that quote unquote, source code leak, basically showed that rather than use some fancy AI thing, Rabbit is actually just using this software called Playwright, which is a very well-known automation software. It's like, if you have a website that you want tested out to see what works and what doesn't, and if all the links go to the right place, and so on and so forth. That's just like a thing a business can run. I think it's owned by Microsoft. Uh, this is well-known technology. It is like, not hard to teach a computer to use a website, right? And, and the idea that that's all Rabbit is doing really rubbed

• 15:54David Pierce?

  some people the wrong way. Uh, but I think in general, these companies feel like they have to do the whole thing and really reinvent the wheel, or else you're just a smartphone. And, and we're in this moment now where I think the next phase of this will be starting to push the two things back towards each other a little bit more. We're going to get smartphones that do more sort of one-touch AI stuff. We're going to get devices that are more connected to your phone. But if I'm Rabbit or Humane, you rewind even a couple of years and what they're all saying is we have to do our own thing, build our own platform, own the whole experience ourselves because that's the only way for us to be successful. And I think if you start with

• 16:35David Pierce?

  that assumption, that is how you run into, holy god, this is so much harder to do all of this than we thought. And it's how you end up with devices like these. Like, I think you can't take the Android clock because people will look at it and be like, that's the Android clock. Why don't I just use my phone?

• 16:50Nilay Patel?

  You could just not show the clock to people.

• 16:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. You came to see your wife?

• 16:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm not talking about the old HTC flippy clock widget, although if they brought that back, that would be sick.

• 16:59Alex Cranz?

  That would be sick.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that thing was iconic.

• 17:03Alex Cranz?

  So good.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  What is the most iconic Android widget of all time? It's the HTC flippy clock. You cannot convince me otherwise.

• 17:08Alex Cranz?

  I would agree.

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  Or the circle clock from the T-Mobile G1.

• 17:11Alex Cranz?

  No, no, it's the flippy clock.

• 17:12Nilay Patel?

  The flippy clock?

• 17:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Alex Cranz?

  When I think Android, I think of that with like the background and everything they have.

• 17:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that weird cartoony vibe.

• 17:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:20Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful.

• 17:20Nilay Patel?

  Let's just talk about all the Android phones now and how you can start a startup shipping all the Android phones. But honestly, I think part of that is related, right? You're two years ago, you're starting this thing. You could say, all right, we're going to ship an AI app for people's phones. And then you run right into, and then Apple and Google won't let us because that threatens their business.

• 17:39David Pierce?

  Right. And we're now in literal, direct, exact, precise competition with those companies and the other best funded companies on planet Earth.

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  Right. But now you can't, like, all the antitrust stuff that has happened, alternative app stores, all this stuff, now you can. Like, I kind of fully expect to see a wave of startups that are like Rabbit but an app.

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  Right? Without all the hardware noise to say like, you can just run this on iPhone now because Apple can't stop me, or at least in the EU. I don't, you know, I don't know what's going to happen with Google in that particular way, but at least in the EU, Apple now has to allow these alternative app stores, all this stuff. And that is interesting to me. I don't know if it'll work. I don't know if Apple's just going to Sherlock everybody at WWC this year. But it feels like the Rabbit and the Humane caught a moment and a vibe when they were, no one could build an app like this on the app. Like, Apple just wouldn't let you ship that app. I'm confident.

• 18:33Nilay Patel?

  Especially because they can't probably buy stuff and Apple wouldn't get a cut of that money. Like, there's a million reasons why Apple wouldn't let you ship that app.

• 18:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 18:40Alex Cranz?

  Well, also, it would have been a crappy app. Like...

• 18:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it wouldn't have worked.

• 18:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right? Like, the talent and what we really saw, the real success of the R1, the reason it's a 3 and not a 1 or a 2 is because the hardware is nice.

• 18:56Nilay Patel?

  Because the hardware is...

• 18:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, they did this core and the user interface is pretty. It's not always pleasant. Yeah.

• 19:04David Pierce?

  It's fine.

• 19:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, right. Like, there was some genuinely good stuff there. And one had nothing to do with Rabbit. Frankly, it seems primarily a teenage engineering did the good parts. And, yeah, like, they just never would have made it as an app.

• 19:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Alex Cranz?

  And their whole thing was, we want to be the next Apple, which is enormously ambitious on an easy day. And their climate is like, godly ambitious.

• 19:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the fact that DoorDash just doesn't work on this thing, and Uber just doesn't work, and Spotify is broken, is like... Yeah, you could say it should just be an app, but those apps tend to work on phones.

• 19:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:48Nilay Patel?

  You can get food from DoorDash on phones.

• 19:52David Pierce?

  Pretty successfully.

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  100% of the time, DoorDash is like, "Your order is completed." The fact that they shipped it broken with those integrations... Jesse, I think he tweeted, he's like, "My hope for this trying to reviews is a 6." He actually tweeted the number that he was hoping for. And it's like, wow.

• 20:10Alex Cranz?

  Did you use your product before you shipped it?

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, not giving yourself the 7 is incredible, right? You're like, "World of no 7s, I'm not an 8, I'm a 6."

• 20:19David Pierce?

  It's tough.

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  That's rough.

• 20:21David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, I think about it, like, Phil Libin, who used to be the CEO of Evernote, and then was an investor and now running Mm-hmm, which is that cool, like, video chat app. He said to me once, a couple of years ago, and I may have said this on the show before, but I think about it all the time. He said, "When I look at a product, my question is always, is this primitive or is this stupid?" Because you can't fix stupid. But primitive usually gets better, right? He was like, if you, and he was like, the first iPhone, like, perfect primitive. The thing barely worked, but the minute you looked at it, you were like, oh, there is, there is something inside of this. But if he was like, if I don't have that reaction to this, if there is no good version of this, it's just stupid.

• 21:04David Pierce?

  And I think where I've come to is like, I think Rabbit might be stupid in a way that I think Humane is just kind of primitive.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 21:13David Pierce?

  And I'm happy to have this argument with you, and I would love to have this argument with you. I am still convinced that the idea of like a wearable on-body device that is easier to access than your phone is something. I don't know how big that something is gonna be. I would bet money it doesn't have a laser projector involved at all. But like, there is, there is some teeny tiny nugget of AI wearable that I still find compelling. A handheld device that isn't my phone, that does everything my phone tries to do, but worse? I don't see it. And, and there, maybe there is some technological AI miracle coming that makes these like large action model agents work? And if so, I look forward to being proven wrong on this one.

• 21:56David Pierce?

  But like, I don't see the runway for the R1 from what it is now to something that is like genuinely interesting and different from my phone, so that I will carry both of them. I just don't see it.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  Let me pull apart one idea in there, and then I can disagree with you about the rest.

• 22:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  You mentioned large action models, which we have not really talked about in the context of the R1. But when you think about these products and how their companies are talking about them, Humane, a bunch of stargazy, navel-gazy phones are ruining your life.

• 22:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:30Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, just stuff, just whatever, whatever that vibe is from Humane. Big thinks, thought leader stuff.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  Rabbit is like, we made a large action model that will use computers for you on your behalf if you give us your login information, which is a very like, small idea in practicality. It's a huge idea in the world, right? It's the idea of you will have an agent, but the actual idea is really quite small, which is why they could fake it with Playwright, which is just like user testing software, right? They're running a bot farm. They got 100 sausages waving at 100 Android phones somewhere, just using computers for you.

• 23:10David Pierce?

  I mean, like, that is so much closer to true than it should be. Like, I just, like, that's a joke, but you're not all that far from describing what Rabbit is actually doing here.

• 23:20Nilay Patel?

  Right, but I'm saying, on the, on the, on the split, right? If your, if your idea is, um, is it primitive or stupid? The idea that, okay, we're gonna automate the use of a bunch of websites, and we're starting with like, a commercially existing tool that already automates websites for you, and we're gonna try to like, fake it there until this large action model idea is ready, and then we're just like, gonna do a bunch of computer vision and horsepower our way through the web. Sure, that's the point, right? But they're nowhere on that journey, except to have used some commercially available, like, user testing software.

• 23:55David Pierce?

  Poorly, but I would add, like, they attempted to use it, but they didn't do it. And that, that's where I land, right? It's not, there, there's one thing where it's like, okay, we, we tried to do something and didn't quite do it. And then there's another one that's, we promised you we were gonna do it and just didn't. And like, that's, that's pretty hard to come back from.

• 24:12Nilay Patel?

  And then, but I'm saying, then what Humane is selling is like, you do not need a phone. Your phone's killing you, and we know it, because we invented it, which is an amazing thing. Beautiful. Um, that's, you wanna be there, like, those cigarettes were ruining you. I know this because I am Dr. Tobacco.

• 24:29Nilay Patel?

  Please try this jewel, which is the story of jewel, right? Um, 100% by the way, the story of jewel is they hired a bunch of tobacco scientists. Um, but humane is like, we're, we got you hooked and now we're going to break it by selling you our PIN. That promise is like even more nascent, right? Like the technology doesn't work, but it also might be the wrong promise. That's like what I'm hammering on here, right? Like the idea of the software agent will go use software on your behalf. Seems more achievable than we're going to fully replace your phone.

• 25:01David Pierce?

  Oh, I think that's right. I, I think I have, uh, in the course of several weeks of talking to people kind of in and around humane and reviewing this device, I think even humane is slowly starting to give up on that vision.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 25:16David Pierce?

  I, I think if you gave them a time machine and let them go back 12 months ago, they would not start to tell the story about how your phone is killing you and we need to take away from your phone. Uh, I think they realize how deeply weird their entire like marketing strategy was for a long time. And even if you look at what they've done publicly, like they've tried to sort of chill a little bit, which I think is good. But again, I, I do agree, and this is, I think the most consistent piece of feedback we get every time we cover one of these devices is people saying, why would I use this over my phone? And the answer is you wouldn't, and you're not going to anytime soon. Uh, and that just is what it is, right? And so I think if, if we just assume that as like ground truth, and at this point I do, right?

• 26:00David Pierce?

  And I think that's why the humane price is so absurd. 6.99 plus a subscription for a phone number and a text messaging system, neither of which are attached to your actual phone number is like preposterous. But still like boil it down even further. And it's just like the thing that device is seems closer to being something to me than what the R1 is.

• 26:22Alex Cranz?

  I, I just, I think they're both stupid.

• 26:26David Pierce?

  That honestly might be true.

• 26:27Alex Cranz?

  Like, like I think, I don't think either one is primitive. I think they're both.

• 26:30Nilay Patel?

  I think David is just trying to justify giving one a four and one a three.

• 26:33Alex Cranz?

  No, I get, I totally understand the three and the four. I was telling somebody at the office earlier today, cause I edited that review and I looked at that three and I was like, hmm, well, you know, the humane PIN like promised a bunch of stuff and badly delivered.

• 26:48Alex Cranz?

  Rabbit promised a bunch of stuff. It didn't deliver at all.

• 26:51Nilay Patel?

  Didn't do any of it.

• 26:52Alex Cranz?

  But it didn't catch on fire or physically harm David.

• 26:56David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 26:57Nilay Patel?

  I feel like we gotta recount.

• 27:00David Pierce?

  No, I think, I think you could make a fair argument that they both should have been threes. There's no version of the argument that they both should have been fours, which is why I gave it a three. Like I, there's no, I hemmed and hawed on the AI pin and this one was easier. And frankly, I think the simplest way to look at it is just price. And realistically, for what these things do, they're both too expensive. And I think what $200 means to somebody versus what $700 means to somebody, I don't know. If you're buying one of these things, you have disposable income anyway. Like, I don't know. I am perfectly happy for everyone to yell at me about the score. I feel very good about this score.

• 27:34Nilay Patel?

  I feel fine about this score. What I'm getting at is that the rabbit is like a toy, right? It's 199, you can have it, it's broken. I buy so much broken tech garbage all the time.

• 27:44Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 27:44David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 27:45Nilay Patel?

  But the idea of the humanity, you're gonna wear it, it's gonna be in your body. This is the part where I just like disagree with you, right?

• 27:50David Pierce?

  That's fine.

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, I think that will just be a watch.

• 27:53Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 27:54Nilay Patel?

  If it's gonna be anything else, it'll be the meta glasses. But like the little Star Trek communicator badge on my curve of wearable bullshit. It's like, boy, I better hope I'm wearing a shirt today.

• 28:08Alex Cranz?

  Star Trek exists in a world where there are no toilets.

• 28:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm also always wearing a shirt. I don't know why I picked that one. Like, I'm not like, I'm not doing Baywatch, you know?

• 28:18Alex Cranz?

  Slow run, be like, run.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  But it's just like that thing, like it is demanding in a particular way that you adjust your wardrobe around it. And I, there's just a part of me, it's like, that's the part that's destined to fail.

• 28:32David Pierce?

  Maybe.

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  Right, is it goes here.

• 28:34David Pierce?

  Maybe. I think the answer is it's gonna be lots of things. Like, I think, I think a watch is gonna work for lots of people. I think glasses will work for some people. They're not gonna work for me. As somebody who doesn't wear glasses or contacts, the idea of wearing a pair of glasses all day is just a non-starter for me. Like, I'm not gonna do it.

• 28:48Alex Cranz?

  All right, Mr. Fancy Pants with the nice eyeballs.

• 28:52David Pierce?

  Sorry, sorry, y'all.

• 28:53Nilay Patel?

  The next time I see you, I'm shining my iPhone flashlight.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if that's gonna hurt you or anything.

• 28:59Alex Cranz?

  It doesn't feel good.

• 29:02David Pierce?

  I appreciate that. But no, I think the answer can be lots of things, right? And I think the like, the breast pin communicator thing is also kind of weird. My honest bet is that the first thing is gonna be headphones. Like, I really sincerely believe that we're due for like, a giant explosion of AI stuff into your headphones, and it's gonna solve a lot of problems. And I think we're gonna get to that faster.

• 29:25Alex Cranz?

  Apple is taking notes as you say that.

• 29:27David Pierce?

  I said this on Tuesday's show, but my absolutely baseless, unreported conspiracy theory is that the AirPods Max are going to be AI products, and that's why it's been so long since they've been updated.

• 29:36Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no, it's gonna be the Pros.

• 29:38David Pierce?

  No, the Maxes are big. They can have a big battery.

• 29:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but I like, I don't know. I remember the first time I put in AirPod Pros, and I like, just asked my phone to do something through the headphones, and I was like, oh, this is magic. And like, if you can do that like, consistently and regularly. But I think also, to the other, if you pull that out further, what we were all really seeking is a voice assistant.

• 30:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, AI is the buzzword, but actually, we're just all revisiting the voice assistant.

• 30:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Alex Cranz?

  And the R1 does it horribly, like, sassy. The R1 is so sassy. Every time I asked it something, it was like, hold on, let me think about it. And I'm like, well, I paid for you. I mean, I didn't, Parker did, but still.

• 30:25Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 30:25Alex Cranz?

  Chop, chop.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  I paid. Nightmare restaurant customer.

• 30:29Alex Cranz?

  I am absolutely.

• 30:30David Pierce?

  I paid for this. One of my favorites is when you ask it to do something it can't do. Normally, it'll say like, I'm unable to do that. And then every once in a while, it will just say, I cannot set a timer.

• 30:41Alex Cranz?

  It's like, alright.

• 30:42David Pierce?

  Excuse me.

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  Look, I like the idea that Apple's gonna subsume this entire market. WWC is coming up. We've heard now, drumbeat of AI, AI, AI. I've heard someone actually say to me, Tim Cook is putting a lot of pressure on himself to deliver AI at this WWC. It's a real sentence I heard from someone, who knows.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  You've got to make Siri good.

• 31:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  Like, let's not kid ourselves.

• 31:07Alex Cranz?

  And I think that's going to be hard because the problem is, yes, large language models are very good at making these assistants loquacious, but they don't make them smart.

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Alex Cranz?

  Like, like, there's still the core problem of we don't know how to regularly interact with a voice assistant in like a comfortable and normal way. Because you're still going to be like, hey, can you say it? And you do the, you know, you do the voice, your Siri voice. What's your Siri voice, Neelai?

• 31:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I don't, I don't.

• 31:33Alex Cranz?

  You don't have one?

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  I've, I've remapped the action button on my phone to ChatGPT.

• 31:37Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 31:37Nilay Patel?

  Um, which is equally frustrating.

• 31:39Alex Cranz?

  But do you, do you do like a special voice, like an intonation to get it to respond to you properly?

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  No, I, uh, we do it to the Google Assistant in our house.

• 31:48Alex Cranz?

  What's, what's your Google Assistant voice?

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  Loud.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  Just loud.

• 31:53Alex Cranz?

  Just shouting across the house.

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm not going to do it because they're going to let off everyone's.

• 32:00Alex Cranz?

  David, what's yours?

• 32:02David Pierce?

  Mine's very sort of monotone and, and careful.

• 32:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're talking to the robot like a robot.

• 32:09David Pierce?

  Or mine is just like, Siri, please remind me tomorrow at 9 a.m. to take out the trash before the trash arrives. And then it says, and then it always is like, got it. Added reminder. And I say, thanks. And it goes, I can't help you with that.

• 32:26David Pierce?

  Cool.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 32:26David Pierce?

  I just want to put a point on the Siri thing because I've spent a lot of time getting like emails and posts from people being like, Apple's going to do this. Do you all know how long Apple has spent trying to make Siri good? And do you know how bad Siri is?

• 32:39Alex Cranz?

  It's real bad.

• 32:39David Pierce?

  And, and not only would Apple have to take the state of the art in AI and put it inside of Siri, it would have to make the state of the art in AI much, much, much, much better in order to do the things that we are asking for. Like, there, there is no extant proof in the universe right now that it is possible to build the kind of high quality assistant we're looking for. Like, I, Siri will get better when they plug in a large language model. That just seems to be true. It will, it won't be good just because Apple does that.

• 33:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  The thing that I've been. Knocking her out of my head. As I read these reviews of these devices, I think about what's coming at this next set of developer conferences. Google I O is happening around the corner. Confident we're going to see a bunch of AI stuff from Google at Google I O, right? Yeah. Microsoft Build is coming out. It's all, we're going to see another round of AI stuff. There's a rumor out in the world that we're going to see GPT-5 soon. Who knows? We're going to see another version of this. What all of them have to show us is whether these things are getting intelligent. Because right now, all they've shown us is they can fire out a bunch of language.

• 33:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Loquacious, not intelligent.

• 33:51Nilay Patel?

  And like, I know people who talk a lot.

• 33:53Alex Cranz?

  It's like, I'm really good at being loquacious and not intelligent.

• 33:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think that turn remain, it just, we'll see. Well, it's just not there yet.

• 34:03Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  And I, you know, you can, Sam Altman today was like, I'll spend as much money as it takes to build AGI and I'll be worth it. And it's like, dude, you, it's like, I can get on a horse and be like, fly and throw money at the horse. Like, there's no proof that this thing can do that thing. Right. Like, you haven't gotten there yet, and you haven't even, like, demonstrated that you're on the right.

• 34:24Alex Cranz?

  I'm sorry, I'm still seeing you riding a horse throwing money at its head.

• 34:28Nilay Patel?

  Fly! Fly, goddamn you! I hate horses. I had a girlfriend in high school with a horse, and I realized I was very allergic to the horse.

• 34:41David Pierce?

  Didn't you ride into your wedding on a horse?

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  I did.

• 34:45David Pierce?

  Did you, did you just sort of make it ran money off of the horse while you rode into the wedding?

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  I was just screaming, "Fly, goddamn it!" If you're a horse person, you're listening to the Bridge Cast, first of all, how, what Venn diagram led you to us? Please let us know. You can email us at [email protected].

• 35:03David Pierce?

  But also, we love you.

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  But also, yeah, I'm sorry that personally, it's the horse thing for me is a real problem. Anyway, we gotta take a break. That's a good, as good a place to end it as any. We'll be right back with the money round. We'll be right back.

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• 36:53Nilay Patel?

  We're back with the money round.

• 36:57Nilay Patel?

  When I was in college, there was a parking garage by my house. And it had a big sign that said Cash Lane. And my friends and I, we were like, we gotta make that cool somehow. We're in the cash lane. Like, if you can figure it out, let me know. I don't know if that parking garage is still there, but it might have been torn down. It was 20 years ago.

• 37:16David Pierce?

  Also, if you would like to generate an AI image of Neelai in the cash lane and send it my way, I would very much appreciate that.

• 37:22Alex Cranz?

  Please do it.

• 37:23Nilay Patel?

  And if you run a bank and you'd like to sponsor this, the Cash Lane Round.

• 37:29Nilay Patel?

  That's cool. I feel like the banks aren't really promoting the idea of cash anymore.

• 37:34Alex Cranz?

  They're not fans.

• 37:36Nilay Patel?

  They don't use cash. If you run Cash App and you are Jack Dorsey, you should just come on the show. We have a number of questions for you, sir.

• 37:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, money round. There's kind of a lot of money floating around. Let's stay on the AI for one second. A bunch of sort of like search AI money moving. The one, Google's antitrust trial, which we have not talked a lot about because it has been very shrouded in secrecy. We have talked about that. Google has done a good job sort of shrouding its trial in secrecy. It is now barreling towards closing arguments in the search antitrust trial.

• 38:13Alex Cranz?

  Like today, right?

• 38:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so we're covering that and a bunch of documents have been released because various news organizations have basically been like filing motions with the court being like, this is crazy. You've got to release the evidence in this case. So the New York Times and others have been filing motions to get evidence unsealed in this case. A bunch of other motions gone through, a bunch of documents sort of flooding out here at the end before closing arguments. The thing that I think is most important, we can talk about some other stuff, is that we now have the number for how much Google has paid Apple to be the default search placement on the iPhone. It is $20 billion in 2022.

• 38:51Alex Cranz?

  I'll be the default search engine on the iPhone.

• 38:54Nilay Patel?

  Which is crazy.

• 38:56Alex Cranz?

  So much money.

• 38:57Nilay Patel?

  That is a crazy amount of money.

• 38:58Alex Cranz?

  Like so much money. Like more money than either of the two companies we just talked about in the first round, like have. Or will ever make, probably.

• 39:09Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, the argument here is if you're running a search engine, if you have AI ideas, you just need a lot of data. And Google has gets a lot of data from iPhone searchers who are clicking on things or picking results. That helps them pick better results, obviously helps them serve a lot of ads, it's worth a lot of money. Do we think that Google is making money on the $20 billion it pays Apple?

• 39:34David Pierce?

  Yes, it's a rev share. This is the thing that a lot of people miss about all of this is this is not just like a flat fee that Google pays to Apple. I don't know the exact details of it, but. From a lot of what we got in the trial, Google is sharing revenue with iPhone using people with Apple. So if I'm searching on my iPhone, Apple is getting a percentage of that revenue from me every time I use Google. Google wouldn't do this if it wasn't profitable at this point. Google's market share is so large and so substantial. And a big part of the case that Google is making is Apple saying,

• 40:14David Pierce?

  we picked it because it is the best search engine and not because there is some financial agreement. Separately, also, there is a very lucrative financial agreement. But this is a giant victory for both Apple and Google. And I think the idea that's out there that Apple kind of has Google over a barrel is just not true.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  So two things there. One, if it's a rev share, that means Apple's making a bunch of money on Google's ad tracking, which seems challenging for Apple to defend.

• 40:49David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. At the same time that Apple is running around talking about how insecure Android is for precisely that same reason. Yeah.

• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  So Apple's just collecting a bunch of money on the revenue Google makes through Google Search, which is entirely advertising based. Weird, just weird, fully, fully weird to consider. Second, it is beneficial for Google to keep any competitors away. I mean, that's the heart of this trial, right? Is if Apple picked Bing, whatever, there would instantly be another search engine at scale. And Google cannot afford that. So, yeah, sure, it's making a deal that works for everybody and is probably making some money. But I suspect even if it was losing some money, it would be worth it to keep another search engine from emerging.

• 41:35David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. Satya Nadella, remember, last, whatever that was, last fall, it feels like ancient history now, got on the stand and said he would have done it for free just to get the queries coming from iPhone users because better queries would have meant better results, would have meant better ad placements, would have meant more expensive ads, would have meant more queries and like on and on and on and on it goes. And basically offered this whole thing.

• 42:00David Pierce?

  You can, you can keep all the money, Apple. We just want the searches. And Apple said no. And that was a total nonstarter for them. And you're totally right. Like, obviously, it's a huge victory for Google to get this. And it's why, at least according to the testimony, we've heard Apple's share of that revenue has gone up over time. But still, like, Google, Google is not in the habit of losing $20 billion to maintain its place as the dominant search engine that everybody uses.

• 42:31David Pierce?

  That's just, it just hasn't had to make that choice yet. And I don't think this is that choice.

• 42:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Google just likes losing money in other weird ways.

• 42:37David Pierce?

  Right. Google likes to throw money at, at like, roller skating executives trying to build self-driving cars.

• 42:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:43David Pierce?

  Not search ads.

• 42:46Alex Cranz?

  I was really surprised, though, by the part where they said that Apple's, like, or the 2020 payments that Google paid was 17.5% of Apple's operating income. That seems like an awful lot.

• 42:58David Pierce?

  It's nuts.

• 42:59Alex Cranz?

  Am I, like, misunderstanding the numbers there? Do I not understand business?

• 43:04David Pierce?

  I mean, that essentially means a, a, and a fifth of Apple's profit is coming from this deal. Because to Apple, it's pure profit. And Apple would tell you it's not that all the money that they put into making the iPhone terrific is what makes that come from. But that's like, a bunch of mealy-mouthed nonsense. It's, it is pure profit to Apple and it accounts for a huge amount of the money that that company makes.

• 43:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and that's just wild.

• 43:27David Pierce?

  It's so much money.

• 43:28Alex Cranz?

  Like, that Apple is that dependent on Google?

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if it's dependency.

• 43:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think that's where I'm like, I'm like, do I understand business correctly? Because...

• 43:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, it is, in that if it went away, it would be a dependency. And maybe this trial will lead to some outcome in which it changes and the money changes in different ways. But I think what it actually speaks to is the phone market slowing down. Apple itself is looking for whatever next thing will exist.

• 43:59Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 44:00Nilay Patel?

  They just spent $10 billion on the car and shut it down. They spent half of that Google money trying to build the car.

• 44:07Alex Cranz?

  One year of Google money.

• 44:09Nilay Patel?

  Like, literally the equivalent of Apple getting on a horse and screaming "fly."

• 44:14Nilay Patel?

  It just didn't work.

• 44:15Alex Cranz?

  Didn't work.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  You can't get in a midsize crossover and be like, "Don't have a steering wheel." Like, you can't do it. What Apple is addicted to is monetizing every interaction you have on the phone.

• 44:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:25Nilay Patel?

  Right, and this is, has just led the company into more and more perilous waters. Because that means a bunch of people are now mad at Apple all the time, including a bunch of European regulators, including our Department of Justice, whatever it is. But the fact that Apple makes as much money as it does when people merely search for things in the web browser.

• 44:47Alex Cranz?

  It's insane.

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  It's brutal.

• 44:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that was the, like, really surprising part. You're just, anytime you type in, you're helping Apple make a shit-ton of money.

• 44:57Nilay Patel?

  Right, and I, you know, maybe that's fine. Apple's free to run its business how it wants. But you can see that the, the chain reaction of Apple saying, "It's our phone, and every single thing you do on our phone should generate revenue for us," as the backstop to the upgrade cycles are slowing, the phone market overall is contracting, da-da-da-da, all that stuff. They hedged it by saying, "Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna, everything on your phone is not being monetized. We're gonna be aggressive with app developers. We're gonna have this deal with Google." Everything. "We're gonna shut down ads with app-tracking transparency," which is maybe a good thing, "but then we're gonna move the entire market of app-install ads to the App Store, and the App Store gets really, it's getting really weird."

• 45:39Nilay Patel?

  All of those things are just them monetizing the software on the phone, or the experiences you have on the phone.

• 45:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  I think this trial has, like, shown us, this is real. You know, like, it's, this is a real pressure Apple feels, and they're collecting a bunch of money from Google for the thing most people do on the phone most of the time, which is just, like, search for things in the web browser. And then on the flip side, more documents from the trial reveal Microsoft is, like, terrified of this, and they're looking at Google's investments in AI and what they can accomplish there. They freak out, and that's why they go invest in OpenAI.

• 46:13Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  Which you just see like Google's at the center of a lot of things happening in tech right now because they're just throwing money around. Google did have a good quarter this last quarter, like they did well. Turns out people are still using Google Search. But you can see the threat it's under and you can see Google turning the revenue lever on Google Search to have it make money instead of be good.

• 46:36Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  More documents from the trial, we should, Ed Zitron wrote this up. The title was "The Man Who Killed Google Search." And basically the thesis of that story, which we'll link to, is the revenue teams at Google came to search and said, "We need to make more revenue on search." The search team was like, "No, search is pure," and the search team lost.

• 46:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And we've all felt it.

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  We've all felt it.

• 46:59Alex Cranz?

  Like, very keenly.

• 47:00David Pierce?

  Well, I think one of the things that has come up a bunch in this trial that Ed also points out in his piece is that the question of what does good search look like is so mealy and hard to put your finger on that literally what you are like goaling your team against changes the way that you do business, right? So if you, if you're Google and you say, "Okay, the thing that we are going to measure is number of search queries. The main thing we are going to do is make search queries go up." Like Sundar Pichai always talks about this when he was running Chrome, right? That the, the goal was the fastest web browser. And they, they built a bunch of things around that, but that was the goal. And so if you run towards the fastest web browser, you build a certain kind of web browser.

• 47:42David Pierce?

  If you run towards do the most searches, you're actually not incentivized to make the search engine great because it means people will actually search less because they found what they needed faster. But in a certain way, you also say, "Okay, if we get people to do more searches, it must mean people like Google because they're doing more searches." And both of those things are true and yet they're completely mutually exclusive. And I think this is what, in a lot of ways, seems to have happened to Google is they got to the point where they were like, "Okay, we make money when people do searches. We need people to do more searches." And so they started spending money on deals like with Apple and Mozilla and others. They started changing the way that the pages work and the results were delivered in order to get people to do more searches.

• 48:25David Pierce?

  And that just sends you down a really ugly road. You make people do more searches, but it, actually you don't care about the experience as long as people are doing more searches. And that's just that that's what the thing that I think feels bad to people.

• 48:38Alex Cranz?

  It's the, what's Corey Dr. O. call it, enshitification? I hate that word, but it's a really good word.

• 48:43David Pierce?

  I wish he'd come up with a better term. It's a, it's a very useful, like, construct, but it's an awful word.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  I love it.

• 48:51David Pierce?

  Have you ever tried to type it? I can't, I have never once typed it successfully on the first try.

• 48:55Nilay Patel?

  No, but by the time I get to around being like, I should type this, like 15 people have said it or typed it before I do.

• 49:01Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 49:02Nilay Patel?

  Because it's the default response to anything getting worse, whether it counts or not. Because specifically what Corey means is that most web platforms products start by delivering a surplus of value to you because they're all losing money at the beginning. Then they take away that value from their advertisers, right? They squeeze advertisers for dollars. Then that lever is fully pulled and then they look at you and they turn the knob away from you, right? And like, that's just the cycle of the subsidized web platform.

• 49:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and that's what's Google's stuff.

• 49:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and you can, you can just see it with Google search. Like first they squeeze the advertisers and then that is not great. So now they're like, now it's you. Um, you know, the Google product recommendations, uh, the house fresh people.

• 49:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're starting to get more expensive. So you search for a product on Google and they're starting to recommend you slightly more expensive products.

• 49:54Alex Cranz?

  That part like shocked me because they did a really good bar graph there. I was just really impressed with the bar graph and everything was like red and, and orange and showing it was really expensive. And then house fresh was at the very bottom, bright green, smallest bar.

• 50:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Alex Cranz?

  We're always the cheapest and I was like, respect it.

• 50:11Nilay Patel?

  It turns out a fan blowing air through a filter is not necessarily an expensive product.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  We'll link to all of this stuff, but the point of this is like Google's dominance of the ecosystem actually extends in every direction, right? It's pushing Microsoft to invest in OpenAI. One of the documents here is Satya Nadella forwarding an email from Kevin Scott, the head of AI, explaining that Google's getting better at stuff to the CFO of Microsoft. I mean, like, this is why I want to invest in OpenAI. Like, this is the reason. Here's, here's my, here's my, as the CEO justification to you as the CFO of spending $13 billion over the next few years to compete with Google because we see the opening and we're behind. And then on the other side, you see. Apple, just again, a huge percentage of their incoming revenue.

• 51:02Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 51:03Nilay Patel?

  Which is pure profit, basically, because they're not doing anything.

• 51:08Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's a danger zone for them. If this trial ends in some different thing happening, like, Apple starts to go off course.

• 51:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  Which is crazy, to think about.

• 51:16Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think the thing that strikes me there is, like, we've always talked, everybody talks a lot about how clever Apple is and how good it is at making money, and, and how good its products are, and how its products have really driven it to this place where it's really good at making money. Does this kind of, like, prove that wrong? The fact that they were making so much money off essentially doing nothing?

• 51:39Nilay Patel?

  I, it's like, hard to begrudge Apple for being like...

• 51:42Alex Cranz?

  Free money's free money, like,

• 51:43Nilay Patel?

  You know?

• 51:43Alex Cranz?

  Free money's nice.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  But like, it just feels to me like, no one eats for free in Tim Cook's house.

• 51:49David Pierce?

  It does seem a little bit like the vibe of Apple has shifted from like, a bunch of geniuses around those blonde wood tables designing stuff, to like, a handful of unbelievably good negotiators.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:03David Pierce?

  Winning deals. And like, that is the sort of mental picture that I have of Apple now, is just like, Eddie Q and Craig Federighi just like, rolling into rooms, being like, "What's up, losers? I win."

• 52:17Alex Cranz?

  On a segue.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would point out that this is the other antitrust trial.

• 52:22Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 52:22Nilay Patel?

  Right? That specific thing. How much power does Apple have? That's the DOJ case against Apple. We'll see. I don't know how that one's gonna go, but that thing, the vibe you are describing, Eddie Q shows up to Hollywood, passes out in your boardroom, and you still have to give him a deal? Like, there's reporting that happened, I'm not just making that up. I don't know if that's true or not, but there's reporting that that's happened before. And you still have to make the deal? That's just Apple's power being expressed. Okay, so that's Apple, that's the money stuff.

• 52:49Alex Cranz?

  That's the money stuff.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  That's the Apple, Google, Microsoft money stuff. Other money stuff.

• 52:52Alex Cranz?

  Less fun.

• 52:53Nilay Patel?

  Less exciting. Peloton, which Vee just wrote a big profile of, which we're very appreciative now. She's like, "What's up with Peloton?" The answer is, the CEO is quitting, and they're laying off more, hundreds more people.

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  Which is weird. So the CEO Barry McCarthy joined Peloton, his whole thing was that he was like, a Netflix guy.

• 53:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  And Peloton's a subscription service, so he's gonna do a good job at the subscription service. He did not.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  Do that.

• 53:25Alex Cranz?

  Nope.

• 53:25Nilay Patel?

  He is laying off 15% of the staff, which is about 400 people around the world. That's the fifth round of layoffs.

• 53:32Alex Cranz?

  Well, he's leaving.

• 53:32Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and by the way, last quarter, he said on the earnings call, uh, we're done with layoffs and the ship is turning. He was wrong.

• 53:41Alex Cranz?

  Very wrong, extremely wrong.

• 53:44Nilay Patel?

  And then he's, he's leaving. Um, he took over from the founder who was a little more chaotic. He was supposed to be the adult and now.

• 53:53Alex Cranz?

  It's two board members are now in charge, which is like, that's never a good sign when it's like, yeah, two board members are going to be in charge until we find a new CEO.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:02Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, that's rough.

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's you just got clipped.

• 54:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yikes.

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  Um, so we'll see what happens with Peloton. It's obviously very sticky. People love it. The instructors are famous. You should go read V's piece. It kind of lays out what's happening here. We'll re-link it to us from a few weeks ago. Again, she saw this future coming. By the way, Baron McCarthy has never responded to requests to be on Decoder, and I suspect now he never will.

• 54:26David Pierce?

  I know why. I will say just two thoughts on that. One, I think, reading the comments of that Peloton story was really interesting because the number of people who drew a direct line from the existence of Apple Fitness Plus to the demise of Peloton is really fascinating. I have no data on how successful Apple Fitness Plus is, but just purely anecdotally speaking, like in my life and the people I know, it's gone very well. And I, and I.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  Fitness Plus?

• 54:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like, it's out there. It's like a thing people know about. It's not that expensive. It's on your device. People who are like buying Apple Watches are prone to like that kind of thing anyway. It gives you the classes. It just seems like Peloton maybe thought it had a moat that it didn't, I think.

• 55:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:10David Pierce?

  And add that to the, they got very excited because everybody bought one during the pandemic and they said, oh, maybe this will be our demand forever, uh, which was just an insane thing to decide at that particular moment in time. But it's just interesting that I think the question about Peloton has always been, how do you take a thing that is by all accounts very good and people really like and botch it so spectacularly? Uh, and I think maybe I have underrated the extent to which it has been kind of eaten alive by some of the other products out there.

• 55:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I think connected fitness is a thing. V has written about it.

• 55:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Nilay Patel?

  People want these products. Peloton is a gold standard brand, though, right?

• 55:49David Pierce?

  It is. People love Peloton.

• 55:52Alex Cranz?

  I feel like the people who are using Apple Fitness are not necessarily the same people who use Peloton. Like, the people who use Apple Fitness are like me, where every three months, I'm like, "This is the time I'm gonna start working out all the time and become a total gym rat in my house." That's who's using Apple Fitness, right? It's people who are like, "This is easy, I can just hop into this." Peloton is like, "I'm going to spend thousands of dollars on this equipment, I'm going to have it in my home, and I'm gonna use it."

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  And pay a subscription fee.

• 56:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and pay a subscription fee. I think those are very, kind of, different audiences.

• 56:22David Pierce?

  That could be. Peloton is also stupidly expensive and has remained stupidly expensive for way too long.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like $45 a month for our subscription.

• 56:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's ridiculous.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  I could pay for 10 HBO Maxes for that.

• 56:34David Pierce?

  And I will.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  It's not even true. At this point, it's like 1.5 HBO Maxes. Speaking of boards that should take a hard look at the CEO...

• 56:43Alex Cranz?

  I already know who you're talking about.

• 56:46Nilay Patel?

  Elon has gone, quote, "Absolutely hardcore" with Tesla layoffs. He fired the entire Supercharger team, including the people who are in charge of refurbishing and installing new Superchargers, which seems very bad, because everyone just signed up to use their connector.

• 57:02Alex Cranz?

  Well, you heard the rumor...

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  The NACS connector.

• 57:04Alex Cranz?

  For why he did this.

• 57:05Nilay Patel?

  Why did he do this?

• 57:06Alex Cranz?

  So, the rumor is that the head of the Supercharger unit said, "No, I've, like, pushed back on the number of layoffs that she was asked to do." And he was like, "No, you're fired too. Everybody on your team, to prove a point to the rest of the team." That was some of the reporting we saw this week.

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  And the point is, no one can do a good as a job as someone?

• 57:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I, like, I think it was, it sounds like the, the piece was mainly about how he was really just pushing himself out there, and he's like, he's in charge and just reasserting his authority after being at Twitter all this time and coming back in and being like, "Do what I say. If you don't want to do what I say, you're gone, and so's your team."

• 57:47David Pierce?

  Well, that's a long-running Elon Musk trend of

• 57:51Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 57:51David Pierce?

  wanting to be the shiny face on everything and demanding to sort of disappear for a long time and then come back and exert total control and then disappear for a long time again. That that tracks with a lot of what we've heard about his management style over the years.

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:05David Pierce?

  Is there something I'm missing in the why Tesla would slow down its investment in superchargers? Because everything I've understood about this company, and I do not proclaim to be an expert in Tesla, would suggest that actually the supercharger network is one of the things it should be investing in the most.

• 58:22Nilay Patel?

  Right, especially because now there's expanding demand for it.

• 58:25David Pierce?

  Right.

• 58:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, if you get Rivian and Ford and all these other companies, like, using it, BMW, like, you can't name a company in North America that's not about to use NACS and sign a supercharger deal. If they're all coming online, the demand for supercharging is going to go up, and they're going to pay you money to use it.

• 58:43David Pierce?

  Does Elon Musk just, like, not want to be a gas station mogul? Like, is that, is that just where we're landing?

• 58:49Alex Cranz?

  I think that's why, why this, this theory that he did it to exert his dominance, essentially, is so popular, because, like, it doesn't make sense. But then you hear the rumor about how Elon always wants to be in charge, and it starts, that theory makes a little sense.

• 59:05Nilay Patel?

  Andy and I did an entire episode on Tesla on Decoder this week, so just go listen to that, we can move off it. But we didn't talk about superchargers enough on that episode, I think. And this, to me, is like, you take your greatest advantage and you're like, stop.

• 59:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that, it's, it's just bonkers.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:21Alex Cranz?

  It makes no logical sense.

• 59:23Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you ask people, like, yes, people love the fact that the cars get over their updates and have fart mode and all this stuff. What is the real reason people buy a Tesla when they're in the EV market? Charging network.

• 59:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  And, like, you just, literally, no one's working it. Like, if one breaks right now, it's unclear who will come and fix it.

• 59:40Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 59:41Nilay Patel?

  Weird.

• 59:41Alex Cranz?

  And they canceled a bunch as well, too, right?

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:44Alex Cranz?

  So.

• 59:44David Pierce?

  I saw a tweet this morning, I think, that was like, I wonder how many charging startups will trace their founding day to whatever it was, April 30th of 2024. And like, feels kind of, feels kind of right. Somebody, somebody has to show up and solve this problem in order to make electric vehicles work, and it is increasingly unclear who that's going to be.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  I think, I, so my, I saw that tweet too. And I was like, zero. Like, this is an incredibly enormously expensive business to be in. You gotta go buy real estate, you gotta buy a shitload of electricity, you gotta work with every, like, software problems, the stuff does break, just like, the capital expenditure to do this is so high. Like, there's a reason Electrify America is the big one. It's because Volkswagen had Dieselgate, and that was their make-good. That's why Electrify America exists.

• 1:00:33Alex Cranz?

  As far as like Shell and Exxon aren't just being like, yeah, all right, we'll do this. Like, just diversifying into it.

• 1:00:40David Pierce?

  Somewhere the CEO of Wawa is like drawing up a pitch right now.

• 1:00:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like Buc-E. Well, Buc-E's already has superchargers, actually.

• 1:00:47David Pierce?

  Buc-E's should win. I'm good with Buc-E's just like owning electric charging infrastructure in the United States.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I super know why Shell and Exxon aren't getting into the EV charging game.

• 1:00:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, they, they don't want anyone to use.

• 1:01:00Nilay Patel?

  They're at my house right now, keeping me from sawing the raptor. They're like, this gets eight miles to the gallon, and you're gonna have it forever.

• 1:01:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  See, I hope the CEO of Exxon's at my house right now. I have a number of questions for you, too, sir.

• 1:01:12Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's take a break. We're gonna wrap this whole thing up with a lightning round. We'll be right back.

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• 1:02:46Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. I need to apologize to everyone. At the top of the show, I said we were going to talk about gaming coming to LinkedIn, which I know everyone's on the edge of their seat. I forgot to put that in the money round because that's where all LinkedIn discussion goes, per the bylaws of the United States. Yeah. Anyway, they're adding mobile games to LinkedIn.

• 1:03:06David Pierce?

  Did you see the guy, by the way, who posted the thing on LinkedIn, proposing and saying, "Here's what it taught me about B2B sales"?

• 1:03:13Nilay Patel?

  Yes. He was proposing to his fiancee, like on a beach.

• 1:03:17David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it was a picture of him proposing and he says, "Here's what it, here's the experience it taught me about B2B sales." I thought for the longest time that was a joke. I think it was actually real and it is, it has, it has broken me in a way that I cannot describe, that that is a thing that someone did on the internet.

• 1:03:34Nilay Patel?

  Did you learn anything about B2B sales?

• 1:03:36David Pierce?

  No, or proposing. I came away with nothing.

• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're a person who proposed.

• 1:03:42David Pierce?

  I did.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  I proposed.

• 1:03:43David Pierce?

  I did it on LinkedIn, actually. I just, we were, we were playing LinkedIn games together. I just said, "Let's get married."

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  I, what I learned about that was I should know that the answer is yes before I do.

• 1:03:56Nilay Patel?

  That was the big secret to B2B sales for me.

• 1:03:59David Pierce?

  And that your proposal should involve a lot of one-sentence paragraphs that are vaguely motivational.

• 1:04:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, as the person who introduced David to his wife, I can tell you what I know about B2B sales, which is be hammered on a boat and just shove David into a girl.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna have a baby someday.

• 1:04:18Alex Cranz?

  It worked.

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  That's 100% what happened.

• 1:04:21David Pierce?

  Literally, that is the story.

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I learned about B2B sales. You need a lot of tequila.

• 1:04:31Alex Cranz?

  That tracks, that tracks.

• 1:04:33Nilay Patel?

  Also, the bigger the boat, the better.

• 1:04:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  That's what I know about B2B sales.

• 1:04:38David Pierce?

  Absolutely. I mean, honestly, both of those are probably good sales tactics. That's right.

• 1:04:43Alex Cranz?

  I was like, yeah, just in general, those are good sales tactics.

• 1:04:45Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, LinkedIn has added mobile games to its platform in an effort to make it stickier, because the only idea people have on how to make things sticky and have you come back to them is casual mobile games.

• 1:04:57Alex Cranz?

  Consider this. LinkedIn doesn't need to be sticky.

• 1:05:01Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm trying to get at.

• 1:05:03Alex Cranz?

  Like LinkedIn buddies, you're doing fine. People need a job, they go on LinkedIn. They don't need a job, they don't use LinkedIn. It works.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  If you find yourself in life being like, oh, I gotta get back on Pinpoint. Like, reevaluate. Throw your phone into the ocean.

• 1:05:18Alex Cranz?

  What if it's actually really good? What if it's like Wordle?

• 1:05:22Nilay Patel?

  You can only play each game once per day, and after your daily session, you'll get access to your metrics. So it is Wordle.

• 1:05:28Alex Cranz?

  It's Wordle.

• 1:05:29Nilay Patel?

  They made a Wordle.

• 1:05:30David Pierce?

  Can you imagine? Like, there's all these people now who are like, you know, I wake up in the morning, I do connections, I do Wordle. It's like a huge success story for the Times. Great job by them. I think if I ever found myself at a coffee shop and somebody was like, oh, hold on, I gotta do cross climb for the day, I'd be like, I'm gonna go.

• 1:05:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45David Pierce?

  Like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave.

• 1:05:48Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you're, you know too much about B2B sales.

• 1:05:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're not going on four days.

• 1:05:54Nilay Patel?

  It's like ultimate red flag. Did we find out if the woman he proposed to said yes? I'm assuming she said yes.

• 1:06:01David Pierce?

  I don't know.

• 1:06:02Nilay Patel?

  Because if like the last thing he learned about B2B sales was like, don't take no for an answer. That's not great.

• 1:06:07Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, rough.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  It's rough. All right, so I promised you we talked about LinkedIn gaming. And I, we have in a matter of speaking.

• 1:06:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you can do it if you want.

• 1:06:18Nilay Patel?

  All right. I was really stalling in the hopes that Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, would call in to sponsor the lightning round. He did not. Mostly because we published the show after we recorded, so he didn't know I was waiting for that.

• 1:06:31David Pierce?

  There's that.

• 1:06:32Nilay Patel?

  And I, I didn't text him.

• 1:06:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Nilay Patel?

  Jim, quick question.

• 1:06:36David Pierce?

  This lightning round needs to be sponsored by Horse Girls. Because of the incredible slander that we brought to them earlier in the show. I think we need to give them this one.

• 1:06:44Alex Cranz?

  They got it. It's all you girls.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  There was a second one in law school, I think it really cemented the situation for me. Uh, I wasn't a great person for many years. Then, after mastering B2B sales, I got married.

• 1:07:00Alex Cranz?

  There you go.

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, lightning round. We got us, we, this is important. This one's important. There is an Apple event next week.

• 1:07:06Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  By all accounts, this is new iPads. David, you wrote a spicy headline this week. The last thing the iPad needs is a spec bump.

• 1:07:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, I.

• 1:07:15Nilay Patel?

  I'd say this is more than a spec bump. We're gonna get OLED iPads.

• 1:07:18David Pierce?

  Spec bump.

• 1:07:18Nilay Patel?

  This is like my dream spec bump.

• 1:07:21David Pierce?

  Sure. You and Liam are both gonna be psyched and everyone else on earth is gonna say, what is OLED? I don't care. Leave me alone. No, I, I think, I mean, we, we've been asking this, what is the iPad for? And what it, what is Apple trying to do with it question for a while? And I was on the, they just need to make the iPad a touchscreen laptop train for a long time. I'm, I'm now off that train because the MacBook era is that, is that thing. Like, it's not a touchscreen, but it is, it is a damn good laptop. It is the laptop. People who want laptops should buy. Problem solved. The iPad needs to figure out the other thing that it wants to be.

• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:58David Pierce?

  And what's interesting is it seems like, and again, I'm like a little bit kind of making a mountain out of a molehill here, but the, if you just look at the invite to the Apple event, it's called Let Loose, and it is just, it's just an Apple pencil. It's not like hiding that it's an Apple pencil. It just is an Apple pencil. And to me, it's like, okay, if Apple wants this to work, the thing that it needs to focus on is accessories. Like sell, take the idea of the iPad as just, it's a screen and you can attach every other piece of the device that you want to it and take it off as you need it or don't. And Apple has gone like an inch down this road. They have two different keyboards for different kinds of people who want different kinds of keyboards.

• 1:08:41David Pierce?

  There's the pencil. Do you remember when they had the smart connector that no one ever used? Because Apple never opened it up to anybody? That was the thing. Apple is like, is like this close to being a really interesting modular accessory system around this really great tablet. And it just, it needs to stop worrying about having more processing power because it already, it has had too much processing power for like six years. Like no one is using all of the power of their iPad. In part because they can't, because there's not enough powerful software to do it, but also because you're not giving people the literal physical tools they need to make the most out of this device. So I think as we go into this event, I'm like, whatever,

• 1:09:22David Pierce?

  I'm sure I'll end up buying an OLED iPad because that is like a sickness I have in my life.

• 1:09:27Nilay Patel?

  Because you love black levels.

• 1:09:28David Pierce?

  I do.

• 1:09:29Nilay Patel?

  Infinite contrast.

• 1:09:32David Pierce?

  But like, I just, I don't know. I feel like I'm, we've all sort of gone blue in the face yelling, like, what is an iPad actually for? Uh, somewhere Dieter Bone is like shaking his fist at our podcast right now, but I just like, Apple's like right there. And it's like, just go, go finish the thing. Make me some accessories. Build the iPad out.

• 1:09:52Nilay Patel?

  So two things. Rumor is they're gonna put an M4 chip in these iPads. Uh, massive increase in processing power. The thing does not need. Second, they need to change the software. That's actually what it needs. The hardware ecosystem around it, whatever. Make accessory manufacturers make more stuff. To make any of that worthwhile, you need more software capabilities. And they can't do that because W W C isn't until June.

• 1:10:23David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  Right. You needed the next version of I O S. What can they show us besides an O L E D screen?

• 1:10:29Alex Cranz?

  An M four processor.

• 1:10:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. And it's a die, like a chip die diagram

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  of the M four being like, look at this neural engine. Read it and weep.

• 1:10:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's going to be a lot of unlabeled graphs.

• 1:10:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Alex Cranz?

  There's going to be, oh, there's a, there's a pencil and it's going to have replaceable nubs. But like

• 1:10:48Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:10:48Alex Cranz?

  Cooler replaceable nubs than the current pencil has. And there's a, there's an aluminum magic keyboard. That's also not software.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  The rumor from Mark Gurman, the rumor from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg is that it will be, it will lean into being a laptop. Or the Pro will lean into being a laptop. I mean, I expect a full model refresh. Like the iPad model range right now is out of control.

• 1:11:10Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  So they should end with an iPad that is cheap, that makes sense for students. An iPad Air that is like the mainstream one, and iPad Pro that is expensive and has all the stuff.

• 1:11:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  Sure. That, that's theoretically what they have now, but it's all very blurry. And then a pencil that works with everything. One assumes, and maybe some of these keyboard cases and whatever else that work with everything.

• 1:11:30Alex Cranz?

  I hope it still has a lightning port in the eraser.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  The base one.

• 1:11:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I, I like, I, I just hope that they, they just with it on a port.

• 1:11:41Nilay Patel?

  There's like one last lightning port.

• 1:11:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. You're just like, what?

• 1:11:45Nilay Patel?

  I just think the future of the iPad Pro should be, this is a modular Mac.

• 1:11:52Nilay Patel?

  And you should just let the iPad, the base model iPad be like, this runs Disney Plus.

• 1:11:56David Pierce?

  I just want to point out that you, you're, you sort of like, you just hand, literally hand waved away the iPad that everyone buys and uses.

• 1:12:04Nilay Patel?

  I think people buy the cheap one.

• 1:12:05David Pierce?

  That's what I'm saying. The iPad Pro is, is not the most important iPad by a million miles.

• 1:12:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, but again, I think the cheap one runs Disney Plus.

• 1:12:15David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:12:16Nilay Patel?

  I think, I think that's what it's for. I, like, here's the cheapest TV in your house.

• 1:12:21Nilay Patel?

  Fine, the iPad.

• 1:12:22Alex Cranz?

  No, there's a Westinghouse you got for like 90 bucks.

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  That's exactly. You signed up for a bank account at Chase and they gave you a TV. Sure, sure, but like that's what I mean.

• 1:12:31Alex Cranz?

  Portable, portable TV.

• 1:12:32Nilay Patel?

  But like, yeah, this is like, here's this content consumption device that occasionally lets you tap out an email. It's like, that's the base model iPad. I don't, fine, like, let that thing be this weird appliance. I'm just saying for everything else to solve that problem of like, what is this for? Actually, it should just be a Mac. Like, they should just let you run Mac apps on it at this point. Like, why not?

• 1:12:56David Pierce?

  I do agree with that. I don't think it should be exclusively that. But I think that is one thing it ought to do, right? In the way that you can now run some iOS and iPad apps on your Mac. It should, it should pull in both directions at this point.

• 1:13:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't think Apple will ever let it go because then they will have made a touchscreen Mac by accident. And that really implicates a lot of things, but everything they've ever said. But I just, I just don't know why you wouldn't converge the iPad Pro and like, the cheapest MacBook Pro.

• 1:13:28Alex Cranz?

  Because one time, years ago, they said they will never do that. And now like, we'll really like ruthlessly mock them when they do it.

• 1:13:35Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Apple says they're not gonna do things until they do it all the time.

• 1:13:38Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 1:13:38David Pierce?

  I do think if you, if you look at your Mac and you think about what it would be like to use macOS as a touchscreen, it's a nightmare. Like, just think about the amount of time you spend in a menu bar and how it would feel on a 9.7 inch screen to try to poke at those little icons in the corner, like, bad times.

• 1:13:57Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no, no, no. It's, it's a great time. I'm, I'm checking out this, this product right now from Ioneo. I think that's how you say it, Ioneo. They do like game, little handheld game consoles. And they have one called the Flip DS and it's got, it's got Microsoft built in.

• 1:14:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Alex Cranz?

  It's just a tiny DS shaped Windows machine.

• 1:14:17David Pierce?

  Oh, no.

• 1:14:18Alex Cranz?

  And the only way I can like, turn it on, because hardware wise, gorgeous, don't worry. Reviews are coming. Software wise, it's just Windows and they didn't really do anything. So, and there's no keyboard, so you have to like, you have to like, I have to use my pinky. I can't use my regular finger. I have to use my pinky to like, hit a button to turn on a keyboard. And then, it's beautiful. It works every time. It takes 20 minutes. I love it.

• 1:14:45David Pierce?

  I mean, that's that's the Apple experience I'm looking for.

• 1:14:47Alex Cranz?

  That's what I want from Apple, too. Everyone should let me have like a tiny, tiny screens that I've used my pinky to to work on.

• 1:14:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and every time you push that button, Apple makes $20.

• 1:14:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we all win.

• 1:15:00Nilay Patel?

  All right, lighting around, Cranz, what you got?

• 1:15:02Alex Cranz?

  Okay, do you guys remember, do you remember when Razer made made their mask?

• 1:15:07Nilay Patel?

  They they made like three masks.

• 1:15:09Alex Cranz?

  Oh, sorry. Do you remember when they made the Zephyr?

• 1:15:11Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:15:12Alex Cranz?

  And and and it was kind of see through and and it had the RGB. They actually, they appeared at our

• 1:15:18Nilay Patel?

  They did, and they refused to answer any questions about the medical backing of this this device.

• 1:15:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and and shocker, they didn't have backing. This this this mask, they they said had like N95 grade filters and stuff. That was just a lie. Or it was not the truth. Maybe maybe a lie is too hard.

• 1:15:41David Pierce?

  N95 grade is an amazing phrase. It's like it's not N95. It's like N95 ish.

• 1:15:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and and that's not anything. Like, that's just, that's just not a thing, you know, it's. And so they are now being required to fork over 1.1 million dollars in refunds to customers. And I think the real question here is who are the people who bought the Zephyr mask and are now getting their one point, their their refund? Because you did that?

• 1:16:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, that means like thousands of people bought that thing. Wasn't it only like 100 bucks?

• 1:16:19Alex Cranz?

  It was it was more expensive than that.

• 1:16:21David Pierce?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:16:22Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no, it started at $100. Yeah. So, but still, you bought it? And I should, I haven't seen you wear it. I feel like I would have, if that many people bought it, I would have seen at least one on the street. The only one I ever saw was at the our our 10 year party, and it was the Razer guy wearing it.

• 1:16:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and Cameron and our health reporter at the time, Nicole Wetzman, who, by the way, joined The Verge before the pandemic and then was our health reporter during a global pandemic.

• 1:16:51Alex Cranz?

  Like, right before the pandemic.

• 1:16:53Nilay Patel?

  I feel like every time I see Nicole for the rest of my life, I'm so sorry.

• 1:16:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:57Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, but Nicole was there, and she was like, so is this certified? Is it actually? And like, over and over again, and they're like, we'll get to it. It was a very weird moment at our party, I must say.

• 1:17:07Alex Cranz?

  It was super weird.

• 1:17:08Nilay Patel?

  When you think about the Verge party, you think about our health reporters being like, are you lying?

• 1:17:14Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's what, and then there's tequila.

• 1:17:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, that was exactly.

• 1:17:19Nilay Patel?

  Weird product. Weird product, weird moment in his, the global history. To be like, this RGB N95 is a fake.

• 1:17:29Alex Cranz?

  It had like speakers in it.

• 1:17:30Nilay Patel?

  It was a very odd product.

• 1:17:31Alex Cranz?

  It was, it was see-through. That was the part that was.

• 1:17:35David Pierce?

  It really is a very specific artifact of a very specific time, that thing.

• 1:17:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39David Pierce?

  You will look at that thing and you will always know exactly when it came out and exactly who made it and exactly what happened to it. Like, it tells a whole story.

• 1:17:47Nilay Patel?

  All right. I have a lightning round item here. Yeah, it's about Instagram algorithm updates and what it means and a TikTok ban and da, da, da, da, da. But then I'm just looking at this headline that says, "Google is building a fart button into Android."

• 1:18:01Nilay Patel?

  And it is, they're putting a soundboard into the phone app of Android?

• 1:18:06Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:18:07Nilay Patel?

  So you get what are called audio emoji? So that you can just play them during phone calls?

• 1:18:14Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I shouldn't have that power.

• 1:18:16Nilay Patel?

  You get clapping, laughing, crying, which is a literal sad trombone.

• 1:18:22Nilay Patel?

  Partying, drum sting, which is tch, tch, tch, and then fart sound.

• 1:18:27David Pierce?

  This is, and I, I wanna, I wanna not be hyperbolic here. This is the worst idea I've ever heard from a technology company, maybe ever in history.

• 1:18:39Nilay Patel?

  It's like, do you remember when Google's last idea about the phone was like, we'll have the robot make reservations for you? They're like, nah, dude, like, you should be able to womp womp your friends in the middle of a phone call.

• 1:18:49Alex Cranz?

  I, I love that you can just be on a phone, phone call and be like, brrr. Like, that's great.

• 1:18:54David Pierce?

  This is also.

• 1:18:55Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:18:56David Pierce?

  What this reminds me of is like, you know, when Apple rolled out the reactions thing in FaceTime? And so everybody was, you would like do the, an accidental thumbs up on camera? And it would, in some horrifically inappropriate moment, do like fireworks explosions behind you? Or like a really happy thumbs up or whatever? This is going to be that because I guarantee you, Google is gonna put this button in a place that is too easy to find. And people are going to be having like, you know, hard conversations with their boss or their family or whatever. And all of a sudden, they're gonna, their face is gonna tap a button of their phone and it's gonna go, wah, wah. Like, this is not a good idea.

• 1:19:34Nilay Patel?

  I love it. Like, the fact that we haven't had soundboards built into the default dialers.

• 1:19:39Alex Cranz?

  It's just, why weren't we doing that?

• 1:19:41Nilay Patel?

  Audio emojis.

• 1:19:42David Pierce?

  Just in case you wanted to make sure no one ever makes phone calls ever again, here's this.

• 1:19:47Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. I'm hoping they demo this onstage at I O. Like, if they take a huge chunk of time at I O to be like, we've invented audio emojis. You can make fart sounds during phone calls.

• 1:19:57Alex Cranz?

  Hyper-realistic.

• 1:19:58Nilay Patel?

  This is what it's for. Surprise and delight your customer. This is why we make the technology. Billions of dollars have gone into the mobile phone supply chain, the software, the open source development of Android itself. Billions of dollars, thousands of years of human effort, you know, cumulatively. We built these networks. 5G is a phenomenon, and now you can just make fart sounds.

• 1:20:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. You don't even have to use your mouth. Like, innovation.

• 1:20:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 1:20:28Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you yet one more story from my youth?

• 1:20:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Is it a fart story?

• 1:20:31Nilay Patel?

  No, well, it's sort of, it is in its way.

• 1:20:33Alex Cranz?

  Adjacent. Okay.

• 1:20:34Nilay Patel?

  I had a remote-controlled speaker that made swear words and fart sounds.

• 1:20:37Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  And I super hid one in the, like, the balcony of the room that we had our high school morning meeting from. And just ruined that meeting for weeks.

• 1:20:51David Pierce?

  It's good work.

• 1:20:51Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's what you're supposed to do.

• 1:20:52Nilay Patel?

  I got suspended from high school, like, a lot. It's like, all-time record.

• 1:20:57Alex Cranz?

  But like, for good cause.

• 1:20:59Nilay Patel?

  My dad was like, are you gonna go to school? And I was like, well, I'm getting good grades. He was like, fine.

• 1:21:03Alex Cranz?

  You're just like.

• 1:21:04Nilay Patel?

  That was the, that was the trade in my household. You got good grades. My dad was like, I'll go talk to your principal again.

• 1:21:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Nilay Patel?

  It was a small town. It was a private school. There was nowhere for me to go. All right. I think that's the first test. Stay in school, kids.

• 1:21:22Alex Cranz?

  Love a fart button.

• 1:21:24Nilay Patel?

  Try hard. No, that's it. That's where it's at. Next week is gonna be a huge week. We got an Apple event. We got this. We're gonna find out what's gonna happen with the iPad. This Google trial, closing arguments are today. We're gonna hear a lot about what's happening very soon, because that's a bench trial. A lot of tech news is coming. And then soon after that, I/O starts and developer season is off to the races. So, take a breath, pull over in your car, just think about what it means to be a large action model. It means nothing. It actually doesn't mean anything at this point in time. It's a three.

• 1:21:56Alex Cranz?

  I had to work so hard not to make a fart noise at that silence.

• 1:22:00Nilay Patel?

  See, that would've been perfect.

• 1:22:01Alex Cranz?

  It's just, oh my god.

• 1:22:02Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's it. That's where it's at.

• 1:22:08Speaker 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.

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