Android 11 beta / PS5 reveal / Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft ban facial recognition tech for police

Stories discussed this week: Tinder CEO Elie Seidman on finding love during the pandemic It’s hard to figure out how often people without symptoms spread COVID-19 Inside Nextdoor’s ‘Karen problem’ Nextdoor tells community leads to allow Black Lives Matter discussions after exposé Contact tracing programs have to work with local communities to be successful Apple launches $100 million Racial Equity and Justice Initiative Android 11 beta: all the announcements Android 11: conversations, bubbles, and making sense of complexity Five new features Android 11 borrows from the iPhone Android 11 may be the best texting platform if you use multiple chat apps Apple’s virtual WWDC keynote will take place on June 22nd at 1PM ET Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month, says report Apple pulls podcast apps in China after government pressure The new Sonos app and S2 update are available now IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology Amazon bans police from using its facial recognition technology for the next year Microsoft won’t sell facial recognition to police until Congress passes new privacy law Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, the PS5 is here. Andrew Webster and Megan Farukmanesh talk all about that. Dieter and I talk about Android 11, what's going on with WWDC this year. And then James Vincent joins us, talk about IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft changing their facial recognition plans. That's going up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:16Speaker 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.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey. I got you.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer serum.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse. Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 1:03Speaker 04

  There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty, only at Sephora.

• 1:10Speaker 02

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

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the next generation of gaming. I was trying to do my game voice there, Dieter, did it work?

• 1:28Speaker 05

  No, not at all. You gotta get, you gotta get lower.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, we're gonna stop that immediately. Hi, I'm Neil, I'm your friend, Dieter Bohn is here. I'm your constant companion. We have a lot going on in the show this week. The PS5 came out this week. Andrew Webster and Megan Farukmanesh are gonna do a whole segment on the PS5 and the games that we saw. That's gonna be great. Android 11 beta hit, Dieter pulled that apart, we gotta talk about that. Google sued Sonos for patent infringement. You know, I'm in it and Apple announcement is going on at W W C. So that's all going on. And then James Vincent is going to join us and talk about the spate of announcements we've seen from big companies, pausing with many caveats, their facial recognition plans, selling that software to the police. So a lot going on. Before we start is always

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  What week is it, Eli? It's week 13. Again, we get, we just get a lot of feedback about balancing the show between the larger stories in the world. The two biggest interlocking crises in the world are the pandemic and the protest against police brutality. That's the most important stuff. We're covering it all over the site. So I just want to give a quick rundown of that stuff before we go on into all the tech news of the week. It is week 13, 13 weeks since Donald Trump held up a flow chart for coronavirus testing and a website. I believe it was 4 million Google engineers were working on it. That's the number, right? That website still doesn't exist. We haven't heard about it for 13 weeks. There is more testing rolling out in states. The states are doing it on their own,

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  but that main testing website, 13 weeks, really haven't seen it. Other stuff on the site, Ashley Carmen and I interviewed the CEO of Tinder, Elie Seidman, on finding love during a pandemic on using Tinder. I just want to, if you haven't listened to it, go, I just want to encourage you to listen to it. Tinder is rolling out video chat and the thing that they're doing is they're going to have an AI watching the video chat to prevent harassment. And we talked about how that might work. It is just really something else. In other sort of pandemic related news, Nicole Wetman wrote about contact tracing programs and how they have to interact with local communities and work on a local level. Contact tracing is one of those things that to manage the pandemic, which remains more or less unmanaged, to manage the pandemic in the United States, we have to get

• 3:42Nilay Patel?

  good at contact tracing. We're going to have to understand it. So check out that piece from Nicole. Then there's also a lot of controversy this week about asymptomatic people spreading the virus. The World Health Organization said they don't, and then they walked it back. Nicole wrote a great piece about why it's difficult to do that science. She also wrote a great piece about hydroxychloroquine. Obviously, you know, the president has been saying this is worth taking. There's a lot of controversy about it. There is a new study saying it doesn't work. Nicole just basically wrote about why the speed at which we are doing the science, doing the research about the virus and possible treatments is causing this level of confusion. It is broader context just sort of helps you understand what's going on. So that's some pandemic stuff.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  In terms of protests and racial justice, there's actually quite a lot of news, quite a lot of change happening in this world at rapid speed due to the protests. McKenna Kelly wrote an enormously impactful piece about Nextdoor, which is sort of the local neighborhood level social network. Nextdoor, people make a lot of fun of it because it's Nextdoor, it's people in their neighborhoods complaining about each other, but they have a moderation problem at scale, just like every other social network has a moderation problem at scale. There's a lot of controversy that they don't train the people who start the local neighborhood social networks. Those networks often devolve into exactly the sort of form fighting that you would expect. So McKenna's story was called Inside Nextdoor's Karen Problem, which is a great headline. Nextdoor then reacted to that story.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  They basically are mandating that their community leads have to allow Black Lives Matter discussions because some community leads, some of their moderators were not allowing it, and they are proposing a sweeping set of changes to Nextdoor. So that's just great. McKenna, she wrote a really impactful story. We're seeing the change immediately come out of it. Then big companies are doing what big companies do. Apple launched $100 million racial equity and justice initiative. They put Lisa Jackson, who's the former administrator of the EPA, who ran all of Apple's environmental programs, she is now in charge of it. They're going to invest particularly in the black community. That's a big number. Yeah, Apple's doing it. YouTube announced, how big was YouTube's, Dieter?

• 5:49Speaker 05

  The exact same number. 100 million is apparently the number for big companies now.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  There you go. YouTube announced $100 million racial equity fund. So there's just a lot of action at the corporate leadership level around racial justice, which is at once good to see, but also needs to be held accountable. It needs to be transparent. That's stuff we're going to be tracking on the site. So all that's happening on the site, I want to again emphasize. We know, we hear from our audience that that stuff is important, but they also want us to talk about tech stuff. And there was a lot of tech news this week, so don't doubt for one second, that's our priority. It's the coverage we are talking about. It is the two biggest news stories in the world. They dominate everything, they color everything. It's on the site. Go check it out. Our reporters are doing a great job. Very proud of that work. But there's other stuff to talk about, too. So here's what we're gonna do.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  PS5 came out yesterday. If you're listening to this now, you know that we're coming out late. It's because our normal recording time was at the same time as the Sony PS5 stream. So we held it back a little bit, so Andrew and Megan could do that coverage. The rest of our team could do that coverage. I'm just gonna tell you, I'm pretty bad at talking about video games, and they are really good at it. So I'm gonna step away. Here's Andrew and Megan talking about PS5.

• 6:58Speaker 06

  Hey, it's Megan Verone, and I'm here with The Verge.

• 7:00Speaker 07

  And it's Andrew Webster.

• 7:02Speaker 06

  So Webster, we just saw the PlayStation 5. They finally did a reveal event.

• 7:06Speaker 07

  It did, and it is definitely a video game console.

• 7:10Speaker 06

  Okay, so for people who haven't seen it yet, trying to do your best to describe it, what does it look like?

• 7:15Speaker 07

  Okay, so imagine Michael Bay doing a new Transformers movie. And the like cute little baby Yoda style character is a clam, but it's also a Michael Bay style robot.

• 7:28Speaker 06

  That's a very strong description. So, okay, we have this new console. It is very different, I think, from what other consoles usually look like. It's kind of like, it looks a bit like a router with like a marshmallow wrapping. But I don't hate it. I think it's actually kind of nice to get a change from, say, like my Xbox from my old PlayStation.

• 7:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm not entirely sure if I like it, but I like that it's not a black box.

• 7:54Speaker 06

  Totally. So in terms of what we actually know about the PlayStation 5, it's not too much beyond specs. Like, we don't actually know the pricing, for example. We do know they're releasing two versions, one with a disk drive and one that's digital only. I'm curious what your take is on that.

• 8:08Speaker 07

  I think it's smart, and it kind of falls in line with what Microsoft is supposedly doing. As our good friend Tom Warren has reported a bunch, there's likely gonna be a cheaper version of the Xbox Series X. And this seems like it's going in the same direction for the PS5. Although I'm curious how much just knocking off the optical drive will really lower the price. So I'll be really curious to see what the final points are.

• 8:33Speaker 06

  At this point, I think it's interesting to just not have one altogether. I can't remember the last time I bought a physical game. I mean, usually I just download stuff now and then kind of delete as needed.

• 8:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, but you don't have a very large selection of children's Blu-ray discs either. So that's a very important part.

• 8:48Speaker 06

  That is actually a good point. I mean, I think also people who don't have a strong internet connection will also need a disc no matter what. So it's good that there is still kind of that accessibility.

• 8:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're definitely covering their bases because there's regions in the world where having no discs is not really feasible.

• 9:03Speaker 06

  Well, it's also interesting, too, because, I mean, the PlayStation 5 is apparently going to be backwards compatible with, I can't remember, they said something along the lines of just a lot of PlayStation 4 games. And in that case, I think people who still have those discs will probably need it as well.

• 9:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, that will be very good information to have when they finally clear up how that stuff works. Because obviously, that's a huge part of what Microsoft's doing. One of the main reasons to buy into the Xbox ecosystem is that, like, you know your games are going to work across different platforms. So I really would love to hear something about that for the PS5.

• 9:36Speaker 06

  Well, speaking of games, we did see a lot of stuff they showed off yesterday. What did you think? Are there any games in particular that stood out for you?

• 9:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I mean, I'm definitely, like most people, looking forward to jumping into more Horizon Zero Dawn with the sequel that is, for some reason, called Horizon Forbidden West, because Horizon Zero Dawn wasn't confusing enough. It looks very cool. And, I mean, Resident Evil 7 was one of the scariest games I've ever played. So Resident Evil 8, or Resident Evil Village, as it's called, the V I L L is the Roman numeral. It's very important.

• 10:06Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 10:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, they all look great. Ratchet and Clank, always, you know, bright and colorful. Looking forward to jumping into more of that.

• 10:12Speaker 06

  I think it's really interesting to finally get a Spider-Man game that will star Miles Morales, although they're now saying it's not an expansion, it's not a full game, it's a standalone experience, which we've seen before. It is kind of a bummer to not get a full Miles game yet, though.

• 10:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, although although that being said, like it sounds similar to Uncharted Lost Legacy. And that's even though it's slightly smaller in scale is, in my opinion, the best Uncharted. So I think it'll still be good.

• 10:36Speaker 06

  I think I'm just really ready to ditch Peter Parker. I'm very bored of his story. I feel like we've seen it so many times and I don't really enjoy playing as him anymore.

• 10:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, as much as I like swinging around New York.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  So we also saw a bunch of either new titles or smaller titles that are really exciting. I think one that I'm personally stoked for, because I am, of course, a crazy cat lady, is Annapurna Stray. Annapurna, I think, has a really good history at this point with publishing good games. Like, I can't think of a single miss they've had so far. And with Stray, it has this really cool, like, neon drenched, like, cyberpunk kind of thing, except that it seems like you play as a cat, wearing a backpack, which is extremely important.

• 11:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, that screams next gen to me.

• 11:16Speaker 06

  It's all I want, really. So overall, what do you think this means for the PlayStation 5 and the next gen?

• 11:22Speaker 07

  I mean, I'm a little a little torn, I guess, because on the one hand, like, everything we saw looked really cool, or at least I got what I wanted, a new Horizon, new Spider-Man, lots of cool indies, terrifying new Resident Evil. But the thing I didn't see, I feel like, is what makes this next gen? Like, why I need a PS5 to play these games? You know, you and I just finished playing The Last of Us Part II, which is a pretty good game that really makes use of the PS4 hardware. And I guess these games don't necessarily seem like a huge leap from that, from what we've seen so far.

• 11:56Speaker 06

  I go through this with every new console cycle where, as soon as it launches, I'm generally a person who comes on really late, because I feel like until there are, I think it's more than five is my standard, until there are more than five games that are exclusive to that console, I won't buy it. Because until then, it kind of just feels like building on the same thing I already have. So it kind of feels the same way when it comes to the next gen Xbox as well as PlayStation 5. I think I'm probably going to wait this one out and maybe like six months or more, and I'll probably pick one up.

• 12:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, I do wonder if this would have gone over different if we could play it. You know, E3 would have been this week. Seeing these games is probably very different from actually getting to sit down and play them. So maybe that'll make all the difference, who knows?

• 12:35Speaker 06

  One last thing I want to talk about before we go. So the actual reveal for the PlayStation 5, I think, is interesting, because the way the whole video was shot, it feels very like sports car, check out this beautiful thing, which is much better than whenever they revealed the PlayStation 4 Pro, and they just had. Kind of a wall dropped down and there was. So I appreciate that they've really upped their game here.

• 12:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, the shift to having these pre-recorded things has been very beneficial for companies. Cuts out all those awkward moments.

• 13:05Speaker 06

  At least we still have that to look forward to as we're all stuck inside. So that's it for us. Thanks again for listening. I'm Megan with The Verge and I report about video games.

• 13:15Speaker 07

  And I am Andrew and I do the same thing.

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  All right, that was great. My thanks to Andrew and Megan. I think the PS5 looks crazy. Dieter, you mean it looks crazy, right?

• 13:24Speaker 05

  I just hate how much attention it draws to itself. I think I love that they went for something. I just wish that they went for something that I felt comfortable having be massive and huge in the middle of my living room because I'm gonna buy it.

• 13:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, uh, who are we? I just think it's like the disc drive one to me, it's like GameStop went to Sony at the last minute. And they're like, here's a check. We still sell, we still sell CD-ROMs. That's our business. That's what we do at GameStop. You need to keep making this one. I think there's a good argument for like used game sales and all that stuff, but never has any product looked more like it was forced to include a disc drive than the disc drive PS5. All right, go look at pictures of it. It's fun to dunk on. Send me your best photoshops. Uh, we're gonna take a quick break and then we gotta talk about Android. We gotta talk about Apple. We gotta talk about this Google's lawsuit. Lots going on. We'll be right back.

• 14:14Speaker 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 like 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.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey. I got you.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer serum.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse. Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty, only at Sephora.

• 15:08Speaker 08

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

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Dieter.

• 15:16Speaker 05

  Yo, yo, yo.

• 15:19Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing, man? Let's start with Android. Android 11 is out. You had the beta even using it. What's going on?

• 15:25Speaker 05

  I have the beta on a Pixel 4 XL. I think it'll work on Pixel 2 and up. If you don't have a Pixel, it's coming to a few other phones this summer, but nothing really major. It's like they're actually backsliding a little bit in terms of beta availability, in my opinion. But it's, you know, it's the pandemic. Maybe a bunch of companies couldn't get their ducks in a row. Anyway, it's here and I did a big look at all of the stuff that's in the beta. And to me, the headline is they fixed text messaging.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  No, you can't say that.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  No, they didn't.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  Well, okay, they fixed the problem that you are going to run into inevitably on Android. And I think if you're not in the US and everybody uses iMessage, you hit on iOS a little bit too, of having three to five text messaging apps that you have to use. So they separated out all of your notifications from your texting apps into its own section. And that's like, fine, whatever. But the thing that they did that's more important is the notifications in that section have like their own rules. So you can, when you set priority on a conversation, it does something different than if you set like alerting priority note thing on a standard notification. If you set silence on a conversation, it's still up there at the top.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  And if you set silent on a standard notification, it basically like disappears from your entire life. And what that means is you can have a bunch of group chats that don't annoy you. You can have notifications from your boss or, you know, your family or whoever, break through your do not disturb if you want. And you can actually manage having three to four chat apps, but still have all of them feel like they're in the exact same place.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I didn't quite understand this until I like watched the video, but let's try to explain it to people. I'm gonna ask a series of dumb questions. So what you're saying is I've got WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Signal and Telegram and Google's standard Android texting app on my phone.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  All of those apps, their notifications now go to a special place.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  Special place at the top of your notification sheet called Conversations.

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  Do they have to do any work to get there?

• 17:32Speaker 05

  Kinda. Yeah, they have to. They have to support two specific sort of APIs that Google uses for messaging apps. Some already have, some don't. They need to like, they need to support like a people API and they need to do one other thing. But it's apparently not too difficult about, I don't know, a bunch of the apps I already use already do it. There's a second thing that they have to do, which is slightly more difficult, which is they need to like turn on support for bubbles. And if you've been following Android, you might know what bubbles are. They had this in the beta last year. It's now official. You know what chat heads are, right? On the Facebook Messenger app? Chat heads have been around since 2013. I looked at it like, ah, it's been a few years, right? Oh, no, it's been seven years.

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  They put it on the face, the first Facebook from the HTC first.

• 18:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I don't love bubbles. It's basically, it turns your icon for the particular conversation you're having and it makes it this little floating head that you can move anywhere on the screen and it sits over on top of your other apps. So what Google's done is they made it an official system level thing. And so you can quote unquote bubble your conversations. And if you are into it, it's actually really cool because if you've got a like a conversation in Android Messages and another one in WhatsApp and another one in, you know, Signal or whatever, and they all support bubbles, you'll have one bubble that you can have anywhere on your screen and it has all of those conversations stacked in it. You tap it and then it opens up the bubble interface and you basically can just tap through the icons to each one.

• 19:00Speaker 05

  So effectively what you get is something that is a single icon that has all of your conversations across multiple apps. So like, Google got the benefit of having everything integrated into a single app without integrating anything at all. If the developers actually update to support it.

• 19:16Nilay Patel?

  Ah, yes.

• 19:17Speaker 05

  Ah.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  The asterix upon all things. How does that work? Like, do you see, you open the bubble and then you click on the WhatsApp one? Do you see the WhatsApp interface? And you click on the, on the, on the Signal one? Do you see the Signal interface? Or is it Google's UI?

• 19:31Speaker 05

  No, no, it's the, it's the app's interface. And in fact, the default, if you just do the simplest, basic turn on bubbles, when you tap on that bubble and bring up the interface, it's literally the app interface inside an Android window. Cause you know, Android supports Windows, because Android supports everything. And if you want, you can customize it down and have your bubble interface be something different and lighter or whatever, but you don't have to.

• 19:56Nilay Patel?

  There was just a period on desktop computers when the big race was to build a universal chat client.

• 20:03Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  Right? What, what was the one that everyone used called?

• 20:07Speaker 05

  Trillion.

• 20:08Nilay Patel?

  Trillion. Trillion Chat was like, it like had a, like a Windows moment.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is like the early 2000s. And that went away because everyone built their own chat apps and they insisted that they had to build their own features. We have talked about this forever on the show. And now every chat lives in a proprietary protocol inside of its own app. Except for RCS, which is a failure. So, lesson there. It sounds like Google is building a universal chat interface, but they're letting the app developers still control the code inside the interface?

• 20:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they're not admitting that they're building a universal chat interface. Because if they did that, then people might not participate. Because nobody wants to be integrated and aggregated into a universal chat interface. This is the lesson of the Apple TV app, right? Not the chat interface, but everyone wants their own interface. Everyone wants a full control of their own app. And so, Google can't, what they can do though, everyone needs to be in notifications. So, Google can just be like, if you want to be in notifications, you should work this way. And then all of a sudden, your notifications become your universal app. If you live in notifications and like, like run your phone through notifications, and which is kind of how I do it, at least for like email and messaging, it's great. If you don't like using notifications in that way, this is actually like not going to be super helpful for you.

• 21:25Speaker 05

  You're, you know, you're, you're sort of stuck still in the old way of just looking for dots on your home screen.

• 21:30Nilay Patel?

  So you install the chat apps, their notifications go to a special conversations view. Inside that conversations view, you can say notifications from this WhatsApp thread, they should be silent and then WhatsApp respects that and then Android handles that. And then you can set all these other priorities. That seems incredibly smart. It also seems like a new layer of complexity.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  Yep, it is both of those things.

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  How are they managing the complexity?

• 21:55Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, they're trying. The, there's like, if you've got a really complex, mature operating system, you want to keep adding features, but as soon as you add features, it's a mess. Like, look at, look at the settings in Android 11, look at the settings in a Samsung phone, look at the settings in any modern OS. And it's like, I don't know what any of this stuff does. What I think they're trying to do is basically put like presets. So if you think of all the notification settings, there's actually, if you really look at it, very little that you couldn't do on Android 10. All of the like silent, does silent appear here? Where does the icon go? What notifies you? What doesn't? Does it vibrate? Does it make a sound? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Most of that was actually available today if you knew how to dig into the settings and look at all the things.

• 22:40Speaker 05

  So what they've basically done is they've made presets. So when you hit silent on a conversation, it like runs through this preset algorithm of stay in conversations, don't alert the phone, still appear at the top, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you set something a priority, it does another thing. And so they've, they've kept all that complexity there, but they've made simple sort of macros, I don't know, whatever, to like, give you like the basic settings they think you're probably going to want. And I think most people are just going to use as basic settings and it's an upgrade. But there's no getting around like Android is pretty much unafraid to, one, mess with settings with every version of Android. And two, they're like, they're, they're willing to put a little bit of complexity

• 23:23Speaker 05

  in front of users and trust that they're going to like follow Google along with these new metaphors. Which as a person who's obsessed with like the different metaphors that companies put in their, you know, screen operating systems, I find fascinating because Apple has also gotten more confident in putting more complexity, metaphorical complexity for their users with iPad OS. With iOS, I think there's still a little chicken.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, there's like a part of it where it's like, we trust the users to follow our metaphorical complexity. And there's also like, we have no idea what we're doing.

• 23:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm not gonna say what I think is happening where, but I think the reason that the phone is staying static and the iPad is changing, you can make your own decisions.

• 24:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  At the same time, like Android 11, it seems to be just veering towards a bunch of iPhone ideas.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, the gesture stuff in Android 10 was like an iPhone. The screenshot interface, they, you know, one of the themes is they wanted to pull stuff out of notifications. So they pulled screenshot interface out of notifications. It works just like the iPhone. I don't know, man. What else? Home control is sort of iPhone-esque. It's in the power menu, but it's like they've they like given you system level buttons for stuff.

• 24:37Nilay Patel?

  And that's to do smart home control.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  That's to do smart home control. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they're, you know, they're fine to be a great artist and steal, I guess, is like the nice way to put that.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, so you and I had this like minor debate. So the smart home stuff, I turn off, I have one smart light switch in my house, a smart outlet, rather, and it just turns on some Christmas lights that the baby likes looking at. So she turns them on every morning and then turn off every night. And I turn that off using iOS Control Center in the home thing every day.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 25:10Nilay Patel?

  So that that's a thing. So now Google has built something like that where you can like get to a screen that has top level buttons to turn stuff off on a control smart home stuff.

• 25:19Speaker 05

  Right.

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  That screen also has the button to turn off your phone. It also has like your credit card in case you want to pay for something. The idea that I go to turn off my Christmas lights and then accidentally turn off my phone seems bad to me. The idea that I'm in Walgreens and I want to pay for something and I accidentally turn off my phone seems bad to me, but you're telling me that it's actually great.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, the the button is like, you know, Android phones are really big, Neelai. You got to like really reach to hit the power button.

• 25:50Speaker 05

  I mean, Google's idea is that it's like your, it's your wallet or it's your wallet and keys. It's the stuff you put in your pocket to control stuff outside of your phone. Plus, power menu. It's like, the metaphor isn't perfect. And so where are the different zones, where are the different areas that have different like metaphors for what they do on an operating system is really fascinating. And I could like, get into it. Do you believe that like, this is your remote area for controlling the physical world? I kind of do, kind of don't, it's whatever. I think more important is, when you turn off the Christmas lights on your tree or wherever they are, how many button presses does that take?

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  It's a swipe up and I, and you click the home icon and you turn the thing off.

• 26:30Speaker 05

  So it's a swipe up?

• 26:32Nilay Patel?

  No, it's a swipe down from the corner. I was thinking of the old control swipe. But it's a swipe, a tap and a tap.

• 26:38Speaker 05

  A swipe and a tap and a tap. Mine is a long press and a tap. And I've got like, a bunch of lights. And it's also if I want to dim it, it's a long press and then I can immediately just drag my finger on the button to dim it.

• 26:50Speaker 05

  And so it's, it's also conceptually, or not conceptually, it's like, it's easier just physically because you don't have to like, hit a target. You don't have to be like, alright, swipe down from this corner, now hit this button that happens to be right here on the screen. And this other thing, it's like, I know where the power button is, I hold it down and then I see the button, I tap the button. So, like, I think Control Center and Home on iOS in general is a little bit better than Google Home stuff. I think they've just done a better job requiring local control, giving you more options for where the rooms are, not making Google Home settings just completely bonkers. But in terms of like, speed to turn on my smart light, Android has definitely won in Android 11.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  So that's a bunch of interface stuff. Is there sort of technical backend stuff, new features to Android 11 that we should know about?

• 27:36Speaker 05

  There's 12 new project mainline modules. That's the system that Google uses to directly update your system without having to go through carrier approval. I don't really know what they are. I haven't gotten a list. I know one of them is the time on Permission Reset, which is another new feature. So if you don't use an app for some period of time, Google will just yank that app's permissions. Like, this app, you haven't touched it in a month. And it still has background location permission, screw that, and the app just loses its permissions. They also stole from iOS one-time permissions, especially for location. So the three options that are offered to apps now are grant location access once, grant it when the app is open, or deny it. And if an app actually wants background permission,

• 28:19Speaker 05

  it has to like link you to deep into Android settings. So Google's really trying to like, get people to stop having background access to sensitive things like location or microphone or whatever. And again, this is like following what iOS does.

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then there's like the big question of you tested this on a Pixel four, when will anyone get it?

• 28:41Speaker 05

  2022.

• 28:44Speaker 05

  Okay, now to be to be fairer to Google, they managed to get more companies on the beta last year and they managed to get, Samsung, like Samsung's one that matters. They managed to get Samsung to like start updating its phones as early as like a month earlier than the year before, maybe a little bit more. And they've done better. They've done better than I expected them to. But you know, like when you're starting from a, you know, 500 foot hole, getting up to 450 feet is like, good job, but you're you're never climbing out of that hole, friend.

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I just think back to our sooner conversation and it's like, it's a long process for the Pixel phone to be a, that's the real answer here. They show us the new software. It is expressed best on the Pixel, but really for most people, some hardware manufacturer and some carrier are in the way.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  Right.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  In this country, that looks like Samsung and AT&T and Verizon and T-Mobile, right?

• 29:38Speaker 05

  Like, yeah, Google's dedication to openness is like some percentage, like Google likes to be open and Android and good for the world or whatever. And some percentage of they have to be because otherwise like people will start blocking them and Android will be as powerful as it is, right? And that like applies this power menu thing, right? So all those buttons are powered by Google Home. You know, who doesn't want you to control your smart home with Google Home? Samsung or literally like it's not available in China. And so in addition to that section being powered by Google Home, it's also just available for other companies to do whatever the hell they want with. So if you get a Samsung phone, will that power menu exist for the Samsung phone? Or will it still map to, uh, what's it called? Oh yeah, Bixby.

• 30:17Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 30:18Speaker 05

  TBD.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. Is Bixby still a long press on the power button?

• 30:22Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 30:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy. He's a, look, he's a plucky. He's a plucky little dog that Bixby just puts on his shoes and goes to work every morning. All right. So what's the, this is the beta. When is it scheduled for release?

• 30:35Speaker 05

  There's three or four more betas. It'll come out in the fall with the Pixel five, uh, or maybe slightly ahead of the Pixel five. That's, I think they've gotten ahead of the Pixel in years past, and then the Pixel gets a couple of extra features to wow you. So that's probably they'll stick with it. They've managed to sort of get caught up and not be too slowed down by the pandemic, but we'll see if that affects things or not. To me, the big question is where the hell is the Pixel four A? It just seems like it's delayed into oblivion. And again, like, uh, at some point in the near future, we should be seeing some pretty heavy Pixel five rumors and we kind of aren't. So I kind of wonder what's going on.

• 31:12Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they just canceled it after like Rick Osterland was like, you didn't tell me the battery is too small on the Pixel four. I need to check over the four A.

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  I mean, if, if the pressure on them is to finally succeed, the four A is not going to be the thing that does that.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  No, well, it might sell well. So the rumors of the Pixel five is that it's not going to go like full on mega flagship, $1,200 ultra, you know, Snapdragon eight sixty five fastest, most beautiful, blah, blah, blah. They're gonna like tone it down and basically admit that like the Pixel four was not like ultra, super ultra premium. It was like a fine phone and they're actually with the rumor is with the Pixel five gonna like price it appropriately, position it appropriately, not try and say that this thing is comparable to even like a, I don't know, Galaxy S20 or something. We'll see, but you know, they're, they're at a spot where, you know, Pixel five, that's like, it'll be their seventh Pixel phone,

• 32:10Speaker 05

  depending when the four A comes out. They should have figured it out by now. They really should have figured it out by now. And I'm tired of hearing, well, we're young. Well, yeah, sure. You're young, but you know who figured it out by five generations in? Like Samsung, like, like they, like, like a bunch of people, they got it. So.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. So that's Android. Then Apple this week announced W W C. It's happening. We talked about this a couple of weeks on the show, right? Google, like it's developer conference season. So we already had build, which became very developer focused from Microsoft's point of view, and they separated out all their consumer announcements. Google canceled I O. And they've been rolling out announcements like Android 11 beta. Apple's just virtualizing the thing they do. It's W W C. Same as ever, just all happening online. So there's a keynote. It's taking place on June 22 at 1 P M. Eastern. I have a little bit of fun news. We're gonna obviously live blog the keynote. Walt Mossberg is gonna join our live blog.

• 33:10Speaker 05

  Hey, that's great.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  Condemned into doing with us. So, right, June 22, 1 P M. Eastern, Apple keynote. We'll just see how they do a virtual keynote. We'll see if, you know, like Craig Federighi is socially distanced away from Tim Cook. We'll just see how they manage it. They're gonna have a keynote.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  I mean, that stage is pretty big. If they, if they decide to do it at the Steve Jobs Theater.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  Right. They're gonna do an empty theater. Many questions about the staging of the Apple keynote. Okay, that's happening. But there's like rumors that this is a monumental keynote, because the rumors are they're gonna announce the transition to ARM for the Mac.

• 33:48Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 33:49Nilay Patel?

  And right before we started recording, Dieter said, man, we could talk about that for one hour.

• 33:53Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 33:53Nilay Patel?

  Because we could definitely talk about it for one hour. Let's see what you can do in a little short of that. What do you think, Dieter? Tell me about, tell me all your feelings about the transition to ARM.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  I just, I have so many. Do you want me to start with Catalyst? Do you want me to start with like Swift UI? So, look, we've seen the Mac make processor transitions before, but those were in like, different eras, right? And so there's like, possible analogous things we could see from like, the Intel transition. And it's, one of the things that Apple did is they didn't just make an emulation layer and just say, here you go. They, they did this thing. It was called Rosetta. It was like, sort of an emulation, sort of not. There's a bunch of layers in the API. So when you make a program for an operating system, you know. There's like, there's abstractions. And so you like, you ask for something and the operating system provides it for you. And a lot of that, like, asking and providing, doesn't care what

• 34:45Speaker 05

  the processor is. So there are things that can be done to have this, like, not actually be that big of a problem. But fundamentally, like, eventually, the processor needs to be called by the app. And so who knows how they're going to handle that? Are they just going to straight up emulate it, which is what Microsoft does with Windows on ARM, but they can't emulate modern apps that are 64-bit because blah. Are they gonna have some weird in-between option? Are they just gonna say, rewrite your app, sorry, guys? Like, there's actually a pretty wide array. And everyone's sort of assuming that Apple's got this, because Apple historically has got this. They figured out a bunch of transitions in the past. And I want to be optimistic,

• 35:25Speaker 05

  but I also want to be really realistic that switching a desktop operating system to ARM is not, not an easy thing. It's not a fast thing. It's not clear what you do to the existing user base. And it's not clear what you do with existing apps. Because if you buy a Mac, you expect the Mac to run Mac apps. And if, when, when you start having to add asterisks to that, it gets a little bit dicey. And I'm not just talking like the standard, like, oh, who knows if it'll run Photoshop? Like, there's a bunch of possible weird gotchas for people with, with Mac apps. Like, how is this thing gonna run Chrome? Like, that's, that's a big question, right?

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, what is the question for all computers is how badly will Chrome run on your computer? So not to go fully historical here, but Apple has pulled this off before. They've switched from Power PC. Well, actually, they've done it twice. The original Mac ran on the 68K processor. That was a whole system of processors made by Motorola that hit the end of its line. They switched to Power PC processors, which were made by the AIM Alliance. This is a real thing. Apple, IBM, Motorola. It was like Apple buying chips from IBM was a shockwave moment because they were big competitors. So they switched from 68K to Power PC. They were able to emulate 68K on the Power PC. So it was seamless.

• 36:46Nilay Patel?

  All the apps ran and then they did that. Then Steve Jobs comes back to the company they had bought next. When they switched from Power PC, they ran, the Power PC roadmap ran out. Like they basically just like couldn't do, it was the G5 chip. They couldn't get it into a laptop. This is ancient history. So they decided to switch to Intel. Steve Jobs stood on stage and said, we've had the secret project in the works in the basement forever. It's OS 10 running on Intel. And I think the thing we are forgetting in that whole transition is not only was Apple transitioning the processor. They were partially along a massive operating system transition. So there was OS, or I think it was called OS 9, Mac OS 9. They held a funeral for Mac OS 9. This is a real thing that Apple did.

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  They had a coffin on stage and they put the box, the software box for classic OS 9 in the coffin. And they had a funeral for their operating system. Technology used to be a lot funnier is what I'm getting at here. Can you imagine like Google holding a funeral for like Android 10? Like they're not going to do it. But they, they transitioned their entire operating system to OS 10, which had a Unix kernel, like the whole thing. They were pushing developers to OS 10. Stop, port your code from the old operating system and then along there, they had the Intel transition. Apple does not have that same moment of we're canceling our operating system. They're not setting a bunch of, and they were much smaller, right?

• 38:15Nilay Patel?

  They were, they're selling many, many, many fewer computers and at a smaller developer base. They do not have that moment of, hey, in the middle of one big transition, we're going to layer on a processor transition. It makes the computer faster. So what you really want is an OS 10 application. And to make the best OS 10 application, you want it to run on Intel because it'll be faster. Right now, they've just got what you want as a Mac with a long battery life and high performance. We're going to seamlessly switch the chip in it and everything will be the same.

• 38:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, so the, the question is, can they say everything will be the same? Will they try to say everything will be the same? My strong hunch is that as good as they are at this and as, as much better, we think that the ARM processor that Apple can make is going to be than whatever, you know, Intel can make for laptops these days. I don't know that they can say like, you don't have to worry about it. We got this. It just don't, it just works. No problem. Like, I think they might have to throw some asterisks out there and they might need to throw Intel under the bus a little bit in this. And those are all things that Steve Jobs did in that announcement about the transition. Like, you should go watch it. It is actually like, basically like every Steve Jobs keynote. It's incredible, but it's also really, really

• 39:27Speaker 05

  instructive to see how direct and blunt he was. Like, here's how this transition's going to go. It's going to be a little rough. Here's how it's going to work. This is what you need to do. This is why we did it. This old stuff was bad. We wanted to make this thing and we just couldn't. So we're going to make this thing instead. And like, he laid it out. And, um, I don't know, man. I don't know if you've been watching the way Apple does keynotes lately, but, uh, they're not fond of saying this might not be perfect.

• 39:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, we, you and I were talking about this yesterday. What is time? Uh, we were talking about this and I just keep coming back to that first Apple Watch keynote, when they announced it and like Bono was on stage and they had videos of supermodels running through Africa. It was, it was insanity. And then they had to completely reboot the product and its interface over time. And now it's like a fitness tracker with notifications, right? Like, a very good one. I'm wearing one right now. People like it a lot. They're selling a lot of them. But the promise of what the thing could do and what the thing actually were, were at odds. That's, but that's their mode, right? Like, that's Apple's mode. They're very bombastic now. It's fine. They make a lot of money. I'm not saying this isn't a bad strategy for them as a business,

• 40:38Nilay Patel?

  but their communication style has definitely shifted from the sort of Steve Jobs mode of, I am aware of all the trade offs. I have made a decision. I know some of you will be mad at me, but I think it's the right choice to, there's only one decision Apple has made it. And this kind of transition does not allow for that style of communication to be perfectly effective, I would say. I also think the open questions around, and the trade offs are obvious, right? Like, we think the ARM processors, Apple's A-series processors are very fast, right? Benchmarks of them on iPhones and iPads suggest they are very, very fast. We know iPhones last a long time. We know iPads last a long time. They seem very fast. They have a lot of headroom.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  What happens when you take them out of the thermal environment of the iPhone and the iPad? And you try to run them at max performance for extremely sustained periods of time in a laptop chassis? We have no idea. Apple is pretty good at this stuff, but we actually don't know. What happens when you take, I mean, what, we just reviewed the Mac Pro, which is an Intel processor AMD GPUs, right? They could not, until just like a month ago, three days ago, five minutes ago, Adobe was not supporting their GPU architecture for accelerated rendering in Premiere. Well, they're about to pull the rug out of that whole deal.

• 41:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, theoretically, yeah.

• 41:58Nilay Patel?

  Is Apple gonna be able to make GPUs that compete with AMD's GPUs that they insist on using? That compete with Nvidia's GPUs that everybody wants them to use and they don't? Wide open questions for Mac. Also, Apple just refreshed all of its Macs. They just did a whole series of, I mean, two years of we haven't forgotten the Mac?

• 42:18Speaker 05

  No, no. In fact, there is a rumor, which I don't think we've posted, because like, it's not quite strong enough yet, but I believe it because I want to, that they might refresh the iMac to have it look like a, like a big iPad Pro. And I, I want there to be a hot new iMac that's like SSD only and like gets rid of that weird chin on the bottom. Like, I want that. So therefore I choose to believe it, even though like, but like, if they announce, here is a hot new iMac with a faster, new, you know, Intel processor, whatever it is, Lakefield or whatever, has that Lakefield, it's another one. There's so many frickin' lakes.

• 42:55Nilay Patel?

  They're all lakes and mountains. Many of them are icy.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  Five minutes later, they're like, that, okay, let's stop talking about that, that new Intel iMac that looks dope. And let's talk about how the future of Mac's arm and we're going to sunset Intel. Like, I don't know how those fit in the same keynote.

• 43:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it depends on how fast I think their transitions may be. And I think my expectation here is that it will take a long time.

• 43:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, it has to.

• 43:19Nilay Patel?

  The piece that just sort of kicked off all these rumors is from Mark Gurman. Mark Gurman's piece says the entire line will go to ARM over time. But it does not specify a timeline. That's like the thing. And I, this is a moment like we have been waiting, like, you and I are both, I would say, small MacBook aficionados. Right? Like that 12 inch MacBook with one port. As much as I complain about ports and dongles and whatever, that computer is great. It was a great computer. We actually, we have two of them. Beck and I both have them. They can't make that right now. It would just be too slow. I mean,

• 43:51Speaker 05

  They can't. They tried.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  The MacBook Air that I just reviewed is thermally constrained.

• 43:56Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 43:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? It just isn't very fast if you want to push it for a sustained period of time. Like, they have run into a thermal problem with their computers. It's interesting to me on the Windows side, that does not seem to be the same kind of constraint.

• 44:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, there are thermal problems, but a lot of, a lot of manufacturers solve it by being willing to make their laptops a little bit thicker on a different materials or whatever. They also, I mean, if we're going to talk about Windows, like you can go buy ARM Windows machines right now. And they have an interesting number of benefits, but also like more constraints we expected. And they're also like not very fast. And so the going assumption is that Apple can do what Qualcomm couldn't and make a fast chip because Apple does that on phones and tablets all the time. But, you know, never underestimate Microsoft's ability to screw up an app framework transition.

• 44:52Speaker 05

  But there are like, there are dangerous roads to go down when you are going to try and support both ARM and Intel at the same time, which whether or not they're going to sunset Intel, assuming they are, they still are going to have to support both for a while. And like, Microsoft hasn't like managed that very well. And so Apple needs to make sure that it does.

• 45:10Nilay Patel?

  So we, at the very beginning of all this, you brought up Chrome, which is like half a joke and half extremely serious business, right? If you make a laptop and it runs Chrome badly, I know people are going to react to this. You make a laptop and it runs Chrome badly, you have made a bad laptop.

• 45:31Nilay Patel?

  And that's not because I love Chrome. It's right, like Chrome destroys my battery life and is slow and is wonky and like whatever. Chrome is an aircraft carrier of a piece of software. It's not great, but it is the thing people want. Right? It's, it's, it's the standard. It's when you get a new laptop, what do you do? You run up to download Chrome and then like Walt tweets at you to download Safari instead. Like there's like an active effort, like people like evangelize Safari because Chrome is the default. And it is at the point when Microsoft made the Surface Pro X, which is an ARM computer, they dropped their own web browser, Edge, and they moved it to Chromium so that they could improve the foundation of Chrome,

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  such that it ran well on their computer, such that they could manage the ARM transition.

• 46:19Speaker 05

  I don't know if I'd say that's like the reason, but it's, it's one of them. Sure.

• 46:23Nilay Patel?

  Of the 500 reasons to do it, I would say that ranks in the top five.

• 46:27Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 46:28Nilay Patel?

  Right? We need processor independence and the browser that everybody wants has to run well on the processors we choose. So we are going to, we're going to more actively control that code base and express the Chrome engine, the Chromium engine in Edge.

• 46:41Speaker 05

  Oh, so you're saying they didn't, they didn't do it so that like Chrome would run better. They did it because people want Chrome. We're just going to give them Chrome or we're going to give them like the Microsoft version of Chrome. That I believe.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. There's like a web standards, like whatever, it's all in there. And then I think on next to that is we, there's a chance ARM can build a product like the Surface Pro X and Intel can't. So if we want to build products like this, we need to be in control around Destiny.

• 47:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  Right. And like Electron isn't going away. So we should make that work better on ARM.

• 47:11Speaker 05

  I mean, it's gone away for me on the Surface Pro X. I just run PWAs of like individual app windows. And honestly, I would use Safari on the Mac, except that Apple doesn't let you make single site browser windows to like turn Gmail into an app on your Mac with Safari. It's very strange.

• 47:30Nilay Patel?

  Does Fluid still exist?

• 47:32Speaker 05

  Oh, there's a million different things. There's Fluid, there's, there's a whole bunch of like, there's newer versions of more modern versions of Fluid that you can get. But it's like a hassle, right? I'd rather just like click turn this into an app in my browser, which Edge lets me do, which Chrome lets me do, which Firefox lets me do, you know, go down the line. And for whatever reason, you can kind of do it on like the iPad and on the iPhone with Safari, but you can't do it on a Mac.

• 47:58Nilay Patel?

  I just want to be clear. I'm not saying the only purpose of laptops is to run Chrome. I'm saying it is one of the most commonly used, most popular software products in the world. It means like it's just like a universal democratic free piece of software that people use to do the thing they do most commonly, which is browse the web. If you make a laptop and using that piece of code makes your laptop suck, like you've kind of missed a trick, right? And that's already the case with Macs. And the answer is use Safari instead. Okay, fine. But when we review Mac laptops, I'm like, the battery life sucked with Chrome because that is important information for people to know. If they put out an ARM Mac and battery life craters because they're emulating x86 already running Chrome badly, like they're

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  going to be in a world of hurt. And I do not expect Apple's going to be like, we're transitioning Safari to the Chromium engine.

• 48:49Speaker 05

  No.

• 48:49Nilay Patel?

  Because the history is they were all on the same engine and they walked away.

• 48:54Speaker 05

  So there is ARM Chrome. Like you can buy an ARM based Chromebook. I mean, you used to be able to. They're not very common anymore for whatever reason. But it is within the realm of possibility that Apple and Google had a conversation. They seem to be doing that more often lately. And when there's an ARM based version of the Mac, there will be a native ARM version of Chrome that won't completely crater your battery because it has to run through some version of emulation.

• 49:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I hate to just harp on Chrome here. It just seems like the, you go into the Apple Store, you buy the thing, you come home. What is a thing many, many people are very likely to do, right? And like, It's those kinds of questions and those kinds of trade offs that Apple needs to answer. I don't think, and I've seen this a lot, like jumping all the way to when will Photoshop be native on Mac for ARM? The people who are buying Photoshop, who are spending thousands of dollars a year on Creative Cloud subscriptions, they know, right?

• 49:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  And they're going to keep buying the Intel computers to do their work until it's ready. It's the people who just go to the store and buy a computer to go to college or whatever, who are going to be faced with these trade offs and Apple has to be able to communicate what those trade offs are. All that said, I really want this to happen because I, I do kind of want to see what an A series processor without thermal constraints can do. We've been waiting to see it for years. I do want an E12 inch MacBook. I do not like my 11 inch iPad with the keyboard cover. Every time I use it, I'm like, man, I wish this was a Mac. Like, I wish I could window these apps. Like, there's a bunch of stuff the Mac does really well in a smaller form factor with long battery life would be amazing. I just, I think the danger here is that they don't communicate well.

• 50:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's the main danger. Like I, and there, there is also the danger that they will screw up either the app model or the transition or whatever. Like, we saw them try and get people on Catalyst and that has not gone well. So they don't have a perfect track record right now in recent history. So I'm trusting they're not going to screw it up, but I am also trusting that they're not going to screw up the communication. And that's two levels of screw ups that are going to multiply on each other if they don't get it right. So the risk is very high.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I also think that the risk that sort of the Mac application community just decides it isn't worth it is very high, right? If you are, we bring up Adobe a lot, but if you are Adobe or you're Cinema 4D or you're any of these huge products that people use, and you're being asked to like support a new processor architecture, and Apple doesn't seem to like you very much, and many of your customers are just using Windows, like that Pro Mac ecosystem, it's, it just starts to look very different. That said, they did make a big deal out of the Mac Pro and how much of the Pros and blah, blah, blah.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 51:33Speaker 05

  But if you're a pro shop, I mean, this cuts both ways. You, you're not just a consumer buying a laptop. You're like, you're running a business that depends on computers in some way. And you look at the cost of dealing with a processor transition and whether or not the apps your team needs are available. And you, you weigh that against the cost of screw it, we're just switching to Windows.

• 51:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I was talking to a designer friend of mine at a big company and he was like, dude, we haven't used Photoshop in like two years. We moved everything to Figma and I can do all my work in a Chromebook. And he's like, that's just better for me. And like, why would I buy Mac? Why would I care about Adobe? Like, and that's like a big company. There is a world in which something else is happening next to all of this that we're not paying enough attention to. And like this process actually doesn't matter because

• 52:22Speaker 05

  Everyone's using Electron anyway.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we gotta get somebody from Electron. The problem with Electron is there's no like CEO. It's an open source project. So it's composed of like multiple committees of people who have real jobs. I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna get somebody from Electron on the show.

• 52:36Speaker 05

  Okay. Hey Neil, I remember when we said we were working to talk about the ARM transition for an hour?

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  What are we at, 55 minutes?

• 52:44Speaker 05

  We should talk about this, uh, this Google counter suit against Sonos.

• 52:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh man, this is so emo. No, I'm into it. I love talking about patents. Okay, so in January at CES, Sonos like came out hard, sued Google. There was a big story in The Times. Patrick Spence was out in the world. He was basically saying, "Google, we wanted to use Play Music. We integrated Play Music. Google turned around, stole our intellectual property, put out the Chromecast audio and the suite of Chromecast products."

• 53:13Speaker 05

  Which I just want to point out is the largest impact Google Play Music has had on the world, full stop.

• 53:19Nilay Patel?

  So Sonos' story was Google is undercutting our products. They, they took our technology, they put out their products, they priced them super low because their real business model is selling ads. So they're doing predatory pricing and pricing their products super low. And then we wanted to integrate Google Assistant. You will recall it took forever for Sonos Smart Thickers to support Assistant. They sorted Alexa right away. It took forever for them to support Assistant. And they kept on saying it was technical reasons. Then it comes out that what Sonos really wanted was for the Alexa wake word and the Hey Google wake word to be active at the same time. And Google said, no. And they fought and fought and fought. And Google eventually said, you can have assistant or not, right?

• 54:01Speaker 05

  Meanwhile, Amazon's on the side, like, starting a consortium of people who want open access to voice assistants as like, literally just a troll on Google.

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  Part of this deal is to get the assistance, Sonos has to turn over six months of its product for to Google. They're already mad at Google is like ripping off their IP and now they don't want to show them their products. So they filed the patent lawsuit.

• 54:21Speaker 05

  Also, also, uh, Google smart speakers, surprisingly inexpensive.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. So they, they, they're copying the products, making them super cheap. Sonos files a patent lawsuit. The patents are on, if you, whatever, I'll talk about the patent submit. I will talk about the patent submit. Sonos files a patent lawsuits, the sort of important top level thing to know about the patent Sonos used in that lawsuit are it had previously sued Denon, the home theater company. Denon has a multi-room audio system called HEOS, which it just doesn't, I don't think most people even know about it, but yep.

• 54:56Speaker 05

  It's, it's the perfect thing for, for like, like audio bros. He os, he os.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  It's he os. It's crazy. Denon has it. You can buy a bunch of Denon speakers and you can multi-room them, whatever. Sonos sued them for patent infringement. Sonos won. So they've tested these patents in court. Okay, it's months later. Google told us yesterday they're gonna countersue Sonos. Sonos is like on fire, right? Like Patrick Spence was just on the, on the podcast, you can go back and listen to that interview. The end of that interview is all about like, there have to be like, small companies in America are under threat by the tech giants. He testified in front of Congress and said, like, we have to be able to compete. We're, we're okay to compete with big companies. We just want to do it fairly. He's mad about something he calls efficient infringement, which is a legal theory that a big company like Google can say, you know what we're gonna do? We're

• 55:47Nilay Patel?

  gonna infringe these patents. We, we, we know we're gonna do it. The cost of paying off the patent infringement lawsuit and the penalty is low enough such that if we win in the market, that's a useful cost. We're going to pay our way into market domination.

• 56:03Speaker 05

  We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna break the law or we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna steal your stuff and it'll cost less than the money we'll make by just having sold the things.

• 56:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What is the cost of owning the smart speaker market, some X million dollars to Sonos for patent infringement?

• 56:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:16Nilay Patel?

  That's a good deal. Efficient. It's efficient. Efficient infringement. So you can listen to Spence. He like talks about this a lot. Google is like emo. They're like, our feelings are hurt.

• 56:26Speaker 05

  It's insane. They're just like, oh, why? They're a huge, world spanning, global mega corporation. And they're like, why did Sonos say such mean things about us?

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Google has insisted that they, you know, they, they have all these, they have lots of patents. They buy companies, they get their patents, they file lots of patents. Google is like, we helped them. We assisted them in integrating assistant in Google Play Music.

• 56:51Speaker 05

  That's Google's whole thing. They're, they're helpful. That's their like motto.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so here's their statement. Google is proud of its more than five year partnership with Sonos and has worked constructively with Sonos to make the company's product work seamlessly by building special integrations for Sonos. Right. So Google's position is we don't want to do this, but we have to defend ourselves. Here's our set of patents. We're going to sue Sonos right back. Okay. So that's the kind of the state of things. I would look at this and say, what Sonos wants is to be treated more fairly. They've got, they're an older company. They're not a new company. So they do have this patent library. They've been building and engineering and developing the stuff and patenting it over time. And so, you know, their position very clearly is we just want to be treated fairly. We're going to use our patents that we think you're copying.

• 57:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:34Nilay Patel?

  To, as a leverage in a negotiation where we want to be treated fairly. I do not think what they want is to win a patent lawsuit and then collect licensing fees from Google.

• 57:42Speaker 05

  Well, and Patrick Spence, in particular, knows better than to think that just having a lot of really great patents, because you're an old company, is a path to success. He used to work at BlackBerry.

• 57:53Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Yeah, he knows. He's, he absolutely knows. Spence's response to Google filing the lawsuit is fiery.

• 58:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  So I emailed him yesterday and said, hey, Google filed, here's our story. Do you have a statement? I won't read the whole thing. You can look at us. It's, it's long, but I'll just read the, the heart of it. As we saw in the past with Eero and have seen most recently with Zoom, Google seems to have no shame in copying the innovations of smaller American companies in their attempts to extend their search and advertising monopolies into new categories. And so what he's specifically referencing there is Eero was another small company owned by Amazon. It's the way these things go. Google put out the Google Wi-Fi, dramatically undercut the price of the Eero and then made it the first search result when you search for Eero. And like that decimated Eero's business and then their business went upside down and they had to sell themselves to Amazon.

• 58:41Speaker 05

  They bought advertisements on their own website to show it as an ad.

• 58:44Nilay Patel?

  I do not believe any company buying its own product counts for shit. I'm sorry. Like Google, like whatever.

• 58:53Speaker 05

  I will say, I just like, you are right. They, they did some really sketchy things. But at some point, like when Google doing a sketchy thing with the search algorithm is the nuclear thing. It's what Yelp has been accusing them of. And it's like, it's the thing that like, once they like, can be, once you can prove they've crossed that Rubicon, like all bets are off. Google is fully evil. And like, I'm not saying that like, buying your own ad is evil, is not evil, rather. Like, sure, that's like, that's, that's cheap, whatever. But I don't, we can't, we don't have them dead to rights that they actually messed with the algorithm.

• 59:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. What they do is they take the 10 blue links, which are the algorithm, which is can't touch it, pristine, organic search, gotta be the best information. And they just like scoot it down the page. And then they put boxes full of Google shit above it. And so you, whatever. This is like deep into like Google angry at Google territory. This is whatever company says to us. What he's saying about Zoom is Zoom became a competitor and the Google meet button just got bigger and bigger and bigger in Google Calendar.

• 59:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  Right. And like, they're using their dominance to extend it in other categories.

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So that's like the shape of it. What I will tell you is, and I'll write this piece up because honestly, who else is gonna write this piece up? When you look at the patents that both companies are asserting, it will drive you crazy. It will make you frustrated that software patents exist. Like in a deep emotional way. So Sonos' patents are like,

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  Syncing audio streams on multiple devices.

• 1:00:27Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:00:28Nilay Patel?

  That's hard. They had to figure it out. They got their patent on it. Great. But should they be able to block everybody else from doing it in a similar way? Like, I don't know the answer to that. That's like a philosoph- deeply philosophical question. Uh, setting up speakers, they have a patent on that.

• 1:00:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:43Nilay Patel?

  Does the Google product look substantially like the thing that Sonos has patented? Yeah.

• 1:00:47Speaker 05

  Well, and this gets into like methods, like you patent a method, you don't patent the idea, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like deep in the weeds. Uh, Google's patents are just all over the goddamn map. Like, I'll just be honest with you. Like, it's a patent on, um, one of their patents is literally the sort of the inoperable part of it. Describes how it's a patent on, um, sending wireless signals to an audio device. But the audio device that it's talking about, like the system it's for is for like smoke alarms.

• 1:01:14Nilay Patel?

  And it's like a patent on like wireless smoke alarm sensor stuff. But the patent is written so broadly that Google thinks it can apply it to the Sonos wireless speaker. Does that make you happy? There's like, are, are we happy that we're at this point with patents? Like, no. There's a patent on search across multiple services. Like, you've got a bunch of, you've got a bunch of music services and you search for a song and it shows you all the services on. Google says it has a patent on that idea. Are you hap- are we happy that that exist- like, there's a level of this underneath it all. Where they, the leverage they're using each other, against each other is like, oh, I feel icky about all of this.

• 1:01:50Speaker 05

  Right. Like, it's actually dangerous to like, start setting precedent on these patents, letting companies do things or not letting companies do things. Because those patents end up like being kind of important to make all sorts of different kinds of technology.

• 1:02:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so like that, I'll write up that piece. I'll, I will take the time to try to explain all the patents are. Whatever. There's a lot of hearings. There's something called a, a marksman hearing or a markman, sorry, let's take that again. There's something called a markman hearing where the, the first thing you have to do is argue in front of the court over what your patents actually mean.

• 1:02:21Speaker 05

  Great.

• 1:02:21Nilay Patel?

  So, like, you're, you're not even at that step of this thing yet. Two lost to reply, they have to deny each other. I think all of this comes down to they are negotiating against each other. And they're, they happen to be using patent lawsuits to do it. I think, once you step through the negotiation to, what happens if Sonos gets very loud about, we think this core bit of multi-room speaker technology is a patent that we should enforce all the time?

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, that could, you know, right? Like, what happens if Google says, uh, our patent on authorizing DRM to multiple devices is operable and we're gonna enforce it? That's bad. Like, there, there's some, there's some real tricky stuff in there. So I think, I don't know. Like, I, like I said, the, there's the business strategy stuff. I'm pretty clear in where I stand on that. Right? Tech giants are really big. Google is, you know, they wanna be the adorable, helpful company.

• 1:03:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  They are not shy about crushing whatever in their way. Amazon is not shy about crushing whatever in its way. Apple's not shy about it.

• 1:03:23Speaker 05

  And their feelings are very hurt if you say that they are doing that.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  Right. And they, and they, and they're like, we're open. We only have the patents, so we don't use them. And it's like, well dude, you're using your smoke alarm patent against a speaker company right now.

• 1:03:33Speaker 05

  Well, but I, the, the last big patent lawsuit that Google actually filed that I could find is like 2013. So it has been a minute. That doesn't mean that this is not, this is good and they're cool and whatever. But it has been a minute. Let me ask you one last question. We, we sort of know using lawsuits as like negotiating tactics to get a better business deal. Like, that feels fine.

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 05

  I don't think that, uh, you, you might be tempted to think that like Spence's congressional testimony and complaining about Google's monopoly is equally a negotiating tactic. But like, even if it is, and I kinda don't think it is, that's like a hard thing to walk back from.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I, I mean, he sent me this statement. It's in our story. Go read it.

• 1:04:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, you can evaluate for yourself how Patrick Spence feels about Google. Right? Like, "We're mostly sad to see a once innovative company that started the mission of do no evil, avoid addressing the fact they've infringed on our inventions and have instead turned to the strong-arm tactics that the robber barons of old would have applauded." Wow. I don't think he's worried about conditioning his feelings about Google. I do think that, I mean, he said this to me several times. I don't remember if he said this on the, on the show this last time. His point is, we can't all just work for four companies. There needs to be some check on the size and ambition of these companies, such that new companies, smaller companies, mid-sized companies can exist and compete fairly. Like I said, I'm fully behind that. Anybody who listens to the show knows that's mostly what we talk about.

• 1:04:59Nilay Patel?

  Once you get to the specifics of, do I love software patents of this kind? Like the patent I think about all the time. The patent that like helped us build the Verge audience at the very beginning, when Apple and Google and Samsung were all suing each other. And we did like hardcore Android iOS patent coverage. Is Apple had a patent on Slide to Unlock. Right. Yep. And the patent was insanely specific. And we made a whole video about all the different ways people are getting around it. And it's like, what did that serve anyone? At the end of the day, a bunch of lawyers got paid. And it turns out Samsung still made its phones. Yep. And 11 versions of Android exist. Like, what, did Apple get anything out of that effort? Other than being mad, like, no. So I would say I have mixed feelings about this, but I do hope that like,

• 1:05:43Nilay Patel?

  yeah, I would like to be able to say both Alexa and hey, Google to my son or speaker. That'd be cool. That'd be a good product to have in the market. All right, we, all three of these things we could do forever. We should take a break and come back. James Vincent is gonna join us. We gotta talk about facial recognition. There's a lot happening.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

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• 1:07:04Nilay Patel?

  James Vincent, welcome to the Vergecast.

• 1:07:06Speaker 09

  Hello, lovely to be here.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  It's good to have you. It's been a minute since you've been on. We've talked in the past. But if the audience doesn't know, James, you're our AI reporter. There is a lot of AI news happening in the world. I want to unpack, it's actually the opposite of news. Big companies are saying they're not going to make facial recognition technology. So just the quick rundown, IBM announced it's no longer an offer to develop or research facial recognition technology. There's some important caveats to that. Amazon has banned the police from using its facial recognition system called Recognition for the next year, which is... Oh, another caveat? Internally cava... And then Microsoft, which has sort of talked about this a lot, has said, "We will not sell facial recognition to the police until Congress passes a privacy law."

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  Another caveat, like they're all caveated announcements. But just before we started recording, I was saying, "You do not often see a technology at this stage of development halted in any way because of social concerns." So walk us through what's happening. Obviously, this is in the context of Black Lives Matter and the protests, but walk us through what is going on with these announcements and how they work.

• 1:08:16Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, so I think something that I definitely want to highlight up top is the history of criticism of these systems, which goes back years. And there's a few researchers, particularly Joy Belenwini and Timmy Gebrew, who in 2018 published a paper called Gender Shades, which they really sort of provided the first comprehensive empirical evidence that there are racial and gender biases with these systems. So that's been a line of criticism that's been picked up, pushed forward by people like the ACLU. And now, obviously, with the protests across America and greater scrutiny on, you

• 1:08:57Speaker 09

  know, police and law enforcement in general, that's now pushed that to the fore. But these criticisms go back years. So it's really important that they're now being talked about and action is happening. As you said, there's been three announcements, IBM on Monday, Amazon on Wednesday, Microsoft on Thursday. But each of them deserves different caveats. Amazon and Microsoft announcements obviously goes together because they're going for a 12-month ban. And IBM's goes in a different slot because they're saying, we're going to stop doing this totally. However, I would say that I've been desperately trying to get IBM to answer some specific questions about the sort of scope of this ban, and they have been very unhelpful. I don't know, you both will have experienced this before, when you go, okay,

• 1:09:40Speaker 09

  so I have a little question here, and I'd just like a yes or no answer. And how do you feel about giving that? And I'll go, James, we've written a blog post. If you'd just like to read the blog post, that'll explain everything. And you go, yeah, no, I read the blog post, but I had some questions about the blog post. And they were like, no, but have you really read the blog post?

• 1:09:57Speaker 05

  You know, for a company who makes software that claims to like, understand the breadth of human knowledge and is able to like, actually literally debate you, the inability to engage in a discussion about its products is fascinating. Maybe you're actually talking to their debate AI and not to a real human.

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. Yeah, it turns out Watson sucks. It only generates blog posts with ambiguous claims and cannot answer a follow-up. So, James, real quick, just give us a brief intro. How does facial recognition work?

• 1:10:30Speaker 09

  So facial recognition is based on machine learning, which is a sort of technology that looks for patterns in large data sets and then tries to predict or find those patterns elsewhere. In this case, the patterns it's looking for are measurements based on your face. Now, there's lots of different ways that these algorithms work, but basically they're looking for, say, the distances between certain landmark features on your face. That could be the distance between your eyes, from your nostrils to the tip of your mouth, between your eyebrows. All those sorts of things. So they will be scanning faces, they will be measuring those little points and then they will be comparing them to a database.

• 1:11:08Speaker 09

  There's different ways that could happen. You might be doing a one to many find where you have a face that you've, say, recorded on CCTV and you're looking for it in a big watch list of people, or it might be a one to one thing, which is what happens at a passport border check where you have one picture, one face, and you're just looking to see if they're a match or not. Those technologies are implemented in very various ways. You know, some people use them to pull footage from CCTV that they analyze later. Some do live CCTV stuff, that's happened in London, for example, and some want to integrate them onto body cameras as well. So there's a lot of different ways this is coming out, but you're basically getting an algorithm that looks at your face and looks to see if it matches another.

• 1:11:49Nilay Patel?

  Let's start at the top, right? There was the gender shades paper. There is this just enormous body of evidence that facial recognition systems are biased against gender and race. Just unpack that a little bit. What does that actually mean in practice for people? What should people understand about that?

• 1:12:07Speaker 09

  So that means that the same system, when it's looking at a white face, when it's looking at the face of a person of color, it is going to be just less accurate when it comes to matching identities, when it comes to just simply saying, say, what gender it thinks that person is. These algorithms consistently get lower scores for non-white faces. I mean, it's really as simple as that. The huge terrifying scary things is when you think about how those judgments are then going to be used by people with power over your life, whether that's the law enforcement or whether that's a private company, many of whom are buying these systems and integrating them, say, into a watch list for their shop.

• 1:12:49Speaker 09

  And they are going to start going, well, system says you're on our naughty list and you can't come into the shop. And, you know, what recourse do you have in that scenario?

• 1:12:58Nilay Patel?

  Right. So I always think of this in terms of the TSA. As a brown man who regularly travels with a bag full of batteries and wires. I have many interactions with the TSA, but I'm in the airport. Somebody's on a watch list. The TSA facial recognition system looks at me, gets it wrong. Has it because it has a low accuracy score. It will look at me, get it wrong. And then I end up with no recourse, saying, I'm not that person.

• 1:13:24Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  Right. Because it's an automated system that I cannot see.

• 1:13:27Speaker 09

  Exactly, exactly. And at that point, it's often the case that when you've been flagged by these systems, then that gives the individuals, the humans, the response, you know, the, the, the opportunity to detain you, to question you, to take your stuff, to look through your stuff. So it gives them precedent and that precedent is now biased in the way that we, you know, think law enforcement more generally shows racial biases.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  Right. And this is, to me, the connection to all of this is our systems often just reflect the society in which we live, right? I mean, I, I keep thinking about Tay, the Microsoft chatbot. It was like instantly trained to be a Nazi, like in, inside of a day, the, the user training that the bot received made it extremely racist. Okay. So that's the big picture. I know you have some questions for I've in if you're for the listener, James's frustration with big companies telling you to read it. It's like the most, it is the single most common thing that happens. Like, uh, companies often tell us to make things up or read between the lines. So we'll seem smart. And I'm like, I don't want, I would prefer to feel, be very dumb and for you to be smart. And like, no, you be smart. It happens all the time. But here's my read of the IBM announcement.

• 1:14:35Nilay Patel?

  IBM's technology is bad. It isn't winning in the market and they opportunistically took this moment to say, we're not going to sell it.

• 1:14:43Speaker 09

  So I don't know. So their, their technology is definitely has problems, but they are doing badly and other companies are doing badly as well. I, it is, so the basic truth here is that IBM, Amazon and Microsoft, none of them are winning in this market right now. None of them are the big player in law enforcement facial recognition. The big players are companies you've probably never heard of. They're NEC, they're Jamalto, they're Idemia, um, and they're new players like Clearview.

• 1:15:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm glad you brought up ClearView because this has been like you saying they're not winners in the market. This has been one of my big questions. There's been a lot of questions, especially around Amazon. You know, they're the ones who have been, I think, maybe criticized the most for problems with race and facial recognition. But they said, we're not going to sell the police for a year. And I was like, do you sell the police now? And then ClearView, ClearView AI came out with this like victory lap statement. That's like, unlike Amazon recognition, our stuff is great and the cops can keep using it whenever they want. It was very strange.

• 1:15:44Speaker 09

  Yeah. So the thing is, I don't think anyone has a clear picture of exactly how many agencies in which states are using which company's technology. We really just don't know that. We know that some big companies, NEC I mentioned earlier, they're a Japanese firm. They have, they're used by, I think, more than a thousand law enforcement agencies in America in 20 states. But we don't have exact numbers for each of these firms. Yeah, that's just something we don't know.

• 1:16:12Nilay Patel?

  So there are these smaller, well, NEC is not a small company.

• 1:16:16Speaker 09

  No.

• 1:16:16Nilay Patel?

  In sort of our consumer world, we don't think about them much. Then there's other smaller players. ClearView is a new company that was very quiet until recently, when a bunch of reporting sort of thrust them onto the scene. They're not stopping. So if Amazon, Microsoft, IBM aren't winning in the market. If, if they can't walk away from the police and then get the thing that they want, right? Microsoft wants a privacy law. Amazon presumably wants something to happen such that selling recognition doesn't get it in trouble anymore.

• 1:16:48Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Nilay Patel?

  IBM is probably hoping some, somebody works really hard and makes Watson good. But if they're just going to lose to these smaller companies that are not as constrained in their behavior. What is the benefit of walking away from this market for them?

• 1:17:03Speaker 09

  I think it just reduces public scrutiny of them. And the other answer is that they will win in plenty of other ways. Facial recognition is one part of the services that they can provide to these law enforcement agencies, to ICE, to CBP, to all these sorts of government institutions. They may not have to, they may not want to sell the algorithms themselves because that's obviously become a pressure point in terms of scrutiny. And it's very obvious to see, okay, this is the point where this product fails. We know it's bad. They just go, okay, we don't sell that. We will sell everything else, though. How about that? We'll give you the servers and we'll do the cameras. You know, Amazon, for example, may have stopped its facial recognition stuff for a year with law enforcement, but it still has Ring. It's a home camera system.

• 1:17:48Speaker 09

  That has, as far as we know, based on reports, contracts with more than a thousand law enforcement agencies. And they encourage owners of Ring's system to pull footage from Amazon's cameras and give it to law enforcement agencies. And those agencies could then just get a company like Clearview and use their facial recognition technology on it. So even if these companies, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, step away from facial recognition algorithms, they are still in it to provide the infrastructure that supports those technologies.

• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  So facial recognition itself seems like just a very well-publicized or tip of the spear to a technologically enhanced police force. I think I've seen a lot of people saying we should just ban this technology entirely. Again, Microsoft has been, again, with caveats, saying, we need laws. I think their goal is to help write the laws because they're a big company and they spend a lot of money on lobbying. But they have just been very clear, there needs to be some legal boundaries over what facial recognition can and cannot be used for. Is it appropriate or useful to say, actually, we should just not have this technology at all?

• 1:18:53Speaker 09

  I think banning it entirely would be incredibly difficult. But I realise as soon as those words are out in my mouth, I sound like a defeatist. Do I think personally that the world would be a better place if facial recognition was never used by law enforcement? I actually think yes, because I think it destroys a certain level of public anonymity that has so far seemed to be pretty useful for our countries and how they deal with things like civil disobedience, for example, in protests. I don't think that that should necessarily change as quickly as it's currently changing. Now, is it possible to ban it? As I say, I don't think so, but it is possible to regulate it. So last year, for example, Congress started looking at some legislation called the Facial

• 1:19:38Speaker 09

  Recognition Technology Warrant Act. That was introduced to Congress last November, still being discussed. And that would basically mean police have to get a warrant before they can use facial recognition for public surveillance. That would include a 30-day maximum period for those warrants and exceptions for time-sensitive cases. Now, something like that, that feels to me like an incredibly sensible, you know, who would really argue with that as an intermediary step? I think something like that should be the target for now, but I know plenty of people would disagree with me and say, no, we need to go straight for an outright ban now and forever.

• 1:20:12Nilay Patel?

  And what is their argument for straight to an outright ban now and forever?

• 1:20:15Speaker 09

  That there's no good way for this technology to be used in how, you know, how our countries currently operate. There is just this presumption that we have a certain level of anonymity. You know, we have that online if we want. People say that's being eroded and we have it when we go out onto the street, whether that's walking into a shop or whether that's going to a protest. There is just no need for this sort of technology to track us every second of the day. If you think about sort of the revelations we've had in recent years about ad-tracking technology and how our movements across the web are being tracked and how that information is being traded very freely by private companies who are just using it to target advertisements

• 1:20:58Speaker 09

  at us, that is a direct analogue for me to facial recognition. And surveillance, you know, if you're being tracked across the web, what's to stop you being tracked across the city? Now, once that information is out there and it's, say, being traded and bought and sold by private companies, what's to stop it being taken by hackers? What's to stop it being used by oppressive governments? I think there's just a very, very sensible argument to be made that you're just future-proofing yourself against some future tyranny.

• 1:21:26Speaker 05

  So I, I think about this in the context of consumer devices, right? The, there are any number, Ring cameras, Nest cameras, Google, Home Hubs can sense when you're there, can identify you to some degree of accuracy, can personalize what they say. If you ban facial recognition entirely, that category of things goes away. Is there a potential for a split to say, oh, it actually is useful for my video doorbell to tell me that my family has arrived home, but it's so dangerous and so inaccurate that the cops are going to make mistakes that we don't want that to ever happen?

• 1:22:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that, that's what, that's what I think is the right way forward for this, which is just law, which is legislation focusing on use by law enforcement and related agencies. Very importantly, that includes ICE and Border Patrol as well, because they often get separated from domestic law enforcement. But actually, the way that they use this technology is just as likely to be dangerous and harmful to people.

• 1:22:31Speaker 05

  The, the legislation thing, I'm, I'm glad you brought up Microsoft, Neil, like, it's like, it seems like that's their tack with every complicated issue relating to technology is, well, we definitely want a law. And sometimes we'll like pause if there's, there's not a law, but we definitely want a law, there should be a law. And it's like, okay. But with facial recognition in particular, it just seems like it's like the most obvious example of there is no way that the legislative process, definitely in the US and maybe elsewhere, is able to come anywhere close to keeping up with the pace of technology. And so when a bunch of companies say, well, we would like a law, it sort of feels like, well, sure, you'd like a law, but by the time that happens, like, the entire landscape is going to have completely changed. You know,

• 1:23:16Speaker 05

  little companies I've never heard of are providing facial recognition to hundreds of police departments. It's great that these bigger companies are pulling out, but by the time we get a law, who knows how capable these smaller companies are actually going to be.

• 1:23:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. And what data sets they will be accessing or have accessed. I think that that combination of factors is very complicated. I think, you know, we've had Brad Smith, the president and chief legal officer of Microsoft on the show. I have been in rooms where Sachin Adella talks about it. I mean, they're Microsoft's general position, general posture is always, it would be great if the government was functional. Right. Like they're like, like that's just like where they operate from. They're a huge government contractor, you know, they're in a massive fight with Amazon over supplying the Defense Department. Like it's in Microsoft's interest for the functional government that it has a good relationship with for any number of reasons. They need somebody to sell to.

• 1:24:15Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like it'd be great if our client worked. What if our, what if our, what if one of our biggest clients was efficient and bought more stuff is like a good position for Microsoft to be in. I think they take the, the social responsibility aspect of it seriously, but I think that's why they come at it from there. I think IBM, you know, the caveats here are like, it sounds like they're still going to sell specialized facial recognition software. I mean, if you read that statement, it says they will not sell general purpose facial recognition software. It does not say they will not build some tailored application. And that those caveats, I think, are all related to eventually we will have some boundaries that are agreed on. And then inside of those boundaries, we can build a business.

• 1:24:57Nilay Patel?

  I think the bigger question for me is, well, the technology is still inaccurate. None of these companies have said, we're going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that we don't confuse two black faces. Which is the problem that is leading all of the energy to ban the stuff.

• 1:25:15Speaker 09

  I would, I would say that these companies have invested money in that. I don't think they're going to solve these problems, certainly not quickly. And that it just, if those problems are solved, that doesn't stop these technologies being used in bad ways. But IBM has created what they call a diverse faces data set. Amazon has sponsored research into, into, you know, improving those, those accuracy rates. But that's still, that's still in, you know, leads us to the question, okay, so you now have a perfectly accurate facial recognition system. Is that a good thing or not?

• 1:25:45Nilay Patel?

  That is worth diving into. Right now, the problem is we know it's inaccurate and that has led to, we should not use it because it will lead to the same kinds of policing outcomes. We already see that are biased across race and gender lines. If it's perfectly accurate, there are still an enormous set of problems. I think the question is, how do you even determine whether it's perfectly accurate? Is that, is that, is there an industry standard metric? Is there a test? Is there something that people will agree upon?

• 1:26:14Speaker 09

  So the sort of, as well as the work done by individual researchers, NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, which is a, you know, US government body that standardizes your weights and measures, for example. They do tests on facial recognition algorithms, but those tests have been criticized. So those tests are done where you have faces that are very well lit. They are well framed and they are sort of on a nice neat background. And you get faces of different ethnicities, et cetera, et cetera, different demographics, and you run those through those systems. However, researchers who are involved in this say that that's, that's an easy test

• 1:26:58Speaker 09

  in many ways, and it's not the same as doing this stuff in the wild. So one example with NEC, as well as selling to American law enforcement, they also run facial recognition trials in London, my, my home city. And an independent analyst, analysis of their algorithm, one of the very few, found that they had an 81% error rate, which is staggering. 81% of the matches their system found were incorrect.

• 1:27:29Nilay Patel?

  And what is the recourse for that? Right, if I, if I'm a purchaser of some software, how do I even know that? Right, I mean, if I open Microsoft Word and 81% of the characters I type are wrong, I'm like, screw it, I'm not using Microsoft Word anymore. But if you're just, if you're a shop owner and you're using the NEC software, how would you even know?

• 1:27:48Speaker 09

  Well, yeah, if you're a shop owner, you wouldn't. I mean, the trials that the NEC has been doing with the London Metropolitan Police, obviously, they have been designed to find out these sorts of things. And I should mention that the Met would dispute my figure of 81% there. They think there are, they think there are better metrics that, surprise, surprise, make the software look much more accurate. And they, that's How they want you to judge it, but the the underlying point here is that we are still finding out exactly how these things work in in the wild, as it were, how they work in real life. And we're still finding out about these effects. And to me, that supports definitely a moratorium on the use of this technology, because there are just so many unknown questions here, unknown answers, sorry.

• 1:28:32Nilay Patel?

  So I want to end by zooming all the way out and talking about action movies.

• 1:28:39Speaker 05

  Well, I thought you were gonna go for general AI, so this is great.

• 1:28:42Nilay Patel?

  No, yes, is well, James, will a general AI exist on what timeline? That's just that's what you ask AI reporters, right? Uh, no, I want to zoom out to action movies and thrillers. I feel like so much of the sort of common perception of facial recognition is a scene from a Mission Impossible movie where they finally catch the bad guy's face, right? They finally find out who the bad guy is and they get one spy photo of him at a casino in Monaco. And then they hit the button and they find out exactly where he is in the world in 20 seconds because he walked through a train station and they blow up the train station.

• 1:29:21Nilay Patel?

  That makes for a very good movie, but that seems like that's the promise law enforcement is making. It is does not seem like the promise they can keep. And I'm just wondering how much of that sort of common pop culture perception of what the systems can do is coloring the actual policy conversation.

• 1:29:40Speaker 09

  I mean, I think it it must be. It's hard for me to sort of know exactly what, say, police are thinking when they when they use this sort of equipment. But as an AI reporter, it's something I bump into all the time, that the the pop culture expectations set the bar incredibly high for what these things can do. And I I think actually. What these systems do do, even if they do it very badly, is they offer an answer, right? They will say, "We found a match." And sometimes people just really want a technology that says, "Yeah, here's what you do next. Here's the next thing you do." And I think that in itself is incredibly dangerous because, you know, I don't want to get into the technical details of it,

• 1:30:25Speaker 09

  but one thing that's caused a lot of arguments is this idea of confidence thresholds, which is basically how certain should a system be before it gives you an answer? Amazon has been terrible on this, basically. They've changed their answers on what they think is a decent confidence threshold many times. And we've had reports from police departments saying that they just crank it down because they just want an answer. And I think that's something that technology, we love it for, it gives us answers, but we don't often, or we don't enough, scrutinize exactly where those answers come from.

• 1:31:00Speaker 05

  You know, if I were a conspiracy theorist, and I'm not, but if I were, I would suggest that all of these very sexy, very accurate, very exciting scenes of people using facial recognition were planted to move the Overton window of what we think. But I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so instead what I will say is, "I don't like Batman anymore." Because there's that one scene in the movie.

• 1:31:23Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that is the plot of The Dark Knight.

• 1:31:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:31:27Speaker 09

  Oh, I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, he turns it off in the end.

• 1:31:30Nilay Patel?

  Right? He's like, "No one should have this, except for me, right now." Which, by the way, is a wholly consistent and reasonable policy position for any individual to have.

• 1:31:42Speaker 05

  Any.

• 1:31:42Nilay Patel?

  Like, everything would be fine if I was the supreme dictator of the tool. Like, that's how I feel. Like, "Oh, I should just be in charge. Twitter's moderation policy is a problem, I'll just do it myself." Not scalable. So, James, what happens next?

• 1:31:57Speaker 09

  I mean, the fight continues, I think is what a lot of the people who have been criticizing this stuff would definitely say. This, for a long time, companies have been, I mean, just not acting entirely... They've been acting disingenuously about this, basically. They've been burying their head in the sands a little bit and refusing to address this problem. This is now... You know, even though these are 12-month bans, they're obviously temporary and Amazon, Microsoft are obviously waiting for the new cycle to move on before they return to this stuff. It is still a staging post to invite greater scrutiny, discussion of what these systems mean and whether they should be a part of public life or not. And I, I hope this conversation continues.

• 1:32:42Nilay Patel?

  All right, James, thank you so much. We'll have to have you back. It sounds like we're gonna have to have you back soon. All right. Thanks to Andrew Webster and Megan for just making a part of The Verge Cast. It was good. That was great. Thanks to James Vincent for joining us. We love your feedback. You can talk to all of us. Andrew is A underscore Webster on Twitter. Megan is Megan underscore Nicolet with two Ts. James is at JJ Vincent. Dieter is at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. Love hearing from you. There's a bunch of newsletters you can subscribe to. Dieter's newsletter, Processor, is where he sub tweets Apple about being humble each and every day. That's out. You can subscribe to the Interface with Casey Newton. There's still a lot of 2:30 action. Casey just interviewed Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel. That's in the Interface. Go read that. That's at theverge.com/newsletter

• 1:33:27Nilay Patel?

  and theverge.cominterface. Subscribe to those. On Tuesday, we're back with the interview show. McKenna Kelly and I interviewed Senator Ed Markey about his proposed national broadband plan, expanding broadband. It's a wild interview. It was usually when you interview like a Senator, right? You're like, you're in person. He's got like a fleet of PR people or you're on the phone. There's like 45 people on the call. McKenna, I just talked to Senator Markey. He was just in his house by himself on Zoom, just freewheeling. It was, you'll hear it. He's a character. That's coming on Tuesday. We're back on Friday with the chat show. A lot going on. Love your feedback. Hit us up. We like hearing from you. Rock and roll.

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