Microsoft's Surface event, Pixel 7 and Pixel Watch reviews, and Meta Connect 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss the announcements at Meta Connect, the new products from Microsoft's Surface event, and reviews for Google's Pixel 7 and Pixel Watch. Meta Connect 2022: all the news on the Quest Pro The Meta Quest Pro is a cutting-edge headset looking for an audience Meta figured out legs for its Horizon avatars What does Mark Zuckerberg think ‘open’ means? Mark Zuckerberg takes a shot at Apple’s closed ecosystem FTC files to block Meta from buying VR fitness studio Within Google Pixel Watch review: it’s a smarter Fitbit Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro review: better and better Smartwatches, not phones, are where the action is at this year The biggest announcements from Microsoft’s Surface event Microsoft Office will become Microsoft 365 in major brand overhaul Microsoft’s Surface Studio 2 Plus ships with an RTX 3060 for $4,299 Microsoft’s Surface Pro 9 is the latest major gadget to ditch the headphone jack The Surface Laptop 5 arrives with Thunderbolt 4 but no AMD options Surface Pro 9 lets you pick between Intel or Arm 5G and new color options Microsoft partners with Meta to bring Teams, Office, Windows, and Xbox to VR Apple shows Windows some love with new Music, TV, and iCloud photos integration AI-generated imagery is the new clip art as Microsoft adds DALL-E to its Office suite New York’s weed laws mean marijuana is legal but the stores selling it aren’t yet Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today on The Vergecast, our crew reacts to all the news from Meta this week. We'll break down our reviews of the Pixel hardware and somehow Microsoft makes its way into literally everything this week. That's coming up right after this.

• 0:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:01Speaker 01

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

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the studio kind of smelling like weed.

• 2:06Alex Cranz?

  What are you guys doing in there?

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  We weren't doing anything. What I said to David as we walked in was, I bet that Kara Swisher was in here with her new Vox Media Podcast Network show, On with Kara Swisher, presented by New York Magazine.

• 2:19David Pierce?

  Listen, when you leave the New York Times, you get to just go crazy. That's what happens.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  Y'all want me to plug the show? I'm gonna mention that it smells like weed. Go subscribe to On with Kara Swisher wherever podcasts are served. Get that five-star review. Don't mention the weed thing to anyone that I report to.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Yes. Dear listener, there's no evidence to back up Eli's claim.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  Thanks, Liam.

• 2:41Nilay Patel?

  Opinions expressed on The Vergecast are not the opinions of Vox Media or Liam.

• 2:46Alex Cranz?

  We haven't even finished the intro. We've already done the disclaimer.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Hi, everybody. I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here.

• 2:53David Pierce?

  Hi, I'm sitting right next to you.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're

• 2:55David Pierce?

  This is very exciting.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  We're together in New York City, which hasn't happened in quite some time.

• 2:59David Pierce?

  No, and it smells like weed. I don't know if we've talked about that yet.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  I think that might just be New York City.

• 3:05David Pierce?

  It's very possible.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  There's a real chance it's just the city wafting into the office. Alex Cranz is also in New York City, but at her home.

• 3:13Alex Cranz?

  I am at my home, smoking weed, just furiously in the middle of this podcast. So I can feel like I'm there in the office with you. Yeah, that's great.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  That's good. She's got her Plex server. Do you use the Plex server to heat the weed? Or are you like a, is that a multi-functional vape situation?

• 3:30Alex Cranz?

  You know, it gets hot enough.

• 3:31David Pierce?

  Is it possible that, like, firing up the Plex server is like a euphemism for Alex smoking weed? And every time she talks about the Plex server, that's actually what's happening?

• 3:38Alex Cranz?

  It's actually a bong. It's great.

• 3:40Nilay Patel?

  That's good. No, you gotta heat it. So you heat the crystals. It vaporizes the weed. It doesn't burn it. Plex, the streamer of the future. All right. There's been quite a lot going on this week in tech news in addition to whatever happened in the studio earlier today, which was very chill.

• 3:57David Pierce?

  It's been a big week for everybody.

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  It's been a big week for everybody.

• 4:00Alex Cranz?

  Everybody's having a great time.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  On with Kara Swisher, now part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Meta Connect was this week. We, you all did a whole episode about Meta Connect. We should talk about it just a little bit. There's some, the VR people have legs now. The new Quest Pro is out. We, Google reviews hit, so the Pixel Watch review, Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro. And then Microsoft just announced everything that it had. It just was like, is anybody at Microsoft have something to announce? Today's the day. And they did it, like, all at once. Uh, so you got new Surface Studio 2 Plus, Surface Pro 9. It's 10 years of Surface, by the way.

• 4:35Alex Cranz?

  Crucial Microsoft Teams news.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  Crucial Teams news. They rebranded Office to Microsoft 365, which, something, but Tom sat down with Panos Panay, talked about 10 years of Surface, Surface left 5, I mean, just everything you can think of. Sacha just walked around Redmond saying, does anybody have anything to announce? And then Microsoft Teams came out and they said, we have Microsoft Teams to announce.

• 4:57Alex Cranz?

  Somebody walked behind him and took notes.

• 4:59David Pierce?

  That, that second step is very important. Sacha walks around and says, what do you have to announce? And then they tell him, and he says, how does Teams figure into this? And then they tell him, and then they get to announce it.

• 5:07Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft announced so much stuff, they announced stuff at Facebook's event.

• 5:12David Pierce?

  It just spilled over.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  They're like, this is our event too. So let's, let's quickly start with Meta Connect. We, you all did a whole episode on it already, so we don't have to overdo it, but Quest Pro 2 kind of looks incredible. It also kind of looks like an expensive Boondoggle. I can't tell.

• 5:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. Both of those things are true at the same time, right? Like, it is, by all accounts, very impressive. The facial expression tracking seems to be pretty good. The pass-through video seems to be pretty good. The overwhelming question is like, what is this for and who's going to buy it? And there were a bunch of people on Twitter who were like, how dare you not love the future? I can't wait to spend $1,500 on the Quest Pro. Uh, and then it's like, what are you gonna do with it? And they're like, well, I'm gonna have it.

• 5:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's how I, I almost pre-ordered one. I came so close to pre-ordering one yesterday. Just to have.

• 5:56Alex Cranz?

  So you could just play like Supernatural and Beat Saber, but in slightly higher resolution.

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  But so there's that. So we use our Quest 2 like almost every day to do Supernatural. It's great. Love it.

• 6:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:09Nilay Patel?

  Almost nothing else happens in this VR headset. So whatever. But then, you know, you look at the white boardy thing that they did so that controllers are really cool. They have, the controllers now have their own sensors. So the controllers have their own sense of where they are in a room. They do their own inside out tracking and they have all these haptics. So Addy and Alex Heath, who both got to use the thing were like, it actually feels like you're pushing the controller against something when you write. And the bottoms, you can screw in little stylus tips. You gotta love this. Virtual E Ink drawing tablets. Come on.

• 6:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, it brings me a lot of joy. Like I think, I think the Quest Pro is very, very cool. But I was thinking about this earlier this week, you know, we're coming up on the, what was it? The 30th anniversary of the Lisa, no 40th.

• 6:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Alex Cranz?

  Sold. The Apple Lisa, which like the Quest Pro was super, super cool and did a lot of really cool stuff that hadn't really been done before. And like the Quest Pro was super, super expensive. And unlike the Quest Pro ended up being buried in like a landfill somewhere in Utah.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Alex Cranz?

  But I think like, I just keep thinking about that and like how, how expensive this thing is and how cutting edge it is. And how it's probably a little too cutting edge. Probably not quite ready. Like the audience doesn't quite exist.

• 7:26Nilay Patel?

  The Lisa was supposed to be like a real product for Apple, right? This was like Steve Jobs thing before the Mac and then back and forth. And then he cruelly abandoned the Lisa.

• 7:37Alex Cranz?

  He took so long on it.

• 7:38Nilay Patel?

  The Mac.

• 7:38Alex Cranz?

  That he had to like get kicked off to do the Mac. They're like, stop, stop messing with the Lisa. You suck at it. Go do the Mac. And he just took all the best ideas and was like, here's the Mac.

• 7:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They made a smaller, cheaper one. Notably, the Mac also came from Apple. So like the Lisa is a disaster, but it's a disaster. It's sort of like almost sank Apple because they were betting too much on it. But then they refactored everything into the cheaper Mac and they did it, right? Zuck is not positioning the Quest Pro as the future of meta. He's like, I've taken yet another small step to my dream of permanently surveilling you in virtual reality. And here's the most advanced headset. And he has given a version of the speech now several times. He gave it to Joe Rogan. He gave it to Alex Heath. He's I've heard him say this thing. He's coming at it from two directions. So one, they are coming at sort of AR or

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  mixed reality from we're going to pack all the technology into the biggest headset we can design and build, but it'll have all the tech in it.

• 8:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  And that's the Quest Pro. And then we're going to make glasses that can actually fit your head and shove as much into that form factor. And over time, those things will converge. So he's basically got like Ray Bans with a camera over here. And he's got the Quest Pro over here that can actually do mixed reality. And his plan is they'll meet in the middle. I don't know why he thinks that's the right approach. Like, you should just, you know, like,

• 8:58David Pierce?

  So I kind of think it is. I mean, the, the reality is if you're, if you're doing it from one side, you're also doing the other side. You just don't ship it, right? You just, that's the stuff that like, lives in the labs that you make for a long time. And it's a, it's a big prototype. And then you make it a smaller prototype. And then eventually you can ship it inside of the thing. But the other thing Meta is trying to do is make all of the rest of this stuff happen. So like, they need stuff to be out there for developers to play with. They need people to be like dreaming up cool new apps. They need all of this stuff to happen all at once. So if they're to sit there inside until they can fit all of this tech into Ray Ban glasses, they're going to be way too early because they won't have given anybody anything to do, or anything to work with. So I kind of feel like,

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  But why ship the Ray Ban glasses?

• 9:37David Pierce?

  That I think is a more fair question.

• 9:40Nilay Patel?

  But I, I, That's what I mean. It's like,

• 9:42Alex Cranz?

  I think the Ray Ban glasses makes sense, though, because that was part of their attempt to normalize.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  Cameras on your face.

• 9:48Alex Cranz?

  The surveillance. Yeah, like, right? Like, that's the entire point of it is like, let's normalize cameras on your face. Because if we want AR to work in the future, people have to be comfortable being constantly surveilled by everyone around them at all times.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Alex Cranz?

  And like, I mean, I do kind of think that that idea of everything meet in the middle makes sense. But also, why do I want to spend $1,500 to be a beta tester? If I'm a developer who's, who's really excited about the future of VR, the Quest Pro makes sense. Are there enough of those developers to make the Quest Pro a success?

• 10:22Nilay Patel?

  No, and that's why you sign up Microsoft to throw the HoloLens out the window and put Microsoft Teams on the Quest Pro. And then you sign up Accenture,

• 10:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Nilay Patel?

  and you have the CEO of Accenture in hologram at your event, being like, we're going to do corporate training in the metaverse using Quest. Like, they are making a full-on enterprise play with this product.

• 10:45David Pierce?

  But not because this is the thing that has driven me the most crazy about all of these announcements. It's everybody has come out and said, you know, Microsoft and Meta believe VR is the future of work. Like, no, they don't. They absolutely do not think that. Sachin Adella even said to Ben Thompson that like, this might be a thing that you own, but this is not going to be like your primary device. You'll also have a laptop. You'll also have a phone. What this is, is like a pretty naked attempt to make a thing that someone will pay for. Right? Like, yeah, Google made Glass and it failed. And so Google went, Google Glass Enterprise. And then they sold it to some people. And that's just like, that's a, that's a thing you do when you can't get consumers to buy your device. You come up with this really narrow work thing and try to sell it that way. And it turns out that companies love to burn money on fancy, cool new technology that gets them in press

• 11:29David Pierce?

  releases from companies like Meta and Microsoft. And so this is, this is like a stepping stone to get from here to there. And I think anyone who is like, everybody thinks the first killer app for VR is work. No, it just isn't. And none of the companies building this think that. They just think this is a way for them to make some money while they continue to build deeply imperfect products into ones that actually work for people.

• 11:52Nilay Patel?

  So I will say that expensive technology happens in corporate America first is a real pattern.

• 11:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:58Nilay Patel?

  PCs happen in corporate America. Macs, actually, the first, they were so expensive. They're $4,000, $5,000 a piece. Graphic design shops are the thing that like blew the Mac up with desktop publishing. This is like ancient history now. But yeah, it was enterprise product.

• 12:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. It works.

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  My mom.

• 12:14Alex Cranz?

  I mean, even the BlackBerry.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the BlackBerry. I was saying my mom had a, one of those giant Motorola bag phones in her hospital gateway.

• 12:21Alex Cranz?

  Those are the best.

• 12:23Nilay Patel?

  So like there's, yeah, somewhere on the adoption curve, there's the business has a business need and it can solve it using this tool. It's just really unclear what beaming a Windows desktop into the metaverse does for you at work, which is more or less what they have promised. And then there's this, you know, they, they, they did the more realistic avatars, which aren't yet coming to teams. Like there's like all these bits and bobs that aren't yet connected, but you can see Microsoft was like, screw it. We don't want to pay for the holens. Also, we fired that guy.

• 12:53Alex Cranz?

  Alex Kipman.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  Alex Kipman is gone from Microsoft after a series of pretty devastating reports about his behavior. And they had this like, it just didn't work. It just didn't happen for them. And they can just divest themselves of that hardware investment, let Meta take all of the pain and get to work building software experiences that potentially, you know, they'll put on Apple's headset or whoever's headset when somebody wins.

• 13:13David Pierce?

  Which is more modern Microsoft anyway.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:15David Pierce?

  Like that basically tracks with who Microsoft wants to be as a company. And like, they might make a Surface headset someday, but like, there's no reason for Microsoft to really try super hard to be way ahead of the game here. They're much better off being on everybody else's stuff right now than trying to build it their own.

• 13:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Which is funny because the flip side, the next day they're like, Surface, the computers that we make.

• 13:37David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 13:38Nilay Patel?

  What were you saying, Alex?

• 13:39Alex Cranz?

  No, I was gonna say, I am putting my, my inbox at risk for saying this, but I do think Microsoft Teams is actually like sneakily a killer app for VR.

• 13:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 13:51Alex Cranz?

  All right. Yeah. I mean, again, my inbox just PR just flooded it as soon as I said that. Just a hundred.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  Alex Cranz, willing to accept future of work pitches.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  Alex at theverge.net.

• 14:05Alex Cranz?

  I'm so sorry.

• 14:06David Pierce?

  How will you collaborate in the metaverse?

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  AI predicts workplace collaboration.

• 14:11David Pierce?

  [email protected].

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:13David Pierce?

  She's ready.

• 14:13Alex Cranz?

  But I think that, I think there is a very small potential for VR to solve like a lot of the problems we're seeing in remote work, right? Like, remote work is, is, I think about this a lot because working at The Verge, we're a fully remote company. We have a lot of people and work has just changed and how we communicate with each other and how we can like just turn and talk to somebody has changed. And there is some desire to have that connectivity again. And Teams could, could.

• 14:38Alex Cranz?

  Do that if they nail it, but currently it's all super creepy and weird. And also like, nobody wants to have a meeting with their boss and get fired by like a cartoon avatar. That's just like a hellscape that we're all trying to avoid.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  Yes, that's

• 14:50Alex Cranz?

  But if Teams like figures out a way to be like a good VR app, then maybe that could be a thing.

• 14:58David Pierce?

  That, okay, I just, the, the, the logical leap that you just did in this sentence. If Teams can figure out how to be a good VR app is just enormous.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  Here's, I just wanna, just, here's a little, here's a little slice of life.

• 15:11Alex Cranz?

  They're not putting any resources towards HoloLens. They got, they can put it towards that now.

• 15:15David Pierce?

  And they love Teams.

• 15:16Nilay Patel?

  No, no, let me just offer everybody a little slice of corporate life. Sometimes we're all talking and I sense, boy, Slack makes everybody a jerk. It's happening again. It happens every day. Slack makes you a jerk. So you should stop doing that. You should talk to each other like adults with your voice. And so I say something like, let's get on a Slack call or let's hop on a Zoom or just call me. And I can hear the devastating sighs from 200 miles away. People just being like, oh. And all I'm asking them to do is push one button in the app in which they are already pushing buttons. And talk with their voice instead of their fingers. And people are like, oh, every day this happens.

• 15:58Alex Cranz?

  Every day.

• 15:59Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't matter what company you work in. It doesn't like, The Verge is a great culture. People love each other. Oh, right. Like, I assume if you work at a place where people like each other a lot, it's even a more devastating sigh. Now imagine being like, all right, coworker in Microsoft Teams. What I'd like to do is for you to put on your headset so you can look at me as a cartoon. So we can more intimately connect on an emotional level. I just don't think that's gonna go well.

• 16:26Alex Cranz?

  I feel like there's a lot of things they have to do.

• 16:31Alex Cranz?

  Like, there's at least three steps they have to clear. But, you know, it could happen.

• 16:36David Pierce?

  At least three. It seems fair.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  I cannot wait for you to get one of these headsets. I'm getting one of these headsets. We are only meeting in VR from now on.

• 16:43Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  I will say, we got a note, I can't remember if it was Addie or Alex, who got a note from a reader. It was like, "The thing I miss most in my life as a designer is whiteboards. Whiteboards are now, have always been, and always will be the future of collaboration. I am so excited about the virtual whiteboards." And I was like, "Yeah, I am too."

• 17:03David Pierce?

  We trash talk virtual whiteboards a lot, and we were put soundly in our place by that DM. I think it was Addie who got that.

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:10David Pierce?

  It was rough times.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's the last thing I want to talk about with Meta. It's what, and we, again, whole episode with Addie with Chris Grant, I believe. Go listen to that. But here's the thing I want to talk about on this.

• 17:20David Pierce?

  Is it legs?

• 17:21Nilay Patel?

  It's not legs.

• 17:22Alex Cranz?

  None of us on the call have legs.

• 17:23Nilay Patel?

  Although the way that Meta has co-opted the legs from being a joke to like, being like a joke they're in on is like, it's, you're not in on it yet. I hate to tell this to you. It's still a joke.

• 17:34David Pierce?

  The sentence that Mark Zuckerberg said out loud, that legs are probably the most requested feature on our roadmap, is just...

• 17:40Nilay Patel?

  It's not true. It's not true. Like, it's just, the most requested feature on the roadmap is like, "Don't make me nauseous."

• 17:47David Pierce?

  Better VR.

• 17:51Nilay Patel?

  Cool things.

• 17:52David Pierce?

  Okay, well, wait, keep going. What did you want to talk about?

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so what I want to talk about is, Zuck took this shot in the keynote at Apple. And again, you can tell he's got these like, these speeches, these fragments of speeches that he's been rehearsing. So he did it in the keynote, he did it with Alex. I've heard him say this stuff like this before. Where he's like, "In the history of computing that I'm aware of, sometimes the open system wins, and sometimes the closed system wins. And the only history of computing that he's talking about is mobile and PCs, which, to be fair, are the only eras of computing that we have all lived through." Sometimes I remember the Mark Zuckerberg is about my age, it terrifies me. And what he means is, in PCs, quote, "Open one, Microsoft one," and there were lots of PC vendors. And then in mobile, and this is wildly up for debate, he means a closed one because Apple's a closed ecosystem.

• 18:39Nilay Patel?

  We don't apparently mention Android in this conversation. The world's most dominant operating system does not count in Zuck's interpretation of Open V closed, right?

• 18:49Alex Cranz?

  Because we use iPhones in America.

• 18:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sure, but it's like, Android is more popular. I don't, I don't know what he means by winning and losing. Whatever. I just like, the Quest is an iPhone, right? Like, at best, it allows some side-

• 19:03Alex Cranz?

  Well, technically, it's an Android phone.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's right. It runs Android, and it allows side loading. You put other stores on it.

• 19:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  But like, the operating system is made by Meta. The hardware is made by Meta. Most of the applications are made by companies that have been bought by Meta. What do you, what are you talking about?

• 19:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  So Addy wrote a great piece that was like, what do you mean by open? And what he basically means by open is like, many app developers participate in our platform. And I just, I'm, I'm curious what you two think about it. Cause A, I don't even know that open has lost in this generation of mobile. Cause Android exists and there are lots of, there are lots of forks of Android out in the world running on phones. In China, for example, forked Android with no Google involved, running all over the place. There are lots of hardware vendors. Samsung obviously dominates. And it's the most popular operating system in the world. And in the previous era, it's like, sure, there are lots of PC makers, but I mean, they called it Windtel, and the government sued them for being a monopoly.

• 19:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a bold strategy to hold up 90s era Microsoft as like your bastion of openness.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, I just kinda don't get what the argument is. I've not, and like I said, he's been saying it in different forms around the same shape for a while now.

• 20:12Alex Cranz?

  I think he's trying to like, hope nobody notices that they, that Facebook, excuse me, Meta still makes the hardware. Meta is still in control, regardless of the software, regardless of the developers. They're still in control. It's not like when, when Microsoft did its VR attempt, what, in 2017, 2018? And they're like, everybody can do headsets. And everybody made that, there was the Acer headset and the HP headset, and then we never talked about it again.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Alex Cranz?

  Like, that's not happening at Meta. Meta is making the headsets. That's it. And if they control, if you control the hardware and you control the primary app store, how can you call yourself an open ecosystem?

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it's it's the primary app store has been like Microsoft would love to control the primary app store on Windows.

• 20:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  Like it's there.

• 20:57Alex Cranz?

  They can.

• 20:57Nilay Patel?

  No one uses it, you know, like Apple would love to control the Mac App Store. No one uses it like I it's to me, it's is the operating system and the hardware are they independent of each other? Then you can you start to begin to claim that things are open, right? Anyone can come build some hardware that runs this software. You can compete as a great hardware vendor, or you can on the flip side, anybody can build an operating system that runs on any piece of hardware, which is less likely. But, you know, I think in the Windows ecosystem, you can just run Linux.

• 21:25David Pierce?

  I think in so many ways, listening to Mark Zuckerberg talk about a lot of this stuff is like, you have to assume his entire brain is in like 2035 and is in a world where like the metaverse is everything he imagined. And I think he does genuinely imagine a like broad sort of standards based thing that works more like the open web than like the App Store, right? Because I think when he talks about open versus closed, like very specifically where that has bit him is like Apple, and I think the way I rephrase it, which I really liked, was basically like the extent to which they dictate the rules of the platform. And to the extent that there are lots of developers all over the world building stuff for Apple platforms, it's wildly open in that way. But Apple is like extremely in control of absolutely everything about the platform

• 22:09David Pierce?

  and can do whatever it wants to you for basically any reason at any time. And even if you don't run afoul of those rules, you know, they exist and you know that they can come crashing down upon you at any time.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  So here's what he said specifically. I strongly believe that an open, interoperable metaverse built by many different developers and companies is going to be better for everyone.

• 22:26David Pierce?

  Sure. I believe him when he says that.

• 22:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but I don't believe that he's doing.

• 22:29David Pierce?

  I would say there's nothing in his company's history that would lead me to believe he'll do that, but I think I believe him when he says that.

• 22:35Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 22:36Alex Cranz?

  Like, isn't he going around and buying up every single super successful VR company right now?

• 22:40David Pierce?

  And also, Facebook exists. If you believe this stuff, Facebook would be different.

• 22:45Alex Cranz?

  Like, yeah, an open ecosystem will do it, but he's not doing that. He's aggressively against it.

• 22:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm just deeply confused. I think like what he means is the only competition he sees on the horizon is Apple, which is also making a headset very much like the Quest Pro.

• 23:00David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 23:00Alex Cranz?

  Right?

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  We're anticipating that we'll see it next year.

• 23:04Alex Cranz?

  Same price.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  VR headset with cameras on the outside. It'll do mixed reality with video passer. Alex Heath has reported on that at The Information and at The Verge many times. Great, so then he's gonna have a competitor and what Apple is gonna sell to you is?

• 23:16David Pierce?

  Apple.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  Apple, right? A tightly defined experience that other people can participate in on Apple's terms.

• 23:21Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 23:21Nilay Patel?

  So Zuck is obviously just trying to differentiate that. I'm just saying, I don't, nothing about what he has today is actually differentiated from that.

• 23:29David Pierce?

  Agreed.

• 23:29Alex Cranz?

  Agreed.

• 23:30David Pierce?

  And that's what I mean by you, like, you have to assume Mark lives in 2035. Because like, I really think when he looks at the metaverse, he sees a totally different thing than actually exists in the world. And it's like, it's why he talks about everything in these like crazy 10-year things. It's why when you say like, who are you gonna sell this to? He's basically like, I don't give a shit.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. He really is at this point, like, we just gotta keep doing it, you know?

• 23:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. He's just like, I'm gonna burn so much money and then it's gonna be amazing. And I, like, I think he is, he is already at the end of that road when he talks about some of this stuff. And like, but I agree, I mean, the Quest as it exists is price, is precisely the Apple model of how this stuff should work. If Apple bought all of the best developers.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  It's an iPhone with like a medium amount of side loading.

• 24:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, not even like a lot of stuff, like a medium amount of side loading.

• 24:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  The thing that kills me, and I was thinking about this because, you know, this was like another pre-recorded keynote, and we've done, we just had the Google event, which was in-person, and the Apple event is like this hybrid where you're like, David, I watched a video, like, whatever. You know, it's like, it's kind of like fine with phones. I don't even think it's fine with phones to like, see this stuff on video. I think you have to hold and perceive these objects. But like, we've been reviewing a lot of phones lately and we're like, trying to tell people about 120 Hz variable refresh rate displays. And no one can tell you what that looks like.

• 24:46David Pierce?

  Right.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  You can't even watch a video about it. It's even harder with this VR stuff. Like, to have the experience of whatever the Quest Pro is compressed and then sent over the internet and displayed on somebody's like crappy, uncalibrated 30 Hz display, like.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  There's something about these, this generation of products that's coming up where people, the cynicism is amplified by how we perceive them, right? It's like the internet, like looking at pictures, JPEGs on the web do not actually communicate anything about these products. Right. And like, that's like, I think, gonna be the hardest turn for everyone. It's gonna be the hardest turn when we review it. It's gonna be the hardest turn when we write about it. It's gonna be the hardest turn as more and more companies launch the stuff because there's just nothing.

• 25:28Alex Cranz?

  Unless we're already wearing our VR headsets and watching the keynotes.

• 25:35Nilay Patel?

  Unless we're watching the brilliant pixelated 480p display of our Quest 2. I think it's 720p. With legs. With legs. Could there's a, go find it in the video. We didn't like, whatever. There's a moment where they're saying they're in the metaverse, right? And it's like, Zuck, and it's like, PM. And he's like, we've done legs. And they have hosted this in like a virtual, it looks like a basketball court. It was like really hard to understand what kind of thing they were in. Cause it had bleachers. Did you see the bleachers? I missed the bleachers. So they were like talking to each other like in Horizon and they were like, here's all the stuff we're doing.

• 26:12Alex Cranz?

  And there's like people sitting around in bleachers watching.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  And they clearly, it's like, who knows if they were live or if they were programmed, whatever, but the little avatars had the ability to like throw confetti. They were all jumping and throwing the confetti. And so like Mark is there.

• 26:25Alex Cranz?

  But they didn't have legs.

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  They didn't have legs. So Mark, the CEO, the billionaire god king CEO of Meta is like, look at my legs. And then everyone in the crowd is like throwing confetti and jumping and their avatars are cut off. And then there's just like a black space and a bar underneath it. And the whole thing is just like vertically jumping like an old Atari game. What if this is the metaverse business model? You get to pay for legs. And they keep throwing this confetti and I was like, everyone should just go watch this moment. It is truly one of the most bizarre tech keynote moments you have ever seen. Mark, virtual Mark Zuckerberg trying out his new legs while an audience of cartoons just vertically moves up and down throwing confetti on him.

• 27:10David Pierce?

  Seems great.

• 27:11Nilay Patel?

  It's, I was like,

• 27:12David Pierce?

  I'd like all my meetings to have that.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  And like, you know, we're all remote. So I literally was at home watching this Zoom by myself, or watching this on the TV by myself. And I was like, is anybody else seeing this? No one, like, you're just like, this is the loneliest I've ever felt.

• 27:28Alex Cranz?

  Again, you could have been in VR and slowly turned your cartoon.

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  We're doing the next episode of The Vergecast in the metaverse.

• 27:37David Pierce?

  We're gonna take a break.

• 27:39Nilay Patel?

  This was supposed to be a quick conversation about the metaverse. And look at what happened to us. This is what the weed smell does to you. We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're talking about the pixel stuff. We'll be right back.

• 27:53Speaker 05

  Company spending is complex. Managing it should be simple. This is AMX Corporate, a single platform connecting cards, expenses and payments to streamline the way you work. Flexible controls for when priorities shift, support around the clock, all backed by American Express. So you can stay focused on what matters most. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMX Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash AMX corporate. Terms apply.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 28:48Speaker 06

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 29:13Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 29:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. It's review season. This is great. So we reviewed the Pixel Watch. We reviewed the Pixel 7 and the Pixel 7 Pro. What do you think?

• 29:40David Pierce?

  I, well, let's start with the watch because I think as our reviews confirmed, the watch is substantially more interesting than the phones this year, just in terms of like new stuff happening. My takeaway, V's review was really great and everyone should read it, but

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  Indeed.

• 29:54David Pierce?

  I was kind of unimpressed in a way that was a little bit of a bummer. Like, Google's first ever smartwatch, they like, they made a nice thing, which I think was a big win.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:03David Pierce?

  And by all accounts, it is a nice thing. It's a little small. The bezels are a little big, but my experience has been the same as V's where like, in actual use, you don't really notice the bezel. They did a good job with the UI. The band thing is nifty, but it's like, I wanted Google to like, really get one piece of this right. Right? And it was like, there was a, this is their first one. It was clearly not gonna be- You mean right? Or like, just nail it? Like, like crush it. Like, I think what, what Google really needed to do was like, have one thing that it was like, A plus job, Google. And I assumed that would be the health stuff because they have Fitbit. Yeah. They like, talked a big game about all the sensors they were putting into this and it was like, okay, if this thing was a kick-ass fitness tracker and a pretty good everything else, that's like an awesome start from Google. They're gonna be in this for real. Yeah.

• 30:45David Pierce?

  And instead, it seems like Google did pretty well on everything without nailing anything. And that kind of left me cold.

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they didn't push the envelope.

• 30:54David Pierce?

  It felt very Pixel. It was very Pixel. That's fair.

• 30:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, but the Pixel, you know, pushes the envelope, at least on photography every other year or so, right?

• 31:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's, that's true. That's true.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  And Pixel drama aside, like the, the thing of the Pixel is not designed to win, you know? It's like, it's a hedge against Samsung and it's like a showcase for Google to be Googly. You know, every 30 days, the Pixel just kills one feature automatically. It just takes one thing away.

• 31:24David Pierce?

  If you want them to live, you have to start buying pixels.

• 31:26Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. But I see what you're saying about the watch. Like, they made an Apple Watch for Android users, but like, an Apple Watch 4 for Android users.

• 31:34David Pierce?

  Yeah. And like, the Google Assistant thing is a big win. My overwhelming experience is that Google Assistant is better than Siri at absolutely everything.

• 31:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:43David Pierce?

  I don't know if this has been your experience recently, but Siri is worse than ever for me, all of a sudden. Like, it's so bad. So stupid. It's crazy. And I get the thing where I'm just like... Just thunderously dumb. I do like a basic reminder, and it does the thing where it's like, "One moment, still thinking."

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:58David Pierce?

  "I'm sorry, please try again." And I'm like, "I'm on Wi-Fi, dude. Like, what's the problem here?" But anyway, Google Assistant is way better than Siri at all of the things you would want it to do on a smartwatch. And that seemed to be V's experience, too. Like, the mic is pretty good, the speakers are pretty good. Outside of that, it just doesn't feel like Google nailed anything here. Like, the Fitbit stuff is good, but missing some of the best Fitbit things, like, it doesn't have automatic workout detection. And at the very least, this thing should have been like, the mega Fitbit. Yeah. Right? Like, it's more expensive, it's more impressive, it's clearly where Fitbit is headed, is this device. Which V wrote, I think she reviewed this since 2, and was basically like, "Google is going to eat this thing to death with devices called Pixel."

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:36David Pierce?

  And I think that's right. But in order to do that, this needed to be, if nothing else, like, a truly, truly kick-ass Fitbit. And it gets, it gets almost there, and it does all the things it does pretty well, but there were just a bunch of, like, little places it fell down. It, like, ended a couple of her workouts early, and it didn't do the workout detection. And just little things that it's like, if, they knew they had to get this right. Like, Rick Osterlo told me, he was like, "We know the thing we have to do if we want to get to this, like, magical wrist computer smartwatch future, we have to get fitness right, and that's why people will buy it today." And they'd like, almost but not quite got there.

• 33:09Nilay Patel?

  The thing that got me in V's review, you know, about the Pixel watch in general, is it doesn't know when you're washing your hands, which is not a useful feature of the Apple Watch at this point.

• 33:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  They rolled out handwashing detection...

• 33:21David Pierce?

  When it was useful.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  In early 2020.

• 33:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  When everyone was still like, afraid of their shopping.

• 33:27David Pierce?

  To remind everybody not to be disgusting.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  You know, people are like, indexing their cardboard boxes.

• 33:30David Pierce?

  Do you guys still wash your hands obsessively, by the way? Because that is one...

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  I do wash my hands. I'm not doing it for 20 seconds. Are you kidding me?

• 33:35David Pierce?

  That's who has the time.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  You still singing "Happy Birthday" twice? Like, what are you doing?

• 33:38David Pierce?

  You sing, you sing the chorus of Mr. Brightside. That's what it is. The chorus of Mr. Brightside.

• 33:43Nilay Patel?

  David's still like, and David's like, "I'm a sophomore in college, and I'm gonna sing." It's perpetually 3am. David has come home from the bar every time he washes his hands. I mean, like, you know, I'm just like, I'm trying to be careful of this stuff, but like, I'm like, you know what? Like, a little bit of soap, we're good.

• 34:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Nilay Patel?

  But like, at least the Apple Watch is like, you know, 75%. It's like, I think you're washing your hands.

• 34:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  Like, the Pixel Watch, you have to tell it that you're washing your hands. And I'm like, this guarantees that no one will ever use this feature.

• 34:15David Pierce?

  Correct.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  And Google is like, the most powerful AI company on planet Earth. And it hasn't figured out, or is this watch on a wrist connected to hands that are being washed? And that to me is just like a, it's just a miss. They didn't finish the feature all the way.

• 34:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:29Nilay Patel?

  And I, that-

• 34:30Alex Cranz?

  Well, how would they have known? Like, I don't want to give, I don't want to give Google any credit here because they're one of the largest, richest companies in the world. They should be able to do this and figure it out and nail it on the first try. But this is also like, the first try. And they're not, they're used to a lot of ways that humans interact with computers. But computer, wrist computers is a totally new thing for them, as evidenced by WearOS 1 and 2. Like, they've sucked at it for a long time and they've made no effort. Now they're like, okay, we've got to make our effort.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, they've been chasing after this for like, five or six years. They would run a whole piece about it.

• 35:05David Pierce?

  This is why you buy Fitbit. Like, the answer to your question is, they screwed it up, so they had to spend billions of dollars on Fitbit.

• 35:10Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 35:11David Pierce?

  And to be fair, it does seem like, like, the leap from what you get with Google Fit to what you get with Fitbit, and thus the Pixel Watch, is massive. So like, in that sense, kudos, they did the thing. But, I mean, and I take your point, Alex, that like, a year of people wearing these things will give Google a lot of data about when they're doing things like washing their hands that might turn out to be useful for V2 of this.

• 35:33Nilay Patel?

  But again, the hand washing thing to me is not important because no robot is going to tell me to wash my hands for 20 seconds. Like, again, I'm in and out of there. Like, I believe the soap works, you know? What I'm saying-

• 35:44Alex Cranz?

  You just like, run your hand under it real fast.

• 35:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm like a little kid. I go in there, I turn on the water, I make sure my wife heard it, I turn off the water, I'm out. You know, like-

• 35:53David Pierce?

  You should wash your hands correctly.

• 35:54Alex Cranz?

  No one shaked his hands.

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  It's like how little kids do it, you know? I don't care what they ask Siri, you can't force me to do anything. But they know this is the bar, that's what I mean. If you're gonna have this feature and you know your competition is Apple, and it's not even just Apple. This is a thing where if it's good enough, people might leave the iPhone. Right? You make, you make a wrist computer that's so competitive.

• 36:18Alex Cranz?

  Not for the hand wash.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  Right. And so then you gotta, you gotta look at every feature of this thing and say, is it that much better than the only competition that's real? Cause they're not trying to take market share away from Samsung. They're trying to build a compelling wearable that lots of people will wear because they think this is the future of ambient computing is to have a computer on your body. And then you take share away from Apple, all, all these things. And they're like, okay, ship the hand washing feature that you have to tell it count to 20. So it's not even a hand washing feature. It's just a 20 second timer that you can enable with a tap. Right? And it's like, that's obviously not good enough. Like it obviously isn't a complete idea. Like just don't like, take it out, actually. Don't ship halfway ideas. Ship only the things that are so much better that people are like,

• 37:03Nilay Patel?

  maybe I should give up my iPhone because this thing looks so cool. And I don't think anybody's looking at this thing and thinking, that looks so cool, I want to give up my iPhone. Especially not in a world where the Apple Watch Ultra exists.

• 37:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like where's the disconnect coming at, at Google though? Because Rick Astor was like, yes, this is the future. We're doing this. And then like, apparently the, the PM or whoever was in charge was like, we're doing what? Like, we're do, we're doing a nice Apple Watch knockoff. We're doing the Android version of an Apple Watch Series 4. So like, why did it's like, why is it so sad?

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this thing was basically delayed a

• 37:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it took a long time.

• 37:37David Pierce?

  At least, yeah. I mean, yeah, it is an interesting counterfactual to know, like what would have happened if the Fitbit acquisition had gone through much quicker? Because at least the story Google has told me is basically like, we want to do this thing. We knew we couldn't do it properly until we got Fitbit. And then the Fitbit thing took forever. And I think Google correctly surmised that every day they didn't launch a smartwatch was a problem. So I think I definitely got the sense that this was like, not a rush job, but like there was, there was a day circled on the calendar a long time ago that it was like, if we miss this, it's a problem. And that's Day was probably in like 2020 and now here we are. But I think, I mean, to me, it's like the question of what is Google trying to do with this? I think is part of what's super interesting because on the one hand, it's, I think they are trying to take away from Samsung.

• 38:20David Pierce?

  I think Rick Osterloh's remit is to get market share in the phone space. And the easiest way for them to do that is to steal share from Samsung. Like, I don't know that Sundar Pichai is that worried about it, but like Rick Osterloh definitely is.

• 38:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:32David Pierce?

  They also want to take away from the iPhone. They also want to do the like big, broad ambient computing vision, which means plugging into everything else that Google does. And they want to make sure that they have a thing that will keep people who currently use Android phones from switching to an iPhone in order to get an Apple Watch. And so they're, they're playing with all these things and the bar for each one of them is very different. And it just feels like trying to do that, trying to satisfy all of those things on your first try was just always going to be very hard. So for that reason, I'm sympathetic. The stuff I'm less sympathetic to is like not getting the Fitbit stuff right because they knew they needed to and they got it fine, but not good enough. The battery life is the one that really kills me.

• 39:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:08David Pierce?

  Like, if you want to come out and instantly have a move in the smartwatch market, it's the battery. Like, that's just it. And Fitbit has done good battery stuff over time. And if I'm Google, I would have stripped the thing way down and basically been like, it's a Fitbit and it's Google Assistant. It does nothing else and it lasts for three days. Like, what's up? And I think I genuinely think that would have done something. And said. Instead, it like barely lasts a day. If you, like V's takeaway was basically if you really, really baby it, it'll last a day. But that's if you don't use it very much and you don't have the always on display on. And. I mean, that matches the first gen, the first gen Apple Watch. Yeah, that was seven years ago. Yeah. You don't get to do like, you don't get to play by 2015 rules in 2022, even if this is your first smartwatch. What, like it isn't.

• 39:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, she lost like, what, 25% of her battery in an hour long run?

• 39:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:57Alex Cranz?

  With just GPS on and that's, that's it? I mean, GPS does suck a lot of battery, but that should not be a thing in 2022. For a big Apple competitor, you shouldn't have to worry about losing a quarter of your battery just because you're making the awful choice to run.

• 40:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Alex Cranz?

  Kudos to all people who run.

• 40:13David Pierce?

  Running is a disaster.

• 40:14Alex Cranz?

  I love you.

• 40:14David Pierce?

  But I like the, I think it was V who told me that like one of her theories is like the marathon test. Like, could I run a marathon with this and it wouldn't die? And this would die. And it fails the marathon test. I don't know how fast V runs marathons, but I would not make it with this thing through a marathon.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  One of my favorite TikTok trends is the people who are trying to run a marathon at the pace of the world record that was just set, which is you have to basically run it 13 or 14 miles an hour.

• 40:36David Pierce?

  Dead sprint, yeah.

• 40:38Nilay Patel?

  And then like they're like, this dude did it for two hours. And people are like, 30 seconds and falling down. The treadmill ramps all the way up and they fall down. It's great. That's my, that's my marathon test. I was talking about Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro. They are very iterative. I mean, they fix some things. It seems like they don't get as hot. The cameras are ever so slightly improved.

• 40:59David Pierce?

  The fingerprint seems to work better, which is a win.

• 41:02Nilay Patel?

  Allison said it was a beat faster in the review.

• 41:04David Pierce?

  I'll take it.

• 41:05Nilay Patel?

  So it's not slow, but it's a beat faster. And they added face unlock soon to use.

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I'm looking at a photo, I mean, obviously, what do I look at? I look at the photos and I'm just blown away by how much Google is doing with these cameras now, especially the zoom stuff they're doing, which is not as good as Samsung in some of our sample shots. But Samsung has a dedicated lens. This is like, Google's adding the ultra wide, the main camera, the zoom, and they're getting a really passable super zoom, but it still just scares me.

• 41:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, she has, Allison put a shot in here comparing the Pixel 7 Pro's 10x crop mode to the 10x dedicated zoom on the S22 Ultra. And the S22 Ultra, like you said, is definitely better. It's dedicated glass. And Allison even says in the review, like, there's only so much you can do by cropping pixels. Like, that just is true. It looks so much better than I expected it to.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:54David Pierce?

  On the Pixel 7. Like, it's really, really impressive.

• 41:57Nilay Patel?

  If this wasn't an image slider and you weren't directly comparing the two, you'd be like, oh, that's great.

• 42:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a smidge dark, which actually makes sense, given what it is. But it looks really good. And 10x, I mean, I'm used to like the 5x pictures coming out of phones looking borderline unusable. And this is like a perfectly functional photo. I'm really impressed. It does bring up fascinating philosophical questions.

• 42:19Alex Cranz?

  It's like a photo you could send to your friends and family and not get judged.

• 42:23David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 42:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But again, it's like they're merging three cameras into one, multiple frames. At some point, you're just holding your phone up to reality, like in AI prompt and being like, tell me what you think the science is like. I'm just like fascinated by this. Like it, Google has pushed so far beyond the what is a photo debate with, with particularly the zoom stuff and some of the video stuff they're doing that.

• 42:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Like I, we probably just need to call Google and be like, give us the pixel team again. Let's, let's smoke some weed in the studio and really get into it.

• 42:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, we should do that because it's not, you're, you're right. They're way beyond like, what kinds of nifty stuff can we do with your pixels? And they've gone into, we're going to take all these pixels, we're going to feed them into our neural network and it's going to spit out what it thinks it's seeing. And it's like, there, there is a, there is a black box step in there that even like, even pixel binning is like a little bit of black magic, but it's at least it is math with pixels.

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:18David Pierce?

  This is like math with pixels, underpants gnome, step two, step three, photo.

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:23David Pierce?

  It's nuts.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  Right. You're taking multiple exposures off one camera. You're taking multiple exposures off another camera at a different focal length. And then you're producing a zoom image and yet a third, and it's like, I don't know what's going on.

• 43:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what's going on.

• 43:36David Pierce?

  It's good though.

• 43:37Nilay Patel?

  It looks amazing, but I'm dying to have some more detail on how this works. Just because, you know, they say when companies claim they're going to do this kind of stuff, there's a part of me, when Mark Zuckerberg shows off his ultra realistic and extremely well moisturized, high resolution avatar. That shit's dewy.

• 43:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  You're like, that's great. This is a demo, like whatever. Like, and he tells you how complicated. Google announces this stuff and they say they're going to do all that stuff. When you see the photo, then that's when all the what is a photo, like they, we actually, they shipped the phone, Alison has it. We've taken a lot of pictures with it. Oh, it works. And there's a step in there where they are recreating whatever the image is that is just utterly fascinating to me.

• 44:21David Pierce?

  Well, and the, the photo and blur feature is, is an even more like direct version of that, right? You're like, it, I took a photo and it's like, oh, here's a different photo.

• 44:32Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's literally the enhance button, right?

• 44:35Alex Cranz?

  It's so, it's my favorite part of the review, honestly.

• 44:37Nilay Patel?

  The photo on blur slider?

• 44:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I just, I spent, I'm like, I just scrolled down to look at it again. And I'm just like, wee, look at this guy. He's so unfocused. His hair is so detailed blur. It's great.

• 44:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, the computer just made up the detail.

• 44:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, and I think we, we've seen that sometimes with Adobe too.

• 44:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, David zoomed way in on this thing. I'm watching, I'm watching him do the slider pixel by pixel.

• 45:00David Pierce?

  There's just something about his eye that doesn't look human.

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because a computer made it up.

• 45:07David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, that's the thing, right? It looks drawn, like, A, it looks better. Like, it clearly improves the photo in terms of like, it looks more like what a photo should look like. But as I look at this, he looks less like a person in the processed photo. This is a shot of basically, I think it's Novak Djokovic from a bunch of years ago, right after he hit a tennis shot. And it's like a profile shot and it's, it's blurry in the like, person who is slightly moving blurry. And then you, you go over and it's like, it looks a little like if you just open like the Photos app and just crank sharpness up to a thousand. In that it, it kind of looks like it just drew edges around it. But then there's like something in his eyes that it just, it, he looks less human afterwards.

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:47David Pierce?

  And it's a little creepy.

• 45:47Alex Cranz?

  Well, like, it gives him these highlights that just feel, that again, feel like that, that, oh, the sharpening thing in Photoshop where you're just like, oh, that's a little unpleasant. He's got like highlights on his face. There's like a guy in the background wearing a striped shirt and his shirt just gets gross looking when, when it goes through.

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  The computer is like, your shirt's a little uglier than before now. This is how I perceive reality. That guy, his shirt sucks.

• 46:12Alex Cranz?

  He sucks.

• 46:13Nilay Patel?

  I know, that's a lot. Look, go read the reviews. Allison, Allison's segue is there are slightly better versions of last year's phone. They're competitive with Apple and Samsung. What more can you ask for? And I think that ties well into a piece that Dan wrote today. And it's like, all the action this year is in the watches.

• 46:27David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 46:27Nilay Patel?

  Like Apple Watch Ultra, Pixel Watch, Samsung's latest watches, even Garmin's latest watches. Far more interesting products than the iPhone 14 or the S22 or whatever, like,

• 46:39Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 46:39Nilay Patel?

  The Pixel 7, like, they're all just like extremely iterative phone updates. And the watches are where all the heat is, so.

• 46:46David Pierce?

  There's just more to do in watches at this point, like more like work to be done. Phones are just phones.

• 46:51Nilay Patel?

  There's little rectangles of despair.

• 46:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it's like, you can go in and slightly fix the things that are broken. And if you try to do new things, people freak out.

• 46:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will say, and I'm just pointing this out to all the YouTube commenters out there who are like, you would never, did I do this last week?

• 47:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, you did this last week. You can do it again if it'll make you feel better.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't remember what I did last week. I also did a version that's to post on YouTube Shorts, and Varan didn't post it, so I don't remember.

• 47:16Nilay Patel?

  I was like, I'm making a YouTube short about it, and Varan was like, "Don't do this."

• 47:19David Pierce?

  Oh, wait. Speaking of things that have not changed about phones, I got an iPhone 14 Pro. It has a dynamic island. Do you know how many times I have remembered to do something with a dynamic island? Zero times. That's a spoiler alert. The dynamic island instantly ceased to exist in my brain as soon as I got the phone. I turned off the always on display because I hate it. It's awful, awful implementation of that feature. And the dynamic island is like, "Fine, I don't notice it. I do like the thing where there's like a little bit of a waveform, and it shows the podcast that I'm listening to, but like as a, as a place for interaction, I have gotten nothing out of it so far. So if you make a cool app that uses the dynamic island, please send it to me. Otherwise, I'm just sad at my island."

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  You're waiting on live activities, man.

• 48:01David Pierce?

  I guess so.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  Like, it doesn't-

• 48:03Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be a game changer for you.

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  It's not gonna be.

• 48:07Alex Cranz?

  Huge, huge, huge moment in your life.

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  Have you noticed that like, now that you've got it and you're using it, it's like, oh, it's like, oh, it's still computer stuff? Like, sometimes it does, doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

• 48:18Alex Cranz?

  I like it.

• 48:18David Pierce?

  My thing that I've really noticed is there's something about the phone stand on my desk that the sun hits it at the exact angle where you can see all the parts underneath. So it just doesn't look like I have a dynamic island. It's just, it's just like, "Here's some sensors. Enjoy." I'm like, "It's fine."

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  Richard Lawler, by the way, Virgus cast superstar Richard Lawler.

• 48:37David Pierce?

  The loved-

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  The audience clamoring to get this man back on the show, which maybe you will do.

• 48:41David Pierce?

  We can't do it again. It was too much. The people aren't ready. The people aren't ready.

• 48:45Nilay Patel?

  He showed up, he dunked on crypto for 45 minutes, he left. That's it.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  There's an Android version of Dynamic Island, and Richard is, he keeps posting it on the site, because we had quick posts, and he keeps pointing out that it's a better dynamic island. It's very good. It's very good. Okay, we gotta take a break. We still have like 9,000 Microsoft announcements to get there, so we'll take a break. We'll be right back.

• 49:12Speaker 07

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• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I don't even know how to get through the amount of Microsoft news there is. Alex, do you want to try?

• 50:36Alex Cranz?

  We start with teams.

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  Start with teams.

• 50:38Alex Cranz?

  It would work our way.

• 50:39Nilay Patel?

  There's only one piece of important Microsoft news. Microsoft Office is being rebranded to Microsoft 365.

• 50:47Alex Cranz?

  Woo.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  Which is just weird.

• 50:49Alex Cranz?

  I like it.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  You like it?

• 50:51Alex Cranz?

  I hate it. I'm saying that because I know David hates it.

• 50:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, you go first. I'd like to hear your case so I can pick it apart piece by piece.

• 50:56Alex Cranz?

  I like it, not necessarily like for me as a person, but I like it for Microsoft attempting to get away from the fact that they're known as the boring office company by being like, what if we just get rid of that word? Because work is now 365 days a year. And so will we.

• 51:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:13Alex Cranz?

  Like, in that way, I'm like, yes, this makes a lot of sense. This is what a great branding exercise, but that's as far as I get. I'm just like, neat.

• 51:21Nilay Patel?

  It sounds like the store branded the grocery store. That's what I have to offer you.

• 51:25David Pierce?

  It absolutely does.

• 51:26Alex Cranz?

  Okay. It's Whole Foods.

• 51:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:27David Pierce?

  I have two thoughts on this. One, 365 is a bad brand that no one is allowed to have because the earth has it. Like, our planet has a trademark on 365 as a brand. So you, no one else gets to have that. Also, do you know what everyone on earth knows about? Microsoft Office. It is like, honestly, on, in the scheme of like, brand recognition, there are probably not that many things that have more of it than Microsoft Office. So now, this is not like, Google trying to rebrand G Suite into Google Workspace. And look how messy that's been. This is Microsoft taking like, one of its oldest, most successful and best-known products, and giving it a stupid name for no reason.

• 52:11David Pierce?

  This like, this just, I can imagine the meeting here, which is my favorite part of this. It's a bunch of executives sitting in a meeting saying, okay, we have a lot of Office users, but they're older and like, the Gen Z doesn't vibe with Office in the same way. And we want, we want people to think of this as something new and cool. And no one raised their hand and said, well, as long as they're called Word and Excel, we're not accomplishing anything.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:33David Pierce?

  But they, so then they decide like, we need an edgy, cool, new brand. It was called Microsoft 365.

• 52:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it's good.

• 52:41Alex Cranz?

  Somebody skateboarded in with their backwards baseball cap. It was like, 365, and skateboarded out.

• 52:48Nilay Patel?

  Office 365.

• 52:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, cuz everyone's, everyone knows that. That went great.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's how you pay for it.

• 52:54David Pierce?

  365 days a year.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Saks model of Office is 365. It does seem like a huge miss. And I buy that they were like, the kids hate work. Right, you get a bunch of cranky holds, and you're like, these kids today don't wanna work. You can't tell them to go back to the office.

• 53:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, so we're gonna call it like, Microsoft Kick-Ass Fun Time.

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Microsoft Work From Home.

• 53:19Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft Unlimited Vacation Days. Huh?

• 53:22Alex Cranz?

  That's what they did. They absolutely were like, oh no, we, the kids don't like the office. The Gen Z, they're 12 and they hate the office, cuz they're 12.

• 53:31David Pierce?

  But we are Microsoft and we are unavoidable.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  It is one of the most baffling brand decisions of all time. One of the strongest brands in all of tech is Microsoft Office.

• 53:41David Pierce?

  Next, they're gonna call Windows "computer time", and it's not gonna work.

• 53:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Nilay Patel?

  Windows 24/7.

• 53:47David Pierce?

  Windows 24/7.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  So what they're allowed to do, because they got rid of this, here's the argument.

• 53:52Alex Cranz?

  Version 10.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  They got rid of the Office brand name, they can roll more products into it.

• 53:56Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  So Office was tightly defined, the bundle's getting too big. Microsoft 365 is like, "Anything."

• 54:05Nilay Patel?

  Like, at some point, they were like, "Xbox, now part of the Microsoft 365 family."

• 54:09Alex Cranz?

  It's coming.

• 54:10David Pierce?

  That's absolutely the reason they did it.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:13David Pierce?

  They were like, "Well, Microsoft Designer isn't an Office product." And somebody goes, "Well, we gotta change that then."

• 54:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. At some point, they're gonna bring back the Office branding just for the word Excel and PowerPoint. And OneDrive, OneNote, whatever it's called.

• 54:26David Pierce?

  It's just, if you have a good brand that everybody knows that has been very successful for you for decades, don't change it.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:33David Pierce?

  There's my free business advice for you for the day.

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  Just change the logo. I've really been bad about the logo, trust me. You gotta believe me.

• 54:39David Pierce?

  Coca-Cola, we're now Soda America. Like, it's nothing. It's nothing.

• 54:43Nilay Patel?

  Fizzy 365. Again, sounds like the store brand.

• 54:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:47Nilay Patel?

  All right, so that's the big Microsoft news. That's it. That's the first customer. No. They announced like 500 other things.

• 54:52David Pierce?

  I would drink Fizzy 365.

• 54:56Alex Cranz?

  It'll be cheaper.

• 54:57David Pierce?

  That's carbonated soy.

• 54:58Alex Cranz?

  No, you'll get Mr. or Dr. Fizzy.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  Mr. Fizzy 365. Pitbull's lesser-known alter ego, Mr. Fizzy 365.

• 55:10David Pierce?

  Please, Dr. Fizzy is my father.

• 55:13Nilay Patel?

  That's horrible.

• 55:14David Pierce?

  Oh my god, Pitbull's got a son, Fizzy 365. I can't wait for him to hit.

• 55:21Alex Cranz?

  But they did announce a lot of stuff.

• 55:23Nilay Patel?

  They did announce.

• 55:25Alex Cranz?

  Or this week.

• 55:26David Pierce?

  I mean, they did and they didn't. They announced a lot of products, but did they announce much?

• 55:30Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so let's start with the thing that I'm always the most fascinated by, which is the Surface Studio 2, because I desperately want a Surface Studio. I love this product. I love the hinge.

• 55:38Alex Cranz?

  I believe you mean the Surface Studio 2 Plus.

• 55:42Nilay Patel?

  Plus.

• 55:43David Pierce?

  Streaming service.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  It's very clear why they named it the Surface Studio 2 Plus, because they changed virtually nothing, including the CPUs, stuck with 11th gen Intel CPUs in there, but they added a laptop grade 3060 as a GPU, which is the knock on the Surface Studio is it always had a weak GPU. So they're like, do you want this GPU? It's from last year and we are running it at laptop speeds. Fine. It seems great. It's also $4,300, which is bananas.

• 56:13Alex Cranz?

  Who buys this?

• 56:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I want one very badly. I've always wanted one. And one day they're gonna make one.

• 56:19Alex Cranz?

  The hinge is cool.

• 56:20Nilay Patel?

  The hinge is cool. I just love the idea of like-

• 56:22Alex Cranz?

  Why don't they just make a monitor? The Office 365 monitor.

• 56:25David Pierce?

  Monitor 365.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  Every day.

• 56:30Nilay Patel?

  I've got this dream. Again, most of my life is Zoom meetings. So I'll be in a Zoom meeting and it particularly tense, and I'll stand and I'll like roll the monitor down and then point down at people. We're making this decision. I don't, I have weird ideas about work. Have you ever been like, suddenly Nilay is towering above me. I have not moved.

• 56:53Alex Cranz?

  But you could do that in VR.

• 56:57David Pierce?

  Teams VR support staff.

• 56:58Nilay Patel?

  Every, every part of this is just me being a more tyrannical boss at work.

• 57:04Alex Cranz?

  Move everybody else's legs. You loom over.

• 57:06Nilay Patel?

  So that's the Studio 2 Plus. They added the 3060, which is a reasonable good GPU for that device.

• 57:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:13David Pierce?

  To me, honestly, the-

• 57:14Nilay Patel?

  It's so expensive.

• 57:15David Pierce?

  That's the main problem. Like, I still think it's a cool thing. And the one they shipped two years ago is like relatively powerful. Like, it's weird that they didn't update it, but it's still probably a very good machine. It's just twice the price it should be. It's crazy.

• 57:27Nilay Patel?

  Then they did the Surface Pro 9. Kind of a lot going on with the Surface Pro 9.

• 57:32Alex Cranz?

  The CPU stuff there interests me a lot because they did Intel, they got rid of AMD. Or no, they never had AMD on the Surface Pro 9.

• 57:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, that was just the laptop.

• 57:41Alex Cranz?

  So it's, it's kind of interesting to me because they did Intel and then they've also just gotten rid of the Surface Pro X and put the ARM chip into this. And it's very clearly like Apple's running circles around both Qualcomm and Microsoft for years. I mean, two years, but still that's years. And now they're going to try to compete. They've been trying for years, but this could be good.

• 58:03David Pierce?

  This chip is a, it's a Microsoft Qualcomm co-JAM, right? Like, I don't actually know anything about this.

• 58:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, so this is like the next in that generation. They did the Surface Pro 9 that had the last generation of this chip. This is the new SQ3. It's going to have 5G support. This is the only way to get 5G on the Surface Pro 9. And it's like, it's, it's interesting, but we haven't seen it yet. We haven't gotten to play with it. Tom played with it and he was like, well, it seems fast enough. It seems to do the stuff. And that's always been the complaint about the Surface Pro 9 is it's this really cool, super tiny, super thin device and it's awesome. But then you go and, and try to do anything besides some little Office 365-ing and you're done.

• 58:45David Pierce?

  It's actually called Microsoft 365.

• 58:46Alex Cranz?

  Excuse me, Microsoft 365-ing, sorry.

• 58:48David Pierce?

  Stock or fizzy to you, Alex?

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, so it's interesting that you can pick between Intel and ARM. You know, the Surface line is kind of like an odd one because it caught totally blown up by the pandemic in a way that I don't, like Microsoft's still reckoning with. Like, the last time we talked to Panos in depth, he was here in the office, pre-pandemic. He had the Surface was the Neo, the dual screen, the Surface Duo.

• 59:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  They were pushing in the Surface, what was it? The Surface Pro X. That was their ARM device at the time. And they were pushing towards this dual screen future. They were pushing towards ARM and then the pandemic hit and all of those plans evaporated. Like, they just went away. So this is kind of like our, just a re, just a refocusing of what they're doing with Surface in a real way. But like Windows on ARM, like we're still, still trade-off city. And now it's like, what you get for that trade-off is 5G, probably better battery life. Unclear where the performance will be. And then your other choice is Intel, where you get all your apps, but it's still an Intel chip in this form factor, which means it's going to run hot and the battery will be low.

• 59:47David Pierce?

  Yeah. The thing for me with the ARM stuff has always been that you're fighting a bunch of battles simultaneously. It's like, there are performance questions, there are battery life questions, and I would argue continually, most of all, it's an app compatibility thing, right? Like, you buy these devices and they just don't run most things, because Microsoft has not either done enough or been able to get its developers to do enough to be part of this. And Alex, you and I were talking about this earlier this week, like, Microsoft is clearly committed to this. Like, it has these developer kits out there, it's made it easier, it's issuing all kinds of new stuff. It seems to be mercifully done with the idea of trying to make a whole new Windows just for ARM, and it's like, we just need to make actual Windows work. Yep.

• 1:00:27David Pierce?

  But I am suspicious of the idea that this is gonna be the one. Like, I think Microsoft is right to keep trying on this, because it has to, and it has to keep convincing developers to play along and convince them that it's the future and it's worth, you know, re-architecting their apps to make it work. I just, I have a hard time imagining that this is gonna be the one that, like, magically makes Windows work well on ARM. Yeah. I hope that's true.

• 1:00:50Alex Cranz?

  They still have to figure out, like, the secret sauce of the Mac, of macOS, is that they, they now just emulate everything on ARM. They're like, okay, we know a lot of people are gonna switch over, but also, we're just gonna do really, really, really good emulation, so it doesn't even matter. So you can play your games or whatever and go. And Microsoft just hasn't done that? And I'm not really clear why they haven't.

• 1:01:12David Pierce?

  I mean, part of it is the chips, right? Like, the Mac just has so much performance to spare, that it can, it can do a lot of that emulation pretty successfully, in a way that, you know, these, these deeply subpar Qualcomm chips just have not been able to hack so far. I would also say catalyst on the Mac is like, all over the place, in my experience. I've had some apps that work really well, and I've had some apps that suck. And I don't know if that's just my own experience, but that's, that's certainly what I've seen sometimes. But I think Microsoft, again, it's like, back to that same thing, right? You kind of have to get all of these things right simultaneously before it's gonna really work. And it's a weird sort of chicken and egg problem, where it's like, without the right chip, you're not gonna get the apps to work, and without the apps, the chip isn't gonna get you there, because the apps don't matter. So it's like, they, they have

• 1:01:55David Pierce?

  to, they have to pull a lot of things all together at the same time, and have not successfully done that so far.

• 1:02:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, I'll be real, I'm not super, super confident in the SQ3. Like, Apple has a ton of resources behind it to make really, really good chips. And Microsoft just does not prove that out as evidenced by the Studio 2 Plus existing out in the world with super old chips in it, like that, that kind of hardware stuff. There's some of that that they just are failing on repeatedly. So I'm not like, I want to be excited about this. I want to be really enthusiastic. I can't wait to try it out and see how fast it is. But ooh, I'm not confident that they're going to nail it this time.

• 1:02:36Nilay Patel?

  I will say, if they have gotten closer than the thin and light, long battery life, reasonable performance, but it's Windows, it's a whole ass operating system that's actually represents the, the competitive break with Apple that Microsoft's been chasing.

• 1:02:53David Pierce?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:02:55Nilay Patel?

  Right? Instead of like, here's, here's everything you ever wanted, but we're going to treat you like a baby versus it's not quite everything you ever wanted, but we treat you like an adult to get it by ourselves on their computer. Like those are your choices. And like Microsoft might have a product that could actually make that case in a way that no Intel tablet has ever really made that case. Two things I want to ask though. One, well, two things, related ideas. One, there's no headphone jack on this thing, which is just brutal for a tablet of this size.

• 1:03:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  Especially because the design is the same as last year, basically. And last year I had headphone jack. What are you doing? You can't just don't.

• 1:03:29Alex Cranz?

  Well, they have to make room for the neural processing unit on the new Qualcomm chip, you know, you gotta, you gotta, sometimes you have to sacrifice for stuff that may or may not actually make the product better.

• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So that's one.

• 1:03:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Nilay Patel?

  Two, how well do you think this will take Tom Brady just absolutely ripping this thing down the field?

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's gonna.

• 1:03:48Alex Cranz?

  Break it in half.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  It's the first thing that's gonna happen. You know, I had to issue like a, like a directive to the teams being like, stop destroying the tablets, please.

• 1:03:56David Pierce?

  I hope that's Tom Brady's true legacy.

• 1:03:58Alex Cranz?

  Do they all use the Surface Pro 8? Or do they give them like really old Surface? Cause they know they just kind of.

• 1:04:02David Pierce?

  I like to imagine they're like Surface RTs.

• 1:04:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05David Pierce?

  And they just barely work.

• 1:04:07Alex Cranz?

  That's why they're flinging them.

• 1:04:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's pretty good. Last piece of Microsoft hardware, really, is the Surface Laptop 5. This is basically another chip story. So last year, Microsoft hedged some bets, added some AMD into the mix. AMD price performance, heat, kind of better than Intel for the past couple of generations. You could see why they went with it in the laptop. This year, we're back to Intel 12th generation.

• 1:04:32David Pierce?

  Can I run a conspiracy theory by you? I'm curious if there's any chance that I'm right. So you just talked to Pat Kelsinger on the other podcast that we don't talk about.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39David Pierce?

  It was actually very good. It was a good episode of Decoder, unlike all the rest of it.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  That dude's a huge nerd.

• 1:04:43David Pierce?

  Oh, my God. The acronyms. Good Lord. Okay, but anyway, one thing all of these announcements made me wonder is like, is Microsoft aware of the Intel roadmap and slowing its role to meet Intel at a point at which everyone is doing good things again? And so at this point is like, why are we going to reinvent the wheel for continually crappy Intel chips when something real and good is coming in one, two, three years? And all we need to do is actually just match that and then we can run together.

• 1:05:08Alex Cranz?

  Why would anyone wait?

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Alex Cranz?

  Like, Intel screwed it up so badly. Why would anybody trust Intel again?

• 1:05:15David Pierce?

  Because what other choice do they have?

• 1:05:16Alex Cranz?

  AMD?

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  But they didn't. They chose not to do it.

• 1:05:20David Pierce?

  This is what I'm saying. So is that why they chose? Like, is that why you keep throwing your lot in? Because otherwise, I'm with you. I agree. Like, you're nuts to not continue to pit Intel and AMD against each other unless there is a, like, moment in the future that you're betting on in a big way. I just can't see any other reason.

• 1:05:35Alex Cranz?

  I wouldn't be surprised if external pressures, like Monica and I were talking about this in the office earlier this week after the event. And we were both like, she was super, super bummed that AMD wasn't on this thing. We're like, well, why isn't it there? And sometimes, in the laptop world, somebody says, hey, how about you just use our chips in your devices? And I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of what happened here.

• 1:06:00David Pierce?

  But in like a, I feel like you need to say that again in like a much scarier way.

• 1:06:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05David Pierce?

  Like, oh, nice computers you have there.

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  David, look, Microsoft can just issue that threat right back to Intel.

• 1:06:10David Pierce?

  Yes, this is, yeah.

• 1:06:12Nilay Patel?

  It would be a shame if Windows didn't run on your chips, Pat.

• 1:06:15Alex Cranz?

  Well, I mean, I don't necessarily think, like, also, there's just money. Money gets, people just give people money and are like, hey, I want to be exclusive here.

• 1:06:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Alex Cranz?

  I don't know if that's legal or illegal. I'm hoping I'm not accusing two companies of breaking the law.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, they're allowed to. You're allowed to, you're allowed to spend some money.

• 1:06:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  You got a little walk around money.

• 1:06:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:36Nilay Patel?

  It's just fascinating, like Microsoft's chip choices here are fascinating across the board. I agree, everyone's waiting for Intel to take this turn, but it's also Microsoft, the stack of things Microsoft has accomplished with Surface is just as complicated as Google's Pixel Watch stack, right? They have to set the bar for all their OEMs. They have to keep both chipmakers happy and participating. They have to not over compete with the Lenovo's and Dell's of the world. They have to compete with Apple at $1,000 and above, which is where the Lenovo's and the Dell's don't really compete anymore, on and on and on. And you kind of just like, the thing is inherently political. Like the laptop, more than anything, the laptop is inherently political because the OEMs have basically stopped making Surface shaped things, or they do, but they're like very enterprise focused.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  So like, and no, like Lenovo is not out there with a Surface Studio 2 Plus. Like, that's just like the hinge engineers at Microsoft got, they got one. You know, like Panos was like, yeah, that's fine. This is the most complicated hinge in America and you should ship it. So I think the laptop is, and it's where the politics really come to play most directly with this. But we'll see. I mean, there's just like, there's so much Microsoft stuff going on and it surfaces 10 years. Like, we should say this, Surface is a huge success. It has accomplished every single thing Microsoft ever wanted it to accomplish. It really did reinvigorate Windows laptops. Panos has done an amazing job, like, running this program in the face of all these politics.

• 1:08:00Nilay Patel?

  There are effectively no companies that have ever managed to be the OS vendor and the premium hardware vendor and make everything work. Like, Google has not done it with the Pixel. No, because Apple doesn't have OEMs. They're not a vendor of software in that way. Right? So like, but Google hasn't accomplished it with the Pixel, right? They're a successful OS vendor and Samsung is their primary. Interesting with BlackBerry and QNIX. Yeah, BlackBerry failed, Palm famously failed. We've gone through that. We have a whole documentary about that that you can watch. It's called Springboard, it's very good. Basically, no company's ever managed to pull this off, but Microsoft did it with the Surface. Yeah. It's, it's kind of remarkable they pulled it off for the past decade. Like, people doubted them very much and they thought the OEMs would run.

• 1:08:43Nilay Patel?

  And it kind of turns out there's nowhere to run to like it has never been the year of Linux on the desktop sadly. So they were in a little bit of a stronger position. But I've talked to Panos, I've walked around CES with Panos Panay and like, he's been like, "Look, we invent hardware and we license it back out to the OEMs and like, that's our hinge and that's our thing and that's our design." And like, you can see them pushing the Windows hardware innovation ecosystem ahead because they knew that Apple would just kill them and Dell and everybody else would focus on the high margin, cheap computers for business and never sell the $1,000 consumer laptop. And so like, "We're just gonna do it." Huge success. Very complicated politics that expressed themselves in things like the Qualcomm SQ3 and this like weird lack

• 1:09:27Nilay Patel?

  of ARM, but, or weird lack of AMD, but pretty rad. But you should watch the video with Tom and Panos because it's great.

• 1:09:32David Pierce?

  It's dope.

• 1:09:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let's do the lightning round.

• 1:09:35David Pierce?

  Well, the other Windows thing we should talk about before we switch is this Apple partnership, to some extent, I guess, with Windows where I think, what is it, you're gonna get music and TV apps, both on Windows and on the Xbox, which is like, it's one of those things that both seems insane to me that that's a thing that's happening and also like-

• 1:09:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, and iCloud Photos and Windows.

• 1:09:56David Pierce?

  Oh, right, and iCloud Photos. Everybody's favorite photos app that is a thing that I care about, that definitely-

• 1:10:02Nilay Patel?

  What's the default, it's the default iPhone photo app?

• 1:10:04David Pierce?

  It's just there so that when I search phones, it still works. I don't care about it on any other platform. Anyway.

• 1:10:09Nilay Patel?

  But you get all your photos on your laptop. That's a big win.

• 1:10:11David Pierce?

  That is true. No, I'll give you that. iCloud Photos is legit. Yeah, I think it was just, it's one of those things that it's, it's representative of the thing that Apple is desperately trying to do, which is like, be a services business. And like, speaking of, you know, the politics between companies, Apple and Microsoft are not like famous for being best friends. And so it says a lot about what Apple is trying to do, that it's willing to put music and TV and photos into all of these different Windows products. Like that is, Steve Jobs would never in a million years have done that. And even five years ago, I don't think Tim Cook would have done that.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, he put iTunes on Windows, just on iPods.

• 1:10:44David Pierce?

  But that's like, that's actually probably a good example, right? Because you get to a point where it's like, "Okay, this is, this is our move. This is how we reach a lot of people." And that's clearly where- Music and TV are next. Like, a lot of people who have Windows want to watch Ted Lasso.

• 1:10:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56David Pierce?

  And that's a way to get a lot of people to do so. And so it makes sense. It was just slightly surprising to me to see Apple and Windows be like, we make apps together.

• 1:11:04Nilay Patel?

  So my, my theory here is very cynical. So game consoles are underappreciated as streaming devices. Tons and tons of people

• 1:11:12David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:11:12Nilay Patel?

  Run streaming apps on their game consoles all the time. And so if you're Apple, you gotta get the Apple TV app on the game console just to compete.

• 1:11:19David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:11:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's life. So they're like, we want to go on this game console. And Microsoft was like, haha, we tightly control the economics of the Xbox. And there are no, it's not an open app store. To get on this game console, you gotta come through us.

• 1:11:33David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  And they were just like, Sasha and I just walked around campus and was like, what do you want? We have one chip with Apple. They want, they want Apple TV app on the Xbox. Like, who's got something that we want? And the, the team that runs the Photos tab in a like Explorer

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  was like, can we just get the iCloud Photos integration? Every other photo service supports this tab. Please. Can you just get them to give us the API hooks? And Sasha was like, yeah, we could probably get that out of them. So that was the trade.

• 1:12:03David Pierce?

  They were like, we want fast pairing AirPods. And Tim Cook was like, no.

• 1:12:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, this is a straight up, just tit for tat. You want to be on the Xbox? What are you gonna do for me?

• 1:12:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, that sounds right.

• 1:12:15Nilay Patel?

  And they landed it iCloud Photos on Windows. And that's just how it goes.

• 1:12:19David Pierce?

  Everybody, listen, I'm happy for them.

• 1:12:21Nilay Patel?

  Fast pairing AirPods. I want an iMessage client for Windows. Apple's like, death first.

• 1:12:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. That's when Craig Federighi hangs up.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  He's like, here's what, here's what I got for you. iCloud Photos.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Wait, I can't help myself. I, I have to ask, do you think that they tried to get the Xbox? I forget what it's, it's called, but the service that has to run Safari on iOS?

• 1:12:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, do you try to like, a game streaming app on iOS?

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  That's where I thought you were going.

• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. And they ended up at iCloud Photos. They're like, can we get the Apple TV app on the Xbox? And Microsoft was like, yeah, if you'd let us do cloud gaming on the iPhone. And Apple's like, death first. Absolutely. Here's our counter offer. iCloud Photos, which you can already access in a web browser on any computer on planet Earth.

• 1:13:09David Pierce?

  There. But now it's in the start menu.

• 1:13:13Alex Cranz?

  That's all that matters.

• 1:13:15Nilay Patel?

  It's a high stakes negotiation. Teams in two separate conference rooms. There's one person had to walk back and forth.

• 1:13:21David Pierce?

  It's PONOS for sure.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  It's just like someone is gonna write the inside the deal that brought iCloud photos to Windows. It's like, you know, it's like a 600 page novel.

• 1:13:32David Pierce?

  Like barbarians at the gate.

• 1:13:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35David Pierce?

  I like imagining it, Brad. It's more like a wheel you spin and it just landed on iCloud photos. It's like

• 1:13:41David Pierce?

  cause like right past Mac integration for Xbox goes right past all of the iMessage stuff and it just lands on iCloud photos.

• 1:13:49Nilay Patel?

  And the one right next to it is bankrupt.

• 1:13:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. iCloud photos is like the five cents on the Price is Right wheel. And it's like, well, at least we can get zero.

• 1:13:58Nilay Patel?

  So I have bad news.

• 1:14:01Nilay Patel?

  The wheel spinning goes so great.

• 1:14:04Nilay Patel?

  All right. One last thing we should mention before we get out of here. Netflix disclosure, we made a Netflix show. Vox Media makes Netflix shows. Comcast invested in Vox Media. Everyone has, everyone here owns a television. Everyone here is a Netflix subscriber. There are disclosures for the day. All right. What are we but pawns in the great game of capitalism? Netflix is adding ads. It's gonna cost $6.99 a month. The ads, by the way, run by Microsoft. Microsoft's shown up in everyone's announcements this week.

• 1:14:29David Pierce?

  Seriously.

• 1:14:29Nilay Patel?

  Do you have something to announce in tech? Microsoft will be there and they will rebrand office.

• 1:14:34David Pierce?

  Teams is probably involved.

• 1:14:35Nilay Patel?

  It's called Netflix 365 now.

• 1:14:37David Pierce?

  All the Netflix ads are just for teams.

• 1:14:39Alex Cranz?

  Well, no, that's how you do group watch now. It's through Teams.

• 1:14:42Nilay Patel?

  Like all the Amazon ads on football are just for Amazon. Last week the ads were for ERO and I was like, you guys, like just let someone else buy some ads. Like if you're watching football, Thursday night football streaming on Amazon Prime, it seems likely you've got your wifi situation sorted out.

• 1:14:59David Pierce?

  So that's definitely the best case scenario for this Netflix thing, right? Is that it's, it's, what is it? Four, four to five minutes of ads per hour? If that four to five minutes is just trailers for other Netflix shows, like I'm down.

• 1:15:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Netflix is gonna buy it. Let's do this. Yeah. $7 a month. Nielsen is gonna start offering data about Netflix's audience for the ad business only, which is fascinating. But ad buyers want a standard source of data to know where their ads are hitting. So they're letting Nielsen into the ad side, but not the paid side. So Reed can still do fake numbers whenever he wants. It was the most watched show on Netflix.

• 1:15:33Alex Cranz?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:15:35Nilay Patel?

  That means something to somebody.

• 1:15:36Alex Cranz?

  Believe you.

• 1:15:37Nilay Patel?

  And then they're gonna do less ads than competitors. Here we go.

• 1:15:40Alex Cranz?

  When do you think they start standardizing their, the lengths of shows? Like, network TV does. Cause right now, they're all over the place.

• 1:15:48Nilay Patel?

  I don't think they're ever gonna do that. Cause it's just like too much.

• 1:15:50Alex Cranz?

  End up seeing a lot of ads for like an hour and five minute show. You're like, okay, I guess I'm into my next set of ads.

• 1:15:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, that's, I think that's why they're doing four to five. They're giving themselves a little buffer. You know, Netflix, this whole thing is like, you're gonna watch the next one. Right, so like, they're, I don't think they're worried about whether shows are 20 minutes, or 22 minutes, or 35 minutes, or whatever. They're just like, what we'd like from you is four uninterrupted hours.

• 1:16:12David Pierce?

  Well, and I'm assuming, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think Netflix has said anything about like, compensating content makers differently because of ads, right? Cause that-

• 1:16:21Alex Cranz?

  Oh heavens, that is a big-

• 1:16:22David Pierce?

  That would change it instantly.

• 1:16:24Alex Cranz?

  That's a big argument right now in the unions.

• 1:16:25David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:16:25Alex Cranz?

  The unions are all getting upset about this because right now, when they sell the rights to these shows, they end up basically being like, you own it forever. And then it's like, wait, I only get $5 for the hours of blood, sweat and tears I put into this? I used to be able to live on my residuals with other shows. So that's actually like, I think we're gonna be seeing a lot of that in the next rounds of union negotiations across the industry. Cause they getting mad about it.

• 1:16:50David Pierce?

  And, and if, if that comes-

• 1:16:51Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be fun.

• 1:16:51David Pierce?

  Back, the gamesmanship on how long should my content be, then becomes really interesting. Cause even if Netflix doesn't standardize it, like, you see YouTubers who have like, vastly changed the stuff that they make in order to maximize the ad load in the videos that you see, and like-

• 1:17:06Nilay Patel?

  But the YouTubers did that because YouTube told them to. YouTube was like, 10 minutes. And YouTubers are like, fine, 10 minutes.

• 1:17:12David Pierce?

  But if Netflix says, you know, we're gonna show you two ads over a 20 minute show, or four ads over a 30 minute show, like, tell you confidently what's gonna happen. But that only matters if the compensation changes. So I guess for now, it doesn't necessarily matter.

• 1:17:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm not an expert on TV deals, but those residuals are paid by licensing to other people who broadcast the shows. Netflix isn't doing that, right? They're just adding ads.

• 1:17:32David Pierce?

  Yep, yeah.

• 1:17:32Nilay Patel?

  And they're lowering the price. So I, I think they're, how those deals get done-

• 1:17:37Alex Cranz?

  I think those deals are gonna start changing. And, and we're already seeing that, that, that, those discussions in those union channels and, and networks of like, okay, we need to start changing how we're doing this because we're getting screwed. Because there's infinite content and not infinite dollars and dollars there are going straight to the streamers and bypassing all the creatives.

• 1:17:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's funny because none of the streamers are making enough money. It's like it at no point do we actually make this better. But the streaming wars are here.

• 1:18:03Alex Cranz?

  It's just a pyramid scheme. Disney's at the top and everybody else is just like, I guess we're also here making stuff.

• 1:18:10Alex Cranz?

  We're not Disney. Subscribe.

• 1:18:11Nilay Patel?

  It's coming. It's launching in November. The other plan, there was a big Bloomberg piece, Lucas shot a big Bloomberg piece on the future of Netflix today. So the ads are one part of the plan. The other one, cracking down on password sharing. And they were like, not enough people are paying for Netflix. And these are the two things they're doing. Like the CFO of Netflix said to Lucas, here's the two things. It's ads and it's password sharing.

• 1:18:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, haven't they said there's like 100 million users they think are getting Netflix through shared passwords?

• 1:18:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so they're trying to reframe it. They know it's hard. They've like launched a bunch of trials in South America and they're trying to reframe it as not cracking down on it. But wouldn't you like to pay for your ex-girlfriend? What if you paid a little bit more money? Huh? That'd be nice. We're, we'll just see how this goes.

• 1:18:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. Sorry, all my old roommates.

• 1:18:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm definitely going to start VPNing to wherever your house is.

• 1:19:01Nilay Patel?

  Just so it looks like I'm around. That's the, the password sharing is just going to get more complicated. People are just going to VPN into one apartment.

• 1:19:09Nilay Patel?

  You could do it.

• 1:19:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Alex Cranz?

  I'm excited for everybody to know what a VPN is. That's going to be great.

• 1:19:13Nilay Patel?

  I feel like the kids all know what VPNs are because VPN companies advertise so heavily on like YouTube and TikTok.

• 1:19:19Alex Cranz?

  That's.

• 1:19:19Nilay Patel?

  And podcasts. All right, we've gone over. It's been amazing to be in the studio with my friend, David Pierce. It's amazing to just send digital weed to you, Alex.

• 1:19:28Alex Cranz?

  I'm so high right now. It's great.

• 1:19:30David Pierce?

  Alex is firing at the Plex server as we speak.

• 1:19:34Nilay Patel?

  Tons and tons of news, all the coverage of Microsoft, of Google, Meta, it's on the site, check it out. Also, tons of other stuff, tons of little updates to the site experience. And everybody wants to hear about those. We've got another big set coming, maybe in two weeks from now. We're going to redo the top of the site, the hero area. We've got some big plans there.

• 1:19:50David Pierce?

  Also, we should just say, if you do read all the Microsoft stuff, send Tom Warren nice tweets about how much you love him because he did all of this while having COVID.

• 1:19:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:58David Pierce?

  And did a great job. So tell Tom you love him.

• 1:20:00Nilay Patel?

  You can't tell on the video unless you know.

• 1:20:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:05Nilay Patel?

  That's good. It's really good. But no, yeah, Tom came to America, had to go back to the UK, all while dealing with this, and put out just absolutely tremendous coverage. So yeah, tweeted Tom, told me to do a good job. Don't mention the COVID thing, just tell him to do a good job. Don't let him know we had to stop. Be cool. Be cool. Be cool, man. Be cool. All right. That's it. That's a Vergecast. You can tweet at us. I'm at recklessdavids, at Pierce, Alex is Alex H. Cranz. We'll be back on Wednesday. We get the hotline coming this week. Yeah. 866 VERGE11. I will tell you this, I already answered a hotline question this week. Huge. It's pretty good. Game changer. It's, it's so deeply exactly the thing that you would expect someone to ask on the hotline. I don't know. I'm not giving away. It just perfectly, I answered the question and Andrew goes, "I knew you'd know the answer to that question."

• 1:20:47Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Okay, that's it. That's Vergecast. Bye, everyone.

• 1:20:55Speaker 00

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected]. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter's and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:21:31Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:21:52Speaker 06

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you, if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 1:22:17Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:22:33Speaker 08

  Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run subagents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and own the judgment. Trusted by more than 60% of the AM Law 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey, AI tailored for law. Learn more at harvey.ai.