Pod Insights The Vergecast Search as we know it is officially over About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Jake Kastrenakes discuss OpenAI's new SearchGPT product, Amazon's plan to launch a paid version of Alexa, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold review, and whole lot more.
Further reading:
OpenAI announces SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine
Bing’s AI redesign shoves the usual list of search results to the side
Reddit is now blocking major search engines and AI bots — except the ones that pay
Google had a massive quarter thanks to Search and AI
Amazon’s paid Alexa is coming to fill a $25 billion hole dug by Echo devices
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is a great phone that’s out of ideas
Asus ROG Ally X review: the best Windows gaming handheld by a mile
Samsung Galaxy Ring review: keeping you in Samsung’s orbit
Apple’s first foldable iPhone could arrive in 2026
Apple Maps launches on the web to take on Google
The Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle is now available
Rivian CEO says CarPlay isn’t going to happen
The NBA’s new TV deals put a lot of games on Amazon’s Prime Video starting in 2025
Reddit’s NFL, NBA deals bring more sports highlights — and ads
Spotify CEO confirms a ‘deluxe’ version with hi-fi audio is coming soon
Sonos CEO apologizes for disastrous rollout of new app
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 18,066 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com slash superior access to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
0:32 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of being a pilot who emailed David Pierce about using an iPad in a plane. There's so many of them. So many of them. They're in our YouTube comments, they're in the emails. One of them flew to David's house. The premier tablet of the sky. Yeah. Last, I'm your friend, Neil I. Hi, David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex Cranz is on vacation this week and Verge Executive Editor Jake Kastrenakes is here. Hey Jake.
1:00 Speaker 02 Hey, thank you for having me. I've prepared my spiciest takes on obscure streaming services so that you won't miss Krantz too much.
1:08 Nilay Patel? That's very important. Jake hasn't been on the show in like for five years?
1:12 Speaker 02 Something like that.
1:13 Nilay Patel? But you've been at the Verge for like 15?
1:15 Speaker 02 Something like that, yeah. I don't, we didn't exist technically 15 years ago, but emotionally I was here back in those days.
1:22 Nilay Patel? Jake's always been here.
1:23 Speaker 02 Yeah. Actually, in this office, it was empty.
1:25 Nilay Patel? Just waiting.
1:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, Financial District was different back then, but.
1:29 Nilay Patel? Our office used to be the Goldman Sachs building, so this is your fault.
1:33 Speaker 02 I have a lot to apologize for.
1:37 Nilay Patel? That's a true story.
1:38 Speaker 02 Ah.
1:39 Nilay Patel? The ghosts of finance bros haunt us every day in this office. Anyhow, Jake, you don't know this, but last week on the show, we were discussing the iPad and David, out of nowhere, just fired a stray and said he didn't believe pilots used iPad minis on planes and.
1:58 Nilay Patel? I don't know, man. He was wrong. David, would you like to defend yourself?
2:02 David Pierce? So first, I would just like-
2:03 Speaker 02 I need you to issue a correction here.
2:05 David Pierce? I would like, I was miscategorized by Neil I Patel just now. What I said was, this is like the canonical real world use case for iPads that if you, if you ask anyone at or around Apple about like, what is a thing people do with an iPad? They all just want to tell you about Delta pilots. And so all I-
2:24 Nilay Patel? Specifically iPad mini?
2:25 David Pierce? Yes, the iPad mini, which apparently like, you know, pilots strapped to their leg and do stuff with. Terrific. I simply-
2:32 Speaker 02 Sorry, tell me about the leg.
2:35 Nilay Patel? Because you're flying a plane. So where are you going to put the screen?
2:38 David Pierce? Right, it's right there. It's a, it's a-
2:39 Speaker 02 Because they have the entire console of physical buttons.
2:43 Nilay Patel? Well, no, those are mostly not screens as well. We're gonna-
2:46 Speaker 02 I'm so, my apologies.
2:47 Nilay Patel? They're gonna come for you too. You need to be careful.
2:50 David Pierce? This is good. Email Jake and not me.
2:52 Speaker 02 This is why I'm not on the show for five years.
2:53 David Pierce? With a list of every button on a plane. That's important. Please do that.
2:56 Nilay Patel? I would like to apologize to the entire aviation community at this time.
3:00 David Pierce? So, no-
3:00 Nilay Patel? I'm on your team, and if you can get me into an F-22, I think that would be great.
3:06 David Pierce? So what I actually heard, which was very cool, is that there is a lot of iPad usage specifically on planes. And I heard from commercial pilots, I heard from hobbyist pilots, like the whole gamut. And there are a lot of uses for it, but it seems like the number one main one is just that flying involves both a lot of paperwork and a lot of reference material. And to take it from a giant, like binder in a rolling suitcase down to an iPad makes a lot of people very happy. I heard from a few people that they're now like, using them in flight schools. So when you're training to get your pilot license, you actually like are given an iPad in the way that like kids are given a Chromebook as part of the process now. And a lot of people take it through. So I, I didn't know, and now I know, it is apparently a very real thing.
3:52 Nilay Patel? And that's why the iPad mini exists.
3:53 David Pierce? They actually, I just took my iPad mini to an airport and they just gave me a pilot license. It was the most insane thing. I just fly now.
4:01 Nilay Patel? America's skies are no longer safe. All right, there's a lot of news this week beyond David and the pilots. As we sat down in the studio, OpenAI launched Search GPT. It's a direct competitor to, to Google and interestingly Bing, which runs an OpenAI. It's a lot. We got to talk about that. There's a bunch of gadgets. There's a lot of news about what Amazon is doing with Alexa to talk about. Boy, that's been a long time that Amazon's been trying to figure out Alexa. And then we got a lightning round unsponsored, but Jake is here. So Jake will be the sponsor of lighting round. Welcome, Jake. Thanks for having me. Yeah. All right. Let's start with search GPT. It is the news. It is the big news. It's the thing that everyone saw coming that might actually shake up the search market.
4:45 Nilay Patel? There's other stuff happening underneath it that is interesting, like the web is being re-architected and we can talk about the deals Google and Reddit are making.
4:55 Nilay Patel? But we should just start with search GPT. David, what is going on here?
4:58 David Pierce? I guess the best way to describe search GPT is as chat GPT, but instead of returning text that it pulls from the internet, it returns text that it pulls from the internet, but with slightly more citations. We don't know that much. OpenAI basically put out a simple blog post with a couple of pictures. There's a text box that says, what are you looking for? And a search GPT icon and it will, it will attempt to kind of return links to you when you ask a question, but also kind of make sense of them in the process. So it seems like it's going to do some work on like the order in which they appear and trying to kind of tell a story with the links instead of just returning a bunch of links
5:38 David Pierce? in a row. OpenAI is being very slow about this. I guess it's, I think it's going to be open to, what was it? 10,000 users at first. They're calling it a prototype, like really trying to sort of slow play this thing. But we've been talking about, you know, the media deals that OpenAI has been making with our parent company Vox Media and The Atlantic and lots of others. We've been talking about the ways that which OpenAI is like crawling the web and taking data and all these fights over whether that is a copyright. Like all of that, I think in so many ways is actually building up to this, like chat GPT. I still believe this. They opening, I won't say it anymore because it got too popular, but I
6:20 David Pierce? sincerely believe that chat GPT was never meant to be the thing. And I think as you look at like the actual products OpenAI wants to build, I think it looks a lot more like search GPT than chat GPT. And I think like we've been building towards this for a very long time.
6:35 Nilay Patel? Wait, I disagree with you in the most minor of ways.
6:38 David Pierce? Okay.
6:39 Nilay Patel? What OpenAI says it wants to build is a world conquering AGI that will put us all out of work and let Sam Altman live a life of endless luxury.
6:47 Speaker 02 Sure. And he keeps writing op-eds saying it's super fine. Don't even worry about it.
6:50 Nilay Patel? So that's the goal. Just to be clear, their goal is like, whatever robot did everything and you lived in a cave running on a treadmill powering the robot. And like, fine, you know, maybe LLMs will get there, maybe they won't. I think they won't. But it's, that's the big goal.
7:06 Speaker 02 Yes.
7:07 Nilay Patel? The medium goal is how the hell do we make any money, which they have basically failed to do. There's some reporting out there, they're in a much more tenuous financial position than they went on. They've obviously have taken on a ton of money. They use a ton of Azure, compute, all this stuff. And so you got to make some money. And ChatGPT at 20 bucks a month just wasn't the thing. So a search product, if you look at the history of companies that make an awful lot of money, the search company seems to be making an awful lot of money. And they're headed towards, so I think this is just like a middle step of like, how do we fund our like world conquering AGI dreams?
7:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, they're currently spending a lot of money on SearchGPT. They're paying for publisher deals. They're paying for training these models. They're not making any money off of the people who are going to be using SearchGPT. That's going to be even more money in the hole as they get there. I think you're right. Like, there's a very clear monetization model for this. But in the short term, it's, it's rough for them.
8:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And, you know, the idea that they will capture, I don't know, Google AdSense ads or whatever, that like advertisers will pay for OpenAI's search product instead of, who knows? But I, the, the piece of the puzzle where you might move one user from using Google to using SearchGPT is the first problem, which like Microsoft has not solved in over a decade.
8:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:31 Nilay Patel? And like, the European Union has like, tried to legislate a solution to getting people to stop using Google and they can't solve it.
8:37 Speaker 02 I mean, it's funny because this is like, it's day one. Zero people are currently using this. Maybe a few thousand will be by the end of the week. This is a really, really small step. But this is also the sort of explosive moment that everybody's been waiting for. Right? Microsoft was so excited by this technology, they aggressively shoehorned it into Bing. Google was so scared of this technology that they put some sort of disastrous AI results directly into the front page of Google.
9:09 Speaker 02 All of the major players are fearful of what's going to happen with ChatGPT. And now we finally see the product and, you know, it's very, very alpha.
9:19 David Pierce? That's such a good summation of the entirety of the AI product industry right now. Everybody is either super bullish of it or terrified of it, depending on where you fall in this sort of current power stack of the tech industry. Uh, and all of the products are just, they're there, they're products. And I think the search thing is so interesting to me because on the one hand, you can make a pretty compelling argument that Google has never been more fragile than it is right now. Right? Like it has had all these own goals in a row with all the AI overviews. There is this wide perception that Google search is getting worse and worse and worse, is getting overrun by ads on and on and on. You could argue that the regulation is coming for it in a real way, like Google search might be more beatable than it has been in 20 years.
10:04 David Pierce? And yet there is exactly no indication that anyone is making any kind of a dent into Google at all.
10:11 Nilay Patel? In fact, there's the opposite indication.
10:13 David Pierce? Correct.
10:13 Nilay Patel? They just had their financial results and they're
10:14 David Pierce? Just keeps winning.
10:15 Nilay Patel? They just made $85 billion over the past three months, a 14% increase over the last year, like
10:22 Speaker 02 I do think there's something really interesting in how they've set up the main search GPT screen though. Because Google, I think for the past couple of years has been like, the way people search is changing. People are using TikTok, they're asking full questions. And yet Google has not really responded to that. Google search still functions exactly the same way. This is a really small change, but the main search GPT screen, um, instead of being like a thin little box where you're supposed to type in three keywords. It's a large text box and it says, what are you looking for? And I do think there's like a small turn that they're making there. There's almost this idea of, you know, you're supposed to ask a full question here and expect a full answer. I do think that is sort of a differentiator.
11:06 Speaker 02 They're sort of playing into this idea that like, we are searching in different ways now. We do need to build a different product for the moment.
11:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
11:14 Speaker 02 I don't know if this is the product, but
11:15 Nilay Patel? Their example search is music festivals in Boone, North Carolina in August, which if you type that into Google today. It would just be total, it would be A, you did the SEO garbage that you're used to, but you wouldn't get an actual answer to that query. Not, not even close. And so what they're showing, and we should talk about the actual product here. Right. It's a big, they're showing the larger context window. And then you ask it a question with multiple parameters and it answers it. Right. Like the answer it provides that query is in August, there are several music festivals and events happening in Boo, North Carolina. And it has a list, all the lists, all, every item in that list has a link, which is really the thing the publishers have asked for. Nick Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic was just on Decoder and he's like, the thing we wanted in our deal
11:59 Nilay Patel? was control over how our links would be displayed and how much of the stuff they would use. So it seems like that's what they're getting here. And then bizarrely, you can click a button on the left rail to open a panel of links, which is a much more traditional search result. And that you can't even get from Google anymore. Well, it's actually kind of interesting that no one has really rethought search interfaces a long time. And in the past week, Bing has deeply rethought its interface. Cause they can just do whatever they want. And then OpenAI is like, well, no one has any expectations of us. Here's a totally rethought, like what if links were a panel? As opposed to Google, which has been stuck in the 10 blue links paradigm, which they've complained to you about David, like this is that everyone's expectation. It's not what anybody wants anymore.
12:45 Nilay Patel? But then you change it, everyone like freaks out.
12:47 David Pierce? Yeah. I mean, it, it, it cuts both ways, right? Like the, the great thing about being Google is that you're Google. And the crappy thing about being Google is that anytime you do anything, a gigantic portion of your users are gonna hate it and lose their minds. It's why there's still the buttons in Microsoft Word, right? Like the, it's the famous thing Microsoft always says, right? They're like, 1% of people use this, but 1% of people is 10 million people. Like, what are we supposed to do with that? And I think that's real. And when you don't have any market share and don't have anything to lose, it's a lot easier to take swings like this. That's, that's certainly true. And I think to some extent, like Jake, what you're talking about, about this idea of, you know, asking fulder questions and getting fuller answers is real. It's only one part of search and it's actually a pretty small part of search.
13:32 David Pierce? But it is a real part of search and it is, I think, where all these companies sense Google is weakest and most beatable. But like this Boo, North Carolina thing is actually a perfect example, right? Cause all this stuff exists inside of webpages.
13:46 David Pierce? It's just a gigantic pain in the ass to find it. And what we've all done for forever is you do that Google search. You open up 10 pages and you sort of collate it yourself. And you like make that list either in your head as you read or in a spreadsheet or a Google Doc or an email or whatever. This is just doing that for you, which I think is super valuable. Like, one thing I do almost all the time is sit down and Google like, "Things to do near me this weekend." And holy God, is Google bad at serving an answer to that question. You just hope that there is some like local news website or Eventbrite happens to have something. The potential for this to be good at that is vast and very exciting.
14:28 David Pierce? There are a lot of really interesting questions about what it does to like publishers. Cause you even look at some of the links in these things. They're links directly to the venues. They're not links to whoever did the like 10 fun music festivals in Boone this weekend that OpenAI might be pulling from. I don't know the source of some of this data. I don't know if it's actually parsing the individual venue websites to get the answers. I don't know that it matters. I don't know that it's going to make a difference, but all of that is being abstracted completely away. Potentially better user experience, but super weird, different way to think about how the internet works.
15:05 Nilay Patel? So this, this is like an interesting puzzle to figure out. And I'm sure we're going to hear more about over time. Cause there's only two search indexes. There's Googles, which no one's allowed to use because they're Google. And then there's the Bing search index, which everyone uses. And all the alternative search engines that we've written about, that David's written about at length, they're all kind of running on the Bing index and then presenting a new front end to you that is maybe more private or whatever. And so it's pretty obvious that OpenAI is using the Bing search index, mostly because Microsoft is a huge owner of OpenAI.
15:38 David Pierce? We asked them and they just sort of vaguely said, "Third-party partners are powered."
15:43 Nilay Patel? Well, so, but then they, then there are other indexes you can use. And then there are these publisher partners that they're paying for.
15:49 David Pierce? Yep.
15:49 Nilay Patel? Right? So if you look at this, it's like, do you, do we think that? OpenAI is publishing appsummer.com, which is not the summer of apps for your phone, but the summer of festivals in Appalachia. Right, like, very different. Like, do we think they went out and made that deal? Are they paying Wikipedia? Doubtful. But are they gonna pay The Atlantic and Vox Media and everybody? Like, yes, because we know about those deals. So there's some weirdness here in, well, they're using Bing for the big web, like, the majority of what they do. And then they have these, like, priority partners who are getting a revenue share when they appear in the results against what revenue? Unclear. And you just gotta spiral into the complexity here.
16:34 Nilay Patel? And the answer is, like, I just wanna know what the music festivals are.
16:37 Speaker 02 Are those publishing partners actually to help improve this product? Or is that entirely because, uh, because of copyright?
16:45 Nilay Patel? I think it's both. Like, fully, I think it's both. And I think that is actually echoed by what Google is doing. Like, we, this is the marker, I think, this week, of the next evolution of search on the internet in a huge way.
17:00 Speaker 02 That's right.
17:00 Nilay Patel? Because this product launched and it's gonna become whatever it is. Bing is redesigned and it is basically just showing you AI answers first. Like, you thought people were freaked out at Google AI overviews? If you look at Bing today, it's like, there are no links.
17:14 Speaker 02 It's actually structurally pretty similar to SearchGPT. If you looked at Bing today.
17:19 Nilay Patel? Right, so, again, the risks that these other ones are doing. And then Google, it came out this week. Google obviously has a big deal with Reddit. Now they're paying Reddit for results. And Reddit is blocking all of the other search engines.
17:32 Speaker 02 In some ways, I think this is like the craziest news item of the week. Like, this is, this is unheard of. Are there any other major websites that block all search engines as a rule?
17:43 Nilay Patel? But they don't block Google.
17:45 Speaker 02 They, right. Well, yeah, but Google's paying.
17:48 Nilay Patel? Right, there are lots of big platforms that don't want Google to index them because they want people in their walled garden. But we don't think about the web that way.
17:59 Speaker 02 Right. And this is, I mean, this feels like an explosive moment because of that, right? Reddit has always felt like part of the web in a way that I think Facebook does not. Maybe that's not a fair assessment, but I think Reddit is at the very least trying to recontextualize what it is right now. And they see that this is the way they're going to be profitable going forward. And so they're playing a pretty hard ball with search providers right now.
18:26 David Pierce? Yeah, I mean, even Reddit's statement to us from Tim Rasmussen said essentially that, right? There was a sense that the denial was that this is about preferencing Google, but very clearly what that means is actually, no, we want to give it to everybody. It's just that everybody has to pay us the way that Google did. And that's, I think, going to be an increasingly common position. And what's a bummer is that it was Google. Like, I think this actually would have been a much more interesting test case if Reddit had blocked everybody, but DuckDuckGo, because DuckDuckGo paid first. You know what I mean? And it's really easy to sort of toe a moral line when the only search engine that matters
19:07 David Pierce? to your business is the one that's paying you. And so I think to some extent, everybody gets to kind of have their cake and eat it too here. But this is the fight you're going to see over and over from these platforms.
19:19 Nilay Patel? Right. What I'm saying, this is the big week in internet search. What I'm saying is, this is the week that paid search started happening.
19:25 David Pierce? Yeah, oh, I agree with that.
19:26 Nilay Patel? All these publishers are paying OpenAI to be in their search product, and they are saying to us on the record, Nick Thompson on Decoder, saying loudly, this is all just baby steps towards trying to force Google to pay.
19:38 David Pierce? Yeah, the tacit agreement of search, which was that I'm going to let you crawl my data and in exchange, you're going to send people to me, I think is, this is the week that broke, right? Like, that is no longer the agreement of the internet.
19:49 Nilay Patel? We're definitively on another path now. So you've got the publisher, you've got OpenAI paying the publishers for SearchGPT, you've got Google paying Reddit, and Reddit blocking all the other search engines. And you're just going to see that continue on. And then you've got Perplexity in trouble, because they built SearchGPT without any of these deals, and they're getting sued. Just straightforwardly sued.
20:11 David Pierce? Yeah.
20:11 Nilay Patel? Conde Nast, which owns Wired and Vogue and all the other big magazines, is suing perplexity for scraping its, for scraping insights. Well, there you go. Like, we're in it. We're, we're in the era where accessing a website is going to cost money for robots. And like, I just, where the money comes out on the other end is actually up for grabs, right? Like, only Google is making any money and scale in search, and they're making all the money.
20:37 David Pierce? And they're making more and more all the time.
20:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:40 David Pierce? Despite trying to screw all of that up with the AI overview stuff. And meanwhile, the other thing that's happening is the, the rage against the AI companies who are doing this without asking permission is just getting louder and louder and louder. Like, there was a big kerfuffle around Anthropic this week because Kyle Weens, who runs iFixit, said that Anthropic's crawler was on iFixit's website, I think it was a million times in a day. And this is like, it's, it's an important thing to understand. Like, if you get a million page views, that costs money, like, actual, real money. The bandwidth and hosting cost for that stuff is expensive. And to have that happening all the time, which is what these crawlers are trying to
21:23 David Pierce? do, not only do you have, like, moral feelings about it and there are copyright questions, it literally just costs money. And so there, there was a whole thing where they had disallowed Anthropic in it, in their Terms of Service, but not in their robots.txt file, which is this thing that has, you know, been very important for a long time and is quickly evaporating as a part of the internet.
21:46 David Pierce? And so now they put that in, and there's a question of like, okay, is that going to stop? But it seems like all of these AI companies just decided a couple of years ago that they can just run roughshod over the internet for as long as they can and as aggressively as they want to and just ask a lot of forgiveness and not permission. And I think we're, the other thing that's happening this week is that is coming back around on them in a pretty serious way.
22:08 Nilay Patel? Two, two things. One, Conde Nast sent a cease and desist to perplexity. They didn't actually sue them yet, so there's clarification. And two, I forced David to write a story about robots.txt, and that was the rightest decision I've ever made.
22:19 David Pierce? You didn't force me to write that story.
22:21 Nilay Patel? You fought me.
22:21 David Pierce? I cannot believe you are taking credit for that. That is outrageous.
22:26 David Pierce? That's unreal. Actually, you get half credit because I was telling you about it and you were like, you should just write that story. And then I did write that story. So I'll give you, I'll give you half credit for that.
22:34 Nilay Patel? That's usually how these things go.
22:36 David Pierce? I'll, I'll live with that.
22:37 Nilay Patel? We should actually re-up that story. We'll put it in the show notes. That deal, right? Which was about compute power, like this file that lives on every website called robots.txt is just says what you cannot scrape and who and who cannot scrape the website or read the website or index the website. And it was there to manage the amount of server load that websites would have in the beginning as everyone sort of calling everything. And it became very political. And now you're at the place where perplexity CEO is like, robots txt is not a legal agreement. And we're calling you anyway, but you don't understand how the web works. So it's like a real thing that he has said in response to some of these complaints. And it's like, well, can you explain how you think the web works? And why you're scraping these sites that don't
23:20 Nilay Patel? want your callers to scrape them? And that, you're right. There's a moral argument against AI that is like leaking into the legal argument. And the moral argument is like, go away. And then the hard, the harder part is like, well, maybe you can pay enough money to overcome morals. Like that's capitalism.
23:38 David Pierce? Yep.
23:39 Nilay Patel? And no one knows how much money that is yet.
23:41 David Pierce? I mean, The Atlantic might, they have, right? Like this is, this is what those deals are, right? This is, they're trying.
23:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Candidly, I think our executives were a little jealous. We had Nick on the show. But I can't interview my own boss. This is not how it works. Like, nobody, nobody wants that conversation. So you're real smart. Like, nobody wants me to do that. But I, I think those deals are even only a couple of years long. And they're all betting on whether the Times wins a lawsuit or someone else wins a lawsuit and they get to renegotiate. But I just think like, the bigger picture here is very much, people know there should be a next generation search product. A bunch of companies are trying to build them. It was 18 months ago, right? That there was the Bing launch powered by chat GPT and I, you know, I went to Redmond and Nadella was like, I want to like Google Dance.
24:29 Nilay Patel? That's the quote with brother. I think he did make Google Dance. He succeeded in dancing.
24:34 David Pierce? Yeah.
24:35 Nilay Patel? Dancing occurred. Whether or not that dancing resulted in any additional market share for Bing remains to be seen.
24:42 David Pierce? Well, what's ironic is I think everybody lost, right? Microsoft poured a lot of money and time and energy into making Bing more successful to essentially no avail. And Google got so freaked out by it that it is blowing up its own search project. Like it's, it's just the worst dance of all time.
25:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I'm going to want you, one who's usually out there being like, competition's good for consumers. And in this case, I'm like, was that, is, has this gotten any?
25:08 Speaker 02 I enjoyed the AI overviews. I thought we got a good chuckle.
25:13 Speaker 02 Before they started hiding them more often.
25:14 Nilay Patel? Yes, there's the studies out there that say they don't even show them anymore.
25:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, there is. There, I mean, Google has fought this, but they, they, they appear to be reducing the frequency with which they show up. And that, that feels right from my experience. I feel like I was seeing them on just about everything. And now either I've mentally blocked them out or they're reducing them and I don't know which it is.
25:35 Nilay Patel? So I just did the search for music festivals in Boone, North Carolina, and that is something where you would expect an AI overview. Nothing. Just didn't get one. And yeah, it's random. That's a sample of one that I ran twice, but like they are, they do see me coming and going and they cost more money than the normal search to execute, to run the inference. And so we'll see, but I, this just feels like, oh, the, the way we think with the internet, which is like you just search for stuff, it's going away, like just fully going away.
26:04 David Pierce? But I, I, I mostly agree with that, but I do think the thing I'm most interested about with search GPT is we are at this place now where everyone is assuming this is the future, right? But it is, it is very much not. The present, like, I think the thing that Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs search at Google, said about people going on TikTok is like, you say that because you don't want regulators to yell at you, right? Like, it's everybody invents competition that they don't have. Like TikTok is not search competition for Google. It just isn't. It might be. It's a really interesting, different way of thinking about the future. But it is, it is not.
26:44 Speaker 02 I do feel like there is something here, though. Like, to your point earlier, David, you said, you know, normally on Google, you would go and you would read 10 results and you average them in your head. And then these tools just average them for you. And those are the kinds of things where I have been trying to use ChatGPT to see if I can get that sort of quick summary. And because the Google product has gotten so disastrously messy in recent years, I don't feel like I'm missing out, right? I, the accuracy threat is not really a thing I'm unhappy to deal with.
27:22 Speaker 02 So I do think like things are changing. I don't, they certainly have not changed wholesale yet. But I think it's coming.
27:29 David Pierce? No, I agree with that. And I think to Google's credit, with things like voice search and lens and the multimodal search, Google is actually like a much more sophisticated search product than it probably gets credit for. It's just now trying to blow all of that up with AI overviews. But I think my larger point is we're at this moment where like, all of these products are way out in front of what they're all assuming is this big behavioral shift. And there's really no evidence yet that that behavioral shift is happening. And so all these companies are just flushing money down the toilet, being like, the people are coming. This is what everybody wants. And, and there was like, it's because ChatGPT hit so hard. Everybody's like, if that's gonna happen again, we can't miss it again. And I think what we're learning is that actually ChatGPT
28:13 David Pierce? was really cool and really novel. And we haven't really found the like mainstream consumer use case. It goes beyond, it's really cool and really novel. And like, by all indications, the, the $20 a month co-pilot stuff and the $20 a month Gemini stuff is like not taking over the universe yet. There's some really interesting AI, like IT backend stuff that's happening. There's AI stuff in industry. All of that is cool and interesting. And I think that's gonna be where all the interesting stuff is. But the idea of like, I as a person in the world am going to use AI all the time. Not nearly as proven as all of these companies would like you to believe.
28:49 Nilay Patel? Right. Did we overreact and cause a multi-billion dollar bubble? Because it seemed like a computer wanted to bang you.
28:56 David Pierce? Yeah, like is is Google going to burn down search because it thinks everyone's going to change even though they're not actually going to change like?
29:02 Nilay Patel? I would I would say in the history of the world, it seems like something wants to bang you has caused many mistakes to happen.
29:08 David Pierce? But also most technological change.
29:11 Nilay Patel? So there's that. Um, uh, one thing I just want to end with that seems important here is search GPT is a search product that runs on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. And Bing is a search product that runs on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and makes use of OpenAI, which runs in like, what is going on here? Are these? It does not seem like these companies are as tightly linked as they used to be.
29:38 Speaker 02 I don't know. I mean, I I feel like if you had to ask Microsoft to pick one, they're gonna pick Azure over everything else. It's like.
29:46 Nilay Patel? My my one true.
29:47 Speaker 02 Right. No, it's like it's the cloud.
29:49 Nilay Patel? This is like Hulk Hogan ripping open the American flag to.
29:51 Speaker 02 Yes.
29:53 Speaker 02 It's all Azure. It was always Azure. This is what they care about. They don't care if it's them or somebody else. And it's not like they have a lot to lose with Bing.
30:03 Nilay Patel? It's true. It's just, I would say after the big OpenAI coup and, you know, Nadella being like, Sam is my guy. He's back. Then there was Apple might join the board and that went away. Microsoft did this weird aqua hire of inflection where they have a new CEO of AI. Which is weird and they hired an entire AI companies worth of engineers. And then Nadella hasn't really said anything about opening like every other tweet from Nadella used to be about how cool OpenAI was and Alex Heath has pointed out to me. And it all hasn't, not one post about OpenAI.
30:35 Speaker 02 Do you do you think he's he's upset about their product direction? Just worried about regulators? Because it feels like regulators to me. I feel like.
30:42 Nilay Patel? It's true. There's there's a lot of investigation of like, did you do you actually secretly run a bunch of companies? Sure, but it also their products are directly competitive. Like they both have search products.
30:53 David Pierce? Yeah.
30:53 Nilay Patel? And I guess the idea is, well, if either one of us takes a percentage of share away from Google, it's still running on Azure.
31:00 David Pierce? Yeah, I really think that's it. I think Jake's summation is perfect, that Azure wins all the way down and the the enemy is Google. And whatever you have to do to take away from Google is fine. And I think for Microsoft, the we're going to use AI to make Bing work ship has sailed. And so you use Bing to like, keep doing weird stuff and keep getting press. And then you hope search GPT like really wins.
31:24 Speaker 02 We didn't touch on it, but Google was rumored to make this enormous $23 billion purchase of a cloud security startup just to, you know, boost Google Cloud, which is behind Azure, which is behind AWS. So I think this that is just like a huge opportunity for Microsoft and for all of these companies. And that company spurned Google. So it's not going to happen, but I think that just goes to show how important this market is.
31:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah, or the CrowdStrike thing happened and Google was like, what if we aren't responsible for things like?
31:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:02 Nilay Patel? It is very, by the way, it is very unclear what happens with that deal. It's a little far afield from the very chest, but it seems like some weird, some weirdness there.
32:11 Speaker 02 It wasn't clear to me. I thought that they just were like, oh, we can make more money just IPOing.
32:16 David Pierce? Capitalism.
32:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah. All right, we have to take a break. Kylie Robinson wrote the whole story about search GPT. It's on the website, go read it. We'll be right back. We're going to talk about some gadgets.
32:28 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
33:00 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. There's a lot of gadgets to talk about, like quite a few. We have Sean just in love with the Asus Rogue Ally X. We have Allison not so in love with the Galaxy Z Fold 6. But I think we should start, and we have the, I would say, having no feelings at all about the Galaxy.
33:18 David Pierce? Yeah, that's right.
33:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's hot, hot, cold, lukewarm. That's how that's going. We should start, though, with what feels like a pretty huge piece of news. The Wall Street Journal had a big in-depth piece on what is going on with Alexa at Amazon. It's almost 10 years old now, Alexa. I have a vivid memory of the first Echo launch when we were in our midtown office, David, and we were sitting next to each other, and you and I were the only people who thought it was a good idea. And everyone else was like, what's this tube? Like, it was like a very odd moment. And I was like, this is all I've ever wanted, to talk to a computer. Look how far we've come.
33:59 Nilay Patel? But Amazon's been at it for 10 years. They sent $25 billion on it, and they have not really made any money. The Wall Street Journal goes into some very boring accounting tricks that they've used to prop up the division. But now Jeff Bezos is gone. Dave Limb, who used to run that whole division, is gone. You got an Andy Jassy. You got a Panos Panay. And they're like, what is this garbage? And they're kind of just shutting it down. It sounds like a paid version of Alexa is coming, and that's the future.
34:28 David Pierce? A thing that I've learned a bunch of times over the last couple of years, and for whatever reason, this just keeps coming up as I talk to people about products, is that if you work at a big company and you have a product, there has to be someone really high up in the company who cares about it. And without that...
34:48 David Pierce? If you're not like earth shattering least successful, your thing will die. And this is, this is true at Google. Like if you don't have a sort of executive sponsor who can sit in a meeting and talk about why you're still worth the resources, your product dies. If you, it's true at Amazon, like I think one thing that we're learning about Amazon is that there were a bunch of things that Jeff Bezos in particular really cared about. And we've seen those things start to kind of wither on the vine after Bezos left. And I've heard this about the Kindle. I've heard this about Alexa, that these were things that right or wrong, good business or bad business, like Bezos really believed in as, as things that matter both to the world and to Amazon. And without him there, it makes sense that if you're Andy Jassy and you're looking around
35:32 David Pierce? and you're saying, okay, where are we just hemorrhaging money and/or wasting resources? You could look at Kindle as wasting resources. It's a, it's a big team that doesn't make that much money in the scheme of what Amazon does. And you look at Alexa and you're like, okay, this thing was supposed to be the future. It's been 10 years. We've lost, not only, Neil, I did they lose 27, $25 billion. They lost $25 billion in five years, not even the whole run. The Journal's very good reporting couldn't find losses earlier than that, but presumably they were very large. Like this thing is a disaster of a business. And can I just read you what I think is some like truly great knife twisting writing from the Journal?
36:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:09 David Pierce? Like I used to work at the Wall Street Journal. They're very careful. They're very meticulous. They, they are not prone to like grandiose turns of phrase, but what that means is they will just very quietly subtly just stab you repeatedly with a story. So it says, while hundreds of millions of customers have Alexa enabled devices, the idea that people would spend meaningful amounts of money to buy goods on Amazon by talking to the iconic voice assistant on the underpriced speakers didn't take off. Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. We're worried we've hired 10,000 people and we've built a smart timer, said a former senior employee. Brutal, brutal.
36:46 David Pierce? But also yes, correct. That is exactly what it is.
36:49 Speaker 02 Yeah. I, I can't think of another company that operated a product division, the way that Amazon operated the Echo division. Right for 10 years, what, once a year, they would roll out a dozen new Echo devices and they would just be different shapes and sizes, ever so slightly like weirder variations on the same thing. And if you look back over 10 years, how many Echo products would you say are essential? Right. I really can't think of that many different Echo products that are not just variations on the original formula that they identified 10 years ago. And so we talk about $25 billion being wasted. It's like, I don't know what they got from that. The product just hasn't gone anywhere.
37:31 Nilay Patel? Well, I'll make this comparison, which I think is, it's a little out there, but go with me on this. This week Meta released the latest version of Llama, which is open source. And Mark Zuckerberg put out this whole thing about why he believes in open source and all the stuff. And he has this line in there. It's like, one of my formative experiences was building products limited by what Apple would allow in its platforms. And this is why I believe in open source. And you know, read it straight. And I'm sure that will cause its own kind of consternation out there in the world. Amazon thought this was the next platform. If you recall, they failed at the Fire Phone, deeply badly failed at the phone. They are also constrained by what Apple will allow them to do on their devices in meaningful, big ways. And they really thought they had it. They really, okay, ambient computing is going to be the thing. We're going to put-
38:15 Speaker 02 I mean, they got one in every single home.
38:17 Nilay Patel? Because they gave them away for free.
38:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:19 Nilay Patel? And then they, this is part of the accounting tricks that the Wall Street Journal is talking about, is they, they accounted revenue for purchases that were like not made. They call it downstream impact. And like by putting an Alexa device in your home, people will shop this much, or they will stay with Prime, or whatever it is. And they made up some money. And then you're like-
38:38 Speaker 02 It's brilliant.
38:39 Nilay Patel? There's no money. It didn't happen.
38:41 David Pierce? Have you guys ever bought something directly through your Echo?
38:44 Nilay Patel? No. Actually, I moved off the Alexa platform ages ago, because I just wanted Google Home Frames. I wanted the photo frames on the hubs.
38:52 Speaker 02 Hmm.
38:53 Nilay Patel? And Amazon finally did this, but they never built a good photo service, which is exactly the problem you're talking about, which is the amount of cost and complexity to build a good photo service is not worth anything in the scheme of Amazon.
39:07 Nilay Patel? Right. Google accidented into Google Photos.
39:09 Speaker 02 Right.
39:10 Nilay Patel? And they have it so they can run Google, the Nest Hubs, which have the cool photo frame feature. And I know, I know that Alexa devices have that and you can do it, but then you gotta use Amazon Photos, which is not as good. And it's like, oh, is the money to improve Amazon Photos worth it to get even 5% of people to switch away from Google? And you just like run the math inside of Amazon. You're like, what are you talking about? We run Amazon. Like, figure out how someone wears shoes. Stop it.
39:41 David Pierce? I've been thinking a lot about the conversation we had around that very first demo of the humane pin all those months ago, when he stood there and he was like, I forget what he's wearing. He ordered a book. He like took a picture of the book. This is Imran Choudhary, the CEO. I think this is right. He was wearing a prototype of the pin, like took a picture of a book and bought it. And we were just sitting there being like, okay, here's the list of questions I have about what just happened. What credit card did you use? Where's it shipping to? Where did you buy it from? What's what sources it? How much did it cost? All of that stuff has existed with the Echo forever. And with all of this, you're like, Alexa, you know, buy me toilet paper. If I have to then go check my phone to make sure it worked correctly, which I do, we failed. We just accomplished nothing. And I that I think was just never gonna work for Amazon. And and
40:26 David Pierce? they have they have tried to back their way into people want to do this with the, you know, the subscribe and save thing has some stuff going for it. And they're like, we'll reorder the things and all this stuff. And it just doesn't work. And God, this has to have been six years ago now. I was in Seattle in a conference room with a bunch of Amazon executives. And I made the joke about like, okay, this thing is for music and timers. What's the third thing? Where's where's my third thing gonna be? And they gave me this long speech about how, oh, there are tens of thousands of things. Lots of people like to do lots of different things. And I was like, but none of what you just described to me is a killer app that will make you money, or any of these developers that you're trying to bring onto this platform. And it is wild to me how many years later, precisely nothing has changed.
41:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
41:09 David Pierce? Like, they just never found another thing. It got very good at the things it was good at. And it never found another thing.
41:14 Nilay Patel? It's so funny, because there is that subscribe and save stuff, you know, you run out of things in your house, and you should be able to be like, Alexa, I'm out of coffee, or whatever. And they just couldn't close the loop in that very specific way. Or do you remember the dash buttons they had? You would like push the button and like laundry detergent would show up. And like, kids are pushing them too much. So they got rid of them. They just figured out like automating that stuff. And maybe you have a little too much overlap is better. And that's how you get to subscribe and save. Like, it doesn't really matter. And then anything that you want to buy that isn't something you've already bought 100 times in a row, you probably want to do like an infinite amount of like product research on. And that's just better. And so like, I think they're stuck with this product and the next
41:58 Nilay Patel? move is to put an LLM in it, to charge money for it and to have it be this thing. But to your point, they thought this was an operating system. They thought it was a platform. They were licensing it out to all kinds of other companies. They, they thought they had Windows. We've talked about it in the show. It's like, Amazon thinks Alexa is Windows. And you're like, the thing you can do with Windows is look at it.
42:25 Nilay Patel? Like, right? Like, you can play games on it. Like, the, the computers need screens, I think, is like, maybe the end result of all of this.
42:32 Speaker 02 Them planning to charge for an AI-powered Alexa feels like a, a very questionable next step. Like, it feels, it feels necessary, right? You need to charge for it because that's what everybody's charging for the premium version of their thing. But it is, you know, after a decade of people being like, Alexa, could be a little bit better. I think the idea that people are like, you know what? Maybe I will pay and get a slightly better Alexa.
42:55 Nilay Patel? Well, just think about the horrible upsells that are coming for all of us with Alexa devices, yes, right? Like, even today, like, you've, every one out of 10 times, I ask Google Home to do something. And it's like, you know, I can also do this. I'm like, I don't, I've known that for so long. I don't, I don't want you to. When, with Alexa, it's gonna be like, you know, you can pay me to tell you even worse.
43:17 David Pierce? That's the thing, right? So like, Jake, to your point, I think, to me, the question Amazon is about to ask is, is 50% better Alexa actually meaningful? Because let's assume that it is, right? Like, I think there's some evidence that if you go from the machine learning tech that we've had before to like, LLM-powered systems, the like, the, the speech to text gets better, the text to speech gets better, the natural language processing gets better. Like, most of that seems like it'll work. If Alexa just gets 50% better at every single thing it already does, does it, does it become a better product or a better business for Amazon? Because I don't think so. I can't think of anything that I'm like, oh, if only it were better at this, I'd do it all the time.
43:58 Speaker 02 I think if you put ChatGPT into Alexa, it would get a lot more usage than it does today. I think if you charge $10 a month to access ChatGPT in Alexa, you're not going to earn that much money.
44:12 Nilay Patel? Right, and this is a problem with it being a voice-first assistant. If you could pay $10 a month to get ChatGPT everywhere, oh, that's kind of interesting, right? But you can't. You can pay to get it in their app, and then that app runs on your phone where Siri is there.
44:31 Nilay Patel? Fine, and it's not going to run in these voice assistants in your house because Google owns them or Amazon owns them. And you actually have this problem where you have what is fundamentally an application running into what many, many, many big companies have thought of as an operating system.
44:45 Speaker 02 I mean, this is like the starting point, though, right? The grand AI dreams are that these AI tools can actually functionally do things for you, right? They can make the purchase, they can push the button, they can navigate an app for you. And so I think if we're talking about Alexa as an operating system, 100%, they need to be working on these AI things, they need to make that happen. But the last time somebody tried this, it was the rabbit, and they sort of made up the fact that they could do any of these things. And so, you know, I would say I don't have high hopes for V1 of this, but it's, I think, very clear that they need to do something. This feels like the start.
45:26 Speaker 02 Haven't seen it yet, but it feels like this is going to be very much first steps.
45:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah, one thing that's interesting about the journal piece, which is indeed very well-reported and does, like David say, have many fine turns of phrase in it. Panos Panay, who now runs this division, did not speak to them. And we know Panos. He is a forceful personality. I don't think he's just going to let it ride. Like, if anything, he will provide focus to this, and it is unclear what that focus will be. If they are going to launch a paid tier, maybe, you know, maybe that's his project, maybe there's a new set of hardware coming. But there's another turn coming for this. It just feels like an entire decades' worth of Alexa hardware is about to become like...
46:13 David Pierce? So what's funny about that is I think if it weren't for Panos, I would have just asked you just now, do you think it's possible that Amazon is just going to decide to get out of the devices business? Because what this story is about broadly is Amazon's devices business is a disaster. And there was a period not that long ago where Amazon bought Ring, Amazon bought, what was it Blink? It bought Eero. It was like, it was deep in the, we are going to be a hardware company in a very real way, especially in the smart home. And obviously Alexa and Echo is the biggest part of that team as Amazon looks at it. But like, there don't seem to be runaway hits here. There is nothing that is like making all of this work.
46:57 David Pierce? And it's the same for Kindles and Fire TVs. Like all of this is baked into that. And so if I'm Andy Jassy and I'm like, okay, we need to, we need to keep growing. We need to put money inside of the stuff that's really going to matter. It doesn't seem that outlandish to look at devices and say, this is not a game we want to play anymore. But if you're going to do that, you don't hire Panos Panay, I don't think. And if you're going to do that, I don't think Panos goes to work for you, which is why all of this is very confusing to me.
47:21 Nilay Patel? Right. And there's a lot of early sort of unsourced, rumor-y reporting that he's like, what have you all been doing?
47:30 Nilay Patel? And so we'll see. They need a vision, right? The vision, you know, under Dave Limp, and you can listen to Dave on our shows over the years, was your house would become a computer and he was just going to like, put microphones and speakers everywhere and then maybe get some satellite internet and like,
47:49 Nilay Patel? right? Cause he ran Project Kuiper, their satellite internet that competes with SpaceX. This is a real thing. And so his idea was that he would just sort of like smarten up your house and that would, you would just like add stuff until you like.
48:05 Nilay Patel? Like a black hole, like it collapsed and so it started giving off light and heat and became alive and turned into a computer. Like, I don't know what that metaphor is, but that's what it felt like every time I talked to him. He's like, here's what we're gonna do. We'll add some Ring cameras and then Eero will run the networking. We'll put a mic and a speaker in every room and then you'll have a Fire TV and then we'll just keep squeezing until it's alive. And I was always like, but when do they talk to each other? Like, that is the part, like, the vision is like, they have to do something that is more than the literal sum of the parts. And I don't think they ever got there.
48:37 David Pierce? And importantly, if your Amazon makes money at some point, like, Amazon just keeps giving hardware away, betting that once it's in your house, they'll figure out how to make money off of it. And we are now pretty long into that experiment not working. And you kind of wonder if it's ever gonna start to work.
48:55 Nilay Patel? It feels like everyone learned the wrong lesson from Apple, right? Apple turned your phone into a shopping mall and like, you blink in an iPhone and Tim Cook is like, that'll be 100%, right? But the hardware is still very expensive.
49:07 David Pierce? Yeah.
49:07 Nilay Patel? Amazon's like, this is the cheapest TV we can make. It's full of ads. And it just did, they didn't get the, they didn't get the second part. All right. There are other gadgets to talk about. Do you want to start with the Z Fold 6?
49:19 David Pierce? Yeah.
49:21 Nilay Patel? That's about it, right?
49:22 David Pierce? Yeah, that's my, that's my level of enthusiasm. Yeah. So Jake, I want to know what you think about this. Neil and I have talked a lot about folding phones and I always end up sort of defeated and sad, but I want to know what you think.
49:33 Speaker 02 I mean, if I had a lot of extra money to spend, I would own like nine foldable phones. And, and I would love staring at them. I would love dreaming about how often I'm gonna flip them open and use the huge inner screen. And in reality, everybody I talk to who has a foldable phone does not open them all that often. And it's really interesting reading Alison's review because she's looking at this, she's like, this is, you know, it's a great phone. I think they've like, pretty much figured it out. You know, they, they ironed out all but the literal crease. You know, it folds flat now. The screens like touch the edges. Great. It's, it's a really nice looking piece of hardware. And I do think like,
50:17 Speaker 02 We sort of got to, you know, a few years ago, there was this question of, okay, is this going to replace the standard phone? And I think now it's very clearly, no, this is just like another offering. And they've gotten really good. And I think what Allison is kind of finding here, and this seems right to me from everything I've read, from everybody I've talked to, you have to have a use for it. You have to specifically want this and buy this. And particularly given that these are like twice the price of another phone, you have to really want it.
50:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Our old friend Dan Seifert, who's now at Google, had maybe the funniest reaction to David instigating what I can only describe as the Buchs Palmer Wars of 2024.
51:00 Nilay Patel? He was like, well, you really want us folding phone, which is the most
51:04 Speaker 02 Or screens.
51:05 Nilay Patel? The most damn thing to say, oh, I love you, Dan. Dan is also the one who tried to get me to use Samsung Dex every day, which we all know that one. But his point was, you want a device for reading, what you actually want is a folding phone that is a phone most of the time. And then you open it and you have a tablet and you do this thing. And it's still, the argument is what you really want is a tablet most of the time. But it's just, I don't think Android tablets are that compelling yet, like to this day. And so Allison's point here is like, Samsung kind of has no competition here and they're coasting on having invented this.
51:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:38 Nilay Patel? And these are totally iterative refinements.
51:40 David Pierce? I think, I think that's true. But I also think if you're Samsung, you're, you are kind of looking at Android and going like, okay, what are you, what are you going to do for me here? And, and we're now on a pretty long run of Google kind of loudly talking about how it's investing in making stuff better for larger screens. And it has gotten better. Like the basic UI of a larger screen Android device has come a long way. It doesn't feel like somebody just like took the edges of a JPEG and stretched it anymore. Like it's much better. But it's still, it doesn't feel meaningfully different to use the internal screen than it does to use the external screen. And so I think like Jake, to your point, you get a foldable phone and what
52:24 David Pierce? you realize is mostly what you bought is just a heavier phone that every once in a while, you're going to open up and do something with. It's not like a, every time I sit down to do it, I'm going to open up the phone. This is the reason I think flip phones are more interesting, because I think to me, there is a much more natural divide of what you do where on a flip phone. And on a fold phone, I think Partly just because of the way we've all used phones for so long, you're just gonna sit there and use it as a phone most of the time because all of the operating system, all of the apps, all of our muscle memory has taught us how to use a phone like a phone. And so there's just the case for this larger screen just has not been made super convincingly. And Samsung does not seem to every year invent new reasons to make that case.
53:07 David Pierce? Like the, the sketch thing that you can do on there is awesome. You can draw an image and it'll make that image for you with AI. Terrifying for the future. Very cool. You need like a lot of those if you're gonna start to sell these things to people in meaningful ways, especially for twice the price of a normal smartphone.
53:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Also, it is still too tall and skinny on the outer screen, which I think is why people instinctively sort of open it every time.
53:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, though weirdly it seems like Google is heading in that direction too. All the rumors about the Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
53:39 David Pierce? You did. That's really impressive.
53:41 Speaker 02 Hmm. Are that they're going more in this direction, which I think is crazy. I thought the old, uh, kinda wider, more book-like format was gonna be a winner.
53:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but the Pixel 8 Fold.
53:56 Nilay Patel? You can tell Google runs a company where most information is indexed by machines in how they care to name things. Um, uh, but it was like too wide. Like, Allison has a photo interview of the OnePlus Open, the Pixel Fold, and the new Galaxy Z Fold 6. And it's like the OnePlus Open is the right shape.
54:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
54:15 Nilay Patel? It's a phone. Like, that's the answer is make it a phone. And then you can open it to a tablet. And every other one is like, it's a book. It's a remote control. And it's like, why don't you just make it the size of a phone? And I get that it's challenging because you have to optimize the tablet on the inside. And you, you, I don't wanna reopen the great aspect ratio debates of the Vergecast of old. But like, what is the right aspect ratio for both of these things is kind of an open question.
54:41 Speaker 02 It's 16:10. Just gonna lock it in.
54:43 David Pierce? 3:2, baby. Let's go.
54:46 Nilay Patel? All right. So that's the Z Fold 6. You've really, uh, sketched an image is gonna, you know, probably end democracies we know it, but it'll be fun while we, while we have it.
54:53 David Pierce? Wait, can I just say before we move on, if you are a person who already owns a Z Fold and you're upgrading to the 6, tell us why. Vergecast at the verge.com. I'm like, I sincerely want to know because there are a bunch of little hardware things, there are a bunch of little software things. I want to know like, what are the, what are the new things that make you want to upgrade your foldable phone? So hit us up.
55:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Uh, let's talk about the Galaxy Ring real fast. Uh, V's analysis of this is this is an accessory for the Galaxy Watch.
55:20 David Pierce? Not what I expected.
55:21 Nilay Patel? Which is kind of fascinating. Yeah.
55:23 David Pierce? Yeah. So basically the, the ring seems to have gotten the hardware basically right. It's light, it's thin, it lasts a long time. It doesn't have a subscription. The charging case is great because it's a charging case and not just like a weird puck that sits on your desk. Uh, but it's, it is kind of totally ancillary to everything. It doesn't seem to be wildly accurate in the way that you would hope something on your finger could be more accurate than something on your wrist. It does an interesting job, V found of sort of trading data collection between the watch and the ring. So it'll, it'll actually optimize for which device is better at collecting which kind of data through which sensor, which is very cool and potentially good for battery life. But yeah, it seems like it's, it's
56:03 David Pierce? fine. Like if you don't have a watch and you want a ring, it'll be fine. It won't be as good as having both. It probably won't even be as useful as the watch, but it'll be fine. But also like people who want smart rings probably also have smart watches. I don't know. So I, I land on like, this seems like a good additive thing, but I kind of wanted more out of it. It's also extremely Samsung dependent.
56:28 Speaker 02 Yeah. I, I just Googled it. I can get a Galaxy Watch 6 for half the price of the Galaxy Ring. And I think like, there's the question. This thing does more. We already know people like smart watches. Um, Galaxy Watch 6 looks pretty good. Um, it, and in V's findings, right? The ring is supposed to be better, um, at a bunch of different tracking, uh, for, for L stuff. Um, it just wasn't. Um, so at least for this first version, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. Um, yeah, as much as like the discrete form factor could be nice, um, for people who, you know, want to wear other stuff on their wrists.
57:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Can I ask, if you are deeply in the Galaxy ecosystem, can you talk to us? This is like every now and again, I ask for people who are like, who buy. Like gaming, Android phones. No one's ever called us. I just want to be clear. Maybe, look, not all audiences, as we, as we know, it's a fractured media landscape. Maybe hardcore Android gamers don't listen to the Vergecast, but I suspect if anyone would have that audience, it would be us.
57:32 Nilay Patel? Reveal yourselves. And if you're hardcore in the Galaxy ecosystem, if you're, like, we know about our iOS fanboys, right? There are people who are like, I, now that iPhone has RCS, I believe in RCS. Like, we know you are.
57:45 David Pierce? But we're talking like, deep. Like, if you, if you don't have a phone, if you didn't buy a Galaxy book just for the connection to your phone, like, I'm out. You're not in it enough.
57:54 Nilay Patel? If you're not using DEX as your daily driver. I'm sure, I know, and I just wanna, I just wanna know you.
58:02 David Pierce? Just be our friend. So, one thing about V's review that really jumped out at me was, we talked about this after the Samsung launch, but the whole energy score thing, this idea of like, collect a bunch of data and it's gonna sort of spit back to you, like, this overall measure of how you're doing and also some information about how you can do better. Can I just read you a paragraph from her review? Just while I'm reading damning paragraphs about companies. She says, "The new energy score is also broadly accurate, though the AI-powered insights for her hit or miss. After a punishing long run in 90-degree heat, my energy score dipped 18 points the next day. Victory. I was told I needed to rest. That night I went to bed, my score jumped 16 points, blah, blah, blah. Except, I was also told my sleep was compromised and to stop drinking alcohol
58:45 David Pierce? or late-night eating to ensure quality sleep. I don't drink, and my last meal was at 6:45 PM."
58:51 David Pierce? AI, baby. That's the thing. Like, all of these things that Samsung and Apple and everybody else is on this path of, like, we're gonna collect as much data about you as we can on your body biometrics. We want all this stuff. And we're gonna, we're gonna give it, we're gonna use AI to give it back to you, right? And the more data you give us, the better the AI will do. I am, I am so skeptical of the idea that these tools are going to be good at reading charts and helping me understand what's going on with my body and helping me try to live better. And-
59:22 Nilay Patel? This is the future of medicine, David.
59:23 David Pierce? Yeah, I also, in some episode in the last couple of weeks, ragged on people who aggressively sleep track. Uh, I'm just, I really am like throwing a lot of strays on this show recently. Uh, I heard from a bunch of people who were like,
59:35 Nilay Patel? You're just firing into the air, just seeing where the bullets come down.
59:38 David Pierce? I heard from a few people who were like, I sleep track intensely and I look at my score and I care very much about it. And I, that's all well and good, but still it's to the point of like, okay, if, if you're tired, go to bed earlier. Like that's, that's as sophisticated as most of these tools get. And there is no evidence in a lot of these that AI is going to make that like meaningfully better.
1:00:00 Nilay Patel? No, no, no. I use the app Sleep Cycle on my phone, which is a great alarm clock. I pay the subscription. It's a subscription alarm clock app on my iPhone. It's great. Uh, and it will tell you basically like astrology level correlations.
1:00:17 David Pierce? All right.
1:00:17 Nilay Patel? Maybe it's real.
1:00:18 David Pierce? Is the moon?
1:00:18 Nilay Patel? You know, I just like haven't dug into it.
1:00:20 Speaker 02 Affecting your sleep?
1:00:21 Nilay Patel? But it's like, it, it's like, here's, first of all, it calculates a sleep score, which I don't even know what that is. Um, it's because by listening to you, which is terrifying. And then it will just like correlate it to different things. So it's like, you sleep better when it's raining. It's like, do I? And the craziest one is, uh, air pressure. It's like, here's the air pressure and it, it's a, it's a curve with two peaks. And there's like parts of a barometer that apparently I sleep better. And, and I'm like, I don't know if this is real.
1:00:49 Speaker 02 You have to optimize. You're missing out.
1:00:52 Nilay Patel? This is why I have hermetically sealed my room and I adjust the air pressure in my room every night.
1:00:56 David Pierce? Neil just vacuum seals himself every night before bed now.
1:01:01 Speaker 02 Wirecutter has a great list for, for hermetically sealing your room.
1:01:05 David Pierce? It's very expensive, but it's really worth it.
1:01:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:01:08 Nilay Patel? I'm saying, once you've used this app that is like astrology level correlation.
1:01:12 David Pierce? I do like the idea, I will say, of, of waking up in the morning and it's like, ah, you didn't get very good sleep. That's Mercury's fault for sure. Like that would make me feel better. I would actually pay for that. Like I would, I would like to outsource all of my bad sleep to someone else's problem. Do that with me.
1:01:26 Speaker 02 I mean, I guess my, the, the question I have though is like, I don't, I don't know how much more, uh, like a doctor is going to help you, right? I, I, I mean, if you, if you discover that you actively have sleep apnea, that's very serious. That's a really good thing to learn about. If you just find out that you're waking up a few times in the middle of the night, um, I don't know, like,
1:01:46 David Pierce? Feel like a quick Google search, asking your friend for some, some advice on if you're partying too much.
1:01:52 Nilay Patel? Like rainy showers is plus 9% sleep quality for me. Actually, my favorite in this list-
1:01:57 David Pierce? Is there a word cloud coming here?
1:01:59 Nilay Patel? Uh, it's affected by location, so it knows where you are. And I will tell you that if I go to bed in Philadelphia, minus 26% people. I don't know what that means.
1:02:13 Nilay Patel? I've, I've often enjoyed my time in Philadelphia.
1:02:16 David Pierce? Too much.
1:02:17 Nilay Patel? Uh, but the air pressure, I'm just showing Jake.
1:02:19 David Pierce? The air pressure-
1:02:20 Nilay Patel? It's crazy. I don't, I-
1:02:21 David Pierce? You, you have to be careful there.
1:02:22 Nilay Patel? I'm, listen, I'm-
1:02:23 David Pierce? There's a lot, there's a lot of red on this.
1:02:25 Nilay Patel? Today, I am the pilot. And I am telling David he's wrong.
1:02:30 Nilay Patel? Uh, all right, we should talk one more gadget, the Asus Rogue Ally X10. However, you want, it's whatever you want. Uh, Sean loves this thing, loves it. Says it's the best Windows gaming handheld there is, except Windows is really bad at going to sleep.
1:02:44 David Pierce? Right, best Windows handheld is, is like the most damning with faint praise thing of all time right now. But yeah, it's-
1:02:52 Nilay Patel? By the way, I have to say, I think we gave all of these products sevens, and I feel like I need to have a stern meeting.
1:02:59 David Pierce? Cause only the Vision Pro gets a seven, right? Is that, is that right? Yeah. Only, only the Vision Pro deserves a seven, nothing else. But-
1:03:06 Nilay Patel? We give one seven a year, and it's the most damning seven we can get. That's my-
1:03:11 David Pierce? I love that phrase.
1:03:12 Nilay Patel? That's the new rule.
1:03:13 David Pierce? But yeah, the, the rub on most Windows handheld gaming is that it's bad. Uh, like the upside is that it's Windows, so it runs everything. The downside is that it's Windows, so it ruins everything. Like that's, it's honestly that simple. This one, kudos to Asus, like the, it's fast. Uh, the battery life is pretty good. The, the fan is not super loud. It has a variable refresh screen that Sean really liked. Uh, the downside is still Windows. Uh, it is just not optimized to run well on a screen like this. But I will say, we had a whole conversation, uh, two weeks ago on the show with Sean and Cranz, because I am like deep in a buying debate with myself about which portable console to buy.
1:03:58 David Pierce? And they kind of were like, it's the Steam Deck unless the, the Rogue Ally X can be great. It kinda seems great. Like, this kinda seems like the one. It's a little finicky because it's Windows, but it'll play all your games and it'll play them all pretty well and it will last a long time. Like, as Windows goes, that's it.
1:04:15 Nilay Patel? This is the key. It will play all the games, right? Sean is like, the performance can play the most demanding games and the battery life is good.
1:04:21 Speaker 02 The other thing I'll say here is like, this is twice the price of an entry
1:04:24 David Pierce? That's the killer part. It is $800.
1:04:26 Speaker 02 This is not the price of buying a gaming PC exactly, but this is like a pretty serious console level investment.
1:04:31 David Pierce? That is true. It's like more than buying a PlayStation.
1:04:35 Speaker 02 Right. Yeah. But buying the Steam Deck, you're like, oh, it'd be kinda cheeky. And I think this is, this is like, this is your serious gaming device.
1:04:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah. This is a commitment.
1:04:44 David Pierce? But I think that's okay. Like, if it, if it, if it runs as well as it seems to, like Sean is a pretty demanding benchmarker of games. So when he, when he says he's happy, I know I'm going to be like ecstatic because Sean is mad about frame rates. And I'm like, this looks great to me. What are you talking about, Sean? This is why I don't review gaming handhelds. But I, I think, I was very encouraged by how encouraged he was, even playing, what was it, Alan Wake 2? That he said is like a bear of a game for any of these systems and seemed to be pretty happy with it.
1:05:13 Speaker 02 Yeah. And the, as these things get less and less finicky over time slowly, I mean, it's just making this kind of caliber of gaming more accessible to people who do not want to deal with that on a full-fledged PC, which is great.
1:05:27 Nilay Patel? All right. We gotta take a break.
1:05:29 David Pierce? Are we not talking about Google's weird Chromecast thing? That's it. That's all I have to say about it. Google has a weird Chromecast thing that hopefully will be more powerful than a Chromecast.
1:05:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:05:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's like a wedge. It's like, you know, the people who do finger skateboarding? It's made for them.
1:05:46 Nilay Patel? That's what it is.
1:05:47 David Pierce? Like, Belkin is gonna make you a finger skateboard for this thing 10 minutes after it launches. But yeah, we don't need to talk too much about this because all of this stuff is launching in two weeks, basically, and has just been leaked to death. So we'll have many more chances to talk about this between now and then. But weirdly, of all the stuff I think Google is gonna launch, if they can launch a very good Google TV-powered set-top box, that might be the thing I am specifically most excited about it. And I say this as somebody who finally caved and bought an Apple TV to plug into my Roku TV because I'm so tired of crappy streaming software. Just give me something better.
1:06:21 Nilay Patel? Sony Pictures Core. You can only watch four movies. Three of them are in the Bad Boys series, but they're 80 megabits per second.
1:06:28 David Pierce? And number four is Madame Web.
1:06:31 Nilay Patel? Which exists, I like to think, in the same universe as the Bad Boys movies. I wa-
1:06:37 Nilay Patel? I watched all of Ghostbusters Frozen Empire at 80 megabits per second. I could not tell you what happened in that movie. I could not tell you if it began or ended. Like, it just, it just happened to me and I was like, "These pixels look so good. This movie is so bad."
1:06:55 Nilay Patel? It's great. Alright, we gotta take a break. We'll be right back with the lightning round. Still time to sponsor it. Call now.
1:07:03 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
1:07:35 Nilay Patel? Alright, we're back. Jake, you've never done a lightning round with us.
1:07:38 Speaker 02 No, uh, and I, you know, Neil, I want to apologize for that sponsorship not coming in. It, ah, really felt like-
1:07:45 Nilay Patel? This was hard time. I have been told, again, this is not my set of has it all, but I have been told that there is interest. We just gotta-
1:07:54 Nilay Patel? Jake just couldn't get the money together in time.
1:07:55 Speaker 02 I, I, I had $15. I offered it, uh, to Andrew and he-
1:08:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah, apparently we priced this thing too high. I'm willing to take any amount of it at this point. But our sales team would like to hit its revenue number. Rides on boats. We're, it's, we're in. Alright. Jake, you, uh, you're our guest. You have the, you have the opening lightning round item.
1:08:20 Speaker 02 That's very kind of you. Yeah, so I want to open with, "Apple Maps launches on the web."
1:08:25 Nilay Patel? Revenge of the web.
1:08:26 Speaker 02 This is-
1:08:26 Nilay Patel? We open the show with like, "The web is dead." We're closing it with like, "Apple has to do web stuff now."
1:08:31 Speaker 02 This is either monumental, or just does not matter at all. And I, I am not sure which it is. Um, but there's like a thing happening around Apple Maps. Where I'm I'm of a generation. My my my generation believes that Apple Maps is garbage. Because that's how it was when it launched in 2012. And then we kept using Google Maps because we you, you know, I I've used Google Maps since its inception. It's a lovely, mostly good product. But I do think more and more people are using Apple Maps. It's the default on the iPhone. People aren't questioning it. And by all accounts, it's gotten pretty darn good over the past 10 years.
1:09:12 David Pierce? Can I caveat that slightly?
1:09:14 Speaker 02 Yes.
1:09:15 David Pierce? Apple Maps is very good at navigation. It's very like if if you put in an address and you want it to get you to that address, Apple Maps is very good. It's actually in a lot of ways better than Google Maps, which I think has like mostly lost its mind as a navigational tool. We can come back to there are lots of other parts of a Maps app. Apple Maps is trash at most of them, but it is is very good at just like A to B directional navigation, especially if you've watched. You guys ever use the the tappy tap things? I really like that, not because I remember what the taps do and are supposed to remind me to do, but because it makes me look down at the map so that I actually remember where I'm going. It's just like, hey, you have to turn soon. Look, look at the screen. It's very handy.
1:09:57 Nilay Patel? The map, the the taps, the haptics are like the purest hidden UI of all time.
1:10:02 David Pierce? Yeah, it's like six in a row if you're supposed to turn left and like three pairs of two if you're supposed to turn right. Like, I really think that's what it is. I cannot figure it out. I just take like my my wrist starts making noises at me and I'm like, oh.
1:10:16 Nilay Patel? It's like no one cares enough to figure this out.
1:10:18 David Pierce? But sorry, Jake, continue.
1:10:19 Speaker 02 No, so I so now it's on the web, right? It is on the the platform that is it is accessible to everyone. So before now, it's not that Apple Maps was available on the web in some very limited ways, right? They had an API. Developers could pay for it and embed it into their tools. I believe the Infatuation uses it for all of their restaurant maps. Duck Duck Go, all the Duck Duck Go heads out there know this. It powers Duck Duck Go's maps. So it's not like it wasn't available, but there was no maps app. Apple.com. And now there is. Don't go to that address because it might be slightly different. But you know, it is on the web. You can use it. And if you're sick and tired of Google Maps, which I'm sure some people are, you can switch to Apple.
1:11:04 Speaker 02 And I think as they, I think inevitably, try to turn this into a services business, the fact that it is on the web is going to matter. So it's not clear to me that overnight, anybody's gonna switch their bookmark from Google Maps to Apple Maps on the web. But it feels pretty important that they have brought this to the web eventually, so that it is on, you know, the biggest platform in the world.
1:11:27 David Pierce? Can I give you my galaxy brain take on this?
1:11:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:11:30 David Pierce? So Google Maps is fundamentally a search engine, right? Like it is, it is a, it's a local listing of places. That's actually the thing about Google Maps that is the best. It has all the places. It has pictures. It has reviews. It is as a, as a database of local things. It is pretty much unmatched. Apple is awful at that. It has a Yelp integration that everybody really hates. It's just, Apple is not good at that. But that's where all the money is in Maps, right? Like you can be a data provider, which, which Apple is. But if you want to really do this and do this well, you want to essentially sell ads in local search. And that's a big business. It's a business in which hardly anybody is doing a good job
1:12:14 David Pierce? of competing with Google, because you kind of need the mapping product to do it on top of. And if you want to do that, you need it to work on the web, because you need it to be everywhere. Because like, if I'm in the car, what I want is navigation. Like I need to get somewhere. But if I'm like, planning things, or I'm looking for places nearby, like that is a desktop activity that you do on the web. And this is how you get to Chromebooks. This is how you get to Windows. I think like, there is a Maps app for Mac that I cannot imagine people open ever on purpose. But this is like, this is your way of becoming like a tool for advertising and for place search, way more than it is like...
1:12:59 David Pierce? Mobile web navigation. And so I think in
1:13:02 Speaker 02 No, I think that's a hundred percent right.
1:13:03 David Pierce? That this is something Apple is going to start caring a lot more about as a business is super interesting to me and probably bad for Yelp because you gotta kick Yelp out if you want to do this well.
1:13:12 Speaker 02 And bad for Apple Maps. What you're fundamentally describing is they're going to put a bunch of ads.
1:13:16 David Pierce? I know.
1:13:18 Speaker 02 Which is, is the reason that people like it right now, that it doesn't do that. But I, that feels like it is the inevitable direction. So use it now while you can. But yeah, this feels like they're teeing that up and, you know, being available on a huge platform is.
1:13:35 Nilay Patel? All right, now I'm gonna Galaxy brand it. This is, this is Apple knowing that there's big court case about Google default search on its products and that search is all going wonky and people search for places all the time, all the time. And the, the thing, after all these years, people expect Maps to show up in search results on the web. So you just need to get to a place where you're not kicking people on their MacBooks into a weird map app that you can just display your results.
1:14:10 David Pierce? I thought you were gonna say, instead of taking Google's money for Safari search, it was gonna take Google's money for, to like, power all the place data in Apple Maps, just as a way to like, make a deal while sneaking around web defaults. And I like that a lot, too. But I think, I think you might be right. And this is, this is a hedge in a lot of ways, right? Like, you have to be good at this if you want to win at any of this stuff. I think that's, I think you're probably right.
1:14:33 Nilay Patel? The web ain't dead. By the way, as we have been speaking, we have a little breaking gadget news. Patrick Spence, the CEO of Sonos, released a letter apologizing for the disastrous rollout. I will point out just some chronology here. He says, "We know too many of you have experienced significant problems with our new app which rolled out on May 7th. Today is July 25th."
1:14:58 Nilay Patel? It's been a minute, and I want to begin, not me, this is, I'm quoting Patrick now. I don't want to apologize to you for anything. Patrick says, "I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you. This fixing the app is our number one priority. Since May 7th, we have released new software updates approximately every two weeks, each making significant, significant and meaningful improvements, and they're gonna keep releasing updates every two weeks." And now they have, they have a schedule. So here's, here's all the things they're gonna fix over the next, every two weeks for the next several months. What a mess.
1:15:29 Speaker 02 There's only one answer here, and it's that your entire audio chain should be analog.
1:15:36 Nilay Patel? I agree.
1:15:36 Speaker 02 You would have none of these.
1:15:37 Nilay Patel? I agree. This is why I have a full vinyl setup in my house. Every now and again, I play a record. I'm like, no one knows I'm listening to this song and it is the best.
1:15:46 Speaker 02 That's, that's not true. Your phone is listening to it.
1:15:49 Nilay Patel? Mark Zuckerberg and the FBI are like, he's listening to that again.
1:15:53 David Pierce? Can we just crisis comms this one for a second?
1:15:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:15:56 David Pierce? This makes no sense to me because there are two things here that Patrick Spence did that I think are bonkers and nonsensical. One is 10 weeks later, remind everybody of the stupid thing that you did.
1:16:12 David Pierce? Which frankly, many Sonos users are reminded of every day because the experience is a mess. But like, Sonos initially came out and talked about how it took courage to do this, like just to, what an incredible million years later own goal. And then the other thing that he does is, is lay out the roadmap, like you said, for the next few months, which says, among other things, that the alarms are not going to get better until September. So now what you've said is, oh, we screwed up. We're so sorry. It's going to take two or three months before really, really, really basic things ever start to work again. And so all I'm going to do is a Sonos customer who came out of this whole
1:16:53 David Pierce? period being like, well, that sucks. Hopefully it'll get better. Now I'm like, oh, now they're just sorry, which helps nothing. And all I know is none of this is actually going to get better anytime soon.
1:17:04 Nilay Patel? Here's what I'm going to tell you. If you are looking for an alarm clock, you can use this app called Sleep Cycle, which tells me that if I get 6,000 steps, my sleep is green. But if I get 12,000 steps, it's red. But if I get 21,000 steps, it's green again.
1:17:19 Speaker 02 And you have to pay for the alarm.
1:17:21 David Pierce? So you have to exercise none or tons.
1:17:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:17:25 David Pierce? But if you do like a good job, disaster.
1:17:28 Nilay Patel? Hey, look, they've never updated the app and made it not work, you know?
1:17:32 Speaker 02 Does the alarm go off every morning?
1:17:34 Nilay Patel? The alarm, it's terrifying. It's a surveillance alarm clock. It listens to your sleep. It figures out when you're coming out of REM sleep and then it wakes you up. So you actually.
1:17:44 Nilay Patel? I mean, look, it's terrifying and sometimes it it um it claims to have recorded you talking in your sleep. Look, I'm saying I love it. It's my favorite.
1:17:55 Nilay Patel? It is. It is my astrology. All right. Leave me alone. I'll take that as as one of my lightning rounds.
1:18:01 David Pierce? David, what? Yeah, Jake, I forgot to mention that we do a lightning round in which we all pick one thing and then Neelai picks six or seven things. It's just important for you to know. The lightning round is just when Neelai talks for a long time.
1:18:12 Speaker 02 I I'm honestly, I was stunned. I looked down. I'm like, sorry, Neelai doesn't want to complain about the 1080p limitation on.
1:18:19 David Pierce? He will. We'll get. I'm sure we'll get to that.
1:18:21 Speaker 02 Yeah. How? How are you going to let that opportunity go by?
1:18:26 David Pierce? Yeah, I just wanted to fill you in. I know it's been a while since you've been on the show.
1:18:31 David Pierce? Which oh, which the other part of that means is my lightning round thing only gets to take about 45 seconds because at some point the show has to end.
1:18:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's a lightning.
1:18:37 Speaker 02 That is how. Yeah, actually, I'm really confused about the lightning round actually.
1:18:41 David Pierce? It's best not to worry about it. It's just. It just helps.
1:18:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:44 Nilay Patel? It's just three things.
1:18:45 David Pierce? Jake, when you actually sponsor it, then you can. You can be mad about it. Okay?
1:18:49 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna make it. The second we get money, the whole lightning round is gonna change.
1:18:54 Speaker 02 We should be talking about these for no longer than 30 seconds. It should be. You should. It should be debate policy style. We're just talking really, really, really fast to get it through.
1:19:01 Nilay Patel? That's the thing is that's what we're supposed to do is get through all the things as fast as we can. And somehow we got to. We're just gonna all pick one and talk about them at length, just like all the other segments, which might be why it's never been sponsored.
1:19:12 David Pierce? Because as fast as we can is four or five hours.
1:19:15 Speaker 02 Listen.
1:19:17 Speaker 02 Guys, we can do this.
1:19:18 Nilay Patel? No, we can't.
1:19:19 David Pierce? It's impossible.
1:19:20 Nilay Patel? Want to be clear. David, what do you got?
1:19:21 David Pierce? I just want to really quickly talk about these new NBA TV deals that just came out. We've talked a lot of the show about how sports deals are like a harbinger of all of what's coming in streaming. The NBA just signed two or three, rather, new decade-long deals. One with Comcast, one with Disney, which are fairly normal TV deals, some streaming, some TV. But the big new one was with Amazon, and there are now going to be not a ton of games, but lots of games, 66 a year. And 20 playoff games a year on Prime Video. Amazon's paying almost $2 billion a year for this. It is like this company is dead serious about being a real player in sports.
1:20:05 David Pierce? They are all the way out on gadgets, apparently like all the, all the Alexa money is just going to end up getting put into sports rights deals because Prime Video seems to be the thing they are like deeply committed to winning in some way, shape or form. And I just find it fascinating. And yet again, the sports watching landscape gets weirder and more confusing. There's going to be TV deals. ESPN is going to have its own streaming service. It's also going to have this, this venue sports thing. There's going to be Peacock. There's going to be Prime Video like God help you if you just want to watch sports in the next day.
1:20:39 Speaker 02 I don't know a ton about the, the sports landscape. Before all these streaming deals, was it this fractured and splintered? Or, or could you mostly get one or two channels and find these things? Now it feels like just to watch one league, you need to split across nine different streaming services, depending on the phase of the moon.
1:20:57 David Pierce? No, that's right. It never used to be this bad. I think the NFL was probably the most spread out. And basically the way it worked was two channels split Sundays. And then a third channel had Sunday nights and a fourth channel had Monday nights. And that was.
1:21:12 Speaker 02 And that was the best?
1:21:13 David Pierce? That was the worst, like the most confusing, complicated version of it. Most of the time it was split between one and two networks. And then you throw in like regional networks for baseball and it's always been a little weird, but like right now, so I'm an Arsenal fan. That's how I watch soccer. If I want to watch every Arsenal game, I have to have five networks. That's a, that's a real number. It is insane. And so like, it's just, all of this is broken and it's because there's now so much more money in sports, like the rights have gone through the roof. And so these traditional entertainment companies just can't afford the rights anymore because like, I mean, if you total up. So Disney is paying 2.6 billion annually. Comcast is paying 2.45 and Amazon is paying 1.93. So
1:21:58 David Pierce? seven ish billion dollars. Nobody can afford that on their own a year. These rights have gotten so expensive and they're so important that the competition has just gone insane. And the leagues, I think probably correctly are like, well, we can make more money by selling pieces of it to lots of people. And then we'll let fans solve it for themselves somehow.
1:22:18 Nilay Patel? And the solution is going on to internet message boards.
1:22:23 Nilay Patel? And stalling this storm season. That's what's happening. Like eventually it's going to get so complicated, the revenues will come down because people. We'll see, but I agree with you that. Amazon is betting very highly on sports because it makes Prime Video stickier. It makes it feel more free.
1:22:42 Nilay Patel? And it gives you like, other than that, then they have to, what do I mean, pay for more seasons of Reacher?
1:22:47 David Pierce? Right.
1:22:47 Nilay Patel? Like is Homeland are going to be even more evil?
1:22:49 David Pierce? Well, it all, it all sort of tracks, right? Like it is, it is. It does the thing for Amazon that actually Alexa doesn't where like you can sell ads against football. That accrue back to Amazon in a very real way. Right?
1:23:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah, there's a lot of AWS ads on those Thursday night football games.
1:23:04 David Pierce? Exactly. In a way that all of that stuff, they wanted to connect those dots with Alexa and never did. They're actually pretty well connected on Prime Video.
1:23:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But it's, it is getting insane to watch anything.
1:23:16 David Pierce? It's a disaster.
1:23:16 Nilay Patel? All right. Here's my other one. I am going to complain about 1080p streaming. As long as we're on the subject. I'm going to take this opportunity. Disney launched the bundle of Disney Plus, Hulu and Max. Interesting, by the way, the ESPN plus is not part of it. Just a little swap out there. Like no one cares about this sports product because that's moving into the bigger bundle. With the other companies, very weird. There's a lot of weird stuff going on there. None of this really matters, except the, the bundle is what 29.99 a month, 16.99?
1:23:46 David Pierce? 16.99 a month with ads, 29.99 a month without ads.
1:23:51 Nilay Patel? For ad free.
1:23:53 Nilay Patel? So it's cheaper. It's if you were to pay all in just straight up, you'd be paying $48 a month. So it's cheaper, but.
1:24:02 Nilay Patel? 1080p two streams and the weirdest part about this.
1:24:07 Nilay Patel? Is that when we asked Disney to clarify that and make it clear, they refused to answer on the record.
1:24:12 David Pierce? It's so bizarre.
1:24:13 Nilay Patel? What are you doing? Like usually when we get a refuse to answer on the record, it's like controversial, you know?
1:24:18 David Pierce? This is controversial.
1:24:19 Nilay Patel? We have like an explosive claim and they're like, no, we're going to see, and Disney's like, we just won't tell you it's 1080p.
1:24:25 David Pierce? No one wants their name attached.
1:24:27 Speaker 02 To bit rates that low. So we actually, we actually don't know. We know that Max is 1080p.
1:24:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:24:34 Speaker 02 Hulu and Disney Plus, they wouldn't say. So actually, it's the Disney half of this is just stonewalling. The HBO half is like, eh, whatever.
1:24:44 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Max is like, we.
1:24:46 Speaker 02 You don't care that much.
1:24:47 Nilay Patel? Uh, it is very hard. It is very expensive and very hard to get Max in 4K. You have to buy Max Ultimate and it's just ridiculously expensive and nobody wants it. It's what I gather.
1:24:58 Speaker 02 It's the only streaming service I pay for.
1:24:59 Nilay Patel? You pay all the way?
1:25:01 Speaker 02 If I'm paying for it, I want, I want all the tickets.
1:25:04 David Pierce? Wait, Jake, be honest. Do you really? You pay the whatever $700,000 a month?
1:25:11 Speaker 02 It's like $17.
1:25:15 David Pierce? Okay. But the reason I ask is we, we've talked a lot on this show about like price elasticity for 4K. Because my theory is they're just gonna charge everybody who is dumb enough to pay for 4K streaming until you're paying a hundred dollars a month per service, or you just go down to ads. Like, those are gonna be the two tiers.
1:25:33 Speaker 02 To be completely candid, I meant to cancel a month ago and.
1:25:38 David Pierce? Okay. So you're in the kneel I situation where like I pay for this.
1:25:41 Speaker 02 It's just, I'm like, I'm probably gonna watch something. I, I, I'm really not sure. What network is the bear on?
1:25:47 David Pierce? Hulu.
1:25:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I gotta cancel this. It's not good.
1:25:51 Nilay Patel? I'm just saying, the fact that of all of them, Max, which has the best movie catalog, makes it the hardest to get 4K is just kills me.
1:26:01 Speaker 02 I watched Dune 2 on a plane.
1:26:07 Speaker 02 It looked all right.
1:26:10 Nilay Patel? I still have never done this, but my dream is that when we remove, review movies, we don't issue them scores. We issue them where and when to watch.
1:26:19 Speaker 02 Oh, that's good.
1:26:20 Nilay Patel? Hmm. Right. So like, some of them like, go to the theater.
1:26:23 David Pierce? We rate it by screen size.
1:26:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah, go get to the theater. IMAX. This is an IMAX movie. And then you get all the way down to the end and you're like, for free on a plane, if you, there's nothing else. Right. And like in the middle, it's like, wait for it to hit Netflix. Like, there's all these things and that is the true mark.
1:26:39 Speaker 02 That's really good.
1:26:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's on cable with ads in your hungover. Fine. We need to come up with a scale.
1:26:48 David Pierce? On mute in the dentist waiting room.
1:26:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah, exactly.
1:26:53 Nilay Patel? It's fine. Uh, I, we gotta figure out the one for Baywatch, which I have seen go viral on seatbacks. I just, the, um, what's the new Sydney Sweeney Glenn Powell?
1:27:05 David Pierce? Anyone but you. I mean, I don't know.
1:27:07 Nilay Patel? But you.
1:27:09 Nilay Patel? Uh, I watched that go viral on seatbacks the last time I was on a plane. Whatever that category is, is the most complicated category. Cause it's not wait for a seatback. It's when it happens, it happens to everyone.
1:27:20 David Pierce? You know what's tough is, is.
1:27:21 Nilay Patel? Which is better than wait for.
1:27:23 David Pierce? So I have my, my new plane gadget is the, the 13 inch new iPad Pro. Very beautiful, very bright, very large. Um, nothing like a, like surprise nudity in a movie on a 13 inch iPad. To really make the plane ride awkward for eight minutes. I just do the quick, like fold the screen down, just sort of keep an eye on it for a couple.
1:27:45 Nilay Patel? That's worse than watching with your parents.
1:27:46 David Pierce? Oh, it's awful.
1:27:47 Speaker 02 Got Oscar nominated. It's fine.
1:27:51 David Pierce? It's for art. That's just sort of yelling at the plane as it's happening. Yeah.
1:27:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah. My parents like, let's watch Oppenheimer. And I was like, this isn't supposed to be here. I'm 42 years old. Okay. Uh, last quasi lightning round item. We have, David caused the Buchs Palma war of 2024. Uh, Rivian CEO RJ Scringe caused the great CarPlay debate of 2024. To light up.
1:28:16 David Pierce? It's real.
1:28:17 Nilay Patel? Light, like people are writing articles, people are yelling comments. Uh, David and I are holding a formal CarPlay debate. Soon on the Vergecast. I just, I'm just letting you know.
1:28:27 David Pierce? We hashed it out.
1:28:27 Nilay Patel? Like rules and like Liam is a moderator. They got heated. I won. I'm not telling you what's.
1:28:35 David Pierce? Eli called me names and they hurt my feelings.
1:28:40 Nilay Patel? It's a reflection of the current political environment in America.
1:28:45 Nilay Patel? That's what I'm saying. All right. I think that's it. There's like a lot of other stuff going on. It's a wild week. We, we barely even talked about the other thing that happened this week in the world after we received feedback on our political views last time.
1:28:58 David Pierce? You mean the Olympics?
1:29:02 Nilay Patel? I'm going to wrap this up. All right, that's it. There's a lot going on. We have to, you know, there's a new presidential candidate. She has like a lot of tech policy views that we don't know yet. So all that's to come. The Olympics are starting, which also seem very difficult to stream in 4K unless you have a specifically a Comcast cable box, in which case you get a low latency 30 megabits per second stream. Comcast is an investor in Vox Media. They provided me with none of these. You can tell how much they care for me. They did not install Comcast service in my house, far outside of their service area to just give me one of these boxes. There's a lot going on. It's all the way to the verge.com. Jake, this was great. Thanks for joining us, man.
1:29:40 David Pierce? Of course.
1:29:41 Nilay Patel? That's it. That's where it has to roll.
1:29:46 David Pierce? And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.
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