333: 5G phones, Juul, and Microsoft's move to Chromium

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter are joined by Verge science reporter Rachel Becker to discuss what’s going on in the world of Juul — why it’s so popular, how addictive it is, and where it’s being restricted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Merck.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  A decade ago, during experiments onboard the space shuttle Columbia, Merck scientist Paul Riker discovered conditions that crystallize a specific protein. By studying these crystals, Paul and his team determined all new ways to improve the storage of structurally fragile medicines, devising lifesaving drug-delivery methods. Paul is just one of many Merck scientists dedicated to inventing for life. See why we invent at merck.com/inventingforlife.

• 0:41Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com, a website about technology, about the future, about your feelings, about USBC, about policy news.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Mostly USBC.

• 0:55Nilay Patel?

  Mostly USBC. I'm trying to do pro intros now. I'm Neelai Patel. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Verge. That's the website we were just talking about. Dieter Bone is here. He's our executive editor. Hi, Dieter.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Hello, I'm here. Well, I'm here and I'm not there in the room with you, but I'm here.

• 1:09Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller is here. Paul, do you have a title anymore?

• 1:13Speaker 02

  I vacillate between freelance and unemployed. It depends on the context.

• 1:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I get it. I'm with you. Anyway, these are my two buddies. We talk about technology every week. How's it going?

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  This is a strange week. We're going to do a bunch of stuff on the show that is interesting. Qualcomm demoed 5G in Hawaii. Normally you'd think, hey, we're going to send a reporter to Hawaii. That reporter's going to be really happy. I'll tell you, Sean Hollister, who went to Hawaii for us to attend these demos, mostly filed a bunch of copy that sounded tortured because the demos were bad. So we're going to talk about that. We've got to talk about what is going on with Google and messaging. Because there's always something going on with Google and messaging. Dieter's going to walk us through that. And we're going to have Rachel Becker on, who is one of our great science reporters, to explain exactly what is going on with Juul, which I'm just going to straight out say is a nicotine company. Not a vape company, a nicotine company. Yeah, so that's all going to happen. And then Liz Lopato, our great deputy editor, is going to do this week in Elon. So a lot of things happening on The Vergecast.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  But, Dieter, you have titled this section of our rundown Qualcomm in paradise. And so I believe it falls to you to drive, drive this news segment.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Qualcomm, the company that makes the chips in every Android phone and makes modems and stuff, they are really, really excited to take advantage of this moment when Intel is not doing

• 2:28Speaker 03

  and Apple's blazing away making fast, fast chips. And they have decided, you know, Apple does its, you know, keynotes in the spring and the fall. And there's a big Google developer event in the spring and then they have hardware in the fall. Qualcomm has decided it wants to have a yearly big tech event. But they've decided they want to do it in Maui. And it's super frustrating because we really want to write about and see the stuff that they're talking about. But we have to send a reporter to Hawaii, which sounds like not a problem because like you get to go to Hawaii. But I don't know, it's always a hassle because in December we're always getting ready for a bunch of stuff. Anyway, Sean Hollister, intrepid reporter, took the L and went to Hawaii to cover Qualcomm's event. And they, we expected three things and we got three things so far.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  They talked a lot about 5G. They talked a lot about their new smartphone processor and they talked a lot about this new processor for Windows computers, the 8CX.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  So we didn't want to go, but we went. And I'm super happy that we went because the, all that Sean did the entire first day is look at their demos for 5G and listen to all the hype about all the amazing things 5G is going to enable. And then when he went to actually like see the demos, they were terrible. Like the, they, they barely managed to get a basic demo setup and it was getting speeds that were like meh. Just kind of meh.

• 3:50Nilay Patel?

  And kind of their excuse was this isn't optimized yet.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:53Nilay Patel?

  Which I guess makes sense. If they're doing it in New York, you know, there's a lot of signal interference around. There's big buildings. It's like you're in Hawaii.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  You're in Hawaii.

• 3:59Nilay Patel?

  You're in a situation where you could honestly just like run a cable. Like there's nothing in the way.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  Like, it should be pretty, like, here's a transmitter, here's a receiver, it goes real fast, should be where you live, in the middle of nowhere.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  We're like hitting the moment where the hype about, oh my gosh, 5G is gonna change everything, hits the like, well, let's actually see what it does. And what it does is there's big, thick, heavy phones with insane notches, and millimeter wave, which means it only works inside the room that you happen to be in, apparently. And then it's like, the demo wasn't like, fully optimized. Their grand rollout, they had a bad demo. Like, what are you doing? Like, this was your moment. You're trying to make it a big event every year, and you just didn't do it.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  I mean, to be clear, 130 to 140 Mbis, it's not, it's not the worst thing. I wouldn't be mad if my phone was that fast. But yeah, I don't understand this line about, we need to optimize it if you have a completely controlled environment. That makes it seem like the technology is far from ready. Like, you're not gonna have every engineer that's gonna deploy this network across the nation, across the world, is not going to have as much time to set something up as you did to set up one room in Maui, right?

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Well, and the clarity around, like, when will you actually get, like, 5G? And what will cell towers look like? You know, Apple's waiting until 2020. OnePlus's CEO thinks that 5G phones are gonna cost an extra $100 to $200, because smartphones don't cost enough as it is right now. If you think that you're gonna spend 2019, like, excited to buy a 5G phone, I'm just telling you right now, I used the first 4G phones, and that was a mistake. That was a huge mistake. And I think that using the first 5G phones is probably also going to be a mistake.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  I just tried to do this gambit where I was like, I'm gonna do my AT&T, and it's gonna be just as fast. But it's AT&T, so I got 10 down.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  See, right, right? Like, this would be a fine upgrade. Like, this would mean I could stream to Twitch from my home with a 5G device, and I'd be fine.

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  Until AT&T captured data, because you're not streaming Game of Thrones for free.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  I'd be poor. Well, that's the thing, is I gotta succeed on Twitch, I gotta get the Ninja money, so I can afford the bill.

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  So you can write it off.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. I do think this is an important time to explain that 5G is not an upgrade patch to physics. Right? There are physics defined limits to how much information can be carried over a wave, depending on like, you know, what frequency that wave is and then how much noise is on that as well. So, you know, fiber optics right now is how we get the most information because you're using like the spectrum of light, which you got real tiny waves. And so that's great. So 5G is adding these millimeter waves, which are tiny waves so that they can hold a lot of data. Right? It's just like a high frequency means you can get more bandwidth.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  The downside is it doesn't propagate very far. But you know, 5G is not going to magically make a ton more data appear in the regular spectrums.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think there's some expectation that over time. So first of all, I want to agree with you that it's not a hack over physics. I agree with you. I don't want to contradict that idea. But there is some expectation that over time, the way it's going to do band steering and like multiple input, multiple, like all of that stuff will be able to move more data over the existing spectrum. But the first thing that's going to happen is they're going to do millimeter wave and they're going to have to put way more base stations everywhere. So there's a huge infrastructure deployment piece. And then they're going to like bring it to the 4G spectrum. I mean, we're looking at 10 years, right? Like realistically LTE deployment was 10 years. We're now like in it fully. We're at the peak of that cycle.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  And think how LTE really tailed up speed wise right at the end as they were starting to pile multiple frequencies together. So 5G will have a lot of those advantages.

• 7:58Nilay Patel?

  I would say it took, yeah, are you adding 10 to now? It's 2029.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  You know, there's a part of me that's like, I know this is not actually feasible, but there's a part of me that like looks at the range or that we're expecting from these millimeter wave towers and like their ability, their inability to go through walls. And that makes a part of me be like, what if we all just got together and bought Eros across the nation and just use those?

• 8:21Nilay Patel?

  What was that Wi-Fi company called? There was one. It was called Riot Wireless.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? Where it was like mesh Wi-Fi hotspots.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  What if we just all agreed to just share Wi-Fi passwords with each other forever? And then that we don't need cell towers anymore?

• 8:33Nilay Patel?

  That was Steve Jobs' original plan for the iPhone.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:36Nilay Patel?

  Walt tells the story all the time, where he was like gonna partner with Comcast, and every, there would be your network and a public network on every Wi-Fi router from ISPs, and the iPhone wouldn't need a cell connection because he hated the carriers. And that, to me, is still the dream. Comcast did have a crazy, was it Republic Wireless? There was some company that was gonna put a Wi-Fi router in your house that would mesh to other Wi-Fi routers. This was like 2008. It wasn't successful.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  I think Republic is one, it's like a password sharing service, kind of. Or, or they have like open access points. There's, there's one that does this Wi-Fi router thing that's still pretty popular, apparently, in like France. Forget what that one's called.

• 9:16Nilay Patel?

  France.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  But think about it.

• 9:18Nilay Patel?

  Why you making fun of France? France is fine.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Millimeter wave doesn't replace a Wi-Fi router because it does not go through walls. I mean, think, if you have a Wi-Fi router and you're 100 feet away from your Wi-Fi router and like two rooms over, you're gonna have sometimes trouble connecting to your regular Wi-Fi router. Millimeter wave has way more difficulty propagating.

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So, look, they're demoing it. We're at that stage. I would imagine we're gonna go to CES in January and just see lots and lots of silly 5G things. That seems likely. But I would just go back and read our reviews of like the HTC 4G Epic Touch, or whatever it was called, and just how horrible, the Thunderbolt, how horrible this first generation of 4G devices were. And it's just gonna be all of that all over again. Because the sacrifices they need to make for the radio, the battery, and the power consumption are too much at this period of time.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Now, here's the ironic thing. After 10 minutes of debunking hype, I am actually kind of excited for Qualcomm's chips. And I shouldn't be because I've been burned by Qualcomm before, especially when they made like smartwatch chips recently. But their new Snapdragon 855 is coming to phones and it's got stuff in it. And then there's the Snapdragon 8CX, and the X stands for Extreme.

• 10:39Nilay Patel?

  No, it doesn't. Come on, it does not.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it does.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  What does the C, what does the C stand for?

• 10:45Nilay Patel?

  Close. The 8, close to extreme.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  But so, okay, so Qualcomm is the first big company after Apple to ship, in theory, when they ship these things, seven nanometer chips, which is, you know, half as many nanometers as the chips that you have right now, which enables more power efficiency and theoretically more power. Presumably, that'll be great for phones, and I hope it's really good for battery life for phones. I want more power, but I'm not like, super worried about that, which is maybe weird because they're so far behind Apple, but whatever. But for laptops, it is actually deeply fascinating to me because they are claiming that this, you know, this 8CX chip is the equivalent of a Core i5 U series, which is like the desktop-class i5 Intel chip, and that they have way, way, way less power consumption as well.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  And so this dream of having a Windows laptop that could actually last 20 hours and actually be something you'd want to use seems like maybe, maybe this time, it's gonna be okay, Paul.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Reading these specs, this, this sounds like the perfect laptop chip. I don't want to be hurt.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  I'm scared right now, how good this looks.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  This is very emotional. Paul, tell me which specs are, are, are filling you with such deep anticipation.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  I'll give you seven of them.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  All right, wow, it's more than I wanted, but here we go.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Seven nanometers.

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  That's not the right spec. Who cares?

• 12:13Speaker 03

  It's twice as fast when you run seven watts through it.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  Maybe. So that's it? That's the only spec? It's a seven nanometer ARM chip?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  10 years ago, how did computers get faster? The process size of the chips would get smaller, right? But, but in recent years, it's become very difficult to make chips at a smaller process size. So we've done all these shenanigans to try to make faster computers. We got all these AI accelerators and, and, and all this garbage. But still, if you can, if you can get the process size down, it's less electricity to do more work.

• 12:47Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so you're saying this chip, just because it's seven nanometers, you think it's actually competitive with an Intel Core i5, which is what most people would have in their laptops?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they're claiming, I mean, again, if any of these claims are true, and they manage to ship it, and if Windows runs well on it.

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  All right. I think we all understand why Dieter was scared.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  They're claiming to beat out, like, not the, like, the super slow kind of Corium-style Ultra Ultrabook chips. They're claiming to beat out or meet, like, the MacBook Air-style

• 13:21Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Corium chips.

• 13:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so let's go to the sort of Microsoft side of it. So they have this chip, they promise it's really performant, it's as fast as an Intel CPU. That doesn't mean anything if Windows on ARM isn't a real thing. And it's been around for a while. Is it more real now?

• 13:35Speaker 03

  There are more promises, Neelai. Firefox has promised it's going to run natively. All of Microsoft's stuff is going to run natively. I'm looking at a screenshot that lists Spotify and Minecraft and Netflix and Hulu and Norton by Symantec.

• 13:48Nilay Patel?

  Oh, what you want is Norton running natively on your ARM chip. That's, phew, finally I can switch.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  So, we're going to get into this later, but because of some other stuff that's coming to the Edge browser, they're going to make that run natively on ARM, I'm sure, which means that a bunch of the web apps that you use are going to run better on ARM, in theory, possibly. Maybe, hopefully, I'm scared. I don't think it's going to be great

• 14:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  on ARM, in terms of, like, software being, like, natively compiled to ARM. But I think it's going to be better than it was, which isn't hard. Hold me, I'm scared, I have too much hope right now. That's where my head is at right now.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Here's what I want to do. I want to, I want to run Linux on this. Because with Linux, a lot of times, even if something isn't already compiled for your system, you could typically compile it to ARM. Linux has pretty good ARM support. And you can, yeah, you can run Firefox in Linux on ARM.

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  You're golden.

• 14:44Nilay Patel?

  I like how your answer last week to the bad Pixel slate was like, I'll just put Linux on it. And your answer this week to, like, these promises might not come true are like, I'll just put Linux on it. Like, that's

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  That's good, I'm into it. Are we looking at, like, all-day battery life, or all-week battery? Last year, they demoed Windows on ARM, and they're like, Constant connectivity, week-long battery life. None of those things happened.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  And I couldn't, I would, I think there's one Samsung Windows ARM laptop that like is in the world right now.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  There's not very many.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  There's a few, and they're, they're bad. They're slow. Because they're running basically phone chips. And they have 14 nanometers, which everybody knows is garbage. You should throw your laptop and your phone in the trash right now.

• 15:28Nilay Patel?

  I feel so bad for Intel. They're just like not a part of this conversation. And when they are, it's gonna be at 10, right? Like, it's still 3 nanometers too many?

• 15:36Speaker 03

  We spent the past two months talking about how stupid fast Apple's iPad Pro is, right? And one of the reasons it's stupid fast and has stupid good battery life is because it has a 7-nanometer chip. Now, there's a lot of other reasons that Apple's chips are so far ahead of what Qualcomm and Intel have been able to do. But that's one of the very big ones. And so, even if, and I'm assuming it's true, that Qualcomm's chips are not as like efficient or fast or even, you know, just as high quality as Apple's chips. They've at least cut that lead down by a significant amount. Which is something that Intel hasn't been able to do despite many promises. And so, I'm way too optimistic. I know my heart's gonna get broken.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  But, I mean, I'm telling you, Neil, like GameLoft says they're gonna have a native ARM code for their games. So, it's gonna be fine.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  This is amazing.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  I still can't find what the C stands for, and now I'm really suspicious. Could be crappy.

• 16:30Nilay Patel?

  So, when is this stuff gonna ship, Dieter? You know?

• 16:34Speaker 03

  All right.

• 16:35Nilay Patel?

  When is Sean coming back from Hawaii? When does our friend come back from Qualcomm jail?

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're saying second half of 2019.

• 16:42Nilay Patel?

  All right, so I would imagine that all this means is they demoed a bunch of stuff, they made a bunch of announcements. CES is coming in January. We'll probably, hopefully, see a bunch of ARM laptop news, maybe some 5G like hotspot things, right? And then we've got a ways to wait before these things actually ship.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:59Nilay Patel?

  But it is good that Apple's getting some competition in sort of the thin and light batter, thin and light laptop thing. It would be wild if there was a great ARM Windows laptop with connectivity and all-day battery life before Apple does a thin and light MacBook running ARM. It would be absolutely crazy if that happened.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  I think that that is a real possibility.

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  That, I mean, that would be crazy if they just ceded that, that advantage. Because they could do it right now, right? I mean, we all feel like they could.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, maybe, maybe, maybe some competition will come into this market. You know how I feel about that. I feel great about that. All right. Let's take a break and then we're going to do This Week in Elon and then Rachel's going to come talk to us about Jule. You ready?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

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• 18:17Nilay Patel?

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• 18:37Speaker 04

  Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else, welcome to This Week in Elon. I'm your host, Elizabeth Lopato, deputy editor at The Verge. This week, we're going to talk about SpaceX. So, you may have noticed that this week SpaceX didn't land its rocket booster for the very first time. There was a splashdown instead. It wasn't an explosion, as we have seen sometimes in the past. So, I was trying to figure out how much that matters, and I went into this weird rabbit hole because it turns out SpaceX is a private company, which means that there is less available information for me to figure things out with. So, welcome to this odyssey. Just to give you an example of how hard it is to figure out what's going on between private companies and public companies, no

• 19:19Speaker 04

  one actually really knows SpaceX's valuation, or at least, most people can't seem to agree. So, with a public company, it's super simple, right? You multiply the outstanding shares by their prices, and ta-da, it's a valuation. But with a private company, you kind of have to estimate. So, I've seen estimates that range from $25 billion to $27 billion. That was CNBC. Bloomberg has pegged it at $28 billion. And The Wall Street Journal has said it is worth more than $20 billion, which is, I think, probably the safest thing you can say, right? The consensus seems to be that there's disagreement about how much more than $20 billion SpaceX is worth, but that does seem to be the floor. Cool. So this is why it's difficult to figure things out. Because if I were talking about Tesla, I would just pull the share price, multiply

• 20:04Speaker 04

  it, and we would know. Now, it's also kind of hard to figure out, like, what the revenue is like, how much profit they're making, even if they're making a profit. So that makes it harder to figure out whether or not the failed landing matters to SpaceX financially. I've got limited information. I don't know how trustworthy some of it is, and I'm not entirely sure where all of it is coming from.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  But that is not going to stop me. So, here is my speculation. I don't think the water landing matters very much. Remember, landing the boosters for these rockets has always been a secondary objective for SpaceX. Also, that was a used booster, right? Like, it's already flown. So, you know, it landed in a splashdown the first time, and then it was refurbished. And the things that Elon Musk has said publicly about this particular situation suggest that he thinks that the booster can be recovered again and maybe even reused. Because the other thing that happened for SpaceX this week is that they landed a booster for the third time. So it seems possible they could recover the booster from Wednesday and fly it again.

• 21:10Speaker 04

  The reason I say this is because one of the things that matters for SpaceX as a company is the ability to re-fly their rockets. They've been very public about this, they're very bullish about this, they think this is going to bring down the cost of going to space a lot. So, it seems like this is actually probably not a very big deal, although it is extremely cool video, which I highly recommend you watch. It's very sideways.

• 21:31Speaker 05

  Very windy today.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  There go the legs.

• 21:34Speaker 05

  Come on.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 21:36Speaker 05

  Come on.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  Stick it!

• 21:38Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  It's pretty sideways. Nope. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! But I then started thinking about, okay, what is going on at SpaceX?

• 21:50Speaker 04

  Well, there are a couple of things, right? When we talk about Tesla, I can tell you kind of what investors think because I can look at the stock price and be like, oh, yeah, the stock price fell, so that means that investors have lost confidence, or, oh, hey, the stock price is rising and that means that they're excited. I can't do that here. But part of the benefit of being private is that you get to pick and choose your investors. And so those investors have a much longer expectation for a return on investment than somebody who might be trading Tesla. Here's something that you hear again and again, is that they're actually looking for people who are not trying to make a return for like 15 years. So I think that this is unlikely to matter financially for the company, not only because it seems much more minor than some of the other things that we've seen happen with SpaceX,

• 22:33Speaker 04

  but also because the investors are less worried about short-term returns. One thing that I might mention is you might remember that there was a big explosion in 2015 and a big explosion in 2016, both of which delayed SpaceX's other planned launches. There was an explosion in 2017 that did not do that. But the reason that we know that those things mattered is because last year, The Wall Street Journal got a hold of SpaceX's 2015 finances. I did tell you this was a rabbit hole. And look, I know those are profoundly out of date, but we're dealing with a private company and limited information, and that's some of the clearest stuff I've seen. So I pulled those numbers because I remembered they showed that the margins were pretty thin. And rereading it, I thought, oh, OK. The margins are pretty thin, but this is not the sort of thing that's likely to move the needle in the same way as those two explosions did.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  But the other thing that I saw when I reread that report is that there were projections for SpaceX's launch schedule, specifically for next year's launch schedule. Again, these are old projections. Obviously, things change, businesses change, people change things. But the number at the time was that they thought there was going to be 52 launches. And right now, it looks like they're actually going to be around 20. So that's about the same cadence as this year. Now, you might wonder, OK, why are those different numbers? I did tell you this was a rabbit hole. The reason they're different numbers is in part because the business conditions have changed, right? There are fewer people who are sending up certain kinds of satellites, which means there are fewer people who are ordering rockets for those satellites.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  And so SpaceX has rejiggered its business to try to deal with that. Part of it has to do with the telecommunications venture Starlink, which is a constellation of 12,000 satellites that are meant to provide continuous internet service from orbit. And there were some details about that in the WSJ report, too, a projection of 40 million subscribers and revenue of $30 billion by 2025. But I haven't seen anything since then, and Starlink has changed. So, in conclusion, I feel crazy, and I'm not totally sure what's going on at SpaceX, so I could be wrong. But it does seem like that splashdown, no matter how dramatic it looked and how disappointing it felt to watch, probably isn't a big deal in the long run. I'm Elizabeth Lopato. That's been This Week in Elon.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  I will see you next week.

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  All right. Rachel Becker is here. Hello, Rachel.

• 24:51Speaker 06

  Hi.

• 24:52Nilay Patel?

  Rachel is one of our science reporters. She's in New York this week. It's so good to have you here.

• 24:55Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  And I figured it'd be a good shot to have you on and talk about Juul, which is a thing that both you and I have a relationship with. I've been trying to quit that relationship for a long time. But you've been reporting on Juul, which is a little USB stick-looking nicotine vape, and they dominate this market.

• 25:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're huge. I started reporting on Juul this summer when Bloomberg reported that the company was raising money against a $15 billion valuation.

• 25:24Nilay Patel?

  $15 billion?

• 25:25Speaker 06

  It's huge. It's huge. And when you look at the vapes in the marketplace, there are ones that are made by companies underneath big tobacco companies. So like your Views, your Mark 10, your Blue, those are all the products of big tobacco companies in this Russian doll scheme of company ownerships. And then there's Juul, which, for now, is independent of big tobacco. And you can just see it, when you look at the numbers, you can see it just taking off. So I think it was... Views. It was certainly big tobacco vapes that dominated the market starting in 2013.

• 26:06Speaker 06

  And then Juul just really took over, starting in 2017. And it's really kind of, it's reshaped the vaping marketplace.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  And there's like government interest in this. The FDA is like, "Stop it. The kids are addicted to nicotine." And now there's big tobaccos interested in like buying a chunk?

• 26:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's what the Wall Street Journal is reporting, that Altria, which is the parent company of Philip Morris USA, which makes Marlboro in the US. Again, it's like a Russian doll of nicotine addiction. They're just like companies within companies within companies. But it's interested in buying a bit of Juul.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  That's crazy. So why did it take off? I have a theory, but you're actually the reporter, so I want you to tell me.

• 26:44Speaker 06

  So why did Juul take off? It's such an interesting question, because when you look at the landscape of the vaping marketplace, you've got the cigalights coming on the scene in 2007, you've got the mods, you've got vape pens, and then you've got these pod systems like Juul. To me, I think that it comes down to a couple of different things. It comes down to the design. It's convenient, doesn't leak, it's discreet. It comes down to the marketing. So other companies focus more on TV, they focus more on promotions with the retailers, and Juul was the first to really lean heavily on social media. And then it's also the recipe. So Juul has a higher dose of nicotine, and it's in a formulation

• 27:24Speaker 06

  called nicotine salts, which resembles the form of nicotine that's in cigarettes. And the nicotine salts are more palatable than the freebase nicotine, which is the form of nicotine that you find in most other vapes. You find it in cigars and pipe tobacco. And that's harsher. And big tobacco's known that for decades, that it's harsher. And because nicotine salts are more palatable, you can afford to pack more nicotine, a higher nicotine dose within the pods.

• 27:52Nilay Patel?

  So you basically vape a Juul. Is that the verb? You Juul. I mean, that's the verb.

• 27:56Speaker 06

  You're the one who does it.

• 27:58Nilay Patel?

  Not anymore. Dieter, what's your verb?

• 28:00Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't talk about it, because I would, I would never inhale nicotine. Ever.

• 28:06Nilay Patel?

  Both of us are so embarrassed by this. Anyway, I quit smoking forever ago and then the Juul came back in my life and I was like, "Oh, nicotine, I really like this." And then it's been like a year of me trying to stop. So to me, it's, this thing is more like a cigarette than anything else. And that, because of the higher nicotine dose, it just feels like the most addictive thing in the world. And then you look at the, like, the teens on Instagram and they're like, there are Instagram posts where they're like dramatically throwing Juuls in the ocean to be like, "I'm done with this now." So is it just more addictive?

• 28:37Speaker 06

  So, it's a hard question to answer. And scientists, some scientists won't answer it because there hasn't been a really great, well-controlled study that looks at Juul compared to other vapes compared to cigarettes and says, you know, are the people who start with Juul more likely to continue using nicotine than the folks who start with a free-based vape? So, that's one answer.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  I mean, I'll give my answer. My answer is yes, but not necessarily like medically speaking, but you have this thing that is convenient, easy to hide, easy to have on you all the time, has a very high concentration of nicotine. They say one of these pods is supposed to be the equivalent of like one or two packs of cigarettes or something, but people can go through them much faster than that. And so, you are able to have this high concentration nicotine hit without any of the social, or many of the, the social things that come with smoking a cigarette. You don't have to walk outside, you don't smell, you know, you're like less of a skis, you've just got this, this little thing and you can just take a, take a quick hit of it and you can do it more often.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  And so, the pragmatics of the thing, combined with the high dose of nicotine that it provides, you add those two things together and, you know, to me, it's like, I had an easier time quitting smoking than I have had quitting using the Juul.

• 29:58Nilay Patel?

  I agree. I actually went to a fancy restaurant in New York last night and it's like the restaurants have caught on here. There's just no vaping signs in bathrooms all over the place because they know. They know what you're doing in there and they would like you to get out so the next person can use the bathroom. So, okay, so that's the Juul. Like, it's a tech product. It spun out of, it was Pax Labs, which is the weed vape company, and they spun out the weed stuff and they renamed Pax to Juul, right?

• 30:23Speaker 06

  I think so.

• 30:25Nilay Patel?

  It's a really weird corporate structure. They know they're in trouble, they know the FDA is coming for them because they think teens are addicted to nicotine. Do they have competitors? I mean, you and I looked at their patent a while ago, but it seems like there's holes and you can get around it.

• 30:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, they do have competitors. They're suing a bunch of them right now.

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  So they have a patent on nicotine salts?

• 30:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, kind of. It includes nicotine salts in various formulations with, so the way you make a nicotine salt, you take freebase nicotine, you take an acid, you mix them together, and you should get a nicotine salt of various forms. Juul, in their pods, they use benzoic acid, so you get nicotine benzoate as the salt. Juul's patent also includes a variety of other acids, but it's going after a lot of patent infringers that kind of combine a bunch of different aspects of the Juul. So, you know, it's the salt in the pod, or it's the cartridge combo. So that's kind of part of it. So it's suing a bunch of kind of less legitimate competitors. And then on the other side, it has competitors in the nicotine salt space that are making

• 31:30Speaker 06

  open bottle nicotine salts that are for the refillable vapes. That's not really like, that's comparing kind of apples to oranges, because part of Juul's selling point is the fact that it's so convenient and it's part of the system. Whereas the open bottles, you know, they might leak, they might be, they might spill, you know, it's very different. So I think the biggest competition that Juul has, or will have, that it has had, was from Big Tobacco. And so companies like The Views Vapes were, are made by British American Tobacco through some subsidiaries, but that's...

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  I know you're listening to this in your car, like, watching Rachel be so frustrated at how hard it is to explain the ownership structures of these companies is very entertaining. She's just like, ah.

• 32:21Speaker 06

  Anyways, the companies behind Views, they say, you know, they've been using nicotine salts since way back, since before Juul. Fontem Ventures, which is the company behind the Blue line of vapes, which is a subsidiary of Imperial Brands, which is a tobacco company.

• 32:40Speaker 06

  They are also incorporating nicotine salts and are seem to be pretty happy with the result of using nicotine salts, trying to make a product that's more like a cigarette. Mark 10 vapes have some nicotine salt products as well. Juul has been clobbering all of them like crazy. I mean, when I say Juul is dominating the market, I'm not exaggerating. They are dominating the market. And so I think the biggest competition it has faced is from Big Tobacco. It's crushed that competition and so Big Tobacco will have to innovate if it wants to keep competing with Juul.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  Is that a good public policy outcome? Like, does the FDA want nicotine innovation? Are they, are they just like, stop selling this to teens and please wither and die?

• 33:22Speaker 06

  That's such a good question. So if you'd asked me this in 2017, I would say FDA wants nicotine innovation. I think the FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb came out with this whole kind of harm reduction strategy for nicotine. It was kind of part of this whole package where the FDA proposed reducing the nicotine levels in cigarettes and kind of along in that same moment pushed off the deadline for vape manufacturers to apply for FDA pre-market authorization to keep their products on the market.

• 34:02Speaker 06

  And so by signaling that FDA would make, potentially would require cigarettes to become less addictive by reducing the nicotine levels and also saying vape manufacturers here, you have more time to apply to stay on the market. I think the idea was that it would foster innovation to make better vapes, like better alternatives to cigarettes. Now, I think the FDA is sort of walking that back and you see that with the flavor, the flavor restrictions that the FDA announced the other week.

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  And they just worry that kids are addicted to nicotine? It's like, long and short of it?

• 34:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, and the kids I mean, I don't know if they're addicted, but the kids are definitely using it. It's a 1.5 million increase in high schoolers and middle schoolers who are vaping over last year. So I think it's like 3.5 million high schoolers and middle schoolers have used e-cigarettes. Yeah, it's a huge number.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Can I use this opportunity to explain my ideal vape product?

• 35:01Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God. Yes.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  As someone who smokes real cigarettes and would like to not do that and has a hard time quitting real cigarettes, I want a product that will, I can match my current cigarette pace as vaping. Because my fear, if I went over to Juul, I would just go insane on the nicotine and then I would be more addicted to nicotine.

• 35:22Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that is effectively my experience, that I was able to just stop smoking. I quit smoking while I was studying for the bar exam.

• 35:30Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 35:30Nilay Patel?

  Because my, my theory was that if I could do it during the most stressful period in my life, that I would just do it. And it was, it worked. It just happened. I think I, for a while, I used to go outside and blow bubbles because I was just so used to taking breaks. So I just like, it's crazy. It's also like, smoking was like a good way to like, make conversation. I'll tell you, blowing bubbles outside a bar, great way to make conversation. So I found it way easier. And now, it's like, it's been a year, almost, I'm pretty close, and it's still like, ah, I think about it more than I should in a way that I didn't. So Paul, I wish it had a timer. Like, there's, there's innovation they could do to that product to make it work better, to make you quit smoking. But that obviously goes against their business

• 36:12Nilay Patel?

  model of selling you nicotine. And have they cleared that up, Juul? Like, have they addressed this very obvious conflict of interest they have? Because they're like, we just want people to stop smoking. But you're like, but don't you want people to not be inhaling nicotine all the time? Isn't that the real goal?

• 36:29Speaker 06

  They, well, they don't say that. They say that they're a switching tool, not that they're helping people quit. And part of that is regulatory, so they can't make those claims that they're helping people quit nicotine without going through this whole FDA process. So right now, they're saying they are a switching tool to get people off of combustible cigarettes and onto vapes.

• 36:50Nilay Patel?

  This is like everything the Vergecast is about. This is like a regulatory interference question. This is a vendor lock-in question in a walled garden. Proprietary products with patent restrictions.

• 37:01Speaker 06

  I love your walled gardens.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  My fear is if Juul came out with like a flashy new product that had like an app, you know, it connects over Bluetooth and then you regulate how much nicotine you can have a day out of this Juul with your app, the FDA would be like, "Apps are for kids. It sounds like you're trying to sell them to kids."

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 37:23Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  It would die on the vine. That's my fear, that a product like that can't exist because innovation is not really allowed right now.

• 37:30Speaker 06

  There are definitely rumors that Juul was considering a Bluetooth-enabled vape that would communicate with your phone, too. And some critiques I've heard of that is that you're basically giving this company that is selling you something you're addicted to, access to your data about how often you use it, how much you use, and is also letting you kind of control your settings potentially. So like, yeah, there seem to be pluses and minuses.

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  Surprising no one, I think the regulation is good here, Paul. Because their incentives are so upside down. They have no incentive to get you to quit. They have every incentive to get you to buy more stuff.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  I know.

• 38:09Speaker 06

  Wait, Paul, what's your experience been with the cigalikes? Which, you know, are the disposable kind of ones that look like cigarettes.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  That's how I got started smoking.

• 38:18Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  I was not a smoker before Enjoy. And Enjoy came out and had this, it looks like a cigarette, feels like a cigarette. I had a hard time regulating my intake of Enjoy's and became very addicted to nicotine and then switched over to cigarettes.

• 38:33Nilay Patel?

  Because I stopped. Because you're out of cigarette.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think it's an advantage. Also, you have to go outside. That's a good thing.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Turns out.

• 38:41Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so Rachel, what happens next?

• 38:43Speaker 06

  Oof, what happens next? Well, I think what happens next is we see whether FDA's flavor restrictions really have a big impact on curbing youth vaping, which is the big concern.

• 38:55Nilay Patel?

  Those youths.

• 38:56Speaker 06

  Those youths, the teens. What's your favorite phrase?

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  The Nicotines. It's just waiting. It's just sitting there for you all the time. I've been wanting to publish a headline that says, "Rise of the Nicotines."

• 39:11Speaker 06

  I have resisted this.

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  For like months. And no one will let me do it.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  It's not okay.

• 39:16Nilay Patel?

  Rise of the Nicotines. Just flash forward, it's 2040, a generation raised with nicotine straight to the brain from age 13, wanders zombie-like through the streets, upping their Nicodose on their Nicodose apps. There's a whole situation. All of this, I had Rachel on here just to get to that.

• 39:36Speaker 06

  I set it up for you.

• 39:38Nilay Patel?

  Thank you, I appreciate it. Anyway, so what, so the FDA is gonna monitor Nicotines?

• 39:43Speaker 06

  Yes, the FDA is gonna monitor the, I'm not using that word. But FDA has been very, pretty clear, it had some very strong language that it's gonna keep an eye on youth vaping, basically. So the FDA's flavor restrictions basically say, if you're a store that doesn't have strong age restrictions, you can't have, you can't have flavored products on your shelves, and you can't have flavored products on open shelves, you might be able to have flavored products in age-restricted areas. But FDA says, you know, it's gonna keep an eye on it, if they don't see a reduction in youth vaping, they're gonna reconsider and maybe crack down even harder. And so I think that, right now, we're sort of in a holding pattern to see what FDA's

• 40:27Speaker 06

  restrictions does to the youth vaping issue.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Rachel, when these companies say, "We're not advertising to kids," no, heavens no, we're scandalized, do you believe them for a second?

• 40:40Speaker 06

  Ooh, that's a good question. I mean, Juul was, there's this great paper that came out of Georgia State that looked at kind of, basically, why Juul has been so successful. And it definitely was one of the first, according to this paper, to lean heavily on social media for marketing. You know, other companies used TV, others used promotions. Part of that, I kind of wonder, is whether big tobacco companies have sort of been burned about their marketing, and so they were cautious about marketing in a way that would, you know, you could argue, is marketing to young people, since young people are on social media. It's what the teens are doing.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Those Nicotines. Is that a hashtag? I'm looking at Instagram.

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  No, continue.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:26Speaker 06

  So, and then you look at some of Jules' early, early marketing campaigns, which had, you know, clearly young, good-looking people using the products. And I think that's certainly what attorney generals around the country, like the Massachusetts Attorney General is investigating Jule to see if it was actually marketing towards kids.

• 41:44Nilay Patel?

  Twenty-two posts.

• 41:47Speaker 06

  Nicotines.

• 41:48Nilay Patel?

  It's not yet a phenomenon. I'm sorry. All right, well, Rachel, thank you so much for joining us.

• 41:54Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  I know you're on the Jule beat, so as things develop, we will definitely have you back.

• 41:58Speaker 06

  By the way, I do want to correct myself. FDA says 3.6, not 3.5. So 3.6 million high schoolers and middle schoolers are vaping.

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  That's 100,000 more nicotine.

• 42:07Speaker 06

  No.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  You walked into that, Rachel.

• 42:11Speaker 06

  Oh, boy.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  Thank you so much.

• 42:14Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 42:15Nilay Patel?

  All right. There's big news in this world, in the world of web browsing. And it's, I think this is really tied into every story that we've been talking about, because we've been talking about the iPad and the future of computing.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft, which makes the Edge browser, just...

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Does it?

• 42:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's a lot here. Microsoft makes the Edge browser on Windows, which has been aggressive in getting, trying to get Windows users to switch from Chrome. Like, literally will pop up a dialog box. It's like Chrome will kill your family. Switch to Edge.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  Is switching the rendering engine from Edge to Chromium, which is the Google open-source project that is Chrome.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  So...

• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  This is a huge deal, right?

• 42:54Speaker 03

  I could even, like, walk that back. They're actually switching to Blink, which is the fork of WebKit that Chrome uses to render the web, and then V8, the JavaScript rendering engine that Chrome, that Google and Chrome use as well. So it's turning Edge into a Chromium browser, and they're contributing to the Chromium open-source project. They're like, they're going all in on the rendering engine and like the, the philosophy and the way of making a webpage happen that Google has been working on, that they, you know, used to be friends with Apple on, and now they're not quite so friendly. And it's a huge deal for lots of reasons, which I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to say Blink.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  So Microsoft had its own rendering engine. And there's, there is a world in which having three competing rendering engines, four if you count Mozilla, but you know, these are the three big platforms, right? Chrome, Windows, iOS, which is where WebKit lives. These are the defaults. So this is a huge deal for so many people. So it's better to have more rendering engines because that makes the standards on the web more robust. But now we're coming down to two. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

• 44:04Speaker 03

  It's tough because as a person who has purchased a Surface Go tablet, I cannot wait to have the default web browser that... So first of all, using the default web browser, if you use like Safari on a Mac, for example, it just tends to be faster because like there's other parts of the OS that do web stuff. And so you don't have two rendering engines going and it just, it feels more optimized. So having Chrome on, having a Chromium web browser be the default on Windows is gonna be great for me, assuming it doesn't destroy battery life, which it often does. Because, because Chrome, just like the web works better on Chrome web browsers than it does on Edge web browsers. It just does.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  And that is often because developers are only coding to that and WebKit. And so you can be mad about that. You can call them lazy. You could say that they're under enormous pressure and it's too hard to code to every single different web browser out there. You can get mad at the web standards for not moving fast enough to support multiple rendering engines. All of that is like, bah. But at the end of the day, when they ship this thing on Windows, Windows is gonna be nicer to use and so I'm happy about that. I'm unhappy that the web is getting more monolithic and people are coding to like these specific rendering engines instead of to like an abstract idea of what capabilities a webpage ought to have.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, the web is becoming Google's operating system that you can run in, you know, remember, was it Parallels or VMware or QMU? Yeah, the web is just like your QMU to run Google's operating system.

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  I like that you went to Linux again. It's good. It's just... What's going on over there?

• 45:54Speaker 02

  I switched, I switched to Safari completely randomly before I read the news today. I was like, because Mojave broke Safari. I don't know if other people have had this experience, but for me Safari pauses all the time and I don't know why and I'm just sick of it. And so I switched to Firefox because Chrome uses too much RAM and I don't, I don't like it. I do not like how much RAM Chrome wants to use and I'm not going to stand for it. So Firefox is, is way more responsive than it's ever felt to me.

• 46:27Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, I just had the visual of you downloading the Firefox like disk image file being like, I won't stand for this.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 46:35Nilay Patel?

  It's great.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  So that said, as a hobby, I'm working on an application right now. Guess how I'm building that application? How I'm building the graphical user interface of that application? I'm using Electron because you know what? The easiest way to build a cross-platform desktop application? Electron. Guess what Electron's based on? Chrome. So, you know, I can't win.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  By the way, Mozilla is like, they, they had, they've spent the past couple of years being pretty friendly with Google. And then in the past year or so, they like decided they're on a privacy kick and they're, they're a little bit pricklier. Chris Beard over at Mozilla has published this blog post that starts with, "Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google." And it just goes on and gets like more strident from there. Mozilla's going hard. They're saying this is bad for the internet and bad for privacy and bad for security. By the way, download Firefox because you know, they would like to do that.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  I use Firefox Focus on my phone. I think everyone should use it more.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  It's great. There's like all kinds of things where I just like, they're not like devious, but like there's all kinds of things where I'd like to enter text into the web and see what happens. And Focus is great for it. It's also very fast.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Also uses the WebKit rendering engine, which Apple is in control of, because they're not allowed to use their own Firefox, you know, the Gecko ultimate quantum Gecko quantum rendering engine, because Apple doesn't allow competing companies to run rendering their own rendering browser rendering engine. And, and, and neither does Microsoft on Windows S mode. You can't get anything in the Windows Store unless it runs the Edge HTML rendering engine, which by the way, you know, they're going to stop using themselves and they're going to let people put Chromium stuff in the Web Store. So that'll be a party.

• 48:26Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so here, I mentioned the iPad when we got into this conversation. Here, it's great. Windows is going to have a better browser. No one said about it. Everyone was installing Chrome anyway. Right? At the end of the day, they're like, it doesn't matter because Chrome was already winning and Microsoft is doing everything it can to compete with Chrome, including now adopting its browser engine. Okay. It's fact. That's just a fact. That's what they're doing to compete with Chrome.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Chrome was not a better web browser than Edge. I mean, it was, but not that much. It's that the web was not designed to work well to the way that Edge didn't work well at the web. So like, you're right that Chrome is a better web browser and a better experience, but like, on the merits of the technology, it wasn't that far ahead of Edge.

• 49:07Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  So noted. Here's my point. We, Dieter and I have been in, I would call it a three to four week, slow burn Twitter argument with folks about the iPad's web browser.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:22Nilay Patel?

  It's just every day, someone else pops up. Steven Sinofsky, bless his soul, always finds these threads, contributes. It's great. It's like a very interesting sort of long conversation. The thrust of this conversation is, I say the iPad's web browser, mobile Safari on the iPad is limited. A bunch of other people say it's limited too. The response to this, which is totally valid, is, well, no, it's websites sniff the user agent and they deliver a mobile version to the iPad instead of delivering the desktop version. You can hit Request Desktop Version, which is a workaround because that's the way the iPad works, and you can get a more full-featured thing. But there's all kinds of stuff that doesn't work on it. So Google Docs does not work great in mobile Safari on the iPad. It just doesn't.

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  And they want you to use the app, the app is more limited, and this little cycle is like very descriptive of the iPad. The question is, is that Apple's problem? Should they make the browser better? And I think one important, one answer to that is, no, you should use the apps and Google should make better apps for the iPad because that's where the people are. I think this Microsoft move is a massively important counterpoint to that argument. Because in order for Windows to be successful, it has to have a great default browser. Right? It has to be great. It has to do all the things you think it needs to do. And even on a system where you can go and get Chrome, which will, doesn't, you're still using Windows. Microsoft has decided that the browser is so important that they will capitulate to Google.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  And deliver a browser that works more like you think the web should work. And I think that is just a massively important data point in favor of users' expectations in terms of what you, whose problem it really is. I think it's the platform vendor's problem. Versus, every app developer should do the work to capitulate to the platform vendor. Right? So if Apple does the work to make the iPad browser do more stuff, the return on that investment is exponentially higher than every app developer doing work to make a slightly better app.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually, you saying, whose problem is it? I feel like you're referencing Frasier Spears's blog post. He's, he wrote a blog post about switching from an iPad Pro and a MacBook. And he makes a really, it's a really important distinction. The web not working well on Edge or on mobile Safari on the iPad, it's not Apple or Microsoft's fault. Like, it's not their fault. It's the web's fault and people coding to specific browsers. Chrome is the new IE6. Just because it's not their fault, doesn't mean that it's not their problem. Because at the end of the day, they sell a thing to a customer that the customers want to work well.

• 51:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think that's the way to think about it. And I think it's, this is gonna be better for Windows customers. They're gonna launch their web browser that's installed by default and it's gonna do the things they want it to do. It'll probably still send you to Bing by default, I just realized.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  That'll be fun. And everyone, whatever. But it's gonna do more out of the box because it'll be more compatible with the web. And then we can have this argument about... Whether the web should be compatible with browsers or browsers should.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  Well, that's so.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  So one, I'm learning a little bit about the web standards bodies from reading too much hacker news. And as far as I understand, to become a web standard, it has to be independently implemented in at least two browsers. You have to have separate implementations and like where we went wrong early on is they tried to make like implementation, a single implementation into a standard and they realized that that doesn't carry well. So in a sense, everything that that that Chrome puts in what it calls like a stable, like a release, like a user facing feature, right, is typically based on a standard.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  The question is if a company like Microsoft or Apple can afford to put as much money as Google puts into its browser for much smaller returns to keep up with all of the absurd features that that that Chrome is adding. And Firefox keeps up with the standards fairly well, surprisingly well, but Apple is really slow and Microsoft clearly just got bored of it.

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think Apple is, I mean, Apple just wants you to go to the App Store. Fundamentally, I think if Apple can go to a place where so mobile Safari is a document viewer and you read all your news in Apple News and you do all your work in an app that you download from the store, they would be very happy. I mean, that's, that's, I think that's why they don't, like, Apple's developer relations teams can reach out to Google and be like, hey, why don't you switch your user agent sniffing to make mobile Safari work on docs? And I don't think they do that. I think they're very happy to say, hey, you should make those apps better. Now, I just think the web is so important to so many people that that is only tenable for so long, that they will get this criticism from every version of the iPad until they fix that browser.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  Well, what they're gonna get are more commercials like the one that that Microsoft just put out with the 10 year old girl singing that the iPad isn't a real computer, which is.

• 54:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  I love it. And I love it because it just makes people so mad in the same way that the iPad, what's a computer commercial made people so mad. I just, I want to see like young children making people who want to define what a computer is and whether a tablet counts as one irate, like, it's just nothing makes me happier.

• 54:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  It's the best.

• 54:44Nilay Patel?

  All right. We're going to take a break and then we're going to talk about Google's extreme number of communications apps.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  All right, this is a break. It's advertiser content from ZipRecruiter and The Road to Hired. Learn more about how one groundbreaking business is attracting the best talent.

• 55:00Speaker 07

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• 55:04Speaker 08

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• 55:07Speaker 07

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• 55:23Speaker 08

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• 55:31Speaker 07

  As Codable grew, Gretchen was wearing a lot of hats.

• 55:33Speaker 08

  All of our sales and marketing, all of our game design, first curriculum.

• 55:37Speaker 07

  So to scale, she needed to find talented and passionate people fast. So she turned to ZipRecruiter and used their candidate screening feature.

• 55:45Speaker 08

  My favorite thing was the deal breaker questions because I was able to ask people, why do you think it's important for kids to learn to code? It's really important that I know their answer to that.

• 55:55Speaker 07

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• 56:00Speaker 08

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• 56:13Speaker 07

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• 56:20Nilay Patel?

  Thank you to our sponsor ZipRecruiter. Try ZipRecruiter for free now. Learn more at ziprecruiter.com/verge. That's ziprecruiter.com/verge. All right, Paul.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  Every week.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Always.

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  What's it called?

• 56:33Speaker 02

  It's called Nice Netbook, man.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  Did you find a netbook?

• 56:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  Did you see the last netbook?

• 56:43Speaker 02

  It could very well be the last netbook. This is the Falcon. It's an eight inch laptop that folds into a janky tablet, writes Sam Biford. So yeah, it's a, it's a tidy little laptop with a 1920 by 1200 eight inch display, which is pretty bonkers. Also has USB C, regular USB, mini HDMI and headphone jack. So it's basically a MacBook killer.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  What, what, what kind of MediaTek processor is powering this delightful project?

• 57:22Speaker 02

  I was trying to find the processor. Obviously it should run the ACX.

• 57:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  But it's a Kickstarter project, but they've shipped, I believe they've shipped another product that's similar, like another like seven inch laptop. This looks too small to type on, but it's just so cute. I'm sure I've told this story a million times, but I just remember being in Germany at a trade show and Asus shows up with the EPC and the whole world was different for like two years.

• 57:52Nilay Patel?

  I used to have the, the specs for the, the standard Intel netbook memorized. I don't think I do anymore. It was an Intel N270 processor with a seven inch screen and like four gigs of RAM and a 160, I do have them memorized.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  And EMMC storage or whatever.

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, it was Microsoft. They priced Windows differently if your screen was bigger than a certain size. So every netbook had exactly the same specs.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  This, this is running the Intel Gemini Lake Pentium Silver N5000.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Apparently it's similar to the Surface Go.

• 58:29Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  God.

• 58:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh, well, I can't wait.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  Update from paradise. It combines everything. While we were sitting here, Sean Hollister has given us a dispatch from Maui. He has used the ARM native Firefox browser on the ARM Qualcomm prototype computer. So it's using a different rendering engine. It's on ARM, compiled, blah, blah, blah. He says he got a dozen tabs going, including a couple of HD videos, had PowerPoint going, and it was fine.

• 59:01Nilay Patel?

  Bar reached. I liked that that was a breaking news update. Firefox was fine.

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Everything's gonna be great, I promise.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  I like it. This is a, this is a hopeful episode. Dieter, what on earth, they canceled ALO today? That's not a surprise. What is happening?

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Okay, so, we've been waiting for Google to corral every carrier on the planet to switch over to RCS-rich communication services, AKA chat. And it, uh, we expected it to start beginning at the end of this year, right about now. And sure enough, a couple of weeks ago Verizon said they'd do it in early 2019, but then, out of nowhere, surprise, they announced that it's coming to just the Pixel 3, uh, just on Verizon, that more phones are coming. But it's a very slow rollout, uh, as of this recording, today, December 6th, today it's supposed to be out, I still haven't gotten it yet. But, at the same time, uh, when Google announced this big, or, you know, we talked about this big switch over to focusing on RCS instead of their own texting apps, they told us that

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  they're pausing investment in ALO, their texting app, now the inevitable's happened, they've told everybody that they're canceling it. This comes on top of another, like, clarification they put out, that Hangouts, their older texting app, which has turned into an enterprise Slack competitor, you know, enterprise, company texting thingamajig, whatever the hell it is, uh, is going to, in fact, become available to consumers someday, it's not completely shutting down, but whatever. Google has reduced the number of chat apps that it makes, uh, it now makes Hangouts Chat, which is for enterprise, but if you really, really want to use it as a consumer, you can. And then it tries, it's trying to get carriers to support RCS Chat in the Android Messages

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  app for texting, and then, you know, they've got Duo and Google Voice and, you know, some other stuff floating around there.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  Their cellphone network.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  Their cellphone network, Google Fi, which puts all of your text into Hangouts still, uh, by default for a lot of people. So, it's...

• 1:00:59Nilay Patel?

  It's really bad.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  I don't, who, somebody, somebody said it best, it's like, you know, the ironic thing about what's going on with all of Google's communications apps is they're really bad at communicating about what's going on with Google's communication apps.

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  Here's my dream. I have, I have a dream.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:12Nilay Patel?

  That's not, the thing that follows is not gonna be as weighty as the last time someone said I had a dream.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:17Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Sundar Pichai is gonna testify in Congress next week, on Wednesday.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  This is coming out on Friday. That means we have four days. Call your representative in Congress and demand that they ask Sundar Pichai about Google's messaging strategy. Right?

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  We've done this, we've done this for net neutrality before.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  What should they ask? What kind of question? How's it going?

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  But like, the question, Eli, is what do you want Google to do? Because they tried Hangouts, that bombed. They tried ALO, which was like everything except for default encryption, that bombed. They're, they've done the stuff, it's just none of it worked.

• 1:01:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying, he's going in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  So call your member of Congress, your representative from your district. Figure out who it is. And say, hey, I hear Google CEO Sundar Pichai is, is coming in front of the Judiciary Committee. I, as a citizen, would, I would love to know about, you know, search bias. I'd love to know about what's happening on YouTube. But really, I think Congress should ask him, why doesn't Google have a unified messaging strategy that competes with iMessage? And then if enough Vergecast listeners do that, hundreds of thousands of people, Congress will ask Sundar Pichai, why Google doesn't have a proper competitor to iMessage? And then I will have won. It's very simple. And then he will, he will feel shame and he'll go back to Google and he'll say,

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  Rick, you know, I don't think the Pixel's gonna do great unless we figure out some iMessage competitor. And then someone else will like fix it.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  See, but Google has such a good slam dunk, Congress approved answer for that. Like, we, we wanna embrace open standards for messaging. We don't want consumer lock-in and...

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  Wow, did you just make the nerd voice to...

• 1:03:00Nilay Patel?

  He just did the nerd voice to say lock-in.

• 1:03:04Nilay Patel?

  You just couldn't help it.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  When they shut down the current consumer version of Hangouts and when they shut down ALO, I'm pretty sure that Hangouts chat doesn't support end-to-end encryption, which means that Google will not give you, does not make, a product that you can use to communicate with over text that's end-to-end encrypted.

• 1:03:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's ridiculous.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  Available to consumers.

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think this is the thing that they failed at. It is, I firmly believe that if they had a great, multi-platform chat solution that was encrypted, that seemed private, that worked really well, that they could break the iMessage lock-in thing. And that would be a true competitor and it would kick some innovation into this market because competition is good. And they just can't get there. I don't, I don't understand what it is.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Like, a hundred years ago, Google, or, sorry, Gmail had built-in, what do they call it back then, Google Talk?

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  Google Chat.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  Remember that, that Google Chat, they're like XMPP?

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I could use it with the iMessage app on, on the Mac, it was great.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  The Jabber Protocol, right?

• 1:04:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  So, Google had working chat and presence back then, and my mom could get ahold of me in my Gmail tab, right? Google abandoned that. And then now, at some point, those people, I think, ended up becoming Hangout users. And now, Google's killing Hangouts. Like, Google is aggressively only killing its best successes, I feel like, in chat.

• 1:04:28Nilay Patel?

  Right, so G-Chat took over for i, like AOL Instant Messenger, and then both of them just blew it on mobile. When the transition to mobile happened, I swear to God, if the people in charge of AOL Instant Messenger had just been like, "Here's a really great IM app, it's just gonna move you over and it's gonna replace your text client", they could've, they could've, they could've, they wouldn't have. I, we worked at AOL during that time and it would've not have happened. But, maybe, it's like theoretically possible. Google, if they just moved G-Chat over and actually said, "This is that", and it worked well. It could have been a whole different story.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  And then encrypted it.

• 1:04:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they didn't do any of that. Anyway, so RCS is coming. Is it gonna, is it gonna change everything?

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  No, it's gonna, you just, I mean, it'll be fine. But who knows if it's gonna come to iPhones? And it's not encrypted, so, I mean, it's just, it's gonna continue to be messy forever. That's like, that's the answer. Android messaging is gonna continue to be messy forever. And there are things that are gonna get worse before they get better, so I do not think that third-party texting apps, if you use like a little indie SMS app or something, are gonna work super well with RCS, if at all. They might just have to fall back to SMS, or they might not work at all. And, speaking of, what's really interesting about that whole situation is, I mean, I think it might be for like, security of identity of the app and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, there's maybe not a nefarious reason for it.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  But if that turns out to be the case, that it's hard to make a third-party RCS app for Android, guess what that means? Uh, the Facebook Messenger app, and WhatsApp, and Signal, aren't gonna be able to easily offer to be your default SMS client in addition to being, you know, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger, or Signal.

• 1:06:03Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  And most people just use the default. So, you're gonna, you're gonna have two apps if you wanna use those other apps. It's, yeah.

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  That's great. We should all switch to WhatsApp tomorrow, except that it's on my Facebook. There's really no good answer. Signal.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Signal.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Keybase.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  Keybase?

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, somebody found me on Keybase after the, after I plugged it. So I'm just gonna keep plugging on, plugging Keybase.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  I don't... I'm deeply suspicious of your motivations, Paul.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  Critical mass of Keybase users will take over the world.

• 1:06:32Nilay Patel?

  We gotta wrap this up. I wanna tell you, go look at Andy Hawkins' video. He rode in the Waymo One Taxi, which is a functioning self-driving taxi service in Arizona. Sean O'Kane went to the Tesla Giga Factory. Go watch that video. All that stuff is incredible. Ashley and Caitlin are cranking away in Why'd You Push That Button? That season is so much fun. Um, go listen to Why'd You Push That Button everywhere you can get your podcasts. We have a holiday gift guide up. It's that season. Go look at our cool gifts. We have a bunch of new shirts in our store. They're awesome. They're just my favorite. Go buy a shirt from us, give it to your loved ones. And last, this is my, this is my big plug for the week. We've talked a lot about Foxconn on this show, and Reply All just did a huge episode about Foxconn

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  Wisconsin. They went to Racine in Mount Pleasant, my hometown. They interviewed a bunch of people. They met the village president of Mount Pleasant. This, it's a crazy story. You should absolutely go listen to it. Next Tuesday, Shruti Pinnamaneni, who is the reporter on Reply All who went there, is our interview next week on Tuesday. She did an interview with Josh on the site. You can go look at that, read that. It is wild. The village president of Mount Pleasant, which is where Foxconn is going to be in Wisconsin, there's just some guy who took like a course on how to be a politician from like a Tea Party group, and the first week on the job as the president, the village president of Mount Pleasant, he got the Foxconn RFP, and then $10 billion of Foxconn landed on his town. And so there's audio of all the board meetings. It's just an incredible episode.

• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  Go listen to it on Reply All. Next Tuesday Shruti's going to join us on the interview episode, so that's super exciting. And that's it. You can check out Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can check out Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway, and you can check out Function with Neil Dash, which is a new show from the Fox Media Podcast Network. That's it. Thank you. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  Promo code. There it is.